rivets

Is it amoral to smack someone upside the head with a baseball bat if it’s for a good reason? Asking for a friend.

Just a little bit. Legal issues. Car got impounded. Ride to work is consistently late to work. Stress headaches every day. Life is peachy, cops are great, I’m going to have to write a Christmas note to the cop who pulled me over. “Thank you for your service! You’re doing a wonderful job preventing working folks from being able to survive in this economy. I hope you get a bonus this year and won’t get run over by a bus while writing a ticket!”

You know, I sometimes wonder why we call it mental illness. Why not call it what it really is – affliction of reality. Reality is the worst affliction.

Just relax and listen to hippy shit.

The ghost of George Carlin speaks.

Not ever. Except when drunk.

That civilizing force. Everything’s boring now. It’s all scripted. You have you entire life laid out for you, like noble children of old, only now it’s everybody. I don’t think this is the kind of egalitarianism past generations dreamed of.

Now everything is cheap. Cheap, yet expensive. It’s cheap to make, expensive to pursue. But pursue it, we must. Why? I don’t know, because all the other lemmings are doing it. And if you or I don’t do it, too, the lemming police with baton you in your lemming head. The boundaries are strictly defined – in this world of blurry, hazy transitions, it’s mind boggling how precise our boundaries are. We’ve given up the natural transition between root and mycelial networks and soil for binary dilemmas and mathematical precision.

Some days I just want to watch it all burn down.

Maybe I’m a monster, or maybe it’s psychosis. Who knows. I’m feeling super irritable lately. Once this patch is crossed, I can start saving up for a little plot of land and a trailer or something.

The  world is absurd. Politics are absurd. The news is absurd. Even an absurdist would feel depressed looking at this sheer lack of exploitable material that exists in the present. Everything is doing the work for them already, and there is nothing left to make fun of. It’s all making fun of itself.

Hourly jobs are absurd, and yet countless humans the world over continue to clock in precisely on time every day.

Healthcare is absurd, and yet countless people stress over how they’ll pay for their procedures (in the States, at least) every day.

The economy is absurd, and yet countless people worry that the housing market might crash again and we’ll enter a new recession worse than the last (spoiler: we will).

College is absurd, and yet countless students continue pursuing a piece of paper that qualifies them to sit in an office doing essentially nothing for however many hours the corporation they work for demands every day. Assuming they can compete with the hoards of other recent graduates in their field. Don’t even get me started on student debt.

Laws are absurd. How can alcohol be totally cool and fine, when other psychoactive drugs are grounds for firing in most places of employment, when alcohol clearly impairs the ability to work much more than most/any other substance? And don’t even dream of driving around with a broken headlight or tail light. You might get shot by a cop for that.

Civilization is absurd. We’re all so stuck in our tracks that we feel helpless when society turns against us. What even is society but the will of the powerful reverberating unconsciously through the people around us?

And what could be more absurd than to unconsciously echo the thoughts of some wealthy idiot who’s never experienced reality and lives in a stupid Platonic dreamworld? I need more beer.

Would my landlord be mad if I did the equivalent of this, just inside my apartment? Hmm…

Quit gobbling at me all the time, humans.

I wish I lived in a world where humans were not the dominant species on the planet, and had to hide in little enclaves, consumed by the daily tasks of survival, rather than scheming and pantomiming their garbage mass-produced culture. I don’t give two bits of excrement what sports are on TV right now. Give me my beer and stow it.

I’m not so sure. The language makes it seem like I do – we have words for that, you know. I, me, my. Have you ever felt like you’ve melted into the landscape and lost all perspective of the things those words refer to? I miss that feeling. Whenever I have to deal with bills, being presentable, cleaning, fixing something that’s broken, talking to someone to clear up a misunderstanding, it detracts from that sense of flowing with my surroundings. It’s like a skipping CD (for those of us old enough to remember that). Why would anyone want to fill the world with something so discordant?

When you reach your last day on earth and you look back at your life, does it seem strange that this is all there was? Working every day, feeling exhausted all weekend, going back to work every day, paying bills, doing all that god-forsaken math to balance your budget, with brief moments of spontaneous enjoyment like little rays of sunshine piercing through an otherwise stifling room? Well, at least you got to stack some boxes every day at work for 25, 30 years, and at least you got a change of scenery every time you changed jobs or got laid off. At least you got to enjoy generic coffee from generic company who employs people who get to put coffee grinds into a coffee tin for countless years and then die.

And if another person tells me to just work hard and you’ll succeed, I’ll have to ask them what I’m meant to succeed at, and why I should like the idea of any of it. Either that, or punch them in the face. Not sure which.

Rivets smash. Most things break if you smash them hard enough. I smashed 280lbs of glass today. I will do it again tonight. That’s the best part of the day – the smashing hour. Tempered glass goes “BOOSH” when it smashes. It’s the greatest sound in the world. If I could find a job where all I had to do all day was smash glass, I’d take it in a heartbeat, even if it paid minimum wage.

So I’m a little drunk. Bite me. I’ll probably regret typing the things in my brain when the buzz wears off. Go figure, that’s life I guess.

Have you ever thought about the expectations people have for you? At work – they expect you’ll want to be a good employee, to fit the mold for a leadership position, because who doesn’t want that? That you’ll want to advance your career, such as it is, and take on more responsibility. Or at home – that you’ll want to start a family, have kids, a wife (or husband), a house and maybe 1.5 dogs. I don’t know what people like these days. Maybe it’s 2 pitt bulls and a chihuahua now. What if you don’t care about any of that and only go to work because you need a paycheck to pay the bills, and no other concerns encroach upon your conscious mind? What if the idea of having kids and a family and all those annoying dogs seems more like a second job than a blessing? I have three cats, that’s more than enough chaos to call a life. If you express those thoughts in polite company, everybody will look at you like you’re an alien from Mars working a human job for human people, and clearly you’re supposed to be farming Martian gourds or something. How do you deal with that except to reject outright all of the stupid things people seem to find meaningful? Which includes, of course, the people themselves for finding those things meaningful. Is it possible to live in society with a different set of values without having this kind of awkward conflict? I haven’t been able to find a way to balance it except by getting really drunk after work. And so, check, really drunk after work. Is it okay to go on like this indefinitely? Why is life so stupidly full of conflict? Maybe people will never know the answer to that question. Until then, there’s always hard liquor and other booze to help ease the troubled minds among us.

Just for relaxation’s sake.

I’m not here to impress you. I don’t need your validation. I don’t require your consent for my continued existence. I don’t exist as a foil for your otherwise perfect day. I am not here to perform services for your benefit. I am not here for you to look at and think, “My how pretty.” I am not interested in your thoughts about how unkempt my beard is. I am not concerned by your shock at my disregard of your social norms. I am not interested in your social norms.

Does that make me a bad person, a crazy person, an antisocial person, or does it make you those things for believing the opposite? I don’t know, and I really don’t care what the answer is. Insert reference to Osho reading the definition of some derogatory word here.

Straight into that vortex. Now I’m the focal point between the currents, wandering around looking for some ham to put on my toast.