I WAS RIGHT
This weekend news sites started to report that the governor of South Carolina was missing. His family, his friends, his staff, no one knew where he was. He didn't leave anyone in charge, just disappeared. Yesterday his office said that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail alone. Apparently not unheard of as he's done such things before but he usually told someone where he was going first.
In class we talked about it and speculated. I threw out there that he was off with a load of cocaine and hookers. We all had a good chuckle, blow and hookers is a good easy laugh, and went about our day.
It turns out I was closer to the truth than I thought. He was in Argentina, being "unfaithful to his wife". Piss test this man. I guarantee he'll come up hot for cocaine. What did I tell them? Cocaine and hookers. No one disappears for a weekend without telling anyone without good reason. Cocaine and hookers.
Clarksville, TN in a nutshell
I was driving home at lunchtime last week on a very busy main road. It's spring, which is roadkill season in TN, so it's not strange to see something dead on the side of the road. This time, however, it was a dog. Some fucking asshole hit somebody's dog. It was in an area where it was nice and clear all around so it's pretty obvious that the driver either wasn't paying attention or it was intentional. It wasn't completely mutilated either, it looked like a dog on it's back, but it was clearly dead. I went home and was kind of sad and wondered who the fuck hits a dog and how long it'd be till the owner noticed.
After my class I was on the same route going home. The dog, which was almost off the road it was so far next to the curb, had been hit again. So now there was a half crushed roadkill dog right next to the curb. Fucking awesome, that's exactly what I want to see. So now that there's a mess, it's only a matter to time before the city comes along to clean it up, right? Or the owner finally notices and does something about it themselves? I mean, as hard as it is to think of such things, I wouldn't want any of my pets lying dead in the street.
The weekend goes by. It rains, hard, several times. It's more than a week since I first saw it. What's left of the dog is still there. A flat, unrecognizable mash of fur, bones, and dried entrails. The blood has been washed away by the rain.
Somebody killed someone else's pet and no one gives a shit. The driver didn't give a shit. The owner doesn't give a shit. The city doesn't give a shit. That piece of roadkill that (I estimate) hundreds of people, if not a couple thousand, see a day is going to sit there until it decomposes itself into nothing.
This is how this whole town operates. Clarksville, TN. No one gives a fuck. I've never seen such apathy in my life. If someone's car breaks here, they just ditch it on the side of the road. It'll sit there until the city decides to move it. I was driving home on the same ultra-busy thoroughfare on my lunch hour when I found myself in the middle of a street race. In broad daylight. Some fuckheads want to show off and swerve through traffic at 80mph in a 45mph zone. They can do this because the police don't give a fuck. When Chester got bit by a loose dog in the neighborhood and I tracked down the owner, he didn't give a fuck.
It is one hundred percent obvious to me that in this city, you are absolutely on your own and the solution is always get a bigger stick than the next guy. Clarksville, TN is an apathetic shithole.
Here it is
The definition of clueless leadership.
The single notion that repeated, long deployments are not the source of the increased number of suicides is absolutely ridiculous. That "resiliency" that develops is apathy. It's depression, and anger, and loss. It's knowing that even though you're putting in your time overseas, the Army needs one more body to fill up that plane going back to another meaningless fight so you can watch as the world you know disintegrates. It's the hopelessness of knowing that the deployments will never end for you. "Resiliency" is what's driving us to suicide.
I tried to warn them.
Well I did. I told them I don't work well with him at all and that I didn't like him or his (lack of) work ethic and now I've gone and hurt his little feelings. To top it all off, I've got to live with the guy. Well this may make things awkward. I'm not sorry for whatever he heard me say because nothing I said was a lie. Maybe now he can quit pretending he's my friend and we can maintain some form of mutual apathy toward each other for the sake of keeping appearances professional.
But I don't like him. I never have and I never will. And I don't have to like him. I don't particularly care what he does or what happens to him and if he were to drop dead tomorrow I might even throw a little party. He's the everpresent thorn in my side and will be until he's gone for good. I know you can never escape shitty coworkers but I really think I'd be a much happier person if he were gone since he's constantly the source of my gripes this time around.
But whatever. I'm getting shorter every day and he's much easier to ignore when I'm at home.
Vampire shift
I'm back in hell! Boo! But hell is other people and I'm back on night shift so people are few and far between so I guess that makes hell a little less unpleasant. In fact, it's been pretty goddamned pleasant so far. When you catch bad news for people you don't like, that's like getting good news for yourself! And man, I can't get enough good news lately.
So Katie and I decided when I was home that we were done with CDs. It's basically a dead medium that we both have entirely too much invested into and it's all going nowhere. It's consumptive and wasteful now that we can get legal unprotected MP3s from Amazon and Zune Marketplace and elsewheres and we both have Zunes. There's just no reason to buy CDs anymore.
So I've been enjoying the hell out of my Zune and auto-playlists. I've got one that is 100 songs I've never listened to in random order and it's great. I can sit here and goof off and when I hear a song I like I'll mark it as good and when a crap song comes on I'll mark it such and skip it. And when I'm feeling nerdy I've got like 8 podcasts I'm subscribed to so I've got some kind of nerds (tech nerds, video game nerds) talking at me and that's rather fun.
While I was gone someone important's laptop crapped out and the people in my section gave him mine. No one backed up my stuff for me so I'm pretty sure it's all gone. That's a really shitty thing to do. I mean I know they think I do nothing but play games and view webpages on it and that is a lot of what I do but I also believe in seperating work and fun so all my work was on that laptop as well as other unreproducable items and those files are all gone. So lesson learned here, when you leave for a long period of time and you think you're leaving your work laptop unsecured so other people can get use out of it in your absence, fuck them. Lock it up somewhere and toss the key or take the damned thing with you. Or at least take the hard drive out and stow it somewhere, which has the same effect as leaving behind a paperweight. Because the people you work with don't give a fuck about work you do that they aren't benefitting from and no one's getting points for being considerate around here.
Oh well, enough downers. I want to post huge news but I think I'll make a new one for it.