Topics

46

Or Kill Me / Let's talk about the weather.

« on: February 13, 2010, 12:01:47 am »

Banal conversation and pointless chatter are obvious chagrins to everyone.  Some have lower threshholds than others but we all have a limit to how much uninteresting crap we can put up with in a day.  You've got interaction trappers who come up to you and start talking about whetever comes to mind, office nonsense and such.  And really, is there any greater example of this dull, wretched talk than the weather?

The weather gets a bad reputation though, undue for what it is.  Our lives are so inundated with media and potential interests that it's a miracle two people can share similar hobbies.  We've got nothing in common with each other anymore - even the people who supposedly do!  Two people love beer?  That's great - good luck getting them to agree on which is incredible and which is crap.  Don't get me wrong, this is a great thing, more potential for individuality and independent thought (won't hold my breath for it) and all, but it backfires sometimes.

We're just so damn disconnected.  Where does one find a common ground in conversation in a group of relative strangers thrust upon each other so often seen in workplaces?  Five people in a group enjoy television, let's say, but one guy hates reality shows, another watches only sports, one nothing but major news, another the history channel, and another prime time sitcoms.  Television itself has so many options the common joke has been about who gets to control the remote.

The weather.  It's one of the few things that's occuring to every individual in your immediate vicinity in the same way at the same time.  It did in the recent past and it will in the near future.  It's an experience we actually share, in the very real sense.  I saw a great spirit of camaraderie on my street the first storm of the season - neighbors who barely spoke helping each other shovel and push cars that were stuck (like -ahem- my own).

So please, if you see me, point out what kind of day it is.

And then fuck off.   

Anyway, it was just stirring around my head lately.

47

Or Kill Me / Sustainability

« on: January 25, 2010, 04:38:31 pm »

It's the eco-friendly buzz word just after green became cliche.  It's the new earth hipster way of saying green is fine for the general public, but sustainability is where it's at.  It's for people who know organic isn't necessarily the answer, who make conscious decisions to lessen their impact.  It's the management of people, economy, and environment in order to live on this earth forever, to undo what we've done and begin healing the scar tissue we live in on a daily basis.

Adam is this guy who's always been big on the trends, a discoverer personality that markets hope to catch the attention of because they know this motherfucker will spread the good word.  But there's no market in this one, Adam knows too well food marketing and its effect.  He's a vegan, not because he's against killing animals but because Adam knows factory farming them is bad for the environment and he has no access to healthy grass-finished beef.  He lives in the city and rides a bicycle to work, public transportation if it's really bad.  No cars, nope, that shit's a dead American dream where Sunday rides were the tradition and Route 66 was pure romance.  His clothes are from hemp and organic cotton, his electricity is from wind power, and he cooks like a mad motherfucker.

You see there's this test Adam took online, a sustainability test that was just for kicks at first but really got him thinking.  How many earths would it take to support human life if everyone on the planet lived like him?  The average American was 8.8.  Adam was a 5 at first (young people without many resources tend to score higher) and through all this sacrifice and hard work he's got himself down to a 2.3.  He's been doing all that brain work lately about how to lessen his impact and finally he's got the message, the real message.

He's really that discoverer personality like I said and on this one he'll be the first.  Adam goes out and gets himself a gun license and a high powered rifle.  Hunting is big in his parts so that's easy, God (or Gaia, or Whoeverthefuck) bless the USA.  He finds himself a nice little perch out of view and he waits for his prey to come out.  Finally the answer to sustainability!  After a little while he's got one in his sights and he waits calmly, remembering that he used to be pretty good at Boy Scout camp, keeps steady and fires at the big bastard.  He hits it dead on.  It's got to be at least...

Thirty-five years old.

Sustainability is the management of economic, environmental, and societal needs in hopes of finding an equilibrium that will let humanity live on this earth forever.  Current thinking is to curb economic gain and develop environmental practices without hurting people.  But that's a trade off, it's ignoring the whole idea.  On that online test Adam took it's impossible to get 1 or less than one and damned difficult to get less than 1.8.  It's got nothing to do with how we live.  It's that we live.  Or more appropriately, how many of us do.

So remember Adam's lesson.  If you want mankind to survive, kill at least three people.  It's the Sustainable thing to do.

48

Bring and Brag / Statues and Cliffsides

« on: January 12, 2010, 08:37:02 pm »

Back in October my girlfriend asked me to write and orate a short story for her for our anniversary (yesterday).  Now that she's officially the first to have seen it, I'll post it here:

    In the Traveler's world no place has a name.  Destinations are necessary as beginnings and ends to journeys, for resting or restocking his supplies, for anxious leisure while not feeding insatiable desires for new sights.  Home and place of birth exist separately, the latter forgotten to decades of wandering and seeming eons without speaking, the languages of men and other blended to ambiance of new surroundings, both brick and mortar to empires raised on words, some hollow and some awesome.  And the former is where the pack rests beside him that night, the sky perpetually taunting him with its infinity above.  Tonight they would offer no such humiliations, their merry eyes and innumerable grins, their hints of grander meaning falling on the uncaring tiles of a standard fare inn.

    His road ended shortly ahead at walls that seemed to dance in the waning sunlight.  They rose tauntingly before him, covering only the half of the city not resting upon sheer cliff side.  Rumors told him to arrive at twilight while others claimed twilight never ceased so long as the sun fell on the city, the beautiful city, its irrelevant name etched as the only mark upon the high walls.  There was no welcome in addition to the name, no title or claim to supremacy, merely a declaration of its being.  With similar function the guards stared at this path worn man, the filth of his lengthy wanderings seemingly more than the accumulated filth of the entire city could be.  They watched him pass and watched the soles of feet that seemed to have seen more miles than the world has seen years disappear on cobbled streets more immaculately tended than most palaces.

    Business of the denizens appeared to be dwindling with the hour, the city's squares emanating a foreknowledge of desertion.  Men and women were perfect here the Traveler saw.  As his gaze rested from face to face in awe a plethora of the same passed by without his notice, each attractive in unique ways.  Looks began to be thrown at him of concern and distaste and in his shame he realized how he much look to these people.  With effort he averted his eyes to the architecture of the place.

    Nothing about the place was uniform, no two buildings alike nor even very many symmetrical, yet it was all so perfect.  He sat for a moment on a bench that clearly belonged precisely where it stood to find the breath pulled from him by his shock.  Shocking eyes that had seen so much he marveled briefly, the thought interrupted by his notice of a pristine fountain his seat faced.  A child with clever eyes knelt on a stone pedestal with a smile hinted on her lips as her arms lifted a circlet to place upon her brow.  It was a snake engulfing its own tail.  Clear water cascaded from the serpent and splashed to the rest of the pool with a shifting chime.

    After marveling from his spot for some time he rose on tired legs with excitement, the exploration of a new place at hand.  He mastered the skill of finding the shy sights, the ones which hid themselves from prying eyes and appeared only if one knew they were there.  In cities they were discovered only by following the kind of person who looked as though they might find themselves where one wishes to go, a skill that takes a keen eye.  But he found none like this here.  Instead he set to his life's work of letting his whims guide him.

    Darkness fell before long, marked by moonlight shimmering on the streets and none to see it but him.  His footsteps echoed across the lonely alleys in an ethereal music.  Down one street or another he might find flickering light playing upon the edges of a closed door, laughter inside like any other tavern in any other city.  But the tones were richer and the light more pure somehow.  Eventually he found one such doorway from which slow music drifted and the light seemed feeble and the laughter was not real but only an idea that had once been there, a memory imprinted on the spot by those who would frequent it.  Here he stepped inside.

    Lovely people sat dejectedly about the place, their features no less striking for the almost determinedly sullen mood.  He sat at a bar of oily wood, rich smelling and spotless.  A mug was set down before him in a silent gesture from the rough looking man tending to the customers.  With a nod he turned to a woman crooning before a fire, her voice sounding as though it might catch aflame by the sparks popping intermittently.  He became slowly infatuated as her tune carried him through histories and tragedies.  These were not the words of a mortal, or if they were they were not meant for mortal ears.

    His drink was sweet and heady and as he turned for another the bar man lingered a moment longer, the act so foreign to the man as to make him visibly uncomfortable.  As though he knew the question forthcoming.

"What does the lady sing?" the Traveler asked.  It was the first he'd spoken since arriving; he awaited the reply nervously.  Thus far his beaten appearance had made no impact on the folk but he feared to be ostracized.

"The day's events, in town at least," came the reply.  The man's tones lilted in gruff song not unlike the lady's own.

    The Traveler listened more closely, catching the rhythm and understanding her at last.  Expecting to hear of thefts and politics, of deaths and religious figures he instead learned gossip.  The grocery boy was in love with a nobleman's daughter; a visitor had entered the city gates and has been seen exploring its streets.  He perked up at what might be about him, but there was no more.  His presence was known and evidently unremarkable.  He motioned to the barkeep.

"Do you have rooms available?"

"We do, and baths and food if you'd like more than drink."

"I'll have the lot of them," he said.

    The man showed him to the upper floors of the building, where narrow halls belied spacious rooms and opulent beds.  His own was decorated with flowers.  He laughed a little, unnoticed by the exiting innkeeper.  It made him forget a disturbing image while he left the basement lounge, a slight vision that chilled him.  On the railing leading upstairs his hand passed over a gouge in the wood otherwise polished smooth by both care and years.  It was the first imperfection he'd seen since arriving, but with those delicate flowers in view it seemed a mistake of his own senses.

    A bath was drawn shortly after, happy looking attendants filled it swiftly without seeming to break their own paces.  In it he washed the filth of miles, the dust of roads caked so firmly upon him it seemed a part of him.  It stayed there in the basin, now a cloudy unsavory stew that drew his mind again to that rough spot on the railing.  He fell asleep with it in mind.

49

Apple Zone / ATTN SUU

« on: December 18, 2009, 09:57:00 pm »

I got your Christmas card.  It's wonderful, adorning my tree, and here's my attempt to respond:

Seven days 'til Christmas in the Principality,
Suu's gone down south, leaving it all to me.
Or so I assume since that time you went north,
and put me in charge as your bus took you forth.

While you're visiting family in the Sunshine State,
I'm defending the turf, Baron EoC the Great.
But there's this one guy whose imminent flight
keeps me tossing, turning, enraged at night!

He's got powerful allies, supporters worldwide,
but damned if I let that save his fat hide.
Awful things of mine are patrolling the air:
dirigibles, airplanes, and sattelites - a pair!

I'll hunt the jolly fucker on his night of fun,
I'll see if he's merry through the sights of my gun.
And I'll don the cap, the sled with such powers,
I'll repair the holes made by sentry towers.

I'll reanimate those steeds that he has to draw him,
their hooves shall ride thunder like they never did for him.
The elves I shall keep to wage war on the Keeblers,
you can have them enslaved as your costume needlers.

But don't think me mad, this isn't power thirst,
it's because, dammit, he fucked with me first.
How dare he violate our precious air space,
he'll learn but good when I violate his face.

I don't think I'll kill him but I will make him quiver,
and I'll sentence him to a life spent in Fall River.
What that means is New England spags are expanding,
we'll have the North Pole to increase our standing.

And it's not the end of my holiday plans,
I'll invade their spaces, kill all their mans.
Let it never be said I'm without ambition,
even if it's not quite Christmas tradition.

So thanks for the card that adorns my tree,
the only one Barony wide it will be.
Hoping your Florida trip is met without frowns,
there's plenty up here,

Sincerely,
Eater of Clowns.

50

Discordian Recipes / Dear Jim Koch,

« on: December 09, 2009, 03:46:56 am »

I respect you, really I do.  I place a good deal of credit in the revival of craft brewing in this country with the success of Sam Adams.  You weren't the first to do it, but I think you played a big hand in its popularity.  I think that you have a live feed of hop fields in Germany to have up to date weather information is fantastic, and that you bought a surplus of hops during the shortage to sell at a loss to other microbrews was a great gesture.  I like your commercials and that catchy tune that plays in the background.  I like that when you gave your speech at the 2008 Octoberfest I'm pretty sure you were drunk.

But our relationship is tumultuous at best, Jim.  Quality seems to be taking a dive.  There was a time when your seasonals were only available in New England and summer wasn't summer without Summer Ale.  Winter Lager was one of my favorite beers and I could ignore Spring Wheat because your Oktoberfest kept getting tastier.  They just aren't as fresh anymore; this year's Summer Ale tasted like piss and I don't mind telling you, but this year's Winter Lager is one of your best in some time.  Nothing has become more stressful in the season changes than that first Sam Adams to find out if my safe standby for the next few months will be your own or if I'll have to find another.

I'm a fan, Jim Koch, I'm a fan of you and I'm a fan of your brewery.  I've known you and enjoyed you for years, and I wish you would take this simple advice:

Make Old Fezziwig Ale available in a six pack.

It is the best beer you make, hands down, year after year.  It is cruel, making me suffer through a Winter Warmer 12 pack including that god forsaken Cranberry Lambic so I have an opportunity for two of those delicious Old Fezziwig Ales.  Give me direct, unhindered access to Old Fezziwig and I'll ignore your miserable decision to mass produce Blackberry Witbier, which I advised you upon taste testing it against the Espresso Stout to shit can both.

So Jim, I ask you, nay, implore you with all humility and deference, give us Old Fezziwig.

Sincerely,
EoC

51

Apple Zone / Cain, it's a riot.

« on: December 02, 2009, 02:52:46 am »

I don't know that I've ever mentioned it to anyone here, but it's one of my favorite stories.  It's the kind of thing where you have to tell it if you've experienced it and when you do you become Shakespeare, your words are carried from your mouth without any control of your own and they form a picture of the night putting to shame the most clear of photographs.  I used to work student security at UMass Amherst; the part time job shaped my entire undergraduate career there from how I viewed my peers to how I spent time with my friends.  My gig was a supervisor, I would go from building to building across the campus and talk to the people who were signing in guests and make sure it was all going well.  UMass Amherst is big, if you didn't know, huge actually.  It would take ten of us divided across the place to get to each building three times if we were lucky over a nine hour shift, so we were assigned areas.  My area that night, December of 2006, was in Southwest, the party area of the college and on alert for the evening for one simple event happening hundreds of miles away.

Our football team was playing in the NCAA Division 1A finals.  One lucky thing about being in a shithole like Southwest on a game night was there being no need for a radio or a television.  From the yells echoing across the cracked concrete from drab twenty seven story high rise dorms you knew if we scored, if they scored, if the refs made a bad call.  And I listened to it because it spelled how I would spend the remaining seven hours.  If we won, the students would party and jubilantly riot.  If we lost, the students would party and angrily riot.  It was unspoken and palpable from the moment the game was scheduled.

The game drew to a close and I was told to stop making rounds, to just stay put in the central tower, the epicenter of the horror show that part of campus represented.  A few drunken students trickled out the doors, dressed in t-shirts and shorts against the winter cold.  The trickles conjoined to a stream to a river to an ocean of angry movement and expectant violence.  Shortly thereafter the crowd was ordered to disperse by the UMass police department, these guys essentially state police and not your standard college cops.  They predictably failed to exit.  That's when the smoke came.

I don't know if it was a smoke screen or what, but when people breathed it in they gasped and they choked, they covered their faces with their t-shirts and their eyes were reddened and they rushed for the nearest place away from the smoke they could find.  It was my building.  Dozens of the smart ones flooded through the doors and they brought the thick grey smoke with them, they rushed past the desk and there was nothing our little security desk could do to stop the tide of bodies.  I was yelling at the top of my lungs, which is loud, but with any prolonged burst of my voice like that it would quickly give way from either strain or struggling to breath through the smoke.  Whatever I would need to do the rest of the night would need to be done through a hoarse whisper.

Eventually the doors closed and hundres of people still stood outside, yelling and throwing things at the police.  The lobby of the building was encased by enormous windows and spectators who just wanted to see what happened next were standing and staring at the event.  I couldn't blame them, it was a uniquely terrifying sight to see a line of police, complete with helmets and riot gear, advance on a crowd of raging drunks.  I wondered if they all hoped for both sides to annihilate each other quite like I did.  But people were digging up chunks of that ugly cement, looking like a petrified granola bar covering the whole area, they were throwing it.  I kicked the reluctant onlookers out of their spots and sent them to the upper floors, the box seats.  Five minutes later the first window was shattered.

It was a big chunk of that cement tossed through thick glass above our heads.  It rained down and clinked upon the floor to be crushed under the hiking boots I wore every day at that job for comfort against all the walking we normally would do.  I pocketed a small bit of the concrete that I still keep as a souvenier in my car.  More rocks and more glass would follow.  You see, we had uniforms, dorky gaudy things like putty colored jackets and maroon security hats.  My belt was filled with cell phones and flashlights and radios and keys and for all the lack of weaponry about my person everyone insisted on believing I carried handcuffs or pepper spray.  That thin stupid jacket was a bulls eye that night because it wasn't the first time they thought of me as a fascist; me, whose job it was to merely lock the doors and keep the building monitors company at two o'clock in the morning on a Saturday.

None of them ever got me, their eyes too lazily unfocused on the menacing figures of mounted or marching police.  There were more of them now, not just UMPD but Massachusetts State Police.  They brought their pepperballs and I was amazed at the ability of the weapons to really send people fleeing.  The riot had faded and most involved escaped to the safety of friends' rooms after causing over $100,000 in damage, broken glass and smashed book cases, torn up pavement.  I ended my night like any other and went back to the security office that we shared with UMPD to exchange tales with the other guys in my area.  We went to a 24 hour Dunkin Donuts and talked for a while before returning to Southwest at five in the morning.

More striking than the outfitted police was the desolate ruination of what was supposed to house upcoming minds of society.  Windows were shattered on every reachable surface, still smoking piles of rubbish and casings of smoke grenades, a loaf of Wonderbread crushed and toilet paper strewn about, a book case thrown through the door of the cafe.  None of us spoke making our way across the center of the mess, unlike the minutes before as we told our stories or the days after when they were the talk of the university.

I'm telling you this Cain because this is the stuff that once affected change.  It was the behavior once driven by powerful views and conviction, knowledge that things can't continue along the same path and catalyzed by one too many acts of oppression.  But not any longer.  Now it's fools upset about a football game, their cause a trivial sports defeat.  I like to tell myself that the rage was about so many other things, not the championships, but our criminally rising fees and our increasingly diminished control over the university, that the game just gave us a way to manifest it all.  I just don't think I can tell myself those kinds of lies anymore though.

52

Or Kill Me / Like goatse for your brain!

« on: November 13, 2009, 10:13:34 pm »

Here's some content, possibly for 23ae?  Tell me what you think.

We've all seen goatse.  It's a damn classic.  I don't know where it comes from but like anything there were all these rumors around it when people were talking about it.  One tale, the one that I believe, is that a weightlifter was pushing beyond their limitations, every muscle in their body so tense, especially in the lower body, that the weakest one just let go.  That happened to be the sphincter, so we get that fleshy pink monstrosity staring at us, literally an exploded brown eye, when we're first unfortunate enough to have clicked that link.

That kind of thing happens more than just physically.  We see it emotionally all the time, the I-can't-take-any-more-of-this-shit-and-if-one-more-horrible-thing-happens-I'm-going-to-explode.  Little chemicals are fucking up your insides, they're all out of whack and you'd do god damn anything to right it all.  Then the explosion is with violence or sobbing, sometimes both, it's ugly and it feels so fulfilling at the time and afterwards you're ashamed.

Then sometimes it's a mental thing.  Anger, confusion, shame, sadness, joy, none of them mean anything when that one happens.  One day you're perfectly calm and staring at a pen wondering what the hell it's for, you're relearning the use of hands that you must be borrowing from someone else, like a lobster, and walking around on a floor that you're positive can't actually be there and for fuck's sake it might not be.  You know nothing, all the categorized thoughts and compartmentalized knowledge that you've spent years putting just where they are as if they were some prized collection scatter about your head.  You've got to learn to find them and leave them as they are, follow one to the next because getting them all back together again is another lifetime.

When you learn to see the world again after that last one, that's when you're on top of that shit.  Those other two kinds of explosions keep happening but they never touch the mental one.  All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put hodgy podgy back together again.

You've suffered a violent relaxation of the mind, and you're a discordian.

53

Or Kill Me / Optimists: A Call to Arms

« on: October 23, 2009, 09:26:18 pm »

"Every rant here lately starts with a quote.  Why is this happening all of a sudden?"
                          -Eater of Clowns

"Sometimes it's several quotes, too.  It really seems to be only a recent thing."
                          -Eater of Clowns

I consider myself an optimist.  A cynic, possibly paradoxically, but never pessimistic.  Cautiously, I approach situations just thinking everything is going to turn out all right.

Does this sound naive?  That's because optimism is so frequently defined by its naivety.  Phrases like happy-go-lucky spring to mind and we imagine this pathetic, exuberant creature charging headfirst into a wall of shit with a dumb smile.  This doesn't need to be the case.  Optimists, this is our call to action.  It's time to walk confidently up to that shit-wall and declare "I bet I can get around this motherfucker and it won't be all that shitty."

One problem is that pessimists, traditionally, tend to have their wits about them.  They can look at the The Shitwall and say "It stretches on for miles in both directions.  It's all gloopy so if you try to dig through, it'll collapse on you.  Also there seems to be peanuts in it and it smells bad."  All of these are valid points, as is the idea that we can all just find another place to go and another challenge to undertake.  But for some of these people, every challenge is insurmountable, every effort deadly and every minutiae a threat.  The human race might as well cower in the shadow of every disease, predator, storm, and human race that happens its way.

That is, of course, not the majority of pessimists, like the majority of optimists aren't the headlong into The Great Shitwall of Shitville type.  So why let ourselves be portrayed in the extreme?  Because it doesn't matter because everything will turn out okay?  Fuck that.  It does matter and things will be okay because we'll fucking make it okay, and we're not going to be stupid about it.  And we'll very likely fail and get all shitty, but so what?  Better that than give up.  You see, Shitula, Duke of Shitville, Home of The Great Shitwall wants you to think all your efforts will come to nothing, that you'll have died horribly and young and horribly young having never achieved anything.  Well flip him the finger and show him that even if he's right, you had a goddamn blast doing it, and that makes it just fine by you.

Optimists, fight on, keep your wits about you, and have a nice day.

-EoC

54

Apple Zone / Dear older, wiser generation.

« on: October 22, 2009, 09:52:36 pm »

We just can't bring ourselves to blame you any longer.  This is a confession.  It was us, after all, that ushered in the decrepit modern age.

When we were born, all soft skin and lumpy limps, our eyes were closed tight against the cold room, our wailing making our presence known to the surgeon whose delicate hands were still too gruff on fleshy, frantic features.  Passed about the loving arms of the attendees to our celebrated arrival words like "hope" and "future" were spoken in the light manner of people who truly believe in them.  Then you did us the greatest favor any mentor can give, you opened our eyes to everything.

There's a scene at the end of Apocalypse Now.  See it if you haven't.  Marlon Brando's profile is horizontal in the shot, his eyes terrified as he whispers "the horror...the horror..." maybe you know what I'm talking about.  He's not an old man expressing his shock at the true depths of misery.  It has nothing to do with Vietnam.  He's an infant, complete with clean shave and bald head, the look of a baby seeing something the first time.

If we could see it all, every detail so fine, the world itself at once, then we needn't waste time on mere pieces of the puzzle.  But I can remember how the flooding brightness burned our tiny pupils, how the filth seemed to cake itself instantly on new eyes.  I remember the wrinkles on the corners of the mouths of the ones who came before us, that piece of lint on their left shoulder, the smudge on their shoes, the spill where they stood, the hole in the floor across the room, the peeling wallpaper over crumbling drywall, the cracks in the ceiling.  I remember bloodstains on their hands, hastily and carelessly wiped clean so they need not explain where it's from.  Our tabula rasa filled with scratches across the board dug deep by panicking, desperate fingernails.  We did the only thing we could do.  We closed our eyes.  And we did not open them again.

55

Or Kill Me / Picking Out My Fucking Eyes

« on: October 21, 2009, 02:52:49 am »

I'm sitting at my work station, which I will swear to you is not a cubicle as it only has two sides, every few minutes interrupting my typing or reading for my hands to gravitate to my face and make some minor adjustment.  Maybe it's a piece of skin I can just feel is falling off or an imaginary itch around my eyes, or a real itch born from staring at two screens two feet apart.  Maybe when I start towards my ears it's to reach in and pull out the drums that hammer from listening to four phones, four radio channels, an ancient dot matrix printer that conveniently lets us know whenever a child goes missing or police are after, say a suspect in a 1995 Ford F150, then that lovely satellite television behind me that goes into a hidden expense pocket in our budget so nobody knows just how cushy their dispatchers have it.  My hands gravitate towards my mouth of their own accord, maybe to pry my jaw unclenched so my teeth don't shatter from the pressure I put on them to cease the vibrations coming from everywhere else or to gnaw my fingers to nubs so I can't type as fast and I have an excuse to slow the fuck down.

The point is that I've known this forever, this sick ritual, this preening bird behavior that doesn't stop until the crazed winged demon renders itself clean of all feathers, naked to the elements, shivering and fussing over down that isn't there.  Then this weekend it stopped.  We were in a cabin on the lake with no running water and no toilet.  Now maybe I stopped picking out my eyes because had it followed a trip to the outhouse I would be in a world of discomfort.  My hands were unrecognizably caked with layers of bacon fat, spilled booze, ash, rodent feces, dust, flies, rodent remains, egg, human urine, saliva, and regular ol' dirt until I knew them as some foreign appendage, a gross tentacular amalgamation of the disgusts of the civilized world.  These wonderful horrors didn't grip the wheel of my beat up shitty car and they didn't wrestle with keys in the lock to my place.  They held paddles and stoked flames and the handles of hatchets and kukris.  But they didn't touch my face.

We rode back on a day so beautiful we would all happily have sacrificed the time from our lives to have experienced it even if we had a choice in the matter.  In the fashion of many an outing such as this I lay doubled over in the back seat to avoid the eye contact with a horizon that would inevitably attack a gut bruised by a shade too much liquor.  By the time I got to my own car my phone had turned itself on, a betrayal I'm sure on the part of my hands, which promptly upon its familiar and hated vibration in the right front pocket of my jeans brought my stubborn, wretched fingers to my face.  Something needed adjusting.

56

Discordian Recipes / EoC vs. Fritters

« on: July 09, 2009, 04:04:32 pm »

You'll have to understand I'm both unskilled in the kitchen and also pretty new there.  Cooking is not an assertion of my control over the ingredients or a knowledge of interacting flavors, it is a fucking fight.  A fight where science, nature, and manufacturing are all teaming up against me and I am losing.  Nothing quite highlights this so much as the bean fritter, my arch nemesis.  I've tried a black bean and corn meal fritter several times with mixed results and just got off an abomination of a fallafel attempt.

Now the recipe I used called for a food processor to mix the ingredients into a smooth batter.  I don't have a food processor, so I minced all the ingredients then mashed them together for a very, very long time.  I got a nice, sticky batter out of it which I refrigerated for about 24 hours.  The next day I made disks about two inches in diameter and a half an inch thick, then refrigerating it while I heated the oil.  I don't have a thermometer, so I tossed a pinch of the leftover batter in the oil to test it, when it sizzled like a good fried food should, I added two of the fallafel pieces.  They disintegrated entirely.

My question is:  Why?  If you need more information like the ingredients I'll post them.  Right now I'm trying to salvage the remainder of the fallafel by baking it.  I have no idea what's going to happen, but it's a better bet than trusting that fucking oil again.

57

Literate Chaotic / Hehven - an open ended story

« on: July 03, 2009, 10:37:30 pm »

I like this concept, and already knowing where I'd like to go with it I decided I'd rather find out where other people would go with it.  I have the setup here, and whoever wants to expand on the story can do so.  Or maybe I'll just finish it later, depending on interest.  Have fun with it.

*****

I think it was Tuesday when I died.  I can't know, it happened rather suddenly and I don't recall precisely what I was doing.  The habits I stubbornly formed over the most recent years of my life, or the life that was, allowed me to coast blissfully through my waking days with little actual thought required.  This isn't meant sardonically, mind you, rather I genuinely felt better meandering through the less glamorous aspects of existence and saving my energy for about one explosive experience per week.  Life isn't what concerns me right now though, so I'll save its ponderings for those still caught up with all of that.

On awaking, or a close approximation of awaking, I stood lamely before the pearly gates.  I'll use waking here even though it isn't accurate.  It's seriviceable until a word comes into being for that feeling one gets during a very deep yawn in conjunction with a very deep stretch.  Or when one's bladder has been held for a seemingly incomprehensible length of time and is finally relieved.  Did you know that a word does not exist in any language on Earth to describe either of those conditions?  That's not true, actually, how would I know that?  So these pearly gates are a surprisingly spot on description of the scene, though either misspoken or misinterpreted.  They are pearl-y, not pearl, like hospital soap they have a pearl-like trait.  There was this guy in front of them.

I'm not very familiar with any major religions.  I guess this guy is Saint Peter, I don't know.  He seemed really bored and didn't introduce himself, like the customer service kid at a department store.

"So I'm in Heaven, then?" I asked, not knowing what one says when suddenly found in what is clearly Heaven.

"Yeah.  Can I help you?" said the man.

Agitated that I'd not yet rid myself of shoddy service, I requested entry.  He sighed and looked down into an impossibly old book, an inkstained finger running up and down columns of names written hastily and carelessly.

"Wow, an awful lot of people are getting in, aren't they," I inquired.

"Everyone.  Everyone gets in," he replied.

"So then why bother writing down the names?  When someone shows up just open the gates for them.  Why be here at all for that matter?"

"Someone on Earth decided that this is what it looks like over here.  'What you hold true on Earth I shall hold true in Heaven' or some such," came the rueful reply.

"I'm no scholar, but I thought that was in reference to the authority of the papacy."

"That's what most people think.  It was quite literal in every aspect."

"Then why aren't you very stately and welcoming," I asked, frowning again at his demeanor.

"Because it says 'hold true' not 'wish it were', you'll find a lot of discrepancy between what was intended in God's words or actions and what they how they were interpreted.  That much is obvious.  What you people seem to forget is that, having been made in God's image you're a pretty accurate reflection of both God's perfections and flaws.  A lot of us are upset with God for the ambiguity of that statement," he explained.

"You're saying God a lot and it's making me uncomfortable with how unwieldy it's making your sentences.  Isn't there some pronoun you can employ?"

"God is a pronoun," said Heaven's now visibly irritated doorman, now looking away.

Heaven on Earth suddenly making sense to me, I walked through the gates.  That is, in the sense that wind blows through the trees I walked through the gates.  I recalled conflicting accounts of whether one is corporeal or ethereal in Heaven so I had to, in a sense, push myself through the gates as though I were opening an immense door.  It also hurt, which I was not expecting.

The thoroughly unpleasant first impression of Heaven behind me, I set to explore where I would be spending eternity.

58

Literate Chaotic / An Early Spring Night

« on: April 26, 2009, 12:49:36 am »

He was walking down the street in what seemed like quiet contemplation as I, the comparably hurried and bothered youth stepped out of my car and ensured I was an adequate distance from the curb, the driveway, and the car behind me. My rush to return to nothing, dishes I fully intend to do but ultimately won't. Clothes I want nothing more than to shed, though it comes at the price of looking into my diminished sock drawer and reminding me of the laundry desperately needing to be done. A day I'd like to wash away with a snack and a beer; to forget that I woke to a morning which had done nothing wrong to earn my scorn, a trend of recent frequency.

My hurried and bothered self crossed the street knowing that at the pace I set I would end up walking side by side with him. I think he planned it this way, I think he dawdled to talk. I fiddled with my keys, looking for the one marked Hall in the streetlight. He's relatively well dressed, with a full head of gray hair and a face that seemed kindly even by the foreboding effect city lighting has on anyone in the night time.

"Hello," he says, having waited for me to close the distance though my own pace.

I said something to the effect of hello, maybe good evening, as he seemed to deserve.

"Do you live around here?" an innocent enough question.

"Yes, I live on this street, do you?"

"Not on the street, but on *REDACTED*," he stops and turns, extending a hand, "Michael."

I shake, of course, "*REDACTED*."

"So which house are you in?" he asks. He'd be seeing me enter it soon, so I thought I might as well answer.

I point, "Just this one here."

"Ah, which floor?" he inquires further. Which floor of which house do I live on, a line of questioning suspicious by even the kindliest of dispositions when asked at 11:15 on a Tuesday night in the north end of *REDACTED*.

"Why do you ask?" is my tactless, wary response.

"Well if I'd like to come by and say hello again," comes with no hint of desperation for companionship. A friendly neighbor, though not necessarily a neighbor. "Do you live with a friend?"

Relieved to have dodged the first question I say, "No." By now I've stopped in front of my porch. He's stopped a few feet further up the street. "Well, good night."

"I hope I haven't been too forward," he says, polite to the very last.

"Not at all," I maybe assure him coherently, maybe mumble. I unlock the front door, close it behind me, and guide myself up the stairs without turning on the hall light. That touch lamp in my place has turned itself on again unprovoked and lets me enter into the room without switching anything on or off. It'd be pretty obvious to someone watching outside if lights came on or off, anyway.

I busied myself with my nightly rituals. I took off the pants that I hate and those uncomfortable, poorly maintained shoes. I hung everything up and emptied the backpack I used this weekend; I appeared to be missing a sock. I worried about what this guy's motivations were, if he wanted to be invited up for a drink to feed an addiction. I was concerned with the question about living alone, not for fear of having something happen to me but to give out the knowledge that when I was gone nobody else would be around. Then I thought.

Here I've been fascinated for so long by how human experience represents infinity, to learn about individuals and what makes them do what they do. This guy had a story to tell, an interesting one and told well. And now I'll never hear it. Maybe I did the smart thing. Maybe, though I doubt it, I even did the right thing. Maybe he was just looking for someone to talk to, just to know there are more people like him in the world.

Unfortunately, there are more like me.

59

Literate Chaotic / On Writing

« on: October 23, 2008, 09:36:31 pm »

I choked this out while trying to describe what it's like to want to write but to only stagnate.

My protagonist is a mild mannered young man who sees himself as a hack in an endeavor he's never actually undertaken. He'll weave a semi autobiographical tale into a lackluster volume that serves to affirm his considerations while defeating the purpose of the story entirely. Along the way obstacles will present themselves that he does not overcome; they are solved by themselves or by other people. Page 1294 will bring readers to the revelation that neither he nor the story has flatlined, which would of course imply that a pulse had at one point existed. Instead, the doctor had hooked the machine up to a fence post then observed it for however long it would take for the reader to plod through the near endless muck of language struggling so hard to be lofty that it fell defeated back to earth and collapsed amongst its dead comrades, where it would shit itself and contribute to the wretched mire of English being presented. Here, the horrified reviewers and publishers of the work discover that in the creation of one of the singularly most deplorable undertakings any of them had experienced, our hero had actually brilliantly created a minute life in each word he had selected. Hundreds of thousands of times they saw birth, struggle, and death. Every sentence a tragedy, every paragraph a genocide. However, by the time any individual was able to choke down the volume to realize this our protagonist had died, never to know that his accomplishment, as well as his crime, marked the most important point in the written word since the first time it had been used. Until now, words gave life. Now, life was given to them.