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American Jitters

First, allow me to take a moment to mark the 6th anniversary of this blog, which occurred some time last month.

I started revision99 during the runup to the 2004 presidential election. I’d been fed up with George W. Bush for about four years by then, and I wanted to express my exasperation that he was ever installed in the White House in the first place and my fervent hope that he would be evicted. It gives me no solace today to know that history will not be kind to George, but of course what really hurts is that my ravings apparently had no effect on that election.

Over the years I came to realize that my ravings were having no effect on much of anything, and I had to retreat back into that blogger’s sanctuary of “I’m writing only for myself.” This was the golden age of personal blogging. I had a few readers, and in turn I read and commented on their blogs. As the impossibly stupid Bush Administration dragged on I became so surly that all my readers and commenters disappeared, and even when I promised to stop writing about politics no one returned. After that, I really was writing just for myself. Then in July of this year I stopped writing altogether.

But I can’t very well commemorate an anniversary if the blog is moribund, so what the hell — I’ll write again about politics.

It’s another day-after. The 2010 election was yesterday, and again I’m scratching my head, trying to make sense of it. Sure things are crappy, but why would voters reelect Republicans, who are primarily interested in enriching the already rich? It’s a mystery that has been getting deeper and more confusing for the past several election cycles. But in trying to explain the current political climate to myself, here’s the latest fairy tale I’ve come up with:

Starting some time in the depths of the Great Depression, Americans got focused. They tightened their belts. They worked hard. They built bridges, dams, monuments, parks. They agreed to legislation that reigned in that era’s Wall Street casino and prevented another such meltdown for 70 years. They created and supported a social safety net to protect the weakest among them, and those who fell through the economic cracks. In the 1940’s they went to war and, against all odds, saved the world. And when those soldiers came home, 12 million of them, we sent them to college and trade schools. They became scientists and engineers, teachers and statesmen. They built homes and churches and schools. They assembled the Interstate Highway system. They created the Space Program and went to the moon. America was the most admired nation on earth. And as late as the Eisenhower Administration our millionaires, mindful of the debt they owed their country, paid a marginal tax rate of 94%.

Contrast all that with the atmosphere today: Americans have become selfish, jealous and greedy. It’s every man for himself. We haven’t built or even attempted anything big in 30 years. Our roads and bridges and levees are crumbling, often with deadly results. We trail most industrialized nations in 21st century infrastructure: broadband technology, high speed rail and clean energy, and there are no plans to catch up. The cars we drive and the electronics we use are built in other countries. We have invaded and still occupy nations on the other side of the world, and the world asks why? We speak seriously about withdrawing aid from anybody “unwilling” to work, at the same time we send their jobs overseas. We pay the lowest taxes in generations, and we are enraged by how high they are. In a world in which 3,000 children a day starve to death, we have an epidemic of obesity.

Our parents and grandparents have spoiled us. They built this magnificent edifice where we live, but we don’t want to maintain it or improve it. We only want to buy big screen televisions and sit on our ever-widening butts, smugly and stupidly imagining that we are still admired by the rest of the world.

All we want are tax cuts and bigger televisions, and we won’t give any government more than one election cycle to deliver. We send the Republicans to fix the economy, because the Democrats didn’t do it. Two years from now we will probably be ready to throw out the Republicans. We’ve got the political jitters. We want quick fixes, no matter how long it took to create the mess we’re in. We’ve been watching TV instead of going to college, so we are no longer smart enough to look five or ten years down the road, form a plan and see it through. We are like fourth-graders on the playground, calling each other names, stealing each others’ lunches and dreading going back into the classroom, where we are expected to pay attention, work together, and learn something.

So in summary let me just say revision99: still harshing your mellow since 2004.

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Night Voting

In my dream I am a member of a political campaign staff, working for a candidate in a county-wide election.

Our man is the best candidate. We believe this because we are partisans, but somehow we also know it to be true. But the primary was held recently, and he didn’t get enough votes to avoid a runoff. As we prepare for the runoff, government data regarding the exact vote count by precinct falls into our hands. We are not supposed to have this information. In my dream world, it is legal to know the vote totals, but this kind of granular tally is a crime for a campaign to possess.

Our team is aware of this, but we ignore it and begin to analyze the data. Gradually it becomes clear that there is one town in the north that has voted unanimously — one hundred percent — for our opponent, and it is because of this anomaly that we are in a runoff. If this town had split the way the rest of the precincts in the county did, we would have won the election in the primary.

We have a meeting about this, and here is what we decide:Â Our candidate is an eminently qualified black man, and his opponent is a white buffoon with little to recommend him. The voters in this town, then, are all racists who would rather be governed by a nincompoop than a black man. It’s the only explanation that makes sense to us.

So we focus our campaign on this one town, working day and night, knocking on doors, putting out press releases, holding meet-and-greets at local coffee shops, buying radio spots, all making the point that our candidate is smarter, more experienced and more purely motivated than our opponent. If we can turn this town around, even a little, we will win.

On the eve of the general, after a meeting at the home of a citizen, I am approached by a couple of the locals who tell me they are excited about the upcoming election and looking forward to voting for my candidate again. I thank them earnestly for their support before starting back to headquarters.

It’s late at night and the election is tomorrow. I’ve done all I can, haven’t I? But what is it that’s bothering me? There is something wrong. I’m alone in the car on a two-lane country blacktop, slicing the night between fields of corn, going back over everything again.

And there it is: Again. Those two people want to vote for my guy again. They voted for him before, in the primary, and now they want to vote for him again. But the election tally showed one hundred percent of them voted against my man. We had assumed it was a racial thing

My foot has slipped off the accelerator and I am coasting to a stop, pounding on the steering wheel over and over. The primary vote totals for this town had to have been rigged, and we — I — hadn’t even considered the possibility, hadn’t done anything to expose the crime, and now it was too late, and we were going to lose again, this time for real!

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Hold On Tight

I just heard Peter Goodman of the New York Times on a local public radio show.

He said something about our current economic crisis that’s been in the back of my mind for a couple of years now, but it’s never come to the surface, and I’ve never read it or heard it anywhere. He said (paraphrasing) that yes, in the runup to the economic collapse in 2008, people did spend beyond their means, but they did so because they did not have the means to live. Their incomes had been stagnant or falling for decades, and they had to provide homes for their families, put their kids through school and pay for increasingly unaffordable health care.

Most of them didn’t stupidly and greedily buy more stuff than they could afford. The monied class simply took all the money and left the rest of us foundering with the leftovers, while fuel prices and everything else went spiraling upward. The masses turned to credit to cover the gap. The banks then jacked up interest rates and fees, making it ever more difficult to stay out of credit problems.

I’m not excusing the abuses that many people engaged in, or the foolishness of falling for the mortgage broker’s line that you could refinance forever and your house would always be worth more. And it’s certainly true that Americans have come to expect a higher standard of living than any other population in history. But our founding documents guarantee a fair chance for all, not to mention life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and as far as I’m concerned the ability to go to the doctor when you’re sick falls under the heading of “life.”

I’ll forgive those who racked up too much debt so they could go to the doctor, or college; those who thought it was their right to take the kids to Disney World or the Grand Canyon; or those whose faith in our system led them to believe that somehow things would work out in the end.

They didn’t know that the ruling class had changed the rules, that the game had been rigged, that the house didn’t just have an edge — it had the outcome totally locked. In effect, most of us have been playing a game in which we had no chance at all.

Maybe this was inevitable. Maybe human nature was bound to pervert the values of solidarity, fairness, freedom and compassion expressed in those original writings. Maybe we just didn’t notice what was happening because it took the ruling elites a couple of hundred years to pull it off. If that’s true, then religious fundamentalists of all stripes are right after all: humans are essentially bad, and must be watched constantly and threatened with the wrath of God or else they will sin.

Personally, I don’t believe it. I think that most of us — not all, but most of us — are in this sinking boat together. A tiny few have escaped to island paradises, and are safe and untouchable. Good riddance. Those of us left holding the bag must try to keep it together by helping each other, acting like grownups, and holding on tight to our dreams.

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It Never Ends

Our Peace President seems to be creating more veterans for us to remember on this holiday.

In 1971, a young naval officer named John Kerry testified about his experiences in Vietnam before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He was long-winded, pompous and obviously starting his political career, but his words are fitting, poignant and sad:

… thirty years from now, [when] our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, without a face, and small boys ask ‘why?’ we will be able to say “Vietnam,’ and not mean a desert, not a filthy, obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

Nobody listened to him in 1971. Thirty years have come and gone, and nobody can hear those words today. We are the finest nation in the world, and we stand ready to kill anyone who disagrees.

May our troops, and all the troops of the earth, come home soon, safe and forever.

_______________________________________________

You can listen to Kerry’s short speech (19:48) by clicking the blue button.

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Satan’s Cookies

First, I got my memory stick back.

Then, Congress passed health insurance reform legislation. So, not a bad week.

I don’t like the law they passed, even with the “fixes.” It’s not really healthcare reform. It’s insurance reform, and even at that it doesn’t go far enough for me. They started with the premise that the insurance companies’ role in healthcare was critical and sacrosanct, when they should have begun by questioning the very roots of the system. Why, they might have asked, should we perpetuate a system in which the insurance companies skim off at least 30% of the money spent on healthcare and use it for everything but healthcare?Cookies

But whatever — I’m not going to get into it. It’s been predicted, and I agree, that people are going to like this legislation and that there will be improvements to it in the years ahead. I really believe it would have been vastly better to implement a government-run single payer system. Yes, it would have been socialistic, but I’m a socialistic kind of guy. I don’t see why anyone should have 50 billion dollars while others are hungry, homeless and sick. A single payer system would have done a lot to right this wrong, but we have allowed the insurance companies to get too big and rich and powerful, and what we have seen in the past year has been dramatic proof that they will have their way no matter what the people want, no matter how intelligent and compassionate the President and no matter what makes sense. I will deal with them, since it looks as if I must.

In other news, I have survived another round of firings at work. Living inside the beast, as it were, I didn’t see the pattern until the past couple of months: Ever since HugeCorp acquired our little company they have been firing people almost continuously. The Depression that began in 2008 was an excuse to accelerate the job cuts, but in reality the job cutting began only shortly after the takeover, and continues today, despite frequent media pronouncements that the depression has struck bottom and things are getting better.

Better for whom, I wonder?

Back in 2008, everyone in my office — except me — was fired or moved to a nearby city. where they were assigned roughly triple the workload. After doing that for a year and a half, they now find that HugeCorp is closing that office, too, only this time no one is getting moved. They’re just being fired, and a new, mostly automated office is being opened. In another state. In another time zone.

The rumors about this began flying six weeks ago, and I of course assumed that I’d be getting the axe for sure this time. Training sessions that should have involved me took place, but I wasn’t invited. As the administrator of a certain network system, I was asked to create a new user — a new user with my exact job title. A fellow worker bee told me on phone that she’d been told not to “get too attached to me.”

What other conclusion could I have drawn?

I was actually starting to look forward to it. I put a CD in my work computer that would, on a simple command from me, erase everything. I started to put my personal office supplies in one place, the better to gather them up with minimum fuss when the day came. I was extra nice to my friends around the workplace, extra nasty to the assholes. What was the point of being political if the decision was already made?

Then last Monday I was called into the executive office.

There was no drama. The guy I spoke to — nominally my boss, although I have seniority on him in every conceivable category — had no idea about the rumors. I already “knew” everything he told me, except the part about my new duties. New duties because the corporate changes were going to relieve me of many of my old duties, but I still had the privilege of continuing to work there. Just when I was making plans to clean out the garage once and for all, write and record more songs, start running again, spend more time making sweet, sweet love, and updating this blog.

It was a blessing and a bummer.

I’ve been circling around my new duties this week, trying to figure out efficient ways to make it appear as if I am getting them done, but they are essentially accounting functions, which means they will be checked and audited by various detail-oriented bean-counters at several different locations within HugeCorp, so I may have to actually do some work. At this stage in my career, and considering my bad attitude about HugeCorp, this will be a challenge for me.

So I took a break and went to Trader Joe’s a half-mile down the street to get a bag of Sutter’s Formula cookies. These are soft, slightly chewy peanut butter cookies with tons of chocolate chips. Why put chocolate chips in a cookie unless you are going to put tons of them in, right? These cookies are truly of the devil. The combination of sugar, peanuts, chocolate, gluten and white flour will kill a lesser being, and you will soon pay for your pleasure, because you will arrive at the gates of hell fat and with a serious headache, which can only be cured by more Sutter’s Formula cookies, but they don’t have them in hell, bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha. However, the moments of ecstasy as you bite into each cookie will make you forget your crummy job for a while, and your “new duties” will seem unimportant, if only briefly, so, totally worth it.

I was at the counter at T.J.’s paying for my guilty pleasure (in cash, so there would be no record of the transaction), and I pulled out all my change and spread it on the counter, the better to extract the precise amount required, and I looked down at the pile, and this is what I saw: Some change, of course, and also a tiny little pocket knife, a couple of guitar picks, a nail clipper, and my new memory stick, which I bought to replace my lost one. It turned out I didn’t have the correct change, so I scraped the whole pile off into my hand and dropped it back in my pocket, and it was at this point that the lightbulb over my head blinked on.

When I had completed my unholy bargain, I picked up my cookies and strolled over to the “office” to talk to the “manager.” At T.J.’s they don’t have a reagular office where the big shots hide. They just have another counter, a little higher than the ones at the checkstands, but otherwise unassuming. And as for managers, everybody wears the same casual T-shirts there, so it’s hard to tell who is a big shot anyway. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll apply for a job there once I get fired for real.

I asked the friendly-looking guy at the big counter if they had a lost and found, and as I was describing my lost memory stick to him and explaining that I may have left it on one of the checkstand counters a week or so earlier he pulled out a small cardboard box containing several keyrings, a couple of pairs of sunglasses, a small notebook, a bunch of bank cards, and my memory stick!!

“That’s it!” I almost shouted, and I could see in his eyes a split second of indecision: How could he be sure the thing was really mine? I was fully prepared to tell him exactly what he would find on the stick if he inserted it into the nearest USB port, but, in the great tradition of Trader Joe’s, he quickly sized me up and decided I was trustworthy. Besides, he was probably prohibited by corporate policy from sticking anything into company USB ports, because of viruses and possible pornography, so he just handed it over.

Memory stick recovered, landmark legislation passed, sweet bag of pleasure in hand. A good week indeed.

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It’s Your Ribs

On balance I guess you’d say I’m a melancholy guy.

I was just thinking I’ve written too many downer political statements on this blog and it was about time I got back to frivolous stuff, the kind of stuff you write about when you are social networking, like American Idol and Lost, recipes, music and sex.

But then I discovered that I have lost my memory stick, and it always brings me down when I lose something, but in this case it’s worse because I can’t really remember what I had saved on my memory stick. It’s physically tiny, but it holds 16 gigabytes, which is a lot of damned data, and even though it wasn’t full, I think I must have lost a lot.

I just don’t know what.

Ribs

Maybe I should just forget it. It didn’t cost that much (and I’ve got a drawer full of them in my desk anyway), and if I don’t know what was on it, maybe the information wasn’t that important. Of course, there might be a list of user names and passwords on it, enabling somebody to get into my various online accounts and do bad things. (Watch out for that here on revision99.) So now I’m bummed again, and I don’t feel like happy talk.

2009 really sucked, didn’t it? Consider the depression (economic, I mean), teabaggers, the endless frustration and tedium of the “health care” “debate,” the military escalation in Afghanistan, the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks, the Supreme Court decision to turn corporate money loose on our political system — oh, wait, some of that was this year, wasn’t it? That just points up the fact that 2010 looks pretty much like 2009, which bums me even more.

So I have lost my memory stick. I wish I could lose my memory. too.

But on that earlier-promised lighter note, this cartoon cracks me up. It was sent to me by my dear friend Kate. I met Kate at a party when we were both in high school, and her sense of humor and mine clicked immediately. I am certain that if we had seen this cartoon that night we would have giggled together over it for the rest of the evening, and now all these years later she has clipped it out of a magazine and sent it to me. I’d like to give the cartoonist credit for this charming non sequitur, but obviously he (or she) should have signed it more boldly.

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You Will Atone

Remember this? Ned Beatty gives a dumbfounded Peter Finch

the facts of life about “the primal forces of nature,” from Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 script, “Network.” It could be today, except the televisions are bigger and some of the corporations have changed their names.

We are so fucked.

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State of the Union, 2010

I expected President Obama’s first State of the Union speech to be dramatic, eloquent and inspirational.

And it was all those things. He’s a fine public speaker, probably the best in the White House since Jack Kennedy. He struck most of the right chords, beginning in a somber tone, acknowledging that the nation is still reeling — and hurting — from the current economic depression. And he took us in turns through all the Americas: America the Proud, America the Compassionate, America the Injured, America the Resilient, America the Determined, America the Tough.

It was a splendid ride, but if I may cut to the chase, it was mainly Another Speech.

I don’t expect miracles, and I know he’s only been in office for a year, and he is following the administration of George W. Bush, who must surely have been the worst president ever, and who really did leave a stinking mess behind. But I have the distinct sensation that nothing good is happening in the federal government, and while I want to be tolerant of a man whom I consider smart and decent, I think I’ll hold my applause until I see some action.

I’m not even going to criticize his stupid idea of a “spending freeze,” because, based on past performance, I don’t really know if he’ll actually do it. (For the record, I hope he doesn’t. It’s wrong for job creation and it’s horribly wrong politically.)

I’m not all negative. This is what I want:

  • Withdrawal of all big combat troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, to be replaced by diplomats, spies, police and the occasional saboteur.
  • Reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act or whatever it might take to make the financial sector act like grownups.
  • A hundred billion dollars of infrastructure spending in the next three years (to create jobs, build for the future and fix the Grand Canyon-size potholes on the 405 Freeway).

That will do for now. If I see even one of these ideas pursued intelligently and put into effect, I’ll be a lot more excited about the State of the Union, 2011 Edition.

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Even Better than Fascism

UPDATE: A better-written (and darker) discussion of this topic is available here.
**********************************************************************

For those members of America’s dumb-ass electorate who don’t know why I keep yelling about the Supreme Court whenever there’s a presidential election…

…take a look at last Thursday’s horrible decision. The court, which is packed with corporate shills, has overturned a hundred years of case law and precedent by saying that there need be no limit on spending by corporations during political campaigns. That’s presidential campaigns, congressional campaigns, statewide campaigns and right on down to local elections for your own city council.

What this means for you and me is that in about five years, all elected officials will de facto be working for at least one corporation, having been supported/paid/bribed by them, and all governing from that point on will be strictly for the benefit of said corporations, even more than it is today.

Congress over the years has sensibly tried to restrict spending by corporations for political purposes, because corporations have no conscience and only one reason to exist: to make more money. Thus their interests do not often — if ever — coincide with those of the nation or its people. That’s you and me, and oh, by the way, corporations have unimaginably more resources than you and me, so don’t get the idea that if we all band together we can outspend corporations and defeat them in that way, because we can’t.

Consider: Worried that the Obama administration was going to hit drug companies with all sorts of regulations and demands for better deals on prescriptions for Americans, Pharma struck a bargain with the White House, agreeing to give up 80 billion dollars in revenue over ten years in exchange for no additional hassles. Yes folks, that’s 8 billion dollars a year that they are able to deal away, so let me ask you: If they have that much to spill, don’t you think they have a lot more that they’re keeping?

And now that they can spend it any way they want, why wouldn’t they just call Obama and tell him they have, say, a billion dollars to spend on his next campaign, and does he want them to spend it for him or against him? Obama’s been a big disappointment, but he’s not a fool. I’m sure his answer will be simple: “How can I serve you, Master?”

Or, consider: Just last June, a New York Times/CBS poll revealed that 72% of Americans favored a “government administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans.” But after several months of disinformation and fear-mongering by the insurance establishment, the peasants have changed their minds and hit the streets with torches, pitchforks and yes, semiautomatic weapons, crying “fascist,” and “socialist,” and “Marxist,” and demanding that the government stay out of health care.

The court case on Thursday was called “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,” and it was about a right wing group (a corporation) not being allowed to release a hatchet job movie about Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries. The FEC stopped them because everybody knows these video assassinations are potent and often change the course of elections. For example, look what the lies of the swiftboaters did to John Kerry, a decorated war hero. By the end of that election, many Americans thought Bush, a draft-dodger, was the hero, and Kerry was a lying, cowardly skunk.

So we know that you can determine the outcome of US elections with videos and advertising. Now all you need to do is get the money to make compelling, professional, good-looking videos.

Enter the Supreme Court, headed by ex-corporate attorney John Roberts. Here’s their position: Corporations are people, just like you and me (you and me with hundreds of billions of dollars in our pockets). But they have this handicap. You see, the poor corporations can’t talk. (That’s actually because they’re not people, but pay no attention to that.) So the only voice they have to make their political arguments is their money, of which they have more than God. Thus, according to five members of the Court, there must be no restrictions placed on corporations spending their money during political campaigns, because that would be the same as jailing you and me for standing up and saying “Change we can believe in” or “Country First.”

Anyone who thinks that wealthy corporations will not use this ruling to completely take over the government is simply not looking at what corporations do. (See above, the one goal of corporations.) And this ruling cannot be appealed. And no laws can be enacted to counteract this ruling. And for you slippery-slopers, here’s an icy one for you: Soon, this ruling will be used to show that corporations, being regular folks like you and me, can contribute cash directly to candidates. This will be much more convenient for them, as they will not have to have meetings with campaign managers to find out what to say in their political TV ads and their “documentaries” about opposing candidates. They’ll just be able to pay money openly to whomever agrees to play ball with them after winning the election.

This used to be called bribery. Now it’s Free Speech.

This is going to be even better than fascism. In fascism, the government and the corporations are bound together, and run things sort of as a team, with the government making the policy decisions. In the new era of the Roberts Court, there will be no government, only corporations. They are not interested in health care for all. They don’t care if the roads are fixed, only that the toll booths are operating. Education? Private schools only, charging the most the market will bear. I could go on, but you know what I’m saying. Picture a nation run by Halliburton.

Picture a nation run by Halliburton.

_________________________________

PS: A quick shout out to the voters of Massachusetts: You sure sent a message to that socialist Obama! Maybe you should work to throw him out of office in 2012, just in time for a Republican president to appoint a couple more big business conservatives to the Supreme Court. That’ll teach him.

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I Hate It When That Happens

You know how when you’re going to work, driving on the freeway?

You’re running a little late, so most of the worker bees are already off the road, at their jobs, so traffic is a little congested, but not too bad and you’re rolling along at maybe 45 MPH, and you’re trying to do the right thing, driving safely and leaving four or five car lengths between you and the car in front of you and you’ve got Delbert McClinton playing on the CD player and he”s givin’ it up for your love and you’re cruisin’ and groovin’ and suddenly from the next lane over and without any warning or signal somebody pulls into that safe zone and cuts you off in a great big SUV. Now you have to slow down but if you do, maybe somebody else will pull the same stunt and you’ll be the chump again, so maybe you’ll just tailgate him for a while, that’ll show him, but then you realize that just as his huge pigmobile has completely blocked your view down the road so you no longer have any idea what’s up ahead, whatever selfish roadhog is driving that big Personal Global Warming Device probably can’t see you, either and so what’s the point, you might as well just choke on it and back off, the Big Guys rule everything anyway. So you back off and keep driving and the big SUV gets smaller and smaller in front of you until you can’t see it or even remember it anymore and then through some miracle you find yourself in another lane that’s moving along close to the speed limit and you and Delbert are grinnin’ and rockin’ down the highway and you get cut off again by the same SUV.

Doesn’t that chap your hide?

And then you get to work and you have to make an important phone call to another office and it’s really kind of urgent that you talk to this certain person at the other office and they have a switchboard operator and when you ask for your intended party by name she says “One moment” and then you get the Muzak in your ear. While you wait you wonder how long a “moment” will be, but it doesn’t matter because you’re going to be getting on with your important call pretty soon. You smile as you think of that operator at that other company you call a lot, who, no matter who you ask for or what you say to her, always responds by saying “My pleasure.” Ha! Is she getting pleasure from being a telephone operator? You think of her squirming a little in her chair and this fantasy is just starting to get interesting when the voicemail comes on in your ear. Oh no! You have to talk to this person, because you need an answer on a very important matter and you need it by noon or preferably right now. You don’t mind leaving a message, but what if he doesn’t check his voicemail, or what if he gets your urgent message but doesn’t get how urgent it is? While you’re pondering this you hear the beep so you go ahead and leave your important message and hang up but then back in your own office you’re doing stuff and time is passing and you’re not getting any calls and it’s like an hour later and you’ve only got until noon to settle this matter so you call again and before you can stop her and ask if your party is even at work today she says “One moment” and the Muzak starts again. This is not what you wanted but maybe the guy will actually answer this time so you stay on the line and you hear a ring, a hopeful sign, and your spirits rise but no, it’s voicemail again. You don’t want to antagonize your intended party by leaving another message so soon after the first one so you quickly press “0” on your phone to get back to the operator but the system switches you not to the operator but to some woman in the mail room who has no idea why you’re calling her if you want to talk to him and she can’t or won’t transfer you to the operator so you hang up and call back and this time you don’t start by mentioning your intended party’s name but you say “I’ve already left a message today but I was wondering if Mister So-and-So is in the office today” and the operator, who is the receptionist, says she doesn’t know, and you want to say “Why don’t you go back into the office and look?” but you don’t say that because she has that same power over you that servers in restaurants have — you never know who’s spitting in your chicken piccata or letting you sit on terminal hold while your professional life trickles down the toilet, and so you meekly ask her to put you back into your intended party’s voicemail again and you realize you may never get to have your very important conversation, or at least not in time for it to do you any good.

That really planes my shins.

And you know how you have a blog and you write stuff for like five years, almost as long as a car loan, and for a long time you have a bunch of imaginary friends and you read their blogs and they read your blog and you comment on their posts and they comment back to you and you have some fun and some lively “discussions” and once in a while you actually meet one of your blog friends in person and it’s not always that great but sometimes it is, but you love all your fake friends so much and then you start making an occasional inappropriate remark on your blog and little by little your fake friends drop off and finally one day you write a post from your heart and it’s like totally politically incorrect and for the first time in five years no one comments and you realize you have no more fake friends at all?

I hate it when that happens.

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UPDATE: Thanks to Bains, who rescued the previous post while I was writing this one. I love you, man.

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