I'm very tired.
I got home from work around ten tonight, which means I pulled a thirteen hour day today. I'm one of the few lucky Americans who still has a union job, but even so, I'm not making a cent of overtime. I'd have made the same money if I had gone home after eight hours. They have us on a deal known as a "day rate", which means I'm getting paid for an average workday every day, or the union equivalent of having a salaried job.
I'd feel cheated, but it is the same all over. My friends with salaried positions are all working longer hours for the same pay too. We all go in a little earlier; 8:30 is the new 9:00, and we're all going home later too. It could be worse even; the lawyers and accountants and consultants all seem to have to work a few Saturdays and Sundays each month, and their Blackberrys all work 24-7. We all send our coworkers text messages and conference on Nextels and I wonder how anyone ever got anything done back in the days when I was in grade school and no one I knew had call waiting.
I can still remember dialing numbers over and over waiting for the busy signal to end. Do they still have busy signals anymore, or will I tell that to some 22 year old girl I'm talking to in a bar and she'll wonder what the fuck I'm talking about like I'm Grandpa Simpson?
I wish I didn't have to be getting home from work at 10 on a Friday. But wishing won't make it so. When I got home, I posted that I wanted to retire, and I was asked if I meant I wanted to leave dKos.
But, to be honest, I wish I didn't have to blog either - both in general and here at dKos. I wish that the people who get paid to report the news and inform the public did their jobs well enough that there was nothing new I could tell anyone. I wish the political left in this country was less arrogant and the political right less retarded. I wish all of us, myself included, were quite a bit more humble. I wish that I didn't have the feeling I have before every election which is that I understand the game and how it has to be played; I just can't believe we're all stuck playing such a stupid fucking game.
To paraphrase what Bill Maher just said, I can't believe it is about Mark Foley and his goddamn cock and not about the incompetent thieves who have the audacity to call themselves the public's servants. I can't believe that we're fighting a war in violation of every principle of every military thinker from Sun-Tzu to Clausewitz to Liddell Hart and John Boyd, and that isn't the issue, but "cut and run" is. I can't believe that every few days I have to explain all over again that no, I'm not a libertarian because I only care about myself; I'm a libertarian because I see a hole in the ground down on Chambers street where the towers were, and a wading pool where New Orleans used to be, and kids not learning in Newark and Baltimore and the Bronx - all of this in spite of all of our taxes and a seven trillion dollar public debt, and think we better come up with a different plan of how we're going to help people.
So in a few weeks, I'm going to drag my ass out of bed even earlier on a Tuesday morning, and bring myself over to the local community center where Narcotics Anonymous has its Tuesday meetings and I'll vote, which any economist will tell me doesn't really make any difference because the odds of any election being actually competitive where I live is statistically meaningless. And I'll still feel a little good about that, in spite of having little affection for the vast majority of people I'll be voting for, if for no other reason than because far better people than I have fought and died for this simple right. And I'll get up extra early because even though it is the "law" that my employer has to give me a chance to go vote that day, and even though my union-negotiated contract has that legal responsibility promised to me from my employer, I know it won't do me any good with my employer to actually try and make them honor it, and I'll want a good reference when I move along to my next job.
And no matter what happens with the results of that election, not that much will change. Our kids in our cities still won't learn as well as they should, and we'll all still owe several trillion dollars to the Chinese. But maybe they'll put something down on Chambers Street, and maybe they'll get someone to pick up the garbage on Bourbon Street, and maybe they'll find some guys over at the Pentagon who can understand what Clausewitz did in 1820. Who knows, maybe even the obsession with what Mark Foley did with his cock will accidentally lead to some positives regarding the financial and legal issues that this government is actually supposed to be attending to, when they aren't asking us to give them what is left of my salary after they take one-third and my union takes its dues and Con Edison takes a few hundred each month because the government convinced them to sell me gas generated electricity. Which actually is important because if I don't give them what money I have left, the other party will get to ban internet gambling and contraception and teach the kids in my neighborhood that Adam and Eve had a pet brontosaur named Dino.
The stakes are astronomically high, and the game we're playing for them is so retarded, I feel like I'm trapped in an episode of Deal or No Deal. It is all I can do to remember that I want the prize more than I want Howie Mandel just to shut the fuck up.