If Obama's a socialist, why are we broke?

1. I have big boy problems to worry about.  It’s been a year since I graduated from college and I still can’t even get an interview for a real job, and I’ll need one pretty goddamn soon if my girlfriend and I want to keep our apartment when she goes back to grad school full time and has to cut down her hours at work.  The job that I do have works me 25-30 hours a week, long enough for me to spend huge chunks of my day babying whiny idiots, but not quite long enough to pay the bills, which actually makes my life more stressful than it would be if I had to deal with asshole customers for the full 40 hours.  I lie awake at night worrying that I’ll never escape this rotting corpse of a town now that the country’s economy is bleeding to death from its ass after the brutal fist-raping it got from the financial sector (and now that I think about it, fist-rape wouldn’t be a bad punishment for the goons who got us into this shit.  But I digress.).  I barely have the energy to keep up with the things that I actually like.  So you can see why keeping up with the career of, say, Fred Durst so that I can come up with a cute way to call him a sad fag every time he craps out a new album has steadily moved down my list of priorities.
2. I am but one squealing rodent in a rat king of pretentious music fans.  There are approximately 65 hojillion assholes who write about music, both online and in print.  I am no more or less qualified than any of them.  Nothing will change if I bow out.
3. I have made no contribution to the artistic world.  Last year, the utterly irrelevant Marilyn Manson tried to start a feud with My Chemical Romance by saying that Gerard Way and company were “doing a really sad, pitiful, shallow version of what I’ve done.”  Way layed the verbal smack down with a quote that stuck with me ever since I read it: “We still haven’t found someone that has knocked us down that we need to take seriously. If Elvis Costello said we sucked we would think about it a bit.”  Now, I don’t like My Chemical Romance.  At all.  But they’re creating something.  I’ve created nothing.  Even Marilyn Manson – who I just hypocritically, but still somehow correctly, called irrelevant – has contributed more than I have.  So who the hell am I to try to tear these people down?  It’s so much easier to throw rocks from behind a protective wall of obscurity than to take a risk and try to make art for yourself.  Which leads me to my last point…
4. I have another major project that I’ve been neglecting.  For a few months now, I’ve been bursting with ideas for another creative endeavor.  I’m not going to say exactly what I want to do because I don’t like to tip my hand before I’m totally ready to move forward with something, but I’m pretty excited about it.