Without HR assets the Syndicate Flops

We, meaning us, were a specialty crop. Raised in New Jersey, kept in the dark and fed a lot of crap, we did not know who we were, or what we were being prepared for. I was lucky to have been far from the pick of the litter, or the cream of the crop:

I smoked pot with the Black kids and drank vodka with the Jews. We robbed the mob of thousands of dollars’ worth of illegal fireworks while still in grade school and later blew up pipe bombs in our own front yard. We grew pot over the overflowing septic tank and hung up the plants to dry in the attic. I learned most of these skills and others in the Boy Scouts and thought little of it.

America’s got talent. I was far better at shucking clams than I was gutting fish. Clams do not bleed, or stare at you with terrified eyes. Under the radar, in the back of the house, washing pots, and then moving up, until wearing a white hard hat in Channelview, Texas at eighteen, as the kid on the OCMT management team.

It took me years to catch on. I might yet have it wrong. When a play is well done, this is how the mark should remain. No, I have it right, finally, as the regime shits all over what should be my swan song. But there was a time when I was easily gaslit into taking someone else’s word for what did not make sense to me at all.

Even when I was far from convinced, I had felt the electrified fence enough repetitions to realize the shortest distance between me and fresh air was to convince the rank in the room that reality was what they claimed it to be.

I eventually, at 21, worked in the same Scout camp I had been to from 11-16 as an assistant director. There was some strange stuff going on. I only worked one season. The next summer I was doing hard labor in Austin, Texas. By New Years, I was representing a manufacturer of transits and clinometers in Philadelphia, Pa.

I can answer David Byrne’s questions. I did go to night school. I know all about credit, collections, credentialing, and still can shuck clams as well as tie a bowline behind my back, with a minute of practice.

I grow tomatoes just outside the Lakehurst joint base gates. I live on Medicare and Social Security. I am not a hypocrite: I am a Democratic Socialist. I do not play golf, nor am I running from creditors, collectors, or for office.