Brain Drain. Use it or lose it.

After surviving 7 rounds of layoffs, the evil layoff elves found my hiding place and I was given the boot. We had all seen it coming. As each shielding layer of management was lined up and shot, my human shields were becoming non-existent. We hunkered down, hoping to stay long enough to vest the rest of our worthless shares of stock -- hoping against the impossibility that the stock price would rise above our options price.

Afterwards, I enjoyed 1-1/2 years of vacation. Lazing about, traveling, goofing off, watching movies at the local 2nd run theater for $1.50.

When I started working again I found something odd had happened. My brain seemed to have sloooowed down. Was I getting old? Is this what happens when you get old and become fossilized like Ronald Reagan? Alzheimer’s. Parkinson’s. For a person who prides himself in being an intellectual, this is one of my greatest fears – turning into a human vegetable. Mad Cow disease scares the hell out of me. It turns your brain into Swiss cheese – ten years after you’ve eaten some bad beef.

After working a year on building cutting edge software, I’ve gotten the edge back. Things come back to me in a flash. The slowness is gone. My mind cuts quickly like a monofilament whip. I just have to stare at a bug and it just rolls over with its legs twitching in a death dance.

So, what happened?

Use it or lose it. The brain is an intellectual muscle. You’ve gotta exercise it or it atrophies. Retirement is slow death. They’re right, Old age is a mental state. If you act young, you stay young. If you sit on the couch and ossify, your bones fuse together, your muscles weaken, and you get old and tired. Your nerves and neurons slow down and you die a slow and horrible death.

I’ve had my taste of retirement. It’s like a drug, lulling you into a slow death. We all have a dream of retiring on a beach with no cares, but do we really want that? How long could you stand it?

Me? I’ve learned my lesson. I’m going to keep busy until they issue that death certificate.

Enforced Waste. Recycle the World.

I just tried to make a comment on a comment on a co-worker's blog and lo and behold, I had to create a blog before I was allowed to make a comment, for christ sakes, this is what is wrong with the world today.

Enforced waste.

We get plastic wrapped around a cardboard box around a plastic bottle holding a small wad of cotton keeping pills from doing their death rattle in a bottle. Yeah, look at all that waste just to keep you safe. We try to feel good by recycling aluminum cans, bottles, cardboard, but we're just fooling ourselves. In this consumer society, we're just using everything up: trees, fossil fuels, oxygen, water, everything. All this conservation and recycling is just to fool you into thinking you're a good citizen. As religion was the opiate of the masses, recycling is the new world religion. Wait until we run out of everything and we're cave men huddled around a burning pile of tires. We'll tell stories of men flying, messages traveling around the world at the speed of light, weapons that can kill you miles away, and food that came in clear cellophane boxes that were crispy and tasty, but not healthy for you.

So what's wrong with forcing me to create a blog? Aren't the bits recycled? I don't see any trash floating by on the ethernet whirlwind. So, what's the big deal?

I'm wasting space on someone's hard drive and wasting someone's electricity.

Take a look at the other blogs on this site. I did a quick run through. Most of the blogs are fake blogs pointing to porn sites. Others are just blatent plugs for companies and businesses. What a waste of resources. We rail about spam, hating it, disliking it. The junk blogs here are just as bad.

Wail into the night, scream at the top of your lungs, tell them you've had enough and ain't going to take it anymore. Get the powers that be to pull the plugs on those junk blogs and recycle their ass.