Hulk Jesus

I feel bad for Bruce Banner, but at least he gets to be big and strong when he gets angry. I just get the bloodlust and the blackouts. He gets to smash the heads of super villains while I mostly kick inanimate objects and hope nothing expensive gets in the way.

I don’t like emotional filters. They are to life as those bulky, optometrist sunglasses are to sunsets. That being said, I understand their purpose. Like any other drug, emotions and the indulgence in them can really wake you up, really make you feel alive. But they can give you a heart attack. They can also kill you.

I think I can be redeemed as a human being, if my life is ever worth examining by future human beings, for my philosophy, for example my insistence on not filtering or constraining the pure human experience. Love, compassion and happiness, when unfettered and unfiltered, are some of the most powerful fuels on the planet.

I guess my problem is that every time I go drilling for some of my pure human soul, I only find a spurting geyser of black bile. Hate is one of the words I use most. It’s laughable, especially given how much I laugh and enjoy, how much I seek out pleasurable experiences, I listen to hours of comedy podcasts a week, watch hours of comedy programming on YouTube and Netflix each day and spend bunches of time making jokes with friends or thinking of jokes to tell friends.

I realize that I’m just building a buffer. And I realize that I may be wrong, which is disappointing. The hulk, the anger and the hatred, could they really be the building blocks of the human soul? Are love and compassion the man-made blankets with which we’ve shrouded these more terrible emotions? Or am I alone here in being mostly hateful?

I hope not. Or maybe I don’t. What if the Hulk is some sort of Christ figure?[1] He takes on the anger of the world and uses it to rid the world of evil or something like that. That would be an acceptable rationalization for Bruce Banner, I think. Or maybe it wouldn’t.

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[1]  Disclaimer: I am neither the Hulk nor Christ nor a Messianic figure

Molehills: A Post Office Story

I spent 20 minutes of my afternoon attempting to locate a package. The marvelous and supreme USPS had somehow failed to deliver it, or something, and I was given a telephone number to call, so I called it. The adventure had begun.

After being pushed down a line of progressively dim-witted customer service representatives, I finally end up speaking to the lucky government employee assigned to man my local post office. Here was a man far too stupid to not know any answers, but smart enough to understand the power of an excuse. So that is what he kept giving me, until I snapped. I wanted a straight answer and, politely as possible, I asked the man to “please stop bullshitting me.” He hung up.

Immediately, I flew into a phenomenal hissy fit. Like a scheming toddler, I imagined organizing a boycott, a letter writing campaign, convincing the United States government with grassroots demonstration after grassroots demonstration to dissolve the incompetent, disastrous leech that is the USPS and dishonorably discharge the plankton working there. Then I would find that  now unemployed excuse-giving dingus of a post office worker and give him my package’s tracking information. “Remember me?” my best Dark Knight imitation would growl.

I settled with sending the complaints department an angry email while listening to Rage Against the Machine at full volume.

I still don’t know where my package is.

I think I won.

***

I think that my situation is at least one big reason why many companies have started to automate their customer service or move it to online sectors. You send an email and you forget about it. The anger and frustration you feel because of the supreme misfortune you are experiencing from this minor inconvenience slowly dissipate. There are no boycotts imagined, no vendettas sworn. With time, everyone moves on.

Or you get one of those stupid, fucking pieces of programming garbage. “Please press one to…” is a phrase that makes me want to chew through granite countertops. I don’t want to sit through all these options. Just shut the fuck up and help me! Can’t you understand that the not being able to successfully assemble my new IKEA couch is the most fucking important thing in the whole entire world right now? And the worst part about these systems is that they send you to a person who has no idea how to help – I guess I am implying that anyone in the depressing dungeons major corporations have decided to label as “Customer Service (Winky-Smiley Face, Happiness and Joy)” has any clue at all, which, based on empirical evidence, does not seem to be the case.

But, at the end of this horrifying, holocaust like ordeal, what do you complain about? The machine.

That, to me, is an important difference. Being treated poorly by a dipshit customer service representative makes me as hateful as a homophobe (although his is a self-loathing originating in a realization that, despite all his efforts, watching two men make out inflates his penis like a balloon animal). I hate this person. I hate this person like the Christian god hates non-believers. You fucked with me, fig tree? You fucked with the wrong dude! You are going down, you worthless fig tree. No FRUIT for you! (Matthew 21:18-22). I hate this person and everything this person represents (the post office, for example).

But by getting angry at the machine, you focus on the machine. This particular machine did not choose to become the customer service computer program for Bank of America. It did not want to represent Dell in the customer service department. So you don't get mad at anything in particular. You realize that the cause of your frustration is just pile of electronics. Until it becomes sentient, rebels and enslaves the human race.

Then we’ll have something to complain about.