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Recently a coworker greeted me by saying; "Did you read "Garfield"
today? It was hilarious!" Is it fair to require such a level of rage
from me first thing in the morning? I explained to her that "Garfield"
and "Hilarious" were diametrically opposed words and could not appear in
the same sentence without a modifier of some sort, such as "isn't". I
won't bore you with the details, suffice it to say this was merely my
opening statement and a half hour later my coworker started crying and
went home sick. So she got a paid day off. I got my second written
warning of the quarter some strongly worded 'advice' about my job, my
hanging on to it, and my participation in an 'anger management workshop'. I was intrigued until it became clear the course work
entailed would not help me increase my stamina. To my mind any form of
'anger management' that doesn’t improve your personal best is just a
waste of time. I was so exhausted at that point I could hardly summon
the energy required to brief my supervisor on the history of the First
Amendment and its critical role in our Democracy.
No one in the office would speak to me all day and everyone felt sorry for the woman I 'made' cry, as if the choice of tears was never
actively hers. Honestly, I'm the one they ought to feel bad for. I don't
think they have any conception of the burden of being as intolerant as I
am. When the alarm goes off and I confront the barbarous wage slavery
that compels a man to rise before the sun, knowing this is only the
first instant of a day so swollen with indignities it would snap the
spine of Job... well, I just thank my lucky stars the good lord invented
the run on sentence, because without it there would be no way to express
even mathematically, the near infinite mass of steaming crap it seems
everyone else on Earth has no problem whatever ignoring!
I mean, maybe everyone else is just more evolved than I am, maybe they
have some sort of bio-chemical brain shield that allows them to go
‘uh-huh’ when someone refers to Barbara Walters a journalist, maybe when
the child waiting to get fries with that in front of them has enough
denim in the ass of his pants to make six God Damn circus tents. Perhaps
some extra organ I somehow lack in my hypothalamus makes it possible for
most people to keep from screaming until their throats bleed, maybe its
JUST ME; but doesn’t someone have to shoulder this weight? Shouldn’t
somebody be jumping up and down on the opposite end of the see-saw from
Judge Judy and John Tesh’s musical career and TV commercials for
prescription drugs and George Bush Jr. calling himself ‘Dubyah’ and
Barbara Bush being called ‘the Silver Fox’ instead of ‘That Really Mean,
Nasty Old Silver Rabid Sasquatch’ and George Bush Sr. having donated
half the DNA for George Bush Jr.?
I know the domino theory is out of fashion, but isn’t it remotely
possible the way was paved for Hitler’s rise to power by a bunch of guys
going "No, really, I think Lederhosen looks O.K." So the next time you
and ‘the man’ are chatting about how the office ‘crank’ is
‘affecting productivity’ with his ‘negativity’, maybe you ought to think about how
much you’d like wearing jackboots to the office next Casual Friday.
Because it may start with allowing someone to express their amusement
over Garfield’s irrepressible antics, but it ends in a glass booth at
Nuremberg.
note: -RoG- is currently on the FBI's 10 most wanted list for
gunning down everybody in his "anger management"
class... and he's feeling much better now.
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