There You Are And Aren't

You've been here before:

You are the Category 5 hurricane that bears your name.

You are the spider on the intricately woven web of carcasses.

You are the first exhausted marathon runner to warn of the march of the Spartans.

You are Nietzche's mustache.

You are the absolute truism that you can't remember.

You are the one who signs the women's birthday cards, "However old you are, you don't look it."

You are the unforgettable face.

You are the bee who forsakes pollination to sting and tear his body apart.

You are the end of history.

You are ...

The false deity.

The unnatural existence.

The void.

The man who isn't there.

But will be again, because you must.

Let Me Tell You What Melba Toast Is Packin'

If we must be in a constant state of warfare to ensure that the product of production is destroyed to prevent the producers from improving their lives through their production, we must destroy the means of production to destroy the production, and to destroy the reason we produce.

It's just my interpretation. Of the situation.

Go on and marinate on that for a minute.

"Different Thoughts Make The World Go 'Round"

Working for a large media korporation that spans the globe has its advantages.

Like, incredibly detached and laughably manipulative corporate propaganda.

It's in the elevator. In the stairwell. In the weight room. Hanging over the pisser.

Or so they say.

The most delicious propaganda is the kind that compels you to stare at it wondering, "How, by all that's holy, did they ever think this would convince anyone to do anything?"




This is an effort to protect the korporation from computer thingamajigs that gum up the works and shave half a cent off the stock dividend at the end of the month. Viruses, they might be called. Or porn sites. Whatever.

Put aside the numbing acknowledgement that someone is getting paid some sweet coin to come up with this stuff, and ask yourself this question: Does this look like a guy who works at a computer in a corporate environment?

And if so, would he be sitting at a computer wearing a wife-beater, showing off his incredibly contrasty and unimaginative ink as he handled highly sensitive information?

What exactly are they trying to say to us? That we should "select a good password?"

Or, are they saying we can ditch our ties and grow contrived 5 o'clock shadows accentuated with earrings?

("Quality control my ass, bitch! Don't you see these guns?!").

Here is another piece, ripped off the wall two years ago by a high-strung guy who sometimes is more high-strung than is normal, a guy who enjoys "collecting" korporate propaganda and sometimes answering, with a Sharpie, the questions posed and posting on the shitter stall door the new version with more answers than they ever knew could exist:

This one has an answer:




The backpacks symbolize the load we all must carry to meet the bottom line.

The water is the various and sundry challenges we face.

The rocks are the policies we are so fortunate to have as our guides across the turbulent waters. Korporate scripture.

The trees represent the plant we keep on our desks because flourescent overhead lamps are our only symbol of sustenance.

The tie represents the noose they will hang us by if we slip into the water.

Or maybe it doesn't mean anything.

That's the best strategy. Nothing means anything unless it's supposed to mean something.

Shortly after the larceny of this exquisite piece of propanganda, the thief shows it to the front-door receptionist unfortunate enough to be attending the phones that particular hour.

"See this?"

"Mmm, hmm."

"'Development is not optional. It is a necessity.' They're saying 'evolve or die, and we're going to dress you in business suits to make walking on the rocks more difficult.' Isn't this ... evil?"

"Ummm ... ahhhh ... well ... different thoughts make the world go 'round, I guess."

A deft piece of diplomacy: "Holy shit, this guy's crazy. How do I keep him from shooting me when he brings the 12-gauge to work, yet at the same time not betray my corporate acquiescence?"

She has successfully negotiated the raging rapids.

She has evolved.

She will not die.

In The Wheelhouse

I've raised my boy to be a boy.

And I've enlisted his help in raising his baby brother to be a boy, too.

A boy's boy.

The kind of boy teachers try to androgynize because they simply don't understand that these little guys enjoy tackling and wrestling on the playground to build kinship.

Boys who don't whine and tattle if a favorite shirt accidentally gets ripped in the process.

I've encouraged this by letting him punch me, to express affection and appropriate frustration.

Yes, hard. Otherwise, there's no purpose.

This is easily tenable, particuarly if you save spankings for transgressions like, say, finding a loaded gun under a bed and playing with it rather than telling your parents.

There are only two rules:

No punching in the face.

No punching in the plums (which is a good rule for adults to follow, too).

The face rule is easy to enforce because he's not tall enough to reach a chin or an eye socket already swollen and bruised from Daddy's head-to-head collision the other night.

But the groin? Well, that's right in his wheelhouse.



There are countless things that make being 5 years old sublime.

One is the juxtaposition and unpredictability of affection. A "thank you" for hanging up a poster can come in the form of a misaligned punch in the exact wrong place or an unabashed, unrelenting, uninhibited, unsuspected hug that finds his big old Charlie Brown head resting right below the side of your ribs.

You never know which one's coming. I find myself folding in on myself when I see a any wave of emotion wash over him.

He usually just barely misses. Sometimes he doesn't.

The times he doesn't miss seem to come with the frustration.

For a while, he enjoyed calling people "Booty Head." That didn't go over well with his Mom. The best way to get a 5 year old to stop doing something is to adopt it yourself and hammer it so firmly into the ground that you've effectively beaten him into submission.

"Hey, Booty Head. Give these scraps to the dog."

"You can't play Madden 06 anymore today because you've played it all day. Booty Head."

"OK, OK. I won't call you Booty Head anymore, Booty Head."

And then the emotions wash over him.

And there's no use hesitating self-defense for a hug.

New Year's Revolution

Happy New Year.

Whatever that means.

Welcome to the change in the last digit you will use now to write your checks.

Nothing will be different this year than it would have been if we didn't count years.

You will still work your way through each day of each month just as you have every other year. One of these days -- March 6? October 25? July 18? -- will be the day that you die. Maybe this year. Maybe not. In any case, you have lived and will live a date that you will die on.

Maybe that's why people drink themselves into oblivion hours before the ball drops and some emo band on ABC plays a song in Times Square that was popular two years ago.

I don't even watch the ball drop. I just blow stuff up with fireworks.

I'm not celebrating a new year. I'm laying waste to it. Destroying history before it begins.

This is the day that I have to seriously consider taking down my lights and tree and stop listening to Charlie Brown Christmas, a funeral of plastic shallowness that will leave us in mourning until the sun returns. This day that draws a line and compartmentalizes life, making it more predictable and recordable and limiting.

Here's my New Year's resolution: I'm not going to have one.

I'm not going to do anything better or different because the linear means by whicht we measure time on has reached an arbitrary end and new beginning.

I will live and die brand new days. Different than every day before them.

Unbound and unlabeled by myopic obsession with time's progression.

"One should count each day a separate life; the day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity." -- Seneca