If you are looking for something inspirational to read, you're probably not going to find it here. I'm writing this to relieve some stress, and will probably delete it later, but it was important for me to write this so that I can get it out of my system and move on to other things.
Not much to report, other than that I've been very depressed lately.
Why? Well, let's see: I was laid off from a job I loved and that I was really good at, was replaced by outsourcing and automation that really isn't as good, have gone through a substantial amount of personal savings, and despite applying to over one hundred jobs I'm still unemployed.
My unemployment has run out, and I just signed an 18 month apartment lease renewal, despite having no income. Lucky for me they didn't check, since I had been working for the same company for almost seven years, always paid my rent early, have never been late, and have excellent credit.
I didn't want to renew, this place has really gone down hill, the new manager is an idiot, the maintenance men suck, and the landscapers are beyond useless. But I knew it would be difficult to find a place to rent without proof of income, would have been extremely expensive, most likely requiring a huge deposit, and restricted to a month-to-month lease term at a premium rate, and the price of staying in a hotel would easily be at least double what I'm paying now, so I figured I should just stay put.
And of course as soon as I renew they make all sorts of draconian changes, suddenly not allowing bird feeders or windchimes, not allowing more than four plants, not allowing any kind of artistic creative expression outside your door, or on your patio, they want it all to look the same, you know like a drab non-descript prison complex. And then they tell us they have to bomb the apartment with bug spray, because one of the residents had an infestation, so they are spraying all the apartments, even though I haven't seen a bug inside my apartment in years. Then they had a major pipe burst, and they hired some fly by night plumbers to fix it, and we had no running water for almost a week, and have had several leaks since, and they keep bringing back the same people, who only temporarily fix it, and so it's like a recurring problem, and as a result our water bill has been consistently 30 dollars higher than normal.
And then they hire new landscapers, who don't wear uniforms, have no company logo on their shiny new black Dodge Ram pickup trucks, who are barely out of high school and look like cartel thugs. And then they butcher all the bushes and trees and spray weed killer everywhere, and if you complain about it they don't do anything, and if you confront the landscapers they report you and you get threatened with eviction. Welcome to Mexico! Oh, I mean, the southwest, USA, where nothing works, where being retarded and lazy gets rewarded, and being smart with a strong work ethic gets you demoted, and if you aren't white, or Asian, well, this is the place to be!
You know how I feel about weed killer, right? I'm completely against it. So, I thought I'd spend a few hours on Sunday, pulling all the weeds outside my apartment by hand. What happens? Well, this slimy evil looking creep, who is all covered up and wearing a black balaclava over his face, sprays even more weed killer than ever before, blanketing the whole area, even though there were no weeds, and he was so sloppy he sprays the sidewalk and the building too, almost as if he was doing it out of spite. And so I walk through the complex and notice that he dripped weed killer all over the sidewalks, like the container must have been leaking as he's walking down all the paths, and he was too lazy and dumb to notice, or too unscrupulous to care, and meanwhile inattentive people are walking on it and picking it up on their shoes, and tracking it into their homes, and people's pets are picking it up on their paws and licking it.
But this manager doesn't care, because she's an evil bitch, who is probably on the cartels payroll, and all she cares about is her big fat paycheck and driving her shiny overpriced luxury vehicle, and looking down on the residents who can't afford to own their own homes, and doesn't give one squat about the people that live here, and I can tell she is on some authoritarian power trip, who gets her jollies over threatening people with eviction when they have legitimate complaints that aren't being addressed. She's only like the seventh manager in seven years, and is absolutely the worst one ever. I speculate that this apartment complex I live in, which is owned by a multi-state property ownership company based in a very affluent area of Southern California, has probably had a controlling interest in the company bought up by the cartels, for reasons of money laundering, and as an added bonus they get to bring in their own people, office staff, management, maintenance men, landscapers, third-party contractors, and suddenly it's all Latino. I mean before it was a mixture, but now it's like everybody, and I'm telling you, regardless of their ethnic background, I'm noticing a major deterioration in the quality of work, and in the quality of customer service, where the work is shoddy and there is a major lack of professionalism at all levels. Things are always breaking and take forever to be fixed, and it wasn't like that before.
And so, anyway, getting back to the weed killer incident, I report it to the manager, thinking that maybe she would be sympathetic, and agree, that this is not right, and that this guy needs to be reprimanded, and educated, and probably replaced, and it should never happen again. But, oh no, she didn't see it like that, she defended the guy, without even coming to see for herself. Basically saying that the landscapers are under contract, and if I don't like it, I should buy a house, so then I can landscape the way I want. Basically implying that the landscapers have complete immunity, they can do whatever they want, and they will never be held accountable for making mistakes. So what if they hire unskilled day labor, that don't know the first thing about landscaping, and are going to ruin the bushes and the trees, and contribute to high levels of pollution and toxic contamination, because they're under contract to landscape however they see fit, and if you don't like the quality of their work, you either shut up or leave.
So yeah, as I said they also forced me to have my apartment bombed for roaches, even though I didn't have any bugs at all, only because one of the neighbors had an infestation, and so they forced every single apartment to get bombed, and it's never ever happened before in the whole seven years I've lived here. Before they only sprayed individual apartments if you actually requested it and if there was actually proof of an infestation. And being someone who never uses pesticides or weed killers, preferring to use non-toxic natural remedies instead, I've never ever had my home sprayed for bugs ever before in my life, and so yeah, although it didn't kill me, it probably lowered my IQ about ten points, because it's a neurotoxin. Its damage is subtle like asbestos. It may not be apparent today, but later down the road, you get sick, or maybe you notice your thought processes are a little slower, and you're not quite as sharp as you used to be, where it takes a little longer to think.
Now I see why the people I live around are so stupid, because over the years they've probably endured dozens of such applications, that they are no longer bothered by it, they actually like it, and welcome it, and accept it as normal, because it makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside, being just a little bit dumber over time, and so now they smile when they see weed killer, and they smile when they hear the leaf blowers and see the big clouds of hazardous dust in the sky, and they smile when they see a bush that is half dead because the landscaper butchered it to death, because they've become accustomed to all the bushes looking like that, and are accustomed to the trees having no shade, because they are overtrimmed, so they expect it, and accept it as normal, even though it's ugly as hell, isn't good for the plants or the people, not just aesthetically, but also in a practical sense, because a butchered bush that is half dead, isn't as OXYGENATING!
You see, when landscape companies overtrim the bushes and the trees, it contributes to more CO2 and less OXYGEN! Maybe that's the plan! Less oxygen, less shade, more pollution, more heat, fewer plants, more concrete! That's it. That's the conspiracy! They are slowly killing us!
