About Uncommon Sense

Uncommon Sense and Sensibility

Some things are better left unsaid, but why the fuck then have a first amendment to begin with? Sure, we could play it safe and worry about offending each other or some other others and withholding information to keep everybody happy and complacent, but where’s the fun in that? I don't care if anyone thinks it wrong or blasphemous, because I don’t believe in anything. Not one fucking thing.

Belief is a mean dog between me and the next beer.

I wrote that line in a poem almost 50 years ago in Fayetteville, Arkansas, when I was hanging turkeys at the Ralston Purina plant in Springdale. I had a Master of Arts in English Literature, and I was hanging tom turkeys for $2.30 an hour, plus time and a half for hosing out the blood tunnel before our shift. Such a deal.

I still don’t believe anything, and the dog doesn’t bother me anymore because there's no beer in the fridge. I do still smoke a lot of dope.

After the summer of hanging turkeys, I returned to the university and earned an MFA in poetry, which I used to find work as a poet in the schools for part of a year, until I got fired because some dumb fuck muckamuck was deeply offended about a poem I read at the University of South Carolina campus in Lancaster, and I refused to apologize & may have suggested he shove corncob up his poop chute.

From there I drifted into Industrial Engineering and graphic arts processes, working layout and design, platemaking, operating printing presses, and writing training guides.

The longest I worked anywhere continuously was roughly 6 years at the Multnomah Country Tax Collector in property tax collections and 6 years at Wagner Mining and Construction Equipment in the technical communications and customer service departments. Both ended in termination, and both required detox.

After that I began to work short term contracts in the dot.com and tech industries with offices clustered in the armpit of Oregon’s Silicon Buttcrack. I was a factotum, but I did quite well on 3-12 month gigs where I could afford to get by on unemployment insurance for a few months at a time. I relapsed into “permanent" employment occasionally, but I seldom lasted more than a year getting paid by the same company.

I learned a lot by never deciding on a career that I would never have learned had I stayed in academia, not that any of it matters. Matter is just the bored form of energy. We all know where we end up, no matter what path we take.

I’ve never been good in social situations, & working for pay was enough human contact for me and, fortunately, also for Mrs. Faustroll.

We moved from coast to coast across this nation of miserable fucks to put distance between us and our families, and 40 years later we don’t know anyone in Idiotville well enough to complete our advanced medical directives.

So I was writing work instructions for the manufacturing engineering department at a company that builds electron microscopes when I got fired again less than a year into my latest foray into the world of corporate permanence.

“Really?" I said. “Why the fuck did you hire me?”

“You know I can’t answer that.”

“Oh fuck you, very much,” I said, and left.

I had one of Mrs. Faustroll's paintings in the back of the truck to drop off at the frame shop. After that I drove to Hillsboro to file another unemployment claim.

When I got home, I started to tell Mrs. Faustroll how great my day had been, but I thought better of it andsaid: “Fuck it. I just retired.”

I think that was five or six years ago. My memory ain’t what it used to be, and it was never worth a shit. Time flies when you’re getting old and dying in a nation of miserable fucks. I may never decide what I want to do when I grow up.

So no, I’m just going to continue saying the kinds of things that should remain unsaid, because it’s not enough to think such things. Thinking makes nothing real. You have to shout it out. You have to read the demons aloud in public restrooms. You have to hear them speaking in your own voice when lawyers read excerpts of them in the courtroom.

I will continue wasting the time I have been gifted to waste, writing on the electronic walls of the imaginary caves I visit in invisible ink. Without your own personal decoder glasses (not included in the very good purchase price of FREE!), you may not be able to fully experience the imaginary splendor as I smoke even more of this grass.

This collection of hamberders for your mind & blogs of ephemeral services is purely American, although it will comment upon and ridicule lunacy and blind belief wherever it is encountered in our digital world: on land, in the air, at sea, or even in space.

I’m talking about you Israel, North Korea, ISIS, and the ISS. This site caters to a diverse clientele prepared to sample the entire smorgasbord of American deceptionalism.

You think there’s nothing here for you? Just check the list below and see if there isn’t a broad category you can shoehole yourself into for the sake of perserving pataphysical culture in an age of Moochism.

• Things that people don’t want to hear.
• Things that people can’t stand to hear.
• Things people are shocked to hear.
• Things that make stupid people angry enough to kill over.
• Things that people call naive and inconsequential.
• Things that people piss their pants laughing about.
• Things that people repeat to the cops, their parents, priests or shrinks.
• Things that compel readers to drive repeatedly over previously flattened roadkill to assuage their murderous rage.

And other shit I can’t go into right now because the information is protected by various NDAs or gag orders.

I will say this. The greatest thing about being retired is not having to fake all those random drug tests.

Everything you encounter on this web site was alternate news & #SpeculativeHistory before Kellyanne Conway was a glisten in the meatus of her father’s penis, which is to say it is guaranteed to be 100% pure and unadulterated whatever it is. I’m sure you’ll agree.