fday, Sept 26 2003

Okay, take two... I typed all this in once and did something on Chad and Mel's annoying computer and the whole entry went away. SO:

T-storm yesterday ate my modem. Maybe screwed up computer's ability to get online, can't tell. No money. Until any of this changes, no blog. Sorry.

Will try to use Chad & Mel's comp or neighbor's comp to check email but probably no more than once a week.

Everyone have fun.

mday, Sept 22 2003

In this or any other summer

Here we go.

I finally dug out “Hard Candy” again… Paul’s been keeping it in his backpack, the sneaky little fuck, but he left it behind today when he went over to a buddy’s house to play games, so it’s MINE, MINE, MINE, BWA HA HA!!… and you can just deal with the quotes as I listen to it.

Today I did things, but they’re boring. I called a cab, had him swing me by the bank where I cashed in the $64 worth of coins I’d rolled over the weekend for real money, then had him drive me up to Postal Zone, where I paid our utility bill, or rather, paid $50 of our utility bill, after calling them last Friday to put the rest off until October. Early October, as in, um, next week. Ha! I’ve run rings around myself logically.

There was a very nice and rather hot woman named Jennifer working the counter at Postal Zone who seemed distantly cordial if not outright friendly, and we chatted a bit, and I wound up filling out an application. So. Two possible forks in life’s road for me, neither of which will amount to anything, most likely.

Er. Job application. I don’t believe Jennifer is accepting applications for any openings she may have in her personal life. I don’t know for sure, though, I’m cowardly about asking things like that.

I thought of going back and changing ‘openings’ to ‘positions’ to foil those in the crowd who may have filthy minds (like me) but then realized that if you’re gonna have a dirty mind, ‘positions’ is just about as bad. So fuggit. Go nuts. It’s Double Entendre Night at Casa Handsome.

Honestly, that was pretty much the whole day. Except that the cabbie mentioned that the Clock (our local 24 hour restaurant, mostly patronized by the blue haired set) has just lost their third shift dishwasher. Yay! There’s a job I can actually probably get, and even more depressing, actually live off here in Zephyrhills. For god's sake. Somebody save me.

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He wants to have a good time, just like everybody else

I believe I said, right here in this space a week or so ago, that the Tampa/Atlanta game wasn’t going to be a contest, it was going to be a lynching. And… well…

I’m not going to try to analyze what the hell is wrong with the Falcons, who are supposed to be one of the better football teams in the NFL but Jesus, you sure wouldn’t know it lately. Apparently, they really really rely on Michael Vick. I’d sneer at them for that (like all the local sportswriters are doing today) but having watched Shaun King go in for the Bucs in the fourth quarter and play the rest of the game with, apparently, his head quite firmly up his ass, I’m uncomfortably aware that Tampa is one good hard sack away from a very similar situation. Personally, if Brad does get hurt (and he’s had some annoying groin strains lately), I hope Gruden is smart enough to just skip right over King on the depth chart and go straight to Simms. King may have had a great preseason (I wasn’t impressed, but I’m just a geek who watches football, what do I know?) but he sure hasn’t shown anything in a real game lately.

And the Bills lost. To Miami, which sucks even more. I guess the Bills have some creeps on their roster, or Miami does, or something, and there’s some feud, which is nothing new, there was a big rivalry between Buffalo and Miami back in the 70s, too. But then, I guess the Bucs have a few real pricks on their roster as well. That would seem to simply be the NFL… pro athletics in general in the States, actually… and I think I had a thing about that a while back here, so I won’t go into it again.

Right now, though, it’s distressing that the Bills and the Bucs are both 2-1. Oh, I know, it’s early in the season and there is plenty of time for one team or the other to completely come unglued. But whoever is currently running this planet seems to be one of the guys who used to knock my books out of my arms back in high school, so if the Bills end up playing the Bucs in the Super Bowl, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

And that BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM sound you’ll hear coming from Zephyrhills will be me banging my head against the wall. If you listen closely you’ll be able to hear fairly shrill shrieks of “nooooo noooooo noooooo noooooo nooooooo” in there, too.

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And what brings me down now is love

It’s… I don’t know… strangely depressing to read Trinity’s blog, and realize that at the exact same time she published that really nice apology to me here in my comment threads, she had apparently just renewed her commitment to Narcotics Anonymous, or something, and therefore, was not really apologizing to me. She was just doing one of the steps in her program… you know, that thing where they take stock and accept accountability and try to make amends.

Which explains why she hasn’t answered the follow up email I sent her thanking her for the gesture. It wasn’t personal on her part at all; it was just… well… therapy for her.

I realize I’m just a whiney prick for letting that annoy me. After all, all that really means is that her apology wasn’t about making me feel better, it was about helping her heal. And… well… what’s wrong with that? Why does everything have to be about me?

I don’t know. I guess I just thought that, for one brief shining moment, someone had actually thought about me and how I felt, and it had actually mattered to that person, for just a second, that they’d treated me badly and made me feel lousy. That they’d actually cared about my feelings.

Well, that was kinda ignorant of me, wasn’t it?

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American girls are weather and noise

I was truly and spectacularly bored last night. Hoping that, as this week is indeed debut week for most network programming, there’d be a new PRACTICE on (but nooooooo… we don’t START the week with Sunday, Darren, because YOU’D LIKE THAT! We start the week with MONDAY and make you wait ALL GODDAM WEEK for a new episode of THE PRACTICE, and you can just LUMP it, buddy, HA HA HA HA!), I found a rerun of Threat Matrix, the new 9-11 inspired anti-terrorist show instead. So I watched that.

The show’s pretty boring, for the most part. However, I’m tempted to watch it from now on just to see if what I think is true… except that it’s going to regularly be on opposite Eliza Dushku’s new show, and I can’t not watch Eliza Dushku, so…

Anyway. What I’m wondering about this show is, will every episode have some subtle little pro-government, anti-free speech propaganda bit in it, or is it just this one?

See, I’m not overly troubled by the plot, or the ridiculous technology the anti-terror squad uses (although, if our government really has this stuff, they don’t need the Patriot Act, because nothing should ever happen anywhere inside America that they can’t find out about ten minutes later). What did kind of bother me was… well, there’s this scene, really late in the show, where the anti-terror squad has tracked the infiltrating Al Qaeda suicide bomber (through various ridiculous technological applications, helped along by the terrorist himself being a complete moron, and a grotesque disregard for due process or civil liberties, but never mind) to some big stock market exchange in Chicago. They have barely minutes before this nutball is going to detonate his enormous vest-bomb and… of course!… they run smack into a protest outside the stock exchange.

What the crowd is protesting is never made clear. No one in the crowd ever gets a close up. We never heard anyone state the protest’s purpose or goal. The protest is simply there to be an obstruction, and the message, while reasonably subtle (for television) is pretty clear… if you’re a protester… any kind of protester… you are helping terrorism. You are hindering your government. You are B.A.D.

Personally, I’m curious to watch other episodes of this to see if the same sort of ‘if you’re not 100% with us, you’re totally against us and should be destroyed’ mentality comes through in other little propaganda arcs. I mean, the show is called ‘Threat Matrix’ and it’s obviously meant to appeal to neo-cons, so I didn’t exactly expect a lot of yellow bellied lily livered pussyfooting liberal tolerance (the sort of thing that allows foreign nationals to detonate home made nuclear weapons right here on American soil!!!… in some right wingers’ rabid wet dreams, anyway). But I always find it interesting to see an entire opposing point of view reduced to a few skewed and obviously deranged sound bytes and a background pan shot of an obviously unhinged mob who clearly only staged a demonstration in order to obstruct the righteous workings of… um… America’s secret police force, I guess.

But wait. WE don’t have secret police! We have covert counter-terrorism operatives. And that’s much MUCH better.

An amusing point about the episode was at the end, when some guy… I guess he’s supposed to be the fictional equivalent of the Secretary of Homeland Security… announced at a national news conference that a suicide bombing had been prevented at the Chicago stock exchange, and this was simply one example of a war that was being fought on the streets of America by ‘soldiers you will never know’, or some such crap.

I found this amusing because even Bush and Cheney aren’t this dumb. You do not announce on national television that some nutjob wearing an Iranian flag for a turban just came very close to detonating a huge bomb in the Chicago stock exchange. People do not tend to hear that and think “Thank God for the U.S. Gestapo! Those homegrown goose stepping sieg hieling storm troopers are really on the ball!” No sir. People hear stuff like that and they go “Oh shit, what happens NEXT time when these guys screw up?” And they stop going out anywhere in public, and become extremely paranoid, and millions of worthless tips flood the anti terrorist 800 numbers, and the economy goes into the toilet again.

The only other thing I enjoyed about the show was picking out one of the female supporting actresses as someone who had a small recurring role I enjoyed in the first few seasons of NYPD Blue. She’s had a few other regular parts here and there on shows that always wound up getting cancelled. I don’t wish her any ill will, but I can’t hope Threat Matrix turns out any better, from the looks of it. Still, it was nice to see her again.

The main chick on the show, a sort of female action hero type, is a completely hot blonde I first noticed on Kindred: The Chosen years and years ago, and who had a part on Melrose Place. I don’t know her name, but she’s a real babe with a very distinctive and memorable face. I enjoyed watching her, too. But it’s still a lousy show, at least, if you’re the sort of person who thinks human rights and civil liberties are worth something.

Sorry I don’t know either of the actress’ names, but I’m like that. It would probably kick up this blog’s profile if I did, because I’m sure people do Google searches on both of them a lot more often than they Google search for ‘Darren Madigan’s weblog’ or ‘idiots who quote from Counting Crows a lot’.

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Marianne, you’re better than the world

Apparently, my abrasive, bitter, and obnoxious devotion to utter agnosticism (I enjoy the idea of ‘utter agnosticism’, actually, that seems kind of ironic in and of itself) has made Paul a more spiritual person. Or so he claimed in a brief conversation we had this morning that started out, of all things, as a discussion of the beautifully illustrated, dreadfully written DC graphic novel KINGDOM COME.

Paul claimed, a tiny bit self righteously, that he wasn’t bothered as much by the religious elements in KINGDOM COME as I was, and as always when Paul draws comparisons between himself and me, somehow, because I’m more analytical and have higher standards and am less willing to compromise than Paul is, I’m a far worse person than he is and he’s just spiffy.

Well, that may be a little unfair. Paul also admitted last night that I really shouldn’t take anything he says seriously because while he always means what he says when he says it, he often realizes later that something he said previously was completely idiotic. So later today or sometime tomorrow Paul may suddenly abandon this new spirituality that the horrifying abyss of Darren’s Lack Of Faith has driven him to. We’ll just have to wait and see.

For now, though, I seem to have led Paul back to God, because, as he puts it, the times in his life when he’s had some sort of faith that everything was all right and there was something looking out for him were much better than the times when he didn’t feel that sort of assurance.

And, well, duh. It would be nice to feel that there’s someone in charge, I suppose, and that that someone really does lub ev’ybuddy just sooooooo much. God as Celestial Barney Figure is, indeed, a comforting notion, if, I suppose, you’re capable of stifling your giggles at the very notion.

Me, however… I simply can’t seen any evidence of any kind of compassionate celestial authority in the world around me. I have my own articles of faith because life is simply too damn depressing without SOMEthing (and I may discuss them at some point in the future, but not now) but every single organized religion I’ve ever even remotely acquainted myself with the belief structure of simply strikes me as irrational and childish horseshit. (My own articles of faith are also irrational and childish horseshit, but I don’t proselytize them or use them as a basis for my ethical structure or insist that other people should, or ask people to pay me for expressing them.)

I suppose I shouldn’t have gotten on Paul’s case about it, but if you push my philosophy button, you’re going to get a big chunk of it, so when Paul kind of bitched at me that he didn’t know exactly what prayer of mine it was that God didn’t answer that caused me to lose my faith, I came back at him that as far as I knew, God had neither answered nor refused to answer any of my prayers because I tend not to pray a whole lot… but I was pretty sure there had been, oh, ten million people in various Nazi death camps whose prayers got pretty resolutely ignored as they were watching their loved ones get tortured to death by sociopaths in swastikas. I added that I had little doubt there was some 8 year old girl somewhere in America… maybe in Zephyrhills, who knows… who was being tortured or raped by her father or stepfather at that very moment and God probably wasn’t doing a whole lot of prayer answering on her part at the moment, either.

Paul came back as all the deists do when you say shit like that… he gave me a tired sigh and said something like “you simply can’t accept that sometimes bad things happen for good reasons to people”. And I had to stop talking to him at that point, because when people start justifying their own comforting self delusions by saying that kids being raped and tortured, or millions of innocents being slaughtered in work camps, happened for a ‘good reason’ that I simply can’t understand, I want to simultaneously puke and beat the hell out whichever smug prick is currently spouting that toxic nonsense.

Here’s my deal: if God thinks there is a valid reason for letting kids suffer, he, or she, or it, needs to explain that reason to me. I’m a pretty intelligent guy (so people tell me) and I have a very highly developed active imagination, and I cannot for the life of me think of any good reason why some little kid should be abused by the people who are supposed to be protecting and caring for him or her. Nor can I think of any valid reason for genocide, or for an all powerful, all knowing, supposedly all loving deity figure to tolerate it.

I freely admit, I don’t know the context. Perhaps this is just one stage in some vast spiritual evolution, and maybe what happens here on this particular material plane just doesn’t have that much overall importance. Maybe how we live and how we die in one of many lives isn’t really that significant. Perhaps evil does have a purpose, or, at the very least, has to be tolerated here on the lower planes as a free will choice, to sort the chaff from the wheat and keep the really bad spirits from ascending into the higher planes of reality.

And, I’ll admit, if people really are rewarded or punished for this life’s deeds in the next life, that would make a huge difference to me. (I don’t like the Christian God’s standards of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, though… accept Jebus as your savior, get on the bus to heaven. Don’t, head for the pit. Yes, child molesters and mass murderers who sincerely repented on their death beds have a crown waiting in Paradise. No, Gandhi has to go to hell. Sorry, dude, dems de rules. But if there’s some sane judgement system in the afterlife, well, that would make a lot of the evil that gets done here on Earth more tolerable.)

But leaving aside minor theological details like that, what Paul, and pretty much every other deeply religious person I know, seems to be saying is, it’s better to have faith in something that you find comforting than to stay out there in the dark. And I hear that. Paul actually told me that I was going to drive myself insane, because no one could really know the truth here in this life.

And I suppose that’s true (not being able to know the truth, not me driving myself insane) but to me, that’s no excuse for abandoning the exercise. The journey to objective truth may in fact be an ultimately futile one. But the effort itself is worthwhile and intrinsically valid. Simply surrendering and saying ‘okay, I’m going to believe in Happy Flower Sky Land and Big Daddy Who Has a Candy Bar For Everyone because it makes me feel better’ is no answer, and I don’t think it makes anyone a better person. In fact, I think it makes most people into smug, sanctimonious, intolerant assholes.

The ability to say “I don’t KNOW” is an important one, if you’re going to have any real value as a human being. Yeah, it’s scary to contemplate an empty and spiritually meaningless universe. But ultimately, your life will mean what you make it mean. I’m not a Christian but I like Christmas. I don’t have to be religious to have faith, nor do I need faith to have a meaningful life.

Christ. I should be writing Hallmark cards.

Ignore all this twaddle. I don’t know anything. I’m just a guy who doesn’t have a fucking job.

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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:

(a) seem smarter than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(b) be funnier than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(c) be a better writer than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(d) be correct when you point out some manner in which the person writing the blog you are posting comments to was wrong, and/or

(e) Upset The Wimmenfolk On The Blog.

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:

(a) seem smarter than I am, I like people who are smarter than I am, as long as they’re not jerks about it;

(b) are funnier than I am, then I get to laugh at your witty remarks, and hey, that’s all good;

(c) are a better writer than I am. Although I’m in a peculiar place as regards writing skills; good enough to be better than nearly all the amateurs out there, not good or lucky enough to be a professional at it. So if you are a better writer than I am, you are probably a professional writer and therefore do not have time to post comments on other people’s blogs, so this probably doesn’t matter, as relates to this blog;

(d) correct my mistakes; unlike apparently 95% of the remainder of the human race, I am under no illusions as to my own infallibility and simply don’t care if someone points out that I am wrong about something. Being wrong about things does not strike me as either a character flaw or a shameful embarrassment; we are all wrong about a lot of things every day of our lives, and that’s just how that works;

(e) Upset My Wimmenfolk. Well, actually, I shouldn’t say I don’t care if you upset my wimmenfolk, I do, the very thought deeply offends me. However, it’s just that the wimmenfolk at this point on this blog are my mom, my cuz in law, and my sister in law, and if you do something to upset them, I strongly doubt the authorities finding what’s left of you will be able to identify you without a DNA comparison. My mom, and any woman who marries any of the males in this family and stays married to him for any length of time, are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. So offend them all you want; it’s a self correcting problem.

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.

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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.

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