If there's one thing this world needs, in times like these, it's another blog by a white fella talking about the news and culture he loves to hate.
Drifting Somewhere in the VAST
I have written four thousand something words about an album that is finally old enough to drink something besides the sacramental wine.
A Post About Good Books
Over on SOCIAL MEDIA, an endless stream of everyone else's shit, sometimes you might find yourself TAGGED or CHALLENGED to, like, dump a bunch of ice water on your head or BE THE ONE PERSON WHO CARES ENOUGH FOR VETERANS TO NOT JUST LIKE BUT SHARE THIS POST or buy cheap RayBans from criminals, or something. Recently, I was tagged in one of those goofy nü-chain-letter tag-fests. Normally, I'd ignore it with appropriate, removed disdain, as one should ignore any awful social pestilence, like "the wave" at a sports stadium, for example. But this was about books! I like books!
Fear the raped.
So we've gone from needing a wall to protect us from the Mexican rapists, to not getting the wall, to needing the military to stand guard at the southern border to protect us from those who have been raped.
The Contingency of Oarsmen
We call it inhuman, we call it monstrous, we call it illness--a pleading hope for distance, as though there has ever been anything on the planet capable of these things, besides the human being. As though we could disown it. As though we might, through civilized heartbroken denial, absolve the human race by mere redefinition.
Toadie Meaningfully Remains Seated
You can't just be like, "hey, let's separate the politics from the athletes, here." (...) They aren't free persons choosing to unite with their southern counterparts in a bid for human unity and a more peaceful future, they're Stockholm-syndrome'd propaganda weapons of a murderous despot.
The Greatest Interview.
"[Marlon] Brando used to go cha-cha dancing with us. He could dance his ass off. He was the most charming motherfucker you ever met. He’d fuck anything. Anything! He’d fuck a mailbox. James Baldwin. Richard Pryor. Marvin Gaye.
He slept with them? How do you know that?
[Frowns.] Come on, man. He did not give a fuck! You like Brazilian music?"
"Also, the pee tape probably exists. What are you gonna do? Things get weird, sometimes. If there's a tape there's a tape. So much for your *Kompromat,* Vlad."
"The judge, on the other hand, seems to have been left brutalized by the trial--how else to explain sitting in court and telling the world that you wish you could order Nassar to be repeatedly raped?"
The Grass is Always Greener When It’s Fertilized with Self-Loathing
...It is a feeling of absolute uncontrol, of being lost within one’s own body, a fracturing of physical and mental identity and will and experience into incommunicado fragments of the self.
Bart Simpson and Darth Vader, Mouseketeers
"We don’t have two hours or even two minutes to risk such a thing as enduring a failure to entertain. Better to delve back into the comfortable imaginary worlds that enthralled us when we were kids. Like Facebook, Disney--and it’s not just Disney--is just repackaging and reselling us our own memories. Free and open? All right, man."
In Defense of Roy Moore
"...should you choose to vote for Judge Roy Moore, know that you’ll find no quarrel with your choice in Scripture. Quite to the contrary, in fact."