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Won’t You Please Stop Draining the Nutsack of The Golden Bull

I like consistency. Not predictability though, and there is a considerable world of difference between consistency and predictability. Predictability is the mentally-impaired comic book editor who tried to sell me on a job from out of the blue yesterday. Consistency, on the other hand, is my adamant insistence that truth is my one and only measure for success.

While many would see this as a character flaw, I have never in my life been broken up with. I was always the one to call it quits. Likewise with employment, hard as this may seem to believe, I have never been fired from a job, whether day-labor bullshit or whatever freelance gig. I alone make the decisions for how far I am willing to go in my relationships or working relationships. People are invited to define the nature of their own relations to me, as either friend or enemy, because people generally require no basis for making such decisions and so just do as they wish anyway. They can try to explain away their logic, or lack thereof, but in the end it’s all entirely predictable. I saw that at a very young age, how infuriated others quickly become when I fail to match their preconceptions, and all these years later I can earnestly say that I have remained consistent in never misrepresenting myself or my intent. People project their desires and their fears, and when I find no reason to conform my convictions to indulge their fantasies or to manifest their ignorance, then I am made out to be the bad guy. I’m the tyrant for refusing to help others help themselves.

Even with the comic book journalism crap, thousands of reviews in the can, and not one for a Marvel or DC product, because I made that rational, conscious decision from the start, that corporations can hire their own fucking marketing people, whereas the real creators building their dreams from nothing, around grownup obligations, were the ones who deserved any attention or assistance. Hundreds of interviews conducted, and not one focusing on any singular project, because I wasn’t talking to a thing to be sold, but a person. Now I think they are one and all tools, but this was my approach to media work back when. Contrast that with someone like Eric Stephenson, who used reviewing to connive his way into creative work, and while nowadays he likes to sell himself as some indie godfather, he is responsible for scripting hundreds of the most godawful pages of comics in history, back in his time with Extreme studios. Comic books are a 2-dimensional world of course, so 2-dimensional people are the only ones who thrive in that environment. The same applies to all media. Consistency is abhorred, because these mediums draw to themselves the most flighty personalities alive.

While the big partial government shutdown drizzles on, affecting hundreds of thousands of people and their families and personal debts, I cannot bring myself to feel any sympathy for the ousted federal drones, especially the ones who continue their employment without pay. If they were naturally that kind they’d never have landed with government employ to begin with, so realistically they continue on for no better reason than pussy-whipped fervency in knowing who their respective masters are. Like asshat soldiers, proud to give up their lives for a government that afforded them no other options in life but to lay down their lives for said government. They never thought to try for better than matching the assumptions that they are nothing more than cannon fodder, so they absolutely deserve what they lazily reap. Their inaction proves the weakness of predictability. The regalia of uniforms is a mask distracting from uncertainty, because if they did not truly need to be defined by others, they would not fetish costumes to provoke favorable judgement. But I’m implying much more than surface-level inconsistency.

Gannett is currently laying off journalists and reporters around the country, and I say, fuck them all. They were not forced to contribute to a monopoly, so they deserve to feel the effects of that monopoly more than anybody else. I bounced and barbacked at a club in Louisville a zillion years ago. When I learned a co-owner was selling coke in the VIP area up on the third floor, I did what any Frank Castle fan would do and I slashed his tires, knowing he was too paranoid about his bad habits to park by the cameras. But when I learned he had tried to rape almost every female employee he was ever left alone with, I threw a garbage can at him, knocking him down a flight of stairs. I dared him to call the cops, and of course he would not, as he had more than a few 8-balls stashed around. I did not return to that job, although it was many years later when it dawned on me that, as hurt emotionally and physically as those workers he abused were, they continued working for the sleazeball. They had more reasons than I did to know better. The Gannett employees knew Gannett has a distinguished track record for turning newsrooms around the country into skeleton crews, yet they chose to play that game themselves. Fuck them all.

The same goes for the 250+ idiots getting pink slips from BuzzFeed. They threw in with a digital news front that relished in clickbait trash and listicles, then they have no earthly right to shock that their employers lacked the depth to care about how the workers bringing in the traffic are to go about feeding their kids. And now there’s going to be 250+ idiots trying to write the Great American Novel, as though people loved their listicles so much they will be down for wasting 30 bucks to scope their long-form prose. It’s no different for the victims of layoffs from DC Comics, a tiny subsidiary of Warners. Commenters on this article about that news story are quick to spot the bogus corporate form letter language, but they will keep buying the products because they are too cowardly to exist without escapism. They hope those pushed out are able to find comparable gigs, but for every job at Marvel or DC there are thousands of Peter Pan syndromes lined up but only so many old college roommates who shall prove lucky enough. It’s not just about fleeing challenging, impossible odds. They won’t ask themselves why.

And now we have news that Oracle, owned by some of the wealthiest people in the USA, specifically hired as many females and minorities as they could explicitly because they knew from experience how easy it was to get away with underpaying them and denying them earned benefits. Who could ever have imagined that persons willing to safeguard billions from trickling out of their Swiss bank accounts back down into the economy might be so cold-hearted? Even after the token court order, the boss smileys have more in the banks than what they were compelled to finally payback. Did these people think working for such characters would turn out any differently when they first filled out the fucking job application? How many of them are still there? It’s not victim-shaming when, as the proverb suggests, evil is knowingly welcomed. Nobody is entitled to a life free of remorse.

By all means bite the hand that feeds you when you know there’s poison in there. If a job or a relationship is not going to work out and you smell users or abusers coming round the bend, then you ultimately have nobody else to blame for predictably going along with it. My mistakes are unpredictable, but they remain consistent. And evidently that is something I can work with, because truth is all that matters. I won’t lie to myself, and so I sure as shit will never lie to others about what their needs could or should be. Because that’s not my place, or anyone else’s.