I am a lot like America right now - in a dark spot, completely self-created, with easy to identify solutions that don't seem too much fun to have to deal with. I have used too much credit, and not worked as much as I should. It's got me in a tight spot, but not nearly as tight as a lot of people, much like America, where our kids don't make toys from scrap lead at the landfill. They still ship our donated clothes by the ton to foreign countries much more fucked than us. I should probably simplify my lifestyle, as opposed to feeling entitled to the bullshit routine I sometimes am in, and expecting someone else (i.e. credit, or home refinancing creating false wealth by cashing out home equity that only existed as imaginary paper wealth anyways) to infuse me with supposed sustenance for my indulgences.
Really, the last couple months - actually the past year - has been shitty financially for me. Not as shitty as a lot of people, but shittier than I would've wanted myself to be at this point in my life. If not for a loving family and three beautiful daughters who get me geeked to pull myself out of the bed, I would've swallowed a hollow point by now. Then again, without the family, I'd probably be a derelict hobo drunkard poet most of my life, living in the obscurity of the deep underclass, far deeper than alleged underground pop cultural movements.
I can accept what I need to do. Wake up, do a little Jimmy Valiant in the mirror, roll out and work a long fucking day. I tend to feel cleansed by hard labor - that is the work ethic brainwashing a lot of southern fucks like myself get distilled with. It is why we do not believe in organized labor, because you work to earn money. Paid holidays and paid breaks and shit like that seems perverse to us because you earn money for working, not sitting around fucking off. It may seem simple, but is how my mind works. And being self-employed, with a decent amount of work still lined up in this declining economy, all I have to do is pull a few 50 hour weeks and my financial situation will improve just fine. My problem is motivation, not opportunity. This is like America as well, or at least how it was, because plenty of people have plenty of jobs where they don't do shit but fuck off most of the day. If you are sitting at work reading this, you are a good example. Why the fuck would you be reading this while someone is paying you to work?
But simplifying my life would be the best bet, much like America. I am involved in far too many things, many of them commercial (meaning they cost money not only to take part in, but to sustain, as whatever form of shit you waste time with, technology constantly make obsolete what you just invested into), that don't really feed me personally. I "own" (in the sense I owe the bank) five acres, and a two-story house. That's a hellafied amount of land to put to use with animals and plants and creative endeavors.
That's the darkest part for me lately. I have plenty of ideas, like always, but little execution. I think there's some connection for me subsconsciously where if I'm not working as hard as I should be in laborous ways attached to earning money, I don't feel I deserve the self-indulgent time to be creative. Or maybe I need the physical exhaustion of my body to force my mind to be like, "Yo, let's get our's too, bitch."
The point is, fixing my darkness is easy... work harder, allow my creativity to come out more thoroughly, and simplify things. Same thing for America. Except it doesn't do shit like that. It wants to continue thinking everybody can get rich always, as if capitalism is a continuous creation of new imaginary wealth, as opposed to the circulation of a finite amount of tangible wealth. There are those who have lived off of refinancing or getting new credit cards for almost a decade now, and they are being forced to face the place they set for themselves - no longer being to roll it all over, but also having to actually pay the things they've ran up. I'm not sure how sorry I feel for some people who find themselves in houses worth less than they owe, especially knowing how people started to treat houses like cars that you traded up for a new one every few years, or worse yet, people who were "flipping" houses for pure profit for basically doing nothing more than having enough imaginary paper wealth to allow to do such a thing.
That is my biggest problem with all this shit - that people make fake wealth by skimming off of other's transactions, and that's supposed to be a perfectly acceptable thing to do. The bundling of fucked-up mortgages as investments, even oil futures investments, banks skimming transactions fees, five bucks to cash a check when you don't have an account, all that bullshit. Making money for doing nothing. And no one is going to start seeing that as wrong. Hell, that's more the American Dream now than working hard and making a nice spot for yourself. Working hardly and getting paid, that's the shit right there. And that's not gonna change, no matter who the fuck you vote for. In fact, most of these people who have invested all this saviour energy into Obama are not all that different from neo-con Bushies when you sit on the outside looking in. Both groups feel like they know what's best for everyone, both want to force their beliefs on the majority at large, and neither of them really respects anybody who disagrees.
I am highly disillusioned lately, but again, that's because I've been paying attention to much. Pulling inward, working more, creating more, looking to others less, it will make it all a whole lot better. Any of you putting a lot of value in what someone else is going to do for you, I'd advise you to temper that with simplicity or you're just gonna get fucked, over and over. It has been a bad relationship thus far, with two men, and I know one of them is promising you he's changing this time, but you are going to have to move back in with him in order to see if he actually has changed. And I know the first guy has beat you up pretty badly the past few years, but going back and forth between a couple of assholes always promising to behave differently has helped make us all fucked in the first place. But props to you for still believing in fairy tales.
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