On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 13:44:08 GMT, something compelled Rick
, to say:

Jaxworld is truly a bizarre place

Jaxworld is a poorly lighted downstairs room in a seedy tract
house located in a dead end rust belt town. The kind of town
where young people with a clue abandon as quickly as possible,
leaving it to retired folk on pensions, the few that find gainful
employment providing goods and services to those retirees, and
dope smoking losers without enough ambition to take the minor
steps required to improve their lives.

Jaxworld has as its primary citizen, a fat goggle glassed
scraggle beard vaguely odoriferous male in his late twenties.
He's working at the same Shell station he started working in the
summer of his junior year, and has been promoted all the way to
night manager. This means he's in charge of washing the floors
and rest rooms, refilling the windshield cleaner buckets, and
scheduling the odd oil change or lube job for the next day when
the mechanic will be in. He has asked to *be* the mechanic, but
his constant arguing with the customers has made it clear that
it's better for them and for him to be placed as far from them as
possible. His title as manager is the default for what is
actually 'the only guy who's here at night, because there isn't
enough business to keep two people on'.

At eleven he closes up, balances the numbers on the pump with the
credit card receipts and cash, and stuffs it all into the slot in
the barrel safe for which he has no key, for the owner to review
the next morning. He stops by the late night diner to get a
double cheeseburger with bacon and a plate of greasy fries, the
same meal he has every night. The wait staff is generally polite
to him, except for the slightly overweight, mildly retarded
seventeen year old girl he obsessed over for a couple of months,
until her father stopped by the station one night with his
shotgun in the back window. Told him those things were always
going off by accident, and wouldn't it be a shame if it was
pointed at him when that happened? And that leaving his daughter
alone would be a good way to avoid an accident.

Jax makes it a point to not speak with the girl any more, but
that doesn't stop him from including her in his masturbatory
fantasies, along with the girls on the oil company calendars his
boss puts up in the employee washroom.

Jax pays for his meal, leaving a niggardly tip, and makes his way
home to his rented room. He was happy living in his parent's
house until at twenty three his father told him, yelled to him,
"Get the hell out and make something of yourself, boy!" as his
mother silently wept in the kitchen. She knew that he had to get
out, but she also knew that he was ill equipped for the real
world.

He boots his eMachine with the fifteen inch monitor he salvaged
from the high school scrap heap, s******ing to himself about how
they were so stupid to throw out a perfectly good piece of
equipment. So what if the red gun is dead? Windows95 finally
starts, the Pentium 133 processor making maximum use of all
thirty two megabytes of ram. The 14.4 modem wails its mating
call to the modem bank at his ISP, the newsreader takes its place
in RAM, and Jax is transformed from the fat greasy ****** he is
in real life to the highly educated, erudite, knowledgable being
he plays on usenet.

Unfortunately for him, much like the guy in the white jacket in
the aspirin commercials who states that he isn't a doctor but
plays one on TV, Jax can't completely fill out his usenet
character. His performance falls flat, and he has as much
success as he's had with the seventeen year old, or in fact any
other part of his life.

There it is. Jaxworld. Take off your hat and jacket, pull up a
chair, pop open a Pabst and set awhile.

If you have the stomach for it.