#226

Logitech. All these damn library keyboards are logitech keyboards and man, there is a reason they do not cost very much. They're pretty new, I haven't seen this iteration of their logo before, but logitech is just reliably shitty. One rung above the kinds of brands that only exist long enough for the upper management of the company to abscond with conned millions, leaving unpaid hourly workers and ripped-off consumers in their wretched wake. 

Dunno, maybe this new logo impresses a new durability. I will say that it does not equate to improved ergonomics.

*

There is that school of thought that implies that ripped-off consumers are a section of the free market that has only itself to blame for its gullibility. Maybe it's a correct claim, but it's not really a fair one. The problem is that even simple maxims like "you get what you pay for" don't fill your pocket, so the countertautology to that is "you get what you can afford to pay for". And now we are circling down the drain of total uselessness together, one of us thinking it is rad and cool to basically steal from poor people and is impressed with someone who knows how to pick low-hanging fruit and one of us can only gesture weakly at the notion that it is better to not do that, though there is no cogent reason not to. 

You are free to con whoever you want. A sucker is, after all, born every minute. But if you have balls, I don't know why you'd pick on suckers. I guess the same reason people climb mountains. But the creature derided as a sucker is much more often merely desperate, merely hungry, so the nobility of conquering an obstacle simply because it is there is absent, at least so far as I can see. Anybody can piss on a fucking anthill. Punching down doesn't make you anything but a bully and a louse, in my opinion, but I can't argue with the fact that the world will treat you like a champion and suck your dick for it.

*

Hey, I'm mad that my local library, one of the most well-funded in the nation for the size of the population that it serves, buys crappy cheap keyboards! There's like thirty computers in this area I'm sitting in, plus special fancy computers for the blind and deaf and otherwise differently abled in another part of the library, but I'm mad that I can't punch the keys. Do you see this, my cried river?

Fuck it. You should see the size of the monitor. Hella crisp display, too. Nobody gives a fuck about keyboards as long as they work and this is a rich person's library, even though they let homeless people chill in it.

If you're bitching, the bitch is usually you. Nine times out of ten, you are the bitch. So it goes. 

*

Been missing teaching, so after this post is done and I kill whatever time is left before they open the doors, I'm going to go down to the local youth center and see if they have any paid writing instructor positions that I qualify for. Got decent experience, much of it through the center itself, so chances are even. Most writers ditch this town, see. Most writers try to go where the action is supposed to be. My action is wherever I happen to be. So there is hope. I will probably volunteer if they can't pay me, but if I do that I'll either demand and receive a raise at work or I will find a kitchen that isn't being strangled by managerial incompetence (or outright sabotage, I can't decide which because they tend to look so similar) and pays an adult wage. 

There are dishwashers around here making two fifty an hour more than I get for prepping and cooking two hundred pounds of food a day on average, plus running the shift and making the schedule and doing part of the orders and stocking the orders and putting out fires and whatever fucking else needs to get done. I have mentioned having to clean human feces. 

What I am getting at is that the punishment I have felt it is necessary to take by working my job is feeling pretty much over. I am now feeling like my rent is punishment enough, and it should be easier to make enough dough to cover it.

This has been more bitching, and once again, I am probably the bitch. Time to change that situation, one way or the other.

*

Keep forgetting to roll myself an after-work joint. That is another thing that has to change. I mean, it's fine today, because I prefer to do interviews sober (I am a square like that) but damn. Not doing the post high takes a lot of flavor out of it, honestly. A lot of writers and artists would look down their noses at me for this, but fuck them. I'm here to have fun.

Smoke weed every day, children. Go to sleep stoned and wake up to get high. Tell your parents I said so.


--JL