Bitter and Inane

It's been a while since I posted here. Looks to be a little more than two years. The world's no better than it was. I'm lonelier and angrier. I taste bile when I go back and read most of these old posts. I keep thinking about deleting them, but that feels disingenuous. I guess I want anyone who stumbles across this blog to know how awful I am.

Jesus, I'm a crybaby.

I feel compelled to write, but I have no idea about what. I try to write about my life, but it's so fucking boring even I can't stand reading about it. My opinions matter as much as any one's, which is to say not that much at all. What's the trick, here? How do I go about writing without feeling and sounding like a self-involved creep? Is that my voice? Should I just embrace that? Does questioning that make me insecure? How many inane questions can I write in a row before I lose you?

Maybe I should focus on the self-involved and inane. That's where my head is most of the time anyway. I got a new pair of jeans yesterday for the first time in many years, and I'm thrilled because they're not baggy fat-kid pants. They're normal people pants. They don't make me look like I'm trying to hide three adult diapers in the seat. They're a little too tight on me, but not so tight I have to cripple myself before buttoning them. Almost, but not quite. This gives me something better to strive for. I've been losing weight due largely to stress and poor finances, and now I can add narcissism to that list. I guess the end really does justify the means.  I want to look healthy again. I doubt I'll ever be happy with myself and think I actually look good, but I would like to look like less of a heart-attack-in-training. Eating next to nothing and exercising daily helps that goal, but goddamn does it suck. I'm a bitter American. I want to gorge myself on pizza covered in high-cruelty meat and wash it down with ancient whiskey poured from a bottle made of ivory and conflict diamonds. And I'd like to look like a NAVY SEAL (excluding all the awful tribal tattoos. Just, fucking yuck.) when I'm done.

Now I'm off to make myself feel cultured by reading some Joseph Conrad instead of doing, you know, work.

My Trepidation

I have been experiencing some flare-ups of my old political leanings recently. I am finding it more and more difficult to justify a vote for Obama this November. Not that I am leaning to the right or anything. I haven't fallen off the wagon that hard. What I have experienced is profound disillusionment with the broken promises of this administration. I know that every president lies, but that doesn't justify the outcomes of the deliberate deceptions of this administration. I mean, let's be honest and just admit none of us really thought Obama would close Guantanamo. He signed an executive order saying he wanted it to happen, but left the order so full of loop holes it still hasn't been completed, more than three years later. That's disappointing, but at least it was expected. What I didn't expect, and what has nearly destroyed the little shred of hope I had left for the executive branch, are the following two things:

No one has been held responsible for the financial crisis.


I understand this is a big, ugly, monstrously complicated issue. That cannot stop justice from being sought, though. Revelations of misbehavior on the part of mega-banks, which have only gotten bigger, should have led to some sincere investigations by our government. Our representatives aren't elected to serve the banks, they're elected to fucking PROTECT US FROM THEM when they, our market institutions, cross the line. Why haven't any executives been charged in the robo-signing scandal? If a corrupt, greedy government bureaucrat broke the law, lied to investigators, forced a small army of his underlings to sign forged documents, and did this with the full knowledge that tens if not hundreds of thousands of families were being wrongly evicted from their own homes as a result, that motherfucker's head would be on a spike on the capital steps. Why do bankers get a pass because they're millionaires? This is exactly what they did, but somehow we haven't yet painted our homes with their blood. The unfortunate fact is that they have sold a Randian narrative to a majority of US citizens which dictates that they are more important than us and less deserving of punishment because they are successful, which is simply horseshit, and our president fully supports this Wall Street agenda. He wouldn't have hired former Goldman executive Henry Paulson's Sycophant if he didn't.

The brutal security apparatus we despised under Bush has only gotten stronger under Obama.


Not only has it gotten stronger, but it has done so under the guise of progressive restraint, which also makes it insidious. As this great NYT article points out, the president has signed off on the CIA's official method of tabulating the civilian casualties from drone strikes, which assumes that every adolescent and adult male within the target area they hit is an enemy combatant, unless proven otherwise. Please just stop reading now and don't talk to me again if that doesn't strike you as utterly preposterous and completely antithetical to our national moral compass. I realize the fact that we're talking about dirt-poor brown people who pray to a different god might make this excusable to some, but not to me, and it shouldn't to you. For instance, the CIA has said that none of its recent drone attacks have killed any civilians, but this fact is loudly disputed by almost every major news source outside the US. Why aren't we being given the same information? I firmly believe this is because our fourth estate has become so tightly profit driven that they are complicit in the misdirection, lest they lose a lead on some artificial, establishment-created "story". It works like this: If puny Washington beat reporter X wants to get a byline then he has to cultivate a resource within the Intelligence Community (tm), and that resource will demand that puny Washington beat reporter X follow the official line on certain statistics, such as using CIA figures when discussing drone strike casualties. This means no more Woodward and Bernstein. It means that if puny X doesn't do as he's told, he loses his resource, then his byline, and then his job, with no skin off the administration's back. At least with Bush in the White House, the more loudly liberal elements of the MSM would dig a little deeper than just reposting the official press release. The ironic thing is now that a Dem is in the House, the conservative elements of the MSM are not returning the favor because they support the fucking program, so it only gets deeper, and quieter, and even more entrenched.

I believe my vote should still mean something. I used to believe that a vote I didn't fully support was justified by voting for the lesser of two evils, but I am tired of voting for someone I still consider evil in the grand scheme of things. I'm sick of being led to believe that expecting more of our elected leaders is naive. I refuse to stop seeing the world as a place full of potential for improvement, as a place capable of being everything for everyone. In the words of Muhammad Yunus, "Prosperity is not a zero-sum game." And don't think I've gone all hippy on you here, either. I know full well that the world is still a dirty, dangerous, unpleasant place. I just think it can get better. If we expect ourselves to live up to higher standards, why don't we constantly expect that of our leaders as well? Why in the hell should I vote to support a man whose economic policies I distrust as much as Bush's (because they're not really much different)? Why should I vote to support an administration that is sacrificing our best convictions to the specter of national security? Why should I give my vote someone who didn't even earn the last one?

And fuck Romney too. Just fuck 'em all.

Rhetorical

I'm not sure anything I have to say is worth this blog existing. None of us are really this important. I know some of us hope to be, but we're not, really. I can't concentrate on any one subject long enough to give this blog some validity by way of a consistent theme. It used to be fairly political, before my shit-head friends beat that out of me because they "got tired" of my "incessant liberal rants." Whatever. Fuck them. I also tried writing about music, and predictably ended up with a few posts that sat comfortably within the boundaries of the "Suburban 20-something bitching about pop music he doesn't like" category, which is about as interesting as watching dog shit dry. I think I tried to write a concert review at some point back there, and yeah, it's as awful as you'd expect. My point here is I'm a terrible writer, but I feel compelled to do it anyway. Is it social pressure? The Internet has this awful way of equalizing everyone, so suddenly everyone becomes your peer, whether you like it or not, whether or not they would have anything to do with you in the physical world, regardless of skin color, teeth color, shirt color, or BO problem. So if all of them are writing boring, insipid nonsense about their lives for the world to see and judge, why shouldn't I? Maybe I'll have something interesting to say one day.

~ I watched some of Bill Maher's Religulous two nights ago. Almost made it to the 40-minute mark before turning that crap off. If I wanted to watch Maher be a sarcastic dick and pick fights with people I'd watch his show. Instead I watched Howl, which was better than expected.

See? Why am I writing this? I don't really believe you care what I think of Bill Maher's phenomenal Douchebaggery, but I write it anyway. Maybe it's net vanity that's drawing me in. I keep doing this hoping I will get better at it and then more people will read it and then I will matter. Is that really so much to ask? That you find joy in my cynicism, run-on sentences, and poor grammar?

You're such an asshole.

Firsties!

This is my first mobile post on the blogger android app. Now I can write in the awful, truncated fashion of a facebook post without feeling the guilt of doing so while sitting at an actual keyboard. Oh, happy day!

I'm finally coming out about this.

I have spent a large part of my life denying this, to myself and to those I love and respect, but I just can't keep it to myself any more. I have tried to suffer through it, to keep my mouth shut, even to immerse myself in it, hoping in vain to resolve this issue, but I cannot fight this part of me anymore. So here it is: I can't fucking stand Jane's Addiction. The music is good, the hooks are great, even the lyrics are fine, but Perry Ferrell's voice has got to be one of the worst in rock history. His nasally, whiny tone and inability to hit the right pitch even on a professional recording are second to none, and unlike Gordon Gano or Chino Moreno, his awful voice isn't endearing in its sincerity. It's just terrible. Everything about the way he performs is artifice, and he makes no attempt to cover it up. They are over-rated hacks.

Fuck them.

Since no one else is saying it...

Re: "The Verdict"

If you got all the blood you lusted for, you'd fucking drown in it.

So, freulein Anthony got away with it, you say. The unfortunate truth here is she will forever be the only person who knows what really happened. I can tell you something that I know, though: reading Us weekly and watching a few Nancy Grace meltdowns does not make me a justice expert, and doesn't give me some supernatural ability to know what happened better than twelve men and women who spent every damn day for six weeks buried in the details. The predisposition towards assumptions of guilt in our culture is well documented, and she was crucified in the court of public opinion the moment charges were brought against her. She could have been gloriously and widely cleared, and she'd be just as fucked.

The fact is that reading and watching about a case, even voraciously, will NEVER leave you more qualified to render judgement than the twelve people sitting on that bench. It might feel like it, and you might want "justice" because you want someone, ANYONE, to hang for whatever crime-du-jour is at issue, but there's a reason we did our best to get rid of lynch-mobs. Facebook is the new town square, and loudly thirsting for blood is just pointless there.

Some final thoughts:

~I know some of you will accuse me of defending her. Go for it. I applaud your reading ability.

~I did not follow this trial, as I generally do not follow sensationalist bullshit, so don't come blabbering to me about the "details of the case". I do not care, nor will I ever, about what you think really happened.

~I am deeply cynical, and sleep soundly at night knowing everyone is guilty of many bad things. For all I care the court reporter did it.

~Mistaking punishment for justice is common; desiring one above the other is masturbating the darker parts of your soul.

~Everyone already has plenty of awful shit to deal with. Stop making another family's tragedy your own.

Meditation

[revised 1/4/11]
I have a very painful muscle spasm problem in my back. It started years ago, and multiple trips to the doctor have done nothing for me. As a result, every few months I get to spend a week or two laid out with searing pain moving around my back. It isn't localized and moves from a blade beneath my shoulders to a concrete tightness in my lower back. The pain and the tightness don't really restrict my movement in any particular way, but the pain keeps my ambition limited. It comes in waves of severity, but there is always a pleasant beach of hurt, occasionally washed over by frothing arcs of debilitating pain.

The doctors have told me it is an inflamed muscle condition, and they give me narcotic pain killers, muscle relaxers, and anti-inflammatory pills to help, along with some wonderfully dull literature on proper stretches to help my back. None of these things work because I genuinely hate taking pills, and I can't do the stretches until my back is better. Even then, they haven't stopped this flaring up every few months. Pain killers make me feel zonked, and I develop a physical dependency after the first pill, so after about three hours they start to wear off, and I am overcome by cold sweats, chills, and a rather nasty disposition.

And then there's the stress. I work in a high-stress environment, I have a relatively high-stress home life, and I think it all gets stored up in my back. The crippling waves don't seem to have a trigger, though, and come with an irregular regularity. The tightness is there all the time, like a shitty friend I don't want around anymore, only there to remind me of how much worse it can get.

But I will say that, through it all, I find relief in being able to feel the knife in my back. It's the cold comfort you can only take from your best friend and worst enemy.