{"id":2428,"date":"2012-06-26T07:04:25","date_gmt":"2012-06-26T12:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=2428"},"modified":"2018-10-28T17:59:23","modified_gmt":"2018-10-28T21:59:23","slug":"let-them-eat-static","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=2428","title":{"rendered":"Let them eat static"},"content":{"rendered":"

I often go on about how bored I am<\/a>. And I am. It\u2019s overwhelming, sometimes. Every single aspect of my life is predictable. Like a show you\u2019ve watched a million times. My entire life is Star Trek II<\/em> on mute while I sprawl on the couch with a midday gin and tonic and mumble the dialogue, not even bothering to watch the screen. Let them eat static.
\n<\/p>\n

I try to put in little interesting things to keep me on my toes. Woman, publishing, the occasional irrational battle against office nebbishes. Nothing really catches, though. Women are the most predictable creatures of all, whether they are insane or well balanced. It seems that the modern woman has only been given a limited tree of events in her life, no matter how she goes about experiencing them.<\/p>\n

Publishing is more an act of tedium than adventure. By the time the roughly nine months of grueling pre-production is done and it\u2019s time to enjoy the limelight, you can barely look sideways at the book without wanting to scream. Nine months of rewrites, edits, corralling cats, and digging through every sentence again\u2026and again\u2026and again. It becomes a passion, yes, but, after the first time, it\u2019s all muscle memory.<\/p>\n

Picking fights is no fun either because there are never any results. Half the spectators don\u2019t care enough to participate and the other half are so afraid of rocking the boat that they\u2019ll curl up into little armadillo balls, shivering, waiting for the storm to pass over. Hell, those folks are legion. The masses of idiots who rule us by sheer numbers and who fear everything. Those who have lost their souls. Those who are not awake.<\/p>\n

Worse still, they think they are awake. They think they\u2019re clever. I hate that. How much more boring and predictable can you possibly be? The out of control simpleton who thinks they\u2019ve claimed some small square of life.<\/p>\n

The whole day \u2013 every day \u2013 plays out in front of me as I sit with my morning coffee. I know what I\u2019m going to see, horrible or otherwise. I know what\u2019s going to happen. I know I\u2019ll be bedeviled by bosses and idiots, and I\u2019ll do a little bedeviling myself of landlords and publishing folks, and I\u2019ll spend endless hours twiddling my thumbs, or trying to get Netflix to load on my office computer so, once again, I can kill time marathoning every single episode of the Stargate <\/em>franchise.<\/p>\n

Even when something exciting happens, it seems strangely predictable. There I was, on 9\/11, ejected onto the streets by my typically panic-mongering company. There was an exciting moment there before the towers came down. Everyone was together, traffic was stopped, police were (literally) running in circles, jet planes screamed low overhead. I dared to get my hopes up \u2013 an invasion. Just like Red Dawn! I was ready to run for the hills and start the new world order. I dreamed that it was all coming down. The new world was upon us\u2026and I would be God-King, of course.<\/p>\n

Watching the towers come down was sobering. Not in the sense that so much innocent life had been lost, but merely because, by then, it had become apparent that the terrorists had blown their wad. There was no invasion. No massive shake-up of society would result. No change. It would be business as usual on 9\/12. The day \u2013 even the rest of 9\/11 \u2013 played out before me in the usual, dull, predictable way. Even with the smoke of the Pentagon on the horizon, 9\/11 felt as remote and removed as some faraway disaster. Who cares about the Boxing Day Tsunami? Who cares about the Japanese tsunami? What color were Sally Ride\u2019s eyes?<\/p>\n

This intolerable, soul-devouring boredom I complain about probably settled in on 9\/12, as we all marched back to work under the muzzles of machine guns. Perhaps my outlook would have changed if we had just fucking gotten a day off. But, no. There we were, at my office, on the phones with customers \u2013 most of who didn\u2019t even know that 9\/11 happened. We have the worst customers in the world. I still have the email from the lady who sent a complaint about me when our phones were disconnected minutes before we were sent out on the street on 9\/11. She wrote the email to my bosses as the first tower was collapsing. Her parting comment was that she hoped, for me, that \u201ctomorrow would be a better day,\u201d in reference to my attitude on the line as our offices devolved into every one for themselves panic.<\/p>\n

On the morning of 9\/12, I had to face the music and was chastised by my bosses. What was wrong, they asked, that I treated that customer so poorly?<\/p>\n

Business as usual. Not even the greatest shake-up of our generation could alter the path of dull predictability. And I knew it, too. As soon as Bush said we all should go back to work on 9\/12 to show that America stands strong, there I was again. The morning coffee in hand, and the day playing out before me.<\/p>\n

I knew, when I went home on 9\/12, that nothing would ever change again. That every day would be the same, every idiot would be immortal, every job would be shit, and every action I took would be met with a wall of inaction and ignorance no matter the circumstances.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s been true for a decade. Sometimes, I do find a rare nugget of life. I keep publishing books \u2013 this one linked here is the latest<\/a> \u2013 because I like the sense of accomplishment. Of course, they don\u2019t sell well. I go into debt. I become consumed by that debt. I lose the thread. But the idea that I can navigate the waters of boredom and complete a monumental task is rewarding. I may want to die by the time the books hit the shelves but, in the name of the God of Fuck, they will<\/em> hit those shelves.<\/p>\n

For 12 years, I suffered intolerable pain and was able to (somewhat) ignore the boredom of life because I could not live life. Now that I\u2019m out of pain, the true horror of our lives screams around me every day. Technically, I stopped publishing in 2009. I consult for other publishers, but publishing was more of a pain thing, really. With this latest book, though, I wanted to see if I could get back in the saddle and recover that little nugget of not-quite-boredom. Proof of life, if you will. Because there is no other proof, really. Everything feels like some terrible dream, way out of my control. The books say that, yes, despite that, I am alive.<\/p>\n

But, of course, when they fail to sell, that\u2019s just so sadly predictable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I often go on about how bored I am. And I am. It\u2019s overwhelming, sometimes. Every single aspect of my life is predictable. Like a show you\u2019ve watched a million times. My entire life is Star Trek II on mute …<\/p>\n

Let them eat static<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13],"tags":[351,397,400],"class_list":["post-2428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","category-wage-slave","tag-boredom","tag-rants","tag-wage-slave"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2429,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428\/revisions\/2429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}