[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl6SJgm2pGI&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]

Morning. The alarm goes off. You wake up. Wafting in the air is the smell of coffee and bacon. Your wife is already in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. You get up and stretch out. Sunshine ispouring in through your window. Dusty rays off light guide your eyes to the robe lying in a pile next to your bed. You pick it up, put it on. You walk out to the kitchen. Your wife greets you, and you give her a kiss. She hugs you back and hands you a cup of coffee. You sit down at the table and she plates the both of you some breakfast. The two of you enjoy the slow morning together.

It’s time to go to work. You go put on your jeans and a T-shirt and then you hop into your very average used car. It gets the job done: gets you from Point A to Point B. It’s not much to look at, but it’s dependable. You turn on the radio, tune it to your favorite station. Twenty minutes later you’ve reached your destination.

It’s a convenience store. You walk in through the glass doors and your best friend is working the cash register. The two of you have known each other since you were kids. Back then you would spend all day hanging out with him. And it’s how you spend your days now. Both of you now run the convenience store. Maybe there’s that one teenage kid that you like, he works on the days you don’t. The store basically runs itself. All you have to do is make sure the cigarettes and milk are in stock. Lots of down time to spend with your best friend, just shooting the shit and essentially hanging out all day, just like you used to.This sounds like Clerks. And it’s my dream.I have very simple desires. I don’t ask much out of life. The lifestyle portrayed at the end of Clerks II is not only appealing to me, it is an incredible dream. A loving woman by my side, my best friend as my right hand man, a small house with decent sunshine. A job where I make my own hours, being a small business owner. My job is simple, and I get to hang out with my best friend all day. Watch videos and whatnot. Put in a couple of computers and game all day. Why not?

I don’t want thehugehouse and the fancy car. I can get a big screen TV and a home theater system without the rest of that bullshit. I don’t want to go hang gliding in Australia, I don’t want to visit the African savanna. I don’t want to go see an opera, I don’t want to drink fine wine and eat escargot. I don’t want a Monet in my living room, and I don’t want a Park Avenue loft. I don’t want a lawyer on retention, or my own personal accountant.

I am happy with mediocrity. All I want is a loving wife, happy well-fed kids, a cozy home, time to write my novel and my screenplay…is that so much to ask? I am comfortable with not being the kind of guy who has visited fifty different countries. I am comfortable speaking only one and a half languages, I am satisfied eating fast food burgers and fries and drinking Archer Farms Italian soda. I don’t aspire to owning a vacation home or a three-story mansion that you have to drive up to to get to the door. I don’t really care that much for speedy little foreign sports cars.

Sam Bicke said it best in The Assassination of Richard Nixon. He said that slavery never really ended in this country; we just gave it another name: employee. Fuck what society says we should be striving for. I say deny that which is pushed onto us. Fuck the six-figure salary, fuck the Mercedes-Benz. Fuck the twenty hours of unpaid overtime, fuck the Rolex. Fuck having a boss, fuck getting shit on by some fucking moron who thinks he’s better than me. Fuck the 9-to-5, fuck being a slave.

I suppose in this little rant I see more clearly that I place a very high value on independence: independent thought, independence from outside influences. I hate being bogged down by material needs and being influenced by popular culture. I refuse to follow the shephard, I refuse to be swayed by anything that does not come from within, from my own will. I suppose that, as much as I hate it, in some ways I am a hippie, with idealistic notions of being a free spirit. Yet this is somewhat incongruent with much of my more conservative leanings…I suppose I’m just complicated.