The Tattoos on the Executioner's Wrists

This morning, instead of wondering about who might eradicate who, I thought I'd use my bubble of free time and space to propel myself across the universe and into an earlier period of American history. But, it didn't turn out like I'd hoped, so I'm back to the 21st century.

Ah, the Double-O's (which I truly hope people will call this decade). In May next year, we'll be two thirds through them, and I will be another year older. Also, there will be a third Spider-Man movie. Chevere. And a cool-looking movie called "300." Neat title. Plus a third Pirates movie, right? Egads.

And I will have submitted at least two short stories to publishers hither and yon. That is my goal.

Meanwhile, Jimmy cracks corn, and I DO care. I really care.

Have yourself a jingle bell Christmas.

The Bag

Today was a very brown day, slightly red, but with no green, touched by mild blue. I refer, of course, to my M&M fortune-telling.

Also, nobody "belongs" in hell, but plenty of people are going there. Why? Because we are all born into a disgusting cycle of destruction that corrupts the very fabric of beautiful nature.

But, anyway, I don't really want to talk about that right now. I want to talk about snow.

When I was but a larva, I would dream every night of waking to the sight through my window of a snowy Colorado hill. I would run outside, snowpants securely grafted onto my body, and try my best to make as few footsteps as possible, leaving as much of the pure, white smoothness as I could. And then I would destroy it with a trash bag, an inner-tube, or a sled with metal parts that could have easily punctured my spleen.

But it was all so idyllic: the snow angels, the huge snow-boulders, and the poorly-designed snowmen. The freezing wind and the beautiful memento mori of ice on my face and gloveless hands were cheerful reminders of my status as a breathing, bleeding, carbon-based object. And then the cider, or whatever, that waited inside the house, along with the soothing voice of my mother and the delightful melodies of my oldest sisters singing Christmas carols from an antique songbook -- ah! My heart is cloven in twain for the devastating nostalgia.

But now, I'm in the South, and snow is rare. But I shall have my wintry, white wonderment. Oh, I shall.

The Mark of the Replicator

I haven't seen the movie Cars yet because, when it first came out, I was told by a friend that its plot ran exactly like that of Doc Hollywood, and I later read more about it in a NY Times review, which, I must say with utter shame, fully persuaded me at the time to pass Cars by and consider keying it. But now I've been persuaded to rent that movie sometime, not only because the art looks incredible, but also because the similarities to Doc Hollywood appear unintentional. Also, Owen Wilson is top hat to me ever since I saw The Life Aquatic.

But one movie I will not see, and I can guarantee that with ardor: Eragon. And I won't be buying the book, either.

Sure, fantasy is fun, and the special effects are probably magnificent (special effects are boring now, because they're almost always "magnificent"), but I refuse to see it because I've already seen Star Wars a dozen times.

Apparently it's easy to write a hit novel or screenplay: take some young orphan with a crazy heritage unknown to him (adept at some mechanism of travel), add in an old mentor with an air of mystery, put in a dash of forces of darkness or evil empire led by some black-knight-or-wizard-looking guy, and finally kill the mentor in the end. Luke, Obi-Wan, the Galactic Empire, and Darth Vader killing Kenobi -- or is it Eragon? And if I've spoiled the end for you, I'm sorry, but I'm offended by encroaching globs of uncreative, commercial pabulum (there, I used your word, St. Crispin Bacon).

Also, why tire out the same old dragon motif even more? And by that, I mean why continue using the same stinking western-style dragons with little-to-no personality or complexity? And why have people ride them all the time? Dragons should be insane, demonic, treacherous and cool! And they should whip around like snakes and be just as frightening as they are beautiful by behaving like real animals, not posing all the time. The Dragonlance series, for instance, used tired dragon motifs, but included more aspects of dragons' personality, interesting magical properties of dragons, and emphasis on the absolute terror dragons cause in human beings. There has to be terror! And the spitting of nun-chucks!

But I'm being excessively negative today. Go see the movie if you so desire. It will probably include some type of huge, spherical fortress in the air that can only be destroyed by making the dragon spit fire at a certain spot, and that's sure to be exciting! And Eldest probably introduces a wise little green character, but I haven't looked into that.

May Samuel Morse be with you.

The Dead Ringer

Why is it so easy to watch flesh go by as flesh, realizing nothing more than the curvature or the color, imagining the unseen flesh as if it were more than fantasy, but a separate, additional reality? Why is it so simple to imagine a touch, a caress, totally unrealistic in its texture, or even to guess at a flavor -- the flavor of skin?

One image brings back a memory not fully recalled, and that memory stirs arousal. Maybe that's a cause. Or maybe some biological tendency towards a positive reaction to something unusual -- that's possible. Or maybe a constant flood of information drifting to and fro between bundles of neurons, connecting to the body's pheromone sensors, causes an overflow of emotional attachment to a particular image, odor, sound, taste or texture from time to time.

An old Fugazi once said, "Why can't I walk down a street free of suggestion?" Fugazi was referring to overemphasis of the physical attributes of any given person in people's minds. My question is, "Why can't I walk down a street free of suggesting?" Why can't I stop myself?

But that's pessimistic, even for a card-carrying pessimist. I can stop myself, just not permanently, apparently. I work on a case by case basis.

Anyway, where you are a sex addict, so am I. Where you are a drug addict, I have a problem also. Where you have committed murder, I too am guilty. Where you have committed rape, I too have given in to the violent indulgences of lust. And so has everyone else. We are all just as responsible for the crimes of the worst person in the world as he is, but every person is capable of change as long as we realize we're all in this cesspool of human nature together. (I'm almost certain the worst person in the world is a man.)

Animus breathes deeply and breeds rapidly, but I guess that's only because I care.

The Humbaba

When a child scores a goal in hockey or something, people ought to cheer, because sports are all about healthy competition building higher self-esteem, right? Or, in adult arenas, people cheer when their team succeeds and gloat when the opposing team fails, but in a playful and sportsmanlike manner, because sports are all about bringing citizens together in enthusiasm and good fun, giving them something to talk about when they would otherwise talk about nothing, right? Sports may be marinated in a bunch of useless math and sensational journalism, but it's really all about an excuse to have a big powwow, right?

Anyway, I know next to nothing about sports, but I do know that science and art used to have similar, grand purposes, but there's always someone out there who forgets what it's like to be alive and concludes that the purpose of science and art is to "prove" that one group of people is better than another.

But maybe it's wrong to continue pursuing things like sports, things that are designed to help humans pretend that they like each other and are glad that other people exist, even if they have different opinions or habits. In science, are we lying to ourselves and inhibiting progress by accepting an axiom of racial or mental/spiritual equality?

Even now, when all the Pokemon have told our kids to follow their happy dreams and all the Blackberries have helped roboticized organisms refrain from draining their blood for a second of free time, I see advertisements and scientific opinions regarding animistic and hunter-gatherer cultures as if they were unevolved humans.

For example, a commercial for a travel-planning Web site recently showed a family getting ready for a vacation. The father told his kids, "We're going to go see the land of our ancestors." The kids said, "You mean Ireland?" And the father said, "No, our more distant ancestors." The family ended up going to a village populated by a hunter-gatherer tribe of what looked like South American natives, speaking a language that was treated as comical gibberish (and it probably was).

Now, I'm not a combative guy at heart. In fact, I think a culture that is unable to laugh at its own foibles is an insecure culture. But this wasn't a comedy of foibles (I really hate that word "foible"), this was just plain insensitive.

The genius of "primitive" cultures and their own breeds of science and art is in many ways just as grand as the supposed genius of the non-culture of affluent America. Evolution happens, but not on the wavelength that a white stock broker in New York can be considered "better" than a Huli warrior from New Guinea.

But I'm probably overreacting and seeing something that isn't there. It's just a commercial -- maybe I should pretend it's all in good fun and go back to thinking about all the white people I see every day and all the white things they do. My brother-in-law is a scientist and in no way an elitist. On the other hand, he's a physicist and not a biologist, and the science of biology has been so corrupted by the daft ideals of humanism through the years -- daft because, even though humanity will apparently save itself some day, elitist scientists and sci-politicos absolutely hate individual persons, especially persons who differ in opinion or habit from them.

We're all in this together, baby, but according to Mengele's progeny, if you're primitive, genetically diseased, imbalanced, religious, short, black, or just plain ugly, then you might as well have not been born.

Look around and you'll see a world of pure evisceration.

The Dander Not My Own

Mine eyes have seen the glory of hundreds of portraits of semi-fetal persons, mostly 18 and 19 years of age, in the past week. Skinny necks, bad haircuts, bashful smiles, long ears, frayed fins, broken claws -- they're all just regular human beings, boring old homo sapiens with homo sapien minds and murky homo sapien pools in their eyes. I'm supposed to hate all the ones I don't know, right?

But it's Christmas in the Swamp, and I can't say I've ever hated any of them. they don't deserve the hatred of other short-lived beings just because their skin is fragile and their bones are brittle and bland. So what if most of them can't do more than a monkey's job? Functional illiteracy isn't a terminal illness and it CAN be cured, transhumanist solutions aside.

I'm only guessing, but the reason these semi-fetal forms take such a barrage of education (and other forms of strife) to become full adults is because they're duped from birth into believing their lives make sense.

Kind of like the alphabet. Turds think the alphabet makes sense, but it doesn't at all. How is making an alphabetical keyboard any better than making a keyboard with QWERTY ... etc.? Answer me that, Parkinson! Not only is your "New Standard Keyboard" totally futile in concept, but no ice cream scoop of brain matter is going to want to re-learn how to type on that little toy, especially when the obviously-made-for-internet-gaming arrow array is smack in the middle of the letters.

But whatever. The black and silver coloring sounds cool, but only as long as the silver is really shiny. A girl I know also liked the beginner's Simon-looking version. Read the technology section of the NY Times.

The Foundations

I was sprawled on the blue futon one day when I realized my destiny had to be more cloud-like than jelly-like. To be sure, it was still an amorph, but it couldn't be limited by surface tension. And I didn't want to be the kind of person who was more like a train than a dirigible, more directed by solid rails rather than air currents.

But that's stupid. My neurons are twisted and I've been referred to as odd so many times that I've concluded I was born with a mental deficiency and, because of various social and religious pressures, learned to deal with my environment through some back-door way of thinking.

Meanwhile, I sit cross-ankled in dim light with the voices of revenants swirling in and out of my sinuses. This week has been slightly more foolish than usual, and I think it's because I'm coming off my H.I.S.

And here's this post's purpose, as I was invited to to write this at lunch today: the H.I.S. is the male equivalent of P.M.S. I developed the acronym because men are incapable of menstruation, at least as far as I know. More accurately, men go through a Hormonal Intensity State -- simple, n'est pas?

I don't know how often it occurs, or if its frequency decreases with the sufferer's aging. All I know is I'm not in love with anyone right now, and the very prospect actually revolts me. But it doesn't matter, and this will most likely be the last post that has anything to do with me personally.

Enjoy the stars while you can, because soon they'll all just be smoking bulletholes.