The Cloud That Took the Form

I'm Not Crazy. You're the One Who's Crazy. (You're Driving Me Crazy!)

2010-05-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

Don’t read me: I dare you!

See, I know a secret. That’s the secret of my cocksurety: a secret. The secret: you are reading this.

Here is the matter: I admit to allowing the accidental, and mere, seeming of a hostility toward the reader in those first six words, above. Yes, it is also deserving of note that the exclamation mark might feel like a crowning insult. It is not, and there is no insult at all to crown. Still, to sound so cavalier and contemptuous—to merely sound so—is like writerly suicide.

And yet it remains: that either I still have your attention, or I have lost it. In the latter case, these very words are mere trash-canned elocution to nobody—and such mere unread patterns of pixels, or patterns of ink on crumpled paper, are absurd, are an abortion of language, are language conceived, concocted, encrypted in print—but unreceived and so, at once, ceasing to be language. They’ll therefore have no sense, no reference, and, most notably for my present point, no truth-value. From this, I believe, it follows that you are still reading.

Consider the proposition “You are still reading this.” Let this be our topic, presently. One of the fundamental laws of thought has it that, to deny this proposition requires proposing its negation—to negate it, you must propose that you are not reading this. Please note that I am not even talking, right here, about the trivial fact that you are indeed reading this—that is merely a state-of-affairs, which might as well have been otherwise, whereas I am concerned with logical necessity. I am trying to draw your attention to the fatal contradiction implied in any argument against our topic proposition. To clarify that, let me please mention myself instead of you—it might be anybody doing this brief meditation on the proposition “You are still reading this.” So let’s say “I.” Should I try my hand at negating our topic proposition, I must assert its negation: I must assert that you are not still reading this. But of course, I cannot assert this latter, contradistinct proposition without negating the reception, and therefore the linguistic-ness of my language, and therefore any semantic content at all to my hopeful counter-proposition. Unequipped with such an impossible assertion (only language can assert, and language into the void, as writing to non-readers, is something like a twin without a sibling—it rapidly un-becomes itself), I cannot possibly negate our topic proposition. In asserting its contradistinction, I pull the semantic rug out from my own feet, thereby finding my assertion impossible to assert, in virtue of that very assertion.

I believe, and hope you will agree, that I have proven and demonstrated that it is necessarily true that you are still reading. I flatter myself, probably, but cheerfully, by supposing that I am the first writer ever to so prove and so demonstrate the necessity of being read—I feel I have fuddled with the metaphysical, and in fact ordained the necessity of my readership. Not even Goethe was ever—strictly, logically—so assured that anything he wrote would be read. He, and all the writerly world before, and around, me, had merely, at most, fantastic popularity, et cetera, to stack probability greatly in their favor, in finding readers for anything they would write. Mere probability! I chortle at probability. I have dealt, am dealing, in necessity. That’s what god does!

Perhaps you are snickering at me now. Well, snicker: but you cannot disprove my point—and, yes, after all (let’s admit the trivial, but true) disproof (of any deliberate sort) requires cognizance—disproof of a written point requires readership, and there remains, in addition to the strictly logical argument above, the miserable little, inescapable matter of you actually reading this. Should you set your mind on disproving this point of mine without ever having read it, should you spontaneously know that I write what I am writing, should you prove yourself unaccountably aware of the abstract point of this piece of language or hopeful-language, I might want to bow out and surrender to such an apparently preternatural opposition, which would certainly seem enormously admirable, which would certainly steal my affection and respect. Still, I would be obliged—logic always obliges us, after all—to be assured, by my lucidly logical meditation on our earlier proposition “You are still reading this,” that I am right. And it is necessarily so. And sure, it is, as arithmetic.

And let me double back a bit, and consider the mere, but almost-necessary, state of affairs which has you, indeed, though accidentally (not necessarily), actually reading this. I figure it is almost certain, barring something like telepathy. Disproof (of a written point), as we have said, requires readership: so, disproof invalidates itself, if my point is that you are still reading. And it is. And I needn’t add that you are, also, reading, as that is implied, strictly and surely.

But: you are. It is necessarily so.

Perhaps you think I am slipping away toward half-madness, or into early madness, into delusions of grandeur. But I have only pointed out the fabulous truth: that I have asserted astounding, logico-metaphysical powers unrealized yet by anyone else, ever, probably. Thus I prove and require my being read. And, behold: you readeth!
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and
despair.

Now I descry mine self, ecstatic: lo, here is Me. Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes in holy dread:

For he on honey-dew hath fed,
and drunk the Milk of Paradise…
(thank you sincerely for your time),

Christopher Lantz.
(a great big batshit-insane lunatic bastard, only faking: this has all been make-believe. I am very bored, and so singing songs of a sort.)

...and the songs that I sing,
they’re not supposed to mean a thing!
(La dee da da. La dee da, la dee da da…)

You Call That a Guilty Pleasure? Try Buggering the Couch. Here's a Pair of Scissors.

2009-04-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

February is long gone, thank god. The Oscars and all that, come and gone. If one more person told me that watching this or that awards show is a "guilty pleasure" of theirs, I was going to say it to their face: that's a fucking pitiable excuse for a guilty pleasure.

Three--no less than three people have "confessed" to me that they love watching the Oscars.

Maybe that’s a coincidence, but it is certainly, at heart, part of a larger, obnoxious trend of playfully confessing to things we’re not really ashamed of.

Everybody has such benign guilty pleasures: a friend of mine half-whispers to me that he "kind of likes the Bee-Gees."

For shame! Is this what lurks in the darkest depths of the human heart? Speak up, so everybody can hear–because you know you’re not really ashamed of liking the Bee-Gees. And if you are, then, yes, there is something very, very wrong with you.
I wish I could yell back at my friend to find a better (i.e., worse) way to squander his spirit than listening to the Bee-Gees–I would suggest masturbating gloomily all weekend, every weekend, but I secretly know he already does this. I was his roommate in college. But I don’t expect he’s going to confess to that particular "guilty pleasure" anytime soon.

A coworker admits to me, with fake solemnity–like I’m a priest or something–that she "actually hates talking to payroll on the phone" and that, though she sounds friendly, she’s "only faking it."

Oh, how horrible! Guess what? Payroll is only faking it, too. What’s more, you know they are, and they know you are. And you know that I know that. Our social world, each of our daily lives, is premised on fake friendliness... and most six-year-olds are aware of this. To pretend that I am not, that you’re letting me in on a secret, is a little demeaning.

I do this, too, but I truly feel it’s time we stop: I will never again tell people that one of my "guilty pleasures" is watching every film version ever made of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol each December. Because I know in my heart that this is perfectly wholesome. In return, please do not tell me that your "guilty pleasures" include eating half a pack of Fig Newtons in the bathtub. Tell me that you enjoy making fun of the deaf. Or that you like to start vicious rumors from scratch, just to watch them grow and grow until they devour innocent people’s lives. Tell me that you beat up old people for fun. These are the kind of unspeakably sick, depraved things that make for true guilty pleasures; these things inspire contempt, and make others feel good about themselves.

Don’t tell me that you secretly like eating straight from the jar of peanut butter–tell me that you secretly pay somebody to smear it onto your face while saying hurtful things to you. Because if you can’t come up with an unsightly paraphilia, or some such true disgrace to admit to, I’m going to just feel awful about myself in comparison. And you know what? I suspect everybody really knows that already...

Most people will say I’m making too big a deal out of this. But it’s such a riddle, nearly an unfathomable mystery to me that we live in this age of bogus confessions. Everywhere, the frenzied voices of friends, family, and coworkers are "confessing" to things they aren’t really ashamed of.

Well, here’s my own, last contribution to the din: don’t tell anybody this, but I did not really read all of the assigned reading that earned me my college degrees. For instance, I did not really read the French sociologist Michel Foucault. Not a word... but, from class discussion and secondary sources, I get the gist of what he was saying, and it goes like this: our notions of pleasure, shame, and depravity are hopelessly bound up with social relations of power. And we all like to feel powerful. (Admit it.)

Thank you, Foucault, my second-hand, adulterated, oversimplified imaginary friend! You not only faked your way so convincingly into my final examination essays, you have (I think) artfully explained the mystery of the bogus confession: we just like to make each other feel guilty, because that makes us feel strong. Tell a human being that, deep down in the darkest shadows of your soul, you secretly long to... eat two whole pints of ice cream, and you’re pretty much going to make him or her feel awful. Honestly, I think we use this light-hearted hush just to make others feel unconsciously depraved by comparison, even as they are forced to laugh and make-believe at being outraged by our obviously wholesome "bad-habits." We all know that every human being has far, far darker secrets than liking the Bee-Gees, or hating the girl in payroll.
The fake "guilty pleasure," and all such bogus confessions, are really aimed at making other people feel awful in comparison to you–and this is essentially an exercise in power. The same Puritanical power that held, and still holds, together the fabrics of whole, wild, mighty, otherwise untamable societies is miniaturized, and given a friendlier face in the bogus confession. At heart, though, it is just about power, plain and simple.

So stop yourself, next time you feel like telling a friend "You know what? Sometimes I like to watch Days of Our Lives... but don’t you tell anybody that!" Do you really need that smiling sleight-of-hand, do you really have to heap all that guilt onto others, just to feel powerful? You ought to be ashamed of yourself!

P.S. I fucking read Michel Foucault! Saying I didn't just helped make my point. ...Shame on me, I fibbed, and I confess! Tee hee. Hoo hoo. (Fucking kill me, please.)

12 June 2008

2008-06-11T22:04:00.000-07:00

You should shut up now and read everything I am about to say.

No, seriously shut up... And now, please read all of this, please:

Let’s start with an elemental idea in economics. I swear I am not patronizing you, and you will see–we’re going somewhere interesting with this:

Surplus value is simply the exchange value of the work you do (what it’s worth to some corporation or other) minus the wages they pay you. (And now, we’re off into something more interesting...)

Here is the truth, as sure as arithmetic, and very brutal: a capitalist will always take as much as he can get away with from you, because he must, because competition demands it categorically, and if he neglects this immoral responsibility, competition (it’s always there, in capitalism) will outperform him, and soon he is no longer a capitalist. Then the competition will perhaps hire him, and take from his as much as they can get away with... They always will, in capitalism.

The interesting thing about this is what it suggests for the history of American socialism, in particular. Whatever you say about the adulteration of socialism (which should be global, human) with nationalism, or national definitions, or national politics, it is undeniable that once, about 75 years ago, it clearly scared the wits out of the corporate class, and motivated some bitter consolations, and more than a tweaking of a whole titanic capitalist economy. The American working class that finally organized itself into something faintly like coordinated (though still awfully spastic and jerky) action had the American corporate class sweating. That, of course, is unthinkable, in the American way of thinking about history and political reality, i.e., the capitalist way of thinking, i.e., the way you’re supposed to be thinking, i.e., the only way you’re supposed to think about thinking, if you’re minding the rules. (The rules, by the way, are as swift and insidiously slippery as, more stupefying and mind-warping than the mercury out of old thermometers, which, you know, you must never drink. Well, what do you know? I’m patronizing my readers after all. Please now forget everything you have found between these particular parentheses.) It’s unthinkable because the capitalists are in control, and they don’t want us thinking we ever made them flinch.

But we did make them flinch, or our grandparents did, when they got out and organized unions, and started talking about One Big Union. They whimpered in fright, when we started acting like one, and threatening to simply shut down the whole apparatus of American capitalist production, if they didn’t stop brutalizing union members, and working little kids to death, and trying earlier on than Mussolini to pull that kind of corporatist shit he later specialized in (under a conveniently different, demonized and exoticizing name: "fascism," which sounds a heck of a lot less disturbingly like something our own bosses would surely like to set in place than the original term "corporatism.")

We worked together, and by we I mean our grandparents, who learned to be far smarter than we have forgotten how to be, we talked about what we wanted, and then we shouted our demands right in the face of the corporate class. And they flinched, which is why, today, the economic arrangement of life in America is a little bit less fucked up, for Americans.
They didn’t have a choice: it was all boiling over, and threatening to shut down. We can always be proud of that, our one brief moment so far in history where we showed true audacity, made possible by organizing, and inspired mostly by hungry children. If you want to make anybody really interested in politics and unions, really fast, show them their children crying because they’re hungry. A hungry mob is an angry mob, for sure.
If it has gotten to such a point, and you are a capitalist, you want things to simmer down, and so you had better give those kids something to eat, and quick. If you’re lucky, you can reverse the damage done, even dimantle the unions, if they’re not yet ironclad, formed from pure outrage and sheer necessity. You’d better feed those kids, and play down the flagrant hand up the government’s ass you’ve been working to your own selfish ends, and the ends of capital. And stop beating and killing union organizers. And slowly, really slowly, people should start losing interest in unions and politics again.

That, then, pretty much accounts for current the state of things: we did just what they predicted we’d do, and, today, people are proud to announce that they don’t see how socialism is relevant to their lives, or their interests. Today, the working class thinks socialists are the people Chuck Norris had to kill so many of to free those American prisoners of war, and the people who fight climactic fights against Rock Balboa, even though they are obviously taking steroids, and the officials should totally step in and disqualify the cheating commies (but they don’t, so the myth goes, because of some unaccountably believed-in left-leaning bias of those in power, like international boxing officials, and the media–by the way, that myth was brought to you by the media, so go figure... ).

The American working class is not in itself stupid, just like we are not by nature racists. We have to be taught those things, and many of us are, to ensure we don't act up again, don't organize, don't realize our own best interests, as a class. We have been taught, and so often in painfully dumbed-down, degrading form, absurd lies about who and what socialism is. Next time somebody tells you that education is the answer to racism or mindless-culture-addiction, remind them to be careful they're not suggesting that the poor are somehow naturally racist and mindless, and, if only they weren't so filthy and poor, they might be lifted out of their natural ignorance into the light. Children, before they are taught differently, don't care any more about the color of somebody's skin than the color of their shirt or shoelaces. The disadvantaged must be taught their ignorance. Remember that, and stop touting education for backwoods yokels in that particular way we tout.

In short, we are still being milked for all they can steal. Surplus value is always pushed to the brink. That’s just an immutable fact of life under capitalism: they never take less than the most they can get away with. But these days, that’s less, a lot less, than what they could get away with in 1910. So, if by some odd stroke of luck (or lucky lack of a stroke, I suppose) one of your grandparents is still alive, say thank you for the food that sustained you, and the fact that the considerable periods when they do not inflict nightmarish world wars on us... and send us in armies out to kill armies of other working class people, who have done nothing to hurt us, and even though we have nothing to gain from fighting, except probably a tighter stranglehold for capital, around our own necks. Say "thank you" to your grandparent. Before them, children didn’t really experience puberty, did not become full fleshed-out men and women until they were about twenty-two years old. Even then, they straggled into maturity. All because they didn’t have enough food to eat, because "grocery money" was still part of that huge swath of surplus value that the corporate class was gobbling up and reinvesting in our own exploitation. There was so little food that their bodies simply didn’t have the energy to orchestrate such a huge change, and so they dragged along into unhappy adulthood, which was long, long after they had started working like adults, and being worked to death, or very nearly so. Always, always, always: as much as they can get away with. Our grandparents simply told them they weren’t going to get away with so much anymore. Or else, that was it, capitalism shuts down. The economy is nothing more than the sum of our work (dynamically restructured, turned against our own best interests). And for once we, the working class, said that we would stop the whole big machine, unless things changed. So things changed. So thank your grandparents. Even if they’re dead.

What’s a corporate class to do after that big flinch and frustration at home? Expand exploitation, the real, ruthless kind Americans have long forgotten is real, and at the heart of this economy, expand that exploitation beyond national borders, and start taking it out of an international working class, a "third world." That will pay for the concessions to the American working class, with a whole lot left over...

So, while you’re thanking people for dinner and a checking account and a handful of paid holidays, you should say "thank you" to the third world. But they probably seem less real to you than your dead grandparents... Say thank you anyway.

3 June 2008

2008-06-04T20:49:00.000-07:00

Though I could never study something as methodologically disciplined and potentially practical as psychology, general education requirements have left me with a knowledge of its key points, and the ability to make from them uninsightful extrapolations, none of this really worth mentioning except: it’s interesting that I still don’t really get any of these points, and that I have to relearn them all, for myself. Take, for instance, the famous self-destructive side of the personality. It’s real, just as I’d figured, but never felt for myself. (In fact, I acknowledged many just such profoundly disturbing things about myself, and while these thoughts were still fresh and abstract, I pinned them down in my psychology textbooks, and tried to shelve them away, forever unseen again.) My self-destructive side: my, is he ever bent on ruining me!

He’s stupid as all hell, and his calling card is the irrational thought. I think that’s why Albert Ellis uses "self-destructive" and "irrational" to mean the same thing. The self-destructive side is just that predicatably and without fail, stupid.

He made me think maybe I got Albert Ellis mixed up with another guy, so that I had to double-check for just long enough to forget what I was about to say, because it actually seemed worth saying...

He's too stupid to hate, like a swarm of bees, or a bigoted grandparent.

He'll try anything, anything to screw with me, barring a well-formed and well-premissed argument. He's so very unclever. And yet he often gets away with it. He comes up with the most brazenly stupid ideas when I'm groggy or distracted by far more important things. Somehow, he thought it sounded like a good idea to divide up the things I have to do into three very poorly defined classes, and to buy a different planner for each. And over the course of late 2006, I fell for it I bought three different 2007 planners.

He's why I haven't written here in so long: he remembered me thinking how shamefully neglectful so many people were, starting blogs and keeping them for a few weeks, leaving a clear record of their inability to stick with stuff.

You've got one, too, in case you didn't know. He seems like he’s not there. He vanishes before you can find him, but deep down, I think you know him as well as he knows you, which is very well: his favorite food is stuff you've recently heard is especially bad for you. His favorite music is catchy, his favorite songs include anything you hate, and anything that will keep you from your work. Most of all, he prefers anything he can pare down to a mocking fragment of a melody, and sing to you over and over and over. His turn-ons include anybody you cannot have sex with, because you cannot have sex with them.

30 April 2008

2008-04-30T12:20:00.000-07:00

Goodnight, reason: the signs that we’re cheerfully poised to slip back into real-life fascism are too clear to ignore. The latest one I’ve noticed: a Nextel commercial, called "what if firefighters ran the world?" It’s apparently going over well with the public (it’s been running steadily for weeks now). The public, it seems, dreams of a government run by no-nonsense men (yes, men) who get the job done without deliberating, hearing out dissenters, or (god forbid) dissenting themselves. The American public longs for a legislature that "gets down to business," that speaks, thinks, and votes in an eerie, regimented monotone. The kind who know that there’s a time to think and a time to do, and this (congress) isn’t the time to think! The kind of politicians who don’t need to be reminded that they’re at work, on wealthy taxpayers’ time. (And sure, why not ones who will hock mobile phones or whatever the fuck Nextel sells. Surely that can’t hurt? A corporate-sponsored Congress?*) Americans want to stop being nagged and guilt-tripped about voting, and would prefer firemen –i.e., legislators selected for heroics, courage, and physical prowess. Most of all, they want, instead of the usual bunch, guys who have better things to do with their time (and our tax dollars!) than menstruating, hand-wringing, photo-oping, foot-dragging, flip-flopping, wish-washing (that one’s mine! but you can borrow it anytime, indignant taxpayers!), or general pussy-footing around, whatever that means.

In short, the public doesn’t want real legislators, but guys who will follow orders, and answer to the wealthy, which (it’s suggested) is what governments are supposed to do.

I’ve grown accustomed to idiot populism, chauvinism–what disturbs me enough to write this is the undeniable hint of corporatism. Real, honest-to-god fascism. Again.

Here. I’m not going to put a big youtube box for you to watch it, because its very presence offends me. But this guy’s link links to it, and includes lots and lots of applauding commentary, which should be an index to just how scared you should be, with the American mind in such a state:

http://www.firefighternation.com/video/video/show?id=889755%3AVideo%3A601822

Things would be so much better if we didn’t have to spend so much time (and tax dollars!) thinking, deliberating, and (I’ll say it again) general pussy-footing around (though I still don’t know what that means). The common man,** while apparently clueless about the abstract apparatus of government, let alone what actually goes on, assumes that it’s "politics as usual" which has something vaguely to do with wasting time and money. Also, things, they believe, would be so much better if we just got over our obsession with being p.c. (?), and stopped tiptoeing around other people’s feelings.

That’s basically what the commercial is about, raves the common man. Stop holding shit up. Governments should just do whatever it is governments have to do, and get out of our hair (unless the firemen need to delouse us). In layman’s terms: Get the shit done. (The common man doesn’t know quite what the term "layman’s terms" means, but has a pretty good idea, and sure likes how it sounds.) Who better to do that, who better to run the world than firemen? Well, maybe Marines. But still, it makes a good point.

Acch. Enough of my mind-boggling untrained babel of sarcasm/sincerity/sarcasm/etc. I am, in short, frustrated and afraid. History is still bottled up, roiling, rolling, turning back on itself, regressing. Reason's so clearly being lullabyed. We're slipping back deeper into darkness. I mean it: we're teetering on the brink of fascism. Again. I want to close my eyes before the great fall.

*I just know that the American people would like a Congress "that pays for itself." Because, I hate to say this, the American people seem generally ...very dim. Mercifully, dim enough thus far to neglect this opportunity to give American corporations a hand-up, and a more blatant and abusable say in government.

**Hey, get off my back--they’ve asked me to refer to them collectively by that sexist term–and, when referring to any of them specifically, to refer to that reference as his or her "Christian name." P.S. They told me to tell you: It’s called a Christmas Tree. Deal with it.

28 April 2008

2008-04-28T14:02:00.000-07:00

HERE IS WHY I'M A MARXIST. HERE, I THINK ...YES, HERE IS MOSTLY EVERYTHING I THINK ABOUT POLITICS:

Raise an eyebrow, when the mind protests too much. Or when culture does.

Raise an eyebrow when you wonder, as you’ve been subtly taught to wonder: "Can you believe how cruel and irrational the world used to be? Wouldn’t it suck to live back then, in the vague past, in olden times? Subject, as the people were, as we now assume, to the whims of elaborately cruel emperors and barons and absolute monarchs?" Ah, those awful days of crueler rulers... we’ve come along way, right?

Remember the holocaust?

Remember how quickly it was archived, tucked away into deep, dark history, misshelved in the "premodern horrors" section?

Did you check between the Bronze Age and Early Modern Europe? Because there’s no way that thing was spawned by modern-day capitalism! No freaking way...Stalin’s Russia, now there’s a monstrosity rightly associated with the economic system (nominally) in place at the time.

Purges, that’s what you get when you try to be communists! Because, as we all say, as though we’d memorized this script: "Communism works... in theory, but not in practice. Look at Stalin’s Russia."

"How do you get purges? Communism ...How do you get a holocaust? How do you shut the fuck up and stop asking so many questions?"

Well, now that the wars are all over, and all the dogs of Europe have stopped barking, and fascism, slavery, superstition, the English system of weight and measures, and unkindness have all been forever banished--now that the past is finally over, aren’t you glad? Do you ever think about how you take for granted little things, like leisure time, and dinner, and the History Channel? If you do think about it much, I pity you. Because I think you’re being deliberately misled.

Is the world really less cruel than it once was? Is it as kind now as it insists, so loudly, through popular history so seldom followed up by solid research?

We have a habit of "looking back" (as an unwittingly motivated and coordinated culture) on the "bad old days" to ratify the current state of things, the current distribution of social power, by implying that things are great–now that we’ve emerged from racism, or militarism, or a Red Scare, or the absolutely ruthless exploitation of the poorest of the poor.

But the truth is, it’s status quo, or, perhaps, things have gotten worse. The working class is still kept from consciously coordinating any of its actions, by racism and other carefully orchestrated, self-defeating postures (though, in an appalling irony, we’re unconsciously, culturally maneuvered into these very postures, which we like to imagine are "our own opinions.") And we’re still starting wars. And exploitation is more ruthless than ever... only it’s now outsourced to the third world, where it conveniently escapes the attention of guilt-stricken first-worlders, union organizers, and militants, changing all of these into something (semi-rich and) very strange: complacent consumers, Democrats, and "ivory-tower academic types." They are thereby rendered conveniently harmless or inarticulate, they’re all conveniently cut off from the third world that’s being worked to death by our corporate class.

We’re all so happy to remain unaware of the misery we’ve outsourced to the third world, where it waits, where it takes the current, still-spectral form of true international Communism, breathing faintly down our necks, soon raising one hand to tap us on the shoulder and get us to turn around for just a second ...where it waits to blow up in our faces once and for all, destroying this cruelty-powered economic arrangement of life, laying waste to capitalism, but killing God knows how many good people in the stampede.

It must have been awful living in the Middle Ages, don’t you think? Do you think? Why don’t you spend your time thinking about how awful it would be to live in 2008, in the wrong (i.e. larger) part of the world. Why doesn’t the History Channel tell you that story over and over and fucking over? Do you suppose there’s a reason we’re rather told about the elaborate cruelty of Caligula, or the brutal rituals used to reinforce relations of power among the Inca, or how shitty and degrading it must have been to be a medieval peasant? (Hint: yes, there is a reason...) (I’m only talking down to the vulgar Marx-bashers, mind you.)

We’re still lost. Lost deep, and deeper, in the nightmare of the dark.

So many clever people have forecasted the end of this arrangement of life, and, despite some sound reasoning, they always get it wrong. I don’t want to try my own artless hand at divining a date for the end of capitalism, or prophesying an exact schedule for the rise of true World Communism. But I want to suggest that things look shaky with the world.

Now, I’m not calling out "iceberg." And I would like (having thought out a tough ethical dilemma) to encourage our corporate filth to keep plowing full steam ahead.

Oh, about all this and, simultaneously, my blog title: History unfolds like clouds take forms. That’s what clouds do: take form. And take form, and take form, amazing, bewildering us, making fools of what weathermen we have. Changing into something always new and never quite what we imagined. Weathermen always get it wrong. But I rest assured of this, and you can too: sooner or later, it has to rain.

23 April 2008

2008-04-23T12:34:00.000-07:00

Acch, Gott I am sick. On such a lovely day, too.

Acch, Gott, this is der Deutschsprak. Dis is mee mocking jau, Deutschland, fur, um, der Holocaust, and dat fucking band "Tokio Hotel" or vatever.

Datt said, I believe I'm moving to German Village soon.

The Flower Duet (Lakmé)

2008-04-21T15:39:00.001-07:00

Here: Be taken in by the mesmerizing appeal of Orientalism. Have you social conscience dashed against the rocks, like I have. Weave a circle round him thrice, while you're at it, and close your eyes in holy dread at just how lovely this sounds. And remember: it was used in a British Airways commercial. How shameful!

18 April 2008

2008-04-18T14:17:00.001-07:00

You know what I like most about youtube? You get to meet, curse, demean, and be both offended by and offensive to people from all over the first world, and most of World 1.5 (formerly the second world, which nowadays just means the axis of evil... Oh yes, they're still around! No, they're not on youtube... you and I both know they couldn't handle that kind of freedom). Not to mention the nine dozen third world kids with those new old $100 laptops.

Why, just yesterday I looked around at some replies to video comments I'd made, and found myself knee-deep in the muck, slugging it out online with a whole army of South London Chav kids, who actually spell in their dialect.

(Bored by highbrow bullshit? Skip this paragraph. It's a note strictly to the conscientious, and as yet unutterly bored: I use the term "Chav" aware and in spite of its use as part of a sickening bourgeois fantasy about the childishness, triviality, and perpetual unsophistication of the working class. But that awful fantasy, like all bourgeois fantasies and linguistic magic tricks, has a way of reifying itself, and a totally disorganized proletariat is always sure to witlessly play along, each of them, one by one, as long as it provides them with an identity other than "working class" or "poor" ...a whole vast, owned western culture has beaten into their heads the idea that "working class" or "poor" is the last fucking thing on earth you want to be. And so there are so very many saved-up miserably small paychecks going to outrageous conspicuous consumption, which doesn't have anybody fooled except the poor, who remain very, very fooled, and therefore remain poor.)

And so I've got these South London kids bellowing at me, telling me to sod off and a few other much-used communal (don't tell them that!) colloquial expressions. And spelling out their own fucking accents! That kind of shit--phonetically transcribing your god-awful Peckham, England accent--is precisely why I made my first disparaging comment or two. I couldn't resist taking the bait, which they left out by accident. The dazzling kaleidoscope of British social class (and speakers of the myriad corresponding British accents) --they all dance through their daily lives in a lavish orchestration called "Let's Pretend We're British (Even Though We Really Are)" It involves overuse and overpronunciation of British slang, caring way too much (i.e., at all) about "football," and generally acting like a parody of yourself, like a caricature of the British. Or at least this is true of most of the English, if not the rest. Or at least most of the English I've encountered, in real life, in England, most of all lately on youtube, in comments or in actual videos. It makes me wonder, for real, whether these are actually spies from Russia or Albania or some such country where politics and universal pasty skin would respectively motivate and account for their spot-on performance.

I really suspect, sometimes, that at least the most prolific British makers of shitty ...pardon me, shit*... music are faking it, and routinely checking back at the politburo or Board of Fluorinization, or whatever stinking People's Commission they answer to.** Well, at least they're faking it, for whatever reason. Come off it, then, England! Just be yourself! We won't like you either way!

Wales: you're cool.

Scotland: it's your job to tell Sean Connery that it strikes the entire world as utterly preposterous that he has "opinions" at all. All I'm saying is do your job, Scotland, and we'll be cool again. (Oh, and I totally read Waverly. Where are you going? Scotland?)

Maybe the English have just got ethnicity-on-the-brain. My great grandfather died of that.

Yes, that's probably it. They can't forget they're English, and can't let us forget it, either. Just like Jews who always forever are talking about being Jewish, and actually saying "oy vey." Most English people seem to go around talking unnecessarily about Parliament or British-style court cases (wherein gratuitously many barristers, solicitors, and police constables are mentioned). Or they go around saying (just) "oy," and "oy, where's the fackin bar?" and "oy, where's the fackin baby?" They seem to be trying much too hard to sound English. It seems like they're putting on a show for the normal-talking world. How often do you actually have to say "wanker" or "tosser" or "right, mate! look here..."

Part of pulling off a role as an English person, without sending up red flags at MI5 or whatever the fuck it's called, is talking like you've got a mouth full of shit. Or shite, if you like. The point is to give the impression that you're trying to talk through and pronounce around a hideous train wreck of mangled British teeth. Or teef, if you like. Just make sure they sound light-tan. (You can do that by saying something like "My favorite British band is the Smiffs." Only don't say that, because real British people don't actually appreciate the good music that comes out of Britain. They listen instead to Lady Sovereign and various "DJ's.")

I fink some of the limey sods I've seen, particularly the Souf London kids, have actually discolored their teef wiff wood glue to look a bit more British, dinnay? So I'm not saying they're spies, but...hmm?

Souff London kids, according to the costumed people who at least claim to be South London kids, apparently have teeth all the many-varied shades of the rainbow, if you look at it through a sheet of orange mylar. See, this is where they slip up! We'll at least know for sure that these kids are faking it if we catch them trying to sniff the woodglue. Because every Souf London kid surely knows that that kind of glue don't get you high, duzzit?

My point, in short, is that British people sound like fake British people. There, that's not so offensive, is it? Oh, and they have on average 74 god-awful, staggering jaggedy teeth crammed into their jaws. What do you expect, when you live on an island for a thousand years, without letting Asians, et al., in to stir up the gene pool a little? Just be glad you've got some of the smartest, coolest fucking people in the world (Thom Yorke, David Mitchell, Terry Eagleton ...yes, I said Terry Eagleton. He's cool as all fucking hell, which is why you don't know about him, limey motherfucker.)

Well, here's an overture for peace with Souf London, and that whole limey country full of fake citizens. I'll play along with this whole gigantic show you're putting on there, on that blessed plot of yours. Just own up to it: you don't really talk like that by instinct, do you? You're trying to sound that way, and your reasons are your own. Just know that I know. Okay?

Now, that overture: A List of Things I Have in Common With South London Kids

1. "Chav" and "Chris" both start with "Ch."

2. My parents named me after various sounds that struck them as really fancy or posh-sounding: Roginald, Windrow, Dominatello, Nick, Palace, Antique. My sister is named Cliche. Her kid’s name is Secret Desire. She wants to change it to Secret Dezire, or Dez’ree, but they sez iss too late for that. [Hey! There's my accent!] She’s one and a half or some shit. We call her Dezzy anyway, because Cliche is so headstrong, she don’t care what DHHS say. The kid’s also called Dizzy, because she keeps falling off of shit: the telly, the stove, the balcony, the handlebars of Cliche’s bicycle.

3. Oh, I can't wait to try this new designer drug from England I've heard so much about: Apparently, it's called "model airplane glue" and it comes in little foil tubes ...you can buy them at hobby stores and toy shops. Must be some legal loophole, corresponding, perhaps, to an actual, molecular loophole that makes it technically non-narcotic. I bet that really gets their goat down at Scotland Yard. Anyway, you can buy it right there in front of everybody, and by all means do so, if there's a bobby standing nearby, as it's sure to piss the wanker off, but whus he gonna do about it? But otherwise, do it the South London way, and just "nick it."

I warn you, though, there ARE side effects: it makes your teeth go all "wangly" (yellow and mangled), your face go all "spotty," and turns your queen into a harpy.

It also makes you and your countrymen stupid as all hell, while your comedians remain inexplicably funny. It will make women give birth after only four months, usually to hideous skull-warped monstrosities like Lily Allen (who is rumored to be vying with incumbent Elizabeth II for the post of "Queen of the Harpies." I know what you're thinking: "What about Margaret Thatcher?" She eats harpies for breakfast, locked in a frozen torturous parody of bliss down in the very bottom center of Hell.)

Okay, England, here's the troof: ...God, this is hard to say...England, the reason I tease you so is that I'm in love with you. England, you are my precious jewel of the silver sea, and I need you, and I think you need me too. I think. I don't know... I know a wanker like me doesn't deserve a lady like you, England, but we just go together like the two decks on a double decker bus. (I'm on top.) I am Holmes and you are my Watson. Let's not be like them, and die without consummating what we both know in our hearts to be right, though it is forbidden. Shhh, baby. Let me bugger the queen. That's the same as ceremoniously buggering you, England. Shhh...

*shit (adj.): smelling or looking like shite*** to an Englishperson.

** In the end it all means one thing: everything we say gets sent right back, dutifully, to Joe Stalin himself. Whose brain (which now floats in a jar full of highly fluorinated bubbly water/sapped precious body fluids of Christian American babies) will one day be reanimated, so that he might lead the Russians to victory after all. I am a crazy fucking patriotic American and a proud Christian.**** My basic problem is that I drinks the mercury out of old thermometers. If you fuck with me, you are going to hell, my friend. Check out my angry comments on Iraq IED videos! I have some interesting opinions on cowardice.

***shite: (n) English shit. (Usage note: connotes especially voluminous, long, drawn-out, oily feces, like you get when all you eat is lampreys, thrice-boiled leeks (?), fish and chips. )

****Here, and probably in many other places I can't be bothered to check right now, I'm adopting a persona. It's just a persona. Because, were someone to write a ranting and raving message to me about "my" anti-Communist views, I would find myself in that most unhappy predicament, when you find out you've got somebody really, really dumb on your own side. Now, if you'll excuse me, I feel these footnotes-to-footnotes-etc. slipping toward an infinite regress, and it's making me nervous. I'm off, then, innt I?

17 April 2008

2008-04-17T17:31:00.000-07:00

I hate Edgar Allan Poe so much. I hate Mark Twain too. In fact, I hate the American 19th Century in general. I hate cowboys and Thomas Edison and every Little House that Laura Ingalls Wilder ever lived in. I hate that demeaning wide-rule Great White Christian Schoolhouse notebook paper that the Office of Indian Affairs gave to the Sioux so they could sketch out the Battle of Little Bighorn in four crayons. I hate the fact that you can't actually see George Custer getting killed in any of those pictures. I hate Presidents with moustaches, non-consecutive terms, and a "practical attitude toward the issue of slavery." As a matter of fact, I hate all nineteenth-century moustaches, and I despise all nineteenth-century political cureos (including vicious cane beatings on the floor of the Senate) . And I think we should remove from our currency any President who, despite pressure from abolitionists, took a "practical attitude toward the issue of slavery" --I say, in fact, we ought to dig up their corpses, put them on trial in a deliberately farcical kangaroo court, and hang what remains of them, as a mere symbol, desecration, and token.

I hate people from the American Nineteenth Century. I hate cholera and the Civil War, even though they did indeed rid the world of many thousands of nineteenth-century people. Mercifully, I was born just around when the very, very last Nineteenth-Century American people were dying off anyway, so I owe nothing to cholera or to the Civil War, even if the latter did wipe from the face of the earth two idiotic, peculiarly nineteenth-century American names: "Jeb" and "Ambrose." (All Jebs died fighting for the Confederacy, all Ambroses died fighting for the Union.)

I hate the idea that it might once have been called "New Fashioned Peanut Brittle," even though I know it never was. I hate peanut brittle, and licorice, and what I imagine nineteenth-century root beer tasted like (uncarbonated, to begin with, and warm).

But for today I had my students read "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe, whom I hate. And, reluctantly, I have to admit: it was a good story. But I hate Edgar Allan Poe, or at least all the hackneyed drivel that he's so popular for, the sing-songey poems, and the forlorn photographs we all know so well from 9th grade textbooks called "Adventures in Literature." (The ones where we discovered, in chapter one, that we had actually been enjoying literature all of our lives, we just didn't know it. Because we're fucking idiots who only read the outdated comic strips that illustrate Chapter 1, like Garfield and Family Circus, and we're such fucking idiots that we didn't dare think these could be construed or misconstrued as "literature." ...which they are in Chapter 1, though they are never, ever mentioned again--as they shouldn't be--in that or any other literature textbook.)

So now I am going to call him Edgar Poe. That's the author who wrote the neat story I read today. He's much better than Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote crappy poetry that's still got the French totally fooled.

I really do like Edgar Poe, though.

15 April 2008

2008-04-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

Enough of that, let's have some of this: the call of the tame, which, while more plaintive and passive-aggressive, is easier on the ear than coyotes hunting through the park, and all the rest of that great wild kingdom recently all around my house. I will write about the domesticated animals whose company I suffer. But first, a few final notes, on the fucking great outdoors of Dublin, Ohio. Which I will now deliver in a fittingly grandiose style, which I of course call "a la mode de la asshole pretentiousse":

I've come to accept these wild animals in a way, and shorten my walks, and avoid those rough undiscovered places in Dublin where screaming, monstrously huge birds of prey and shocking proportions lurk, and feast, on heartbreaking, fuzzy things. I steer clear of that darkling, untamed wilderness that's crept back into suburban Ohio, along tributaries of the Scioto River, those sprawling, tenuous, but as-we-speak consolidating stretches of woods, where, for instance, some sort of eagle ...no, more like some supereagle, because this thing fucking outclassed all eagles... where supereagles lurk, to strangle, slash, and tear things to bits, to feast, and not to flinch for man or beast,--only to wander off this way, irritated by the man and his dog who are ambling like retards through the park, while the fuzzy things escape into those woods over this other way, here.

The woods, all the woods around my house, are sprawling, razor-thin skeletons of a forest, tenuous, but slowly, insidiously growing, meeting up, and joining together, consolidating all around us... less like an assembly of lonely, straggling trees, more like something organic on a wider scale, gathering all around us, from patchy woods that meet up in points, and grow into the same thing. And less like a thing being born, more like a thing being healed.

It's scary: my best guess is that this is the very same forest earlier, more self-assured generations of Americans thought, arrogantly, they had beaten, had chopped down once and for all. Now it is growing back, all around us. Maybe it will grow and grow, and one day swallow us. I mean swallow Dublin, Ohio, of course--not humanity or anything so romantic. One day, perhaps, Dublin will be laid waste by the unchecked forests, recently so full of stupid-looking wild animals. (Who, of course, always seem to be doing, just for me, a caricature of wild animals doing stuff, like: shrieking while they feast, as a sated eagle is wont to do... Pardon me: supereagle.)

Hmm... I believe I will now see if there is any such thing as a supereagle on Wikipedia. If not, I am going to report that huge fucking bird I saw a while back. What's more, I will brazenly, stridently start a Wikipedia article on the supereagle, which I will give a Latin name when I know how to say "eagle" in Latin (I could be wrong, but "super" has got to be totally easy). Whenever you see the words "experts" and "scientists," that means me. For example:

"Scientists believe that the supereagle is more powerful than any other bird of prey, and may in fact also be faster, screamier, and much more closely related to dinosaurs. Like, a cousin or even closer to fucking Tyrannosaurus Rex. Only with wings! Picture that dinosaur; this is maybe its little cousin, scientists theorize, and experts agree. Few men can stare one down and rescue from its mighty clutches an adorable vague fuzzy thing that escaped right in front of the scientists and their dog (also a scientist) , escaped right into the woods over there. Truly, scientists have a cold, hardass, intimidating look in their eye, when the shit goes down, and it's like a do or die situation. That is surely why the supereagle backed down, even though he totally tried to play it cool, like "Whatever, I got to go, I was going to go over here anyway, not because of you..." But scientists know, they know now for sure, that scientists are big strong men who command respect when they walk, whether it be into a room, across the street, to work to save gas money, or, as we only just witnessed, through the woods, with their loyal dog, who maybe helped out, but just a little. That's certainly not why the supereagle backed down or anything.

Oh, yes: let's have no more talk of wild animals and all the hilarious and unfunny-because-it-happened-to-me theatrical shit they pull. Let's all try to be a little less Grizzly, a little more Urbane Adams. For today. So: The call of my cat, Sophie, always plaintive, always hungry. Cute to strangers, really very pretty, even--but like torture when you live in the same house as it, the meowing, meowing and meowing, meowing, meowing. If I could bring myself to swear at my cat, --which I can't, because I would feel fucking awful about it--I would so gladly tell her to shut the fuck up, because she knows it's not time for dinner yet.

I have a dog, too. I know that she, too, is also hungry. She doesn't want me to know that, though, because I might feel obliged to make her dinner earlier than usual, and then I would surely feel put out.

If you ask me, we use the word "bitch" for the wrong species of pet.

Flight of the Conchords Ep 12 Bret's Angry Dance

2008-04-12T14:03:00.001-07:00

Harr. This is what wild animal encounters make me feel like doing.

Oh, I just love unaccountable saxophones. They are a fucking riot!

11 April 2008

2008-04-11T08:09:00.001-07:00

Must rush screaming to my defense, after reading my last post. Would rather not hack it all up and edit it, because in writing all this, I'm trying to be uninhibited in my honesty... warts and all (and all). But now I will scramble and clarify to the universe of imaginary readers of my blog that all the italic phrases in the 10 April post are deliberately stupid... I wouldn't really say "took straightway to the wind" or "beat a hasty retreat" or whatever... the point is that all these animal encounters I've been having lately are really just that stupid and corny and magestically absurd... the language is meant to fit the experience.

So that's what happened today. I woke up, like Gregor Samsa, to realize something else dreadfully odd about my appearance (in print, to go along with my reluctant Grizzly Adamsishness). That's probably going to be the whole day. I don't teach today, so I should probably manage to avoid the angry goose and his bitch (again, no disrespect to her, but all the disrespect in the world to him... don't fuck with my shit again, angry male goose, because I will stop my car, get out, and one of us is going to get his ass kicked... I'm 40% to 75% sure it's going to be you...).

Oh, but about accidental "animal magnetism" (fully aware that I'm misusing the term, and admit that I will never bother to learn what it really means, because I know it's some kind of 19th century pseudoscience, which surely isn't worth reading about in any considerate detail... I use it to mean, of course, the fact that animals are mysteriously drawn toward me lately, as though my new detergent included some traces of some pheromone that cries out to all nature : "come to me!)" ...when I was an undergraduate, I had this guy in my philosophy of art class who was well-meaning but just goofy as hell, and way too eager to volunteer his "insights" like this clarification of "what 'aesthetic experience' means to (him)"--
the previous year, he took his Jeep Cherokee (?!) up to Salt Sand (Rocky) Creek (State Forest) [or some place like that, pronounced as though we all knew what he was talking about, and had probably gone "up" there ourselves]

and he brought his didgeridoo (chortle!) and was chilling out, playing the didgeridoo by himself (gert!) when a honeybee came out of nowhere (chuck-!) and started, like, dancing (chuck-!) on the rim of the didgeridoo (chuckle! snort!) while he was playing it (snortle!), like it was just drawn to him, or to the music. (and this is when I remembered that this guy was always forever eating Twix and 5th Avenue Bars, and, doing the math quickly in my head, I finally burst out snortling, sputtering, laughing... crying with laughter, then crying with the crippling thoracic pain you get from kind-heartedly stifling your laughter too long... and then everybody turned around and looked at me like I was a total dick for laughing at him. I wanted to shout, in my defense: "but it was "dancing" with your breath, because of the candy bars!")

... I feel like that guy, whenever I have wild animal encounters. So embarassed by them.

10 April 2008

2008-04-10T20:36:00.000-07:00

I apparently have some kind of animal magnetism, and I don’t want it. I love animals plenty, but I don’t like the fact that lately I’ve blundered my way into so many strange encounters with wild animals. Mostly while walking my dog: we’ve come upon a freakishly large owl at night, and in the daytime walked around a corner in the woods to find ourselves three feet away from a hawk–a fucking hawk! In Dublin, Ohio!–about to devour some small rodent clutched in what I can only describe as his... talons. Fucking talons! I don’t want to see fantastical beasts and this sort of shit. I laugh at people who say "talons." But these were so much bigger than bird feet. (Incidentally, the hawk let out a piercing cry–a piercing fucking cry!–and took straightway to the wind (!), leaving the rodent trembling in our path. Then he, too, beat his own hasty retreat–his own hasty retreat!–into the woods...Which suddenly looked less like woods, and more like yonder patch of green. Or something gay like that. Sure, I was happy it didn’t get killed right there in front of me, but I had no intention of rescuing a field mouse from a mighty kestrel or whatever... I would have stayed at home if I knew such a ridiculous scene was waiting to unfold for me in the woods. My dog, of course, innocently thought the whole thing was fucking awesome...)

Then, a couple of weeks ago, my dog and I came across a pack of coyotes in the park. Yes, coyotes. In Dublin, Ohio. A fucking pack of them. Who of course had to make the whole situation feel extra-awkward by taking flight so gracefully, as coyotes are wont to do, across the meadow. Yes, that’s right, they staged the whole thing on the only fucking "meadow" in the whole fucking park.

I now believe in God for the first time in my post-adolescent life, and I am convinced He’s turning my life into a walking comedy, starring lots of impossible animals. I feel like Gregor Samsa, except, instead of waking to find myself transformed into a hideous vermin, I've woken to find myself transformed into Grizzly Adams. Animals are somehow just drawn to me lately, and somehow must act out their animal lives in grand, Discovery Channelish theatrics before my helpless sight. Fuck! Arghh! I am now burdened with an unasked-for animal magnetism. It’s more embarrassing than suddenly discovering that you’re really good at juggling, despite the fact that you’re not the kind of fruit who thinks that’s so neat, who can’t wait to show his friends.

By the way, I think that some people I tell this to don’t believe me. I know that the pack of coyotes was the last straw. I just know that, privately, they think I’m making all this shit up, because I think it is somehow impressive. I shudder at thinking about this, but know deep down it is probably true.

Oh, the crowning insult... or what I hope is the crowning, and final encounter with wild animals: my car has been attacked by the same Canadian goose two days in a row. He stands guard in the damned road, while his bitch is nesting in the grass, just off of the interstate, on my way home. When I turn onto the road, in front of Walgreen’s, he rears up, hisses, and lunges at me, or my car. And I have to dodge him, nearly causing an accident. Two days in a row. The same goose! Yesterday, and today. And now I have to tell everybody about it. And now everybody will call me Nature Boy or something behind my back... as they very well should. I know that I’d ridicule me, if I were someone else.

Hmm... now I feel kind of bad about calling the girl goose a bitch. She’s not the one who lunges at my car. In fact, she's always been cool to me...

9 April 2008

2008-04-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

Two hours ago, the A.P. summed up the day in Iraq: "Errant mortar shells slammed into houses and a funeral tent Wednesday, leaving three children among the dead during clashes in a Shiite militia stronghold under siege by American and Iraqi forces." That's right, "errant mortar shells." ...When did Little Lord Fauntleroy get a job writing for the A.P.? Errant mortar shells? Why flatten my lovelocks, those were surely meant forMuqtada Al Sadr, and the knaves that are in league with him, not for those unfortunate children! But alas! I am impressed, I suppose, that they've finally found such really horrible writing to fit the usual horrible news from Iraq. It's appropriately appalling.

All across America, it's the first full-blown sweltering sunny day of the most abysmal, impoverished, gasoline-starved year yet. All down the interestates, and at long, unhappy traffic lights, nobody has their windows up. Nobody can afford to run the air conditioner. Gas is impossibly expensive. Pity us.

I have this kid in my class who's a real twat. I can rest assured he'll never find out I'm talking about him online, because he's too much of a twat to know I mean him. Even when I say: "hey kid, I'm not going to tell you the fucking point of the story I asked you to read while you're taking a quiz on the story I asked you to read. I like you, but you act like a twat. Twat."

Generally, I love my students. I mean that sincerely, fully. I have an unaccountable, or unfamiliar, pride in my work, at least when I work as a teacher. And I feel genuine affection for my students generally. I feel like I've got a really big responsibility, teaching them. That's so corny, but it's authentic, and instinctive, so I'll go with it, and admit to it. I have a probably undesirable, probably paternalistic instinct, too--a protective instinct of some sort. And that's dangerous. Because, while I'm exceedingly passive with most things in life, I am disproportionately, unhealthily protective of the people I love, or am charged with protecting. I mean really way too protective. I get homicidally angry when somebody threatens or abuses the people I am supposed to protect, or the people I love. That's why I say this: I will kill you if you keep acting like a twat, kid. Stop bothering other people while they're taking quizzes.

On an entirely different note: while driving home (from teaching the twat, et al., about Frank O'Connor), as I watched gobstopped with my fuel gauge impossibly twitching and sagging, faintly falling before my eyes (I really saw this happen today, staring as I did with all the morbid, intense scrutiny of a self-pitying fuck stopped in traffic), it occured to me that, yes : I have so much honey, the bees envy me. Somebody's radio was playing that song, everybody's windows were rolled down. I feel stupid, but that realization really made me happy.

8 April 2008

2008-04-08T17:30:00.000-07:00

Gert. This isn't your daddy's Matt Damon weekly horoscope fanpage. In fact, it's not a fanpage at all. And it's got nothing to do with horoscopes, or Matt Damon. Even if I were into astrology, I sure as hell wouldn't care about Matt Damon's horoscope. I would be, I am, a lot more concerned about my own fate this week.

I know what you're thinking: "what the fuck do you know about my daddy's Matt Damon weekly horoscope fanpage?" And you're right: I've never even been there. I'm sorry if I'd rather not fag it up online with your daddy and his superstitious friends, gossiping about celebrities, and wondering what the stars have in store for Matt (just "Matt") this week. Jesus fucking Christ, I would have to end my life.

Don't get me wrong: nothing against gay people. Just that particular mindless, flaming, celebrity-cult cliche rubs me the wrong way. There's absolutely nothing inherently wrong with your daddy's homosexuality. That qualification surely spares your family much heartache, and efficiently also spares me any accusation of homophobia, which as we all know is intimately linked to homosexuality (repressed). The two always go hand-in-hand. Like your daddy and his latest boytoy (who of course kind of looks like a fucked up Matt Damon), hand-in-hand, sashaying their pretty little selves up and down the town square. God damn it! They piss me off so fucking much! Arggh!

(You might like to know that I just screamed "faggots" real loud, like that big guy Moose or Animal or whatever from Revenge of the Nerds, when he contemptuously screams "nerds!" That's right, I'm a jock. And we rule. And I will say it to your face. Online.)

Here's the truth: this is the beginning of a blog, the uncensored and unshaped mess of my mind, changing changing changing. It happened to occur to me today that some idiot probably has a web page somewhere dedicated to somebody else's horoscope--Somebody famous! (The exclamation mark is theirs. They are excited by celebrities, because they are stupid.) And this amused me. And so, to amuse myself further, at the expense of make-believe stupid people, I thought "What's the most depressing celebrity horoscope web page I can imagine?" Sure enough, Matt Damon came to mind immediately. And soon later on, I was trying to think of a title for this blog. "Matt Damon's Weekly Horoscope" thus very nearly became my title. Fortunately, I was also thinking about clouds today, and how what they do is take form, perpetually and forever. And so I have a more reasonable title, I think. The cloud that took the form.

My right shift key is broken, and these capitals have been a pain in the ass. I just scoffed out loud at initial capitals. I really did. I was lying about the homophobic ejaculation (try to argue that that's not the perfect word for it). ...And, fine, about being a jock. But it's the truth: I just scoffed out loud at initial capitals. The English language looks so ridiculously early-modern when you step back and look at how we write it down. It's kind of like catching a horrifying candid glimpse of yourself passing by a mirror, looking stupid. Or it's like saying a word over and over and over until it becomes vacuous and silly. It's absurd. English.