I still say that song is about urine.....

ColdPlay sucks. Yeah. I said it. They are fucking awful. I'm not even going to give them the good natured grace of a rhetorical question. They're just awful. Listening to them is the audible equivalent of shitting mucus. The only hook these blithering british idiots seem able to write is a major to minor key change. That's it. What's even better is that they have publicly admitted to their songs being utterly meaningless, but I swear I can still find people who hear "real pain" in that asshole's voice.

Please excuse me while I go eviscerate myself with a hot fire poker.

another day, another sneer

So I was sitting at Starbucks yesterday, cleverly taking aderol to counteract the effects of all that sperm-killing caffeine, dressed head to toe in clothing purchased at wal-mart, save for my UPS hat, stabbing little children in the throat, while Ronald McDonald gave me a Viagra assited blowjob, and it occured to me that I may not be properly living up to all these lofty ideals I preach.

It's funny how the world works sometimes...

Sir Quotes-a-lot

It's the christmas season, and I work in retail. I think satan himself concocted the near lethal combination of retail employment and the seasonal shopping rush. Everyone needs things packaged and sent, and if some moron at the hub accidentally sends the box to the wrong place, it's your ass for ruining christmas. There is nothing I hate more than the righteous customer. You know the type. The person who is crusading for the rights of consumers everywhere by viciously, loudly, obnoxiously fighting the injustices imposed on her by the inept idiots taking her money. She is the true hallmark of what the american dream has become. Product savvy, with zero patience and, amazingly, even less tolerance. She has "a lot, I mean a lot, of powerful friends" and if you don't get on your knees and beg for her wretched forgiveness she will "run your business into the ground." I could swear that this great nation was founded on principles of brotherly love, so why did we let it get to this point? It is neither loving nor brotherly to expect legions of young, undereducated (or sometimes even overeducated) people to behave as customer service drones; robots designed to indulge our every whim, and then not react when we verbally assault them for something that was more than likely not their fault. Keep that in mind the next time you get a bug up your ass about something at the store and feel like chewing out the clerk. He or she almost certainly had nothing to do with your problem, and all you're doing is fucking up someone else's day. Lest we forget: "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind."

In the devil's dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defined cynicism as "the aim to improve the world by pointing out it's faults." That's a pretty accurate description of me. My concern is that it's going to poison me. I get angrier and more bitter everyday. I still laugh and smile, I'm still a happy fat fuck, but I take these fights to bed with me every night, and I lack the focus to do much about it. By the time I've gotten angry enough to do something about one issue, another one pops up on my radar. It's not a lacking attention span either. It's just overwhelming. To paraphrase a great film: "You need wings to stay above the bullshit in this city."

I could take this time to waste valuable bits railing about my hysterical satire of a love-life, but that would be just a little too cliche, even for me.

Does anyone want to go couch surfing with me this summer?

State of the union

All the good news we get is just the offal of a deeply corrupt system. The more I read and the more I learn, the more I come to understand this. I get angrier every day. Not at the injustices imposed on me by a linear and conformist society because, hell, I drink a cup of starbucks nearly every day. I get angry at the fact that we've all been made to be so apathetic.

We are the children of the information age, so why do those in our ranks who have gotten angry enough to care still want to wage an activist war? We're trying to change people's minds with 50 year old techniques. Wal-mart, the gap, and Nike could not care less if a bunch of uppity hippies boycott their store. The money lost is not even a rounding error on their annual profit report.

Just think about some of these things. Just think about the fact that our whole system of economics does not account for negative economic impact. The GDP only calculates positive economic factors. For instance, you may remember the big announcement in early october that unemployment had slowed down dramatically, with only 15,000 jobs lost in august and september. Sounds great, right? But I could have sworn that well over 700,000 jobs were lost in one nine hour period at the end of august. That strikes me as a rather significant detail, so why did the US labor department see fit to exclude all the jobs lost on the gulf coast due to Katrina? Because the GDP equation is neither written nor designed to include acts of God, so the 700,000+ jobs lost there in august just don't count. That does not strike me as a very effective way to calculate our national economic well being. Another problem is that because our economic system rests solidly on the idea of income gains, we cannot include catastrophes and their negative implications. By way of our contemporary economic calculations, the rebulding costs in the wake of the triad (Katrina, Rita, Wilma), now estimated at over $40 billion, are a good thing. It will provide jobs and income to a marginal number of people. Meanwhile, there are burger king franchises in new orleans so desperate for employees that they are offering $1000 signing bonuses to fry cooks. No way in hell will you convince me that the massive destruction and loss of life due to those hurricanes were good things, socially or economically. I'm sure there were some low income housing property owners here in atlanta licking their greedy little fingers thinking about all the po' Nawlins folks about to become po' 'Lanta folks, but those slum lords should all be lined up and shot like like dogs anyway.

Blow it out your ass.

Happy thoughts!

I used to drink to drown my sorrows.

But the fuckers learned to swim!

avenging angel

So I have this friend, and he has these friends, and they all went to wal-mart®. The story should end here with the whole world blowing up, but as we all know, God is not that kind.

So wobbly, baby-mamma, and a friend of theirs got bored and went stumbling around a wal-mart® super center somewhere near the armpit of america they call home. Whilst on this journey of disgusting, over-indulgent consumerism, they were struck by an uncontrollable altruism and decided to help some kids on this particular wal-mart®'s "angel tree". All I can think is how wonderful it is to live in a country where the world's largest retail corporation, who repeatedly screws employees in the worst ways every single day, whose employees undoubtedly have welfare children on that very tree, can make people (read: profit capital) feel generous by giving them the opportunity to spend more money in their store. How fucking wonderful. How generous of wal-mart® to not give a shit about these destitute children. Here's an idea: why don't Alice and Jim Walton (the owners of wal-mart®, you dolt), whose combined worth exceeds $31 BILLION buy a few bikes for these poor tykes getting so fucked this holiday season. I'm sure they can afford it. And here's the real kicker: DON'T claim it on their tax returns. When you are worth $15 billion as a private citizen, I don't think anything you do should be tax deductible. Not a damn thing.

That would be a truly earth shattering thing for wal-mart® to do. Actually show that they care about the communities they claim to be supporting in their national ad campaigns. They don't give a damn about these kids. The only thing they care about is increasing their profit margin, and what better way to maximize the holiday season bottom line than by infusing it with a little yuletide generosity. Fuck you very much, senor Walton.

So here's my idea. Let's call it the "avenging angel tree". Go to your nearest wal-mart®. Go to the "angel tree" inside said wal-mart® and pull every single child off. Then walk out. Take these childrens' one and only holiday wishes to different stores. Ask friends and family to help you out. Purchase presents for these poor kids at businesses OTHER THAN FRIGGIN wal-mart®. Then take all these gifts back and watch the "customer service/care agent/representative" squirm for his or her life. The children will still get their presents, you will still get to feel good, and angry fuckers like me will wear smiles as we watch wal-mart's® devious scam fall through.

Who wants to help me?

damn

The official death toll estimates for the tsunami of last year have reached 232,000. That is a lot of dead people. Katrina wasn't shit.....

Hypocrites

Yeah, that's me. A dirty hypocrite to the last. I don't like it, I'm not content with it, and I certainly don't revel in it. I had a rather spirited discussion (on my part at least) with Dan'l on the way home from work today. He gave me a ride due to my car being impounded in midtown at the moment. The discussion primarily focused on my utter disgust with advertising and marketing in general. Being both my little brother, and the biggest devil's advocate I know, he was able to push all the right buttons at all the right times to reach the conclusion that all my anger really fuels is my own hypocrisy. And in many ways I agree with him. But not entirely. To a certain extent I do feel like this wellspring of anger is righteous and justified. The ideas are all there, I just lack the energy and willpower to do something about it, which only fuels the fire. I also still have the putnam situation hanging over my head, and a 20 year prison sentence is a pretty big deterrent to taking on the man for right now. I'll be concerned the moment it's not a deterrent anymore. At least I'm not apathetic though. Apathy is just too easy. Acknowledged hypocrisy can serve as merely a brief pause on the way to action, whereas apathy is simply a roadblock. Hypocrisy can be worked around, where apathy has to be entirey overcome. And the big, evil, ubiquitous "they" that I'm always bitching about (you know who I'm talking about) would much rather have you be apathetic than hypocritical, because at least when you know you're a hypocrite, that value meal leaves a shitty taste in your mouth, and one can only willingly ingest shit for so long.

I'm off to go get shitty and record some delightfully deluded hooky pop punk tunes with A.D.R. and Mia Malice at Vision. Toodle-oo children.

Please provide me with feedback on some of this. I know you dickheads are reading it.

it never stops

The pentagon has been caught with a program of distributing pre-written articles into Iraqi newspapers. All's fair in love and war, right? It kind of undermines our justification of the war (making Iraq a safe and truly democratic state) when our own national forces are doing things we find utterly deplorable to our sense of "democracy". The pentagon has defended the program by saying it's necessary. Mis-information. Dis-Information. Fuck-me-formation.