By Matthew MacIntosh

OkCupid once offered its users a blogging feature, giving aspiring writers instant access to a sea of volatile nutjobs from around the world. I posted a single blog entry on their platform titled, “God is a Black Woman,” where I waxed poetic about Mitochondrial Eve and humanity’s shared origins in the Kalahari Desert.

Within a few minutes, I received the following message from redneck in a Fort Wayne, Indiana. He had a week’s worth of stubble on his face and a cold, lifeless stare that made Timothy McVeigh look cuddly.

He simply wrote: “Drink bleach!”

I was intrigued. I love a man who speaks in metaphor, and nobody had ever accused me of not being white enough. I may have lived in Oakland for the better part of a decade, but my roots are entirely suburban. In fact, my parents are so white they had to turn the subtitles on for all five seasons of The Wire.

An hour later, I received an angry note from a Gender Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa—an Asian-American M2F transgender woman who thought my post was culturally insensitive for some very complex, academic reasons. Her profile gave the impression that she woke up every morning looking for reasons to be offended and, once she found them, worked backwards to justify her rage.

What are the odds? Two pissed-off midwesterners in the same afternoon? I felt the hand of fate at work!

I sent them each links to one another’s profiles along with the following note:

“Maybe you two could meet up for drinks in Chicago? I know it’s a long shot, but we never know where Cupid’s whimsical arrow may land. Good luck, you crazy kids!”

Sadly, I never heard back.

By Matthew MacIntosh

I once had a friend who became an exotic dancer. No, I never saw her dance—she was like a sister to me and I had no desire to watch her swing around a pole. She didn’t consider herself exploited and she described herself as a strong, sex-positive feminist who didn’t need society to tell her what to do with her own body. She talked about empowerment and patriarchy and subverting the dominant cultural paradigm…or something like that. I’m not really sure, actually. I spaced out by the time she got to patriarchy.

In any case, when I attended her birthday party, I found myself surrounded by intelligent, tattooed, sex-positive feminist strippers, and the conversation was engaging. They all danced at an employee owned San Francisco strip club known for featuring women with diverse body types—large and small, tall and short, black and white and brown. I met one woman who was stripping her way through law school and another who was an advocate for sex workers. It broadened my world, and since my friend vouched for me as “one of the good ones,” nearly everyone was friendly and open. At one point, I struck up a conversation with an attractive, plus-size stripper who told me that she can’t find work anywhere beyond this employee owned club. Nobody else would hire her because her body “doesn’t reflect the current socially constructed standards for beauty,” and this really upset her. Still, she found plenty of work at the club and made a respectable living. She didn’t earn as much as some women with flatter bellies, but she was a successful entrepreneur who was making it happen.

The invisible hand is good at some things and terrible at others. It does a horrible job of determining how much the lowest-paid workers should receive or whether corporations should dump toxic waste in the pond behind your apartment. It does, however, do a decent job at setting prices for goods and services provided by independent business people. I would love to get paid to take off my clothes for a living, but it’s a question of supply and demand. There are simply too many out-of-shape men willing to take their clothes off in public, and too few voyeurs willing to pay. Someone out there might be willing to pay me NOT to take my clothes off, but at what point does that become extortion?

I write for a living and I would love to earn a full-time salary musing about weird cultural phenomena, but people are willing to pay far less for my insights about life than they are for my copywriting skills. Am I a sell out? Totally. I need to eat and it beats working at a steel mill.

I would love to charge you $1,000 for reading this blog post and never write another line of ad copy again, but you’re not willing to pay that much (or anything, really). Is that your fault? Are you taking advantage of me? Of course not! I cherish the opportunity to express myself in a commercial-free zone where I can be as edgy and irreverent as I choose—until, of course, someone re-tweets this post under #EverythingShaming. I fully expect my fellow liberals to surround my apartment with pitchforks and torches someday. For now, however, I’m having a great time, and you people seem to enjoy my crazy thoughts, so I don’t mind doing it for free. Similarly, there must be a female voyeur out there who loves watching a pasty-white nerd boy take off his clothes, but he’d better not expect to make much money at it. The male exhibitionist is eager to strip and a million others are waiting in line to take his place if he gets too uppity. If you don’t believe me, post an ad on Craiglist seeking male exhibitionists and see what happens.

I had a professor at UCLA, a free-market economist, who argued that unionized workers who demand a livable wage are doing the same thing as corporations that conspire to fix prices and build monopolies. Yes, you can file that away in the “WTF?” folder, but it’s an interesting argument to deconstruct. My position on the livable wage is that every W-2 worker deserves one. Yes, if the baristas in my local café are paid more, the cost of my already expensive cappuccino will rise—and that’s a price I’m willing to pay! Profits may decrease somewhat, but if every employer is forced to pay their workers a livable wage, the ethical businesses aren’t destroyed by competitors who screw their workers and pass the savings on to you.

Yes, this amounts to a slight redistribution of wealth, and I’m fine with that. People earning a solid middle-class salary (like my stripper friends and me) ought to pay a little more for their coffee so our baristas can afford baby formula. Libertarians argue that the economy would take an enormous hit, but minimum wage laws have been in effect since Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Far from destroying the economy, these regulations helped create a strong middle class, which was better for everyone.

Unfortunately, our divided federal government has done little to prevent the demise of the middle class, but changes can and do take place on a local level.  Oakland recently increased its minimum wage to $12.25 per hour, which isn’t terribly livable in this part of the world, but it’s a start! And yes, my favorite local coffee house raised its prices, so I now pay $4.00, instead of $3.75, for a cup of gourmet drip coffee that was handpicked by Ethiopians.

Now, you may be thinking, $4.00 for a cup of coffee? That’s outrageous! But the beauty of conspicuous consumption is that overpaying makes us feel like we’re getting something of greater value. Literally. When you put someone in an fMRI and tell them they’re drinking a $100 bottle of wine (when it’s really a $10 bottle), the pleasure centers in their brains light up as though they were drinking the expensive wine. The same neurotransmitters are released, and it’s precisely the same chemical reaction.  How cool is that? My baristas get a higher wage, I get to savor my expensive cup of coffee, and the only people getting fucked over are the Ethiopians.

By Matthew MacIntosh

I was running out of money, and it was entirely my fault. I’d been laid off from my job as a “product manager” for a consulting firm, but I never actually managed anyone. Instead, I edited workbooks that taught real managers how to produce more widgets, more efficiently. And while I don’t blame myself or my employer for the Great Recession, I know that showing up to work with a Mohawk just before the third round of layoffs couldn’t have worked in my favor.

I signed a release form stating that I wouldn’t publicly denounce the company in exchange for a small severance package, and I used three years worth of credit card miles to drift around Thailand for a month. Quite possibly the most amazing thing I’ve ever done, I slept in a bamboo hut in a Lahu village so remote we had to take elephants over a mountain range to get there, helped a Thai NGO write their annual report, taught English to 14-year old monks, swam in the Indian ocean, learned a little Thai massage and became infatuated with petite, blonde, crazy South African.

That’s the plus side of walking into your day job with a Mohawk. The downside occurs a two years later, when you’re forced to take a temporary job at a steel mill.

Technically, it wasn’t a steel mill, but “steel casting company” doesn’t have the same ring, and most people have no idea what that means. A casting plant takes hot molten steel, pours it into sand molds, and turns them into heavy steel widgets. What kind of widgets? Something to do with oil rigs or truck parts or God knows what else. I didn’t really pay attention because it wasn’t my job to make anything tangible. Instead, I took the data from a stack of cards that filled half a room and entered the information into a laptop. Management would later crunch the numbers and work out more efficient ways to make more steel widgets. My ability to type 90 words per minute without drooling on myself made me the perfect candidate.

My supervisor was Ali, an Industrial Engineer and a classic narcissist. Everyone hated Ali except his boss, who had no idea he spent three quarters of his day on Facebook. Ali would come in every Monday and brag about his sexual exploits, even though anyone with a modicum of sensitivity could tell that nobody cared. Other times, he would wax philosophical about his conspiracy theories. For example, you can rearrange the letters of “Obama-Biden” to almost spell “Osama Bin Laden.” Makes you think. Almost.

One morning, Ali came in with a big smile on his face. “I’ve been out womanizing all weekend!” he announced. Yes, he really said that. I slipped my earphones on to drown him out and began entering data while I listened to French podcasts. I’d studied abroad in France my senior year of college, and I didn’t want to lose my French fluency. I would close myself off to the outside world and mindlessly key data into a massive database while I dreamed about the cobblestone streets of le Quartier Latin à Paris. If those guys had any idea I was listening to Frenchies drone on about Philosophy and politics, they would’ve kicked my ass.

What’s amazing about that time in my life is that I have nothing but warm memories. I would get up before sunrise and head out to the plant. I knew I was getting close because I’d see a plume of steam rising from a nearby factory next to the freeway. My clothes reeked of toxic chemicals and my shoes were covered in soot. My days were segmented by the sound of a horn that signaled our breaks, and the roach coach arrived promptly at 11:30 AM. I got scolded once for forgetting to wear my hardhat… and for heading out to the parking lot 30 seconds before I heard the horn. And yet, none of this mattered. After all, I was in love.

I met Mary at café that serves the best loose-leaf tea in Berkeley. She stood 5’2” tall and had olive skin, big brown eyes, and a wide smile that made you feel as though the world was pregnant with possibilities. She glowed. I sat next to her and asked her what kind of soup she was eating because I couldn’t think of anything better to say, and within ten minutes we were talking about world travel, mindfulness and enlightenment.

Mary was an executive assistant with a degree in Psychology form U.C. Santa Cruz, and she hated her job. She had just broken up with a New York investment banker and recently sailed from Brazil to South Africa to help a team of scientist study the massive vortex of plastic in the middle of the South Atlantic. She had no background in environmental science, yet she convinced them to let her join them on the expedition through sheer strength of personality. That pretty much sums up Mary. She dreamed big and whenever she put her mind to something, she accomplished it. However, like me, she rarely put her mind to accomplishing anything practical.

After her adventure, the humdrum of everyday life left her wanting more, and our collective yearning was undeniably romantic. One morning, after broadcasting a debate between a socialist and his right-wing adversary, the French radio station played Jon Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer.” It became our anthem.

“Wooooah, halfway there… woooah, ooooh, livin’ on a prayer!”

Mary’s parents referred to me in private as “the unemployed writer,” and her father would ask, “Soooo, Matt… how’s life at the steel mill?” He was originally from Leeds in Northern England, and I could never figure out whether his tone was condescending… or just English. It was probably both, but it didn’t matter. His judgment just fueled our passion. It was us against the world. The environmentalist and the starving artist—two wayward adventurers who would prove the world wrong.

“Take my hand, and we’ll make it, I swear… wooooah, oooh, livin’ on a prayer!”

Ali liked to use four syllables words he didn’t understand, such as, “I got an infection, the disposition of which is, I have to take an anti-biotic.” One Monday evening in early May, Mary sent me a text that read: “OMG! Osama Bin Laden is dead!” The next day, Ali told me he just knew they’d kill Bin Laden during an election year. That would make for a great conspiracy theory if it were, in fact, an election year.

“It’s not an election year,” I told him. “2010 was the mid-term, and we don’t vote for the president again until 2012.”

“Well,” Ali sputtered, “Still… you see my point, right?”

All this made for some great Facebook status updates, and my friends loved the Douche Bag Boss (DBB) chronicles. Here’s a favorite from April of 2011:

DBB is raising money for charity by auctioning himself off to the highest bidder. The winner gets to join him for a bike ride and an afternoon picnic. Any takers?

One day he suggested we get lunch together. He sped through the parking lot, blaring his horn at anything in his way (cars, forklifts, human beings, etc.)… because he’s just that cool! He spent the entire lunch talking about bong hits and booty calls, and he never once asked me about my life. We split the check and went back to the plant.

Everything was going swimmingly because, after all, I was in love! I remained optimistic about launching a freelance copywriting business. I had a website that I’d designed from scratch and a portfolio I’d built by offering my services for free or well below market value. I received a call from an agency that specialized in staffing creative professionals, and they had a prospective writing job that paid nearly twice as much as the steel mill. I figured it was just a matter of time before things took off. I just had to limit my spending and wait it out until something took.

There was only one hitch—the steel workers decided to strike because they wanted better health benefits. I couldn’t in good conscience cross that picket line, so I called my temp agency and told them I didn’t feel comfortable going to work until they reached an agreement.

The strike was only expected to last a few days but it went on for an entire week, so I felt the financial impact. Fortunately, they let me return to work afterwards because good data entry clerks are hard to find. When I came back, much of the management team looked at me askance, but the workers treated me like a celebrity. Raoul, a robust foreman with a handlebar mustache (the kind hipsters try to emulate) shook my hand and introduced me to his team. “We all heard what you did,” he said, “You’re the only one in the office who refused to work, and we appreciate it!” We all laughed at Ali’s expense, and I went from the lily-white college boy with no calluses on his hands to “one of the guys.” Ali complained that I’d left the office without his permission to tour the plant with Raoul, but I shrugged him off. I had the people on my side! I was a regular Che Guevara, and his bourgeois ass was going to hang from a flag pole when the revolution came.

Hasta la victoria, siempre!

Alas, the revolution never came. I did a series of jobs, some of them writing gigs, others well below my skill level. Eventually, Mary decided that, while she loved the artist component of the starving artist motif, she wasn’t so into the starving part.

“What if we’re always poor?” she asked. A fair question, since I’d been poor my entire adult life, but I believed until the end! Bon Jovi still sang to me.

“Union’s been on strike, he’s down on his luck, it’s tough…. soooo tough!”

Shortly after Mary and I broke up, I landed a full-time job that secured a solid income and excellent benefits. I was finally writing for a living and working for a boss I respected. Mary wasn’t right for me for a variety of reasons, and my life has improved drastically since we parted ways. Yet, while I’ll gladly take gainful employment over the steel mill, I remain a touch nostalgic for spring of 2011.

Whenever I drive past the Gilman Street exit on the 580 Freeway, I see that plume of white steam rising above the grimy factory next to the casting company. And every time I smell that otherworldly aroma of carcinogenic chemicals, it takes me back to laughing with the steel workers, listening to terrible French music in between radio segments and dreaming about traveling the world with Mary.

I’d never suggest that “life is what you make it” and “all suffering is in the mind.” I would be pretty miserable if I had to work at a steel mill for the rest of my life, especially as a laborer. The heat produced by the molten steel is sweltering, and some of the workers are missing fingers because machines chewed them up. Anyone who thinks that all suffering arises from our reaction to external events needs to spend a few weeks in a steel mill.

That said, when external events aren’t so rough… when you’re making ends meet and ready to embrace the next stage of your life… when your worst complaint is that your boss is annoying and your job would be painfully monotonous without the French to keep you company… a shift in perspective can change everything. And even though falling out of love can be excruciating, falling in love never hurt anybody.

By Matthew MacIntosh

WHAT IF I’M WRONG?

I frequently ask myself that question on a wide range of issues. What if Obamacare really will destroy America? What if supply-side economics really does help the poor? What if Kanye West really is a lyrical genius?

Entertaining diverse viewpoints and understanding the logic of your detractors is a valuable intellectual exercise, and it’s entirely possible to recognize the validity of someone’s logic while rejecting their conclusions. A logical syllogism is based on “IF/THEN” statements. For example:

IF Kanye’s famous line, “Heard they’d do anything for a Klondike / I’d do anything for a blonde dyke,” contains a deeper meaning that I’m simply too white to understand…

THEN he could be more than a douchebag with an ego the size of a small planet.

It’s not proof positive that he has anything worthwhile to say, but accepting the “if” premise for the sake of argument opens the door to the possibility of lyrical genius.

As you can see, I’ve made good use of my Philosophy degree, and I can entertain the Pros and Cons of nearly any position in the universe of ideas except one: the case against marriage equality. I’ve read dozens of arguments against same-sex marriage, and they all make enormous leaps in logic. There’s simply no way to justify denying civil liberties to people who haven’t broken the social contract or harmed another human being.

That’s why I was so impressed when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie decided to forgo marriage until everyone could get married. People dismissed it as Hollywood fluff, but I thought it was a powerful statement until, last year, they relented and tied the knot. Brad told reporters that the kids kept asking about marriage, so they finally gave in because it meant a great deal to them.

Admittedly, I have no idea what it’s like to field questions from your son or daughter about why you’re living in sin—I have no children and I’ve only ever lived in sin by myself. That said, it doesn’t seem difficult to tell your kids, “Mommy and I have decided to remain unwed so we can stand in solidarity with an oppressed community.”

Of course, you’d have to simplify it for a child’s mind, but it could be done. Tell them, “What if you went to a birthday party and all your friends with blond hair weren’t allowed to have a piece of cake? Wouldn’t it be great if you refused to eat cake until everyone was offered a piece?”

It’s not the easiest conversation to have with a young child. Maybe they’ll have more questions and maybe they won’t entirely understand until they’re a little older. But by and large, it seems much easier than sitting them down and saying, “Look kids, it’s very important to stand by your principles, and everyone deserves equality before the law. But, you know… sometimes… you just gotta’ say… fuck the gays!”

Brad and Angelina aren’t terrible people. Their decision not to marry was entirely symbolic and easily reversible, much like Hollywood wedding vows. It’s not as if they donated to the Christian Coalition—they just decided to do what millions of people do each year and a sizeable minority should be allowed to do. The moral to the story is that, if you’re going to take a stand on an issue, make sure you have the wherewithal to stick with it or you’re going to look like a five year old who threatens to hold his breath until he dies. Good luck with that, big guy.

Maybe Brad and Angelina thought they could hold out? Maybe they were too hopeful about the prospect of marriage equality in this reactionary country? Yes, we’re winning the fight, but across-the-board marriage equality in all 50 states is going to be a long battle that consists largely of hateful bigots dying off or becoming too senile to vote. In fact, if there’s anything in the world you don’t want to do, tie it to gay rights in America.

Struggling with an intense fear of commitment? Look your girlfriend in the eye and tell her, “Baby, I love you sooooo much. And I will re-grout the bathroom tiles… I will take the garbage out every night… and I swear to God… I will marry you! Just as soon as sodomy becomes socially acceptable in Alabama.”