Booming.
It's getting late. I keep looking over my shoulder, listening over the music, for my wife's car. The alarm just loves going off at random now. It makes me nervous. I hate technology, I really do. Sure it's all great when engines drive us and fans cool us and computers connect us, but all of these things fail, and then people get agitated. They never seem to say, hey, things are back how they used to be. No, they say, things are worse off, as if a small negative in a mass excess somehow creates a void.
Some damn mosquito bit me on my wrist. I love Texas mosquitos. They're rare now because the county has upped the spraying for them, but the occasional Tiger mosquito still flies by here and rips your skin up. They're fast, hard to see, and strike repeatedly. They're the second nastiest mosquito I have ever encountered in the nation next to Minnesota's Black Mosquitos of Death. Regardless of their secondary status, one of them managed to get me last night. I was standing outside staring at the car. The car said "click, click, shunk" to which I only stared, and then it said "boodle oodle oodle oodle" to which I glared angrily. And then I got bit.
It would be a pretty minuscule problem not even worth noting except for a) the precise strike of the pest on the underside of my right wrist and b) the ongoing swelling of my entire wrist. No little bite bump, no itch, nothing but a big puffy wrist. If I've developed some sort of allergy to the local mosquito variety, things may become a bit difficult around here.
I've got this techno music on, distracting me from rubbing my wrist out of instinctual concern, and to remind me that the car outside probably won't start blaring loudly for me to go change its diaper. You never know though, because machines are such fickle things. Over the past few years living out here "on my own" under the gentle guide and tolerance of my wife, I have learned something very important.
My original thought was all people have the same amount of knowledge and conceptual understanding, from about the age of five until the day they die; they just manifest it in different places. My second revision maintained the core of that statement, adding that people only pretend to know what they are doing, and that in actuality every person on the planet is just wandering around confused. They are all either blindly following the rules, cheating to get around the rules or take advantage of the rules to make personal profit, or boldly challenging the rules (often resulting in death). My third revision was more of an ultimate conclusion: if everyone has the same conceptual understanding and primary brain function, yet all of them do things differently in accordance with personal variation and beliefs in the second revision, everything anyone does will always turn out differently provided any free will is involved.
Skipping all the existential crap, I realised I can do anything. A bit late I know.. a bit obvious. Perhaps what I should say is that, I should personally address everything in my life. If my computer blows up, I will repair it myself. If my roof leaks, I will patch it. If a car drives through my wall, I will be the one to rebuild it. If the sink leaks, if the roaches take over, if my wrist swells up to the level of a portable pillow, I'll take care of all of it. All of the modern maintenance information in the world is available to me via the wonders of the internet, and my skill level can handle all of it. I can do any job, and this is exactly why I am unemployable; I know a little bit about everything and specialise in nothing. Except game design. But game designers are mostly pretentious narcissistic high-school dropouts, so that doesn't really count.
Now this idea of complete freedom and control over everything in my life (except surgery and cars, because surgery is too complex for casual study and I just don't give a shit about cars) would normally excite me, but there are things in the way. The first thing is that most items existing in the area around me aren't mine. The second thing is that, being "unemployable" I seem to be unemployed, and as such I have no money to actually do any of the tasks that need doing even if I did own the articles in need of maintenance.
Some may think that I'm the snobbish, pretentious one, turning down jobs just because I never hear any response from any (now digital-only) company applications, find no way to contact anyone in charge of hiring, and walk into stores to talk to employees who have no idea how they ever became employed. Along with this I also have no "contacts" because of this wonderful old ideology I have that business is business and that it does not cross with my personal life in any way whatsoever, including getting drunk with co-workers, copulating with co-workers, sharing intense political or religious viewpoints with co-workers, or getting the names and numbers of co-workers for future job references. I suppose that would be a lovely way to approach someone if you needed to stalk them though: "oh hey, I might get a new job someday, can I get your full name and number for future references?" The police might even believe it.
Ultimately I not only need to address all of the problems in my life by myself, free of the lecherous involvement of foreign "specialist" companies under a variety of local guises, but apparently I also must be employed entirely by myself as my own CEO, regional supervisor, assistant supervisor, manager, assistant manager, key-holder, minimum-wage grunt and trainee. If I smile, I'll do it myself. Everything, apparently, has to be done by myself... yet the United States of America and all of the people within it have done a wonderful job of making all of that nearly impossible. Don't get me wrong though, I'm still looking for ways around it, over it, through it, anything. And believe me when I say I give thanks, I accept help, and I appreciate my friends, family, and acquaintances, as few as they may be, they are all the more precious to me. I've got someone else to look out for in my life now, a wife that has helped me to rediscover life when I thought I had lost it all, and in reality all I had lost was the ignorant burden of the bourgeoisie.
Every day still I am grateful. Just today we drove down the road and passed a man around my age standing beside the road, holding a giant sign in the air. I had to point him out. In my job searches over the past few months, I had come across nearly spam-level job advertisements for this... I could recognise that it was the same company I was looking at by the type of sign he was holding. I seriously considered it. This could have been me out there, never seeing or talking to anyone, getting a cell phone call directing me to a random location like a nameless, expendable asset. And that's exactly what he was.
I could have been standing there for $12 / hr at a high-traffic intersection next to the freeway in 100°+ heat, jumping up and down like a trained monkey so that mega-corp fatcats could get a little richer. Here I am fighting to survive, racking up debt just to eat while my skin still stretches taut over my ribs like a canvas, and I still looked at that and said no. It's too far.. that's too much. I really won't stoop that low. Am I pretentious snob? Yeah, maybe that makes me one. But I still get to look at that guy, and be glad that I am not in his shoes, and wonder how much worse off he must have been than I am to have said yes.
Some damn mosquito bit me on my wrist. I love Texas mosquitos. They're rare now because the county has upped the spraying for them, but the occasional Tiger mosquito still flies by here and rips your skin up. They're fast, hard to see, and strike repeatedly. They're the second nastiest mosquito I have ever encountered in the nation next to Minnesota's Black Mosquitos of Death. Regardless of their secondary status, one of them managed to get me last night. I was standing outside staring at the car. The car said "click, click, shunk" to which I only stared, and then it said "boodle oodle oodle oodle" to which I glared angrily. And then I got bit.
It would be a pretty minuscule problem not even worth noting except for a) the precise strike of the pest on the underside of my right wrist and b) the ongoing swelling of my entire wrist. No little bite bump, no itch, nothing but a big puffy wrist. If I've developed some sort of allergy to the local mosquito variety, things may become a bit difficult around here.
I've got this techno music on, distracting me from rubbing my wrist out of instinctual concern, and to remind me that the car outside probably won't start blaring loudly for me to go change its diaper. You never know though, because machines are such fickle things. Over the past few years living out here "on my own" under the gentle guide and tolerance of my wife, I have learned something very important.
My original thought was all people have the same amount of knowledge and conceptual understanding, from about the age of five until the day they die; they just manifest it in different places. My second revision maintained the core of that statement, adding that people only pretend to know what they are doing, and that in actuality every person on the planet is just wandering around confused. They are all either blindly following the rules, cheating to get around the rules or take advantage of the rules to make personal profit, or boldly challenging the rules (often resulting in death). My third revision was more of an ultimate conclusion: if everyone has the same conceptual understanding and primary brain function, yet all of them do things differently in accordance with personal variation and beliefs in the second revision, everything anyone does will always turn out differently provided any free will is involved.
Skipping all the existential crap, I realised I can do anything. A bit late I know.. a bit obvious. Perhaps what I should say is that, I should personally address everything in my life. If my computer blows up, I will repair it myself. If my roof leaks, I will patch it. If a car drives through my wall, I will be the one to rebuild it. If the sink leaks, if the roaches take over, if my wrist swells up to the level of a portable pillow, I'll take care of all of it. All of the modern maintenance information in the world is available to me via the wonders of the internet, and my skill level can handle all of it. I can do any job, and this is exactly why I am unemployable; I know a little bit about everything and specialise in nothing. Except game design. But game designers are mostly pretentious narcissistic high-school dropouts, so that doesn't really count.
Now this idea of complete freedom and control over everything in my life (except surgery and cars, because surgery is too complex for casual study and I just don't give a shit about cars) would normally excite me, but there are things in the way. The first thing is that most items existing in the area around me aren't mine. The second thing is that, being "unemployable" I seem to be unemployed, and as such I have no money to actually do any of the tasks that need doing even if I did own the articles in need of maintenance.
Some may think that I'm the snobbish, pretentious one, turning down jobs just because I never hear any response from any (now digital-only) company applications, find no way to contact anyone in charge of hiring, and walk into stores to talk to employees who have no idea how they ever became employed. Along with this I also have no "contacts" because of this wonderful old ideology I have that business is business and that it does not cross with my personal life in any way whatsoever, including getting drunk with co-workers, copulating with co-workers, sharing intense political or religious viewpoints with co-workers, or getting the names and numbers of co-workers for future job references. I suppose that would be a lovely way to approach someone if you needed to stalk them though: "oh hey, I might get a new job someday, can I get your full name and number for future references?" The police might even believe it.
Ultimately I not only need to address all of the problems in my life by myself, free of the lecherous involvement of foreign "specialist" companies under a variety of local guises, but apparently I also must be employed entirely by myself as my own CEO, regional supervisor, assistant supervisor, manager, assistant manager, key-holder, minimum-wage grunt and trainee. If I smile, I'll do it myself. Everything, apparently, has to be done by myself... yet the United States of America and all of the people within it have done a wonderful job of making all of that nearly impossible. Don't get me wrong though, I'm still looking for ways around it, over it, through it, anything. And believe me when I say I give thanks, I accept help, and I appreciate my friends, family, and acquaintances, as few as they may be, they are all the more precious to me. I've got someone else to look out for in my life now, a wife that has helped me to rediscover life when I thought I had lost it all, and in reality all I had lost was the ignorant burden of the bourgeoisie.
Every day still I am grateful. Just today we drove down the road and passed a man around my age standing beside the road, holding a giant sign in the air. I had to point him out. In my job searches over the past few months, I had come across nearly spam-level job advertisements for this... I could recognise that it was the same company I was looking at by the type of sign he was holding. I seriously considered it. This could have been me out there, never seeing or talking to anyone, getting a cell phone call directing me to a random location like a nameless, expendable asset. And that's exactly what he was.
I could have been standing there for $12 / hr at a high-traffic intersection next to the freeway in 100°+ heat, jumping up and down like a trained monkey so that mega-corp fatcats could get a little richer. Here I am fighting to survive, racking up debt just to eat while my skin still stretches taut over my ribs like a canvas, and I still looked at that and said no. It's too far.. that's too much. I really won't stoop that low. Am I pretentious snob? Yeah, maybe that makes me one. But I still get to look at that guy, and be glad that I am not in his shoes, and wonder how much worse off he must have been than I am to have said yes.