Note: if you are looking for the first three parts of this post, go to page 1 of this thread and read the second to last post on that page. You can also just jump in below. Come on in, the water is fine.
PART 4
Later that Saturday afternoon (January 11th), the North Star crew made serious headway in its mission. As I see it, (and also as I get older), I know that making every single fucking business decision solely based on higher profit margins is becoming a real threat to the coolness & fringe nature of off beat ventures like this one. This new wave of coin operated amusement machines invading our diverse cities across the country provide a great chance to run a more incomparable business model than any other that came before, and even more so in Québec. Now that is opportunity ! The question is, will this new team of crazoids at North Star be creative enough to make that happen ?
Big corps bank on the predictable, right up to the extent of manipulating their clientele as they would manipulate the products they peddle. They work at gaining control of the unpredictable by whatever means they can "legally" conjure up. The man plays hard on the slide because he is basically a bastard, a real son of a bitch in my book. He would very much like everyone to behave in the same way, like the same things, and say how great it all is to everyone they know. And even if he succeeds in making everyone buy the same products, he is always very careful not to blow the clients' belief in their own individuality, uniqueness and choices. It is tricky, but he is managing to pull this off quite well these days with the help of all the information willingly provided by what he considers as his own fodder by now. This is very underhanded on his part and also quite naive on the part of the web consumer. But hell, don’t you feel special and important when you are offered to buy something you were messaging your facebook "friends" about last week ? Sure you do, you are still making your own choices, aren't you snowflake ? The man is just being helpful and getting to know you better & better, now don't you feel so special & prime ?
Then there are the experts at efficiency who are always trying to find new ways of increasing productivity in the workplace. They work for the man, and they make employees feel more miserable by evaluating (i.e. manipulating esteem) their performances and aiding them in feeling inadequate by adding more and more to their tasks until they can’t deliver. Another good management trick is pushing their subservients out the door and way beyond what normal healthy humans can do so that they eventually leave their jobs on their own or lose it completely. This is good because then the man does not have to pay any severance to that washed up shmuck of a human being supporting a family who could no longer take the turning up of the pressure valves. Then replace them by someone younger, less efficient and cheaper so that you can freely bullwhip them into a drone. Repetitive tasks and routine are the tools of choice, and they are great tools when you are putting someone under the gun of generating profit at all costs. These tactics are not conducive to a sustainable economy, but who cares, these short sighted greed head bastards are not about the long run, it is about making what is called “fuck you money” right here, right now, and the “fuck you” is aimed directly at their clients for starters, and then is turned gently to their subservients who made it all possible for their so called superiors to achieve this crude goal as their ultimate answer to life itself. Fuck these people. Boy, I just read what I wrote, I am not human tonight.
Regardless, we are “all grown up” as a capitalistic society by now, and there is little room (or time) for organic growth anymore, so we shoot up the hormones and the steroids promoting monstrosities and producing burnouts along the way. Good business, in the true sense of the term is where the supplier and the customer and the employees profit from each transaction, but unfortunately, we are now down to the nitty gritty, especially in what remains of the traditional retail businesses. We are moving towards a new reality instead of taking on the huge task of fixing the one we still have on hand. This new less substantial reality is quickly being appropriated by a new set of greed heads who can now sell their goods, stuff, eats,rides and garbage without displaying them in the old reality, thus ungraspable by all the 5 senses. It looks good in the pictures, but you can't touch or feel or smell or taste it, just have it delivered quickly because we are very important, remember ? No worries, this new way of retailing and of centralized power distribution is so very convenient, and some of “it” can even venture to have no material substance at all, yet still sell somehow. Very cool, and everybody still gets to feel so special with home delivery right to your very own doorstep. More pollution via the sale of a product that is more than likely disposable so we can reorder. Wow.
Making substance, quality and even truth matter less is so very necessary to this new way of achieving higher margins. Start by treating your customers like morons, they will get use to it. Give them a free cell phone, then slowly deliver less and less quality as they get use to that as well with more disposable crap becoming available while you keep the price the same. Then take the opportunity to raise the price when you deliver a new flashier model of the same item with even less durability, but damn, it sure looks good doesn't it ? So by selling looks and hype instead of substance, you are becoming quite the retailer. Hype is now primordial to business visionaries instead of the actual goods.
Business mission statements should be more meaningful than just colourful words laced together to sound nice. Maybe the consumers should write them instead of the marketing teams and then be upheld to the man demanding that he be accountable to it or get off the bus, fully/completely. Someone has to be responsible for all this shit, or at least the part that is hurting our environment, yet no one seems to be around to answer. Basically, we need to stop being careless in how we do business and especially how we consume so widely without concern for consequences. Making money is fun, and having more than you need can make you feel good, but shouldn't that entail some kind of responsibility ?
Being one-dimensional in business means that you harbour one lonely goal, and that is making money which is vigilantly driven by profit. Letting this become the only value and the only goal defining the work that you do, - well, that is kinda sad and lacking somewhat in the deeper meanings that are possible. In short, I don't think that money should be the only dictating factor to a business endeavour striving for natural growth.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that having a vision hinders the goal for profit, it depends on how smart you are in being able to make the two jive as one. Meaningful and responsible money is one way to reduce its vile effects on our world. And if there weren’t so many stupid things offered as compensation for the efforts of bringing all this shit to market, it would be a lot easier to hang on to your own hard earned money when you start getting ahead of the grab and go game.
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Ok, so most consumers are made out to be stupid, and often treated that way. Greed and money and prosperity gaps are some of the culprits, along with a disregard for a future that can easily be less toxic if people gave up on what are still considered unquestionable values in doing business which got us here in the first place along with this senseless god damn race to the finish. There are so many things that we don’t need and are told that we must have to be content and complete. This may be partially why we are in such trouble lately.
Moving on.
Regardless, this latest motley crew of hoodlums hanging around the North Star that morning decided to head back to the shop to play/test the pins we had received from Toronto in lieu of the big installation due to take place on the 25th of January at the Bell Center. Now that made me feel like we were going the right way – shrine like location with lots of people traffic where we could show pinball to the general population once again with a good possibility for profit, what a wonderful combo. I was a bit too excited about this upcoming prospect for North Star amongst the other projects we discussed. I personally don't get easily excited about much anymore, but I thought that this was something worth reckoning with, and I then sort of decided to get stupid out of amazement. I started drinking in the early afternoon in order to feel something more than just the thrill of organic growth.
Lord Byron wrote something once about modern man and intoxication which I like very much and I have taken the liberty to interpret below for more clarity by explaining it in the parlance of our times.
When we were cave dwellers or tree climbers or whatever we were a long long time ago, basically before we developed words and combinations in order to abstract the thoughts that were beginning to cross our minds and needed to use a vehicle in expressing these abstractions. Basically, the time before that, before civilization and agriculture at best. That time when we used various noises and sounds to express our base instincts, needs and desires. Again, all those loud grunts and groans and laughs and cries, hell, also the howling at the moon we use to do and the silence of the hunt and the scream of the kill and the exclamations while mating. So now, here is Lord Bryon saying that when we stopped doing all that in the wild, we lost something. And we gained something else, and that something else was the ability to be reasonable. Lord Byron uses the word reasonable in his quote, I use civilized.
“Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.”
Here goes my version and his together so you can grasp what he meant back then.:
So now that man has become reasonable (and civilized), he must get drunk in one form or another because the best part of life (being this meaningless and dirty little thing we are thrown into) is but intoxication, in any of its many forms.
Byron is referring to the intoxication of the wildness being substitute these days for alcohol lets say. What we had many thousands of years ago as the only dope and source for intoxication came from our natural unaltered surroundings, way before the ancient Egyptians messed with hops and water and yeast and invented beer. Now we can sell this stuff in Byron's words as “the best of life” or as we put it today, “miller high life”. Intoxication in all its wonderful forms is the best part of an otherwise dull life heavily burdened by the task of survival. It is now bottled for the civilized city dweller, and even in soft drink form, - so Enjoy Coke – it’s the real thing.
So it is not because we are out of the caves that the best part of those terrible lives spent in fear and darkness in the cold and wet huddled humidity of the night while hiding from predators did we not have moments of reprieve and intoxication through full moons, killing and carnal knowledge. That was as good as being alive got back then. That was the best of cave life, and it was indeed intoxicating. And even now that we are ‘reasonable’, the best part of life remains intoxication in one form or another. And since for the most part we are not howling at the moon anymore, and are reasonable, we still have this innate need to feel intoxicated. Why ?, because it is indeed the best part of life, a sort of celebration of being here.
So understanding this quote from that Englishman, I was tempted to celebrate the high side of life. Not a good idea since I was lacking in sleep and that I am also way past my prime as a good hunter, but once again, I repeat, - the best part of an ordinary life lived is indeed intoxication of one sort or another. I was swept off my feet by the road, the prospects, the energy around me and the general buzz I was getting from what loomed ahead in the month of January. That was the trigger for the intoxication that followed and for which I felt I needed to be promote. Always higher and further right ?
After some pinball and some talk and laughter and champagne and planning, I thought that it would be a steadying proposition to get some food. So after some Pho at my favourite restaurant of late, the Warlock & I did the rounds of our locations on the Main which I like to survey every weekend, and this Saturday was no exception to the routine. So the beers began to flow, then the ciders and then more of the same. So by 6pm I needed rest & especially refuge from the energies around me. The Warlock was just getting wound up, so I left him in the care of the North Star and I made my way home to sleep some. He was going to uber it back, but when I awoke partially rested at 8:30 PM, I texted him and asked him what his status was. No reply. I knew that I had to get him out of whatever predicament he had gotten himself into by his adhering to Byron’s quote about the best of life. He is my friend and regardless of how I felt or how heavily and hard the rain was coming down, I understood that I had to go beyond downtown and get to him.
And yes it was still raining and the roads were shit and the night was dark and he was far from home, so I brought him back to the refuge after stopping at the Provigo to pick up more protein to feed us. We ate like cavemen, drank like idiots but talked like reasonable men. So again, the best part of this shitty little thing we are all involuntarily thrust into by two other people (our parents) looking for their dose of intoxication unknowingly stemming from their ancestors time, I know that all these intoxications in all of their many many forms will always be the best part of my life for sure.
Between the throwing of ideas back and forth, I had managed to ask the Warlock what the plan was for the next day, Sunday. Asked him at what time he needed to leave Montreal. The truck was in Mile X, we were on Nun’s Island which is at least a half hour away in good climate, and we were not experiencing those idyllic conditions at all that weekend.
It was past midnight when I managed to utter the schedual question. Meanwhile the outside temperature was dropping fast and the insistent rain was turning to snow while the puddles transformed to very smooth ice surfaces all over the city. It was looking like it was going to be a long and nasty drive for Scott all the way to Hog Town from la Ville de Marie tomorrow no matter what time he decided to leave. Scott said that he wanted to be in Toronto by noon, so I did a quick calculation and shuttered at the result. This meant getting to his ride (i.e. The 5 ton truck) by 5 AM. This also entail getting up from slumber around 4:15 AM and just “go out there” after coffee and cereal. This didn’t seem to phase him, but I was concerned about the feasibility of it all as I watched the ice pellets start falling on the cars parked below. It was nearing midnight now.
I had learned years ago that the Warlock understands time in a different way than I do. But even if he does, we both always manage to somehow be on time to meet any of our schedualed obligations. And even if we have very different ways of achieving this quality of perfect punctuality often described as the politeness of kings (even the intoxicated ones) we both manage to keep to our scheduals.
We know time.
Editing of the above will follow when I make it back to the refuge of the night on Feb.10th. DONE.
For now I am going to gather material for another episode. Starting a new apprentice today. As well, Mindstorm88 will be hanging out with us (Joanna, Lucien and I) at North Star this morning when another routine like day on the road begins. All my hopes for an interesting day, or rather should I say, all my efforts will be present to make it so, what about you ?
PART 5 to follow very soon. I am way behind in my work because somebody' else's behind is often in the way of my work these days.
R.A.B.
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