There is no Heart on the Right
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07/21/08
The entrance is recessed into the building and forms an open air vestibule
with six tables and twice as many chairs. This is where I sit. The bus
stop is directly in front of the café. Both the Metro city-wide
busses and the local DOT busses stop there. It makes a racket. The city
busses have a subwoofer rumble as they idle and the Dashes have breaks
squeaky enough to let blood from a fish ear a fathom under, but it's
still quieter than the coffee shop I used to go to.
In pops a middle aged man to the alcove. I've seen him before. he's
a god peddler, but he doesn't harass you with his evangelic schtick.
He wears oil-stained jeans that look like they've seen some labor, a
brown belt and a faded red and black checkered shirt. I could swear
he wears the same thing every time, but I'm not one to infrequently
swear making that worth little. He has a slight stoop and keeps several
Christian pamphlets tucked under his belt. He leaves his booklets on
all the vacant tables. Today there was only one. He swiftly moved in,
laid it down, about faced and walked off like it was the most natural
and not at all insane thing to do.
I thought I should promptly jump up and throw the thing right away.
I should have. It's an appropriate response. I didn't. I went back to
my book, and not a minute later one of the barristas came out to clear
tables. She bussed some plates and in a fluid motion showing no more
thought than a man brushing crumbs from his shirt front, plucked up
the pamphlet and dropped it direct into the bin. I liked her style.
I would have surely appeared angry, petulant or smug, but she had it
down – religion doesn't need to be swatted, simply brushed away
like a fly landing on your plate – swat it and you splatter potato
salad everywhere, doing nobody, including yourself any good, and then
you've only increased the area the potato salad covers, making it harder
to defend from flies. There's a point in this somewhere. I think it
has to do with making our country a reeking load of dogshit screaming
to attract a bunch of crap-loving Islamic flies. No, that's not it.
When you see religious leaflets, don't think of it as combat, think
of it as throwing out trash no more or less relevant than tossing a
fast food burger wrapper. That's it. Don't allow their nonsense to have
any significance.
07/17/08
It started in Florida as tales of general stupidity usually do. A student at the central university of Florida went to mass and when they handed him the Eucharist (that's the magic bread that turns into godflesh) he ran off with it, allegedly holding the tasteless wafer hostage. Catholics freaked out. The University of Florida freaked out. A prominent biology teacher, who most likely found the whole mess both humorous and sadly medieval, asked reader's of his blog to send him these crackers and he would, "... show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won't be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse..." This statement of associate professor Myers has in turn caused Catholics to once more freak out, and this time with accusations of intolerance and bigotry. They have called Prof. Myers comments "hate-filled" and worthy of classification as a "hate crime." Catholics, in numerous angry emails ask him why he won't wipe his ass with the Qur'an, insult Jews and Muslims or denigrate Martin Luther King Jr. and homosexuals.
A few things to note: Myers did not say he was going to shove communion biscuits up his butt. The pages of the Koran are notoriously not squeezably soft. A Jew is not only a practitioner of Judaism, but is also a member of a specific semitic group that includes apostates (even some gone Muslim and Christian), atheists, agnostics and various new age tits. Thus, you are born Jewish in much the same way you are born a homosexual or born black. Catholics on the other hand are a diverse group from all over the world who are in no way genetically Catholic. If someone believes a cracker is god it is their lunatic privilege to do so, but do not expect others, or for that matter, ask others, to think the same mad thoughts.
It is not possible to be bigoted against another person's beliefs unless it is to be said it is bigoted to exercise critical thought, accept evolution and deny a geocentric universe, thus greatly offending and promoting hatred of scientific illiterates.
Now I want a holy cracker too. My sacrilege will be to follow in the footsteps of Saint Francis and give the Eucharist to a dog with a sweet manischewitz chaser. Woof!
07/15/08
I got home. I was in a state, half-drunk, stunned, over the hill back down the road toward sobriety. Equally tired as drunken, but not ready for sleep. You need a little alcohol to flow out of the blood stream before that so you turn on the television. Humans are no good at that hour or for that state of mind. You need something with animals. The human is reduced to a voice. The life on the screen knows nothing of economics and less about foreign policy. It's a relief. The simple actions of animals: eating, breeding, resting, waiting to eat and breed again. And then there's the narrator. Usually a calm presence. A slow and steady baritone male or rocking female lilt. On the television a snake was eating a mouse. It had him head first. The ass, hind legs and tail protruded from the snakes widely hinged jaw. The male voice over called the snake's dining habits "a slow and violent process." What way is that to talk? A slow and violent process? What would the snake say about our manner of eating? A slow and butcherous process? Would the snake's documentary be appalled at the way we skin, gut, drain of blood, dissect, expose to extreme heat and then bite into small pieces as we masticate the meaty morsel to a fine pulp before swallowing? Now that's a slow and violent process. My brain was starved of sobriety and that's what the TV had to throw at me – a bizarre and totally species-centric judgment on another species method of acquiring nourishment, necessary sustenance so it may continue to live and breed and perpetuate its snaky likeness to subsequent generations of slow and violent food eaters. It wasn't easy to get comfortably to sleep after that. I've seen snakes eat, and I'd call it sudden rather than slow, and as for violent, well I'm sure they're very sorry they haven't the skills to skin it, clean it and soak it a few hours in a rum marinade before slow roasting and serving on a bed of fresh baby greens drizzled in a raspberry vinaigrette. Fucking uncivilized snakes!
I was at the coffee shop today. It's hot. I have no air conditioner so I go someplace where I can sit in the shade and sip ice tea. The traffic is loud, but not terribly bothersome. I've only been accosted while there a dozen times. Typically it's a beggar, a random deranged chatterer and sometimes a Christian (always high on the nuisance list – I'd like to found a church called the "Nuisance Church of Christ." It has a ring of truth. A good acronym would be handy. Maybe "Christ United Nuisance Temple" would be better.) I didn't have anyone bother me today except a guy who walked by. He didn't turn and look at me. He walked down the sidewalk, straight ahead, purpose in his stride, going to where he needed to get. My problem was one of decency, decorum and taste. He was wearing a teeshirt, sleeves ripped off. He was walking east on the north side of the street. He had his left side to me. I say this because had he been walking the other direction or had we been on the south side of the street, then I wouldn't have seen what I saw and what I saw was a tattoo – faded with age. It was the Ghostbusters logo. The ghost in the red banishment symbol. I won't say Ghostbusters is a bad movie, but to permanently mark your arm with an image from a Hollywood marketing campaign brings shame upon you, your ancestors, your entire extended family, out to and including third cousins, and all subsequent generations of your family should there be any, which there shouldn't because your frivolous inky actions ought to cause their genitals to whither in disgrace. It's times like that when only Yiddish will suffice... putz. Fucking putz. The putziest fucking putz in Putz Angeles.
The first thing I thought was, "Man, that's got to be a mistake." If you're going to get a Hollywood tattoo there are so many better choices. I'd go with Edward G. Robinson in the bathtub. That's class. Real men bathe in their boxers. Shit, don't you wish that was you? A full tub of water, scotch on the rocks, racing form in hand, cigar and the cool breeze of an electric fan. Better be careful about that fan though. Things could go rotten.
07/11/08
My nerves are getting stretched thin. I can barely drive on the freeway any more. Every car, truck, big rig and humvee looks like its lunging at me from the edges of my vision. I am easily startled. I have broken, and nearly always break, dishes when washing if silverware in the drying rack settles and clangs against the other forks and knives. Sounds from outside are obviously rodents scratching around behind the furniture. Now I have to kick the furniture, peer behind chairs and sniff the air for the scent of mouse turds. The speckled design on the kitchen countertops moves and becomes insects. There's no way around it. I am jumpy. I can't close the door anymore unless I swing it to and fro five times and pat myself down for keys, wallet and cellphone twice. I need to check the blue post box three times to make sure the Netflix envelope has gone down, and then as I walk away, I turn to make sure the red envelope didn't simply fall through a big rusted hole to wind up on the sidewalk. I am unsteady, jittery. I no longer drink coffee. The maniacal thought to quickly send a bullet through my soft palate leaps at me from almost nowhere. It doesn't take much to trigger the impulse: an elderly woman fanning herself, a mother pushing two children in a mega-stroller while holding a third, an obese bus driver stuffing her fat black face full of Cheez-its™, a man in a yellow and blue Hawaiian shirt and short pants swinging a briefcase, the woman with half a right index finger who pantomimes smoking when she asks to borrow the cigarette I never have, the clerk who insists on bagging a six pack even though it has its own convenient handle built in, an old man with socks that don't match, anyone over the age of eighteen reading Nietzsche at a coffee shop... or Jung or Marx or Harry fucking Potter. It jumps in there. I'm stuck thinking about death, sudden, cold, empty, out of the shit. Mostly, it's my death, sometimes others but only in as much as their deaths would effect me. Occasionally everyone gets the death – the big improbable yet inevitable extinction event that would scratch Homo sapiens sapiens off the globe like the itchy rash it is, and that's another thing – I have this rash, heat rash I suspect, on my thighs and up around onto my lower back where my underwear band rides. I do my best to leave it be. I've been going out into public as much as possible where decorum alone keeps me from digging in nails first until blood and blessed endorphins flow. But going out there, into the people is one of my problems. It is what frays my nerves and spurs my self-destructive impulses. O, Lord – all the mothers. They congregate with their children at the local coffee houses and chatter about the only thing they have in common – their feculent twat litter. They're not friends; they have next to nothing in common except their children and their rampant consumption of every tawdry consumer product they can get their well manicured fingers into. These are the middle class mothers. Except for their number of kids they're no different from the pig-cunted Catholic whores with literal litters of their foul fuck-diseases. God told you you couldn't go on the pill? Fucking credulous bitch! No, no, no. It's not that bad. I just need to stay at home. Close the blinds, lock the door and hide from the world. Rest in easy solitude. Cross the street for beer if need be, but avoid the open air, the sidewalks, the stench of exhaust and burning cow because that's America: exhaust fumes and scorched bovine flesh. I'll survive if I can keep away from them and their problems and their sickening squawked lines of conversation. Stay inside and scratch and bleed and scratch and bleed and feel the cool rush of the first beer race to my toes, give them a wiggle and ZOOOOM! back straight to fill-in every contour of my body's grey-meaty puppetmaster. Ah. I think I'll be fine. Just fucking fine.
07/10/08
Republican howls of indignation are now so common as to be entirely unremarkable, but remark on them I will. So what is consternating the party of crybabies this time? Barack the Black, of course. Barack the Black – I like that, like Ivan the Terrible or Alexander the Great but rhymey. What it is this time that's got the boo-hoo gang of warmongering sockpuppets sobbing is Obama asserting the benefits of a bilingual education. Yes, that's about it – seriously, Republicans are now in the habit of going on spilt milk treasure hunts to find something to cry over – because what's more attractive than fat, blubbering, pill-popping closet-cases opening their gobs for a good long wail? – wah! wah! Maybe they can whine the terrorists to death. It's their one truly tremendous skill. Can't do shit about the economy, health care or win a war to save their asses, but they sure can bitch and moan and play the victim.
A few choice Republican quotes on the subject...
“Obama is quite embarrassed that Americans are so boorish and refuse to speak French while traveling abroad. It’s so uncouth.”
“Barack Obama: Europeans are cooler than Americans.”
"It’s the old argument among the betters with well-stamped passports: fie on those foolish grunting hoi polloi who show up in Paris in loud shirts expecting people to speak English..."
Lileks, from whom the last quote comes, in a fit of startling conclusion jumping, gets so whiney and bent out of shape he views Barack's endorsement of a bilingual education as an attack on Americans who have no passport and have never traveled abroad. The milk is salty with that boy's tears. He then goes on a listing rampage of all the great American sights such as, "plains of North Dakota, the small towns of Maine, the mountains of Montana, the outback of the Southwestern deserts, the coastal glories of California, the croc-snapping Everglades, the Appalachian trail, the Boundary Waters where the US blends into Canada..." And I can agree with him, but it has nothing to do with a bilingual education. In fact, in the "outback" of the southwestern deserts, it might be handy to have Spanish in your arsenal. I've been to small Maine towns. They're pretty much the same as small midwest towns and small midwest towns are rather like small German towns except for the language being spoken. But to stick to the point, the point being the failure of the U.S. educational system, these great American sights like the Big Bad Lands, the Scab Lands, the Grand Canyon, the Colorado National Monument, Yellowstone National Park, The Redwood Forest and so, are all the better appreciated with a little education under the hat. Without a concept of geological age, the Grand Canyon is simply a big hole. Without a knowledge of basic evolutionary theory it's hard to let your mind go in the Big Bad Lands and imagine what wonders used to strut around like they owned the place. Oh, but hooey to that. "God done it," is good enough for your average science-phobic American who'd rather gawk and grunt at the beauty than intellectually interact with it.
Whine, whine, whine.
In an astonishing bit of meta-whining, one of the whiney whiners of the party who have brought us endless failing wars, massive oil company profits, rising food costs and the home mortgage crisis whines his way around to blaming the victims.
McCain's top economic adviser Phil Gramm says,“We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline.”
Your party put it in decline, Bub, and primarily by whining like the spoiled rotten brats of rich parents you are until you got your way. A Republican whining about whining. This is meta-up-your-ass.
07/02/08
I am not voting for Obama. I am not voting for McCain. Maybe this is a clear sign there aren't any fuckers who would be politicians I'd ever be happy with. Obama is the same sort of credulous god-cunt gawker as Bush. They both believe they have a world class view up the almighty's skirt. I don't know how they do it. Shoe mirrors maybe.
What does Obama want to come drooling down on our head's from god's holy snatch now? An expansion and strengthening of Bush's bogus faith-based initiatives plan. Obama wants to continue to give religious organizations our tax dollars. What particular qualifications does faith give someone for handling millions of dollars? He doesn't say – just as Bush never said. Obama says he doesn't want the religious organizations to discriminate in their distribution of the money, but religion is discrimination. A religion is a discriminatory group. It says your flatulence smells of rose water and roasted cumin seed, but those bastards over their reek of baked duck shit. That's how religion works. They are organizations designed to steal money from others. That is the end goal of Judaism. All the world will hand its wealth over to Israel and serve them. Islam has the same end goal. When they have a modicum of power they offer nothing but avaricious violence against those who will disobey their terms. It is to these people Obama wants to hand over our tax payer's money. Money that the church's front to abstinence only organizations, anti-choice groups and education alliances that support intelligent design. Religious authority will always favor lies over truth because the truth, as the old cliché goes, sets you free while religion enslaves and steals.
Religious organizations have always been quite adept at stealing money from the gullible and painfully ignorant. I'd like to think our government made of men and women who are better than that, but evidently it isn't. The future rule of our country will still be guided by the gullible and painfully ignorant after Bush leaves office. "Internal Revenue Service" is just another way of saying, "Pass the collection plate." Obama – a firm believer in the separation of church & state my black ass.