It's always the drugs, Jim.

[Doktor Howl]

I mean, fuck, how many people have answered this thread?  How many people have posted in the TCC abortion in OMF?  With the exception of you and Freeky, everyone I come to PD to see has either become addicted to a pack of smelly fucking Wiccans, or has stopped posting.

And I'm going to get my entertainment somewhere.  If not at PD, then maybe at 12th and Ajo.

yeah, I wish I had a good response to that but the truth is, I've pretty much been co-opted, and between the big increase in my personal income, the HUGE increase in how interesting my life is, and the access to knowing things I'm not supposed to know, I'm happy about being co-opted. And I still consider you (and several of the people here) a good friend and I look forward to causing some mayhem and shooting things with you in my off-time someday, but since I can't talk about all the interesting shit, I tend to end up not saying much at all. And I'm not apologizing because, again, I like where my life has ended up, but sometimes I feel like I owe an explanation.

also, 12th and Garlic?

1.  Oh, no complaints there.  Life happens, and far be it from me to bitch about someone getting paid.  I'm not pissed, or anything, just feeling like PD died under my feet.

2.  Yes.  White people using Spanish words badly to name streets is an art form here.  I'm waiting to see "Calle Pantelones".

[Doktor Howl]

PLEASE TO THINK POSITIVE! OR I WILL TELL NURSE ENABLER AND BRING THE MEATHAMMAH!

woooooooooooo

[Richter]

You tell people about that fucking Spider, and of course they don't beleive you.  The prosaic, the mundane, the every day "This is suppsoed to be happeneing.  Everything is udner control."....  I don't even know if it's a platitude or a pill anymore.  They're really the same, and they're all pumped out along the same channels.  

For some reason, it's jsut this goddamn huge mother of an arachnid doing the deed.  

There was this movie awhile back "The Matrix".  They started it off with this very Plato "What is reality" style mindfuck.  They gave it up though, so everyone could put on sunglasses, black leather, and play "Revenge of the Nerds" with firearms and kung - fu.  See, if they'd kept it going with the reality questioning, you could have gotten pretty interesting, and it's a good example of how I feel about the Spider.  (yeah, I know, "The Matrix" had big bastard bugs too.  Besides the point though.)  You can't  TELL anyone what it is, you have to clue in and see it yourself.  

Neo didn't deal too well with having it revealed to him, yakking all over Laurence Fishburn's hovercraft.  Some of us, in "real" life by contrast, have always sort of suspected, so it's more of a rolling case of "Well...Shit."  
No freakouts, no vomit.  
No kung fu and madghiqual powers either.  

Scowl at the Spider like Clint would and keep on walking when it stoops over.
"Hey.  You don't have to go through it like that you know.  Have one of these.  Just try, huh?  You can always stop later if you want."

Yeah, like you "just try" meth or smack too.  All that's different in the stuff that has the Spider's icons all over it.  
(Not an obvious 8 legged thing.  Jsut a few here and there.  Like it's throwing up 4 different gang signs.  "This is approved, this is controlled, don't fuckign copy the funny name, oh yeah you can recycle this bottle.)  

I wan    

[East Coast Hustle]

I mean, fuck, how many people have answered this thread?  How many people have posted in the TCC abortion in OMF?  With the exception of you and Freeky, everyone I come to PD to see has either become addicted to a pack of smelly fucking Wiccans, or has stopped posting.

And I'm going to get my entertainment somewhere.  If not at PD, then maybe at 12th and Ajo.

yeah, I wish I had a good response to that but the truth is, I've pretty much been co-opted, and between the big increase in my personal income, the HUGE increase in how interesting my life is, and the access to knowing things I'm not supposed to know, I'm happy about being co-opted. And I still consider you (and several of the people here) a good friend and I look forward to causing some mayhem and shooting things with you in my off-time someday, but since I can't talk about all the interesting shit, I tend to end up not saying much at all. And I'm not apologizing because, again, I like where my life has ended up, but sometimes I feel like I owe an explanation.

also, 12th and Garlic?

1.  Oh, no complaints there.  Life happens, and far be it from me to bitch about someone getting paid.  I'm not pissed, or anything, just feeling like PD died under my feet.

2.  Yes.  White people using Spanish words badly to name streets is an art form here.  I'm waiting to see "Calle Pantelones".

In my defense, I have never once posted at TCC, nor do I see any point or potential humor in doing so.

[Doktor Howl]

Yeah, but Nigel had a point in that thread.  Ranting is a dead art, here.

[East Coast Hustle]

Yeah. I've run out of things to be mad about. I like to think that's a good thing, but time will tell.

[Doktor Howl]

Yeah. I've run out of things to be mad about. I like to think that's a good thing, but time will tell.

I'm still mad as hell, but nobody else seems to be.  Or at least very few people.

[Jenne]

...I have holes in my guts, otherwise I'd be ranting away.  When gut-leakage is no longer an issue for me, I'll have some anger issues to manage.

ETA:  no, Jenne's not on drugs atall atall--damn, look at the sentence formation up there.  Meh.

[Judge Nasty]

Are Doktor Howl and Miss Freaky together? Married? They seem like the discordian John Lennon and Yoko Ono of the internet.

[Don Coyote]

Are Doktor Howl and Miss Freaky together? Married? They seem like the discordian John Lennon and Yoko Ono of the internet.

I think it's more like Dok Howl is Freeky's mutated teddy bear.

[BabylonHoruv]

I know it's the crack here, the crack and the booze.  The people of Crow Town don't rape their daughters just because they are bad people, or because they are filled with despair and hatred from having their jobs taken away and their options slowly shut off.  They don't go and get in fights because of these things and shoot one another, no it's only the crack, if we could just clean that up, just get the bars shut down and replaced with churches all the problems would go away, the factories would open back up and people would start being decent to each other again and the stores downtown would open back up again instead of staying as slowly decaying buildings that aren't seven safe to walk around in.  I bet the KKK would leave too, if we could just get the crack and the booze and the weed and the pills out.  Those people aren't really bad people, they just used some chemicals they shouldn't have used and they put badwrong thoughts in their heads.  Maybe I should organize a march, a march against drugs and alcohol, to get the people to see where the real problem is.

[Cainad (dec.)]

Disclaimer: I thought this was gonna be a three-paragraph mini-rant with a pretty straightforward point. It ended up being a long stream of projectile word vomit, but after spending like 45 minutes on it I'm posting it regardless of quality (or lack thereof, really). You have been warned.

Yeah. I've run out of things to be mad about. I like to think that's a good thing, but time will tell.

I'm still mad as hell, but nobody else seems to be.  Or at least very few people.

I'm pretty stinking mad, Dok, but I guess I'm just the quiet sort of mad. At least for the past while.

I went through my angry, ranting, latter teenage years here, furiously typing about what I was seeing as I opened my eyes to the world for the first time. Then... I don't know what. I stopped taking my pills, I trudged through the end of adolescence and into my 20s on willpower and the emotional support of my friends, here and in real life. But the world didn't go away just because I had turned my eyes away from it and towards my much smaller personal world; I just sort of... put it on the back burner of my mind.

There it's stayed for the past several months to a year, on the back burner, not forgotten but largely ignored. There was so much other stuff to focus on, and some of it was way more pleasant than what I was seeing in the real world.

It is the drugs, Dok. My drug, it puts it all into sharp focus. Sometimes I think maybe I don't have a disorder so much as I have a natural defense against seeing too much. There is a reason the Blur Tool is so widely used in touching up photographs: it's nice to see a person's face without seeing the little red constellations on their chin or whatever. Sadly, though, circumstances in my small personal world have pushed me towards my pill again, and taken away the nice soft blur.

Now I can see it again, Dok.

The Grime.

I know you know what I mean. The thin film of invisible spunk that seems to cover nearly everything: people, places, institutions, ideas, everything. A nasty-smelling oil slick that makes everything seem disgusting and wrong, even though you can't quite pin down why sometimes. Other times, it's obvious.

There's nothing truly wrong with all of those people out there that I pass by every day. They've just been touched by the Grime, and it gets everywhere. They just want to get through the day with as little misery as possible, like all of us. I look down, and oh god it's on me too and I realize I can't get away from the Grime.

The school is covered in Grime. The politician in charge of it is practically a Lord of Grime, a seedy little goblin of a man whose main goal is to expend what little budget the school can manage on turning a public university into a glorified, profitable research facility. The undergraduates are nothing more than a whiny source of revenue for what's Really Important, and, what the hell, they're all just kids from less-wealthy families who thought they had a shot at sending their child to a nationally renowned college without having to relocate the rest of the family to a place with cheaper rent in order to make tuition. Darned city kids.

The new "education bill" for the State University of New York, PHEEIA, is a piece of impending legislature that purports to 'streamline outdated practices in the name of continuing to provide top-quality education', which, once you've washed the Grime from your tongue, is pronounced 'put the ability to hike up tuition in the hands of the university, rather than the state, and crank that sucker for all it's worth.'

They're all in on it, too. The universities, I mean. If tuition starts cranking up, do you think the current students are gonna vote with their feet and take their money elsewhere? Fuck no, not when transferring schools means finding another school with your major, or something close to it, that you can afford, and then losing about a fourth to a third of all your credits towards graduation because your new school decides that the work you did doesn't count. Better to suck it up and plow through that Bachelor's degree as fast as you can so that you can begin the long and rewarding process of paying off your student loans for the next fifteen years.

So money gets tighter and bright young eyes get duller and the Grime just builds up and up. Slog through it day by day, and put on the goddamn Blur filter if you don't want to lose your mind from just how scuzzy the whole thing is.

But I can't blur it out, Dok. Either I skip the pills and let everything pass me by in a haze, or I take them and see the Grime in all its hideous glory.

[Jasper]

Yeah, but Nigel had a point in that thread.  Ranting is a dead art, here.

I haven't ranted in a while.  For a long time now I've been on this "calmly accept the failings of human existence" kick.

[Richter]

Yeah, but Nigel had a point in that thread.  Ranting is a dead art, here.

I haven't ranted in a while.  For a long time now I've been on this "calmly accept the failings of human existence" kick.

IF you don't kick the dog once in a while, It will keep shitting on your carpet

[Doktor Howl]

Are Doktor Howl and Miss Freaky together? Married? They seem like the discordian John Lennon and Yoko Ono of the internet.

It's complicated.

In any case, you should probably apologize to her now, for comparing her to Yoko Ono.  It would be the polite thing to do.