AM I AWAKE?

You know there’s something seriously wrong when you’re sitting in a midtown Sacramento brewpub -- just minding your own business -- attempting unsuccessfully to unknot your central nervous system after yet another trying day of being alive, and you happen to notice that there’s kickboxing playing on the television behind the bar. It should be pointed out that life is enough of a vicious scam, an overwhelming farce, and an existential gross-out already, even without the superfluous spectacle of two hyperactive spasmos beating the crap out of each other with their feet. Kickboxing? You must be kidding. Am I asleep right now, or what?

Well, if I’m not sound asleep and completely at the mercy of the venomous, pus-filled monsters at the core of my unconscious mind, I might as well be. Kickboxing -- for fuck’s sake.

So anyway, I’m pretty sure I’m awake, which is unfortunate really. Not being asleep and dreaming that our fearless “leaders” are relentlessly goading us all toward a bleak, Orwellian, post-industrial Neo-Con version of 21st century corporatist bondage must mean that it’s actually happening -- as difficult as it is to believe sometimes. It sort of goes without saying that our lives would be immeasurably eased, and the future considerably less uncertain and threatening, if the very existence of the so-called Bush “administration” was nothing more than the foul after-taste of an insubstantial nightmare induced by, say, over-exhaustion and/or over-medication; if wanton acts of criminal aggression, international torture gulags, Diebold-compromised elections, the systematically engineered impoverishment of uncountable billions of people, and the inexorable, mechanized rape and plunder and obliteration of what’s left of the real world were all simply, well, a jumbled psychological slide-show flickering across the frayed margins of humankind’s battered and beleaguered subconscious …

Yeah, if only. So much for rhetorical wishful thinking, I suppose. We’re really awake -- most of us; we’re sinking fast, and there’s not a fucking thing we can do about it. That is, nothing beyond staring at nonsensical kickboxing contests and pontificating in a blog that nobody ever reads.

Holy shit.