(500) Hours of Somber

In regard to the perfect girl that one devises for oneself in his dream. She can never be perfect even if she exists with all the characteristics that you would want her to have. This is because you as a person, are perpetually learning, and changing. Unless she is dynamic she cannot be perfect, because even the girl that supposedly was without flaw yesteryear might not be what you desire now. Furthermore, even if she is dynamic, she would need to be so in a perfectly congruent manner, aligned to your desires. There is, however, a catch. She must be so without your knowing. For it is clear that in some aspects of relations, the pursuit of a woman induces certain emotions – enjoyable emotions – that one does not find once he has her. This is due to the comfort of certainty, him knowing that she is his. If that perfect girl was so flawless that you lose any fear of losing her, you will become bored, because then, despite her dynamic nature, the relationship will become static, and plateau at a stagnation….

Gotta try for tomorrow. You can’t see through today.

Held like water in you shaking hands are all the small defeats a day demands. 10-6 or 9-5 trying, dying to survive. Never knowing what survival means. Leave the apartment to buy alcohol. Hang our diplomas on the bathroom wall. Pick at the plaster chipped away, survey some stunning tooth decay, enlist the cat in the impending class-war. Let’s lay our bad day down here, dear and make-believe we’re strong, or hum some protest song. Like maybe “We Shall Overcome Someday.”

Overcome the stupid things we say. Say I needed more than this, say I needed one more kiss. We left that light on way too long now. Let’s plant a bomb at city-hall and kill an MLA. We’ll talk the night away. You call in sick, I’ll quit the word-games that I play. I swear I way more than half believe it when I say that somewhere love and justice shine. Cynicism falls asleep. Tyranny talks to itself. Sappy slogans all come true. We forget to feed our fear.

Status Update

Now go and brag of thy present happiness, whosoever you are, brag of thy temperature, of thy good parts, insult, triumph, and boast; thou seest in what a brittle state thou art, how soon thou mayest be dejected, how many several ways, by bad diet, bad air, a small loss, a little sorrow or discontent, an ague, etc.; how many sudden accidents may procure thy ruin, what a small tenure of happiness thou hast in this life, how weak and silly a creature thou art!

I Walk Between Raindrops…

I look out for those around me — woman, brother, friend, stranger. I pass along expertise, one man to the next. Know-how survives me.

I am good at my job. Not my work, not my avocation, not my hobby. Not my career. My job. It doesn’t matter what my job is, because if I don’t like my job, I get a new one. And I never take it too seriously.

I can speak to cats.

I listen, and that’s how I argue. I craft opinions. I pound the table, take the floor. It’s not that I must. It’s that I can.

I can look you up and down and figure some things out. Before you say a word, I make you. From your hairstyle, from your shoes, from your posture. I infer.

I own up. I grasp my mistakes. I lay claim to who I am, and what I was, whether I like them or not. Some mistakes, though, I let pass if no one notices. Like dropping food on the floor.

I can tell you I was wrong. That I did wrong. That I planned to. I can tell you when I am lost. I can apologize, even if sometimes it’s just to put an end to the bickering.

Style — I have that. No matter how eccentric that style is, it is uncontrived. It’s a set of rules.

I love the female body, the revelation of nakedness. I love the sight of the pale bosom, the physics of the human skeleton, the alternating current of the flesh. I am thrilled by the wrist and the sight of a bare shoulder. I like the crease of a bent knee.

I know how to ridicule.

I know how to lose an afternoon. Playing Xbox 360, reading graphic novels, browsing thrift stores. I know how to lose a month, also.

I welcome the coming of age. It frees me. It allows me to assume the upper hand and teaches me when to step aside.

I understand the basic mechanics of the planet. I can close one eye, look up at the sun, and tell you what time of day it is. Or where north is. I can tell you where you might find something to eat or where the fish run. I understand electricity or the internal-combustion engine, the mechanics of flight or how to figure a checkmate in three moves.

I do not know everything. I don’t try. I like what others know.

I do not rely on rationalizations or explanations. I don’t winnow until truths can be humbly categorized, or intellectualized, until behavior can be written off with an explanation. I don’t see myself lost in some great maw of humanity, some grand sweep.

I resist formulations, question belief, embrace ambiguity without making a fetish out of it. I revisit my beliefs. Continually.

I am comfortable being alone. Love being alone, actually. I sleep. Or I stand watch. I interrupt trouble. This is the state policeman. This is the poet. Me, both of them.

Sometimes I go and sit in a crowded place knowing I won’t spend a dime, witnessing the temptation and the maneuvering of others. Sometimes I stand on the street corner observing the chaos, ignorance, and apathy. This is not about quietude so much as collection. It is not about meditation so much as considering. I refract my vision and gain acuity. This serves me in every way. No one taught me this — to be quiet, to cipher, to watch.

In this way, in these moments, I am like a zoo animal: both captive and free. You cannot take your eyes off someone when he is like that. You shouldn’t. Who knows what I am thinking, who I am, or what I will do next.

Egyptian decor coloring logic…

Schadenfreude. Leave it to the Germans to come up with a word for deriving pleasure from others’ misfortune. Part of the reason that my karma levels are so low is that I make no apologies for enjoying when people I hate finally get what’s coming to them.

Cynicism and idealism are two cheeks on the same ass. But being less cynical doesn’t preclude your remaining intelligently skeptical – after all, many of the examples of ‘cynicism’ would, to many people, form part of a perfectly rational worldview. There’s nothing inherently cynical about not settling for easy answers. Of course, it’s hard work, and not a succession of soft-focus cockle-warming epiphanies, being a cynic.

So I’ve been thinking about Social Darwinism; and further thinking about how weird it is to be thinking about Social Darwinism. That might be because I sparknoted Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand recently and her philosophy of Objectivism certainly seems like a close cousin to Social Darwinism to me. Or maybe its because I take the city bus every morning and there are always beggars around looking for money.

I never really wanted to consider myself a Social Darwinist, mostly because I’m constantly surrounded by bleeding hearts and liberals and bleeding-hearted liberals, but I find it hard to refute the basic tenants of a philosophy whose pillars are industrious work ethic and self-advancement. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are people that I do feel for, and believe need assistance: the sick, the psycho, the retarded, et cetera, but I certainly don’t believe in welfare or governmental/societal intervention for the preservation of a few at the expense of the many.

That sounds really cold-hearted, I know, but I’m a firm believer in learning through failure and survival. Lord (and everyone else) knows that I have failed an ungodly number of times in my life, but the measure of a human being is not his failures, but his successes. Yet how can any man be considered successful if he never faced any trials or tests of his endurance and moral integrity?

It’s the same thing with parents that over-protect their children. Those children are never given a chance to learn from their failures and can’t deal with the harsh realities of the real world. They grow up to be the guy that shoots Lincoln or sends bombs to people’s houses. Simply put, every able-bodied, able-minded person in this world has the ability to rise above their conditions. It is a matter of application and denying yourself the comforts of self-pity.

I realize it easy for someone like me to make generalizations like this, considering I’ve been born to relative privilege, and I do see the need for charity and – as implied by my earlier statement about random acts of kindness – I don’t believe in the staunch, kill-or-be-killed, dog-eat-dog Objectivism of Ayn Rand.

I’ve heard it said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but I have to retort by asking if you continuously examine your life, are you really even living it?

I’ve come to the realization that I’m completely unable to give a fuck. Whatever mechanism causes people to give a fuck – whether it be a soul, a conscious, Irish guilt – mine is broken. It is slightly upsetting. I opened up this blog writing thingy with the thought that I want to write something, but I really don’t give enough of a fuck about anything right now to even post something coherent (you know, like I always do). Blogs are self-indulgent, sure, but acts of self-indulegence are not inherently narcissistic or vain.

Maybe I’m not supposed to care. Wasn’t it the Shins that said “Caring Is Creepy”? There’s a certain level of awe and prestige in our culture bestowed upon people who can remain aloof. Maybe caring is creepy. Think about the concept of a “crush”. You can’t let a crush know that you care about them. Or at least you’re supposed to ration the amount of emotion you show to them until you’ve gauged the likelihood of their reciprocation. You’re punished for caring essentially, or for getting carried away. Yet every storybook and movie you’ve ever read or watched leads you to believe that you’re supposed to wait around for that romance that makes you abandon all pretense and let’s you get swept up in it. Isn’t this contradictory? I don’t believe in love at first sight, mostly because I believe love to be a complex emotion that varies, not only from person to person, but internally from relationship to relationship, and the singular sense of sight (the easiest sense to deceive) should hardly be left to be judge, jury and executioner over love.

The Lucy Van Pelts of the world are happier than the Charlie Browns. Assholes are the heroes of their own stories. And they don’t even know that they’re assholes; because if they did, they wouldn’t truly be assholes. They’d be self-loathing wishy-washies in therapy. So raise a glass to the insufferable jerks; little critters of nature!

And this is my conclusion; my brilliant insightful coup de grace: The truth hurts… that’s why I use it.

Devil’s Playground

Maybe, perchance, I have misjudged my readers and in fact, what you are looking for is a discussion of the philosopher niche? It’s a great topic to think about — what is the niche that the philosopher occupies? Why do we have philosophy? Why do human beings like to engage in it?

Not all people might like to do so. Though I have, in jest, suggested earlier that only those with active and sensual lifestyles should engage in philosophy, as opposed to people with introspective ones, the truth is that they don’t. There is a big divide between popular culture and philosophical, or high, culture, that’s hard to bridge. You can’t get the athlete to write philosophy. Why not, though? Because he’s too busy.

This is key in understanding who writes, or “does,” philosophy — that some people are always too busy. The rest are too bored, and ergo, they write philosophy. So the true niche of philosophy is boredom. You know when someone will start spouting philosophy, is when they are bored. Some people are just sitting there, she got nothing on her hands, he got nothing in his head, and the next thing you know, they are saying philosophical stuff.

What comes out of boredom is self-reflection. Boredom is a state of refined lethargy. It is a state of languor, the kind of attitude that looks best with when adopted on a chaise lounge, with a cigarette holder in one’s hand, dripping ash on the carpet like a ghostly benediction. And what comes out of self-reflection is the slowing down of reality. The world resolves into archetypes and objects, categories and metaphysical entities, all of which interact at a slower pace than the hurly burly of ordinary reality. Everything happens with the import of historical materialism, with the ponderousness of academic tomes. Everything has meaning.

For a philosopher, all these aspects of the philosophical world are infinitely alluring and infinitely malleable. Everything can be questioned — what we perceive, what the perceptions mean, how someone knows what they mean, whether any one knows anything at all, whether there is in fact worth knowing. A philosopher can wander lost forever through the tricky terrains of these questions for hours.

Philosophers do not only occupy the niche of boredom, but are a good cure for it. If you find yourself possessing a moment of time in which you wonder, “Boy, I don’t know what to do with my time right now,” think of a topic that has plagued philosophers for centuries — is there free will, what if nothing actually exists, do animals have moral rights — and you will soon find your head hurting so much that you will be compelled to find something else to do. This is why philosophers were invented — because people had to be convinced to not sit on their asses and be unproductive if economies had to be built, wars had to be won and heavy metals discovered.

If you were thinking of occupying this niche yourself, know ye that these are difficult grounds to tread. You might think that it’s a simple matter to spout nonsense but it isn’t. Nonsense takes a long time to spin out, after the first three hundred words of it or so. I started writing this post eight months ago and couldn’t finish it until now. It’s an exceptional amount of boredom that you need to be able to sit down at your desk and construct philosophy or even to put together thoughts about philosophy (an act called meta-philosophy in the jargon of philosophers.)

If you read this far, it means that you really are into the niche of philosophers rather than merely into the utterances of that German guy, who wasn’t a bad egg at all really. You know why he wrote most of what he wrote — because he never got laid. So maybe that’s another philosophers’ niche — sexual frustration. Oh, but don’t even get me started on that one.

A particularly bored girl once said to me that she thought molecules had meaning and a purpose of their own, even though it was a very tiny and darling purpose. I told her she was drunk and insulted the color of her nail polish (black). I am not making this up, because this is the kind of human interaction you can’t make up. It was four in the morning, and she and I had been drinking a lot. This was before I had had sex with any one. I was a nerdy, drunk, virgin, arguing the metaphysics of molecules with a drunk girl. Let’s face it, at that time, what I was doing was something slightly, but ever so slightly, different — I was arguing metaphysics with a drunk highschool kid! This is important, because it is what adds the post colonial emphasis that all narratives need — or definitely all narratives that involve the Oppressed.

Anyway, to return to my original point — one couldn’t possibly imagine any conversation, no matter how drunk, ever approaching such topics as molecular metaphysics if the interlocutors weren’t bored, to begin with. Terribly bored, perhaps. I won’t claim that the degree of boredom bears any relationship to how good the philosophy is, because such a claim would be too controversial and distracting. But it’s important to at least notice when a philosopher is less, or more, bored, than other philosophers, or than he has been on previous occasions.

Unfortunately, my proposition is hard to believe, and easily refuted. One could point to the generally energetic, mentally so if not physically, life of most philosophers. There is also much passion, that one associates with many of the philosophers — and even more so with all philosophers in the post Enlightenment era that are associated with various strains of empiricism and utilitarianism. None of these men were bored at all — in fact, they were a study in industriousness and engagement.

The thing to realize is that philosophers are not always bored (or stoned). Boredom is not the philosopher’s niche for always, but for a critical moment — the moment when they are ejected from the world that doesn’t know boredom, or at least true boredom, and into the world of philosophy. The philosopher’s attitude after this critical moment is of no importance for us. Only the critical moment, the ejaculatory moment one might say, is what matters.

Another criticism we encounter is the idea that philosophers suffer not from having too much time on their hands, but merely from an excess of the clarity of vision. A philosopher sees things — the reality that envelopes us but is carefully hidden from most of us, the structures that govern us without revealing the slightest impression on our shoulders of their heavy yokes — and so he has to react. He has to point to these spectres and try to describe them, either to alert the rest of us — as if we asked the philosopher to be told!

It’s instructive to consider if boredom is, or has a relationship to, disenchantment, discomfort and any form of rebellion.

Anyway, I am beginning to get the feeling that watching too much porn has damaged my ability to relate to women, or to sex in general. Well, duh!, I hear you say. What else did you expect? But I don’t think it’s the simple explanation at play here, that I have tended to objectify women because I watch them being treated as sexually subservient online. It’s more that the focus of my interest in sex is on personal pleasure and control. I want my sexual life to be like watching pornography. I get to choose most of the time how to get my rocks off.

Real life sex is about listening and compromises — it’s like a political conference! Where’s the “Here, suck it, and now I’m going to fill your pussy with my big, hard cock” dynamic?!

Que sera sera

Gentle reader, at this moment I am keen to let twin trains of past and present obsessions collide. The engines meet face to face at exactly equal velocity so that they rise up on their hind wheels while peeling apart and driving through; prismatic spirals of shatter glass, chrome, iron, hydraulic tubing, tungsten (the engines of my mind are always built primarily of tungsten).

Now the lead cars are also rising, pelted by expanding bits and pieces of both engines like meteors, perforating, crushing, collapsing, introducing chaotic elements into what nanoseconds past was perfect symmetry and then the shock wave dispenses with the subtlety of shrapnel and tears each lead car to accelerating, unidentifiable hot chunks.

In both directions cars are leaping upward as if in joy toward the center of impact, chaos has almost but not quite surpassed order and a nearly intact dining car lifts off the track, it’s ass end rising; and the dining car on the other train buckles nose first into the track, passengers shoot through disintegrating walls, windows, tumble almost gracefully, trapeze artists made of tangled meat, up, over and into the somersaulting dinning car from the first train, punching through the roof like bullets through a paper target!

And in the spinning dining car sufficient centrifugal force creates for a fractional moment artificial gravity. To the passengers inside, both original and recently arrived, it seems as if nothing is moving at all or would seem so if not for the terrible bodily damage they have sustained.

Recalling that these trains are imaginary, recalling I am not a spectator, but rather Imaginengineer… I restore the structural architecture of the dining car, drape white linen back upon the tables, refill each cut glass vase, reassemble each flower petal by petal, ‘ton em sevol ehs, em sevol ehs’, restore the passengers to the physical state they enjoyed prior to being brutally shaken about like whatever makes the noise inside maracas.

I take a second’s worth of time within the dining car between my fingers, stretch it like Silly Putty until that single second becomes hours quite long enough to hold a dinner party in.

And then I have myself a peek.

Her eyes are a chocolate whirlpool, I want to dip myself in them and emerge chocolafied, I want to hide in her refrigerator waiting, waiting, waiting to become a midnight snack.

A lifetime or lunchtime, we all arrive on schedule at our terminal destination.

RE: Tardis

Who is ever spinning away from his true Center, and like a wandering star, remains outside the Core of our very Being?

Who is ever lying to himself about what is happening right now, and like a political ideology, proclaims as truth his own preconceptions formed in the past?

Who is ever pretending to be what he is not, and like a popular actor, turns his life into a comedy-drama of make-believe?

Who is ever denying the actual cause for this pretentious display, and like a fashionable critic, blames others for his own hypocrisy?

Who is ever escaping from taking living responsibility for his own actions, and like a dedicated con artist, tries desperately to fool himself, as well as others, that he is?

Who is ever packaging and selling himself as a commerical product in order to gain self-gratification, and like a super, but grasping, salesman, pays the price for his own craving, which is death to the spirit?

Who is ever thinking that he is something solid, and like an isolated body, suppresses the emptiness that plagues his quiet moments?

Who is ever believing that something is good or bad, right or wrong, positive or negative, this or that, and like a leading authority on the subject, traps his object self in a cycle of conflict and hostility?

Who is ever experiencing whatever as being outside himself, and like an unconscious observer, never sees its essential quality as being within himself and as ourself?

Who is ever projecting himself but never being or understanding ourself as a Whole, and like a partial witness, gives evidence against our very Being?

Who?

Why, my own ego, that’s who!

2k9

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

We don’t need roads…

Last post before the New Year. Albeit premature, fundamental nonetheless. Vital. Impervious. Insidious. Magical manifestations of mindlessness. Hi!

Another year-who knew it would get here so soon? In some ways the longest year of my life, in other ways, astonishingly short. Ohhhh, but I am SO much wiser. The amount of knowledge acquired between the immature and oafish 2008 and the glorious year-of-the-dave, magnificent 2009…well…ginormous barely begins to cover it.

Here’s what I learned, in a very edited list (ps, I’m making this up as I go along…but am feeling quite loqacious tonight, so this is my mental note to try and keep it brief):

Just because someone seems like a friend, it doesn’t mean they are. I learned last year that though I have throughout my life played the victim in shitty friendships-’he/she was a bad person…la la la’-by my silence, I make it OK for people to use me. I am an active participant in the people I choose to spend my time with and energy on. I learned that you must constantly evaluate the friends in your life. If you are more often than not feeling unappreciated and under-loved, something has to change. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…well…exactly. I will be a million times better off ending a poisonous relationship the minute I realized it is lethal, then wait for a slow death. Nip that shit in-the-bud. The worst that could happen is a few random prank phone calls. But I changed my number so no more of that troglodytical crap!

Good will prevail. Not always as swiftly as you want, or with as much fanfare as it deserves, but everyone eventually gets what’s coming to them. You reap what you sew, and karma’s a bitch. Nothing I hadn’t known before (apparently my learning curve has no bendy part).

I’m sure I am missing a prodigious amount of Dave-isms and year-in-review truths, don’t fret, loyal fans, I am certain to ponder all of this at a future date.

Will this year be different? Will 2009 hold the answers that 2008 failed to reveal? Will this new set of 12 perfectly un-lived and untainted months carry with them success, satisfaction, beauty and love-love-love? 52 weeks without emergency room visits? 365 days mixed with calm and frenzy-but only when you want the extremes? Will the time be endless ah-ha moments of self-improvement and awareness?. Will I learn more, give more and live more freely? Will sex feel better, movies be more spectacular and music be produced by the thousands that change-enrich-catapult our auditory senses into the seventh level of Heaven? Will food be only fresh and full of vitamin-y goodness, yet devilishly delicious? Will the winter be time for somber reflection and summer time for sun-filled spontaneous serendipity?

Whether the next 12 months, in hindsight, were the worst-and we chalk this year up to be forgotten in the archives of absolutely awful… who would want to know that in advance? That would make living it twice as bad, because the anticipation of dread means you would be going through some version of Hell twice. And if this year turns out to be the BEST FUCKING YEAR OF YOUR LIFE-the year that on your death bed you proclaim to the loved one holding your hand that ‘2009 was the most fantastically magnificent three hundred and sixty-five days of my whole existence’-who wants to know that on January 1st? That’s like finding out that one of your foes, dies a nasty poetic death and you’re not there to see it. Buzzkill.

I don’t live in a bubble, but sometimes, I set up shop there.  If you want something to seem as good as it used to, you’ve gotta actually do the things that made it so great to begin with. Just cut to the chase. Oh, and add a chase. That you can cut to.

Regrets, bitterness, mistakes, empathy and apathy aside, Happy New Year.

The Placebo Effect

I feel like for all my talk about being a cynic, I never really believed any of it. All my sarcasm, and cutting witticisms were merely smoke and mirrors. My cleverly crafted diatribes on the ups and downs of love and loss and relationships et cetera, were penned the air of a man impervious to everything except a little self-deprication. I’d loved, I’d lost, and I’d come out the better man; smartened to the world and hardened over with an icy heart.

Well, frankly it was all bullshit. Don’t get me wrong. I’m cynical about a lot of things. I think the majority of people on this planet are unfit to do more than breathe and consume mindless reality television programming. I even prided myself on my prowess at helping friends navigate their troubled times with their “love du jour”, with a slight inward smirk. Karma, as they say, is a bitch. For all the times I knew exactly what to say, for all the times I’ve been the rock and the shoulder to cry on, for all the times I’ve cracked the perfectly timed misogynistic joke to break the funk, and for all the times I’ve recited the cynic’s Gospel on Love… I find myself now realizing I didn’t believe a word of it.

I always believed in true love. I believed in Romeo. I believed in Juliet. I secretly enjoyed love songs and pined for the one that I would pen about “the one”, my perfect girl. And when I fell in love, I kept that cynic’s posture, maybe even covered my tracks with bravado. In truth, I had never been happier than when I held her against my chest and let her listen to my heart beat.

Cynicism and sarcasm are misunderstood. They aren’t weapons to be used in offensive. They are defensive in nature. They create a shield. A barrier between a boy and the emotional trauma the world seeks to inflict upon him. He can watch his parents gunned down in an alley. He can stare at the pale, lifeless bodies of his coworkers. He can watch friends sink into self-destructive depression, offering to help them out when they turned their eyes to him. He can accept rape and murder and theft and death with righteous indignation and a venomous perspective that these things always were and always will be.

He can call love a joke. A punchline for teenagers and romantic comedies, and overrated novels about vampires. He can call it that, but he can never believe it. I felt betrayed because I convinced myself that I did believe it. As far as armor went, I was the “unsinkable” Titanic. But the Titantic did sink. The world, she found the chink in my armor. I built my entire life around one unalienable fact: I know, above all else, who I am.

I’m your average, everyday, run-of-the-mill non-conformist. I spend my time not watching “Heroes” or listening to “Hannah Montana,” or thinking up other ways to otherwise not conform. I quietly, and perhaps only internally, think of myself as a punk even though I know full well that the last person who had the right to claim such died somewhere around 1994.

And while to some extent this previous paragraph does describe part of my personality, it does little to distinguish me as an individual. Even a rudimentary description of what makes a person unique in modern times at some point degenerates into vagaries and a bullshit sense of superiority-through-enlightened-individualism.

It seems simple, it seems basic. I know what I believe in, completely. And though my opinions and beliefs may change, they are – inarguably – my own, and therefore what makes me. It turns out, I didn’t believe even myself. I believed in love. In fact, I believed in it fiercely and unwaveringly. Like the cynic builds the armor around himself, I enshrined my true belief in a chamber of sarcasm and snide, forgetting what I truly believed.

Break a window and the building still stands. Attack its foundation, destroy its cornerstone, and it crumbles like a house of cards. I made love my cornerstone. I love. I am loved. And nothing else matteres. Nothing else has to even make sense. No ship is unsinkable. No building is indestrucible. No man is untouchable. I stand before you as proof of that. As the shipwreck. As the rubble. As the shell of a man who once was.

GARBAGE DAY!!!

They say if you are going to write, you ought to write about what you know. If this is any kind of axiom, then the author will soon prove that he is a veritable mastermind of pretentiousness. I could define it for you, but it is better understood through experience. For this, we must draw on your personal experiences. Often pretentious people are considered jerks, but not always, and in each case, it is only due to a deep misunderstanding. The true pretentious individual will only make you feel as if perhaps you do not quite know what you are talking about or that you should be preferring his opinions rather than your own. A pretentious person may make you feel stupid, but usually, that is not his intention and has more to do with your own insecurities. Also, a pretentious person is not necessarily a close-minded one, although often he is thought or presumed to be.

Pretentiousness is a specific trait, usually growing without notice, not unlike mold in woodwork. And though it may not have outward signs, sooner or later, some inspector or visitor will come along and say, “You’ve got mold.” And then there will be the question of whether or not you should be rid of it. “Not all mold is bad,” you’ll say. How do I know this is the bad kind?” Or if you are especially sagacious, you might ask, “Is there a way to harness this culture into something useful, rather than to merely eradicate it without considering first various options and possibilities?” (This latter path is the one of arrogance.)

If someone has pointed out a kind of raw arrogance or pretentiousness on your part, as yet un-honed or cultivated in any way, and you believe that such work may benefit you, this blog is for you. However, if you prefer to pursue a path of total humility wherein you will make friends but impress no one, then reading what follows can still be used as a source of argumentative preparation for future confrontations, so you also should read this. If you are neither of these, but believe you have the mental capacity to understand complex topics beyond your realm of experience, then also, read on. And those of you who have been insulted by any of these statements or have continued dwelling on the whole masculine-preference thing, I’m sure have already moved on. That all being said, we are now free to explore the art and benefits of pretentiousness unhindered.

The first thing to prepare yourself for, in the opening steps of developing your own pretentiousness is, curiously enough, being humbled. It may seem strange that to develop pretentiousness you must learn to be humbled with grace, but it is vital. The difference between a pretentious jerk and a smart-person-who-is-also-pretentious lies in the degree to which you will want to be right for right’s sake versus realize quickly and readily when you are wrong. If you accept some ignorance or misunderstanding on your part, you take on what the other person is saying before it can be a point against you. Let us say we are discussing something about which you know nothing or very little. You can still retain your veil of pretentiousness. That veil which says I am independent and stand firmly on my own feet, and also, I am in one way or another, better than you. (I am not going to go through the effort of defining “better”, just use any ole dictionary for the meaning.)

Watch this exchange:

“And that is why, based on all those examples, the human race will shortly be destroying itself.”

“That is very interesting. And I have to admit, that I had never before researched it as thoroughly as you obviously have.” Whereas, if you argue with the person, even if you suspect he is wrong, you come across as a moron, because you don’t know for sure. Though, often you don’t need to. Being pretentious requires a complete cultivation of your character, in all aspects, this is only one of them.

Being pretentious is shaky ground at times. You’ll come across others who seem to be better than you. And you’ll have to collect yourself to discern how the reverse is actually true. This can be a harrowing moment. You’ll ask yourself: “Has my entire sense of identity been predicated on lies and illusion?” If you have formulated the fundamentals of your pretentiousness well, and are comfortable with them, you will come through these difficult times with ease and without so much as a tremor passing over your face: the veil better preserved than a jar of Schmucker’s Raspberry Jam stored five miles below the Earth’s rapidly disintegrating Eco-Sphere.

But how do you formulate such a foundation? The first thing you need to determine is what your pretentiousness is founded upon. It can be virtually anything. You could be a sanitation worker whose pretentiousness bases itself on the fact that without you, the rest of us would be surrounded by piles of refuse and in time, the boundaries and roles of society would collapse, disease and pestilence would run rampant like immortals causing mayhem through Troy while Greeks pillage and plunder. You, the last and first bastion of civilization: the Alpha and the Omega.

Or you could be someone who reads books, and as a result, knows more than others. Pretentiousness, therefore, can be founded on knowledge or action or both. No matter what it is, there will be limitations and strengths. The next thing you need to determine is how you are separate from others (i.e. the public).

The Sanitation worker may say, “I am willing to do what few others are,” or, “My steady daily work provides the foundation upon which all civilization not only occurs, but is made possible.” (If you said this last part before I suggested it, then you are doing great! If not, that’s another reason why I am better than you, and you still have a way to go. Don’t fret, it won’t always be this way. I’ve been a confirmed pretentious person since I’ve started using the internet. You may only now be discovering your pretentious roots. Though one day, with hard work, you too could be better than everyone else.)

Here’s another example. The college professor could say, “I know how civilization operates, and were it not for me and people like me, civilization would stagnate, the populace would devolve into mindless unthinking automatons.” And you could go on to point at all the automatons around you. (Don’t do this too often, it breeds arrogance which you need to stay away from. Arrogance is the dark side of pretentiousness. And once you start down that path, it can be a bit difficult to turn around and come back. Many people ask what the difference is: if I’m better than everyone else, isn’t that arrogance? I’ve heard this question from many people. And I always say: you don’t get it—you provincial fool!)

Here’s an explanation: arrogance is thinking you are better than everyone else. The practice of the art of pretentiousness renders actually being better. Part of being better means acting the part: those who are better don’t generally go around treating others like dirt. That is arrogance. Pretentiousness appreciates the individual’s capacity for growth and understanding, why else would you bother to take the time to explain yourself or reform others? (Two key activities the pretentious individual not merely ought to, but must engage in.) If you do not understand the difference, consider these two interactions:

“I am a bank teller.”

“Banks steal money from others, they deserve to be destroyed.”

(Gee, what a jerk, the teller thinks.)

Versus:

“Hi, I’m a bank teller.”

“Nice to meet you. What kind of bank teller are you? That is, do you work with monetary exchanges between individuals and institutions? I’ve read a little about this, and there are some fundamental concepts I’d be interested in hearing your views on.”

(What a nice fellow.)

Most people would simply say that the second one is friendlier. But it is more than that. Arrogant people tend to be jerks and seem to enjoy acting this out at every opportunity. Pretentious ones though, give you an opportunity to learn from them (so that you can begin to see or perhaps perceive how they are better.) The second one didn’t seem particularly pretentious. But let’s see what happens when we pair the bank teller and the sanitation worker. Let’s think about the sanitation worker: what response would be fitting there? He or she’s probably not read anything about banks. Let’s take a look:

“Hi, I’m a bank teller.”

“That is a great job. Without you, where would the rest of us be? In our homes hoarding our cash. None of us would ever go out. Ha ha ha.”

“Ha ha ha. You’re funny. It’s not all that big a deal… so, what do you do?”

“I serve and protect the foundations of civilization.”

“Ooo. That sounds important, and it must be hard.”

“You have no idea. But let’s go out to dinner and I’ll tell you about it.”

“O.K. Here’s my phone number.”

Clearly, pretentiousness has its perks. In both cases, the bank teller (one obviously oblivious to the power of pretentiousness) is treated respectfully and as a human being. What we find is that it’s not the particulars that matter so much as the application. Additionally, that the application must not in any way ignore the sense of the receiver: the other person (arrogance completely disregards the other person). Remember, just because you are better than everyone else, doesn’t mean you can act like you’re god’s gift to the world. We all dislike people like that. And a pretentious person does not presume to know; they rely on empirical deduction and facts combined with understanding.

So, let’s put this to practice.

Sanitation worker:

Facts: Removes refuse or ensure safe disposal of waste.

Deduction: Were it not for this role, garbage would accumulate.

Understanding: It is important to perform this role for the function of society, and therefore, civilization. Ergo, without me, society and civilization would fall in upon itself and give way to chaos and anarchy, which, while O.K. for a fun time every now and then, should generally be avoided. (Sacking of ancient or modern cities not-withstanding.)

Academic

Facts: Studies and teaches things (often completely esoteric and without relevance outside of the academic environment).

Deduction: Were it not for this role, these esoteric, nonsensical things would be forgotten, new theoretical mysteries would not be uncovered because no one else cares about them, and also, no one would teach in the colleges—instead there would be sports and nothing else. (Note to self: research why this would not be good.)

Understanding: It is important to perform this role for the function of society, and therefore, civilization. Ergo, without me, society and civilization would fall in upon itself and give way to chaos and anarchy, which, while O.K. for a fun time every now and then, should generally be avoided. (And the sacking of cities provides additional material for study, so whatevs.)

Even the bank teller can get in on the fun! For your own practice, see if you can fill out the diagram for the bank teller.

Bank Teller:

Facts:

Deduction:

Understanding:

Now that we see that you are the pinnacle of society, we must determine how it is that you are to fulfill your public role in society. That is, how you will relate to others and encourage their own development. (You are a leader after all, not an arrogant jerk.) But that will have to wait…

It is I, the Beta, Omicron, and Decepitcon, your savior, Dave Vanachronism!

It strikes me that every wrongheaded sentiment in society ultimately derives from the culture of inherent, unconditional rightness. As I grow older, I find myself less prone to have an opinion about anything, and to distrust just about everyone who does.

I am supposed to have a lot of opinions about things. Very often, people ask me my opinion about things I’ve barely even thought about before. This is always an enjoyable experience, but I never understand why they are interested in my response. I certainly don’t think it’s because they believe my opinion is accurate; I think it’s probably because they like knowing that a potentially inaccurate opinion has the potential to exist (and that holding such an opinion is socially acceptable, particularly if the holder has no specialized knowledge of the subject itself).

All the world’s stupidest people are either zealots or atheists. If you want to truly deduce how intelligent someone is, just ask this person how they feel about any issue that doesn’t have an answer; the more certainty they express, the less sense they have. This is because certainty only comes from dogma.

Like all techno-media advances, the Internet is good for the world in the short term and bad for the world in the long term. But its most meaningful impact is neutral — it provides an opportunity for average people to create public identities that are entirely their own vision. The self-portrait you upload on Myspace is what you always look like. Always. It does not matter if you’ve honestly enjoyed the movies you list as favorites or read the books you claim to love; by typing those titles, they constitute your aesthetic. Who is going to disagree?

This, I have no doubt, has been wonderful for the self-esteem of countless people who are not designed to thrive in a less pliable, more judgmental, wholly nonvirtual society. There are now two distinct worlds in which people can live simultaneously. But that also creates a new kind of problem: Because of technology, the gap between the life one inherits and the life one creates has become exponentially vast. The fake world is much, much larger. Every online existence is a noncommercial simulation of celebrity culture: Users develop a character (i.e., the best-case portrait of themselves) and then track the size of its audience (via the number of friends they acquire or page views they receive). As a result, private citizens now face a dilemma previously reserved for the authentically famous: How do they cope with the disparity between how they are seen in the communal sphere and how they live in private?

Obviously, the idea of people having secret lives is old. However, the idea of having a secret public life is new — and it’s a different kind of secret. It’s more creative than escapist, and it requires the person to self-identify as a public figure. Over time (or at least on occasion), the online creator will desire separation from that celebrity construction and return to the simpler, unimagined existence that was always there. Don’t get pissed off over the fact that the way you feel about culture isn’t some kind of universal consensus. Because if you do, you will end up feeling betrayed. And it will be your own damn fault. You will feel bad, and you will deserve it.

Our notions and arguments for belief have their own dignity and require a certain distance from presumption to fully appreciate their complexity. By ignoring the theological arguments of all but the most facile of the believers, you have gained nothing but further alienation and lack of truthful communication. But that is not the point…

There is a certain dignity to humanity and however much you believe in your reasoning and perceptions, not only is toleration of differing opinions a necessity, outright respect is as well. If you cannot come to demonstrate the smallest appreciation of another’s opinions, where can you expect a semblance of toleration of your own? Eventually, under rational circumstances, the truth will always come out, but if you do nothing but step on everyone’s toes in order to protect your preconceived notions of reality, truth will on some level be always impeded and stifled. Fair, honest appraisal without dismissiveness, is the only way for you personally to meet that goal.

RIPDFW

It’s hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it’s next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he’s not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling’s enough. Surely one reason, though, is politics is not cool. Or say rather that cool, interesting, alive people do not seem to be the ones who are drawn to the Political Process. Think back to the sort of kids in high school or college who were into running for student office: dweeby, overgroomed, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the Game. The kind of kids other kids would want to beat up if it didn’t seem so pointless and dull. And now consider some of 2000’s adult versions of these very same kids . . . Men who aren’t enough like human beings even to dislike—what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is so often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us in ways that are hard even to name, much less to talk about. It’s way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don’t want to hear about all this, even.

Pissing Into The Wind

The modern day Conservative Movement has convinced millions of otherwise smart and sensible Americans that to help their neighbors and fellow citizens is an evil so profound as to be neigh on par with that age old bogeyman, Socialism. If lower middle class children got used to having ready access to health care, then poor children and even adults would expect to have access to health care that borders on the Universal and well, we all know how bad that is. Just look at Europe! With their lower infant mortality rates, longer life expectancy and lower rates of obesity and chronic illness, plus all those doctors on call 24/7, why it’s a veritable Hell of Socialized Medicine! It’s a wonder that they don’t flock across the ocean for our American style, sub par health care with it’s built in hidden fees, byzantine bureaucracy and outrageous prescription costs.

How exactly Socialism got the stench of evil about it is a long and convoluted story. Mostly, it’s lingering word association games played during the early twentieth century. Socialism was something that the lower classes engaged in. It was foreign. Never mind that Germany’s National Socialism party was built on a foundation of free market fundamentalism, Christian identity politics, racism and rabid nationalism and that the Nazis imprisoned Socialists along with Jews, Gypsies, Commies, Gays and anyone who pointed out that what they were doing was neither in the best interests of the nation nor actually socialism of any variety. Oh, and stark raving evil.

Nevermind that the late twentieth century saw a melding of democratic principles with socialistic ideals that created a dozen solid examples of what it means to be egalitarian, humanitarian and truly democratic. To listen to most political douchebags, you’d think that Europe was a floundering shipwreck, casting off starving survivors forced to gnaw on the bones of their own sick and dying children just to keep their wine glasses full in th afternoon while they sat around discussing Sarte and not going to “Church”.

What about the angry mom whose kid is sick and no one will treat them because their paperwork isn’t in triplicate and preopproved by some jackass in a Bangalore Basement staring at a computer screen prompting him to shuffle on to the next case because this one is costing the Trial And Error Big Healthcare too much money?

But, instead we get platitudes. Every politician admitting silently that helping people is Socialism. And Socialism is evil. So, fuck you grandma and little Joey. You’re broken hip or persistent cough will probably kill you because to help you would be to commit the unforgivable sin of following Europe’s example. Because if it wasn’t Made in America (but manufactured cheaper in China), than it’s just not an option.

I bet most of you wish I would just shut the fuck up, because I’m just a proll who should accept my place and thank the media outlets (all six of them), for allowing me the pantomime of free press.

But here’s the thing: if you’re reading this right now, you’ve already decided for yourself if you’re going to be offended by my loose language and run to the swooning couch and have Mommy fetch the smelling salts, or read through to the end to see if I make a valid point or not. And that’s all the bloging ethics I’ll ever need. Read my words or don’t. Agree, or don’t. You can agree and leave a comment to that effect or disagree and call me names. And maybe I’ll respond and maybe I’ll delete your trollish rants. But it’s up to me to decide because it’s my fucking blog. You don’t like my perspective? Go write your own blog and call me names on it. Maybe I’ll read it, maybe I won’t. But if you don’t like what I write, you’re under no obligation to read it. And the thing is, I figured this out pretty quickly, on my own, years ago.

The problem is that the Internet is a free medium and that scares the shit out of some people. It means unpopular opinions that might have some validity have an opportunity to get heard and to spread and become popular opinions, all without gatekeepers or some authority figure giving the thumbs up. It allows for culture to be spread and evolve organically, in the hands of anyone with a desire to contribute, not just the monied elite who, for most of human history, were the arbiters of taste and expression. Now that it is no longer so, there is fear that we, the unwashed, foul mouthed masses will have a say. And that, my friends, means the end of the way things used to be. The order is rapidly fadin’…

Not that any of this matters because most of you arent even audacious or astute enough to challenge any ideas. You pusillanimous bootlickers!

Trick or Treat

Even a casual observer might readily note that among people there is no pastime that is more pleasurable to them than that of judging and criticizing their fellow man. The generous nature of man is such that even in time of leisure, people are devoted to pointing out faults of others, for their benefit and improvement of course. While some might make the mistake of reacting with compassion and understanding, most know that it is far better to list the faults of a person to them so as not to indulge them in their bad habits. It can only help someone to make them feel that their list of virtues is nothing in comparison with all their imperfections. If such an action results in the recipient feeling sorry for themselves and downtrodden, it is but another opportunity to point out their poor way of receiving constructive criticism.

Moreover, those who are kind enough to offer such improving advice require nothing in return except for gratitude and humble submission, as is right. When the improver’s thoughtful advice is met with resentment and resistance, it is only more proof of the absolute rightness of what was said. At other times, there are those who out of resentment and for no reason feel led to unleash their tongue and pour out criticism on the improver. What an unfair world, that those who should be praised for their honest concern for their fellow man’s improvement, do not receive respect and honor that is due them. It should also be noted, that those caring people who endeavor to improve mankind are of such a sensitive and self-aware nature that they never require anyone to point out their own minor blemishes because it is redundant, as such ones already know about themselves all they require or need to know.

Also, it is perfect acceptable for the improver to be harsh maybe even cruel, to the unobservant eye, to an individual that requires enlightenment. Indeed, there is no need for gentle words or false politeness, its far better to come straight out without any pretension. For example, one might say to an erring friend, “You are too sensitive and needy and I find it terribly annoying and I am sure everyone else does as well.” Or “You are fat. You need to lose weight.” What a kind friend to say such a thing! It can only help the erring person to learn how hateful and loathsome their behavior is to those around them. Moreover, in the future, they might one day be rid of such annoying tendency with the right kind of prodding and poking towards perfection. In fact, forbearance with your fellow man is not a virtue at all and walking a mile in his shoes can only make tainted with the stench of kindness and compassion. So to those of you who refuse to buy into the myth of kindness, compassion, mercy, and all those other attributes of weakness and frailty, I congratulate, and am assured that a time will come that you will be justly rewarded for your efforts.

I feel a little narcassistic blogging all this. Really, a blog is a personal introspection of someone’s opinion, hobby, fetish, etc. Or at least that’s how it all started. But now, there are a kabillion words, all these little type written letters floating in cyberspace of millions on millions of people’s written words, stumbling upon eachotherfallingintootherrealms. How is it that one written word makes it above others? Is it a left brain thinker or a right brained feeler? Is it a particular age, race, what exactly is it? Who the hell wants to read my crap when they have their own crap to ruminate over and they get to be the star of the show!? What beliefs do we subscribe to that makes us check into Facebook, myspace, and the thousands of other social networks, bypassing the actual physical interaction that actually can help with biorythms in the body? Is it escapism to deviate from human interaction? One can get pretty creepy being alone.

I am aware, and it didn’t take a BA in Psych at some college, to realize that our society truly likes to ignore their inner stuff and proclaim enlightment. I’m amazed that we humans have any capability of communication when we are all our own freakshows ignoring our very essence. We have made habits of being so damn busy all the time, doing this and that, to truly avoid ourselves… We have errands, and if not errands, a job that we can put in over time, and if not that, another job and an exorbitant social life and living the dream of tremendous debt but we look good on the outside! We have children, get fancy cars, and iPods and gaudy body jewelry and cool hipster clothes and a home and trendy tattoos and any other material substances that are considered a good thing to possess before you die.

Then, there are the truly blind, who claim that through yoga, meditation, and my favorite: inner mind search (you know this means they did drugs for a long time), and religion and belief, they have truly faced and joined with their inner soul/dragon and are the enlightened ones. They then go sell their BS through a book (or blog) to all these other people looking for another way to avoid getting in their own way. So much work is put into how we look on the outside, we fail (on purpose) to delve into the gooey slimy chocolatey inner components that in all reality, keeps us alive. Every once in a while, that “ugly” knocks on your door and comes in just at the moment you were open and distracted. Oh yes, and honestly if that part of you doesn’t sneak in, you can ignore it for years until it becomes an ugly CANCER or some kind of physical or mental ailment that OOPS! You didn’t know it, but your ignorance has created a monster!

I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to feel that soon there will be no other option than to face yourself. I feel like with the advancement of technology, science, beliefs and dogmas and human kind, it seems the energy has shifted and all that avoidance may be for nothing. I see more and more people dealing with personal stuff and it seems to be more and more out in the open. Inner Demon? Nah, we just make it one because of the avoidance thing. Really, all that demon may truly be is a little child in a demon costume. So give him/her some fucking candy!!

Mountebank

Now all of us know who intellectuals are. Those who think positive and constructive, those who are optimists, those who are Capable of so many things but still are God Fearing (Well most intellectuals are not athiests) and finally, intellectuals are those who use Their Brains for the Benefits of the society, or should I say use their Brains for making things better.

What about Pseudo-Intellectuals?

Some of you know what their lot are. For those who don’t, Pseudo-Intellectuals are people of average intelligence who are enchanted with highly intellectual topics and discussions such as philosophy, socioeconomics, destiny of humanity, etc. Unlike a genuine academic, a pseudo-intellectual’s main reason for being interested in these topics is because it makes him feel intellectually superior to his peers. He usually despises main stream culture, accuses those who disagree with him as being ignorant.

Wikipedia describes that a Pseudo-Intellectual is an intellectually dishonest person. The term is often, though not always, used to describe one who regularly critiques the work of professionals, while lacking the requisite background knowledge and experience to have an informed opinion. Synonyms for this character include sophist, and in medical terms, a quack…

Anyway,

There’s something dreadfully wrong with this life. The human race is capable of startling nobility, acting in accordance with what are classified as virtues of the highest level. Returning good for evil; noble self-sacrifice for the good of another; responding in gentleness and love to vehement outbursts.

Yet the human race is equally capable of the most disgusting, vile, hateful acts. Brutal homicide. Rapacious lust. The self-destructive flame of pride. Wholesale genocide. Repetitious torture. Costly negligence. Greed like a bottomless pit. Oh, we have so much iniquity seared into our bones. And all too often, we put on a self-righteous facade and distance ourselves from that kind of nastiness. Surely we, as civilized, decent individuals, could never do such things. And by and large, we don’t, at least not at that level. But we could. It’s within us, the same infectious spore that contaminates the hearts of those who break others for their own gain, who rape, extort, torture, murder, who scheme and plot, who flaunt ill-gotten gains in the faces of the destitute, the impoverished, the disadvantaged. It’s in us. I know it’s in me. I’ve felt the eruption of this disease. A burning coldness within the innermost regions of selfhood. A grating whisper, a contorted mask, a wicked command. A blazing drive, a thirst. A thirst for sexual gratification, for violence, for power and influence, for riches, for wanton destruction. I’ve felt it. And so have you. Maybe not in quite the same ways, and maybe not always in the same degree. But you know it’s there. It’s in us all.

It’s manifestly clear that although we have our noble threads, there’s a great darkness in the human heart, and injustice shines out of that watery matrix. What can be said of this? What can be done? Who among you has not wept in the face of the agony? The Reaper’s eyes glare through the mists of time, and his bony hands clutch the ends of the earth. Death. Misery. Illness. Devastation. Burdens. The excruciating spiral down into madness.

We could turn to a thorough-going materialism, of course, in face of the terror. But as we gaze deeply into that, what does it bring? We are absolutely nothing but matter arranged in a certain fashion, with certain chemical processes marking us out from other arrangements of matter. Life is, ultimately, nothing but a distinctive feature of the chemical operations being exchanged. Nothing better or worse than any other manner of processes. No objective reason that “life” should be superior to its cessation. Nothing wrong with effecting the shift from one mode of functioning to another. Nothing wrong with killing. And for that matter, consciousness is entirely reducible to a particular exchange of impulses in the brain. Same for any particular variation on that, such as pain or pleasure. Nothing ethically distinct between inducing one or the other, or between consciousness and its alternatives.

What, then, is wrong with the thought of a man lifting a weeping child and thrusting a short dagger into a growing belly, letting young entrails pour out onto the cold ground? That child’s pain is simply one manner in which matter can interact. And nothing higher exists to censure it and praise the alternative “action” of, say, giving bread to a malnourished beggar. It’s all just matter, and nothing more to tell, for materialism is inevitably reductionistic.

Matter in action. Morality, a farce. Nothing but the combination of deterministic physical interactions and the occasional indeterministic quantum fluctuation. Certainly nothing teleological lying behind either, of course. And so no space for agent causality and other assorted myths like free will, moral responsibility, justice, freedom of choice, virtue, vice, and rational thought. And no hope for anything different in the future. Just a failed collection of biological specks. As Dogbert once quipped to Dilbert, “organic pain collector[s] hurtling towards oblivion”. So why feed the hungry? Why care at all for the sick? It’s neither better nor worse than, say, desecrating your great-grandfather’s grave, or depriving the needy to get another coin in your pocket, or depleting our natural resources with wanton abandon. For what does it matter if humanity lasts even another year? It makes no cosmic significance whether a nuclear Armageddon wipes out all life on earth next week. Our survival surely isn’t some objective good. There are no objective goods; they rest on the shoulders of teleology and intentionality. No difference between life and death, between perseverance and desperate suicide. No good, no evil. Just brute fact. Unexplainable and unexplained. No reason for hope.

Yet we live on. We act as if there is some deeper purpose behind it all, as if how we conduct ourselves matters. We have mental events distinct from brain events. We construct a hierarchy of goods, imposing it upon the realm of matter and function. We almost universally press on, even through our darkest hours, even when it seems that our own personal hierarchy (pain is an evil to be avoided) conflicts with that perseverance. Others, of course, select death over pain or solitude. But, by and large, we see continuation as a good that, even combined with that pain, secures a positive net entry into our little mental notation. We have hope. We behave as though minds genuinely exist, and as though moral responsibility is a true aspect of mortal life. We instinctively know that things are not as materialistic reductionism would lead us to perceive. We know better.

There is, of course, a perspective far more consonant with what we immediately perceive. There’s a world that includes mental substances and mental events, things not reducible to the merely material. Things not wholly determined by physical events. There is moral responsibility. There is objective wrong and objective right. Our reasoning faculties are not just interacting particles and chemical signals; they are also mental events that can fit together in a logically coherent whole. And this is reasonable. But there is still something horribly wrong. Something sinister at the core. For, as before, we see that extremities of good and evil reside within us. Great virtue, great vice. The former is no problem, we like that… but what of this latter, this grotesque inclination that erupts in violence and degradation?

Perhaps there is an answer. Something higher, a source for this abundant teleology. A reason why death is bad and life is good. A fundamental ground that serves as the originator of mental substances that are seemingly conjoined unexpectedly with matter. Call this what you will. But perhaps in such a postulate, if it be true, there is cause for hope.

Some think so. Some tell a sweeping saga about a love. It concerns, you see, the Teleology Provider expressing great distress over the way things have gone, and so there is invasion. The schizophrenic world received visitation like no other. An Untainted One felt our filthy touch and reached out fearlessly with spotless hands of His own. A power was promised, a power was offered. Grime of the heart, soaked in the blood of perfect life. A new people, snatched from old ways, living in the interim between two eras. A community, bound together by bloodshed offered freely. And an infinite force taking up residence among the members as though in a sanctuary. Of course, there’s still that thorny matter of the in-between, the paradox. But in that, there’s a promise. Now is partial; then shall be full. A new age, the new age. Perfection comes. Justice done, death undone. A banquet for the hungry, flowing water for the thirsty. Wealth for the destitute, new robes for the naked. Wholeness for the broken. Tears a moist memory. Violence gone; no more violation, no more shame. The new people, the temple people, the community, blessed for a new age. Healing. Hope for the helpless, rest for the weary, love for a broken heart. Mercy and grace, might and pardon. All because of an invasion, ferried in by the Untainted One who took stains from the stained.

That’s at least how the narrative goes. So many stories. Some hopeful, some fearful. I’ve told two. One wretched to the core, painted with blood at its very foundation. Not even reason survives its touch. Nearly every basic belief is called into question or outright denied, though most back away from its darker, deeper corridors. Another also has blood at its foundation. But not mine, and not yours. God’s. It offers hope and encourages truth, reason, and virtue. It displays standards by which to truly evaluate acts.

I know which story solves a very real problem, and which story reduces the problem into insignificant brute reality at the expense of every value anyone has ever held. I know which story tells me that I should be dismayed at evil and overjoyed at good. I know which story tells me to feed the naked, clothe the hungry, tend to the wounded, and comfort the hurting. I know which story enables and unlocks true humanity, if only we’ll be saturated by the epic. I know which story speaks of change, and which one speaks of dreadful stasis.

Which story do you tell?

Truthiness

Merriam-Webster defines Truthiness as: something one claims to know intuitively without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual facts.

I believe I touched on this subject with my previous entry so no need to get all redundant up in this bitch.

I have many beefs with the world around me, but with good reason: I never asked to be here, never asked to stay on this particular planet, or live amongst its maniacally dangerous inhabitants. My life is at the mercy of the irrational, and they are legion. So, yes, I have my reasons for being bitter at everyone and everything. Today however, I want to talk about the vague concept of the jerk: who they are, how they came to be, and the morons who spawned them.

As a species, we have the power to create more of us, and we also have the power to mold them into our image. The problem is that there are so many of us who can’t be bothered with the act of raising and nurturing our progeny. Too many times, at too crucial of moments (adolescence), we leave our children to their own devices, with little to no guidance, and the social result is that these people grow up to be bitter, angry, and unintelligible, left to roam the earth at our peril.

The Alpha and Omega of the Jerk. They start out innocently enough. Then, with television and the bastards down the street bombarding them at every possible moment, with enough anger and resentment stoking the fires of douchebaggery, the earliest signs of jerkitude are born. Then, as life goes on with no warning that the American Dream was nothing more than a reneged promise, they become self important, but not necessarily self reliant. The need to ruin everyone else’s day is a hunger not sated by reason or rationality, and soon, they have psychologically mutated into a complete prick.

Cereal Box Psychology form an Armchair (mousepad) Philosopher

It is a perfectly valid standpoint, and a common one, that humanity as a whole is good and possesses innate dignity, and flowing from that, certain provisions are rightfully demanded of those of greater fortune or aptitude for those without. Many presume that food, water, shelter, education, and health care are universally deserved for no reason beyond being human, and even if some do not carefully buttress this presumption, there are still nonetheless those who can effectively support it. The greater question is whether any given individual should see himself as personally entitled to any such provision. The only honorable answer is denial.

Forgetting entirely about to what others are entitled, do you ever feel justified in taking any help that someone did not freely offer you of his own volition? How could you? Your hunger does not render the other’s plenty any more yours. Fine, perhaps the fact that there is an inequality of wealth in existence transfers some of that wealth from the rich to society as a whole, but it does not transfer it to you personally. Any societal concerns for the greater common good do not come into play when one of the entities benefiting from a provision is you. It is one thing to say that one should sacrifice himself for society or a group of indistinct but needy individuals; it is quite another to say he must sacrifice himself for you.

Conscripted, involuntary contribution for your own needs or desires is thus always a coercive action that has absolutely no justice, but what of that is of the other party’s own volition? While there is certainly nothing emphatically wrong with receiving aid from others, it must be done so honestly and without the shadow of a misdirected intention. Think of any of the times you sweet talked, spun, or otherwise finagled an issue into your advantage. That is no more than manipulation, and even if it is not explicitly evil, let alone illegal, it is under no circumstances good. The only thing one gains through tactful manipulation is that which one does not rationally deserve, if not literally “rationally”, than “rationally” as in accordance with the other’s true beliefs, desires and true volition.

The only sequitur solution to this quagmire is the willingness of one to partially destroy the advantages one may naturally receive for reasons beyond his talent alone. Do not sweet talk; do not schmooze. The truth of your statements should be enough, as otherwise the other is only hurting himself by failing to accept whichever proposition you have portrayed. Since we all will inevitably believe our own position or importance is greater than reality, true honesty forces us away from where our words could put us with minimal difficulty. If given five options, the only moral option is the second best. Your assumption should be that the best is not that which you deserve.

To be truly pretentious is to believe that any smooth talking is entirely unnecessary, as one’s merits will ultimately overcome another’s biases. It is a degree of faith to assume that humanity generally values that which is good, but it is far more a testament of faith in yourself that anyone who does not willfully accept your abilities or judgment deserves to be without them.

I am genuinely confused by the populace’s widespread misappropriation of pretentiousness as a negative. Too much self-importance, it is believed, is nothing more than a sign of a sanctimonious, selfish disregard of the beliefs of others and a dishonest, inaccurate judgment of the credit or favor to which one is entitled. This is not only patently false, but ironically pretentious as well. To make any reasoned judgment, flawed or unflawed, is an inevitably pretentious action. Pretentiousness is not dishonest or inaccurate, and to suggest so is extremely dishonest, inaccurate, and hypocritical.

What is a judgment? A statement that you know the truth. Yet, one cannot make any such statement without implicitly making a statement on literally everything else in the world. Our views -our judgments- are predicated upon certain base presumptions that probably do have an ultimate truth to them, but are seemingly impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Our aesthetic choices, our political views, and even our most trivial tastes are all inexorably controlled by our answers to broad questions such as the existence of the divine, the rationality of humanity, and natural law. If two people precisely agree on such encompassing concepts, they will very likely agree on the specifics they imply. Even if their views differ just slightly even on just of those, however, it is remarkably unlikely that they will practically agree on very much at all. It is the margins and specifics of issues we fervently debate, but those are no more than the symptoms of our disagreement in more important, yet far less openly, discussed areas of contention. They are avoided not because they are any less truly believed, but because they are much more difficult to prove. These are the bases on which we form any judgment whatsoever, and as such are open to discussion irrespective of how strongly one believes in one direction or another.

What do we in reality do when we choose to make one of those all-encompassing judgments? We are saying that, even if we can’t walk up to someone on the street who is normally a rational human being who disagrees with you on this one point no matter how effectively you argue it, is wrong. If it really was that self-evident and banal, it would never gather such a following. By making any judgment at all that isn’t previously universally agreed upon, we ultimately say we are smarter and more rational than anyone else who has ever lived, without ever being able to prove anyone of our assertions beyond reasonable doubt. That is, as I’ve said, ludicrously pretentious. Everyone implicitly believes this, even if they do not openly admit it. It is literally impossible to judge, reason, think, or live, without that presumption of self-worth, which is always impossibly wrong. Not to live pretentiously, that being to treat the living world agnostically, is a retreat to solipsism, one wherein you may as well end your life, as you can assume you are nothing more than a brain in a glass jar manipulated and tortured. Does it truly make sense to any rational mind that it is better to live philosophically paralyzed?

Centuries before time began, one caveman hit another with a stick in a playful, jocular manner. He sheepishly smiled and turned back to his huntering/gathering. Unfortunately, irony had yet to be invented and the other screamed in a vengeful pronouncement of hatred and betrayal and murdered his friend. We are reliving this same Sisyphean cycle by reacting to facetiousness with aggression, fatuousness with imperceptive simplicity, and the non-sequitur with outright dismission. Until the world can move past its preconceived notions of what is true and what is false, we may never come to understand each other on anything beyond a paradigm of naïveté. Perhaps differing layers of how true an assertion may be is best expressed solely by the connivances of differing layers of sarcasm mixed with self-indulgent self-awareness. Perhaps saying so is another layer of sarcasm mixed with self-indulgent self-awareness.

About ten minutes before time began, dictionary.com defined irony as “(esp. in contemporary writing) a manner of organizing a work so as to give full expression to contradictory or complementary impulses, attitudes, etc., esp. as a means of indicating detachment from a subject, theme, or emotion,” which was very prescient of them since neither the English language nor the internet had been invented yet. We must try to incorporate this aggressive, accurate foresightedness as we rationally convey our meaningless lives with meaning. As we all know, the universe is no more than an enormous ticking clock, its gears and parts representing the everyday activities of our lives which we may foresee as easily as we see our true love in our mind’s eye. The gears of time may be deciphered, understood, and mastered to allow us to stroll through our limited earthly time as accountants, fast food cashiers, and drug dealers to the outermost reaches of our abilities. It should be noted, of course, that never once does this analogical timekeeping instrument of the universe tock, however much it effectively ticks. Only with this in mind can we spearhead tribulations in the robustness demanded by our collective knowledge of the tickness –tickicity, if I may- of the world.

Pretentiousness demands that you find your own truth. According to urbandictionary.com, truth is, “Something which would probably upset a great many of people if it were known and made public.” The editors on that site are an angsty group of fourteen year olds that have little to do beyond contribute and listen to linkin park; who cares. If you now ask me why I mentioned it at all, you missed the entire point of the preceding paragraphs. The world is confusing and chaotic, and however much we may believe we grasp its intricacies and what is true and right, we neither have any right to believe that to be incontrovertibly sure nor should we actively ever coerce our values on others. Hence, what is truth; what is love; and always drink your Ovalitine with a large scoop of Chemical P for a balanced breakfast.

“Shock Humor”, by nature, is an act of relative pretension. One must honestly feel an unnaturally strong degree of self-worship to attempt to force aside another’s sensibilities by way of an argument hardly more subtle and inoffensive than starkly plating a dead baby in front of a guest, running into the kitchen, and laughing hysterically within the palm of one’s own hand. That is not to say that this specific brand of humor does not have its time and its place, but the relative meaning and constructiveness of such ridicule must be carefully weighed against masturbatorial, grimace-inducing smugness that is scarcely becoming of a user of Pretentiousness.

The most infamous level of shock humor is that which attempts to portray the preconceived notions of the preponderance of humanity as innately misguided. For example, a joke that relies solely on the spilling of blood or base sexual perversion as a means of forcing out a giggle does not proclaim the gospel of pretty much anything beyond that cheap giggle. Unless it somehow acts tacitly as a means to an end, this usage is scarcely anything more than an embezzlement of pretentiousness to advocate the abstinence of judgment it by nature contradicts. While in totality it may give us a laugh if executed effectively, one should never consider it a philosophically reasoned depiction of the human experience.

The second level is somewhat less common, but far worse. Rather than actually coming to grips with what those holding another set of values believe and challenging that, it degrades them. If one is truly pretentious, such an action is flaccidly stupid. Either one’s arguments are fundamentally more logical than the other party’s and deserve to be hastily flaunted, or the other party’s point of view deserves no further consideration. There is never any justification or rational desire to satirize and humiliate those of another perspective, as that is to say that one’s own argument cannot stand on its own two feet and must be buttressed by the coercive, irrelevant words of its believer.

The rare level of shock humor that falls in line squarely with acceptance of pretentiousness is the satire of the way in which people commonly perceive and reason with the world. It does not war against one particular value set or another, but it attacks the shallowness to which many entertain the essential questions of the world, persistent logical fallacies, and other similar incongruities. Such humor indirectly exposes the flaws and missteps of the other without blindly oppressing values and beliefs. Pretentiousness dictates that those missteps are the true root of disagreement and regrettable viewpoints, and thusly have legitimate cause to be harshly punished through observational application of those notions to more sharply apparent inconsistencies.

There are few more magical moments than when two polar philosophical opposites are browbeaten into making the precisely same argument. However much we build our viewpoints up, there will seemingly always be someone who can rip us apart if we stand there and rationally debate them. Of course, “rationally debate” is a notion scarcely to be taken lightly, as that requires a total detachment from fleeting emotion, or in other words, not to be human. No matter what we read, what we ponder, or how deep our analysis goes, ultimately the realizations upon which we arrive have been tread, retread, disproven, reproven, forgotten, lost, found, and reconsidered a few thousand times before we have ever been born.

This is only to say how unbelievable it is for anyone professing any view, value, or belief to scowl and curse the other side in totality for being misinformed and ignorant. Chances are neither understands the nuance, the analysis, and the honesty to which the path-forging originators took when forming these means of debate. You may fly in any popular or semi-popular direction and chances are that even if you cannot rationally defend your position, there is someone out there who can.

That can be comforting, but should it? The contemporary suburban liberalized teen feels free to scoff at religion, traditional values, and the blind ignoramuses who live judged, restricted dead lives before a deader god, but if he is ever actually challenged as to why he feels so free to cast aside shamelessly those beliefs he does not try to understand, he can retreat to the writings 0f Nietzsche or some modern academic intellectual rather than coming to grips with the a contrary point of view. Is that any different than the Middle-American Evangelist Christian who belligerently does not care one way or another how some hedonist atheist comes to their beliefs, and will make a point to scoff at how they could refuse the love of their God, and can numbly cite Aquinas or Luther to make the finer parts of their arguments for them? There is a tightly sewn line of irrationality holding the fabric of either pattern together. That thread is prejudice.

“Prejudice” is bandied about as some infinite evil eternally imprisoning our society from peace and rendering it in an endless cycle of injustice. This prejudice is generally nowadays no more than literally skin deep, if you excuse the politically incorrect pun, as however harmful the residual sins of our forefathers run, they only govern interactions among human beings. The prejudice that abides within every one of us every day, insulating us from clear sight or truth, is the bias of opinions, and that which governs our souls. It is the refusal to honestly grapple with even those opinions most diametrically opposed to your own with consideration only lending to whichever is of the greatest rationality. It is searching, instead of wallowing cowardly in the works of those whose opinions you share, to go out of your way to do everything you can to disprove yourself. It is to place the relative merits of Hinduism, Blood and Soil Conservativism, Islam, the Mormons, and Shinto on equal footing, and truly to ask yourself not just why you dislike those accepting those ideologies, the consequences of doing so, and why it does not elegantly congeal to your presumed world paradigm, but how on its own merits it supersedes your null philosophical hypothesis. Your responsibility as a human being is to prove beyond a reasonable doubt those very issues that by nature are impossible to prove to such a degree. If your view does not stand the test the counterarguments of a literate, expert Hindu priest, a literate, expert Southern conservative, a literate, expert faithful Muslim, a literate, expert liberal Westerner, or a literate, expert fisherman living on the southern coast of Japan, what is the point of claiming that view as the truth? And if you have looked upon anyone of those listed with a half-eye roll as impossible to be expert and literate, you are already distastefully biased. You do not have the right to your own opinion until you not only know the other side of the argument, but to foresee it, to empathize with it, and ultimately to beat it without a scent of smarmy presumption.

Many are familiar with the slanderous accusation that application of turgid prose to five dollar bills will morph Lincoln’s portrait to the visage of Andrew Jackson, in turn quadrupling the value and threatening the American economy. In reality, any currency will simply change to its equivalent value in pesos at standard exchange rates.

I don’t know what either “pretentious” or “irony” means. My inscrutability has no purpose whatsoever. I am a vapid and defensive pedant who substitutes circularity for substance.

(in bed)

I was really torn as to what to post as today’s glimpse into my “life”.

(“life” in quotations not an accident. Another very obviously emo shout out implying an ocean of boredom. Wait, wait. “…a sea of ennui.” BETTER, now I am sound avuncular and kind of bourgeois. Top drawer.)

Is it lame to use fantastic vocabulary words in everyday writing/speaking when the majority of people will have, at best, only a slight idea as to its meaning? Is it pretentious to do this? Or is it worse that when you do have that one great SAT word (let’s say “insouciance” or “inimitable”) in the most fitting of occasions, you don’t use it, because you know those around you are small minded nitwits who will make fun and “ohhh la la” your endeavor? Is it worse to be pretentious or dragged down to the depths of lolcatihazcheezburger & txt-speak? Ayn Rand would certainly say the latter is the more abysmal choice. I’m with her.

(Xenophobia is spelled with an “x” not a “z”…another tricky bit about the english language…an “x” is a sub for the “z” sound, occasionally. Just for funsies. We like to throw this in for immigrants and foreigners to keep them guessing. Our gift to the world.)

Isn’t it funny how you can neglect some of your favorite songs because you have liked them forever, you take them for granted? And then one day on the bus you fall into them on accident or on a whim… music on shuffle, and it’s like meeting an old friend?

(What exactly is the statute of limitations of friendships? If you were friends during those tender, adolescent, ugly-duckling years, don’t talk for a decade, and then pick up where you left off [well, not really... where you left off was asking your parents for permission, and paying for health insurance was a test question-not something that came out of your paycheck.] Do you call this person a friend? For a DECADE, a third of your existence you have not been in contact. I find it a stretch. Because really, when it all comes down to it, you are trying to be friends, but you can’t really ever go back. You won’t ever be spending a school night outside of 711, drinking mad dog 20/20 you got a migrant worker to buy for you at the local stop-n-rob, smoking clove cigarettes. Because at almost 30, this would be incredibly tragic.

But at 18, well, it was…well maybe it was sad and tragic then too, but in a entirely different genre.

You can’t ever go back.)

But I digress…

Information is like porn.

You are chatting up an aquaintance, discussing politics, origami, or possibly the worst show in existenence, (Lost/Heroes) when something is called into question. “…what was that joke?…what was that urban legend?…”

And its like the conversation, Any Conversation, is temporarily paused until the answers are found. It’s as if you can’t form words, the whole driving force behind talking is freeze-framed. You feel an itch. You can’t let it go. Without the answers to your questions, you couldn’t possibly continue discussing well, anything. Let’s imagine the douche you are chewing the fat with is not hooked on the same info-drug you are. He dismisses the question almost as quickly as it falls out of his fat mouth. You reach for your phone/computer/data-crack-pipe-of-preference and he tells you its “no big deal”…that you can “look it up later.” You start to hate him. A consumning, vehement loathing rolls across your retinas like a fog. You can hardly see him anymore. This cretin. This cow that stands between you and the answers. This imbesol. You want his face to melt right off to expose what is obviously his lack of any brain matter whatsoever. You start to sweat. If you are me, you scribble down the questions to remind you as soon as you escape the clutches of this toady, unibrowed caveman.

Information. I can’t get enough. More input!

The speed at which you can get immediate, as-fast-as-your-connection-speed-allows answers to anything is making me hopelessly ADD. When I read an article, if there is any kind of link, I click on it faster than explaing kills a joke. I then wander off to a link in that article and la la la… and within a pocketful of hours I am utterly disoriented and have no idea where the hunt for the elusive great white rabbit began.

You walk down the street, and you are completely alone. Everyone is somewhere else.

Listening to music-headphones jammed deep into the holes in the sides of their heads… trying desperately to create the soundtrack of their lives… going live in a constant, continuous music video. Texting little fingers madly dancing across the latest it-device, reading messages… just to look busy, talking on the phone…

Same thing happens at dinners, in bars, at cafes all over this economically nasty country… maybe the world. And it’s depressing. No one looks you in the eyes anymore. No one listens to the tail-end of conversations. They are already documenting the past thing, or catching up to the current thing, or chasing the future thing.

No one just is.

I find myself becoming the Multi-Media Third Reich. Which makes me feel simultaneously old and out-of-touch. But its really starting to get on my fucking nerves. Yes, ok, so we know now we can talk to anyone, anytime, and know exactly when everything on the entire planet is occuring.

Now it’s time to live in the present. Start with a minute each day where you aren’t at your computer, on your phone, or myspacing. Ok? See what happens when you pick your eyes up from your ratty screens and you see what is going on in real time all around you. All you have is this moment. There are no ctrl+z edit undo’s. Live it, or lose it.

And yes, I feel preachy and self-righteous. But mostly just sad… and not endearingly so. Sad that I am out on the street all alone. (Positively 4th St.)

I started writing this with the fervor of a buffalo hunter, full of piss and vinegar and evadradesque opinions, and then my attention deficit kicked in vis a vis The Debates.

Lost my train of thought… again. I feel like any locomotion of ideas I am focused on gets rattled and meanders into cloud town. Is this thing on? Hello? Am I in Harrison Bergeron? Hello?

I think it’s time to shut down the engines, take myself back to neutral (stockcar flaming). I’m really bored of pointing out things you should know already. We’re just going through the motions.

Fortune cookie hour is over.

Stream of consciousness….

It’s a vast sea, isn’t it? Full of endless possibilities and permutations. The moon pulls at the sea’s surface, causing the ebb and flow of submerged currents that dictate the tides. As food rides in with the tides, so do the fish. It’s a wonder cats disagree with water so much. I love cats. People don’t give cats enough credit. They’re a cunning species, felis catus, engineering a false guise and conning their way into our homes.

Lying with us when we sleep. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. That and shitting in a box in our homes, and making us clean it up. Fork-tongued proprietors of false love, purrs are the softened legato of the death rattle.

The most important thing you can do is convince yourself that you’re over it – whatever it may be. Obviously, that depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. But focus on the manifest content of your dream and not that which is obfuscated. Happiness lies in the perception of your current circumstances. This is precisely why I ride the bus.

You’d think that after dipping my toe into today’s climate I’d say it was to be “green”, but personally, I think I look like shit in green. Earth tones do my blue eyes no justice. Stop. Go. Stop. Go. Stop. Go. Rhythmic gymnasts wish they had this kind of precision. The bus is a Petri dish on which to base the current state of society.

Where else can you find corporate bankers, students, day laborers, bums, nuns, musicians, pederasts, and the like, all in such an intimate space? Well, besides church. Amazingly, all these people follow the bus rules: move to the back, give up your seat to the elderly, don’t talk loudly, etc. When the buses go to shit, so shall society.

But while society is alive and kicking, so shall I be. Butterflies-in-stomach, heart racing alive.

My eyes fall all over you. You move and its fire. This room turns to flames.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in a house of cards.

They’re Grrrreeeeaaaaattttt!!

One thing that really really drives me nuts is flaky friends – friends who don’t return my phone calls or respond to my e-mails for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. At first I think, “Hmm. Maybe my e-mail went to their junk mail, or maybe they’re just really busy, or maybe they’re depressed and hiding out in their room this month, or maybe …” I make all kinds of excuses for my flaky friends. I’ve learned to do that since highschool – excuse tardiness, forgive people for not showing up to parties even after they RSVP’d that they’d be there, ignore lunch- and dinner-date cancellations, even last-minute ones, and the list goes on.

I try to be patient, try to be a good friend, and I e-mail (or call, because someone may be having technical problems, may be out of town, or may be living under a rock) them again and politely ask when they want to meet for movie, lunch or tea, but … no response. Usually I even try again, to the point of making a fool of myself for practically begging the person to hang out with me, and again no response. At this point, I begin to wonder if that person is angry with me for some reason they haven’t communicated with me. Hmmm … could it have been that smart-ass remark I made about three months ago? Could it be the smart-ass remark I made about their flakiness in an e-mail last week? Could it be any number of smart-ass remarks I may have made at any number of times? Or do they just not want to hang out with me anymore? Then I wonder how it could be that they seemed to have thought I was the most wonderful, charming friend they had last month (or last year), but don’t seem to think so anymore? Hmm. Is it because I don’t party enough? Because I don’t worship music? Because I am not that interested in expanding my social status? Then I start to think, why am I friends with this person at all? Why am I wasting my energy on them? And I start to focus on their negative traits and convince myself that I don’t want to spend time with them after all. Because who needs another FROSTED FLAKY FRIEND©? It’s just about that time, when I’ve given up and decided I don’t want to bother with that person anymore, that I get a phone call or an e-mail saying, “Hey! How are you?! I miss you! Let’s have lunch!” Yeah. And because I am a DOG and I am LOYAL, like a Golden-fucking-Retriever, I go romping back with my tail wagging and my tongue hanging out, eager to be patted on the head. Then we’re best friends for a while until they drop off the face of the earth again.

Another pet peeve of mine: friends who don’t tell you what is bothering them when something is bothering them, who instead ignore you (often in the form of not returning phone calls and e-mails, making them FLAKY FRIENDS), leaving you to guess what you did or said to piss them off. These friends often turn to another friend to complain about you, until they are annoyed with THAT friend, then they may turn to you, or another friend, to complain about them. Unless they have a blog. Then they complain to the whole Goddamn world.

I’ve also found my relationship dynamics with certain people in my life, and my tolerance for certain types of people, to be changing. I used to put up with shit until the point of sainthood, but now I feel like, I’ll give back what I’m given. Quid Pro FuckYou. It’s been hard for me to realize that not everyone acts with thoughtfulness, or the best of intentions. In some cases, I think it was a matter of just going through phases in our lives; sometimes time and space works things out. And other times, I’ve just had to reevaluate who was really a good person to have in my life, and who wasn’t, and I’ve swiftly broken off the latter.

A no call, no show is a form of absence from the workforce, which is generally considered inconsiderate and very unprofessional. When a worker misses work, especially in jobs where ones workload would need to be substituted for the day (teachers, cashiers, servers etc), it is generally expected that he/she call in advance to warn of his/her absence, so his/her workload can be completed by the present workers. Many businesses have forms of punishments as a result of no call, no show’s such as counseling statements, suspension and possibly termination of employment.

Sometimes, an employee who does not show up to work without reporting is quitting the job, but doing so inconsiderately by abandoning his/her position and discontinuing all further communications with the employer. There are times, however, when a no call, no show is not preventable, such as when a good-faith employee is suffering a medical emergency and is unable to communicate with the employer. An employer is more likely to excuse such an absence if the employee has a good prior attendance record.

So with that in mind… anyone from this point forward who flakes out on me, consider it a voluntary resignation of whatever it is you’d consider this acquaintanceship. I apologize for the dramatics, but I have nothing left to lose and I have never been one to back out quietly, even if it is usually unnoticed. And much like I am a ghost to you, you will be the fucking Easter Bunny to me. Don’t worry I’ll still put up the fake polite demeanor around you (just to keep my girlfriend happy) but if you ever feel like calling me out on it, I’m more than willing to exchange repartee! Not that any of you have the balls.

Don’t Plagiarize What They Cant Understand

Clearly there’s been a pattern in my postings. Whenever I try to don the “Professor” hat when it comes to blogging, I usually come off as pretentious or smug. You know what kind of Professor I mean, tweed jacket and pipe sitting in a library. Well, it sort of works like this: For me, the “Professor Hat” is like the potion that Dr. Jekyll drinks to become Mr. Hyde. Only instead of becoming a brute who bludgeons children, I become a pretentious git. Whenever I start talking about “philosophy in the boudoir” or “pipes”, you know these are warning signs that I’m not myself. Whenever I mention these I tend to go to the dark side of philosophy, thinking my words are gold.

What’s even more embarrassing is that whenever I put on my “Professor Hat” I usually make an ass of myself in front of more experienced intellectual bloggers (don’t worry, none of you guys). They expose me as the Emperor who has No Clothes, and thus the cycle of sulking and lack of self worth begins. But is there a way I can destroy the Professor Hat, throwing it into the fires of Mt. Doom so it will never again trouble me with its nefarious power?

I guess I have to stick to what Philosophy really means instead of donning the Professor Hat and staying away from associated “Clive James in the Library” sort of imagery that reeks of pretention. How could I go from insightful posts to something so smug as a subversion of feeding my ego?

I guess it’s about restraint. In my years as an intellectual I have become familiar with being roasted by other intellectuals. Maybe I need thicker skin, I won’t go into hiding this time though. Not this time.

Because experience tells me that going into hiding only makes people think I’m a wuss. There are times where I slip up, and there are times when I am insightful. I aim to be more insightful than slipping up in my blogging. Maybe I just need to swallow my pride and burn that Professor’s Cap once and for all, before it gets worse. I can always be an intellectual without having a persona, it’s not something I need, and it’s dishonest to put up a facade. My readers deserve the real me, not some Tolkienesque Professor clone type who smokes his pipe like a chimney.

I want to first apologize if I have ever written anything pretentious on this blog. It’s something I’m a little self-conscious about because I am a firm believer in the idea that simplest is best. However, in those rare moods where I’m feeling verbose, the words just flow out like I’m not even speaking them. And I’m not really speaking them, some idiotic voice in the back of my head is going “Yeah, that sounds great write that, just keep going, don’t think about it, just keep writing.” But all that ends up being is fluff: nonsensical, pretentious, important-sounding-but-really-unimportant-and-pointless fluff.

All I can say after rereading my blogs is “I’m sorry, what?” Because they are so unnecessarily dense, filled with words that don’t need to be there, they have no effect. Even if someone could elicit meaning from these sentences, it took them too long to do it. Pretentious to the nth degree. It’s just throwing out words that don’t need to be there so I can sound smart, and impress upon my readers how erudite I am.

So please, if I ever write anything near as pretentious as any of that drivel before, please call me out on it. Lambaste me publicly. I want to hear it, so that I don’t turn into something far, far worse… like an idiot savant!

Never perform an oscular examination on a gratuitous solid–hoofed plant–eating quadruped

A person experiencing a sudden drop from a relatively erect to a less erect position, should entertain the possibility that their inflated self-image is unendorsed by the general consensus.

Mankind, in its self-congratulatory revelry, will finally come to realize that all forms of kudos simply blind us from the solitary incontrovertible truth: life is a hollow shell of nil.

Once, during my younger days, in an ultimately nugatory proclamation (is there any other kind?) of my desensitized attitude toward accolades and gifts, I coined the phrase “He who dies with the most comments … still dies.” A bumper-sticker company then offered me a large sum of money for the rights to this phrase. I told them to keep it and give it to someone or something that mattered, which I guess was my way of making a joke (back before I realized how asinine and fruitless such a thing was). But not like ha-ha joke. I mean ineffectual, obviously.

It tickles me greatly that vapid, hornswoggled employers place so much emphasis on scholastic aptitude and higher education, as if knowing the Pythagorean theorem could shield us from the stygian pointlessness of mortality or the lurid abyss of imminent nonexistence. Of course, I use the word “tickles” figuratively, since I feel absolutely nothing.

Skills are valueless and only serve temporarily to bolster the trembling egos of the sheeple of this wretched world. I eschew all so-called personal development, instead dying under the premise that, when I’m a biodegrading mess of worm feed hopelessly buried beneath a fathom of dark earth, being able to type 70 words a minute really won’t do me a modicum of what you so ignorantly refer to as “good.”

It pains me (again, being loose with the language here) to think that one could be so ridiculous as to maintain any sort of attachment to this-worldly tangibles, concepts, or other such contemptible ephemera.

I am a vessel specifically designed
For the calefaction of tea leaves and water combined.
I am of diminutive dimension:
A corpulent invention.
Observe the place where your hand is supposed to go.
Observe the outlet where the drink is supposed to flow.
When my temperature is high,
Ebullition will make me cry.
You must leverage
To release the beverage.

WOMEN SUCK

Top Ten Reasons Why:

1) Selfish – to the point where they don’t know the difference between love of self and plain downright greed–and drilled into believing that whatever happens is the fault of whatever man is in their life because of the feminist crud drilled into them by the cadre of asexual closet cases called “therapists” who appear on “Ricki”, “Oprah” or other such electronic drivel

2) Deluded – into thinking they “deserve” a rich, model-handsome husband who will “take them away from all of this”–whatever the “this” might be–and leading to resentment when they discover that the universe does NOT revolve around them

3) Angry – ALL the damn time about things which are so far out of their control as to be nonsensical–and constantly wanting to “discuss” this mind numbing drivel ad nauseam

4) Psychotic – multiple personalities in the same woman – as “Nomad” put it in the “Star Trek” episode: “Woman…a mass of inconsistencies…”, and also when the feminist voices in their heads start with the regrets and victim acculturation

5) Worthless – anything that does not immediately resolve itself in her favor or to her benefit is meaningless to her, especially husband and family

6) Lazy – drilled into their head that they “deserve” a maid, nanny and personal slave to take care of every detail – and that their husband/boyfriend is REQUIRED to cater to their each and every mindless whim

7) Resentful – especially of other women who have things that they do not, in material, spiritual and esoteric senses

Greedy – to them, “housekeeping” means getting the house in the divorce (thanks to Zsa Zsa for that immortal line) and sucking the guy for every last cent, even if they had nothing to do with the building of the nest egg

9) Mindless – constant, irritating, idle prattle about topics they read about in some women’s magazine and then become instant experts–particularly pop psychology and the latest crap they see on “Oprah” or “Ricki”

10) Vain – believing that they are irresistible to everything in pants and therefore are allowed to behave sluttish and without any honor.

The Catalog of Anti-Male Shaming Tactics

“Shaming tactics.” This phrase is familiar to many Men’s Rights Activists. It conjures up the histrionic behavior of female detractors who refuse to argue their points with logic. Yet women are not the only ones guilty of using shaming tactics against men. Male gynocentrists use them, too.

Shaming tactics are emotional devices meant to play on a man’s insecurities and shut down debate. They are meant to elicit sympathy for women and to demonize men who ask hard questions. Most, if not all, shaming tactics are basically ad homimem attacks.

Anyway, it might be helpful to categorize the major shaming tactics that are used against men whenever a discussion arises about feminism, men’s issues, romance, etc. The following list contains descriptions of shaming tactics, some examples of quotes employing the tactics, and even color-coded aliases for mnemonic purposes. Enjoy.

Charge of Irascibility (Code Red)

Discussion: The target is accused of having anger management issues. Whatever negative emotions he has are assumed to be unjustifiable. Examples:

“You’re bitter!”

“You need to get over your anger at women.”

“You are so negative!”

Response: Anger is a legitimate emotion in the face of injustice. It is important to remember that passive acceptance of evil is not a virtue.

Charge of Cowardice (Code Yellow)

Discussion: The target is accused of having an unjustifiable fear of interaction with women. Examples:

“You need to get over your fear.”

“Step up and take a chance like a man!”

“You’re afraid of a strong woman!”

Response: It is important to remember that there is a difference between bravery and stupidity. The only risks that reasonable people dare to take are calculated risks. One weighs the likely costs and benefits of said risks. As it is, some men are finding out that many women fail a cost-benefit analysis.

Charge of Hypersensitivity (Code Blue) – The Crybaby Charge

Discussion: The target is accused of being hysterical or exaggerating the problems of men (i.e., he is accused of playing “Chicken Little”). Examples:

“Stop whining!”

“Get over it!”

“Suck it up like a man!”

“You guys don’t have it as nearly as bad as us women!”

“You’re just afraid of losing your male privileges.”

“Your fragile male ego …”

“Wow! You guys need to get a grip!”

Response: One who uses the Code Blue shaming tactic reveals a callous indifference to the humanity of men. It may be constructive to confront such an accuser and ask if a certain problem men face needs to be addressed or not (“yes” or “no”), however small it may be seem to be. If the accuser answers in the negative, it may constructive to ask why any man should care about the accuser’s welfare since the favor will obviously not be returned. If the accuser claims to be unable to do anything about the said problem, one can ask the accuser why an attack is necessary against those who are doing something about it.

Charge of Puerility (Code Green) – The Peter Pan Charge

Discussion: The target is accused of being immature and/or irresponsible in some manner that reflects badly on his status as an adult male. Examples:

“Grow up!”

“You are so immature!”

“Do you live with your mother?”

“I’m not interested in boys. I’m interested in real men.”

“Men are shirking their God-given responsibility to marry and bear children.”

Response: It should be remembered that one’s sexual history, marital status, parental status, etc. are not reliable indicators of maturity and accountability. If they were, then we would not hear of white collar crime, divorce, teen sex, unplanned pregnancies, extramarital affairs, etc.

Charge of Endangerment (Code Orange) – The Elevated Threat Charge

Discussion: The target is accused of being a menace in some undefined manner. This charge may be coupled with some attempt to censor the target. Examples:

“You guys are scary.”

“You make me feel afraid.”

Response: It may be constructive to point out that only bigots and tyrants are afraid of having the truth expressed to them. One may also ask why some women think they can handle leadership roles if they are so threatened by a man’s legitimate freedom of expression.

Charge of Rationalization (Code Purple) – The Sour Grapes Charge

Discussion: The target is accused of explaining away his own failures and/or dissatisfaction by blaming women for his problems. Example:

“You are just bitter because you can’t get laid.”

Response: In this case, it must be asked if it really matters how one arrives at the truth. In other words, one may submit to the accuser, “What if the grapes really are sour?” At any rate, the Code Purple shaming tactic is an example of what is called “circumstantial ad hominem.”

Charge of Fanaticism (Code Brown) – The Brown Shirts Charge

Discussion: The target is accused of subscribing to an intolerant, extremist ideology or of being devoted to an ignorant viewpoint. Examples:

“You’re one of those right-wing wackos.”

“You’re an extremist”

“You sound like the KKK.”

“… more anti-feminist zaniness”

Response: One should remember that the truth is not decided by the number of people subscribing to it. Whether or not certain ideas are “out of the mainstream” is besides the point. A correct conclusion is also not necessarily reached by embracing some middle ground between two opposing viewpoints (i.e., the logical fallacy of “False Compromise”).

Charge of Invirility (Code Lavender)

Discussion: The target’s sexual orientation or masculinity is called into question. Examples:

“Are you gay?”

“I need a real man, not a sissy.”

“You’re such a wimp.”

Response: Unless one is working for religious conservatives, it is usually of little consequence if a straight man leaves his accusers guessing about his sexual orientation.

Charge of Overgeneralization (Code Gray)

Discussion: The target is accused of making generalizations or supporting unwarranted stereotypes about women. Examples:

“I’m not like that!”

“Stop generalizing!”

“That’s a sexist stereotype!”

Response: One may point out that feminists and many other women make generalizations about men. Quotations from feminists, for example, can be easily obtained to prove this point. Also, one should note that pointing to a trend is not the same as overgeneralizing. Although not all women may have a certain characteristic, a significant amount of them might.

Charge of Misogyny (Code Black)

Discussion: The target is accused of displaying some form of unwarranted malice to a particular woman or to women in general. Examples:

“You misogynist creep!”

“Why do you hate women?”

“Do you love your mother?”

“You are insensitive to the plight of women.”

“You are mean-spirited.”

“You view women as doormats.”

“You want to roll back the rights of women!!”

“You are going to make me cry.”

Response: One may ask the accuser how does a pro-male agenda become inherently anti-female (especially since feminists often claim that gains for men and women are “not a zero-sum game”). One may also ask the accuser how do they account for women who agree with the target’s viewpoints. The Code Black shaming tactic often integrates the logical fallacies of “argumentum ad misericordiam” (viz., argumentation based on pity for women) and/or “argumentum in terrorem” (viz., arousing fear about what the target wants to do to women).

Charge of Instability (Code White) – The White Padded Room Charge

Discussion: The target is accused of being emotionally or mentally unstable. Examples:

“You’re unstable.”

“You have issues.”

“You need therapy.”

“Weirdo!”

Response: In response to this attack, one may point to peer-reviewed literature and then ask the accuser if the target’s mental and/or emotional condition can explain the existence of valid research on the matter.

Charge of Selfishness (Code Silver)

Discussion: This attack is self-explanatory. It is a common charge hurled at men who do not want to be bothered with romantic pursuits. Examples:

“You are so materialistic.”

“You are so greedy.”

Response: It may be beneficial to turn the accusation back on the one pressing the charge. For instance, one may retort, “So you are saying I shouldn’t spend my money on myself, but should instead spend it on a woman like you —and you accuse me of being selfish?? Just what were you planning to do for me anyway?”

Charge of Superficiality (Code Gold) – The All-That-Glitters Charge

Discussion: The charge of superficiality is usually hurled at men with regard to their mating preferences. Examples:

“If you didn’t go after bimbos, then …”

“How can you be so shallow and turn down a single mother?”

Response: Average-looking women can be just as problematic in their behavior as beautiful, “high-maintanence” women. Regarding the shallowness of women, popular media furnishes plenty of examples where petty demands are made of men by females (viz., those notorious laundry lists of things a man should/should not do for his girlfriend or wife).

Charge of Unattractiveness (Code Tan) – The Ugly Tan Charge

Discussion: The target is accused of having no romantic potential as far as women are concerned. Examples:

“I bet you are fat and ugly.”

“You can’t get laid!”

“Creep!”

“Loser!”

“Have you thought about the problem being you?”

Response: This is another example of “circumstantial ad hominem.” The target’s romantic potential ultimately does not reflect on the merit of his arguments.

Charge of Defeatism (Code Maroon)

Discussion: This shaming tactic is akin to the Charge of Irascibility and the Charge of Cowardice in that the accuser attacks the target’s negative or guarded attitude about a situation. However, the focus is not so much on the target’s anger or fear, but on the target’s supposed attitude of resignation. Examples:

“Stop being so negative.”

“You are so cynical.”

“If you refuse to have relationships with women, then you are admitting defeat.”

“C’mon! Men are doers, not quitters.”

Response: The charge of defeatism can be diffused by explaining that one is merely being realistic about a situation. Also, one can point out that asking men to just accept their mistreatment at the hands of women and society is the real attitude that is defeatist. Many men have not lost their resolve; many have lost their patience.

Threat of Withheld Affection (Code Pink) – The Pink Whip

Discussion: The target is admonished that his viewpoints or behavior will cause women to reject him as a mate. Examples:

“No woman will marry you with that attitude.”

“Creeps like you will never get laid!”

Response: This is an example of the logical fallacy “argumentum ad baculum” (the “appeal to force”). The accuser attempts to negate the validity of a position by pointing to some undesirable circumstance that will befall anyone who takes said position. Really, the only way to deal with the “Pink Whip” is to realize that a man’s happiness and worth is not based on his romantic conquests (including marriage).

Women want a beta male who has the appearance of an alpha, who ultimately caves in to women’s whims and desires, and go to the next man if the former outlives his usefulness—providing she already has more than a toehold in the latter’s life.

Lasers

If there’s one question I get all the time it’s “Why can’t I be as smart as you?”

This is a good question, for which I have a brilliant answer.

I am extremely smart.

Some people refer to this as being “gifted.” This term is misleading. It implies that intelligence was handed to me like a present in a box that, upon shaking, feels like it might be a video game or the keys to a vehicle with a “thumping” sound system, but that, upon opening, is just a sweater with an embroidered pussycat on it that gets you beaten up. But my genius is not a gift, nor does it spring from textbooks or manuals or Wikipedia or the ramblings of my so-called teachers, professors, and Stephen Colbert. My brilliance is a tree that grows in the fertile soil of experience, and extends 74 miles into space, where it catches passing satellites, which not only hang from its beautiful branches like multimillion-dollar Christmas ornaments but also impart to my brilliant tree all of their satellite knowledge. It’s also why you get such great cell-phone reception in my presence.

In short, unless your brain is a 74-mile-tall tree that catches satellites, that’s the first reason you can’t be as smart as me.

Second, I know the answer to every question that has ever been asked and that can ever be asked. Each and every answer is written on a sort of cheat sheet that I keep folded up under my watchband (which may sound like cheating, but it’s not, because I memorized all the answers when I wrote them down, so I don’t ever actually look at the sheet—I just like knowing it’s there). You may ask (and I knew you would, because it’s on my sheet) how it could be possible to get such a wealth of information onto a piece of paper that could be folded up and put inconspicuously under my watchband. The answer is lasers. (“Lasers” is also the answer to almost all the other questions that have ever been asked or could ever be asked, so if you less intelligent folks find yourselves facing a tough question, try just answering, “Lasers.”) But these are not ordinary lasers. They’re special lasers that I invented, potty-trained, and put through school. And they write their information in a typeface that I also invented, which can only be deciphered by a person like myself, a person whose IQ is an infinity symbol.

To summarize, unless you can read the infinity-IQ typeface written by special homeschooled lasers and happen to have made a cheat sheet containing all the answers to all questions, that’s the second reason you can’t be as smart as me.

There are 847 more reasons why you can’t be as smart as me, but our time is short, and, really, is there any point in dwelling on that which you cannot change? (The answer is no. But if you said “Lasers,” you were close.) Reason No. 8 involves sticky buns, and Reason No. 612 details my nightly aluminum-foil mummification ritual.

To conclude, there are many reasons you can’t be as smart as me, but my hope is that when you see giant trees extending into space you’ll think of me and my mind, and be inspired to leap into the branches of those trees and begin to climb, reaching ever higher, until you grow too tired and hungry to continue and eventually fall and wonder why you even tried to ascend to the heights of my genius.

If I could say one final thing to each and every one of you, it would simply be this:

Lasers.

The Bowline

What are these blogs?

Why did I write them?

Will they be of interest to anyone else?

Of any use?

Do they need to be useful?

Well, I guess they’re a lot of things. Faux science, automatic writing, self-analysis, satire, and maybe even a serious attempt at finding connections where none were thought to exist.

They began a few years ago as instructions to myself. Mental maps of imaginary territory; medieval war machines. Maybe it was a sort of self-therapy that worked by allowing the mind to “say” what the voice could not.

Irrational logic—I’ve heard it called that. The application of logical scientific rigor and form to basically irrational premises. To proceed, carefully and deliberately, from nonsense, with a straight face, often arriving at a new kind of sense.

But how can nonsense ever emerge as sense? No matter how convoluted or folded, it will still always be nonsense, won’t it?

I happen to believe that a lot of scientific and rational premises are irrational to begin with—that the work of much science and academic inquiry is, deep down, merely the elaborate justification of desire, bias, whim, and glory. I sense that to some extent the rational “thinking” areas of our brains are super-rationalization engines. They provide us with means and justifications for our more animal impulses. They allow us to justify them to both ourselves and then, when that has been accomplished, to others. “The hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge [as an explanation of nature] is as faith-based as intelligent design”, says Leonard Susskind, inventor of string theory.

This might not seem a very optimistic view of intelligence, but even viewed this cynically, centuries of this cerebral activity have produced a lot of beauty, pleasure, and magnificent, well…. stuff.

I watched a nature documentary on youtube today, and I saw creatures from the ocean’s depths caught in the glow of deep-sea submersibles. Some of the creatures had never been seen before, or were not even thought possible. Things that spew time-delay fireworks, things that live where life was thought to be impossible, a fish on a kind of stalk. I concluded that they would have seemed preposterous, imaginary, and unbelievable, if the camera hadn’t filmed them.

So, extrapolating from Mother Nature, if you can draw a relationship, it can exist. The world keeps opening up, unfolding, and just when we expect it to be closed—to be a sealed sensible box—it shows us something completely surprising. In fact, the possibly unacknowledged aim of science may be to know how much it is that we don’t know—rather that what we do think we know. What we think we know we probably aren’t really sure of anyway. If we can get a sense of what we don’t know, at least we won’t be guilty of the hubris of thinking we know any of it. Science’s job is to map our ignorance.

So, here I am, hands on the keyboard, poking around in the dark … wait, is it a keyboard or a flashlight? … maybe the keyboard is a flashlight, and it roughly illuminates a tiny part of the above “knowledge.” Maybe just enough to get it all wrong, but the puzzle pieces are us; we can recognize familiar pieces of ourselves, so they are scary, fascinating, and lovable.

The rabbit comes out of its hole, goes around the stump, and crawls back into its hole.

The rabbit comes out of its hole, goes around the stump, then slows to a stop. Hmm, it thinks, which one of these here is the hole? They look awfully similar … The rabbit’s freinds look on disapprovingly over their shoulders, points. The rabbit, a little sheepishly, crawls back into its hole.

The rabbit comes out of its hole, goes around the stump, and crawls back into its hole. Aha, says the rabbit, that wasn’t so tough. But when the rabbit reaches the bottom, the stump and the hole disappear, leaving the rabbit sitting there alone like a true jackass. Apparently, that wasn’t the hole. Damn it. The rabbit checks to see if his friends saw.

The rabbit comes out of its hole and, while it’s circling the stump, a 4-foot swell crashes into the bow. The rabbit pulls itself up and leaves the hole again, but now it’s rattled. The rabbit sees the rocks, and, I assure you, the rabbit’s trying to take its head out of its ass. You know what? I’ll just hold it. Yeah. In my hands. For the rest of the trip. Whatever. The rabbit’s plenty mature.

The rabbit, hands raw from holding the jib sheet for what seemed like hours, considers this a perfectly fine knot. It’s strong, easily recognizable, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to tie. No stumps, no holes. As simple as tying your shoes. Admittedly, it’s not the hallowed bowline, God’s gift to rope fastenings, but too fucking bad. Ask the rabbit if he cares that it’s harder to untie when under a load. Go ahead, ask him. God forbid you use your knife for something other than cutting lines. The rabbit’ll be in his head if you need him.

Here’s the thing about the rabbit. He doesn’t care if you consider him seaworthy. There. It’s tied to the dock. Yeah. I guess I finally did one. The rabbit still says it’s a stupid knot. And if you don’t like it, you can talk to his friend, the bird!

What is so rare about a day in July?

A pseudo-friend (or ‘friend on the surface’) is the social equivalent of fast food: a useful creature who can be called upon to deliver a tasty illusion of friendship without the expense and bother. We use pseudo-friends to relieve boredom, furnish us with professional and romantic connections, reflect our socioeconomic aspirations in the presence of our peers, and enjoy transient companionship for sporting events, movies, bar-hopping, or trips to the video store.¹

We can tell a pseudo-friend about our jobs but not about our souls, and most of us seem to be content with that unwritten code. Most of us².

1– I hate unreliable people. Additionally, I really hate when people flake out and ever-so-casually break plans at the last minute. Do they actually believe that my time means less to me than theirs does to them? The worst, though, are the people who do it over and over. And they never answer their phones, text back, respond to emails, and when confronted in person, act and pretend like nothing happened. Or they recycle the lamest of excuses. Am I so much the picture of calm that one would believe that repeated acts of rudeness would not totally piss me off? Apparently so. Well, here’s a heads-up, unreliable people of the world… You suck and you deserve to have it done back to you but I, regretfully, do not have it in me to be that much of a self-absorbed asswipe.³

2– Not me.

3– This phenomenon is more common in females. Why is that??⁴

4– Rhetorical Question. I mean due to the vast number of comments, feedback, discussion, ignorance, and apathy of my readership, this whole damn blog has become bitterly rhetorical.⁵

5– We can tell a pseudo-friend about our jobs⁶ but not about our souls…

6– My occupation allows me to take you guys on frequent guilt trips throughout the week. What do you all do at your place of employment??⁴

The Fungus Among Us

What a fascinating place this world is. Filled with all types. Myspace is really one of the most interesting ways to people watch ever, a sea of humans all electronically connected, and looking to communicate. But mostly people that would lose a spelling bee to a fucking toilet seat.

My favorite part of Myspace though? The pictures of the hot chicks seductively pulling their panties down in their profile pics, and a nice blurb in the “about me” section about being a “spiritual person,” and under her turn offs, I’m sure she’s listed “Fake people.”

Personally, I’m with you, sister. I hate those fake fuckers, too. But then loudly proclaiming that they’re “not interested in meeting perverts.” That’s the way I would handle it too if I was a hot chick that wasn’t interested in meeting perverts. Just stick it out there right in their fucking face, and then tell ‘em you’re above it all. Two fingers shoved deep in your pussy lips and a screen quote that says, “What the fuck are you looking at!!??”

You see, it’s actually a very zen like strategy… a clever ruse to expose the perverts, and uncover the good men. It’s so very “Art of War.” They PRETEND to be sluts, so that they can identify all the perverts right away. You see, if you’re a regular girl, it takes a while before some guy you’re chatting with on the net gathers up the balls to type, “I wanna lick your asshole, baby” in an email, but if you’ve got 8 pictures on your site of you in a bikini simultaneously washing cars and giving hand jobs, then “I wanna lick your asshole, baby” might be a popular opening line. The same guy that you would have had to wait 3 months of regular dating to find out he’s a fucking deviant, you can find out right away.

And the good men? Well, the good men would want to save the slut and rescue her. Taking her away from the empty life of slutdom, and bringing her home with him for true love and marital bliss. “Remember, everything happens for a reason!” Can you just imagine the joy on a good man’s face, when as he’s trying to save a girl, she tells him, “I’m not really a slut, I’m actually a virgin, saving myself for my one true love, but I want to be sure when I decide to sleep with him I don’t get deceived, and give up my virginity to a clever confident man, so I PRETEND to be a slut to weed out the perverted men right away.” The good man would be so happy to hear this. Tears of joy would roll down his young, handsome, Robert Redford looking, Marlboro man face.

Denial is a weird fucking thing…

Just like mold on a sandwich. When you see mold on a sandwich, how do we know that mold isn’t conscious? Maybe each one of those individual mold spores thinks he’s a bad motherfucker, and that there ain’t never been a mold spore like him. He works hard every day to consume as much of the sandwich as he can, to impress the other mold spores. He thinks he’s independent, but meanwhile to us he’s just a part of what we see as one unit of mold when we open up the fridge.

Maybe that’s how we look to someone watching from afar.

Veni Viblogged Vici

Don’t expect a bunch of literary pyrotechnics, apt metaphors¹, or perfect spelling and grammar. I’m writing this one from the gut – straight from my gut-to the keyboard-to you.

In the words of the Zep: “It’s been a long time since some rock and roll”. Unfortunately for you I’m not going to write about the fascinating world of rock and roll. I was just using part of that song as a metaphor^1.5 to say I haven’t posted something in a long time. I hope I haven’t lost anyone yet².

As you will probably find out very soon³, I get easily irritated by a lot of normal, common and human things. May range from purple crayons, leather belts and paper bags to ways of breathing, you know, things of that nature. I don’t really know when, why and/or where it all started but I’ve become a real professional at it. See me as the Tiger Woods of getting irritated by random crap. Which reminds me, I should introduce you to my S.H.I.T.(Super Hate In Textform).

S.H.I.T. is a never ending list I’ve cooked up, of ambiguous trivialities. You and your loved ones will love my S.H.I.T. and even lose 3 to 4 inches of body fat⁴. I won’t lie to you, my S.H.I.T. will not always be good. You’ll never see me acting like I think my S.H.I.T. don’t stink, but hey, let me see your S.H.I.T. You might find yourself asking yourself³, is this S.H.I.T. for real?, because I’ve seen other S.H.I.T. before and wasn’t impressed. Well my good sir, need look no further. I have a lot of good S.H.I.T. for you in store. Isn’t it funny that you can say any foul word as long as you make each letter mean something remotely coherent? Going off on far away tangents, another gracefully useless quality I possess. I hope I’ve seduced you into a breathtakingly riotous second date. Keep reading for some astonishingly arbitrary but endearing S.H.I.T⁵.

It’s true. I love hate<sup.6. Hate is like a drug. It makes you high. It gives you clarity. It focuses you. It puts things in perspective. It’s like⁷ cocaine. But better.

I hate liberals; I hate the weak; I hate the strange; I hate the people in my way; I hate the woman with her crying kid; I hate Muslims; I hate haters; I hate the strong; I hate the poor; I hate the way homeless people smell; I hate growing older; I hate that stupid dress you think is so cute; I hate Rob, the guy who thinks he’s her friend; I hate the rich; I hate Jews; I hate jokes⁸, especially the kind smart asses tell that don’t make any sense; I hate environmentalists; I hate bumper stickers; I hate dinner parties; I hate anything “organic”; I hate the ching-chongs and Apu’s who are buying up all the oil, and the speculators who make money off my misery; I hate my job; I hate going to the dentist because he charges an arm and a leg just to clean my teeth; I hate child molesters and perps; I hate know-it-alls; I hate niggers, especially when they’re in my goddamn face; I hate kids because they don’t know when to shut the fuck up; I hate having to say I’m sorry, even if I am; I hate ballet; I hate taxes; I hate clerks; I hate women; I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate.

And it feels so, so good.

I don’t know how many of you agree with this, to those of you who don’t it’s OK to disagree².

You see, giving an opinion (a.k.a. opinionating, bloviating, blogging) is a necessary feature of life. And the appropriate vehicle for opinions is the rant. What exactly is a rant? According to Merriam Webster it is, “a bombastic extravagant speech”; the Cambridge dictionary describes it as, “a long, angry and confused speech”; and Microsoft’s Encarta describes it as, “loud and threatening speech: a very loud, aggressive, or bombastic speech that is usually long and repetitive” (like those definitions!). Be that as it may, all you need to know is that a rant occurs from the time I start writing until everyone within my extended network has capitulated to my higher wisdom⁹.

Take GOD for example. We love GOD! YAWEH, the One and Only, The Man Upstairs, the Unmoved Mover, He who may only be represented by the TETRAGRAMMATON, He who holds worlds in his hand, yeah, universes! His heart is as firm as a stone; yeah, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone. When he raiseth up himself, the mighty are afraid: by reason of breakings they purify themselves. The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold: the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon. He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood. The arrow cannot make him flee: slingstones are turned with him into stubble. Darts are counted as stubble: he laugheth at the shaking of a spear. Sharp stones are under him: he spreadeth sharp pointed things upon the mire. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment. He maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be hoary. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride!

Yup. He is the true apotheosis of a douchebag. And that is why we worship him¹⁰.

Anywho, I forgot where I was going with this so I’ll just stop¹¹.

1– Metaphor is the scientific word for the number 4.

1.5– I lied.

2– Actually fuck you for being so stupid.

3– Subject to continuance of readancitivity level of reader.

4– Results may vary.

5–Caesar didn’t worry much about putting his views out in the open. Of course, look where it landed him. Et tu, Bloge?

6–Why Do Fools Fall in Love? Well, it’s easier for them than for we intellectuals. They have lower standards about pretty much everything. Food, lovers, cigarettes, everything. I pity fools, I really do.

7– The definition of the word ‘like’ resembles ‘resemble’.

8– Being a comedian is like being dead. Either you are or you are not.

9–Is this blog coming on to me? Is that why it is so long and hard (to read)? Why do I always feel violated after reading a new post? I have to say, though, it is a nice package.

10– When life hands you water, high-fructose corn syrup, citric acid, lemon juice from concentrate, gum acacia, natural lemon flavor with other natural flavors, salt, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), and beta carotene (for color), make Snapple® Lemonade.

11– What’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down.

Dear Dave,

You are so bitter and full of vitriol. It’s all pretty senseless and rather unbecoming of you. And, really, a parody? Is that the best you can do? Parodies are for Mad Magazine. You’re better than that. Stop wasting time with piss-poor parodies, and get back to writing what you love (and, frankly, is the only thing you are particularly good at): hate-mongering propaganda. There isn’t enough decent mongering of any kind in the literary scene anymore. Now sit down and pound out some good monger, will you? Monger! Monger!

Insincerely,
Blog

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe…

Dear Intolerable Ennui,

There’s nothing to do. Are we just going to sit here writing increasingly lame blogs to inanimate objects and abstract concepts? We need something, anything, more productive to waste our time with. Look at all those jigsaw puzzles up there on the top shelf of the closet. They’re just sitting there, collecting dust. We’re never going to try putting one together, are we? No, no, of course we won’t. If only, Intolerable Ennui, you weren’t such good friends with Abject Apathy and Crippling Depression, perhaps we could really do something worthwhile.

Sincerely,
Dave Vanachronism

I’m always wasting time, I suppose. No, I am implying that life is a waste of time. In some sense, it is. But then, the language there is warped. English, or any natural language, runs into lots of difficulties when talking about philosophy. Life and time are easy enough to define, but “waste” is far too subjective. Life is, perhaps, a consumer of time. So in some strange sense, everyone is just wasting time, due to its transitory nature. Life, that is. Life is transitory. But that’s obvious. Philosophy is good at restating the obvious into something more complex.

Not very deep, but an interesting thought. Is life necessarily a waste because it is transitory?

Life is transitory (given premise).
Transitory objects are “a waste” (controversial premise).
–
Therefore, life is a waste.

I think that would be a fair summary of philosophical nihilism.

Dear Dave,

You have perfected the art of medium-funny; that is, stating the obvious, the boring, the banal, the unimportant, and the uninteresting with a straight face, and insisting you are serious, you are not joking, you are honestly stating as such. And therein lies the “joke.” This is a unique brand of whimsical irony: the joke that is only funny to its teller. Somehow, you’ve parlayed this non-attempt at non-humor into a singular success that rivals, well, some obscure high-brow reference that, too, is serious. You’ve really stepped in shit, you lucky, lucky dog.

With this new blog however, you’ve seemingly 180ed; you now deliver boring, pretentious horseshit, but appear to be smiling while doing so. I suppose there may be some post-modern, self-aware, circular, meta, nonironic irony to be found in that unique situation. We’re not sure; that’s your game, after all. But ignoring your blogs is ours. So please… stop posting!

Sincerely,
All your friends (and lurkers)

Applesauce

Anaximenes of Clazomenae, was a Greek Philosopher who lived in the sixth century BCE. Through observation and the use of logic, he correctly deduced that a rainbow was the work of a natural phenomenon rather than the work of a god. Thus, he was among the first to renounce the belief that reality is created from thin air by an omnipotent being, but rather, the natural outcome of immutable physical laws. The universe works by its own machinery, creating and upholding everything within it – including the gods. This is an astronomical order in no need of outward influence.

Not that I consider myself to be any manifestation of an otherworldly evolutionary intelligence, but it has become painfully obvious to me that, as the late George Carlin (RIP) was fond of pointing out, most people are really fucking stupid.

More to the point, most people are just intellectually lazy. Stupidity, after all, is a function of what capabilities your brain has or doesn’t have, and what knowledge it can and cannot comprehend. That is mostly a product of genetics and you really have little control over that, except for the fact that the more you use your brain, the better it gets at processing and decoding information. But the fact is that most people dismiss their capability to learn a great deal more than they choose, preferring instead to remain ignorant and uninformed. And that makes me all ill and angry.

What a better planet this would be to inhabit if people would simply get up off their mental asses, exercise a little cerebral calisthenics, and fucking learn something other than what the rest of the badly informed and intellectually deficient masses are telling them.

There is no shortage of idiocy or ignorant things that people will do, say, practice or believe in. Certainly, it is a subject so broad, so vast and so pervasive that I’ll never have a shortage of material to write about. And as I think about it, most of my blog postings are centered precisely on things, practices or beliefs that are obtuse…

That’s it. It’s over. I cannot string together two more words and make them sound anything like writing. I just keep getting “cliche alert!” warnings blaring in my head with a healthy dose of “this blog sucks!” every now and again.

I feel like an electrical plug with no outlet…all this creative energy, all these ideas, all the right wiring, but no power source to make me go! Frustrating as all hell!

And if you cannot comment without ad hominem attacks or canards of a vociferous nature, or if you don’t know what those words mean and are too lazy to look them up (you might also look up the word “satire”, as my postings are merely nothing more than trenchant wit to poke fun at various subjects), please keep your stupidity to yourself. Anaximenes, and I thank you.

Why So Serious?

Some days hit like a rape of the senses. You wake up, and everything around you confirms it: toothbrush upside-down in the shower, toilet paper missing, coffee almost gone, furniture rearranged to accomodate luxurious TV-watching the night before, curtains fallen down, a patina of cat litter on every horizontal surface. It’s as though your corneas have been smeared with shit or your entire domestic existence fallen down a hole while you were sleeping.

Good afternoon, everybody!

Do you ever wonder if your whole personality is molten trauma cooled in the random winds of KFC parking lots? Or can you give an incredibly boring list of where you became the person that you are, complete with “artistic” photos of yourself in gay poses all over parks and in front of old buildings?

I’ll bet anything you’re one or the other, because that’s the kind of jackass I am. I make up things, out of nowhere, and defend them to the death. If you try to make me answer A or B, Left or Right, I’ll accuse you of old skool sophistry; but when I do it, ohhh, stand back and back the fuck up, because all notions of fallacy are prepostmodern. What does that have to do with anything? Give me a minute.

I’m the kind of person everyone thinks is “serious”. You know, like how people think “Bono” is “serious”, and ladies cry when his voice cracks because he is so “serious” that when he sings out of his range it is beautiful? I’m actually bad and mean –like Bono. Every day, I’m trying not to laugh at someone else’s misfortune. I thought that thing where you’re constantly trying to suppress mean laughter at the rest of humanity would end when I left high school, but it just got worse. I didn’t get through a single class in community college without faking death-door-knocking coughing fits, unable to pay attention to what was supposedly my “vocation”, because I was always imagining my professors were about to have a literary potluck or sleepover tonight in the librarybeds that folded out when the bookshelves spun around. I would shoot knowing looks of effervescence about to spill into hysterics at likely colleauges as I traipsed out “to the bathroom”, who would stonily ignore me. In fact, to paraphrase my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Kay, no one thought it was funny but me.

Over time, I’ve perfected what is apparently a “serious” look (hey everyone the Bono comparison is over now) to disguise what is happening inside my brain, which is a big cauldron of chaos heating up over hellfire. The individuals in my head require so much pruning that if I leave them alone even for the weekend they’ll weed their way through everything, in awful and unexpectable directions. A whole circus of people, which I’m presumably saving “for later”. It’s not like I need all of them, but I don’t know how to choose one or two; so they’re all penned up and miserable. Like seventy stuffed animals in garbage bags in the attic. When I try to let one of them out, I’m paralyzed by a misplaced sense of ethics. You would think that I had them imprisoned, but that’s not how it works. I bet Nazi guards felt the same way…

Rubber Chicken

A philosophy consisting entirely of jokes is akin to an authentic text read as a joke. This alternative approach resides in the realm of reader-response theory (and possibly various forms of post-Marxism; or at least tendencies of literary criticism that intersect with said political ideals). The idea is of deconstructing the philosophical (or political, sociological, etc.) practices of another via satire. Downright banality is often used to lessen the sense of awe that would usually surround a certain authority figure.

Ancient Kynicism, at least in its Greek origins, is in principle cheeky… In kynismos a kind of argumentation was discovered that, to the present day, respectable thinking does not know how to deal with. Is it not crude and grotesque to pick one’s nose while Socrates exorcises his demon and speaks of the divine soul? Can it be called anything other than vulgar when Diogenes lets a fart fly against the Platonic theory of ideas – or is fartiness itself one of the ideas God discharged from his meditation on the genesis of the cosmos? And what is it supposed to mean when this philosophising town bum answers Plato’s subtle theory of Eros by masturbating in public?

Kynicism is a first reply to… hegemonic idealism that goes beyond theoretical repudiation. It does not speak against idealism, it lives against it. In idealism the ideas stand at the top and gleam in the light of attentiveness; matter is below, a mere reflection of the idea, a shadow, an impurity… The excluded lower element goes to the marketplace and demonstratively challenges the higher element. Feces, urine, sperm! Vegetate like a dog, but live, laugh and take care to give the impression that behind all this lies not confusion but clear reflection.

When philosophy entangles itself in conceptual problems, the answer does not lie in further observation or purely logical analysis, but in ‘finding its way about’. This is philosophical therapy. Something that begs to be taken seriously, but, in the end, means absolutely nothing; thus playing a joke on the interlocutor. Here we see clearly how philosophical therapy is achieved through comedy. When the tedious things in life (made further mundane by less than lively adjectival ascriptions) are enlivened through mixed metaphor, our imagination is provoked. A historiography of perforations seems to be a misnomer. Historiography is for more important topics like religion, or politics; and perforations are not meant to be considered at length at all, excepting their common utility. But what if we looked with new lenses? What if we removed the scabs from our eyes and saw a world that wasn’t meant to simply be used? This is a violation of philosophical grammar; or, as commonly understood, a joke.

The idea here is of a revolution from within.

All People are cats…

I’m back!

Well, I up and decided that my blog and I needed a few days apart. This happens every once in a while. We have a pretty intense relationship and sometimes things just get out of hand.

Basically what happened was my blog and I were arguing cause the blog thought things were getting pretty shitty. I was like “things have always been pretty shitty here, what’s the problem?” and next thing you know I started telling the blog that it was too needy and too possessive and has too many invisible expectations and then the blog called me an unimaginative, illiterate hack.

My blog crossed the line with that “illiterate hack” remark and knew I couldn’t just let that go. So we ended up not speaking to each other for a couple of days. You know how it goes. But, it’s all good now and we’re back on speaking terms.

I suppose it is possible to live one’s entire life without entertaining an original thought. I used to dismiss the nonthinkers of the world as second-rate creatures, but now I almost envy them. How many of our proud ideas are truly original? And why strain our brains with pointless abstractions when there’s music and ice cream to be had? You can’t hear a hypothesis; you can’t taste an aphorism.

How many original minds wither from chronic stress and hopelessness before they can make their mark? How many potential Shakespeares have been crushed by drudgery, rejection, failure or frustration before we could hear from them? The artists who prevail today tend to be the ones with a knack for schmoozing with the gatekeepers (I am the keymaster).

We humans are the only animals that require coaching on how to live. And despite all the coaching, most of us make a sorry mess of our time on this planet. A squirrel simply follows the ancient dictates of his tribe; he is genetically incapable of ruining his life. But the human animal is free to shun the customs of the herd, to light out for some enticing unexplored land on the far horizon, to thrive or come to grief through a bewildering array of choices. We ponder; we stall; we lamely hope for the best; we make the wrong decision anyway. The problem with most decisions is that all the available choices tend to be intolerable.

Our most deeply held feelings resist introspection, almost as if they exert an electrical charge that deflects our thought-probes. We think we know what we think, but we can never really know what’s down there.

I don’t think anyone ever convinces anyone of anything — people only learn from experience and then only slowly and grudgingly. Cats are not rocks; rocks are not people…

No Handlebars

So it has come to this. My entire being resolved in an inductive proof. The whole question, “what do I want?”, the subject of the examined life under late capitalism. There is only one thing I know I want. And it’s not good.

So that’s what I had to say today, but if I had obeyed my lightspeed murderer’s thumb and posted the first paragraph, I might have gotten comments such as “what is it?”, perfectly understandable and in fact almost obligatory, since sharing an obscure personal reference basically means, “I’m being mysterious, come on over and let’s smoke some cigarettes and then do it”. I’m not mysterious. I just feel like talking.

Years of regimented schooling down the drain as people die. The world has gone insane, again. And somehow the ostrich is no longer my role model. Somehow, the prospect of pushing reams of envelopes with the evidence of “work” no longer gives me the same kind of thrill. Another book to be burned. Another name erased.

Even sarcasm seems less a craft than an Emperor’s bulletproof clothes. When spiders scan text for key words and sophisticated webs of association, the very concept of evidence has drowned in the Bible Belt floods. And when there is no community, there is no meaning to be rescued, even with the aid of my seventeen boxes of notebooks. Should I brandish my class notes at the future? I’d do better to throw the box, which at least weighs something. I’d do better to brandish my fist, which at least can be cut off. My small consolation in my small existence. It was fun to speculate that ideas were something like an extension of my body; I was trained to believe that ideas were real. But in the New American Century, we can only count. Bodies, barrels of oil, prices, probability of fictional events. We can only count, and the objects we are counting are imaginary. I had no idea when my Math teacher ridiculed the concept of meaning in mathematical operations that he was right, that at my age I would be looking at an either/or world composed of the devil’s accountants and the unemployed.

As always, the binary is fake. But there is nothing outside. Only prisons, everywhere. What an apotheosis of differentiated competition! Choose your prison. The sooner you choose, the more options you’ll have left. Act now! This offer will not be repeated, this plea will not be repeated, this criminal record will haunt your fantasies of freedom even in your dreams. Is this your choice?

And then you have the collateral damages. A bad back, a bad arm. But at least for the meantime I can choose my poison. God bless American freedoms!

People are too dumb for the present. So they live in a past haunted by fear of the future. From minute to minute like a piece of porcelain, standing very still, as though what the future will do to them is infinitely gentler than what they could do to the future. As though it were the difference between hiring V.I.P Movers and renting a U-Haul without a driver’s license. The future ain’t gentle-ride, bub. Staring ahead, fixed in time, transfixed by the headlights.

You probably think I’m some kind of “faggotron” or something, but I’m telling the truth. Don’t you remember those lies you learned about how to “be prepared” for 1)bees 2)wild animals 3)criminals? Remember the first time a long orange wasp landed on you and someone said, “just hold still and it will leave you alone”? That’s bullshit. Wasps don’t have fear. Wasps aren’t “afraid” if you swat at them. They don’t get “angry”. Wasps don’t make sense. They might not notice you if you hold still. But if you’re afraid, they will. And they might just anyway. Sometimes they sting tree trunks, and die, but what consolation is that to the tree? Remember the first time someone mugged you and you stayed very calm and just went along with everything they said and ended up raped and murdered in a dumpster (with diapers and hooker needles!)? Remember how that happened? You will once it’s over. And then you’ll say, “Damn that invisible future!”

And you will say, Thank god the war is over. Hallelujah. I’m just an ordinary citizen who wants an ordinary American lifestyle. I don’t consider my ordinary American lifestyle to be bought with blood. We didn’t know what was coming. They told us it was in the name of freedom. I lost too. I lost my brother or my friend or my friend’s brother or my brother’s friend. They were the greedy dinosaurs and I’m a scavenger crab, crawling backwards, and my footprints were blown away in the sandstorm.

I want a taco.

Beautiful Losers

What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

Balderdash

Today is a good day I think to talk about pretension. Where would we be without pretension? We’d be short a few critical essays on Leonard Cohen, thats for sure! But pretension is pretty subjective. One person’s pretension can easily be another’s well-argued piece of literature. I’d like to set up some authority for pretension, but alas, that itself would be pretentious. That’s probably why nobody’s done it before. But heck, I’ve got the time… I’m unemployable!

Where my dogs at?

Cynicism is a Greek invention, like the Doric column or the gyro sandwich. The first Cynics (we capitalize the name when we’re talking about the ancient ones) were students of a now-obscure philosopher named Antisthenes, who in turn was a student of the illustrious Socrates. Like Socrates, the Cynics believed that virtue was the greatest good. But they took it a step further than the old master, who would merely challenge unsuspecting folks to good-natured debates and let their own foolishness trip them up.

The Cynics were more blunt when it came to exposing foolishness. They’d hang out in the streets like a pack of dogs (“Cynic” comes from the Greek word for dog), watch the passing crowd, and ridicule anyone who seemed pompous, pretentious, materialistic or downright wicked. Fiercely proud of their independence, they led disciplined and virtuous lives. The most famous of the ancient Cynics was Diogenes, who reportedly took up residence in a tub to demonstrate his freedom from material wants. This cranky street-philosopher would introduce himself by saying, “I am Diogenes the dog. I nuzzle the kind, bark at the greedy and bite scoundrels.” He’d use a lantern by daylight, explaining that he was searching for an honest man. Even Alexander the Great didn’t escape unscathed. When the young conqueror found Diogenes sitting in the marketplace and asked how he could help him, the old philosopher replied that “you can step out of my sunlight.”

As you might expect, the ancient Cynics’ habit of ridiculing their fellow citizens didn’t win them many friends. People generally don’t like to hear the hard truth about themselves, especially in public (or online). But the Cynics felt they were on a mission from Zeus. As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote several centuries later, “A Cynic is a spy who aims to discover what things are friendly or hostile to man; after making accurate observations, he then comes back and reports the truth.”

Cynics have been making those observations and reporting the truth ever since. The ancient Cynics have turned to dust, but their successors have carried on nobly in their spirit. Great names like Juvenal, Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire and Mark Twain have used the classic Cynics’ tools — bitter irony, biting sarcasm and mirthful ridicule — to expose the follies of their times as well as the timeless foibles of humankind. If you consider yourself a cynic, take pride in your heritage; the world needs you now more than ever.

Telling the truth can get you into hot water (or “your foot in your mouth”). As much as the world needs its cynics, it still doesn’t REALIZE that it needs them. Cynics today are habitually castigated by politicians, corporate chieftains and other productive citizens with tidy lawns; they know that we’re on to them, so they lump us with the lowest of the low. We’re generally cast as the heavies in the black hats, counterproductive miscreants who broil babies when we’re not spray-painting obscenities on public monuments. We’re portrayed as masters of chicanery and intrigue, untrusting and untrustworthy (like Wikipedia!). Since we’re neither leaders nor followers, we’re expected to get out of the way — and the tidy-lawn folks get furious when we don’t. Nobody loves a cynic, except maybe another cynic.

Even the dictionary definition of a cynic makes us look like scoundrels: A faultfinding captious critic; esp. one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest.

Aside from casting us in a negative light, Webster & Co. miss the point by half a mile. Where’s the hint of lost ideals, the rueful humor, the wounded childlike soul that lurks behind the cynic’s sarcasm?

What a sadly maligned and misunderstood tribe we are! Cynicism, after all, springs not from cruelty or viciousness, but from precisely the opposite: a fatal love of virtue. If we were mere realists, we’d have no need for cynicism; the world would never disappoint us because we’d expect so little of it. But the best cynics are still idealists under their scarred hides. We wanted the world to be a better place, and we can’t shrug off the disappointment when it lets us down. Our cynicism gives us the painful power to behold life shorn of its sustaining illusions. Thus the new definition of a cynic is born: An idealist whose rose-colored glasses have been removed, snapped in two and stomped into the ground, immediately improving his vision.

If we were activists, we’d do something constructive about our discontentment. But we’re smart enough to know that we won’t prevail, and probably a little too lazy to attempt any labor that’s predestined to fail. So we retaliate with our special brand of wounded wit. If we can’t defeat our oppressors, at least we can mock them in good fellowship. That’s about as much justice as a cynic can expect.

So if you’re a disgruntled idealist, a subversive wit, a professional misfit, a skeptical jester, a curmudgeon, a social reject, a misanthrope, or a secret sentimentalist who longs for a simpler, sweeter life, then I would greatly appreciate your virtual companionship. I promise you won’t be snubbed by snooty high school cliques or begrudged or ridiculed by clueless jealous inferiors. No smug certainties of any kind. You’re among kindred spirits.

I’m Not There

There are seven simple rules, for life in hiding…

1. Never trust a cop in a rain coat
2. Beware of enthusiasm and of love, each is temporary and quick to sway
3. When asked if you care about the worlds problems, look deep into the eyes of he who asks, he will not ask you again.
4 & 5. Never give your real name, and if told to look at yourself, never look.
6. Never do or say anything that the person standing in front of you cannot understand.
7. Never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you the rest of your life, it will never change.

SO OBSESSED THAT IM BECOMING A BORE

I’m so puzzled. How could anyone so ambitious, so educated, so passive-aggressive, so obviously destined for success have so much trouble with inconvenient situations and failed friendships? It couldn’t have anything to do with an uncontrollable urge to air their dirty laundry in public and a raging paranoia, could it?

A life can have a lack of ambition? Help me out with this one. Maybe you mean in a karmic, reincarnation kind of a way? Nope, didn’t quite reach nirvana this time around, back you go to the cash register!

Well, dye my eyes and call me pretty.

Bunker Atmosphere

Assuming (because I think we have to start with some assumptions, even if they get turned around or broken down in the course of research) nature/the world/the universe favor/s novelty over stagnation, and randomness-differentiation over entropy, how does the (novel and creative) coping “trick” of dissociation, divisive in its fragmentation of the ego and in its promotion of a plurality of ego states, fit into a paradigm of an integrated universe (transcending the illusion of separateness)? (Should I assume this integrity is the ideal?)

In other words, if ego splitting/branching is evolutionary in that it supports the survival of the subject, does it then fit harmoniously into the model of the ideally integrated universe (“as within so without, as above so below”) in which survival is the leitmotif?

Maybe we can also look at communication within the matrix itself (probably instantaneous if not simultaneous, but I digress).

So, does dualistic survival (diss.) meet harmoniously with integrated survival (greater universe) or does the dualistic eventually have to surrender to the unified?

We might examine rhythms and patterns, ebbing and flowing of oneness and divisiveness in the microcosm (i.e. the person as a biological and as a psychological entity) and in the macrocosm (i.e. society, nature, universe, etc.) and see how these impact the reconciliation of dissociation with an ideally integrated universe. We might also consider the possibility that divisiveness here coexists with unity there, or that the divisiveness will eventually have to surrender to integrity. (And then we open several cans of worms such as paradox… *sigh*)

I would also like to examine the nature of dissociation. Is it simply an ego fragmentation caused by trauma and intended to promote survival in extremis? Is it a multi-frequency, multi-dimensional state in which different parts (subtle bodies, etc.) attain separate awarenesses (and awareness of those awarenesses), perhaps achieving communication among those awarenesses (co-consciousness)? Is dissociation as simple as leaving the body? Is it all of the above in cooperation (my bias)?

Thing is you can’t take back mistakes and I can only do so much about being vain…

asphinctersez

This will not be interesting to anyone who already understands the nuances of socialization; and by socialization I mean trying to do it others. It will only be interesting if, like me, you do not know how to “chat”, not at Imagination Station here on Tha Internet or anywhere else either, but were nontheless raised to be polite and to put people at ease whenever possible —until and unless a “disagreement” could be determined, such that positing the wrong number of angels able to stand dégagé on a pinhead provided your cue to say, By George, Our Universes are Incompossible, Catch You On The Flip Side of Never.

People with my peculiar sociolinguistic disorder miss the forest for the trees, because we are trying to process the utterances of our interlocutor as if our interlocutor were actually trying to communicate through language, rather than throwing language at us in order to achieve a paralinguistic purpose such as maximizing rate of return or tagging the species.

Often enough, some random dude will say that I look like someone he knows, like, “are you sure I haven’t met you before?” or “you look just like this friend of mine”.

It used to annoy me, because I was like, I get it already, I look like everybody else, how flattering; and judging by one or more of your current friends, some prizes of whom are doing body shots and hanging out with you, no prize yourself, you’re basically starting a conversation by saying I’m at least heterozygous for ugly.

But then I had a revelation, brought on when a random bald, muscle-shirt wearing dude swore furiously at me on the street, and then tried to play it off as “normal” behavior because he “thought [I was] this friend of [his]“.

Candidly enough, I replied, “I thought you were crazy”, prompting him to “lose it” and argue that HE IS NOT CRAZY BECAUSE:

-his friend is a really good friend of his
-if I just saw him, I would understand
-would a crazy person have speakers on his bike?
-I dress just exactly like him because we have the same style
-I am the same shape as him [Am I a polygon? Am I congruent with your friend? Or just similar? When pressed, you could only offer upsetting hand gestures.]

But my point is that the correct response to this whole situation is to bite your tongue and not under any circumstances say “WHAT?”

Remember how in middle school it was really devastating to drop a well-timed “what?” in a bored, slitty-eye way, which basically meant, “whatEVAR”, with the added kick of “drop dead”. Guess what —you heard it hear first— “WHAT” NO LONGER WORKS.

I don’t know if it’s my age or the death of irony in our magical machine culture, or perhaps the fact that I’ve actually left my house, but “WHAT?” has seems to have been restored to its grammatical function, meaning that it PROLONGS THE CONVERSATION, and that is all.

Furthermore, once you’ve said it, you will never be able to stop saying it. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. All responses to such a “WHAT?” will only provoke a new “WHAT?”. It is like Frege’s Paradox, except that for every n there is some monologic bullshit function(n) such that you get n again, and again, infinitely into the future, as each n —however deadpan— sounds to your interlocutor like, “I am interested in pursuing this conversation with you. and perhaps I would like to do it with you soon.”

Think about it. Jakobsen missed this important “wtfunction” of language. One might erroneously (as I have done in the past) attribute the man’s nonsense speech-acts to the phatic function of language; but in fact I believe that the production of phonemes such that the interlocutor can only respond “what? what? what?” is actually its own ritual of nasty by which an otherwise uncompetitive dude paralyses the brain of his interlocutor with a sort of linguistic venom, thus literally “stealing time”.

Which makes me think of how Deleuze postulated a straight line as a more terrible labyrinth. I have to go back to work immediately, so let that be a mesmerizing UNCLUSION!

Blahblahblah

“Conversation,” of course, has long been the polite name for what happens every fortnight or so when the petty bourgeoises get maudlin and decide to do something about all these feelings that are so unpleasant. We handle this, like everything, as a matter of economic exchange, investing a mortal percentage of self-worth in addressing a poorly posed “question” or “issue”. “Responses”, “hypotheses”, “ideas”, “opinions” etc. are all brave sallies with the exclusive purpose of increasing one’s sense of self-worth. In theory, a conversation can be about anything; however, statistically, once an “issue” has been identified, conversations tend to take on one of the many forms of point/counterpoint.

This is because the purpose of entering a conversation is to gratify our ego boundaries by withstanding the onslaught of differing opinions unmoved, and so we are more than willing to ensure that we remain forever enslaved in our cramped and adolescent quarters with their minimal view of ourselves and the world rather than change. This is why it is imperative to state your potential disagreement with someone else as soon as you feel the slightest bit uncomfortable with anything they’re saying, before it can sink in and brainwash you.

Or better yet, it’s like when my mom used to babysit for some really bratty kids back in the day and I would try to tell them a story about Transformers and every little thing that deviated at all from their like three tenets of Transformerdom they were like, “Transformers don’t live in New York” and I’d be like ok, but in this story they do, and they’d be like “Transformers don’t go in houses” and so on, until they basically ruined any possible enjoyment they could have had of the story. And now because it is a movie they will accept that Megatron went to the North Pole, and also because they are now like 20 years old. But I bet if I called them up tomorrow and was like, “hey, what about a story where Megatron burns the map leading to the source of all Decepticons onto a pair of eyeglasses” they’d be all, “Decepticons don’t have glasses”.

Decepticons don’t have glasses, Transformers don’t live in New York or go in houses, History isn’t whatever you say it isn’t and the media directly impacts our behavior. And now what? You want a new story based on your super restrictive belief system?  How many choices do you have when living in such an insane aesthetic set of regulations yet demanding fresh textual flesh all the time?

Participating as you do in our Manichaean culture, you “believe” that every issue has exactly two sides, leading to the faith-based certainty that any assertion necessarily implies a sound, padded, comfortable and moderate “other side” from which interested readers can volley “feedback”, a polite way of calling their own feces which they triumphantly hurl in order to demonstrate their existence by shitting near to what others wrote, thereby fulfilling the double purpose of both proving their proximity and marking their territory.

Think about the worst thing you’ve ever read, terrible fucking writing, where you must physically maim yourself in an effort to survive the sucking-out of your soul by proximity to such god-awful dialogue, begging the characters to please stop telling rather than showing, biting your own hand, please, let me paraphrase it for you, it’s apparent to entire insect species what is happening, which is to perp-march readers through the holey plot, wrenching their arms behind them as painfully as necessary to keep anyone from wondering aloud what all that weather is for or what happened to Mrs. Nichols from a chapter ago, and why it’s relevant that Tony’s uncle went to Toledo.

This is what such “conversation” does to our lives.

Now, if I want to avoid embodying what I second-most dislike about blogging (which, after the idiocies of “conversation”, is the relentless negativity necessary to sustain a critical posture without any menacing possibility of being changed in the process) I should provide an example of a good conversation. Which, to review, would consist of participants willing to change and, we can add, who possess an attention span that encompasses their participation. If you’re unable to wade through the boringness of a whole post, don’t respond to it in a confrontational manner. Not because it’s “wrong”, but because you will enter a bad conversation. We’ve all done it.

The Latin verb conversare means literally “to turn oneself about, to and fro.” Conversation has the same root as conversion; and both involve transformation. In its earliest English usage, conversation means the action of living or having one’s being among persons, as in “Where is his conversation but in the empire of heaven?” Conversing means dwelling somewhere, as in “How many years art thou old and where conversest thou?”

But what’s more impressive than how much the meaning of conversation has changed is how clear the distinction between transforming oneself and interacting with others seems to us. It’s absolutely bizarre the extent to which we have removed being around other people from our sense of conversation, and conversation from transformation. And by “being around people”, I don’t mean only physical proximity, and by “transformation” I don’t mean only physical metamorphosis. I mean something more like how it is that we attempt a solitary versare without others, turning all alone on our individual axes, spending all our energy in a rigid resistance to change, to remain unaffected by what is around us.

Let’s stop spinning on our tire swings, let’s get off the enormous nauseating tilt-a-whirl in which each of us spins in our individual teacup and in company cannot speak but vom. Only such extreme centrifugal force can keep us packed into the illusion of a unified subject, a lifetime spent either throwing up or about to throw up, except for the weird few, all of whom must have attended my high school, who relish being spun and wish amusement park rides could go faster and faster and faster; if I ever become a park, I hope they won’t be there; but the rest of you will be welcome.

See? Pathetic. Just a bunch of words. Consider this an enema. The next post will be fresh and clean, and probably appear sometime in the not too distant future. Next Sunday A.D. perhaps?

After crying, one puts on dark glasses to hide one’s swollen red eyes and save dignity… The glasses suggest the presence of a critical situation whose unsuitable aspect is masked at once. Whoever puts them on wants, on the one hand, to receive sympathy for the uneasiness alluded to and, on the other hand, to arouse admiration for succeeding in not exhibiting such discomfort and for avoiding being too upset by it. In the same way, irony can be likened to a pair of “dark glasses,” “uncovering” what it apparently hides. Moreover, just as dark glasses, conceal what they display, irony is a strategy for indirect speech. It is a “meaning-full” mask, and it has the prerogative of rendering flexible the borders of the area of meaning, allowing for their negotiation in accordance with the situation.

Paradoxically… the people most likely to know the literal definition of irony are the people least likely to appreciate it in its modern form.

Rocketship Underpants

It’s just one of *those* weeks. A wallowing sort of week. I’m a world record holder in wallowing. On a wallow sort of day, one little thing and my mood twists into a pretzel. I’m betting roughly half the world can relate. There is the oft quoted cliche which states: Life is 10% what happens to you, 90% what you make of it. Very profound. In my hunt for the above quote I came across this one.. equally.. um, profound: I had a stick of Carefree gum, but it didn’t work. I felt pretty good while I was blowing that bubble, but as soon as the gum lost its flavor, I was back to pondering my mortality.

Snooze Button

Some people grow on you, others turn out to be crop failures. Some people practice what they preach, others practice preaching. Some shepards feed the flock, some shepherds fleece the flock. Not that I’m trying to say you guys are failures or liars, but no one person could be so stupid. No you dont detect a note of sarcasm… its a whole fucking symphony, and its playing my song. I have fewer real friends than an alarm clock!

You’re Welcome

 Perhaps you’re already afraid that this is going to be long, a lot of ellipses in the dialogue, sighing and nervous adjustment of waistbands in the narration. Maybe you would prefer more reader participation. Choose Your Own Adventure? A multiple-choice genre?

I’ve crafted my blog the way a caricaturist sketches a face: with an eye to the possibilities for whimsical exaggeration. It is as much an elegy for old-fashioned virtues and pleasures as it is a diatribe against decadence.

Nobody loves a cynic. His friends grow tired of his airy detachment and cutting irony. His colleagues find him peevish and aloof. Productive citizens chide him for refusing to lead, follow or get out of the way. His cat curls up in a far corner of the room, and heaves an audible sigh. Even Nature casts a harsh eye on the poor fellow: Medical studies have suggested that cynics fall prey to coronary mishaps at a rate of several times that of the general population.

Let me assure you that I am not a cynic of the hard-boiled school — one of those narrow-eyed miscreants who view life through a noxious cloud of cigarette smoke. I am actually a disgruntled idealist — a sympathetic fellow with a fondess for most of humanity. Call it a romantic’s disgust with the shabbiness and sham of a cynical age. I wanted life to be a melodious waltz, brimming with gaiety and bittersweet regret; the times have given us country music instead. I feel swindled… don’t you?

Many of my targets are, I am quick to admit, as broad as a barn and just as easy to hit. I have taken care not to single out any individuals for ridicule. This decision arises from my conviction that most people are the innocent creatures of their genes and their times. I take no pleasure in the prospect of trashing hard-built reputations, no matter how deserving they may be of the honor.

What a vast, pretentious and perfectly ridiculous parade struts across the landscape! What ripe possibilities for satire! Let me goad the obnoxious, defend the defenseless, play like a cat with whatever smacks of folly, and attack bullies from the incomparable safety of my computer screen. What could be more fun?! I give you our times on a hot-plate of wit, roasted and seasoned for your gustatorial pleasure.

Lincoln Logs

I know things, dear reader; I want to share my experiences to save you the trouble of living, and you say no dice?

You may have observed that certain behaviors affect your “withitness” in the flabby world offline, making you feel less-than if you don’t get-enough-sleep work-every-day do-a-routine have-enough-fun. But that’s like saying that bandaids support democracy. Maybe other people have more powerful “superegos” -which I put in quotes ever since I larn’d that it didn’t mean your-superhero-personal-best, but then maybe Other People’s Ids are on line for the Apocalypse.

The point is that patience is like a slutty genie, ready to go home with anyone regardless of the myth about the wishes. Which everyone should keep in mind. Genies: nonfiction. Genie slave wish-granter: fiction. I don’t know about you, but for me it’s a clue in when someone is having-fun-being-a-mischievous-slave. Thank you, Disney, for your transparency.

Idiot Wind

As a child, I believed that all educated people were wise. In particular, I placed educators and authorities on a high pedestal and I sought their wisdom and wanted to become one of them. Unfortunately, years of “higher education” has taught me that parts of the system is rife with many of the same problems that plague society as a whole: greed, self-absorbtion, addiction to power, and an overwhelming desire to be validated, praised, and rewarded. As certain people lament the ills of contemporary society, I find myself nodding along. The pervasive view that American society is a meritocracy makes me want to scream, but I fear as though my screams fall on deaf ears (or skewed eyes). To cope with my frustration, I often return to my bubble (blog).

The Internet is a funny thing, especially now that those online are not just the connected elite. It mirrors and magnifies the offline world – all of the good, bad, and ugly. I don’t need to travel to Idaho to face neo-Nazis. I don’t need to go to Colorado Springs to hear religious views that contradict my worldivew. And I don’t need to go to Capitol Hill to witness the costs of power for power’s sake. If I am willing to look, there are places on the Internet that will expose me to every view on this planet, even those that I’d prefer to pretend did not exist. Most of the privileged people that I know prefer to live like ostriches, ignoring the realities of everyday life in order to sustain their privileges. I am trying not to be that person, although I find it to be a challenge.

In the 16th century, Sir Francis Bacon famously wrote that “knowledge is power.”  Not surprisingly, institutions that profit off of knowledge trade in power. In an era of capitalism, this equation often gets tainted by questions of profitability.  Books are not published simply because they contain valued and valid information; they are published if and when the publisher can profit off of the sale of those books. Paris Hilton stands a far better chance of getting a publishing deal than most astute and thought-provoking academics. Even a higher education is becoming more inaccessible to more people at a time when a college degree is necessary to work in a cafe. $140,000 for a college education is a scary proposition, even if you want to enter the ratrace of the white collar mega-corporations where you expect to make a decent salary. Amidst this environment, it frustrates me to hear librarians speak about information dissemination while they create digital firewalls that lock people out of accessing knowledge unless they have the right academic credentials.

I am a hopeless Marxist. I want to equal the playing field; I want to help people gain access to information in the hopes that they can create knowledge that is valuable for everyone. I have lost faith in traditional organizations leading the way to mass access and am thus always on the lookout for innovative models to produce and distribute knowledge. Wikipedia brings me great joy. I see it as a fantastic example of how knowledge can be distributed outside of elite institutions. I have watched stubs of articles turn into rich homes for information about all sorts of subjects. What I like most about Wikipedia is the self-recognition that it is always a work-in- progress. The encyclopedia that I had as a kid was a hand-me-down; it stated that one day we would go to the moon. Today, curious poor youth have access to information in an unprecedented way. It may not be perfect, but it is far better than a privilege-only model of access.

Knowledge is not static, but traditional publishing models assume that it can be captured and frozen for consumption.  What does that teach children about knowledge? Captured knowledge makes sense when the only opportunity for dissemination is through distributing physical artifacts, but this is no longer the case. Now that we can get information to people faster and with greater barriers, why should we support the erection of barriers? Would Galileo have been allowed to write an encyclopedia article?  The “authorities” of his day rejected his scientific claims. History has many examples of how the vetting process has failed us.  Imagine all of the knowledge that was produced that was more successfully suppressed by authorities. In the era of the Internet, gatekeepers have less power. I don’t think that this is always a bad thing.

Like paper, the Internet is a medium. People express a lot of crap through both mediums (ahem!). Yet, should we denounce paper as inherently flawed?  The Internet – and Wikipedia – change the rules for distribution and production. It means that those with knowledge do not have to retreat to the ivory towers to share what they know. It means that individuals who know something can easily share it, even when they are not formally declared as experts. It means that those with editing skills can help the information become accessible, even if they only edit occasionally. It means that multi-lingual individuals can help get information to people who speak languages that publishers do not consider worth their time. It means that anyone with an Internet connection can get access to information traditionally locked behind the gates of institutions (and currently locked in digital vaults).

Don’t get me wrong – Wikipedia is not perfect (though I challenge anybody to find me ONE FUCKING ARTICLE that “lies”). But why do purported experts spend so much time arguing against it rather than helping make it a better resource? It is free! It is accessible! Is it really worth that much prestige to write an encyclopedia article instead of writing a Wikipedia entry? While there are certainly errors there, imagine what would happen if all of those who view themselves as experts took the time to make certain that the greatest and most broad-reaching resource was as accurate as possible.

As human beings, we have an ethical responsibility to help distribute knowledge. We have a responsibility to help not just our friends and “yes-men” (or “yes-hawks”), but the millions of people globally who will never have the opportunity to read (or lurk) one of our “pretentious” (like magniloquence is such an abominable attribute) blogs (hi, guys!). The Internet gives us the tool to do this. Why are we throwing this opportunity away? I don’t believe that all crowds are inherently wise. But I also don’t believe that all authorities are inherently wise. Especially not when they are vying for tenure.

Why are “they” telling us not to use Wikipedia rather than educating us about how Wikipedia works?  Sitting in front of us is an ideal opportunity to talk about how knowledge is produced, how information is disseminated, how ideas are shared.  Imagine if “they” taught the “history” feature so that students and people would have the ability to track how a Wikipedia entry is produced and assess for themselves what the authority of the author is. You can’t do this with an encyclopedia. Imagine if “they” taught students how to fact check claims in Wikipedia and, better yet, to add valuable sources to a Wikipedia entry so that their work becomes part of the public good.

Wikipedia is a public-good project. It is the belief that division of labor has value and that everyone has something to contribute, if only a spelling correction. It is the belief that all people have the inalienable right to knowledge, not just those who have academic chairs. It is the belief that the powerful have no right to hoard the knowledge. And it is the belief that people can and should collectively help others gain access to information and knowledge. Personally, I hold these truths to be self-evident, and I’d rather see us put in the effort to make Wikipedia an astounding resource that can be used by all people than to try to dismantle it simply because it means change.

Wikipedia may not provide a strong or prominent enough disclaimer to suit you, but the obvious question would be: what does? TV news? The New York Times? A Bob Dylan song? A college professor?! Can you name a single “authoritative” source of information that either 1) Prominently disclaims their status as authoritative or 2) provides some substantive guarantee of the accuracy of the information?

Love Us Dead

After a breakup, a girl I know wanted closure. She called and called the boy who broke up with her, unsure of their status, until one day, in a public park, he shouted “I DON’T WANT TO BE WITH YOU ANYMORE.” Pow! Closure.

But was it really closure she was seeking? To just about everyone else, the status of their relationship was clear. I’ve known a lot of people who chase down seemingly irrational strands of hope far beyond the limits of dignity. Do they really not know it’s over? I don’t think so. I think they’re looking to walk away with a moral victory, albeit a kind of pathetic one.

What could be worse than a partner who breaks up with you using care, tenderness, love, and grace? THAT’S THE PERFECT PARTNER! Don’t say goodbye to me, say hello! Keep saying hello forever! Gah!

Women recover from breakups by having other women tell them that they were too good for the bastard, anyway. No matter how educated, intelligent, or spiritually advanced a woman is, when she is in pain, she wants to hear this.

So what do you do with a dude who is kind and loving when he leaves you? Your ladies got no fodder! Well, go make it happen! If you can manipulate him into being a jerk — or doing something even moderately jerky — you will gain that precious moral superiority, and you can move on knowing that he had that secret seed of jerkiness inside, and you’re glad you found out NOW. Then you can pull that comforter around you a little tighter and sip that Sleepytime Tea in your sweats while your bestest galpals cuddle you in shifts.

Boys, the “perfect” breakup is a myth. You will always fall short because falling short is what is required. If you are not made into some form of monster, it hurts too much. And if you don’t step up and provide sympathy fodder, she’ll have to make shit up, cobble something together from old suspicions and petty gripes, and her fabrications will forever taint her moral victory! Is that what you want? If you ever loved her, you will do this. You probably don’t have to shout humiliating things at her in public, but give her SOMETHING. Break up with her via text message! Fuck her sister! Slash her tires! Your kindness is KILLING her.

I have Nothing to admit

A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and countercurrent, of back-wash with other flows – the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc. Like writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other – two flows in what relationship?

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.

We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial root, adventitious growths and rhizomes.

Revolutionaries, artists, and seers are content to be objective, merely objective: they know that desire clasps life in its powerfully productive embrace, and reproduces it in a way that is all the more intense because it has few needs. And never mind those who believe that this is very easy to say, or that it is the sort of idea to be found in books.

Assprat Pretentia

I also had my illusions. I thought life was going to be a brilliant comedy, and that you were to be one of many graceful figures in it. I found it to be a revolting and repellent tragedy, and that the sinister occasion of the great catastrophe, sinister in its concentration of aim and intensity of narrowed will-power, was yourself, stripped of that mask of joy and pleasure by which you, no less than I, had been deceived and led astray.

Dearest fans, stalkers, hangers-on and assorted persons who pilfer our undergarments for the purposes of titillating their olfactory nerves…

Whilst this blog primarily being a forum for the author to parody an horrifically pretentious (and quite often merely horrific) group of jackasses, this blog will also serve to give voice to the pretentious rants of the author’s multiple personalities, which we (the said personalities) hereby confess to be every bit as pretentious as those of the aforementioned jackasses. Though a majority of us were originally opposed to the idea of diluting the parodist effect of our blog through the inclusion of our own opinions, political rants, cigarette fetish, short fiction and other similarly duncical attempts at profundity, we were eventually persuaded by the minority that the inclusion of our indecently priggish writings would, in point of fact, be of great value to our readership — specifically, they will function to ostend the fact that the brand of pseudo-intellectual pageantry practiced by the hitherto unnamed coterie of jackasses, is a load of unconscionably boring and particularly malodorous shit, even when scribed by people who actually are possessed of intelligence.

And now… GAZING INWARD… into a dark and particularly malodorous orifice.

1. Why did you decide to start blogging?

Well, you see, I felt constrained by my ordinary real-life environment. What is a poor rump to do, when seats on planes and desks in classrooms are so criminally designed for scrawny, anorexic individuals with nothing to display? Nevermore, I said, nevermore. Blogging provides a medium in which the crispy, flaky, tender morsels of dehydrated feces that adorn my voluptuous flesh could finally taste the air of freedom. Much to the delight, I am given to understand, of legions of fans. I also like to inform people that they are wrong — especially when they aren’t. Blogging provides the perfect medium for this as I can place the whole world’s inferiority on display and pretend that everyone thanks me for it.

2. Does the fact that you are, well, an ass effect the way you blog?

Really, it’s hard to know. I’ve never blogged without being an ass. I do find it particularly perplexing that asses, such as myself, have very little external authority with which to cloak themselves. This misses the obvious point, of course, that asses should not be cloaked at all. Sadly though, my uncloaked ass is much less likely to be cited than a professor’s ass. However, at least I am more likely to be sighted .

3. You are such a wonderful and magnificent paragon of asininity. Tell us about why you are so well-educated and so infallibly correct in all your opinions.

To this I must credit my long, pendulous and cheeky education, which has spanned many hours and many places. While I have absorbed much in the way of asinine courses, I have recently come to the conclusion that in fact nobody has anything to teach me at all. Why? you ask. Well, gentle reader: a nice thing about having most of your views based on principled logic and not just contested empirical fact is that it makes it impossible for anyone, ass or otherwise, to ever change your mind.

4. You’re in favor of school voucher programs as one way to help America’s schools. What else do you support to help them?

Let’s face it. Poor people are inherently stupid. So are blacks, hispanics and, in general, people who are corpulent, adopted, or aptly nick-named “Buttkiss”. These people are obviously destined to lives of manual labour, such as hauling my righteous behind around on a litter. Therefore, I support a system of gulags in which these inferior proletarian beasts may be trained in the arts that will service them in later life — specifically, litter-bearing. Similarly, I find that as asininity is genetic, and flourishes in certain corpulent individuals with no external help, it is only morally right, from an economic perspective (for there are no other morals), to let these individuals frolic with no impediments, constraints, tights or belts. Voucher programs, while not the perfect solution of freeing all people from the pernicious state influences that threaten to educate them, at the very least make it possible for my tax dollars to support little Jihad al-Mohammed in his studies at the Madrassah for World Domination.

5. What is your opinion on the appropriate legal position of children? How much control should parents be able to exert over their children’s lives?

I am a libertarian. Ergo, there should be no laws or legal system at all. The law is only useful as a bucket into which I may void the excrement of my genius. Consequently, if there should be no laws, then there should be no legal position for anyone, children included. I could, and usually would, add a lengthy and utterly meaningless monograph upon the subject, but am a little too tired at the moment (how I get the energy to post so many pages of meaningless literary dung each week is truly beyond me).

6. Let us suppose that you are a coprophiliac, that I have masturbation fantasies about Goethe, that Mark David Chapman really shot John Lennon with a water pistol in Lennon’s successful attempt to fake his own death, whilst McCartney prefers vanilla ice cream. No, you didn’t read that wrong. Let us suppose, hypothetically of course, that you like to eat shit and all that other stuff about the Beatles and my fascination with riding crops and classic German poets. Does not the mind bridle at such an assertion? Therefore, without going into humanity’s shared evolutionary dictate of survival and the objective logical system this implies, I declare the majority to be intrinsically logical and, consequently, myself to be intrinsically right.

Yes, of course I like to eat shit, but this is not point. The point is that though Erlkonig and Heidenroslein are okay, Goethe was full of shit — I can therefore see why one might want to eat him, but he is undeserving of your masturbation fantasies. Furthermore, you really creep me out with your predilection for equestrian implements and Paul does NOT like vanilla. Therefore, one need not mention John Lennon’s supposed assassination (which would only have occurred if I had seen it, and even then I wouldn’t have seen it) in order to point out the fact that there is no intrinsic logic in the intuition of the majority. Though one might argue that there is logic exhibited in a consensus of intuition, if not in the intuition itself, I will have no part of it. I intended to declare myself right and now I shall do so: there is no logic, there are no facts or ethics or morals, I am obviously right and I don’t give a damn if I’ve just contradicted myself. In fact (wait a minute, there are no facts) — in allegation, I find this whole intrusion of intellect into my realm of unbridled pretension to be quite unnerving and I accordingly ban any further discussion of the topic and leave you with a lengthy and wholly unrelated quote from Voltaire’s “Zadig” which, with the exception of the quoted passage, I have yet to read:

Her wounds were slight, and she was soon well again. Zadig’s hurt was more dangerous. An arrow had hit him near the eye and made a deep wound. Semire asked nothing of the gods save that her lover should get well. Night and day her eyes were bathed in tears. She lived for the moment when Zadig should be able to delight in her tender looks once more. But an abscess formed on the wounded eye, and made the worst to be feared. The great doctor Hermes was sent for from Memphis, and he came to Babylon with a numerous retinue. He visited the sick man and said he would lose his eye. He even predicted the day and hour when this disastrous accident would happen. “If it had been the right eye,” he said, “I should have cured it, but wounds in the left eye are incurable.”

Breakfast of Champions

In a room full of eggs, it is hard to be a frying pan. Once they crack they know their doom, they will be cooked until transmuted into the next stage of existence. This is what it is like to be a psychotic daydreamer with absurd yet revolutionary philosophies among the automatons and troglodytes. The eggs fear their inevitable change. They want to remain stagnant, hidden and cold in the confines of the fridge of ignorance. It is my duty to break through the shell, until the process is complete. This is not always pleasant, it is often frustrating and sometimes even painful.

Happy New Year yolks folks!

Bella

There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places had their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I’ve loved them all

But of all these friends and lovers
there is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I’ll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

Psnarkology

Sarcasm is a very delicate and precise art form, which must be worked at for many long years before one can finally master its subtle intricacies. Indeed, very few have ever achieved true mastery of this international language. It is found that not many people actually can use sarcasm effectively, mostly those who believe they can who make themselves look like a jackass when they try. But a large majority of females suffer from Asperger’s Syndrome* and therefore have great difficulty recognising sarcasm in a textual format.

Sarcasm usually requires a quick wit, and the ability to extract the minutest points of weakness in a conversation. So it is quite unlikely that it is the lowest form of humor as some would like to call it. Perhaps not being able to enjoy sarcasm is directly related to not having the ability to come up with sarcastic comments, which in turn creates a feeling of inadequacy, which in turn can spawn a Napoleon complex, that can cause someone to logicise that sarcasm is the humor of the stupid.

What is a NARCISSIST?

It is a person who murders other people one insult at a time. Who enjoys their God given superiority.

It is a stage mother who pushes her child not to enjoy or celebrate their successes, but to triumph, win and ridicule the dumb ones.

They never feel loved, or love. A narcissist sees only the prey, the strike and the kill.

They see life in black and white. Their toys are rascist, elitism, misogyny, classism, they are on Top.

And the more starved, disordered or deprived others are the more comfortable the Narcissist is.

They do charity to remind themselves how disadvanged and needy the regular common people are.

They become teachers, advisors and therapists not to help teach or guide, but so their students and clients will look up to them.

They masquerade as human beings but they have sold their souls for applause and become inhuman.

Not aware that others are beings they may become presidents who commit genocide on whole populations who are ignorant, powerless, defenseless.

Like any good narcissist who sees how they can profit from standing on anothers heart of life. Snuff. Extinguish. Then laugh at them.

The thrill of their secret contrived ascendancy is that other people don’t exist for them, only as audience or victims.

How do you know when you meet one? They seem bigger than life, so charming, capable, wise you feel suddenly smaller, your stories about yourself seem boring in comparison, your achievements and happinesses shrink.

They may even tell you — you talk too much and you might never feel confident enough to talk freely again.

They have an aura, a presence, a confidence. You meet them and say WOW! Others meet them and say I’ve never met anyone so (fill in your favorite compliment).

You are sure that you are blessed to share the same blood with these lucky successful grand personalities. Maybe some of their panache, charisma, glory will rub off on you.

But scratch the surface. Dare to criticise them and watch the claws, the fangs, the incisors unsheathe, that clever subtle smirk that masquerades as a smile, and wait for the payback. They will strike unobtrusively, say, when you have finally gotten a raise and they say you deserve more. They rain on your parade.

Raising the bar for you, to unreachable heights. They may even remind you that anyone can buy a diploma.

The narcissist will tell you its good to be able to laugh at oneself, but they never do. They laugh at other people.

They call them, poor souls, poor bastards, losers, or if it is you, they just glance at you with pity.

The narcissist is a world unto themselves, insulated beyond reach. Their Heart is in a prison they chose, when young, when someone hurt them, (we all get hurt) but instead of them forgiving or forgetting or understanding that this is just the human dilemma and accepting that sometimes you just have to lose at the game of life, lose face or stature or lose the moment of sweetness they longed for…

They swear to themselves, I WILL NEVER LET THIS HAPPEN AGAIN! They put their heart in a safe. A defense system unparalleled by modern weaponry. No one ever penetrates their shell, ever again.

They might have a loving spouse who stays at home. Takes care of the kids. But their spouse is just a utensil. Someone to use up, like any other type of fuel. And discard if they get too sick, or are dying, or too old or fat.

The narcissist will take everything they can from you and applaud themselves for how well they did, how lucky they are.

They won’t even give you the credit for a lifetime of loyalty, or for your enjoying their successes. You are just another inferior person to strut in front of.

The narcissist does not believe in love, in sharing, hates to give gifts, hates when you are happy. It reminds them they are not the only ones who exist.

The narcissist goes through life looking in their mirror. They are snow white, and you are their dwarf.

Memes?

Am I really going to talk about “memes”? Can I spare the quotation marks, brackets, italics, and boldface screaming required to actually “do it”? Couldn’t it be proposed that each person is allotted a certain number of punctuation marks, characters, words, and then, like a bird reaching its maximum number of heartbeats, “passes on”? What if I die writing this post? But then again, will I really care, in the “afterspace”?

Instead of the obligatory “what is a ‘meme’” paragraph and (“memetic”) disclaimers of the topic, please read the following technical-style numbered list, which I “memetically” employ in lieu of a Confession, Forward or Foreword, but sempre avanti, aibik forvitz, and onward marching in the Name of Science:

1. Insofar as I understand evolutionary psychology (which is not very far), I disdain, disclaim and hate on it.
2. I consider Memetics a pseudoscience, which as a nonscientist is a pretty cool (read: adaptive) trick to pull.
3. If Memetics has anything useful to say about reality (which I doubt) then my disdain will function as a viral “memetic” diss or “countermeme”.
4. If Memetics does not have anything useful to say about reality (which I propose) then my disdain will function as a mild vaccine/antidote/Greek chorus to the wastrel “memetic” lifestyle.
5. As perfectly sound existing greek roots “morph” or “mut8″ or “memolve” into their Y2K “improvements”, the probability of some seriously ill science goin’ on approaches 1.

In other words, I win; and to paraphrase Julius Caesar, it’s no fun pounding a nonexistent enemy as most likely he is very weak.

On the other hand, I refuse to engage the “meme’s-eye view” of the world* “dialectically” by making farsical, crab-walk aaliyah to the third-grade of philosophy**; and, as such a vacuous definition of “meme”*** makes for a metapausal Memetics (that can only leave me reeling as I fail to refute that which is plainly self-contradictory) I will not attempt a rebuttal, but rather pull out a cheap frankfurter cocktail illusion.

This Is Not a Wiener
“Meme-ing” a pseudoscientific flow by assuming that Memetics is “true” (barf), I will conduct a totally skewed “empirical” study that will leave party guests dripping bemusedly in hot german mustard as they attempt to eat themselves.

This technique, which I have trademarked as “showing metacause”, is a litigation-oriented demonstration of why Memetics deserves to pay me, all because in its sloppy positivism it attributes multiple meanings to the same word and then attempts to police it. Ipso facto, sciencedastards.

Exhibit Un: “memes”
I’m not immune to the lure of multiple-choice tests, particularly when the results come in HTML. I like the narcotic seamless present of the quiz as much as the next douche. I like to type in my username and have a computer tell me Who I Am; and virtually anything that will put me in a category according to some totalizing system in under five minutes is ok by me.

But “memes”, I have an unhappy tendency to foil you. I foiled that stupid ENFPISTSEIZURE test in high school ( by scoring equally INTP and INFP… ) and today, “memes”, you bring me this cozy ( deja boo… )

Summary: We have learned nothing about “memes” except that they seem to involve some kind of scantronTM comfort rituals under late capitalism: cut-’n-paste and passive learning through the exercise of (newspeak) “multiple-choice”, by which one, singular sensation is picked from each falsely-total set of options which will ipsemet perform a 70s spectacular of cartesian splitz on ice as the quizzèd is, therefore, in an immanent ’splosion of formatting, “sexpositive”, “free to be” or “lovin’ it” in response to life vs. art, words vs. things, reason vs. emotion, your-way-right-away vs. ba-da-buh-buh-buh).

As I have argued many, many times with myself, “Free Speech” is not a “position” to “assume” in a debate. Insofar as “Free Speech” exists ab initio, it is not the case. Therefore, any advocacy of it, or defense of it, must deal with the reality that “it” is not “there”, and therefore cannot be “alluded to” like a rare butterfly specimen or “fixed up” like a monkey in spats and a monocle. Similarly, “Solidarity” has little meaning as a rhetorical stance, since its significance is its practice, and any theorization of solidarity will fall away into a memetic black hole at the rate it abstrues rules from diminishing marginal reality multiplied by the force of suckiness of “the other side”.

But the Science of Memetics enables me to make even more outrageous claims based on “the evidence”.

What Is To Be Done
The only thing we can do in such a (calvinist) memedeterminist world is ridicule those who engage in “debate”. And that is, really, the crux of neoconservatism, and the human memenome in its memotypal form. According to a memetic view, there is no sense in elaborating coherent arguments while sitting on a cloud with Heidegger, Zeus and The Heritage Foundation since one can yell “nazis” and be off for scones and a manticure, considering that actually being a Nazi (i.e. the homo in the ad hominem) makes one invulnerable to “reasoned” argument, since as soon as one’s opponent yells “nazi”, one wins the argument; whereas if one yells “nazi”, one wins anyway, because one is removed from the discussion (which takes on an ahistorical memetic meaning at the expense of any approximation of historical, “real” meaning anyway). Far better to observe from on high through 19th century binoculars and shout “good show!” while hurling lightning bolts.

Were You Aware…
*From the meme’s-eye view, every human is a machine for making more memes – a storage facility, an opportunity for replication and a resource to compete for. We are neither the slaves of our genes nor rational free agents who create art, science and technology for our own happiness. Instead we are part of a vast evolutionary process in which memes are the replicators and we are the meme machines.

**Certainly it feels as though there is a self inside who owns this body and controls it – a conscious self who experiences the world and has creativity and free will. Do you feel this way too? If so you face a problem. Either you must accept the existence of a mysterious soul, spirit, or separate mind – with all the philosophical and scientific problems that poses – or you must reject it.

***Another problem is thinking that everything is a meme and therefore the whole idea is vacuous. This is easily avoided by relying on the simplest definition of a meme – ‘that which is imitated’ . Innate abilities and emotions are not memes, nor are those learned by classical or operant conditioning which almost all animals have. So if you learned something for yourself, by yourself, then it is not a meme. If you copied it from someone else then it is. Clearly not everything is a meme

Managed Friendships

Welcome to Managed Friendship, a whole new way of thinking about friends and relationships. The Managed Friendship Plan (MFP) combines all the advantages of a traditional friendship network with important cost-saving features.

How Does It Work?

Under the Plan, you choose your friends from a network of pre-screened accredited Friendship Providers (FPs). All your friendship needs are met by members of your Managed Friendship Staff.

What’s Wrong with my Current Friends?

If you’re like most people, you are receiving friendship services from a network of providers haphazardly patched together from your old neighborhoods, jobs, and schools. The result is often costly duplication, inefficiency, and conflict. Many of your current friends may not meet national standards, responding to your needs with inappropriate, outmoded, or even experimental acts of friendship. Under Managed Friendship, your friendship needs are coordinated by your designated Best Friend, who will ensure the quality and goodness of fit of all your friendly relationships.

How Do I Know That the Plan’s Panel of Friends Is Not Made Up of a Bunch of Losers Who Can’t Make Friends on Their Own?

Many of today’s most dedicated and highly trained Friendship Providers are as concerned as we are about delivering Quality Friendship in a cost-effective manner. They have joined our network because they want to focus on acting like a friend rather than doing the paperwork and paying the high bad-friendship premiums that have caused the cost of traditional friendship to skyrocket. Our Friendship Providers have met our rigorous standards of companionship and loyalty.

What If I Need a Special Friend, Say, for Poker or Fishing?

Special Friends are responsible for most of the unnecessary and expensive activities that burden already costly relationships. Under the Managed Friendship Plan, your Best Friend is qualified to pre-approve your referral to a Special Friend within the Managed Friendship Network should your needs fall outside of the scope of his/her friendship.

Suppose I Want to See Friends Outside the Managed Friendship Network?

You may make friends outside of the Managed Friendship Network only in the event of a Friendship Emergency.

What is a Friendship Emergency?

The Managed Friendship Plan covers your friendship needs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, even if you need a friend out of town, after regular business hours, or when your Best Friend is with someone else. You might be on a business trip, for instance, and suddenly find that you feel lonely. In such cases, you may make a New Friend, and all approved friendly activities will be covered under the Plan, provided you notify the Managed Friendship Office (or 24-hour Friendship Hotline) within two business days.

What Friendly Activities Are Covered Under the Plan?

Friendly Activities that are typically covered include:

* Agreeing with you
* Appearing sympathetic
* Chewing the fat
* Dropping by
* Feeling your pain
* Gossiping
* Hanging out
* Holding your hand (up to 5 minutes per activity)*
* Joshing
* Kidding around
* Listening to you whine
* Partying
* Passing the time
* Patting your back
* Ribbing
* Sharing a meal
* Shooting the breeze
* Slinging the bull
* Teasing
* Blog comments and/or kudos

*up to 15 minutes under the Premium Gold Friendship Plan

What Friendly Activities Are Not Covered Under the Plan?

Activities that would not be pre-approved include (but are not limited to):

* Bar hopping
* Bending over backwards
* Drinking to excess
* Giving a hoot
* Going the extra mile
* Lending money
* Real empathy
* Sexual favors
* Truly caring
* Using illicit drugs

How Can I Find Out More About the Managed Friendship Plan?

A simple call is all it takes. If you need a friend, just call our toll-free number. Or visit our web site. Sign up for the Managed Friendship Plan and rest easier that all of your appropriate friendship needs will be met.

Who Decides What’s Appropriate for Me?

We do. Isn’t that what friends are for?

Frankness and Empathy

I’m going to cut down my Friends list,
There are too many of you to read,
You can beg to be spared in my Comments,
If you’re desperate enough to plead.

There was a time when I added you,
(Or more likely added you BACK),
In those days I noticed your good points,
Now I’m noticing things that you lack.

I’m happy imparting MY wisdom,
For that is what wise people do,
But though you’re all interested in ME,
I’m bored witless by some of YOU.

Perhaps we have nothing in common,
Or you only Commented a bit,
Or perhaps you’re too intellectual,
Or perhaps your myspace is shit.

Some of you are using filters,
To spare the people you’d bar,
I’d rather cut out the “dead wood”,
That way they’ll know who they are.

If you think I’m going to drop you,
You mustn’t get too forlorn,
You could change my mind by flattery,
Or by sending me amateur porn.

And if I eventually dump you,
You mustn’t feel hurt at all,
It just means that if I was KING,
You’d be first up against the Wall

Friendship is often destroyed by opposition of interest, not only by the ponderous and visible interest which the desire of wealth and greatness forms and maintains, but by a thousand secret and slight competitions, scarcely known to the mind upon which they operate. There is scarcely any man without some favorite trifle which he values above greater attainments, some desire of petty praise which he cannot patiently suffer to be frustrated. This minute ambition is sometimes crossed before it is known, and sometimes defeated by wanton petulance; but such attacks are seldom made without the loss of friendship; for whoever has once found the vulnerable part will always be feared, and the resentment will burn on in secret, of which shame hinders the discovery.

It is reasonable to believe, that thought, like every thing else, has its causes and effects; that it must proceed from something known, done, or suffered; and must produce some action or event. Yet how great is the number of those in whose minds no source of thought has ever been opened, in whose life no consequence of thought is ever discovered; who have learned nothing upon which they can reflect; who have neither seen nor felt any thing which could leave its traces on the memory; who neither foresee nor desire any change in their condition, and have therefore neither fear, hope, nor design, and yet are supposed to be thinking beings.

new year

Last night I had a really euphoric experience. I usually have high, defined, rigid standards of what beauty is. I haven’t been posting for awhile or sounding like myself because, well, I was beginning to get depressed… hopeless… because there are so many ugly things around me, and I only like attractive things.

Well, last night I couldn’t sleep again. I looked outside the window and I saw a b i r d. Not any special kind of b i r d. Not any rare kind of b i r d. Nothing like that at all. Just a plain, insignificant, darkly colored b i r d, flapping its wings in the moonlight.

Slowly, it settled down to its perch, it’s hiding spot, a comfort area on a jagged-looking tree. It quietly rested at its perch. Then it glided smoothly into the air, perfectly penetrating the pores of the wind. What freedom it has. If it doesn’t like something, it can flee, fly, and abandon the entire world, as it knows it. And go somewhere else.

How I crave to experience the feeling of joyous rapture like the b i r d. The feeling of power. The feeling of change. The feeling of being literally above everyone else instead of only metaphorically. The feeling of being completely braindead but not knowing it. My pupils widened, taking in darkness and excitement, as the b i r d neared to my window.

Suddenly a ray of bright white light appeared on the window, and it seemed like Nature was greeting me, or a magical fairy had appeared at my window, no wait, it was b i r d shit, but it was a beautiful and euphoric experience nonetheless. At that moment, I underwent an epiphany. In which I realized that even unimportant creatures with flaws are still creatures, and maybe they even have more freedom. They have the right to take dumps wherever they damn well please.

This, to me, seemed metaphorical to many stages of my life and it was a night that I will never forget. At that moment, all disdain that I felt for fat, ugly, poor, and unpopular people was gone. I wanted to be o n e w i t h t h e m. I wanted to be u n i f i e d. I did. It was beautiful.

Happy Birthday

God: Do you want free will?
Man: Do I have a choice?

God: You can either have no knowledge of me, or you can have the ability to guess at what my nature might be.
Man: Could I be right?
God: One of you might be. Of course, you’d have no way of knowing who.
Man: Eh, it’s better than nothing.

God: Do you want desire? It will allow outside forces to effect free will.
Man: Will I still have access to rational thought?
God: Yes, but you won’t often use it.
Man: I don’t care. I want it I want it.

God: Do you want to eat meat? It tastes, like, awesome.
Man: What’s the catch?
God: I have to let the other animals kill a few of you every once in a while.
Man: I dunno…
God: Don’t worry, you’ll get back at them by raising food livestock in miserable conditions.
Man: Deal.

God: When do you want your mating season to take place?
Man: All the time.
God: What? Why? It’ll lead to overpopulation and a constant obsession with sex.
Man: You got something more interesting to spend my days thinking about?
God: Fine.
Man: Hey wait, what if some of me are unattractive and can’t find mates? Then we’ll be thinking about sex constantly with no release.
God: Here, take some opposable thumbs. My gift to you.

Man: Is it true you’re going to create the world in seven days?
God: Since a day, or even time of any sort, has no meaning to me until I create the universe, any answer can be correct.
Man: What I mean is, are you just gonna create things as is, or set off a big bang and let the universe progress?
God: Both. I’m going to create the universe with a big bang and let it progress for a while. Then I’ll destroy it. Then I’ll create it at a point in time billions of years in the future, but with everything the same as if I had let it progress from the big bang. I’ll do this as often as my whimsy dictates.
Man: You mean you’ll even create people with memories of a past which never happened?
God: Hey, if you remember it, and everything gives evidence for it, who’s to say it didn’t?
Man: You did. You just did!
God: Here, give me your memory for a sec.

Man: Why is it sinful to take your name in vain?
God: Cause only I’m allowed to do that. Cause I’m God. I’m so hip I can’t see over my pelvis. So. Hot. Right. Now. That’s me. God.
Man: You don’t have hips.
God: Sure I do. They cover infinity. So you can’t distinguish between what is God-hip and what isn’t.
Man: That doesn’t make any sense.
God: Doesn’t have to. I’m God, bitch.

Man: Why don’t you ever answer my prayers?
God: Someone else in the world asked or will ask the opposite thing. So I’m doing you both a favor and staying out of the whole mess.

Man: Why did you smite him with lightning from the heavens?
God: Stop blaming this shit on me. If you’re not gonna keep track of collections of charge within the atmosphere, I’m not gonna do it for you.

Man: Why are there so many planets if we’re the only life?
God: You think I got this right the first try? When you have eternity to fuck around, you fill up a universe pretty fast.

Man: Where is heaven?
God: You know the universe?
Man: Yeah?
God: It’s everywhere else.

Man: If you don’t interfere with human affairs, what do you do with all your time?
God: Your Mama…heh heh heh…seriously though, I told that joke to this dude in Nazareth this one time and he so totally believed me.

Man: What’s your favorite color?
God: Smlurn.
Man: Oooh, can I see?
God: It has such a high frequency a single photon would vaporize the universe.
Man: Aw, you’re no fun.

Man: What’s your favorite food?
God: Kittens.
Man: Wow…
God: What, you think I’d give you opposable thumbs for free?

Man: What was the first language?
God: By a complete coincidence, Klingon.

Man: How come the Jews get to be the Chosen People?
God: Trust me, there was a reason I didn’t tell them what they were chosen for.

Man: What’s the meaning of life?
God: To live. Just live.

Since these are dark days, it’s time to stop all this polite tiptoeing around religion and harden up accordingly. Our elected leaders constantly bleating their respect for religion is not political correctness but a public declaration that intellect, tolerance, democracy, reason and enlightenment are of less value than dogma and delusion. Now’s the moment for a clear, definite, distinct line to be drawn between state and religion, one that defends the individual’s right to follow whatever ideology he or she wishes within the law, but also firmly declares and vigorously defends our collective ideals of gender equality, respect for differing sexual orientations and reinforces the message that there is no room whatsoever for the supernatural and the irrational.

No bishops, mullahs, Presbyterian ministers, rabbis, or Scientologists should be gifted special hearings at Downing Street, but should confine themselves to wielding their power and freedom as the rest of us do, namely as ordinary voters. And the state-funded faith schools that shame us all with their manipulating and abusing the innocence of trusting children by teaching them superstition alongside facts, to ensure they cannot separate the two, must cease. We have all been mugged, but the shock must take us back to reason and as far away from religion as we can get.

ONNANIFUJIYU

There’s a kind of music that reminds me of you. Like the first foot on the moon, oh, and it glows with ache. And if it hits me right it’s almost too much to take. And it’s got right angle razor thin lines, that turn and swerve like perfect signs, as we dress to the nines in an attempt to leave it all behind, in a search of the moment between the seconds where everything is just fine; That silver thread imbedded deep within our spines.

And I used to be kind of weird about this. A fear of dependence on a guilty gilt-edged hedged transcendence that makes us liars and tense. The fear of looking down and seeing that nothing really suspends us. But it was never just another Saturday night, not without you in attendance. So throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don’t care. It’s on a whim; it’s on a dare… to shrug away what we can’t bear. And we’re going back and forth and it’s a deep blue see-through membrane that protects us. It connects us, a pulsing cellophane party-train skein that helps us and envelopes and keeps us locked inside forever and ever along for the ride.

And we’re moving through a phosphorescent gel. A semi-solid self-lit ocean and it’s a funny notion, isn’t it? Yeah, but I’m kinda digging it. And it’s rigged and isn’t nearly so big, and it speaks only of its own perpetual near miss, like the uncertain memory of a stranger’s mistaken kiss. And faces slide by in glowing shadows like snowbound ghosts that go up and down in epileptic shivers and negative radioactive slivers in a landscape of endless dull glitter, and a taste in my mouth so sweet, yet so bitter.

And we exhaust ourselves trying to get there. Somebody scream… all right we’ll try to fill the echo-less night, so fasten up and hold tight. We can’t give up without a fight. And we’re going back and forth so in the end, whatever, we die, we dissolve, equations unbalanced, riddles unsolved. And we were never connected or involved… except for the intersections and crazy mathematics with no time and no space and no schedule and no place, and we pass right through it without a trace.

And sometimes that music drifts through my ear on a summer night when anything is possible. And I close my eyes and I nod my head and I count to a hundred and ten because you’ll always be my hero, even if I never see you again.

You know what irks me?

Waiters who ask, “Would you like to hear our specials?” and then proceed to list about 62 DIFFERENT SPECIALS WITHOUT STOPPING TO SEE IF WE CARE ANYMORE. How many times have you been at a table when this horrific monologue started, and you and your friends are just looking at each other embarrassedly? “Please stop,” I whimper to myself. “Please stop.” If I were a waiter and I saw 4 of my customers looking down at the table, inspecting the nearest fleck of microscopic dust, and slowly reaching for a screwdriver with which to kill themselves–aka NOBODY WAS LISTENING TO ME–I would probably stop, leave, and send free drinks for everyone to atone for my mortal error. Quick tip: If it looks like someone is going through the pain of giving birth while listening to you, you can safely assume TO STOP TALKING RIGHT NOW.

Hap

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”

Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased, too, that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? –
Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan …
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain

Tell the ghost of Emma Clark, I grasp the irony… of haunting a library at night when it’s too dark to read. Coca-cola everywhere but not a drop to drink. I slept in the kitchen sink but could not pay the water bill. How I saved my life. How I saved my life… By surrendering it to Him, to him, to her. Tell the ghost of William Floyd the road to hell is paved, with the souls that he has “saved” by taking their music away. How I saved my life. How I saved my life… By surrendering it to Him, to him, to her. She shook a black tambourine, in my seasick dreams. A heart like a lighthouse took these dark hours away from me. She shook a black tambourine, in my shipwrecked dreams. A heart like an anchor that sank her down to me… at the bottom of the sea. How I saved my life… I’ll be tied to the mast of a pirate ship when God’s children rejoice. Because when I was given the choice…I chose to hear the bad news first.

I ran from the haunted mansion. Left behind my inventions. A talent for my own destruction is all I’ve ever owned. And in the dark a fog descends, the velvet edges split and then, the bright lights have found me again…alone with a microphone (so I sang.) These are the happiest days of my life, I know. Black anoraks. Synthesized strings. Two tarnished tin wedding rings. Nostalgia for meaningful things is all I’ve ever known. These are the happiest days of my life, I know. My death scene played to no applause, two angels came to my dire cause. Their voices like melodicas, they spoke to me and said… “Your darkness is brighter than all the lights in the disco tonight.” “Your darkness is brighter, you are inevitable!” Then why is she making me wait so long?

Milk spills and mothers run away. Black shoes shine, flannel sheets are warm. She knows the price of Cheerios. He says, “It’s just you and me now kid.” He hopes the new job will make things better. She knows it won’t matter. Alone at school she sits and dreams of John and Bobby Kennedy. But tonight she’ll wear his working class jacket over her prom dress and dance as the pop sings, “It’s a crazy world, and you’re a messed up kid,” and that’s why you’re my favorite, and I believe in you. Rich kids hate the skinheads, and the skinheads hate the rich kids. She gets thrown in with the deal. She knows just how it feels when God hates you and mothers run away. She says, “I’m gonna kill someone.” Alone at school she sits and dreams of Johnny Marr and Morrissey. But tonight she’ll wear his working class jacket over her prom dress and dance as the pop sings, “It’s a crazy world, and you’re a messed up kid,” and that’s why you’re my favorite, and I believe in you.

Par for the Course

Skip the cloak and dagger bit. Don’t you know we’re sick of it? As much as I would like to stay, the message light just blinks away. And while I’m here you won’t push play. You leave me no option to indulge in this. Exercise in cowardice. Ignorance without the bliss.

Because I know where this boat will go. Pulled down by the undertow. It’s lucky I know how to row. So propel, propel, propel your craft, placidly down the liquid solution. Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically… existence is but an illusion?

The Beached Sea God

Pull the pin out, sheep creep in wolf garb. Fronted by the Hail Mary parry lunge mixer. Kill the populace for stability, jeopardy’s a stickler. Its bob and weave amalgam played the falcon to your fixture. I branch out, arms flailing backwards wailin upon a tidy sound circuit. Slightly foul with a bed of nails and drumlust plus disgusted service. Workin in shifts opposite the asbestos brain furnace. I be the now observatory eye ear antenna feeler. Spittin like a dragon with a similar demeanor.

Stood innocent bystand. Witness the diehard fan. It’s shock treatment offered by the weekend. This still be a getaway, let’s display the sequence, it goes: One for the heartless thievery turning my guardian angel harpless. And the rest to sweep the mess under the carpet. I drag a yellow taxi meter behind every measure. And charge cats for labeling me shepherd.
“That’ll be Six Fifty plus tip darlin… I take cash, credit, check, money-order, gold and cigarette cartons!”

Huh, got caught up in the universe tryin to zoom in on stardom. Forgot the passion plus the hatred, both were based in Carbon. And I don’t comment if you formulate a weak Zen. All I ever really wanted was a getaway. I’m gonna take a chance by letting a brook slide for what I got in my hands. Bring out your dead, we can put em in a pile, and burn ‘em with the novels for the kids then to admire. Kill the ones that speak from a different life. Brewin other killer noise makin the sentiment… okay, welcome to the kamikaze bottle rocket cockpit.

Live by the icy cold hand of bad intention youth blender. Oh yeah I’ll let God warm the bench for now but, I’ll ascend to spin you all dizzy (and for the record I’m bringin my t.v. with me!). Let the commoners speak publicly, then disperse eye jammies for cats that swear by third pupil, but can’t see past the loophole. Motherfucker, my word is born like Siamese triplets. Just cursed as fuck with no such luck, my future plans include not much. Playing poker with a joker and some Uno cards. Dealt nothing and bluffing hard.

I tack hacks to the backboard. Honesty’s a latchcord. Fury’s far from obsolete. Serenity’s a crack whore. Raw caricature of mayhem standard branded by the labor. With a thousand reasons to end this for every one of your saviors. Saw the brightest burst ironically wide from the vacant stage. Gave it a pound for burning where bunk ratio’s engaged. Keep me posted as to when you grasp something mature to sit and sulk about mister, and I’ll consider pickin up your record. Uh-oh, misplaced red hunter’s cap… I can’t believe you guys are still reading this crap!

This is not a test, it’s difficulty. Picture closely, the ignorant mostly. Blind, deaf, dumb, your mind left numb. Lost soul who failed to hear the roll of the drum. In the bottom of your bomb shelter, still felt the heavy blast that blew off the masks of twelve welders. The math of an elder, praise the Lord – thank you Genius Operation: Project English. Commander-n-chief of flight style, check the aircraft. Glide like the frisbee, Digi look Disney. To check fault in oneself is pure loveliness. You break the mirrors that remind you of your ugliness.

He had the heat in his hand, but he didn’t shoot. Therefore; your mechanism of material better be sickly or let your lead spread incredibly quickly. I move bravely, travellin on a horse on the battlefield, surrounded by the loss of those who plotted with the brains of animals. My high molecular structure be untangible. The name ring a bell, killable two syllable. Comin through, the outcome is critical. To be blunt, the beef was cooked up like coke goods.

The immortality of my fame is the measure of other’s torture. Burnt offer, from a flamin author. The falconer who flies enough birds for the chase. Strictly excel in what is excellence with grace. The significance was not the vulgar applause of interest but the feelin that exists, completion of a sentence. With age and experience, my reason ripens. I strike on you Vikings, slash like a hyphen. If you enter the house of fortune by the gate of pleasure, you will leave by sorrow, the flow measures, everything fails with the unfortunate.

Track records ranks us, with the exceptional. Extreme complex physics, high technical. The truth is usually seen and rarely heard. What’s more dangerous than hatred, is the word. You wild cards, Jack of all trades. Those who parade their positions, show their Spades. A large flock, they figure to be taught. It ain’t hard to see why I’m so vigorously saught.

SNAFU

The animals laugh from the dark of the wilderness. A baby cried hard in an apartment complex, as I pass in a car buried under the influence. The city is driving me out of my mind. I have seen a child is caught in the sad trap of gravity. She falls from the lowest branch of the apple tree and lands in the grass and weeps for her dignity. Next time she will not aim so high. Yeah, next time, neither will I.

I know that there are worse things than being alone. I have learned to retreat at the first sign of danger. I mean, why wait around, if it’s just to surrender? Ambition, I have found, can only lead to failure. I do not read the reviews. No, I am not singing for you. I stood dropping a coin into the pit of a well. And I would throw my whole billfold if I thought it would help. With all these wishes I make, I should buy something real.

So now I try to keep up, I have been exchanging my currency, while a million objects pass through my periphery. So now I am rubbing my eyes because they are starting to bother me. I have been staring too long at this screen. But where was it when I first heard the sound of humility? It came to my ears in the goddamn loveliest melody. How grateful I was then to be part of the mystery, to love and be loved. Let’s just hope that is enough.

I’m sick, lonely, no laurel tree, just green envy. Will my number come up eventually? Like Love is some kind of lottery, where you can scratch and see what is underneath. It’s “Sorry”, just one cherry, “Play Again.” Get lucky.

But then, my knees give under me. My head feels weak, and suddenly, it is clear to see, that it is not them but me, who has lost my self-identity. As I hide behind these books I read, while scribbling someone else’s poetry, like art could save a wretch like me, with some ideal ideology that no one can hope to achieve. And I am never real; it is just a sketch of me. And everything I have is trite and cheap and a waste of paint, of tape, of time.

So I hold my tongue, forget the song, tie my shoe and start walking off. And try to just keep moving on, with my broken heart and my absent God. And I hang like a star, fucking glow in the dark, for all those starving eyes to see, like all the ones we’ve wished upon.

BS

Just because a rose died on the vine, doesn’t mean it lied to you when it was in bloom.

Bravery and stupidity go hand in hand. I guess that makes me the bravest man. I was quick to learn, but slow to understand. Well, what can you do?

I think I’ll go home and mull this over, before I cram it down my throat. At long last it’s crashed, this colossal mass has broken up into bits in my moat. Lift the mattress off the floor. Walk the cramps off. Go meander in the cold. Hail to your dark skin, hiding the fact you’re dead again. Underneath the power lines seeking shade. Far above our heads are the icy heights that contain all reason.

It’s a luscious mix of words and tricks, that let us bet when you know we should fold. On rocks I dreamt of where we’d stepped… and all the whole mess of roads we’re now on. Hold your glass up, hold it in. Never betray the way you’ve always known it is. One day I’ll be wondering how I got so old, just wondering how I never got cold, wearing nothing in the snow. This is way beyond my remote concern of being condescending.

Broken boys look good sitting on their shelves. Silent waves responds expose to fear. Library cards, rented faces, lying on the naked train. Hard parades with nothing skin. Things that breathe way too thin. My theories are borrowed from somewhere else. And I never had too many to talk about. But you were real quick, you were quick to point out… well, that was borrowed too.

Oh these squawking birds won’t quit. Building nothing, laying bricks.

The Fancy Pants Manifesto

Although she’s none the wiser. Although we’ve barely met. I can recognize her, from the treatment that I get. So it’s my duty to advise her, If she breaks the rules I’ve said I’ll quit. Though I’ll admit that hasn’t happened yet. And as sure as she is sitting here, she’s sure that she’s awake. And as soon as we’re committing, we’re admitting our mistake. So of course it’s only fitting that the course we’re going to take, is drawn and whereupon, I’m slamming on the brakes.

The power of suggestion. The element of chance. And the subject now in question, is the same old song and dance. And the time that we invest in, setting traps out in advance. So we could spend the weekend staring in a trance….

I hate to complain, you know, but then again I can’t pretend nothing’s wrong. Looking at my present situation, the act can’t last for long. Viewed from outside these pursuits I might try, seem possessed of a certain allure. Now they’re no longer a source of mystery; my faith in them’s more unsure.

The choice is quite clear, to move on or stay here. Decision is harder to take. Reject what I have for something unstable, could easily be a mistake. So I walk around the place with a smile on my face, pretending the best that I can. Hoping to lose the inclination to desire, what I can’t understand.

Five days in a watery cave. Another song for the day that I take to the grave. I gotta be the first to see the specter. Everybody wants to be friends with the nectar protector. Seventeen skulls in a hole in the woods. Already know of the low down, but not of the goods. We can’t see but lo and behold her, it’s funny how we think with our heads when the shoulder is colder.

It’s never too late to take the chance of a lifetime, under the weight of life, and chance, and death. And it’s never too far out. We don’t know how the sun became a star. They say it’s always been that way, but I’ll be damned if that’s the case. We’d love to have you as our guest this afternoon. We’ll get the kettle ready, hope you show up soon. We can talk about life, we can talk about death. We can talk about film, we can talk about chess. We can talk about the faceless evil shadow creatures underneath our clothes. We can talk about the government conspiracies and circumvent the challenges that represent our foes.

All day I’m doing fine, cuz there are things to pass the time. Smoke a cig and drink some tea, watch a program on TV. I just don’t care where you are now, cuz I’m sorted out, and how I’ve got it all set up you see. But when I close my eyes it happens to me. Oh yeah well it stopped sometime in May, while you were still away. Was I in bed or on a bus, doing something pathetically ridiculous?

I never noticed it at first. But when you came back it got worse. It’s the idea of you, you see. When I close my eyes it happens to me. Oh you’re a nightmare and you’ve got it all wrong. You’re a nightmare to me and I just can’t see, why you should keep on happening to me.

It’s never my fault. Take what I say with a big fat grain of salt, and take my fears away. We never will break out, and we’ll leave not one thing in our wake. They say it’s always been that way. And it’s a pretty shade of gray. It makes the woodwork eat away. Glass breaks and cow’s milk curdles. It glows in the dark and it mutates turtles. Somebody told me something interesting. They told me the world is always tempesting round and around again. I’ve had enough of that pseudo-Zen.

Somebody else was watching from afar, screwing it up like a broken VCR. She thought that I was very insincere, because I rolled my eyes a bit too much. Am I really that out of touch? Why should I care about this? I’m not concerned with the things I miss. I don’t see the point in not believing in things you can taste like fear and cinnamon. Sadly this hasn’t gotten me anything but dread and gluttony.

You walk around in circles, I walk around in squares. Another round of musical chairs. And maybe no one really cares about the way we walk. The record stores are out of stock, and all we want is bloody rock and roll. And clearly this is not the way to go. This is the truth about it. You’ll learn to never doubt it. The whole affair is shrouded in living mystery. So what goes on in your tree, when all you know is your evil shadow has a cup of tea?

I saw you standing at the stop in your crochet halter top and your sky-blue training bra. I know you’re gonna go too far. You’re driving all the boys insane down by the sports hall in the rain. Chewing-gum, a navy dress, a purple shirt and all the rest. I heard you let him touch too much on the back seat of the bus. Did you stay over at his place? And did you do it? Was he ace?

The world is bigger every day and you’ve always got something to say. And you’ve always got somewhere to go. It’s getting faster don’t you know? And there’s stacks to do, and there’s stacks to see, and there’s stacks to touch and there’s stacks to be. So many ways for you to spend your time. Such a lot that I know that you’ve got places to go and faces to kiss and boys to confuse. Are the boys good to miss?

There’s nothing to do so you just stay in bed, oh poor thing, why live in the world when you can live in your head? Mmm when you can go out late from Monday till Saturday turns into Sunday. And now you’re back here at Monday so we can do it all over again.

And so you finally left school, so now what are you going to do? Now you’re so grown up, yeah you’re oh oh oh oh oh so mature oh. Going out late from Monday, chuck up in the street on Sunday. You don’t want to live till Monday and have to do it all again.

Oh I know that it’s stupid but I just can’t seem to spend a night at home. Cuz my friends left town and I’m here all alone. Oh yeah they say the past must die for the future to be born, in that case die little me – Oh. Stomach in, chest out, on your marks, get set, go.

Now, now that you’re free, what are you going to be? And who are you going to see? And where, where will you go and how will you know you didn’t get it all wrong. Is this the light of a new day dawning? A future bright that you can walk in? No it’s just another Monday morning. Do it all over again oh baby.

And you go and I want a refund, I want a light. I want a reason to make it thru the night, alright. I want a reason for all this night after night after night after night.

The word’s on the street: you’ve found someone new. If he looks nothing like me, I’m so happy for you. I heard an old girlfriend has turned to the church. She’s trying to replace me, but it’ll never work. Cuz every touch reminds you of just how sweet it could have been. And every time he kisses you it leaves behind the bitter taste of saccharine.

A bad cover version of love is not the real thing. Bikini-clad girl on the front who invited you in. Such great disappointment when you got him home. The original was so good; the one you no longer own. It’s not easy to forget me, it’s so hard to disconnect. When it’s electronically reprocessed to give a more life-like effect.

Aah, sing your song about all the sad imitations that got it so wrong. It’s like a later “Tom & Jerry” when the two of them could talk. Like the Stones since the Eighties, like the last days of Southfork. Like “Planet of the Apes” on TV, the second side of “‘Til the Band Comes in”. Like an own-brand box of cornflakes: he’s going to let you down my friend.

There’s a hole in your heart and one between your legs. You’ve never had to wonder which one he’s going to fill in spite of what he said. You’ll never get away. And the time to play is over. Time to dispose of the lies. Time to show what’s really on my mind. Yes I’d like to turn you over, to see what’s on your other side. To see if the problem’s just all in my mind??

Is this my chance, for goodness sake, to make the point I’ve tried to make, for all my lifetime, give or take a year? And now it comes as no surprise: The world gets lost, the world gets wise. So dot your T’s, and cross your I’s, my dear. And it’s a golden opportunity to take a stand and claim immunity. And wait until the day arrives we will. We don’t pretend we’re fighting crime. We see the world in lemon lime. The only casualty’s the time we kill. But still, a lot of things are problematical. There is an urge to wax fanatical, but we will not fall prey to radicalism. Well never mind, cuz here’s another thing. You won’t believe what we’re discovering. And you can see it through the hovering prism.

Cock-juggling Thundercunt

These girls always end up ‘hurt’. And the only way they could be hurt is if I meant something, but if I meant something then why did they let it fail? Why did they throw it away? Im always the one going back and apologizing, always the one asking questions. I’m tired of wanting. Someone should fucking want me. And not just some words, not just telling me, I want them to act on it.

So sick and tired of sticking my neck out there only to risk some cunt cutting my head off with a rejection. If a girl really wants something to happen between me and her, then they should have the fucking balls to do something.

I guess im just sick and tired of women. They all seem to be the same, and its like I hate to do it, but im giving up. Fuck em. You win, ladies, you’ve beaten me down to where I don’t think its worth the effort to get to know your name. You went from human, to idiot, to sex toy, to complete apathy. Enjoy the cold shoulder.

It’s not like I havent given women a chance. I’ve tried. God knows I’ve tried. And you always come to the table with 1 thing. “Your Needs.” Honestly, Im tired of your needs, im sick and tired of coming as a alpha-male-hunter-breeder-provider. I’m not here FOR YOU. Im here for me. Selfish, yeah, just a little. But I think I have some coming to me. Y’know? If i mean so much to you that you can get “hurt” show some fucking desire. Want me.

But all you fucking want is your cunt filled. Me? A Finger? A Dildo? Yeah, we’re all fucking the same thing. You all say it; “I don’t want this to be just about sex.” And 2 months down the line, thats all we have in common.

I’ve been fucking A Corpse…

Metapause

• Do you worry that today could be “the day the irony died”?
• Do you experience anxiety, elevated blood-pressure or crying jags watching Reality Shows, The President or TV Commercials?
• Have you recently attempted to make a witticism about current events and been thwarted, mid-remark, by the fact that reality is already parody?
• In trying to explain your blathering, have you resorted to terms such as “popomo” or “post-everything”?
• Have you responded to sub-par manipulations of irony with furious subpar ironic remarks intended as parody of irony itself, such as “Oh is it 1994?” or “Holden Caulfield, well I never!”, only to have your response interpreted as “ironic”?
• Do you wonder if anything will ever be funny again?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you may be suffering from Metapause.

Metapause affects over a billion people per second.
Unlike mal du siècle, ennui or The Enlightenment, Metapause is not an autoimmune response to the philosophical inconsistency of modern life. It is a linguistic disorder not unlike autism. Confronted with a reality which seems to be nonsense, the metapausal individual will feel out of control, inarticulate, powerless to insult that which seems literally to insult itself and thereby stripped of the primary coping mechanism of our generation.

A woman has a close male friend. This means that he is probably interested in her, which is why he hangs around so much. She sees him strictly as a friend. This always starts out with, you’re a great guy, but I don’t like you in that way. This is roughly the equivalent for the guy of going to a job interview and the company saying, You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we’re not going to hire you. We will, however, use your resume as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But, we’re going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn’t work out, we’ll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.

Hello World

The blog¹ is an important aspect of the much-lauded “Care in the Community” treatment for the mentally-handicapped. Mental patients are invited to express their fears, suspicions, experiences and cravings by means of one of these occasionally-updated internet logs. The use of blogs as a general source of information and entertainment by a surprising number of Internet-users is therefore discouraged.

The concept of “blogging” is said to have originated in the Amazonian rainforest, where European explorers observed the native hunter-gatherers communicating by means of high-pitched whining and long-drawn-out musical glossolalia. Although no actual information was ever conveyed by this meaningless prancing, the locals appeared to enjoy the sight and sound of each other’s attempts and dancing along with them.

Due to their fragile mental state, bloggers can readily be identified online by their sub-normal writing ability, constant and pervasive paranoia, fondness for wildly implausible philosophical theories², and severely under-developed sense of irony and/or humor³.

1– A certified smug bastard should be able to spout crap until the proverbial cows come home⁷.

2– Philosophy⁴ is a psychological disorder that causes people to endlessly ponder the in(s)ane, the improvable, and the pointless rather than go out and get a job. It is classified under obsessive/compulsive disorders in the American Assoc. Catalog of Psychic Dissociative Disorders, DSM 5 (Volume IIIV pg. 1546, section 172, lines 45-21). The purpose of studying philosophy is to disprove your religion, your scientific methodology, the laws of your entire civilization, your ethics, and the existence of that chair you’re sitting on (although not convincingly enough as to make you feel you have to stand up). Bonus points are awarded for disproving that you disproved it.

Philosophy has avoided adopting either a purpose or a method, and therefore it is immune to most criticism, since you can never point out that it failed to reach its goal or work as advertised. If you are foolish enough to try to criticize philosophy anyway, your statements will simply become absorbed into the morass as yet another branch of philosophy.

Unlocking the potentially godlike power contained within the complex maze known as human soul is the greatest challenge mankind is faced with. The human’s spirit is a Pandora’s Box, waiting to be opened. However, reflecting the moral of the story of Pandora, the contents of the box may be better off kept locked away from humans. I believe that the vast potential of human thought will decide for itself when it should be tapped into, meaning that only when humans are ready to have such power will they realize their full potential. If our latent abilities are indeed as powerful as the great science fiction authors would have us believe, then picture the devastation that only one power-starved person could cause by abusing the powers of a god. This super-human would destroy needlessly, as mankind does now, only on a universal scale. It is clearly unwise that anyone short of a god should wield that kind of power, because no human could avoid being corrupted by an unlimited energy source.

Humans already have more power than any other known entity, and we are using it to destroy each other and our home with purposeless wars, genocide, and our lack of concern for nature. If a human had that kind of power, he would use it for personal gain and evil. In order to achieve that kind of godlike power, I think humanity first must purify itself to the point of absolute perfection, because if a man becomes perfect, he is no longer a man. He is a god, and only a god should have that kind of power.

Every living creature contains a perpetually vast well of inaccessible energy. But in order for the seed of godliness to take root, one must plant it in the soil of perfection, because only then will it grow into what it could be. Perhaps the god that created this universe was once a creature, or perhaps an entire race of creatures, or even an entire plane of being known as a universe that, as a whole, achieved perfection, and, in one single moment of absolute wonder, this creature or species or universe became one with itself and became a god, left with the infinite blank canvas called space, on which the new god must create something tainted, must paint a picture in white and black, and with the celestial and limitless hands of the deities, the god must either guide the warped and twisted painting to a white, perfect canvas akin to the one the god itself sprung from, or watch the universe destroy itself until the canvas is completely black, at which point the god must start over, discarding the destroyed universe, blackened by the very fools who want more than anything to become pure. But with such a fierce will to grow, the paradox of the harsh, misguided fertilizer of human passion can turn on the plant and destroy it completely. Humanity is headed towards a black, mangled canvas, and one can only hope that the god of our universe will help us to recover from the damage we have caused to our planet.

3– You know why an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters could never write a great novel? Lack of competition! Give an infinite number of monkeys a finite number of typewriters – then we’ll get somewhere.

4– Bullshit is not made of metal or paper or plastic, like most currencies. It is a verbalized monetary system: value is based on the linguistic prowess of the user. Thus it is not distributed based on wealth; any person can have as much BS as they want, as long as they are capable of producing it. Those who can or will not produce must rely on more pedestrian forms of currency⁵ to get by.

5– Honesty⁶

6– Alright. I’m not going to lie to you: I thought, for a second, just a tantalizing, titillating second, about not being honest in this blog. But I can’t do it. I wanted to write about the topic of ‘Honesty’ and fill it with lies, lies, dreadful lies, to fulfill my own sick urges. But I can’t lie to you, with your big, beautiful, trusting, strangely inhuman eyes, with your naive mind so full of innocence and glee. Here you come, onto mein blog, thinking, (always thinking!) that this was a source of valid information, a Kampf of fact. “Hey, maybe I’ll check out his new honest blog” you thought to yourself, you clever fool you. But unbeknownst to you, a conspiracy was afoot. Forces conspire against you, even now, to spread ‘misinformation’ and ‘lies.’ I know this. I once trafficked in this dark art. It’s only through a court order and the distant twanging of my nearly-strangled conscience that I reveal this truth to you. I hope there’s something I can do to make this up to you.

Something easy, hopefully, that won’t require much work on my part. And if there is, we can both be reasonably assured that I’ll never complete it. That’s what Honesty is like sometimes.

Take this knowledge and use it. Sleep with it. Brush your teeth with it. Adopt it. This information could save you someday⁴.

7–Adding the word “proverbial” to almost any sentence makes it sound vastly⁸ more authoritative.

8–The same proverbially applies for the word “vastly”.

A hard life is not a blank check to be an ass…

I know that I’m not as bad off as someone who’s homeless and ill, that’s true (believe me, I’ve beat myself up enough times for being depressed when I don’t have anything to worry about). But when I look at someone in a situation similar to mine, with a comparable intellect and ability, I see someone who is able to achieve the same things I do with a lot less effort. I see someone who doesn’t have to worry that they might have an anxiety attack during class, who doesn’t have trouble getting work done because they’re miserable for no reason, who doesn’t have to expend every ounce of their willpower to leave their room. (I mean, we all have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, but that’s a bit different.) It’s hard, sometimes, not to get bitter about that. It’s hard to see people doing twice as much as you do because they don’t have this extra stupid thing to worry about. Life is always going to be easier for them, and sometimes I can’t help resenting that.

When I look at how little I’ve accomplished in my life, it sometimes helps me to remember that I had to work pretty damn hard to get where I am without, y’know, killing myself, and that my relative lack of achievement doesn’t reflect negatively on my abilities or intelligence — rather, it reflects positively on my ability to deal with a serious problem.

Salutation

if you can’t be a good example, you have an obligation to be a horrible warning.