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American Wage Slave
American Wage Slave
American Wage Slave
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American Wage Slave

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Wage Slave is born deformed to a family of heavy drinkers. His mother is a paranoid schizophrenic. He is mentally ill and disabled, but he is can't afford good enough doctors to make his disability case, so he lives in the netherworld between unemployment and disability. The pressure of not being strong enough to lift himself out of poverty, and being labeled a malingerer unworthy of aid, finally drives him over the edge. When psychiatric treatment, and the surgeries he needs, finally come, it is already too late. He spirals into a dark path of downward mobility.

Discredited and abandoned, he drifts from job to job, each new job often as bad as, or worse, than the previous one. His first wife cuts him off. His first two families run away without leaving a forwarding address. He is forced into a third family which he eventually abandons, believing they will never understand him. He attempts a second engagement, but the pressure of working while disabled results in another hospitalization. He realizes his mental health is so bad that he is unable to marry and work. Utterly lost, he drifts from relationship to relationship, his health, and therefore his personality, deteriorating as he loses access to consistent health insurance and safe and clean housing.

The plight of Wage Slave is both big news and no news, big news because his fate is shared by countless millions of people, but also no news because, in spite of how many people live under identical circumstances, the overall topic of his life is still taboo. Even the words used to describe his story have been purged from the English language and have been replaced by the language of denial. As the linguistic tsunami of Positive Thinking, Religious Science, New Age Healing, Positivity Coaching, Affirmation Training, The Prosperity Gospel, and A Course In Miracles, washes over the landscape, indulging in Wage Slave's story has become a social crime for which the punishment is instant cult-like shunning, disfellowshipping and interpersonal excommunication.

You can speak of the story of those murdered, of those tortured, even of whole populations suffering genocide, but Wage Slave's story is still off limits. This cuts across political lines; and, if you try to talk about it, you will find your Democratic congressperson every bit as hostile to you as your Republican senator. Why? Because everyone lives with the subconscious fact that Wage Slave's story could easily become their own story. It is as if each American were navigating a thin trail on the top of an endless mountain ridge with thousand-foot drop-offs on either side. In such a world, the one forbidden topic would be that of possibly falling. It's simply too close to home to admit into the conscious mind; and so we plod on, unreal to each other, as we deny each other, face to face, the opportunity to tell our real life story, since that story points to, at every turn, a possible plunge into Wage Slave's fate.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 10, 2017
ISBN9781370895007
American Wage Slave
Author

Mel C. Thompson

Mel C. Thompson is a retired wage slave who survived by working through temp agencies and guard agencies. Unable to survive in the real world of full-time, permanent work, he migrated from building to building, going wherever his agencies sent him, doing any type of work he could feign competency in and staying as long as those fragile arrangements could last. He somehow managed to get a B.A in Philosophy from Cal-State Fullerton in spite of his learning disorders and health problems. Unable to sustain family life due to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, lack of transportation and lack of income, he lives alone in low-income housing and wanders around California on buses and trains. He began writing at the age of 14 and continues till the current day. (He turns 64 in June of 2023). In his early years he wrote pathetic love poetry until, in his thirties, he was engulfed by cynicism and fell in with a group of largely antisocial poets who wrote about the underground life of drugs, sex, alcohol, poverty, prostitution, heresy, isolation and alienation. In his fortes he turned to prose and began to write religious fiction with an emphasis on the comedic aspect of theology and philosophy. He now writes short novels focusing on the attempt to find meaning in a economic world beset with money laundering, unethical marketing, contraband smuggling, human trafficking, patent trolling, corrupt contracting and every manner of spiritual and psychological desperation and degradation. When he is not writing, he wanders from hospital to medical clinic to surgical room attempting to sustain what little health he has left after a lifetime of complications resulting from birth defects and genetic problems. When he is able, he engages in such hobbies as reading, walking, yoga and meditation; and whenever there is any money left over from his healthcare-related quests, he goes to wine tastings and searches for foodie-related bargains. Before the pandemic, he spent many years gaming various travel-points systems and wrangled many free trips to Europe. He is divorced and has no children, no pets, no real estate, no stocks nor any other assets beyond the $550 in his savings account. His career peaked in the early 2000s when he did comedy gags for a radio station and had about 10,000 listeners per week. However, currently, he may have as few as five active readers on any given day. He no longer has the stamina to promote his work and only finds new readers through ran...

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    Book preview

    American Wage Slave - Mel C. Thompson

    American Wage Slave

    Mel C. Thompson

    Copyright © 2017, 2018

    To contact the author if this book, along with any of the other authors in the Mel C. Thompson Publishing Company lineup, feel free to use the contact data below.

    Mel C. Thompson Publishing

    3559 Mount Diablo Boulevard, #112

    Lafayette, CA 94549

    melcthompson@yahoo.com

    Table of Contents

    Living On $300 Per Month In San Diego

    Anaheim Police Department Clerks On The Edge of The Abyss

    The Der Wienerschnitzel Debacle

    Officer Mushroom Meets Eminem

    The Pink Tiger Dry Cleaning Nightmare

    Terminal Ward Worker In The AIDS Epidemic

    Full Circle With Rodney King

    My James Brown Panic Story

    J.D. Dupri And My Flight From The Rap World

    The INS Incident

    He Was Not An Imposter

    Full Circle With Lionel Richie

    The Geneva Building

    Fire!

    The South of Market Car Thief And The Wu Tang Clan

    Ma & Pa Security

    Living On $300 Per Month In San Diego

    Return To Table of Contents

    Fibromyalgia, which almost no one had heard of in the late 1980s, was mostly understood as a mere pretext for malingering. Only two medical clinics in San Diego took it seriously. Due to it not even being on the Federal list of approved diseases and syndromes, you could not get on Social Security Disability for it no matter how crippled you were. You could get on the more liberal State Disability program, but only for six months, after which you were essentially consigned to death on the streets.

    The doctors had gotten me to where I was no longer bed-ridden all the time and could walk up to two blocks, maybe more. And while I could sometimes play guitar for an hour or more, because it oddly conformed to the exact shape of my curled hands, I still could not type enough to hold a job typing full-time, and typing was involved in almost every job I was qualified for. Additionally, I could not even do the remaining old-fashioned jobs involving hand-writing, because, after about ninety minutes my hands would give out. On any random day, my hands could only be counted on to work for an hour or so. On a great day, perhaps my hands would work for two hours. (My temp agency tried every type of job to save me from bankruptcy, but at last I went bankrupt and lost my car too, as there simply were not enough accommodations at any job site for a person in my condition back in the 1980s, or so we thought.)

    Jobs not involving either hands or legs were quite rare then, so, when my State disability ran out, I was in a real fix.

    I dared not ask my family for the amount of help the few sympathetic souls around me thought I should. My reticence to turn to my family in a whole-hearted or consistent way began with the following incident: One time a visitor had declared me a malingerer in front of the whole family on some Holiday get-together. No one in my family called me a malingerer, however the whole room fell silent. Then they all looked at me and smirked. I desperately tried to explain my situation, but the more I tried to explain, the more they silently watched, grinning, as I twisted in the wind. They allowed me to dangle that way and they did not offer any pushback to the visitor’s assertion. After the get-together was over, I went to my family members individually to see if they thought I was a malingerer, but they all turned away silently and offered no comment in support of me after this humiliating episode. The overall atmosphere surrounding my chronic pain went on this way for decades.

    This has led to a lot of tension between me and anyone being introduced to this dilemma, because every time I would be in severe financial hardship due to muscle or joint pain, people would all ask, Can’t you ask you dad for help? Then I would explain the silent treatment I’d gotten around this topic and how humiliating it was to never get an answer about it; and why, therefore, I could not persist in asking for anything like the kind of major life-support that folks were suggesting I ask for. In fact, no matter how long I spent explaining how many awkward and humiliating interactions took place with my family around this, the reply always came again, I don’t understand. Can’t you just ask you dad?

    What sporadic help I got from my family always felt so degrading that I often felt it would be better to die on the street than to accept the random types of irregular help I did get from them. I did accept aid, after all, here and there, but always left such interactions feeling guilty, inadequate, or somehow filthy.

    Many friends also began to write me off as a malingerer too. It was Southern California, in the 1980s, and most people were solid conservatives whose party line was, We don't believe in being sick. (They believed illness was all a matter of beliefs. Conservatives at that time had decided that even aging itself was a belief problem; and so it was not unheard of to meet people who said they did not believe in growing old, several actually saying to me that they could never die since they no longer believed in dying. And so elderly persons looking for anything like deep sympathy at that time were largely out of luck, because, as the New Agers had it, old age, sickness and poverty only had one cause, and that cause was always negativity on the part of whoever was suffering, period.)

    At this time Republicanism was just beginning to merge with the New Age movement, (and the heart of this New Age Republican fusion, as my bad luck would have it, was San Diego County). People were already dying on the streets of San Diego, as the belief spread that illness was a sign of bad thinking and that weak thinkers didn't deserve help, but rather a good kick in the butt. And so I was profoundly alone, afraid to ask for help from most of the people I knew. I was isolated in a studio apartment in a dangerous, heroin-laden, mugger-infested section of San Diego right under the loudest jet-path in America. It was not an ideal situation for a person whose nerves were already on-edge.

    My last State disability check had run out, and I would need $300 to pay rent for my hundred-square feet directly beneath the flight path. (Each night jet liners, diving down at a steep angle to try to not to miss the runway, had to come within thirty feet of my roof. This was one of the most dangerous landings in North America at that time.) The roar

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