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Three Years

It's been a little over three years since I really wrote stuff on here on a regular basis. I got busy, tired, unmotivated - pick one. Mostly, I blame you. The audience. The reader. The theoretical mass of broad, open faces focused on the the free "content" that I would occasionally fling across this page, like 10,000 drunken Jackson Pollack-inspired monkeys.

Why do I blame the collective you, other than it's simply easier than taking personal responsibility? Here's why. When I would spend days crafting a blog entry with a solid, escalating, logical argument full of insight about something, I would get a couple of reads and likes, and the attention would die down quickly, like an X-rated metaphor. When I would rant silly, like a bolt of driven rage pushing across pixels and filled with invective, my readers would reward me like a banana dispenser in a chimp piloted spacecraft.

Pavlov. You rewarded me for paying less attention and half-assedly throwing my shit at a wall until it stuck interestingly, and discouraged me from craft. To the point that I ceased to craft at all. Your fault.

Not really, though. In the meantime, we've seen the ascension of Twitter, which is a much more efficient way of ranting - so much so that our Least Executive, Resident Chump, uses this as his secondary form of communication, just after his primary form, assaulting people. I can't tell you how disappointed I am - I see the Chump election as my fault, in a way: I was vigilant during the President Monkeyface administration, and we got the Obama years. I take a break from blogging for a scant trio of annums and people from Appalachia team up with the Mercers and elect a reality show dickbag to the fucking White House.

This is why we can't have nice things, America.

So, I'm back. I have probably stuff to talk about. My kids are older, I'm trying to change some stuff, and the new job I posted about is now three years old. America is in the midst of a great Crappening, lots of comic book-related stuff is part of our country's mainstream conversations, and people are still doing that religion thing, so I should have some stuff to address, yeah?

I Am A Kite

I am a kite.

I am a kite and fuck you, I spend most of my time up in this tree, the tall elm just off the backyard.

Apparently, you think that leaving me on the wall of the garage for nine months of the year only to come out at Springtime is okay with me. It's not. I am a kite - being on the wall is not the same thing as soaring high above the grass and trees, touching the sky as sun illuminates my panels, briefly turning me into a piece of stained glass art against the backdrop of a temperate, windy day. I'm a kite, you prick, and you think you can just park me on the wall like a shovel and expect me to cooperate when YOU decide it's time for a little kite flying?!? Do I look like a shovel? Bitch.

I am a kite. I am a delicate construction of fabric and string arranged upon a light framework and held together not only with stitching and pockets and fasteners, but also with love and light and altitude and wind beneath the canopy of my bright colors, struggling to break free, holding me aloft against the firmament of the sky. I am a kite, trailing colors and laughter and fun. Ideally. I am not a simple toy to be dashed across the dirt and rocks because your legs and understanding of basic wind physics aren't up to the challenge. I am a miracle of lightweight aerodynamics, you dumb sonofabitch, and I will not be told what to do by you, or any grubby-pawed little simpleton with an itch - I obey the wind and whimsy, and I might decide to spend the whole Spring up in this fucking elm, or on the roof, precariously niched against the gutter's edge, my sun-bleached panels a silent rebuke, reminding you that if I'm not cooperating, it might just be because you stuck me in a darkened room until winds brought blossoms and barbecue smells to your nose and you thought, "Ooh. Kite weather."

Maybe I decide when to fly, and maybe it's the wind, but you're not the boss of me. I am a kite, motherfuckers, a majestic wing on the air, a symbol of hope and freedom, and an object of joy. When I want to be.

I am a kite.

My Valentine to YOU.

I know a lot of people hate on Valentine's Day. Many of them are single, or people who hate being pressured into buying stuff to show that they love someone. At least one of these people I know is a 12 year old boy. Those who dis the day express this as hatred toward a corporate, manufactured or retail holiday, or at least one filled with societal or relationship pressures. 

The feast of St. Valentine has been associated with a time that people express romantic love for more than 300 years. So it's not a recently made-up thing. Maybe relatively recent, but then, by that measurement, so's America. If you want to go after completely made-up holidays, let's attack Hallowe'en, which is only a thing because it falls on the day before a Church holiday. Or Christmas, which is where it is because the early church wanted converts. Or what about Mother's Day, which isn't even 100 years old? And don't even get me started on Kwanzaa, President's Day, or Cinco de Mayo.

The day means something because we decide that it does. That's all, and that's any day; Vikings would probably be pretty upset about our piss-poor observance of Thor's Day, for instance. No one's going to make you participate in this. And let me be especially clear on this: If they do, they THEY ARE WRONG. If you're buying a bunch of shit because you feel like you have to, then you are either a tool or in a passively manipulative-to-borderline abusive relationship. GET OUT NOW. Run. Come to my house, we'll counsel you and you can live in the basement. Societal and relationship pressures are bullshit, too. No one knows what you need better than you do. Go get it. Or not. Either do stuff with holidays because it's fun and you want to, or don't. It's really pretty much that simple. Mostly, though, for Cupid's sake, shut up.

You can lament commercialization if you want to, but I wouldn't. No one cares. Look around you. Selling this holiday begins right after the previous one. I saw a St. Paddy's ad on TV last night. Lamenting commercialization in America is about as useful as me trying to clean my house using my fucking mind powers. Going on fifteen years, and I still can't move stuff with my brain. Go figure.

If you are capable of hating the day with a sense of humor and moving on, then my missive is not for you. The rest of you, I'm going to have to ask you to get the fuck over yourselves and seriously, shut up. You're a fart in an elevator for people who would otherwise be having a lovely day.

Happy Valentine's Day.

The Weekly Death

I have this English class, Research & Argumentative Writing, which is ongoing. I have to pass it to graduate in December. It is good that the University would not let me test out of this class, since I have no skill for either of its major pillars.

As part of the weekly assignments, I die a little. There is a "discussion" thread, upon which no discussions actually take place. People make statements and people make other statements that may or may not agree with them, which can often include such incisive language as "I agree." Sometimes the statements share relevant content. Even more rarely, they indicate that the poster has read and digrested the comments of anyone else on the board. Some of the posters are obviously posting from Soviet-era telegraph machines that offer no spacing, spell checking or formatting of any kind, while others are posting without the benefits of literacy. Some of these "people" have to be comment-generating robots or something, though one thinks robots would have come farther along by this point. Any dissection or deconstruction of the thread's "content" is generally not done, and if you were to say, point-by-point refute someone's argument, that would be considered aggressive and overwhelming.

Topics include softballs like "the survivability of the movie industry" and "compare and contrast yourself with someone important in your life." My fellow posters really only get into it when they can judge the morals of others in regards to marriage, gay rights, computer dating, or porn. This week's post is about honesty. The prompt reads:

"There is evidence that academic dishonesty (plagiarism, cheating, etc.) in schools is growing. Some schools have "honor codes," which include pledges signed by their students promising to complete work honestly. What do you think about the idea of "honor codes?"

What do you think about the problem of academic dishonesty? Have you witnessed or been a victim of it?  Is it appropriate for university students to serve alongside administration in reviewing cases of academic dishonesty? Why or why not?"

Here is my post for this week:

I, for one, think dishonesty gets a bad rap.

Lying (either by direction or omission) is frequently the engine that drives progress. Our elected officials lie to us not just to get elected, but also to protect us in matters of national security, or to keep us from having information that might be harmful to our daily lives. Great histories paint with a brush of obfuscation, leaving out that which does not cast them in a favorable light, and the result is national pride, patriotism & heritage. In our daily lives, who among us does not lie to our children to protect them from awful truths, or lie to friends, family and co-workers about how "our phone was off" or "how nice that new dress is?" Lying is a fundamental part of many professions, it is simply how the world works.

That said, learning to lie at the college level is an essential skill for later life, which demands dishonesty. If one can get the answers more easily without working at it, doesn't that just make for a more efficient and quicker-working society? Why do work someone else has already done? "Plagiarism" is an outmoded concept in an age where information is free, and because of fundamental dishonesty, disinformation or misinformation has the same currency as anything factual. "Truth" is a pliable concept. "Honor codes" are all well and good in an age where honor is a fluid concept that includes lying to your fellows when you feel it is in their (or your) best interest, but even they should be malleable and adherent to situational ethics.

Of course, I may not actually feel this way. I could be lying.

Discuss.

Summer School

Going to school over the summer sucks.

I realized a couple of semesters ago that things weren't moving fast enough to suit me, and that, while looking at the requirements for graduation, I would be in school basically until the end of time itself. Or until I was 40, which felt like the same thing. So I switched advisors to someone who actually gave me advice, and we drew up a plan for getting me the fuck out of Dodge. Well, she drew up a plan. I just agreed that it was a good plan and went along with it.

(I feel like I've been over this material before. Sorry if that's true; I've been away for a while, bear with me.)

The plan involved a lot of stuff, the most recently significant of which was me going to school all summer. Man, it's been great! I mean, no, wait - I already gave that one away. I started in with what the school calls "Maymester" and what rational people would call "a travesty of education." I took two classes for six hours a day for three weeks and got 6 credits. These were Nazis and Victims (with a very depressed and angry woman who was afraid of technology, fun, and loud noises and who assigned us, no lie, something like 700 pages of reading every week, then demanded a five page paper in Arial Black at the end) and Ethics (which was awesome and I had to give a presentation on pornography. If you are female and a FB friend of mine, it's possible you know this already, as I solicited the input of a few of you). This led to weeks of people being confused around me:

PERSON: What are you taking again?

ME: Nazis and Victims and Ethics.

PERSON: What the hell class is that?

At some point in there, I lost my mind a little, and would sit in the lobby of the James Union Building in the break between classes and hand out crap advice and directions. The staff had left a lot of official-looking tables and stuff sitting around, and I would just go and set up my computer. People would wander in looking for the Scholarship Office (literally about 10 yards from my location) or other campus stuff, and I would mess with them if they weren't to my liking. Occasionally, I would hand out really helpful advice, but a lot of it contained references to non-existent swimming pools, vikings, and guys named Arthur. I did give out candy and nickels one day, so I like to think that makes up for it.

After this was the five week period (for another 4 credits) where I was taking gen-ed Astronomy (with a lab I liked a lot better than the class itself - I got to use the observatory and looked at something 27 million light years away) and Asian Thought, which is a great class with a shit name. In Astronomy I learned that I don't know as much about the universe as I thought, and that I don't like most of the people I meet. I guess that's only really learning one thing. 

Asian Thought was an experience of a different color & flavor, though; It was hard and easy and forced open jars in which I keep all kinds of more or less random things. I had to keep a journal for it, which you can read here, if you're so inclined (and you're not one of the people I let read it early). We went to a sort of ashram (a giant concrete dome with gardens all around) and did a guided kriya with a recording of a guru. I may sound flip here (because I can't help it, presumably), but I really very much enjoyed (and felt I got a lot out of) that class.

Now, I'm just starting five weeks of American Political Thought, and except for all the damn Puritians at the beginning, I'm back where I belong. I have an English class to CLEP before the Fall, and if I can get off my ass, a math class, too. So if you wonder what I'm doing in the forseeable future, I just told you. I'm trying to make a 16 credit summer happen over here.

But I hope to blog some more, too.

Presidential Football Dream

So, last night I had this dream.

There was a huge open lawn space upon which someone had scrawled a hasty gridiron and thrown up some rudimentary uprights. It was for football, and I, and some random acquaintances and friends of mine, had the honor of playing the sport of kings with a number of American historical political figures, mostly Presidents.

Reagan's not as good as you'd think, it turns out. Obama runs the ball like crazy, but then so does Teddy Roosevelt. And JFK. Lincoln's a great QB; makes sense, all those years of splitting rails giving him upper body strength and his height gives him reach and command of the field, while the debates with Douglas have instilled in him the quick thinking you need from a team leader. Ford and Nixon can both play, but Ike's nothing special. You've never seen a nose tackle like Taft, though McKinley was right in there. I remember seeing Truman and Grant on the sidelines, chatting with FDR. Alexander Hamilton was keeping score and Barry Goldwater was calling plays for one side. Henry Kissinger and John Madden were doing commentary.

Offspring was playing their half dozen or so songs I know while the game was happening. There was a little raised stage near one of the endzones, and they were set up, just running through this six song set list, over and over. I'm not particularly fond of Offspring.

You think this is a geeky dream, but just wait.

During "Come Out and Play" I was in the midst of trying to tackle Bill Clinton and bring him down before he could score when Al Gore got in the mix for some unknown reason. It was totally illegal - there was definitely a horsecollar in there - and since I already had a pretty good lock on Slick Willie and just needed to put my weight into it I kept with the play, but from within the dream, I began to instantly analyze whether or not maybe this little scrum represented Gore's need to separate himself and his post-Washington legacy from the negative aspects of the Clinton White House.

And then I woke up.

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.