I dropped out of college at nineteen after one semester.

I truly sucked at going to college.  I skipped classes.  I skimmed novels the night before in order to write B minus papers due in the morning.  Mostly, I couldn’t figure out why the hell I was paying for D&D all-nighters a BA in English Lit I couldn’t afford. I didn’t go back the next semester.

Instead of stretching my mind and my limits of alcohol consumption in academia, I began the vastly lucrative and oh so rewarding career in concession services at a movie theater.  Most of my fellow employees were college students.  To them, serving popcorn was a temporary sentence.  They didn’t commit any egregious life choice crimes requiring labels like single mother, college dropout or manager, who was treated like a lifer with no possibility of parole.

The problem with being a dropout is the space on job applications for schooling and subsequent questions during interviews.  I didn’t have a cool story like my parents were irradiated in a nuclear fission accident and I quit school to care for their horribly mutated bodies.  So I mumbled stuff about getting life experience because that sounded better than loser who couldn’t hack it.

Here’s life experience for you:

• No degree, no customer service experience, no marketable skills – your job requires making change for people..alot.

• No degree, some customer experience, no marketable skills – your job requires either saying how may I direct your call or it requires you to wear pieces of flair.

• No degree, some customer experience, and the ability to type 80 word a minute – your job requires picking up dry cleaning after normal work hours for someone making 10 times your pay.

Socially, twenty-something dropouts become 3rd world yokels who’ve immigrated to the promise land.  Your peers, though happy for you, assume certain words and phrases are beyond your comprehension like Bukowski or beer pong.  I was among them but separate.  They had classes in the morning.  I had to put on a name tag.

I tried returning to the fold by taking an extension course.  That was college suckage at a whole new self-esteem crushing level.  The 200 level Poetry class with the “real” poets required submitting writing samples.  I got turned down.  I ended up in the 100 level Intro to Creative Writing for Losers and Students Wanting An Easy A.  I stopped taking classes after that.

It wasn’t until several years later, that I learned to be okay with it.  I’d recently moved to Denver.  My temp agency sent me to Charles Shwabb to become a quoter, a rep that took calls and quoted stock prices to customers.  One of my co-workers just graduated with her English degree and $40K of debt, half of which were on credit cards.  We were making $8/hour.

Eventually, I did learned some marketable skills.  No wait.  Being able to play World of Warcraft for 32 hours on nothing but Funyuns and Diet Coke isn’t marketable?  Crap.

As for the poetry, about two years after my rejection from that Poetry course and about 20+ rejections from various lit mags later, I got something in the mail.

That’s Bukowski’s poem on page 39.  I’m on page 82.

Too bad that isn’t marketable either.  Double crap.

Category: Self-delusion isn't pretty | 3 - Leave a comment

I have two friends who deejay alt/goth/EBM and 80’s music. They are awesome so I dance where they deejay and rarely go elsewhere.

One deejays at a club that’s an old cathedral, unimaginatively named The Church. Yes, that place is as cool as it sounds, unless you’re a young Servas guest from Poland from a Catholic family. Then, it’s just sacrilegious. I didn’t know. Oops.

The other deejays at a place called Milk, supposedly named after the Korova Milk Bar from A Clockwork Orange. However, I was disappointed the first time there when I didn’t see any naked mannequins for tables. Epic fail.

On the plus side, Milk has couches and pillows and oil paintings of Jimi Hendrix and Lucille Ball, and it had Deejay Mike last night. He’s very old school which is to say that at one period in his career, he had to beat mix on vinyl. Also, he doesn’t play shitty music.

In a club setting, shitty music is anything that people aren’t dancing to. This, of course, changes from week to week because club people are fickle like God or children. However, all shitty music stems from shitty deejays. I’ve been subjected to plenty and here’s my easy guide on how to tell if you’re a shitty deejay.

1. You try to play cool music no one will dance to. E-jays or Ego Jockeys are easy to spot. They’re the ones that want to be the tastemakers by playing lots of esoteria because they don’t want to be trendy. I like new music, but if you’re music empties the dance floor for more than 15 minutes, you suck.

2. You try to be cool by playing the same thing every week. There’s a game that my friends and I play called Guess-The-Next-Song. If we can consistently guess the next song, you suck.

3. You’re too cool to play requests. People like it you when you play requests, especially IF THERE’S NO ONE ELSE DANCING.  Your  job is to get people to dance.  We get it when it’s busy and you forget our requests as soon as we walk away. But if I’m there early and the only other occupants are five seat warmers, and it takes an hour for you play my request, you suck.

4. You try to be cool by playing something “outrageous”. You know what. I like old Motley Crue. Yes, I did get to see Tommy Lee drum upside down in mid-air & bought the t-shirt. I think Nikki Sixx’s 2007 album, the Heroine Diaries is an awesome album. Of course, you wouldn’t know that you hipster POSER so stick to Wolfsheim, VNV Nation and the stuff you actually do know. Journey is only hip and ironic after Marilyn Manson if you can get people to dance to it. Otherwise, it just goes to show you suck.

If you couldn’t tell, all this suckage comes from deejays trying to be cool. Deejay Mike isn’t young and hip wearing latex and buckles. He’s close to 40 and wears shorts and soccer t-shirts because “this booth gets really hot” as the night progresses. He has a lot of fans because he knows his shit. The good shit from Kraftwerk to the latest Pet Shop Boys release. And the bad shit, making the music all about the deejay instead of the dancers.

That’s why he’s so cool.

Category: I'm not goth | 9 - Leave a comment