The Future of The Mateel

I heard a report on the sad state of affairs at the Mateel Community Center on KMUD’s Local News the other day. Faced with immediate bills, and overshadowed by a looming half-million-dollar debt, SoHum’s most celebrated non-profit has very few options. Some hope that the Mateel can secure a debt consolidation loan through the Humboldt Area Foundation using the Mateel Hall as collateral. If that happens, the Mateel will have to repay the loan, plus interest, which means that our community will make payments on that debt, for many, many years to come.

The other option, it seems, requires the Mateel Board of Directors to declare bankruptcy, sell the hall and the rest of the Mateel’s assets, and if there’s any money left, after all of the creditors have been paid, they can use whatever is leftover to try to start a new community center. There’s a good chance, however, especially in today’s real estate market, that liquidating the community’s assets won’t raise enough capital to cover all of the Mateel’s debt, in which case some creditors will take a loss, and the community will have to start from scratch.

It boils down to this: Will we, the SoHum community of today, spend the next twenty or thirty years paying for the excess and irresponsibility of SoHum’s aging dope yuppies, in order to save their dream, the aging and irresponsibly excessive Mateel Hall, or will we write it all off as a total loss? Unless those aging dope yuppies dig deep into their own pockets and come up with that half-mil, right now, we no longer have a community center. Instead, we have inherited from them a yawning chasm of debt that they now invite us to throw our money and our lives into.

Did you expect anything else? Did you think the black market marijuana industry was going to leave the Mateel Hall to the SoHum community as a gift for posterity? Drug dealers throw great parties, but they don’t generally leave nice community centers in their wake. Instead, they leave gutted buildings and trashed properties. Why should the Mateel be any different?

Drug dealers often, and with good reason, feel guilty about their dirty Drug War windfall, so they sometimes donate large sums to churches and non-profits, especially when money is easy, but these donations come sporadically, and rarely continue long term. Drug dealers also tend to gamble irresponsibly and spend too much money on status symbols. Drug dealers need visible status symbols to compensate for the deep negative status of their occupation. Inevitably, the gambler’s luck runs out, and the trashed status symbols get hauled off to the scrapyard, or in this case, sit vacant, waiting for demolition or immolation. The Mateel was both a charity, and a status symbol to the black market marijuana industry in Southern Humboldt, but now that the money’s gone, it may just become part of the trash they leave behind.

Thankfully, the Mateel has had the forethought to prepare the community for this moment by discontinuing the only program people really needed and relied on them for, namely the Mateel Meal, a free lunch program, years ago. We still have plenty of hungry people in our community, but they already know better than to look to the Mateel for help. For them, nothing will change if the Mateel closes permanently. The Mateel never offered shelter to those in need. Hundreds of people in our community who sleep huddled under plastic tarps outside in the rain, because of the lack of affordable housing, will not miss the fancy dress balls or A-list reggae shows at the Mateel, so the venue will be no great loss to them.

The Mateel Hall primarily serves the dope yuppies who live in the hills, have plenty of money, and want a swanky place to party, and because of that, the Mateel feels more like a country club than a community center. I’m not really a country club kind of guy, and the Mateel has done a pretty good job of turning my partner and I off to events there. First, precious few of the events held at the Mateel Hall interest us. Second, we’ve had enough bad experiences at the Mateel that we’re very hesitant to go back. Third, most Mateel events are outside of our entertainment budget. Exclusivity achieved! So, as tragic as it is to lose the Mateel Community Center, when it comes down to it, a whole lot of us here in SoHum will hardly notice that it’s gone.

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The Giving Season

The Giving Season

As 2013 winds to a close, once again we find ourselves in “The Giving Season”. The time of year when we take a moment to show our appreciation for the people who matter to us, and to the folks who serve us faithfully all year long.

Of course, a lot of the people who serve you faithfully all year long, like your postman, barista or auto-mechanic, your kids school teacher and bus driver, your hooker, drug dealer and bartender, or if you live around here, your crew of trimmers, those people all get paid for their work. Believe me, those people wouldn’t lift a finger for you, if it weren’t for the fat paychecks they take home week after week. So, fuck them! Don’t waste your generosity on those douche nozzles.

Instead, this year, give generously to the people who really deserve it. Give to the people who work hard for you all year, every week, rain or shine, and ask for nothing in return for their tireless efforts and diligence. People who make it their priority to provide you with interesting, amusing, and mildly arousing entertainment every week, free of charge, and without compensation, acting purely from the goodness of their hearts, for the benefit of all of humanity. In other words, people like me, your humble blogger at Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do.

I honestly cannot think of anyone who deserves your generous financial gift more than I do, and if you take the time to think about it carefully, I think you’ll agree. Don’t make the stupid mistakes that trap so many gullible saps into supporting greedy, undeserving scam artists, while good, hard-working people like me persevere through the cold, dark winter months without so much as a “thank-you” from the faceless masses who show up here to consume my work anonymously, leaving nothing of themselves but the statistics that record their activity.

Lots of people give money to help the poor around the holidays, and I can hardly think of a dumber waste of money. Look, I don’t have any money. I’m poor, but you don’t see me standing on the side of the road looking pathetic, flying a cardboard sign, and playing on your sympathies. I don’t do that because I don’t play people for saps.

The poor are just a bottomless pit. That’s why they call it “pity”. Don’t throw your money into it. The poor aren’t poor because they don’t have enough money; the poor are poor because the rich have no use for them, and the middle-class would rather kiss rich ass than stand shoulder to shoulder with the poor against the 1%. I spit in the eye of the rich and the middle-class, and call them on their bullshit, while the poor who stand around begging, just play the rich and middle-class for suckers, and exploit them for their pity without challenging the status quo.

Some people prefer to give money to organizations that help the poor, rather than giving to poor people individually, but these organizations play you for rubes too. The Salvation Army hires thousands of “bell-ringers” every holiday season just to suck up all of the money that would otherwise go directly into the pockets of poor people. That is, if business owners didn’t harass, kick and call the cops on every legitimately poor person who comes within 30 ft of their business. Merchants love these “bell-ringers” almost as much as they despise and detest real poor people.

The money that you drop into the Salvation Army kettle goes to pay a literal army of salaried administrators, who enjoy comfy heated offices, medical benefits, and paid vacation time. They spend their days deciding which projects to fund that will make them look good in the public’s eye, while they dream up new ways to capitalize on the pity of the stupid. What is more obnoxious, a paid asshole who never stops ringing that goddamned bell, or a homeless beggar with a nice quiet sign? Take my advice, ignore them both, and give to me, the one you neither see nor hear.

Some people like to give money to environmental organizations. These groups suck worse than organizations that help the poor. I don’t care whether it’s Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, World Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, PETA, or any of the fucking PIRGs, they’re all full of the same bullshit. They’re all just a bunch of spoiled brat white kids who would rather take pictures of dead whales, tortured lab animals, or disgusting landfills full of toxic waste than get a job killing whales, torturing lab animals or making massive amounts of pointless consumer garbage.

Every year we have more environmental organizations, and every year the environmental crisis grows more dire. Stop throwing good money after bad, and cut those suckers off.

The same goes for social justice organizations like the ACLU, Doctors Without Borders, or the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Doctors and lawyers are the blood-sucking scum floating at the top of the cesspool we call modern society. If doctors and lawyers think they can do something about the injustice and inequality in the world, they should do it with the vast sums of money we already overpay them for creating that injustice and inequality in the first place. Don’t give those greedy bastards one more dime than you absolutely have to.

Finally, too many people donate money every year to support public media like PBS, NPR and Community Radio. For God’s sake don’t get fleeced by these shysters. So what if you let Big Bird babysit your kids or like to watch taxpayer funded programming from some socialist country that forces people to pay for it. That’s no reason to open your wallet for them.

Whenever a publicly funded media outlet asks for money, they always like to remind us how much better they are than Fox News. So what! That’s like gonorrhea asking for money because it’s better than AIDS. Look, we’re all media here. Media ain’t gonna save the fucking world folks. I’m not saying that public media is as bad as a case of “the clap”, but there’s a good argument to be made that we’d all be better off without any of it. There’s some news you’ll never here on public media. Here’s some more: Public media is one of the most overfed pigs at the public trough.

They all tell you that it’s non-commercial programming, but that doesn’t stop them from interrupting every fifteen minutes to tell you that the show was paid for by “Saps like you, and generous contributions from Archer Daniels Midland, Cramming Our Food Down Your Throat 247365, Warehouser, Clear-cutting Old-Growth Forests So We Can Plant More Trees, or Massey Energy, We Mine Coal… Fuck You.

Yes, all of those public media outlets enjoy taxpayer subsidies, and suck-up to every evil corporation on the planet for the billions of dollars they give, just for the phony respectability that public media gives them. That’s why you never hear anything like the biting social criticism you read here at lygsbtd, on public media. Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do challenges the right, the left, and everyone in the middle. You won’t get that on PBS, NPR, or even community radio.

All of those public media outlets know where their money comes from, and they’re not about to rock the boat. I don’t know where my money comes from, because I don’t have any. and I’m all about rocking the boat, because the boat is sinking! Public media still wants you to believe in the system, because they are part of the system. They don’t care what the system does to you or your kids future, you’re already shark bait to them, and they’re the shark.

For them, it’s a feeding frenzy, and they’re never satisfied. They always want more. It’s time to cut them off, and put your money behind the real independent voice of Southern Humboldt County, me, and this blog Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do. Your kids will never forgive you if you don’t.

I don’t take money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, because I can’t deal with the paperwork involved. I don’t take money from corporations. I mean, I would, if any of them offered me any, but so far they haven’t. Any corporations looking for favorable coverage from a hot, edgy new-media outlet, I’m listening, but until we make a deal, you are fair game.

Until now, I have not received even one-cent, from anyone, for producing this blog. Yet, every week, I give you more. I give you more humor, more pictures, more social commentary, more science, more economics, more big words, more of myself than I give to my beloved partner Amy, who’s feeling a little unappreciated right now. So how about it folks? I could sure use some help right about now. My truck broke down last week and it’s going to cost more than a grand to fix it.

If you enjoy reading this blog, and if you’ve gotten this far, you must, click that donate now button. Give a hundred bucks to keep me, lygsbtd, my truck, and my mechanic, going strong in 2014.

Can’t afford a whole Benjamin? I understand that times are tough. How about a dollar week? $52, that’s just one dollar per post for all of 2014. It would really mean a lot to me.

In fact, as a thank-you gift, for any contribution of $25 or more, I will send you this lovely Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do coffee mug.

This is a really nice mug. It holds 16oz of your favorite beverage. It has the Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do logo on the side. It’s a good quality ceramic mug, and I’m happy to send it to you for $25. Of course, the real prize is this blog: Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do, and your donation will keep it coming to you all year in 2014.  thanks for your generous support!