Confessions of a burnout...

Warning this be my rant space. Comments telling me the error of my ways and reminding me of the other side of the story are a waste of time. I know, I know, I know. Let me vent, I'll be fine come morn...

A district seminar to educate the local disabled population on their right to vote. Disabled people, in wheelchairs and on crutches or limping. The car park is a building site, a war zone. A conga line of wheelchairs and their helpers pick their way through an assault course of piles of gravel, planks and steel cables. The wheelchairs have to be ramped up, tilted backwards to scale each new obstacle. One wheelchair is tilted too far back and the female helper is unable to stop it falling right back onto the ground. They're quickly helped up and it's laughed off. I realise the toilets for the venue are on the other side of the building site and anyone wishing to go has to navigate back through it all. Inside the hall people in the wheelchairs freewheel through a large puddle which pedestrians have to skirt to get to their seats. The sound system doesn't work and no-one sees fit to turn on the lights. Various delegates are gathered on the stage and at some point someone quietly starts talking and I think the show is on. The various delegates assembled on the stage take their turns speaking to the gathering. It is difficult to tell who is talking, they generally talk quietly and the lack of decent light makes it difficult to see their lips move . Mobile phones ring and are answered even by those on the stage. One speaker waits patiently for one onstage phone call to finish but then has to plough on when it shows no sign of ending, struggling to make himself heard over his pompous companion.

The director of NSD,N ( hah!) takes the floor. The pompous one takes another call. The audience is no better. People are talking all around me. Pouring in the wide open windows are the sounds of the building site, the general hammering, the crash of sheets of ply, the shouts of the workers. Back in the hall, down the back, cups are being noisily unpacked for tea. It has become entirely irrelevant that I do not understand the language being spoken onstage as I can't hear it anyway. The guys on either side of me start talking over me. I have to struggle not to laugh. I wouldn't mind if it was just chaos. But this meeting stays on the borderline of chaos, the speakers refusing to surrender it to anarchy and continuing on with earnest faces and gestures and just making it worse. It starts to piss me off a little. I want to stand up and tell the audience to grow up and stop being so fucking ignorant. But I'm angry at the people on the stage as well for such a piss poor showing. Then I realise I'm angry at the whole bloody country.

In all facets of everything I am doing here I have to increasingly often avoid this temptation to grab people and just fucking shake them until they see things my way. The logical way. Some structure, some common sense, some ambition. Not just in the various work environments but everywhere, on the roads, in shops, at the pool, in the cinema. It even pisses me off a little that nobody says thank you. Thats how bad its got. I know, stupid, pointless sentiments, betraying more about me than about the country.

But thats just the way I roll, dogs.