Year: 2014

Here we go:  another year in this thing called life.  I think I'm going to Marilyn Monroe my way through 2014.  Rock the curves, take a lot of pills, fuck whomever, and smile guiltily the whole time.  I can't think of a single reason not to be happy or pretend to be happy through every moment in my life.  Even if I'm just pretending, at least I won't be contributing to the belly fat accumulating around my waist (stress - google it.).
I would also like to write my own version of Modern Family, with more dysfunction and mystery.  Actually, I'll probably just write that screenplay in my head and then not share it with anyone, thus maintaining the status quo of accomplishing nothing outside of my day job.  I mean, why screw with a formula that has kept me in moderate pre-bankruptcy for this long??

Or ... maybe I'll just wear 3-D glasses all through 2014, so I think things are more intense than they really are.  This theory might work for hordes of people, making me an entreprenuer.  People can pay me double the regular "life-rate" just to see their life up close(r).

I literally have no idea how I'm going to make 2014 better.  Move?  Change jobs?  Find love?  Create art?  Watch "Frasier"?

Here's one thing for sure:  fewer words in my brain.  Fewer words which interfere with my brain.  That's really all I ask for.  And a new friend.  A friend.  Someone with whom I can share secrets and aspirations and dreams.  (And who is a good snuggler.)  Do such people exist outside of movies??

Plot Twist

A conundrum:  what does a teacher do when a student reveals something highly irregular, ethically questionable, personally dangerous, or totally illegal in a memoir?

Let me qualify by saying that I told all students that they could not write about harming themselves (or anyone else) or doing illegal things for which they had not already seen consequences.

I am currently knee-deep in teenage chaos.  (...Periodically interrupted by intense boredom caused by stories of everyday triviality.)  I don't know now whether to panic about the state of youth or be appalled by my own stodgy old age or just drop some therapy in the margins of their papers.  (I am currently doing all three, depending on the situational necessity.)  I should merit hazard pay for subjecting my entire holiday break to the hormonal insanity of adolescence.

Instead of reading the novels which are piling up (unread) on my desk, I'm reading thousands of other words.  And what is my remedy to this dilemma?  Vomiting more words into cyberspace.

I need a hobby.

Blogging or Something

I just finished a year-long blog.  A commitment which I have finished.  I am so glad to be done with it, because now I have no choice but to write creatively.  I make excuses for not writing every day.   I make excuses for not working out every day.  I make excuses for staying in a shitty marriage every day.  I make excuses; it's what I do.

As cliche as it may sound, I'm ready to start living my life the way I should and not the way I've told myself is inevitable.

So the short term plan is to go have several cocktails.  I'll reassess after I've pulled my head out of my ass later.

Don't Forget

I will light the match this morning, so I won't be alone 
Watch as she lies silent , for soon night will be gone 
I will stand arms outstretched , pretend I'm free to roam 
I will make my way through one more day in hell 
How much difference does it make? 

I will hold the candle 'til it burns up my arm 
I'll keep taking punches until their will grows tired 
I will stare the sun down until my eyes go blind 
I won't change direction and I won't change my mind 
How much difference does it make? 

I'll swallow poison until I grow immune 
I will scream my lungs out 'til it fills this room 
How much difference does it make?             -Pearl Jam "Indifference"

How much difference does it make?  None.  Sometimes when it seems like no one is listening, it's because they aren't.  

As an adult, I'd like to lead by example.  Am I?  Am I living my best life?  No.  Am I good parent?  Maybe.  Am I a good teacher?  I think so.  I would like to go on record as saying that I wouldn't change anything about my life, but it's simply not true.  I want to rock out in front of a stadium of screaming fans.  I want to publish a best selling novel that I then adapt as a screenplay.  I want to be madly in love with my best friend.  I want to live in a house that doesn't systematically leak air from every seam.  I want to be at peace.  I literally have no idea how to do any of those things.  

When my car is broken, I take it to the mechanic.  When my light bulbs burn out, I replace the bulbs.  When a rip a hole in my jeans, I sew them back together.  
I don't' know what to do with this fucking mess I've made.  All on me. All my choices.  

When Kurt Cobain died, Andy Rooney said that Kurt Cobain's suicide made him angry:
"A lot of people would like to have the years left that he threw away," Rooney said.  "What's all this nonsense about how terrible life is?" he asked, adding rhetorically to a young woman you had wept at the suicide, "I'd love to relieve the pain you're going through by switching my age for yours."  In addition, he asked, "What would all these young people be doing if they had real problems like a Depression, World War II or Vietnam?"  and commented that, "If he applied the same brain to his music that he applied to his drug-infested life, it's reasonable to think that his music may not have made much sense either."

 ... Dick.

I think that most adults secretly think this way.  We descend into thinking that life is something to "deal with" and "accept" rather than to seek out and experience and enjoy and change.  Life, by nature, needs to be modified in order to be successful.  Hunkering down and passively accepting that which has become ordinary is not the ideal.  No one lives through their younger years hoping that eventually they will end up on a dead-end street of work and drudgery.  They just don't.  So why are adults so happy to accept any version of life as long as it doesn't suck?  And even if it doesn't suck, we accept things which a younger version of ourselves would never have thought was okay.

I need to spend even just a small part of every day trying to be the other version of myself that I have in my imagination.  The version of me in my head is so much cooler than the one I see in the mirror every morning.  I want to get there, and I'm going to do it.  My drug-infested life might not have a Vietnam or a WWII, but it has the viscosity of a disaster ready to rise from the ashes.  And while my ideals might not make sense to anyone but me ... I. Am.  And that's all that matters.

On Smoking

I realize that smoking cigarettes is currently, sociologically unpopular.  I also realize that cigarettes kill (numerically) airplanes full of people on a daily basis.  But … there is something really, truly aesthetically pleasing about smoking a cigarette.  There is something quite lovely about the sulphur on a match igniting and subsequently meeting the end of an untainted, white tube of tobacco, followed by the sudden, sweet rush of smoke into one’s mouth and lungs.  It’s jarring, and then consequently enormously relaxing to pull the smoke in through the lips, to treasure it, then to expel it back again into the fresh air.  (Smoking outside is the key; indoors, the smoke is too concentrated and toxic.  And yes, I see the obvious oxymoron or juxtaposition or whatever you want to label it.)

The key is to smoke a cigarette when 1) no one else is watching, or 2) to smoke with people who will not judge you.   Finding these two conditions is, for me, quite difficult, as I live with children who have been taught that smoking is bad, and I also live in society where, well, smoking is bad.

I smoked cigarettes for most of my adolescence, and then into adulthood.  I quit when my son, who was then about 10 months old, picked up my pack of cigarettes from the table leading out to my deck (I was only smoking outside by then, because secondhand smoke is obnoxious and rude and harmful to others) and starting eating them.  I came into the kitchen about 30 seconds too late, and he was vomiting up MY cigarettes, which I had left within reach of a newly walking person.  I quit immediately, cold turkey.

That was about 16 years ago.  It was only recently that I tried less chemically-laced cigarettes, and found that (in moderation) cigarettes are quite lovely.  I’m not endorsing the stank-mouth, foul-smelling lifestyle I once ignorantly embraced; I’m just saying that there is a time and a place for a trail of smoke wafting off into the distance and a few consciously-pulled drags from a cigarette.  That TIME and PLACE needs to be carefully timed, or else the cigarette-smoking experience is ruined.

Here are the rules:

·         None of my younger children can be present, imminently present, or even accidently/potentially present.  They make me paranoid and self-conscious, and thus ruin the aesthetics. 

·         There must be a cocktail within reach.

·         I must have food in my stomach.

·         Ideally, I can call someone on the phone, who I would never in a million years be caught smoking in front of.

As you can see, these limitations severely hinder my ability to smoke (which is good) and also make the experience rare, satisfying, and personal. 

In a day and age when everything is bad for you and neuroses is the norm, it’s the little things that can make one moment a celebration of both lung capacity and social rebellion.  

I'm sitting outside on my patio, and through the backyards I can see into someone's bay window.  The sun is kind of fading, and the family seems to be sitting around a table doing something, backlit by the lights in their living room.  There's a kid out in the street playing catch with his dad in the street in front of their house, and I can tell they're chatting it up about something, even though I can't hear them.  It's like a fucking Norman Rockwell moving picture.  Meanwhile, I'm over here sitting at an empty table with my computer.  No one is home; they all have their other things going on.  One's eating at a lovely Japanese steakhouse.  One is at a raucous slumber party.  One is on her own, living life in a different house.  And one is ... well, who cares where that one is.

The cicadas are droning and my Tibetan prayer flags are barely swaying in the breeze.  If Norman Rockwell is to my right, to my left is some kind of suburban ghetto house:  busted-up deck that has to be some kind of housing violation, blue tarp over a hole in the roof that has somehow survived several years of weather, trash littering the yard, and four shitty, rusted grills in various disorder.

Yes, I am so lonely and bored that I am describing my view.  I don't know what else to do.  What does a person who is moderately old and has no love- or social life do?  Go to a bar by myself?  (No thanks.)  Treat myself to dinner?  (Sad.)  Wander the neighborhood hoping to find someone else bored enough to talk to?  (I hate small talk.)  Have a cocktail?  (Check, that's the one thing I have.)

---

After about 10 minutes of spacing out, I looked over at the Rockwell family again, and no one has moved.  Maybe it's all an illusion, and those people I see are just cardboard cutouts put there to create a vision of family.  That would actually make more sense, because I can't seem to figure out why everyone seems to have an engaging life except me.  I talked to a kid who's going to a prestigious, pretentious college this fall, and he admitted that he just sat around playing his instrument and watching netflix and going for insanely long walks every day this summer.  Maybe that sort of reality is more commonplace for people who dislike pretending to care about the mundanity of everyday life.

As disgustingly hippie-ish as it sounds, I think I'd be better off in a commune, where like-minded people come and go, and are free to interact (or not) with their chosen community.  If I had any money, I'd start one.  It would be awfully hard to get me to accept your "friend request" for that commune, but once we were in, it'd be pretty great, I think.

For now, I'll have to just sit here and watch these prayer flags flutter, and hope that one day this purgatory will end.

Fuck You

Is that a good title?

I'm just wondering, since apparently the packaging of ideas is the central thing in America 2013.

People will look at and read things as long as there is a sufficiently radical tagline attached.  What does that say about people?!  I don't even want to spend more time than I already do thinking about it .  I'm confused about what excites and inspires people.  I used to think inspiration was about ideas, but obviously, I was wrong.  Or maybe, as long as it's a SHARED idea, then it's an okay idea to have.  Or maybe, if the "idea" can be conveyed in a six-second vine, then it's a solid idea.  Or maybe, if the "idea" is a blurted post on facebook about how you just took a shit or ate a sandwich or woke up late, then it gets to be valid.

I guess I'm either too old or too stupid or too intellectually pretentious to understand what "good" means anymore.

Syria

Are you fucking kidding me?  Why are we helping other people commit murder?  Both sides are a death squad.  There is no winning in this, or any other conflict like it.

Reality Bites

This reality thing is kind of a buzz-kill.  I don't know what I expected from life, but life is not what I hyped it up to be.  I kind of thought there was a pattern, like love and happiness and occasional valleys; but what I've found is bottomless pits of anxiety and overwhelming sadness, and tragic idealism gone awry.

I want to be happy.  I will myself happy all the time, but when I look at the reality erupting around me every day, I feel nothing but chronic fatigue.  I have become necessary to people only in what I can provide for them, and there is no one there in return.  I am loved by my children, but only in the sense that a child feels obligatory love to his or her parents.  They are usually kind, in between bouts of raging narcissism and blinding self-interest.

I am alone in my work, in my home, and in my bed.  Yes, much of that is a product of both my introversion and my decisions, but I have always been willing and able to let in the right people:  People who share some idealism about a better day and a soulful future.

Where are those people?

Where are the people who genuinely care?  I can't find them.  Maybe I don't care enough to find them anymore.  Maybe I am like the walking wounded, who wander around in a self-inflicted stupor due to past and present neglect and abuse.  Maybe I'm the one alienating myself, because I'm afraid to throw out filaments to other people, since humankind has been so cruel in the past.

Perhaps my existential dilemma is that of many philosophers who see the problem and the potential answer, and then watch people choose the opposite of kindness and empathy and knowledge every day.  If so, then checkmate, life.  You win.

Why So Hostile?

I just got off the phone with my husband.  I texted him with a simple question.  At maximum, at would have taken five words to answer.  At minimum, a single word answer would have sufficed.  But every time I text him, he wants to call.  You would think that when I didn't answer the house phone, and then I didn't answer my cell phone the first time, he would have gotten the message, but no.  He wants to call and tell me things that I don't care about, and ask me questions that a 40-something-year-old man should be able to figure out all by himself.

Statement (from him):  "I read your text."  (Pause.  Full stop when I don't respond.  Did you ask me a question?  Do you have an answer for MY question?  Why are you calling me?)
Question (from him):  "Are you there...?"  (Yes, I'm here.  I just answered the phone.  Again, did you ask me something?  I repeat the texted, SIMPLE question and get a 100 word rambling response riddled with excuses and nonsense, followed by many more unrelated statements about things I already know and don't care about.)
Question:  "So what's the plan for Friday?"  (My answer is that I don't have a plan.  The subtext is that even if I HAD a plan, he wouldn't be a part of it, because our lives are completely separate.)
Question:  "Do you just want to write me a check for _____________?"  (He's asking about payment for something for one of our children - the second time this week, for different expenses.  Why the fuck would I want to write him a check/pay for something which is FOR ONE OF OUR CHILDREN?  When did I become the bank for every incidental expense incurred in our household? - Answer to my rhetorical question:  the moment we had children, apparently; or the moment he decided to drop out of college and get a series of shitty jobs.)
Question:  "Well, how do you expect me to pay for it?"  (Answered with some snarky shit by me about how whenever expenses exceed HIS budget they go on MY credit card, since I make so much money as a teacher.)
Question:  "What are you doing for your birthday?"  (In my head, the answer is "be left alone, please", but aloud, I say, "I haven't thought about it.  I don't want to do anything."  Because I don't want to fake through a happy, pretend marriage on my birthday, of all days.  I'd rather sit on a park bench and talk to total strangers.)
Question:  "Why so hostile?"  (My answer:  "I have to go.")

But hmm ... now that I've had a minute to think about it, let me make a list of reason I'm so hostile.  Just for you, honey:

1. You ask stupid questions that an adult shouldn't have to ask.  Grow up.
2. You pretend like everything is okay, when it isn't.
3. You never talk to me about anything important, only bullshit.
4. You act like all the terrible shit in the past is somehow not directly related to my animosity towards you, so you do nothing to fix the problems, only gloss over them.
5. You assume that I will take all responsibility for parenting our children because you are never home.
6. You then subsequently act like you are not at fault for anything, because you weren't here, and thus could not have been part of the problem.
7. Even though you're never home to parent or spend time with our children, you make sure to build "me time" into your days off.
8. You watch television incessantly when you ARE home.
9. You maintain superficial relationships with everyone, but can't manage to have a real relationship with anyone. 
10. You stopped being my friend about 10 years ago, and you stopped being someone I cared about shortly after that.  
11. You have broken my heart and my ego and my spirit so many times that I can't care anymore about anything you say.
12. You never listen to me, ever.  I have recurring nightmares about screaming for help, but no one hears me.  I wonder why ...

Why so hostile?  You, my love.  Now go away.

Major Dickhead

 In regard to the major who worked at Fort  Hood and murdered 13 people, why would the United States of America do what this asshole wants and kill him?  If he wanted to be a martyr for his faith, he failed. He's not dead.  If Allah really wanted him to succeed as a martyr, maybe he would have been killed by the gunfire from the brave military men and women who took him out after he murdered a bunch of innocent people.  But since that didn't happen, the United States shouldn't grant this idiot his last wish so that he can become something which he failed at trying to become.  I fail to understand why our country would even consider helping someone commit suicide in the name of an ideology that it vehemently opposes.  Sick and twisted humankind, in effect.

Advice to my children for when I'm dead and gone:

Squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom up, and put the cap on tight.  It's common sense.  Don't be a secret slob with globby toothpaste and a rusty razor in your medicine cabinet.

Don't double- fist electronics.  You look like a tool, it's making you dumber, and you slowly become incapable of paying attention to anything for more than 30 seconds.

Don't leave your dirty shit laying around.  No one, not even a person who loves you, wants to pick up your shit.

Just because other people are acting like assholes, you can still be kind.  Somebody ought to be the good guy.

Books are life reincarnated.  You can learn from other people's suffering and find solidarity with the human condition just by paying attention to what is recorded by people in books.

Don't eat your feelings.  You'll get fat and then be even less happy than you were before you picked up the chocolate.

When someone treats you like shit, you're allowing it.  Stand up for yourself, and people will respect you more.

Never underestimate the power of a hot bath.  Add a candle, and you have the equivalent of a session of therapy (for a lot less money).

Really listen to music:  the radio is fine, but get deep with Head music and old hip hop and French acoustic and Latin jazz and Deep South blues.  You never know what you might hear that changes your life.

Learn to play an instrument so you can express yourself a different way.  

Never stop learning.  Seriously.  Not in a "school" way, but in a "life-is-exceptional-and-there-are-millions-of-cool-things-to-learn-about way".

Don't let other people try to tell you how you feel.  (And someone will always be around to try.)

Get your teeth cleaned; bad breath is repulsive. (No really...)

Travel.  Don't get stuck in one place.  Life doesn't exist in a vacuum.  If all your "people" look the same, you need to mix it up a little.

Make friends; life can be very lonely when there's no one to talk to.  (Trust me, I know.)

When you're old enough, drink champagne just because it's Tuesday or something - make your own occasions to celebrate. 

Acknowledge that popcorn and diet Dr Pepper can be a good breakfast combo.

Above all, be good to yourself, because the world can be a pretty harsh place, and the last thing you need is to beat up on yourself.

Junior high, in effect

They say that junior high contains some of the worst times in a person’s life.  I didn’t really hate junior high, so it’s not like I’m biased or anything, but I do teach high school, so I hear the stories about how awkward junior high is.  And I watch the freshman walk in at the beginning of the year and act like total heathens, because they don’t know any other way to act, apparently.  It’s reflex and hormones in action.

But my youngest child just crossed the threshold of junior high.  She was kind of irrational before, but in the last five days, she has turned into a monster.  Raging hormones plus peer pressure plus imagined versions of how things should be plus asinine social media apps that require no brains and lots of over-sharing.

Currently, she is not speaking to me because she needs money tomorrow for FCS to make pillows.  She doesn’t have an exact dollar amount because she couldn’t remember to bring a piece of paper home.  For five days in a row.  It’s a fucking piece of paper.  One.  I’ve heard a hundred stories about who likes who and who said what, but I haven’t heard a single thing about school and what’s required of her, because in her brain, those things don’t matter. 

How does a person talk (rationally) to a person who is hormonally irrational?  It seems like I forget the symptoms of adolescence every time one of my kids hits that particular threshold.  Perhaps it’s evidence that people should just have all their kids at once?  I have no idea.  All I know is that in addition to the 150 hormonal kids at school every day that I have to try to teach something, I come home to irrational children of my own, who have a hard time thinking through seemingly simple tasks like “bringing home a piece of paper.”  

Teaching Motto, in brief

“You gonna be my nigga forever.  Don’t forget that.”  -Tupac

That’s going to be my new class motto at school.  I feel it’s apropos in a lot of ways; they do, in fact, keep coming back into my life long after they have graduated. 

“Better Together” is my current school motto.  Mine’s better.

The only thing I’m going to miss when I quit teaching is the interpersonal relationships I make with certain students.  I can’t say that I reach or bond with all of them, because that’s a lie, but the ones who make an impact are there forever.  It’s hard to impact people when like if you have a job scanning items at a store or whatever.  I have pretty cool access to people at my job, and I’m definitely going to miss that.  Even when I want to pull my hair out, my job is a good one. 

All good things have to end.  

Distraction as a Disease

I’m lost. 

I flounder around every day in a muddle of “parenting”, “housekeeping”, reading, and distracting myself with electronics.  The first two are in quotes, because I don’t think I’m doing either one of them particularly well.  I used to be a pretty good parent, documenting all the semi-relevant occasions with photographs and taking the kids on diversionary field trips, but I have a really hard time caring any more.  It’s not that I don’t love my children; I do.  They are my life.  But I’m slacking on the job.  Probably because they would rather have me leave them alone most of the time.  (That is, of course, until the very second they need something, at which time I need to be immediately accessible.) 

I am the only one who cleans my house.  My roommates are pigs of the first order.  You wouldn’t know it just by walking in my house, because I wander around all day picking up the remains of the things they’ve left behind.  Half-empty water glasses are everywhere, laundry is in piles wherever they stripped off their clothes, dishes are piled by the sink (or washed in a half-assed way so that I have to wash them again), labels and wrappers and containers and set wherever they ran out of product to encase …

A good parent would kick their ass and make them pick all that stuff up, but … I don’t want to fight with them, and I feel like a naggy bitch when I have to tell them over and over and over to do simple things.   And I don’t want to take them places, because I’m the only one who pays, and they’re probably going to complain that it’s boring or too hot or whatever.  So what’s the point?

I read, which is great, but every five minutes or so, I set down my book and pick up my phone to play Words with Friends.  Sad.  How can I chew out my children for sticking their faces in a device (or two) when I tend to do the same thing?!  I have no husband around (and when he’s around … well, if you read the blog, you know he just pisses me off with his face) and no friends to speak of, so I distract myself constantly with bullshit. 

I don’t know if I’ve written about this before (and I’m too lazy to go back and find out), but two of my favorite movies are A Good Year and Under the Tuscan Sun.   (I am also partial to Sideways and Bottle Shock.)  What the first two have in common is beautiful scenery of European vineyards (the second two are Californian), beautiful people, beautiful accents, love, and wine.  I haven’t been in love for so long that I want to have this huge romantic adventure in a place with fabulously brown, foreign people.  I watch these movies and I place myself in the situation and daydream about the possibilities of uprooting myself in favor of sweeping coastlines and fragrant vines and celebratory harvests. 

The truth is that I’m too much of a coward to leave my life here.  BUT:  I truly envy people who live in a place where there are no distractions.  Places where television is sporadic, and maybe has three channels.  Places where WiFi zones aren’t every single place you are.  Places where children still romp around imaginatively rather than gathering in groups to stick their faces in screens and take pictures of stupid shit they happen to be doing.  Places with culture and flavor and ambience. 

I guess I’m being nostalgic or hyperbolic or something; I just long for things to be simpler.  I wish for days when my children weren’t so jaded about life based on the bullshit they see on tv and on the internet.   I wish that Ridiculousness wasn’t a show and that The Kardashian’s would go fuck themselves.  Privately.  I wish that Honey Shit-Face (or whatever that little fat girl’s name is) wasn’t a person who was celebrated by American society so that I could show my children that doing something with your life could be construed as valuable and contributive rather than just stupid and entertaining. 

In that, I guess I’ve failed.  Both for them and for me.  

American Tragedy

                                                                                                                                        

American Indian culture has always fascinated me.  I have a minor in Native American Studies, because once I started taking the college courses, I found all this incredibly rich subtlety in the culture and literature and traditions.  My favorite part was learning about Indians living TODAY, not all the shitty pilgrim stories.  Unfortunately, most people look at Indian culture as being past tense.  They don’t see it existing in 2013, only as footnotes in a history book.

But the one time Americans DO hear about Indians (as least in the mid-west) is a direct tie to liquor.  In a nutshell, settlers brought alcohol to the country, Indians got a hold of it, Americans didn’t like that (they want to keep their alcoholism all to themselves apparently), so Thomas Jefferson barred the sale of alcohol “under any pretense” in Indian country.  Even after the stupid and ineffective national prohibition of alcohol went away (because it didn’t work) in 1933, the federal government still banned it from reservations for another two decades. 

Some tribes have since decided to allow the sale of alcohol, but many do not.  One such staggering example is in Pine Ridge.  The sale of alcohol is banned on the reservation.   The sale of alcohol is NOT banned in Whiteclay, Nebraska, 200 feet from the reservation border.  The four stores in Whiteclay sell the equivalent of about four million cans of beer annually, mostly to residents of the reservation, since the population of Whiteclay is 14 at last official count.  66% of the Lakota people at Pine Ridge suffer from alcohol addiction. 

 

66%.  Holy shit.

Indians walk to Whiteclay and buy beer.  It’s pretty fucked up that the business owners in Whiteclay prey on a demographic so susceptible to alcoholism.  But this IS America, after all, and the economy is driven by supply and demand.  There is a demand for beer on the reservation.  Business owners supply it.  Nobody is forcing these people to walk down the highway to buy beer.  They do it willingly and often.  They are also not being forced to stay on the reservation if that life is not to their liking.  It’s not a concentration camp; they can walk away at any time.  OR…

The Indians could provide a support system for the people suffering from debilitating alcoholism.  When a Lakota tribal elder came to Lincoln, NE the other day to talk to the governor about the Whiteclay situation, he walked out almost immediately when it was suggested that the tribe take some responsibility and provide treatment programs.  That’s pretty ridiculous.  The U.S. government is not in the position to shut down stores just because some people make bad choices with what’s being sold there. 

I would think the Indians would know by now that Americans kind of suck in terms of caring about other people’s problems.  Every man for himself, and all that.  So maybe this is a test of the Lakota people – not as victims of a bloody war, like in the past – but rather as a step toward becoming independent and strong in the face of struggle.  To become the stereotypical “warrior”, defending their pride and strength as people. 

It may sound harsh, but these Indians need to sack up and run these stores out of business by NOT BUYING THEIR PRODUCT rather than holding protest signs and complaining to the Nebraska legislature.  Their ancestors certainly didn’t fight and die for a future that looks like Pine Ridge does right now.  

Abort Your Laws, First

Sex is cool, right?  Sex feels good.  Sex sells products.  Sex inspires people.  Sex is the social taboo, which is somehow also a cultural zeitgeist.   How can it be both?  How can rappers talk about skeeting all over bitches, (and that song is a party song), and skeet is radio-friendly, but bitches isn’t?  Really?  Are we all going to pretend that the radio DJs don’t know what those two words mean?!

Abrupt transition:  abortion.  I tell my students all the time that they can’t do persuasive speeches about abortion.  There are really a variety of reasons for this exclusion.  #1 is that they aren’t going to change anyone’s opinion in a 3-5 minute speech.  #2 is that I don’t want to listen to the incessant rambling of people who don’t know what the fuck they are talking about. 

I have never had an abortion.  I had two children prior to being married, a detail which is really no one’s business, but which is relevant to this argument.  I had wonderful parents who assisted in the child rearing, and my finances were fairly stable.  I am not every woman.  I am a woman.  One.  I do not, nor can I, speak for every woman.  For that reason alone, I am sick to death of this ignorant, irrelevant, vestigial, asinine, and ongoing legal argument about abortion. 

Are we STILL arguing about this?  How many people are in the world?  What number of people do the earth’s resources sustain?  How many countries allow rape as a legitimate recreational or penal activity?  How many men “accidentally” have growing fetuses in their innards?  How many unwanted, abused, neglected, malnourished children do we already have in the world?  Are we willing to support all of these unwanted children, financially, emotionally, and indefinitely?  Can we just stop this nonsense already and allow women the choice to evacuate a clump of cells (which, yes, of course, has the potential to become a child), if the women acknowledge that they neither want nor are willing to care for an impending child?  The very nature of these fucking ridiculous and prohibitive laws are an embarrassment to an enlightened culture.  

I have children, because I chose to have children.  As a mother (and a person of intellect and compassion and rationality), I would never impose my choice on someone else.  It was mine.  I will own it, and I will deal with the repercussions and responsibilities for the rest of my life.  We should expect nothing else from other people, than that they choose, they accept, and they act accordingly. 

If certain states make abortion prohibitive and illegal (again), it will result in the death of mothers, who already have a full and developed central nervous system, a family, and a life.  The difference between that woman and a clump of cells with potential is enormous.  As hyperbolic as it sounds, the slippery slope here allows for the banning of masturbation by men, simply because their sperm has the potential to become a life.  Potential is not actuality.

The ultimate irony is that the drum-thumpers of this procreative policy are Republican:   People who constantly run their mouths about how the government should stay out of the daily lives of its constituents!  Apparently, only in cases involving stealing large caches of money from people or leading them into a costly, deadly, endless series of wars.  The premeditated murder of war is seemingly okay, but preemptively eradicating a mass of cells is unthinkable.  What hypocrisy.  

Toxic

David Matthews asks in one of his songs, “do you remember when everyone wanted to be us?”  I remember.  We were far from perfect, but god, could we have a good time.  We partied like there was no tomorrow, all the time.  A rollicking good time.  For a while, at least.  At some point, years had passed, and my man decided it was still party time, but by then I was living in the world of grownups.  By the time he surfaced and took responsibility for his life, the rest of us had moved on to something different.  When your learning curve is too long, people stop waiting.  Somebody has to pay the bills and raise the kids and learn the everyday basics of home maintenance.  It’s called functioning.

And then when you wake up one day and decide to be responsible and adult (after you’ve already burned down the house, so to speak), the party is over.  You don’t get my sympathy, hanging out the 14^th floor (thank you, Radiohead).  Because you did it to yourself.  We all do.  We have to accept the product of our choices (since we made them), even when we don’t want to.  And due to all the personal baggage and compromises and bullshit we both create for ourselves and endure from others, we then accept the love we think we deserve (to pilfer from another better-than-me writer named Stephen Chbosky).  So I accepted this shitty, watered-down version of love and life, knowing all along that it wasn’t what I wanted.  More stealing?  Yes.  Albert Einstein this time:  “Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.”  Einstein knew what he was talking about there.

I changed because someone had to grow up and raise children and pay the mortgage and have a real job.  He wanted me to be the same crazy, happy, fearless girl I was at 21.  I truly believe that it is unhealthy NOT to change.  People are supposed to grow and change and amend and adjust their lives to fit the circumstances which surround them.  To not change is to stagnate.  Not changing also leads to pretending  – because whether you like it or not, life morphs around you. You can make-believe it’s not happening, or you can acknowledge and act accordingly.  To not acknowledge is toxic.  The very action of ignoring something shows your inability to deal with it appropriately, which in turn shows childish naiveté.

 tox-ic-i-ty (noun) 

1.        the degree to which something is poisonous

2.       the state of being poisonous to somebody or something

Our relationship became this thing.  Poisonous.  Venomous.  Don’t get me wrong; the venom took a very long time to work its way through the veins.  A long period of denial and compromising, which amounted to nothing in the long run.  Now, when I am around my husband of 15 years, I feel like I’m having a root canal.  I am anxious and angry and fucking annoyed (accidentally all A-words).  I asked him about five years to go away so that we could have time to regroup and get it together, and he refused,  I told him that we could maybe fix it if we could have some time apart, but he insisted that pretending everything was okay was the better route.  And now? 

in-ter-nec-ine (adjective)

1.       relating to or involving conflict within a group or organization

2.       damaging or injuring participant on both sides of a conflict

a.       mutually destructive

Now this word has happened. 

When your significant other tells you that they have thought about killing themselves to alleviate the mental angst, and your response is … “oh” … then the relationship has failed.  It’s dead.  Stick a fucking fork in it.  This is your own personal Waterloo (to steal from Andrew Bird, the best intellectually musical snob of all).  No one wins.  Guess who else loses (over and over and over)?  The kids.  As much as you pretend that shit is fine; everyone else knows it isn’t.  My niece said the following sentence to me the other day:  “You better not do anything – you know he lost his dad too.”  WTF?!  She is six.  When I asked her what she meant, she said, “I don’t know!” and skipped away.  She doesn’t know what she’s talking about; she’s only parroting something she heard her parents say at home, and my face probably reminded her of it. 

How lovely to know that other people are talking about your relationship as if they have any idea what’s going on.  How inappropriate to even have an opinion on something so personal that has nothing whatsoever to do with you.  And how ironic that your brother seems to have no opinion on the whole matter, since talking about things is completely out of the question.  Talking = bad feelings.  Conversation about reality = arguing.  (Apparently, in his particular family, that’s the order of things.)

It didn’t have to be this hard.  Sometimes, the only way to repair something is to release the stranglehold you have on it.  I used to think that we could be cool, divorced parents who get along, but every day we are trapped in this “No Exit”, Satrean hell, the anger and bitterness and animosity and anxiety blooms into a palpable wall.  His insistence on pretense has created such a deep division of priorities, that I don’t see how it can ever be fixed.  His approach to the problem backfired in such a profound way, that I can’t even stand to look at his face anymore.  He is making me physically ill. 

Mostly, I blame him (obviously, based on the ranting…), but I also blame society’s ridiculous insistence that marriage has to be forever.  Nothing, and I mean nothing, lasts forever.  Things might change and grow, but everything changes.  You can either go with it or drown in the riptide of the past. 

BFH in the Middle East

Bloody Fucking Hell.  That's what BFH stands for, in case you were wondering.

I read today about Egypt:  the country which overthrew its dictatorial government in an effort to become more fair and free.  Unfortunately, Egyptians, now you're slaves to the Muslim Brotherhood and their asinine, prohibitive, misogynistic laws governing thought and subsequent behavior.  I do not understand this group of miscreants, honestly.  They are mouth-breathing cavemen with an attitude about thinking that comes straight out of unenlightened ignorance of reality.

Proof?  I'd love to ...
Insulting religion is a crime in Egypt.  The campaign against free thinking people targets (of course) intellectuals reaches the elite members of society to the rural teachers.  People who ... (wait for it) THINK.  Teachers are ground zero for the criminal procedings.  You know who else took such a stance?  Hitler.  Stalin.  Pol Pot.  A bunch of fucking assholes, that's who.

Contempt of religion is HEALTHY.  Anyone with neurons firing in their brain can see, OBJECTIVELY, that religion has done some really bad shit over the centuries.  Saying that out loud (in Egypt, at least) then becomes a jail sentence.  Even though these narrow-minded idiots lack evidence, the courts prosecute people and imprison them, simply out of FEAR of the religious zealots.  How sad.  Once again, if god is a thing, he/she would banish these assholes to the far reaches of hell for being so ungodly and stupid.  Mankind's job is NOT to do god's work.  That's god's job.  Get a job, contribute to your country's economy.  And then shut the fuck up. No one made you THE DECIDER just because you have a beard and an attitude.

When the government uses the vague laws against the people, and is afraid of the religious fanatics roaming the streets (instead of doing something productive to make their country a better place), your country has failed.  Unfortunately, Islam is failing all over the globe, because the people who follow it often use it as an excuse to act like vigilante god-police and exact (childish) vengeance over (perceived and irrational) crimes.

Get it together, people.  You're an embarrassment to humankind.

Suburbia in Effect

I live in Nebraska, arguably not the greatest place in America.  It's subzero in the winter and chokingly humid in the summer.  In between there are spring tornados and clogged gutters of autumn leaves.  Good stuff, right?

But sometimes ... Nebraska is a good place.  I had that epiphany earlier today when I was floating in my above-ground micro-pool, watching the trees sway and the flowers in bloom and the grass shimmering green in the sunlight.  Life exists in the way we look at things, as everyone knows.  I am often prone to looking past the beautiful things and fixating on the shitty bits.  Like there was a moment today when my eyes wandered to my roof - a veritable shit-fest of broken, crumbling, flaking shingles.  It's one of the roofs that even strangers out for a walk might look up and say, "what the hell happened there?"  I'll tell you what happened:  Nebraska weather.  But rather than cussing out my husband under my breath, I just closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of suburbia - distant lawn mower, chirping birds, scampering squirrels.  Seriously, that was all I heard for two hours. 

Here's the deal:  it's pretty inexpensive to live here (compared to the ridiculous cost of living in "cooler" cities), the schools don't suck, there's no real crime to contend with (at least where I live), and everything I could possibly need to live within a five-mile radius of my house.  My kids are fairly well-adjusted, no one I know is in jail, most people I care for are healthy, and I have full use of all my limbs.  You know?  Life could be worse. 

Smoke it

I've written about this before, but I am trying so hard to be a smoker again.  I smoked cigarettes for about 10 years or something.  I started when I was about 15 and it lasted well into my adult life.  And then I quit when my middle child picked up my pack of cigarettes from the shelf by the back door, ate a few, and then puked everywhere.  No shit; I just quit on the spot.  I was struggling to quit, and then I saw him barfing all over my kitchen and came to the realization (not a new one) that I was an asshole.  So I stopped smoking.

Fast forward to 15 years later, and I just want to smoke a cigarette!  I try to do it periodically, and it makes me physically ill.  I hate it.  I hate the taste and the lingering smoke and the "mouth skank," and all that shit.  AND YET ... I still want to be able to enjoy a cigarette now and then.  But (sadly?) I can't.  I am currently holding on to an un-smoked cigarette, just because it feels right in my hand, and the (theoretical) idea of it is lovely.

I assume that I am lucky that I don't like the taste anymore, because otherwise I would die of lung cancer.  BUT ... I think I've made it perfectly clear that I am trying to kill myself via poor life choices, so I don't see why my brain would resist so much to a simple (chemically engorged) cigarette!!  I even bought the ones with the Indian on the front, in an attempt to be "fresh" (or whatever shit they're selling).

I guess I'll have to drink myself to death instead (plus the pharmaceutical factor) - eventually, my heart will just give up, I'm thinking.  Hopefully it will be quick.

(I love how totally fucking morose this blog entry is.  It makes me happier.  Fucked up?  (No one asked you.))

Fucking Fracking

Here we go, New York Times ..

Full page advertisement put out by the U.S. Department of Commerce encouraging the Keystone Pipeline.  Why?  Because (they say) the pipeline will provide 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada.  Quote:  "That's 800,000 barrels a day that we won't need to import from countries that don't always share our values."

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME??!!

So ... most of the imports currently come from five countries: Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela and Nigeria.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Mexico and Venezuela and Nigeria and Saudi Arabia DON'T "share our values".  Mexico:  drug cartels are in control of that particular country, not the government.  Venezuela:  Hugo Chavez, anyone?  Nigeria:  totally corrupt government and death sentences for gay people.  Saudi Arabia:  Most of 9/11 hijackers came from here, and it's not allowed NOT to be Muslim here.  So, America.  Tell me again how these countries share our values?  

This ad is so fucking ridiculous that I'm almost just embarrassed for my country of origin.  Fracking (how will get our oil from Canada) is so incredibly dangerous that methane concentrations are 17x higher in drinking-water wells near fracturing sites than in normal wells.  Totally fine, right?

Hey, America:  pull your head out of your ass and realize that all oil sources are poisonous to the environment, and the only way we will avoid total contamination is to stop fucking driving cars everywhere all the time.  

Or don't.  Because that's the America that I know:  Delusional.  

Mid-life B.S.

It was just suggested to me (via the book I am reading) that "midlife crisis might be a response to life having run out of novelty."  Why, yes, Mr. Smith: I believe you are correct.  That is exactly the condition of my life, though I'm not sure it has much to do with the "mid-life" part - more the "conditions"  of my life.  If I do my job right and really pay attention and stay on my toes, teaching high school never has to be boring.  The rest of the bullshit - the aging, paunchy husband, the children who railroad me, paying bills, being a maid, and so on - sucks.  There is so much "unhappeningness" every day that I want to run out the door screaming.  Unfortunately, I don't know where to run, because there's nothing interesting anywhere near me.  Life has become depressingly predictable, and I'm not sure what the remedy for that is.

Midlife stages a confrontation between one's older and one's younger self, with the former apologizing to the latter and begging for a second chance.  I didn't have the highest of expectations in my youth, but I never would have put my future self in a shitty marriage with ennui eating away at me every day.  So my "remedy" to the nothingness is to paint things and rearrange them and make stupid lists of petty things which will occupy my mind (and my time) enough to (kind of) forget the nostalgia for a life I never really had in the first place.  Every self-help guru on the planet would tell me that my remedy is not only a huge waste of the limited time I have on this earth, but also slightly delusional, in the sense that I am trying to systematically murder time until I can just die and be done with all this petty nonsense.

It is not healthy to sleepwalk through life, and I think I might be doing it every day.  The only hopeful potential in this tale is that this "midlife crisis" is not yet a "tragedy".  I might be able to find a new path or discover myself again.  I don't know though; I spent so many years losing and forgetting myself, that I don't even know who to look for anymore.

42

I am 42.  Kurt Vonnegut was 42 when he finally published Slaughterhouse Five, one of my favorite books.  42 is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.  42 is the approximate angle at which an rainbow appears! 42 is the number with which god created the universe in Kabbalah.  Jackie Robinson wore number 42, and he was a stud.

42 is the last interesting number.

Is my life supposed to be so fucking lame?  I am choosing to be in a marriage I can't stand.   My husband is a large child, who wants to act like if you ignore something long enough it goes away. My kids totally railroad me into doing shit for them all the time.  They can't even pick their dirty laundry up off the floor, because they (subconsciously) know that I hate clutter, so I will pick it up.  I love my job, but I'm fairly sure that people have the totally wrong impression of who I really am, simply because I'm introverted., so they think I'm anti-social  AND .. I'm pretty sure the squirrels in my yard are emissaries of the devil, because they just LOOK at me when I walk outside rather than scurrying away.  (Just a theory.)

I can't even leave this shithole called Nebraska during summer break, because I'm poor as shit.  I can't afford anything, but my husband is currently out clothes shopping with my son, then off to a nice dinner, and then to a 3-D movie (aren't those like $15?!).  Why doesn't he buy some groceries instead (fucking asshole).  (Sorry, that was an organic anger, and I refuse to backspace/delete my feelings.)  Or buy grass seed for the gigantic rut he digs out beside our driveway with his car wheels?  (That shit is EXPENSIVE!!  Don't buy a house.)  Or fix the water spout in the backyard (which he started to fix and then totally fucked up and left broken).

Is this blogging supposed to make me feel good by writing my feelings down?  Because it's not working.

Shut it down.

Killing in the Name of ...

According to Urban Dictionary, BLASPHEMY is defined as “running into church on Sunday and screaming, ‘Jesus Christ is a fake, and you’re all going to hell!’”

According the regular dictionary, BLASPHEMY is defined as the act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God.

BLASPHEMY is all capital letters because apparently BLASPHEMY is really bad.  I don’t mean “I-ate-candy-instead-of-dinner” bad; I mean “I-AM-GOING-TO-BE-EXECUTED” bad.  (Different things.) 

Once again, I find myself reading The New York Times and wanting to have a proper freak-out about the state of humanity.  People are dumb as shit.  Truly, utterly, basely, inexcusably, pedantically ignorant.  Let me elaborate:  In Bangladesh (this time – I only single this country out because their radicals are currently splashed across my newspaper) Islamist (of course) fundamentalists (shocking, I know) are demanding the passage of an anti-blasphemy (sorry, BLASPHEMY) law.  They are demanding an amendment to their constitution which would ban intermingling between men and women and punish by execution Bangladeshi bloggers accused of blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad. 

Are you fucking kidding me?  

Not only are these jackholes backward, unenlightened cavemen, they are trying to impose their stupidity on the masses of other people in their country.  These fundamentalists are so ignorant, in fact, that they forgot the pillars of their religion.  Not one of those five pillars mentions beating people to death in the middle of the street because they disagree with you.  Actually, none of those pillars talk about separating men and women, either.  And I’m fairly sure blogging wasn’t a thing back in the day, so execution of people with an opinion would also probably not be favored by Allah.

Here’s the deal:  Christopher Hitchens was absolutely right when he said that religion poisons everything.   People take a simple concept like The Golden Rule and fucking pervert it and legislate it and package it up with an inspirational prophet at the helm, and … voila!  People who think they’re better than everyone else start dictating how everyone must act.  Ethics without thought.  Morality fueled by fear.  Critical judgment thrown out the window in favor of dogma and prudishness. 

I, for one, am sick of it.

Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead, but what most people ignore is the second part of that sentence from The Antichrist, which is:  “God is dead, and we have killed him.”  Indeed.  If there is a God, man (via religion) does everything in his power to harness that power, impose it on other people, and thus repudiate all the teachings of their prophet.  It’s sickening.  No church should have ANY power, because that church is simply a BUILDING which houses God.  That’s it.  It’s a PLACE. 

Let me put my feelings as succinctly as I can:  RELIGION SUCKS.  How’s that for blasphemy?  Do I have to insult your god for it to be blasphemy?  How about this:  if god is real, he/she would flush these fundamentalist killers down the fucking toilet.  IF your god condones such anti-human, misogynistic, childish, homophobic, murderous action, then your god sucks. 

The greatest thing about that last sentence is that it doesn’t matter.  People can make all the asinine, ridiculous, prohibitive laws they want, and people will still be people at the end of the day.  In other words, making stupid laws doesn’t make people less stupid.  If god wants to smite me, he or SHE will.  It’s none of your fucking business.  Get a job, contribute to the economy, and shut the fuck up.  Pray to whatever god suits you, and stop trying to enforce your bullshit on other people. 

Specifically, I want to take aim at the Muslim extremists who make their women cover up their bodies “to protect and respect “ them.  Over and over I hear that, in order for men not to be tempted, women should cover up.  “Not to be tempted”?!  Are you a 12-year-old boy?  Do you have a mental retardation that would stop you from attacking a woman because her ankles are visible?  Or are you simply unemployed and/or feeling unsatisfied with your life, so you need “a cause” to “fight for”?  Are you serious in saying that men cannot control themselves in the presence of flesh?  And if so, what does that say about the intelligence and morality of your men??

This whole ideology of religion and punishment for sins is simply embarrassing.  WHY is it necessary to impose religious ideology on other people?  WHY is it so hard to believe that life is what it is, and there is no afterlife to kill and die for?  WHY do the churches in my area feel it necessary to market their “product” via glossy, expensive fliers espousing their desire to save my soul?

Some of us do not require “saving”.  We do not need Jesus/Muhammad/Xenu/Buddha/Joseph Smith to lead the way to behaving well.  We get it.  Leave us alone. 

One last thing:  you can take your fatwas and shove them up your ass.  They mean nothing.  And if Allah is there, the killers will burn in hell for all eternity for killing in the name of rage rather than god.  

So many thoughts, and so little time.

I don't know how the intellectuals of the past did it.  Yes I do, that was a lie, sorry.  They were able to sit around and write without interference from another job.  Their JOB was to write.  If that was my job, I would be proliferate, seriously.  I have so many words racing around in my head, that it makes me dizzy,  I write novels and essays and screenplays in my head every day and all night long (while I'm busy not sleeping).  The problem is that I can't keep those thoughts in my head long enough to write them down.  OR ... they're gone before I wake up the next day.  It's grossly unfair that an entire opus can appear to me in the wee hours of the morning, but I don't have the mental strength to get up and write it out, not do I have the memory to sustain the ideas into the waking hours.

Oh well.

What's a girl to do but keep on teaching ideas which most people ignore and writing a blog which no one reads?

And then the pity stops and we move on to the writing.  When Stephen King tells me to carve out a space for myself and spend 10 hours a day writing, I want to punch him in his freakish mouth.  Who the fuck can do that?  (Published authors, who can sit around, that's who.)  I don't have time.  But here's the real deal:  maybe I don't have the ability to do anything.  Maybe I'm just lying to myself so I feel better.

Okay, so this isn't helping, I'm signing off.

Philosophy, again

Knee-deep in words right now.  Research papers at night and speeches all day.  It's extraordinary to see the suspension of disbelief which some students have, jarringly contrasted to the iron-clad prison of ideology to which other students chain themselves.

My favorite moment of the day came after a student presented his speech on Nietzsche, and another student said, "wow, he was pretty hopeful, huh?"  Now THAT is what I'm talking about.  Nietzsche was hopeful?  Yes!  He was!  He was an idealist!  He saw the potential of humankind and held out hope for anyone to be enlightened at any time (even though he recognized that most people are stupid and greedy and don't want to think and move like herd animals).  BUT ... this presenter didn't approach Nietzsche as a god-hating misanthrope.  He talked almost exclusively about The Birth of Tragedy and how art and music transcend the dreary bullshit in life and elevate people to something ... beyond.  He talked about the intoxication (which no one but me seemed to notice) that music and art can induce.  And while this kid was speaking ... he believed in it.  And even though I was already a believer in Nietzsche on every level, he made me love this profound German, syphilitic, church-bashing, misunderstood thinker even more for a while.

All I want to do is induce reciprocal learning.  I realize that notion may sound naive or nerdy or whatever, but I don't really care.  Teaching should be transcendent every single day.  No joke.  Even if that transcendency (a word?) is only for a little while (55 minutes to be exact), it's worth my time and effort.  Always.

As a side note, even though a handful of the papers I've read tried to tell me that their philosopher was a hypocrite or failed or sucked in general, I know the incredible impact these philosophers have made on society.  If the works speak to people, who cares if the writer achieved his or her goals?  (Except for Ben Franklin who I increasingly hate every time I hear anything about his life - so he's off the list in the future.)  Their brilliance is in identifying the fundamental struggles we all face.  And those of us who live in the intellectual realm every day understand the importance of expressing our ideology, even if we can't reach our own ideological bar.

I can still try.   I can still contemplate.  I can still live out my version of the struggle.  Life is good.

Philosophy: The Breakfast Cereal

I fucking love philosophy.  Does that make me weird?  Probably.  Is it additionally weird that I love the darkest of the philosophers like Nietzsche and Kafka and Sartre and Camus and Vonnegut and Thompson and Orwell and Pessoa and Morrissey?

I don't care!!  Fornication with odd ideas is a good strategy - no strings attached.  I can read about all these different ideologies without prejudice and learn about misanthropy and idealism and happiness and morbidity and failure and introspection and the cold and broken hallelujah.  And in doing so, I can feel a solidarity with all those feelings without feeling too alone or too crazy, because other intellectual people share both my bliss and my neuroses.  It's comforting, even when it's disturbing.  If Nietzsche, a guy who was dealing with tertiary syphilis and the utter betrayal of those closest to him, could declare at the end of his life that:  “The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest ” -
well, then I can handle my personal shit.

So when Morrissey occasionally reminds me that "time's tide with smother you" - it makes me more ready for the suffocation of life, because I remember not only his sweet voice, but also the idea that all the shit that happens in life IS smothering me.  I just have to find a way to breathe.  And when I can't find a way to breathe anymore ... well, I'll be done with it all.  Camus will finally be speaking a truth about suicide which I can celebrate.  Even though he couldn't follow through with the ultimate exit, that doesn't mean it's impossible or even implausible for other people who are at the end of their road.  I suppose it you're still alive, you're not yet at the end of your road.

Maybe all of us bleak thinkers are simply idealists, drowning in the shit of humanity.  We see the potential, and then we see people not living up to that potential.  That's a crushing weight to bear.  As Salinger so aptly said, we're all a bunch of goddamn phonies.  The worst part is that we KNOW we are, but we just can't help it.  And us idealists are just like, "really?  Ya fuckers?  Is this what's happening?"  And yep.  People are still doing their shitty, mean, acts every day.  To themselves and to other people.

But I want to believe.  I see your guns and bombs and insults, and I raise you with truth and respect and tolerance.  Get it together, people.

Let me leave you with another idealist, mr e e cummings:

“Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you”