The Monthly Rag

It’s been over a year since I last wrote an editorial for this site, and not a lot has changed in any personal category (or, at least, certainly not anything for the better). I don’t know about you, friends, but these are depressing days. From where I stand, detached and staring incredulously, all that can be seen is endless despair stretched out to the infinity line.

Now rarely do I complain, but just what the hell is going on here in 2013? Forsayers and doom prophets struck out again as the unlucky number rolled into theaters on schedule, except smuggled with it came a toxic cloud of negative that seemed to encapsulate the entire globe. Public shootings, marathon bombings, increased government spyware, soccer games that ended in dismemberments…maybe the news just amped up the usual fear factor for their own gain, like they’re prone to do, or maybe the world just isn’t balanced right without real Twinkies on store shelves, but for whatever the reason, the past seven months have presented few and far between on the positive meter.

If the last five years have reaffirmed anything, it’s that the very basic luxuries must be appreciated because so many can’t even hope to achieve them. Life takes more away as it stubbornly lurches forward, and doesn’t seem to care one way or the other if you or anyone else is stripped of happiness or sanity. I am thankful to still have had a roof over my head, and the very few family remaining at my side to enjoy it with, even though I do sometimes miss the old days of having extra cash in my account and being able to indulge and enjoy something. Perhaps that is the entire problem. Just going out to a movie is too damn expensive now, let alone taking a tiny vacation. It keeps getting worse, and where it will all go from here, I have to wonder in trepidation.

Along with proposed raptures, what also didn’t happen for the tail end of 2012 was a newsprint release of a 40th and final Monthly Rag. Printing on real paper, which costs real trees, is just not in on the new age budget plan. This apparently extends to grocery bags, as well, because now that they’ve done away with plastic and gone back to the old ways, it donned on them to also start charging cash for every single one of those too. Let’s get all this straight in a nutshell here: we took a step backward in materials (try carrying your paper bags in the rain and see how long it is before they totally desintigrate), and now we get the pleasure of adding them to our shopping bill on top of it? As if the casual necessities aren’t being jacked up in price every other week despite this—how in the hell are we supposed to keep the electricity on (don’t even get me started on PG&E and their monopoly-centric schemes) and still continue to eat? And if you think they did it for the environment, you need to head over to e-bay and buy the bridge I just put up for auction. Corporations do not care about such humanitarian causes; they care about a profit margin that allows their CEO’s to wipe their asses with cash and buy children for sex on the black market. Now they can cut plastic bags off the big bill, get an extra ten cents for every paper sack they pay less for in bulk, AND smugly sell it to an eco-friendly community as some sort of heroic act of green charity.

I call bullshit on yet another in a long string of ways to bleed the public dry. The economic milking has reached the critical point where even the most ignorant of minds suspect the cow is on full time life support, and that may be why that thickened dread is hanging in the air. We’ll just have to wait, pray, and see if it can still be dissipated.