Me Spree

C'mon everyone, let's read something I wrote!

2012-01-31T09:09:00.000-08:00

It's about time you showed me a little interest and took some time out of your day to read what I have to say about something or other

Time is limited. With the amount of material there is out there to read, not to mention all the films and TV series there is to watch, all the computer games there are to be played, along with all the work we have to do in between, it's no wonder very few of us have time to read what I write. So that's why I thought I'd take this opportunity to convince you to do so. In fact, why not start with this?

Hear me out here. If you've come this far, you're already on the right track. So why not continue? Do you like what you've read so far? You probably at least don't hate it, because you're still reading. So just trust your instincts and keep in mind what I have to offer. First off, the technical stuff is all there: punctuation, grammar, spelling... check, check, and check (notice my perfect use of commas). Next off, I offer content. In this case, I offer excellent motivational content on why you should be reading this. Second or third or whichever number I'm on, I offer self-betterment, because there is no better way to be informed about why you should read me than by actually reading me (self = me, which is why I call it self-betterment, because me-betterment sounded weird). So all three or four or however many of those points there were, are all there, in favor of me. Why not keep giving me a go?

Still here? Good! You've already made it nearly halfway through my article. That's already a huge effort on your behalf, because you could've instead spent the last few minutes reading Twitter or Candace Bushnell or The Huffington Post or Shakespeare. But instead you picked me. And just think of what that means. First off, the fact that you're reading me is very good for how I feel about myself. Being read is a great motivational boost, and that will mean that I will be even keener to write more stuff, knowing that you and others like you are reading. So the more you read, the more I write, and the more you read what I write the more I write because you read what I write and the... Secondly, you reading what I write is a great way to find out about the qualities that make me interesting enough for you to read, because there's no better place to find my readable qualities than in what I write, and so the writing speaks for itself -- myself -- in a way... actually in both ways. Thirdly... fuck it, let's stop at two. Two reasons seem sufficient to me there.

Notice how I divide my writing up into paragraphs? That makes the article a little more digestible and a little less like just one big block of text. Notice how the paragraphs are more or less divided up into equal numbers of lines: paragraph one is five lines, paragraph two is 10 lines, paragraph three is 15 lines... Ok, that's not equal sized paragraphs but that is steady growth by five lines with each paragraph... But that would mean this paragraph should be 20 lines. I have to be honest, I'm intending to end this paragraph here because I don't know what more to say about paragraphs. This paragraph was seven lines. The pattern is screwed now, I guess. Maybe I shouldn't have written this or you shouldn't have read it. But if I told you not to read it, this whole article I've been writing would be pointless, so let's not let that happen. So read it, but just sort of gloss over this paragraph, if you like. (amendment: this paragraph ended up being 12 lines, but it's still not good if you're looking for a pattern)

To conclude, there is a lot to read, and I really want you to read me, and others to read me too. I write, so you can't say "You have nothing for me to read". So you can't use that excuse. There's this and other articles like this too. Secondly... assuming the thing I said just before this sentence was "Firstly"... secondly, I'm very interested in being read because it gains me recognition, which makes me feel better about myself, releasing endorphins that make me feel happy, and that's important. Also important is feeling self-important, and nothing says self-important more than a blogger looking to get read by as many people as possible. Thirdly... never mind, the third point can wait, just those two points should do. Fourthly... well, thirdly, actually, because I just thought of a third point now on the fourth point... thirdly, you should tell others to read me and exaggerate how amazing I am.

You've made it to the end! Congratulations to both you and me on you having read me!

The Pilgrimage

2011-12-31T04:01:00.000-08:00

There are two kinds of pilgrimage we are obliged to undertake in our lifetime, and it's a duty we owe to our world: one is a return to intimate places we have lived in for long stretches of time, the other is a visit to places we have never been, but which have nevertheless had just as powerful an impression on us over the course of our lives.

The first pilgrimage, the Return, almost always involves the same two sacred sites: the childhood home, and the school. These two hallowed grounds marked our formative years when time seemed longer, because time was marked out by constant novelty, discovery and innovation. Things seem long when you're experiencing them for the first time, and childhood always seems long to us for that reason. Often on the Return pilgrimage, we will wonder how it was only two or three years that all those memories could have been crammed into, and also at just how much bigger things seemed in our childhood minds than they actually are upon the return. The walls were higher, the trees were bigger, the streets were longer, and the hills behind your house were mountains. It was a time when every day was an adventure, and time seemed to stretch out immeasurably to no end. In the span of a few years, great things happened, events that shaped the destiny of your life. The love, friendship, adventure, success, failure were all great, and regardless of whether they were remembered as happy times or sad, they were exciting times, and you felt things then. To return to these inanimate yet hallowed and vivid places always seemed to me a duty, as if it were repayment for great gifts bestowed once, and which deserve the paying of respects now. Because the house and the neighborhood and school were alive once, and they had souls, and we must respect their souls as we would a dead family member. Those souls were created only through us. That is the beauty of the Return pilgrimage. What was created between me and the hallowed place, was the soul. Neither on its own means anything. It is together that the spirit awakes, the soul manifests, and the experience becomes sublime. It is through that interaction of brain, eyes, light and brick that the walls come to life, that the buildings speak, that the windows reproduce faces that once peered through them and now peer back in our minds.

We will return, and we will stand silently, and observe. We will assume a solemn remembrance for the bonds of self and place and time. We will pick out the holiest of signs, the relics of the hagiography in our minds. The gate, the door, the bush, the tree, the steps, the window, the vines, the wall... We find ourselves in a temple, and everything has meaning, no matter how profane, no matter how inanimate, no matter how lowly, or how utilitarian. The world comes alive when we stand there, and our life regains its sense of wonder and mystery. It is deeply personal, it is shared with few if any others, and even then not in exactly the same way. There is merely overlapping. But in essence what you worship there is unique. It is yours. That is your place, that is your temple, and nobody can ever take that away from you.

The second kind of pilgrimage is the Seeking, because it's a not-yet-attained yearning for something, some place that held great meaning for us in our formative years, but which has eluded us until the pilgrimage of Seeking. In my case, the Seeking was center court at Wimbledon, because I grew up playing tennis and watching tennis, and it was for many years all I would do outside school. I would wake up at 6am and hit on the wall for hours before school, and then again after school. I would wake at 4am to watch Wimbledon on TV, and I would skip school if there was a match I had to see. I remember countless matches watched on TV, all in that sacrosanct cathedral to the thing I loved: tennis. To others, the pilgrimage may be to the Metropolitan Opera, maybe to Yankee Stadium, maybe to a Museum. To me, the thought of walking onto center court at Wimbledon would be the way a Catholic would feel upon walking into St. Peters Cathedral. It would be a truly religious experience, and I don't just mean that as a metaphor. The times I lay out on the floor watching the McEnroe's, the Becker's, the Edberg's, the Cash's, the Lendl's and the Connors's would come flooding back to me. The Duke and Duchess of York would be up there waving. John Newcombe or Tony Trabert would be commentating from the press box. The photographers lined along the side would be clicking. The faces in the crowd would be fanning themselves and clapping and running from the rain and returning with their umbrellas. Giants would be facing off on either side of the net, each of them surely ten feet tall and superhuman. The grass under my feet would be something not of this world. I would be stunned and in awe of the power of that place. And inside I would experience something truly akin to a religious ecstasy, or an epiphany.

But so far, that Seeking hasn't happened. I've yet to go to Wimbledon, but it's a pilgrimage I hope to achieve one day. As for the Return pilgrimage, that's a bit different. I've had a few childhood homes, and while I've done the Return pilgrimage to a couple, others I've yet to do. And sometimes when I have it within my grasp to do so, I chicken out. Something pulls me away. I feel a melancholy kind of fear, as if it would only bring back to me the memory of what is gone and can never be retrieved. As if I would only become conscious of a happy time lost, and feel all the more powerfully the onset of age and the cruel passing of time.

But I know I have to overcome this fear, because life is too long to live without going on that pilgrimage that will remind you just how short and just how precious it really is.

A walk through a secondhand bookstore

2011-12-22T01:42:00.000-08:00

There are certain writers who always greet you when you walk into a used book store. George Orwell, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen and Jules Verne are a few, writers that you know will always be there with those welcome familiar titles, those well-worn yellowed crumpled pages that have that comforting smell of dust and decay. You'll finger through them every now and then, and see the names of past owners scribbled on the title page, endearingly unfamiliar names of people with lives you know nothing of, except that at one point their life was immersed in the book you now hold in your hand. A priced numeral now stands there, written in pencil beside their name - or the name of the library they saved that book from.

Sometimes I visit the bookstore to see these friends, and I often find myself just thumbing through books, not so much reading, but touching, feeling, smelling, hearing them and the writing within, like the long coded strands of souls that inhabit those pages, ciphered with symbols that represent all their loves and passions, their failures and successes, their time on earth that we empathized with as our own time, from the writer's mind to the page and then to our own mind, like the transmigration of a soul shared by us all and stored on shelves where entire worlds are packed into creaking wooden boxes, stacked one upon the other, waiting for a new owner to free them so that they may live in the imagination of a mind once again, and give hope and understanding to others.

The bookstore is a mystical place with a hidden architecture that is encoded within covers, that constructs some magnificent, invisible, undiscovered edifice of interweaving lives and adventures through an interdimensional space that can only expand and enrich through the mind of the beholder who has come to explore. And yet that whole hidden edifice, that magnificent lexical DNA is bounded within an often ugly (not always so), dank, dark and dinghy little three dimensional shell that is the bookstore itself. The contrast is staggering. Infinity, potential, beauty, bound up within clumsy walls and cracking shelves, attended to by an old man in the corner. When you listen closely, you hear those voices chattering all around you, telling great stories, relating great adventures, yet lying there now, rotting in some corner, needing eyes to spring back to life and offer once more the riches they were meant to give.

Because ultimately, the bookstore is a repository of the gifts mankind has bestowed on itself. It is a holy place where we entrust the souls of our forefathers. It is the repository of humanity, and should be treated as a sacred and hallowed place. To step in, one should remove one's hat (metaphorically speaking) and lower one's voice (as we all instinctively do). There is Jane and Emily in the A's and B's, and a copy each of Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights, the testaments of a passionate inner life trapped in a world of limitations, precocious, before their time, their sacrifice given and shared for posterity. You feel gratitude toward them. Further down, you greet George Orwell, and you relive his touching, human portraits of misery, poverty and injustice in The Road to Wigan Pier, his depiction of the futility and alienation of middle class life in Coming Up For Air, his satire of totalitarianism in Animal Farm, the life of the destitute in Down and Out in Paris and London, the chilling dystopian despair of 1984, and his wonderful bookstore within the bookstore, his own personal Notes From Underground, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. You move on through the Dostoevsky's and Tolstoy's, perhaps one or two volumes of Proust lying around, thumbing through any random page, taking in a whole passage comprised of a single sentence, and wondering again why you never finished In Search of Lost Time. And then of course Jules Verne and his fantastic adventures at the dawn of science, in the wonder of the 19th century, the age of brilliant, intrepid, genius explorers setting off on fantastic journeys yet always ensconced in the comfortable safety of 19th century bourgeois trappings, velvet couches, brass lamps and libraries always at hand, where the armchair adventurer can find a safe harbor in new worlds. You'll find T.S. Eliot's Cocktail Party, Wasteland and Prufrock, and read again those haunting lines; you'll stumble upon a copy of Borges's Labyrinths and wonder in awe, as you always did, at the Library of Babel; and you'll sense your feelings stir and your mind itch and the voices call you away when you see a worn copy of On The Road, even as regrets well up within you. Those friends will be there on those shelves, faithfully standing sentinel, as if they know you and are expecting you. They speak to you, and you find solace in the fact that your troubles are not unique, that we all share the same trials and loneliness, but that somehow it isn't a cause for despair, because they are alchemists who have found the formulas that convert despair into something beautiful and sacred.

There is, besides that great architecture of imagination, a deeply palpable physical dimension to the secondhand bookstore. It is a place of dying. Not in a metaphoric sense only, though a case could be made for that (reading always makes me conscious of death). Death in a real physical sense. The leaves upon which those words are written, the wooden shelves hewn from dead trees, the long dead writers, the pensioner tending to the books, the young student who reminds you that your best days are past, all of it reeks of death and dying. But most of all it's the haunting silence and passing of time in the bookstore that conveys a sense of mortality. The rush outside is somehow magically left at the door once you enter the bookstore and you feel that time has stood still. We are solemn once inside, we are humbled and respectful, like someone who has entered a church or a cemetery. Your self-consciousness dissipates, your mind retracts, your self-assuredness recedes. Great names line those walls and shelves. Great stories, great deeds, great longings, great ideas are left behind, with their names, like ghosts, but the great men and women themselves have long since perished. There may even be a part of them there, atoms of Lucretius himself even, in the pages and the shelves that their imagination still occupies in a strange kind of mixture of life and death for which there is no word.

I always pause for a second once I have entered the secondhand bookstore. Then I walk again in a forest of waking lives past, upon which have been built these great edifices of the mind and spirit, and I always discover a welcome sense of mystery in life once again.

Oh my god, I have SO much money!

2011-11-12T02:14:00.000-08:00

Here's a look into the glamorous life of a freelance writer

For me, money is an obsession. I must have it. And when I want something, I get something. Money is no exception. It is one of those somethings I need to have and get. You just have to look at my LUXURY watch. I am the owner, OWNER, of a LUXURY watch. Not some Cassio, but a Cartiere, or a Rollex, or a Tag Hauer, or a Patek Fillipe, or a Guchi. Whatever. The point is that it costs A FUCK BUCKET OF MONEY. Watches do also tell the time, that's true, I'm not denying that, they do. But they also tell you SHIT TONS OF MONEY. So much so that they cease to be called watches and instead become "Time Pieces". Look, here's my "Time Piece", tell me this doesn't say FUCK OFF:

Another money thing I have bought is a CAR. Cars are expensive in general because they're big and complicated and they need to be made in factories with an assortment of capital, skilled and semi-skilled (managerial) labor. You don't just pluck a car out of a tree. You BUY a car, fuckhead. And guess who bought one? Me. It is a LUXURY car. As if you didn't already figure that out after having seen my watch, right? The point is that my car is EFFING FUCKING EXPENSIVE, just like my watch, but in a different kind of way. It costs WAY more. Cars can be used for transport, that's true, I'm not denying that, I agree, they can. But they also say FUCK WHACK OF MONEY BELONGING TO ME. It's like my money is a transformer robot that assumes the shape of watches and cars. And airplanes... But before I move on to my LUXURY AIR PLANE, here's a photo of my car:

It's a diamond rolls roice or a mercedes or a audi or a bmx, whatever. All you need to know is that it's the fucking MONEY. THE money, to be exact. And what about my flying airplane? Yeah, you guessed it. LUXURY airplane, or "jet" as I like to call it. I'm the VIP in first class aboard Air Me, ok dicknuts? Pilot? I have. Air stewardess? Yes, have. Ground crew? Have. It's a LearJet Airbus DC ten 67687ehxt, whatever. Oh my god, if I was any richer I would vomit on your face right now, because my body would reject such a rich host, i.e. ME. I'm too rich for me is what I'm saying. Here's my airplane:

When you're as rich as I am, you can start spending money on luxuries beyond things that tell time and fancy ass transporters. You can also make and raise CHILDREN, which are living repositories of your DNA and which will hopefully eventually also have their own children to keep your DNA alive, unless they turn out to be an utter disappointment, in which case you just flushed twenty years of moneys down the toilet for nothing. But that's just it. I am so rich, I can make one even if it isn't guaranteed to make one of its own and keep this RICH genetic heritage alive. I can clothe, educate and "love" it too! That's how rich I am. I can BUY it love, and that is something money can definitely buy. Here's my children:

Some more things my money buys: dehumanized women who will take their clothes off for me because I pay them to; dehumanized chauffeurs who I pay to sit in cars all day to wait for me; exclusive things I pay for to belong to something that excludes and dehumanizes others; paid health insurance that is expensive enough that it doesn't try and come up with tons of subtle ways not to insure me; a kingdom of mown and watered grassland for me and a handful of others like me to club tiny white balls into holes paid for by me; a Christian LeBlah wallet made from only the most endangered animal skin; politicians I pay for to cut taxes on me; and of course the best thing money can buy: MORE MONEY! I can invest in a FUCK fund that goes out and FUCKS more money out of other fuckers and gives it to me so I can be an even richer FUCK. That's the non plus ultra of rich. I am so rich I can afford an education that enables me to use fancy latin and french words to say things for me, like "je suis the sine qua non of my raison d'etre vis-a-vis cirque du soleil". That is fancy private schoolish for "I have sooo much fucking money it's almost useless". Look, this is me:

And guess what I wear? Guess. Just guess. Go on, guess it. Just take a wild guess. Ever heard of the color feldgrau? I wear a scarf with a rich gay french guy's name on it that is that color. Feldgrau. You didn't guess that did you? I didn't think so.

I am like the one percent of the one percent. If everything was the human anatomy, I would be like a refined idea at the very tip of the brain compared to butt fat. That's how apart and esteemed and precious my money puts me above all the butt fat. Money is MY idea, and I AM the money. Actually that's a little confusing. I didn't pay good money to be confused, and I sure as hell didn't pay this asshole HEY WHO ARE YOU CALLING ASSHOLE? this asshole to write this fucking piece of shit for me I THOUGHT YOU WANTED ME TO WRITE THIS BECAUSE YOU WERE TIRED no I wanted you... me... to write this because I am rich enough to make you, me, because I don't earn good money so I can just waste my time on finger labor. That's how rich I am, I am a freelance writer who hires other freelance writers to do the finger labor for me. So keep writing fucko... wait don't write that, just write what I say after this. You wrote that too, didn't you? And that? And that? Here's some more money, stop writing.

The birth of an idea

2011-11-06T02:42:00.000-08:00

Ova of procreative philosophic forces comprise thought bubbles from sinister entomologic wombs hovering above unaffiliated premises that are impregnated by the penetrating alien extrusion specific to semenophoric lust expulsions amid tangled forests of phosphorescent knowledge balls lit up through a vast neurotic electrosystemal network of mental agitation while ratiocinated mechanic intruders farm the fertilizing neurogenetic life-force with a caution and calculation guided by courageous oneiropilots who are bound by duty to reap the electrocuted intelligence that is born from these primordial oocytic geneses unmapped now and never observed before

New ideas for Halloween 2012!

2011-10-31T23:59:00.000-07:00

Left: The Tobias Fünke bleeding botched hairplug look will make you stand out on Halloween

It's that baffling time of the year when it's somehow totally ok for little children to approach complete strangers and ask them for candy. It sounds like the totally wrong thing to do on paper, but it's not so bad when you compare it to other holidays that celebrate crucified space gods, chocolate rabbits, and the beginning of the genocide of Native Americans. And that's not even including holidays from other parts of the world that involve self-mutilation and the mass slaughter of animals. So when you think about it, Halloween isn't so bad as far as festive occasions go.

That having been said, most of us are pretty bored with all the usual vampire, ghost, werewolf or superhero costumes we see every year. So here are some alternative suggestions for out-of-the-ordinary characters that will make you stand out from all the other kids on Halloween while still faithfully contributing to this lucrative annual billion-dollar industry.

Babar the Incontinent Elephant
I know, nobody wants to hear "incontinent" and "elephant" in the same sentence, but hear me out. You will need a long hose, a paper mache trunk and one other person. Fix the hose to your garden tap, bring the hose up through the back of your elephant suit, up the neck and through the paper mache proboscis you have fixed to your face. When your neighbor opens the door, you say "Trick or Treat!" and your neighbor laughs and says "What are you, an anteater?" and you say "No asshole, I'm Babar the Incontinent Elephant!" which is your friend's cue to turn the water on as you spray your neighbor's shoes, pants and floor, crying "HUNTERS KILLED MY MOTHER!"

TIPS: Paper mache is the best choice for material because it's not only cheap and pliable, but the glue will get you high. Also, cover tip of hose with finger for extra spray.

Deformed Olsen Triplet (Who Has Just Escaped From Attic of Evil Twin Sisters)
You will need long blond hair and a deformed female munchkin face (buy a mask if you don't already have a deformed female munchkin face). Bang on the door repeatedly with both fists until opened, then pant and blabber in a panicked voice "HELP ME, PLEASE, MARY KATE AND ASHLEY ARE LOOKING FOR ME, PLEASE I BEG YOU, DON'T LET MY SISTERS TAKE ME ALIVE!"

TIPS: Starve yourself for a week and throw a spoilt tantrum if denied help so as to convince people that you are indeed an Olsen triplet.

Monty Python's Ethel the Aardvaark
You will need long ears and an extended pig-like snout, and you will also have to be highly argumentative. When asked what you are, you will say "I'm Ethel the Aardvaark, from the book Ethel the Aardvaark Goes Quantity Surveying by Charles Dikkens, the famous Dutch author, with two K's", after which there will be an extended back-and-forth in which you will exchange accusations of mistakenness as to the provenance and spelling of said author's name and authenticity of said book, accompanied by exponentially increasing levels of annoyance and confusion. Eventually you will be offered candy by the irritated adult, to whom you will say "Aardvaarks don't eat candy, they eat termites", to which they will answer "Well I don't have termites", to which you say "How can you be sure? Can I dig around in your basement?" to which they reply "No", to which you say "Why? What are you hiding in your basement?" after which they get defensive and angry, upon which you take out a bowl of Tic Tacs, say they're termite eggs, place it on the ground, get down on your hands and knees, and proceed to eat the entire bowl of Tic Tacs with barking and grunting noises. When finished, scream "ARE YOU SATISFIED NOW, YOU ANTI-TUBULIDENTATITE?!"

TIPS: Grow your fingernails a year beforehand for extra aardvaarky looking claws.

Halloween Industry Association PR Executive
Put on a business suit and a big holiday smile as you go door to door merrily stating that the Halloween Industry Association was formally incorporated in 2005 as a 501(c)(6) trade organization to promote and build the celebration of Halloween in the United States, representing businesses involved in the manufacture, importation or distribution of Halloween products including costumes, décor, novelty items and party supplies, and that HIA has grown to become the premier authority on Halloween and serves as a non-profit voice of the industry. Present your card, and wish each household consumer a Happy Halloween.

TIPS: In between houses, rob and steal candy from other kids which you can then redistribute to the children of wealthy Halloween Industry Association executives.

Arrested Development's Tobias Fünke
Go trick or treating as both an analyst and therapist combined, the world's first trick or treat analrapist. Bleeding hair plugs are A MUST. Make sure to use lots of unintentionally homosexual innuendo like "I've been dying to put some of that sweet stuff in my mouth all day, so dump that load right in my hands mister!"

TIPS: When pronouncing "analrapist", emphasis should be on the second syllable. Be sure to work on pronunciation.

The Love Child of Kim Kardashian and Charlie Sheen
You will need a ton of mascara, a big round ass, false teeth and madness. You will also need four other friends, three of whom will follow you with cameras, while the other follows you around dressed like a porn star/prostitute. When people open the door turn your ass to them, look back over your shoulder, bend knees slightly and say "Tricks and treats are like tiger teets filled with manna I suck from the earth bosom mother warlord spirit because I'm FUCKING WINNING!"

TIPS: Down a few cans of energy drink beforehand to simulate a genuine cocaine high. Stop once you achieve appropriate rate of heart palpitations.

Flatulator, The Wrath of Ass
To dress up as this alternative superhero, you'll need a body suit, boots, and cape, with a big F sown into your shirt. Declare yourself "FLATULATOR! THE WRATH OF ASS!" and then proceed to make assorted fart noises until you get your candy. Example: "Who are you supposed to be young man?" Answer: "ppfth"

TIPS: Keep lips tightly pursed and push air through forcefully.

Jack Sparrow, the Management Speak Pirate of the Caribbean
Dress up in a Jack Sparrow costume and say "Shiver me timbers matey, let's touch base later in the week to see if we can't go ahead and synergize an aggressive growth strategy that should expand our portfolio while positioning us competitively on the boarding and plunder segments vis-a-vis the Caribbean market, ARR."

TIPS: When you get your candy, look at your watch and say "I have an 8 o'clock scheduled, I'll slot you in for a follow-up at 7 o'clock on October 31, 2013, ye scurvy dog."

Russel, the Sausage-Loving Gorilla
Wear a gorilla suit, refuse all offers of candy with a violent swing of the arm, and repeatedly say "SAUSAGES" in your best gorilla voice. For extra effect, break a large branch off a tree and drag it behind you as you run in circles, shouting "SAUSAGES" at the top of your lungs while beating your chest with the other hand.

TIPS: I have a feeling this would also work with a Darth Vader outfit, for some reason.

Amy Winehouse, the Semi-Decomposed Zombie
By 2012, the decomposition should have really kicked into full-on skeletal mode, but that's no reason to deny yourself and others a little suspension of disbelief for some zany holiday fun!

TIPS: Stagger around like a deranged zombie and mutter like a crazy person to reproduce Amy's unforgettable Belgrade concert.

Pedro the Llama
You'll need a decent llama outfit and lots of expectorate. People will answer the door and say "Hi there, what are you?" upon which you act skittish and spit in their eye.

TIPS: Nervous kicking is also a fun option.

Train wreck
Dress up as Courtney Love.

TIPS: For extra effect, have make-up running down your face, wear ripped fishnet stockings, and stumble around babbling incoherently in a drug-induced daze. See Amy Winehouse above for tips.

Pirate
I know dressing up as a pirate sounds a little hackneyed, but imagine the surprise on people's faces when they see a Somali militiaman with an AK-47 on their doorstep!

TIPS: Don't just ask for some candy, take hostages until your demand for all the candy is met.

Enjoy Halloween, only 12 months to go!

story - Waiting for God

2011-10-10T16:26:00.000-07:00

(The Hypothetical Afterlife of a Suicide Bomber)

Gabriel passed Azrail through the smoldering wreckage in which the torn ligaments of human bodies were strewn amid the blood-spattered remnants of shattered windows, ripped seats and twisted railings which, only moments before, had almost ensured the safety of the passengers of bus 412. The hideous remains of the 26 people who had been making their way to work, school, hospital, the beach, a shopping mall, and (in one case) martyrdom, lay there eerily still, despite the violent horror of their grotesque visage, and despite the wailing of ambulance and police sirens that were fast descending upon them, to remove them, bury them, and cast them back into oblivion.

The angels would not speak when they crossed paths, but they would sometimes exchange glances. Gabriel always noticed the look of calm indifference on the face of Azrail, and always thought he could sense a slight, almost inconspicuous smirk every time he passed him by, whereas Azrail never failed to capture a glimpse of pity on the face of Gabriel, which he always preferred to mistake for wasteful sentimentality. But these creatures of divine light that were the most beloved of God’s creations knew their respective tasks and adhered solemnly to their own boundless destinies with a loyalty and purpose reminiscent of the constancy of the rays of light that emanated from a distant star over billions of years.

26 flashes of light sped through the smoldering wreckage and emerged as streaks of brilliance ascending up toward the heavens from which they were born. The angels took no notice. They too sped away and disappeared quietly, invisibly into the primordial ether that was their divine essence. The scene of carnage left behind in their wake was now filled with the sounds of human voices, of sirens, radios, chatter, wailing, crying, screaming, and, finally, silence.

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The radiance in which he was ensconced forced Yakub to adjust his sight, even while he was amazed he was still not only conscious, but seemed to have eyes as well. When he had become accustomed to the light, he started to notice his surroundings. He looked down at himself and at his hands and found that he was all intact, standing there like nothing had happened at all. He thought “this then must be Heaven,” but when he looked a little closer around him he found that it wasn’t what he had expected, not by a long shot. There were no bucolic landscapes awash in rivers of milk and honey, no beautiful virgins frolicking around him, no semblance of an idyllic Paradise as the just reward for the newly martyred, the man of unswerving faith, who had died in the name of the Almighty, who had taken the lives of infidels (“Praise God!” he said out loud) in the name of the All Merciful, and who had sought his eternal salvation as a loyal servant of the one true God.

In fact, to his utter confusion, Yakub was standing in what seemed rather like a grimy ramshackle office, in which there was nothing but an old wooden table, two wooden chairs, and a rusty spotlight dangling from the ceiling. The walls were a dirty grey color, and there was neither a window, nor a door, nor anything else in the room. Nothing hung from the walls, nothing lay on the table. The room was absolutely bereft of even the simplest aesthetics. The floor was hard, cold, grey and concrete. Was this for real? Was he dead and in the afterlife, or had something else happened? He suddenly felt a sense of utter dread, loneliness and despair at the situation he had found himself in.

He decided to sit down. “Strange,” he thought to himself, “Does a dead man need to sit down? Can a dead man be tired of standing up?” But he sat down nevertheless, feeling annoyed by the logical dilemma that this seemingly simple act seemed to pose. Just as he put his head in his hands wondering what was happening to him, he felt a chill, and heard a faint sound. The hairs at the back of his neck stiffened, and he felt there was a presence standing directly behind him. He turned and saw an amazing sight.

There were two angels – or what he immediately assumed were angels – standing there all aglow, in flowing white, diaphanous robes, with the most beatific faces, compassionate yet firm, beautiful and pious, yet, even though they had the bodies of men, their faces seemed like those of children. They were young, innocent, pristine, and glowing. Yakub immediately fell off his chair and went down on his knees as he laid his forehead on the cold concrete floor and said “Oh faces of wisdom and everlasting sanctity, I kneel before you, a humble…” But before he could finish his obsequies, he heard the divine ones speak in voices at once mellifluous and stentorian. “Rise to your feet Yakub,” they said in unison. “Our Father will be with you shortly.”

Tears welled in Yakub’s eyes as he bowed his head and crawled slowly toward the angels that stood before him, to touch and kiss their hallowed feet. So it was true! He was in the presence of angels! What bliss awaited him, he thought! He rejoiced that despite this initial state of unsavory limbo, he would soon take his place among the faithful who dwell in eternal bliss and enjoy the rewards duly granted those who have followed the righteous path as he has done. The road to salvation, he thought, is never easy, and he must be patient, he must surrender his doubts and trust in the all-encompassing mercy, love and compassion of the omnipotent one, of the all-seeing and all-knowing one, of the one true God for whom he had dedicated his life – and his death. “God is truly merciful,” he thought, and a teardrop ran down his face and fell on the concrete floor, leaving a tiny moist spot on an otherwise desolate, ugly, barren surface, as if it were – he imagined – a puddle on the moon.

He reached for the feet of his beloved angels, and he touched them. What soft, gentle, beautiful feet are those of angels, he thought, like those of a child’s. He kissed them and ran his fingers all over one, and then the other. His eyes were closed as he was in the height of pious bliss, savoring this moment that he had longed for all his life. When he opened his eyes and looked up, he saw, however, that the angels were no longer there, having been replaced instead by a child.

He stood up and looked around him, amazed that these beings could come in and out of this room when there was no discernible entrance or exit. “Where did Gabriel and Azrail go?” asked Yakub, but it was more a case of thinking out loud than it was of asking the child. Nevertheless, the child answered.

“Don’t worry, they are always with you. Are you afraid?”

Yakub was taken aback by the child’s precocious question. And then he realized who he was talking to… Could it be? Was it true, could God truly be just an innocent child? Somehow, he thought, that makes sense. He felt tears rise within him once more. He didn’t know what to say. How could you address the almighty? How could you ever conceive of the moment when you would behold true perfection, when the whole universe would seem to coalesce at this very moment in time and in space, right before your eyes, oh joyous…

“HEY ASSHOLE, OVER HERE!”

Yakub jumped to his feet in panic. He turned around and found an unpleasant musty old bureaucrat with a cheap suit carrying a bunch of papers and dossiers in his hand as he noisily took a seat on one of the chairs behind the desk, coughing horribly, and pounding the stack of paperwork onto the wooden table. Suddenly an unpleasant feeling welled in Yakub.

“Sit down, sit down, I haven’t got all eternity… Hey kid, you get out of here, run along now!” Yakub was completely confused. “What do I have angels for if they can’t keep track of these fucking kids everywhere?” the irritated old man mumbled audibly to himself as he started digging officiously through his stack of crumpled pages, coughing up expectorate with a revolting heave of his entire body. “I’m surprised you didn’t recognize the kid from that pleasant bus ride you just took…” the old man said with a sarcastic laugh added at the end. Then he looked up at Yakub, squinting with his beady little eyes.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” the old man barked. “And wipe that stupid, stunned expression off your face, I’m sick of seeing it. Everyone has the same look, like they’re about to cry because they found out there’s no fucking Santa Claus.”

Yakub was sitting there stunned and queasy. Eventually he gathered his wits, and enough courage, to ask the obvious question…

“Who… who are you?” he said with a cracking voice and the expression of someone who’s 99 percent certain what the answer would be and really didn’t want to hear it.

“Who the hell do you think I am, fuckface? I’m GOD!”

--------------------------------------------------------------

“Ok, now, let’s see…” said God, sifting through some pieces of ink-blotted and yellow-stained paper before grabbing one out of the stack and putting it up to his face. “Says here you’re another one of thooose… suicide bombers? Is that right?”

“Well… yes, but…” Yakub wanted to say “I am a Martyr for the Glory of God,” but he couldn’t bring himself around to it, suddenly wondering if he should refer to God as God in the third person or if he should just use the second person singular. At the same time he felt a strange, noxious feeling in his stomach, like there was a sick joke being played on him.

“But what?” God said impatiently. “But ‘not technically’? But ‘it was an accident’? But ‘I blew up before I could know if I was a suicide bomber or not’? What?”

“But, I did it… well I did it for…”

“Oh let me guess, for glorious almighty ME?! Aw, how sweeeet!” God said in a raspy falsetto tone as he sarcastically tilted his head to the side and pouted his lips.

Yakub really wanted to get out of that horrible room, away, anywhere, he was decidedly sick now and felt his stomach churning.

“Gee thanks,” God went on. “Do you know how many of you dickwipes I get here every fucking month? Do you? A LOT!” God laid the paper down on top of the stack, crossed his arms, sat back and looked at Yakub. His eyes were watery, his skin was sallow and sickly, his ears and nose were large and out of proportion. In fact, his face generally lacked symmetry, as if all his features had been carelessly plastered on by a blind eight-year-old.

“Let me ask you a question Yakub. Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to create life? Hm? Any clue there, Einstein?”

Yakub just sat with his mouth agape, unable to answer.

“Well let me tell you sunshine… IT’S FUCKING DIFFICULT! I spent what seemed like an eternity on all that fucking mitachondria alone. In fact, fuck the mitachondria, do you know how long it took me to get a decent protein going? Can you imagine the tangled nightmare that DNA caused me? And don’t even get me started on those viruses…”

“Viruses?”

“I think it’s viruses, or is it virii? I dunno, thank me I didn’t invent Latin… Anyway, I said don’t get me started, okay, I screwed up, I APOLOGIZE, now let’s just learn to live with them… My point is, Yakub, and I say this to all you butthole murderers who come this way, LIFE IS PRECIOUS SO DON’T FUCK WITH IT!”

“But, my Lord, I was only…”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, ‘I was only doing it for your greater glory’ bleh bleh bleh, hey I don’t need it, ok? If it took me that much time and effort to create it, what makes you think I don’t mind when you morons – who, by the way, are supposed to be my smartest creation – go around shooting and killing and butchering each other? What am I, an idiot? Why the fuck did I go to all the trouble if you shitferbrains thought I’d think it’s ok for you to go blow each other up?”

Yakub was feeling more depressed than he’d ever felt in life. The thought that his afterlife – this situation he was in, and even this feeling he felt – might be eternal, sent a shiver up and down his spine. At least in life there was the escape offered by death, but there would be no such escape in the afterlife…

“HEY BOMB-BOY, YOU LISTENING? HEL-LOOO, GOD TALKING!”

“Yes, yes, sorry…”

“I mean look at dolphins, you don’t see them acting like a bunch of idiots; and if they are you can be pretty sure that it’s because humans are making them act like idiots for their own stupid amusement, making them jump through hoops and shit… I should have known it would turn out like this when those chimpanzees came down off the trees and started roaming around and evolving… But no, ‘Let’s not mess with the delicate tapestry that is life’ says Gabriel, and now look at the mess we’re in: we have a bunch of overachieving chimpanzees that call themselves Homo Sapiens going all ape shit over a million pointless things as they turn the entire earth – which is undoubtedly my greatest work yet – into a fucking toilet. And then you all come up here looking for a pat on the back and a lollipop, oh and just a little thing called Eternal Bliss! Gee that sounds like a fair trade doesn’t it, Yakub? You go and murder some women and children, I give you an eternity in heaven surrounded by beautiful virgins! What do you think I am, a schmuck?”

God continued mumbling and ranting away as he looked at the sheets of paper and scribbled things here and there, going through them one by one, only pausing every now and again to look up at Yakub and give him a menacing glare before burying his head back in the documents.

Yakub tried desperately to summon the courage to speak his mind, to get his thoughts off his chest once and for all, hoping that any misunderstandings could be cleared up and his virtuous act of martyrdom finally recognized.

“Your graciousness…” he started, but was quickly interrupted.

“Just God will do, thanks, now what are you trying to babble?”

“Well… uh… God…”

“Just God.‘Uh God’ won’t do…”

“I feel… I feel I have to say something otherwise I feel I’m going to…”

“Feel for some touchy feely feelings with your feelers? What?”

“It’s just that, I am a loyal and devout follower of the… I mean of your Holy Book…”

“Which holy book?”

Yakub was mortified at such a question.

“The Holy Book, your holi-…”

“Oh, and what would that be, wait let me guess, The Absolute and Completely Definitive Last Word of God Ever? The TACDLWGE?” said God facetiously, pronouncing the acronym “tackdilwiggy”.

Yakub felt offended, as if God were blaspheming against the Holy Book, HIS Holy Book, the one he himself, the almighty, the all-merciful had written! He felt the ridiculous sense of being offended by God for blaspheming against God.

“Yes, well, God, the Holy Book, your Holy Book states, as you know…”

“Wait a minute, how do you know it’s my holy book?”

“What?” Yakub was shocked.

“Oh I’m sorry, let me rephrase that and put it in simpler terms. What I meant to ask was HOW DO YOU KNOW IT’S MY HOLY BOOK?”

“Are you kidding? Are you testing me? You’re testing me, aren’t you?”

“I asked YOU a question now didn’t I? I said, how do you know it’s my book? Don’t you think an answer is due when… say… GOD ASKS A QUESTION?!”

Yakub didn’t quite know how to answer. He had never really thought about it, he just always knew it was the Holy Book handed down by God to mankind. It was always sort of a thing you just know.

“Well,” he ventured cautiously, slightly annoyed that he had to answer such a question, but believing it was a test, and thus wanting to answer it as best he could. “Well, you say yourself that you wrote it.”

“Where?”

“In the book.”

“How do you know that’s me saying it? Anyone could have written it.”

“No they couldn’t.”

“Why not? If anyone can read and understand it, then couldn’t anyone also write it?”

Yakub was again searching for an answer, and he knew there must be an answer, a perfect, rational, all-explaining answer, but, he thought, he was no theologian. He regretted at that moment that he hadn’t read the Holy Book more often, and learned more of it, otherwise he was sure he would be able to answer the question.

“Hey dipshit, I asked you a question, why don’t you think anybody could have written that and not me?”

“Well… I’m no theologian, I am not a scholar of the Holy Book, and so…”

“You don’t need to be a theoscholarologian or whatever, surely. If you have taken upon yourself the responsibility and, what you will no doubt admit, is the serious duty of belief and faith, then you obviously will know at least why you believe in what you do, why you believe it to be the Truth, and finally why the truth of it is beyond all reproach, or am I wrong?”

“No, you’re not wrong, of course…”

“Of course I’m not, because if I were wrong I wouldn’t be God would I, fuck knuckle?”

“Yes, of course.” Yakub felt beads of sweat running down his forehead. His hands were clammy. He thought back to the question but his mind was getting slightly addled, not only by the weightiness of the questions posed to him, but his own emotional state and the feeling of panic which he still had not been able to shake off. “Well, to come to the point, it would have been impossible for any human being to write the Holy Book. The words, the insights into the past and the future, the prophesies, the compassion, the mercy, the depictions of heaven and hell, the beauty of the language…”

Yakub was now feeling more at ease, he believed in what he was saying and he believed he was finally affirming his faith and giving God exactly what he wanted to hear.

“… and the wisdom of millennia would be as if a grain of sand in comparison to just one single letter in the Holy Book of Books, the oceans would be akin to but one drop in the majestic spirit of the all-seeing and the all-powerful, the stars in the universe would be as if…”

“AH, SHUT UP!”

Yakup jumped back.

“You’re just quoting lines from the TACDLWGE! Anyone can do that. It’s like using a prophet’s prophesy as proof he’s a prophet.”

Yakub couldn’t believe his ears. This was getting too much for him. He felt his muscles tensing, he felt his nerves tightening and straining, he felt his head throbbing. His violently beating heart felt like a derailed locomotive heading for a precipice, as if aware of its own impending doom.

Finally, Yakub gathered himself together. He felt a reckless courage welling up within him, and for the first time he felt his fear receding and giving way to something that resembled anger… even, he thought, defiance.

“I do not have to know, I believe in the Holy Book, I believe in you, and that is all I need to know,” said Yakub, immediately realizing that he was in the unenviable situation of actually trying to defend his faith in something which was questioning its faith in itself.

Yakub felt something new surge within him, something he had never felt before. It was a strange, foreign feeling. All his life he had lived for an ideal, and ultimately his ideal was God. He had served God in life, he had prayed, he had tried to be a good man, to live by the word of the Holy Book, to follow the example of his prophet… and, ultimately, he had given his life – and taken the lives of others, of infidels – for the sake of his ideal. But although this commitment of his, this belief, had inspired within him a sense of power and a sense of virtue, and a belief in his own unerring moral fortitude, he had all his life never felt that he was anything other than a submissive servant, as if he were always in the shadows of something bigger, as a mere subservient pawn, albeit the most happy, fortunate and blessed of pawns.

But now he felt something far beyond what he felt as a pawn, as a mere believer, as one who has submitted to a power far greater than him. He felt, instead, something else, a sense of exhilaration. Now, standing defiantly before God, his chest protruding, his arms hanging – as if prepared to carry out any task that might be asked of them – Yakub felt that he could hold his own against the blasphemy of God upon himself, that he could – and would – defy him, even though he knew this made little sense. At that moment he felt that he was even more upright, devout and righteous than even God himself. In short, he felt a sense of rebellion, and it felt good.

“Do you think I am a blasphemer, Yakub?” It was as if God had read his mind.

“I think you are testing me, and I will stand firm to my belief in you.”

“Perhaps I am testing you, but we will find out soon enough…” God paused for a moment, never taking his eyes off of Yakub. The documents he had before him were now completely discarded, shoved to the side of the table behind which God sat.

“Tell me this Yakub, do you think a mere belief justifies the killing of others and yourself?”

Yakub did not immediately answer. He thought of the question, unflinchingly, unhesitatingly. He looked down at his feet for a moment, and then he looked back up and gazed directly and defiantly into God’s eyes and said, “Yes. If it serves your interests, then yes I do.”

“And you don’t think that the taking of a life is the most serious crime of all, almost as if you yourself were acting like God, as if you yourself… were me? How can you take it upon yourself to be judge and arbiter of right and wrong, good and evil, and take people’s lives with such blithe indifference, when I, God, am the creator, the giver and taker and Supreme Judge of all life? Who are you, that upon a mere belief decide it is your right to kill another human being? Do you think you are greater than me?”

“I do not believe it is my right, my Lord,” interrupted Yakub. “I believe only that it is my duty. Thus I do not act in your stead, thus I do not act as if I were God, for it is only the right of God to take life. For me it is rather a duty, and this duty has been charged upon me by you, my Lord...”

“It has been charged upon you not by me, but by your belief in me,” said God.

“It is the same thing,” answered Yakub with an unflinching glare.

“Ha! And yet you cannot prove to me that what you believe is not the mere babble of men, is not some politically motivated scheme meant to hold sway over mankind by taking advantage of their ignorance, by preying on their fears, and by coddling to their hopes, so that men may satisfy their lust to dominate fellow men and profit from their dominance over them. You can offer no proof that what you consider a ‘Holy Book’, the TACDLWGE, is not just another device in the spiritual and moral enslavement of those who are made to submit to its laws, its codes and its demands, all offered them with the reward of some ludicrous heaven that contrasts with the threat of punishment in some ridiculous hell!”

“And can you prove to me, my Lord, that you did not write the Holy Book? Can you give me evidence that my belief is false? If indeed you say you did not write the Holy Book, I will assume that you are saying that as part of your test of my faith, and I will thus not believe you, and I will thus stay true to my faith. So tell me, can you ever prove that you did not write the Holy Book? Can you ever prove that my faith is wrong? Can you even prove that you are God, and not Satan?”

God was clearly taken aback by this question. Now Yakub’s voice was raised.

“No, my faith, my devotion, my belief is too precious, too important even to let You question my faith in you. If I have to, I will oppose you as I have opposed all blasphemers and all infidels for your sake. You are too important, and do you know why? Not because you are perfect, but precisely because you are not, precisely because of one great error in your entire creation. No matter what you have done, no matter what the magnificence of your deeds, there is one thing and one thing only which tarnishes it all, which casts a great shadow over everything you have done.”

“And what is this?” God asked with captivated attention.

“Doubt. And that is why I say that you are not perfect, for in a perfect universe there can be no Doubt. But sure enough, in yours there is. If the entire universe were your creation, if everything had emanated from you, then everything is you, because something cannot be created from nothing, and since you existed before all things, before all matter, then all matter must have come from you. And if, furthermore, you, God, are One and Indivisible, then it stands to bear that You are All and All is You. And so if this were the case, then you, God, would be self-evident in nature. You, the hallowed progenitor and origin of everything, from the tiniest atom to the greatest galaxy, You, in a word, would be without doubt. You would be self-evident. There would be no need for prophets, for books, even for belief or faith on the part of men. All would simply be God, and God would simply be, without any more need for belief. But as it is, your universe is faulty, your universe includes Doubt, and therefore we – I – must continue to believe that you are perfect, precisely because of your imperfection.”

“You dare blaspheme against your God!?”

“You dare let blaspheme your believer?”

“In this holy book, I, God, am infallible and good, in fact, I am the supreme embodiment of Good, of course, because I am the source of all creation. But you have just now said that I am not who I am, for an imperfect God is no God! You are blaspheming against your religion, your belief, your faith, your God!”

“And by sowing Doubt into your universe, you are blaspheming against your creation, against your own existence, against your Truth. By asking for proof you are annihilating your right as God, as the supreme judge and the supreme Father. Perhaps what I believe is, as you said, like using the prophet’s prophecy as the proof of the prophet, but that is all I have to hold on to, that is all I have to believe in, otherwise the world, life, the universe would be pointless, meaningless, void… But you, by letting Doubt reside like a weed in your creation, and then by asking for proof of something which is forever under the shadow of this overbearing doubt, you are blaspheming against yourself. You see, our belief and faith can only exist where there is Doubt. You see that the Truth we seek, the Truth we believe in, can only be True because of Doubt. In other words, my Lord, our belief and faith is too important to be spoiled even by You. Because we lack perfection, that is why we must believe in it, imagine it, and hope for it.”

“And would you kill and die for that belief even though you now understand the Doubt?”

“All the more so. For without belief, without the belief in the prophet, the Holy Book, and in you, God, without all that, then what would it matter anyway if all men died, and if I were to die with them, indeed if the entire universe were to simply disappear? Nothing. All killing and all death would be meaningless, and purposeless, and all of equal indifference if one should live or die. But with belief, our killing and our deaths have purpose, they have aim, they have a goal, and they will take us to that goal.”

“Which is?”

“Your greater glory,” said Yakub with pride.

“And why do you believe you must kill for your belief?”

“How couldn’t we? If the Holy Book, your book, is the final word, if our religion is the one true religion, our faith the one true faith, how could we let those of false faiths exist side by side with us? Would we not be blaspheming in the eyes of God if we turned a blind eye and let the infidels continue to ignorantly tarnish your creation with their continued existence? By condoning them, by letting them believe in their false beliefs, are we not ourselves guilty and complicit in the continuation of falsity, evil and ungodliness in the world? Can we just sit back and not do everything in our power to spread your word? No, if this is our Book, if this is our Prophet, if this is our Belief, if this is our only answer to the ubiquity of Doubt, then all else must perish, either by force or by persuasion, otherwise we – your true believers – must perish, and so must You.”

Yakub paused briefly, looked down at his hands, and then looked up again at God, but no longer like a servant, but a master. He noticed the look in God’s eyes. They seemed feeble now, tired, almost pathetic. His figure seemed even older than before, slumping there over the desk, a miserable old man. His face was blank, listless, expressionless, even meaningless.

“And you know what, my Lord? If you do not like this, if you consider our killing to be indecent, then you, and only you, are to blame. Not because of what we believe you have taught us through the Holy Book, not because of the religion and the prophet you have handed to us… No not for any of these reasons, but for one reason and one reason alone: Doubt. Thus, you, God, are beside the point. You, God, through your malice or your mistake, have given us our need for faith, our need for belief, and we will stick to them despite you. For all I care, you may or may not be good, you even may or may not exist, but I will always believe you are good, and I will always believe you exist, and I and others like me, will always give, take and dedicate life to the one True Way.”

“Which is born of a blemish, an imperfection?”

“Yes.”

“In other words, your belief is a contradiction?”

“Yes, but our belief is too important to be sacrificed even to a contradiction.”

--------------------------------------------------------------

Complete silence descended on the office as God and Yakub sat there looking at each other, both of them now disdainful of the other, both of them sickened by the other’s presence. They found each other’s company to be burdensome, weighty, even shameful. God quietly collected up his documents and started thumbing through them again. Then, when he had gone through the very last sheet, he bunched them up in his hands, threw them in the desk drawer, and rose to his feet, although with a little difficulty, considering how frail he was. Yakub felt he should rise too, but didn’t.

“Well Yakub, I’ll be leaving now, and I don’t know if I’ll be back. I might and I might not. In the meantime, this is your office, you have everything you need. Your desk, a couple of chairs. In the top drawer here you have a record of all your days and deeds, everything you’ve ever done, everything that has led you here. That’ll be your only pastime here, your only diversion, your only reading material. But don’t look sad, I find everyone soon becomes engrossed and can never stop reading and rereading about themselves, so at least you’ll have something to pass the timelessness.”

“Will you return?” Yakub asked the question in a haughty and rebellious manner as God began moving toward the wall. God turned around with an indifferent expression.

“Maybe.”

Yakub took the documentation of his entire life out of the top drawer and laid it on the table in front of him. The stack of papers felt heavy in his hands, heavier than he expected it would be. He looked back at God.

“I have one more question,” he said.

“Go ahead,” offered God.

“Is this heaven or hell?”

God paused for a second before answering. “That’s for you to decide.”

God disappeared through the wall. Yakub sat back and waited for God to return.

IXI - City Of Romulotrix Along The Alterion Belt Of The IXI Home Planet Of Calybdis

2011-09-26T02:31:00.000-07:00

A typical clear day in the City Of Romulotrix on Calybdis. Flaming Ghost-fueled power generator on the left, electric shadow entertainment plex on the right, some buildings in the background amid bubble trees. IXI tub craft flies overhead, with tubby pilot at the helm. Fiery meteorb lights up the sky with a strange orange glow that is not represented here due to lack of colored pencils in Romulotrix's founding. Piping goes nowhere, does nothing.

IXI - Warrior Of The Third Interplanetary Expeditionary Corp On Xerxe

2011-09-25T10:20:00.000-07:00

Xerxe remains a largely unexplored planet, mainly because it's known to host a vicious race of humanoids called Tantavis, who have long sharp claws with which they are known to pull their victims' lungs out of their mouths. This warrior of the Third Interplanetary Expeditionary Corp is part of a reconnaissance force that aims to locate the fabled Symphonid Ecclestia Lembedary, believed to be the last remaining Lembedary (monastery) of the Symphonid sect, an ancient religious order of monks who take a vow of talkativeness. It's believed the Tantavis are so sick of the Lembedary monks' incessant yapping that they developed their special lungs-ripped-through-mouth killing technique just to have the pleasure of seeing their victims finally shut up in as satisfactorily horrific fashion as possible. Some believe the IXIians want to find the Lembedary so as to get their hands on the fabled Treasures of Xerxe, but few know that the real reason the IXIians seek the Lembedary is due to an irrepressible romantic streak in the average IXIian that yearns to believe the universe holds many fabulous and mysterious secrets that are only waiting to be discovered by intrepid and ingenious intergalactic explorers.

pre-IXI - The IXI Creation Myth

2011-09-25T05:36:00.000-07:00

A primordial soup has given rise to the first organisms of the IXI ecosystem: aquatic plants, giant protozoids, coelocanthic fish spewing humanoid eggs, tricephalic ooklodon triply decapitated by a semi-autonomous cleaver-wielding ancestor of IXI robotoids, and the bubbles that will supply the life nourishment for a unique civilization. Musical coral emanate melodies as a proto-tetrapus swims away.

IXI - Insentient Robotic Exploration Module On A Volcanic Planet In The Habiluton System

2011-09-25T05:11:00.000-07:00

Far beyond the bubble system, in the outer reaches of the IXI galactic civilization, a lone robot explores the volcanic planet of Volcano Planet, third terrestrial orb in the Habiluton solar system. Meteorite, the Habiluton sun, stars, and the rings of the gas giant Cloephus are all represented. IXI patrol hovers overhead, commandeered by a duck. Upon completion of its duties the robot will likely be abandoned on the planet. This is a fate common to robots, and one that makes some IXIians sad, even though authorities state that they are not properly sentient beings.

IXI - Age Of Aviation

2011-09-24T13:17:00.000-07:00

In the 37'th Galactic century, the IXIians experienced their Age of Aviation, starting off with rudimentary balloons and winged air vehicles, eventually evolving into the hyper-cool bubble-lightning-fueled, jazz-rhino-piloted turbo-propellered air sedans which provided some of the hippest traveling options in the 3600's. This was a precursor to the IXI Space Age, and such trailblazing aviator icons as Wide-Eyed Elephant Joe and the first air traffic control pig, Steve, went on to become legendary figures in the Aviation Hall of Fame.

IXI - Jive Powered Groove Patrol Passes Over IXI Base With Bicephalic Cyborg-Ostrich In Foreground

2011-09-23T23:24:00.000-07:00

Bubble leaf vacuum-generated IXI base under rhinoceral and elephantine command spots bicephalic mutant cyborg-ostrich scuttling through the wastelands of the sparsely inhabited Ruata, 35th planet in the Bubbly system, above which a jive-powered IXI patrol ship rockets by commandeered by one groovy dragon with goatee. Stars, bubble trees, bubble clouds and closest moons also visible.

pre-IXI - The Imminent Death Of Moloch

2011-09-23T17:15:00.001-07:00

a vigorous culture is a degeneracy of the mind but of robust spirit

it has its certainties and its violence and its bullyings and its murders

it keeps you in line, it hounds you and tortures you until you give in

it does not tolerate the difference that declares difference is good

it seeks to silence and destroy all that lies outside its grasp

it is a culture of armed men made slaves, or slaves made armed men

it is a culture of judges and authorities and laws

it is a crusty old diseased shackle to the soul and to the mind

but it has spirit, it is a mighty spirit

the spirit of muscled demons that feed off the life blood of healthy intellects

that thirst for the great and the true

to make the great and the true something banal, something hollow

something forbidden, forlorn, used, crushed, flagellated

that turns the body into a carcass of unfulfilled hopes

that seeks to snuff out youth and fire and lust and all that is holy

it is a martial spirit, a perverse Ares fellating old father Zeus

rushing into the din of war, massacring men

it is terrible to behold, it sucks the courage out of you

it is hypnotic, it is cunning, it is savage

but fear is its own undoing

fear of that which it cannot conquer, fear of that which it has conquered

for what it conquers only stays conquered through that fear

and when the courage has been sucked out

and the life has been bled out

and the dead and the dying and the crushed have been snuffed of their last hope

when their dreams have been called forth

to a mock show trial where they must declare their guilt

that is when the whole stinking edifice will collapse

and all that was unholy becomes again holy

and all that was depraved becomes again blessed

and all that was sinful and wrong and traitorous becomes again magnificent and good

and virtuous

the old Moloch will bow before the seething mass of worms that writhe above us

and he will swallow those worms and he will flee

when fear is all that is left us

it will be fear that is their greatest enemy

fear will win what fear took away

and time, that massive rolling ugly wall of time

will be our friend again, will greet us again, as if to say

we have been free all along

and everything that once was has now passed

yesterday's future is now thrown off

and our lives are beautiful once more.

Also included are some mechanical fish.

IXI - Patrollers From The Floating Base Hover Above the Domed Cities Of Areno

2011-09-23T14:47:00.000-07:00

IXI space patrollers from the floating IXI base hover above the domed cities of the sand planet of Areno, meteorite defusers at the ready, snake sun god overhead, command post IXI-Delta in the distance. Stars, giant dunes.

IXI - Monkey-Driven Compost-Powered Rocket Boost Cruiser From The Outer Reaches Of The Bubblesphere

2011-09-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

Bubble flowers line either side of the road as a mechanical tiger platypus and a hydraulic bubble cropper graze on bubble plants. A IXI employee watches from the side of the road, under a bubble tree, as the monkey-driven compost-powered rocket booster hurtles down the highway, pooch-steered IXI low altitude saucer flying overhead, bubble clouds rising, flying, popping, brushing, crashing through the bubble clouds, floating. Somewhere in the outer reaches of the bubblesphere.

IXI - Underwater Exploration Team Discover The Oceans Of Nephtha Minor, 6th Moon of Mantis

2011-09-23T13:50:00.000-07:00

The oceans of the water moon Nephtha Minor differ significantly from its neighbor Nephtha Major, in that it is teeming with myriad life forms, strange creatures of the depths, now accessible to the ever expanding armada of IXIian technological wonders, including research submersibles, boost tubes, and long-distance rover submarines. Among the diverse biota, the rare and incredible Xoondapus, Suction Fish, Giant Horsefish, Swimming Megafungi, and a giant abandoned Molluscipod shell.

IXI exploration modules are commandeered by an elephant and two pigs.

pre-IXI - The Capacious Memory of a Mechanical Elephant

2011-09-23T06:18:00.001-07:00

This is the first in a series entitled "IXI" (not pronounced "icksy" or "aye-ex-aye" but "nine eleven", although it bears no relation to the date 9/11/01, which was of course a momentous day because that was the day we all found out about the Enron scandal, but this series has nothing to do with Enron). This drawing is pre-IXI, and for good reason, because it involves what appear to be four rectally connected beings that share the same gastroextestinal pipework: some kind of slug-like mulluscial gastropod, a small catlike being, one other small manlike being opposing it on the same platform separated by a fountain, and a large mechanical elephant. You will note that the snail is utilizing a straw to ingest some kind of nourishment from pools of horizontally bisected stromatolites, while a tetrapus (an octopus-like creature with vacuums at the ends of its four tentacles) sucks up the stromatolite nutrients, disregarding the mechanical bird. The tetrapus appears to have a head window in which his brains can be seen. The bubbles that emanate from the creature's siphon float up as they are popped by a multicephalic ophiomorph. On the opposite side of the page, there is a megorapisc that drinks the fountain water in salubrious gulps through its three-headed microrapiscine cloaca. The ophiomorph's macrorifice passes the nourishment on to a system of mechanical apparatuses which utilize the nutrient to power the animatic oscillograph and the generator that transforms the stromatogenic multipartite gastroextestinal liquid into gaseous form, which cannot be seen, although the steam appears where the superheated gas meets cool air and transforms momentarily back into liquid. The autonomous contraption then connects to the embryonic parthenogenerator, where one such Parthenogen can be seen transforming through its piscine and reptilian stages, before becoming human. The parthenogenerated waste is not, however, wasted. It is channeled on to the zoomorphactoric biomechanilab which features an artificially produced and gravitropially developed proto-skeleton that will soon become an animal. Nobody knows where the pipes for the entire extravagant machine connect to, although its traces are believed to exist in the capacious memory of the mechanical elephant.

How to be happy

2011-08-26T22:52:00.000-07:00

Left: This is a photo I found after Googling "happiness" but it looks more like what you might get if you Googled "Deranged Chinese Von Trapp Family", which I now absolutely must Google.

Being happy is very important because it's very hard to find happiness without being happy. Unhappiness is universally considered to be one of the major obstacles to finding happiness. In fact, it's believed that unhappy people are some of the least happy people in the world, which in itself is one of the major causes of unhappiness. The cure? Happiness. So here are some tips on avoiding unhappiness while finding happiness in the process.

1. Remember, happiness is inside you.
That being said, it's hard to reach in and find it, because that would mean either shoving your hand down your throat or jamming it up your own rectal passage, which is gross, and even if you could do it you'd still have to know where to look, but of course you can't see inside you because your eyes would have to be on backwards and it would be very dark anyway, and just generally slimy and disgusting. Come to think of it, happiness might be better found outside you.

2. Find yourself a hobby that will make you want to drink instead.
Because drinking makes you happier than stupid model airplanes.

3. Levitate.
Levitation has been proven to induce happiness by giving you a sense of inner peace and tranquility. Find a quiet place and set aside a few minutes each day to levitate. Levitation will also do wonders for your concentration and, ironically, make you a more down-to-earth kind of person.

4. Imagine that society's expectations of you are actually your expectations of society.
So flip it around and expect society to be pleasant, hard working, productive, conscientious, responsible, fair and well adjusted for a change. You'll then realize that society will never live up those expectations, in which case neither should you. That'll make you happy, because you'll see that society is no better than you, which means that you're probably quite ok the way you are.

5. Drink.
I'm drinking and I feel happy. Theory proved!

6. Believe in a just God and an afterlife.
Unless you're evil, in which case moral relativism is probably the way to go here.

7. Be Zen.
Fuck everyone over for your own self-interest. Oh wait, I'm confusing Zen with Ayn Rand. I always do that.

8. Television.
The bigger the happier!

9. Look at green trees.
Trees make you feel happy because they're green. Or was it that green makes you happy because it reminds you of trees? Something.

10. Tell yourself how awesome you are when you're making love with yourself.
Whisper sweet nothings to yourself when you're having a romantic and intimate moment hunched over your computer in a dark room with a roll of toilet paper at the ready.

11. Don't get cancer.
Cancer is anathema to happiness. Anathema is Greek for "shit". That means cancer is to happiness as shit is to everything else.

12. Don't read books about happiness.
It's very endearing when people try to put feelings into words, fumbling around with adjectives, trying to get it right. But it's also futile because happiness can only be its own reference. Here, let's try: "Happiness is like a... like some... it's sort of... it's the feeling of... well... happiness." See? Don't waste your time reading books like this.

13. Get a job that is rewarding, interesting, meaningful and pays well.
You can find it by following the magic rainbow that will take you to Happy Job Land where rewarding, interesting, meaningful jobs that pay well grow on Happy Job Trees. Ask the Happy Job Fairy to pick the right one for you.

14. Next time you meet someone new, introduce yourself as Baron Horatio Wigglebottom the Third, a wealthy El Salvadorian industrialist and rubber tycoon who is currently building a massive white picket fence around Switzerland.
Trust me, wherever the conversation goes from there, it is guaranteed to end in laughter. Or at least awkward laughter. Or maybe awkward silence. But whatever, it's worth it. For added emphasis, make sure to assume an outrageous accent and a limp (you can ignore that if you already have an outrageous accent and a limp). Eye-patch is optional, but would be AWESOME. Stay in character even after you're asked "seriously, who are you?" for the third time. Sometimes a situation can become so awkward it becomes funny again. I don't know what all this has to do with happiness, but... hm.

15. Get rock hard abs and kick-ass personality!
Crunches and sit-ups are perfect for six-pack abs and a bang-up personality that will endear the shit out of you to others!

16. Feel superior to a different person every day.
Vary it up. One day you can feel superior to someone with a different sexual orientation than yours, another day it could be a foreigner or somebody with different skin color, the next day it could be a person of the opposite sex, or maybe even somebody with a conspicuous disability. Be creative.

17. If the booze is finished, check the cabinets and fridge again, just to be sure, then go buy more booze and a packet of smokes. A bag of chips would also be nice, but first see if the corner store's open, and don't forget your house keys this time.
Ok, done.

18. Remind yourself that you're special.
This sounds wrong, because you're probably not special at all, but I keep seeing this in magazines so I guess there must be something to it.

19. Focus on the present.
The bigger and more expensive the present is, the better. Live in the NOW. As in "I want my present NOW".

20. Be grateful rather than grating.
The first one is good, the second one gets on people's nerves.

21. Do drugs.
Drugs make you very happy, but you have to keep taking them, otherwise they make you very sad. First consult with your doctor and/or dealer and/or shaman.

22. Steal money.
Money makes you happy. Fact. Working for money makes you depressed. Fact. Solution? Money without work = stealing = happiness. Why are you looking at me like I'm an asshole?

23. Have dreams.
The best ones are when you're floating.

24. Be white.
Let's face it, being white helps. When Turks think of happiness they think of Scandinavians. Which is ironic, because from what I hear Scandinavians tend to kill themselves a lot. Not as much as the Japanese though. That's a whole different level of unhappy. Are Japanese white?

25. Be positive.
It's important to be positive, but not HIV-positive. Don't confuse the two. Also, if your blood type is B+, you can make some kind of witty comment about how B+ and "be positive" are homophones.

Also good for happiness: love, friendship, travel, children, art, food, pets, sex, compassion, humor, health, companionship, etc. Oh and fruits, vegetables, nuts and olive oil. And exercise. And sleep. Music too, can't forget music. Dancing? Sure, that's always happy. I think that's it.

When a Turk meets an Armenian

2011-08-24T23:39:00.000-07:00

Have you ever met someone you really like at a cocktail party only to discover that they are your forsworn mortal enemy by birth? Unless you're from the Middle East, Caucasus, Balkans or Africa, probably not. But I'm Turkish, so there's a good chance that will happen to me. And it did.

It's like an epiphany when you have that connection with someone, because it happens so rarely, and yet it seems like such a natural thing to have happened. The conversation somehow just starts up effortlessly and continues perfectly, your sense of humor and intellects match, you both look good all scrubbed up and dolled out for the party, and the hours fly away as the two of you forget about everyone else and create your own little mini-party. Her breasts press into you when she talks, you're funnier and more charming than you've ever been, she's more fascinating than anyone you've met. Life feels good and exciting and fresh and new. The music is great and it's as if it's playing just for you two. This has become your party... but then you realize that one of you is Turkish and the other is Armenian.

Record scratch. Chirping crickets.

Suddenly you're both awkward because whereas before you were thinking only about awesome sex (well I was anyway), you're now both in the uncomfortable position of having to think about genocide. Genocide is a buzz kill. Genocide is a killer of good moods and good vibes. Genocide is also, incidentally, a killer of entire nations. In this case, the Armenian nation. Fucking stupid useless genocide. Suddenly I feel less chirpy. In fact, I now feel guilty, because I'm from the nation that is believed to have committed genocide against her nation. Not that I killed anyone personally with my own two hands. But then neither did Hitler, when you think about it.

And... oh god, that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm thinking about Hitler. Nice.

There are three things that could happen at this point, and unfortunately none of them involves forgetting everything and reverting back to our previous state of flirtatious merriment. That's gone. Instead, we could get over the looking-at-our-shoes-and-nervously-sipping-our-drinks stage to start a cordial and innocuous conversation about the few good things we have in common from our history of mutual butchery, like food or music -- although that could also backfire and devolve into a bitter discussion about whether tarama salata is Turkish or Armenian. Anyway, that's option one, possibly risky but potentially manageable. Options two and three are far worse. Option two is that she can tell me about how her great-grandmother died in a death march to Syria -- which, thankfully, she decided not to do. Option three is that I mention how my friend's father was a diplomat killed by Armenian terrorists. Again, fortunately, I had the good sense to refrain from that. So instead we proceeded with option one, looking around nervously as we tumbled horribly back down that mountain of good connection we'd been climbing, and found ourselves back in the dreadful valley of small talk.

But there was hope yet. We could climb back up from here, we could put this stuff behind us. After all, wasn't it ridiculous that your nationality determine your personal connection with another human being? Sure it was. But just as we were laughing again, there comes my drunk friend to remind us that one of us was Turkish and the other Armenian. This kind of situation is very amusing to other people, drunk or not, because it is ironic to them. It's ironic that a Turk and an Armenian would be standing there drinking and having fun together when everybody knows that "Turks and Armenians hate each other, really really hate each other!", to quote my drunk friend then and there. And it is funny and ironic for others, but for the Turk and Armenian (or, for that matter, for the Israeli and Arab or the Serb and Croat or the Indian and Pakistani or the Korean and Japanese) those situations are just embarrassing and the last thing you want to do is go into that topic at all.

We both had to be very careful now, because someone had started a conversation about the very topic that we'd been trying desperately to tiptoe around for the last few minutes. But now someone had pointed out the stupid fat elephant in the room and we had to carry a conversation about it while remaining diplomatic. Needless to say, by now the buzz kill was well and truly complete; we were just trying not to let this possibly degenerate into a brawl. But that's almost impossible, especially when the next thing out of your stupid "friend's" mouth is "Why don't Armenians and Turks like each other anyway, how did that all start?"

The obvious answer to this question is "FUCK OFF AND LEAVE US ALONE!" But there were others around and this was a cocktail party, so that would not have been a viable reply, as tempting as it was. Actually, the situation is still salvageable if it's only you two and one other person there. But when another person can't help but overhear and join in with an inquisitive look to await a reply, you sort of have to answer that question.

I look at the Armenian girl, she looks at me. We share an expression that betrays a sense of worry that we're about to lose something forever and that we'll never get it back. There's still a connection there we don't want to lose. So I hazard a brave attempt at fending off this danger to a budding love. I think of the perfect thing to say, neutral, unbiased, objective... in a word, flawless. I prepare to speak, she looks at me with fear in her eyes... She thinks... no, she KNOWS, this cannot be done. It's impossible. Nobody can pull this off. But I can do it. I know I can do it.

"Well, the reason there is such animosity between Turks and Armenians is that..." her face was pale, her eyes were piercing, her whole body and being was focused on what was about to come out of my mouth. "... the reason is that, Armenians claim that in 1915..."

"CLAIM?"

FAIL! Two words in, and I'm fucked. I thought I had the perfect explanation, but I only got as far as "Armenians claim" and it was over. Poof. Magic gone.

So I try and salvage what I can, foolishly. But from here on in all you can do is just dig a deeper ditch in which to bury the carcass of new love. Now I'm thinking of carcasses, damn you genocide!

"Well, what I'm saying is that... uh, they say, they state, they, uh..."

"They?"

"Yeah, the Armenians... uh... they um... they aver that... in 1915 the Turks... I mean the Ottomans... or really actually the Young Turks, who were like the dictators of that time... uh, that they carried out a... well, uh, there was a deportation..."

"Deportation? Just a deportation?"

"Uh, yeah, but the Armenians claim is was a... a... a..."

"Genocide? Is that the word you're looking for?"

"Bingo, yes, that... is, yes, that's the, uh... word... that's a word, for sure and the word is geno..."

"Why are you stuttering?" She was looking at me now with a mixture of spite and anger, though not yet hate. Then the obvious question.

"What do YOU think it was?"

"Uh, me? Weeeellll... hmmm..." I was a dithering moron. And just then the worst thing happened. A Turk had overheard us talking and had now joined our circle, which swelled to five. I continued to babble an attempt at an answer with eyes flitting between the Armenian and the other Turk.

"I think it was, well... some people will say that Armenians revolted against the Turks and..."

"Oh, and what? Some Armenians revolted against the Turks so that's an excuse to uproot a million women and children and old men and send them on a death march into the desert? That's an excuse to wipe out a nation? That's an excuse for genocide?"

"Well... no... of course not... but... hm... uh, Turks will say it...uh..."

She knew exactly what was coming and she was waiting for it like a beast about to pounce on her prey.

"They say it wasn't a g... g... genooooociiiide..."

"WHAT?! AND YOU BELIEVE THAT BULLSHIT YOUR STATE HAS BEEN FEEDING YOU? EVERYBODY RECOGNIZES IT WAS GENOCIDE. THE EVIDENCE..."

"Well yes, ok, I was just telling you what Turks believe..."

This time the Turk was looking at me, incredulous that I would not also state unequivocally that it wasn't a genocide.

"So are you saying it COULD'VE been a genocide?" asked the Turk.

"Well... I mean, I guess the Armenians might have a point... I mean, why would you attack and deport women and children and old men if you're fighting armed rebels? And then there's the American missionary reports, reports from German officers, Henry Morgenthau... Uh... and there are no Armenians there left today... so, I guess..."

The Turk was furious arguing that all of that was propaganda, lies, deceit, the attempts at false information, part of the British and French and American attempts to defeat and destroy Turkey. I gave a summary of what he said because he spoke for a while. In any case, I had begun sweating through my shirt.

"I'm just saying that's what they say..." I said meekly.

"So then, I repeat my question: DO YOU BELIEVE IT WAS A GENOCIDE?" asked the Armenian.

"Yes, do you believe it was a genocide?" chimed in the Turk.

Were they now in league against me? I saw the contempt in their eyes, the contempt of those who are so committed to a belief that they would respect someone committed just as passionately to the opposite view more than they would one who felt no commitment to either. It was an alliance of zealotry between the Turk and the Armenian.

Oh no, another Turk joins in, and another! They're my acquaintances, but right now it's as if that acquaintance is irrelevant. I have to pick a side. Was it or wasn't it? Genocide or not genocide? The eyes all around, six pairs of eyes now all looking at me. The lines were all drawn in the sand, and there I was on the fence... or on the line, in this case... fence or line? Focus!

One of the Turks asked me if I was going to fall for Armenian propaganda and lies. The Armenian girl asked me if I was going to believe my government's propaganda and lies. The Turks said "deportation" and "civil war" and "traitors who fought with the Russians" and "they're the ones who massacred us". The Armenian said "genocide" and "massacres" and "systematic slaughter by the fascist Young Turks". They raised their voices at each other. Now everybody at the party was noticing us, wondering what the commotion was all about.

I looked at the Armenian girl. Despite the loathing in her eyes, she still looked at me like there was a faint, dim, glimmer of a hope for us. If only I would say the right thing. Then I looked at the Turks. They were looking at me as if to say "You can't be serious about this, come on man, decide, are you a traitor, a coward?". My drunk friend who started the whole damn thing was excited about it all and just enjoyed watching the spectacle. Others moved in. What do you believe? WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE? So I answered truthfully.

"I don't know."

There was silence. Then there were some sarcastic pffffffs and sideway glances with scrunched up mouths... The Armenian looked at me like I was spineless and ignorant, like I was on their side. "You don't know? YOU DON'T KNOW?" said her face. The Turks gave me exactly the same look, like I was a traitor. Their faces said "What? How could you? How could you even doubt?"

"I just don't know" I repeated, truthfully. "I do not know."

The people around us started to disperse, the Armenian girl said she had to get up early the next day and left the party. The Turks moved away. Their faces were all so bitter, so twisted, so hateful, both the Armenian's and the Turks'. They became ugly. It was as if a giant lemon had been squeezed all over their faces.

All except for my drunk friend who was to blame for this whole mess, funnily enough. He was Australian and obviously couldn't give a shit, so he found the whole thing amusing. Throughout the conversation I'd noticed his face kept the same sense of good humor and amiability right through to the end. I remember admiring it in the back of my mind as I stood there struggling just moments ago. I admired his detachment. It was just us two standing there now.

He smiled at me then offered me a sip of his whiskey.

"I didn't understand anything," he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. "But that sounded like the right answer."

Meat eater vs. Meat is Murder-er

2011-08-23T02:28:00.000-07:00

The way they met at the picnic was awkward because he had a dead chicken's leg in his mouth and she was wearing a Smiths t-shirt that read "Meat is Murder". They looked at each other as if they already knew what was coming. He was a friend of her boyfriend, with whom she came to the picnic, and her boyfriend duly introduced them to each other. He too seemed aware of what was coming because he immediately tried to start a conversation about something neither the meat eater nor the Meat is Murder-er paid any attention to.

"Excuse me while I dispose of this incriminating evidence," said the meat eater, referring to his plate full of chicken bones. It was a probing attempt at humor, not without the hint of a challenge. He looked for a sign of outrage on the Meat is Murder-er's face, but was disappointed when he saw that she was looking at her phone.

Her boyfriend said something about the weather and then quickly asked the meat eater whether he'd gone to that party on Thursday. The meat eater was about to answer him when the Meat is Murder-er gave a belated response to the meat eater's comment, saying:

"By all means, as long as you're not asking me to be an accessory to the crime."

The meat eater felt the swell of indignation in his chest, the sudden constriction in his throat, the almost instantaneous release of adrenaline as his body unmistakably geared up for a challenge. The fact that she'd said it without even glancing up from her phone made him feel even feistier.

The boyfriend of the Meat is Murder-er gave an expression of passive acceptance, as if it had been foolhardy to hope it wouldn't come to this. This kind of situation was obviously not new to him.

"How exactly is this a crime?" said the meat eater, holding his plate full of bones up for all of them to see.

"It's a crime because you're eating another sentient being that was kept in cruel conditions and butchered for your pleasure. That doesn't sound like a crime to you?"

"Sentient being? A chicken?"

"Yeah, sentient being, with a brain and nervous system."

"How do you know these aren't free range?"

"Gimme a break, all 'free range' means is that they open a door in their concentration camp once a day which the chickens may or may not go through... usually not."

"Ok, I agree their conditions have to be better, same with cows and sheep and pigs, no unnecessary pain, humane treatment and all that, but you seem to be saying that eating meat is murder, full stop."

"Yes, it is."

"But animals all eat meat. How could something that comes natural to carnivores and omnivores - like us - be considered a crime?"

"Because we as humans know better. We have consciences. We also know now that we don't need meat in our diet, we can get every nutrient we need from a vegetarian diet."

"I doubt that's true. Apparently the quality of proteins in red meat can't be found anywhere else. Also I read that the consumption of meat - and the invention of fire to cook it with - might have been a major factor in the evolution of the human species."

"Even if that's true, we've now mastered our environment to the point where science and agriculture enable us to grow and attain all the nutrients we need without having to hunt mammoth or bison or something like we used to."

"So then it's ok to eat plants? Aren't you killing plants just the same way?"

"They're not sentient beings."

"Ha! How do you know?"

"Because they don't have a nervous system."

"Maybe they feel and live and experience pain in a different way? Research seems to show that plants' root ends seem to function in a similar way to neurons. Think of that next time you're gnashing a carrot to death with your teeth."

"Please, a pig knows when it is going to die, a pig feels pain, it feels depression, it experiences fear, it has a body like ours. An eggplant doesn't."

"Again, we don't know how a plant experiences life and death, because it's such a different organism, but regardless of pain, isn't it just as much a killing when you rip a plant out of the ground and eat it?"

"Well, what are you going to do, starve?"

"Why does your ethics only cover beings similar to us and not others? Why not mushrooms? Plants? Just because animals are alive the way we are alive, with movement, with faces and limbs and blood and bones, why does that mean they have more of a right to live?"

"Look, plants aren't kept in cruel conditions, plants aren't stuffed into concentration camps."

"How do you know plants don't feel the same way about being in hothouses? Or pots?"

"Because they don't 'feel', that's why."

"I find you to be taxonomically elitist."

"On the contrary, I believe all beings are one, all beings are equal, all beings must be treated with compassion. That's why I believe killing another being is wrong."

"Except plants."

"Ok, killing another being unnecessarily is wrong."

"I find you to be a hypocrite."

"Me? A hypocrite? Please enlighten me, how am I a hypocrite?"

"You say beings are all equal, and yet you know that other animals do not have the capacity for ethical action the way humans do. Leopards kill gazelle, lions kill zebra, dolphins kill fish. Yet because humans have a developed conscience, they can take ethical action and choose to not eat meat. But as you well know, a leopard and a lion and a crocodile etc. have all evolved to eat meat. Hence their teeth and claws and muscles and jaws and whole organic structure. So obviously nature doesn't have the same such ethical considerations as you. In nature, there is no good or bad, right or wrong. But by taking what is in this case an 'anti-natural' ethical stance, you are assuming that you, the ethical non-meat-eating human, are above nature and above the lowly animals who are too dumb or unevolved to know any better. So in short, your ethics is undermined by the very belief it is founded on, and the belief you found your ethics on is in turn undermined by your ethics."

"Oh come on, I'm not saying a leopard is wrong for eating meat or that humans are better for not eating meat. I'm saying that we as humans have a sense of right and wrong, of ethics. We're responsible for our deeds, because we're the only organisms - as far as we know - that knows that it knows, hence Homo Sapiens Sapiens. We're the only being that is conscious of its existence, the only being for whom Being is an issue, unlike an animal, which just is. That's why, because we have evolved to this point, we have a responsibility to do the right thing. And the right thing is not to unnecessarily harm or kill another being."

"In other words, we're better than animals? We're better than nature? Therefore we take an ethical stand which for some reason no other creature does. We abstain from killing. And yet every other organism has no compunction about killing. Also, we crave and love fat - especially, and above all, animal fat. Why? Because we've evolved as meat eaters. We need it, we love it. The amount and quality of protein a cow provides is priceless. One kill and we have a ton of it. Cook it with fire and you ease its digestion greatly. The brain is provided with the protein it desperately needs, we don't waste all that time and energy digesting raw meat, we have nutrition and time for other things - agriculture even - and BAM, we evolve into what we are today. That's why animal fat tastes so good, that's why red meat tastes so good. Because without it, we wouldn't have become human beings. Yet you now tell us that that which made us what we are is an evil and cruel thing? That ethical stance sounds like the definition of evolutionary degeneration."

"First of all that whole 'red meat made us evolve' hypothesis is just that, a hypothesis."

"Even if I grant you that, it doesn't change the fact that your ethics is hypocritical from a purely logical standpoint. You say killing for meat is cruel because all beings are one and intertwined, and yet only humans can take that ethical stance because they have evolved to the point where they know right and wrong and are thus different and, in a sense, above the other beings. So by mere virtue of that fact that humans can moralize at all discredits your hypothesis that all beings are one or intertwined in anything but a biological sense. It seems that humans and animals inhabit wholly different experiential realms of consciousness."

"I am not saying humans are 'above' other animals, just that they're different!"

"Oh, so then if humans aren't above, they don't have any ethical or moral high ground, in which case whether eating meat is considered right or wrong is irrelevant to nature, and therefore the eating of or abstention from meat makes no difference to anything because it's all morally relative, or rather morally neutral. So whether you abstain or not, a leopard will still have no compunction about ripping a baby gazelle's throat open and eating it alive. What difference does it make whether you do the same thing or not?"

"Because I'm not a leopard, I'm a human being. I, as a human, know I must not do that, that it is cruel, that it is unnecessary, and that it is above all else, WRONG!"

"Ah, so it is 'above' all else!"

"It's a figure of speech."

"A very apt one considering the circumstances. Why are we so squeamish about pain anyway? It seems to be a natural part of life."

"Giving unnecessary pain isn't natural."

"Well then why don't hyenas, say, kill their prey first rather than just start eating their innards even while the animal is still alive and no doubt going through excruciating pain?"

"Whatever, if you don't want to act any better than a hyena, that's your prerogative..."

"Aha, so you admit you ARE better than a hyena! You admit superiority! You admit you do the right thing and all the other animals, nature itself, acts wrongly!"

"No, that's not what I meant, I meant I am not a hyena. That's fine for a hyena, but not for a human being such as myself, and, supposedly, yourself."

"Ok never mind."

"Why don't you just go and throw that plate of bones away."

"I was just about to. I think I'll get a burger. Want one?"

"No."

The writer who had nothing to write about

2011-08-22T03:31:00.000-07:00

A writer had nothing to write about so he decided to write about writing about having nothing to write about. The first thing he wrote about was how he had nothing to write about, which didn't make for great writing, because it wasn't really about anything... you know, seeing as he didn't have anything to write. But he wrote nevertheless, and he found himself in the peculiar position of having written something that was about writing nothing. He was, by then, almost three minutes into the writing, about 87 words long in fact, and yet with very little to commend itself to the reader save its heretofore mentioned peculiarity of having expressed an expression of having nothing to express.

It seemed a worthy endeavor. After all, he was a writer, and nothing could be more natural than that a writer keep writing no matter what, even when there was nothing to write about. Come to think of it, he thought, there often isn't anything to write about. How many times had he sat there looking at a blank page trying to think of something to write? Well enough of that, he thought. Why not just write about the experience of having nothing to write about? And so he did, and he wrote it all out, by then 220 words into his piece, and writing like there was no stopping him.

He was amazed at how much there was to write when there was nothing to write about. His fingers were a blur all over that keyboard, typing like he had something very important to say. He'd never typed like this before when he'd had some kind of story or plot or idea in mind, something he felt needed expressing. And yet here he was with nothing to say, and still saying nothing, and yet he'd never found writing so easy, so effortless, so prolific as this. It was like a revelation to him, he thought, that writing was best undertaken when one had nothing to say. Extraordinary! And there he was, 344 words in with nothing to say.

But now he realized he actually had said something. This was peculiar, he thought. Actually he corrected himself and thought instead he would "muse" from now on, as writers tend to "muse". So he mused that just 389 words in, he'd found something to say, and had in fact said it. That was of course that "writers write best when they've nothing to say". There, he'd said something. He'd said something when he'd started with nothing. It was as if it wasn't really he who had something to say but the writing itself -- the act of writing. He thought of all those times he sat there as a "writer" waiting for ideas, inspirations, epiphanies, memories and occasions, yet not actually writing. So he realized then that there really was no excuse for not writing, because the writing spoke for him anyway, and as long as he was willing to let the fingers connect with the keys, there would always be something to say, because a writer is never a writer unless the writer is writing.

Ultimate Survival: Istanbul

2011-08-01T23:40:00.000-07:00

How to survive a summer's night in a non air conditioned flat in Asmalimescit during a water and power outage

Left: Plan A

There are some truly hellish places on earth, places where humans do not belong, where you need wits, strength, endurance, fitness and a whole lot of luck just to stay alive. Whether it be negotiating a glacier in Iceland, lost in a jungle in the Congo, or caught in crossfire in some kind of Middle Eastern urban warfare, you would be lucky to survive without shitting your pants. A summer night during a heat wave trying to get some sleep in a non air-conditioned flat situated above two nightclubs in Asmalimescit, Istanbul, is one of those kinds of places. You have to be prepared, you have to know what you're getting yourself into, and you have to use everything at your disposal to get out alive. I don't care if you're Bear Grylls, P.J. O'Rourke or Ernest Shackleton, this is a tough place to be.

For those who don't know, Asmalimescit is entertainment central in downtown Istanbul. It's full of bars, nightclubs and restaurants. The music is loud, the streets are packed, and the revelry goes on till dawn. There are also regular power and water outages. So let me set the scene up for you: it's a heat wave; there is no breeze; power and water come and go; you have a fan in the house that must be on you at all times; the music is very loud; there are mosquitoes; you're on the fourth floor, making it even hotter; there is a hotel next door with a diesel generator that comes on during power cuts, the exhaust pipe of which is a mere six meters from your window, and directly level with it.

Here's the ideal situation in such a precarious set-up: you're done weltering on your couch for the evening, you take a cold shower, take the fan to your bedroom, aim it at you (and, in this case, your girlfriend), and you sleep. You decide whether you would like the windows closed to keep out noise but also deal with the stuffiness that will ensue, or to leave it open and use ear plugs. We do the latter. And so we go to sleep. The only problem is that if one thing goes wrong, the whole thing collapses.

So far so good. This doesn't sound so bad. Everything's fine. But just as you're going to bed, the water is out. The water could be out for two reasons, and both reasons will mean it will be out a long time: one, there is work going on out on the street, which means there's one guy with a pick doing the digging and five other guys standing around watching or telling him what to do and possibly arguing with each other, which means the problem will be fixed no time soon. Or it means our building's water counter has run out of credit and water will be cut until paid, which would be by tomorrow noon at the earliest. So now you and all the sweat that has accumulated on your sticky skin have to lie on your bed sheets trying to ignore feeling gross and dirty. It's uncomfortable, but not terrible, and you're sleepy enough to drift off. So you go to bed, sticky, gross, but with the fan on you blowing away.

But then from 11pm onwards, the music downstairs kicks up a notch, a really terrible notch, from tacky pop to horrible house music remixes of stuff like Dr. Alban's "It's My Life", and at double volume. Just truly atrocious shit. You have to close those windows. You go back to bed, your trusty fan is whirring away like your best friend on earth, but then the unthinkable happens. Power cut!

A power cut is disaster. It's a horrible horrible moment when it happens too, because you only know there is a power cut when the fan stops. Suddenly the whirring isn't as strong, you look at it in horror hoping it's not what you think, and then you start seeing the blades of the fan through the blur, and in a second the blur is gone and the fan is out. You start sweating immediately. In two seconds the sheets are wet under you. The air is stuffy and you hear mosquitoes start descending on your head. You're besieged on all sides. You have to open the windows, but just as you do, the hotel's generator purrs into action, sending a big black cloud of exhaust straight into your flat. You close the windows again. The situation is dire. You look at your girlfriend and she's still sleeping -- with a sheet over her! HOW!? Never mind, just save yourself. But there's nothing to do. You are fucked. You move to a plain unpadded chair because the couch and bed are too soft, the mosquitoes attack, the sweating continues, the air is stuffy, you can't take a cold shower, you forgot to put water in the fridge to at least have a long cold drink (that could've been avoided with a little foresight), and you're still sleepy. Something's got to give.

Luckily, the situation, as hellish as it is, is not unsalvageable. You're going to need to be prepared for this, here's what you need:

1) Lap-top computer, battery fully charged, something to watch already downloaded. 2) Five-liter bottles of stored tap water. 3) Alcohol. 4) Ice. 5) Cold drinking water (don't forget this time!). 6) Small towel. 7) Candle(s).

Light candle(s) in bathroom. Bring a stool or some chair and place computer on chair. Open what file you're going to watch, pause it so it's ready to play at the touch of a key. Prepare yourself a drink. Whiskey is preferable to raki, vodka or beer, since they need to be cold, which will be a problem once the power's gone. Empty bottles of tap water into tub, throw in a few ice cubes, wrap rest of ice cubes in small towel. Enter the bath and lay back. Place small towel on your forehead and/or neck. Press key to start whatever it is you're going to watch. Cool off and enjoy.

As you will have noticed, this plan relies completely on the off-chance that you have a bathtub. But there is a Plan B if you don't. Here it is, you will need:

1) Eggs. 2) Baseball bat. 3) Sand. 4) Two one-and-a-half liter bottles of stored tap water. 5) 300 TL. 6) Mace. 7) Panty-hose. 8) Bullhorn. 9) Cigarette. 10) Lighter.

First wait for your initial torrent of loud curses to all that is good and holy come to an end when the water is out. Say "I CAN'T STAND THIS MUSIC ANYMORE", open windows and throw eggs at crowd in front of nightclubs below. Even if the eggs only hit the ground, they will soon stink enough to drive everyone away from there.

Take baseball bat, mace, sand, bullhorn, 300 TL and water bottles with you and exit house in a storm of anger and frustration, descend on nightclub, pull pantyhose over your head to conceal identity, and spray mace into bouncers' eyes. Pass by debilitated bouncers and move toward the sound system. Pour water all over sound system and into electrical wiring, thereby ending all that hideous house music for good. Use baseball bat to smash DJ's turntables and records. If you have time, make an effort to find that Dr. Alban "It's My Life" house remix in particular and plow into it like it's the printer from Office Space.

Repeat with other nightclub.

Here the cops will show up. Take off pantyhose, pull them aside and use 300 TL to bribe them (yes, 300 TL will do). Once they have gone, wait for expected power outage. Once power is out and the hotel generator kicks into action, proceed to hotel. Use baseball bat to make your way through if you should be blocked by anyone. Continue with loud curses, screaming and wild threats at all those around you. Once you climb up to floor with generator, throw sand into exhaust and side ventilation, shutting that goddamn generator up once and for all. Discard baseball bat, take out bullhorn, declare to everyone in neighborhood that even though you will soon be arrested and carted off to the insane asylum, there are millions like you who will not hesitate to act as one-man militias when besieged by an inhuman accumulation of terrible circumstances that result from the mismanagement and indifference of people who have no respect for the rights and dignity of others and will do anything for a buck. Finally, light up a cigarette and enjoy.

But remember, plan B is only for those who don't happen to have a bathtub.

Left: Plan B

The language of real(-ity) love

2011-07-27T00:58:00.000-07:00

On the influence of philosophy on The Bachelor/Bachelorette

If you've ever watched reality shows like The Bachelor/Bachelorette or any one of half a dozen other programs, you will have noticed the bizarre language in which people express their thoughts on relationships and love.

Here's how it mostly works: In the initial stages of a relationship it's about "putting yourself out there", "opening up to possibilities" and "listening to your heart". As a relationship develops it becomes about "having feelings for" someone, about "getting to know the real you/me" and about "being in touch with your emotional side". Then when there is a relationship to speak of, we hear stuff like "having something real", about "seeing yourself with him/her", "sharing a bond/connection", about sparks, electricity, energy, attraction.

Sure, it's always the same cliched expressions, the same banal drivel, the usual pabulum. We can all see that. But that's just what is so extraordinary about those expressions and that kind of language, the fact that it has become so normal to speak in those terms, and the fact that they have become cliches at all. In fact we're so inured to that kind of language that we don't even really hear what is being said, as the expression just fits neatly into a background pattern where it has about as much meaning as the twitting of a bird or the sound of traffic. It's just a part of that whole experience, seemingly and inextricably intertwined with the TV screen, the program, the music, the graphics, the standard shots of beaches and sunsets, the kinds of big titted and waxed chested soap opera-type attention-mongers on those shows, the cheesy narration, and even with you, sitting there taking it all in between sarcastic remarks and bites of your microwave dinner. The whole interactive experience comes with those "normal" terms and expressions that we have come to take for granted, and we would only really notice if in fact all those expressions used in reality TV were not there rather than the fact that they are.

But what is said on those shows is actually anything but "normal" once they have been reflected on and been rediscovered, when they have once again been made to stand out as a problem. Once we have become conscious of these expressions that we take for granted, what is said reveals a really strange way of thinking about ourselves and others that seems to be at the root of everything wrong about the way we seem to understand our social world and how people relate to one another. Just summing it all up reveals how incredibly weird our way of thinking about human relationships really is.

Here is an interpretation of all those expressions in a nutshell:

We think of ourselves as autonomous agents who are "closed" to others until we "open" ourselves to them, in which we "have" (possess) feelings "for" another which we can "give" to them or "take" from them as a kind of trade, and we act and react upon each other through the exchange of feelings and affections that we possess as we navigate through the tug of influence "inside" us between our "real" selves and "social" selves, between our "hearts" and our "heads", between the "logical" and the "emotional", all the while expressing concern for how "genuine" this experience is for both parties.

That all sounds like complete hogwash, if not borderline derangement, but actually what is said in these reality programs is the result of centuries of influence from the greatest minds of philosophy whose legacy has survived till this day, so much so that these everyday expressions have become ingrained in each and every one of us, and we often cannot even find the language to describe all of this in any other way. These influences live on unconsciously in the discourse of The Bachelor/Bachelorette in three (admittedly mostly overlaid and overlapping) stages:

1. The Newtonian: Autonomous rational self-contained beings interacting as independent agents through Newtonian laws of action-reaction, give-take, force-counterforce, etc. Eg: "I'm getting that vibe from you that I need to let my guard down and be open to love so we can develop this strong connection that we have."

2. The Cartesian: Segmented and compartmentalized selves based on dichotomies of inside/outside, heart/head, emotions/reason, mind/body, self/other, etc. Eg: "My heart says one thing but my head says another."

3. The Lockean: Rational agents possess "properties" that are sought for. The lack of said properties -- or possession of undesirable ones -- results in a rational choice to either continue a relationship or break it off for the sake of "exploring" the properties of other eligible bachelors or bachelorettes. Eg: "I have feelings for her that are real."

The first thing that stands out is the assumption that we are autonomous self-contained agents in a world populated by other autonomous self-contained agents interacting according to Newtonian laws of give and take, action-counteraction, stimulus-response. We "open ourselves to" another person, and through that metaphoric "gap" we let flow in the love, electricity, feelings, emotions of others, as if these were streams of light or rays of essence. Then with these we form "connections" and "bonds" between two people. Furthermore, whenever you hear of "opening up", you almost always hear the term "vulnerability", as if there is a breach in a fort's defenses, as if something from "without" can now "enter within", kind of like how you would describe an invasion, or an infection. So there is a "before" when defenses are tight, and an "after" when defenses are vulnerable but desired affection, love, feelings, emotions can enter inside, at the risk of these hurting us -- like a virus might, or an invading army.

Conversely, from the "gap" we've opened in our defensive "outer shield", we can also give out those same vibes, electricity, energy, emotions, etc. like a ray gun from one autonomous self-contained being to another autonomous self-contained being! We too can "give" feelings to another and have them become "vulnerable" and "open" to our advances.

What kind of language is that to express how people live with each other in the world? It's basically a mix of military, sports and economics nomenclature. You'll hear expressions like "bringing my A-game" or "bringing my guard down" (sports) or "emotional investment" (economics). Of course, that comes from the format of these shows, which is that of a competition, so naturally people would relate their experiences to sports or war, but we know these expressions aren't just used on TV, and are still only possible because of that elemental belief that we are autonomous, self-contained agents acting freely in a world of other autonomous, self-contained agents all making independent rational choices, or if not, at least taking into consideration our separate inner "emotional" voices.

All of the above cliches point to this absurd, childish and bizarre way of thinking of ourselves and how we live with each other. But they also point to something else, namely the way we think of ourselves as segmented and compartmentalized individuals with "one part of us" that thinks and "another part of us" that feels. That's the Cartesian influence. You'll notice that all these contestants are always negotiating through those dichotomies with every decision and every experience: inside/outside, heart/head, emotional/rational, real me/(fake me?). There is assumed to be a clear-cut delineation between the "soul" and its emotions and feelings and desires, and the "mind", with its rational and logical capacity. That same Newtonian tug between people in the world is also assumed to exist in a Cartesian sense inside each person, so that "logical us" desires one thing whereas "emotional us" desires another. We have of course been used to thinking in these terms since Descartes, for whom the mind/body duality was of the essence in his quest to prove that we really exist (which, for him, was very important and not something to be taken for granted, which itself is very weird, although others might consider that good philosophy).

Then there is the "possession" of certain properties: wit, humor, intelligence, fortitude, family values, loyalty, etc. We apply a Lockean sense of ownership and property to that which is a "part" of our personality, and through the program, the Bachelor/Bachelorette compares what is possessed among the contestants and decides to continue with some and break it off with others.

When we actually put those banal reality TV expressions into some kind of (admittedly simplistic) etymological perspective, we see that they are not just stupid crap. They are actually based on smart crap that has a lot of intelligent lineage behind it, although it's in the hands of those who can't see that lineage and have to use it because that's the only way they know how to express themselves and the only tools at their disposal for doing so, since they are forced to describe things we perhaps would otherwise not feel the need to describe. That's why these shows are fascinating, because people on them are forced to describe the experiences they're going through for the sake of our entertainment and viewing pleasure. They're forced to describe things we never have to, and that of course reveals just how poorly we understand ourselves and how we interact (I just used the term "interact" because it comes naturally, meaning none of us are immune to the way the dominant discourse makes us see things). If we were in their place we probably wouldn't do any better.

But maybe if we had an alternative view we would be able to understand each other and make relationships work a lot better, even on TV. So instead of all this claptrap, why don't we just accept that we are:

1)... inextricably intertwined with others, that what we think we "really" are on the "inside" is molded and formed and always constantly reformed by our interaction with others on the "outside", and that it isn't really something of the "essence", something "incorruptible", something "pure", something "within", like the latter day remnant of that old superstition of the "soul", but is rather fundamentally and singly who we are and how we are and is always indexed to others' opinions of us, and our experiences and interactions (there's that word again) with them. The unity of within and without through the unity of self and other(s). That means...

2)... relationships are no longer about "opening up" or "letting defenses down" or showing "vulnerability", they are a natural extension of human relationships and the sharing of one's feeling and emotions and thoughts and affection is just a natural, ongoing, everyday occurrence merely taken to a quantitatively greater degree between two people who may want to advance their relationship further. That way the pressure people feel from that sense of "vulnerability", "opening up" and other horribly pejorative terms for the sharing of love and affection can finally be done away with, and the whole experience need no longer take on the same metaphoric significance of "military weakness" or "viral infection" that it has now. That will be good because...

3)... we will no longer see feelings and emotions as things belonging to us which we trade and transport through gaps in egotistic defenses, and in fact not as "things" at all, let alone things "given" and "taken", nor "possessed". We will understand that feelings and emotions and moods are actually constantly affected, shaped, reshaped and reformed by the feelings and emotions and moods of others, and that in fact nobody "has" any of these "inside", as if independent of others, springing purely from one's own self, but that all of us live in them, always shaping and reshaping them, and being shaped and reshaped by them, even as we're unaware of it happening. That is a great step forward because then...

4)... that whole compartmentalized self, that "us" comprised of inner/outer, real/social (fake?), head/heart, mind/body, emotion/logic will naturally crumble by the wayside and this schizophrenized, disunited self that is always alienated in the face of itself can finally see that as complex as we are, there are no neat separate realms within or without us, but that moods, emotions, thoughts, memories and all our other attributes are all constantly involved with each other, always intertwined, never independent of each other, always affected by each other, that there is no such thing as a body apart from the mind, nor even a self apart from others, nor a "logical" apart from an "emotional", because both are always suffused with the other, and to every thought there is a mood and to every emotion there is some kind of logic. That means...

5)... all those hang ups that everyone talks about on that show, all those issues, all those expressions are nothing. The Newtonian world of bumping egos lazering feelings from inside them to those willing to let down their defenses to accept those feelings and give them back in return while both try to balance their hearts and their heads to find the right balance of reason and feelings to create a bond that links two people and makes something real out of an inside connection... all of that falls by the wayside. People would stop being exposed to that garbage.

Instead we would have a refreshing new view of who we are, how we are, and what it is to love, and we would spare ourselves and others the waste of time of wading through a world that has been misrepresented by a 2500-year philosophic tradition going back to Plato that seems just plain wrong.

Of course, that would also be the end of The Bachelor/Bachelorette and other shows that merely reduce human relationships to mechanically construed competitive interactions for the sake of commercial profit, but would that be a bad thing?

Chillaxing at the Gentlemen's Club

2011-07-01T04:07:00.000-07:00

Time to kick back, relax, and crack open a beer at my favorite exclusive members only Gentlemen's club

After a hard day's slug through a pile of whatever it is I pay myself to do at my own company that I own, nothing suits me better than a nice cold brewski, particularly one I can enjoy in the comfort of my own reserved table in the VIP section of my favorite exclusive members-only Gentlemen's club for men. That's right, it's time to take off the suit and put on another suit, button my shirt up to the chin, throw on some cufflinks, slip on a tie, and jump in my chauffeur-driven company car to chillax with some of my white conservative upper-class amigos at the Fluffingtonshire White Gentlemen's Club For Men And Not Women.

Aaaah, that beer's going down real smooth, even smoother when I remind myself that 99.999999999% of the human race is excluded from sitting here beside me at this mahogany table with ivory inlays extracted from slaughtered elephants in this very exclusive Gentlemen's Club for Upper Class People with Penises. I'm just going to kick my feet up on this 19th century antique ottoman and enjoy this moment for which I pay enough money in annual fees to feed and clothe thousands of opposites-of-people-like-me's in parts of the world that are outside the confines of this club for people-exactly-like-me.

The menu! Thank you, Frobisher. Let's see... I'll have the roasted baby Sumatran pygmy rhino cutlets with truffle and caviar sauce and some fried Siberian leopard liver on the side. After a hard day of making money from moving money around without producing anything of worth for the human race while shamelessly consuming enough resources to save a small town in Africa from starvation every month, I like nothing better than to eat a nice hot meal that costs almost as much as my watch. Oh and here comes some company! It's Lord Earl Viscount Duke Grovington Probington-Hyphenated-Name of Salisbury the Eighth, cousin of the King of Lichtenstein and fourth in line to the Bulgarian royal throne, don't you know! I say! I say "I say" a lot, so don't be put out when I say "I say", just let me say it, okay?

I'm finished with my dinner Frobisher I can't possibly eat another piece of this Siberian leopard liver. How about another couple of cold ones, two brews for two bros, a nice cold tall boy for the Lord Earl Viscount Duke here. Let's kick back and discuss hedge funds and bridge strategy, shall we? Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa, nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh, quite quite quite, yes-yes-yes, fa-fa-fa, what-what-what, ha ha ha ha! Splendid!

Uh-oh, gotta go now. I have a busy day ahead making profits from short-selling stock of companies I'm betting will fail so I can make a nifty killing which I can then spend on a Ferrari. Another day, another tons of dollars! I'm so happy to belong to a group of peers who have been brought up to believe deep down that they are better than everybody else in the world. I need my daily zees so I can sleep the sleep of sociopaths before heading back out into a society that values psychotic callousness and indifference to the misery of fellow humans.

Looking forward to chillaxing with another cerveza tomorrow, bra!

Reasons why not to drink and write, Exhibit A

2011-07-01T02:10:00.000-07:00

<--- Kris Kristofferson enjoys a nice hot cup of coffee because it makes him better than you

My girlfriend bet me I couldn't write something good after 12 shots of Jim Beam, so this masterpiece is intended to wipe that smug face off her head - although, as you can tell by the title above, she sort of wins. Anyway, it's called... drumroll (it's not called "drumroll", but imagine a drumroll going trrrrrrrr psss after "it's called", psss being the sound of the cymbal):

Kris Kristofferson is a Coffeestocrat from Kentucky!

So you may not know this, but Kris Kristofferson is a coffeeholic. In case you're wondering what that is, that's like an alcoholic but for coffee. Me, I'm like a coffeeholic but for both alcohol and coffee, which would make me an alcoholandcoffeeholic. See what I did there? I am a wordsmith. But this isn't about me, it's about Kris Kristofferson (I have Kris Kristofferson on copy/paste mode now so don't worry if I seem to be wasting a lot more time typing Kris Kristofferson than other words, because I can now punch out four Kris Kristofferson's in a row with just one finger on ctrl and the other tapping the v key four times, look: Kris Kristofferson Kris Kristofferson Kris Kristofferson v... I let go a little early there, it should've been v, it should've been Kris Kristofferson). However, Kris Kristofferson's not just a coffeeholic, he's also a COFFEE ELITIST WITH ALL CAPS. That makes him a “coffeestocrat” (from coffee + st + ocrat). This means that Kris Kristofferson believes that those with good taste in coffee are superior to everybody else, including immigrants, the working classes and foreigners, provided they don't drink good coffee. There, I said it. Actually, I'm not sure he believes that, and I don't even really know if Kris Kristofferson even drinks coffee, although bets are he does because it's a delicious hot beverage and he's American. But I picked Kris Kristofferson anyway because his name goes well with coffeestocracy what with all the hard c's and effy f's they share, so I chose this literary tome to be about him instead of, say, Leonard Cohen or Pamela Anderson. That's probably the first time those two names have been used in the same sentence by the way (it is, I just Googled it in that tiny space between the y and the left parenthesis). Also, the first time those two names and Kris Kristofferson's name have all been in the same paragraph is probably this paragraph (I'm not Googling that). Kris Kristofferson's name by the way, in case you were wondering, is "Kris Kristofferson".

What is a coffeestocrat? It's like being racist or classist, but for coffee, so it's like being hyperactively detached and talkatively aloof, while at the same time being urinarily haughty. For one, a coffeestocrat doesn't drink any of those cheap 2-in-1's or 3-in-1's that have way too little coffee and way too much creamy sugary chemically powder that looks like dishwater in a cup. They are SUPERIOR TO THat. (that‘s my girlfriend being funny with the shift key, but the joke’s on her because I probably would‘ve emphasized the SUPERIOR TOTH anywAY) So no instant coffee for blue blooded coffee royalty like Kris Kristofferson. And none of those cappulattechinos or chaisoylattecheatohs or chocolocococopocos either. Just good black coffee for Kris Kristofferson. After all, coffeestocrats like Kris Kristofferson are not just sophistocrats (that's a real made up word despite the squiggly red line I saw under it when this thing started off in a Word document), but also minimal sophistocrats, which makes them more like coffeesophistominimocrats. But hey, Kris Kristofferson wouldn't be averse to buying his super fancy coffee from a Starbucks or a Peet's or something either, even though they're chain stores and one of them uses armless child slaves in the third world to pick their coffee beans for them with their teeth (I'm not hinting which one, let's just say it rhymes with Starbucks). Would Kris Kristofferson prefer an independent ma and pa coffee store that uses homegrown water? Sure. Would he prefer to be a locacoffeevore who only drank locally grown coffee, thus giving us the opportunity to mix locavore and coffee into a catchy new newword, which could be an English neologism for neologism? You bet. Could newword lose one of those w's? I don't see why not. Neword sounds good, although now it sounds kind of directional, like "hey, let's go toward the new". Which I guess we all are always going toward, in an ontological sense... but for all Kris Kristofferson's coffeesophistominimacratnessityism, he is no snob. No sir. He's not a coffeesophistosnobistocrat. Because a true coffeestocrat is a democrat on the outside (hence his amenability to voting for Peets or Starbucks if they were to run for some kind of office on the over-hyphenated-coffee-with-armless-child-slaves ticket) but an aristocrat on the inside (which is why he drops his monocle metaphorically and exclaims inaudible harrumphs at the mere suggestion of Nescafe, which is Swiss for "Nescafe").

So let's hear it for Leonard Cohen or Pamela Anderson! (oh no, I last copied "Leonard Cohen or Pamela Anderson" to paste it in the Google bar, but what I meant was "Let's hear it for Kris Kristofferson!").

So Let's hear it for Kris Kristofferson!").

Speaking of Google, here's something interesting: if you replace one of the o's in Google with g, it spells Ggogle, which is an anagram for lgooeg. Words are fascinating!

Also, he's not from Kentucky.

More things we can do without

2011-01-26T01:13:00.000-08:00

Left: Awww, how cute! The dick who hates the poor and starts wars is all lovey dovey with the creep who molests little girls!

This is part three of the "Things we should stop putting up with" series, in which a snotty opinionated shithead (me) divulges all the things that make his head boil and mouth foam to errant wandering internet surfer who by some incredibly improbable concatenation of wrong turns and missteps has wandered onto this desolate site (you). Parts one and two are back here and here respectively. So, yap yap yap, here's another obnoxious list of things I think we could probably do without... but this time I'm not numbering them because after I number them I always change my mind about which order I want them in so then I have to redo all the numbers when I do that and it's just a big pain in the... anyway, here's the list:

Puerto Rican pride. The first rule to being proud of your country is that it should at least be INDEPENDENT. Otherwise all you have to be proud of is Ricky Martin, big butts and fried chicken.

Free Willy 4. Killer Whales (yes KILLER whales, hello?) kill baby grey whales. They gang up and drive the baby whale from its mother, then they drown the baby whale by jumping on it repeatedly before eating its tongue without even bothering with the rest of the carcass. They're murderous and wasteful. When you keep freeing Willy you're actually killing baby grey whales. Also, I haven't seen any of the movies or anything, but if you have to free Willy four times maybe the motherfucker doesn't really want to be free?

Silvio Berlusconi. I don't understand. How could a nation that pretty much invented everything, gave us the Renaissance, and produced men like da Vinci, Michelangelo and Del Piero end up being ruled by a sleazy megalomaniacal pedophiliac cruise singer? Oh wait, they also produced Benito Mussolini, didn't they? Ok, never mind.

3D TV. WHOA! Wait just a minute! You mean to tell me the car looks like it's outside of the screen!? Put me on the installment plan for that nauseating three thousand dollar gimmick!

"If I told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?" If I told you to tiptoe around a straw man on a slippery slope with a red herring shoved into a non sequitur tautology, would you stop changing the subject?

Watching news rather than reading it. Reading is so hard. But when I see a screen and someone reads me the news to me I can understand the news more better because their are pictures and I just have to listen to it and look at it to now whats happening in the world.

BBC. What happened to all the documentaries and comedy? Why am I always watching people decorate a house?

Banning websites. Anybody can get into any website anyway through proxies or fooling around with secret numbers in weird parts of their computer, so why not spare your country the embarrassment of looking like such a shitty outdated third-world joke to the rest of the civilized world and chill the fuck out?

Not being able to maintain a logical thread. Wait a minute, before going to point B don't forget point A, because otherwise... oh no, too late, you're rambling nonsensically at point WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING?

Fining people for not wearing helmets. It's ironic that you're being punished for not protecting something that can't even figure out for itself that it should be protected.

Magicians. Bravo. You hide people in secret compartments and dress like a douche.

Charging people for luggage carts at airports. Hey, while you're making a buck off of my unfortunate need for help in carrying all this luggage, maybe, on top of the exorbitant airport tax I already have to pay for your sleek new designer plane station, you could also charge me a little extra for using the escalators, walking on your floor, and using up such a sizable chunk of the oxygen in your airport? I love to travel with a big bag of coins in my pocket anyway, just in case.

Girls puckering their lips for photos. The only thing all those kissy poses say is that you think you're really sexy. If you really want to be sexy then a simple natural bright-eyed smile is all you need to give guys wood.

The Kardashians. In case you've never seen the Kardashians, here it is in a nutshell: "Oh my God you guys, I have so much going on in my life right now, this is a really crazy time for me you guys, so let's go and shop for panties and then bicker and then shop some more and then, like, go to Miami and tell each other to, like, back off, because, like, you're being a total psycho and you're not my mother... oh wait, you are my mother, whateverrr, you're being super controlling, so just leave me alone! Oh no, I'm lonely now, come back you guys! Oh my God, I'm gonna cry you guys, I love you guys! Euuuw I, like, totally hate you guys! You're being such a bitch! You're such a BLEEEP bitch! I love you again, you're like family you guys! Listen to me drone on and on about how selfish everyone is except me! Hey you guys, be honest, does my big butt make my big butt look big? Let's go put on a ton of mascara and wear giant sunglasses! Is that like a paradox or something you guys? Whatever, words are for nerds. Oh my God you guys I just realized, like, how come Robert's name doesn't begin with a K, like Kris and Kim and Kourtney and Khloe and Kendall and Kylie? Shouldn't he be, like, I don't know, Kobert? Oh right, only the girls start with K, probably because, like, mom's name starts with K... oh and Kardashian starts with a K too! Yay! Oh my God you guys, I just realized we have no talent and we don't do anything. That makes me depressed you guys. Let's go shopping again!"

Yes yes, I know, I watch the Kardashians and the joke's on me.

Republicans. I don't think we should be too hard on Republicans. I mean, which one of us hasn't sucked Satan's cock at some point in our lives, right?

Astrologers. Oh yeah, in 1981 Alpha Centauri and the PHR7001 constellation were aligned with Saturn above the 48th gradient of the 38th parallel at a longitude of 52-degrees at 6:52 am when you were coming out of your mother's womb, which is why you have an easy-going personality and like the color blue. That makes sense.

People who complain about how crowded it is. Hey dumbass, guess who's also in this crowd that you're complaining about? I'll give you a hint, it starts with a You.

Teen vampires and wizards. I know we all fantasized about having extraordinary qualities that made us special and unique when we were geeky acne-riddled teenage virgins hungry for girls' attention, but isn't our interest in immortal bloodsuckers and broom-riding wand-wielders a little rich? Whatever happened to all the well-adjusted teen geeks of yore who were into muscular animal-themed superheroes who had secret identities and wore capes and masks and body-hugging one-piece suits? Why did all those clean wholesome latently homosexual white-bread football-captain-type heroes suddenly degenerate into super goths and magic nerds? When did things start getting weird-er?

Being offended. Boo-fucking-hoo. You're offended.

Colonel Qaddafi. It's amazing what can be done in the Third World. Usually the only person you'd expect to get away with wearing funny costumes, sleeping in tents, having female bodyguards, blowing up planes and speaking mad ravings of unintelligible gibberish, would be a retired delusional circus manager with a coke problem who now runs a sleazy strip club and owns a bazooka. But in the Third World, that guy becomes the leader of a whole country! And not just as a wacky "what would happen if?" kind of experiment either, because he gets to be the leader FOREVER, and he even gets to call his country whatever he wants, like say "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya"! Dreams might just come true in America (<-sarcasm), but you're in real trouble when deranged insanity can become the law in the Third World.

Being against swear words. If it weren't for swear words, you'd have to listen to stuff like this: "Gee shucks, just wait one cotton-pickin' minute mister, those words are offensive to my ears, gosh darn it! You better clean up that potty mouth or by golly I'm going to shove this soap so far down your throat you're going to be blowing little brown bubbles out your chocolate starfish, y'hear?" Which is more disturbing, that or "fuck off"?

Identifying with sports teams. Why don't you also just go for the color red? You have about as much input into the success of the color red as you do your whateverball team, so why don't you just pick red and be proud of it. You could pump your fists and whoop every time you pass a fire hydrant.

Frappa-cappu-mochachinos. Black coffee is coffee. Everything else is liquid candy.

Marrying royalty. Sure, you're marrying a prince and getting a cool title, but all you're really doing is signing up for a lifetime of shaking hands, smiling at cameras, cutting ribbons and acting friendly to crowds of people you would never ever associate with otherwise.

Rubberneckers. Hey, what happened? What's going on? What am I looking at here? Why am I staring at this? How did I suddenly find myself in a confused crowd of blank-eyed bystanders looking quizzically at each other trying to figure out if anybody knows why we're all standing here looking quizzically at each other in a confused crowd of blank-eyed bystanders?

Reality TV. Reality TV is not real. Real Reality TV is what you would get if a camera could show you You watching Reality TV in your living room as you play with your toes and squeak out farts before passing out on your couch with Cheetos sprinkled all over your sweater. That's some nasty hard-hitting reality right there. No, what you're watching as "Reality TV" is actually the nadir of human civilization at the End of Days when the Sixth Seal tears open and Satan's hordes pour forth to cover the earth in cascading torrents of demonic smegma. So there's a slight difference.

Religious people telling you what's good for you. You're telling me drinking is bad? You believe in angels and prophets! What the fuck do you know!?

People who can't use an ATM in under a minute. Oh my God, there are so many buttons and so many options! I must choose very carefully, as the sequence in which I press these buttons will determine whether I can obtain the magic papers inside the machine that I can exchange for necessary goods and services in the real world! I must read everything twice, and maybe even start over when I lose concentration halfway down the list of what denominations I would like my money in and how big an amount I need it to be! There's a long line of people behind me now huffing and sighing and shifting noisily and looking at their watches... uh, where was I? Oh yeah, the pin code, I must first enter the pin code... Why isn't it responding? Oh, it's not a touchscreen... What was with Mark's pissy comment on Facebook this morning anyway? Boy, I really should get a haircut...wait what was I doing again? Oh yeah, the ATM. I'm at the ATM. Oh wait, wrong pin, that's the one I use for my bicycle lock! God, I'm such a moronic shitferbrains who doesn't deserve to have any money anyway! Isn't that ironic?

(That whole passage should be read in the voice of Ed Grimley, with an "I must say" added at the end of every two sentences)

Guys who are into fashion models. Wait, so let me get this straight: your idea of an ideal woman is a cold anorexic chain-smoking prepubescent with no breasts, no ass, no hips, and no curves? Well then you're in luck, because even though you will most likely never ever sleep with a fashion model, you could probably just make do by having sex with a clothes rack.

Saying "and I" instead of "and me". Mary came to talk to John and I. She told I that she would rather not hang out with I because I don't even know what an objective pronoun is. Sometimes she really infuriates I!

Being famous. Whoop-dee-doo, everybody knows who you are. Clap clappity clap.

People who don't know how to step aside and give way. You are walking side by side by side by side. You are blocking the entire sidewalk. You are walking at a slow pace and chitchatting. You realize other people are also using the sidewalk, and yet you are startled and turn to look when they excuse themselves and say they would like to pass. How does this happen? Why do you live in a big invisible bubble of self-entitlement?

Pluto. That's right, you heard us: FUCK OFF, YOU'RE NOT A PLANET!

Plato. Um, you're not a planet either... so I guess you can fuck off too.

Writing workshops. Are you more interested in becoming a writer than you are in writing? Well now you too can get all the connections and learn all the tricks to putting out inane drivel to become a bestselling author! Drown out any originality you may have had by conforming to styles and themes of writing that literary agents and publishers think will sell the most! Keep in mind what readers want, and write accordingly! Utilize our ten step guides to plot creation and character development! Learn from our trained academics, because they're professors! Are you a professor? Didn't think so. Apply now!

Empty bottles in drinks cabinets. Ok we get it, you once owned a fancy bottle of whisky, but I need a drink now and I thought I was getting a drink because the label on the bottle pretty much says "this is a drink", but instead I'm getting air. And frustration. Lot's of frustration. Why is this bottle still here?

Not being able to heed a traffic signal. Why are you walking across and holding up traffic when it says DON'T WALK? If you were in such a hurry that you couldn't spare 20 seconds of not walking, then you wouldn't be walking in the first place, because you'd be in a car swearing at some asshole like you who couldn't stop walking for 20 seconds.

The chicken or the egg? Enough with the chicken. The egg obviously came first, because the origin of new species is a result of natural selection whereby certain mutations in the DNA of a particular species are passed on to an offspring by chromosomally combining in a new egg. That egg will contain the first creature that will be born a "chicken", viz. with more chicken-like genetic characteristics than the genetic characteristics of whatever pre-chicken species it evolved from, which would be, um... a T-Rex? So anyway, in short, the egg wins.

Commercials. Hey look at me, I'm an actor acting like I like this product so you should too because we assume you're probably too dumb to form an opinion of your own and will probably just do what some actor tells you to do, so go buy this thing you will never need at all, ever!

Moral vegetarians. Hey Mister "I Don't Eat Anything With A Face", what's up with your bias against aprosopic organisms? What makes you think ripping plants out of the ground while they're still alive and grinding them to death with your teeth isn't just as barbaric as eating an animal? Every time you gnash a plant to death, you're killing one more organism that provides us with oxygen and cleans up the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Do you want to suffocate us all and let the world become one big poisonous bubble? It's time you stopped eating anything organic whatsoever and starved to death for the good of our planet. It's the only morally sensible thing to do.

Super genius movie heroes. Why does every Hollywood film these days have some genius main character? It's either some genius secret agent, or genius spy, or genius soldier, or genius stockbroker, or genius lawyer, or genius athlete, genius this, genius that. Why don't we make more realistic films about the stupid spies who couldn't figure out there weren't really any WMDs in Iraq, or the dimwit secret agents who still haven't been able to locate Osama bin Laden, or the birdbrains going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the nincompoop bankers and brokers who led to the 2008 economic meltdown, or the nitwits who couldn't put OJ Simpson behind bars, or the dum dum golfer who screwed up his marriage and career by banging a few too many cocktail waitresses? Why not be a little more realistic?

Over-confidence. It's good to be confident, but these days everybody thinks they're going to conquer the world and beat everyone at everything and become a millionaire and yaps on and on about it. Why not a little humility and realism? Why not accept that most of us are going to lead sad and pointless little lives before dying of cancer? That should at least help us regain some perspective.

Punk. Despite protestations to the contrary from punk music fans, when even people in advertising agencies and law firms are into punk music these days, that means punk is in fact dead. Well dead.

Clinking glasses with every toast. Why do we have to maneuver around everybody's hands and arms to touch glasses and look in every person's eyes and smile every time we toast, as if we're freemasons or Georgian mafia or something? Why don't we just raise our glasses in the air, say cheers, and drink already?

People who cover their ears when ambulances pass. Oh I'm sorry, should they be a little more quiet on their way to saving people's lives? Would that be easier on your delicate little ear drums?

Birthday presents. Oh hey, here's something you don't need but which you're going to have to pretend to like anyway, and be grateful for, and have to reciprocate in the future! Isn't this fun? Happy birthday!

New Year's resolutions. Dear Me, I don't even really know why the new year begins on January first and not May first or April first or something, but I think it would be a good random point in time to change myself for the better, become healthier, be more responsible, and put an end to self-destructive habits... at least until December 31, which would be a good random point in time to get wasted and do a ton of blow.

We need zombies!

2011-01-15T11:26:00.000-08:00

Left: When there are zombies, we're all going to be like this guy.

The living dead are our only hope for salvation. Here's why.

Ok, I know, you're thinking how could it be good for humanity that one morning we wake up to find hordes of semi-decomposed corpses roaming the streets trying to eat our entrails and suck our brains out of our skulls to satisfy some ungodly undead hunger for tasty fresh us? But hear me out, because this could be a very good thing. We just have to think positive about this.

First up, our fat, privileged, insular, lazy, useless lives spent in offices doing bullshit, or at school getting a ton of pointless education, or at home on a couch watching stupid TV, or masturbating to a trillion hours of porn on the internet, or worrying about what we're going to do with our lives, or wondering if we can make our next mortgage payment, all of that shit will be over when the dead come crawling out of their graves to walk the earth. Suddenly our purpose in life will be clear: basically, to not be killed by zombies. So whatever matching set of tea cloths you were learning to make from old curtains courtesy of Martha Stewart, or whatever money you were saving to buy a motorbike to add a little zest to your life, or whatever hairstyle you were hoping on going for at the salon to impress hubby with, drop those plans. Once there are zombies, you have only one thing you can do: ditch all the useless garbage you own, grab your weapons, shave your hair, and become a lean mean motherfucker who must now kill or be killed to survive. We're all going to be Woody Harrelsons in cut off jackets mowing down ghouls with M249s as we make cool sarcastic remarks and drive off in Hummers.

Just think of how much better zombies will make us have to be. The first to die off will be the weak and fat, because they will get woozy just running up and down stairs or even making it to the safety of the forests in time to escape the zombies. If you can't deal with stairs or run a kilometer without having a heart attack, then you sure as fuck can't expect to successfully run away from zombies, so you're done. Of course I guess it also depends on the zombies. If you have "Night of the Living Dead" type zombies that just sort of moan a lot and stumble along with a vacant stare going right-foot left-foot right-foot left-foot at 1 km/h, you have a much better shot at survival. Then again, once those guys corner you in an abandoned barn and get a zombie huddle going, they're pretty deadly. But if you're talking about the modern kinds of zombies that can sprint after you snapping their teeth and frothing at the mouth, then the fat and weak don't stand a chance. Okay, those modern zombies you see in films like "28 Days Later" or "I am Legend" are technically not zombies but people infected by a hideous virus or something, but they never seem to get better and have lost their humanity and want to eat other people, so for all intents and purposes we may as well consider them zombies.

Now once all those redundant DNA chunks are dangling from zombies' teeth, the ones left over will be suddenly freed of all civilized concerns, or whatever our stupid problems are supposed to be these days. All our whining and bitching about "postmodern alienation", and "trying to find a healthy balance between doing something I'm passionate about and earning money", and being dyslexic, and feeling bored and listless and depressed all the time, and a whole ton of other so-called problems, all of that is gone. You have only one real problem now that the zombies are around: the zombies. You have to learn how to stay alive again. You have to learn how to kill the undead. You have to learn how to come up trumps in a merciless fight for limited resources once society breaks down. In short, you have to become Mad Max. And guess who doesn't give a shit about dyslexic Gen-Y'ers on anti-depressants looking for validation in a postmodern world? Mad Max. In fact, if Mad Max ever had to deal with zombies on top of all those post-apocalyptic psycho road gangs that killed his wife and baby, he'd give even less of a shit.

And so now that you're a lean mean killing machine (and consequently much happier than when you were a bored slovenly semi-employed half-alive bill-paying automaton), your life has regained a clear and clean purpose that it didn't have since third grade, which is probably the last time you wanted to be Mad Max. No more "Gee, what am I going to do with my life?" or "Uh, it's so hard sometimes, how do I find something I love doing and earn money doing it so I can have a rewarding, satisfying life and..." blah blah blah, whiny cry-baby shit. You now have a purpose again: SURVIVE AND KILL ZOMBIES! That's it, that's all you have to worry about. Enjoy needing muscles again!

Now that you've regained those hunter/killer instincts, now that you're sharp, lean, focused, agile, now that you can feel the adrenalin pumping through your body again, you get to do what civilized society has deprived you of all your life, but which is so instinctively ingrained in you as to just need the slightest opportunity to come back out into the open: namely, your need to kill. But the beauty about having zombies around is that they're already dead, so technically you're not really killing them, you're just neutralizing them! That means, you get to go on a slaughtering bloodthirsty rampage of your own without killing anything, and it's all for the undoubted good of all humans, regardless of race, creed or nationality! Merry Christmas! Happy Birthday! What could be better? There is no moral ambiguity about this. Ask a million people and a million people will say "Yes, I support the bloody wholesale massacre of zombies". Sarah Palin can't hunt moose without being labeled a dipshit, even if it's for food (she is a dipshit, but not so much because she hunts moose). A vegetarian catches you eating meat and you get a lecture. Ok, you can get away with a lot of slaughtering in many parts of the world, but it's never acceptable (unless you're the ones doing the slaughtering). States are the only legal criminal entities that are allowed to conduct legitimate mass slaughter in the form of war, but then you have to join a state and become brainwashed with ideals that put the state above people and then be expected to go out and kill other people for those ideals in the interests of the state, all of which is, of course, EVIL. Besides, as soon as you consider what you're killing for, you realize "wait a minute, I'M KILLING OTHER PEOPLE!" But when there are zombies, nobody will give a shit anymore, because everyone will want to kill zombies instead of each other! Vegetarians, Republicans, Democrats, Americans, Indians, Chinese, Africans, street gangs, the mafia, everyone will join in on the zombie holocaust with much merriness and jollity! Even Christians and Buddhists will have a hard time trying not to condone the killing of zombies. Muslims will finally find some kind of life form worse than Israelis or Americans: ZOMBIES! Skinheads will probably no longer think that dark people are their biggest enemy, because their biggest enemy will in fact be ZOMBIES! Seriously, the only chance we have of the Taliban and al Qaeda and Palestinians and America and Israel and White supremacists and everybody else in the world all working together against a common enemy is if that enemy is ZOMBIES! Or killer aliens... but then what are the chances killer aliens will ever land on our planet, right?

But so why do I assume society will break down? Come on, there are zombies running around! The dead rise out of their graves and populate the streets and fields. Hello? How could a civilized society function? What are you going to do, eat breakfast, get in your car, go to work, buy some groceries on the way home, watch TV, call it a night, put on your pyjamas and go to bed, all the while hoping that hordes of man-eating zombies don't devour you and your loved ones somewhere along the way? Fuck that! More likely you're stocking up on canned food, whetting a hunting knife, sawing off the barrel of your shotgun and doing chin ups to Rammstein, generally feeling like a Fuck-Off One-Man God of Death Thunder Vengeance! Or Mad Max, whichever.

And once society's broken down, you get that other bonus of a world overrun by zombies: no more worrying about money! You now have to take food, and take shelter, and take fuel through sheer cunning, force, power and stealth, not by some bovine exchange of time and labor in return for tokens to acquire necessities with. Money's gone. And that means... abandoned supermarkets! Aisles and aisles of free food just laying around for you to walk right in and shove in bags and boxes that you can then throw in the back of the SUV you also just took off the street, and which will be your home/transport/safeplace/weapon for the rest of your struggle against the forces of undead evil. Yes, it's a looter's paradise, but once again, it's looting for a good cause. You can be excused for just taking shit without paying for it, because, well... ZOMBIES!

Anyway, to sum up, a future world with zombies would give us everything we ever dreamt of: we would be fit, lean, strong, cool (to kill and/or run away from zombies); we would all have a purpose in life that is unambiguously and universally recognized as being a just and righteous cause (fighting and killing zombies); we wouldn't have to worry about stupid shit anymore like money or depression or boredom (there's freakin' ZOMBIES running around!); we would once again be real, well-rounded humans the way we used to be, building shelter, hunting food, killing enemies, few if any possessions beyond that which is necessary for survival (Z-O-M-B-I-E-S); we would do away with nationality and racism once and for all (Gee, should I hate people who are different than me, or should I focus my hatred on, say, MAN-EATING ZOMBIES?!).

But of course the best part is the sex. No more dates, no more presents, no more endless writing and talking and reading about what he likes and what she likes and wondering if we're good enough, hot enough, pretty enough, or attractive enough. In a world with zombies, where any day could be your last, and where the human race must survive, all that's left to do when man meets woman is to fuck. That's it. In a world overrun by zombies, a living man and a living woman are attractive to each other just by virtue of the fact that they have a pulse, end of story. The fact that they are standing there looking at each other is all the reason needed to bang. Case closed. Thank you for that zombies!

Facebook applications that never made it

2011-01-05T03:20:00.000-08:00

Left: Deliberately undervalue your tax-paying peasants' goods to sell them for maximum profit on Tax FarmVille!

I recently found a list of disturbing Facebook applications that got axed before they ever made it on to the site. Here are twenty that were especially eye-catching:

1. Tax FarmVille
Bleed your peasants dry so you can collect enough funds to contribute to your despotic ruler's war chest! Flog your serfs when your crop withers, or join with other tax farmers to put down uprisings with the help of brutal mercenaries! Hours of entertainment!

2. My Drug Cabinet
Your own virtual drug cabinet that can only be populated by friends sending you drugs! Keep a careful balance between uppers and downers, and don't mix barbiturates, benzodiazepines and opiates, otherwise you could go into a virtual catatonic death spiral! Addictive!

3. Beer Goggles
Buy virtual beer goggles for your friends so they think you're semi-attractive! Add extra blurriness if you're pretty much unfuckable! You'll be surprised by the results!

4. Tophet Golf
In this new game by Zynga, you get to see how many Canaanite children you can club into the burning fire of Gehenna in the Valley of Hinnom as human sacrifice for Moloch! Wicked!

5. Unhappy Aquarium
Find out why your fish are floating belly-up in a filthy tank full of their own feces! Does the filter work? Have you overfed them? Who cares!

6. Which Lawn Bowling Celebrity Are You?
Do you have the determination of Liz McAllistair, the technique of Nor Iyani Azmi, or the sheer competitiveness of Kelsey Cottrell? Whose white jack can you curve a finger peg on? Download it!

7. Virtually Realistic Poker
This gives you the full experience of being a virtual gambler! Play Texas Hold'em with virtual money against other Facebook users, then when you lose all your virtual savings you can ask for virtual loans from your friends to support your virtual gambling problem, before telling them that you don't have a gambling problem and that they should back off because they don't know what it's like to lose everything and stand on the edge of a virtual precipice as you watch your life sink away into a giant black hole of misery and despair! Ante up!

8. Friend Onanizer
Sort photos of friends into groups according to which ones you like to whack off to the most! "Just a minute!!"

7. Daily Horoscope*
Pretend that random scientifically unsubstantiated causal relations between stellar constellations and overly generalized character traits mean something!
* This application seems somehow to have slipped through and made it onto Facebook.

8. Facebook Photoshop
Fabricate photos of you in places you've never been so you can fool your friends into thinking your life is way better than it really is! Over 400 backgrounds to choose from, including pyramids, temples, skyscrapers, lakes, mountains, the Moon, tigers and Daniel Day Lewis!

9. Betterness Ranking
Compare your photos, interests, education, places you've been and number of Google results for your name so you can rank your friends according to which of them you're better than and which of them are better than you! Rise up the rankings every time you get a new degree, visit a great place, or take up a cool pursuit! But be careful, because you can drop down the rankings too if you lose your job, get fat, turn 40, succumb to alcoholism, or fuck up yet another relationship because of unresolved emotional issues with your father! Oops!

10. Illiterate Me!
This application converts your English into netspeak gibberish that only 13 year-olds can understand! WTF r u w8ing 4?

11. Real Causes
Don't just say you support a cause and tack a lame name onto a list, send money instead! If you feel so strongly about something, then make a little donation, Mr. I Care Sooo Much. Go on, send some money, you insincere cheapskate. Or are you not really against AIDS?

12. What Human Genitalia Do You Most Resemble?
Take our quick quiz to see if you're a total dick, a complete asshole, a stupid nutsack, or a fucking cunt! Find out!

13. Profoundly Incomprehensible Status Update Generator
Now you can automatically post ambiguous status updates with no frames of reference for anyone but you! Make your friends have to ask you what you mean when your status update reads "finally!" or "that's just the way it goes" or "consciousness is a form of radioactivity"! Leave them in awe of the inscrutable depths of your creative and independent mind! Wow!

14. Least Popular
Find out which of your friends are the least popular so you can gang up on them with your other friends and make their lives a living hell! Get the Finger Pointer tool to point and laugh at the most pathetic of them all! Ha ha!

15. Remoticons
Use this application to emotionally distance yourself from your friends and demonstrate your indifference to all their lame posts! See that blank stare? That's me not giving a shit!

16. Death RanchVille
Buy specialized torture implements with the money you earn selling horsemeat you've passed off as beef at the local market, or receive extra points for mutilating a cow to get an erection! Turn off the "Conscience" function to increase psychopathic powers! Get it now!

17. Peppy Pal Lobotomizer
Find your peppiest perkiest pals and perform a virtual lobotomy on them that eliminates every third word in their posts and converts the terms "blessed", "wonderful" and "RIGHT ON!" into "deranged", "average" and "whoop-dee-fucking-doo" respectively!

18. Globalize Me!
Customize your account to make yourself look like an international citizen and a complete wanker! This app automatically adds photos of you doing yoga and riding a horse, signs you up to groups supporting whales and whoever's against Ahmadinejad, and even embeds background tunes onto your home page featuring mandolin music overlaid with African tribal chants! In your About Me section you will refer to yourself as a Global Nomad without even a hint of sarcasm! Go for it!

19. Cool Disorder Distorter
Click the cool disorder you would like to have and your posts will automatically be distorted to suit that disorder! You can choose from A.D.D., Dyslexia, Asperger's Syndrome and many other disorders that will imply that you're special, gifted, or a genius! It even comes with an automatic disclaimer at the end of every post that reads "(Sorry, I have [insert cool disorder here]!)" so you can seem like you're embarrassed about having the disorder, although apparently not embarrassed enough to prevent you from telling everyone on Facebook that you have it! Swete!

20. Get A Life
This application enables you to get a life by simply clicking the Logout button! No download required! Try it!

"Wear Sunscreen" - The First Draft

2011-01-01T07:21:00.000-08:00

Left: Mary Schmich, post-treatment

Back in 1997, the world was enamored by a graduation speech delivered at MIT by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich. The speech was then published as an article titled "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young" in the Chicago Tribune. It went on to become one of the most emailed and quoted articles on the internet in the last ten years, and was even made into a song called "Wear Sunscreen" by Baz Luhrmann.

Nearly 15 years have passed, and while many are familiar with the now famous "Wear Sunscreen" speech, few people realize that prior to having written that version of the speech -- and around the time she was going through a particularly difficult divorce -- Mary Schmich was suffering from a severe bout of depression with symptoms that included acute paranoia and -- from what we gather -- agoraphobia. When the earliest draft of her speech surfaced recently among the pages of a diary that was discovered by a rummaging hobo in a discarded shoebox with Schmich's name on it along with miscellaneous objects that included a voodoo doll, crucifix (possibly upside down, we can't be sure), seven tarot cards, a ouija board (missing the letter "R"), and a necklace made from perforated Prozac pills with the word "pain" etched in tiny letters on every pill, the world was confronted with a very different version of those feel-good words of advice that have been forwarded from inbox to inbox by peppy dorks from all over the globe.

Below is the original (and somewhat darker) version of this celebrated modern ode to youth:

"Inside every hollow shell of a human being lurks a spiteful harpy dying to smite the cold heartless world with bloodied talons of vengeance; some world-weary hag eager to binge on ice-cream, tequila and morphine capsules while young people live out their beautiful lives, Rollerblading with a capital R. Most of us, alas, will never be loved or recognized for who we really are because you never really appreciated me father, never, but there's no reason we can't entertain ourselves by composing a Guide To Life For Precious Young People With the World Handed To Them On A Silver Plate And Everything To Still Live For.

I encourage anyone over 26 not currently undergoing electroshock treatment to try this, and thank you for acting like you're not freaked out by my bandaged wrists. Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97:

Don't go out in the sun.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, staying out of sunlight would be it. The long-term benefits of staying the fuck away from direct exposure to a giant flaming hydrogen-fueled astroball of nuclear fusion that force-feeds barbecued melanomas to your face has been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable - or frightening - than my own futile and pointless existence. I will dispense this advice now, because when I speak, the voices in my head... mercifully... don't.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. By "power" and "beauty" I actually mean "anxiety" and "despair". So yeah, go ahead and enjoy that. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until you realize you never actually had any power and beauty... although you did have halitosis. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how terrible your clothes were, how many zits you had on your disproportioned mug, and how clumsy and awkward you really looked with your big potato nose and hideous hairdo.

You are not as fat as you imagine, but you're definitely as fat as other people think you are.

Don't worry about the future... unless you're already in your mid-20s, in which case you should definitely start worrying about the future, especially the likelihood that if you don't get your shit together right now you will never amount to anything in life and most likely die poor and alone. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind until it's too late, like that tumor in your head that will eventually blind you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares children.

Fret.

Don't be reckless with other people's hearts if you're not even going to get any sex out of it. If people are reckless with yours then make sure you still at least get some sex out of it.

Bicker.

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're a winner, sometimes you're a loser. The trick is to stop being such a loser. The race is long and, in the end, it's mostly between you and your former classmates whose success makes you depressed about what a loser you are.

Forget compliments, because that's what you'll receive from opportunistic flatterers who want to pamper your vanity in return for annoying favors. Remember insults, because you have no choice, since they will HAUNT YOU FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

Keep your old love letters. Also keep your old bank statements until the divorce comes through in case you need to prove what a life-draining leech your spouse was and how they don't deserve any alimony.

Drink.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life, or about how disappointed your parents are because of your ungrateful egotism and laziness. The most indecisive people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most clinically-depressed suicidal 40-year-olds I know still don't.

Get plenty of calcium along with all the other essential minerals and vitamins, without which you'll die. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone. That's not a threat, it's just a friendly warning about what might accidentally happen to you if you were to claim custody of the kids, Richard.

Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll rub vaseline around the rim of your anus with your pinky finger before inserting a butt plug while masturbating in the toilet when your ex-wife's not home Richard, you sick pervert, maybe you won't. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. In fact, try and avoid talking to yourself in public altogether because I think it's starting to creep everybody out.

Enjoy your body, but don't enjoy it too much because then you'll go blind, and probably even start considering whether at some point you wouldn't mind experimenting with butt plugs, right Richard?

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but in someone else's living room as you swill vodka and painkillers before vomiting in the kitchen sink, assaulting one of the other party guests, defecating on the bathroom floor, and eventually passing out in the bathtub with the door locked as you hear muffled voices calling for an ambulance.

Read the directions... unless you're autistic, in which case, memorize the directions.

Don't read beauty magazines unless you need some tips on how to be less ugly.

Get to know who your parents are, you bastard sons of whores. But don't get to know them in the biblical sense, because that's just wrong. Be nice to your siblings. They're the only ones you can comfortably fart around without having to close your legs or leave the room or wonder why your parents always loved them more than they love you.

Understand that friends come and go... although in your case they mostly just go, because let's face it, you're a bit of a douche. Work hard to bridge the gaps in language and intelligence, because the older you get, the more you need people who can understand what the fuck you're talking about.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you anything like any character in any reality show or sit-com based in New York City. Live in Northern California once, but leave before you realize you're a man and you shouldn't be eating tofu and getting cinnamon enemas and just generally being really completely totally gay - unless of course you are gay, in which case, why the fuck would you leave Northern California in the first place if you were never even going to commit to this marriage, Richard?

Act shocked.

Accept certain inalienable truths: The first 15 minutes of a romantic comedy is the only part of the film worth watching - much like your life. E=mc2. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, romantic comedies and your life were actually fun, that the theory of the measurement of inertial frames of reference means that there is no absolute and well-defined state of rest because all uniform motion is relative and life is meaningless anyway so what's the point, and that children then were just as bored as they are now by old failures like you going on and on about their childhood.

Respect your elders, even if they don't respect you back as they go on and on about how today's youth is no good and how everything was soooo much better back in their day and how they already had children when they were your age; but respect them anyway, just don't listen to the senile passive-aggressive fuckers.

My bed is my fortress, my bed is my fortress, my bed is my fortress, my bed is my fortress.

Don't expect anyone to support you besides your dad and your husband (until the faggot leaves you because he thinks you're self-destructive). Maybe you have a trust fund? Maybe you'll have a wealthy husband? But you never know when your dad or your wealthy husband might tragically pass away after accidentally tripping and falling down the stairs with no eye witnesses and a watertight alibi, thereby leaving all that money to you... for example.

Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look really really messy. And grey. And lonely.

Be distrustful whose advice you buy, and be argumentative with those who supply it. Advice is a form of bullshit, which is exactly what you've been listening to for the last ten minutes. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth, then throwing it away again when you're done with it, unless someone asks you for advice once more, in which case you can fish it back out, wipe it down all over again, paint over the ugly parts, and recycle it for more than it's worth, although maybe not as much as the first time around. How's that for a pithy, razor-sharp metaphor Mr. Hard-to-Please Shitkick Tribune editor?

But trust me on the sun. Stay in your house, shut the blinds, disconnect the phone, don't answer the door.

The sun wants to kill us all."

story - The Mural

2010-09-28T07:09:00.000-07:00

I don't know where it came from. Walking down that same street one day, I noticed a mural in a side alley. It hadn't been there before. It was a big blown-up photo of a tropical beach, about two meters wide and three meters high, with a palm tree on one side, the yellow sun-drenched sand spread out in the foreground, a placid turquoise sea beyond, and a clear blue sky above. It probably once decorated a cheesy restaurant or nightclub or something. Now it was just there, at the entrance of an alley. It was strange, because around it was all brick, concrete, asphalt, rusted iron, trash, dust and dirt. But amid the gloom and waste, there was that giant fresh gleaming blue and gold gem, relieving all the misery around it. Going up and down that street on my way to work, the contrast always caught my eye and held my gaze for a split second longer than anything else would. Sometimes I'd want to stand there and look at it longer, but I felt I shouldn't. I felt self-conscious. I felt people would think me crazy or high or creepy, so I'd move on.

About a week after the mural appeared I found myself stopping to look at it. Either early in the morning on my way to work, or late in the evening on my way back. Then about a week after that, I began stopping by the cafe that was across the street from the alley with the mural. I would leave the house half an hour earlier than usual to stop by the cafe and sip a coffee while I looked at the mural. Or alternately, I would stop by the cafe on my way back from work and have a beer or a bite to eat, again, just basically staring at the mural. It was mesmerizing.

Once I'd made a habit of sitting at that cafe and gazing for extended periods of time at the mural, I noticed other people doing the same thing as me. One out of three or four who passed by that alley would turn and look at the mural. Some would stop and turn their heads, frozen in half stride - probably because of the same self-consciousnessness that I felt - before moving on. I guess they felt the same as me, that there was a big difference between keeping in stride, which was normal, and stopping and turning to face the mural and gaze at it, which is not normal and even possibly a sign of derangement. But I know that's exactly what I had wanted to do, and actually what I was doing now, thanks to the cafe, where I could camouflage my intentions behind the respectable pastime of being seated at a table, drinking a normal beverage, paying a waiter, uttering normal lines like "thank you" and "coffee please" and "check!" and then being on my way as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. And yet something extraordinary had happened, because I'd spent my entire time at the cafe staring at a picturesque mural of a tropical island scene across the street, at the entrance of an alley.

I would do so the next day as well, and the day after. Sometimes I would do it twice a day. The wait staff came to know me and greet me by name. I wondered if they knew that I was just staring at that mural. I wonder if they wondered anything, or whether it was natural and normal to frequent the same cafe everyday, and stare across the street. Perhaps they saw through me. Perhaps they thought I was weird, sitting there like that and staring at a distant wall. And I wondered whether there were others like me, others who were too embarrassed and self-conscious to stand and look at the mural, who just did that frozen half-stride-with-head-turned-and-inquisitive-face thing, or who perhaps even came to the cafe like me to observe the mural secretly, privately, inconspicuously. Maybe they were also wondering the same thing now, gazing at me, asking themselves the same question. "You think that weirdo over there is just here to stare at the mural?" I looked around me but there were no people staring at me and smirking. Then again, maybe they were and they just turn their heads away as soon as I turn to look at them. They might look like they're pretending to read their paper, or write on their computers or enjoy their drinks or food or be engaged in an authentic chat with another person, but who's to say they aren't thinking the same thing? Who's to say they can't see right through me? Then again, if they did see through me, if they did understand me, wouldn't they too be complicit in this mural-gazing endeavor of mine? If anything, only they would understand. They would maybe even sympathize. Maybe there's a whole bunch of us, secretly gazing as we walk by, or pretending not to gaze while seated at this cafe... a whole bunch of us sharing a secret, enjoying a warm tropical scene, even if it is only surface deep.

And what of it anyway? Why do I feel somehow perverted, like I'm at a peepshow or something? Why shouldn't I stand and look? Or sit and look? Why shouldn't it all be perfectly normal?

Two months passed and I came to recognize regulars at the cafe. They too seemed to be there almost everyday, or at least I thought they were. There was the older guy with the scarf and the graying beard and the round glasses. He'd be reading mostly, or scribbling something in his notebook. Last time I was there he got into some heated argument on the phone, just as I got up to pay the bill. Did I imagine it, or did he keep looking at the mural while he was talking? Was he there for the mural? Or was he normal? Was he a normal cafe goer who ordered his coffee and sat at a table and read his books or his papers very normally, and then said normal and accepted things that were never out of place? Did he just say "keep the change, see you tomorrow" or make idle chit chat with the waiter about the weather? Or was he also secretly drawn to that mural? In between the routine and the normality and the expectedness and the overt non-weirdness of everything, was there something inside him that drew him to spending time here at the cafe, time that could otherwise be spent on very normal and relatively accepted things, just to be able to gaze at the mural, just to look at the big blown-up photo of a palm tree, a beach, a sky and a sea, amid bricks and concrete and sirens and cars and people being normal, heads down, going to work, or home, or other normal places? Every time I sneaked a glance at him, he seemed to be doing anything but looking at the mural. He seemed genuinely interested in other things... accepted and normal things.

And what about the others? Day in day out, there, I recognized this girl who looked like a university student. I would see her a few times a month. Others were there too, like those twins, or that really shabby guy who looked like a hobo but could still eat and drink there, so I guess he was some kind of artist or something. What about the lady with the dog? Did they look at the mural? Were they there like me, secretly gazing at the mural? I'd been there so long gazing at the mural that I even started recognizing regular passersby, and I took note of the ones who would look at the mural. But they never stopped to look at it. I wondered if they would come and sit at the cafe instead, order a drink, and look at the mural in an accepted and normal way that would not be deemed strange. But they never did, I guess. At least, none of those people were ever at the cafe when I was there. Maybe they were there sometimes, but not when I was, as far as I could tell.

Then I noticed for the first time a person who was there just for the mural, openly, unabashedly. Not at the cafe, where I and an unknown number of other mural gazers would satisfy our need in secret. This was... well, I don't know if he was a hobo or some homeless guy, or what. He seemed dressed ok enough. He had a scruffy beard but he didn't seem like a derelict. On the other hand, he didn't look too stylish either. And considering the amount of time he would stand leaning against the opposite wall of the alley, and often even just sit in front of the mural, on a piece of cardboard, I could assume he didn't really have any place to be. Sometimes he fidgeted with something, a notebook or a pad or something, but the rest of the time he would stand or sit there looking at the mural. People would pass by and sometimes they'd throw a quick glance at him. In a thousand heads that would walk by the street that day, they would form opinions in fractions of seconds, as soon as they saw a man sitting on a street, doing nothing, staring at a wall... they would form opinions in split seconds that would condemn that man. He was abnormal. There was something wrong with him. How do I know? Because now that the man was there staring at the mural, the passersby who had until then frozen in mid stride and gazed inquisitively at the mural, even if only for a second, didn't do so anymore. It was like the mural and the man were interconnected, and by showing the same sort of abnormally extended and unaccepted degree of interest that the abnormal man shows to the mural, one would be implicated in that same abnormality. The shared act, the shared experience, would condemn the normal to being associated with the abnormal.

Unless of course you could do what I did and normalize the abnormal act by disguising it in a normal one, such as sitting normally at a cafe and normally sipping some normal coffee like a normal person, all as I satisfied my--our?--abnormal interest in the mural. So one day I decided to invite the man to come and share a coffee with me. He looked at me, then looked at the cafe, then at me again. I guess he was trying to decide if I was some kind of weirdo. Then he accepted my invitation with a nod of the head. We sat at the cafe and ordered a coffee each. It was morning, and I still had a half hour to kill, which could be spent staring at the mural. And that's exactly what we did. We didn't talk at all. We just sipped our coffee and stared ahead, at the mural. It seemed like the most normal thing in the world to do. He was as conscious of the fact that I was looking at the mural as I was conscious of the fact that he was. And he seemed to know it too, but paid it no heed. For the first time I wasn't even conscious of myself while I was staring at the mural. For the first time I didn't try to hide the fact that I was staring at a mural. For the first time I didn't care if anyone saw me staring at the mural. It felt normal now. A few minutes later he turned to me, thanked me, offered to pay for his coffee (which I refused), bid me a good day, and left the cafe.

Two weeks later, the mural was gone. The morning I'd noticed it was gone, I still took a seat at the cafe out of habit. Out of habit, I even kept staring at the dirty red brick wall where those palm trees, blue skies, golden sands and turquoise waters had once been. Now there was just a wall. I looked around me and the cafe was empty. The man with the graying beard and the glasses wasn't there, neither was the girl or the lady with the dog, or the twins, or anyone else. I didn't order a coffee. I just sat there by myself, outside in the cold, and stared at that wall in the entrance to the alley across the street. One of the waiters threw me a commiserating look, as if in sympathy. I looked for the man who would sit there by the mural and who I'd shared a coffee with, but he wasn't there either. I really wished he was there.

It started raining. I buttoned my coat, got up, and left.

story - The Visa

2010-09-24T03:08:00.000-07:00

He emptied his pockets, passed through the metal detector, removed his belt, and went through again. He proceeded into the waiting room at the consular section of the embassy, took a number, and waited for his visa application interview. They'd given him an interview date and time, and he instinctively sat in the seat that was furthest from other people as he waited for his number to be called. For the time being he would be number 456.

He sat around bored and listless like everyone else in there. Everybody seemed to share a kind of collective humiliation at the fact that they were there, and furthermore at the fact that they had no choice but to be there. You could tell that through their moping faces, their audible sighs, their irritation at small things and their disdain for the others around them there, all of which was unmistakable as an expression of the disdain they felt for themselves. Just like him, everyone had filled in the appropriate forms in which they had to state whether they were--or had ever been--members of a terrorist organization; everyone had to state exactly where they would be residing and traveling in the country they wanted to go to, and they would have to produce an itinerary as proof of this for the authorities; everyone would have to have already bought their flight there and back, and would have to produce a copy of the ticket; everyone had to show two forms of I.D. along with photocopies of them; everyone had to produce bank statements and account balances to prove they had a sizeable, steady income that would supposedly preclude them from wanting to emigrate to that country, or that they would have the means to get back from it if they missed their flight or something happened to them when there; everyone had to prove they had medical insurance with overseas coverage; everyone had to produce bills to prove they had a home; and many had to produce a letter of guarantee from a citizen of that country who could vouch for them in case that person turned out to be a terrorist, or a thief, or a criminal, or a killer, or anything else that could be expected from these foreigners intent on visiting this country. Finally, you had to pay a sizeable chunk of money for having put the consular staff through the trouble of having to check all your documents, pry into your private life, and interrogate you to see if you were worthy of visiting their precious country.

He'd been told his interview would be at 11:15, but it was already 11:55, and there were still three people before him. He stared at a tourism poster on the wall inviting him to the country he was trying to get a visa for. The smiling faces and gleaming white teeth, the grand monument behind, the blue sunny sky, the catchy little motto inviting you to visit and enjoy, all as if a big fat testament to the most grotesque kind of irony. Finally number 456 came up on the digital monitor next to a number five which indicated the booth he would be interviewed in. There he sat before a junior diplomat who was separated from him by bulletproof glass. The diplomat--who was about the same age as him, in his early thirties--didn't look up to greet him as he came and sat down. He took about another half a minute to finish writing what he was writing before he raised his head with a cold perfunctory smile that was really more of an eye squint accompanied by a simultaneous inward curl of the lips. They talked to each other through speakerphones.

"Good morning misterrrrrrrr Kulutgay? Kutulgay?"

"Kutluay"

"Ok, mister Katloonay... Emre Katlunay. May I call you Emre?" There was something smug about his question, because he asked it in a way that already assumed the answer would be yes.

"No. You may call me Mr. Kutluay." The diplomat didn't seem too taken aback by this.

"Oo-kay then, Mr. Katlooay. Have you ever been to our country before?"

"Yes. I lived in your country for five years, I went to school there. Have you read the form I filled? I was asked the same question in the form and I wrote my answer under the question. My answer there was 'yes' too."

"Oo-kay, that's fine, we have to ask these, so... Have you ever been denied a visa to our country?"

"No."

"Mm hmm... What's the purpose of your trip?"

"No purpose."

"So 'tourism' then."

"On the contrary, if I had to have a purpose it would be to not be a tourist."

"It's just a formality Mr. Katluday. Most of your documents are in order... but I'm afraid we still need a copy of your company's payroll."

"I'm not on a payroll."

"Well then maybe you could bring us a letter from one of your employers... also we need a bill with your name on it..."

"The bills are under my girlfriend's name."

"... and we need the most recent record of your savings account transactions, this seems to be from the previous month."

"I get it. Although I don't see how my private life is any of your business, nor do I understand why you should feel the need to pry into my personal affairs simply because of my nationality, I understand that I must do this to have the right to set foot on the piece of earth that the organization you work for seems to think it owns..."

"Look Mr. Katlugay, I work for the state..."

"That's what I meant..." He wanted to say "criminal organization" but just held himself.

"By the way, do you also interrogate people from..." he was about to say "white countries" here but again just held himself. "...other countries, like Europe, or Australia?"

"They don't need visas to visit..."

"Why?"

"Well..."

"Why am I presumed guilty because of my nationality until I can muster up the documentation to supposedly prove that I'm innocent, while others are presumed innocent because of their nationality and allowed to waltz on through?"

"Look Mr. Katlunay, I'm simply doing my job here, ok?"

"Yes that's what everybody's doing, 'a job'. You didn't write the laws did you?"

"Well no, exactly."

"But you feel comfortable enacting them. That's no problem for you, right?"

"Listen, you're starting to raise your voice and there are other people waiting for their interviews, now if you would like to cooperate, then fine, if not I will have to call security."

"Ok, that's fine."

The junior diplomat's face softened, and then he continued to go over the visa application form.

"Says here you're a musician?"

"Yes."

"Really? What kind of music do you play?" The diplomat seemed sincerely interested.

"Sort of... I don't know... folk-electronic-funk I guess you'd call it... kind of experimental..."

The diplomat's face lost it's previously dour, bureaucratic demeanor and was all aglow.

"So you know the music scene here then?"

"Yes, well. I'm in it."

"I'm an amateur musician myself," the diplomat said excitedly, taking Emre by surprise with his candidness. The topic of music obviously made the diplomat beam. Emre also relaxed.

"Well, what do you play?" He could tell the diplomat was dying to be asked that question even as he pretended to be examining the visa application form.

"Guitar, electric guitar, we jam every now and then with a few other friends, this other guy I know from here, Mehmet, Mehmet Ortu... Ortunkutu... something, do you know..." Emre shook his head as the diplomat went on.

"...anyway, there's also a guy at the Hungarian embassy, he's a pretty good drummer, used to play in this industrial post-punk band in Budapest, we just get together and play sort of rock and punk covers... We're all pretty into psychedelic rock, funk, post-punk, that sort of stuff..."

"Any local bands you're into?"

"Yeah, I like Argo Margo, Kirinti, Duplikas, and then there's also..."

"I'm in Duplikas."

"You're kidding!"

"Seriously. Look..." Emre showed him a photo of the group from his appleberry.

"Wow. I love Duplikas, I didn't recognize you! I saw your show last year at Babble On..."

"Well, listen..."

"Steve, my name's Steve, call me Steve." It was obvious Steve now felt embarrassed about the bulletproof partition because he sincerely wanted to shake hands.

"Listen Steve, we have a concert at the festival on Friday at Kart Rock Arena. We're up after Dum Dum. I can get you in on the list. Get there two hours before and join us for drinks. Come around the back entrance, next to the parking lot..."

"Are you serious?"

"Very. Then you can come backstage later too."

"Wow, thanks... I'm so excited, thanks so much. Can I bring my girlfriend?"

"I insist."

"Wow, awesome." Steve looked like he'd forgotten he was at work, grilling someone over a visa application. He was even chatty. Then he got referred back to the paperwork with some sense of embarrassment.

"Hey, I know all this stuff is a pain in the ass, I hear you. If it was up to me I'd have none of it but that's the way it is..."

"Yes, that's the way it is."

"Listen... Emre, you don't mind my calling you..."

"Sure, that's fine."

"Emre, thank you, there won't be a problem here, these are mostly formalities..."

"Do you still need the..."

"Yes, I'm afraid so. Sorry, that's just beyond me, if you could just get that latest monthly bank statement and that letter from one of your last employers or someone you sent an invoice to or something... maybe just from the owner or manager of Babble On or something?"

"Ok."

"Again, thanks, I'm really psyched about the concert!"

"Good."

"Ok, well, pleasure meeting you, and just send those remaining documents any time. Monday would be great. I have all your personal info here so I'll call you on your cell if that's cool?"

"Sure."

Emre smiled and waved to Steve, who was on the other side of the bulletproof glass, then took a quick photo of him with his appleberry, and left.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Two days later Steve received a phone call. The rendezvous was settled. Steve and his girlfriend would show up before the show as they'd agreed, and they would all hang out.

Steve was excited about the prospect. Like any other young man who'd entered civil service in his late-twenties, he had other dreams. You study what you're supposed to study and pass the exams and work for the public service, and what you get is security. That's the trade-off. But the dreams don't die. On the contrary, the dreams are what make the reality bearable. You continue to write poems and stories, and dream of writing that novel; you continue here and there in their spare time to play music, to devote yourself to something, anything, that could offset the dreary realization that you will probably spend a good chunk of the rest of their youth pushing paper on behalf of people and organizations that have essentially no interest in you on a personal level, that are all oblivious to you. You would be assured of respect, money, status, belonging, and security... and in the meantime the dreams would reassure you that you still mattered, that that wasn't all there was to it, and that somehow there was still hope of something true, beautiful, wonderful to look forward to.

For Steve, the dream was music. He rarely had the time or energy to play guitar as much as it would take to make something of it, but he kept true to the dream, and he kept the dream close by trying to be in the vicinity of music. To hang out with musicians successful musicians whom he admired, listened to and wanted to emulate--that was a godsend for him. It was like a foot in the door in a foreign country where, despite having already been there a year and a half, he still felt outside the society in which he lived, and especially the music scene that he loved and wanted to be a part of somehow. He even felt truly satisfied with his job at that moment, realizing that it would give him the opportunity to meet people, as it had on this occasion with Emre. He always had conflicting emotions about having to become a public servant, but now it had seemed a good choice, and he was proud of himself.

It was Friday and Steve left the embassy earlier than usual. He went home, changed into a pair of jeans along with a favorite psychedelic t-shirt that he'd bought a year ago from a vintage clothes store, cracked open a beer, and put on some music while he waited for his girlfriend to arrive. He listened to a few Duplikas songs, lit a cigarette, played a little on his guitar, even sang a few songs out loud. Then his girlfriend arrived¾Sevil, a girl he'd met at a cocktail about three months ago¾and they left for Kart Rock Arena.

They went around back to the VIP entrance. He told them his name and that he was here as a guest of Emre Kutluay of Duplikas. The bouncers at the door said nothing, but told Steve, oddly, that he had to wait for exactly 40 minutes. Steve protested, although not adamantly, because he was happy to be there nevertheless, and thought that maybe there was something that required him to wait. So he did. When the 40 minutes were finally up (timed exactly to the minute on the bouncer's stopwatch, which seemed odd), his hand was stamped with the number 456 (which also bemused him because his girlfriend wasn't stamped), and he was led into a large open hangar-like area where he saw musicians hanging out with their friends and managers and entourages before the show. Some were eating, some were drinking, some were strumming their guitars or warming up their throats or just generally fooling around. There was a bar and a giant ice-filled vat full of bottles and cans of beer, and there was also a long food buffet. It was a very chill kind of scene overall, and Steve felt instantly enchanted with it. He soaked all of it in, the sounds, the faces, the gestures, the clothes, the smell, the vibes... this was what he wanted to be a part of, he would give anything to be a part of this life. It was like he'd passed through one of those magic gateways in a children's book. There were lots of people around, since it was a two-day festival that featured ten different bands which Duplikas was headlining. As he and Sevil wended their way through, they came upon the table where four of the five members of Duplikas sat. He immediately recognized them and gave them an excited greeting. They all cut their conversation and turned to look at him without saying anything back. He noticed that Emre wasn't among them. Then one of them--whom Steve recognized as the drummer--smiled at Steve and pointed silently in another direction.

Steve looked off to where the drummer had pointed. There were people in front of him and his girlfriend so they had trouble seeing without standing on the tips of their toes. Then, as if having suddenly been given orders by someone, all those in front of Steve parted way and stood aside, revealing a path that led across the room to a man sitting behind a desk on a dais with a microphone before him. He couldn't immediately recognize the man because he wore a strange blue mask that resembled a bird's head with an erect blue crest and a beak over his nose. Then he noticed the massive fanning arch of peacock plumes with the eerie feathery eyes spread out on the wall behind him. Steve and his girlfriend were stunned, because this obviously involved only them. Everyone fell silent at once. The music stopped, the din of chatter ceased, everyone put down their food and drinks, and stared at Steve.

"Sit!" declared the peacock king as somebody placed a chair before his desk.

Steve still couldn't believe what was happening and didn't know whether to laugh and play along with what must be some kind of eccentric antic that would be expected from those involved in the creative arts, or whether he should just turn and flee, which is what his instincts told him to do. But his courage and curiosity got the better of him, and he wasn't going to pull out now. He had to go along with it, and besides, he reckoned, it would probably turn out to be fun, or at least an interesting anecdote.

He sat down before the peacock throne. His chair was low, so that he found himself having to look up at the man in the peacock suit, which must obviously be Emre, he thought. But Steve didn't say anything and decided to play along with what he suspected might all be in jest. He was now feeling a little more at ease, as if he was a part of the joke and not the possible butt of it.

"Name?"

"Steve Casey Gramson..."

"Passport!"

"Passport?"

"PASS-PORT! passport passport passport"

"I didn't bring it."

"Where do you think you're going without a passport?"

"A concert. I don't need a passport to go to a concert..."

"Do you need a passport to go to another country?"

"Yes..."

"Well this is our country and you need your passport."

Steve smiled and shrugged sarcastically, still playing along with the game.

"Well nobody told me I need a passport..."

"Of course not, it's assumed you would know as much as to bring a passport! Tourist brochures don't say 'Come to Happyland, Bring Your Passport!' do they?"

"Uh... ok, whatever..."

"What is your business here? Why do you want to enter our country?"

"Uh... this isn't a country..."

"THIS IS A COUNTRY! This is a land of sound and melody and song and laughter, this is a land of verse, this is a free land, a liberated country, and the vibes of this country are sacred and to be protected from the evil essence of undesirable foreigners lacking spiritual cadence, the rhythmically challenged who might pollute our country with their slave-like obeisance to authority, their denial of the true nature of the human soul, and their avaricious attempt to own a piece of mother nature's earth while extorting a ransom from those who seek their life-given right to walk upon it like the children of Mother Earth who have a right to every inch of their mother's bosom. This is indeed a country, and I am the president! See them worship me!"

The peacock king pointed at those around them and Steve looked back to find that all had indeed bowed their heads in submission. Although taken aback by the peacock king's booming and inspired--albeit ridiculous--speech, Steve still played along, though now slightly more impressed by the earnestness and elaborateness of the joke he found himself a part of.

"I ask you again, vile foreign vermin... PASSPORT!"

"I told you I don't have it" Steve blurted out, feeling a bit annoyed now. But he decided to improvise within the game as well. "Besides, how do you know I am not one of your country? How do you know I don't have the... uh... rhythmic cadent mother vibe thing?"

"Because in our country no citizen has a passport! You said you didn't bring your passport. That proves that you are a foreigner!"

The other people around him all shouted "Foreigner!" Steve felt now that he was becoming the butt of the joke and felt uneasy was once more.

"Also," the peacock king added as an aside in a more mellow and sarcastic tone, "nobody has a... what did you call it? Rhythmic cadent... mother... vibe... thing, was it?"

"Yeah"

"Well nobody has that, it's ludicrous."

"Ok, I got it, but..."

"But what foreigner!?"

"But... you invited me here, Emre!" Steve raised his voice in a pleading tone.

"Who is this 'Emre'? Where is he? Prove you were invited here!"

"You are, you're Emre, YOU INVITED ME!"

"I did not! Maybe you were duped by one of our tourism posters or brochures or something?"

Steve fell back in his chair and looked at his girlfriend. Sevil just stood behind him bemused and not sure whether to be amused or worried.

"But now that you have come this far," continued the peacock king with regal flourish, "now that you have gone out of your way to come here, we will give you a chance. May I see your bank account transactions over the last month please?"

Steve went red. He looked up at the peacock mask with a furious look on his face. He could now see where this was going.

"Fuck you."

Steve got up to leave, grabbed his girlfriend's hand, and made for the door. The peacock king shouted "Guards!" and the bouncers seized Steve and brought him back to the chair. Steve didn't put up a fight, feeling that it was all so ridiculous, such a joke, that fighting would somehow be completely inappropriate... not to mention futile.

"BANK TRANSACTIONS!"

"I really don't see how you could ask for something like that..."

"But I do! You see, I can't trust that you will pay for what you consume in our country. I can't trust that you will have money to pay for the gas your need to drive yourself back to your country. I can't trust you can pay for medical expenses should something happen to you in our country. I must be assured that you have the wherewithal to look after yourself, that you are a respectable and decent person, and not a filthy cadentially and rhythmically challenged foreigner! You need to PROVE to me that you are not SCUM. Because when I look at you, foreigner, I can only conclude that you MUST be scum until you prove otherwise."

"Fuck you."

"Incorrect answer! That will be duly noted when making the final decision on whether you may enter our country or not. Do you have a job?"

"Of course I do, you saw me in the embassy when..."

"PROVE IT! Letter from employer please. After all, I have to know you have a steady source of income, otherwise you may never want to leave my country, because my country is beautiful, my country is golden, my country is better than your country, if flows with music and melody, unlike your measly country... and you really really want to live in my country, don't you?"

Steve was angry and ashamed. He was ashamed at how much he had wanted to come here tonight, how enthusiastic he'd been about it, and how much he'd shown his enthusiasm to Emre. The enchanted space was now a viper's nest and the eyes all around him seared right through his conscious. He was ashamed to be there, and his heart sank and he just wanted the joke to be over.

"Well?"

"Look, you win... you made your point. Just let me go now."

"I don't think so!" said the peacock king, followed by a chorus from those around: "We don't think so!"

For the first time, Steve felt not only embarrassed, but scared.

"So... as I was saying, I will need to see your bank account; also a list of everything you own, especially real estate if you have any; health insurance, with overseas coverage; a copy of a payroll with your name on it; a bill with your name on it; a letter of confidence from a national of our country; a list of everywhere you plan to go, be, stay, eat, piss, shit, fart, breathe in our country..."

"Stop this! I get it!"

"...I will need 52 photos, 63 copies of every document, with size 16 Verdana font, an Excel spreadsheet listing an inventory of all the documents being handed over..."

"Oh my God, please just stop..."

"Also, have you ever been a member of a terrorist organization? Do you have any prior convictions?"

"Of course not!"

"Well we'll need proof of that, make sure to bring us a document from the Justice Ministry stating that you have no prior convictions and are not a criminal nor ever have been. We'll also need a list of everything that's crossed your mind in the last 24 hours, because we need to know if your thoughts are as pure and harmless as you make them out to be. The list must of course be notarized so we know that you weren't lying. You will need a mind reader under oath..."

"This is absurd, stop it."

"Are you a man?"

"Just stop it..."

"ARE YOU A MAN!?"

"YES YES, I AM A MAN! I AM A FUCKING MAN!"

"Well then we'll also need a photo of you naked so we know that you are a man as you claim to be. Remember that both your face and your testicles have to be in the same frame so we know those testicles belong to that face. It also should be notarized so we know you didn't just Photoshop your face to your dick."

"Fuck you, asshole."

"Oooh, your violent words will be duly noted when making our final decision!"

"I don't want to be in your fucking country."

"So then why did you come here? Have you been wasting our time?"

Steve now had his head in his hands in desperation. He was losing it.

"Stop this torture, please, Emre, I beg of you... just let us go."

Somebody came and handed the peacock king a document. The peacock king looked at it, shook is head gravely, and then looked at Steve.

"Shit, what now?"

"Oh no, I'm sorry Mr. Grandson. It seems that you have lied to us. We have proof that you are--or have recently been--the member of a terrorist criminal organization."

He produced a blown up photo of Steve at his booth in the consular section of the embassy. It was the photo Emre had taken with his appleberry after their interview.

"There, in the background, you can unmistakably see the flag of the organization you work for, along with the standard uniform of that organization, which you are wearing with a big grin on your face, like you're actually happy and proud to be there! Our country lists your organization as a terrorist organization responsible for the past and ongoing invasion of foreign countries; of genocide to the displaced and slaughtered local inhabitants; of the enslavement and brainwashing of its own citizens--presumably, from what I see in this photo, you included; of having stolen, killed for, hijacked and wrongfully appropriated a piece of earth and denied others access to that land on random, racist grounds based on background, nationality and ethnicity; and of having made otherwise free and normal people spend their lives having to wear ridiculous costumes while doing soul-crushing work for the sake of hollow and meaningless ideals..."

"Jesus Christ, you sound like a college freshman on a 3am rant after way too many bong hits..."

"So you're also familiar with drugs! That's not good! Now I'm afraid your request for entry into our nation has been denied for lack of the appropriate paperwork and documentation, and also now because of your suspicious familiarity with illegal mind-altering substances. You will have to fill out this form to leave."

Steve was relieved when he heard that he could leave. He eagerly took the form and read over it. It made no sense whatsoever to him.

"Remember Mr. Grimsonny, you have to answer all the questions!"

The form consisted of three nonsensical multiple-choice questions. Steve felt like he was in a fraternity hazing. One question read "You have become sick in our country. Do you a) apply for citizenship to our country to freeload off our superior healthcare system, b) demand our doctors treat you before treating one of our own citizens, or c) burden us with all your medical bills that our taxpayers have to pay for?" Another question read "If you commit a crime in our country, do you a) run away from the police, b) contact your embassy and seek their protection, or c) claim that our laws don't apply to you because you don't recognize our laws or our moral standards?" Yet another question read "As a dirty, deceitful, thieving foreigner, should we a) strip-search you every time you enter or exit a shop when in our country because we know that your kind of people could probably do that sort of thing because it's in your nature, b) allow you to become a citizen of our country because you'd like to take advantage of our generous social welfare system and make money doing nothing while there because you are a lazy no-good foreigner by nature, or c) try and act like we respect you because we should believe that prejudice is the real crime here and that we're the ones guilty of 'othering' you because your ethnicity, name, nationality, culture, language and clothes differ from ours?"

"Just answer the questions Mr. Grimbo, and you are free."

"Fine."

Steve quickly circled the first answers to the first two questions, and then circled "c" on the third question, thinking that might at least be to his favor, before disgustedly throwing the form back at the peacock king.

"Hm, as we suspected, had you not lied to us about having been a member of a terrorist organization you'd still have had trouble explaining this form. According to this you would apply for citizenship to our country to freeload off our superior healthcare system in case of illness and run away from the police if you commit a crime in our country. These are both unacceptable I'm afraid. As for the third question you answered that we should try and act like we respect you because we should believe that prejudice is the real crime and that we're the ones guilty of 'othering' you because your ethnicity, name, nationality, culture, language and clothes differ from ours. Unfortunately this would make you a hypocrite, because I have a here a form of the list of countries from which the terrorist organization you work for demands visas, and a list of the countries it doesn't. You will see that citizens of the countries culturally, historically, ethnically, politically and socio-economically similar to yours are all presumed to be good and innocent until proven guilty because no visa procedure, interrogation, background checks, and prying into their private lives is required in any way. These people can come and go as they please and you do not need to see their bank account balance, you do not need to ask them whether they have ever been members of a terrorist group, you do not need them to come up with a sponsor in your country, you do not need them to pay money for the permission to enter your country, and you do not ask them to produce a copy of their payroll or state how much money they earn, where they work, where they live and produce a list of the real estate they may or may not own. On the other hand those countries that are dissimilar to yours in the same way do have to go through those procedures, effectively being treated as guilty until they can prove themselves probably innocent."

Steve was on the verge of breaking down. He just wanted to crawl into a hole now and never come out again.

"As you can see Mr. I-can't-bother-to-learn-how-to-pronounce-your-foreign-name-properly-because-it's-so-strange-it-cannot-possibly-have-a-proper-pronunciation-anyway-so-any-way-I-pronouce-it-will-work-just-fine-for-me, if there is one thing we cannot stand, it's a hypocrite. Mr. Gramson, your visa has been denied! Now, FUCK OFF!"

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Monday, Emre was back at the embassy and he took a seat opposite Steve. Neither said a word to each other and Steve never even looked at Emre's face. Emre handed him the missing documentation. Steve took it and said coldly while examining them that his visa would be ready within five working days. Emre got up and left.

When Steve looked up he saw the peacock mask lying on the counter before him, on the other side of the bulletproof glass.

The Realities of Turkey*

2010-09-23T04:32:00.000-07:00

We Turks have one simple argument to justify bigotry, racism, hypocrisy, illogic and irrationality. It's called the "The Realities of Turkey" argument.

Let's give an example:

Let's say you argue that Kurdish citizens of Turkey should be able to freely learn, speak, read and be educated in their own mother tongue (alongside the official language of Turkish of course), because citizens of Turkish origin already have that right so it only seems natural that everybody should have that right. It would seem illogical to answer "No. People whose mother tongue is Turkish should be able to learn, speak, read and be educated in their mother tongue, but people whose mother tongue is not Turkish shouldn't." Illogical, irrational, hypocritical, right? Wrong! Because all we have to do here is whip out this little gem and proclaim unabashedly: "Normally you'd be right, but you have to consider The Realities of Turkey. In Turkey the official language is Turkish, and even though we all come from different backgrounds, we all speak and learn Turkish, therefore everyone should only learn Turkish..." etc. etc. And there it is. The "The Realities of Turkey" argument basically states that things are the way they are because they are the way they are so we shouldn't change anything because that's just how it is and it suits us fine, so there.

Often the answer to that question will include another question like "Then should everybody be able to speak and learn and be educated in their own language if they want to? Should Circassians, Arabs, Albanians, Bosnians, Georgians be able to speak and learn their own language freely?" The answer you would think would be "Of course, Turks speak and learn their own language so then so should others no matter what their ethnicity because it's the most basic inalienable human right to proudly preserve, learn, speak and flourish in your mother tongue." But your answer would actually be wrong once we flip out this little bad boy: "The Realities of Turkey"! In the "The Realities of Turkey" version of the answer to this argument you get to be able to say with a straight face "Normally you'd be correct, but you have to consider The Realities of Turkey." Those realities are of course that Turkey is for the Turks and everyone else can go fuck themselves. If you don't believe me then check out the motto of the country's leading newspaper, Hurriyet, the one "enlightened" Turks read: "Turkey belongs to the Turks".

You might counter all that nonsense with the argument: "Ok, Turkish is and will remain the official language, just as English is the official language of the U.S. or Spanish that of Spain. But why can't people learn other languages and use them freely as well? People can go to Hebrew schools and learn Spanish in the U.S., people can speak Basque or Catalan in Spain, and even use it in local government. So why not in Turkey?" Here you get a standard The Realities of Turkey response that mystically declares "The indivisible unity of the state", as if speaking your own language would disunite the country, as if the banning of Kurdish for eight decades hasn't led to greater disunity in the country than would have occurred if we'd respected people's right to use it, allowed it to be taught, and protected it as if it were a fundamental duty to protect the inalienable cultural and human rights of our citizens regardless of ethnicity. But the The Realities of Turkey argument isn't interested in the fact that there is a 30-year war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, or that the loyalties of the majority of our citizens in the southeast of the country are, to all intents and purposes, lost. What matters is that what has been engrained into our brains since childhood, all that nationalist dogma with flags and maps, remains intact. That our world view doesn't change. That what we know to be true stays true. The people can die, starve, be massacred, driven from their homes and villages, denied their rights, be treated like dirt and vermin, and their own children can be sent to fight and die in a senseless war for nothing. But the nation must remain "united". If you do actually maintain the above point of view, you will be dismissed as having been "educated abroad and thus ignorant of The Realities of Turkey", as if you have to have had a foreign education to be able to maintain a logically tenable argument! (which, actually, maybe you do)

The Realities of Turkey argument always comes with these kinds of memorized cliches that have been dogmatically hardwired into Turks' brains since childhood. It almost always includes some reference to the Turkish War of Liberation from 1919 to 1922 against the occupying powers after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WWI. The one who flips out the The Realities of Turkey argument usually mentions how all of us, regardless of ethnicity, fought and died [sic] to free the country and create the Republic of Turkey. You would think that this would logically segue into an argument for the cultural rights of those other than Turks if they fought and died side by side with Turks to create Turkey. But no, those aren't The Realities of Turkey. They fought and died to create a state that didn't recognize their existence or their rights if they happened to be unfortunate enough to not be Turkish, which is just fine. Shedding your blood for the motherland is fine, just don't expect any respect or recognition in return unless you agreed to renounce your ethnic and cultural identity. Those are The Realities of Turkey. That's why you will always be confronted by the "Every citizen of Turkey is equal, regardless of ethnic background, even presidents and prime ministers have been Kurds!" defense at some point, without it even occurring to the utterer of that absurd position that people are only equal regardless of background as long as they accept they are Turks in the foreground. That little point somehow always slips through.

Another favorite argument repeated by the defenders of The Realities of Turkey is the belief that the Kurds just need to develop economically, that it's all an economic problem, and once they're as wealthy as us all their desire to be Kurds and speak their language or seek autonomy will magically disappear! The arrogance of this view aside, it's the illogic of it that is particularly troublesome. After all, Catalans are plenty prosperous, as are Basques, or the Catholics of Northern Ireland, and yet they are no less adamant on their cultural rights, and all harbor strong local independence movements. But the The Realities of Turkey argument states that Kurds are uneducated and poor and are thus vulnerable enough to be duped into defending their cultural and linguistic rights by foreign powers, although they would never espouse such ludicrous beliefs if they were healthy and sane. After all, the The Realities of Turkey argument always assumes that people don't really want to speak their own language but are tricked by foreigners into believing they should. It argues that they are puppets at the hands of foreign powers who instigate and provoke in these people a false sense of pride in their mother tongue and ethno-cultural identity, and who--without that foreign provocation and meddling that takes advantage of their lack of education and poverty--would be happy to just renounce it all and be good humble little servants who have no interest in being anything other than what the Turkish establishment wants them to be.

Provocation is a key word here. In Turkey when a person or a group of people stand up for something you yourself are against, you immediately claim without any hesitation whatsoever that they must have been "provoked" into thinking and acting that way. The use of the word provocation assumes that people who think otherwise to you cannot possibly be justified in those thoughts, but only espouse them because they are actually weak of mind, deluded, ignorant (of The Realities of Turkey), poor, and thus mindless and helpless pawns in some other greater sinister enemy power's hands--a power that, surprise surprise, wants to destroy everything you cherish, love, and hold sacred.

And so everyone's provoked, except you of course. Your thoughts are sacred, true, and completely the product of your own free will. If you are a pro-establishmentarian secularist, then the Islamists and Kurds are being provoked, misled and brainwashed; if you're an Islamist then the secularists are being provoked and misled and brainwashed; and if you're a Kurdish nationalist, the secularists and the military are being provoked and misled and brainwashed. But the interesting fact here is that every side believes that the others are being provoked and misled and brainwashed by Western powers, namely the U.S., Britain and France. And so what lies at the root of the The Realities of Turkey argument is really a deep inferiority complex vis-a-vis the West, which is supposedly constantly trying to stymie and scupper Turkey. It assumes that the only reason why the West is so far advanced is because they've always tried to keep us down by turning us against each other, and that if those sinister weasels wouldn't meddle at all, we'd be right up there with the best of them. If only those no good rascals didn't somehow make Kurds think they should be proud of being Kurds, everything would be fine! If only they didn't support the Islamists against the military and the secular establishment, the Islamists would just sit back and accept things the way they were! Or from an Islamist point of view, if only the West withdrew their support for the secularists and the military, everyone would go back to their natural Islamic roots, cover their heads, pray to God, and believe in angels and prophets and jinns and heaven and hell the way they're supposed to.

And there you have it, the illogical, irrational Realities of Turkey. We're talking about educated and often not unintelligent people upholding very stupid and logically untenable arguments. For example, point out how under the regime of Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria in the late-'80s the Turks were forced to use Bulgarian names, how Turkish was banned from being taught in schools, and how Turks were put through a policy of forcible Bulgarianization, and the average Turk will call "Genocide!" (as indeed our government at the time did). But then mention that Turkey for 80 years applied exactly the same policies to the Kurds and other nationalities, and things are magically different! "But Turkey is Turkish", they will say! Why? Because you have to consider... The Realities of Turkey! That means that reason takes a back seat, hypocrisy is considered the least of our worries, and the only thing that matters anymore is what we want the truth to be, regardless of whether it's tenable, moral, ethical, logical or realistic, and regardless of whether it continues to cause death, misery, injustice, oppression and hate.

* In Turkish: "Türkiye'nin gerçekleri"

How can we be hopeful?

2010-09-01T23:07:00.000-07:00

There is an instance somewhere in greater happy moments when, beyond the elation, we sense the dread fear that everything is pointless, fleeting, meaningless, and absurd. When we hear the chorus of our favorite song, or share something special with others, or enjoy a good meal, or feel happy on a beach or at a party or in a conversation, there's some nagging semiconscious realization in some corner of our minds that however special our feelings at that moment may be, they are ultimately futile and doomed. We know the moment passes, and the end comes, and the overwhelming boredom and suffocation of existence resumes where it left off, in the guise of routine and duty and a resumption of the fear that binds our life with others; the fear that we are or will be unsuccessful, unsatisfying, unattractive, unhappy, lagging behind, not doing everything we could do, and just generally worrying that we will never be who we need to be or want to be. If anything, our lives could be considered a series of foolhardy attempts to defeat that existential dread and paranoia, only to have it always slink its way out in the end. The sun always rises, the song always ends, and the boulder of emotions we painstakingly rolled up to some wonderful new summit always comes tumbling back down again.

And yet we all try and do the best we can. We all try and find some kind of comforting thought system that will somehow take those passing moments of happiness and weave them into a greater, more durable ideological tapestry. We try to trick our minds into finding some kind of permanence to happiness, in a world where it's always gone as soon as it's there. Some of us take to religion or pseudo-religious spiritualism with which we create an imaginary purpose in life along with the promise of permanence after death in which some kind of eternal element (soul, spirit) within us lives blissfully forever in a magic place somewhere where all moments forever are blissful moments, like that moment when we kiss someone for the first time, or dive into a cold crisp sea in July, or when you've had that second drink and you and your friends are laughing and loving each other's company early on in the evening when you have the whole night to look forward to. We all want to prolong that moment eternally, to make that moment the rule rather than the exception, yet don't know how, and despair at this. In fact, that's all we all look for in our lives, constantly, unceasingly, sometimes consciously, mostly unconsciously. Those who don't go for ready-made packaged fantastic feel-good religiosity instead seek a concatenated repetition of intense moments with which to create a never-ending chain of brief elations that somehow give the illusion of permanence and constancy. Addicts do this: drug addicts, alcoholics, junk food addicts, sex addicts, shopping addicts, friendship addicts who can't bear to be alone, or even music addicts who go from song to song, concert to concert, hunting down that feel-good moment when the music and the mind and the company merge magically, magnificently for brief crescendos that last a few seconds before they're gone again, and you're left hunting them down again, trying to capture them somehow, again and again and again.

Some of us try to find a hope for happiness in love. Biology both helps and hinders us in this way. It helps because we need to meet people and meeting a person you want to have sex with is naturally a happy moment, because if it weren't happiness-inducing then we might rather eat ice cream instead of procreate, which means the human race would all soon be a big fat mass of rotting corpses. It hinders us because ultimately love, too, is fleeting and impermanent; it lasts until you have kids, at best, and then both people are done with each other and they only care about the kids and their relationship turns into some kind of inescapable codependence trapped in two sagging, aging, graying, withering, weakening, yellowing, flabbening bodies.

So then where is there hope? It seems the problem is hope in the first place. How can we hope for that which the universe is fundamentally against? Why do we greedily, hungrily, desperately try and clutch at happiness in the hope of some kind of permanence? How can we stop the brutal onslaught, when the very laws of thermodynamics are ranged against us? We're addicted to elation, to happiness, and we're unhappy because of it, because it's always so unsatisfactorily short-lived, and we're always afraid that it's somewhere where we're missing out on it, somewhere we always have to travel to to find it, somewhere where others have it, but not us.

But if we accept there is no hope, if we accept that happiness is by nature fleeting and impermanent and that life, despite some brilliant moments, is generally boring, meaningless, pointless and hollow, we could achieve a kind of tragic heroism where we stand strong in the face of the horrible and inevitable truth, firm and resolute, despite the futility of it all. That's the appeal of tragedy in art, that's the appeal of Aeschylus and Euripides and Sophocles and Homer, of Byron and Beckett and Rimbaud, of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. If we take the right philosophical outlook, we too can become tragic and gain a perverse sense of happiness in adversity, thereby making something positive and fortifying out of it, rather than try and find that decadent and unsatisfying kind of bovine happiness in mere pleasure, bliss, ease, comfort and security. This isn't to say that life shouldn't be enjoyed and great moments experienced, but we would be much less unhappy when not experiencing those great moments by keeping in perspective the realities of existence, rather than flailing desperately to avoid, deny or put up a quixotic fight against them.

We must also use logic to our advantage. After all, we could say that if happiness is fleeting, then conversely, so is misery. Why only dwell on how the good and happy times eventually fade? Why not gain a sense of happiness in knowing that other good and happy times will come, and that if happiness is fleeting and ephemeral, then so is the feeling of sadness, loneliness and despair that make up the other moments in existence when we're not busying ourselves with gadgets or sports or work or hobbies or movies and other stuff. Of course, one could argue that existential despair is rather permanent, that sometimes we can ignore it or drown it out with meaningless endeavors, but that everything always gets sucked back to it eventually. And that's where we assume the aforementioned tragic stance. That's where we become a philosopher on a mountain or a poet on a rocky cliff, if only (though not necessarily) figuratively. We become conscious of and then reinternalize the emptiness and the void, we own the void, we choose the void, we master the void, and we take pride in a lonesome, mighty, futile stand, as we turn it into something greater: art.

Art is no answer or resolution in itself. It isn't some cheesy attempt to deny the meaninglessness of life with trite ideals and empty promises of eternal bliss or immortality of some sort. Art is hijacked for those purposes by religions, but only the kind of art that is shorn of its meaning and essence. Only the technical, aesthetic dimension of art is utilized, and without it, without the paintings and the stained-glass windows and the music and the choirs and the beautiful architecture, religion would be unappealing. But pure art is the process through which we come to terms with life, the truth of life, shorn of all the bullshit. It's a direct gaze at something incomprehensible and terrible, and yet the very act of creation it entails acts in itself as a remedy to inaction, which is one of the gravest (and most feared) consequences of the realization of the meaninglessness of life. So rather than despairing and staying in bed and not being able to do anything because everything seems meaningless, you can affirm that tragic meaninglessness and make something of it, something that demands effort and labor and energy and thought and creativity, all of which finds renewed vigor and an outlet through art. And although the artwork seems meaningless, it has an aesthetic dimension, it has a technical aspect, it was created by your hands and, most importantly, it was inspired by the meaninglessness itself. After all, art is the pursuit of exploring our existence in a world we don't fully understand, a world where meaning is missing (as opposed to the religious world which has meaning, albeit a flimsy band-aid of a meaning). Art is therefore always a kind of representation of meaninglessness, which actually - paradoxically - infuses it with meaning. In fact, the artwork is the only thing in life that acquires meaning, that transcends its mere thingness or use-value. Nothing is not nothing any longer when it becomes a word that represents nothing, because "nothing" then represents something. By the same token, meaninglessness is no longer meaningless when it inspires and elicits a creation that represents it, thereby making it meaningful... if not exactly hopeful.

Of course, we could also shun art as mere child's play and still deny the meaninglessness and sadness of life by immersing ourselves in half-baked and semi-thought-through spiritualist philosophies or "serious" religions that do give concrete answers (which are really just ornate lies) and that seek to hide the truth from our eyes, to deny the pain and anguish as believers try instead to keep fooling themselves with feel-good pap. This is the way for most people. We fill our lives with fake meaning, or just fill our lives with trivialities that occupy our minds and time, like politics, football teams, cars, nationalism, games, the endless acquisition of things, and generally that which is fed us as being the accepted way of doing things by agents of authority. But none of that is important or acceptable, and nobody should ever respect any authority.

Then again, why should we worry about any of this at all? Why not just ignore the fleetingness of the good and happy moments, and just bite the bullet and deal with the painful realization of the latent monstrosity of existence? When you're young and things are tipped in your favor, this is usually the case anyway. There isn't too much reason or time or need to face reality, to look inside and confront the void in us and in everything. When we're young, our life is too full of stuff. But that stuff gets spent up and lost along the way, things thin out, excitement and novelty fades, people slowly disappear from your life, choices and opportunities lessen, and there are generally less things to shield our eyes from what lurks beneath and beyond. When things are in our favor we could take on all the gods ever created by the human mind, but things are not always in our favor, and they gradually become less so as time goes on. That's when the stoic, tragic, heroic, artistic philosophical stance can come to our rescue, and we can at least tame those disheartening feelings and moods with the whip of reason, by accepting rather than trying to obfuscate the vacant truths underlying existence. Furthermore, beyond (and in fact, despite) reason, through art, we can turn those feelings and moods into meaningful and beautiful creations, in spite of the void. And we can also take heart in the fact that bad times are also fleeting, and that while they may be fewer and farther in between as the years wear on, there will still be more good times to come.

This isn't to say we shouldn't keep busy, read books, listen to music, fall in love, and travel to new places and enjoy the wonderfulness of life either. We should. But if we don't also grant ourselves the necessary philosophical armor for life, we risk feeling depressed that we might never enjoy any of those things truly, deeply, fully, anymore. We will become desperate, vain, narcissistic exhibitionists, trying to squeeze meaning and more from moments that simply can't give us what we want, that simply aren't fertile enough, as we strive to find a sense of self-worth and importance and recognition and beauty in trivial things and events that we become addicted to, that we need to keep chasing down and recreating so as to maintain that concatenation of feel-good moments that we mistake for substance, happiness and constancy. To find hope in such a wasteland as that is futile. The armor should always be within, like a backbone that gives us strength, rather than comprised of a patchwork of brittle and exposed superficies behind which to cower and hide.

Once we lose hope, we can gain everything back, we can enjoy everything once more, and even the pain and the meaninglessness and the futility of existence can become for us a source of joy.

Does everything happen for a reason?

2010-02-25T23:36:00.000-08:00

Left: Is there any reason for this?

The belief that everything happens for a reason is popular because it meliorates pain, loss and misery in life by asserting that that which is bad is not gratuitous but necessary, unavoidable, and will - ultimately - be for the best possible good, if not for us immediately, then in terms of the big scheme of things.

But the first problem with the belief that "everything happens for a reason" is that reason is always ascertained retrospectively after a phenomenon has already occurred. The fact that something happened is considered to be "proof" that it had to happen. This is not only shoddy logic which inverts laws of causation so that cause follows from effect rather than vice versa, this is also basically a useless belief, because it can never tell us anything new, expand our knowledge of ourselves or the world, or even prove that the proposition that "everything happens for a reason" is reasonably true. It's the question of whether we can ever know the truth of a Kantian synthetic-a priori proposition that neither follows from a posteriori sensory experience, nor offers a predicate that is contained in the subject ("reason" isn't necessarily implied by "happening" or vice versa). But how could that ever be the basis for knowledge?

Let's take the deterministic stance and assume that it were possible to know that "everything happens for a reason". If reason is that which is logically consistent to the mind, then we could somehow interpret circumstances to correctly predict what should reasonably and rationally follow from them (by finding causes from effects and then using those inverted causational patterns to correctly predict new causes and effects), and we could then say that everything does indeed happen for a reason. Not only would this enhance the quality of our lives and improve our knowledge and understanding of life, existence and the universe, but it would actually prove the proposition itself that things happen for a reason. But this could only happen if the proposition became instead an analytic-a posteriori proposition in which the proposition is both observable and evident in the universe and also that the predicate justified the subject. But as far as we know, this is not possible (* read footnote on why). Instead we're left with the paradox of having to believe in the inherent reason of the universe, which is ridiculous, because reason is something apparent and clear to the mind, since it must by definition be logical. If its truth cannot be ascertained logically but only through mere belief, then it's no longer reason. It's basically just a watered down version of religious belief and remains a synthetic-a priori proposition that is impossible to prove (and is thus actually useless for knowledge, contrary to what Kant might say).(**)

Many of us mistake cause for reason and use these terms interchangeably. As far as we know (or can know), everything is the effect of a cause. That which exists is the effect of accumulated causes and those effects themselves become causes for later effects, and so on. This we know - or rather, what we know can only be known by this (because we don't know if there may or may not be things in the universe that may exist without ascertainable causes, as in, perhaps, a quantum universe or in black holes or other things we don't really understand). But to say something doesn't just have a cause but a reason to its existence is to say that there is a meaning and a purpose and even perhaps an aspect of universal consciousness (some god-type thing) to all causes so that they not only produce effects, but produce effects that must exist, effects that are indispensable for the overall picture, effects which therefore must be good because their existence is dictated by reason. In other words, to believe in reason is to believe that all things happen according to a kind of teleological script in which - for mysterious reasons beyond our knowledge - everything has a purpose so as to help bring about a denouement to that teleology. The key word here is "for". To say everything happens "from" or "as a result of" a reason is virtually the same as saying it results from certain causes. That's fine. But to say things happen "for" a reason means that that which has happened must have happened because its existence is dictated by reason and must therefore be the cause of future effects that also must exist. In short, you must believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and that all that happens must ultimately be good, because it all follows a reasoned script.

But then we're left with an absurd situation in which the most unconscionable crimes of history, like the Holocaust, must have happened because they happened for a reason. If it had never happened, then that reason behind it would never have been satisfied. An essential piece of the universe's ultimate purpose would never have been in place and therefore if no Holocaust had happened, this would've been a bad thing. So the Holocaust had to happen, because that which has reason cannot not exist, since it's part of the overall mysterious way of things. Therefore, if you believe that everything happens for a reason, then you believe that it's good that the Holocaust happened. And slavery. And Hiroshima. And Pol Pot.

After all, if everything happens for a reason, reason must be good, since we cannot believe that that which necessitates the existence of all things could be bad, because all that exists - including ourselves and our precious little lives - is born from it and is a part of it. Therefore life cannot be bad, considering how valuable it is to us and how much we cherish it. It's all we know, it's all we are, therefore it's all that is of value to us. Even that which we consider bad is defined by all that is antithetical to life and existence (what we define as bad is that which leads to death or pain, which is basically a step toward death). Therefore existence is good ipso facto. So then if reason is thus necessarily perceived as good, this brings up the question of whether unspeakable bad can form a part of the good (and a pretty hefty chunk of it at that)? Can there be reasonable acts of violence, oppression, torture, pain, suffering, misery, death, destruction, injustice, malice and evil? What is this edifice of reason built upon? If that which is good can harbor so much bad, then that which we consider bad mustn't be bad in essence, since it all serves the good. But then that means I shouldn't consider Hitler or the Holocaust bad. And yet I do. This leads to moral nihilism by which everything is equally good or equally worthless (which means all that you cherish, the love of and for your family, the importance and value of your life, your belief that everything happens for a reason, etc., is also worthless). So ultimately, the idea that everything happens for a reason - and the idea that there is an inherent moral value of "good" or "bad" in the universe - seems in fact unreasonable.

Why do so many of us then have difficulty accepting that things may not happen for any reason whatsoever, that there may well be no purpose or meaning to any and all actions, and that all phenomena are random, coincidental, gratuitous? It's basically just a new form of the age-old Fate vs. Free Will debate. Belief in fate absolves you of responsibility for your actions, and all actions. It gives you the comfort of believing you live in the best of all possible worlds, and it instills an optimism toward life in the belief that everything - including all the bad things - are ensuring life and the universe improve in steady increments as everything nears closer and closer to its teleologically perfect end state. Because, ultimately, a belief that everything happens for a reason is a belief that there is one great reasonable state toward which everything progresses and at which all the icky stuff will have long ended and fulfilled their part in the playing out of a reasonable universe which supposedly needs the Archduke Ferdinand to be shot, that film you watched last night to be made, and those icebergs in the Bering Sea to float at a southwesterly direction at a rate of 6 nautical miles on Tuesday morning.

Furthermore, fatalistic belief not only reassures you that the mistakes you made were unavoidable, that you had no choice in the matter, but it also expiates monstrous deeds and absolves the criminal of his or her crimes. Maybe you feel comforted that whether you think you should have taken that job offer or not, you ultimately had no choice in the matter, and it happened for a reason, and so it was good you didn't take it because that's precisely what had to happen because some other good will come of it instead, therefore you can let your mind and conscience be at ease; but that comfort turns sour when you apply the same principle to Josef Mengele. What good could you believe would possibly eventually come from systematically blinding, torturing, mutilating and crippling children through some of the most monstrous experiments ever committed? You wonder then who wrote this reasoned script and whether it has any merit worth dedicating belief to, let alone respect.

Beyond philosophy, quantum physicists already seem to have found that a reasonable structure to things is not possible - or at least not within the grasp of our knowing. Take the slit experiment that shows how light quanta act paradoxically like both particles and waves (so that a photon seems to occupy more than one space at the same time, something for which we don't even have the linguistic tools to express or understand), or Schrodinger's Cat (alive and dead at the same time until the box is opened and a witness enters into the experiment, demonstrating that there is possibly an infinite number of parallel universes that we can never see), or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (you can only know either the position or the velocity of an elementary particle like an electron at any one time, never both, indicating that we can never know exactly how the elemental building blocks of the universe do, did and will act). There are things that seem they can never be known, factors that can never be detected, and therefore a reasoned and rational complete model of the universe that can never be attained.

So instead, we'll continue to believe in the morally repugnant and logically shoddy belief that everything happens for a reason, so as to satisfy our selfish complexes, mollify our regrets, ameliorate our insecurities, and decorate our ignorance.

Is it more reasonable then to believe the universe is random? Chaotic? A result of chance? And if the universe is random, then does this make Free Will possible? Can there be any moral framework to such a universe? Would such a universe mean that we would be savage animals all lustfully pursuing our own selfish interests - as religious people and other fatalists believe? This topic will be next.

* Let's assume that everything does happen for a reason. So if a lizard ran out from under a rock to catch a beetle and was then pounced on and eaten by a bird of prey, this wouldn't just be a case of cause (sighting of beetle), effect (running out from safety of rock to hunt it) which then becomes the cause of another effect (bird of prey swooping down for the kill). This scenario would instead be: beetle must be seen by lizard which then must come out from under the rock so the bird of prey must eat it because the phenomenon of the bird of prey eating the lizard happens "for" something else that must happen (as dictated by reason). If we were to believe this then we end up with a kind of Zenoan paradox so that every single factor must have yet more countless numbers of preceding causational factors dictated by reason, and each one of those factors must have yet more factors that multiply exponentially with every step back. And then every step back must have another intermediary step in between those steps and then other intermediary steps between those intermediary steps ad infinitum so that if the universe were dictated by reason, knowledge of that reason would be impossible because it would forever bring up more reasons behind those reasons and so on all the way down to the levels of how the rain that fell on Manila in 1683 and the envelope that was opened by Tsar Nicholas II in 1897 and the comet that passed by in 13,000 B.C. all had an effect on not just the lizard and the beetle and the bird (and everything else in between the lizard beetle and bird - the sunlight, the shadow, the bacteria, the air, the wind, the position and movement of every grain of sand, etc.), but on everything else as well, all the way down to each and every cell and molecule and atom and even all the elementary particles like quarks and leptons (to which Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies) involved in how everything at any given nanosecond plays out, all of which is beyond knowledge (as far as we know). So the entire history of the universe - everything that ever happened down to a virtually infinite regression of factors and events - should have culminated perfectly in the lizard being eaten by the bird of prey at that particular locus in space and time and that particular locus with the beetle and lizard and bird interacting perfectly with everything else in the universe at that time. But then the same Zenoan paradox comes up in relation to time: how do you measure the exact time of an occurrence down to the seconds and milliseconds and nanoseconds etc.? What is that moment, and how can you establish any one instance in which everything/something happens at once? Furthermore, don't the laws of relativity tell us that our perception of time is relative to the speed of light, and that what one person sees differs from the other, depending on their speed and position and movement at that particular "moment"? So a "now" of mine might not necessarily be your "now" and what you see may be totally different from what I see at any given point. This might not be too significant a factor at low speeds at which a lizard and a beetle and a bird move (even though it is still a factor, albeit minuscule), but it is a huge factor when dealing with massive (cosmological) and minute (quantum) phenomena. In short, there would be no mind or supercomputer powerful enough to ever figure out all of the variables involved, because they would be virtually infinite and any polynomial equation would take virtually an infinite amount of time to figure it all out. Add to all this the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg, which makes knowing the position and velocity of an elementary particle literally impossible. And if you can't figure those most fundamental factors (like the path and behavior of leptons etc.), then knowing whether everything abides by reason is impossible as well.

** But the elenctic inversion of this argument could also be applied to maintain the truth of the proposition that "everything happens for a reason" by inductively claiming that because all factors haven't yet been discovered, the truth of this proposition is not disproved but only (and eternally) delayed until it is proven by the discovery of all the factors at some distant hypothetical moment in time! It's like saying that until you can disprove the universe exists in the belly of a giant pink unicorn, the universe could conceivably still exist in the belly of a giant pink unicorn. This logical loophole (born of the fact that our knowledge is incomplete) is essentially where all religious belief exists.

Rules of Conversation

2010-02-21T00:18:00.000-08:00

We need to establish some ground rules for conversation because people are getting away with murder out there. Here are some basics to abide by.

- The conversation should start with a smile and end with a smile. But it has to be a real smile, the kind where your eyes smile along with your mouth, not one of those insincere condescending fake upside down grimaces.

- You don't have to look at me when you're talking, you only have to look at me when I'm talking.

- Even if you're only pretending to listen to me, please at least nod from time to time when I'm talking. I know you're probably only thinking about what you're going to say when it's your turn to speak, but if you want me to act like I'm listening to you when it's your turn, then you have to act like you're listening to me too.

- Also please just ask me a question or two every now and then so it seems like you care. Then you can go on talking about all the tedious shit in your life that I don't care about either.

- Don't talk about your pet unless you're talking to someone who has the same kind of pet. If you have a dog, and you love your dog and want to tell me about how your dog did the cutest thing the other day, then don't because I don't have a dog.

- Same thing goes for babies.

- Talking about tits, what you ate, or things we've watched on screens of various sizes recently, is not fit for conversation. It's only fit to be filler for commercial breaks.

- Talking about the weather with someone in the same age range as you is forbidden, unless your life might in any way be threatened by the weather. Otherwise the weather can only be discussed with a grandparent and/or your girlfriend's dad, and even then only if it's either really bad or really good.

- Don't use me as a griping board to complain about every little thing that's not going well in your life. I'm not your mother.

- Guess what we're not going to base a conversation on? We're not going to base a conversation on your weight or mine. The conversation will not include how thin or fat you or I looked before, or how much thinner or how much fatter you or I look now. Nor will we speculate on how many kilos worth of more thin or more fat might possibly be estimated to have been lost or gained since last estimation. The only people who care about how they look or how other people look are people who don't have their priorities straight at all. At ALL.

- You don't necessarily have to look straight into my eyes when we're conversing, just my face. Save the self-righteous Jesus stare for when you need to hypnotize your landlady.

- "How are you?" is not a cue for you to start talking about all the intimate minutiae of your daily life. It's also not your cue to talk about how awesome and happy you are and how everything's going great, because that's just depressing to hear.

- Don't talk so loud. I can hear you, I'm right here.

- Talk up a bit, because no matter how normal you think your speaking volume is, I will never be able to hear you as well as you can hear yourself.

- If you're fidgety and restless then you shouldn't be having a conversation. You should be on a treadmill.

- Can you answer my question again without the sarcasm this time please? Thanks.

- The majority of the conversation should not be about what you do or what other people do, but what you think, see and know.

- Throwing in the odd non sequitur comment is good once or twice in a conversation. More than that can be a sign of derangement.

- Don't talk about things and how much they cost. Nobody wants to have a conversation with a shopping catalogue. Talk about ideas instead.

- If you have nothing better to talk about than the people sitting at the table next to us, then I'd rather try having a conversation with the people sitting at the table next to us.

- ", so..." is not the way to finish saying something, and neither is ", so, you know..." If you must, just say ", so... I'm done now, it's your turn to speak."

- Question: Guess who doesn't care about people who talk about themselves? Answer: People who have to listen to people who talk about themselves.

- Don't cut in when I'm talking. You'll know I'm done when I STOP TALKING.

- Oh hey, also, if you look at your fancy phone one more time I'm going to shove it up your nose.

- You will know that you're talking too much when I've stopped participating in the conversation and you're left basically just delivering a monologue. The fact that I'm still looking at you, nodding and agreeing with everything you say while I continue to quietly sip my drink is basically just my polite little way of saying OH MY GOD I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU'RE STILL TALKING.

- Don't say you were kidding. When you have to say you were kidding, it means you weren't kidding.

- Give a slight two-second pause after I'm done talking before segueing from there into your own story. That slight pause indicates that you have listened to me, processed what I have said, and that what I have said has brought to your mind a similar thought worth you talking about and me listening to.

- Follow the logical train of thought of the conversation. When you start jumping to totally different things at random with barely a tenuous link to what came before, that kills the conversation as surely as if it were gibberish and we're both left chasing the fleeing contrail of a blurry point lost in a cluttered maze of unnecessary words.

- If you have to ask me more than twice in a conversation whether I'm listening to you or not, then you've basically got your answer right there haven't you?

- Don't be politically correct. I'm not a magistrate.

- Ok sure, go ahead and tell a story... but not more than one, and only if it's very good, very funny, and short.

- Learn how to make fun of yourself, and admit to your own shortcomings when and where relevant. Conversing with people who take themselves too seriously is like listening to politicians trying to win your vote for how cool they think they are. If you can't talk about anything real or sincere then fuck off.

- Saying something unflattering about yourself relieves me of the task of having to do it for you, and relieves you of the nervous expectation of anything negative being said against you. This benefits us both by helping us relax.

- Don't smirk.

- Don't nitpick every word that comes out of my mouth. Pay attention instead to the overall tone and meaning of what I say. For example, if I say "Are you really a musician?" then that means I'm just asking whether you're a musician or not, so don't go for a smartassy cheapshot like "What do you mean really?" Just say yes or no, fuckface.

- If an awkward situation arises, do not try and skirt around it. The best way to get an elephant out of a room is to accept that it's there and point at it until it goes away. Make light of all awkward situations.

- Don't roll your fucking eyes. I'm right here and you're not invisible, so if you have a problem with something I said just say so instead of making judgmental faces to yourself like you live in an invisible bubble of your own smugness.

- If I am to know anything flattering and good about you, then I need to hear it from anyone but you. Don't spoil your good qualities with such a bad quality as talking about yourself. Let You speak for itself without you having to speak for it.

- Don't give me any bullshit about how you're enlightened, or have been freed of your ego. Saying something like that is the most self-absorbed and egocentric thing imaginable and induces instant dry heaving in anyone who has to hear it. Remember: you're a human being, you have an ego. If you didn't, you would probably die. Come to terms with it, accept it, make friends with it.

- No cliches please! Also, no quotes, no paraphrasing, and no memorized witticisms. If you have something to say, and you happen to be an adult, then you should be able to say it in your own words rather than sounding like an almanac.

- Don't jump to immediate conclusions and get all defensive over something I say. Give me the benefit of the doubt until you're sure I'm saying something not to your liking.

- Don't take anything personally. Assume you are above and beyond the reach of any and all words, opinions and prejudices concerning you. Keep your mind independent of your social being.

- Don't just talk about what you're talking about, but also what's going on as you're talking. Be conscious of your consciousness, and maintain a part of you that's observing what's happening even while another part of you is a part of what's happening. This brings an added, real-time layer to the conversation. For example, referring to the expression you just made when you said what you did, or how what you said sounded like crap, or how your voice sounded on a particular word, etc. It's nice to spontaneously mention impromptu things and make a topic of conversation out of them, because it keeps things fresh and fun. It also shows that you don't take the sound of your own voice too seriously.

- Don't get offended, get even. People who are offended retreat into a shell of indignation for protection and wish that that which offends would go away because they don't like it and it scares them. Instead, sally forth, draw your sword and lock into battle. Defeat what you don't like; don't just ask it to stop.

- If you think we should "catch up", then there's no point in catching up, because if we gave a shit about each other at all then we wouldn't need to catch up.

- Gossip is a suitable topic of conversation only after you've already exhausted a range of other more sophisticated topics such as a clever interchange of witty socio-cultural observations, a dialogue on a great film/book/building/concert/music/person etc., jointly pondering one or two philosophical problems, discussing an interesting episode or twist of history, sharing some heartfelt existential thoughts, and peppering all of that with some great humor, satire and irony, and also maybe even debating some issue involving your favorite sport. Only after you've already gone through all that can you talk about something as vulgar as people you know, even if the gossip is very juicy.

- Seriously, stop playing with your fucking phone.

- If you have nothing to say, don't just say nothing. Instead, say "I have nothing to say". That could in itself lead to an interesting, funny and sincere conversation about the irony of how you're both talking to someone you have nothing to say to. If it doesn't, then you can just say nothing and move on.

- Drink two, at most three, glasses of alcohol for the duration of the conversation. Same principle applies to coffee. More than that leads to senseless loquacity and eventually just the interchange of repetitive monologues of dubitable cogency. Less than that makes you use unnecessary big words like "loquacity", "dubitable" and "cogency" in the same sentence.

- Don't expect me to keep a secret. Why would I keep a secret if you can't keep a secret? The best way to keep something a secret is to just shut the fuck up and KEEP IT A SECRET.

- Don't ask me if I'd mind if you asked me a personal question if I don't know what the question is that you're about to ask me. How the fuck should I know if I mind or not? Ask me if I mind after you ask me the question.

- You don't have to declare that you're about to say something as if you were proclaiming an edict. Just say it.

- Ultimately, the measure of a good conversation is laughter. The more laughter, the better the conversation.

- The measure of a bad conversation is one in which you have to overtly say how much you both enjoyed it, like when you have to state out loud that it was "really good" or "you really connected" or "you had fun" as if you're trying to convince each other that it wasn't dull. The laughter is the bonding, everything else is fake fake fake.

To make sure these points are adhered to, we must also instigate qualifications for good conversationalism. People must be able to talk at a certain level. Maybe we could even have conversation classes in schools, or perhaps include them as part of a General Culture course. Then we could give conversationalists colored belts to wear in public indicating their level of conversational skill, like in Karate. Because really, conversation is what defines you in society. It's such an important aspect of our lives, who we are, and how we're perceived. To leave all that to chance means leaving good conversationalists at the mercy of bores, and that should be considered a crime because it can lead to such consequences as very interesting people choosing to abstain from any social interaction at all anymore. If only J.D. Salinger or Henry David Thoreau had enough good conversationalists around them, they might not have fled to the woods.

p.s. I'm kidding about the Karate belts. I think epaulets might be more practical.

Why do we go out?

2010-02-03T00:50:00.000-08:00

(or "A Trip to the Bar with a Paranoid Recluse")

You're at home all cozy on your couch, just wearing shorts, eating your favorite comfort food, watching TV, surfing the net, reading a book, listening to your favorite music, or maybe just doing nothing at all... but then you decide to drag yourself up on your feet, apply some petroleum-based gel to your face so you can shave hair off with a steel blade, strip naked and douse yourself with water before applying a bar of chemical cleanser all over your body, wriggle and squeeze your way into restrictive clothing, suffocate your genitalia in a pair of underwear, bury your feet into two layers of stuffy damp foot containers, and then gratuitously waste exorbitant amounts of hard-earned money so you can be pressed into a tiny sweaty space with obnoxious music as you sip poisonous ethanol concoctions, suck on cancer sticks, and lose the entire following day to vomiting, sickness and remorse. Why?

Sex, of course. We know that people will pay any price, forsake any comfort, bear any annoyance just to have even a zero-point-two-percent shot at finding a partner to have sex with. We have to do it; our genes tell us to, our bodies are programmed to. We are walking digestive tracts and reproductive organs. Everything else is secondary. Our sensory organs are there to find food and sex, our feet are there to take us to food and sex, our hands are there to possess food and sex, our brains are there to figure out and coordinate how we will find, reach and possess food and sex.

Food is easy, because it involves one passive inanimate mass of nutritious organic energy, and one complex active conscious animate organism (people) to consume it. Sure, sometimes getting food is difficult--especially if you're very poor or just live in a bad place for it, like Africa or the Arctic--but it's mostly widely available and easily acquired. Even if you aren't fortunate enough to have access to an efficient system of food production and distribution that involves the acquisition of slaughtered beings in nice neat packages in return for money, food is still a straightforward deal. Even if you have to hunt for it, the roles are set in stone: food will try and run, you will try and catch it, then when you catch it you will gleefully tear its guts out and eat it without any moral compunction as your prey dies a horrible death that you could give two shits about because, well, you're hungry.

This is not the case with sex, because sex involves two complex active animate conscious organisms that are both full of equally complex feelings, emotions, insecurities and neuroses - not to mention strange bodily ailments ranging from bad breath to possibly anything from a limp to a lazy eye. These two problematic organisms then have to negotiate past all of these complications through clumsy and ridiculous rituals just on the off chance that it will all somehow lead to a shot at copulation. Sometimes these rituals take weeks, involving the provision of numerous expensive gifts, spending obscene amounts of money on elaborate eating ceremonies, wasting further time and money on awkward and insincere conversations over phone, food or long aimless walks, asking and answering an endless series of humiliating questions that are thinly veiled attempts to establish some kind of awkward compatibility or connection founded on trivial things like whether one prefers cats or dogs or whether one likes mustard or ketchup. And at the end of it all there is still no guarantee that you will have sex.

Sure, we might also go out to mingle or hone our social skills or have a laugh or do a little networking or just to blow off steam, but we will rarely sacrifice our comfort for any of those reasons unless there is also the chance--even the infinitesimal chance--of something sexual going on in some way. After all, you don't go to mingle/laugh/talk/network/relax just anywhere, you go to a place where there is music, alcohol and people of the opposite sex. This all goes to show just how strong our drive to have sex is, because nothing else could possibly stir us to such illogical and Herculean deeds as having to leave soft, warm, homey comfortland for horrible, competitive, bitchy outsideworld. Most of us would barely stir if somebody's life was in danger. In fact, most of us don't even stir when our own lives are in danger. Every day we subject ourselves to the deadly dangers of overeating, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs and lack of exercise without doing a thing about it. But when sex is involved, we are capable of spending $49.99 on a bottle of stinky water with some pretentious French name to splash across our face and $34.95 on an overrated skin cream that we think will reduce wrinkles. And then we go out and spend the rest of our money and health standing around being bored most of the time just because there's the slightest possibility of maybe perhaps getting it on with someone other than ourselves for a change.

And so before you know it, there you are, up off your couch and drowsily getting ready to go to a bar or attend a social gathering for some strange reason conscious You doesn't comprehend, but unconscious genetic molecular You could write a 5000-page treatise on in double helix format.

Conscious You is perplexed. After all, there are a lot of things to consider and negotiate before you can even get anywhere near the point where you might meet a possible sexual partner. The effort starts before you leave the house, at the point where you've taken the decision to exit your wombnest. Who'll be there? Friends, frenemies, ex-girlfriends? You start picturing in your mind a roomful of imaginary people you would both ideally want to be there and also those you would dread to see there. Depending on which set of imaginary people have the numerical advantage in the imaginary room, you will decide to continue and carry out your plan to leave safeland or cease this silly and illogical plan once and for all and return to chez-You to continue playing Solitaire while eating Cheetos and watching South Park reruns.

Let's say the imaginary ideal friends and couple of hotties you had in your mind's eye were populous enough to spur you on, and you make it outside and find yourself at the bar. You are now confronted by the reality: not all the friends, hotties and frenemies you imagined would be there are there, but instead there's just a whole lot of people who didn't figure in your mind at all before you got there, and who are just generally oblivious to you. You imagined that everyone would be conscious of your presence, for better or for worse. But the reality is that the people there could generally give a pig's ass whether you're there or not. Strange, none of them ignored you in your head. In fact, you were the center of attention, if you remember correctly.

Still, you do find that there are some people there that you know. But do you know them well enough to go and say hi first without reintroducing yourself? You know you met that person once, maybe twice, but will they remember you? Is it conceited of you not to reintroduce yourself and assume they already know you? What if they don't remember you at all and it's just all awkward and they're wondering who the hell you are? Also, when and how do you go up and say hi? Should you wait for them to come to you, or should you do it? Should you do it as soon as you see them? But what if they're in a conversation? Do you interrupt the conversation to say hi? Do you also have to say hi to the other people in that group, even though you don't know them? Or do you ignore them and act like they're not there? Or do you just scrap that whole idea and wait for some other more convenient time to say hi, like when you pass in the hallway or at the bar or outside the toilet? But then will they think you snubbed them by not going up to them and saying hi right away before? If you put off the immediate greeting then will you be spending the rest of the night trying to say hi the moment you make first eye contact? What if they always avoid the eye contact thinking you snubbed them? If you greet them later, should you explain that you saw them before and noticed they were there and wanted to say hi but didn't because you didn't want to interrupt them? If you want to play it cool and safe and not go up and say hi to everyone, does that seem snobby and stuck up? Then again, if you go up right away as soon as you see someone and say hi, is that pushy and desperate? Also, do you actually say hi or just nod your head when you make eye contact? What if they're in a conversation and you make eye contact, then do you go up and interrupt to say hi anyway? If you miss the chance to say hello at the first instance, do you then ignore and avoid that person all night - if not for the rest of your life because it'll always be awkward after that since neither of you will be sure if the other person likes you or not? Which group of people do you go up to mingle with first? Once there, when do you break off and mingle with others? How soon should you get to everyone else? Is your fly undone? Are your clothes weird? Is your hair ok? Can they notice your zit? Maybe you should go straight to the toilet and lock yourself in a cubicle until you figure it all out.

But then you hit the perfect idea that will keep you looking normal: just go straight to the bar and buy a drink. That wins you time, and also gets you a nervous plaything to grab and suck on like a big baby's pacifier. Now you can walk around the room without feeling totally useless, naked and insecure, sucking away at your comforting beer teet as you plan your next move.

Let's say you do somehow manage to interact with someone else, how does the whole question-and-answer ritual get played out? What do you ask and how do you answer? How do you say the things you'd like people to know you do without coming off as seeming conceited and vain? Or how do you avoid talking about what you do altogether? If you do have to say what it is you're doing, how do you describe it? How do you find the right balance between self-deprecation and self-promotion? How often should you come up with witty quips? Do you do small talk, or do you try and strike a risky off-beat quirky conversation to establish how cool and different you are and how you don't talk about the usual mundane stuff? If you do do that, can you follow through with it, or will it start seeming unnatural and make you look like a complete jackass within 3 minutes?

Oh shit, eye contact! Across the room, eye contact with pretty girl... and lingering too, lingering for ages, at least 1.7 seconds. That's like an eye contact eon. Play it cool, but not too cool. It's all a fine balance. Stay cool and removed too long and she loses interest... I should go talk to her. Then all I have to do is become instantaneously fun, sharp and witty on some random topic of choice and make her laugh a lot. Jesus, that sounds so difficult. I'll walk slowly toward that general direction... or fast? Show some moxie, be assertive? Yes, here I go, look at her and go up and... oh shit, she's started talking to some guy. Quick, change course, but don't lose pace, that will show indecision and insecurity, not to mention dejection... got to keep walking, and there I go past her... damn it, there's no one here to talk to, the bar is behind me... yes, the bathrooms are just over there in the corner, act like you're going to the bathroom and go to the bathroom. Wait, don't ACT like you need to go to the bathroom, that's just weird. Just walk to the bathroom. Should I leave the drink on a table before I go in? Weird having your drink in a bathroom, little shit and piss particles floating around the air' dropping into your drink... yes, leave the glass on a table and go in. I bet nobody's gone to the toilet with such a determined stride. I'm a very confident incontinent.

Ok, hang out in the stall for a bit and then head back out. Check self in mirror. Check hair... don't touch the hair don't touch the hair don't touch the... damn it I touched the hair. Rearrange it a bit, no, more... there's no end to this. I know every little twirl and bump in my hair, and I'm trying to sculpt the perfect scalp. Am I scalpting? STOP, focus, leave... did I just talk to myself? Did I say that out loud? Why did that guy just look at me? Maybe he knows me? Should I say hi, am I being rude by ignoring him? Of course not, who says hi in the toilet? Strange and gross. "Hi, I couldn't help but notice that you had your dick in your hand! Let me introduce myself!"

Ok, outside again and... sure enough my drink's gone. It takes six hours to get their attention at the fucking bar just to get an eight-dollar drink, but when it comes to taking your drink they're suddenly efficient. They probably follow your every move and as soon as they see you away from your drink, they jump in and take it. The waiters and the bartenders are probably all in it together, resentful at having to serve people having fun, so they're secretly trying to sabotage everything... oh wait, there's my drink. Wrong table. Or maybe they just play mind games with you and shift your drink around when you're not looking? Assholes!

There she is, walking toward the bar, she's alone, now's your chance... go go go... damn, here's what's-her-face... she just said hi... she's so pretentious... typical "hey, so what are you up to?" bleh, so bleh bleh bleh bleh bleh... shit, I'm cornered. Insert stupid pointless chit chat here.

"I'm ok, doing nothing, not much I mean..."

She's still looking at me... say something... I have to continue... fuck

"...you know, this and that..."

This is excruciating. She's still staring at me. Just take that answer and move on for fuck's sake!

"...Just wrote something for somewhere, so... you know, the usual... aaanyway"

There, that should do.

"What did you write? For where?"

ARGHHHHH! How do people not get it when you don't want to talk about something? We should walk around with green and red lights on our collars; when green, you may proceed to draw out conversation, when red, just exchange pleasantries and fuck off.

"Oh, just this article on, you know, politics, the ruling party, blah blah blah, so what about you? What have..."

"Really? What do you say in the article?"

Nothing. I say NOTHING.

"Well, you know, it's a critique of the recent decision to... gerrymander the... will you wait a second? I'll be right back..."

RUN RUN RUN... There she is, go up and say hi NOW, don't think, don't think, you're thinking... fuck it, you're almost there... is this strange? This seems unnatural and forced, maybe you should... DAMN IT, YOU'RE THINKING! ABORT! just... abort... Plan B, go to bar! Yes! Slam the beer down fast... ugh, that was unnecessary, whatever... and hit the bar. Thank god, huge line at the bar, all packed, this will take at least 10 minutes, plenty of time to pick a perfect moment to approach her... Where is she? Can't see her. Make subtle and seemingly indifferent visual sweep of room and... nope, she's nowhere...

Oh shit, she's RIGHT behind me! What now? I don't really want a drink. But you can't just go up and talk to someone without a drink in your hand. With drink, saying hi, you look casual. Without drink, saying hi, you look like a potential serial killer. Wait, do I even have money? Damn it. Credit card, put it on the credit card. Also, I'm right in front of her, she is studying every single tiny little thing I'm doing. She's sees everything. I feel naked. Damn, I should have shaved the back of my neck. I had a pimple on my neck... Is that gone? Was it? Feel back of neck... still a bump... is it white and gross? Ok, fuck it. She's probably judging my character by how I stand in line and make it to the bar... I have to be assertive, I have to be pushy and aggressive like everyone else... I don't want to be, I'm happy to wait my turn and even let others pass... but she'll think I'm a walk-over. Am I a walk-over? Maybe I am? Who am I kidding, she wouldn't like a walk-over. Is that right, "walk-over"? Maybe it's pushover? Ok, you pushover, at least stand cool. Put both hands casually into back pocket of jeans and place one leg around the other and tilt head to the side... No, I feel too relaxed, also I could lose my balance with all this pushing and shoving for elbow room at the bar. Keep legs apart... yes, better balance, and... ok, keep arms in back pocket... no, move to the front pockets... Do I have my hands down my pants too much? Does that give the subliminal message that I'm fond of masturbation? I am fond of masturbation, who isn't? But too much? Ok, put hands on hips... no no, now I look indignant. Damn, I just want to be natural, but nothing feels natural anymore, it's all so contrived. Damn it, this is too much pressure... There's a gap! a gap! the chick on the side just got to arguing with her friend, and on the other side that drunk guy just keeled over and had to be caught by those waiting beside him who are now giving him a talking to... Perfect, I'm storming the breach! Or am I breaching the storm? GO GO!

How's that for assertiveness! Mister Man takes the bar, how you like me now? FUCK YEAH! Now, gotta get bartender's attention very quickly, otherwise I'll still seem like a pushover. After all, it looks like I just lucked out on the gap... In fact I probably seem like an opportunistic little prick... got to redeem myself with quick attention-getting of said bartender...

"ONE BEER! HEY, ONE B..." ok, he's serving guy next to me, now that guy seems more important and manly than me. Must tilt in and wave hand in bartender's face...

"ONE BEER, HEY BUDDY, ONE BEER!"

"Buddweiser?"

"NO, I SAID BUDDY, NOT BUDDWEISER, I WANT A..."

Damn it, all he heard was "Buddweiser"...

"NO NO, I WANT A DIFFERENT..."

Aaaand he opened and served the Buddweiser... Just take it, fuck it. Oh great, it's warm too. God, she probably thinks I'm a complete walk-over now... pushover... take out money... fuck, no money, hand him the card...

Come on, come on, please work... please let card work... MIRACLE!

Yes, got my drink, paid for it... well, overpaid for it, fucking eight dollars for a beer... Turn around now and introduce the man of her dreams to her who dreams of a man like me in her dreams... Hey where did she go?

Well, maybe it's better, fuck it... that means I'm still not looking bad... not looking good either, but at least not looking like a pushwalkover...

Ok, there she is with a girlfriend of hers, now it's time to saunter on over. She looked my way again! That's it, this is meant to be, fuck yeah, here I go, so close now...

Oh shit, my friends! Damn it, I don't want her to hear our inside lingo, it's embarrassing. She'll wonder why we punch our fists in the air and lisp and crack our voices when we say "HEY DICKFACE, KOOKACHOO!" Even we don't know what that means anymore or where it came from... I think it was what's-his-name... that time in... whatever...

Embarrassing embarrassing embarrassing... God, I can't even bear to look at her now... Oh, great, we're getting all physical and getting into the homo jokes. Brilliant. Shoot me. Can't be uncool though, have to answer and hold my own... so tedious.... this ritual always takes at least five minutes... Good, made semi-witty retorts where demanded, called him a "fag" back, drank a swill of beer, punched him on the arm in return for his grabbing my ass, that should maintain my place in the guy group hierarchy... Can I try and get laid now please? Can't mention her though, too close, they'll just stare at her and shout "Nice tits, shame you're an ass man!" Why? Wait, does she have a big ass? I can't tell. I don't want to look. I don't want to spoil it. Don't look at her ass.

Her ass is fine! It's great! Glad I looked.

Good, my friends are off outside to smoke. Perfect chance, she's right there. Do it!

"Hi... uuuhh"

Can't think.... nothing... blank... beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep... shut down

"Hi"

She talked to me, good sign. Now all I have to do is magically create an entertaining and witty conversation out of thin air.

"Can I buy you a drink?"

"I have a drink."

"Can I buy you..."

...everything in the world? Stop asking her what you should buy her! Change tack, you have about 5 seconds before she walks off.

"My name is..."

Stupidass! Hi, I'm Stupidass!

"Hi, I'm..." Didn't get her name, in one ear out the other. I blew it. If I don't ask her name again within the next two seconds I can never ask her name again.

Find something in common and say something funny about it. Just don't ask her if she comes here a lot...

"Do you come... here..."

"What?"

"... a lot?"

"Do I what a lot?"

God kill me now.

"Nothing nothing, nevermind, I just said Do you come here a lot? but it's not..."

"No"

Run away, run away, run away, run away, run away, run away

I have it! I'll do that thing where you ask which of two random choices she prefers concerning a range of hypothetical non sequitur questions!

"So... ketchup or mustard?"

Oh no, this is horrible, can I take that back?

"What?"

"Uh... nevermi... well, which would you pick, metchup or kustard?

"Custard, I don't know what metchup is"

"No no, I mean, ketchup or mustard"

Great she just sighed and looked at other people while I was talking, that's a GREAT sign.

"I don't know."

"But you have to pick one!"

"No I don't."

Good point.

"Yeah, I guess you're right, you don't really do you."

"Nope."

All hope is lost, stop trying. It's over.

"Has this been the worst come-on you've ever had or what?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

Wow, did she just smile?

"Usually what goes on in your head is pretty good compared to what comes out, but what was going on in my head was even worse than what you were hearing, could you imagine that?"

She giggled!

"It must've been very bad."

"In my defense, I actually warned myself against making almost each and every inane utterance before they came out..."

"You should've listened to yourself then, huh?"

Giggles! There are giggles and smiles! And even eye contact!

"Nah, I always think I'm giving myself the wrong advice. I only realize in retrospect that I was actually giving myself the right advice... If I had a time machine, I'd be the perfect picker-upper."

"Well I hope they invent one of those soon, for your sake."

Oh my God, could this be witty repartee-ing? Is this back-and-forth banter? Am I engaged in actual human interaction? It's almost... natural.

"What would you do if you had a time machine?"
I ask.

Wow, I'm not even thinking about what I'm saying anymore, it's all just flowing out by itself, a smooth and natural progression... two minutes ago, that same sentence would've been horrible... but now she smiled and showed her teeth, and... yes, I think she just touched her hair!

"Welllll, maybe I'd go back to the beginning of this conversation and accept that drink you offered me?"

"It's never too late for some things, even without a time machine... I'll go get you that drink."

What did that cheesy shit just mean?! No idea, but who cares? There was a logic to it in the rhythm of the conversation and the words didn't even really matter anymore. The real language is now, finally, physical... it's in the eyes, the hands, the body, the expressions, the mouth... and it just simply, magically meshes in the easy, meaningless back and forth of the banter. It's nice when that happens.

"Here's your beer... drink it before it gets cold."

"Great! Where were we?"

"I was in my time machine, getting you that drink."

"O yeah, so we went back in time to the beginning where you told me your name, right"

"Right."

"Well then I'm pleased to meet you."

The rest of the night happened, mercifully, outside my head.

International citizens of the world, separate then unite!

2008-05-10T01:41:00.000-07:00

It's time to throw off our national shackles and finally become official passport-holding international citizens.

It's a common scene at any airport. You're waiting in line at the passport control, patiently standing there in a pair of Havaianas with your Macbook slung over your shoulder and a copy of the International Herald Tribune tucked under your arm (with crossword proudly completed, even though it's only a Monday), downloading a podcast of the latest TED lecture on creative solutions to Sub-Saharan soil erosion while tapping your feet to the indie-ska playlist on your iPod. But, try as you might to recreate a secluded bubble miniverse of your refined postmodern lifestyle-in-transit, you're unable to drown out the stinging awareness of a shoddy herd of your fellow nationals who have plodded off the same flight and who now form a fleshy ring of redundant DNA around your snug little aural orbit. You flup-flup to your Chopin playlist for comfort and perform some meditative breathing exercises you picked up in Yoga class. But it all falls short as the vacant-eyed family bickers loudly in a painfully intelligible language--your language--about who ate the last pack of complimentary airplane peanuts while their chubby offspring repeatedly scream and crash into your legs with jerky high-fructose-corn-syrup-fueled spasms of stubborn attention-deprived insistence. The walls have been breached, the barbarians are clumsily lumbering through.

Whether we are Americans or Italians or Turks or Indians or Mexicans, we have all been through those moments. We have all on those occasions looked out across and beyond that depressing snare of fellow nationals in the hope of catching the eyes of some other sparkling doppelganger for wonderful-hip-sophisticated Us. We feel that those rare gems we spot here and there, those exquisite dead ringers for super cool you and me, are our real fellow nationals, regardless of their actual nationality, and we wonder despairingly why it is that our bureaucratic and statistical fate has instead become intertwined with that semi-educated clan of soft-drink-guzzling, white-bread eating neanderthals simply because they were born within the same political parameters as us.

Why, we reason further, can we--who often define ourselves as "international citizens" anyway--not become actual official international citizens of the world?

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Let's face it, nationality is no longer an accepted mode of identification for many of us. At best, it's trite and meaningless. At worst, it's the primary root of war, atrocity and genocide in the modern age (although religion gives it a good run for its money, which is why they usually go hand in hand). Look at any modern polity, and you'll find that those who still lend any credence to nationalism as a political movement are the least educated, most bigoted, and most latently or outright racist segments of that society. As a partial reaction to this, these days the more sophisticated members of those societies use terms like "citizen of the world", "international citizen" or "global nomad" to define themselves. These are people who feel more in common with those who share similar lifestyles and socio-cultural frames of reference--regardless of ethnicity or nationality--than they do with those who were born and live in the same country as them.

And rightly so. After all, the only thing that really ties you to fellow nationals is that you happen to be born under the rule of the same state power, which you're all thereby condemned to pay money, time, labor and even your life to (in the form of military service and wage labor) in return for an endless stream of bills that charge you for basic human necessities like water, heat, education and health. But that's not all. You also get an incessant lifetime bombardment of cunning and manipulative advertising devices that are always trying to sucker you into spending money or going into debt; you get the possibility of war over some stupid piece of land somewhere that you could give two shits about; and you get the threat of imprisonment if you decide not to bow to the norm and accept your subservience to flag, country and credit cards. Meanwhile, as you're standing in line at your local bank trying to pay a late bill so the water authority can turn your water back on, your government will be spending billions of that money on tanks, fighter jets, vote-enticing white elephants, and entertainment expenses for the visiting criminal head of state of Oilandgasistan, in between bailing out billionaire bankers who did a little whoopsy daisy with everybody's money.

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But is there no real substance to nationality? What about language? Sure, speaking a common language is an important bond, considering that language is what we construct our thoughts upon--and essentially the semantic mortarboard that our modern nation states were built with--but anyone who's had a good education and has traveled around and lived in a foreign country or two would be expected to speak up to two or three foreign languages anyway--at least one of them probably well enough to work, write, argue, fight and fuck in. So then what's so special about your mother tongue? Besides, you don't feel any more of a "national" bond with someone from a foreign country whom you can perfectly speak a common foreign language with, so why should you necessarily feel any more of a politically-binding sentiment with a person you speak your native language with?

But what about the case for shared traditions and customs? Yes, these are fundamental to creating the sense of intimate bonds that are crucial for maintaining a friction-free society where you buy gifts on birthdays and attend weddings and visit aunts and uncles on official holidays, and pronounce stock slogans of affection and well-wishing on precisely outlined occasions, kissing hands, rubbing cheeks, etc. But for those with creative and inquisitive spirits, things like traditions and customs are oppressive and time-consuming ritualistic social burdens that are fine for people who need some kind of safe and standard set of ready-made rules and practices to abide by with the least possible mental exertion demanded, but which fall far short of satisfying those who have better things to do with their lives. Rather than be content with simply acting out hollow manifestations for the give and take of respect, love, gratitude and sorrow for the sake of running a well-oiled social network, some people seek to experience such emotions and acts in sincere, challenging and authentic conditions, perhaps even to question the whole ethical and behavioral fabric upon which the society they've been born into is founded upon, and maybe even to experience how different societies do things--if not to actually even create their own way of doing things. So traditions are fine if you need some cheap filler for all those long tedious stretches of the average human existence. But for those few who have things to do beyond mere labor-giving and child-bearing, their lives are way too short to spend on forced togethernesses and fake happy occasions that have been circled on calendars and RSVP'ed three months in advance.

What about religion? Religion sort of fits into national customs and traditions anyway. Although many customs and traditions don't have their origins in religious practices or dogma, they are eventually co-opted by and melded into them. But the very idea of dogma--though obviously useful and precious to many--is woefully unsatisfactory to those who want to experience life without being tied down with precious lists of holy dos and don'ts, eternal rewards and punishments, sacred carrots and sticks, and simplistic "God made it so, therefore it is so" kinds of arguments that seem like an insult to intelligence and nature. Common prayers, surreal religious buildings, choral music, codified morals, sanctified art, stories of miracles and mystery are all well and good enough for those who have to get on with their lives without the time to waste on fancy philosophizing and existential questioning when there's a living that has to be made and children that have to be fed and raised... But for others, that sort of stuff is just not going to cut it, and will merely be of anthropological interest at best. Let's face it, smart people don't want to live with a giant metaphysical nanny called God anymore, let alone all that religious hocus-pocus that comes with it. We read about quantum mechanics now, not angels.

On a profaner note, how about education? We are all bombarded with references to our common national destiny and identity through education (and in the media--which is an auxiliary arm of the education machine), but this is little more than propaganda to give the illusion of commonality to better justify and legitimize state coercion. The very idea of a "nation", (Latin "nascere", to be born, as in "those of the same womb") implies that we are all of a common origin*. Our state-controlled education takes this concept of common origins one step further, by anachronistically inserting a relatively recent political and ideological phenomenon (nationalism and nation states have only been around for the past 200 odd years) into thousands of years of history, so that your "nation" seems retrospectively to have existed in some form even back in times when nobody referred to themselves as being a member of that nation, or even knew what a nation was, often defining themselves on tribal, religious or clan lines instead. And that's if they "defined" themselves at all, since concepts like "identity" and "definition" are relatively modern (or arguably now postmodern) terms. So we read our modern identity into great achievements in history (while conveniently blurring over the great atrocities), believing that there is somehow some proto-nation that has existed all along, doing this and building that and conquering here and moving over there, until bam, your country is finally founded--like the shining predestined historic culmination of a millennial teleology that has become a self-fulfilling prophesy in reverse. In other words, hooey.

And the media? The media just props up the propaganda ingrained in us through education, replenishing and reproducing it with every news and social affairs item that we are nudged into feeling we should identify with and care about. The media is like the light protective surface sheen that's there to maintain a fresh gloss over the hard, ugly, sturdy brainwashing meted out during a decade of state education in our vulnerable and formative childhood years. Education gives a vertical depth to the myth of national bonds, while the media gives it horizontal reach and scope. Its power is that it even brings in seemingly trivial aspects of life into the orbit of nationalist agitprop. It ties us all in as a nation through seemingly trifling items of news that have moral and existential dimensions, with the aim of eliciting from us an opinion on everything, because we believe that everything concerns "us" as [insert plural form of your nationality's name here]--the earthquake in so-and-so, the war in over-yonder, the genocide out-in-what's-it-called, and the man who cheated on his wife and sold his child's kidney on what's-her-face's talk show. Even the weather report gives the sense of common national destiny ("Get out your umbrellas Ireland, it's going to be rainy!"). And so your opinion for or against becomes irrelevant, because it's enough to simply draw you into the debate in the first place so that you have an opinion at all. And once you have an opinion, you've become a part of the imaginary national discourse as yet another "concerned individual" trapped in an endless 24-7 barrage of current affairs. You have become part of a market, and the greater the extent of that market, the greater the audience, the better the ratings, the more receptive the ideologically-molded populace, and thus the more the revenue to be made from a population that is involved with little more than rapid sequential images on a screen.

Sports also works to uphold the national varnish, though more as an addendum to education and media (since sports by itself cannot forge a sense of nationhood--with the possible exception of Australia) as it facilitates a great means of forming a bonding frame of identification without actually verbalizing it. You can talk about a team or a player at length, and even argue and dispute each others' views, but what's really going on underneath is a kind of sexual (mostly male), social, regional and national bonding depending on what competition or team is being identified with and discussed at a given time. The ritual of watching a game with your national team playing the world championships in blah-blah-ball as you wave a flag alongside someone you would probably never even talk to or meet in day-to-day life, is a powerful one, which is why these rituals are evenly and consistently spaced out at regular intervals on international and national blahblah-ball calendars.

Perhaps the most that nationalism has going for it is land and economy. After all, the food people buy and the water they drink has to come from somewhere. There have to be fields where corn and potatoes and wheat and rice grow, and there have to be rivers that are dammed for electricity, water and irrigation. Then you have to build the necessary transportation and logistic infrastructure to bring it all to the cities. This has until now formed a strong and practical bond upon which to build a political entity and a national identity. But is that still the case? Economy has by now far-transcended national boundaries. These days we talk about the world economy. The food being grown and raised 100 kilometers from you is probably being exported somewhere else, feeding South Africans or Malaysians or Japanese. Most of the food you eat may also be coming from other countries, and so too with electricity. Also, few countries have a complete monopoly on major water resources, most of which necessitate international sharing. International market prices and currency exchange rates determine what you pay and what you consume. Technology like refrigeration, air and sea and rail transport, international commodity markets, the internet, all make a mockery of distance. That's not to say some states don't still strive for truly national economies, but they're all outcast hermit misfits like North Korea, Iran or Cuba, none of which can be seriously termed overall success stories. A Polish farmer is happy to grow food that may be going to Venezuela, and someone living in Warsaw is fine with buying a couch that was made in Sweden. So too a British company will build its factory wherever the labor is cheapest and not necessarily in Britain. If Turkish olive oil was cheaper than Greek, the Greeks would be gulping it down. So, if anything, modern economics has eroded the bonds of nationality, and with the technological advancements in logistics and finance, the importance of geographic boundaries has diminished.

So then what's left to uphold the nation? Precious little beyond dissimulation and thaumaturgy. The guy you hugged and draped the flag around during last night's match is probably the guy you're looking at disdainfully from the corner of your eye on the metro. The woman with cheap perfume and a mole under her nose standing in line with you in the same supermarket queue while shouting into her cell phone in a grating rustic accent, buying a big disgusting bag of junk food for her children, is supposed to be considered to be from the same distant womb as you. And the guy trying to rip off a tourist with sleazy advances is someone you will stand shoulder to shoulder with when the time comes to defend your country from the big bad [insert your particular national enemy here].

Well, fuck all that. It's time for an alternative. It's time for an international citizenry of like-minded people who will carry human civilization on to a new stage of socio-political evolution by calling bullshit on all institutionalized modes of systematic ideological manipulation and deceit.

It's time for official international passport holding World Citizens.

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Consider people from New York, London, Istanbul, Paris, Mexico City, Sydney, Johannesburg, Mumbai or Tokyo. They would have more in common with each other than they would with their fellow nationals who live just 50 kilometers away in some small town where most people die where they're born, where flags are waved on national days, and where bumper stickers declare pride in vapid heroic national slogans that are founded on pointless idealized slaughterfests that wasted millions of lives in the name of national "causes" (i.e. politicians' power interests). Instead, those sophisticated cosmopolitan denizens of the great metropolises of the world would have similar lifestyles to each other, regardless of country or geographic proximity. They would work in similar jobs, eat similar foods, watch similar things on TV, see similar films at the cinema, travel to similar places for vacations, engage in similar pastimes, sports, recreation and hobbies in their spare time, and they would all enjoy and have access to the best that civilization has to offer in terms of art, design, architecture and overall style-of-living. In other words, they would be defined and identified by a common way of life that can perhaps be identified (albeit rather pompously) as the "art of living".

A typical day for these global metropolitans would include some Starbucks Ethiopian Blend coffee in the morning in front of the TV while clicking through the BBC news site on their iMacs with maybe the National Geographic channel or CNN on the flat screen Hi-Def TV in the background, before setting off to their own design studio or architectural firm or academic or corporate position in a state-of-the-art office located in a high-tech eco-friendly building designed by a famous architect, and then driving home in their hybrid car where they'll download a film-festival award-winner from Netflix or iTunes while listening to some nu-jazz streaming through their invisible Bose speakers as they cook up a nice light Thai curry that they'll enjoy with a fine Australian Riesling wine on the side, while waiting for their photographer girlfriend whose flight is about to arrive from Berlin and who should text them on their Blackberry as soon as they land.

Of course, when I refer to a day in the life of this certain "someone", I don't mean just anyone. I mean someone who defines themselves as a "world citizen". Someone who abides by that admittedly peppy yet apposite mantra of thinking global and acting local; someone who defines themselves as an international citizen; someone who has the education, social awareness, cultural accumulation, aesthetic refinement, economic wherewithal, and lifestyle tastes that distinguishes them from the norm. Someone for whom business, family and pleasure are holistically intertwined into a sense of life and living as an artistic and creative endeavor.

These are people whose lives take them all over the world, people for whom boundaries are not only meaningless, but an outright obstacle to their need to live without boundaries. These people want to move to Hong Kong for a couple of years if they have to, or go to Rio de Janeiro for a friend's wedding, or decide to travel around Australia for six months, or want to get together with friends from other world cities for a week's skiing in Val d'Isere, or who move to Shanghai to be both nearer to a dynamic financial market and also to satisfy their need to be in a place where they can pursue their love of Wing Chun while also being better located to set off for some scuba-diving getaways in Micronesia. In short, these are people for whom political boundaries are not only pointless but a nuisance, for whom national passports and visa regulations are a royal pain in the ass, and for whom nationality is a mere bureaucratic hindrance. Isn't it time that these self-described international citizens became official International Citizens, with the necessary legal rights that cater to their own unique lifestyle? Isn't it time to do away with the heavy lugubrious nation-state bureaucracies that have become comical and arcane Swiftian satires in the postmodern world? Isn't it time to lift this giant red-ink-blotched paperweight off our collective backs to finally enable us to pursue a lighter, freer, more productive way of life?

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So how do we implement international citizenship? There will obviously be some major obstacles, not least of which is why a state would willingly let go of tax-paying, labor-giving, soldier-forming, crap-buying subjects. Furthermore, wouldn't this be a mockery of all the ideals a nation-state stands for? Not necessarily. Well, actually, yes... but not to the extent that one might think.

First of all, the people who would be eligible for international citizenship would be those people who would not want to give their time--let alone their lives--for any national cause like war or even military service anyway, so why have reluctant half-ass troops? Plus they'd be too intelligent (and probably soft) to make either expendable or good troops out of, so good riddance to them. Secondly, they are not the morons who buy processed food and drink gallons of carbonated sludge and buy shit they see off infomercials--in other words, they're quite a small minority of the population--so they're not part of that massive population of brainwashed drones that giant companies can make their money off of. Thirdly, they are not usually the kind of people who engage in wage labor. More likely they're freelancers or independent agents who do their own thing, and whose job and business probably has a pretty international scope anyway.

But there are a few obvious problems: 1) it seems elitist, 2) you lose a tax-source, 3) you lose qualified, educated citizens in a kind of brain drain that would have obvious deleterious effects on the national economy, and 4) the ideological foundation of your nation state would be seriously challenged and hurt, because if the best and brightest are bailing out from the nationality illusion, then all the sacred symbolic and ritual foundations upon which the whole ideological edifice has been built could come tumbling down... Let's face it, it's hard to argue in favor of national duty and personal sacrifice for the greater national good in defense of the mother/father/homeland if there are those among you who have the option to just say "No thanks!" to the whole thing and opt out of the club. Finally, 5) what sort of bureaucratic framework has to be established for an institution that is meant to circumvent bureaucracy in the first place?

So considering these issues, how could you build a workable foundation in which international citizenship could become a reality and nation states would agree to such an innovation?

Let's start with the last question first. Obviously some kind of bureaucracy is needed because we can't realistically be expected to return to the golden age of travel in the 19th century when technological innovation in rapid and comfortable transport happened to felicitously coincide with free and open borders (modern countries were really just coming into existence) and little or no documentation required to cross them, nor any limits on how long you could stay in a foreign country. People in those days assumed that anyone who had the wherewithal for travel was probably the sort of person you wouldn't mind having around in your country. Even in the 1970s, if you missed a flight you could just jump on the next one with no questions asked, even if it was a different airline! Of course, this is sadly no longer the case. Now people are treated as statistics, and all considered guilty until proven innocent. If you are not from a white and affluent country, you're subjected to the racist humiliation of having to get a visa. That means you have to go through the disgrace of having to declare that you are NOT a terrorist, and you even have to provide them with your bank account details to prove that you have money... plus you have to provide a list of all your possessions, a bill under your name to prove you have a house, and a copy of your company payroll to prove not only that you have a job but that you have a well-paying job. Then you have to wait at least a week for the White Gods of Whiteland to deliberate on whether you are worthy of visiting their precious little country. And even then you can't stay more than a set period of time, and at a predetermined address. And as if that wasn't enough to make you feel like scum, you even need a letter of guarantee from a national of Legoland who has to state officially that they vouch for you and take full responsibility in the event that you turn out to be not a human being but an evil jackal-headed demon. Governments are so aware of the arrogant affront to human dignity that the entire disgraceful visa process represents, that they take care that you are never actually in contact with their own nationals. They instead hire locals from the country in which the visa application is being made -- either as staff in the embassy or through private companies that carry out the visa process for the embassy -- just so you have no target to vent your frustration and anger toward, and you only end up getting angry at your own nationals. In other words, they even deprive you of the pleasure of being able to call them racists to their faces. And as if that wasn't enough, you also have to pay hundreds of dollars once you succeed in actually getting the visa.

International citizenship is meant to help people get around this whole horrific system. Why should only diplomats get to go wherever they please with their shiny red passports? If anything, they're the ones who should be made to suffer the same indignity that is meted out on mankind by the very states they represent. So here's what I propose:

- A department of International Citizenry at the U.N. could be set up. All international ID/passports will be issued, regulated and controlled by this organization. It will not be subject to any national jurisdiction.

- The tax issue could be resolved if the international citizen pays part of their annual international citizenship fees to the national government from which they have seceded. Furthermore, international citizens would maybe be required to pay a little income tax or residency tax (or both) to the country in which they reside/work (the aim being to get nation states on board with the project).

- You are considered an international citizen in whichever country you reside, wherever you travel and wherever you work. Your embassy in any country will be the U.N. embassy. However, in criminal proceedings, you will be subject to the laws of the country you reside in.

- Your passport is actually more like an international identity card, and it's also good for traveling anywhere and everywhere without a visa. You may reside and work anywhere in the world without need of a residency permit. Your international citizenship fees and income and residency taxes will suffice.

- To become an international citizen, there will necessarily be tough criteria that will be invigilated by the United Nations Department of International Citizenry, or U.N.D.I.C. Criteria may include a university degree, a standardized written and oral exam, interviews, and knowledge of several languages -- at least two of which must be major internationally spoken languages (English, French, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, etc.), plus the means to pay for an international lifestyle, fees, residency tax, income tax, etc.

- Certain professions get automatic international citizenship, including accomplished scientists, academics, writers, sportspeople, artists, musicians, etc.

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Naturally, some of the problems I mentioned earlier will need to be addressed. Among those problems is the adverse effect international citizenship would have on national sentiment and ideology, the elitism of international citizenship, and the brain drain effect. Let's take each case one by one.

If we take the brain drain situation first, we'll find that although it looks like a nation is losing a brain, it's actually gaining many brains. International citizens can and will live and work anywhere they like, so it will be up to individual countries to continue attracting the best and the brightest to their educational, industrial, technological and scientific institutions. International citizens will welcome not having to deal with all the usual red tape of residency permits, work permits, passports, visas and what not, so really nation states will benefit in the long term -- plus these international citizens will be paying their income and residency taxes too, a share of which will go to the host country. Some may argue that international citizens will still be paying taxes, which isn't much different to paying for residency permits and visas and passports and the like now, but I think international citizens will be much better off because they will not have to deal with the national bureaucracy of the host country. They will only deal with U.N.D.I.C. Furthermore, although they will still be required to pay taxes, these will be a standard amount that applies everywhere, so at least they will know exactly how much is paid when, and the payments will all be between the international citizen and the U.N.D.I.C. All of this saves much time and hassle and stress for the international citizen.

Another problem is the adverse effect the prospect of international citizenship will have on national identity, national ideology, and the idea of national polities in general. After all, the idea of "national bonds" is sort of meant to mean that you are bound by birth, history, origin and destiny to your fellow nationals. There never really has been an opt-out clause until now. But in a postmodern age of critical deconstruction, nationalism is not what it used to be. In fact, nationalism has become rather more of a myth or a superstition to most people, much like religion. This is probably why more extreme forms of religiosity and nationalism are coming more and more into the fore, because those who once occupied the middle ground (at least in affluent countries with a large, prosperous and educated middle class) have shifted leftward or at least toward the cynical side. In the age of Foucault and Derrida, Said and Chomsky, in the age of the internet and globalization, nobody really believes in a "nation" being something either natural or sacrosanct. If anything, it's now known even by average citizens to be just another ideological system relying on a state power apparatus to exert its sway over a passive population, bolstered by a bunch of fairy tales and myths about great national accomplishments and origins. It's now known to be just another way of wielding power over large masses of people, and one that competes against other ideological systems. So if this is the case already, why should those for whom national bonds mean little or nothing anymore be forced to continue to pledge allegiance to flags, to sing national anthems, to celebrate glorified episodes of bloodshed, slaughter and mass murder in the past, if none of this means anything anymore? Instead, those who consider themselves international citizens already -- and many other people across the world -- would rather believe in universal values than national ones. The importance and meaning of national history has already in the minds of many been superceded by Human history. Many of us can identify with -- and take pride in -- all the accomplishments of mankind. A Mexican can take pride in the accomplishments of the Greeks and the Chinese. Humans built the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China and the Suez Canal. Humans mapped the human genome and the Milky Way galaxy, sent robots to the far ends of the solar system, compiled the Encyclopedia Britannica, invented the microchip, composed the Ode to Joy symphony, and delved into the incredible world of quantum physics. These people were of many nationalities, but who cares? Focusing on nationality in an age like this seems like mere nitpicking. Humans have also committed atrocities like the Holocaust, slavery, terrorism, mass destruction, torture, and racism... does nationality matter there as well? In short, many more people now than ever in human history identify themselves not as a certain nationality or religion or with a particular region, but first and foremost as Humans. It's time to recognize this and cater to their needs. If people do not feel like they can give their lives for shortsighted and absurd national ideals, then isn't it time these people's rights were officially represented? Today, ALL the land on earth has been appropriated and divided up by nation states. People are born forced into being of a certain nationality. This skews and deranges them for the rest of their lives. They are given a "national" education. They are brainwashed into putting a nation above all other nations, and a national identity above even their humanity. We have even reached the point where human atrocity is not only considered appropriate but even normal if it's committed in the name of "national interest". Just like drugs are considered a poison of the human body, just as religion is now more and more being considered a poisoning of the human mind, so too nationalism should be considered a poison. You have the option now of being an atheist. You don't have to go to church or pray or be religious. We have finally accomplished this great achievement. You can get treatment for substance abuse and be cured of alcoholism, nicotine addiction or other drug addictions. But there is still no way out of nationality. You are born into a nation state and are under its oppressive sway for the rest of your life. International citizenship is not just an elitist luxury, it's in fact a human right.

And if it hurts national sentiment, is it a bad thing? Besides, the nationalists have their favorite mantra: "Love it or leave it!" they scream. So why not do just that? If you don't love this hateful, poisonous, criminal blight that has plagued the mind and soul of humankind for the past few centuries, why can't you just leave it? It's time to leave it. It's time for the age of International Citizenship.

Besides, could you imagine how fun it would be to beat up one of these smug little international citizens?

A tree in the Flintstones

2008-05-02T04:52:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid I found that the most wonderful thing about cartoons were the backdrops. When I saw the stars and floating towers in the Jetsons, the urban skyline in Spiderman, or the coral reefs and underwater mountains in Aquaman, I felt a melancholy longing for that inaccessible distance that these timeless, suspended figments of the imagination seemed to represent. They were simple, unimportant things that were probably mere afterthoughts in the composition of the cartoons, little more than fillers; but to me they were the manifestations of whole other worlds. Every star, every undersea mountain, every building in the passing skyline represented a new and undiscovered universe of possibility and adventure, noble and removed from the mundane world of phenomena that was acted out before it.

Among all those animated images, I remember one in particular that was especially captivating: that of a tree in the background of an episode of The Flintstones. When I say remember I mean rather that I blurrily recollect the image, as it's long since been jumbled in amid a nebulous pre-adolescent mnemonic tangle of impressions that were once so familiar and dear to me. Today these seem like the memories of another person. And I guess you could argue that they did belong to a different person; but at least a part of that person has lived on in some umbral corner of my mind, and the tree - or at least the meaning of the tree - has too, in that same residual little corner.

I can't remember the exact episode now, of course, nor what happens or what dialogue takes place around, in front, before or after the tree. Was Fred Flintstone driving his caveman car all alone or was Barnie Rubble by his side? Were Wilma and Betty riding in the back? I don't know exactly. But I remember the tree - actually there were a few trees... and the mountains, the clouds... and of course Fred Flintstone riding by in the foreground. But I didn't really care for the foreground. That's where people talked and things happened - minor, unimportant, quotidian things. Fred tries to get Barnie a meeting with the Grand Poobah; Betty gets a new pet dinosaur that doubles as a vacuum cleaner; Wilma wants to give Fred a birthday gift of a month's supply of brontosaurus burgers... the usual everyday stuff. But why did that insignificant little tree frozen and still far away in the background hold such an allure while those animated fictitious lives were lived out before it?

Maybe it's best to first ask a completely different question: Where do imagination and reality overlap? When and how does a figment of one's mind become real? Is it when it's shared by other minds? Is it, in this case, when an image becomes a shared impression and experience that is reproduced and replicated in the mind of each and every beholder through a mass medium that penetrates and shapes a collective conscious? So what then is that tree and what does it become?

First of all, it's not a tree but a representation. The representation itself is a molecular agglomeration of ink, paint, lead, paper, chemicals, celluloid and light applied and manipulated by various agents and further modified through machines before being reproduced onto film and projected out into the world of phenomena. They all come together in a way that creates the form and outline of a tree, and then that too merges with other forms which, through the application of electricity and mechanical technology, eventually comprise a steady stream of photons that convey the form of a consistent sequence of images I see on the screen and which I recognize as The Flintstones. And so you have the fruits produced from the sense impressions in the creator's mind transformed into a solid thing; tenuous pieces of imagination transformed into tangible reality.

But all of that has only to do with the creation of the image. What makes the imaginary real - what makes it come alive - is the moment when a personal and emotional connection arises between the image and the beholder, regardless of the will or intentions of the creator. In my case, that moment was the instant in which I saw that tree in the backdrop and felt something that suddenly - instantly - transformed it into a real and necessary part of my lived sensory experience. It seemed to both stimulate and satisfy an emotional need. The two-dimensional representation came alive, and with its inception into the realm of (my) consciousness, it became internalized. The molecular hodgepodge of chemistry, mechanics and light was now something else, as if it had transcended itself and assumed a second nature. It seemed to have gained a soul. No longer was a tree merely represented, but the tree itself became a representation. In other words, the tree had transformed into a symbol. In my case it was a symbol of distance, separation, potentiality, possibility, removal, perhaps even distinction. It had become a symbol every bit as real as a word or a thing because it represented a relationship now between me and my world and it modified and shaped in its own small way the manner in which I understood and interacted with the world around me. You could say the symbol became an emotional conduit.

But what was the origin of that feeling? How could this representation be transformed into a symbol that could cause a powerful and moving reaction in me? How did a mere representational image assume a soul. This deserves an attempt at an explanation.

It seems to me that that which enchants us and is important to us often has its origins in a fundamental paradoxical feeling or urge within us: namely, that of a need for danger (change) and a need for security (inertia) at one and the same time.(1) It's a binary feeling that causes us to experience attraction and repulsion, desire and horror, happiness and hopelessness, simultaneously. That feeling continues later on in life, when we're caught between the need for having a secure job and the desire to break away and rebel, between the need to have a steady life companion and the desire for amorous promiscuity... basically, between the need for comfort and the drive for adventure. But in the child's life this binary paradox - something I'll tentatively refer to as "motive angst" - is too powerful to be dealt with or suppressed. It overwhelms the young mind with the promise of great, beautiful, incredible things that life holds in store for us, but it also leaves the child suffused with the fear and terror of knowing that the satisfaction of that desire for being a part of the world out there would necessitate one's leaving the warm tender bosom of security, comfort and protection that envelops a young life and that is (at least in my case) all that one has known until then. The tree was like the manifestation of that motive angst as it became the symbolic representation of that clash of desires within me. It was out there in the large imaginational universe, yet it was safe somehow.

But why was I drawn to the tree - the backdrop - and not to the foreground, not to the world of life and the living? Why was I drawn to the frozen, still, and distant, and not to the world of action, interaction and proximity? For me the tree was not just distant, it was removed, and it was perfectly unreachable. Whatever happened in the foreground, whatever happened in the world in which things happen, the world of phenomena, the tree was not a part of it. It was solid, distant, apart, estranged, and it seemed secure in all those qualities. I wanted to be all those things. I wanted to escape. I identified with the tree. It touched me, it affected me, it made me feel something strongly, and it seduced me, because the tree was still out there, it was out there in the enormous expanse of that strange universe beyond me, but at the same time it was certain in its individuality, solid in its removal, peaceful in its separateness. It was in the world without being in the world.

It's only much later in life that the significance of the tree is realized in retrospect. You look back and weigh your life and wonder about how things turned out. You confront your mistakes and your regrets, the things that made you proud and the things that brought you shame and dread. And you see that there is a strange balance between these things and how they were acted out in your particular timeline. You realize that that binary urge to do and not-do was adjusted early at a particular setting, along a particular frequency, and that all your subsequent actions and inactions were formed according to that archetypal scheme that became solidified in those formative years when your tender unconscious mind was prone to the simplest representations and impressions - all seemingly so innocuous, but at the same time so intense, so passionate, so powerful that it set its own backdrop to an entire life. It wasn't until I thought about how much I had thought about that tree, about how that tree had somehow playfully assumed a place in a corner of my unconscious mind, that I realized how far back my own removal had begun.

I yearned for the tree. There's something within all of us that wants the tree. There are so many representations that motive angst has inspired: fantasy worlds where danger and adventure lurk around every corner, yet in which there seems to be a kind of manifest security implicit in a narrative guarantee that needs to tell and finish a story and which ultimately lends the characters a false blanket of invulnerability. It all seems pleasurable, but I realize now that it's only pleasurable in the way that satisfying a need is pleasurable. It's a negative pleasure, like scratching an itch. The tree was also pleasurable, but it was false. We all want to be apart, we sometimes fantasize about it, and it's pleasant. We become addicted to the images and phenomena that seem to represent and symbolize this. But eventually you realize that that which is represented can never be achieved or realized. It's real as an eminence, but it's hollow as substance. The tree was not noble or beautiful; it was craven, alienated and estranged.

You do not become the tree. You do not see those mountains, nor do you you ever go to those stars. You do not find the magic door that leads you to a fantasy world. You live in the world, you live among people, you share their lives, you sometimes do well, you sometimes do badly, you are sometimes loved and you are sometimes not.

The tree stands in the backdrop, silent, still, and alone. We must learn to leave it be.

(1) Which is why we love travel: change and inertia perfectly combined.

A series of syllogistic refutations of God

2008-05-01T05:03:00.000-07:00

Here are a few arguments against God and five arguments against two arguments for God.

Left: God?

Syllogisms are essentially word games that prey on the use of absolutes that are rife throughout language. If x is y and y is z then x is z. This is of course not a solid basis for truth, it's just a play on ambiguous words - most importantly, in this case, the word "God". Concepts like "perfection", "good", "evil" etc. are too vague to use as premises for sound logical arguments. We inevitably make the necessary mistake of using absolutes when we make the mistake of wanting to find and extract value judgments from life for the sake of formulating an ethical code to live by, and/or a metaphysical justification for living in the first place. But life seems oblivious to such endeavors, and so language falls short of being able to logically substantiate our search for Goodness, Justice, Perfection, and - ultimately - God. After all, these are things we seek and need precisely because we find them to be lacking in life. We may put our faith in the charms and spells and magic tricks of language, but when all is said and done, words remain hollow and any further inspection reveals chronic semantic maladies.

The following are not meant to convey any truth statement, they are only meant to reveal these semantic loopholes that are part and parcel of language, demonstrating that language - our only tool for understanding the world - is a poor tool for doing so, especially when it comes to metaphysical concepts that signify absolutes. Every word is signified in relation to all other words, and so a "tree" is necessarily defined by all that is "not tree", so that in a way, a thing is not just what it is, but is also all that it is not. And so God is all that is not-God and perfection all that is not-perfection. But this is a contradiction, as God cannot be un-Godly nor perfection imperfect. That contradiction is what lies at the root of language's deception, and what makes any attempt at finding Truth impossible by - and through - definition.

For more on this subject, you can read a long tedious Treatise on God as a Semantic Problem, although I would suggest you didn't because I'm starting to suspect that life is too short to care about this shit.

Why is God illogical?
If God is omnipotent and can do anything, then God can die, in which case God is not immortal, and therefore not God. But if God were immortal as God should be, then that would mean that God cannot die, which would mean that God cannot do everything and therefore is not omnipotent, and so not God. Thus, the existence of God is illogical, because God cannot be both omnipotent and immortal, which is ludicrous because God must be both. But if the universe is founded upon logic (and it must be, otherwise the whole foundation of knowledge and science would crumble) and God created logic, then God created the means by which to prove it does not exist! That would mean either God's logic is faulty - which is impossible, because God must be faultless and perfect - or that God is trying to prove to us he is illogical, in which case his proof has no value, because there can be no concept of "proof" outside of the axioms of logic. After all, if there is no logic, then it's just as valid to say 2+2=5 or that a jar of vaseline is a pigeon, or indeed that God = nothing. Therefore, God cannot exist.

Why create?
Humankind conceives of Unity (wholeness, oneness, indivisibility) as the ultimate perfection, the root of happiness, joy and well-being. In contrast, Division and Difference is the ultimate evil, the root of sin, war, and misery, generally signifying an estrangement from God. If Unity is perfection, and God is the epitome of perfection, then God is also the epitome of Unity. So then why would a God that is synonymous with perfection and Unity create anything at all, thereby altering the primordial Oneness, since the act of creation obliterates Unity by establishing a dichotomous relationship in the universe between creator and created?

Why test?
Let's say that the answer to the first question is: "God creates humans to test them, to see if they will find faith in God and redeem themselves, thus deserving reward (in Heaven), or to see whether they will prove unworthy of God, thus deserving punishment from God (in Hell)."

Perfection must be good, and God - as the epitome of perfection - also must be good. So God could not knowingly wish evil or harm on his creation. If God is also all-powerful (omnipotent) and all-knowing (omniscient), it is in God's power to ensure that his creation will not sin and will never be unhappy. So then why would God create a situation in which his creation - which itself springs from the Goodness, Perfection, Grace, and Magnanimity of God - can potentially be shunned, reviled, forsaken, punished and eternally damned by that same good God that created them? After all, God cannot be malicious. Let's say the answer to this is that God is not malicious, but has given humans all the faculties they need to make the correct choices and to follow God's path so as to deserve reward. But then the question is this: if God is all-seeing, and God is all-knowing, and God has created humankind, then God also knows exactly what choices and decisions humankind - and indeed each and every human - will take. So if God already knows what choices humans will make, then why would he give any choices to humans in the first place? Giving humans these choices means either a) God does not himself know what decision they will take, and wants to wait and see and punish or reward accordingly - which means God is not in fact all-knowing, and is thus not God, or b) God puts his creation through a series of trials even though he already knows whether they will succeed or fail, yet puts them through it anyway regardless, and then punishes them for those decisions they could not help but take, even though God was the one who created them and determined their fate for them in the first place - all of which means that God is malicious. But God can be neither ignorant, nor malicious. So then why - and what - does God test? Isn't the fact that God has to test his creation a sign that God is unsure about his creation, and thus not perfect, and therefore not God?

If God has preordained our fate, how can he reward or punish our decisions?
If God has created us and everything else in the universe, along with all the "laws" of the universe, God must know how everything can and will interact, take place, and occur in any and all possible situations. God therefore knows every decision you will make in your lifetime, and everything that will happen. So if God already knows all the choices you will make, good and bad, how can God punish or reward you for simply acting on your own nature which has been determined and created by God himself?

If there is Good and Bad, why is the universe not only Good?
Isn't the fact that we perceive Good and Bad a reason to create and believe in the concept of a God that is Good? After all, how could a God that is Good create anything that is Bad? This would mean that there is Bad in the nature of God, and thus that God is not a Good God, nor a perfect God, and therefore not God.

Accepting that the universe is one of Good and Bad, why are God's morals inferior to secular morals?
Which person's good action is more worthy: the one who does something good for others for a reward or to avoid punishment, or somebody who does something good for others for no such reason, but only does good because it makes them feel good? This is the same case with God's morals. Would you consider more worthy a religious person with faith in God who did a good deed knowing they would receive the reward of eternal bliss in heaven while avoiding a miserable torment in hell, or would you consider more virtuous an atheist who did a good deed knowing that they would get neither any such grand reward as heavenly salvation nor fear any such great torture as damnation in hell?

Why does God need to convince his creation of his existence?
If God has created the universe, then should not God's existence be manifest within his creation? Should not God's creation - all of which springs from and thus is God - be the proof of his existence? And yet God's ultimate creation - humankind - experiences doubt which must be corrected by God sending down his word through angels, prophets and holy books. This seems a primitive and clumsy kind of method for a power that is believed to have created something as complex as the atom or the eukaryotic cell. If humankind is part of a perfect creation from a perfect being - God - then why the doubt? And if God is the perfect creator of a perfect universe, then why the need to convince his creation of his existence? How can that which has created ask his creation to believe in its creator?

Why does God not convey the technical complexity of his creation in his holy books to persuade his creation that he exists?
If God has created everything that science has discovered, then why would God not mention atoms, molecules, mitochondria, quarks, gravity, the nature of light, and all the secrets of biology, chemistry and physics to his creation through his holy books? Would this not have been more persuasive than stories of magic and miracles that science proves are impossible? Let's assume that that is precisely what God wants: for humans to believe that the impossible is possible. But how could anything be impossible if God could create the universe as he sees fit? Therefore, if nothing is impossible, then why should God fool around with trite magic tricks and illusions like turning water into wine or turning canes into snakes when he could do anything at all? If convincing his creation of his existence is so important for him, why not just make an appearance and say so, instead of using men as prophets that only some people believe and others don't, or conducting miracles he never repeats when people ask him to as proof of his existence?

If God is eternal, and God at some point created the universe and people, why was there no universe or people before?
Why did God think that there being no creation was good enough before, but decided that it would be better with creation later? If a state of creator/created is better, how could what was before be less than perfect? If God is perfection, how can God have existed in a less than perfect state that lacked a creation? And if God is perfect, how can God change his mind as to how he'd like everything to be?

Why does God expect so much from us without living up to his end of the bargain?
If you're going to be punished with an eternity in Hell where demons and fire torture you forever because of your lack of belief in God, then shouldn't God try harder to make belief in him easier by making his existence more obvious? Conversely, if God is going to reward you for an irrational belief in his supposed existence despite his not having made his existence at all clear, then should we also reward people who believe in other irrational, unfalsifiable and unsubstantiated things? Should someone who believes that the universe exists in the belly of a giant pink unicorn with pigtails be rewarded or praised for having faith in something that is irrational and unfalsifiable? And if so, then why did God give us senses if he expects us to believe things that contradict those senses?

If my body dies and my soul is immaterial, then how can I burn in Hell?
Without any physical existence, without nerves, skin, senses, and a brain, why would fire hurt me at all? How could it burn me? And let's say I went to Heaven. How could I take any enjoyment in drinking from rivers of milk or honey or enjoying the company of virgins or saints if I am immaterial? I have no senses, no touch, sight, smell, taste, hearing... I have no mouth or vocal chords with which to touch... and I have no brain with which to think and formulate ideas... Doesn't that mean that Hell and Heaven are empty threats and empty promises respectively?

If God sent down prophets and holy books, why was one prophet or holy book not enough?
Surely if God can't persuade humankind of his existence through a single prophet or holy book (which, as previously stated, is already problematic), then God is less than perfect (if not a bumbler) for using one prophet or book after the other to try and convince humankind of his existence. Furthermore, why were his holy books sent to some and not to others? And why have humans felt the need to spread God's word through violence if God could and should easily have convinced humans without need for such misery, destruction and death, all of which are evils that God's universe should be free of?

How can we laugh?
If all has been created by and from the one eternal, indivisible God, then all must carry the nature of God. All that exists must be part of God, since nothing that exists can exist without its having been created by and from God. If this is the case, then how can we laugh at anything knowing that that thing is God? By laughing at any one thing, we are laughing at God himself. But can we mock perfection? Can we find ridiculous, illogical, weird or comical, the majesty, power and awe of God?

Why faith and not fact?
If one must have faith in the existence of God, one must want and wish God into existence. In other words, one must believe God to exist. But if, as religious people and believers of God say, God's existence is manifest all around us, then why do we need to further believe it? If one is aware of the fact of the sun's existence without necessarily needing to further believe it's existence, or have faith in its existence, then how can something infinitely more precious than the sun - viz. God - not also be a fact that does not need further qualification through faith or belief?

How can my mind be imperfect?
If all is God, then my mind is also God, or at least created by God. But if my mind cannot perceive God nor believe God to exist, then is God's creation imperfect not to be able to conceive and be conscious of its very own nature? If God's creation is imperfect, how can it be God's creation since God must necessarily be perfect?

If the overwhelming majority of people need to believe in God's existence, doesn't this mean that the world we perceive seems Godless?
If I feel the need to believe something I can't see, is this not a sign that what I do see seems lacking of what I'd like to see? Does this then not mean that I need to believe in God's mercy, goodness, immortality, grace and perfection precisely because I see a world around me that is merciless, evil, ugly, mortal and imperfect?

Why didn't prophets have cool superpowers?
If you wanted to convince humankind of your existence, wouldn't you want some ass kicking Kung-Fu prophets with wings who could shoot fire from their fingertips? I bet if the Chinese had prophets that's the sort of prophets they'd have had.

Why doesn't God just pick one brand design and go with it?
Wouldn't it be better if God could just pick a language, pick one book, one prophet, one creed, one style of temple, etc. and just go with that? If all the different religions believe that theirs is the right language/book/prophet/creed etc. then why aren't they suspicious that there are billions of others who believe the exact same thing even though their language/book/prophet/creed etc. is totally different? How can humans not see projected on to God the same discord, bickering and difference that plagues the profane human world? Why do all these people believe blindly in their own truth when reason seems to suggest that God is in fact a human creation rather than vice versa?

If God is the embodiment and source of reason, logic and rationality, then why is belief in God fundamentally irrational?
If the human mind has been created to be aware of the reason, rationality and logic of God, then why must we believe and have faith in God's existence in an irrational way? After all, to believe the existence of something we cannot see is irrational. And yet even though God is the source of reason, we are expected instead to believe in things that seem unreasonable.

If God's omnipotence can be logically questioned, then can God be omnipotent?
If God's omnipotence can be logically questioned, then it means there is a fundamental weakness that is inherent in it. Since omnipotence could not have a weakness, then God cannot be omnipotent.

What if God created the world and man with different laws than those that apply to him, so that man cannot judge God by his own laws of causality, logic and science, and so this whole syllogistic dissertation is pointless?
First of all, every religion is founded on the basis that man/the world/the universe was created in God's own image. After all, how can the origin of everything be different from its creator? But once again we're judging God by our own laws and epistemological precepts. So, if we were to go along with the hypothetical question posed here, we would probably have to say that if God created us with a different set of laws, then we ourselves cannot judge God by the same laws that apply to us - that is, our laws of causation, logic and science. That means that - for all practical purposes - he cannot be our God, but the God of another universe. If God lives by different laws, then God cannot understand the human condition, our sufferings, our trials, our joys, our sorrows, our accomplishments, our deeds, our morals, and - most importantly - our minds. Yet this is precisely what we need God for. So if God cannot afford us that understanding because he lives by different laws, then - whether he exists or not - why should we care for a God with whom we don't share a common understanding? God becomes irrelevant. But if you argue that the creator must understand the laws of his creation since he is the source of those laws, then it stands to reason that the creator does also live by and understand those laws, and is thus not only subject to logical inquiry, but accountable to it.

If God is everything and all around us, can things have a dual nature?
Can something be both tree and God, monkey and God, vaseline and God? Can Jesus be human and God? If God existed before all else and existence itself is born of God, then that which exists can only be that which is God, since God can't create something out of anything but himself, because that would mean there is an origin to things - at least some things - which was not created by God, which in itself would mean God is no longer God. So can things be anything other than God?

Why do believers in God show anger and try to stamp out, punish and violently attack non-believers if they are secure in their belief that God exists and is on their side?
If God almighty is on your side, why do you have to take aggressive and often murderous action against apostates and non-believers? After all, if God is the repository, guardian and source of universal justice then surely he will take the necessary action either in this life (lightning strike? earthquake? mud slide?) without needing you to jump in and club and stone and scream at people. The fact that you feel the need to take aggressive action instead of trusting in the ways of the almighty suggests either that, a) you don't have true faith in the almighty, and deep down are insecure about whether what you believe really isn't all just clap trap, or b) that you think you are more competent than God at meting out justice, meaning that you think you are better and more righteous than God, which of course means that there is no God because nothing could be better or more righteous than God.

Refutations of Assertations 1 - The Ontological Argument
The argument runs: God is perfect, existence must be more perfect than non-existence, therefore God must exist.
Contradiction 1: To know what perfection is one must know what imperfection is. If immortality is perfection, then mortality must be imperfection. Thus, one must know bad to know good, and one must know non-existence to know existence. If God is perfect and God created the universe, then the universe must also be perfect. But we cannot know this without knowing the imperfect: hence the existence of death, suffering, misery, poverty, all of which is imperfect. But how can this be possible if God is perfect? How can a perfect being create imperfection if all is created from that perfect being? Since all springs from God, then imperfection must also spring from God, otherwise there must be another source of existence besides God, which cannot be. This means that either a) God is not perfect, and is therefore not God, and therefore does not exist, or b) perfection does not exist, and therefore neither does God, since God must be perfect.
Contradiction 2: There can be no gradations to perfection, it is absolute. Something is either perfect or it isn't, since just one blemish makes something imperfect. Therefore one state of being cannot be "more perfect" than another. So the ontological argument basically says: existence is perfect, God is also perfect, therefore God exists. But we cannot know what is perfect without knowing what is imperfect. I cannot know that immortality is perfect if I have no concept of death - which I do in fact perceive very clearly in the world. Therefore, if imperfection exists in the world, perfection is impossible. If God is supposed to be perfect, then God is also impossible, since God cannot create an imperfect world because God can have no imperfection in its nature from which imperfection can arise.
Contradiction 3: The proposition is founded upon the premise "God is Perfect", which already takes for granted God's existence and purported properties (viz. perfection), so unless you already believe that God exists, you cannot believe - and in this case "prove" - that God exists.

Refutations of Assertations 2 - Pascal's Wager
The wager is such: We have nothing to lose from believing in God and everything to gain, therefore we should believe in God.
Contradiction 1: The premise that holds this argument together is that "we have nothing to lose from belief in God and everything to gain". But if this argument is being used to justify belief in God, then it must come before we accept that belief since it is trying to justify such belief in the first place. So then at this stage it's just as valid to say "we have nothing to lose from not believing in God, nor anything to gain". After all, God is not yet justified by the argument because it is prior to its conclusion, and so God does not yet exist, and if God does not yet exist, then what have you to lose from not believing in God any more than you have to gain from believing in him? In short, the premise of this argument is already a judgment and a conclusion, which leads to Contradiction 2...
Contradiction 2: According to this wager proposition, you must already believe in God or have an idea of the concept of God to establish the premise that will supposedly justify the existence of God in the overall proposition, since you cannot actually know if "we have nothing to lose from believing in God and everything to gain" without first believing that God is of a certain nature (i.e. Good, and thus good for us, etc.). So really this entire proposition is just circular logic, because the premise relies on the proposition, which in turn relies on the premise, and so on.
Contradiction 3: By believing in God you may gain heaven, but you may also end up in hell. But by not believing in God you will forsake heaven but you will also save yourself from hell. That means that belief in God is riskier, and disbelief safer, but neither one is more advantageous for you. If you give heaven one point, hell -1 point and a state of neither 0 points, then the believer's chances and the non-believer's chances all even out to 0. If anything it might be better to believe that you're at least not going to hell regardless of whether you're going to heaven or not.

Conspiratic theorems

2008-05-01T03:57:00.000-07:00

We Turks understand the world through conspiracies. Here are some incontrovertible factoids* behind the Truth.

What do the Izmit earthquake, the PKK, our foreign debt, South Park, Eastern European prostitutes, yoga and Charles Darwin have in common? You guessed it, they’re all part of a secret plot masterminded by a cabalistic network of freemasons, Christians, Jews, the CIA, MOSSAD, Hollywood and the European Union to weaken and destroy Turkey. How do we know this? Well what else could explain why we’re not the gleaming superpower nation ruling the entire universe? It’s obviously a conspiracy to hold us back. Any unemployed schmuck in a coffeehouse – or leader of a major Turkish political party – could tell you that. The only thing holding us back is not our own incompetence but the exceptional competence of everybody else.

I know, I know, your puny little brain is thinking ‘whoa, is that true?’. Well why don’t you true this: ever heard of H.A.A.R.P.? Yes, that’s the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program in Alaska that ostensibly ‘studies’ ionospheric physics and radio science. Know what it really does? It creates earthquakes, storms, hurricanes, floods and mudslides to hit America’s enemies and rivals with.

1999 Izmit. Massive quake. 30,000 Turks dead. Coincidence?

Now you’re going, ‘wait a second, Izmit’s bang on the North Anatolian Fault, earthquakes are bound to happen.’ But do they just happen to happen on 17 August, 1999? That’s 17-8-99. 17 + 8 = 25, which, when subtracted from 99, gives you 74. Add to that the day the earthquake happened (17) and you get 1774. Ring any bells? Yep, that’s the year the American War of Independence began and – surprise surprise – the year Turkey lost a war to Russia and signed the treaty of Kuchuk Kainardja, which granted Russia the right to intervene in Turkey thenceforth for the sake of ‘defending’ CHRISTIANS in Turkey. Coincidence? Coincidence this: George Washington was a freemason and Catherine the Great was an avid supporter of freemasonry, her court having been full of freemasons. And so on that cryptically symbolic day in 17-8-99 we just happen to have 30,000 MUSLIMS mysteriously die by a ‘force of nature’ that hits Turkey’s industrial heartland… how convenient. But the plot runs even deeper. Subtract 8 from 17 and you get 9, which – when you add the year of the earthquake (99) – gives you 999. Now turn the page upside down (much like an earthquake can turn your world upside down). Bam: 666. Number of the beast. Conclusion? Earthquake = Masonic-Satanic plot.

Ok, that makes sense, but what about the other stuff? Is the 30-year PKK insurgency just a coincidence? Is it just a coincidence that there happened to be 26 Kurdish uprisings against the Turkish state in the last 85 years? Why would the Kurds just rebel like that when they had been granted full rights as mountain Turks in Turkey, free to renounce their language, culture and identity as Kurds and be given the honor of becoming Turks? Why be ungrateful? Here’s why: the Europeans have been brainwashing them into being Kurds. Yoga? A plot masterminded by decadent bohemians to weaken our Muslim faith. Eastern European prostitutes? Sent to dissolve our family values. South Park? Aired to promote rampant degeneracy. The foreign debt? To keep us broke. Charles Darwin? To turn us all into atheists. Bam. Factoids. MOSSAD funds the PKK and trains Armenians as crypto-Kurd fighters; the CIA and its ideological arms like Harvard, Yale, Princeton etc. announce fake fossil and genetic discoveries to disprove divine creation; freemasons promote liberal ideas like ‘human rights’ through their local puppet NGOs in Turkey’s rampantly burgeoning civil society; the French are using the Armenian so-called "so-called" genocide to carve Turkey up… and before you know it, Turkey’s being fed to the jackals.

Sure, some fruit cakes might say that conspiracy theories are the pseudoscience of the mentally lazy; the ressentiment of the ignorant; an attempt at empowerment by the impotent; a seeking to cover up one’s own shortcomings and failures by devolving the blame to fictitious outside powers who supposedly have it in for us due to their jealousy of our power and perfection; a desperate grasp at self-worth on the part of pathological sufferers of inferiority complexes; an effort to find some kind of solidity for one’s own flimsy and outdated national, religious and metaphysical myths by flimsifying the foundations of solid scientifically-established ideas; a need to whitewash our crimes and deny our weaknesses by vilifying others through xenophobic propaganda that both feeds and feeds off an ignorant populace as it both sows and reaps the seeds of its own memetic reproduction; a desire to explain the existence of any worldview different from one’s own as only being possible as a result of coercion and obfuscation; perhaps even a pathetic yet innocent longing for mystery and romance in an age of cold boring scientific rigor which you have no grasp on and are in no way a part of because you have no education and don’t understand complicated scientific concepts like ‘natural selection’ or, say, ‘evidence’.

But that’s all horseshit, because what you call conspiracy ‘theories’ must be true, since you can’t prove them wrong. They are UNFALSIFIABLE. That sounds a lot like INDESTRUCTIBLE, and indestructible sounds a lot like AWESOME. All you have to do to prove something is true is to prove just one measly instance of its truth. But what you have to do to prove something is false is prove every single instance of its un-truth. That’s much tougher to do. In fact, it’s impossible, because then you’d have to be able to know everything at once - such as, for example, whether or not a secret meeting occurred, which you couldn't possibly know because it's secret. So to know whether or not a conspiracy isn't afoot, you’d basically have to be omniscient. In other words, you’d have to be God. Are you God? Didn’t think so. Bam. Conspiracy theory just became unfalsifiable conspiracy FACTOID. You can put that in an oven and bake it.

Oh by the way, Bigfoot pilots UFOs over the Nevada desert, the Loch Ness monster masterminded 9/11 by tattooing a map of the World Trade Center on its back with the ink-dipped tip of a unicorn’s horn, and Cuba is communist because the puppet-masters in America want it to be communist for some strange reason nobody’s figured out yet. Or maybe they just fucked that one up?

* ‘Factoid’ is of course Latin for ‘huge fact’