January 20
This morning I sat through the inauguration upstairs, the bosses smug in their pajamas, barking at the television, slurring ejaculates firing out of their fat lips. What a thing to witness. I live among Palin supporters, old guard Republicans who extol Christian virtue out one side of their mouth while spitting vitriol always out the other. Obama a terrorist, Obama not even a citizen, the “negro situation,” the elegance of Laura Bush, the accolades due her husband. I left the room after a comment about how blacks might finally get their acts together, went to pull weeds from the superfluous garden of these superfluous people, to tend to shoots & weeds & improve their lives even as they go about the deleterious business of condemning everyone else’s. At 11:30, I rose from weeding, nauseous with the morning, with what I was doing. I came in & packed for an hour, ate & went back to work. The neighbor stopped over in the afternoon to join the chorus & pitch polemics at blacks, Jews, women & “liberals,” that last of which, apparently, each & all share the same incessant need to feel entitled to hand-outs that he himself is forced to provide. These people. Tireless onanists.
I will work out the week & be done with it. Have your opinions, but hold them close at bay. This kind of quiet, jingoistic tirade is born of an attitude of superiority founded solely on wealth, predicated on what can only aptly be called blatant stupidity or vicious idiocy. These people make Palin seem like a Rhodes Scholar versed in ethics & full of compassion. I realized today very clearly that I will only find myself smaller & smaller if I stay on here, that my daily toil will actually, in its small way, be a hindrance to the world. That dreaming will itself diminish, joy grow specter-thin, any fire in me lull into a seething ember. I will come to despise myself, too, if I tolerate this life because I think I must. I cannot.
It is not the politics at all, though they provide a framing. The priorities of these people had confounded me well past the point of patience before today. The last one to work this job lasted six years, a sad, tired, dim-witted man who finally one day disappeared without notice, fed up. They spit on his memory. What took him six years has taken me less than two months. Continue to work for despicable people & you begin to wonder at yourself. No righteous indignation, no smoldering pride, no sense that I have been unjustly treated—only that I know what will work for me & what will not. I have learned that well, over & again.
I will work out the week & be done with it. Have your opinions, but hold them close at bay. This kind of quiet, jingoistic tirade is born of an attitude of superiority founded solely on wealth, predicated on what can only aptly be called blatant stupidity or vicious idiocy. These people make Palin seem like a Rhodes Scholar versed in ethics & full of compassion. I realized today very clearly that I will only find myself smaller & smaller if I stay on here, that my daily toil will actually, in its small way, be a hindrance to the world. That dreaming will itself diminish, joy grow specter-thin, any fire in me lull into a seething ember. I will come to despise myself, too, if I tolerate this life because I think I must. I cannot.
It is not the politics at all, though they provide a framing. The priorities of these people had confounded me well past the point of patience before today. The last one to work this job lasted six years, a sad, tired, dim-witted man who finally one day disappeared without notice, fed up. They spit on his memory. What took him six years has taken me less than two months. Continue to work for despicable people & you begin to wonder at yourself. No righteous indignation, no smoldering pride, no sense that I have been unjustly treated—only that I know what will work for me & what will not. I have learned that well, over & again.
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