In Media Res

And lo begins this point in the tale in which I realize that finding a job in Detroit is exactly as hard as people have said it is.  Possibly even harder, because I have one of those personal fulfillment / artsy-fartsy degrees that make people assume that I'm frivolous and self indulgent which, in their defense, is a little bit true. 

Furthermore, places that don't require any sort of college education (restaurants, clerk jobs, etc) assume that because I have a degree that I will flit off at the first sign of something better, and in their defense they're right to think so, except that if you look at the above paragraph, you'll see how evidently unlikely that is.

I wrote a novel!

I had hoped against hope that Detroit would be my Penelope, bravely waiting for me to make my way back while eschewing suitors and keeping my bed warm until the day I came home and killed everyone with a bow and arrow. Instead, Detroit has proven a bit more like my Tithonos, living beyond it's appointed hour and growing old and dessicated in the process.  Yeah, I just went all kinds of Classical on your ass.

So sadly I have broadened my search to include not just Detroit, but all of Michigan, not that that's going much better.  I'm getting front-row seats to Michigan's crippling economic depression show, which is a little bit like a Tijuana Donkey Show, but replace the Donkey with the ravages of time, and the woman with my bank account and optimism.  The howling cheering Mexicans are probably still howling cheering Mexicans, but I'm too tired to make a NAFTA joke, so you'll have to do it yourself.

More like Go Broke, amirite?

So the competition is fierce and the rewards are spartan.  I'm still fighting the good fight, but I'm noticing that I'm wearing a shirt around the house less and less, and showers are becoming an afternoon sort of thing.  Half my energy goes into canvassing restaurants, bars, and video stores filling out applications, and the other half goes into keeping my spirits up. As a friend of mine pointed out, all this free time would be great if it weren't in large part being swallowed up by job seeking and crippling anxiety.

I can't help but think that, maybe, I could have planned this better.

Regardless, I'm hanging in and moving forward - ask not what I can do for you, but ask what kinds of booze you can bring to me (I'm partial to gin, red wine, and malt liquor).  I am ever more keenly aware of my transient place in space and time, and naturally I am reminded of the old Sufi expression This too shall pass, and other things that wind up as trashy tattoos like the only thing constant is CHANGE! and also yin-yangs, Tasmanian devils, Chinese "symbols," and fairies.

In other words, it won't be long until I look back on all this and laugh, laugh, laugh.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

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After Action Report: Jobbie Nooner

Rarely does something turn out to be so exactly-as-advertised as Jobbie Nooner.  For those interested in connecting this blog post to the one previous, I decided the moment I set foot on the boat that I would go along with the Jobbie Nooner experience (as opposed to sitting there and judging everyone like a douche). 

The party itself consisted of thousands and thousands of people converging on a small island in the middle of Lake St. Clair.  Once at the island, those people anchored their boats and set about consuming prodigious quantities of alcohol.  Yes, it really is a "WOOOOO" sort of party, yes there's a lot of flashing in exchange for beads, and yes, as the day wore on there was an upward-trending tendency of boozy meatheads trying to act surly and pick fights, but happily the only violence I witnessed was my own merciless beatdown on the volleyball court. 

Woooo!

So the party went off as parties do, and my own crew managed to empty a lot of bottles and cans.  The sun was dipping lower and lower in they sky and everything was turning a sort of shadowy blue color, so we got ready to wrap it up.  That's when we saw that, not two boats away, there was a reporter on the water with his cameraman.  My stepbrother swam over to talk to them, and they interviewed him on the spot, and that seemed like the end of it. 

As the sun turned orange and sank low so that its reflection grew miles long across the water, we rounded up our stragglers, pulled up the anchor, and headed back to the marina. We had barely come about when the party boat with the news crew waved us over.  Their motor had completely conked out - plenty of gas, but no response from the controls or the engine. The reporter explained that they had less than an hour to get their tape to the news van back on shore.  

We had a mission. 

Er....yes, like that...

Quickly comparing the capacity of the boat against the already crowded conditions aboard, we judged that we could let two people come aboard, but that the others would have to fend for themselves.  Assured that the stranded boaters had in fact radioed for help, we raced off at top speed for Belle Maer harbor. 

As we crossed the lake, I had one of those beautiful this-is-why-I-live-here moments.  Our boat crushed the wake and slashed the waves and every so often a big spray would wash up from over the bow, and we would all raise our drinks up and cheer.  It felt magnificent to be alive. 

In the back of the boat, the reporters interviewed my sister and her friends, my cousin, whoever they felt like pointing a camera at.  It was all good fun, and we made great time across the water.  We made a small error in taking the crew to exactly the place we thought they'd requested (a small marina just outside of Selfridge ANG base) instead of the place we were going, which is what they assumed, but we did get them to the harbor with time to spare, and one of our entourage drove them up North River road to their waiting news van. 

I'm the blindingly pale guy standing in the back

And that's how my family and I came to be on Fox 2 News this last Friday.  In their gratitude, and despite the rather obnoxious earful I gave them vis-a-vis how much I disliked and mistrusted Fox News, they used footage of us to lead their segment, including my shout-out to my own notorious Shockah Krew.  

So there's a portion of my 15 minutes of fame, I guess - a great souvenir from a fantastic party to be sure.  Now, back to my relentless search for employment, and nursing this total bastard of a sunburn I managed on account of being out half naked on a boat all day.

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OMG I've Never Seen a Boob Before!!!

Here's a short post for you because I'm sacking out early, and I'm doing that because I've got to get my ass rolling early tomorrow in order to clean up my dad's boat in order to make my first ever Jobbie Nooner.


For the uninitiated, Jobbie Nooner is basically about 8 hours of the Boats and Hoes video from Stepbrothers.  It's a mix of Michigan boat culture and Mardi Gras - girls with orange tans and fuzzy cowboy hats smoking cheap cigarettes and flashing their tits for fat guys with chin strap or door knocker beard-staches who use all of the money from their landscaping businesses to buy plastic beads to throw at the girls who show them their tits.

It's all very urbane.

Every time I cum I produce a quart

I like naked chicks as much as the next guy, but I probably hate obviousness by several orders of magnitude more.  Yes, I get it, we're all here to drink beer and objectify women, and this is supposed to give me a big hard-on, but there are honestly so many degrees of interoperable sexual politic here that I have absolutely no idea just who is hustling who.  So guys get to see tits and girls get...beads?  I mean, am I supposed to think that the girls are empowered because, by showing their tits, they are manipulating guys? That guys are overpowering women because they see tits in exchange for beads? My mind = blown.

Honestly, I'm a killjoy at functions like this.  I say pretty much exactly what I just wrote above, but also laced with comments like "What did your dad do to you that makes you act like that?" or alternately, one of my favorites, "I'm sorry, the only thing that turns me on is self-respect."   I don't really know why I'm going except that, like Faye Dunawaye's character in Barfly, I will follow a bottle of booze waved in my face, which is pretty much what's happening tomorrow. I've been promised free, repercussion-free booze and I mean to indulge.

Fuck your boat - I hope it sinks and you drown

I posted the picture above because I'm going to fucking strangle someone if I hear that song again, which I will, because a shitload of the people who own boats are unoriginal fucking douche knockers who like to throw beads at girls who are too smart to lay them but who, on the auspicious occasion of Jobbie Nooner, will show them their titties.  So they play music, loudly, that has something to do with boats, or water...so it's "On a Boat" or "All Summer Long" or "Baby Beluga" or fucking whatever song is about boating and also hot at the moment.

Yay.

So call it a sociological experiment - OR, maybe, I can check my pretentiousness for a few hours and just see some nipples and drink some beer and call it a good day.  Either way, off I go.  I hate obviousness, but I hate missing a party even more, so on Monday you can expect an after-action report.  Unless the whole thing sucks.  Then I'll post nude pictures.  They won't be of me.  In any case, I've got a 5th of Gordon's and a 30 pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Bottoms up, hoes - I'm on a boat.

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Fuck Your Rocket Car

Just like it says on the tin, chuckles - fuck your rocket car.  You know how everyone says "We're living in the future now - where's my rocket car?"  And I say again, fuck your rocket car.  Your reflexes aren't sharp enough to drive one, your 3-D spatial reasoning isn't acute enough, and  you don't even know what yaw is. Without an understanding of yaw, a rocket car in your hands is nothing but a screaming turbine of death.

Neeeorrrrrooowwww  *BOOOM*

There's a diminishing return on science fiction the closer you get to the date of speculation.  If I write a story about the high-tech advances that are coming out tomorrow (literally tomorrow, June 24 2010) you're going to be all like "Oh, yeah, that's pretty boring and also anyone could have thought of that hurr durrr" but if I write about June 24 2100, then all of a sudden I'm some sort of visionary, neverminding the fact that I'll be mostly wrong at best, and laughably so at worst. 

In the early half of the last century, the realm of science fiction was one big question mark - everything was a "maybe" as in "Maybe we'll live on the moon, do you think?  Would you buy a ticket to see a silent movie about that?"  In the 1950's we had unbridled rocket-ship optimism - science fiction with an exclamation point.  By the year 1985 we would be flying to work in astro-cruisers and smoking Winstons on the moon.  Then drugs happened, and the 1960's gave us a sort of acid-addled angst-scape where your average Joe was given a number and pacified with chemicals so that he could be a more productive work-sex-flesh unit before breaking through the chemical haze and screaming "What has HAPPENED TO MANKIND!?!"

Okay, so it wasn't ALL "Flowers for Algernon"

The Seventies benefited from the auteur movement of the 1960's and so you had all kinds of interesting conceptual stuff like A Clockwork Orange, Silent Running, and Soylent Green, and of course in print you had Ray Bradbury still pumping out the same Baroque plodders he'd been writing for decades, Heinlein was wrapping up his first cycle of Hippie Libertarian Love-Fest books, and the general tone seemed to be that of smudges and grease smears on the neat skin-tight tunics of decades past - the notion that the neat and clean order of 1950's science fiction had broken down, and that the psycho-social questions posed by 1960's sci-fi was just so much big-headed ivory-tower babble.  

But by the 1980's we were all like "Duh dude, no shit" concerning most of that line of inquiry, and that's why we had Cyberpunk. 

Before anyone jumps up to ask, no, I'm not a cyberpunk junkie.  I've read some Phillip K. Dick and some Neal Stephenson, and I saw Bladerunner about 8 bajillion times, but no, I've not read Neuromancer and it's not even at the top of my list, so stop asking.  90% of what I know about Cyberpunk comes from two sources:  Billy Idol's Shock to the System video, and the role playing game Cyberpunk 2020. 

His GUN has LIGHTS on it - FUCK YEAH!

So as far as I'm concerned, the future was supposed to be all about awesome chrome cybernetics and changing the color of my mechanical eyes with an impulse.  It was about tattoos that shifted and changed under my skin, and also lit up.  It was about air-brushed handguns in exciting colors "for the teen interested in self-defense" (to quote the second edition of the RPG rulebook). 

Taking the broader view, it was about cities that sprawled into giant steaming conurbations and racing down the streets of those cities in something that looked like a stretch Ferrari.  It's about racing a motorcycle through back alleys to do battle with the neon samurai security forces of the Japanese mega-corps and enlisting the help of retired mercenaries who remember hearing, vaguely, that once upon a time Americans had freedom and that it was something worth fighting for. 

But here's the one that really disappoints me - where the hell is the little plug in the back of my head?  Do you know how onerous it is for me to have to type this crap out?  If this were the 2010 I was promised, you would put a wire in the back of your head, I would put a wire in the back of my head, and you would "hear" everything that I have to say from my 3D avatar  just as fast as I could think it. 

This is what I look like on the 'net, but with a katana

But here we are in the so-called future.  There are no data terminals where I go to read a digital newspaper from a street kiosk, no hardwired Internet-surfing hardware in my head, and guns remain generally the province of gangsters and rednecks.  Indeed, the more things have changed the more they have stayed the same. Instead of jacked-in neuro-running cyber-couriers crossing a broken-down neon streetscape, we get KFC eating Wal-Mart shoppers downloading shitty crippleware copies of Leap Year to their iPhones.

Furthermore, cybernetics remain the domain of those who actually need them, and they are prohibitively expensive even then.  We are evidently a long way from designer chrome hands or light-up orange eyes.  Worse still, and maybe I'm just jaded, there's less and less that's actually subversive about getting out of "meatspace" and jacking into the digiverse (that's what I like to think we cyberpunks call going on the internet - I'm hoping it catches on).  This open conduit of suppressed information is now the place where soccer moms go to buy tickets to Elmo on Ice. 

It's got digi-art on a 3.5" floppy

I'm left with an intense disgust for the world in which I live, and an intense longing for the way things were supposed to be - a nostalgia for futures past.  The mundane march of American mediocrity continues without breaking step, and a final econopocalypse, the kind that would actually force people to riot in the streets over the breakdown of society (or at least the loss of basic cable TV service), seems a long way away.  People keep moving farther and farther away from cities, thus leading us to endless exurbs as opposed to sprawling concrete mega-cities, and sadly, it looks like the Japanese are not poised to take over the world economy despite the most dire predictions of late 1980's economists.

And so now we must invent new futures for ourselves.  Sadly, it looks like those futures will not include keyboard-laden New Wave or LA Glam Metal music.  High-tech at street level will be limited, at least for now, to cell phones and GPS devices while electronic music trends away from futuristic beep-boop sounds and ever more closely resembles its organic counterpart.  I guess maybe I will go read Neuromancer after all, and dream of a world in which I can fulfill my dreams of replacing half of my brain with circuitry, and both of my arms with machine guns.

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Where are you Going to, Where have you Been?

This last Saturday, I found myself in a conversation concerning regret.  This is usually an un-troubling topic for me because I try my best to embrace the old maxim that it's easier to regret the things you have done than the things you haven't (it really is) and that maxim's close cousin: it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission.

But that doesn't mean I have no regrets.  Indeed, just because it's presumably easier to regret something you have done as opposed to something you haven't doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that I don't do regrettable things.  Nevermind what they are - sufficed to say I've done them.

Not quite that bad, but pretty bad

The important thing to remember about dealing with regret is that it can only make you feel as bad as you let it.  That's a paraphrase of an Eleanor Roosevelt quote I've always liked (and have used before), but it's apt. Each of us has a million and one things we can look at from our past that make us cringe, but the question to ask yourself is:  why?  

I would lump most of my regrettable actions into things that were at the time embarrassing.  No, I'm not going to say what they were - just imagine one of your own embarrassing little faux pas and assume that it was I who committed it.  But the funny thing about embarrassment is that typically, you are the only person who remembers it. Thus, it seems that any regret stemming from embarrassment should abate within a reasonably short span of time after committing the act. 

This picture is so quintessentially internet that now it's not

And yet it doesn't.  Such incidents haunt us years after the fact and we slink around with our heads down, ashamed, remembering drunk texts, inappropriate comments, and spectacular pratfalls.  To what end?  For what purpose? Surely, some Neck-bearded Ladder Theorist / Evolutionary Psychologist would point out that the point of remembering embarrassing incidents is so that you remember not to commit them again, a hypothesis that I'm actually willing to accept at face value, so as far as I'm concerned I'm satisfied.  Someone calls you out for having your fly down = learn to not walk around with your fly down.  Good enough for moi.  

Cool story, bro - I award you 1000 internets

But what about the bigger regrets?  What about something like getting locked into a house that's now 100% underwater?  What about marrying someone you shouldn't have?  What about those big life-changing decisions you made 5-10 years ago that are only now starting to catch up with you?  What about the things so huge that learning not to do them again would be moot? 

My contention is that these things, though typically called "regrettable decisions," are not actually cause for regret.  I'm not one usually for talking about "sin" in any traditional context, but regret to me is tantamount to despair - where despair is the hopelessness and helplessness that eventually leads to self-destruction, regret is a disavowal of one's own past, a desire to have the past be different, and thus affect the present.  It is despair in reverse - a despair of the past.

GTFO n00bs!

For me, at any rate, it's worth looking at Western last names, and I of course mean the really obvious ones:  Miller, Smith, Shepherd, Cooper, and so on. In Western culture, what you do very much defines who you are, to the point that your twelve-times great grandfather's job gave your entire line the last name you have.  To regret is to resent what you have done, and to resent what you have done is in part a reflection of self-resentment.  No, a person is not entirely what they have done, but action informs perception, including self-perception.

I posted a picture of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden for good reason, and to explain it I would invoke a quote:  In every life, some rain must fall.  Not could, not might, but  must.  I find this to be delightfully profound - the notion that a life is not a life at all without hardship.  Those dark and damp experiences that we so often regret are in fact formative.  No, not all "rain" is simply regrettable action, but regrettable action certainly fits within that category. 

 Fuckin' metaphors - how do they work?

So of those actions that cause hardship - I say embrace them.  Get to know them.  Consider:  did you know at the time that your action would end badly?  If not, well, that's nothing to feel bad about - the market tanked, your wife went frigid, your husband is a bum, well, these things happen, often without warning.  The other point to consider is:  can you do something about it now?  Then do so.  Fix the problem, you'll feel better, and if the problem is unfix-able, then at least you can learn to live with it.  Embrace what you've done as a contributing element of identity, and remember that identity is fluid.  Don't like being the guy who got drunk and told off all his friends?  Don't be.  Do something else to outshine that facet of your being, but own up to it - be it for a little while, and then do something else that merits being something else. 

This all sounds very new-age self-helpy, but it's been on my mind for a couple of days. If you want something less maudlin, how about running around screaming "NO REGRETS! WOOOOO!"  Or if you want something more maudlin, you could also say "The only thing constant...is CHANGE!!!111one."  Either way, just remember - nobody cares about this shit as much as you do, and only you can do anything about it.

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Follow-Up to Interview

First, this previous post informs this one.

Now you may be asking how it went, and I will tell you that I think it went very well.  I managed to not throw up or pee or anything, and I would say a good half of my sentences were in coherent American English.

Now this guarantees nothing, of course, but I will say I enjoyed this interview more than the last.  The last interview I had before the one today was to try out for the position of bartender at the Mt. Clemens Elks Lodge.  Ever have a potential employer tell you that they didn't have any business and that you weren't going to make any money, all amid the wafting stink of stale cigarette smoke and lonely old people?  Good times, guys, good times.

So good interviews or bad, it's time for the weekend - enjoy!

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Have YOU got a job for ME? An Incomplete Entry!

Many, many years ago, when I first asked my dad how to go about getting a  job, he said that the best thing to do was just go in, do a little soft shoe and say: "Have YOU got a job for ME?"

Go ahead and keep trying - you're not hearing it right in your head.  It's this supremely dorky little sing-song thing that's been an inside joke with my family for something like 20 years.  It comes to mind now because I have a job interview at 10:30 this morning (technically 10:45, but the guy kind of flip-flopped on the time once or twice, so I'm just showing up at 10:30 and bringing a crossword or something). 

Dah-daaaa, da-da-da-da-dah, da-da-dah-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-dahhhh

So if this post runs a little short, pardon me - I'm drinking extra coffee, putting on my best suit, and practicing saying things like "Absolutely, I think it's important to make the company's mission my own" and also "I have no problem going the extra mile for a client." While I do think these things are important bits of, if nothing else, esprit de corps, they don't really drive home what makes a good worker. 

I'd like to mention in my interview that I have a pathological aversion to eating other people's food from the shared fridge.  I don't care how good you allege that it is, other people eat weird food.  I just get this nauseating sort of system shock when I see that someone packed, say, a salami sandwich and then put sprigs of cilantro on it, or that they made it with pumpernickel bread.  You people weird me out, and by you people I mean all of you people. You disgust me.

It very clearly had my name on it

As for my other assets as an employee:  I rarely remove my shoes at work even though I dislike wearing shoes.  I am not getting married anytime soon so I will not come to your cubicle and bore you with my obnoxious wedding tedium (also: not a chick).  I do not have kids, so you can be sure that I'll probably have interesting stories to tell on Monday that do not involve little league, doodie, or renting a new Veggie Tales video. 

On the other hand, employers often ask for your weaknesses, and I have more than my share of those.  I'm a writer, which means that in addition to getting the usual blue-funk streaks of melancholy one associates with the art, I also maintain the hope (fragile that it is) that one of my books or stories will run away wildly and the closest anyone will get to two week's notice is seeing my mug flipping you the bird on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous which I'm just assuming is still on the air.  Also, you know, "I work to hard," or "I care too much," or something like that.  

A writer?  What's that?  Also, you totally just read this in my voice.

So wish me luck!  If this ending seems premature, mea culpa - I've got to go finish shining my shoes and cleaning my nails. It's time to get into interview mode and put on a bit of that razzle-dazzle.  If you should be so inclined, come back later in the day (around 12:00 EST or so) and I will update this post with my impressions of the interview - could be something good, could be something bad, but either way, you'll get all the minutiae of my life right here at SSS!

Rich Creamery Blasphemy

As you prepare to read this, please note:  my review of the iconic 1980's mainstream blaxploitation extravaganza "Action Jackson" is up at Rental Rehab: Where Bad Movies Live.  Check it out:  http://wherebadmovieslive.wordpress.com.  

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This last week, a giant statue of Jesus previously resting on I-75 south of Cincinnati was struck by lightning and burned to the ground.  If you're wondering just how a statue can burn, well, that informs a lot of this post.

Good luck topping that, Burning Man

Across the religious community, and especially amongst members of the 4,000 member Solid Rock (Mega) Church of Cincinnati, Ohio, there has been speculation regarding the meaning of this particular fire. Some argue that god, yay, did smote the statue with much lightning, and much thunder, and lo, the statue did burn, and this pleased the lord.  Other people who did not get their science from the fevered scribblings of desert-wandering cave dwellers from 6,000 years ago have reasoned that the statue was the tallest thing on the property, and if anything was going to get struck, then that was it.  

Team Smite in turn splits into two categories:  modestly-dressed people who think the image was idolatrous or graven, thus angering ol' Elohim and incurring his wrath, and "spiritual but not religious" people who don't like the fact that this 4,000 member McTemple was of the "gay-curing" variety, and they smile smugly when they think of god, who is also Gaia earth mother and The Spirit Manon unsubtly correcting that behavior, as they smoke cheap cigarettes and shout "Karma's a bitch!" over the Creed CD that's been stuck in their CD players since 2004. 

Lame - this is just begging for "YMCA"

But me, I'm on team meaningless.  I'm a Nihilist, Lebowski, I believes in NOTHING.  If there is a god, and I don't think so, he hasn't convincingly or consistently used lightning bolts as a weapon / teaching tool in thousands of years, OR, if all those lightning strikes are god's artillery, I would like to say that god needs glasses, because he's hitting about one in, oh, 64 billion.  

Alternately, it's possible that lightning is god's shotgun, and he just spits a bunch of them out hoping that one of them hits a heretic.  Either way, not a strong case for omnipotence or divine intervention. 

It's possible that god is an aesthete, however - that statue was, frankly, not very good.  From the road it looked okay, but up close you could see that it was pretty lumpy, which is odd since the building material was styrofoam, which seems like it would have been pretty easy to smooth out. Second, I'm not sure where this statue rests in its depiction - it's called the "King of Kings" statue, so presumably this is supposed to mark some point in the Ascension, but as so many people have tiresomely pointed out, it really just looks like he's declaring for a successful field goal kick.  

It's good!

I did appreciate some of the choices on the statue - the tiny little cross is a symbol (rather obviously) of Jeshuah's triumph over death, but what I really like is that this is a pretty clearly Semitic Jesus.  This was not yet another statue of Ted Nealy in a bathrobe - he's got curly hair and a big schnoz - this guy probably came from the line of David.  Plus, he's got this sort of desperate, fevered look about him, like a man who really did wander the desert and get tempted by the devil for a few decades and then came back not-at-all crazy to share wisdom and healing.  

He's the kind of Jesus that people like me can appreciate - the kind of guy we'd like to discuss philosophy and cosmogony with, the friend we don't usually introduce to our girlfriends because he'd scare them off.  This is as opposed to the beatific Jesus, who just makes me want to punch him in the mouth.  What are you looking so smug for, huh?  Nice lamb you're holding there, Jesus - bring some mint jelly and you can come to dinner.  

Lamb = sweater + dinner

But if there's any metaphor we can take away from this fire, I'm sure it has more to do with the statue itself than in its subject, or in the politics of the organization for which it acts as a signpost.  Rather, why the hell would you make such a thing out of Styrofoam?  That thing cost $250,000! The statue was coated in a protective fiberglass shell, but fuck that - you ever see a 1980's corvette go up?  *shwoom*

In a way, Butter Jesus (spread the word) was a truly American icon - a spiritual facade made of so much polystyrene and steel coated in fiberglass, hollow in the middle.  For all that expense, it still seems a half-assed effort.  A quarter of a million dollars for a big ostentatious cream-yellow monstrosity that drew more ridicule then reverence.  Like a Hummer or a McMansion, it exemplified up-in-a-week/down-in-a-day construction and, to be fair, I've no doubt the sculptor and his team worked very hard to get the thing erect (giggidy), but in the end, it seems a smaller statue made of stone would have looked better and lasted longer. 

Birds poop on me!

In the end, it hardly matters.  Symbols are symbols, and even if they never fall, the things they represent often change or are forgotten.  I'm sure that when Obama lets all the terrorists come into the country and make us be Muslims next year they would have torn it down anyway, so big deal.  Everything fades, everything turns to dust, and we are all always burning in thefire called life.  I think somebody wrote something about that once. 

It's the bible, stupid - Ecclesiastes.  Read a book, for fuck's sake. 

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Terrible Secrets of Freemasonry Revealed!!!

I was going to write this big huge blog post debunking some of the big huge conspiracy theories about freemasonry because this last weekend I went down to a big huge chicken dinner at my dad's old lodge. The chicken was a little greasy, but it was all pretty tasty, and of you take the first word of every letter of the sentence before this one, then unscramble it, you will know the name of He whom the Freemasons most revere.

 Dear god, what nefarious scheme is this?

Did you try to decode my secret message?  If you did, that means you think that scrambled mnemonics and geometry puzzles are a good way to pass messages, and that means that you are on your way to becoming a conspiracy theorist! 

Conspiracy theories work on this sort of reverse Occam's Razor principle: that the most complex and convoluted answer to any question is in fact correct.  But how do you get to the complex and convoluted answer in the first place?

If you said "duh, to have an answer you first have to have a question," then you are wrong and also stupid.  Conspiracy is all about having an answer before you have a question, and then bending the question in such a way that it fits the answer you've already made.  Or rather, you know,..."uncovered."

 The crutches are a red herring - look at the space between the letters

 
So it works kind of like this:  Suppose that you think that a dark cabal of lizard people have actually formed a shadow government that runs the world.  Never mind how or why you thought of this - it's not important.  What is important is that you suspect this dark lizard cabal of running everything and of keeping the human population ignorant and docile. 

Don't work to hard on collecting actual evidence - this is key.  Instead, prove your hypothesis by inference. Strange weather today?  It's not because you live in Michigan, it's because the lizard people are testing their weather control device.  Sound cuts out in the middle of the president's press conference?  It 's not because some intern tripped on a cable while carrying an armful of donuts and coffee, dropping them with hilarious results -  it's because the anti-lizard-person militia attacked the event (but of course you'll never hear about it because the media are totally complicit).  You can't get a job?  It's not because you lack basic social skills or anything resembling a skilled trade, it's because they know that you know about them, and so you must be silenced.

1D8 racial hit points plus one level of New World Order

Now here's where the real thinking comes in:  you know that they know, and they know that you know, but they can't just kill you, see?  Despite controlling the media, and the government, and also the weather, and also having the ability to wipe peoples minds and memories, they can't just kill you because that would leave too many...okay, don't think so hard about that part.  They just can't, okay?  Because someone might find out and ask questions, and the last thing they want is for you to ask questions. 

So you collect corroborating information and you move it by covert channels - the internet used to be good for this, but now it's all in the hands of the Controllers (that's what they're called - the Controllers.  Because they control things.  Get it?) and so the only safe way to send a message is by ham radio.  Sure, that means that anyone with a receiver can hear your message, but unless they triangulate on your signal, there's no way to track it, and as you know they are trying to remain inconspicuous and so they won't send out the Black Trucks until they absolutely have to shut you down. 

Contrails?  More like CHEMTRAILS amirite?

Now of course I could go on - I can talk about how you're too important to kill, or how they like having you around because they can call you a lunatic, but you know that you'll be the one laughing when we all have to wear the mark of the beast and march into forced labor camps - but I think I've made my point: conspiracy theories are stupid, but it's important to understand just how stupid they are.  I think and hope that the conspiracy theorist phenomenon, that big rush of new conspiracy theories following 9-11, has crested and fallen like the big wave of retarded that it was, but every time I say that the History Channel has a "Secret Brotherhood of Freemasons" marathon and kicks up this sort of mud again.  Thus, I want to say the following to the people out there who accuse the masons of plotting this and concealing that: 

There is at least one Masonic lodge in every major American city.  Frequently, there's one in tiny little backwards towns too (the town I visited this last weekend has a population of 1,200 people). The meetings are usually closed to members only (so are a lot of things: corporate board meetings, parent/teacher conferences, etc), but the location of the lodge is no secret, nor is the membership.  You can go to the temple just about any time it's open.  If you really want to know what the Masons are up to, go ask one. 

Yesssss the profits from the Friday Night Fish Fry will bring the prophecy to fruition - Mua ha ha ha ha!

The problem a conspiracy theorist has with actually going up and asking a Mason to tell him about his lodge is that it would completely destroy the neat little package he's made for himself.  He'd find out that he could actually fill out an application and join. He'd see that it's not too much more sinister than an Elks club, or a Lady Lions Auxilliary. But such a revelation of benign banality would shatter the theorists worldview - all the delicate strands that hold up his web of self-deception would come undone, and then what would he have to believe in?

And there you have them - the dark terrible secrets of Freemasonry.  It's a little bit like a pot luck luncheon, but with a lot of weird-looking furniture.  This idea that all these wealthy powerful people go to secret meetings and plot out the fate of the world based on the rather flimsy coincidence of membership in one particular fraternity is, frankly, retarded.  Why not talk about the things that powerful people demonstrably and obviously have in common?  How many are Christian? How many are white?  How many of these devious "Controllers" very obviously flaunt their power with titles like "president," "prime minister,"
"member of parliament" or "king?"

Power is not usually much of a secret, and big power even less so.  For better or worse, it's not hard to see who really runs any given show, and ones energies are much better spent supporting or opposing those forces as appropriate.

Of course, then again, this is all obviously just what we want you to think.

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Fruit Pie the Logician

When I was an undergraduate at MSU, I had an atypically short period of being "undecided" in terms of my major. Most other misdirected undergraduates languish for a good 2 years until finally being forced to declare one major or another - me, I went right for the throat after one semester and dedicated myself to earning a degree in Philosophy.

He's in the phone book under "Socrates"

Of course, anyone who has read more than 3 posts in this blog knows that that didn't work out particularly well.  I changed my major to English not 4 months after declaring for Philosophy, and it's a good thing too, because philosophy ain't what it used to be.  

In high school, I was lulled in by reading Socrates - well actually I read Plato, but Plato said he was just writing down what Socrates said, so let's not waste too much time on that - and a randomized sample of other philosophers hand-picked to appeal to high school students - Plato, DesCartes, Nietzche,  Sartre - generally forward thinkers with revolutionary concepts or exciting narrative presentations.  

Naturally, what I actually fell in love with were the words, the style, and the notion of metonymy, but at the time you could not have told me that I was not destined to be a philosopher.  

Also, Roadhouse kept coming on TV, and I think I rented it a couple times, and I thought Patrick Swayze's Dalton had a pretty good thing going. Of course, he held a BA in Philosophy from NYU and he spent his time chucking people out of bars, so that should tell you something of the career prospects for a Philosophy major. 

Oiled up like the greasy boy lover of a Greek logician

When I got to college, I discovered that the game had changed.  It was widely conceded that the great unknowable questions were in fact pretty unknowable ("why" being the quintessential reducto-ad-mortem example), and that the best any Philosopher could really contend with were issues of logic.  

The problem for me is that I am not a particularly logical person.  Although I respect facts and evidence, I am not easily persuaded by reason. I am one of those people that religious pundits point to when they're saying that people "take science on faith" because I'm no scientist but I trust in scientific results.  I'm much more affected by personal experience and emotional appeals than I am by matters of black-and-white truth.  In other words, I'm a lot more McCoy than Spock. 

Exactly

My first Semester of Philosophy was spent reading the pre-Socratics - Diogenes, Democritus, Anaxagoras, and so on - very ancient, very dead men who went around postulating that the earth was a piece of wood floating on water, that life was the conflict between the animate and the inanimate, and that ducks weighed more than witches.  Good fun for the whole family!  

After that, I blew off a long and tedious DesCartes class (which I nearly failed) and anxiously awaited the opportunity to sign up for classes that taught the really cool modern stuff - the stuff that Philosophy studies should be: dressing in black slacks and berets, growing a soul patch, and smoking exotically flavored cigarettes while drinking absinthe. 

 Your professor and lover

But first I had to get through logic, and that was the straw that broke this camel's back.  Again, I'm just not very logical.  In Vegas, I play roulette tables that "feel" right.  I navigate a car by intuition. I majored in English, for god's sake.  

So when I got to the logic class and we started talking about syllogisms, I was all like "Oh man, awesome, 'cause like, if Socrates is a man, and man is mortal, then Socrates is mortal man - I can dig it, man."  To which my professor replied, "yes, but also:  If A and B then C, so if B but not A then not C, and if C then B then A, and if B but not C then not A, and if C and B the A, and I before E except after C and in sounds of A as in neighbor and weigh."

As this diagram clearly proves, you're not only wrong, but also gay

So I gave up on a brilliant Philosophy career in order to go have a stunning and meteoric flight in Arts and Letters.  Now, in my unemployment, I'm free to sit at coffee shops or dark taverns with the unemployed philosophy majors and discuss heady white-tower things that don't concern the unemployed auto workers at the other end of the bar who would just as soon beat our privileged asses than to listen to us spout our asinine academic rhetoric.

The strange thing for me is that I expect others to bear the burden of proof while I tend to work in a murky sort of empathetic gestalt.  I remember decrying the Iraq war because there was no proof of WMD's while at the same time George Bush went on about his own gut reaction to the business, and I ground my teeth over thousands that were going to die on someone's (completely wrong) hunch.  At the same time, I couldn't really counter the arguments without having first-hand experience in the matter myself except to say with equal ambiguity that the whole thing felt wrong and contrived. I happened to be right, but all that means is that I guessed correctly - there was very little method to my madness.

 I am driven with a mission from God, who sounds a lot like Dick Cheney on a PA

However, I'm glad for my time spent studying philosophy - as much as I just feel my way through situations, I did learn a little bit about the value of evidence and the weight of reason.  I managed to pick up a little self control and a lot of objectivity, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.  At the end of the day though, I realized that you can't fit a square peg in a round hole, and so changing my major and abandoning the study of logic and reason was probably the most rational and logical thing I've ever done.

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Clowns to the Left of me, Jokers to the Right

This last Sunday, I had a whimsical daydream and set my Facebook status to:

As I continue this job search, I wonder:  Is it stupid to think of going for my PhD, or just Crazy? 

Though hardly a universal response, the consensus was that it was in fact stupid AND crazy to go back for my PhD.  Responses ranged from "...why not? its not like you've got anything better to do, right?" to "I believe that going back to school is a way for people to avoid dealing with harder realities in life" and the ultimate in dissuasion:  "You'll be dead!" though I think that last one might have just been a Star Wars quote out of context. 

Power converters! 

Naturally, the question begged by the commencement of doctoral study is:  why?  The answer for me is flat-out vanity.  I'd like to be called "Dr. Malesh," and to satisfy the dull curiosity that I have about the limits of my discipline (though to be clear, I wouldn't get a PhD in creative writing, I'd be going for English and Literature, which is not even really my thing).  

One of the commenters on my status pointed out that a BA didn't get me a job, an MFA didn't get me a job, so why would I think a PhD would get me a job?  He's right - checking behind door number three would result in a bonus prize of nothing - absorutery nothing.  I so stupid. 

Supplies!

In the interest of clarity, I've never really considered my degree a job-getting tool.  I only consider it to be such when I get confused (which is pretty often) and kind of fall into the rhetoric of people who say that it is, which is honestly just about everyone.  The world is glutted with English scholars, some good, some bad, but all contributing to an overpopulation of liberal-minded word nerds.  Finishing college after dropping out was a very personal thing for me, a need to complete a failed quest.  The graduate degree was an effort to see that line of scholarship to its logical end.  The resultant unemployment and alienation from anything resembling a normal workplace is just a happy bonus. 

But what about something that really would be a worthwhile career tool?  Something that would make for a great source of contacts, provide valuable job training, ameliorate my student debt, and let me travel?  Oh god, yes, here we go - time to talk about the prospect of joining the Navy. 

Creepy uncle is violating more than Don't Ask, Don't Tell

It's an idea I've entertained more than once, both when things were flush and when they are thin (as they are now).  Although the pay isn't great for anyone with a "real" job, it beats the hell out of any salary I've made in the last 3 years.  They don't pay for all of your school, but they have programs that would chop my loan debts down to size - plus you get good medical and dental, and all the other usual benefits of military service, namely banging waitresses and hangers-on from the parasitic little "army towns" that spring up around military bases and feed on the soldiers stationed there in the name of "supporting the troops." 

I digress - the thing to remember is that on paper it's a good offer, and one that people keep waving under my nose.  On paper it's three hots and a cot, easy money, and a guaranteed job for 4-6 years.  On paper, why would I ever do anything else? 

Shall you? Oh, shall you? 

Probably the whole "not really looking to get shot int he face and die" thing, coupled with the "I would just be doing it as another job, and I find jingoism contemptible" thing. How the hell does a left-leaning over-educated douchenozzle like myself even begin to take orders from a mouth-breathing drill sergeant or toe the line with a bunch of pants-pissing 18-year-olds? How the hell does a pot-bellied hedonist with weak ankles and bad knees even make it through basic training?  

My point in mentioning all this is that I've got some pretty extreme options set before me, none of which do I fully believe in. The academy is just distant enough in my mind that it seems like a lilac-scented lollipop fun land where every day is a creative challenge and every professor sings songs of welcome at their office hours. Contrarily, the military option is being suggested to me by people who have not been themselves, and keep getting the same brochure in the mail that I got when I was 18.  Both options are being presented through a rose-colored haze that sounds vaguely like someone sighing a sweet chorus of "what could possibly go wrong?" and the answer is, naturally, everything.

Boom - headshot

So there's the take-away, kids - don't buy anything people are trying to sell you, because money talks and bullshit walks.  In both of my extremes, it seems like people are piling the bullshit high and deep, and there's a lot of sweet promises that will like as not go unfulfilled.  An advanced degree in astrophysics is one thing - an advanced degree in comparative English lit is another; likewise the promises a recruiter makes to get you into fatigues is rolled in  honey and dipped in sugar, but the accounts I hear of military service usually sound more like vinegar and tears.  Also: dismemberment.

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Snoop Doggy-Dogg Better Find a Jobby-Job

While I've been courting unemployment for a while, it's only now that I'm actually becoming free from my previous job.  I spent a chunk of last week and this last weekend cleaning up a really horrible textbook, and now I find my duties and responsibilities shifting to something altogether just as odious: job searching.

I'm never sure which I dread more: getting a job or not getting a job.  On the one hand, I do have bills to pay and so having a job is just swell.  On the other hand, starting at a new job can be totally nerve-wracking: new people to meet, new responsibilities to master, new soul-crushing and mind-numbingly inane conversations revolving around Lost or American Idol. Who the fuck is Sawyer and what the fuck does he have to do with me?

Still not helpful


Yes, I know that Lost is over.  Office gossip takes forever to shift, and workers will be talking about it until sometime in 2012 when, hopefully, the world ends.

In theory, I should be taking a few days off and just collecting myself instead of diving headlong into a job search because now, instead of breathing deep and thinking rationally about the sort of job I'd really enjoy, I have to thrash around like a drowning man and take the first thing that comes along to stay afloat, be that office drone, bartender, pizza cook, or jizz mopper. 

You never know though, sometimes you get lucky.  In between all the Craigslist ads for "$$$ Human Test Subjects Needed $$$" and "Free Couch - Not Too Many Stains" I hold out the hope that I'll find something good.  Something that pays a decent enough wage that I can stop staying up all night freaking out over how I'm going to afford a package of Meijer-brand hotdogs, but also something that won't consume my life like a lurking, slurping parasite burrowing into my brain and making me the puppet spy of Khan Noonian Singh. 

Khaaaaaaaaaaaan!

I don't have any conclusion on the matter just yet, just a slinking optimism that things will work themselves out as they always do, and that I've got my priorities back in the right place.  The writing comes first, the writing must always come first, and I feel pretentious enough even to say that given the volume of literary tasks I have undertaken, the writing can come second, too. 

It's also important that I maintain a healthy sense of gamesmanship.  It's very easy to despair and lament, but it's infinitely more rewarding to roll up the old sleeves and dig into the mess.  If that's unconvincing, let me offer a better example than that of me possibly having to make pizza again:

A world of fascinating smells

Last night I was watching Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern on the travel channel.  Andrew Zimmern is a big guy with a slack made-up-drunk sort of face, and apparently those pudgy jowels and baggy eyes are the result of years of hardcore alcohol abuse, but I digress: the guy goes anywhere and eats anything.  Dude eats live spiders and poison fish.  Dude eats chicken feet and hickory smoked horse buttholes.  Dude sat on a rickety old vietnamese boat and ate broiled bottom-feeding scum fish that had been "rinsed clean" in doo-doo water.  Literal doo-doo water, like from people in the river boat houses just sticking their butts over the side and doing their business.  They rinsed off the fish in that and then ate it.

I figure if that loveable old fat guy can do that, risking dysentry and death, then I can pick up my chin and have some fun with this whole thing too. 

Update:  Interviewing at the Mt. Clemens Elks Club tomorrow - this is NOT a full time job, this would just be bar tending experience and something to don on weekends.  Still, it's a start! 

Dahn dah da-da-dah da-da-DAH-Dahn-Dahn

In 1976, a down-on-his-luck Sylvester Stallone used the last of his cash to go see a boxing match.  As he watched two pugilists pound each other to paste, he got an idea for a movie, wrote a script, made enough cash to hire a crew, and made Rocky for 1.1 Million dollars.  The movie went on to win 3 Oscars, gross over 225 Million in its first year, and reinvigorated boxing for a whole new generation of fans.

I have a really visceral reaction to this movie - I love watching it.  When I hear that opening theme and watch the word "ROCKY" scroll sideways across the screen, I get goosebumps.  When Mickey comes over to Rocky's apartment and breaks down, and when Rocky finally takes him in and accepts him as his trainer, my eyes well up.  When Rocky, beaten and bloody, staggers his way through a mob of reporters and fans crying out "Adrian" like a bleating calf, and when Adrian answers and runs to him, my heart beats right out of my chest.  It's just beautiful to me.

That pet store broad

And yet, as a modern educated liberal academic post-modern guy, it's the kind of thing that I should at some level find repellent. Cinematographically it has aged well - the blood looks real, the punches connect, the camera work is understated and powerful - and of course the easiest and most popular read is that of an underdog story (Rocky coming up from under), and liking underdog stories has been part of every American citizenship test since 1784.  But for all that, there are two points of politic that seem a little harder to swallow now, nearly 34 years later.

For one thing, there's the racism.  There's enough cushioning here that this might not be readily apparent - after all, Apollo Creed actually wins the fight, right?  Black guy wins - how is that racist? The answer being that while Apollo Creed wins the fight, Rocky wins the movie. The whole point of Rocky's journey is in going the distance.  He knows he can't beat Creed, so he commits to "go[ing] the distance."  He just has to keep up and he's won, and he does, and in the end we know that he has come out on top.  Creed is left squabbling with the referee over the match proper.  He's left with the scrap of victory that the white contender doesn't even want anymore.

I'm about to die! 

The whole Rocky franchise coincidentally features Rocky beating the crap out of black people (or, just as problematic in Rocky IV, going off and avenging his beloved Creed, succeeding where the black man failed).  Rocky is the "Great White Hope" - in a sport dominated by blacks and Latinos,white boxing fans had come to feel disenfranchised (why there should be so many white MMA fighters and so few white boxers is beyond me - why one combat sport or another? I have no idea.). To white America, boxing was another aspect of daily life being "taken over," and they pined for their white champion to show that they could compete too.

They can't, by the way - the last white heavyweight champion was Ingemarr Johansson in 1959.

And so the second kind of icky issue with Rocky:  he's completely artificial.  For all his gritty "realness," for his man-on-the-street minimalist identity, he's little more than a pipe dream. Rocky Balboa is modeled in part on Rocky Marciano, but the boxing world of Rocky Marciano doesn't exist anymore - you can't just drown your opponent in blood and crush him with your falling body.  Form and technique count for something.

Gonna fly now

But that same boxing world exists for Rocky.  Even by the liberal weight classing standards of the 1970's, there is NO way he and Creed would be put into a ring together.  In wide shots, it literally looks like Little Mack fighting Tyson.  Horribly outmatched, he swings and lasts, he bleeds and bruises, and the fight is not called.  He digs in and manages to give as good as he gets until the match is finally ended and he can enjoy the healing embrace of his Adrian, and this is significant too - Rocky is no braggart.  He's humble and hardworking, earnest and quiet - he is the exact opposite of the loud, black, boisterous then-heavyweight champion Muhammed Ali (upon whom Apollo Creed is in part modeled).

It's not coincidental to me that Rocky runs up the steps of the Philadelphia museum of Art, then.  He is a work of art himself.  A fantasy, a daydream.  It's very much fitting then that in Rocky III they erect a statue of him on the front steps - that is just what he is: an icon, an image, a metaphor so obvious that the cinematic entity that is the Rocky movie franchise must recognize it.  As this movie is a work of fiction, we should expect a character, yes, a fictive construct like any other movie character. But as a character, Rocky Balboa is also an avatar of unfulfilled wishes and unsatisfied dreams.  Since America could not actually make a white champion, they had to invent one.  Like Nietzche's Ubermensch (and in turn, Hitler's Aryan), he is a myth, an idea - the best and most famous boxer in the world, and he's not even real.

Hug it out, bitch

So how to reconcile the inspiring underdog story with the rather depressing race and identity politics?  Long story short, forget it.  You read it, you can't un-see it now.  That was kind of a dick move on my part, but then the movie series itself has to fight with this as well.  Rocky and Creed start as rivals and then become friends.  Creed dies in an extremely Uncle Tom-ish fashion (he is not himself a "Tom," but rather, he exists only to die and so move the white character's plots forward) and Rocky avenges him.  There's some back and forth there.

The Creed-Balboa relationship is complex, but other black characters are either "helper figures" (Creed's trainer, Duke, joins Rocky's camp) or antagonists (Mason Dixon, George Washington Duke).  The only thing that ameliorates this rather glaring problem is the classic underdog story presented in the first film.  White or black, Rocky resonates, and the story itself would hold up well if the races were reversed, and furthermore, we can always be happy we're not watching Gladiator.

This move is TURRUBUHL

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