So This Baby Seal…

As of this week, I’ve been working a year at my current job. One year spending nights at low-level admin crap and babysitting felon addicts. One full year of doing in my early 30s the type of shit I swore in my early 20s I’d never do again.

(Christ, I suck.)

I only announce this to remind myself from where the severe case of self-loathing comes each night as I prepare for work, drive to work, work, leave work, sleep after work, randomly remember where I work, etc. Being a working class failure doesn’t have to be an eternal state, however, despite the plummeting levels of class mobility in this ripoff country (and that transience is not just because you and everyone you love will one day die). I just finished the first semester of my return to school with all As, including a 100% in Macroeconomics.

(school apparently works better when you actually attend class and do it sober; go figure!)

Still have a few prerequisites to get out of the way before I can apply to grad school and hopefully propel myself from society’s bottom rungs. Just a few more years of shoveling thousands of dollars at the university and engaging in that wonderful equation of Work + School = Exhaustion.

Oh, and unless I somehow find better employment in the near future, I’ll also be spending my days  piss-testing felons, all while worrying, worrying, worrying about money…because that’s every young lad’s American Dream!

(what? you don’t want me to have real problems to complain about, do you?)

Bitching aside (since I know you come here for your weekly dose of sunshine), here’s the second segment of the STBS…Audio series’ Part 9. It features more paranoia and horrible condescension toward the less fortunate. Consider it like Mein Kampf, but less funny.

I’d like to take this occasion of Mother’s Day to thank my beautiful wife for always remembering to take her birth control pills. Her responsibility and dedication to keeping her womb as baby-free as possible are the one thing standing between me and a drastic increase in adult responsibilities, as well as a corresponding decrease in potential life enjoyment.

Thanks, darlin’!

(and additional thanks to everyone I’ve known over the years kind enough to not ruin my life by falling susceptible to my body’s efforts to reproduce itself; your artificial or natural infertilities have done wonders preventing me from being the deadbeat dad I could be today)

…in that you’ll barely realize how it’s infected you before passing along the hate and bad vibes to others.

This poorly-written, piece of shit chapter is one of the book’s philosophical hearts. STBS… has several, like a cow (that’s how they’re built, right?). It presents one of the book’s many argument against compassion and charity. If you’re going to read one screed today about how your fellow man are mere leeches welcome to fuck themselves– and which doesn’t come from a Republican or Libertarian ad campaign — make it this one!

Of course,that’s not the only way to look at the world and the less-fortunate. Really, I even stole an example from my favorite conservative website. Volunteering to help feed Berkley’s homeless each week helped all-around Decent Chap Matt Talbot develop this counter-point of view. Never met the guy, but he’s apparently one of those weird, real-life people who uses their religion as something other than a guide for who to hate –which is pretty much what the STBS narrator is missing in the above chapter. And that’s kinda the goddamn point of the entire book:

“That’s the thing about dealing one-on-one with homeless people: they stop being a category – a mental abstraction, a them – and become richly complex individuals with stories as filled with vice and Divine Grace as my own. When I started, I thought I was bringing Christ’s compassion to them – but I realized as time went on that they were really bringing Christ to me. In those weary faces at the tables, I saw Christ staring back at me, asking me where I’d been all this time. He had been out there, in doorways, shivering in cold rains and stumbling in rags and singing to the midnight streets, waiting for me to show up.“

Or, you can be content with the contempt of imagined superiority, both from a distance and STBS‘ close range. There’s an inexhaustible supply of the former in a society built on greed and exploitation, but for the latter there’s Part 1 of 2 for the book’s ninth chapter below.

As this episode contains a couple fighting — and as I really lack the time for much else, with all the work/school responsibilities — I thought I’d introduce Part 2 of this chapter’s audio recording with an example of the most amusing couple-fight I know.

I thought that it would be amusing, at least, until I realized that those sorta anecdotes are pretty impossible to tell well. Too much backstory, too much personal bias, too much care making sure one person or the other’s role in the joke isn’t usurped by reader identification or whatever. Like, if someone once went through anything remotely like what one person once did, it can really kill the focus and the comedy.

(for example, I saw the movie, Sideways, back in ’04 with a group of friends and my then-girlfriend; despite a 99% percent approval rating from the rest of us, the girlfriend hated the movie — haaaaated it — because one of the protagonists gets way with infidelity)

So then, these sort of things are a minefield. In order not to immediately alienate one section of the readership, all one is really left with is the punchline, really; free-floating from months/years of history and resentment and all the other mess that goes into personal relationships. It’s not enough for a joke or a halfway story, but I’m putting this one here, regardless, so I never forget.

…the scene is an eastward drive through the dark canyons of I-70 in Colorado. Sometime in mid-December. A couple days of birthday celebration and boozy exhaustion behind us that stretched all the way back to Moab, UT. I’m driving with a lethally cheap rum bottle in my lap. My beautiful young wife is nearly in tears beside me as she says:

“I…I don’t think you really like white people.”

…anyways, enjoy more fun stories about people ruining each other. Sometimes I think it’ the only thing our species actually does well.

ADDENDUM: just kidding white people; you’re a-okay in my book…for the most part…except for a few things…well, a lot of things, but don’t get me started…

The wife and I received a package this week from my mother that contained, among other things, plastic Easter eggs with Bible verses scrawled on the side (just the verse numbers, not an actual transcription). That’s how I know that Easter is this Sunday.

Today in the Catholic calendar, however, is Good Friday. That celebrates the parts in the Bible when Jesus ended up on the wrong side of history’s most famous ass-kicking. You may also recall that said ass-kicking was made into a blockbuster piece of cinematic torture porn last decade.

Personally, I laughed myself stupid at the movie, cartoony, over-the-top, and endless as its violence was. That, and it’s always good fun to drunkenly/repeatedly shout at a movie screen, “Where’s your messiah now, god-boy?“…and, yeah, if it wasn’t the childhood Catholicism, then something screwed me up bad.

(did I mention that A Clockwork Orange is my favorite comedy?)

Seriously, though, for me Good Friday is a nice reminder that humans always abuse authority, and you’d better watch your ass when there’s a cop/soldier around. The dudes who kicked Christ’s ass throughout the movie were just some good ol’ Roman boys who — in a phrase that Americans seem to love more and more since Nuremberg — were ‘just doing their jobs.’ I’m not sure that the Good Friday story was intended to have the moral of ‘never trust some violent fuck in a uniform,’ but that’s what I take from it.

Good Friday is the Death part of the Death-and-Rebirth cycle that’s been a popular motif in religion since before recorded time (we guess) and which Christianity absorbed wholesale from the other popular mystery cults of the Roman Empire (like Mithraism and Orphism). It’s the solve of the solve et coagula formula, the tearing down before the building up in a new form.

This is why the narrator of So This Baby Seal Walks Into A Club… complains in the “No Rising From the Grave of Stupidity” chapter that the clients, in discussing Easter, are mistaking a “metaphor for personal growth” with historical fact. Taking the brutality of the Good Friday story literally, however, does result in the viewpoint which concludes the chapter.

It’s framed as:

Humans: 1

Loving God: 0

The STBS…Audio segment for this week is Part One of a two-part chapter. Enjoy!

My youthful metabolism dried up several years ago. This means that life without exercise will result in me being One Fat  Motherfucker. It’s why I jog regularly, as unpleasant an experience as that may be.

I’m tempted to go the OFM route, being married and all. Spousal cruelty mixed with curiosity as the primary motivators. It’d almost be worth a heart attack by 40 just to see how much legal trouble someone will go to (like divorcing my fat ass) in avoiding having to shag waaaay above their previous weight limit. Then I recall that the only adult female obligated to love me unconditionally is  my mother…so it’s probably best not to test anyone else’s limits.

Jogging, as an exercise, has all the fun and excitement of yoga, which is actually #1 on my list of shit-boring activities. The only perk that jogging has over yoga is that it tends to be over sooner (about a half-hour for jogging, versus an hour minimum for hatha yoga then however long you meditate afterwards), and with jogging there’s the delightful burning in your lungs to distract you from the tedium of the actual exercise.

Otherwise, jogging would totally get over yoga my reward for Best Thing I’ve Done for My Health That Also Made My Brain Yearn for the Stimulation of a Broadcast Sitcom. Don’t just take my word for it: the late, great Israel Regardie, in his excellent biography of Aleister Crowley, referred to pranayama (yogic breath control exercises) as the ‘height of boredom.’ Or words to that effect. I’m paraphrasing from memory, even though my wife’s copy of said biography is currently reachable by me leaning 45 degrees to the right and extending my arm.

Christ, there’s years of daily exercise I won’t get back from all that. And, as wonderful as it may have been for the depression that’d plagued me since I was in grade school, it’s time I probably should have spent studying for school or establishing my South American children’s organ farm or whatever would’ve made the last decade less of a cascade of failure. I’ll probably feel the same way about all the wasted suffering involved in jogging, hauling my miserable ass along the track around Cheesman Park, wishing for death with very third step, grimacing every time I’m lapped by someone twice my age…

(The park is supposedly some infamous hookup spot for gay/adventurous men, but so far I haven’t been propositioned even once. That kinda hurts…and makes me realize the local gay community has higher standards than my wife.)

On STBS…Audio this week: bum fights!

Addendum:  Picked up a copy of Miles Davis’ On The Corner from the Denver Public Library. For everybody who thought the man got a little out-there with Bitches Brew (my 2nd favorite album of his) and other late 60s/early 70s recordings, this is one fun piece of work; brilliant (’cause it’s Miles Davis), accessible and enjoyable as all hell

This entry is posting a little later in the day than intended, as I just spent all morning working on my taxes.

Thanks to contract labor on which I wasted the first few months of last year (and from which I was surprise-fired by email one afternoon), I ended up owing the Powers That Be several hundred dollars. That’s a bit of a change from the tax refund that I’ve gotten every other year for the past decade. It now makes sense why my repeated requests for payment stubs from that publisher went ignored…but fukkit. Bygones are bygones, and if that was the final fee to never have to deal with a certain place or certain people again, I’ll consider it a goddamn bargain.

Anyhow, the government now has a decent chunk of my change that it’s welcome to blow on wars, corporate tax credits, bank bailouts and the security state. It’s also welcome to choke itself on my engorged genitalia.

More of the latter than the former, please.

The prosaic crap involved with modern adulthood just bothers me: the bills, the tax-paying, the bureaucracies. I would happily have a chunk of income simply deducted from each paycheck as a sort of Life Tax that covered rent, utilities, healthcare, my phone, etc. instead of having to remember to pay each grasping mouth in our market economy. The decentralized market is touted in my macroeconomics class as being superior to a centralized  planned economy. However, my macroeconomics class is one long apology for the status quo, and I’d prefer to be taking it up the ass from one specific Cock of Oppression rather than the opportunist gangbang that lower-class American existence resembles.

Seriously, fuck this place. I’m off to go punch a bald eagle in the face. You can enjoy the latest chuckle-fest from the STBS…Audio series.

ADDENDUM:

Death and taxes have been said to be the only inevitable things in life, a viewpoint encouraged by those who benefit from both. But, just as a friendly warning: other things don’t have to be inevitable. Avoid them. Like, say, doing your taxes while sipping a mixture of coffee and gin.

(we’re out of kahlua)

Seriously, I don’t recommend it. And now I’ll go bleach my tongue…

It just fucking figures: Spring Break is here, I’ve a plane to catch in a few hours, and I’m sick.

Got the sniffles, lethargy, aches, stuffy nose, headache and all the other ways to disprove the existence of a loving god.

(9,637,874,333 in a series! Collect ‘em all!)

This would be so much more amusing were it only happening to someone else…

In addition to the usual remedies, I’m drinking tea. Because I’m health-conscious when already sick. It’s mixed with Amsterdam gin, but still: tea. As far as quintessentially English things go, I’m bigger fans of rum, sodomy and the lash, but this will do. The wife has a cupboard full of the stuff, so I thought I may as well avail myself of some of it. We’re all out of other mixes for the gin, anyways.

To me, tea tastes like vaguely-flavored dishwater. That may explain why it’s only cultivated in climates unsuitable for vineyards. Houston tapwater had more flavor to it, but hopefully this is less carcinogenic.

Additionally, have you ever read the packaging on tea bags? I just did, and the first thought in my head was, “Oh, white people; you’ve let me down again…”

As a member of that particular tribe, I can tell when something is geared toward us. And that usually makes me sad.

“When you sip this tea, you are benefiting from the healing power of plants and the wisdom contained within the world’s system of traditional herb formulating….blahblahblah…probably something about crystals blahblah…”

Wow…what the hell was that? Was there anything to it besides new-agey, Whole Foods-esque cliches? Do people actually buy into that? Did any of it even make sense? Jeez, if this passes for secular sales techniques aimed at white folks, then, religious people, I owe you all an apology (that you’re not going to get).

Power and wisdom of the plant? Really? How is that a selling point? I want to absorb the brawn and brains of something vegetative? That should be useful if I never need to do anything more complex than turn myself toward the sunlight. And, even worse, as I’m reading this off the packaging I’m also dunking the plant’s ground-up remains in boiling water. For all its vaunted wisdom, the plant lacked the street smarts to prevent me from desecrating its corpse.

Not that any of this has fuck-all to do with this week’s STBS… Audio recording. And the post’s title is pretty unrelated, too. That’s just the phrase that always goes through my head whenever I hear a member of the clergy condemn the sorta fun stuff the rest of humanity enjoys. And the thought wasn’t even prompted this time by anything Catholic/pervy.

I just started reading Forbidding Wrong in Islam by Michael Cook. It’s a abridgement of his Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islam, which he allegedly described in an interview as a study of, ‘the religious duty of every Muslim to tell people off for disobeying God’s law.’

‘Cause really, life isn’t tough enough without having a bunch of busybody religious twats nagging you about following the countless rules set by their imaginary friend. Christ, you fuckers, keep it to yourselves!

Life will make us feel plenty bad, enough of the time, without the extra guilt trips that religion’s countless strictures can being. Nobody needs the extra help. And that does help us segue into this week’s audio chapter. Enjoy!

It’s odd to be in your 30s and excited about the approach of Spring Break. I am, though, even if I still have a full week of work to contend with. That’s okay, though. I’ve only had one Spring Break since I was in college (the first time) where it meant something other than having one less hassle amongst a 40hour workweek and other grownup responsibilities.

That blessed time was, I think, my freshman year, when I came back to Texas from St Louis University (a place filled with creepy priests and the coolest occult-and-drugs wing of their library). I was unemployed at the time, so there was no work to be done. I had no responsibilities. And I was a grateful 1,000 miles from the dour midwest, where I’ve since tried to remain. It was a perfect setup for good times.

I spent all that week sick with the flu. Aching, coughing, sniffling, wishing I and the rest of the planet was dead. Somebody was majorly fucking with their Randy-brand Voodoo Doll kit that year.

So, instead of going places, having fun, etc., I stayed under blankets in my old bedroom all week. Just curled up in my papasan chair, smoking pot and reading the Bible from cover to cover. As far as marathon reads go, I can’t really say that I recommend it: waaaay too repetitive, and the story gets rather predictable after Jesus’ third or fourth lynching.

(gee, maybe he’ll get away this time…?)

The Bible also stops having anything resembling a narrative after the synoptic gospels, where it devolves into a lot of bureaucratic wrangling and theological nit-picking amongst early versions of what eventually became the orthodox Xtian community.

(ya know, the folks who sucked up to the Romans so they could sic the authorities on the other Xtian groups with whom they disagreed; church father and historical dickhead Augustine of Hippo was particularly fond of that tactic…it’s where we got the collusion of Christ and State that went on to retard human progress for the next millennia-plus)

I remain, however, a huge fan of the high-weirdness and bloody hatefulness of the Tanakh; or, as the Christers called it in an act of dickishness only surpassed by two-thousand years of persecution: the Old Testament. I first read the OT as a kid, and found it incurably weirder than the little sections they doled out in church. It was a genius mix of fairy tales, unfamiliar names, horrific violence, archaic moralizing and lists upon lists of genealogies and other things that no reader could possibly be expected not to skim.

I reread it again in high school, though that was more of an act of intellectual self-defense. I was attending a fundamentalist Protestant high school in Buttfuck, TX, and quickly figured out that their selective readings from the holy anthology were intended to buttress their constrictive, paleoconservative worldviews. Most attention was paid to the parts on obedience, submission and who/what it was cool to hate.

I wanted the whole story, and I knew I’d have to get it in spite of my formal education. As usual.

(I think it was in bible class when we entirely skipped the scene of Lot repeatedly nailing his daughters that I began to notice that they used the book not as the infallible, God-created guide to everything they always claimed it to be, but more as a series of justifications for ignoring modernity and hating anyone not like them. That struck me as a hilarious example of the difficulties of trying to use ancient, cultic bullshit as a guide to modern life. Also, it was a waste of the best parts of the anthology…I mean, who wouldn’t want to highlight the hot family fucking in their holy books?)

<Sigh> From Spring Break to ancient incest…I really should plan these things out before I start writing. Fukkit, though, here’s this week’s audio chapter of So This Baby Seal Walks Into A Club… which introduces the narrator’s boss. Hope you like it. As previously mentioned, all authority figures in the book do double-time as vehicles for theological viewpoints, trends and/or schools of thought.

I know you have plenty other things to think about besides subtext in a religious book — busy victim of modern society that you are. So, I figured I’d spell that out for ya. You’re welcome. And hell, I find sensible Pound’s suggestion that, if your writing has a structure, you should really let the reader know upfront.

One of the few perks of working healthcare is finishing your shift feeling better about your own failure of a life. Like, you may not be a Nobel Prize Winner (or decent human being), but at least you’re not recovering from a cardiac infarction, debilitating addiction, brain parasite, car accident, or any other of the horrible things  that can befall our species.

(or, more likely, that we can do to ourselves)

You may not have accomplished a goddamn thing in the multiple decades you’ve wasted oxygen on this planet (you’ll think to yourself as you walk to your car at the end of the shift), but, by christ, at least it wasn’t your innards spilled out on the emergency room floor…or your tearful confession in group therapy about robbing your grandmother for crack money…or whatever impugning of human dignity you just earned $14/hr to witness.

Sometimes this is enough to cheer you up. Or, at least, thinking about how less your life sucks than the lives of others can buoy your worker-drone spirits from their accustomed depths.

Then there are things — little bits of degradation — too craptastic to provide any bit of solace. There’s horrible events/occurrences/situations that are too sad to ever make you feel better by comparison. They’re like black holes of feeling, sucking into themselves all emotional responses and, in return, emitting only despair.

I mention this because I was at the methadone clinic for work. We drive clients there once a week to pick up their government-approved fixes. The clients sit in our big, government issue van, clutching their lock boxes of empty methadone bottles, and I steer it toward Saddest Goddamn Place on Earth.

(note: I would much rather my tax dollars go toward this, rather than having junkies breaking into my apartment to rip me off to pay for their fixes; I’d also much rather my taxes go toward this than the military-industrial complex, which tends to also lessen my safety by making enemies of most of the globe)

The methadone clinic is in an office building on Denver’s southwestern fringe. We use a code to get inside the building a little past 5am. Then we line-up outside the office door with the rest of the sad bastards hoping their fix comes before the sickness starts. I tend crouch against the wall, making small-talk with the clients to burn time and force 530am to arrive quickly as possible.

I wish I could say that the customers waiting at the clinic were of a wide demographic spread. That would show how addiction is something that can befall anyone, regardless of social class, income or race. In truth, everyone is pathetically lower class. Scruffy and ragged. Mostly white with the occasional Hispanic thrown in for variety’s sake.

It’s while waiting in line that I get my anti-theodicy for the day. Being there around concentrated misery wasn’t enough; something extra was apparently required to utterly disprove the notion of a loving god.

A young Hispanic woman arrives after us and settles at the end of the line. She’s dragging with her two little kids. Toddlers, at the oldest.  Mommy brought her babies to the methadone clinic.

I hear my voice say, “Oh, Jesus fuck…”

No one else turns to even register the family’s arrival. They’re too caught up in their own misery; someone else’s would exceed the daily recommended allowance. I just try not to stare.

The clock can’t move fast enough to get that door open at 530. I listen to the children whimper and the other junkies make their junkie small-talk about life on the underside of society’s shit-barrel. We eventually shuffle inside. The clinic staff can’t dispense methadone fast enough. I want out of there and away from all the reminders that there’s no bottom floor in Hell.

(it now occurs to me that what if the toddlers were actually no-account junkies and their poor, caring mother was forced to accompany them to horrible locations like methadone clinics at five in the morning…eh, I guess it still brings one to the same conclusion; that being: “Fuck you, too, God”)