for 17 September 1999. Updated every WEEKDAY.
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Subject: Labor Day? What Labor Day? I don't know about you, but I haven't had a Labor Day off since 1993. Neither has anybody I know. Welcome to the Great American Artificial Economic Recovery, where people have traded in their one good job for two or even three crappy ones. Ironically enough, we just might feasibly blame the labor movement for it. By unnecessarily escalating the cost of production while lowering quality overall, labor unions more than had a hand in driving a huge number of American manufacturing jobs to other shores. Today, almost nothing is made in the United States. That which is, is only assembled from parts made elsewhere. Americans now earn their livings by offering support services for those products at less than half their former wages in manufacturing. And when some lucky bastard has a holiday, I have to work my ass off all the harder for it. Fuck Labor Day. Alan in Albuquerque ("Bitter, party of one") <EvlGenius1@ aol.com> How can you simultaneously blame labor unions for escalating wages, thereby driving American manufacturing jobs overseas, while bemoaning the fact that you'd make more in manufacturing (thanks to labor unions) than you do at your support service job? Issues aside, we'd be bitter too if we didn't get Labor Day off. Maybe you should get another job. The luckiest of bastards, the Sucksters  Good on yer Sucksters! All the best from the Land of the Long White Cloud on your achievement. As the owner of a small business that is celebrating its second anniversary at exactly the same time, I know how difficult it is to start something new and understand the satisfaction derived from being suckcessful (terrible pun, I know, but I just couldn't help myself). I'm proud of you. Your email helps make my day. Just one request: As you grow older (and stronger with profits), please don't get fat or complacent. That would really suck. Steve Grbic Auckland, NewZealand <steveg@easynet.co.nz> We may get older and older, but our ever-present, lingering sense of disappointment in all things prevents us from getting complacent. Our moodiness dictates that we exercise regularly, which in turn prevents us from getting fat. Thus, we shall likely continue our long tradition of dissatisfaction and resentfulness henceforth. "Good on yer" — is that a New Zealander thing? Phony, lonely cacophony, the Sucksters
Richard Stocker Costa Rica <stocker@sol.racsa.co.cr> OK, that's a good first draft, but the rhyme scheme breaks down in several places.
Also, the third stanza, which involves a wasted wife and something about coffee and magazines — we'd like to cut that one. It's not that it isn't interesting, it just doesn't do anything to develop the life-affirming themes present in the rest of your piece. Thanks so much for submitting. Your check and your complimentary Fuck You Custard Pie are both in the mail. the Sucksters Subject: My dear, sweet Sucksters Well, you're all off on a vacation and doubtless having the time of your lives. Well, perhaps not the time of your lives, but anything that involves a glass pipe and some burritos probably can't be all that bad. In the meantime, I recline groggily at my desk, nursing a hangover that would doubtless kill a lesser man, and browse your archives. I think I've read almost everything Suckly (whatever happened to Zero Baud?), and have been duly amused by this activity. I believe that you're the only online magazine to make such frequent use of the words apocryphal, screed, and Zeitgeist. Now don't get me wrong, because I really do love you all to bits, but do you have some sort of spin-the-wheel system in place, utilized to choose from the list of words that Suck has laid claim to? If so, I hope you can send me one. I think it could come in handy here at the office, where I often find myself lapsing into a serenely numbing state, groping for a k-rad word to build a rant around. But I digress. Not that I actually stated anything at the outset from which I could digress, unless it be your infamous crack habits. I just wanted to tell you that while sniffing the days Fish, I came across a banner ad. Yes, yes — this is probably not an unfamiliar scenario to you, but this one was for Sun and featured a version of Breakout! As memories of a childhood misspent, one hand on the joystick and the other in my pocket (please, the innuendo really is too easy, so's the Alanis Morisette crack) flooded back to me, I became — and this is the only word that does it justice — zombified. After I put the dot back in dot com, I realized I'd forgotten everything I'd read in Suck today! This banner ad is obviously some sort of nefarious plot from the Man to bring your riot house down. I just thought that you should be warned. Hugs and kisses, Liam Black <lblack@marlborough.ie> Well, we're just brimming over with apocryphal conspiracy theories, aren't we? Maybe such screeds are all too inevitable these days, given the approaching Zeitgeist. Just remember, it doesn't take a zombification process to forget everything you read in Suck. Forgettably, the Sucksters Subject: The Electric Boogaloo I think that I may have evidence that kids today indeed are still break dancing. Real kids too, not some pasty goober who has spent the last 15 years languishing in his parents' basement, fretting over his dwindling supply of parachute pants. I teach saxophone at a music store. During a lesson last week, I asked one of my junior-high-age students what he does with his time (since he obviously isn't spending it practicing, buying new reeds, or learning to read music without having to write the note names under the staff). He listed a couple of activities. Aside from being interested in "metal and rap" (point of reference: picture an African-American Kidd Rock fan), he said that he and his sister were trying to learn how to break dance. I was skeptical until he mentioned, without prompting, the difficulty of getting good cardboard. Perhaps this individual is part of some line of near-troglodyte stock. But considering that he lives in rural Indiana (which has just discovered quinine and Richard Marx), it is safe to assume that any revival of breaking has preceded this by at least a year. MattReynolds <joodi@mindspring.com> Hmm. Thanks for that anthropological tidbit. We've also heard tell that men in some parts of North Carolina are still wearing acid-wash jeans. Slow trickle-down, or the first waves of '80s retro revivalism? You make the call. Finger on the fading pulse of the dying trend, the Sucksters Why do people write you such long letters? R. F. <anck_98@yahoo.com> People write to us from work. People have time to waste at work. People feel an affiliation with us because we're just as snotty as they are. People procrastinate in any way possible. People like getting published on the Fish page. People like getting published, period. Anywhere. People like to tell us where to go. People like to tell us what to do. People like to tell us what they loved or hated about what they read. People like to go on and on about what they think. We're living proof of that. We read all our mail. We respond to a lot of it. We like getting a lot of mail, even after all these years. Hard to believe, but true. We're not always sure, ultimately, why people write us such long letters, but we're sure glad they do. Feeling momentarily grateful, which is understandably very disconcerting for us, the Sucksters |
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