Inefficiencies in Getting my Degree
This is one! Writing, journaling, blogging, what have you. How else can I keep track of my life? The minutia otherwise lost between watershed events like:
being born, dying.
maybe sprinkle some romance in there, some loss.
Let’s make it interesting. How else can I get a good story across, without details?
Kent State and Nixon in Cambodia
I wasn’t there for those things, I wasn’t born yet. Maybe you were? Maybe you were somewhere else, alive. Can you recall the day you read the headlines?
One leg crossed over the other, at breakfast with your wife. You just bought a new home, the mortgage be damned, those greedy banks. Alas, the breakfast sausages filled the warm yellow light that swathed your kitchen with hints of apple and maple smoke. That first sip of coffee, lots of cream and sugar, just barely hot enough to not scald your mouth as you sipped it, just how you like. You can breathe it all in, do you remember that? The front page, you were busy living, perhaps even surviving.
Not looking barrel down a gun. The peace that a woman that knew she found a good man in this God forsaken world. You had that.
Revolution
One of these days, the events that line the news media, filling our ears 24/7 with tragedy after tragedy, one of them may be the tipping point. It’s hard to imagine, just what would come of the world, launched into war. Maybe I’d ask a Global Southerner, if I knew a real one enough to get them to spill their guts over a drink or seven. I get ideas from my friends, struggling in America, keeping their head above the water. What is it exactly that I need to have ready, come this apocalypse or rapture?
Surely, the masses will bite back, striking against their slavers in the Shinkolobwe, Haitian debtors post revolution thirsty to sell out, the working class in America that drinks to sleep and wakes to drink, working in the mean time for bread and oil, oily bread, lightly breaded oil with some cheese on it. God I love pizza.
And booze, can’t seem to get enough of it. Soon as I have a night where I feel like I reached my limit, I’ll throw my bottle away or flush it down the toilet, and reach for a pick me up in the morning.
Why so stressed? It’s just school? I got myself through college before, but now is different isn’t it?
Is it? When has slavery not ever been written in the Constitution Mr. Doom? A hilariously cynical name for my high school AP Government teacher, surely a sign of things to come. I had another teacher in high school who said the hardest part about Berkeley was getting out.
Getting in was easy
Now, with my financial aid and scholarships slashed, I join the masses in the Bay, working to survive, drinking to feel like we are alive. You can see it in the Tenderloin, where Dave Chappelle reportedly called for a Batman in the city. Another rich dude to beat up the poors? Didn’t Chris Nolan already do this whole arc? Didn’t PatBat already do the broody, depressed millionaire who turns into a savior of the people, go over this?
People love Mr. Beast, he’s a good guy! He makes a ton of money from documenting his philanthropy, and puts almost all of it back into his brand, that sells burgers at ghost kitchens and gives sight to the blind, only if they sign this consent form first.
I wake up, my once-upon-a-time lyft driver is in the bed next to me, I got drunk the night before, but nothing happened. She needs a place to sleep, and figure out her life. Me too.
Between apartment viewings, meetings with her case manager, and the bizarre woke racism that could only fly in the Bay, she must feel crazy day to day. Well, God Bless her Godamnit! I have an extra bed in a spacious room, and all I do is work and sleep drunk or high no matter day or night! Hop aboard, you scallywag, the ship leaves before dawn! Pretending with the pretentious that I am all right, surely we will survive, just you and me aboard this dastardly ship, and the kraken trawls the deep each night, toying with its food as a lion would its pray. Each day and night a mere blink in its Lovecraftian eyes…
But the whole world is on my side, see! I live to write!
The words of the wicked, too busy to sleep, let alone be mindful what they read, I shall be thy savior!
