I think the biggest problem I've found with getting older is that it's harder to find excuses to keep going.
I mean there's pure cussedness. That keeps me moving most days.
But it seems that the longer I live, the harder it gets to justify my existence.
I'm not talking about the severe depression of my 20's and early 30's where the only thing that kept me from eating a shotgun out in the woods was the fact that I didn't have anyone I trusted to feed the cat if I did.
It's more of a general malaise.
Recognition that in all likelihood I have nothing really to contribute, and nothing to look forward to.
If I'm 'lucky' maybe another 30 years of taking people's shit, making other people richer, getting screwed over, and worrying about what new horror lies just around the corner.
Three, maybe four more decades of increasing loneliness as the handful of people I care about die off or drift even further away.
I'm tired.
I'm not well suited to this modern society.
I don't see things improving.
And I can't help but wonder if the responsible and intelligent option is just cashing in and making room for someone better suited to survival.
As of today, I figure there are two, maybe three people (family included) who would be upset if I went down to the harbor and blew my brains out. Possibly three more who would notice, try to tell nice lies about me, and forget about it by the end of the year.
Sometimes I wonder if I just keep going out of habit.
But on the up side, if the situation in the South China sea, and the situation in Syria continue to deteriorate at the current rate, I won't have to worry about it much longer.
I'm a simple guy
I have simple tastes
simple desires...
Good food
A patch to live on
the freedom of not being beholden to strangers
Someone to hold my hand when I die...
But the cost of these things is always just a little too high
and as the years pass they seem to keep pace
enduringly remaining just a step ahead
tantalizingly out of reach...
Anyway, my sister and her husband are currently living in the area where I grew up, and consequently my niece is going to the same schools I went to as a kid.
We were hoping that the area had improved.
It's starting to look very much like it has not...
Granted, to my knowledge, no teacher has intentionally kept her in her desk for multiple class periods in order to force her to wet herself... yet... but they do seem dead set on turning a blind eye to the older kids bullying her.
Now I know it's a part of growing up.
And I know she'll have to get use to it.
And I am a big proponent of letting kids toughen up a bit.
But these little shits are 8-10 years older than she is.
And really, six seems a little young to be hearing every racial epithet in the book.
If it were just kids her age I'd teach her how to knock their little peckers in the peat (and encourage her to do so) But with kids that much older there isn't much she can do.
My sister has already talked to the teacher, and all it's done is all that it ever does (earn my niece a reputation as a crybaby. Which is hilarious considering that the kid has survived more injury, bullshit and horror than most of the teachers in that place).
Ah, but she's not from one of the 'ruling' families in the area.
She's not a little blonde haired, blue eyed, princess.
She's not a perfect little church going angel.
And for some folks that's enough of a reason to be a dick.
For some folks that's enough to justify little cruelty (petty or not)
Some folks will say it's her own fault for having been born in another country.
Some folks will say that the kid would be better off if she knew her place.
Some folks will say 'it's to be expected in a conservative area'
Some folks have no idea how glad they should be that I am who I am today and not who I was, say, fifteen or twenty years ago.
Hope she doesn't get too disheartened.
Because she really is a neat little person.
And I don't want her to lose that just because she's stuck maneuvering the gentrified, yuppie infested ghost of the redneck tweeker shithole I grew up in.
Can't wait till we get my fathers place sold so we can turn our backs on that dump of a county for good...
Some folks don't know just how charmed their lives are.
Work is love, work is life... (where-in I bitch at length about my first world problems)
So I've been at my current company for way too long.
And my supervisors keep trying to get me to take vacation time (even going so far as to create a use or lose scheme to keep me from accruing any more).
But, things being as they are, I've only had one solid period of time off (that being more than a week) since I started here, and that was earlier this year when my father died.
In fact, I've not had a straight week off from any job that didn't involve unemployment, illness, or a death in the family since 1997.
So anyway.
I was supposed to be taking a trip to visit my 82 year old aunt with breast cancer this week.
I was supposed to leave on Friday, and be back to work next Tuesday.
But.
The flights got screwed up, and after three days of arguing with airlines and sleeping on benches I decided to say 'fuck it' and cancel the trip.
Went in to work and told them I'd be back this Wednesday (as it took a lot of tooth pulling, palm greasing, ass kissing and general chicanery to arrange for this Monday and Tuesday off, and I didn't want to waste the days as I couldn't be sure when or if I'd be able to pull of so monumental a feat again... seriously, almost five weeks of meeting with supervisors, asking people directly, and massaging schedules...)
Now I should say that the big argument that my supervisors use runs along the lines of 'just turn off your work phone and take the damn time already'
So I turned off my work phone on Friday.
And for most of Friday and Saturday, my immediate supervisor sent numerous texts to my private phone asking if the trip was still on.
On Sunday I texted back saying that it was off and I'd be back on Wednesday.
Today I turned on my work phone. And found messages from three supervisors, two employees in my department, and an employee in another department, all wanting to know when I was coming back, if I was back yet, if I could cover for them, that they wouldn't be there today, etc...
It would have been day 4 of my 12 day vacation, had things gone according to plan.
And I'm already scheduled for a meeting tomorrow to explain why I wasn't available to cover for the unique special snowflake who decided to take an unscheduled 3 day weekend yesterday to balance out the scheduled 3 day weekend he has coming up at the end of the week...
And this isn't new.
A number of years ago I was dating a lady who I had hoped to marry and settle down with. (she'd even talked me into kids if you can believe it, and I can't stand most of the little fuckers). Anyway, as soon as my employees and co-workers found out that I was seeing this lady, they went out of their way to call in 'sick' every time I tried to take any sort of time off. (often resulting in my having to drive back from wherever we were to cover a shift)
I'm still half convinced that one of them was trying to sleep with her while I was at work covering for his skeezy ass.
And it's the same for illnesses.
Family emergencies.
Any of it.
While my father was dying, the first time I got called out of town because the doctors said 'this is it' two managers and an employee used the three days I was in the hospital to work a deal behind my back and reduce my available manpower by 12%.
When he finally did die five months later I couldn't go more than a day without at least one message from work asking me to do something.
I actually ended up having to go in three days after he died to run something for them.
And in the end they never did give me the company mandated bereavement leave (choosing instead to dock my vacation time for the time I was out, in spite of the fact that HR and the company manual both said that I was entitled to a full week for a first degree relative)
I know I'm not alone in this.
And I'm sure there are lots of folks who have it worse.
And I'm aware that this is the new business model.
Expect a master degree and 10 years experience for a $25,000/yr entry level job.
Run people non-stop.
Punish and or chastise them for not taking the agreed upon vacation time.
Contrive a way to steal said accrued vacation time.
Punish and or chastise them for taking what time they still have available.
And people wonder why the unemployed stop looking for work.
(to the point that they've had to change the official definition of unemployment... if you look at any of the federal reports from about 2005 on you'll see that 'unemployment' is no longer a representation of people who are unemployed and looking for work, but is now a representation of the number of people actively collecting unemployment [which runs out after about six months]. This, of course, is done because it wouldn't do for the general public to know that we're currently running about 21-26% unemployment, instead of the 7% that they keep quoting on television when the powers that be want to bullshit us into thinking that the economy has improved)
People wonder why the country is tearing itself apart.
Why nothing is getting done.
Why it seems that an entire nation is going insane...
So a couple of the young folks I work with were talking the other day about how something was retro 80's, and what the 80's were like, and a number of other things...
Ok kids, for those of you who missed it, while here was a little testosterone and plastic thrown in for good effect, for the most part, the 80's were composed almost entirely of one thing...
The music, the people, the clothing, the politics...
All made out of cocaine, greed, and social masturbation.
In a way, I guess it's fitting that the 80's are coming back, and the 90's...
So since I started losing my hearing a few years back I've had to adjust to a lot of new things.
And one of the more interesting adjustments has been listening to music with stereo headphones.
Songs that are familiar, that I've been listening to for my entire life, take on a whole new, and sometimes hauntingly beautiful feel when you can only hear half of the tracks.
For example.
Try to listen to only the left channel of the following song. (It completely changes the feel of the songs intro when you can't hear the guitar after the choir. )
Try it, and then think of how strange it would be to spend a decade or so listening to everything like that...
