Me on Ulysses via THE B9

reading this post will tell you everything i think you need to know about that book.

first of all, nobody really enjoys reading ulysses. it's some english major rite of passage that they all do the same way maori tribesmen hang themselves from skewers.

joyce was irish. what do we know about the irish? they love punishment. and ulysses is a thousand pages of punishment.

you can either get in for a ride and let the words wash over you like passing cars or you can pore over every detail and try to get it all to make sense. do the first one and you're allowed to stand in a circle and talk about the book when it comes up in the next literature thread, which it undoubtedly will because this is the book people read to impress other people in literature threads. (among other reasons) do the second one and you'll probably appreciate the book a lot more, typically to the point of an irish-catholic abusive relationship where Ulysses comes home from work and beats you for reasons unknown and you love him for it because he's dark and complicated and nobody knows him like you do.

it's genius at its most horrifying. this is not the kind of book you read on the train or on the beach. i think there's no amount of speculation you can invest into this book that won't yield some sort of clarity, but you'll never truly understand it. fortunately you can appreciate it for what it is even if you can't master it. (again, like the irish)

just read the molly bloom speech and call it a day.

yesterday i felt like writing

but i didn't
i went home, had a shot and a beer, smoked a little, and hung out

i didn't write because i had nothing good to write about

there was an accident on middle country road.

two kids died.

i didn't know them and now i'll never know them.

that's fine.

you know what's sad for some people to think about? i don't know my neighbors names.
you know what's even sadder? i don't want to know my neighbors names.
you know what i don't think about? whether they want to know mine or not.

dead teenagers.

i do not care and i do not feel empty.

Thieves and the Champ of Oneonta

here's a little story about dudes hanging out.

who doesn't like tour stories? this is a story where a band goes on tour with two other bands and spends the night on a hill in oneonta, alabama. Not New York, Alabama.

So Thieves and Crime in Stereo are on tour together. This is in like... 2004 I think. Way back when in terms of hardcore. Scraps and Heart Attacks was on the tour too, but they had somewhere cool to stay. We just had three goodnatured alabamians willing to let us stay with them.

so let's talk about them.

We met in this pizza place where we went to hang out and talk to people after the show, looking for a place to stay as always. We find these two girls, but they get their dude friend to come with them because maybe they're just a little bit afraid of rape or something.

Two girls and a dude. I don't even think the dude was at the show. The dude had a misfits shirt on. But not like an OG shirt. Just one of those misfits shirts you get at the mall because it glows in the dark or something. He also had big pants on. Real big. Like... black parachute pants with all that shit hanging off of them. Do you know why this is an important detail? I guess it isn't, but hey, this is what sticks out to me because I'm the type of asshole who judges people on the way they dress because you don't accidentally buy black parachute pants with shit hanging off of it. He's like a cro-magnon juggalo. A small, yet important step in the evolution of musical genus species.

This other girl looks like pretty normal girl. Jean shorts, maybe some shirt with some sort of logo on it. Probably a babydoll tee. Let's call her Jane. Meet Jane. Now say goodbye to Jane because she doesn't really do much in this story.

Now. The belle of the ball. Let's call her Crystal. That might even have been her real name. I was gonna call her Crystal anyway. It was her cabin we were staying in. What is a cabin? That's what people call a house they have somewhere that has electricity and shit but no heat and you don't sleep in it every night. Crystal had invited us up to this cabin up on a mountain in Oneonta, Alabama.

Let's talk about the drive up the mountain. It was a good drive. Very rural, but it was the summer and it was through the woods and as creepy as it was it was also very nice. There was lightning in the sky but no rain. If the nicest places in the world are inhabited by the worst people this was some middle ground where sorta ok people are able to experience sorta nice things like heat lightning from the side of a mountain.

Now I'm no city mouse, but like any other Long Islander a half hour drive through the woods feels like the first act of a teen slasher. Woods? Lightning? Strange women willing to take us in? Thank god none of us are black because it was just a matter of time before someone disappeared into the woods.

Speaking of thank god none of us were black, we get to the cabin, and we poke around a little bit. This cabin is like some loft-style high peaked cathedralish type residence where the basement is finished with a tv\kitchen area leading out to the backyard (a hill with trees), the first floor is a small living room with a master bedroom directly across, and the loft area is where the kids sleep because the ceilings are low and sloped. The perfect environment for a child because hey let's face it kids like sleeping in cracks and tents and floors because there's still some survival instinct in a child that knows to survive the night it must hide from predators. So, we poke around, and somehow someone that might have been me stumbles upon a picture of the Reverend Raccoon Jones. The Reverend Raccoon Jones is Crystal's dad in blackface and a Don King wig. I guess he performs as a sort of stand-up comic or something?

Here's a good improv line from the Reverend she told us about when we asked her how his act went:

[couple of black folk enter the room where he is performing and sit in the back row]

RRJ: Why y'all sittin in the back? Fought so hard to sit in the front!

Riiiight...

So we keep on hangin out. One of us is in the master bedroom with Jane Shorts getting cockblocked by the misfits dude. Some of us are chillin in the living room. A couple of us, myself included, are on the back roof of the house, accessible via loft window. We start asking normal questions to this girl in the general "getting to know you" spirit of things, partially out of genuine interest, partially to profile this girl and find out if this girl is a Klan sympathizer or just a good-hearted girl full of Southern hospitality. The questions get a little more serious as we finally realize this girl is, with all due respect, kind of a dummy.

Us- Do you smoke meth?

A- If it's around

Us- ... ... ... so you smoke meth.

I mean we all sorta do drugs if they're around, but I'm not usually in places where meth is around and if I am I don't do it just because it is around. But I've always been sortof a pussy when it comes to narcotics and I'm glad to see this girl is less inhibited. She showed us just how uninhibited she was by blowing one of us twice, but we don't have to talk about that. It just sorta happened. And don't go trying to figure out which one of us it was because if it was me I'd tell you and if it was anyone else they would probably not. To their credit they were very discreet. The touch of the arm, the come hither glance, all that shit. Anyways, before all that shit...

Me- Is this place haunted?

Crystal- Yeah, I guess. I mean the sliding glass door opens by itself sometimes, not sure why. [Pronounced 'Yeah ah geyiss, ah maine thuh slahding glayuss doughurr opins bah itself sumtahms, not shoore wah']

Not sure what else she said, but it was fun to hear about on a night like that in a place like that.

Ok, so let's get real.

Everybody is either upstairs or in the living room or getting blown. It's time for me to take matters into my own hands and sneak downstairs for some quality time with myself. It was honestly one of the only times I jerked off on tour. There's something about being in a van with dudes all day then playing a shitty show that keeps erections away. But this is one load I'll never forget.

It was a pretty mediocre session. No porn, nothin fresh in the spank bank, standing in the bathroom of a cabin in Oneonta, Alabama. No touch of the hand, no come hither glance, just me staring into the unforgiving eye of the toilet.

While I'm in there, I hear the tv downstairs den go on. It's Will Smith! "THE CHAMP IS HERE. THE CHAMP IS HERE." It was that part in ALI where he says that. Remember? It was in the trailer?

Anyways, I hear that and successfully block it out of my mind. A moment later I hear two kids poking around the downstairs area. Now, keep in mind I'm in the bathroom and at this point safely assuming they just need to use the bathroom and, for safety's sake, are using the buddy system. One good thing about tour, you'll always have a buddy. Except when you're jerking off in a shitty bathroom.

So me, in my post ejaculatory depression, begin the walk of shame back to my friends. I walk up the stairs to the living room where most of them are chillin and I hear "FUCK, it was YOU!" followed by laughs of what sounded like relief. And I was like "uhh... whaddyamean?" thinking I'm gonna be called out on jerking off by those dudes poking around or maybe I shouldn't have flushed the toilet because it blew a fuse or whatever the fuck.

One kid, in a very accusatory tone, goes "Tell me you didn't turn on the fucking TV."

"I didn't turn on the TV, I was in the bathroom. Maybe it was whoever was poking around down there."

"Dude, we went down there to see who turned the TV on and we didn't find anybody."

"Well I was taking a shit I didn't turn on anything."

"No.... Fuck you, really?"

"Yeah, really."

And then they all look around at each other, laugh, put their hands on their heads and say "what the fuck?!"

Why did that TV turn on? Couldn't tell ya. Nobody can tell ya.

Maybe somebody stepped on a remote or something.

Maybe the force of my orgasm caused an electro shock wave that resonated through audio\visual appliances everywhere.

But maybe...

just maybe...

(this is where you put the flashlight under your chin)

...The Champ showed up.

you thought this was a blog update

but it wasn't
it is a bomb
now you're blind and you have no hands

the period piece

the period piece is ok, but it'll only ever be a reaction. an afterthought. now that the votes are in and we can weigh judgment on the past from the comfort of the future.

but if we all exist always at the same time maybe part of our oppression is coming from the future. maybe in order to stay the future it must shun and ridicule the past.

the gods of us in the future are laughing because they know the only way out is through, and when they hear us yelp or cry or whine, they laugh because they know the worst is yet to come.

this is about television. mad men is good, but maybe too good. maybe a bit too stylized, but i like how they've sharpened their edges. and by sharpened i guess i mean ground down to a baby bottom smooth glistening finish. they've excavated the mineral from the ore. they're showing the 50s exactly how the 50s wanted to be seen. it's the ghosts from the past haunting or present. forcing us to tell their final story, what they couldn't get out before the grave.

you know why i write? why anyone writes?

because when we die we want our ghosts to rest, or see what it means to be a ghost, not stay caught up in what it is to be a human being, not forcing the living to think about the dead. you remember the past by living in the present. i wouldn't want my ghost skulking around like some jealous ex-boyfriend waiting in the parking lot of a movie theater to spring out and ruin the next good thing to come along. but, OH MY GOD PEOPLE REALLY THINK LIKE THIS, some people are living and lost among the dead.

i don't care about japanese dolphins

well, i don't care about japanese dolphins. as horrible as it is, i just have a feeling this is the sort of thing that will or won't get sorted out. sure the videos are horrible, the treatment is horrible, but when i gaze into the heart of man i see genuine indifference towards tragedy outside the realm of their own personal experiences.

i mean, everybody knows veganism is a bunch of bullshit, right? like... what's the harm done in a can of tuna fish?

ok, let's rewind.

i'm gonna tell you the real reason i don't speak out against the things i am outraged by, why i don't read books that let me look in on the horrors of the world, why i don't go to college for international politics or marxist economic theory.

i don't do any of that shit because it doesn't matter how right you are about anything. exposing things like hypocrisy, cruelty, oppression, inequality, racism, hate, bigotry, any of the seven modern deadly sins- well, who fucking cares?

i mean i care. i guess. i care enough to let myself think that i care. but what i'm saying is that the polls are closed. the debate is over. Product has beaten Process.

did you hear me?

i said product has beaten process. if you can understand this vital truth to existing in 2010 you can understand why anybody does what they do. why for all our knowledge and information and factoids and wikipedia entries everybody is gonna do whatever they feel like doing.

it doesn't matter how something's made or where it comes from, what matters is it's ability to produce the desired effect.

i observe a world of people hungry for new experiences.

new products. the hamburger no one has eaten yet. the hamburger that could not have existed in 1955. i don't want the hamburger my dad told me to get, i want one better than that. i want to know there is still something worth discovering in the world. i want to know that my experiences and interactions with this beast called man on this rock called earth are unique, authentic, specific to my being. right? i think people really think like this.

they don't want their experiences diluted by someone else's jaded 'been there done that' attitude. they want to get into heaven with a report card god will hang on his fridge.

i think if you were to ask people what heaven is like in 2010 you'd get much different answers than if you were to ask people the same question a hundred years ago, or a hundred years before that.

actually, if i can expound on that a little bit

i think many people's idea of heaven was the same for probably like, 1500 years.
then it was the same for 250 years
then 100
then 50
then 25
then 10
then 10
then 10
and so on and so forth

so that's some sort of exponential decrease in the half life of religious ideologies.

what would heaven look like today?

a computer on a cloud where you can google whatever you want and place yourself in the context of whatever you'd like for as long as you might want.

2000- an apartment in a cloud with a laptop with access to websites where you can order whatever you want

1980- an apartment in a city in the clouds where everything you could ask for is a short walk away

1950- a house in a nice neighborhood in heaven where the neighbors are all good by your definition of good and everything you need is a short drive away

1900- a place where the investment of ambition is met with great reward and likeminded individuals build a city worth living in together

1800- a country where the investment of ambition is met with great reward and likeminded individuals build a country worth living in together

1600- a world worth understanding

1400- a world worth exploring

so, i guess what i'm saying is that as the world gets smaller so are people's minds. the way a fish grows as large as the thank will allow them.

the ocean was once a great place for a fish to live. now the smartest of all fish, the dolphin, a genius creature, the human being of the ocean, gets terrorized and tortured for being in the way of humanity. another blessed being trampled underfoot.

boo fucking hoo

oh shit, it's 9\11.

anybody wanna hear me say something edgy about 9\11?

ok here goes:

i don't care about japanese dolphins, i don't care about 9\11 victims and rescue workers, i don't care about your wife with cancer, i don't care about your dying africans.

why not? because life sucks.

life has always sucked.

thank god history gets written by the conqueror because the story from the conquered would just have us all weeping in the fucking streets.

or worse, not weeping.

going about the business of looking for the computer in cloud where we can just order whatever our heart desires.

welcome to 2010.

the most photographed hare in history

so i don't really know whether or not this is the most photographed hare in history, but damnit he must be top 5.

this is the hare from the north american mammals section of the museum of natural history in new york city.

look at that poor bastard. his parents don't know what a star he is, neither do his friends. he was just some dummy hoppin around the desert til he was shot and stuffed by teddy roosevelt himself (citation needed) and thrown in a glass case for all to enjoy.

i think he might even be a jack rabbit.

whatever. there's no hidden meaning here, i just want both of the people who read this blog to know that i am pretty proud to be showcasing the most photographed hare in history.

food

food is always fascinating.

hey

before you go to sleep you should write some stuff down
lay some things down

you know

dig through your head
like a rummage sale
like you lost your wedding ring down the toilet
like you're up to your elbow in a cow's cunt

just lay them out in front of you
watch those bugs squirm and writhe as they nestle into the page
hose your blood off of them and let them dry in the sun

must use directionals

ok so i was on facebook and this girl candace that i used to work with at trader joe's had this status update on facebook:

Candace is filled with uncontollable & inexplicable rage at the Brooklyn Public Library (shitty hours), & people who drive like jerks (not using directionals).

and it made me think of love. it made me think of all the bizarre standards i have for loving someone that i've never really thought about but know for a fact this person must have in order for me to fully trust them and fully invest myself into them for either friendship or romance or whatever. and one of them is using directionals.

i don't think i could love someone that drives like an asshole, and i know they're out there. come to think of it all my friends are pretty good drivers. i'm glad i've inadvertently surrounded myself with people that know what roads are for. roads are for getting from one place to another place. they're the journey, not the destination.

but then i think of all that postmodern bullshit i read (and in general i genuinely adore it) and i think of the way people's minds are changing to be about the journey not necessarily the destination.

because we all know the destination, the destination is death. be it individual or society, we will all die. our kids will die. our grandparents will die. the white house will be a museum or something sillier. maybe we'll still be around but things will definitely be different. we know this because we have the historical context to map the trajectory of a nation and analyze and compare the similarities between the cycles a nation goes through before it's eventual demise.

and that's as far as you can get from pop culture. pop culture can discuss any matter of topic except for those dealing with the ideas that truly engage people's intellect and asks "why are you doing what you are doing?"

i'd like to think this isn't just hippy bullshit. and by hippy, i mean a movement that was once truly inspiring and afforded many young people the chance to get in touch with a more primitive yet intellectually fulfilling experience that was somehow turned into a running joke and a chance to celebrate the ability of drugs to take you out of reality rather than get you thinking about it.

i mean, this is the shit i think about when i get high. i get a little scatterbrained but sometimes it's the only time i can bear thinking about the way things in my life are going and the way things in the world are going.

it's hard to admit when you're projecting your problems onto society and it's hard to know when you're suffering as a result of society's ails. like when i hear about the bad economy and job gloom i think "oh shit, this is what it means to be in a recession. that word i've heard about since i was a kid but never knew what it was."

i mean i know i've been kind of a scumbag my whole life. i went to college and everything, but i had one foot out the door of every class i've ever sat down in and all my favorite people felt the same way. the best thing i can say for myself is that i learned how to manage my general disillusionment and allow for myself to actually do good in school. i did this by seeing the relevance that information and intelligence have and the way people's honest-to-goodness emotions get distilled into works like shakespeare or the jungle or candide or really anything ever written. eventually what i got down to is "OH MY GOD PEOPLE REALLY THOUGHT THIS WAY"

like, people really read and enjoyed henry james' portrait of a lady and they had all the time in the world to read shit like that. i mean, am i just an idiot because i can't read something like that for more than an hour without having to do something else? god, i can't read anything for that long anymore. my attention span has somehow been shortened to the span of like... oh i dunno, just read this thing and look how short the paragraphs are, that's how short my attention span is. i'm not doing this shit on purpose like "oh man look it's a story about a kid with a short attention span look how small the ideas are before he goes to another one" this is me and this is how i write and i'm trying to get better.

i knew my mind was atrophying ever since i stopped using it, and i'm not sure when that was. it was probably around the time i stopped trying to get smarter and wanted to be friends with other people.

i know i'm not fooling anyone, and that's ok.

i've turned into a genuinely gregarious being, and that has everything you've come to know about gregarious beings with it. the good and the bad. yes i am generally friendly and goodnatured yes i think it's important to be considerate to other people and use directionals when driving.

but yes also instead of being individually brilliant or devoting myself to the intellectual pursuits that i know my mind is capable of i decided to go get whatever job would help me do the things i want to do in this world.

i'll tell you something i really think: there's nothing in this world i don't deserve to experience and i'm living the life that helps me experience as much positive and as beneficial as there is in the world and that feeling is a virtue and a sin simultaneously.

because down that road is a threat of evil. the evil of becoming what my friend craig calls a "HUNGRY GHOST". this is a demon that is never satisfied with anything and needs to scour the earth in search of fulfillment that never comes.

so, now that i know i'm not a hungry ghost but a human being capable of feelings and emotions and all that nonsense (NOT REALLY NONSENSE ACTUALLY THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT OF HUMANITY) how do i behave? how do i gain what i immaturely presume everyone else in the world has but me? SATISFACTION

ok listen up because me with all my ADD i'm gonna tell you how to be satisfied:

by realizing that satisfaction does not exist. it's not a feeling, it's not an emotion, it's not a state of being, it's nothing. if satisfaction is gonna come from anywhere, it's gotta come from inside.

don't scour the earth looking for a more perfect relationship to it, start where you are. where you've been planted.

but that's not always easy.

one of the reasons i wanna stay on long island is because i want to do it right. there's nothing about long island that i don't deserve to experience no matter how much money i make, right? well, that's not entirely true.

long island is a fucking expensive place to live. it just is. property tax is high, gas is expensive, mass transit is shitty, etc. what this means is that 6 million people who want the convenience of the city alongside the bucolic aspect of the country are willing to pay through the nose for it.

is it really that surprising to you?

it's like the first thing people do when they get serious amounts of money is get a house on a big piece of property on the north shore of long island.

oh but hey guess what asshole, you're gonna have to get gas one day or go to the supermarket and interact with the townies that have lived here all their lives.

you know what i hate? i hate when people who live in western long island think the people from eastern long island are hicks. i mean, don't get me wrong, it's kinda true, and if you threw a rock in the smithhaven mall food court it would strike an idiot dead facedown in his panda express, but let's get one thing straight: just because long island is an island doesn't mean it's the resort paradise you thought it would be when you moved here from queens or wherever the fuck you came from.

the scary thing is, i really think it's possible that long island will one day be a big fairfield apartments and the throgs neck bridge will be for residents who are allowed in residential sections and the whitestone bridge will be for industrial applications like import\exports and letting working class families get to their homes.

ok, let me expound on that.

let's talk about this monopoly tattoo on my arm. what it means is that i think one day there will be hotels on the graves of the pieces and the moral of the story is the people who win monopoly aren't the people who play the game but the people who control the rules of the game.

let's think about this game about money. this is a game that uses the names of real places. monopoly is a game of chance and a game of skill. the endgame of monopoly is one player having all the pieces and everyone else either giving up, playing until they've literally given every dollar to the one player who has won. how much chance goes into winning? how much skill?

i want you to think about every game of monopoly you've ever played. i want you to think about how monopoly is like the real world. you're born into it with a certain amount of resources and it is up to you how to spend those resources when you're given a chance to spend them.

oh look, i've landed on baltic. should i buy? hmm... if i buy now maybe i won't have enough money to spend on a more valuable piece of property like marvin gardens or (should i dare to dream) BROADWAY and PARK PLACE!

good god, i could think of shit like that all day.

ok, i'm gonna start writing something about the game of monopoly. i'm gonna do a little research maybe, learn when it came around, but i want to know the game of monopoly.

board games are important. all games are important. chess, monopoly, video games. they all have something in common and they've represented the same things for years: community, competition, recreation, leisure time, etc.

ok, i want to write a book about games. not sports, but games.

what i was gonna say was that in order for me to love someone they have to us their directionals, like they don't let themselves succumb to the temptation of being a shitty driver and possibly frustrating or harming another driver. i think that's a lovely sentiment. even if they say they're only doing it so they won't get pulled over. i know what they're really saying is 'i am not going to risk my life, your life, or anyone's life just to get somewhere a little bit faster.'

oh, and i agree with the NYS law making cell phone usage on the road a crime in the same way i agree people shouldn't be allowed to drive drunk. but i'd be lying if i haven't seen my friends act that irresponsible for reasons less than noble and i forgive them because i know even if they're drunk or texting they would never intentionally act in a way that would endanger anyone. so i forgive them.

but if they get busted, i don't let them complain. they should have known they were doing something wrong regardless of the merit of their intentions. sometimes i like how ruthless the legal system can be. i have a friend who was forced to take a breathalyzer at a checkpoint three times before it was over the limit. can you believe that shit?

"blow it again, we can't arrest you yet"

are we really fucking serious? can the law not discern between someone drunk and someone sober? if a cop can't tell who is drunk and who is sober, then why is he a cop? if we can't trust that cop without relying on a little piece of technology to show some number indicating how drunk someone is, why is he a cop? why would we give an idiot like this the power to change someone's life so dramatically?

and meanwhile, am i to believe that angry mothers somewhere want to see more drunk driving arrests? what happens when MADD stirs the police into some frenzy where they need to show big numbers and a tough-on-crime attitude to drunk drivers? well, that's when they start making people who can drive perfectly well take a breathalyzer three times.

(no this didn't happen to me and no i'm not telling you who it did happen and i swear on everything that means anything to me it wasn't the girl i mentioned in the beginning. not that i'm ashamed of that person or what they have done. i'm just afraid what a stranger like you would do with that sort of information.)

when i hear of groups like MADD that really exist i experience a very unique emotion that i want to convey with you. it's a mixture of "aww how cute" with "OH MY GOD WHAT ARE THESE PEOPLE THINKING?"

the gentle soul in me thinks 'aww, how cute. these angry moms think they can get their children back by pooling their misery and turning their anger into a platform to cry for justice and prevent personal tragedy from happening to themselves and others anymore'

i mean i guess they should maybe pool their tragedy and make some sort of platform, but in my world that platform is for them to stand all the mothers of dead children on. let the world see what their good intention has done to the world. it makes an angry mother, which makes a cop out for numbers, which makes an innocent person take a breathalyzer three times.

why do we treat drunk drivers like they're the end of civilization? are they ruining the planet? or are they just met with an equal and opposite reaction by a group of mothers who've turned their wailing in grief to a cry for social justice?

you wanna know the degree of a society's compassion? it's humanity? look at the way it treats it's criminals.

http://askville.amazon.com/measure-civilization-treats-weakest-members-accurate-quote/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=4718239

but before you do that, look at how it defines crime.

it ain't supernatural.

the respect bank

i know some people
who think respect is something that never goes away
that it can be horded
but it can't
it is spent like money

and i know some people who have been making sizable withdrawals
and they know it
they're abusing the credit i've extended

well this is a recession
and the bank wouldn't loan a pen to dolts like you
so let's put in some work and make some deposits
before your account gets closed
and you starve on the street

my reply

i think this is a good reflection of the way people rationalize cruelty. the greatest virtue of the modern american is his sense acceptance of cognitive dissonance. toleration of cognitive dissonance is also a buddhist virtue. just goes to show you how the right tool (CD) in the wrong hands (omnivores) leads to deformed morality.

i also respond to several comments others left


http://eatocracy.cnn.com/2010/07/12/a-day-two-pigs-would-die/

Notice the vocabulary change from the beginning to the end of the article. This is a perfect rendering of the transition an animal goes through being dissected and turned into a commodity. The popularity and curiosity urban and upper class people have with 'free range' and 'organic' meat is reflective of a desire to live a more sustainable lifestyle without compromising their diet. Essentially, reform without reform; a revolution that's pointless and inept instead of bloodless. As long as articles like this continue to be written the most ethical among us will look for ways to buy the right kind of meat rather than simply abstaining from meat, the right hybrid car instead of driving less. Does it really make it better to know that the animal you're eating had a name? Personally, I think it's more abhorrent. I'd rather eat a faceless nameless not-even-numbered hog than one swindled into sacrifice for a more ethically palatable dish.

Cruelty is cruelty, any way you slice it.

so i don't really write

and i hate to say why i don't , but i need to.

i'm just a little bit terrified. of what? of everything. and i know saying everything is the same as not saying anything, so i'm gonna try and get a little more specific.

i'm afraid everything i say will be undercut with humor. i'm a pretty funny guy, and most people like me because i'm friendly and i really do enjoy interacting with people and i'm pretty good at making people laugh or smile, and that's something i've always liked about myself. i try not to isolate anyone based on their politics or ethnicity or social group or anything else. (i try to isolate them based on their actions, but that's another story) i think i do this because i know how it feels to be isolated because of my beliefs. or even worse, beliefs that weren't really mine. that's something i should probably get around to getting over.

i've always been afraid of only being liked for my sense of humor. i guess this is what every smart pretty girl is afraid of, only being liked for her looks. well i'm afraid of only being liked for my humor. i mean i know i can be funny and likable by many people, (don't roll your eyes fuck you i'm trying to be serious) and that can be exploited by people and that can attract the wrong people. you've seen the lotus eaters that go to comedy clubs and like dane cook. they're fucking scary. people that only wanna laugh? good god they're the worst people in the world. spectators of the lowest degree.

in as much as writing is always something i've felt i've been pretty good at, i've always had this idea hanging over my head that writing is a grueling process that drives men to kill themselves. maybe we can call it kurt cobain syndrome. (you see right there? i put a maybe behind that sentence. i'm also gonna watch out for undercutting adverbs and other self-deprecating words). So if writing is this grueling process that drives the greatest minds to off themselves, why do it?

All I care about is art and politics and I only care about them because I think they affect and reflect the world we live in and if something isn't gonna benefit society it should be on the cutting room floor. i'm sorry for being so ruthless but let's face it: giving everything credence and respecting everything anyone does just degrades everything that actually worth appreciating.

You know how things are, or at least how I think things are, I think things are bad. I think they've been getting bad and we're all the frog boiling in water. I just get a little gunshy about calling things out.

There are enough people doing the calling out, the world doesn't need one more voice pointing a finger, because we all know what happens when we point fingers. For every finger I've ever pointed there's been at least one pointing back at me. We know what happens when people poke fingers at the government-- the government points back and they like pointing guns more than fingers.

But lets not get too political, even though I do care about politics.

Let's start with things people do. Things I do, maybe you do, maybe a girl you work with does it, whatever.

ok, let's actually start with an anecdote about work. we all have jobs, and we've all felt this way before.

I've been working at my job for 7 years. I know how to do pretty much everything. I've seen the store run poorly and i've seen the store run well. Forgive me if you actually work with me and see me slacking off sometimes, but when it comes down to it I know my shit.

When things are running bad, the store has poor morale, people get snippy, there's infighting, discontent, etc. It's the proverbial downward spiral. Shitty store affects morale, morale makes the store shitty, etc.

One of the things I see people do in order to avoid the discomfort of actually having to put in real work is work on a little pet project of theirs. I do it too. If I don't feel like putting out bananas or filling up bagged salad, I'll write more order. The secret to not getting told what to do is to be doing something when they try to get you to do something. This is my favorite rule of slacking because ultimately it's not slacking. I mean it's not like I'm painting my nails or balancing my checkbook on the clock, right? But let's get one thing straight: there's a time to slack and a time to work. I don't avoid the bigger projects when they fall to me, but if I'm assigned to one I demand the resources I need to accomplish them. Things like time, occasionally assistance, whatever equipment and space, etc. I keep my needs simple and grounded.

Where was I... pet projects.

I work at a grocery store, and the most important thing at a grocery store is getting the corn on the shelf. God when you say it like that it sounds like the easiest job on the world. Like the job a sundial has of telling time. It doesn't know what it's doing, it's a piece of rock with another piece of rock on it for fuck's sake. Well this particular grocery store has more in common with swiss watches than sundials. You might meet or work with a few morons who insist that it's the other way around, but that's the problem with some things, people who don't do it always underestimate how easy it is. (like a bad sports fans and backseat drivers sortof)

People do pet projects like making their own personal section look as nice as it can be. Maybe they go off and start some other task that, while not objectively unworthy, might not be the best course of action as far as actually accomplishing the things that need to be accomplished.

And that's why I don't write. Did you see that coming? Do I need to explain that?

I don't want to be another asshole working on some pet project while the world goes to shit. Can I say something you might not expect to hear? I've been feeling pretty patriotic lately. I love the freedoms america was founded on and i hate when they're taken away.

I'm smart. I know I'm smart. Not only am I smart, but I'm motivated to change things. Not just certain things, but everything. Things about myself, my room, my house, my street, my town, my county, my state, my country, my continent, my planet.

It's the job of good-natured average individuals to show up to work on time and do what is expected of them. It is the job of intelligent benevolent human beings to make sure what people are doing is not bad.

But that's too ambitious for me. It's too ambitious for everyone. I don't want to lead some children's crusade against the american government. I don't want to lead any kind of children's crusade. (it's amazing to me how many things I think about the world weasels it's way into my work ethic, but i guess it's not that amazing because that's a symptom of integrity and pardon my boldness but i can exhibit a large degree of integrity)

I don't want to be writing the script for the next Judd Apatow movie or making some slack-jawed yokel laugh at black people or making grad students laugh at a president they can't do anything to stop.

I want to contribute. I want to make good things happen for good people. I want my motives to be trusted.

But to do it, I need to lead a children's crusade. I need to point some fingers, I need to make a blog in a world that's been blogged to death. I need to be the still small voice in a cacophony of still small voices. (bible references still sneak in)

Writing can be my children's crusade. it can be my pet project. why? because things are bad in a way that it is beyond me to fix. but maybe if i just contribute positively to whatever I am involved in somehow things will butterfly effect into something good for someone. someone said once that it's better to do evil than to do nothing. well, that's debatable.

a phrase I like better is "it's better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission". I like that one, at least how I employ it. I wouldn't tell that to a kid with a hard on on prom night but I think I can use it to help me write.

I can forgive myself for making people laugh and making life a little more bearable, even if those people don't respect me or they harbor beliefs I don't agree with. I don't need my ego stroked.

i'm straying...

anyways...

i'f i'm ever gonna write anything it's gonna be at a time in my life when my resources allow it. and i don't mean just money, i mean inspiration as a resource, time as a resource. y'know, the little things i demand at work to do what they expect of me.

anyways... we're not at work anymore. there's more on the line here. work ends when i punch out and if i'm terrible at my job my job is all i have to lose. life never quits though, and if i'm terrible at life i'll lose my fucking mind.

stay tuned for some finger pointing. i can't say what's good, but i can say what's not good. (don't ever try and discuss what's universally good.)

goodnight internet.
i start work tomorrow.

why everything is terrible

because it's impossible for people to make the connection between process and product in any way other than intellectually.

i'm sick of images. i'm sick of facades. sandcastles, statues of clocks made out molded concrete that don't tell time, sundials made to look like watches

i know they both tell time but in certain instances i prefer one over the other

the threat grapes pose

i ate all my red grapes but when there weren't any red grapes i bought green ones
i like the green ones so much less than the red ones
i never really respected the difference between the two
but now that i know there's like this big difference i know what to avoid
and i'm asking myself now if the taste of green grapes
somehow obscures my love for red grapes
and i'd have to say 'yes, yes it does'

and that's the danger of grapes
so insipid to me

so important to not settle for something one does not want

so important for me to watch what i eat
because it becomes me

sometimes sitting at this stupid thing just pisses me off
too much of my time is spent staring at screens

i don't blame bp

i blame everyone who has bought an automobile over the past umpteen years
i blame myself
i blame you

i mean don't get me wrong here it would be nice to see someone take a walk for this ecological disaster, but let's be really real: they were drilling for us. for me and you. if the gas didn't go in your car it went in the truck that delivered the mail to your house or the food to your grocery store.

sadly, this isn't enough for a shift in people's consciousness. i shudder to think of what kind of disaster we'll need to do something really real.

you know who i don't blame? the unabomber. but we can't all be unabombers now can we?

write something else

write something else about what a maniac you are and what you think you see when you look at people
how their whole lives are scrawled across their faces
how they don't hide anything, nothing, no pain that hasn't crystallized into a wrinkle or a furrowed brow at the sight of a crying child

something like that
about the women who shop in your store with their children and their children's allergies
their reusable shopping bags
their neverending quests to eat themselves skinny

how you know which one of them is in love
which one of them has a shell around her skull blocking anything from going in or out
which one knew you were about to ask them if they were finding everything ok
who sucks
who shaves

who cares?

it's taken years of experience and more than a little self-convincing to think that this feminine rabble i rub elbows with are anything more than buckets of their husbands money or black holes of their own debt.

but those are the typicals
there are the exceptionals

the ones who smile at you first (1 in 1,000)
the ones who aren't married (1 in 10,000)
the ones who don't look like their hobbies include boring paint off walls (1 in 100,000)
the combination of all three of those things (you do the math)

why am i so hard on these women?
is it because they are so hard on me?
is it because any one of them can be the lady who stops me when i'm on my break and asks me to check for something in the back even though i told her i was sure we didn't have her plain flavored pub cheese? (i pawned her off on a new kid, but still she had the guts to ask)

sorry ladies.
it's all just a little too overwhelming sometimes
the breadth of your characters
i'm sure i'd feel the same way about men if i worked at home depot

i'd know who was gonna ask the girl if she needs help
i'd know who talks about my beard because he can't grow one
i'd know who's an asshole to girls and who gets romantically exploited
who sucks
who shaves

who cares?

truth does not exist

i've been thinking about conflict in the role of fiction. conflict as it's portrayed in fiction. conflict between characters, ideals, or the former embodied in the latter. whatever.

i think the primary role of fiction is to create what the mind cannot absorb naturally. fiction used to just be a smaller and more palatable rendering of reality. it created order and implied that life would surrender to the same rules of logic that theater does and for the most part it does. the lives of the characters are simultaneously sacred and worthless. the audience holds them sacred as the whole of the drama generally relates to their actions. to the writer the lives of the characters are worthless. they will die for the sake of the drama, they will succumb to the theme and should they disobey the unspoken rules they shall surely suffer.

and what better thing can a person be than the main character in his own drama? the comedy of youth, the drama of life, and the tragedy of death. but we're not characters in anyone's drama and as far as control goes we all might as well be sitting on the couch screaming at the tv.

but who's writing the drama of planet earth? the drama of america? and what type of movie is this anyway? i know who.

6.8 billion monkeys at typewriters. they're typing and typing and i still can't tell whether this chaos is elegant and brilliant or random and atrocious. i mean this is an all or nothing type situation right? it's either everything or it's nothing? it either all means something or none of it means anything, right? god's either watching or he isn't and we either get reincarnated or we don't. when it comes to different religious staking claims on the unknowable i still think about it like somebody's right and somebody's wrong. i've been boiling down to the absolutes and i think i have a couple i'm willing to stick with

1-if you can't know then you don't know

if you don't know but you act like you do you're a christian
if you think you know but you act like you don't you're a buddhist

then there's the atheists. can they really do anything but tell other people they're wrong?

then there's the agnostics. wouldn't they just love to be the prophet ridiculed in the first act who turns out right in the end?

so where do i sign up? and why do i have to?

every now and then i have a quick little crisis of faith in humanity and think OH MY FUCKING GOD PEOPLE REALLY LIVE THIS WAY. i do it when i hear about girls getting their genitals mutilated and when i see people go to church all the same.

people still think their particular brand of knowing the unknowable holds court. well, not only holds court, but has a moral authority over the other.

buddhists have it right and this makes me think i understand buddhism more than people who study it. (ed. note: CC if you're reading this i don't mean you i mean the yuppies who start yoga and eastern thought to burn the bad karma they've accumulated in the imaginary race to the top of the pyramid) anyways, all roads of thought that want the closest thing to truth anyone will ever be able to observe lead to the idea that truth does not exist.

that's the one noble truth of roman: truth does not exist.

but it's nice to pretend it does.

our ghosts will be realer than us

how long until the internet leads us to nirvana? this is something i really believe.

i believe technology gets less durable as it gets more complicated. there is a tension between humanity and technology and this tension is why your ipods break and why your cell phones break and why your grandfather's television was made of wood and worked for twenty years with some maintenance here and there but your television is made of plastic and cost 3\4 the original price to fix if anything goes wrong which, chances are, will happen.

robert browning wrote that "man's reach should exceed his grasp". well our reach exceeds our grasp mr. browning and that's why nobody listens to poets anymore. yeah we're still writing on the walls but the advertising leviathan keeps putting advertisements over it. so now what? we write under existing advertisements for like-minded revolutionaries to discover? no, we write, but it's for hipsters and tourists of the mental landscape, always observing and never participating. cataloging it with blogs and tumblrs. we find writings and pictures that LOOK like they might be there to provide some insight or make something meaningless relevant but that's it. they only LOOK like they're able.

but ultimately that's all it takes. they just need to LOOK the part because we'll fill in the blanks. we can put meaning into things that were essentially meaningless.

take this eddie murphy skit where he sings "kill all the white people"
this is funny. this is a funny skit.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/a7fde48976/kill-the-white-people-from-nino

but yknow what? i don't think it's just a funny skit and i've got a boatload of meaning i wanna put into it.

i watch this clip and the little hippie inside me starts acting up. he goes "this is awesome. this is an artists representation of what counter-culture would look like doing it's thing inside the very establishment it is railing against. but why the fuck is this funny?" and why is it funny? here are the lyrics:

I live in a shanty in the shantytown.
We have no money so we had to sleep on the ground.
I played the music. My father he dig a ditch.
My mother she do laundry life sure was a bitch.

But soon we killed the white people. Ooh we gun make them hurt.
Kill the white people yea. But buy my record first.
Ooh yea. Why don’t you buy my record?

We sing of freedom and ooh equality.
But we really don’t care we just want money money money.
We want to drive in a big black limo.
Get so high off ganja we cant even see.
Soon we kill the white people. Ooh we gunna make them hurt.
Kill the white people. Yea. Ooh but buy my record first ooh.

When u go in the record store. We gunna wait outside.
We gunna hit them in the bat and make them cry.
Soon we kill the white people.
Yea but buy my record first.

ok, now watch me try to walk the line between saying something that means anything and being an asshole with an degree in literature fingering himself publicly on blogspot, the chatroulette of intellectual masturbation.

starts off with a mockery of the plight of jamaicans. it's halfway authentic. the difference obviously being that the dudes that wrote the songs eddie murphy is mocking were serious. it's jamaican poverty. http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/economies/Americas/Jamaica-POVERTY-AND-WEALTH.html apparently eddie murphy thinks this is ok to mock. and it is, because it's a black guy doing it. he can say the n-word all he wants and he can mock whatever it is about his own culture he wants and we can laugh about it too. the difference being that smart dudes laugh at how ridiculous it is and racist dudes laugh about how true it is. (ask me why i think dave chappelle doesn't do comedy anymore.) ok, we all know it without seeing it. i'm ready to move on.

then we get to the hook. kill the white people, but buy my record first. ok, the jury is still out on whether or not this is snl being counter-culture or mocking counter-culture. because if reggaedude is singing this because he wants to take the ruling class's money before exterminating it, that's pretty cool, right? that's a pretty big fuck you actually. the hippie in me is happy.

but wait, joe piscopo must have written the remaining verses. the second verse speaks for itself. just kidding "mon", no revolution. just the slave in the house (american network television star) mocking the slave in the field (revolutionary jamaicans). or not. maybe they're just mocking the FAKE revolutionary rastafarians. well, the good news is nobody cares because it can easily be played off as "just a skit on SNL" just as easily as it can be hyped up to be "revolutionary" or "racist". because obviously what's being mocked here is this cartoonish SNL caricature of rastafarian culture committing cultural seppoku by admitting to be motivated by greed and drug use.

then we get to the final verse, where it's clear these rasta dudes are all about money, and are willing to get money BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. is this what happened to the struggle for racial equality? this is what i'd like to call the Great Racial Compromise. black culture could coexist with white culture. that is, if actors and major label musicians belonging to a clearly and publicly defined racial group could be described as ambassadors to the culture they're intended to represent, and somehow i think it'd be hard to find one who'd publicly claim they do not. (or did not for that matter)

so what are the major tenets of the GRC?
well first off, let's say that this isn't totally about black and white. this is about ruling class versus laboring class. this is about more than black and white. this is about the thing versus the other. (that's a thing, right? hegel?) not sure if this is how it works, but i'm mixing hegel's other stuff with marx's dialectic materialism, which might not be allowed, and this is where we get into the limits of my very superficial philosophic knowledge, but bear with me. (or get out your red pen and write "NEEDS SOURCES" right here) so let's take the R out of the GRC because this isn't about race. this is about class and the power associated with it.

well anyway, the major tenets of the GC (as written by the ruling class) state you can laugh at us, you can say how much you hate us, you just have to keep the noise to an acceptable level. HOWEVER, when you want to share our freedom and dignity, you have to play by our rules.

we can make fun of paris hilton all we want, because the harder you laugh at her the more you envy her. the more undeserving she seems of the wealth she has been born into the more you realize that wealth in many cases isn't earned, some people just get to live like that for no reason other than the toil of their fathers. and yeah, it's a tightrope walk because all fathers die eventually, and just like that the winds can change and before you know it the economy is shit and all our dotcoms go bust. but that's the chance they take, and that's the game.

oh, some leftwing nutjob on the writing staff of SNL wants to sing a song called KILL ALL THE WHITE PEOPLE? hmm... ok, let's set the terms and run with it:
1- the lyrics, while initially somewhat revolutionary, must eventually self-destruct. they must show the hypocrisy of revolutionaries hating the system because they envy the people it works for, not because it must be dismantled.
2- they must be sung in an environment provided by the system, both fictionally and realistically
3- they must be broadcast by the system
4- the system must never be dismantled.

after years of upper class racial disharmony the ruling class has finally accepted some select minorities to stand among their own. white isn't white anymore like it was maybe in the 80s or the 60s. again, this isn't about race, this is about power. anyways, the government used to be all white, and it didn't matter how free minorities were how many votes they got, that's just how it was. (statistic\citation needed) well all your protest songs and your civil rights marches were a fine song and dance, and no one can say it wasn't without a few skirmishes here and there. (see: birmingham fire hoses\german shepherds) but ultimately it took the aristocracy to say "hey guys, maybe these kids are right. i mean, we all know some pretty smart minorities right? why, just the other night my wife was reading a book by a black author and she was loving it! these savages can wear suits and ties just like us because y'know what, maybe they AREN'T that different after all! i mean, sociologically maybe [read: definitely] but ultimately some of them want the same things we want: power, prestige, seats at fancy restaurants without having to rub elbows with the rabble." and for whatever reason the paradigm shifted, and the aristocracy began to accept minorities to walk among them, but never lead them. (until maybe obama, but he's just a halvsie, and pardon me for saying so, but the closest thing he's done to represent urban underclass culture was get that dirt off his shoulder. but i haven't really been watching him do anything except not pass universal health care with a public option)








so i don't really know where i am anymore, but what i'm saying is what Audre Lorde said. (i know, i grew up white, but bear with me) The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

you can't be revolutionary on tv. ever. ever ever ever. not keith olbermann, not glenn beck, not dave chappelle, and not eddie murphy. if you think you are, you're being duped. you don't even have the dignity of fooling yourself. the thing about that eddie murphy skit that got me on this topic was how for a split second, i thought it was more than comedy. welp, back to the duping...

it's like when that dude from the matrix sold out all his friends. he knew the only way to live comfortably was inside the matrix, not outside it. it's the outside where we get to experience reality, but it's the inside where we get to experience a world better than reality. we can eat food genetically engineered to perfection, and maybe we get cancer, but that's the game. you get to spend your whole life eating shit and one day you get bitten by the cancer bug and you die. or you spend your whole life selling drugs and one day you get shot on the corner for whatever's in your pockets. it's the difference between pickup soccer at eisenhower park in hempstead and the north london derby. one is organic and fun and pretty much enjoyed by anyone with two feet and a ball, and one gets infused with the drive for capital until the only people who can enjoy it are the spectacles produced by modern footballing masterminds and rich devourers of young talent.

another part of the Great Compromise is that you get to poke around intellectually as long as you promise not to really change anything faster than the establishment can catch up (barring any disaster type scenarios)

this is to say, people are making a great stink over the environment. well how does the establishment meet this great stink? they make a movie from one of their own called An Inconvenient Truth, and what does this teach us? it teaches us that the hippies were right. (a good hippie is always right, but a good hippie is hard to find) anyways, the hippies were right. mother earth is officially suffering. the ice caps are shrinking, the atmosphere is warming, and it's all our fault. but what ELSE does a movie like this teach us? it teaches us that if you can generate a big enough stink it'll catch the nose of the people in the ivory tower and maybe THEY can get a former vice president to do something about it. (wow, a FORMER VICE president. why don't we just let last year's oscar loser deliver concession speeches at the this year's academy awards) anyways, this movie also teaches us that we can trust our government to make things right. it teaches us that the system works. it also takes the responsibility out of the hands of the government (perfectly embodied by Al Gore, toothless and robotic. is that D- next to his name for democrat or demagogue) and places is it in the hands of the public. This makes sense, right? How basically that movie said "it's up to us" instead of "it's up to the government" which ultimately just goes to show you the government exists separately and independently of the public it should represent.

talk about a world without origin or reality, how about a government directly and indirectly preserving the status quo supported financially by a population without leaders? the difference i see between democrats and republicans is this: democrats bullshit the laboring class, republicans bullshit the ruling class. if anything i respect a successful republican more than a successful democrat because at least the republicans are bullshitting themselves a little bit less. because you can probably get one drunk and admit they're happy they don't have black neighbors versus some quasi-bleeding-heart liberal former first wife who puts an office in harlem just to see how the other half lives even though manhattan has already pretty much turned into a theme park for the ruling class where they have(brag of once having had) subways and cab rides through ghettos instead of the drive-thru safari.

look how clean the city is now! and all it took was for a republican mayor to outlaw poverty and outsource it to the other boroughs. now we can finally have our city back. we can make Time Square safe for tourism and industry. that strip club is a Price Club, that crack house is now a Pottery Barn, etc. and that's cool, i mean, nobody wants to be robbed on their way to CBGB's. but in order to not get robbed on our way to CBGB's we had to make the environment around CBGB's so safe and sanitized and expensive CBGB's couldn't survive in it. That punk club is now a clothing boutique and it would take all the writers in the world to fabricate a transition so fitting. Not only is it a clothing boutique, but it's a clothing boutique that uses some of the organic holistically generated punk culture intrinsic to CBGB's to sell totally aseptic conventionally-grown assembled-or-scoured-using-postmodern-FIT-refined techniques to purvey punk looking clothes no punk would be caught dead in to people still dressing up for the party all the old punks already left and no real punk nowadays would ever go to. All at prices no punk would ever afford.


Thrifting
You wanna talk about thrifting? Well thrifting is cool. It's good for the environment. Thrifting is a positive.

Yknow what's not as positive? intellectual thrifting. this is one of the reasons i didn't really like six feet under. every time they made some relevant cultural reference i thought it was intellectually thrifted. which is to say those characters weren't around for that, they never experienced it, the writers just heard about it and had one of their characters say it to make their character seem more authentic, which in turn makes the story more authentic.

well fiction has always done what it does best: invents a world more sane and orderly than has ever existed and could ever exist. not that that's really their fault, i mean it's only fiction. what else should it do but entertain?

Intellectual thrifting is a technique employed by the ruling class, and it has been happening forever, and here's how it works:

we are the characters in a story called Capitalism: The Musical, and if we are good actors we never forget that we are acting our parts in the world that is but a stage. if we are bad actors, we namedrop things we never participated in to make our characters more believable.

for instance, all my favorite artistic movements have come from the lower class. ok, maybe not the lower class, but not the ruling class. the poor starving artists who make art without regard to what the system wants or requires for mass consumption\replication.

anyways, a couple people start making whatever art for whatever reason. let's use punk rock, because it's one i'm most familiar with and it's one that's been totally co-opted, but you think about how this also happened to hip-hop\urban culture and folk music and any other form of art you love like i do.

some punks made punk because they felt like making punk. they weren't trying to key in to the urban white demographic, at least not financially. they were either trying to appeal to the urban lower class demographic on a philosophical\artistic level, or they did it accidentally. however it happened, they did it. and thus punk was born. and what do we know of punk today? well the ramones started it, it kind of fractured into other forms of music like hardcore and metal and ska and whatever other genre you wanna throw at the wall, it'll probably stick (although thus far unnamed, there's another offshoot of that poguesish dropkick murphy drinking irish brand of punk that i can't really stand, but that's another post). well if Punk is\was counterculture and revolutionary, punk is dead. now we have Punk(tm).

if you've been paying attention to punk you know what Punk(tm) is. it's punk that operates alongside the system it once fought against, and it's no different than the activist turned politician who realizes he can only throw a wrench inside the system only if he promises to fix what he breaks and thus becomes a custodian for the status quo. Punk(tm) is the greatest of intellectual thrifters and it provides the ultimate form of tourism. let's watch another clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfn_IuQ3zRU

you know what that is? that's Punk(tm). Punk has always been cool. But like all celebrities, it got even cooler when it died. Punk(tm) is all about who knew who back when, who has the best vinyl collection via ebay, etc. it dies from lack of relevance if it doesn't namedrop shit it was never a part of. anyways, i see this clip and i see something as raw as Black Flag (which has become the touchstone of punk analysis not for being the most punk, but for being the most well documented of punk bands) getting sanitized and repackaged for mass consumption. I mean once upon a time, black flag was really fucking punk. they might not have been that political, but punk never has been that political. yknow why? because real revolutionaries don't waste their fucking time singing about it because they're out living it. but that's why punk is a little bit magical to me, and i know for the most part i'm drinking the kool-aid on this one, but punk lives it BY singing about it. punk for the most part is about standing up for yourself and being whoever the fuck you wanna be. that central punk ideal gets used for the purpose of what i think is good by people like jello biafra of the highly publicized participants in the age so nostalgically creamed over DEAD KENNEDYS, but it also gets used for evil by people like ian stuart and the nazi punk brigade. two groups who represent a pretty substantial binary opposition to one another existing under the umbrella of punk's "FUCK YOU WE ARE WHO WE ARE" mentality. you can't make anything good without it getting into the wrong hands. and now it's in the hands of kids who say "FUCK YOU I AM WHO I AM LET ME BUY MY WAY BACKWARDS IN TIME SO I CAN VICARIOUSLY MOSH WITH THE CRO MAGS AND DRINK OUTSIDE CB'S WITH REAGAN YOUTH." not that these kids aren't involved with punk\hardcore as it is today, i mean for god's sake, look at their record collections. http://www.howsyouredge.com/swap/ (that was sarcastic by the way) anyways... i respect people who earn records more than people who pay for records the same way i respect people who earn sex more than those who pay for it.

so, let's make my final point.

if you create something beautiful, honest, meaningful or relevant in this world, someday and somewhere an aspiring young capitalist will steal it and use it to make money. he will kill you and steal your spirit. he will use your spirit as a model to create merchandise, intellectual property, VH1 nostalgia shows, fictional documentaries cooler than real life like "Lords of Dogtown", etc. Your spirit is now a ghost that will be mistaken for you that nobody wants to believe is dead.

and that's how punk turns into Punk(tm)
how environmentalism turns into An Inconvenient Truth
and how revolution turns into maintenance of the status quo.

occasionally

occasionally i wanna drive a knife into the heart of the world

i'm sorry, but i do.

i know i never will and for a billion reasons i would never want to just as much as you might never want to, but there's this monster lurking around inside of me that sneaks up into my head sometimes. what does it mean and why is it there?

i dunno, but if i write about it it helps. and you're not supposed to write about stuff like this, but i look inside and that's there, and that's what i wanna get out.

i don't wanna labor over some gorgeous memory or get caught scouring my mind for minutiae and deleted scenes from the arthouse flop "My Memory: The Stylized Interpretation of My Life as I Feel Like Remembering Out Loud to You"

i wanna write about that monster.

look how embarrassed he is for wanting to drive a knife into the world. he talked a big game a couple seconds ago but now that the world is looking him in the eye he's not so brave.

wishlist

subtlety



brevity



sparseness



grace

it's 1890 again (write a message in a bottle)

is that a skirt on the legs of your synthesizer?

i watched knocked up and juno and all those movies with credits with the freaks and geeks font and they said alot of curse words but at the end i thought 'holy shit i think i just got preached to'

we can have our dick and ball jokes as long as we don't get abortions.

it's like when a nice old man stops and talks to you but he reaches into his pocket and gets a tract of some sort and wants you to think about the rest of my life and what happens to me when i die.

we can curse and post whatever inane shit we would ever want to post on the internet but the house always wins.

does anybody here know about the BOOMER from left 4 dead? well it's an enemy from a video game. it's a zombie that is fat and if you shoot it and its guts get on you you get swarmed by zombies. if it gets close it will puke on you and that will attract zombies. they do this because it's a video game and they need to do something to make them worth shooting besides just blowing up. but get ready because here comes a metaphor: that's how i feel about all the church going christians i know and will ever meet. they are waiting to puke on me because i am not like them. they are waiting for me to curse or fuck up or do something wrong and then they get to puke on me and i get swarmed with other zombies who will beat me to death.

i guess maybe i asked for it.

i used to want to write. i wanted to write something that would make people think. well the thinkers already think and the non-thinkers... well they're just that. i bet somewhere else there's a 29 year old dude thinking about how he wants to write something to make people believe in god and he wants to make nonbelievers into believers.

it's not like i've given up on writing or literature, i just don't see the point anymore.

everyone's just DYING to hit the reset button. we're all itching for the big one to drop and we all get to start over, just like that last thing i wrote. why are we so obsessed with disasters? why 2012? armageddon? deep impact? dawn of the dead? the road? what is this obsession with post-apocalyptia?

we're all terrified because we don't know when or how it will happen so we need to watch how it might look and how it might happen and someone always survives and it's usually the person we identify with most.

i have an idea. it's because we know armageddon isn't coming so we put it on the silver screen. we eat because there are things our body needs that it cannot create. and like our bodies consume what they cannot create our minds must also.

we create fiction out of preexisting facts and ideas like we're baking cakes. cakes is good because that's as far as you can get from the things you started out with- wheat, butter, eggs, milk, sugar, etc. there you go you have a cake you baby.

where was i...

ok, here's a sad story: every movie you've ever seen, every book you've ever read, it's been a cake. it didn't grow out of the ground or get plucked off a tree, the ingredients were carefully measured and it was baked very carefully to make sure it's everything you want it to be. they even make cakes that taste bad, and people go apeshit for them.

cake serves two purposes: it tastes good and it fills your belly. unfortunately it's not that good for you.

well all i see is cake everywhere i look. i see cakes made out of animals and cakes made out of the suffering of different peoples and i see cakes made out of sugar and spice and i see cakes made for pre-teens and cakes made for divorcees and cakes made for the aspiring hegemonist and cakes made for me.

i see nutritious cakes and think 'is this the best we can do' and i know before i ask yes it is.

and it's ok that they're bad for you, because we're all just begging to die. we're all just aching to get a major role in the human drama.

you want more about the cakes that taste bad?
well they make cakes that taste like vegetables only better.

whatever. i just give up. i just give right on up.

we've passed on every opportunity to make anything better. we fix problems in ways that create more problems. we leave our children only a broken legacy of debt and error. my kids will buy ipods that will start their cars for $500 that will last three months and they will not complain.

i'm dante without virgil. i see ghosts and shades and hell. throw me in the lethe river i wish to forget.

hey... i do alot of "everyone this... and everyone that" in this. sorry. it's a bad habit. i'm not trying to be judgmental. i don't hate people. there's redeeming qualities in everyone despite their best efforts. i can like almost anyone on an individual level. it's the what happens when they get together and start making decisions that affect people that aren't them is when i take the safety off my pistol.

for that i am not sorry. one man could never kill as many as many men.

capitalism failed in the great depression
science failed when we dropped the bomb
art failed when we stopped trying to better the world and started imitating our heroes

and i don't mean better the world like building hospitals. (but that's a step)

i mean making people's lives better. create something beautiful that someone can appreciate. do SOMETHING to let someone else know they're not alone. lay down with a pretty girl or a handsome man and let them know and let yourself know that you need to interact with people to experience some of the greater pleasures in life.

write a message in a bottle and throw it in the ocean and don't care who reads it or whose life it changes, but know the odds that it just might are far less than the odds it will not.

spray paint the lambda character somewhere, drop some medkits and ammo, and let gordon freeman know he's headed in the right direction. (this is a video game reference)

i'm glad i make video game references. it's very populist. i'll understand if you don't get it or appreciate it but i base my success as a writer on how well i believe i've made my point not how well you understand or how much you agree with my point. and besides, if you're really confused, you could just email me.