Expletive (Not) Deleted

Some things are very black and white in my book. For instance, Gold Star is good, Skyline is bad. This is a fact, there are no two ways about it. There are a few other things that are etched in stone as far as I'm concerned. So, here's the thing about Chicago: fuck Chicago. It is the worst place humanity ever conceived of. I've had the pleasure of spending a total of about six hours in Chicago in my life, and every one of them ranks among the worst hours of my life. Those of you who know me that well will probably point out that I was passing through Chicago going to and from Montana on a Greyhound bus, so most of that time was spent in a bus station, and that's not representative of the real Chicago, right? Bullshit, that is perfectly representative of Chicago! But Ryan, you ask, you must have been in a lot of bus stations on that trip, and there must have been shitty people in every one of them, right? Not a chance. People were perfectly nice at almost every single one of them, and at the various other places I saw along the way. But in Chicago? No, anybody I had to communicate with for any reason was nothing less than a complete douchebucket. I've never been to New York, but I cannot imagine that New Yorkers are more horrific people than Chicagoans. Chicago is that place that Hell spewed forth from its seventh circle, then promptly disowned for being too disgusting. For those of you who haven't been to Chicago, have you ever maybe been channel-surfing, and you happened upon a Chicago Cubs game on WGN? Have you seen the kinds of people who attend those games? They're the kinds of people who throw baseballs onto the field, who steal the cap off the heads of the players in the visiting team's bullpen, and who dump beer on the opposing outfielders. Real classy, Chicago. Hey, I know, there are shitty people everywhere, even here. But damn, it's like Chicago has been holding an Asshole Convention non-stop for the last century or so.

Okay, that's all of my anti-Chicago rant there. In other news, I had a pretty lousy day yesterday, bad enough that I'm actually bothering to bitch about it here. It's actually not really to complain, but rather to astonish you, my beloved readers, that a day can, in fact, be that lousy without a loved one dying or something. Okay, it wasn't really that bad in retrospect (and not compared to Laura's...as she told it, hers made mine look like a walk in the fucking park, but nonetheless). It started with me waking up at 3:30 AM, better known as the middle of the fucking night, and still two and a half hours before I had to be at work. For reasons known only to...well, nobody really, my brain decided to switch itself on and begin galloping at top speed. So that was it for sleeping for me, in spite of my efforts to get back to sleep, which I needed to do badly. An hour later, I gave up and went to sit in front of my computer. However, upon turning it on, I discovered that it decided that it wasn't going to locate my hard drive. I don't know a ton about computer problems, but I know enough to realize that "Hard Drive Not Found" sounds pretty bad. With no other options presented to me, and since I couldn't get to Windows, I ran some sort of diagnostic thing, and left it running while I went to work and spent my shift wondering how I was going to afford a new computer. Feeling about the worst I've ever felt at work, I worked my usual exhausting spot on the line while we unloaded a 2100-piece truck, the most difficult one I've done yet. I was offered an extra half-hour at the end of my shift, which I could've used, but I was supposed to meet Old Gary to get some back pay, so I had to decline. Naturally, Old Gary was late enough that I could've taken the extra work anyway, so that was great. I spent most of the rest of the day cleaning the living room, washing dishes, and trying to plunge the toilet that randomly refuses to flush. On the plus side, my computer magically fixed itself while I was gone, apparently, but I'm still a bit paranoid that it might go out again and not come back. Ain't technology great? My space bar also isn't working so great, I have to keep backspacing so my words don't run together, but I guess that seems pretty minor after all the rest, eh? Okay, so yeah, not really the worst day ever, but worth the recounting anyway. I also meant to do some writing, but I never could get my brain into the right gear for it, hence this lengthy blog today. Not altogether my usual sort of blog, I know, but it's good to mix things up occasionally.

This So-Called Progress

This should be a quick thing, because I was griping to Audrey about how much bullshit planned obsolescence is, and she said I should blog about that, so here it comes.

You guys know what planned obsolescence is, right? It's when a company makes a product designed to last only for a little while, so that in a couple years or whatever, you have to buy the new, updated version, or else you'll be behind everybody else and won't be able to use the product. For example, we had VHS tapes to be played on a VCR for awhile there, but those eventually gave way to DVDs, and even they are about to surrender their throne to Blu-Ray discs, whenever the price goes down or the economy recovers enough to support a Blu-Ray player in about three out of four households. Remember cassette tapes? They were what we played music on before there were compact discs. Their predecessors were actual vinyl records. They're both gone now. Even CDs are in their death throes now. Digital music dominates. Before long, we'll be able to watch movies or concerts in hologram form. It'll be just like being there, or something! All that is no accident. It is completely planned out. In most industries, the progression already contains several generations beyond what is on the market now. They're just waiting until the time is right to roll out the next round. The media companies in particular know that, sooner or later, enough people will have a Blu-Ray player that, if you're one of the ones who doesn't, you'll start to feel compelled to get one, either via old school peer pressure (they used to call that keeping up with the Joneses), or by gradually eliminating the previous generation so that you won't even have the option anymore. Don't have a DVD player yet? Want to get your own copy of the newest Harry Potter movie? Boy, you're boned there. They don't make 'em on VHS anymore. Looks like it's time to upgrade! And since a DVD player is better quality than a VCR ever was, why don't we just update our whole video library while we're at it! But don't you know, in another few years, you'll be hard-pressed to find the newest movies on DVD. So you'll have to finally get a Blu-Ray player, and you want all those awesome new features, so you'll turn your whole collection over to Blu-Ray, and the companies that produce all that stuff become a whole new level of rich off of the unsuspecting consumer. Do we see how that works, kids?

And keep in mind, it's not just with movies or music. Very nearly everything you've got, you better believe there are new and (maybe kind of slightly) improved versions right around the corner, but they'll convince you that you've gotta have the new one! Even if it's just about exactly the same! Even books and newspapers are on the way out. Do you even know what those are still? Probably not, since you can read whatever you want on this newfangled internet thing (look who's talking, the guy who wants you to read this on that very medium. But I still love my books, damn it!) Print may not be dead quite yet, but it is about to give up the ghost. Look, I'm all for progress, but too often when we actually get some, we lose a little bit more of our heritage and a little bit more of our culture. And that ain't no good, because it means that sooner or later, we'll forget who we are collectively as a people. We'll still be people, but we won't even know who or what we are. We'll be too busy all being kept alive artificially and stimulated just enough that we won't notice. So yeah, it'll be kinda like the Matrix. And we won't even realize that we've done it to ourselves, just by not being aware of what's going on around us.

We're All Mad Here...But Not Nearly Mad Enough

Anybody notice that there's been an awful lot of seismic activity on this planet lately? First Haiti, then Chile, one in Taiwan the other day...even some rumblings along the New Madrid Fault. I know that there's always some tectonic movement going on, most of which goes unreported because it's pretty minor. But those first three were all pretty big ones, all pretty close together...does anyone else think that's a bad sign? I mean, that's some end of days shit there! Okay, maybe we don't have birds falling out of the sky or the dead rising from the grave or anything, but still...

Actually, I'm really more thinking along the lines of, this planet is fucking rebelling against us (the human race, that is). We sprung up accidentally from the primordial ooze, and we've pretty well been trashing the place ever since, like teenagers with too much beer and too little supervision. This isn't any sort of environmental rant, mind you. I think we've long since passed the point of no return, and anything we try to do to fix it now is just gonna be a day late and a dollar short. So no, this is not a plea to recycle and reduce your carbon footprint or any of that. Think of it more as a smack to the back of the head. Look what we've done, because we can't possibly manage to think of anything larger than our own little world. Oh, there are other people who might be affected adversely by my actions? I'm sorry, I didn't know! Well, it's broken now, and there's no going back and fixing it. We only had one planet, and we've gone and pissed it off so bad that it'll never forgive us. You know all those earthquakes? That's the earth trying to shake us off like a dog shakes off fleas. That's all we are, a bunch of fucking parasites. Think that's a little harsh? Bullshit, it's a reality, and if you can't accept that reality, then you're more than just a little deluded, my friend. You're not cynical if it really is as bad as you say.

So, I'm sure we'll be able to hang tight for a little bit longer, maybe even until the last members of my generation are pushing up daisies (if we haven't managed to wipe daisies out by then). But it's only a matter of time before the earth decides it's finally had enough and comes up with a way to get rid of all of us for good, and then...that's all, folks!

Your Extra Credit Assignment

I know, I know, some of my valued readers out there have been wondering, where has Ryan gone? It's been two long weeks, and there has been no sign of him around here! Fear not, for I have been well. Or at least, I have been. I did, in fact, write a blog earlier this week, as a guest spot for my friend Laura. If you wish to read my guest entry (and you should), you can find it at:

ls250802.blogspot.com

At any rate, your beloved Excellence of Eloquence has returned home to his own blog, and I have a new and exciting topic for the day! For several years now, I've had people react with surprise when they discover that I do not have a credit card. I know, I know, I'm an adult now, isn't it about time I got one? No, it goddamn well is not time that I got a credit card! The credit card industry is a fucking scam, but somehow this fact seemed to elude the rest of the populace of this country until, what, a couple weeks ago? Now suddenly, everybody is all up in arms about what I could see, plain as day, from the start. Suddenly, we're getting some restrictions passed, some laws about what credit card companies can and can't do (though these aren't actually going to change anything, it's still a scam, now it's just in plain English so that people can't complain when they get gouged). Not that I'm entirely taking the side of the American public in this debacle. So many allegedly responsible people with credit cards still spend against it even though they know it's a bad idea, because they know it's going to take longer than their natural life to pay the thing off, but they still do it, either because they have no money anywhere else to buy the things they actually need, or they are stupid and buy the things they want and then act surprised when they have to suffer the consequences of those actions! Either way, it's bad, and it's a scam.

Unfortunately, so many people are stuck in a rut of owing on their credit card because they don't actually make enough money to live off of, because this country is so fucking hostile to its own working class. Anybody know why that is? Anybody? Oh, wait, I know. It's probably because the credit card companies, like every other large company in this country, essentially owns our legislators, so they can pressure those lawmakers to not do their job and make laws preventing those companies from fucking over...well, everyone. So, they get to continue charging outlandish interest rates, and on top of that, they're allowed to do dick-ish things like raising those rates without warning and for no good reason. It creates an enormous mountain of debt that virtually nobody can ever hope to pay off, because it's more than they can expect to earn in a lifetime. But the credit card companies know that's what will happen, and it's what they want, because you're still paying them for life, and even if they don't get anywhere near the whole amount, they'll still get a hell of a lot more back than you originally spent.

So, I don't get a credit card, because I at least know myself well enough to know that I would be too tempted to use it, and I don't want to be paying it off for the rest of my life. I make very little money as it is, I see no sense in throwing any of it away.

The Greatest Game of Them All

I'm going the sports route here today. Even if you're not a sports fan, please continue reading, because it's a sports piece that's not a sports piece, you know? It's kind of about life in a microcosm, savvy?

To start, I'm sure you've heard by now, but my Saints won the Super Bowl. That still hasn't sunk in for me, really. It's just unreal, and no team deserved a Vince Lombardi trophy more. My team, that being my favorite team, a team beloved by me (that list really is restricted to the Saints in football and the Reds, of course, in baseball), had not won a world championship in my conscious memory. That was the Saints' first in their 43-year existence, and the Reds last World Series victory was in 1990, when I was just six and only just becoming aware of baseball, and I certainly had no emotional investment in the ballclub at the time. And what an opportune time to discuss that one thing that I love above anyone or anything else, save for Audrey.

With the conclusion of the football season, there is a brief week or two during which I feel vaguely lost, but that feeling is fleeting. I like football, and I enjoy my football league, the friendly arguments and the competitiveness, but I don't live and die with the game, even the Saints. Baseball is a whole other matter. Many who will read this know of my great love of baseball, though perhaps you don't know what about the game is so compelling to me. As spring training is set to begin once again next week, I feel that this is an apropos time to explore that, and I will attempt to do so in at least a vaguely poetic manner for once.

Baseball is a game marked by its deliberate pace. The other major sports in the United States, football, basketball, hockey, all are marked their near-perpetual action, or at least intense action in short bursts. Baseball has its bursts of activity as well--a hustling triple into the corner, an outfielder making a diving catch, a collision on a play at the plate. Yet baseball is known as a slow-paced game. This is in part due to the absence of a clock; the game is not timed, it could go on forever. Major League Baseball has made recent attempts to quicken the pace of the game due to a feeling that fans lack the patience for a game that is not only deliberate but also lengthy. How ironic that a game long known as America's pastime is now too slow for the average American, who now needs constant and immediate stimulation.

To someone like me, however, baseball is paced just right. It is leisurely in places, yes, but this is by design. I know that nobody reads books anymore, but a baseball game is like a good book. If you crammed all the action together, it would only be twenty pages long and would be far less interesting for it. Instead, a good book is, say, three hundred pages for the same reason that a baseball game lasts for three hours rather than twenty minutes. Much of the early and middle parts of both the book and the game are creating a storyline, developing central characters, all the while slowly building the suspense towards what will (hopefully) be an exciting climax. The suspense lies in the inaction of a baseball game. Since there isn't something happening at all times during a game, you have a chance to sit and absorb the situation periodically, to ponder what might happen next, to play out all possible strategies and scenarios in your mind before they take place on the field itself. To me, constant action is not desirable in a game. Constant stimulation is a shock to the senses; it is too much to absorb all at once.

There are few ways in which I could be called a traditionalist. For the most part, my personality lends itself to progressiveness. Baseball, however, is one thing that I believe is in need of very little change in terms of the game on the field. Yes, salaries are out of control, the draft needs revamping, and there is simply nothing in place that prevents teams like the Yankees and Red Sox from outspending any other team for the services of the best free agents every off-season. The game itself, though, has remained remarkably intact over the last century or so. We need to do away with this ridiculous designated hitter experiment. It served its initial purpose, but it has become vestigial. It eliminates strategy, and there is plenty of offense in the game without it. I'm not a big fan of instant replay either. It largely serves to remove a human element from the game in terms of the officiating. Replaying calls to determine their accuracy is not the way to handle poor umpiring. The better way is to reward the umpires with the lowest percentages of missed calls with higher wages.

Aside from these two minor qualms, I wouldn't change a thing about the game I love. I have thoughts about a great many other things pertaining to baseball, but the things that have been a part of the game since before my grandparents were born are the things that so appeal to me: the way a baseball fits perfectly in your hand, the bit of dust you can't help but get on your hands standing in the infield that would drive me crazy anywhere else but somehow I can't get enough of on the diamond, the slight smell of peanuts throughout the ballpark, the sound of the bat (a wood one, of course, none of that aluminum for me) as it connects with the ball, and then the dull thud of the ball as it lands in the outfield grass and rolls towards the wall, the brief anticipation as you wonder if the hitter will settle for a double, or if he will round second and try for three, the determination evident on his face as he digs for that extra base, the cloud of dust as he dives into third...So many other things, all of those things which embody the very essence of the greatest game of them all.

Too Much to Ask

I was about to make this a facebook status, but then I thought that it might turn into a long-ish rant, so I decided to put it here instead.

Why do people posting statuses (is that a word? Spellcheck isn't complaining about it...though curiously, it did highlight the word "spellcheck"...hmmm...let me start over...)

Why do people who post a status, or more often a number of them, about their young child, almost invariably seem to refer to said child as "angle"? What kind of angle is it, folks? An obtuse one, I suspect. Look, for one, you mean "angel", so you sound like an idiot. Two, your child is not an angel either, just one more screaming mouth that needs feeding in a world that already has far too many of those, and that will one day become instead a mouth that talks ceaselessly about things it knows dangerously little about, and we certainly have too many of those. Three, have you noticed about how many people usually comment on these status updates? About two, and those are your other two friends who have a little "angle" of their own and who also have nothing to do other than talk about every stupid thing the little "angle" does, and even that amounts to a whole lotta nothing.

Back to my first point, though. Why do people who have about as much skill with the English language as your common snail insist on publicizing this fact? If you're going to insist on spouting your drivel in a public forum, you really ought to run each and every thing you type through a spellcheck, and then you ought to read over it carefully and make sure that everything makes sense. If you do these things and still post an update full of spelling and grammatical errors, then you might be beyond help, and you should refrain from doing things that make it widely known that you have all the intelligence of a box of Tic-Tacs. Honestly, I don't expect Shakespearean prose from everyone; I don't even expect everyone to write as well as, say, Stephenie Meyer. But you are an adult, you should be able to, at a minimum, spell correctly, use punctuation properly, put your words in order that they form coherent sentences, and use the right words in the right places. Really, that is not too much to ask, people.

The Great Ones

What? I haven't posted in a week? Where have I been? I guess I haven't really been all that busy...it's kind of felt that way, though. That first ninety minutes of my shifts at Target, it takes a lot out of me. It's not that it's super-strenuous, it's just that it's ninety minutes during which you are constantly moving, constantly running with boxes, trying to keep them on the tracks, picking up the ones that fall. It's a marathon, and I was never a long-distance runner, I was more of a sprinter. Then there's that part where it starts before I've been awake for even an hour...it's a hell of a way to wake up at six in the morning, that's for sure. My hand hurts, and I'm not sure why. I don't think I did anything to it...

Here's something I've been meaning to complain about for awhile now, I'm just now getting around to it. The state of modern music is just pathetic, there, I said it. First, let's start with the things that pass for music today. Lady Gaga? Miley Cyrus? Kanye West? These alleged "musicians" give the whole industry a bad name. You are not a musician if you cannot play an instrument. Oh, it can have a beat, and you can sing over it (kind of), but that just makes you an entertainer. And your so-called songs are grating on the ears anyway. Then there are those who actually do play instruments, but do it so poorly that Prince would be rolling over in his grave if he was dead. Jonas Brothers? Nickelback? I know, I pick on Nickelback a lot, but it is very well-deserved. I loathe not only the horrifying songs they churn out, but what they represent, and that is an overwhelming trend towards mediocrity (or worse) in rock music (also known as actual music). Who are the big acts in rock now? Let's see, we've got Kings of Leon, who are actually pretty good from a musical standpoint, but their lyrics are dumbed down almost to the point of incoherence. That actually ends up kind of working, because their vocalist is pretty incoherent in his own right. There's some potential there, but they're only run-of-the-mill right now. Green Day looked like they were back with American Idiot, but then they tried to get even more grandiose and it ended up being extravagantly ordinary. Then there's U2, improbably still going strong, at least in terms of popularity. The actual songs, though, have become much more hit or miss. There are still some good ones sprinkled in, but you can't help but notice that U2 are much more into themselves than anything else these days. These guys are the face of rock these days, but they're not the best the genre has to offer; they're just the most popular. And even they are overwhelmed on the popular music charts by some of the garbage I've mentioned above. That just goes to show what poor taste in music most people have.

Of course, I don't much care what kind of terrible music people listen to in the privacy of their own homes, just like I don't care what drugs they take or what kind of kinky sex they have. What concerns me more is this: where have all the great musicians gone? At one time, we had absolute, unequivocal geniuses like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, to name just a few. Well, Clapton and McCartney are still around, but they're just resting on their laurels these days. Prince and Bob Dylan are still putting out albums, but you don't hear much about them anymore. The only modern guitarist regarded as a great is Jack White. Perhaps it's a case of great artists not being recognized as such until after they are gone? I dunno, seems to me that the sixties and seventies knew greatness when they first saw it in Roger Waters, in Lennon and McCartney, in Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, and they certainly saw it when they proclaimed Clapton to be God. No, I don't think that's the problem now. I think that the last decade has produced a previously unseen dearth of true talent. Sure, you've got the likes of Shinedown, Muse, and the Arcade Fire, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains are still kicking copious amounts of ass, but they first burst onto the scene two decades ago, and Metallica preceded even that. So, I ask, not rhetorically, where have all the great ones gone?