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hand crushed by a mallet (Remix) by 100 gecs

[hand crushed by a mallet (Remix) by 100 gecs]

Both are fantastic exploratory lovely electro hyperpop rock hits.

This feeling's going to my head

I'm thinking things I shouldn't say

You circled me inside my room

I couldn't go, go, go, go


It hasn't been the most fun set of weeks here. Overall, I have been angry. Anger is kind of a new feeling for me. Well, that's not necessarily true. Anger is normally an impulse for me. It's a firework in the night that pops and then when you blink, it's over. You remember it, but you can't remember what it looked like. The last few months haven't been like that. They have been like a pot that's almost boiling, but the lid is on. You see the flames licking on the bottom, eating up the side. If you open the lid, maybe the steam will come out, but then it won't finish cooking. You have to keep waiting, poking, simmering, making sure it doesn't boil over. It's two hundred and ten degrees. It's not boiling but boy, it is starting to hurt.

Most of the time, I loathe young people in 2020 sometimes1. The go-to line is just “lol you're actually depressed”. Ugh, what an awful line. In an effort to reclaim mental health, folks have done the two-for of de-emphasizing emotion while simultaneously minimalizing depression, all in one fell swoop. When I tell people how I feel, they almost write it off into a Pandemic Puddle of Problems. Yeah, that's all real and valid and not something you should pretend isn't real. But also, the things that make oh so livid have a very real chance of being there even without a global quarantine.

I am struggling to find a work-appopriate way to express my frustration. Why the prefix? It's because I know coworkers (above and below me in the org chart) read this and as a result I have to set expecetations correctly. I have to be honest without being real… or maybe the opposite? Let's just get it out. I work a tough job. It's amazing, it's empowering, but christ2 it's hard. I can almost always deal with that (previous posts aside), but I draw a line at one very certain point. The line is equality, or maaaaybe fairness? I have my own version of the Golden Rule:

when you see people hurting, you help them

Very often, that means taking some pain on yourself. I'm not mad at people who don't see it, I'm mad at people who turn a blind eye. Doubly so when you should have seen it coming. In these times, it's literally not always possible. But still, you can't just surrender. You have to flag it. You have to tell someone. Letting people suffer in silence is not going to help anyone get out of their dark cave. This is a lesson that I only learned after many weeks of suffering, so I'm re-broadcasting it loud and clear.

As so often happens here, I wish I had a simple and obvious conclusion for everyone. I don't. I only have the words that are coming out of my head. I have hidden my phone (under several inches of blankets) as well as my burner phone (sadly, no, just work, not drugs). I've opened and finished one bottle of alcohol too many. I abandoned any hope of efficient or producitve caloric content - Walgreen's salad is surely covering all my bases, no? I have to draw lines like in a children's coloring book: thick and bold and so everyone can see.

This is a fun place to deposit ink, but it's important we all know the rules. The ones I hated are becoming realer every day. See you on the other side, hopefully a little sooner.



  1. Cancel me because I'm old, but the last word does a lot of work right? ↩︎

  2. I thought about capitalizing it but sorry, was too fun to leave it lower-cased. ↩︎