Are You Following Me, Camera Guy?

Screw all the philosophical crap, below. I want to talk about advertising!
Have you seen commercials? They're everywhere.
On TV, the radio, the highway, the movie theater, automobile bumpers, guitar cases, the backs of cereal boxes, the dentist's office, the Cleo Awards, pro sports, little league sports, yearbooks, Christmas, the little woman with the cups and toothpicks by the end cap . . .

. . . not to mention comedy.

Yes, professional or amateur, comedy is laced with commercials. How does this happen? Well, first, somebody makes a shitty commercial, like this.
Then, this happens.

It's easy comedy. I mean, the inspiration is bad enough that we've been making fun of it without the coercion of comic aid, already. Now, however, we don't only have a possibly new perspective from which to laugh at the advertisement . . . we've also got a secondary reference, so we're even more sure to remember the product forever. The worst part is that the comedy resulting from a commercial parody is usually sub-par, overly derivative and really dated.

Am I saying that comics are in some sort of crazy cahoot-riddled conspiracy with ad agencies? They might be, but I'm not saying so. But I am saying that you don't have to be Larry The Cable Guy to figure out that the same people who write those "hilarious"Geico commercials probably watch the same sketch comedy shows, online videos and movies that you do. So, it wouldn't be so ridiculous to say that some of these commercial geniuses are banking on their product being parodied by comedians you follow, further lubricating the membrane between your brain and a product placement implant.

So, around the same time that I'm realizing there's way too many Sham Wow parodies on Youtube, I see this commercial on cable television. I'm sure anyone in the developed world is familiar with the Vince Offer character and his current 15 minutes of immorality. Maybe you've even got your own Vince Offer impression. Well, believe you me, he's onto you! He's on to everybody.
Maybe he had it planned from the beginning. His fake-ish Boston accent coupled with his carny eyes and cellphone kiosk polo shirt could have all been part of a decisive scheme to be parodied; comically immortalising the products he sells and his personality as a television salesman. Maybe. Or, maybe, he was just savvy enough to realize the pot of gold dancing in front of his lazy eyes. Either way, we've apparently snagged his barbed hook on our respective scrotums and labia and eagerly tugged the line.
There have been some serious Youtube videos, like this'n, about the Sham Wow ads, but most of those are just as hard to take seriously as their subject matter.
Most of these homemade parodies, however, are like the videos I've taken the time to link and list, below:

Youtube Poop is a sublime and simple phenomenon and I think they always serve to make the best parodies.

Other, more structured Youtube videos are annoying and obviously made by college students who think they have well defined comical sensibilities, because they "lol" at Flight of the Conchords.

Others are amalgamations of clever amateur editing, a good eye and a taste for tedium.

Vince's latest commercial, for the Slap Chop, was seemingly made for parodies both Youtube and otherwise. The name of the product is funnier than "Sham Wow". Slap Chop sounds like a throw-away Bobby Lee character from the worst of Mad TV. On top of the funny name, the commercial is laden with awkward hijinks, like working "bikini" into a rhyme scheme with "linguine". He throws a competitor's product into the sink garbage disposal. He drops a bomb with "You're gonna love my nuts." The man may look a little - let's admit it - retarded, but he isn't naïve. The bastard knows kids are gonna laugh when they're told that they'll, somehow, derive enjoyment from his testicles . . . even if there's a really strong argument that said kids are taking his words far out of the realm of intended context. There's simply too many awkward and funny moments in this ad for me to explain and there's far too many for it to be unintentional.

Well, I say the game stops now. Right here.
I want you to close the Youtube tabs in your web browsers. I want you to get up from your computers. Find a window; open it. Open your window and yell out of it. I want you to scream at the top of your lungs "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna play dumb anymore!"
We're not gonna give Vince Offer any more of our time, or our minds, or our hearts.
We're not going to give any more of these advertisers the backhanded affirmation they're looking to get from our half-cynical senses of humor!
We're not going to give these bastards the time of day!
Yeah, that's right, Mr. Cash for Gold and Mrs. Tiddy Bear, we're on to your game and we're not going to play anymore.
No more jokes, in the office.
No more SNL sketches.
No more witty references on "Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me!"
No more tongue-in cheek "Daily Show" comments.
No more animated .gif files posted on our friends' Myspace profiles.
No more Youtube videos.
No more blogs . . .

. . . shit

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I guess.

This blog post is brought to you by Youtube's Slap Chop Remix and has been posted in loving memory of Willard Scott, America's first and greatest commercial clown.

F(ucked)U(p) B(eyond) A(ll) R(esponsibility)

I was gonna do a really cool blog post, a while back, but never got around to it. It was gonna be all to the point and shit.
Like, "Don't tell me the economy is shit, when the bank parking lots are plowed better than the streets."
But the snow is melted, now, and my hard drive is still inoperable.
Anyway . . .
So, like, I'm sitting on the couch, with my mother and the local news interrupts. The primary annoyance of what was on my screen was the simple fact that it wasn't a local story. I don't live in West Virginia. The secondary annoyance was the bigger one.
Read this story. It's short.
Right when I thought people were done using the word "hero" in any other context than referencing summer blockbusters and video games with gaudy, guitar-shaped controllers . . .
Man, I seriously thought 9-11 burned people out on the whole "hero" thing.
Nobody accepts the title, and we love them for it.
If they accept the title, they're probably an asshole.
How passive aggressive do we have to be? There's far more simple and less media-involved ways to test whether or not somebody has a shred of artificial humility, aren't there? That's a rhetorical question?

But, I suppose, in the current political/economic climate, it makes perfect sense to start calling people heroes.
Why?
We Americans hate doing shit.
We'd rather sign away our sanity than take responsibility for anything. We celebrate victimhood and the entitlement that comes with it, like it's a year long holiday. Fuck me, we've got a goddamn cable channel dedicated to it. The bitch even comes with a sexually insulting name, to help the victimization along:

And, why not?
Victimhood is like a self-loading absolution gun with a studded dildo pistol grip. It's a get out of jail free card that comes with a special clause that lets you use your favorite Monopoly piece every time! I could metaphor the shit out of it, until I sounded like a southern politician.

This kind of almost uniquely Western mentality makes the title of "hero" ideal to throw around like semen in the White House swimming pool. I mean, if you call a Regular Jo, who's "Just doing my job" or "what I expect anybody else would have done", it opens the window that you've been looking for, since your parents made you give that dog you never took care of away; run-of-the-mill responsibility is fucking extraordinary!
So, we've arrived at a mob consensus that dictates if anybody is caught being a Good Samaritan, or doing anything that requires serious effort, they're a hero. Sure as hell exempts the rest of us mortals from having to do that shit. We can sit around and not even look like assholes, because that five percent of us that have the will to effect something are so goddamn heroic.
Maybe we should make a TV movie about those guys.
Nah. You're right. I'd rather keep watching Lifetime, too.

Jerk a hero off as hard as you want. In the end, you're still just sucking your own dick for having the cleverness to avoid doing anything.

Man, I hate The News.

My First Retraction!

In the post, titled Beaumont's Brains Out, I said this:

"Open a no-minimum savings account with no inactivity fees. They, more than likely, have one. Put five dollars in and never close it - just leave it. The paperwork and records they keep on that five dollars will cost them about as much every week. It might harm your credit, but only slightly. You don't need perfect credit. It only proves you're good at being in debt. It only proves you're a prime candidate to be taken for granted. If that sounds underhanded or passive aggressive, keep in mind that a bank is nothing but a reservoir of calculated risks. Let them calculate the risk they took in you, until you die. They're obligated to. Besides, you might be able to will eight dollars and six cents from that account to one of your grandchildren. Stipulate in your will that they frame it."

This, apparently, is no longer true. I suppose things have changed since I opened my first bank account (about 14 years ago, when I was still scheduled to be a minor for another 6 years). And, maybe, my memory just didn't serve me correctly in the first place.
I was talking to a friend of mine who works at the call center for the very bank I custom (although I'm closing my account, soon). It turns out that, after two years of inactivity, your account can be closed and the money in it can be given to the state.

So, as a bit of advice, don't go and take my advice without checking my apparent lack of facts.

I HATE what you people call LOVE these days

First off, let's get it out of the way; yes, I am reading Slavoj Žižek's Fragile Absolute, right now. I am, however, only a couple of chapters in. I am also, however, borrowing it from a friend who lent it to me because I apparently say a lot of things he has to say . . . although that might not be a compliment, being that he's an Obama Supporter (don't fucking start with me!) and has some obvious Dispensationalist tendencies (from what I can tell). This post is far less of a reaction to Žižek than it is a reaction to bumper stickers, postmodernism and the taint of Apologetics. . .

. . . it has more to do with the fact that I think hate has become the misunderstood villain in a bad movie. We've failed to sympathize with hate, let alone empathize with it. We've failed to develop it's character for a fair presentation. We've failed to accept it. We've failed to embrace it, when we need to. All in all, we've failed to love our good neighbor, hate.

You don't know what I'm talking about, most likely. How can this bastard put hate on his roster board of virtues? Well, I guess we could go all of the way back to the beginning and talk about how G_d hates the devil and all that, but I think we can pick a more contemporary beginning: Apologetics.

Sure, sure, I'm a fan of C.S. Lewis. I'm also entitled to think he was a bit of a pussy. I've thought the same of myself, when I tried to rationalize my beliefs to those who do not share them. I've looked back on my attempts to appeal to questions that were asked in a certain way and had a prickle of regret scuttle across my scrotum as it drew walnut tight. In an imperfect world, accountability is not as universal as you might think it is. The only people that anybody needs to explain their beliefs or their actions, in relation to their beliefs, is other people who claim the same belief set. This doesn't just go for Christians. It goes for everybody. If a non-believer confronts you about what you believe, you have no reason to dignify them with a polite response. Why? You don't need to justify yourself. We live in a world that does not have to justify itself to us, yet we are constantly interrogated and persecuted. It's a double standard, and to use that hypocrisy to call you out on what they perceive as yours is nothing short of a hoodwink. Why be a party to it? Especially if you say you're a Christian or follower of Christ; a man who instructed us to be in the world but not of it? If you're confronted by a non-believer about your faith, you have every right to be reflexively combative. If they ask you to justify a certain point, feel more than free to point-out to them that it's politically incorrect for them to have to do the same for you, so if they're curious about what you believe, they can find a more honest and less pride-driven, insecure and passive-aggressive way to entertain their curiosities about your world. But we don't do this. We feel pigeon-holed into explaining ourselves to people who we do not answer to. We feel this every day and we cave-in to the weight of those feelings. This, among other things, has distorted how we view love.

The other great distortion comes from, I think, the postmodern synthesis of human emotion into something of material import. Human feelings have become a commodity in the modern, western social and philosophical dialectic. Political correctness is an almost universal paradigm in modern, western culture. Emotion is, somehow, sublime and seems to be at the center of the American and European thought process. But why? Feelings are fleeting! I've even been recently quoted as saying, "Peoples' feelings are supposed to get hurt. That's why G_d designed them to be passing." Still, who you offend seems to matter quite a bit these days. How you offend them matters just as much, if not more. So, is it any surprise that people have come to confuse love with a euphoric emotion? Yes, love can be a sure catalyst for this euphoric emotion but love is not this emotion, in and of itself. Love is a resolute decision to give someone or something priority over almost everything else, if not everything else altogether.
In a world where love is an emotion that makes you want to sing, laugh or involve your genitals with fluid, hate is just bad feelings. Hate is what offends. Hate is the opposite of love. Love makes me feel good (especially when my genitals are involved with fluid) so hate makes me feel bad. G_d is love, so hate must be really bad. Ha ha. Well, if G_d is just a good feeling, the Holy Spirit is a pretty capricious little slut. Isn't she? Fair weather friend to the end. But, if G_d is love, then that's impossible. The Holy Spirit must be with us all the time, whether or not it feels that great. So, we must be wrong about love.
I'm right, we're all wrong. Excuse the hubris (not that I'm really asking for you to excuse me.)
My third observation would be that Dispensationalism has contributed to the Christian misconceptions about love and hate, specifically. Most Christians, especially so-called Evangelicals, tend to forget the old testament existed until a Charelton Heston movie is on T.V. Do I have a problem with the New Testament? No, not entirely. I will, however, acknowledge that it is replete with punditry. The Old Testament is based almost entirely on actual accounts. Whether you believe these accounts to be fantastical or historical is completely irrelevant. The point is that the Old Testament is comprised largely of narrative accounts. Straightforward, even if not firsthand. The New Testament has some stories, yes. Quite a bit of the New Testament, however, is comprised of letters and sermons. The problem lies in the fact that the stuff that isn't in red print is not being said by Yehoshuah. It's being said by His Apostles. Men with fallible minds and opinions. Am I saying they're liars? No. I'm just saying that a lot of what they had to say came loaded with considerable bias. I'm saying that one should take what they say with a grain of salt. Fortunately, the entire New Testament was written by men who read the Old Testament a lot so, unless you have one of those weird New Testament only bibles, you've got your grains of salt in that really fat first half of the book in your hand.
We, however, seem to forget the Old Testament is there for anything other than adventure stories put there for us to censor and regurgitate for our children, so the young ones can have something adventurous and epic to hold their juvenile attention to the "boring, old bible". This New Testament approach has left us not only soft and diluted, but confused. We spend our time trying to follow the gospels and teachings of six-out-of-twelve apostles, and sort out the disparities between their opinions. No wonder it has become muddled into some sort of pre-digested mush we can all agree on. No wonder we've chosen the un-challenging, un-criticizable and unoffensive answers for every question.
This is what lead me to leave the church. In our search for answers for a political world, we've become a political organization. For the church, especially in a democratic west, that's a dangerous and unstable place to be.

But, what does all of this talk about love have to do with hate? Everything. To love, hating something is necessary. Not because the universe was built on extremes, but because we live in a universe that has been fractured. We live in a world that has been made imperfect. In this imperfect world, there are threats on the things and people you love. These threats can be real, perceived or merely plausible, that is, however, no reason to dismiss them. Yes, when or if you hate somebody, the risk of objectifying that person is very real. That, however, doesn't change the fact that forgiveness has nothing to do with the truth that, sometimes, a person becomes their actions. If I am striking somebody, they cannot stop my actions without stopping me. To love something, you must hate the concept of its antithesis. Without hate, love becomes corruptible, soluble and worthless, because you have no desire or passion to defend it.
Hate is not prejudice. Prejudice is a kind of hate that comes from ignorance and selfishness. Hate is not murder. Hate is the willingness to let that which you do not love die. Hate is not premeditated unforgiveness. Hate is the willingness to forgive yourself for choosing to love something first and forgive the other second.
Hate is a strong word and doesn't need to be avoided because it is strong. It needs to be avoided, so it's strength can be retained.
Vengance is the L_rd's. Anger is a sin, because we are failing to give our vengeful feelings to G_d. Grace, however, can sometimes be something we need to hand over to G_d as well. There's no point in claiming grace, when you don't understand it or when it stands between you and something you love. Love and hate are two hands on the same body, so why not keep them at two and ten when you drive?

Something I said a while ago (Sept 15, 2007)

We all know Rupert Murdoch owns Myspace and, for some people, that's enough to give their profile the great, big piss-off. Over the past few years, however, social networking sites have become a crutch for venue owners - a crutch that alienates any band who doesn't want to fuck-around with these sites. Myspace is the most obvious example.
Before I explain, let me tell you a little about Rupert Murdoch.
After becoming a very successful media executive in his native Australia, he decided to globalize his assets (something that most people of the e-generation consider creepy and suspicious regardless of their politics, in spite of their own Google-oriented lives). The globalization started in the UK. He bought the British periodical, The News of the World, which was the single most read English language publication in the world, at the time. He sold his shares in his Australian companies to afford the buy-out of the paper. Once he was at the helm of TNOTW, he reclaimed his Australian assets, buying them out from under the people he sold them to.
From there, he bought another British paper, The Sun. Once his acquisition of The Sun had been made, he converted the entire publication to a tabloid format. This meant that the news could be more easily filtered because its circulation was less frequent than a daily paper and, although weekly, it had fewer pages. Not to mention the fact that tabloids focus on entertainment news and gossip, giving the publishers an even larger opportunity to isolate their readers from the world, what's going on and, ultimately, the truth.
Just in time for the Thatcher era, Murdoch bought the Times and The Sunday Times, giving him control of over almost all printed news, in the United Kingdom.
Once Thatcher was out of office, by the way, he became chummy with Tony Blair. Murdoch's media control may be attributed to Blair's success. To ice the cake, there was an ongoing scandal, in the UK, because Blair often included Murdoch in secret discussions about national policy.
Although Blair is, technically, a member of the Labour Party, in England, many people lost their jobs. The unions rioted, but to no avail. Murdoch introduced the automated, electric method of newspaper printing, used across the world, that can be credited to greatly reducing the manpower required to print a newspaper. Cost reducing, I suppose, but I haven't seen prices do anything but plateau, climb and plateau, again.
With the profits he accumulated from screwing so many Brits out of a living, he moved to America and bought the San Antonio Express-News. Then he founded the Star (that b.s. tabloid you see, at drugstores). He went on to purchase the New York Post, which, when founded by Alexander Hamilton, was a political broadsheet. Over the years, the tabloid has changed and become another giant, winding gossip column. Thanks, Rupert.
Maybe it was the tabloids that lent him the idea of numbing the public mind, but around that time he started buying the shit out of television properties. He bought Fox. He bought British Satellite Broadcasting and gained control of almost the entire British pay television market.
He went on to buy two record labels, in Australia. He merged them and gave them to his son.
Rupert Murdoch is one of very few multinational media execs who makes the decided effort to retain the major controlling stake in all of the companies under his gaze, by keeping everything in his family. This means almost every part of his empire is managed by a family member who, of course, answers to him.
Since all of this, he's bought the controlling stock in DirecTV, most Asian media and Intermix (the former owners of Myspace) and IGN.
Many credit Murdoch as being a GOP man. He was friends with the Regans, Pat Robertson and George Bush. But he also backed Hillary Clinton's re-election campaign for senate. He's also worked with third party groups, like the Libertarians.
If you ask me, his across-the-board interest in worldwide media and politics has nothing to do with conservatism. I'd say it had to do with his specific vision for the world. He wants a world that thinks and behaves his way. I really can't think of a businessman more megalomaniacal than him.
Keeping your Myspace profile is nurturing that power. Not only are you giving him a healthy stake in the youth culture that he previously had very little access to, but you're creating a system in the music scene that is completely dependent on his services. You are helping create a monopoly that reaches as deep as the local bands - unsigned acts.
Many venues, now, require you to have a Myspace profile, if they're even going to consider you. Not just so they can hear your demo, but so they can gauge how many people will attend one of your shows. Any band's music player shows daily plays, which really help venue owners make a more educated guess as to whether you're a viable risk, because it's a little more obvious how many kids have heard of you and are likely to go to a show with your name is on the bill. Honestly, although I have very mixed feelings about the method, it makes sense and it's very helpful.
But Myspace is not about music. It used to be. But, now and forever, it is a social networking site built around advertising. By depending on Myspace to book shows, bands and venues are setting up a monopoly, in an area of American culture that has, for the most part, retained a uniquely D.I.Y. approach for the last 30 years. It was spontaneous and alive and, although it had its failures, that was a large part of its success.
If you're going to use the internet to help with booking, do it old school. It's cheaper and easier to build your own website. Put your music up there. Put counters on the links of your songs. Create an on-site fan network for your band. Sure, it might be the same, in principal, but it's at least under your control and you can say you're the only one who owns the rights to the images and music on that page, which greatly reduces the risk of it becoming about much of anything other than the music.
If you want to use networking sites to do booking, fine. I can't argue with everybody that doesn't go out of their way to suit my out-of-date, knee-jerk, punk-rock sensibilities. But, seriously, ditch Myspace. We're setting the music scene up to be a wellfare state of Rupert Murdoch.
When you're dependent on something, you're in a position to be controlled. Once Rupert Murdoch's research and development team finds out how many venues are depending on Myspace, he will control them. In one way or another.

If you need me to put it in perspective for you, think of Myspace as Ticketmaster's still, small voice.

The do-it-yourself spirit of young people, even when that spirit is at odds with their own habits, is what makes the powerful figures on this planet nervous. Twelve-year-olds start their own charitable organizations. High school dropouts start magazines, record labels and clothing companies. Twenty-something musicians create a nationwide sense of solidarity for teenagers who feel otherwise alienated. In fact, entertainment and entertainers seem to be the cultural glue that bind the youth together. Entertainment is a zeitgeistal, motivational network for the youth of the "civilized world". More people voted for 2004's American Idol than they did for president. Retaining control over small, local shows may not seem like any kind of real issue but, when you take the power of entertainment into account, it is. The disassembly of a d.i.y. culture, like the local/unsigned music scene, would be a tremendous blow to the overall d.i.y. spirit of young people . . . and Rupert Murdoch has already received part of the message. He isn't unaware of his power potential over pop culture and youth culture. After all, the Fox network does own American Idol.

Keep Your Rabbit Tight In Her Hutch . . . She Wasn't Born To Be Wild

About one in eight native, mammalian species went extinct, in Australia, after the arrival of Europeans. The whites didn't come with smallpox blankets, strip mines or fatally bland food. They brought rabbits. The rabbits got loose, multiplied and drew waste from their own fertile crescent. They ate crops. They ate grasslands. They gnawed rings of bark off of trees, killing forests and causing erosion. The poison farmers used to kill the rabbits killed birds as well, leaving other rabbits without avian competition for food. The rabbits were a vicious, undulating cloud of locusts that descended over Australia in a spiral. They were a plague on the proverbial House of Egypt . . . the only problem is, when you live on an island, where do you make your exodus?

Introduce a foreign organism into an established ecosystem and see what sticks. Usually, nothing does.

I think about cultures in the same way. I've lived in three boroughs of New York City. Each one was different. Not only was each one different, but they were laced with substrata of different cultures from neighborhood to neighborhood. From Long Island City to Astoria, Queens was not the same thing twice. Williamsburgh and Bay Ridge were like two different worlds at opposite ends of Brooklyn. Harlem and Inwood had an ocean between them, even though they are practically next door, at the upper end of Manhattan Island.
It goes on. Chicago is not New York. Grand Rapids is not Detroit. Atlanta is not Savannah. Portland is not Seattle. Miami is not Orlando. SanDiego is not L.A.

There is, however, one thing they all have in common. It isn't the language. It's the ubiquitous presence of national food and retail chains.

You've heard it all, before. Your fake-ass, dumpster-diver friends have screamed at you for getting a coffee at Starbucks, because they choke-out local business. But local business can do the same to other local businesses while, most likely, not treating their employees as well as Starbucks does. Anybody who has played a sport, entered a poetry contest or gone after "that one girl" knows they don't have a right to jerk their knee at fair competition. You've heard about Walmart, again and again. But, it wouldn't be there, if they didn't offer a service convenient enough to thrive. I don't really care about what these places supposedly do the economy. The economy is what you make it. The economy is an appetite without a stomach; a speculative panic engine . . . a mouse chasing irrationally fearful elephants.
I don't care about the goddamn economy. You weather it or it weathers you. It's completely intangible and it will rake you through the mud whether or not you think it's behaving.
I care about things that have fooled us into thinking they're intrinsically financial institutions. I care about what happens when something as physical as a literal invasion becomes confused with something as ghostly and jocular as the theory known as economics. I care about what these invading organisms do to your cultural ecosystem. Fins drink milk. Nigerians don't. I don't care about how much you spent on your food. I don't care about what you're eating. I care about who you are.

When an outside organism enters an ecosystem that wasn't designed to support it, something strange happens. Strange is one of two things, but both things are violent. Violence, in this case, not being something of blood, guts, fire and riot. Violence, rather, being something unnatural and abrupt, like a shaken bug realizing he's in a jar.

Introduce a foreign organism into an existing ecosystem and watch one of two violent things happen: One being that the organism either lays waste to the ecosystem, eating anything beneath it and killing it's competition or the ecosystem lays waste to it, because it has no room for outsiders. The second violent reaction being something more like a pustule or boil. The organism tries to assimilate as much as the ecosystem tries to assimilate it. Call it an attempt at some sort of covalent bond. It works until it doesn't work, because - when you get down to it - this organism doesn't belong. Except now, when the mutual rejection happens, the efforts the ecosystem has made to accommodate this outside thing have left it at a loss. It is crippled. It is weak. It's used.

It's for this reason I've been considering becoming a "Locavore". Unfortunately, I've eaten at Burger King three times this week, rather than packing my own lunch for work. I also did almost all of my Christmas shopping at the mall. But I don't fail to see the merit in doing otherwise. And I don't see it as a futile effort.
Unfortunately, the Local Food Movement has much more to do with the trend of environmentalism . . . which is a little too Maoist for my taste. As a means to an end, however, I think it can do much more cultural good than having the bragging rights of saving a little gasoline because you didn't buy food shipped from far-off places. Yes, it could, potentially, save fuel. Yes, if we were smarter than we are, it could promote the reintroduction of the novel concept of crop rotation. But it won't, for the same reason I went to Burger King three times this week.
We're consumers. We also put too much stock in theory. Theory like economics. Hell, it gets its own magazines, radio shows, newspaper columns, television shows, books, books on tape and seminars. We're a movable feast for the stomachless appetite of economics. We don't just let it chew us up. We follow that fucker around with our fingers around our ankles and our assholes bearing full-toothed grins. Maybe it's some sort of misplaced consumer guilt: We're consumers, so we must allow ourselves to be consumed.

Anyway . . .

Consumer, Locavore, Anarchist, Republican . . . All labels aside, we are what we eat. Your momma said it. Your schoolyard friends said it. You never knew what it meant, but you said it for no reason. It rolls off of the tongue like a Spanish swear word. Let me tell you what it means; if you eat, drink and buy from outsiders - from chains - you will be an outsider. Your house will be a haunt, in a no-man's land that used to be a city. Your identity will be lost, because you've sold it to Taco Bell and Urban Outfitters.

Am I smearing international trade? No. But I am saying that this whole "bail-out" probably would have never happened, if we didn't repeal all the crazy tariffs we used to put on international and cross-national goods. Am I saying you should feel like shit for eating Indian food? No way! Indian food is awesome. There's nothing wrong with enjoying another culture. But there is something wrong with propagation. A healthy plant's roots grown down. Vegetative propagation is an art reserved for nature's carpet. Grass is homogeneous and it chokes out anything that's different. It's also a simultaneous feed-trough and shit-catcher for livestock.

You don't have to be a delicate flower. Just don't be grass, either.

Pox Blankets and other Cynical Clichés

I spent the night at my Grandparents' cottage home, overlooking a beautiful lake, surrounded by familiar things I never see anymore, feeling thankful that my friend was able to have Thanksgiving with their family after all. I was thankful that my friend didn't have to take me up on my offer to meal and relax with us. I was thankful that my friend didn't have to deal with the awkwardness I had forgotten and, had I remembered, never would have offered as an alternative to the awkwardness of being alone on a holiday. I was thankful that I got to look and feel like a good friend and be rescued from possibly looking and feeling like a horrible friend all in one week.
My father chose not to come, optioning to make himself a martyr to his feelings of failure and stay home. My grandparents were the usual poor hosts, acting like terrible guests with bad manners, demanding attitudes and abrasive habits that wear on their welcome . . . even in their own home.
I was thankful my friend was able to spend their time among their own family and not mine. I wasn't thankful for the meal, the relaxation, the lake or the cottage . . . which made me feel . . . selfish. Selfish in my own way.
It also made me feel the dull bite of my own cynicism.

I, this past couple of months, have been slowly shedding my cynicism, scale-by-scale. I had even started listening to a Christmas C.D. in my car, a little over a week before Thanksgiving. White after Labor Day, I know.
I've been choosing to accept the apparent foolishness of sentimentality over the brittle carcass I had been slowly putting on thicker and thicker under my own skin. Especially, after coming on quickly to Chanukah. I realized that I hadn't lit my Menorah last year, because I had felt so disheartened about my life at home.
I left home because G_d told me to move to Brooklyn. I moved to Brooklyn, without knowing why G_d told me to go. I moved back home, with my sister, knowing it was to bring my family back together. I did what I had to, but seemingly to no avail. I couldn't hold myself responsible for how they received the idea of my move only being a means to their ends. I couldn't be disheartened by what they chose to do with the fact that all five people were back in the same house for the first time in nearly four years. But I did. Last holiday season, I didn't light my Menorah once. My Shamash passed no flame. I said no blessings.
Late this Summer and early this Autumn, my sisters said they were moving to Chicago and my father said he was most likely moving out. I stopped going to worship, pray and commune on Wednesdays, at the place I had adopted as being my church. Wednesday night was my Sunday morning, until a few months ago . . . until I stopped thinking about attending until it was too late, as I walked my dog past the building.
It wasn't until last weekend that I had realized, in the presence of two friends praying over a meal I had cooked them, that I had even stopped praying before I ate.
I'd grown colder to the traditional holidays, recoiling at the sight and sound of anything remotely yule-oriented. I had stopped even telling people when my birthday was, for fear of having it thrown in my face with a smiling "happy birthday". I had stopped worshiping. I had stopped praying. I had stopped having any form of spiritual communion with anyone other than friends who happened to be believers anyway.

I had even forgotten my dreams.
Every one of them.
While discussing my misanthropic tendencies with my mother, after one of her therapy sessions, she asked me about my dreams. I said I had none. I even used G_d as a cop-out, saying I didn't want to get in G_d's way with my own plans and ambitions. The closest thing I had to a dream was buying an R.V. and spending my days as a vagrant citizen of the western hemisphere, staying anywhere just long enough to remain a ghost. My only dream was anonymity. I realize, now that it wasn't mere anonymity, it was a want to be forgotten. I didn't even want a funeral, should I die.

But I don't want that R.V. anymore. I'm praying, again. I'm planning on celebrating my birthday, in 2009, and throwing the first birthday party I've had in sixteen years. I've been listening to Christmas music and thinking about what to give my family and friends for more reasons than an aversion to the shame and guilt of being the only one to not give a gift. I'm looking forward to lighting my menorah. Maybe even rediscovering what it means to have a dream.
I'm also wondering about how I feel about how I felt today, at my grandparents' cottage.
Is it me, or the ghost of who I've been tainting his old haunts with an ectoplasmic bitterness?
The ghost of the boy who started this blog? A blog that I can only hope might contradict its own name before too long, even if it should retain a certain faithfulness to my lack of ever wanting to fully be a part of this society as a whole. A blog I started only a few weeks after I started spending massive amounts of time and conversation with a new and valuable friend. A friend who I don't know whether or not I should attribute these changes in myself to . . . but I can say that I at least appreciate the parallels. They know who they are and I know they'll be reading this, so they don't need to be cheaply named for just anybody to read . . . but they deserve a post, regardless, because I'm not just thankful that they weren't with me and mine, today. I'm thankful they're with their own, because they deserve more than awkward charity.

It's 8:15, Thanksgiving night, and I might need to be more grateful for what I have, but I'm grateful nonetheless.