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There’s a lyric in Lady Gaga’s ripoff song “Born This Way” that says, “Cuz God makes no mistakes.”  This was not the first time I’d heard this sentiment expressed, and not the first time I thought it was absolute Disneyesque hippy garbage.  To disabuse Miss Gaga of this ridiculous notion, I’d invite her to spend a little time looking at pictures and videos of the myriad babies born everyday whom are so horribly disfigured that their deformities condemn to die within days or weeks of being born, and those days or weeks will in many cases be spent in absolute and constant physical agony, after which death with be a relief.  I have adherents of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam explain their respective religions’ teachings on this issue, and am familiar with the various rationales used by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic and its various saints who wrote on the subject.  Saint Augustine (who was basically God’s attorney) tells us that “evil” is not something that God created because it is not actually a thing.  It is a privation.  That is, what we perceive as evil is simply an absence of Gods love and presence.  Which is a positively brilliant argument.  However, I reject it and all of the other justifications for painfully deformed newborns out of hand.  These babies are, as the song says, literally “born this way.”  They never even had a chance to do anything to deserve such a fate.  You can cite karma, past lives, the sins of the father, we mortals being unable to comprehend God’s plan with our infinitesimally limited perspective, original sin, whatever.  I say horseshit.  I’m not buying it.  I’m an atheist, so I understand that horrendously deformed babies and all the other horrible aspects of existence are not directed, not personal, not punitive, but simply the result of most of what happens is a result of random chance and chaos.  But if you’re going to espouse the idea of an omniscient and omnipotent creator God, then you can’t somehow say He’s responsible for everything that exists and intentionally created the way it all exists, and kiss His ass with thanks and praise every Sunday morning and then not dump an Olympic amount of blame on his hallowed lap for all the fuck ups.  Whatever it takes to get you through the night, I guess.  But He sure as hell doesn’t deserve 100% on his review with this “God makes no mistakes” nonsense.  If you believe in a creator god, then I think he probably has a pretty reasonable performance review coming up…probably something in the high 80s…a solid B.  He gets a lot of shit right.  But 100%. Absolutely not.  My ignorant and sinning ass could do better than that.  Maybe not with all the issues…I have no experience managing the rotation of the planets or creating stars or black holes or anything.  But if I was as all-powerful as you credit Him as being, I would at least manage not to fuck up the newborns.

N.P.: “In the Name of the Father” – Bono, Gavin Friday

It wasn’t a chemical imbalance, and it wasn’t drugs and alcohol. I think it was much more that I had lived an incredibly American life. This idea that if I could just achieve X and Y and Z, that everything would be okay. There’s a thing in the book about how when somebody leaps from a burning skyscraper, it’s not that they’re not afraid of falling anymore. It’s that the alternative is so awful. And so then you’re invited to consider what could be so awful…that leaping to your death would seem like an escape from it. I don’t know if you have any experience with this kind of thing. But it’s worse than any kind of physical injury. It may be in the old days what was known as a spiritual crisis…feeling as though every axiom in your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing. And that you were nothing. And that it’s all a delusion, and you’re so much better than everybody ’cause you can see how this is just a delusion, and you’re so much worse because you can’t fucking function. It’s really horrible. I don’t think that we ever change. I’m sure that I still have those same parts of me. Guess I’m trying really hard to find a way not to let them drive.
~ David Foster Wallace

Jayson Gallaway

June 22, 2019

“We often meet our destiny on the road we take to avoid it.”
~ Jean De La Fontaine

After the revolution, on my first day in office as President, or Sexy and Benevolent Leader, or Illustrious Potentate, or whatever of the United States, I will outlaw the observance of Daylight Saving Time.
A recent poll of random adults at the bar waiting for a table at Red Lobster in northern California revealed that 90% of all Americans think daylight saving time is an outdated and pointless exercise in arbitrary adherence to tradition.  The other 10% are idiotic twats.
I have never understood how so many allegedly intelligent, free-thinking people could be so-easily convinced to do something so fundamentally silly.  For four decades now, I’ve been listening to people embarrass themselves trying to explain their adherence to this absurdity, patiently enduring their assaults on logic and reason as they slowly reveal that they themselves don’t really understand this nonsense either.
There seem to be three basic arguments these pedants of chronology employ.  to wit:
  1. Benjamin Goddamit Franklin, may God rest his sweet, patriotic soul, invented daylight saving time just like he invented electricity and he was obviously a genius and how dare you or any other non-genius fuck with Uncle Ben’s ideas.   They didn’t put your ugly ass on the hundred dollar bill now, did they?  Alright, look…you need to remember a couple of things.  Absolutely, Ben Franklin was a genius.  A great many of his inventions propelled America and mankind into the future that we enjoy today.  However, Ben Franklin lived in a world without electric light and climate control.  His nights were lit solely by candles and oil lamps, and even though his idea of shifting the clock around was pretty clearly meant as a joke, and he had likely been into his cups when he wrote this letter, it did make some bit of sense then to suggest that opening business an hour earlier during certain months of the year would reduce candle usage. American businesses haven’t relied on candlelight or oil lamps in more than a century.  Even candle shops now use electric light and computers.  The position of the sun no longer has anything to do with when we can and cannot work, play, cook, read, et cetera.   If B.F. were alive today, I suspect he would want to pimp-slap all those who have mindlessly remained allegiant to daylight saving time.  He invented his stove to more efficiently heat houses: he would certainly acknowledge that central heating and air is a vastly more safe and effective method of climate control, and would likely insist on having it in his house.
  2. It will save energy and money.  Poppycock.  Patently untrue.  In fact, the exact opposite holds true: hundreds of millions of dollars are lost every year due to employees arriving late for work, conference calls and meeting missed, and overall productivity lost.  Doctors tell us that dicking around with the clock and one’s sleep schedule increases the chances of heart attack significantly, leading to hundreds of millions of more dollars lost in medical expenses.  Sleep loss, the disruption of the Circadian rhythm, greater susceptibility to illness…all of things lead to lost productivity, lost money, and ultimately increased energy resources. And having citizens in the work force arrive home at the hottest part of the day ends up using significantly more energy than would be used otherwise.  Just ask Arizona.  They ignore DST (as does Hawaii) and they do just fine.  In fact, neither of those states have nearly the same number of rolling blackouts during the summer as California does.  We have them regularly throughout the summer, during DSL.  There has never been a rolling blackout during Standard Time.
  3. The farmers need daylight saving time to order to harvest their crops and get all their work done during the summer.  I can’t even begin to understand this one.  And I think that’s because this one falls in to the very strange category of many of the other lines of rationale I’ve heard to justify the menace of DST: people seem to actually think that DST adds an hour of time to the day.  Like we ACTUALLY get an extra hour of daylight or the days are ACTUALLY an hour longer than they would be during Standard Time.  To these poor souls I can say only that I will include you in my nightly prayers and hope that you aren’t a registered voter.  Farmers go to work when the sun comes up, and they don’t spend the day watching the clock, waiting for 5 o’clock so they can knock off.  Hell no.  They quit work when it’s so dark they can’t see what they’re doing.  They don’t give the slightest of damns if you insist it’s 5:00pm or midnight: just stay out of their way.
The practice of hourly timekeeping only began in the United States once train travel began: people needed to know when the hell they needed to be at the station to catch their train.  Fair enough.  And today’s world is governed by the clock.  Fine.  But let’s just settle on what time it is and then leave it that way.

It’s Super Sunday.  The entire herd of idiots has converged someplace downstairs.  Bellowing idiot sounds at each other, getting louder so as to be heard over the others.  Christ…now they’re moving furniture around.  This does not bode well.
I am not a big football fan.  Nor am I a little one.  The truth is I don’t watch football at all.  Not voluntarily, anyway.  I’ve watched a Superbowl from time to time, but that usually had something to do with getting laid.  Outside of that, though, I can’t really be bothered.  It’s a pointless game with esoteric rules and far too many pads to be entertaining.  Besides, I heard there were going to be male cheerleaders this year.  So yeah, just another Sunday.
Note to self: there is no place called Whiskey & Wings.  If there was a place called Whiskey & Wings, I would live there.  Next time you’re thinking about opening a restaurant: Whiskey & Wings.  God yes.
N.P.: “Evil Ways” – Blues Seraceno