This guy knows what I’m talking about, vis-à-vis the whole cubicle drone thing. Though I have to admit, reading his sad cubicle story made me realize that I have it pretty good.

Go, Pat!

Google makes everything easier.

As soon as it’s available, I’m going to have the Google search bar implanted in my arm. There are few things more frustrating than being in a coffee shop or bar, or in “nature” or some similar technologically unequipped place, and getting into a dispute that can only be properly resolved by googling.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk to you about this evening. See that strip of Google ads down and to the right? Maybe you thought I’d sold out when you saw them unfurled for the first time. I probably have. I do, after all work for the Man now. My friends tell me so, the ones who continue to define themselves by how disenfranchised they can keep themselves. Now, I’m all for remaining disenfranchised, at least on the inside. “Poets should arrange to remain thin,” I once read, but I can’t remember where. I think it was in a poem. But it’s such hard work, you know. Exhausting.

My brothers have taken to taunting me with accusations of yuppie, though I can’t think of a less accurate description for someone who at 31 lives in a basement and shops almost solely at Ross. But that’s not the point. I have now made over forty-two cents from those carefully placed and highly relevent text ads. As soon as I break $100, they say they’ll send me a check. Now, I have some friends who stuffed envelopes at home for a while, and their checks never arrived. One of them instead set out to demonstrate that you can earn more than minimum wage by spanging at the local strip mall, and he did. He also set out deliberately to become homeless and ride trains just like the real hobos of yore, and he did. Nonetheless, as far as the check goes, you’ll have to excuse me for remaining sceptical.