A Place in the Greater Scheme......

     It's my weekend off and The Wife returned to work coming off a really nasty cold complete with bronchitis.  Yesterday at work I seemed to be getting the first hints of symptoms myself but I seem to be fighting it off, either that or my immune system deals with these things better than hers; probably a beneficial side-effect of my employment.  I'm exposed to the worst of the worst, microbe wise, and I get a mandatory flu shot every year, so my ability to deal with these viruses has probably been enhanced.  I still feel a bit under the weather, though.

     This evening we watched a NATURE special about the Harpy Eagle, the largest and most magnificent of the Raptors.  This is the kind of programing which will disappear from the airwaves if the Republicans have their way; already our local PBS stations have lost ALL their state funding, depending more than ever on contributions from their viewers.  Truth and learning should be above politics, but unfortunately, some people are threatened by it.  So, please, support your local Public Broadcasting and let your representatives know how important it is that we NOT cut all funding, or the Earth is going to flatten back out and he universe will revolve around US, because the bible will once again become the basis for our science curriculum.

     Of late I have been contemplating the fears one embraces when they are in the grips of "intelligent examination" of the world in which they live.  Yes, because I DO think for myself, and not just live day to day with spoon-fed dogma, I AM afraid;  I am afraid of being caught in the crossfire of someone's religious beliefs, of not so much discovering the meaning of life, but not ever coming to a satisfying definition of "meaning", of never being content with what I know of love, and of coming to think of pain as a necessary by-product of living longer than I am now.  I am afraid of losing my job, then my home, then any remaining semblance of sanity.  I am afraid of being completely forgotten within a year of my death.  I am no longer afraid of some vengeful God out to make me suffer for who I am, but I am still afraid of there never having been a purpose for anything at all.

     But I will never be afraid to let my friends, those who KNOW they are my friends, that as best I am allowed, I love them.

Please Eat this Post when you've Read it.........

     I'm afraid that tonights' post is going to occur in darkness, but that's the risk you take when you allow the sun to sink behind the horizon just as your muse decides to visit.  I know this might not make sense to you NOW, but believe me, my friend(s) (notice the trace of optimism I am displaying in this sentence; it really is refreshing, isn't it?) one day, it will, and when it does, I want you to think back on this day when you decided to place your mouse (I take it you DO  use a mouse to click on your bookmark) on the bookmark directing your browser to this blog, and discovered that a madman has gotten loose with a blog and there doesn't appear to be anything the authorities can do about it.  Or is there?  I don't know.....it seems that things are just going to hell in a hand basket (as opposed to a big plastic tub with daisies on it) and nothing is what it seems anymore.  Or any less, for that matter.

     You're probably wondering by now what would possess a person to come to this blog, considering what you find when you get here.  Not that you actually ARRIVE at any particular spot in the space-time continuem, mind you, when you GET to a Blog, but since we are simply being figurative here, let's just say you've arrived and let's leave it at that.  So.  OK.  What would.  Possess you.  Certainly not a demon, because we ALL know those things don't really exist, except in the minds of stressed out fundamentalist  types who need something to be afraid of.  Me, I'm not afraid of being here, because until I wrote it, this fearsome assemblage of facts, opinions, and assaults on common sense didn't even exist, and since I wrote it, I can damn well UN write it, simply by hitting the delete key, like this........see?  Well, no, actually, you wouldn't have just seen that because I just now typed this back over it and thus the evidence of the crime at hand has been erased......sigh......I suppose you'll just have to take my word for it.

     Having made NO sense whatsoever with as many words, I have decided that the best thing to do is stop now while I still can and publish this post before someone decides it's not a very smart thing to do.  If I only did smart things with my life I certainly would have had this printed up and sent out to book stores (the ones still remaining, that is) and had you pay to read it instead of providing it free of charge within the reach of any computer, even a Windows PC.  Now, I am not disparaging Windows PC's by any means, but I am saying somewhat disgusting things about them, or at least I HAVE said somewhat disgusting things about them, but only in passing, and boy have I passed some good ones (I sooooo crack me up sometimes).  So, in conclusion, I conclude this concoction in the hopes that I have not TOTALLY wasted your time, and that during those moments that I was wasting perhaps some of it.....well.....a chuckle threatened to escape from deep within your carefully maintained demeanor which really isn't any meaner than it has to be.

     You can stop reading now.  I'm finished.

     For NOW.......hehe........

Let's make up OUR own rules, shall we?

     In an effort to downsize the drain on our finances, I decided that it wasn't worth $80 a month to pay for 500 channels of nothing worth watching on Direct T.V.  Yes, I miss a very few select shows, but there are alternate ways to get to them if I wanted to see them badly enough.....only for the most part I haven't wanted to.  Now, I want to state up front that as programming goes, I did not have much to complain about, and yes, there are worse things in your life than losing your signal every time a thunderstorm passed anywhere near the vicinity, but it can be irritating when it's right in the middle of your favorite show.  So, I hooked the boob tube back up to the rooftop antennae, and bought a ROKU, a tiny little internet video streaming box that allows you to watch all sorts of subscription and free content over the web.  And I cancelled my satellite.

     I paid my final bill, and like a good little consumer, I placed their receiver in the box they sent me to ship it back in, and thought that would be the end of it.  Boy, was I wrong!   Next thing I know, I'm getting another bill charging me $187; this after I had payed off my final bill.

     The first thing that becomes obvious after numerous tries is that Direct TV doesn't answer the CUSTOMER SERVICE number.......first it runs you thru the 87-odd choices on it's never-ending menu, and then sends you to a busy signal.  Yes, I know, they only have about 23 operators standing by in New Delhi, but the only way I managed to get to one of them was by dialing the ORDERING number; you know, the one they answer right away in order to get your bill inflated by more movie channels and such.  I told them up front that no, I wasn't calling to order anything, I just wanted to speak to a human to find out why they were charging me more money, which the bill didn't explain.  Of course they didn't sound to pleased being  tricked into actually DEALING with me, but I was put through to a person who should have been answering the phone over there at "customer service".

     He cheerfully informed me I was being charged for a "non-returned" receiver.  I told him in no uncertain terms that I HAD returned them their receiver, and that once I had put the thing into the loving arms of the U.S. Postal Service, it was no longer MY responsibility.  I left that agent with the impression that they needed to track down that receiver from their end.

     Then that $187 disappeared from my checking account.  Man, was I livid, and after about 15 tries in and around their menu, finally managed to get another human being on the line, and asked them what they were doing mucking around in my checking account.  The guy checked, and said it was for the receiver, but then he checks and acknowledges that yes, they DID receive the equipment, and promised to refund my money with 72 hours.  OK.  Fine.

     So four day later, no money.  So today I call and am informed that yes, they credited MY ACCOUNT the $187, but as for any actual REFUNDS, well, that would take at least 30 days to "process".  Yep, you heard it here, folks.  First they will charge you for the receiver whether they get it back or not, and then they will keep the money they steal from you for a month, collecting interest in their corporate bank accounts.

     I asked to speak to a supervisor, and of course after being on hold for another forty days and forty nights was informed that keeping my money for a month was "policy" and there was nothing he could do about it.  Oh really?

     So here I am stuck waiting for them to send me back my money, and already one lawyer has politely decided he would not make enough money suing them in my behalf.  However, there IS one thing I can do which will inflict at least SOME small measure of justice in this regard.

     Post this for all to see.

     Folks, we have seen what consumer outrage has done to Bank of America.  People are saying "enough is enough" and moving their accounts in droves to small banks and credit unions.  Enough that Bank of America has suddenly got religion and have gone back to the drawing board to figure out how to milk their customers (new, diabolical hidden fees you won't notice unless you really stay on top of your account) for more money.

     This is MY message to corporate America.  No, you are NOT a person, and no, you cannot just run us over with no consequence.  Direct TV, the consequence today is that maybe someone will read this and decide it's not worth the possibility of having their bank accounts broken into and raided just so they can watch HBO.  You did WRONG by me and karma will have it's day, one way.

     Thank you all for listening to my rant and may you have a nice day.  Perhaps next time I will have something nice to say about somebody.  Gods know the nice people in this world could use some illumination too.

It just keeps rearing it's ugly head.......

     Hello and welcome to yet another incarnation of my habit of assembling incoherent nouns, verbs, ideas, ideologies, and incredible insights into longer-than-average paragraphs which thankfully get around to ending themselves with very finite periods.  I have never been one to think that economy is a dish best served lean, because it's this very lack of fat in our literary diet that is responsibly for, at least in MY humble opinion, in the degradation of our state of sentience lately.  Yea, and on occasion, I like to throw big words out there, like "sentience", so that I can fool those of you who don't already know better that the measure of a man is not necessarily weighed by the heft of his dictionary.  And, yes, I just read over this last sentence several times and knowing it doesn't really make any sense, have decided to leave it alone because, you have to admit, it DOES look rather literary.

     I have been writing blogs since way back in the day when the word BLOG was mistook for a failed Apple product that Steve Jobs was field testing and decided not to try and sell to the general public.  It's been a wild success, this BLOG thing, especially since people who actually know how to write and could think critically got ahold of it and decided to forego the idea of getting people to pay them for essentially doing the same thing.  However, just like everything else these days in a disposable, instant-on society, the BLOG has gradually lost ground to the new kid on the block, the SOCIAL NETWORK, creatures that allow those of us who don't want to string together deep discussions and tackle intellectually challenging subjects to write anyway, mostly producing such literary classics as "I just bought a loaf of bread and it was moldy" and "Today sucks as days go", instead of having to sit at their keyboards for any real length of time and THINK about something deeper to say.  Depth is really not a popular place to be for most people.  We enjoy the shallows.  It's where our genes seem to pool the easiest.....

     Now, I suppose you think that I am going to suggest that THIS blog is going to be remarkably different from all the scads of other blogs you have, are, and will be reading, providing you don't give up blogs altogether.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Well, OK, there are SOME things which COULD be further from the truth than the concepts I am addressing right now, but let's not worry ourselves with all that right now.  What I want you to focus on is this;  This blog will, in fact, become the most successful, well read and critically acclaimed piece of wordsmithing you have ever read IF, and only IF, you decide to believe it is, and share this wonderful, awe-inspiring belief with other people you know and don't have any particular bad feelings towards.  Think of it much like religion.  I'm pretty sure that by now you have discovered a religious belief system that you have decided to bet your soul on, and you have in passing decided to evangelicalize this wonderful news with other people whom you think have been waiting around for YOU to enlighten them about.  It has become common knowledge of late that only about one out of every 148 of us discover the truth about God and are expected to fill in the other 147 of us before we die, failure to do so being implied that our boarding passes to nirvana will be jerked before the celestrial 737 takes off from gate nine.  So, read this blog, think about what it means to you, and then GET OUT THERE and spread the word, and if you really put some feeling into it, YOU TOO can claim to be one of the VERY FIRST to have discovered THE BLOG that EVERYBODY is talking about, even on social networks, which ironically are the mortal enemies of blogs to begin with.  I can't count on Ophra to stumble across this since she's retired; I'm counting on YOU.  Yes, YOU.

     Or not........

     So, in closing, I want to thank all of you who somehow managed to get to this last paragraph in a desperate attempt to find meaning in what's been typed so far.  You have done well, grasshoppers.  All that remains for you to do now is "follow" this blog and as long as mercury doesn't go retrograding again, you will be treated to yet another attempt by yours' truly, Alex Pendragon, to find relevance in a world that does everything it can to bury it, relevance that is, beneath a steaming dung-heap of hopelessness and value-added taxes.  You will be rewarded, I promise you.*










*Promises have no cash value.  We reserve the right to change the word "promise" at any time, at our discretion, to some other word which may or may not, but most likely may, alter the meaning of the sentence in which the word "promise" is included, as to not actually honor any concept that suggests a guarantee that effort will be expended in such a fashion as to make the word "promise" relative in this epoch, era, or day of any said month, including those months that follow December 2012 on the Mayan calendar.