Love²

We were/are Soul Mates! In ancient Greece it was told by Aristophanes in Platos symposium that every person was once a being containing 2 people in one body. A round fat body that was complete and spherical. We were prehuman humptey dumpties with bodies composed of 2 hearts, 2 minds, 4 arms, 4 legs, 1 large head but 2 faces. We could see, grasp and move in all directions with mind power². With our 360° vision and body it's easy to imagine that from our vantage we experienced the world as if we were the center of the universe. We were a terribly powerful beast of body and mind but a cocky center of the universe beast that greatly angered the gods. A butt hurt Zeus split us all in half, (with dental floss apparently) separating us into 2 individual people. It was done to humble our humpteyness, splitting us like an egg to bring us down a notch. Giving us 180° vision and ½ body. (Sadly, despite this many of us still believe that we are the center of the universe.) Afterward in life so the story goes you find yourself a half with an insatiable longing to find your other. This other half being the love of your life, your soulmate. like some perfectly squared math equation. Love².



It's a beautiful parable. It is a fable of the same kitchey fairy tale flavor one can imagine hearing often in the microphone at one of those Mormon Wedding Reception Halls in Sandy that smells and vibes more like a funeral home. It's the Freebird of wedding speech tales. The ideas that stem back to 1/2 souls and the shaping of the world around them put this wrongheaded idea of love as a completing make out session of puzzle pieces into practice.

I may be an overly romantic hyper-individualist but I want to go to toe with this idea of love². I see it as an idea that muddies the waters of a shallow puddle to make it seem deep (oooh Nietzsche-poo) or drops a roophie into the cocktail of love. I know from the outset that being for all accounts a bitter ultra-single young anger-pot of a man that in even considering love², I have to avoid becoming the outside clueless observer who mimics an overly analytical solitary lesbian feminist with teen wolf body hair, dessecting concepts of Male attraction with statistics and math equations. I also know this is totally going to jive like a sermon or lecture in a "Im telling you like it is" tone but consider that I am merely TELLING myself and sharing that experience with yall, whose eyes remember choose what they read. Like a throw down of self with a studio audience.

Don't get me wrong I have a strong personal sense of what love is and well was. That past tense knowledge being really kind of the key twist to it all. Sometimes you do not understand something until it breaks apart. Imagine the magic of a clock radio as revealed after being smashed to pieces. A myriad of components lay strewn about on the floor that shed new light on its function and significance once hidden in it's polished completeness. Anyway, I just want to run the pieces of the idea with a bit of a Mormon twist through the perspective press of my own philosophy that churns in a busy chamber behind my eyeballs. Just some Philosophy with a subjective but also human face to look at something often thought about but too often skipped over and rarely dissected with inquiry. One of the beauties we have in Life with a capital L as I see it, is seeking simple awareness. Avoiding deep thoughts into love is like carpeting a wood floor covered in marbles without thinking about the consequences. So, instead we can blow up the idea of love like myth busters with a little bit of explosive arm chair pondering pointed toward simple awareness seeking. Avoiding the unconscious rationalizing in this case that is the algebra that forms our lovers squared math equation.

"You complete me!" "You are the Balki to my Cowwsin Larry!" "We are PERFECT Strangers." "I live for you, and without you I would now be nothing." To imagine believing this, in a way seems like only a longing to become nothing. I know that this cliche idea of love has seeped into the semiconscious vernacular of the masses and often sentiments like this are just grazed over with the same unconscious knee jerking of thought that many relationships are formed by in the first place. An unconscious knee jerk that in a way is like when you awake to yourself jerking IT in your sleep and you've just missed the climax. But what does a cliche sentiment like this even mean? and worse in practice? What does an idea of a relationship like this mean for the individual? How does the idea of love usually play out in the average marriage? Is love bonded eternally by this magic notion of love² or more often is it by a mortgage or the immense cost of a divorce attorney? I dont want to talk about the on the surface nitty gritty material details we all observe in Siamese twin lovers² . Let's think about this in surreal terms.

I want to slap around the idea, not the face value. The messy idea of love² something we all know and which the masses seem to worship. (The mob masses seem to always love ideas of any irrational perfection that allows them to cop out on their responsibilities to actively better their situations.Cop outs like attributing Godlike divinely gifted Black Presidents, or Brad Pitt's abs as carved of God's own turgid ass with a holy melonballer. All of which naturally endowed by some kind of heavenly Magic) Does someone in such a soul completing union somehow dive into the ribcage of their lover and submerge themselves into the soul waters of the other's being? what a terrible way to drown your meta-individual self while at the same time weighing down the snuggles fabric softened fluffiness of your soul and that of the other who you supposedly love. One could go on about the lame-ocity of this love² concept for pages and pages but countless pages have already been written on the subject from Plato to De Beauvoir. Where I want to take this love² is to see how it works in combination with another picardfacepalm.jpg vision of Love... the Mormon Temple Marriage.

*PREFACE* Now, I know from the outset that many have countless arguments and defenses of the "wonderful union" of a love glued and squared away. Well this isnt really some attempt at a debate. This isnt even an attempt at a constructive argument. This is at best some humorous perspective sharing on fluffy theology and notions of love and it's supposed bonding purpose. But really this is merely a bitter 20 something ex-mo sitting on a park bench with a tall boy(beer) rolling perspective presses in his mind on the idea of love². Maybe All for the purposes of textainment and reaffirming bitterness. I am also not writing this to change any minds or inflict existential crisis on the single person looking for love² or someone trapped in it's clutches. It's for me and perhaps the fence sitting more cynical lover of love or bitter ex-mo who, if they have all their little existential ducks in row would toss out this love² notion outright. Anyhoo, let's face it if you are a 20 something living on planet Utah, talking about the "never-ending" bond of love and marriage is merely talking about the big shitting white elephant of relationships in the small room of Utah. I'm not trying to smash anyone's beautiful image of neverending love or Mormon sentiments of it. I would never try to deflate the ideas of yourself, love or your theology that you shine on(eyes closed) through life with. That's like taking the needle out of the vien of the Junkie and that would just be darn cruel. */ PREFACE*

Now I may have over prefaced this but hey when you grab an elephant by the tail in a small room you have to be prepared.

RIGHT! So this may jive like a hard tossing of word salad liken to a COBB salad of fictional Non Fiction, or basically senseless text-tainment and like I said for reaffirming bitterness. I am going to throw in a personal angle, taking a turn on subjective anecdote ave with the only case study I have on the Mormon marriage. That being the beautiful work of Sadism I like to call my Parent's marriage.

I'm not bashing relationships or marriages altogether rather just saying in passing that it is a little bit of ugly faith to think of love in such bonded completing terms. Maybe getting into ideas that most people kind of just skip over out of I dont know convenience? Ignorance? Laziness? Complacency? (Nah to big a word for the unconscious). Ideas like the role of the individual in a relationship and how lethal weapon 4 this concept can seem. I also want to elaborate on how this idea of love² only gets worse when you throw in a disgusting, antiquated, and chauvinistic religious dogma into the thickening molton mold of an exploded caulking gun type of messy bond.



I want to tell a brief tale of the Mormon concept of soul mates(It's far less poetic and 10x fold more creepy then Zeus splitting 4 legged human humptey dumpteys like egg beaters). For a Mormon you SEAL(their word) the deal so to speak in the Temple through marriage with your eternal souls sealed as one for now and into eternity. You are nothing if you are not sealed into this union. In fact for a woman to even gain entry into level 7 (planet making) heaven it can only be through an eternal sealing through your marriage to a capital M Man. (THAT'S THE RULEz I DIDNT WRITE EM says the prophet) The Man in level 7 heaven will also get many other wives with which to populate his own planet with. (NOTE:My planet would consist of hedgehogs who mate with possums and consume the LSD that flows in the rivers and streams) Anyway, that's the short of it and so from the beginning they have this love² on Meth idea. CUTE isn't it? It demands from the outset the idea of perfection sealed bonded terms for all time and eternity. The ugly faith in this conception can be viewed in the unique Utah statistics in areas like domestic abuse, Prozac consumption and murder suicide cases. So let's think about this from the woman's perspective. She essentially only exists to be a part of Man that in the eternal heaven will mean an even smaller divided fraction of that portion of man. SWEET!

Imagine for a minute the gowned wife as she takes the plunge and submerges her existence into the man and become one. Afterward they find that their being is drowning in the dark shallow cavity of the big macho male's chest filled with dogmatic BBQ sauce and chauvinistic Man-musk. The room of the man's chest isn't the dream home they'd thought they share forever but more like a dank basement apartment with no door and stolen construction materials serving as makeshift furniture. With many more spirit wives soon to join you in the drowning later on of course. Shall we try to create a psychological profile of a Mormon woman in this state? I think selfishly for our own sanity's sake we best not but with that in mind, is it any wonder that Mormon trophy baby makers(in life and death) consume more Anti-Depressants per capita then Dick Cheney's neighbors? Nietzsche's Zarathustra says (to highlight irony) man's key to happiness is "I will" and for a woman today it is "He will" repeat "He will." This may be the only point the Mormons would agree on with Nietzsche's fictional character and thank god there are heavy doses of narcotics for the Sistas of the ward to back up this insane notion of subclass happiness.

A Mormon woman is drowning in a mess of a man's chest, sentenced to an eternity of marginality and subclass faux-happiness. Not to mention the Mormon-man whose chest they inhabit is hopped up consciously or subconsciously on a sense of supreme and divinely sanctioned superiority. THINK of Glen Beck(Mormon!) on his knees praying for ratings. So what happens when this atrocious assbackwards idea of marriage falls flat on it's face and evaporates? Not even considering the unbelievable amounts of pain and effort it takes(for a Sista) to overcome the endless amounts of road blocks enforced by church doctrines to prevent such an exit from the superglue'd Mormon marriage. Eventually, the marriage hits terminal velocity and the relationship burns up as someone cuts the squared love equation with a square root.

Imagine the freed now ex-wife exiting the man's chest. She is still dripping in the stink and sticky mess of their ex-man's spirit sauce and the foul dogma dank that they once dove so willing into. They are probably carrying 5 to 6 kids(remember their meaning for being) and spare baggage, have no professional work experience other than the roles of heffer cow or domestic slave. Very generally and stereo typingly(word?) speaking they do not have the slightest idea how to function without a PRIESTHOOD holder at the wheel of their life. I am now taking a right turn on "Subjective Anecdote Ave."



I am taking this view after being an on-board witness to the plane crash of my parents Mormon Flight 666 disaster of a marriage. Among the fiery wreckage there sat 7 kids under 11 and one sticky Mom, a tiny bubbly blonde woman whose radiating energy and happy breathes could fill balloons that could float into space. It was on the curb with my family as this jaded, uneasy, jiggling mess of mormon jello waiting for life to pick us back up that I realized my parents, this commanding and directing force in my life may actually be as completely lost, alone and as scared shitless about life as I was. I did not think that with any type of scorn or even pity just a sort of charged sadness. My poor little Mother a 5 Ft nothing, 90 lbs spitfire covered in the sticky love² mess from a 6'2 300 lbs Mike Meyers as Fat Bastard as well as a dogma fat on hypocrisy. There is something about the Mormon religion that takes a young soul as fiery as it may be on it's own and gives it a paddle ball on a string game of existence to play with supposedly for all time and eternity. Eventually the very thin string breaks and standing there is this adult soul filled with fire but no direction and no idea of what to do with itself.

So, I sat there among my mormon herd of siblings looking at my mother and in the darkness of her over sized pupils, I could see the image of her little soul with a broken paddle ball and a look like she was holding a flood of tears back with her lower eyelids like pursed floodgates. The eyelids weighed down and fluttering like a moth in your bedside water cup, an act of trying to maintain composer. I imagined what her view of the world would look like through the "film strip off the tracks" watery chaotic projector of her sight at that moment. A moment like when you turn to your Mom after watching Bambi's Mom get shot and you realize she would someday die too whether by a hunter, cancer or city bus. The hardest part of this realization being that she did not have many reassuring words to say about it. You parental reflects chaos like no circus mirror ever could.

So the surreal scene you can imagine, is my family minus one insane Fuckwad of dad was left in this deep sticky mess with a Mom at the helm who was busy trying to put the pieces of the broken clock radio of life back together. My Mom's way of getting rid of the musky sticky BBQ mess of my father was through wiping it off on a bunch of Ghey former BYU theatre majors who SURPRISINGLY were now single AND still faithful, after having a terrible mess of a marriage themselves. (Conflicted gay former RMs trainwrecking through marriages like a high jacked bus in an Urban center? "I KNOW THIS MUSIC" says the Utah native.) So fittingly my Mom went to wiping the sticky mess of the mochoness of her last marriage on effeminate Mormon men who actually liked their sex....*cough* a bit sticky. However, her soul was playing with the paddle ball again just pretending that it wasnt broken. In the act of this wiping my Mom and my family actually dodged another clusterfuck marriage plane crash. One of the BYU theater studs(Fittingly named Dean) she was dating(and engaged to) we found out was oh no GAY?!? This revelation came from a former wife of said stud who informed my naive(but cute) Mommy that she had in fact been dating a "Woman spirit from heaven who must of fallen into a man's body and loved the COCK." After this experience she avoided dating the effeminate "struggling" Mormon BYU theater majors.

She eventually settled luckily in a pretty on-the-surface happy Mormon marriage to my step dad, a beautiful Ned Flanders type with a softer voice and a Mormon seminary teaching job to boot. God bless their bonded submerged paddle balling souls. Getting back to love², fittingly my step Dad was a widower and a Mormon seminary teacher and by that I mean only that they were two 1/2 souls playing with broken paddle balls when they met, looking for each other so they could become whole...again. Another additional tid bit to that info is that as my new step daddy was a widower, my Mom theologically thinking from the beginning will only get 1/2 of 1/2 of my step Dad for their love equation. The division she has to accept in order to feel "complete" in love is like some warped infinitesimal that divides and divides as new wives come on and her purpose diminishes exponentially. And what of my step Dad's former wife chilling up at level 6 heaven waiting to level up? well of course she get's no choice in the matter. (Do you think there is some type of lobby on level 6 heaven where Husbands can introduce their wives to each other before they take the plunge into their level 7 planet making?)

On a side note despite going through the terrible pain and even falling in love with one of these "Fallen Angels" gay MOs, my Mom still stands strong against gay marriage and considers homosexuality a choice and abominable sin. So in this line of thinking her belief wishes the gay men of the faith to be condemned with their future eyes melted in mascara mormon wives to divorce after divorce. Condemning homosexuality and subjecting both parties to a failed marriage after say a wife walks in on her fabulous husband boning his male boss on his desk at work or after seeing him on the KSL nighttime news after being picked up "cruising" around Fairmount Park behind the 24 hour fitness in Sugarhouse. But we've again run off course here down a back alley. Let's get back to love².

So in a smug, asshole-esk / tongue and cheek style, I'm questioning the idea of the Mormon marriage outright on principle. It's harsh perhaps but with the idea of love on principle I do not run around like a football fan painted with love's colors on my face with some type of misplaced hubris for "the game" (that is any relationship whether a night or decade) or "team" that will carry me into overly romantic notions about it's outcome, meaning and purpose. There is no "I" in team but there is an "I" in relationship and in Marriage. To think otherwise is just a terrible and disingenuous way to fuck yourself and others over. All that said However, I do not cut the magic away from the fruit of love. To do so would be to peel an orange tossing the juicy fruit and going only after the peel. You have to leave and enjoy a level magic, beauty and art in all things, the point is to not get lost in it and see things in true technicolor vision.

So in concluding this obscenely overly epic novella/rant let's ponder if there is a better way to think about love? What does this ultra single anger-pot think about love? For this let's slide down a sentimental hill on a metaphorical sled to the finish.



Maybe we can take a square root surgical operation of common sense to love² and well since I use analogy like oxygen in any and all things expression I will use another. From my foray into love I would say it's safer as in more realistic to analogize and compose Love between two people as a force of gravity not split superhumans. Call it Lovity. Any thoughtful person in a relationship can acknowledge that is is a sensitive balancing of 2 people involved in a complex power play of wills. Rather then the bonded playdough or completing idea of two long lost halves coming together perhaps we can view or seek out the idea of love as do independent bodies in motion that come together in a vacuum of space. Think about planet you and say planet me in a dancing orbit not the final glueing of the last two pieces of humptey dumpty. Thinking about independent bodies of equal mass and equal significance coming together.

In space these two orbs attract each other forming an illusory yet physical bond within the force and limits of lovity. A bond that transcends surface or on sight definition, some real and meaningful magic. They do not merge, they are not two long lost bodies now joining together, completing each other. They are not lost halves floating through the universe searching tirelessly for each other. In fact their individual movement is based more on their own self-searching. In my experience if you look to be "completed" by another you will never be complete. You will find that in searching for a completing match that you are opening yourself up to be less whole than you ever would of been on your own. Attraction in lovity is now quite to the contrary of love², attraction is now based on their individual searching and drive that has found oneness in spherical wholeness within themselves. A conscious complete planet despite their self achieved wholeness will be aware of the fact that they are but a spec in an infinite swirling of bajillions of orbs. Their connection with one another not divinely magical but an outcome from a myriad of forces and happenstances based on realities of their existence and efforts.

Human planets of equal size, wholeness and fiery energy moving at the same speed on a similar course will attract into lovity's reach. In that you can still sense a bit of magic in love. As joining orbs, they still retain their alluring autonomy and provide each other space but also magnetic company bonded by their mass. A side note to this in the same strain of metaphor is the chaotic life of the incomplete ultra single human wanna-be whole planet. I only know this from my own space adventure experience and telescope observation. Lost single orbs seem to travel around in the darkest , and most nihilistic regions of space with other orbs all in a chaotic asteroid field. Colliding, connecting shallowly for short periods, bumping and grinding each other away into a pulverized pulp of jaded and confused scattered space dust. As I see it, this existence of human connection is a far worse puke in mouth vision of love or human interaction than even the silly Mormon Temple marriage.

Milan Kunderan in the Unbearable Lightness of Being defined Happiness as "the longing for predictability." To understand this, think of the predictability of a relationship, a pet, a parent or talent that brings us happiness. Through a trusted and enjoyed expectation that you feel when you see a persons familiar shoulder blade covered in familiar blades of hair with a familiar scent at the first sight of each and just about every the morning. Through that familiar purring cat on your chest without fail at first light. If you power-squat on that thought for a bit it becomes easily clear. The enjoyment of repetition with another being and the longing for it. In considering love, I think this definition of happiness is important but is too dry, considering that we are sliding down the sentimental hill on a metaphorical sled. However, as for lovity I sense that happiness as experienced in love would be better defined as "the longing for serenity" or "seeking serenity." This conveys more sensuous human activity and tacit enjoyment. Lovity is this in action and as a force of attraction not bonding. Besides the way the words ssslide out of your mouth and hisssss is in itself more sensuous.

But back to space, the lovity force is always active between joining human beings in orbit and they themselves must remain active and whole to maintain it. A philosopher Robert Solomon said that you can imagine love in this realized sense as a long conversation. With the same sensitivity, mutual effort and imperfect ebbs and flows of any 30 to 40 year conversation with any one person. A perfect process for human beings in orbit with each other is acknowledging this with keen awareness of it's sensitivity. Lovity is a means not an end and not contingent on infinity. Lovity should never be a prison. Human beings in a lovity orbit are however in a beautiful dance spinning around the other with a union of almost perfected symmetry. To maintain this symmetry between human dancing planets takes as much mutually inspiring effort as any classic dance or break dance battle. There is no perfect soul only a perfect dance or perfect process between individuals seeking perfect means not perfect ends.

Derived from all this if I throw love² into a square root and arrive at a definition of love that I can sit better with.

Love is the mutually inspiring effort for maintaining a sensitive, serene symmetry between beings.

If you think about it, Love is the only thing that makes life truly worth living. It adds color and a bit of magic to an otherwise barren black and white fruitless landscape.

If you've made it this far and you have slid down sentimental hill with me I feel comfortable sharing that I can say with honesty and conviction that after a few years contemplation, I long for this lovity thing and seek it genuinely. Of course only through what I now feel is the calm calculated lens and light of simple awareness that makes love a dance not a longing to be a superglued other half.

Philosophies in a Word

I wanted to go through all the little minds I have floating around in my noggin and throw together a list of buzz words for each of the MCs of thoughts. A type of name game association experiment. These men and women of letters have been shortened to their lowest common denominator that opens up the potential flood of knowledge that they all contain. The single words are like a flood gate of their thought. Sometimes it only takes a word to get the ball rolling in your mind. Take a lookey at the philosophical hooks that I've compiled into an epic list of prophets..... who dont make shit up. You can make your own list and share it with the FaceBoosh class if it fits your fancy.






Socrates - Platos?
Plato - Socrates?
Confucius - Respect
Buddha- Asceticism and repeat
Descartes - Think
Spinoza - Humility
Hobbes - Afraid
Locke - Property
Rousseau - Citizen
Voltaire - Wit
Hume - Imperial-Empiricism
Edmund Burke - Convenient Prudence
Kant - Reason
Adam Smith - Invisibles
Schopenhauer - Nihilism
Kierkegaard - Anxiety
Dostoevsky - Punishment
Nietzsche - Power
Marx - LABOR!
Bentham - Utility
JS Mill - Happiness
Hiedigger - Being
Betrand Russell - logician-Magician
Sartre - No-Excuses
Camus - Absurd
Frued - Mother
Dewey - Experience
William James - Pragmatism
Noam Chomsky - Calculated-Dissent
Paul Krugman - Liberal
David Brooks - Conservative
Kundera - Lightness
Ayn Rand - Me-Me-Me-Me-Me
Nabokov - Lolita
David Foster Wallace - This-is-Water
Salinger - Angsty
T. Mann - heightening
Hesse - Flowing
kerouac - All-That-Jazz
Bret Easton Ellis - Shells
Chuck Palahniuk - Gateway-Drug
Bukowski - Dirty [Pronounced: Deer-tae]
Vonnegut - Rosewater
Salman Rushdie - Bombay-Magic
Dawkins - Evolution Bitches
Hitchens - Poorly-evolved-primates


Some Unhonorable mentions to

Glen Beck - FUCKWAD
Micheal Jackson - Analrapist
Joseph Smith - Lies-Lies-Lies
Brigham Young - Child-Rape
Rush Limbaugh - PorkChops
Sara Palin - CUNT
Jesus - Shit-Happens
Rupert Murdock - Thought Control
Republicans - Millionaires and Idiots
St Paul - ressentiment

DAVID FOSTER WALLCE - This is Water

I have a special place in my wee bird brain for the late David Foster Wallace. When you read a provoking author with such undeniable depth and scope, you feel like you have made a friend with whom you could talk for hours on end. Unfortunately, with his semi-recent death that is not even a poetic option for we the living. His words will be limited to what he left behind. We shouldn't despair as fortunately for all of us the words he did leave behind inflate life and power into our skulls that will fill us and have us all floating a bit higher for a long time to come.

This is a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College. It filled me with enough thoughts to chew on that my brain is turning raw like a pink blasted tongue of 5 year old with an everlasting gobstopper.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, This is Water

IN MEMORIAM | September 19th 2008

The world of letters has lost a giant. We have felt nourished by the mournful graspings of sites dedicated to his memory ("He was my favourite" ~ Zadie Smith), and we grieve for the books we will never see. But perhaps the best tribute is one he wrote himself ...

This is the comencement address he gave to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. It captures his electric mind, and also his humility--the way he elevated and made meaningful, beautiful, many of the lonely thoughts that rattle around in our heads. The way he put better thoughts in our heads, too. (Many thanks to Marginalia.org for making this available.)

DAVID FOSTER WALLCE

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education--least in my own case--is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

My Open Letter to the American Bald Eagle

Attn: THE AMERICAN BALD EAGLE
Subject: EVERYTHING
Address: Washington D.C

Dearest timeless endearing feathered symbol of freedom and liberty aka American Bald Eagle,


Baldy, I am sorry but a raging fire under my ass has compelled me to

write you in these earnest and distressing times. I have turned off the

TV, hiked up my sweat pants, put a Totinos pizza in the oven and

changed my Aim status to busy for this. This isn’t to be taken lightly,
it regards the state of Union err umm Nest. You see it isn’t the dive

bombing economic state or festering state of our decaying democracy per

se. No, as your average American I am writing you with a more

predictably prosaic and banal observation. You see it’s just that funky

smell of yours filling up the nostrils of the nation and my own that I

want to talk to you about. I tell you it smells something awful. The
smell is almost unimaginable but it is something like if you stuffed
some putrid poultry with some long expired mayo and let it ferment
nestled in an aged Pete Fonda’s taint as he free rides it through the
muggy south. It’s not the waves of grain and purple mountain majesty

breeze that I remember. This is a serious stench but hey my bird the
first step is always identifying the smell but let us roots it out to
the source or cause because it cannot be an issue of hygiene alone.

Now, I don’t know if I should mention this but have you noticed that
you are sizzling in front of a vintage free-market microwave lacking
protective shielding? I don’t think you were supposed to be cooked like

some kind of Thankful Turkey or McNugget bird the aroma is just too
unnatural. So what’s with this microwave cooking you instead of what it
was designed for remember how that microwave had great promise of
nuking our profits into more and more profits? Remember how it was to
have regulatory, ethical or moral protective plating built in to keep
us from getting burned? That sizzle its putting off that aroma of stink
lines floating above you. I think we have found a source of the problem
remembering of course the real problem being that once beautiful breezy
lavender of liberty smell hypnotically enticing to the souls of
individuals that now smells morally repugnant and stale. It’s enough to
even out of disgust tame peppy la pew’s skuny hard on. Do you catch my

drift about your whiff? Good because the problem gets worse.

That free-..market-..cant-go-wrong micro-deathbox you’re standing in front of ya, that short sided

credulous creation of convenience well without those protections it is

now inconveniently ionizing your scarce assortment of birdie brain
cells (and let’s stress the scarcity). Let us think about this, by way
of the microwaves hitting your skull every lil baking cell in your head
is gasping up an ignorant exhaust of leukemia to be picked up by your

birdy blood cells metastasizing hemlock through the entire economy of
your tight birdie veins. Oh and yes it’s becomes worse ever still as
this disease has become airborne and contagious. The money we all had
in your microwave hoping to cook into a comfortable future is a molten

toxic mess. It has leaked out and the toxic molten assets are burning
holes in the infrastructure of our country like the acidic blood of

those biting head within a biting head alien foes of Sigourney Weaver.
Now, I feel I am a little to blame in this as I smelled what you had
cooking before all too willingly. I bought into the smell I guess
though not that my 401k left me with any other choice. Still had you
not sold off those protective shields for a quick corrupt profit
perhaps your once dividending cells would not be perilously dividing
uncontrollably.


This cancer that you and the rest of us are now dealing with is surely
depressing but let’s not forget the smell (if I havnt beaten that drum
hard enough refer back to paragraph 1) In getting to the bottom of this
smell I think I have found some more trouble. Perhaps it’s the fact
that your every nook and cranny is now swelling and pulsing with cancer
bulges that has made you aloof to the fact that you’re sitting over a
massive pile of eggs ½ of which have been crushed. Leaving smelly cold

congealed glue plastered to the surviving eggs. You’ve forgotten that

you have buns in the oven. Left unchecked they burn up like you. This

barbaric situation of progressive draconian poverty stinks and only
adds to the smell. In any case I guess it’s a fitting way for your sad
next generation to come into this cruel stinky world anyhow. For the

ones you don’t eat immediately at birth, most others although filled
with a certain free spiritedness will ultimately be eliminated by
starvation. Left to rot and stink up the nest. You are too busy feeding
the other “elite” old aristo-birds in the nest the ones that whispered

in your ear no doubt to create that microwave sans the protective
shielding of course. Ironically these are the old fat birds that turned
into foxes and ran around in the hen house of our economy. Why are you
trying so hard to feed this sick paranoid mess of birds even save whose

only threat or predators apparently are these fluffy white newborns for
trying to take a bite out of that stomach bile pile of wealth. The only
little fluffy white kin that can make it are the ones who respectfully
clean the crap out of the old aristo-..birdie’s seed holes. For god
sakes kick these old birds out of the nest. Despite some atrophy in
their flight muscles my guess is they can fly fine maybe they can focus
their elite-ness on the mastery of liberating aviation instead of this

alienating system of maximizing greed.

This can leave you to focusing on creating more opportunity and life
for new generations. Maybe create a system for enlightened high flying

birds not this system for no-flying shit eating fat foxy-fowls. I know
this is coming off as harsh but at some point the gauntlet had to be
thrown down. I marvel and wretch at the way you are ignorantly trapped

in a prison aviary of this consumptive system of avarice, the fact that
you are too heavy to fly perhaps a comforting irony to your
imprisonment. Flightless and bloated you sit there eating what you shit

and shitting where you used to eat. Is this American dreaming? I think
not but I’ve run off course. It’s just that smell that I can’t stand as
I cannot be bothered with all the details of its cause. I am too busy
chasing the tail of the American Dream. You know treading the water from the “rising tide” that was supposed to lift all boats… (I guess that only applies if you have a boat).
Perhaps you can take care of this stink, get back in to shape, and
learn to fly again? Maybe come pick me and my drowning friends out of
these dark economic waters or at least lower the tide? What do you say
symbol of liberty, freedom and national pride?

Forever and Always Yours,
Chris Jex

Pirate Hookers !!

This is to describe what I term the modern day pirate hooker and the modern day pirate. Do not adjust your facebook language setting there may be some colorful pirate terms ahead. Ohoy?

Pirate Hooker: is a woman/girl who idealizes as sensual-perfection the image, object and spirit of a man that best embodies the style, look and character of a 16th or 17th century pirate.
This term is used in modern times to identify a woman who seeks a Back-to-The-Future- II-esk pirate who after commanding his pirate ship to 88 miles per hour in the Bermuda triangle is now masquerading around in modern times as your typical 21st century mid 20s man-hobo. So don’t be fooled think Jack Sparrow, think Devendra Barnhart... Picture this said pirate-hooker-swoon-machine as unshaven, drunk, with bits of pirate gruel in his beard and reeking of an acute case of Caribbean foot fungus ARRRRHHH SHIVER ME LABIA this be just the scallywag that the Pirate Hooker’s lady parts salivate for.



He has given up the high seas of the 16th and 17th centuries for the high rises of the 21st century and the pirate hooker wishes to go back in time and be his whore-island bride. Now, from the onset we have to carefully define this "plunderer of the hooker’s vagina" which btw is self describe by said hooker as “pirate waters.” If the pirate man tells the pirate hooker to start wearing purple they starting wearing bedroom eyes with rosy red cheeks and it sends their lady bits a blazing. (This is pushing gypsy but gypsies totally get along with pirates) A pirate is not to be confused with a modern day hippie. Now, both modern day hippie and pirate seem to be temporally displaced. Both are socially and mentally living in the past but they are two very distinct animals outside of a few similarities in appearance. First a hippie tends to be protective of, and have an affinity with nature and animals. The pirate which only has an affinity with rum, chaos and pirate hooker vaginas on the other hand would cut open a panda cub with a dull knife if told it had swallowed his flask of rum. Or imagine that the pirate would openly burn down an old growth forest filled with meditating hippies after having crossed his extremely alcoholized pee with a torch to settle a bet with his drunken swashbuckling friends.

Like many trust-afarian hippies the modern day pirate is actually a mama’s boy and not only because of the Mother tattoo. Dear mother probably pays the rent which the pirate actually doesn’t pay in lew of buying dark colored liquors and getting gypsies to dance. The pirate protects his piratexcore-ness imagine while living off mother by justifying it as just another way in which he is swashbuckling. The pirate may bring in some dough by playing in the local band or occasionally holding down a job at Whole Foods but don’t let the corporate apron fool you he is a bone chewing murderous chaotic hurricane just waiting to unleash his curved sword(penis) on an all too willing pirate hooker. YARRRRRRRRRRRR.

Anywhooo Im off work now but look for you token pirate hooker and pirate during your next voyage across the high seas of Salt Lake City. Smooth Sailing

Marijuana and Jesus

Alright this isnt going to be hyper-poetic or some groundbreaking treatise on legalizing weed or Jesus. The idea to even compose sentences about it comes from this article I read last night on the NYtimes. Im busy schoolin and Cookie'in but thought I would throw down a quick rant cheaply conceived like a white trash baby in the backseat of a 1984 Lebarron.

Check the link v------v
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/if-marijuana-is-legal-will-addiction-rise/
If Marijuana Is Legal, Will Addiction Rise?

Addiction to weed, what? Jesus? Twitter? (sorry that last one kinda just comes out) I feel like those naturally inclined to be "addicted" to weed have already found their yellow brick road to their Emerald Pothead City in the land of OZ. We all know this type, from about junior high on they emerge. They make the scarecrow seem like Steven Hawking at times but are we worried that the rest of the world is going to follow this path. No, this zainy cast of pot-characters may already have their heads floating almost as high and as green as the wizard himself but that doesn't mean we are going to see a stampede of high buffalos if we legalize pot. In any case, for fucksake is weed some Deadly Molten Liquid Hot Magma to society the way Herion or Meth are? Pass me a fucking break(always to the left). Stoners only hurt one thing, pot plants. They cut off their sex organs burning them or grinding them into all kinds of food. C'mon, Bad? Addiction? I dont even think the argument needs to be made. So lets get to the point. I am more interested in why it was ever made illegal in the first place. Tobaccy without being whacky is physically addictive and totally lethal but completely Legal. The Duke smoked up a Marlboro on screen and never paid a fine for a sprinkle of tobacco shake in his glove box. So thinking about the rejection of pot I am pondering as a principle, who the hell came up with the idea to tell you what you can do, put in or fuck with your own god given body as long as it doesnt hurt or limit someone else's freedom. Hmmmm and that's where J-man comes in... with his religion... and gay-ass culture .. oh and just the whole idea of Christian Slave morality...a morality that we all are still slaves of.

So wait what does this have to marijuana and why are we talking about it you may ask? I told you because I read that article and since I pretty much hate Christianity all the time I melted the 2 topics together into a fine dip for thought like velvetta and chili. (which of the 2 examples would be Jesus is up for debate)

J-man came down landed himself on the cross becoming doughnut hands for pissin off the Romans with his magic powers right?. On the cross he went and whipped out his holy cock and bitch slapped slave Christian morals and the like onto his own followers. Why not just the Romans who put you up there oh Doughnut Hands? Why? Of course the story goes after much mass murdering, torture and warring yada yada yada the Christians came to predominant power and here we are. So let me explain this Christian Slave moral bologna(dont worry Ill get back to pot soon enough). The idea is that we are all horrible animals. Eve, that gluttonous whore made from a rib fucked up the whole perfection thing by eating the fruit and Adam for some reason followed this slut into the world. Now our whole purpose in life is to avoid all passion, pleasure, drive, will and the like to ascribe to handcuffed, cookie cuttered and most important constrained life laid out for us in the great book. The only pleasure lies in the great beyond of paradise that awaits on the flipside...the meaning of life is to hold tight and not live a single second outside the authoritarian control of Christianity. Just clench your butthole around their retarded beliefs and make way too many babies. We are now all the victims of the holy retarded idea of mandated abstinence and punishment for any deviantion along with our poor Xbox loving, plant molesting stoners in arms. We have shaken a lot of this bullshit off but in America but we are still stuck with laws passed by a chain gang of holy abstinence Christian pussies, reflecting the Puritan strain of the Christian virus. Oh yes the Puritans are little bitch slapped cowardly witch burners with the messiah's doughnut hand so far up their ass they stah stah stuttered their way from England to the Americas.

So even in the light of blaring common sense, hard and true real world facts, our laws still reflect the idiocy of this line of thinking. Backed by an irrationally charged electorate with dominion to create and maintain failures like prohibition and the war on drugs following their holy models based on ideas eons old. Naturally they will not understand the concept of freedom, liberty, experience and common sense. Hello, remember that whore eve and how we are to be their plastic dickless pious Ken Doll. They will seek prohibition in every area that has not been ordained as "free" to their choosing by the Bible(great for rolling joints). Weed is not in the bible (wait are guns, teabags or Mormon pajamas?) so it should not be allowed and a point for punishment.

Seeing the authorities violently oppress, control and punish Pot gives society a semi, as it cannot get a full erection out of the natural passions of life...that, like pot is a sin...stroking their moral cocks they see this as the only acceptable way to deal with this devil's bush(not the burning one). Of course it's short sided, petty and ignorant but c'mon war and prohibition are awesome and they always work out even on drugs. The fight no matter how stupid like the war on evil must rage on FOREVER. No matter what the cost. No matter how over crowded our jails get or brown people are killed on the border. We are fighting the good fight. In my view with Christians, Americans, our society is full of a lot of weak pussies... who sadly can and do VOTE. So we're forced to obey the laws of pussies. Even as the war on drugs as we are fighting it does nothing but jack up the price of drugs, organize a criminal syndicate and push drug users, dealers, smugglers and ring leaders to the most dire criminal acts imaginable. We are all the victims but the Christians love sacrifice (they’re banking on it). All of this remember to stop with force an untaxable commodity that only causes massive costs to prohibit and to holy WAR against.

Think however, just like with other wars politicians are not employed by common sense or by making tough decisions but rather are employed by an electorate who like to be force fed what they want to hear as well as most important industries and defense departments that would love to make a shit ton on contracts, mobilization etc. Best of all this whole mess is on the taxpayer’s dime. OK, so this is all getting way to "real" for Jesus but I am just shedding light on the concept of where ridiculous laws and prohibitions like this come from and how they are maintained despite being absurd... its from the bitch slapped slave moralities of pussy ass Christians. This type of irrational thinking makes them weak sheep that only get a rise in life out of watching and enjoying the punishment of others. Like watching Mel Gibson have his organ spaghetti sprayed everywhere for not accepting the divine right of his king. Christ! what a treat.

Having personally been affected so deeply that I think about drug policy every single day of my life dont think that I am looking to try and argue for some self indulgent desire to have cheap easy access to all drugs at all times... Just understanding that soceity is more willing to pay for a helicopter to shoot at poor farmers in Columbia but not on methadone and or treatment because sinners dont deserve it. It really grinds my gears... if you understand even the most simple explanation of supply and demand economics then look at our war on pot over the past 30 years then prepare yourself for your head to be smacked by your own hand with other working to catch your dropping jaw... or prepare for your faith in the holy battle of abstinence and prohibition to be reaffirmed as a waging war that will only end when you enter paradise while others burn beneath your wings. Why can't we just have the kids burn plants in the basement beneath your main floor instead?

Obesity! Human Pot Pies

You see these people at the grocery. *whispers* the obeseesssse */whispers quote unquote "people" right. You see them in motion which is an amazing spectacle all its own. Such a massive project in movement is always quite the sight. They cannot walk, they are upright and moving but not walking, they are lumbering if anything. Their stretch cloth moomoo-esk clothing, sweat pants, or a dresses tailored for a manatee or a partially shaven grizzly bear with downsyndrome stretch on their bodies wishing to soon be set free by radiation away from this fat fucking nucleus. Who knows under the friction that builds between flab continents enough heat for nuclear fission may be possible. They lumber on feet smashed square like elephant hooves, they are blasted with weight, they are carrying the weight of a world literally on their flattened arches. The weight of the planet that is this person for which they are forced to transport through the space vaccum that is the frozen food isle of Smiths Marketplace. They are an embodiment of the limits of physics.

These human impersonators more sack of mayo than man are just 1 step away from graduating to a jazzy scooter designed by nasa to transport 2+ tons of melted twinkies, buffalo wings, french toast and pizza. They are another step away from washing themselves with baby wipes taped to a stick. Their ascent is complete to this enormous life form that is 3/4s lipid lasagna that audaciously I am expected to consider human.. you may ask how can you hate these people? are they not just sad victims ... Were they not raised on dominos delivery, and trained like dogs with happy meals for not shitting on the rug...or outside on the side of the kilby house by the ladder(wtf you fucking asshole why?) How can they be hated? Well, how can a heroin addict be hated? how can a chronic masturbator be hated? How can one who ritualistically farts in elevators be hated? Here is a better question for you. What runs through these peoples bloated heads when they are sitting on the john flowing over the edge of the seat dropping an epic family of cosbys off at the pool. Ill tell you what they are thinking "GOD! I should of brought that submarine hoagie in here with me, Fuck look at me Im wasting away here dropping off my last reason for living at the porcelain express.

I mean come on Millions die from lack of cabbage or yams to eat, yet these obese wastes of space commit suicide with plastic wrapped pastries. These people are completely oblivious to the science that is their body, the science that is nourishment. They seem to be only conscious of their mutated gluttonous appetite. They have a holy faith to food that turns its back on the truth of calories and physical activity. They have given up completely on 1/2 of natures gift of purpose for life. Sexuality is robbed of its purpose. Isnt part of the essence of the sexual gaze of others based on assessing the vitality, the effort, the accomplishments as well as the natural form all of which is of course robbed and "eatin" away to nothing. In this state of obesity-stasis they are a physical embodiment of gluttony, selfishness, disregard, indifference, and morbid weakness. They are a bitch slapped slave to value meals and salivating insatiable taste buds. We are all fucked in one way or another by the human condition. Expectations of build, personality, intelligence etc that are completely unattainable but fuck man life is not enduring it is over coming if it is anything at all. Its ok to judge and end up hating weakness and epic failures.

HARSH! a more sensitive soul may ask Why cant you just pity them?, Obviously I do pity them.. thats where it starts but thats problem in pitying them I enter their stay puff marshmellow being. I empathize with them and after investigation of the possible scenarios that is their body and mind fucked by Dairy Queen I find no excuses plausible for their unbelievable contemptible cream filled creation. My sexual senses, my nostrils, my eyes, my idea of human dignity, my optimism for humanity and understanding of inequality are afflicted and accosted by this planet Wingers calling himself Michael. My affirmation of life is challenged, hell is other people and the daemons of the darkest devil is an obese 2 ton ameba who I am forced to acknowledge and endure. Whose gaze I am to consider in my attempt in being for others. Yes, Sartre hated fat people too... he hated everyone. Im with Sartre at least on judgement of the human pot pies and self indifferent failures..I apologize for being overly candid and brutally over liposuctioning with extreme prejudice. A request of all my future or current type 2 diabetes patient friends Lose some weight or at the very least until a cloaking device can be invented wear a moomoo with a screen print on it of a real human being who wont make me loathe humanity at first sight.

My Un-Eulogy for Michael Jackson

Really? "Michael we'll miss you" ?... Our dear departed Michael I've missed you since 1992. You see you miss someone when they are gone not just rotting… he was launched into outer fucking space to planet-crazy on a pop-culture rocket decades ago and it is at that point that I truly mourned for him. Why are all the lost souls and their void fillers in the media worshiping this guy like a new black to white Jesus, who tortured his own face like Roman guards? I have missed his talent and his sanity for longer than most of Jackos delicious jail baits have been alive. You see, I will not miss his Oxy guzzling, preteen ass-spelunking, post-modern zombie skin bleaching, blanket dangling, face fucked by NASA crazy once black ass. To esteem him in every moment up until death and beyond is a Holy-abomination to the whole concept of respect and mourning. Get a life, grow up and moon walk your way out of never-never land into reality and try to start walking with the Earth again as it spins underneath the slick bottoms of your penny loafers. I will miss the large bear cub family I left in the toilet this morning after my ceremonial cup-of-joe more than Jack. I will miss the trillions of dollars we’ve all spent on stimulating banker’s unwashed taints. I will miss Neda Agha-Soltan who was shot through the heart in Tehran even before she had a chance to write a hit album or rape a child with the help of spiked cool-aid named after ole doughnut-hands. I had a lot more in common with her. I will miss Robert Mcnamara who decided to throw his gemmed glove into the Cuban-missile crisis instead of a kiddie pools filled with Pilipino boys cream’d corns. I will miss never being able to hear new ways to laugh at the world from Vonnegut, Updike, and Foster-Wallace. I will miss the scrilla I just threw down on my $160 bi-monthly health premium. I will miss the $30 in wallet marrow I just burned up in my gas tank. I will miss all the non-pop-idol troops lost fighting for my ability to relentlessly trash celebrities and public officials without hesitation…*coughs* online.. I will miss Judas, Hussein and Dahmer more than post-rape wacko-jacko. We had more to learn from their software version of insane. I mean an infinitely talented man steamrolled and gang-clustfucked by fame and a blood thirsty society is nothing new or special. I will miss the man Michael could have been if left alone with maybe some serious help. I mourn for the society-beheaded sad once king of pop. I mourn for the lost opportunity that was his life and I send my condolences to those in his family who knew who he truly was deep down before he was beaten by Dad and society to a pulp of pop culture grease. I respect and praise holy the man who at one time first gave little 7 year old me the idea that perhaps someone else could indeed be way cooler than Jesus and Joseph Smith. Almost walking on water this guy, a man, a mere mortal with way sweeter hymns a true King among men/women. I’ve missed this cooler than Mormon Jesus guy ever since but allowed myself to cut that praise off when it started to become rancid and toxic.

To be fair if now is a time to remember him I raise my 2^nd cup of joe to Michael Joseph Jackson the little boy from Indiana with a fiery talent few can ever spark in themselves. It is with deference that I acknowledge that after many unfortunate circumstances of a life a man spread over time became a figure liken to Dr. Wacko-Jacko and Mr Hyde(the king of pop). All the while I throw my cup in the air to you but still keeping my eyes solidly level on the shit, issues and people that truly matter and demand my attention and forward thinking respect. Thanks Michael, and no thanks Jacko.