For the last few days, John Hiatt’s Master of Disaster has been trapped in my head. I’ve always liked Hiatt, but there’s something about this song that’s attached itself to my conciousness.

Maybe it’s because I’m often the Master of Disaster, and while I’m not tangled in my Telecaster (I play an Ibanez Artcore mostly), I’ve migrated from being an angry young man to just an angry man to an angry soon-to-be-41-year-old….”Now he’s just a mean old bastard”.

Not that anyone could really tell. I mean, I’m probably the most laid-back mean old bastard there is. It only comes out in flashes, mostly when I’m dealing with something related to work. I have never suffered fools lightly, which is a pretty bad personality trait for someone who’s essentially a mid-level project manager with no real hope of advancement without major ass-kissing.

But I digress. Besides, I’m not supposed to blog about work; it’s a corporate policy, you know, and one basically created specifically because of me. In fact, I’m personally responsible for the creation of at least three or four pages of corporate policy–a point of personal pride for a crypto-anarchist like me.

So, anyway, I don’t have much of an outlet for the rage that comes from dealing with pointy-haired bosses who change project parameters without bothering to tell me (the guy allegedly managing the projects), or changing their priorities like an infant following a reflection off some shiny object that rolled past their playpen. And there’s something in the subtext of Hiatt’s gravelly unspooling of the lyrics of this song (and the rest of the album) that somehow speaks to that untapped need to club something to a pulp with a rusty old beercan, or to throw a phone through a sliding door, or pound something flat with a hunk of old pipe. And that’s a good thing.

Right?