The Horny Creek Chronicles, II: You're Hired, Sucker

Our story starts when I decided to finally attend a post-secondary educational institute after a year of being out of high school. I moved from the little nowhere town in which I'd spent the past ten years, back to the city of Toronto and immediately started looking for supplementary work. For further background, see "The Horny Creek Chronicles, I".

To make a long and really unimportant story short, I used to work for a Horny Creek store located closer to that small Ontario town in which I grew up (but in which I must make absolutely clear I was not born). It was a boring, uneventful job that was not worth the money I spent taking a bus to attend. However, it was the only prior retail experience I had when I arrived in Toronto, so I figured, rather than waste my valuable time (har har) running around and applying for positions I'd likely have to work to maintain, I would just drop off a resume at Horny Creek (New Money Mall location) and wait for the inevitable re-hiring to occur.

It's a well-known fact that Horny Creek, like many retailers who hire under-age mouth-breathers to sell garbage to other under-age mouth-breathers, cycles through employees faster than some people go through clean underwear. There's a revolving-door policy in effect which stresses the hiring of bodies to fill positions on the floor, rather than hiring people who have some degree of competence - or at least an IQ level which comfortably exceeds that of the average goldfish. The result of this policy, of course, is the hiring of a continuous flow of sixteen year-old high school dropouts who smoke way too much pot and spend most of the time on the floor yanking their droopy-ass pants up from around their knees and talking to their loser friends on their Raspberries or whatever. These Darwinian exceptions are usually fired within two weeks of being brought on, to be replaced in short order by more just like them, and on and on into the annals of retail history.

Therefore, if a former employee who previously showed a penchant for following orders with a reasonable degree of accuracy (and who doesn't mind working for peanuts) returns seeking a job, and has not recently committed any federal offences they're willing to admit to, the policy is to basically re-hire him or her on-the-spot.

This is precisely what happened to me: I was re-hired by a District Manager called "Mary" approximately three minutes into my interview. I could have picked Mary out as a Horny Creek DM from a veritable line-up of corporate drones. It wasn't just her pasty face and hollow cheeks. It wasn't the way her mousey hair hung down in tired strands like defeated blades of grass. Mostly, it was due to her excitable (read: cocaine-addled) facade of a personality, and the light of false hope for advancement that shone in her eyes like Christmas lights from a redneck porch in July. An equal giveaway was her fanatical dedication to the company that would inevitably bend her over a counter, roll up the stock options she never did receive regardless how many times they were promised, and proceed to...to fire her. This dedication was easily observable by the sheer volume of prepackaged company propaganda that spewed from her well-meaning but ultimately vexing talk-hole. The conversation went something like this.

Mary: So you used to work *twitch* for Horny Creek at another of our sixty-five fine locations across Canada?

Al: Yes ma'am, I worked as a part-timer for store #(XXX) for six months.

Mary: (absolutely horrified) It says here *twitch twitch* that you voluntarily resigned from that position! Do you mind telling me why??

Al: Well, I had just finished high school and needed a full-time job, but at the time they weren't able to offer me those kinds of hours.

Bullshit. The assistant manager of that store was a meth'd-out psychosis poster-child who hated me because I was far more capable of doing her job than she was, mostly because I wasn't stealing out of the cash register every second sale in order to get out of giving blowjobs to large angry white men in exchange for powdered glass. She didn't have any real excuse to fire me because my three-month probationary period was up, and I was selling on average $400.00 worth of clothing every time they threw me the obligatory three-hour shift (did I mention I wasn't getting hours? More on the poor treatment of part-timers later), so she just made sure I came last on the list of people who got the budgeted hours per week, basically railroading me into quitting. But I wasn't going to tell Mary that. Particularly because at this point, Mary looked as though she'd hit the three o'clock wall and needed another line to make it through the next thirty-five minutes.

Mary: I'm sorry to hear that *snort, wipe*, but it's all right now, because you're back with the company! And I can't tell you how happy that makes me! Your sales record is extraordinary for someone your age, and we really *twitch arm shake twitch* look forward to you bringing your skills to our 'hood!

I wish I was joking, but she really said 'hood. In fact, I think if there was a comic dialogue bubble over her head, she might have pronounced skills with a "z". Did I mention this woman was whiter than an albino Stephen Morrissey?

Al: Great. Thanks. When do I get started?

Mary: Well, right now we don't have an opening at this particular location *eye twitch*but let me tell you something dawg - I'm going to have an opening for a third-key position here at the New Money store within about three weeks, so what I'm going to do with you just for now - just for now, mind - is place you over at the Beggar's Market location, 'cause we're really really excited about re-opening our warehouse store, and I want you to be a part of it!!!

Beggar's Market is a pseudonym for a stretch of warehouse outlet stores that runs the length of a four-block street not far from New Money. Most of the major-label companies have locations along there where they basically sell off last season's castaway shit and damaged products at bottom-rung prices, to predominantly white-trash families looking for a deal because they'd rather spend the extra welfare cash on cases of Molson Canadian and cartons of DuMaurier Lights than their children, or to recent immigrant families who either don't have the money to buy clothes off the shelf, or they think they're still in a country where bartering is an accepted form of goods exchange. Most of these places will let their employees get away with a little haggling, particularly when the product in question is a Nike-brand sweater that some careless part-timer sliced damn near in half with a box-opener, meaning they can't sell it on the shelves anyway. Yes, Beggar's Market: where fashion comes to die.

And this is where they wanted to place me: the Horny Creek Warehouse Outlet, located four full city blocks' walk farther than the bus stop for New Money, and conveniently right across the street from our parent company's Head Office. Fuckin' great.

Al: So this is only going to be a temporary placement, right? I'm not going to be stuck selling faulty jeans and misprinted teeshirts to Jethro and Cleetus for the whole year, right?

Mary: Oh, absolutely *shudder shudder* not! Trust me my man, I want you in New Money just as soon as I can clear the *jump jump* paperwork. In the meantime, you start Monday. Go see "Shawna" the manager at 7:30AM sharp! Kick it to the rhythm, Gee!

Apart from that being one of the most thoroughly ridiculous conversations to which I'd ever in my life been privy, I was now faced with the prospect of at least a month's worth of moving smelly returned clothing all over a poorly-ventilated, superheated warehouse for the express purpose of selling it off at five bucks apiece, piece-by-piece, to sweaty, deal-mongering troglodytes and pushy, obnoxious people that don't even speak English. But, with the promise of that magical third-key position (read: more responsibility, same pay) looming just within reach, I manfully accepted my new position and, at the crack of fucking Dawn on Monday morning, set out with my eyes full of hope (or at least sleep-goo) towards my first assignment.

The Horny Creek Chronicles: Dramatis Personae

(Written sometime in 2006, after the events chronicled in "The Stair Night" story)

It occurred to me while writing down the events of "The Stair Night" that, if I am going to keep writing these pseudo-memoirs, I really ought to provide a little bit of background on a few of the major players that will appear in these stories regularly.

Stories you tell other people are more often than not "only funny if you know ______" or "you really had to be there". In an effort to dispel some of this so people can get as much enjoyment as possible out of this stuff, I've developed a basic dramatis personae of some of the main characters who accompany me on these silly journeys. I've included it as a separate post because "The Stair Night" wound up being really goddamn long, mostly due to footnoted information that didn't really have to be there. It's a learning process folks; bear with me.

At any rate, without further ado, I present my brief introduction and first cast list. Other players will be introduced as they come along, possibly in later incarnations of this post if the need arises.

I've been very fortunate in my life to meet a wide variety of extremely cool people who have taken on the unenviable task of befriending me. Many of them are intelligent, reasonable people with their feet on the ground and their heads on straight; they are friendly and engaging, and have goals, careers, motivation, and all the other positive qualities you would expect to find in up-and-comers of my generation. Needless to say, they make perfect foils for someone like me, who in contrast has no real goals to speak of, is gainfully unemployed, whose motivation extends barely far enough to get up from the laptop to make a coffee, and who is generally considered an all-round egotist cynical prick. As I've said before, I truly don't understand why these people continue associating with me, but I count myself lucky that they do.

There are others that I count as friends, however, who in some way, shape or form, manage to sideline their goals, careers and motivation in order to exist (at least in my mind) in some kind of tandem with my more, shall we say, passive-aggressive worldview. These people have the unique ability to combine the best traits of my other friends with the worst traits in me. They have careers as well as the skills which will allow them to attain a high degree of success; they are friendly, sociable people who make friends easily; they have great game and are found attractive by the opposite sex; all in all, they are outstanding people. They also have the penchant for rampant insanity that I have. The four men I have in mind have been mentioned in some of my previous posts, but have yet to be spotlighted.

The Captain: Former boss. Tall, lanky white boy who kind of looks like the dude that starred in Euro Trip (we noticed this while watching on Saturday; see "The Stair Night"). Laughs often and easily; isn't nearly as cynical as he comes off sometimes. Brilliant environmental engineer (running his own building at 21). Closet Star Trek fan. Devoted friend, boyfriend, son; generous bar buddy. All-round Good Canadian Boy. Drinks like a fish.

E-Dubb: Former employee underling. Shorter, built solid, mixed ethnic background which
includes Polish and something that makes him brown-ish. Haircut we've come to describe as the Signature E-Dubb Hair - think Mexican Kurt Cobain. Computer whiz; works for video game store. Closet techno-geek. Budding musician. Sarcastic bastard with a quick wit and no real moral filter. Very devoted son; lives at home voluntarily to help out his mom. Always up for intoxication. Drinks like a smaller fish.

G: Best friend of almost ten years. Metrosexual and yet masculine (go figure). Respectable
(!). Genius technical theater manager in his last year of school. Thinks far worse things than he ever says. Unbelievably good game. Sense of humour completely on-par with my own. Most dependable man you want to know. Drinks like he means it. And he does.

Brody: Former mall rat (hence the moniker). Completely morally bereft. No social skills to
speak of. Loud, obnoxious, brazenly inappropriate at any given time. Emotionally stagnate after a girl broke his heart. The only one on this list that doesn't embody any of the "good" characteristics. A goddamn train-wreck waiting to happen. Drinks like the bastard son of Winston Churchill and Courtney Love.

Now, in an effort to organize the repertoire of stories I'm trying to write down from memory, I'm starting with the more recent and well-worn of these and moving backwards, so G is not likely to make an appearance for some time. Too bad for him. In the meantime I'm going to focus my next few posts on the events that made working at Horny Creek so very much fun. The Freak Parade continues

The Horny Creek Chronicles, I: Introduction

(Written sometime in 2006...I don't have the exact dates anymore)

This will be the first in a series of stories I plan to post, tentatively entitled the Horny Creek Chronicles (I said it was tentative). I'm aware that most people of my generation have probably worked in some capacity for that Mecca of mall employment we call retail services. For those of you who have not, I will try to provide some brief background on my own experience working at the "New Money" Shopping Mall in Toronto, Ontario (a large, mid- to upscale shopping center blemishing the north of this fine city, which has been pseudonymed in honour of the jerkoffs who shop there) in order that you might fully appreciate the sheer magnitude of idiocy for which this sort of capitalist edifice serves as a lush breeding ground. With this in mind, I introduce you to life as a "paid" mall rat.

Back when I was around 19, I worked as an assistant manager at a Canadian retail chain called "Horny Creek" (obviously, not the company's real name - but I don't really want to be sued). For those of you unfamiliar with this particular company, Horny Creek ostensibly sells young men's apparel, usually pandering to the same lucrative 13-19 demographic that MuchMusic and MTV and all the rest try to corner.

Now once upon a time, way back in 1995 or so, Horny Creek went about cornering this market by selling to a slightly older crowd; say, the same folks that were actually old enough to have seen Nirvana in concert prior to Kurt Cobain's unfortunate encounter with the business end of a twelve-gauge. Think of this demographic as pseudo-Yuppies; former Seattle Grunge patriots who discovered that many post-secondary institutions required general hygiene and moderate sobriety (at least at the interview) to be mandatory in order to secure acceptance. To these patrons, Horny Creek sold fashionable young men's apparel: you know, sweater-vests, khaki pants, reasonably-priced boot-leg denim jeans...sort of your standard all-American boywear. Okay, so it isn't exactly avant-fashion risqué in that high-school Hot Topic kind of way, but I liked it, at least. Take what you want from that.

At any rate, by the time I began working at the New Money Mall location (for those who care, it's the flagship store for Canada), Horny Creek had been sold to another interest, and as such a new Head Office staff was hired. They immediately shut down all stores nation-wide and began implementing a new "marketing plan" (read: pandering to the lowest common denominator in the interest of securing a sizeable retirement fund for themselves). Thus, when I moved back to Toronto and took the assistant manager position, I was aghast to note that the trendy sweater-vests and khaki pants of old had been replaced with PG knockoffs of T-Shirt Hell outerwear, bargain-basement versions of the likes of FUBU and Sean John jerseys and pants, a whole slew of "wide-leg" jeans whose total fabric volume might well clothe an entire African village, and a host of thoroughly gaudy belts, necklaces, sunglasses and even boxer shorts, all designed to lure in the chronically self-image-deprived young men of the greater Toronto area. The tag line for this new wardrobe abortion might well have been "be a non-conformist, just like all your friends". Needless to say, nothing could be further from my own strong sense of self-direction and common decency, but with bills piling up and an earnest desire to fill my belly with gin and President's Choice macaroni and cheese motivating me, I dutifully set aside what dignity I retained from my high school years and utterly sold out.

Upon taking my position at the helm of this inevitable train-wreck, I met and quickly befriended the manager of the store, a 19-something like myself who I'll henceforth refer to as The Captain (in the interest of avoiding him beating me to death with a tire-iron for posting these potentially libelous stories). The Captain was truly a straight-arrow; after having been booked on an arson charge for burning down a barn full of tires while under the influence of copious ganja (seriously), he resolved to move his life in a better direction and took his responsibilities as skipper of the U.S.S. Horny Creek very seriously. Initially, he and I quite did not get along: he disapproved of my lackadaisical attitude towards all things work-related, and I found it necessary to regularly point out the large stick that seemed to be protruding from his asshole. In time, however, he and I developed a symbiotic relationship; just as the moon governs the tides and the spontaneous bleeding out of human females, so I worked upon The Captain as a mediating force, eventually transferring my total lack of regard for the alleged responsibility of our positions onto him.

Assisting me toward this end was our third-in-command, a twenty-something who I will refer to as E-Dubb, though I seriously doubt he'd have nearly so much concern regarding these stories as The Captain might - E-Dubb and I tended to take notes from the same page with respect to the utter shenanigans that constituted our job descriptions. E-Dubb and I spent the vast majority of our time at Horny Creek generally hanging out with customers instead of endeavouring vainly to sell them clothes that both we and they knew invariably stained, shrank, ripped or simply fell to pieces upon four or five washings. In general, our customers were reasonably intelligent men and women, often the parents of the aforementioned self-esteem challenged. Of course, given The Captain's intense desire to right his past wrongs through masochistic retail ritual, he was obliged to frown on our simple fraternization in lieu of hard budgetary goals.

We were therefore obliged to sell the occasional thousand dollars' worth of clothing, which isn't nearly as hard as it might sound. Granted, at thirty dollars for a pair of jeans, it takes a goodly while to reach that lofty thousand mark, but I'm going to dispel the rumor now: this shit sells itself. No matter what your District Manager has told you about "upselling" (or, as it's better known, convincing people that they really do need a faux-silver Ghetto Chain to go with their K-mart Sean Johns, and while we're on the subject wouldn't a belt be a good idea since you're a 32 waist and you're buying the pants in a 38?) you really don't need to convince anybody of anything - these kids come in knowing exactly what they want, or at least exactly what they want to look like, and they can put it together themselves. One might think that it would be more of a trial to sell to smart parents whom, as I've said before, were well aware of the sweatshop quality we were trying to peddle. One might think so, that is, before discovering that these selfsame, otherwise-intelligent men and women, are all total pushovers. I said before that New Money is a mid- to upscale mall, but really the only "mid" part about it is the existence of a Horny Creek within its confines - most everything else is Harry Rosen and Hugo Boss and so forth, so you can imagine that the clientele that frequent the mall are also ostensibly high-class, or at least have a lot of cash to burn. Couple the Platinum Card with a serious case of divorce-related guilt on the part of Mom and Dad, and suddenly they're charging up not only the Ghetto Chain and the studded belt, but also a very trendy Puffy Jacket (you know what I'm talking about - those Michelin Man-looking things favoured by suburban white boy gangbanger wannabes all across this great land), a sweatshirt that says something derogatory about girlfriends even though half these pint-sized G-unit disciples haven't even figured out how to masturbate yet, an assortment of white cutoff shirts (I understand why they're called wifebeaters but I can't bring myself to call them that) that look like they came out of Eminem's yard sale, and still have room left over in the bag for a pair of yellow boxer shorts with black ant graphics on them. Ants in the pants. Get it? Seriously.

It's a love-hate thing; on the one hand you get some kind of hollow satisfaction out of putting that red checkmark beside your employee number (not your name, your employee number) at the end of the night, signifying that you jumped the hurdle with room to spare. On the other hand, you've just partaken in what amounts to a fashion Holocaust. Your compliance in allowing for an impressionable youth or youths to parade themselves around with "I'm a big target" written on their saggy-pant asses for every real gangbanger to line up in their sights is kind of inexcusable from a moral standpoint. But like I said before: there is no dignity left in me, so I plastered on my best used-car salesman smile and sucked it up.

Here endeth part one, moreso because I have to take a bit of time and structure what I'm going to say next; for the moment this is all memory work, so I think I'm going to call up The Captain and E-Dubb and have them help jog my memory. A litre or so of whiskey might do it.

Localized Irritant, III: A Christmas Story

(Written 28 November 2007...I took it down originally because it was "too negative" according to some sources, but I think it's funny so I'm putting it back up)

It’s beginning to smell a lot like Christmas. You know the smell. The unmistakable scent of pine wafting through the Home Depot as they load in their crooked overpriced yuletide arboreal shit festival. The delightful vapour of bargain-bin gingerbread cooked within an inch of its structural integrity at your local grocery chain. The nostalgic aroma of gasoline fumes fairly crystallized in the minus-thirty Canadian winter air, fumes that pervade every stitch of your seasonal garments and leave you wafting petrol in your wake like you work at a Sunoco. And then, of course, there’s the spicy, metallic olfactory joy that accompanies this farce of a holiday every year without fail: the invigorating smell of desperation.

There’s a lot of things about Christmas that have never made a great deal of sense to me. I mean, I was raised sort of Christian, and I was definitely raised white-North-American, so I know the religious angle inside and out. Woman gets knocked up, convinces husband she’s carrying the child of benevolent bearded man who lives in the sky. For some reason husband does not stone her to death. The two of them walk halfway across Arabia so she can give birth in a barn. Three fellows on camels chase Halley’s comet halfway across the known world in order to deliver gifts of questionable utility. Child grows up to become spiritual leader, is nailed to a tree by his own people, expires, comes back to life in time for Easter.

Like so many hackneyed comedians before me, the part where I start having trouble is where this charming story translates into a totally different mythology: fat guy, red suit, reindeer, elves, all-night sleigh ride, chimneys, et cetera. As though one fictional omnipresent entity who “knows when you’ve been bad or good” wasn’t enough, Coca-Cola and its affiliates decided to construct a contender: enter Kris Kringle, Jolly Old Saint Nick, The Big Elf Himself, Santa Claus. Now, I get the whole marketing angle, especially the consumerism and the corporate promotional value of an easily-identifiable spokesman for the holiday. Everywhere you look, it’s Santa-themed wrapping paper, tee-shirts, pyjamas, decorations, children’s stories, made-for-TV specials, lunch boxes, jewellery, musical CDs, telephones, wheelchairs, foodstuffs, bedding, silverware and sex toys. I am not even kidding. I even get the moralistic cause-and-effect that the idea of “Santa” teaches kids: do the dishes, take out the garbage, say “please” and “thank you”, don’t put venomous spiders in your sister’s bed, because SANTA IS WATCHING and you won’t get any presents if you’re a little shit all year. (If you have ever been to church, you’ve heard a similar version of this: just replace “Santa” with “God” and “not getting presents” with “going to Hell”) Fine. I guess that’s the link between the manger and the North Pole: maybe Santa’s more palatable than Jesus in this day and age. But to me, either choice feels like parents passing the buck. Fear Santa? I don’t know about you, but when I have kids, the omnipresent entity they’re going to fear and respect is me. Because I’m bigger than Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Great Pumpkin, the Thanksgiving Turkey, the Hanukah Troll, and the Kwanza Leprechaun combined, and most importantly, as far as my kids are concerned, I AM GOD.

Anyway, I digress. I’m currently sitting at my job as a front-desk guy for a car dealership. It’s November 24^th. The last of the Halloween candy has just gone the way of the dinosaur. Two days ago the weather decided to take a sharp right-turn out of pleasantly Warm Fall (formerly known as Indian Summer before the INAC finally got around to politically-correcting that blemish) and into Freezing Bitch Cold Canadian Winter. Two weeks ago my neighbours were swimming in their pool, and now I’m getting ninety-five calls a day from frantic idiots who ignored last week’s warnings about an impending snow storm, and waited until two feet of freezing white shit fell from the sky to book an appointment to get their snow tires put on. Canadians have memories like goldfish. Every year around the same time in this country, we start experiencing the same weather: snow, freezing rain, hail, and other assorted cold unpleasant conditions, and EVERY YEAR people wake up on the first morning and go “OH SHIT! WHERE THE HELL DID THIS COME FROM?! I’M TOTALLY FUCKING SHOCKED! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET TO WORK WHEN THERE’S A QUARTER INCH OF WET SNOW ON THE GROUND?!” Never mind the fact that you’ve probably been living in this country most, if not all, of your life. Never mind the fact that it’s the same goddamn thing every year. No, instead of being prepared for the inevitable return of cold weather and bad driving conditions, they assume since the snowstorm didn’t hit exactly when it was supposed to that it’s NEVER GOING TO SNOW AGAIN. And, predictably, when it does, everyone loses their shit, forgets how to drive, gets in horrendous accidents causing hundreds of deaths each winter, and yet the population of people who are this stupid never seems to diminish. Good, now I have another reason to hate this season.

So I’m sitting at my desk, on November 24^th (it’s a work story, remember?) and I’m listening to the radio they have playing in the show room. Generally it’s a mid-range mix of soft-rock, easy-rock, easy-listening, easy-soft-rock-listening, and elevator music. This is okay with me. Unlike my last job where the speaker was located two and a half feet over my head and blasted at a hundred and seventy decibels right down on top of me, the speakers here are a good twenty feet above me and the volume is set to a more tolerable background level (read: easily ignored). I’m really not a big fan of the Beegees, but if I can tune out their whiny caterwauling then I’m hardly going to have a fit about it.

But there’s one kind of music I can’t tune out, and slowly but surely it’s working its insidious little way into the regular rotation. You all know what’s coming. Now, it’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas too.

A couple of things about Christmas music. First, I understand there are people out there who actually enjoy and look forward to this time of year, and in fact enjoy and look forward to hearing a different version of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” in every different store they enter during their week-long cash haemorrhage consumerist orgy. But the fact of the matter is that I am not one of those people, and further, I can state with reasonable surety that no one who has ever had to work a retail or customer service position over the Christmas season falls into the above category either. More on this later. For you, the valued customer, a sampling of Christmas music is a pleasant reminder of the joy and nostalgia and fuzzy cuddly warmth of the holiday season. You walk into one store and hear “Jingle Bells” as performed by that irritating bitch with the big nose (you know the one – where the tempo is accelerated to the point where it sounds like it’s being performed by a speed-addled Tourette’s patient), and that’s nice. Walk into the next store and you’re treated to Louis Armstrong doing his best Cookie-Monster impression to the tune of “Winter Wonderland”. And that’s nice too. Another store might even be playing a song with religious undertones – go figure – but they’ll be sure to play the version recorded by Jewel or Celine “The Aural Holocaust” Dion so as to maintain the illusion that they’re merely playing “pop” recordings and not actual hymns (even though it’s allegedly a Christian holiday…apparently Santa is a liberal). And that’s even nicer. Surely you, the valued customer, appreciates listening to a snaggle-toothed one-hit wonder from Alaska reaching for the high notes in “Hark The Herald Angels Sing” and not quite making it. Or, contrarily, stepping over the shattered glass that resulted from the nuclear force of the highest C note known to man, as it expelled itself out of the gaping sing-hole of a psychotic French mannequin from Charlemagne. Nothing says Holiday Cheer quite like permanent inner ear damage. But whatever trims your tree, I guess.

Anyway, the point is that Christmas music, to paraphrase Karl Marx, is supposed to be the opiate of the mall-going masses. I’m told the intent of piping this Holly Jolly nonsense all over major consumer outlets, is to remind people that the whole point of Christmas is to be with the ones you love and spend quality time with them, not to murder other parents in a desperate bid to claim the last Molest-Me-Elmo, or whatever the hot item is this year. I know, this philosophy is somewhat at odds with all the corporate hyping that goes on around this time: LAST MINUTE SALE, CHRISTMAS EVE BLOWOUT, FORGOT-YOUR-WIFE’S-GIFT SPECIAL, et cetera. The whole point of that side of the equation seems to be to whip the masses into a bloodthirsty, stress-generated buying frenzy, and let the winner take all. On some level I’m surprised they don’t hand out small-calibre firearms or bladed weapons at the door, a la “Battle Royale”, and just let these last-minute morons and Ho-Ho-Homicidal Maniacs have at it, because really: is that too far from what already happens?

For example, I once saw two customers (both women) get into a fist fight over a bottle of Jean-Paul Gautier cologne because it was the last one the fragrance department had in stock. These women were both impeccably dressed in designer brands and they both had wedding rings set with diamonds the size of the goddamn Rock of Gibraltar, so not only could they obviously afford to buy pretty much whatever they wanted from the counter, they were probably already using their husbands’ platinum card to buy him his own gift anyway. Yet, they were kicking the shit out of each other over a fifty-dollar bottle of cologne shaped like a naked man’s torso, complete with tastefully blended Ken Doll jockstrap genitals. I’m sure any man would be thrilled to grab a hold of that little treasure in his stocking Christmas morning. It wasn’t even a nice scent, unless their husbands really wanted to walk around smelling like they fell in a big bin of potpourri. Eventually, somebody called security and the boys managed to break these two out of the death-grips they had on one another’s throats.

What does this have to do with Christmas music? The consensus in upper management seems to be that Christmas music promotes higher sales (check) because it puts people in a generous, gift-giving mood (check), because it adds to the “festive atmosphere” of the store (all right, fine) and finally because it promotes a general sense of holiday cheer and joviality between customers during a stressful time of year (wait). Seriously, that’s as close to a direct quote that I can give you – a floor manager at the department store I worked at last year actually said this during a floor meeting. Holiday cheer and joviality, huh? Tell that to Steve in Loss Prevention who caught a Gibraltar diamond above his left eye while subduing the Gautier harpies and needed three stitches. Peace on earth my Aunt Fanny.

So it’s fairly safe to say that Christmas music as it is defined by upper management does not, in fact, have the calming effect on you, the valued customer, for which it is intended. It’s also fairly safe to say that the average employee, if lambasted for eight hours a day with every conceivable version of “Santa’s Coming to Town”, will likely become sick of it (if by “sick” I mean “violently ill and/or certifiably psychotic”). I’d be willing to accept it as one of the many, many necessary evils of this stupid holiday, except for one thing: if all of what I’ve said so far is true, and many of you will agree, then why, why, why must we start this process earlier and earlier every year?

I’ve been tracking this disturbing trend for the last ten years or so. Look, I know that “holiday”-themed sales, with the exception of some token Thanksgiving crap, go through sort of a slump between November 1^st when the Halloween thing is all over with (and when did people start treating Halloween as a legitimate holiday, complete with full-house decorations and light show? More on that another time) and the onset of the Christmas thing, which is still realistically five or six weeks away. I’m sorry that for those five or six weeks, you might actually have to try and sell something worthwhile and/or useful to your customer base, rather than stuffing all this throwaway holiday pabulum down their throats. I know it’s not entirely your fault, because you work on supply and demand. and generally speaking your customer base is downright stupid. “Gee, I really should invest in something intelligent like a microwave that doesn’t make a horrifyingly loud buzzing noise so it sounds as though you’re cooking a beehive every time you set the power level above 3, but HOLY SHIT, LOOK! FOR THE SAME PRICE I COULD GET THIS ENORMOUS CERAMIC TURKEY THAT LOOKS LIKE IT WAS STOLEN FROM THE SET OF ‘THREE’S COMPANY’! I know it’ll take up half my dining table since it’s larger than the actual turkey my measly wage down at the Stop and Go can provide my family for Christmas dinner, but DAMN it’ll look classy when I pair it with my ‘vintage’ (read: bargain basement) circa-1977 ceramic Santa-and-Elf salt and pepper shakers!”

It’s hard not to take advantage, I’m sure. But still, you could show a little restraint for the sake of the rest of us who actually need to go get that microwave, and don’t really want to be inundated with all this “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” horseshit.

About that: who gave you the authority to arbitrarily decide when the Christmas season starts and stops – particularly when it starts? Why is it that I walk down the street, still having to step over smashed pumpkin bits left over from Devil’s Night, and I’m already seeing tinsel and holly and pictures of elves everywhere? Isn’t this season, with the snow and ice and cancelled transit and family theatrics and gift-related guilt and alcohol abuse and rampant consumerism and depression and suicide, bad enough with out extending it by another whole month and a half? Last time I checked the song talks about the twelve days of Christmas, not the twelve WEEKS.

Look, everybody who was going to do their Christmas shopping early this year is already done by November, okay? You know why? So they don’t have to go to the mall and deal with people like the Gautier twins or the savage parents. And all the rest, the people that constitute 95% of your customer base, are going to do the same goddamn thing they do every year. They’re going to wait until a week before the day and then flip out, jump in their car, repeatedly hammer the horn and smash into other cars in order to get to the mall before everything is picked over, and once they get there they’re going to battering-ram their way through all the other toe-headed morons that wonder why hot-ticket items are no longer in stock by December 23^rd in the hopes of finding something, anything that will appease their kids and/or their significant others or ailing parents or bitchy coworkers or greedy friends or whatever. They will spend inordinate amounts of money on a credit card they cannot really afford, which will take them until next Christmas to pay off, and then they will get in their cars and smash their way out of the nightmare back to their suburban shit holes, just in time to catch Tim Allen starring in “The Santa Clause” on TBS for the ninetieth time this week.

So if that’s true (which it is), what’s the point in subjecting the intelligent consumers – not to mention your employees – to a month and a half of totally unnecessary holiday cheer? I know, I know. You will now quote facts and figures to me that prove Christmas decorations and a Christmas soundtrack are guaranteed to increase sales in November and early December. You will point out that if I don’t like the music that is being played in my store, I can happily go find another job where music and indeed contact with the outside world is not required. You will smugly suggest that if I like getting paid, since it’s not terribly feasible for someone to find a job this late in the Christmas game (thanks to your arbitrary dating system), I will shut up and do my job and like it. You will tell me these things and you will be right, and I will not care. I will hate you anyway. Fuck Christmas and fuck you too.

…Wow. Sorry about that. Much of the preceding off-kilter rant, I can only assume, was the result of post-traumatic retail stress disorder. In fact I like my current job very much, and in fact I’m doing my damndest to keep an open mind about the holiday season this year. I’m not complaining about the weather since it’s possible this might be the last Canadian Christmas I see for a while, and I’m not complaining about the customers since I get to pass the buck to the service department and they can deal with the snow-tire morons. In fact, I’m keeping everything pretty simple this time around. My Christmas wish list for this year: to see my friends when they’re in town, to make it through the day without any of my family members being incarcerated for mischief, public drunkenness, assault or murder, and maybe, if I’m really lucky, to be able to see my girlfriend soon after the whole thing is done with. That’s all I really want, so please, Santa, please make this boy’s wish come true. Make it a Christmas miracle, for me?

Wait…what’s that smell? It’s metallic and vaguely spicy and…oh, right.

It’s beginning to smell a lot like Christmas, folks.

And it smells like shit.

Localized Irritant, II: (Since When Do We Not) Support Our Troops

(Written 19 September 2007. Obviously it's a little dated now, given the way things are going in the Middle East, but I figured I'd put it up just for posterity.)

I just got a Myspace friend request from Canada. That's right, Canada wants to be my friend. I was unaware that Canada and I had had a falling out. We've been on relatively good terms for the last twenty-three or so years. Maybe Canada was pissed that I've been spending so much of my free time in transit to, thinking about, and generally working on moving to Texas. Could Canada be jealous? Naw, it's too pleasant a country to succumb to jealousy. Anyway, I accepted Canada's invitation, and we are now friends (again?).

But it seems Canada has had a change of heart since we last spoke. You see, I went to Canada's Myspace page, and all I could find was various maple leaf paraphernalia, a few references to the Tragically Hip, and a lot of "Support Our Troops" notices.

Okay, now I've been down in Texas for a few weeks now, and I've seen my share of Support Our Troops ribbons stuck to the back of large SUVs and just about every other conceivable surface. I can't remember which colour signifies "Support Our Troops" because it seems that every cause and charity now has a ribbon attached to it. Pink for Breast Cancer, yellow for Other Indiscriminate Cancer, white for Male Violence (which is so non-discriminatory), blue for human rights, red for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the cute little rainbow ones for gay rights, and even a black ribbon for - get this - the fight against ego. But the "Support Our Troops" one still seems to be most prevalent. I saw a Hummer the other day with six different ribbon stickers on the bumper, four of which were Support Our Troop ribbons done stylistically in the Red, White and Blue colours generally associated with the American flag. This driver also had a bumper sticker that read "Git 'Er Done" on his rear window and a few non-specific military logos, and my favourite: Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) peeing on something with a nasty look on his face. Bumper stickers make you cool, no doubt about it. The one that wins for me is still the lady driving around with the "Kerry For President" sticker still hanging onto the back of her beat-up Subaru. I guess she needed a new one to replace the "Bring Down the Berlin Wall" sticker she had on there up until May of 2003.

Anyway, the Support the Troops thing. So I'm loathe to enter into a political debate about a country whose political leaders have been somewhat lacking in my eyes, especially because I'm trying to move here and the DHS is listening. I'll say this much: insofar as "Support the Troops" goes, I'm all for bringing men and women back to their homes in one piece as quickly and efficiently as possible, because I'm tired of turning on the news and seeing more dead people. The concept of supporting one's troops isn't what bugs me about Canada's Myspace page (this is a Canada story, remember?)

What bugs me is that it's just another symptom of my country blithely following along the beaten path laid out by our neighbours to the south and adopting yet another element of their culture into ours. Canadians have always been proud of our military men and women, and we've always done our best to be respectful and honour those who have served in war - to the point that a certain War Museum is considering revising a plaque it has posted detailing the Allied attacks on Axis civilian populations during the Second World War (in which Canada took part) because it paints us as the "bad guys". Yep, we're willing to rewrite our history for the sake of our veterans. So I think it's safe to say that we are supportive and respectful in our own way already. I just don't get why we think we have to remind one another to "support our troops". Canada's involvement in the Middle Eastern conflicts of the last several years has continued to be a peacekeeping, humanitarian role (largely). We're there to help folks out who've been disadvantaged by the ongoing hostilities, and I really don't think you'll find a Canadian anywhere who is going to disagree with our political standpoint on the whole thing (Canadians feel free to disagree with me). Canada joined most of the rest of the Western world in giving the big thumbs-down to Operation Iraqi Freedom and the Coalition of the Willing and everything else, instead opting to do the same thing we always do - go in and help clean up the mess. We're doing our bit as international peacekeepers, and we're largely staying out of the cluster-fuck that is the main conflict out there right now.

So, we've determined that we do, in fact, support our troops in many ways and that we don't really need to be convinced that supporting our troops is a good idea (the way that a lot of Americans seem to require convincing that being in Iraq and sending their young people to get blown up is a good idea). So why does Canada's Myspace page suggest that we need to be bringing more attention to this idea? Why does Canada's Myspace page say that we should go to "rallies" to Support Our Troops? I'm well aware that this page is probably not sanctioned by any member of the Canadian government, but still: there are enough people in the world who are totally ignorant of the country I love that they might actually believe that Canadians on a whole are this stupid. We aren't a military culture and we never have been: granted, we'll fight like crazy people if we figure we're in the right, but we'd rather find diplomatic solutions to our problems. Hell, we've been putting up with the Quebecois for over a hundred years and have yet to start an armed conflict...that has to say something.

I guess it just bugs me when I see an expression of my culture that doesn't really accurately reflect what we're like (to my mind). Granted, we too have our share of psychotic rednecks who live by the mantra "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out", but they truly are a minority - by and large, Canadians really do live up to the stereotype of being friendly, non-aggressive people.

That said, I did "friend" the Canada page, just so my American friends can go have another good laugh at my expense. I'm sorry if this post was disjointed...there's more I want to say about this, but I'm not yet sure how to phrase it. I might come back to this issue later; I really just am trying to get the juices flowing again. More rage another time.

Localized Irritant I: Suicide & You

(Written 13 September 2007...but it still rings as true now as it did then, at least in my head)

I'm currently sitting in Fort Worth Texas, working on research for my graduate school writing sample. Okay, not really – I'm reading news on the BBC's website, because I have a penchant for procrastination.

The BBC is a pretty reputable news source - inasmuch as any government-sanctioned, industry-run news source can be in this day and age - but I'm telling you, the demographic they sell to are some seriously fucked up people. First off, the British paparazzi is one of the most ruthless organizations in the world: they can and will dig up dirt on anyone, anywhere, and at any cost. Give those guys two weeks in the Middle East, and not only will they be able to tell you where Osama is, who he's been schmoozing with and who he's fucking, but they'll already have concocted a sensational story in which he's actually Anna Nicole's baby-daddy. But the British public are even worse for feeding into this: they're a nation of very twisted voyeurs who get off even more than most Americans I've met on stories of human suffering and the debasement of their fellow man. As a result, I've been slowly eating my way through stuff run by the BBC, and they're constantly the same kinds of stories: death, murder, rape, suicide, death, celebrity titty, death, suffering, celebrity mental breakdown, death, death, death. It's a little much for me.

But this actually isn't a story about the BBC or its questionable journalistic ethical integrity, I just tend to get on a roll with this sort of stuff sometimes. This morning, I read the latest in the "suicide" category of news items. The story is a bit dated (March 23rd of this year) but the context is still relevant. For those who question my integrity, this story can be found at www.bbc.co.uk by looking in their archives under "chat room", as well as at a variety of other sites, including www.thisislondon.co.uk, which is the site I will be referencing particularly.

Apparently a fellow in the UK by the name of Kevin Whitrick became Britain's first case of "cyber-suicide" after logging into a chat room, turning on his webcam and proceeding to hang himself with electrical wire for a live audience. Sad bits: he was 42, had two 12-year-old daughters, and had been struggling with depression after being involved in a serious car accident last year, as well as coping with the death of his father as well as his own divorce proceedings. As per usual, the folks around him didn't notice a thing, though the lady who worked the convenience store across the street from his flat said he was very nice when he came in every night to buy eight cans of Boddington's. When Whitrick took the plunge, shocked chatters contacted police, and he was pronounced dead at the scene, during which time the site moderators closed off the camera feed.

Important things to note: the website in question, called "Paltalk" hosts a wide variety of chat rooms ranging from the starkly religious to the conventionally political, from the sicko celebrity to the sultry and steamy. One of the rooms hosted by Paltalk was ostensibly an "Insult Room" in which, according to the London Evening Standard, participants are encouraged to "have a go" at one another (that's British for making fun). I took a look at Paltalk a few minutes ago and wasn't able to locate any such chat room which means one of two things: a) I didn't look hard enough because there are several thousand chat rooms hosted there and I don't have that kind of patience, or b) the room was shut down, which is pretty likely considering. Either way, I've heard of these sorts of chat rooms before, and I'm sure you have too.

Okay. So this brings me to the good bit.

I think we can all agree that suicide is bad. It's horrible that anybody feels like they have to cut their mortal coil off at the bud, because there aren't too many people who deserve to feel that way. But the other thing is, in my personal opinion, it's pretty selfish to wax yourself, because you don't have to take responsibility for the kind of havoc you wreak on the people around you (believe it or not, there are people who give a shit). It's the ultimate guilt trip, right? Especially those fuckers that leave a note saying "It's not your fault"...that's the cosmic, mortal version of the "It's not you, it's me" speech that people in relationships give one another when they're trying to say "It's not me, it's you", but they want to soften the blow. And that just covers people who go quietly into their rooms, down a bottle of sleeping pills and a handle of Jim Beam, and leave the world as unobtrusively as possible. As for everybody else - the skyscraper leapers, the "I'm taking you down with me" psychotics, the subway jumpers, and in fact the webcam performers - it gets elevated to new levels. At that point you're actively involving other people - people who don't even know you - in your little drama play. Think how the subway operator feels when she wipes out some idiot at seventy-five kilometers an hour because he leapt off the platform, or the guy who nearly gets flattened by somebody swan-diving off a fifteenth-story balcony. Think about what it must be like to see some guy hang himself - live and in living colour - and because you're sitting behind a computer screen there's nothing you can do to prevent it. Worse, you thought the cat was kidding because he brought up suicide in an INSULT CHAT ROOM, so you goaded him on, thinking you were participating in some bizarre "Punk'd" facsimile. How would you feel?

Pretty fuckin' bad, I'd imagine.

Apparently, the people who commented on the article at ThisIsLondon agreed with me. The difference, of course, is that the commenters were all ready to line up and crucify everybody who was in that chat room that night - some comments even called for legal action against the other chat members.

Okay, I want to address this first, and then we'll look at some gems from the comment list.

Here you have a 42 year old man - an electrician by trade, so you assume he's got some brains. He's got two 12 year old daughters whom he professes to adore (according to his family and friends). Okay, his father died - that sucks. And his wife left him right afterwards - that was a pretty bitchy thing to do (which is thoroughly overreaching, I know, but I'm giving this guy the benefit of the doubt). And he was in a car accident (I couldn't turn up anything reliable about the accident itself or what happened to him - but if he didn't lose his dick in the wreck, and if he still had enough ambulatory agency to be able to break his ceiling and hang himself with electrical wire, his injuries couldn't have been that extensive). Plus, the guy is probably a functional alcoholic (eight cans of beer every night?), which is no good in and of itself. So the cat is pretty unhappy, which nobody is going to hold against him because he's had a rough year.

So what does he do?

He goes on the internet. To a chat room, where he can talk to people he doesn't know. A chat room which, I gather, was clearly demarcated as one in which "fighting" or "flaming" or whatever is allowed, and in fact is encouraged. He then proceeds to tell everyone in said chat room that he's going to off himself. This is akin to cutting yourself shaving and then taking a swim in the Great Barrier Reef: a feeding frenzy will quite obviously ensue.

I can say for myself that if I was in that chat room, I would have serious doubts as to whether this guy really meant it. I mean, what kind of person who is struggling with depression and having suicidal thoughts goes deliberately into a jackal's den like that? What would somebody like that hope to gain?

The answer, my friends, is justification.

If you've already decided more-or-less beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're going to make the Big Move, you usually don't tell everybody about it. Generally speaking, people who tell other people that they want to die are looking for some kind of support - they call it a "cry for help" I think. They want to hear that their life is worth something: they want to be validated externally because they can't find internal validation for whatever reason. Kevin Whitrick was obviously kind of like that - so why did he go to the one place where we was absolutely guaranteed to get the opposite kind of attention? It strikes me that the only reason somebody would deliberately go somewhere to get mocked and belittled before killing themselves is that they needed one last push in the "right" direction, one last justification for their decision, one last shred of proof that the world is, indeed, a cold and lonely place where no one understands their pain and other people exist only to stomp out the last vestiges of hope that have been sputtering within their breasts and holding off the inevitable blackness of existence. It goes back to what I said about suicide being a pity-party: woe is me, the world hates me, I'm justified in ending it all.

So where do we put the blame for this? I'd tend to put it on Kevin Whitrick, myself, because it's his life and his decision to end it, regardless of the other factors at work. If he had nothing else to live for, he had his daughters, and that should have been reason enough to find other ways - any other ways - of dealing with his problems. But here in North America, and obviously in Westernized cultures the world over, it seems to me that we have this amazing capacity to turn everyone into a victim. Have you ever noticed this? The rising prevalence of "victim criminals"? They don't call it that, but when the rapist is just a rapist because his father raped him, and his father raped him and so on back through the annals of time, and when the serial killer is a serial killer because mommy didn't love him like she should have because mommy was a crack whore because she was underprivileged and "fell through the cracks", and the kid who goes to school with a shotgun is a victim of the faceless media that told him to listen to Marilyn Manson and watch The Matrix and that's why he was violent, where do we put the blame? Who gets to take responsibility? See – everybody's a victim and nobody's at fault.

So instead of looking at this situation for what it is: a guy who was terminally fucked up and offed himself on camera after placing himself in a situation in which he was almost guaranteed to not be taken seriously, instead of looking at why Kevin Whitrick and so many other people like him are driven to suicide when suicide as it exists today was a relatively non-existent phenomenon prior to maybe a thousand years ago, instead we back into a corner screaming "Not me, it's not my fault, I'm not part of the problem, I'm not partaking in a sick, wrongheaded culture that spawns depressive suicide, it's not my fault that the Kevin Whitricks of the world feel so isolated and fucked up that they have to hang themselves, nope, not me...it's THOSE GUYS OVER THERE."

And who, in this case, are those guys over there?

"For all those people who watched this tragedy I hope you are proud." - Paul Rust, UK

"Those people egging him on are disgusting - I hope they feel ashamed." - Mia, England

"My thoughts the room should be closed and the people who had @ on need banning..." Lesley, Saint Paul USA

"The fact that those people goaded him into killing himself is unbelievable. Regardless of whether or not they 'thought' he was acting even joking in that way about suicide is not acceptable. Those people that encouraged him to go ahead and kill himself should be held just as responsible for his death as if they were there and assisted him with it! Those people have something seriously wrong with them in the first place...they need more help than a 'support facility' can offer." - Jenn, USA

"I can only hope that the rest of their lives they will feel responsible for the death of this poor man and find it hard to live with themselves." - Linda, Lynn, MA

I could go on and on because there are lots more comments just like this, but I think you get the idea. Basically, the prevalent opinion seems to be that it was not, in fact, Mr. Whitrick who was responsible for his own death, but instead a bunch of people located all over the world who were speaking with him via a specially-designed insult chatroom when he turned on his webcam and killed himself (I'd like to make special mention of the term "KILLED HIMSELF" here). Certainly, had Mr. Whitrick entered the insult room and found the kind of caring and supportive environment one would obviously look for in an insult room, his terrible decision might have been averted. Certainly, in mocking Mr. Whitrick's assertion towards suicide, the denizens of the insult chatroom were behaving completely out-of-character and in a manner for which Mr. Whitrick must have been totally unprepared. And yes, Jenn USA, they should be held totally accountable as though they were there assisting him, because without their "goading" Mr. Whitrick would doubtless have returned to his life and found the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel - perhaps even accepting Jesus and foregoing his alcohol addiction in favour of the children he professed to love. We can only hope that the hardened murderers of the Paltalk network will take this opportunity to reevaluate their life decisions and even, as Lynn MA suggested, "have a hard time living with themselves". If we're really lucky, they might even become so depressed over their "responsibility" for Mr. Whitrick's death that they might take a page from his book and off themselves too. They could start a whole chatroom on that very topic, in fact: "I killed Kevin Whitrick and now I want to die". Might want to disable webcam availability in that room, though.

Get your shit straight people. Take some responsibility for your actions, and hold other people responsible for theirs. I wasn't in that chatroom that night, so I can't say for sure what went down. But the scenario seems pretty goddamn fishy to me, and the minute we decide to start shutting down websites and handing out judgment to people for behaving in a way entirely accordant to the standards of the situation, well, what does that make us? I'm sorry Kevin Whitrick is dead, but I'm more sorry his two daughters will now grow up without a father. And as far as the people on the insult board at Paltalk go, I'd be willing to bet that they're already heaping enough largely-undeserved guilt on themselves as it is, without you fucking moral puritans advocating their crucifixion.

It all comes back to addressing the disease rather than the symptom. Instead of blaming all the worlds' problems on cosmetic issues, we need to get to the root of the issue: next time something like this happens, because it will, let's look at how we can prevent more fathers from hanging themselves with electrical wire rather than who we can blame for his personal decision.

And that's how I spent my morning. There will be more of this to come. I'll try to make the next one a little more light-hearted. Thanks for reading friends...I don't know about you, but I feel a hell of a lot better.

Localized Irritant - Prologue

(written 13 September 2007. This was the beginning of a series, which I'll probably revisit here at the new site.)

All right, so I'm going to try and make this a more regular thing. I've been trying to figure out what I can sit down and write about in a weblog forum that's going to fulfill a couple of requirements: a) it's something I actually want to say, b) it's marginally creative, c) it amuses me, and d) it amuses others. So I did some thinking, and I realized that the answer was right in front of me the whole time.

I'm not the most content guy in the world; a lot of stuff that I see around me every day, both in the news and personally, infuriates the shit out of me. The context doesn't really matter; I see things worthy of my intense hostility everywhere in the public sphere, and certainly in my day-to-day life. But the problem I have is that people, by and large, don't want to be exposed to the kind of "negative energy" I seem to radiate when I try and talk about the things that are bugging me about the world. There are a select few people that enjoy my half-lecture, half-rant pseudo-polysci diatribes, but for the most part people seem to view me as a pretty intense and easily-wired kind of guy, and honestly I get the sense that the majority of people just don't like to think too much on the subjects that preoccupy me, because in fairness it is kind of depressing and it's hard to think when there are so many ways to just forget about stuff and let it all slide.

Unfortunately, I can't bring myself to do that - partly because I feel like we should be talking about everything that goes on around us, like it's our duty to do so, and partly because it's just so overriding in my head that I have to get it out somewhere or risk giving myself brain cancer or something. So in the interest of maintaining what semblance I have of a social life and structure of friendships (and sanity), I've decided to start expelling the kind of bile I stockpile every time I turn on the television or read the news or leave the house, by doing what the rest of Middle America seems to do with the minutiae of their mediocre lives that nobody really cares about: post it in a weblog. Every time I post on one of these potentially spiteful and vindictive subjects, it will be titled under the name "Localized Irritant", more as a gesture of forewarning to the five people that actually follow my seldom-updated weblog than because of any intentions to make up a clever or marketable name.

I can't make any guarantees that all of these posts will be particularly funny - the one that will follow this post likely won't make anybody's comedy routine anytime soon - so if you're looking for a laugh-a-minute "Big Al" story, you run the risk of being disappointed. But if you're looking, as a hero of mine says, to "prolong your life by keeping your blood thin with rage", then I'll do what I can to dole out some serious white-hot hate on all the things that make us want to ram tuning forks through our ears. Join the fun, won't you?