Ranting and Raving Beneath the Pinnacle of Madness and the Power of Judgment

"Oh my god, she actually started collecting donations to move. I was like, she's like, 30. You just don't do that."

I listened to the little group of them chatter as I cleaned the surface of the bar, carefully pouring steaming hot water over the draft levers. I wondered if you could either learn a lot by eavesdropping or simply excel at self-torture. I started a go-fund-me sight and accepted donations. I'm 30. Did my friends and family say that about me? But mine wasn't for a god dam move, it's to write a book, to better the world, but is that any better? Or am I completely full of shit? Big shit, no shit? Who gives a shit.

What the hell are we learning from judgement, what are we teaching? I couldn't go an entire minute without passing it though. I swear I couldn't. I'm terrified of being disliked but I spread my own distaste for the world all over their tacky clothes, their bad haircuts, over sized, hip eye wear and their sad tips which almost always follow a barrage of questions about our menu's prices. The secret is not to judge, per say, but rather to judge without apprehension about un-fellow judgment. You hate me, big fucking deal. You hate something she did, while I did it too, so fuck off. I hate the way you talk, like what you say has any significance beyond your own significantly large mouth and crooked front tooth, but I don't hate your front tooth particularly, it makes you human, it's simply your lack of self-awareness, which makes you stupid. I hate stupidity because I can be so stupid. Dear God, does everyone else know how stupid I can be? Oh fuck it, it's my life.

Enough about judgement. It's me. I give a fuck about people I shouldn't give a fuck about. The cousins who think birth control is a sin and I'm a black sheep. The ones with their Old Navy-I-Puke-Rainbows-and-shit-out-organic honey-and-picnic-in-the-yard-with-my-white-picket-fence-and-well-behaved-Labrador-and-hair-extensions-and-botox-and everything I'm against but feel for some reason I need to live up to lives. Fuck you. If I never liked you to begin with it's fine, let it go, they never mattered. But it's the fall from grace, the connection that snapped, how did it snap, how did I snap? Is snapping the only true redemption and it's the people that fail to snap that are lacking something; so tightly wound they might collapse all over their loathsome expectations of the rest of the world? Then what, we catch them in our arms with their perfect smiles and glass houses with our hands full of our own bad decisions and our smelly arm pits, wobbling along on the balancing act of depression and ecstasy, always unsure as to what will hit next. Or maybe not, maybe I'll just giggle as they fall because it's funny to watch and hope no one is too badly hurt then skip along my merry way trying to overthrow depression once and for all and maybe, finally, not give a shit about what doesn't matter.