Show of Hands

Why is it that the people around us, those that we are forced to interact with day in and day out, are the very ones who are virtually begging for the most cosmic of bitch slaps? I don't know if it's the impending birth of my daughter or if it's something malevolent, but I'll be damned if I'm not finding myself revisiting a classic level of misanthropy to which I had erroneously assumed was well under wraps. I mean, oh sure, my reputation preceeds me, but fuck all that horseshit. You really can't expect the people you deal with daily to actually know anything valuable about you, but you can sure as hell expect them to make snap judgments and dramatic overreaching leaps of reason to your detriment.

And then there are those who simply lurk on the very bottom rung, the one which is permanently stuck in the mire that lies at your feet. For the bottom feeders, the rules have been either completely rewritten, or even worse, totally suspended in a sort of immoral denouement. For these, nothing isn't fair game, no ball out of play, and you are the playing field, totally at the mercy of the situation. It's apalling.

I used to live down in the flaming pits of League City, an asshole of a town, and in this berg I would set out to commute with my deranged mother on her daily quest to earn a pittance. My inclusion in this jaunt was short lived, which is attributable to not only my self-destructiveness, but to a rapidly growing recognition of the way things really were. One morning, as we drove in, we spoke of corruption and dishonesty, and how those that were comfortable with their bullshit were effortlessly ably to trump any fool dumb enough to have actual morality to tie them down. I was shocked to realize that there was a disturbingly large number of people out there that operated with no qualms about fucking those around them. Because really, without morality, you can do whatever the fuck you want, and the rest of us are stuck milling about like blind cave fish, squirming to get our little crumb.

Melodramatic? Of course it is, but it also is true. Adn that shit simply killed me when I was staring down the scope of it.

So where does that leave me now? I mean, I am damn sure more aware of this concept then ever before. You work hard, you keep to yourself, your own problems, and you scratch by. In my case, I worry. I am an eternal worrier. I never thought of myself in that way until I developed a full blown case of panic disorder (which for the record, is shitty and hellish).

But so what, right? You've got to rise above and all that shit, right? Well, what if you can't? What if you are bogged down in it?

Well that's your problem. I'm just whining about it.