Nonculture

“They don’t care because they stay paid anyway – “

            Flava Flav, 911 Is A Joke, Fear of a Black Planet

Got my yearly review today.  For those of you not in corporate culture, it’s a 1 on 1 meeting where your manager assesses your progress/performance.  These are bullshit because the manager is told to pare down the numbers, while at the same time it’s known that you did a kickass job.  As usual I am an “above average” employee, which is what everyone gets because the manager cannot give out the real points.  I expressed my displeasure with the numbers today, not because I don’t know the situation, but because in years to come, I’ll need those badass numbers.  The way it was explained to me is that, basically, there is no promotion from within and the numbers will never matter.

Now, that’s refreshing honesty; reviews are admittedly useless and not even tied to raises.  Raises, by the way, probably won’t happen despite the company securing a billion in contracts in just the last quarter.  I love my fucking job.

 I need to stop opening the page (drunk) and writing posts about (drunk) boring shit.  I should write interesting shit about winning the lottery.  Thoughts about winning the lottery are always interesting.  I could use this Coltrane (Mr. Syms) and this red wine/scotch/beer/white wine buzz to pontificate about the world’s problems maybe.  But this may be more than a buzz and pontificating would be more inane than the regular shit.  I could light up my last cigar and stink the fuck out of my place, finish this white then try to stomach some scotch without ice.  But, strangely, that doesn’t sound like a good idea.  Yep, it’s drinking while on call again time.  I’m just going to finish the white.  I’m a company man.

I will say up front that if I win the lottery I’m buying a condo in Europe and starting a publishing house.  And that would be it, except for all the drunken stripper parties, but that goes without saying I figure.  With my free time, I’d sit in my cliché studio flat in Paris or Munich, or whatever, and write and drink, soaking in the cliché and fucking loving it.  At least until the French started to bug me, then I’d come back to the states until I was reminded of how stupid Americans are.  Then I’d go back overseas, and so on.

Is that too much to ask?  I mean, I know there are starving kids and shit, but come on Karma, just hook it up already.

To come completely out of left field here, I’m looking forward to a retrospective on GWB2.  I need validation that the embarrassment I’ve suffered as an American and my impulse to cringe when I hear his voice or see his face is something that I am not alone in.  Seriously, people voted for him, twice?  Is it abnormal to still be stupefied by this?  On the eve of the first election, when GW gave his acceptance speech after pickpocketing the election from Gore, I turned to my girlfriend at the time and said, “There goes our foreign policy.”  No shit, I called it and I wish at that time Vegas had a board running for his (dis)accomplishments.  I’d be a motherfucking millionaire and wouldn’t even need to buy these lottery tickets.  My girlfriend at the time just looked at the screen and nodded, because she was bi-polar and totally doped up.  So she probably can’t verify my claim to fame, but she was a sweet gal anyway.

I really need to refer back to the first line of this post and follow my own advice.  This shit is completely inane.