New Sun Rising

Do Not Enter (or, "It's A Marshmallow World")

2012-01-14T20:57:00.006-05:00

So there I was, happily leaving Walmart with marshmallows for the hot chocolate. All in all it had been a painless visit to one of the most awful places on Earth, which in retrospect must have been divine foreshadowing.

And as I walked through the exit door through to the vestibule, approaching through the other side was the Rude family. Mr. Rude, Mrs. Rude and little Rudy Jr. The Rude family was attempting to ENTER through the same door I was trying to exit from. Or egress, if you prefer a fancy and slightly archaic vocabulary. Now the Rude family weren't merely trying to enter through the wrong door; a crime of mere social convention I commit frequently myself. No, they were determined to walk through the door side by side, BLOCKING the door from honest hard working citizens like myself who take it on good faith that they will be able to leave the building through the door marked "EXIT."

So of course I did what I always do when rude and inconsiderate people are in my way, I walked right up on them till I was about three inches outside their personal space and snarled, "excuse me." Shake your head and disapprove, but it is a surprisingly effective method of shaking the cattle from their stupor usually. In this situation a regular rude person would realize, "oh shit, we're blocking the entire door that this nice if somewhat intimidating man is trying to leave through," and step aside. Maybe even say "sorry." A regular rude person would, perhaps. Mrs. Rude was having none of it. She stood her ground and said "excuse YOU," forcing me to dodge running directly into her at the last minute like a game of chicken and continue on.

Now, I'm not the most confident person out there, and Mrs. R's clear disgust at my behavior forced me to second guess myself. Maybe, I thought, it WASN'T the exit door? Maybe on THEIR side it said "enter" and I was the rude one. Why a door would say enter on one side and exit on the other, I don't know. But retail logic is an oxymoron and this was Walmart so... maybe? Why not? I second guessed myself, which I do all the time, and I stopped and I turned around and I saw how, from this side, the door had a big red sign that says "DO NOT ENTER." And again, not that I'm a big stickler for that convention, but in this case the woman and her Rude brood were clearly in the wrong. So I said, out loud, not even for them but just because I am an out loud motherfucker, "It says Do Not Enter," and kept walking.

"Hey big guy!" I heard from behind me, but kept walking. I exited the building proper for the bitter cold of the outdoors, and I was living in some Jack London novel in my head when Mr. Rude caught up with me. "Do you have a problem?" He asked, trying to sound intimidating and rough while keeping up with my pace. Based on his ridiculous little gray mustache I was easily 20 years younger than this guy. He must have wanted to impress his wife with what a man he was.

"No, no problem now," I said, tactfully not adding that I HAD had a problem with his cunty rude wife 45 seconds prior, and that they might have a problem with first grade level reading comprehension, but that now my only problem was getting the marshmallows into some hot chocolate stat.

"Do you want me to knock your head off?" Mr. Rude kindly offered.

I replied, without missing a beat or pausing my stride, "What would I do without it?" People never know how to take it when I react flippantly to their anger and threats. Truth told, I was ready to be hit. I wasn't worried. There were like fifteen cops at the entrance to Walmart and they would break up the fight before the guy fell and broke his hip. Worse thing that would happen is I would get hit in the head, and hell if he hit me in the right spot he might loosen up this one tense knot I have on my temples. But it didn't come to that. Cooler heads prevailed. The guy was out of the line of sight of his wife, so there would be no impressing her. Actually if he got the cops involved she would probably be pissed. And it was very cold out and windy. So they guy made this really frustrated sound like "ughn!" and went back inside.

Another tense situation I entered, and exited, because of my wit.

I left Walmart and had some delicious hot chocolate. Marshmallows included. Mr. Rude went home and had to spend the rest of his days sleeping in the same bed as some idiot illiterate middle aged hag. Pretty sure I took the win on this one.

STORE SCUM

2011-11-15T21:04:00.000-05:00

To me "customer" is a bad word. If I could go the rest of my life without having to wait while some soccer mom haggles over the price while her annoying brood hold a contest to see who can scream the loudest and most blood-curdling -- If I could go the rest of my life without waiting for some inconsiderate asshole to finish balancing their checkbook at the checkout line -- If I could go the rest of my life without waiting for some ancient person to finish buying a year's worth of cat food with seemingly nothing but coupons -- If I could go the rest of my life without having to squeeze around some fat fuck who left their cart in the MIDDLE of the GODDAMN AISLE -- but I can't.

I Don't Belong Here!

2011-11-11T00:21:00.004-05:00

I keep forgetting to say anything here because I assume no one is actually reading New Sun Rising, but I have a new weekly thing going on every Friday over at the It's The Crew! blog called I Don't Belong Here. It's actually been going on since the beginning of August, so I really fell asleep on plugging it on my own blog. Raise your hand if you noticed. Anyway, you can play catch up here --

IN DEFENSE OF RAPE JOKES (8-5-11)
WE MUST DESTROY THE EARTH (8-12-11)
JUSTIFY MY HATE (8-19-11)
WAR IS A GOOD THING (8-26-11)
HIP-HIP-HYPOCRISY! (9-2-11)
I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT 9-11 (9-9-11)
MINOR HERESIES FOR THE MODERN AGE (9-16-11)
SOME BITS FROM "THINGS I HAVE LEARNED" (9-23-11)
BREAST CANCER, BREAST SCHMANCER (9-30-11)
COLUMBUS CAN EAT A DICK (10-7-11)
HATE (10-14-11)
MY PERSONAL PANTHEON (or some of them) (10-21-11)
THE JOY OF THE RUBBER BAND GUN (10-28-11)
I DON'T VOTE (11-4-11)
NO SOLDIER GAVE ME MY FREEDOM (11-11-11)

No prize for noticing that some of these are blatant reprints from this blog. I just said it right the first time, is all.

The Lazy Man's Nefarious Plan

2011-10-19T23:54:00.002-04:00

Step One: Let everyone know you have a nefarious plan.

Step Two: Don't have any plan. Sit back and do nothing.

Step Three: Every so often, as events take their course, cryptically comment that everything is going according to plan.

Church!

2011-10-02T16:52:00.002-04:00

There's people that actually, honestly believe there is a fairy-tale magic man with a beard in the sky watching their every move, and that if they don't all come together in a room once a week and let some guy read to them out of a book that's so old people didn't even know the world was round when it was written; that unless they pretend not to be bored during this weekly reading, that the magic beard man will throw them into flames FOREVER. Quaint, no?

The Other End Of History

2011-08-23T15:00:00.002-04:00

Finally, as far as all of this goes -- the world affairs, the religious disputes, the toils of mankind at this day and age -- as far as all that, we are so early in the era of human history and development that the time will come that everything that is happening today will be as relevant and consequential as the tribulations of the early Cro-Magnons are to us now. And since all of time is happening at once, if these events WILL BE irrelevant SOME DAY, that day is now. They are completely irrelevant.

Many will listen, but few will hear.

People Are Morons

2011-08-11T23:34:00.003-04:00

People are morons. It's pretty amazing that we're as smart as we are in comparison to other animals, true, but mostly it's frustrating that we're just smart enough to see that we're not smart enough. If people weren't morons, they wouldn't need to invent religions to keep themselves organized. If people weren't morons, they wouldn't need to invent governments and laws to keep them from raping and robbing one another. When you look at us as really clever chimps in clothes, our accomplishments are quaint and impressive. When you look at us as, quite possibly, the highest developed manifestation of intelligence in the universe, suddenly you get depressed. The next step is to invent a god that's smarter than you, so you don't have to be depressed anymore. And it all starts again....

I Don't Want To Hear About Your Fucking Kids

2011-07-16T23:10:00.000-04:00

Stop acting like reproducing is some major achievement or accomplishment. It's not. It's a biological process, built in through billions of years of evolution. You yourself had barely anything to do with it. Hey, do you know what else is capable of reproducing its' species? EVERY OTHER FORM OF LIFE ON THIS PLANET. They ALL reproduce. Earthworms reproduce. Goldfish reproduce. Dogs reproduce... or they would, except we keep neutering them.

The Human Mind

2011-05-27T19:09:00.002-04:00

Some people will kill for money.
Humans created money.
The human mind that is capable of creating money is more valuable than any sum of money can be.
Some people will kill for their country.
Humans created countries.
The human mind that is capable of creating countries is more valuable than any country can be.

On Current Events

2011-05-02T19:04:00.006-04:00

I was going to write about how disappointed I was that Obama caved and produced his birth certificate. Stooping to enter an argument that is so ridiculous with people that dumb, even when you win, you lose. But before I could get off my procastination platform the news overtook my social commentary. We killed Osama bin Laden!

And by we, I mean, the United States military. Personally I had nothing to do with it. But still, what a win! Except, wait, the war's still going on. But anyway, forget that for a moment. What a great day to be an American! That man was a monster and committed atrocities. Except, oh, yeah, we armed and funded and trained him and set him loose on the world. But besides that, isn't it a proud moment that we... well, we could have brought him into custody and held him on trial for war crimes or whatever, and then executed him like what happened to Saddam Hussein. But instead we shot him in the head and dumped him in the ocean. Because THAT isn't exactly the same way they killed Jason Voorhees for like ten movies. So probably Osama is dead now. We identified him by DNA evidence. And then dumped him in the ocean.

So that in a few months, or whenever, when they need a bogeyman to keep the war going and fuel the military-industrial complex's fat coffers, they can trot Osama out again and claim he wasn't actually --

(Sounds of forced entry, scuffle and struggle.)

-- like I was saying, the royal wedding. Wasn't it like a REAL-LIFE FAIRY TALE?

the story of knuckles, a triumph of the spirit

2011-04-25T01:44:00.001-04:00

(from google chat: march 12, 2008)
so i have an idea for a movie
it's called "Knuckles: A Triumph Of The Heart"
it concerns this young teenager named knuckles
aka clyde smith
and all knuckles wants to do is make fun of the host of the local cb radio show
"crazy george"
so one day, at a big event, knuckles is surrrounded by his friends at a party. cigars, babes, kegs. knuckles is going to prank call.
but "crazy george" picks up the phone
and says "hey knuckles, suck my cock!" with a british accent
this is all act one
so now knuckles is distraught
all the people who were cheering him on have abandoned him
alone in the room
sad
forlorn
dejected
end act one
beginning of act two
fast forward 3 months
knuckles is unkempt and unshaven, falls out of closet when alarm clock goes off
trudges over to kitchen, pours beer, ovaltine and a raw egg in a blender and drinks it down.
his two friends, "Roger Snoel" and "Cash Scottin" come to see him
give him pep talk
he can still prank call crazy joe
i mean george
pat him on the back
give him pep talk basically
go to montage
knuckles training with blair marvin in improvised wit and verbal intimidation
cash scottin rolls a fat blunt
montage music plays
probably throw a girl into the movie, they always do
anyway
act 3
the big day
the room is dark except for candlelight
knuckles calls crazy george of the 904 radio show
ready for his rematch
the phone rings
you could hear a pin drop
rings again
the orchestra swells
crazy george answers
"thank you for calling the 904 radio shooooo!"
"this is that nigga knuckles, aka clyde smith"
"hey knuckles, suck my cock!"
"why do you want me to suck your cock? what are you? i know who you are. i know what you're up to. 18 willow street. i know what yall niggas is doing!"
"i know who you are!"
"you don't know me! i'm from the streets!"
"you're a nigger! you're a white man pretending to be a nigger, you nigger!"
"aiyyo, crazy george, need to quit playin. that racist shit needs to stop. it's on. you and me. i don't man, i don't know."
"i know who you are! you're a nigger etc."
"you, 18 willow st. I know what you're up to! shit ain't even playing no more man, shit aint even funny. 3:00 after school, you and me, in the parking lot."
click
his friends pat him on the back
the fickle crowd cheers
the girl who had previously scorned him now wants the diddick
but he pushes her away
"bros before hos, beeyotch! this is knuckles, aka clyde smith!"
the end

The Political Spectrum Is A Polite Fiction

2011-04-11T19:32:00.001-04:00

I always get very suspicious when people say "liberal this" or "conservative that" when both positions, politically and philosophically, are utterly fucking retarded. Liberals say everyone should be free to choose, but then they want to make you wear a bike helmet. Conservatives say they want less government, until gays want to get married, then they want laws against it. I don't think either side actually believes what they claim they believe. I think it is ancient primate clique-ish behavior with a new paint job so we can pretend we're not still chimps throwing shit at one another. So we can pretend we're civilized. I swear to god anarchy sounds better and better every day.

I Don't Trust Religion

2011-04-11T13:51:00.001-04:00

I don't trust religion, in the sense of "moral and spiritual codes imposed on me by other people." I don't trust people, and I don't trust the codes they follow and are attempting to impose on me. I don't trust that they have any knowledge of a higher power or a greater force or an advanced intelligence, and I certainly don't trust that the codes that they follow and are attempting to impose on me are derived from these higher powers or greater forces or advanced intelligences.

As near as I can tell the chief function of religion is to sever the individual from their own internal and personal sense of spirituality and replace it with mechanical codes of behavior and the old primate dominance-submission games, the better to turn a never-ending series of wild, anarchic, more-unique-than-snowflakes individuals into drones and interchangeable parts -- insects, essentially -- the better to set them in motion as the great machine Society.

But we are not insects. We are individuals. I don't trust any religion that is not personal.

Me And Food

2011-04-06T01:07:00.006-04:00

My mom became diabetic when I was like five or so, so all of a sudden
all the house foods became super boring. Like, Honey Nut Cheerios was the wildest cereal we ever got. Oh, and Cinnamon Life -- both of which I like, but I never got to have the kids-eating-awful-kid-cereal-when-they're-kids experience. We got like Total and shit. And Common Sense Oat Bran, which looked and tasted like twigs from the backyard. Mmmmmmm. Then I got put on the intestinal colic diet, and then on the low cholesterol diet, and each time the food got even more boring. I reacted by, the moment I hit 18 and started buying my own food, descending into a never-ending spiral of beef jerky and Froot Loops.

I did it in reverse: everyone else got to eat nasty disgusting but fun foods when they were kids, then they grow up and start going on the Atkins diet or whatever. I on the other hand had a very healthy childhood, but will spend the rest of my life eating junk. Which will undoubtedly shorten "the rest of my life," but fuck it, who wants to eat fucking Total cereal? And drink diet soda? When I go diabetic, I will lapse peacefully into a coma... PULL THE PLUG!

RETAIL (a quick sociological breakdown)

2011-04-05T22:10:00.003-04:00

Fucking retail. It pays like four bucks an hour and is thankless work for people who get treated as sub-human by helpless and rude people all day. So, the only kind of workers it gets are:

A) high school kids on their way to (maybe) something better

B) people who have some talent or skill or intelligence but are held back by personal demons or poor life choices or some form of mental or emotional illness

C) utter fucking morons that literally can't do anything else EVEN MORE than they can't do retail competently.

And that's it.

COLUMBUS CAN EAT A DICK

2011-03-11T01:44:00.001-05:00

Fuck Columbus. The dude deserves zero accolades. ZERO! Leave it to the fucking Catholics to ram this asshole down everyone's throats, if I may mix metaphors for a moment.

I mean, everything they teach you about this guy is a lie. It's not that he was the only one that thought the world was round and everyone else thought it was flat... EVERYONE KNEW THE WORLD WAS ROUND! Since like the ancient Greeks! And okay, some people probably still thought it was flat, so what? Some people today do too -- look up the "Flat Earth Society" and see what I mean.

What Columbus thought, and what he was terribly wrong about, was that the Earth was much smaller than it was -- and being so small, that it was therefore feasible to sail ALL THE WAY AROUND THE GLOBE to get to Asia. Which, it was not. Everyone said, "No, don't do it, the Earth's bigger than you think, you'll get lost in the huge ocean." And indeed, if he hadn't hit this general landmass -- WHOLLY BY LUCK -- he would probably still be floating around somewhere with the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa fucking María.

So the guy has one bright idea that he is completely wrong about, cons the one royal family who will listen to his madness into giving him ships, stumbles by dumb luck across the New World -- and immediately? Immediately? HE BEGINS WIPING OUT AND ENSLAVING THE LOCAL POPULATION. Like, I'm not even sure he waited until the next day.

This man, this Christopher Columbus, did NOTHING that deserves merit and much that deserves scorn, or at least to be seen as an example of what NOT to do. Eat a dick, Columbus.

Anarchism In Text And Action

2011-03-06T23:07:00.000-05:00

Verbatim from a recent text message exchange:

Anyway grandma I thought you would appreciate a reason to drive even slower than usual

Drive slower? I go up to 7 over the limit. Dont have mommy and daddy to bail me out when i get tickets
Served
With a radish on top

Fuck that
I pay my own tickets
When they take my license i drive anyway
Because fuck them
And fuck you

Thats awesome. First they take the license, then they cancel insurance (cant have one without the other), the they impound your car. Have fun with that while making a "point"

Weak
I have had license suspended twice
Kept driving like nothing
And
I was uninsured for like a year
Nothing happened
No one punished me
The sky didn't open up and rain policemen and jail cells on me
So basically
Eat my ass with a radish you troll
Taking the "laws" seriously
How's that working out, felon? Maybe you should be more like me....

On The Subconscious (Another Excerpt From "Things I Have Learned")

2011-02-28T01:13:00.002-05:00

Unconsciousness is your mind on standby mode. Most external input is disabled or turned down really low. But you never stop thinking. Or rather, the thought processes keeps going on, but at some point there just stops being a “you” that’s thinking it. I would imagine dreams then as quite likely the ego’s attempt to exert some sort of narrative control over the stream of white noise think-babbling, dropping a protagonist into the back alleys of the subconscious. And really, who the hell knows what’s there? The subconscious is the “wrong side of the tracks” of the mind, where the unseen workers live in tenement buildings, and in every dark alleyway is some cold, unemployed old subroutine or memory just waiting to pounce on a hapless ego to vent its frustrations.

Or, less dramatically, dreams are quite likely the equivalent of the songs you might hear in your head when there’s white noise (like a window fan or TV static) playing. Significantly, this white noise effect most often happens while you are falling asleep, as if your mind’s ability to transform noise into signal increases as consciousness loses its control. A good image: the trains of thought running amok when the conductor (consciousness) passes out on the controls. Or, another view of the subconscious: the subconscious is like the Windows 3 \WINDOWS\ directory, where every file needed by every program ever run on that system collected. These files would stay on after the programs are no longer installed, obsolete leaves in a forest of possibly-relevant files. Every so often Windows users would simply have to reinstall the operating system and start fresh because the \WINDOWS\ directory became too bogged down by useless files. I wonder what the equivalent for re-installing your subconscious would be?

Catholicism Is Laaaaaame

2011-02-17T05:06:00.007-05:00

The Vatican sits on zillions of $$$ worth of art treasures and shit. Jesus said to give away all your possessions. And that, right there, is what I think about the Catholics -- they don't even follow the guy they follow. And like, okay, I don't follow Jesus's every teaching either. But-- I am a flawed human who sees him as merely a teacher to attempt to follow, and I understand that I will sometimes fail or disagree. I don't see him as, you know, THE LITERAL PHYSICAL MANIFESTATION OF THE CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE HERE ON THIS EARTH TO TELL US HOW IT IS. So I am okay to not follow his every word. If I actually believed that he was FUCKING GOD? I would HANG ON HIS EVERY FUCKING SYLLABLE. And if GOD, the CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE, told me to give away all my possessions, fuck yeah I would! I would do EXACTLY what God wanted me to do to get me into heaven! Now since I don't believe in any of that stuff except as metaphors I am free to pick and choose and try and fail. I don't have a code provided for me from an external source. These lames think they have the code -- AND THEN THEY IGNORE IT. Lame!

A Rhyme I Came Up With In The Shower Just Now

2011-02-07T15:21:00.002-05:00

Kill my brain with chronic
Get a low I.Q.
Then, when I'm moronic
I'll be so like you...

Where No Law Is

2011-01-25T13:33:00.001-05:00

"For where no law is, there is no transgression"
(Romans 4:15)
Words on paper exist. People in blue uniforms with guns and truncheons and cars with flashing lights exist. People in black robes with funny little wooden mallets exist. Cages exist.

If you do not follow the words on the paper, someone with a blue uniform will take you, in their flashing light car, to put you in a cage until someone with a black robe figures out what to do with you.

And yet I say to you, that law does not exist.

Nuns Are Crap

2011-01-22T23:05:00.004-05:00

Nuns are crap.

I'm just going to pause and let you digest that. I can hear your brain cells -- both of them -- starting to rub against one another and create the thought of protest or outrage. Kindly leave such thoughts to yourself and hear me out.

I realize we've all of us, in this culture -- and not just the Catholics, neither -- been programmed to think of nuns as being somehow better human beings or something. It's never something that's put in words exactly but it is definitely something we wind up internalizing somewhere along the way.

And why? Nuns are like the most worthless people on the planet. They provide nothing, they create nothing, they contribute nothing. They pay no taxes. Their life-giving wombs are denied use by their vows of chastity so they don't even manage to put new humans here. Nothing. They just wear their funny outfits and they believe their quaint myths and they expect the rest of us to treat them as special because they took some vows to their made up god and dress up like penguins.

Anyone else was such a gigantic waste of space and resources and air and they would be seen as dead beat degenerate scum, it's not even a question. But all of a sudden they're part of some freaky cult and it's okay?

Nuns are crap. That's my word.

A Degenerate Rush (2003)

2011-01-21T22:40:00.001-05:00

Have enough and soon it shifts to absurd
Senses drift and merge
I guess it's best to rest a bit
Repetitious
Reminiscent of a
Record skip
Deja vu jackhammer
Happened all before
Then the narrative is lost in the roar
Come to sprawled across the floor
And that's end of the trip

A Mad Bastard Language: My Love For English

2011-01-12T02:02:00.005-05:00

English is a crazy language, but I love it.

It's a mad bastard language; a cobbling together of Germanic Anglo-Saxon syntax as a skeleton but with vocabulary from EVERYWHERE. Mostly the words were stolen from various Romance languages but English words literally come from all over. So there's no standardized phonetic spelling, half the verbs are conjugated irregularly, and because of its rich heritage and theft of other languages there are like eighteen terms for any one concept and it's hard to express the differences. Or there's a word like "set" that seriously means like 47 different things depending on the context it is used in.

There's simply no other language like it. There's others that are perhaps equally mad in their own right, but none mad the way that English is mad. English is mad like some patchwork Frankenstein monster that is at the same time beautiful and vulgar.

Also? I love English because English was the language of a forgotten, beaten and defeated people. So downtrodden that the Anglo-Saxon terms for simple bodily functions were deemed "bad" words (fuck, shit, piss) while their Latin-based counterparts (fornicate, defecate, urinate) were made acceptable. The English people at one point were ruled by people that spoke French. The English king didn't even speak English. That's low.

Today? EVERYONE speaks English. Or thinks they do. So all the haters back then AND now can eat a dick. Or, if that's bad words, "consume a phallus."

Violence Is Not The Answer

2011-01-11T11:52:00.003-05:00

An act of violence creates a situation for which the easiest, most natural, and most often response is another act of violence. But two wrongs do not make a right. One and one do not make zero, they make two. The responding act of violence also creates a situation for which the easiest, most natural, and most often response is yet another act of violence. Which would itself in turn create a situation for which the easiest most natural dot dot dot. You have probably heard of this looping dance of action and reaction before. It is called "the cycle of violence." The inevitable outcome of the cycle of violence, carried through to its logical conclusion, is violence for all. Maximum destruction with minimum creation. It's what Gandhi foresaw when he said that an eye for an eye would leave everyone blind. The only way to end this cycle is to absorb it when it comes your way and not pass it along further. When someone slaps your cheek, turn to them your other cheek as well. That's a pretty bold concept. So bold that when Jesus tried to tell everyone about it back in the day, they responded... with violence. Forgive them for they know not what they do, and try not to add to the mess. Violence is not the answer.

1 - 1 = 1

2010-12-28T23:44:00.000-05:00

I'm a hole. I'm deep, and I'm dark, but I'm empty.

The Bit About The Government

2010-12-22T04:06:00.000-05:00

Everyone is born with a certain measure of personal power. Most people, cowed with fear of death (which comes anyway) opt to give up their power to the nearest armed and charismatic "leader." Enough people do this and something like "government" seems to emerge.

Every Story Is Not A Love Story

2010-12-22T01:05:00.001-05:00

I hate how Hollywood always seems to add a stupid love angle to every single movie they make, as if every event that happens in someone's life that's memorable or worth telling has to revolve around some mating rituals. Like that's the only story there is. I mean, I appreciate pair-bonding as much as the next domesticated primate, but come on. Every story is not a love story. That's ridiculous.

The Problem

2010-12-21T15:01:00.000-05:00

The parroted platitudes of my peers provide no peace, no pleasure, no purpose.

The Gluurg Conjectures

2010-12-21T01:16:00.001-05:00

Of all the religious concepts I have created and toyed with in the years -- and it is strange to realize how many I have created, from the Book of Spoons to the Church of the Auto-Deity to Nasirology to Crypto-Solipsism -- out of all of them, probably my proudest moment was the creation of Gluurg. Gluurg is just like God, you see. Except he's not God, he's Gluurg. Later on I ret-conned that Gluurg stood for something. Galactic Lifeform Universal Something Something Something. I believe the proper term is "backronym." But really there was no meaning. I liked the sound of Gluurg. I liked spelling it with the double u. The point of Gluurg is that Gluurg means nothing. Because Gluurg is just like God. Except he's not God, he's Gluurg.

It's like this. Every time some true believer makes a statement about God, replace "God" with "Gluurg" and see if it still sounds reasonable or if it sounds nuts:

Gluurg is the uncaused cause.
Gluurg moves in mysterious ways.
Gluurg is love.
Gluurg knows all, and sees all.
Gluurg is infinitely merciful and infinitely just.
Gluurg created the heavens and the earth in six days.
Gluurg exists outside of time and space.
Gluurg is transcendent and immanent in all things.
It's in the Bible, Gluurg said it, that settles it.

And what you wind up with, is a description of a character that sounds something like a cross between a Jack Kirby super-hero and the guy from those Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man In The World" commercials. Someone making these sort of statements about this sort of character with a straight face would be necessarily insane in some variety.

This was the whole point of Gluurg. "Gluurg" is a syllable the same way "god" is. It is an accident of history and culture that the single syllable we use to express the concept of deity is "god" rather than "gluurg." So why would one syllable make for statements that sound credible to most of the populace, and the other one take on a completely different connotation?

(pictured: "Gluurg" by the author, 2002)

Random Drug Memories

2010-12-19T03:25:00.003-05:00

So I ate an entire bag of mushrooms, and I spent hours seeing paisley patterns emerging apparent from the background. And it made me realize, this is why the hippies were putting paisley on everything in the 60s, they must have been seeing these same patterns when THEY were tripping. Oh god, they know, they know, I don't want to die, I'm not ready, oh god I'm going to die... So then what IS that pattern and why would it emerge independently under the same chemical stimulus?

Took DXM in pill form. Robo-tripping without having to actually down any cough syrup. Just remember sobbing. Passion by Peter Gabriel was playing. I was sobbing. I don't remember vomiting but I remember that I did.

One time I smoked some PCP and I watched A Fistful Of Dollars. Or was it For A Few Dollars More? Every time I tell this story the movie changes. Anyway, the thing I found most interesting about PCP was how overrated it was. Every time you hear the story about PCP it's like, "Man on PCP kills ENTIRE FAMILY!" "He tore out their eyes with a plastic spork!" "The cops kept pumping bullets into him and he just kept coming at them!" And when I smoked PCP? It changed my thought patterns a little. Or a lot. Hard to say. I just remember this one time, watching the movie, and I was thinking of these lizards, emerging from the mud like a Claymation version of Escher, emerging from the mud and building cities.

Two words: Seroquel. Dreams.

I was getting teeth pulled. Wisdom teeth, maybe? No, couldn't have been, that was years earlier. Doesn't matter. Anyway, they knocked me out for it and when I woke up, the first thing I said was, "I've figured everything out!" The worst thing is, I'm sure that I had.

The first time I really got high, I mean REALLY got high, was pretty late in life. I'd just gone through some pretty traumatic, life-altering times and all of a sudden there's drugs right there in front of me. Call it cliche, but call it cliche while you're blowing me. And so I was really high, and I was TERRIFIED. Nothing made sense, and I couldn't connect one moment to the next. Things were happening and I couldn't narratize them or place them in context. Maybe I'm still there now.

The Bit About Cyber Monday & Black Friday

2010-12-16T00:08:00.002-05:00

"Cyber Monday" has got to seriously be like the dumbest fucking name ever. I mean, at least Black Friday SOUNDS cool. And why? Because EVERYTHING sounds cool if you put "black" in front of it. Black sun. Black hole. Black lung. Black death. Black plague. Black magic. Black cloud. Whereas NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING sounds cool with "cyber" in front of it. Was I the only one paying attention during the 1990s?

Candid Bicamera

2010-12-14T12:23:00.000-05:00

I don't really know who I am. The problem is, there seem to be two of me.

One is a sweet little boy with a genuinely good heart. He totally and sincerely believes that people are basically good, so he tries to see the best in everyone. He wants to help them. He cried when Optimus Prime died.

The other is a monster with a black and twisted center. He dismisses everyone as idiots to be despised or tools to be manipulated. He wants to hurt them. He laughed when the Twin Towers fell.

But. The boy thinks the monster is a mask he created to keep himself safe from all the cruel people around him.

And the monster thinks the boy is a con game, a paint job to deceive people and misrepresent himself.

It's been going on for so long that I can't remember which, if either, actually came first.

The Elba That's In My Head

2010-12-09T20:17:00.003-05:00

I am the stone that the builders rejected. The monkey with the wire mother. Exiled from the flock. And everything that I have done, every move that I take, every decision that I make, every choice, every path, every step along the way, has been informed by this knowledge that I. Do. Not. Belong.

Com'st' Thou To Beard Me In Denmark?: Facial Hair And The Tragedy Of Hamlet

2010-12-07T22:44:00.001-05:00

Continuing in the mission of shining the light of day on EVERY half passable piece I ever wrote, here's one I did for an English class all the way back in 1998:

Insanity is a very hard label to pin on someone; no two people can totally agree on what its parameters are. Moreover, someone can be insane in one aspect yet totally sane in others -- what than is this person, mad or not? Thus, it is of course impossible to with any certainty decide whether or not Hamlet, the main character of William Shakespeare’s famous The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is mad. A character as complex as Hamlet’s would be difficult to correctly diagnose in a person-to-person analysis, let alone through the filter of a play written about him.

However, impossible to ascertain or not, it is my contention that Hamlet did indeed go mad, or at least delusional, for a short period of time, as the result of sudden and extreme psychological stress in his life. Why do I feel that this is the case? For numerous reasons, as all supported throughout the text.

For one, Hamlet’s mood changes abruptly throughout the course of the play. His behavior throughout the play, especially towards Ophelia, is exceptionally erratic. He claims to be the only one who truly loved Ophelia, during the fight with Laertes in her grave (I.ii.216-218), but he tells Ophelia herself that he never loved her, when she returns his letters (II.iii.116). Also, on the subject of the fight with Laertes in the grave, Hamlet instigates the fight because Laertes said none loved Ophelia more than he, which Hamlet disagreed with. As quantitative love is a purely subjective matter, this is hardly grounds for a quarrel, at least not in the judgment of a sane person. But in my opinion the strongest evidence of Hamlet’s growing insanity is in Act III, scene iv. First, in what he later admits to be a state of madness, (V.ii.197) he kills Polonius, thinking him to be the King Claudius, and when he discovers his mistake, shows little remorse. Even worse, while conversing with his mother, he sees again the vision of his father’s ghost. Now, every other time the ghost has appeared, others have seen it as well (I.i, I.iv). However, in his mother’s room, he is the only one to see it. Is it possible that Hamlet is by this point mad, and is merely hallucinating the apparition? In of itself, this instance could be interpreted numerous ways. But when weighed with other evidence, this is indeed clear proof of Hamlet’s derangement.

So, Hamlet is insane, if only temporarily. Why than is he insane? Numerous reasons can be cited as possible cause. The sudden death of his beloved father, King Hamlet, followed soon after by the marriage of his mother to his uncle. This makes Hamlet uncomfortable, and his only escape, his school at Wittenberg, is denied him. Which is followed soon after by the appearance of his father’s ghost, who tells Hamlet of the treachery surrounding the King’s death, and sets Hamlet on his course of vengeance, which makes Hamlet paranoid and trusting of no one. This in turn makes Hamlet decide to pretend to be mad, in an effort to properly exercise his revenge; and when one acts mad, one often finds themselves becoming that which they pretend to be. Hamlet’s girlfriend Ophelia suddenly spurning and ignoring him must have been another blow to his psyche as well. Finally, on top of all of this, there is the threat of war with Norway.

I believe these elements all were indeed factors in Hamlet’s temporary loss of reason. However, I do not believe that even this series of traumatic events could have felled the mind of a man as grounded as Hamlet were it not for some other, deeper factor. And that factor is this: facial hair. I believe that Hamlet the play is infused with the subtext of Hamlet’s desire for a better beard.

That Hamlet thinks beards are an important aspect of a man’s character is undeniable. In his soliloquy in Act II, scene ii, lines 474-533, in which he berates himself for his inability to express his emotion, he says "Am I a coward? Who calls me villain? … Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face? (lines 497-499)" The implication here is that his beard is being plucked, metaphorically, because his cowardice makes him unworthy of having a beard. Plus, when Polonius demonstrates cretinous behavior by complaining about they player’s speech in the same scene (line 434), Hamlet responds by saying "It shall to the barber's, with your beard." In other words, cretins such as Polonius aren’t worthy of their beards.

Looking closer, we see Hamlet as a man obsessed with beards. When told of his father’s ghost’s appearance, practically the first question he asks about the ghost is "His beard was grizzled- no? (I.ii.240)" He obviously had great veneration for his father, and the good king’s beard, surely a majestic and regal one. When King Hamlet died, there was an immense beard gap in Elsinore, one hardly filled by the loathsome Claudius or the youthful Hamlet. Thus, the greatest beard in Elsinore now unfortunately goes to the King’s counselor, Polonius, a "tedious old fool" in Hamlet’s estimation (II.ii.211). When the ghost appears to him, it only reminds Hamlet that a great beard is gone, and the present King’s is no match, nor is Hamlet’s. This unsettles Hamlet to the point where all he can think about is beards. He thinks that Ophelia is spurning him because of his beard’s inferiority to her father Polonius’s, in of itself an upsetting notion. Also, in his talk with his mother (III.iv), Hamlet shows his mother pictures of the brothers Hamlet and Claudius. Why else but to compare King Hamlet’s regal beard, "A sable silver'd (I.ii.241)," with Claudius’s lesser one, "..like a mildewed ear… (III.iv.64)."

Amid all the other stress in his life to this date, the pressure to have a good beard and live up to his father’s is great. He cracks under the stress. Why would he pretend to be insane to find his father’s killer? How would that help? No, he tells Horatio that he is going to feign an "antic disposition, (I.iv.172)" and convinces himself that he is merely pretending to be mad, to cover up for the fact that he obviously is going insane from the stress to grow a better beard than he is currently able to. Horatio notices it early on, referring to Hamlet as speaking "wild and whirling words (I.v.133)." In pretending to be mad, Hamlet slowly does go mad, culminating in the murder of Polonius. However, Hamlet becomes more or less totally sane again after his return from England — it follows that with Polonius dead, Hamlet has the best beard in Elsinore, thus making him able to live up to his father’s bearded legacy. The stress to have the best beard has been lifted off of Hamlet’s over-burdened shoulders, and his reason returns.

Alas, it is too late for Hamlet. By the time his much-vaunted bearded status comes, he is already soon to be a victim of the plot machinery his madness helped set in motion. He dies, and in his dying breath tells Horatio that the crown is to go to the Norwegian Prince Fortinbras. Thus, Fortinbras must have had a pretty impressive beard as well, which Fortinbras himself remarks upon, citing it as his right to the throne of Denmark. "I have some rights of memory in this kingdom, Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me (V.ii.354-355)."

The beard has long been associated with masculinity; as only the males of a species can achieve one. The pressure in a male-dominated society to prove one’s manhood is great indeed. However, besides Hamlet I can think of no great works of literature in which the fatal flaw of weak facial hair plays so central of a role.

Peterpanarchy

2010-12-02T02:12:00.000-05:00

I am still in this phase where I look like I am still in my 20s, passably, and I can most easily relate to people in their 20s or late teens over the boring compromising hypocrites my age with their sad little hobbies and their domestic "bliss." And it's like one of those movies -- if I ever get out of that phase I will all of a sudden age those decades INSTANTLY -- and you'll be like, the revolution is happening, Noel, and I'll be like, oh no, what will that do to my 401k? Or, oh, I can't come to the communal melding of minds into one godlike being, guys, the wife says it's romantic movie night. But would you like to see some pictures of my kids while I drone on about every thing they do like it is seriously the most fascinating event in human history? I would hope someone would have the decency to put me down. I have done everything I could while I was younger to sabotage that future before it could happen by accident. Dropped out of college. Burned bridges. Drove away anyone dumb enough to want to mate with me. Drifted from shitty job to shitty job. No stability. No comfort. Which is what happens: they get comfortable and their minds shut off. And they get old.

Everyone Is Out To Get Me (a charming ditty)

2010-12-01T21:31:00.001-05:00

everyone is out to get me
and i don't know what to do
everyone is out to get me
for what i've got no clue
everyone is out to get me
don't deny it's true
so are you
so are you

everyone is out to get me
and i don't know why
everyone is out to get me
'till the day i die
everyone is out to get me
and it ain't no lie
so am i
so am i

NXIL2

2010-12-01T01:30:00.010-05:00

Or, start here. I can recall quite distinctly the day that I first realized that my life was over. The memory like an old photograph, faded and yellowed. I was eleven years old, standing in my grade school gymnasium waiting to be dismissed.

Okay, I thought, I will have to be in school for like another decade or so. Then I have to get a job. Then I will work until I'm old enough to retire, and then ultimately, I am going to die. I was only eleven years old and my life was already over. Whatever path I took, whatever steps I chose, just wouldn't matter. It was always too late. I was strapped into this ride and it could only be heading to the grave. My life had barely begun and now, it was over. This thought, this realization, infected me. I left that grade school gymnasium that afternoon a different child, one with all hope and ambition vacuumed clean from me. I had become poisoned with the futility of the future. Decayed.

Ever since then I have lived my life in this Schrodinger's cat, simultaneously-alive-and-dead state. While my body slowly travels through the book chapter by chapter my mind has already skipped ahead to the last page.

And it's. Always. The same.

Outlier Blues, Now With 100% More Line Breaks

2010-11-12T23:00:00.001-05:00

i have so many things only happen to me
that sometimes i think
the reason i am here
is for statistics
so all those things that have to happen to someone
will happen to me
weird, outlying stuff
that only happens to me
like somehow i am balancing the cosmic books
DAMN IT
other times i think everyone has weird shit that only happens to them
and i am the only one that talks about it

A Leg For A Leg Leaves Everyone Lame (an expansion on a theme that needs no expansion)

2010-11-08T21:04:00.000-05:00

See, it's like this. Someone kills you. So I kill them. So then their brother kills me. So then Attila kills that guy. And his son grows up and kills Attila. So the MOB pound that kid out and dump his body somewhere. And his peeps come looking for the MOB. So now Kidd-Dogg and T-Owl are out looking for those guys. Pretty soon everyone is in a state of perpetual vendetta, a pyramid scheme that can end only when everyone is dead. Study the first five minutes of The Godfather Part II or the last five minutes of Hamlet. It's a flawed philosophy.

I Don't Vote

2010-11-02T20:39:00.004-04:00

I get so mad when I see people say ignorant things like "If you don't vote, you can't complain" and other similar bumper-sticker slogans. By my thinking, it is exactly the other way around. If you DO vote, if you pull the lever that signifies your endorsement of a corrupt, rigged system --

-- and let me stop right there for some expounding. Exposition. Whatever. When I say the system is corrupt and it is rigged, I am not speaking (only) about the current United States political landscape. I'm not talking about how this isn't a true democracy but an elitist republic. I'm not talking about particular individuals running for particular offices, or whatever particular parties they belong to. I am beyond all that shit. Waiting at the finish line, chirp chirp. When I say the system is corrupt and rigged I mean literally, the SYSTEM is corrupt and rigged. The very concept of government is FLAWED AT ITS CORE. I have made this argument so many times in so many places that you can go look it up and stop bugging me. Made sense thousands of years ago, sure, now it's time for something new. Don't know what that something new is. Just trying to remind people there's options.

So I guess what I'm saying is, lead yourself. If you pick someone else to make decisions for you -- and this is what government is, make no mistake. Look up "social contract" theory sometime. I don't agree with the social contract either but even there it is implicit that the individual cedes their individual liberties and their individual responsibilities to the government. Made sense thousands of years ago. And sure, democracy (or whatever this is) at least allows you to CHOOSE the person you allow to be lorded over you. But still. If you choose someone to lord over you, and it doesn't work out, THAT'S YOUR FAULT. Shoulda done for delf. Burned the whole thing down and started over. The system is rigged and corrupt and everything it does it does to benefit the system and never you. But hey, at least you contributed with your vote, right? Wrong. If you pick someone else to make decisions for you, you have no right to complain when they make decisions you don't approve of. And before you say "But I voted for the UDDER guy!" remember this is more complex then simple political parties and empty campaign promises. If, with your vote, you buy into a system that allows some people to be lorded over some other people, it doesn't matter whether it's "your" guy or "their" guy that gets in. Someone's gonna be doing some lording. If you accept this, you are part of the problem and have no right to complain. Period.

One for you, one for me, one for the kids (3 things I wrote today)

2010-10-24T21:48:00.011-04:00

My Scandal In Bohemia

She's my scandal in Bohemia.
Doomed, damned and beautiful.
And I, her guilty secret.
She loves me.

A Terrible Liberation

I don't know if I hate the world because I don't belong, or if I don't belong because I hate the world. Either way, I hate the world, and either way, I don't belong. It's a terrible liberation. But at least it's mine.

These Things Called Seasons

See kids, when I was a little boy, we had these things called "seasons." There were four of them. And each one had a specific temperature range and weather pattern. Like, you know how it goes from 70 degrees one day to 40 degrees the next day and then 60 degrees a day later? It was sort of like that... except it took MONTHS.

The Restaurant Bit

2010-10-20T19:22:00.002-04:00

Another good piece that I cut loose:

HART
How was work?

PAULIE
It was crap. Jehovah's Witnesses are the cheapest people ever.

HART
Please not this again.

PAULIE
No, no, let me finish. Everyone says Jews are cheap, and that Indians are cheap, and, okay, yeah, sure, you know what? They are. But Jehovah's Witnesses? Make them all seem as frugal as Paris Hilton!

HART
I can't take you anywhere.

PAULIE
I'm serious! The cheap bastards don't want to pay for room service, and they don't want to pay the tip at the restaurant, so they all come down at once and line up to order their meals to go. All at once. The kitchen was total chaos!

SKIP
Paulie, you are like the klutziest person I ever met. How do you even work in a kitchen without falling onto the knife rack or landing face first in a burner or something?

PAULIE
In the kitchen I am as graceful as the majestic swan.

(He attempts a pirouette and knocks something else over.)

Shaggy Doggerel

2010-10-15T08:51:00.002-04:00

I'm filled with trepidation
My soul brims with dread
I need it like trepanation
Get it? A hole in the head.

Time To Hate On Breast Cancer Awareness...

2010-10-12T23:50:00.003-04:00

I feel like being inflammatory, so let's go to a topic that everyone seems to love this time of year: breast cancer. Why the fuck is breast cancer so important? Name another cancer that gets an "Awareness Month". Name another cancer that gets its own color.

And before you come in and tell me, Noel, did you forget that July is Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month, or, certainly you must know that chartreuse is the official color of Brain Tumor Awareness, or some other dumb facts you may pull out to back your argument up, allow me to make it clear that I could give a flying fig about the facts. All I'm saying is, if another cancer is as big-time and hoopledy-hoopla'd as breast cancer I must have missed it, because I never heard of it and I can't AVOID breast cancer awareness. The stupid Facebook memes about the bra colors. The special pink version of products. The pink ribbons. The entire fucking month of October. Just saying.

And why breast cancer? The most cynical hypothesis would of course be because it's the cancer that WOMEN get, angled just right to stimulate the save-the-princess section of the primate brain -- and then the reason why it's breast cancer and not ovarian cancer or the-gift-of-life cancer or always-right cancer is because men like breasts, breasts get their attention. Makes sense, in a cynical and awful way.

Except.

Because believe me, I already hear you revving up to dump a whole lot of boring facts and percentages on me. Lame! But I already KNOW that it's not just women that can get breast cancer. Men do too -- and not just fat guys with big floppy moobs, either, so you know it's real. But then... why is breast cancer singled out to be so fucking important?

Look, all I'm saying, because really I know breast cancer is a serious thing and right now I am in perilous danger of some breast cancer survivor chiming in with a creakily boring story of hope and inspiration who will make me look like I'm Darth Hitler for daring to doubt the serious nature of breast cancer -- all I'm saying is, lung cancer. Melanoma. Leukemia. Bad shit. They kill people too. Heart cancer. Did you even know heart cancer is real? Says here that it's rare -- but rare STILL HAPPENS. Bad shit. Where's Heart Cancer Awareness Month?

And then what about salivary gland cancer?

Colon cancer?

Retinoblastoma? I have no idea what that even is but it sounds pretty fucking hardcore. I wouldn't want to fuck around with some retinoblastoma, s'all I'm saying.

Cosmic Conscious Crackpot

2010-10-11T23:24:00.001-04:00

There may well be a universal consciousness, but my hunch is that regardless the universe is not conscious per se. We are the universal consciousness, or at least the part of it that is awake. The universe is still waking up, but until the conscious entities it has created and become leave behind their individual egos, the process of awakening will not continue. This sense of separation from the rest of universe was a necessary illusion at a point in our evolutionary past, but it is an illusion nonetheless and the time will come when that must be confronted. That time is almost upon us.

This could of course only be half-right, because I am operating under the assumption that we are the only consciousnesses in the universe. I have yet to be convinced that anything weird happening on Earth cannot be explained in terms of the activities of the human brain, which is surely the most amazing and untapped tool we have. There had to be a point in time where consciousness only existed at one point in space. Somebody had to be first, and since I see it existing here and do not see it existing anywhere else I have no reason to assume that it’s not us.

The Mall

2010-10-07T15:00:00.001-04:00

A scrap on the cutting room floor, from this project I'm working on:

(JOHN and THEO sitting on a bench in the mall. One is eating a pretzel, the other is drinking a smoothie.)

THEO
This it it? You just sit here and watch people?

JOHN
The most entertaining thing to watch in the world. Human beings, with their endless passions and melodramas.

THEO
That's crap. People are very simple. Like robots. They're easily led. In this case, the television led them to the mall.
(pause)
Except for them.

(THEO points to a group of teenage girls, fashionable and disaffected, laughing and texting and sipping their super-sized soft drinks at a table nearby)

THEO
They're here because school lets them out too early.

JOHN
(shakes his head sadly)
I see. You seem like a smart guy, Theo, but you sure look at things funny. What's so wrong with a mall?
(THEO attempts to interject)
Let me finish. The mall is a picture of human existence in miniature.

THEO
What the hell are you talking about?

JOHN
Okay, look at those kids over there, the ones you just pointed out.

(cut to teenagers again)

JOHN
They come here to hang out because all their friends come here to hang out, and all their friends come here because all their friends come here, and so on. They buy music, hair dye, jewelry. Luxuries.

(now JOHN points to a married couple in their late twenties walking leisurely, stopping to glance in a shop window)

JOHN
In a few years they’ll be coming here on weekends with their spouses to get away from the hell of the work week and the daily grind, maybe to catch a light romantic comedy and shop for some sensible shoes.

(JOHN points to another couple, mid-thirtyish. The wife is pushing a stroller.)

JOHN
Eventually, they’ll start bringing their own children with them, a whole new generation of consumers to keep the machine going.

(Now JOHN points to an old woman with curly short white hair in jogging gear power-walking.)

JOHN
Finally, in the twilight of their lives, they’ll come here on the weekdays, early in the morning. Retired, widowed, children all grown up and shopping in their own malls somewhere else, they’ll walk the mall. No shopping, just walking, because they have nowhere else to be, nowhere else to go. The tribal village has been replaced by a mall and no one even knows.

THEO
Huh. Paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

JOHN
So they say.

The Damned Thing

2010-10-06T03:49:00.004-04:00

The skeptic dismisses it as coincidence.
The mystic calls it synchronicity.
The theologian refers to it as divine will.
The paranoid sees it as enemy action.

Forever Suffering (Cut-And-Paste God Knowledge)

2010-10-06T03:45:00.000-04:00

From private correspondence, simply too good to leave for an audience of one.

If you're hoping to avoid pain and death, you're on a fool's errand. Life is pain and it ends in death. Okay, life isn't JUST pain -- but suffering certainly seems to be a key aspect to it. If you try and shelter yourself from it you wind up either completely unprepared for it when it comes anyway or so dissatisfied with your safety that like the Buddha you reject the whole concept of safety and declare all of existence to be an illusion.

I am also reminded of an old Sufi tale about this sage on a sea voyage. At some point during the trip the ship hit a really bad storm, and while the boat tipped this way and that, while the seamen were running around barking orders and unrolling sails and bailing out water, while the other passengers were terrified and whimpering and praying, the sage sat in complete serenity. When the crisis passed someone took him to task, asking "How could you stay so calm, knowing that the only thing between you and a watery grave was a thin plank of wood?" And he responded, "I was able to remain calm by reflecting that, at many times, even on the land, there has been far less between me and death." We are all of us at all times living in the shadow of the valley of death.

I knew a kid, my age, he was coming back from vacation summer after 6th grade. He unbuckled his seatbelt for a moment to turn and say something to his cousin in the backseat and at that moment someone hit them. Everyone else survived, he died in his mother's arms on the side of the road. A kid younger than me, one of my cousin's friends, out of the blue dropped dead at 15. Turns out he had some heart defect no one knew about.

I think the healthiest way to handle the idea that terrible things happen is to accept it. You can try to ignore it but still the horrors slip in like a thief through an unlocked window. You can embrace it and spread it, be a monster -- but to what end? You can despair and see that all of life is misery and give up. Or you can accept it as an aspect of life, see it for what it is, and use it to measure the rest of your time. Enjoy what you have because it could be taken at literally any moment.

It's like this: the world is a horrible place. When we came up, the last time we actually evolved, there was nowhere we were safe. There were giant animals everywhere that would catch us and eat us if we strayed from the pack, if we moved too far from the fire. Huge cats and wolves and wild hogs and giant bears and snakes -- watch the middle five hours of the Peter Jackson King Kong and you will realize that all these giant monster animals fears are almost an encoded race memory from a time when things like that almost actually existed. And, over time, we have shone the light of civilization, beat back the threat of bloody nature, "red in tooth and claw." Now when you hear about a giant animal killing a human it is probably an escaped zoo animal or the guy was some nut who tried to live with the bears. It's just not the same anymore. But somehow the state of fear and terror of the external world never left us even as we defeated most of the external world, and today we need to have just as much fear and terror, only it's almost all towards other humans and their artifacts and their actions. For better or worse we live in the world that the humans built, and maybe one day they will realize this and opt to change it into one with less need for fear and terror. This is, I believe, simply the way evolution works as we move from an animal's awareness to the awareness of whatever we will eventually become. Man is a bridge between the ape and the superman, a bridge stretched over the abyss, as Nietzsche said, and it is this abyss that you are attempting to come to terms with.

Good luck, kid, you're gonna need it.

Ye Olde Book Of Nanopoetry

2010-09-26T00:36:00.003-04:00

sometime between 1999 and 2004:

consequences
i came to the fork in the road and paused
“you’ll never take me alive,” i said
the road replied “you’re already mine”

editorial
how did i get so
damn self-conscious
counting out the syllables and
cursing all the words

the exile
i am an exile on the moon
but the sun is brighter here

fireworks
we never let the sun go down
for fear of what we have hidden in darkness

flaw
a lousy magician
I explain how my tricks work
before i perform them

footnote to the apocalypse
i'm waiting for the waters to come
but armageddon's never this quarter

the information age
inundated with stories
we expect our lives to become one

insult to injury
we're civilized now
we only slaughter dreams
instead of people

ivory tower
and i have watched
as those who have dared to love
have been crucified

the king is dead, long live the king
nothing ever changes
except the innocence

progress in the age of human mortality
inspire.
expire.
repeat.

revisionism
the past is prologue
written in stone
come down off your mountain and smash the tablets

untitled
if wishes were commas
my life would be a run-on sentence

The 9-11 Al-Qaeda Mixtape (A Work In Progress)

2010-09-14T00:55:00.003-04:00

"An Experiment In Terror" by Henry Mancini
"Jet Airliner" by Steve Miller Band
"Mmm Skyscraper I Love You" by Underworld
"It's Raining Men" by The Weather Girls
"Hijack" by Thunderball
"Flying High" by Country Joe And The Fish
"Pentagon Afternoon" by Frank Zappa
"Empires Collapse" by Cop Shoot Cop

...and then I ran out of ideas.
Send hate mail and death threats to ndotrogers@gmail.com

UPDATE:
"Leaving On A Jet Plane" by John Denver
courtesy of Attila, the King of Beacon!

"Cities In Dust" by Siouxsie & The Banshees
"The Horror" by RJD2
"Black Box Recording" by Firewater
courtesy of Charlie Rogers!

"911 Is A Joke" by Public Enemy
courtesy my brain, days after it would have been funny!

They Still Can't Download Buildings

2010-09-05T01:02:00.003-04:00

So if you're planning on being an artist or creator in the 21st century but don't want to have your works passed around on the internet, architecture looks like it's going to be a pretty safe bet for the time being. Music, books, movies, television, comics, software -- they can download the hell out of those. But not buildings. Not yet.

God Grows Up: An Interpretation Of The Judeo-Christian Mystery God Based On Scripture And Armchair Psychology

2010-08-28T00:07:00.001-04:00

When you read the Old Testament God is a whiny spoiled brat demanding that His toys give Him attention and follow His every rule, and if He's not happy with the way it turns out He will just flood it out and make new toys.

Then by the time of the New Testament, God is a teenager. He gets all angsty, comes to Earth as a dude with long hair, preaches about love and tolerance like any idealistic adolescent would, but at the same time He gets mad and starts knocking over the money-changer's tables. He curses a fig tree. Tantrums. Then his toys kill Him, acting out His teenage emo self-destructive fantasies.

Today God is an adult, all grown up, and he's finally realized that the only thing he can do with us is leave us alone and let us find our own path. That's how come God directly interfered in human affairs seemingly every five minutes in the Old Testament, then He came to Earth manifested as a human in the New Testament, and now no one has heard from him since. Except for the occasional odd-ball. Or schizophrenic.

A Bonus Track: Pissing In The Stream Of Consciousness

2010-08-26T14:46:00.002-04:00

The CEBP week 9 assignment had us writing a few pages of stream of consciousness and then remixing it. My heavily remixed -- and frankly, much better -- version can be found in Heroes And Hierophants, here as a historical oddity is the original, dated 3-1-9:

PISSING IN THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Original Mix)

Do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to write stream of consciousness? I type so much slower than I think and by the time I have travelled a thought to its conclusion my fingers have begun to stumble over the keys and it all comes to a screeching halt, the train of thought has slammed on its brakes so I can fix the typo and begin again and then what? Where was I? I am lost and confused and don’t know what I was writing. Reread the beginning. Any ideas? Only that this whole thing is ridiculous. I hate stream of consciousness. Pause, hit pipe. I hate stream of consciousness. This is all a fraud anyway. I am not writing everything that goes through my head. Worse, I am editing it as I go along. Some would say, screw the typos, fix ‘em at the end. I can’t. The typos, they sing to me, siren little songs of woe and despair, they are like blinking red neon dots on the screen. I must fix the typos, they are like errors in the genetic code, bringing only monstrosity and death to the table. Do you understand what I am getting at here? I am trying the best I can to get through this assignment and it is going to be really difficult. I’d rather pontificate about something profound. “In the future we will all be silver shiny bodies of intelligent nanospores, a hive-mind Godling transforming the universe into the One Mind it already was, is now, and ever shall be. World without end.” “In the future we will taste the succulent karma-free shrimp and float in the space between outer space and cyberspace.” “In the future Dippin’ Dots will be called the Ice Cream Of The Present.” I can see the future, you know. It says so on my business card. That means it’s true! I love to be profound. But instead I am writing stream of consciousness, excluding this sentence which I went back and inserted later to express a thought I had but forgot to write down. No doubt while fixing a typo. Also, I am multitasking. “No. But I thought I remembered seeing it somewhere.” I just said that in a chat with a friend. What chat? What friend? Only time will tell and if you know time you realize that since time is an abstract concept it is incapable of verbal communication. So there! Also, time is an illusion. Which means that when I go back and edit this in the future, it will really be the present I am writing of now. Which means there is no editing at all. All writing is stream of consciousness, written out four-dimensionally and looping back in over itself. Everything is happening nowhere all at one. It’s a metaphor for God, clumsy words prefiguring the transcendent deity that no words can speak of. But is behind every syllable.

Pause. Start over. I just deleted an entire line of text. Is that stream of consciousness? My stream said to edit over the last line and I followed it and did. A technicality? Of course. I love technicalities. Live my life based on them. Only live at all because of a technicality here or there. Pause. Start over. “Write a two-page story where Peter Gabriel is being tortured and murdered.” I wrote stream of consciousness once. Edited out the superfluous hyphens. This was during a period I called my Mad Poet Period. I was doing a lot of nitrous oxide at the time. I was also smoking a bit of PCP. Not nearly enough, actually. I remember this one night I had smoked dust and I was watching A Fistful Of Dollars and I was imagining these lizard-like beings rising out of the white mud and building cities. I guess you had to be there. So, weird drugs, stream of consciousness, Mad Poet Period. It’s all in my book. For sale wherever those sorts of thing are sold. And also from the trunk of my car. Shameless plug. Filler space. Edited out the superfluous hyphens. Is this what you’re hoping for? To open up the door to randomness and let God walk through? I am anti-randomness. I am editing as I type. I am crafting the sentence three from now as I type this one. I backspace over mis-steps and pull them from their space in time. Time is an illusion. I would edit the Akashic Records if I had the time. But time is an illusion. Repetition. Hypnotism. You are getting sleepy. The sound of the teakettle is pure Americana. I don’t even know why I typed that. I had a story once I started and it began with that line. Then my hard drive crashed. I lost it. It was unfinished and never had its chance to shine and now it’s as if it never was. No trace. But I remember that line. Like 9-11. Never forget.

Backspace, backspace, return. I already decided how I am going to end this piece. I have the perfect ending line. Does that mean I can’t use it? It’s not stream of consciousness. I mean, it was just now when I thought of it, but it has already stripped into the pre-manufactured as I write about it now. By the end it will be schemed, planned, pre-meditated. Hatched. So should I give up a great ending because I thought of it before the end? Half the time I come up with the ending line before I write the essay. I wrote this essay about how they’re tearing the woods down in my backyard and I came up with the last line a full day before I wrote the rest of it down. A metaphor for God, the omega point that casts shadows backwards in time and those shadows are us. I am a metaphor. What’s the point of an ending line when this is to be mixed up anyway? The point is the point of being a craftsman at all. I am writing this now. It must be able to stand up on its own. Stream of consciousness or no.

I started writing this yesterday. Not this, but an attempt at the same thing. I got interrupted, I had to put it down. By the time I picked it back up I was too far removed from that stream of consciousness – you might say I had detoured down a tributary and been dumped back in the great untamed ocean of my mind. Pause to look up the word tributary. Does it mean what I think it means? Close enough. So today I sat down, angrily, and began typing. Do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to write stream of consciousness?

Period.

The Ground Zero Mosque Thing, or, "Wait, No, Really?"

2010-08-19T02:48:00.007-04:00

"I don't mind being the smartest man in the world. I just wish it wasn't this one."
- Adrian Veidt

Okay. So let me make sure I understand this now. I'm a little slow on the uptake and I try not to pay attention to the news because it's a bit like being trapped in the primate house at the zoo. So bear with me as I recreate the facts here. Apparently, like ten years ago, certain elements, certain people who proclaimed to follow a specific religion, committed a devastating terrorist attack in New York City. I think maybe it happened in October or something? September? I'm a little hazy on the details. Now today, or recently rather, or whatever, some people that follow that same specific religion want to set up a place of worship two blocks away from where this attack happened. And there's some sort of controversy about this. Do I have the facts right? Good. So now we leave the world of facts and enter the world of opinions. And in my opinion this whole thing is ridiculous. No, I take that back. An elephant fucking a dachshund is ridiculous. I don't know what the fuck this is.

When I sat down to write this I was going to get all eloquent and explain in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington Jimmy Stewart style why this is the dumbest fucking controversy EVARRRR but the fact is I don't have the patience or the attention span, so instead here is another classic numbered list of bullet points.

"Muslim" does not equal "terrorist."
Follow me through this cipher, folks. Same way "Christian" does not equal "Inquisitioner."Same way "American" does not equal "Stupid fat fuck." Yes, there have been Muslim terrorists. Bad scene. Don't approve. There have also been non-Muslim terrorists. Which brings us to number two...
Timothy McVeigh was a Catholic
But if they were putting a cathedral a block away from the Alfred P. Murrah building, these same assholes talking about how "insensitive" and "bad taste" this mosque is wouldn't be making one fucking peep. Almost like the whole thing is a smokescreen for some stupid American fat fucks to display their racism and xenophobia without overtly branding themselves as stupid fat racist fucks.
The First Amendment
Guarantees the right to worship. There is no asterisk after "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" that says "unless it's the same religion some terrorists claimed to follow." And do you know who wrote the First Amendment? The Founding Fathers. It is central to American values, so central to American values that you really can't have the one without the other. It'd be like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with no bread. If you do not like the First Amendment, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY COUNTRY. If you want to live somewhere where there's no state-protected freedom of worship, maybe move to Iran, you unAmerican piece of shit.
George W Bush said that the terrorists hate our freedoms.
So if you hate our freedoms, you're a terrorist. Q.E.D.
I don't even understand why we have to waste our time on this.
I don't. Seriously. There are people dying out there. There are people starving, people suffering from illnesses that haven't been cured yet, people suffering from illnesses that could be cured but they can't afford it. People are in prison unjustly. People are being raped. People are being robbed. ACTUAL shit that ACTUALLY causes people to ACTUALLY suffer ACTUAL loss. And we're worried about whether or not a mosque is going to be "sensitive" or not?
History is going to mock us for this shit.
Remember when we studied the Salem witch trials, or "Irish Need Not Apply," or the internment of the Japanese-Americans during World War II? We look back at that kind of stuff and we shake our heads. It's hard to believe people back then could be so narrow-minded, so trapped in their own tiny flatland world-views, so constrained by their own petty prejudices and biases. THIS IS EXACTLY HOW FUTURE GENERATIONS WILL LOOK AT THIS. Me, always unfashionably ahead of my time, I already look at it that way now.
Wait, no... seriously?
What the fuck does a mosque have to do with 9-11? Even if it IS insensitive, which I dispute, so the fuck what? Who gave you the right to go through life without having your feelings hurt or your sensibilities offended? Because believe me, if we were going to suspend Constitutional rights based on what I find offensive or insensitive, most of you would be spending the rest of your life in prison. But in a sane and just society, it takes a lot more than personal whim, even the personal whim of the majority, to upset the basic rule of law. So basically if you disagree fuck off and die.
Newt Gingrich is a fucking moron.
I find it amazing that I should even have to point that out in this day and age. I find it amazing that Newt Gingrich is even still around or that people pay him any mind at all. But Newt Gingrich is a fucking moron. I know dude was like a college professor and he wrote some really awful novels so maybe he's not a retard but he is definitely a moron. I have an article here where he says that building a mosque by Ground Zero "would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.” Except that it's actually nothing like that at all. You fucking moron. See, the Nazis were a specific group of people that specifically brought about the Holocaust. Muslims are a wide group of people, of all kinds, around the world -- some of whom specifically brought about the World Trade Center attacks. (I will avoid any Loose Change style debate on this point for the time being.) So really the proper analogy, Newt -- and seriously, what the fuck kind of name is Newt anyway? It's a lizard! -- would be like opening up a bratwurst stand next to the Holocaust Museum. Get it? You fucking moron? Because not all Germans are Nazis, and not all Muslims are terrorists. Note that I avoid the "You automatically lose the debate when you bring up the Nazis" argument, because....
I'm Bringing Up The Nazis
Know who else didn't approve of free religious worship? I'm just saying.
The Other Mosque
Did you know there's another mosque within spitting distance of Ground Zero? Been there since the seventies. Been there since before the World Trade Center was even put up in the first place, let alone knocked down. Now that's neither here nor there, the point is, there's been a mosque real close to the World Trade Center this whole time, and not one of you stupid fat fucks noticed or cared or worried about its "sensitivity" or whatever. So even if the argument made any sense (which it doesn't) it still wouldn't make any sense because THERE'S BEEN A MOSQUE IN THE AREA THE WHOLE TIME and no one made a big deal about it. Know why the rest of the world stereotypes Americans as a bunch of rude and ignorant fat-asses? BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT WE ARE. Or rather, what you are. I barely even consider myself an American at this point.
Stop the world, I want to get off
Instead of building a mosque next to Ground Zero, let's build a big space ship instead. Actually, it doesn't need to be that big. It really only needs to carry me. I am willing to concede this world to the rest of you stupid fat fucks. I can roam around the galaxy in search of higher intelligence, and you guys can call me when the Dark Ages are over. I'll be with Bill Hicks, waiting at the finish line. Chirp, chirp.

Next time: The Dr. Laura Controversy... you mean Dr. Laura's still alive?

Parents lie, teachers lie, but Uncle Noelie will never lie to you.

2010-08-05T19:54:00.003-04:00

Kids:

Adults will tell you that lying is wrong. They will probably even chastise and/or punish you for lying if you are dumb enough to get caught at it. But, as you may already know, adults lie to you all the time. Ever hear the one about the fat man in the red suit at the North Pole? Or the giant bunny with the basket of chocolate eggs? Odds are, yes. So you might be feeling a bit confused when you realize that adults are lying all the time. You might think that they are awful hypocrites who aren't fit to be the authority figures they have imposed themselves as. The truth is, you'd be right. The truth is, lying isn't wrong. Lying is a crucial part of adult life. They lie to others and they lie to themselves. All the time. The only reason adults don't want you to lie is because allowing that would threaten their monopoly on falsehood.

The Saga Of Forgotten Space Baby

2010-07-05T19:50:00.009-04:00

Forgotten Space-Baby was once a baby named Alex. One day his mother took him the Baby Trade Shop and traded him for another baby that was eight feet tall. This baby was also named Alex. His mom liked him because he was eight feet tall and could reach things for her. She forgot all about her original son. The now nameless baby cried and cried and cried, and nobody else wanted to trade him, so finally the Baby Trade Shop launched him into outer space. Up there he gained incredible space powers and became Forgotten Space-Baby, legend of five galaxies. Now he is on a quest to return to Earth, to get back to his family. But first he must defeat nefarious space villains such as the Skeleton Family, or the evil Dr. Trap. Will he ever make it back to Earth? Will he be able to replace the eight-foot baby Alex and regain his mother's love? Will he get assistance along the way from his long lost father, Forgotten Space-Dad?

Independent Of The Facts

2010-07-04T11:50:00.001-04:00

Here's something you might not know: In terms of our independence, July 4th is an almost completely meaningless date. It wasn't the day the Declaration of Independence was ratified -- that was July 2nd. It wasn't the day the Declaration of Independence was signed -- that was in August. It certainly wasn't the day this country actually became independent -- we still had to win a war to achieve that. As near as I can tell, the only thing special about July 4th is that it's the day the text of the Declaration was finalized -- which might make it a memorable day for proofreaders and editors but otherwise has little to no bearing on our actual independence.

So.. what's so special about the fourth of July? Why do we celebrate this basically meaningless day? Um. Because we always have? Geez Noel, did you need a better reason than that?

Meditations On A Wound

2010-06-21T12:00:00.001-04:00

I recently cut myself. Not in the goth emo teenager way. It was an accident. With a razor blade. An inch-long incision on the side of my thumb in an almost straight line. Oops.

Anyway. I cut myself. It was like a week ago. Since then I have watched it slowly heal, felt the skin itch as it re-knits itself together. And it made me remember something I don't often think about -- that my body is actually an intelligent colony of organic nanotechnology.

Presumably, so is yours -- except for the "intelligent" part.

The Human-Created World

2010-06-06T22:20:00.001-04:00

In the beginning we did not live in a world of our own creation. Oh, sure, we were already the masters that made the grass green: we always lived in the world created by our own nervous systems, but the external world was not yet of human creation but the world we inherited from geological and biological development. This seems like it should be obvious but it is worth keeping in mind because today we live in a world that is almost entirely of human creation. This ranges from the obvious, like technology and infrastructure and money and domesticated animals; to the subtler such as the languages that constrain and control our thought processes. And sure, I know that there's still a lot we don't control, like the weather and microbes; and much of the ocean remains a mystery and... uh, that's basically it. For better or worse, we inhabit the world we made for ourselves.

The Realest Shit I Ever Wrote

2010-05-23T16:08:00.004-04:00

But I don't mean to play the blues
not complaining
just explaining
how it is I paid my dues
all the years I was in pain, confused
in tears, ashamed
that life's a game
and I'm afraid to lose
so I don't need respect or sympathy
they don't mean shit to me
I'm only here to stay amused...

Divining The Future: The Patron Saint Of Nanomachines?

2010-05-04T22:55:00.016-04:00

The hard part of being a futurist is in seeing angles to the future that have not already been explored. For instance, take nanomachines. Everyone by now basically knows about nanomachines. There's been all sorts of uses and mentions in popular culture, in speculative fiction, and so forth. At this point, just about every angle of nanomachines has been covered. Possible beneficial uses. Possible harmful or detrimental uses. Use in space travel. Use in medicine. Use in warfare. Use in sex. The ever-looming possibility of the Gray Goo Apocalypse. Every angle is covered.

Except... who will be the patron saint of nanomachines? Think about it. The Catholic Church has a patron saint for EVERYTHING. Not just the obvious stuff like lovers and doctors and lost causes and children and so forth, but crazy modern-era stuff as well. There's a patron saint of the automobile. A patron saint of the Internet. A patron saint of environmentalism. No, I didn't make that up. There's even a patron saint of astronauts. Seems like every time some new thing comes along, before long those kooky Catholics are making some poor dead bastard the patron saint of it. So who will be the patron saint of nanomachines? Inquiring minds want to know. Here's a few possibilities I've narrowed it down to:

Saint Albertus Magnus
Albertus Magnus, or Albert The Great for those who fell asleep in Latin class, is the patron saint of science, which makes him a fairly plausible contender for patron saint of the future science of nanotechnology. He is also the patron saint of philosophers, schoolchildren, and apparently, Cincinnati, Ohio. I wish I could have rewritten that last sentence with less commas.

Saint Isidore of Seville
Isidore is the patron saint of the Internet, which is a pretty neat trick as he only died about 1300 years before Al Gore invented it. But I suppose it's just that kind of transcendent and miraculous behavior that gets you made a saint in the first place. More to the point, he is also the patron saint of technology, which is definitely the last four syllables of "nanotechnology."

Saint Thomas the Apostle
Also known as Thomas Didymus or Doubting Thomas, St. Thomas is the patron saint of building and architecture, which definitely describes the actions of nanomachines. They build stuff, on a molecular scale. It's a plausible argument, but feel free to doubt it.

Saint Patrick
Seems I can't write a piece about Catholicism without mentioning Saint Patrick. This time it's because he's the patron saint of engineers, not because of his lame holiday. Moving on...

Rebekah
This is super sketchy. First, Rebekah is one of those Old Testament characters that was ret-conned into being a saint ex post facto by the Catholic Church. Second, while Wikipedia mentions her as the patron saint of physicists, I can find absolutely zero confirmation of this. She's just on here so the list isn't another sausage fest.

Saint Luke the Evangelist
Only the second guy on this list to have a gospel named after him, Luke is the patron saint of sculptors and surgeons. Somewhere in between those two is nanotech. Also, it says here he's the patron saint of artists, bookbinders, and unmarried men as well. That has no bearing on anything, but I feel better now that I know it.

Saint Pantaleone
Pantaleone is the patron saint of physicians. I just like his name.

A saint to be announced at a later date
Obviously, nanomachines are still something that people are talking about, something that's supposed to happen some day, but not something that has happened yet. Could be the person who will eventually be made the patron saint of nanotechnology hasn't been canonized, beatified or even born yet.

Of course, I suppose there is also an outside chance that by the time we are advanced enough to have invented nanotechnology, we would also be advanced enough that we would no longer rely on organized religions as a structure to keep society together and people would no longer be so irrationally accepting of ancient superstitions. Hahaha, cough cough spit, but seriously folks.

Hypocrisy Is A Necessary Step

2010-05-01T23:32:00.003-04:00

In the beginning... well, in the beginning there was no morality, of course. Right and wrong are judgments of a conscious and aware mind, and without any of those around there was no morality. But skip past that. It's not the point.

The point is, that in the beginning there was the path of right action and the path of wrong action. Right is more difficult and less immediately rewarding. Wrong has clear advantages, but it is wrong. In the beginning though we clearly didn't care about the morality of wrong action. Study human history and you will see that it is drenched in blood. Ours, mostly.

Somewhere along the way the predominance of wrong action gives way to the predominance of right action. A necessary step in this transition, this raising of hell into heaven, is the trait where one proclaims the value of right behavior while in fact engaging in wrong behavior. This is hypocrisy. That's another word for this behavior.

And I, for one, have denounced hypocrisy all my life. In me, of course, most of all, because to be a human is to be a hypocrite, so to be a hypocrite who hypocritically denounces hypocrisy is, typical of me, one meta too many. Woe unto ye hypocrites, I would often say as I got my inner Jesus on. Then I realized what I outlined in the paragraphs above. If the evils of the past world are to give way to the utopian paradise of the future, a necessary transitional phase is for most everyone to be the most shameless and awful hypocrites imaginable. Which is kinda where we are now, if you look around you'll see what I mean.

So enjoy it while you can, fuckers. The wheel turns slowly but it does turn.

A Riff On Nostradamus

2010-05-01T11:12:00.006-04:00

They say Nostradamus was such a great seer because he predicted Hitler and some other shit like that. Yeah, a warlord is going to conquer some shit... THAT's a risky prediction to make. If Nostradamus was really seeing the future he should have predicted the iPod. But he didn't. That's okay, I didn't predict the iPod either and it happened in my lifetime. I'm just saying.

Some Random Jewels

2010-04-20T22:04:00.004-04:00

"The thing is, and I think it is important to hold onto this thought, that humanity is so far away from its ultimate destiny that everything that is happening right now, EVERYTHING, is wholly irrelevant. Think about the trials and tribulations of the early Cro-Magnons and how much of an impact it has on your life. That's how much all the fucked-up shit happening now will matter in the post-human, post-Earth future."

"People invent governments for the same reason they invent gods -- because they are too lazy and too chickenshit to take responsibility for their own lives and destinies."

If I Wasn't So Lazy

2010-03-07T01:09:00.002-05:00

People tell me that I'm lazy. I tell them that they're lucky.

If I wasn't so lazy. With this much hatred towards the world, if I ever got off my ass it would be to tear the whole damned thing down. Or die trying. I joke that I am a bomb-throwing anarchist. The reason that it is a joke, and I am not actually out there throwing bombs, is because I am too lazy. It is easier to get high and play video games, to sit in my bathrobe and catch up on 60 years of comics continuity, to invent schemes and scams I will never actually get around to setting in motion.

People are kept in line, kept from actively attempting to overturn the staus quo, by certain socially-implanted barriers. The fear of ostracism. The fear of punishment. The fear of death. These barriers mean nothing to me. I have been ostracized all my life. There's something missing inside and I ultimately don't really care what happens to me. I have already been willing to risk -- at various times -- jobs, relationships, my freedom, my life, all solely in the pursuit of making trivial and petty points. It gives me satisfaction to make a point. It's pretty easy to imagine how over-the-top I would extend that characterization if I had a cause or a belief that I gave a shit about.

If I could actualize my vision, transform my delusions of grandiosity into just plain grandiosity, I could be a great and terrible monster.

If I wasn't so lazy.

Happy No Presidents Day!

2010-03-04T11:23:00.000-05:00

Today is No Presidents Day. Today we commemorate the day 161 years ago that there was no President of the United States for one day.

Sunday, March 4th, 1849. That was the day that James Polk's term as President expired, and his successor Zachary Taylor refused to take the oath of office on a Sunday, the Sabbath. And yes, while you and I know that Sunday is the Lord's Day, not the Sabbath, cast your mind back to the simpler times of 1849. A time when an incoming President would be willing to throw the entire country into anarchy for a day just to be freakishly faithful to an already antiquated religion. One day we'll have a President that isn't a Christian and I will declare that a holiday too.

Anyway. March 4th, 1849. Zachary Taylor, afraid to anger the God that would strike him down a year later anyway, refused to take the oath of office. James Polk's term had expired. Millard Fillmore, his vice-president, likewise didn't take office. So who was President? The legend is that David Rice Atchison, President pro tempore of the Senate, was President for that day, since he was next in line at the time. But. His term had also expired, and he also never took any oath. So if he wasn't President, who was? I am going to argue quite simply that no one was.

For one day the country had no leader. And everything was fine. No cities burned down in mass looting and orgies. The trains still ran, or at least they would have if they had trains in 1849. Not switching over to Wikipedia to research that one, enough is enough. The point is, for one day the government had no head.

We remember this until it becomes the every day reality.

We Are No Threat To The Earth

2010-02-15T23:18:00.000-05:00

Get over yourselves. We are not harming the Earth one bit. Let me explain. By "the Earth" you can mean a few things. You might be referring to the actual planet Earth, an astronomical body in orbit around a G-type star. Or you might be referring to the biosphere, that envelops the blue planet like a tapestry of green and red. That line came to me as I was drifting to sleep last night. Regardless, we are no threat to either one.

The biosphere thrives on chaos and devastation. Don't be fooled by how pretty it is, study how it actually works. The biosphere has stood up to asteroid impact, terrible ice ages, biological plagues, it has taken them and laughed. AND evolved intelligent beings, some of them smug, one of them me typing right now. Yes, it's that kind of piece. The biosphere thrives on chaos and devastation. It's really a kind of awful game, but it was around long before us, and hopefully in time it will escape planetary confinement and spread. Hopefully in time it won't be such an awful game. But until then, we are no threat to it.

The actual planet itself is a big rock. It doesn't even know we're here. One day the Sun will have heated up to the point where all the liquid on the planet boils off and whatever life is still here will die badly. And then some time after that the Earth's orbit will decay and it will collapse into the red, giant sun. That's the only threat to the Earth. And maybe an impact with a body large enough to crack it in two. When the Earth dies it will die without having had any clue it had intelligent life on it at one point. We are no threat to it.

We will live and die on the Earth, or we will leave the Earth and live forever. Given enough time, we could conceivably develop to the point where our technology has hit the Clarke's Law threshold and we can harness unfathomable power and move planets around at whim. By this point we would definitely be a threat to the Earth, since it would finally be within our power to destroy it. But why would we? That's dumb.

I've slipped around a lot from the rant I heard in my head as I was drifting to sleep. It was in my voice and I'm pretty sure it was me, but I kept trying to sleep and not listen to it, and it kept shouting "Two spheres! There are two spheres!" So this is only the ghost of a rant, and I guess what I am trying to say is this: Screw you, hippies. The Earth is doing fine.

The Life Cycle Of The God-Mind (Made Simple)

2010-02-09T23:04:00.000-05:00

The mind of the universe, and how it is experienced, can be broken down as such:

1. The Void
In the beginning there was nothing. A period of darkness and sleep. On a universal scale, this refers to the time before the universe had manifested, or at least before it had manifested consciousness. On a personal scale this refers to the time before you were born, or more accurately, the time before "I" was born.

2. Yin & Yang
The current phase, a period of alternating sleep and wake. Universally this can be interpreted as the imperfect and incomplete manifestation of conscious will over the blind and impersonal forces of random chance. Personally this can be read quite literally: your entire life is periods alternating wake and sleep.

3. The Eye
The Omega Point. The period of pure and total consciousness, the entire universe awake and aware as a single all powerful entity. Waking into this from your life is probably analogous to waking from a dream. For all intents and purposes, this is God. The personal and universal scales are the same.

Except breaking it down into a three-step process implies the existence of time. Problem is, time doesn't really exist, at least not the way we understand it. This leads to the tricky and ineffable part -- somehow step three IS step one, or leads to it, or causes it. Better prophets than I will hopefully explain further.

a quick argument against intelligent design

2010-02-03T03:06:00.000-05:00

Let's talk for a minute about the maxillary sinuses. Like the rest of the paranasal sinuses, they are hollow areas in the bones of your face. The maxillary in particular are these arrow-head looking hollows behind your cheeks on each side of the nose. These sinuses are lined with mucosa that produce mucus for whatever reason which I am too lazy to look up. The sinuses drain this mucus out of these small passages in the bone called ostia. If for some reason these ostia become inflamed, proper drainage can become blocked and the buildup leads to sinus headaches. Now the maxillary sinuses in particular don't drain right under the best of circumstances, since they only have a single ostium for each, called the "maxillary hiatus," and they are located near the top of the sinuses, as opposed to the bottom where any competent engineer would tell you is the best place to put the drainage pipe. You know, because of gravity. And so forth. So under the best of circumstances they don't drain right, under bad circumstances they don't drain at all. These holes in the cheekbones collect with mucus which in turn collects bacteria or viruses, better known as an infection, which finally leads to a really bad sinus headache. Sort of like the electric agony of a toothache mixed with getting kicked in the balls, except if your balls were behind your nose.

Intelligent design my ass. If sinuses are intelligent design, I'm Leonardo da Vinci.

post-addendum footnote disclaimer: Yes, true believers, I already understand that my scope and vision is too limited to truly understand how the crap design of the maxillary sinuses is completely crucial and consistent with blah blah blah blah blah. You don't need to tell me.

post-post-blah-blah-blah: Also I already know there are plenty of things that post-technological humans can do to alleviate this crap design, from decongestants to irrigation of the nasal canal with that weird teapot looking thing to balloon sinuplasty, and seriously look this last one up if you haven't heard of it. That's not the point.

Thoughts On Christmas (And The Holiday Season In General)

2009-12-25T10:06:00.002-05:00

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

2009-11-06T00:37:00.000-05:00

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

Render Unto Caesar

2009-11-02T19:58:00.000-05:00

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

2009-10-28T11:59:00.001-04:00

Confusing Continuity
Consisting of Crossovers
Concerning Carnage and
Clones

3 Things I Wrote In My Head Today

2009-10-24T00:14:00.000-04:00

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™

2009-10-20T03:39:00.000-04:00

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

2009-10-05T18:09:00.001-04:00

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

2009-08-30T20:34:00.001-04:00

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

2009-08-26T23:56:00.000-04:00

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

2009-08-18T09:27:00.000-04:00

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

2009-08-16T19:34:00.000-04:00

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

2009-07-25T01:43:00.002-04:00

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)

2009-07-14T11:00:00.000-04:00

          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)

2009-07-09T21:38:00.000-04:00

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

Scatalogical God Knowledge

2009-07-04T18:26:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-30T23:36:00.002-04:00

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")

2009-06-26T12:20:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-23T23:02:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-21T19:35:00.000-04:00

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"

2009-06-18T06:20:00.000-04:00

"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

2009-06-16T20:55:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-12T20:14:00.000-04:00

(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!]

2009-06-09T12:56:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-08T14:45:00.002-04:00

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

2009-05-27T21:19:00.000-04:00

(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

2009-05-25T00:50:00.001-04:00

          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

2009-05-15T23:50:00.000-04:00

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

2009-05-11T18:04:00.001-04:00

"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

2009-04-03T22:37:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-07T22:22:00.000-05:00

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.