The contents of my previous journal.
As I walked down the street today, watching the beautiful people scurry in
and out of the ugly buildings on their way to whatever pointless errand got them
out of bed this morning, I realized that no one would make eye contact with me.
Everyone walks with their eyes on the ground or stares blankly ahead, eyes open
but not really seeing anything. This is what’s become of our world – everyone
afraid to connect with another person. We are the unwanted refuse of our dead
society, the waste that waits to be buried under Yucca Mountain for a thousand
generations, until our undreamt progeny break open the crumbling lead barrels
with their faded yellow warning labels written in dead languages, dip their
fingers inside and bring them to their lips, tasting the fruits of our progress.
I think that one of the real harbingers of the breakdown of society was the
demystification of the pen. It used to be that only an elite few could write.
Their words were observed with a sort of reverence; they were almost divine.
But as time progressed, the written word lost its meaning. Any business in the
world today gives out free pens. I have one from the CIA, for god’s sake. How
are we supposed to take seriously an agency that gives away the instruments
it uses to formulate the future of the entire world? The ultimate expression
of this is, of course, the Internet, where no one is held remotely accountable
for their words. The most powerful mechanism mankind has ever formulated for
the conveyance of ideas has become mass entertainment, meaningless commercialized
crap. I shouldn’t be too hard on the Internet. If it didn’t exist, I would never
have been exposed to anything remotely resembling the real world. Writing doesn’t
have to be about communication, of course. Take me, writing this. I’d have to
be insane to show this to anyone else. Sometimes people write things down just
because they feel like they should.
Hey Leslie, I have a journal.
Ditto fire. It took mankind millennia to perfect the mechanisms of making fire;
now a $.49 Bic does the same thing.
A million people died in Rwanda and no one lifted a finger. But the death of
a single American citizen can start a war in which thousands die. Why are we
so much better?
As a society, we create ever more complex machines to solve problems that most
people didn’t know they had. Take the automobile. Before it was invented, people
didn’t know that they had to get to the hardware store and back in ten minutes,
that they had to travel at absurd speeds, that they had to take cross-country
trips to see the same things that everyone else sees. Superchargers, cylinders,
viscous differentials, continuously variable transmissions, are all technological
marvels. But the technology is all that there is, because the premise on which
it is based is bullshit. 99.9% of the things that people do exist for their
own sakes; they do nothing whatsoever to serve humanity. .099% of the things
people do exist to serve the interests of the new religions – organized corporations.
I drive the coolest car ever created.
Arizona/Indiana – DST not real!
Random thought: If a four-person chair lift is a quad, is a six-person lift
a sex?
I think every ski resort in the world must be required to have a Widowmaker,
a Sidewinder, and something named after the Devil.
We all know that school saps you of your will to live in anything more than
the most literal sense. What if that isn’t unintentional?
It’s amazing how little you can get done when there’s nothing better to do.
Why am I happy? Nothing’s changed. Before I always said that I have Leslie now,
but that’s absurd. I can’t have her any more than one human being can possess
any other. The only things that can possess human beings are Enron, AT&T, and
Wal-Mart. I’m being more than a little paranoid here, but what if I’m happy
because someone wanted to shut me up? All I’ve succeeded in doing is getting
my steps onto the beat, and happiness is worthless if that’s the cost. But to
make my reality meaningful I have to believe that there is another way. I have
to believe that I can, by virtue of my own will, make things right.
I’m becoming a danger to myself and by extension those around me. Everything
I stand for says that the most logical course of action is to remove the threat
to society as a whole at the expense of personal safety. That is every man’s
obligation by virtue of his existence. The needs of the many outweigh the needs
of the few or the one.
Pay attention to people who repeatedly say stupid things. They obviously know
more than you can possibly imagine.
Could there possibly be anything more annoying than people who actually believe
that television has meaning?
I know that the only purpose school serves is to keep idealistic people out
of the real world so that they can’t make a difference until it’s too late for
them still to believe in things.
It is vital that we as a society have someone asking the questions which have
no answers. If we do not, no one will ever try to answer them, and we will stagnate.
“Are you about ready to sleep in your own bed?”
“I’d rather sleep in Leslie’s bed.”
It’s really amazing when you think about it. Forty years ago drugs were the
counterculture. Now they are the culture.
I’m sweeping the dessicated remains of dead flowers from the patio, the broom
leaving streaks of pink and purple in its wake, like a patina of tears flowing
down the earth’s concrete cheek.
I’m also working on a case of heat exhaustion; the only thing that’s hotter
than the sun beating down from above is the exhaust against my leg as soccer moms sit
in their minivans with the AC on.
777 NNY
As far as Sam Walton is concerned, the only thing this pen is good for is initialing
receipts.
Somewhere in this country, the next Albert Einstein is schlepping mulch into
some hoosier’s pickup. That thought gives me comfort.
513 JGI
10 if n<25 then let n=n+1 20 goto 10 30 if n=25 then say "have a nice day" 40 end I told Aaron it was going to rain today. The front comes roaring in across the valley at about 5:00, then does what all fronts do when they arrive over St. Louis: it stalls there, pumping oppressive amounts of humidity into the air. The parts of you the rain leaves dry get soaked with sweat. no trees were destroyed only electrons disturbed sending this message Disorder | Rating Paranoid: Very High Schizoid: Very High Schizotypal: High Antisocial: High Borderline: Moderate Histrionic: High Narcissistic: Very High Avoidant: High Dependent: Low Obsessive-Compulsive: High URL of the test: http://www.4degreez.com/misc/personality_disorder_test.mv URL for more info: http://www.4degreez.com/misc/disorder_information2.html I don't know if I just figured this out or what, but I think so little of people that I actually assume that if everyone does or believes in or likes something it must be bad. Everyone always seems to thing they have everything figured out, but you look at them and say, "What do you know?" Then you look at yourself and say, "Now me, I have it all figured out." I guess maybe if I acknowledge that I depend on other people's opinions of me, I can start trying to change it. What I really want is to make a lasting impression, and I suppose I'm a little worried that it seems impossible to create something that will last forever, which pretty much just leaves me with destroying stuff. I beat Halo tonight and got to watch my character blow up an entire planet, occupied at least in part by all his friends. All I could think was that it would be so much better than what I'm doing. I guess it could mean something when having your brains sucked out by an alien is an attractive proposition, but it's only when you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. This is not the worst thing that will ever happen to me. Teacher: OK class, now who can tell me who discovered America? [Hands rise.] Teacher: Yes, Jimmy? Jimmy: Well, the European explorers are well known, of course, but there is significant evidence that the Vikings settled Nova Scotia as early as the eighth century BC, and several scholars have proposed that Chinese merchants made the voyage much earlier than that. All these theories exclude the, quote, Native American populations, who likely migrated across the Bering Strait from Asia as much as 12,000 years ago. I've also read some very interesting research that suggests... Teacher: Thank you, Jimmy. Billy, did you have an answer? Billy: Christopher Columbus? Teacher: That's right, Billy! Hey everyone, Billy gets a gold star! "Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for the one, the only, Jesse and the Displays!" People like to talk about "quality of life", which is well and good. It makes sense that some people would enjoy their lives more than others. The problem is that they always try to express it in terms of dollars. I can't help but feel that the two are unrelated.
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