OK, well, Monday’s over with. I guess Obama was on the teevee last night. I didn’t watch, but I assume whatever he said was so stirring that he moved the Republicans to realize that they ought to declare victory and move on. Let me just look at the news sites…. Hmm. Nope, guess not. Well, I guess there’s nothing anybody can do, so I wonder how this will affect me, personally. ‘Cuz if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the teabaggers, it’s that the only thing that matters is, me, me, me. Ideally, other than the embarrassment of living in a third-world country on the down side of the roller coaster (I think we’re somewhere between Constantine and Valens on the scale of Empiric Decline), I’ll remain unaffected. I hope so, anyway. It’s hard to tell, what with everybody changing their story all the time. All I can tell for sure is that everything kinda sucks these days. You know, as I reflect upon my life, it seems that everything I’ve been involved with “used to be” great before I came along (or, at the very least, turned to shit rather shortly after my arrival on the scene).

I mean, I was born in 1960, so I came in at the tail end of the 1950s when the USA was the world’s hero, we could do it all, men were men and women were damn glad of it. People could not only live on what they earned, but could afford to buy a house, raise a family, send their kids to school if they wanted to, and keep their stay-at-home wives well-stocked in state-of-the-art vacuum cleaners and the fancy dresses and pearl necklaces needed to operate them (and even have time to go to “the club” on Saturday to play a round of golf). Well, white people could do all that, but that was OK, ‘cuz there weren’t all that many non-white folks back then, and those that were around were valued members of the family (you know – maids, butlers, and “man servants” or whatever Rochester’s official job title was).

Now look at us. We can’t pay our bills, we have to bribe the Russians – the goddamn Russians, ferchrissakes – for a ride into space, the few jobs that actually still exist suck, “union” is a dirty word, rich people are so goddamn selfish they don’t want to help out the old and the sick, and we’d be hard-pressed to invent a potato peeler, let alone innovate our way out of Global Warming.

I was a Steelworker when factory work changed from a career where both workers and the company felt loyalty to one another for life, to just a transient job where “labor” became a drag on profits that needed to be eliminated, and unions needed to be squashed like a bug on the windshield. I was a union (IATSE, baby) movie projectionist in what was a great (and relatively lucrative) trade, just as automation took over and forced union people out in favor of 17-yr old kids who could be trained to thread a projector and push a button (and damn the product on the screen). I became a member of the State Workforce, which almost immediately seemed to transform from a job where you didn’t make a fortune, but you had security and good benefits, to a vilified profession and scapegoat for all that is wrong with the world.

I got into this whole IT thing when it was the up-and-coming, A Number 1, best career in the whole wide world. Now? Meh. A transient position that’s better outsourced to kids who can share an apartment with 10 other geeks because they’re willing to spend 16 hours a day coding, and be paid in Red Bull and Nachos.

When I was born, a Democrat was JFK. Now a Democrat is, well, I have no idea what a Democrat is any more.

My real fear is that, in the not-too-distant future, I’ll look back on 2011 as “the good old days.” Oy.