015: Insomnia = Insanity

I envy you people... It must be nice to be tired, lay down in bed, and then fall to sleep... I don't know how to do that...

Instead I come downstairs and plug into this machine, drop a set of headphones onto my ears, and type until my hands go numb... (That takes less time every week... Soon I won't have to feel my fingers at all...)

Today (tonight, whatever) I'm less thrilled about life than some days (nights.) I've been reading Arundhati Roy's An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire and I'm feeling ashamed of being an American citizen, although it doesn't appear that anywhere else in the world is worth a shit either...

(I HIGHLY recommend reading some of Roy's essay's if you get a chance. A nice chunk of her writing is available here. She is a very courageous person that has even been jailed in India for contempt of court. That's pretty cool in my book...)

So here I am already feeling bummed when I notice the discombobulated pile of pages from my wife's Sunday paper on top of which is sitting the most recent issue of Parade, an insert magazine which I think you can find in most Sunday papers. The title of this issue: "Who Is the World's Worst Dictator?: A New Ranking of the Contemptible." What surprised me most about this article? There was no mention of George W. Bush...

This is insane... The article lists a number of reasons why this group of people are considered terrible dictators. The reasons include: having and using a death penalty as a means of punishment (Wasn't that George W.'s favorite hobby back in Texas?); controlling the media (we all know that OUR media is unbiased); imprisoning people who speak out against the government (can we all say PATRIOT ACT); and, in the case of the number one "bad guy" in this article, Omar al-Bashir, "uproot[ing] 2 million people and kill[ing] 70,000." Is it even possible to count the number of people that George W.'s sanctions or military actions have killed or displaced??? Not without a big goddam computer. If you ask me, old Omar is a fucking AMATEUR compared to George, who comes from a long line of psychotic American dictators that somehow, by some means that I don't quite understand, manage to charm the majority of the population into thinking they are promoting DEMOCRACY by their terrorist activities... In my humble opinion, NONE of the people in this article can come even CLOSE to touching OUR boss when it comes to genocide, thinking of dollars over bodies, and the casual stripping away of the civil rights of individuals in the name of freedom and democracy...

It's a pile of shit, really... and I couldn't get to sleep tonight without sitting down and typing this out... I just HAD to get it off my chest before I can go upstairs and watch Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid in peace. (Why don't I just go to sleep you ask??? Because I haven't had enough to drink, and I already brushed my teeth...)

By the way, my wife and I have officially been together for TWELVE years tomorrow... That seems like a long time, doesn't it??? But, honestly, I can't remember very much of it. I was "AT WORK," which means I turned my brain OFF so that I wouldn't yell at so many of the INCREDIBLY STUPID and ANNOYING people who used to come into the music store and ask me to find things for them that I really didn't think I should have a hand in selling... It was only the one thirty minute break that I got during my ten hours days that allowed me to keep my sanity. I would hide in the break room and read Albert Camus, Bertrand Russell, or Plato, and think to myself, "Why can't I just kill everyone??? I mean, really... They ALL deserve to die..." Yeah, those were the good old days, weren't they...

That's enough drivel for tonight... Tomorrow's entry: how to plead the 5th amendment when the F.B.I. comes to the door and asks you about your blog posts...