Blame it on My Brain

Probably the most asked question in English is one iteration or other of, “How are you?” But I bet the second most asked question is, “What do you do?” In my state of advanced mankind disillusionment called “old age,” I can't help hearing, “What do you do?” as, “What company owns you?”

If I do some rough calculations, I could figure out the depressing amount of money I have made over a life of employment that has included some of the hardest jobs imaginable. I've been a tree planter, a diamond driller and I've worked in the fast food industry. But for those inquisitive folks who want to know what it is that I do, perhaps a more pertinent calculation would be how much money I have made for my owners over the years. And that number is a bit harder to come by, though probably much MORE depressing.

I've never been one to lose sleep over what I would do without my employment and source of income. I HAVE wondered what my owners would do without me on drunken indulgences of exaggerated indispensability usually shortly before or after quitting a job, but those were a bit short-sighted. Most would answer, “Elementary, they'd get another worker.”

As I see it, this is a major problem in our society and increasingly, the world. Not just that it is thought to be the simplest thing in the world for employers to find good workers, but that the majority of us worry, many absolutely obsess, about what on earth we would do without our precious jobs. This, in large part, is what gives our owners ownership of us.

I'll give you another example. In Canada the government wants to introduce a tax on big factories that belch tonnes and tonnes of shit into the clean air of Canada every year. What a terrible idea! Fascist even! You see, the logic is that the cost of gas and oil and heating and other things will go up if this carbon tax is introduced. People are so well trained we don't even notice the important step in between the introduction of a new tax and the raising of gas and oil and home heating prices that happens with the regularity of a knee-jerk and is publicly allowed to the point of apathy. That step is the one when the big factories and companies raise their prices so they don't have to pay the tax at all, their customers do. We all know they have done this forever, (i.e. they've never really paid any tax at all), they've just foisted their tax responsibilities onto an over cooperative, not to say stupid, public.

The same tax dodgers who own these companies are the douche bags who own US. That is, they pay our wages. Now if they ever gave us a raise, it would just defeat the purpose of hiking up the cost of their products and services, wouldn't it? Hence, the situation we have in our country where the prices of EV - REH – THING are skyrocketing while wages have stagnated.

And don't be foolish enough to think that every time the big companies encounter an expense, they only raise their prices enough to offset it and pass that expense onto the public. They raise their prices more, sometimes a lot more. That's why the country, (meaning them), is getting richer while the people, (meaning us), are struggling to make ends meet.

The middle class is being eliminated. Never have the haves and have-nots been so far apart! The results, as can be expected, are stats like by the age of 30 the average Canadian has a savings of ZERO. It's even worse in the States, who our government inexplicably models itself after, where the average 30-year-old's savings cannot be expressed as a positive number and 50% of the people in the country, I repeat - 50% could not come up with 500 bucks if their lives depended on it. 50% is the median, folks. This means it's the average. The average American doesn't have 500 bucks. They're BROKE! And Canada is following right along behind them like a puppy dog to a Korean kitchen.

“But the U.S. is a rich country,” says President Cheesy Poof, “We've never had a more robust economy.” While this is true in the sense that the country has pulled in a crater full of dough, that dough is almost all ending up in the hands of a very few people. So when that rug headed manchild talks about, “the country,” or “the U.S.,” or “We,” he means himself and all his buddies, the douche bag owners and tax dodgers of the country. And it's no wonder they owners and controllers of the U.S. and Canada have all had a great year because they've been busy for a long time changing laws in our countries to re-route all the cash to the top so that they can have such a wonderful year and then tell us, the people financing their happiness with our blood, sweat and tears, that WE are enjoying ourselves too.

 

But I might not even know what I'm talking about. It's been a long time since I blogged because of China. I just today got my internet hooked up and feel comfortable again. It has been years since I could say I am working legally and comfortably. And I am truly thankful to Korea for that!

 

I can't get that comfortable in my own country though and I think it's largely because of the things above. But I'm learning that a lot of things I thought I was sure of, are wrong! More and more lately. Am I getting old? It used to be pretty hard to prove me wrong. That was because I didn't argue about something unless I was positive about it. Even THEN I still wouldn't argue sometimes. Nowadays it seems I am more argumentative even when I'm wrong. The thing is, I truly believe I'm right! How have I come by such faulty information and why haven't I been corrected. I'm talking about beliefs that I've held for decades!

 

For instance, I've been asked by 100 people if I've been asked by one, "What is the coldest weather you've heard of in Canada?" I always say, "White River, Ontario. -72 degrees Celsius! I know this because I lived very close to White River in Northern Ontario and I travelled there and saw with mine own eyes the giant thermometer that reads -72 degrees. Well very recently I found out that that temperature is Fahrenheit! What the hell? Why? IT'S CANADA! Maybe it's to trick us all into THINKING it's colder than it is. It's almost -58 Celsius, so I've only been off by 14 degrees, but still... Twenty odd years of certainty blown away with one google.

 

Then a good friend told me her daughter just got her orange belt in Tae Kwon Do. When I practiced, there were no orange belts. But when I heard the news I had just finished off goodly portions of both beer and scotch, so, "They didn't have orange belts when and where I took Tae Kwon Do," became, "Your daughter is going to a fraudulent school! There's no orange belt in the whole world of Tae Kwon Do! YOU SHOULD SUE!" Well upon an internet search the next morning, then a follow-up search to see if the first search was wrong, then another follow-up follow-up, I had to admit to myself, (but not yet to my friend or her daughter), that, yes, there are orange belts in Tae Kwon Do. Now is this a new thing? Are there different schools? Does it depend on the teacher or the country? It seems the answers to all of these are yes. Some Tae Kwon Do schools have orange and some don't. So I shouldn't have been quite so argumentative.

 

Did you see what I did just there with the parenthetical statement? Comma, space, parenthesis, blah, blah, blah parenthesis, comma, space? It's, (like this), and then I keep writing... I've been doing that for I dunno how long. You can read this blog and go back years and see it. I was editing the new text for this quarter at work and suggested it because someone had used bare brackets (like this) and it just didn't look right to me.

 

Now look, I wrote dozens of papers for teachers and other inspectors who were absolute sticklers for proper punctuation, citation, spelling and grammar. Of course! I was an English Lit. major! I'm talking profs who reckoned a misplaced dot or an errant comma in a citation tantamount to intellectual property theft! One percent per mistake! I'm not kidding. If you wrote a PERFECT paper, (and the English program at my university would find fault with something written by Merriam Webster, (see I did it again)), and you made 10 TINY mistakes in reference citation, you got 90 on it.

 

And I put up with 7 years of that until I was writing papers without deductions at all! And now something I was pretty darn sure of, just today, proven wrong. I immediately start asking myself questions. How long have I been doing this wrong? How long has it BEEN wrong? Was it EVER right? Are there different schools of thought on this? Is it something stylistic? Is it because I'm doing it the old way or just because I'm old and doing it the way my Alzheimer riddled brain misremembers it?  Because, I mean, it just looks neater, (like this), to me. When you do this(it looks cramped)but I've started, (since this morning when I was proven wrong), noticing both the other two, but nowhere have I seen it like I do it! HOW THE HELL have I missed this? It's EVERYWHERE! Even in Korean!

 

I agree, a comma plus a parenthesis is like a double comma or double parenthesis. It's very, very redundant. (like very, very) But parentheticals like the one to the left just seem to be floating there to me if they're not anchored down with a weighty comma at both ends. No? Am I just wrong? Can I really be the only person who feels this way? Has it always been thus?

 

I'm not satisfied yet. It seems to me direct quotes are set apart far more redundantly, aren't they? It is with a comma,

 

                              

                              "Two spaces, indentation both sides, quotes at both ends

                          and another two spaces that direct quotations are separated."

 

 

So, (this doesn't seem that redundant, now does it), my dear reader? But it's wrong. I keep doing it, but it's wrong.

 

It may seem a trifle to you, but now I'm questioning absolutely everything. What do I believe to be true that just isn't? Are you supposed to put a space between the last word of a question and the question mark ? For all I know that could be correct. Or what about this  ? Or even this   ? If someone challenged me I don't know that I'd feel confident enough to argue right now.

 

But maybe I needed a little humbling. Maybe it'll be good for me and for this blog.

 

So back to the original points I was protesting: I could be totally wrong. I don't even know where I got that stat about Americans not being able to come up with 500 bucks. It could be total bullshit. ALL the stats could be. And maybe we should all be happy having any job at all while the rich get richer and so do our countries. Maybe it won't be bad when EVERY country introduces a social credit score that smacks of Orwellian elitism, separates the rich and poor like a schoolyard pick for a game of Kill Each Other, and doggonnit, I'm going to do it again, (China's already introduced one that will be implemented by 2020), maybe we're just weak and deserve to be owned by the rich, who are our betters.

 

I probably shouldn't speak so definitively about such things because Canada uses Fahrenheit, Tae Kwon Do uses orange belts, and (I'm so uncomfortable with this!) THIS is correct! What the hell, I might just be getting old and losing my mind. Well, at least I can use that excuse. And it gets valider and valider every day.

 

What? More valid you say? Hell if it is! Really? But it only has two syllables! Ah, yer probly right. My brain's goin'.