I work in customer service, and if you ever have a desire to see the ugly side of humanity, I highly recommend a job in this field. I don’t get to witness mass genocide or death by starvation, but I have regular contact with people who think that retail injustice, or their perception of such injustice, especially when they are the alleged victim, is just as infuriating, if not more so.

I’ve been with the same company for roughly two-and-a-half years, and although I found my current position enjoyable at first, the job and the industry have served to highlight just how skewed our priorities are. Our price adjustment policy “victimizes” the customer. Our shipping charges are “a crime against humanity.”

This is our Darfur.

I am uneasy about having to feed the ideal of American Consumerism in order to feed myself. My job requires me to embrace the idea that the customer is Number One, that it is all about them and their little world. A world where tragedy is paying too much for a sweater and outrage doesn’t begin to describe the reaction to a sold-out pair of shoes.

This is our Blood Diamond.

I’m tired of helping people who don’t have actual needs. Spoiled rich kids mourning over a jacket as if they’ve lost a child to AIDS.

I’m sick of it, and I want out. I’m still young (by most standards anyway), single, and I’ve got nothing keeping me here. Except debt.

Ah yes, debt. The thing we love to celebrate with the ringing of bells and raucous cheers and applause.

That’s not a metaphor. We actually do this where I work.

God willing, I will have paid off my credit card by January, leaving myself with only student loans, which I will carry with me for many years. Thankfully, I have options for forbearance and deferment, which means I could be temporarily without any debt-related bills as early as next winter. Once that is ironed out, I will (hopefully) make my great escape. But to where?

I want to do something real. Something that matters. I want to get out of my own little world and start serving people with actual needs. I want to wake up in the morning knowing that I have the chance to make an actual difference, however small. Not through some side project or weekend trip, but all the time.

Although the prospect scares me a lot, I’ve been looking at the Peace Corps website recently and considering it. I don’t think I would deal well with not bathing and having to eat mushy/liquidy food. Then there are other creature comforts like running water and air conditioning that would be difficult to live without. But maybe something like this is what I need. Maybe I just need to try a short-term mission trip and see how that goes. I feel like I need to see the world to truly grasp the big picture. Not the world I see on TV, but the world as it truly is. I want to go away and experience culture shock, then come back and experience it again in America.

Most of us don’t realize just how shocking our culture is.

Japan might have us beat, though.

I just started listening to Christmas music tonight for the first time this year. In years past I would have been playing this sort of stuff for a month or so already, but not anymore. As time passes I’m becoming sort of a cross between Ebenezer Scrooge and George Bailey. I miss what Christmas used to be and in many ways I hate what it has become.

Maybe it’s because I work in the retail industry. Every day I stand on the front lines of everything that is wrong with Christmas. The rampant consumerism and materialist values of our culture. The ridiculous war waged by those who boycott every retailer that uses the word “Holiday” instead of “Christmas.” Two thousand years later and we’re still waiting for peace on earth. You’d think we could get it right at least once a year.

Maybe as kids we are protected from all the vitriol and selfishness that makes itself painfully clear this time of year. Maybe we don’t realize at the time that Santa Claus is being used by the Man to perpetuate the retail agenda.

Despite my feelings about the holiday season, a trace of the Christmas I used to know still remains, if only for a few hours each year. I’ll always miss the people and things I used to associate with what Christmas once was, but I have to cling to the pieces of what it still is and hope that the parts that have been lost along the way will return in the years ahead and awaken the spirit of Christmas that has seemed farther with the passage of each year.

But maybe I’m hoping for too much.

I’m currently on the road with my old pal Ari Hest; I was able to take off work for a few days to help him out on tour for a few nights. Yesterday was a day off, and I spent the vast majority of it in a hotel room in Durham, North Carolina.

I had hoped to make some progress on the novel, and I wrote a few paragraphs, most of which will probably be cut later on. Still, I consider it progress. I just wish it would happen faster.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Charlotte right now, killing time before we have to set up for tonight’s show. It’s hard to think between the cappuccino machine, the Spin Doctors song in the foreground, the whistling customer and the other one talking on his cell phone. I apologize if this post makes no sense. I blame these things.

I got an idea for my next novel recently, and just the other day I combined it with another idea I had for a short story. I think it has promise, and I’m really excited about getting into it, but I think it should wait until my current project is finished. I wish I could tell you all about it, but that would simultaneously ruin the surprise and open my work up to theft, two things I’m trying to be careful about.

This whistling guy needs to have his lips removed. And his arms, too. He’s tapping on the table while he whistles.

I’ve always been a writer. When I was a kid I kept irregular journals and concocted weird stories inspired by wild animals, monsters, video game characters and drunk hillbillies.

A couple of years ago, as I was washing dishes, I got the idea for my current work-in-progress. I need to finish the story and establish my copyright before I start giving specific plot details, but I’m hoping it will be something people will enjoy, connect with and take something from.