What, with all the tiny little thoughts I can't bother to develop further.
Here's one for today.
Do you ever find yourself wishing that Rage Against The Machine was a good band?
Hasn't anti-social individualistic cynicism been the de facto American ideology since the 1970s or so?
People crying tears of joy during the recent conventions notwithstanding of course.
I guess those people still exist.
I'm jealous. I want to be re-illusioned.
All I'm certain of: I like to dance sometimes alone in my apartment. Also, eating ice cream generally makes me happy provided it's been made recently and flavored with something I want to eat. Already, a lot of caveats, but I feel like someone out there is already thinking of cardboard-flavored ice cream, just out of spite.
I wish I lived in DC again solely so I could go out drinking the night before the election at a bar filled with hubristic young congressional staffers. Pickup line: what's your pet's name and does it fit on a ballot?
I've worked twenty-five of the last twenty-six days.
I generally have less money at the end of the day than I did at the beginning. I get paid every day. I feel like my existence disproves a lot of economic theory somehow (rational choice?). Others have it much worse.
I'd like to offer a challenge to those of you who love making new words: what's philanthropy in reverse? I don't mean the wealthy stealing from those who have less but rather the word for someone of lower means voluntarily paying to make the lives of the wealthy better. I'm actually getting close to that now.
If we fail at creating new words, we fail at creating new realities.
I've given up a lot to hold on to this shrinking piece of land.
Oddly enough, of all of the things I've had to temporarily scratch from my list of dreams, what almost made me cry was shopping for dinnerware online today. I'm not buying any; for some reason, looking at pretty plates online evoked a placid domesticity that is as foreign to me as Bangladesh, even as it may exist in a home twenty feet from my apartment. I never got a car, never thought I would have a serious crack at owning a house, forgot long ago that I ever planned on living somewhere on the water in northern Europe, have become patient enough to accept that it may be a few more years before I'll have a cat again. But, man, I didn't think I wouldn't have some nice plates, you know? Isn't that what people do?
Like, it's totally out of reach right now: buy a piece of steak, season it, pan-sear it, toss it in the oven, take it out when cooked for the right amount of time (I'm a medium-rare guy), place it on a pretty plate, cut into it with a steak knife and a fork, and use the fork to place the steak in my mouth.
First off, I'd need a ride to the grocery store. Then I would have to get the steak back here, along with salt (I don't think I even have that!). My stove isn't powerful enough to really sear it, especially since I have a crappy pan that an old roommate burned accidentally and it doesn't convey heat very well, so even if my stove was powerful, I'd still probably need a new pan. Even if I had the pan and the stove, a ride to and from the supermarket, well, I'd still need a steak knife. I have a crappy fork. I have a crappy plate.
Actually, I have two plates and a table to put them on but only one chair so if you want to join me in eating steak one of us will be standing huddled over the steak trying to cut it with a butter knife. The seated party will be eating dinner in a decaying office chair that will roll around the floor as the steak is being cut.
Maybe only one of us should cut the steak. I'll do it for you. You are my guest. I do have manners, at least.
It's actually shit like this that makes me feel stuck in permanent adolescence, much more than anything else.
I'm ashamed of myself for not being a great artist but most people aren't, anyways. Somehow, though, I feel like many Americans can figure out how to own steak knives and chairs at the same time; they've made a better go of their exploitation, even if they have nothing particularly interesting to say. Maybe because.
It's not self-pity.
Can you really prove that Miles Davis actually made music, or that Jane Austen wrote a novel? Leave your house and walk around the streets and don't talk to anyone and prove it. I dare you.
I wonder if we are reaching some sort of breaking point with civilization.
People complain about specialization. He knows how to do this and not that, and vice-versa for her and all that. I think it's brilliant. Someone will make great pens, another will write with them, and if the writer had to make pens, or the maker of pens had to write, well, pens and writing would suffer.
Fine by me.
But what if we all come to live such distinct lives now that we'll never understand each other, even as we continue to create our self-justifying hierarchies amongst ourselves?
The hierarchies are stupid. Consumerism allows us all to not take responsibility for the social and economic systems which are created and engendered by our desires. A neurosurgeon could look down upon someone who harvests tomatoes, thinking, well, they must be stupid, they must have wasted their life, must have fucked up somehow, while eating a fine plate of penne all'arrabiatta. Ironing is delicious.
A couple came in to the bar tonight and spent about as much money on drinks as I made in the twelve hours I worked today. Admittedly, it was very slow night (just like about twenty of the last twenty-five I have worked). They only had three drinks between them; not really excessive at all. And yet the disparity. That even one cocktail, one glass of bourbon and one glass of Scotch could actually nearly exceed the income of the person serving those drinks.
It's true I should quit, and I will. It's also true that they must have presumed that there would be no consequence for tipping me $3 on $37. They were right.
Maybe I am stupid, maybe I have wasted my life, fucked up somehow, but, even if it I wasn't there, someone would be, even someone who made better choices, and that someone would be there not because of stupidity, because of a wasted life, because of fucking up, but, simply because a couple of rich people want to have a drink outside of their home.
I think I'm losing what I'm trying to say. I think it's just...
The cool thing about the world right now is that the less responsibility for the way the world works any individual possesses, the more blame they take.
But really, it's nobody's fault.
Rage Against The Inability To Take Responsibility For The World, it doesn't have the same ring, though.
I'm back at work in ten hours.
