What Makes You Laugh 4

I can't help chuckling, putting the coffee pot on and thinking about where the day is going to go and where this presidency is and that faint fog of dread that crawls along the ground these days.  To be clear, we all know how this story ends, right?  Regardless of if he actually helps a single person that actually needed it or makes lasting, real, improvements to any segment of the country that actually needed improvement, it goes like this:

In the waning days of his presidency, he will declare that he was the greatest president to ever overcome what he had to overcome for you, the hardworking, tax paying, glorious American citizen.  In the face of adversity, mountains of prejudice and discrimination to him and his family, unprecedented and unjustified scrutiny and opposition propaganda, and a congress of Democrats that refused to get out of the way of progress and reform and change, he worked tirelessly to make this country the greatest it has ever been since the days of the revolution and he will further declare that "haters gonna hate" and that history will tell the true testament of his tremendousness long after the fake facts have faded.  He will declare the war on terror to be a He will then proceed to throw absolutely everyone he can't use in his businesses under the bus for anything and everything that blew up in his face or turned out to be completely empty campaign gibberish lies and then walk off to one of his golf courses or towers, hopefully never to be heard from again with a half built, useless to begin with, wall as his lasting legacy.

I can't help chuckling because you know that's how it's going to go, right?  Dear god, please just don't let him end up on the motivational speaking tour... his ego, probably won't let him fade into obscurity though. Another thing that makes me laugh is this visual in my head of Donald as a kid with his arm jammed in the bottom of a vending machine absolutely thrilled he found a way to get what he wants out of it without having to risk tipping the machine over onto himself by rocking it, but not realizing just yet that he is stuck...

Maybe I'm Missing Something

Enough with the ridiculous headlights, please.  Pretty please?  Can someone please step in as a voice of reason and say something?  Anything?  Can we appeal to logic?  How about safety?  How about simple decency?  The idea that hurting other people because "whatever, they can go to hell" is a not good thing.

Yes, we get it.  They're very pretty when you're taking pictures of them, or sketching them in a design lab, or walking around them in your garage or someone else's garage or at a car show.  Sparkly, shiny, shifting through the spectrum of visible light subtly or standing bold and stark and sudden, so alert and commanding or brilliant, smoldering, and devilish, double daring you to put the key in or press the engine on button.  We understand that aspect.  That bending and twisting and running of the finger's tips along that silk membrane between machine and animal, animal and man, man and near sentient machine.  We understand and we are not asking to tamper with that experience or dull it or snatch it away from you, person driving the car with the tremendously intricate, unreasonably high powered headlights.

Remember when you could replace a headlight bulb yourself for $15?  I still can.  Is my car less attractive because it runs $15 headlamps?  I don't care.  I don't love my automobile any less because it doesn't have black bedded lenses that look like a unicorn sneezed a rainbow around the fringes of the beams.

Can we stop with the ultra bright, surface of the sun, "just like driving at noon", lamps?  I'm sure you probably need to see six football fields ahead of you when you are blazing down the straightaway portions of LeMans at 220 miles per hour never, can we tone it down a little bit when the longest straight portion of highway in your city is maybe half a mile and the safest speed you can average on it without killing yourself or someone else in your suv is a brisk 80.  Not to mention, inside the highway ringing that city, with stoplights, you're probably crushing it a blistering 30 miles per hour.  Stop it already.

Every time that chassis hits a bump or a pothole or manhole cover or gentle dip in the road, the angle of that ultra bright, kaleidoscope changes for a split second and my rear view mirror turns into a camera's flash two feet away from my face.  It's so pretty.  It's so pretty.  What could the reason possibly be?  Is it just rich people wanting people to know that their car, their status symbol, is out on the road and people had better take notice.  It's not the standard model either.  The standard model has the LEDs with the white lighthouse grade bulbs.  It's the S model so the white lighthouse grade bulbs have been replaced with omni directional plasma discharge tubes powered by nuclear cold fusion.  Everyone will know what I drive is better than what they drive because they'll see my headlight's coming from beyond the curvature of the Earth.

Jesus, get over yourself.  No one cares.  What they will know is that whoever is driving the car behind them deserves to have their headlights caved in with a hatchet for every other motorists sake.  I'm not against getting creative or embracing the art of lighting, crystals, lenses, and advancing the technology.  I am against taking it way too far.  All of the light is practically false security too.  It only illuminates, but so far, and if you're a bad driver guess what?  You're still going to screw up.  You'll have an extra 500 feet though to make the same dumb decision.

Things are seriously getting out of hand out there.

Stresses and Stressors and Life On My Tardis

Life is stressful and full of stressors.  That's not news to anyone.  Time is money and money can be converted into time.  The time it takes you to read this is time you could've spent making money.  Or maybe it is time you are spending making money.  Getting paid to read blogs.  Or maybe getting paid to do something, anything, besides read blogs.  Shame on you.  The time it takes to write this could have been spent working as a dishwasher at Eat n' Park.  Or could've been spent getting shopping carts at Kmart and trying not to completely lose it and burn the place to the ground.

Life has many different stresses to it.  Some of those stresses are more intense than others.  Just about all of those stresses demand some sort of relief, some sort of answer, and you can only ignore the bell for so long before they break in and tear you to pieces and sack your fortress and leaving nothing more than a few shreds of clothing and broken cookware and a few charred pages in their wake.  You have to answer the bell.  Eventually.  It's critical to your survival.

The sad part is, in order to answer those stresses, you have to introduce stressors.  Jobs, tasks, relationships, a stressor is anything you take on, voluntarily or not, to help alleviate the stresses, the ambient tensions of your existence, of being alive in a shared world.  If the world were not shared.  If the world were entirely yours, there would be a single bridge.  A single leap from stresses to peace.  A back and forth street, a channel, two lanes wide, and perfect. However, it is a shared world.  There is no single leap and there never will be.

To achieve any sort of relief from stresses you must introduce or have already introduced stressors.  Stressors which often times do introduce stresses of their own.  The channel becomes layered denser and denser with lanes upon lanes of tasks and responses all in the name of achieving a peaceful state or a state of greater fluidity and less tension than what your own ambience, your own existence, demands by the fact that you are alive and breathing and as such will not remain so in an entropic universe.  By the way, did you ever see Tropic Thunder?  Hilarious movie.  I highly recommend you watch it if you haven't seen it.  Came out a while ago.  Should be available for rental or something by now.  Robert Downey Jr's in it.  Tom Cruise to.  Surprisingly good.

Anyway, it's truly mystifying sometimes when you step back and look at and draw the circuit board, the ridiculous interstate  highway map of what you have to do just to feel good, normal, and whole, on this shared planet, in this country, in your state, in your city where you call yourself a citizen.  It's troubling sometimes.  From the time you are alone as a child until the time you die, so much of your energy will be spent on trying to return your state to a single bridge.  Return to the two channel direct connection.  The single bridge.  It's amazing the damage adding a single extra link, one more node, to the graph does.

Time is money and money is time, so let's move this thing forward.  I get that time is money, but I also get that what America values my time at is not what I value my time at.  I have precious little of it, not because I'm particularly busy, but because it is very difficult at times to function on a, for lack of a better term, "normal" level.  A level normative to my peers and expectations of someone my approximate age, build, and general intelligence.  My head wears out very quickly and I have to rest and gain space to gather myself before re-engaging.  I don't blame mental disorder as much as it's part of how I function and maintain myself now.  It's not something distinct of myself, it's incorporated [really, it's only a matter of perspective, part of yourself, outside yourself, what difference does it make from the outside observer looking in?  Very little.  The only difference looking in from the outside is viewing it one way sounds like you make "convenient" excuses when you do not perform and looking at it the other way sounds like you are a person who is unreliable and irresponsible and maladjusted, but you try to work on yourself.  "Attaboy, chap!  If you work hard enough you'll get there."  Eat me.].

At any rate, the way I understand it is spending your time allows you to convert it into money which you can use to purchase things you may need or want, things you would never have the time to learn how to make, gather materials, and then produce on your own.  The question is the conversion rate.  If the fastest I can convert time into money is a certain figure per hour, it will cost a certain amount of time to get X or Y thing, necessary or not.  Then the question becomes how much time will it cost to maintain X or Y thing at that time to money conversion rate.

With all of the time being drawn out of you, how much time is going to be left for simply living.  Will you spend most of your "free" time recovering from work so that you can go back to work so that you can keep X or Y thing you thought you needed or wanted?  How fast is that going to kill you.  How much stress is that stressor going to introduce and are there enough channels flowing back to ever break the loop long enough to have time to feel whole?  My time is worth more than the conversion rate offered.  I'll do without, thank you.  If my conversion rate changes, I will reconsider.  Until it does I am happy maintaining what I have, where I am, keeping the channels as simple as possible so that I do have time to enjoy life and write and breath and sleep.  I get it, the more money you make the "better" your life will be near the end.  I am sorry.  My mind will not work that way.  I wish many nights and days that it did.  That it functioned properly and reliably and all of the other words that make an effective and productive, ever climbing upward, American.  It doesn't.  I won't get to enjoy that.  I won't get to see that.  But hey, I could always win the lottery or something.  Wouldn't that be a gas.

Life on my Tardis is pretty okay.  Often times when I do manage to save up money and get near the cusp of making a capital improvement to my life or my ship, something breaks.  I laugh saying it because it's happened so many times it feels nearly inevitable, to the point where whenever I save up any significant amount of money I start to get anxious and wondered what the ship is going to pull out of it's hat next.  I sometimes think the answer may be a credit card, but after being buried by student loans that turned out to be all for nought I refuse to live beyond my means.  No credit cards unless they're already paid for, in which case they're not really credit cards are they?  I still have never owned a credit card and I'm damn near 30.  I had a Target card back in the day, but I think we all know that doesn't really count.  Besides, that ended in utter disaster too.  I will not do it.  If you have to make payments on something, you probably shouldn't have it right now.  Simple as that.  Of course that also leaves no space for emergencies and heaven knows there have been emergencies aboard my ship.  Gross injuries to my musculoskeletal system as wheel.  Pretty sure I still have a torn ligament in my thumb and being uninsured, that range of motion is just going to be gone by the time it heals on its own.  "You should have gone to the hospital!"  Yeah, right.  Of course.  It's a part of my life I've kind of resigned myself to.  As fast as I can improve and repair things is just as fast as they'll break and splinter and burn up and fizzle out.  Life aboard my Tardis.  One step ahead of the fire, but boy it would be nice to be a couple more steps ahead, or even a block away would be swell.

What day is it?  Sunday, 6 P.M.  Are you sure?  Yeah.  No.  Wait a minute, it's 6 A.M.!  What the hell happened?  It's Tuesday!?  What happened to Monday?  Weren't we supposed to be somewhere?  It's 6 P.M. on Tuesday.  Are you sure?  Well, okay.  We'll call them tomorrow morning at 6 A.M. and explain everything.  Yes, that will be Wednesday.  I'm pretty sure they don't want to hear it now.  What do you mean we're 5 miles from home.  This is a park bench?  Come on, man.  Get it together.  The Tardis will get you to any point in time or space within a 5 second 5 inch radius.  Except when it doesn't.



Bjork - "Enjoy (Dark Jedi Remix)"  There have been a lot of great reimaginings of Bjork's music.  This is one of my favorites of late.  So dark.  So playful.  So wonderfully and beautifully mechanically.

Change, Other Peoples Clothes, Top Down Sun Up, and Attack

I think that's how I got good at defense.  Attacking is an entirely different bag.  Attack, attack, attack!  Get on it!  I don't do call and response all that well.  I do response.  A lot of my growing up and formative whatevers was response, not call.  I was raised not to call and it's been a hedge maze trying to get out of it.  When I do call it's usually over top of what I was calling for and it's blunderbussy.  Killing a fly with a hammer instead of a swatter and then I have to fix the hole in the wall left behind.  It's been fun learning though, learning how to call the right way when calls need to be made and learning that response shouldn't be the only way to integrate myself into lives, because they have lives too and waiting until you're screaming and bleeding out of the eyes is no way to go about inserting yourself into conversation.  I still need distance in a bad way, but a good way.  It keeps them safe and it keeps me safe from misunderstandings and not so shuffle crowds and that's a good thing.  The fewer the things flowing in the better I can handle, and then it's not a frag of choice.  I hate getting hooked on forks.  STOP GIVING ME CHOICES WITHOUT CHANCES TO BREAK UP BAD ONES!  That's my only qualm with the United States of Aye Merica.  The land of one time opportunity for too many of us.  I'd swing less opportunity for more chances any day.

If I could go back in time I wouldn't punch myself in the face or shake myself by the shoulders.  I'd kiss me.  Hard and furious and little me would be like "what the fuck, man!" and then I'd tell him "it gets rougher, harder, longer, and more ridiculous.  You're going to fire a staple through your hand by accident and it's going to suck, but you're going to try to get out of work early and it's going to be one of the worst days post parents that you'll hate.  It'll heal up alright and nearly seamless and your boss will be proud of you for getting things done, but you're gonna wish you took more time on the project.  Just sayin'.  You're gonna hate it for about two minutes, but you're gonna kiss the blood and move on."  Poof!  Time traveling me peaces out and little me scratches his eyebrow and mumbles "no way."

I'm wearing other people clothes from goodwill.  They're great!  Half the stuff I have on makes me wonder what could provoke someone to give them up.  I haven't bought myself a jacket in a long time.  It's been years and I hadn't really thought about it until now.  It was always my mother, well, not always.  Sometimes my dad would pass me one.  I still miss my Bell Atlantic jacket sometimes.  That thing was the tits.  Furry pockets, double layered body and a knit collar.  Loved it.  Don't love how I got it (from my father, I hate saying that, but it's true.  I hate thinking about "I came from that"s cuz it makes me sick and it probably shouldn't, still heated, still gotdamn heated, it's not gonna die, but I actually want it to.  If he wants to apologize, my terms are teeth.  Not all of them.  But give me one of your kanines and apology accepted.  Until then, and only because you outright refused me.... twice, til death), but that jacket was everything you could want in a jacket.  Nice and tough outer with ... aw, it's not leather... trying to think of the word... the outer was made of the stuff good work pants are made of.  The cuffs were knit too, just like the collar.  And you can't beat the Bell Atlantic logo on the chest.  So good!

I'm wearing other peoples clothes and it feels nice.  It feels right.  It feels good to have new things that I bought on my own with my own tastes instead of for all kinds of purpose.  Purposeless clothing rocks.  Why do you have that jacket?  No reasons beyond my own.  It tickles me to say that.  Everything has been so purpose driven toward survival and managing damage and matching in, but this time, this jacket isn't about matching in or history or family or learning how to run with the silverfish, it's just about wearing what I want to wear.  The thing about goodwill though, the darker side, is wondering about if some of my stuff is going to end up at one when for one reason or another, cut short, or left standing still, my things get out of time.  Is someone going to be eyeing my baseball jersey who also loves the number 78?  I'm not mad about it, but I wish I could meet them so we could talk about our affinity for 78 and how it came about.

Top downing it.  I tried to go ground up and I couldn't provoke myself to make the change to oemfail, so I'm taking it from the roof down and it hurts.  Thematics don't work backwards no matter how hard you try to grow them that way.  I do enjoy the brighter motif.  I really do.  We're gonna grow the font into a better color and adjust the images, but sometimes you just have to go into a room and sit down in it to begin to understand where it's coming from.  The same thing goes for people.  You'll never get a good read from afar.  Top downing it because I've been boxed out and there is no other option.  And I'm okay with that.

I don't like change.  Change is stupidly difficult.  Sometimes routine will betray you and catch you not paying attention and I think I like that worse.  I can be manipulated and gulled and switch backed fairly easily, but I like to think of it as a trade off.  A trade off I am willing to take.  Unwillingly at times.  Taking it though.  Brighter and brighter.  Years behind and still in meta jail with my fingers through the fence, but making keys.


///Mackelmore - "White Walls"  .... lean back... the more I listen to his album the more I enjoy it

fuck the news

Subject : fuck the news
Posted Date: : Jul 25, 2009 2:42 PM
the news sucks. ihate watching it. i hate all the networks. i hate all the spins. i hate that i rarely ever get to hear about anything even remotely important. and i hate that its now more or less a source of entertainment, product placement, and spectacle more than it is a source of information, reliable or not. its something to tell you how to think and feel. and it does it with arguments and commentary that wouldnt stand up in a highschool logic and proofs class if people even went that far in high school, let alone college.

watching the news is like a recieving a daily reminder about just how fucking dumb the majority of americans are. which kind of reminds me of something i thought about near the end of a drug policy class. the conclusion was that the war on drugs was an unsustainable war that is not even close to fighting the real source of the drug problem, if you can even call it that. america is a country of wars. we need wars to dominate everyone else and to flex our will on them, but the only sustainable war, in a country that has thrived on war decade after decade, the only war worth fighting that will take care of so many problems that lead to desert storm part 2 in the first place, the only war to potentially end all wars is a war fought against ignorance.

if people werent so god damn stupid and complacent and fucking misguided there wouldnt be unions, we wouldnt need them, classism would fucking die out because it had to, legislation would be reasonable, people would care about public policy, american cars wouldnt suck dicks and would be worth more than the CHILTON manuals printed about them, fossil fuels wouldnt be a crisis, renewalable energy would be a lot more than a pipe dream, the banks wouldnt have gotten so far gone, gore would have been elected, bush wouldnt have been elected twice, a bill wouldnt have passed making it okay to bring guns into bars, all university would be free, homes wouldnt be built ten feet away from hurricane swells, infrastructure would be stable and able to grow, wal mart would be gone, america wouldnt be an exclusionist state, global warming would be under control, 1 percent of the people wouldnt have 50 percent of the wealth, healthcare would be available for everyone, cigarettes would go away, stupid drug laws would never happen, you'd have to be older than 16 to drive, and younger than 21 to drink, politics wouldnt be nebulous, school would teach you how to learn and grow, prison would reform instead of being a self serving industry, campaigning wouldnt mean pandering, the best man would usually win, the f22 would be out of production years ago, we wouldnt be in a consumer/debt driven society, outsourcing would be non-existant, religion wouldnt be law, the free market would be a myth, job security would be real, a life of excess would be considered abhorrent instead of the ultimate goal to work toward, celebrity would shrivel up and die like the wretched pox on humanity it is, tv would be worth watching, homelessness would be a choice, joining the military wouldnt be the only way out of a dead end life, people would be upwardly mobile, stories of courage would be exclusive of any tv or film personality or lifestyle choice, rags to riches stories would never be told, athletes would not command more money than the president, and corn wouldnt be fucking subsidized.

but the news reminds us every day that america is a pretty fucking ignorant place populated and run by sheep with expense accounts and a desire to someday own an escalade and a helicopter and a house so big the electric bill alone would swallow a low class persons monthly paycheck whole with a pool big enough to provide enough water for a small town to drink and a lawn as green as the sky is blue all located in the middle of the fucking driest climate possible with a gate hardy enough and security force reckless enough to keep out the god damn huns and lurking have nots. cuz what is stupidity and excess without that wonderfully american "they said it couldnt be done so i did it" spirit.

fuck the news. i dont need to be reminded.

///lily allen - ldn: because sometimes things get so rediculously sour that all you can really do is smile about it. the scale of disdain only extends so far. and sometimes things are so black they can only be described in shades of white.

do i really want to be a writer? 02/14/06

Subject : do i really want to be a writer?
Posted Date: : Mar 14, 2006 3:20 PM

yes, more than anything in the world. i know ill find success eventually and i know that i have this inexplicable urge to write all of the time. I dont write as much as i probably should because i spend a chunk of time doing other things and another person (which is unfortunate at times, but i just haven't reached that level of eccentricity that would allow me to eshew everyone and everything that might stand in the way of writing eight hours a day, masturbating two hours a day, drinking six hours a day, and sleeping off the hangover and depression for the remaining eight).

wondering everyday about what i will or will not be able to do with my BA in creative writing, shoddy grades (almost across the board), and just about complete lack of experience in writing related fields outside of school, would probably result in me sitting down in the bathroom with a shotgun purchased at Wal-Mart. who's to say what the market is for BAs in CW. I mean, these degree programs exist all across the nation at both private and public instituations... is it designed for those kids with trust funds who don't need employment to support themselves? the people who can "afford" to be eccentric? Ill have to compete with them eventually and theyll have the advantage of little pressure from the day to day struggle of... wait a minute... this is sounding like another "haves and have-nots" rant.

i do really want to be a writer and it does worry me a little bit from time to time... but if i didnt want to be a writer im pretty sure i would drop out and become a serial killer prostitute whose MO involved shotguns, natty light, and ass licking.

obsessing.

i am not anna nicole smith 12/02/05

Subject : I am not anna nicole smith

Posted Date: : Dec 2, 2005 6:37 PM

She is white. I am black. Our similarities pretty much end there. She attempted to make a living with her acting and endless breast enhancements (to the point where she could literally use her tits for extra shelving or a convenient t.v. dinner tray holder or even a nice crevase for catching stray crumbs when eating crunch n munch popcorn while jetting through the l.a. freeways), and only ended up alieniating every living person on the face of the earth except maybe david hasselhoff and a few perverted little kids who had no concept of what a beautiful woman really is anyway. then again david hasselhoff isnt really a person so that leaves like .000000001 percent of the population who could look at her and have thoughts other than murder/divine punishment/"retribution-for-womens-rights-though-i-am-a-die-hard-chauvanist" come to mind.

when she realized she couldnt act and no one was interested in seeing her, naked or clothed, she went gold digging with some dude 63 years her senior who died a year or so after they got hitched. I on the other hand am not banking on anything else except my ability to land that hottie who may or may not happen to be 63 years my senior and even if she did die in the year after i got us hitched and my name in the will it would still be the best damn year she ever had, god damn it! yes, i plan on becoming filthy rich through essentially servicing an older woman, but at least its not a dude, and at least i have her pleasure in mind. when you break it down its like any other job: you put in your time until theyre gone and bam! its time to retire to mutha fuckin rio forever and shag all day and drink all night with a view of one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth.

i mean, consider the alternative: i could work in a nursing home and shag the patients and get nothing out of it but a tiny pay check and union security. now you tell me you wouldnt pick the able bodied old lady with a fat wallet and a horny sand box over that poor bed ridden shmoe who will probably get you fired after your night of illicit passion. hmmmm... tabloid super star > washed up nurses assistant any day if you ask me. anna nicole isnt even a tabloid superstar. She's a pathetic example of excess gone awry and, sadly, very well documented through small distribution media that happens to be tabloidal in nature. she is a failure at life, where as i will be a resounding success because i will set out to do what i have always intended to do instead of pretending to be good at something im not by running around with two extra bald heads grafted to my chest.

$$$$ its all about the benjamins. plus i dont need any enhancing. that shits just shallow in that kind of extreme!