The Post I Didn't Want to Write

What a firecracker of a title I’ve got working there. Yes, I’m going right back to the “I can’t title for shit” well. Cut me a break, I have very few wells!

So, some time has gone by since I wrote a post that didn’t have anything to do with what I’ve been listening to over the previous year. Warning : A new one of those posts is beginning construction very soon. And I’ve wanted to return to this sad barren wasteland of a blog. But I had absolutely no idea what in the Hell I wanted to write about.

Yay. Wonderful. Huzzah.

And then I got laid off.

So I guess that covers the “What’s new, Cliff?” portion of things. Good. Got that out of the way. I also discovered that I’m allergic to Purex laundry soap, but that offered pretty limited options for decent writing fodder. One can only write “Holy shit, was I itchy!” in so many ways. And then this happened like so much really crappy source material. So, go me?

Anyway, yeah, got let go. The circumstances around the whole thing were frankly a little bit bizarre and a little bit nonsense, but that’s a story for in person. I’ll try to maintain some barely coherent level of semi-professionalism in the online world. Sweet mercy, he can LEARN! Anyway, it’s where I currently find myself, so I guess it’s just back to what I always do whenever I find myself in this position. Except that I actually don’t remember and don’t know what to do in this position because it’s been ten years or something like that since I’ve actually been here. Yep. A decade. I was surprised, too. I’ve achieved some basic level of relative stability. Until now.

And I have basically no clue what to actually do.

Okay, I know what to actually do in terms of basic stuff. Like looking for a job. Actually, the job search had already commenced a month or two before this went down. Again, that’s an in person kind of topic of conversation, but suffice to say that I wasn’t a happy boy. And I already put in my EI application. That’s new. Never done that before. But now I’m just left waiting. Waiting so long, in fact, that I had to call them up so that they can actually call me back at a date in the near future and finally tell me whether or not I qualify. And I’m sure that process makes sense to somebody somewhere. Good for them.

Never fear, Bureaucracy Man is here to wrap everything in seventeen layers of needless red tape!

Of course, this follows a small chunk of time wondering whether or not I would even qualify for payments, since my previous employer wouldn’t actually tell me why I was now a former employee. To be exact, I was told that they were “unable to disclose” that. Which led to panicky wondering about what insane reason they were going to gin up for all of this, only to finally get access to my Record of Employment and see the words “Was not a good fit”. That was what you couldn’t just tell me? That? What the Hell? This is ignoring the fact that I think this reason is both totally made up nonsense, and yet also totally accurate and correct, but that’s diving dangerously close to territory that would negate my status of barely semi-professional. So yeah, it has been a lovely few weeks of stress for someone who hates things being completely out of his control and who does not deal well at all with the unknown. Good times!

Getting back to the general point of all of this, I know how to do all of that stuff I just spent a paragraph sort of describing. And I know how to deal with the reality of being angry. I’ve spent too much time in the past just stewing to head back down that terrible roadway to nothing good. So now I just sort of hold it in a reserve tank that gets opened up once I’m working out or doing anything

Congratulations on such an incredibly dated reference!

physical and need a bit more oomph. I figure that way I can actually benefit from it. Congratulations. You ‘beat’ me. I’m going to get better now. I do very well with that “Oh yeah? Well, double dumb ass on you!” sort of mentality.

But then I end up getting all kinds of pissed off at myself because I’m slipping back in to really dumb habits and just generally feeling sorry for myself. And fuck, that isn’t helping anything, is it? But I can’t really pretend that it isn’t there, even though I feel like an idiot for actually feeling slapped because the job I didn’t want anymore anyway is no longer mine. Or maybe I’m angry that I left a job that I liked to get more hours at this new place and ended up completely miserable and now have nothing to show for that change except waiting. Of course, I’m not psychic, so it isn’t like I could have known that my interview was pretty much me being fed a bill of goods and that this soon-to-be employer was going to be an irresponsible bunch of WHOA, let’s just steer this bad boy back on course to utter confusion again.

So maybe I don’t know how to deal with being pissed off. And I don’t know how to deal with being stressed out. And I’m trying to walk through this mental maze of realizing that I’m not the idiot that I was ten years ago, but I’m a completely different brand of idiot now, and that idiot is just as incapable of understanding what in the world he’s doing. Like I said before, I thrive on showing other people that they were wrong. Perhaps I need to figure out how to make that work on myself, too. “Oh yeah, me? I’ll show…me.” Okay, I am now completely lost in the morass of whatever the Hell this paragraph was supposed to be getting to.

Look, dear readers! An image to reflect how you're probably feeling right now! You're welcome.

Getting back to what I REALLY don’t know how to do any more, and that’s somehow fill all of this time. Because holy mother of fuck do I find myself with a lot of goddamn time! Sure, I work out 4 days a week, I walk every day, I meditate every day, I need to eat occasionally, and I fire off applications. But that really eats up shockingly little time. That leaves a fuck ton of hours that I find myself needing to burn off. Too many of them end up expended on things so totally pointless that I couldn’t even tell you what I spent them actually doing. And that DOESN’T include stuff like playing The Division 2 for 55 hours (and counting, because that game actually is fun), or finding myself watching Baywatch episodes on E!. Side note : Holy shit, is the music on that show awful. Not just the shitty songs they commandeered to play during the weird musical interlude sections of nearly every episode, but that general background music is shockingly bad. This was the #1 show on television, and THAT was the best they could pull for music?! And I could do other things, but other things usually end up being something like this exercise in whatever exactly it is that I’m trying to accomplish here and now.

And I really don’t know what this is. I don’t know what this was supposed to be. Maybe it at least lets me knock the rust off of whatever mediocre level of writing talent I possess so that I can write more? I will try to make it better than this. That shouldn’t be a difficult goal to achieve. I don’t know what the fuck to do with my time to avoid finding myself just spinning away down another weird rabbit hole like this. Seriously, this is like the blog post equivalent of the album some artist releases when they’re at peak arrogance level. This is my own personal Fat Axl moment. At any rate, I don’t really have much of a choice. It’s not like I’m just going to sit here and do nothing. That doesn’t get me anywhere. So something it is. What will that be? I’ll tell you when I know. I guess I’m hoping that maybe if I get all of this out somewhere it might stop clogging up the interior of my skull. In the short term, it’s going to be a lot more waiting than I’d like. I’m just going to have to learn to deal with that.