Since I'd been letting it go awhile, I elected to Rake the Lawn this afternoon. After that, I stepped outside a few times to admire my handiwork, and my, how tidy! Along with stringing up the Christmas lights outside the house and trimming the hedges, lawn raking is one of those middle-age life tasks that tell you that your 20s are long gone, because back then you didn't own a house and the landlord did all that stuff.

Of the few things I've attached to this page, the Blogsnob feature that puts up a random blogsnob page link is one of the most useful and interesting. Today, f'rinstance, I noticed a link to the Freak Depository and hit the site. In an entry, the author contemplates fielding a few of his short stories to the trade mags, and he decided to do some reading to see what the competition was like. His impressions are decidedly like my own:

So on one hand I feel pretty confident in my chances of being able to sell something in this market, and at the same time I'm just thuroghly depressed by what I'm seeing. Just weak characters, predictable stories, tired devices, poor social commentary... Just sad sad sad.

Because I had some travel ahead of me, I picked up Dean Koontz's One Door Away from Heaven to read on the plane and found that he's going seriously astray. Here's an Amazon review that captures my sentiments:

Is it my imagination or do Koontz's characters get kookier and more unbelievable with equally unusual names with each book? His writing is also beginning to get (overly) descriptive and slightly tedious.

There's only so much of this a person can take before he starts screaming, "Shut up! Shut up you melodramatic moron!" Other than that, the book is all right. Oh, except for the aliens and government plots and brilliant sexy twins and washed-up P.I. and recovering alcoholic smart-babe and her brain-damaged but oh-so-compassionate aunt and the eviler-than-all-get-out heartless badguy and... you get the idea.

So Freak Depository has a point. Sharp writing doesn't call attention to itself, it explicates. The writer is compelled to bring this story to you, not labor over the word count. And you know what? Based on what I see around here on Salonblogs, quite a few of us could be (and should be) earning a livelihood with our prose.

6:57:11 PM       

Like a vicious, insane beast from a horror film, Wal-Mart stores continue to propagate like an alien invasion, ringing communities and strangling their local commerce. The pattern is so well-established it's become a cliche: First a Wal-Mart store appears on a town's outskirts, then it hollows out and guts the downtown area, leaving plywood-boarded windows and crime-infested streets in its wake. With the downtown jobs gone, the numbers of shoppers decline until eventually the Wal-Mart closes down and moves on to another community to repeat the process, leaving a garbage-strewn ghetto of pain and misery in its savage wake. Except that it isn't just one store, it's thousands of them and they're eating us alive.

"But Raven," you ask, "Doesn't Wal-Mart bring jobs to the cities that attract a store?" Sure, but according to the activist site Walmartwatch:

Three existing community jobs are destroyed for every two new jobs at Wal-Mart.

Whatta madhouse! Just getting the car parked was tough, and by the time I'd threaded my way to the front door, I could see this was going to be wild. Inside, the place was going at full frenzy: people running around, screaming at their kids, kids howling in mindless rage, loudspeakers blaring music and announcements and calls for a "CSM," whatever that was.

I make my way to customer service, and get into line, which is a long one. Now you know me, I love to watch people, so I'm studying the antics behind the counter and these people are operating only one notch below full-freakout panic mode. Smiles and "thank yous" died in triage some time ago and the gal in charge of the returns section was surrounded by an ever-growing pile of merchandise. Turns out she was the one who kept asking for the CSM, which I figured was the customer service manager.

"I need," yelled the beleaguered clerk, "one person from every department, here, now!"

All the employees who started to show up were women, as are 72 percent of Wal-Mart's staff—the only guys you see are either stocking shelves, working in auto, or over at the seafood counter. A story I was looking at earlier this week pegged the average cashier's wage at $7.50 an hour, and I'm standing around watching what these people are dealing with for what's going to amount to around $35 for an 8-hour shift after taxes and it doesn't make sense.

I saw a couple of stories this week about the miserable deal Sam Walton's set up for the women who make his empire hum. In Oregon, testimony in the first of 39 class-action lawsuits against Wal-Mart recounted appalling treatment, like this from personnel manager Carolyn Thiebes:

Managers also circulated a trophy, sculpted in the form of a donkey's rear end, called "the horse's ass award," Thiebes said.

"It was humiliating," Thiebes testified in tears last week to open a wage-and-hour lawsuit against the company. "That trophy was given so many times... anytime a department failed."

Its aggressive expansion plans during the next five years call for hiring 800,000 more workers, giving the company a work force larger than the U.S. military.

"I guess you could say I was Walmatized," says Stephanie Odle. "I gave up my nights, my days, my weekends, my holidays. Time and again the jobs I should have had were given to men."

So what should be done about all this? First, if you hear that one is headed toward your community, hit the Walmartwatch link above. They have case studies of successful efforts at driving the behemouth off. Second, pay a little extra to support your local merchants when you can. Third, support the efforts of Wal-Mart employees to unionize, organize, and cooperatize their stores. I'm not known as a pro-union kinda guy, but this is a situation that warrants one.

12:51:36 PM