End Title. Meant.

So I’m sitting on the train, yet again, tapping away in the face of “artistic” futility. Yeah, who am I fooling? I can barely write code, let alone a meaningful, first-person analysis on the Lifestyles of the Repressed and Cynical.

There was a chap on the platform this morning… early 20s, about 5 foot 7, looks like a shorter version of Ioan Gruffud (read: hawttie). I’d seen him around before and had a fairly passing appreciation of his aesthetic… until today. He’s actually really good looking, and in an uncharacteristic (and masked) display physical attraction, I checked him out. Oh my, did I check him out. Horizontally-striped “sailor” t-shirt, perky arse in denim, two earrings in the top of left ear, light olive complexion, tiny waist and fairly buff. Yanno, flattered-by-the-too-tight-t-shirt type of buff. Good arms, which were apparently impervious to the late-winter cold of my rural area because they were quite, quite bare up to just below the shoulder.

The guilt kicked in soon afterwards – I’m not often so deeply, deeply shallow as this – and it occurred to me that I’m now officially a dirty old man. You don’t have to be old to qualify – just subtly lecherous and devoid of the burdens of regular shaghood. That’s me all over, I guess.

*sigh*

I haven’t had a lot of time to myself lately. The stress of my daily commute and fast-paced, thoroughly unimportant job is taking a toll on my health. Last week I came down with a somewhat brutal cold which refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of my immune system for a good deal longer than any curable virus should, and when it was finally vanquished, it decided to play the scorched earth card on my lungs. Self-medicated leftover antibiotics (yes, I know, very bad) had the organs back and up and running, but at the loss of my weekend from Friday to this morning (Monday). Hardly a trade-off; I stayed in bed almost completely, except for a quick run to the shops. Out the window went my plans for a Sunday night jaunt to the cinema to see… well, whatever’s playing… even though I can’t afford it because completely broke and won’t taste any rental income until the end of August, thanks to a slight oversight in my expectations of landlandyship. Oh well, payday Wednesday, I can slum it until then.

In my copious time, free from the distractions of penile stimulation or social life or, yanno, health, I’ve had ample opportunity to ponder an increasingly pronounced sense of discontent with my life… and it seems to resolve itself into one big issue:

Entitlement.

I hate entitlement. I really do. There’s so much of it going around, rather like a virus, and it’s shitting the hell out of me. Who is anyone to just expect a free ride? How can anyone be so god-damned deluded?

You’re standing on the platform, waiting for a train, hoping desperately to find a seat so you can sit down, whip out the laptop and do a bit of overdue blogging for the ~60 minutes you’d be otherwise wasting, and then you get pushed out of the way by some rampaging, government-sponsored infant factory with a veritable elephant-trail of offspring stretching half the carriage. Oh, she’s entitled to a seat, and you’re not, because she’s got literally hundreds of kids, and you don’t.

You’re walking down a busy street, trying to avoid the crush of people moving in all sorts of insane directions. Some moron with a surgically-implanted mobile phone is rushing to some extremely important corporate wankfest and raving like a schizophrenic, obviously distracted by the desire to appear important. You’re headed straight for each other, blocked into a narrow corridor of free space by street hawkers, pamphleteers, the aforementioned baby factories and their produce, and psychotic, Evel Knievel bike couriers. There’s nowhere to go but forwards, and at some point, someone is going to have to stand aside to let the other through. Being the smaller of the two obstacles, carrying less and being far more manoeuvrable than Cellular Lunatic, you decide to dash a zig-zag between the human traffic, clearing a blockage and facilitating an open corridor for a whole stack of people stuck behind said Lunatic, like an impacted bowel movement blocking an intestine. Mobile Schizoid decides (correctly) that your inertia is less than his, goes for an icebreaker tugboat kind of shove, pushes you out of the way with a glancing blow to the shoulder and leaves you within the slowly dissipating free space, pushed back a few steps by his obesity, then pushed a few storefronts further back because you can’t go forward into the human pressure wave, you can’t go sideways into the slipstreams, you can’t crowd-surf over them and going under them is not an option, unless you want to break every sliver of bone and cartilage in your body. They’re entitled to take over the whole left side of George Street because there’re more of them. He’s entitled to bulldoze you out of the way because he’s as wide as he is tall. You’re not because there’s only one of you, and you’re only about human-sized.

It’s 9AM on a Saturday. Your biological alarm clock didn’t just go off, it went completely ballistic at 8AM and woke you like a gunshot. You’ve spent the last hour phasing in-and-out of the sleep-time continuum because you work what is effectively a 60-hour-week, you’ve had a major cold/flu combo, you’ve barely eaten a meal in days, it’s freezing outside and you’re FUCKING EXHAUSTED. There’s a knock on the door and a parent decides to make sure you’re awake so they can let you know that they’re going out for a walk. This is not to let you know that they’re going out for a walk around the block and they’ll be back in an hour, so you don’t suddenly get up and flit about the house in a mild panic, wondering if aforementioned parent has been abducted by aliens, fled the country, or been killed, diced and consumed by a serial killer in the night. No. This is your Saturday morning wake-up-call so you can get up and do your laundry (which you absolutely insist on doing yourself), because this parent cannot detach their inactivity-paranoia from your life quite long enough to realise that maybe you deserve a lie-in, because hey, it’s been a big week, and further, maybe it’s not up to them about what you deserve, because it’s your life, and if the laundry doesn’t get done, it doesn’t get done, and by the way, your laundry actually doesn’t have anything to do with them at all. Their disregard for your physical and mental health, because they think laundry is more important, is itself more important than maybe letting you rest-your-weary-everything. They’re entitled to decide what time you should be awake on a Saturday morning after a very, very long week/fortnight/month because they’re stuck in the childhood you left behind so long ago. You’re not, because you’re merely an independent 29-year-old who works absurdly long hours during the week, is almost completely unconscious on a Saturday morning, and therefore powerless to prevent the invasion of his slumber.

Your parents are on holiday in Western Europe for a month, again, leaving you and your brother to look after the house, the dog, the cat, the birds and the chickens down the backyard. Your brother does bugger-all to maintain the house, despite working only half an hour away, and will occasionally feed the animals. You work in the city, a good 90- to 150- minutes one-way and often get back when it’s dark and bitterly, bitterly cold. Not only must you feed random animals (though not to each other, sadly), there’s domestic upkeep, cooking, laundry, self-preservation and sleep to contend with. A friend suffers a technical disaster with their PC and asks you to drop around and take a look. You do what you can to salvage the situation, offer a spare computer as a replacement (which subsequently fails… of course), try to make time in your already overwhelmed schedule to continue repairs, and generally put yourself out for many hours at a time, often not getting home until much, much later in the evening than is practical, starving oneself of food, relaxation and sleep because of some sense of duty to your friends. A large amount of data, for which you rather nicely provided a temporary home, must be returned and returned pronto because it’s more important than anything you’ve got going on in your own life. Your parents have returned and your schedule has lightened up, but you still find it difficult to meet the supposedly reasonable demands being made of you. You make a special journey to the letterbox of the owner of said data and leave it all, fully intact on one of the ever-decreasing numbers of spare hard drives you have lying around. They are entitled to what they want because they are your friends and the data is extremely important, moreso even than your health, wellbeing or personal obligations. You are not because, well, it’s you and you’re supposed to fix every major computer problem that comes your way, and everyone has every fucking right to be shitty with you when you can’t solve their myriad technical ills with a mere flick of the mouse.

You’re stepping out of the office to grab some lunch from the subterranean eatery across the pebblecrete plaza. There’s a homeless chap hovering around the garbage bin, wearing a groove into the ground between the cave of culinary capitalism, the steps down to the other street level, and the automatic swinging (not sliding, swinging) doors of your building. You’re starving because you generally don’t get a chance to eat in the mornings, it’s now 1PM and you haven’t eaten since about 9PM yesterday. He doesn’t just ask you for spare coins, or even silver ones for that matter, he demands that you reimburse him in gold for his time. You actually have nothing on your person at the moment, and politely decline. He launches into a surprisingly verbose hissyfit about your supposed lack of generosity and how you never donate anything unto him, because somehow, of all the thousands of people who cross this one patch of perpetual shade, he’s remembered you, and your coat in particular. He’s entitled to your pity and guilt because he chooses to ignore the virtually infinite options available to him, like shelters or rehabilitation or other such initiatives – many of which are planned, sponsored and run by the very organisation you work for – and decides to stay here, in the plaza, day in, day out, every day for six months, in the middle of winter or not. You’re not entitled to say anything, because to do so would be in extremely poor taste and would also likely convey a sense of ignorance, greed and absolutely mercenary lifestyling in the face of ugly, rank economic oppression.

You’re blogging away on your laptop, quite badly wanting to purge, through words, the depression, frustration and general dismissal you feel on a daily basis, and you repeatedly choose to go easy, in your blitherings of innate idiocy, on the people who are royally pissing you off because, hey, they’re only human, they have their own battles, right? They’re entitled to sleep easy each night under the impression that they’ve gone and been perfectly reasonable about everything they do, and you’re not, because everything since DAY FUCKING DOT has been your fault, your responsibility, somehow due to your own ignorance or inadequacy or incompetence or general MARAUDINGLY EPIC FUCKDOM, and you drive yourself mad trying to find some other outlet for your not-so-latent misery, and physical exercise isn’t possible because you’re tired, hungry, sick and your shoulder’s playing up like it usually does in winter; you can’t actually talk to anyone because you’re either on the other side of the planet, in a different state, surplus to their requirements or because you know that everything you say will be memorised and used against you later on, when necessary or not, and your blog, once the last bastion of sense and reason in your own seriously conflicted and completely warped existence, is looking as barren and empty as a Tom Cruise sperm sample, and you finally, finally decide to shut it all down because it no longer serves the purpose you, at long last, understand. Everyone’s entitled to have their feelings protected because it’s them, and you’re not because you are actually much less important than anyone else and really, you should just shut the fuck up and deal with it.

So there. Rather than go all FUCK ENTITLEMENT, I’ve decided to take it up as a hobby. I’ve decided that people aren’t owed anything anymore, they have to fucking earn it from now on. I’m not putting myself out there, I’m not offering anything, and I’m not obligated to do or be anything for anyone. If that makes me a COMPLTELY SELFISH CUNT, so be it, I’m not going to be stomped on and used and implemented and disposed of and bypassed. It’s my fucking time that’s running out while I’m busy helping everyone else. I’m fucking entitled to a bit of leniency within my own life, and it starts now. This blog ends, and another... infinitely less visible one... begins somewhere else.

THE END.