White Collar Blues

Plainfield Fest rages down the street.  Used to be such an anticipated weekend.  Now, it's as they say, meh.  I'm more interested in talking to the Carnies and learning who they are and where they came from, where they are going.  I'd like to buy you a drink sir/madam.

I have a great job, I do, but ideally I would be a full-time musician/songwriter, that's the most I have to offer to the world. So sometimes ya get to feeling bummed out at and/or about work, that's the way these things go. The other day I got to feeling thata way (my eyes were on fire!) and happened to be listening to Chicago Farmer's "Assembly Line Blues." If you've never listened to Chicago Farmer, please do. As Clifton Roy says, he's the "Woody Guthrie of Illinois." Needless to say, I wrote "White Collar Blues," my version of Chicago Farmer's song.

*Chicago Farmer is playing with me at Finnegan's in Plainfield on Friday, July 31st. Both "Assembly Line" and "White Collar" will be played that night!*

www.chicagofarmer.com


White Collar Blues

Staring at a spreadsheet
Need a band-aide for my eyes
The walls the saddest shade of grey
I've seen in some time
No widows and my cube
Feels like a padded room
Lose another day
To white collar blues

Scrounging for some change
For to get my morning fix
Meet me in the break room
Don't invite no management
I should be at home
Writing something brand new
Not staring at the clock
With white collar blues

Meetings in the morning
Meetings in the afternoon
Meetings to discuss
What the hell we gonna do
Sales are down all over town
Morale is too
I'm doing all I can
But white collar blues

Now I'm dreaming of being
A country music star
When the boss man calls
And asks me for some kind of chart 
Downsize my mind
At least the parts that I don't use
Sure don't need the right side
With white collar blues

The clock is crawling slowly
Towards five o'clock p.m.
A collared shirt and pants
Surely isn't who I am
I'll go home and sing tonight
At the local saloon
Wake up in the morning
With white collar blues

He's Got Dirty Dishes on the Brain

We have dish weeks at the Overhouse.  Each month we draw up the dry-erase calendar, marking down gigs and other days of significance, and assign Sunday Dish Days.  That is, a 4-man dish rotation, with each person responsible for having the kitchen sparkling clean by bedtime Sunday night.  The board looks like this:

As my finger indicates, this past Sunday, the 11th, was Russell's dish day, a light one at that.  Now I'm not doing this to call Russell out or anything like that, well kinda, but mostly because we have created an interesting system, full of interacting entities, quirks, variable and ethics, in an attempt to keep our kitchen clean: One person is responsible for the kitchen per week.  A foolproof and forgiving system!

The fact of the matter is, we absolutely loathe doing dishes.  Not so much that act I suppose, I always enjoy putting on a record and cleaning the kitchen into submission, but rather bringing ourselves to pick up that first dish.  It's tough sometimes.  Maybe its Sunday afternoon, after a good Saturday night, the games on the tube, a non-dish week roomie is napping in the recliner, you're on that magical love seat strategically placed right above the heat vent *niiiice* the last thing you wanna do is get up and wash a few notoriously brutal loads of Overhouse dish.  It doesn't feel natural to do dishes on Sunday.  Sometimes you get them done on Monday, sometimes Tuesday, nobody's perfect.  It's Wednesday night, for instance, and this is how close Russell has come to finishing his dish week:

He even managed to pull off the somewhat rare "dishes-are-in-the-dish-washer-and-ready-to-be-washed-but-are-just-sitting-there-useless-to-the-world":

I will say, to call Russell out is to call us all out.  There are no winners, no superstars in this game.  We eat our Nachos Locos together from the same bowl, at the same time, and we like it.  If the bowl sits on the counter for 6 days before someone washes it, so be it!  At least I know that next time I eat out of that bowl, that beautiful bowl, someone had to scrub the hell out of it to get it clean.

But seriously Russ, you gonna finish those or what?