The State of OZ 2011

DorObamathy lays down the state of the Kingdom to the Emerald people of Oz.

The Boehnerly Lion is having another uncontrolled cry-gasm after being neutered by the Wizard.

American Pastoral: Swede Levov's Situation

Philip Roth takes a reverse swing at the American Dream in American Pastoral. Swede Levov is Phillip Roth's emblematic cinderblock precisely cut from the rock hard mountain of the American dream. Roth produces a thoughtfully developed narrative with an intelligent style of hyper-real truthiness through "the Swede" 's situation in American Pastoral. The Swede is a Blonde jewish hero puffed up with docile honor and nobility seemingly carved out of the heart of one of America's founding fathers. A New Jersey-ite bred through success on the field and in the social jungle the Swede peaks the cliche perfection meter in every way right down to the Miss New Jersey wife. The Swede's situation in his journey traversing the American historical landscape of the 1950s, 60s through to the 90s brings him into a void. Just to note this New Jerseyian's situation is far from thee "Situation" from the shores of Jersey with its oceans of Jager spiked vomit and beaches of sandy vaginas and vanity..

In the Swede's journey he is an unfitting Pleasentville mayor riding the rapids of the 60s and 70s only made worse through his relationship with his Daughter Merry. Merry is a young stuttering translucent sponge to the black liquids that spill over the perfection bucket of America onto the rest of society. Swede cannot reconcile this and is ended at a standstill with reality. Roth attempts to retrace the ails of the Swede and inserts himself into the Swede through his Character Zuckerman reflecting on this rough ride and trouble despite his own Ivory tower image of the Swede. Roth in this interaction shares some wise albeit manic insights that drip with every page onto the Swede that cinderblock of the American dream slowly but surely melting him and it away. As impervious as a section of Washington's own Mount Rushmore chin may seem to the American masses standing on a gilded soap box of patriotic rhetoric Roth eloquently subjects it to the chinese water torture of his pensive anxiety pulverizing it from cinderblock into moon rock. He explains the "trouble with Swede Levov," the trouble with "The American Dream," the trouble of perfection, the trouble of doing the right thing in a world that spins too often against the grain of our socially derived ideals, the horror of chaos that still exists even when we close one eye to avoid it. I feel this is the true take away of American Pastoral.

All poo slinging on ideals aside it still wants us to ask ourselves "what exactly is the American Dream and where has it gone wrong?" One can think of what we have seemed to mutually agree on as a society in what is success through reaching for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but our communication is far from clear, the murmurs from the dark crowded periphery of humanity and reality itself still reach us... Our aloofness to them puts us in a situation where we are subject to the tyranny of blind fate despite our feeling of having both reins of success and happiness welded solidly in each hand. There is a lot to learn and unlearn in this book. It is a bit slow, mentally and emotionally challenging however the biting hyper-realism and forced relevant contemplation it brings on makes it a worthy read. I highly recommend taking a slow and thoughtful literary walk with it.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

The year of one of my sister's birth. A year after my own. A year in which the Cold war was still a brewing although about to become stagnate. A time when Reagan was busy stretching the O ring of the middle class and the charts were in love with Phil Collins. But Im talking about the Orwellian world of 1984 here. If you feel overly pressured by the world's vice grip around you then you should perhaps gander at 1984 by George Orwell. I am no biblical LIbertarian but this book does have some very ethereal qualities that will make you shake in your reading slippers. It has some of the clearest and cleanest prose I have ever enjoyed. The symbolism and considerations formed within its own well constructed master narrative is phenomenal. What a mind it would take to swallow such a world of ideas passing it into such a clear and all encompassing story. This is not just another Stalin era dystopian tale for me. There is something going on in this book that screams to the ever present problem of power and the fallible spirit of man. Power and its arms of oppression are a malleable force. The shapes that we ourselves are molded into fit into a patchwork of souls to create a warming blanket for acute power interests. Our conscience attacked from within and without constantly, sought out for the greatest crime of all that of not being "Sane" in an insane world.

"Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves." Orwell - 1984

Peeing gives your feet time to think....

Below is a ridiculous little jotting I found sitting here at Nostalgia sifting through my journal( a google doc :) from my touring around days earlier this year. This is apparently what my restless and slightly inebriated mind comes up with in the middle of the night. Its funny to read something you apparently wrote yet you have no memory of ever writing it. Especially something so ridiculous. Although it is just silliness emptied from my mind's subconscious bladder I thought that I would share it... Much like me my mind enjoys peeing in public.

So here you are..... in the pitch of night in some unfamiliar abode in the Midwest. You fumble through an unfamiliar hall called to action out of a deep sleep by nature and empty bottles of Sam Adams. Remember how you are a traveling hermit? Is it any wonder you find yourself yet again confused in foreign situation? Your senses of time, place, being and location of the bathroom are ever subject to this precarious uncertainty. You are constantly entering and leaving new worlds with every fickle moment that passes. Anyway back to this moment... A yellow beam from a hall hung night light like a beacon bleeds with a flickering pulse on to the hall floor and wall. The light the color of hobo teeth creeps from the hall on into a room reflecting off a floor’s surface obviously of the non-carpeted variety. Linoleum you think?! Linoleum! That’s a good sign you semi consciously deduce as it indicates perhaps a bathroom or laundry room. You prepare to enter.

With a blind man’s hand and half the arm attached to it you reach awkwardly around a wall corner and in. You fumble until an involuntary flick of the light switch illuminates the white waterproofed room. Most of you immediately starts to deal with an intense stabbing light but your lower brain only feeling natures call emits a cerebral and non-auditory “score”. You shimmey back and forth ever forward into the room while a stabbing white light assaults deep beyond your eyeball skins. Your eye lids flip out overreacting to the light. The rounded skin curtains with lashes are dancing like a single winged moth with epilepsy causing the light to come at you with an unbearable flutter. Because of this the light that does make it through annoyingly pees into your stream of consciousness. In this situation you hope beyond hope that this is indeed a bathroom and you’re not about to pee into a Washing Machine.

You continue to blink, shimmey and fumble with hands out but finally you find yourself sitting on a toilet. Although your anatomy dictates a standing position you are sitting simply to avoid the effort of aiming your yellow business. With your peepers still adjusting your tucked back naughty zone semi-involuntarily goes to work. You regret your laziness to stand and aim as now the B vitamin contents of the newly purchased mystery multi vitamin from a drugstore in Detroit cannot be visually accessed immediately from the source. You peer down between knees and pale blonde speckled thighs. Between your legs on the floor you notice a tag flipped the wrong way coming out the side of the bathroom rug.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54t0iyp_udc
(For more info on sitting while you pee watch this instructional video)

The underside of the tag is something sewn in Swedish. Hmmm IKEA has apparently made to the heartland your mind’s voice grumbles. You are confronted with an upside down backwards word that reminds you of perhaps a species of deer with a name composed with every vowel available on the wheel of fortune. You immediately feel the hasty fabricated cheapness of the rug on the bottoms of your special feet.

Now the bottoms of your feet you remember are like a more tender and silky version of a baby's butt. This tenderfoot quality unfitting for their use as the sole ambassadors to the harsh and abrasive Earth has been provided by a lifelong and hypervigilant campaign of over protection. Like a pale and frail young prince isolated in an ivory tower they are tender to a fault unable to handle the real world. However, as a result of this effort your porcelain feet can now take in the world like a god gifted sixth sense.

You see the bottoms of your feet are like a magical scientific instrument unlike any other. They can feel, see, taste and communicate in a universal stream of sense beyond imagination. Your feet upon the bathroom rug senses the strands of cotton separated between the feeling from the pseudo strands of plastic spines woven into the rug. With your feet’s sixth sense the components of the rug are broken down into a chemical language of elements. Atoms are counted. They back it up a bit now as Urine content is assessed, tasted and interviewed. Bacterial colonies are visited by diplomats from your foot’s grand network of sensory outreach. You sense a particularly interesting bacteria named Teri, Teri the Bacteria. Teri enjoys deep sea diving and molecular monopoly. Like any bacteria she tastes terrible. Moving on your sixth sense dives deeper into Teri beyond her cell wall and plasma membrane. Swimming through the cytoplasm deeper through her single spaghetti like string of DNA. Your sense commutes deeper breaking into a single nucleotide a universe of scope and activity in itself. Cornered off is an atom and your sense dives deeper towards it.

Your sense dodges off pesky electrons as it travels into what now seems like a football stadium of open space. It approaches four balls of protons and neutrons. You say hello and you peel back the skin of a proton and reveal a super massive black hole among a universe of its own but quickly reseal it out of fear. You peel back the skin of a neutron and reveal a supernova among another universe exploding out with a force that would make a billion nuclear bombs feel like morning drizzle. With wonder and amazement still boiling up in you, you quickly reseal the neutron. You ponder the profundity of it all but before you can make any sense of it you are finished with your yellow business and immediately shoot upwards and walk off the rug. Your eyes now adjusted to the light you flick the switch and now try and make sense of a new pitch abyss of darkness. Again you enter a new world.

Prayer for America!

In light of the way the Republicans have change the word "old" into the word "new" with their "new" Pledge for America. I thought I would share with a prayer to Darth Vader Capitalism that I have written that explains in a little more detail just what they are praying for this coming election.

Dear Holy Facist Corporate America,

Please benevolent Corporate Darth Vader Capitalism we pray before you today with faith that you will hear our humble calls for the apocalypse. Please oh lord continue to pollute our planet into that Wall-E movie world, while doing so please continue reduce everyone to a chinese slave worker with your chosen knights of bankers and ceos as our overlords, give us Health Care that spends more on Air than on Care. Please oh lord give us lower and lower infant mortality. Give us more and more and MORE War and conflict, Especially the kind that is insanely costly to most of us and extremely profitable to your chosen ones. Give us more Socialism for the Chosen ones you know the ones who truly deserve it. Please keep that Median income on its way down to hell where it belongs right next to ethics, justice and common sense. Just please continue to spread the income Gap to Alpha Centari. Tighten the grip around our democracy's balls until they finally finally fall off. Keep the puppet show in Washington Alive oh lord with your hand so far up its ass that your finger tips serve as eyes. Please continue to agitate the Israely conflict just for fuck all fun, also continue to reach inside a woman's Uterus and make choices for her. Keep the smoke screen of Racism against Mexicans to stall any rationalization of immigration to keep that nice beautiful brown flow of cheap labor coming into our land (the way we secretly desperately desire). Please continue to sell that ego and ethos laden snake oil to white trash and loud mouthed cocky red faced white middle class men to hijack their own needs in favor of their lower brains ideas of about themselves. Oh and of course keep that Hypnotizing watch of religion on our side where it belongs. Blessed be the Manipulators of the meek oh lord. Please keep diligently working to wipe away that dirty Human face to our democracy and economic system. Replace it with your benevolent sky-nett capitalism as you have been doing. Anyway Lord we must now dine upon these Ferraris sirloins and these Fabergé egg omelets. So to conclude we ask you these things in the name of the continued R-ape and Pillage of humanity, Amen.

Man's Search for Meaning - No Really No Excuses

Just finished a re-read of Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and thought I would write down some purpley prosed praise to the author rather than paint a portrait of him to hang on my bedroom wall..... I cannot paint a stick figure

This book burns the weakest parts of my soul with a realism and an inspiring insight like some kind of existential napalm. It sticks to everything in my life that I have ever let slip into the void of an existential vacuum or worn on my sleeve. A giant dick of No Excuses slapped me in the face repeatedly while reading this book. If you ever wished to vent your frustration over your suffering, toil or depressed dread over any aspect of life perhaps imagine that Victor Frankl is among your audience.

He is a sage of the human condition. His philosophy, mind and body has stood among the waters of humanities darkest hour. He boils up an amazing stew of his own thought but throws in a little Nietzsche, Sartre, Spinoza, and Dostoevsky to flavor. If I can grasp anything from this book it is the realization that you must stand up against the tornado of everything that is this shitshow called modern life. Compelling one to find meaning among life like a Mendelian Monk changing the world, your world forever. Even when life has stripped you of all comfort, joy, status, personal identity, family, friends, work and even your own self conception there is still not only meaning to be found in the future but power and meaning to be found in that very suffering. Suffering can sharpen the very tools of responsive awareness of your world that allows one to cut meaty chunks of meaning out of it moment by moment. Whether youre climbing a mountain or digging your own grave you are compelled to cut, cut and recut your life’s meaning.

In a biography of an experience Frankl commandeers his greatest suffering to become the point at which he discovers everything necessary for achieving meaning and overcoming anything. Taking that meaning for him the completion of his manuscript and theories on logotherapy and translating it into a concise and constructive life changing psychological method for addressing a range of tears from housewives to suicide risks. In this effort Frankl transforms his analysis of the life and psychology of the concentration into a beating heart of solid philosophical gold. He offers something for everyone. No one can escape the added benefits the ideas of this book poses to a more thoughtful genuine life.

We are at a point in time when 40% of people seeking mental health help from professionals do not have a single biological or neurological identifiable disorder but rather just an existential vacuum that once used to be called the soul. For instance YAVIS(Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent and Successful) make up over a 25% of Psychological Counseling treatment dollars. Mormon Housewives, and over achieving student "sufferers" now turn to Zombiefying drugs and pop psychology self help books for "answers" before they have even started to begin asking themselves the right questions. Others turn to worse options Ocyodon Coladas and meth for void assessment. We are a Prozac and Meth Nation for fake christ's sake. Man's Search For Meaning should be a required reading to be considered a Human Being.

I’ll admit I am butchering any calm cool account that this book deserves. Perhaps I am wearing the purple prose tinted glasses of recently read author adulation and if this comes off as such than I implore you to read the book and call me out.

Fools Gold: Inside the Glenn Beck Goldline Scheme

Infographic by The Big Picture