I find myself coming to a grinding halt, screeching to a standstill, muddled thoughts and preoccupation with a stale situation and joblessness that leaves me broke. Its sapping my happiness and sense of self-worth leaving a hollow feeling, a gaping vacuous void that is slowly devouring my life and gagging at the insipid taste that my bland life leaves lingering, the meaningless flavor of a deprived and starving existence, the self-pity and sadness that accompanies it, and the stigmatization of government handouts. Too much to bare, scraping by, the long winter of my discontent, unmotivated and lackluster, thinking back on my late father's partial memoir and documentation of post-modern alienation and his ode to his estrangement from the generic repetition of art and pop culture and the sense of not belonging, his elegy to the slow descent of our culture into the quagmire of mediocrity and a bedrock of haughty smugness , a rejection of American values as a whole and the implosion of our aesthetics, cultural suicide and synchronized worship of mass-produced plastic idols , disillusioned iconoclasm and doomsday pessimism. Kind of depressing, the extreme realism or existential brooding of a disenchanted starving artist. The familiar repulsion by materialism and greed, self-preservation and obsession with wealth and fame, the sensationalist vomit and fear mongering horseshit of inscrupulous media moguls and rightwing pundits with over-exaggerated senses of self-righteousness. It sounds like a climate that would spawn the Joker, nihilism and mayhem, fascination with destruction, schadenfreude succumbing to the depressing reality of newsreel tragedy, discrimination and violence, bank failures and economic woes spiralling out of control. But everyone refers to the impertubabilty of the American spirit, the defiance embodied in our heritage, a liberated revolution of tolerance and extension of freedom to the oppressed people of the world, the soothing injection of Americana and television-escapism replacing our self-reliance and survivalism, making us pampered and rosy cheeked, fat and middleclass, the threat to this complacency becomes an all-emcompassing fear generating cutbacks in personal spending to be replaced by big government spending to bail us all out, injection of the almighty dollar to bolster our failing industries and inflate our pride, Uncle Sam taking the reigns, guiding with unitarian determination and quasi-socialist governmentalization, the call for hope, instead the bureaucratic disintegration of the seemingly straightforward process of democracy. We hear the call for collective rejection of partisan strife and togetherness, and still Rush Limbaugh runs his mouth, pumps more fear into our collective unconscious, tears down liberal steps forward and pines for the conservatism.