my rant on workrant.com:

My job sucks. Why? Because it is a job. All jobs suck by definition - trade your time doing something you don't want to do for money. Working is like trading your soul for food and shelter. Just keep on trudging away, day after day, never getting ahead. Credit card balances get higher, inflation makes your pay get lower. Slowly piss away your life doing something for someone else. Work day after day for someone else until you die - what have you accomplished with your life?
It just isn't worth it. Life is too precious to trade away for just enough money to almost get by. I'm thinking I would much rather be poor and free than be a wage slave to a car and a house. Fuck, I just hate that it took me 34 years to figure it out!

I'm sick of doing someone else's bidding. Listening to some jackass tell me to do this or that absolutely pointless thing. Having clueless jerkoffs explain to me what they think is important - things that are actuallly meaningless - and expect me to give a crap. Knowing that nothing I do really matters, being bitched at because I'm not fitting some duechebag's idea of a timely schedule. Other than getting paid, it is pretty close to being a slave. But I don't get the money - my landlord, the power company, the bank that owns my car loan, the phone company - they all get the money. I'm trading my life for a car, a phone, and a shitty house in the ghetto! Talk about wasting a fucking life. Fuck this. I can't even remember the last time I did something I cared about. And to listen to the assholes at work tell me how "lucky we all are to have such wonderful jobs" - they would be right there in Auschwitz, gassing people and "following orders". Probably telling people how lucky they were to have a shower. People are idiots, except for the few that have found a way out. A job is the most grueling form of drawn-out suicide I can imagine. I think that it is actually a test given to us by a higher power - how long will you willingly suffer until you finally just go fucking berzerker and bash your stupid co-workers heads in with a three hole punch, or just stick your hand in the paper shredder? A cruel experiment to see which ones of us are smart enough to just say 'enough' and walk away from the rat race forever?

Just think - there are some novelists, inventors, private investigators, fucking landscapers who have had the balls to tell their boss to eat a tube of shit and are now doing exactly what they want, when they want to, where they want to, and don't have to listen to a single asshole tell them what to do or how! God bless the rebellious few! My heroes.

Does it ever just kill you?

Here I am at 5:30Am, too annoyed to sleep. My shoulder hurts, so I got up to take some ibuprofen. I read my email while waiting for it to kick in. My Windows-run PC crashes four times just trying to get to read my email - which is pretty much the norm. If I just try to connect my external hard drive to open up some photos, I usually encounter two days worth of troubleshooting - this from the version of Windows that people call stable! I would use my brand new computer, but it encountered fatal errors within two weeks of arriving from the factory - and for over six months it has sat in the office of a highly trained computer repair person who is either unable to fix it, or just isn't working on it. Unbelievable. I spent hundreds of dollars on it - I may as well have stuck that money up my ass.

Finally, I got my email up. I encounter the following:

Nevermind. I tried to cop/paste, but for some reason Firefox just doesn't let me select things sometimes. About half the time. 99% of the time I spend on computers, something is not working right. About half the time, it is so bad that I cannot do what it is I set out to do! Unfucking believable. What happened to quality control? Why do we accept this crap? Why do we not demand our money back? I plan to get a new, updated computer from HP to make up for all the missed time I had from the new one I bought not working.

Blogger works well, though. Google is a bright spot in a dark, dark forest of shoddy, infuriatingly poor made and supported products. Imagine if your TV only turned on once every three tries. Imagine if you could almost never watch your favorite programs because they did not function. How long would you remain a customer? How long would you keep that TV? We put up with it from Microsoft, though, because we are used to it. Used to being treated like shit. My Mac at work NEVER crashes. EVER. It just works - amazing. A product that does what it is supposed to do. What a concept!

Well, I was going to show you two articles. One about a woman who smuggled 2500 kids out of Nazi camps. She just died, and did not get the Nobel Peace Prize. The point was that we should be outraged because she was denied it and Al Gore won it for his movie. We are supposed to hate Al Gore for winning the Prize, I guess. We are supposed to associate him with the Nazi's who killed kids, because he purposefully took this prize away from some old lady who saved babies from Nazis (could you get more sentimental than that?). The point of the email was that we should hate Al Gore. Because he won a prize. He didn't decide the prize. Hell, he probably didn't even know the other lady was up for it. He only made a movie trying to save the entire world. How selfish! He should go to hell for that.

I'm sick of people bashing Al Gore. Whether he has a big house or not, he is trying (much, much harder than the writer of that email) to save the planet. He is doing as much as he can. He has dedicated his life to it. He has given up his career in order to spend all of his time trying to save the Earth. And people like this fucking retard who wrote that email hate him for it. People do not deserve to have the planet saved for them. We need to have two planet Earths. One, that can be fucked and ruined by every idiot who says we are not causing global warming, that somehow 2500 human lives are more valuable than the fate of every living thing on the planet. Those same people are the ones who think it is ok to beat animals, that poverty-stricken Africans should just get a job, and that any and all brown people should be humiliated, tortured, and killed because of something an American-trained asshole did (with or without the help of the US gov.) to get back at us for a hundred years of oppression and murder of their people.

That's right. 9/11 was just retribution. It was the next move in a never ending series of two groups of people killing one another. We strike, they strike, we strike back, they strike back. It is how WAR works. If we try to kill them, they are going to try to kill us. This is the myopic world in which most republicans live in. They see only as far as the last strike against us, and feel that we should do all in our power to retaliate. I see republicans and extremist Muslims as the same creatures. Most of the US is every bit as guilty of bloodlust as any of them.

We could stop it right now. We could lay down all of our weapons and say enough. We could stop invading them, and tell the entire world that we will no longer take part in revenge attacks. If we were to seriously just lay down all of our weapons, there would be no terrorists - they would have nothing to be fighting against. It is so bleedingly simple, yet no one gets it. I have to say that I think 95% of the human population is fucking worthless. Personally, I hope we go all out nuclear war - WW III! I hope we bomb each other back to the stone age. And, I hope we stay in the stone age this time. The rest of the planet would be better off for it (after nature recovered from our destruction). Let the animals rule - we suck at it.

The other email I wanted to show you was another outrage piece about a well built state of the art prison in Austria. The Austrians have the nerve to treat their prisoners with respect - to try to rehab them instead of just punishing them. How dare they! How dare they try to correct the problems of society, when they could GET REVENGE! They should water board those white collar and petty criminals - those who stole money to feed their family, or to get a taste of the good life. Those who did drugs to escape the drudgery of life, or sold drugs to get some good money in a world where that is the only way certain people can ever get ahead. We really could be spending tons of money to abuse those people and turn them into real criminals - murderers and rapists - instead of giving them treatment, clean food, respect, and a chance to improve or make up for what they did.

If I were elected president, the first thing I would do (ok, second after decriminalizing all drug use) would be to round up all the people in the country who feel they have the right to tell others how to live, and give them whatever part of the country they represent percentage-wise. If 94% of the US believes they can tell others how to dress, who they can or can't marry, what they can or can't do with their own body, who they can or can't pray to, etc. - I would take all those people and put them in 94% of the country (starting with the mid west - those guys won't have to move). The 6% of us who respect one another can have the other 6% of the real estate (probably Cali and Alaska). The first 94% can sit around making one another miserable, while the rest of us live a lovely, productive, happy life unbothered by such befuckery.

We get the Macs, and they get all the PC's.

why thoughts don't stop

Man, what is it about females? They keep your head spinning from day one. Even when you get involved with a "safe" one that you don't feel a whole lot for - then, one day you turn around and she's got complete control of your soul, whether she wants it or not! Now, she is seeing things in other guys that she finds attractive. I'm not sure how much longer I can continue to keep her interested, unless I change myself somehow.
That is the problem - I feel like I have to change myself in some way to be what she needs. The ironic thing is that the thing I need to change, is feeling like I need to change. Now, if that is not an oxymoron, I don't know what is. Maybe I do not need to change at all, then. Maybe all I need to do is hold on, and trust the universe. That is my plan, but it makes for some dog-gone sleepless nights. In the mean time, I am planning on ways that I can improve my own situation, improve my own comfort level.
I am the quintessential gen X'er: I have a creative job that I am struggling to stay interested in when what I really want to do is get high enough to forget about my life. All my life I have thought about how I don't want to end up like my parents, but suddenly I realize how amazingly well they have done. At this point, not being alone is almost the most important thing, although alone is when I am happiest - except for those hours I spend lying next to her, caressing her hair as she sleeps. Those are magical. And I've never felt this way about a woman - we have all found ourselves saying that, but this is honest - not wishful thinking. At nine months in, I still have a profound interest in her - what she thinks, what she did that day, how she feels. I still enjoy holding her, even more than before because I feel like I may not get to soon. I want to do anything to keep her - well, almost anything. That ONE thing is just too big to take on right now, isn't it? Well, I've got to do it at some point. Please, if you see me in the street, just remind me to not act so desperate around her - act strong in front of her, because she is losing interest in the whole sensitive artist thing. Maybe some jealousy would be good for the gander, too. I'll have to arrange a "date" with a beautiful woman soon. Hmmm.....

What would dating be if it weren't for scheming? NOTHING turns around a disinterested heart like jealousy does! The thought of losing someone seriously is what makes us fall into that passionate, desperate kind of love. Jealousy. Hmmm....

People are animals

People just kill me. If only they could keep their scams to themselves. I am finding my life full of nasty, petty people who are just out to scam a quick buck, or to boost their ego by pushing others down. A few simple rules to make sure that you are 95% clear of going to hell:

1. Don't do anything to anyone - you have no right to act upon anyone without their consent. I am 100% free to do anything I want, as long as it does not infringe on your life. I can dance around like an idiot, punch myself in the face, snort powdered frootloops, and draw pictures of naked Hillary all I want. I am a thousand percent free to do so. I am not, however, free to draw those pictures on your car. Or dance on your toes. Or snort your powdered frootloops. Or punch you in the face.

2. Don't badmouth people because they are not how you would like them to be - People are funny. They are all weird and there are a million flavors of crazy, and not one flavor of sane. People need some really, really freaky shit to keep themselves moving forward. I need so much space and freedom just to exist. some people don't understand that. I can't tell you how many times I have been torn a new one just for being eccentric at my job. I became used to a very late schedule earl in life because of a job I had, and have not recovered since - I suppose that I am doomed to a life of staying up late and sleeping late. But, I am excluded from 90% of good jobs because of that. Administration guys like to work early, so they only want to hire people who work early. Imagine if it was a late-nighter's world how early risers would get badmouthed at work for not being able to work all night.

3. Don't stay up all night posting blogs that no one reads - although it may be cathartic, you are still missing sleep and will be OMG - late for work, again.

Laws that must change:

There are a host of laws that simply do not make sense. Whether they be outdated, or just based on false assumptions, here is a list of laws that would do an immense amount of good if they were rewritten:

1. Non-violent drug offenders - should not be put in jail. Jail only turns them into criminals and causes more difficulty for drug users to straiten out their lives. It also costs the nation billions in tax dollars. Make rehab or education the "punishment" for using drugs. Drug use should not be illegal - it should be taxed. This would eliminate drug money going to support violent cartels and terrorists, and the money could be used for treatment. This would improve the lives of addicts - they would not need to rely on crime to pay for drugs, and would not receive tainted doses that kill them or make them sick.

2. Bad drivers - we need to make a driver's license much harder to get. Driving a vehicle is a dangerous thing. We need to make extensive driver training mandatory for getting a license, similar to what one needs to get a CDL. Drivers should be tested regularly as they get old, since elderly drivers lose critical skills. Cell phones should be illegal to use while driving. This would lower traffic fatalities, lessen road rage frustration, and lower auto insurance. It would also encourage public transportation, saving on greenhouse emissions.

3. Public transportation - should be encouraged. All major cities should provide eco-friendly, reliable transportation for free. Tax money should go to pay for clean, comfortable trains, buses, and shuttles with extensive all-hours schedules. It would lessen pollution, traffic, highway deaths, and improve the quality of life (good public transportation is much more satisfying than the stress of driving everywhere).

4. Public education - should be based on a voucher system. Schools should be made to compete for students' monies. Competition is what fuels our society, and makes it better. The level of education would drastically increase, and parents would be given a choice as to how their kids are taught.

5. Credit cards, banks, and check cashing businesses - should be held more accountable for their policies. Predatory lending acts should be banned. Banks make profit from setting "traps" for naive customers, encouraging them to make mistakes. This is just immoral.

6. Politicians - should all have term limits. Average citizens should be our policy makers, not professional politicians. Careers in politics nearly always lead to corruption.

7. Police - their actions should be recorded. Too many bad cops are out there getting away with abuse. They should be paid more and monitored more closely. There should be an extensive performance review every year, and citizens who have dealt with each cop should be interviewed about their experience. Police exist to serve the community - they should be held accountable, and should be evaluated like any commercial service personnel.

8. Health care - should be free. The first thing a civilization needs is security for the well being of its citizens. Quality health care should be paid for by taxes. People should still be able to pick their doctors and plans - given a voucher for a certain amount of coverage by the state. This way, competition still exists to keep providers at their best. No one should have to go without medical treatment.

9. Small businesses - should be encouraged with tax breaks and free education. Low cost loans should be available to those who would like to start a business. This policy would increase competition, discourage monopolies, and improve the quality of life of small business owners.

10. Immigration - immigrants who would normally be sneaking in to the US should be allowed to come here to work - at a higher tax rate, lower wages, and without government benefits. Menial labor jobs should be made available to them if they choose - jobs that most Americans would prefer not have. Let us benefit from the problem! Who wouldn't hire a housekeeper for $3/hr? This may take away jobs from US citizens, but those citizens could save money outsourcing labor to immigrants, and get training for a better job.

11. Job training - should be free from the government. Not college and university - but short, career oriented training. This would improve the workforce, and the more money people make, the more tax money there is. Everyone wins.

12. Shorter work hours - an employee who works 20 hours a week happily will get more done than one who works 40 hours a week miserably. We should allow for happier workers. We should have more vacations and shorter work weeks. Work is not life!

bad vibes from the future robots from outer space

Ever feel like something's wrong?

Check that.

Always feel like something's wrong?

Yeah. Me too.

It just doesn't seem like we are living life. It feels like we are living in this false reality - like Plato's cave. Things aren't real, but are a reflection, a shadow of what is real. We don't notice because we have nothing else to base life on. But, there is a constant feeling of lacking. A lacking of substance in life.

I feel like this is just a rehearsal for the real thing. I want to fight to survive, not fight to make ten percent more this year than last. I want to wake up and be compelled to act by more than the alarm clock. I want to live moment to moment, and do things that make sense in the moment, not according to some vague plan that no one has written down or thought out.

I crave some vitality!