we must be nearing the holidays...

...clues pointing to that abound...christmas decorations out at lowes and walgreen's...yahoo jabbering on about "black friday" steals i should make myself aware of...and the n y times has been including "style" magazines for "fall and winter fashion" for the well dressed social climber or just social scum...no doubt an electronics issue is forthcoming, but today we are burdened with the watch supplement...tissot, longines, jager-le coultre, gucci,audemars piguet, omega, chopard, and the half naked model wearing the dior men's watch, presumably to call my attention to what i am missing out on by not wearing ( or buying her) one of their fine time pieces ( i have been married for thirty-four years and blondes have never been especially attractive to me...i am a demographic wasteland for advertizers...mutual hatred everywhere...fuck these people...)what i did notice about this expensive bit of glossy advertizing is there's not a single price listed anywhere...zilch...unlike the ads for condos with a view of the manhattan skyline that are keen to advertize their value as a status symbol by boldly proclaiming the price per square foot of this valuable real estate, the watchmakers seem to be subscribing tot he "if you have to ask the price you can't afford it" philosophy of excluding ( or, perhaps enticing ) the proles from taking up the limited counter space at their boutiques...i have had an analog casio that i paid thirty bucks for five years ago and it keeps good time...i have a times "ironman"digital that i beat the crap out of at work...it's about the same age and if you discount some interesting gouges out of the crystal it's fine too...so much for tissot, dior , and hot blondes...i will become increasingly cranky ( come on people that's why you read this ) as the season progresses and my neighbor drags out the million candlepower industrial candy cane decorations that fade the curtains in my front window and disturb the bird with a false sunrise for a month...i am aging and it is enhancing my already formidable reputation as an eccentric weirdo and curmudgeon...i wouldn't be this way if they didn't deserve it...their insistence on extremist holiday behavior obligates me to demand concessions by creating a black hole of non-observance...almost time to watch a clockwork orange.

it's a sunny day for the end

i hesitate to make so bold a statement as "harold camping and his evangelical peers are manipulative shits making a living ( and a fairly comfortable one i'll wager) by playing on the fears and demons of those who, for whatever reason, are not in a psychological position to tell them to go fuck themselves"...but i'll do it anyway...cheapjack scumbags to a soul... another set of likely candidates for a special lake of fire...another failure harold...and you've put your fellow revivalists on the tent circuit in the difficult position of denouncing one of their own because you're about to screw up the prophecy business with your goddamned specifics...keep it general harold...so open-ended and non-committal that the rubes will never notice that it's all bronze age nonsense repackaged with all the slick pr that dr. goebbels pioneered back in the greatest generation and the consumerist utopia refined to a hard, sharp alloy of desire and wishful thinking that "the market" thrives on because it makes the proles such chumps...addictive as fine china white and legal to boot...life goes on harold...whip out the texas instruments calculator and rethink your math..we're waiting for answers.

rapturefail

jesus! it's october already? seems like just last may that harold camping was backtracking and explaining a "miscalculation" in the date for the rapture as "bad math"...it's sort of cruel to pick on just another refugee from the acid generation who found god in a sheet of windowpane blotter...but the sectarian warfare in the name of the son o' god goes on apace as the folks at rapturefail.org have sent me an email inviting me to join them in jeering at old harold and celebrating their wisdom and jesus' love in not letting them fall prey to crackbrained prophecy...i am asked to download a copy of their flier and then have a photograph of me holding it taken next friday which i should then upload to their flicker account to add to all the other photos of "true"believers they will then post...this is,of course, nonsense on stilts and i'll be goddamned if i'll participate...the rapturefail folks have a really neat sideline in t-shirts going at cafe press if you're interested in what the fashionably moderate fundamentalist yahoo is wearing this season ( it's really no worse than what the n y times style magazines have been flogging to the fashion challenged over the last month...this week's was a corker...but that's another blog) and their blog is unbiased and informative in a snarky, sectarian kind of way that would resonate with some people i know...but that's a journal entry, not a blog...some things are too vitriolic to print on the interweb...even for me...with the holiday season just around the corner it's good to see the god fearing folks dragging out the heavy artillery of hellfire and damnation to cure a wicked and weary world...too fucking bad they'll be out gunned and outspent by the desperate retailers of the consumerist utopia who are far more concerned with black friday than their immortal souls...business is business despite "the reason for the season"...damnation you say? tish tosh...the entrepreneurs will just license the ice water concession...religion at work...in the words of an anthropologist i know, "that stuff is all made up anyway"...humans are entirely too easily taken in by loony ideas...see you in hell...all the cool people will be there anyway.

union matters

my mailbox has been stuffed with all sorts of weird mailings from both the local and international union...it's election time again and they are sending out lists of local whores that are our "friends" and for whom i should cast my ballot when i do my civic duty...there's a "meet the whores" called meeting later this month...and they've sent me voter registration applications as well as ones for absentee ballots...all fine and good, but pointless since i vote on my own terms not theirs and we seem to agree on so little anymore...like a marriage gone bad...but without the first blush of romance...just the baggage and burdensome recriminations...i'd get an attorney but i think it's too late for even that...anyway...today i got my dues receipt and a nice letter from the international telling me they're concerned about my health...what a great bunch of guys! today's missive concerns the perils of high blood pressure which, apparently, "...more than one-third of people who work in non-office environments are not aware that they have high blood pressure, and many do not get treatment. please bring this letter along with you to your next doctor visit. it can help you discuss your heart health with your doctor." ( great bunch! always on the lookout for ways they can help me overcome my deficiencies)..it goes on to gently inform me that high blood pressure can be caused by smoking or secondhand smoke, lack of exercise, poor diet, obesity and overweight, drinking too much alcohol, and stress...chiding me mildly to set aside these vices and lead a healthier lifestyle...but ( and this is the real kicker here ) what if that just isn't enough? then my good friend joe j. nigro ( general president of the smwia...honest)tells me that i should ask my doctor about the blood pressure medication EDARBI ( sounds like a demented baseball stat ) which is a trademark of the takeda pharmaceutical company ltd....who, incidentally prepared and paid for the distribution of this letter ( with a kick back to the international? just asking) i bet they're the ones who included the nifty spec sheet with all the chemical composition and possible side-effects too like dizziness, muscle spasms, diarrhea, and, in some "rare" cases, "increased hypertension"...neat trick for a drug that's supposed to palliate it...so...things are so god-awful bad in the sheetmetal industry that my union has taken to shilling for pharmaceutical companies as a sideline...dues must be down ( not that you'd know it from the looks of my receipt)...those poor bastards are making do in these tough times...an inspiration to us all.