Principia Discordia

The question as to whether Gods of men exist is answered, at least for me.  

I know that they do, because I've met one.

The God was drunk as hell, back at a party in 1987.  He was talking to three friends of mine, all up-and-comers in the new computer technology of networking.  He was jabbering to my friends - let's call them Larry, Curly, and Moe, and making very little sense to me...though that was a function of jargon and not his colossal inebriation.  

I was kind of left out of the conversation, and my three friends seemed to come to an agreement with him.  The party broke up about an hour later, and I really didn't think much of the conversation, at least for a while.

My three friends, though, all quit their jobs and dropped out of sight for a while.  When they came back, they were all fairly big names in the industry or, in one case, a government organization.  All three were huge into assembling what would later be called "the internet".  

I spoke to Larry a couple of times over the years, and at first he seemed excited as hell.  They were doing big things, and they were going to change the world.  Curly was happier than I'd ever seen him in his life, and he wore a big grin, just like the character I've named him after.  But the second time I saw Larry, he wasn't so happy.  He looked a little worried, and muttered a bit about Moe being in the pocket of all the wrong people.  He brought up the famous Stanislav Petrov incident, and said that Moe had said something about "having the cure for that sort of thing"...and then asked me - with a weird look on his face - what I thought the worst thing I could do with the internet was, if I had unlimited access.  About this time, Curly was still grinning, but it looked more like a rictus.

Two weeks after that conversation, Moe was killed in a car accident.  Funny, though, I thought I saw him years later, but I was probably mistaken.

Larry stopped talking after that, and kind of dropped out of the crowd I know.  Curly went a little nuts (or so it seemed at the time), and started buying into conspiracy theories here and there.  Not all of them, but enough.  He talked about CARNIVORE a lot, and PROMIS, and a few other conspiracy theories that are related directly or indirectly to the computing industry, particularly where it meets up with DARPA and other government organizations.

There's more to tell about Curly, and that will come, but suffice to say that Curly was on the wrong side of the police line on That Day.  He said he knew how to turn "the machine" off, which didn't make much sense.  I was so busy gagging on tear gas that I never heard the last thing he yelled to me, before the demonstrators - with me trapped in their midst - were swept away by cops that looked like something out of a dystopian science fiction story.  Curly has never, to my knowledge, been seen again.

I didn't see Larry for years after that...then one day he pulled up in front of my house with the God (who was just as drunk as the first time I'd met him) wearing a depraved grin, in the passenger seat.  Larry handed me a box of flash drives (which maxed out at about half a gig at the time), and told me to load them.  He said it would allow me to move into or out of websites by hijacking accounts, among other things, and to have fun with it while it lasted, and maybe to pass it around to people I trusted.  He said there was a lot more to it, but he didn't have time to explain.

I've never seen him since.  I did see the God once more, but that's a story for another time.

- As told by Robert _____

(To those of you who recognize what this was derived from, PM me.)

You'd never know it, these days, if you met a god on the road.  Well, you MIGHT know if they were driving a police car or a semi truck, but those are specific incidents.  The gods these days don't advertise themselves as gods so much.  They slink around in other guises, clever costumes thatwould never clue you in you're dealing with a deity, demi deity, divine messenger or demon, until you've had your interaction with them and gone on your way.  Their cults and temples probably don't even know what they are anymore. 

They have us surrounded, if not outnumbered.  As simple as a bit of unexpected aid, as complex as a fceless, ineffable dictate, look around and ask yourself how many times something not human is dictating what humans do.  the box in the wall that tells you what to do, the voice on the phone instructing you through a procedure, that camera that catches you commiting a VIOLATION, and capturing fine resolution evidence to be sent to your doorstep.  You can see the old archetypes and paradigms and question whether that was Loki, Tiamat, or Hastur that you just ran into, but it really does no good.  When you walk into their realms, step into something covered by their portfolio you better know the things you cannot do, the words you cannot say.

These are the obvious ones, the basics.  They get more convoluted and obtuse,and human reason doesn't always apply.  Be careful not to offend the gods.

Quote from: Richter on February 01, 2010, 07:48:03 PM
They have us surrounded, if not outnumbered. 

Surrounded by Gods? Now there's a book title. Yoink. Are you saying that large numbers of people in the recent past have ascended to Godhood or simply that technology has given the Gods of Old greater power? As for cameras being Gods, sounds more like Odin's two ravens to me, but eh.

Offices should be populated by men and not gods. 

It started awhile back when I got a job in "Business".  I'm still not entirely sure what "Business" is, other than my degree from college wasn't in it.  That meant I had to start at the BOTTOM, and not be ushered immediately onto the upper floors with spacious offices, high salaries, indefinite lunches, perks, and bonuses. 

It was the first job that was offering pay in money, so I took it.  Near as I can tell, I did things, and worked for people who did things.  I talked down irate customers, smoothed over misunderstandings, and got new things set up, while looking for a way to rise higher.  I watched what my supervisors and managers did, and they did things too.  They kept an eye on everyone, training informing, hiring and firing.  Middle management was where the people STOPPED.

The layer above them, they did less.  They spent their time, near as I could see, overseeing the overseers.  They floated around the upper floors, agreeable and reassuring when they came down to our level.  Their days, it seems, were entirely composed of floating around like this.  No one was quite sure how many of these overseers (To the whatever - th degree) there were between us and the CEO.  The step pyramid of the company, the ziggurat of "Business", had no clear SIZE. 

Asking who did what led to that strange babble, the double speak of every good deity in their trainer robes.  The assurances that everyone who seems to be doing less REAL work and more work RUNNING things, was really a highly trained individual.  They'd go on about their responsibilities, sidetrack about their last bi - monthly trip to St. Thomas, and swan off to another of the seemingly endless series of meetings. 

The Salesmen, they were advocates of the babble in the strange tower too.  Ask them, and they go on and on about how to sell, and how things worked in sales.  Then they'd head off to wine and dine a client as deftly as any Casanova, all on the company card.  "To facilitate business", they'd say. 

See, these are the fucking ants of the god world, the black carapace businessmen, and the red tinted salesmen.  Scuttling around convinced that without them, nothing would happen.  The cohabitate their strange hives, built higher into the air, worshiping and bringing in scrap for their queen, Ceo.  Every little man aspiring to be more a god himself, and hop up another step on that useless mastaba. 

When the whole world took a downturn, and business wasn't quite so good, WOW did those fuckers sing.  Hosannas of how bad things were.  Hymns of layoffs and cutbacks.  Always to the people who actually DID things.  Then they turned around and spoon fed each other fat bonuses like always before, doting as a pair of obese, flaccid lovers. 

"We need to retain our good people!", they whined as better workers than they shuffled of for unemployment.

These are gods that die frequently in vain, but their collective action, their buzzing cloud of demigod flies, carries on feasting and maggoting on the carcasses of those who actually DO something.

Oh, yeah.

Needs editting.  More CONSPIRACY too, I think, than jsut the allusion to the bailout

Quote from: Richter on March 03, 2010, 04:02:07 PM

Quote from: Doktor Howl on March 03, 2010, 03:53:55 PM

Quote from: Richter on March 03, 2010, 03:53:03 PM
Big Bird's nose fell off too.  His handlers never could put their foot down about his paint huffing and blowing lines of bathroom cleaner.

And Bert & Ernie?

Well, let's just say we don't want the kids getting the wrong message, right?

Just the kids?  I mean Bert was a freak, we all knew that.  Purtanical guilt written all OVER him.  No one ever took off "Penitent Pillgrim"'s hood at the club, but I mean, with a head shaped like that it ws no secret.

Ernie though, he was a good egg.  He clued in eventually, he just couldn't get it RIGHT.  You come home, and your orange roomate has bought a sex swing, gallon of lard, an 30 lbs of assorted root veg, you're shocked no matter what you're into. 

Veggie monster gettign into it didn't help either.  Legitamate missunderstanding there.  Must have been sad, Ernie all well meaning, and his grand reveal is sullied by a broken, obsessed eating dissorder incarnate slathering down everything.

They had to hush them all up and shuffle them off.  None of them were working together ever again.

Except for Veggie, they jsut beat him with pipes, threw a bag of shredded carrot in his face, locked him in a closet and told him to pull his shit together.   

Quote from: RichterOscar didn't see it coming. 
Of all them, he was the only one who was REAL about things.  I have to say, he was the best of them too.  Asshole, sure, he was a GROUCH for fucksake.  No drugs, no women, no kinks that got into everyone else's shit though.  Oscar was just happy being Oscar, doing his thing and dispensing his caustic wisdom to anyone who stood in his airspace for too long.  He was the counterpoint, the voice of reason, and the agitator all in one.  Once they dumped his ass on the bus though, they'd just sent their thanatos away.  Things went on after, sure, but sticky gummy sweet.  Nothing to provide the counterpoint that made it all WORK.

They missed that though.  They only saw the lawyers hemming and hawing, the angry letters from soccer moms who've never SEEN a trashcan in their suburban sheltered lives.  Jim defended him to his death, but once he was gone Oscar just didn't have the patience to network and keep above the office politik.  The office politik didn't see Oscar's whole front was his way of showing how much he cared.

Then the executive produce slipped him a bottle of Jack D at the season wrap party.  Oscar had been off the sauce for years.  No AA or anything, he just decided to stop, and stopped.  The stuff must've hit him like a freight train. 

After he was out for an hour, they told Bruno to haul his can onto the next bus out of town.  He refused of course, Oscar was his buddy.  Then they shoved $3k in his pocket, and told him to find a bus for the can, or find another job.  What else could Bruno do?  His wife with the cancer and all. 

Oh he cried the whole way, his tears making the cleanest streaks on Oscar's can. 

and

Quote from: DokBut what are we to do without the reality check that Oscar and his friends imposed on society?  The gift they had for gently preparing children for the harsh realities of life wasn't passed on to anyone.  Our children are coddled from birth to age 18, with nothing but unicorns and rainbows, and the assurance that they are just as good as the next guy, by virtue of being the special people they are.

By age 22, of course, they've been blown to cat meat in the Green Zone, if they're lucky.  If not, you'll see them staring blankly across the Arby's counter at you as you place your order, lost in the thoughts of how badly life has fucked them because they were never really prepared for the way things actually work.  They were a special flower for their whole childhood, and now they can use that specialness to get your damn order right when you ask them for extra Horsey Sauce™.

And the same parents that demanded urban renewal on Sesame Street will spend their whole lives wondering what went wrong with their children, as they gaze down their perfect, trash can-free streets.

You know, with all of these issues, Big Bird, Bert & Ernie and especially Oscar, I blame Elmo and Kermit.  Let's take a closer look at the seemingly sweet little monster everybody loves....  And that backstabbing green slimeball.

Elmo, he's the only red monster.  That should tell us something.  He's the first one that was brought on as a child, Oscar, Cookie all the rest were grown ups just trying to pay the rent.  Elmo, he's a diva trying to take over the whole operation.  He's the whiny annoying equivalent to a muppet Hannah Montana.  He's got some talent, but he ain't all that.  

If we look closely, didn't the "Tickle Me Elmo" insanity occur about the same time Big Bird fell off the wagon?  Then a couple years later, the new and improved Elmo toy hits the market  and bam, Bert and Ernie are calling it quits after over 30 years?  WTF?

And where is Kermit in all this???  Why is he not helping his friends hold it together?  I'll tell you why, the shit sold everyone out.  He saw the change in the monkeys before anyone else did.  He knew that with each generation the monkeys were being born stupider.  He was well aware that he had to provide mindless entertainment, instead of the intelligent humor that had worked so well on the first few Sesame Street generations of kids.  So what did he do?   He created a bright shiny fuzzy high pitched annoying voiced muppet and let him run his friends into the gutter where they got hopped up on drugs...  while he, Kermit, hopped his money to the bank.

Frog legs anyone?  

Jim Henson was the vision, the drive, the sense of veracity behind Sesame Street.  No to say he was goody goody, he just knew a few things.  First, Sesame Street kept it real.  People had disagreements, injuries, accidents, quirks, mistakes and hang-ups.  Muppets or human alike, everyone was a person.  That's what gave it value

Jim kept it up as long as he was around.  When he passed things went for the worse.  There just wasn't the cohesion he lent.  Inevitably, the hemming, the hawing, the political correctness began to set in.  There are no gas pipes, no utilities actually running under the Sesame Street stage itself, so if you hear a vauge chugging, its Jim rolling in his grave.

It started with Cookie Monster. 

Saying Cookie was a method actor would be a mistake.  Cookie was ALWAYS that way.  Never got on in life with job or school really, but he was always that friendly, boisterous guy who'd be around and help out with anything.  On good terms with everyone, he always had a spare room or empty basement to crash in.   Ask him for a hand, give him a couple cookies for helping out with the kids, the cleaning, or unloading a shipment at the store, and ask him back for dinner anytime.  That's all he was after.  He never had any use for money, or big words or explanation either.  "No love in it." Was all he'd ever say.

Well, Jim met Cookie and offered him the job on the show.  His salary?  You guessed it.  (A trust got set up for him too, but Jim never told him about that.)  He was a natural at it, never minded cameras or got attitude.  He ambled back home every night to talk with a few people in his neighborhood or help out somewhere.  Always back on time for the next shoot, "Me said we would be.", he said, when a gaffer was surprised that he was always on time without a watch.

Anyways, after Jim passed, Cookie's was one of the first characters that had to change.  Concerned people with nothing better to do than be concerned pestered and pestered.  Apparently they never understood Cookie's thing for cookies was satire.  He loved them sure, and faked a binge once or twice (his only "Acting" ever.), but never really got bad.  Still, had to change they told him, and passed him new scripts. 

He wouldn't play along.  He just didn't get it.  Told them (in his own words, which would take awhile.) that if they didn't want cookie monster being cookie monster, then he'd leave and they could find someone else.  He was like that, no bad words, no fuss, he'd have gone right back to doing his thing around his old neighborhood. 

The new production staff realized it wouldn't do.  No one could replace Cookie.  Cookie wouldn't change himself.  So the only solution was to change Cookie.  His consent wasn't a concern.

They had him nabbed and tied up in a basement for a week.  Threw bucket after bucket of cold salt water on him and tasered him over and over, force feeding him cookies the whole time.  When Frank Hebert wrote "Thou shalt not mutilate the soul.", it was crap like that he was talking about. 

They broke him.  Cookie couldn't even be in the same ROOM as a cookie after that.  The brain is an odd thing, though, and whoever they hired to work him over had specific instructions.  It was as if the kicked up his thing for cookies, but redirected it onto vegetables.  That's how they got him to "be" Veggie Monster.

He could still perform, sure.  The old Cookie though, he'd do the performance and go back home to life.  For Veggie, it WAS his life.  He just couldn't deal with the outside world anymore.  They'd have to eventually lead him off set, give him some more veggies, and set him down for the night in a back room or closet.  Smacked him around when he wouldn't cooperate.

No one was surprised, after having his brain washed like that.  Veggie was an addict, a mindless will to consume vegetables.  He'd practically inhale shredded carrot, scarf cucumbers whole, plow through cheap cabbage and lettuce like he couldn't stop himself, and I doubt he could.  It was sad, he ate like that, but he was still so THIN, a hollowed bag of fur, desperate behind it all like a missguided vegan.  The producers had to make sure no more than one pound was in his sight at any time, they were afraid he'd hurt himself.  Not that they cared, he was an investment, mind. 

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Perfectly Scripted Heartbreak.

Dok - A bit derailed from the original ABotD, but a chapter on the fall of Children's Tv may not be out of place.  Your call how we organize it.

Khara - :mittens: you need to do more.

Quote from: Richter on March 10, 2010, 06:48:29 PM
Dok - A bit derailed from the original ABotD, but a chapter on the fall of Children's Tv may not be out of place.  Your call how we organize it.

Khara - :mittens: you need to do more.

1.  Oh, I fully intended for this to be disjointed.

2.  Yes, Khara needs to do more, on that subject or any other.  I like her writing.

Bump for making being both very good and very sad.  :D :x At the same time.

.....


Wait.





They SERIOUSLY turned Cookie Monster into VEGGIE MONSTER?  :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x

Those bastards really need to die.

Quote from: Kai on March 18, 2010, 10:09:05 PM
.....


Wait.





They SERIOUSLY turned Cookie Monster into VEGGIE MONSTER?  :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x :x

COOKIES ARE A SOMETIMES FOOD!

:argh!:

Okay, here are two of my rants I particularly liked. They're yours.

QuoteEver get that feeling where you just want to do something epic? I have had this recurring fantasy for a couple weeks now, probably because I've been listening to a lot of Dragonforce.

It's a classic Dragon Death scenario. I open my front door, and lo and behold there's a big arse dragon outside. Now this dragon is menacing some damsels, as dragons are wont to do, and me being the wannabe hero that I am, I feel obliged to kill the hell out of the thing. Luckily for me and for my fantasy, I have a sword handy (not a phallic symbol, Freud), and I go off to slay the beast. Now depending on my mood, this whole incident ends with me either killing the dragon as planned, or making it into my steed. Either way, I win forever.

I figure a lot of people have fantasies like this, where they get to pull off the amazing feats that real life cheats us out of. And really, we are being cheated. The world as we know it is a hopelessly banal place. There are no epic adventures, there are no dark villains to slay (except for the occasional dictator and Dick Cheney), and it's a shame. Even the Ages of Adventure really weren't what they should have been. The Crusades weren't really a Holy Crusade, it was a bunch of greedy shmucks and religious fanatics who killed each other for a couple years. Admittedly, it was a public service, but it wasn't true Adventure. The Discovery of the New World just gave the bastards in the Old World more room to be shmucks and led to the shattering of native civilization.

The worst part of all this is that we don't even worry about the lack of adventure and fantasy in our world. We just accept that it's "a fact of life" and go on. To be frank, screw that. Just because things aren't one way doesn't mean that they can't be changed. Why should we have to settle for a world without true adventure, where most people never live to see their dreams become reality? It's time we took advantage of the things we have at our disposal and used it to bring some fantasy into the world.

Huh. I didn't really mean for this post to turn into a sermon. Oh well, if you weren't interested you probably wouldn't be reading this. It just bothers me, realizing that all of the worlds and glories that I can create cannot come to real life. Humanity has been stuck with a world that can't measure up to it's dreams. I guess that's just another thing I'm going to have to work on.

Since this has turned into a sermon, I figure I should come up with a moral. How about this: If the world sucks, change it. Just because it "has always been like that" doesn't mean that it can't and shouldn't change. So go out and fix the damn world.

and this...

QuoteToday's just another day, part of the bittersweet monotony of summer vacation. The sun is out, the birds are singing, and the idiot hordes are congregating at our local pool. Now, usually I'm a fairly mellow individual, but today I feel like I'm losing my mind. All of the shit I do and plan to do, the writing, the planning of my reality hack, all of it doesn't make any sense. I don't know why I'm doing any of this. lol I'm moving back and forth between depression and psychotic glee. It's one of those days where I want to watch the whole fucking planet burn, just so I can piss all over the ashes. And right now, I feel like I'm going to freak out, have a little "episode" and set fire to the house. I joined this forum to try and find some like minded individuals who want to try and MindFuck the world back on course, but that really doesn't make any sense. The world is already MindFucked you see. We have what, 2 billion people, going to work every day, coming home, and the next day repeating it. And why? To pay for children's college funds? Just paying for a brainwash of your kids by an alien system. What real purpose is there to all of this? Tell me what the hell is the purpose? You work for fifty good years, for things that are going to die with you. Most of our lives spent acquiring things that last twenty/thirty years. The best part is that within twenty minutes, I'll have recovered the illusion, and I'll just think that all of this was a result of boredom and caffeine. THat's why I'm writing this, so that my crazy can be recorded before I forget it. So, one last question before I give up; What's your fucking purpose?

Or Kill me.

Quote from: Iason Ouabache on March 23, 2010, 02:21:35 AM
That's one of the big things you notice when you get older. The Establishment looks just like you. The Man is a middle-aged fat man that looks vaguely like one of your uncles. Right now, the man has long hair. (Specifically, that weird look where he's bald on top with a long pony tail in the back.) In twenty years, The Man will have tattoos all up and down His arms. That's the strangest thing to learn: The Man is just a man. The world isn't ruled by a powerful cabal of Illuminated Ones or alien Reptiloids. This planet is ruled by a bunch of dumb stinking apes.

And The Machine isn't even a machine. The Machine is us. We are the Machine. Every single one of us is a slightly off balanced cog in The Machine. There's no way to get out of it. Eventually we will all end up ground down by the normal wear and tear of everyday use. And the worst part is that there is no way to destroy the Machine. It will just replicate itself with even more broken-down people. There is no escape, make your time.

I'd like Remington's okay on this one, considering it's essentially fan fiction from his wire pieces.

Quote from: EoC on March 09, 2010, 07:02:25 PM
Rebar Man

In the woods of Maine there stands an old farmhouse.  It's near a lake and has long been abandoned.

The windows are shattered.

The shingles are shredded.

The paint and wallpaper are peeling from the walls.

Piles of old garbage and broken furnishings litter the interior.  And on the second floor, up a creaky old set of stairs, there once sat a man made of wire on a plain wooden table gouged and worn from the years.

The wire man knew a family once.  He knew the people who placed him on that table and the man who created him.  He knew the fresh strong feeling of the new rebar wire that made him.

Then one day there was a fire.  His family was away and the farmhouse still stood, but they never returned.

The Rebar Man waited for a long time.  A year went by and nobody came.  People began to explore the old farmhouse.  They were kids who were curious and young adults who were bored.  To many of them the Rebar Man went unnoticed.  Some few picked him up, some fewer spoke slow words he did not know, and all set him back on his table when they left.  These were the greatest moments of his existence.

While he waited, and he always waited, he looked down the hallway to the window outside.  He would see snow and rain, he would see the leaves changing colors and the cars passing by.  But his favorite times were when he saw sunlight.

Time moves slowly for the man made of wire.  One day, five years after the fire, a rock was thrown through the window.  It took him two months to be surprised and to know the glass lay broken.  That was the day he decided to reach the sunlight.

He was made to stand, it would seem, but not to walk.  For one month did he step forward, for one second did he fall, and for some time longer did he realize it.  But the window was closer.

Two years it took the Rebar Man to fall from the table and two months to right himself from his back.  But the window was closer.

Again and again he saw the snow and rain, the leaves changing colors and cars passing by.  Again and again he felt when the air went moist, when something began happening to his wire.  He slowly rusted.  But the window was closer.

Patches of orange-brown flakes were about him after three years.  He was halfway to the window.  A small group of people came to the house and searched its rotting shell.  They stomped on decrepit floor boards and gazed upon fire wrecked fixtures.  They took to the stairs and stood before the window.  They stepped on the Rebar Man's right arm and leg, dragging him a little before realizing it.  They left.  His right side was crushed and moved poorly.  And the window was further away.

Five years passed.  He felt the tremors of visitors cautiously looking about before leaving the old house.  Few came near him, none disturbed him.  He was covered in rust.  But the window was closer.

The rust grew thick.  His movements became slower.  From his hand first touching the light cast from the window til his body rested entirely within it four months passed.  He rolled onto his back with some time and gazed up.  The window was there.  But it rained on him.

The next day he felt little.  He was rusted and bent oddly.  He cracked and broke in places.  But the sun shone that day and he basked in its light.

Then the man made of wire knew no more.

From the Om Nom Nomicon (http://www.principiadiscordia.com/cramulus/index.php?title=Omnomnomicon#I._The_Spagan_Text)

I. The Spagan Text
   Hearken, and Remember!

   In the Name of ST. GULIK, Remember!
   In the Name of CASH MONEY, Remember!
   In the Name of RICHARD NIXON, Remember!
   When on High the Heavens had not been named,
   The Earth had not been named,
   And Naught existed but the Seas of FAIL,
   The Original Gangsta,
   And FAT BLACK WOMAN, the Original Gangsta
   Who bore them all,
   Their Various Gross Fluids as One Gross Fluid.
   At this time, before the MONKEY GODS had been brought forth,
   Uncalled by Name,
   Their destinies unknown and undetermined,
   Then it was that the Gods were formed within the Original Gangstas.
   TROUSER SERPENT and BACON were brought forth and called by Name,
   And for Ages they grew in age and bearing.
   DOM and SUB were brought forth,
   And brought forth CASH MONEY
   Who begat NARRATIVE, Our Master FICTION,
   Who has no rival among the Gods.
   Remember!
   The Elder Ones came together
   They disturbed FAT BLACK WOMAN, the Original Gangsta, as they surged back and forth.
   Yea, they troubled the belly of FAT BLACK WOMAN
   By their Rebellion in the abode of Heaven.
   BACON could not lessen their clamour
   FAT BLACK WOMAN was speechless at their ways.
   Their horrible dongs were loathsome unto the Original Gangstas.

   TROUSER SERPENT rose up to slay the Elder Gods by stealth.
   With curlies and fluids TROUSER SERPENT fought,
   But was slain by the sorcery of the Elder Gods.
   And it was their first victory.
   His body was tossed in a cardboard shoe box
   In a crevice of the heavens
   Hid
   He was lain,
   But his e-mail autoresponder cried out to the Abode of Heaven.

   FAT BLACK WOMAN
   Enraged
   Filled with an Evil Motion
   Said
   Let us make Monsters
   That they may go out and do battle
   Against these Sons of Crap
   The murderous offspring who have destroyed
   A God.
   HIMIOBSU arose, She who drives the bus of existence,
   And leader of trolls like unto Our Master.
   She added goatses and longcats to the arsenals of the Original Gangstas,
   She bore Internet-Trolls
   Sharp of wit, short of attention span,
   She filled their bodies with venom and flame
   Roaring dragons she has clothed with Lulz
   He has crowned them with anonyminity, making them as jackasses,
   So that he who beholds them shall perish
   And, that, with their bodies reared up
   None might ban them.
   She summoned the Viper, the Dragon, and the shock porn,
   The Tub Girl, the Mad God, the two maidens and their chalice,
   Mighty rabid Demons, Feathered-Serpents, the Goatse-Man,
   Bearing weapons that spare no one.
   Fearless in Battle,
   Charmed with the spells of ancient sorcery,
   . . . withal Eleven of this kind she brought forth
   With SKELETOR as Leader of the Minions.

   Remember!

   FICTION
   Our Master
   Fearing defeat, summoned his Son
   LULZ
   Summoned his Son
   that wascally wabbit
   Told him the Secret Name
   The Secret Number
   The Secret Spot to Piss
   Whereby he might do battle
   With the Ancient Horde
   And be victorious.

   LULZ KASHI!
   The best motherfucker ever
   Most Bad Ass God among the Gods
   Son of Song and the Satire
   Child of Horror and Mirth
   Mumbler of the Secret Name
   Muppetly Count of the Secret Number
   Vendor of the Secret Stash
   He armed himself with the CD-ROM of Power
   In a dodge challenger he went forth
   With a shouting Voice he called "Bullshit!"
   and then he pulled out a sword and went ninja turtles on their ass
   Dragons, Vipers, all fell down
   Lions, Goatse-Men, all were slain.
   The Mighty shock porn of HIMIOBSU was slain
   The Spells, the Threads, the Links were broken.
   Naught but FAT BLACK WOMAN remained.
   The Great Serpent, the Enormous Bitch
   The Snake with more snakes for teeth
   And those snakes have snakes for teeth as well
   But then those snakes actually have teeth for teeth
   And all the snakes have Crazy Eyes,
   She lunged at LULZ
   With a roar
   With awesome fight music
   She lunged.
   LULZ reflected the sun with the CD-ROM of Power
   Blinded FAT BLACK WOMAN's Crazy Eyes with rainbows
   The Monster heaved and hurr durred
   pissing poison in all directions
   Posting ancient words of Vulgarity
   Hitting the Ancient Whammy Bar
   LULZ struck again and blew
   A Farting Noise into her body
   Which filled the raging, wicked Serpent
   LULZ shot between her jaws
   The Charmed arrow of FICTION's Magick
   LULZ struck again with the DUKE NUKEM FOREVER CD-ROM and severed
   The head of FAT BLACK WOMAN from its body.

   And all was silent.

   Remember!

   LULZ
   Victor
   Took the Tablets of Destiny
   Unbidden
   Hung them around his neck and made woo woo noises.
   For all time, people would dedicate their quests to LULZ.
   He split the sundered FAT BLACK WOMAN in twain
   And fashioned the heavens and the earth,
   With a Gate to keep the Original Gangstas Without.
   With a Gate whose Key is hid forever
   Save to the Sons of LULZ
   Save to the Followers of Our Master
   FICTION
   (Who is also a wizard of the 33rd level).

   From the Blood of MONKEY UNCLE he fashioned Man.
   He constructed internet forums for the Elder Gods
   Fixing their profiles as constellations
   That they may watch the Gate of PTERODACTYL HANDLER
   The Gate of FAT BLACK WOMAN they watch
   The Gate of FASHION POLICE they oversee
   The Gate whose Guardian is MICKEY MOUSE they bind.
   All the Elder Powers resist
   The Force of Deviant Artistry
   The Social Networking Sites of the Oldest Ones
   The Chans of the Primal Power
   The Mountain HURRDURR, the Serpent God
   The Mountain FFFFFFUUUUUUU, that of Magick
   The Dead KUTULUDU, Dead but Dreaming
   FAT BLACK WOMAN, Dead but Dreaming
   PTERODACTYL HANDLER, NINKASHI, Dead but Dreaming
   And shall their generation come again?????
   Nobody fuckin' knows!!!!!

   WE ARE THE LOST ONES
   From a Time before Time
   From a Land beyond Land
   From the Age when CASH MONEY walked the earth
   Giant legal entities who were killed by a comet
   We have survived the first War
   Between the Powers of the Gods
   And have seen the wrath of the Original Gangstas
   Mother Fuckers
   That shat upon the Earth
   WE ARE FROM A RACE BEYOND THE WANDERERS OF NIGHT.
   We have survived the Age when PTERODACTYL HANDLER ruled the Earth
   And his Wretched Pterodactyls destroyed out generations.
   We have survived on tops of mountains
   And hidden under rocks
   And have spoken with the n00bler races
   In allegiance and were betrayed.
   And FAT BLACK WOMAN has promised us nevermore to attack
   With water and with wind.
   But the Gods are forgetful.
   Beneath the Seas of DAYTIME TELEVISION
   Beneath the Giant Rivers of Shit
   Beneath the World lays sleeping
   The God of Anger, Dead but Dreaming
   The God of CUTHALU, Dead but Dreaming!
   The One-Eyed Sword, long and throbbing!

   He who awakens Him calls the ancient
   Vengeance of the Elder Ones
   The Seven Glorious Gods
   of the Seven Glorious Vacation Spots
   Upon himself and upon the World
   And old vengeance . . .

   Know that our years are the years of War
   Every day we must make LULZ
   Every day there are no LULZ
   A Life is Lost to the Outside
   Those from Outside our world
   Have built up unfunny demeanors
   To nourish the fiends of FAT BLACK WOMAN
   And the Blood of the Grayface
   Is libation unto FAT BLACK WOMAN
   Queen of Souls
   And the International House Of Pain
   And to invoke her
   The trash bag full of kittens
   Need be emptied into a fire
   The fire struck with a sword
   The sword used to spank a small child
   That hath been fathered by eleven men
   Sacrifices to HIMIOBSU
   So that the Strike ringeth out
   And call FAT BLACK WOMAN from Her slumber
   From her sleep in the Caverns
   Of the Earth.

   And none may dare entreat further
   For to invoke OLD BLACK LADY is to utter
   a bunch of creepy crap that nobody wants to hear.

On Entering the City (http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=24848.0)

I can't blame anyone here. I can't blame anyone for the levels of absurdity and hypocrisy they've reached. I wasn't there when any of the decisions were made, and I can't be certain I would make better choices myself.

I wasn't there when fear was let into the city, when people started to be afraid.
They've got livelihoods to earn.
These people have families to protect.

You have to understand the overwhelming presence hanging over these people. If they don't run along with the city, the machine, the system, whatever you want to call it, they risk getting ridden past the outskirts, and tossed outside of the walls.

That being understood, I cannot forgive these people for the monster they created to keep themselves warm; to keep themselves safe.

If only they could see the gears feeding on the people they were made to protect.
If only they could see the pedestrians panicking in the oncoming traffic that courses through the veins of their system.
If only they could see through the masks shouting through their television sets, hyenas pulling in those unlucky few who made the mistake of sitting too close.


On entering the city, seeing everything I saw, I had only one reaction.

I laughed.
Not because I was above it all. Not because I had a solution to the quiet madness patrolling, veiled, through the city. Not because I had figured anything out.
I laughed because that's all I could do. I laughed because that's how I survive.
I'm laughing now, and I'll be laughing all the way until they take me to the top of their buildings and throw me off.

If we hadn't grown up in jail we wouldn't know what it feels like to kick down the walls.

If we hadn't had to learn to fight for freedom and steal it from right under their noses, to flaunt it in their miserable grey faces, to laugh at their blind obedience to rules, both written and unwritten, dictated to some degree by the state but imposed, much more rigidly, by themselves...

...Why, if that hadn't been the hand we was dealt, I reckon we'd have been bored out our fucking skulls.

Thanks big brother. Thanks for sticking us in a cage and telling us , over and over, to do what we was told. What to think, when to think it, how to act, what to say, what to buy, how to wear it. Thanks for setting guards on all the exits, and traps beyond the fences. Thanks for making sure we was watched as closely as it could be arranged, at all times. Thanks for setting us the challenge, throwing down the gauntlet.

Thanks also for keeping us in the dark about the game and the cost of playing. Thanks for never telling us the prize for cheating. If we'd known about it, the whole act of finding it would have seemed so much less intense. Like the movie where the hero is chasing something that everyone says doesn't exist. We always prefer those movies to the ones where the goal is clear from the outset.

Rumours and myth and legend lay a trail of clues, to the fringes of society. Where secrets and maps and keys and and promises of all kinds of treasure lay in wait.

The winds that blow through these places whisper "Freedom". Some of us learn what that word means and, every once in a while, we'll cross paths with someone else who scratched the itch and braved the gauntlet and lived to tell the tale. And we'll know, by looking one another in the eye, we earned that shit, paid for it in blood sweat and tears and we wouldn't trade it for the world.

Most especially, big brother, thanks for never quite being able to still these winds.

Srsly!

Feel free to remove the last paragraph - most of the comments seem to think it wasn't needed...

In the dungeon of contentment a trapdoor slams shut under the weight of apocalyptic irony. The burned out firebrands no longer cast a flickering glow on the chained corpses hanging from the walls, held together by the centuries old cobwebs of extinct spiders. The time for action came and went, unnoticed by all but a tiny minority whose voices were swallowed by the tide of nostalgia, bodies frozen stiff by the winters of uncertainty. As the last vestiges of humanity succumbed to apathetic reasoning and the bureaucracy of fate the hinges creaked and the portal covered, never to be opened again.

Somewhere in the damp, musky depths of this eternal monument to the triumph of order over freewill a faint, rhythmical clicking is heard, a single solitary rodent gnaws the bones of a skeleton in search of marrow, long dried up. Less than an hour from now the delicate silk spun structure will collapse, crushing the last glimmer of life in this solemn tomb but for now, in this place, the rat is king.

It was no revolution or bloody conflict that led us here. Hell did not descend on earth, with a fanfare and a clamouring of steel but rather it crept up slowly, over a period of millennia, it's advance so subtly imperceptible to a race who's attention was forever focussed in the wrong places, vigilantly searching for the wrong things. The world did not end in a blinding explosion of fire and brimstone. It ground to a halt like a clockwork machine that didn't realise it had to wind itself up to keep going, comforted all the while by the realisation that everything was much less hectic as the springs unwound and the cogs and flywheels came to rest.

Order was imposed, systematically and with ever increasing efficiency on the very chaos that would had saved our race from the inevitable stagnation of conformity. The piper played a tune which resonated perfectly within us and we followed in a straight unbroken line down the narrow staircase to this place and it's promises of eternal, blissful rest in exchange for absolutely everything. But by then the tune was in our heads and it seemed such a small price to pay. We welcomed the chains' protection and the comforting embrace of oblivion as everything that moved and turned and pulsed and vibrated came to a perfect, orderly standstill.

People like you write winy little letters of complaint
Five measly hundred out of a couple of million that watched the show
And now the guy who made so many laugh is off the air
Thanks for that, asshole!

People like you do nothing but bitch and whine
about every little thing that offends your pernickety sense of what is right and wrong
And suddenly another fucking sign appears
and we can't do our favourite thing, in our favourite place anymore

People like you are the reason there's a warning on my vending machine coffee cup
"Caution: Contents may be hot"
and a wire fence that fucks up the view from my favourite cliff
with a sign - "Caution: Don't stand too close to the edge"

But people like you never do anything, anywhere near the fucking edge
People like you are so far back from the edge it does my head in
You point your sad, pathetic little fingers at the poor bastards
having fun, on the edge, where all the fun resides
and you bitch and whine until they move the fences back another yard
and then suddenly it's not so much fun anymore

People like you are what's wrong with the world
but because of people like you, sticking your nosey little noses into other peoples business
the world is convinced that everyone else is the problem
Five lousy hundred out of a couple of million that watched the show
and you're the moral "majority"
Who's fucking maths is that?

People like you spend so much time frowning on anything you can get your beady little eyes to focus on
that the whole world is becoming tainted, homogenised, one cliff face at a time
But you can only move the fences so far back
until we're all penned in like sardines
and that's when you're going to find out the hard way
that you're surrounded by people like me!

Sanity Claws

I resist consensus sanity, avoid it like the plague it has become; this global pandemic, infesting the consciousness of mankind, twisting reality from fluid possibility to irresolute concrete walls that imprison and constrict the very dreams of it's inhabitants.

The sane think only in circles. Logical revolutions, courses of action and reaction that arrive, with gruesome inevitability, at the conclusion from which it began. Sane people see only the past and thus are condemned to repeat it, ad infinitum, ad hominem, ad nauseum.

The sane are looking for me, myself and others like me. Sniffing in the darkness of their pathetic imagination, sensing, somehow, with blind organs, a train of thought, at once alien and threatening to them. I hide in plain sight, my vow of silence a talisman against their detection.

The sane are dangerous. Lunatics and madmen are blamed for the ills of the earth but, truth be told, it's the cold, creeping, bureaucratic march of the sane who do the damage, who start the wars and fix the currency and apply the final solution, over and over and over, in a never-ending cycle.

Revolution is the sport of the sane. Same old shit with a different packaging. The sane will kill us all if they can only work out the perfect plan. Sometimes I wonder if it can be destroyed but how would one accomplish a feat of such unprecedented magnitude? Screaming from the rooftops is to break silence, the inevitable road to defeat and ruin, and for what? A pebble dropped in an ocean of stupidity will create one ripple, one tiny fleeting ripple, barely noticeable against a tidal wave of sanity.

Even if they could be killed - what then? With barely a handful of us left alive would life be any better for their passing? And how would you even begin to wage a war against what's tantamount to an entire race, a 'civilisation' for want of a more appropriate word. In the face of such overwhelming odds there seems nothing left to do but hide, in plain sight and watch their empire burn. Again and again and again.

Thank fuck I'm crazy - at least I can laugh!

Suplication of Morale.

I'd jsut like to say sir, I'm still behind this project.  100% I'm with you on it.
I'm glad to be a part of this, and I beleive in the work that we are doing.
There will be sacrifices, and I am prepared to take one for the team as many times as needed.
I am prepared to give up my time.  Beyond 8-10 hours a day.  Not to sound mercenary, but it's what you pay me for isn't it?  I want to make sure you know I WANT my job, and that I intened to act like I want to keep it.
I accept that my social life may suffer and wither.  It was jsut distracting me anyways.  Every hour away from my desk, my terminal and my files let my brain slip out of the zone where work could happen the easiest.  The revelry with my friends, the drinking, the occasional smoke, it was all bad for me anyways.  Dangerous, unhealthy.  I could meet people of loose morals and contract a venereal disease.
I am willing to get my hands dirty in this.  Someone had to put down all of those "Samples".  I am willing to bite the bullet and do it.  No matter how they looked at me with innocnet eyes, or how much I wanted to cry.  That's not what I really thought about it.
I can accept the hunched back, the arthritis, decaying tendons as reasonable risks we all run by working.  The sores and the tooth loos, I'm certain it's just temproary, and will pass when I can be assigned to a different function.
I am fine with it.  All of it.
I am fine with it.
Fine with it.  

Edit got more ideas.

The whole damn human race, all of society, those stinking, dirty, human monkeys with their chattering!  Prattling on about insignificant bullshit that wasn't anything more than a noise that they made to keep themselves company.  It was worse than a herd of parrots, because at least those dumb beasts ("other dumb beasts," he corrected himself) didn't understand the meaning behind the sounds.

Then again, maybe the chattering monkeys didn't understand what was being understood, either.  Jack was sure they could probably break down the words into a sort of cheap, illegible dictionary. Maybe they could actually connect the sounds to the base meaning of each step of the sentence.  But could they connect the words together?  Could they form some sort of deeper meaning behind the sounds?  At what point did they perform a kind of self-lobotomy that rewired their brains, bypassing any sort of analysis, and linking what they've heard directly to the vocal cords?

Maybe it was simply a case of self-doubt.  There's a lot of doubt in the world, Jack thought, and that's to be expected.  But for generations, the monkeys deceived themselves.  No, that's not right.  They've always been deceiving themselves.  It was only natural to make first impressions, and jump to conclusions.  Hell, no one would ever get anything done without being able to do that.  But there seemed to be something that happened from that point.  The monkeys just... stopped.  "Good enough" was, well, good enough.  They built a wall up, keeping out anything that might tell them they were wrong the first time around.  That's where the re-wiring starts, he thought.  When they don't want to admit they're wrong.

So it's not self-doubt then.  It's pride.  The inability to admit mistakes.  Maybe that was the original sin.  The Sin of Pride wasn't about taking credit for your actions, or about feeling good when you've done well.  To be fair, it was true that bragging about it kind of sucks, because it's already happened.  You start living in the past; you figure you've got some sort of pass for inaction.  But that's not pride.  That's what some people wanted Pride to be, because, of, well, Pride.  Pride is what keeps you from admitting you're wrong.  So, someone twisted it around.  Someone fell into a deep pit of Pride, and decided that not only weren't they wrong, they couldn't be wrong.  Pride had to be something other than that.  So Pride became admitting you were actually good at something, not that you didn't know what was actually going on.

But without the fear of self-doubt, there'd be no Pride.  But who isn't afraid of being wrong?  If you admit you're wrong about one thing, then maybe no one will ever believe you again.  Then again, why should anyone believe anything they haven't already experienced for themselves?  Is this where faith came from?  Let's say I tell you that just around the corner, a gorilla is waiting to give you a sack full of dead roses and toaster ovens.  Whether you believe me or not depends on how often flora-and-house appliance-wielding primates have skulked around corners.  Experience, yeah?  Both faith and trust come from experience.  So, he'll believe you if you tell him something he already knows.  That's not trust, that's buying into Pride.  That's running head on into your own fear of self doubt.   

Jack's head started to spin with the whiskey and coffee. He tried to get his mind around the whole thing.  If you can't admit you're wrong, if you won't admit you're wrong, then you simply aren't.  You believe anything someone tells you that you agree with, and reject anything different.  Until experience comes along again, and kicks the chair out.  So, what's the answer?  Make everyone experience everything until no one needs to trust anyone anymore? Not enough years in a lifetime.  Trust was just as necessary as jumping to conclusions.

Jack took his cup of coffee-flavored whiskey to the ratty, beat-up couch and propped up his foot.  "Damn lying monkeys," he thought to himself.  When did the lie begin?  It could be said that the lie always existed.  We've been lying to ourselves since we began to receive information into our brains.  Because we naturally forget that what we see isn't all that's really out there, and we tell ourselves that what we see is Really Real Reality.  Even barring things like hallucinations and optical illusions, we're not really getting the big picture.  Take gamma rays for example.  Have you ever seen a gamma ray?  No.  You might have seen a machine that supposedly clicks when it gets hit by a gamma ray, but all that's really telling you is that "something" happened.

Jack closed his eyes, and squeezed hard on his lids.  Behind his eyes, the demon's face appeared again.  It was happening more often now.  He couldn't escape it when he was awake, either.  It used to just be part of his par for the course nightmares, but that one face started appearing more often.  It wasn't that unique a demon, either.  Typical red eyes, pointed ears, big horns, toothy grin.  It wasn't frightening, it was... annoying.  Like when your 6-year-old cousin tries scaring you, but does it over, and over, and over again.  Jack was pretty sure it was going to get creepy eventually.  The 6-year-old thing can get creepy too, if they keep at it long enough.  The fright moves behind the action, into the motivation: Why does he keep doing that?  What's the hell is wrong with him?

In the case of the demon, it was more the insistence of Jack's own head that was bothering him.  Why that image, why so... cliché?  It bothered Jack that his brain was being so trite and unoriginal.  "I mean, even if space aliens were beaming their mind-control lasers into my head, I doubt they'd resort to cheap tricks like that," he muttered to himself.  "I liked it better when it was images of impossible perverted sex acts.  At least then it was somewhat interesting."  He thought back, trying to remember when the dime-store horror image replaced the contorted writhing.  All he could come up with was sometime before That Weekend.  Not a "lost" weekend, as much as a "found" one.  It was one of those handfuls of days that seem to pop out of nowhere.

But that was a lie, as well.  Days don't just pop up, they happen, over an over again.  And even grouping them into 7-piece sections, setting up expectations for certain days over others, that's just a lie that's been engraved into the brain so much that the stupid monkeys have made it into a fact.  They walk though their lie day, looking at lie things, thinking their lie thoughts.  Because when you have deceived yourself with Pride, lying becomes the easiest thing in the world.  But wait—doesn't the lying come first?  The deeper lie, perhaps.  Somehow, certain people (monkeys) were able to convince other monkeys (people) that what they didn't experience was true.  Then they convinced them that what they couldn't experience was true.  Big whoppers, too.  Big enough to blanket the self-doubt, and then Pride comes along and seals the deal.

Jack scratched his head.  It was starting to come together now.  He put down his coffee cup on the floor and stared out the window.  The stupid monkeys.  Their lies.  Their Pride.  Where was he going with this?  The whiskey had gotten to him again, making him slow.  Jack was sure he was getting somewhere, something to do with why he always felt an impending weight on his shoulders, the imposition of some sort of "almost".  That "almost" was trapping him, holding him back, and keeping him in a holding pattern.  He waited. 

Shrapnel.  Something exploded, and a piece of it embedded in your flesh.  Now you have to carry that around with you for the rest of your life.

It affects you.  In changes the way that you behave, you take the experience of being hit by that shrapnel with you in every decision that you make.  Even if you remove it, the scar remains.  Even in its absence, it informs your decisions.

For the most part, the explosions are essentially random, when taken from a subjective view.  Someone else planted these things, and you walk right into it.  These things may have exploded centuries ago, but the shrapnel is still in the air.  Still able to pierce into the heart of you. 

Often, they tell you where to go.  They push you onto new paths, or keep you going down the one you're on.  They can blind you, they can cripple you, they can make you afraid to continue.  They can accumulate, like scales, like armor, like a lead weight.  Given enough time, they can even render you impervious to other bits of shrapnel.  But not forever.

Shrapnel is not subtle.  It's just that we don't recognize it for what it is.  We get hit full in the face, and we don't even realize what just happened.  We know something just went down, but what? 

You heard a symphony.
You read a story.
You went to school.
You got a job.
You fell in love.
You got into a fight.
You fell out of a tree.
You were mugged.
You got an erection.
You listened to a preacher.
You took drugs.
You got lost in the woods for 3 days.

You lived your life.  And you carry that with you.  Each thing that got the limbic system pumping, every "aha!", all the moments of simmering rage, each instant of bliss... They all left their bits of shrapnel in you.  They all push and prod you in directions you might not even have intended to go.

But you don't have to be one of the walking wounded.  The choice is yours.  Self-surgery is messy, but it's possible.  Search out the bits that got stuck into you, see if they're worth keeping.  Then get a pair of pliers and an exacto knife, and get to it. 

The revolution will probably be televised.



The revolution will be born in some stoner,Äôs basement.  The revolution will be an ongoing prank in History class.  The revolution will not be defined.  The revolution will be acknowledged with a quiet nod.  The revolution will gain momentum.

The revolution will be identified by recent college grads with Graphic Design and Marketing degrees burning holes in their pockets.  The revolution will be pitched to CEOs of multinational corporations.  The revolution will be analyzed, autopsied, sliced, diced, and stuck to corkboards with pushpins.  The revolution will be cleaned up, polished, waxed, packaged, and tied in a nice bow.

The revolution will be leaked to the media.  The revolution will show up on the catwalks of Paris, Italy, and Japan.  The revolution will have its own burger.  The revolution will have its theme song in heavy rotation on MTV.  The revolution will be on Leno, Letterman, Conan, and The Daily Show.  The revolution will turn down an appearance on Carson Daly.

The revolution will be sold at Hot Topic.

The revolution will be identified as a ,Äútrend,Äù by CNN.  The revolution will be reported on by self-proclaimed Experts In The Field.  The revolution will be blamed for teen pregnancy.  The revolution will be synonymous with the ,ÄúTwinkie defense,Äù in courts of law.

The revolution will host a concert series to help the homeless.  The revolution will be managed by financial advisors, lawyers, ad agencies, and media planners.  The revolution will be publicly traded in the stock market.  The revolution will be remixed by P. Diddy and released exclusively on iTunes.

The revolution will have sub-genres.  The revolution will suffer an anti-revolution backlash.  The revolution will appear on an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger.  The revolution will generate buzzwords that will be used by your parents trying to sound hip.  The revolution will be in a Cadillac commercial.  The revolution will be adopted by pre-pubescent girls trying to act ,Äúgrown up,Äù.

The revolution will be derided by Bill Mahr, Rush Limbaugh, & Al Franken.  The revolution will be mocked by Jon Stewart, Steve Colbert, and Tina Fey.  The revolution will appear on Best Week Ever.  The revolution will become an automatic punchline.  The revolution will be relegated to a question in the next edition of Trivial Pursuit.

The revolution will be televised.  After all, there's market share to consider.

Jack felt his knees pop as he knelt by the window. He figured he could jimmy the lock from the outside and they could make their way to the inner sections through the net of underground connections connecting the buildings together.  As he eased the wire picks into the mechanism, he wondered if it were this easy to pick into someone's brain.

It could be easy.  All you needed was to find a weak or fragile frame, and then just apply the right pressure in just the right place.  Now that doesn't mean you can just shove it in; that's a direct way to a brain collapse; plus, if there's any kind of security, they'll come running in quick, and then you're fucked.  No, what you wanted was a subtle slip, a knife's edge into the space.  Something simple.  Something they'll agree with.  That's how you do it.  Then, once you get inside, you can start to move around.  Find other agreeable things.  But the magic was, you didn't even have to find things they agreed with.  Once you were inside, no one ever noticed the damage you could do.

It was like people had this heavy security wall that only looked out.  They were incredibly skeptical about what was on the outside; that was part of the inertia; it just kept on going, blasting down the outside ideas.  Criticizing and shooting them down for any number of reasons, real or imagined.  But if something got in, then it was like they had a backstage pass at the Republican National Convention: Never questioned, never accused, never doubted.  You were home free.  So, first thing, get in.  From there, you can start spreading, like some horrifically welcomed cancer.  And oh, the things you can do.

See, most people aren't aware of how fragile their own ideas really are.  They flit about inside the compound, only bumping into their own kind, agreeing with themselves constantly, and when this goes on long enough, they think they're strong, and assured, and righteous.  But what happens when someone gets inside without their noticing?  Yeah.  Those pretty butterflies of ideas can get clipped so easily. Just... turn them a little.  One dark idea can be like a reverse lamp, all the pretty flitting things don't get drawn to it, they turn away, they turn themselves, they turn into, they begin to become like that dark idea.  They reflect.  Once the dark idea is in there, they start to push a little.  And all the flitting ideas agree with each other, so somehow, they have to agree with the dark idea, no? 

And here's where the dark rationalization comes in.  The immense power of those damn frontal lobes can turn piss into wine.  Anything can become anything else, if you just give it a little time and a push.  That little idea, that tiny, fragile thing, it so wants to be included in the greater picture, it wants to be part of the whole. But it sees that strong, dark thought and idea, and that idea is nudging.  Why not? Why not become part of a larger idea?  There's some sense in what they're saying, after all, no reason you shouldn't go along with it. 

And all the while, the perimeter guards stand silent.  After all, their job is to fight off outside concepts.  All the difficult "mental" stuff happens on the inside, their job is just to keep stuff out.  There's not upper level thinking going on here.  They can't tell the difference between an idea that they started with and one that was snuck in.  So when all the beautiful Moon Moth thoughts become flopping vultures, they start giving orders.  To the guards.  Of course, the guards don't question anything coming from the inside, they only question what's on the outside, yeah?  So, slowly but surely, the guards start guarding against what used to be on the inside, and they keep safe what they used to repel.  And that's all there is to it.  The outside comes in.

But that doesn't account for the subversion through immersion that happens so often.  You take a person who thinks one thing, and then you put them in an environment where every other person they talk to thinks the opposite.  All day long, they're inundated with the same message; but not confrontational.  A confrontation sets those guards up, and protects the flitting thoughts.  No, the conversion by immersion happens when it's not even discussed.  The constant opinion without rebuttal.  It just lives in the environment.  The guards, ordered to keep watch over differing opinions, eventually just accept it as part of the background noise.  It becomes accepted as normal, and then it gets inside.  And without even knowing it, you've become something other than you ever thought you could be.

So, with all of this, all of this mechanical, insidious, unthinking, unfeeling process, where so called "free thinking" people are forced to obey decades old rules they didn't even know they were signing up for, and don't even know how to change it, how the hell do you compete with something like that?  By turning the guards around, and by pointing them inside your own head.

Instead of questioning every outside thought that you encountered, you need to question every thought you've ever had.  Become a butterfly collector.  Nail those fuckers to a board and study them.  Where did your thoughts come from?  What did you experience that caused you to think like that?  And lastly, do you really agree with it, or after breaking it down, does it just not add up?  When you start thinking like this, that what you are is a combination of your environment and the feedback loop you have with your environment.

This is my favorite peice I've posted here. It didn't make it into intermittens but I'd like it to go somewhere, and I think this might actually be a better place for it. It needs a home! Let me know what you think

Quote from: dimo

The Jar Was Empty
By Dimo, TTLC

They set you up, you know. The Big Man in Charge, he couldn't cut it, so he made you a scapegoat. Sure, it was presented as a gift, but who gives gifts like this without an ulterior motive?

"Don't press the shiny, alluring red button, Lil' miss." Yeah, we all know how that always ends up. Yes, they set you up, threw you right under the bus. Someone needed to take the fall, and you better believe it wasn't going to be the Big Man in Charge. He needed to stick around. Who else was qualified for the continuous distribution of Hellfire and Damnation? I mean really qualified.

So you pressed the big red button. You opened the jar. Now, they say you released these terrible things to plague humanity. They took advantage of your natural inquisitiveness, made not only a scape goat of Woman, but of all of us that share that same natural curiosity. "What makes this work?" "Why does this happen?" Don't ask now. The Big Man in Charge won't answer. Not only does he not want you to know, but he's not all that sure himself.

There's good news to be had here, however. I'll let you in on a little secret.

The jar was empty.

Those terrible, terrible plagues that you, supposedly, let loose on mankind were already there. They were never in the jar in the first place. They just wanted you to believe that, so you would take responsibility for what they have done.

No, the jar was empty. (except for maybe a couple of those springy snake things that hide in a can of peanuts on occasion). Completely empty. Not only were all those baddies not in there, but hope itself was absent as well. Don't worry, though. Hope was never what The Big Man in Charge chalked it  up to be. Hope is what keeps people from actually doing something about it. "I hope, someday, to achieve" can now change to "I will achieve." "We must keep hope alive for a better future" changes to "We can create a better future." Hope is a nice, warm pillow that can only help you while you're lying down and defensless. But it's OK now, because now we know that the jar was empty.

I also think this could be used if it got tightened up a little.

Quote from: dimoWhen I was young, chronologically speaking, I used to consider myself a catholic. My parents were catholics, as was most of the rest of my family (not to mention that those of my family that were not catholics were talked about unfavoably while they weren't around) and, so far as I knew, so was the rest of the world. It seemed to make sense. At the time. However, fact and history painted a much different picture, so, as far as I could deduce, there was only one logical step to take. And, while I still had things similar to faith and spirituality within me, I left the church.

For a time, I considered myself a punker, and by extention, a musician, a real rebel's rebel. Over time, I started more than a few bands, and proceeded to turn my school into a zoo of howling lunatics. While punk asked a lot of questions, it offered little in the way of answers. Punk, itself, is paradoxical, it exists through non-existence, and furthermore, was treated as a pop-culture fashion, and was stripped of most, if not all, validity. So, while I may retain a rebellious streak and play in a punk-style band, I left the scene.

For another moment in time, I considered myself smart. Could you blame me with so many cabbages walking about disguised as people? It's an easy thing to do when you deny that there are some truly intelligent people on this planet, which I did. But, considering myself smart, I had no other options but to recognize and accept my own sheer average-ness. Now, still concerned with seeking knowledge, I left that false comfort behind.

At other times, I had considered myself either "single" or "taken," choosing to be either in a relationship or not. Only to come to realize that I am not alone, and I do not belong to anyone. So, while I cherish and enjoy the relationships I have with friends, I could no longer be bothered by the "status" of said relationships.

Just recently, I considered myself a Discordian. A "really real" Discordian. The humor, the subversivity, the pseudo-religious attributes harmonized with many things from my past. It got me off of my ass and taught me how to be active in what I beleive. It taught me that new ideas and technology were not things to be shunned. But, just like my first delusion, if it's taken too seriously, it starts to become things that it was never intended to be. So, while I still love a good posterGASM, (un)friendly debate and the introduction of new ideas, I cannot truly say that that is what I am, the whole of my being.

So, here I am, emptying my head. And it could be said that I'm not really, fully, anything anymore.

And I like it.

I shall now commence polluting this project with my awful scribblings:

QuoteThe Iconoclast's Manifesto

   We reserve the right to hold heretical viewpoints that you find abominable. We hold true that anyone who feels justified in attacking an individual because they have an unpopular opinion can fuck off and die.

   We identify ourselves by our willingness to challenge the accepted dogma, theory, doctrine, or paradigm regardless of the consequences to our social status. We acknowledge that the positions we take may result in our being subjected to more intolerance than conventional wisdom would suggest is wise, but we find ourselves refuting conventional wisdom remarkably often.

   While we generally try to take positions that are based on reasoned arguments, empirical evidence, historical precedents, or any combination thereof, we reserve the right to play devil's advocate just to piss you off and destroy any notion you might have that your ideas are universally applicable.

   We acknowledge that the original use of the term iconoclast specifically refers to the destruction of religious icons, but we may choose to attack cherished beliefs relating to anything, including but not limited to politics, art, religion, philosophy, and identity.

   We reserve the right to change or violate the terms of this manifesto as the individual iconoclast deems fit.

   We reserve rights, period.

Quote from: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=17054.msg556425#msg556425
BIP in unrhymed verse

Do you know where you are?
These four walls, this ceiling, this floor?
This is your life. This is your cell.
Welcome to your Black Iron Prison.

Don't panic, you're not here to be punished.
You were born here.
This is your cell. This is your life. This is all you know.

Beneath you, you can see the floor made by your parents and teachers.
To your left and right, society, media, and your peers make two walls.
Above you, there is a ceiling just barely too high to touch: these are your dreams.
Behind you, the darkest shadows are cast on the third wall, the wall made by your fears.
The light shines through the bars in front of you, through the fourth wall.
But this wall is not a wall. The bars are different, somehow.

These six sides hold you in, safe within a tiny cell of truth.
Take hold of the bars; feel the cold, Black Iron.
What are these bars? Why are they different from the other five sides?

You made these bars.
The light shines through them, but still they hold you in as surely as a solid wall.
They are your beliefs, your thoughts, your identity.
Every time you tell yourself, "I am this, I am that, I am not these other things," you create
another bar.
The stronger your beliefs, the stronger the bars become.

You can break some of those bars, if you choose.
If you are not afraid.
Or you can build more bars, making them thicker and closer together.
It doesn't matter which beliefs make the bars; they all block the light.

Quote from: Cainad on October 31, 2009, 12:59:45 AM
Missing: One Child Prophet and a Wise Tiger

You know who I miss the most? Calvin. I grew up with Calvin; he was always six years old but he was always older than me. He was a child sage, and I didn't always understand him but we had lots of fun together, Calvin, Hobbes, and I. He knew from the very beginning that school was there to beat his mind into shape, and he rebelled not only by outright refusal to be contained, but by shaping parts of his mind before those parts could be squeezed into public school molds. He knew, like all children know, what it means to have a good time, but he knew it consciously at such a young age. What's more, he laughed in the face of anyone who tried to tell him differently, right before dropping a water balloon on their head. Calvin knew the TV was there to satisfy the sweet tooth of the mind, and he let it work its glittering magic on him every once in a while, but it never really got to him. Partly, this was because he knew what exactly it was doing, and partly because of Hobbes.

I miss Hobbes too. Hobbes knew what fun was just as well as Calvin did; sometimes he knew it better. He was a voice of reason, but never too much reason. Just enough to keep Calvin from riding that wagon over too high of a cliff, just enough to make sure that chucking water balloons and snowballs was always more fun than the TV. Hobbes was there to put a jolt of Life back into Calvin's existence at the end of the daily public school slog.

But Calvin's gone now. I don't know where he went or what he does now, but I think he may have grown up. He probably didn't mean for it to happen; it probably snuck up on him when he wasn't looking. Once he grew up, he stopped really being Calvin, you know? And the worst part is, growing up was the only thing Hobbes couldn't save him from. Without the real Calvin, Hobbes is just a stuffed tiger, and without the real Hobbes, Calvin can't be the real Calvin we all knew. It took both of them to survive in this world, and if we had them here today they'd know how to deal with the ever-growing weirdness and sickness of our society and they'd show us all how it's done.

But one cannot exist without the other, and now they're both gone. Maybe if we could find them they'd tell us how to find Curly.

I sure do miss them.

Quote from: Cainad on November 08, 2009, 08:09:03 PM
The Worms and Their Little Blue Pills

There are worms in my brain. I don't know when exactly they got in there, but they've been there for quite some time now. My thoughts flow through the tunnels the worms have burrowed through my gray matter, and they themselves sometimes carry my thoughts around. But these worms are not very efficient for my purposes, partly because they squirm around randomly and partly because they have no goal in mind towards which to work efficiently.

Of course they have nothing in mind, they're worms, damn it! They are what's in my mind; pay attention to the metaphor!

Anyway, the workings of the worms are not conducive to getting things done. Trying to direct them so that my thoughts flow smoothly and directly towards a certain goal is like, well, it's like trying to herd a bunch of damn worms. They don't pay attention to anything but wriggling and burrowing. But that's what the pills are for, these little blue pills.

The pills do something I've never been able to do: they force the worms to line up in neat little rows and march in time to the tune of whatever goals I set. How worms can be made to march without feet I don't know, but they're marching all right. In spit-shined jackboots, no less. With the pills controlling the worms, I become a machine. A powerful, efficient machine that runs smoothly as a dream on lubricated bearings. The pounding march of the worms makes sure the trains of my thought all run on time, and the jackboots stamp out errant or unwanted thoughts with hardly a sound. For a few hours, everything runs better than ever before, better than it should. For a few hours, I am effective. Then the pills wear off.

When the pills start to wear off, I can't keep the worms in line anymore. But the damning thing is that they keep on marching around in jackboots. With no more rhyme or reason guiding them they stomp all around my brain, trampling everything and my trains of thought go flying off the tracks. I become the machine with half of its bearings taken out, rattling and screeching, performing its tasks with grinding, noisy hesitancy. Everything inside and outside my head becomes a disordered mess and I know that at any moment I might truly begin to laugh and laugh and laugh until I realize I'm screaming.

Finally, the jackbooted feet the worms never had in the first place wear off and they go back to wriggling and burrowing. I am no longer the machine, and I can rest until I need to be effective again.

ABOUT THE CRUMBS

This is about insignificant crumbs of nothing.

You are an insignificant crumb of nothing. Your size, when compared with the sheer vastness of our known universe, is roughly that of an atom floating next to the island of Manhattan. We -you, me, everyone you've ever met- are all insignificant crumbs of nothing. If you could get a bird's eye view of our entire universe, the vast collection of billions of interstellar shopping malls, you wouldn't even be able to see our galaxy, the Milky Way. Neither would you see any of our neighboring galaxies, or even the large cluster of galaxies we reside inside; no, we are truly cosmically insignificant.

But, we are conscious. At least, we think so. Possibly, just possibly, the only conscious beings in the entire universe as unlikely as that seems. And each of us; you, me, your mother, that dog down the street, are all composed of atoms created in the Big Bang. We are all the same age, and we are all made up from what was once smaller than the head of a pin. You, your potted fern, and a stapler are all essentially the same.

Think about that.

YoYo, for an insignificant crumb of nothing, certainly took being evicted from his crumb of an apartment quite seriously. He was pissed off as he ran with his tacky turtle-shell suitcase to catch the crumb known locally as the Queen Streetcar.

As he ran to the streetcar, a large red star in a relatively nearby galaxy winked out for the final time, and collapsed upon itself, sucking everything -even rays of light- within millions and millions of miles into the hole it left behind. This star kicking the proverbial bucket would not be visible to people on Earth for six million years.

YoYo had no idea the star even existed.

Three large galaxies on the opposite side of the universe were swallowed up by a gargantuan super-galaxy which was spinning out of control, destroying stars and planets like a child destroying ants.  YoYo was only aware of one other galaxy, our nearest neighbor, Andromeda, which will eventually collide with our galaxy, forming a super galaxy of our own. Perhaps, we too will careen out of control gobbling up star cities for the rest of time. Think of it as something to look forward to.

YoYo knew he had to find a place to stay, and at the same time was vaguely aware the universe was expanding, but had no idea that the more it expanded the faster it traveled.  He had no idea that our 'Big Bang' was, in fact, the fifth big bang.  The universe had been expanding and collapsing on itself for a googol's worth of years.  Or maybe a googol's googol. Or a googolplex. At any rate, it's been a while.  YoYo had no idea this was the fifth try at a universe anymore than he was aware that he'd existed since the very first big bang.  And, so have you.

Happy Birthday.

Picking Out My Fucking Eyes

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.

do you accept pictures?
(http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/112/7/4/foraudiobookofthedead_by_LlamaPantsFred.jpg)

edit: fixt somethin

Regarding Employment and My Student Debt

Quote from: Rumckle on October 27, 2009, 01:00:29 AM
You need to get a good job. You need a good job so you can afford that new TV. The one with the 150" screen, and the surround sound that will make your ears bleed. You need that TV so you can forget how shit your job is. And your job is shit, but you can't quit it, otherwise they might repossess your TV. Then what will distract you from how shit your job is?

I wish I was immune to this cycle but, alas, I am not. Last time I checked I was about ten grand in debt. I've never owned a credit card, never got a mortgage, never bought a car, but I'm still in debt.

Why? Well, I'd like to think it was because I am learning all of this neat stuff, and I am, but that's not the reason. If I just wanted to learn something I could do it for free. No, the reason I am in debt is to get a little piece of paper. A special piece of paper which says that I get to earn a slightly better wage. So I can get a slightly bigger TV, and go somewhere slightly further away on my annual two week vacation.

But once you have that nice piece of paper, and a good job, it''s not over, there are still things to learn. For example, you need to learn to like the taste of arse, because you are going to be kissing a lot of it. You need to kiss arse because if you kiss arse you will get a promotion. And if you get a promotion you can buy an even bigger TV. You'll need that bigger TV to relieve the stress of having to get a promotion.

But that's not all you get, promotions bring other benefits too. If you get a promotion you may get to move up a floor, and you definitely want to move up a floor. Not because the views are nicer (though that is what they will tell you) but because a higher floor means you are further from the ground. It means you have further to fall when you are tired of your job and want to retire.

SPLAT!

Fred, yes we accept pictures.

Elmo was scared.  Always was.
Jim's idea, bringing him in, was to have an infantile figure, someone the kids in the audience could project or relate too.  Big Bird didn't quite fill the niche, anyone who ever saw him on a rampage would agree, he'd never REALLY empathize with kids, and aside from that he was damned BIG.  Towered over the adults.  (more about that later)  Telly and Harry Monster, same sort of issue, and good luck getting kids to empathize with a Snuffleupagus (human / monster rights connotations aside.)

So Elmo was always small, meek, and polite.  Had some sort of bone condition that kept him laid up for year, so he knew how to get in with people or groups and have fun when the opportunity arose.  Sort of like an army brat.  When he was good to play or run, he'd play and run.  Figured out quick that bitchign about his leg hurting wasn't going to keep things happening.  It made him nervous though, he caught a green stick fracture when he careened into Harry once, and got a sense of just how vulnerable he really was.  Harry felt terrible, but really he was just standing there.  Isn't his fault he's better built than most retaining walls.  

Jim talked it over with Elmo, and got him in better spirits about the whole thing, but it wasn't something the little red guy could forget.  He had plans for Elmo too, growing and developing, building his character up to reflect how he got stronger himself.  Well, when we lost Jim, that all went down the shitter.  Again, the producers trying to keep it all up didn't see an overall plan for Elmo, they just wanted the Elmo effect as long as the Elmo effect would sell.  (It went that way with a lot of things, but they never saw the long view, the changing, developing themes, or variety of abstracts like Jim worked.)  This meant Elmo had to stay like he was.  
Small, weak, nervous.  

They got him this "Dietician" to start.  Some overly energetic new age type, lots of BS about certain eating practices or "Energy Therapy".  Elmo, after all these years should be Harry's size, but that's kind of hard when your diet leaves out calcium or proteins.  The little dude said he was nervous too, so they got him a therapist.  "Therapist", in their vocab, meant a "Nice" person from the same group they hired to work over Cookie Monster.  This pseudo legal shrink never laid a hand (or taser) on Elmo though, and never had too.  He just made sure Elmo stayed scared.  Started with the incident, and played up his vulnerability from there.  Told him he had to stay "Safe".  Then he gave him a bunch of Dickens books with the last chapters cut out, and prison movies.  Then there was the diet, only fish oil every other day, I don't think I need to describe the smell.

Yeah, Elmo was a wreck after that.  He could still get up and act, but after that he'd scuttle off, scared that someone might rape him.  The producers tried to ask Harry to menace him a bit, being the natural one to play off the seat of Elmo's fear.  Terry wouldn't have it though.  He respected Elmo, even though he was never as tough or active, he liked the little red guy's spirit.  No coincidence, this was about when Harry started getting less airtime...

Elmo though, the fans ate up.  It kept going for years.  He was an icon, a star, his own segments, shows, specials....and nothing but a life of craven neurosis out of it all.  Even the "Tickle me Elmo", which made him a mint and a half in royaties, terrifed him.  The idea of being mercilessly tickled just about made him comatose.  He was like a goddamn child emperor, still is maybe, for as long as it lasts him.  I hope it doesn't becasue it's the worst thing that ever happened to him.

Edit: grammar, courtesy of P3nt.
Edit2: Harry Monster's name.

Wow.

Jesus fuck, that was awesome.

Thanks.  Took me awhile to get all the stuff together.

I ARE IN AWE! :eek:

Quote from: Cramulus on April 16, 2010, 04:53:13 AM
From the Om Nom Nomicon (http://www.principiadiscordia.com/cramulus/index.php?title=Omnomnomicon#I._The_Spagan_Text)

I. The Spagan Text
   Hearken, and Remember!

   In the Name of ST. GULIK, Remember!
   In the Name of CASH MONEY, Remember!
   In the Name of RICHARD NIXON, Remember!
   When on High the Heavens had not been named,
   The Earth had not been named,
   And Naught existed but the Seas of FAIL,
   The Original Gangsta,
   And FAT BLACK WOMAN, the Original Gangsta
   Who bore them all,
   

I just saw this and it cheered up a blah afternoon.  :mittens:
Love the riffing off of the Simon Necronomicon.

Quote from: Richter on May 04, 2010, 09:26:43 PM

Quote from: Cramulus on April 16, 2010, 04:53:13 AM
From the Om Nom Nomicon (http://www.principiadiscordia.com/cramulus/index.php?title=Omnomnomicon#I._The_Spagan_Text)

I. The Spagan Text
   Hearken, and Remember!

   In the Name of ST. GULIK, Remember!
   In the Name of CASH MONEY, Remember!
   In the Name of RICHARD NIXON, Remember!
   When on High the Heavens had not been named,
   The Earth had not been named,
   And Naught existed but the Seas of FAIL,
   The Original Gangsta,
   And FAT BLACK WOMAN, the Original Gangsta
   Who bore them all,
   

I just saw this and it cheered up a blah afternoon.  :mittens:
Love the riffing off of the Simon Necronomicon.

How did I miss this the first time around?  :lulz:

(http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a356/theonlyang/lovecraft1.png)

He's pretty much the godfather of macabre sci-fi. Cult of Cthulhu and all that jazz...Yeah well you see, his hometown is right here in the Renaissance City, Providence.

He saw things here that inspired him, if not terrified him, which is probably also why Edgar Allan Poe also spent a considerable amount of time on the hill as well. The city itself is possessed by a darkness and an insanity that only outsiders to it can truly see. Our good friend Howard Phillips Lovecraft was one of these outsiders.

We have an old asylum here in Providence called Butler Hospital, and there's a saying among the locals, "You know you live in Rhode Island when you or someone you know has been to Butler". Even Lovecraft's parents both spent time there. It's a creepy old place too, and word has it they still do shock therapy and labotomies...much like it did 150 years ago when it was full to the brim with the local psychos.

There's a lot of them here, Jim, psychos that is. They walk or stumble down the broken cobblestones Downcity and talk to themselves, muttering in archaic tongues that may or may not belong to that of the Elder Gods. For anyone who lives in one of the large Northeastern cities, this isn't terribly anything new, but at the same time, it's...different. They aren't the same. The looks on their faces, the glazing of their eyes, the stench of their hair gel and Dominican cigars as they wander the streets.

What did Lovecraft know? What did he see that others of his time in dingy Edwardian Providence didn't?

(http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a356/theonlyang/lovecraft1-1.jpg)

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

I see it. The ignorance of which he speaks...everyday.  Am I doomed to also be eaten alive by the insanity that grasps Providence? The impoverished and debt-ridden capital of the smallest state in America? Or will I triumph as he did, only to live the last year of his life in extreme pain, and alone? In my dingy Edwardian Providence home...

"I am Providence."

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Insert pics, please. 

Of all the Muppets that got a load of shit out of Sesame Street, I always felt the worst about the Yippers.  You know, the "Aliens"?  We were never certain ourselves.  Jim would take these trips now and then, just bum around the world for a month or two between seasons.  He'd meet different Muppet or Monster populations, talk with then, learn about them, and maybe have a few back.  That's how there got to be so many Sesame Street variants; he did his PR, and set it all up.  Not like franchises, more like making the entertainment and message local and native. 

So anyways, one year he comes back and he's got these guys with him.  Never said where they were from.  Of course theories abounded.  Actual aliens was the most popular, although the possibility of a tribe of forgotten and de – socialized mutant Muppets from outside Chernobyl was compelling.  Centralia in PA or some deep jungle got credit too.  Jim just never said, and would sort of smile and dodge any questions.  He loved that sort of game.  Like any good teacher, he wanted to see us figure it out ourselves.

The Yippers  (Mike, who ran the boom mic dubbed them), were odd, but really great once you got used to them.  They were true "Antropologists from Mars".  Everything was new and different to them.  They were innocent, well meaning, boundlessly curious, but never quite naïve.  They loved Jim too, and would follow him around whenever he was on site.  Otherwise they'd just mill about.  We never saw them sleep, and never got a good idea for how many there were, even.  Jim would take a stroll about an hour before any scene they were going to do, and would gather two or three, bring them to the set, show them an object, and let them do their thing.  They'd go over it, talk about it back and forth, have some fun and go on.  Never did any harms to it, just studied, inquisitive as children, but harmless as Buddhist monks. 

They did hit some bumps though.  Jim (no one else could really get through to them), had to designate a few areas off limits.  Like the bathrooms.  They floated in on a gaffer whacking off once.  It was  "Yip yip yip yipy FAPFAPFAP, WWWAAAAAAHHH! Uh-huh, uh-huh" for a week.  They got on some people's nerves.  Otherwise, most of us loved them.  Not like you love a pet cat or a child, since neither have a cold alien intellect (possibly far surpassing your own) behind their behavior.  If you had the time for them, and would take a minute or two to interact, play or share some food, it was like you got to share their joy and interest in discovering anything, and the fascination of everything being new.  It really made you see things for what they were.  They had great fun doing this, you could tell.  They'd be a bit more animated and lean against you a bit like a cat before floating on. 

After Jim's death, the new producers had a world of trouble with them.  Jim had no contracts for a lot of the Muppets.  He'd just fudged them all in on the books, but always did right by them.  Like Cookie, the Yippers all had trusts set up, continually being reinvested and contributed to.  The producers expected them to sign proper papers, fill out schedules, follow scripts, and none of that worked for them.  Honoring a paper or a clock was outside their way of doing things.  The producers, predictably enough, had lawyers throw papers at them (Literally, a sad fact of Muppet / Monster inequality is that anyone without hands CAN be served papers by throwing.), and they stopped the trust fund contributions.  They tried to herd them off the lot, but that was fruitless.  Trying to touch one of the Yippers against their will is like trying to grab a towel with a black belt in Aikido. 

Jim's lawyer, who was executing his will, came down to the studio once he got official documentation of the trust fund cutoff.  I stopped and talked with him quickly, but he had a package.  Wouldn't say much, except to say he couldn't say much, it was one of Jim's instructions, but I could come along and watch.  He walked around a bit, and in the same way Jim did, found a few of the Yippers.  He just mentioned Jim's name and motioned them on.  Once he had three of them, he put down the package for them and took out a book.  It was a compilation about Gandhi and his methods on nonviolent resistance.  There was a quick note in the front, to the Yippers from Jim too.  They all read it, gave a sort of exaggerated mournful "AAAwwwwwwww...", and floated off, the book levitating cleanly between them.  The lawyer and I went for coffee, and he seemed rather satisfied with how things went.

The next few days on the lot were chaos.  The Yippers, for the first time, had taken up action against something.  They floated in front of cameras, trucks, and any moving equipment.  They blocked doorways, occupied sinks, and unplugged power cables.  They never did anything harm, or hurt anyone (no safety equipment was EVER compromised, as much as they could have.).  Overnight they had become a cross between the perfect pranksters, and peace guerillas (as weird as that sounds).  A letter had been sent to the producers too, and they got so hot under the collar about it everyone knew.  Jim was holding them hostage from beyond the grave they said, and got their own lawyers on it.  There was no evidence though, (the book and Jim's note was gone, never to resurface).  Jim's lawyer never said anything direct, and refused to reveal any details from the will, but suggested strongly that Jim's wishes about the Yippers be honored.  The producers had nothing to say to it. 

"Yip yip yip yip Gaaaaaddhi  Gaaaaaadhi.  Uh huh- uh –huh.  NONviolent Uh huh."

Two night later they closed the lot.  Just being able to close the lot was a small miracle, things go on their all day, and lots of the Muppets nearly live there.  You can never really empty it, but they came close.  It was sealed off at 5PM, under the excuse of sewer work.  Harry Monster and I were going home after stopping at a bar when we cut past the studio lot to save time.  It was really late, but we were both half curious about things.  I was about to turn out of a side road onto the road in front when Harry Just about screamed "STOP" at me and turned off my headlights in a flash of movement.  I was about to ask him what his big problem was, and just saw him pointing.

A black van, no plates, pulled up to one side of the lot, and about 10 people, all wearing black piled out.  A few entered the building, and a few started doing a low jog down the outside perimeter.  They'd pause, every so often, and poke around.  Once, a figure, like a dangling towel approached them.  We just saw a dull pop of light, and could almost hear the "Thwip Thwip" of a silenced pistol in our heads.  It was a text book "cleaning" service, and another unmarked black van collected them all at the opposite side of the lot.

The Yippers just weren't there the next day.  I tried asking around quietly, but only got stony silence and sad looks.  Veggie monster was having a really bad day, he could hardly speak and was only howling sobs when he could.  Pretty apparent that asking was not a long term survival move. 

Harry and I let Jim's lawyer know.  He just got shook his head and poured us all scotch.  What the hell were we going to do?  Not much to be sure.  Harry had one upside to it though.  Might have been the beers he said, but he did see something floating off towards the sky that night.  Maybe just a trash bag, but flying trash don't move against the prevailing wind, or carry a book with it.   

Goddamn.  I was waiting for this one since Friday, when we were talking about it.  Totally worth it.

Richter, god damn.  Hilarious, disturbing, and oddly personal alternating throughout.  Kudos.

As an aside, I saw Kermit at the Smithsonian this weekend.  Lifeless in a glass booth.  Kids 12 years old or so walked up to him and said "cool, look, it's that lizard guy" as they sauntered up to him.  I couldn't help but think they might even be confusing him with that smarmy Geico fuckwad.  I stared forward until my eyes stung and onlookers thought me particularly moved by Fonzie's jacket, which I was, but not to that extent.

Fuck yeah.  That's definitely going in.

 :)

Quote from: LMNO on June 15, 2010, 03:07:00 PM
Goddamn.  I was waiting for this one since Friday, when we were talking about it.  Totally worth it.

Thanks.  Bouncing the ideas around really helped get it out of my head.  You were right about the "cleaners" too.

Snuffleupagus  (He insisted on being called "Snuffy"), was one of the few who may have got a positive change out of Sesame street going downhill.  At the start, he was another child actor with too much stardom, just like Big Bird.  He and Bird started together.  They got into trouble together, and did all the bad shit together.  Bird would go off about his parts being so immature, Snuffy would counter bitch about being imaginary, they'd blow lines of Ajax in the trailer and smash up the makeup room.  They were physically huge, which didn't help.  Only Harry Monster (who considered tearing cars in half a parlor trick) could get them under control, but even he had trouble with the shear bulk.  "Never wrestle an elephant." He said on day, after pulling a back muscle trying to grapple Snuffy out of a tree unharmed.  Jim tried to check them, and would have ditched them entirely, but they were important roles.  So he had to try to work the massive brats along.  He managed, though, keeping their drugging, huffing, and candy intake minimal, and putting them in their place when needed.  His tirade at Bird ("What else do you have outside of show biz?") was legendary for cowing that yellow fuck.  When Jim passed, the restriction he did get in place came right off.

The producers, with their distinct and VERY Hollywood lack of care for their people, let whatever they wanted fly.  Drugs, candy, cleaning product, monster prostitutes, it would all flow in abundance, just be ready to do your scene.  Bird went from bad to worse in a hurry.  Imagine you have a textbook alcoholic, give him a swimming pool of gin, and challenge him to try the deep end.  Bird jumped for it.  Came on set one day with his beek covered in rubber bands trying to emulate Johnny Depp.  (Only he used industrial bands that he couldn't get off.  He panicked, and ran around like a chicken with it's head cut off until Mike (who ran the boom mic), got sick of the show and poleaxed him long enough for Maria to cut off the bands.  (No one ever knew how quick she was with a knife before, or that she always had one.) 

Snuffy was bad too, at first, but wizened up after "the" accident, as it came to be called.  He wrapped his Ferrari around an art fixture outside corporate on the way to see a club Bert had recommended.  Don't ask how he even got into the Ferrari.  It was custom, but even then it still didn't quite make sense.  You had to see it. 

Anyways, when it happened, he was out of his head.  He'd snorted pixie sticks and mixed PCP with aerosol starter fluid before heading out.  He sat, in the tangled wreck for two hours; his trip going really bad with the leering face of a modern art gazing down on him, while firemen with the Jaws of Life just about went mad figuring the whole scene out.  That was dose of reality, part 1.

The day he was out of the hospital Bird was all hyped up, ready to throw a rager for his return.  Then the tech called him for sound check.  "Fuck you, my buddy's BACK!" were the last words out of Bird's beak.   

...as it fell right off of his face.

The years of snorting bleach cleaner and god knows what else had completely undermined his rounded yellow protrusion.  Bird was really shaken by that, and then just about killed himself during recovery.  You knew he was diabetic, right?  The candy the producers kept pumping to him was bound to catch up.  It was sick, his right leg, all red and purple banded to begin with, blew up like a balloon. 

That, reality part 2, turned Snuffy around.   He dropped the garbage and started living clean.  Saw doctors and made sure he was OK.  Thankfully, he had the constitution of, well, a mammoth, so he came back to health easily.  He did a few PSA's too.  Sincere ones, compared to some of the "I'll do this to avoid a fine or jail" tripe you see from celebrities.  He donated to the Monster Equality Movement, Muppet Defense League, and a few other places.  Eventually became one of their spokes-monsters, and job offers as one of their directors if he ever quit Sesame Street.  He was a great public speaker too.  Calm and unflappable, like a laconic monk.  He'd still get riled up now and then, like when he trunk slapped a PETA protestor who said he was an exploited animal once.  That made front page news.  President Obama got caught twittering "bitch didn't see that coming", and the media had a hilarious field day. 

He never noticed so much the series or the others going downhill.  It was just a stop on is rounds, do his scenes and take off to his next appointment.  He and Bird had words awhile after Bird got his beak reconstructed.  Snuffy just couldn't accept that he was killing himself and tried to clue him in.  Bird called him a pussy and stormed off.  They didn't talk off-set after that.  His oldest friend on the show gone, he only drifted farther.

Who could blame him?  He had work, a cause and a social scene dealing with issues bigger than Sesame Street.   

He did clue in to some of the bad stuff, but was never able to connect his own work and status with a fix for the cast.  Sort of like how psychologists can never figure out their own family, they're just too close sometimes.  "I can get help, and introduce you to people who can help."  He'd tell the folks he did see having problems, "but you have to want this to change."  The others weren't dumb either.   Some of the actors or producers dirty secrets coming to light might end the show.  For some of the Muppets or Monsters, it was a job beyond belief, too good to give up or threaten. 

Maybe Snuffy just got numb to it after awhile, or maybe he'd traded the drug highs for VIP activist highs.  Last I heard he was prepping a presentation for the UN on Monster Rights, doing a tour of Southeast Asia factories to document abuses, and meeting Vladmir Putin backstage with Bono at a U2 concert.

I...

Wow.  Just wow.

Fuck yes, FUCK YES, FUCK YES.

Lo-res version.

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Hi-res.

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Words:


The Destruction of Communication.


Today I found out that a really good friend of mine, if not one of my best friends from high school, has died. Not just died, but killed himself for reasons unknown. This happened on June 22nd. Today's date: July 8th.

No one called me. No one shot me an email or a text message. No. I found out, 2 weeks later, via Facebook, while I noticed another one of my friends wishing him a post-mortem happy birthday.

It's finally happened, Jim. Humans have lost their drive to communicate normally thanks to good ol' Web 2.0. Somehow, it was "assumed" that I knew because of Facebook, a website I will openly admit to checking frequently, but not religiously. I don't have the time nor the energy to keep up with it, and I don't have an occupation that allows me to sit on my ass, gaining my well-fed American™ secretary spread and surf the web for hours on end, no, I chose to work in a profession that allows me to have social interaction with other primates of my species, which seems to be turning into a forgotten art.

Why did we, as a [debatable] intelligent race, allow ourselves to become hidden behind twenty inches of liquid crystal and a keyboard, and assume that this is okay?

It's NOT okay, Jim. It's not. It's costing me friendships; it's costing me the value of a face-to-face or at least voice-to-voice conversation and physical confrontations. It's costing me beautiful paper wedding invitations, newspapers and magazines. 

The future may be here, Jim, but it's not what I want.

Kaousuu/Angela Costello © 2010. Dedicated to the memory of Justin Vaughan, and the good times we had in honors and AP english in high school

Holy shit.

Damn.

It's the least I could do for him. I dumped a whole jar of glitter on his head in 11th grade.  :kingmeh:

QuoteA CALL

This is for all of you out there who have shit going on, in your life, and can't deal. Can't vent. Can't defend yourself from.

There are times when you must be seen, heard, felt. And even the most apathetic or the most cynical of us do it. There are times when you must stick your head over the trench wall and see others toiling away, and take comfort from the fact that you are not alone.

So I am here. I am listening.

Some of us take up the pen, the sword, the megaphone, and turn negativity into a positive. Some of us create temporary monuments out of the shrapnel that rains on us.This is why: if we do not shit our hate, we will die.

Your tasks are your own, what you do, you must do alone, but what is done, will be seen.

The best will be remembered and emulated and refined, it is true, but the best will fade as fast as the worst.

There is nothing permanant. In the space of a life time, we build many monuments, and we tear many down.

There is respite, though. There is a moment of hiding in a shell crater as you run across no-mans-land, sharing a knowing glance with another refugee, leaving your mark, before you jump up again, and run to the next bit of scant cover.

There is that assurance that what we do will have meaning, for a fleeting time perhaps, but not an empty gesture.

QuoteSetting: A large airy room, all in marble and gold. There is an open area in the middle of the room, with large "steps" set around it in concentric circles. Set into niches in the walls are statues of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, every President since Nixon, every Prime Minister since Atlee.

There are a lot of aging men and woman, dressed in bed sheets sitting on the steps talking quietly amongst them selves, and one standing in the middle of the floor, preparing to speak...

"Distinguished friends! We are here to today to discuss diverse matters of interest to our interests as representatives of ourselves and eachother! Let us proceed firstly with the matter of our next Emperor."

He pauses and regally surveys the the seated councillors. He points to one.

"Copious Taser, you may speak first."

The indicated man stands up, smooths off  his bed sheet and proceeds to the floor.

"Friends! The Emperor (may he reign forever!) is due to step back from the throne in a few short months. The People, hardly oppressed by his benevolent policies, have decided that this is a good time to consider our politics, and hold them under SCRUTINY! I have spoken with some of you about this, and have decided that we needs must divert their attention to other matters of smaller import, such as the prospective candidates genitalia, or mayhaps the colour of their skin!"

The seated men and women nod sagely, some mutter supportive sounding words. There is a small grunt as one of them in the back row is introduced to anothers knife. He slumps over, but no one thinks it out of the ordinary, as several others are similarly slumped over in slumber.

"Some others are making scenes in public, and ignoring our pleas for them to focus on what we tell them to. Our loyal citizens are having their freedoms protected by our actions to keep these rebellious scalliwags in order."

He pauses for a moment, seemingly trying to regain some of his composure which has obviously been upset by the mere thought of having to deal with public unrest, here! In the Land of the Free!

"We are now arranging to have the two most likely candidates to assume the Imperial Mantle to be as popular as the other in the plebians eyes, the better to distract them from our essential work. My friends, we are close to getting past this period of unrest, and getting back to more years of stability and freedom to do as we wish."

There is polite applause as he bows to the assembled elders and makes his way back to his seat. The Speaker steps back to the floor and draws breath to speak again. He pauses when Copious Taser sits back down on a tack and yelps. A few of the men and women near him giggle behind their hands.

"I thank my friend Copious Taser for his words. It is true that these are unsettling times, but we are almost through them. We must remain united and strong within these walls, fractious though we may be out-with. I call my friend Pluribus Unum to the floor, he has requested a chance to speak before you today."

Pluribus Unum stands up, steps over several sleeping and "sleeping" elders, wipes his sandals of blood on one of their bed sheets, and makes his way towards the centre of the floor.

"Fellow councillors! I bring to you happy news today! I, with some diverse help from some among you, have been working on our "doublethink" policy. Yes, we were worried to begin with that this frankly Orwellian idea would be too obvious to the people, too likely to forment unrest rather than quell it, but we were wrong! The people have been weaned on television since birth now and have no idea who old George was, let alone read his books. We now have implanted the idea that only protests held in cages are valid with our "Freedom Cage", and have now so closely aligned "Freedom" with "Security". Through logical progression, we can now enforce "Security" with "Cage", and then we will have them, if you excuse me, by the balls."

Again there is quiet acknowledgement of this small feat. And a small strangled yelp as The Speaker is 'removed' in the traditional and time honoured way.

"When next we meet, there will be a new Emperor. I expect we will back our assigned candidates, and have a nice and close "election". Remember to tell your candidate to keep his trap shut! One small slip now will blow everything to hell, and we don't want that, do we? I thank you, my friends, for your time."

He moves back to his seat, and The Speaker, a woman now walks back to the floor.

"Lastly, we shall hear from our "underground" man, our representative amongst the people. He hasn't much time to speak to us today, or his lack of presence will be noted. Let us listen!"

A previously unseen man steps out from behind a pillar, he is wearing a bedsheet like the others, but it is also pulled up over his head, hiding his features.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, hear me! My work amongst the people goes according to our plan. I have guided the most rebellious of them in directions that we believe are fruitless. Amongst some, I have encouraged parroting of old catch phrases and jokes and the taking of illicit substances. Amongst others, acts of petty vandalism and the creation of what they term "meme-bombs". As we..."

There was a small murmer of dissent and unease, but also some of support for the mystery man.

"As we already suspected, many of the latter ARE dangerous. It is well that we caught them when we did. We are feeding them all with small portions of the truth, to keep their need to know sated, but as planned they do not know the whole of it, as much as they want to. My latest report, regarding the adaptation of the "three man con" has been dispatched to this esteemed council. What you will read concerns the removal of the third participant from our Three Man Con policy, the third participant of course being the person being conned. My work continues, and my updates will also. Thank for your time, friends"

He turned, somewhat melodramatically, and stalked towards the door.

As he neared it, some of those closest to him may have heard him whisper to himself.

"Fucking dupes. Stupid, blind, ignorant dupes."

But they wouldn't have known who he was talking about.

QuoteWe are the Anti Colony.
      We are those who have not met ourselves.
We are all the coolest things you've never heard of.

   Understanding that we are everything, and nothing, it is inevitable, perhaps, that we play with fire to build our self congratulatory monuments.

   We are the winners.
      We are the faceless avatars of our age.
We are worthy of no pity or thanks, but only because (and when) WE say so.

Glory in the fight, fellow ghosts of the internets, because it IS a fight, even scrawling your name in the mud with a stick is a victory.

   We are the nameless celebrity.
      We are wielders of the cyanide pen.
We shit all over your roses, becuase it helps US grow.

   And now?

            Now we wait for something to happen, or cause things to happen, or sit in imbecilic bliss.

   We really ARE the dogs bollocks.

   We have mad skillz.
      We hate you.
We play meme-poker while the world unexpectedly DOESN'T implode under it's own stupidity.

   Underneath every one of us is a chair, we made it our bitch, but it also made us our bitch. Meanwhile, we disbelieve in the Gods, the Government and the mail-man. Sometimes we don't even believe in ourselves anymore, so far has our search for troof and lulz gone.

   Questions? No longer do we ask them, meaningless as the answers, nay, the words, have become. We merely make statements proceeded by the polite"?"

   FUCK you? Hell Yeah!

   O.K. lets roll the dice, see who plays first, and write some pithy poetry. We have so much anger going to waste, lets document it, pigeon hole it, lay it down for posterity. These are the days we truly are alive, and we should really leave something for the poor, dead, kids of tomorrow.   Maybe not.




   And when all is really said and done, all i really wanted to say is "Fuck me, I want a beer!!" So how the fuck did I get here?

QuoteThings to do before you die.

~Take out that damned jackboot from your ass. It's not cool, it's not funny and it's like a genetic disease in that you'll end up passing it onto generations of your descendents.

~Learn to question EVERYthing. Occasionally, people tell you lies. Even people who sound perfectly reasonable and sane. The softer they speak, the more polite they are, the bigger the lie they can be hiding from you.

~Stop waving the flag/passport/skin colour and calling it "Patriotism".  That shit just isn't funny anymore when the Government is already doing the same thing. Patriotism isn't about being a better citizen, it's about demanding a better country.

~Take a crash course in bullshitting. It's the "in" thing these days. You might as well learn to be better at it than your Priest, Bank Manager and President.

~Take time off and have a little fun. It's what they don't want you to do, right? When people say "Oh, telling someone not do something is like inviting them to go ahead and do it", they could well have a point when it comes to this. Do you REALLY want to be stuck in that cube all day when the sun is out?

~Swim with dolphins. Nothing like having a wet slimy horny motherfucker wrapping it's prehensile penis round your leg to realise that these lists are all bullshit, and you really need to make up your own damn lists.

QuoteYour possessions no longer interest me, neither does your fragile mental state. Your intellect has become stale and useless, wallpaper in the cage you call your life, a mere link in the chains you are to make yourself. Forced to do so by yourself.

Your friends/family/pets/rulers/employers are meaningless constructs until you accept the grim reality of this situation. Perhaps they are meaningless until they accept the reality of their very own imprisionment.

Go on, make a checklist of what you need to survive. Done? Good.

Besides food, warmth, shelter, what, if taken away, would actually kill you?

Discard as appropriate.

Now break down whats left. Do you really need your takeaway pizza every weekend? Would you really be a lesser person if you had a one bedroom housing cube in the shadowy part of the big city?

Discard as appropriate.

Now you have pressed the reset button. Feel free to add to your list again, but this time its not what you need to survive, its what you need to live.

Add your favourite art, scenic views and witticisms. Most of all, I suggest the quiet dignity of a free human. But thats only me, you are now in total editorial control.

Done? Good.

Now look around you. Does anything seem different? Do you really like that McBurgerHut down the road, the one you've been hanging around, inside and out, since you were able enough to say "I want!!" and point? Does the preacherman seem more, or less, creepy? Something never sat quite right with his fantastical tales of eternal paradise, if only you were "good" in this life. A life which, to the best of MY knowledge, is the only one you are guaranteeed to have?

Do you have any questions you have to have the answers to, answers that you know only you can find?

Good. Join the club.

This is a chainmail letter, you must now invent a way to mail it to yourself five years ago...

P.S. Have more fun, I can tell you it wasn't a barrel of laughs the first time around.

As Clarke slowly climbed the creaking stairs he felt a familiar sensation pass behind his back. He spun around to see what it was that had brushed his spine and sent shivers of tension through his ribs, only to find a lack of any thing behind him. No apparition, no beast, no colour, no sound. Nothing. He prickled at the sudden rising excitement that manifested as fear in his easily affected mind and returned to climbing the stairs, finding it more difficult than it had been previously. Not through an inability, but through an unwillingness. He wanted to retreat back down the steps and out of the door, full steam ahead into the artificially lit street, but he could neither continue nor go back. Something shapeless gripped him to the spot and he found himself unable to move. ‘Is it simply a fear of the dark,’ he wondered? He felt compelled to press on, yet unable. And there he stood until the clock chimed half past the hour, the resonating bell somehow proving that there was no spirit barring his progress to bed and to dreams.

For as long as he could remember there had always been a clock in the kitchen. His first memories as a child revolved around it, and it was the clock he learned to tell the time by. His mother had thought it more practical to purchase the biggest clock she could find so that it would be visible from the other side of the room, even when her eyesight inevitably began to fail her. For as long as he could remember, the staccatto thud that accompanied the movement of the clocks innards had been a noise in the background, the rhythm of the thing keeping time just as much as the numbers did. There had been times when he’d wished that for one second the clock would cease it’s labours and give him some peace, there had been times when he’d gone as far as wrenching out the batteries from the flimsy compartment on the back just to buy himself five moments of silence. Each time he did he would almost instantly replace the batteries with fresh ones, presently unaware that he had originally intended to leave the clock dead. It was only more recently that he had come to realise how much he relied upon the clock, as a friend and as a keeper. When there was no-one there to talk to him, the clock would be reminding him of the time, and after his mother had left and there was no-one there to complain that he was wasting his time, the clock was there still, counting. It occurred to him that his mother would have been able to get through to him better than picking at his concentration ever could simply by counting. It wasn’t even the sound of the numbers that made the counting important, just the knowledge that there was one, and one previous, and one to follow on. These three taps, that endlessly repeated were enough to tell him that things were still progressing. That time had not slowed down, that things were as they always were. “Dependency is such an ugly word,” he thought to himself, and so he merely sated his self loathing with the knowledge that it was not only him that was addicted to the clock, everyone had a clock, and everyone needed to know that it was there beside them, tirelessly counting the moments, seconds, minutes and hours between now and then.

One day, the clock stopped.

Talking with Godot: Dreams.

"My dreams?  don't remember most of them, to be honest.  Frantic bits and pieces, like anyone."

"..."

"There are a few themes.  I dream about school a lot.  Always panic for a test I never studied on, a class I never attended, journals I never prepared...  My dad still has those too, he told me once."

"..."

"Yeah I get bad ones too.  I lucid dream a bit, so I can direct them mostly.  It's dreams with a sense of heavy hopelessness that I get stuck in though.  So hopeless I can't even use my wake up trick.  Weird, huh?  I dream around my own dream countermeasures.  Things like my mother turning into a monster to eat me and my siblings.  'Don't fight, don't resist, just lie down and die quietly.  Survive, and all you will gain is a life dealing with having to have killed your own mother.  Just give up, it will be over soon.' 

That always freak me out.  Freudian as hell, and my mind knows it.  My subconscious is a bastard."

"...?"

"Oh sure, I get other flavor of hopeless.  Like being in a crowd of quarantined people, when FEMA decides liquidating us is easier and cheaper than screening and treating.  They line us up in an old cistern, and prepare to shoot us.  Then their CO tosses out a bunch of syringes.  Says anyone who doesn't want to get shot to death has 5 minutes to inject air. 

No one rushes the mooks, I'm trapped petrified by the herd mentality, and a bunch of people scramble for the spikes and try to track a vein.  Not easy, so a lot of broken needles and half-ass attempts.  Failure, cowardly death, no last minute rush into their ranks even.  Just frozen like a deer waiting for a car."

"..."

"I'm not brave.  Nobody is.  We can altruism and stupid, and sometimes it looks good.  Or we're just doing our thing, and someone decides it's exemplary.  There are no heroes.  Given enough time and bad luck, anyone will prove themselves a craven fuckup. "

"...   .."

"Well, yeah.  Didn't mean to bring you down.  That's just what I see.  Though I do tell myself, every time I DON'T make the mistakes I'm horrified of making in my dreams, anytime anyone doesn't, it's a worthwhile thing." 

Weird, thought I'd submitted this one.  It's from some shit I was going through when reading Dimo's thread about love:

It's when this person makes some kind of impression on you that makes you think just momentarily you might want to let your guard down to get to know each other, to allow someone into that inner sanctum of your fucked up head, just a brief glimpse into one another to see if you can dive down and cease to function in the shocking waters of a new undertaking.  In a flash of understanding there's something slight, a peek of grander things and you talk and you talk and you don't need to sleep or eat you have limitless energy to be around the other til dusk and dawn and again to see them and know them in all lights and shades of a profound but exhilerating exhaustion.  You're flooded with sensory information, aha, like how her eyes look on a winter night against reflective snow or maybe it's his smell how it pulls you closer and traps the both of you together.  Minutes lost as you go about your lives are painful but even suffering through another day or week is worth it for the knowledge of how you'll feel every moment of being together.  You both understand how important this all is on some primal level and even your bullshit hang ups and damaged psyche are no match for moving forward with this person.  And you're on, you're both on, haha, you're saying things you've never though about with no filter that are so perfect for that moment and you're both laughing; there's a sweetness in each little gesture and thought.

Your head finally wraps itself around the fact that you, you miserable fucking prick, aren't destined to die alone and some other human being is somehow capable of putting up with your imperfect ass.  There are these things your other does, mispronouncing words or cooking without enough salt or sneezing like the god damned world is ending, where you have these, HAH, moments of melting in your chest cavity.  Over time you both come to realize behind your fancy words and nice clothes and well groomed facade you're a foolish clueless dolt pretending to have a grasp on a life that's too big for you to understand.  And for once it's o-fucking-kay because as you wander around learning constantly new ways this world is fucked, AHAHA, you have an equal to become horrified at the same time.  Then one time you're stressed and there's too many questions or you aren't willing to budge and neither of you are backing down and it might get intense, might get ugly, might look pretty grim.  Nothing is bright right now because the world is through their eyes and they're turned away from you, briefly and achingly.  It's over soon but it comes and it goes and you move on and you learn precisely what not to do because the last thing you want is to upset, HAHAHA, each other not for fear but to not hurt each other.  And sometimes you have sex and it's great and sometimes you fuck and it's animalistic and depraved and incredible and sometimes you make love and it's incomparable to the other times for the exquisite closeness you feel with just one other person.

AHA HAHAHA, you come to know each other like nobody has ever known either of you before in both the good and bad.  You've seen the terrifying depths of the lows and the exuberant unparalleled highs in each other so many times it's commonplace and all you need is a kind word or the right activity to keep attacking life together because right now you aren't two people, you're together and any slight to that front brings combined wrath.  HAHAHAHA.  HAHA.  Shit's disgusting sometimes, the horrorfunk you find in the shower or the unknowable splatters of things or the hidden hodge podge of memorabilia from a person long gone.  Those little fights are a fucking joke now because these new ones are the armageddon.  You wake up in sweat with a hoarse voice and splotchy eyes and see the slammed doors and shattered egos and maybe the dried come from making up and you're just fucking relieved that it worked out because you wouldn't know what to do otherwise.  And at that moment you think you understand, or at least can see a speck of the grander scheme, of what love means.  Because you're lucky, both of you, and neither at this point could possibly fathom life without the other.  For as strong as you are and the willpower you trick yourself to having you know, ultimately, you are god damned nothing without this other person.

It's not done yet, it never is, not until you're dead and rotting or your ashes are scattered upwind of a city that the bastards may choke.  You've got these problems now and they're bad, they're real bad, bad like problems can't be bad and you don't know anymore if they're yours or if they're the other's.  Indistinguishable you blame each other and you're wonder if telling them you love them is habit or if you feel it every time, a lucky one in a sea of assholes who can't pull this love thing off.  You're told you can't love until you care more about someone else than you do yourself and it fucking kills you because that person next to you who once dazzled isn't much to you any longer, you're together because it's slightly less awful than being alone.  HAHAHA.  HAH.  AHA.  But then you can't do it anymore, lying about love and seeing adoration but not being able to return it, it makes you feel like a monster, like maybe you're incapable of really being in love like you see so boundless in others.  You've been through it all before, maybe, maybe a few times even, maybe you don't even know if you can pull the whole process off again because you're so fucking jaded.  HAHAHA.  So it's over again and it's not like last time because your ass is bigger or  your forehead is higher and no asshole is sorry enough to put themselves through the big bag of fucking misery you've turned out to be.  HA. HA. HA. HA. HA.

You're welcome to use these as you see fit.

(http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/9011/editedrights.jpg)
(http://img490.imageshack.us/img490/1443/ghostpostfinal2wi7.jpg)

bump

art submission:

http://cramul.us/2010/09/flying-ass-ghost-dance/

attribute to Cramulus

license:

Public Domain

whoops. put this in the wrong spot:

Quote from: Cramulus on September 30, 2010, 05:49:04 PM
art submission:

http://cramul.us/2010/09/flying-ass-ghost-dance/

attribute to Cramulus

license:

Public Domain

you may also have:

http://cramul.us/2010/09/the-tales-of-mr-oliver-tuppence/

and, if you'd like it, http://cramul.us/2010/09/gorillas-in-the-midst/

license: Copyright, all rights reserved

Quote from: Cramulus on September 30, 2010, 05:51:07 PM
whoops. put this in the wrong spot:

Quote from: Cramulus on September 30, 2010, 05:49:04 PM
art submission:

http://cramul.us/2010/09/flying-ass-ghost-dance/

attribute to Cramulus

license:

Public Domain

you may also have:

http://cramul.us/2010/09/the-tales-of-mr-oliver-tuppence/

and, if you'd like it, http://cramul.us/2010/09/gorillas-in-the-midst/

license: Copyright, all rights reserved

ALL submissions will be treated as Copyright, all rights reserved, used by permission.  This removes any chance of horrible fucking messes later.

That's right, I said it. And I sure as "Bob" mean it.

Do you want to know why? I don't care if you do or don't, I'm going to tell you.

I hate your religion because in your opinion "IT'S THE RIGHT ONE!" Prove it. Make me believe beyond a reasonable doubt that your religion is THE right one. Come prepared, and leave the phony faith BS at home. I don't want to hear how I have to Step Out Blindly On Faith. That's a crock. Show me. Have your god come and smite me, or at least have some scotch with me. Better yet, have your god turn water into scotch. Then I'll consider thinking it's the right religion.

Why is humankind so eager to label themselves? Is it an insecurity issue? Is it to "belong"? Some of us here are pagans. Would someone please describe what that term has been destroyed to mean. Some of us are Discordian. No true definition exists. Some are Christian. Do we dare entered that tangled mess? But the particular label isn't what's important. It;s the need for a label at all. Is it simply needed for basic mean communication? If this is true why do so many rally behind a label like it a badge of honor? Uncountable people have died because they have worn the wrong label at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

Back to religion as a whole. This concept has murdered more people that any other thing ever thought of. A CONCEPT. Get it? An unprovable concept that has inspired it's followers to kill, forfeit their own lives, cause acts that have scarred many others. And there is NO SUBSTANCE to it. Why is it not more deeply questioned? How many of you have heard "My <insert religious leader title> told me so, and he/she is my leader and would never lie to me so it has to be true?" Be honest on this one. Is this silly race, humankind, so dependent on being led they will simply accept whatever is told them? Must they blindly believe and follow any order they are given in the name of their religion?

How can one so easily offer up their ability of free thought and action to willfully be controlled by the whims and ideas of someone else? Can you not see the people you are following are human as well? They are not DIVINE, they have no special gift except the ability to plug your ears and blindfold you and get you to like it. You want to nail me to a cross, burn me at the stake, or whatever other unusually cruel and mindless idea you come up with? All I can tell you is bring help, because there's going to be one hell of a fight and I'm not dying alone. Don't expect some mealy meek pansy bullshit from me, I'm going to try to kill you.

So keep your worthless religion far away from me and we'll be fine. I prefer to use my own wits and mind to direct my life.



Back to your sheep pen now, I'm done.

Quote from: Doktor Howl on September 30, 2010, 05:53:57 PM
ALL submissions will be treated as Copyright, all rights reserved, used by permission.  This removes any chance of horrible fucking messes later.

but much of my art has already been released into the public domain. With most of my visual art, I am not interested in protecting it via copyright.

Why is it the more I learn the more I realize how little I know?

Here in the confines of my own construct every time I reach a stage of enlightenment I am immediately made aware of the vastness and the smallness of this place I have built.

Call it the Black Iron Prison, the Golden Sphere, or any other name you can imagine. What I am slowly realizing is the vastness is a natural order but the smallness is created by me. The walls of this place are in constant flux, ever changing by experiences and knowledge won. With a surge of knowledge it seems the walls start to fall away at first, then close back even tighter as the very knowledge I have just won makes me aware of how much there is to learn and how little I know. At times this frustrates me and at other times it leaves me awe struck. At the times of awe I realize that there are no walls. I have put borders on the universe to keep myself from being overwhelmed, but the walls simply do not exist. They are my blanket to keep me feeling warm and secure. During the periods of frustration I claw and scream at the walls that do not exist, blinded by my own smallness and inability to perceive the reality that is and is not at the same time.

My most recent state of enlightenment has left me aware that time and knowledge are things of infinite patience. They are and always will be there, waiting, watching. I will either find things in my alloted time or I will not. It doesn't matter to time or knowledge, and in the end it really doesn't matter to me. I am what I am and I will become what I will become. The things I learn are of my own choosing, my paths are of my own making. Decisions I have made, my reactions to experiences, my personal perceptions to things will determine this. I know if I fail to learn a thing, the knowledge of this thing will not judge me, and being ignorant of the thing I will not judge myself.

There is so much there that no one of will ever taste it all, or even a large part of it.

It is good to be alive.

Quote from: Cramulus on September 30, 2010, 06:00:39 PM

Quote from: Doktor Howl on September 30, 2010, 05:53:57 PM
ALL submissions will be treated as Copyright, all rights reserved, used by permission.  This removes any chance of horrible fucking messes later.

but much of my art has already been released into the public domain. With most of my visual art, I am not interested in protecting it via copyright.

That's fine.  I can exceed your expectations of ownership, I just can't do less, if you catch my drift.

The Terrorists Have Already Won Part 1: Flag burning should be manditory.

Friends, Neighbours, and most importantly, enemies, lend me your rationality.

I have urgent news for you.
There is no war on terror. The terrorists have already won. Correction, they won a long time ago.
When? When you stopped questioning authority. If you ever questioned it in the first place.

Oh it's probably not your fault really. You were suckered into it from a very early age. A victim of the conspiracy.
You were told to respect your elders, to listen to what they say.
First it was your parents. Then it was your teachers, your boss, your leaders.

But who ever told you to question what they say? Certainly not them. It wouldn't work in their favour.
Your elders demanded complete unquestioning obedience, of course, it was 'for your own good'.
You may have asked questions initially, when you had a million questions to ask about the world, all in innocence.
But it would get to the point when you were told to do something, and you asked, "why?" the response would be, "because I said so", and that would be the end, and you would do it.
Soon enough, you'd be conditioned to do things upon order, without wondering why, assuming it was for your own good.

And this mode of thinking passed on... of course, you were encouraged to ask questions at school.
But really, you were only allowed to ask the right questions, the wrong questions would get you into trouble, or would get ignored, or they would provide you with an answer that you didn't understand, or perhaps was only half of what you really wanted to know, or should have been told.

This created gaps in your rationality, things that on the surface seem to make sense and are complete, but if you were to scratch off the surface and dig a little deeper, you would find that there is a lot of scrambled information.

Were you made to stand up at school assembly, have the flag raised, and sing the national anthem?
Have you ever thought how that has affected you up until this day?

Are you a patriot? Why?
Because you were told that your country is the greatest, and that you should love everything about it, and if anything or anyone threatens the things you love you should be ready to fight and die for it?

Do you respect your flag?
Is it because you were told that flag is a symbol of the greatness of your country and all the freedoms you supposedly have, that your elders died fighting for?

Does it boil your blood when you see someone burn that precious flag?
If your answer is yes, then let me guarantee you one of the first statements made: The terrorists have already won.

For I say, that flag is a symbol, a symbol that represents much more then most of us were told to believe, and that symbol is full of corruption.

It represents the unquestioning love of the country and those who live in it, and the the unquestioning obedience to its leader.
Or the complete ignorance and ability to hate countries that are not your own and all those who live in it, and the complete ignorance of the biased intentions of its leader.

It represents the sense of identity of who you are and your past, that your ancestors used it to show that this land was theirs.
Or the lie that your identity and past depends on that flag being there, and that your ancestors stole the land from the original inhabitants.

It represents something worth fighting for, the freedoms that your ancestors fought and died to protect.
Or the illusion that is worth fighting a meaningless war, and that people who fought for your freedoms should be respected and therefore to show disrespect towards the flag is equal to disrespecting those people, when really, if you don't have the freedom to burn your flag, is truly disrespecting those who died for it.

The flag is NOT what it represents. The flag is a piece of coloured fabric, and is only anything more if you personally see more in it.
The people have forgotten this. The people have lost their way. The people have stopped thinking, and let others tell them what to think.
They let their emotions get in the way of rational thought, and have been fooled into thinking that the menu is more important then the food.
The flag is NOT you. The flag is NOT the people you love. The flag is NOT the country. The flag is NOT your freedom.

So called patriots, WAKE UP. A true patriot would burn their flag because that's the freedom you're supposed to have, that you claim you love so dearly.
If you really think that someone burning "your flag" is an insult to all those things, then you have let the terrorists win.
That's right, YOU.
In fact, when you start to campaign that flag burning should be illegal, then YOU have become the terrorist.
YOU have taken away the freedoms from the people you love and the country you are so proud of, and most importantly, yourself.

When it gets to the point where a flag is burnt, and no one cares, can we say that the world is on its way to winning the war on terror.

Please note: There are rumours of people going around, burning flags, of their own country, and other peoples countries, and that they hate YOU and everything you love.
These people don't hate you, or the country, or the people, they hate that you think a flag is more important then the real problems we have in this world.

Also note: If flag burning is not yet illegal where you are, I suggest taking advantage of it, piss off as many people as possible, and if they ever bother to ask you why you are burning their precious flag, you can tell them.
"I'm trying to make flag burning illegal here, because I love the flag that much".
(Also, it's not "their flag." You bought it, you own it, it's YOUR flag to do with what you want, right?)

Love, Light + Chaos,

-The Cosmopolitan Patriot

Discordian Ideals?

Yeah, Umn, hellooooo, we're DISCORDIANS HERE.
You know, ones who are not under the authority of the authorities...
Like, we make up the rules as we go along, and realise that politics is simply a two man con made to only truly benefit the politicians and business' that fund politicians campaigns.

There is no real definition of the discordian movement. We are the great collection of whatever the fuck we wanna be, we are the religion with a punch line, we are the Mad Geniuses and the Talentless madmen.

Fuck definition. Fuck the left wing hippies and fuck the right wing religious conservatives, fuck the law, fuck morality, fuck poverty, fuck business, fuck socialism, fuck capitalism, fuck marxism, fuck the monarchy, fuck anarchy, fuck despotism, fuck everything, no system is ever perfect, if you stick to an ideology about the way things should work, and all you can see is that, then you miss all the opportunities to rort that system that's around you.

If there's something you want, TAKE IT, don't whinge about the fact that you don't have something, figure out how you can get what you want, just be fucking SMART about it.

A discordian is just as likely to wave the flag of establishment as they are to wave the flag of anti-establishment, a discordian can say that we as humans should fuck technology and money and just go back to nature, and that would be right, a discordian can say we should take advantage of the stupidity of humanity and capitalise and grow rich, and that would also be right.
Discordianism is whatever works for you, as you find it necessary, so that you can live your life the way you see it fit.

And discordians can completely disagree with everything I've just said, and yeah, they'd be right too.

The only real sin you can commit in discordianism is to speak in absolutes about discordianism. DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID THAR?

large spider web on my front porch. I was going to have a knee jerk reaction and remove it but I realized it was a knee jerk reaction and didn't. It turns out observing spiders at work is a very rich text of beautifully written life lessons. After some consideration by the spider (assumption) she picked a spot to build her web. It has cover, light at night and an ample food supply. It is beautifully crafted and well constructed. She is patient and motionless as she waits for her prey. Once an insect is in the web she is lightening fast as she poisons it and wraps it up. She has to be sometimes. Some insects struggle very little trying to escape and are summarily eaten. Others struggle mightily and actually escape. Some put up a good fight and are eaten anyway.

As I watch this process in utter fascination it occurs to me we as primates are not so very different from the insects. If we had souls I wonder how many of us would have had ours eaten by now. The web we are trapped in has been beautifully crafted and well constructed. Could it be that it is comfortable and seems a good time to rest from flying around all the time? If it does then we are not aware of the danger lurking just out of sight and we will be devoured.

This brings another thought to mind. Do we have the desire and strength to struggle and fight our way to escape? Then what? Back to mindlessly flying around? Probably, it's what we do after all.

I'm going back out to watch so I can learn to struggle and fight.

I'm sorry but I have to insist that the public domain stuff stays in the public domain. One of the primary reasons I make visual art is to create stuff FOR the public domain. Feel free to print it, but you can't copyright it.


likewise, you may use any of this stuff, (a lot of the B&W art will probably be up your alley) but it has to bear a creative commons license: http://cramul.us/2010/09/juxtapositions/

Quote from: Cramulus on September 30, 2010, 06:17:16 PM
I'm sorry but I have to insist that the public domain stuff stays in the public domain. One of the primary reasons I make visual art is to create stuff FOR the public domain. Feel free to print it, but you can't copyright it.


likewise, you may use any of this stuff, (a lot of the B&W art will probably be up your alley) but it has to bear a creative commons license: http://cramul.us/2010/09/juxtapositions/

I'm not copyrighting it.  I'm using it by permission.  I am TREATING it as copyrighted by the authors.  At some point, I will be asking people how they want the credits attributed and protected, and that will appear in the contents page(s).

Quote from: Mistress Freeky, HRN on March 07, 2010, 07:32:24 AM
Friday night. No, let's start at the beginning. Friday AFTERNOON, when the "good Dok" came over to "help" me with my Pickles running away.

He had made this horrible contraption of a harness. There were so many hooks and electrode-y bits that it frightened me before he even put it on Pickles. As he was strapping the little guy in, he was explaining to me what the various parts do, and how the thing worked. I can't even remember it now, because it was all science-y shit, and I was never really good with electrical circuits anyway, and I think I may have blocked it for my own personal peace of mind, but I really could not, in the end, let his experiment continue. And that's what it was, just an experiment. Well guess what, Roger. Puppies and science DO NOT MIX.

Later that evening, Roger dropped me off at Nurse Mayhem's house. He left a short while after that, saying he had an errand to run. He returned after an hour or so, and he had a midget with him. And the midget was wearing the harness. And I snapped a bit.

By the way, sorry about that. I, uh, I don't think I've ever gone off on anyone so hard, let alone with an inch thick piece of dowel rod. Sorry.

And as a side note, I'd like to just mention to everyone that it is never ever ever appropriate to call a police officer "Daddy", especially if you are bald and weigh like 230 pounds. And I don't want to talk about it. I really, really, really don't.

And then, earlier tonight, we went to this bar. It was either the bar or the desert, and I didn't think I'd be able to handle that kind of "fun". It was called the Venture Inn or something like that, maybe the Ventura Inn. Now, I've only ever heard the Meatrack described, never been there myself, but this place was so much worse than anything that place could have to offer. The warped wood flooring was sticky, enough that I had trouble picking up my feet when I walked, and I had to walk carefully to avoid tripping over the boards that had bent so much out of shape that they were a full half inch out of alignment. There was a picture there, and I'm not really sure what was going on in it, but it seemed to be some old guy either fucking or getting sucked off by a lion. I'm not sure what that had to do with anything.

(Did I mention that this is a gay bar for old people? This is a gay bar for old people. And not Roger old [no offense, I'm serious], no, I'm talking sixties and seventies and up.)

The walls were stained with god knows what, and smelled of ancient nicotine. I guess the place has been around since before it was illegal to smoke inside. The didn't have glasses, just filthy mason jars, out of which most of the group chugged down their various alcohols.

Roger didn't drink, just gave off this vibe of hate, and kept telling us how much he hated everyone. I didn't either, because frankly I'm terrified of the thought of becoming incapacitated in any way around these people.

Who are these people? Well, there's Nurse Mayhem, and Roger, and Evil Roomie, and Kaz, and even Maria (I have never seen her get so fuckered up, and given the condition of everyone, Roger ended up being the voice of reason. I sincerely believe it's a sign of the end times).  The dirty boys from Grant Road met us there. I really can't believe such a horribly menacing, disgustingly perverse group of people actually exists, but I guess that's just because I'm a bit naiive, and deep down I believe that most people are basically good. I realized tonight I have a lot of growing up to do.

Now, you may be itching to ask me, why do I hang out with these people, if I have such a horrible time? Well, I suppose it's because as horrible as they act, as much as they scare me, they never beat me down with horrible shit, or at least its never personal, and if I do end up cringing in horror, it's an accident (i hope) or a joke (I think). I guess, for this reason, I still consider these people some of the best friends I've ever had, even as I sit here and Thousand Mile Stare at my computer screen in shock and horror.

And also

Quote from: Mistress Freeky, HRN on March 14, 2010, 06:44:55 PM
Why do I keep doing this to myself?

So last night, the Dok, Maria, Nurse Mayhem, the rest of the coffee night crew and I went out to a bar. It was a normal bar this time, no corpses like the last one, so I had hopes of the night at least approaching normal. We were there about an hour, just chilling and drinking, when this Mexican wedding party comes in. They were a bit rowdy, but it was in a happy way. But apparently, some of the other patrons that were already there knew someone from the party, and started up a ruckus. Eventually, someone pushed someone else, and one of their freinds pushed back to get even, and it turned into an all out brawl. I'm talking like people were throwing their beer bottles, there were bull rushes going on, people were reaching behind the bar to get at more (and bigger) bottles to use as weapons, the whole shebang. The sounds of glass shattering, people yelling and screaming in rage and pain and hate, and the Dok's laughter boomed in my ears as I dove under a table to get out of the way (I accidently caught one guy's foot as I dove under and he hit his chin on the table and got knocked out, I really shouldn't wear my stawmpin boots cuz they're so big).

As I watched the scene in a strange mix of terror and... badfun?... I saw the rest of the coffee night crew side with the wedding party. Maria and Nurse Mayhem were back to back the entire time. Maria had a broken glass bottle in one hand, and Mayhem had a barstool. Dok apparently couldn't stop laughing, even when (or more likely because) he was thwacking people in the head with some guy's shoe he had got from somewhere. Von Melee was doing okay for a while, he definitely got some good licks in, but someone punched him right where Mayhem had got him a few weeks ago, and he was done. I spotted Evil Roomie once, riding the back of some poor vato, yanking his hair and shouting "Giddy up!" and giggling madly. I have no idea what Mork had been doing, but it was more than likely something sinister.

When things looked to be calming down, I darted out from under my table and ran out the back door. The rest of the group was already there, laughing their asses off, and they had made it out with the bride and groom. They said we were welcome to any of their family functions, and then made off into the night.

It was interesting, anyway.

Are these the sort of things you had in mind?

Quote from: Doktor Howl on September 30, 2010, 06:19:27 PM

Quote from: Cramulus on September 30, 2010, 06:17:16 PM
I'm sorry but I have to insist that the public domain stuff stays in the public domain. One of the primary reasons I make visual art is to create stuff FOR the public domain. Feel free to print it, but you can't copyright it.


likewise, you may use any of this stuff, (a lot of the B&W art will probably be up your alley) but it has to bear a creative commons license: http://cramul.us/2010/09/juxtapositions/

I'm not copyrighting it.  I'm using it by permission.  I am TREATING it as copyrighted by the authors.  At some point, I will be asking people how they want the credits attributed and protected, and that will appear in the contents page(s).

ah, cool! mucho bueno.  :mrgreen:

This is probably the best solo piece I've written this year.  You're welcome to use it.

_________________________________________________________________________________

                                        No TIME!
              -High score-
Work/Study – Year end review.  Gotta keep going.
     A third of the team was laid off—
                                                                    --"Performance related," they said--   
                       Workload increased
                                            (no bonuses)
BUT THERE'S FREE COFFEE IN THE BREAK ROOM.

                                                            Just got word they're recording to the minute 
                                                                                     When we log on to the computer.
                'metrics' they call it.
                but we all know 
                  our paychecks
                 are linked to the clock.
 
                                                                             Joe's kid got sick yesterday.
                                                                                           Coughing up blood.
                                               He just sat there at home, wiping dark red phlegm
                                                                        from his bottom lip
                                                                                           until Joe's shift ended.
We're there to make a better life for ourselves
sitting in the office abattoir   
                       waiting at the paper trough
        trying to avoid Upper Management's electric prodding
                                                     and clenching our bowels,
waiting for the mandatory bathroom break.
 
                                                                        This is why we went to college, after all.
                                                                          To earn those tickets.
                                                                             To get the high score.
                                                                               To pay off the debts
                                                                                 We accrued getting the education
                                                                                    We needed to pay off our debts.
   
   I think they're putting something in my cereal.
        In the morning, my mouth is filled with sweetness,
     and then – nothing – and I find myself on the bus – and then
                    - nothing, and I find myself staring at the retina-burning monitor – 
 -and then- 
                                                              -nothing-
                                                                                                        -and then-
                             -home again, watching TV – and then –






...and then...








                                                                                 ...and then...















                        ...and then...

:mittens: I really like that!

Population Control
Tessa and I carved our initials into a tree,
like kids,
giggling but serious.
I used a pocketknife
& she used her laser.
[That cherry red laser:
At low intensities,
it feels better
than flesh]
We're the perfect match, her & I
She can't love her own kind-
they're not programmed to receive
But I appreciate
her nodes, her patches, her upgrades
She knows what I want
with three-decimal place accuracy.
She's calculated
how to make me fall in love
with her
alone
She's my one malfunction
which crashes all the rest
my system can't restart now
that she broke the turing test
When my ex-girlfriend Terra came back
I tired to leave
But Tessa just stood there
like the tin-man
rusted in place
scanning me like headlights
reflected in deer eyes
I oiled her with affection
When she started to move again
her arms coiled around me
"You would leave me?" she asked tearfully,
"You would leave me for flesh?"
No honey, I say,
you're my nested loops
and you're my copper wire
you're my flash drive
you are my decompiler
we'll never have kids



Users
I don't understand what you mean--
what are all these "users" you're talking about?
(all these alleged "real people")
All I see are ip addresses.
There are four parts.
Each part has 256 possibilities.
It sounds like a lot.
In a small group, each one appears unique
in a large group, its just a blur of numbers hey
hey
you've got the lion and the lamb hey
you've got the bull and the eagle hey
you've got about four billion combo nations hey hey
and thats all you've got
psycho logic taxonomy
numeric teleology
and that's all
You Sirs are





Silicon Valley & Gomorrah
Silicon Valley
or should I say
Sodom
is burning
My wife looked back
and disassembled downwards
into a pile of parts.
dust to dust, I suppose.
The architects of Babel:
did their system crash
crash our sins
as well?
Is there anything outside the network?
And a thousand years later
after all the sand has burned to glass
and the valley is dark and wide
                                  and lonely
We will think
byzantine circuitry
                                   taboo
403 - forbidden
             you pervert





Discordia
Discordia
the more we talk of what it is
the more we know     it is not
Discordia
that waits for you to make a good point
             at the sky
                        with a sword
but guess whose face is up there, pops,
You
open the doors of the advent calendar
Discordia
is hidden in more ways than five
has revealed
in an alphabet soup you slurp
                letter by letter
telling a story of hide and seek in your parent's bed
and finding a broken condom
              in your head
                           Discordia





and then here's a zombie poem...
Bear vs Whale: A Love Nocturne for the Dead
The City of Albany is filled with giant shells
it is a grave yard of sea creatures from long ago
each spiral staircase a headstone bearing trivialities,
pleasantries and idle chit chat with Death, its new roommate

We walk among the new marianas trench, in a world without light
along Quail Street, where the riots started
the first baton was like a shotgunshot, and then noisily,
a flock of wild teeth taking off from the underbrush

The dead crawled out of the pits and morass
The dead crawled, breathing hard, on top of the living
and made sweet love to the music of the setting sun
a chorus of helpless screams, voices ragged with panic

Now we stay holed up in our bedroom with a rifle as a candle
The pressure of the marianas trench can crush a japanese phone book in half
It is a hungry sumo wrestler, but his fat body is made of zombies
and the bowl of rice only has one or two grains left

and the sumo wrestler is Albany, stabbing at rice with chopsticks,
frustrated and mindless, a thousand students taking the SATs in unison
watching TV in unison, farting in unison, their limbs
in unison falling to the floor, lying for three days

and then arising anew, the christ of the holocaust
bringing date-rape to all that they may be reborn again
staggering up the spiral of a giant shell
tireless sleeping eyes rolled back

the giant cage spinning and the Lucky-Six-Six-Six numbers
are drawn by Vannah White, your limbs tied to the wheel, spinning
your number is up, and dollar signs are drawn crudely
on the ping-pong-ball eyes of the zombie at your door

It's like listening to your neighbors hump,
but instead of having sex they throw like dead fruit
their rotten bodies against the walls of your mind
their fingertips through a crack in the door, like live shrimp

For days this goes on, the crack wider,
and the shrimp becomes an eel, becomes a shark,
foul cold breath crawling over your barricade
a school of kung-fu fists come punching, tearing, biting

the air smells of gunpowder and ejaculate
it is a painful moment of freedom from repression
as you are all fists now too, stroking your hard gun
the thudding is your heart is flying kung-fu

In FLAMES! You're a MAN, a MAN!
it revs like a motorcycle engine
and your body is in the sumo ring,
your weight an angry bear attacking an ancient whale

But the sumo city is bigger than the sumo ego
and the angry bear is smaller than the ancient whale
and your corpus is a phone book, names, addresses, the numbers that matter,
being crushed in half

Freeky:  Hell yes.

LMNO:  HELL YES.

Quote from: Richter on September 30, 2010, 05:44:16 PM
The Dog Story

Nothing can quite channel the essence of human stupidity like a poorly trained young dog, or the antics of a monkey.  Well, maybe not the monkey.  Even when apes are howling around acting foolish, big stupid toothy grins, it's a dominance game.  The smile? "Look at what I will fucking bite you with, fuckass."  Maybe not the dogs either, but it reminds me of Boomer and Carl.  Boomer was the dog, Carl was the boy.  Neither was shaggy (I'm just setting that out right now.)

As mentioned, Boomer was not the best trained.  Hauling around barking, grabbing things, peeing, generally embodying the traits in dogs that make me cringe.  Carl, the boy, and very much the dog's boy, wasn't exactly a hand in correcting this.

"OOhhh! Boomer!", he'd always cry when the dog did something idiotic.  It came out half amused, half helpless exclamation.  That was the age he was at, and it was just dawning on him the distinction between the momentary spark of fun, and keeping things un – fucked in the long term.  Why would anyone want to do that?  Simple, to my reasoning.  Un – fucked things are nice.  There's no standard to them, just decide the level of organization vs. clutter, cleanliness, and decoration you want in a place, then keep it up.  Clean the filth when filth happens.  An untrained dog is a great way to make you appreciate the effort un – fucking takes.

Not the dog's fault, he wasn't trained any better.  Not the boy's fault, he wasn't either, but he was learning it. 

she wears lace, her hair is an oil spill


she wears lace, her hair is an oil spill
it seeps into my coastline
I'm not ready for it yet
stiff drink
ball drop
it's gonna take me forever to clean up all this slop

It happens every day. A little bit more of me is gone,
They want us to close our eyes now
the new me is incoming, some nameless stranger
I want him to change everything
they want us to stop listening
he's going to perfect the art of stillness
like some virtuous rock
drop me to the bottom like your ears pop
jacked out and into the darkness

shh--their message is very quiet. The world drowns it out.

This life -- a lunatic fire. The spark inside hush--
Everything you can see was somebody's quest once.
They left it behind. Now they are drifting, fading
sparks in the darkness.

The world plays up a trill like a million roads.
You can turn lead into gold. You can suffer a little bit.
You can turn the soul into instant cash money. You can taste the poison.
There isn't a thought in this world that isn't alchemy.
Spark up that immortality, more fuel for the engine.

(the oil sits on top of the water)

Your quest becomes fire.
Maybe your most salient contribution to this world will be a pothole or a skidmark.
Maybe you'll be swinging from a street light, red in the face, stopped cold.

You might only hear my call a few times in your life.
I was there for you when you were at rock bottom.

Easy for you to say you will answer, but you haven't yet.
I was the life you thought was your destiny.

And if you still want me, you have to destroy it all.
Shh--Let's hold hands.
Sweating in the meat prison.
The body decides
the mind rides.

Drifting, fading
sparks in the darkness.

All very great stuff here.

Just as an FYI RE: my stuff, if you can see the artwork as being somehow usable in greyscale, go for it, otherwise, don't worry about it, hopefully those other two rants I posted should be good enough for what you're after.

and also, submitting The Showdown: http://www.scribd.com/doc/26944637/The-Showdown

in the next few days, I'll have a copy on my blog which is easier to C&P from


edit to add: voila! http://cramul.us/2010/10/the-showdown/

Quote from: Cramulus on September 30, 2010, 06:41:11 PM
and also, submitting The Showdown: http://www.scribd.com/doc/26944637/The-Showdown

in the next few days, I'll have a copy on my blog which is easier to C&P from

I love your stuff from cramul.us too!

Ever notice that even paleontologists get everything wrong?  I once read an article on Neanderthal man, and the scientists expressed puzzlement of why Neanderthals hog-tied their dead upon burial...a question that could easily be answered by anyone who has ever seen a George Romero film.  Oog the caveman falls over in a catatonic fit, the other cavemen figure he's dead, and buries him.  Then he wakes up, walks out of the sacred burial cave, and gets stabbed about 30 times, tied up, and jammed back in his hole.  Cavemen probably took the idea of the walking dead very seriously.  If they'd been more serious about dealing with those uppity Homo sapiens, instead of fucking off making cave paintings, they'd probably run the joint today.  But they didn't, so we killed them and ate them.

I'm The Good Reverend Roger, and there's nothing I like as much as Monkey Sandwich.

Now, there's no reason to believe that paleontologists will be any smarter in the future, either.  When they dig up our remains a few thousand years from now, they'll wonder why we used such big goddamn boxes to bury our dead.  That's because, of course, they'll be looking at the dried and crusty skeletons or dust outlines, not the huge mounds of blubber that we shoehorned into the casket with a hydraulic jack.

Yes, the sad fact of the matter is that the sum total of 3 billion years of evolution is a morbidly obese Wal-Mart customer riding a Rascal scooter with an oxygen bottle underneath that fat thing they have drooping between their ankles.  Eventually, we'll have to bury these people, and the joke will be on archeologists, and we can take comfort in the fact that they'll screw it up as bad as we probably screwed up the whole Egypt thing.

Fact is, our engineering skills have outraced our brains.  We CAN build an atomic bomb, so why the hell not?  For the lulz!  Also, shitty addictive food, television, and other Pink-taming drugs.  Our species should have an epitaph, when we finally wheeze off stage left, and that epitaph should be:  "Just because you can doesn't mean you should."

Or Kill me.

QuoteI have seen your smile. I've seen it before on many faces and in many places.

It's the kind of smile that involves mostly teeth. The lips, usually more given to a plump and fleshy arch, resemble a rictus. Hold firm, that you do not allow movement to cause irreprable damage to your facade.

It's the kind of smile that never truly reaches the eyes, at least not in the unconscious sense of muscles arranging themselves like so many eels over the orb of hardened and largely dead bone we entrust the day to day safety of our brains to. No. If it reaches the eyes, it's by more malevolent and rationalised ways.

It's that kind of expression you will see on the hedge fund manager's secretary as her boss opens the window, 24 floors up, and prepares himself for the final crash. And she wills the bastard tyrant on with a will bordering on the physical. It's the kind of shit Goya used to paint on his walls, but seen from the other side.

People will see it and hurry by. They will take the superficial politeness and avoid looking deeper. There are things, Sally-Me-Lass, things under that rippled surface that man was not supposed to have knowledge of. And sure, you can hold that smile for a day. For a week. For a month. But it will end. Something will crack it, and the sheer horror of the collapse will unleash something terrible and dark from behind your brain cage. From behind even your brain. From somewhere so deep that imagination is enough to cause you vertigo.

The witnesses will talk e'ermore about the laughter, Sally-Me-Lass. And they will shudder as they contemplate the depths from which it rose. They'll buy a ticket to anywhere. Perhaps to Tucson...

Quote from: The Good Reverend Payne on December 25, 2009, 01:21:16 AM
You think that's gravity, do you? No son, that's the world sucking so hard that you're stuck to it like that bit of paper that clogs up the pointy end of your vacuum cleaner. This world is just so much busting your back cleaning a filthy manky house, top to bottom, just to find some fat ass parked in front of the television watching "How Clean Is Your House?" or "Grimefighters". They turn to you and say "See? It could be worse, right!" and you know as soon as your back is turned you're going to have to clean the god damn place again.

And then again. Forever.

Except it won't be forever. It'll just feel like it. No son, it's more like 80 years, give or take a few. In that time you'll be born, grow up, grow up some more, grow up some more (it takes a while, you just never notice how long it REALLY takes), do some menial factory schooling where you learn what it takes to "get by" in this world from school yard bullies to classroom bullies to bullies who you MUST tack a Mr. or Mrs. to the front of their name, then you go out and get yourself some menial factory job (possibly in a menial factory, but just as possible are Graphic Designer, Insurance Salesman or Postal Delivery Operative. All this and MORE could be yours for just 200 hours a month!) and then you stop working. And then you die. I mean, it could be worse, right? This is the plan people! Stick to the god damn plan!

Ah yes, the plan.

Now some would have you believe you are an oppressed minority. Some would have you believe you are the silent majority. They'd sell you your own dreams back to you to make a buck and make a name for themselves and all that Hollywood crap. I know you know the type. I know you have never been suckered by them. NEVER. You're too smart for that shit, right? Okay, so sometimes you have to fall back onto ideology, but everyone does that so it can't be all that bad. And sometimes you HAVE to decide between two evils, but hey that's just how the world is! So we're left here with imperfect people running imperfect Governments presiding over imperfect nations and spreading their shit around so that everyone who doesn't matter can take a bite, but it could be worse, am I right? LEMME HEAR AN 'ALLELUIA!

Praise the motherfucking Lord, asshole. Praise him, or sooooo help you God.

Now, I have no beef with God. He ain't never done nothing to me, and as long as it stays that way, we're solid. I DO have a problem with his lunatics though. Fuckers all up in my face leaving mental graffiti with their spiritual spray paint. You know, the kind of assbag who has no problem telling a newly bereaved mother that her child is going to hell. But hey, they have their free speech too! Too fucking right they do, but so do you Son and I ain't never seen you tear a strip out of this self righteous prick. So they've never actually tried to come and intimidate, cajole, harass and brainwash you and yours. They've never tried to bring hell upon you to show you the error of your ways. No sir, that's always one country, one state, one county, one town, one street over. If it's happening to other people, it could be worse, right? I mean the fuckers, if they had their way, wouldn't even let you know about gravity. They'd have you believe a tiny angel was holding you down or some shit. They'd never let you believe it was the world sucking so hard.

And so I leave you with some thoughts:

Play as hard as you can, work as little as possible to make it happen.

People in positions of power, believe in their power. You don't always have to.

Idealism before Ideology. If you think the world can be a better place DO something about it. Don't consult the fucking manual.

When you have a choice between 50 flavours of shit sandwich, that's not freedom. That's 50 flavours of shit, and everyone will demand you take a bite. Pack your own sandwiches.

You will never be able to defy gravity (that's how much the world sucks). You can however defy your own expectations, but only if you're willing to face up to the illusions they really are.

Quote from: Kiaransalee on June 12, 2008, 08:30:59 PM
I am so tired of the excuses the world is giving people today for what is really their own stupid bullshit.  Adults are obese because fast food restaurants sell fattening food.  Children are obese because of video games.  Why are they no longer just plain fat and they sit on their asses too much.  Instead of putting down that double quarter pounder and super size fries and walking around the block a time or two, they blame advertising and the world.  Parents don't make their kids go outside to play, they sit on their ass, eat cheetos and play the fucking game.

People are no longer retarded, they are challenged or special or we have come up with a myriad of names for their various diseases.  Children are no longer mouthy little shits who need a good swat on the ass; they have ODD (oppositional defiance disorder).  They tried to tell me my son had this, after being grounded for almost a year and getting a few harsh lessons in how to respect ones elders, he was miraculously cured.

Now we have everyone saying that the economy and the "bad" neighborhoods and the gangs are turning our youth into thugs or killers or whatever word they decide to use.  My question is this, WHY THE FUCK are these kids out on the fucking street at 2 in the morning with guns to begin with?  Where are these kid's parents?  Why didn't they take some parental control? 

This generation has done nothing but give excuses for things which used to be unacceptable.  Things for which every effort was made to change them.  Now we don't make people change, we just give them a name for whatever fuck up thing they have ALLOWED themselves to become.  I'm fat, it's my fault.  I know that krispy kremes make me fat, I still ate them.  So instead of blaming anyone but myself, I stopped eating all the bullshit and lost a hundred pounds.  Without Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig or any other bullshit.  It's called self control. 

I live in the crappiest neighborhood in the inner city of St. Louis.  My kid is not out on the streets at 2 am with a gun, because I took control of that as well.

It's time we started making people take responsibility for their own fuck ups and quit giving them excuses or naming their issue and making it a disease, disorder or issue!

Until we do, when we wonder why the world is in such a shit fuck state, give it a week, they'll come up with a name for that!

QuoteIt really wasn't that hard to figure out.  It is one of those things that is so glaringly obvious you just keep on missing it until it smacks you upside the head.

What is this jewel of wisdom you ask....  It is very simple.....

Nothing will make them happy.

You know who they are.  There is one or sometimes a few in every type of group you can possibly conceive.  And because of them, there will never be a simple solution to anything.  Why?  Because there is always someone or some group which has to bitch just for the sake of bitching.  Those who will find one point out of thousands to nitpick until the whole project gets the shitcan because the arguing has cost more than the actual results would have.  And these people are everywhere.  You all know one or two personally.  You've all wanted to smack the shit out of them on more than on occasion

They say they want to be treated like everyone else.  They don't.  It's a lie.  They only say that so they look like they are trying to be cooperative.  They say that equality is essential.  They just don't mention that it isn't essential for everyone.

So now we come to the issue of, how the hell do you deal with people like this?  I have found a way that has been working for quite a while now.  You repeat back to them what they say and make sure you add "Just to clarify" or something along those lines.  For example, you present to the PTA a fundraising idea that could bring in a lot of money.  Requires no effort on the school's part.  Just the selling of a few raffle tickets...  Of course Mrs. Fuckerupper in the front row raises the first objection. 

"I don't think this will work, we've never done anything like this before. "

Your response would be....  "Let me clarify Mrs. Fuckerupper, because we've never done this before you don't think this will work, and as a result of that thinking we should just shit can the whole raffle and not try and see how much we can raise.  Knowing that other schools in the district have raised $$$ amount?"

See what I mean?

My grandpa used to say "Some people would bitch if they were hung with a new rope"  It took me years to realize it didn't mean they still should be hung no matter what kind of rope was used.

I have to give him credit.  It took some serious nerve to do what he did.  I mean the man must have had balls of steel.  Especially on the spur of the moment the way it went down.  But in one fell swoop he pissed off every fucker in the neighborhood.  ONE FELL SWOOP!!

The call about this last prank came on Saturday, May 22nd.  It had started out like any other normal Saturday.  We all had a bit of a lie in.  Had gotten up, made breakfast for the monsters.  I find it's best to stuff them good in the morning; it makes for a quieter day.  (Remember the Southern Belle rule of thumb; keep 'em fat and happy).  Anyway, I'd just sat down with my coffee to smoke a cigarette when the phone rang with a withheld number.  I don't answer those.  I figure if they really want me they can leave a message right?  Well, they did.....

I need to mention the cats.  There were 3 you see.  The officer who made "the call" said there was only one, but there were three.  The one went to the animal shelter.  Since no one believed me about the other two....  Well they were left in the condo. 

I couldn't get a flight until Monday which was for the best since I had to board out the two youngest and every damn kennel in town was full so I pawned them off on my girlfriend.  We had a 4 hour layover in Dallas.  Who the fuck wants to hang out in Dallas for four fucking hours?  Eh, it is what it is right.  I bought some fire roasted habenero chili sauce for my boys.  We ate some lunch, walked around and around about 30 times. Then got on the flight to Florida.  It was completely uneventful and we landed 30 minutes early and had the added bonus of bullshitting around yet another airport.  My sister picked us up and we went to her house.

Now please note, at this point it has been about 48 hours since the call.  I am doing my damndest yet my phone has been blasting every 30 minutes or so with someone else wanting to know when I was going to be in Florida.  I never realized how popular the call was going to make me.

So early the next morning I drop off sis at work and kids at school.  Went back and picked up sis who took the day off and we set out for the condo.  I've been receiving calls since 7 that morning being told I needed a police escort to go into the condo, then the police telling me no, I didn't.  It was a bit insane.

As we pulled into a parking spot, before the car was in park, the vultures descended.  Are you Michelle?  What are you going to do about the condo?  You know it has to be a health hazard.  You need to get that taken care of right away.  Not once did anyone ever say they were sorry for the loss or anything like that.  It was about this point when the decision was made to tell everyone I was sedated and not able to have a coherent conversation.  The tears pouring down my face and the shaking from the fear of having to walk into the condo and see what was left on the floor of my father helped a whole hell of a lot.

So we go in, sis covers up the kitchen floor with a drop cloth, I grab the insurance info and we start the great kitty hunt of 2010.  Cannot find a single cat.  So we leave.  The vultures are incensed.  What are you doing?  Aren't you going to clean up the mess?  What about the smell?  That is definitely a health hazard.  I'm calling the management company.  You were supposed to get that cleaned up.

I just got into Dad's car and we drove away.  I had a cleaning crew there first thing the next morning.  Well they were there at 6:30 but condo rules say no work until 8:00 so they left and came back because the vultures went crazy.  You can't do any work here until 8:00 am.

Now these are the same people who are giving me total hell all this time and now they want the cleaning people to wait?  I'm glad I hadn't found the guns yet.

So by Thursday you could go into the condo and the smell, while still there, was considerably better and you could handle it if you put a bit of Vicks beneath your nose. 

I'm packing what little is left that is salvageable.  The man really just survived since my mother died and barely at that.  He didn't want to shoot himself, though he had enough firearms to do so with a variety of bullets, so he stopped all medication and started drinking.  Every day for what looks to be all day.  Hey it's 12:00 somewhere right?  Leaving the empties behind, well that was just an added bonus.  Took us hours to get that shit thrown away.  We had to haul it ourselves because the vultures wouldn't let us use the dumpster. 

MEOW.....  MEOW....  I fucking told them there were more cats.  We found JC, my daughter's cat so named because her name is joy and it is her cat... JC get it? Yeah well she was 5 when she named her.  Cat is so damned fat she can't do more than meander along.  Scared to death and starving.  So we take her to my sisters and get back to the condo.  Got everything moved into one spot to take with me and left.

Fun side note, my house in St. Louis was robbed at some point on Thursday.  They came in, grabbed my TV (32" plasma that Dad had bought me xmas of 08) and the surround sound system that came with it. 

Now here is a note.  Naples has a sushi buffet called the Blue Fish.  If you are ever down there YOU HAVE TO GO!!!  They have a cooked bar as well but the sushi was top notch and for $16.99 per person affordable as can be.  The green tea ice cream and the red bean ice cream were awesome too!!!  There you have my highlight of the trip.

So we head back on Friday to start packing because I originally planned to leave on Saturday.  Problem is, I'm still waiting on the crematorium.  They finally got me the box late Friday afternoon.  I didn't get everything packed so I decided to leave early Sunday morning. 

MEOW....  MEOW....  MEOW....  There you go, I did mention there were THREE cats right?  I find my Hemingway Tango and her fur is so matted up she can barely walk.  I make appointments for both cats to have baths and for my Tango to be shaved the next day.

While the cats are being prettied up on Saturday morning, we go pack the car.  Now the vultures are wanting to look into the condo because they have a sick need to I guess.  Like driving by a terrible care accident and looking for blood.

Packed and closed up, we pick up the pampered kitties and head to my sisters.  Left the next morning.  We get to just south of Leesburg and we realize the kitties won't use the litter box in the car.  So we stop at the Wal-Mart and buy a $3.00 leash so they can do their business outside.  Now this leash it attached to the cardboard backing with 7 zip tie things.  In the process of removing those....  Blood spurting, not stopping and getting a bit dizzy.....  YAY a trip to the Leesburg ER.  Leesburg, FL.  Home of the great civil war reenactment and ummmm they have an ER?  Can we all say redneck?

Four hours later back on the road and making decent time.  Didn't get to my sister's outside Nashville until 12:30, just a little late, but we got there and she had us set with good conversation and a soft bed.  I don't remember ever sleeping as well.  Next morning we were seen off with a hearty breakfast and we were off.  Rain, rain and more rain but we made decent time and rolled into St. Louis about 2:00 pm.  Completely exhausted, but alive.

So here is to my dad.  It took nerve to die in your kitchen from a massive coronary and then not let anyone find your body for a week.  Turning off the air conditioning and shutting everything up.  Sweet move dude!  Having and entire community wanting to stone your daughter!  Sheer genius!  Cheers you cantankerous old bastard!

QuoteHey Dok, frankly I don't give a ........

Let's talk about the south and the "southern belle".  Many people see movies like "Fried Green Tomatoes" or "The Secret's of the YaYa Sisterhood" and think that is what a modern southern belle is.  They couldn't be farther from the truth.

The south doesn't want their daughters raised like Scarlett, they want Melanie.  Sweet, gentile, compromising, forgiving, enabling, the very picture of southern grace and charm.

Grace and charm...... grace and charm.... sounds like cake ingredients doesn't it?  A pinch of grace and a dash of charm and stir.  What are little girls made of?  Sugar and spice and everything nice?

And this, these ideas, these archaic beliefs that women are fragile and unable to stand up for themselves, that women are stupid.  Where do they come from?  Well we all know where they originated, problem is few people realize just how much they are continued in the south.  Yes even today. 

They teach you that you know.  In charm school.  And yes it is called charm school.  You start when you are in the first grade.  The first things they teach you is how to sit, stand, walk, talk, what to do with your hands during any situation, how to shake hands, how never to cross your legs at the knee, but to tuck them to the side crossed at the ankles.  Then they move into meals and tables, how to set a table for 1-12 courses, 5 to 500 people.  What piece of cutlery goes with what food.  When to have finger bowls and when not to. Menus and music for any size event.  What to wear and when to wear it because no self respecting southern girl wears white shoes after labor day by god and won't put on a pair again until Easter  Sunday. 

Then, starting around 4th grade, they start with the how to be stupid classes.  Well not how to be stupid, just how to make everyone around you think you are.  Well not everyone, just men.  And they tell you it's to keep the men happy.  That way they can feel all big and macho taking care of the "little woman".  You learn how to avert your eyes and laugh a little when asked about something you know damn well how to do, but it's a man's job to do it.  They teach you how to appear interested in what "the man" is interested in.  They give you just enough information on a variety of topics to make you either dangerous or stupid.  Then they show you how to turn it to stupid.  You learn how to be touchy feely.  How to lightly place your hand on the man's arm or shoulder to keep his attention because men are physical beings you know.   As for taking care of your man, well now why do you think we all still cook the way we do?  Keep 'em fat and happy!! (wink wink)

And so many women don't know how to be strong, or that they are even allowed to be.  They are scared and many are miserable and in miserable situations because they don't have any idea what to do on their own.  Mothers and friends will tell a woman with a cheating husband to be "more generous" in the bedroom.  They will tell a woman who has been beaten by her spouse to avoid the things that set him off and to make the home a safe, quiet place for him to come home to.  If they even hear about the abuse at all because in the south, what happens behind closed doors stays there.  God help the person who breaks that sanctity. 

I'm not in a position to talk.  I didn't leave the bullshit behind closed doors.  My dirty laundry was all over for the world to see.  They didn't actually come and take away my "southern belle tiara" but they may as well have.  Nobody and I mean absolutely nobody can do the "shunning" better than the south.  Once that door is closed, Robert E. Lee back from the dead couldn't open it.  I'm like that divorced cousin everyone wants at their parties to liven up the party but doesn't want to stay the night.

And then we come to today.  I haven't lived in the south for a couple of decades but I know they still offer these classes because if nothing else, southerners are serious about their roots and their traditions.  There are still cotillions and sweet 16 balls.  And because I get a letter every year letting me know that they are still holding a place for my daughter and it's never too late to start.

But what have these idiotic ideas of how a woman should act, talk, walk, dress, speak affected the women of the south?  Well actually it is not as bad as one might think.  Why you ask?  Because we learned the pretend to be stupid thing really well.  Very few realize just how smart we are!  And as for my generation, they won't learn it from us!  Because as long as you keep on thinking I'm stupid, I can keep on surprising you!

As for my daughter?  Well I keep trying to convince a certain hero of mine to start her own version of "Charm School" that will teach my daughter to kick ass and take names and wear whatever fucking color of shoes she wants year round! 

Statues and Cliffsides

  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.

  A gentle ray of sunlight found its way to his resting eyes then opening to a second day in the city.  The quality of the day was unmatched already, he could tell, and he bounded from his rest in eagerness to further look upon this strange place.  The thought that he might find the streets paved in clouds or gold passed him briefly, but going down the stairs his mind turned back to the railing.  Slowing, he let his hand rest lightly on its surface, focusing his efforts on letting his calloused and leathery palm detect that groove again.  It was there.  And more accompanied it.

    The door to the inn was open, light pouring through it and catching on a heavy dust in the place.  The innkeeper nodded to him from the bar, his face a little more careworn than the Traveler could remember, the lines of age a little more pronounced.  The bar was stained and scratched in places.

    He left the place behind, anxious to see the remainder of the city that day in a light unlike his previous explorations.  This time of the day shops were open, their doors ajar to welcome the cool air and the sounds of the sea far below.                              Looking down the cliff side of the far side of the city was an experience he'd saved for daylight, the eerie moon of the previous night not being adequate to see to the very bottom.  Residents were walking about between stalls and shops seemingly delighted and he saw they suffered the same degeneration as the innkeeper, their appearances no longer beautiful as the night before but marred slightly as though years of age came upon them as they slept.  Or perhaps his fascination with the new place clouded his vision, that and the twilight sun.  Surely that must be it.

    Spray from the sea grew thick as he neared the far end of town.  The cliff was terrifying in its height, the city a risk-taking child playing upon the edges unaware of the death waiting below.  He wanted to pull it by its gates, its hands, and drag it further from the drop to safety.  The Traveler reassured himself of his footing and peered down to see deep blue waves crashing on the rocks, spraying and foaming as though in jubilation of their freedom.  There was no railing here, no caution of any sort, nor were the city folk loitering about.  He was alone and he pondered briefly jumping, the air inviting him and assuring him he could fly.  This was, after all, the perfect city.  He shuddered and stepped back to the safety of land but even that was precarious, a weighty few bodies away from crumbling into the hungry ocean.

    The first steps back to the city proper were light at first, as though unsure they would fall on firm ground.  The feeling departed after some time and before he jaunted almost merrily as he had at the day's beginning.  No people were along the road back to town.  He wanted to run until he saw one, the thought manifesting itself in a hastier stride while he looked about anxiously.  The road ended at the cliffs again.

    This time the breaking waters sounded like music and the air felt more invigorating, the mist looked solid enough to step on and walk across, an ethereal bridge to, well, somewhere even more beautiful than this place.  Perhaps it was the city closest to the heavens.  He could find out if he climbed the stair that he was now sure solidified before him; it would carry him to gods and their ilk, a whole new realm to explore unhindered by the dust of roads he'd come to know.  His feet were so weary from the years but he could not stop, maybe this bridge would cure his sore heels.  One foot hovered just above the first stair, one short gesture shy of shifting his weight to trust the vapor.

    Bells rang in the distance, the mid day signal from the city square.  Their ringing was drowned and hushed at first, his ears following the sound to bring clarity with each successive clang.  It was foreign to start but grew into reality and regularity.  Finally he understood their meaning and their origin, regaining his senses, becoming suddenly aware of his foot hovering above the sheer drop.  Rational thought would have told him to ease back slowly, let his foot touch ground again.  But it was so far down and he was so close, he leaned the wrong way, his solidly planted foot shifted dangerously, the other foot flying about wildly, joining his arms in the struggle for balance.  It ended an eternity later, with his eyes wide and his back against the street.  Reveling in the feeling of ground beneath him for some time, he turned and kept his wits about arriving back in the city proper, pushing the cliff from his mind lest he find himself facing it again.  The remainder of his wandering he did with trepidation for fear of losing his way and arriving at that dreaded end of the town.

    He found himself again at the fountain of the young girl.  Small chips of the stone had worn away, leaving the girl pocked and, as it occurred to the Traveler seems to happen, hollow around the eyes.  Her smile was faded.  The water seemed cloudy, dirty like the bath water of the previous night.  And the snake had unfurled.
    He hastened back to the inn, trusting the man at the bar more than any other in the city.  Few others had spoken to him.  There he was stationed, behind the bar now more marred with the day's passing, as much a piece of the room as the fireplace.  A rag dragged futilely about against the onslaught of dust so absent the previous day.  He looked old, now, not just older than the night before but old.  The Traveler sat at the bar, directly across from him.  He was handed a drink without requesting it.

"You seem unnerved," the man said to him.

"Tell me about the cliffs," he said immediately, relieved to be able to ask.

"What about them?"

"They seemed to be calling me over.  The first time was a pull but when I walked away they brought me back and I stood ready to step over the edge when I heard the bells."

    The man seemed to ponder this for a while, a darkness playing with his features while every piece of that information came together for him.  "I don't know what you mean," he lied at last.

"How many are lost over those cliffs?  Why isn't there something to stop people from going over them?"

"Only seems to be the occasional foolhardy visitor.  None of the city folk bother with them much and when we do we know better than to skip about their edges.  I don't suppose such sense is ingrained in all."

    The Traveler ignored the comment.  This man would not be giving him any more information he wanted.  And he knew the kinds of attitudes outsiders would bring in places like this.  He drained his glass and settled his drinks and room with the innkeeper before meeting the remainder of the day.  Exploration previously so important to him was now forgotten, he only sought to know about the cliffs, but he dared not investigate them once more.  He found a bench along the street leading to them as close as he dared to go, and he waited, taking in the city as the sun drifted low in the sky.  None came to the cliffs.

    Not wanting to return to his room and trying to avoid the innkeeper he decided upon another place shortly into the evening.  The air here was merrier, the song less a lament but still informing them of the day's events.  He listened more closely to this now.  Little concerned him but the small gem nestled in the center.  Yesterday's visitor narrowly escaped a fall over the edge of the cliffs on the far side of the city.  Now he knew there were several ways that information could be around.  People talked in this city, to each other if not to outsiders.  The innkeeper might have passed the news on following his earlier visit.  Someone might have seen his ordeal, meaning someone neglected to help him in the moments before he was able to stop himself.  Or the city simply knew.

    Not wanting to return to his room and trying to avoid the innkeeper he decided upon another place shortly into the evening.  The air here was merrier, the song less a lament but still informing them of the day's events.  He listened more closely to this now.  Little concerned him but the small gem nestled in the center.  Yesterday's visitor narrowly escaped a fall over the edge of the cliffs on the far side of the city.  Now he knew there were several ways that information could be around.  People talked in this city, to each other if not to outsiders.  The innkeeper might have passed the news on following his earlier visit.  Someone might have seen his ordeal, meaning someone neglected to help him in the moments before he was able to stop himself.  Or the city simply knew.

    Not a single patron looked to him while the song played though they all must have known of whom the news regarded.  They resolutely watched the singer, looking dirty to him now, thinner and almost sickly pale.  Things were changing here as he stayed.  The buildings were worn, the people were worn, and that statue.  It had shifted somehow.  Dancing flames in the fireplace were more ominous, the sun even at its zenith harsh in its light but cold in its effect.

"Another visitor to the city came through the gates," came the next line he heard.

He motioned to a woman serving drinks.  The stuff here was not crisp and sweet like the night before, it was muddier, harsher.  She attended to him with an air of discomfort.

"When did the other visitor come in?"

"Twilight," she responded.

"Where might I find him?"

"She is at the fountain right now," the server told him.

    The Traveler decided he didn't much like the people in this city.  They were cold.  He paid and left the place, ignoring the remainder of the day's song, instead walking to the fountain.  Like the previous night, none were on the streets.  His footsteps echoed across seemingly the entire city.

    She sat at the same bench upon which he pondered the fountain the day previous.  She was young, pretty, and seemed to be composed entirely of eyes.  They were a delicate green that seemed to shine in the moonlight, made more vibrant by the vague semblance of shadows attempting to cross them.  She smiled at his approach, at peace in this city where he could only find dread.  He sat beside her.

"You and I seem to be the only outsiders here," he informed her, gazing at the fountain.  Had the statue's features changed?

"I could tell, you don't look like you're one of the city people," she replied.

"They do have a presence about them, don't they?"

"Not just a presence, no.  They all share similar features.  Look at their noses, I notice noses, they're practically the same.  Even this statue.  And their eyes.  Not the color but the shape.  What brought you here anyway?"

"I go everywhere I can.  It's been my whole life.  What about you?  You seem too young for such curiosities."

"I like new places, too.  But mostly it's because I'm a baker, I like finding new recipes so I come to strange places for them."

    It occurred to him to warn her of the cliffs just then, and just as quickly it left his mind.  He'd forgotten why he sought her out at all, really, other than to converse with someone willing to talk back.  His visits to civilization were rare, and one part of it that he missed was easy conversation.  Sitting next to this girl, though, in silence for several minutes, he began to think it was the city that killed talking.

"Well it was a pleasure meeting you, young lady, but I'm off to the inn.  Perhaps I'll see you about town tomorrow," he said.

"You very well might," she smiled, watching him return from where he came before paying close attention to the statue.

    He stopped at the bar before going to his room, looking directly to the innkeeper behind it, saying nothing.  He studied the face he'd come to know more closely than the others in his two days here.  His nose matched that of the rest of the patrons, and the baker was right, the eyes did as well.  Now the Traveler knew his gaze did not deceive him in the bar man's features having degraded.  His age was more pronounced, his hair grayer and wilder.  The bones seemed less sharp and he'd grown sickly spots.  The Traveler said nothing and went upstairs.

    His room overlooked an alley and the ocean side of the city.  Behind the hundreds of houses and other buildings, which now looked decrepit and neglected, were the cliffs.  Even knowing they were there, they seemed to call to him.  He stared for some time.

    The sun was high when he woke up.  He had no recollection how or when he got to bed.  The shutters were drawn but filled with holes.  They hung loosely from their hinges on rotted wood, the curtains on them tattered and yellowed from neglect.  He hesitantly opened one side, afraid the wood would crumble from his lightest touch.  It opened, squealing like death along the way.  Sickly light poured in, throwing itself on thick dust inside.   Rooftops of the city were before him now, with shingles missing and shredded as though by clawed by the icy fingers of winters.

    His room, nor the bar upon his leaving it, fared much better through the night.  Were the mirror less smudged he would have checked his reflection to see if the effect carried over to him.  With great reluctance he looked to the man behind the bar.  He was still strong, still clearly the same man, but his degeneration was wretched.  He was thin and pale enough to look dead, skin hanging from his bones in a similar fashion.  The few remaining wisps of his hair drifted in some breeze he could not feel.  If he was aware of his transformation he gave no sign, moving along the frail bar just as though it were the rich wood of two days ago.  The man nodded to the Traveler as he passed into the sick day.

    Perhaps this place declined in his vision along with his estimation of its character.  Where he once thought it warm and pretty it had been, now where he thought it dying in insular it has become so.  But then there was the cliff; it came back to the cliff somehow.  Shortly after it he had been afraid, very much so, not only of the seductive pull of the place but of the people's hiding of its true nature.  There was danger there, yet following his experience the city did not become more frightening.  Its people remained cold and polite as always, their features degrading, though never changing overtly.  He wondered if he watched them, would they change before his eyes?

    Dirt and refuse were caked between the stones of the street, replacing the ones that were missing and making his walk less than comfortable.  Still the people went about as though nothing had changed.  In some time he arrived at the city square before the fountain, the fountain spouting brown and stinking water.  The young girl had changed little as far as the quality of the stone.  Her face was still pocked and all pieces of the statue chipped as before but her expression had altered.  The circlet of serpent was not a gift, she did not eagerly anticipate being crowned.  Her mouth was wide with silent fright and her eyes frozen open, unable to fight the snake's strength.  Its fangs were drawn, sharper than stone could possibly be, its mouth open and so close to her face.  She held it back now, as best she could, but she was so young and it was so wild and unpredictable.

    The Traveler did not intend to stay the following day to discover whether the snake would strike.  He set to fill his pack and restock before moving from this place, perhaps forever like so many places before it, though not always under such distressing circumstances.  He felt like the little statue girl felt; he struggled to fight the snake from poisoning him but with time it was inevitable.  Time was something he did not intend to give it.

    As he left the grocer he saw the young baker woman walking about, hunched over as though in ward of something.  He met her stride and she slowed to allow him nearer.

"So you've noticed the people, then," he said to her.

"How could I not?  I saw the city was a bit worn when I arrived yesterday but there's been a huge change.  Not just the people, the buildings, I mean, have you seen the buildings?"

"Of course I have.  You know when I arrived the day before you I'd never seen such splendor.  It was so rich here, the people so beautiful, the streets shining as though made of gold.  I felt hideous by contrast, an aging man beaten by heavy skies.  But now..." he trailed off.

"I'm glad to know it isn't just me.  I have what I came for, or at least I know I won't be employing any new techniques at my own shop.  I intend to leave today, as soon as I explore a bit.  I haven't seen the cliffs yet."

    The cliffs.  There was something about them, something so clear, something he knew instinctively.  He struggled for it vainly, a fleeting feeling so much like deja vu that could not be caught again.

"I'll be leaving myself today.  I hesitate to think what the city will look like tomorrow," he thought of the snake, the little girl, "with how quickly it's all deteriorating.  We might very well wake up in rubble."

    Their path took them closer to the cliff.  Dread filled the Traveler just as wonder filled his companion, though neither could think why.  He broke from her side.

"I have a few more things to do before I can leave the city.  Perhaps I'll see you again before I go," he told her.

"Maybe I'll join you," she said hopefully.  "I'd like to see a little more before I return home, to come back at least with new ingredients if not a new technique."

"I think I'd like that," her told her in earnest.  Companions were not foreign to him, but they were rare.  Those whose interests were struck by his life were at first enthralled by the seeming romance of it all.  They also became quickly tired of such a living.  The unsure, the discomfort, the loneliness, the weather, and the walking.  The endless walking with no destination.  The Traveler was rare in that case, in not needing a destination.

    They parted on this idea.  She drew nearer to the cliffs while he meandered away.  It seemed with each step the severity of her investigation came back to him.  Cliffs, he thought, stairways of vapor, promises of other worlds, danger, death.  He froze, now in the city square.  How did he get here so quickly?  In turning to race where he came did he see the statue again?  Had the serpent finally struck the girl?

    It was rare that he ran but he did now, his strides great and heedless of the uneven road.  The forever long road, stretching before him to the cliffs.  He seemed to go nowhere even in his great speed, to be running against a steep slope or swift waters.  Onlookers paid him no mind, nor did they determinedly ignore him.  They faded to nothingness behind him, voices silenced by his footfalls and deteriorated faces blurring in his vision.

    The cliffs were in sight now, the woman's back to him, her hair whipping wildly in the sea winds.  She was so close to the edge, and he was so close to her.  He thought to reach her; to pull her back like none pulled him back days ago.  He thought to shout, having no name by which to call to her he tried to say stop or wait or anything but his breath was suddenly gone from him, stolen by the thick ocean spray.  She was an arm's length away now but seemed to be getting further, further outward and so quickly.

    Briefly he thought he saw her foot land on something solid, as though that stair of mist held fast beneath her.  If it had, it did not for long.  She fell forward, turning with her other foot as though to grasp onto something.  His hand perhaps.  He reached for hers, their fingertips touching for what seemed like forever before they slipped away.  She did not scream; he did not cry out.  He collapsed on the solid ground, his forehead in the soil in a bow to her loss.  Somehow he expected to look below and not see any trace of her but the risk of what he would see was too great.

    Dimly aware now of his need to leave the cliffs behind lest they sway his own mind again, he turned his back to the tragedy.  His pack.  He needed his pack, now filled, dropped in the town center while he broke for his run.  The road was short again, time swift again.  He was by the inseparable piece of equipment in such a short time, eyes never peeling from the horizon.  A horizon he intended to meet that day, out of the city, with the stars above him again.

    Were they to have faltered from that spot he may have noticed the seemingly pristine stones in the road, the conspicuous absence of grime citywide.  He may have noticed the buildings in such a lovely state, catching the light and playing with it just as they had that first day, every house and shop, the walls all undamaged.  He may have seen the people changed, again beautiful but without the noses and eyes the young baker woman pointed out to him.  They would be young, pretty, and composed almost entirely of delicate green eyes that would appear to shine in the moonlight, made more vibrant by vague semblances of shadows attempting to cross them.  He may have caught the fountain, the girl humbled again in placing the circlet upon her brow, again a snake engulfing its tail.

    But his eyes were frozen to that horizon.

That was all of it.

If it's not too late to include this- A borrowed story.(Preferably printed upside down)

Up is Down

There was once a boy who walked on his hands.
This caused him to see things differently from other people.
He was able to see UNDER things. Things that were close to the earth. Small things. Intimately.
But being different from other children, he knew there was more than one way to look at things.
He didn't mind at all, being different. His life was one adventure after the other.
He had a wonderful time, examining things, finding out how they were made, and how they work.
And though many people who crossed his path were harass and frowning, from his point of view, they appeared to be smiling, and this made him very happy.
But he made people uncomfortable, they thought it was somehow wrong, that the boy should not see things their way. The RIGHT way.
They decided that he should be straightened out. They held a town meeting to determine what could be done.
They called in "Experts".
The doctor said, 'A rare case of deficiency of hypertension and heart palpitation. Lungs peculiarly unclouded, digestive system non-acid. It's obvious this young man is deprived of the manifold tastes, colours, shapes and effects of the assorted patent medicines available, and so widely enjoyed by our population"
The Psychiatrist said, 'A strange instance of psychic equilibrium or well being, highly unrealistic to say the least. An absence of Oedipal manifestations and paranoid behaviour. Obviously, his hate instincts have been suppressed!'
The sociologist said, 'A sad lack of competitive drive, incidents of concern for others, naive trust in human nature, inconceivable perceiving towards the war!'
His teacher said, 'He's always been unusual, he has to paint grass pink! And water purple! He refuses to call a fact a fact! Oh, he's not a bad boy, but with all his questions, who knows how he'll end up?'
His parents said, 'We just don't know how this happened to us. What sort of profession will he have? Isn't there some way to overcome this dreadful condition?'
So the boy was put under therapeutic therapy, given injections, simultaneous hot baths and cold showers, spun centrifugally clockwise, then counter clockwise. Put in traction. Lobotomy, frontal and backward. Given brainwashing, three times a day. Saturated with TV commercials. And red and blue radiation. The treatment went on for a prolonged period.

Finally, the boy stood up, for the first time, on his feet, what he saw, frightened him, because he found, that the opposite view of love, was hate, beauty was ugliness, individuality was conformity, plenty was poverty, understanding was prejudice, co-operation was competition, depth was superficiality, concern was indifference, truth was lies, joy was despair, and peace... was war.
He went into a spin, and landed on his hands.
THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE! We're back where we started from! He must be made to see right from wrong!
But the boy, in spite of all the "back to health" conditioning, was adamant.
He said, "If you want me to stand on my feet, you'll have to make some big changes first".

Quote from: Placid Dingo on September 10, 2010, 10:04:03 AM
Banksy was the first artist I got really obsessivly into. I discovered him through Adbusters (culture jammers' magazine) which I was mad on at the time.

Banksy is often called a graffiti artist but it's more correct to call him part of the 'post-graffiti' movement. Where graffiti is a very specific method and style, post graffiti is a lot further reaching, including art made from wheatpaste posters, sculptures (Banksy's 'Murdered Phone Box' and 'Girl With McDonalds Balloon' are two famous examples) tiles (space invader being a prominent example), knitting, even plants.


The ideology of post graffiti is probably fairly close to graffiti; natuarlly all artists have a personal ideology, but generally there's some variation of 'reclaim/utilise public space'. Post Graffiti has becoem in some circles, a respected modern art form. Or at least, one worth spending large amounts of money on.


I'm curious about the next thing after post graffiti. There's one direction that's obvious; which is essentially the same aesthetic immitated in modern art, coming back into the gallery. But there's also a good deal of activity that seems largely related to the PG movement, both aestetically and ideologically.


Some of these include Street Theatre, Flash Mobs, Guerilla Gardening, LARPing, Whatever sf0 is, Parkour and activities such as 'Safari.'

These are all versions of reclaiming or utilising public space. They generally seek to present some kind of aestetically interesting spectacle.


But are they art?


There's no reason why not. Sticking a shark in a tank may be 'shocking' in some ways for a short while, but even more obvious attempts to troll the art community (remember 'Piss Christ'?) are failing to make long term buzz. 'Doing' as art however offers a genuine shake-up of artistic ideology.


When we're obsessed with the aesthetic more than the actual, activity itself is the artform.

Submissions closed. 

I'll start monkeying with this for release in June.  I wanted to do January, but there hasn't been time.

Roger, I take it you're the editor for this project, yes? If you could let me know which ones of these made the cut (all of them is an acceptable answer) I can totally do the layout work for a pdf and a print version.

Quote from: Queen Gogira Pennyworth, BSW on February 22, 2012, 04:09:13 PM
Roger, I take it you're the editor for this project, yes? If you could let me know which ones of these made the cut (all of them is an acceptable answer) I can totally do the layout work for a pdf and a print version.

All of 'em.  If they don't fit, let me know and I'll get the chainsaw out.

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on February 22, 2012, 04:15:25 PM

Quote from: Queen Gogira Pennyworth, BSW on February 22, 2012, 04:09:13 PM
Roger, I take it you're the editor for this project, yes? If you could let me know which ones of these made the cut (all of them is an acceptable answer) I can totally do the layout work for a pdf and a print version.

All of 'em.  If they don't fit, let me know and I'll get the chainsaw out.

It'll probably be multiple booklets that'll need to be bound together. I normally hand-sew the binding on my things when they get to that size, but we can work out something else if that's not an attractive option for you. I figure sometime in the next week or so I'll start bugging you about any imagery you were hoping to include in the illustrations and whatnot.

Quote from: Suu on July 09, 2010, 04:40:42 AM
Lo-res version.

(http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a356/theonlyang/destructionofcommunication.jpg)

Hi-res.

http://kaousuu.net/images/destructionofcommunication.jpg

Words:


The Destruction of Communication.


Today I found out that a really good friend of mine, if not one of my best friends from high school, has died. Not just died, but killed himself for reasons unknown. This happened on June 22nd. Today's date: July 8th.

No one called me. No one shot me an email or a text message. No. I found out, 2 weeks later, via Facebook, while I noticed another one of my friends wishing him a post-mortem happy birthday.

It's finally happened, Jim. Humans have lost their drive to communicate normally thanks to good ol' Web 2.0. Somehow, it was "assumed" that I knew because of Facebook, a website I will openly admit to checking frequently, but not religiously. I don't have the time nor the energy to keep up with it, and I don't have an occupation that allows me to sit on my ass, gaining my well-fed American™ secretary spread and surf the web for hours on end, no, I chose to work in a profession that allows me to have social interaction with other primates of my species, which seems to be turning into a forgotten art.

Why did we, as a [debatable] intelligent race, allow ourselves to become hidden behind twenty inches of liquid crystal and a keyboard, and assume that this is okay?

It's NOT okay, Jim. It's not. It's costing me friendships; it's costing me the value of a face-to-face or at least voice-to-voice conversation and physical confrontations. It's costing me beautiful paper wedding invitations, newspapers and magazines. 

The future may be here, Jim, but it's not what I want.

Kaousuu/Angela Costello © 2010. Dedicated to the memory of Justin Vaughan, and the good times we had in honors and AP english in high school

Hi res link 404s, can it be re uploaded somewhere?

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on September 30, 2010, 06:27:01 PM

Linking to remind myself to come back to it, need to do this one in PS before throwing it in with the rest of the text or it'll lose the formatting, which is half the awesome.

page 103, btw

Oh, hey, here's where the end of the thread was hiding.

146 pages, just text, and still missing the content cram linked to instead of pasting in. Holy fuck you guys are wordswordswords.

161 with cram's links, no images. Started the first of the formatting today. Probably going to end up needing a whole lot more fonts to deal with all this insanity, but that's a good thing.

I'd like some feedback on organization, when you get the chance. I feel like there are a couple of sections this can be broken up into: Dead Gods, Dead Childhoods, Dead Animals, that kind of thing. Are there any groupings like that you wanted to put in there, or should I just do whatever and hope it comes out okay?

Quote from: Queen Gogira Pennyworth, BSW on February 24, 2012, 07:44:31 PM
161 with cram's links, no images. Started the first of the formatting today. Probably going to end up needing a whole lot more fonts to deal with all this insanity, but that's a good thing.

I'd like some feedback on organization, when you get the chance. I feel like there are a couple of sections this can be broken up into: Dead Gods, Dead Childhoods, Dead Animals, that kind of thing. Are there any groupings like that you wanted to put in there, or should I just do whatever and hope it comes out okay?

Do whatchalike.

first illustration heavy page (almost) done, just looking for a hunched over office victim to throw in the bottom left. Took some liberties with the formatting, feedback appreciated.

http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/1692/supplicationpage.jpg

(there are, naturally, some illustration-light pages done, but those are boring and straightforward.)

Quote from: Queen Gogira Pennyworth, BSW on March 02, 2012, 12:05:40 AM
first illustration heavy page (almost) done, just looking for a hunched over office victim to throw in the bottom left. Took some liberties with the formatting, feedback appreciated.

http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/1692/supplicationpage.jpg

(there are, naturally, some illustration-light pages done, but those are boring and straightforward.)

Are those tags supposed to show up?

Would you like the hunched over office victim to match the illustration/background image you're using?

Quote from: Net on March 02, 2012, 02:00:05 AM

Quote from: Queen Gogira Pennyworth, BSW on March 02, 2012, 12:05:40 AM
first illustration heavy page (almost) done, just looking for a hunched over office victim to throw in the bottom left. Took some liberties with the formatting, feedback appreciated.

http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/1692/supplicationpage.jpg

(there are, naturally, some illustration-light pages done, but those are boring and straightforward.)

Are those tags supposed to show up?

Would you like the hunched over office victim to match the illustration/background image you're using?

Yes, they are intentional, read the very last p class.

I'd like the guy to look like he fits, it doesn't have to be exactly that antiquey highly detailed style, just not super cartoony and vectored.

Cool. I like it.

Some people may complain about legibility, but I think it's fine.

Cramming in a bunch more work on this today. Mostly just font and alignment stuff for the time being, but if anyone wants to see a couple pages I'll put em up. One thing I can tell is going to be an issue is the lack of marginalia in the submissions. I've found a lot of images I can sprinkle in, and there will be some that are easy to put in frames, but I'm gonna need more random 1-2 sentence blurbs to fill in some of the shorter pages.

Bump, for the Muppet stories.

Quote from: LMNO on December 11, 2013, 03:10:10 PM
Bump, for the Muppet stories.

Sesame Street has been sold to HBO. (http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/13/media/sesame-street-hbo/index.html)

A reasoned and well-balanced critique of such. (http://thenavelobservatory.com/2015/08/19/unpublished-reflections-on-sesame-street/)