I’ve actually lived in Jonesboro, Arkansas, Elon College, North Carolina, Greensboro, NC, Chicago, Illionis
back to Greensboro after a 6 weeks of young summer in Michigan at an exclusive school for young artist. Then
because of the war I went to Toronto in case I was going to have to live in Canada depending on how my number
came up.
There and That was and adventure.
Back in Greensboro I went to work with dreams. Foolishly I worked at what I was offered and could drift into.
You have friends who help you get at cash.
I did hold away from crime so far in my life. That’s been good. The laws have been real slow to change.
I know how medical marijuana really would help as a replacement for Viagra, but they get to take my blood
all the time and I am in a lot of pain and have to have significantly powerful pain medications which have
the side effect of sapping desire.
The state of NC is run by the mean and powerful. Making a list of my enemies is something I really need to get
around to doing. I need a Friends list, and an Enemies List.
So I fell in love with a girl who didn’t talk much about emancipation, or a woman’s rights that I remember.
Mostly strong sex was one of her big interests.
She liked being pretty and dancing and was something to watch because she was graceful.
Paying out of State tuition became a problem for her parents so I drove her back to
Binghamton where we stayed in her parents basement for awhile and then we went to
Rochester New York where we lived together for 3 and a half years or so.
I got my heart broke and went close to suicide and ended up back in Greensboro. I am
real aware of the importance of having family and a place to go.
My government needs to care for the unlucky.
That does mean schools where people are comfortable living. People need some space around
them.
Rochester has an important story as a medium sized town with a long history of touchstone events
for an American town.
They say it was the first Boom Town because of being at the end of the Erie Canal for a long time.
That had a lot to do with it. Buffalo gets more snow than God in his heaven. Eventually Buffalo got
lots of power for it’s position as a border town during prohibition, as well as the wonders of
cheap hydro electric power which to this day matter a great deal if you are running a company
that needs electricity.
But Rochester is not to far from the power source of that falls.
I’ve spent a lot of my life: 8 years. There is a great deal of struggle about my life there. Maybe
I sas build to be melancholy. I am regretful at my depressions. I did laugh and make jokes.
I learned how to do stand-up comedy.
Comedy I learned in Fort Lauderdale the first time I lived there. I learned stand-up because I had
hecklers honor.
In Rochester we performed poetry. My friend and friend performs his poems and his wife sells her
paintings. They are real iconoclastic artists and have yelled at me about my recommendation that they
get Poetry, the Poetry Foundation to help support their work.
But it makes sense about how Rochester is to look at even since I have seen so many of my photographs
of Rochester’s buildings and the way the city has ended up with its universities and rust stains.
RIT is still a futuristic movie set. Electric cars look right at home there. Little cars that were
red and quiet amazed me whenever I went over there to buy books.
It is an impressive brick pile more than the littler brick pile that we went to: That being Monroe
Community College.
You can bet your ass I am sorry I didn’t go to Harvard.
You do not want to go to a Community College maybe only. Guilford Technical Institute over in
Greensboro is a great Community College. I worked as the gaffer on a commercial
for that place.
It has a fantastic Aviation school as part of its offerings. If you can’t first go to
Embry Riddle the Aerospace University, go to Guilford Technical Institute, not to be confused with
the Quaker College Guilford College.
There is plenty of culture in Rochester and its population is small for its designed population making
getting around easy and fast.
When I worked as a Taxi Driver driving fast like a maniac in the zone system 90 miles an hour at night
was a possibility if you wanted that and were willing to pay for it, or otherwise I needed to be
in the right zone to be first in line and I was eventually pushed out because of being maybe a little
too good.
I drove fast.
Driving fast is no fun anymore in North Carolina. People like driving too much in North Carolina, and
there are too many of them, so it is simply not much fun at all anymore.
It is still fun in Rochester from what I hear.
Like Chapel Hill North Carolina, the University is now the major employer now that Xerox
and Kodak have been either pushed out, or destroyed.
The trend of power for the university is like a return to medieval times.
Rochester was not the first to have a university with Ivory tower power. Chapel Hill
is the oldest and most powerful University in the nation, if not the world, and there
are things you need to know about how that turns out.
Academics with power look down on the working class and the self educated auto polymath
had better watch out because Frank Zappa was a redneck jazz playing sex fiend.
I know now what I did.
I loved music by Bryan Ferry, but that wasn’t enough. I didn’t know I was really
working class for a long time.
I often identified as a poet.
But you see Rochester is a poetry town of suffering and isolation and melancholy and
scientific achievement. Business people at the top were doing their duty building
great businesses well housed and in the right engineer trends like how early you did
not much need to go outside.
That is about Midtown Plaza. They used to say it was the first indoor Mall. I saw
it in Architectural books identified as the first indoor mall. It gets good and cold
in Rochester. There is a long tradition of managing the cold. Indians didn’t want
to be there because of Hay Fever.
I was a sufferer from Hay Fever for a long time.
I can see why it was a place to be avoided if you had that with no cure.
But this is my fear for Rochester about how it is part of the Medieval trend.
Temporary Labor and big towns with Universities as the major powers; the number One
employers want things quiet. The Port Town model isn’t quite what they have in mind.
Leastways from all I see. NYU wasn’t a bother, though there when I lived in New York,
but since Bloomberg has been in power all the scruffy working artists of the East Side
have been run out of town and across the river to Williamsburg. That was happening
around the time when my business was failing and I was coming apart in the early 90s.
The I retreated back to Fort Lauderdale.
When there was the economic collapse one of the first things done counter to the needs
of the people for alternate types of freelance life and work, was that the Temporary
labor service was shut down.
I’d have turned it into a full service Freelance employer. These organizations,
Companies do not work without clear missions. I grant that.
Work for you as you are is a hard sell. Somehow I fit into the filmmaking world of
hard competition. But you test people and get an idea of what they can do and draw
a 50 mile circle.
Then there are the more trained you can send out fast and far on the airplanes for
big problems in a world of scientific needs.
Finally it is not possible or advisable anymore to move for a job.
That is part of the story of the modern age.
You are a working warrior.
I am a librarian of work.

More later: Copyright Russell Scott Day