Thoughts On Christmas (And The Holiday Season In General)

WE NEED A HOLIDAY FROM THE HOLIDAY
There's a reason basically every culture and civilization put a big holiday right around the winter solstice. It's because that time of year sucks ass. It is really cold, and it gets dark so soon, and outside everything is death and bone-chilling despair. That's why suicides historically skyrocket this same time of year, because it's an awful, awful time. So they created the Holiday. Call it Christmas, Yule, Hanukah, Kwaanza, Saturnalia, or any of the other names it has gone by in different cultures, the Holiday itself is pretty standard. Today, what was intended to be a joyful celebration to help make bearable the depressing winter has been transformed, become a monster that makes this awful and hateful time of year even worse. It is not only a major Consumer Stress Event, but it also leads to Unavoidable Social Obligations. Everyone is so stressed out about having a good time during this "most wonderful time of the year" that they neglect to have the good time. We need a holiday from the holiday.

CHRISTMAS IS A HOLIDAY FOR WOMEN AND SMALL CHILDREN
Actually, come to think of it, ALL holidays are holidays for women and small children...

CHRISTMAS IS A MODERN AMERICAN POTLATCH
Stop me if you've heard this one. The people are under intense social pressure to BUY, to purchase gifts for one another. Then the holiday comes, and when it passes they all rush back to the stores to return the gifts they just received. What is this immense waste of time and retail man-hours but an ineffective version of potlatch, conspicuous consumption on the tribal scale?

"THE ONE DAY A YEAR I'M SUPPOSED TO NOT BE A DOUCHE"
In older, more religious societies, the paradigm was six days with the Devil and one with God. In other words, for six days you would be concerned with this world and tarnish your soul to grasp onto it, but come Sunday you would be back in the house of the Lord. In modern secular America it is 364 days with the Devil, one with Santa Claus. Christmas is the time when you're not supposed to be a douche, but people spend most of the month or so leading up to it being selfish and lunatic douchebags. Defeats the purpose? Not for me to say.

LYING TO YOUR KIDS ABOUT SANTA CLAUS IS STILL LYING TO YOUR KIDS.
Just a thought.

RUDOLPH THE RED NOSED REINDEER WAS AN UNCLE TOM
What's the meaning of this story? Kid born with freakish ability. Ostracized for it. Oh, wait, his freakish ability saved the day! THEN how the reindeer loved him... If I was Rudolph, I would have told the reindeer to fuck off. I'm the same reindeer you made fun of yesterday, I want nothing to do with any of you assholes.

WE NEED SOME NEW CHRISTMAS SONGS
Did you ever notice that Christmas songs describe the Christmas experience of the 1940s or the Christmas experience of the 1800s? When was the last time you ate chestnuts roasting on an open fire or rode in a one-horse open sleigh? Christmas songs are totally irrelevant to the modern Christmas experience. They should do a song called "I'm Waiting On Line For Christmas" or "A Prescription For Yuletide Cheer."

SANTA HATS AREN'T FESTIVE
They just make you look like a fucking idiot. Consider this a public service announcement.

THEY SHOULD SELL EGG NOG YEAR ROUND
I mean, they don't just sell turkey around Thanksgiving, or liquor around St. Patrick's Day. Why do they only sell egg nog around the Holiday? It's really delicious!

CHRISTMAS LIGHTS ARE TACKY
To be fair, I guess in the right hands they could be a tasteful, even aesthetically interesting medium. Just not the way you're doing them. Especially you lames with the flashing lights. This has been another public service announcement.

PEOPLE WHO SAY KEEP CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS ARE DUMB
First off, Jesus wasn't even born in December. He was probably born in March. The reason the festival of the dying-and-returned god was placed in December had a lot more to do with the pre-existing holidays already set for December. Saturnalia ran from the 17th to the 23rd. The Germanic pagan winter festival Yule took place on December 25th. There was the Holiday long before there was Christmas. Christmas itself wasn't celebrated as such until centuries after the death of Christ, when it finally supplanted the pre-existing holidays and assimilated them into itself. (Listen to Christmas carols talk about "yule-logs" and "yule-tide" and see what I mean.) In fairness, I do admit that if you take Christ out of Christmas it's just "mas." That sounds retarded. Maybe we should keep Christ in Christmas after all.

A Passage I Just Wrote For Something That I Deleted

...his attendance was like a game of Battleship, sometimes a straight run here or there but mostly scattershot and random.

Render Unto Caesar

So I got forwarded this chain email, by a close family relative who really should know better, and while I usually delete these unread I clicked this one out of curiosity and was rewarded with a genuine head-scratcher, the body of which I have duplicated below (minus most of the poor formatting but with all the poor grammar kept verbatim):

---

Fw: Re: Fwd: It has begun...Refuse new coins

REFUSE NEW COINS

This simple action will make a strong statement.

Please help do this.. Refuse to accept these when they are handed to you.

I received one from the Post Office as change and I asked for a dollar bill instead..

The lady just smiled and said 'way to go' , so she had read this e -mail.

Please help out...our world is in enough trouble without this too!!!!!

U.S.Government to Release New Dollar Coins


You guessed it
'IN GOD WE TRUST' IS GONE!!!
If ever there was a reason to boycott something, THIS IS IT!!!!

DO NOT ACCEPT THE NEW DOLLAR COINS AS CHANGE

Together we can force them out of circulation..

Please send to all on your mailing list!!!

---

Okay... so. Wait, I'm still laughing about how ridiculous this is. Hang on.

(nervous, incredulous laughter)

Okay, I think I'm -- wait, be right back.

(more laughter, cough cough cough hack spit, deep breath)

Okay, I'm ready to continue. But where to begin? By picking apart the patently preposterous propositions? Like "our world is in enough trouble without this too!!!!"? As if WORDS ON A COIN really matter EVEN AT ALL in a real world sense. Or the part where "The lady just smiled and said 'way to go' , so she had read this e -mail." But, how could she have already read this email when the incident involving her was just mentioned in it? Time travel? Precognition? Or maybe the person that wrote this email is lying scum. Take your pick, back to the subject at hand.

Now, maybe you really think God should be on our coins, the way it's been since the beginning of... well, since 1864, when Salmon P. Chase (yes, his real name) got the ball rolling on stamping In God We Trust on coins. Maybe you're really religious, and you just forgot the part where Jesus said "You cannot serve both God and money." It's Matthew 6:24 if you need to look it up. Or, maybe you're real patriotic, and you just forgot the part where it is unconstitutional for the federal government to acknowledge or endorse any deity, deities, or religious figures. (Except Elvis, naturally.)

Look. It's almost 2010. There's still slavery going on, did you know that? In the time I wrote this sentence a couple hundred people just had their lives taken by violence in various parts of the world. A bunch of people just starved to death somewhere. We live in a world where 99% of the resources are owned by 1% of the people, and "if ever there was a reason to boycott something," this is it? Seriously? I've said it before and I'll say it again, please someone build a spaceship so I can get in it and leave this madhouse and all you fools behind. Please.

But wait, here's another relevant Jesus quote: "Render unto Caesar's what is Caesar's; and render unto God what is God's." (Matt. 22:21)

The real question is, why does In God We Trust belong on our money in the first place? Jesus didn't approve of mixing God and Money. The Founding Fathers didn't approve of mixing Church and State. So clearly only someone who hates both Jesus AND the principles of this great nation would want to demonstrate their contempt by cynically putting In God We Trust on money.

It's like this, folks. Over here is religion, and whatever God or Gods you worship. Spritual. Transcendent. And over HERE is government, and money. Secular. Material. If you were to draw a Venn diagram of it, it would look like TWO COMPLETELY UNCONNECTED CIRCLES because that's what the spiritual world and the material world are. Unconnected. Unless you buy into Eastern philosophy or quantum physics and believe that everything is connected to everything else, in which case you probably aren't too concerned with WORDS ON A FUCKING COIN.

And last, since the money isn't actually backed by anything but our own belief that it's worth something, wouldn't it be more proper for the coins to say IN OURSELVES WE TRUST?

Spider-Man Comics In The Nineties

Confusing Continuity
Consisting of Convoluted Crossovers
Concerning Carnage and Clones

3 Things I Wrote In My Head Today

Talya
Talya likes to ride on my shoulders. A few visits ago I told her that I would not let her if she had a dirty diaper because I didn't want a dirty diaper up on my neck. Reasonable, right? And she understood. Then somewhere along the way it turned into every time her diaper gets changed she runs up to me and says "Uncle Noelie, I want to ride on your neck! My diaper is clean!"

Me Against The World
I am only an outcast freak because in my mind I am still an outcast freak. Time and again the world has told me it is ready to accept me now, and time and time again I have told the world to go fuck itself. Tragic flaw or personal triumph? I'm not objective enough to say.

A Classic Rant
You know how they have those self-checkout lines at grocery stores? And how they break them down by quantity? Like twelve items or less, five items or less, and so forth? Here's an idea: self-checkout lanes for COMPETENT PEOPLE.

The Dark Ages™

an excerpt from Panopticon Remix:

Picture it like this: You're born in a dank, smelly, dusty hut with a dirt floor. When you are old enough you are set to work in the fields for the Lord Of The Land™. If you don't provide enough the soldiers come. Perhaps you get drafted to fight in one of the dozens of small wars between this lord and that lord or between this king and that king or between the followers of this sect and the followers of that sect. Or perhaps you are drafted as a laborer for one of the great and grandiose projects your leader envisions; a big wall, a lavish palace, an ostentatious tomb. Better not complain. Maybe you even survive all of this, to come back to the home you do not own and work again. From the day you were born to the day you die your life is not your own. You cannot read, you know of no other life than a short and miserable one at service to people you have never even seen. Maybe if you're lucky you will not fall victim to any one of the thousands of illnesses they cannot cure yet. Maybe if you're lucky you won't be murdered outright in this era of lawlessness. Maybe you'll live to a ripe old age, to see your children felled by war and disease and overwork. Then die, then repeat. Continue this for a few thousand years.

Or maybe that's too depressing for you and you prefer to identify with the rulers. Who wouldn't? So how about this: You are born into more wealth and power than you rightly know what to do with. Your slightest whim is made into reality, you hold in your hands the lives and deaths of thousands of people. Dirty, smelly people -- barely even people at all. You bask in pleasure every waking moment of your life. This is the Divine Right Of Kings™. Then, one day, you get murdered by your own guards. Or by your brother. Or your son. Right before you die you think for a moment about how tenuous your "power" always was, or more likely you just think about how unfair this is. Or heck, maybe you live a long life and it's only after you die that your entire bloodline is brutally wiped out by the competition. It happens.

Either way, insert some Dark Ages™. Fast forward through the needless suffering, the ignorance, the filth. Or, if you’re one of those ren-faire type people, fast forward through an era of unheralded chivalry and honor. Either way, skip ahead a few thousand years.

The Chess Piece

In chess he is brutal. He tears apart the opponent's force, piece by piece, before finally backing the enemy king, frightened and alone, into the corner. Checkmate. He does this, not because he is malicious or vindictive, but because for him it is the only way. He does not see the quicker and more efficient lines of vulnerability, he is too cautious. Cautious yes, yet brutal. Against lesser and equal players he can hold his own; his brutality capably backed by his intelligence and his short-term planning. Against greater players he is destined to lose; while he is tearing into their defense they can trap his king with inventive combinations he is incapable of seeing, let alone guarding against.

A Very Scientific Explanation Of Why Old People Suck

Remember when getting old was a sign of wisdom? When the elders of the tribe were the ones with the most experience and knowledge and respect? That was way before Toffler's Future Shock kicked in, when generations could pass by without a whole hell of a lot changing technologically or socially. In that environment an older person would be wiser, if for no other reason than they lived through more, they put in the time.

Now things change so fast that an old person, whose mind has become rigid and less adaptable to changes, is basically useless. Who cares how things were in the 1950s, you old fart? Quit driving so slow! Quit holding up the grocery line with your hundreds of coupons!

Now, it's not that I think that old people are worthless, per se -- just that I think that most people overall are worthless, and people in their 20s-30s are better looking and have more flexible minds than people in their 70s-80s, and they can walk faster too, so they are not quite as worthless as they will be given another 50 years.

OBAMA PASSES LAW, BOGARTS KRETEKS

One thing that really gets me cheesed off is the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which was signed into law by President Obama on June 22, 2009. This law, designed to regulate the tobacco industry and make things safer for kids and soccer moms, is a bunch of crap. And why do I say this? Because now clove cigarettes, or kreteks, are outlawed.

Not just cloves, of course. All flavored cigarettes are outlawed. With the exception of menthol -- and just try to get the black president to outlaw menthol cigarettes. Some people are crying conspiracy, that Phillip Morris makes menthol cigarettes, that once again Big Tobacco has reared its ugly head.

I am just mad that I can't get cloves anymore.

I am mad because I voted for the guy that signed them out of law.

I am mad because instead of legalizing more and cooler things to smoke, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction.

I should have known that this would happen when the Democrats took power. Goddamn liberals trying to legislate self-destruction out of existence. I like to self-destruct! I like to smoke cloves. The crackling sound they make as they burn (hence the onomatopoetic term "kretek"). The pleasant numbing sensation in the roof of the mouth. Menthol cigarettes are like smoking a damn cough drop – utter crap in comparison.

Now the first Democrat president since the one that tried to outlaw Internet porn (with the Communications Decency Act of 1996 for all you young heads out there) has come in to outlaw clove cigarettes.

Good job, Obama.

At least under the Republicans all we had to worry about was people getting tortured and phones being tapped and shit.

A thought: Does this mean some enterprising soul is going to start selling black market Djarum Blacks? I mean, just because a commodity is outlawed doesn’t mean it’s unavailable – Lord no – it just means it’s more expensive and when you get ripped off you can’t complain to the Better Business Bureau.

Let me go back to my earlier point. It is 2009. Instead of outlawing clove cigarettes and fruity flavored cigarettes and whatever other flavors Phillip Morris doesn’t sell, why not legalize every cool drug and even some of the weirdo degenerate ones your black sheep uncle is out in his car doing during awkward family get-togethers? I mean, if health is the issue, we could try making a better health care system. That way, people who get weird illnesses from smoking cloves or salvia or doing lines of ketamine on the men’s room floor could be treated, and go back to enjoying their alternative lifestyles. Isn’t that what America’s all about? Rugged individualism? A nation of men, not laws? So instead of banning things that are fun to do but may be harmful to the health of the individual that uses them, reform health care.

What’s that? You say they already are, and it’s a big controversy? Shows how little I get out. I don’t really pay attention to the news anymore. We are so far away from mankind’s actual destiny that by the time we get there everything happening now will be wholly irrelevant.

So why can’t I just have my damn cloves?

Liberals Saved My Life

I definitely had a Columbine in me. Here's a secret I don't think I ever told anyone: I sat in the back of the crowd at my high school graduation, watching the proceedings and seeing all the different ways I could be killing these people. Later in life I would joke that I was just too apathetic, but the fact is that being raised in a post-hippie liberal household saved my life, prevented me from making these idle daydreams into a reality.

Had I been raised in a conservative gun-nut household, I would have had easy access to weapons. And without the liberal touchy-feely huggy-huggy feelings-are-real and everyone's-are-valid mindset, I would not have had the only value structure that would prevent me from using said weapons willy-nilly. And while it could be argued that in the long-view that was a mistake, that I passed up a real and direct chance to clean up the gene pool and do a favor for future generations, it is also true that it would not have ended well for me personally. So, in a very real sense, liberals saved my life.

The Hate Files

There is a calm clarity to my hatred that is missing in me at all other times. In love I am awkward and unsure. In indifference I am scattered, apathetic. But in hatred -- not red-hot rage, not white-hot fury, but cold and calculating hate -- there is a kind of purity, a peace, at my center. The proverbial eye of the storm. An understanding.

a brief anecdote from today at the park

Sarah and I are sitting at a picnic table overlooking the Hudson, eating our BLTs (with too much mayonnaise for my liking) and strawberry Twinkies (just as vile as they sound). Making conversation, Sarah says, "Seventh grade is going to suck. We have to take health class!"

"Do tell," I say noncommittally, wiping excess mayonnaise from the sandwich.

"They're making us take health class instead of art class. Isn't that stupid? Wouldn't you choose art over health?"

I take a sip of sugar water and reply, "I did."

Study Hall With Booze (An Almost True Story)

          One weekend Doug called me up and said "I think we should go to the quiet party."
          "The what?" Everything was buzzing very badly and I was sure I had misheard him. More high paranoia.
          "The quiet party," he repeated. "It's this thing, it's in some hotel in Manhattan, and you can't talk."
          "I beg your pardon?" This time I had heard him perfectly.
          "No, really, everything you want to say gets written on index cards instead. Like at a monastery or something. Oh, and there's drinks too."
          "I dunno. It sounds lame."
          "You say that about everything. It'll be a novelty."
          So we traveled by subway from the Bronx to Manhattan and began our exploration into the seamy world of silence. At the door we each had to pony up five dollars, then on the inside a cheery woman told us "There's a two-drink minimum. Fifteen dollars, please." Everywhere you go there's someone trying to shake you down. I coughed up another three fives and my hand got stamped. Inside the place looked like any bar or club might, except that it was almost entirely silent. Excluding at the actual bar, where talking was still permitted -- bizarre social experiments apparently only go so far.
          "So far this seems like the lame art snob version of a frat party," I muttered to Doug as we entered the room.
          "Ssssshhhh!!!" someone said, louder than I'd been speaking. Then someone else shushed that shusher, even louder. I imagined everyone shushing everyone else, louder and louder, but it stopped there. We sat at an empty taple. On it were a whole slew of index cards, and those short pencils you get on standardized tests. Someone came and took our drink orders. Then we sat in silence, watching everyone trying to maintain the atmosphere of the quiet party. People were shuffling around, passing each other notes. Every once in a while there's be another outburst of "Sssshhhh!!!" in clusters. It was all quite silly: "Someone violated the code of silence so I will reprimand them even louder!" I wanted to laugh but I didn't want to get shushed again. So I wrote HA on an index card and crumpled it up. It wasn't the same.
          Doug passed me a card. "SO."
          "SO WHAT?" I scribbled back.
          "SO WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE QUIET PARTY?"
          "SO LAME."
          "SO TRUE." He took the card back and added "CIGARETTE?"
          Outside it was noisy the way the city is supposed to be. Doug lit a cigarette and handed it to me, lit another for himself. It was chilly, and we basked in the loud and the dissonant.
          "Okay," he said finally. "So the quiet party is lame. It could have been interesting. It still could be. Maybe in the fourth quarter someone goes nuts. It could still get good."
          "Please. It's study hall with booze."
          Then, more smoking in silence. Traffic sounds. People talking -- to other people, to cell phones, to themselves -- as they walked by. Sirens in the distance. Then the cigarettes were done and we returned inside.
          "Oh, you're just in time," the cheery woman said after checking our stamped hands. "They're about to begin the silent poetry reading." Me and Doug exchanged glances, wordlessly turned an about face and left.

Post-Ridiculoid (A Haiku On Haiku)

It is all so real --
building syllabic cages
to house our verse in
(April 8th, 2003)

Scatalogical God Knowledge

My real belief is, we are all given a pile of shit that had no right to be there. We inherited this from our ancestors, both biological and cultural, and before there were humans from a harsh nature that is "red in tooth and claw." The ones that came before us didn't do enough to absorb this pile of shit, and in fact some of them actually just piled more shit on it instead. So here we are, in the pile of shit. It's our job in this life to do what we can to clean the shit up and not add to it so that the next generation will have an easier time cleaning up the shit we didn't, and so forth and so on until we (not us, we'll be long dead) finally clean up all the shit and heaven dawns on earth. This is the secret occult meaning of "turning the other cheek" -- when you get shit dumped on you you have to absorb it and not pass it on, otherwise the cycle goes on forever and this is the best it will ever get.

The Lesson We Didn't Learn From Hitler

The lesson we didn't learn from Hitler is this: that Hitler was harmless on his own. The millions of people that listened to him, that put him in power, followed him and carried out his orders -- they're just as much to blame, if not more. Without them, Hitler would have been just another harmless crank ranting about the Jews. We all know one, some crank ranting about Jews -- a drunken uncle, the creepy old guy down the block, whatever. Harmless cranks on their own are, well, harmless. It takes the entire mechanism of society, government and military to turn a harmless crank into a Holocaust. If they had all just laughed at him and his ridiculous notions of racial purity -- for when you subtract the atrocities and the genocide, what's left really is quite laughable -- he would have been powerless. Maybe he could have become a serial killer or something and still personally taken out a few dozen Jews / gypsies / homosexuals / non-Aryans but a few dozen against a few million is a staggering difference and, dare I say, acceptable loss. Instead, the people gave into their worst instincts, allowed themselves to be led by fear and swayed by nationalist fervor, and a black mark on human history followed.

Because we do not want to admit that the people were responsible for allowing Hitler to be Hitler and not just another crank, we demonize the man. Hitler is the closest thing to the personification of evil in my society, and yet again I stress that he was virtually harmless on his own. There will always be people like Hitler. Rather like how single celled organisms come together cooperatively to form more complex lifeforms such as ourselves, and yet we cannot stop rogue cells from going cancerous and destroying that which they are a part of -- so too will we always have people like Hitler. Rogue elements even in paradise. What we won't always have is the sheep-like drive to be led by these rogues, these predators, to do their bidding and elevate them above us. The reason we won't always have this characteristic is because either we will eventually grow up and stop doing it, or because we will follow the wrong cancerous leader straight to complete annihilation.

Just something to consider during a quiet moment of reflection.

On Morality (An excerpt from "Things I Have Learned")

If you flip a coin, and it comes up heads, that is right. If you flip it and it comes up tails, that too is right. It is the nature of a coin that if it is flipped it will be heads or tails. If you flip a coin and it comes up “rainbow trout,” that would be wrong. But that cannot happen, because it is simply not in the nature of coins to do such. Anything that actually happens CANNOT be “wrong” in any sense that is meaningful to the universe at large. There is no “right,” there is only “right for me.” No, not even that, just “seems right to me.”

Religion is NOT the basis of morality. Morality evolved from the necessity to distinguish between White Hats and Black Hats; once certain impulses have negative connotations and others have positive ones (say, the difference between the feeling of hunger and the feeling of orgasm) the world gets divided into Right and Wrong by the individual. This tendency was co-opted by societies as bodies in themselves to preserve their own structure through the creation of laws and rules. There's a reason every society on the planet has had a taboo against killing another one of Us - a society that allows its members to go around killing one another won't last. Killing one of Them, on the other hand, has always been, if not openly encouraged, at least not particularly discouraged. The problem is where Us ends and Them begins, something every society and individual has to judge for themselves.

Some people will try and argue that there is some sort of Universal-Morality-By-Consensus: “Every society in human history has considered murder WRONG. Therefore, murder is intrinsically wrong, aka EVIL.” But already there is a magic trick going on in the words: literally, murder is "wrongful killing." Note how an intrinsic "wrongness" has at this point crept into the definition of the word, so you can now offer the proposition "Murder is intrinsically wrong" and technically it's true, when in fact there is still nothing intrinsically wrong with KILLING per se. And in fact, this is where the difficulty in making it a universal law comes in: what’s the difference between killing (which is okay) and murder (which is bad)?

The Problem of Definition has again reared its ugly head. Everybody has different views of the same abstract concepts (Plato’s “perfect forms”). For people thousands of years ago, human life was sacred, but the folks in the tribe over yonder hill weren’t really human, so it was okay to wantonly murder them. In the middle ages, human life was sacred, but non-Christians, or people not of one’s particular sect of Christianity, I should say, weren’t really human, so it was okay to torture and enslave and murder them. In the pre-Civil War South, human life was sacred, but slaves weren’t really human. To your average sociopath, the only real human is the sociopath himself, or herself. Proponents of the death penalty think convicted murderers aren’t really human. The Nazis didn’t think non-Aryans were really human, and they considered their mass genocide to be nothing more than a large-scale pest extermination. But on the flipside, Vegans and their ilk have expanded their concept of “humanity” to include all members of the Animal Kingdom. For that matter, most people consider their pets to be honorary humans.

So you see, human life is sacred to everybody, but no one agrees on what a human really is. When we say “human,” we really mean our tribe, our species, our nation, our family, our race, our gang, our pets, whatever. The abstraction “human life” is the same, and everyone considers it sacred, but the definitions are always different. In the end, it all comes down to Us vs. Them, with wildly differing subjective views of what constitutes Us and Them. The Problem of Definition prevents human word-magic from ever becoming completely real (think of Orqwith bleeding over into the world and be glad) but it also leads to some major misunderstandings. Here we see that almost EVERYONE considers the killing of a member of Us to be intrinsically WRONG, but who is in the Us is entirely a matter of perspective. We create these abstract notions to explain the world, and then turn them into concrete cages with sharp borders. The universe knows no absolutes but we always try and turn an infinite scale of gray into black and white. It is how our minds work, both a great strength and a great weakness. The Double-Edged Sword strikes again!

Five Franchises That Need To Have A Free-Roamer Made

Free-roamers, or "GTA clones" to the jaded masses, are open-ended video games that progress in a non-linear fashion while giving you wide expansive areas to play in or just explore. In some of them you are a grim and gritty urban gangster type that goes around jacking cars (ie Grand Theft Auto, True Crime, Saints Row) in some of them you are super-powered (ie Infamous, Prototype or the half-dozen Spider-Man games). Or else you can be an alien (Destroy All Humans), a mercenary (Mercenaries) or just a kid trying to survive prep school (Bully). Many popular franchises (such as The Godfather, The Simpsons or the aforementioned Spider-Man) have been developed into free-roamer video games. Even Jaws got one. Here's a quick list of some that haven't and should:

1. The Prisoner. Nuff said. This would be more like Bully where you mostly traverse a smaller area on foot, since the only vehicles worth jacking in The Village would be those little golf cart things. And of course that bicycle. Probably story mode would entail some new Prisoner (Number 114?) who has been kidnapped to The Village, taking various missions (some from those who want to escape, some assigned by Number Two) while trying to escape. The good ending? You escape. The evil ending? You become the new Number Two.

2. Snake Plissken. Another no-brainer. Set it in a new futuristic post-apocalyptic wasted city (like Detroit or something) and set Snake loose in it. Some macguffin of a plot where the government sends Snake in to the city to retrieve something. Lots of side missions. Most of the amoral character-types that protagonize these games are third generation carbon copies of Snake Plissken's badassness anyway.

3. Ghostbusters. This one is so obvious that I can't believe a Ghostbusters game just came out and it's not a free-roamer. You're the new Ghostbuster recruit, drive around town in your Ecto vehicle and bust random ghost events. Story mode would be something suitably apocalyptic.

4. Batman. Spider-Man got a bunch of free-roamers. Superman got a (terrible) free-roamer. The Hulk's even had a couple. Batman's the only major superhero left. And what cooler city to free-roam in than Gotham? What cooler car to drive than the Batmobile? Zip into the sky on bat-lines, glide around with your cape, this practically writes itself.

5. Philip Marlowe. Set in 1940s Los Angeles. Written in the same over-boiled neo-noir style of Max Payne. The main story mode would involve the big convoluted case that Marlowe is in over his head in. Side missions would be smaller detective jobs to pay the bills and interesting mini-games. Travel around the city in taxis and try to avoid being doublecrossed by beautiful femme fatales.

It isn't a franchise or a property but I also have a great idea for a free-roamer called Law Abiding Citizen. I'll save that for another time though.

There's A Razor-Thin Line Between Genius And Lame

SELF-IMAGE (as expressed in Castlevania song titles)

wicked child / walking on the edge
heart of fire / poison mind / out of time / nothing to lose
dead beat / demon seed
a man who knows too much
clockwork / dance of illusions
battle with chaos
underground / message of darkness
pressure / nightmare / anxiety
revenge
cursed memories / wandering ghosts
the tragic prince
new messiah

The Gender Politics of "LOL"

"Lol" is more girly than Hello Kitty pajamas and having a womb combined. If you're a guy and you use the phrase "lol," you are no longer a guy. Sorry. You could be the most manliest, strapping lumberjack type -- wrestling crocodiles with your teeth, with seed so fertile that every woman you even glance at bears pentuplets -- and if you use the phrase "lol" you are no longer a guy. It's done. A dude that gets his dode chopped off and parades around in three-inch heels and mascara is more of a man than you are at that point.

A Brief Refutation Of Law

You ever know someone who didn't break any laws? Any laws at all? I don't mean the obvious ones like murder and rape and arson and so forth, I mean any laws period. Someone that never drove faster than the speed limit, never drank while underage, never used any illegal substance, never bought a bootleg DVD or downloaded pirated software. Never engaged in oblique sexual practices in areas where said practices were illegal. Never turned without using a blinker. Never, ever, ever broke the law. While you are out looking for this hypothetical person I am going to move ahead with my argument by assuming that this Ideal Law-Abiding Citizen simply does not exist.

Next. Imagine murder was made legal tomorrow. Are you going to go out and kill someone just because you can? If arson was legalized would you start torching shit? If rape was legal, would you be out raping people? Okay, but don't joke about it because my mother might be offended. Zing! My point is, if you were inclined to kill, burn and/or rape, chances are you would be inclined to do so even with it being illegal. How do I know this? Because these kinds of things happen every day everywhere. On the other hand, I wouldn't do any of them even if they were legal. Why? Because they are wrong... to me, at least.

Personally, I have an internalized ethics / moral code that guides me. I don't need a Mystery God to damn me, I don't need The State to imprison me. Punishments are for children. I have my own code and I live by it, and when I break it the knowledge that I fucked up stays with me forever and I would say it is punishment enough. There is no need for law.

Eh. When I was drifting off to sleep last night this was more eloquent.

The Earth's shape and a divorce from belief

(January, 2006)

I had this novel I wanted to write sometime in the late 1990s where the protagonist discovers that the Great Conspiracy’s deep dark secret is that the world is really flat. A secret society (I think I was going to call them the Brotherhood of Eratosthenes or something lame like that) has been keeping people deceived for centuries. Columbus? In on it. Magellan was killed when he discovered the truth on his own voyage. Lindbergh? In on it — and his child kidnapped and murdered when he threatened to spill the beans. Amelia Earheart? Another casualty of the code of silence. The moon landing? Faked. The real map of the Earth is the one used in the symbol of the UN with “Antarctica” actually the icy border of the flat Earth (presumably to prevent the oceans from running off.)

I never wrote it, and probably never will — mostly because I couldn’t think of a good Why — why lie about the shape of the Earth? Cui bono? But that being said, I like to use the flat earth as a good example of the way we let beliefs dominate our way of looking at the world. For all I know, the world really is flat… if they lied to me about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy I can’t rule out the possibility that they are lying to me about other things as well. I’ve never traveled around the world, I’ve never personally seen the world from space, and what other empirical evidence do I have for believing the world is round?

But before anyone jumps down my throat because I said the world is flat, understand that I don’t believe that. I accept as the most likely hypothesis the round world rather like although I have never fooled around in a particle physics lab I accept the existence of subatomic particles. All I’m saying is that I don’t believe anything about the shape of the Earth at all — based on my own information I cannot form an opinion, I can only accept the consensus reality. I think that most likely the world is round and will continue to hold that as my model of the world until I am proven otherwise — but if they flew me out to the edge of the Earth and I peered over it, I would switch my model with relative ease. After Santa Claus I am never making that mistake again.

The truth is, we know next to nothing about reality as it IS (and, if you accept quantum mechanics it appears that at the base level reality IS nothing that correlates with our own experiences) but are constantly guessing, theorizing, making it up as we go along. Thousands of years ago the best guess we had was a flat earth at the center of the universe with the sun and stars and planets fixed above us in some sort of inverted dome. But, confusing the map with the territory, we are very reluctant to let go of our pet theories and world models — consider what happened to Galileo when he found better evidence for the heliocentric model of the cosmso. Remember that they burned Bruno for suggesting that other planets might have life on them. This was in the era when religious thinking, inflexible and trapped in dogma, dominated the world — but even in scientific thinking paradigm shifts do not occur until most of the old guard dies off. We are stubborn and do not want to change the way we think. In a world that is in constant change this inflexibility is our chief downfall.

[Fwd: Fwd: fwd: The Chain Letter Of Mystery And Vexation!]

This is not your run-of-the-mill, harmless, chain letter. Oh no. This is the Chain Letter Of Mystery And Vexation ! This is an electronic transcript of a chain letter someone found in their late grandfather's belongings. Apparently, the grandfather and nine of his friends received the chain letter while still in college back in the 1930s. They all scoffed at it, and all of them threw it away -- except for the grandfather, who was trying to build up the world's largest collection of chain letters so he could get into the Guiness Book Of World Records. None of them continued the chain, not believing in the powers of the Chain Letter Of Mystery And Vexation -- and within 70 years, they were ALL DEAD!!

A woman in Denver, Colorado didn't break the chain, and received a huge raise at her job -- FOUR MONTHS EARLIER!!

Two parents in Tampa, Florida broke the chain -- their son was born with a congenital heart defect. When the son received the chain letter 15 years later, he sent it to ten of his friends, and the next day he died of heart complications. But -- HE WENT TO HEAVEN!!!

A man dreamt that if he broke the chain letter, his plane would crash. So, HE TOOK THE TRAIN INSTEAD!!!!. Actually, I'm not sure what the point of that one was.

Anyway, this is the Chain Letter Of Mystery And Vexation!!!!! Send it to ten (10) of your friends as soon as you can, to receive good luck. If you don't have any friends, try e-mailing random people, or your congressman. If you decide to be a skeptic and break the chain, be warned -- the Chain Letter Of Mystery And Vexation will cause you to regret your ways!!!!!!

So hit the forward button already!

Disconnect

I go through my days in a daze. Ignore the unintended wordplay and vibe with me. There is no clear connection between one moment and the next. Instead of following a linear narrative I am adrift amidst coincidences, synchronicity and Pavlovian repetition. There is no clear connection between one moment and the next, and consequently I wind up repeating the same things over.

Unable to hold my timeline in my head, I am constantly extrapolating the present moment out to fill the whole. I remember a poem I wrote a long time ago, where the gist of it was that when it's winter, in my mind it has always been winter. I remember the poem but I don't remember writing it. There is no clear connection.

As a result of this fog, I can only practically remember the last two, maybe three years of my life. Anything before that enters into the realm of myth -- half-remembered snapshots as faded and yellowed as actual photographs, and my own written record. I pore over my old writings, trying desperately to remember being the person that wrote them, but there is no clear connection.

At the present I am not paying attention to my surroundings and circumstances. I am lost in my own head, confused and constructing narratives to explain how my karma led me here. As this present slides into the past, I am already there in the future, reading these words with detachment, trying to recall where and when I wrote them. What I was doing, thinking, feeling. Trying to connect one moment to the next.

Think About The Future

(Week 21: Write a speech for an intended audience.)

          There’s something I want to talk to all of you about today, and it’s the future. When you chart the progress of humanity, the highs and the lows, when you chart the direction life has been moving in this whole time, it becomes clear that we stand today at the precipice of two paths, if I may mix metaphors: total death or eternal life. Total death would mean the extinction of all humans and the devastation of the biosphere to the point where intelligent life cannot redevelop in the time left before the sun blows up. Eternal life would entail humanity transcending their physical location and physical selves, to grow and to become gods.
          If this sounds to you like rehashed rhetoric from the Old-Time Religions, you are not far off – this conflict, this crisis of choice, has been standing before us since before we were even humans. But it is only now, as humans, that we have the knowledge, the numbers, the technology, to bring about total death or eternal life. Today I’d like to talk more about the latter.
          What do we need to do to achieve eternal life? Well, the Old-Time Religions say all you have to do is live a virtuous life and obey God and you’re set. The Eastern Philosophers imply that all life is already eternal, already one, already timeless. The Techno-Futurists say we need to work on Life Extension. They’re all right, but I would like to suggest some practical baby steps to help achieve this goal a little faster, to immanentize the eschaton such as it were.
          First, I think it is crucially important that we get off this planet. For starters, one day the sun is going to blow up. So even if we have achieved some sort of physical immortality and developed a society that will never self-destruct, as long as we are here and only here we have all our eggs in one basket. Now, that is five billion years from now, I admit, but you don’t need to cite Unicron or Galactus to imagine the possibility of a cosmic-level threat demolishing the Earth well before the sun goes. In fact, I just read on Wikipedia this morning that we only have about a billion years before the sun heats up enough to boil off all liquid water. One billion years. To put it in perspective, life itself has only existed for about four billion years. So when you look at it that way, the Earth’s biosphere is about 80% of the way through its life cycle. We can’t stay here forever.
          Once we get off the planet it will be time to start working more on inventing the Life Extension techniques the Techno-Futurists are so enamored of. The end goal of course being physical immortality or some way of preserving coherent consciousness beyond the death of the body. Why do I say wait until we are off the Earth? Because the Earth is a finite and limited space, it is a bad place for an immortal species to be reproducing. See how bad we’ve wrecked stuff up with a life expectancy of 50-80 years? Imagine how much more catastrophic it would be to the planet if we stopped dying altogether!
          Now so far I have only spoken about technological solutions for thriving in the external world. This is very important. But just as important is the development of our inner spiritual selves. Because of some quirk of our nature, or for all I know any intelligent life develops along the same lines, our technological development is chiefly driven by war, by military means. So destructive technology is always at the crest of the wave. Technology to heal, to build, to create – they are usually reverse-engineered from war toys. Study your history. But now is different, the last sixty years or so I should say. Today we have the technology to wipe out all life on Earth a hundred times over. How did it come to this? It’s not a relevant question. The question is, how do we not use it? How do we learn to connect with one another on a more organic level and leave aside the violent tendencies we inherited from our animal forebears? Remember, the world was a dangerous place for us once. Even during our early days as humans it wasn’t safe at night away from the fire, there were giant cats and other predators lurking around all the time. Eventually we consumed the wilderness, tamed or exterminated the worst of the dangerous animals, paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Today the only real threat to the average human being is other human beings. Not forces of nature we cannot control. Not wild beasts we cannot overpower. Us. Only us. And so it is up to us, as a whole people, to come together. The Hippies knew it. Jesus knew it.
          How do we do this? How do we learn to love each other, to escape the Earth that birthed us and to live forever as Gods of the Cosmos? I have no idea. I only have some small pieces of the puzzle, and barely the dimmest outline of its final shape. I don’t consider this a failure; at this point in the tail-end of the Dark Ages it is necessary to talk about the changes that are necessary even if you cannot effect them yourself, to remind people that it doesn't always have to be like this, that there are greater stakes for us than financial security or social status or any other artifact of human-created society. That’s all they are, you know. Money, fame, the approval of others – none have any intrinsic worth of themselves and only have value as long as there are human minds to create them, to appreciate them, to strive for them.
          Anyway, I think I’ve said all I meant to say, except that the first step towards positive change is believing that it is possible. We have to believe that we can become gods or we are doomed to extinction. We have to rise above it all, or drown in our own shit.

The Other Sweet Science: The True History Of The Rubber Band Gun

          I was bored. That's how most of my stories begin. I was bored, so I started photoshopping word balloons onto pictures of my friends. I was bored, so I plotted a scenario to drive my girlfriend out of my life. I was bored, so I stopped going to class. In this case, I was bored, so I started shooting rubber-bands. This was at work, where the nature of the job dictates long periods of intense boredom punctuated by heavy bursts of frantic and desperate activity. This was the former. Hence the being bored, which I will keep hammering on until you are just as bored as I was.
           Shooting rubber-bands is all fine and good, but I am descended from a long line of clever tool-using monkeys and it quickly occurred to me that I could build a device to shoot them better. Based on the materials at hand I took two pens, hollowed them out and taped them together. On one end I taped down a small binder clip. With small pliers I pinched a paper-clip into a narrow s-shaped hook and I pushed it through the pen cap on the other end. Rubber-band goes here, stretches to there, clip, aim, squeeze. Thwish, snap, smack.
          The basic design was in place. The only problem was, no handle. I took stock of the items I had available to me, holding various office-supply items in my hand, squeezing them, juggling them, feeling them out. I eventually settled upon the common household tape-dispenser, the disposable plastic kind that comes with a roll of tape on it. Flip it upside down and it becomes a nice grip. I taped the shaft to it and my first rubber-band gun was born.
           That was September 1st. That night at home I took an old clothespin and replaced the binder clip. I attached a prescription bottle to the bottom of the shaft in such a way that it could be detached and rubber-bands stored inside. I wrapped the whole thing in duct tape as a finisher. I pointed, I aimed, I shot. The world felt right.
           The next day I built another one.
           The day after I built another one.
           By now I was hooked. I was experimenting with different designs, different materials. I went to Wal-Mart and bought a whole bunch of colored duct-tapes. I bought different size clothespins. I bought wooden dowels. I began scrounging around work for weird pieces of plastic, usually to be found on the floor in the back or on the ground by the dumpster. I decided that since I had built a gun a day so far for the month of September, that I would continue on that path and build at least one gun per day for the entire month. I decorated them in different colors. I gave them names: The Originator, Number Two, The Aardvark, The Assassin Pistol, Silver. I tried out different design novelties -- although I never went back to the detachable storage bottle of my first gun, I built double-shot guns (in both rifle and hand-gun variety) with Vitamin Water bottles and a dozen pen-tubes. I built one on a ruler and decorated it to look like a sword. I decorated another shaft-only model to look like the classic black and white magic wand. Abracadabra, shoot! By this point my bedroom floor was carpeted in a soft layer of rubber bands, a decor that extended to every reasonably flat surface in my room.
           In the end, I kept up to my project and didn't miss a day. Actually, by the end of September I had actually built fifty guns, ending on the 30th with the Ultimatum. Some of them were really good, a lot were mediocre -- the risk any creator faces when sticking to a given schedule -- but I had built fifty of the damn things and now I was done.
           I cleaned up the rubber bands.
           I boxed up the guns. Two boxes, one for the guns that were good shooters and aesthetically pleasing and one for the aforementioned mediocre ones.
           Then, a few months later, I built another one at work.
           Then another one. I had found a new hooking device to use, the "roundhead fastener". These were more reliable than the bent paperclip if not as easy to load.
           Then, just when it seemed I was beginning a second renaissance of rubber-band guns, I stopped.
           A similar thing had happened with the photoshopping word balloons.
           I was bored. That's also how most of my stories end.

I Am Not An American

I am not an American. I just live here. I live here because I was born here. I have never made any concerted effort to live anywhere else because I do not particularly care to give up the huge investment I have made in learning the cultural mores, dominant language and social structures of the society that I grew up in. In other words, I am lazy and indifferent to the whole damn shebang. Wherever you go, there's still people there.

I am not an American. I just live here. I do not have a problem with America. I am not anti-American. I am not pro-American, except inasmuch as I live here and American interests can coincide Venn diagram-like with my own. But I am not an American. I am not proud to be an American, not because I am ashamed of being an American but simply because I am not an American. I am proud of my accomplishments, my achievements -- not that I happen to have been born within these lines on this map. I do not believe in countries, I do not believe in nations. I do not believe in laws, borders, or governments. There might be clear delineations between different species (there aren't) or between the land and the sea (nor these) but everything else is some human-created nonsense. Including America. As a human myself I am free to toss out the rules and ideas that were laid down by those that came before me and build my own world from tabula rasa. You should try it sometime.

I pay American taxes. I follow American laws (or rather I follow my own code and am smart enough to not get caught where that happens to be illegal under local conditions). According to the records, I am an American citizen.

But, nonetheless, I am not an American. I just live here.

memoirs found in a pants pocket

"Through the protective barriers of my sunglasses, the tinted sun-roof and the thick gauzelike clouds, I stare directly at the sun."

An Open Letter To The Fresh Crush Crew

Dear Fresh Crush Crew,
cc: Grand Wizard Bumble Bee Nice (Burgess Waxman)
cc: MC Chocolate Lover Larry (Elgin Lawrence)
cc: Cool Skee Bop (Darius Radcliff)
cc: DJ Redpack (Emil Bedford)

          I have to tell you, I am like your biggest fan ever! I mean, I know you guys must get that a lot, being the legendary old school hip-hop crew straight outta Buffalo, but I have to tell you that I really mean it.

          I have every vinyl single you ever released, including the rare radio station-only release of “Cold Bust A Party” with the photo of all four of you cheesing in Bumble Bee Nice’s barbershop imprinted right on the vinyl. Paid a pretty penny for it on eBay, and that’s no lie. Then last summer my friends and I hitchhiked to Buffalo for the weekend so we could walk the streets you guys walked on and rapped on. We even stopped by the mural on West Chippewa Street. That’s how hardcore of a fan that I am. I think you guys are great. After you broke up in 1983 is the day hip-hop died for me, and for other people as well. For years I would hear an artist or an MC and say, that guy’s alright, but the Fresh Crush Crew had crazy science.

          Now, I know you guys must hear this all the time, but when are you going to get back together? I think now that hip-hop is dead would be the perfect time for the four of you to come back together and bring it all back to life. Know what I’m saying?

          I have to admit, I have no idea what you guys are up to these days. For a while there was a Wikipedia entry for the Fresh Crush Crew which I took as a good sign since there were no other mentions of the Fresh Crush Crew anywhere at all on the Information Superhighway we call the World Wide Web. Then a few months went by and the entry was taken off. The wiki-douche who marked it for a speedy delete had these condescending remarks to make:

“[N]o claim of notability, they wrote a song, and dissed some folks. Not even Google has heard of them.”

          Can you imagine? What an awful epitaph for such a storied and historical career! Wouldn’t now be a good time to come back together like the Voltron of this shit and show the Wikipedia Thought Police what a bunch of clowns they are?

          In that vein, here are some thoughts I have on how the Fresh Crush Crew can become relevant again in the twenty-teens:

• Do a diss song about 50 Cent. These days, it’s practically a rite of passage for any rappers worth their salt. Plus I think that if you guys come with the same blistering wit and lyrical fury you had on your landmark diss record “Party Pussies” you will be getting bumped on iPods nationwide.


• Do a song with T-Pain. For some reason the kids love that off-key computer Auto-Tune sound. That’s why, after you do a song with T-Pain, you should go ahead and record a whole album worth of singing in T-Pain style.


• Invent a dance. Not like that time in 1979 when the Fresh Crush Crew adopted the Charleston as their official dance for six months in honor of your slain and fallen member Rodney “Rodney C” Carver. Come up with a new dance and make a song about it. The dance doesn’t have to be good, the song doesn’t have to make sense. The kids just like dances.

          I actually have much larger ideas and plans for the Fresh Crush Crew than merely a musical revival, including a biography, a film based on the biography, a tie-in videogame based on the movie, and an album release of the videogame soundtrack featuring all the classic FCC jams like “Disco Party Rap” and “My Man Rodney” re-recorded for the jaded ears of Indigo children. But for right now just getting back together at all would be a great first step towards your future, and mine.

          Oh, and reality TV too. Everyone loves that crap.

Sincerely,
Noel Rogers
ITC Talent Management Inc.

Fuck Saint Patrick's Day

Yes, I know, St. Patrick's day isn't for another week or so, but in honor of the bullshit-ass St. Patrick's Day Parade they had in Wappingers today that shut down all local traffic and made my commute home take like 45 minutes, here is once again my classic ode to that lamest of lame holidays:

FUCK SAINT PATRICK’S DAY

          You know what? St. Patrick wasn't even Irish. He was something else that I am too lazy to look up (or not -- he was Welsh) and was taken from his family by marauding hordes of Irishmen. Whether they were painted green history doesn't record but they were probably as drunk as the marauding hordes of Irish assholes getting all puffed up because it's getting to be St. Patrick's Day. You know what really pisses me off? When someone says "On St. Patrick's Day, everyone's Irish!" What an arrogant and presumptuous statement. What other holiday has the balls to be so culturally insensitive? Can you imagine it elsewhere? "On Yom Kippur, everyone's Jewish!" "On Earth Day, everyone's a hippie!" "On Nasmas, everyone loves Illmatic!" Name another cultural group that gets a special parade for their holiday.
          And I know, I know, the real reason St. Patrick's Day is such a crossover success is because it’s a reason to drink a lot. Who needs a reason? You want a reason to get stinking drunk? Try looking in the mirror and realizing that your entire life is a big fat lie. No, seriously, go try it. I'll wait. Tap tap tap. It's a sobering thought, isn't it? Shit, I think I'll have something to drink now too. Gulp, paranoid stare around the room.
          Fuck Saint Patricks Day, and fuck Irish Pride. You love Ireland so much? Go the fuck back, they got that potato problem fixed now. There's some guy shivering in a box right now who would love to take up your eco-social slot when you go back to the Motherland, and I'm sure he'd be proud to be an American unlike you, you ungrateful little shit. Yeah, you, I'm talking to you. No, not you, the bitch sitting next to you. Yeah, you, bitch, you. Whatcha gonna do about it? Huh? Huh?
          Goddamn I get belligerent while I'm drunk. Where was I? Oh yeah, fuck Saint Patricks' Day, and before you reply to disagree know that I already know what you're going to say and I think you're an idiot. Yeah, you, the fat kid in the back. You dumb fatso. I can read you like a book.

Blood: A Tone Poem Shoehorned Into Prose

           I was coughing blood today. No lie. Not a lot of blood, sure – I was in no danger of losing precious liters – but it was blood nonetheless. Little specks that stained my tissue, like red snowflakes against an all-white sky.
           I was coughing blood today. No lie. I guess it’s the chickens coming home to roost. For the sickly child I was, I’ve abused my lungs too much, for too long. I smoked marijuana daily for like seven years, and that's not exactly past tense behavior. For a long time I smoked cigarettes too – and unfiltered Luckies, no less. During a dark and desperate time in my life I was a fiend for nitrous oxide. I’ve smoked PCP. I’ve smoked opium. I’ve smoked salvia divinorum. Christ, I’ve even smoked orange Tic-Tacs, or tried to though they refused to burn. Did I miss anything? Oh, cloves. I also smoked clove cigarettes – again, a dark and desperate time in my life. The point is, if my childhood was marked by various respiratory ailments, my adult life has been characterized by my complete and utter lack of concern for said respiratory ailments. I always joked that I’d know it was time to quit when I started coughing up blood. Now that I have...
           I was coughing blood today, no lie, and now I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid to get it checked out, for two reasons. First, because I am scared that this is the beginning of the end, that I have finally done one stupid thing to my body too many, that these specks of blood represent the punctuation at the end of my sentence. But I am also afraid that it won’t turn out to be anything fatal or terminal or even anything serious at all – that after all the coughing is said and done, after the blood has all dried up and the tissues are long discarded, it will be back to business as usual, and I will still have to wake up every day as I get older and more bitter. That I could still live long enough to see my fire die slowly instead, from flame to ember to ash.
           I was coughing blood today. No lie.

I'm Not Here

I’m not here. Wherever here is, I am usually somewhere else. I don’t live in my body, I live in my head. Nitpickers will point out that be that as it may, my mind inhabits my body so I still live in it like it or not. I woke up the other morning at 4am from awful back pains. As those began to halfway subside I was wracked with a bout of explosive diarrhea. What I’m saying, and too much information be damned, I know that I live in my body all too well.

And nonetheless, I live in my mind. I’m not here. I am hiding out, between and behind my thoughts. The real world intrudes like a loud voice in a theater or an alarm clock’s ring. I react with panic, with terror, with confusion, as if I have just woken abruptly. I have developed defenses against this. I have trained my body to act on its own in all but truly critical tasks. I have trained my body, like a dog, to go through the motions mindlessly; an ontological zombie. And like a dog, my body is not very smart. I find myself walking in circles a lot, forgetting what my tasks were, and needing to consciously re-intervene, interrupt my thoughts, to set it back on its way. I have also learned pre-canned verbal responses, like a parrot, to hold my own in simple conversations with no thought necessary.

I’m not here. I am not in this moment. I am not in this spot. I am somewhere else.

Elegy For A Black Cat

Noir died three years ago today. This is a memoir of sorts, a reminiscence of our time together, and a cautionary tale about how you treat the ones you love.

Noir was born on October 16th, 1998, in Philadelphia, though I didn’t meet her until a few weeks later. She was part of a litter of kittens that my brother’s cat Salvatore had given birth to. I was visiting around that time and I had decided to take one of them. All that was left was to decide which one. I chose her. Partially because she was solid black and partially because… to tell the truth, I don’t know what drew me to her. Call it fate or call it a sixth sense, but I knew she was mine. I held her tiny body in my hands and she fit perfectly.

Noir grew up to become a beautiful cat, the statuesque and regal kind the Egyptians had worshipped as gods. From the right angle, the light reflecting off her black fur made her look like she was carved from obsidian, and you could understand their point of view. Noir was something. The two of us shared some similar personality traits – to strangers we could be aloof, even hostile; but quite loving and affectionate when around the ones we trust. Then there were also the quirks that were hers and hers alone, like her thing about plastic bags. Noir loved to play in plastic shopping bags. Couldn’t get enough of them. On more than one occasion she would get the handle of one stuck around her neck and run off while I chased after her, terrified that she would choke.

When I moved away to Philadelphia I took Noir with me. Instead of seeing it as a homecoming, a return to her place of birth – and how could she – Noir saw it as an upsetting change to her routine and environs. After a few weeks of her being unable to adjust to her new surroundings, it was with great sadness that I put her in a cat carrier and sent her back home to live with my parents. I often wonder even now if Noir knew something that I didn’t. But for the next two years, Noir was distant with me when I visited, as if she hadn’t quite forgiven me or wasn’t sure what I might do next. Once the life I had built for myself came crashing down house-of-cards style, and I too had to return home, Noir opened right back up to me. All sins forgiven. At that low time in my life when I didn’t know who my friends were and who I could trust, Noir was there for me.

And me? I loved her in my way. I loved her as best as I could. Translation? I was an ungrateful little shit who took her love for granted and often, far too often, reacted to her signs of affection with annoyance and impatience. It made sense to me at the time – I would be at my computer, playing a video game, and all of a sudden Noir was up on my desk, in my face, on my keyboard. Invariably my inner-Cartman would come out: “Goddammit, kitty!” Like I said, it made sense to me at the time. Like I said, I was an ungrateful little shit.

A little over three years ago Noir got sick. I didn’t even know it at first. I only caught on when I realized that Noir had been hiding somewhere for the last twenty-four hours. Once upon a time I had a dog who got sick and we did nothing and we waited too long to get him help and in the end nothing could be done. My dog was put to sleep and I never saw him again. I was determined not to make the same mistake, so I brought Noir to the animal hospital the next day.

And it was too late.

They said it was a congenital problem, and indeed some of Noir’s litter-mates had already died from one thing or another. They said it was going on for a while, that by the time it became apparent it was already too late. They said they could put her out of her misery. I nodded, and I told them they could kill my cat, who had loved me and I had not loved back enough. Now there was no more time. So I stood in the examination room and I cried. I kept myself in check, fighting back tears in an unsafe public place, but in my heart I was burning with a conflict of emotions. Grief and sorrow that my cat was going to die. Empathy or sympathy for the cat’s suffering – each pained yowl Noir made sent a chill through me. Blind and white-hot rage at a world that permits death in the first place, at God for filling creation with beauty and then systematically destroying it all. But mostly I just felt guilt and shame. All I could remember was my impatience, my ingratitude. I sobbed in silence and I wished desperately that none of this was real. Then I drove home, and threw out the litter box. She wouldn’t need it anymore.

A year or so ago I dreamt I was sitting on my dining room couch. The shades were pulled and the light of the autumn sunset was coming through the window. Noir was on the couch, in the spot where there was light. I sat down next to her and I cried and I cried. I told her how much I loved her, how I missed her, and how sorry I was that I hadn’t been more loving to her when I had her there to love. Even in my dream she said nothing. Then I woke up.

I held her in my hands, and now she’s gone.

Emerson & Pete in None So Blind

(Okay, I totally lied. Here's another one of the short pieces I generated for this project the Crew Elders are working on. Based on an idea I had in my late teens, which was based on an idea I had as a child:

EMERSON & PETE in: None So Blind

          Pete is my friend. Pete is my only friend. Let me explain. Before I met Pete, I was the social pariah of the fifth grade. Mostly because I am the only kid in the fifth grade who knows what “social pariah” means. Then I met Pete. Now, I’m still the social pariah of the fifth grade, but I don’t really care anymore.
          See, Pete and I have been on dozens of adventures of exactly the sort you read about in boys’ magazines. Hidden pirate treasure, lost dinosaur islands, intergalactic intrigue. That was the fun stuff. Mad scientists, with their convoluted schemes and inescapable death traps, not so fun.
          Guess which we were doing today?
          “I think this is the end, little buddy,” I said to Pete. The two of us were hanging from thick steel chains, suspended above an ominous chemical concoction. Gears ratcheted, and with every click we were lowered closer and closer to the vat. “I don’t see any way out of this.”
          Pete nodded in agreement. “Sheesh,” he said. It was all he ever said.
          I almost forgot to mention – Pete is a four-foot tall bird-looking alien with blue feathers and a green beak. His kind mostly only communicate through a complex scheme of body language. The best he can manage in human vocals is “sheesh.”
          We make do.

          I first met Pete when his spaceship crashed into the woods next to my house. At least I think it was a spaceship – it was pretty smashed up by the time I saw it and all I’ve ever been able to get out of Pete by way of explanation is “Sheesh.” He was a stranger to this world and he needed a friend. I was, as I said, the social pariah of the fifth grade. In no time at all we were inseparable. Eventually I learned to understand his sheeshes, to interpret their subtle nuances into English – though occasionally he made simple errors like confusing “causal” with “casual.”
          Pete was a misfit, like me, and neither of us really had a place in this human world. So we became freelance adventurers, journeying to the last street at the edge of my development or to the last star system at the edge of the galaxy. Once, the two of us defeated Sid Viscous, the Not-Nice Goo, a nasty mucusy little bully that fancied himself Emperor Of All Creation. We found a miniature scale model of an A-bomb (capable of throwing fallout in a six-inch radius) and dropped it on him. Princess Arlissa of the Vandaloo gave us medals for that. And we got back in time for supper.
          My parents? Clueless. They know Pete is my best friend, and I swear they can see him and everything but somehow they never notice how he is a four-foot tall bird-looking alien with blue feathers and a green beak. Or, even worse, maybe they do know – and they are just so glad that their only son finally has a companion that they ignore the fact that he is an alien that can only say “sheesh.” Did I mention that I am the social pariah of the fifth grade?
     The death-trap we found ourselves in today began the way most of our adventures do – me and Pete had been in the woods near my house, digging for old Indian arrowheads. Occasionally Pete would pluck up a centipede with his pudgy feathered fingers and pop it in his mouth like a piece of popcorn. With legs. Suddenly there was a roaring sound all around me, like the sound of the ocean played through giant subwoofers. I think I heard Pete say “Sheesh,” and then I blacked out. We came to chained up in a broken-down warehouse, dangling over a cauldron of bubbling liquid, slowly being lowered in.
          “I think this is the end, little buddy,” I said, and that’s about where you came in.

          An old man with a bald spot, a lab coat, an eye-patch and a mechanical hand entered the room. “I assume,” he said in a thick mad scientist accent, “that I have the pleasure of addressing Emerson and Pete, fabled adventurers?”
          I tried to put a brave face on. “That’s right, you old meanie. I’m Emerson, he’s Pete. What’s the big idea?”
          “The Emerson and Pete? The ones that vanquished Sid Viscous? Defeated the Sky-Pirates of Mystery Island? Uncovered the smuggling ring disguised as a circus?”
          “Same, same, and same. Why are you doing this to us? If I don’t get back before sundown, I’ll be grounded!”
          “That is the least of your concerns now, my boy. My name is Dr. Infamy. Perhaps you have heard of me.”
          I had. “Sure. Some big-shot mad scientist villain for a few decades. Retired before I was born. They say you were one of the finest minds of the Third Reich.”
          Dr. Infamy scoffed. “That’s like being one of the tallest Munchkins in Munchkinland. Those fools, with their half-baked theories on race and a hollow earth… don’t get me started.”
          This whole time Pete and I were still ratcheting closer and closer to our doom. I decided to mention this. “Look, Doc... can I call you Doc? What are we doing here? And why? And, um, so forth.”
          The old man smiled. “The chemicals below you are a peculiar invention of mine. You are familiar with the principle of petrified forests, yes? Over time water brings in minerals which slowly replace the organic structure of the tree, down to the individual cells. It takes centuries. This silica solution I am lowering you into will do the same thing in minutes.”
          “What? Why?”
          “I can explain it to you and I think you’ll understand. You are like me, you live outside of society. We are not bound by its conventions and customs. We are free to choose our own path.” Well, I was free to choose my own path until Dr. Infamy chained me up, but I let that one pass. “Not so my brother. Yes, my brother. Bob Infamy. While I was born with a twisted genius and a hunger to build lasers on the moon, Bob is the very picture of normality. And next week, he is getting married. She’s a lovely girl, a hair stylist from Ithaca, and I really want them to be happy together.”
          “Um, I don’t mean to be rude.” Click. “But I don’t see how that has anything to do with me or Pete.” Click. “And it’s not exactly like we’ve got all day for the story.” Click. “So how about cutting to the chase?” With each click we were nearer to becoming instant fossils.
          “Yes, very well. I need a gift for the wedding. But nothing that I have will do. What would they want with the steam-powered robot that once fought the Golden Paladin to a standstill in the ‘50s? What use could they have for an anti-gravity gun? Or rocket-powered boots? So instead I decided, get them something for their house. A nice tasteful decoration. But what?”
          “Wait. I think I understand. Lifelike statues of Emerson and Pete.”
          “Indeed! And none more lifelike than the originals, petrified and preserved for the ages!”
          At this moment Pete, who had stayed silent through Dr. Infamy’s monologue, spoke up with urgency. “Sheesh,” he said.
          He had a point.
          “But Dr. Infamy,” I said, explaining Pete’s objection, “if Bob and his wife are normal people, won’t they be mad that you killed an innocent ten-year-old boy?”
          “Sheesh!”
          “And an innocent bird-looking alien?”
          Dr. Infamy looked real thoughtful. Then he reached over and turned a crank. The ratcheting stopped. We were a few inches from petrifaction but it was still a relief. “You know, I never thought about that. I have lived outside society for so long that I no longer even consider their hypocritical and cowardly values.” He paused, rubbing his chin with his mechanical hand. It sounded like tinfoil crumpling. “That completely ruins my gift idea! Say, do either of you have any other suggestions?”
          “A fondue kit?” It came to mind quickly because it was so obvious.
          “That’s too obvious, no?”
          “Sheesh!”
          “Say, Pete, that’s a good idea!”
          “What did he say?”
          “He said, how about some nice ice cube trays? That’s something any new home needs!”
          “Why… that’s brilliant!”

          So Dr. Infamy let us down and untied us. He was real apologetic about the death trap thing. He even gave me a lollipop. I guess he really was a doctor. Then he drove us home. As he dropped me off he asked where he could get ice cube trays. I suggested the mall. Then me and Pete played a couple rounds of kickball.
          That night we had tacos for dinner.