squidbag

Don't Come Around Much Anymore

Those of you who have been reading me since 2004 (masochists, to be sure) may have noticed the extreme drop-off in posting that has, of late, occurred. My habitual ranting about shit in print has taken a backseat to paper writing for school, with dual downsides: once I'm done writing papers, I don't want to be anywhere near a keyboard for a while, and the poisons hang about in my brain, burning the top layers. 

Regardless, if you're here, you have come here to read, and due to a small but not completely ignorable number of requests, I have decided to upload some of my school work here, for your perusal. You will perhaps notice that the quality of my writing doesn't have to be much better than it is here to earn an A. Surely this says something deplorable about the nature of public education. Enjoy, and as always, everything here is copyright me.

Book Review - Making Schools Work

Book Review - The World Is Flat

Comic Books & Cultural Evolution

Faith, Support and Rationality

Focus on Focus on the Family

Frederick Douglass and Christianity

Max's Room

New Urbanism

Nixon Ab Chao - the US Presidential Election 1968

Out of Our Depth - Americans in the Meuse-Argonne 1918

Processing Process Theism

Reality Television

Research Project Design - Religiosity and Party

The Changing State of War

The Heart of New York

Thomas Paine & Edmund Burke

Human Nature

Except that really, humans, for the most part, don't act naturally at all. When we do our best, we tend to behave against nature. Even giving into desire (of any kind) often requires a rejection of self-preservation. What's our deal?

Part of it is striving to be civilized - we resist our lizard brain impulses and such so that we can live as a part of a community in a society which has its own benefits; this is the argument that you hear murderers & rapists & pathological whatevers simply throw away when they talk about "not being able to control themselves." Bullshit. You can, you just didn't. You may want to do things all the time that you don't, and it is the not punching deserving fucks in the back of their heads that makes us people and not animals. But we do the best we can, most of us (the ones not featured on local news coverage), and I'm certainly not advocating for Rousseau's completely natural people - who'd want to share a meal or be trapped on an elevator with them? Naked, squalid, farting self-centered savage people - like attending a biker rally, NASCAR infield or large hippie gathering. Disgusting.

Another part of it (that thing I'm talking about - keep up with the stream) is getting bound up in our own expectations, and then leaping the chasm into other people's expectations - as if those were ever fully understandable. Trying to measure what's happening by one set of (probably unrealistic) expectations is crazy failure-making enough, but then compounding the problem by adding in another set that you've only interpreted and not fully understood, no matter what you think? Well. That's just asking for unhappiness, isn't it? I expect you to answer. Heh.

Do we have a duty as people to make each other happy? Probably not, but it seems like a good idea anyway, especially if you can quantify happiness as the removal - even for a short time - of suffering. If we're built to suffer, and suffering causes change, progress and development; if the grain of suffering under the shell of our skin causes the eventual pearl of evolution, then using our powers to bring happiness occasionally seems like a pretty good idea, since it can be interpreted as bringing vigor to the process and improving the morale of those involved. It's good for the race, character building stuff. And we know this - that's why there's so much rich food and different sex and chemical engineering and entertainment and diversion. Fuck it, let's be happy for a while. Go nuts with it and you're a fat sexaholic drug-addict, or some other permutation of excess, but that's really all about motivation, yeah?

Motivations and artifice are a deadly combination - some of us have no poker faces, so we start with hope and then become immediately cynical, disenchanted and untrusting when we realize just exactly to what degree others suck. What is a person doing, really, when they regale you with stories about themself? Painting an accurate picture, or the one they want you to see? Are they hiding? Is there a reason to hide? Where do they hide when they hide from you? What does a person's mask say about them? Analyzing this causes you to see the world through a version of Terminator or Robocop's onboard display, with a list of optional responses to the situation. Pick the one most genuine, and find yourself at 90 degrees to humanity forever.

I personally don't really understand, for the most part, what motivates the largest mass of people, and you can see that in the beats I miss in conversation, the courses I take in school, in entries like this one, in the way that I build a relationship based on loyalty and commonality and value and love and only dissolve them when the tools for maintaining them elude me - when the other person seems to be operating outside of what I understood our interactions to be. Not an expectation, an understanding. I'm fond of talking stuff to death, and this is why - too often, I'm not only not on the same page as everyone else, I'm in a different fucking library.

Where am I going with this? I don't know. I'm weary of second-guessing. Tired of masks and controls and stories and endless parsing through the muck of words that describe emotions without being emotions. It's time to drop shit that doesn't matter and channel zero my brain into happiness, allowing others to do likewise.

Feed the feedback loop on this one, folks, if you dare.

The American Hopeless Problem

If you're like me, (and you know you are, secretly, down in places you'd rather not acknowledge) you find yourself frequently in observation of others and thinking "Man, this guy is completely hopeless."

Whether it be some talking head floundering around for ersatz points on his conspiracy monsters map in the media or hapless motorists who seem not to understand physics, vehicles, or indeed, sitting up, you've seen them. Unspeakably rude bastards who have jaws that unhingedly jack in the hot air that spews incessantly from their putrid noise holes or morally superior pricks who wield their sceptre-cocks of half-baked ideology over anyone who is unfortunate enough to be caught in their headlight gaze, you know who they are. Ever encountered someone who is obviously in the wrong, but assumes instead that it is everyone else? Liars? Thieves? Shouting driveway shitheads? Pious and necktied doorstep religion peddlers? A person who doesn't seem to grasp societal norms of speaking, relating to others or wearing clothes? People who act like sit-com characters? Anyone who is still blowing their nose in restaurants? Reason-free martinets? Vacuous bureaucrats? Anyone with 1000 piercings? Like they walked into Blind Jack's Needle Hut and just said, "Here's money. Fuck me up." White people with dreads? Stank-ass dreads? Gibbering fuckheads just on the wander? Someone who is just extraordinarily bad at their one job; people who are essentially doorknobs, with one thing they can do, and it just means they go back and forth all fucking day? People who make you say, "Jumping Jesus at this hopeless bastard; kids, don't look." The hopeless. They are a problem for all Americans, and all of us have seen this chronic hopelessness problem. If you're like me, then you're tired of this shit.

I know what you're thinking: "Sure, there's a problem in this country and I *hate* that, but what I can I do - the situation is, by definition, hopeless. I mean, have you seen these fucking people?!?" Yes, I've seen them, and I've heard the sounds they make, and you sound like one of those hopeless bastards now, with your gibbery whine noises and blibbity blabbery. Shut your mouth, grow a spine and help me confront the problem before the big guns of the War On Hopelessness are pointed at your ass. 

That's right; the War on Hopelessness. It's very patriotic. We're going to stop having no hope, and have fucking hope instead. In fact, that's our slogan: HAVE FUCKING HOPE. We're going to hope things turn out okay, we're going to hope not to run into any desperate shitheads during our days, we're going to hope not to run out of money. We're going to have hope and fight the hopeless, bringing them around, and if they can't be brought around, we'll wade through the oceans of their gibbering froth to the islands of their incapacitated, lying drunken on bathroom floors & watching reality TV. We're going to work to make the things we hope for, and then hope for whatever the next shit on the horizon is, too. We're actually going to hope for the future, because you know why? The alternative is to end up among the hopeless, taking up space and wasting time and fucking with others.

Even if the hope turns out to be unjustified, it'll be worth it not to have been down there with the likes of them.

No Country For Stupid Men

The world is not safe for disrespectful pricks in restaurants any longer. Two instances from last week, the first from Friend of the Squidbag (SquidFriend? SquidFiend?) Joe Basilone out of Chi-Town:

"Took the boys out for lunch, and there were two men sitting across from us having a loud, profanity laden conversation. Realizing that my only "backup" were 2 and 7 year olds, I did the only rational thing I could think of.

Walking over, keeping my voice low enough so that the boys couldn't hear me, I said calmly, "You may not have any children with you, but I do. Have some respect before I shove that hot dog down your throat for you. Sideways." I then slowly walked back to my table and sat down to finish. Neither one of them knew what hit 'em. And neither one uttered a single word for the rest of our meal."

This one's mine: Stopped into a Mickey D's (I know, my mistake) for a quick breakfast between an Abby school activity and a presentation I had to give last Friday when some Seniors, skipping classes, decided to heckle an older woman who was working the register: the main heckler was six feet plus, pasty and red-haired: 

"Hey, you disrespectful Ronald Weasley looking motherfucker; you'd best calm down and keep your mouth shut or I'll drop you like a bad habit right now. Test me." It looked like he might speak, and I did my best dad/dog owner "Ut-tut-tut! No more talking 'til you leave," accompanied by closing mouth hand puppet gesture. It worked, everyone else had a peaceful wait for breakfast, and I did not hear him speak again.

We're out there, people. It's about respect. Behave.

I'm Trying to Understand

Last month, a bunch of us found out that my daughter's Girl Scout troop leader had been lying to all of us about various things for almost two years, stealing money from the troop and using it for whatever she saw fit, and withholding information and opportunities from the girls. I am happy to say that she is now our former Girl Scout leader, and is no longer allowed around Scouting at all. I gave her multiple online opportunities to come clean about it or tell her side of the story but was roundly ignored. She won't speak to me in public, either, choosing instead to alter her schedule so we don't see each other and refusing to acknowledge my existence. It's clear that she's told her two daughters, casualties of the situation if ever such existed, to do likewise. Troop gossip is that she contends that she's done nothing wrong and is espousing a "I'm just a victim" story to anyone who will listen. 

Last week a young man who everyone says was a very pleasant guy blew up a bunch of people in Boston with a shrapnel bomb in a backpack. Apparently, this was done to defend Islam, perhaps at the suggestion of his other brother who was not as successful in life. The two men killed four people, wounded scores more, and created an atmosphere of havoc over something that not only doesn't need defending, but isn't even really a thing. Later, after being wounded in the throat and fighting police, the young man hid in a boat, and is now in hospital with a serious injury, communicating by writing, and being promised the death penalty when found guilty of what he's done. His brother is dead, and likely this upsets no one but him. 

Today, during one of my classes at school, a young woman who was supposed to be doing a speaking presentation about anti-abortion radicals (the sort who kill people and firebomb stuff) instead decided to distribute a handout urging us to "save the babies" and then went on for six minutes about how horrible abortions are. When gently confronted by our professor about whether or not she was ever going to move on from graphic & illustrated descriptions of abortions and talk about the actual topic to which she'd been assigned, she shut down completely, ended her presentation, became disrespectful, and refused to participate further in the class. She quickly ducked out when class was over, and we had to overcome awkwardness to move forward.

I suspect that my former GS troop leader felt desparate and unappreciated, overwhelmed and sad, worked over by life. But you don't get to lie and steal from children, at one point withholding a not-insubstantial gift card from a boy with cancer. I suspect that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev loved his brother and was "radicalized" by his brother's strong faith and opinions and undue influence to the point that he was willing to do anything, including kill people. Maybe he thought it wouldn't work; maybe he thought he'd never be caught. Nothing justifies what he did. I suspect that my fellow student was - inside her mind - taking a heroic stance for the "rights of the unborn," speaking up for them when she felt people had to listen. Nothing makes hijacking a class with your subjective opinion and trying to manipulate them a good substitute for a research project.

I'm trying my damndest to understand you fucking people - but you don't make it easy.

Wal-Martination

So I had to go to Wal-Mart for some stuff.

Don't judge me; I needed storage bins and a picture frame and milk and bread and make-up for my lovely wife and fish tank things and so on, and they were the closest place to my house that I thought would have all of that. I should have known better, of course - Wal-Mart never seems to work out for me, not really.

First off, it's raining. The hazardous combination of Tennessee drivers plus rain is well documented, so I won't belabor the point, other than to point out that until I went out today, I had spent the entire day organizing papers and watching political dramas in my den. So the contrast was jarring, and may have soured my mood.

Then, people were dicks. People were on cell phones, shouting and not paying attention to their environments, people were not spatially aware, people were ignoring their crying children, farting and laughing about it, listening to loud bad music, and parking their baskets in front of shit and walking away. I hate people on the best of days, and today is not one of their best days. I was not enjoying my last half dozen interactions when Dorkbag Stumbleson came hobbling down the aisle on his cell phone, turning 360s and and looking around for something or somebody while trying to hold up his pants. When he encountered my now stationary basket corner, he actually said, "Excuse you."

ME: Excuse YOU, motherfucker. (For the record, "motherfucker" is not a go-to epithet for the suburbs. I was not raised entirely in suburbs.)

DS: What?!?

ME: Look, I've had seven non-quality interactions in a row since I got here, so I'm going to give you one short chance to back off and move before I see if I can fit you in one or two of my new storage bins I got here. Now clear out so I can buy my base or foundation or whatever the hell it's called. It's been a long week.

He moved and went away without another word, and I got space around me in every direction as others cleared a path. So I guess I can recommend this technique for your use in crowd control.

Transmissive Animosity

I think that one of the hardest problems we have as members of the human race is this; when we hate someone, it's extremely difficult for us to move through life when no one else feels the same way about the person we hate, or, even worse, when those we love still like that person, or when the depth of their condemnation for the person seems to lack the degree appropriate - the degree demanded by our fiery burning hate. It's marginally harder - even for those of us practiced at the process - to hate someone without help. It's not vindication we need, though we feed on that when it happens, it's just about empathy.

When Bastard X (who for the sake of argument we'll call Bastard X) has wronged us, we want to have people we love around us so that we can run to them and tell it on the mountain that Bastard X is a bastard. And to have them agree with us? There is nothing so euphorically vindicating than to have Friend Y wholeheartedly agree with us about Bastard X's bastardness. We need to vent, to commiserate, indeed, the only things Misery might love more than Company are Sympathy and Affirmation. Misery probably loves Company simply because Company can provide those qualities in greater degree than anyone else.

The point is this: Whatever Bastard X does to us directly is so big that we fail to see any other qualities in him/her/them for a time. And it could be a long time. And unless whatever Bastard X did is so objectively bad that it brings EVERYONE around (and it never is, even fucking Hitler had friends) there's always going to be someone you're talking to who doesn't get why you hate the guy who they have class / drinks / church / sexy times with. They can't see it, while to you, it blots out the sun. Sometimes they're obligated to get along and won't allow themselves to see it, or they're on personal journeys and shit. That's always the worst.

Other people's hate touches us all the time: parents get divorced, and unless one of them is an objective prick, you usually have to get along with them both. Couples split up and one half of them will vent to you about what a psycho the other half is and then say shit they don't mean like, "I know you guys are still friends, so I'm cool with you hanging out with her still," when what they really want YOU to say is, "That bitch." Friends bail on friends, co-workers stab one another in the back, shit happens all around and these people forget that you're not really in on their drama at all. It'll happen to you if it hasn't already - someone will wrong you, and your intimates will continue to get along with that person, and indeed, find value in their character and person. And it'll hurt.

Secretly and close away near the hearts of the person (subjectively) wronged is often the dual suspicion that Bastard X is quietly and objectively one of Shakespeare's smiling villains and that Bastard X will slip up eventually and reveal what a fucking bastard he/she is to everyone else. And then they'll see. Oh, they'll all see it then. They'll understand that you were not, in fact, just a virulent sack of hatred and poison all this time, but a prescient and insightful judge of character, way ahead of the curve.

What I'm saying is; It's hard, hating someone who is really deserving of hate, and it's not like anyone's going to help you - you're on your own. If they're really, really terrible, though - just an absolute shit of a human being - you'll reach a transcendent, white electricity point of hate, and it will become light and easy to carry. And if they're really as bad as all that, well - it's usually worth it, whether you can share it with anyone or not.

A Magical Place

I don't know how many of you have ever had the occasion to travel to the Hazen's Brigade monument at the Stones River Battlefield in Murfreesboro, but if you can make it out there, I highly recommend the experience, which will stay with you for days afterward, creating many different kinds of powerful feelings.

First of all, you should perhaps be aware that it is the oldest Civil War monument of any kind, anywhere, having been erected on the site of the battle in 1863, shortly after the fighting occurred. The monument also contained a time capsule with some artifacts of battle contained within, and the significance of this is still being debated.

The magic of the place comes from something else, though. There is a cold rock wall surrounding the small graveyard, and in order to go in, you must trip a wrought iron latch, giving one the feeling of seclusion, of being trapped in there with the dead, hidden from the rest of the world. Pressed against the wall,time slips away, and spaces behind the monument are like falling into another world. It really is an experience to be had, and more than once, if you can manage it.

Additionally, the monument's proximity to a train track presents the visitor with a unique juxtaposition of the static past and moving present, and can be euphoric under the right circumstances. The many trees around present their own interesting fun, and the site boasts not just a trail, but a "trail exhibit." Not everyplace can say that.

I, for one, hope to get back there soon.

Unreasonable Book Feels

Above is a trailer put together by people who love Warren Ellis & his new book, Gun Machine. That's Ben Templesmith's art, and Wil Wheaton's voice. I finished this book over the weekend, during some time I decided to take off from books I have to read for school right now, and because I hated everything just a little bit. For those of you who loved Crooked Little Vein, well, you can still love that, because it's a thing you can love. This is a different and better thing, in its way, because it works on more story levels than Ellis' first novel, but retains the sharp nastiness of his characters furiously boiling away at the madness all around them pointing their own vomited madness back at it.

But you see, there's too much. I find out from Ellis' page that Ian Rankin is back in the Rebus business with his new one. This is good news, because it's been a bit too long since I got my teeth into a punchy Scots detective novel, and I've missed DI Rebus. Been watching Luther from the BBC via Netflix just for the hit of Brit police procedure. Well. And Idris Elba, who is awesome.

But, wait. Neil Gaiman's got a new one coming out, too. The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Which is even better news, as it sounds like the world decided to give me plenty of recreational reading during the last year of me going to school. So I'm looking forward to that, as that and a novel from Joe Hill are long overdue. Oh, look - a new novel from Joe Hill.

If only there was going to be new Christopher Moore as well. Best you can hope for is Sacre Bleu in paperback. Which you should definitely read if you haven't.

Tearing the Ticket

I hope to hell I die off camera.

Seriously, the sudden variety of on-camera death is either pointlessly gory - which I don't need; the idea of everyone seeing the chicken salad I had for lunch and the state of my liver whilst I'm trying to check out of this life with some last shred of my damned dignity after a monster attack does not thrill me (and would take the prestige away from my death scene) - or heroic to the point of ridiculousness, so that the life that precedes it is instantly made to stand small in the shadow of the heroic act that resulted in my death. Every act with meaning that happens after something like that is framed by the heroic sacrifice of the departed, and you forget that he used to swear at people in grocery lines. A hail of slow-mo gunfire is not for me. I might jump in front of some people to save them, but that would depend upon the people, and if the violence is quick enough, it's liable to catch me weighing the worth of my compadres before deciding to sacrifice myself for their potential collective mediocrity. I could end up missing this opportunity entirely and find myself staring at the receding bus that ran them all over and wondering if I should just leave, or call somebody, or...?

The non-sudden, foreshadowed for fifteen fucking minutes, on-screen sort of demise is usually reserved for one of three people; the Plot Device, who kicks off early on and you have to see it happen (usually in entrail-wrenching detail) to frameworkily understand all the subsequent stuff that springs from that event, the Wise One, who passes along important knowledge or a sacred trust (or both, possibly accompanied by a totem) and likely makes you cry about midway through the film, or finally, the Protagonist's end scene death, which only happens if the story is about you, and I'm not egotistical enough to assume that this one is. I guess it could be. Maybe I'm the one who doesn't see his destiny's path until the third act or something. Somehow, I doubt it, though. I've lived too long to be the Plot Device for someone else's story though, and I think we can agree the closest I'll ever get to Wise One is wiseguy.

Besides, all of these pretty much require a strained-breath soliloquy, a recitation of final wishes pushed out behind a sucking chest wound, or a pacific "giving up of the ghost" resignation move. The first one sounds laborious, and further has the additional pitfall of timing issues; I can't imagine anything that would piss me off more than dying before I was done talking - unless it's finishing the big speech and then being forced to hang out and make fucking small talk as I'm shuffling off. I write, I use social media, I spend quality time with my friends and family and I have more conversations in a day than I would usually prefer; if I haven't said it somewhere by the time I'm dying, then I'm expecting the rest of you can live without it. No speeches, please. If a man can't get some quiet while he's checking out, something is seriously wrong with this picture.

Nope, dying off camera seems pretty much the way to go. You can explode gloriously and no one has to see your internal bits, you can drop off quietly from disease, you can be heroic or mundane without the additional responsibility of looking good while you do it. Takes the pressure right off.

All you have to do then is die.