When the World Makes Sense

Don’t go in the water.

Don’t go in the water.

DON’T go in the water.

…Okay. You went in the water.

You probably know the OceanGate story — and the idiocy surrounding it — in intimate detail, so I’ll try to keep it short. Five mega-rich light-bending guys thought it’d be pretty darn cool to look at the sunken Titanic in a rinky-dink, commercial submersible. The vehicle was built from fragile carbon fiber, piloted with a Logitech gamepad, and bolted shut from the outside so the occupants couldn’t escape if they wanted to. When the gamepad stopped working properly, our intrepid adventurers became stuck in a tube with no way to move. In time, the pressure of the ocean became too great, and the hull ruptured. The little sub crumpled like a Pepsi can, and gooified everyone inside.

Now here’s the funny part: the news really wanted us to feel bad about all this, to sell it as some heartbreaking tragedy…but it doesn’t look like it worked.

Too soon? Possibly. In bad taste? Maybe, but don’t worry; we have some very good people on patrol, ordering us not to joke about it.

Well, all I can say to these people is, “Welcome to the Internet. First time?”

All right, that’s a cop-out, I know. Let’s put aside the cardinal rule that says the Internet turns people into assholes. There are a couple of other issues at play here.

First, there’s the crab mentality that leads to a general distrust and hatred of the super-rich. For generations, Americans have toiled under the doublethink of capitalism. Chasing the promise that hard work leads to riches, while internalizing the fact that only a lucky few ever actually get rich, can drive a person mad. Add to this the excess and debauchery that the rich regularly get up to, and bitterness shall well.

So five of these fucks blow a million dollars in total so they can brag to their rich-fuck friends about their “amazing adventures?” Oh, and to make TikTok videos about solving a Rubik’s Cube at crush depth? Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em in the ear. Does that make me a crab? Well, I’m the crab who didn’t get squished in a carbon fiber can. Stay in the bucket, boyo, and that won’t happen to you.

Which brings me to the second impetus for these jokes: a dire need to see natural selection at work. Everyday, it seems like the value of wisdom drops another dollar, as idiots and morons are either excused for their behavior…

…or are rewarded for it.

And everyday, we’re told to pity these people.

Do you?

Compassion is important and all, but so is personal responsibility. Suppose some guy is out for a walk, and a random alligator that escaped from a zoo jumps out and kills him. I’d feel bad for the guy. He didn’t know that was coming. Now, suppose some other guy gets killed by the gator because he tried to snuggle up and take a selfie with it. Well, I’m not going to feel so bad about that. In fact, I’d probably feel pretty happy about it.

Bloodthirsty poacher gets slaughtered by locals? I’m going to laugh at it.

Idiot government agent shoots himself during a gun safety lecture? I’m going to laugh at it.

Aggressive nature show host gets stung in the heart by a stingray? Well, okay, I didn’t laugh at that, but I certainly shook my head in non-surprise.

Why should anyone feel ashamed to laugh at this? The shame doesn’t lie on the witness to the folly. It lies on the fool, where it belongs. I have no sympathy for these people. Zero. The tale of OceanGate is rare and precious evidence that the universe is cognizant of hubris and stupidity. It’s the way things are supposed to happen, and it gives me hope.

The ones who take my hope are the ones who pretend to feel bad for them, the ones who refuse to learn a lesson, the ones who find consequences inconvenient. They stand up, stiff and sanctimonious, and tell me what I should think and feel about the situation. These are the sycophants, these are the enablers, these are the people who allow humanity to slide into ruin, because aww shucks guys, it’s not their fault!

Not everything is in our control, but we certainly have the power to not go where God doesn’t want us without proper preparation. You want to go on a daring adventure? Fine, but think ahead. Plan properly. Consult with experts who’ve done it before. Most importantly, consider your motivations. If you’re only climbing Mt. Everest for the likes and the follows, maybe you should just fake a photo and have ChatGPT write the anecdote. It’d be just as impressive to me.

The Real Fear

Like most of the Switch-owning public, I downloaded a copy of Metroid Dread when it was released earlier this month. I have to say, it’s a slick piece of work. It’s got classic Metroid design and classic Metroid gameplay. The artwork is pretty, and the animation is gorgeous.

And, well, I’m kinda disappointed with it.

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Heh, I should probably be up front here. This post isn’t meant to be a review of the game, though I guess I can talk about it a bit.

I guess my problem with Dread is that I don’t feel it takes any chances. It’s certainly not the revelation that Metroid Prime was, that’s for sure. Maybe that’s not fair to complain about; Dread was never advertised as some revolutionary take on the series. Even so, I had this quiet hope that Dread would be a new Breath of the Wild: a game that would stand before the Hollow Knights, Axiom Verges, Shadow Complexes, Guacamelees, and all the other indie wannabes that have sprung up over the years, and say, “Listen up, fools, here’s how it’s done.”

Instead, it’s just another Metroid. That’s cool, I guess.

The world is lovingly crafted, but it doesn’t stand out from the other rocky/volcanic/watery/technological planets Samus has visited. Honestly, I preferred the BSL from Metroid Fusion. At least it wasn’t just another planet. The boss fights are cool, but something about them just feels rote. Super Metroid may be old enough to drink, but it set the bar pretty high. How many times are they going to trot out Kraid and his belly? I felt more impressed by the bosses in Cuphead. The ballyhooed E.M.M.I. robots that stalk Samus through certain passages are too numerous, and encountered too frequently, to be truly scary. I suppose that, if you’re sensitive enough to be shaken by games like Slender, the E.M.M.I.s might give you a chill, but I found them more annoying than anything else. The SA-X from Fusion was far more frightening, and far more rewarding to finally stand up to because it appeared rarely. The methods for laying out an E.M.M.I. are also unusually complicated. Hold L, hold R, hold Y — jeez, is this really a Nintendo game? What happened to intuitive simplicity?

Now, here’s the thing: I can already hear the voices of Nintendo fans leaping to this game’s defense. I also know exactly how they would respond to my complaints.

“Um, this is the Metroid formula, duh.”

“Um, Kraid is a perennial villain and an important part of Metroid canon.”

“Um, you complain about the game being too much like other Metroid games, but then you complain when they add new things like the E.M.M.I. What do you want?”

“Just another casual who can’t handle complex controls.”

These voices descended on a poor reviewer at the Guardian, who dared to post her shrugging review of the game. I found it when I went in search of opinions that might match my own, wondering if I was really alone in my assessment. I’m glad I wasn’t, but I can also see why people who dislike popular games don’t speak up. The worst response to the review was probably this one:

The language here concerns me. “Safe to ignore this review?” What does that mean? That the review isn’t a threat of some kind? If so, a threat to what, the foot-thick consensus of “indomitable triumph?” Also, because the reviewer has a particular notion of what a short game is, all of her points can be dismissed completely? What fragility this reveals!

I know how you guys feel; you love Nintendo, you love Metroid, and you want to feel secure that your love is worthwhile. You don’t want to hear any criticism when you’ve already made up your mind. To instantly cast aside differing opinions, however, and finding weak, tenuous reasons to do so, is dangerous. I know we’re just talking about a silly video game, but I actually think this attitude is one of the reasons why our political situation is where it is. We can’t afford to be this sensitive. It’s just a game, guys. I guess the same can be said about everything.

Because the Light Went Out

About two months ago, for no real reason that I can think of, I went on a Norm MacDonald binge. From out of the stars, Norm’s “cliff-diving” joke shot into my head, and I wanted to see it again. So, I looked up his One Night Stand special on YouTube, and wound up sliding down a rabbit hole.

I actually saw that One Night Stand special back when it was new, and I never forgot it. Aside from cliff-diving, I never forgot Norm’s jokes about lottery tickets and the guy who killed his family because the devil told him to to do it. Norm’s style and attitude made him stand out to me — even in the time of Emo Phillips, Dennis Wolfberg, and The Amazing Jonathan, I knew this slightly befuddled dude with the nasally voice was something special.

Although I’d seen Norm doing Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live, and caught a few of his cameos in movies by his SNL buddies, I never really followed his career. Until this recent binge, I had no idea he’d written a book, and hosted multiple shows. As my YouTube adventures led me to tantalizing snippets of these shows, I decided to jump on Netflix and watch them in their totality.

That was when I realized that Norm wasn’t playing a character when he did his comedy sets, he was just being himself.

Many of the clips I saw of Norm were of jokes and shaggy-dog stories told on late-night talk shows. Few of these jokes were his own (even the beloved “moth” joke is just an old standard), but when hearing them in Norm’s voice, you’d never know it.

So I took in all this Norm stuff, had a great time, and felt glad that Norm was having a great time too. I looked forward to seeing what kind of trouble he’d get into next.

And then the dude died.

Like Richard Farnsworth, the sheriff from Misery who refused to inform people of his cancer, and then blew his own brains out, Norm kept his suffering to himself and went out on his own terms.

Every comedian he touched was shocked and horrified at the news, and an outpouring of love and memories came from the likes of Bob Saget, Conan O’Brien, and David Spade. The tales they told described a mischievous, idiosyncratic introvert who refused to drive, and who took days to respond to a text. They showed admiration for his bloodyminded adherence to OJ slander on Weekend Update, his “shocking” behavior on The View, and his time-gobbling jokes on The Tonight Show.

Some folks called him a genius. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I can’t deny that Norm was an individual, steadfast and uncompromising. He was never offended, and he loved toying with those who were. People like that are hard to come by anymore, especially in show business. He broke rules and won laughs anyway. That takes courage. Now, whether Norm was truly being courageous or just crazy is up for debate. Still, he did things his own way, for better or worse, and I think that’s why people respect him.

I’d like to write more, but I really have to read that book now. I’m told that Norm gets his job at SNL by selling Lorne Michaels morphine in it.

On the Page

A few nights ago, my online friend PacBilly hosted a stream on YouTube. The poor guy had been laid up due to what sounds like severe tendinitis, so he grabbed his MacBook and said, “What the hell; I’ll go online and draw a picture.” What resulted was an amazing expression of community talent.

PacBilly started out drawing a cartoon in Paintbrush, the MacOS equivalent of Microsoft Paint, using only the trackpad on his laptop. I tell you, I wish I had this guy’s right brain, because his ideas are out there, man. He wound up drawing a picture of a mad duck, a sniffing banker, and a bumblebee with the head of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs. Listening to his creative process as he constructs this crazy drawing is as much fun as looking at the drawing itself.

He didn’t stop there, though. As folks gathered to watch, PacBilly decided to turn his bedridden impulse into an art showcase. He asked his viewers to draw and send in their own pictures, which he would then share on the stream. The only rules were that the drawings had to be done in Paint or a Paint-like program (no layers), using a mouse or a trackpad (no tablets).

Drawings poured in from everywhere. As PacBilly revealed them, I felt as though some peculiar curtain was lifted. The sight of these spontaneous sketches suddenly gave faces to these screen names, and put me in touch with something real, something true. I realize that’s the whole point of art, but when I go to DeviantArt and look at something like this:

Well…I just don’t feel it. There’s expert craftsmanship on display for sure, but I don’t get anything honest from it. On the contrary, I get the sense that the artist is hiding from me.

Looking at this stuff, however, I felt like I was seeing the souls of real people, shyly bared. Sure, the pictures are rough due to the limitations set by the rules, but that adds to their purity, I think.

Many viewers expressed apprehension about submitting a drawing, because they didn’t think their efforts would be worth sharing. PacBilly wouldn’t hear these objections. He told them that this activity was not about impressing anybody, but about the simple joy of creating.

Then he meticulously pored over each drawing, and gave them all due attention. He expressed curiosity on their inspiration. He saw personality in their details. He recognized the qualities of their designs, and mulled on where he would place them as printed copies.

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He didn’t stop there, though. As conversation continued, it was discovered that two of the stream’s viewers lived near each other, another was a skilled ukulele player, and yet another was about to celebrate his wedding anniversary.

That’s right, the morning PacBilly chose to host his stream was also the morning of this fellow’s anniversary. His screen name was The Highlander, and he was up late while his wife was sleeping. In PacBilly, this inspired a new mission: he was determined to get Mrs. Highlander to draw a picture for the stream.

More ideas followed. Hey, let’s hear some fond memories of The Highlander’s marriage, and get the viewers to draw pictures of them! Then, when Mrs. Highlander arrives, we’ll show them off to her! Better yet, let’s commission LogrusUKE, our resident ukulele player, to perform a cover of The Highlanders’ wedding song, and play it for her to hear!

The memory drawings didn’t happen, but thankfully, everything else did. The Highlander managed to get his wife out of bed, and she did draw a picture. She named it “Fowler,” and it touched PacBilly profoundly. He described it as “minimalist, but evocative,” and he believed that it would make a fine album cover. I have to agree.

Meanwhile, LogrusUKE quickly recorded a cover of “Just the Two of Us” by Bill Withers, the song of the Highlanders’ first dance. As soon as he was done, he shot an .mp3 to PacBilly, who then played it on stream for the couple. It was truly remarkable.

But that’s PacBilly. He knows how to pierce the fog. He has a deconstructive humor, and he embraces the imperfect. He has a playlist of videos called “Analog Anecdotes,” which are stories told on old-school, 4-track cassettes, and mixed over footage recorded on VHS. The videos are wracked with tape hiss and tracking lines, but that only makes them feel precious and human. I really admire that.

I regret to say that I missed this amazing stream, but I’m glad it’s uploaded to YouTube for posterity. For the hell of it, I took a stab at the MS Paint challenge while I listened to the video, but I don’t think my drawings really fit the spirit of the situation. It was a fine exercise, though, and I think it helped me get past the creative constipation I’ve been dealing with lately. Bless ya, Billy, you’re a hell of a guy.

My Turn, Murakami

Seven years ago, I went through a tough time. Work stressed me out to the point that I felt very unfulfilled and depressed. I stopped exercising, ate nothing but Little Caesar’s pizzas, and shaved my head like Britney Spears on extra-fruitcake mode. It kinda sucked.

Something I found that helped, however, was walking. There was a bike trail near my apartment complex that stretched halfway across town. I would go there on weekends and just walk that trail back and forth for hours. Sometimes I would read while I went, other times I would listen to music, and still other times I would do nothing else at all but feel my body move. I had always hated exercise, but I was beginning to understand why people did it, aside from trying to prolong their lives and look nice.

“God, Kathy, your ass looks so good! How do you do it?”

One of the many things Alan Watts taught me was the concept of “walking meditation.” Apparently it’s a big thing among monks throughout the ages. Before Watts mentioned it in his lecture, I had thought of meditation as sitting, lotus-style, on a mountaintop with one’s elbows on the knees. That, of course, is one manner of meditating, but walking is apparently just as good. The point of meditation has nothing to do with what one does with the body, but what one does with the mind. Or, rather, what one’s not doing with the mind.

Of course, this isn’t news to those who take walks to relieve stress. To me, a person who has serious trouble controlling his thoughts, it’s quite a revelation. Unfortunately, I’ve found that it still takes some serious practice to get right.

I don’t live by that bike trail anymore, and walking my dog is usually more stressful than anything else, so I have to make do with my treadmill. You see, when my life crashed in 2014, I gained a lot of weight. I went from one-hundred and thirty-nine pounds to one-hundred and ninety-seven. My belly protruded, my thighs rubbed, and my neck swelled until it was as wide as my jawline. I told myself that I might be a loser, but I’m not going to be a fat loser, and I started making changes.

So now I run thirty minutes a day on the treadmill, sweating my ass — and hopefully my paunch — off in gushing streams. It’s hard sometimes, and I still have days when I’m tempted to skip it.

I know I can’t though. Not only do I feel guilty and worried about gaining weight back, I get physically tense. I’ve been working the mill for so long now that my body has gotten used to it, and complains to me when it can’t get its fix. I had heard of people getting addicted to exercise, but I never thought that I’d experience it myself. I’d always thought of exercise as a miserable chore. I know that exercise helps me to feel better: it relieves my anxiety and makes me feel accomplished. Still, I have that feeling that it’s a just a dumb necessity that I have to force myself through each day.

I’m searching for ways to change that idea as I run. The method that seems to work best is to stop thinking of myself as a pilot, sitting in the skull and operating a pair of legs, but as a pair of legs working on their own. No joke: I close my eyes, and try to “push” my consciousness down into my legs and feet. I try to let them take charge for a while. It sounds weird, I know, but it actually helps.

And why not? My legs are me, after all. They have just as much right to be called me as my mind does. Who says my mind is the boss, anyway? The heart is pretty damn important. If it goes, everything goes. The stomach has a lot of sway, I’d say. Even the spleen has its own say-so. This ain’t a solo, it’s a harmony.

Believing that my mind runs the show creates all kinds of tension. All my mind wants to do is bounce around from one artificial worry to another. It thinks on how much time I have left before work, how tired I am, how sweaty I’m getting, how many calories I’m burning, oh God how much longer do I have to keep doing this, and so on. It drapes a filter of definitions over the experience and separates from it completely. No wonder it gets exhausting.

Thinking of myself as legs removes all that. As legs, I’m doing what I was made for. I’m moving, I’m gliding, I’m shining onstage. I’m a stallion on the plains, galloping, grunting, sweating, and loving every minute of it. The rhythm of my breathing, the stretch of my muscles, the push off the earth beneath me — they’re all glorious sensations to relish, to soak up, to be glad for.

I can’t say if this is the legendary “runner’s high” that I’ve heard tales about, but it might be close. I can say that it’s a kind of meditation, though. It gets me out of my head and in touch with reality, which can’t be broken down into alphanumerics, no matter how hard we wish that it could.

Foam Rubber Lover

The other day, my brother asked me about the power of puppets. He had recently watched the old music video for the Genesis song “Land of Confusion,” and he remembered how big a role puppets played in our childhoods. I hadn’t really thought about it, but he’s right.

I must have watched every Muppet movie a thousand times over. I loved The Dark Crystal and kinda liked Labyrinth. I was a fan of Sesame Street until I was way too old for it. I owned at least three stuffed ALFs. I even watched Spitting Image when it briefly aired on NBC, despite the fact I didn’t understand a word of it.

Perhaps most telling: my all-time favorite television show remains Mystery Science Theater 3000 (the original one). Breaking Bad is a distant second.

Puppets are indeed curious. Though they might seem like shields to hide behind, they actually yank down our guards and free us in a strange way.

Consider an audience’s reaction to puppets. When the puppeteer brings out his little friend, an audience immediately defines the two as separate performers. They respond to the puppet as though it actually has a self. In Sesame Street segments, you’ll see children hugging and patting puppets like people, even though the puppeteer must in be plain view to them. Alice Cooper said that performing on The Muppet Show was a wonderfully surreal experience. He said that even when the camera was off, he found himself in conversations with Miss Piggy and Rowlf the Dog, whose puppeteers remained in character. While interviewing Kermit the Frog on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart chided himself for looking in the frog’s eyes as he spoke to it.

But it’s not just audiences that puppets can charm; the puppeteers also come under their sway. I’ve seen shy people play with puppets and suddenly come alive. They giggle when they get caught, though. I suppose it’s not much different from the rush of acting, only without the need to memorize lines and place oneself before the critical eyes of others. When you play with a puppet, you can be as silly as you want and fear no judgment, because the puppet isn’t you.

One might say that this satisfies a need to play God, to breathe life into the lifeless, but I don’t think that’s the appeal here. I think what’s really going on is the very human practice of creating egos. We may not realize it, but the social game we play everyday is not a series of exchanges between living beings, but a dance of ghosts. It’s a system of roles and perceived personae, whose rules and rhythms are so forceful and complicated that they often stress us out. Playing with puppets gives us the opportunity to create a role voluntarily, and defy the currents that shove us hither and yon. Puppets can do all the outrageous things that we’re afraid to. They’re free from the bullshit we’re always worrying about.

My brother also asked if I thought puppets would have the same effect on today’s generation as it did on ours. I realize that puppets have a lot of competition these days, but I don’t think they’ll ever really go away; they’ll just get more computerized.

Look at Apple’s memojis: they may use high-resolution cameras and advanced face-recognition, but they’re basically just puppets to play with. Universal Studios has an animatronic Donkey, operated by a live puppeteer, that jokes around with the park guests. Charles Martinet has voiced a digital Mario at the Nintendo World store, and the kids eat it up.

Even so, you don’t need anything fancy to tap into the appeal of puppets. Puppetry abides by no rule. That’s probably another reason why they resonate with us: there are no real gates to pass. You could shake a sock around and people would love it, provided you made it lovable.

I think it’s all about the easy, pressure-free creation of egos — using our natural social instincts to weave a character from thin air. Playing with a puppet, you don’t have to be you for a little while, and you can be loved just the same. You know, this might be why we find artificial intelligence so compelling: Siri and Alexa seem like beings from another world, armed with all the knowledge of mankind and aiding us like alien butlers. We’re always trying to bring out the human in them, though, right down to making them fart.

387.44 Million Miles

While walking my dog today, I came across something weird on a playground sidewalk. It was a word written in chalk. A single word that I’ve seen many times in YouTube comments, but never anywhere else: the word “Libtard.”

Yeah. Somebody actually took the time to scribble the word “Libtard” on the sidewalk next to a park in chalk.

This perturbs me. It’s not that I take offense to the term. I don’t consider myself a liberal, or at least, not when it comes to most issues. I agree that some liberal stances, especially where I live, are impractical and even dangerous. I’m also not concerned for whomever the hell the word was referring to.

No, what bothers me is that the word was so near to the front of the writer’s mind that he or she felt inclined to write it in a public park. They’re obsessing over it that much.

Those YouTube comments I mentioned? They weren’t for videos that had anything to do with politics. They were posted on clips of Warner Bros. and Beavis and Butt-head cartoons. Using the most tenuous of connections, people crafted insults about Biden or Trump, or else Biden supporters and Trump supporters. If these people were just trolls, then they weren’t very good trolls. No one took the bait, and the comments had that sort of pouting indignation you usually see in political posts. These people were honestly mad, and they felt the need to let strangers know it.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being mad about politics, but when it gets to the point that you’re thinking about it while watching Road Runner cartoons, then it’s probably getting out of hand. You watch cartoons to forget about those things. You move on, you relax, you try and enjoy life. If watching cartoons gets you this pissed off about evil Democrats, what are you doing with the rest of your time? Are you just stomping around all day, muttering to yourself, “God I hate Democrats! I hate them so much!”

Now that I think about it, maybe that is what these folks are doing, if social media is anything to go off of.

Whatever the case, it’s unhealthy behavior. To put your political rage on your sleeve reveals an obsessed, contentious personality. You look like one of those smug douchebags who wear those “I’m an atheist. Debate me” shirts. You’re like one of those people who introduce themselves cause-first.

“Hi, I’m Ethan. I’m a vegan socialist pansexual.”

Yeah, that’s great. For you. Fact is though: I don’t care, and it makes me uncomfortable that you think I do. Things like that are personal, and require at least a few minutes of conversation before they’re appropriate to trot out. Even then, you’re kinda pushing it.

So, can we all just chill a little bit? Put the self-righteousness on the back burner, and remember what it’s like to interact with each other? There’s a lot of shit we can’t change in this world, but we can at least try to treat each other like human beings. Besides, you know someone’s profiting when the people turn on each other like this. Why play into those libtards’ hands?

Walkin’ the Dog, Walkin’ the Dog

Did you know that, over at the Lewis Black fan site, you can submit your own rants? It’s true, it’s true, and if your rant’s good enough, Black himself will read it for an audience in his own, inimitable style.

I decided to try my hand at it in a rant about the anxiety-ridden ordeal that is walking my dog. I don’t know if Black will ever read it, let alone perform it, so I figured, what the hell; I’ll post it here.

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Dear Lewis,

I hate walking my dog. I do it everyday, and everyday I ask myself, “Why the fuck do I keep subjecting myself to this shit?”

Of course, I know why I subject myself to it: the little fucker’s a butterball. My fiancee has overfed him to the point that he looks like a burrito perched on sticks. One night he was sleeping under an old, stretched-out blanket my fiancee had crocheted, and he looked like one of those netted roasts you find at the supermarket.

So he needs the exercise, and, well, let’s face it, so do I. I recently turned forty, and the godly metabolism that kept me rail-thin from my teens to my thirties finally gave out like an old air conditioner. I’ve also spent a lot of 2020 drinking more than I usually do, but I doubt you need me to go into the whys about that. So I’ve developed a gut that I’m rather ashamed of, and I figure any activity is good activity, so out with the damn dog I go.

Some people say that they find walking their dogs pleasant and relaxing. They say it helps clear their heads. Not me. Not in the fucking slightest. There’s a lot of shit you have to put up with when you’re walking your dog.

First is the little bastard himself. He’s always fucking stopping. He stops so much that  you can hardly say I’m walking him. Sometimes he stops to investigate a square inch of grass that’s apparently so alluring that I have to drag him away from it. Seriously, he’ll dig in and resist me, leaving little nail scratches on the sidewalk. I’m amazed that his claws haven’t been filed down to flat little nubs. Eventually he’ll give up and get back on the trail, but only so he can continue his pissing schedule. Jesus Christ, how can one fat little dog have so much piss in him? Every five steps he’s lifting his leg and letting loose, whether there’s an object there or not. When I do that, people tell me I need a prescription.

Now, I’m so anxious around people that I won’t use a public bathroom unless I’m alone in it, but this damn dog LOVES a fucking audience. He always waits to shit until someone’s near enough to get a good look. All I can do is stand there like a moron, sheepishly grinning at passersby, while my idiot dog defiles someone’s lawn. Then I have the lovely pleasure of picking up after him. Honestly, it’s not the smell or the appearance of dog shit that makes this experience so unpleasant, it’s really the warmth. When my fingers close around that little lump of former Purina, I get a real sense of the temperature of my dog’s lower intestine. You might say it makes me feel closer to him, like I know the little guy inside and out, but don’t, because it’s a shitty joke.

Meanwhile, people are walking by and looking at the whole thing. Now, even when the dog’s not shitting, these people piss me off. They’re always going in the opposite direction from me, so when I first spot them, I get to enjoy a long period of dread, worrying about how I should address them, or if I should address them at all. What do I say? Should I say hello, or give a silent acknowledgment? Should I nod, or should I just smile politely? Will they even see my smile through this god-damned mask I’m wearing? What if they want to pet the damn dog, and I have to yank him away before he snaps their fucking fingers off?

Usually they just give my dog a compliment. I hate when people compliment my dog, because my dog can’t understand English, and he comes off as rude when he doesn’t fucking respond. So I have to answer on his behalf, and I never know what to say. They give me things like, “Oh, isn’t he cute,” and the only polite response I can ever come up with is, “Gee, thanks,” and I feel like a fucking dumbass. I have nothing to do with the way my dog looks; why am I taking fucking credit for it?

Still, as nerve-wracking as all that can be, the worst and most baffling thing about walking my dog are the intersections. God, I fucking hate intersections, but not because there’s a lot of traffic in my neighborhood. If there was, I actually wouldn’t hate them so much, if at all. No, the real reason I hate them is that at least once a day, invariably, when I approach an intersection with my dog, a single car will pull up and stop at the same fucking time.

Let me repeat that: a single car — that is, with no cars before it, and no cars after it — will pull up and stop at the same time that I approach an intersection. If I had arrived at the intersection a minute earlier, or a minute later, this wouldn’t happen, but it DOES. What’s more, since the state of California apparently deemed turn signals optional at some point, I have no way of knowing what these fuckwads are going to DO. So, I’m standing there with my dog, wondering whether this fucking driver is going straight, or will turn in front of me. Again, the anxious questions run rampant. Should I assert myself and go forward, or is this guy a fucking nut-bag who will gladly run me over? Should I play it safe and let HIM go ahead, or is he one of those overly careful douche-nozzles who likes to feel good about himself by letting everyone else go first? When that turns out to be the case, the two of us end up staring at each other like a couple of dimwits with no plans on a Friday night.

“So, uh, what do you wanna do tonight?”
“I dunno, whadda YOU wanna do?”

This happens everyday, Lewis, and everyday it’s a different car, at a different intersection, at a different time. It happens so often that I have to wonder that it happens at all. I mean, think of all the variables involved in this sort of occurrence.

The time that I leave the house. My energy level, which determines my walking speed that morning. The number of times my dog stops to sniff shit, and the amount of time he takes sniffing all that shit. The number of times he stops to MAKE shit, and the amount of time he takes making that shit. The number of times he stops to piss, and the amount of time he takes doing all that pissing. The number of people I have to slow down and talk to, and how lengthy each of those social interactions becomes.

Those are just a few of the factors on MY end. The fucker driving adds even greater dimension to the equation. What time the asshole left the house. Whether his car started properly. The numbers of stop signs and stoplights he encountered. The amount of time he spent in the drive-thru at Starbucks because those fucking baristas always take FOR-GOD-DAMN-EVER. The number of homeless people he fucking ran over on the way — you get the idea. With so many factors to be aligned, you’d think the odds of a single car arriving at the same fucking intersection as I do each day would be astronomical. Yet, without fail, the mathematics always add up to: GOD-FUCKING-DAMN IT, HERE’S ANOTHER ASSHOLE I HAVE TO DEAL WITH!

After hours of pondering this strange choreography of the universe, I believe I have determined the way that I am going to die.

You see, ten-thousand years ago, the inhabitants of the planet Zebulon discovered how to harness geothermal energy, and use it to power their cities. Since the Zebulonites hired Chespeake Energy to do the work, however, they dug too deep into the Great Magoovian Fault. This caused a massive explosion at Zebulon’s core, and split the damn thing in half like a jawbreaker. The planet’s two hemispheres went sailing across the galaxy as though hurled by heavenly hands. One of the halves came into the path of an Abraxian battlecruiser on deployment, which blasted it out of its way with a photon torpedo. This sent chunks of debris in all directions, and one such chunk was sent on a trajectory that, in time, will bring it into contact with a small blue planet called Earth.

As of now, the chunk is still many millions of miles away, but soon it will enter Earth’s atmosphere, where it will come ablaze and crumble, until it’s about the size of a .32 caliber bullet. Then, it will fall seven miles out of the sky, and right onto my god-damned head.

They’ll find me splayed on the corner of Third and Atchison, where I was waiting at a crosswalk for a car to pass by, still clutching my dog’s leash. The coroner will say something like, “Poor bastard; he never knew what hit him.” But I DID, Lewis. I DID.

Now, I know that this isn’t really how things work. I’m not so egocentric that I really believe that the universe has it out for me, like some cosmic version of The Fucking Truman Show…

…but it sure FEELS that way sometimes.

Your fan,

Daniel

Ceaselessly Into the Past

The use of firearms requires training, and not just in how to most efficiently bring death upon your target, but in knowing when doing so is actually necessary.

Self-control. Putting the situation before oneself. Recognizing the terrific and irreversible consequences of the trigger pull. These are the behaviors of the fit owner of a firearm. The fit owner is mature, careful, and draws his or her weapon only when death is clearly at hand.

Michael Dunn is not a fit owner of a firearm. I’m not even sure that he’s a fit member of society. Check out the video below to see how his story ended:

Before I get to the point, I want to give credit to Rhonda, Dunn’s fiancee, for her courage in telling the truth. Instead of scurrying and resisting and hiding and lying, she gave the testimony that incriminated her man, even though it clearly broke her heart. That she put justice before herself gives me hope for humankind.

So, what the hell, man? Why did this happen? Many of the comments on the above video say that Dunn is a racist, that he felt an immediate hatred for those boys because they were black. I’m not sure that that’s the chief reason. Prejudice certainly played a part in the motive, but I think what spurred Dunn was something more fundamental than that.

At the introduction to the video, the creator wisely holds on the telling phrase, “I’m the victor, but I’m also the victim,” which reveals, I believe, all we need to know about Dunn to explain this case.

Dunn was a successful man, and I’ve found that success often breeds paranoia. Once you have things, you start to worry about losing those things. Opportunists have reaped fortunes in money and power by exploiting real threats to successful people, and much more by selling perceived ones.

To an old, successful person, nothing is more threatening than the lands beyond the walls, where the indigent and misguided await to take over the world. With their stupid clothes and their fidget spinners and their weird, weird music, these creatures exist only to tear down all that the oldsters hold dear. Of course, this is exactly what every generation does, but let’s not think about that.

The disgust and distrust that every generation has for the next always amuses me. I’m guilty of it too; I hate the culture that teens have constructed, with their bronies, selfies, foodies, besties, and normies, but I try to remember that I was once no different from them. What must my parents have thought of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or the surfer-dude lingo we once found so bodacious, or the anti-adult rhetoric of most Nickelodeon programming? It’s a cycle, and every generation insists that the next one is the worst one yet.

Even so, they feel a need to perpetuate it, and then they congratulate themselves for it. New parents say, “I just want my child to have a better life than I had.” Old parents say, “Kids today have it too damn easy.” I’m tough, they’re weak, but I loved them enough to make them weak. A classic ego stroke that works from both directions.

And the reason they stroke themselves is that the truth is hitting them hard. The system never gave them the rewards they were promised for their years of back-breaking work, and now has turned its greedy eye to the kids, to the young, to the liberal, to the ones who are relevant now. All the advertising is aimed at them. All the music is aimed at them. All the great shows aren’t on TV anymore; they’re on these new-fangled streaming services. And these kids, suddenly they’re interested in politics, talking about gun control and pollution and housing costs, and showing their anger that their parents didn’t do anything to ensure a better future for them. What a bunch of bratty little ingrates! While the old and middle-aged rock in their recliners, wondering why retirement isn’t making them happy, these kids are all over television, acting like thugs, rioting about issues they don’t have any right to be involved in, and spouting “OK Boomer” to their elders. It’s like they think they can do whatever they want! It’s all scary and foreign and impossible to understand. Of course, a lot of the examples I’m giving here occurred after Dunn’s crimes, but the sentiments are evergreen.

So I think that the sight of those annoying, selfish punks, blaring their wicked music in a public place, struck a nerve with Dunn. In those kids, Dunn saw all the threats in the world, everything that made him feel small and sad and marginalized as a middle-aged man in a secluded suburb, and he decided he’d had enough. In shooting at those boys, he would strike a blow against this sick, dangerous world that just didn’t make sense to him anymore.

It’s all pretty grim, but that doesn’t mean I feel sorry for Dunn. His victimhood was entirely fabricated. The world was never out to get him. Certainly, none of the kids in the car he shot up were. He thought it was, though, and he had a need to fight back, even if he didn’t know exactly what he was fighting against. This need to be the “victor” was born of an ego made fragile by perceived powerlessness. Here he stood, the last sensible man facing the representatives of the future, a throng of smartass kids and encroaching thugs, all giving the finger to authority with their militant hip hop music, and no one standing up to do anything about it. Until now…and look where it got him.

I think the lesson to learn from this tragedy is pretty clear, but if it isn’t, I’ll spell it out for you: NO ONE IS OUT TO GET YOU, OKAY? THE GHOULS ARE NOT SCALING THE WALLS TO STEAL YOUR TREASURES. YES, KIDS ARE LOUD AND ANNOYING AND DISRESPECTFUL, BUT YOU WERE THE SAME WAY. IF YOU REALLY THINK KIDS ARE THE PROBLEM, THEN MAYBE YOU SHOULD ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO STOP HAVING KIDS.

Having shown no remorse for Jordan Davis’s death, Dunn may never really understand why he was convicted, and why should he? Believing oneself to be a martyr provides the greatest sense of moral superiority, and there’s no more comfortable place than the couch of complete delusion. This is why I find the hateful noise in our culture so unsettling; there are people who really believe that the world outside their doors is full of monsters to be slain. Or, if they don’t think it is already, then it will be after the inauguration. They’re prepping for doomsday when the doom is all in their heads, and they’ll fire the first shot if they have to just to make sure it happens.

Is this how you want to live? Bitter, enraged, convinced that your cherished property is under attack from all sides? Seriously? You think on that a little, then get back to me.

Polite Society Strikes Back

What a great time to be alive! I don’t care what anyone says about surveillance, the nanny state, or the “cancel culture” — and just what the fuck is that, anyway? A culture that says, “You know, your behavior reflects poorly on the rest of us, so we don’t want you around?” Weren’t we always like that? I swear, these people only give names to stuff when it doesn’t help them — the ability to call out and shout down the assholes is exactly what’s been missing from life for centuries.

How long have decent people shoved their bile down while morons, douchebags, and jackoffs have thrown their weight around, acted like children, and expected everyone else to eat shit and like it? Unlike these walking scraps of semi-sentient garbage, the rest of us were taught that a civilization must remain civil to survive. We had parents who took us to the car and smacked us when we screamed in the store. We had people tell us “no” on occasion. We managed our emotions in positive ways, such as in the gym, or on the track. Most importantly, we learned that we couldn’t always get what we wanted, and that sometimes life sucks, and the reason that life sucks is that there are so many morons, douchebags, and jackoffs in it.

And by God, we can only turn the other cheek for so long.

I’ve come to realize that there are two major types of people: those who take responsibility for their own behavior, and those who blame everyone else for calling them out for it. Well, with the glorious new hashtags of #karensgonewild and #kevinsgonewild, the latter folks are finally starting to understand that it’s not just the people calling them out who have a problem with them, it’s the rest of the fucking world.

It amuses me that the Karens and Kevins of the world are so mad at the camera-holders. They don’t like being held responsible for their bullying. The way they see it, they’ve been allowed to shit on anyone they like all their lives, so why is everyone getting on their cases now? It’s not fair!

Now I know that the punishments we’re seeing, such as lost jobs and ruined reputations, might seem a little extreme. Let’s get real, though: how hard is it, seriously, to not make a selfish, racist tirade in public, especially when cameras are rolling? If these people had just kept their mouths shut and walked away, they could’ve gone right back to their high-paying jobs, their prefab homes, and their 1.5 children, all while maintaining their fitter, happier veneers.

But no: these spoiled filth need to yap. They need to remind us — and themselves — that they are the superior class of person. They need to feel that their particular position in life has earned them some unwritten privilege to step over and intimidate the peasantry.

So I can’t help but smile when I read about another Karen losing her job, or another Kevin issuing a public apology, because of some “But I’m special!” tantrum that he or she threw. I have no sympathy for these people. None whatsoever. They needed to learn a lesson, a lesson that they should have learned when the consequences for failure were not so dire as they are now. I can only hope that these trending hashtags will remain more than just trends; otherwise the assholes will come crawling back, and all opportunities for the growth of our species will be lost.