Today and always.
Category Archives: Lucubrations
There are about 149 reasons I can thinking of off the top of my head that I want to get this book finished, but the biggest one, dearest reader, is so that I can finally talk about this shit. Before this book was conceived, and after my previous experiences with such things, I had decided that I would do no publicity for whatever I wrote next. No interviews, no signings, no readings, nothing. But I’m going to have to totally reverse course on most of that due to the nature of this book. I make a lot of assertions and posit a lot of conclusions that differ from many widely held beliefs in psychology. So I’m going to have to defend a great deal of it to some people with rather a lot of letters after their names. Which I’m fine with, but that means I have to be precise and exacting with the language and overall writing, much more so than anything I’ve done previously. Hench the ludicrous amount of time it is taking.
N.P.: “Lunatic Fringe” – Red Rider
Today is the eater of dicks. It started off okay enough, but by 10:00 I was looking for friends to talk me down from the mushroom-cloud-laying mood that was rapidly setting in. No luck. And things have only gone south.
99 days.
N.P.: “Sad But True” – Metallica
Aw fuck, the stupid Oscars are on. Another masturbatory, self-congratulating salad toss of an awards show. Honestly, those things ceased being relevant long ago. Did they ever find anybody to host this cinematic circle jerk? Thought they might have The Juss do it…why not? He’s not doing anything these days. Hell, they should have asked me…I’d’ve done it. I would have hosted the shit out of the show. Meh. Maybe next year. #fuckHollywood
N.P.: “The Dope Show” – Marilyn Manson
Okay, dear reader, I promise I’m going to stop reading the news. But there’s so much intrigue!
Anyway, I think the American ISIS brides, women who knowingly and intentionally traveled to ISIS territory with the explicit purpose of joining ISIS (and/or getting married to and banging ISIS fighters) should absolutely be let back into the United States. And shot upon arrival. Unless they are to be detained, brought to Washington, and then shot on the White House lawn. That would also be acceptable.
N.P.: “Saladin” – Hybrid
This shitbag.
It’s been a couple of years since I published my People I Want To Fight list, mostly because it hasn’t changed, and it’s dumb to keep publishing the same list year after year. But this asshole just made the list.
He, like millions of other Americans who seem to lack any ability to think critically, drank the Kool-Aid long ago on a particular narrative that simply isn’t true, but it’s very awkward to find oneself living life according to some narrative that doesn’t actually exist or that does not accurately reflect reality. That amount of cognitive dissonance is unacceptable and intolerable for some people. Despite all the evidence reality may have to offer, their neural pathways are so deeply carved to be allegiant to the narrative that they simply cannot alter the template of the narrative to fit over reality. So they choose instead the only other option…change reality to fit the narrative.
Which is what this idiot did. After spending years in Chicago, walking the midnight streets as an openly gay black man, he couldn’t get anyone to pick on him. So he cut letters out of a magazine and sent a threatening letter to himself at the studio where his stupid show is filmed. Exactly nobody gave a shit. “What does a brother have to do to become the victim of a hate crime these days?” he must have thought. And his answer to that was, evidently, pay a couple of other black guys several thousand dollars to pretend to pick on him. .
For some reason, the thing that made me want to fight this guy the most was when recounting his fictional events onstage to a crowd of tens (by reading from an index card?) , when he was done reading his bullet points, he concluded with, “And most importantly, I fought the fuck back,” Jackass. Maybe that’s why this makes me want to fight him: just:to demonstrate what The Juss would and wouldn’t do in a fight.
I have always disagreed with the idea of “hate crimes,” differentiating the severity of the charge and the severity of the punishment from one case to another based on the victim’s race, orientation, religion, et cetera. Suggesting that an assault or murder or terrorist act is somehow worse because of what the perpetrator was allegedly thinking? Moronic. And unjust But the reality is we have something called hate crimes. So fine. Either this guy committed a hate crime (just because a racist, sexist attack is in no way mitigated because he committed it against himself. Or he’s only guilty of filing a false police report and repeatedly making false statements to the police. He should also be charged with all manner of libel, slander, and calumny for the direct accusations he heaped upon an entire group of people. Regardless, whatever the penalties are should be augmented and enhanced just as the penalties for the hate crimes he falsely alleged would have been augmented and enhanced.
But yeah, fuck this guy.
N.P.: “Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums” – A Perfect Circle
The Case Against Jussie Smollett Goes Deeper Than Anyone Knew.
CHICAGO (JG) — As authorities laid out their case against “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett, it became clear that the deception in this incident went far deeper than anyone could ever have guessed.
“At this point, I think I just need to start drinking again,” Police Superintendent Tommy Jackson told reporters. “Y’all better brace yourselves, cuz you ain’t gonna believe this shit. Mr. Smollett is neither gay nor black. That isn’t even his real name. The man we’ve been lead to believe was Jussie Smollett is really a straight white guy from Connecticut named Kevin Kevin. That is his full name: Kevin is his first name, and his last name is also Kevin.”
Police say Kevin could possibly be the whitest person in America. The 26-year-old was born and raised in New Haven, CT, and studied acting at a community college.
Police released parts of Kevin’s confession: “I knew I could never break into professional acting the traditional way, so I decided to take on the ultimate challenge and I created a character called Jessie Smollett, who was going to be a 24-year old white girl into country with big dreams. I was going to move to Nashville, get a job at a country bar, then achieve extremely moderate success as a professional singer. But I did not want to spend three years or however long it would take in heels or cowboy boots and daisy dukes. So I changed the spelling to Jussie and made him a gay black guy. I moved to Hollywood and for several years lived 24 hours a day as a gay black man. I had an entire life. Some of the sexual parts of the dating life I wasn’t too crazy about, but even that was better than wearing heels. Anyway, I eventually started to believe that I really was a gay black guy named Jussie Smollett, and I became frustrated with the stagnation of my acting career. I decided that if I could convince the entire culture that I was not only gay and black, but that I had been the victim of a hate crime, then people would have to acknowledge the greatness of my acting ability. So I did what I did. And when Reverend Al and Kamala Harris showed up, I thought, “You did it, Kevin. You actually pulled it off.”
“Holy fucking shit,” said Superintendent Jackson, as he took another huge slug from a whiskey bottle on the podium and shook his head in disgust. “His attorney say that Kevin is refusing to make any additional statements unless he is nominated for the Best Actor Award at this years Oscars. And now we got to figure out what to do with this case. Is this a white guy that paid two black guys to beat up another black guy who is secretly white? Shit. Who knows? I think everybody involved is guilty of numerous hate crimes and should be shot.”
Adding to the confusion was the discovery that Kevin once identified as a gay black man. “If that is the case, then this whole case just imploded in a convoluted cloud of weirdness. I think everybody just walks and we forget about the whole thing. Jesus,” told reporters before finishing the bottle of whiskey that the superintendent had brought to the podium.
“And one more thing,” slurred superintendent Jackson, “Don Lemon is a racist, idiotic jackass. Fuck you, Don.”
The companies that make “Empire,” Fox Entertainment and 20th Century Fox Television, issued a statement Thursday saying that they were “evaluating the situation” and “considering our options.”
N.P.: “An American Dream” – Love and Rockets
Sorry, dear reader, but tonight I’ll have to keep it brief. See, tonight, while I was walking home from Subway in below-zero cold, two black dudes wearing Obama “Hope” hats viciously attacked me. They beat me, screamed, “This is Obama country” at me and called me “hetero cracker breeder” and poured black paint on me. Then they sort of cuffed me with plastic toy handcuffs, Then they just ran off into the icy night. Because I fought back. Good news: Even after all that, I managed to not drop my sandwich. So I’m gonna eat that, then probably report this racist and sexist hate crime. This is America in 2019. And be sure to check out my show nobody watches, “Vampire” this Friday on Lifetime.
N.P.: “Fame” – David Bowie
Okay, let’s get to some of your recent mail. At least your mail that was recent about a month or so ago when i started listing and discussing my various biases and assumptions. So there were a bunch of women’s marches held across the country, the exact point of which remained unclear even after having heard numerous explanations proffered by potential participants. One particularly honest explanation, and the one that makes the most sense to me, was, “It just makes us feel better, and ______ really wants to do it, because we’re trying to be supportive of her…” Et cetera. Which is fine for those who need that sort of thing. But you know what I think of marches, so there’s that.
The problem here started when a week before the march, the organizers cancelled the march. Because too many white people were going to show up. Yeah. Of course, the organizers attempted to dance around the blatant racism of their behavior being trying to hide behind the “inclusive” language of the politically inept: “Up to this point, the participants have been overwhelmingly white, lacking representation from several perspectives in our community. Instead of pushing forward with crucial voices absent, the organizing team will take time for more outreach.” What a load of shit. They cancelled the event because too many white people were going to show up. Well, fuuuuuuuck you, ya racist beezies. Which is my reworded summary of much of the immediate push-back the organizers received when the cancellation made the national news, so they felt compelled to further explain their racist actions: “The organizers of the Eureka Women’s March in Humboldt County, California, are moving the focus towards an event date on March 9th, in conjunction with International Women’s Day, to ensure that the people most impacted by systems of oppression have an opportunity to participate in planning. We failed to have the type of collaboration needed to be inclusive of some of the most underrepresented voices in our community, namely, women of color and people who are gender non-conforming.”
How can you expect whomever you’re expecting to take your march seriously when the organizers themselves clearly don’t take it very seriously at all.
This particular march was planned in Humboldt County, which is a few hours north of Anhedonia. I’ve been there several times. They grow good shit up there. And according to the Census Bureau, is 74% non-Hispanic white, so I’m not sure exactly whom you were expecting to show up to your bullshitty march in the first place, but if you weren’t looking for white people, you probably should have done some better research and planning. But the egregious racism and poor planning abilities are not the real issue here: those things can usually be expected by the sorts of people and organizations that plan (and then cancel) marches. Here are some thoughts in random order:
These people have obviously never been in the military, a street fight, or lived in a country where an actually oppressive and corrupt government is actively making life so unbelievably intolerable for its people that those people decide to take to the streets to fight the government because they cannot bear the thought of the sun rising on another day of this wretched oppression, et cetera. In those circumstances, the demographics of who shows up to help you fight is so completely unimportant that it doesn’t even register. If your “cause” is the sort of thing that can be postponed until the optics more properly serve a not-so-hidden agenda, then it is obviously not a very important cause. And it is a very clear signal that the organizers place a great many petty and irrelevant things higher on the importance list than women’s rights. They are not there to help you, they are there for a photo op that serves their own agenda(s), and if they can’t get that photo, then you’re on your own, sister.
If the causes cited for the march were legitimate, if there was actual intolerable government oppression going on, if actual rights were being denied, the organizers would never have cancelled it because they were worried about the optics not matching the fictional narrative they are trying to put forth as truth. And if they had, all the white people who had participated up to that point and whom were planning on showing up to the march would have said, “Fuck these bigoted assholes…they don’t even live here…we’re marching, as planned, only now we have another oppressive group to protest: the racist organizers of the old march.” But instead they just got sad and enrolled in poetry classes at the community college.
Anyway, you wanted to know what I thought, that’s it. I think if you feel compelled to take to the streets for whatever reason, then do it. But don’t show up to someone else’s photo op because it makes you feel like you’re doing something. If you actually want to start to affect real change, address only your own agenda. Lose the group. And don’t plan on wasting much time marching around with strongly worded signs.
N.P.: “You Haven’t Done Nothin'” – Stevie Wonder
Things did not get off to the most pleasant start around Hotel California. I was awoken by a horrendous noise. It was more of a rumble, and repeated series of low vibrations that one feels more than hears. I did what I could to ignore it and try to go back to sleep, but the rumble was just too much. Frustratedly furious and alarmingly naked, I burst out into the landing to find and destroy the source of this egregious rudeness. I had already kicked the thing down the stairs before my still-asleep mind processed that it was probably a small Cambodian child and that given that, my reaction may have been a bit over the top. But I don’t know that there really is such thing as an overreaction when it comes to being inordinately woken up. Anyway, whatever the hell it was, it got kicked the hell down the stairs. After all the bumping and thudding ended, there was nothing but silence. My knowledge of the Khmer language is limited to the single interrogative phrase “How do I get to the nude beach?” which, according to Bong, my fixer the last time I was in Cambodia, goes something like, “Tae khnhom tow chhner akrat daoy rbiebnea?” There was no reply. Perhaps the child had not been Cambodian. There could, of course, have been an issue with my pronunciation. But I began to doubt it was a child at all. I didn’t have either contexts in or glasses on…it could have a been a Cambodian child, but it could have also been a medium-sized dog, or one of those wild turkeys that’s always running around The Creek demanding food as baksheesh to avoid avian sexual assault. I guess we’ll never know.
The moral of this story is don’t wake Jayson (or any other adult) up ever. And also don’t let your kids, Cambodian or otherwise, play on the goddamn stairs.
N.P.: “Sex on Wheelz” – My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult