The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
…the kind where you get into a shouting match with a co-worker in front of customers that’s mostly your fault but is just enough his that you’re more likely to jump off a building than apologize, then go home early because fuck it and spend the rest of the weekend filling out job applications. I am tired. Tired. Physically and emotionally fucking exhausted.
But hey, I drew a stupid little picture tonight. So there’s that.
I’m on the couch with my laptop in its appropriate place, and I think I literally fell asleep with my eyes open a few minutes ago. So watch this and maybe I’ll type words tomorrow:
I am, in no particular order, sick of:
Okay maybe it’s in that order. That exact fucking order, in fact. I’ve been on a self-imposed Facebook break for the last couple of weeks; if you’ve seen me post there it’s because something else I’m using autoposted for me, and I haven’t missed it. That’s across both my author and Clark Kent identities, and I’m considering a mass unfriending (again) on the CK account of literally everyone but immediate family and people who I have no other way of keeping track of.
And then there’s Twitter, which is normally my outlet for politics-related stuff so that I don’t have to vomit it up here, but which has been on an exceptionally stupid bender for the last couple of days. I just tore myself away from it and closed the app down when I caught myself moments away from sending an incendiary reply to someone I generally respect who was criticizing my college hometown for having too few pleasant places to sit. Which is, like, abject nonsense; the entire town is a pleasant place to sit, but what the fuck do I care one way or another if someone is wrong about that? I do not have any reason to care. None at all. And yet.
Who knows; maybe this is the Lexapro talking again and maybe the world did get measurably dumber recently. There was that attack in London last night, which does always tend to bring out the stupidest among us. But in general I’m just not in the mood for humanity lately.
I’m going to go put the boy to bed now and try to bask in something happy and simple for a few minutes. Everybody else, like, go outside, or something.
Jesus, I thought doing cons led to long days. I’m dead exhausted right now. The good news is that the company is not wasting their money or my time, and we are being well fed. I have no real complaints other than I’m not at home and not asleep.
Also, Denver is very flat, which surprised me, and seems to consist entirely of warehouses and factories. It may be that I’m in the wrong part of town but there are a lot of goddamn warehouses and factories. We’re pretty much confined to the hotel at all times so there’s been no real opportunity to sightsee and that’s unlikely to change.
“Why are there no pictures of the mountains, Luther?” you might be thinking. Well, it’s because so far the only time I’ve seen them has been while I’ve been in a van with ten other people and that does not lead to prime photography opportunities.
Sleep now.
Yesterday at work: a $2,000 return on an insanely slow day. I have like eight sales but the biggest one is for less than a hundred and fifty dollars so it doesn’t amount to shit.
Today at work: a $4,000 return, and I still haven’t dug myself out of yesterday’s hole, plus it’s Tuesday, so there’s two trucks in the morning and then lots and lots of phone calls to people whose stuff has arrived and then spending the rest of the day answering the phone and in a progressively worse and worse mood because you’re leaving detailed messages for these fuckwits and they’re calling without listening to their fucking voicemail and saying things like “Uh, yeah, I got a call from this number?” and then trailing off.
LISTEN. TO. YOUR. FUCKING. VOICEMAIL. YOU. FUCKING. CRETIN.
I’m gonna go off on somebody sooner or later, goddammit. If I answer the phone and say “Thanks for calling <furniture store>, this is Luther, may I help you?” then maybe the phone call might be about furniture? Did you even hear that, moron?
And then I got home and had an angry letter from the Illinois Department of Revenue wondering why I hadn’t filed my taxes in September. Because I haven’t set foot in Illinois since July, maybe? Or earned any income? And don’t taxes get filed in April, and what is this September shit? That could be why.
OH SHIT RIGHT also half the staff got written up because the store had too few prospects last month. That was fun too!
Indiana opens up early in-person voting next Wednesday, which is the 12th. Conveniently, Wednesday is my short day and I’m off work at 2:30, and I will immediately be heading downtown and voting. There’s one more debate between now and then; I’ll try and watch it because that’s what I do, but fuck it; as little of a chance as there ever was that I would vote for a Republican for President at any point in my life, there is so much less of a chance in 2016 that it’s a whole new level of no chance. As much as I hated George W. Bush, I feel like I could come up with theoretical reasons why one might choose to vote for him. Same for McCain and Romney, although I can’t pretend to have been especially fond of either of them and Sarah Palin was probably the biggest deal-breaker this side of Trump himself.
There is no reason to vote for Donald Trump other than bigotry. None. If you are a racist, a sexist, or both, he may appeal to you; I assume you still might prefer to not die in a nuclear explosion and you still ought to vote for Clinton anyway if only to preserve your worthless white hide. If your bigotry is literally worth more than your own life, vote for him, but do me a favor and try your best to never cross my path as long as you live, as I don’t want to know you exist.
I am looking forward to this election being over. I am also looking forward to a Clinton presidency, despite knowing that the #1 rule of the Republicans is They Can Always Sink Lower Than This. They’ll find a way. But I will try and remain optimistic and hope that this election will be the one that drains the pus out of their political party. I would like to have a sane opposition.
One way or another, my part in all this will be done in five days.
I know for damn sure that I’m far from alone if I look at the last week and just have no goddamn idea where to even start. I could probably generate half a dozen posts from national and local/semi-local news events alone, and that’s before we get to the part where I turned 40 this week and my mom had surgery on my birthday and I don’t even remember if I mentioned it around here (she’s fine) and after eight months of sick leave and unemployment I was at work for 54 hours last week and it was both week 3 at a new job (certainly within the learning curve for anyone, right?) and my first week on the sales floor.
(Which went well, even if all the stories I have from the week are about things that went wrong, including a nearly seven thousand dollar sale today that went south due to financing issues and wasted, literally, four hours of my time out of the last two days. My supervisors appear to be very happy with me so far and I’m enjoying the job quite a lot.)
Oh, and I’ve started unfriending “all lives matter” people on Facebook, particularly if I know you only because we worked together at a majority-black school and after repeatedly pointing out to you that the words “more” or “only” or “just” do not appear in the phrase “black lives matter,” you still point-blank refuse to affirmatively answer the question “Do you believe that the lives of your black students have value?” At that point I have given you every possible goddamn chance to do the right thing and you’ve repeatedly chosen not to so you’re just a fucking racist and I don’t care if it makes you feel bad. If being called a racist makes you feel bad, I can come up with a real good way to keep that from happening.
Because that happened this week too, and white folk, I am, by and large, done with you, and I’m doubly done with explaining simple shit that you have had ample time to comprehend at this point. White people’s need to be at the center of every single conversation, and their inability to deal with the idea that there might be anything in the universe that is not about them, has pushed me to my breaking point. I’m done.
Also, this:
Because that same person has suddenly become a “blue lives matter” person, and does not see the contradiction at all. I’m done.
Don’t even say “Pokemon” to me. I cannot. Specifically, I cannot even.
Can we all just agree to slow down a fucking bit next week? Maybe next week absolutely nothing interesting could happen. That’d be cool.
If we were having coffee, I’d
SHUT UP AND GIVE ME COFFEE
We’d probably end up
SUGAR DAMMIT SUGAR TOO
And eventually the subject would probably turn to
MOAR GODDAMMIT JUST INJECT THE SHIT INTO MY VEINS FUCK A SYRINGE GET ME A BIC PEN AND A KNIFE
I mean, it’s neat that we
MILK WHAT THE FUCK IS MILK COFFEE IS BLACK I ONLY DRINK BLACK COFFEE NOW
And maybe it would be neat if we would
BLACK LIKE THE BONES OF THE EARTH I WANT THIS COFFEE TO CRAWL OUT OF THE CUP AND SLAP ME
And it’s really nice to see that you’re
I HAD BETTER BE ABLE TO SEE THROUGH TIME WHEN I’M DONE WITH THIS SHIT
I’m happy to announce that
GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
Let’s do this again next week; it was
