The Vindictives - Assembly Line
The Vindictives - ...and the world isn't flat anymore

I haven't had a 'real,' full-time job since January 2002. I worked at Kinko's for over four years prior to that, from when I was 18 to 22. Perhaps numerically that's not a whole lot of time but anyone who's made it past twenty-five can attest to how hard those years really are. Some pop psychologists have coined the term, "Quarter Life Crisis," because the same general symptoms seem to be widespread. At some point after leaving high school, or college, most people have to confront the fact that they will now be working at a job for their rest of their lives. Reality kicks in and it leaves an ever-growing bruise.

For those of you who met me recently, it may be hard to envision me in this period. I don't think Patrick believed me when I first told him about how I'd spike the free coffee with Drain-o, but I was so full of rage and depression then. Let's face it, the prospect of basically wasting away your life at a stupid job is horrendously depressing and dealing with the public daily is enough to instill rage in Tibetan monks.

But the quarter-life crisis was not something that we actually talked about in Psych 100 so I thought I was just losing my mind. It seemed like everyone was completely capable and complicit with this daily grind. I thought maybe I had some kind of Persecution Complex or Oppositional Authority Disorder. I was forced to read a Dr. Dobson book to Prepare for Adolescence, but nobody told me that 'real life' was so absolutely shitty. The Vindictives helped me out immensely. Singing along to Joey's lyrics as I collected my two-dollars in change for the toll road from OCC to my Kinko's was really what kept me going. Belting out "you can't control me" over a wall of backing vocals, doubling Joey on "don't let them make you think you're weird" or "you look at me and shake your head and say that I'm not sane / While watching sitcom reruns is the highpoint of your day," seemed the closest thing to reassurance I could find. Punk is filled with disaffected voices but something in The Vindictives lyrics and sound resonated with me. I'd heard all about why I should hate my job and the cops and that I should burn the church, the cross and the money that makes us hate, but I never heard a lyric and said, 'that song's written for me,' until I heard 'Assembly Line.'

Like I said earlier, I was working at Kinko's, so I photocopied the lyrics and thumbtacked them to my bedroom wall. I tacked them up right by my closet so every morning as I cinched up my tie or packed my book bag I could remember that it was okay not to be one of them. I could remind myself that their 'vulgar anecdotes won't lure me into an assembly-line life.' And there's something more than the sum of the words there, an unspoken hopefulness to the self-deprecating anthem. Of course there's the not-so-subtle mocking of the square culture too, but the closing line became my mantra: It's my intention to defend my volition.

"...and the world isn't flat anymore," had to be posted in this context as well. First of all, just take the title (and repeated ad nauseum outro), the phrase is packed with meaning. Considering the second and third lines of the song, "And if I change my mind about things / I know that I will change it again" this song touched on something I'd been thinking about a lot lately. As we laugh at Columbus' neigh-sayers with our contemporary knowledge that world is indeed round, what are we wrong about today? What will the future being laughing at us about? "...and the world" closes out The Many Moods of the Vindictives and seems to offer Joey's summation of everything addressed previously. Yeah, this life is pretty shitty and it will most likely make you crazy and it's full of emptiness... but we do have a chance at a better future. It's a far cry from a political song but as I became more jaded against my own political ideals, the idea of long-term evolution rather than a drastic revolution seemed more and more realistic. And it empowered me. I couldn't start Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat but I could live my life in a way that didn't embrace our culture's answers to our current problems. I could live a good life and hope that it would catch on, inspire mutation. Maybe if I treated everyone I encounter in life like a human being then my customers might not treat me like shit... and the world isn't flat anymore. You're a living time bomb.

('Assembly Line' Lyrics)
('...and the world isn't flat anymore' Lyrics)

(Buy The Vindictives The Many Moods of the Vindictives at Amazon.)