Well hello there. How are you? Me? I'm alright. You know, I've been better, I've been worse. But that's enough about me. Tell me about you. Tell me your hobbies, interests. What's your favorite food? Your favorite Stooge? How many times a day do you ask yourself "How the hell did I end up here?" That's enough about you. I'm glad we had this time together.

I have this file on my computer called "Blog" in which my ideas for blog posts age like a fine wine or a cheese of some sort that may either get better or moldy with age. Sometimes I open this file and I find things I forgot about, or things that don't make sense. Sometimes I open this file and I see things that I really don't feel like writing about. The point of this paragraph is to let you, dear reader, know that I have a computer and a file full of ideas, so I have no excuse for not updating this in so long. Thankfully, Brian has been here with an inordinate amount of posts to keep everyone enthralled.

If I may have a moment of your time for a sad note, loyal and dear friend, my grandfather's sister Maryann passed away last week after struggling with cancer for a long time. He said this, in a moment of sheer, unabashed loving emotion before breaking down in tears: "She was a fighter. I loved her. I loved her so much it’s hard to talk about. I loved her so much it’s hard to think about."

I feel like I should end this post there because it seems strange to keep writing after that, but I'll keep going, because we all have to move on sometimes, and sometimes the best way to do that is to just keep writing. So please allow me to continue.

Cam and I had a conversation in Red Robin a couple/few weeks/months ago (time is kind of a blur for me), and the gist of that conversation is I fucking hate working in this bullshit corporate environment where employees are nothing more than pawns for CEOs to use and throw away, a number on a sheet that either produces or doesn't produce, and if they don't produce, they can be crossed off the sheet and replaced by another number. I'm fucking tired of my people being laid off and "important people" getting bonuses for running their companies into the ground. I don't know what makes these people qualified to run a company, but the ability to run a company is definitely not a requirement anymore. I'm going to make up facts here, but did you know that 50 years ago CEOs made about 30-50 times more than their employees, and today CEOs make 600 times what their employees do? It's true! (It's not true) And what about bailouts? I'm sorry, but if I open a restaurant and I make shitty food and charge twenty bucks a plate and nobody comes to eat there, I go out of business, my employees lose their jobs, and I'm in the fucking poorhouse. However, if I run a big company that has lots of ties to Washington D.C. (which I'm assuming at this point stands for "damn corrupt"), I get lots of money with no oversight to do whatever I want with, which is a great plan because you saw how I burned through all the money my company had to begin with. I'm sick of all of this bullshit that's going on, and I'm starting to think it's time we just let everything that's been mismanaged to the point of failure JUST....FUCKING...FAIL. There are no extra lives in real life. Let the big companies go out of business, let the rich fat cats lose their money, let them live like everyone else for a while. Shit in this country has gotten out of hand, and I really think that a little leveling of the playing field wouldn't hurt anyone. And don't talk to me about job loss if these companies go out of business. If things keep moving in this direction we'll all be laid off to save money anyway, so why not take them down with us? Obama promised change. I want some fucking change.

Wait, that's not what Cam and my conversation at Red Robin was about at all. We talked about writing a TV show or a movie or something. We talked about being creative instead of working in the soul crushing corporate machine. It gave me hope that maybe one day I'll get fired, and I'll have time to be creative, and I'll have the freedom to move somewhere creativity flourishes, and I'll be able to make a living on my own terms, and I'll watch from the sidelines as corporate America burns and crumbles to the ground, and we realize that no job anyone does is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and we see each other as human beings instead of numbers, and we realize that religion is a personal thing not to be foisted on everyone else, and we realize that all people, black, white, yellow, red, whatever other offensive terms I can think of, straight, gay, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, we're all just people trying to get by, and no one is any better or worse than anyone else, and we'll all just leave each other the fuck alone and let people do what they want to do, and the laws will change, and everything will rebuild into what society should have been in the first place: a bunch of people gathered in one place to celebrate life and live it without fear of being judged or hated. And I'll be there, writing things that make people happy. And I'll be happy. And you'll be happy. And that will never, ever happen, but it's kind of fun to think about.