Joining the rabble

I have a horrible confession to make—a terrible, shameful, humiliating confession of a shocking plunge into depravity and loathsomeness. Sorry, nothing to do with sex; that’s old hat. No, it’s worse than that: I’ve started dieting. Oh, please forgive me! I don’t know what I was thinking of when I did it! Well, yes, actually I know perfectly well what I was thinking of: I was thinking of 195 pounds on 5 feet 7 inches, among many other things. My chagrin regarding this derives from the fact that I’ve always had a sort of supercilious contempt for people who felt they had to indulge in such vain attempts to improve their appearance or health or whatever. Well, I said to myself arrogantly, I’ll never descend to that level. And here I am, down with the rabble.

Spent Halloween with my niece and nephew-in-law and their two kids, who said they had recently started the South Beach diet (a.k.a. the South Park diet to the cynical) because they had felt the need to trim weight off what looked to me like healthily trim bods, and they raved about the results they had seen in only a few weeks. And it was only a few days earlier that I had suffered the shocking reality check mentioned above at a doctor’s visit. (The pain in my leg mentioned in the last post turns out to be superficial phlebitis, which always sounds to me like flea-bites but is actually inflammation of arteries—or, in bad cases, deep veins—in the legs.) So I thought, well what the hell, I have to do something, I might as well try this.

I enrolled for it online instead of buying a book. Online enrollment costs some bucks, but not nearly as much as wine or high-speed internet. And it involves the option of journaling, if you want to keep track of your “progress,” and the chance to browse other journals to see how their authors are doing. It’s supposed to motivational, I guess. Most of the others restrict themselves to a line or two of telegraphic brevity, but yours truly, of course, could not resist the temptation to use a dieting journal as yet another platform for the display of his keen, insightful intellect and deathless, scintillating prose, and turns his journal entries into small essays. And, not very surprisingly, I don’t have any more audience in this medium than I do in this blog. In my browsing journal entries, my own never show up. Once more, my fragrance wasted on the desert air. I was tempted to widen the scope of my oblivion by copying the journal entries into the blog, but they involve too many details of the diet which would be boring and meaningless to anyone not sharing it.

But browsing the other journals has been a bit of an eye-opener and, I hate to say, has rather confirmed my perception of dieters as rabble. A not-surprisingly-large proportion of them are what are called yoyo dieters—people who try again and again and again, often with several different diets (Atkins often being mentioned), and either fail to lose any weight because they keep falling off the wagon, or lose it and then gain it back (I’ve seen a few of my friends do that). And their woeful tales of weakness and despair are full of guilt and remorse, sometimes approaching self-loathing, and they often come across as losers, whether born that way or made. One woman blamed her fall from grace on the fact that she was missing the boyfriend she’d broken up with. And yes, not at all surprisingly, the vast majority are women—hardly any men, from what I can tell. This could be expected on the basis of the numerous obscene cow whales I see in supermarkets, their carts piled to overflowing with junk I can’t even stand to look at, and the general obsession of this nation’s women with their appearance. Only in Boulder do the men seem to be as vain as the women everywhere else.

I’ve been on SBD (as it’s called by its users) only four days, and I’ve already failed to maintain the discipline for two of those, once when a dear friend invited me to dinner, and once during the weekly Sunday brunch of the church choir. And, as I have discussed in detail in the journal, I refuse to feel guilty about it. “The essential issue is, who’s in control, the diet or me? If the diet is in control, I’ll feel guilty about failing to keep it; if I’m in control, I won’t. It would be easy to say that if I were really in control, I wouldn’t break it in the first place, but the point is, I’m in control when I break it.” Yes, the other journalers have indeed motivated me: they’ve motivated me to avoid falling into the guilt trap they’ve fallen into. “The point has been made elsewhere that it’s as easy to become addicted to dieting as it is to suffer the addiction to food that made dieting necessary. Addictive behavior can attach itself to almost anything anyone does: eating, dieting, drinking, exercise, religion, work, you name it. If it’s intrinsically good, it can be turned bad by addiction.” The rabble are diet addicts—dietoholics, to coin yet another loathsome neologism. I am not one of the rabble, and I will not let South Park turn me into a dietoholic.

And I’ll probably never lose much weight. C’est la goddamn vie, as one of my teachers used to say.

Just checking in

Oh, gosh, has it been two months since my last post? Ask me how much I care. Time flies when the world is coming to an end. Has anything important kept me too busy to write during this time? Ask me what I consider important. I was once criticized, by a friend who herself took things entirely too seriously, for my not taking music sufficiently seriously, to which I replied, “Music is entirely too important to take seriously.” It seemed like a clever paradox at the time, and had the desired effect of making her do a mild double-take, but in fact, not even music is that important. Yes it is; why did I say that? Because I’m trying to make a case for not taking seriously even things which deserve to be taken seriously. To quote the motto of the American Nihilist Absurdist Loafers (ANAL) Party: Nothing really matters; and even that doesn’t, really.

I waste hours and hours and hours and hours and hours on the computer. I almost wish I’d never gotten one. I originally got one—a model I can’t even remember the name of, back in the cybernetic Stone Age—for the purpose of processing music. Now, about 5% of my computer time is devoted to music-processing, about 45% to word-processing, and about 50% to web-browsing. I almost never walk any distance of more than 2 miles anymore, and most of that is around the city, not up in the mountains where I ought to be. My dog sits and looks at me wistfully and whines every once in a while. My health is going to hell in a hand-basket. The computer is ruining my life.

But I guess it’s still better than the idiot box. I find it easy to wean myself away from that because I don’t have cable and my reception of the mainstream channels is so lousy that it’s not very enjoyable to watch. So I read. Books. I gather I’m in a vanishing minority in that pastime. And the only one of any importance I’m reading now is Beckett’s Watt.

Beckett is well known to the cognac-scented, pardon me, cognoscenti, and perhaps to a large number who are not, or may arguably be, among the cognoscenti, as probably the greatest Irish writer since James Joyce, and was in fact himself deeply influenced by Joyce, as well as being considered, generally but perhaps arguably, an existentialist, and certainly and unarguably an absurdist, and in fact, one of the founders, so to speak, of the theatre of the absurd, as in Waiting for Godot, famous for the savage humor with which he portrays not simply the absurdity but, according to some, the pessimism of the human condition, although others argue that he is really not pessimistic, since, for all its absurdity, life, in his vision, has a certain grim nobility, this vision being expressed in a style which is noted, particularly in Watt, for sentences of labyrinthine and at times almost incomprehensible complexity, running on for pages on end, although still, at that, more easily comprehensible than, say, The unnamable, in which the text runs on for page after page without the slightest comforting landmark of any punctuation or any other sort of break whatsoever, reminiscent of Molly Bloom’s free-association soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, to refer back to Beckett’s indebtedness to Joyce, and reminding one, in the case of Watt, in terms of bewildering sentence structure, of some of the more distinctive idiosyncrasies of German, a language whose tendency to turgidity is perhaps most famously exemplified in the critical works of Kant, and which is notorious for its use of separable-prefix verbs such as, say, zurückhalten, to hold back, in which the prefix zurück may be separated from the root halten by twenty lines of text, so that, by the time one gets to the prefix, one may very well have forgotten what root it was attached to, although this does not, of course, occur in English, so that one of Beckett’s distinctive trademarks is the stringing together of subordinate clauses that have their own subordinate clauses, and subordinate clauses to the subordinate clauses of the subordinate clauses, and subordinate clauses to the subordinate clauses of those subordinate clauses, creating the same effect of losing track of whatever verb started all this, as well as running through all the permutations and combinations of a series of items, such as a series of people, or a series of physical attributes, or a series of dogs, such combinations, again, running on for line after line after line, and adding to both the humor and the absurdity, since it is, after all, both humorous and absurd to mention that a followed b and b followed c on Monday, but a preceded b and b preceded c on Tuesday, and both a and c followed b on Wednesday, and both a and c preceded b on Thursday, and so on, thus giving the impression that life is so pointless that one is reduced to such desperate devices to try to give it some meaning.

I don’t do it as well as Beckett, obviously. Imitation is the easiest form of laziness.

Time for a drink. My leg hurts. I’m probably suffering from some terminal condition—besides life, I mean. I’ll probably die soon. If you don’t hear from me for another two months, assume the worst. It’ll be Christmas then, which is an appropriate time for catastrophes to happen. A friend of mine actually told me she worried about me when I didn’t return her phone calls because she wondered whether I’d died or not. How touching.

Save the Planet: Kill Yourself

Remember when I wrote (11 Feb) about Homokaasu’s “Kill Everyone Project”? Not surprisingly, they finished virtually killing everyone months ago, so that’s kind of obsolete by now. But now the stakes have been upped from the weirdly bizarre to the disgustingly sick, from killing the entire world population to killing yourself. As an example of the strange connections one can find in Internet links, I was linked to this from the Wikipedia page on “Sacred geometry,” of all things, to which I had been led in researching the “music of the spheres.” On the “Sacred geometry” page, there was this note: “Chris Korda, an infamous software engineer and leader of the Church of Euthanasia, designed an open-source software — ”

Wait a minute. The Church of Euthanasia? Is this for real? Yes, kiddies, it’s for real: its website is www.churchofeuthanasia.org, and they even have their own Wikipedia page, which quotes CoE’s own FAQ page, where we learn: “The Church of Euthanasia is a non-profit educational foundation devoted to restoring balance between Humans and the remaining species on Earth. We believe this can only be accomplished by a massive voluntary population reduction. … The Church has only one commandment, and it is ‘Thou Shalt Not Procreate.’ In addition, we have four ‘pillars’ or principles, which are Suicide, Abortion, Cannibalism and Sodomy.” (They explain that cannibalism refers to consuming the already dead—as if it didn’t by definition—and sodomy refers to any sexual act that doesn’t lead to procreation. Also, “voluntary” is emphasized in order to eliminate any impression that they’re advocating killing others. Glad they cleared that up.) Their quarterly publication is called Snuff it, and their usual slogan is the title of this post: “Save the Planet: Kill Yourself”—and that’s a relatively innocuous one. They go downhill from there, with such gems as “Eat people, not animals” and “Eat a queer fetus for Jesus.” Of course, population reduction is a worthy cause to support, but their tactics may not be the best way to support it. The “Family album” shows photos of their actions at various demonstrations intended to promote their cause, but many of the actions depicted and signs displayed (such as a 15-foot inflatable penis and “Sperm-free cunts for the Earth”) are so deliberately offensive and provocative that I can’t imagine them winning very many sympathizers. I think they consider it a form of Dadaism, but it’s Dadaism with an attitude (which is okay, since the original Dadaism certainly had an attitude). Some of their stuff is sick enough to push even my envelope, and I have a pretty liberal tolerance for sick humor; I will spare you the details on these. If you have a really strong stomach, you can research the site yourself, but be forewarned.

It gets worse

I wish I’d known this when I wrote the previous post. Only hours later, I hear on the 10:00 news that biology professors at the University of Colorado at Boulder are receiving threatening e-mails, including death threats, for teaching evolution at the university. Whether or not the perps are college students has not been determined, but it’s fairly clear that they are, like the maniacs who murder abortion doctors, confessed followers of the God of peace and love. One group “protects life” by killing others who they think don’t “respect” it, the other protects doctrinal purity by threatening to kill people who teach heresy at a state university. These monsters cannot and should not call themselves “Christian”; they should be locked up in mental institutions. We worry about Islamo-fascist terrorists and yet seem to accept with little question the growing number of Christo-fascist terrorists in our midst. Can we blame this on the climate of intolerance and paranoia fostered by the high crimes and misdemeanors of the pack of vicious thugs who are destroying this nation from their positions in the national government? Will we ever recover from the damage those psychopaths have done and will continue to do for the next nineteen months? Stay tuned for breaking developments, as the simpering androids who do newsertainment cheerfully tell us.

Another alternate reality

Well, no one should be particularly surprised at my silence here lately, since I said on 2 June (“Have a nice day”) that I was running out of anything worth saying. However, in my wanderings around the blogo-
sphere, or just in my casual encounters with what claims to be the real world (filtered through such windows as The Funny Times and the Onion newspaper), I frequently run across little items that strike me as so insane that they seem to deserve some comment, although I rarely get around to making any. But this one can hardly go by unnoticed.

As usual, I ran across this in a long and complicated sequence of following one Internet link after another—a sort of Internet free-association—and eventually ended up in a blog called “Dadahead”, where a post on 29 March 06 (“Galileo was wrong”) mentions the work of Robert Sungenis and his argument that Earth really is the center of the universe and does not rotate, and the Sun rotates around Earth. This is, of course, simply another instance of the same sort of lunacy as Creationism/Intelligent Design, and although one would think that “geocentrism” would be somewhat more difficult to sell, it turns out that Sungenis, while probably the best known proponent, is by no means the only one; there are several other such fruit-loops. And the kicker is that Sungenis is not, like most proponents of Intelligent Design, an evangelical fundamentalist, but a Roman Catholic—president of “Catholic Apologetics International.” And it turns out that, even though both beliefs are based on biblical literalism, the Creationists don’t always support the Geocentrists. Even among the literalists, there is disagreement about which parts of the Bible are more literal than others. I once asked a literalist how she reconciled the belief that Creation was supposed to have occurred in six “days” with the fact that a day is biblically defined as the rotation of the Sun around Earth and the Sun wasn’t created until the fourth “day.” Or, for that matter, where the “light” on the first “day” came from before the Sun was created. She looked vaguely uncomfortable and lamely muttered that it was a matter of “faith.”

What is there about religion that brings out the worst in people?—the worst stupidity, the worst cruelty, the worst fanaticism, the worst hatred and intolerance. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; it was supposed to bring out the best in people—and occasionally still does, although apparently to an extent that seems to be diminishing daily. Those whose religion inclines them to love and peace and justice and acceptance are rapidly losing ground to the growing number of those who use their perversions of religion to justify ignorance and hatred and intolerance and war and murder, and of atheists who dismiss all religion because of the evils perpetrated by the fanatics and theo-fascists.

Several years ago, the Onion ran a story about a new movement among fundamentalists to replace the (Newtonian) theory of gravity with the theory of Intelligent Pushing: objects do not fall to Earth because they are “pulled” by gravity but because they are pushed by God. Someone once said that a satirist is always faced with the problem of dreaming up a story so manifestly absurd that it won’t eventually become a fact in the real world.

Monty Python’s The meaning of life features a song in which the last line is: “Pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space, ’cause there’s bugger-all down here on Earth.”

Reality imitates psychosis

Back in 11 February, in “The Kill Everyone Project,” I wrote about a Finnish group called “The Sect of Homokaasu,” or just plain “Homokaasu,” a Finnish word which means “gay gas.” The source of the name “involves a long, breathtakingly paranoid rant by some guy who claims the Roman Catholic church was pumping poison gas into his room to make him a homosexual.”

Then a few weeks ago I ran across a post on “Only in America” (“Democracy at the end of a barrel, gayness at the end of a bomb,”
4 June), based on a BBC News article of 15 January 05, that says the geniuses of military strategy and guardians of American morality whose work our tax dollars pay for really were thinking, in 1994, of “building a ‘gay bomb’, which would make enemy soldiers ‘sexually irresistible’ to each other. . . . The plan for a so-called ‘love bomb’ envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behavior among troops, causing what the military called a ‘distasteful but completely non-lethal’ blow to morale.” Of course it never occurred to the rocket scientists behind this idea that in certain historic cultures (like Greece during the Trojan War; see Achilles and Patroclus), gay attachments among the troops were an important factor in strengthening morale, although it would have the desired effect among Muslims who, like fundamentalist christo-fascists, are rabidly homophobic. (However, the terrorists do not “fight” in troop formation, so it really wouldn’t work after all.) Fortunately (or unfortunately?), the plans “were never pursued.” The same BBC story also says that “researchers pondered a ‘Who? Me?’ bomb, which would simulate flatulence in enemy ranks.” I like that idea even better. Turn our enemies into farting gay-boys. (“Well, I’d really love to kiss you, if you’d only stop that horrible farting!” “Who, me? It’s you that’s polluting the air!”) Is this a great country or what? How often are the Roman Catholic Church (in Finland) and the U.S. Department of Defense on the same page?

Have a nice day

Let’s face it, that half-assed piece of shit about “Martyrdom and Hate” which I was talking about working on all the way back in March has suffered a well-deserved abortion. Yup, vacuumed all the little bloody pieces out of the, no wait, that’s something else, I mean it’s been on the back burner for so long that it’s simply burned or boiled away. And good riddance; it was me at my most insufferably pompous and bombastic. Besides, I’m not only running out of anything I consider worth saying, I’m running out of any motivation for saying it if there were any such thing. In fact, I’ve become rather more depressed than usual at the rapidly mounting piles of shit which seem to be smothering the world. Joe Bageant, whom I mentioned with such praise back in 24 March (“Life without blogging”), is such a mercilessly acute critic of the present descent of Babylon into chaos and madness that reading him can quickly become something of a bummer. Basically, he seems to destroy any reason for anyone to hope that anything can get any better. His scorn and contempt for the Dummy-crats is, if anything, more savage than that for the Republicans, because the former have treacherously betrayed all the principles for which they are supposed to stand, whereas the latter have steadfastly upheld all those for which they stand. And his loathing for the Dummy-crats extends to all liberals generally, whom the party is supposed to represent. Even before the entire Congress recently begged the Mad Emperor for the privilege of standing in line to suck his cock by writing him a blank fucking check for his evil war, Bageant was warning that any appearance of the “liberals” attaining victory because of pissed-off conservatives leaving the ranks was an illusion because their defection was only a temporary aberration and they would come flocking back to the True Faith when the chips were down. Bageant grew up in the belly of the Beast and speaks from first-hand experience when he says that these people—his people—basically welcome any kind of catastrophic shit which they think will hasten the Second Coming of their sick, vicious, heretical version of kick-ass, meaner-’n-shit Jesus à la that Left Behind vomit—and that includes continuing and even worsening conflict in the Middle East, where the occurrence of Armageddon is an important part of their vision of the future.

Regarding the recent Congressional gang-bang of the Mad Emperor, the satirical White House has a cheerful and typically sarcastic take in “Iraq Funding Approved: President lauds Democrats’ courage to stay true to their spineless jellyfish convictions”: “[A]fter all their chest-pounding and tough talk about pulling the plug on my pet abortion of a war, [they] done went and tucked their packages between their legs. … Hot diggety, I love the smell of political cowardice in the morning.” So much for the so-called Democratic “victory” in November; I was by no means the only one who suspected all along that it was a hollow, fraudulent scam.

Yes, a faithful reading of Bageant has made me lose all hope of anything getting any better, at least in my lifetime, which, at the age of 70, I don’t expect to be much longer—or hope it isn’t. I really don’t want to be here when the shit seriously hits the fan and civilization collapses in anarchy. And when you factor in the accelerating pace of global deterioration from warming, now seen to be happening at a much faster pace than previously thought, it’s not gonna be just here in the Divided States that it’ll happen. We will be in the unenviable position of having been primarily responsible for the collapse of the entire fucking planet.

One of my crazier friends (a lot of them are more or less off), who died about two years ago, had a small arsenal in his home in suburban Lyons CO (have I told this already? do I repeat myself?)—at least twenty weapons with ammo, most of which I can’t even remember the names of, several of them illegal to own—which he said he was prepared to use when the above scenario occurred and marauding hordes of savages came pouring over the top of the canyon ridge across from his house, which he expected to happen in his own lifetime. He also expected to live more or less indefinitely by having all his failing body systems replaced by artificial ones, making him a kind of bionic man. Fortunately, neither of his expectations came to pass. But if I live longer than I want to, or if the shit-storm occurs as quickly as some of the gloomier prophets predict, I might yet see it. And so might you—almost certainly.

So, have a nice day.