Happy Patriotic Day Off!

Today I want to wish everyone a happy day of revelry, remembrance, and appreciation of all those freedoms that we haven‘t had overtly removed.  I know I will be expressing myself  frequently, loudly, and incoherently, if drunkenly, and remembering those who have served, died, and died while serving.  I have the right to be awesome here, and I know there are places I would not be allowed to be so.  I appreciate that.  I hope you do, too.

This is a great country, but it is in no way perfect, and our leadership seems, at times, to not have made it past an 8th grade maturity level.  Seriously.

Ok, in the spirit of  our rebellious forefathers, I want you to be the most patriotic American on your block, So here’s my suggestion:  We have the ability to change the people who actually run the government, but we have this habit of staring at the figurehead that we have no control over.  Instead of getting all angry at the President, who you can’t legally replace at this point, try learning about what your Congressmen actually do & vote on.  Figure out if they are part of the idiot problem, and vote against them if they aren’t helping. 

START HERE:    http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
                            http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm


If your Congressmen are part of the problem, and the other candidate makes you sick, don’t be scared of the third party option.  Find someone who represents you and vote for them.  If no one does, you may need to run, personally.  Seriously, if you can get a few thousand friends on Facebook, you can get elected.  I’ll tell you a little secret:  Appeal to senior citizens.

No matter what, talk (don’t preach or push) with your friends about this.  Make it popular.  Make the Representatives people, and not just part of a faceless, all encompassing, hive minded Congressmonster that I shall call Congrazilla the Obfuscator.

If people are aware of them, and what they do, maybe they won’t keep electing the same pile of fools. 

In any case, have a great Independence Day.  Don’t drink and drive.  Get a ride home if you‘ve had a couple, and drink a glass for me.

A longer post will be up in the next couple of days, with lots of goofy drawings and little mini comic strips.

From One Pot to a Few Kettles.

I’m going to write this without pointing fingers.  I don’t have enough fingers or time to attempt the task.  In fact, this isn’t about any particular person.  If you think this is about you, rather than get mad, try sucking up your anger and then taking it for what it’s worth.  Perhaps you can learn something about yourself in the process.  Now, to the point:

You are not as strong as you claim you are.  More than that, no one is fooled.  The majority of your friends accept you for who you are to them: just another person, wrapped up in there own dramatic crap-fest.  Every time you go on about your strength, what you’ve been through, or how unusual you are, there is a good chance that someone is literally, or figuratively, rolling their eyes at you.

Facts: 

• We’ve all been in fights, gotten hurt, and wanted to kill someone.
• We’ve all had someone we love die.
• We’ve all committed, or been around, drugs abuse.
• We all know a criminal or two.
• We’ve all seen or heard something we wish we hadn’t.
• We’ve all had confusing sexual desires and misunderstandings.
• Our parents screwed up.
• We screwed up.

Don’t get me wrong: you’ve been through some pretty messed up junk in your life, but, barring victims of the extremes (e.g. disaster survival, vivisection, dehumanization, enslavement, forced participation in murder, etc.), crap-fests are not really that unusual.  Probably, yours is only special because it’s yours.  Yours matters to you, the people it directly effects, and not really anyone else.  If it did, there would probably be a charity in your name.

Listening to you, there is nothing you can’t do, overcome, or haven’t done.  That’s fantastic.  You are epically great.  Just look at you!

The problem is that I don’t believe you.  I’ve seen you.  Most of us have.  I know you have significant limitations.  We all do.

In fact, every blog post, facebook update, or tweetapolooza you commit reinforces this to each of us.  The need to remind us that your year/month/week/day/morning has been rough, and that, by the grace of your own inner strength, you’ll pull through, tells us that you really just want to maintain your pride while begging for sympathy & encouragement. 

That great scar, or pain, you wear like a medal brings you no honor if you constantly shove it in the face of everyone you meet.  In fact, it loses power.  People are no longer shocked or concerned. Eventually, it looks like a crutch you have to prop yourself on every time you interact with someone, or else your character would fall over like a cardboard cut out.

And then there are the memes.  Great Gawd’s Nethers, will there never be an end to the memes?  It seems that every idiot teenager or “artistic” adult with an internet connection has created a meme to reinforce their essentially unhealthy prejudice in a one-size-fits-all .jpg.  These are neat things, sometimes, but it’s marketing trickery.  Really.

You may think it’s profound and want to feel profound by reposting it, but, before telling the world this “gem” of knowledge, trying examining what it means.  If it were such a valid point, and it’s something you live by, why are you in the emotional turmoil you’re in?  Why are you trying to make yourself feel better by feeding it to everyone else?

Some of this stuff is just pure idiocy.  Here are a few I made, some time ago, to illustrate the point:

See, there is nothing wrong with wanting sympathy or encouragement, but you’re lying to everyone while you do it.  The lie is irritating to your friends.  If they like you, they play along.  If they don’t care, they brush you off and keep moving.  There is a fine line where irritated friends turn to enemies.

So, you have a choice.  You can continue constantly forcing your self-image fantasy on everyone you know, or you can shut your mouth and be who you really are.  If you choose the second, your words and actions will show your character, and your less-than-tactical image-masturbation can take a load off.

If you really are that strong, show me, don‘t tell me.

Targetted Consumer.

I live a bit of a lie.

I work a white collar, well-paying job that meets most of needs and may lead to a reasonable amount of comfort in the near future.  Yard/house/wife/kids/sports-car/midlife crisis ambition aside, and a means to obtain it aside, I currently sublet a room in a stranger’s apartment, drive a mid-90’s compact car, and thrift-shop my professional wardrobe.  My casual clothes are a mildly pleasant combination of hold-overs from the turn of the millennia and whatever my girlfriend chooses my hindquarters should be swaddled in.

Frankly, I blame this on the area in which I live.  I’m in a suburb of Washington, DC, close enough to walk to a Metro station.  Everything is at a premium.  A reasonable salary, which would sustain a family of four in most of the country, means that, here, you just get by.  For example, I heard a girl I know complaining about how hard it was to live off her $66,630/year.  A few years ago, I would have laid into her about being grateful, but, having lived here, I bit my tongue into slivers and minded my business.

As in keeping with some of my lie, I typically go to Target instead of Walmart, and almost never find myself in a Big Lots or Kmart.  At Target, I can drink an overpriced coffee, look at shiny new crap I don’t need, and interact with people who don’t force me to ponder the American class struggle.

The problem with going to Target is that, along with all the pretense, almost all the utility has also been removed.  Target caters to people who will never really have to lift much of a finger, except to pursue sport.  This means that everything comes as part of kits or in styles that require little effort.  It’s like someone went down a checklist and removed anything that involved a saw, hammer, or technical skill.

Tonight, I needed drapery hooks.  The curtains over the sliding glass door needed re-hanging and were made to be pierced by little sharp bits of steel.  So, off to Target I took my little meep-mobile, in the rain, wearing my trench-style outer coat, with the intent to get in, buy shiny bits, and roll home to fix someone else’s window coverings… maybe buy some Starbucks as a reward for leaving my room.

I wandered.  I sipped.  I failed.  Target had nothing even remotely similar to what I wanted, leaving me standing in a long coat, beard, and rumpled expression, in a store mostly populated with 30-something professiona-frau’s who quickly and pointedly ignored me when they passed.  I don’t blame them.  I am not compatible with their yoga pants.

So off to Kmart in the rain, radio blaring about Boston cops as they caught their second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing, through the mildly emptied streets.  Strangely enough, it was very easy to find exactly what I wanted, once there.  I needed no help, and everything was clearly marked.  I was in and out within 10 minutes and only had to listen to a bit of noise from a seemingly elderly sales clerk, whose teeth and common sense seemed to be missing, but was simply running about saying “Sir?” while searching for the man she had been helping.

Things I noticed:

I was the only seemingly partially-Germanic  person there.  That means nothing specifically, but it may inform the next things I noticed.
I was the only person using a debit card.  Paying with cash or rebate seems to be the preferred method for the other people there.  They seemed to have some sort of phone number based store credit account, and wads of cash, like I used to carry in my blue collar days.  Hard to get in the hole if you can’t spend what you don’t have.  Hard to be traced if you don’t use a bank account.
While I still didn’t fit, the people around me were quite pleasant.  All of them.  No snot, little pretense, and only one whiff of odeur de merde de l’enfant.

I should explain further.  I look like a pudgy rectangle wrapped in a t-shirt and a trench coat.

It doesn’t seem to matter where I go, it’s the same situation: conspicuous at 1500 ft.

I guess what I really noticed today was that I might never fit in, but there are places I can go where I won’t be edged away from quite as openly.  In the end, isn’t that what we really want?

Or maybe this just a bunch of boring junk that happened.  Meh.  I’mma gonna go make me a sammich.


~The Crow Drinker.

P.S.

While in line, I picked up a $5 DVD set entitled Fright Fest, which included some of the worst horror films ever committed (and some of their sequels).  12 movies in all, but including one of the stupidest cheese fests ever: Jack Frost 2.  I especially enjoy the fight, in the survival raft, over the carrot, which then washes up on a tropical island and waggles like a rubber phallus in the sand at coeds around a campfire…  then supernatural ice cycle murder.  Let me just say “Bwah ha.  Bwah ha ha ha.”