Break a Leg

I decided just today that most of the population of this country is dead inside. By most I mean only around 90%, so there may still be some people actually alive around here somewhere.

You know that old (I mean old) song Big Rock Candy Mountain? I love that song. It's a beautiful hobo fantasy about a land where cigarettes grow on trees, lemonade springs forth from the ground, and the jails are made of tin. They have also apparently, in this land of milk and honey, "killed the jerk that invented work". That sounds like my kind of place.

The country is dead inside because 90% of us have been trapped in this nightmare lifestyle where we spend 40 hours or more per week doing something for somebody else that we most likely don't want to be doing. It's the logical, ridiculous conclusion to what began eons ago when our ancestors settled down from a life of hunting and gathering and founded agricultural society, supposedly offering us more leisure and the ability to pursue the arts, literature, music, politics, etc.

If you have a job, take a moment now and think about how absurd it is. A schedule is established, either on a weekly basis or just "these are always your hours", and you just show up. At the time on the schedule. You willingly show up. It's like at the end of 25th Hour when Edward Norton's dad drives him to prison, you know, he has an appointment to turn himself in to jail? If you have a job, you do that five days a week or more.

Some of us maybe have jobs that aren't half bad, but what does that really mean? In my case it means I hate my job not quite enough to stab my eyes out with pencils, red ones, repeatedly. I'm just not quite there. And I don't even have that bad a job; I do it well, I'm the boss at my office, there's even actually a lot of downtime on the job depending on the season and the level of business.

I hate my job even when 75% of what I did on a given day is check my personal email and read feeds in my RSS reader.

Why do I do it then? Why do you do it? Have you ever read Walden Two? It's a utopian fantasy yarn about a little commune somewhere where people don't have jobs. They are obligated to work something like 20 hours per week, but they can choose what job to do to fill those hours. Each job has a multiplier for how much it "pays" in hours. So being a, oh I don't know, chocolate taster would only count 30 minutes for each hour worked, whereas working the sewage treatment plant would count double.

I went on a rant about Battlestar Galactica, but I tell you, Star Trek is worse. BSG at least has balls; you don't talk in BSG, you shoot. Picard would have been dead before he said "hailing frequencies" if he came anywhere near a Battlestar. The one thing though that Star Trek got right is that they don't have money, they don't have jobs, they don't have obligations. In a society where a replicator can make matter out of energy, what do you need money for? If you don't need money, you don't need work, and if you don't have work then you have people doing what they love.

In a lot of ways I'm doing what I love everyday, and that's what's even more depressing. I know there are people out there who do exactly like I do every day: they go to work, they come home, they start all over again. At least I have a few things going for me ,and I try to live what little life I can call me own to my fullest, and I hope all of you do too. I have a great family, I have acting and filmmaking (and Break A Leg, of course), and I have the ability to bitch to apparently hundreds of thousands of people on a weekly basis.

Thanks for listening. Now it's time for cookies and American Idol.