Scheduled Maintenance

Intermittent to nonexistent posting for an indefinite period. Certain exigencies of TRW™ make regular updates unfeasible, perhaps until June. We apologize for any inconvenience.

but what if you don't want 'em?

Current targeted add in gmail:

How To Get Your Ex Back - InsideAGuysMind.com - Learn The "Secret Psychology" To Getting A Man Hooked For Good.



Fuck that. Here's some secret psychology for you: the secret is sex. But he won't respect you for it. P.S. it's not a secret: Alanis Morissette wrote a song about this like ten years ago.

icarus ii

it was an ordinary gathering of fools
gentry'd up and strutting
at the opportune moment alex spoke
just the wrong words
–she took the fools lightly–
from lips curled into themselves
in contempt

like a murder of judges
fools in flashing noses flourished
rubber knives, kung fu taunts
swooped together on an imaginary
carcass–alex's soul was gone
chased by self examination

more on chemical dependency

some admittedly disjointed thoughts.

orgasm suffuses the human brain
with a certain chemical
–it's oxytocin, for the record–
which facilitates affectionate
behavior and feelings which
are associated with such behavior

ethnic groups associated with
cultures in which alcohol consumption
is not known show relative inability
to cope with the potential addictivity
of ethyl alcohol: this is genetic

feelings of wellbeing are accompanied
by relatively high levels of
serotonin, that same structure massive
release of which is the main
product of the ingestion of lysergic
acid diethylamine, and SSRI's

every natural stimulant known is
used by at least one indigenous
culture in whose home habitat
the plant is endemic

alarm

1. Waking far too early for dawn
head and neck curved just wrong
I am not identical to I.

2. Please explain this lump in a
dream breast; I entreat you, O
Demeter and Fortuna, wake me.

3. Several small killers
kidding in a cave and grooving
on a riff: doze during Sleep.

4. Wrestle with too many ideas
which all indicate giving in
to sleep indefinitely.

5. It all goes to prove
your chemical dependency
is no longer charming.

6. Today is the greatest day I
will ever regret being alive so
you are able to love me and I you.

7. &

8. Don't forget, me, to listen
for music. This boy's elaborate
anguish is worse than possible.

9. Shower. Coffee. Coke. Speed.
Sweet sweet diphenhydramine sniffles
or big-N little-y bigfuckin'-Q.

10. An accelerating heartbeat
does nothing for a frustrated libido
as your crotch floods ever so.

11. I can't believe this but instead
of the horns I seem to be throwing
the shocker. Insert bitter chuckle.

12. Waking far too late for breakfast,
confused and struggling into today's
pants, rush past superfluities.

13. You and I keep busy and ignore
all the things which make us dead,
and stay alive together that way.

the view from

my mind is embodied, extended ever so far from
the center of me, long lines of kin-
aesthetic distance, the continuous reach of my consciousness
of self, the projection I make of my sensory surfaces, the inner
and outer, distance, which is the physical me
confronting this jagged angry weathering world.

from the center of me, the 'I' place that
point behind every pointing
back through which traveling leads nowhere but to itself no
distance later, and outside the infinitessimal self
there extends the space in which thoughts are exhibited
flickering and vivid brightly colored and rarely black and
chalky, where 1+1=2 stretches high as the jovian
atmosphere above, or the height of a space
elevator to an and, in which nothing feels like anything.

The sensory surfaces float outside this place my mind
black and back underneath everything where the watcher
watches and interprets the feelings out there at
the nose and muscles and in the tightening hurting
place just in front behind around inside but separate from
a fast-beating heartache. I feel the surface of my eyes.

short

abandoned cradle
stands quietly rotting in
sunlight and aspen

take this, nanowrimo

Well I'm no road-hog speed freak with an endless roll of typing
paper and contempt for corrections or even looking back.
(Dylan had his back pages, too, I recall)
Nor am I a wannabe writer or even a writer without motivation.
(Who was it who said you write in a gutter or your bullshit day
job, while the Man wrings you out a bit each day, even when
your little tiny crunched-down humped-down landlady kicks you
out for leaving all those wine bottles in the hallway and
not paying a dime of rent?) But I digress–
your eyes are the least enchanting shade of evening, my deer
–and I ask whether you can Beat your way to a romance novel
or perhaps should stick to short-form
slashfic?
::page 46
had been hungry all day. Todd finally spotted a deer through
the lush summer foilage, a beautiful 14-point buck with bushy
white tail twitching as he scented a doe who was no doubt nearby
with brown spots on his hide to camoflage him from wolves. Todd
knew better how to take out this magnificent creature. He raised
his Hollytown A-46 compound bow with its twisted blue-and-white
nylon string and pulled back until the fletchings on his hand-made
::page 48
Charlene, her blonde hair stylishly lifting up and back from her
brow, crumpled her brow in worry, "Don't leave me Todd," she said,
"I'll do anything you want," she said, reaching for his hefty
::
but look maybe you shouldn't wait until the month of
publication nightmares
and a blank page waiting to chew your ideas from shit into visible
shit
but instead retreat with your pencil and yellow lined legal pad with
its useless punched trio of voids around which you can doodle
to the outhouse and amidst the flies contemplate the hurt
and pointlessness and injustice of the universe and distill with
your flexing bowel a thought which squeezes itself bloody
from your forehead, bits of you gray matter still clinging to
it, postmodern Athena clothed in graphite dust cyphers and signs,
and bury that pad then, in the earth, and return your idea to the garden
from whence it came: that compost heap where you
grow all those tomatoes and yams
and blackcurrants
from which you make the ink which you use
to ghostwrite bedtime stories told by your grandmother to your
nonexistent children, in the voice of Samuel Clemens and Goethe's
love child, from the viewpoint of a drug-addicted autodidact with
cerebral palsy and gender identity issues and also schizophrenia
on alternate Wednesdays,
and every story is both a murder mystery
and a meandering meditation on modern life
both a self-referential and endlessly clever send-up of contemporary
fiction and a sober re-invention of the drama;
and all of it poolry edited,
before you fall asleep with your significant other holding your
shoulders gently and cooing to you when you say you didn't
do anything as spectacular today as yesterday or the day before that
or even last week when you were the best new composer of
garage rock since what's-his-face, and happy
you will be, and you'll sleep.

thousand, or, how it was the wrong season to write with a pounding heart

she sounds like dragonfly wings
sapphire-drenched clustering dis-gemini flashing
four directions, four sounds, four windy
–above my water-logged ears, a reflection–
lofting vessels of chitin and light:
is how i saw her humming
in the swing
out back
today.

try reading your diary aloud

on the occasion of the adoption of moxie catherine azazzel rutabaga, &c., Bukowski's the cat:

the hunter by my window
4 feet locked in the bright stillness of a
yellow and blue
night.

cruel strangeness takes hold in wars, in
gardens–
the yellow and blue night explodes before
me, atomic, surgical,
full of starlit
devils...

the the cat leaps up on the
fence, a tubby dismay,
stupid, lonely,
whiskers like an old lady in the
supermarket
and naked as the
moon.

I am temporarily
delighted.

nerd... core?

Another in our ongoing series of filmic recommendations, sure to please the eye and the ear. But mostly the ear, seeing as the shoestring budget for Nerdcore Rising [trailer] won't allow more than a rudimentary documentary style. Just kidding, maybe. Ups as well to MC Chris and the Boogaloo Jam Band. Via J-Ro.

covenant

c'n i jus' say that th' film 'the covenant' is the most godawful POS.

on a day like this or that they separated though having never met

Bukowski, a division:

I live in an old house where nothing
screams victory
reads history
where nothing
plants flowers

sometimes my clock falls
sometimes my sun is like a tank on fire

I do not ask
your armies
or
your kisses
or
your death
I have my
own

my hands have arms
my arms have shoulders
my shoulders have me
I have me
you have me when you can see me
but I don't like you
to see me

I do not like you to see that
I have eyes in my head
and can walk
and
I do not want to
answer your questions
I do not want to
amuse you
I do not want you to
amuse me
or sicken me
or talk about
anything

I do not want to
love you

I do not want to
save you

I do not want your arms
I do not want your
shoulders

I have me
you have you

let that
be

Enlightenation

Since we're on course for a "bracing" week of political action (or something), why not just whip this little S.C.U.M Manifesto thang out?

It's been a while since I'd read it, but the scumm is still fresh. And, rhetorically pungent as it is, more likely than not to provoke actual thoughts. That is, its accusatory style and substance are such that any quarter-way intelligent person cannot sink immediately into a that-dyke-hates-men-shes-crazy thoughtjerk reaction, since it specifically singles out the most likely groups to do so (i.e. men and their admirers) a being incapable of rational thought. Clever, that. Excerpt:

The affect of fatherhood on males, specifically, is to make them `Men’, that is, highly defensive of all impulses to passivity, faggotry, and of desires to be female. Every boy wants to imitate his mother, be her, fuse with her, but Daddy forbids this; he is the mother; he gets to fuse with her. So he tells the boy, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, to not be a sissy, to act like a `Man’. The boy, scared shitless of and `respecting’ his father, complies, and becomes just like Daddy, that model of `Man’-hood, the all-American ideal — the well-behaved heterosexual dullard.

Via the inaptly-named womynkind.org (scroll way down for link).

Stop with that faith stuff already.

No, seriously. [See also: flyingspaghettimonsterism/pastafarianism. --f]

So yesterday I included the following

"(WHAT?)"

in a post mostly focussed on the sad state of godbag/queer relations. I received a couple (someone actually reads this thing?) of angry emails about the importance of faith as a firm foundation in life, from admittedly ambiguously "spiritual" folks who do not self-identify as Christian. Congrats to them on that. The point, however, is that atheism isn't some kind of, you know, paucity of spiritual fulfilment or something of the sort. We don't need to be coddled as psychological/emotional cripples. Quite the opposite: if faith is a crutch that gets you through hard times, if your god carries you across the sickeningly teacle-y beach of life when the going gets tough, aren't you (that's the midwesten 'you', meaning 'one', folks), to put a rather blunt point on the matter, the one with the emotional problem? That is to say, doesn't it indicate that one isn't strong enough to handle some aspect or other of life alone, and simultaneously one is unable to turn to one's fellow people for support?

More to the point, however: I am not going to rehearse arguments in favor of atheism (or, better, just not discussing the matter, since it is, you know, just false). Those who don't want to allow themselves to be swayed by sound arguments will always find a way to cut off their intellectual noses to spite their intellectual faces. Wanting is of course the key here. The leap of faith is such a powerful cultural tradition in this country that it sometimes seems hard to imagine a faith built on, for instance, natural phenomena, or on supposed rational arguments (cf. Catholicism). So let's address it in particular.

I claim someone you have never met exists. However, there is no evidence available, besides the professed belief of large numbers of other people, that she does exist. Now believing other people to be generally reliable, you are inclined to accept this. However, I also tell you that you must demonstrate that you accept the existence of this person despite an acknowledged lack of any evidence. That is, you can't even take others' beliefs to be prima facie (at first glance) evidence for the existence of this person. And the reason that you should accept the existence of this person and furthermore follow the rules this person endorses (according to a document written many years ago in another country by an unknown author) is that (1) at some unspecified point in the future you will be rewarded or punished to an unreasonable magnitude for your (non-)compliance with those rules and/or (2) you owe the person you have never met your loyalty. Sounds very familiar, no?

Is this starting to look ridiculous yet?

Beside the truly laughable (ha ha) nature of the claim just outlined as it pertains to the invisible cloud being, there are a number of other reasons for thinking that faith, leapt, blind, or otherwise, in said noodly Lord is to be avoided. Let me mention only one: that it distracts individuals in a rather unfortunate manner from dealing with the actual problems facing humanity. It is, in other words, negative in the sense of providing a reason why things are the way they are and in so doing justifying all of the bullshit we see (see also capitalism, patriarchy, and their associated discontents). Yes, much charity is inspired by "divine" guidance etc. But will that outweigh the many religiously motivated crimes of the past present and (probably) future, and the ongoing crime which is the perpetuation in the minds of unsuspecting human populations of a blatantly false view of the universe? A right does not cancel a wrong.

So, "Dogma" fans and dogma fans, think about having faith for a while. Perhaps you'll be open to changing your opinion. Someone once pointed out to me, back in knucklehead times of church youth group, that challenging one's faith can make it stronger. I should say now that if you've made it stronger, the challenge wasn't difficult enough--kind of like asking Tiger Woods to take on a golf course he's never played before: he's just not going to fail to make 18 holes. Okay, I've made a golf analogy. Time to quit while I'm marginally ahead.

Everyone's gay today!

...not happy.

Let's think about queerness for a second. Maybe a little more. There you go. Apparently, if you're like the fine united statesians over at the family research counsel, you were contemplating the various tortures Ted Haggard will suffer when he finally makes it to Hell. Which is, you know, fine, except for the fact that he'll be going there for hypocrisy rather than his (hot) sexual behavior.

What's really flabbergasting, at 9:30 on a weekday morning, is how much hate some people can pack into their tiny, silky-smooth brains. I don't mean anger here, which is healthy and such, but actual hate. Irrational (and when have Invisible Cloud Being worshipers been anything else--they take pride in it for chrissakes), hyperfocussed, self-righteous in that annoyingly bad way: these are the hallmarks of someone in such deep delusion that they make a lifestyle out of a silly (seriously: silly as in absurd) ingroup-outgroup distinction.

And what about that, it's th' American way, right? Spaniards, Reds, Germans, Anarchists, Suffragettes, Japanese, Germans again, Reds again, Islamists, welfare mothers, ethnic cleansers, Bill Clinton, Islamists again. Is any of this ringing a bell? The creation of a mostly nonexistent menace is a standard of the infantilizing social structure I've had occasion to criticize in the past. The standard belief seems to be that if you can come up with a plausible threat, you can both conveniently "solve" all of the various woes one can identify or manufacture and galvanize betas, gammas, and deltas into mass (read: mob) action. Goebbels was apparently right on that score.

Speaking of which. Question: what do 'homosexual' and 'Juden' have in common?

All one can do is continue to point out the folly of fools, while not personally identifying any of them so as to be able to perhaps persuade their sheep that maybe a flock lead by a blind ram (it's always someone with testicles, ain't it) is not the place they want to be. Continue to point and laugh at the blabbering japes of people who wouldn't know who they were without a vicious ad insideous Other to contrast themselves with. Always with the "I'm not that guy, thank" deity. Continue to hope beyond hope that the completely insane notion that "what's important is that you have faith" (WHAT?) will become an extinct meme in a culture surpassed by one a little more humane and, you know, live-and-let-live.

I mean, really, whose ass do I have to fuck to get that accomplished?

basic visual

And a fine laughy laugh to you, too, my fine visual html jokes-loving friends.

Two deaths

Ford and a terra-ist. TV content: hangings yes, well-shaped titties no? Goddamn you people are stupid. How sad is it to say Michael Moore was right? Fuck.

up and at... oh hell with it, where's my coffee