A Moment On A Tough Day

I sit down and think that I want to write a bit. I turn on some music and notice that I’m not getting any sound. God damn it. What the fuck is going on? Check volume in Windows. Check that the right playback device is selected. Test playback device. Nothing. God damn it! I then realize that the TV my computer is plugged into has the sound turned all the way down. 

I’m angry today. 

Fuck CEOs. Fuck you if you are a CEO. 

Fuck the carceral state. 

Fuck The Supreme Court. 

Fuck Tucker Carlson. 

Fuck white nationalism. 

Fuck white supremacy. 

Fuck capitalism. 

Fuck Jeff Sessions. 

Fuck the War on Drugs. 

Fuck the lawyers who fix shit for rich motherfuckers who do bad shit. 

Fuck Goldman Sachs. 

Fuck Chase bank. 

Fuck Capital One. 

Fuck Netflix. 

Fuck the Democratic Party. 

Fuck the Republican Party. 

Fuck fascism. 

Fuck fascist superheroes. 

Fuck the state of Israel. 

Fuck SWAT teams. 

Fuck the NFL. 

Fuck the New England Patriots. 

Fuck Tom Brady. 

Fuck Robert Mueller. 

Fuck James Comey. 

Fuck the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Fuck welfare reform. 

Fuck Bill Clinton for welfare reform. 

Fuck Bill O’Reilly. 

Fuck Paul Ryan. 

Aight. That went on long enough. 

I wrote nothing on Monday or Tuesday and that frankly is unacceptable. 

Are you still reading? I don’t really care if you are but it’s nice if you are. Thank you.  

I’m slipping a little. I feel laziness starting to grip me. I ain’t been as conscientious with this endeavor. I missed two days this week. I did not write a single word. Whatever. Like many a baby boomer says, it is what it is. I’m gonna pick up. I’m gonna continue. I’m gonna live on. I will survive. Aight. I’m gonna put on that song. The Cake version. 

I sit in this room that was my bedroom back in the day. I grew up in this room. I came to be in this room. I prayed in this room. I had my first orgasm in this room at the age of 16. I dreamed in this room. I woke up on summer days that were full of nothing but possibilities in this motherfucking room. I sat in the dark and listened to Art Bell in this room. I don’t have my own space anymore. I haven’t since some time in November, I think. I miss it. I’ve always felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. I don’t really have a space right now where I can just be. That’s traumatic, man. It really is. I express this and nobody really seems to give a fuck. 

Fuck. Fuck. Part of me thinks this shit is about on the same level as some angsty, hormonal teenager who is failing English and is brilliant but lazy according to themselves and who writes on a blog with a background that is as black as their nail polish.

I need to challenge myself. I’m not quite sure how though.

I finished reading two books this week. For a man that has been struggling with his attention span for years or at least feels like he has, that is an accomplishment. I finished the The Great Derangement by Matt Taibbi and The End of Policing by Alex Vitale. 

Taibbi is just an excellent writer with a good eye and a keen social conscience. He’s a minor hero of mine. I will pretty much read anything he writes. 

The End of Policing made me think a lot. I can’t say that it challenged me too much but it made me think about the why of a lot of things. In recent years, I’ve become really concerned about the militarization of police forces and the violence that more often than not victimizes the poor and people of color. It keeps me up at night. It makes me angry. It makes me want to give the finger to every cop I see. Blue Lives Matter flags make me fighting mad. I really cannot watch cop shows any longer because they play like insidious propaganda to me. The book is a bit dry but it’s quite readable. It is written by an activist academic who traces a lot of the problems heavy handed policing is thrown at to cruel austerity measures. If you’re reading this, you should read that book. I kinda wish everybody in this rotting empire would. Maybe some time soon I will write about some of the things I actually learned from the book. 

Keep liking the horny posts of that girl who doesn't follow me back. Eventually she'll fall in love with me. Yeah.

The Fail-Son

My parents had two kids. I’m the oldest by a year and some change. I also happen to be the one that failed. I’m the fuck-up. I’m the problem. I’m the one they worry about. I believe the prevailing term these days is fail-son.

I’m a fail-son. Being a fail-son is not such a bad gig if you happen to come from money. I do not come from money.

You might think I’m being too hard on myself. Maybe I am but what I’m doing here is telling the truth. I’m giving you the truth even if that makes me look like a feckless piece of shit.

The longest period of time that I’ve ever held a job is six years. I left that job on impulse. I left that job on account of boredom. They were going to fire me eventually. I was on and off FMLA for depression. It was only a matter of time so one day I went in, I fired off an email to my direct supervisor and told them I was resigning and that my resignation was effective immediately and that was that. Yeah, I was depressed and often was burdened with an anxiety that made me feel like the apocalypse was imminent. See, that’s such bullshit. It was always anxiety over shit that was minor. Maybe I’m gonna come in to some snippy email from the boss. Maybe I’m gonna have some awkward social interaction. When I look back, it’s clear to me that the primary motivator for walking was boredom. I gave up a steady paycheck and relative stability because I was bored.

I’ll admit that that wasn’t the brightest thing I ever did.

After that, it was about 5 or 6 years of bouncing around from bad entry-level gig to worse entry-level gig. What I ended up doing more often than not was working as a call center agent. If there be circles of Hell, I’ve very little doubt that one of them is a god damn call center. I did low-level technical support. 95% of problems got fixed by having the inept soul turn the uncooperative piece of technology off and then back on again. You might think that doesn’t sound so bad. Alright. Imagine being chained to a phone for 8 hours a day. Imagine call after call after call after call after call. Imagine doing this at odd, wacky hours. Start at 3 PM and get off at midnight. Imagine sitting at your desk near the end of your shift on your Friday (Your Friday. No one else’s Friday. You work weekends so your Friday is a Tuesday.) and you’re praying to whatever Gods may be that you are not gonna get a fucking call. See, you don’t want a call. You have no idea at all what that call is gonna be. Every time you hear that tone in your ear, it could be a simple 5 minute call that is relatively pleasant or it’s going to be that call that makes you question every single fucking decision you ever made in your life that possibly led to you sitting in that desk taking that call. So many times, the fickle finger of fate poked me in the eye and I ended up talking some guy through installing some piece of software a half hour past quitting time as he gets increasingly more irritable and pissed off. I lived in dread of that. On my days off, I still felt dread. All I could think of was going back to it and a lot of the time, I didn’t go back. I’d call in sick, stay home and live in dread of going back to the shit. I can remember driving to work and having mad envy for so many people. I envied the guy who was out running. I imagined that maybe he’d go back to his home and he’d just chill for the rest of the day knowing that he had already done the hardest thing he was going to do that day. I envied the guy who was out there landscaping. I had no idea what kinda headaches landscapers endured, but sign me the fuck up.

It got to the point where I just could not stand to do it anymore. I could not hold down a job. I could not cover my bills. I had no choice but to return home.

The home I grew up in.

The place that doesn’t quite feel like home anymore. The room I sleep in has a floral bedspread and a statue of Jesus hanging on the cross.

I come home from the office to the Fox News Channel blaring all loud, sinister and mean. The people who raised me to be decent, kind and honest believe in President Donald John Trump. My mother is a Mexican national. She speaks English but not perfectly and with a noticeable accent. This is a woman who waited tables. Fuck. I can remember being ashamed of the fact that my mother waited tables but she did that for me. I hate myself for having been ashamed of that. I denounce Trump and she tells me that I’m jealous of his success and that every woman who accused him of sexual assault was being paid to do it. My dad is a simple man. He never missed work but he bitched about work all the fucking time. When I gripe about the grind, I catch myself sounding just like him. He loves those cheesy, underdog sports movies. I think he sees me as the underdog that’s eventually gonna win. Trump is no spunky underdog but my dad is in his corner for reasons I just will never fucking comprehend.

I hate the fact that they support Trump. I cannot ever let that go. However, I’m undeniably grateful that they opened their home up to me, that they took me back in. I realize that not everyone has family that can take them in when times are tough. That keeps me awake at night.

I’m a fail-son that should be hurting a hell of a lot more but somehow I’m not.

Sick Dogs and Our Bad Conscience

I spent a bunch of time with a sick dog this weekend. I’ve known this dog since she was 8 months old and rowdy as hell. I really thought that she might die. I cried buckets. It looks like it isn’t this dog’s time though. As a result, my emotions are still pretty raw. I ain’t got tears to cry but I’ve still got plenty of feeling. 

Compassion that moves me to anger. Furious anger. Righteous anger. I don’t know what it is about the drive home from work that makes me think about all the big picture stuff. Big picture stuff? Shit. That’s so inadequate but I don’t know what else to call it. It’s burning anger about all the injustice that’s bigger than me. The injustice that happens while I watch a clock. It’s monstrous shit. It’s shit for The Hague. It’s shit that gets Meryl Streep Academy Awards for starring in fucking movies about it. It’s shit that grieves my fuckin’ spirit but at the end of the day doesn’t even really inconvenience me because of the accident of my birth. 

My country puts little brown children in concentration camps. They cry for their mommies and daddies. These facilities are often run for a profit and the guards go home, drink beer, watch the game on occasion and probably beat their wives and then promise to never ever do it again. They can do what they do and then they can go to Home Depot or Cabela’s and never give a second thought to what they are doing to earn a pay check. Banality of evil. They’re just doin’ their jobs. Maybe they’re all grim about it. Maybe they’re tormented. Maybe they lose sleep over it. I know some of ‘em enjoy it. They are having the time of their lives.

Yeah, immigration cops are bastards. It’s a popular thing in certain circles to say that all cops are bastards. I didn’t use to believe that but I’m starting to. I got a relative who is a deputy sheriff. I’ve watched him joke about running over protesters. I’ve seen his buddies mock African American Vernacular English. I’ve seen them drink a beer while rockin’ a Punisher skull on their chests. They’re bloodthirsty, suburban warrior fascists. They are the soldiers of this sad apocalypse. 

The enforcers of this shameful order are one thing but then there are the people on the sidelines. There are people who see the pictures of weeping children behind chain link fences and are thankful. They smile. They could not be happier. They are seein’ America become great again. They are seein’ people who are not like them suffer. They are watching a man who says the vile shit they say in their taverns and their country clubs in front of the whole nation proudly and without any shame at all. They got a man leading the country who has given permission for the demons that lurk inside them to run wild. 

I sit here at my desk and pound my keyboard and I got no idea what to do. I wish that I could tell you what to do. Tomorrow I’ll go back into work, the machine will grind on and I kinda hate myself because anything I might do or say is ineffectual in the face of this grave evil. 

Here’s what I’m going to do. It’s not much. All I can think to do right now at this moment is to tell you the truth as I see it. It is that bad. My country is engaged in a great evil. If there be a God and that God is just, he must punish us. I do not know if there is a god. I do know evil though. We’re seeing it. I don’t give a flying fuck about flags or anthems. I care about what’s true. 

God. Damn. It. 

I will never forgive the people who perpetrated these atrocities. As far as I am concerned, names like Trump, Miller, Sessions, Kelly and the whole Satanic cabal of them deserve to live in infamy. They should be hauled before a court and sentenced for crimes against humanity. 

Summer

I’m swimming through a world of thick oatmeal. I’m in oatmeal purgatory.

My deepest desire at the moment is a dim room and the feeling of bedsheets against my bare skin. I’ll take a whole week of that. In fact, get me three months or so of that. Just give me time and I’ll decide how to kill it. Mostly though, I just want to close my eyes and drift off. When I wake up, maybe I’ll feel like smiling. Maybe I’ll feel like life is okay.

I don’t think I ever quite adjusted to the lack of a summer vacation in adult life. It was a life saver. A soul saver. Was three months or so of nothing but damn did I need it.

I remember late nights. Staring at the ceiling. Chocolate milk on the nightstand. Art Bell’s voice on the AM radio gently interrogating a long haul trucker who has visions of how the apocalypse might go down. I remember the sound of the garage door opening. Dad home from the night shift.

I can remember my face illuminated by the pale glow of a computer monitor. Lights were off. Tapped gently on the keyboard so mom and dad had no idea I was awake. XXX lovin’ with strangers on IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Some of ‘em come to me more than once. Yeah, I had online “things” with people who I never really knew back in the dial-up era. Like friends with benefits type stuff but instead of real life sex, it was just writing dirty stories together. I never ended up on an episode of Catfish: The TV Show. I’m thankful for that. That could have been way weirder.

I can remember getting dismissed from the last day of school. High school some time. Evangelical Christian school. The books say diabolical shit. The Great Depression was socialist propaganda. British rule was good for India cuz it exposed Indians to Christianity and many of them cast aside their false religion for the only savior that laid it all down for them. Nelson Mandela was a dirty commie. Satan basically ran the Catholic church. Bible teacher was a nice guy. I think his heart was in the right place. I think that to this very day. I remember when it was all done. No more schooling left so we all chilled and watched a movie about getting left behind after the rapture. So, I walked out of the school a free man. The sun was shining. Women wore sundresses. My mind kept wandering to the appearance of the Anti-Christ and 7 years of tribulation. I can kinda laugh now but that shit fucks with a kid.

I can remember a suburban megachurch. I can remember a youth pastor with swagger. Shit, I think he hangs out with Justin Bieber. I’m serious about that. I’ve seen pictures on Instagram. He spoke with a drawl despite not coming from anywhere near the south. He was obsessed with talking about sexual purity. I used to go midweek. Jesus power ballads and righteous suburban honeys I never said a word to. One night, his words cut deep. I had mad guilt. Mad guilt over being a human being. Mad guilt over filthy thoughts. Come forward and re-dedicate your life to Jesus Christ. I did. I responded to an altar call. I cried. I got taken in a back room. I got told to accept the baptism of the holy spirit. The evidence of that was speaking in tongues. It was supposed to come down on me and I would speak in tongues that were not my own. Some bald dude had his hand on my chest as he declared that I should let the spirit speak. I did not speak in tongues that night. I didn’t feel it. I had at least one person years after the fact admit to me that they faked speaking in tongues.

I’m sitting here in the office on a Monday. I’m tired. I keep sipping water and having to go to the bathroom. Maybe I should stop before someone thinks there is something wrong with me. I also keep getting up and just taking laps around the office.

I need mercy today. I need the world to play as nice as it can today. I feel like I don’t have ‘it.’ I don’t know what ‘it’ is. The best way I can describe ‘it’ is whatever you need to be in the world and not totally fucking lose it. That sense is always more acute on a Monday. As the week goes on, I feel it less and less. That’s how it goes most of the time anyway.

I do feel some satisfaction. I did the work of attempting to communicate the realities of my internal world. Just trying to do that is fulfilling. It occurs to me that I’m not only trying to communicate my internal reality to whoever might be reading this, I’m also attempting to describe it to myself.

I better get to trying to look busy. I better get to trying to look like I know what I’m doing.

So... I woke up and thought

Being aware of your own internal life and spending time there makes you remember that others possess an internal life as well.

This has the side effect of wanting to make sure the world is gentler.

The Grand Motherfuckin’ Conspiracy.

I’ve always kept one eye on the conspiracy theories that were en vogue. It’s just something that I’ve always done. I suppose you can learn a lot about reality by examining alternative interpretations of it. That’s basically what a conspiracy theory is. It’s an alternative explanation of reality that’s not endorsed by The Powers That Be. 

I have a lot of feelings about conspiracy theories. Complex feelings. On the one hand, they can make people feel dis-empowered. If Queen Bey, Jay-Z and the rest of the Illuminati elite have everything locked up that tight, what kinda hope does the average Joe have? I do believe that there is a grand overarching conspiracy by powerful individuals to keep things pretty much the way they are. I believe that The Powers That Be only want you smart enough to fill out the forms and push the buttons. They don’t want you schooled in critical thinking. They don’t want you to have the time to think. They want you to come home all bleary-eyed and ready to turn on the TV. The last thing they really want you doing is thinking about your situation. If people really start thinking, the whole system will fucking fall apart at the seams and there offspring will have to take that job at McDonald’s. 

One of the big names in American conspiracy theory has been Alex Jones. He’s a Texan with leather lungs who has been preaching on the radio since at least some time in the 90s. He warned about government overreach. He ranted hysterically about RFID tags paving the way for the Mark of the Beast. He’d be nearly in tears talking about CPS (Child Protective Services) being some kind of stealth pedophile ring. He was the prophet Ezekiel for American paleoconservatives who waged their own “infowar” on the Internet. 

I remember that old milieu. It wasn’t that long ago. I can remember these YouTube channels run by upstarts that were inspired by Alex Jones. They shared dispatches from the rising police state from their own neck of the woods. Maybe their local police department bought up a bunch of military surplus equipment. Maybe they noticed listings on an Internet job board for military detention specialists and they connected the dots to a possible internment of American dissidents that was just around the corner. I remember sitting up at late at night, sipping on orange soda like Kel and watching these grainy YouTube videos of possible camp locations. Imposing, empty structures behind razor wire. Huge train cars. It was speculated that the train cars were fitted with shackles for the transport of prisoners. Yep. The FEMA camps was comin’. They would be filled with patriotic American citizens who would not go along with the Luciferian, globalist New World Order death machine that was run by bankers who wanted to merge with machines and become immortal beings of light or some shit like that. 

What became of Alex Jones? Well, that’s a funny story. You see, at some point, he came to the conclusion that the only hope for America against a bloodthirsty, pedophilic, globalist conspiracy was Donald J. Trump. Trump was America’s last best hope. Jones-y always had a problem with torture yet Trump declared on stage that he loved water boarding. Jones-y railed against power hungry cops that beat the shit outta citizens. Trump joked about police brutality on stage in front of an audience of pigs who fucking loved it and yes, they are pigs. If you have a problem with that, you can go fuck yourself. 

The FEMA camps never came. That shit got especially intense under President Obama. Of course, we are now seeing people get rounded up and Trump presides over it. The Infowarriors and their YouTube channels are silent however. Many of their channels sit abandoned and those that do not have taken up the banner of Donald J. Trump, the golden-haired warrior who is making America Great Again. See, it doesn’t much matter that people are being rounded up because the people being rounded up have dark skin, they don’t speak English and they are not American citizens. 

It’s only an outrage if it happens to white folks. White pain is the only pain that matters to motherfuckers like Alex Jones. 

You’ve got no idea how surreal it is for me to see Alex Jones carrying water for a sitting American President. It’s incredibly difficult to appreciate if you’ve not followed the man’s career. In his mind, pretty much every President that came before Trump was working for them. They were in on the plot but somehow this fat, loud-mouthed septuagenarian ex-game show host who got his kicks walking in on naked teenage pageant contestants isn’t. Somehow he has been sent by God or some shit. 

The reality we live in is truly strange. As I go about the drudgery of my day, I sometimes pinch myself and wonder if the Almighty dropped acid at some point and this just happens to be his bad trip.