Shoplifting in a Ghost Town

Rose/Concrete

2012-02-11T03:42:00.000-05:00

We are a miserable race of insecure, bitter, and lonely people. We all feel ourselves terrible, inadequate, we live in fear of the scrutiny that would reveal our deficiency. I am especially aware of my faults, I hold myself to impossibly high standards and condemn myself for every flaw. There are precious days when my hyper awareness of my own base and vile nature drives me to noble if unsuccessful attempts at self-improvement.

But most days I hover between lethargic futility and outright depression. Recently I've been at a record low but a recent conversation with my younger sisters has revived me in the way that only they can. My sisters demonstrate infinite grace and nuance in dealing with an older brother so prone to self-indulgent whining and misery. They always manage to put things into perspective for me.

The gist of the conversation was that, for someone of my background, I'm really much less of a failure than you would expect. I don't use my upbringing as an excuse for any of my failings, but when I am beating myself up it helps to reflect on how far I've come just to stave off feelings of self-hatred. As the child of two heroin addicts, born into a family of poor white trash, growing up in a house that was frequently without electricity or running water, I could have turned out much worse.

I could have turned out like my older siblings and cousins. I don't want to be too harsh on my parents who I think had wonderful qualities despite their obvious failings, but when I think about my origins it's easy to see why my family is full of alcoholics, drug addicts, all with tons of kids that they're too poor to support and too stupid to raise properly. They're just being exactly what they were raised to be. They're a simple product of their origins. If you knew my parents, you would expect their children to be exactly like my older siblings. My half-sister's mother smoked through her pregnancy, and in turn she smoked a pack a day through two pregnancies.

Once again it should be said that I'm not singing my praises, simply accounting for factors beyond my control. If you knew my family, my neighborhood, and the schools I attended you would know how much of a miracle it is that I'm alive, literate, childless, in decent health, and a non-smoker/drinker/drug user.

It's amusing to note that while most of my friends and current peers think of me as white trash, an uneducated, rude, and tactless philistine my family and my peers from childhood think of me as an arrogant sophisticate, a sellout dandy with no street cred who thinks he's better than everyone because he spent two semesters in college. A change in perspective makes a big difference.

Having my little sisters say all this to me has helped me get through a rough period. I'm writing this with one hand as my right hand is broken, leaving me out of work for a month with hospital bills, no income, and a scary level of uncertainty in my future career.

All of this has also prompted me to notice that almost everyone I know is more or less who they were born to be. All of my friends who are rich and successful come from rich and successful families, neighborhoods, schools. All of my educated friends come from families of educated people, and all my artistic friends come from families of artistic people.

This thought makes it especially insulting to be consistently patronized and condescended to by the products of the artsy, affluent, liberal upper crust for not meeting their standards of civility, education, or success.

I started the week thinking that I was worthy of nothing but contempt, wondering if I would ever be a worthwhile person, and as hokey and sentimental as it sounds, the words of two people I love were able not just to give me a little bit more faith in who I am, but to take a lot of my detractors down a peg.

I have to remember that while you're who you are because of where you came from, I am who I am in spite of it.

"You try to plant something in the concrete...if it grows, and the and the rose petal's got all kinds of scratches and marks, you not gon' say, "Damn, look at all the scratches and marks on the rose that grew from concrete." You gon' be like, "Damn! A rose grew from the concrete?!" Same thing with me...I grew out of all of this...That's what they should see...All the trouble to survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle they gave me. I'm just trying to make something...You see you wouldn't ask why the rose that grew from the concrete had damaged petals. On the contrary, we would all celebrate its tenacity. We would all love its will to reach the sun. Well, we are the rose - this is the concrete - and these are my damaged petals. Don't ask me why, thank God nigga, ask me how!"-Tupac Shakur

Past Year's Accountability 2011

2011-12-31T23:59:00.000-05:00

In December of 2009 I started a new tradition in my life, of doing a recap of my new year's resolutions from the preceding year. I really enjoy the tradition of making new year's resolutions; I think it's one of the few positive traditions -- if not the only positive tradition -- associated with the new year. Even if most people don't follow through with their resolutions, it's still infinitely better to think of the new year as a time to improve yourself and your life instead of a cheap excuse to get drunker than usual.

That being said I have started trying to keep up with my resolutions at the end of the year and hold myself accountable for my successes and my failures.

My resolutions for 2011:

1. Get three stripes on my white belt.
At the beginning of 2011 I was still training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and had hoped to be able to have three stripes on my white belt by this time. However I had to take an indefinite hiatus from training when I started my apprenticeship to become a hairstylist in March of this year. I simply don't have the time to train anymore. I can't give myself any credit for this resolution.

2. Become conversational in Spanish.
Learning Spanish has been something I've wanted to do for a couple years now, and while I did get Rosetta Stone for Spanish this year and have started working with it, it wasn't until the past few weeks here at the end of the year so I can't give myself any credit for this.

3. Publish issue three of Litmus Test.
This is one of those resolutions that requires of a lot of money and given that I was laid off for the first quarter of the year and have been making minimum wage since March I wasn't able to make this happen.

4. Publish book of my dad's writing/photographs.
This is another creative project like Litmus Test 3 that got put on a shelf for the time being. I've been working way too much to start work on this yet.

5. Publish book of my own short works.
We really are off to a bad start with this. The first five resolutions got no credit whatsoever. Once again I didn't have much time for creative endeavors because my apprenticeship took up most of my time this year. I'm currently working on revising some stuff but I can't give myself any credit for this resolution.

6. Not reactivate my Facebook.
Even though I did reactivate my Facebook a couple of weeks ago, I am going to give myself full credit for this resolution for two reasons. 1. It was inactive for an entire year, December to December. 2. I only reactivated it for professional reasons, to find people to let me practice on their hair. Last year I deactivated my Facebook because I was frustrated with how much time I spent online arguing with people, lurking weirdos, and hitting on girls. Since I reactivated my Facebook I've removed all my personal info and use it primarily for work stuff. I think it's fair to give myself full credit because I followed the spirit of the resolution even if I didn't follow the letter of it.

7. Convince my mother to go Vegan.
No credit here, my mother is bull-headed and obstinate.

8. Use Warehouse to benefit arts community outside of Hardcore.
No credit here. I had plans for using the space to do some interesting things but never followed through with them before the space was shut down.

9. See Earth Crisis.
Sadly I didn't get a chance to see Earth Crisis this year. No credit.

10. Read 20 books of intellectual worth.
I'm gonna give myself half credit for this resolution because while I didn't hit the number mark, some of the books I read this year were dense and intelligent enough to count multiple times. Reading "Of Time and the River" by Thomas Wolfe took up a big chunk of the year. That book in and of itself counts for ten in my opinion. Additionally "The Moral Landscape" by Sam Harris was especially enlightening.

11. Take a college course.
I'm gonna give myself half credit for this resolution because while I didn't take a college class, I am taking a cosmetology class in a classroom as well as one online. I think it's conservative and fair to count two tech center-esque classes as half of a college class.

12. Study a subject that is outside my normal realm of interest (math, science, economics).
I'll give myself full credit for this resolution for reading two books that dealt with math or science. "The Moral Landscape" by Sam Harris and "The Golden Ratio" by Mario Livio.

13. Write a novella.
I'm gonna give myself half credit for this as I finished a 28 page short story in 2011. I would give myself full credit but I only finished it in 2011, I started writing it in 2010.

14. Start a band.
I always talk about starting a band but never do it. No credit here.

15. Finish watching all of Star Trek.
Full credit for this one. I have now watched all of The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, and all of the movies at least once.

16. Finish my sleeves. Tattoo hands/neck.
No credit for this one at all. Other than letting my friend tattoo Christopher Hitchens' initials on my arm I didn't get tattooed at all this year. This is actually the longest I've gone without getting tattooed since I turned 18.

17. Visit London/Hawaii.
No credit for this one either. Other than traveling to DC and North Carolina to see Eisley I haven't traveled at all this year.

Overall my success rate for this year was 4.5/17 or 26% success. In 2009 my success rate was 43%, and in 2010 it was 29%. That means I have gotten progressively less successful on my resolutions every year. It's a discouraging fact but I have a very optimistic feeling about 2012. I'll check back in with y'all at the end of 2012.

Without a Hitch

2011-12-17T01:44:00.002-05:00

Last night, December 15th, right before I was to go to sleep, I happened to glance at my Facebook newsfeed and saw an old friend post a status update that simply said the name of Christopher Hitchens, sandwiched by several heart symbols. I knew without further elaboration that Hitchens was gone. I remembered the announcement of his cancer diagnosis, and had watched miserably as pictures and videos of the man featured a progressively more weak and skeletal figure. I knew he was dying, and to see his name pop up in so plain a way I knew meant that he was gone.

I knew immediately that I wasn't going to get a decent night's sleep. Hitchens' death was something that I had to process. The first step of Kübler-Ross model is denial, and my immediate reaction to hearing of Hitchens' death was to get out of bed and watch videos of his interivews and debates for an hour on YouTube. Seeing him alive, talking, allowed me for a brief moment to deny that he was gone.

It goes without saying that I felt furious at a world without Hitchens, saw the futility of trying to bargain, became depressed and have stayed so for the past 24 hours.

I spent my day at work alternating between holding back tears and desperate attempts to explain to my coworkers who exactly the world had lost, only to have them simply say "oh, he was that atheist." It was crushing. I spent my lunch break hidden in the storage closet because it was the only place in the entire building I could go to get away. I listened to Pistol Bitch in my headphones and read articles by Hitchens on my phone. It felt appropriate to listen to Pistol Bitch because I remember after Jerry Falwell's death, the two people I had heard denounce him publicly were Greg Edmondson, the singer of Pistol Bitch, and Christopher Hitchens.

The two will always be linked in my mind because while Greg and Hitch are two very different people, they were always at their best and most in their element criticizing a hateful, disgusting bigot like Falwell.

Hitchens' "The Trial of the Will" was not only a powerful piece but resonated for me -- as I'm sure it must have for many -- as someone who cared for a loved one dying of cancer. Hitchens' description of his cancer treatments and its psychological effects on him aren't the first time that he has reminded me of my father. As his weight and hair were stripped away from him by his cancer and the treatments he was receiving for it I often noticed that he was starting to look like my father.

I never met Hitchens personally, so I leave the job of memorializing him to better equipped men. Christopher Buckley does an amazing job encapsulating a man that I am miserable to say I'll never know and I can't recommend enough reading the piece.

I'm not depressed because I've lost a friend. I'm not even sad that I've lost a favourite author. Hitch was prolific -- it's unlikely I'll get around to reading his entire body of work before I die -- so it would seem silly to be miserable that he won't be putting out more material when I may never finish I am sad that the human race has lost of a voice of reason, truth, and beauty. By his honesty and his power Hitch elevated the consciousness of our species. He was a rising tide lifting all boats.

It goes without saying that I disagreed with Hitch on many issues. As someone who abhors drinking, smoking, and eating animals, I often found myself grossed out by his unabashed indulgence in all three. I was opposed to the invasion of Iraq, and believe that the United States cannot advocate nuclear non-proliferation until we take serious steps to dismantle our own nuclear arsenal, both points on which he and I would disagree.

My occasional disagreements notwithstanding, I do not think I could praise Hitch highly enough. This isn't because I can't find the words, but because I am not good enough to give him his due. I would need to be half the man that Hitch was in order for my praise to be worth offering up, and I don't know that I would be half the man that a cancer-suffused 62 year old Hitch was if I lived to be 602 years old. Who am I to judge Hitch? Who am I to praise or laud him?

So when I say that Hitch was a rising tide I'm not really speaking to Hitch himself; I'm just trying to tell the story of a boat on that tide. I could never speak to Hitch's character, to his grit, his backbone. I have no more authority to praise him than I do to give out A+ grades on particle physics papers at MIT.

But for my own part, I can say that Hitch represents all the virtues that I could ever hope to have. He never spoke anything except what he had every conviction to be the truth, he never let himself be bullied. But more importantly, he never lowered himself in order to make his point. He answered ignorance with erudition, emotional shrieking with cool reason. He refused to speak to people as though they were as stupid as they actually are, but spoke to them as though they were smart enough to see the truth that they often weren't smart enough to see. He was the embodiment of human intellect, razor-sharp criticism, logic, precision, and the perfectly timed, immaculately delivered polemic takedown.

I am not worthy to say anything except, rest in peace Hitch.

"Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."-Christopher Hitchens

Buy "God is Not Great" on Amazon
Watch some of Hitch's best debates on YouTube. Part One. Part Two.

I tattooed Hitch's initials and date of death on my wrist.

In Defense of the Tough Guy

2011-12-15T03:36:00.003-05:00

If you spend any amount of time with hardcore kids, especially vegan or politically active ones, you'll hear the phrase "tough guy" thrown around a lot. If you aren't at least somewhat involved in the hardcore punk scene, this might be somewhat confusing, partly because it might not necessarily be clear who these tough guys are, and why exactly everyone is so resentful of them.

Of course even someone who's never listened to a single punk record can easily glean the meaning in a general sense. Everyone has dealt with aggravating hyper-masculine men in some context. In high school it might have been the athletes, in college it might have been the frat boys. The annoying alpha male knows no bounds, he's everywhere.

But that vague sentiment doesn't really do justice to what a phrase like "tough guy" means in the context of the hardcore scene. It's not just a physical description, it's not just an attitude or a behavioral pattern, it's not just a philosophy. Those are all things that are easy to quantify and describe, but there is a tough guy aesthetic, tough guy melodies, tough guy rhythms, and tough guy musical intonations. You can tell a tough guy band by the sound, not just by looking at the dudes in the band or even their fans. One of the biggest "tough guy" bands a few years ago was made up of people weighing less than 150 pounds, who were some of the quietest, kindest people in their personal relationships. There's more to "tough guy" than being a tough guy.

And as much as I agree with some of the criticism aimed at that particular brand of music, I love a lot of tough guy bands, and at times I'm pretty unabashed in my tough guy behavior.

I know that most people would think that the world has more than enough hyper-masculinity, violence, intolerance, and exaggerated alpha-male dominance rituals. But I think there's something to be said for tough guys (even if they're not such tough guys).

For example, the most common response I ever get when I talk to people about veganism is "I could never give up chicken/beef/cheese/eggs." And my response is always the same, "yes you could." Of course it annoys me to constantly hear negative feedback about what is a very important moral issue, but it also is like nails on a chalkboard to hear people openly admit their weakness without shame.

Always in that moment I feel like a tough guy. It might be the result of 13 years of listening to Hatebreed, Judge, and Earth Crisis, but I feel an appropriate amount of shame whenever I have to openly admit that I am afraid of something, or too weak to do something. Of course there's a downside to that mindset, but I can never feel comfortable saying that I would never do something I know to be for the best simply because I am not strong enough to do it.

I encounter people constantly who "care about" animals or any number of issues who say that their own lack of willpower is what keeps them from changing their lifestyle or bad habits. "I know that cigarettes are bad for me, I know that they hurt the environment and that they test on animals, but I can't bring myself to quit." My inner tough guy is disgusted by statements like this.

As awful as it may seem, I do see weakness as something to be ashamed of. I speak from personal experience that the fear and shame of having to admit weakness has kept me from slipping up in some of my own commitments. Of course I'm not perfect in my commitments, and my tough guy attitude has sometimes gotten me into far more trouble than it's been worth. But you lose out when you become too comfortable saying "I'm afraid, I'm weak."

Maybe I've internalized too much of the tough guy rhetoric, but maybe other people haven't internalized enough.

We're all weak, we're all afraid sometimes, but maybe if we were more ashamed of our flaws that shame might push us to not accept our shortcomings. We let our shame guide our decisions constantly, we're made to feel bad about our belongings, so we live beyond our means, we're made to feel bad about our bodies, so we diet and get gym memberships. There are tons of people benefiting from our insecurities, but if we were neurotically insecure about our own weakness, what would we become?

What if every time you felt like you couldn't do something, Jamey Jasta punched you in the face and told you to have discipline and determination, and to cultivate your pure strength in solitude?

And At My Funeral, You Will Sing the Requiem

2011-02-09T00:47:00.003-05:00

I think about my own death a lot. Often, though not necessarily always in a way that people would associate with depression. I've gone through one genuine suicide attempt and have had a few brushes with death that varied in their seriousness. In addition I have had a lot of close friends, sworn enemies, and casual acquaintances die at very young ages. I'm a very introspective person already and an unexpected death is enough to make even the biggest idiot pensive for a time.

Anecdotally I would estimate that I have had more experience with death than your average person in my socio-economic/lifestyle/age group. I certainly wouldn't say I've had a lot more experience, but more than average for whatever demographic you want to place me in.

By definition that also means that I've been to my fair share of funerals. I realize that once again I'm speaking from inside of a very limited cultural microcosm, a white American working class Judeo-Christian view of death, dying, and funeral rites. I admittedly have very little experience with funeral rituals in other religious/cultural/ethnic settings. So it should go without saying that some of my experiences and opinions here are more insular than usual, perhaps bordering on ethnocentricity. For that I apologize.

Depression is by definition self-indulgent, so it should come as no surprise that the only character trait that defines my personality more than my misery and discontent is a nauseating degree of egocentricity, introspection, self-conscious obsession, masturbatory psychological self-diagnosis, and a general lack of concern for other people's feelings or ideas.

The convergence of all of these traits is that I am not only obsessed with dying, but with my own legacy, especially with my funeral. Part of this is of course due to my own vanity; I want whatever ceremony that follows my death to represent the depth of my character in a way that satisfies my own self-indulgent nature.

Additionally - and I think this is more important - I think that a bad funeral does a disservice to mourners. A powerful and appropriate funeral has the ability to act like a flashbulb on the best parts of a deceased person's character, giving you the best picture to remember them by. A cheesy funeral, an insincere eulogy can muddle our memories of a person.

I've sat at funerals and been crushed by the failure of a speaker to do justice to the person who had just died. As much as I want to be remembered well, I want my loved ones to find closure and connection in my funeral.

It would be hard for me to relate how it feels to be so vain that an appropriate funeral is one of the biggest concerns in your everyday life.

All of that introduction to say that I would like to outline some very important instructions for my loved ones to consider when I die and preparations are being made for my funeral.

First, so there is no ambiguity on legal matters, everything that I own will be left to David Phinney. David Phinney alone will have the final legal say in all matters relating but not limited to my body, property, creative work, funeral arrangements, &c.

Second, I have two older half-sisters that I do not consider family, so under no circumstances are April or Casey to be listed as my sisters in my obituary or any other memorial information, funeral programs, &c. The only siblings who should be listed are my older brother Michael as well as Hannah and Emily.

Third, I don't have a preference for where my funeral is held as long as there aren't any religious messages in the actual proceedings. I'm an atheist so it seems rather silly to talk about my going to heaven or whatever other nonsense people would like to think. Make sure that whoever gives the eulogy is someone who is very eloquent, hopefully at least as eloquent as me. Greg Bennick is an obvious first choice, Joseph Green would also be good. Whoever you get, make sure they're good.

Fourth, use the following picture of me as the official picture on display and in my obituary. Don't use any dressed up nonsense to represent me.

Fifth, make whatever use of my body you can - donate my organs or even my whole body to science if it can be of any help. If you want to dispose of my remains, make sure that I am either cremated or if you wish to bury me only do so in accordance with natural burial guidelines. You can read more about natural burials here. This is not a point I am particularly picky about, plus the circumstances of my death may have some bearing on how best to dispose of me. I'll leave this up to David's best judgment.

Sixth, the following are suggested songs that can be played at my funeral. Otis Redding - Sitting on the Dock of the Bay. Converge - The Saddest Day. Tupac - Unconditional Love. Tom Waits - Dirt in the Ground. Eisley - Combinations. Gillian Welch - I Dream a Highway. Trial - Reflections.

Seventh, if you plan to use any of my writing in the service, try to make sure it isn't something I would have been horribly embarrassed to hear read out loud. Certainly nothing I wrote in high school should be read out loud, ever.

Eighth, when you remember me, make sure that Veganism and Straight Edge are the first things you think of.

Ninth, I fully endorse my friends using my death as a way to get free things, get lots of attention, get out of work or school, and make out with people they find attractive. I try my hardest to help my friends get things they want while alive, so if my death can help my friends get things they want I fully endorse that.

Tenth, I realize that it might be a very long time before I actually die so many of these suggestions may become either outdated, irrelevant, or contradictory. To that end I once again authorize David Phinney to make whatever changes he feels best represent the spirit of what I was trying to get across. Also he's authorized to make whatever changes he feels would make my funeral more powerful, endearing, or amusing to himself.

Past Year's Accountability 2010

2010-12-31T23:59:00.003-05:00

Tradition is a complicated concept in human society, used often to justify some of our most barbaric and insane actions. It's often said that the most meaningful and powerful advances in our culture come when people openly flaunt tradition, but it could also be argued that many of our most precious ideas are the culmination rather than the antithesis of our oldest traditions.

I take traditions on a case-by-case basis. When it comes to the beginning of a new calendar year I recognize that the Gregorian calendar is a arbitrary tradition and is by no means universal. The beginning of a new year on January 1st makes only as much sense to human perceptions of time as we decide it does and holds absolutely no water when you think about time as a universal concept.

It should come as no surprise that I am frustrated and disgusted by the tradition of getting drunker than usual on New Year's Eve, and often find myself either staying home to avoid the revelry or going out and trying to force myself to enjoy it which almost always fails.

However I do wholeheartedly embrace the tradition of New Year's Resolutions, its questionable effectiveness notwithstanding. Scientists who specialize in answering questions like this have found a dismal success rate among people making resolutions for the new year, and on a anecdotal level my own personal success has been found wanting. For my own amusement and also to hold myself to my goals I've started a tradition of my own called "Past Year's Accountability" wherein I document my success rate with the previous year's resolutions. Last year my success rate was 6.5/15 or just over 43% success. Let's take a look back at 2010 and see if I did any better this year.

Once again this years resolutions were written and revised between mid-December of last year and the first week of January this year. After the first week of the year they were unalterable. This is the list as it was written a year ago.

1. Get two stripes on my white belt.

Training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was just becoming a big part of my life at the end of 2009 and so I made a commitment to get halfway toward a blue belt by the end of 2010. I received my first stripe on my belt in March of 2010 but as my training became inconsistent I never received a second stripe. The math is simple here, one stripe outta two counts for half credit.

2. Visit Hawaii.

2010 was a dismal year for travel plans, I couldn't seem to make ends meet no matter how hard I tried and so almost all discretionary spending was frozen for the year. I went to Philadelphia in January and after that I never went outside of Virginia. This was a resounding failure.

3. Tattoo my neck.

Getting tattooed was another victim of my tightened finances in 2010. I didn't get my neck tattooed, but I did get a small tattoo behind my ear. It's technically on my head but I'm gonna be generous and give myself half credit for this resolution since it's still a very visible tattoo and I only didn't follow through on account of money.

4. Go back to VCU, change major to journalism.

I didn't go back to school this year, once again mostly - but not entirely - because of money. My fascination with being a journalism major only lasted about a month or two. If I went back to school now I wouldn't go into MassComm at all. No credit for this resolution.

5. Blog consistently all year.

I got a job blogging about Animal Rights in May of this year and in addition to writing professionally I posted 16 new SIAGT entries this year. I think this resolution deserves full credit.

6. Publish book of my dad's writing/photographs.

I have a bunch of my dad's photographs and writing laying around that I plan to eventually compile and edit and publish, mostly for the benefit of myself and my family. I did spend a few days organizing the film and photographs into sleeves and binders but I never got around to really publishing them. This resolution could have earned half credit with a week's worth of additional effort but sadly I didn't do it. No credit.

7. Finish sleeving both my arms.

As mentioned above, I didn't have much money to get tattooed for most of the year. I did however outline a huge piece on my left arm at the end of the year, finally closing up the last big gap on my arms. This resolution gets half credit.

8. Visit Africa/South America.

Never made it off the East Coast all year, no credit.

9. Perform in a Shakespeare play.

I auditioned and was cast in a play that involved Shakespeare and was being performed by the local Shakespeare company but I couldn't actually perform due to my work schedule. I'm gonna give myself half credit for landing a part even though I couldn't follow through.

10. Compete in six BJJ competitions.

I only competed in two competitions, one in Philadelphia in January and one in Richmond in February. I registered for a third in March but couldn't make it due to transportation issues. Given that the one competition I missed wasn't due to laziness on my part and since the fights I had at the competitions I did attend were very good I will give myself half credit for this.

11. Fight a celebrity.

The best-case scenario for this resolution would have been an encounter with my nemesis Travis Barker and fucking his world up before being arrested/smashed by bouncers. Sadly this didn't come to fruition, I was only in one fight all of 2010 and it was not with a celebrity in any sense of the word. No credit.

12. Get married/Get marriage annulled.

I had originally planned on following through with a plan to fly to Vegas and get a joke marriage to a friend. I found a very attractive woman willing to go through with it but once again my finances kept me from following through with it. No credit on this one either.

So overall my success score is 3.5/12 or just over 29% success. That is a pretty sad dropoff from last year's success rate of just over 43%. My resolutions for 2011 will definitely require less money since that seemed to be the downfall of a lot of my 2010 resolutions.

Additionally one of my resolutions for 2011 is to do better on my resolutions than I did in 2010. I'll be checking back in at the end of 2011 to let you know how I did with my resolutions for next year.

Happy Christmas

2010-12-19T16:21:00.003-05:00

I get asked a lot why I love Christmas so much if I'm an atheist. Sure, everyone from Dawkins-esque atheists to noncommittal Jews can be caught whistling a carol every now and again as well as buying gifts for their loved ones, but few people approach Christmas with the same level of fervor that I do. We've got a Christmas tree downstairs, lights in the living room, kitchen, and my bedroom. Stockings and tinsel adorn the walls, and we play Christmas music almost constantly.

The answer is that for me, Christmas isn't a religious holiday. Taking a historical longview of the holiday it's clearly a hodgepodge of the silliest and most questionable aspects of Christian theology, mixed with pagan nature festival aesthetics, and secular cultural accoutrements.

Even if you accept the Christian narrative (which I don't), the Christmas celebration as we know it today seems entirely disconnected from it. If there was a person known as Jesus (there wasn't), he certainly wasn't born on December 25th. The alleged birthdate of Christ has been disputed by scholars for centuries while the mainstream church openly admits that the exact date isn't important. The date was likely chosen to coincide with the celebration of solar-inspired winter-solstice pagan holidays. This not only allowed Christianity to co-opt the revelry and decorations, but also smoothed the transition from paganism to Christianity by converts who didn't want to give up their tacky sweaters.

And while modern religious zealots militantly push Christmas in America to combat the alleged "War on Christmas" by infidels, it was not always the case with mega-Christians. Christmas celebrations were banned in England by Puritans - arguably the most belligerently intolerant Christian group in history - who controlled Parliament and felt that Christmas had no biblical justification and was simply an excuse for the kind of fun that Puritans structured their entire ideology in opposition to.

The exchanging of gifts, decorating Christmas trees, characters like Frosty the Snowman and Santa Claus, are all non-biblical cultural additions to the celebration. The attempt to fit these aspects into a religious context is never convincing.

The ubiquity of Christmas has only served to remove it from its religious foundation and expand it into a secular cultural celebration of shopping, winter sports and vague feel-good themes like generosity, togetherness, love, family, friendship, and charity. Usually I despise the overuse of nonspecific aphorisms and bromides but at Christmastime I make an exception.

If Christians wanted to preserve the religious integrity of the holiday they would embrace the politically-correct inclusive attempts among merchants to replace "Merry Christmas" with "Happy Holidays", &c. Why Christians feel that linking their most sacred holiday to a retail shopping clusterfuck is an effective means of proselytizing is beyond me.

As it stands, no matter what salutation your cashier is muttering after handing you a receipt and an overpriced piece of plastic, Christmas becomes less Christian every year.

Personally I love Christmas music, even the religious stuff. I view the story of the nativity as a fascinating piece of cultural mythology the same way I view Native American, Norse, Greek, Roman, Indian, or Chinese mythology. I'll visit church on Christmas Eve and listen to the story, and thoroughly enjoy the music. I'll feel a childhood glow in my chest brighter than the lights I see on houses, I'll spend the season with my friends, try to be a little bit less of an asshole than normal. I'll watch Christmas movies, and hopefully end a pretty shitty year on a high note.

Star Trek is Better Than Star Wars

2010-10-03T18:50:00.001-04:00

Being a nerd means that you will inevitably get involved in a lot of esoteric debates which rage on for literally decades. Debates such as Magic the Gathering vs. Warhammer, Starcraft vs. Command and Conquer, Marvel vs. DC, Vampire the Masquerade vs. Werewolf the Apocalypse. These are the battles which define our existence as hopeless dorks.

The most important debate in nerd culture however, the question that gets to the heart of everything that nerd-dom is based on is this: which is better, Star Trek or Star Wars?

Well, to be direct I will begin by saying that Star Trek is vastly superior to Star Wars.

This however is NOT to say that I don't love Star Wars. I have always loved Star Wars. I don't want anything that I say to be misconstrued. I've seen all six movies more times than I can count, I used to photoshop lightsabers into pictures of myself when I was in high school. I love Star Wars. I just think that Star Trek is better.

The entirety of the Star Wars canon is contained within six films. Star Trek however spans six television series encompassing 726 episodes in all and eleven feature length films. The scope of Star Trek means that by its nature it is an endeavour to really get to the know the universe in any great depth. This would explain why Star Wars is generally more popular; you can watch every Star Wars film in a day. Star Trek however takes time and dedication to appreciate. If you watched one episode or one movie per day, it would still take you over two years to cover all of Star Trek.

People appreciate things that are easily encapsulated. Star Wars follows a single story arc which is conducive to tourists, part-timers, and dabblers. True Star Trek fans cannot dabble.

Star Trek is more than a single story, more than a single set of characters or even one overall objective. The Star Trek universe is a huge canvas that allowed many different creative minds to collectively ponder some of life's more important questions. The vastness of the Star Trek canon serves the purpose of investigating, contemplating, and explaining every minute aspect of what it means to be a human being.

The human condition - moreso than any interstellar politicking, supernova's explosion, time travel, or laser beams - was the true subject of Star Trek. This is why in every series there was at least one character struggling with defining their humanity. In TOS it was Spock the half-Vulcan science officer. In The Next Generation it was Data, the android who struggles to continually be more human. In Deep Space 9 it is Odo, the shapeshifter who tries to fit in among humanoids by maintaining a humanoid form even though his species is more comfortable as a puddle of liquid. In Voyager both the holographic Doctor and the former Borg drone Seven of Nine struggle to find their place in human culture.

Another reason that people gravitate toward Star Wars is because there is almost no moral ambiguity. Star Wars presents a moral dichotomy that conforms to lowest common denominator of human ethical sensibility. The "light" side of the force - peace-seeking, contemplative, and always fighting with friendlier colours of lightsaber - is battling the "dark" side of the force - confrontational, deceptive, and always fighting with red lightsabers. Light vs Dark, the lack of subtlety is comforting but makes for a less pervasive and verisimilar storyline.

Star Trek on the other hand is neck-deep in shades of grey. It's hard to watch an episode of any of the Star Trek series without feeling a deep ethical conflict. It's never 100% clear of what the right thing to do is. Unlike in Star Wars where the multitude of aliens exist solely to provide a colourful supporting cast for an all human group that actually drives the story, the aliens in Star Trek have unique and important cultural, biological, and mental characteristics that actually determine the arc of each story.

Moral allegory is a huge part of Star Trek. By creating scenarios where there is no clear right or wrong, no clear light or dark side, we are forced to contemplate our choices. By using specific components of different species, we are able to create moral dilemmas with real emotional weight, scenarios that could never exist in real life. By the introduction of species that could realistically be defined as pure evil, or species that are telepathic, species that live for hundreds of years through symbiotic reincarnation, or species that are nearly omnipotent, species that are cybernetic, inorganic, or non corporeal we can push the bounds of what defines personhood, what are the rights of sentient beings, how can moral standards be applied evenly to species that are so inherently dissimilar?

Inevitably in any discussion about the merits of Trek vs Wars, there is the assertion that the action in Star Wars is better than the action in Star Trek. That is a point I don't hesitate to concede. No handheld phaser shootout or starship battle in Star Trek begins to compare to the amazingly choreographed lightsaber duels in Star Wars. I will however assert unequivocally that this is a very weak element to hinge an argument on. At the end of the day, what makes for exciting entertainment doesn't necessarily make for enlightening literature.

Star Trek is also superior because it is grounded in this place and timeline. By setting Star Wars in "a galaxy far away" Lucas lets himself of the hook for continuity issues. Star Trek however has to work with a future that - however improbably - evolved naturally out of the present we live in. Star Trek begins with us, right now, on Earth, and expands and unfolds and progresses. By limiting itself in one area, the Star Trek universe has a basis from which to grow indefinitely while remaining emotionally compelling.

Star Trek emphasizes the political and the rational, and an overwhelming number of episodes focus on logical progression of scientific ideas and applying just political principles to governing internally and exploring externally. Star Trek never dealt with what could be called spirituality in a traditional sense (temporally aberrant wormhole-residing aliens in DS9 notwithstanding) and there are no overarching superstitious themes. Star Wars however deals almost exclusively with the spiritual. While there is a political subplot, it is a one dimensional backdrop to Luke/Anakin's religious maturation/unraveling/redemption. The defeat of the evil Galactic Empire ultimately doesn't hinge on savvy political maneuvering, guerilla warfare, or espionage, it hinges on Luke's self-realization as a religious messiah.

The plot of Star Wars is intrinsically elitist. While any story has to emphasis certain characters over others in order to drive the plot, the Star Wars storyline explicitly states that certain characters are born more important than others. It is typical of a religious viewpoint that some messiah characters will be more important than others no matter what happens. This is shown most obviously when Anakin/Darth Vader is redeemed at the end of The Return of the Jedi.

Vader we know has killed countless numbers of people. He has ordered them killed as a military commander and in the prequels he personally slaughters everyone in the Jedi temple, including children. His only redeeming action is to kill the Emperor when he tries to kill Luke. While that act was dramatic, it hardly constitutes a real change in Vader's moral compass. Even the most ruthless murderers would likely take revenge on a person trying to murder their son. But we are presented with Anakin completely redeemed as a spectre, standing with Obi Wan. This is an obvious way of saying that the rules do not apply to Anakin or Luke, and that their lives are simply more important than everyone else's.

Star Trek plots are always overwhelmingly egalitarian. One of the consistent themes is the need to treat our enemies, ostensibly "lower" forms of life, and even artificial species with respect and dignity. It's rare that even an unnamed character in Star Trek dies without significant attention paid to it. This is somewhat less true in TOS, spawning jokes about "the unnamed officer who goes along on away missions simply to be killed dramatically". Even accounting for some merciless killing in TOS, Star Trek maintains and enormous amount of respect for all characters. We are told time and time again in Star Trek of characters who progress because of hard work and dedication instead of simply being born "special".

Boundaries give a sense of realism to storylines. While both Trek and Wars are guilty of extensive departures from realistic boundaries, reality keeps Star Trek on a much shorter leash than it does Star Wars. Although almost all extraordinary phenomena that occur in one occur in the other as well (except for Q), Star Trek remains grounded in science by at least offering explanations for how things happen - even if those explanations aren't at all scientifically feasible in the sense that we understand science. Star Wars simply waves a hand and chalks all supernatural occurrences up to The Force.

Star Trek, even with all of its occasional clumsiness and continuity issues still clearly surpasses Star Wars by every meaningful narrative standard. All of the problems with Star Trek all come from its single biggest strength, namely its huge expansive universe that has allowed for many creative minds to control the arc of many interlinking stories. Being ambitious with a project means that there are more opportunities for minor solecisms, and being relatively conservative with a single story arc means that there are fewer such opportunities. The tradeoff is obvious.

In order to illustrate a few of the points I've asserted I would like to provide a few narrative examples of powerful moments in Star Trek. This list is by no means exhaustive or even chronological, it is simply a brief listing of some of my favourite moments in Star Trek.

1. "The Measure of a Man". In this TNG episode, Data the android is put on trial to determine if he is a sentient being or if he is the property of Starfleet. This scenario draws obvious parallels to the Dred Scott Supreme Court case in which the fugitive slave was found to be only 3/5 of a human being.

Captain Picard believes Data to be a sentient being but also recognizes that the court's decision could hold dire consequences for future androids like Data if he is ever successfully reproduced. Classifying Data as an object would mean that all future Data-like androids would be born into a life of bondage. A troubled Picard considers a future where humanity can create androids as slaves. He takes the longview and successfully argues against classifying Data as property.

2. "Lonely Among Us". In this episode early in TNG, Commander Riker makes the claim that his people "no longer enslave animals for food purposes". Almost all food on a starship is created by machines called replicators that materialize food from thin air. In this way the meat that the crew eats doesn't come from animals, it simply comes into existence. Later episodes do contradict this, there are instances where people eat eggs. Some characters hunt occasionally. And in DS9 Captain Sisko's father owns a seafood restaurant that serves real fish.

However, most humans in the Star Trek storyline no longer rely on animals for food. This is an example of how progressive the Star Trek universe is, even episodes written in the '80s. It assures us that in the future there will be an end to religion, racism, poverty, sexism, and large-scale animal exploitation.

3. "I, Borg". In this TNG episode, the crew of the Enterprise rescue a single Borg drone. For those unfamiliar, The Borg are a cybernetic species that travels through the galaxy kidnapping other species and 'assimilating' them into their collective by attaching robotic parts onto their bodies and hooking their brains up to a collective consciousness. The Borg represent the closest thing to irredeemable evil that we encounter in all of Star Trek.

After rescuing the single Borg drone and nursing him back to health, the crew comes up with a plan to implant a computer virus in his brain and send him back to the collective. The plan would effectively destroy the entire Borg collective. Captain Picard overcomes his personal vendetta against the Borg (he had been previously assimilated into their collective and was emotionally scarred by the experience) and vetoes the plan, which he calls genocide.

4. "The Drumhead". In this TNG episode an admiral comes on board the Enterprise to investigate what was thought to be a sabotage by a double agent on the ship. In the end it is determined that there was never a sabotage or a conspiracy or a double agent. But the admiral is so paranoid that she goes on a rampage, interrogating and accusing anyone on the ship who opposes her of being a traitor to the Federation. The situation quickly becomes a witch hunt led by the admiral. Picard attempts to get her to listen to reason and she summons him for questioning.

She calls his integrity into question and he responds by quoting the admiral's father, a famous judge who defended civil liberties and due process. The short speech he gives is powerful if brief: "'With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.' Those words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie, as wisdom and warning. The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged." Later in the same episode Picard warns that "the road from legitimate suspicion to rampant paranoia is very much shorter than we think."

5. "Rejoined". In this episode of DS9 we are introduced to a particular feature of Trill culture. The Trill are two species that are joined symbiotically. There is a small vermiform creature that inhabits the stomach of a humanoid. The smaller species lives for much longer than the humanoid species (at least nine times as long) so when the humanoid host dies, the symbiont is passed onto another host. The personality of each Trill is a balance of characteristics from the symbiont and the host. Each Trill carries the memories of all its past hosts. In a lifetime, Trills can go through many hosts, some of whom will be male, some female.

In "Rejoined", the plot is driven by the fact that in Trill culture, it is forbidden for a Trill to become romantically involved with the partner of a previous host. One of the main characters in DS9, Dax is a Trill, and in one of her previous hosts she was a humanoid male and was married to another Trill that was a humanoid female. Both of the symbionts have been transferred to other hosts and Dax has to work with the new host of her old host's wife. They become romantically involved and conflicts arise about whether or not they can follow through with their love given that it would mean they would be ostracized from Trill society. The episode subtly addresses a number of sexual minority issues, and looks at love in a way that is very post-gender.

6. "Tuvix". In this episode of VOY, a transporter accident merged two crew members, Tuvok and Neelix at the cellular level, creating one person, Tuvix. Tuvix had the memories and abilities of both Tuvok and Neelix and was a physical hybrid of the two but had a distinct personality. It was weeks before a procedure was developed which could separate Tuvix back into two people. Tuvix however considers himself a sentient being and asserts that separating him back into two people is no different than killing him. Captain Janeway's decision to force Tuvix to undergo the procedure was - for me personally - one of the most emotional and ethically ambiguous moments in all of Star Trek. I nearly cried when Tuvix is asking the crew for help, to stop Janeway from forcing him to undergo the procedure.

Through the lens of a technologically advanced future, Star Trek gives us a glimpse of what humanity could be: a people united to explore the galaxy and seek out peaceful contact with new forms of life. We can see a triumph of egalitarianism and respect for the dignity of sentient beings, a dedication to civil rights, deference to alien culture's sovereignty, and a commitment to resolving conflicts peacefully. Star Trek expands the horizons of our compassion, urges us to consider complex moral questions, and continually prompts us to be a better people.

Dean Koontz is a Fucking Moron

2010-09-12T18:45:00.002-04:00

There was a period when my blog focused a lot around Veganism and specifically around lambasting celebrities who had either been Vegan/vegetarian and weren't any longer or who had made exceptionally stupid remarks about animal rights. I felt like I had addressed all the possible angles to the issue, at least all the ones that would be entertaining to read.

Then came Dean Koontz.

I have held a deep disgust for that Stephen King wannabe since I was a child. I attribute this to my mother's long time obsession with his books. I have always had a profound love of reading and it is only fair that I credit my mother with reading to me every night before bed. It is from her that I developed my love of reading that has lasted me a lifetime.

I however grew into a person who appreciates good literature, narratives that give you a piece of the human condition. I read books that make you more intelligent, challenge you, force you to open your mind. My mother however has always had a taste for the cheapest literature, the kind of writing that caters to the lowest common denominator.

The kind of drivel that Dean Koontz makes money writing.

Well Dean Koontz has evidently decided that he's an expert on more than just pulp fiction; Mr. Koontz has evidently decided that he is a philosopher.

Dean Koontz has penned the introduction to a new book by Wesley J. Smith about the danger of the animal rights movement, which Smith views as "anti-human". Wesley J. Smith's philosophy is more complicated than I want to get into right now, but suffice it to say that he believes in "human exceptionalism", which is an intellectual way of saying that he thinks humans have the right to kill animals unnecessarily because we're special. Those of us in the animal rights community call that "speciesism".

What I'd like to address is the end of the preface written by Koontz in which he asserts that:

"...if the [animal rights] activists ever succeeded in their goals...the world...would be a utilitarian nightmare in which the strong would destroy the weak, in which power-crazed leaders would destroy everyone who loved peace, in which the wealth of the world would be concentrated in the hands of a murderous few, in which mercy would be unknown and the only virtue would be the ability to survive, in which the only right would be the right to die."

In over three years of Veganism, I've heard a lot of really absurd theories about what a Vegan world would look like. Emaciated, jaundiced humans overrun by the newly freed cows and ridden with disease from lack of animal research. Listening to these kind of post apocalyptic, worst-case scenarios from uneducated morons is a part of being Vegan, you get used to it.

But this preface by Koontz is the first time that I've ever heard someone assert that a world free of animal exploitation would mean a world of totalitarian oppression, poverty, and war without end. I hesitated to even argue with his reasoning because I hate to acknowledge that there is anything there to argue with.

Dean Koontz is a hack of an author who makes a living riding the coat tails of other hack authors. His attempted foray into bioethics is a mediocre piece of vaguely worded half-logic applied to an idea that he doesn't understand.

The nightmare world that Dean Koontz actually sounds like the one that we live in today, with resources concentrated disproportionately at the top, where might makes right, war abounds, and murder for gain has long since stopped being shocking.

The kind of garish hyperbole in Koontz's prediction is not just laughable, it's borderline lunacy. He has iterated that eliminating possibly the single bloodiest and most violent aspect of our culture will somehow result in a world that is not just more violent than it already is, but will be so violent, so hopeless, so horrifying as to make our world today look like a Utopia. The failure of logic here is glaring.

For centuries important philosophers have asserted the exact opposite. Plato said in The Republic that the large land requirements of animal agriculture would inevitably result in war between neighbors. Leo Tolstoy, one of the greatest writers in history and an advocate for animal rights said succinctly that "as long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields."

Carol J. Adams covers the relationship between war and eating meat more thoroughly than I ever could. She discusses how vegetarianism was prominent among people who opposed to or experienced WWI. An article she cites by a soldier who fought in WWI states definitively "...cattle hustled together in a van, and being conveyed to a slaughter yard, struck the writer of this note as being at least as abominable, and as degrading to our civilisation, as anything he had recently witnessed on several hard fighting fronts in France and Italy".

Meat eating prepares humanity for war. By our slow and subtle inurement to the slaughter of animals, we open a space in our conscience to justify the slaughter of humans. When we can say that the death of an animal is acceptable because it is convenient to us, we can say the same about a human.

Human morality loses nothing when it expands the scope of its ethical concern. Kindness and peace toward other living beings will never deprive the human race of anything.

The other main point of Koontz's argument -- the assertion that a world free of animal products would result in consolidation of power and resources in a harsher and harsher hierarchy -- is equally as difficult to understand. By eliminating animal agriculture, we would exponentially increase food supplies worldwide, driving prices down and alleviating not just hunger but environmental damage as well. By eliminating that kind of waste we take steps against the kind of resource-hoarding that Koontz speaks of.

Dean Koontz is not just an idiot and a terrible writer, but he's a phony who attempts to pawn off his own personal insecurities and fear of change as a legitimate moral position on an issue that affects billions of lives.

Friends don't let friends read Koontz novels.

Order Litmus Test Issue Two!!

2010-09-12T03:33:00.005-04:00

Online ordering for Litmus Test Issue Two is now up!!

Sorry this took me so long, I have been busy the past week and only had a chance to hit the post office today.

If you ordered Issue One, you'll probably notice that shipping costs for this one are a bit higher. This is because with the first issue I didn't price the shipping before I posted online ordering, I just guestimated and ended up sinking over a hundred dollars of my own money into paying for shipping that I had accidentally made unreasonably cheap. I didn't even have the foresight to charge people for the envelopes I was mailing the damned things in.

Feel free to email me if you have any questions about ordering.

Litmus Test Issue Two

2010-08-31T00:14:00.001-04:00

As of today I've been Straight Edge for ten years, and I'm cautiously excited to announce that I have finally finished the second issue of my Straight Edge zine , Litmus Test. It will be available September 4th. Both issues required a huge amount of work on my part as well as a huge amount of work on the part of the other contributors, editors, and photographers who helped out.

I thought that Issue Two would be a lot easier to put together. Not only did I have the experience of doing the first issue under my belt, but I was working on a considerably shorter project -- 32 pages for Issue Two as opposed to 52 pages for Issue One -- and I was doing the entirety of the design on my computer as opposed to cutting and pasting strips of paper and scanning them manually.

But the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry. I found ways to make my own work more difficult so as to thwart any attempts to get this issue done faster than the first one.

The difficulty in doing this particular project however didn't come from the actual work. The writing, editing, designing layouts, sending emails, adjusting the opacity of photographs, those parts were all easy compared to the struggles I dealt with on a personal level while putting this zine together.

Litmus Test Issue Two takes on women's issues in the Straight Edge community with a good portion of its content. It was important to me to address this particular subject because so many of my best Straight Edge friends are women and I feel like their voices aren't necessarily always heard in Richmond. Feminism and women's issues have always been important to me and it seemed only natural to address them in the context of a Straight Edge world view.

It is really difficult as a man to actively engage in a dialogue about feminism and women's issues. There are a lot of pitfalls to avoid, and it requires a lot of introspection. You really have to approach the topic with an open mind and be ready to find that you're guilty of some of the things that you think you're working against.

I am however sad to say that overall the process of doing this issue was more discouraging than encouraging.

By doing a zine that from the start was aimed at addressing women's issues I made myself a target for a lot of criticism, some of it warranted and fair, and some of it deliberately insulting, dishonest, and hypocritical. The more work that I did on this project, the more invested I became in the issues, the more hurtful and infuriating some of the criticism became.

I have been called a misogynist more times in the months I spent working on a feminist zine than I have ever been called in my life up til that point. I'd be lying if I said that it didn't start to get to me.

But despite being told I was sexist by some people in my community, despite being told to kill myself by at least one person peripherally involved with the creation of Issue Two, I feel that the project has been a huge success.

I'm confident in saying that Litmus Test 2 is a meaningful addition to the dialogue about Straight Edge and Hardcore, especially in Richmond. The writing is better, the layouts are cleaner, the design is more cohesive, there is less filler. It is a streamlined project that fulfills all my expectations for it as far as a Straight Edge zine.

Whether or not it contributes to a discussion of women's issues within the Straight Edge community on any level remains to be seen. I want to believe that some of the personal growth I went through while writing this shows in the pages. I want to believe that I put something into this that can help to embolden at least one woman and change the attitudes of at least one man. I want to believe that it will mean as much to other people as it does to me.

I can only hope.

Download Litmus Test #1

2010-08-26T03:05:00.000-04:00

For those of you who never got a chance to pick up a copy of the first issue of my Straight Edge zine, here are a couple of download links for you.

There are two files, one of which is just the pdf of the zine and the other is a zip file of the pdf as well as jpg files of the 52 individual pages. The pages are 72dpi and mostly in colour. I designed Issue One primarily in colour even though I was planning to print it in black and white.

You can also view the pages on the Litmus Test Facebook page (facebook.com/LitmusTestZine).

Litmus Test Issue One:

PDF file of Litmus Test 1. (27mb)

PDF file of Litmus Test 1 + 52 individual JPG page files. (52 mb)

What's in a Name?

2010-08-22T02:30:00.004-04:00

Generally speaking I try to avoid writing in my blog about subjects that are too personal or esoteric. I try to keep the topics I write about - at least on SIAGT - broad enough that an individual who doesn't necessarily know me personally or my lifestyle can sit down and read and be as equally annoyed as a person who has known me for years. Of course there are exceptions to this but the topic I wish to discuss right now is arguably the most personal of anything I've written here in a long time.

My first name is Joshua but a couple years ago I made the decision that I was going to start introducing myself as Mac, short for McDaniel, my family name. I thought about it since I was a kid, the way a Billy thinks that someday he will be a William. A lot of the men in my family have gone by Mac: my grandfather and uncles for example. It wasn't until my father died in November of 2002 that it became important to me to be Mac.

Names are a fascinating aspect of our culture, and one that I really started to analyze - at least on an anecdotal level - not necessarily when I started introducing myself to new friends as Mac, but when I starting asking old friends to start calling me Mac instead of Joshua.

I never would have thought that people would be so personally and emotionally invested in whatever name I choose to adopt, but it continues to be a huge source of contention even years later, and I've begun to see the issue as one of self-determination. It's interesting that adversity tends to galvanize us in our convictions. Being called Mac started out simply as a preference, but every time that someone says that Mac is a "nickname" or "not my real name", it becomes more and more an issue of asserting my identity.

It never occurred to me until I went through the trouble of trying to change my name that I have an unusually high number of friends who have changed their names. Among my twenty closest friends, four have changed their names. Those four are all also Vegan Straight Edge kids. I'm not necessarily trying to draw a correlation between those two ideologies and a desire to change one's name, but rather wondering if a person who is already in a mindset of questioning cultural traditions - for example intoxication and eating animals or any number of others - might be more likely to stumble upon a curiosity about adhering to an arbitrary naming process.

My motivations for wanting to change my name are pretty straightforward. Firstly, from an aesthetic standpoint I have always preferred my family name to my first name. Secondly, I'd like to have my dad's name. The only thing I have left of my dad is his name. On my worst days I feel like it's the only thing of his that I inherited and being Mac is one of the few things that I feel keeps us connected. I am terrified that I'm nothing like my dad, and having his name might be the only real reminder that I'm really his son.

But the more that people in my social circle tried to fight against me changing this tiny aspect of my identity, the more I began to see naming as an ideological issue. It seems symptomatic of a larger problem. We are told who we are before we're old enough to comprehend the meaning of the words. We are expected to go through our whole lives with a name that was chosen by people who didn't know who we would be when they gave it to us.

Names don't hold as much significance in western civilization in 2010, the meaning we assign to them is arbitrary and personal instead of institutional and universal. We're lucky not to live in a culture with a caste system where a name can mean a social status for a lifetime. But everyone has affinities and distastes for different names. I know plenty of people who can't stand to hear their whole name said out loud because it reminds them of being disciplined as a child.

Changing one's name is pretty normal for transgendered people: male-bodied individuals who identity as female, or vice versa, or people who do not identify with a gender binary at all.

Changing their family names was an important gesture for early members of the Sikh faith as it was a sign of their rejection of the caste system inherent in the Hindu religion in India where Sikhism began. Sikhs all took the last names Singh or Kaur so that their caste could not be determined. Egalitarianism is an important tenet of Sikhism and so they could not condone the discrimination inherent in the caste system.

For Malcolm X and other members of the Nation of Islam, the X represented the African surname that every slave lost when they were brought to America. Malcolm rightfully rejected his legal surname "Little" because it came not from his own people, but from the slavemaster that had owned his ancestors.

I don't hold any attachment to the name Joshua; truthfully I've never liked it. And on top of that my father openly admitted that he himself had no attachment to my first and middle names. He told me my whole life that he just picked the first J and A names he could think of because he wanted my initials to be JAM.

I have always identified first and foremost as a McDaniel, and going by Mac is not just a reminder that I'm my father's son, but that I'm my uncles' nephew, my grandfather's grandson, my brother's brother - and because of my vasectomy and my siblings' only having female children thus far - possibly the last McDaniel in my line.

I am the person that I decide to be, not the person that anyone else has chosen for me to be. I'm Mac, just like my dad, just like his dad.

Change We Can Believe In

2010-03-28T19:53:00.003-04:00

When I was 15 years old, Americans over the age of 18 without felony convictions went to the polls and elected the single stupidest president in the history of this country. George W. Bush is not only without a doubt the least intelligent person to be elected to be head of the US executive branch in over two hundred years, but also one of the least intelligent people to be born anywhere on the planet in over five hundred years.

This was a defining moment in my lifetime because at the age of 14 when the campaign was ramping up, I realized that I would be able to vote in the next national election and so it was important for me to start paying attention to presidential politics. Prior to the 2000 election I had only paid passing attention to the presidency in general. I remembered vaguely liking Clinton, or at least I liked the comedic caricatures of him on various comedy shows like SNL. But it wasn't until 2000 that I started to pay attention to things like primaries, the electoral college, &c.

It was frustrating to me to know that the result of the election in 2000 was going to shape so many aspects of my life and ultimately the issue was decided by the second most awful state in the Union, Florida.

The most embarrassing part of being an American is not that we elected George W. Bush, because Americans -- like college freshman -- are shortsighted floozies and are often charmed into one night stands we later regret. The really embarrassing part is that we elected him twice in a fucking row! The eight years of "Dubya"'s presidency represent the combination of ruthless authoritarianism in the form of constant expansion of executive power, warrantless wiretapping, illegal detentions and torture with incompetent bungling of every single important project from the Iraq war to peace talks between Israel and Palestine.

George W. Bush is a moron, a right-wing conservative lunatic, an unapologetic fundamentalist Christian, and an incompetent leader. There was absolutely nothing for any reasonably intelligent person to like about him, and now, years after the end of his presidency I realize that was the most important thing about him. George W. Bush was a great president because he consistently stood on one side of every issue -- the wrong side. My life was so easy to organize when our country was being led by a man that was universally hated by anyone with whom I had anything in common and universally loved by everyone I despised. Asking someone how they felt about Bush was a wonderful litmus test that enabled me to screen people for entrance into my life. In fact I had quite a few friendships based on nothing else but our shared hatred of Bush.

But all that has changed...

We are now about 14 months into the presidency of Barack Obama, a man for whom I cast my second presidential vote. I followed this campaign closely and like many other people whose political opinions fall far to the left, I was so hopeful for his presidency. During the months leading up to the election he seemed to me like some incarnation of Santa Claus for grown-ups, he promised to pull the American troops out of Iraq, close the Guantanamo bay prison, give us universal health care, respect civil liberties, and even hinted that he was somewhat less inclined to seek the death penalty even if he wasn't entirely against it.

Understandably on that night in November of 2008 when all major news sources were calling the election in his favour we all took to the streets. All of my friends were out marching through Richmond until the wee hours of the morning screaming and celebrating. We thought things were going to change, and why did we think things were going to change? Because Obama told us they would, he told us thousands of times that they would.

Thus far we haven't pulled our troops out of Iraq, the Guantanamo bay prison is still operating, the health care reform bill that people are lauding like it's the second coming of Christ is a joke of a compromise with no public option, the Obama Administration has continued to seek the death penalty in the same percentage of federal cases as the Bush Administration, and Barack Obama extended the Patriot Act, the single most despicable piece of legislation written in my lifetime.

I feel personally betrayed by every single failure of this administration and while I would never in a thousand years have voted for McCain, a man so old he doesn't know what the internet is and so sexist that he voted against an anti-rape amendment, I definitely wish I had simply voted for a third-party candidate or perhaps just given Greg Bennick a write-in vote. Greg Bennick has effected more meaningful progress in the past 14 months than Obama has and he may not have gotten a single vote in the 2008 election.

My disillusionment with the Obama Administration has put me in an awkward position as an activist and as a Hardcore kid because I find myself being really angry with a person who is -- vaguely and perhaps only ostensibly -- on my side...kinda. This is troublesome because 99% of Americans are only smart enough to perceive politics as a dichotomy of Democrat v Republican, Red State v Blue State, Explorer vs Prius, so I am constantly being perceived as a conservative because I disagree with Obama. Also I'm having so much trouble figuring out who is and isn't a moron. When Bush was president all the wrong people supported the president and all of the right people hated him, but now it seems like all of the wrong people, and some of the right people hate the president, and some of the right people still support him.

Having a center-left president isn't all it's cracked up to be and it's nerve-wracking for me on a personal level because the enemy of my enemy is NOT my friend by any means. When the health care bill was passed I felt betrayed because it passed without the public option, and so I ended up ranting about how much I hated the bill right alongside all the stupid conservatives in the country and it made me feel gross to almost kind of agree with them even if it was for different reasons, gross like someone had poured cheap beer all over me. Obama registers close to the middle of the political spectrum (and also the middle of the intelligence gauge) and so I can be attacking him from the left (and high end of the intelligence gauge) at the same time as people are attacking him from the right (and the low end of the intelligence gauge), which makes me cringe a little bit.

I've used idiots as a compass my entire life in that whenever an idiot applauds something I'm doing, I immediately do something else. So it's inevitable that I die a little bit inside whenever I criticize Obama and I receive emphatic agreement from idiots who believe that Obama is a socialist, or a Muslim.

The only productive thing for me personally about Obama's presidency is that it has allowed me to locate the racists in my life with pinpoint accuracy. A mention of Obama is usually enough to cause all the racists in the area to float to the surface, much like firing a cannon across the Mississippi River to raise drowned bodies to the surface, except that this method -- unlike the cannon -- actually works. I recently had someone tell me that Obama's election had a lot to do with Kanye West "calling out the black card" (I think she meant to say pulling the race card) which for me was like pulling the mask off the villain at the end of a Scooby Doo episode to discover not just a racist, but an idiot!

People have always called me an optimist for even bothering to vote or follow establishment politics and while I don't necessarily think that the biggest problems in the world will be addressed by politicians, I do think that there are some issues that could in theory be solved by politics. In a country with any sense of justice, we would have a constitutional amendment banning the death penalty, one guaranteeing universal healthcare for everyone, and another securing the availability of abortions for women with no legal restrictions.

Sadly the only legislation to positively affect me in the past ten years has been Virginia's limited indoor smoking ban. At this point I've got such lowered expectations that a statewide partial ban on indoor smoking coming years later than most other states seemed close enough to a velvet revolution that I was tempted to get together a drum corps and some banners and take to the streets to celebrate some real change.

Barack Obama ordered secret service agents to take my faith in politics out into the Rose Garden and shoot it in the face. But no matter how angry, disappointed, or offended I am I bite my tongue, not because I have any hope left but because I think that it's not only important to be liked by the right people, but also hated by the wrong people so when conservatives start applauding me for anything I know it's time to get the hell outta Dodge.

My vote goes to Sarah Palin in 2012 based solely on the fact that she's even stupider then George W. Bush. It's worth the nuclear war she'll inevitably start because at least with her in office I can easily tell who's a moron and who isn't.

Peace and Love

2010-03-21T21:50:00.000-04:00

Given that I am generally an excessively negative individual, few things bother me as much as the idiotic platitudes and bromides that people choose to plaster about themselves as ways of defining their spineless and trite views on life.

Based on reading my blog it should be obvious that I am a person who takes words very seriously. I think that our ability to communicate our thoughts, beliefs, feelings is something that we should not only be thankful for, but also marvel at and should exercise to the greatest extent possible at all times. Our species, moreso than any other on this planet has the capability to make other beings understand who we are and what we are and what we want at any time. The only constriction on our ability to communicate with others is our own laziness, and the extend of that laziness never ceases to terrify and frustrate me.

When I read on your t shirt, or on your Facebook profile, or tattooed on your ankle that you're into "peace" or you think that "all you need is love", I have established that you are a moron in the blink of an eye. Life is too short to be disingenuous, or to subscribe yourself to such meaningless and empty phrases.

If you have all the words in the English language at your disposal, and the way that you choose to communicate yourself to the world is to copy and paste vaguely worded, mindlessly positive mandates about how thinking happy thoughts makes the world better then I don't think you've earned the right to express yourself at all.

Most of my life I've been characterized as unhappy, overly serious, mean, and judgmental and while that assessment isn't entirely inaccurate, I believe that anyone who pays close attention to the laziness and complacency of most people will end up unhappy and seem overly serious and judgmental. I certainly don't think that I'm a walking cultural revolution, and most days I feel pretty shitty about the things I don't do to make a change in the world rather than confident about the modest things I am doing so don't take me for being arrogant. Honestly if I felt like my lifestyle was difficult I would have more sympathy for people who like to eat meat, drive cars, and get drunk every weekend. But I honestly feel so lazy most days, like I'm doing nothing, so the idea of someone who can't put forth the effort to even be Vegan would seem comedic if it weren't for the billions of lives being lost.

This kind of diluted-hippie, lazy positivity is the result of the juggernaut that is American culture. When any subcultural group comes up with an interesting or innovative idea the entertainment industry, the government, and the media come together like the Power Rangers' Megazord to process that idea, remove the threatening or subversive aspects and print the watered down slogan version onto shirts and bumper stickers. People who record songs like "Waiting on the World to Change" are the epitome of this apathetic complacence. That song encapsulates the mindset of American youth with a catchy melody. The world is a terrible place so I'll just wait for it to change. Are you fucking kidding me?

Hip hop used to be the most threatening music in America, so much so that congressmen and senators and even the vice president were regularly attacking rappers in the public forum. "Cop Killer" by Ice T and Body Count is one of the most important songs ever written in my opinion because it terrified America so badly that record executives received death threats and boycotts. It was amazing. A record like "Fuck Tha Police" by NWA could never be made today. In 2010 hip hop is so friendly, so cuddly, that it's hard for children of the Lil Wayne generation to even imagine that rich white people had ever been afraid of gangsta rap.

Don't get me wrong, there's not much fondness in my heart for hippies, but at least real hippies in the 60s and 70s were so passionate about their beliefs in peace and love that they marched by the thousands to protest war, they actually participated in political discourse, held rallies, wrote some of the most incendiary protest music ever recorded at the time, and some of those activists (Weather Underground members like Bernadine Dohrn) went so far as to commit non-violent acts of property destruction to protest the war in Vietnam and planted explosives in government buildings.

People who live this watered down post-hippie lifestyle could never imagine that living a truly peaceful lifestyle requires more than smoking weed, listening to reggae, creating a deeper dent in the couch as you get fatter, and suffering any personal humiliation necessary to avoid a confrontation of any sort. The unwashed, uneducated, unenthusiastic masses who populate the neighborhoods around any university campus have no concept of the difference between peaceful and sedentary so their underdeveloped brains equate a lifestyle void of movement, productivity, or disagreement with peace and egalitarianism.

Truthfully if you support the American government you do not believe in peace. If you eat animal products you do not believe in peace. If you think that love is going to solve all the world's problems you're a moron. It's gonna take a lot more than love to get rid of the corrupt plutocracies that run the planet we live on. Love isn't going to stop genocide, it's not going to bring food to the starving, it's certainly not going to eliminate religious superstition and usher in a golden age of secular humanism. According to 50 Cent, love won't even get you on the bus.

People that preach the kind of happy-go-lucky, kumbaya-singing, ultra-positive mantras that you see pasted on every piece of tie-dyed clothing need to realize the amount of negativity, violence, and hate associated with their lifestyle and stop hiding behind vaguely worded, intangible doctrines and beliefs and actually DO something. Or if you're not gonna do anything then the most peaceful and helpful thing you can do for anyone is to shut the fuck up.

Peace and love, man.

God Hates Blogs

2010-03-01T01:45:00.004-05:00

Tuesday, March 2nd Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church will be in my hometown of Richmond VA protesting at a number of Jewish sites (including the Richmond Holocaust Museum) as well as at an area high school. There are a lot of groups organizing counter-protests and there is endless debate about the best reaction to these people.

For those of you not in the know, the WBC is an independent church based out of Topeka Kansas that manages the website godhatesfags.com and protests consistently throughout the year against anything even remotely related to homosexuality including the funerals of gays murdered by bigots as well as the funerals of soldiers who fought for a country that in their views is too tolerant of gays. To give you an idea of the extent of their hatred of gays, the WBC once protested a store for selling Swedish vacuum cleaners because Sweden had recently prosecuted hate-speech by an anti-gay preacher. If you require anymore information about these guys, check out their Wikipedia page.

The WBC has been around longer than I've been alive and I think Fred Phelps is the only person who is consistently hated more than I am so I honestly have to give credit where credit is due and no matter how you feel about the guy, Phelps is no moron. It is an obvious sign of the importance that a group like the WBC has in our culture that its critics have come up with so many different strategies for dealing with it. Some people say that people like Phelps need to be addressed because their ideas are dangerous. Other say that his group's protests are so obviously attempts to garner media attention that counter-protesters only give them exactly what they want, an audience. Recently there has been an upswing in comedic style counter-protests, such as the one at the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco in late January during which counter protesters came with signs such as "I was promised donuts" and "God hates kittens".

I've been invited to three or four different counter-protests by various organizations with a multitude of gameplans and mission statements. I will hopefully be at every event to show my support for the WBC, because while I may not agree with the WBC on any points, I think that they serve a very important purpose in our cultural milieu and may be working for the greater good even if they don't mean to.

People love to define themselves by what they are not, but at the same time most people are so boring and hesitant to take ethical stands that may later become inconvenient that it often takes a group like the WBC that is so absurd, so ridiculously incendiary and universally despised to get people to have an adamant opinion on anything. I meet people daily who would be without a single strong conviction if it wasn't for their hatred of the "God hates fags people". If the WBC disappeared tomorrow then the streets, university campuses, and bars of America would be populated by wandering, barely conscious automatons with lukewarm feelings for everything they see, their lack of any inclinations causing them to nearly starve to death as they gaze with glassy eyes, shrug their shoulders, and answer with an unemphatic "ehh" to every question that they are asked.

The public's hatred of the WBC is useful and worth preserving not just because it provides millions of otherwise boring people with an idea to call their own, but because it may help to serve the purpose of delegitimizing Christianity in the eyes of the American people.

I was a Christian on and off (various parts of my teenage years and my early 20s weakened my faith periodically) for eight years before the neurons in the logic centers in my frontal lobe started to fire and I realized that believing in a benevolent creator and an afterlife was for children and I was made a hasty and embarrassed exit from the realm of spirituality, taking my multiple religious tattoos, theological writings, and certificate of Baptism with me. I think that the primary reason that I didn't come to the conclusion that religion is bullshit earlier than I did is that I was a part of a very aberrant, progressive, intellectually stimulating church environment. The faith tradition that I came of age in admired people like Clarence Jordan who worked for racial integration, Albert Schweitzer who worked as a doctor in Africa for thirty years, and Walter Rauschenbusch who worked for the poor in New York as a social justice minister. Because of the Christian environment I was exposed to between the ages of 14 and 22, I viewed Christianity as a very progressive philosophy that made up for failures in its logic by addressing the needs of suffering people in practical and selfless ways. I consistently viewed Christ as the paradigm around which my views on human rights, animal rights, environmentalism, and social justice needed to be centered. I referred to myself as a "radical Christian" regularly.

I think that a reasonably intelligent person can realistically only hide behind the good works of some Christians for so long before he or she inevitably takes a good hard look at the narrative of the Bible and realizes that not a single word of it makes any sense. Modern Christians have been forced into creating elaborately coded linguistic systems, metaphors, and semantic acrobatics to account for the fact that the people who wrote the sacred scriptures obviously had no concept of history, geography, time, astronomy, or genetics. For example I was once told by a serious Christian that you can reinforce the seven day creation story found in Genesis with a later passage in the Bible that says that a human day is the blink of an eye for God and by multiplying the number of times you blink each day by 24 hour "human day" periods you can in theory create a scientifically realistic timeline for the creation of the planet. I've never looked into the validity of this claim for the simple reason that trying to validate such a claim would open a singularity in space-time and collapse the universe on itself. Don't try it.

So even though I do not agree with the WBC on any issues, and I agree with progressive Christians on almost every issue, I support the WBC as the model of what the Christian Church needs to be because making the WBC the paradigm of Christianity will only speed the public's eventual realization that there is no god and that we should stop spending our time worshipping nonexistent deities and work for humanistic solutions to the planet's problems.

I admire ideological consistency in anyone, even people with whom I disagree fiercely and I like that the WBC is ideologically consistent to a cartoonish degree and so for me I recognize the Westboro Baptist Church as the archetype of what it means to be a Christian.

So I would like to bring my friends, readers, and supporters on board with recognizing the WBC as the only real Christian Church for two reasons.

The first reason is that the WBC believes in a literal translation of the Bible and therefore require none of the aforementioned rhetorical gymnastics to make their beliefs jibe with the actual facts of how this planet came to be and how human beings came to be on it. The fact that they are willing to stick with a dogma that makes no logical sense helps to delegitimize the Christian worldview overall and shows a real strength of conviction. It takes more willpower to stand by a belief no matter how irrelevant and stupid it eventually becomes than it takes to try to mold that belief into something else like silly putty to fit whatever new evidence you have at the moment.

Secondly, because Christianity is fundamentally a bat-shit crazy doctrine to believe in, people who are out of their mind should actually be the torchbearers for it. Hardworking, cognitively capable, mentally sound people have no place believing the glaring logical discrepancies that are pervasive throughout all of Christianity. Leave the crazy shit to crazy people because they know better than us how to best steer the religion as a whole. Someone like Shane Claiborne or Rob Bell have no place being the spokesman for a religion that preaches concepts like original sin and advocates stoning disobedient children and homosexuals. Fred Phelps is the only person who has the proper mindset to speak for the Christian religion.

By showing people that the WBC practices the only legitimate, ethically consistent, and scripturally sound version of Christianity, we may be ushering in a golden age of secular humanism and saving the minds of billions of people worldwide. Think of all we could accomplish by holding a mirror up to the Church's nose and letting them see Fred Phelps.

By Any Means Necessary

2010-02-21T16:54:00.003-05:00

I wanted to take a moment to recognize that today is the 45th anniversary of the death of Malcolm X.

Malcolm X is one of my personal heroes and represents the power of spirit necessary to be a revolutionary leader. Throughout his life Malcolm saw every side of the American experience, from poverty and crime, to the sector of public policy, he met with heads of state, traveled the world, opened his mind to new ideas in ways that so many dogmatic leaders refuse to, he wrote and spoke prolifically about the struggles of the black man in America and the fate of the underprivileged worldwide.

When I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X it changed my entire life. I saw an example of a man who was willing to kneel down to pick another man up out of hardships and at the same time show him not just how to stand on his feet and be a man, but how to fight against every single aspect of his environment that brought him to his knees in the first place.

Malcolm X had no respect for any establishment, person, or idea that he viewed as holding him or his people back from freedom. I envy a man who had the power to publicly criticize JFK just days after his assassination, and who even criticized Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. To be that honest and that sincere, to stand for ideals no matter what the political or personal cost requires a strength of character that few people have.

Malcolm was the son of a political activist who worked for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. By the age of 13 Malcolm's father was killed by white supremacists and his mother was in an asylum. After a life as a young man spent hustling he wound up in prison and there discovered the Nation of Islam and after he was released became the head spokesman for the organization. Through the NOI Malcolm worked for the black community, doing political organizing, working with charities, and speaking. After he left the NOI to become a Sunni Muslim he continued traveling and working for Black Nationalist ideals and spoke extensively against the repression of minorities in America.

I aspire to one day be half the man that Malcolm was.

Throughout my entire school career, I was never taught about Malcolm X, it wasn't until I took it upon myself to read the autobiography and to do some research on my own that I learned about this man. It is sad that even today the establishment still fears the ideas of a man who wanted nothing more than freedom for his people.

Malcolm X represents just one of so many important revolutionary leaders who have been assassinated by agents of the United States Government. Anyone who thinks that you live in a free country where people can speak, organize, and protest unfettered then you are living a lie. The moment you make yourself a threat you make yourself a target.

I urge anyone who doesn't consider themself a student of history or interested in revolutionary politics to take some time to educate yourself about things that you were probably never taught until you got to college, and maybe not even then. The story of Malcolm X's life is a powerful and inspiring reminder of what it means to stand for something and give your entire life to it.

Rest in Peace brother Malcolm, your message lives on.

Buy the Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Check out some videos on youtube of Malcolm speaking.

Quotations from Malcolm X:

"I'm not an American. I'm one of the 22 million Black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million Black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy."

"Did the Zionists have the legal or moral right to invade Arab Palestine, uproot its Arab citizens from their homes and seize all Arab property for themselves just based on the "religious" claim that their forefathers lived there thousands of years ago? Only a thousand years ago the Moors lived in Spain. Would this give the Moors of today the legal and moral right to invade the Iberian Peninsula, drive out its Spanish citizens, and then set up a new Moroccan nation ... where Spain used to be, as the European zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine?"

"...to me the earth's most explosive and pernicious evil is racism, the inability of God's creatures to live as One, especially in the Western world."

"I've had enough of someone else's propaganda. I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I am for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."

"Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery."

"Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it."

"We declare our right on this earth to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary."

"I have no mercy or compassion for a society that crushes people, and then penalizes them for not being able to stand up under the weight."

Loser

2010-02-17T16:39:00.003-05:00

"I'm not a very well-liked person" might be the biggest understatement I've ever written in this blog. If you're reading my blog that means you have at least some exposure to what people call my "internet personality" which differs from my real life personality in that it is more obnoxious. I'm a guy that most people, even my close friends, can't stand being around; it's pretty rare to find anyone who has anything nice to say about me. I can't really nail down the period when I went from being a guy who prided himself on being very well-liked and who had a lot of friends who thought he was very kind-hearted and caring, to being a guy who prides himself on brutal honesty and not caring whether people like what he has to say, I think it happened gradually.

I've come to appreciate in a way all the insults leveled at me on a regular basis because I understand that an insult reveals much more about the person saying it than the actual target. For example, I don't mind being called an elitist, because anyone who calls you an elitist is threatened by you. While elitism is a shitty thing, I am always very flattered when someone calls me an elitist. Same way with fanatic, zealot, or extremist, I know that anyone who says something like that about me is simply a person without ideas. A person without ideas is always bothered by a person with ideas.

This isn't to say that there aren't insults that do hurt my feelings. There certainly are things people say that really cut to the bone. But I think the one thing that never hurts me, the one "insult" that I find very affirming, very validating and vindicating is "Loser". I definitely think of myself as a loser and I think that being a loser is maybe the most defining aspect of my entire existence. I have been a loser my entire life and I have never wanted to be anything else.

Self-interest is such a powerful, overwhelming motivation for most people that it is impossible to really know who a person is and what they're all about because you can never separate genuine conviction from self-interest. It is only in the moment when a person makes a decision to completely relinquish the chance for their own gain in the name of a hopeless cause when you can see their soul. On a subconscious level we understand this because we have a tendency to say that we are willing to die for things. We know that the truest devotion to a goal, a cause, a person is to say that we are willing to take the greatest loss, the loss of life, for it.

But like most cultural ideals, we merely pay them lip service. Most people are more afraid of being losers than anything else because they are motivated by self-interest more than by their interest in anything else. It takes much more character, much more strength, more fortitude and willpower to be a loser than to be a winner. It's so easy to stand on a stage, on a platform, on a TV screen and be adored. It is very gratifying, empowering to be liked, to be loved, to be admired so most people seek out whatever thing in life that they can be good at, they gravitate toward behaviors that come with social approval. They look to be liked and in the process they neglect what's important.

We see this a lot because our culture knows the power of the loser. We look to losers as the greatest examples in literature of love (Romeo and Juliet), philanthropy (Jesus Christ), of psychotic dedication to a goal (Captain Ahab). These are all people who die trying to fulfill their goals. The loser has incredible power, he has the unbreakable strength of personal fulfillment. He is not persuaded by worldly gain, he is not moved by promises of money, influence, or sex. He is not interested in praise or his own lionization. We as a culture have a love/hate relationship with the loser. We profess to admire people who go down hard for their beliefs, but then we immediately turn around and kick the next loser we can right in the teeth.

It feels good to be a winner, and it puts a terrifying sinking feeling in your stomach to stand on the edge of a cliff and stare down and know that if you jump ain't no one gonna come save you. There is no happy ending for the sincere. In Great Expectations by Charles Dickens the main character Pip is tormented by a malicious love interest for the entirety of the novel. Charles Dickens originally wrote the novel with a sad ending where Pip never ends up with the girl he's loved his whole life. In the end however, he changed the ending to a happy one. The idea of Pip coming out a loser was too scary for even Dickens.

People only want to take a risk if they're sure that they'll come out on top. They hedge their bets for safety and this is where they show their weakness.

I am used to having really unpopular beliefs and because I can't ever keep my mouth shut I'm also used to constantly arguing about those beliefs. I tend to phrase my beliefs in such a way that people who agree with my beliefs still want to argue with me about them. One of the most common things that people say to me when I argue on behalf of things like Veganism is that I can't possibly be right and even if I am right it doesn't matter because I'm on the losing side. I'm in the minority and that means I'm a loser.

Nearly every serious endeavour I've ever taken on in my life has been a losing battle. Nearly every girl I've ever been romantically interested in has turned me down. Besides writing, every hobby I've ever taken up has been something I've been terrible at. I was bad at slam poetry, I was bad at ballet, I've been bad at all the musical instruments I've ever played, I was bad at all the languages I tried to learn, I'm embarrassingly bad at Brazilian Jiu Jitsu but regardless I train six days a week because I think it's an important thing to do. When I claimed Edge ten years ago it was a really unpopular decision, and ten years later it has become really unpopular all over again.

People work very hard to convince themselves that they are passionate about ideas but they're never willing to be on the losing side of something just because they believe in it. They want to have their cake and eat it too, they want to believe in an ideal but the idea of having to go down with that ideal is too scary so they bail out when things get rough. It's shallow to always want to come out on top. Every couple wants to be Romeo and Juliet but they aren't willing to die if necessary and they don't realize that the thing that defined Romeo and Juliet were the fact that they were willing to lose everything.

People want to be winners because they're afraid to be losers.

I take every risk expecting to lose and I almost always do.

Til Death Do Us Part

2010-01-09T01:18:00.001-05:00

Anyone who has known me for a while knows that at one point I was engaged. My ex and I had gotten her sized for a ring at a jewelry store and I was a couple of months away from buying the ring and helping to announce the whole plan to her family when things fell apart, she called off the engagement and I spent my engagement ring money on tattoos. The entire experience was a big wake up call for me. I was 22 and trying to settle down for the long haul, doing the Christian family man thing. When that relationship ended I was forced to re-evaluate my feelings on a lot of topics and I am a very different person now. If nothing else, I am at least grateful to my ex for waking me up out of some really silly delusions.

Marriage -- in the broadest sense -- is universal across all human societies. Marriage is defined in an anthropological sense as any rite which determines sexual access. Given that humans lack a biological trigger to determine sexual access the way that animals do, a cultural process is required to regulate sexual interaction and procreation. Marriage ceremonies and criteria have a very wide range, some marriages create permanent bonds, others temporary ones, some involve two people, some involve more, some tribes in Africa have a marriage ceremony wherein a man and a woman from separate villages are married and then never see each other again. The range of these kind of rituals is very very interesting but the one thing they all have in common is that they determine how, when, and with whom a person can have sex.

Americans have a policy of refusing to acknowledge other cultures and so our legal system only acknowledges an Abrahamic marriage ritual. This has multiple cultural effects, all of which are stupid: it reinforces a cultural mythology centered around romantic love, creates a childish debate about marriage between homosexual couples, and gives religious institutions one more avenue by which they can invade and dictate the lifestyles of ordinary people.

I would like to go on record as saying that I respect and am intellectually fascinated by the anthropological concept of marriage. I am however thoroughly disgusted by the western Abrahamic ritual of marriage. This should come as no surprise as I have outlined in a few different posts how I feel about love, procreation, and religion.

It surprises me how many of my friends are still fascinated with the myth of love and marriage. On my most optimistic days I view marriage as a huge joke. On my most bitter days I see it as a religious conspiracy to control reproductive rights, subjugate women, and repress sexual minorities. Hence all this debate about gay marriage.

Gay marriage has become a hot-button issue in the past few years and has been one of the defining political debates of my generation. We have heard so much rhetoric from the religious right over the past few years about the fact that gay marriage cannot be legitimized because heterosexual marriage is a sacred institution. In response many gay rights groups have tried to make the familial structure based around a same-sex couple seem more legitimate and normal to American society. In solidarity I would like to try to work back from the other side of the line in an attempt to delegitimize heterosexual marriage to the greatest extent I can. If gay rights groups succeed in normalizing same-sex relationships, and I succeed single-handedly in making a huge joke out of heterosexual marriage, we all win.

The logic from the conservative Christian movement employs any of a number of arguments for the sanctity of marriage, including that heterosexual marriage is sanctioned by god, is for the purpose of procreation, is an expression of love, is a lifetime commitment, &c. So my goal for 2010 is to go to Las Vegas to get married and subsequently annulled. By my atheist marriage to someone I don't love with whom I do not intend to stay married and with whom I cannot reproduce I can do my own small part to invalidate all of the aforementioned claims.

The hard part is going to be finding a like-minded woman who would be willing to travel with me to Nevada to get married. I plan to make a fun vacation out of the excursion, get married, and document the entire process for my blog. As of right now round-trip to Vegas is less than $300 bucks so I think it's a viable option.

On a personal level, this marriage plan would also give me a chance to permanently put that dark "Christian family man" chapter of my life behind me.

I'm now accepting applications for a wife. If you're interested in getting married, email me at veganmac[at]gmail[dot]com.

Burn

2010-01-07T10:00:00.000-05:00

I've always been fascinated by fire. When I was a kid, my two favourite mischievous activities were to throw eggs at passing cars and setting things on fire. My friends and I were always interested in finding newer and cooler ways of igniting objects. Rubbing alcohol, nail polish remover, hair spray, gasoline, air freshener, lighter fluid were all favourites. We'd get together and try to invent new ways to create bigger, more intense, and more dangerous flames. We'd steal lighters from the corner store and adjust them so they'd make flames two to three times as tall as regular lighters. We'd direct hairspray across a lighter's flame to melt action figures or we'd write our names in gasoline on the street and light it up.

Fire plays a huge role in our social consciousness. As humans we've used fire to represent a lot of emotions, we describe passions as "fiery", and depending on what we're burning we can use fire to show deepest respect or acerbic mockery. Vikings would burn their honoured dead. I've caused myself a lot of trouble burning things in the past. I am a strong proponent of burning things out of disrespect. While there are definitely more powerful ways to disrespect something - pissing on it for example - nothing really combines disrespect with destruction in such an eloquent way as fire does.

I've never outgrown my love of setting things on fire, it's just that what I used to do for fun I now do to prove a point. It's a different direction my life has taken since age 15.

A couple of years ago my friend Marshall who is a very talented artist asked me if he could paint a portrait of me wearing this corny Straight Edge basketball jersey that I own. He said he wanted to start a portrait series of Straight Edge kids since he's also Edge, and I of course agreed to do it. He came over to my old apartment and took a digital photograph of me wearing my Straight Edge jersey and over the course of a couple months he painted a really impressive portrait of me. He won some awards from his school and had several of his painting including the one of me hung in a school art show.

I borrowed the painting from Marshall to hang in my room for a few months until he asked for it back to display in another art show he'd gotten at a local restaurant/venue space/art gallery in Richmond. He was really excited for his first real non-school art show and so he invited a bunch of us to come out. I showed up to support Marshall and when I arrived the guy working the door at the venue was really weird and awkward to me and made some snide remark about not needing to see my ID as he knew I wouldn't be drinking. I laughed it off figuring he just recognized me from the portrait wearing the Straight Edge jersey.

When I took a look around the room I realized that the paining of me was sporting a plain black jersey that no longer said Straight Edge on it. I went directly to Marshall to ask what exactly had happened to my painting and he answered that the guy who runs the place claimed to have "had problems with Straight Edge kids in the past" and refused to hang the painting.

There is a debate as to whether the guy running the venue asked Marshall to paint over the words "Straight Edge" or whether Marshall volunteered but in the end Marshall censored his own painting to get it hung in an art show. When I confronted Marshall about how bullshit his behavior was, he said that he needed to sell paintings to pay rent and so he felt he had no choice. I felt like it was one of the biggest betrayals of Straight Edge I'd ever heard of and on top of that was a huge insult to artists everywhere. To censor a painting for the sake of making money, and in the process disrespect both your own convictions and the convictions of your subject seemed incomprehensible to me.

I was disgusted that I felt like someone I was friends with could be bought and sold like that and I felt like I had no choice but to buy the painting and set it on fire. I was infuriated by the idea of having my likeness being involved at all in the buying and selling of a person's moral convictions.

So I scraped together a hundred bucks I couldn't spare, met Marshall at the venue and paid him for my painting and yanked it off the wall. I met up with some friends who share my feelings about Straight Edge and about art and we doused the painting in rubbing alcohol and set it on fire and laughed as it burned. At first I felt like it was a pretty crazy thing to do until I realized that potheads make an entire lifestyle out of spending hundreds of dollars on something just to laugh while they burn it.

I never really thought that I could feel insulted and degraded by art but I really felt like my whole life was deprecated by that painting and I think that it is the hands down my favourite thing I've ever caught on fire.

State Murder

2010-01-06T12:08:00.003-05:00

I am told constantly that because I am Vegan and pro-animal rights, and because I am an Environmentalist and support the concerns of preserving ecosystems over human expansion, and because I am sterilized and therefore unable to reproduce, and because I support a woman's right to have an abortion, that I tend to come across as depressingly anti-human. This is one of the few criticisms that actually troubles me because I consider myself a humanist and all of my interest in social issues, human-rights, and progressive politics has come out of a deeply held respect for human dignity.

But that's not to say it's easy for me, because I do struggle with humanism. I often find myself getting frustrated with people's ignorance and self-destruction and I start referring to my own species as a "disease" or a "cancer" on this planet.

Becoming anti-human is a dangerous path because it invalidates so many important beliefs that I've held for so long. Being anti-human would make being anti-racist sort of ridiculous. Being anti-human would make being anti-homophobic or anti-war or anti-sexist pretty pointless. So I strive to believe in humanity in whatever small ways I can.

Of every human rights issue in the world, there is one that is particularly important to me on a personal level and that is the death penalty.

A little over a year ago one of my childhood friends was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. She and I had been really close in middle school and the beginning of high school. We had grown apart after high school which happened with almost all of my friends but I still cared very much for her.

I worried very much about the possibility that her killer would be eligible for the death penalty. Being against the death penalty has been an issue that has defined my attitudes for almost a decade and I would have felt very compelled to speak publicly on the issue if her killer had been eligible for execution. I have had two close friends murdered in the past three years and on both occasions I was spared the difficulty of having to speak out against executing the murderers. The first time one of my friends was murdered the man who killed her committed suicide shortly thereafter, and the second time the prosecutor was unable to make a case for first degree murder so there was no possibility of execution.

I know that at some point in the future one of my friends will be murdered and if the killer is eligible for the death penalty I will feel compelled to speak publicly against his execution. I find it hard to maintain interpersonal relationships as it is and I know that if I advocate against the death penalty for a person who has murdered one of my friends, most of my other friends are going to turn their backs on me. I am relatively used to losing friends over ideological issues but this I know will break my heart.

It is strange to me that when I think of the possibility of a friend being murdered, I am most nauseated and terrified by the possibility of all my other friends seeing me go into a court room or to a newspaper and speaking out against the execution of a person who killed that friend.

From a purely rational perspective the death penalty makes no sense. The justice system is admittedly flawed and to have any aspect of such an inherently flawed system that is permanent and irrevocable seems counter-intuitive. Our justice system routinely imprisons people for crimes they didn't commit, punishes minorities disproportionately, and to give that system the ability to play god and choose life or death for human beings is without any redeeming value.

But truly, discussing the flaws of the system causes one to overlook the real issue: that executing human beings is wrong. To use one murder to supposedly "correct" another murder is flawed logic. You can invent new terms for a murder and call it "justice" or "retribution" but truthfully a murder is a murder regardless of whether an individual does it with a knife or a prison guard does it with a three-drug cocktail. When a human kills another human it's murder. The cultural institutions we invent to justify it are arbitrary and meaningless. In human history there were dozens if not hundreds of bizarre culturally accepted rituals that we would abhor today. In the 18th and early 19th centuries we justified the way we treated African slaves by legally classifying them as property and equivalent to 3/5 of a human being. The legal and cultural codes invented then to justify slavery are just as empty and without substance as the legal and cultural codes we invent today to justify state-sponsored murder.

The most bizarre part of the death-penalty obsession - the opiate of revenge - is the fact that people feel so passionately about murders that have not affected them personally in any way. When the news reported that my friend's killer was sentenced to prison time instead of death, there was an outcry among total strangers that justice had not been served and that he deserved the death penalty. I responded to several internet posts saying that I was a friend of the deceased who didn't support the death penalty for moral reasons and that I would appreciate it if those who were not close to my friend would not advocate for the death penalty to satisfy their own feelings on an issue that had nothing to do with them.

I was astounded when I was told by multiple people that because I didn't support the death penalty, that I didn't care for my friend and that I was a better friend to her killer than I was to her. That is how far the bloodlust can take people, to the point of saying that "if you don't want someone killed, then you obviously don't care."

We are always more concerned with our personal satisfaction than we are with taking a moral stand. We want revenge, and for someone to pay for what has happened. The problem is that we only hate murder 'cause it takes away someone from us, we don't hate murder because it's inherently wrong. If we hated murder because it is wrong, then we would hate the death penalty because it is no different than murder. When a murder occurs we have a gut reaction and get carried away with our feelings and never stop to think about the effect it has on society when we do things because we want to and not because they're right.

Many who have doubts about the death penalty worry that if they speak out against it they will be branded as uncaring or a person who sympathizes with murderers. But we shouldn't measure our love for one another by the lengths we are willing to go to hurt someone who has wronged us. Revenge shouldn't be the ultimate way to show you care.

The justice system doesn't work in this country, in fact most of the "systems" in this country don't work and I'm not sure that they are ever going to work to a degree that satisfies me so I try to keep my hopes for change modest. I know that the day when people respect the rights of animals to live without human interference is probably far off, but I think that the brutality, the inhumane, vengeful medieval practice of executing criminals seems so terrible that even normal people could come to see the error of our ways.

Our ideas of justice should be based on doing what's right even when it's hard, even when it inconveniences us, even when it makes us feel small and powerless. Doing the right thing isn't easy and it never will be. Denying our own emotions, our own desires isn't easy but we have to do that to be able to make choices that are for the greater good. Yeah it would feel gratifying to see someone who murdered a love one put to death but is it the right thing to do?

America Smokes

2010-01-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

The majority of people who read my blog live in Virginia. If you've had the dire misfortune of being born anywhere but our fine commonwealth then there's a 50/50 chance that you are from a state that has already passed an indoor smoking ban and an even better chance that you're from a state that has at least some sort of restriction on the ability to smoke indoors.

One of the most important things to know about Virginia is that Virginia loves smoking, in fact we love smoking so much that a nonsmoker from Virginia smokes more than a smoker from any other state. With all the wealth of information about tobacco's links to heart disease, cancer, &c, you're probably wondering why we love smoking so much. Well the primary reason that we love smoking so much is that we love freedom and we know that smoking is patriotic. I don't even smoke but I don't let that stop me from inhaling at least a pack's worth of tar and nicotine a day at the various restaurants and clubs I frequent, because if there's one thing people know about me, it's that I love freedom and I love America. This is why I am so concerned about the new VA indoor smoking ban.

On December 1st of 2009, a smoking ban passed earlier in the year finally took effect. One cannot overstate the difficulty of passing any restrictions on smoking in the state that is home to Philip Morris, the largest cigarette maker in the country. I have been calling and writing my representatives trying to get this bill passed for the past few years and every year up til now it has been killed in committee -- democracy at its finest. The only way that the legislature was able to pass it this year was by giving several concessions to opponents of the bill, namely that smoking is still permitted in businesses that construct a separate smoking section with separate ventilation. Also Governor Kaine had to behead a chicken in a bizarre legislative voodoo bonfire ritual conducted on the grounds of the capitol.

It's rare that the government does anything that I agree with so I rarely have any occasion to voice any support for a law or a policy of any sort but once in a while it happens and this is one of those occasions. I was more excited about the passing of an indoor smoking ban in VA than I was about President Obama's election because this actually represents a real change that affects me personally. The indoor smoking ban -- even with all its flaws and compromises -- constitutes my proudest moment as a Virginian.

There was a cognitive disconnect for people between when the bill was passed and when it took effect so people didn't really start whining and complaining about the smoking ban until it actually took effect a month ago. The indoor smoking ban really gets under the skin of Virginians first and foremost because of our aforementioned love of tobacco, but it also raises a deeply genetic disposition toward civil disobedience and archaic revolutionary rhetoric and hyperbole. People are so indignant about the ban that everyday I leave my apartment expecting to see pamphleteers and town criers inciting people to armed insurrection against the government, buckled shoes, tricornered hats, and muskets in tow.

As of yet the revolution has been mostly kept to circulating internet lists of "smoke friendly" Virginia restaurants and ultra-libertarian blog postings.

All of this is noteworthy to me firstly because as I said before I've never really sided with the government before so it's an unfamiliar feeling to agree with the government and insult the people who are fighting against the law. Secondly it is interesting to me because the kind of rhetoric floating around is typical of a specific and particularly stupid American mindset and therefore gives special insight into the collective consciousness of these people. Aberrant stupid behavior might be more novel, but it is less insightful.

The first thing that I love about "Revolutionary Smoking" is the kind of powerful language used to defend the "right to smoke". Based on the kind of arguments being made on messageboards, blogs, and the comments section of local newspapers, you'd think that VA was under martial law with the way people are talking about their constitutional freedoms, civil liberties, and governmental tyranny. The level of ideological inconsistency is so overwhelming it almost chokes you, but really these people are never concerned with a moral or a political stand, they're merely concerned with the continuation of their lazy and self-indulgent lifestyle and they'll temporarily latch onto any cause that promises to resist any meaningful change. The truth is that someone invoking their civil liberties to defend their pollution of my air is so silly that it's surprising that anyone can really make the argument with a straight face.

The people who are complaining fall into two categories: smokers and bar owners. Smokers are concerned about the inconvenience of having to smoke outside or to change their habits to start frequenting establishments with approved smoking areas. You can only imagine the amount of sympathy that I feel for a person who thinks that having to step outside to smoke is symptomatic of an authoritarian regime and that it's their constitutionally granted right to increase my chances of a dozen illnesses because I had the misfortune of sitting down at the same restaurant as them.

Bar owners are concerned about their profits and if there is one tradition in America that we hold above all others, it is that we love to mask a concern about money with enlightened and high-minded sounding rhetoric about personal liberty and the social contract.

The truth is that the issue at hand is peoples' health which is more important than your convenience and more important than your profits. Relying on the market to solve a problem like this is naive, as long as the tobacco industry is pulling in billions of dollars there is never going to be a voluntary move toward being smoke free.

I am not in favour of outlawing cigarettes anymore than I am in favour of the current war on drugs because I don't think that the government should be imprisoning people for engaging in recreation that harms only them, but the entire dynamic changes when your recreation starts to affect my health. I have the right to visit any public space, restaurant, or club without having to breathe toxic smoke.

There's an old saying, "Your right to swing your fist stops at my nose".

We live in a culture that has gotten progressively more self-absorbed, complacent, and greedy over the past hundred years and politicians, companies (especially service industry companies like restaurants) have bent over backwards trying to out-convenience each other and create more and more ways to give people everything they want without having to pay full price for it, work for it, wait for it, or feel the consequences of it. The government uses our tax money to subsidize farmers so we can buy meat for 1/6 the market price, we drop bombs on countries to maintain our supply of cheap oil so we don't have to tell people not to drive cars anymore. It's really hard to tell a person to give up a luxury you've already given them, and so we have an entire country of people who feel 100% entitled to every piece of cushion in their seats and every piece of food on their plate that when someone tries to tell them to go outside to smoke, or cut back on their driving or meat consumption they are ready to set up barricades in the street.

We are so afraid to tell people that maybe not every comfort is a god-given right that even those of us who try to live in a reasonably responsible manner find ourselves pandering to this ignorance when we discuss morality with most people. I find myself trying to convince people to go Vegan by discussing the benefits to them personally because I know that if I tell them the truth -- that they never had the right to eat meat in the first place -- they're not going to listen.

Truthfully this has been a part of our culture from the beginning. America wasn't founded by philosophers who sought to embody some abstract enlightenment ideals. It was founded by businessmen who were frustrated with unfair taxation. Profit and convenience.

People who have raised such hell over the smoking ban are being more American than they ever realized.

Past Year's Accountability 2009

2009-12-31T23:59:00.007-05:00

The tradition of making resolutions for the new year every 31st of December is a tradition I fully support. I think it is a much brighter, more productive tradition than the tradition of high school kids getting trashed out of their mind and speeding through red lights in the middle of the night and killing bartenders in some weird sort of twisted poetic justice, even though the latter creates a much more entertaining media spectacle.

On a basic level I support self-improvement and I support setting goals. With that said I'd like to start a yearly tradition celebrating something else I support: accountability. I made a list of New Year's Resolutions in December of 2008, and now that 2009 is coming to a close it's time to check in and see how well I did with keeping to those resolutions in a ceremony I'm calling Past Year's Accountability. These resolutions have sat on my computer desktop for the past year and I'm copying and pasting them directly as they were written a year ago.

1. Go back to Ballet for at least six months.
I had wanted to go back to taking ballet classes at the Richmond Ballet in 2009. I never got around to doing this; in fact I never even made the slightest effort. I don't really feel bad about missing this one but I'm gonna label it a completely failure.

2. Start Muay Thai for at least six months.
I had originally planned on starting Muay Thai at Richmond BJJ but I started Brazilian Jiu Jitsu first instead and started Muay Thai towards the end of the year. Given that I've trained BJJ for six months and Muay Thai for almost two, I'm going to give this one a passing grade and say that I completed this resolution.

3. Go back to slamming.
I have made a resolution to go back to doing slam poetry every couple of months for the past four years. It never happens, this is no different. This was a complete failure as well.

4. Start working out again.
I had intended to get back on a regular lifting schedule to try and get back in shape but I never did. But given that I'm training six days out of the week currently and doing some light supplementary exercises between classes, I'm going to give myself half credit for this.

5. Follow through with travel plans, Hawaii and California.
Mary and I had vague plans to travel to Hawaii and California over the summer. Those plans fell through but instead we went to Europe for three weeks stopping in The Czech Republic and in England. I had previously visited England in January. In May I visited Chicago and in October I did go to California for a week. Overall I visited more places than I had intended to originally, even those one of those places wasn't Hawaii. I'm going to give myself full credit for this resolution.

6. Move into a cheap house with a basement.
I made this resolution in the hopes that moving into a cheap house with a basement would facilitate starting a band or having house shows. I did move into a cheap house but that experiment failed miserably and although it did have a tiny basement, it did not facilitate any musical projects so even though I did move into a cheap house with a basement I'm going to call this resolution a complete failure.

7. Take month long break after #100.
In March of 2009 I kissed my 100th girl. I had originally decided to take a month long break after doing it, but in the moment decided to abstain from kissing girls altogether. I think I may have lasted a little less than three weeks. I'm going to give myself half credit for this resolution.

8. Not have a girlfriend for the whole year.
While I did get myself into a few weird situations and hurt a few feelings in the process, and while I was tempted at times, I did not enter into any exclusive monogamous contracts the whole year. Full credit.

9. Start a band.
Barely even tried. No credit.

10. Publish my zine.
I published the first issue of my zine in March of 2009. Moved 300 copies all over the world including Belgium, England, California, and Seattle. Full credit on this resolution. I am very happy with how starting my zine went.

11. Get the Venue started.
Brendan and I were trying to start a new venue for Hardcore shows in Richmond in 2009. It didn't happen. No credit for this.

12. Sleeve left arm.
I added one large tattoo and two smaller ones to my left arm in 2009 so I'm about 60% of the way toward a sleeve. Given that I also tattooed my hands I'm going to give myself half credit for this.

13. Weigh 165lbs.
My highest weight for 2009 was 160, up from my starting weight of 150 so I'm gonna give myself half credit for this.

14. Get back nice guy reputation while remaining Hate Edge.
Looking back I'm not sure what prompted this resolution; I guess I was feeling nostalgic for my high school days when people thought I was a really kind person. I think my reputation is worse than it's ever been so I'm going to give myself no credit for this resolution.

15. Purge belongings.
I did manage to throw away a lot of junk in 2009 but not as much as I wanted so I'm giving myself half credit for this.

So my total score for 2009 was: 6.5/15 or something like 43% success. I'm not necessarily ashamed of this number because as I have changed over the course of a year some things on this list aren't nearly as important to me as they were in 2008.

I fully intend to write another ten or twenty resolutions for 2010 and barring unforeseen circumstances I'll be checking back in with you in a year to tell you how I did.

They Schools

2009-12-27T12:23:00.001-05:00

I received a letter on my birthday of this year from a friend who wrote to tell me that not only was our friendship over, it had never actually existed at all. This blog entry isn't really about her, or about the letter, but it is about one very small very interesting part of the letter. When she was outlining all the reasons that she thought I was a completely worthless human being she included this little tidbit: that I had unrepentantly dropped out of high school and also out of college. Needless to say when I read that bit my mind was pretty blown. She thinks I'm shitty because I'm a high school dropout? I'm sad to say that she wasn't the first person to tell me how much respect they'd lost for me because I "gave up on my education." I don't think there was a single sentence in the entire letter that didn't break my heart into a thousand pieces but over months of re-reading that letter, as the rest of the insults started to hurt less, the remark that I was "anti-education" stuck with me like a canker sore.

So really what is education in America and why do I hate it so much?

My own personal experiences with education are pretty typical of what school is in the US. I spent my years in the compulsory portion of school doing mindless repetitive busy work, taking standardized tests, being told to sit down and shut up by unenthusiastic and bitter teachers. I would wake up before the sun had risen to go to a school that looked like a 19th century factory and sleep through class after class that didn't interest me. I then went to college and spent a few thousand dollars of borrowed money to learn that I was going to a second-rate institution with a bunch of basketball stars, frat boys, and party girls who were just trying to get by academically so their parents would continue paying their rent so they could live away from home and get trashed on the weekends and go see college basketball games. Overall I was not intellectually stimulated by my college experience.

I am not going to sing my own praises because it's not that I'm necessarily a very intelligent person, but I am a person who has a real enthusiasm for learning in a universal sense. So why have I always hated school? You can't blame my problems on my contrary attitude because for most of my life I was a very cooperative, open-minded, and curious kid. I don't understand why a person who loves to learn would be so negatively impacted by a school system whose job ostensibly is to foster and augment that love of learning.

The undeniable fact of the matter is that the compulsory education system in the United States serves the primary purpose of shaping personalities and indoctrinating citizens and is concerned about educating children only as a secondary or even tertiary function. To say that school serves the purpose of educating is like saying the police serve the purpose of protecting ordinary citizens. Yeah every once in a while a cop happens to do some negligible act of benevolence and children do pick up some knowledge on their trip through school but these are collateral occurrences and don't give any real insight into how the system really functions and why.

Industrial magnates including Rockefeller pretty much built the American educational system from the ground up by funding every research project, taskforce, or governmental agency that involved education and hand-picking the people who were to create a public school system for the country starting with the building of schools, the creation of some semblance of a universal curriculum, but more important than all this was the overall experience that a child would have in school. Schools were built to look and feel like factories and schoolwork was designed to condition children to be comfortable doing repetitive boring activities for hours on end while sitting quietly in uncomfortable chairs in stuffy brick buildings. Teachers serve the purpose of authoritarian first and educator second. The real lessons in school come from subtle, almost subliminal cultural norms that are taught alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic. Can someone explain to me the educational purpose of taking several minutes out of every school day to pledge allegiance to the American flag? The older I get the more indignant I feel at all the bullshit I was coerced into in school.

Rockefeller's fingerprints are all over the US Education system which worked hard to stifle creativity, critical thinking, or intellectual curiosity in children for the purpose of creating functional, ideologically homogenous, easily trained submissive laborers and citizens to people the menial service economy that has replaced the industrial sector that we outsourced to Asia after Rockfeller's death.

So I feel no remorse for dropping out of high school; in fact my only regret is that I did it at 17 and not at 14 because the longer you stay in that system the more brainwashed you get, and I feel sad everyday at how much of my personality is gone and can never be replaced thanks to 13 years of US "education".

During the year that I attended the prestigious Virginia Commonwealth University I was disappointed across the board. To be fair I actually was much more intellectually stimulated than I was in high school but I naively came to college with the intention of studying subjects that interested me with little regard for trying to find a major that would benefit me professionally. When I got to college I realized very quickly that a four year university is nothing more than a really fancy technical college where people go to train for a job. I was disillusioned with the prospect of joining a bunch of middle class career-seekers whose only goal in life is to find a middle-management position where they can supervise poor people who never went to college. It's sad to witness how much of a class divide there is in so-called "higher education".

I signed up for classes absolutely giddy at the prospect of going to college because I believed in my blissful ignorance that universities were bastions of enthusiasm for learning as an ideal. I thought that everyone I met was going to be a scholar and that I would spend my days surrounded by brilliant people with interesting opinions. When I got to college nearly every person around me was in school to satisfy their parents' expectations. I borrowed enough money from the government for my education to feed some smaller south Asian countries for a year and haven't been able to afford to pay it back so now my credit is destroyed. I wish that I had realized six thousand dollars ago that I have no professional aspirations and that I was going to school in the hopes of someone eventually handing me a piece of paper to prove that I am smart to people who would otherwise want to insult my intelligence.

I don't mean to denigrate people who go to college, because I think that there are many worthwhile and meaningful professions that require a college degree and I have nothing but respect for people who attend school in the hopes of being able to have a job that is fulfilling to them or beneficial to the world at large. I have no respect for people who follow along with a set path for their education simply because it's expected of them. Universities have far too many students who attend to appease their parents, tread water academically, take up space that could be occupied by people with real aspirations, ceaselessly indulge in the "college culture" of binge-drinking and graduate with an absolutely meaningless degree.

In a perfect world, I would get a scholarship to a small university where I could indulge my intellect in all the subjects that interest me in an environment entirely free of stupid party culture and the infuriating obsession with college sports that is so pervasive at every university. A university without partying or sports? Yeah I know it's a vain hope but we all have dreams and that's mine.

Back to the birthday letter. In the end the part of the letter that was so sad to me was that my friend was so brainwashed as to be convinced that school = education and that any person who isn't in school isn't concerned with educating him or herself and that the only meaningful purpose of education is to further your progress in the professional world. I don't believe in education for the sake of anything else, I believe in education for the sake of education.

In the end I think that my point can best be made with a quotation. This quote comes from a project my friend did for a college course in which she had to interview people about things they were thankful for. The following quote comes from a person --name withheld for pity's sake -- who graduated from college and has a degree in....something. The fact that these words were typed by a person who has spent at least 17 years being educated speaks volumes about the ineffective nature of education in our country:

"I am thankful that god created myself and works for my good and the good of everyone who believes. I don't mean to say this as an ignorant thing if one doesn't believe in god but I think that god isn't what people say he is(especially christians, for example). I think sometimes people take the concept of god and format him as their own liking. But really, god is in everything. God is love. He is every good part of us and this world and to truly see him we must first become aware of our surroundings, who we are and all good energy that comes from us and that is god. I am thankful to become more aware of life, to see good in others, to be given the ability to love, the gift of faith, for family and friends not just that they are those things but that they are there to help lighten my burdens when they come, to learn about others and for so much more. I am thankful for life."

Amen.

Skin

2009-12-23T05:25:00.000-05:00

I don't feel like I have a lot of tattoos. The microcosm of Hardcore in which I spend most of my life is so filled with heavily tattooed people that I never really feel like a very tattooed guy. But I do occasionally spend time in circles of - it's hard to find a nice way to phrase this - normal people, people who don't have interesting beliefs, people who don't hate the police. When I am around these kind of people, people like my ex-girlfriend's parents or the people at Taylor's neighborhood pool or at my shitty job, I begin to feel like some sort of deformed circus freak based on the amount of unwarranted visual contact or idiotic questions I receive.

The fact that people in the world are still astounded by tattoos gives me a migraine to be quite honest, especially given that tattooing as an art form has existed for nearly five thousand years and is spread across the entire globe. It's been almost three hundred years since European sailors brought the art form to places where even white people could see it. It's really not new or novel anymore but some people are still behind the times. Every time that I get hired at a job and they inform me that I need to make sure my tattoos are covered I feel like strapping dynamite to my chest. The fact that anyone feels that me decorating my body in any way I see fit somehow affects their appreciation of whatever menial service I am currently rendering them at my minimum wage job makes me want to rip out my fucking hair. Someone explain to me why a person would be unable to enjoy a plate of food if it's handed to them by a person with tattoos?

I grew up in a family that was not necessarily heavily tattooed but included a few significant tattoos and piercings. My dad had a lot of rings in both ears and five or six tattoos, my older brother has a couple tattoos, as do both of my older sisters. Growing up seeing the occasional body modification was pretty normal and never really struck me as out of the ordinary so I was more than a little bewildered as I got more and more tattoos and people started to react to me with more and more shock and disdain.

Given the mainstream media attention given to tattoos recently with the advent of several reality TV shows based around tattoo shops and the fact that it's the 21st god damned century I can't really understand why anyone continues to be perplexed by tattoos. But these kinds of ideas persist because humans especially in the western world cling to close-minded preconceptions about these things. If I hear another old person tell me that in their day only criminals and sailors got tattoos I'm gonna puke. And of course people try to use the Bible to condemn tattoos which gives you a pretty good idea of the social ideas of people who hate tattoos.

I get asked a lot if I worry that having tattoos is going to limit my opportunities in life, or if worry about how people might perceive me and it's not something I care about. I have never met a person who hated tattoos who wasn't racist, sexist, or homophobic. And I have no desire in my life to appease, flatter, serve, or impress bigots. The kind of idiotic conservative Christian nutcases who hate tattoos are the same kind of people who think the world was created six thousand years ago and evolution is "just a theory", the kind of people who are fearful of minorities, think women should remain in the home, and that gays are condemned by God. It's not that everyone with tattoos is socially progressive, but everyone who hates tattoos is a dumb hick living in the Middle Ages.

I certainly understand that in order to live a "productive" or "normal" life I will have to appease some people I don't necessarily agree with, but anyone who will look down on me immediately based on my appearance without having spoken to me is not someone I care to live with, work with, do business with, or be friends with. I'm very unconcerned with how stagnant that may make my life from a professional or social standpoint given that there are very few things I care less about than my career or maintaining a sizeable group of acquaintances.

Being realistic however, I often am more annoyed by tattoo dabblers than by tattoo haters. Not all tattoos are created equal, different styles of artwork can tell you a lot about a person. It's incredible to me how often someone with a shitty tribal or some kanji characters or god forbid a cartoon character tattooed on them thinks that we have something in common and tries to bond with me over their shitty tattoos. Too many people think that tattooing is simply a means of putting an image onto your skin and don't understand that tattooing as a process and as an evolving artistic style with many branches has a long and important history and that having a lot of images permanently inked into your skin doesn't necessarily mean you are a tattoo person.

Also you should not have shitty tribal designs all over you if you are not a Maori, and if you are then you should have them on your face or you're a pussy.

I made some pretty bad tattoo decisions the first few years that I was able to get tattooed and that's fairly common. I think a lot of the mistakes I made were based on the stupidity of my redneck upbringing. My family name in old english font on my right arm remains as proof of how idiotic I can be at times. I don't necessarily regret any of my tattoos any more than I regret any other kind of stupid decisions I've made in life because I think that tattoos are just like life decisions in general: the older you become and the more of them you've got behind you, the less each individual one begins to matter. I may have some stupid tattoos but the more of them I get the less noticeable and important those stupid ones are. The decisions I made when I was sixteen seemed to carry the weight of my whole life and likewise the first couple of tattoos I got between 18 and 20 seemed to define my body's appearance. Most of those decisions I can barely remember now and most of those first few shitty tattoos are barely noticeable at this point. We are defined by our decisions, we learn just as much if not more from the bad ones and just hope that as we get older we make more good decisions and fewer bad ones.

Generally speaking I don't trust people without tattoos as easily as people with tattoos simply because I've only ever heard four reasons for not having tattoos and they are A-"I can't decide what I would like enough to have on my body forever". B- "My boss/parents/professors would look down on me and it would hurt my chances of getting a job/family life/school life". C- "Tattoos look trashy/stupid". and D- "God says that people with tattoos go to hell" and these excuses tell me that the person is A- Terrified of commitment or taking a stand that would be inconvenient to recant later if it was inconvenient. B- A sycophant C- An uncultured nerd or D- A dumb hick.

A few months ago one of my friend's dads told me that I should write an article about tattoos for normal people to understand tattoo culture and how one goes about getting a tattoo. So after far too many paragraphs of me digressing and ranting, here are some useful tidbits of information for regular people to keep in mind when dealing with tattoo culture.

No matter what you've seen on TV, only very corny and embarrassing people will be willing to discuss their tattoo's "deeper personal meaning" with you. Most people with good tattoos base their decisions on aesthetics and artistic style rather than some sort of convoluted metaphorical imagery. Don't ask people what their tattoos mean because even if it does have a meaning you're not going to hear it. If it's important enough to tattoo on their body it's too personal to talk to you about. Assume that everyone who actually cares about tattoos chooses them based on appearance and if you must discuss someone's tattoos stick to talking about how it looks. Anyone who has a speech prepared explaining the meaning of their tattoo is not someone whose opinion on tattoos you should listen to at all.

People who don't know anything about tattoos commonly voice this concern with wanting to have a tattoo that no one else will have and so they try to avoid recurring flash-style imagery. This is a huge mistake and a disrespect to tattooing as an art form. Recurring imagery and style is a part of all visual art forms and art movements. Having a tattoo that is similar or the same as another person doesn't devalue your tattoo any more than Dali's Christ of St. John devalues Peter Paul Rubens' Christ on the Cross.

People ask me all the time what tattoo they should get and my answer is always the same: sugar skull. They are colourful, fun, classic yet unique with a lot of room for customization, they look cool on any person on any part of the body and are very easy to blend into a sleeve or larger piece if you decide to work more stuff into that area.

One last tip: as long as your tattoo idea doesn't fall into categories of overwhelming awfulness like crosses with script, dolphins or butterflies, tribal, or goofy new school clowns or graffiti style lettering, then a good rule of thumb is that bigger is better. If you've got a half decent idea, then go hard or go home.

If you live in Richmond, get tattooed by Mike Rennie at Absolute Art on West Grace St.

Snowed In

2009-12-20T10:43:00.003-05:00

As I write this entry I am surrounded by eighteen inches of snow and if you think that sounds awesome - fuck you. I hate snow. When I see snow I want to burn the world down, I want to spill oil into the ocean so I can light it on fire and grill baby seals. Every ounce of kindness or goodness in me disappears when the temperature drops below 45 degrees farenheit. When I see snow I don't think of Christmas, I don't think of sledding or skiing or snowball fights. I think of frostbite, I think of hypothermia. I think of the horror of having to kill and eat your best friend when you're trapped on a freezing mountain top. Everything about the cold makes me feel depressed, trapped, but more importantly it makes me feel desperate.

So yes, I hate snow. But more important than the fact that cold weather is dangerous, and that it's inconvenient, and unpleasant, painful or even deadly is the fact that snow represents an important class struggle in human society. Cold weather is a phenomenon inflicted on human society by those concerned with the acquisition of wealth and perpetuated on human culture by an unnatural, perverse mythology that circulates entirely around the capitalist model for the distribution of material resources.

Simply put, snow is for rich people.

So while I hate snow on a personal level because it makes me miserable, I also hate it because it represents all that I hate about the plutocracy of America and western capitalist culture in general.

My entire life the cold terrified me. Cold weather awakens some sort of primal self-preservation instinct in me, the kind of feeling you get when you look a lion in the eyes, when you're lost in the woods, any time when you have to come to grips with the fact that you are still an animal, still able to be killed by nature if nature chooses to. We spend our lives hiding behind all the structures we've built to keep nature away from us. But sometimes nature comes roaring into our cities in the form of a snowstorm and we're reminded that our naive and bucolic ideas about nature and "the environment" are idiotic and really nature is constantly trying to kill us.

I grew up in a house without insulation, without central heat, with a lot of exposed pipes that burst anytime the temperature went below freezing. My dad worked construction outdoors seven days a week to keep the lights on and feed his kids. We burned kerosene space heaters to keep from freezing and so our house was always smokey, stuffy, dirty and miserable in the winter. My friends never wanted to sleep at my house in the winter because it would get so cold and the space heaters that provided warmth would give you nosebleeds from the fumes and smoke and how badly they dried out the air in the house. My dad hated winter and he hated snow because he worked outdoors and since I usually worked with him over Christmas break from school I grew to hate it too. Stepping into my childhood home in winter was not unlike stepping into the hovel of a character from a Charles Dickens novel. Bob Cratchit c'est moi.

When I got older and made friends who weren't from my white trash neighborhood I realized that for the middle and upper classes, snow is beautiful and festive. For the wealthy in their warm houses, watching snow fall outside is serene and peaceful. The rich delight in outdoor cold-weather gear like expensive North Face jackets, snow-tires and sport utility vehicles with 4 wheel drive, and cold weather sports and recreation like skiing and snowboarding. Cold to the rich is just another quaint obstacle for them to overcome in a quest for the next new sporting thrill requiring thousands of dollars in equipment. The rich have always loved to dabble in recreational discomfort. Things like safaris were once popular for the rich to see and hunt animals that poor indigenous people would either hunt for sustenance or flee for their lives from. Rich people starve themselves for aesthetic purposes in a painful irony as poor people die of starvation all around the world. In the same way rich people love to experience cold in small doses from underneath protective sporting equipment.

Let us not forget that human beings evolved in Africa. In Africa humans lived an egalitarian hunter-gatherer existence under appropriate environmental conditions in a landscape which didn't require large amounts of clothing or complex structures to survive. They lived in the closest thing to equilibrium to their environment that we as a species ever have. They hunted animals that had co-evolved alongside them so that the large mammals weren't completely eradicated from the continent the way they were from every other continent that we later migrated to. It wasn't until homo sapiens left Africa for Europe that we evolved white skin as a response to the limited sun exposure, developed sedentary civilizations thanks to domesticated crops, and as a result created hierarchical social structures based on uneven distribution of material resources. The entirety of white western culture was created overnight by exposure to Europe and its miserable cold weather.

And in the end what does snow symbolize to most Americans? CHRISTMAS!

Snow, the catalyst for the stratification of human civilization came to be the symbol for the one holiday which best sums up western civilization. Don't get me wrong I love Christmas, but I can smell bullshit when I'm born into it, and Christmas -- pretty lights and all -- is simply is the celebration of a theistic empire that conquered, killed, and co-opted every piece of cultural or religious resistance it encountered. Christianity was ostensibly the driving force behind the people of Europe's conquest of all the other continents on the planet. Christmas is the yearly observation of a stolen festival celebrated by a imperial religion that mandates material consumption and monetary idolatry under the guise of showing love and goodwill. What better way for the richest 1% of the world's inhabitants to show love and goodwill than to buy each other snowboards and new fleece pullovers?

So as the snow continues to pile up I am fearing for my life, wondering if I'm going to die of exposure on my walk to my shitty minimum wage job. I'm wondering if I can still be Vegan if I have to cut open a tauntaun and crawl inside its belly to survive the Hoth-like weather in Richmond. Every snowflake that falls from the sky is another omen of my inevitable demise by mother nature. But it's nice to know that while I am fighting for survival on a very basic primal level, some Ivy League brat is tearing down a double black diamond slope in Colorado somewhere and laughing about it later with his super hot girlfriend as they sip cocoa and lounge in the clubhouse's VIP hot tub.

Gratification

2009-12-19T13:50:00.005-05:00

CAVEAT: If you're uncomfortable discussing masturbation, sexuality, or the human body then read no further.

It's no secret that I masturbate a lot.

Every boy goes through the same kind of weird paranoia when he first discovers masturbation at around age 11. The feelings you develop creep up on you gradually and then one day you're locked in your bedroom with your dick in your hand, completely unaware of what's going on. It's a scary feeling and it isolates you in ways that you never thought possible. Sexual attractions and the solitary ways one deals with them begin to dominate your day to day thoughts, they become invasive. It's hard to concentrate because you're distracted by these dark secrets you feel like no one else knows about. You look askance at your male friends wondering if they're as disgusting and perverse as you, and you look shamefully at your female friends wondering how they'd feel about you if they knew the things you've done to them in the hidden recesses of your fantasies.

There are a few books that I find myself coming back to continuously no matter how old I get. Books that define so many of the dynamics of my life and one of them is Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. I think that Wolfe captures perfectly so many of the fears and the isolation of puberty. I feel like I never really understood how terrifying puberty was for me until I read this passage and it brought it all back to me in striking clarity. I also don't think that I understood that I was not alone in my experiences.

"She would have been stricken with horror if she could have known the wild confusion of adolescence, the sexual nightmares of puberty, the grief, the fear, the shame in which a boy broods over the dark world of his desire. She did not know that every boy, caged in from confession by his fear, is to himself a monster."

I think that masturbation is something that is a barometer of the human experience. I think that the act of masturbating is a good pulse to put your finger on if you want to know what it's like to be a man in the modern world. Masturbation is the act of satisfying the sexual urge alone and it is one of the loneliest and most isolating and alienating experiences that one goes through on a weekly basis. The men of my generation were born into a culture that still practices medieval genital mutilation to rob us of the appreciation of our natural sexual urges to appease some fairytale father-figure. We came into puberty during the advent of the internet and with more access to pornography than any generation before us. We stumble through a post-modern maze of outdated ideas of manhood, pushed and pulled by contradicting views of gender roles, and with a subconscious desire to apologize to every woman we've ever been attracted to.

We live by the act of shutting one's self up alone in a darkened room to gratify sexual desires toward strangers, constantly reminded of a wounded masculinity, our bodies violated before we could even name our own limbs, turning our sexuality inward, disconnected from human contact by our own insecurities, afraid to reach out for actual human contact or perhaps so desensitized by the barrage of streaming media that we are bored by actual human contact. The information age wields a double-edged sword by exposing us to more people but eliminating intimacy. I have the ability to keep in touch with ten times as many friends thanks to social networking, but I feel like my relationships with each of them are less intimate. For most of my life my own sexuality was a boon to me because my physical attractions to people forced me into social interactions I may have otherwise not attempted. I don't like very many people and I think that being sexually attracted to women was one of very few excuses I had to seek out real human contact.

I never thought that I would get to the point where I felt as though seeking out a one-night stand was the healthier thing to do on a given night, but recently I've chosen to masturbate rather than seek out sex nine times out of ten and I'm wondering if it's laziness or if I'm really losing my interest in actual physical intimacy. I'm not saying that I think that pornography is causing my isolation, but I think there's a correlation even if it's not necessarily a causal relationship.

Any discussion of modern sexuality is a complicated one and for me personally my feelings toward masturbation are more complicated than my feelings toward sexual intercourse. On the one hand I wonder if my attitudes toward sex are unhealthy if it isn't better for me to limit my physical relationships with other people and keep it to myself as much as possible. On another hand I wonder if pornography is sexually liberating or sexually repressive toward women and I wonder if I'm being exploited personally by pornography and whether or not I make excuses for an industry because I've become so dependent on it.

Every new development, each new idea is a mental and moral conflict. We are born into the most egalitarian gender landscape that America has ever known, with access to a hundred years of serious feminist theory but with much much easier access to a cornucopia of sexual stimulation beyond all imagination. I do not consider myself anti-pornography. I legitimately believe that limiting sexual expression or creating taboos does nothing to benefit progress. So it's not that I am anti-pornography but I worry that perhaps my own trouble with intimacy might not be so unique, and that maybe I am not a singular case. I wonder if there are more men of my generation who would admit to feeling internally displaced by a sex-crazed culture and if pornography is turning all of our sexuality into a thing to be fully expressed only by ourselves, obsessing over images that we would be afraid to tell people we find arousing.

I pride myself on being a strong-willed person and I usually see moral issues in black-and-white terms, and so it is not a problem for me to cease a behavior I consider wrong. But when it comes to sex, when it comes to pornography, I don't really know what I think is right, and I don't know if I think there is a right or a wrong side to any of it. Maybe the issue isn't necessarily what's right or what's wrong but rather what's healthy or unhealthy for us and our loved ones on an emotional level. And while that may seem like some sort of touchy-feely hippie copout answer I find it even harder to decide what's healthy than what's right.

Truth be told I find myself liking fewer and fewer things about my fellow human beings the older I get and if I have come to the point where I dislike people so much that even my instinctually hardwired desire for sex isn't enough to get me out of the house and talking to people then I am either a sociopath or very independent, depending on how you look at it.

"Masturbation is our first and natural form of sexual activity and if that's inhibited or damaged, then we suffer for the rest of our lives."
-Betty Dodson

You Said You'd Never Fucking Change

2009-12-14T14:13:00.005-05:00

Sometimes I hesitate to write in my blog about things like Straight Edge. This isn't because I dislike talking about it. Anyone who knows me knows that it's probably my favourite thing to talk about. I hesitate simply because I want my blog to be the kind of thing that most people even those not necessarily super familiar with my personal culture can read and hate. Straight Edge is a very difficult thing for people who aren't insiders to understand. But after the year I've had I need to set a few things down about Straight Edge in 2009.

There have been a lot of things that make me want to say that 2009 was a terrible year for Straight Edge. My closest Straight Edge friend, the friend who played me my first Hardcore record, with whom I claimed Edge over nine years ago decided to turn his back on his commitment. It's been a blow to me. The guy who played "Persevere" by Floorpunch on my dad's stereo in the living room of my house in high school, who told me he'd never fucking change...well he changed.

I think that because most of my friends are younger than me, I'm going through at 24 what most Edgemen go through at 21. I'm watching everyone sell out, and no one care. The truth is that I still believe in Straight Edge, but I don't believe in people anymore. I still think that intentional, radical, militant sobriety is a powerful idea practiced in large numbers and a life changing idea practiced individually but I've lost my inherent trust in the people who claim to be dedicated to the same things I am.

Throughout my tenure being Edge, I've dealt with the same five or six criticisms from hundreds of people. After 9+ years of being Edge, I've grown more than tired and frustrated of dealing with the accusation that people who claim Edge do so for the purpose of "fitting in" or being cool. The truth is that I've never considered Straight Edge cool. The majority of people in the world are drinkers, so the idea of being Edge to fit in or make your lifestyle any easier always seemed ludicrous to me. Being Edge has never made my social life easier, it's always been a source of conflict so I never bought into the idea of being Edge for social purposes.

But I'm really not the kind of person who thinks about these things. I don't climb the social ladder and the idea of being admired, interesting, social, and sought-after has always seemed kind of slimy to me. It seems counter-intuitive to make moral or ethical decisions with the long-term goal of getting in with a cooler crowd of people in the hopes that those people will eventually lead you to a cooler group of people. But over 2009 all I've seen is a lot people trying their hardest to make friends by adopting or abandoning beliefs based on who the next coolest person in the social group is.

In 2007 I made the decision to be Vegan. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do and when I did it, I only knew maybe three or four other Vegan Straight Edge people. I didn't make my decision to be Vegan in the hopes that anyone would like me more because I did. In fact I did it knowing that most people would like me less as a result. I felt like it was important for me to reach out to other people because it could mean animals' lives could be saved and peoples' lives could be improved. I went out of my way to spread Vegetarianism / Veganism to whoever was receptive to those ideas. So many people decided to go Vegan in 2008 that I felt like there was a real paradigm shift happening in Richmond. The truth is that most of those people made that decision as a social play to gain some sort of acceptance and they walked away from their commitment to themselves, the animals, and the planet just as soon as they found someone cooler to impress.

This year some of the oldest and "coolest" Straight Edge guys in Richmond gave up on that commitment and a whole crowd of younger Hardcore kids tripped over themselves and each other trying to follow their lead as quickly as they could. The entire spectacle has made me feel so discouraged about Hardcore as an effective avenue for social change.

People laugh at me when I get depressed about sellouts because most of my friends are pessimists who don't think anyone is real and they expect everyone to fail. I don't believe in doubting people from the first because I think that the "outside world", the world of working and going to school during the week and spending your weekend getting as trashed as possible in an attempt to seal the deal on a sloppy 3am fuck session is the most welcoming place in the world. I don't think there's any hope for an alternative if that alternative tries to close its doors on people.

I believe that Straight Edge is the only viable cultural alternative to that world, and that we gain nothing by turning people away from the only option that's out there that isn't a bullshit work-drink-fuck cycle of mediocrity and apathy. But accepting people means that nine times out of ten I end up miserable because someone I respected decided that there was a cooler decision to make.

People think that my dedication to Straight Edge is stupid. People who aren't Edge call me a fundamentalist or an extremist. People who are Edge call me embarrassing or corny. The fact is that my life is pretty mediocre and to a certain degree I admit that I compensate for that by my strong devotion to a few lifestyle ideals like Straight Edge and Veganism. My life is very difficult because I hold people to my own ethical standards and I create a constant state of conflict around these standards. I don't consider myself a very happy person and I think that Straight Edge has had a lot to do with that. Simply put the lack of intoxicants in my life means that I've never had a moment's respite from the truth of modern existence, there has never been a beer, a joint, or a pill to help me forget or get away from anything in life. Nothing for me is ever is rose-tinted. The older I get the more I learn, and it's a sad fact that I never learn anything good about the world.

It's a terrible thing that when I look back on 2009 as a whole I see more negative than positive because really there were just as many high points as low points for me this year. I may have had some of my closest loved ones give up on Veganism, give up on politics, give up on Straight Edge, but I did release my zine, I did follow DTN on tour, I did travel to Chicago, California, The Czech Republic, and England (twice) all to see Hardcore shows. I did pass my nine year Straight Edge anniversary and two year Vegan anniversary. I did meet some amazing people. But when people ask me about 2009 all I want to tell them is that some of the most important people in my life made a huge fucking joke of the most important part of my life and I hate them for it and I hate myself for giving a shit.

I look back and feel silly thinking that the first time I heard the song "Persevere" by Floorpunch I wasn't even Straight Edge yet, and I had never had a close friend sell out. I didn't know anything about that feeling at the time but that song gave me goosebumps anyway. I can't believe that it was Kerrigan of all people who showed me in the end what it really means to have it happen to you.

I've always hated the idea of calling Straight Edge a personal choice. It has always seemed like a cop out; to call something a personal choice just means that you can make decisions under the pretense of those decisions affecting only you, ostensibly shielding yourself from criticism. People call their diet a personal choice even when their choice to eat meat affects the entire planet. People call their decision to claim Edge or sell out a personal choice no matter who it affects. Everything that has happened in 2009 makes me want to distance myself from the Straight Edge community at large. It seems that for me Straight Edge is becoming more and more personal, more intimate. I feel deeply betrayed by so many people that I considered close and I am ready to start calling my Straight Edge a personal choice, if for no other reason than to drive a wedge between myself and every other Straight Edge kid because in the end I don't really think that anyone has the right idea except me. And I don't think I can really count on anyone except me.

I guess I no longer think that I can stop the world from burning.

North South East West

2009-12-12T15:13:00.000-05:00

The subject of manhood has been tackled by many more brilliant people than myself from many different sociological, psychological, and biological perspectives so when I write about it I really only bring my very personal perspective to it. It never really struck me until recently that so many of the things that define manhood for me aren't really relevant to the idea of manhood for many other men I know.

I must say first however that I do not generally speaking conform to or endorse traditional ideas about gender. When I write about what I think it means to be a man is really speaking about the best way to be a human being inside of the biological traits passed down to me. I don't want for any of my activist type friends to read this and for me to be pegged as even more of a narrow-minded male chauvinist than I already am.

I am like so many men of my generation in that I look directly to my father for ideas about how to be a man, but I feel like my father's brand of manhood isn't relevant anymore. For many years after my father's death I based so many of my decisions about what I thought my dad would do. Over time I realized this just wasn't pertinent to my life. I was trying so hard to be my dad that I'm surprised that I didn't start smoking a pack a day and start wearing work boots.

Boys look to their fathers for what it means to be a man, and so manhood is often defined by ways that boys perceived that their fathers are different from other men. So for me as I grew I began to realize that my father's most distinguishing characteristics were that he always made people feel comfortable, he was a bit of a sleazebag in an amicable way, he didn't look for conflict but never backed down when it came, he tried to better himself intellectually, and he always knew how to get places. His sense of direction was impeccable. My father had worked as a cab driver earlier in life so he always knew exactly how to get places. I didn't get my driver's license until after my father's death but after five years of driving it still strikes me how effortlessly he navigated places.

When I recall memories of my father, so many of them involve him pointing and naming streets and cardinal directions.

National Public Radio ran another watered-down story about environmental issues the other day and the correspondent put forth the idea that there was a serious problem with trying to reduce vehicle emissions because of the emotional attachment that people have to their cars. The idea at first seemed idiotic to me, another sign of our superfluous sentimentality and attachment to tradition and convenience that always holds up progress. But the more I thought about it the more I thought that my dad's sense of direction and affinity to his truck are two of my strongest recollections of him.

I have never owned a car and I never plan to but even I am vulnerable to having my heart strings plucked a little bit by the thought of a beat up old chevy. My dad's relationship to his truck was such a powerful part of his persona and nearly all my memories of him come back to his sense of direction, his unloading of his tools every night from his truck and putting them in the shed, or him on his back in the street underneath the truck working on some part or another.

I felt the most kinship with my dad when I had a job delivering paint for Benjamin Moore. I got to drive a truck, work manual labor, hang around on job sites, and driving around all day everyday gave me the best sense of direction I've ever had. It's no coincidence that it was my favourite job I've ever had. It's another part of my life that a lengthy legal battle took from me.

I worry on a daily basis that I don't know what kind of man I'll be. I'm six years into adulthood but I don't feel any more like a man than I did at 16. I know I'm not going to be my father and that makes me feel like I can't be a man 'cause really my father is the only idea of manhood that I have. I can drive a stick shift, I can navigate fairly well around my own city but I just don't feel like a man really.

I try to stray away from ineffable, unquantifiable ideas about manhood like "strength", "honor", or "heroism" 'cause really what do those things mean? But the problem I guess is that when I take away all the things that I can't explain, and when I strip away the fairy tales, and I abandon the irrational and the sentimental, the only things I have left to define my manhood are a road map, four cardinal directions, and a beat up old truck.

My Country Wrong or Right

2009-12-09T02:30:00.006-05:00

It's well known that I am no patriot. In fact my denunciation of nationalism as an idea has garnered me more hatred in Richmond than anything else I've done. The idea of nationalism has never made any sense to me, I could never really see where patriotism ends and racism begins, it all seemed to blur to me.

If you are relatively unfamiliar with the idea of nationalism and why people like me think that it is arguably the most dangerous mindset in the world, I refer you to an essay by Historian Howard Zinn:
The Scourage of Nationalism

I'm not going to try to do a dramatic outlining of the dangers of nationalism as an idea for two reasons. Firstly it would require more than a simple blog entry to enumerate the issues involved, and wouldn't really fit the tone of my blog generally speaking. Secondly Howard Zinn says it all better than I could in the above essay.

The thing that I would like to focus on is not really the danger of nationalism, but rather the absurdity of it. I like to consider myself a very rational person, so I try to avoid kneejerk reactions to things simply because I'm confused, insulted, or frightened by them. That's what I've found so distressing in my encounters with people of very nationalistic persuasions is that they are so quick to turn a meaningless situation into a litmus test of dedication to some imaginary idea.

The crux of all this came after I burned an American flag two summers ago on Independence Day. Honestly I thought very little of it. I did it to make a statement but I do so many things to make statements and usually no one ever notices. I've cut off friendships, started fights, gotten arrested, written letters and essays, gotten fired from jobs, and put myself in physical danger in the past to make statements and really no one ever notices so when I burned the flag I didn't really expect much of anything to come of it.

The shitstorm that came from that statement almost gave me whiplash. I'm not going to go into great detail but as a result of me burning the flag, I was threatened with violence on numerous occasions, actually hit just once but I've got a scar in my mouth from it, I received harassing phone calls in the middle of the night, I was told by a friend of over ten years that he never wanted to speak to me again, I was told by casual acquaintances that they wanted nothing to do with me. The heat from it got so severe that the other people who were involved with the flag burning got scared and distanced themselves from me and from the incident by removing the pictures from their Facebook profiles and spouting pro-America shit on the internet to try and appease the people who were angry with them.

I knew that I had some friends who were politically conservative and some friends who were in the military but I had sort of hoped that these kinds of attitudes came from a sort of pragmatic conservatism. I had hoped that they were cynics who saw the perpetuation of conservative political-military ideas like the Bush Doctrine as simply the lesser of two evils, and that they took what they saw as a practical and immediate - albeit misguided - step toward making the best of an untenable situation by sacrificing themselves to put a plug in a cracking dam of foreign policy. I had hoped this because I'm a hopeless optimist at heart. What I never imagined in a thousand years was that anyone, much less my friends who are primarily people involved in punk and straight edge and other kinds of alternative if not altogether subversive lifestyle and cultural ideas would ever identify themselves with the kind of jingoistic, abstract mythology that comprises the idea of nationalism. I was wrong.

The idea of identifying one's self so strongly as American that you are willing to fight over someone burning a piece of cloth woven in a foreign country that supposedly represents America is baffling to me. It is the same mentality that baffles me about sports fans. People have allegiances to sports teams, but since sports teams change coaches, change owners, change players, and even change cities, I don't really see what exactly you are a fan of unless it's the mascot, which seems to be the only thing that stays the same. The mascots are honestly the only thing I like about sports teams, and whenever I get suckered into watching a game of something, I usually just pick the mascot I like best, it seems to be the only logical choice. The same fact remains true of countries. What exactly is it that patriots feel so strongly connected to? Since all of our elected and appointed officials change, laws change, physical boundaries change, foreign policy doctrines change, economic and political climates change, what exactly is it that a patriot finds so much connection to? I find few patriots who are enthusiastic about permanent ideals laid down in our legal framework, ideas that protect civil rights and individual liberties, in fact most patriots I know find these ideals cumbersome and superfluous when it comes to things like illegal incarceration, interrogation, trial, and torture of people we don't like.

So am I missing something? Do sports fans really just get excited for mascots? Do patriots really just like symbols like the flag and the bald eagle? It'd make more sense to me than anything else I've heard so far.

I had meant for this entry to be about one specific issue, but as it turns out I rambled quite a bit and the introduction is going to end up being longer than the issue I really wanted to write about.

The thing that I really wanted to talk about was a news story that I happened to glance at in a local newspaper a week or so ago and gave no thought to until it popped up on the national news and started barging into my various social networking spheres.

The story is that a 90 year old veteran of the armed services who lives in the suburbs of my city erected a flagpole on his property in violation of the agreement with the home owner's association of the neighborhood. The HOA ordered him to remove the flagpole and he has refused to. The facts of the situation are this: the man, Colonel Van Barfoot signed an agreement with the HOA when he bought the house. Vertical flagpoles are a violation of the HOA's agreement according to the HOA even though they don't specifically mention flagpoles in writing. They say he would be allowed to fly an American flag from an angled pole attached to his house if he so desired.

If you're wondering "Why should I give a shit about this?" then you and I are in the same boat.

A columnist in Richmond that I respect very much has already put in his two cents on the issue and so I want to give you a link to his perspective before I give you my own:
Michael Paul Williams' article on Colonel Barfoot.

Now before I get into talking about this I want to make it very clear that I do not in any way support HOAs or their right to control what you do with your property. I had a fight of my own over this same issue with a rental agency telling me to take down a banner I hung from my balcony. I thought it was bullshit. So I am not defending in any way the HOA on an ideological level. I'm just looking at the situation from the most logical perspective I can.

The issue here isn't the HOA, because if Van Barfoot wanted to be able to make his front yard look like a national monument or the parking lot of a car dealership, he should have either moved into a neighborhood not dominated by a HOA. But once he signed an agreement with the HOA of his neighborhood, he should stick to it and just fly his damned flag from an angled pole off of his house.

But really the most baffling part of all this isn't the HOA being uptight, litigation-happy douchebags, and it isn't a stubborn old man digging in his heels over a petty issue. The most incredible part of this is the fact that so many people have turned this issue into a new flag lapel pin-esque litmus test. There's an army of people who are turning this stupid situation into a patriotic pissing contest, and even our elected officials are getting in on it. A white house spokesman, a senator, and multiple congressmen have voiced support for Barfoot. There's a 34,000 strong facebook group called "Let Col. Barfoot fly the American flag". And when you look at the situation for what it is, this what you get:

Barfoot wants to fly his flag from a pole that goes like this |
...and the HOA wants him to fly his flag from a pole that goes like this /

And 34,000 internet users, and a dozen people that get paid to represent our country think that this issue is important enough to take a stand on. I have been known to take some pretty stupid, insignificant, and petty stands on some pretty ridiculous issues but I don't think that even I have ever come close to making a nationwide fight out of the angle of a stick that I hang a piece of cloth from. Is there some sort of secret patriotic code I'm not aware of? That if you fly your flag from a pole that is at a 90 degree angle from the ground then you love America more that someone who flies a flag from a pole that is at a 45 degree angle from the ground? And really does a dude who's got a Medal of Honor really have that much to prove as far as his patriotism? I don't think anyone's doubting your patriotism guy, just let it go.

But as always the fight becomes a race to the lowest common denominator with Democrats trying to get the lead in supporting Barfoot because they know the kind of idiotic slander Republicans are going to throw at them if they ignore this issue and address more important issues like deciding what to have for breakfast. I know that many of the people who have gotten involved here are too intelligent to give a shit about this but they know that this is the kind of populist issue that can't afford to be missed. It's sad to watch someone as smart as Tim Kaine or Mark Warner jumping on this bandwagon simply to avoid the bullshit that would come from dismissing it.

The whole issue is a sickening reminder that people who are convinced of the overwhelming importance of every aspect of a nation-state, from its international standing down to its petty symbols have no capacity for rational thought. They close their ears and start screaming words like hero, america, patriotism, and jingoistic bullshit about defending our freedom and refuse to actually think about the facts.

I don't like to use quotes because I don't like to rest the strength of my argument on someone else's credentials, but once in a while when someone says something better than I ever could, I like to give them a shoutout, and even though this quote is quite overused I like it.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
-Voltaire

You're Not Famous

2009-11-29T23:46:00.005-05:00

The first time I ever heard of a "social networking" site, was through my friend Dave Samsel sometime in late 2002 or early 2003. We were at the 7-11 on Main and Harrison and he was explaining Friendster to me. "It's like, you have a page, and other people have pages, and you can add people to be your internet 'friends' through the website". At the time, the idea seemed really stupid to me. I didn't really see the point. For the most part, the people I knew had so little to contribute and so little to say, the idea of them having a personal website seemed incredibly inane, and the idea of connecting those websites seemed frivolous and unwieldy.

For several years, I maintained my own personal website and it was a sort of point of pride for me. Before the era of social networking, your internet presence was confined to the dark dungeons of newsgroups, messageboards, and the occasional badly designed Geocities or Angelfire personal homepage. Maintaining a personal website was a way of making your mark in the vast new landscape of cyberspace. I dabbled in writing my own html before obtaining a pirated copy of Macromedia's Dreamweaver. Being able to search for yourself in Lycos or Yahoo and find your own website was like being a celebrity on a very miniscule scale. I made my first website when I was 13 and made business cards with my email address and website url printed on them. It was really really cool.

I stopped maintaining my website when social networking took off. There seemed to be little point in keeping a personal website that was cumbersome to maintain and contained all the same information that was on my profile. In the interest of continuing the self-deprecating theme of my blog and also for your amusement, here is a picture of the last incarnation of my personal website, "Pensive".
The funny thing is that this blog was actually started as a component of that website and the entries were more journal like and actually posted by several friends. I thought that having multiple people posting journal entries would give my website more of a "communal" feel. I was acknowledging the power of social networking and trying to harness its momentum to keep up traffic for my site, but it was a failure. After I deleted my website, this blog sat completely unused for several years before I revived it. If you go way way back in the archives of this blog you can find the entries from when it used to be part of my website, with posts from Ty and Caitlin and Nick.

While I maintained my website, I felt some kind of subconscious obligation to actually have something on my site worth looking at. Even though my website was personal and therefore I was under no real obligation to present the most interesting parts of my personality and life, I tried my best to. Looking back on my website with seven years hindsight, I failed utterly at making myself seem interesting.

I of course eventually gave into the tide of social networking. I signed up for Friendster in July of 2003 because Kerrigan told me that Friendster was the best way to meet girls. The idea of the internet helping me to meet women blew my mind in 2003. I was interested in computers and the internet from a very young age and that interest had always been the bane of my attempts to meet women and have them fall in love with me. Sorry ladies, I'm busy this weekend playing Starcraft on Battlenet. I'm not sure what it is about the advent of social networking that made computers hip and sexual, but I stand by the fact that my love life would be absolutely nowhere if not for social networking. Only the arrival of unlimited text messaging on my wireless plan even comes close to the assistance that Friendster/Myspace/Facebook &c have given to me.

So I - like everyone else under thirty - followed the social networking tide as it went from Friendster (signed up 07/03) to Myspace (signed up 10/03) to Facebook (signed up 12/06) and Twitter (signed up 08/08). In between I signed up for such failed social networking sites as Xpeeps and Xuqa.

Many people my age have very intense opinions about social networking as a phenomenon. I've been around for almost the entire span of it (I was slightly too young and extremely too lame to be in on Makeoutclub) and really the biggest problem with social networking is this:

Social networking makes dorks feel like rock stars.

The advent of social networking is the advent of micromedia. While many aspects of major media (television, radio, film) are following the trend of companies converging into bigger and bigger conglomerations, the internet has found its niche in breaking content, content-sharing outlets, and expression into smaller, more fractal and ADHD inducing bits. Twitter is the epitome of social networking, breaking everything down into the tiniest and most insane shards.

The result of this shattering of media on the human psyche is evident everywhere that you look. The ability to have an internet presence that compels the casual glance every now and then from a pool of possibly thousands of people makes the most uninteresting, banal, and utterly socially inept people feel like they are in the limelight for the first time in their tiny inconsequential lives. My criticism of this nouveau-celebrity cult is not based on some sort of puritanical, archaic devotion to the classic celebrity maintained by the giants of major media, but rather it is based on a distaste for celebrity as a concept. I find celebrity worship nauseating, and even more unbearable when people who are not famous aspire to appear famous. I think that the power of the internet should be used as a way to break down pedestals and create a more egalitarian view of society, such as when Travis Barker messages me personally to talk shit to me. That is what the internet should be for, making someone as famous as Travis Barker realize that he's a douchebag tool and fame won't change that, all thanks to a dork with no social clout.

There are two very serious symptoms of the internet celebrity that I want to talk about.

The first is that when people think that they are famous, they imagine that the most everyday aspects of their lives are interesting to readers. The fact that people will post things on Twitter such as "I just ate a delicious sandwich" or "Just woke up from a nap" should be as unbearable to everyone as it is to me. I don't think I care enough about ANYONE to force myself to give a shit about how stoked they are to go to Chipotle, not even a member of the Dupree family could get me excited about the prospect of them going to eat burritos. If people were to realize that they are in fact not famous, they would put forth more of an effort to either do interesting things, or at least only put the most interesting parts of their personality on display.

The second annoying symptom is that people feel that their privacy all of a sudden becomes a matter of national security. Users of social networking sites use every security feature possible to hide their information from others and feel intensely violated when they feel someone has viewed their profile without permission. The problem with this behavior is threefold. Firstly it is silly because as I've mentioned earlier, nothing about them or their internet personality is actually interesting, so why should they care who reads their list of favourite bands? Secondly it seems sadly ironic that someone would want to have a presence on the internet, arguably the most widely accessible medium for distributing information en masse but want to keep that presence a secret. Lastly it is noteworthy that celebrities in the classic sense don't keep their internet persona a secret. Shaq's Twitter isn't private, because he's a real celebrity. In order to maintain a sense of power, people inflicted with the cybercelebrity syndrome keep a tight lid on their internet persona.

In the days before social networking, you were only famous if you were talented, attractive, or interesting enough to give people who paid lots of money for cameras an excuse to point them at you. With very limited television time and film reel length, no one in the media could afford to waste time and resources exposing just anyone to the limelight. In the era of social networking and micromedia, even the least interesting, most mediocre looking college freshman can get a couple dozen profile views a day. I didn't want to namedrop any people in this post because it only fuels the problem I'm writing about, but to give the best example I can, someone like xMatthewx who as far as I can tell has absolutely nothing going for him is famous on the internet. Dude is in a band I've never heard of, seems to be a complete idiot but for some reason I know who he is.

On an anecdotal level you can see the rise of internet fame become apparent in the changing way that people represent themselves on their various profiles. I remember the era when people would write very earnest descriptions of themselves on Friendster and would comment each others' profiles frequently. Over time people began to be more minimalist and sardonic in their descriptions, writing only the tiniest snippet in an attempt to seem aloof, mysterious, and uber cool. There arose a sort of etiquette for commenting and adding people which people use to insult or snub others. The whole ritual reeks of Mean Girls, big fish in a small fucking pond.

I don't mean for this to sound like I hate social networking. Quite the opposite. Like I said, I am on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and Blogspot. I think that social networking is an awesome medium for expanding your social circle and interacting with lots of different people you may otherwise not keep in touch with. It would be cumbersome for me to call my friends that moved out of town or that I know from other countries and catch up with them as often as I'd like, but I can touch base with all of them frequently via a site like Facebook. The problem that I have is that people feel so empowered by media attention they create for themselves that they start to act like celebrities.

I hate to break it to you, but you're not a super cool rock star, you're a dork.

Snowflake

2009-11-23T00:02:00.006-05:00

Something in the way of a caveat....kinda:

More important than the criticism I get from external sources that my blog is incredibly self-indulgent and so egocentric that I would have prosecuted Galileo for insisting the sun doesn't revolve around me is the internal hesitation I feel whenever I sit down to write an entry that I am so preoccupied with my own mind that it's impossible for me to ever write something that would ever be interesting for anyone to read.

As is my normal reaction to criticism, both internal and external, I have decided to make no effort whatsoever to remedy the situation and instead to take the behavior to it's most extreme in an attempt to convince others and myself that I am not bothered by criticism.

So in the interest of catering only to myself and my own insipid personal preferences, I present a soliloquy on my favourite topic: things I don't like.

I believe that the most frustrating thing about people that I meet on a daily basis is that most of them don't seem have a personality at all. The most celebrated aspect of the human race as illustrated by hundreds of inspirational posters adorning the halls and classrooms of public elementary schools nationwide is the diverse and infinite possibility for human singularity, and while the myth of the snowflake was scientifically assassinated before I had even entered elementary school, that damned invincible winter icon was the most significant piece of subliminal messaging from my childhood.

It's probably a result of the school year beginning in fall that my memories of school - especially as a young child - are more vividly recalled by images of cold weather, but I swear it astounds me that I didn't come to hate snow and the cold much earlier in life based on the amount of snowflakes I was bombarded with between the ages of five and ten. When I wasn't decorating or cutting some sort of construction paper snowflake to decorate some subtly Christian yuletide distraction from the tedium of industrialized public education, I was being praised for my innate human ability to be as "unique as a snowflake".

As a child I grew up with mean-spirited, sarcastic and jaded parents and I was skeptical of the kind of touchy-feely rhetoric that promotes childhood illusions of being "special". I laughed at these kind of things as the eight year old incarnation of the prick that I am today, and at the time probably uttered something like "if everyone is special then no one is special". But years later, I find that most people I encounter are absolutely devoid of any semblance of a personality.

The dictionary defines the word personality thus:
n. the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character

Now if a person lacks any characteristics that are distinctive, and thus has no real character to differentiate him or her from any other person, does that human have a personality? And if a human being lacks personality, is he or she a person? Unsurprising to me was the alternate definition in the dictionary listed as archaic that defines personality as the fact of being a person as opposed to being an animal or an inanimate object. This etymological clue is - in and of itself - solid proof that the potential for each human being to be absolutely distinct from other human beings is our most paramount defining characteristic.

The question of why people have abandoned their own individuality would entail a discussion of sociological themes of human cooperation, and would require some sort of actual academic certification or a blessing from Jared Diamond, and would also stray dangerously away from the entirely self-absorbed approach I like to take to my life and writing. I will do my best to stick to my own anecdotal speculation and unsubstantiated diatribes.

The older I get the more I find myself uninterested in shit that is going on around me and the interests of my peers and it makes me very sad that I find myself painfully unable to relate to or even hold a conversation with people that I like and want to be friends with. I go on a few first dates but rarely a second date because I find myself unable to talk about anything. When I try to broach subjects of my own interest it seems the resulting conversation sounds like I'm playing a recording of every other conversation I've had recently. Granted that I generally only converse on maybe a dozen topics ever, but the ennui brought on by banal palaver is fatal to me. It's ironic that I am a person who repeats himself ad nauseam but can't stand to hear other people repeat phrases.

The thing that brought all this home for me was a quote from my favourite politician's new book, Going Rogue. Sarah Palin has already been the subject of one blog entry and is far too irrelevant to be the subject of another but this quote from her book piqued my inclination to write a blog entry:

"If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?"

The thing that bothers me about the statement is not that it's absolute bullshit - the same logic could be applied to cannibalism, or eating dogs and cats, or any other beings that a person like her probably would hold to some sort of sacred affectionate status - but the thing that bothers me is that it's so fucking unoriginal. I've seen this slogan on t shirts, messageboard signatures, and facebook profiles for years. Does it not bother people when they're corny and trite? I would hope that someone as rich and powerful as Sarah Palin could pay a speech writer to write her a better personal philosophy on diet. I find it hard to believe she didn't have help writing the book in the first place given that I find it hard to believe that Sarah Palin is even literate and the fact that her and her assistants even approved some corny ass shit like that strikes me as unbelievable.

Despite all my attempts to appear uncompromising and ideologically stubborn, I tolerate dissenting viewpoints more easily than you'd guess at first glance. I don't have a problem with someone disagreeing with me, I just have a problem with people who disagree with me in the most predictable, uneducated, boring ways possible. I correspond with an inmate in prison and when we talked about my vasectomy he told me that he is happy he had procreated because he felt it was the most human thing he'd ever done. It wasn't necessarily that that logic changed my mind, or that it was morally justified in my mind, but it was honestly the only original argument that anyone had made to me on the subject and I was impressed simply by that.

All in all, take advice from me, you have the potential to be a beautiful and unique snowflake, use it. Don't let slogans, one-liners, bumper stickers, and rehashing other people's ideas define who you are. Blending in might save you a little embarrassment in the short term, but it's only going to make you more annoying to me in the end, and that's really what matters most.

Zoroaster

2009-11-17T15:29:00.002-05:00

Over ten years ago, when I was a student at Binford Middle School I came up with a social theory that -- at the time -- seemed to be the end-all be-all of human classification. Somewhat Zoroastrian in practice, the theory I set forth established a dichotomy of humanity with everyone living falling into one of two categories. For years I stood by this theory, then abandoned it in favour of something that I felt made more practical sense. But the older I get the more I see the wisdom of my 12 year old insight.

Many ideas about humanity start with the phrase "there are two kinds of people", and my idea was no different, and this was it:

There are two kinds of people in the world, Kirk people and Picard people.

James Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard represent two sides of the same coin. Kirk represents a fast and loose approach to the world, a hot-shot who focused as much on seducing alien females as saving the galaxy. Picard emerged in The Next Generation as a contemplative, ideologically determined captain. Picard's greatest moments were ones where a powerful question of ethics was at hand, such as early in the series when Starfleet classified the android Data as a piece of property rather than a sentient life form. The episode brought to mind the US Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case. Picard saw past the short term implications of the case for Data as an individual, but to the long term implications for how The Federation might treat an entire race of androids in the event that Data could be successfully replicated. In the end Picard was successful in convincing the Starfleet JAG to classify Data as a sentient life form.

Jean-Luc Picard was willing to make the decision he felt was right, no matter the cost to him personally or to his ship. Picard lacked the ability to delude himself into making the easy choice. He stood by the truth and by justice even if that decision was humiliating or dangerous to himself.

I strive to be a Picard person. Most of the people I know are Kirk people. I don't mean to belittle Kirk's accomplishments because he risked his own safety to save the galaxy many times, it's just that Kirk lacked the philosophical curiosity that drives a man like Picard.

It is the optimist in me that appreciates Star Trek and so it is the optimist in me that sees the world as divided into two columns of heroes as opposed to seeing the world as Picard people and Lore people, or Borg people, or something like that.

I'm not the captain of anything. I have visited only a limited number of places on this planet and no places off of this planet. No decisions I make really affect the fate of anyone, not even my closest friends are aware of the decisions I make daily so it is almost delusional to classify myself as either a Picard or a Kirk but I firmly believe that trying to do the right thing in even the most mediocre and superficial aspects of my everyday life makes it a little easier to look in the mirror everyday even if no one knows.

Vasectomy

2009-05-20T12:37:00.000-04:00

Less than a week ago I got a vasectomy and based on the number of questions I've had to answer about it, I figured that I should write a blog explaining a little bit of my reasoning behind it and how the procedure took place.

The first and more important reason is that regardless of how much you'd like to ignore it, how much you'd like to think that it's not your problem, or how much you'd like to think that efficient lightbulbs and a Toyota Prius is going to fix it, this planet we live on is dying. We are slashing and burning the rainforest, melting the polar ice caps, we are pouring billions of tons of harmful industrial byproducts into our oceans and filling our skies with smog. You would be astounded at the sheer number of resources that it takes for you to do something as trivial as flushing the toilet.

The fact is, that nearly every human being on this planet is using an astronomical amount of resources, an amount that is unsustainable by any reasonable calculation. Even us Vegans who are doing our own small part with our lifestyle to use fewer resources (animal products use more land and water to produce than vegan options) are still using more than our fair share per person.

While minimizing the resources that we use as individuals by going Vegan is the first and easiest step to take as individuals, the more important and much much more difficult step to take is to make a commitment not to procreate. By bringing another person into the world, you are not only responsible for the resources that your child will consume, but the resources that their children will consume. Even if you lived a life that was by ecological standards totally sustainable, every thing you ever worked for would be counterbalanced by your child.

I know that people think that if you are Vegan and work to minimize your impact on the Earth, you can raise your kids to make the same decisions and that by propagating these good ideas you make your positive impact that way. But realistically who do you know that turned out the way their parents planned for them to turn out? I don't know a single person who carried on the way their parents lived their lives. Some of us tried to be better, most of us probably ended up worse.

Bringing another person into the world is just too big of a gamble. I am Vegan, Straight Edge, and I've never owned a car in my life. And if I have one child who rejects everything I believe in the same way that I rejected everything my parents believed, then my entire life will be canceled out by the actions of my child. Then as my children procreate, I'm responsible for the behavior of their children and their children.

All of these same arguments are outlined pretty well here:
Myspace Vegan Blog about Population Control

Besides the ecological arguments, I also just hate children. I hate babies, they cry, shit themselves, and ruin your life. I'm not interested in spending my nights waking up at all hours to feed and soothe a flabby ball of flesh. I'm not interested in taking my baby to restaurants to scream and cry and ruin the evenings of everyone around me. I'm not interested in spending thousands of dollars on stupid shit to take care of a child just so that it can destroy my entire lifestyle. I'm not interested in insomnia, frustration, and giving up my dreams to raise some stupid little person that can't do anything right.

I hate when people tell me stories about "cute" shit their kids did. It's never cute or funny or endearing. It's stupid and annoying and not interesting to anyone who isn't related to the little shit. Children age you, and I'm not interested in looking fifty when I'm thirty. I'm not interested in surrendering the best years of my life to being a slave to someone who will never appreciate it.

The myth of the normal American life where you fall in love with "the one" and get married in a church and settle down and have a family doesn't interest me. I don't believe in love, I don't believe in God, and I don't think having children will fulfill me at all, I think it will prevent me from doing all the things I love. While you're paying for braces and school clothes, I'll be jet-setting to Africa to dig wells and surfing in Hawaii and getting sweet tattoos and going on tour and shit, and you'll be jealous.

(Stop reading here if you don't want to read a detailed explanation of the surgery itself).

Let me preface my description of the surgery by saying that my best friend got a vasectomy two months prior at the same location and his surgery was slightly different and less painful. There are evidently a couple of ways to perform a vasectomy. My doctor chose the more painful route, which all in all wasn't quite that painful for that long.

They ask you to shave your balls beforehand, you come in and they check your blood pressure, ask you a few questions, then ask you to undress from the waist down and lie down on a table. The doctor gives you a cursory examination and then washes you with some sort of maroon coloured disinfectant. The doctor then covers you up for the most part with some papery blue sheets, with just your balls exposed.

First he gives you a numbing shot in your scrotum that numbs the outside skin, that kinda pinches but isn't bad. Then he makes a small incision and pulls the vas deferens (it's a little tube that looks like spaghetti) out through the hole just a little bit. That's the most painful part is the pulling of the vas out, it hurts so bad I almost threw up, but it only last for a little bit, it's more or less like you got kicked in the balls with a jackhammer. He then puts a numbing shot in the vas which pinches a bit and you don't feel anything after that.The doctor then cuts about 1.5 centimeters out of the vas then puts tiny titanium clamps on the severed ends, and tucks then back inside.

He then repeats the exact same procedure on the other side, for some reason though the second time it doesn't hurt as bad, I guess some of the numbing agent spreads and deadens some of the pain on the other side, but it still does hurt a bit the second time he pulls out the vas.

Depending on the size of the incision, they may or may not put stitches in the incisions. I have one stitch on the right side but none on the left side.

Afterwards they clean you and wash off the maroon stuff (which the doctor told me gets itchy if they leave it on) and help you slide on your athletic supporter -- they ask you to bring one -- and your pants (I'd suggest shorts). And give you some condoms and an ice pack and some aftercare instructions. The pain afterwards isn't bad at all, just like soreness.

I confined myself to bed for the bulk of the day after my surgery not because I was in that bad of pain, but because I was afraid that if I did exert myself I would be in a lot of pain later so I tried to take it easy. Two days after my surgery I was able to walk about two miles throughout the day to get lunch and shit, and now four days after the surgery I feel more or less fine. I stopped wearing my athletic supporter today and besides a little localised soreness where the incisions are still healing I feel completely fine.

Litmus Test Issue One

2009-03-24T08:28:00.004-04:00

My zine is finally finished. It has been over four months (off and on) of working on it, and I'm super excited about it. It is undoubtedly the largest creative project I've followed through with in its entirety. I have written one full length novel, a novella, dozens of short stories, a play in which I also starred, I performed slam poetry for a couple years, and I maintain a blog, and my best estimate would be that my zine will have more widespread exposure than all those things combined. I have already received messages asking me to send copies to London, Belgium, and New York, and it hasn't even come out yet.

I am to some degree very nervous about how it will be received. I feel confident in the project but I know that Richmond Straight Edge kids are particularly finicky. I feel good about releasing my zine at United Blood though because hopefully there will be enough out of town kids who are interested to make up for any possible disinterest from the Richmond scene.

I really wanted to do this zine because I am not very talented at too many things but I really wanted to do something that contributed to the Straight Edge scene in Richmond. I don't really play an instrument so it's not necessarily the easiest thing to contribute to the scene musically. And every attempt I've made at booking a show has failed pretty miserably so I don't even try. I try to make up for this by trying to never miss a show in Richmond, but that's nearly impossible.

I feel like the Hardcore scene in Richmond is amazing and has given me so much that I really wanted to put something back in. Eh, a zine is not necessarily the focal point of a Hardcore scene but I hope that it's entertaining and kids like it.

I just went to the printers and got a look at the proof of the zine so I could give them the okay to print the whole batch and it looks awesome. I pick them all up either Thursday evening or Friday morning.If you would like to be kept abreast of updates about the zine or would like to contact me about it, I started a Facebook page for the zine, so add it please and help me get the hype up.

Litmus Test on Facebook

Insanity

2009-03-20T08:14:00.002-04:00

It is well known to all of my closer friends, and to the luckier of my acquaintances that I am completely out of my mind. The problem with insanity though, is that it is only the more contrived, cartoonish mental illness symptoms like hallucinations (both auditory and visual) that warrant any kind of humourous consideration. Borderline personality disorder, depression, or even something as hilarious as bipolar manic depression is rarely the subject of a half-decent standup routine.

I think that there is something deeply frightening about most mental illnesses, and I think that the fear grips those who flirt with those feelings more than those of us who swim in them. For me, a lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder, as well as a smattering of various and sundry other types of nervous pathos has always possessed a real humourous quality. My life is made a lot easier when people are able to laugh with me at the problems that I occasionally deal with.

I once had a very close relationship with a woman who dealt with a psychosis so bad that she had intense hallucinations which led her to serious personal harm. I was always so scared of her hallucinations but she would always laugh about them. It baffled me but she told me that laughing about things like that was the only way to keep from despairing about it.

There's a lot of debate about the line between sanity and insanity. How much of our accepted ideas of reality are cultural inventions? I wish I had an answer. But I know that my whole life I've felt lucky to be intelligent and perceptive as well as insane. Those two qualities are the only things that save me from a best case scenario of utter social isolation, or a worst case scenario of a lifetime in an institution. I do my best to observe the behaviors of people I think of as normal and sane and try to base my decisions around them. It's not easy, second-guessing every decision, not to mention that some of the people I try to weigh my actions against (Aiden, Mary) are at times as insane as anyone else.

Over the years, I've probably been at least partially under the care of upwards of ten mental health professionals in various capacities. In the 8th grade I was mandated to speak with the guidance counselor for half an hour at the end of every school day because certain teachers were disturbed by the poetry I was writing. Looking back on the poetry I wrote in the 8th grade, I think they should have sent me to an extra English class rather than a counselor. There were bigger problems in my life at the time than thoughts of suicide. A lack of style, forced rhymes, and the overall Evanescence/Creed vibe of my poetry was a much bigger problem.

When I was 14 I had a psychologist tell my Dad that he had to remove every sharp object (knife, scissors, &c) from the house. We never went back to that psychologist. When I was 16 I saw a shrink for an extended period of time that was very tall and went out of his way to curse so as to make me feel comfortable, like he was down, or something. I liked him a lot and I felt like I was disappointing him when I told him I was still crazy, so I pretended to get better gradually and then stopped seeing him. I wasn't better then, I'm not better now, and really I'm not sure I even know what "better" means.

I've covered in a previous post that I was institutionalized for one serious suicide attempt, and I also was once before for a cry-for-help type thing.

I think that my all-time favourite encounter with anyone in the mental health industry was when I had to have a psychological evaluation for court to determine if I was a person who was in general prone to violence. The process cost me a month's rent and consisted of a face to face interview with a shrink and then about five hours of bubbling in answers on various personality tests. I couldn't really tell at first what separated these tests from the kind you take online for free. Then I realized the difference: these tests were costing me hundreds of dollars.

I received a formal evaluation in the form of a four page letter. Some interesting tidbits from it:

"Insight and judgment were observed to be above-average."

"His social relationships may be unsatisfying for him due to their superficiality and lack of intimacy."

"...he may not view societal rules to be as readily applicable to himself as to others, and he may flout convention more than the average individual."

"His emotions may be volatile, mercurial, and somewhat shallow."

"....he is much more prone to be verbally aggressive, sarcastic, or critical of others than most people..."

I think all these statements are fairly accurate.

Nope

2009-03-17T02:54:00.000-04:00

"No God can save you now" -TOG

Bullshit

2009-03-16T04:20:00.001-04:00

The concept of lying is an interesting one to me. I have always been honest to a fault. Lying has always seemed much too complicated and I've never had enough of a sense of ambition or embarrassment to need to lie about things. I've done very few things in my life that I've felt that I needed to lie and say I didn't do, and anything that I wanted people to think I did do, I'd just find a way to do. When asked a question it's always my first instinct to just say the truth. It seems so much harder to think of a believable lie and to stick with it. I don't have that kind of wit.

When people ask me what I think of their art/writing/music, I never sugarcoat it for them. Firstly because I want it to mean something when I tell someone that I do like something and I know they will believe it if I have a reputation as the guy who will tell you if he hates something, and secondly because I feel like there's very little to be learned from positive feedback. I expect positive feedback from idiots who have nothing important to say. I start from the presupposition that anyone who shows me their creative projects takes them as seriously as I take mine and would like real criticism because they would like to have the opportunity for real improvement. A better poet than I am once said "I don't learn anything when you tell me I did a good job."

Some funny instances wherein I said the exact truth by instinct:

Early one Saturday morning when I was 15 years old, my friends and I had been out making mischief the night before which resulted in my kitchen being filled with a mountain of donut and cupcake boxes.

My Dad: Where did all these cupcakes come from?

Me: We stole them from a hostess truck.

My Dad: You're grounded.

A Friday afternoon when I'm 19 years old, lying naked in bed with a girl.

Nina: Do you have sex with other girls?

Me: Yep.

Nina: WHAT!?

Earlier this afternoon, in response to a facebook wall post from a girl I had a crush on two years ago:

Julie: How do you know my sister?

Me: I tried to hit on her on facebook without knowing she was your sister.

I also tend to have a very realistic view of myself and my own abilities and also I am very astute at seeing situations from other peoples' perspective so I tend not to get as angry as easily as I could because oftentimes I can so easily see the other person's side that I don't get angry. I once got punched in the face for insulting someone's girlfriend and never held a grudge against the guy because I would have done the exact same thing if the situation were reversed.

Well, the interesting part of all this that I've always had this theory in my head that honesty was -- well for lack of a better cliche -- the best policy. I thought that having the most realistic and honest perception of myself and others would only benefit me. This was the overarching theory regardless of the fact that I often felt mentally weak as a result. There was a nagging suspicion that honesty was the realm of the unimaginative. Think of Big Fish, "All of the facts, none of the flavour". I am bothered by the fact that my favourite artists of course aren't photo-realists. They're primarily impressionists, and *gasp* surrealists. My favourite authors aren't non-fiction writers, they're novelists. So really, is judicial, journalistic, uncompromising honesty a really beneficial way to live life?

Well as I've said, it was my policy, but there was a nagging suspicion that it wasn't necessarily the best policy. And then a stumbled across something that fucked my whole world up.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Radio Lab. It's a radio show that comes on NPR, and produced at WNYC in New York. There are two hosts, Robert and Jad who take a different topic for each episode and explore the science surrounding it for an hour. They speak with experts, conduct experiments, and apply various levels of deductive and inductive reasoning. It's a very entertaining show because it is not at all dry, the commentary and production style are very flashy and fun so it is very easy to listen to.

Anyway, I have listened to every episode and while they are all brilliant enough that they force you to redefine your thinking on that particular topic, one specific episode bothered me more than others, and it was the episode called Deception. The section toward the end bothered me in particular, because it focuses on self-deception.

To paraphrase the story at the end: researchers devised a set of embarrassing questions that people would be compelled to lie about. Questions, for example, like "have you ever thought about raping someone?" Which are almost universally true but which are not pleasant to admit. They then surveyed people with the unpleasant questions and realized that people who lie to themselves (people who couldn't admit to the unpleasant questions) were generally people who were more successful in life. Surprising huh? But when you think about the level of denial that is required to take the risks and put forth the effort that is necessary for success it makes sense.

A person who thinks they can be the best swimmer will always be more confident than a person who has so-called "realistic" ideas about their capabilities. A standup comedian I like once said that (paraphrasing) "denial is necessary to be a comedian because for the first few years you have to stand up in front of an audience and bomb and then say to yourself 'that went great'".

It sorta blew my whole perception of the world apart. It's been really depressing to me that my entire mindset for my whole life has been setting me up for failure. I feel like it'd be easy to start lying to other people but I don't know that I could ever get to the point where I was lying to myself; that's a mindset that I've always had, as far back as I can remember.

So really, not only has my tendency toward honesty often have terrible social ramifications (see above) but also sets low mental standards for myself and inhibits my potential. It frustrates me that the trait I value most in people, and that I've always thought was my best quality is not necessarily a good thing. It is infuriating to me also that to some degree I equate realism and honesty with intellectual superiority. I hate to think that dumb rednecks who walk around with their chests puffed out talking about how they're hot shit are, on some level, hotter shit than me.

If you pause to think about the ramifications of this idea, you can see that more realistic people are always more unhappy. Every pessimist and cynic considers themself a realist, and to some degree that's probably true. Ignorance is truly bliss. The people who are realistic enough to realize how truly fucked the world is, to realize how little and unimportant they are, how limited their capabilities are and how short life is, are the people who are least capable of accomplishing great things. The world is literally so fucking insane that you have to be be sorta insane to make it.

There's no place in life for an honest guy. And that's the truth.

Two Thoughts

2009-03-13T21:36:00.005-04:00

One of the promises I've made to myself in 2009 is to keep this blog updated consistently. The goal is to have an update every four days for the whole year. That is ambitious but I believe I can do it.

There are two things I would like to put forth:

1. If you know of any funny stories I have that I have not written down yet, OR if you know of any topics on which I have funny opinions, let me know. Really if you just have anything you'd like me to write about, hit ya boy up with some ideas.

2. I was thinking of doing a blog-exchange. For example, have someone write an entry in my blog trying their best to imitate my style, and have me write in someone else's blog trying to imitate their style. If you maintain an interesting blog and post consistently and would like to exchange entries, hit me up.

So, email me with ideas, or propositions to exchange blog posts. Also just hit me up with some feedback, I love getting emails about my blog.

veganmac[at]gmail[dot]com

Near Death, Vol 3

2009-03-12T03:35:00.001-04:00

I feel like near death experiences are a good thing to fall back on when I lack an interesting story to tell. I have in past entries already covered the time I was nearly killed by another person, the time I was nearly killed by an animal, along with a smattering of entries where I was grievously or nearly wounded by instruments of human technology or non-animal elements in nature.

The only interesting story left to tell is the time when I nearly killed myself. A caveat: if you are made uncomfortable by discussions of suicide, or if you are a person who cares enough about me in such a way that you would be unable to laugh at the idea of my childish misery or failed attempts to end it, then read no further. I made a promise that I would try to keep this blog more readable than my other one so there will be no introspective and pensive recollections here, just the exciting and funny parts.

So when I was 18 I was in love with this girl, and instead of being in love with me back she was interested in some dumb stoner musician douchebag. I decided that rather than live without said girl, I would kill myself. At the time it made perfect sense: I wanted the girl, but I wasn't willing to turn into a stoner music snob indie-rock dbag to get her to love me back. I mean, what other option did I have? Do something else more interesting with my life and forget about her? NOT LIKELY!

So I shoplifted two bottles of sleeping pills from CVS while on my work break from the Byrd Theatre (where I worked at the time) and after work I swallowed one of them with a big glass of water. After the first bottle, before the second I realized what a stupid fucking idea I'd had. I think immediately after swallowing that last fistful of pills I had the first of many glimmers of how really uncool that girl was. As much as I like her to this day, she's a bit of a loser and I think I saw that for the first time immediately after swallowing all those pills.

I immediately called Kellan who rushed to me and immediately got into rescue mode. We called poison control and asked if maybe if I stayed awake if I could ride this thing out. The man on the phone informed us that my heart would stop if I didn't get to a hospital. Retreat was the closest hospital so we went there. The detachment of medical personnel never ceases to amaze me. I guess I am egotistical enough that I think that my attempted suicide is worthy enough for professional nurses to freak out as bad as my friends.

But really you say something like "I swallowed a lot of pills" and while you expect them to gush with sympathy, what they actually say is "Do you have the bottle with you? How many did you take?" in very cold factual tones.

I was admitted into a room and we were informed that if Kellan wasn't willing to remain with me all night then they would station a nurse or something with me. Evidently it's hospital policy not to leave an attempted suicide alone. Good policy I guess.

I have never done drugs or even been drunk in my life so what happened next was a huge surprise to me. I remember standing up to use the bathroom and falling back to the bed weak and disoriented. The pills hit me all at once, like a wave washing over me. Those of you who have been fucked up before I guess can comprehend to a better degree what I'm saying than others. My body felt completely disconnected, like it wasn't mine. The audio hallucinations started first, I heard people talking who weren't there, a lot of whispered laughter especially.

I was hooked up to lots of tubes and wires, heart monitors, oxygen monitors, IVs, etc. The doctor came in to inform me and Kellan that I needed to drink charcoal. To this day I'm not sure if it was really charcoal or something similar or something they just called charcoal. It certainly looked and tasted like ground up charcoal briquettes mixed with water. Evidently the goal is to soak up the medicine in your stomach. I am not sure if me puking it all back up is the intended effect but I definitely did that, a lot.

Around the time that I was puking my guts -- and subsequently the charcoal -- out, several things happened, my visual hallucinations got really crazy (which included Kellan being replaced by a total stranger, only later did I learn that it was Kellan there the whole time), I started talking insane nonsense, and I completely blacked out. The stories told to me by Kellan are:

1. Immediately after vomiting profusely into a trash can that Kellan was holding for the purpose, I murmured "it looks like a mouse...." and immediately stuck my hand into the trash can and wrist-deep into black vomit which Kellan then spent ten minutes wiping off of my hand.

2. I muttered a lot of stuff about Magic the Gathering, including the phrases "we're gonna bring back all the classic decks, like green creature decks."

3. I answered questions which were not asked, example: "the...the....cari....fuckin dog...dogwood.....dogwood..." to which Kellan responded "Dogwood Dell?"and I said "Yeah, that's where." and Kellan said "That's where what?" and I said "Didn't you just ask me where my old Kung Fu class used to meet?". Kellan evidently had not asked me that question.

4. I tried to formulate a plan with Kellan to break out and escape when the ambulance came in the morning to transfer me from the ER to the psych ward of St. Mary's hospital. I can't remember whether I actually tried to talk to Kellan about this plan or if it existed only in my head.

In the morning I was transported from the ER at Retreat Hospital to the psychiatric ward at St. Mary's Hospital. Nothing really interesting happened there except that I was fully convinced for the two days I was there that I had given myself permanent brain damage. I normally speak very fast and the words that I want are usually very forthcoming. I consider myself a quick witted and eloquent person but in the days following my suicide attempt I spoke very slowly and had trouble thinking of the right words. I confided in Kellan over the phone that I was sure that I had fucked my brain up. Luckily that wasn't the case.

To this day I still have not paid the hospital bills from when this incident occurred. My roommates at the time were astounded that I simply threw away all the bills I received. I think it was a matter of principle for me.

When I was released I obviously had to have a lot of talks with my close friends and explain what happened. The best response I got was from my ex girlfriend Megan who, when I told her I had tried to kill myself, said simply "well, at least you made a decision and stuck with it."

Well said Megan, well said.

The White Cloaks

2009-03-08T03:20:00.001-04:00

So the weirdest thing that ever happened to me was that I was once in a cult. Yeah, seriously. It's a long story that's got a long back story attached to it. I'll try to condense it as much as possible.

When I was in middle school and into my early years of high school I was really into nerdy shit, trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and pen-and-paper role playing games like Werewolf and Vampire. If you're not familiar with pen-and-paper RPGs, just imagine dorks playing sitting around a table playing Dungeons and Dragons, it's like that. Don't judge me, I guarantee there's some mad nerdy shit in your past too. In early high school I got to chatting with this girl and mentioned my love of RPGs and she informed me that she was a regular at a pretty interesting Vampire game on the weekends. My friend Steven and I got in on that game and through it I met some pretty interesting people.

These people were weirdo early 20's goth metal alternative people. When I was 14 they seemed really cool. In retrospect....they were fucking dorks. They were the kind of people who couldn't believe Metallica in general, but especially couldn't wrap their minds around the S&M album where Metallica collaborated with the symphony, at 14 they were my kind of people.

Over the course of several months we all became good friends with me and my friend Steven constantly competing for the favour of these new friends. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until one weeknight I was sitting up and the three regulars from our weekend RPG get together showed up at my house and invited me out to coffee at a local all night diner. I left a note for my dad and left with them. On the way there, the leader of our RPG explained to me in a very matter of fact tone that I was "an empath". My immediate reaction was to think she was talking about our weekend RPG game. "...my character in Vampire is an empath?" I replied. "No," she replied laughing "you are an empath."

I will do my best to communicate in very clear, direct, and succinct terms what was revealed to me very vaguely and gradually over the course of several weeks. The three people I was spending time with were Tetia, the leader and her boyfriend John who were both in their early twenties, and Layne who was a year or so older than me. They told me this elaborate myth that goes like this:

In the beginning of time there were twelve empath people, or rather, spiritual entities, or empath souls, or something of the sort, 2 parents and 10 children who have been alive on Earth since the Garden of Eden and who have been reincarnated in different host human bodies over and over again. That these spirits will usually lay dormant in the host human until awakened by other members of the spiritual "family" at which point the dormant empath spirit and human host mind meld into a peaceful symbiosis. It is the destiny of all of these twelve empath spirits to be united and awakened together at some point to....I dunno, prevent or bring about the apocalypse or something.

Being an empath meant having the power to detect/control emotional energy in others and also the ability to travel to the astral plane. While in the astral plane, we as empaths have the ability to take on two forms, one form is a vaguely familiar yet modified version of our Earthly bodies, always wrapped in a cloak of a colour that indicated the type of empath that we were and the other form was that of an animal, in our cases it was always some type of large cat, like a tiger or panther or something.

...I swear I'm not making this shit up.

The significant thing about me, Tetia, Layne, and John was that we were a special type of empath, called "White Cloaks", which was indicated by the colour of the garments we wore when traveling to the astral plane. All twelve "White Cloaks" were out there somewhere in the world, living as dormant spirits in human host bodies until we found them and woke them up. So the woman that I knew as Tetia was actually "Zelona", the spiritual mother of the spiritual empath living inside me, whose name was "Jonas". John was "Matthias", Zelona's spiritual empath husband and spiritual empath to me and Layne, who as "Qualinqua".

....are you tripping the fuck out yet?

The ultimate goal was of course to find the other 8 members of our "family" and wake them up so as to fulfill the prophecy, or our destiny, or some epic shit like that. The spirits of the other White Cloaks could be living in anyone, octogenarians, babies, and we had to find them simply by our spiritual "sense" that they were nearby. That is how the three of them found me.

There were other empaths that we associated with who were our allies, green cloaks and red cloaks. They were really just other nu-metal dorks. Being an empath usually meant driving around listening to Metallica and doing "energy circles" and "traveling to the astral plane" which really meant sitting in a circle with our eyes closed and holding hands and pretending that our souls were somewhere else and then ten minutes later describing all the cool shit we had done while we were having our out-of-body experiences.

...I know what you're thinking, did I really believe all this wacky shit and if so, how fucking stupid was I? The answers are yes, and very.

How could I believe such an insane story? Well there are several factors to be considered. Firstly, in my defense I would like to make the contention that what I believed was no weirder than what your average Christian believes, it was just more nu-metal and on a smaller scale.

Honestly I 100% feel that I was brainwashed, which honestly was no big accomplishment on their part. I was lonely and uncool enough that I think people could have brainwashed me by accident simply by asking me to hang out with them. I was so miserable that I would have believed anything that allowed me to have a social group that desired my company and respected me. The fact that they were older was a huge perk.

The weirdest part of all this was not the way that I behaved toward my cult/family/fellow white cloaks, but the behaviors I developed toward my normal friends. I had been sworn to secrecy regarding all this business so I was constantly coming up with elaborate lies and explanations for why I called a 22 year old black woman "Mother" and why I was obsessed with long hair (one of our rules was a Samsonesque belief that spiritual and personal power came from hair and as such we were forbade to cut ours and frowned upon loved ones cutting theirs) and why this random girl from my school would call the house and ask for "Jonas".

It's hard to really nail down a solid timeline for this. From start to finish I know that it lasted under a year. It was definitely enough time however to do irrevocable damage to nearly every single one of my personal relationships with friends and family. On Christmas of that year I bought presents for my cult family and none for my real family. Looking back on it all it seems even crazier than I remember it being at the time. My best friends at the time remember watching me slowly get crazier and crazier and more and more isolated from everyone else. It was a frightening time in my life.

Over time the mythology began to fall apart. It turned out that Tetia was severely bipolar with psychosis that bordered on schizophrenia, John cheated on Tetia with Layne, and the "family" fell apart, John and Layne immediately announced that they no longer believed in the crazy lies that Tetia had convinced us all of. I maintained a relationship with Tetia for long afterwards, slowly breaking it to her that I also no longer believed.

I did my best to make it up to my loved ones, but I was always too embarrassed to tell the full story, and to this day only a handful of people know it in any real detail.

After all this, Tetia ended up dating my father and moving in with us, then after they broke up she married a wigneck ex-con and I was a groomsman in their wedding and gave a toast at the reception. The wigneck ex-con later overdosed on heroin and I more or less lost track of Tetia and everyone else. The advent of social networking sites has brought these people closer to being back in my life than I will ever be comfortable with.

Below is some sidewalk chalk art I drew in New York while I was in the cult. I felt it was worth taking a picture of. It says ZMQJ, Zelona, Matthias, Qualinqua, Jonas.

2009-03-04T03:03:00.000-05:00

I feel like I have learned more about "love" in the past seven months than I have in my entire life prior. Primarily what I have learned is that love is complete bullshit.

My mind works by hyper-focusing on certain topics, ideas, or questions and working through them gradually over several months. I will go on a bender where religious questions are the only things that interest me, and I spend all my time thinking about them or talking about them to people. Sometimes it's questions of the distribution of resources, pragmatism, the nature of good and evil, the importance of art or self-preservation, or whatever other idea is stuck with me at any given moment. Right now I'm on a kick where I'm trying to deprogram all I've ever learned about love from popular culture.

This is especially hard for someone who up until now has been in love with at least one person at a time from age 10 until age 23. Let's make a list: Jessica, Erin, Liz, Ami, Rachel, Megan, Roshelle, Carly, Anna, Brittany. Did I forget anyone? Jesus...

I'm not sure what exactly started me on this train of thought. It may have been the dissolution of my most recent relationship, or it may have been watching the dissolution and coalescence of my best friend's relationship. But I decided several things:

1. That Romantic Love (hereafter referred to simply as Love) is by no means an intrinsic human emotion and is a fallacy created by a popular culture obsessed with finding distractions for people so that they don't do anything important or productive with their lives.

2. That the entirety of what people think of as their convictions about love come from magazines, movies, and R&B song lyrics that they have absorbed and internalized through a vague cultural osmosis over their lifetimes.

3. That the worst mass opiates are A. Institutionalized religion, B. Chemical intoxication, C. Our cultural obsession with Love. If we could eliminate all three the world would be a fucking Utopia.

4. That Love is a nearly universal idea among adults and it is so because it is the single most juvenile and ignorant emotional impulse. Our idea of love is taking a childish and possessive instinct and try to make it into a selfless and noble cause.

To be honest however, I am floundering as to how to put these newfound convictions into practice. The ideas grew on me gradually and made me more and more disgusted with my never-ending obsession with the opposite sex. In the beginning these ideas made me disgusted with sex and women in a way that usually only happens when I listen to 108.

But I realized that it wasn't really sex or affection that really disgusted me so much as it was the preoccupation with the opposite sex to the extent that it didn't allow for any other activities. I then thought that the solution was to avoid commitments, emotional investment, and relationships. I then realized that I had been doing that for the past 7 months and I still wasted too much of my time with women. I think that while I certainly wasn't in love with anyone, I was certainly in love with sex to an equally unhealthy degree.

These are all issues I'm struggling with right now. But truly it's all very unfunny and not at all interesting to read about. So in an attempt to salvage this blog entry let me share some stories of my misadventures in love.

On two occasions in my life I have tried to convince girls to run away with me. The first occasion was when I was 17. My Father had recently died and for some reason that still remains unclear to me, the government wrote me a check for several thousand dollars. I did everything in my power to convince the girl I was dating at the time to run away to Prague with me. In my 17 year old brain Prague was the most romantic place on Earth. I was 100% certain that it would be a perfect plan. In hindsight -- and with the knowledge of how my eventual first trip to Europe at age 20 actually went -- it would have been an utter fucking catastrophe.

I do not however think that this excuses that girl from being horribly unimaginative, boring, and utterly unromantic. Nearly every truly romantic plan in history has been an absolute disaster. Nearly every person in Western culture holds onto Romeo and Juliet as their paradigm of perfect romance -- just the names Romeo and Juliet are synonymous with being in love -- and their entire story was one giant debacle that ended not only with their love never coming to fruition but also with the death of them and their best friends. True love must mean failure.

The second time was a few months ago. I met a girl that probably would have wound up on that list in the third paragraph if I had met her two years ago. Realizing that we shared an antipathy toward cold weather, and being the impulsive person that I am -- once again with thousands of dollars in my bank account thanks to a recently defunct plan for a trip to Europe -- I proposed the idea that we run away to Honolulu in two weeks. Once again I spent the entirety of a night trying to convince her to leave; once again I offered to cover all travel expenses in exchange for her company. Once again I was rejected.

I then used that money for a week-long trip to London a month later that ended up being the best week of my life. But once again I refuse to make allowances for girls and their lack of romantic inclinations just because things worked out in the end.

I realize that the majority of people like to read in books and see in movies shit that they would never actually do in real life and it makes me sad. I know that my life hasn't been the most exciting and that I've not done a lot of the things I say I will and know I should, but I can definitively say that I have never turned down an invitation. I may not have taken initiative on things but I definitely never turned down an opportunity where someone else extended the invitation and agreed to take the initiative.

Jesus Moshes

2009-02-28T11:19:00.000-05:00

On February 24th, President Barack Obama delivered an address to a joint session of congress. He talked about the oft-maligned economic stimulus package and offered up his usual bountiful helping of zealous optimism. As is the general custom, someone from the opposing party had to deliver some kind of rebuttal and alert to the public to their stance on the issues raised by the president.

The person tapped by the Republican party to do the honours was Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. I recently was fired from my job that allowed me to listen to the news all day so I may be a little behind on current events, but who the fuck is Bobby Jindal? Well after listening to as much as I could of his joke of a rebuttal (called a disaster by fellow Republicans), I decided to do a tiny bit of homework on this guy and try to dig up something funny enough to be a blog entry and wow....

I have been an atheist for only about six months or so now and I'm still amazed and embarrassed by the shit that Christians do now that I have an outsider's perspective on it all. When I was a Christian I was absolutely horrified by the bat-shit insane things that fellow Christians believe. The concept of "Spiritual Warfare" is one of those aforementioned bat-shit insane things. It is a common belief in many fundamentalist evangelical Christian circles that demons -- FUCKING DEMONS -- live on Earth and possess and attack humans and try to thwart God. The idea is like a cross between Paradise Lost, The Exorcist, and Lord of the Rings. This is an example of the kind of Christianity that Bobby Jindal follows.

I mean, as if Christianity wasn't a stupid enough doctrine when practiced with some kind of moderation, pragmatism, and reservation, this guy, an elected official holding executive office believes in some dark ages bullshit where he and his fellow alumni of Brown University once prayed a Demon out of a girl.

That's right, Bobby Jindal not only participated in an exorcism, but wrote about it candidly in the New Oxford Review in an article called "Beating a Demon". You have to pay a buck and a half to read the full version on their website, but I got that joint for you for free ninety nine:

"Beating a Demon" by Bobby Jindal, from the December 1994 Oxford New Review.

This man is running a state of four and a half million people and he believes that women can be punished by God with cancer and demon possession for such offenses as "intense flirting" (Jindal, "Beating a Demon", p. 8-9). What does that say about American culture that he was elected by a majority of people in his state? What does it say about our collective intellectual capabilities that a man with more political power than me actually believes that cancer can be prayed away, leaving a person "purified"? (Jindal, p. 9).

I think that maybe the reason my life is going nowhere right now is that I lack fundamentalist religious credentials, as that's evidently the fast track to wealth and power in America.

So the next time I go in for a job interview I'm gonna start off by telling my prospective boss that Archangel Gabriel bestowed upon me a flaming sword and commanded me to search out demons on Earth and destroy them to reclaim the Holy Grail for the Kingdom of the Lord or some other King Arthur sounding shit.

Near Death, Vol 2

2009-02-26T02:43:00.001-05:00

Okay. I'm very very sorry that I haven't updated since last year. I really had been rather busy working on a zine (Litmus Test issue #1 coming out at the end of March). But it is rather unforgivable that I should neglect my blog to such a degree.

So here is an update, another funny story about a time I nearly died.

When I was 16 years old, I had long ugly hair, a terrible fashion sense, an irrational temper, and an inferiority complex that would embarrass Napoleon Bonaparte. I also had a girlfriend who - for one reason or another - was always causing me to storm off in a juvenile temper tantrum. Usually the situation ran something like this: we'd be at a party, or some get-together of friends, and I would perceive -- rightly or wrongly -- that Megan was flirting, I would sulk and when she refused to notice my sulking, I would make a scene of storming out and walking home, sometimes in the rain, other times in the snow, usually over distances of over three or four miles. Such was the pattern of our relationship.

Well, shortly after I turned 17 without shedding any of the accoutrements from the aforementioned list, my life was in total disarray. My Father was dying of cancer, my relationship was an all time "storming out of places" high and at the end of October I agreed to go on a trip with my girlfriend and our counterpart couple to hike to the top of a mountain. For some reason I was really excited to hike this mountain, in hindsight I realize my folly, which was that when you are the kind of guy who storms out of places over petty arguments with your girlfriend, you never want to position yourself -- with your girlfriend -- in a place that is inconvenient or even dangerous to storm out of. (this is what we in the literary world call "foreshadowing")

So we hiked the mountain, all the way to the top. Here's a new fact to keep in mind: my entire life my biggest fear has been heights. A fear of heights however is an interesting and complex fear, because it relies on your very human and very flawed ability to mentally calibrate where exactly "the ground" ends and "heights" begins. For example, you could right now be sitting on ground that is - geographically speaking - very high above sea level, but you perceive yourself as being on "the ground". When I hike a mountain, my vertigo doesn't set in because I perceive myself as being on "the ground". But move to the edge of a plateau or cliff-ish rock formation and I'm Rubberlegs McGee, even though the change was a purely horizontal one. Make sense?

Well, when the five of us (me and my girlfriend, my friend and his girlfriend, and my friend's mother and youth minister from our church who had driven us) reached the top of the mountain, we were doing the majesty of nature euphoric survey of the landscape when the other couple and my girlfriend climbed a narrow sort of rock formation that to me seemed like the difference between solid ground and being in a crashing airplane, even though the actual vertical distance was only maybe six or seven feet.

I stood at the bottom and pleaded with my girlfriend briefly to come down and join me because I was too afraid to climb up to meet her. She refused and I stormed off.

Storming off on a mountain however is not like storming out of a house party or a target or a movie theatre, in that storming off a mountain is a confusing and dangerous undertaking for someone who has never in his life been in anything resembling wilderness. In my rage I wandered off the clearly marked trail and ran off down the steep mountain into the forest. I was walking for a couple of hours before it dawned on me that not only was I not headed back toward the touristy parking lot campground area side of the mountain, I was in fact heading toward an area where animals lived. Not animals like I perceive animals -- "animals" in my life being synonymous with either "pets" or "possums" -- but wild animals, animals who have never been taught the hierarchy of humans over non-humans, animals that don't know the rules, animals that could conceivably kill me.

When I realized this, every log looked like a bear, every twig looked like a snake, every leaf looked like some bloodthirsty owl waiting for the sun to go down so it could rip my eyes out of my face. I calmly decided that I couldn't really be that far from the trail, so I called out a cautious "HELLO!" and received no answer but my own echo. I trudged on a bit further "HELLO!?! HELP!!" After another ten minutes of wandering in the absolute wrong direction, I stopped to ponder the hopelessness of my situation and glanced down and saw a snake. And this wasn't a figment of my imagination twigsnake, it was a real, honest to god water moccasin. I was well within its striking distance (1/3 the length of its body, thanks National Geographic!) and it had not yet, as it were, struck.

My heart was beating as fast as.....well as something really fast, but my initial three steps backward were so slow that I could have tricked the motion detectors in that really tense scene in the first Mission Impossible movie. After that I sprinted back whence I came as fast as....damn I'm no good with similes tonight. Needless to say I ran like man who fears for his life.

My initial hope had been to find a way back to the parking lot area by wandering aimlessly in the wilderness like a fool. My near-death at the fangs of my mortal enemy the water moccasin had opened my eyes to the fact that the only way for me to return to where I came would be to ascend the mountain once again and get to the very top where I could regain the trail. When I reached the top I ran into an outdoors-ey nature type hiker lady who helped me to identify the snake as a water moccasin and accompanied me while I followed the trail back to the parking lot area.

I was just getting to the bottom of the mountain when I encountered my friend's mother who had only just then begun to re-hike the mountain to search for me. It is a telling fact about this story that I was gone for over five hours before the search for me had even begun, and it was my friend's mother, and not my girlfriend or friends who went to look for me. I was in a sad emotional state, sweaty, exhausted, weak, terrified, and crying when I finally got back into the car. No one had really been worried about me.

Whoops! You're a douchebag! Vol. 2.5

2008-11-12T12:11:00.006-05:00

This will be a very truncated post wherein I talk about how much I hate a celebrity. I should hope that my blog doesn't become a sort of one-trick pony so this will be the last post of this nature. This concerns breeding. You know, that disgusting practice wherein one dirty, bacteria covered, slimy organism rubs against another slimy organism until a third even grosser, uglier, more disgusting organism emerges, covered in blood and various fluids and screams and shits itself for three years straight and then starts asking for money.

Breeding is the worst thing you can do for the planet. The human race is the problem and bringing more people into the world is only going to exacerbate every calamity we're bringing upon the Earth. If the goal is living sustainably, refusing to breed should be number one priority, followed by going Vegan. If you want more information on this issue, read this essay on the Myspace Vegans Blog. It sums everything up nice and neat.

These two issues bring me to hopefully the last celebrity douchebag I'll have to call out, Jennifer Connelly. According to this website, Jennifer Connelly was Vegan for years until a pregnancy craving broke her will. What a dumb piece of shit. It's a shame that women don't die during childbirth anymore. Modern medicine is bullshit.

Whoops! You're a douchebag! Vol. 2

2008-11-11T19:42:00.003-05:00

Based on the amount of comments I got on my Travis Barker post, it's evident to me that often times a person won't even know how big of a douchebag they are until I put them down on that tip. Acting in the interest of the public good is a well known part of my personality, so this post will be a public service announcement in the vein of the crying Indian. It might be unpleasant to see, but it will benefit us all in the end. Truly.

Should you talk to the cops? Chapter one: nah, nah nah nah.

For everyone who's not aware, the cops are straight up bullshit. No one should ever call the cops for anything ever. Here's a fuckin how-to manual for dealing with the fucking police. If the cops ask you if you saw shit, say "no sir, I didn't see anything." If the cops ask you if you did shit, say "no sir, I didn't do anything."If the cops ask you if some shit happened, say "no sir, nothing happened." It's as simple as that. Not only is it best for your punk/thug/anarchist reputation, it's best for society in general. If you are unwilling or incapable of going and dealing with the problem yourself, just let it go. When you involve the cops you involve a bunch of convoluted machinery that's just best left out of the situation. If you took a beating, either go give a beating or let it go.

Subcultures are not trading cards.

I'm young and just as confused as the next dude, so please don't label me a hater, but some of y'all need to stop and look at your identities and do some fact-checking. Trust me, I'm not insulting any particular group, nor am I trying to tell anyone to be anything other than what they feel in their hearts they are. I'm trying to look out for you, and I'm trying to keep you from looking as dumb as I definitely have looked at times. It's not necessarily hypocrisy that I'm warning against, because that is at least an ideological conflict and has some intellectual weight to it. I'm talking about what I'm deeming "subcultural surface conflicts", which are more about you looking silly than really violating a moral code. For example, you probably are not "a working class skinhead" if you wear gigantic diamonds and crank dat soulja boy in the club with strippers. There's very little that's working class skinhead about that. There's a lot of room for blending cultures to fit who you are, but you really gotta watch some of the overlap.

Jesus moshes.

Very recently I emancipated my soul from the clutches of the bizarre tribal superstitions that make up modern religion. I am certainly not going to tell you that you shouldn't be religious, but I have some serious advice for Christians. Be aware that you are sharing your religion with some of the corniest, wackest, most wonderbread, dumbshit motherfuckers on the planet. So when you are speaking about your faith, be aware that people are waiting for you to spout some of those stupid slogans that Christians are known for. If you aren't capable of speaking about your faith in an intelligent and mature way, you should just keep quiet about it, seriously. I suggest you look into some of the writings of Bonhoeffer or Schweitzer or CS Lewis if you want to be able to discuss theology without sounding like a cult member or a motivational speaker. If you find yourself compelled to ever use the phrase "Jesus Saves" in any circumstance, stop, breathe deeply, count to ten, and find different words.

Reading is FUNdamental.

There are probably no people on this planet more awful than non-readers. I suggest you pick up a book right now before someone notices.

News Flash: Slavery was a BAD thing.

This is mention number two of Soulja Boy in this post. This is no coincidence. He and his fans are the biggest tools you'll ever meet. Popularizing a half-ass dance among white college kids is about as important of an accomplishment as tying your shoes correctly. Also, if you're famous and you're not paid to be sarcastic and funny, maybe glorifying slavery isn't the most culturally sensitive remark to make in public, especially if you're black. But it undoubtedly is a great way to show your lack of historical knowledge and flaunt your overrated ignorance.

Bad Mood

2008-11-10T23:22:00.002-05:00

When I revived this blog, I vowed to you - my readers - that I would do my best to keep it interesting, and if I am lucky to any degree, also somewhat funny. The difficulty therein is this: that I am a cranky sonofabitch and more often than not I am in a foul mood and feel like ripping someone's head off.

There are people who can make anger funny and make a bad mood entertaining. I don't think I am one of them. Comedians like Lewis Black do it professionally. Aiden can do it at times. I'm terrible at it. I try as best I can not to take myself so seriously when I'm grouchy and I try to open up windows to laugh with me about the overall silliness and self-indulgence of being in a bad mood but for some reason I just can't deliver as well as I would like. I can either open the window to laugh at me, or close the window entirely.

Right now I'm in a pretty good mood so in the interest of good humour and general merriment, I'd like to make a list of absurd things I do when I'm in a bad mood:

1. Bedroom mosh to Hatebreed/Converge/Ceremony.

2. Come up with tattoo ideas that would ruin my ability to have any professional job (hand/neck).

3. Post blog entries accusing everyone who isn't Vegan and/or Straight Edge of being subhuman.

4. Punch babies.

I Love Angie So Much

2008-10-28T12:53:00.000-04:00

LOL @ Angie's New Blog Post.

Take a Swing at the World

2008-10-28T12:13:00.000-04:00

A week ago was Have Heart, Ceremony, Let Down, Swamp Thing. One of the best shows I've been to in a while. So many people X'ed up is always an awesome sight. If anyone hasn't checked out Let Down, get on that shit right now:

http://www.myspace.com/letxdown

Swamp Thing played a good set, Let Down was awesome. I hadn't seen them since they played the Floorpunch reunion in Philadelphia. I kicked a table so hard during their set that I was limping everywhere after the show. Amazing how stuff doesn't hurt when you're in the moment but kills you afterwards. I had to get my shift covered the next day at the restaurant 'cause my leg was so fucked.

Ceremony stole the show completely in my opinion. The new record is fucking incredible, get that if you don't have it already. During their last song Brett did a flip off the stage and his boot came down and hit me in the jaw. I went out like a light. Luckily Adrian was behind me and caught me. I've never been knocked out at a show before, it was so disorienting. Check out the gnarly fucking bruise I got from the impact.

Have Heart's set was fucking cool. I love that Pat has cool shit to say on stage. Also the new songs sound WAY better live than they do recorded. It was such a fun set.

Photos from the show:

www.flickr.com/photos/funsizehardcore

and

www.flickr.com/photos/curtisphotography

Near Death, Vol 1.5

2008-10-23T00:29:00.004-04:00

In a previous blog entry, I documented one of several almost-near-death experiences I've had. I feel like one of the best parts of that story however is that about 15 hours after I had someone stick a gun in my face, I was in the worst bike crash of my life. It sorta seemed like that day was determined to kill me at any cost.

The earlier events took place about five in the morning, then about nine pm that same day, I'm riding my bicycle up Laurel St toward the dorms to meet up with the nurse girls and a car - a green civic if I remember correctly - stopped at the corner of Albemarle but didn't look both ways and took off at a breakneck pace and smashed into me.

It should be noted that I'm not positive about the legal nature of the situation here. The driver hit me when he had a stop sign, but I was riding the wrong way on a one way street. But since it is legal to ride a bike on sidewalks I could have in theory been riding up the sidewalks, or I could have just been a pedestrian for that matter. Either way I don't think either of us was in a very easily defensible position legally speaking.

Anyway, when the car made impact I was tossed in the air and went in a very different direction than my bike. Someone with a better grasp of physics should give me some idea of how the hell that could happen. I hit the ground and laid there for a moment to get a handle on what just happened. These are the thoughts that I can grip immediately:

1. Fuck that hurt.

2. I have no idea where my right shoe is.

3. I can't see my bike.

4. I landed on my arm and my tattoo is bleeding. I really hope I don't need a touchup.

5. The car stopped.

So I stand up and realize that my leg is also really hurt. I look around and spot my bike, both of my wheels looking like tacos. I pick up the heavy chain I use as a lock and march (i.e. hobble) over to the car and start to scream for everyone to get out and fight me. I'm beyond livid at this point and when no one gets out of the car I reel back with my chain and smash out the back passenger window. At this point I've assessed that there are four people in the car, three dudes two girls. The girl in the car starts screaming because I've smashed the window of someone who has nothing to do with the actions of the driver.

I'm still screaming "everyone get the fuck out of the car" as I walk around the car to the driver's side to smash out his window and pull him out of the car to beat his ass. I reel back to take out his window and I realize that the guy driving is a casual acquaintance. His name is Eric. So I pause.

"Eric?"

"Josh?"

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine.....sorry about your window."

"Eh...yeah..."

"Do you want to get the police involved? I don't really."

"Me neither."

Needless to say the whole exchange was fucking awkward. I figured that I'd deal with my wheels and he'd deal with his window and we'd call it even. If I'd had some money I'd have helped him out but I was dead broke.

I eventually found my shoe and some nice girl banged my wheels on the ground until they were - just barely - able to be ridden. I made it to the dorms and the nurse girls bandaged up all my wounds which were painful as fuck once my adrenaline wore off. My tattoo was fine though.

I ended up needing a whole new bike because my frame was bent as well as my wheels. Pretty shitty.

Whoops! You're a douchebag!

2008-10-18T12:56:00.001-04:00

I know I'm a little late on this news, but seeing as my hand's been fucked up for a little while (see previous entry "Pistol Bitch Lifestyle") I haven't had a chance to throw in my two cents.

According to Music News Dot Com, Travis Barker has given up Vegetarianism to "help him recover" from his plane crash injuries. First and foremost, is even God in on this MTV celebrity worship bullshit so that when a plane crashes, everyone who's not famous dies and the two celebrities aboard live? What the fuck kind of shit is that?

Truth be told however, since he was only Vegetarian and not Vegan the article doesn't surprise me. Anyone who sits on the animal-rights fence for that long (one site says 25 years) obviously has the moral conviction of a fucking pigeon.

It never ceases to amaze me the logic that people use to eat meat. "Oh, my doctor said I'd be healthier". Even if anyone could convince me of that bullshit (no fucking way), I still don't see where your health is more important than the life of any sentient thing on this planet. People seem to think that eating meat is a personal sacrifice that they make or un-make at their leisure depending on circumstances. Eating meat is morally reprehensible behavior and it is your responsibility to stop doing it. It is not a matter of your preference or a flight of fancy that compels it, it is mandate. All human activity is inter-dependence, cooperation is the foundation of human society and thus morality, when your actions destroy lives, the environment, and your own body, it is imperative and non-negotiable that you cease.

The value that we place on morality is honestly pretty disgusting to me. Our culture and our ideas are so egocentric that we expect everything to enhance our lives and make them more pleasant, regardless of the fact that every bit of "freedom" and convenience was purchased by someone else's self-sacrifice, who put their morals before their self-interest. I honestly don't believe that eating meat will make you heal faster, and I think that anyone who believes that might be mentally handicapped. BUT let's say for a minute that meat was healthier for you, can you honestly say that a moderate increase in health is worth the lives of billions of animals and the fate of the natural environment?

How many people in history have made a difficult stand and put their lives at risk for something that they knew was right. Bonhoeffer didn't stand down in the face of danger, he put his life at risk for what he believed and died for it. He didn't say "well, it'd be considerably more healthy for me if I didn't do this."

As it stands, Veganism is healthier for you overall, doctors who get grants from the animal industry (one of the richest in the world) will always say what the money wants them to say, killing animals is always wrong, if you put your health before your conscience I'll take both from you, if Travis Barker cared about his health that much he'd quit smoking, Blink 182 was better before he was the drummer, and honestly now that he's eating meat again all I can say is that I'm sorry he didn't die in the crash.

Pistol Bitch Lifestyle

2008-10-15T11:59:00.007-04:00

Sorry I haven't been updating. My hand's fucked up and it's not easy to type.

Check out Pistol Bitch:

http://www.myspace.com/pistolbitchrva

Also download their demo:

http://www.divshare.com/download/5571744-22d

Rats d'Eglise

2008-10-11T21:52:00.003-04:00

Mike Rennie works wonders. Best day in a while. Getting tatted and being bad.

Pride

2008-10-11T04:04:00.002-04:00

If you're not Straight Edge, fuck you.

Good Advice

2008-10-06T22:42:00.004-04:00

Yo, I figured just as a public service to the internet community, I would just hit you off with some general good advice. This ain't no super esoteric advice, or specialized in any way really, it's just some helpful tips you might find useful in your life. Check it out.

1. If you're driving, and you are approaching a red light, go ahead and take your foot off the gas and kinda coast up to it. You save fuel like that and it makes for easier, more gradual stops.

2. Don't wrap your headphones around your ipod, ever. Wrapping the headphones around it will over time bend the inside jack for your headphones and they'll stop working. Apple will not fix it for you unless you pay a lot of money.

3. Get tattooed by Mike Rennie at Absolute Art in Richmond, Va. Dude rules. 804-355-8001

4. Stop eating meat. You'll feel better physically, you'll smell better and in general people that you want to find you sexy will find you sexy.

5. When in doubt about a course of action, go with your gut instinct. If you don't know what your gut instinct is, go with whatever option is more punk. Nothing is worse in life than indecision, it's better to make a bad decision than no decision.

6. Only buy Macintosh computers. They're just better.

7. Don't ever acquire any of these things: a car, a dog, a cat, a couch, a moped. There are different reasons for each of these things, but just do your best not to own any of them. Your life will be easier.

8. Read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn and Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. They're very easy reads and on a very basic level they will make you more interesting to talk to you at social gatherings.

9. Don't make friends with anyone that you see cry within 24 hours of meeting them.

10. In general, if Aiden advises it, it's generally a good idea. I can't think of a single instance in which that dude has ever steered me wrong. My advice is to follow his advice whenever it's offered.

Blog Cry

2008-10-05T13:30:00.004-04:00

If there's one thing in this world I know a lot about, it's breakups. The weird thing about breakups though is that no amount of knowledge will ever save you from completely fucking it up. You'd think that after something like ten years of extravagantly difficult breakups I'd know enough to see most of these curveballs coming. But wrong, no amount of knowledge ever helps you out.

So, having acknowledged that there's no "How-To" manual on how to gracefully navigate the most ungraceful and unnavigable of human situations, there are a few pieces of information that can still be useful. I would argue that there is no situation common in everyday interpersonal interactions that is more difficult to deal with than a breakup (barring bizarre accidental deaths and/or injuries). Therefore I will not try to tell you how to deal with these inevitable circumstances, but hopefully knowing that they will occur will give you the time necessary to make wise choices about your reactions.

Here, in hopes of keeping you from making rash decisions, is a list of things that undoubtedly will happen when you break up.

1. Your ex will date someone that will make you question your own self-worth. This is a subject worth discussing in depth, but you can tell a lot about yourself by who your ex dates immediately after you. Like alcohol on a cut it always hurts at first, but will eventually give you valuable insight into yourself. Is this person like you? Unlike you? Smarter? More attractive? Is this person a complete toolbag? What does this say about you?

2. The internet is your new worst enemy. Even if you don't want to, you will know everything that your ex is doing on any given day. Your ex will sign up for all kinds of sites that he/she was never interested in before. You will know every URL and will lurk impulsively. How could you not? He/She now has a myspace, facebook, xuqa, xanga, friendster, livejournal, deadjournal, blogspot, flickr, they're on hotornot, myface, mychurch, craigslist, twitter, and youtube.

3. Your sense of humour goes off a fucking cliff. Nothing you say will be funny for six months.

4. Your friends will seem cooler, nicer, more interesting and way more fucking down than they have in a long time. You wonder why you ever stopped chilling with them when you had a significant other.

5. You'll find yourself with more money than you have had in a long time. Your eyes will bug the fuck outta your head the first week you pay all your bills and have money left over that you don't have any particular plans for.

Good unlikely breakup songs:

Jay-Z "Song Cry", American Nightmare "AM/PM", The Pogues "The Leaving of Liverpool", Tom Waits "Blue Valentines", Suicide File "Now Lie in It", Cat Stevens "Wild World", Bayside "Carry On", Ruiner "Adhering to Superstition".

The Vice Presidential Debate

2008-10-02T22:57:00.005-04:00

I started to say that I didn't want to write a super political entry, but fuck it, did anyone else feel like they were watching the retarded kid get picked on at recess tonight? Seriously Sarah Palin looked terrified and her voice trembled the entire debate. Admittedly I've not always been the biggest Joe Biden fan but the debate tonight really won me over. Dude was cool, calm, and collected. The debate was completely one-sided. Palin barely even answered most questions. She sounded like she was stringing catch phrases together with no regard for tone, diction, or cadence.

The fact that Sarah Palin even mentioned equal rights for women made me laugh though, since when did being anti-choice and pro-rape make you a feminist? I didn't spend as much time laughing as expected, because while I do believe she is evil, it really was pathetic watching her try to debate.

I think that John McCain should have gone with his first pick for VP and chosen Lauren Caitlin Upton. Shit, half of the debate I felt like I was listening to Miss Teen South Carolina anyway.

"I personally believe that, everywhere like the Iran and Pakistan, everywhere like such as."

The retard even said "nook-yoo-lerr", Jesus Christ.

On a more positive note, I'm gonna mosh so fucking hard when Obama's elected.

Obama, the Pro-Mosh Candidate

Living Well is The Best Revenge

2008-10-02T22:52:00.000-04:00

"Living Well is the best revenge."

-George Herbert

So in marked contrast to earlier posts that were of a decidedly gloomy, forlorn, melancholy, and sometimes even morbid tone. I would like to shed some light upon the fucking awesomeness of my life.

There remains the fundamental issue with me being a huge bipolar prick however. When I'm bummed, I'm intolerable in my self-pity. When I'm elated, I'm intolerable in my cockiness and braggadocio. So no matter which way the seratonin pendulum swings, I'm a pretty awful dude to be around. With that in mind, I'd like to elaborate on some of the better parts of my life right now.

Being single. Need I say more? I'm done being bummed about it and the fucking tiger's on the prowl. No need to dwell anymore there.

Being Richmond internet famous for a week or so is cool. Everyone knows I'm big on public attention, be it positive or negative so I was excited when someone posted an ad on Craigslist claiming to have seen me making out with a drunk 16 year old at a dance party. LOLz. The girl was a 21 year old childhood friend and definitely not drunk. But any publicity is good publicity, so this ad definitely got me excited:

x JOSH NOJOB x - w4m
Date: 2008-09-26, 12:21PM EDT
I SAW YOU AT THE 534 DANCE PARTY..YOU WERE MAKING OUT WITH A GIRL THAT LOOKED ABOUT 16 AND SHE WAS OBVIOUSLY WASTED. COOOOOL

And when you have a name that people know, once it gets posted once, it gets followed up by lots more ads. So for a week or so now I've involved myself in a pretty consistent craigslist missed connections war. Many of the best posts were flagged and removed, but some highlights include:
"this dude is a total piece of shit. you've got serious, serious issues fella. get over yourself scum bag."
"total babe. Josh Nojob, let me give you a blowjob. "
"Josh NoJob would probably win in a fight, but that dude is fucking annoying and his beliefs are ass backwards."
"not all straightedge kids are like Josh NoJob and the people that hang out acting all super tough."
but hands down the best post was the tragically poetic ad that included the lyric (I'm paraphrasing it because it was flagged and removed):
"Josh NoJob is just another lonely tree in a forest of Straight Edge failures, all on the wall in Shafer rustling their branches as loud as they can to drown out the inevitable sound of reality."

Holy shit being internet famous rules.

I'm not as broke as usual, and I'm starting to save up for my trip to Barcelona with Van in March. This is undoubtedly the best part of my life right now. I'm stoked out of my fucking mind to go to Barcelona. Aiden and Brendan are moving there in January so Van and I are going to visit for a week March 7th-15th. I should have my airfare money in two weeks then that leaves me until March to get up spending money. I'm trying to live like a king while I'm there, eat well, get tattooed, and chill hard. It's gonna be fucking awesome.

Practicing bass, going to a lot of shows, and being social. Had a blast at the past few shows, especially the Ruiner/Pulling Teeth/Government Warning/The Ergs/Sick Fix show in Maryland. So many good bands I couldn't leave off mentioning. But really the fucking show of the century isn't until April. TRIAL IS PLAYING A FUCKING REUNION. There's already talk of renting Chevy vans to get everyone to Chicago. Chitown here I come!

Current playlist:

Jets to Brazil, Jawbreaker, Tom Waits, The Game, Biggie.

Annapolis

2008-09-29T02:44:00.001-04:00

My dad died of cancer when I was 17 years old. When I look back on the 23 year long road that brings me to sitting on the edge of my bed typing at this computer, I divide it up into clearly delineated chapters. The "My Dad is Dying of Cancer" chapter is one of those very very short chapters that contains a lot of really significant stuff. It's like the John 11:35 in the book of my life.

There are moments that you return to again and again in your life. The roads diverged in a wood that you think of as defining in your story. I remember that up until I was 17, and truthfully to a less degree still now, I never thought of life as full of possibilities. I was raised in a very repetitive, confined, lackluster culture and neighborhood. The idea of travel, or doing anything other than working shitty manual labor until I died was beyond the bounds of my imagination. At the time I was dating a girl whose life had been the exact opposite of mine. She had a stable family, money, opportunities, education, and a limitless lens on the whole of life. Her father was a very good man to me who did his best to try to give me some sort of motivation to think of this point in my life as a starting point and not an ending point.

The thing that he told me that stuck with me was that I should go to Annapolis, Maryland and try to find work aboard a ship. He presented it as a fairly easy proposal, that if you were in Annapolis, it was fairly hard to not wind up working on a ship. The simple act of walking near the harbor was provocation enough for any captain to snatch you up and give you some seadog speech worthy of Melville and give you your very own hammock.

Every time life gets rough, or gets to a low point, and by low I mean low like the horse winds low, I think about the sea and about Annapolis. I think about Japan and South America. It's noteworthy how much time I've spent reading novels about the sea when I've never been out to sea. I didn't even grow up near the ocean but I've spent a lot of my life reading and thinking about it. And when my girlfriend's dad told me that I should go to Annapolis and go out to sea I really should have. Had I been a different person, either slightly more or less fortunate than I was, I probably would have done it. Instead I took a job and got an apartment and started on the normal life. What a mistake that was. It's six years later and I've got next to nothing to show for that time. I'm getting old and just now panicking about all the things I should have done when I was young.

So these days, now that me and the newest girlfriend are over, I'm thinking a lot about Annapolis. I'm thinking about places far away and new stuff to do. Annapolis feels to me like a made up word for some magical place that can be anything you want. I've never been to Annapolis even though I've been to Maryland a number of times. Annapolis still feels like Neverland.

Well next Summer is the time to decide. Come June I may or may not still live here. Anyone got a place they want to take me? But in the slightly more shorter term, Annapolis looks a lot like Barcelona. We'll see how that goes first.

The Smallness of Language

2008-09-27T05:06:00.005-04:00

So, it is 5:07am and I'm reflecting on my life and by association, writing and communication, as one is wont to do at hours like this. Other than the hour, the main thing which prompted these thoughts was the discovery of a year-old "Things to Do Before I Die" list in an old notebook in a drawer. Here is the (obviously unfinished) list:

1. See a total solar eclipse.

2. Visit Alaska during their six months of daylight.

3. Listen to Rakim on a rocky mountain top.

4. Have a barbershop quartet sing to someone.

5. Play bass in a band covering: Rage Against the Machine, Hatebreed, Carry On, Metallica.

6. Meet Anthony Hopkins/Brad Pitt.

7. Swim in the Pacific/Mediterranean.

8. Work on a ship.

9. Be in a gangsta rap music video.

10. See the Dalai Llama speak (for real).

11. Get hand/throat tattoos.

12. Liberate animals from a farm/lab. Take cool myspace pics.

13. Visit Egypt, Czech Republic, Russia, Australia, Kenya.

14. Publish a novel.

15. Deliver sermon in Church.

16. Build eco-friendly house.

17. Get married. Have alcohol-free, meat-free reception.

The smallness of the language here is staggering. It's certainly not my intention to demean any of my dreams as they're only a year old and I haven't fulfilled any of them. I think that a "to do before I die" list is the perfect way to demonstrate the complete and utter failure of the written word to even begin to encapsulate anyone's life or dreams. The fact that the words for my dreams even fit on a page, much less in a blog are demonstration enough.

As someone who kneels and worships at the altar of language it is disheartening as fuck to see the biggest part of your imagination in the smallest part of a web page or a discarded spiral notebook. If my hopes and dreams can really be laid out so plainly in the most inconsequential of mediums, how could I ever hope to write anything of any real weight?

I wonder how many pages of writing I could fill with my experiences, were I to fulfill any of these goals. It is worth contemplating the words that I have so often lifted up as the epitome of expression have in themselves been intrinsically just as limited as the to do list I made a year ago. The best of a medium cannot break free of the limitations of that medium.

In conclusion, and in tribute to the written word, I would like to contrast the smallness of my language with what I consider to be the most expansive, important, and beautifully composed paragraph in all of language. It is from the book Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. It describes the main character Eugene as an infant:

"And left alone to sleep within a shuttered room, with the thick sunlight printed in bars upon the floor, unfathomable loneliness and sadness crept through him: he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and he knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never."

If there existed any human being capable of composition that broke through the barrier of language to be able to express that which is by definition ineffable, it is Thomas Wolfe. His words are the only hope.

Sweet Little Bullet/Pretty Blue Gun

2008-09-24T12:47:00.007-04:00

"It takes a sweet little bullet from a pretty blue gun to put those scarlet ribbons in your hair."

Tom Waits is undoubtedly the best singer/songwriter who has ever lived. His body of work spans more than three decades and he has written some of the most original, creative music ever. I wrote this post simply to express that most times when I'm feeling it seems like Tom Waits is the only person that understands me. His range from the melancholy, to the darkly humourous, to the poignant, to the prophetic and political never ceases to impress.

The man is the fucking epitome of cool. Beyond just listening to his studio music, you should grab a copy of his episode of VH1 Storytellers or any of his live albums to get a feel for how fucking cool he is. He says some of the funniest, most interesting, and off the wall poetic stuff on stage.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, start out with these albums:

Blue Valentine

Bone Machine

Mule Variations

VH1 Storytellers

Best songs:

"Sweet Little Bullet from a Pretty Blue Gun"

"Blue Valentines"

"Dirt in the Ground"

"Earth Died Screaming"

"Georgia Lee"

"A House Where Nobody Lives"

If you don't love Tom Waits, you're not real. Just sayin.

Nightmare

2008-09-23T03:31:00.004-04:00

So I just had an experience so subtly unpleasant that I felt like I was living in a nightmare. Not to use the word nightmare to mean an horrifying scenario, but that it really felt very much like a type of unpleasant dream.

My friend has been in the hospital all night. She's got fibromyalgia (wikipedia that shit son, it sounds real fucked up.) And last time I talked to her on the phone, shortly before midnight she told me she may want me to come pick her up from the hospital. She was there running tests and such and said she'd call me back to let me know if she needed a ride. But she never called back....

So I texted and called her for a while and when she didn't respond I got nervous (seriously, read the wikipedia page on fibrowhatever) and started to wonder if she was okay. I would rather be safe and go to the hospital and pick her up if she needs it or at least see her and make sure she's still alive. So I drive to Johnston-Willis hospital, but in the process I get super lost because road construction forces me to take an unfamiliar exit and I have to find my way back to the highway.

So I arrive at the hospital, but modern hospitals are such sprawling, expansive affairs that I am circling parking lots and following signs for a long time it seems before I find a welcoming door. I make my way inside but the front desk is closed given that it's almost two am.

I wander through identical looking hallways for twenty or so minutes looking for any person sitting at a desk that may be able to tell me where my friend is. I eventually find some kindly ladies sitting at computers. I explain the situation; I'm there to pick up a friend. This is her name. She's got fibroblahblahblah and she was here running tests. I'm just not sure which continent of the hospital she's on. I have to spell her name, "Is that E-E?" "No it's A-I."

"She hasn't been to Johnston-Willis or Chippenham in a very long time."

They ask her birthday to confirm her identity. I know the year, it's her all right. She hasn't been there in "a very long time."

So I drove all the way to Midlothian, got terribly lost, get to the hospital and wander around in circles for twenty minutes just for someone to tell me she's not there and hasn't been in years? My life has become a Dali painting. I'm stumbling around on stilted legs trying to find my way back to the door I entered through, and recounting the awkward conversation I attempted to make as I backed away from the desk with the ladies. I tried to make light of the evident practical joke at my expense. They simply stared at me.

I am pacing circular halls, arriving at the same signs over and over again. It takes me almost a half hour (literally) to find my way out of the hospital.

I have wasted two hours of my life, and I have no idea if my friend is okay. If she ever was sick in the first place or whether she ever went to the hospital.

My life is so surreal.

Pescetarian Genocide

2008-09-23T03:20:00.003-04:00

The biggest bummer about being Vegan is this: you have to constantly be coddling other peoples' guilt complexes about the fact that they're not. I'd say most people are aware of the fact that Veganism is the right thing to do, regardless of whether or not they'll say it out loud. So as soon as you tell someone you're Vegan, the first they want to do is tell you 1. why they 'could never do that', and 2. how much they do for the cause and how much they love animals.

So, here is where your argument turns into a pile of dog shit: Anyone can be Vegan, it's so easy you should be ashamed of yourself. When people tell me they don't have the willpower to be Vegan I look at them as though they said they have trouble counting numbers into the double digits. Amira is fucking allergic to soy and she's Vegan, tell me your excuse?

Second, if you're not doing the simplest, easiest, most basic tenet of the animal rights lifestyle, you're a joke. Don't talk to me about your volunteer work at the pound, or whatever. I don't care. You don't care about animals if you eat meat. Shut up you sound like a god damned fool.

Which brings me to my next point, people that are total pussies, namely Vegetarians. If you are a Vegetarian for any reason other than as a transition toward being Vegan, you need your head examined. Either decide to care or decide to be a stupid nihilist. Fence-sitting your whole life is nothing to be proud of.

But really my strongest hatred is for the few select people who call themselves Pescetarians. People who eat fish because they don't consider it meat. Sometimes these people call themselves "Vegetarians who eat fish", which makes me want to puke on them.

I'm not gonna lie to you, being Vegan is the easiest thing I've ever done, and it makes people who can't even follow through with real Vegetarianism look like they're riding the morality school short bus.

Reasons you should stop eating seafood:

1. Because it's fucking meat, stupid.

2. Because it's full of fucking mercury, stupid.

3. Because commercial fishing destroys the oceans and subsequently, the whole fucking planet.

4. Because octopi, dolphins, and whales are all smarter than your dog.

5. Because I fucking said so.

All Cops Are Bastards

2008-09-20T02:59:00.003-04:00

I Got my ACAB tattoo today at Absolute. Greg paid for it 'cause he's fucking awesome and Mike did it because he's fucking awesome. It was funny because at the same time I was getting this done, there was a cop getting tattooed by Zack and I happened to notice the drawing for the cop's on a table and knew that I had to take a picture to share with everyone:

In case you can't tell, it's a cross with what looks to be a tattered American flag draped across it with a shield that says "Serve and Protect" and some handcuffs. Yeah dude, you definitely aren't a fucking dipshit.

Sleep Deprivation

2008-09-18T12:53:00.004-04:00

So I barely sleep anymore at all. I am beginning to feel serious long term effects of this insomnia and sleep deprivation. I started out in life - as so many people do - as someone who enjoys a good period of insomnia induced dementia and giddiness. Everyone knows that the best episode of the best cartoon ever run on Nickelodeon was about staying up all night. We all remember the first time we stayed up all night, the more dedicated among us remember each individual milestone as though it was a new altitude reached on a mountain. 12am, 1am, 2am.

I've had plenty of sleep deprivation induced adventures. When we were 14 and 15, Kerrigan David and I would stay up all weekend, usually at least once a month. These resulted in some of the worst ideas we ever had. Also it resulted in me dozing off while walking on at least one occasion.

Kerrigan, Andre and I did just over 48 hours together once. We came up with all kinds of schemes and ideas to keep ourselves awake. Andre and I went out and did graffiti, we practiced Kung Fu, we played video games. We went out one morning in the predawn hours and took pictures of ourselves standing naked in front of random buildings, our friends' houses, etc. Kerrigan sank into insanity, I sank into laughter, and Andre sank into anger. It was terrifying when Andre almost strangled me because I couldn't stop laughing at one point.

But honestly, it's not fun anymore. My personal record is somewhere short of 72 hours, or three full days. I know I've come close a couple of times but I don't think I've ever actually gotten it. Ya'know, I can deal with the exhaustion, confusion, dizziness, fatigue, but the nausea is what really gets me every time. And it's the first thing that comes on.

I only slept from 5:30am to 7:30am today. I have averaged <5 hours of sleep per night for the past month. I can only remember two nights in the past five weeks when I've gotten six or more hours of sleep per night. I really feel like I'm one foot in the grave at this point.

It's on days like this when I begin to consider going on another binge and staying up for days. Then I start to feel the nausea and I lie down to take a nap. Like right now. Let's see if getting an hour in right now won't help me somewhat.

Weird fact, the world record for staying up was set by a 17 year old as a science project for school.

Bloodbath!

2008-09-17T12:08:00.000-04:00

Yesterday on NPR there was yet another economic story about the Wall Street crisis. Another bank going bankrupt, more white people out of work. I'm a fuckin NPR junkie so I stay up on my current events, and currently the only event that's going on in the world is that a lot of financial institutions are irrevocably screwed. AIG got a federal bailout, Lehman Brothers did not, &c &c &c...

...for those of you who aren't on that addictive news tip, let me explain a few things about Wall Street and the financial markets right now. Imagine a city, and imagine that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are a husband wife pimp team / drug and gun runner Queenpin and Kingpin duo. Now imagine that the US Government is like a semi-crooked law-enforcement collaboration between the ATF and the police vice squad. Then imagine that Bank of America is a Russian mobster with his hands in a lot of money-laundering business. And imagine that every real estate speculator is either a small time dope dealer or a prostitute. Also imagine that Ben Bernanke is a perverted serial killer that gets off on strangling hookers. Then imagine that there's a blackout of the entire city where this is taking place. Also imagine that everyone's doing a lot of coke and Walmart's having a bluelight special on ammo. The financial markets are sorta like that.

Anyway, back to NPR...

What really struck me was the language used in the story. They actually used the words 'bloodbath' and 'carnage' to describe the situation. Maybe I'm too big of a skeptic, and those who know me best will decry my unabashed love of hyperbole when they read this post, but there is a time and place for everything, and I'm not sure that a story about a bank going out of business is the time or the place to get carried away with your Stephen King aspirations.

Let me not seem unsympathetic, I understand that people's livelihoods are at stake and that a bank's collapse can mean a substantial amount of misery for a subtantial amount of people. But I think that when a news organization that also reports on actual bloodbaths, and very real carnage, it might be off-putting to hear that kind of terminology applied to lots of people in suits cleaning out their offices.

Perhaps we may want to save such strong vocabulary for more intense situations, like say, when I run out of peanut butter, or when I accidentally spill soup on my lap. Seriously I should work for NPR. I could cover cool ass stories.

Disaster

2008-09-14T03:00:00.005-04:00

This is a very brief entry but I felt the need to share a very brief story about a really weird thing that happened to me once. It was something like six months ago, back when it was just starting to get warm outside. I was walking from my apartment on Boulevard down toward VCU campus in the early evening. There had been a bad storm a couple of hours prior in the afternoon and it was still overcast and dark. I was walking along Grove Avenue in the light residual shower and enjoying the coolness of the dusk. The sidewalk was littered with leaves, twigs, and branches of all sizes from the strong winds that the afternoon storm had brought.

I was making my way east on Grove listening to music in my ipod when I saw Carly, my ex-girlfriend walking toward me, headed west away from campus. I took out my headphones and tucked them into the collar of my shirt. We paused momentarily to exchange a hug and a hello. I asked what she was up to, she returned the favour. I then turned to continue my journey, started to put my headphones back into my ears and take a step forward when about twenty feet in front of me an enormous tree branch the girth of my arm abruptly snapped and dropped down onto the sidewalk.

The timing of it was such that you had to be there, but Carly and I noted definitively that it landed exactly where I would have been if I hadn't paused to speak with her. The weight of the branch was considerable, more than enough to knock me the ground, if not unconscious had it caught me off guard - which it most certainly would have with my headphones in.

One of those moments where the timing fits so perfectly it feels eerie. The whole scene played out like it had been written exactly for that moment. I think about it every time I pass that block of Grove. There but for the grace of God I was knocked the fuck down by a big ass tree branch.

Kill Yourself

2008-09-13T04:23:00.002-04:00

It is 4:23am. I am in the worst mood ever. Here is a list of reasons that you should kill yourself.

1. You will probably suffer from some debilitating mental or physical illness in your lifetime. It might be a cancer that destroys your internal organs and forces you through many painful treatments before it kills you. Maybe it's a painful heart attack. Maybe you will develop schizophrenia or bipolar psychosis or paranoia or some other mental illness that slowly strips you of your ability to interact with others and destroys your relationships with everyone you love because they will only ever see you inside of a hospital.

2. You will not accomplish all the things in life you want to. You'll probably spend your life struggling to stay afloat and live day to day feeding yourself. Your novel, your symphony, your masterpiece, your movie, your building, your epic project will - if you're lucky - go unfinished. Most likely however, it will go unstarted.

3. This paragraph, taken from the book Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe:

4. The human race gets less intelligent every generation. What you think of as intelligence on your part is simply an ability to understand the frivolous gadgets of the modern world. Neither you nor anyone you know will ever be as smart as Thoreau, or Poe, or Hugo.

5. This quote, by French playwright Antonin Artaud:

"If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will."

Trueurotrip!!

2008-09-12T16:57:00.007-04:00

My good friend Keegan is on tour in Europe with his acoustic musical project called xTrue Naturex which is absolutely amazing. He sings a lot about Veganism, Straight Edge, politics, and covers a lot of awesome Vegan Edge bands like Earth Crisis, Gather, Anchor and 7 Generations. If you're not familiar with him you should give his music a listen and come out to see him when he gets back from Europe. Definitely check out his myspace if you're interesting in listening to his music:

http://www.myspace.com/xtruenaturexmusic

Anyway, he has limited internet access while he's there so he emailed me and asked me to do a blog post updating everyone on how tour's going and to post a few pictures from the tour. So here we go.

This is the tour poster that the label did for promotions. That's Keegan in the green striped polo. Those are people from the label and other artists he's touring with.

That is Keegan singing an acoustic version of "Scotty Doesn't Know".

The tour crew waiting for the train to the next show. Artsy b/w photo.

This Not everyone on the tour with Keegan is Straight Edge so he actually ended up going to a bar at one point and it turns out that the green fairy appears to Straight Edge people who aren't even drinking. Weird.

Kinda wack, but one of the first shows was actually in a pub. Keegan says he was pretty annoyed with all the drunk soccer hooligans singing along.

Keegan and the tour crew actually caught a ride to the next show with some of the soccer hooligans from the bar show. He said they were nicer when he got to talking with them later and a few of them have decided to go Vegan or Vegetarian. They're really excited about it.

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Keegan says he's having an awesome time and sends his love. Hopefully we'll have more updates soon!

Near Death, Vol 1

2008-09-09T23:17:00.010-04:00

I grew up Oregon Hill, when it was still a pretty hood place to live. I lived there until I was 17 (2002) when my dad died and I moved off on my own. I moved back to the Hill in 2006 for a few months with the worst combination of people ever. Regardless of the feelings I have toward those people - some of whom I detest, some of whom I still like - it was the worst combination of people to live with. Through the most convoluted bargaining on our part - in all honesty I had not a fucking thing to do with the bargaining but I should own some part of the sin because I did nothing to stop it - we ended up living on the 300 block for three months, then on the 500 blocks for a couple of months. We had a lease which we ended up breaking due to the circumstances I will describe in the following paragraphs.

It was a Saturday night and Greg and I were sitting around my apartment with an unnamed female and despite her annoying insistence that we stay up all night, around three am or so we decided that we should sleep. Given that we had to both work in the morning, it was a responsible decision. I used my roommate's car to give her a ride back to her apartment. On my return trip, I drive down Laurel St and the burgundy SUV in front of me pulls over and gets behind me. I take note of this but I'm honestly too tired to think twice about it. I get back to my house which is on the left side of the street but as there is no parking on the left side of the street, I park on the right.

The burgundy SUV pulls up in between me and my house, and a guy about twice my size jumps out of the passenger side of the vehicle. He's a rather expansive fellow with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled down low and a bandana across his face so what I can gather about him is this: he's big, he's fast, and he is pointing a gun directly in my face.

"Give me the wallet."

Truth be told, I have gone through several long periods in my life during which I didn't carry a wallet. I have rarely carried a real wallet in the few years since Aiden convinced me to buy my first pair of jeans that fit. At the time that I am staring down the barrel of this gun, I've got about $22, a driver's license, and my cell phone in my pockets.

"Give me the wallet!"

The first thing I can think is that I have to get away. I can't just hand him my shit, but I definitely can't stand here with a gun in my face either. So I duck down low and run past him and around the car toward my front door. I have my foot on my front steps when he grabs me by the back of my shirt. In this moment the idea of getting shot in the back somehow seems way worse than getting shot in the chest so I spin around immediately and in the process fall backward onto my steps. I'm basically sitting on my front steps and this guy is standing above me at this point, gun still pointed at me.

"Give me the wallet!"

I honestly just can't bring myself to peacefully hand over anything in my pockets. First off I have this weird sense of pride where I will take a beating way before I'll admit to being wrong or give up anything willingly, and I was really convinced that if he was going to shoot me or beat the shit out of me, he was going to do it regardless of whether I gave him my money or not. I just knew that if I handed him my cash he was either going to shoot me or smash my face in immediately afterwards so it sorta seemed in my head like a good idea to just not give it to him. Secondly I was about a block away from the house I spent the first 17 years of my life in, and it just doesn't seem right to get robbed in my neighborhood.

"I don't have a wallet."

...was the best I could stutter out. I was determined not to give him anything but at the same time I was definitely scared out my wits. He raised his arm to smash me with the butt of his gun. Like I said before, this guy was definitely big enough to handle me without any help so the thought of him hitting me with a heavy piece of metal was pretty terrifying. Fuck getting pistol-whipped.

I reacted really fast, and I just charged him. I was in a position to put my shoulder in his gut really easily. He cocked his arm back to hit me and I was on him. The thing that stuck out to me was how easily he collapsed. I hit him hard with my shoulder and he flopped onto me like a rag doll. It genuinely shocked me to the point where I hesitated momentarily as to what to do with this guy draped over my shoulder. I heaved with all my strength and managed to throw him into the dirt between my porch and Tim Barry's porch.

Here is the short back story of what was going on inside my house while I was gone. Greg had gone to sleep in my cluttered living room, full of not yet unpacked boxes from the move. It was October and uncharacteristically cold so Greg had fallen asleep on my couch with two space heaters plugged into the same outlet in a electrically unwise attempt to heat my shitty old house. This had blown the shitty old circuit and so my whole house was pitch when I burst through the front door screaming.

"Greg! Greg get the fuck up there's a guy with a gun! I'm being fucking mugged right now Greg get the fuck up!"

So I come barreling down my hallway and make the quick left into the my living room and immediately trip in the darkness over one of the space heaters and fall to the ground. Greg panics and tries to escape out the back door while I fumble with a box that I know is right by the doorway. I'm looking for a metal pipe that I had once used as a pull-up bar. While Greg tries desperately and fails repeatedly to get out of my back door due to the darkness and a deadbolt lock he can't seem to find/utilize, I am standing at the ready with a pipe just inside the doorway to my living room. It takes me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that the guy didn't follow me into my house.

I peek around the corner and can see all the way out the door and into the street.

No burgundy SUV, no guy, no gun.

How the fuck did I not die?

Marathon

2007-11-11T09:58:00.000-05:00

The story - however inaccurate - told by Herodotus (known either as the father of history or the father of lies) is a stirring one and we all know it. Darius of Persia is on a mission to conquer ever piece of land on the globe. He's got horses, he's got archers, he's got heavy infantry, he's got light infantry. He's got boats, he's got swords, he's got all kinds of shit, right? He's the fucking King of Persia and shit, so he's got stuff. He's got a military budget that would make Operation Iraqi Freedom blush. So dude's just a fucking steamroller crushing everything in his path. He's got the region of Ionia (just across the sea from Greece) in his grip and relations there are friendly. But shit goes south and the Ionians rebel against the Persians and look to their old masters, the Greeks for help. The rebellion lasts six years with mostly Athenian help but eventually fails.

And Darius is like "Oh hell no, these motherfucking Greeks assisted in a rebellion against me? Who the fuck do they think they are?" And he decides the Greeks are fucked. "They either gon' be my bitch, or I'm gon' burn they whole shit to the ground." Darius supposedly said to a group of his high military advisers. So he dispatches his emissaries, who are either thrown off of buildings (by the Athenians) or down into a well (by the Spartans). The Spartans sorta had a fetish for the whole throwing people down a well thing. So Darius launches a campaign against the Greek city-states.

Many of the city-states surrender to Darius, but the Athenians aren't going to play that. The Spartans are celebrating some festival or another so the Athenians have to face the Persians alone. The Athenian army marches 26.2 miles to the plains of Marathon to meet the Persians. They slap the Persians around a bit and send them sailing home. The elated Greek runner Phidippides is sent to deliver the good news to Athens. Phidippides had already run to Sparta and back to ask the Spartans for help (280 miles) in the past month, nigga was tired. So he sprints the 26.2 miles back to Athens and up to the first group of Athenians he sees and screams "We kilt 'em." and collapses to the ground and dies of exhaustion. It's a good thing those Athenians Phidippides encountered were the NPR type and followed the news. Woulda been a shame if he had died delivering his message to a group of people who weren't aware of the fact that they were at war.

That's history, or legend, whichever you want to call it. This is the present.

The best I can gather is that my apartment is exactly 13.1 miles between the site on the James River where Iranian forces landed to sack Richmond, and the nearest military outpost. I can only conjecture that Richmonders bravely held their own against the Persian forces of Ahmadinejad and that when they won, they decided to ALL run and report the news. My apartment just had the misfortune to be in the middle of this new "Marathon" run. Because two Saturdays ago I couldn't get anywhere near my fucking home because there were ugly white people taking up every street within a mile of my apartment. You motherfuckers better pick up the pace, your fat ass can't be walking the whole way, this is serious business.

I bought a bass cab that day in the hopes of one day being a more prolific XVX Vegan Edge Warrior XXX in my new band. So I've borrowed my friend's car to bring it back to my apartment, which shouldn't be such a tall order seeing as the place I bought the cab from is a mere six blocks from my apartment. I wouldn't even need a car if the damned thing wasn't roughly 70% of my mass. So what is a 12 minute walk became an hour and twenty minute drive as I circled the city desperately trying to get within two blocks of my apartment to drop this damned speaker cab off and get my friend her car back.

A map can be seen below which shows the route I took to get back to my apartment after buying the bass cab.You can probably imagine how frustrated I was at the end of this venture. Well eventually I do make it back, and I carry this huge fucking box up the back steps by myself, and now it sits in my room awaiting practice:Hell Yeah.
-JOSH XVX

The Flying Turtle Version 2.0

2007-11-10T00:26:00.000-05:00

We made an obstacle course for the flying turtle!