Life still sucks ...
I wish that I could believe that there is a job out there that would NOT be a living hell for me. This is, perhaps, the single biggest stumbling block in my job search ... on an emotional basis it is like having to research in depth whether I'd prefer to be drawn and quartered, drowned, dowsed with gasoline and set alfame, dropped out of a helicopter over sharp rocks, tied to rairoad tracks, attacked by vicious dogs, slowly done in by dibilitating poison, and/or tortured to death. Every option SCREAMS "you have failed to make a red cent at anything you enjoy, now you must be punished for having dared TRY to make a decent life for yourself". I swear, NOBODY around me understands this. NOBODY can (or is willing to) see just how hideous these "options" appear to me. All I see is death. Death, death, death, and more death. While on an intellectual level I can posit that yes, indeed, I might end up enjoying working at any number of these jobs for which I've been sending out my resume, but from an emotional standpoint, I might as well be being suspended over rapidly rotating knives. The problem being that the "real me", the "authentic person" inside me, wants to have NOTHING TO DO with any of these "jobs", and sees them as a sentence to a slow, crushing, long anguished scream into oblivion. Damn. I'm fucked. Why are there NO jobs that fit the "real me"? Why is this world so twisted that it spits people like me out like a worm-infested sunflower seed? I don't know how much more of this I can take. I grow so tired of fighting, I grow so weary from the constant abuse. I just wish somebody would wake me up, and this whole "consensus reality" shit would be a nasty nightmare I've been having from some bad mushrooms or something.
DAMNED, BEATEN, AND DESPISED
torrents of tension
pour down from the skies
the external world
re-creating the Flood
in the form of demand
in the shape of oppression
in the mode of madness
and wholly wasted time
we can not synch
into that flow
we can not step
into that path
these worlds are too distant
too different, too disjointed
we can not reach
across that divide
like trying to enter dreams
somehow we are denied
the easy access
to the common world
but no dream, this,
it is the root of nightmares,
the horror story
which has no end
from day to day
and night to night
the insanity lingers
driving our anguish
powering our despair
for this demands
that we now enter
realms that no one ought to bear
as every hope
fades into ashes
and every dream
dissolves as mist
we lose all willingness
to fight these battles
we lose the strength
to yet resist
- Brendan Tripp
07/07/2001
Copyright © 2001 by Brendan Tripp

DAMNED, BEATEN, AND DESPISED
torrents of tension
pour down from the skies
the external world
re-creating the Flood
in the form of demand
in the shape of oppression
in the mode of madness
and wholly wasted time
we can not synch
into that flow
we can not step
into that path
these worlds are too distant
too different, too disjointed
we can not reach
across that divide
like trying to enter dreams
somehow we are denied
the easy access
to the common world
but no dream, this,
it is the root of nightmares,
the horror story
which has no end
from day to day
and night to night
the insanity lingers
driving our anguish
powering our despair
for this demands
that we now enter
realms that no one ought to bear
as every hope
fades into ashes
and every dream
dissolves as mist
we lose all willingness
to fight these battles
we lose the strength
to yet resist
- Brendan Tripp
07/07/2001
Copyright © 2001 by Brendan Tripp