So I was looking at the little statistics thingus on here and it says that about 3/4 of the people who are reading this are from Russia, Romania, the Ukraine and Poland, and 1/4 are from the U.S.
And a part of me is glad that somebody out there is getting a kick out of the whiny bullshit I post here, a larger part of me is curious.
How did you all find this page?
Why are you all here?
Are you actual people, or internet robots skimming information?
Or proxies for web surfers in other countries who don't want to be identified?
Music fans maybe? Brought here by the music links I keep posting on things?
Well, assuming you all are real people who are really there (and really from the places that this whatsit say's you're from)
Welcome! (also Добро пожаловат, Ласкаво просимо, Bine ati venit, and Witaj... At least according to the interweb translator... Hope they're fairly accurate, and not insulting)
If you accept that life is a joke,
then you can appreciate it.
The trick is, you've got to be able to see the joke first, before you can laugh at it.
That starts with cultivating a little awareness.
And a little detachment doesn't hurt either.
Think of every decent person you've ever known who, in spite of doing everything they were supposed to, ended up penniless an alone at the end.
Or every shameless shifty cocksucker who falls ass backwards into money and easy living, who attributes their success to hard work and perseverance when you know damn well they've never raised a callous on their soft soft hands.
Every loyal employee who's been with their company so long that all the skills they had going into the job are outdated.
Who's employer no longer needs to worry about keeping them.
Who's only three avenues of escape are unemployment, incarceration, or suicide.
Every honest dedicated individual you've ever met who was mercilessly screwed so that some unworthy shiesty fuck could maintain the sort of comfort the rest of us cannot even dream about.
Every practical demonstration that the reward for loyalty is eternal and increasingly demeaning servitude.
Every case study offering absolute proof that the only way to succeed in this world is to defy the conditioning so many of us receive in our early years.
Honesty, decency, loyalty, charity, humanity, humility, hard work.
Doing the right thing.
The 'Golden Rule'
The 'Noble Poor'
Convenient fictions, designed to keep us all in the dirt where we supposedly belong.
But I get the hairy eyeball when I tell folks that my goal for the new year is to be a worse person than I was the year before.
Woke up Monday to a message that he had no independent cardio or pulmonary function, and that his digestive tract had completely shut down.
Anyone who's ever worked with animals knows what that means, if you don't know what that means go do some work with animals.
Doc then tells my ma that 'she needs to have the talk with everyone'.
Anyway, hurried calls in to work, breakneck 3 hour drive to the hospital with the sister and brother-in-law and niece.
Two days of waiting to see what would happen.
Only to find out that the doctor on rotation this week has a sense of the dramatic and needs to clean the crap out of his ears.
(the nurse was able to find digestive sounds after about five minutes of listening, and a quick check of back pressure on the breathing machine showed that he was fighting the fluid buildup in his abdominal cavity).
Breakneck 3 hour drive back this evening, and a full shift plus tomorrow.
I really wish, with all it's modern creative billing practices, that the medical business had maintained some air of professionalism...
Guess that's too much to ask.
Don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy to travel across the state for a false alarm. Glad as hell to do it.
But I can't help but wonder, if this guy spent as much time actually with his patient as he seems to spend trying to psych out a 70 year old lady who's been stuck next to a hospital bed for two and a half months, what could he accomplish?
Going on two and a half months now.
Tough old bastard.
His wife has been next to him the whole time,
she's slowly dying of congestive heart failure,
showing all the signs but refusing to see a doctor till he's taken care of.
And every 28 days like clockwork,
they move him to another facility saying
"This is really their specialty, and They can help him, and They're the ones you really want on this"
Thing is,
if he stays at any hospital more than 30 days they start losing money.
So every 28 days,
we're referred to a new facility,
a new specialist,
a new town.
And the cycle starts all over again.
They fuck up his meds,
they don't listen,
they know better than anyone else,
and he gets worse.
Loses a little more ground,
forgets a little bit more,
slides a little further away.
The transport bills alone are worth several times more than the house I grew up in.
And the hospitals charge a half million a piece to do this to him.
We'll never get above this financially, but that's ok.
I've already given up on most of the dreams.
I have no house, I have no business,
I have no children, and my sister has spent years distancing herself financially from the family in case something like this happened.
So the banksters and the collection agents will only be able to bankrupt two generations of us.
That's why I don't have any savings,
at least that's what I tell myself.
Someone will just steal it from me at the end anyway.
That's why I don't take care of myself,
at least that's my excuse.
No death with dignity in this brave new world of ours.
I'll end up stuffed full of tubes and shitting myself,
babbling incoherently and begging to die,
just like him.
And in the midst of all this I got one final message from my secret admirer.
At first I was getting them every couple of weeks, that quickly dropped to once every few months, to maybe once a year once I quit responding.
But I think this one is the final one, in no small part because I got a new phone that lets me block people without having to actually go to the carrier and pay a fee.
Not that the last few years haven't been entertaining.
The goading and shit talking I took as rote. After the first few months I was about 60% sure that it was being done without her knowledge. One of her little yippie city friends putting the stupid hillbilly in his place. Maybe some rival trying to keep me out of the way so he could have his shot ( I knew of a couple who would not be above such behavior).
But I really didn't need to see pictures.
The latest,
the last,
supposedly of the one who I thought was the one,
going down on a trio of guys,
entitled **** pays the rent.
And to tell the truth,
with all I've got going on,
I didn't even bat an eye.
I fucking laughed.
Because if it wasn't photo shopped then I have proof that things turned out for the second best (the best being if she had walked away before gifting me with a dose of the cancer clap).
And if it was photo shopped, then someone wasted a lot of time and energy trying to get under my skin.
Because I honestly don't have the energy to care anymore.
Because for years I've been wasting my sanity with this bullshit,
and with a couple of keystrokes it is out of my life.
At least until this fine individual gets a new phone number.
Funny how,
even though we're older,
even though the technology has changed,
we're all essentially the same level of fucked up we were as children.
Playground rules...
But this new drama,
the constant anger,
the knowledge,
the unceasing worry for those who have earned my love,
this has forced me to evolve.
I liken it to my 25th year when I learned about the half brother I did not know about.
I'd always suspected,
known I was being lied to,
but it wasn't till he introduced himself that I knew I wasn't crazy.
I've always known that the world was crooked,
known that we're only tolerated as long as we can be of use to someone,
known that the only reason any of us are alive is that someone hasn't yet decided to profit from our deaths.
But in a way it's comforting to have an example this blatant to point at.
Something that cannot be so easily explained away.
It's clarifying.
To the point that it generates what can only be called a surety of purpose.
I take comfort in the belief that the pain I feel is but a precursor to enlightenment.
And by holding this thought,
my suffering is greatly diminished.
