LUDIC LOG

Cyberspace is abuzz with news of a number of high-profile cases of people getting fired because of what the wrote in their web logs. Leaving aside the question of whether or not this constitutes much of a loss (how good a job could it be, if your employers are hardass enough to shitcan you for keeping a journal?) and the whole First Amendment absolutist vs. workplace sensitivist argument, my initial response was: god damn. I need to get in on this action.

Unfortunately, I have no job, I have no co-workers and only about four people read my website . But that's not going to stop me from keeping alive my reputation as a mean-spirited, hateful backstabber. After all, I'm probably going to have another job someday, and when I do, I want everyone to know ahead of time exactly what a bastard I can be. Call it a preemptive "don't fuck with me" gesture. Therefore, I offer the following hostile, bitchy gossip about my friends. All guaranteed true, or at the very least, completely made up.

* My roommate C. just got a job at an animal shelter, but her work habits are incredibly slovenly; so devoted is she to getting as much free time out of the job as possible that her very first day, she laced the kibble with arsenic so she'd only have to feed the cats once.

* My pal L. has been shooting heroin on her lunch hours. Not only do her co-workers have to cover for her while she spends half the day sleeping under a coat in the janitorial closet, but when her boss caught her skinpopping last week, she said it was insulin. He bought it and now she takes a day off every week to "see her doctor" and "get her prescription filled".

* My friend R., who runs his own business, is such a drunken cheapskate that he's in the habit of saving the money he'd spend on an accountant by drinking two fifths of drugstore vodka and doing his taxes himself. Unfortunately, the numbers are incredibly unconvincing (last year he wrote off over seventy thousand dollars in copier paper for the first quarter alone), and he's worried that he'll be audited. So he's been trolling white supremacist militia group chat rooms and telling them that he's a Posse Comitatus tax resister in hopes that they'll come to his house and bail him out when the feds come.

* My uncle W. likes to tell people that he, in fact, invented common proverbs and sayings. This is hard enough to believe, since he is functionally illiterate and the only book he's ever read is The Book of Mormon; but the really pathetic thing is that the phrases he actually tries to convince you he made up himself are incredibly trite and boring -- things you wouldn't want to take credit for even if you did come up with them yourself. For example, last year at the family reunion, he tried to claim credit for the phrase "hard to like", and every Fourth of July he tries to convince everyone he meets that he came up with the phrase "hot enough for ya?" and that he is, therefore, owed millions of dollars in royalites.

* My old co-worker, J., wanted to get a tit job, but at the time, she didn't have enough money, so she only got one tit done. Because of the imbalance this caused, she always walks hunched over to one size. Worse yet, she finally got a big raise and has enough money to get the other tit done, but she won't do it. She just keeps one a C and one a DDD. She says she just wants to see if people notice, because she thinks it would be a really good conversation-starter.

Well, I think that's enough to get me punched in the face a few times. I hope to get in more trouble as my readership inevitably increases, and I'm counting on you, my friends, to keep supplying me with grist for this particular mill. It's not easy making this stuff up, you know.