I spent 20 minutes yesterday explaining to a dude that he can’t get toner for a calculator with no printer.

I’m like, “Sir, that model has no printer. It doesn’t print.”

and he’s like, “So do you have the toner?”

And I’m like, “It doesn’t use toner.”

And he’s like, “So you’re out?”

My computers were all blown up.

I “fixed” them. So until the heat from the power supply cooks the gum and tape off the wires, I’m back.

Look grateful.

Several of my friends have the same job as me. One of them is seemingly mystified as to why I quit – he likes what we do.

The truth is, I don’t mind it. My next job, I probably won’t like as well. But it has so many frustrating elements.

For example, my job isn’t important enough for me to be given working equipment. My job isn’t important enough for everyone doing it to even be completely trained. My job isn’t important enough for me to be supervised well.

My job IS imporatant enough for me to have a guy climb up my ass and set up camp over small mistakes. My job IS important enough for random things that go wrong when I’m not at work to get traced back to me, and for my boss too, with ONE FUCKING DAY of work left, leave me little smart-ass comments. How is my job not important enough for me to be properly empowered to do it, but important enough for me to get my ass chewed for not doing it? That doesn’t make sense. The other thing that goes on in this workplace is there’s a scapegoat effect – everyone blames shit, all the time, on the people that aren’t there. I’m talking all through the building, no one ever steps up. That’s why I’m pretty glad I’ve had friends that predate my job here as co-workers. That means even when I’m actually fucking up and eating shit at work (which isn’t unheard of) I know I’m not getting shit-talked behind my back, much less when I’m not actually doing anything wrong.

I’m bored of my fucking job. I’m resolved to avoid the situation of working 8 to pay for 16 every day, from now on. I’m resolved to be in charge of pinheads, instead of pinheads being in charge of me.

I’m so burnt out on this shit I do every day. Completely. My job is light office and computer work. It’s easy. Real easy. A fucking-chimp-could-do-it easy. But I’m just so sick of it that it makes me want to fucking vomit. I mean, it’ll be time to do some little, meaningless thing that will take ten fucking seconds, and I just don’t want to fucking do it, and every single task I do, I resonate with something screaming in my head that says “Don’t do this shit anymorethisisbullshityoushouldbedoingsomethingelse”

Now the fuckits are pretty contagious, and we’re a fuckit prone crew, and all of us are going through a bunch of shit in our personal lives right now, so why the fuck not just do some other fucking thing?

Pretty soon I will have Nothing to do.

I like Nothing.

Nothing’s pretty goddamn rad.

I’m going to do it for at least a day or two.

Edit:

A politician that isn’t quite a total douchebag is Senator Joe Biden.

The link is too his appearence on meet the press. Listen too it and see what he has to say.

This started out as a comment in someone else’s blog, but it got to long, and to complicated.

————-

I used to be kind of a pacifist

Then I found some things happened . . . everone sees that picture of the kid turning back the tank in tienamin square and forgets that it came back the next day after the Boss of Tanks gave it a little pep talk.

I had some personal incidents like that. I realized, through practicum, that if it’s him or me, it’s gonna be me. When a bullet flies by you moving faster then sound and the wind of its passing hits you in the face, it blows away all your morals and all you want to do is live. Then you hear the shot, and you have to react before he shoots again. You have the time it takes a man to move his finger a quarter inch to decide where you REALLY stand on violence, and the decision changes your sense of yourself and your fate in life.  

So if I’d kill to save myself, if I’d kill to save my friends, if that’s inside me, how can I draw a line based on the circumstance it would take? I’d sleep with someone for enough money – so I’m at least a little bit of a whore. I’d kill a guy in the right circumstances, so I’m a little bit of a murderer.

That brings up another point…many people fight, police, millitary men, their ilk, so that you never have to.

Would you call the police to avoid doing violence? If so, you carry the moral weight for what they do to protect you. You are complicit in their actions as surely as the man that hires a hitman is complicit in that hitman’s murders. What I’m saying is, you maybe don’t see yourself as someone who would shoot someone or hit someone or kidnap a person and drag them off after forcing them into irons. . . but if you’ve ever *called the cops* on someone, or moved to a neighborhood in part because it “has a great police department” or “is very safe,” you have essentially hired at least some of those things done, almost as though you went down to a local pool hall and hired Vinnie “the icepick” Falcone to deal with it for you. . . just the finest line, the thinnest veneer, really seperates the two actions.

Dave Grossman breaks the world into sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs…saying, essentially, that only a small percent of the populatioin is vigourously violent, and there is another small percentage that will do violence in response, and vast majority of people are decent and gentle.

He goes on to compare society to an robin’s egg that may one day grow into something far beyond it’s components – but not without its hard shell. It’s entire future is entrusted against that shell, that hard covering that protects it from factors that the inside of the egg doesn’t even know about.  

Once you accept self defense, or defense of yourself through military or police power, you have to wonder what you’d do if someone was just PLANNING to hurt you.  Once you realize you’d act against someone planning violence, you have to work, hard, to draw a line between yourself and the people that MIGHT someday try to hurt you.

I’ve made up a new word!

“Gynotherianthrope”

It’s a noun, a portmanteau of “Gynocologist” meaning “dude that looks at vaginas” and a “therianthrope” meaning “someone what turns into a different sort of animal”

A gynotherianthrope is a man (or, I guess, lesbian) who sees a vagina and turns into a different sort of creature.

IE

“Brian used to be a bad motherfucker, but whenever his girl is around, he puds out on poker night. What a total gynotherianthrope.”

All the recent talk of the new xanga ratings system has called something to my attention.

I am a free speech nazi.

Yes, I mean it when I say people should have free speech. Even nasty hateful dirty people you don’t like.

Letting them have free speech, pretty much unconditionally, is your safeguard against the people that think you’re hatefully, and dirty, and nasty.

There’s another aspect, too.

Who do you live for, and who lives for you? If your answer to either question was “the government,” I don’t know what to tell you, except that there’s a real risk you’ll always be a child.

We should have a law only where we need a law. You only need a rule against someone’s speech if their ideology scares you. I’m not afraid of neo nazi speech, of child molester speech, of crazy born again christian speech, of extreme right or leftist speech.

I’m afraid of some of those people, sometimes, inasmuch as I’m ever afraid of anything.
But I’m afraid of their actions, not their speech. The only way to STOP their actions in the long run is to defeat their ideology, and that can’t be done if they’re under a rock, in the dark.

Let those poison dogmas out themselves. Let them try to bring their ideas to war against mine.

I’ll win. My ideas are viral, my patterns insidious, my ideology of rigorous thought, my distaste for bullshit and obfuscation – it’ll rip your shitty dogma to bits, every time.

So I’m not afraid of your ideas. I welcome them.

Now some will say, “Xanga is a company. A company doesn’t have the same standards as the government.”

That’s a good point.

Nothing legally binds Xanga to uphold any sort of standards of speech or community of tolerance.

Nothing binds them to those standards at all.

But then, a morality you’re forced to uphold was never yours. Your behavior on the barbarous frontier is your true self, not the face you wear when you sell furs in the city.

UPDATE: HAHAHHAHAHAHA THIS IS THE DUMBEST THING EVER

IF YOU AREN’T LOGGED IN YOU CAN BYPASS THE CHECKER

SO JUST LOG OUT AND BROWSE YOUR PORN FOLKS

EDIT 2: OK NOW YOU JUST NEED TO ENTER YOUR BIRTHDATE TO GET TO THINGS RATED A-D AS APPROPRIATE TO YOUR AGE, SOMETHING I GUESS I NEVER DID. THIS IS ACCEPTABLE TO ME IN MY ROLE AS “LORD OF THE INTERNET”

http://www.amirtofangsazan.blogspot.com/

Whoopsie.

Another small note:

Xanga has instituted some sort of “rating” system.

You need to go turn the rating down, or people will be unable to view your content unless they have premium or “verify their age” with a credit card.

I’m watching SNL on the advance network feed.

There is a new SNL every saturday, followed by an old re-run.

New show: Catherine Zeta-Jones is the host. Franz Ferdinand is the guest.

Old Show: Sam Kinison is the host. Lou Reed is the guest.

Sorry new SNL. You lose.

So, me and a certain lowlife aquaintance of mine were walking through our local wal mart.

We walked by a somewhat pleasing-looking woman and we stared at her brazenly, giving her lunatic smiles that served to say, “You are meat. We are things that eat meat. No, you naughty skank, not in a good way.”

She noticed us looking and glanced away. She had three kids with her, and as we walked on into the electronics section, one of us (I honestly forget which, for we are like one mind at times) said, “Well, you can tell she puts out.”

In short, we were acting young and dumb.

So a few seconds later, we turn around and she’s just. . . behind us. Like Solid Snake. We had no idea she was sneaking up on us.

Her face had a look somewhat blissed-out look, and she didn’t seem angry.

“Can I ask you guys a question?” She said.

Now, I was, frankly, thinking we were in deep shit at this point. I figured she either had heard us commenting when we remarked “hey, look, her ass is almost up to par” or “how many dads do you think those kids have” and was about to chew us a new asshole (or attempt to do so just before being shot down) or she noticed what crazy beasts we were and wanted to rut. If the later were the case, one of us would have to immediately oblige her, taking her into the back of the sporting goods section and bringing her right to the edge of pain there in the pool que section, as this was very definately the sort of girl you don’t want to know where you live. Again, as my friend has chosen a path of monogamy-of-dubious-value, I would have had to fall on this grenade. No high-fiving over the back for us these days, alas.
 
At any rate, I said, “Sure. If you don’t mind random answers.”

She said the words that would serve to twist her appealing, if trashy, features into those of the crypt keeper before my eyes.

“Do you guys belive in god?”

Now my buddy found this rude, and odd. He’s not out in the people as much as I, and he doesn’t understand that a good 37% of this country is not just religious, but retarded with the spirit.

He sort of mumbles “no” and when asked for clarification says, “no I never have”

Then he has to wander away. Quickly. Because he’s losing his shit, laughing. Why, you ask? Because I have said, “KNOW HIM? Motherfucker owes me 10 bucks.”

She says, “Why?” (note: These people CANNOT tell when you are fucking with them, most of the time. That and if they can, they stick around trying to still get “the sale”)
“He used to be on my paper route. It’s seriously awkward. You ever try to collect tree fiddy from god? Nice lawn though. Xeriscape.”

“Don’t you know god loves you?”

“Well, I doubt that.”

“Why?”

“Did you ever own an ant farm? (She shakes her head no) “Well, if you did, would you care more about the overall health of the farm, or individual little ants?”

“Why would you say such a thing, don’t you worship the lord jesus christ?”

“No, babe, if anything, I’m on the other side.”

“What, you mean you worship satan?”

“Precisely!”

“Why?”

“Because it’s more american!”

“What?”

“Well, think about it. What did Satan want? He wanted to do his own thing, live how he wanted, say what he chose. All good american virtures. God was oppressing him. So what did he do? He stood up! He fought back! Just like George Washington!”

“But. . . but. . . how can you say that?”

“It’s in the bible.”

“You aren’t supposed to just question like -”

“Yes, you are. You have to be.”

“What?”

“Well, what’s the one thing you can’t do? The one thing nothing can do? You can’t copy yourself. Nothing can. You always lose energy, you always lose something in the process. So instead, you make children, looking to create a lesser being that will one day surpass you. Do you want your children to one day equal or outgrow you, or do you want them to blindly follow you forever? We have to question god! He made us because to be God is to be alone, and he would have peers. If you don’t question god, you don’t love him – you follow him only out of slavish, mindless devotion, and that’s not what either one of you need.”

“ahhh….ahhhh…ok….well, you’ve…given me a lot to think …about…can I just ask you one thing?”

“Sure.”

“Have you ever been in a place where you could be exposed to the word of god?”

“Actually, my friend and I were both raised by insane christian extremists. We know the whole bible front to back. Besides, you could get in trouble if I come to church with you. If I subverted your congregation in the name of My Dark Father, you’d probably get in some kind of deep shit, right?”

“Oh…well…we pray together?”

“No. You can pray for me, though. But only if I can sacrifice a goat to the Eater of Souls for you.”

At this point, I made a quick ” OH SHIT LOOKIT THE TIME” style exit and we walked away.

My buddy was pink with hilarity.

“You know,” I said to him, “The whole time I talked to her, I just heard top dollar from the Crow in my head, where he says, “Her? I think we broke her.”