"Great art is horse shit; buy tacos"

Yes, Charles Bukowski is my spirit animal

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

• May Sarton

Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn't so.

• Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

One of the questions I’ve most hated, probably because I’ve heard them most at job interviews, is “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

Of course, in my head, my immediate response is, “What, do I look like a fucking clairvoyant? If I could predict the future, do you think I’d be sitting here talking to a limp-dicked wonderboy with a Napoleon complex like yourself? No, I’d be in Las Vegas making a fucking fortune off my ability to predict the future, wouldn’t I? Because I wouldn’t need you or your crappy company or your barely-above-living-wage job.”

But, being the obedient, well-trained drone that I am, or at least was, I’d come up with a suitably benign answer that made it sound like I saw my future as being at Military Grade Dildos, Inc., or whatever corporate lifesuck I was hoping to get hired to devote my life force to.

Now that I’m older and significantly more cynical (hard to imagine, I know), I’ve mostly retired my internal editor. While I still manage to keep my powder dry in situations that require it, I can be as caustic as I wanna be when I know I can get away with it. Like here, f’rinstance.

This is especially true since my give-a-fuck is irreparably broken and, since it’s long since out of warranty, I have no incentive to get it repaired. Why? ‘Cuz I don’t give a fuck, that’s why.

Sure, I can play the game when I need to…but I rarely need to anymore. I have a primarily part-time “semi-retirement” job, mostly to make some extra money and keep myself out of trouble. The people I work with are every bit as cynical as I am, and we get along famously, so most of the time, I’m happy as a fucking clam.

The beautiful thing about my job is that there’s a lot of downtime, and I’m encouraged to use the time to do something productive…not productive for the company, but for myself. They have nothing for me to do besides my few job duties, so I use the time to indulge my creative side. I get a lot of writing done.

My boss and coworkers know what I’m up to, and no one cares. There are a few minimal responsibilities I have to attend to, and as long as I take care of those, I’m good to go. I work in one of three theater locations in downtown Portland, and because of the nature of the work, my schedule is all over the place. It can be early mornings or late nights, any day of the week or weekend. That’s the only drawback…if you can call it that.

Because of my schedule, I’ve lost all concept of what day it is. When I wake up each morning, I have to check my phone to confirm the day of the week. I’m writing this on a Monday, for example, and for some reason, I’ve spent all day thinking it’s Tuesday. Weekdays and weekends have lost all meaning; they’re just days.

Since I can spend a lot of time writing, it’s all good; no complaints. It’s the perfect job. I get paid (not a lot, but what the heck?) for a job where probably 80% of my time is spent writing. Yeah, it could be a helluva lot worse, knowhutimean? This gig doesn’t suck, at least from that standpoint.

I often feel as if I’m sitting on the sideline as the world rushes headlong into an apocalypse I can’t begin to understand, much less describe. I wake up and think, “OK, who’s at war today?” “What tragedy happened overnight?” “Did the Packers lose…pleasepleaseplease??”

I sometimes wonder about the things that Americans obsess over. I mean, gasoline is roughly $4/gal., give or take, depending on which part of the country you live in. But if you go to other countries, it can be significantly more expensive. When I lived in Serbia and Kosovo…and this was almost 30 years ago, gas was roughly $10/gal. because of the UN embargo against Serbia at the time. If people were driving high-end, gas-guzzling Mercedes-Benzes or something similar, it was because they were Serbian (or Alabanian) mobsters involved in the drug trade.

The people I worked with in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, could only afford to gas up their cars in dire emergencies.

Inflation is, what, 7%, 8%? In Argentina, it’s 143%…and the minister responsible for the state of the economy just lost the election to become the country’s next President to a Spanish-speaking version of Donald Trump. Prices change in stores daily, and people survive by buying dollars, the only stable currency in the country. The Argentinian currency has something like a dozen different exchange rates, and it’s nothing if not pure economic chaos.

Things could be SO much worse, yet Americans, among the most pampered and spoiled people on Earth, are miserable because the price of bread, eggs, and milk went up a few cents. They blame President Biden for not managing the economy and threaten to vote for Donald Trump- ”at least he managed the economy.”

How quickly y’all have forgotten what an incompetent President Mango Mussolini was. Not only did he thoroughly mismanage the economy, but the Brookings Institution estimates he’s responsible for the COVID-19 deaths of more than three-quarters-of-a-MILLION Americans.

If the pandemic had been wartime and we were talking about enemy casualties, Donald Trump would probably be in the Hague to be tried on war crimes charges. Fortunately for him, we merely get to think of him as criminally incompetent but unlikely to be held culpable for his irresponsible behavior.

And yet millions of Americans still think of him as the bestest, most excellentest, godliest man ever to occupy the White House, someone genuinely ordained by God.

Yeah, who knew that “God” had such an authentically sick and twisted sense of humor?

Speaking of a sick and twisted sense of humor, twelve months from now, we’ll get Biden v. Trump II. The result could mean that democracy in America survives or that we never have to worry about having another Presidential election again.

While not knowing what the next 12 months have in store for America will be difficult, we should assume that whatever transpires, it won’t be dull. With Donald Trump facing 91 counts from four separate indictments (not counting the civil suits against him), it’s possible our next President could take the Oath of Office from a federal or state lockup.

Don’tcha just LOVE America? Don’tcha wish everyone in the world could have this much fun wondering if their democracy is about to descend into autocracy and begin to resemble something straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale?

I don’t know about you, but I could live without this kind of “fun.” Then again, by the end of the first Tuesday of next November, we should know whether the 2024 election will be the last one we’ll participate in.

Stay tuned….

(All of my posts are now public. Any reader financial support will be considered pledges- support that’s greatly appreciated but not required to get to all of my work. I’ll trust my readers to determine if my work is worthy of their financial support and at what level. To those who do offer their support, thank you. It means more than you know.)

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