There's too much fuck in my head

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I had some fuck this morning, but then Lilly didn't accept the explanation that the kiln will fire up differently (and slightly worse) each time because the insulation between the refractory and the shell degrades each time.  This is apparently inconvenient, and if we in maintenance just understood the urgency of the situation, it would all straighten out.

So all my fuck went away, and I went outside and had a smoke, while the rest of the management team yelled rotten shit at me over the push-to-talk feature of my crackberry.  Mortal fools!  One day RUIN SHALL RAIN DOWN ON THEM.  They will scream for maintenance from beneath their desks; but we shall not come.

AND THERE SHALL BE WEEPING AND GNASHING OF TEETH

IN ADDITION, I seem to have become part of the furniture around here.  Perhaps I have been around so long, I don't even get noticed unless I'm writing something like LOBB or Nessies or some shit.  I have become a cut-rate human Kindle.

I DON'T KNOW what to do about that.  I'd like to say "Hey, you know, I'm a person, I kind of like when people say 'hello' and shit once in a while", but it won't do any good.  People will say WHY they never say hello - or anything else - and they'll talk for a minute or two, but then I'm back to talking to myself in a vacuum, and then people have the absolute, unmitigated GALL to complain when I post in the DRUGS DRUGS DRUGS thread because that's the only fucking place in which people will acknowledge my fucking existence...So bitching about it won't do any good.

NO, I'M REASONABLY CERTAIN that there's nothing to be done, so there is no reason to give any fucks about it.

Call 'em out. 

It's easier to name the people that DO acknowledge my existence.  You, Nigel, LMNO when he isn't too busy, and RWHN.  I disagree with him on many things, and I call him all manner of shit (and he is happy to reciprocate), but I give him this:  He doesn't treat other people as articles of furniture that will always be around, nor does he try to keep anyone else from having their say.

I can't count the number of times I've been talked around completely in conversation here, most especially recently.  RWHN has never done that to me.  He's never acted like I was a child interrupting the adults, to be pointedly ignored.

This has been up my ass for a while now.  It's sort of a festering fucking boil of resentment, and it gets worse every fucking day.  I don't want people to fucking drop everything and cater to me or any shit like that, just maybe an acknowledgement that I'm fucking HERE.

And THAT is the fuck that is in my head.

I get pretty passionate about that topic.  But as much as I can I do try to acknowledge everyone's opinions and questions, even if I think they are completely wrong.  And I do know I can get a bit harsh and add some extra commentary to posts.  But everyone has a voice and that should definitely be recognized.  (even if you are dead wrong )

1.  Yep.

2.  I am not wrong, as I am a Holy Man™.  If I appear to be wrong, it's because you're in the wrong universe.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

When reading my comments, Stelz, it's important to consider the thread title.

Everyone's gotta vent sometime.

Not that I don't actually seethe, or anything.

OK.

[LMNO]

Still here, Rog.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Still here, Rog.

Oh, I know.  I have limited my paranoid ravings to this thread for a reason.

It's, you know, the appropriate place.

Each time the brain flukes stop by, a few more stick around.  There's nothing to be gained by taking this self-indulgent whining seriously.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Excellent OP, I missed it the first side around.

Also, Roger, maybe you should reassure Lilly that now that physics fully understand the severity of the situation, they will change for her.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

This is the sort of bullshit I get up to when I'm too lazy to write a 4th chapter to LOBB on any given day.

I sit in my office and look out at the desert, and that's not a good habit.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Excellent OP, I missed it the first side around.

Also, Roger, maybe you should reassure Lilly that now that physics fully understand the severity of the situation, they will change for her.

I'm trying to plan a gag based entirely on that idea.  I did something similar in the army.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

I'm sorry if I don't talk to you much, but I'm scared. All the time. The fuck in my head sees the things that you write and it thinks it has a friend and then it gets all excited and tries to claw my skin off again even though I told it not to and I wake up with these fingernail dents in my hand and they don't go away for hours and sometimes they're not shaped like fingernails at all and I have to pretend that the fuck isn't getting out when I'm asleep and I'm sleeping so much now because being awake is hard and I just don't want to listen to it all but I can't let the fuck out and it's no good. The fuck wants to eat me and when it's done it will get out because someone will hear what happened and the fuck will get in the cracks like a shitty pop song hook and you can't stop it or even slow it down you just have to pretend it's not there or it'll eat you alive. And every time someone talks about it, it gets stronger.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

And I'm there at the funeral and he's crying like the night he was crying drunk and it was too much and I let something else do my talking for me because I just couldn't couldn't stand the thing he turned into and something else hauled him up and made him be a person again instead of a thing and now here we are again and we haven't even fucked in five years I don't even remember what he looks like or how it felt and he's crying at me at the funeral and I can't take it but this time when I start yelling it's the fuck that gets out. And the fuck says at least he got ten extra fucking years after the first operation, and he was a fucking drunk and a smoker and after the surgery - when the doctor said he had to quit smoking or he wouldn't do the surgery - and he went outside to smoke and you and your mom just sat there making concerned faces at each other and not doing anything and I had to be the one to go out there and yell at him and he still lived fucking ten years. And when the first cancer showed up and you called and I said if he could take a partial I would take the fucking test just to see but he was too sick even for that and he needed a whole liver and he fucking got it and it didn't even matter and she didn't even have a liver it was just tumor by the time she got to the hospital and that's why she couldn't eat anything and they fucking bought a case of ensure instead of taking her to a doctor and nobody told me and she wouldn't have even had insurance if my sister didn't call about the lump she found and mom said it was no big deal and not to worry and none of them had insurance and I had to yell and make them do it and two days later dad's carrying her to the car because she can't walk and they call me it was two years two years she was sick and she never fucking told us and who the fuck has a jewelry drawer full of pink fucking ribbons and doesn't get a mammogram she was 49 you shit and your dad still outlived her she didn't smoke went to the gym ate healthy and tried to be a good person and your fucking alcoholic dickhole father outlived her. FUCK.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I'm sorry if I don't talk to you much, but I'm scared. All the time. The fuck in my head sees the things that you write and it thinks it has a friend and then it gets all excited and tries to claw my skin off again even though I told it not to and I wake up with these fingernail dents in my hand and they don't go away for hours and sometimes they're not shaped like fingernails at all and I have to pretend that the fuck isn't getting out when I'm asleep and I'm sleeping so much now because being awake is hard and I just don't want to listen to it all but I can't let the fuck out and it's no good. The fuck wants to eat me and when it's done it will get out because someone will hear what happened and the fuck will get in the cracks like a shitty pop song hook and you can't stop it or even slow it down you just have to pretend it's not there or it'll eat you alive. And every time someone talks about it, it gets stronger.

You need a desert.  These days, I can spend HOURS looking out into it.  It smells like mesquite and creaosote, so it's obviously the wrong desert, so pretty soon the rattle of small arms fire and the hammering of the gun and crump of mortars fades away, back to 22+ years ago, where it belongs.

In their place, I see Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr and I remember what they said, that violence or war kills everyone, even the winners.  That brutality cuts both ways.  You can see this also in the accusatory glare in the eyes of Malcolm X.

The desert is empty, and so am I.  Not in some emo way, just the sort of empty you try to fill up with bad coffee and cigarettes.  So, while I appear "on" all the time, it's just an attempt to shake myself out of the bad noir film that I have somehow gotten stuck in. 

And when I reach this state, I can pull the fuck apart and diagnose it.  And yesterday, I almost had it, but Al, my chief electrician, slapped me and told me to stop looking out there, because the desert will eat you if you let it.  What he doesn't know is that it already had, two decades and 10,000 miles away.

So, I'll try again today.

More to follow.  Pointless meeting and coffee to be dealt with.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

And now we're back at the old house in the kitchen that's smaller than a closet and my brother's there with his wife and he just got all his shit broken into by Russian hackers and he's yelling at me because he's got the fuck to and it makes him think that this shit is my fault because I don't have the patience to try to work inside the fucking system and it's not my fault and I don't even know what he's talking about or why he thinks it's related to anything I've ever done or said or thought but that's what happens when you go in there they cut off your hair and put the fuck in there and you turn hard instead of squishy and his wife is trying to be reasonable because she's always reasonable and and there's an old bear of his he gets off the shelf and he just rips its head off because none of this old shit matters and I start crying and it's a stupid thing and it shouldn't matter but he didn't need to do that and then I know he knows what's happening to me and I go over and I punch him in the arm as hard as I can which doesn't do much because his arm's all made of meat now that they got him but I do it anyway and he punches me back and it hurts and we just keep doing it and she's yelling at us to stop but she doesn't understand because she doesn't have the fuck in her head but he does and he knows and he's helping the only way he knows how because we both need to get the fuck out and this is the only way to make it happen and this sound comes out of me this fucking wail and it doesn't stop and I can't breathe and it doesn't sound human or even animal it's not any of those things it's not a thing vocal chords can do and I don't know if he's wailing, too.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

So, it's quiet in the desert.  You can think.  Things just sort of fall into place, things that would have been friggin' obvious to anyone who DID have time to think.  It's not prophecy, it's looking at things with all the pieces in the right place.

And it occurs to me that I'm not entirely certain that I made it out of that other desert, because when I left, the world made some sort of sense.  When I came back, there was shit like "derivatives", which nobody completely understands and which doesn't seem completely real.  In addition, there will most likely be another serious war in Europe fairly soon, and when I went, that would have been nothing short of hilarious.

After all, the Europeans are the people that we like to behave around (with the exception of GWB, of course), that we put on our Sunday best for, that we try very hard not to embarrass ourselves in front of, even if our pants ARE around our ankles and our crazy is stapled to the underwear we have on our heads.

No, Europe is class.  And now even THEY are ramping up for another world war. 

So, yeah, I'm not entirely certain that I wasn't killed or something, and all this garbage isn't some awful Jacob's Ladder rip off.  There's supposed to be a medical term for people who think they're dead, but that wouldn't be entirely accurate.  I just think I came home to the wrong universe.  My universe made sense; this one is goofier than a waltzing mouse.

I'm gonna think about that today, when I walk out back and look around for a while.  For when you gaze too long into the desert, the desert looks empty.  Empty as a politician's heart, empty as the inside of my skull.

And that beats drugs all to hell and gone.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

and they fucking bought a case of ensure instead of taking her to a doctor and nobody told me and she wouldn't have even had insurance if my sister didn't call about the lump she found and mom said it was no big deal and not to worry and none of them had insurance and I had to yell and make them do it and two days later dad's carrying her to the car because she can't walk and they call me it was two years two years she was sick and she never fucking told us and who the fuck has a jewelry drawer full of pink fucking ribbons and doesn't get a mammogram she was 49 you shit and your dad still outlived her she didn't smoke went to the gym ate healthy and tried to be a good person and your fucking alcoholic dickhole father outlived her. FUCK.

There is, and has never been, anything resembling justice.  There are, however, basic standards of human behavior, and buying someone who has a lump on their breast a case of Ensure doesn't make the standard.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

and they fucking bought a case of ensure instead of taking her to a doctor and nobody told me and she wouldn't have even had insurance if my sister didn't call about the lump she found and mom said it was no big deal and not to worry and none of them had insurance and I had to yell and make them do it and two days later dad's carrying her to the car because she can't walk and they call me it was two years two years she was sick and she never fucking told us and who the fuck has a jewelry drawer full of pink fucking ribbons and doesn't get a mammogram she was 49 you shit and your dad still outlived her she didn't smoke went to the gym ate healthy and tried to be a good person and your fucking alcoholic dickhole father outlived her. FUCK.

There is, and has never been, anything resembling justice.  There are, however, basic standards of human behavior, and buying someone who has a lump on their breast a case of Ensure doesn't make the standard.

My sister found a lump which turned out to be nothing important. My mom, who actually had breast cancer for two fucking years before she died and no one knew, was the one who told her it was nothing. The pronouns got kinda cluttered in there. It is a giant pile of fuck.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Summer is back in Tucson, as of today.  The sun came roaring up at a ridiculous hour, and it has once again taken on the mantle of "Angry God".  I like the summer here.  There's not of this "beauty of spring", because NOTHING CHANGES.  Except the sun.

Oh, and the lizards come out more often.  Millions and millions of the little bastards, vacuuming up all animal life smaller than themselves.  Which strikes me as very American.

I have patriotic lizards.