Dark Rooms are My Favorite

1. Gun laws and gun deaths are unconnected.

2. Private enterprise is good; public enterprise is bad.

3. God created America and gave it a special purpose.

4. Our health-care system is the best there is.

5. The Founding Fathers were saintly figures who established liberty and democracy for everyone.

6. America is the greatest country in the world.

7. Tax rates are too high.

8. America is a peace-loving nation: the reason it gets involved in so many wars is that foreigners keep attacking us.

9. Cheap energy, gasoline especially, is our birthright.

10. Everybody else wishes they were American.

After reading an article in the New Yorker today and seeing this list I sort of sat their dumbfounded by what Americans will believe. Every single day at work I see the same simple minded people come into my work load up their shopping carts full of junk food and take it home. Yet they are all obese and should know better than to do this to their bodies, right? Are Americans truly as dumb and gullible as the greedy corporations make us out to be and the answer is simple – yes. They are counting on us to buy all of their products because without us they cannot exist and there is no place in capitalistic society if you are a loser.

Now let’s take number five up there: 5. The Founding Fathers were saintly figures who established liberty and democracy for everyone.

No, the founding fathers owned slaves and employed poor whites folks for years before they would let them be free poor whites living in the worst conditions. Today when I looked around on the ‘free’ shuttle to downtown I saw the exact same people that rich people turn their noses at. The poor minorities and poor white people with too many kids all living off tax payer money to support their ever growing families. I don’t know how to feel for them anymore but I know if our founding fathers were here right now the welfare system being supported by wealthier whites would be abolished. I think that is why Mitt Romney is so out of touch with the ‘base’ because his administration wants to make things easier for his wealthy friends and even tougher on people without means. How can taxes be too high on the wealthy if they don’t pay them by hiding their money in other countries?

Where did liberty and democracy go or was it ever really there to help the common man trying to raise a family on an average income of $44,000? The way I see it the economy was always on the side of Wall Street where the rich go out of their way to make sure the money never trickles down and that poor keep buying lottery tickets in hopes of becoming rich too. I think that is what is wrong with America is that everyone wants to be rich and no one wants to make living at a modest life.  We don’t live in the best country in the world but its not because we don’t have the means for it. We are too busy buying into the fantasy that we need to better ourselves through hard work and dedication to an employer that sees as mere slave caste to be exploited. Every time I hear my co-workers talk about working harder at their minimum wage jobs it makes me laugh. In fact, yesterday our new store manager told everyone that they should be smiling like I am all the time. My regular manager told her, “that is not a smile on his face, that cynical smirk that he been wearing since he started working here. He is one of the most anti-retail people that works here because he is terribly under employed.” I don’t feel like there is any liberty for a lot of people who are currently trapped or will soon be trapped by an economy that is shrinking day by day deeper into shit hole. The day of democracy stepping in to save the middle-class is long gone and all we have to look forward to is a future of uncertainty. Most of Americans are working nervously at jobs they are not sure if they will have tomorrow. The corporations take advantage of the stress by attaching more demands of the work force with catchy slogans like “if you cannot do the job faster I will hire someone else who will.”

I am not sure how America went from a place that people wanted to move to, to a place where Canadians now have more individual wealth than we do. You are a country that is now below Canada in living standards and what does our government do about this, is there any national emergency as we fall further and further behind, is anyone calling out the banks that used LIBRO to strip us of even more money. We watch the New York stock exchange go steadily higher because if you are rich in America you are doing great. If you live in poverty the welfare system is doing its part to ensure new generations of Americans are taken care from the crib to the grave. You don’t want to be caught out in the middle where people actually have to take care of themselves because that is a death sentence if you need social medical insurance. I had a lady complain about me yesterday at the store because I was rude to her. She went and told a manager that I said the battle for the environment was over, after she touted that she used canvas bags instead of plastic ones to save the planet. “Listen lady, we as a people have destroyed the environment with all our plastic bags and bottles. The environment cannot take what we have done to it and you saving the planet one plastic bag at time is not going to do anything.” I could tell she was pissed but when her canvas bags ran out she asked for the rest in plastic. That is your typical American right there, “I will try to do a little better but in the long run its not my fault the oceans are polluted.”

………

10:30am

My cell phone had rang twice before I decided to get up this morning. I was tired from staying up all night and I did not want to answer it anyway. I thought for sure it was the damn store asking me to come in on my day off because they did not schedule enough people. I looked at the screen and it was university. I have an administrative hold on my student account and I have to get it off. They would not talk to me until I got my student loans on account that I still owe for one lousy class I took and ran out of money. I feel the need for social college is at its greatest right now and no one is talking about it in the media with any amount effort. What is not good for Wall Street stays out of the mass media because saddling students with a mortgage is an acceptable practice.

11am

I finally got off the phone with the registration office who contacted the student loan department to make sure I was going to be awarded this fall. I love that word ‘awarded’ because they are not awarding me with anything but more stupid student loan debt. I went into the garage to wash my comforter and I started working out in the mindless cave man way. Between sets I swept the patio in the backyard and cleaned up the leaves that are collecting more often because of the monsoon blowing sand in our faces every afternoon.

Workout of the Day

Bent over barbell rows superset two handed triceps extensions

t-bar rows superset single arm triceps extensions

lat pull downs superset kick backs

I was a sweaty mess by the time I finished working out but when you finish there is that satisfied feeling you get. You know like after you finish doing your homework the night before its due.

12:45pm

After I made lunch and ate my cottage cheese and plain chicken, I sat on the toilet for the longest time just thinking about stuff. I looked in the bowl and noticed that there was not enough poop in there and that meant it would come out a little later. I finished my shower and started getting dressed to go to school and I felt it rattling in my bowels. The worst thing is to get caught with the urge to crap whilst sitting on a bus. I start sweating and think about that one girl I saw get out of her seat covered in yellow oozing out of her shorts. She sat right next to me and crapped her pants on the way home. What makes it even more weird is that she comes to the grocery store all the time in the same clothes. I hope she washed them several times before she put them on again. If that happened to me I would burn them.

1:30pm

I made it into down town and I wanted to check those lottery tickets I found in the parking lot a couple of weeks ago to see if they won anything. I had these crazy dreams that they might pay for at least my books this semester because it is major expense. After she swiped all 5 of them I did not even make enough to buy my green tea and I waited around for store girl to come back from the bank. She is worked in that place for longer than I have been going to college. The first thing she did when she saw me was hit me over the head with a newspaper. The next thing she did was ask me if she is getting fatter. “I can see it right here on the sides of your hips.” Then I reached down and pulled on her fat and then I looked at her face. “You are the only man that I can count on to be honest to me when I start letting myself go. Everyone else lies to me about it but I can feel that I am getting heavier. You look like you are on diet,” she said with a smile. I am never on a diet, I just eat clean, and not big portions. I think the biggest weight loss ‘thing’ I am doing right now is pushing the shopping carts for hours at time. When the weather is nice I will stay in the parking lot for hours at time so I don’t have to bag groceries. I really don’t like bagging but what am I suppose to do, get a better job? Its only 4 days away now, my three year anniversary of being laid-off from my last corporate job as a computer analyst and although I was not happy there it still paid the bills quite nicely.

The rest of my day was spent at the library where I found a Hemingway study guide laying at the table down from me. There was a strange guy there earlier and I went to see what all those books were. He had good taste in literature. I put down my Tolstoy and I looked through the time line of Hemingway’s life one year at time. I wish Hemingway had stayed married to Hadley his first wife because she was the best one. The other three wives Pauline, Martha, and Mary were not worthy of him. The man could not keep it in his pants though, oh well, I am sure they gave him VD, which he cured with mercury.