Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Living la Vida Cripple


Being crippled can be a tremendous gift for some people because, if you play your cards right, it can give you an ironclad excuse for sitting on your ass and doing nothing. And that’s all some people want out of life.

You know the type of people I’m talking about. I’m talking about the slackers. I’m talking about the stoner types, both literally and figuratively. They’d just as soon lie around on the couch all day and watch TV  and/or play video games and eat chips. Some people love having an excuse for not doing anything because they’re terrified of failing so if they don’t try to do anything they won’t fail at anything. So if they have an excuse for not doing anything then they can feel content and satisfied because they can tell themselves and others that they would’ve succeeded at a lot of stuff if they could’ve but they couldn’t so it’s not their fault.

And if you’re crippled, you can use it as an excuse for not doing just about anything if you want to. You can probably collect Social Security and not work. If you hustle enough, you might even score a space in public housing for yourself with super discount rent. Of course you won’t have much money left for anything else but hell, who’s counting? Some things are more important than money, eh?

And it’s not really accurate to say that cripples situated thusly do nothing. It takes effort to acquire such a lifestyle. Stuff like Social Security and public housing don’t just falleth from the sky. You have to jump through the flaming hoops of applying for them and then duke it out with the bureaucracies when they initially turn you down. That can be a full time job. It’s a lot easier to become a slacker cripple if you’re rich because you've already got stuff like money and housing. You can skip all the bull shit and go directly to the slacker promised land. No lines, no waiting.

But regardless of the path you take to get there, once you receive that golden excuse, you’re in! You’re living la vida cripple, baby! You can slack in peace. You can even make slacking sound cool, bold and/or lofty. You can say you’re living “off-the grid” or “underground” as a revolutionary act of rebellion against government and corporate surveillance. You can say you’re in “self-exile.” You can call yourself an “expatriate” from the land of the verts (which is short for vertical, which is what I call people who can walk).



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