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.

Another post complaining about Radio. Oh Joy.

Modern music is eating itself. There's the continuously recycled 80s influences, which are only partially shrouded by the bands who are claiming to be influenced by mid-90s bands, who were in turn almost always wholly influenced by early-80s bands, and then there's the fact that songs from the early 90s are still in regular radio rotation. This, more than the dull influences issue, is a big problem for me. There are still songs in regular modern rock radio rotation that are nearly twenty years old. This kind of blows my mind. Think back to listening to radio in the mid-90s. How pissed would you have been if you had been listening to rock songs from the late 70s sprinkled throughout your Pumpkins/Soundgarden/Green Day/Matthew Sweet radio set? It would have been preposterous! So why are we still content with listening to Nirvana songs from three presidential administrations ago? The fact that we haven't let these songs pass into the rock-radio library of yester-year is what keeps us in such a terrible cycle. It's why nu-metal never went away, but instead just morphed into "post grunge" (breaking benjamin, sick puppies, etc.) the way a fat ugly guy goes through trans-gender surgery to become a fat ugly woman: even with a face lift and a weird boob-job, it's still the same mopey, fat, ugly fucker.

I've heard through the grapevine that a lot of this is due to Clear Channel's heavy reliance on focus groups. I understand the commercial application of them, but I think it is unfortunate that they have handed over something that should essentially be a creative enterprise to the sub-democratic maelstrom. Individuals are bright, energetic, and creative. The collective is gray and mediocre at best. This is why focus groups are bad for radio business. If you put ten people in a room and ask them to agree on something to listen to, they're all going to default to a list heavy on shit they've already heard and kind of liked, with no regard for the law of diminishing returns. Not only does this make the radio experience boring as hell for the rest of us, but it dilutes the experience for younger listeners. I had the privilege of growing up with radio stations that rarely played songs more than three years old. But they never stopped playing those damn songs. Now, just think, every time you hear a Temple of the Dog or Collective Soul (UGH!) track on the radio, you're listening to four minutes of air that could have gone to a new band. Maybe you wouldn't have liked them, but at least it wouldn't be the same four excruciating minutes of bullshit you've suffered through countless times before.

Brain Laundry.

- I want the rhythm of my thoughts to be more like a noir detective story, punctuated with sharp wit and random, severe bursts of violence.

- I can turn my back on and walk away from absolutely anything in my life if need be, except my family and my books.

- I am not a musician. I do a damn good job playing one, though.

- Misanthropy is the mother of motivation.

- I can't remember how many times I've moved since I was 18. I can't be certain, but I think this is a good thing. It sure has been one hell of an adventure.

- People that talk about porn openly and normally, like they would any pixar movie, bother me. Not because I'm a prude, but because I feel like, somehow, they are trying to molest me any way they can.

- I think Steve Buscemi would play a very interesting Eeyore in a live-action adaptation.

- One of my life's goals is to sit through Pulgasari without laughing.

- I like dark, angular, subjectively artistic, sexual cinema. Everyone else should too.

- I also like Bad Boys II. So there's that.

Back to the grind...

OK Screw not talking about politics. It's who I am and it's how I do.

So the first two years of Obama's presidency have been rather interesting. The inevitable rise of the angry right took place, in the form of the oh-so-trodden-upon Tea Party. The reality show infection that took over our popular culture finally bubbled over into the political sphere and gave us that half-formed warble of a mindless, looping soundbite, Sarah Palin. Health care reform was finally passed, but in true Calvin and Hobbes form, the compromise was so good it left everyone mad. Remember the gulf Oil Spill from a scant six months ago? The Katrina-like disaster that was going to redefine Obama's presidency? Yeah, neither does anyone else. And now, in the end run up to a new, more hostile congress, they are ramming through every piece of social-left legislation they think might make it, and they're doing a pretty good job. DADT has finally been repealed, undoing one of the worst things to happen during the Clinton years, and a vote on the 9/11 first responders medical care bill has been promised before the recess.

Of course, the wars haven't been won, the economy still sucks, a tenth of the country is jobless, and another tenth doesn't see the irony in starting a fiscal insurrection based on the ideology of revolutionary men who didn't pay their taxes in the first place. A big part of the modern rehash of this revolutionary ideology also muddles a whole swath of socio-economic and political terms, like socialism, capitalism, fascism, liberty, etc. I've heard many an interview with some random FREEDOM-LOVING AMERICAN! on the radio or on TV where a beer-bellied "mama grizzly" tosses around brilliant phrases like "what ever happened to our free markets?" without any sense of what she is really asking. Truly free markets only exist in places like Somalia, and those obviously aren't too formal or worthy of academic study. To provide a very generalized answer to "mama grizzly"'s question, let's play a little logic game: In a truly free market, a company could put lead in baby food if it could justify a profit from the practice, even if only in the short term. Once consumers learn that this particular brand of baby food has lead in it, they will stop purchasing the product and the company will go out of business. This is what economists somewhat broadly term a market correction. The marketplace punished a company for bad decisions. Of course, thousands of babies died in the process. Simply putting them out of business is not an acceptable level of justice in our society, and it never should be. Thus, the baby food industry is regulated, and not truly free. Few if any markets in the entire western world are truly free. Another misconception I've noted is that free markets engender a free society. This is also not always true, but I'll save that lecture for another day.

Just because I like meaningless platitudes: I don't even want to think about what would have happened if McCain had won. The meaninglessness comes in because that is exactly what I plan to do. Here goes.

Even if McCain had eeked out a presidential victory, the momentum for change of party strength in congress would have been roughly the same. Franken might not have scratched out his MN victory, and a select few close congressional races may have played out differently, but the end result would be the same: a broadly bolstered, irritatingly farther-left democratic congress. This would have led to legislative gridlock early on, as McCain did not have many fans on the left. I also think his soulless snowplow of a vice president would have been shuttered fairly quickly by media handlers, for fear of adding another tick to the Republican column on the Quayle board. Cursing under your breath into a still-active mic, like Biden did, is a gaffe. Telling a national news network, with a straight face, that you have credible foreign relations experience because of your geographic proximity to Russia, like Palin did, is so criminally stupid it makes me want to be trepanned. I also shudder to think how a McCain/Palin white house would have navigated the financial collapse. I don't have anything to back up that shudder, as I don't know who was on McCain's short list for treasury secretary. I guess I shudder because we would have to see so much more of that ugly fucking Goiter of his. Yech.