Time for another update, I suppose.

My part-time job is going well. At the end of my first week, the friends who got me in asked me what I thought of it. I told them it's the most casual, laid-back position I've ever had. I can drink coffee in the work room. I get to wear whatever I want, even blue jeans. There's nobody hovering over my shoulder. I can go for a break pretty much whenever I want. If I show up to work late (which I haven't yet), it's not that big a deal, provided it doesn't happen often. People tell me "thank you" instead of "why didn't you finish that yet?" My friends seemed surprised by my response, which tells me that they've never dealt with a Boss From Hell before. That's probably a good thing, for their sakes and for mine. I need to be around kindhearted people, the type who still find rude behaviour shocking.

I made the mistake of contacting my ex-…

The highway wound up
to the riverbank in a spiral,
abandoned, echoing sounds of phantom cars,
red and white lights at dusk

Once I'd walked
the fifteen miles to the junction
until the barricades,
and the unknown trail past

Standing at the bridge edge,
kicked loose concrete,
and watched it fall, a mile down,
along the great pillars, decayed
like great…

A financially-challenged man gets a job as a telemarketer, and quickly finds himself complicit in a nightmarish, dystopian scheme to sell arms and de facto slave labor.

Sorry to Bother You, the full-feature debut of rapper/composer/director Boots Riley, begins as an inventive comedy. The film, for example, literally drops its cold-calling protagonist, Cassius, into the lives of the people he phones at their most inconvenient moments. Gradually, it opens…