I Hate My Boss

I’m losing my mind.  I haven’t quite lost all of it yet, but I’m close.  I can’t sleep.  I can’t eat.  I’ve lost interest in sex.  I’m always exhausted.  I’ve lost so much weight.  I look in the mirror and I see a ragged skeleton starring back at me. And my mind races down these tracks: This is not who I want to be!  This is not the life I want!  Why am I letting this man destroy me?  Everyone else in the office just seems to go about their business.  They talk about their wives, the latest sporting events and fashions.  And he seems to have no effect on them.  He’s just their weird obsessive abusive pain-in-the-ass boss.  But every time I see him my bile boils and my colon twitches and my jaw clenches and I get damp under my arms and I feel this almost uncontrollable violence springing up in me, wrapping blackness all around me, these sick twisted images appear in my mind like a horror film director has hijacked it, I see myself  jamming that PDA right down his throat until he chokes on it; bashing his fat smug mug in with his precious laptop; cutting the break cable on his gas guzzling bourgeois breeder SUV.  I have planned his death so many times.  And yet I am too much of a coward to pull the trigger and that makes me loathe myself all the more.  I try to go about my business like everybody else, to be normal.  But every little thing he does crawls beneath my skin like an insect and pumps me full of venom, releasing into my bloodstream and infecting my fevered brain. When he starts talking about his fake liberal politics, always complaining about Bush and the war and the environment, I have to resist the urge to puke all over his suit.  And he’s always going on and on about how he hates the Man, when the rich and brutal irony is that he IS the Man.  And I happen to know he didn’t even VOTE in the last election, because he made everybody work all day that day so that nobody could vote.  And that terrible toxic temper.  Mean for the sake of mean.  Nasty for the sake of nasty.  Cruel for the sake of cruel. Last week I accidentally spilled tea on his desk and he went mental, I could see it in his eyes, this evil insanity, he went totally berserk, screaming and yelling and calling me an idiot and a moron and implying that I was inferior in every way to him, as well as being a pedophile and a homosexual.    O what a rat bastard that paunchy two-faced cheapskate tightwad bitch is.  In front of other people, he’s always telling me what a great job I’m doing and how I’m gonna get a raise, I’m gonna get more vacation time, a better health plan, but it’s all complete bullshit, and as soon as we’re behind closed doors he berates me and tells me what a loser I am, how without him I would be nowhere, that I am a complete waste of space.  And after awhile, of course, you start to believe it.  And he’s always making me work nights and weekends, ridiculous stupid hours, all nighters, so I’m walking around sleep deprived and hallucinating, while he stands behind me cracking his whip across my back, until I feel flayed and bloody.  And he thinks he’s so funny, always making those stupid lame jokes, always expecting me to laugh my ass off at’em.  Seriously, if I don’t laugh he’ll actually say, “Didn’t you think that was funny?”  What am I gonna say?  “No, it wasn’t funny, you’re about as funny as a nun on crutches carrying a crippled orphan.”  I should quit.  I’ve rehearsed my speech so many times, this marvelous rant in front of everyone, in which I expose him once and for all to be the incarnation of arrogant hypocritical incompetence that he is. But do I?  No.  Why?  I have pondered this question over and over because if I don’t do something this is going to kill me.  Or I’m going to kill him. And here’s the sad ridiculous and truly pathetic thing: I’m self-employed.
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