Not Interesting

Walking

Left the house and went out for a walk. 

I’m too sedentary. My life is way out of balance. I think I’m going to try to work back up to running. I think that would be good for me. 

Walked by a park. Saw a little girl on the playground. I realized we were making eye contact. I thought, this is awkward. Without thinking, I waved at her. She waved back. 

That was cool. 

My world is nothing but mundane. I work. I worry about screwing up at work. Sometimes I study for an exam that baffles me and interests me little. I slouch at my desk and look busy. I anticipate terror that often times never comes. 

Sometimes I manage to focus enough to read. I finished Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky. I e-mailed the man. He wrote me back. He didn’t say much but I appreciate that he acknowledged an anonymous nobody like me. I learned a lot from that book. It did something to me. 

I came very close to angrily declaring to my therapist that communism will win. That was really the first time that I expressed candidly the role living in such a fucked up society has on the psyche. That is a huge part of this. This. What I’m doing here. What makes me cry. What fucks me against my will. What turns me into a homely yet charming robot who is programmed to provide you with excellent customer service today. What makes me do this. Trying to express without asking you for a credit card number first. 

That’s a huge part of the project. 

What do you do in the world when you just can’t shake something? 

If I could exist as some kinda layabout, I would do that. I’d shave when I want to. I’d sleep when I want to. In fact, I’ve kinda done this. I’ve spent a great deal of time jobless. You get a ton of time to yourself. Thing is though, it’s pretty much a living hell. Even if you have a place to go if you absolutely cannot pay your bills, it’s awful. You don’t feel like you have a reason to be living. You don’t feel like you deserve to live. Fuck. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever experienced. I did that off and on for about 6 years. 

I fucking need space. 

I could have spent all that time that I had writing but I had even less focus than I do now. 

I get stoned enough, I'm honest. Smart honest. The kinda honest I can live with.

Maybe that's what I tell myself.

This is me writing garbage ain't nobody gonna hold me accountable for.

I don't know how to be. There ain't no fucking manual. Bring me a pizza every once in awhile and I'm good. Pizza and a whiff of sex. I'm good.

Nah. Shit. Maybe I sound like the Internet equivalent of that homeless dude rambling about some shit that makes no sense while he waits for a bus he doesn't have money for. That could be you. That could be me. Maybe your wits and your good looks and your talent and all that shit ain't gonna save you cuz you're just you. Look. I'm just me. It's aight. I love you. Okay. Maybe I won't say that again. Yo. We gotta believe a better world is possible.

Fuck. I'm getting sick of this. 10:29 PM Pacific Standard Time.

I feel lazy.

This is art, yo.

This is sugar.

This is late night truth.

This is finding the one true god again.

This is bullshit but it had its moments.

Should I read this again in the morning?

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. 

The world will terrorize the fuck out of you. It does not need your help.

Someone will always think you’re full of shit. That’s okay. 

What I See

I’m typing this as I sit in the office. For all I know, someone is going to walk up to me with a crisis any second. I’ve usually been going “home” (I’ll explain the quotation marks another day.) and engaging in this exercise this week but I’m afraid that I simply won’t have the motivation after the work day is done so here I am. I type fast. As odd as it is to say, I’ve been typing since I was a kid. I’ve been told that I’m an angry typer. Now that I’ve just typed that, I’m cognizant of the noise my typing is making.

The office is quiet. The people with offices are all buttoned up in them.

I’m buttoned up in my thoughts but not really. I guess I’m trying to be buttoned up in them. How the fuck do you manage to be truly present in your thoughts? Shit. That reminds me of all the talk of mindfulness. Practice mindfulness so you can be a better employee. The CEO should practice mindfulness so that maybe he doesn’t feel so bad when he has to lay off a bunch of people. Maybe the homeless should practice mindfulness so that homelessness might suck less.

I’m getting political now. I’m sick of people who are sick of everything being political. There is a political dimension to everything. Nah. Nope. It is deeper than that. Everything is political. There is no divorcing the personal from the political.

See, the piss of the political class gets on me. There is no escaping that. Even if I never mentioned the name of a politician or a political party or anything in my written emo ruminations, the forces that these things exert touches my thoughts whether I want to acknowledge it or not. I’m choosing to see these things. The bitch of it though is I feel like I cannot un-see them even if I want to. I don’t want to make myself into some kinda god damn martyr but there is a real price to pay for awareness. It ain’t pleasant and it really kinda sucks.

I woke up one day and I took a look around. It didn’t use to be this way but every job I saw was some kind of temporary or contract job. A job that offered barely a living a wage and that offered terrible or no benefits. I don’t know when exactly almost every job I came across became like this but that’s how it is now. I’ve been in such jobs. Those precarious gigs offered by companies who have smiling minorities plastered all over their websites. Look, listen to me, okay? Almost any organization that has pictures of smiling minorities in their advertisements is up to some shit. That’s just the way that it is. Apparently, since the year 2005, almost every job that has been created is a contract job. You ever hear the term precariat? It’s a portmanteau of proletariat and precarious. That’s what we’ve got. We’ve got a work force that is in a permanent state of precariousness drifting from temporary job to temporary job for years and for years. We’re a nation of Uber and Lyft drivers. We barely noticed that shit. Do stand-up comics who get HBO specials talk about this? Is this a plot point in romantic comedies? Hell no. Most of us have been too busy working to notice.

I guess being a flake who constantly had to look for work has its advantages because that had a lot to do with me noticing that trend. It’s not like it’s hidden. You can Google it but it just doesn’t get emphasized all that much. After a long day of working hard so that the boss can buy another Bentley, who wants to think about the fact that a lot of us find ourselves in a terrible position?

What else do I see? I see more transients in the suburbs. I’m a sheltered kid from the ‘burbs. I’m used to going to an urban area and averting my eyes when the stench of the homeless tickles my nostrils. Thing is though, I don’t have to go to an urban center to see homeless people. I see them more and more in the suburbs now. I see people sleeping rough. I see people panhandling. I bring this up to people I know to see if they notice this too and I’ve gotten asked if I called the cops cuz that’s scary. I’m no sociologist. I’m an expert in precisely nothing. I think what I’m seeing is the decay of a society. I find myself wondering how many of those sleeping rough on the streets of the suburbs once owned houses there.

See. You are being psychologically abused. Yes. You. I’m talking to you. You are being gas lit. The TV tells you that the economy is booming, that jobs are being created left and right and that the country is becoming great again but you know that that’s all complete bullshit because you have EYES. You actually live in the world that they supposedly are describing. That fucks with a person.

So, I see what I see and what I see is a society that is decaying, rotting. What is society becoming?

A fascist police state. It’s nascent right now but fascism is here and it will get worse. Trumpism is conservatism in America. The media loves to parade around these allegedly sane and respectable conservatives who don’t much like the Trumpster but here’s the thing, THEY FUCKING LOST. The man is the party now and Trumpism will be with us after one too many Big Macs finally stops his heart. A certain segment of this fucking country loves him because he says the shit they say in taverns loudly and proudly. He’ll make all of those dirty, criminal Mexicans disappear. We got ourselves an efficient deportation task force in ICE. We got privately run facilities that ICE throws detainees into. Children are being ripped from their mother’s arms. People get abused in all sorts of ways in these facilities. Right now, the people subject most to the police state are undocumented immigrants and people of color. That who it is today. It’s going to be somebody else tomorrow.

The reality is this, okay? We’ve got a septuagenarian ex-game show host with a mean streak and a thing for vindictiveness who has control over a nuclear arsenal and the most sophisticated surveillance grid ever devised. I’ve reminded people that this septuagenarian ex-game show host could possibly end human civilization and it gets laughed off.

An unwillingness to engage with the world as it really is could be deadly.

That’s what I see.

The President

I’m going to tell you the truth. 

Not gonna put sugar or honey on it. 

It’s not that I disagree with the President or his policies. 

It’s not that he represents everything that is soulless and wrong. 

No. 

It’s that I fucking despise him. 

With everything in me.

I hate him. I don’t give a flying fuck about discourse or listening to or understanding the other side. If you are going to come to me with that, fuck you. I don’t care. We are past that. What has the fucking discourse ever gotten us? What has being respectable gotten us? 

You can tell me that I’m wrong in my hate. That’s fine. Maybe you’re concerned with the effect that such intense feeling has on my health. I mean, God bless you if you think that. Let me tell you, it’s hard to carry around, aight? 

See. I’m owning the hate. I’m not dressing it up in some pretty three piece suit and calling it something polite. Nah. This is me owning it. It’s ugly. It’s awful but I’m owning it. 

I go off sometimes. I fucking lose it. I lose my voice. I get told by people, “Oh. You’re so full of hate. Everybody hates him so much. It’s scary.” What the fuck?! WHAT THE FUCK?! What do you think he’s full of? Love? Hell no. If you are going to put on that stupid red hat, you do not get to play that card. That’s perverse. 

Me. Haven't posted regularly in years but this is me.

Hey.