What Trickles Down
I just want to say first: This really isn’t a review of the film Parasite. It’s a very personal and indulgent use of this platform to tell the story of my own grim financial reality, and how it led me to connect deeply with and root for the characters in this amazing film. I think most would consider what I’m sharing here to be the financial equivalent of TMI and majorly cringe in its detailed transparency. I get that. But I’ve really been needing to share about my current situation for awhile now, and I feel I’m running out of time to share it. Experiencing Parasite gave me the opportunity for expressing these thoughts, ideas, and moral imperatives in a (hopefully) meaningful way. Thanks in advance if you read all of this. Trigger warning for mentions of suicidal feelings, but I want to clarify that I’m not actively feeling suicidal right now. Also - spoiler warning for the movie!

It was when Mr. Kim’s son Ki-woo dropped into voiceover, narrating his return to consciousness in the hospital after being very nearly killed or made brain-dead by Geun-se, the crazed final competitor in the grift-off that happened under the noses and within the home of the Park family. That was the moment when I felt that Parasite was the greatest film to ever be released in my adult life, and one that had now become highly personal for me. Ki-woo spoke of the idiot cop and aloof doctor standing over him as he came to and opened his eyes. The cop tries to read Miranda rights to the now awakened defendant, and Ki-woo can’t help but laugh in the faces of this “cop who doesn’t look like a cop” and “doctor who doesn’t look like a doctor.”
“Why don’t they look like their professions?,” I asked myself and right away could answer: Because they don’t know how to do them. Because doing one’s job well just isn’t a thing in this world anymore. And that view of mine isn’t a luddite or MAGA sort of lament about the present compared with the past. It’s quite the opposite: Much like the film Parasite, it’s an interrogation of capitalism. In the circa-2019 vicious and violent capitalism-out-of-control world, doing one’s job well just isn’t worth it. It’s not sustainable.
As I watched and listened to the rest of Ki-woo’s epilogue and stumbled out of the theatre, already decided on buying a ticket to stay and watch the very next showing, all sorts of personal synapses fired off in my brain. Here are just a random few:
1. I thought of stopping at a McDonald’s a few weeks ago, and trying to go inside to use the restroom. It was 10:15pm, and the decals on both doors stated dine-in hours were until midnight and drive-thru hours were 24/7. The doors were locked, but many employees were inside. I knocked and was initially ignored, until a manager mouthed to me that they closed at 10. I really had to piss, and I wasn’t ready to let it go and look elsewhere, so I looked up their number and called them while standing outside to ask what exactly the deal was. The manager told me they had changed the lobby hours from midnight to 10pm a few months ago. I said, “The decals on the doors say midnight.” She said, “That’s true, they do. I need to change those.”
Now, this is the biggest fast food company on earth, constantly busy in small-town America like Wal-Mart or Target. Their hours had been changed for months, and for months not a single employee walking in and out of those doors every single day — or a single customer, for that matter — stopped and went, “Hey, wait — these hours are wrong. We need to change these.”
That’s how little incentive people have to do their jobs well in this current ugly stage of rampant capitalism.
2. I thought of my mother’s favorite painter, Suzi Gibson-Druly, and her beautifully contemplative, vivid portraits of strong indigenous women that gazed out from the walls of our home when I was a child. I thought of her because of the Park family’s appropriation of Native American tradition for their ultimately tragic birthday party for Da-song (how fitting it was that Parasite ended up hitting many American cities Halloween weekend, when the reminder not to appropriate a marginalized culture is more vital than ever). I also thought of Suzi because of how she died: Over-dosed by rule-following by-the-book doctors who ignored her specific medication limits during a life or death crisis, and ended up killing her by following to a ‘T’ the med school protocol of how the typical patient should be treated. Those doctors and nurses did their jobs badly by doing their jobs the way they’re “supposed to.”
3. I thought of Terrence Howard’s line to Larenz Tate and Ludacris in the worst-movie-to-ever-win-best-picture, Crash: “You embarrass me.” In my more problematic days, I took this line as a moment of important reckoning within different factions of the African-American community, but now I see that dialogue for what it really is: A blind-spotted, old-fashioned white liberal idea about the right and wrong ways for black people to behave — Howard’s straight-laced “proper” black character modeling the right way, vs. Tate & Luda’s “thug” characters modeling the wrong way.
I realized that the supposed “bad behavior” of the poor, grifting families in Parasite who decide to milk the Parks and their fancy home for all they’re worth is behavior that Crash writer/director Paul Haggis would condemn just as enthusiastically with lines like “you embarrass me.” As if anyone — from the best-intentioned but ultimately misguided “I swear I’m not racist” liberals like Haggis to the ugliest of right-wing racist Karens who call the cops anytime they hear a note of hip hop music on their street or outside their stores — has any right whatsoever to identify the behavior of poor and disenfranchised people in this world as anything but COMPLETELY FUCKING UNDERSTANDABLE. Whether it’s people being louder than you are, or smelling different than you smell, or seeming to have taste that is different from yours (not “bad” taste, though the racist knee-jerk reflex is to call it bad taste — just different taste) — this broken system we’re dying in leaves people desperate, cornered, and optionless. Try their shoes out, if you’re skeptical about that.
4. But most of all, after watching this incredible film my brain and heart finally centered back on my own personal narrative, and where it’s been leading for some time now.
I am reaching the end of my own personal fight with capitalism. There’s very little more effort I feel I can give. This is a perspective, and a part of my story, I often hold close to the chest and feel reluctant to share, because societal pressures and social norms have so often made me feel ashamed and othered for my stance in this regard. But I truly do place this value above nearly all others that I carry with me in my life. In fact, the only other personal value I can think of that is as important to me as the one I’m about to share is the value that, contrary to how my late father’s life played out, I don’t want to leave behind any mysteries for those that knew me to unravel. I want to have lived my life as a (relatively) open book. So, I may as well open up about this.
From age 16, in 1999, to age 29, in 2011, my life was given over full-time to jobs and school — often, both at once. Most people sacrifice at least 50 years of their life, if not more, to work and school. I felt, after 12 years of it, that I had reached my limit. That’s one of the main points of my perspective that I’ve kept close to the chest — because it is so easy for those who have given more of their years to work and school than I have to shame me for reaching my breaking point after such a short time.
My family *was* upper middle class, when my dad was alive. Between investments in the stock market, a pension from working as District Attorney in Erie, PA, and the settlement of a lawsuit following the car accident that paralyzed him when I was three, my dad was the one in my family who was wealthy to the point of six figures. Ironically, he and my family overall were the most affluent during the years when I was paying my own way as a worker bee. My dad helped with my first two years of college, then he and my mom allowed me to drop out to pursue music full-time, and the remainder of my college fund went toward the recording of my first few albums, from 2002–2007. But I paid my own bills, my own rent, and my own way during those years. When I returned to college for another two years in 2008 (after moving to California for the first of several times), I had to take out loans and acrue debt like every other millennial. I dropped out again, just short of my degree, in 2009 to move back east for music and what ended up being my longest romantic relationship.
I put in a few more years of the full-time day job grind AND the full-time local touring grind for music. Then, around the end of the year 2011, in what turned out to be the last chapter of that relationship I’d moved back east for — a chapter that saw my then-girlfriend and I move cross-country in a last-ditch effort to stay together and build a new life as a couple — I left my very last day job and promised myself that I would never work another one for the rest of my life.
With the exception of a few months helping my sister by working the register at her former clothing store for a few months in 2014 (up to the point when my dad died in August of that year), as of this writing, I have kept that promise.
I don’t have a job.
From the time that former relationship finally fizzled in early 2012 until now, I have mostly lived with my family, rent-free. That’s an incredible privilege, and it has allowed me to live out my philosophy about abstaining from day jobs. Another incredible privilege — the greatest of my life, financially, and worst, emotionally: When my dad passed away in 2014, he left behind an inheritance that paid off my student loans and kept me alive for a little over three years — late 2014 to early 2018 — and made it possible for me to continue creating my art, and relocate back out to California, at a time when my joblessness and age were drying up my potential and ability to make a go of it in any realm of life. It was my last gasp of life as a middle class white person, and when the last of the inheritance was gone and I was forced to return back to my family’s Ohio homebase in 2018, I faced the reality the rest of my family had been facing without me: We were poor. And in my case, beyond poor…well below the poverty line. I had nothing. In fact, at the end of the inheritance, I stretched my time out west a further six months by opening a few lines of credit and maxing out the cards. That’s right — I was the rare privileged millennial who actually got to kiss his student loan debt GOODBYE…only to end up trading student loan debt for credit card debt.
For the last nearly two years, my financial situation has been a grim (and laughable, to the judgmental eye) status quo: A couple thousand dollars between checking and savings, plus a few guitars worth a couple hundred each, a pair of aging Macs worth a couple hundred each, a record collection worth a couple hundred, and a car that I owned. After a distracted driver ran a red light last fall and totaled the car I owned, I was carless for six months and now am thankful to drive a newer Toyota upon which my mom makes monthly payments.
All of this sounds bleak and scary and pathetic — and it is to me too (except the pathetic part — that’s the societal pressure from others, not my view) — but my life is still a very lucky and privileged one, compared to so many. I live in a small but comfortable house with my mom, step dad, and aunt, and I don’t pay any rent. I sleep in a big, comfortable bed. I am on a family wireless plan. And my mom even helps with my monthly bills — credit card minimums, car insurance, and over $300 a month for health insurance. I’ve run into recurring roadblocks trying to get onto Medicaid, because the burden of paperwork for that coverage demands documentation of self-employment as a musician that I can’t provide. I make around $80 a month from streams and downloads of my recorded body of work on streaming platforms worldwide. Most of that $80 actually comes from myself — one of the facets of my life where I hustle in a way that would make Parasite’s Mr. Kim and his family proud. Spotify doesn’t care where streams come from, even if they come from the very accounts where the content is being made. So I have a 24-hour playlist of my music that I hit play on once a day, and that constant streaming from my own account generates roughly $50 a month. That’s how much money an artist makes from Spotify, if you were ever curious — If one person streams our music literally nonstop, it brings in about $50 a month.
Besides my Spotify playlist trick, I game the system in other small ways, out of the desperation of my financial situation. I’ve become a bit of a “Karen” myself in customer service situations — except, in an effort to offset the terrorizing of people of color by racist white folks in public, I specifically have a rule for myself that I only complain about service from white people. I hold people in customer service situations to the highest of standards. People only get one chance with me. If they fuck up, I complain. I get refunds. I get free stuff. I let people know when I’m not happy. I’ve become “will complain even if you’re really hot and normally I would be shy to say anything at all to you, let alone COMPLAIN to you” years old, apparently.
Most of all, in any and all situations where capitalism comes into play (which is, more and more, every situation and encounter in America), I have come to have the utmost disdain for “company men” — meaning rule followers, by-the-book types, people who do their jobs in a robotic way without any humanity. I don’t suffer fools in these types of situations at all, and if people follow the rules of their jobs to the extent that it leads them to treat me or someone I’m with inhumanely, disrespectfully, or incompetently, I let these people know about their absence of humanity.
I acknowledge the privilege of my life that I can judge them because I’m getting help that prevents me from needing to get jobs like theirs (although that help is a clock that is winding down…more on that at the end), and I acknowledge that sometimes people must follow the rules because they can’t afford to lose their jobs, but I’m sorry — at this point, with the cruelty and callousness I’ve witnessed over the years, I have to prioritize a demand for humanity and respect from others OVER a sympathizing with their plight of needing to keep their jobs. You can do your job, and still be a human being. It’s possible.
So if I’m so hard-line insistent about protecting this value and lifestyle of mine…why, then, did I walk out of Parasite feeling that I would’ve done absolutely anything for the Kim family? Aren’t they being good little capitalists? Isn’t their labyrinthine scheme to suckle the rich tit of the Park family an absolute manifestation of deference to capitalism and the hunger for dollar bills, even if it dehumanizes you in the process? Sure, of course. All of that is there.
But their desperation is a desperation I so completely understand, and because they are people of color on a planet poisoned by whiteness — and because modern day greed-is-good free market capitalism is one of the most toxic inventions of white America that has now spread everywhere — I sympathize with them. I root for them.
I understand the relief Ki-jung seeks when she fishes out her half-empty pack of cigarettes in the Kim family’s flooding bathroom and lights up a smoke, while using her body to hold down the toilet seat and keep the whole town’s sewage from spilling out. By the time that foul, imposing sewage eruption reached her neighborhood, it was sewage without class, without race, without social status. But we, the viewers, remember from where Ki-jung and her father and brother had just run home — the long, downhill descent from the Park family’s privileged little hilltop fortress. That’s where the storm began, and where the rains touched down and began their sliding flood pattern.
Ki-jung sits on the family toilet, keeping all that sewage down, hungry as hell for a smoke, because she knows the truth: All that actually “trickles down” from rich folks is their piss and shit. And if all she’s gonna get from them is their piss and shit, she’s gonna need a smoke.
The same way I’m gonna need to go see movies at the movie theatre regularly, even when I can’t afford it. The same way I’m still gonna buy vinyl at the record store, even though I have enough records. The same way I’m gonna go out to eat every day of the week, when I should only do that on special occasions.
I have no interest in pissing away anymore of my life working day jobs. And when I see examples of the futility of capitalism, and what it does to people, it only reinforces that resolve. Whether it’s seeing someone privileged who was born into money (likely the story of both Mrs. and Mr. Park), or someone who hustles their way toward a dollar (like the Kims), or someone who gets paid well to not do their job very well (like the “cop who doesn’t look like a cop”), or one of the many, many people I’ve encountered who — by dumb luck and the cruel, arbitrary randomness of the universe — have stumbled into obscenely high-paying jobs for which they aren’t qualified…all of these various employment and social status scenarios elicit in me the same disgust, and the same adamant refusal to play ball with any of it.
My mom and others have looked at such financial situations of others and argued to me, “If you can see others getting paid so well for just the tiniest of effort, with just the tiniest of skill, why wouldn’t you just go and do that? If money is out there waiting to be grabbed and you’re as smart as you are and could easily go grab some of it, why wouldn’t you?” I hope the answer is obvious, now that I’ve shared all this. It’s not the cute version of hating capitalism, as perfectly modeled by Timothée Chalamet’s Danny in Lady Bird, who doesn’t really like money and rolls his own cigs and forms a meditation Om with his fingertips when he comes. It’s the real version of that mindset, where you’re so absolutely racked with anxiety after years of being decimated by worrying about money, and you just can’t fucking take it anymore.
There are so many ways in which my life hasn’t played out as I would’ve hoped and predicted in my youth. There are so many times I’ve compromised my values, or sold myself out, or said something I thought I’d never say, or did something I thought I’d never do, or degraded myself. Worst of all, re: the latter — I’ve degraded myself for the people who deserved my degradation the LEAST. You know how you have that handful of people in your life who’ve used you, or gotten a piece of you, or witnessed you at your worst, and if you could go back you’d give that piece of yourself to literally ANYONE but them. For even those most scoundrelous (not a word) of people, I’ve bent over and given it up.
No more. My limit is my limit. My clock has run out on all that degrading fuckery.
I’ve recorded 16 albums in 18 years of adulthood as a songwriter and recording artist. None of them have broken through and made my life financially steady. I’ve run as far with them as I could, while also living with anxiety and depression. I’ve worked as hard as I could in the creation and promotion of my art.
There are people I’ve watched thrive financially with their art who are WAY better than me. AND, there are people I’ve watched thrive financially with their art who aren’t nearly as talented as I am. There are also plenty of people who just simply have a much more easy-going mental disposition for the hustle and grind and networking of it all. These comparisons don’t really matter — they just make me tired. They all lead to the same end point for me philosophically — of refusing to work for the right to be alive.
But I do want to say, as an aside, because this is a major online pet peeve for me: When we say to each other, via memes, that “your competition isn’t with other people”? YES. IT. IS. That’s precisely how capitalism works, whether we like it or not! It’s what ate the poor families in Parasite, and pit them against each other in their grand and bloody grift-off. So please stop sharing that stupid meme about how our competition is just with our own ego, not with others. It’s really not helpful.
Anyway, that whole reality of my place as an artist and the lack of income from it — that’s only the second-strongest reinforcement of my refusal to work day jobs. The main fuel for my perspective is the destitute financial reality of the people around me — people who played ball their whole lives and have almost nothing to show for it. My step dad is a veteran who killed people for the government as a fighter pilot in Vietnam, and his pension is a measly sum that goes away when he dies. After he’s gone, my mom has next to nothing. He, somehow, doesn’t even have a complimentary military burial coming to him (I didn’t even know that was possible — for any veteran to NOT be eligible for that). My mom worked in media, politics, higher education, and writing fields her whole life and has almost no money put away. She likes to suggest that her financial assistance of both her adult children is what has created this reality, but the truth is — none of her various careers, for which she gave her all, set her up for life BEFORE my sister and I transitioned from dependent kids to broke adults. My aunt had to move here to live with us, because she needs help just like my sister and I, even though she always worked hard and is our parents’ age. My sister lives paycheck to paycheck, and has four sons to support. The only person in my family who had money is dead.
I look around at my friends, and friends of my family, and see the same story everywhere that you see in Parasite: Most people broke and terrified, struggling under the heels of a few pockets of rich folks who hoard way more money than they need or could ever spend — folks who are literally in such a stress-free bubble of comfort and security that they’re BORED with being rich and fetishize the lives of people who struggle (the Parks fingering each other on the couch, talking dirty about an imagined broke, working class life they’ve never had…lol jesus).
So on paper, what remains of the privilege of my life, beyond my privilege of identity as a white person and a male? About $2000 in the bank, ever-dwindling. My mom’s special savings account she draws from to help me with my bills — there’s enough money in it to help me for about six more months (the clock, winding down). I have the belongings I mentioned earlier, worth a total of maybe two thousand dollars. But I’ve sold entire collections of media so many times in my life, and later regretted it. I can’t stomach the idea of giving up my cherished belongings one more time.
The most promising gas left in my “tank” is what I actually consider the greatest positive part of my life, and it’s also its own form of privilege: The creative muse has never left my side. I still am inspired to write nearly every day of my life. In fact, every November I embark upon a songwriting version of NaNoWriMo and write one song a day for the entire month. Even as destitute and bleak as things are, my fourth year of NaNoWriMo: Songwriting Edition is currently in full swing and going very well. My imperative for myself this year is to write all pop songs — sort of a last-ditch effort at trying to survive financially in this world via music by writing catchy songs that people may actually want to hear or even record! It’s my last, best hope.
There have been suicidal stretches in the past two years when I’ve looked at what little money I have and what I’m “worth” and felt strongly that I should kill myself, for the sake of my family. Because what I’m worth is roughly as much as it would cost for my cremation and the carrying out of my private posthumous wishes, which are important to me. My mom and sister can’t afford to carry out my wishes on their own finances. I don’t want this stuff to be flaked on or screwed up. And I don’t want to leave people with a financial mess, either. I’ll leave behind almost $15,000 in credit card debt, but our debts die with us and that’s a little-known and little-understood fact I learned while dealing with my dad’s estate. You are NOT responsible for your deceased loved one’s debts, and you have EVERY RIGHT to refuse to pay any outstanding bills or debts they have. It’s their name, their now-worthless credit score, their financial legacy. It all dies with them. I just want to make sure people know that.
For capitalism to be so out of control, so toxic, so absolutely to-the-core BAD FOR US that I contemplate my life and feel that, given my prospects, SUICIDE, for the sake of not costing my family money in the wake of my death, is the best option…that really says it all.
But nothing I’ve seen or heard has made this case for the ugliness of this capitalist world better than Parasite. It’s a movie that should be its own revolution. We should see selfies of blacked out eyes posted all over the internet. All over the world! People should be declaring their compassion for and solidarity with all the Kim families of the world, and uniting to take a stand for the political necessity for — the absolute DEMAND of — a living wage paid to every single person just for being alive in this world. Not a wage for work, but a wage for simply existing. We are all owed that, in this sick and broken system we’re trapped in.
And if this film isn’t enough to spark a revolution to help reach that goal of a living wage and a dismantling of capitalism, I hope that whatever has the power to spark it happens soon. Because I am dying, and I don’t have much time left. It’s ok if I don’t live long enough to be saved by the revolution, but I would at least like to see it begin.
