I'm driving north on the New Jersey Turnpike and I'm thinking.

I should back up a bit to give you an idea of the kind of day I'd been having.

The night before my wife arrived home after grocery shopping on her way home from a hard day at work to find me sitting and playing Battle Tetris. She had no way of knowing, of course, that I hadn't been doing that all day; in fact I'd spent the day laboriously scrubbing the last layer of lead-based oil paint from the 80-year-old chestnut window trim in our daughter's bedroom while juggling increasingly energetic calls from a recruiter desperately trying to set me up with an interview in less than 24 hours. She couldn't see that. This was like throwing an M80 into the litter box of her usual bitchiness. My wife began to slam things and scream, calling me a fat lazy asshole, and so forth, and my daughter began crying, "Do you see what you did?" until I finally fled to the local multiplex where I sat through Used Cars, I mean, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, which was not exactly an uplifting experience.

The next day, in the time before I had to get ready for my sudden interview, I scrubbed another incremental area of the lead-based oil paint, then went looking for my suit. My suit was missing. Just gone. No idea where it could've ended up. Simply not in the closet. So I pulled out my back-up pair of dress pants only to be cruelly reminded when I tried to button them that I'd put on forty pounds since I bought the back-up dress pants.

At this inopportune moment the bathroom called to me most urgently. In the midst of that operation, my middle finger punched right through the paper and up into an area where no middle finger should be.

After another thorough washing I commenced to search for my suit, which I finally found rolled in a ball in the corner of the entry hallway to the house, waiting vainly to be taken to the dry cleaners since the last time I wore it six months earlier. A quick steam iron to get rid of the wrinkles and I was ready to go and wait for my wife to return with the car fifteen minutes late.

The interview was a complete disaster, terrible, a horrible, colossal waste of time. It made me absolutely certain that I am completely, utterly unemployable in my now-former career as a computer programmer specializing in Perl.

After all of that, I am driving north on the New Jersey Turnpike and thinking. I'm singing along with Wayne Coyne as he croons, "Is to love just a waste? And why does it matter?" and I'm thinking, yes, it is just a waste, it doesn't matter, nothing matters.

Just at that moment I look up and see a billboard for The Toxic Avenger Musical and I realize: This planet, as it exists right at this moment, is beyond satire.