One Way or Another This Darkness Gotta Give

Well, my life is such crud these days, I can’t even muster up my poison pen. I haven’t started watching Dr. Phil or anything quite that horrible just yet, so no need to call the experts, please.  It’s nothing really, nothing more than what an adult is expected to tolerate in this day and age without going postal.  No pretty much we all are not expected to go postal, that would be clearly unacceptable. Especially considering I work at a library.

As I have written before, librarians are far more likely to just quietly get wasted after work, which you’ve got to admit is a lot better than the postal route although probably still a healthy distance from ideal.  Ideal would be a world where things worked a little better for people, instead of whoever the hell this world was built to work for.  Robots or someone.

It’s kind of funny that America can’t seem to figure out a way to make life better for folks — it just gets worse, seems to me.  My parents, they had it okay compared to today, not that I think their sort of indentured servitude was the bomb, but it was a lot closer than what passes for the working class standards that I look around and see now. 

Today, there’s too much stick and not enough carrot.  We have to work too hard and worry too much, and we still may end up getting dumped on skid row by our HMO.  But some leader is going to come along and put our discontent into words, and get us all riled up for change.   And then he will probably be shot, too — and that’s okay. 

Actually, well, it’s not okay. But the human race is still going to limp along forward even with these giant-ass greedy ticks sucking us dry, and we are going to still make progress overall, despite that life is full of totally unnecessary pain and problems for the masses, because, well, because that’s what I tell myself. That increment of progress and the fact I work at the library — these things keep me free of any thoughts that have anything to do with anything that carries stamps, other than my own bills, which I dutifully pay on time almost every month.

This (admittedly-challenged) rationale, along with the smidgeon of free expression still allowed in this world, keeps me going.  And as long as bad apple lives and shines, she’s going to mush herself into that crack in the armor (or possibly, the armoire) of the Man and start stinking, whether she can find her goddamn pen in this bloody freaking mess, or not!

Give Me Liberty or Give Me a Job

Seeing as budget axes tend to fly around this time of year, at least in the public sector, my mother was asking me yesterday if I had a resume online.  “Oh, I have something online all right,” I said, and wondered quietly what my future employer would make of Bad Apple’s Rot Report.

Since I love blogging, and I do love it, I tend to tell people about it and be a blog-vangelist, if you will.  Just this week someone said to me, “I want to start a blog, but I’m afraid to open myself up to it.”

Oh yeah, I once felt like that.  But it’s funny how once you start writing your own blog, things that worried you about blogging just slide away, and you realize you are writing things to the whole freaking world you never really thought you would so much as whisper in public.  And it’s not like I have an anonymous blog and that potential employers and my parents could not find it – they most certainly easily could find it, if they bothered.

However, because even one’s friends and boyfriends can’t seem to hardly be bothered to read one’s blog most of the time, and in fact, one’s readers tend to live in entirely other countries, continents, in parts of the world one has never been, well, one gets lulled into a sense of consequence-less pure expression, from which Bad Apple’s most twisted rationales can find enough rope to hang themselves three times over.

Which is how I find myself contemplating Ben Franklin’s musing on all-day beer in the workplace, defending library workers against saintly public images, and promoting the worst marketing ideas the best minds can generate (not to mention my post on Get Your Ass to Work Day, not exactly written for my future boss’s eyes).  I do my best to be a Bad Apple, although generally, feedback says I’m not all that bad, which in my book is simply not bad enough (and at which point, I refer folks to Baby Needs Salt - nothing says capital “B” Bad like a recipe for baby). 

Of course, this all begs the question, just how bad can an apple be?, and for what purpose?, which naturally I ask myself all the time.

Anyway, you only go around this crap shoot once, right?, so I figure you might as well develop one inch (that’s 2.5 centimeters) of psychic real estate that freely expresses what no one else but you can say.  Sure, the world has some crazy motherfreakers, and you can be one of the better ones, if you just take a chance on the interest of strangers and the disinterest of those closest to you.

Let me take this chance to thank all those bloggers, readers, and nerds that make it so easy for me to resolve all these messy issues and just produce this bruised fruit for you, whoever the heck you might be.  I love it when you comment, you know.

Ben Blows US Beer Buzz: Ben Franklin, Brilliant Dude but Early Teetotaler

I love Ben Franklin, and working in a library, you could say I owe him a lot.  But as great as the library and his other huge ideas were, what really intrigues me is the amount of space he devotes in his autobiography to the topic of drinking in the workplace. 

What we often forget in this country is that our great industrial economy was founded with a workforce that was at most times if not all-out drunk, than at least pretty well buzzed.  Beers weren’t just for breakfast in Franklin’s time.  A good header of stout was enjoyed throughout the day by workers, and Franklin, ever the efficiency engineer and perhaps monumental party pooper, couldn’t help but notice by day’s end that the workers weren’t doing nearly as good a job as they might have had they not been on their 12th pint, or whatever.

As we know now, America’s love of all-day alcohol was a train wreck headed right towards prohibition.  Forcing it underground only seemed to create even more delight in drinking, although certainly no one was doing it at work anymore.  Not openly, that is.  Probably there were always folks drinking at work.  They still do, although less now than ever.  Gone are the three martini lunches of my parent’s day.

I don’t know any day drinkers myself, I just once heard a rumor, that’s it.  And of course, librarians have sort of a generalized reputation for being alcoholics, ironically, since Mr. Franklin was the brain-daddy of the public library. But the best alcoholics, the ones who last for years that is, always wait until after work to drink anyway. 

Yeah, even here in way-out California, the Puritan work ethic and Benjamin Franklin’s teetotaling sentiment have had their way, and now most drinkers, as it is in Japan, only let alcohol ruin their lives after work.  That’s the way it should be, turns out. 

Yep, old B. Frankie was right again!