Another Combo Platter

November 23, 2007
It’s The Day After Thanksgiving. Hooray.
If nobody in my company gives a crap, then why should I? Seriously. The Day After Thanksgiving is not a holiday. Never has been, never will be. Yet I can’t reach anybody, and questions go unanswered, and nobody gives a crap. So I’m just going to stop trying. The hell with it.

My company, obviously concerned with having handed out perfectly good bonus money that they could have kept, has apparently realized that it’s much easier to simply raise the targets, thus making sure no one can collect the bonus. Way to motivate the team, guys.

One of the things that people don’t seem to get, in sports and in life, is that insisting isn’t enough. The manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates can insist that his team play winning baseball, but if they keep writing out a AAA lineup, they’re not going to win consistently. You have to motivate AND provide the tools for success in order to cause success.

But what the hell do I know?

I still hold on to this attitude, admittedly a selfish one, that if I’m working, everyone should be. I get bitterly resentful when I hear people saying, “Oh, I didn’t think you’d be open because of the holiday.” It’s not a holiday.

I’m such a crank.

LHP Joe Kennedy has died, my phone just told me. He’s a guy who was with the A’s, but never seemed to catch on anywhere. He’s one of those baseball guys that kind of disappears from view, never fulfilling his potential, turning up here and there when you watch a game. I usually have the reaction, “oh, THAT’s where he is now.”

Of course, you can also argue maybe he didn’t GET enough of a chance. And sometimes, with lefties, the light just goes on later, for whatever reason.

But now he’s gone. RIP.

I know I’m not playing up to my potential, exactly, either.

I have never been to a high school or college reunion. And I really don’t see the point. Never have. I didn’t like being there when I was there, and I don’t see how I would like going back. I do almost everything in my life because I have to, so I don’t see any point in doing anything voluntary that I won’t enjoy.

Then again, it’s hard to imagine anything that I can do voluntarily that I would enjoy. Other than being stranded on a deserted island, maybe.

I’m a cheerful bastard, eh?

November 24, 2007

Doug Stanhope was on TV last night. He’s pretty graphic, but very insightful at times. His most recent special is pretty reflective, the most Bill Hicks-ish stuff I have ever heard him do. I identify powerfully with his apology for thinking-constantly thinking about God, nature, society, mankind instead of thinking about real estate values and reality television is extremely draining and very distracting. But, like he says, it’s hard to turn off the carnival in your head.
It hurts. It hurts to think about art, and war, and sex, and health, and politics, and love, and baseball, and economics and physics and technology and God and the future. It hurts to try to contain all these thoughts and still do what needs to be done. I get depressed, and eat, and spend too much money, and continuously ruin my life.

It is becoming obvious that I hate my job beyond my ability to properly describe it. It is also becoming obvious that the economy is going to hell, and so I must hang on to it like a barnacle on a rowboat.

It’s great, though, life. It’s really super. I recommend it to everybody.

If I ever get old and retarded and helpless and out of control of my own affairs, please just shoot me in the head.

Please.