Personally, I’m pretty-much sick and tired of the fuckin’ public. As manager of a liquor store, I’ve seen just about every kind of asshole, listened to way-too many deplorably-sad stories, and encountered a general mass of people who in recent times have become so delusional, and so fucked-completely-up, it’s really hard to fathom.

And it ain’t just the characters ingesting cheap booze and cigarettes, this public includes educated, seemingly-intelligent readers of the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, sophisticated sippers of Maker’s Mark, or Knob Hill, ostensibly appearing as “normal,” whatever that means nowadays.
A panic of the heart in all these people — and the worrisome burden of having to bear it day after-freakin’ day as these clueless folks relate shit to me and the other guys working here they should’ve never, ever let breathe into the light of day.

(Illustration: M.C Escher’s ‘Three Spheres II‘ found here).

Sob-stories recited locally only mirror/reflect horror tales told globally.

And what the shit is this crazed, seemingly new-found crime of rape?
Yesterday morning, those two high school football players in Steubenville, Ohio, were found guilty of raping a drunk 16-year-old girl after a party last summer. There’s going to be all kinds of bullshit thrown up about this case — a sick case of life in the US heartland, where being ‘football players‘ is as an important news ingredient as the actual rape. (Just about every news source had ‘football players‘ in the lede — even I used it above).
In India, another gang-rape, this time of a Swiss tourist, but five guys have been caught and have supposedly confessed. However, CNN added this legal ability: Confessions in police custody are not admissible in court, however, and can be retracted.
Change ‘football players,’ to ‘“air-force superstar” fighter pilot,’ and sickeningly another rape case, this one even more shitty, has come to more light — this particular one just another in a long, ugly list heard last week during a US Senate Armed Services subcommittee on the military and rape.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand noted the stats: The Pentagon estimates that 19,000 incidents of sexual assault occurred in 2010 alone, with only 13.5 percent of those reported and an even smaller percentage, 191 cases, convicted. In 2011, Gillibrand said, only 240 cases proceeded to trial.

In this low-blow to macho bullshit came from Brian Lewis, a former sailor and the first man ever to testify before the Senate on military sexual assault. He filed charges of rape, but was told he was just crazy:

“In August 2000 I was raped by a superior noncommissioned officer. I was ordered by my command not to report this crime to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service,” he said.
“After my command learned of this crime, I was misdiagnosed as having a personality disorder … and I was discharged in August 2001.”

He added: “Of those 19,000 victims, about 56 percent of estimated victims in our military are men. This is part of the crisis that the Department of Defense does not acknowledge.”

All this shit about ‘rape‘ like it just sprung up yesterday — people have been raping for thousands of years, maybe hundreds of thousands of years. A horror of having female parts, and a horror men can’t really fully understand, other than ‘rape‘ being a horrendous crime against your person, but to grasp having that fear constantly — one scare I’ve really never experienced is being afraid of getting raped.
I feel for women — having five daughters it’s a worrisome worry, and then have that piss-ant, flyboy’s rape jury-conviction overturned for no reason is an anger modifier.
And the shear-shittyness, dumb-assness of this in this current age is why?
More reporting of the crime?
Or maybe a goodly portion of people are just getting belligerently violent.
And with guns. NRA wingnut Wayne LaPierre continued the vehement defense of firearms in the guise of rape prevention, or something like that, during a spiced speech at the noodle-nasty CPAC this week — the asshole got big cheers when he cried that a well-armed female is a safe female: “The one thing a violent rapist deserves to face is a good woman with a gun,” he said.
In forming-out the term, ‘violent rapist,’ wiley Wayne seems to suggest after the fact comes the gun. The woman gets to her gun after being raped, then hunts the asshole down and blows his shit away.

Also at the resentment-circus CPAC was total flake with a big mouth, Ann Coulter, who blasted away with both upper and lower gums with rape theories (via C&L):

Christie wasn’t he only target of Coulter’s insults.
She also criticized President Barack Obama and made eyebrow-raising remarks about Sandra Fluke’s haircut while addressing birth control and the war on women.
“That haircut is birth control enough,” Coulter said of Fluke.
Perhaps her most extreme criticism was directed at President Bill Clinton.
“The keynote speaker at the Democrat National Convention this year was forcible rapist, Bill Clinton,” Coulter said.

Yes, one can say anything nowadays.

And we’re back to the fuckin’ public.

People can’t help being people packed in a small box. In a box without meaning, other than everything is shitty. Now those stories of the poor is/was/and always-will-be about the same — drinking and failure, as near-about every poor guy/gal are living, breathing, walking-around country songs. In the same refrain.
Enough heart break and after awhile, you also develop a kind of second-hand sad.

And the poor living off some type government check — the first of each month a spike in product sales — are especially melancholic-inducing in nature. A big chunk of these checks are SSI via the mental department.
Even depressingly more-shittingly sad is the big bulk of lottery players come from this econo-level, spending money they really don’t have on something that’s not real (a mickey of Ancient Age is reality, and will make both customer/clerk feel good for a little while).

The late, great Andy Rooney from a couple of years ago:

You see people buying lottery tickets all the time and it’s obvious that most lottery money comes from the poorest people.
They don’t look too smart either.
Some of them cash their unemployment checks and buy lottery tickets with that money.
Then they need more help from the rest of us.
There was a National Gambling Impact Study and in every one of the 48 States that has gambling – only Utah and Hawaii don’t – the people who make the least gamble the most.
Lower income people in Massachusetts, for example, spent 15 times as much on gambling as people who make a decent living.

Mr. Rooney delightfully rants.

(Illustration found here).

And I totally agree: To me (occasionally I tell customers who will listen), the lottery is the most-utterly foolish anything I’ve ever witnessed/been-a-part-of in my life, and the most-utterly depressing. Along with odds that defy rational human belief, the lottery is horrible on both sides of the counter — the lottery has the way-lowest return for all goods the store offers, but yet is the most-labor intensive.

Shitty and depressing — especially in this economic climate, even up here on California’s north coast. Humboldt County is below average for the rest of the US — employment rate at 9.6 percent is lower than the state average at 9.7 percent, but well above the national at 7.8 percent — but the real reality is no one has any real money — the liquor business has fallen drastically the last five years, way-especially the last two. Big chunk of the public has lost a big surplus of income, cash which once went to high-priced booze.

One point I do disagree with Mr. Rooney: The lottery is not gambling, not by a freakin’ long shot. You spend the evening at the casino and that’s gambling, and you might lose some (or a lot), but at least you can have a few drinks, check out the women, etc. Or you could spend the evening playing five-card stud with your buddies, that’s gambling — real gambling takes even a small-dose of skill.
The lottery leaves you with a slip of paper, or a scratched-off piece of cardboard, and the shrill voice of nature screaming at you: You Dumb Fuck!

All this makes one sad to tears.
I listen to a lot of music online. One of the more-nifty ways to enjoy songs from everywhere, from everybody and from the deep reaches of the past even.
A few days ago, in a charmed moment, I took in one of my favorites, The White Stripes, now way-sadly no more. Meg and Jack have split.
Anyway, one of their precious recordings is the more-recent, “My Doorbell,” unique with just drums and piano (the song earned them a Grammy nomination in 2006) and I really just love the shit out of it. Sliding off that tune, I then moved over for some reason to their version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” where they retained the female POV.
Just listening to the plea touched a renounced spot in the heart — the lyrics hurt like shit:

Jolene, jolene, jolene, jolene
Im begging of you please don’t take my man
Jolene, jolene, jolene, jolene
Please don’t take him just because you can
Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of auburn hair
With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green
Your smile is like a breath of spring
Your voice is soft like summer rain
And I cannot compete with you, jolene

He talks about you in his sleep
There’s nothing I can do to keep
From crying when he calls your name, jolene

And I can easily understand
How you could easily take my man
But you don’t know what he means to me, jolene

And at that point, from out of nowehere it seems, I started crying like a freakin’ baby, and I mean, fuckin’ cryin’ and the point of it all was just the shit-ass saddness of every fuckin’ thing — from rape victims to war victims to car-wreck victims to the general sad lives of people who do not have one freakin’ clue about what is coming upon us all and there’s no real way to let them know without having them know to begin with, and who could say if anyone would listen.
And I’m way glad no one could see me — a 64-year-old guy slobbering like a baby in front of my lap top. A total, tear-washed asshole, crying and crying and crying.
My head hurt after awhile.

Cry, cry for the beloved everything.