I have to write this down. Not for your benefit or even necessarily my own although it will no doubt help to vent off a little rage through the medium of writing. Ultimtately this is more about reading this back in the future, in better times, and realising how much this time period pushed me to the very limits of tolerance.
If this all sounds morbid and defeatist then it's not supposed to be, merely informative of the facts which themselves are becoming increasingly hard to bare.
I'll also strive to keep this as light as possible if not for the sole reason of looking back on this record of events and finding something entertaining in this mess.
I suppose it was with a certain naivety that I finished my Journalism degree this year with high hopes of actually achieving something in my life. Up to this point, partially because of geographic location, I've found myself flitting from retail job to retail job; always feeling more and more disillusioned than the last time and frustrated that I'd allowed myself, once again, to succumb to the numbing comfort and sedation of mundane retail work.
One day, roughly three years ago, I had an epiphany of sorts which led me to sacrifice my manager's position in my job in order to take up a course in journalism. During the three years that I spent studying I regret not one day and made some good friends and came out with a good degree, the problem was the aftermath.
Since leaving university I've only been able to scrounge up a few hours at, you guessed it, a banal retail job and the unfortunate (to say the least) circumstance that has arisen from my lack of money is that me and my girlfriend have had to move in with her dad who, for all intents and purposes, is genuinely insane. And that's not in a good way - not in a run around the house with a chicken up his ass and reciting love sonnets to a vase kind of way. No, this is the worst possible way.
Narcisstic to the point of being totally self involved, he's a disgusting, foul excuse for a father who wallows around in his own filth, lamenting his life through beer soaked lips while he relishes in exacting the same misery on his children.
Unemployed for nearly 30 years his days consist of screaming and shouting, routinely upsetting everyone and then retiring to bed where he spends most of his day snoring like the porcine monstrosity that he so closely resembles.
Christ knows how we've managed to survive up to this point with the free babysitting service that we're expected to provide, the fact that we have to cook for his youngest child because often he forgets that he's even there, that he's a raging alcoholic whose main aim in life is to extort money from the kids that he has that actually earn, unlike himself and that most days he teters on a tightrope between slothlike apathy and outright aggression. Up to this point the only reason I haven't beaten him within an inch of his life is because my girlfriend won't allow me to, a fact that he knows and relishes as he gets away with murder and uses his kids as a shield and a form of emotional blackmail.
Try as I might I can't express in words how much I despise him.
Anyway, things have got to change - I've decided that 2011 will be my time for a drastic reversal. Firstly we need to get out of that house as it is the most negative atmoshpere that I've ever been subjected to. Next on the agenda is a new job, a job which actually pays well and involves some sort of thought process in which to actually succeed.
To put it into context, imagine being allergic to peanuts and having to work in a peanut factory. Well that's me in retail. Fuck knows what I was thinking when I initially left school and decided to throw myself straight into a vocation (too grand a term?) which involved having to please people who were infinitely stupider than myself. I don't understand people at the best of times so when some toothless inbred with six screaming children in tow is treating me with contempt and shouting obscenties at me I understand the whole process even less. It's widely known that I'm slightly elitist and egotistical, despite my lowly position in life, and so it would surely make sense for said tootless cretin to be in a ditch somewhere, shovelling faeces, which would normally be the case in a society different to our own which didn't reward repeated procreation and stupidity with fistfuls of money and lavish benefits.
