Center of the Universe

Wow, I've been absent a couple weeks here, haven't I? I beg your forgiveness there, for you see, I have been preparing to run for the hills. As you have undoubtedly noticed by now, the end is near. You can see an apocalypse of one sort or another nearly anywhere you look, particularly if you view the world as I do, in an increasingly Dale Gribble-like way. And how can you not? I know I've been on this kick about how the Man is everywhere now, but damn! The Man is everywhere now! Even if it's not the government directly, it's one of their lapdogs, the military, the multinational corporations, or my personal favorite, the media. And what does media mean today? Well, there's your TV stuff, your alleged news, your mindless primetime trash where amateurs pretend to have talent, C-level celebrities dance, and lots of things happen on an island that nobody should ever give a shit about, but that's just the distractions. The real meat is in the moneymaking, and that's on the internet. And what isn't on the internet now? The big chunk of the internet is the old cliches, all the porn and pictures of cats. Either way, you can't click a link without getting a screen full of pussy. Actually though, the bulk of what you end up looking at is advertising.

That's not the scary part, though! The really ball-shrivelingly frightening part is how specifically aimed at you the ads are now. You think that's just good marketing? You think that's companies studying their demographics? No way, dude. That's McDonald's looking at your Facebook profile and seeing that you're a great big fat person and then following you around plastering pictures of quarter-pounders with cheese on every wall they can reach. That's Starbucks looking at the same pictures and seeing a guy with clogged arteries who has trouble getting going in the morning, and surely needs a veinte-sized double caramel macchiato with a shot of espresso, whatever the hell that is, so you get your Starbucks ads on every page you look at. And then every company promoting every diet ever conceived of by man takes a look at that mess, and they see a guy who hates the way he looks and wants an easy fix, a six-pack in six weeks without having to lift a finger, and you'd better believe you'll see every last one of those on the way to checking your e-mail. A month later, you've lost two pounds, and that's reason enough to reward yourself with a Budweiser...and another, and then another, and then there's a picture of you on the internet wearing a dress with permanent marker on your face, and Budweiser sees that you're becoming an alcoholic, but you're not quite there yet, so give that man another round! Of course, all that alcohol means you can't get it up when you need to, and the damn Viagra isn't working, so you need to buy a big, loud truck to make up for your sad little dick, and of course Ford and Chevy will be there to pick you up when you're down. Of course, you can't really afford that, so you put it on your credit card, which you'll never pay off, and eventually all your stuff gets repossessed and you're out on the street begging for change. But hell, that's just what the marketing folks get paid to do! It's why they make the big bucks!

You think that sounds an awful lot like a slippery slope fallacy, huh? Well, maybe it is. But this shit happens, and don't think for a second that it's not intentional. These people know what they're doing, and they won't stop doing it until you're pushing up daisies, and then they'll just hone in on the next guy. Face it, there is no privacy. They all know just what you're doing, and they know just how to exploit it and make their money off of you and then toss your corpse onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. The upshot to this is that you're not insignificant. No sir, you're the big payday! So enjoy knowing that you're at the center of somebody's universe, whether you want to be or not.

Just Details

Write about something positive, Laura says to me. You're so negative about everything, Audrey tells me. Finally, last night, Ron offers the opinion that I must be sad and depressed all the time, because of my cynical and nihilistic views of the condition our world is in. Really? Is that what everyone thinks of me? That I couldn't possibly be happy, just because the world is falling apart?

Look, the fact of the matter is, things suck, and they're only getting worse. That's just the nature of the universe. Chaos is always increasing. The way we know that time has elapsed is because there is more chaos now than there was a minute ago. You might see a glass fall off the table and shatter on the floor, but you'll never see the glass gather itself back together and leap back onto the table. That's because there is always more chaos in the future than there is in the past. Therefore, if chaos is always increasing, then the universe is just going to continue to get more chaotic, and things will keep breaking down. Remember a few weeks back when I wrote about all those earthquakes we've been having recently? Well, they're still happening. But I'm not cynical about that. That's just a fact of life.

Our government is a joke. It doesn't serve the people, it just distracts them. They don't want us united. Oh, sure, they say they do. But then they turn around and make every effort to polarize us. You know why? Because divide and conquer, that's why. The more divided we are, the more power they have. Do we really want a government that has more power? They tell us we're free, but we're not fucking free. Yeah, we have choices. We can eat at McDonald's or Burger King. We can use an Apple or a PC. We can call or text. We can vote Democrat or Republican. Those are our alleged choices, but ultimately, you get the same thing either way. That's not a fucking choice! We can choose, but we can only choose from the options they want us to choose from. If we choose something else, we're ostracized. We haven't managed to fit in with the societal norms, so we get marginalized, at best. We don't matter.

Back to my original point. Yes, I'm pretty cynical, and yes, I'm pretty nihilistic. But it's just the reality of the situation. The difference between me and most other people is that I've accepted it for what it is. There is no realistic hope of changing it; we're all beyond help. It's all good, though. This is the situation we've all been thrust into, but why should I let it drag me down? Sure, it's frustrating, and it makes me angry quite a lot (hence this blog), but I don't see why it should prevent me from generally enjoying the life I've got. I think I'm in a pretty good mood on the whole. I'm rarely sad, and even if I'm angry, I try to keep my sense of humor about it, because I realize that, at the end of the day, that's all I can really control, and it's the only thing that actually matters. Everything else is just details.

Of Monkeys and Minors

Have you ever been to Wisconsin? I have. I was lucky enough to be there briefly during the summer maybe half a dozen years ago, and I was very impressed. Milwaukee looked to be roughly Cincinnatian in size and in aesthetic qualities, but was mysteriously lacking in a bunch of people being killed all the time. We drove through Madison, with all those pretty lakes, right around sunrise, and that was downright beautiful. There was so much green...it was really the highlight of my trip out west. But today, Wisconsin is disappointing me.

A district attorney in Juneau County has informed high schools within his jurisdiction that teaching students about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases will result in prosecution. How does this work, you ask? Well, according to the DA, teaching sex ed to teenagers amounts to nothing more than contributing to the delinquency of a minor! Really? But wait, this gets even better. These schools are not required to teach sex ed, but those that do are required to teach students about birth control and STDs! That is to say, by teaching students about these things that the DA refers to as "sick and shameful", the schools would be following the explicitly stated law!

I really, sincerely hope that some teacher challenges this and teaches the proper curriculum anyway, in order to challenge the district attorney's decision on this matter. It'll be the Scopes Trial all over again (yes, I know that Scopes was found guilty, but that was teaching evolution in 1920's Tennessee. That wouldn't even go over there today!) I can't imagine that any of this would stand up in a court of law (though I have not the greatest faith in our legal system) as anything resembling contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

On a side note, when are people going to finally give up this notion that teaching sex ed to teenagers is a bad thing? Has it not been shown pretty conclusively that telling kids not to have sex, then sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming until the devil goes away, does not really do anything towards actually stopping kids from having sex? Give up already! They're kids, it's what they do. You need to just accept that and teach them how to do it in a way that won't get anyone pregnant or give anyone the clap. We're a fucking decade into the twenty-first century here people, isn't it time we stopped acting like it's the goddamn 1950s?