It seems that Ted Nugent has written a new book. This may seem strange to you, but it is something I can believe easily enough. The Prince of Artificial Penis has written several books before, and at any rate if someone were to tell me that a five year-old had written a book titled "Mommy and Buster Kill the Space Dragons" I would be inclined top believe that the book had indeed been penned by a child. So when I hear about a book titled "Ted, White, & Blue" and quoted as follows, it is clear that nobody but The Nuge could have possibly written it.
"War: “[I’d] instruct the US military warriors to do their job — win the global war on terror right now and eliminate all threats from all sources by any means necessary.”
Peace: “Each morning I bow down on bended knee in reverence to the Almighty and pray for good bombing weather. The history of mankind is one of war, not peace…’Give peace a chance’ will get you killed. John Lennon was wrong. Imagine that.”
http://www.celebitchy.com/14765/ted_nugent_for_president_the_nugent_doctrine/
"Imagine that?" Damn but you're a clever devil Teddy. All the same the second statement is a half-truth. While it's true that, throughout history, there has always been somebody fighting somebody else, and that large empires such as our own invariably find themselves involved in incessant low-level military housecleaning somewhere, the fact is that most societies are in a state of peace for a slight majority of the time, or at least long enough to do things like invent books and bombers. Any history book worth its salt will tell you whatever you need to know about Gutenberg or Tycho Brahe or Goethe or Kirkegaard or any other human being who did some pretty cool non war-related things. But it's quite clear that Ted was one of those kids in school who skipped all the faggy shit between The Crusades and The Black Plague.
Joking Aside, I might to be able to accept the gist of Nugent's "peace" quote as reflecting an intellectually valid conservative worldview; that the savage history of humanity is proof that there is a universal human nature that seeks to compete and dominate. That societies cannot possibly change this nature, in fact can only make things worse by trying to do so, and that the only thing to be done is to put societies in the hands of a ruling elite wise enough to recognize it's own will to power, and to channel both the social and the individual need to dominate into acquiring more material resources; either by inventing them yourselves, or taking them from somebody else.
But I really don't think that this is what Teddy is talking about. What really interests me is what he had to say about war: "eliminate all threats from all sources by any means necessary.” All threats? From all sources? Here we see the childishness of the right wing in its essential form, the difference between the old economics professor with a sour view of human nature and the modern Christmas Warrior who holds this bleak view of everyone else while seeking some cultural merit badge; Americanism, Christianity, what have you, to exclude himself from it.
What Nugent and his ilk (such as the executive branch of the United States government) seek to do is nothing less than to separate the inseparable, existance from vulnerability. If you are alive, than every other living thing is a potential threat. There are the obvious enemies, of course, and there is nothing wrong with direct self-defense; no more virtue in it, mind you, then there is in eating, shitting, or any other biological imperative, but certainly nothing wrong with it.
But that's not what "all threats from all sources" means. Your best friend might kill you one day for your car or your wife. Your mother could have easily tired of your whining one day while she happened to have a pair of scissors nearby. Whether Nugent is consciously aware of it or not, this is the meaning of "all threats from all sources."
I imagine that Nugent is familiar with the bonged-out hovel version of the Yin-Yang
concept, and so am I. There is bright, substantial, "masculine" life and strength, and there is dark, insubstantial, "feminine" weakness and death. Keep in mind that I'm only the messenger here, but the prevalence of witches, hags, and evil mother goddesses across different cultures is no accident. Man surrenders himself completely only in orgasm and when the strain of taking another breathe becomes too much. Death is perceived as female. She who gives birth gives death. Man perceives himself as creating life within the safety of his own private utopia, while the woman exposes life to the world of decay, her screams reminding him of the pain his child has to look forward to.
Become immortal. Tear yourself away from the woman inside you. Inoculate yourself from all threats from all sources, be they physical or emotional, or medical. But no, that won't do. Emotional threats are too insubstantial, medical threats too uncertain and you must become a perfect wall of substance and certainty. Turn everything you fear, everything you secretly desire, everyone who has ever denied you some sort of happiness, into The Enemy. Al Queda is not just one of the endless number of things that can and eventually will kill you. It is death itself. So is the man who raped and killed a child on the other side of the state, so are the boogeymen who would take your guns away and deny you the cheapest means of establishing yourself as complete master of your environment, affecting but unaffected.
("But you said death was female Josh." So I did, and I direct you to read up on The Lavender Scare, or the blatantly erotic description of Baligant in "The Song of Roland")
There has been a very successful rhetorical attempt by the right to frame differing views of morality into "clear standards of right and wrong" and "moral relativism."
That is, believing in something or not. But the real conflict between right and left here is the different understandings for what right and wrong are. Does the essence of good lie in being good towards others, or does it lie in hatred of and willingness to punish wickedness?
The latter view has obvious appeal for all aspiring immortal rocks. Evil is not some insubstantial malevolence or indifference towards others. If that were the case one would have to become vulnerable and womanly to recognize this dark shade and perceive it in himself. No. Evil is simply those who do evil. To destroy the murderer is to destroy murder. To destroy the terrorist is to destroy terrorism. When a right-winger says that those oppose the death penalty are not properly offended by murder, he is not making a cheap ad-hominem. This is what he truly believes. To support the existence of a murderer is to support the existence of murder.
It all makes perfect sense now. Billions of dollars wasted on SDI; well, would you rather just lay back and receive Russian missiles? Now we can blow them to bits with our lasers! The invasion of Iraq, the howls for Iranian or North Korean or Syrian or Venezuelan blood. Anyone who has the minutest chance of ever being a real enemy must be annihilated. All threats from all sources. Anything less is to accept mortality and uncertainty, to accept feminine death. Callousness towards poverty is absolutely essential. The poor simply haven't learned to unchain themselves from their yin (Think of all the stereotypes of the hedonistic minority or poor person) and become wholly invulnerable. At any rate, the most important step to becoming pure Yang is to never admit to any imperfection in "your" society. Physical invulnerability is worthless if you accept that there is any such thing as valid social criticism. What, after all, could be more insubstantial and womanly than the very concept of society? This so-called society is nothing but an extension of you own impenetrable
self. This is why you have every right to be offended by a department store that doesn't celebrate YOUR holidays, YOUR God, or YOUR perfect, impenetrable heritage as slavishly as you do. It is your society. You control it. You command it. Affecting but unaffected. To criticize society is to criticize you, to remind you of your own fallibility as a human, to remind you that you can not, after all, inoculate yourself from the world. Yin, woman, death, etc.
Needless to say, the ability to cling (Yeah that's right) to such a worldview requires such lacerating mental and emotional self-deception as to leave one functionally insane, and not the cute sort of insane, not Ted Nugent's loin cloth and longbow act. The constant stream of enemies that the perfect yang absolutely needs is the quiet, lurking malevolence of a sociopath who one day slashes his neighbor to death because she reminds him of the banshees who laugh at him in his dreams.
Dé Domhnaigh, Deireadh Fómhair 12, 2008
Dé Máirt, Deireadh Fómhair 07, 2008
Some Qutes From The Palin Visit
"Palin thrilled her Nebraska and western Iowa fans on Sunday with a 24-minute speech at the Civic Auditorium Music Hall. She led a familiar 'Drill, Baby, Drill!' chant, took a few shots at Obama and tried to portray her running mate, Republican presidential candidate John McCain, as the real candidate for change."
An attractive woman leads a crowd into a frenzy over "drilling." I would only be insulting the reader if I elaborated on this wouldn't I?
"The pundits were saying, 'Check out where she's going. She's going to Nebraska.' The pundits were saying, 'The only reason she would be going there is because they're scared. They have to shore up votes,' " Palin said.
I so wanted to reach into that TV and say 'no.' I'm going to Nebraska because I want to go to Nebraska," Palin said."
Sooo, what exactly are you saying here governor? I must admit that I don't have cable and I'm not entirely sure what just what "the pundits" were saying, but I do know it really wasn't very much at all, perhaps a passing reference to the fact (yes) that Obama could conceivably win the Omaha metro district. It's a long shot, but who knows? There may be a brown man wondering around Millard on election day, forcing the locals to barricade themselves inside of their homes and never getting around to voting. "I'm going to Nebraska because I want to go to Nebraska" Okay then. Did a political rally in the middle of your political campaign just happen to come up while you were on the way to "The Waiting Room"?
"Cheryl Martinez of Omaha called Palin 'down to earth.'
'She believes in things that basic Americans - normal Americans - believe in,' said Martinez, 41, a marketing manager and a Republican.
Let me be polite and civil here. If you are of the mindset that "normal=good", you are fucking trash and you can spend an eternity in hell getting fondled by demons with poor conversational skills, covered head-to-toe in tattoos of Ingmar Bergman characters and singing Armenian hip-hop at the top of their lungs. To take pride in imagining oneself to be "the norm" is the absolute lowest state of being that a so-called human can possibly "exist" in. It is perfect weakness, perfect treason to humanity, and the very essence of all that is wretched and disgusting, to be unable to justify ones' life without imagining a non-existent norm that all are beholden to and that "I" am that norm. Cheryl Martinez, 41, can bite my drug-addled borderline schizophrenic ass.
"Palin told the crowd that Obama's association with Bill Ayers showed that he is a man who does not "see America" as former President Ronald Reagan and others do as a force for good."
Well you see governor, "good" is an abstract ideal, while "America" is a tangible human institution. As humans we are free to create ourselves. There is neither any individual human nor any institution that human societies create that have any inherent nature or "force"; good, bad, or otherwise. The idea that one is morally obligated to consider one's own society to be "good" may seem like simple patriotism, but in fact it is the basest sort of nihilism. If we are inherently good, then anything, absolutely anything we choose to do, such as invading Middle Eastern countries at random, allowing strategically vital and culturally revered cities to drown, or denying access to medical care for the children of riff-raff, (You know, all those people who aren't "basic Americans")is automatically the right thing to do, no because of the nature of these actions and the suffering they bring, but because it is we, the magical "force for good." who do them. The moral cowardice of such an attitude should be obvious to any reasonably intelligent...
Oh right, I'm supposed to be pretending to address Sarah Palin. They hate us for our freedom governor.
http://omaha.com/index.php?u_page=2835&u_sid=10451571
An attractive woman leads a crowd into a frenzy over "drilling." I would only be insulting the reader if I elaborated on this wouldn't I?
"The pundits were saying, 'Check out where she's going. She's going to Nebraska.' The pundits were saying, 'The only reason she would be going there is because they're scared. They have to shore up votes,' " Palin said.
I so wanted to reach into that TV and say 'no.' I'm going to Nebraska because I want to go to Nebraska," Palin said."
Sooo, what exactly are you saying here governor? I must admit that I don't have cable and I'm not entirely sure what just what "the pundits" were saying, but I do know it really wasn't very much at all, perhaps a passing reference to the fact (yes) that Obama could conceivably win the Omaha metro district. It's a long shot, but who knows? There may be a brown man wondering around Millard on election day, forcing the locals to barricade themselves inside of their homes and never getting around to voting. "I'm going to Nebraska because I want to go to Nebraska" Okay then. Did a political rally in the middle of your political campaign just happen to come up while you were on the way to "The Waiting Room"?
"Cheryl Martinez of Omaha called Palin 'down to earth.'
'She believes in things that basic Americans - normal Americans - believe in,' said Martinez, 41, a marketing manager and a Republican.
Let me be polite and civil here. If you are of the mindset that "normal=good", you are fucking trash and you can spend an eternity in hell getting fondled by demons with poor conversational skills, covered head-to-toe in tattoos of Ingmar Bergman characters and singing Armenian hip-hop at the top of their lungs. To take pride in imagining oneself to be "the norm" is the absolute lowest state of being that a so-called human can possibly "exist" in. It is perfect weakness, perfect treason to humanity, and the very essence of all that is wretched and disgusting, to be unable to justify ones' life without imagining a non-existent norm that all are beholden to and that "I" am that norm. Cheryl Martinez, 41, can bite my drug-addled borderline schizophrenic ass.
"Palin told the crowd that Obama's association with Bill Ayers showed that he is a man who does not "see America" as former President Ronald Reagan and others do as a force for good."
Well you see governor, "good" is an abstract ideal, while "America" is a tangible human institution. As humans we are free to create ourselves. There is neither any individual human nor any institution that human societies create that have any inherent nature or "force"; good, bad, or otherwise. The idea that one is morally obligated to consider one's own society to be "good" may seem like simple patriotism, but in fact it is the basest sort of nihilism. If we are inherently good, then anything, absolutely anything we choose to do, such as invading Middle Eastern countries at random, allowing strategically vital and culturally revered cities to drown, or denying access to medical care for the children of riff-raff, (You know, all those people who aren't "basic Americans")is automatically the right thing to do, no because of the nature of these actions and the suffering they bring, but because it is we, the magical "force for good." who do them. The moral cowardice of such an attitude should be obvious to any reasonably intelligent...
Oh right, I'm supposed to be pretending to address Sarah Palin. They hate us for our freedom governor.
http://omaha.com/index.php?u_page=2835&u_sid=10451571
Dé Sathairn, Meán Fómhair 27, 2008
Sarah Palin Vs. Thomas Pynchon
“Of course, it’s a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know, the molecules, where it’s going and where it’s not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it’s Americans who get stuck holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It’s got to flow into our domestic markets first.”
"Who has sent this new serpent into our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence -- unless innocence be our age's neutral, our silent passing into the machineries of indifference -- something that Kekulé's Serpent had come to -- not to destroy, but to define to us the loss of . . . we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others . . . we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps -- but the Serpent whispered, 'They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given. . . . ' Can anyone tell me what else he whispered to us? Come -- who knows?"
"As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border."
"Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, 'The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,' is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle."
"I think God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that."
"M-maybe there is a Machine to take us away, take us completely, suck us through the electrodes out of the skull 'n' into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it's got stored there. It could decide who it would suck out, a-and when. Dope never gave you immoratality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But We can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified, Electroworld"
GIBSON: What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?
PALIN: Well, first, we are friends with Israel and I don't think that we should second guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves and for their security.
GIBSON: So if we wouldn't second guess it and they decided they needed to do it because Iran was an existential threat, we would cooperative or agree with that.
PALIN: I don't think we can second guess what Israel has to do to secure its nation.
GIBSON: So if it felt necessary, if it felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right.
PALIN: We cannot second guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself.
Proverbs for Paranoids:
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
4. You hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
"But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that's a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side.
That's what that comment was all about, Charlie. And I do believe, though, that this war against extreme Islamic terrorists is the right thing. It's an unfortunate thing, because war is hell and I hate war, and, Charlie, today is the day that I send my first born, my son, my teenage son overseas with his Stryker brigade, 4,000 other wonderful American men and women, to fight for our country, for democracy, for our freedoms."
"Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers, -- Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin.... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers, -- nor is Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other, -- her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy and Taproom Wit, -- that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forbears in forever, -- not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All, -- rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common."
"where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh -- it's got to be all about job creation too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, um, scary thing,"
"Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power, -- who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government."
"Who has sent this new serpent into our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence -- unless innocence be our age's neutral, our silent passing into the machineries of indifference -- something that Kekulé's Serpent had come to -- not to destroy, but to define to us the loss of . . . we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others . . . we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps -- but the Serpent whispered, 'They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given. . . . ' Can anyone tell me what else he whispered to us? Come -- who knows?"
"As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border."
"Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, 'The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,' is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle."
"I think God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that."
"M-maybe there is a Machine to take us away, take us completely, suck us through the electrodes out of the skull 'n' into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it's got stored there. It could decide who it would suck out, a-and when. Dope never gave you immoratality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But We can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified, Electroworld"
GIBSON: What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?
PALIN: Well, first, we are friends with Israel and I don't think that we should second guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves and for their security.
GIBSON: So if we wouldn't second guess it and they decided they needed to do it because Iran was an existential threat, we would cooperative or agree with that.
PALIN: I don't think we can second guess what Israel has to do to secure its nation.
GIBSON: So if it felt necessary, if it felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right.
PALIN: We cannot second guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself.
Proverbs for Paranoids:
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
4. You hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
"But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that's a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side.
That's what that comment was all about, Charlie. And I do believe, though, that this war against extreme Islamic terrorists is the right thing. It's an unfortunate thing, because war is hell and I hate war, and, Charlie, today is the day that I send my first born, my son, my teenage son overseas with his Stryker brigade, 4,000 other wonderful American men and women, to fight for our country, for democracy, for our freedoms."
"Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers, -- Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin.... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers, -- nor is Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other, -- her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy and Taproom Wit, -- that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forbears in forever, -- not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All, -- rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common."
"where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh -- it's got to be all about job creation too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, um, scary thing,"
"Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power, -- who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government."
Dé Luain, Meán Fómhair 22, 2008
So the Subject of "Star Trek" Came Up Yesterday.
There are of course many logical absurdities in the Star Trek universe. (e.g. Every intelligent species except for humans has always lived under a single culture and language.) and though I'm sure that many others have covered this before I can't help but be intrigued by his carousing. Am I the only one who wonders how it can be that all alien species are divided into "male" and "female" in ways that human beings can easily recognize? What are the odds that a single alien species would evolve something approximating a vagina well enough to accommodate the human penis, let alone all of them? Why does the "Enterprise" never run into intelligent beings who reproduce asexually? Or exchange genetic information in ways wholly different from sex as we know it?
"Star Trek's" paper thin metaphors calling for racial harmony may be admirable, but I'm afraid I simply can't stand behind such egregious anthropocentricism. They have simply paved the way for a "new" order in which, instead of the European man raping the world, mankind comes together in locker-room brotherhood to rape the universe. Tragic folly indeed.
"Star Trek's" paper thin metaphors calling for racial harmony may be admirable, but I'm afraid I simply can't stand behind such egregious anthropocentricism. They have simply paved the way for a "new" order in which, instead of the European man raping the world, mankind comes together in locker-room brotherhood to rape the universe. Tragic folly indeed.
Dé Máirt, Meán Fómhair 02, 2008
The U.S. Constitution is a gaseous self-Imploding star (Part 1. Red State Pagan.)
It is well known that only a handful of blinkered fools believe that "conservative" and "liberal" are objective terms. The standards for what is conservative and what is liberal changes as one moves from age to age and place to place. The most famous example of this would be the meaning of the word "pagan." In Roman days the word was roughly equivalent to our "rube" or "redneck". Those who adhered to the old gods were considered too unsophisticated to groove with the new monotheistic cryptoerotic death cult. So we see that the ancient meaning of "pagan" was completely different from the modern definition, i.e. "lesbian book store owner."
When one looks at the whole of recorded history, the terms "conservative" and "liberal" become wholly inadequate. A somewhat better general division would be between traditionalists who view their native society as a father or a god, something to obey and submit to, and reformists or innovationalists who view their native society as an enterprise that they are entitled to influence. This is, admittedly, still grossly simplistic, but it's the best I can do for now. If I were getting paid to write this than perhaps I would take the time to think up more developed classifications.
If one again looks at the whole of recorded history, it becomes obvious that the countryside of any civilization is always more "conservative", while the cities are always more "liberal." It is as predictable as the despised minority group and lamely justified male dominion. The reasons for this are not, I think, really that abstract or obtuse; nothing that a person of average intelligence couldn't get a basic grasp on if they took the time to think about it. But I've been tumbling my own ideas for how and why for the past few hours now. At any rate this is my blog. This is the age for the narcissist to gorge himself and I shall have my fill.
The countryside is, of course, closer to nature, and the tyrannical dictates thereof, in ways that are both important and superficial. The human tendency to equate the harvest cycle with our own life and reproduction cycles is universal. The rural mind is less inclined to be bothered by the notion that it exists chiefly to spawn somebody else than the city mind is. The old gender roles don't appear to be anywhere near as baffling or insane as they do to the modern urbanite. Now that I think about it, there have been many people, myself included, who have unfairly supposed that the adherence to these roles is born out of a desperate and cowardly attempt to impose predetermined meaning on a life that appears to be empty and chaotic. It would be more accurate to say that the rustic mind is simply trying to interpret the meaning that seems self-apparent to him.
But than there are darker reasons for traditionalism in the country. One is economic force. If we go back to traditional gender roles, we see that they tend to hold in areas where physical labor, and thus brute physical strength, is still of central importance to the local economy. (Indeed, traditional manliness is held in higher value in medium-sized industrial cities like Akron or Toledo than in some smaller college towns.) The fact that I am bigger than the lass sitting across from me, than, is not just a cute evolutionary accident, (There are reasons why country-dwellers are loathe to believe that there is any such thing.) but my means to provide for myself, gain resources, and attract a mate, and it simply must be a purpose ordained to me by a higher power, because that's the only way that spending fourteen hours dragging a plow through a shit-inseminated barley field would be more appealing than suicide.
Beyond this are the psychological effects of living in the country. Life in a small community of people discourages personal distinction, sharpening of individual thought. To be in a human settlement dwarfed by the surrounding countryside creates a sense of intangibility, a heightened awareness of mortality. The desire to reproduce becomes intense, and it won't do to merely pass on the length of your nose or the color of your eyes. My son must inherit my personality, otherwise I never rose from this earth at all. To truly reproduce myself I must destroy time. To destroy time I must make all other ways of life deviant, I must make every figure of authority a father, and I must make every tradition sacred and unchangeable. Than let me smoke and gorge and drink and work until my spine is twisted like the windbreaks that have been dead for fifty years, yet still stand because they too understand the rules of the land. Than let me have an early rest and let my son become me.
When one looks at the whole of recorded history, the terms "conservative" and "liberal" become wholly inadequate. A somewhat better general division would be between traditionalists who view their native society as a father or a god, something to obey and submit to, and reformists or innovationalists who view their native society as an enterprise that they are entitled to influence. This is, admittedly, still grossly simplistic, but it's the best I can do for now. If I were getting paid to write this than perhaps I would take the time to think up more developed classifications.
If one again looks at the whole of recorded history, it becomes obvious that the countryside of any civilization is always more "conservative", while the cities are always more "liberal." It is as predictable as the despised minority group and lamely justified male dominion. The reasons for this are not, I think, really that abstract or obtuse; nothing that a person of average intelligence couldn't get a basic grasp on if they took the time to think about it. But I've been tumbling my own ideas for how and why for the past few hours now. At any rate this is my blog. This is the age for the narcissist to gorge himself and I shall have my fill.
The countryside is, of course, closer to nature, and the tyrannical dictates thereof, in ways that are both important and superficial. The human tendency to equate the harvest cycle with our own life and reproduction cycles is universal. The rural mind is less inclined to be bothered by the notion that it exists chiefly to spawn somebody else than the city mind is. The old gender roles don't appear to be anywhere near as baffling or insane as they do to the modern urbanite. Now that I think about it, there have been many people, myself included, who have unfairly supposed that the adherence to these roles is born out of a desperate and cowardly attempt to impose predetermined meaning on a life that appears to be empty and chaotic. It would be more accurate to say that the rustic mind is simply trying to interpret the meaning that seems self-apparent to him.
But than there are darker reasons for traditionalism in the country. One is economic force. If we go back to traditional gender roles, we see that they tend to hold in areas where physical labor, and thus brute physical strength, is still of central importance to the local economy. (Indeed, traditional manliness is held in higher value in medium-sized industrial cities like Akron or Toledo than in some smaller college towns.) The fact that I am bigger than the lass sitting across from me, than, is not just a cute evolutionary accident, (There are reasons why country-dwellers are loathe to believe that there is any such thing.) but my means to provide for myself, gain resources, and attract a mate, and it simply must be a purpose ordained to me by a higher power, because that's the only way that spending fourteen hours dragging a plow through a shit-inseminated barley field would be more appealing than suicide.
Beyond this are the psychological effects of living in the country. Life in a small community of people discourages personal distinction, sharpening of individual thought. To be in a human settlement dwarfed by the surrounding countryside creates a sense of intangibility, a heightened awareness of mortality. The desire to reproduce becomes intense, and it won't do to merely pass on the length of your nose or the color of your eyes. My son must inherit my personality, otherwise I never rose from this earth at all. To truly reproduce myself I must destroy time. To destroy time I must make all other ways of life deviant, I must make every figure of authority a father, and I must make every tradition sacred and unchangeable. Than let me smoke and gorge and drink and work until my spine is twisted like the windbreaks that have been dead for fifty years, yet still stand because they too understand the rules of the land. Than let me have an early rest and let my son become me.
Dé hAoine, Lúnasa 29, 2008
It's a Pity
Call it a Catholic upbringing or what have you, but I'm afraid I will always see something fetid, something false, in normal human conversation. The game of human beings reacting and feeding off of each others cues, living in the moment, imagining ourselves to lose ourselves. It is a lie. It is a foulness. Or simple bitterness on my part more than likely. Yet I can not help but feel slightly nauseous when I see people lost in conversation with each other. Can't help but feel ashamed of myself when a familiar face makes me feel happy. Utterly baffled when a friend shares something about himself to me with matter-of-fact ease. Several years ago I told an older woman that I lived alone and she was shocked. She said that she couldn't imagine spending an hour of her day without having someone to talk to. Her statement filled me with a white rage that terrifies me to this day.
It is often said that writers are supposed to be filled with uncontrollable passions? Well who the hell taught you that? That rapist Bryon? That drunken thug Hemingway? Is there, at any rate, nothing we can possibly feel passionate about besides the fellow shaved monkeys around us?
I write because my interior dialogue is the only one that is unshielded, and this cannot change. This is who a human being really is, the swirling yokes of feeling and thought and sensation that cannot be released to another through speech or touch or look. Our true selves can only be found by staring within ourselves and giving shapes to these half-comprehended shades. It is then and only then that we can know who we love and who we hate and who simply amuses us and why. But we can never know them. We can only know what we are to us. The world and everyone in it but you will always be objects to you. If we cannot know each other than the best we can do is to love and emphasize, to realize that the isolation we have all been damned to will ultimately hit the extroverts the hardest. Their light hearts will surely beat longer than others, and so to them goes the honor of burying lovers and friends until they see, until they know, and than there will be no one to talk to.
It is often said that writers are supposed to be filled with uncontrollable passions? Well who the hell taught you that? That rapist Bryon? That drunken thug Hemingway? Is there, at any rate, nothing we can possibly feel passionate about besides the fellow shaved monkeys around us?
I write because my interior dialogue is the only one that is unshielded, and this cannot change. This is who a human being really is, the swirling yokes of feeling and thought and sensation that cannot be released to another through speech or touch or look. Our true selves can only be found by staring within ourselves and giving shapes to these half-comprehended shades. It is then and only then that we can know who we love and who we hate and who simply amuses us and why. But we can never know them. We can only know what we are to us. The world and everyone in it but you will always be objects to you. If we cannot know each other than the best we can do is to love and emphasize, to realize that the isolation we have all been damned to will ultimately hit the extroverts the hardest. Their light hearts will surely beat longer than others, and so to them goes the honor of burying lovers and friends until they see, until they know, and than there will be no one to talk to.
Dé hAoine, Lúnasa 22, 2008
And so it goes.
Oh, the usual boilerplate. Futile struggle against a hostile nature and indifferent universe. etc. etc
Dé Luain, Lúnasa 18, 2008
There Was a Time When I Loved The Spark of a Warm Afternoon
And now the sun of through the window of my old apartment
Now the smell of mowed grass is a mockery
Everything I've Failed to Appreciate
The Afternoons when I was twenty four, long ago
the Fridays when I would feel the electricity
Freshly broken up, Perfectly Contented to Spend Whole Days alone
A feeling Gone forever, How Strange
The Grocery Shopping on Friday Afternoons,
The Walk Down To South Street and back, the first time
The first Halloween, Hunter S. Thompson
Still Thrilled at the Sight of the O Street Crowds
The Happiness of Weekends alone
Trips to the bars, perhaps to find a woman, perhaps not.
The love of the smell of dried grass in the air
The feel in the apartment on afternoons that is still there, still the same,
but stining now, Not embracing and alive, as it was
Under This sky and Under These Trees, so long, so long,
Watching the Games with the low-rent people in the union.
Driving to work on the last day of the spring break blizzard,
seeing the sun appear out of the clouds for the first time
The Mopac Trail on my First New Years Day here
I Could tolerate the cold than, oh how I could tolerate the quiet
Always the same calm in my apartment that unified Summer and winter but no more
Now I must Embrace them. I will embrace Chicago when the time comes,
Let me morn now.
The Starship, Hustle and Flow.
Introducing Dan to Shoemaker's, collaborating on the Laurus Story
The nights on the HOA porch
Drinking to bitter hangover and loving it
Let me mourn for what it took me too long to value.
The wisdom that I never asked to bare.
The one love I truly wanted and can't have
The same mourning we all feel
The same weaknesses we brothers all share
And so of so little help to each other
Just the same mirrors showing our own growth and Decay
The beauty that kills all who value it
We can never have this again
We have but to rue the happiness of our children.
Now the smell of mowed grass is a mockery
Everything I've Failed to Appreciate
The Afternoons when I was twenty four, long ago
the Fridays when I would feel the electricity
Freshly broken up, Perfectly Contented to Spend Whole Days alone
A feeling Gone forever, How Strange
The Grocery Shopping on Friday Afternoons,
The Walk Down To South Street and back, the first time
The first Halloween, Hunter S. Thompson
Still Thrilled at the Sight of the O Street Crowds
The Happiness of Weekends alone
Trips to the bars, perhaps to find a woman, perhaps not.
The love of the smell of dried grass in the air
The feel in the apartment on afternoons that is still there, still the same,
but stining now, Not embracing and alive, as it was
Under This sky and Under These Trees, so long, so long,
Watching the Games with the low-rent people in the union.
Driving to work on the last day of the spring break blizzard,
seeing the sun appear out of the clouds for the first time
The Mopac Trail on my First New Years Day here
I Could tolerate the cold than, oh how I could tolerate the quiet
Always the same calm in my apartment that unified Summer and winter but no more
Now I must Embrace them. I will embrace Chicago when the time comes,
Let me morn now.
The Starship, Hustle and Flow.
Introducing Dan to Shoemaker's, collaborating on the Laurus Story
The nights on the HOA porch
Drinking to bitter hangover and loving it
Let me mourn for what it took me too long to value.
The wisdom that I never asked to bare.
The one love I truly wanted and can't have
The same mourning we all feel
The same weaknesses we brothers all share
And so of so little help to each other
Just the same mirrors showing our own growth and Decay
The beauty that kills all who value it
We can never have this again
We have but to rue the happiness of our children.
Déardaoin, Lúnasa 14, 2008
I've Had a Vision
Not a dream but a waking vision. Naked Iron Age women circled around a primitive farm field offering their vaginae to the sky in order to summon rain. And I feel a certainty that something like this has happened, perhaps in my own ancestral line.
Dé Máirt, Lúnasa 12, 2008
So My Mom Called me Last Friday
And asked if I would be available to pick up my cousin Wendy at Eppley Airport and drive her to North Platte through the night. It seems that she had run into money trouble while her husband Richard was visiting the people in Nebraska, and her ex boyfriend kindly offered to drive her from Lake Havasu City Az. to her parents in Las Vegas. He ended up sort of kidnapping her instead. Putting her and her children on a plane from Havasu to Reno and leaving her to escape at the Reno airport by telling him that she and the kids were going to the bathroom. She got a hold of her in-laws, my Aunt Sue and Uncle Tim, and managed to secure airfare from Reno to Omaha via, oddly, Tucson. My mom called at about one o'clock on Friday and asked if I would be able to pick her up at 9:55 and drive her to her husband in North Platte. Of course I would be. So there's that.
I drove to Omaha at about seven P.M. and had a dinner of boiled beef and sourkraut at the Bohemian Cafe with a meatball soup appetizer. The entree had too much dill in it and the gigantic portions left me stuffed for five hours. But overall it was nice. The waitress was great, and at any rate the presence of a Bohemian cafe in Nebraska's chief market is fraught with significance. It the only way it would be better is if the place were on Center Street, the road into Omaha from the Polish/Bohemian/whatever Alps. But on second thought nah fuck that street.
I bought coffee from a place on thirteenth and wondered along the riverfront for a short while before arriving at the airport at round 9:30. In the lounges by the gates middle-aged men were watching the Olympic opening ceremonies as if it were a funeral. I made a crack about knowing that the nation of Comoros existed now and was completely ignored.
The plane was on time from Tucson, but the jet-way was busted, so Wendy and her brood emerged from the plane half an hour behind schedule. Said brood consists of Jade, age six, and the twins Jeremiah and Jacob, eighteen months. In addition to her very small and very loud children Wendy had brought eight bags of luggage and toys, along with a crib and stroller for two. I drive a 95 Buick Grand Prix, and I had brought my own laundry with me out of pure reflex.
She made arrangements to leave the stroller in the care of an attendant on the oddball Arizona-Nebraska route. Several bags of clothes were ripped open for the sake of fitting in the trunk along with the crib, which fell out of it's cover and onto my foot in the process of figuring out how to fit everything in. While Wendy was in the airport making the deal with an attendant, a airport cop stepped out and asked us how much longer we would be. We had been parked by the terminal doors for fifteen minutes or so at that point. I told him he would have to ask the redhead inside at the Jet Express desk. This he proceeded to do after making small talk with the kids and expressing sympathy at the distance we would have to drive.
We eventually got everything into the trunk save for Wendy's suitcase, which she would sit on unbelted. The trunk closed with a small, disconcerting click and I knew that I would do well to avoid a rear-end crash of any magnitude.
The drive was pleasant enough. Wendy spoke of her ordeal and her days as a Vegas stripper and pointed out that she was worried about the cop I had directed towards her because of the high-grade marijuana she had towed across four different airport security checkpoints in a single day. This was good to know. The children fell asleep almost as soon as we started driving. She passed out in Lincoln. If Metallica's "One" hadn't come onto the radio around York I would have gone mad and/or killed everyone in the car.
A stop at Grand Island for more coffee, arrived at my parents house just after four.
My parents are having their bedroom and bathroom renovated. My old room upstairs is being taken by my cousins and their kids. I slept on an air mattress in the computer room five feet from where my father snored in his recliner.
The next day I was high on the high-grade pot and walking the dogs for relaxation when my Dad casually had Jade follow me since she wanted to walk the dogs too. And this was too much. She's a sweetheart most of the time but she's still six. The casual assumption that I would help in watching the kids after all I had done was... my God but that house was loud, and I need my twelve hours of solitude a day just like any reasonable man. So I called my mom at work and informed her that I would be coming back to Lincoln that night.
And now I feel guilty about it. My mom always cooks a big breakfast after church on Sundays for her parents and any extended family that wants to show up, and I know she was looking forward to feeding me. We were only together for a couple of hours out of the whole event. But my God, I cannot sleep five feet away from my parents while infants squeal at random points in the night. I'm just weak that way. I felt like some dipshit tourist taken in by a local peasant family while hiking Ecuador. And I'll be back on Labor Day when surely there will be some space carved out for me somewhere in the house, surely it will get back to resembling my house, our house.
Oh but Fuck it all, I suppose I'll have to tolerate my own infants someday, but damned if I'll tolerate anyone else's.
I drove to Omaha at about seven P.M. and had a dinner of boiled beef and sourkraut at the Bohemian Cafe with a meatball soup appetizer. The entree had too much dill in it and the gigantic portions left me stuffed for five hours. But overall it was nice. The waitress was great, and at any rate the presence of a Bohemian cafe in Nebraska's chief market is fraught with significance. It the only way it would be better is if the place were on Center Street, the road into Omaha from the Polish/Bohemian/whatever Alps. But on second thought nah fuck that street.
I bought coffee from a place on thirteenth and wondered along the riverfront for a short while before arriving at the airport at round 9:30. In the lounges by the gates middle-aged men were watching the Olympic opening ceremonies as if it were a funeral. I made a crack about knowing that the nation of Comoros existed now and was completely ignored.
The plane was on time from Tucson, but the jet-way was busted, so Wendy and her brood emerged from the plane half an hour behind schedule. Said brood consists of Jade, age six, and the twins Jeremiah and Jacob, eighteen months. In addition to her very small and very loud children Wendy had brought eight bags of luggage and toys, along with a crib and stroller for two. I drive a 95 Buick Grand Prix, and I had brought my own laundry with me out of pure reflex.
She made arrangements to leave the stroller in the care of an attendant on the oddball Arizona-Nebraska route. Several bags of clothes were ripped open for the sake of fitting in the trunk along with the crib, which fell out of it's cover and onto my foot in the process of figuring out how to fit everything in. While Wendy was in the airport making the deal with an attendant, a airport cop stepped out and asked us how much longer we would be. We had been parked by the terminal doors for fifteen minutes or so at that point. I told him he would have to ask the redhead inside at the Jet Express desk. This he proceeded to do after making small talk with the kids and expressing sympathy at the distance we would have to drive.
We eventually got everything into the trunk save for Wendy's suitcase, which she would sit on unbelted. The trunk closed with a small, disconcerting click and I knew that I would do well to avoid a rear-end crash of any magnitude.
The drive was pleasant enough. Wendy spoke of her ordeal and her days as a Vegas stripper and pointed out that she was worried about the cop I had directed towards her because of the high-grade marijuana she had towed across four different airport security checkpoints in a single day. This was good to know. The children fell asleep almost as soon as we started driving. She passed out in Lincoln. If Metallica's "One" hadn't come onto the radio around York I would have gone mad and/or killed everyone in the car.
A stop at Grand Island for more coffee, arrived at my parents house just after four.
My parents are having their bedroom and bathroom renovated. My old room upstairs is being taken by my cousins and their kids. I slept on an air mattress in the computer room five feet from where my father snored in his recliner.
The next day I was high on the high-grade pot and walking the dogs for relaxation when my Dad casually had Jade follow me since she wanted to walk the dogs too. And this was too much. She's a sweetheart most of the time but she's still six. The casual assumption that I would help in watching the kids after all I had done was... my God but that house was loud, and I need my twelve hours of solitude a day just like any reasonable man. So I called my mom at work and informed her that I would be coming back to Lincoln that night.
And now I feel guilty about it. My mom always cooks a big breakfast after church on Sundays for her parents and any extended family that wants to show up, and I know she was looking forward to feeding me. We were only together for a couple of hours out of the whole event. But my God, I cannot sleep five feet away from my parents while infants squeal at random points in the night. I'm just weak that way. I felt like some dipshit tourist taken in by a local peasant family while hiking Ecuador. And I'll be back on Labor Day when surely there will be some space carved out for me somewhere in the house, surely it will get back to resembling my house, our house.
Oh but Fuck it all, I suppose I'll have to tolerate my own infants someday, but damned if I'll tolerate anyone else's.
Dé hAoine, Lúnasa 08, 2008
Déardaoin, Lúnasa 07, 2008
I Was in Omaha Some Days Back
I wondered by the riverfront for awhile until I was past the point that has recently been developed for tourists and was back to where there is just the railroad tracks, cement factories, death trap streets,gravel paths to nowhere. It is somehow a great comfort to know that Nebraska's gateway to the East is still a profoundly ugly one. Railroads and cement factories are necessary, but old hat, not superficially progressive enough.
I wondered upon the Amtrak station at 9th and Pacific. It would be closed for several more hours before they started taking tickets for the one train from Chicago to the Bay Area. I used the stations parking lot as a portal to trespass onto the track that cross the river immediately to the east and gradually loop through town to Ralston and Sarpy and eventually Lincoln to the west. Here one will find the original three-block long boarding platform for the old Burlington station. The side of the station that faces the street has been kept up and still looks impressive. The side facing the tracks consists of windows broken decades ago and unwashed graffiti. The interior consists of nothing but dust, odd junk, and one can imagine more than a few rats. There is an awning at the rear of the platform leading to a long rotted-out staircase into the building. Still the place looks better than the glass box Amtrak station, and I see it's being developed into condos. "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burlington_Station" Well, good luck with that. They're definitely going to have to do something about the railroad front.
The platform was covered with rusted metal and glass. It was humid and I was dressed in shorts and sandals. I was a bit concerned for myself. But I was looking for a quick way into downtown and was a bit curious as to what was along this track in the southern midtown area, so I continued to walk southwest. I was looking for a break in the fences to get back to the street grid and there were none. Eventually I came to the overpass over 13th street. There was something of a foot path leading down to the street, presumably made by hobos and random weirdos like myself. By grabbing the branches of a strategic tree I was able to overcome my sandals' lack of traction and make it down to the pavement without tumbling onto it. Than I had lunch at a gyro place a few blocks further south.
It seems that higher gas prices are driving many to lower themselves to the decadent European level and ride the train cross-country "http://omaha.com/index.php?u_page=2798&u_sid=10397453" Of course the problems with Amtrak are well-known. Trains are typically obscenely late, still contacted to ride along meandering Burlington/Santa Fe routes despite B/SF being bought out by Union Pacific some years ago, still forced to yield to freight trains, still carrying standard engines so that they cross the landscape at about the same speed as a modern car retracing a 1920's auto-trail.
But I am a naive and hedonistic leftest, and the truth is that I am so out of touch with my own Godly culture that I really despise driving for more than an hour at a time. Amtrak is shit. This is perfectly clear. But the fact of the matter is that there is no way to travel long-distance that isn't painful. Only Americans would believe that there's something magical or ecstatic about stuffing oneself in some manner of moving box and traveling two thousand miles in one day. Only Americans would think that we are supposed to believe such a thing. The thrill of the open road. Utter horse shit.
So I'm not willing to give up on shoveling tax money into Amtrak. I've ridden the Zephyr and could see with my own eyes that it clearly isn't that much. Let's get faster trains, like they have ion the coastal strips, nationwide. Or how about a north/south line for the Red and Missouri valleys? Fargo to Sioux Falls to Omaha to Kansas City and than on to the cities of Texas. Light rails to Lincoln and Fremont and Blair. You hate your car. Admit it. It's okay. None of your friends can see you now. You can trust the silence of your confessor.
I remember seeing a video once in which Joseph Alioto, mayor of San Francisco in the early seventies, was testifying before a Senate committee and getting berated by Roman Hruska, our own late, great, proudly ignorant, Bohunk jackass, for having the audacity to not cover his city with freeways. Those of us who have been to Frisco, who have seen how beautiful, delicate, and densely packed of a city it is, should know that a full American-style freeway system would ruin the place. Never mind. Spending half a billion tax dollars on a freeway is the American capitalist way of doing things. Spending half a billion tax dollars on public transportation is socialist.
This is the American way. We are God's children and we decide what is and is not normal. That which is normal is good because what is good is normal. The private automobile is the symbol or one's worth and value. The fact that my car is bigger than yours is proof that I am more willing to feed my children than you are. I can't count the number of times when grown men, of reasonable intelligence, and with total sincerity, equated the modern automobile with a cowboy's horse, implying a sacred bond between you and your collection of glass and metal tubes. I cannot count the number of times when I was walking and mocked by random passerby for walking. I might as well have been sitting on the corner with my cardboard sign. It's always the people and the shittiest rusted-bondo cars who mock with the most relish, just as poor whites tend to be more virulently racist than the rich and educated.
And a car-based culture does serve its uses. The core of Omaha, the part that facces the Missouri, is nearly as densely populated as the largest cities, and as beautiful in many parts as well, particularly in Little Italy. But real Americans aspire to be aristocrats, measuring our worth by the size of our steed and our amount of land, and sometimes this takes some encouragement. Build a freeway through the densest part of Omaha. Build the 480 and the North Freeway to continue the long-term work of choking off North Omaha from downtown. Do everything you can to make living in the city core as undesirable as possible. Than we can become a city for the worthy ones, the real Americans, the Red Robin's, and the Von Muir's and the streets named after John Galt. Anyone who tries to walk through the neighborhoods of the worthies is bound to get killed. So much the better.
The truth is that our society achieved hegemony too young, while we were still filled with juvenile delusions and our ideal of liberty was restricted to the right to gain the material, the physical, the easy to grasp, the easy to think about. Now we carry on like Ludwig II, using our power to legitimize the nonsense and lunacy that drowns us. I'm not fond of denigrating my own country in particular, we are not at all unusual in this. But it is damned depressing, how stupid the whole lot of us are.
I wondered upon the Amtrak station at 9th and Pacific. It would be closed for several more hours before they started taking tickets for the one train from Chicago to the Bay Area. I used the stations parking lot as a portal to trespass onto the track that cross the river immediately to the east and gradually loop through town to Ralston and Sarpy and eventually Lincoln to the west. Here one will find the original three-block long boarding platform for the old Burlington station. The side of the station that faces the street has been kept up and still looks impressive. The side facing the tracks consists of windows broken decades ago and unwashed graffiti. The interior consists of nothing but dust, odd junk, and one can imagine more than a few rats. There is an awning at the rear of the platform leading to a long rotted-out staircase into the building. Still the place looks better than the glass box Amtrak station, and I see it's being developed into condos. "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burlington_Station" Well, good luck with that. They're definitely going to have to do something about the railroad front.
The platform was covered with rusted metal and glass. It was humid and I was dressed in shorts and sandals. I was a bit concerned for myself. But I was looking for a quick way into downtown and was a bit curious as to what was along this track in the southern midtown area, so I continued to walk southwest. I was looking for a break in the fences to get back to the street grid and there were none. Eventually I came to the overpass over 13th street. There was something of a foot path leading down to the street, presumably made by hobos and random weirdos like myself. By grabbing the branches of a strategic tree I was able to overcome my sandals' lack of traction and make it down to the pavement without tumbling onto it. Than I had lunch at a gyro place a few blocks further south.
It seems that higher gas prices are driving many to lower themselves to the decadent European level and ride the train cross-country "http://omaha.com/index.php?u_page=2798&u_sid=10397453" Of course the problems with Amtrak are well-known. Trains are typically obscenely late, still contacted to ride along meandering Burlington/Santa Fe routes despite B/SF being bought out by Union Pacific some years ago, still forced to yield to freight trains, still carrying standard engines so that they cross the landscape at about the same speed as a modern car retracing a 1920's auto-trail.
But I am a naive and hedonistic leftest, and the truth is that I am so out of touch with my own Godly culture that I really despise driving for more than an hour at a time. Amtrak is shit. This is perfectly clear. But the fact of the matter is that there is no way to travel long-distance that isn't painful. Only Americans would believe that there's something magical or ecstatic about stuffing oneself in some manner of moving box and traveling two thousand miles in one day. Only Americans would think that we are supposed to believe such a thing. The thrill of the open road. Utter horse shit.
So I'm not willing to give up on shoveling tax money into Amtrak. I've ridden the Zephyr and could see with my own eyes that it clearly isn't that much. Let's get faster trains, like they have ion the coastal strips, nationwide. Or how about a north/south line for the Red and Missouri valleys? Fargo to Sioux Falls to Omaha to Kansas City and than on to the cities of Texas. Light rails to Lincoln and Fremont and Blair. You hate your car. Admit it. It's okay. None of your friends can see you now. You can trust the silence of your confessor.
I remember seeing a video once in which Joseph Alioto, mayor of San Francisco in the early seventies, was testifying before a Senate committee and getting berated by Roman Hruska, our own late, great, proudly ignorant, Bohunk jackass, for having the audacity to not cover his city with freeways. Those of us who have been to Frisco, who have seen how beautiful, delicate, and densely packed of a city it is, should know that a full American-style freeway system would ruin the place. Never mind. Spending half a billion tax dollars on a freeway is the American capitalist way of doing things. Spending half a billion tax dollars on public transportation is socialist.
This is the American way. We are God's children and we decide what is and is not normal. That which is normal is good because what is good is normal. The private automobile is the symbol or one's worth and value. The fact that my car is bigger than yours is proof that I am more willing to feed my children than you are. I can't count the number of times when grown men, of reasonable intelligence, and with total sincerity, equated the modern automobile with a cowboy's horse, implying a sacred bond between you and your collection of glass and metal tubes. I cannot count the number of times when I was walking and mocked by random passerby for walking. I might as well have been sitting on the corner with my cardboard sign. It's always the people and the shittiest rusted-bondo cars who mock with the most relish, just as poor whites tend to be more virulently racist than the rich and educated.
And a car-based culture does serve its uses. The core of Omaha, the part that facces the Missouri, is nearly as densely populated as the largest cities, and as beautiful in many parts as well, particularly in Little Italy. But real Americans aspire to be aristocrats, measuring our worth by the size of our steed and our amount of land, and sometimes this takes some encouragement. Build a freeway through the densest part of Omaha. Build the 480 and the North Freeway to continue the long-term work of choking off North Omaha from downtown. Do everything you can to make living in the city core as undesirable as possible. Than we can become a city for the worthy ones, the real Americans, the Red Robin's, and the Von Muir's and the streets named after John Galt. Anyone who tries to walk through the neighborhoods of the worthies is bound to get killed. So much the better.
The truth is that our society achieved hegemony too young, while we were still filled with juvenile delusions and our ideal of liberty was restricted to the right to gain the material, the physical, the easy to grasp, the easy to think about. Now we carry on like Ludwig II, using our power to legitimize the nonsense and lunacy that drowns us. I'm not fond of denigrating my own country in particular, we are not at all unusual in this. But it is damned depressing, how stupid the whole lot of us are.
Dé Domhnaigh, Lúnasa 03, 2008
Czech Days
First off. it was still eighty eight degrees and humid at ten p.m. I feel that it's real important to mention this, as a single moment of experiencing hot weather makes every millisecond of life pointless and unbearable and all attempts at social joviality evil and disgusting. But the festival, lets get back to the festival.
Well, the town of Wilber was filled to the brim. I drove in via U.S. 77 and Nebraska 41, a narrow shoulderless road that is usually adequate to serve east-west traffic to and from Wilber but on Czech Days weekend is something of a death trap, especially this long double curve out of Clatonia. Parking was a bit of a problem once I got there but not as bad as downtown Lincoln on a workday. I found a spot at first and Court just two blocks from the west end of the street fair. Mostly it was the pedestrians that made driving through town problematic. The typical big bubbas mixed with girls in old peasant-frauling costume wrapped in the arms of boys in cowboy hats and Jay-Z t-shirts.
It was disappointing, the way that the festival added only a thin layer of gloss to a perfectly generic prairie village. There were two live rock bands playing in the bars. (One thing Wilber has going for it is that it has one bar for every thirty people or so, revealing the town's Bohemian roots much more than any country schlock fest.) One band was playing Puddle of Mudd, the other was playing Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Major events, whether at the personal or community level, are really not at all transformative. They merely amplify the character that is already there. If there isn't anything interesting there than this will become more obvious than ever.
There was a street dance going on in the parking lot of a small grocery store. They were playing some current top-forty rap of the type I do my best to avoid. Girls in tank tops and high heels complimented by the occasional straw hat. Boys standing on the backs of pickup trucks and, dear God, raising the roof. It wasn't more than ten years ago when white people in even the larger Midwestern towns had a knee-jerk hostility towards rap. We should go back to that. Rap was better then. It was beyond horrible, watching these kids scream and "dance" while the stereo spouted TRL cant. Girl I like it when/you move that/sit back for me dolla/slap that/Mercedes Rims/That Bitch got a Dime/Move that Ass/ Who now?
I walked to a food stand featuring fare from the meat market owned by Russ Karpisek. Karpisek is known to the outside world as the state senator from the area, replacing deranged moon-harpy Jeanne Combs of 'I need a concealed gun to protect myself from prostitutes' fame. In the last session Karpisek managed to get a bill of his passed which upped the penalty for possession of marijuana under an ounce, reasoning that it was wrong for minors who are caught drinking to be punished more harshly than if they were smoking a substance that it illegal to all. While Karpisek is a marked improvement over Combs, it is still comforting to know that the area can still produce senators with ass-backwards solutions to state problems. I bought a polish dog with kraut. It was magnificent. All is forgiven senator.
I walked into a bar, also owned by Karpisek unless it's his brother or something. There was a Cech brass band singing a drinking song that was incomprehensible over the crowd. There was a two dollar cover charge, with another three-fifty for a Pillsner Urquell. The women were overweight and/or overly made-up. It was stuffed fill of assholes and the collective body heat negated the air conditioning, and than the band started playing the husker fight song, and the people sang along, and I always knew that this would happen. Even when I was an infant, unable to speak or reason, I knew that this moment would be. That I would be in a bar in Wilber Nebraska listening to a brass band in peasant costume playing the Husker Fight song while I was surrounded by sunburned rubes in a fire-hazard country bar. This is my moment of eternal return, this is what I will experience forever in the split-second before my death, and the thought of that fills me with a sort of bitter peace. Why does the world hurt me? Why does it hate me? Why must I be the one who reveals the smell of spilled Bud Light on the floor combined with sweat and chewing tobacco? There is no escape from this universal destiny. This is are apocalypse. While the rest of the world collapses in a great wave of blood and fire, Nebraska will be in a bar listening to an Ethnic brass band play "Good ol Nebraska U."
After this I wondered up and down the festival streets until I came to the Hotel Wilber. Which is a historic hotel which is currently being used as, a hotel, or rather a bed-and-breakfast. And in truth the place is, rather pretty. Judging by the website it seems that the maids and the waitresses all dress in old-world costume. This loses its novelty quickly. It only takes a few minutes for the sight of a woman in Czech dress smoking a cigarette, drinking a Bud Light, and cursing her child via cellphone to become nothing at all.
The Hotel Wilber is where the various state Czech Queens are being kept. I was surprised at how easily I walked in the front door. There were various hangers-on about, presumably the owners of the hotel, officials connected to the pageant, the festival, the town. The Czech Queens came and went among them, dressed down to five or six layers of underwear. Why I didn't strike up a conversation with one of them I don't know. I could of taken them away from there. We could have gone to Oakland, where the weather is never offensive and the subdivisions among white people are laughably insignificant. But here I am and there they are. Life is pain.
I went to a liquor store in search of an individual 24 of Urquell, but all they had in this vain were Budweiser products. I went back to my car and eventually navigated my way out of the village, taking the shouldered Nebraska 103 north towards Crete. Two thirds of the other cars on the highway were cops just sitting there just waiting to catch somebody swerving. When I got back to Lincoln I bought a pint of Pillsner Urquell from N street liquors and drank it in the alleys of T-Town.
Well, the town of Wilber was filled to the brim. I drove in via U.S. 77 and Nebraska 41, a narrow shoulderless road that is usually adequate to serve east-west traffic to and from Wilber but on Czech Days weekend is something of a death trap, especially this long double curve out of Clatonia. Parking was a bit of a problem once I got there but not as bad as downtown Lincoln on a workday. I found a spot at first and Court just two blocks from the west end of the street fair. Mostly it was the pedestrians that made driving through town problematic. The typical big bubbas mixed with girls in old peasant-frauling costume wrapped in the arms of boys in cowboy hats and Jay-Z t-shirts.
It was disappointing, the way that the festival added only a thin layer of gloss to a perfectly generic prairie village. There were two live rock bands playing in the bars. (One thing Wilber has going for it is that it has one bar for every thirty people or so, revealing the town's Bohemian roots much more than any country schlock fest.) One band was playing Puddle of Mudd, the other was playing Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Major events, whether at the personal or community level, are really not at all transformative. They merely amplify the character that is already there. If there isn't anything interesting there than this will become more obvious than ever.
There was a street dance going on in the parking lot of a small grocery store. They were playing some current top-forty rap of the type I do my best to avoid. Girls in tank tops and high heels complimented by the occasional straw hat. Boys standing on the backs of pickup trucks and, dear God, raising the roof. It wasn't more than ten years ago when white people in even the larger Midwestern towns had a knee-jerk hostility towards rap. We should go back to that. Rap was better then. It was beyond horrible, watching these kids scream and "dance" while the stereo spouted TRL cant. Girl I like it when/you move that/sit back for me dolla/slap that/Mercedes Rims/That Bitch got a Dime/Move that Ass/ Who now?
I walked to a food stand featuring fare from the meat market owned by Russ Karpisek. Karpisek is known to the outside world as the state senator from the area, replacing deranged moon-harpy Jeanne Combs of 'I need a concealed gun to protect myself from prostitutes' fame. In the last session Karpisek managed to get a bill of his passed which upped the penalty for possession of marijuana under an ounce, reasoning that it was wrong for minors who are caught drinking to be punished more harshly than if they were smoking a substance that it illegal to all. While Karpisek is a marked improvement over Combs, it is still comforting to know that the area can still produce senators with ass-backwards solutions to state problems. I bought a polish dog with kraut. It was magnificent. All is forgiven senator.
I walked into a bar, also owned by Karpisek unless it's his brother or something. There was a Cech brass band singing a drinking song that was incomprehensible over the crowd. There was a two dollar cover charge, with another three-fifty for a Pillsner Urquell. The women were overweight and/or overly made-up. It was stuffed fill of assholes and the collective body heat negated the air conditioning, and than the band started playing the husker fight song, and the people sang along, and I always knew that this would happen. Even when I was an infant, unable to speak or reason, I knew that this moment would be. That I would be in a bar in Wilber Nebraska listening to a brass band in peasant costume playing the Husker Fight song while I was surrounded by sunburned rubes in a fire-hazard country bar. This is my moment of eternal return, this is what I will experience forever in the split-second before my death, and the thought of that fills me with a sort of bitter peace. Why does the world hurt me? Why does it hate me? Why must I be the one who reveals the smell of spilled Bud Light on the floor combined with sweat and chewing tobacco? There is no escape from this universal destiny. This is are apocalypse. While the rest of the world collapses in a great wave of blood and fire, Nebraska will be in a bar listening to an Ethnic brass band play "Good ol Nebraska U."
After this I wondered up and down the festival streets until I came to the Hotel Wilber. Which is a historic hotel which is currently being used as, a hotel, or rather a bed-and-breakfast. And in truth the place is, rather pretty. Judging by the website it seems that the maids and the waitresses all dress in old-world costume. This loses its novelty quickly. It only takes a few minutes for the sight of a woman in Czech dress smoking a cigarette, drinking a Bud Light, and cursing her child via cellphone to become nothing at all.
The Hotel Wilber is where the various state Czech Queens are being kept. I was surprised at how easily I walked in the front door. There were various hangers-on about, presumably the owners of the hotel, officials connected to the pageant, the festival, the town. The Czech Queens came and went among them, dressed down to five or six layers of underwear. Why I didn't strike up a conversation with one of them I don't know. I could of taken them away from there. We could have gone to Oakland, where the weather is never offensive and the subdivisions among white people are laughably insignificant. But here I am and there they are. Life is pain.
I went to a liquor store in search of an individual 24 of Urquell, but all they had in this vain were Budweiser products. I went back to my car and eventually navigated my way out of the village, taking the shouldered Nebraska 103 north towards Crete. Two thirds of the other cars on the highway were cops just sitting there just waiting to catch somebody swerving. When I got back to Lincoln I bought a pint of Pillsner Urquell from N street liquors and drank it in the alleys of T-Town.
Dé Luain, Iúil 21, 2008
McDonalds Boycotted for Supporting Gay Agenda in Ways Boycotters Seem Unsure Of.
Some knucklehead group out of Naperville called "Americans for Truth About Homosexuality" was whining about the Chicagoland media's blatantly conspiratorial lack of coverage of a press conference the group had on the boycott. This in spite of the fact that "nearly 200000" that's right, "nearly 200000" or nearly one-fifteenth of one percent of the American population, has signed onto the boycott.
"The people involved in this boycott of McDonald’s are good family people — not vegans, America-hating leftists, or some other fringe group."
Right. Boycotting a multi-billion dollar corporation for donating twenty grand to the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce is clearly more American than boycotting McDonald's over objections to the meat industry's treatment of animals. Veganism is communism because people who don't eat meat hate their father's penis.
http://americansfortruth.com/news/chicago-media-blacks-out-mcdonalds-boycott-press-conference.html
The comments on the actual boycott site itself, http://www.boycottmcdonalds.com/ demonstrates how right-wing sloganeering is a bigger threat to the English language that VH1 can ever hope to be. The act of creating ultra-compound sentences for the sake of jamming all of the catch phrases in creates a very Beckettian sense of anti-narrative.
"America is tired of corporations and organizations twisting the free speech and actions of its citizens into 'hatred' when we simply oppose the corporation's, or organization's, involvement in areas where we don't want our money going. Opposing your involvement says nothing about the individual's point of view on homosexuality and yet you claim to know, anyway. How arrogant and childish. We are tired of the brainwashing politically correct movement. I hoped McD's was smarter than that, but obviously it's not. Don't expect anymore of my money."
"We love your fries, but we will not compromise truth. You have taken money that our family, and millions of others, have contributed to the success of the McDonald's Corp. and chosen to use it for an agenda that defies the foundation of our nation, the family, as created by a man and woman. Perhaps you should spend more time sitting at the tables in the play yards of the thousands of McD's restaurants around the country. We will only be missing the fries, but your corporation has lost something much greater, respect and truth."
"I will take me 10 great grand children to Wendys BurgerKing or some other place. YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN!"
(I will take ME ten great-grandchildren? Are London chimney-sweeps signing the petition?)
"We will not spend our money at MCD's until the Co. becomes neutral on the homosexual agenda which breaks down the natural family unit. Having two gay sisters, I know first hand how destructive this agenda becomes. I do not take it lightly labeling Christians as hateful. We just dislike the carefree lifestyles imposed on others. Lets keep our American values."
Conservative cant bingo anyone?
Politically correct
family values
American Family (capitalization theirs)
American Values (ditto)
gay agenda
Homosexual agenda
gay agenda
Homosexual Agenda
gay agenda
gay agenda
I believe I have a postage stamp.
"The people involved in this boycott of McDonald’s are good family people — not vegans, America-hating leftists, or some other fringe group."
Right. Boycotting a multi-billion dollar corporation for donating twenty grand to the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce is clearly more American than boycotting McDonald's over objections to the meat industry's treatment of animals. Veganism is communism because people who don't eat meat hate their father's penis.
http://americansfortruth.com/news/chicago-media-blacks-out-mcdonalds-boycott-press-conference.html
The comments on the actual boycott site itself, http://www.boycottmcdonalds.com/ demonstrates how right-wing sloganeering is a bigger threat to the English language that VH1 can ever hope to be. The act of creating ultra-compound sentences for the sake of jamming all of the catch phrases in creates a very Beckettian sense of anti-narrative.
"America is tired of corporations and organizations twisting the free speech and actions of its citizens into 'hatred' when we simply oppose the corporation's, or organization's, involvement in areas where we don't want our money going. Opposing your involvement says nothing about the individual's point of view on homosexuality and yet you claim to know, anyway. How arrogant and childish. We are tired of the brainwashing politically correct movement. I hoped McD's was smarter than that, but obviously it's not. Don't expect anymore of my money."
"We love your fries, but we will not compromise truth. You have taken money that our family, and millions of others, have contributed to the success of the McDonald's Corp. and chosen to use it for an agenda that defies the foundation of our nation, the family, as created by a man and woman. Perhaps you should spend more time sitting at the tables in the play yards of the thousands of McD's restaurants around the country. We will only be missing the fries, but your corporation has lost something much greater, respect and truth."
"I will take me 10 great grand children to Wendys BurgerKing or some other place. YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN!"
(I will take ME ten great-grandchildren? Are London chimney-sweeps signing the petition?)
"We will not spend our money at MCD's until the Co. becomes neutral on the homosexual agenda which breaks down the natural family unit. Having two gay sisters, I know first hand how destructive this agenda becomes. I do not take it lightly labeling Christians as hateful. We just dislike the carefree lifestyles imposed on others. Lets keep our American values."
Conservative cant bingo anyone?
Politically correct
family values
American Family (capitalization theirs)
American Values (ditto)
gay agenda
Homosexual agenda
gay agenda
Homosexual Agenda
gay agenda
gay agenda
I believe I have a postage stamp.
I Swam At Blue Stem Lake Today
Tried to go to Branched Oak on the weekend but it was actually guarded by Game and Parks employees. I told one that I was lost coming out of Malcolm and he guided me back to town while his hand rested on the towel in the passenger seat.
Blue Stem was nice, the feeling of forty five minutes in pesticide-flavored water on a hot day is incomparable, something that one must do at least once in the summer. Some of the locals were there, don't know if they were from Lincoln or actually local-local. They seemed about nineteen and had no children with them.
Afterwords I went to Crete to have a drink at one of the local bars and catch something of the flavor of the town that way as is my wont. But it seems that Crete is woefully undertaverned, only three bars in a town of fifteen thousand, and only the VFW was open even though it was barely an hour before five o'clock. I take this as a sign of racial tension, or at least some sort of coldness and unwillingness of the townspeople to connect.
So I came back to Lincoln and stopped at the Ideal supermarket looking for some middle-brow tomato sauce to add to some pasta I made yesterday. All they had were the name brands offered at twice the market value, this and middle-brow wine priced at twice the market value. I still have at least a liter and a half on my box of Franzia.
After all of this disappointment the only logical thing to do was to dine at the KFC buffet at ninth and South. I waited in line for ten minutes behind an elderly woman who was having all of the combo meals explained to her point by point. I was the only one there who wasn't at least forty pounds overweight, I thought back to the lake and was horrified. Somehow I knew that, for at least those forty-five minutes, I had a full pair of breasts. I was shirtless of course, and they were there for all to see. Fat, milk gland, enlarged pores, covered in grease. If the police had shown up at that moment I would have been infamous. My breasts roast in the sun for eternity. I had the extra crispy, some buffalo fingers, buttermilk biscuit in brown gravy, and the vanilla wafer pudding.
Blue Stem was nice, the feeling of forty five minutes in pesticide-flavored water on a hot day is incomparable, something that one must do at least once in the summer. Some of the locals were there, don't know if they were from Lincoln or actually local-local. They seemed about nineteen and had no children with them.
Afterwords I went to Crete to have a drink at one of the local bars and catch something of the flavor of the town that way as is my wont. But it seems that Crete is woefully undertaverned, only three bars in a town of fifteen thousand, and only the VFW was open even though it was barely an hour before five o'clock. I take this as a sign of racial tension, or at least some sort of coldness and unwillingness of the townspeople to connect.
So I came back to Lincoln and stopped at the Ideal supermarket looking for some middle-brow tomato sauce to add to some pasta I made yesterday. All they had were the name brands offered at twice the market value, this and middle-brow wine priced at twice the market value. I still have at least a liter and a half on my box of Franzia.
After all of this disappointment the only logical thing to do was to dine at the KFC buffet at ninth and South. I waited in line for ten minutes behind an elderly woman who was having all of the combo meals explained to her point by point. I was the only one there who wasn't at least forty pounds overweight, I thought back to the lake and was horrified. Somehow I knew that, for at least those forty-five minutes, I had a full pair of breasts. I was shirtless of course, and they were there for all to see. Fat, milk gland, enlarged pores, covered in grease. If the police had shown up at that moment I would have been infamous. My breasts roast in the sun for eternity. I had the extra crispy, some buffalo fingers, buttermilk biscuit in brown gravy, and the vanilla wafer pudding.
Dé Sathairn, Iúil 19, 2008
Actual World-Herald Headline
"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' takes a cue from vintage listeners"
It seems that the (Choke) "Saddle Creek Generation" in addition to obsessing over failed relationships and awkwardly spouting liberal slogans, has the same taste for vinyl L.P's that every youngish music fan of every generation, every subculture, and every subgenre has had since the invention of the compact disc.
It is comforting, isn't it, that members of the (gargle) "Saddle Creek Generation" have shown their Midwestern essence by latching onto a (supposed) fad that could not possibly distinguish anybody from anyone.
I don't know how to say it, and yet I can't stop writing about it. I mean seriously, a vinyl collection is as universal as it gets.
"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' Enjoys Beer and Sex"
"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' will quote 'Simpsons' lines when conversation lulls."
"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' is happy at weddings and sad at funerals"
"Men of 'Saddle Creek Generation' are only pretending to enjoy Carly Simon"
"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' whispers at how mismatched you are with your girlfriend when you're not in the room"
"The tenacious comeback of classic vinyl LPs that started several years ago still is going strong."
Indeed it is John Keenen, indeed it is. Your piercing insight into the most obscure subcultural crevasses is truly exacerbating. I salute you sir. And I salute the entire staff of the World-Herald for extending showing such keen insight into youth culture.
Ya fucking dipshits.
http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=1208&u_sid=10384767
It seems that the (Choke) "Saddle Creek Generation" in addition to obsessing over failed relationships and awkwardly spouting liberal slogans, has the same taste for vinyl L.P's that every youngish music fan of every generation, every subculture, and every subgenre has had since the invention of the compact disc.
It is comforting, isn't it, that members of the (gargle) "Saddle Creek Generation" have shown their Midwestern essence by latching onto a (supposed) fad that could not possibly distinguish anybody from anyone.
I don't know how to say it, and yet I can't stop writing about it. I mean seriously, a vinyl collection is as universal as it gets.
"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' Enjoys Beer and Sex"
"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' will quote 'Simpsons' lines when conversation lulls."
"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' is happy at weddings and sad at funerals"
"Men of 'Saddle Creek Generation' are only pretending to enjoy Carly Simon"
"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' whispers at how mismatched you are with your girlfriend when you're not in the room"
"The tenacious comeback of classic vinyl LPs that started several years ago still is going strong."
Indeed it is John Keenen, indeed it is. Your piercing insight into the most obscure subcultural crevasses is truly exacerbating. I salute you sir. And I salute the entire staff of the World-Herald for extending showing such keen insight into youth culture.
Ya fucking dipshits.
http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=1208&u_sid=10384767
Dé Luain, Iúil 14, 2008
Thoughts on The Memorial Park Show.
The Good Life are rather overrated. The impulse to write songs about nothing but your failed relationships is born of the same navel-gazing that causes relationships to fail. Tim Kasher is an absolute dope who lacks stage presence and makes political shout-outs so ham-fisted as to make Kanye West seem smooth. But hell, it was vaguely groovable music played on a beautiful day, their signiture, "Album of the Year" is undeniably endearing, and overall it could have been worse, even with the doddering teenage twits who make up the band's most loyal base.
4.5/10
Argentine Juana Molina's folktronica sound is damned fascinating, especially with her Italian-flavored, consonants-as-vowels, Buenos Aires dialect of Spanish. Her instruments are an acoustic guitar, some synthesizers, and an echo machine that enables her to use a a single lyrical line as background noise for the next minute or so. Very cool, and perfect for sunset.
8/10
I actually liked her better than Feist, who was perfectly fine, charming and playing a good mix of up-tempo songs and torch burners. I'm afraid that I was somewhat distressed by the climax of the show as I had lost track of anyone from Lincoln and worried that my Smiley novel and cheap cigarettes were lost to the four winds. But in the end I ran into Ms. Rebecca who had dutifully saved them for me. There was a shadow show that complimented the music very well, especially on the false closer before the encore, the night was cool and the crowd became more tolerable as Leslie began to command their attention. Overall though, I felt as if something were being held back, can't really explain why.
7.5/10
4.5/10
Argentine Juana Molina's folktronica sound is damned fascinating, especially with her Italian-flavored, consonants-as-vowels, Buenos Aires dialect of Spanish. Her instruments are an acoustic guitar, some synthesizers, and an echo machine that enables her to use a a single lyrical line as background noise for the next minute or so. Very cool, and perfect for sunset.
8/10
I actually liked her better than Feist, who was perfectly fine, charming and playing a good mix of up-tempo songs and torch burners. I'm afraid that I was somewhat distressed by the climax of the show as I had lost track of anyone from Lincoln and worried that my Smiley novel and cheap cigarettes were lost to the four winds. But in the end I ran into Ms. Rebecca who had dutifully saved them for me. There was a shadow show that complimented the music very well, especially on the false closer before the encore, the night was cool and the crowd became more tolerable as Leslie began to command their attention. Overall though, I felt as if something were being held back, can't really explain why.
7.5/10
Dé Luain, Iúil 07, 2008
Dé Domhnaigh, Iúil 06, 2008
Tales From North Platte
Jade Keith is my six-year-old second cousin, the daughter of my cousin Richard and his wife Wendy. She has asthma and allergies that she inherited from my uncle Tim and needs breathing treatments every couple of hours. She is smarter than her age and knows it, reading books aloud, pointing out logical absurdities in movies just like I enjoyed doing at her age and do still, and showing off her handful of Spanish to whoever will hear. She is the primary watchdog for her infant twin brothers while the parents are out smoking.
Wendy is my age, 27. She looks a solid eight years older thanks to powder-parties in the Arizona desert. She has vague notions of going to college for something. I told her about my plans for grad school and my vague notions of being a professor. When I told her all that was required she said "so you're some kind of genius right?" She asked me to draw up an IQ test so she could see if night classes would be worth the trouble. I quickly explained that there's some precision to it, logical riddles and spatial testing and all that, nothing one could make up on the spot.
Aside from this request, Wendy gives every indication of being perfectly bright herself, able to read shades and vocal tone and understand the mood of the room and even get my jokes. She is ignorant to the world outside of the trailer park simply because it doesn't exist to her. I wonder how much she was like her daughter at her age. When I was six years old my family recognized my wits and even though they weren't college educated and not rich they still knew well enough to "encourage" me to take up an instrument, write a poem,go out for band, geography bee, get used to showing off my mental processes in public. I never have, but I can at least tolerate the public, more or less, tolerate having something like a name in a way that would be unthinkable if I wasn't a publicly smart kid.
And what about Jade? She lords over children four years older than her with her wits and the ability to say "silly" with all the honeyed venom that makes adults fall in love with young girls. Beyond that she has nothing but some public school in North Vegas that isn't even trying to notice the superlative poor kids and a family that knows nothing of the white-collar spelling bee and recital circuit.
She'll finish high school easily enough and be thrilled to death with it. She'll take She may or may not spend a year or two in junior college before shacking up with some galoot and moving to a trailer park three towns away from the folks, using her mental power to rationalize his thuggery and drunkenness, staying up late to drink every night with him in the neighbors in the hope that some dear girlfriend will show up and maybe they might get a few minutes to talk alone, acquiring a taste for upper-middle brow films and books before finally becoming addicted to General Hospital out of boredom, waiting for her children to grow up and call her for bail, knowing that it's simply a part of life.
Wendy is my age, 27. She looks a solid eight years older thanks to powder-parties in the Arizona desert. She has vague notions of going to college for something. I told her about my plans for grad school and my vague notions of being a professor. When I told her all that was required she said "so you're some kind of genius right?" She asked me to draw up an IQ test so she could see if night classes would be worth the trouble. I quickly explained that there's some precision to it, logical riddles and spatial testing and all that, nothing one could make up on the spot.
Aside from this request, Wendy gives every indication of being perfectly bright herself, able to read shades and vocal tone and understand the mood of the room and even get my jokes. She is ignorant to the world outside of the trailer park simply because it doesn't exist to her. I wonder how much she was like her daughter at her age. When I was six years old my family recognized my wits and even though they weren't college educated and not rich they still knew well enough to "encourage" me to take up an instrument, write a poem,go out for band, geography bee, get used to showing off my mental processes in public. I never have, but I can at least tolerate the public, more or less, tolerate having something like a name in a way that would be unthinkable if I wasn't a publicly smart kid.
And what about Jade? She lords over children four years older than her with her wits and the ability to say "silly" with all the honeyed venom that makes adults fall in love with young girls. Beyond that she has nothing but some public school in North Vegas that isn't even trying to notice the superlative poor kids and a family that knows nothing of the white-collar spelling bee and recital circuit.
She'll finish high school easily enough and be thrilled to death with it. She'll take She may or may not spend a year or two in junior college before shacking up with some galoot and moving to a trailer park three towns away from the folks, using her mental power to rationalize his thuggery and drunkenness, staying up late to drink every night with him in the neighbors in the hope that some dear girlfriend will show up and maybe they might get a few minutes to talk alone, acquiring a taste for upper-middle brow films and books before finally becoming addicted to General Hospital out of boredom, waiting for her children to grow up and call her for bail, knowing that it's simply a part of life.
Dé Luain, Meitheamh 30, 2008
On The Al Gorium. (Or Why Al Gore is not an Argument you Stupid Asshole.)
Don't act like you don't want what he's got bitch.
O.K. Slim, I'll try to explain this as simply as I can. The message is wholly, completely, totally, and utterly independent of the messenger in every way. If Hitler tells you that water is wet, water is wet. The fact that Al Gore has a big house means nothing. The fact that Al Gore has a private jet means nothing. If Al Gore had a fleet of three hundred diesel tankers idling in his back yard and running continuously simply to satiate his carbon monoxide fetish, it would mean nothing. The problem with killing the messenger is so obvious that it is almost universally known by its common name instead of the official Latin one. (That's Ad Hominem Slim")
There is no excuse whatsoever for anyone of average intelligence to think that either hypocrisy or perceived hypocrisy is relevent to anything whatsoever. The Ad Hominem is the tool of the moron and the liar and no one else.
It's not fair, I know, the fact that Al Gore has infinitely more money, power, and respect than you do, even though he doesn't know how to be a real man like you do. All the same, the way that Al Gore is jammed into global warming arguments like a frat house broom rape does betray a deep level of envy towards someone who's more successful than you, and that's not very conservative of you now is it Slim? A hundred years from now, Al Gore will be remembered in history with admiration and respect. Your great-grandchildren will read about his wisdom and his foresight while throwing your polaroid out with the cat liter. Fuck you.
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