Recognition Day Ducks!
I had this crazy dream where I ran for the Montgomery County, MD County Council. Like so many of my dreams (which, usually, are always either about doing household chores or defending a small town in Western Maryland during the zombie apocalypse), the vivid detail was so convincing that I woke up and immediately looked up the requirements for candidacy. Sadly, the deadline has long passed – even for fruity write-in yahoos.
The requirements are all very straightforward, though, and I’ve been wondering why I didn’t leap at this earlier. How fun it would be to sit on the County Council. I’d earn 128k a year just to sit behind a bench, naked from the waist down, and not actually do anything. Like most of our current Councilmembers! Actually, I’d try and scale back the out of control gentrification which has turned our once sleepy Maryland suburbs into overpriced urban dystopias. Maybe a height restriction is a good thing. Maybe we could all just slow the fuck down and not build a dozen high-price condos at the same time that just end up standing vacant. Maybe we could embrace a scheme where we encourage small businesses to come and open up in some of the two dozen (or more) vacant storefronts right now in Bethesda’s downtown! The rents are so high that even major chains are fleeing the area.
But, anyway, that’s stupid. There’s no stopping progress, and I’d never get elected anyway because I’m not an immortal vampire lizard with more money than sense.
This is all probably part of my current desire to escape my dreadful day job. A topic that has become the theme of all of my whining conversations these last few weeks. The job that’s easy as balls and only requires me to show up for three days a week and, yet, just feels so wrong on this weird sort of spiritual level. Those three days a week burning into my soul in a way that just makes me want to lash out and steal all the office supplies. My friends all say I’m looking a gifthorse in the mouth. All jobs are boring and terrible, they say, and mine is a unique little gem – endless PTO, wonderful benefits, bosses with very low IQs, and my duties? I have to read books all day and tell aged authors (using that word loosely) how to structure their chapters and how not to praise the Nazis too much.
While our grossly overpaid executive staff lollygag around with backdoor Department of Defense dealings that ultimately led to my organization designing and executing all interrogations with potential terrorists, I’m sitting pretty furthering the even more nefarious secondary agenda of guiding incomprehensible books written by ivory tower academics into the world. All very simple, really. If my brain would just stop vomiting all over itself long enough.
Of course, if my brain does stop vomiting all over itself, it probably means I’m dead. I can’t imagine becoming like my peers – pushing through the daily grind, seemingly without any sense of hope or beauty. Sometimes I watch them as they fall deeper and deeper into the pit of despair. Their eyes glaze over, their jaws go slack, the manuscript pages flutter from their suddenly limp hands as, word by word, sentence by sentence, their dreams fade and their souls die.
When they do finally die at their posts, I’m totally going to steal all of their “Participation Matters/Staff Recognition Day” rubber duckies. That’s the only thing keeping me here these days, I think. I must have all the rubber duckies. And then I will put them on the toy trains and ship them to the Lego camps. Choo-choo! I will separate them when they arrive. Female rubber duckies in one direction, males in the other. Rubber duckies wearing 50s greaser outfits will be lined up against the cattlecars and shot.
Oh, I know what they’ll say about me. I know how history will remember me. But I do this for you! For all of you!