Dreams of Freedom & Death.

8/27/22.

At some point in the dream, I suddenly remembered that I owned a motorbike, and I found myself utterly confused that I had somehow forgotten about it.

In any case, I felt excited about riding it again and desperately wanted to do so before summer was out, but I still couldn’t remember what had happened to it. I knew I wouldn’t have sold it, thrown it in the trash, or given it away. Did I forget it in one of the places I’d formerly lived in during the process of moving? Did I leave it at my parents house in the garage, or their barn?

I remember asking the middle child — my younger sister, Eve — though I don’t recall what she said. I think this was when I was at my parents house, where I remember standing by the sliding glass windows, looking out into the front yard (which was strangely full of cars), waiting for the torrential rainfall to stop so I could check the barn.

Around then I started waking up, but fought to stay in the dream so I could find the motorbike — which is an odd thing I’ve done before when striving to find things in dreams. Somewhere in the midst of this fighting, however, my normal, waking consciousness intrudes and it finally hits me: I do not, nor have I ever, owned a motorbike.

Despite that fact, I have dreamed about it occasionally over the years.

A popular interpretation of dreaming about motorcycles and motorbikes is that it signifies our desire to feel freedom, independence, and excitement in life. Given that I had been on an ultimately futile search for the motorbike, particularly given how I’ve been increasingly feeling in my waking life, I suppose that makes a lot of sense.

9/1/22.

As my morning coffee is percolating, my sleepy mind remembers the dream.

I’m standing among one of a few groups of people surrounding a central something, though it’s not initially clear what that something is. I’m engaging in an enduring conversation with at least one person nearby, and while I can’t remember what was discussed, this part of the dream seemed to last an absurd amount of time.

At some point, it’s brought to my attention that we’re all at a funeral. And right before my alarm goes off, as if in a rush to enlighten me before I awaken, someone — a man — informs me that it is, in fact, my funeral.

Assuming this isn’t some form of precognition, popular dream interpretations suggest it could symbolize a recognition that some part of my life or some part of myself has come to an end.

Drugs, Missing Time, False Awakenings, & a Girl (8/19 & 8/23 Dreams).

8/19/22

I had hooked up with a girl. We were sitting in a yard with a crowd of other people, as if we were watching something, like a concert, but if we were, I cannot recall what it was. I remember I wanted to take her somewhere alone so we could make out, but I never did.

I also saw pills in the dream. They were Vicodin, and I’d forgotten I’d had them, but they had all melted together, along with something seemingly plastic. I broke off a piece and took it, and I recall at least once spitting out a peice of plastic.

8/23/22.

I’m temporarily living in a small house while I’m in town visiting, and it’s occupied by other people as well. I’m driving alone along a vacant road during the day when suddenly, everything goes dark. In what seems like an instant, I suddenly come to, only now it’s nighttime, the car is off and I’m no longer in the driver seat — instead, I’m in the back seat right behind it.

Somehow, I convince myself it’s all due to car issues, so I take it to a shop in town within walking distance of the house. When I walk back to the shop later to see if they’d fixed it, they aren’t there, so I walk into the garage and start cleaning out my car. Just as I’m finishing up and preparing to leave, the mechanics come in through the door and I explain the circumstance.

I then walk home, but as soon as I walk in the door I suddenly fear I’ve gone into the wrong one. It looks vacant, for one thing, and the neighboring houses looked the same as the one I’d been living in. So I start walking down the road, but then I see people I know walking towards me from that direction, at least one of which lived with me, and I follow them back to the house. It seemed to be the same one I entered earlier, but it’s no longer vacant of people and possessions. I’m confused.

I woke up, intending to write the dream down, but instead walked out my bedroom door. I didn’t get far, however, until I realized I was dizzy and hallucinating people that weren’t there. It was as if part of me was still in the dream.

In reality, this was a false awakening.

I think it was then that I fell into another dream, which partially took place at work. There I’m working with a new girl that shows all the signs of actually being interested in me. At one point we were looking out the drive through window and she leaned on me, putting her arm around me. While we were unsuccessfully trying to fix one of the machines on front counter, she stands incredibly close to me, and Kelly, the store manager, squeezes between us to tend to the machine herself.

Later, we’re outside, and she seems to be covertly trying to videotape me with her phone. She immediately notices I notice and then moves the phone all around, as if I were just caught in the crossfire. When the camera hits me again, I sort of lean in, showing I don’t mind, and then she puts the camera ridiculously close to my face and starts moving it all around.

At some point in one of these dreams — it may have been before the blackout at the opening of the first dream — I’m gazing at the sun and it seems to be too bright and it keeps getting brighter. I feared that something horrible was happening.

Saul About Love.

8/15/22

Along with others, I have had the tendency to whine about shows that should have gone on, but suffered a premature extinction:

Jericho. Firefly. The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. The Maxx.

And so on.

With every television series that meets its natural end, however, people will undoubtedly bitch and moan about the finale anyway.

Lost. Dexter. The X-Files.

And so on.

And while I’m fairly certain, at least in the light of history, that the same will be the case with the finale of Better Call Saul, the prequel (and sequel) to Breaking Bad, I have nothing but good things to say about it.

Just got done watching it, actually. And honestly, I fucking loved it.

This show? It’s always been a kind of fucked-up love story, however much that fact may have been obscured by other storylines until relatively shortly before it met its terminus. But that fact ultimately shined through all the surface bullshit in the end.

And while it didn’t objectively end with a Happily Ever After — which is cool, as fairy tales are clearly bullshit, as life seemingly, inevitably reveals — it’s actually more satisfying.

How it ended? The morbid realism? It had to happen.

Actions and consequences.

And yet: despite the shitstorm that ensued, love ultimately prevailed. That light? It successfully penetrated the darkness, and gave it a slap on the ass for good measure.

This is the best we can hope for in life, methinks, and the best one could hope for in this show, specifically, given the characters involved in the narrative in question.

And so: Good job, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, as well as your team of talented writers. You’ll never read this, I presume, but I proclaim nonetheless: you are true artists, and I feel confident in calling this your collective masterpiece.

Good job.

Thank you for the journey. You gave Jimmy and Kim a good — nay, a DAMN good — and fitting, bittersweet end.

Cheers.

And to any poor souls that took the time to read this:

G’nite and shit.

Of a Dead Grandmother, Enraged (8/11/22 Dream).

I live in a small room or apartment on the second story of a house. At night, I wander around the neighbor’s yard in the dark, I may even enter the home, and all the while terrified of getting caught.

Once back in my room, I look out the window, which overlooks the neighbor’s yard, and discover someone is indeed home, at least now. They’re using a machine to lift up an old car and move it to a new location a short distance away — but then they just drop it, and it hits the ground violently.

Now I’m watching television, and beside me is my maternal grandmother, sitting in a chair. She reaches out for the television in an attempt to change the channel, but given I was in the middle of watching something, I stop her. I tell her to wait until I’m done, and then she can watch whatever she wants.

This compromise doesn’t satisfy her — she’s clearly impatient and is utterly unwilling to be satisfied with anything less than want she wants immediately. I then try to bring up a similar circumstance in my youth, only in that case, the roles were reversed, my hopes being that this will inspire empathy and understanding — but I hardly get a word in edgewise, as she starts yelling over me immediately, and in a manner so overreactive, so extreme that it confuses the hell out of me.

It’s startling, the crazy behavior she’s suddenly exhibiting. She isn’t just angry, she’s in a blind rage, and all because she wants the channel changed. She’s acting like a defiant child throwing an epic temper tantrum. Her face contorts, she sneers at me, her face blood red. She looks like she’s possessed. She continues hissing obscenities and while most of what she says escapes memory, at the end of it she screams, calling me a “little whore.”

My grandmother died in April of 1999, though she never looked so weak as she did in the dream, nor do I ever recall her screaming and throwing an insane tantrum like that. It was so out of character for her, so frightening in that respect, that it woke me out of sleep with a jolt.

Allegedly, dreams of the dead suggest you have unresolved issues with the person in question. While this makes sense given the childhood incident I was trying to tell her about, I no longer recall the incident, nor whether it actually occurred in the first place. I’ll also add that while the bulk of my memories of my maternal grandmother are positive, there were moments of negativity.

There were lone incidents in which I found her particularly cold — at least one, anyway. I had visited her in what would prove to be her last apartment, and while in bed I was experiencing something unusual going on behind my eyes. I struggled to explain it to her, but all she had to say in response was, “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”

During high school, when she learned I was atheist, I visited her in her aforementioned apartment, and the subject came up. She told me that no one needs to be religious, no one needs to go to church, but that you should always believe in a god. Though she said it minus the “a.” I asked her why, but I felt fear and anger from her and she refused to talk about it. I don’t think I ever brought it up with her again.

There was also a period in my life where I remember having arguments with grandma, specifically when she would watch over my sisters and I at the new house (and so this was after 1988) when my parents were away. I forget what the argument was about, but I do remember being in rage at her.

After writing down the rough details of the dream, I saw memes and videos on my Facebook feed that morning dealing with possession, reminding me of how I thought how she was acting possessed in the closing scene of the dream. Was the dream influenced by the Facebook algorithms, by memes and such I had seen the previous day but could not remember, or was this truly synchronicity — or perhaps just coincidence?

Sadly, as is typical, I haven’t the fucking foggiest clue.

I’ve surely felt that kind of rage before, it’s all-consuming, blinding, tunnel vision focus. But what specifically does it have to do with her?

Earthquakes, Haunted Places, & Leaky Ceilings (8/3/22 Dream).

A group of us are upstairs. I walk into a dark area alone, though not far from the group, when I feel a strange vibration in the floor. I ask if anyone else felt that, and while I think at least the girl I was with — presumably my girlfriend — confirmed that she had, this was soon forgotten, as the entire upper floor started shaking violently, the ground moving like ocean waves.

At some point — I believe while we were upstairs — the group is all around and someone puts a heap of pills in one hand, and then another heap of pills in the other. Both hands can’t hold them all and some of them spill to the ground. All of them are different colors, though the pills in one hand are bigger than the other. Someone tells me the big pills are double-strength, and I should take one or two of those, and double as many smaller ones. Rather than wash them down with the smaller water bottle I stole from work and had already drank out of, I get one of the bigger, unopened bottles from the pack I bought myself.

Suddenly I’m downstairs, alone, in what appears to be the stock room at work, only all the lights are off. Our stock shelves are on tracks so you can roll them and only go down one isle at a time. The second or third isle from the back of the room is exposed, and right above it is a missing or moved ceiling panel from which water is leaking. On top of the shelf right below it is a carboard box with cross-hatch inserts placed in such a way that it catches the leaking water and directs the flow — yet it only directs it to the floor of the isle.

So what might this dream mean?

To start with the leak: water symbolizes emotions and the unconscious, which would seem to imply intense emotions from the past are leaking into consciousness, interfering in my present. This interpretation seems to be reinforced when one considers the previous scene upstairs (remembering that attics, like basements, represent the unconscious) which in retrospect reminds me of a large room my family and I were in when we took the Haunted Flashlight tours at the Madison Cemenary, particularly upstairs, a supposedly haunted area. Aside from the haunted aspect — the past “haunting” the present, that is — we experienced an earthquake up there in the dream, which is said to symbolize intense moods and emotional instability.

The box atop the shelf in the stock room, a kind of jerryrigged means of catching and directing the flow of the water leaking from the ceiling, still confuses me a bit. It’s meaning may derive from the fact that it’s a temporary fix for catching and releasing the water — in other words, the aforementioned intense emotions — in a controlled manner. The fact that it had cross-hatch inserts, as one would expect of a box designed to hold bottles, perhaps indicates it represents my drinking habit and the fact that, while drunk (and high) I engage in writing, artwork, and relentless masturbation.

While I don’t play around with pills nowadays, that scene in the dream may reinforce the drinking part of the interpretation, as alcohol is, of course, a drug. The fact that my hands were overflowing with pills may suggest that I’m doing it too much, too often, which falls in line with the fact that I had to call off yesterday due to being hung over, which is when I had the dream.

Shadows of Connecticut.

1/13/13

Poverty sucks, especially when you’ve been smoking marijuana every evening after work in a crude attempt to relax and maintain your sanity and suddenly have to stop cold turkey for three days until you get your paycheck, during which you’re going through something that feels like withdrawal in tandem with a nervous breakdown. So I was quite happy when I had taken the opportunity to go home after work early, hoping to just hide in my room and write.

Opening the door to the apartment, pissed from all the shit at work, I’m surprised to find Nick sitting on the couch with Sherri. Both are holding drinks. The air carries the sweet odor of alcohol. Strange, whoopee cushion looking balloons litter the floor along with tiny canisters. Nick’s huge flat screen is on the pool table playing Donnie Darko.

Sherri seems excited to see me for some reason. She explains how they were doing whippets and drinking, and we talk a bit about the sequel to Donnie Darko. Eventually I escape to my room, where I change out of my work cloths, but within moments I hear the knock at the door, just as I’m buckling my pants. I opened it and the two of them, with her in the lead, nearly fell into my room, which I tried to hide from her because it was an unconventional mess. She had something for me, she told me, which is something any guy is perfectly willing to hear from a hot girl, but it makes things rather uncomfortable when the girl says it to you right in front of your roommate, who really wants her in the complete cock and cockles fashion no matter how much he plays it down.

Granted, the girl was drunk, but I’ve seen women do this all too often in the sober state and I’ve been both of the guys in question. It certainly seems to me that in most cases they are diverting their attention to one guy in an overly friendly or heavily flirtatious manner in order to produce jealousy in the other, perhaps in hopes that the jealousy fuels the jealous guy into action, specifically in the forms of, a, increased intensity, frequency and swift evolution of his attentions in an attempt to win her over or solidify her desire for him, or, b, she sends him into an overt rage and he starts a fight with the guy, which will not only serve to inflate her ego a bit (two guys, after all, are fighting over her) but give her full justification for being angry at them for treating her like a possession when they aren’t even dating, which will in turn inspire within him the most persistent and passionate attentions to date in an effort to sway her back towards him.

In any case this, it would seem, is just another subtle manipulative technique aimed at acquiring the fullest range of control available — techniques, I might add, that are certainly not exclusive to the female of the species, nor to romantic or intimate relationships. It’s difficult for me to tell whether these efforts are conscious or unconscious ones, or whether or not, in the end, I have as clear a picture as to what is going on here than seems to be the case to me.

I follow them the short distance down the hall to the kitchen, where she pulls a bottle out of the fridge and makes a horrible attempt at hiding it behind her back. Nick’s sister, Sandra, had bought me that bottle of Starbucks-flavored liquor for my twenty-third birthday. I am a certified coffee fiend, so it made sense, and the thought was sweet, but I had taken a shot of it once and nearly vomited it tasted so horrible. It has remained in the fridge of every place I’ve been in for the last decade or so, caked in dust. I don’t imagine it aged like wine. When she poured it into my mug, I thought something more akin to diarrhea might spurt out and plop into the cup with a distinctly wet fart sound. Or maybe what came out of it might make it more appropriate in use as a topping over your morning waffles.

In reality, it looked safe enough. Sherri pours some into my mug and then pours some of the coffee I just made in with it. She hands it to me and tells me that I’m going to drink with them, talk and watch Donnie Darko instead of escaping to my room as I always did. At some point in the midst of us talking she noticed my coffee travel mug, which depicted Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. I made reference to the fact that he had hacked off his ear and sent it to his girlfriend, and she went on to explain that this painting was inspired by the view van Gogh had from the window of his room at the sanitarium where he ended up. Expressing this story, she seemed to feel a sort of dark romance towards it which struck me as curious.

When we sit down, she tells me she used Donnie Darko in a college class assignment. I knew what college class and what assignment because I had also had that class, and that very assignment, only instead of choosing Donnie Darko I had chosen The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. It was the old fate and free will debate. She wrote a paper that favored fate, though she said she didn’t necessarily believe it. I had done my own paper in favor of free will, and I did that the only way I could have: my understanding had brought be to favor the notion of free will.

I’m not sure that my side of the conversation got through to her, however, for as many people do with increasing frequency, she insisted on talking over me, unable to delay anything she has to say any longer than it takes her mind to push out her mouth, and when I speak her speaking speeds and the volume of her voice gets louder, as if she is literally speeding up and running over the speed bump anything I might have to say serves as for her. One could interpret this as not an opressive act at all, of course. For instance, perhaps she only wants me to understand what she says clearly and completely before I say something in response, either because she is afraid she is going to forget these vital elements, what I say next might take the conversation in a direction too far for you to add an addendum to the statements made at your previous turn at the mic. Then again — and this I fear the most — perhaps she doesn’t want to know what I think because she thinks she already knows what I think or she doesn’t really care to know to begin with. and this is how I’ve been feeling lately.

Listen to: Just, by Mudvayne.
Listen to: All About Me, by Drowning Pool.

If I’m an ear, you want feedback. If I’m a wall born to bear the mighty machine-gun fire words, endure the lashings of Logos, then I am a subject being transferred into an object here, dehumanized to the status of a communal psychic commode, a confessional with a pulse, the beats of which go unheard over the roar of the babble from the rabble.

After she had gone to the bathroom, I waited to hear the door close down the hall before getting up, dumping the coffee she had spiked for me, and filling it back up with good old straight blacker-than-death regular fucking capital-C Coffee. I then silently sat back down and tried to seem as if I had never moved an inch. I did not, after all, wish to hurt the girl’s feelings. Nick responded with laughter, but he soon fell silent as she approached. somehow her and I got to talking. I’m sitting on the couch normally and she end up with her hands at either side of me, holding the back-end of couch for support, her face inches from my own, eyes bearing into my own. Around my own eyes, actually: for some reason, she never looked directly into my pupils at any point. She was considerably fucked up, so that’s likely the reason. Regardless, her face being this close to mine with Nick being right there brought me right back to my previous speculations. Is she using me as a tool to control Nick, or is there something else to this?

She thinks I’m interesting, she tells me. She thinks I’m intelligent.

I thank her, as awkward as hearing all that makes me feel. This isn’t right, this isn’t feeling safe. She’s hot enough, drunk enough, I’m horny enough and as much as I wouldn’t mind given different social circumstances, especially given the current context here there is no way in hell I could ever allow myself to do this, your attempt at fucking with me to fuck with him suggests something frigid beneath your skin, running like ice water in your reptile veins, and your just building up a fire I cannot diffuse, building up a rhythm that I could not ethically allow to climax, so knock it off.

Knock it the fuck off.

The pain these instinctual false alarms for my submersible custard cannon cause me is excruciating, but the potential fallout would be a selfish and ultimately emotionally costly slaughter, one too close in friendship to consider mere collateral damage. We’re slaves to instinct. We’re a slave to unconscious forces from sources both in and around us. It only makes sense that we would become enslaved by our ethical valuations of potential behaviors in light of the consequences foreseeable within the range of our awareness as well.

Nick gets up, and I know he isn’t leaving because he is hurt or angry. He is either going to pass out, piss or puke, and given the veiled urgency with which he made his way from the couch, I imagined puking was most likely.

Maintaining her position, she goes on to tell me several times how I’m intelligent, emphasizing it like a well-spaced mantra. That I am so good at reading people. I could meet someone and have them figured out in minutes. She tells me that I’m a good person. That I have a way with words, that I can express a viewpoint in such a way that convinces people of my point of view. Tone not altering at all as she does so, she then comments that I remind her of Hitler.

“What?”

She had caught me off guard, and I had to laugh. She offered this as a compliment and I was curious what she meant exactly. Her and Nick had spoken about this the other day, she went on to explain, how Hitler, with his words, with his speeches, manipulated the masses to adopt his point of view.

“So you mean to say that I am adept at manipulating people?”

“Yes,” she told me. “You just don’t like to.”

There is the distinct sound of vomiting in the distance, and my concern over it catches her attention, and she tells me she’s going to go check on Nick. I follow her to the bathroom, where Nick’s shirt is off and he is nearly baptizing himself in the toilet water. Watching him there, staring into the gaping mouth of the porcelain goddess as if waiting for her to conjure up the relentless cyclone in his guts, I remind myself why I have all but given up on drinking. Above him she hovers, albeit in an off-balance manner, and asks him if he trusts her. Asks him this again and again. Each time, he says yes in a voice that clearly conveys sincerity. She then asks him if this is his toothbrush. He says yes. And she promises him this will make him feel better, and she rams the toothbrush down his throat. It worked. Hard love, perhaps. But that was definitely my fucking toothbrush, damn it.

The high point of the evening was the uncomfortable flattery she had delivered, and from the point of the toothbrush inward it all went downhill. By the time Nick was emptying his guts into the gaping orifice of the porcelain goddess, my patience had already grown thin with her. She is drunk, constantly repeating herself, I’m stuck driving her home and she refuses to take any subtle or direct suggestions that I should drive her ass home before it gets too late. I have a nervous breakdown to work on averting through relieving pressure through writing, and its impossible to attend to while you’re still in my presence.

I’m on overload here.

I take it all in. She graduated with a major in psychology and seems to be inexplicably drawn to the “crazy,” as she is always careful to put it. Already she had told me of her interest in van Gough, particularly his work The Starry Night, which she had seen on my coffee travel mug. With passionate absorption in the story, she had told Nick and I, as she poured decade-old Starbucks liquor from a dust-caked bottle from the back of the fridge into my coffee, how one-eared van Gough had painted the work, inspired by the night scene he could see through his sanitarium window. She is also evidently even more enthralled with the television show Dexter than I am.

She’s ashamed of her belief in fate and an arrogant voice in my head suggests that this might be because I brought up my belief in free will in a recent post I had made about a recent tragedy exploited by the media. This notion was reinforced when she then brought up the whole Connecticut tragedy with me. My head fell at her mention of it. No matter what I do, I cannot seem to escape this topic with people, and my viewpoint becomes more forceful, more rage-fueled every time the subject is brought up.

I can’t say why this is bothering me so much. Why it hit me so hard this time.

When will we wake up and recognize that these tragedies, however inhumane and gruesome when taken in isolation, collectively constitute symptoms of a sick culture? Incidents such as this, which happen with increasing frequency, call for a wider focus, a broader circumstantial and psychological investigation, a deeper contemplation with respect to the causes. I support free will and personal responsibility. I am never one in support of the notion that the individual is merely the product of their respective culture or personal upbringing, as there is always a spectrum of choice, but the cultural factors underlying these tragic symptoms DO serve to dictate the ease of certain choices. Increasingly, individuals in our culture seem to find their path of least resistance in committing these heinous acts, and that much is clear at this point, at least in my tainted inner eye. In light of that, it seems equally clear here that we should take serious and enduring pause before the media serves to distract us with something else to ask why that is, as there are clearly deeper forces at work here.

I still believe that given the right context, everything makes sense.

The motives? Perhaps to shift the power. To gain attention. Why? They feel powerless and unappreciated. Maybe they want a sense of personal significance and individual power and it can only be completed with feedback from the masses, an acknowledgement by the herd.

Why would they be under the impression that they must go to such extremes to get people to pay attention and listen to them?

Since 9/11, just think of the stream of words your constantly subjected to across the bottom of the screen. Other little nuggets of data popping up here and there while a news broadcast is going on. Just think of how nowadays you just cannot escape from everyone, how in some cases the cell phone becomes more akin to an electric leash. Consider how we are being subjected to too many meaningless choices. Recieving too much data at once. Expected to multitask as fast as we can, staying tuned to every relentless channel.

Think of Attention Deficit Disorder, which could be the logical end-result of a mind striving to adapt to the culture in which it finds itself. Given the multiple data-streams that must be juggled and multitasking that this culture demands it’s no surprise at all that so many minds and finding themselves incapable of concentrating too long on any one given thing.

On earth, there have never before been so many humans with so many different connections and so many different ways of connecting. When everyone has their proverbial fifteen minutes more or less at once, its easy for your voice to get lost in the crowd, and so the chatter becomes an ever-escalating shouting match.

People keep upping the ante because people keep getting desensitized. The Tool song Stinkfist conveys this in a most graphic and effective manner as the law of ever-diminishing returns leads him to go deeper and deeper from finger to fist to elbow into a bodily orifice in order to procure the same required level of satisfaction. It seems it is as Kevin Spacey said it was in the movie Seven.

“You can’t just tap people on the shoulder anymore,” he said. “You have to hit them with a sledgehammer. Then you notice you have their strict attention.”

It reminds you of the neighbors of the killer explaining him as always being so quiet and kind. It makes you wonder if maybe he was talking all along and they simply never thought to lend the ears to hear. If you aren’t being heard, the gun can be a more effective megaphone, either directly or through the massive, hollow shell that serves as phantom ricochet-chamber, and which we call the media. You always listen to the one with the gun, right? And sometimes the message is louder when you simply shoot or blow up an enormous amount of people and wait for the media to arrive. You become a celebrity. A dark, transient, cultural god. Antihero of the week. All brought to you by the media. Bred by the media for our money. For the investment of our attention. These antiheros achieve their status through the media providing the spotlight and holding them up for the world to see. All this attention, a media-made antihero, so many eyes watching and listening and taking in all the news stories, people talking about it at work, outside the bars, on talk radio.

“Monkey see, monkey do” is a skill also present in the domesticated primates known as humans, as incidents such as this clearly exemplify. The media exploits these tragedies, not out of some sense of moral obligation to provide the masses with the facts but to increasing ratings through sensationalism and relentless, 24-7 coverage of the killer and the bloody mark he made. They are not blind to the effects of this kind of coverage, either, as forensic psychologist Dr. Park Dietz so wonderfully expresses in a rare interview:

“We’ve had twenty years of mass murderers throughout which I have repeatedly told CNN and our other media if you don’t want to propagate more mass murders, don’t start the story with sirens blaring, don’t have photographs of the killer, don’t make this 24-7 coverage. Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story, not to make the killer some kind of antihero. Do localize this story to the effected community and make it as boring as possible in every other market. Because every time we have intense saturation coverage of a mass murder, we expect to see one or two more within a week.”

Might may not mean right, though it certainly proves useful. This is especially the case in the eyes of those who could never hope to gain the upper hand in hand-to-hand combat; those always stuck on the chewed-up underdog end of the dog-eat-dog world. The physically weak win over the physically strong by using intelligence and technology: guns, bombs and well-executed plans, for instance. This does not merely serve to level the playing field, but rather swings the teeter-totter of power in the diametrically opposing direction. There is always a bigger fish, but sometimes there is a minnow with superior firepower. Suddenly size doesn’t matter. Muscle is no match for the bullet.

Not to imply a connection — as that would surely paint the mainstream media as some fourth, “propagandizing” branch of government — but just a bit too often it has seemed suspiciously as if the government is channeling acute collective outrage and fear generated by tragedies to fuel support for policies they’ve been itching to implement for some time and which in reality have little if anything to do with the tragedy in question. Take 9/11, and the Iraq war. Or the Patriot Act. Take the recent tragedy and the push for gun control. Unfortunate, as clearly the masses have been fine countless times in the past with trading in freedoms for a greater illusion of security. The deeper things at work here are things that treatments such as home-schooling, I’m afraid, will not uproot or even protect you.

Mere laws or regulations on weapons won’t put a dent in this fucking issue, either. I’m not a card-carrying NRA member, but stricter gun control is not the solution. Stop looking at the damn gun and start looking at the broken mind that pulled the trigger and the social context that nurtured that psychology. This must start with defeat of the knee-jerk thought-stoppers. People fear empathizing with what is regarded as crazy, evil or insane as they fear that others will consider them guilty by means of association. So instead they build up a thick wall between themselves and the person in question by use of these dismissive words, which act as thought-stoppers and empathic-barriers. This Wall of Logos designates the solid boundary where our empathy ends, where our desire to understand is snuffed out by the darkness at the very edges of our personal identifications. The more eager people are to throw out those words, the more emotionally-fueled they are, the more I feel that they’re not just cutting off their attempts to empathize with that person but denying the presence of similar feelings within themselves. They’re repressing and projecting aspects of themselves that their ego is loath to accept consciously and identify as qualities of the self-concept.

I turned to Sherri and asked her if she knew why it was that she was so fascinated with the subject of those “crazies” and “evil” ones. This is the only time in the conversation that I recall not only successfully getting in more than a word in edgewise, but managed to get her to listen to it and contemplate it. Her head fell as if in confusion, and she was silent a moment.

“I don’t know,” she said, as if perplexed to find her mental hands brushing up against a wall in her mind.

Analysis of others is fine and good, I wanted to tell her, but every sword should be double-edged. Always turn back to look in the mirror, and look deep into the abyss of those pupils, my dear. It helps to keep you in check.

Doomsday & the Premature Ejaculate of Motivation.

6/18/14

Some time ago a friend of mine sent me a link that referenced a study. In essence, it suggested that if you talk about your goals, you’re less likely to accomplish them. It is born into “social reality” and releases the tension required for actualizing your target early.

It is the premature ejaculation of motivation, you could say.

Yet if that were true, would it not also be true that the more we verbalize or articulate in writing our most heinous, violent thoughts the less likely we will be to actually say those things or execute those behaviors?

If so, the FCC and other enemies of that personal liberty are foolish as fuck. A dirty little tentacle of our culture shooting us all in the foot. Freedom of expression may actually prevent violent uprisings, all sorts of “crime.” It may keep people alive.

7/18/19

Weapons are like gold in a doomsday scenario. As comedian Bill Burr points out, you can prep like a master, but unless you also have weapons and know how to use them, you’re just collecting supplies for the most ruthless mofo on the block. This is why it strikes me as insanely stupid when characters in post-apocalyptic films and TV shows shoot a gun until it’s out of ammo and then throw it far from them in dramatic fashion, like it’s now a forever-useless husk.

Dude: keep the empty gun. Fun fact: it’s reusable. You can reload it and stuff.

While we’re at it: if you shoot an enemy and have the opportunity, take the damned gun away from the corpse. Especially if they have superior firepower. I realize stealing is a no-no and all, but you already shot the guy and I’m fairly certain he won’t be needing it.

And if the enemy is retreating in a car or something, don’t bother shooting out the back window, damn it.

The tires.

Aim for the damned tires.

Pro-Choice Despite the Sexism Called Feminism.

In terms of physicality, your body is your most immediate, most basic form of property, as comedian Doug Stanhope has pointed out. It is your temple, your flesh vessel, your corporeal container, and you may do with it as you wish. And regarding women in particular, there are no squatters rights with respect to your uterus.

In other words, I believe in body autonomy. I’m pro-choice. And, believe it or not, I also have a dick.

The Supreme Court’s decision is absurd and enraging to me, and while I initially felt the need to remain quiet on the issue given my acute frustration with the utter absurdity, hypocrisy, and sexisim of the modern Feminist movement, I now realize that this isn’t about Feminism, it’s about individual rights. It’s about personal freedom. And I can’t sit idly by with my mouth shut as it’s trampled upon by religiously-motivated dipshits in power.

Contrary to the beliefs of many Feminists, this isn’t a war between the sexes, so if you’re among them, please quit framing it that way. This country is divided enough.

Men are not your fucking problem. They are not your enemy.

The problem, the enemy, is a particular political position largely influenced by religious nonsense and held by both women and men.

Lynn Fitch ignited the case that ultimately burned Roe to the goddamn ground. She has a uterus. Amy Coney Barrett was one of the Supreme Court Justices that were part of the majority that struck down Roe. She, too, has a uterus.

So please direct your rage at the right target.

Believe it or not, there are men that are on your fucking side, and I count myself among them.

Death, Discrimination, Hot Cops, & Other Things.

7/7/14

Dear Specific Grouping of Fossils Who Shall Remain Nameless:

Age clearly does not equal wisdom.

Explain dementia. Explain your own mind, fully capable yet stubbornly ignorant.

Days ago you guys said it all and your simple comments still eat away at me. What’s your beef with the skin on those kids, or the sexual persuasion of others?

We are not all one, nor should we aspire to be. Each should be an individual and raise a one-finger-passed-the-pointer salut to the mentality of the flock if you ask me. You didn’t, but screw you.

Variety is important genetically, culturally, individually. Diversity is not only beautiful, it has survival value. So the way I see it if you judge people by gentiles, color-code, or sexual persuasion you’re not just a run-of-the-mill asshole, you’re an enemy of life.

And I don’t care if that’s how you grew up. It was no more justified then than it is now. I don’t give a ragged rat’s left butt cheek if “that’s just the way the world was” back when you were a lad or a lassie. Life is not static. We made it out of the Dark Ages; evolve out of your medieval mentality.

You developed in the womb and escaped, after all: it is presently well within your capability to free your cranium from your anus.

Idiots.

7/8/21

Never in my life have I had issues with the law. Not once have I been put behind bars. I’m certainly not boasting or complaining here, either. If it ever comes to pass that I am thrown in jail, however, I only ask that the smoking hot, jaw-dropping, gothy-vibing, bad-ass lady-cop with the sleeve of elaborate tattoos that just walked into the dining room at work is the one to put the cuffs on me and take me away.

Please?

7/9/19

We hear stories about human ghosts, even the ghosts of animals, such as dogs. Never do we hear stories about insect apparitions.

Why?

Imagine you’re a moth, flapping about happily until one evening you fly a bit too close to a porch light and meet your crispy demise — only to awaken in that stereotypical tunnel with an even more brilliant light at the end. Unlike the hesitant disembodied humans scattered along the length of the tunnel or the eternally immobilized deer stuck forever at the mouth of it, you, as a moth? You’d have no tendency to linger, certainly no tendency to turn around and head back to haunt the living. No, you’d waste no time flying frantically straight toward the light.

You were frigging made for this. This is kind of your thing.

And it was this stupid, half-baked thought that kept distracting me during meditation this morning.

7/9/15

The first words someone offers me upon coming into work for my third shift:

“I had a dream last night that you died,” she told me. “You came back to life, though, so it’s all good.”

Evidently her and a coworker had come to my grave and I emerged from the fresh soil covering it — a little off-color, yes, but it was no zombie, I was still me, complete with a mug of coffee and a cigarette.

I’ll take that as a happy ending.

Lalo & a False Awakening (7/6/22 Dream).

5:09 AM.

I’m sitting just outside a house with some girl, someone who makes me comfortable, with groups of people scattered here and there across the yard. One group nearby was comprised of friends or family. In the distance I see Lalo, the character from Better Call Saul, who calmly walks up to a group, takes out his gun, and executes at least one of them.

I feel helpless. I fear he won’t stop there and I keep closing my eyes tight, saying under my breath, “Please not my family. Please not my family. Please not my family.”

I wake up, and I think my mother is there as I frantically look around not only for a functional writing utensil but something I can write on before my memory of the dream fades. I’m getting angry, but in the end, I fail. I then have another short dream before waking up for real and writing it down.