The Mad Aardvark under arrest

Someone suggested that I do Vlogging with my daughter, or do a MOG (which I had to Google to find out that meant music log).  It’s funny that it was brought up…

I had this dream several years ago where I did an audio track under the alias “The Mad Aardvark” (hence the name of the blog) that encouraged people to start one-man riots everywhere.  It became a national epidemic, and eventually everyone was wondering who the Mad Aardvark was.  Pretenders tried to take credit, but eventually the police tracked me down.  The dream actually started there, with a cop (my dream cast Denzel Washington in the role) came to my dorm room and arrested me (this dream happened long after I left the dorms, though).  He was pretty cool about everything and let me release a video montage of various television things that was supposed to accompany the audio and made it much less suggestive of violence, before he arrested me.  We hoped for either a not guilty verdict or an early release from prison.

I wish I could remember anything about the audio or the video from my dream besides this one thing: in the video I included a clip from a dream-conjured commercial for Pilsburry cake mix, where some guy makes a shitty cake for his wife and drops it on the floor after all his hard work.  The pile of cake and frosting turns into a claymation scene of the Pilsbury Doughboy holding a cake shapes like a heart.  For some reason that commercial made me go off on something about marketing and subliminal messages, and happened during a more violent outburst on the audio track. 

There was a time when I would encourage one-man riots.  I liked the idea of one person giving into their frustration at how they’re being led around on a leash and engaging in random mayhem, vandalism, cursing, etc.   As a national trend I thought that would make an impact better than protests, or mob mentality riots, or these single-shooter catastrophes.  Just perfectly sane people pissed off and showing it for a change. 

Don’t let them force-feed you mediocrity and tell you their shit tastes like chocolate mousse.  Everything we consume in this culture is designed to numb your senses and make you care less about the fact that you have nothing left to care about.  Don’t just sit there.  Get up, do something, activate yourself.

Ka-chunk! Ka-chunk! Hey, man, take a vacation!

So the other day at this craptastic Summer job I have, someone stuck their hand into one of the machines.  The factory makes cheap plastic containers for all kinds of things, like cell phones and jello salad.  Anyway, they had to reach past two protective guards to do it, which are there to remind you not to stick your damned hand into the machine.  Well, some parts were jammed up, causing some problems on the machine, and instead of calling for one of the quality inspectors or technicians to come fix the problem, she reached in to pull the jamed parts out.  She went to the hospital, two fingers being split open to the bone at the knuckles.

On the one hand (ha!) I have no remorse for someone who’s going to squeeze past two layers of guard rails (marked in yellow with CAUTION written on them in red) and get injured.  On the other hand, the job is a tedious, mind-numbing one, and last week I had masochistic thoughts of shoving my hand into the thing.  Luckily, I’m a complete wuss, so I’m still accident free.

Today they put me on a machine that the technicians didn’t want to hook a part sorter up to.  It was moving too fast for three people to work on it (most machines have only two people, or one if it’s slow enough), so the sorter went on anyway.  The technician was so pissy that he didn’t put on the guard rail.  A day or two after a hand injury on the same machine.  Idiot.

And now, for your enjoyment, here’s the Kids in the Hall sketch that was running through my head all last week while I was packing cell phone charger packages. 

http://thetravisty.com/Kids_In_The_Hall/wmv/Compensation.htm