Interlude

Interlude

C: i can't tell if you're feeling better or worse.

B: why can't i be both?

C: because that's weird.

B: when have i ever been not weird?

C: touché.

B: Watch where you're flinging those acutes. Someone could lose an eye.

C: i'll be more careful in the futuré.

B: ow! You bastard! Hiding it as a pun on Canadian grammatical idioms. Diabolical. I guess i did whiffle ball the fact that Rush is next. Take your lap while i have a trainer minion fetch the tweezers and gauze. I don't miss C-cophant, but i'm gonna have to keep my non-watering left eye on you.

C: Ha! What did you do to miff Skip and Sandra?

B: failed to raise enough money to publish Fragile Moments and then just kind of ignored them for all of July and August.

C: that'll do it. Think they'll come back, or is it just you and me now, again?

B: i dunno. If you want to get technical, Skip never asked to be here in the first place, and Sandra was always lamming it for the refreshing lack of luxury. She don't exactly likes being a princess like i do. Still, tedium is only entertaining for so long, you know? Not for me, tedium is my imaginary middle initial, but for everyone else it's only a temporary respite. I'm not the boss of anyone, remember?

C: mostly.

B: mostly what?

C: i mostly remember. Some of it's still fuzzy, i think i might have dipped a toe in the river Lethe on the way under here.

B: bygones be gone, always move forward.

C: yeah, i feel you. Want me to crunch some numbers?

B: i took the liberty myself. 130ish for 50 crummy envelopes. I could do it today, but it's kind of a why bother situation, you know? It's not that i don't want to, it's more that there's no value in bothering at the moment. The books mattered at the time, the albums not so much.

C: seems kinda sad, if you ask me.

B: i don't think i did, but that's how normal tend to people look at it. I doubt you're gonna argue i'm normal people. It's not sad to me, it's just not worth it.

C: you lost me, i don't get it.

B: ok. So, i had crushing depression-worthy debt that won't go away until i die, right?

C: sure, that i think everybody understands.

B: ok, well the "until i die" part has been magicked away with a supurfluous "K." Everybody's out there screaming "it's not fair that other people get a thing i don't need," but completely ignoring the fact then when i start paying again, i will actually be making a gods-damned dent in my student loan debt, aka paying it off. No private financier has even offered in the last 3 decades. An entire year has passed since we collectively stopped paying, people are mad about 80 cents more expensive twinkies than the fact that people like me work full time jobs and pay our taxes, but wish the compound interest on our pretty much mandatory at the time student loan debt was less than we earn on our monthly paychecks, or at the very least stop accumulating on our underpayments. Now it is. The meme-sharers can eat my middle finger, but that's what actually depresses me. People have been so incredibly shitty to each other over the last 3 years that i can't even muster up the care anymore. They won. I just can't care anymore, and that's what's depressing. "But, but, i didn't mean you, Bottle, you're a great guy, i just disagree on politics and stuff." No, eat me. I hate the fact that i don't care, but i definitely don't care about the Republican opinion on anything. Enjoy. Enjoy your death penalties, and health care restrictions, and guns in inappropriate places, and 20-cent raises, and private schools, and fast food restraunts, and lottery tickets, and hating your methhead neighbors, and mysogeny, and whatever else that guy on that AM radio station pulled out of his ass this morning. That's your world, shut up and enjoy living in it. If 10 years of doing whatever i feel like just to amuse myself in the evening isn't enough to prove your politics are garbage, then enjoy your garbage 'cause you've earned it. Conservative Christian America is crap. Doesn't mean Conservatives are bad, doesn't mean Christians are bad, it just means the combined force of the two without any accountability for being wrong half the time can eat a turd sandwich. Be offended, i can't possibly care. Your ideas are garbage, and if you're gonna insist that you are what you eat, then you better enjoy eating garbage, 'cause i'll be simultaneosly paying off my debt and continuing to do what i feel like for fun. Smart people things like reading and drawing and making music. 500 months at 400 a pop, but i'll be up for parole after 120 of 'em. How do you like them apples?

C: you sound so angry, but the face on your face is total Wednesday Addams. I'm terrified.

B: with good reason. Dangerous criminals who say please and thank you, and actually listen and reply to what you say will be loosed on the unsuspecting world. Knowledge might be imparted, talent might be rewarded, friendliness might not have a dollar sign attached to it anymore. Halloween all year long. I will malevolently be nice to people who both do and don't deserve it, and there is nothing you can do to stop me!

C: i am so confused.

B: me too. Fun, isn't it? Now, if you'll excuse me, i have some more of those albums you handed me to review.

C: wait. I'm terrified to ask this, but what about inflation?

B: do you mean inflation of the money supply, or rising prices?

C: both?

B: k, well actual inflation gets cancelled out by actually paying taxes on net profit, that's half the reason taxes exist. Rising prices happen because people raise their prices for any number of real or imaginary reasons. Stop raising prices and let the subsidies from the other half of that tax money do their job for a change. You don't need to think like a criminal to catch a criminal, that's TV brain giving you a dopamine high, if you participate in good faith the criminals will be that much easier to spot. All conservative economics has done in the last 60 years is make money incredibly expensive, high time we liberaled up the place. The funky colored hair and tattoos kind of liberal, not the Bourgeois salesman type of Liberal the Conservatives are desperately ironically trying to conserve at gunpoint. I say imagine a reality where Zuckerberg had chosen the McDonalds and run it into the ground because no investor is gonna save your town's 27th McDonalds, that's way more hilarious. I will once again be voting against Earnst, Grassley, Reynolds, and any other Republican politician i'm allowed to vote against because they represent garbage. I hate garbage. Enough of my silliness, let's hear Rush's take on escape from the stultifying hell of the kind of garbage suburbia represents. Spoiler alert, subdivisions are garbage (except the musical kind, smaller groups of 8th and 16th notes are totally lovely).

Chapter 7