I heard a funny joke today...

A friend sent me this email today...

Hey guys.

Just read some of the headlines and took note that we're in the early stages of a dollar collapse. Central Bank's share of dollar reserve purchases was 37 percent this year, and yen and euro are preferred reserve currencies as of this date. If you have the resources, I'd switch a portion of your assets to commodities.

Probably the best outlook we have for the next few years is stagflation, assuming there's an effort to save the currency. As a practical matter, my humble opinion is reason will prevail and the health care bill is going to die due to this consideration. Could be wrong, but I think conservatives and centrist democrats will agree it's not do-able at this time. It's going to be the 1970's all over again. Upside is our exports will get very competitive, and we're probably going to usher in lots of fiscal conservatives in November 2010.

Here are the first few thoughts that came into my mind:

Assets? I've been unemployed for almost a year. My 401k lost money when I was forced to cash out, both in terms of tax penalties and poor market. Everything else has been slowly trickling away paying for living month-to-month. As if being a single parent wasn't hard enough when I was working, I am now seriously looking into food stamps to help get through the next several months. My assets consist of my health and my daughter. I had a plan to get her through college. Had.

So forgive me if I can't help but laugh at others worries regarding their money being in trouble. My focus regarding the fundamentals of what is really important has been severely narrowed. I have been forced to look at the next few weeks, I don't even think of the next few years as quite literally, I can't afford to. As if my natural Generation-X tendency to distrust any establishment and authority figures wasn't bad before. Now I will most likely never believe any establishment again. Myself and my daughter are now my only investments. With talent, luck and maybe some divine intervention we will be in the class of entrepreneurs of the future. Because right now, most of it, most of them are rubbish. Laughable, ludicrous rubbish.

So please, look me in the eye and tell me that the current and recent past American way of doing business works. Please, I could use a good laugh. I see and talk to so many people and hear of their woes regarding the economy and how they have to make adjustments because the company/organization they still work for is cutting back and their work load is greater and/or the economy sucks and they have to be more careful about what and how they spend because the cost of everything has risen or they can't afford to save as much as they used to. Or whatever other sob story their disillusionment comes up with while still remaining employed.

I don't get mad at particular people, its not worth it and honestly, it is just human nature to look to themselves first. But I won't say I don't find it frustrating and sad. Also funny. Why funny you ask? I'll tell you. Even with my own woes, I live in a house and I can still afford the occasional small luxury. Many people (whether through their own fault or not) don't even have that. So fuck you and your 'dollar collapse'.

In Death Their Is Re-Birth...

The short lived blog, "Life on the Edge" is dead. The Stinking Pile is in it's place here...

The Stinking Pile.

Enjoy...

Forks in the road...

http://laveypoetry.blogspot.com/

http://dimminglight.blogspot.com/

One more to come.

Flushing Toilet...

I have been stale lately so I read back through some of my old blogs. I found a few that I really liked but I found much more that (while I realized it, I didn't realize the extent) were incredibly whiny, self indulgent and pompous. Even more so than this one. With that said I feel lately I have become transformed into a bit of a curmudgeon. I am growing tired of my continued realization that 99.9% of all people on this planet are petty, base and self serving and use religion or their personal sense of values to disguise it. Sure, I mean within that percentage you can find about a third of those people who actually want to be good people but the status quo has tricked and manipulated them into characters that know no other way than to behave petty and selfishly. Now another startling (yet ongoing) realization is that all people are fucking insane in some way. No one is normal. I mean in a serious psychological health way. I’m talking clinically and we could all be diagnosed. None of us are emotionally healthy. My own personal affliction: Ambivalence. I have complex positive and negative emotions toward just about everything in my life from food to love to people and to even sex. I am incapable of find anything wholly good, bad or even balanced in any aspect of my life. I can't find a middle ground or even any ground. I recently read Kurt Vonnegut's Man Without a Country and I found myself relating to this ninety year old man who had done and seen far more that I have. While I felt the book was a great and interesting read I was saddened that my own views matched his on so many levels. The realization (or fear) that no great truth exists and the human condition is constant pain and finding pure joy in the smallest things (or is this the great truth?). With all of this said I have also come to realize that so many of humanity's so called great achievements (or the one's propaganda leads us to believe are achievements) are neither great nor are wholly putting humankind forward in a progressive way. Many of them serve to simply keep us down or forget the real world. They are distractions and nothing more. They are hindering us sometimes more than helping us. Anyway getting preachy. On a lighter and more positive note: I am in love. No, not that screwed up kind that makes people fuck and obsess and lie to themselves and others. This is an ideal love, sort of like how the Christians love Jesus. This is a co-worker that I am very close with. We work together in the true sense of the word teamwork. She is straightforward, has integrity and even is idealistic herself. I'll never tell her though because that will ruin it, as my own personal history suggests. Besides I’d kind of like to keep the idea of it anyway. (Trying to enjoy the feeling without trying to possess it since the desire to posses is the folly of humanity or at least of me.) This is a woman that grew up in Cuba under Castro, escaped to the U.S. using a stolen passport from Europe and she still is idealistic! Holy shit I'm impressed! This is not a physical love but more of an emotional/intellectual love. Enough about that. I have meandered enough and now I come to the point of this blog. Because of my sporadic postings there are probably only two or three readers left anyway. I am quitting this blog. As Stephan King wrote in Rita Heyworth and the Shawshank Redemption through Otis Redding (a.k.a. Red), "Get busy living or get busy dying." Since I am openly suicidal (apparently) but have no plans in doing the deed in the next fifty or sixty years I figure I'd better get busy living. This blog has been primarily a dumping ground that, ultimately, doesn't really help anything that I'm aware of other than my own sense of self importance. So, with that said... Good bye.

Suicide Note

Yes, this is my suicide note. Now wait a minute!!! Don’t get all crazy on me!!! Don't get your panties in a bunch!!! I’m not going to off myself anytime soon. I want to live for many more years, just hear me out first... Yesterday on NPR I was listening to State of Nevada and the topic revolved around (at least the segment I heard) the rise in senior citizen murder/suicides. The reason was because the elders in question felt that they were becoming a burden and were financially broke and with failing health. One caller was freaking out saying how we need to "...stop them from committing such things" I am paraphrasing and she was talking about an older person specifically trying to commit suicide. My first thought was, "Who the fuck are you to tell someone that has lived out almost all of their life how they can and cannot end it!?!?" You see, I have always had an old age suicide plan. I have made no secret that at some point when I become much older and my health begins to really fail and someone else is giving their own life to support me, it was time for me to go. I would pack a small nap sack and head off into some wilderness enjoying the earth one last time. Whether I made it one mile or a thousand miles didn’t matter, I would end it on my terms being as self sufficient as I could possibly be. Many people chuckled at me when I told them this through the years but it’s one of the few things in my screwed up mind that I have been sure about. So, here it is, all official up on the internet for everyone to see. When I’m much older (preferably close to or over one hundred) and my mind and/or body begin to fail I am going to go for a long walk that I never intend to come back from. I'm going to enjoy the sky and the stars and the wind in my face one last time. My most important value in my own life is the personal rights of the individual and respect for those rights. To stop me and label me unfit will surely make me incredibly unhappy and sink me into another depression, make me a burden on society and will infringe on my personal values. If you choose to stop me, fuck you in advance. Hopefully, when I’m older, there will be some wilderness left to go walking in.