[Blarg]

Oh hell yeah, I'm slumming and desperate, whatever, for some of my favorite stories.

One of the articles I remember most was a guy saying that Americans had lost the right to f*ck up, tell their friends with a rueful laugh about it, and feel natural and reasonably okay and accepted about it, because with the Reagan Revolution, now the sh*t was really coming down and being human or having the expectable bit of bad luck or misjudgment was no longer feasible, at least in public. "Nobody wanted to be a Ronald Reagan f*ck-up story." This was some serious stuff. People were scared. Liberals were "the L word." I've often mentioned on these forums another article called The Dog is Us, about people giving up pot smoking, that hit the same theme -- it's not funny not living a life that reads like a resume anymore.

One of my favorite books during this time was one on worker sabotage. Tremendously entertaining and cutting through the crap of "right-sizing" and calling lack of job security and benefits an increase in personal freedom, it was a tremendously bracing antidote to our brittle, scary hallucination that Leave it to Beaver had come to life. Back then, that used to be a point of contention. Now it is largely resolved as fact. Yet people then still had to live their ordinary lives, regardless of what disassociated political ideas floated flatteringly about in the ether for those with a little pull. They must do so still.

When I mentioned in OOT under a thread trolling for potential good topics something on the order of Work products and services I have sabotaged, El D, a clever fellow who once called me his favorite poster but whom I have since regrettably drifted apart from due to board politics, immediately posted his high level of interest in my starting that thread. The truth is, what we have repressed is enormously powerful, at least as much so as what we say freely, even to those who may have essential interests aligned against us. What we dare not say is exactly what we want to hear, for exactly the reason that we dare not say it. There is a burgeoning desire to cut the holy horsesh*t out of daily life that has to be addressed in every generation, and daring to do so or even broaching the subject will always have its detractors more and less clever and persuasive. What I would really like to hear from are people like you and me, the occasionally clever and often less than perfectly so, the guy who has to gulp a bowel-full of crap and shut up about it as part of his daily ration -- and the ways in which he might rebel. Including those ways in which he might fail miserably, hilariously, and all-too-humanly, as both a schlep like me and a dork like Nietzche simultaneously might comprehend. And including the cautionary tales of his personal rough justice.

In other words, your f*ck-up stories are funny. I would love to see stories of people doing their best Don Quixote tilting at windmills. If the windmill should fall, so be it, but most of all, I celebrate the arduous, lovely tilting at.