When I got to Davis Square this evening to pick up a medication and meet
spatch for dinner on his half-hour break, a
busker with good queer style and an electric guitar was performing the English-language verses of Daniel Kahn's "
March of the Jobless Corps." I left money in their guitar case because I spent a portion of this afternoon seriously considering applying for a job that would require me to move half a dozen states down the Eastern Seaboard, which is not my first choice despite a strong ancestral tradition of going where the work is, but there's real money in it and health benefits and I am sick of clearing the rent by an ever-narrowing margin of not being able to afford anything else. I think we exceeded the metaphor of
drowning and struggling for breath some months ago and are now firmly in the realm of
waterlogged corpse somehow keeps screaming.
Last weekend I patched two pairs of my jeans so that I could keep wearing them. Tonight the zipper on the less-worn of the two pairs abruptly broke. So I guess I get to spend this weekend replacing a zipper. It is not an option to replace the jeans; they have been discontinued by the manufacturer, which infuriates me because they were the one style of 100% cotton, non-stretchy jeans I was able to find in more than ten years that actually fit my body and didn't make me want to peel off my skin. They fit so beautifully that I bought three pairs. I expected them to last longer than two years. For that matter, I didn't expect them to be
discontinued within two years. Nothing is made to last anymore and we are always supposed to have the money to buy the next thing.
I rewatched
Metropolis (1927) this afternoon, the 149-minute Kino restoration currently on
Kanopy that's as close as we're going to get to the full original release without another broom closet in Argentina. I'd seen it last in 2010, accompanied by the Alloy Orchestra. This one had a re-recording of the original score by Gottfried Huppertz, which oddly I feel I paid less attention to except when it was quoting from the "Dies Irae." I love the movie; I did from the time I saw a scratchy videocassette of the butchered short cut in high school; it is still such a weird and beautiful thing. I'd like to write about it properly sometime, but I am so tired that that time is not going to be now.
I am glad to see that
HIAS is throwing itself into the border crisis. The Supreme Court decision on gerrymandering
really scares me.
I've just been working so much and I want to do something else and instead I find myself thinking about moving to another state so that I can work more. That can't be right.