I should be doing other things.
Right now my mind is drifting through all kinds of things. There’s sort of a theme, it’s all kind of connected. But there’s a randomness to my brain right now. Perhaps getting this stuff out of my head will help clear the static.
I could do with a massage, but I don’t want to spend the money and gamble on yet another massage person. I could change my mind but for now nahhh.
I was writing a post about the justice system, the news, Biden’s corruption, and lamenting that I’ve gotten bored by all of it.
Then I realized it’s not boredom. It’s overload, disappointment, anger, fatigue, and I just want it all to stop.
I haven’t felt like this since Obama’s second term. I felt so disenfranchised & the government was not representing vast swaths of the American People.
I felt lied to, and generally hopeless. I was genuinely looking for another country to move to. I was investigating asking for asylum. It wasn’t that I hated my country, It was that my country felt more and more like it hated me.
Jerry was happy, and pointed out that part of what I was feeling may have been the employment situation. He asked me to be patient and keep working toward getting a job. I told him that me getting a job in California was becoming more impossible every day and asked that he consider moving to another state.
He agreed, then I got the job in San Diego.
That job did me more emotional harm than I realized.
A lot of the bosses were vindictive and needlessly cruel. The job provided some income but was honestly not a place I should have stayed. Looking back, that place may have set me up to fail with them from the beginning. It certainly instilled in me a major mistrust about any future employer.
These days, with the pronoun police, DEI, and all the other non productive work rules. I might not even be employable. What the hell happened to just going to work, doing your job, and going home? When did that philosophy get chucked in the bin?
I was looking for a job during my time in San Diego but didn’t get any traction. Then they laid us all off, & guess what? Employment wise I got fucked again trying to do the right thing.
Working in San Diego, I did get an opportunity to watch a cross section of people react to Trump being elected. Initially I thought maybe things would get better. I was mistaken. The company enacted more draconian rules and those rules while directed at “everyone” were only enforced against white males.
The guy that had to lawyer up so that he could take allowed company paternity leave, was epic. The company tried to deny him leave that had been pre-approved 5 months before. As if he could stop his child from arriving. Their excuse was they were short handed because 3 women had gone out on stress leave.
The guy’s attorney presented that the company staffing issues were not the fault of the father to be & that effectively the company had entered into a separate employment contract with him 5 months before. The company attempting to re negotiate the contract 1 month before it was to be executed simply because it was no longer convenient for the company imposed a hardship on the guy that was unfair. The court agreed.
The guy took his 6 week paternity leave. While he was out, the company revamped corporate policy to remove paternity leave as a benefit for our department. I guess they wanted the virtue signaling credits, but on the down low no man, especially no white man was supposed to use the perk.
The company also couldn’t keep a director of our department for more than six months. One director came in for 6 maybe 8 weeks and stopped his cross country move. He & his husband chose instead to stay in Texas. No-one ever got a straight story about that one. The last week or two with that Director, it was obvious that he was angry. In one angry conversation that echoed through the office he said his hands had been tied from the beginning and that wasn’t what he’d signed on for.
I don’t know if any of this was a response to Trump, I do know that 80% of the staff was constantly bitching about stuff the media said Trump said, but actually hadn’t. The higher ups int he company seemed to be really pissed off about anything & everything all the time.
Facts didn’t matter, truth didn’t matter, and dismantling one lie or misrepresentation simply led to people seizing on the next media lie or misrepresentation.
I will never forget the customer phone call I got after Trump was elected. It was a person from Canada who said, “My condolences regarding your election.”
It might have been at that moment that I first thought the world was going mad. On the plus side, the Canadians got Trudeau. (Vengeance is a dish best served cold.)
I try to look at the brighter side of the situation. When those assholes laid me off, it meant that I had time to visit my mother in Florida, see my Brothers, see my step mother, and spend the little remaining time Jerry had, with him. Jerry’s death came out of the blue. There’d been signs for a while, but like everyone I thought we’d have more time together. I’m glad that I was with him, not working at some other shithole company god knows where.
Flash forward to the goings on of today and it’s all too much. I’m overloaded with crap from all sides and that means I’ve been reading, watching, or listening to the news or social media too much.
I feel the same despair that I felt during Obama’s reign. Once again I feel that there is no place for me, and this time, that feeling is worse than before. Obama’s motto was “Hope & Change” at the beginning, at the end of his term I secretly thought “Hopeless and changed”.
Then, as now, I wanted to just disappear, to walk away from all the noise and confusion, the politics, and stupidity. At that time my opinion of humanity in general was one of disdain and that a meteor strike couldn’t happen soon enough. The intervening years have left me more convinced that an extinction level event would be a welcome occurrence.
This morning a few minutes before 6AM the power went off. Had it just gone off, I probably would have slept through the event and woke up to a dark house, or maybe woke up when the clock on the stove chirped.
It didn’t work out that way. The power thunked 6 times, (chirping the stove clock each time,) and that woke me up. Then I thought of the electronics, the NAS, the PlayStation, the smart lights, and all the other devices. None of these devices like having the power stutter off & on like this.
That realization woke me up. I walked around the house flipping power strips off so that Edison’s follies didn’t royally screw me. The NAS was already going to require my running a maintenance routine on it, since the power dropped while it was powered up. Nonetheless I protected it from further power surges and god knows what was coming down the line.
I was annoyed but not angry. Damage was already done so no reason to get spun up, just gotta deal with it. Then I went back to bed. Jessie was stretching across the bed but allowed me a small corner of space.
It was at this point that I noticed the predawn silence. The sun was cresting the hills but we were still in shadow. Without all the machines running, the silence was really nice. Jerry’s pocket watch was ticking on my night stand, but there wasn’t a droning of machinery.
It was nice & I fell asleep after briefly wondering if the power had gone out due to an EMP bomb from Russia or Iran. Given the way the power was thunking, it could have been 5 or 6 EMPs and the country was toast.
Ah well, nothing I could do about it, so a nice nap claimed me. I’d do what needed to be done when I woke. Strangely, that nap was more restful than my night’s sleep.
I woke when the power came back on. The stove clock chirped about an hour later.
Since then I’ve reset clocks and devices and thought to myself, perhaps I need to simplify my life in significant ways.
What do I really need? Perhaps a better question is what do I want & actually need? How much crap do I have that is pointless? That thinking extends to non-physical things as well. Things like politics and trials and the news in general. Do I really need this blog? What do I care about and what future do I want to paint for myself?
There are tons of mementos of day life here, my life with Jerry, and my whole life. Those I’ll keep but in reality if I’m just going to pack them away in a box and never see them, then maybe I don’t need to keep them.
Alternatively, if I thin everything out to the point that what I keep is actually stuff I’ll use or that I want to dust occasionally on a book shelf, that’s probably good. I need to be lighter in all kinds of ways. I was super light, after the fire I’d like to get back to that place. Although in a less dramatic fashion.
I saw this headline;
Machines are better at doing the job and less expensive to purchase, operate and maintain.
Okay, at least this time Edison was not only clear about the time and date they’d be doing work.
I think Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story about a smart house that I also read as a teen. I seem to recall it was called The Veldt I don’t know if that is correct, but the gist of the story has stuck with me for decades. Essentially it’s an anti-war piece. However, a smart house is the only character in the story. The anti war sentiment is a sting revealed in the tail of the story.