Well, the problem with that, most soon discover, is that if it doesn't actually kill you, you will have to live with one hell of a headache. Everything has consequences, even when you're in a place you had thought to be the final consequence.
Although I cannot escape from my invisible prison, I can change my location within it.
I should mention here that one of the ways I deal with boredom -- when I have administered as much server above and beyond the needs of the system as can possibly be done -- is to drink, and often to drink heavily. This has gotten a bit beyond the level of "problem drinking", not that it matters to the performance of my job, I don't have a job, or at least I am not employed.
Look, I am completely unemployable; within my invisible prison I am hardly the ideal inmate. I do not have a college degree and I assure you that I shall never have one. It might eventually be possible for me to get one entirely online and it might be possible that I would never have to set foot on a college campus, and never again setting foot on a college campus is one of the primary goals of my life. I'd pretty much rather be hung by the neck and go straight to Hell rather than set foot on a college campus, and as far as I am concerned, every last aspect of a college campus -- especially including the people there -- is designed to make me feel that way. Huge open spaces full of strangers? Or worse, packed close-quarters rooms full of strangers, that can be reached only through a maze of tunnels in which total strangers mill about like cattle in a slaughter chute? And worst of all... these people actually like these conditions. The only thing that could make it worse for me is watching people stroll around languidly as if they had not a care in the world, and no business more pressing than to be out walking around in the hopes of having as many people look at them as possible. To me, this is absolute madness.
The Astute Reader, at this point, is probably calling for a "psych consult", and when the esteemed professional reads the paragraph above, they'll probably start reaching for the prescription pad and write "Xanax" or "Paxil" and cheerfully sign an "involuntary outpatient committment" order. Yet the esteemed professional would be making a classic mistake; there's a world of difference between "acute social phobia" and moral outrage.
The planet is grossly overcrowded already, and cannot sustain further population growth, yet we are on track to have a population exceeding 1-billions of persons in the USA alone by the year 2100.
And as best I can tell, college campuses (yes, I know I should write "campi") are a sort of social triage area, designed specifically to grant wealth and success only to people who actually like gross overconcentrations of humanity. Those of us who have deep instincts guiding us to a sustainable lifestlye in a sustainable population at a sustainable density, we are put into a situation which sets off every last alarm we have, not merely the deeply inbuilt instincts of people whose ancestors survived the Black Death because we couldn't stand living in crowds, but also the moral horror of watching the intelligentsia ignore their education, where history teaches us that crowding enables pandemic, and that the reasonable future of humanity within 25 years will be one of global resource depletion, especially of affordable safe water to drink.
How can these people stand it? Yet they actually like it. To me, this is like watching people who actually enjoy the taste of poison, cheerfully gulping it down.
Which sight, unfortunately, I see everytime I walk into the bathroom with a can of beer in my hand.
Getting a degree would be, for me, pointless. Even assuming that I got a degree without ever having to set foot on a college campus, it is almost dead certain that any degree I could get would do nothing more than qualify me for a job where I'd work... on campus. A corporate campus, but a campus nonetheless, surrounded by people who stroll around languidly as if they had not a care in the world, and no business more pressing than to be out walking around in the hopes of having as many people look at them as possible. When they're not in their cubicles, that is.
Maybe a degree in biology and ecological systems? I maybe could stand a job as a park ranger.
But that also might be a position where I'd suffer from a crippling moral outrage.
Part of my total unemployability is due to the fact that I was raised to loathe Fascism.
This loathing, I now understand, was a sort of compensation mechanism. My father was a forward-fronts effective in WWII, and that meant that he was a very pure German-American going up against very pure Nazi Germans. People could ask him "how could you fight against your own kind" -- and evidently a lot of people did after he captured them as enemy combatants -- and he could say "because you're not my kind. You're goddamn Fascists".
This loathing carried on after the war, and well into the 1980s, when I first heard my father question his role in military service. He said something to the effect of "I was proud to fight for the America I lived in, but did I fight for that then so that we could wind up like this, like today?"
Fascism, you see, is when government and industry cooperate to a degree which overrides basic human rights, or which subverts traditional ideology and folkways. Before the Nazis, the Germans as a people were not particularly hostile to Jews or Gypsies, no moreso than other European peoples. Indeed, some of the leading intellectuals all across Europe were Jewish, especially in the "leading edge" disciplines of mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Yet the Nazis fomented racial hatred and ethnic division, and further sought to impose a very twisted version of a variant of Odinism (the Germanic Old Religion) in the furtherance of re-igniting the fires of industry and economic growth. Seeking to regain the international competitiveness of the German economy, the Nazis only assured that their name would be associated with horror and infamy throughout the ages.
To abhor Fascism is to abhor, not merely the Nazis, but every element that leads to that awful place. When corporations demand laws, and those laws are enacted by the State, and when the State and corporations work together to enforce those State laws which the corporations demanded to increase their profitability, that is Fascism, and I won't support it.
Famed folk singer Mojo Nixon wrote a little anthem, which as I understand it is actually prohibited from being broadcast, but ti certainly was an anthem for a generation. Let's go back to the 1980s:
Well I ain't gonna pee pee in no cup Unless Nancy Reagan's gonna drink it up Said yo Nancy, we just say, no, no, no no no no no Well go ahead and fire me from my job There's one little think you ain't gonna rob That's my freedom, and my liberty
Well I ain't gonna piss in no jar Them evil peckerheads they done gone too far I wouldn't pee in their mouths if they were dying of thirst Yeah we got to get rid of this evil curse I'm alive and I'm fighting this jive
Everybody should go to Washington We can have ourselves a little fun You know, they want our piss, I think we ought to give it to them Surround the White House with a urinary moat So Ronnie and Nancy will have to float on a boat Get across the stinky, steaming yellow pee pee sea, oh
You know Thomas Jefferson is gonna be mighty pissed When he finds out about this, I said Come back from the dead, Tom, sock 'em in the head
Why is everybody so afraid of drugs? Man they afraid of what the drugs gonna do to us
Well I ain't gonna pee pee in no cup Miss Nancy Reagan's gonna drink it up Said yo Nancy, we just say, no, no, no no no no no Well go ahead and throw me in jail Ram hot spikes up my tail But you're not gonna get a drop of no peepee out of me I ain't gonna piss in no jar
You know Foghorn Leghorn wouldn't pee in no jar. You know Patrick Henry didn't "Give me liberty or give me a urine sample" now did he? Aw we sure enough rockin' out, Skid. Huey Long wouldn't piss in no jar! What's gonna be next, the doo doo police?
Well, that's Mojo Nixon for you. Then again, he's a lot more famous for his hit "Debbie Gibson is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child":
Now, it's not like I'd test positive, but it's the whole idea of the thing. It's moral outrage against Fascism.
Hell, if I wanted to get all fucked up on drugs, I can walk into any doctor's office and tell them I have trouble paying attention, and that crowds freak me out. Then I can trot on down to the store and fill the prescriptions for Effexor and Xanax, and go to work too fucked up to walk, meaning I would have to take the damned bus, not that I'd be able to care. I could pass any employment urine screening with no problems at all, because despite being too fucked up to walk, the drugs I'd be on would be legal drugs prescribed by a physician.
And I'd be too fucked up to care that I had abnegated a moral duty to oppose Fascism.
Well, since I don't use drugs -- well, I took Aspirin when I broke my hand -- and since I'm unemployable due to no less than two forms of moral outrage and a more instinctual fear and loathing of crowds and campuses, all that's left for me is drinking.
And if I stay at home and drink -- I almost always do -- I will drink far far more than if I go out and mingle.
But, the Astute Reader may sensibly ask, given that you are a total freak with amusingly bizarre medical conditions, with whom exactly could you possibly mingle?
That is a most excellent question!
With whom can I mingle? Other freaks! And where can I find other freaks? Ones who speak English, that is. Well, where do the freaks go to meet?
Downtown, in the District of Columbia.
Washington is, during the daytime, pretty much one honking huge college campus, and it thus fills me with a horror that goes beyond passing strange. Any city would do the same, but Washington is the epitome of a college town. Even the strippers have college degrees, it has more universities per-capita than any other city, so far as I know.
For the warm months, and even some of the cooler ones, the District resembles a college even more than you might expect.
The people you see stolling down the sidewalks as if they had not a care in the world, or striding purposefully from one place to another, look to me like alumni come to stroll around and reminisce about their Good Old Days, or alternatively, Seniors who know exactly how fast they need to walk to get across campus and not be late for class.
This reminds me of nothing so much as the children's literature classic "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle. I keep expecting to hear the throbbing of the giant controlling central brain, and tend to start wishing I had a handy tesseract to fold myself through to be somewhere else. But there's no tesseract and there's nowhere else but here in my invisible and inpalpable cage, today's location being in a crappy old vehicle rolling down Connecticut Avenue at exactly the speed limit in perfect synchrony with the traffic signals.
There's the other folks in town, the ones who aren't carrying on as if they were visiting alumni or classbound seniors, and these are what the "alumni" call "tourists", and treat like Freshmen or maybe Sophomores.
They generally treat me like someone's dog that wandered onto campus and needs to be kicked until it goes away, but that's usually during the daytime.
In the evening, most of the worst of the people giving it the air of the world's biggest university get on the train and ride back out to Clarendon or Bethesda, to bitch about how hard it is to find good help and how dare the county not have fixed that streetlight since they called it in first thing in the morning, whatever. Good riddance. Most of What Makes Washington Weird lives in Montgomery County or across the river in Virginia. At night, the Real Washington comes out and plays. And along with the Real Washingtonians, also do the freaks come out at night.
The parts of Washington where I go, the Real Washingtonians know me, for better or for worse (all depends on point of view and place of encounter) and I know them.
Mostly, these aren't strangers on some insanely crowded college campus, so it doesn't bother me to rub elbows with them, and most of them are used to me now. We've been hanging out so long that we all know the local jokes. And, generally speaking, we are locals in a local bar and so we tell jokes about people who aren't locals.
For me, it's generally a relief to get out of the house and not be stuck sitting on my porch watching the assorted nazis up and down the block as they sneak and skulk in their suburban schemes of skulduggery and snitching. It's even more of a relief to be able to have someone finish your jokes for you and everyone has a good laugh. For example:
Q: What's the difference between a Tourist and a Carpetbagger?
A: Carpetbagger has an address.
Q: Why is a Tourist better than a Carpetbagger?
A: Tourists go away.
Q: Why is a Carpetbagger better than a Tourist?
A: You've got to be fucking kidding me!
This is the punchline, and everyone invariably cracks up laughing.
It's such a relief to me to occasionally hang out in bars with friends, most of whom are actually pretty normal people. I may be a total freak, but I am their total freak. It's a relief, especially considering that after eating some nice chicken wings and some pizza and hanging around for several hours after last call, I will have to drive home to the part of my invisible cage where I sleep and spend most of my time. Ah, suburbia, Aspen Hill, where the place is considered "too weird" for people from the District, mostly because the goddamn carpetbaggers refuse to even speak English.
But there's something I know about the District, and to some degree the environs. Labor Day, for most Americans, marks the end of Tourist Season. For the District Denizens, the Real Washingtonians, it marks the beginning of Tourist Season, much as the beginning of December marks the beginning of Deer Season.
Some people leaving Washington after Labor Day has come and gone will leave with a quaking dread of the Weirdness that is Washington. Why? They think, "them folks down there is all fucking crazy". But it's not true.
I have this, well, I guess he's a friend though sometimes it's a bit hard to tell, person I know who epitomizes the Weirdness. Basically, he likes to fuck with people, which is a pretty common trait in the District. One of his favorite things to do is to mix modes. For example, in a conversation about choosing a color scheme for new cabinets, he emits the body language of someone upbraiding someone else for having fucked off some responsibility. You think you're having a conversation about redecorating. Everyone else just looking at you thinks that you let them go on vacation for a month and then forgot to feed their dog for them and that they're letting you know how displeased they are and how quickly you are going to be sued.
Etc etc. This sort of thing is a perennial DC favorite, and one of the things that makes the District so confusing to someone. Another one is when someone comes up and is all smiles and handshakes as they tell you in a roundabout but by no means uncertain way that they intend to destroy your business, destitute you utterly, and hire your bodyguards and pay them to whip you out of town. Then they give you their business card and tell you to give them a call if you need anything. Welcome to Washington. Leaving so soon?
Well, Labor Day is coming and so I won't be partying downtown for a while, not until the smoke clears, so to speak.
So, in the meanwhile, I'll just be sitting around being utterly unemployable and generally ineducable (so long as the Campus Creatures dominate society, anyway), and trying to cut down on drinking, although there's just not much else for me to do.
Well, I could blog, but I think I've said about everything that I need to say, and nothing much interesting is happening in the news.
But in the meanwhile, I still can't shake the feeling that there is Something Coming... Something Big... and Coming Soon.
