Nobody Reads my Blog

Nobody.

DOPPELGANGER

Dear suckas,

Capitalism isn't evil. It's an economic theory. Corporations and governments that consider them "people," that's what you want. They aren't the same thing.

So don't dare walk up to me and tell me how capitalism is evil. It's not about it working or not working, it's a lens of perception.

That's all.

(un)lost generation

I found this in a customer review for Gertude Stein's Tender Buttons.

Mimic and talk and write like some kind of Gertrude Stein. We don't know what roots are - rootless - my generation is not lost - we're staying put on the couch where we live. No one can say we're not (or are) expatriate because the shores of our big sea end at the edges of a computer screen - are virtual (and not) reality - no one travels to get there. No hurt feelings (disaffected) because we're all equal - a populist nightmare with the volume turned down. The self-leveling society. Every idea is as good as another is as good as none as all are included. Our defects become differences become diversity become democracy become diluted and die. An eye for an eye made the whole world blind or one-eyed and only some (although they don't want to be singled out) try to make something new something cyclopean (formerly one could say at least but that is pejorative) toward the future but that detracts from the past which we defend on principle only but not in actuality so as soon as we can think of it we'll change that name too but don't pressure us.

Spring and the family good luck charm

I'm having an... interesting semester. Much to learn about life and all the things that the writers of The Wonder Years would have found prime material for an episode.
Now Spring has arrived, the bugs are back, the birds are singing, the trees are sprouting. I just came across something very near and dear to my family. My first sighting of a cardinal for the year.

My grandfather and grandmother loved cardinals. My grandfather died when I was eight, and ever since them my mother told me that seeing one was a sign of him. Since then, they've become sort of a good luck charm for the family. If you see a cardinal, thinks are going to be in your favor soon.

Well, honestly, I wish it came to me awhile ago. I haven't seen a cardinal in a long time, maybe over a year. Maybe now things will work in my favor, I could use a some luck right now and after everything maybe a little good karma might come my way.

America the fucked, or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Today General Petraeus is being grilled in front of Congress over the war in Iraq.

And does it matter?

NO!

For fuck's sake, the man isn't going to give you a real answer. He'll dance around the goddamn question and refuse to actually say anything other than "Surge = Working, War = Continued forever."

I'm not watching it, I don't want to start grinding my teeth like the time I watched Bush invoke executive privilege for anyone called to testify over former AG Gonzales.

UPDATE: Okay, I caved. I watched it while in the Park Laptop Center. Every time someone spent a minute or two of their alloted five caressing Petraeus for his "service to the country" I made the motion of someone stroking his dick. Anyone who walked by would have been really really bewildered. Also, there was lots o that juicy "Iran is linked to violence in Iraq" bullshit.

Here's the only real good one, by the guy everyone thinks I'm crazy for liking.

Hey blog, how have you been? That's nice. I've been fucking great, really. I mean it. No, I won't tell you about it, piss off.

I'm registering for classes in 5 hours and 40 minutes (by the end of this writing, closer to 30) and it dawned on me that three years of college are over.

I guess the age old saying of trying to find yourself in college is almost universally true. Everyone changes when they're finally cut lose, and I'm still changing. The question I'm asking myself is no longer who I'd like to be. I figured that out finally, and it took a great expanse of time, merciless destruction, and rebuilding. You can say that your outlook on life runs cyclical, that every once and awhile you do destroy yourself and rebuild on knowledge gained. The cycles have no predetermined length or stages, other than the existence of oneself in homeostasis and the fall from grace that precipitates change. I can mark these moments not in exact dates, but I know what they are and what havoc they wrought. I won't tell you about them here, this isn't the place for that kind of emotional drudgery. Let's keep it ambiguous and topical with a touch of the serious folks.

What scares me is that even though I have figured out who I want to be, I fear that the mistakes I've made and the habits I have will keep me from being that person. It's a question of finding salvation in myself. Can I? The buildup to the end of this semester is going to be a cathartic moment in my life. The deciding factor of whether I can live up to myself is me, right? That's my assumption, I think it's the right one to have.

Goddamn Cartoon-Journal/Blog crossover again.

Lately I've been really adamant on making sure I draw in my journal every day. It's easy, the sentiments are more straightforward, and I guess it keeps my wits up. As I do more and more of these drawings, I realize that my captions (and therefore writing) are becoming much larger. Today I pondered something in my journal that I usually leave for the blog: political meanderings and dia-dribble, thing is it was also very personal. There's no doubt in my mind that this country is flushing itself down the toilet, and if I were to leave it would be fully justified.

So if I were to describe the drawing: its a plane, and its encountering various symbolic clouds that represent my family and friends, my home and things, my education, my money, etc.

And the caption being:
So I value freedom as my natural right in life, but I asked myself, "Live Free or Die!" or "Life shackled and down-ridden with your friends and family around you!" When I put it to myself, the answer is very clear. I can't leave.

Unless some one/people would leave with me, then it would be a party.

Old post from older blogs: The Judicial Affairs Letter

I'm starting to dig up posts from older blogs... this one from my Media Writing Blog. I read it and realize how far I've come as a person since then. This was my judicial affairs letter when they tried to take away my rabbit (i tricked them, I didn't)

I ask that when I am placed in the stalks in front of town, spare me my dignity and honor. My grievous wrongdoing was bad, I know, but I understand my punishment. Let the physical pain be all there is to give me.
It was a foul, rainy day when my letter arrived to me. It was the indictment that was inevitable, the eviction. I had been harboring a fugitive hare for quite some time. I assumed that eventually the rage of my neighbors boiled over. Some of the extremely discontent advocated a violent solution, reaching to the very heads of state. Luckily, cooler minds prevailed and the authorities were contacted.
Their rage was justified in what that hare did to interrupt their everyday lives. It would scream throughout the night, disrupting quiet hours. How would they catch up on their sleep? While my back was turned that filthy hare would open up my drawers and rub its disgusting, germ-infested hairs on my unworn clothing. When I stepped out of my room I was the allergenic equivalent of the hydrogen bomb.
A comrade of mine who was visiting decided to take the hare home with him. There she will have the company of other filthy hares in the University of Rochester. That institution is noted for the serious allergen problems had by students, since small animals run untamed in their hallways. It is a serious issue that causes the very academic spokes that run the show to stutter and fail.
My prayers have been with my friend, hopefully he can make the trek back without incident. Hares are known to be carnivorous when without food for long periods of time.
I have complied with the judge’s order for re-education. What a profound effect the presentation had upon me! The decisions that Holocaust survivor juxtaposed next to the teenager who was simply too loaded to do the right thing really spoke to me. I actually was so compelled by the comparison that I proceeded to apply all my maligned collegiate decisions to various pogroms.
As the day closes, and my punishment ends, I hope we can all put this ordeal behind us. The dark ages are no longer with us, and we can now resume prosperity in our community. I will never falter like this again, for the damage I have done was far too great.

prose with cartographic imagery.

When tectonic plates break and continents dissolve, whose duty is it to name and classify the once familiar now thrown into a game of Boggle that spells farce, hope, and the unknown ahead? Any major dude with half a sense of the human condition can expect gerrymandering and the inevitable upsets, but even as you charter the unknown with surveying tools less adequate than you believe, you still have doubt when you drag the pencil on paper.

Certainly no maps lie unfinished when the invisible pressure of the nebulous interpersonal forces bring you to your knees. As for myself, I would subscribe to and collect any steel magazines that would put you in peril. The nerves that reside in my spinal column would silently instruct me to stand upright, for I am in the presence of an aspect of the divine whose beacon I cannot fathom but must understand. These are more than just mere sentiments, they are marching orders over a dense forest, lush with wildlife, both tangible and simple manifestations of fear spun into yarns that panic anyone who might let this undesirable linen get the best of their peripheral vision.

Yet even if the turmoil subsides and you march upon the Northwest Passage, and you return in glory with ticker-tape parades and front-page articles... if life has taught you anything it is that nothing you have drawn can ever be a certainty. It makes you wonder why you draw maps at all sometimes, and why even with their seeming futility you can't help but keep your pencil sharpened.

Aldi as a Bizarre Parody of our own Consumption Habits

I find supermarkets absolutely fascinating. In a free market society we largely end up determining and reinforcing our own purchasing habits. When we step into a supermarket everything is custom-tailored to catch your eye, to make you want to buy it, to lay out in concise terms through clever packaging and branding just why you want it.

This is why Aldi is so interesting. Many supermarkets have a store brand, but it makes up such a small fraction of their sales that it doesn't really factor into the larger picture. While most supermarkets are filled with brand-name products, Aldi only has their own brand.

Now, if you are shopping at Aldi, you only have one reason to really be there... everything is dirt cheap. Why you're there and what you buy are pretty much predetermined by the time you walk in. So you won't be considering what particular brand or type of cheese you want, you get what they have: Happy Farms "Brand" Cheese. Everything sold in Aldi is distributed by Aldi, but nothing bears a giant Aldi logo like a Wegmans-brand food would. Instead, all the labels are poor mimicries of why somebody might purchase this item. For instance, their low-fat cream cheese has a "Fit & Active" brand. Anything that can be deemed even slightly Mexican food, it is under the brand "La Mas Rica!" The bread is labeled under the brand "L'oven Fresh."

To try and sum up what I'm saying, Aldi has these strange brand names not out of necessity but out of precedent. We expect to see so many varied brands at our supermarkets that if everything had a giant Aldi logo front and center on it people would be unnerved by it to the point where they would be uncomfortable buying it. So, all their food has to have fake branding and feign the desire to impress people into purchasing them. So their entire branding scheme is a parody of what we want to hear, but don't necessarily need to because we have to buy it anyway 'cause its so damn cheap.

This Nonsense I Noticed at the New Business School

You can't hear the administration talk about the new business school without hearing the words "green" or "beautiful." The school is meant to be a recruiting tool as well as make the campus look nicer over the course of the next few years. Many people debate whether or not we need new buildings, I personally believe that we need more academic buildings since we're so strapped for space as it is (with the exception of the frivolous athletics center... we're DIVISION THREE for chrissake). Yet with all these new wonderous buildings I have to ask myself, how much fiscal responsibility is the school excercising... and how much of this is really just a facade to attract new students?

I walked into the business school yesterday to see the most blatantly offensive use of money by this institution to date. Everything that is done has a reason to some extent, but not this. The coffee counter at the business school uses three HDTV plasma screens to display the menu options, and nothing else. Are they serious? I can't really wrap my head around this hypocritical joke of a display. This is wrong on two levels.

One: Why the hell would they spend $1500+ dollars for a screen, let alone three, to display how much my cheese danish is going to cost? The school has plenty of useless HDTV screens everywhere, but at least they run dynamic powerpoint presentations that must be informative to someone... this is just nonsense. Our tuition is going up every year, and in return we can look at televisions instead of a giant plastic menu billboard.

Two: This is green? This building that is supposed to be so energy efficient as if under the foundation its making love the earth with its giant recycled-steel appendage! So we're going to waste energy on powering three televisions. Never mind the fact that we're running low on iridium (a crucial ingredient in the world of computing), or the carbon emissions associated with producing more of these things... this looks ritzy for students entering the school. What a load of bullshit.

Oh, and these televisions won't last long. Since their background is white, and they never change, and they are on all day, they'll likely start to color-burn very quickly, branding an outline of the words "Cheese Danish $1.39" on it for all eternity.

I think we all deserve an answer as to why in the sam hell anyone would spend this kind of money and waste energy on this nonsense.

Reflections on my alcoholism at the dawn of a new age.

This Tuesday I turn 21. It is the magical arbitrary age where society-at-large deems me fit to drink. Lately I'll walk into a store purveying beer and just stare at the selection that will soon be more readily available. I can cut out the illustrious middlemen that I've brown-nosed for the last three years of my life. Soon I will truly be in control of my own destiny in regards to alcoholism. The thought made me ponder my personal history of various ethanols, and what it has brought me to.

I remember the first time I was smashed, I was 17. It was no ordinary night in any sense. Never much of a social animal, I never accumulated friends of the glorious age I will soon know. Nobody even "taught" me how to drink, I was only familiar with the concept of being drunk. Being me, I decided to make my own alcohol in the basement. I bought honey, a large pot to cook it in, and bread yeast. As a nutrient, I added one of my father's multi-B vitamins. It worked, I had alcohol, mead to be exact. I remember that smell radiating from the jug I used for fermentation, I'll never forget the sense of accomplishment I felt. I put the finished product in mason jars and brought it to my friend Eryk. We drank in his backyard at 2 AM, stumbling around enjoying each other's company and speaking of the pathetic women in our lives, unconcerned with the fact that the mead tasted like shit. I woke up on the floor of his room, I had the option of using the guest bedroom but I insisted on the floor.

I would brew mead several more times before I gave up during freshman year of college. I tried to make a four-gallon batch and let it ferment over winter break. While I was gone the fermentation froze (I'm assuming they turned the heat down to the point where it killed the yeast), and it was all worthless. By this point, I had suppliers of hard liquor, but I haven't reached this chapter yet.

The first time I blacked out was during a ski trip with various schoolmates. I was shooting hard liquor since 1 PM, and by 11 PM I was hugging a toilet. Between 9 and 11 PM they couldn't find me, I was sleeping under the beer pong table. Apparently, they forced me to vomit by making me shotgun a beer, that part I remember well (i took it in stride, btw). Eventually I vomited and they put me to sleep. When I woke up I was wearing a different shirt and the first person to greet me asked if I was alright. Not knowing what had happened, I started doing jumping jacks and smiling. He was horrified.

Okay, now I'm at this chapter. Once I got to college, I kept relationships with certain people solely to purchase liquor through them. This was the time in my life where I would get smashed on the weekends and wake up the next morning chugging water to stave off the dehydration. One economical poison was the illustrious Devil's Springs. I've had several great memories and some truly terrible ones with that particular drink. My worst being the loss of a new friend, we had too much and I woke up the next morning naked in her bed (oh I wonder how that happened and why!). The situation following that I handled so poorly, and that I didn't know what to make of the night's events, that we never really spoke again. She left the college and I haven't seen her since, I still think about her whenever I see someone reading J.D. Sallinger.

According to the law, I cannot drink until I'm 21. Well, I've been drinking since I was 17 and it has brought me the best of times singing Bohemian Rhapsody and dancing like I've never known. Along with this, it has brought me tremendous physical and emotional hardship. I have said things to friends I'll always regret. I have made a fool out of myself in more ways than I can count. I have tormented my body in the name of excess. There are so many stories I've left out of this post, all interesting but I can't type all of them. I must ask myself, would I have been any better if I could buy alcohol when I was 17? Would I have been better if I had someone around to teach me how to drink? I don't know, I don't even know how to feel about being the middleman for friends and a new generation of drinkers.

This Tuesday, everything will change.

The Coming Malthusian Catastrophe

After such a glowing post about the bounties in American supermarkets, I feel like I should take it back down to earth, as the coming crisis of feeding the world becomes serious.

Let me introduce you to my buddy Thomas Malthus. Malthus predicted that throughout history food production is cyclical, from agriculture boom to massive famine. When more food is produced, the population of the world jumps, when the food produced can't match the population spurt, there is famine, and the cycle begins anew.

In the beginning of the 20th century, we faced such a trap, yet with the extraordinary work of men like Norman Borlaug, technology prevailed, and the famine was nearly averted. What happened in the wake of this was a world population that jumped by a whopping FOUR BILLION.

FOUR BILLION.

This cannot hold, and the trap will catch us by the neck. What we will be living through may be the greatest famine in the history of Earth. There is no simple way to say it, but there will be starvation not just across the world, but in America too. We will go hungry, and our personal experiences will be of immense suffering.

This is coming at a time where the Earth is warming, environmental degradation is rampant, and governments across the world are closing down with an iron fist... including ours.

The coming decades will be horrifying times for us all. You can bet on it.

The Warm Embrace of Pax Americana

Last night I was at Wegman's for three things: Rabbit Food, Minced Garlic, and DVD returns. I was there for at least a half hour... never had I felt so at peace with consumerism.

Everything was so perfect. Walking through the bakery, all the earthy tones took me back to a time when I couldn't tell how long a baker has been "serving the community" by looking at his/her name tag. I'm glad I can tell now, it means a lot to me to know how long they've been steadily employed, but not that much.

Everything is so neat and clean, each aisle is completely sterile and screaming with brightly colored cans, bags, and boxes of necessities. You don't have to pick the forbidden fruit from the tree of Eden, Wegman's did it for you and its $1 off if you have your shopper's club card. On top of that, they offer it in three dozen flavors! What a country!

All of a sudden I can understand how people could be at peace with all of this, it really is the closest a giant warehouse with shelves of food will come to being art. Usually when I walk into a Wegman's my senses are on full alert as if I'm walking into the house of a person that I hate but my friend likes him and he's loaded and generous so it makes it easier to tolerate. I'm always watching the cameras hanging from the ceiling, the microphones picking up shopper chatter... and the possibility of plain-clothed security guards that caused me to sneer at a menopausal woman just wondering if I could direct her to the soy sauce.

This time the occipital lobe was pulsing, taking in everything in all its American glory. Mmmm, garlic... So many choices, wasn't this cheaper just a few months ago. Aww shucks, who cares? Everyone working here wants to help me get everything I want with a bright smile.
Walking through the cheese section, John Fogerty's voice leaked out of the speakers asking me if I have ever seen the rain.

Usually, but not today.

American Redundant Consumerism

I wanted to buy some cheese.

Well...... The store has cheese in blocks, wedges, crumbles, shredded, finely shredded, cubes, some fat, no fat, regular fat, mexican mixes, pizza mixes, other sorts'a mixes, real coloring, artificial coloring, artificial flavoring, all-natural flavoring, with anti-caking agents, without anti-caking agents, organic, local, local organic, store brand, and all different sizes.

I bought a block of some pepper jack and shredded it myself.

I am not anti-semitic, but I hate the Israeli state with a passion unmatched.

I am not anti-semitic, but I hate the Israeli state with a passion unmatched. Seriously, but I'm not anti-semitic.

I feel like I'm going to have to write that I'm not anti-semitic between every paragraph because for some reason whenever I talk to Israel being a rogue state committing atrocities on the Palestinians, I'm being anti-semitic.

Now rather than give a history lesson I'm just going to say this: Palestine is the way it is only because of Israel's constant military presence and manipulation of Palestinian lives
in every way imaginable. It's disgusting.

I recognize Israel's right to exist like any other nation, but I can't support their policies in the middle east as well as the manipulation of our own foreign policy. If they want to do these things, I can't stop them, but since they are doing it with my tax dollars I must object.

Great Fictional Conversations Indicative of a Much Larger Problem, Part I

I was watching five minutes of the movie "The Day After Tomorrow," you know, that one where the Earth freezes over and everything seems really bleak but Dennis Quaid is there and it's gonna be O.K.! movie.

Well, if my synopsis is wrong, don't heckle me about it, I didn't dare watch it nor try to justify the film's existence with googling it. The five minutes I saw on basic cable gave me an insight into the largest logical fallacy of a generation: The age of the Ad Hominem. This quote is from a scene where they are trying to find books to throw on the fire to keep warm, and they are scouring a giant library with a cart. Elsa picks Nietzsche.

Jeremy: Friedrich Nietzsche? We can't burn that! He's one of the most important thinkers in 19th Century!
Elsa: Please! Nietzsche was a chauvinist pig who was in love with his sister.
Jeremy: He was not a chauvinist pig!
Elsa: But he was in love with his sister.

Besides the fact that Nietzsche would want you to burn Nietzsche, what the hell is Elsa's point? Who cares if he was a chauvinist pig who was in love with his sister, he still had a mind that influenced Western thought trememdously, to say the least. Some of the greatest minds we have ever known come from lousy people, but we should be alright with that because these people have given us something wonderful. Albert Einstein was a terrible father and husband, but this simple patent clerk gave us the Theory of Relativity. The founding fathers owned slaves, but they were still an enlightened group of men determined to preserve liberty in the best way possible (and for those who want to talk about their voting qualifications, they had good reason for that too). John Lennon, FDR, Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, just to name a few that pop into my head, were never good members of society, but influenced that society to the point where their names will continue to echo long after their time.

We see this everywhere in our society today. We had a president impeached not because he lied us into a war, tortured innocents in the name of national security, favored big business interests in a time of a global environmental crisis, or used the Constitution as a jizz rag, but because he lied about getting a blowjob from an intern. Let that sink in until you cry, and when you're finished send your American flag to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I hear the Executive washroom ran out of toilet paper again.

What bothers me so much about this is that Jeremy's reaction is so typical. He plays into the game and therefore has no choice but to lose. If someone is not exactly the greatest person, there's only so much you can do to sway a moral argument in the favor of the "immoral." All he had to do was say "So what? You're no saint either, bitch. What God are you trying to please, 'cause he's sooo dead."

... Does this sound familiar?
Supposed Patriot: "Why won't you support our troops!?"
Assumed Traitor: "We DO! Really! we just don't think they..."
Supposed Patriot:"How dare you make them think their mission isn't important, this is America! They're defending America."
Assumed Traitor: "Well, maybe, but maybe they shouldn't be in Iraq, there's no proof of WMD's, Saddam Hussein has no links to Al-Qaeda and he's completely inert as a military power, and maybe we might fall into a quagmire like Cheney warned us about back in 1994."
Supposed Patriot: "Saddam is part of the Axis of Evil, he's a bad man, so says The Decider."

Next time someone tells you "I'm voting for ____ because he/she is a 'viable' candidate," give them a slap in the face.

I was at the video rental shop with a friend looking for a movie to pass the time. Since this was a small shop in a college town, you can actually interact with the people running the store. While my friend filled out a membership form coupled with talking on the phone, the clerk and I had a friendly conversation about politics when he uttered: "I like McCain because he seems like a viable candidate."

Taken aback, I wanted to know what a '"viable candidate" meant to him. Well, its someone he can get behind that he thinks other people will vote for. Makes sense at first glance right?

Well it shouldn't! Why compromise your own personal beliefs in order to accommodate a nebulous fickle entity known as the American voter! You are literally voting for what you think others are voting for.

This primary I'm going to vote for what I believe in, and I believe so strongly in it that no claims of "viability" will compromise my vote. I'll defend my reasons against anyone else's, and I hope my arguments are persuasive enough to change minds. How does anyone expect to change things in this country if they are willing to compromise so readily for someone whose only reason for popularity is not their positions but their name recognition?

You can make your vote count, or you can make your vote mean something.