"I see all this potential and I see it squandered. Goddammit, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Advertising gas and chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. We have no great war, no great depression. Our war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives. We were raised on television to believe that we'd all be millionares, movie gods, rock stars . . . but we won't. We're starting to figure that out.

"And we're VERY pissed off."



Tyler's words coming out of my mouth.



I wake up to the blaring of my alarm clock. It's a modest hour to wake up, of course; far be it for me to wake up before the sun. That'd be a personal sacrilege that I refuse to abase myself to. So when I lurch out of bed to stop this godforsaken sound, the sound that seems to greet me in an electronic monotone with, "Wake the FUCK up! It's a beautiful day! Wake the FUCK up! It's a beautiful day!" the numbers on the face read 10:00. After two thoroughly uncoordinated attempts, I finally manage to stifle the fucker on the third swing. The noise stops, and the day starts.

One heaving sigh and a silently whispered "Fuck" later, and I'm on my feet and ready to go. Not so the other sleeping occupant in this room . . . not wanting her introduction to the day to be as abrupt and as sour as mine always is, I let her go on sleeping, free to wake up whenever the hell she wants to. Not like most people. Not like me.

On legs stiff with pain I lurch down the stairs, barely managing to retain the upright posture bequeathed to me by my ape ancestors. The morning is when I'm at my most animalistic, the least "evolved" . . . communicating in grunts and growls, hunched over like my caveman progenitors, looking at everything through a haze of "fight, fuck, food . . . fight, fuck, food . . ."

It's this last compulsion that drives me on this morning. The desire for food is a lead ball of pain sitting squarely in my stomach, warning me to eat something, ANYTHING, and SOON, else the level of torture be sadistically increased. So the mighty hunter stalks his prey on the parched Serengetti of his kitchen, finding his target at last: a bowl of cereal and some milk.

Eat, chew, swallow. Rinse, and repeat.

The meal finished, I seem to have regained some of my more "human" sensibilites. Now, I'm more prone to that more recent compulsion of human nature, that which was born in Greece thousands of years ago but that only became an absolute NECESSITY of life within the past fifty years of our civilization . . . "ENTERTAIN ME!" my mind screams petulantly.

Into the living room I careen, and plop down in front of the thing that is at once my slave and my master. Aliens looking down on us sitting in front of these boxes and banging away at keyboards incessantly would know who the true rulers of this planet are. Not watery bags of carbon and protein, no. These plastic and silicon gods before whom we sacrifice ourselves every day. . . and I am no exception. I spend the vast majority of the silent morning paying homage to the 21st century, communicating without speaking, travelling without moving. The world is at my fingertips. I am pilgrim and I am god all at once. In one moment a 15 year old girl from Australia is hitting on me, the next an uneducated Limp Bizkit loving piece of shit from god only knows where is telling me to "go fuk urself." Ahh, the wonders of progress . . . to think that years ago people had to TALK to one another. Thank god those days are over with.

Sitting in front of my silicon altar, I hear my beloved come downstairs at last. This morning, like most, the extent of our conversation is stunted and banal. The things we DO talk about are invariably those things over which we hold no control . . . money, bills, the sourness of the present, the unquantifiable future. Tiring of these infuriating topics, we turn at last to deafening silence. Silence, that is, except for the sound of the keyboard, ticking away the seconds, the minutes, the hours . . .

Desperation sets in silently upon both of us, sitting uncommunicative in the bowels of our apartment. Desperation on my end for the approaching of that dreaded time when I must leave this place and go to a hated job . . . desperation on her end for the life she thought she'd have with me, but doesn't. It was all shits and giggles, long ago, in another life . . . but harsh realities have set in and drained the life out of both of us. The intruding hand of capitalism has deprived us of any motive, any purpose in life other than to pay bills, pay taxes, and EXIST.

A shower . . . a half an hour of shared sorrows in an unkempt bedroom . . . and the daily goodbyes are said. And once again, the horror begins.

I have to drive her car, out of economic necessity. It takes twice as much gas to drive my car as it does hers, and I have much farther to drive than she does. I climb into this glorious throwback to the days of Japanese domination of the U.S. economy . . . this '88 Buick LeSabre, a marvel of purposefully poor engineering. Will it start today? Will it strand me today? This is the most excitement I get out of my day, that element of RISK . . . driving in this car that I do not and cannot trust, missing the security of my own car all the while.

The drive begins, an exercise in barely controlled fury. Human stupidity is best seen in the way we fight our wars, but a very close second can be observed on the highways and biways. I can't describe accurately enough the RAGE it causes me to be stuck behind a semi truck passing another semi truck, all while going twenty miles per hour below the speed limit. Nor can I emphasize enough how murderously pissed off I get when a ninety year old man driving a car I could never afford (or want) is driving so slow that he backs up traffic for blocks behind him. I can tell stories of sitting for endless half hours in unnecessary traffic jams, driving slower than I could instead walk, all the while festering in impotent frustration over the uselessness of it all, wondering what the FUCK could be so important to turn an interstate highway into a fucking parking lot . . . only to find out at the end of it all that five thousand driving souls decided all at once to STOP on the highway for the flashing lights of a state trooper pulling over some jackass in a Ford Whatthefuckever.

In front of me is a late model sedan, going five miles below the speed limit. In the lane next to me is a semi truck. Two lanes to my right, a Dodge Neon weaves in and out of traffic doing 90, easily, narrowly avoiding major accidents with every lane change. Growing, nay, ominously CHARGING into my rearview mirror is either a BMW or a Dodge Ram . . . one after another, the jackasses come, the jackasses go, turning the highways into a war zone of idiocy. All I want to do is drive to my goddamned job, but instead I get to run the Indianapolis 500 every fucking day.

Just as my patience is very nearly spent, my hour long journey through a hell of diesel fumes and wildly gesticulating middle fingers finally comes to an end. Finally, I reach my destination, and the glory of my day TRULY begins.

I am not my job. So I must remind myself every day. I am NOT a radiopharmaceuticals manufacturing technician. I am Kai. For now, yes, I manufacture radiopharmaceuticals, but it's definitely NOT who I am. It's just what I do. It's just what I do . . .

I get dressed in a uniform that makes me look like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man's cousin . . . and true to the incredibly useless nature of this job, I've got my last name proudly displayed on my chest. Once again, I'm working a job where I get to wear my name on my shirt. O joy . . .

You might be wondering what a radiopharmaceuticals manufacturing technician does. Trust me, it's not worth explaining. Suffice it to say that only one other job I've ever had was more boring than this, and that was a job I had five years ago in a scrap yard putting aluminum cans into a trash compactor all day. This isn't quite as boring, but it's a VERY close second. Suffice it also to say that performing the duties of this job requires maybe a ten thousandth of my available brain power, leaving the rest of my restlessly active mind to seek out entertainment in ANY form . . . and of course, failing to find any, my brain does the worst thing possible: it turns in upon itself.

Three hours pass by in a haze of self recrimination and hatred of life. Trapped within myself as I go through the motions of this boring motherfucker of a job, I dwell endlessly upon the things I have no power over. I think over the past five years of my life, and what an incredible waste they have been. I could have been a college graduate by now, I tell myself, if only I hadn't made so many stupid mistakes. Those two words careen inside my skull, rattling uselessly like the ball in an empty can of spray paint: If Only . . . If Only . . .

By the same token, I wonder if college is really the answer to my problems. Will I truly be any happier if the cycle finally ends, if I finally stop working boring-ass blue collar jobs for pennies above the poverty line, if I can FINALLY start college? Will I be any happier sitting through classes that I can practically sleep through and still effortlessly pull off a 4.0 GPA? Will the desperate scrounging for financial aid, scholarships, etc., etc., really be any better than the desperate scrounging for rent money, food money, etc., etc.?

Over the past ten years, my life has been a constant series of staring longingly at seemingly greener pastures, only to find out that the grass quickly withers and dies once you finally get there. Will this really be any different? This is the kind of shit I think about when my mind wanders. The fact that every time my life sucked, for one reason or another, I came up with an absolute Goal for making it not suck anymore, and I accomplished that Goal only to find myself back in the same fucking hole again. Over and over again, the cycle goes on . . . from high school one to high school two to college to the military to the job market . . . I finally found someone in this corn-filled turd of a world who loves me just as much as I love her, and even THAT isn't enough.

When these thoughts hit me, that's when the fear sets in. Some of the fears are more common to everyone: fear of getting Her pregnant, fear of not being able to pay my bills. What I fear most of all is that I will never be truly satisfied with my life, no matter what does or does not happen. I could go to college for eight years, get a PhD in astrophysics like I want, become a world reknowned astrophysicist with groundbreaking new theories of time and space. Or I could become a writer as many people have suggested to me, write several bestsellers and make my living doing something I truly enjoy doing- inflicting my thoughts and feelings upon those of you patient enough and interested enough to endure them. But I don't know if any of that will make me truly happy. I can't see a future where my life brings me anything but dissatisfaction. Like Tyler says, I was raised to believe that I can do ANYTHING. The damning part is that I STILL believe that. I KNOW that I have the power to move this world, to shape it into something better . . . but for now, I'm stuck.

If someone were to come up to me, someone open to the mysticism of prescience who could look into the future and say, "Kai, this is your life. Despite all your struggling, you're going to spend the next 45 years of your life doing shit jobs just like the one you're doing now, get cancer, and die forgotten." If someone told me that, I would kill them, kill about 30 or 40 people in a wild rampage, then accept the bullets of the SWAT team like they were thank-you notes. Maybe this is what happens to all those maniacs you see on the news- maybe they realize the utter futility of life and try to make their mark on the world the only way left to them, their fear made real through lead and blood and pain and death.

This is the kind of shit I think about when my mind wanders.

Lunch. Peanut butter and jelly, and a book by Frank Herbert, one of the Dune series. I go out to her car, away from everyone, and lose myself in the interesting lives of fictional people. For an hour and fifteen minutes, I'm living someone else's life, and becoming jealous of a character. I want to save the world. I'm convinced it's what I was put here to do. But instead I rot in this cliche of existence . . . I'm the breadwinner, the supportive one, a rated-R version of Ward Cleaver. None of those sitcoms from the '50's ever showed the grit of existence . . . you never saw June asking Ward why he didn't love her anymore, never saw Wally and the Beav' smoking hash under the high school bleachers, never saw Ward kissing his boss' ass just to keep his shitty 9 to 5 job so he could support his family. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it's also less interesting. Who wants to read about the reality, the SHIT of life, when we live it out every day, an endless pinwheeling of self-destruction?

Four more hours of work. Four more hours of self-examination, self-hatred. I become my own worst enemy when I take a true look at myself. I can't blame society for my problems, not with any ring of truth. Nobody made my choices for me, so by that token I have no one to blame but myself. And that only makes me hate myself even more.

Work ends. I get back on the highway, another hour of a raging desire for genocide on a planetary scale. I long for the days when people could drive down the highways and see maybe five other cars in half an hour . . . instead, even at 10 o'clock at night, I get to dodge and weave and brake and scream between some of the country's worst fucking drivers on the country's most dangerous and ineptly designed stretches of highway. Maybe it'll rain tonight and make it even MORE interesting.

I get home, and for five minutes all the bullshit of the day disappears in a blur of something that almost approaches happiness. After that, though, the night is merely the morning in reverse . . . more time spent on the computer, more time spent in silence.

This is by no means the worst day anyone has ever had. Somewhere in Rwanda, a five year old girl is slowly starving to death in a puddle of her own shit. In Israel, an 18 year old boy minding his own business gets his head blown off by an UZI-wielding member of the PLO. In Russia, a family regards their meager crop of turnips and wonders if they will survive the winter. In Philadelphia, a man loses his business, his wife leaves him, and he hangs himself. In Los Angeles, an altar boy finds out that there's something to those rumors about Father Bob after all. Someone, somewhere, is being forced to listen to the Backstreet Boys against his will.

I sympathize, on a very small level . . . but like most people, I'm selfish. It's MY life, it's all about ME. And the greatest joy of my day is when it is finally over, and sleep claims me at last . . .

I wake up to the blaring of my alarm clock. It's a modest hour to wake up, of course; far be it for me to wake up before the sun. That'd be a personal sacrilege that I refuse to abase myself to. So when I lurch out of bed to stop this godforsaken sound, the sound that seems to greet me in an electronic monotone with, "Wake the FUCK up! It's a beautiful day! Wake the FUCK up! It's a beautiful day!" the numbers on the face read 10:00. After two thoroughly uncoordinated attempts, I finally manage to stifle the fucker on the third swing. The noise stops, and the day starts . . .

Rinse, lather, repeat, ad infinitum . . .


"All we have is restitution
Living out your date with fusion
If there's a hope, please end it faster
Don't feel guilty, massive RIOT!
Somebody said that they're not much like I am, I know I can
Make enough words up for you to follow along, I sink and then some . . ."