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