So I've been thinking for a while now, in the way that certain philosophy can make one, about solipsism. That's where you think that you're the only real person. Only you and your body and your mind are real. Everything and everyone else is just a figment of your, the only real, imagination. At least, that's one kind. There are others, but this is the fun one.
So here's what I've been thinking about it: (and yes, I pretty much have to jump straight back into this. right now, there will be no commenting on this sudden, perhaps temporary return) I don't really buy it. I recently started to understand that old joke-cliche about how nothing exists. I mean, we've got no way to prove that we're anything more than video game characters for some vastly superior intelligence. People can't prove they exist because we have no external referance point from which to observe our own condition (that's what makes history so hard, if you're bothering to try to do it right).
But here's where solipsism comes in: I feel pretty immutable. I don't really change. I've said this to people before; I don't have epiphanies, and I don't have life-defining, or life-changing, experiences. Where other people are changed by some event, or by some other person they meet, or whatever, I just ripple on the surface, but my habits don't change. It doesn
I'm too tired to write about that. And hot. Always, always, always too hot.
I'm frustrated. . . a lot? Or just frequently for really short little episodes? I can't even explain the frustration. It's like I feel crazy from holding myself so tight and straight for so long. I try to only be angry at people when I SHOULD be; anger without a real reason is something I try to put away, to dissipate, or to swallow. Mostly I swallow it. Repression. I repress my frustration, which I'm pretty sure comes from repressing things!
aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Apparently, and to my surprise, one of these little bouts of clenched frustration and bitterness is not condusive to writing about the recurring problem of said fits.
I could sure go for some real problems. Or, at least, I say that right now. Should real problems ever arrive, I will no doubt rue them. Rue them and this post hard. Hell, tomorrow morning when I wake up, or sometime soon, when this passes, I'll snicker a little to myself over it. Except for a little part of me that will stay a little worried, 'cause I know this won't be the last. It doesn't seem that they're getting worse, which is worse than if they were. Then, at least, we might be approaching some kind of resolution. But we're not. I just bop along, really happy most of the time, having little episodes of frustration, the reasons for and the nature of which I can't begin to know or conceptualize.
"Bottoms up boys, this is the last call!"
See, if I were getting MORE desperate, then I could relish that lyric appropriately. Look out, world, people! I'm going to snap soon! I'm going to cut loose and kick ass and completely change! I'll have a self-destructive phase! I'll drop out of school and do drugs! I'll learn something in the process, even if it kills me and even if I'd have been better off not knowing it.
I saw "Adaptation" last night. It was really cool. Mara was there, and she was cool. There's a part where they mess of a screenwriter-genius, played by Nicholas Cage, is talking to this other screenwriter. And he talks about how he wants to make a movie about plants, and not people. Where people don't change, or learn something, or grow. Where they start off mediocre and confused and frustrated (my new favorite word) and they STAY that way, "like in real life". The other screenwriter yells at him. He asks Cage if he's even paying attention to the world. People die and kill each other and are born and overcome terrible hardship and are infinitely cruel and endlessly kind and forgiving. Brothers fight over women (guess I've seen that one), familys destroy themselves and reform. People have drug problems and drinking problems and gambling problems. Politics and wars and revolutions and so on.
I was not impressed. I've never seen any of those things. I'm Nicholas Cage's counter-argument (which he didn't make; he appeared convinced, or at least to consider this new idea that people do grow and change like in the movies). He grew, and changed (I'm pretty sure).
I haven't. Maybe I will sometime, but I bet not, at least right now I do. I'm just stable enough not to, but not stable enough to actually avoid fits of what, I guess, is some kind of lack of self-acutalization.
"Ah, we gotta move!"
Pffffff. Someone come have an impact on me. I wish I could be a machine. I wish bolsheviks were right, that we were all just math to be plotted and balanced. I'm just a broken equation, and I won't ever make sense or be at peace.
This will seem like silly excess soon, until its time for me to try to dump all this baggage again. At which point this entry will just be another failed attempt behind me on the road. As if I were moving somewhere.
Arg. Fucking fucking fucking fuck I hate everything.
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A living, breathing, real-time LJ auto-documentary of a few kids' emerging college experience: http://www.livejournal.com/community/avalancheilm/
Enter if ye list (buttsex). |
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Ooh
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Jul. 17th, 2005 @ 11:57 pm
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Yesterday I washed dishes hectically for three hours while listening to Messrs. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer go fucking nuts. Lake, Greg, specifically went nuts on his keyboards. I heard such hits as "Peter Gunn", "The Hut of Baba Yaga/In the Valley of Kiev", and "Karn Evil 9, 1st Impression (Part 2)".Current Mood: happy as usual Current Music: ELP-yesterday. Today-Greatful Dead ("Sugar Magnolia") |
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Ach
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Jul. 15th, 2005 @ 09:58 am
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I am just getting too trendy for my own good. I am listening to my iPod dock. . . with my iPod in it. My iPod is like the One Ring. And I got a hair-cut. Pretty durned short, for me at least. Jury's still out on that one. Mara got Dad to buy me like forty dollars to spend on skin-care products. Like acne wash and face wash and astringent. So now I was my acne and my face and astringe often. [Words misspelled and corrected thus far: fourty, dollers, possibly misspelled]. Maybe I should buy a new shirt or something. Paycheck today?
Umm. . . I had something else. Dad and I had an argument just now about the proper storage of the orange juice pitcher. So I forgot.Current Music: Kalinka-Red Star Army Chorus |
These are by Richard Brautigan:
INSANE ASYLUM, PART 8
Baudelaire went
to the insane asylum
disguised as a
psychiatrist.
He stayed there
for two months
and when he left,
the insane asylum
loved him so much
that it followed
him all over
California,
and Baudelaire
laughed when the
insane asylum
rubbed itself
up against
his
leg like a
strange cat.
IT'S RAINING IN LOVE
I don't know what it is,
But I distrust myself
When I start to like a girl
A lot.
It makes me nervous.
I don't say the right things
Or perhaps I start
To examine,
Evaluate,
Compute
What I am saying.
If I say, "Do you think it's going to rain?"
and she says, "I don't know,"
I start thinking: Does she really like me?
In other words
I get a little creepy.
A friend of mine once said,
"It's twenty times better to be friends
with someone
than it is to be in love with them."
I think he's right and besides,
its raining somewhere, programming flowers
and keeping snails happy.
That's all taken care of.
BUT
if a girl likes me a lot
and starts getting real nervous
and suddenly begins asking me funny questions
and looks sad if I give the wrong answers
and she says things like,
"Do you think it's going to rain?"
and I say, "It beats me,"
and she says, "Oh,"
and looks a little sad
at the clear blue California sky,
I think: Thank God, it's you, baby, this time
Instead of me.
And this one is the best:
HEY! THIS IS WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT
For Jeff Sheppard
No publication
No money
No star
No fuck
A friend came over to the house
a few days ago and read one of my poems.
He came back today and asked to read the
same poem over again. After he finished
reading it, he said, "It makes me want
to write poetry." |
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traaaaaafic traaaaaaaaaaafic traaaaaaaaaaafic
I love traaaaaaaaaaaaafic. Traaaaaaaaaaafic in my bell-eeeeeeeeeee. Yum Yum Yum Yum Yum Yum.
And now for some Blog-Key(Board)-Art
[aaaaaaaaaaaa=~_aaaaaaa=~_aaaaaaa=~_aaaaaaaaaaaaa]
A clean desktop is the sign of a disturbed mind. Or is a clean mind the sign of a distrubed desktop? Or is a mind desktop the sign of a clean disturbed? [==HALT PERMUTATIONS==]
Mar. 22nd, 2005 @ 11:30 pm
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| » Not a real return to LJ |
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This is one of the few places where I don't have to respond to whoever may see this (who?), and can thus dodge accusations of megalomannia and assorted egomaniacism.
Mid-Year Report? Check.
1 out of 375? Check.
4.800 GPA? Check.
And I just saw "The Motorcycle Diaries". It was great. Suprise.
Seeya never.
Jan. 19th, 2005 @ 10:15 pm
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| » (No Subject) |
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Once upon a time, there was a knight named Daniel. He was as good an example of a just, loving, and brave knight as ever could be found, and, like Lancelot, his virginity gave him the strength of ten men. He served his king to the best of his considerable abilities and was generally a good example to everyone. He never started a fight or quarreled with a friend, and he was always just and fair in his decisions. Better than all of this, he was intensely humble, putting others before himself and giving up the least comforts on general principle. Rarely has such a man lived.
Sir Daniel, one day, having just lost his armor and his sword to an evil trickster by the name of Maverick, set off into the woods near a castle he was staying at. He was far from home, visiting on behalf of his lord a distant in-law. Daniel did not really know anyone there and had tried to make conversation and be a gracious guest, but now he was tired and lonely for familiar faces. Maverick, a malignant enchanter who seemed to have a special grudge against the loving Daniel, had come to him in a dream as a fair maiden who cried out to him, "Oh, brave knight! You must save me!"
Sir Daniel, not being accustomed to encountering fair young maidens in his dreams and seeing no danger near either himself or the girl, asked in surprise, "Why, save you from what, good lady? I see no arrow, no spear or sword bent on tearing your white-skinned arms. I see no monster, no brigand, no enchanted prison to discomfit or bind you. But, surely, tell me what it is you need to be rescued from and how I may do just that, and I swear on my magic sword that you will not spend another moment in danger."
He said all of this because he was a good man who considered himself far less intelligent than he actually was, and also because he had a magic sword which had been given to him by a poet and blessed by the oldest monk in the world. The monk had not said what faith it was that he had dedicated his considerable lifespan to, but Sir Daniel was not as intolerant as some other knights and whatever God there is had apparently rewarded him for it with the magic sword and general good fortune.
Getting back to the dream maiden, she said in a rush "Valiant knight! Your pledges of salvation are as cool water to a burn! I am a lady of God, an angel, some would say." At this, Daniel fell to his knees and said a prayer. "And I will surely be destroyed with grief if the weapons of war you carry are not soon unmade." And tears streaked her beautiful, shining face.
Daniel was very surprised to find himself in his armor and holding his magical sword, as he was sure he had not gone to sleep that way, nevertheless began to disarm. With no thought for the value and use of his arms and armor, he threw them into a lake which was conveniently nearby. He turned, grinning with simple pleasure to have been blessed with the chance to save an angel, only to find Maverick where the angel had been, laughing at him. The ugly, evil dwarf squatted on the fair robes of what Daniel had thought an angel, and ridiculed the honest knight.
"You are a fool! A big, dumb, brute! Your God surely loves His fools!" The dwarf said in between gales of uncontrollable cackling. He then called to Daniel again, in hideous tones that mocked the honeyed voice of angels, "Oooh! Good Sir Daniel! Save me from the horrible, wicked monsters!" And with that, the dwarf fell onto his back, gripped his belly, and rolled about in malicious delight.
Poor Sir Daniel was crestfallen. The magical sword, blessed by the oldest monk in the the world! The armor that his father, a truly good knight just as his son was, had given to him! Now it was the knights turn to weep, and weep he did. He immediately said another prayer, apologizing to God for the great mistake he had made in being fooled by the spells and wickedness of Maverick the Dwarf. To think that he had mistaken the little devilish enchanter for an angel! The shame and sorrow were almost too much to stand.
And so he had awakened, unsurprised to find his armor and magical sword gone, and eaten a meager breakfast in silence. Now he had set out into the forest, hoping to see something that would cheer him somewhat. He still had his shield. It was a simple oaken buckler with leather straps for his forearm. He had made it himself, and he supposed (rightly) that Maverick had left it behind just to taunt him. The shield was simple and plain and not magical like many of the other knight's shields. However, though he saw Maverick's reason for leaving him the shield, it did not make him feel any worse. He was not too proud for his little shield, and thanked God for Maverick having left the shield to him, no matter the dwarf's motives.
As he walked down the the forest path, he admired the trees and the way the light filtered through them. He listened to the little birds sing and walked quietly so that his passage would not scare away deer. Soon enough, he saw a doe and her fawn, and stopped to pet them. Sir Daniel did not eat any animals or fish, but only vegetables and what little fruit came far enough north to reach the court of his lord. The other knights made fun of him and called him Sir Daniel the Womanly, but Daniel did not care. He was not sick, like the few other vegetarians he had encountered (mostly holy hermits), for God favored Daniel'S gentleness and sustained him far better than any animal flesh could have. All the animals of the forest loved him, and he they. He was allowed to pet the most skittish of animals, like deer; when he slept, little birds and squirrels slept on his broad chest.
Moving on, Daniel began to hear cries for help. He hurried down the path, and, sure enough, the sounds grew louder. It was a maiden calling for help! He also heard fearsome growls and cries of pain.
All at once, the path widened into a clearing, and Daniel saw a fearsome beast devouring a young maiden alive. It was like a goat, but much, much bigger, about the size of a fully-grown bull. It had vicious horns like a bull and red, rolling eyes. Its feet and teeth were like a lion's, and it had a long, scaly tail that lay limply in the dirt behind its monstrous body. Its coat was rich and the color of melted caramel that is given to children at the feast of a Saint. The maiden it was eating (from the legs up) was very beautiful, with long red hair and big brown eyes. She looked at Sir Daniel mournfully, and the next instant fell in love with him. Then she became even more sad, because she knew she would die whether this man armed only with a shield killed the beast or was killed by it. She hoped he killed it nevertheless, because that would bring him glory and he would not die and she loved him.
Then the beast called to Daniel. "Sir Daniel! I am Nero the Monster! I have killed twenty seven knights, all the bravest in their kingdoms, and now I have come to kill you! Take a little pleasure in being the bravest knight in your kingdom before I kill you." It said scornfully, "I kill only the bravest."
But Daniel was not fooled, like the other knights had been. To each knight Nero the Monster had appeared, and it had said the same thing to each one of them. Then, while they were off-guard and heady with pride, Nero leaped on them with great speed and rent their flesh with his gigantic lion claws. Each of the twenty-seven knights it had killed (for, though it was evil and a beast of whatever Devil opposes whatever God there is, lying was not its particular evil) had truly been the bravest in their kingdoms, but they had also been a little too vain. That had been their undoing. Sir Daniel was not vain or proud at all, for pride was one of the worst sins that his God could think of, and so, when the beast was talking, Sir Daniel threw his shield like a frisbee and the steel rim of his humble buckler hit the beast on the crown of its evil head. Both of its horns broke and its skull was caved in and its brain was crushed, and it died.
Then Sir Daniel looked at the maiden who was lying on the ground, with only her chest and arms and neck and her pretty face still uneaten. And Sir Daniel fell in love with her and was very said because he knew she would die very soon, and he said, "If only your wounds were not so terrible, you might live. Then I believe that I would ask you to marry me, because I have fallen in love with you. Would you say yes, if I asked?"
But the maiden was too badly hurt and she had lost too much blood. So she died before she could answer the knight's good question. She died happy, at least, because the knight she had fallen in love with returned her love. And as her soul was carried up to Heaven by beautiful angels who looked like children, she asked them the name of her beloved. The little angels answered her with a childish giggle (love was funny to them, because they were like little boys and girls at heart) and they said "His name is Sir Daniel, and he is the bravest and the most holy and the best knight in the world."
Sir Daniel looked at the beautiful girl in misery, and he saw that she had a locket round her neck on a little gold chain. Then he looked at it more closely and saw that it was inscribed with the maiden's name. Rachel.
From that day onward, though he would have many more adventures, Daniel was always known as Sir Daniel the Unfulfilled, because he did not know if the maid he loved would have married him or not. But he knew her name, and that relieved the pain of having lost his magical sword and his father's armor.
Oct. 26th, 2004 @ 03:40 pm
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| » lazy like a railgun |
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I'm so tired my head is literally spinning. It really, really looks to me like the whole world is rotating on the axis of me. The E-Axis. Dude. I love me.
I'd tell you more about why I'm so tired, but I'm too tired. I broke the back of my Eagle Project work. It'll probably shape up to about 180 man-hours. I've worked a good seventeen hours in the last three days. On 16 hours of sleep. Yep. Total Number of Hours Worked Since Monday Night: 17 Total Number of Hours Slept Since I hit the Sack Tuesday Morning: 16 Cost of Finally Preparing to Accept my Place as an Eagle Scout, A Rank Only Reached by Two out of Every Hundred Boy Scouts: A WHOLE FUCKING LOT
James's party was fun, they always are. But I wasn't very funny. I hope it's only because I was tired. Hard to type in the Key of the Axis E. Oh, and the insturmental on the live version of 'Veteran of the Psychic Wars'? Totally great. Starts slow and pumping, and it speeds up with more and more little whorls of guitar licks until its propelling you a long at the speed of rock. You don't even notice it speed up and then rock out until its breaing down on you.
LAN Party A: 19 Hours
Oh yea.
Aug. 12th, 2004 @ 10:31 pm
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| » I lost my buddy list for a sec |
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and almost drowned.
Zed Alpha McGraw HST Three-two-one-niner.
Where's my float, i thought i left it here
i guess my little horse must think me queer
no bottom, no top
so just drink every last fluctuating drop
wrists and radials and typhoid blue
tv dials and green keys too
scared and ready for what is a long ways in the offing
degrading-comma-poem
like Flowers for Algernon
i'd do it
you would too
declaration-comma-meaningless
junlge-comma-kelp
pictionary dictionary squares and spheres
my little horse says you're all queers
tears
surge in the chase, i got notebooks today
i wish john and austin where here
austin will be soon
anyone lose a dog? mine's dew later
silly ralson
everyone knows robots don't have mana
fall from grace
scrape your face
lose the race
keep the pace
play it all close to the vest, all close to the vest my loving sons
the end wants you to go meekly, arms wide
so oblige the fucker. he's just the baddest sleeping pill around
maybe if there were rocks
no more rides in the sun cube
life is an inside joke know won else nose
we fade in and out of the slipstream
the slipstream
bears me away, bore my today
today is today's birthday, my child by the slipstream
obviously
go drown
God keep our showers warm and His rains cold.
Aug. 8th, 2004 @ 01:52 am
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| » The river Farda is a magical and cursed one |
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"One may cross it once to gain the blessings of fate. Twice, though, and the curse of the fool befalls you. A third time, and you will never again. We have all crossed it from the lands to the west, seeking fortune. To cross back would mean ill fortune, and to try to return again, death." -IXJac
Holy, holy, holy, holy, HOLY shit this is a good song. Holy shit.
Jul. 24th, 2004 @ 02:10 am
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| » Napoleon(!) |
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DISCLAIMER: The following entry will probably contain a lot of statements to the effect of: "Napoleon was the best _______ of all time." I am excluding Jesus from these sweeping praises because, while dwelling in a mortal vessel, He was still God.
“The world begged me to govern it. . .”
-Napoleon I
Napoleon was a pretty great guy, I must say. I think he existed and exists more than any human being to date. In addition to raw talent in politics, war, law, administration, propaganda, and organization, he possessed an aura of might, power, and charisma the like of which the world has not seen since the greatest Casers, if then. His terrifying pride, arrogance, selfishness, and egomania only serve to make him seem a more epic man.
Napoleon was the kind of man who made people afraid simply by proximity. Even before his ruthlessness in Egypt and Syria became well known, Madame de Staël wrote “The terror he inspires in inconceivable,” to her father. Madame de Staël was one of the foremost intellectuals of her age and not susceptible to sudden flights of unfounded fear.
Goethe wrote of him:
What centuries have dimly meditated?
His mind surveys in brightest clarity;
All that is petty has evaporated,
Here nothing is of weight save earth and sea.
And I’ll admit it, I’m fucked if I know what that means but it sounds impressive. Heinrich Heine, one of his greatest admirers, wrote: “His countenance was of the complexion we fins on the marble heads of Greeks and Romans. The features were as nobly proportioned as those of ancient statues, and on his face was written: Thou shalt have no other god but me.”
Sends shivers up and down my flimsy spine.
A note of interest: Heine saw the Emperor when he was only a small boy. Napoleon was leading his cavalcade across a municipal lawn in Düsseldorf, ignoring signs which said walking on the grass was streng verboten.
Napoleon also compared himself to George Washington. “If Washington had been a Frenchmen at a time when France was crumbling inside and invaded from outside, I would have dared him to be myself; or, if he had persisted in being himself, he would merely have been a fool. . .As for me, I could only be a crowned Washington. . .” Sounds true to me, excepting that Napoleon was far more skillful a general than Washington and probably a better statesman. Not that I’m bashing Washington. Just because he’s not as good as the best modern commander and politician doesn’t mean he wasn’t damn fine, and he was certainly more humble. At least, he was more humble when given the opportunity. If Napoleon had been humble. . . the Revolution would have died and the world would be a vastly different (and probably not as good) place.
A word about the delightful Constitution of the Year VIII: after the coup d’etat in which Napoleon was a third of the masterminds, he out-maneuvered the others and created this masterpiece of authoritarian rule hidden in the guise of democracy.
The citizens voted and drew up “national lists” from which the Conservative Senate staffed three other bodies: the Legislative Body, the Tribunate, and the Council of State. The lists were really just suggestions and used only as a last resort and to fill vacancies. There was no mention of how the Senators were selected, but Napoleon took care of that little oversight. He made the other two men in the coup-staging triumvirate Senators and they promptly made him First Consul (equated by Herold to Roman princeps, whatever those are). Then the senators (for life) chose a bunch more senators and proceeded to staff the Council of State (an administrative organ) and the last two bodies set up by the new constitution. The Tribunate could discuss but not vote on possible laws, and the Legislative Body could vote on by not discuss possible laws! Neither house could start a new bill.
Then, over the course of a few years, Napoleon out-maneuvered the senators and the legislative puppet bodies discussed above to found his own imperial dynasty.
THAT is the interesting new shit I learned today.
Jul. 22nd, 2004 @ 06:09 pm
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| » Oops. |
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I was impatinet and accidentally double-posted my lj magum opus (to date). Sorry. Just read the second one, with the commnet by me.
Jul. 22nd, 2004 @ 06:06 pm
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| » A Real Entry |
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The kid sat at his computer, in the dead of the night. His whole house was dark, all the lights off so he could hear the music coming from the speakers and so he could see the light burning off the screen. Soft, glowing light, gentle when he wanted it stark and painful. A friend when he was looking for viciousness.
He wants to write something trippy, but he’s never taken a trip. Not a real one. Never a trip with any drugs that come from outside his own flesh-and-blood body. He’s not a poet, he’s not a musician, he’s not what could really be called a writer. He’s not Jim Morrison, though he thinks he might want to have a piece of that action. If he could keep it from poisoning him. Shirtless, a little tanned under the cheap suit jacket he wears. He loves how cheap it was and how the sound of the words ‘suit jacket’ make him think of eccentricity, and jazz, and booze. Of mysticism and enigma. He wants to hit that pipeline, that conduit that on-the-edge artists hit. What makes someone write
the killer awoke before dawn
he put his boots on
he took a face from the ancient gallery and he
walked on down the hall
or what makes someone make Apocalypse Now. It’s a cliché, and he knows it all to well, but he wants to lose a part of himself and trade it for a bit of something else. Something that will make him an off-kilter poet. One that sways the average, everyday people to his fold and one that makes the really intelligent, creative ones scared and awed. He wants to be less in control, or really to have his writing (what little and small-scoped writing he does) less in control.
He wants to be less of a writer, if that’s even possible, and more of a sightseer. He wants to take himself for a ride, and to understand what he means only a little bit better than other people.
The kid knows just what it’ll be like when he gets it, if he does. It’ll be like grabbing a live wire, with none of that nancy rubber protecting a stupid world from a barely-harnessed force. It’ll burn him, and he won’t be able to let go because of the current he’s tapped into. His flesh, his skin, will slough off, charred and stinking. Anyone who sees it, and gets too close. . . the current will jump the gap between the kid and the bystander. Then the bystander won’t be able to move, to stop watching. The current will stop and the kid will let go and the watcher will stop watching when they’re dead. When they’re burned to husks from too much creativity.
The problem is definitely control, I’m sure of that now. When I went to the kitchen to get some more vanilla Pepsi, I understood. First, I noticed the white, creamy light from the monitor on the refrigerator, and on the cabinets and the chopping block, and the counters. I thought it was beautiful, so I turned around and looked back at the computer through my glasses. I wasn’t afraid. That’s a problem. That’s the problem. The core of it. The computer screen, with little black characters on it, was nestled in the black of the night around it and it looked like a fucking window man, a damn window into a hell of too much. . . too much something.
But it’s not. Or it wasn’t. It could be. If I wrote something scary, or something profound, which is the same thing but with fewer comfortable solutions hard-wired by instinct, then it would be too much something. You can run from what you’re scared of, but you can’t hide from a truth. A real profound work scares you, but you know it’s true. If it’s really profound, you only know it’s true. Not how, or why, or because of who, or since when. Therefore it’s obvious that a person in control can’t write anything really profound, because how can someone watching what they say or write and being careful with what they say and write ever produce a truth that no one, least of all the author, understands at all beyond its elemental verisimilitude? And isn’t that what it means to be in control? To be watching what you say and write and do and think?
I thought I might have been getting close for a minute. But I don’t think so now. I do know that I’ll understand all this when I read it later, if I do. Does that prove it is profound, or that it isn’t? Maybe that up there is just the truth about profound truths.
That’s not profound. It’s not the walls or ceiling. It’s the foundation. It’s the operating procedure, the algorithm, the formula, the enzyme, not the catalyst or the precipitate or the quotient or the song. It might not be anything but pilpul. I don’t know if I like pilpul or not, but in the end it doesn’t matter right now because pilpul is a game and I DON”T WANT TO PLAY ANYMORE. I want OUT. Right-fucking-now. I don’t want to sit in the same sandbox anymore. I don’t want to rule cows and men and physics. I want to be the king of nowhere! I want to be the master of the yard around and outside your sandbox. The empty yard, where the real big kids left their toys. Where they left their books. I’ll sit out there and draw you pictures of what I see and hold them up for you, you who are building sandcastles, to look at and you won’t understand them any more than I do, but you’ll like them. Some of you will like them at least. The romantics. They’ll be art. That’s what art is; art is pictures of what other people can’t see.
Not profound; just a mission statement.
Before you slip into unconsciousness
I’d like to have another kiss
another flashing chance at bliss. . .
the days are bright, and filled with pain. . .
Listen to that music! Music is raw feeling. If you don’t feel much, or exist much, you won’t produce full music. You might like full music, but you can’t produce it. Those chords right there, the ones I just heard are the right example. They’re feeling. Not a feeling, but just feeling. They’re love and desperation and fear and acceptance of something you don’t want to happen but is going to anyway. The notes lilt by, and they’re not a word or a color but a situation. You love him and he’s going away, going away to fight a war he doesn’t understand or believe in. He was going to go to college, he was smart, he was the golden boy of the whole damn town and he loved you back and he was going to ask you to marry him and you were going to say yes and you would have borne his children after love-charged sex that grabbed you both like a tidal wave mixed with a high-balling freight train and your kids would have grown up and you would have loved him all the more when he became the perfect father you knew he would be and then you would have ridden happily through life and everything would have passed in a golden light and then you would have died and waited for him in whatever afterlife you believed in.
But he was drafted and you know he’ll die. You know. So what do you do with the rest of your life?
That’s what those chords say, twelve seconds of music says that but with the feelings like it’s really happening and not just the sketch I whipped up for you to prove a point.
Ahhh, this gets me hot. Pulling my suit jacket tighter around me, buttoning it so I can warm up more and sweat and be sticky in the morning heat despite the fan like Faulkner, bard of the South and its heat must have been. I don’t know if it’s sex-hot or just creative-hot. God knows I’m not that creative. . . or sexy. Ha! I kill myself. It must be a sin to crack yourself up this much. Are you left-handed? I didn’t know that, but I think we’ve had this conversation before. My memory’s so bad but that’s not why I tell the same stories again and again and again, I tell them because I love talking about myself and what I’ve done and seen and heard and so I’m an egomaniac, but at least I’m a hell of a typist and Wes was right. And so were the rest of you who called this game in your head but not out loud. Nice to meet you, I like Stephen King and suit jackets and music a lot. I read a lot into things other people take as parts of everyday pop culture. Sometimes I read into them four times and glean life-lessons where they’re not supposed to be found.
Dogs in heat, rabid, foaming. . .
. . .WAIT!. . . there’s been a slaughter here!
And he whines so much and I love it.
Am I off-track or on-course? QUI SAIT?! WHO KNOWS!? Watch it Terrance. Things are getting crazy and I’m not the boy you knew but that doesn’t mean I’ve fucked a whore or smoked so much as a cabbage leaf but I DID refinish a table and start half a dozen new books.
But enough about me.
I wanted to write a story about a kid taking his dog for a walk. The kid took his crowbar because it was late and dark and even though his neighborhood is quite safe he was scared of rapists and muggers and third-party candidates. So he went for a walk and whom does he meet? A rapist who wants his wallet and to eat his dog and who’s running for president with Ralph Nader and Ross Perot and Theodore Roosevelt, that’s who. Or maybe just a rapist, as it is, ideally, a serious story. So the kid summons up the cold and violent self-preservation that he always wondered if he had and kills the rapist brutally with his blue wrecking pry bar. So he leaves the body, since he’s a nice law-abiding boy who likes to read but not to believe Hunter S. Thompson and goes to the nearest house. He knocks on the door and the portly, middle-aged housewife who answers sees a boy of average height and build who’s not very creative or sexy with a blue wrecking pry bar and a little white-and-brown dog on a long leash made of two shorter ones and all three of them are covered in blood from head to toe to tail to snout to curved end to straight end.
That’s as much as I’ve gotten so far. I’ll beef it up with imagery and metaphors and similes and characterization of all possible flavors and persuasions and all that good shit. The main character is pleased to meet you and he hopes you guess his name. What? Just a little classical reference. He’s me, of course, silly. Didn’t the little white-and-brown dog and the paranoid neurosis give it away, douche bag? I thought so, G-string.
I don’t want to stop! I started writing all this. . . over an hour ago, I think! Can that be right? Maybe more like forty-five minutes. It’s like if I stop I’ll have to go to bed and be half-way logical again. I prefer to be eclectic, like I am now. It’s a close as a self-absorbed sandbox-dweller like me can ever get to drawing pictures of the orphaned big kid toys. I also like labels, though a wise girl told me that they’re terrible and I can’t say for sure she’s wrong. Since we’re already talking about my favorite thing, namely me, let’s list my labels! I know you’re excited. I’ll talk about something else next, I promise. If any of you have gotten this far.
Communist
Vegetarian
Calvinist
Francophile
Music Elitist
Computer Gamer
Smart Kid ™
Wearer of Suit Jackets
Titles, labels, that may explain me perfectly or be convenient lies or be something atwixt those two extremes.
What does gubernatorial mean?
Capitalism is destructive and wrong because, among other things, it creates the idea that money is the only moral perquisite for ownership. If you can legally buy it in the country you live in, or the country you’re buying it in, or the country you’re from, or the country the former owner is in, or from, or going to, or any other country at all or if the legality of buying it seems obvious to you no matter how lumoxxed up the rest of the world might be on this issue, you have the right to buy it, own it, and use it as you see fit.
For example, consider these movies to better understand what I have so eclectically (very good, very good) claimed:
“House of Sand and Fog”
“Indecent Proposal”
In both of these movies, a house and some land are legally bought, on a legal technicality but still within the law, much to the chagrin and emotional distress of the former owners. In “House of Sand and Fog”, the state of California makes a mistake (gasp) and taxes a woman (Jennifer Connelly, oh gods, getting hot again. . . ) for a business she doesn’t have. It’s only fifty dollars or so, but she goes to court and gets the tax audit removed, no problem. Until it comes out later that somehow that court session got lost and she failed to receive notifications of the outstanding tax. Her house, the house she grew up in and her father fucking built and which is absolutely beautiful and on beautiful land, is repossessed by the state of Californ-i-a. It is then bought by someone else. Who will not sell it back for a price that the state is willing to pay because he loves it.
I ask you, if you love something, does that make it okay to steal it? Certainly not. But did he steal it? Certainly not, under US law. But does he have the moral high ground? Fucking hell no his ass does NOT. She loved that house, it was beautiful, family-built, and a symbol of her childhood. It was crammed to the fucking gunwales with sentimental value and a mis-audited tax and a failure to communicate put it up for sale. And it was bought by someone who would accept no less that twice the price he paid for it to sell it back.
In “Indecent Proposal”, it’s even worse. A man pays some other man’s wife to have sex with him. Pays the couple a million dollars which they accept because they are about to lose their dream house, still under construction in a beautiful New England location because the economy is in the toilet and they can’t get jobs for shit. They even strike out at Vegas.
So they take this billionaire’s, who likes to buy things everyone says can’t be bough (like real, emotional love), offer and she sexes him good. He then goes on a campaign to drive them apart with stress and make her love him by being charming, good-looking, compassionate (when he isn’t using his money to drive her away from her husband of seven years), and fucking rich to hell. His first step is to buy their half-finished dream-house and refuse to sell it back for less than two million dollars. If was up for sale because they where two or three days late on payments, which they could have made easily with the million and had not received notification because they were in Vegas trying desperately to win the money they couldn’t possibly earn in time to PAY FOR THE HOUSE. The billionaire uses his vast resources to find and buy the house in that microscopic window of time.
Did he have the money and the right, under US law, to buy that house, half-finished or otherwise? Yes. Did he, I say, suh, did he have the moral high ground?
HELL FUCKING NO.
Two houses bought on technicalities by people who had a lot of money from people who had huge emotional investments and a lot less liquid cash.
The conclusion anyone who has managed to, over the protests of the fat cats that run the world with their money, pull their head out of the ass comes to is this: capitalism teaches us that the only thing that you need to become morally and legally eligible to buy something is the money to buy it from whomever happens to own it at any given moment. No matter who that person is, how they got it, how long ago they got it or for how long they have it, or what they got it for.
The requirement for moral justification is raw money.
I don’t know about you atheists or Moslems or whatever, but as for you Christians, money is the root of all evil and therefore makes a shitty basis for moral justification. And I’m happy to say I know plenty of atheists who think money isn’t that great either.
The death penalty’s supporters often argue that it is cheaper than jailing convicts for life-sentences. It is. Evidently, killing is okay, if it saves our asses money.
The nobility and aristocracy of France started the Great Revolution because they wouldn’t pay higher taxes. (And that is a fact my friends, try me if you don’t believe me) They loved their money too much. It blinded them just as it blinds the aristocracy and nobility of the money-worshipping world we live in now. Money’s not good, it’s not neutral, it’s fucking EVIL. Maybe it’s not in concept, because in concept it’s just a symbol for goods and services that you can carry in your pocket. But as the fully independent resource it has become, it’s the best tool and weapon of whatever devils you believe in.
Money is the root cause of a dozen wars and atrocities. It’s an old rap but it’s as true a theory as gravity and no one ever says “Oh, not that gravity bullshit again.”, so here it is, again. Slavery was about money. They justified it and dressed it up with religion that they twisted to fit their money-loving sin but it was about money. The Old World obliterated the New for money and the love of it.
Let’s talk for a second about that obliteration, shall we? I think that it’s an easy thing to say but a little harder to really understand. It’s like how people can imagine and effectively conceptualize a hundred, or a thousand, or maybe even understand how much ten thousand is, a little, but how no one can really imagine a billion. We get the concept, but it’s just way too much to hold in the shit-ass mind that’s so easily bought by the rich. A billion is like that obliteration. The Spanish and the Portuguese razed entire empires to the ground. The Incan nation went from about twenty million people to TWO million in something like ten years. ONE POINT EIGHT MILLION MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN DIED A YEAR FOR TEN YEARS FOR THE LOVE OF MONEY. I know that there are some atheist capitalists out there who’d like to blame Christianity, or some capitalist Christians (heh) who’d like to blame the Papists, but I got news for you lot: the crowned heads of Europe didn’t launch the largest cultural invasion in history in the name of God. They tacked that on for icing, but they did it cause there was money over here. A lot of it. Priests and clergy did some bad, baaad shit in the name of the Savior Christ, but the entire effort was launched by the love of money.
There’s a modern day Israel, and the Lord knows his chosen people have been persecuted like almost no other group in history. There’s a modern Iraq and Turkey, and those empires rose and died a thousand years ago. The empires of Europe lost their power and went democratic, but they’re still there. China, ancient China, raped by fake communists and by Huns and by every empire worth its salt before Mao got his turn is still there, and not to be sneezed at now by any means. Hawaii, ancient tribal Hawaii is a state, but it exists. Same for Alaska. Japan, the only country every to be attack with the raw, unbridled ferocity of nuclear fire and shattered in every way possible is still kicking.
There’s no Incan Empire, or Republic, or state.
There’s no Aztec or Mayan Empire, or Republic, or province, or county. They’re gone. Their seed wiped from the earth, their cities smashed and burned and raped and eroded to dust three hundred years ago. Because they unhappily straddled gold and silver deposits galore.
That’s what the love of money brings.
And that, my beloved cock-sucking world, is a profound truth.
Glooooooria!
Glooooooria!
Glooooooria!
Glooooooria!
Jul. 22nd, 2004 @ 04:31 pm
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The kid sat at his computer, in the dead of the night. His whole house was dark, all the lights off so he could hear the music coming from the speakers and so he could see the light burning off the screen. Soft, glowing light, gentle when he wanted it stark and painful. A friend when he was looking for viciousness.
He wants to write something trippy, but he’s never taken a trip. Not a real one. Never a trip with any drugs that come from outside his own flesh-and-blood body. He’s not a poet, he’s not a musician, he’s not what could really be called a writer. He’s not Jim Morrison, though he thinks he might want to have a piece of that action. If he could keep it from poisoning him. Shirtless, a little tanned under the cheap suit jacket he wears. He loves how cheap it was and how the sound of the words ‘suit jacket’ make him think of eccentricity, and jazz, and booze. Of mysticism and enigma. He wants to hit that pipeline, that conduit that on-the-edge artists hit. What makes someone write
the killer awoke before dawn
he put his boots on
he took a face from the ancient gallery and he
walked on down the hall
or what makes someone make Apocalypse Now. It’s a cliché, and he knows it all to well, but he wants to lose a part of himself and trade it for a bit of something else. Something that will make him an off-kilter poet. One that sways the average, everyday people to his fold and one that makes the really intelligent, creative ones scared and awed. He wants to be less in control, or really to have his writing (what little and small-scoped writing he does) less in control.
He wants to be less of a writer, if that’s even possible, and more of a sightseer. He wants to take himself for a ride, and to understand what he means only a little bit better than other people.
The kid knows just what it’ll be like when he gets it, if he does. It’ll be like grabbing a live wire, with none of that nancy rubber protecting a stupid world from a barely-harnessed force. It’ll burn him, and he won’t be able to let go because of the current he’s tapped into. His flesh, his skin, will slough off, charred and stinking. Anyone who sees it, and gets too close. . . the current will jump the gap between the kid and the bystander. Then the bystander won’t be able to move, to stop watching. The current will stop and the kid will let go and the watcher will stop watching when they’re dead. When they’re burned to husks from too much creativity.
The problem is definitely control, I’m sure of that now. When I went to the kitchen to get some more vanilla Pepsi, I understood. First, I noticed the white, creamy light from the monitor on the refrigerator, and on the cabinets and the chopping block, and the counters. I thought it was beautiful, so I turned around and looked back at the computer through my glasses. I wasn’t afraid. That’s a problem. That’s the problem. The core of it. The computer screen, with little black characters on it, was nestled in the black of the night around it and it looked like a fucking window man, a damn window into a hell of too much. . . too much something.
But it’s not. Or it wasn’t. It could be. If I wrote something scary, or something profound, which is the same thing but with fewer comfortable solutions hard-wired by instinct, then it would be too much something. You can run from what you’re scared of, but you can’t hide from a truth. A real profound work scares you, but you know it’s true. If it’s really profound, you only know it’s true. Not how, or why, or because of who, or since when. Therefore it’s obvious that a person in control can’t write anything really profound, because how can someone watching what they say or write and being careful with what they say and write ever produce a truth that no one, least of all the author, understands at all beyond its elemental verisimilitude? And isn’t that what it means to be in control? To be watching what you say and write and do and think?
I thought I might have been getting close for a minute. But I don’t think so now. I do know that I’ll understand all this when I read it later, if I do. Does that prove it is profound, or that it isn’t? Maybe that up there is just the truth about profound truths.
That’s not profound. It’s not the walls or ceiling. It’s the foundation. It’s the operating procedure, the algorithm, the formula, the enzyme, not the catalyst or the precipitate or the quotient or the song. It might not be anything but pilpul. I don’t know if I like pilpul or not, but in the end it doesn’t matter right now because pilpul is a game and I DON”T WANT TO PLAY ANYMORE. I want OUT. Right-fucking-now. I don’t want to sit in the same sandbox anymore. I don’t want to rule cows and men and physics. I want to be the king of nowhere! I want to be the master of the yard around and outside your sandbox. The empty yard, where the real big kids left their toys. Where they left their books. I’ll sit out there and draw you pictures of what I see and hold them up for you, you who are building sandcastles, to look at and you won’t understand them any more than I do, but you’ll like them. Some of you will like them at least. The romantics. They’ll be art. That’s what art is; art is pictures of what other people can’t see.
Not profound; just a mission statement.
Before you slip into unconsciousness
I’d like to have another kiss
another flashing chance at bliss. . .
the days are bright, and filled with pain. . .
Listen to that music! Music is raw feeling. If you don’t feel much, or exist much, you won’t produce full music. You might like full music, but you can’t produce it. Those chords right there, the ones I just heard are the right example. They’re feeling. Not a feeling, but just feeling. They’re love and desperation and fear and acceptance of something you don’t want to happen but is going to anyway. The notes lilt by, and they’re not a word or a color but a situation. You love him and he’s going away, going away to fight a war he doesn’t understand or believe in. He was going to go to college, he was smart, he was the golden boy of the whole damn town and he loved you back and he was going to ask you to marry him and you were going to say yes and you would have borne his children after love-charged sex that grabbed you both like a tidal wave mixed with a high-balling freight train and your kids would have grown up and you would have loved him all the more when he became the perfect father you knew he would be and then you would have ridden happily through life and everything would have passed in a golden light and then you would have died and waited for him in whatever afterlife you believed in.
But he was drafted and you know he’ll die. You know. So what do you do with the rest of your life?
That’s what those chords say, twelve seconds of music says that but with the feelings like it’s really happening and not just the sketch I whipped up for you to prove a point.
Ahhh, this gets me hot. Pulling my suit jacket tighter around me, buttoning it so I can warm up more and sweat and be sticky in the morning heat despite the fan like Faulkner, bard of the South and its heat must have been. I don’t know if it’s sex-hot or just creative-hot. God knows I’m not that creative. . . or sexy. Ha! I kill myself. It must be a sin to crack yourself up this much. Are you left-handed? I didn’t know that, but I think we’ve had this conversation before. My memory’s so bad but that’s not why I tell the same stories again and again and again, I tell them because I love talking about myself and what I’ve done and seen and heard and so I’m an egomaniac, but at least I’m a hell of a typist and Wes was right. And so were the rest of you who called this game in your head but not out loud. Nice to meet you, I like Stephen King and suit jackets and music a lot. I read a lot into things other people take as parts of everyday pop culture. Sometimes I read into them four times and glean life-lessons where they’re not supposed to be found.
Dogs in heat, rabid, foaming. . .
. . .WAIT!. . . there’s been a slaughter here!
And he whines so much and I love it.
Am I off-track or on-course? QUI SAIT?! WHO KNOWS!? Watch it Terrance. Things are getting crazy and I’m not the boy you knew but that doesn’t mean I’ve fucked a whore or smoked so much as a cabbage leaf but I DID refinish a table and start half a dozen new books.
But enough about me.
I wanted to write a story about a kid taking his dog for a walk. The kid took his crowbar because it was late and dark and even though his neighborhood is quite safe he was scared of rapists and muggers and third-party candidates. So he went for a walk and whom does he meet? A rapist who wants his wallet and to eat his dog and who’s running for president with Ralph Nader and Ross Perot and Theodore Roosevelt, that’s who. Or maybe just a rapist, as it is, ideally, a serious story. So the kid summons up the cold and violent self-preservation that he always wondered if he had and kills the rapist brutally with his blue wrecking pry bar. So he leaves the body, since he’s a nice law-abiding boy who likes to read but not to believe Hunter S. Thompson and goes to the nearest house. He knocks on the door and the portly, middle-aged housewife who answers sees a boy of average height and build who’s not very creative or sexy with a blue wrecking pry bar and a little white-and-brown dog on a long leash made of two shorter ones and all three of them are covered in blood from head to toe to tail to snout to curved end to straight end.
That’s as much as I’ve gotten so far. I’ll beef it up with imagery and metaphors and similes and characterization of all possible flavors and persuasions and all that good shit. The main character is pleased to meet you and he hopes you guess his name. What? Just a little classical reference. He’s me, of course, silly. Didn’t the little white-and-brown dog and the paranoid neurosis give it away, douche bag? I thought so, G-string.
I don’t want to stop! I started writing all this. . . over an hour ago, I think! Can that be right? Maybe more like forty-five minutes. It’s like if I stop I’ll have to go to bed and be half-way logical again. I prefer to be eclectic, like I am now. It’s a close as a self-absorbed sandbox-dweller like me can ever get to drawing pictures of the orphaned big kid toys. I also like labels, though a wise girl told me that they’re terrible and I can’t say for sure she’s wrong. Since we’re already talking about my favorite thing, namely me, let’s list my labels! I know you’re excited. I’ll talk about something else next, I promise. If any of you have gotten this far.
Communist
Vegetarian
Calvinist
Francophile
Music Elitist
Computer Gamer
Smart Kid ™
Wearer of Suit Jackets
Titles, labels, that may explain me perfectly or be convenient lies or be something atwixt those two extremes.
What does gubernatorial mean?
Capitalism is destructive and wrong because, among other things, it creates the idea that money is the only moral perquisite for ownership. If you can legally buy it in the country you live in, or the country you’re buying it in, or the country you’re from, or the country the former owner is in, or from, or going to, or any other country at all or if the legality of buying it seems obvious to you no matter how lumoxxed up the rest of the world might be on this issue, you have the right to buy it, own it, and use it as you see fit.
For example, consider these movies to better understand what I have so eclectically (very good, very good) claimed:
“House of Sand and Fog”
“Indecent Proposal”
In both of these movies, a house and some land are legally bought, on a legal technicality but still within the law, much to the chagrin and emotional distress of the former owners. In “House of Sand and Fog”, the state of California makes a mistake (gasp) and taxes a woman (Jennifer Connelly, oh gods, getting hot again. . . ) for a business she doesn’t have. It’s only fifty dollars or so, but she goes to court and gets the tax audit removed, no problem. Until it comes out later that somehow that court session got lost and she failed to receive notifications of the outstanding tax. Her house, the house she grew up in and her father fucking built and which is absolutely beautiful and on beautiful land, is repossessed by the state of Californ-i-a. It is then bought by someone else. Who will not sell it back for a price that the state is willing to pay because he loves it.
I ask you, if you love something, does that make it okay to steal it? Certainly not. But did he steal it? Certainly not, under US law. But does he have the moral high ground? Fucking hell no his ass does NOT. She loved that house, it was beautiful, family-built, and a symbol of her childhood. It was crammed to the fucking gunwales with sentimental value and a mis-audited tax and a failure to communicate put it up for sale. And it was bought by someone who would accept no less that twice the price he paid for it to sell it back.
In “Indecent Proposal”, it’s even worse. A man pays some other man’s wife to have sex with him. Pays the couple a million dollars which they accept because they are about to lose their dream house, still under construction in a beautiful New England location because the economy is in the toilet and they can’t get jobs for shit. They even strike out at Vegas.
So they take this billionaire’s, who likes to buy things everyone says can’t be bough (like real, emotional love), offer and she sexes him good. He then goes on a campaign to drive them apart with stress and make her love him by being charming, good-looking, compassionate (when he isn’t using his money to drive her away from her husband of seven years), and fucking rich to hell. His first step is to buy their half-finished dream-house and refuse to sell it back for less than two million dollars. If was up for sale because they where two or three days late on payments, which they could have made easily with the million and had not received notification because they were in Vegas trying desperately to win the money they couldn’t possibly earn in time to PAY FOR THE HOUSE. The billionaire uses his vast resources to find and buy the house in that microscopic window of time.
Did he have the money and the right, under US law, to buy that house, half-finished or otherwise? Yes. Did he, I say, suh, did he have the moral high ground?
HELL FUCKING NO.
Two houses bought on technicalities by people who had a lot of money from people who had huge emotional investments and a lot less liquid cash.
The conclusion anyone who has managed to, over the protests of the fat cats that run the world with their money, pull their head out of the ass comes to is this: capitalism teaches us that the only thing that you need to become morally and legally eligible to buy something is the money to buy it from whomever happens to own it at any given moment. No matter who that person is, how they got it, how long ago they got it or for how long they have it, or what they got it for.
The requirement for moral justification is raw money.
I don’t know about you atheists or Moslems or whatever, but as for you Christians, money is the root of all evil and therefore makes a shitty basis for moral justification. And I’m happy to say I know plenty of atheists who think money isn’t that great either.
The death penalty’s supporters often argue that it is cheaper than jailing convicts for life-sentences. It is. Evidently, killing is okay, if it saves our asses money.
The nobility and aristocracy of France started the Great Revolution because they wouldn’t pay higher taxes. (And that is a fact my friends, try me if you don’t believe me) They loved their money too much. It blinded them just as it blinds the aristocracy and nobility of the money-worshipping world we live in now. Money’s not good, it’s not neutral, it’s fucking EVIL. Maybe it’s not in concept, because in concept it’s just a symbol for goods and services that you can carry in your pocket. But as the fully independent resource it has become, it’s the best tool and weapon of whatever devils you believe in.
Money is the root cause of a dozen wars and atrocities. It’s an old rap but it’s as true a theory as gravity and no one ever says “Oh, not that gravity bullshit again.”, so here it is, again. Slavery was about money. They justified it and dressed it up with religion that they twisted to fit their money-loving sin but it was about money. The Old World obliterated the New for money and the love of it.
Let’s talk for a second about that obliteration, shall we? I think that it’s an easy thing to say but a little harder to really understand. It’s like how people can imagine and effectively conceptualize a hundred, or a thousand, or maybe even understand how much ten thousand is, a little, but how no one can really imagine a billion. We get the concept, but it’s just way too much to hold in the shit-ass mind that’s so easily bought by the rich. A billion is like that obliteration. The Spanish and the Portuguese razed entire empires to the ground. The Incan nation went from about twenty million people to TWO million in something like ten years. ONE POINT EIGHT MILLION MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN DIED A YEAR FOR TEN YEARS FOR THE LOVE OF MONEY. I know that there are some atheist capitalists out there who’d like to blame Christianity, or some capitalist Christians (heh) who’d like to blame the Papists, but I got news for you lot: the crowned heads of Europe didn’t launch the largest cultural invasion in history in the name of God. They tacked that on for icing, but they did it cause there was money over here. A lot of it. Priests and clergy did some bad, baaad shit in the name of the Savior Christ, but the entire effort was launched by the love of money.
There’s a modern day Israel, and the Lord knows his chosen people have been persecuted like almost no other group in history. There’s a modern Iraq and Turkey, and those empires rose and died a thousand years ago. The empires of Europe lost their power and went democratic, but they’re still there. China, ancient China, raped by fake communists and by Huns and by every empire worth its salt before Mao got his turn is still there, and not to be sneezed at now by any means. Hawaii, ancient tribal Hawaii is a state, but it exists. Same for Alaska. Japan, the only country every to be attack with the raw, unbridled ferocity of nuclear fire and shattered in every way possible is still kicking.
There’s no Incan Empire, or Republic, or state.
There’s no Aztec or Mayan Empire, or Republic, or province, or county. They’re gone. Their seed wiped from the earth, their cities smashed and burned and raped and eroded to dust three hundred years ago. Because they unhappily straddled gold and silver deposits galore.
That’s what the love of money brings.
And that, my beloved cock-sucking world, is a profound truth.
Glooooooria!
Glooooooria!
Glooooooria!
Glooooooria!
Jul. 22nd, 2004 @ 04:14 pm
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| » Not Much |
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I thought this was cool after I saw it on another lj. So I got one too:
create your own visited countries map
or check out these Google Hacks.
Finland is cheap; I was in the airport for an hour when I was two.
Russia is sort of cheap, I was still only two but we lived there for a couple of months so it evens out. Also, it was the USSR then so technically, using this maps system, you should all color in all fourteen former Soviet Socialst Republics in your mind and say I was there too. Muaha.
Bahamas were visited when I was about eight. An octopus stuck to Dad's foot and we heard about people dying from coconuts falling on their heads. It was extermely hot and there was tennis. And big conch shells. And intermitnet power/running water so that we'd all be sitting around in the house we rented and the clocks would start flashing and the lights would come on and Mom would bellow from the other end of the house: "FLUSH THE TOILETS!" and everyone would run to a bathroom and flush the toilets. Also we listened to the Roaches' Christmas Carols constantly and I built a lego (the little ones for big boys) pirate ship. It broke.
France twice, once with Drama and once with Family. STILL HAVE NOT BEEN TO LES INVALIDES!!! GAHIG! That is the military museum and Napoleon's tomb. It puts us to shame, as it looks like the Jefferson Monument except for that it is bigger and capped in gleaming gold.
I visited Nova Soctia in Canada a few summers ago and it was beautiful. I meat a fabulous, world-ranked chess-playing boat captain who said I was good at chess after we had a long game. I listend to Dar Williams, read an abomination to the Dune series by Kevin Jay Anderson and Frank Herebert's son, and did a lot of D&D stat-grinding. Hells yea!
UK, part of the Family Excursion to France. Rode on a double-decker, watch "Young Guns II" on T.V. in the hotel room. And I listend to Garrison Keillor's "Book of Guys" on tape. He is an excellent, hilarious liberal. NPR, six to eight, on Satruday nights, bitches.
Maybe I'll go to college at St. Andrews in Scotland. Great history, take American test scores and statistics. . . sounds good to me.
States I have been to(tenative):
North Carolina
South Carolina
Georgia
Florida
Virginia
Maryland
District of Columbia (not a state)
Pennsylvannia
New York
New Jersey
Vermont
Tennesse
Ohio
Kentucky*
West Virginia*
Colorado
Wyoming**
Texas***
*I think we drove through it.
**I think I've been there.
***Various airports.
Jul. 15th, 2004 @ 02:38 pm
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| » That's right, it's BASTILLE DAY |
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BASTILLE DAY. The anniversary of the first move by Parisian Crowds Seeking Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood. The recognized Independence Day of modern France, the greatest nation on Earth and the dearest to my heart.
On this day, a list of might Frenchmen who changed politics, war, culture, and society while looking good, having good taste, being Excellent Lovers, and displaying epic pride and arrogance:
Leclerc
De Gaulle
Napoleon I
Napoleon III
Massena
Soult
Joan of Arc
Le Chatlier
Fotch
Thiers
Robspierre
Marat
Voltaire
Guizot
Colbert
Louis XIV
Rousseau
Montesquieu
Zola
Gay-Lussac
Pasteur
Blanc
Lamartine
Lammenais
and others. . .
(on an unrelated note, I will now announce my inent to support Cthulhu in his bid for the presidency. "Why settle for the lesser of two evils? Vote Cthulhu!" and "Vote Cthulhu, the stars are right!")
back to the issue at hand:
Yes, France. How I love you. France encompases some of the world's most beautiful lands and has a rich history and tradition of practically everything good.
I also borrowed Diable II: LoD from Mykal, and will play it some. May the addiction grab me again.
If anyone would like clarification on any of the above figures, request it by name in a comment on this entry. (Who am I kidding?!?!)
Jul. 14th, 2004 @ 08:55 pm
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| » StarCraft Politics with my cyberfriends(?) |
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StarCraft (a great game) has made Maloncanth and I like each other a little more, I think. It made Shrike like me about as much as usual, which is to say that he maintains his casual distaste for me. At least now it's because of vicious zealot horde rushes and devious use of dark archons than because I act like a loon. General-G and Rask are too nice to be bothered by losing a lot, and anyway Rask doesn't lose that much because he's good. Rex is definately a little sore on getting rushed.
I'll definately have to lay off rushing them for a while, excepting Mal. He's so dangerous and thus far good-spirited to not rush. Hee hee!
I managed to kick a little ass on SB.com today arguing gay marriage rights. We'll nevver convince ArthurDent, but that's because he's iron-plated in his beliefs. Which isn't to say that I'm not on some things. But we did end their counter-arguments. And I think I found another Lovecraft fan. Bri_Dog. He has a neat avatar from "The Ring".
I tried to get an avatar for lj.com today, but I must be doing something wrong in my file types or cropping because even tiny pictures are coming up as waaay too many pixels. I'll ask Wes. I wish he were hear! He said he'd buy Spider Man 2 tickets if I drove us, BUT NOW HE HAS LEFT. And I have little money.
I got Dad's birthday presents though. An Ann Bonny figureine and a t-shirt with a surfer on it and the legend "I ran out of sick days, so I'm calling in dead." on it. I like it much.
Another CD to buy (arg! so many CDs, so little money!)
Foreigner Greatest Hits (or something to that effect)
Jul. 13th, 2004 @ 09:03 pm
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| » The Bloom Picayune |
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Bloom County is, hands-down, on of the best comic strips.
Narrator: It was that time, that very special time in a democracy. . .
Opus: Phoom phoom oo! Phoom phoom oo!
Oh it be time ta
go to caucus
and I be feelin'
mighty raucous
Yeah, no jive let's
caucus raucous,
I ain't talking' 'bout
caracas. . .
If y'all don't want this
world all messy,
all you bad dudes
just vote rhyme master Jesse!
Steve Dallas: Mind if I smoke?
Portnoy: NO. MIND IF I BELCH PASTRAMI BELCHES IN YOUR FACE?!
(smoke-blowing and face-belching commence)
Just back from the beach.
CDs to buy:
Bob Dylan Live 1962
Led Zeppelin Live II
Phish Live
A double tanner for Dad's birthday, I think.
Work that BoMagic on Grimes!!!
Jul. 13th, 2004 @ 02:49 pm
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| » Classes |
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Heavens.
YOG-SOTHOTH, BLACK GOAT OF A THOUSAND YOUNG, SAVE! THE TITAN BLUR. . . A THREE-LOBED BURNING EYE. . . IT RIDES THE STAR-WIND!
First Semester
Flex-AP Stat (meets Mon/Wen/Fri one week, and then alternates weeks with a tues/thrus schedule. weird)
1st-Office Assistant (had to. i can't have an empty period)
2nd-Honors Intro to AP Lit/Comp
3rd-Honors Drama
4th-Hst 321 Modern France (meets tues/thrus from 2-3:15)
whew!
Second Semester
Flex-AP Stat
1st-French 5
2nd-AP Lit/Comp
3rd-Honors Drama
3rd(-and-a-half)-AP Government
That's right. Nine and a half blocks. Eight Classes. IT IS ON.
THIS SCHOOL YEAR, BE THERE FOR THE MATCH OF THE MILLENIA!!!!
***EDDIE VERSUS EVERYTHING!***
DON'T MISS THE EARTH-SHAKING COMBAT TO THE DEATH!!!!
Saints alive, at least it looks like my damn Eagle Project will be done soon.
Jul. 13th, 2004 @ 10:50 am
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