Thanksgiving – HappyStinkingJoy

50 Sucks…

Alright, here it is. This is the post I was hoping to avoid. I started this stupid blog a few months before I turned 40 in an attempt to… I don’t know… find meaning in crap and avoid a mid-life crisis and find some direction or level of success in early mid-life. I started this blog to avoid this post. Here I am, 10 years later, and the blog hasn’t helped one bit. I’m not quite 50 yet, but I know it’s going to suck. I turn 50 in a few days. I will officially be old.

I’m in a different job now than I was 10 years ago, but I’m making about the same money. It seems that my prime-income earning years are meant to be a slap in the face. Career-wise, I have accomplished nothing. I never was, nor will I ever be, upwardly-mobile. When I graduated high school, I thought that I would go to college, get a good job, get raises and promotions, and retire making a six-figure income. I’m not even close. And not only am I not even close, when you take into account inflation, I’m a horrible failure. $100,000 in 1988 money (the year I graduated from high school… and the money I thought I would be making) is about $217,536 in today’s money. In 1988 money, I’m making less than $23,000/year… with a bachelors degree and almost 30 years in the workforce. My first crappy-paying job out of college with Sherwin-Williams was salaried at $18,000 per year in 1992 money. In 1992 money, I’m making about $9,000 more per year than I did at that crappy-paying job. And what I’m making now is the most I will ever make. The average college graduate makes more money in his or her first year out of college than I am making after what feels like a lifetime of work.

I like my current job, or at least I like the people I work around, but there is not a single thing I can do in my current position to increase my wealth. There is no promotion waiting for the guy running the bookstore. The business of education is one of the few institutions in the US where more education is the only way to more money. And education is too expensive for me. And I can’t seem to win the Powerball. And my basement isn’t conducive to a meth lab… I don’t think… maybe I need to research that more…

People say you’re only as old as you feel. If that’s true, I’m screwed… but don’t worry, it’s not true. You can lie to yourself, but a lie is a lie and your aging body won’t listen to your lies.

There are those who say 50 isn’t old. These people are deluded… and usually over 50. Maybe 50 isn’t as old as the people who say 50 isn’t old, but it’s still old.

At 50, the vast majority of people are well over half-way through with their lives. If they are lucky (if you think of it as lucky), they have another 20 to 30 years to watch their health decline , their earning power disappear, their friends and family start to die off, and their bodies and minds wither away to the point of being unrecognizable. With a few exceptions, most people start to look old once they hit 50. I don’t want to look 50… but really, I’m already there, and it sucks. The dude who looks back at me from the mirror makes me want to remove all mirrors from my house in between bouts of crying hysterically. Being younger and unsightly is bad enough… add in looking old and you’ve got a look that would score screams in a horror movie.

My birthday falls around the festive family holiday of Thanksgiving. I’d really love to just spend the entire day in bed, but my wife won’t go for that. However, knowing how much I am dreading this day, my wife has scheduled a trip to Denver in lieu of the more traditional surrounded-by-family, stress-filled extravaganza that is typically the Thanksgiving weekend. When my house is filled with people, I get uber-stressed, and this year it would have been more than I could handle. My side of the family wanted us to visit Montana, and they would have promised not to do crap for my birthday, but they would have been lying. I spent my 40th birthday with my family and they had a cake and presents wrapped in black (hahaha, “over-the-hill”, that’s hilarious) even though they promised they wouldn’t. Fool me once, shame on you… So, just me and my wife and my sons will be spending a quality couple of days quietly enjoying a Thanksgiving from afar and me officially becoming old.

I’ve read different writings from different people who say that “mid-life” is a great transitional period. You come to the realization that all of those hopes and dreams you had in your youth aren’t going to happen and you become okay with that. It’s a great release of stress not having to worry about accomplishing anything anymore. I suppose there may be some truth in that. I’ve given up on a lot of stuff because I didn’t have the skills to accomplish it, and I can see how being okay with being a quitter would lead to less stress… I’m just not there yet. Maybe that’s what I have to look forward to in the years to come: coming to terms with and accepting my lack of accomplishment and menial lot in life and finding a way to be okay with it.. Sounds fun, right? OK, Boomer…

The Holidays are a Great Time to Lend a Hand!

The Holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, Kwanzaa (whatever that is)… Time to think of others and be thankful for what you have, right? Normally, I would take this opportunity to dog on each and every single one of these holidays. I would bitch about everything I see as being wrong with these holidays… which is a lot. But, then I asked myself, “What would Jesus do?” Jesus would not dog on the holidays. Jesus would tell us too look out for our fellow man. Jesus would tell us to put the needs of others ahead of our own needs. Jesus would tell us all about Stacy Rock!

Stacy who? Stacy ROCK! Say it like you mean it… ROCK! Although a few years younger than me, Stacy grew up in the same small Montana town that I did.

Whenever I think of Stacy, I think of her mom… Mrs. Rock. Mrs. Rock was my English teacher in 6th, 7th and 8th grades. All of the younger grades feared Mrs. Rock. She was the kind of teacher who would yell at a kid down a long hallway if said kid was screwing around. Mrs. Rock’s voice could be heard from one end of the school to the other and stabbed fear into the hearts of the young children. We knew that, sooner or later, we would end up with her as a teacher. There were rumors of children who had mouthed off to Mrs. Rock and just… disappeared. I held a suspicion that the Rock family had a freezer full of formerly-mouthy kids who were served — you guessed it — for the holidays.

When I finally reached 6th grade, I was terrified that I would end up as a Thanksgiving main course. Mrs. Rock was not only the English teacher, she was the homeroom teacher for 6th grade. 6th graders are too young to die. What was wrong with the Ft. Peck school system?!?

Well, it turns out, nothing at all was wrong with the Ft. Peck school system. Mrs. Rock was an awesome teacher. She was strict, but she was also kind. She had a great, cynical sense of humor, which, of course, I loved. Mrs. Rock ended up being my favorite English teacher of all time. It was an incredible experience to watch Mrs. Rock yell down the hall at the younger kids who were misbehaving… knowing the fear that was building in them… some of them probably wetting their pants… maybe even a touch of the poo… Good times! In fact, I contribute all of my writing success to Mrs. Rock. Yeah, this stupid blog is all her fault. So the five of you who read it can blame her.

Back to the real reason for this post. Stacy Rock is no longer a little girl. Stacy Rock is now a soon-to-be rock-and-roll LEGEND! She just needs a little help from whoever stumbles across this post. After school, Stacy moved to the Big Apple in search of fulfilling her musical dreams. She found some success with the release of her first album. Now, she is attempting to produce a second album, and she is raising funds in the effort to make that second album come to life. But Stacy isn’t just asking for money… she is giving out rewards at every contribution level. The rewards sound pretty cool, too. If it wasn’t the holiday season, I would have went for the $50 level just to get some of Mrs. Rock’s cookies, although I still suspect there may be bits and pieces of mouthy kids within (‘What’s the secret to your delicious cookies, Mrs. Rock’, ‘Why, just a little Robert Jones, Mrs. Smith.’) If one were a great contributor to the arts, he or she could actually end up with a personal concert from Stacy in his/her house. That would be pretty cool. Check out Stacy’s story:

Currently, there are two semi-famous people from Fort Peck, MT. One is Wayne Hawkins, who was like a guard for the Oakland Raiders or something. The other is Ron Hauge, who is a television writer who wrote for The Simpsons, Ren and Stimpy, and I think he wrote an episode of Seinfeld or something. Please, please, please help this small Montana town have one more semi-famous person to its credit: Stacy Rock.

Check out Stacy Rock’s Kickstarter page for more information on how you can help and what you get in return. There is a goal and a deadline, so don’t delay. Also, check out Stacy herself and her music at StacyRock.com. The holiday season is a great time to help someone out 🙂

Why I Avoid Black Friday…

My wife has this crazy ritual of getting up well before the butt-crack of dawn on the Friday after Thanksgiving and, with her sister, heading out to various retail locations to fight mobs of people for a very limited amount of sale items. I love my wife, and I know she is muy inteligente almost all of the time… but this yearly ritual makes me doubt her sanity. In fact, she and her sister sit down after Thanksgiving dinner and draw out a game plan (war plan?) for the following day’s shopping blitz. They almost always gets what they were shopping for, and they always have interesting stories to relay to the men-folk (who are usually just crawling out of bed upon the return of the shoppers).

There was apparently some hot deal at Walmart that had people lined up all the way back into the laundry soap aisle. Apparently, there was a pair of young couples who had the foresight to grab some folding chairs from the “folding chair” aisle at Walmart, and these couples had set-up camp in the laundry soap aisle. By “set up camp”, I mean they had their Walmart folding chairs strung across the aisle and their laps and the shelves beside them loaded with some McDonald’s fast food and other heart-healthy treats. And, according to the wife, each couple had a baby with them, and each mother was breast-feeding her baby… right there in the laundry soap aisle… sitting on the Walmart folding chairs.

Of course, being a guy, I’m thinking to myself, “uh huh huh… breastfeeding… that’s cool.”

The wife, sensing the smirk on my face and the glazing of my eyes says, “Remember, this was in the laundry soap aisle at Walmart.”

“So, they weren’t hot?” I ask.

“Seriously… the laundry soap aisle at Walmart… what do you think.”

After clearing the image from my head, I let the wife continue with her story. Apparently at 5am, the Walmart people cut the shrink wrap off of the “special item” and the laundry-soap aisle cleared quickly. The trailer trash that had set-up camp in aisle seven left as quickly as everyone else… leaving behind an aisle and shelves filled with chairs from another department (for all other shoppers to navigate around), their uneaten fast-food remnants, and a bunch of trash. Seriously, someone needed to yell at these trashtastic couples, “Really?!?… I have to watch your ugly kids suck on your ugly wives’ knockers, and now I have to move through your filth to make it down this aisle?” This would probably have led to the trailer trash yelling obscenities (’cause that’s what trailer trash does) and the holiday season could have started with a real bang! The amount of disrespect that certain people seem to exude at any given opportunity is one of the reasons that I do not venture out on the morning of Black Friday.

According to the wife, the shoppers at Walmart were actually quite pleasant this year. The real jerks seemed to be the upper class shoppers at Menards. Apparently the upper class isn’t used to having to venture out early on a Friday morning and deal with other shoppers en masse in attempt to complete their holiday shopping in an cost-effective manner. Thanks, crappy economy 😀 I love it when the beginning of the Christmas season brings out the worst in people… which is what it’s all supposed to be about anyway, right? Apparently the Menards shoppers were pretty careless with their carts full of appliances and… bean bag chairs (I don’t know what marketing genius came up with the grand idea of having a Black Friday special on some stupid 70’s relic that easily can load up a shopping cart and make it very difficult to see where one is going when one is loaded up on them, but he/she should maybe find something else to do career-wise). A bunch of pissed-off people pushy around carts full of crap and not being able to see (nor apparently caring) where they are going… sounds like fun, huh? Yeah, if I had been there and some inconsiderate boob had banged me with his/her cart, there would have been a tipped over cart flying down an aisle and a string of obscenities flying from my lips (’cause I’m kinda trailer trash like that 😀 )

People, in general, tend to suck. I’m pretty sure that many of the really sucky ones come out early on Black Friday morning… so I find it’s best just to avoid it.

Stinking Walmart!

My wife was at Walmart earlier today getting a little of this and a little of that. When she got home, she told me know Walmart has its summer stuff on clearance… and they have some back-to-school stuff out. IT’S JUNE 30TH…JUNE IS NOT EVEN OVER… SCHOOL GOT OUT IN THIS AREA ABOUT ONE MONTH AGO!!!!????!!!! For crying out loud, Walmart has sooo changed the way we live life in this country… and not for the better. It used to be that you could buy a swimsuit at the end of the summer, you know, in case you actually lost that weight you were planning on losing. Not anymore. By the middle of July, no stores will even be carrying swimsuits anymore and it’s all Walmart’s fault.

Ok, I don’t know if this is all really Walmart’s fault or not, but I have a pretty strong feeling that it is. Walmart always gets rid of seasonal merchandise slightly after the season has begun. Walmart also always brings out the next season’s merchandise freakishly early. Does anyone really want to think about back-to-school when school just got out? Does anyone really want to think about fall holidays (Halloween and Thanksgiving) before school even starts? Does anyone really want to start planning for Christmas at the beginning of the school year? I’m sure the answer to these questions for some people may be “yes”… but those people need to be tied up with Christmas lights in the middle of July and whipped senseless with jack-o-lanterns until they come around to my way of thinking.

Have you noticed how time seems to go faster than it did when you were a kid? I used to think this was just part of the aging process; I don’t think this way anymore. I think time seems to go faster than it used to because Walmart has back-to-school supplies out in their stinking stores before June is even over. I think time seems to go faster than it used to because Walmart (and every other stinking store that has to follow Walmart’s stinking tactics in order to survive) forces consumers into thinking about the next major shopping season many weeks (often months) before that season arrives… all in the name of stinking profit!

So a big THANK YOU to you, stinking Walmart, for your contribution to the increasingly insane pace of life in the United States. After all, who really wanted to slow down and try to enjoy summer anyway? Thank you for forcing me to buy what I want and need when YOU want me to have it, not when I really want or need it. Thank you for making me hate you more than I hate a pair of underwear that is too small and constantly rides up and constantly has to be pulled back down at the most awkward moments… and I really hate that. And, finally, thank you for keeping your prices just slightly lower than your competition so that I feel like I would be throwing my money away by shopping somewhere besides Walmart!

Well, enough griping for now. I think I’ll head out to Walmart. I’m gonna need a new sled for next winter and there is a pretty good stinking chance Walmart has them on an end-display. It is the last day of June, after all.