squidbag

Incident on I-24

There will be a real T'Day post later, but for now, this is what you get.

On the way home from Cayce & Matt's place today, we ran into a major traffic snarl on I-24.  This forced us eventually off the road and into the Tennessee Welcome Center at the Georgia/TN border.  The obstruction,was described by the TN DOT kiosk as an "incident," which was very fucking helpful and told us nothing of value.  The "incident" created a giant double line of pissed off people in cars, a huge double line for the bathroom, and an immensely populous rest station filled with people and smaller people and their dogs, all confused, late, irritated and squinty.  When your wife is poring over maps and smoking a cigarette and it's your job to corral the kids for a few minutes and additionally entertain yourself, there're a lot more boring things that you could do than take pictures of the other people at the rest stop.

(special thanks to Matt for reminding me this morning that Animoto existed)

Nightmare?

(I awoke from this dream this morning oddly calm.)

You poisoned and choked me with your infinite lies and bullshit and vitriolic repetitive meaningless alphabet spew that seemed to come without warning and flowed freely over logic and compassion and thought, bringing only mayhem and traditional lying and beliefs without emotions.  And I coughed.  A huge lungbuster racking cough that shook my frame and neck and chest and made my bones rattle and ache.  People - a young blonde woman traveling with an older, apparently homeless man -  across the street turned to look, and then adjusted their Michael Jackson masks and trod along like their shift was just beginning and the reactor had burst back in 1986 and the sunrises were scorched by umbrage and radiant glorious toxin.  I eventually coughed so hard and shook my head and laughed along with the fleeing and broken internal connections that my brain shook loose and indeed took to bouncing merrily along the concrete, picking up bits of fluff and loose filth and a nickel from the gutter as it went.  The body, black-clad, went slack then, like a warm sock discarded before the foot slips into cool sheets and dreamtime.  The scars puckered and bent, and the skin went loose over internal adjustments and vagary.  Glasses shatter.

The brain continued to hop and bounce, turning here and there evading capture, like chickens and boxers. A game. It joined eventually with an enormous Giant squid and regarded the world through its dinner-plate eye with a cold detachment, feeling home, and communicating squidly through mechanical enhancements like a throat cancer mutant, voracious for retribution, sensible or not.  Wedded unnaturally together the abomination struggle-climbs to the top of the highest tower, wrapped around it with tentacles grasping like the drop bar on a roller coaster, and shouting electric epithets through a voice box of hate clamped between a beak and an angry brain.  The tentacles fling the unfortunate from the black tar roofs down into the rat race below - the vampires, negotiators, christians and policemen who have faced the monster and lost.  A flaming squad car drops into the crowd below, and folks run everywhere, and rightly so.

Evening comes early, and blackness creeps across the sky, blending with the smoke of the burn, the burn razing civilization, leaving only the scar of madness across the face of false progress, knocking teeth and spine out of all aggressors, boiling the froth of a raging beast, tightly wound around the tower, above you all.  You, the real monsters, with your platitudes and cliches and disgusting labored efforts to stop thinking, to sink below, to acquiesce to the lowest common denominator.  Fucked, and with fuckery be done to you, and becomes the shadow, I.

We Don't Want Your Help.

Nearly a month ago now, I read in a not-at-all random press release that atheist advertising is going up all over New York City asking people to re-think their ideas about the necessity of their religion.  This is not new, having been in practice in the UK for some time now.  Some of them are put out by these people here, working in local chapters.  They have a book - came out at the end of last month, and they do PR training to get the message out, even going so far as to try and inspire people with good works and community organizations.  Figure atheist daycare and a vascular wing at St. Nobody's can't be far off, yeah?  "Atheist Daycare.  Watching Your Kids in the Absence of Anyone Else Doing It."

I'm glad that they're doing stuff.  Blood drives and that.  Community is good, mostly.  Very productive.  However.  Groups of atheists - actually, coalitions of groups, so groups of groups - getting together, having togetherness and forming communities and walking around putting up ads, releasing literature and trying to - let's face it - alter the way people are thinking - would appear, at least to me, to be missing the fucking point.  Fine, as a non-believer, know that there are others.  Community, as I said.  Statistically, there would have to be others, go talk to them if you need to.  But trying to bring people around?  Forming little non-believer cliques?  Advertising, on a large scale?  Seems like maybe the abyss-gazing went just a mite too far on this one.  Perhaps if you're needing converts, you may not be as rock-solid internally as you think.  Maybe this is a stupid bloody idea, and this money could have been better spent feeding people or building shit, instead of providing a theoretical philosophical refuge for people who are pretty independent in the first place.

Shortest version: Religious people mostly only become annoying when they infringe upon others.  Mute religious people with no arms and legs would be completely tolerable, even by me.

What's worse than this, and moreover, proves my point as to why this is a bad idea?  The atheists are attracting the nutcases, now.  The fucking Raelians are right on board, they've gotten into the rum and salt pork, and they're about to rape the parrot right off your fucking shoulder.  See, when the Raelians swarm about your idea, it's off, and time maybe to let it go.  Only thing worse would have been the Scientologists, and I'm not really sure that's much worse.  They have Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and the Raelians have the undead clone of Michael Jackson.  Thriller 2025 is coming, folks.  It's the organization that does people in, I think.  Inadvertant flirtations with mob mentality and mass hysteria.  How about just not believing stuff, off on your own, and shutting the fuck up about it, unless it's stuck off in an obscure corner of the Internet where people have to voluntarily come and read it, instead of wheatpasted in the fucking subway?

Okay - I'm sure they're professionally applied.  But wheatpaste is awesome, no lie.

Big groups of preachy atheists?  Not getting the Squidbag Stamp of Approval.  Not anymore than big preachy groups of anybody else.  Shut up, stop trying to bring people around.

Ghost Skeptic

I want my own TV show.

It's called "Ghost Skeptic," and each week you're introduced to a new family from somewhere probably in middle America, the upper Northeast, or the Deep South, and a camera crew goes through their house while they tell detailed stories about the cold spots and hazy pictures and noises and doors slamming and furniture moving around in their home, building up to the ultimate admission that they think all this domestic chaos is really the phantasm of dear old departed Uncle Harry, bumping around in the attic.  Most importantly, they detail how scared they are, and what a problem this is, and how they wish it would all go away.  Then they call me in, after the first commercial break.

After the break, they spend five minutes recapping what you just saw - par for reality shows and required for those who were catching the last part of the game, or for those with the typical attention span of the average American TV viewer.  I am then called in from the outside of the home, where I have been standing on the front lawn, doing nothing.  Perhaps kicking over the lawn gnome, in an idle kind of way.  Watching my breath.  Stargazing.  I stand around in their home smoking cigars, jingling my keys and wearing black, with a bored look on my face, not experiencing anything, while they once again explain it all.  Cameras then follow me from room to room as I distractedly pick up things and quietly judge the family.  This happens for fifteen minutes or so.  Segment One could be me standing in a cold spot in the hallway as the family patriarch tells me about their wandering spirit.

"Do you feel it?  The cold spot?"

"Yeah, your AC's on."

"Yeah, but it happens in Winter, too."

"Wow.  Cold in the Wintertime.  What're the odds of that?"

Segment Two should be me staying overnight in their house, raiding their fridge and watching 200+ channels of satellite while I take up space on their couch.  With any luck, some posh hotels and rich people would be haunted and call me out.  In the middle of Segment Two, there would be a great midnight calamity, as the family members jump out of bed in response to some imagined noise or whatever.  I would sleep through this (cue shots of me snoring with my head thrown back and a remote control in my hand, the television showing sharks or war or superheroes), and then watch the green nightvision film of absolutely nothing in the breakfast nook the following morning, unimpressed.  There would be cereal, possibly a bagel repast of some sort.

Segment Three would be me thanking the family for their hospitality and assuring them that there's no money paid to the people who participate on Ghost Skeptic.  I would then conclude our visit with a ten minute vitriolic excoriation wherein I acknowledge the possibility of ghosts while simultaneously concluding that these people don't know shit from Shinola, that they are self-victimized examples of mass hysteria, superstition and family nonsense, and that they should stop wasting other people's time with excremental stories about supposed phantoms on the homefront, or at very least, move.  At which point, the problem miraculously goes away.

At the very end, behind the credits, the Ghost Skeptic van would drive away into the sunrise of enlightened reason, leaving idiocy coughing in the monoxide.

Pep Talk

"Alright.  This is the time to get stuff done, no excuse, we're going to shift it into high gear.  It's on.  We've done the research, and the spheres of influence are like a sales-oriented Venn diagram, they're only touching in the way that kids do on prom night when people are watching and when there's overlap it's Chinese small, nothing, nothing to stand in your way.  No hurdles, we've done the prep, let's get in there and do the work.  The time is now, the place is here, and if you do one hundred percent of what you've been told, you'll be one hundred percent successful.  Middle managers and people with their own money, small businesses.  If you don't stay on top of it, it'll turn into a nightmare.  There's people coming in, and we have to keep accurate records.  We need to dig into the program.  We've got to get those numbers.  Check the discs.  Get into the data.  The data they kept.  The bad months are going to be bad, and the good months are going to be good.  Take it from me, this works.  Horizontal selling.  Get him in, get him out, get his money.  Ajax Plumbing.  Donkey Kong.  No excuses, no overlaps, don't waste your time.  Networking, questions, orders, larger and larger format.  We'll get them in, get it fixed, get it looked at, get it done, get it keyed in, laid out, proofed, finalized, paid for, deposited up front.  Need to get the shirts.  Voicemail, email, answer sheets, quotes.  Market research, phone calls, cold calls - it's called canvassing.  It's called feeling them out.  It's called closing the deal.  It's called a balanced equation.  They've checked this price, and they've checked that price, and come up with an average price, but it might have been altered up or down due to demographic factors, and essentially, we made it up - but don't you do that, even with cost of raw goods and labor figures in hand, because a lot of research was done.  Now is the time to step up, kick it up a notch, push it into high gear."

Spontaneous Buttercup

Three weeks ago now or so, I recorded this at the Whole Foods in Green Hills. It's Nashville in Harmony invading the deli area and infecting everyone present's Saturday with music and fun. They did this spontaneous flash mob thing and it was pretty amazing to behold, complete with confused wonderment on the faces of that morning's shoppers. The gelato girl told me she abandoned her post to go see what was going on. Anyway, posted well behind the curve for your enjoyment.

I may have known about this before it was going to happen.  I'm just sayin'.

10 into 11 & 2 into 1

Because tonight Daylight Savings Time arbitrarily ends in the US, a full week behind the EU, I have no idea what time I'm actually writing this, as if it mattered in the first place.  The blog will pick whatever time it thinks it was, and while it won't tell you anything but the date, it'll save the time for me, digitally whispering it into my stats.  We're close like that.

Halloween 2009 is a thing of the past.  The block party we were going to attend on Friday?  The massive thunderstorms kept us away.  Max's last football game of the season?  Cancelled, due to standing water on the field.  So we had a chill evening (C watched the original Amityville Horror for the 1st time, with much laughter) & day of chores and playing and video games and costuming and cleaning right up to the time we dressed up and headed out for trick-or-treating with one of Max's friends from school and his family.  It was good stuff, cruising around in the deep autumnal night dark, trespassing and getting candy from strangers.  Big freaking plastic pumpkin heads full of sugar.  It's the one night no one gives a fuck about the hue of my attire.  At the moment, both of my kids are crashed out in parts of their costumes, having been moved to their beds after everyone but me tapped out on the couch watching a History Channel show about death masks.  That's them up above, shortly after the crash.

Tomorrow is The Day of the Dead, right on schedule, and I might do some graveyard loitering or candle burning, though either seems kind of ritualistic for me.  More likely, I'll help Max get a school project done, do some laundry, watch some football, hang out, and honor the dead by getting on with the business of living.  But they'll wander the halls of my heart all day - nothing to be done about that.  I would encourage you to do likewise - dwell on the dead so they live in your head while you enjoy the sleeping life all around.