Screaming Hysterical Nothingness

[Cramulus]

I re-learned a valuable lesson last night. It's the same thing I discovered while piloting the OBNOXIOUS JERK CABAL to pointless screaming marathons and drunken debacles. Stupid drunken childish fun is nothing to be ashamed of! In fact, it may be the only thing that can save some of us from becoming total cabbages.


I was back at my old college campus last night. It's spring break there, and some college buddies were getting Saint Patrick drunk with one of their friends that still lives on campus. So they called me, piss drunk, and said CAPTAIN WE NEED YOU, GET DOWN HERE. So I shrugged, picked up some booze, and drove down to my old college.

I love these guys. When they're on, they've got the trickster-asshole thing down pat. But they're kind of media-obsessed, and it gets in the way of their awesome individuality. So instead of talk about movies, I told them we were going for a walk, and we took a tour of all the sacred spots on campus.

There's this place called the elephant tree, this huge old gnarled tree which looks like elephant skin. It's in the middle of this beautiful glade, and for generations, kids have been coming here to - do drugs, fuck, larp, read poetry, whatever. More specifically MY group of friends has spent a lot of time in this spot. it has a meaning to our group. And we stood there for 20 minutes while everybody quoted family guy, swapped celeb gossip, and referenced their favorite moments from recent sitcoms. They're really interesting, creative, energetic people, but sometimes they need a reminder about what REAL fun is.

So I led them away, and I took them down this dark staircase into this really creepy place under a building, which is where I came when I tripped out for the first time. It's easy to pretending you're outside the gates of hell. There's a shaft of moonlight that illuminates the otherwise scary industrial basement-area. I've always found that place extremely poetic. Also, I hadn't been there in three or four years and it was really strange to be back. But everybody was still talking about Watchmen or the Watchmen video game, so I sighed and led them back out.

We used to have ADVENTURES, you know? I mean for real, spending the entire night breaking into buildings and exploring basements and crawling through air ducts.

I kept trying to start a conversation about real stuff - stuff we had done together, stuff we wanted to do. Things that had happened in our lives. I hadn't seen this crowd in two years and every time we started to catch up, it ended up getting derailed into a tangent about complete dross.

and finally, as we were walking through the woods piss drunk, I realized that I was frustrated and bored, and so stopped talking altogether, and I picked up a stick and I broke it over somebody's back.

And they stopped talking, confused, and tried to make sense of it as I walked into the woods, grabbed an armful of sticks and started hucking them at the fuckers. I threw sticks right at their stupid conversation. Then suddenly eveyrbody everybody was laughing and throwing sticks and yelling.

And still laughing, we continued to roam, growing more insane, until we ended up in the big metal scrap pile behind the sculpture lab. And I found this big metal can thing that you could push like a lawnmower, and it made a HELL of a lot of noise, and it was pissing off everyone so I kept doing it louder and more annoying as we walked. And as it got more obnoxious, it got more funny. I can't explain it, but you know what I mean if you've been there. We were all laughing ourselves blue in the face because this trash can I had insisted on dragging along so fucking obnoxious. Somehow that degenerated into us throwing the damn thing as far as we could over and over again and laughing like dizzy baboons as it crashed cacophony onto the pavement. And we were all laughing and screaming and laughing even harder because we were drunk and nobody was hung up by anything. and for a moment we couldn't imagine being hung up on anything ever again.

Screaming hysterical nothingness.

This is the most beautiful possible form of anarchy.

[LMNO]

[hunter s.durden]

We used to have ADVENTURES, you know? I mean for real, spending the entire night breaking into buildings and exploring basements and crawling through air ducts.

I kept trying to start a conversation about real stuff - stuff we had done together, stuff we wanted to do. Things that had happened in our lives. I hadn't seen this crowd in two years and every time we started to catch up, it ended up getting derailed into a tangent about complete dross.

This is just like on Full House when Becky and Jesse are trying to have a nice night without the twins, but after a few minutes of conversation their conversation inevitably drifts back to the twins. They tried to discuss Jesse's music but then got sidetracked. It's like they had no life or frame of reference outside of the twins!

[Cramulus]

Hunter, I want to repeatedly run you over with my car while blasting TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE HEART.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

1. Nice, Cram!

2. I am so glad Hunter's back. 

[OPTIMUS PINECONE]

     I think I saw Peter Griffin do that on an episode of FAMILY GUY. Stewie wasn't laughing though.

[Cramulus]

                                             WATCH IT, BUDDY
                                                                          \

[Tempest Virago]

I like this a lot.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Every time I see the title of this thread I get confused and think that Cram is addressing A Pesky Nonvoting Screeching.

[nostalgicBadger]

I hope you really ran into the woods and started lobbing sticks at people. I would be severely disappointed to find out that you were making that up.

[Cramulus]

no no, that's totally real. My friends expect that I will randomly assault them, but at that moment they were taken delightfully off-guard.



it's fun to watch high annoyance turn into high madness in under 30 seconds

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

I enjoyed this.   

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

A fucking great read.



It's a very familiar headspace, one that I usually find myself getting into after too much sleep deprivation more often than getting smashed.

[Fuquad]

Every time I see the title of this thread I get confused and think that Cram is addressing A Pesky Nonvoting Screeching.

It's why I opened this thread.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I dunno if it's my screwed up mental state right now or what, but what I got out of that wasn't probably what you intended.

Media -- particularly COMPLEX and MULTILAYERED media -- is a treasure trove of... well, nonsense. Chaos. Life turns chaos into order, and entropy fucks with our heads and turns the order back into chaos. Which is a good thing, because otherwise we'd start viewing life as a sitcom or something -- which would be scary, because that means that if it BECAME one we wouldn't notice (there's this story idea a friend and I have been playing with for a while subverting the sitcom trope, set in a future surveillance society that is distributed wherein every home is filmed by a camera in the television and has built in laugh tracks in order to cause the people watching it to believe that it is a sitcom). Okay. Well, the problem here is the homogeny of order that comes from a small and densely interlinked communication network that encourages making and propogating its OWN order (this has been termed an 'autistic community' which is suitable in the literal sense -- highly active but fearful of the Other -- and potentially in some situations medically appropriate as a metaphor -- some explanations of autism involve just this type of dense internal interlinking -- but probably will be a bad term because of the misinterpretations of the intent of the metaphorical label). This kind of community is TOO GOOD at creating order, and HIGHLY RESISTANT to outside forces that jolt the internal sense of order -- think cult mentality. This situation has been around forever, but the advance of communication (McLuhan's intent of the term 'global village' involves this) makes it easy to have autistic communities that are highly distributed, very BIG, and far more efficent at creating order. The problem is that people like their order. It's THEIRS. Humanity has a bit of a hubris streak, as we all know.

Cram's community there was active. IS active. The problem is that without Cram's ability to shake shit up (and maybe other factors) they have homogenized and gotten into complexly ordering and processing as a group whatever already semi-ordered half-digested bullshit in the popular semi-mainstream pseudo-fringe media. Adult swim isn't counterculture. Watchmen isn't counterculture. Counterculture isn't counterculture. Counterculture is a motherfucking monitor full of static -- something that you can discuss and come to no conclusion about the MEANING, but, KNOWING it has no REALLY REAL REAL MEANING, you can go and watch it and MAYBE get enough of a buzz to have hypnagogic hallucinations and find a meaning within YOURSELF that came out of extrapolating MEANING from MEANINGLESSNESS. This is {the,a} function of life. Mathematically, life doesn't do much aside from act as an extremely efficient schocastic process: cherry pick from noise, create order by synthesizing bits and pieces to better fit your apophenia. Life now finds it too easy to re-digest existing order, and even order that is complex and chaotic at first glance is still order.

The author is dead. Let's at least have some fun with his corpse.