Disintermediate Now
Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—One of Scrib’s ambitions in life was to go barefoot; another was to go into a bank as seldom as possible. That’s why he had a job walking on the beach, strolling and pondering. Writing white papers.
He didn’t like the drive-through, either. He rode a bicycle.
You could get killed in the drive-through on a bicycle. It was more dangerous than stepping on fingernails.
The first sentence of THE CRACKER TABLE was, “Cacoëthes Scribendi went out to the charcuterie for forcemeats, on his bicycle.”
Forcemeats related to farce.
Satire is from satura, or mixed plate. Medley. I’ll have the mixed plate, please.
Win that toaster!
Make a fortune in real estate with no money down!
Own the home of your dreams, now, on credit! No credit necessary!
When Scrib quit
the bank, after Screed came out, he
wrote a guest column for the
Disintermediate now, he urged, quoting blind, black, jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk: “Anything you have to do, you have to go on and do yourself.”
Scrib was more influenced by jazz musicians than by beat writers.
Manage your own money. Don’t trust an intermediary to do it for you. A banker, or a stockbroker.
Manage your own career.
Scrib had managed himself into a hovel between two trailer parks, but what else could he do, in the face of the dot-com bust and the real-estate collapse.
He simplified his life.
He lived in his
wife Brenda’s old home place in Point and Shoot,
Well, they had to live next door to Scrib. Living next to some no-account beatnik who put on airs was no bed of roses, either. La-di-da.
The last good corporate job Scrib had, he was a member of management.
That meant he wasn’t protected by a collective bargaining agreement. Like the union workers where he worked.
The company could sell the factory where he worked to another company and the new company could let Scrib go for any reason at all, or no reason. This is called an at-will employment contract. Either party can let the other party go, at will.
The company didn’t need Scrib anymore. They had hired a bunch of Chinamen, or Pakis, to do his job. They worked a lot cheaper. Scrib had finally worked his way up the ladder until he made so much it was cheaper to let him go and hire a younger worker, or a foreign worker, or simply no longer do what Scrib had been doing, documenting how things worked and how to fix them if they broke.
Don’t get Scrib talking about this. He sounds like Peter Boyle in Joe.
He sounds opinionated and ill-informed.
Disgruntled.
He sounds like a disgruntled failure, someone passed-by, a reject of the American dream, a guy who couldn’t hack it, a loser.
Losers aren’t cool.
Winners are cool.
Successful people are cool. People who survive, who end up on their feet, on top, who are maze-bright, savvy, able to stay ahead of the forces of darkness.
The forces of darkness and the forces of light.
It was a Manichaean struggle out there. Principalities and powers. Spiritual wickedness in high places.
Scrib was in a low place. Beneath the underdog. As Charles Mingus called his autobiography. Charles Mingus was a jazz bass player, bandleader, and composer.
But you had a lot of freedom of movement down there. At the bottom.