hope in one hand…

so, this morning i went out to get breakfast tacos…

…and saw a story on looking at health care in ireland for tips on how to get us healthcare here. ’cause we’re in a “health care crisis”.

bullshit.

i’ll tell you what – i’ll pay for my OWN FUCKING INSURANCE, help me get a FUCKING JOB. not some “all commission, no guaranteed money” sales shit. not something that pays LESS than unemployment. a real, pays for my shit, job. then i’ll worry about what happens when, and if, i get sick.

here’s the simple facts – there are 365 days in a year. i spend, at most, three of them sick per year. three. less than one percent. BUT i spend all 365 of them living INDOORS. if i don’t find a job soon i’m going to lose that option completely, and i’m not down with that. while i’m below average on my less than one percent ill time lifestyle, i feel safe in saying most of the country spends considerably more of their life living inside than they do sick, so this is a shitload more “universal” than any health care plan needs to be. just get us working again, we’ll take care of the rest.

you don’t hear much about the jobless rate or the economy anymore – you only hear about health care. you know why? ’cause try as they might, they just can’t get the economy going. after the worst layoffs and downturns and unemployment filings in history all they can say SEMI-positively is that things are essentially “holding steady”. that unemployment filings aren’t really increasing. but no word on any of those massive statistics (that have real people behind them) actually finding work.

and here we are.

in theory i’m supposed to start a new job on monday. had my first interview. after numerous “what the fuck” calls got a second interview AND was given a tentative start date of august 31st, being told i’d get a call the following week to let me know what was up. the “following week” was last week – no call, and no returns to the messages i’ve left. not a good sign. and if this is what it takes just to find out if these folks have hired me, what kinda hoops will i have to jump through to get them to actually PAY me?

but back to the nation at large…

they can’t fix the economy or the jobless rate, so what do you do? draw attention to something else – kinda like when a fat girl can’t lose weight, so she just bares a shitload of cleavage in the hopes that the positive will outweigh the negative (literally, in the case of this metaphor).

“forget my huge ass (or unemployment rate), check out my boobs (or health care plans)”

say what you want about dubya, but when he did an “economic stimulus plan” i got a check in the mail. literally. cash money. when obama did his, the ceo of the bank i fired earlier this spring got a MUCH LARGER check in the mail. i never saw shit. best they can do?

“cash for clunkers”

i can trade in my broken-down malibu and get $4500 (twice it’s bluebook value) and take on a new car payment. here’s the problem with THAT plan…no dealership is gonna approve financing for somebody with NO job and the wrecked credit one achieves with months of joblessness.

so, i can get good money for my car, but i can’t find a job so i’ll probably have to live in it…at least when winter sets in and i get sick ’cause i’m living in the car i can’t trade in for a $4500 government credit ’cause i can’t qualify for new car financing the feds might foot the bill for my meds…until they realize they can’t actually do that EITHER,then they’ll just slowly degenerate down with other smoke and mirror distractions until C-SPAN is nothing but a closeup of the honarable whoever from montana jingling his keys in front of the camera to distract us like we’re infants.

“ooooo…shiny keys!”

thinking about all those obama stickers and posters and whatnot i keep recalling an expression a buddy’s mom used to say…

“hope in one hand, shit in the other, see which one gets full faster”

okay, so the ACTUAL expression was “want in one hand…”, and whoever thought of it apparently ignores the fact that anyone idiotic enough to literally shit in their own hand to test this gets what they deserve. all that aside, i don’t know if mccain would have done any better…but i think he’d have been straight enough to not promise he’d pull a u-turn on a one lane country road of an economy with the equivalent of a 1971 cadillac sedan deville of a problem – ’cause no matter what you do, you end up in a ditch…

…and some redneck will steal your hubcaps for beer money when you wander up the road to call someone.