Was A Good Day. It Was A Day I Could Half-way Breathe. I Handled What Needed To Be Handled And Then I

I sit down here and I try this. Type my thoughts. Try to dress ‘em up like Fonzie or a monk who just got it. Thing is, usually I’m going nowhere. I’m not Fonzie. I’m not a monk. I’m not the hero. The world is full of people who think they need to be the big-dicked hero. 

We. We>me. 

I say that as I tickle these here keys all alone. Are we all these people having heroic fantasies all alone? We’re all Luke Skywalker staring at the horizon. Maybe it’s time to cut that shit out. Maybe we need to cut it out because it’s dangerous. 

I remember. Nah, I half-remember. Shit, maybe this never happened. I remember a Saturday Night Live Christmas parody. It was a parody of those holiday specials with the clay people. I dunno. Do you know what I’m talking about? Aight. There was a line that stuck with me. I don’t remember the context. I just remember the line, “It’s not about you, you douchebag.” 

IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU, YOU DOUCHEBAG. 

Maybe I’m way off here but that’s the heart of pure, undefiled religion right there. Of course, what happens with religion is people get transfixed by the messianic figures. That’s all they see. They try to see themselves in the messiahs. 

Went somewhere. Somewhere. Got lost there though. Might not be able to go any farther. 

Fuck

Fuck. 

When the boss on his shit again and I got a head full of commie propaganda on a Monday

When it’s one way and I need it to be another

God damn it, good looks don’t pay fuckin’ bills. 

Fuck. 

She whispers it in the dark

when she wants that love harder.

At the sky 

when you got nothin’ but the rain, your sweat, your bones and a raw deal. 

Gotta watch who hears you say that 

Not sacred 

but it’s something, ya know? You feel me? Am I talkin’ crazy? 

Fuck. 

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.

Porn bots keep following me like it's cool.

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. 

I’ve been inexcusably lazy this week. I’ve written nothing this week save for what you’re now reading.

Laziness and boredom have been the order of the day. It’s a bit excruciating to even sit down and attempt to write this. I know that I’ve got to try though.

I come from a fairly conservative background. I grew up in the suburbs. The suburbs are tough for me to endure now. There ain’t much in the way of soul there. It’s all Neighborhood Watch and I’d like to talk to your manager. It’s wine moms and religion that consists of nothing but not making Jesus cry over what you may or may not be doing with your genitalia. I’ve changed. Maybe you can say that I’ve evolved into whatever it is that I am now. Whatever it is? C’mon. I guess I can label. Wishy washy agnostic socialist writer who can be pretty god damn angry sometimes.

Anger.

I woke up from a nap Saturday evening. I see I have a notification on Twitter. It’s someone that went to my high school who I used to be friendly with. They tell me that I’m being a typical irrational lefty and labeling people fascists who disagree with me. The last sentence of his insightful commentary tells me that ANTIFA are the modern day fascists. Call me pathetic, call me crazy, but if you ask me it’s crazy, this pretty much ruined my Saturday night. I fired off a multi-tweet reply. I never heard a word back in response. It took a lot of effort not to just attack him personally (Although there was a bit of that. Sue me. I’m no debate team nerd here. I’m not above ad hominem attacks.) but I have to say that I’m a bit in awe of a person who thinks exactly the same way that they did when they were a “porn addicted” pimply-faced teenager. There really has not been too much in the way of appreciable evolution. This is a guy with a well-paying job in tech, a wife and an investment portfolio. I guess you can’t blame him in a way, this is a guy who has a lot invested in keeping things exactly the way that they are now.

ANTIFA engage in violence. Thing is though, I can’t fault them for that. They are putting their bodies on the line to defend people who are not white, not Christian, not straight against fascists who are very openly calling for their forcible removal from society. I told the guy on Twitter who I used to be friendly with that it was very clear that he didn’t care. He doesn’t care. Even if this country gets even more horrifyingly authoritarian, they are never coming for him.

There is a church in Indiana that put Jesus, Mary and Joseph in detention. This has gotten a lot of love on progressive-ish Twitter. 

I get it. I appreciate where that is coming from. 

I’m definitely someone who is interested in socially conscious interpretations of religion, particularly Christianity since Christianity had a big part in shaping me coming up in this Empire. I’m not sure about God or the supernatural or the efficacy of prayer or anything like that but I cannot deny that Christianity had an impact on me.

Here’s the thing. 

I’ve never known conservative Christians to see the humanity of The Other in Christ. I traveled in those circles. I was in that orbit for a long time and I just ain’t seen it. That just is not something they do. 

In fact, the humanity of Christ is a tricky thing. Set aside the humanity of The Other (undocumented, gay, indigenous, lots of other categories). I don’t know that they really see too much humanity in Christ period. He’s this righteous messiah character and not much else from where I find myself standing.   

We’ve all been traumatized by the society we find ourselves in. Some of us get traumatized more than others but most all of us have had pain heaped upon us by a society that is profoundly fucked up.

If ya get a chance to talk to people. Like, really talk. This shit is gonna come up. 

What the fuck do I call this?

If you know where the dream ends, you’re being watched. 

If you can find the seams, the stuff you jerk off to that you don’t tell anyone about is being written down by a government agent who is slowly falling in love with you. 

You make the nipples of their soul hard enough to cut diamonds. 

I clear my throat, “Look. This is bullshit. See, the beginning of wisdom is being able to tell where the dream ends while at higher frequencies. If you can do that, shit will be less scary.” 

See. There were moments here. Undeniably. Some of it was bullshit. Maybe most of it was bullshit but some of it was not a dream. Sometimes I heard right. Sometimes I heard just right. 

That song I know. That I heard somewhere. One time. 

Yo man. I don’t know how I feel about that song thing, man. 

This is garbage, isn’t it? 

Maybe. There were moments though. 

There were moments you thought I kinda had it. 

Maybe. 

Maybe. 

Maybe. 

The audacity. 

to try to utter the unutterable. 

Holy shit, I better stay in my lane, right? 

The crowd builds messiahs. 

Nobody is insane enough to believe that about themselves unless they are high 24/7. 

I don’t gotta worry about that though. 

I’m not that good. 

This though. 

This is courage. 

If you tried. Fuck. That’s cheesy. Good night. You know what I’m getting at though, right? 

Seriously though. Good night. 

This is the part of the evening where I listen to Roads by Portishead and stare at the ceiling pensively.