by Don Hall

“Man, I know what job I don’t want. I don’t want a low wage nine-to-five office thing dealing with mouth breathing middle management. I’m not gonna work for some corporation that takes the land or sells shit I don’t agree with. Not working for some minus wage bullshit and absolutely not selling my soul to the Man.”

His short list was not unreasonable, I thought, but now all I know was what he didn’t want. The question I posed, as we sat in an empty shithole bar sipping rye whiskey on ice was What do you want to do for money?

We American thugs and whiners are an entire nation of animals that know firmly what we’re against but have no fucking clue what is we want instead of all the shit we despise.

“What do you want to eat tonight?” is so goddamned often followed up with the meandering “Well, I don’t want Chinese or Italian. Not sandwiches. Maybe fish? Nah, not fish. I dunno. What do you want?”

“Greek.”

“No. Not Greek. Anything but Greek.”

Jesus Christ in a Volvo, what the fuck?

That shyster-in-chief sitting his fat ass in behind the same desk that Kennedy, Clinton, and Obama sat behind has built his entire political life capitalizing on this. His “base” knows exactly what they don’t want and he uses that to build his empire. 

The gaslighting social justice kids (comprised almost entirely of bored, middle-income white kids with enough money for smartphones but not enough for a decent pair of pants) know what they don’t want and have effectively bogarted the entire #BlackLivesMatter movement to widen and shallow out protests against police brutality for that list of demands already rejected by the voting citizens.

It’s as if both sides of the loudest bunch of hardcore believers thinks the rest of us are simply too enamored with their charming, righteous bullshit that we can’t see past it.

Cuomo asks the right question as NYC began capitulating to the protests, “You’ve won. What is it you want?”

Some Alt Right retards want full separation of the races. Bizarrely, some social justice twits want the exact same thing. I’ve never really understood this race thing much. Not “color blind” because blindness in general isn’t an aspiration but more color celebratory? Enjoy the different cultures of the many colors of the fucking rainbow and get over yourself.

But we’d rather be against things. It makes us feel like we have a purpose, fighting wars. Wars against Drugs. Wars against Culture. Wars against Hollywood, Communists, Islam, Men, Women, Kanye West. We love our wars. Wars are entirely founded in finding things we can be against. Shit, that’s so easy it’s almost a joke.

Being for something? That’s hard. If you’re for something it means compromise. It means working across the ideologies and identities. It means working toward something rather than tearing something down. I guarantee that creating those statues took more work and had more value than the act of knocking them down.

I dig the ripping of Confederate history from our pages. At least the cosmetic parts. Not so much erasing the history but cleaning up the South of the vestiges of southerners using statues to intimidate black people into Jim Crow laws. Maybe the Columbus statues, too, although the conflicted history isn’t quite so clear cut as that of Robert E. Lee, right? Washington? C’mon. Now we’re just finding reasons to toss out legacy from our own moralistic perspective on genuine heroes with some darker elements.

The coming election in November is a shitshow to behold. We all know what we’re against but what the fuck are we for? Being against Donald Trump, that stained, awful, jingoistic fucktard, isn’t enough to inspire. You need to find someone you are inspired by and, if that isn’t Biden, be inspired by his possibility. Ain’t nobody else who has a chance in hell so figure out the policies he proposes and get excited about that.

Sitting in the 109 degree heat in the desert, contemplating my own mortality in the wake of climate change, civil unrest, the looming economic cesspool, and, oh yeah, a pandemic causes me to gaze hard into the abyss of my soul. I find it wanting of less to be against and more to be for.

Today I’m for a break from the heat, a solid hiball glass of rye whiskey, a pipe to smoke, and a swimming pool. Not bad in an immediate fulfillment sort of way. Tonight, I’ll sit down and think hard about what I am for because, Christ, I already know what I’m against.