Why So Stupid?!

Here’s a thought. Stop. Just stop. Don’t cancel the paris premiere of The Dark Knight Rises. Don’t pull the ads from tv. Don’t alter the preview for Gangster Squad that airs before it. Don’t take steps to add security to multiplexes. Don’t talk about it being out of sensitivity to the tragedy. It isn’t. It’s a retarded reaction designed to circumvent dealing with the histrionic mewling of people who run around searching for things to be offended by. If you know someone who was injured or killed, you’re gonna be traumatized for the next while whether you see an ad or not. If you don’t know someone directly involved or affected, and seeing an ad for a movie offends you, then all you’re doing by making that fact known is providing a strong argument that the world would be a better place if you (and people like you) happened to be at that theater in Colorado today. When did this notion, that the feeble-minded among us deserve protection from being offended, come about? All this catering to fucking whiners serves only to swell their ranks, and to weaken society. Tragedies cannot be erased by decree, and attempts to do so are a sop to the worst elements of human nature, but by enduring them without turning to manufactured outrage, the leitmotif of modern-day america, we can gain a measure of strength that only defiance of circumstance bestows.

I went and saw The Dark Knight Rises this afternoon, and yes, I made jokes about getting shot before and after the film. Like the posters in England read in WW2, ‘keep calm and carry on’.

Tales of my recent journeys will resume next week.

A Blonde Fairwell

Last night’s UFC 141 was held to answer the following questions:

-Is it possible to have a main event in a combat sport designed entirely around the premise of mocking the glaring ineptitude/impotence of PED testing in the face of modern human/horse-hybrid science?

-Is kicking someone extraordinarily hard right in the goddamned liver a more badass fighting skill than clumsily attempting to tackle someone?

The answers are yes, and sweet merciful fuck yes, respectively.

Surprisingly, Brock Lesnar elected to retire after suffering another shitkicking at the hands (and knees, and shins… oh my) of someone who uses actual fighting skill to win a fight, as opposed to Brock’s main skill of being 40 to 70lbs larger than his opponents. He seemed to realize that if he couldn’t push people around, he just didn’t want to play anymore. He thought he was a hard man, but learned that he was really just a bully. That’s the beauty of fighting.

Fighting has its adherents and its detractors largely based on the veneer of violence most cannot see past in drawing their conclusions. But fighting, at its core, is not about violence, it is about truth, and violence is the mechanism by which that truth is disclosed. Randy Couture once said “there are no lies in the cage”, and he was right because every single moment you spend locked in there with another man whose job is to attempt to beat the shit out of you (along with one more man whose job is to save your life if the first man succeeds), is a moment of truth. Your words, your possessions, your tribe, your signifiers, all the bullshit that passes for an identity in a society fixated on image, none of that matters, it’s all about reality. Are you in shape? Can you fight? Will you engage in a contest of combative acumen or resort to a cowardly exploitation of the rules to ensure victory? Are you a sportsman or a fighter? Will you quit if adversity slaps you down, or struggle through it earning dignity even in defeat? The answers to such questions reveal who someone is, beneath bluster, beneath posturing, beneath tattoos, beneath all the signals we send in our attempts to distort our failings, our inadequacies, beneath the games we play to pretend we’re something we’re not as we blithely lie to others while reserving our greatest mendacity for ourselves. Fighting strips those witnessing it of their misapprehensions about us, and us of our delusions about ourselves, which for someone like me, makes it as close to holy as anything gets in this world.

You Suck! No You Suck!

Twilight’s back in the cinema houses to give everybody something to get all excited about. Oh Bella, no dumb female fictional character has been this polarizing since Sarah Palin. But why the rabid vitriol? Much has been made of how irredeemably dreadful these movies are, from the implied pedophilia, to the unctuous melodrama, to the blatant anti-feminism, to queering the deal on vampire mythology, all of which is pretty spot on from what I can tell, but what I’m more curious about is why so many have gone to such length to rip apart a piece of bad fiction and hurl vituperative at its devotees. The crappiness of the product itself doesn’t seem to justify the hate and I don’t regard the charges of misogyny which come up when some guys decry anything aimed squarely at women that becomes immensely popular (i.e. Sex And The City, or is it Sex In The City?) to be sufficiently explanatory.

I suspect a significant part of the reaction is a backlash (in different ways from different sources) to the trope that men have simple needs while women are complex creatures. The supposition that one can cash in on the testosterone-laden stupidity of the male demographic with ease while women en masse are more discerning. You know, they’ll toss a few dollars Hollywood’s way for a well made Julia Roberts vehicle, but they won’t shell out hundreds of millions for garbage like Transformers, or camp out for the privilege of giddily imbibing something so glaringly retarded even an Evangelical Christian can spot the plot holes in it (*cough*, Star Wars prequels, *cough*). So for a lot of guys who’ve heard how women mature quicker and how male taste is sophomoric, particularly those who have cultivated a predilection for more cerebral fare… that still originates from comic books (Watchmen, Dark Knight, etc.), being faced with blatant evidence of the distaff side’s ability to cream their shorts over something so puerile generates its fair share of schadenfreude. And for women who cringe anytime some daffy chick brings up astrology because of the aspersion that act casts on her gender’s collective intellect, seeing insuperable proof that girls can be astoundingly devoted to such tripe will, understandably, make the blood boil.

Add that to the various more obvious reasons people despise this franchise and you have a perfect storm of opprobrium. Take heart though, Twi-hards, hating the object of your heedless attention has become so prosaic that it’s only a matter of time before hipsters start sporting ‘Team Edward’ t-shirts, and people will hate them for it a lot more than they hate you. Rightly so.

A Day Late And A Dollar Short

So this is going to be a bit of a tightrope walk for me. I have to balance reverence for the fallen comrades of some of the soldiers that I’ve trained with during my travels, with being a total contrarian wiseass. You see, I find it difficult to reconcile supreme respect for those willing to give their lives for a principle, with utter disdain for those who send others to their demise for cavalier and unnecessary reasons. What does one have to do with the other? Well, yesterday was about honoring soldiers, how about today being set aside for loathing the powers that be and their profligacy with the lives of others?

Here’s the thing, marching off to potential death in a foreign land is not, on the face of it, an attractive proposition. Natural objections based on a sense of self-preservation must be overcome. Since we no longer live in an age where this can be done by offering soldiers the spoils of war (after all, Halliburton’s got dibs on those), it is instead achieved by callow psychological manipulation. The first layer of this is nationalistic and patriotic propaganda. The next, is imbuing military service with notions that appeal to the noblest aspects of the human condition like honor, integrity, loyalty, and achievement, while minimizing the practicalities like the breakdown of individual identity and instilling of unquestioning obedience, neither of which are particularly noble.

Of course in all this, the powers that be cannot just gloss over the fact that you may lose your life in service to your country. They can, however, appeal to high ideals yet again, this time the virtue of sacrifice to a higher principle, secure in the knowledge that your passing will be honored, glorified, and remembered by a grateful nation, by decree, on a day like Veteran’s Day, or Remembrance Day, if you died for the Queen, Victory Day if you died to keep the Nazis out of Russia so you could continue living under Stalin’s benevolent stewardship, etc, etc. Hence my ambivalence about these days, for they are part of the apparatus society employs to incentivize a course of action that places the lives of honorably motivated young men and women in the hands of, at best, people blinded by ideology or willing to compromise their principles in the pursuit of power, and at worst, people awash in corruption, whose only principle is the pursuit of power.

To risk, and ultimately, to give, one’s life for an ideal, is a courageous act, it is a staggering display of the power of the human mind, worthy of commemoration. It is, however, the height of tragedy to die for a politician’s scheme, an ideologue’s fantasy, or a cleric’s lie. I just hope more attention is paid to the formation of the ideals young people are asked, convinced, or compelled to die for, because I believe that if more of us understood the true nature of the things we fight about, we would be unable to find cause to do it so much. And that, perhaps, would truly honor our soldiers, not just in death, but in life.

How Science Proves Marriage Doesn’t Work

Marriage is dumb. Alas, the nature of the discussion about it has rarely eclipsed the erudition of the previous sentence… until now. For too long, the case against marriage has suffered from holding itself to a low standard, due to the fact that it was up against such feeble opposition. Arguing against an institution whose chief proponents wholeheartedly embrace the notion of making major life decisions based on the perceived plausibility of fairy tales just doesn’t inspire intellectual rigor. But it isn’t simply church folk and women who read Cinderella a few too many times before getting their first period that fall for one of the greatest acts of wishful thinking in our society, it’s anyone who fails to comprehend the fact that there exists a reality beyond their own desires. This is because the anti-marriage notions floating about our memesphere consist of various tripe spewed by those who take their marching orders from fantasies about how the world works which are only slightly more believable than the ones provoking the god squad’s deranged perambulations. From both the individualistic and collectivist ends of the ideological spectrum (‘marriages inhibit free association’, ‘marriage confers on people the status of property, and property is theft’, ‘blah blah, if my political cult ran the world, things would be perfect’) to some poorly understood biological inferences (‘human beings aren’t supposed to be monogamous’), to pseudo-rebellious contrarianism (‘marriage is too conventional for someone like me’, spoken by goth rock doyen Marylin Manson, who, I shit you not, was married like a year later)… with such pitiful standard bearers holding the line against the delusion of connubial bliss, it isn’t surprising that people continue to blithely get hitched.

This ends now, I tells you, for I’m about to wield the hardest of the hard sciences to unceremoniously bludgeon the modern conception of marriage into the ontological hereafter. That’s right, it’s way beyond time someone guzzled a few cold, delicious pints of physics and pissed hot, steaming entropy all over a flowing white gown… might as well be me. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of entropy and don’t feel like cracking open a tab to wikipedia, it is decay and disorder, which, according to the laws of thermodynamics, tend to increase in closed systems. Could you dumb it down a shade? Sure. Without outside input, things wither and die. It is precisely the degree to which a marriage resembles a ‘closed system’ that determines its long-term feasibility. If getting married was widely regarded as something you do to create a stable platform for raising a family and nothing else, you wouldn’t hear a peep out of me, or Sir Isaac Newton. If marriage was solely a conspicuous display of romantic love, and the business of sharing a household and turning little retarded midgets into functioning adults was kept entirely separate, I would serve myself up a generous helping of shut the fuck up on the matter. If marriage didn’t require you to forego any other emotionally or physically satisfying interactions and value it above all, by decree, I would be bitching about another stupid movie or writing about how the work of Howard Bloom applies to my sex life right this very second. But it does all those things and more, so here we are.

Your spouse, in the idiotic overreach that modern marriage aims for, must be your best friend, dream lover, co-parent, soul mate, room-mate, uniquely trusted confidante, life partner, the only one who truly gets you, a constant source of unconditional love… and your golf buddy. Woe betide you for permitting anyone else to fulfill any of those roles, or you’re an adulterer, guilty of an emotional affair, refusing to grow up, betraying a cosmic bond, yadda, yadda, yadda. If seeking any sort of outside stimulation wasn’t frowned upon, or proscribed outright, the system could be refreshed by occasional infusions of exogenous sexual, emotional, intellectual, or whatever kind of energy prevents you from morphing into a defeated 300lb zombie. But instead, the system must remain closed, lest we admit that the fantasy is untenable. So people try to convince themselves that a pregnant housewife is sexy, that your soul mate hasn’t become your soul’s mortal enemy, that you should stay together for the sake of the kids, that it is possible to trade freedom for security, that you can have all your needs met by one person, for the rest of your life, and that any attempt at apostasy regarding this faith should be dissuaded by staggering financial consequences, then they ride that bitch till the wheels fall off.

I won’t even bother using the high divorce rate as indicative of an increase in entropy being an inevitable byproduct of modern marriage, because someone could make the counterpoint that an equal amount of marriages persist (let’s disregard for a second that embracing a probability of success equal to that of a coin toss in making what is ostensibly the most important decision of your life should disqualify you from any pretensions to reasoned discourse). Here’s the thing no one ever tells you about the divorce rate: it isn’t high, it’s low… really bloody low. People tend to only avail themselves of the option to terminate a marriage when they are absolutely irredeemably miserable, particularly once they are a few years in. To bring some more physics into this disquisition, the most powerful force in human affairs is inertia, and it takes an awful lot more to change the fundamental arrangement of one’s life than it does to overcome rolling resistance. Witness, based on how many plain old boyfriend/girlfriend relationships limp along way past their expiry date, that people will remain in sub-optimal, declining relationships which subsume their identity, because absent the impetus of crushing despair, the motor of change, like genuine self-awareness, is the provenance of the few. Now add to the difficulty of dissolving any entrenched relationship the roadblock of onerous cost (monetary, emotional, and social) divorce provides, and you have a truly bleak picture. Plenty of people aren’t divorced, but they’re not fooling anyone, and they sure as shit ain’t fooling science.

I’m not saying that it is impossible to have a rich and fulfilling kinship with a primary companion throughout life, I’m just letting you know that the laws of physics can tell you exactly how much entropy will result from the constraints you place on it. People change, relationships change, the heady stew of neurochemicals that accompany new love fade in time, and the only purpose of marriage is to keep you anchored in place when things go bad, because no one needs a contract compelling them to stay somewhere when they’re happy as shit to be there. Uncertainty is one of the vagaries of life, and when we aspire to hedge against it, the illusion of certainty is an incredibly tempting thing to turn to (cough, religion, cough). Alas, illusions blind us to the brewing tempest of disaster that reality rudely foists upon us, serving only to delay our employment of our one legitimate weapon against the pummeling we receive at the cruel hands of fate… our ability to adapt. In a chaotic world, open, dynamic systems flourish, while closed systems inevitably fray and collapse. If you understand this, wed at your discretion, if not, do so at your peril, but you can’t say I never warned you.

Sendai Send Off

A friend of mine is beginning a journey. With any luck, this particular journey will be the first step towards the completion of a lifelong dream. No one I know deserves to have their dreams realized more, but then, no notion of measurement is less correlated to an outcome’s likelihood than whether or not someone deserves it. We invent words like ‘deserve’ in the hopes that we can make life obey our commands, come around to our way of thinking how things should be, as if the world responded to our wishing it were so. But wishes are meaningless without the will to act. We all dream, and wish, some even deserve, but few possess the will to forge thoughts cast in desire into actions carved in stone. So, though my hopes are to see a friend’s dream fulfilled, my admiration lies in the attempt to steal from ephemera to give to reality.

Safe travels my friend, may your hands move the world.

Even The Color Blind Can See Gray

So I’m watching a replay of an old non-UFC MMA fight, and the commentators are going back and forth on how to distinguish between the 2 combatants on account of how they are both wearing black shorts with white trim. One of them refers to the difference in logos, the other offers the presence of ankle sleeves on one fighter as a distinguishing feature. After about 30 seconds of this I’m unnerved, but can’t decide whether I feel rage or pity towards these broadcasters, because, though I can decipher their unctuous display to be the result of cowardice, I also know it’s not their responsibility to slow the march of brain-dead ideology. They can’t be expected to buck whatever retarded edict their corporate masters have laid down that rendered them comically unable to differentiate between two similarly attired opponents by virtue of being utterly shit-your-pants terrified to call any attention to the galactically obvious fact that it was a white guy fighting a black guy!

Really!? This type of behavior drives me positively apeshit! There are real problems aplenty in the world, but you know what never solves them? Pretending. You cannot alter reality by wishing, no matter what Oprah tells you, and when you try to do just that, you aren’t just being ineffectual, you’re actually making things way worse. What’s the harm if a few dippy chicks, and the morons who will agree to any of their daft notions in service of a seemingly blind desire to fuck them, go about their day with rose-colored glasses on? Nothing, except eventually, one of these simpletons gets the notion that the world would be just perfect if everybody thought and acted the way they did, and sets about trying to Picard that shit (you know, ‘make it so’). Don’t agree that a pinkish hue enhances the visual spectrum? Tough shit son, cause here comes the Collective Delusion Enforcement Authority to staple some fuchsia contact lenses to your eyeballs to make everything ok. The world can be a harsh and brutal place, and though human intervention can improve it, pretty much every attempt that’s ever been made to mould it into someone’s vision of utopia has increased the amount of suffering in it by ignoring the one ingredient that any attempt to successfully solve a problem requires: acknowledging reality.

In case you’re wondering, because self-awareness is in short supply these days, if you’re part of the problem, here’s a simple test. Do you think everything could be solved if everyone just followed some well-defined school of thought, you know, there’s a few of them, but they all end in ‘ism’? If so, thanks for coming out, the line to the firing squad starts to the right (or left, depending on who’s in charge). We don’t need any more slavish adherents to ‘schools of thought’, what we need is ACTUAL THOUGHT.

And yes, this post is about the debt ceiling.

There Is No ‘I’ In ‘Motherfucker!’

It’s been a bad day. I thought I might be back on the mats in the next week or two. It appears I was mistaken. I had intended to regale you with my antics at a mountain resort this past weekend (remarkable for my willingness to rise at the inconceivably early hour of 9am, and typical for my running afoul of some authority figures attempting to enforce some inane dictum that required me to deftly circumvent the highly permeable perimeter of a saloon), but I’m having trouble scraping together the energy to brush my teeth (and I own an electric toothbrush), let alone perform the necessary trek to a local medical facility.

Every single element of my neurochemical substrate is screaming at me to surrender to noxious despair and bow my head in defeat. My highest ambition for the day, ostensibly, is to roll over to the other side of the bed. My muscles ache, I have no desire to eat, my brain hurts… in short, I feel like a bag of hammered shit. If the majority of the components of my body had their way, all I would be capable of right now is a plaintive, exasperated exclamation of ‘motherfucker!’, directed at the vagaries of an indifferent universe.

But I am not my body. I am not my muscles. Or my heart. Or even the majority of my brain, laying, as it does, outside my conscious control. My muscles don’t want to move… too bad. My heart desires a leisurely afternoon… tough shit. The elements of my brain that control nine-tenths of the mechanism of motivation want to eat ice cream… up yours you lazy piece of gray matter. About an hour ago I was laying on the floor, gasping desperately for air, while an acrid, coppery taste, emerging from my lungs, seared the back of my throat. My muscles throbbed, enervated by the miserable tide of lactic acid, and my heart was thumping in agony as it descended mercifully, finally, from the lofty pace of over 170 bpm. The automatic, ignominious saboteur that resides in my skull, which had been begging for my autonomous, conscious mind to relent, was finally placated by my recumbence.

I had just obliterated my previous best time in the hundred burpee challenge by as near as makes no difference 30 seconds. I was able to do that because I can ignore the internal wellsprings of doubt that conspire to reduce us to victims of biology and circumstance. I was able to do that because I am my choices, and I chose penance for even considering offering less than my best today.

Wanderlust

I will be traversing a continent today, starting anew, on a mercenary journey intended to last half a decade, which I will consider somewhat of a failure if at its conclusion I depart carrying more luggage than I arrived with. I travel with a backpack… and occasionally a suitcase with hidden compartments for weapons, cash and pornography (the holy trinity of any journey worth taking). The non-transitory content of my life fits entirely into said backpack. I assiduously avoid possessions. The word ‘spartan’, besides being badass, splendidly describes the decor of a litany of temporary residences I have left in my wake. I employ sincere, passionate oratory to persuade those contemplating favoring me with a gift to abstain (unless the gift happens to be  a hooker capable of sincere, passionate oral). In many ways, my existence would be some anti-progress, anti-capitalist, luddite, smelly hippie’s wet dream. However, I don’t espouse ascetic ways because of some douchebag political, philosophical, or religious dogma. In fact, I don’t espouse them at all, after all, who am I to tell anybody how to live. So, if  my brain hasn’t been disabled by the crippling retardation of religious piety or marxist solidarity, why is my stuff so scant? If I arrived at my minimalist ethos not by searching for a club of fellow travellers whose views I could latch my identity to, but as an inexorable result of, well, something… then what was it?

Identity needs abound, and parroting the tenets of some thought cult, in and of itself, ain’t gonna cut it. Your identity needs determine the stuff you acquire, because your stuff is your way of expressing who you are to the world at large. Your stuff tells the people in your club (or in the club you’d like to join) that you are like them, it tells the people not in your club that you are not like them. Some bits of your stuff tell the people in your club that while you are like them, you are also unique and special. Other bits of your stuff tell your neighbors that you are better than them. If you’re a guy, your stuff tells women whether or not they should sleep with you, and if you’re a woman, then your stuff tells men how likely you are to sleep with them. Your stuff reveals your passions, and your fears, your delights, and your sorrow. Don’t listen to shallow observers whose eyes, blinded by doctrinaire adherence to hypotheses long since disproved, see only emblems of crass materialism. Our stuff writes the story of our souls.

So, what tale is told by my dearth of stuff? Is my corporeal austerity a mirror of my inner desolation? Or has my whittling away of personal items been the result of developing a rich inner life, a predilection for repose, a desire for truth, knowledge, and the freedom only portability can offer, living primarily for my own edification, even developing an attitude toward belonging that ranges from indifference to outright scorn? Is it possible that I’m actually just killing time at the airport waiting for my flight, and decided to write some gibberish that reveals nothing about who I truly am? As it turns out, yes. Now fuck off.