TBT: The Brutal Truth

It's Not Quite The Darkside ...

You may have noticed the Pay-Pal donation box appearing under the ol' mugshot within the last few days and may be worrying that it's some kind of omen that means BlogAds, TV spots, and book deals are sure to follow. Rest assured, that's not happening (well, maybe except for the TV spots but I don't think America's Most Wanted counts) and its because of a number of reasons.

For one, BlogAds is one of those nefarious services where at the onset, anyone with a blog could sign up for but now has become the equivilent of a bourgeois "Gated Community" where A-List bloggers from the right and left serve part-time sentry duty guarding the gate from the dirty B-List blogging masses (that is, whenever they're not blowing all that "Let's Help The Lesser-Known Blogs" smoke up their collective asses). In other words, think of the MSM hallucinating on a bushel of shrooms ... wait, we've allready got that. Nevermind.

Where was I? Ahh, yes -- BlogAds!

The above also brings me to believe that I would literally have to kiss a heck of lot of ass in order to be invited into the BlogAd "Gated Community" and that goes completely against one of my own fundamental rules: I kiss no ass less they shave it first. It's a universal rule that doesn't discriminate on the basis of race, religion, sex, or politics. Besides, after 2 and a half years at blogging, it's way too late for this old stale buzzard to pucker up and whore himself out even if I could manage to cast off that rule (and thus crucify whatever values or principals I have left).
 
Of course, if any A-list bloggers were to read that, they'd probably get pissed and cranky and dust off that whole "jealousy/envy" card as their wont to do from time to time whenever one of us B-List, C-List, or Z-list bloggers gets all fuckin' uppity (only to turn around and get doubly-pissed when the MSM plays the same "jealousy/envy" gag against them) but that doesn't apply here.

How come?

Over the past few weeks or months while I've been relatively silent experiancing blogging burnout, I've noticed that if some of the readers of A-list blogs would catch and then question some of the Ad content that I myself find questionable on some A-list liberal blogs, the A-list blogger would have to enage in one hell of a contortionist kabuki dance in order to defend themselves and their Ads (that is until they get pissed and castigate, "trollify", and subsequently ban the reader that brought it all up in their HaloScan).

As nice as it would be for me to recieve 200-300 replies in my own HaloScan (be they positive or negative) let alone 4 or 5 figures from BlogAd revenue, I figure that the best way for me to avoid a kabuki dance myself or alienating my readers would be to avoid BlogAds period even if it means remaining poor and seeing shut-off notices for my gas, electric, and cable in my snail mail.

Plus, if I want to piss off/alienate any potential readers of this blog, I'd rather do it directly -- perhaps via this very post -- as opposed to doing it by proxy and I've been seeing alot of the latter happening on some of the A-list liberal blogs and, in response, the A-list liberal blogger tosses the "It's My Blog - Hit The Bricks If You Don't Like It!" card which I'm starting to find to be more of a universal cop-out more than anything admirable. The more that cop-out gets tossed around, it's going to pull a Bob Novak eventually -- developing a life of its own and growing so goddamned monalithic that it discredits the bloggers more than it protects them and it's one of the reason why I think the idea of having some of these A-List bloggers replace actual MSM collumnists to be an excercise in futilty.

Don't get me wrong -- replacing Joe Klein with John Aravosis would certainly be an improvement -- a vast one -- but one will be hardpressed to not come to the ultimate conclusion that by doing so, TIME is merely replacing the clown drums in a Texas rodeo -- clown and all. If Aravosis is willing to talk down to his audience now in either his blog or his HaloScan, he's willing to do that in an online or dead tree edition of TIME just like Joe Klein does and that's what seperates them both from Molly Ivins, the late Mike Royko, and his current reincarnation as Keith Olbermann.
 
So uh ... yeah, no BlogAds, no 300+ HaloScan replies, and definately no possibility whatsoever of seeing my Feedburner chicklet going above the numeral 5 for the foreseeable future and this post probably ensures that. If not, well maybe this will: the quality of my writing either has or currently is swirling down the hopper right alongside Bush's approval ratings without no rebound in sight as, for the past few weeks whenever I've got a taskbar full or browsers open and notepad fired up with the intent of doing some blogging, that's as far as it goes.

My thoughts veer off to the dire financial and circumstancial problems such as the electric bill, the phone bill, the gas, the cable/internet and the fact that I live in a mouse-infested, bumble-bee riddled, moth farm of a shack with a leaky roof (whenever it rains real hard, the utility closet gets a steady drip-drip-drip that could eventually light this place up like a roman candle because the electric breaker box is in that utility closet, too) and cinder block walls where the bottom 6 inches love to accumulate the lovely substance of black mold that I've neither the cash nor the inclination to deal with any longer (and neither does the landlord for I told him about the utilty closet hole before my father died three years ago ... and it's still there getting worse with each storm). 

At least three times a day, I'll catch out of the corner of my left eye something small and blacker than the mold streaking along the wall and, for a split second I think it's Pope Ratzinger, instead turns out to be a field mouse that I recently discovered -- after pulling a cushion away on my couch looking for a nickle I was short on getting a newspaper not the a nickle but the corner of the cushion closest to the arm chewed pretty well -- had slept with me on the fucking couch all Winter long. That is just in my half of the house alone which is basically a renovated garage (and sure as hell feels like it, too -- both in the Winter climate and whenever one of those bloated bumble bees happens to buzz past my monitor in the Spring/Summer which never ceases to make me flip backward in my chair in a panic)

A step which duals as my only heating duct with a side open for the exhaust tube of the clothes dryer followed by the doorway leading into the other half of the house (a step that gave birth to a blackbird the other afternoon and how the fuck he got into the basement in the first place is someting that I don't want to know since it sure wouldn't surprize me as this sorry-assed house is just like Dick Cheney's heart -- peppered with all kinds of holes but still manages to keep ticking) is the living room and kitchen area where a 62 year old suicidal, hypertensive, chronic migrane headache I call Mom (her chornic headaches; not mine - she's had them since she was a teen). On any given day, she's usually sitting in her chair her head in her hands, fighting over the phone with some asshole government bureaucrat, or with an automated system that wants her to press 3, press 8, insert her social security number, press 9, drape both fucking legs over her head, use her tongue to make her upper denture plate protrude out of her mouth, and then use her hands to scoot along the carpet as if she were a dork-dog hybrid with a bad case of rectal worms, then press 531 followed by the # key, and finally hold on the line another 43 minutes before she gets to even talk an outsourced human being/government bureaucrat.
 
Fuck the kitchen and move on to the stairway in the corner of it by the back door that decends into Sizemore Catacombs where most of the room is taken by a big white cynlider shaped piece of aluminium hooked to an ugly old furnace. This monstrosity is where the heat from the furnace is supposed to rise and heat the whole house but it doesn't. The majority of the heat stays in the swiss cheeze basement because the bottom of that damned aluminum tub is rusted out, causing the furnace to work extra hard burning up a shitload of natural gas. In front of this used to be a nice 30 gallon hot water tank but when the bottom of it rusted out and flooded the entire basement last year, the landlord replaced it with a worthless 17 gallon tank -- worthless because you can't take a shower and do laundry neither at the same time nor within 2-3 hours of each other. All of that in a house out in the boonies, 4 miles from the edge of town, just past the public bus line (and the deadliest intersection in the county), and rent is $575 a month.

Can't afford to live here, can't afford to move, and because of my rapidly deteriorating back and hips, I can hardly physically afford to make it to the bathroom let alone the 4 miles down the road to where all those lucrative jobs are supposed to be in a town rapidly becoming nothing but banks, pharmacies, golf courses, and trailer parks as far as the eye can see in a nation boasting about its 4% unemployment rate. At my father's funeral three years ago, a cousin roughly 10-12 years older than me was using a cane and constantly winced at his slightest move. I didn't have a cane then ... but I do now and I'm only 32 in a country that expects -- nay; demands -- that if I haven't been able to cane my decrepid gimp ass down the road to a $50-an-hour computer service call in the last year, I should still somehow cane my decrepid gimp ass down to flip burgers or greet Wal-Mart shoppers.
 
At this point, my intentions of blogging go away. TBT goes another day without another update and as I close all the open browsers and notepad documents, they're only being replaced with a turbulent, unmitigated, ravenous fury that says if my decrepid gimp ass is going to do any caning anywhere whatsoever, it's going to be down to the Department of Human Services where I use it to emphesize every sylable of "WHAT THE GODDAMNED FUCK?!?" that I roar throughout the entire building because I know damned well that the shit my mother an I are experiancing in this country isn't a burden we share only and that's just more Kerosene for my rage since I believe that in the richest freakin' country in the world, there's no damned excuse for it at all.

None.

And as the inferno starts to consume whatever's left of any rational let alone independedent thought left from the point of my Adams apple up, I start to entertain the wild idea that the solution to America's problems can be inculcated in the following piece of eliminationist rhetoric on a campaign trail somewhere: SAVE AMERICA -- WATERBOARD A  SENATOR!!

If not, it could very well serve as the title to another hit song by Big & Rich.

The point is the lack of cash coming in and the ridiculous quality-of-life in this ... well ... slum of a house that, if it were located in Montana, it would give birth to unibombers and manifestos instead of bumble bees and mice (I can furnish pictures or movies of as I've been tinkering with video capturing, editing, and encoding software) is bleeding into every facet of my thoughts and emotions, which motivates me to just sit here and stew rather than blog because I'm confident it's going to either directly or indirectly effect the quality of my writing if it hasn't allready. Toss in a gallon of apathy and press "Mix".

So, as a last ditch effort  -- a truly desperate effort, to be honest -- I had to break down and do something I hope I'd never would've had to and that's put up a Pay-Pal donation box in the hopes of a miracle ... because at this point, its going to take a miracle to stem the crimson tide my blue liberal eyes see washing upon the shore every single day that beckons me to stop thinking about decent shit and instead entertain pondering on crazy shit -- crazy shit that could pump me full with enough adrenaline, piss, and vinegar to actually try caning my gimp ass down to road to wherever the turbulence leads me ....... and that's probably where DHS and America's Most Wanted comes into the picture.

It's also where my mother leaves the picture.

Nobody will be here to stop her from downing a shitload of her pills.

posted by Sizemore at 5:39 AM

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