Ahhhhh.

Completely missed the point of the movie, did I.

We must give up, let go, and go back to our animalistic natures to fill the spiritual void that is becoming a goddamned epidemic in this country and many other civilized countries worldwide, must we.

Indeed, indeed.

To say that I’m appalled that two people intelligent enough to actually formulate reasonably coherent sentences could, indeed, formulate those particular ones would be a remarkable understatement. I should also note that I’m rather amused at the irony implicit in the fact that these statements of support for Tyler Durden’s dream of the forcible reversion of all humanity to the hunter-gatherer existence of our Cro-Magnon ancestors are being posted on, what do you call that thing, oh yeah, the Internet, by folks utilizing, um, hold on, I'm looking for a word here... computers, that's it. Not to mention basic literacy skills, which Cro-Magnons have neither the time nor the inclination to develop, because they're too busy killing lizards and digging up wild acorns and like that.

However, it’s a free country, and if Trinity and Rupert honestly believe that Tyler Durden makes a valid point, well, as Lt. Daniel Caffee and Lt. Sam Weinberg once noted in unison, “It’s your code”.

As to myself, I will simply express a few minor points in response:

(a) I hope neither Trinity nor Rupert rely on corrective lenses or any sort of complex medication for their comfort and/or continuing health, as neither will be available in their new, spiritually meaningful world,

(b) I hope both Trinity and Rupert enjoy 16 hour work days of hunting and gathering. Although I will further note that as such societies are not known for their feminist impulses, Trinity probably won’t do much hunting and gathering, she can instead look forward to a 16 hour work day grinding and scraping and stirring and pounding, with occasional breaks where she will find herself dragged off behind a rock by whichever alpha male tribe member wanders by and decides to make use of her genitalia for his own pleasure for the next little while (probably not very long, I grant you; alpha males rarely seem to have much sexual stamina, and let’s not even talk about style, panache, or finesse).

(c) Having said all that, I will make one more comment: leaving aside the truly startling evil of Tyler Durden’s methods, whereby he enslaves an army of the weakminded, removing their free will and every last trace of their individual personalities, in service of his (according to Trinity) spiritually wholesome Utopia, there still remains the absolute fact that if people really want to live like a Cro Magnon tribe, they can. Buy some land somewhere and go root about on it all you want. Tyler Durden’s toxic vision is made all the more vicious by the fact that he plans to violently shove it down the throats of humanity at large. He is not going to enact Utopia after taking a vote, no, he’s simply going to blow up the essential underpinnings of modern day civilization and FORCE everyone, will they, nill they, to live in the glorious chaos a ruined, post Apocalypse cityscape.

Now, personally, since I have no illusions about my career choices in any such social order (Original or Extra Crispy), I will continue to think that Tyler Durden is a viciously violent sociopathic whackjob, that his social vision is worthless, disgusting and horrible, and his methods for achieving it are evil and deranged. Trinity and Rupert’s mileage clearly varies from mine in this regard, and that’s fine. After all, we live in a tolerant, permissive, sophisticated high tech civilization empowered by various laws and cultural imperatives which state quite explicitly that Trinity and Rupert have a right to hold any opinion they want to, no matter how silly those opinions may be.

Mind you, if they lived in Tyler Durden’s world, then they’d have no opinions the chief of their tribe didn’t give them, but that’s just fine; they’d have no time to express them anyway, nor would they have the literacy skills to write them out, nor, certainly, would they have an Internet to communicate them over.

DISHONORABLE OPPOSITION

On a related matter, I want to say this: anyone can look like a hero by being opposed to something.

Politicians have always known this. Everywhere I’ve ever lived, there is always at least one local career office holder who has built his entire professional life around being opposed to various things. Usually they’re opposed to indecency and Communism and smut and unsafe working conditions and bad roads and higher taxes, or any other issue that they’ve carefully calculated will arouse the ire of a significant block of registered voters. And when you look at these guys closely, you’ll often find that they rarely tell you exactly what it is that they propose, to be put in the place of all the things they oppose.

But then, that’s the tricky part. Anyone can point a finger and scream “Outcast! Unclean!” Very few are capable of actually setting forth a positive, workable program to successfully rehabilitate the unclean outcast, however.

I mention this because Trinity, whom I continue to believe is a pretty sharp person regardless of her occasional descent into apparent addle-headedness, seems to think Tyler Durden is some deep philosophical genius because he opposes the entirety of artificial, disempowering modern existence. She seems to feel that America is suffering from a spiritual void, and that this is a bad thing.

Well, she’s half right. America is suffering from a spiritual void. But it’s not a bad thing, it's a good thing.

Occasionally, some dimwit Bible thumping conservative, either an elected politician from somewhere in the South or MidWest, or some semi-famous televangelist, will manage to get onto one of the major talk forums and even more occasionally, I’ll happen to be bored and channel surfing by when he or she does, so I’ll catch their usual rant about the growing spiritual void in America, and how the decline of people, especially families, especially children, being raised with decent Christian values in decent Christian churches, is directly responsible for the malignant,carcinoma-like growth of various social ills that have been rotting the fabric of American culture for the entire 20th Century.

I don’t disagree with them. They are, in fact, dead right. One can draw an alarming chart showing the growth of social disorder being a pretty direct parallel to the decline of Old Time Religion, not just in America, but throughout the civilized, high tech regions of the world.

Folks, I’ve given this lecture before, but I never get tired of it: organized religion is a social control mechanism. That is its primary function (its secondary function is enriching and empowering the shaman class, which otherwise has few useful skills to offer any culture and would end up washing dishes or mowing lawns), and it excels at that. The only other social control mechanism that mankind has ever come up with is secular government, and, well, organized religion works a lot better, because organized religion revolves around the notion that a gigantic supernatural creature lives in some invisible palace in the sky, and it’s watching you all the time, and if you do anything it doesn’t like, it’s gonna get you… if not immediately, then eventually; if not here on Earth, then certainly in the afterlife.

Secular government, on the other hand, has nothing to threaten our sulky, recalcitrant asses with except, you know, Uncle John with a badge and a billy club. Now, Uncle John may be one mean motherfucker, but I know for a fact that he sleeps sometimes, and he likes to watch TV from 3 to 6 every afternoon, and he has a weakness for hard cider, so there are ways to get around Uncle John. I may have to behave myself when Uncle John is keeping a fishy eye on me, but there will be plenty of times when he’s down the hall or drunk off his ass and I can do whatever the hell I want.

But that big invisible critter in the sky that’s watching me all the time with a thunderbolt in its paw… brrrrrr. Now THAT’s scary.

So, yes, people… especially people who have been raised since they were unborn fetuses to believe implicitly in thunderbolt throwing invisible critters that live in the sky and watch them all the time… are considerably more well behaved than those of us who merely fear the badged and billy club bedizened legions of Uncle Johns. I don’t deny it. And yes, when you stop raising kids to be afraid of unseen ogres with enormous spiritual morningstars in their hands, when you stop telling your parishioners that they’d better mind their Ps and Qs because a vast spiritual Whacking Day is imminent on the horizon… when you substitute Detective Sipowicz for God’s all seeing eye, Judge Judy for God’s infallible Seat of Judgement, and the county clink for an eternity burning in Hell… well, crime rates are going to climb a bit, yes they are. People are going to fornicate outside the bonds of holy wedlock, yes indeed. Tribal shamans are going to have to go get real jobs riveting sheet metal or painting houses somewhere, oh me oh my.

But this ‘spiritual void’ isn’t a bad thing. It is, in fact, a symptom of a Very Good Thing… man’s gradual social and intellectual evolution into a creature with the courage, en masse, to face up to a scary, hostile universe without the emotional crutch that is organized religion.

Now, you want to live in an orderly, law abiding, decent society, hey, roll on down to your local voodoo mill. Get politically active and pack your local City Councils with people just as intellectually brain dead as you are. Get laws passed requiring subversives like me to get baptized or go to jail, and make certain that your neighbors are sending their nasty little brats to proper Episcopalian Sunday Schools right alongside your spit-curled little monsters. Do this for one generation or two, and I guarantee you, by the time 2040 or 2050 rolls around, if the majority of your neighbors have fallen into line and become good Bible thumpin’ head noddin’ Bingo playin’ sheep just like you, well, violent crime rates will be down and your streets will indeed be safe to walk on at night and you probably won’t have to lock your doors when you leave the house.

In fact, you probably won’t be ABLE to lock your doors when you leave your house, the local Deacon Squad will require you to leave your doors open so they can get in and look around for heretical pamphlets or godless pornography while you’re out at choir practice with your kids.

But, hey, that’s okay, you’re not going to have anything to HIDE, are you? You’re not going to want to think for yourself, or have deviant sex, or be secretly hiding a stash of forbidden children’s DVDs with godless heathen talking animals in them, are you?

Personally, I say if the price for living in a decent society is enacting a religious police state, I’ll take godless anarchy. Bring on the spiritual void.

Oh, and I wouldn’t mind a little of that extramarital fornication, either, if anyone has any to spare.

Bringing this back around to what I was originally on about: it's easy to be a hero by opposing stuff. The real measure of an idea, or an idealist, is not in what is opposed, but in what is proposed.

Happy Hairy Hardon, for example, becomes a messiah figure to his high school classmates simply by screaming that everything sucks over and over again. (Well, he also gets points for pretending to jerk off into the microphone a lot, but, hey, high school audience, what do you want.) Yet it's only at the very end of Pump Up The Volume that Harry offers anything as a solution to the mass social ills he vaguely indicts, and his proposal is moronic: he wants every high school kid to set up their own pirate radio stations and 'steal the air'.

How this will help anything I couldn't possibly tell you (nor, I suspect, could Harry) but at least it isn't likely to hurt much, either.

(It also isn't going to happen; those kids will all just start their own weblogs instead.)

However, while Harry's proposed social panacea is just witless and dumb, our other two examples are rather more efficacious. The anti-smut/spiritual void league, let us remember, wants everyone, especially kids, to go back to church and learn about the Great Big Invisible Troll In The Sky who kicks the ass of bad little boys and girls... eventually. And Tyler Durden (remember him?) and his adherents (including, alas, the lovely Trinity, who is, indeed, a lass, heh heh, and Rupert Not-Giles, who is, most likely, not) seems to sincerely believe that the apex of human existence came 10,000 years or so ago, and the quality of human life took a severe downturn when somebody got the bright idea of building a city to live in, or learning how to actually make fire instead of just waiting for lightning to strike.

Now, personally, I don't want to live in a religious tyranny, no matter how safe and clean the streets there are. Similarly, I say that if Trinity and Rupert want to give up their PCs, CDs, DVDs, TVs, VCRs, SUVs, MREs, and all their other alphabet soup type modern day conveniences, they are more than welcome to. I'll miss them posting comments on my blog, even very silly ones, but still, this is America and if they want to buy some undeveloped land somewhere out in the still remaining wilderness and root for acorns on it, they should rock on with their bad selves.

I simply feel, quite strongly, that they should keep their hands off my technological conveniences while they're out there chasing squirrels and skinning lizards. I happen to LIKE being a 21st Century fella.

AND IN LOCAL NEWS

Remember that thing I was bitching about yesterday, with the chick I was interested in that I’d recently had some contact with, but that was never going to go anywhere? Well, I’m over that. Nothing really dramatic happened, but a chance conversation and a few overheard remarks made me suddenly realize that she’s nowhere near as bright as I’d thought she was, and, well, dimbulbs, however shapely and angelically featured, interest me not at all.

Of course, this may be the crux of my problem, since smart chicks, whom I have always found inordinately attractive, are generally much much too intelligent to date a loser like me.

However, the simple fact is, if I can’t talk to my girlfriend about the objective/subjective dichotomy, or at least have a meaningful chat with her regarding the impact of a stolen Presidential election on the very notion of representative government in 21st Century America, I’m not going to be dating her for very long.

But, anyway, moving on from that, I got an email from an ex lover yesterday. It’s an interesting and noteworthy email, and since it was written in response to something that appeared on my blog a while back about this particular ex lover, it’s certainly fair game to be published and dissected at length here. (See: email policy, in the box to the left and up, which appears on every one of these pages.)

However, I’ve sent her a note back and since I’m a sentimental idiot about any woman who has ever honored me with her intimate favors, I’m going to give her an opportunity to keep our discussions of the various issues she raises in said email private, if she likes. Obviously, she has both this URL and my email address, so I’m going to give her until, say, Monday (morning, early) to continue the correspondence. If she doesn’t… well. Tune in Monday and we’ll all see what she had to say, and read between the lines a bit, too.

But who knows? Maybe she’ll find the time in her busy, busy schedule to get back to me before Monday, in which case, all of you will doubtless find me talking about comic books or some fucking thing instead.

And I also mentioned how Paul was going to be going back to work and his fucking friends wouldn’t be dropping by in the daytime? Well, that’s a wash. Goddam Scott shows up here every day around noon, now, and hangs out until 2:30 or so, when Paul leaves for work. I HAVE to get my own place. Of course, in order to do that, I first have to get a job… ::sigh::

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.