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The End of the World

4 May

I keep thinking about nuclear disaster.  Or some other apocalyptic thing.  Tsunami, mega-earthquake, plague– something.  As long as you made it through, as long as you were not burned by radiation or given giant infectious pustules– as long as you made it through, and weren’t somehow trapped caring for the millions of others who did have radiation burns and giant pustules– the end of the world world be fucking great.

And this is why there are so many movies about it, books about it– it’s not out of fear.  It’s out of wish fulfillment.  Just like Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins and etc . etc. etc.–aren’t orphans in their stories because of fear of losing your parents, but because kids wish their parents were dead.  That the bumbling, irritating schlumps constantly pestering you with questions that are like cigarette burns on the back of your neck– they wish these people had never existed for them, and that their real mommy were a princess who owned a huge magical castle that you could live in, and would have plenty of space to keep the two of you apart.

But anyway, if the world ended, it would be great.  Or at least, if civilization ended.  Loot the grocery store for a bunch of food and go up to the mountains and camp.  Shoot a deer once in a while.  Nice quiet nights by the fire.  Find a young woman of breeding age who needs you for protection and couldn’t leave you or she would die.  Take over some abandoned cabin and raise a modest amount of livestock and just rawdog her for the rest of your life. Continue reading →

The Value of Work

21 Apr

When I was fourteen my mom made me get a job.  She was really hell bent on this, as soon as you can start working legally, you start working.  I don’t mean to make her sound mean—this was perfectly normal.  I imagine someone had made her start working the literal second it was legal as well.  On the east coast, at least 20 years ago, there wasn’t an underclass of immigrants doing all the gigs that teenagers could do.  You’re fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, you get a job. I wish it were like that out here; you’d see more fourteen year old girls working retail.

Anyway, she made me get a job.  And again, not to be mean, and not to make me give her the money or pay rent to live in my own childhood home or any shit like that– I got to keep the money.  But just to teach me some lesson about the value of work. Or some other, more jaded lesson.  Something about how all work sucks and is useless and horrible and the value that you actually get out of your labor isn’t shit compared to what some rich property owning guy makes, some guy who ninety nine times out of one hundred inherited some position in society where it would be easy to have these things.  To own a McDonald’s franchise or whatever. Continue reading →

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To My Future Son

10 Apr

Never have a job you have to explain. Just like you should never have a Halloween costume you have to explain. Your whole life just becomes the same fucking conversation over and over.

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Protected: Work emails

2 Apr

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Diary: Steve Jobs Sucks Cocks in Hell

19 Mar

Ugh, thinking about work.  Thinking about work on a Sunday.  Not only that, but I better get off this journal and go do some actual fucking work.  On a Sunday.  Because I am a white collar professional in the United States of America in 2012.  Typically, in the past, a job with these sorts of demands would have a least paid you handsomely.  But now, everything is in decline. Every industry.  So we all gotta work harder, we gotta work longer, we gotta do more with less.  We gotta hustle. So many people want your job that you are constantly auditioning for your job. And yes, I know it’s better than getting your hands chopped off in some Sierra Leonian diamond mine at age ten.  My point is, only marginally. Continue reading →

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Hollywood

8 Mar

I might lose my job. As a weenie Hollywood “development executive.” Which, fine, I fucking hate my job. Work work work all goddamn day and then come home and read scripts, garbage scripts that will never amount to anything, but I need to read them to preserve relationships. Relationships that will never amount to anything. My job completely eats my life, leaves me a wrecked, miserable shell of a man each day, destroys any chance of my spending time with women and friends, and it doesn’t even fucking pay anything, so fuck my job.

The problem is, after 7 years of doing this– answering phones, learning names, mastering the bizarre mandarin etiquette and arcane structure of Hollywood– I am now only equipped to do this one thing that I hate. I have no choice but to pursue another, similar job. Which, there are two reasons you would want this: to make movies, and to impress girls. Making movies is impossible, and if you have one of these gigs you’re not even around girls enough to impress them. That’s why guys like (REDACTED) have to stock their reception pool with hot young USC pieces of ass– it’s the only exposure they will have to a woman. Most of their life is spent hobnobbing in rooms full of jowelly old William Morris agents. Continue reading →

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To My Future Son: Don’t Have a Career

10 Feb

They tell you, and I don’t know who “they” is because frankly nobody ever told me this but I somehow got the impression anyway—they tell you to get a job and have a career and make money and women will be attracted to you.  “Men like looks,” they say.  “Women like success.” It’s a common countercomplaint when feminists accuse men of objectifying women; the guy will say back “well, you women better stop objectifying my wallet, amirite?” The “take my wife, please!” of antifeminist arguments.

So you go out and get a job.  You try to get into a good college and you study and you intern and you get a toe in the water of some status-y “career” field and you get up early and you stay late and you read work-related material after work and you network with work-related work jerkoffs and you suffer under some cruel old work prick who believes himself better than other human beings because of his work in some lofty status-y career field and you work and you work and you work and you work.  And part of what drives this is the dread instilled in you when you read that in 2020 to put a kid through college will cost sixteen billion dollars and Social Security will have dried up and you better be sitting on a cash hoard of ten million billion trillion dollars conservatively invested because health care costs will have reached the level where only a class of feudal overlords can afford a tongue depressor. And there will be no “safety net;” there is literally nobody who believes programs like Social Security and Medicare will still exist in our financially post-apocalyptic future.  We all know we are headed toward a Randian thunderdome where our old age will be spent guarding a 55 gallon drum of drinking water with a shotgun and removing our own tumors with steak knives.  If you don’t want this to happen, you better sink a bunch of borrowed money into school, and then work. And you better not spend whatever pittance is left of the 22 grand your post-college job earns you on fun; you better save and invest, according to the 401k presentation the commissioned salesperson who gets a small piece of what they withhold from your meager check tells you, because if you don’t, at age 23, begin taking advantage of logarithmic growth to accrue a massive privately-invested nest egg, you will be cannibalized by gangs of cyborg Hottentots, and your bones picked clean. And your children.  And your children’s children. Continue reading →

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