The V-Files: Cracked Lenses

(Commentary: Weird-ass shit that didn’t fit into any other category for this compilation but that I felt was important enough to recycle. I combined the “Epiphany” posts because really, the second one was completely uncalled for.)

The Pants Heist
(Original Air Date: 12/14/05)

The Power of Rock
(Original Air Date: 12/26/05)

Sweaters: Woolen Plague on Humanity
(Original Air Date: 01/18/06)

Epiphanies
(Original Air Dates: 02/06/06 and 02/07/06)

The End is Near
(Original Air Date: 04/19/06)

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The Pants Heist

THE PANTS HEIST
By Josh, age 24

Oh GOD! Someone has stolen Grandmaster Grandfather’s pants! Who could lead a front-end organization for the Illuminati when the breeze is whistling through your thighs?!

“We don’t have his pants,” said the fellow with the star on his butt. “Go ask Fancy Fred,” said the lady with the excessive cheek exposure. “He runs the pants cartel around here.”

“YES IT WAS I,” said Fancy Fred, “I took Grandmaster Grandfather’s trousers. Soon, my pants collection will be complete, and I can complete my ultimate weapon, the TROUSER TRACTOR BEAM, with which I will destroy the world’s magnetic field! MWAHAHAHA!”

He’s not bluffing, look, there are the trousers! Don’t you need those for the Trouser Tractor Beam? “No,” said Fancy Fred, “I just needed them to complete my ensemble. Also, BEWARE THE SHAPE-SHIFTING LADY ON MY ARM! She will safeguard my operation until my fiendish plot comes to fruition.”

“You’ll never get away with this!” shrieked the tiny woman with the awesome homemade Star Wars headdress. “Not only will we recover GG’s trousers, but we’ll recover ALL the pants you’ve stolen over the years!”

Wait, what’s that sound? Could it be? COULD IT BE?!

OH MY GOD THE LARPERS HAVE ARRIVED

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Then there was a great battle. Fancy Fred, Shape-Shifting Lady and all the dastardly minions at Disco Evil faced the might of the Larper Army. Tiny-woman-with-the-awesome-homemade-Star-Wars-headdress was really a spy who had infiltrated the disco using her headdress’s cloaking ability, and she’d been tracking Fancy Fred for several years now. It was a terrible battle; lives, limbs, and fashion accessories were lost forever. In the end, though, the Larpers emerged victorious. Grandmaster Grandfather’s trousers were safely returned to him, and he was free to continue to aid the Illuminati in their quest for global dominance.

The leader of the Larpers, Furry J. Mandible, stuck around after the battle and gave a detailed account of how he singlehandedly laid the smackdown on about 40 pants hijackers. Oh General Mandible, what a cut-up!

THE END

The Power of Rock

Few people will contest the power of rock and roll on humanity. People use it on each other to get a variety of desired results. Some people use it to raise money for charities. Others use it to either edify or tear down the establishment. Still others use it to try to expand the boundaries of art and music, through experimentation. Just like real rocks, musical rock has a variety of uses and purposes.

Some of the many varieties of rock include:

• Classic Rock
• Soft Rock
• Hard Rock
• Rap Rock
• Art Rock
• Pop Rock
• Cock Rock
• Stadium/Arena Rock
• Progressive Rock

and the list goes on. This isn’t even taking into consideration all the various types of “metals” there are in the rock world:

• Heavy Metal
• Hair Metal
• Power Metal
• Speed Metal
• Black Metal
• Doom Metal
• Goth Metal
• Nu Metal

ad nauseum. There’s also a great number of newer genres ending with the -core suffix, to somehow make the music seem more authentic or something:

• Hardcore
• Grindcore
• Speedcore
• Breakcore
• Emocore
• Sadcore

Well, you get the idea. There are almost as many different genres of rock and roll as there are bands and musicians to play them, each genre often with a set goal or agenda that is accomplished through its performance. Soft rock, for instance, is designed to be the equivalent of musical wallpaper for work. Bosses will often play soft rock for their employees to save on the embarrassment of actually going out and buying real ambient music; to do that would run the risk of making the boss look like he’s one of “those people,” as in the kind of people who regularly listen to ambient music. It’s almost a guarantee that “bosses of companies” and “people who listen to ambient music” are almost never one and the same, unless your company manufactures sandals, pachouli, or some substance that actually does not pollute the environment or kill animals.

The harder genres of rock have a wide variety of purposes: to be musical wallpaper for bars; to provide the illusion of rebellion while actually maintaining the “booze, bitches, and bad-assness” status quo of the working class American male; to play a musical game of one-upmanship to see who can be the most daring or the loudest; etc. You just might be surprised the next time you give some serious thought into the kind of music played on most radio stations.

However, the main point of this article is to reveal one fact, one basic and (I think) glaringly obvious fact that underscores every genre of rock, including those fruity and smarmy genres like ska and country.

Guitars are nothing more than stringed phalluses. Think about it. To the guitarist, their instrument is a projection of their prowess or their “manliness,” even if the guitarist is a woman. More than the other members of the band, guitarists find themselves in the spotlight, and find themselves with far more groupie fans than drummers or keyboardists ever do. And I don’t even need to mention all those masturbatory guitar solos, where the guitarist gets up there and wails on his instrument like he’s polished the most powerful knob that has ever graced mankind.

Rock. It’s all about the phalluses, sometimes more overtly than other times. That’s the secret to rock’s lasting power, and its success in whatever purpose it is set to accomplish.

Sweaters: Woolen Plague on Humanity

If you are of an apocalyptic bent, then you will probably be vindicated in your beliefs by reading this article. But I must caution you, the images contained herein will shake you to your very core, and you may wish you had never learned some of the things I’m going to tell you. Proceed with caution!

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Those looking for signs of the end times often cite things such as strange animal birth defects, unusual climatological changes, and world events that seem to correspond to “prophecies” in the flavor-of-the-week book of one’s choice. All that is well and good, but those who want a sure sign that the eschaton is nigh upon us need look no further than at a JCPenney or other such catalog, for an evil exists among us that has escaped our attention… until now.

This evil that I speak of is none other than the sweater and its insidious offspring, the sweater vest.

I was a particularly sensitive child. Some people might refer to my sensitivity as empathy or pathos or some other Greek-based psychological word. I could look at people and objects and get a more or less accurate “feeling” for whether what I was viewing was good or evil. And from the beginning, every time I looked at sweaters, I got an overriding sense of evil. No words can fully describe the evil I felt by looking at sweaters, but it is one of the most intensely negative feelings I have ever known. In fact, the only thing worse than looking at sweaters, I have found, is actually wearing them.

If you have any familiarity with exorcisms or old monster movies, you know that the possessed and/or the minions of the night do not like to come into contact with holy symbols; such contact often burns them or damages them in some way. Think of my reaction to sweaters as a sort of inverse to this, as when a sweater was forced upon me, the intensely concentrated perversion and utter malfeasance of the garment caused my body to react in a very unpleasant manner. Namely, with extreme itching and uncomfortable warmth. It was like Beelzebub himself had sprinkled itching powder into my young and tender flesh, and I was being roasted alive in some Luciferian cauldron filled with yak hair and stiff scouring bristles.

My many unpleasant experiences with sweaters have led me to sound the alarum bell regarding their true, dark nature. “Sweaters,” as a collective group, have some sort of evil hive-mind mentality and are most definitely up to no good. They have fooled a vast number of people into thinking that they actually are “sporty” or “dressy,” clearly illustrating the powerful hypnotic power of the Woolen Plague to cause so many to believe such a preposterous notion. Their true goals remain a secret, as no one in the countersweater resistance movement has been brave (or foolhardy) enough to access the hive-mind to learn their plans. We have, however, successfully rescued several workers from knitting factories all over the world, and after they were unbrainwashed (brainsoiled, perhaps), they revealed to us what they remembered about the Prime Directive of the Sweater Hive-Mind.

We have learned that part of the Prime Directive includes the dissemination and mass approval of a mutant strain of sweater known as the “sweater vest,” which is portrayed by the sweater-puppets in fashion media as being more “functional” and “practical” than sweaters. From a purely objective point of view, the sweater vest is merely a sweater with no sleeves and often with buttons in the front, but not necessarily so. However, this simplicity belies the true nefarious intent of the sweater vest. Our contact from the knitting factory that produced sweater vests was brought to tears when we asked him what the true purpose of the garment was, and all we could get out of him was that it involved “not irritating the arms so more sweaters could be produced.” From this, we speculate that the sweater vest is a sort of parasitic life form that leaves the arms intact so that the hapless victim can be controlled into making more sweaters.

If you thought that was alarming, then you will most certainly be alarmed by the apparently growing bravado and haughtiness of the Sweater Hive-Mind. I must warn you, the next picture is shocking, so if you are sensitive to disturbing images, please read no further and close your browser immediately.

What you are looking at is a sweater knitted from dog hair.

Let me repeat that. That sweater is made from fucking dog hair.

DOG HAIR, PEOPLE.

Yes, the psy-ops of the Woolen Plague have progressed much, much farther than anyone might have guessed. If you follow the link above, you can view the website of the wretched victim of the Hive-Mind’s cunning hypnosis. This poor soul, God bless her heart, has become a puppet of the Woolen Plague, and now produces sweaters (and other knit goods) made from dog and cat hair. For what dark purpose does the Hive-Mind have this woman making these travesties against nature? Is this just the first step in an eventual plan to make sweaters out of human beings, to be worn by the aristocracy of tomorrow who have risen to prominence thanks to the demonic intervention of the Woolen Plague? I shudder to consider it.

It is not too late to stop this growing menace, people. Burn all the sweaters you might own, and burn those belonging to your friends and family as well! (Preferably when they are not being worn, but hey, every civil uprising has its casualties.) If we work together, you and I can stop the Sweater Menace before it is too late.

Epiphanies

I have blogged before about my random epiphanies which often strike without warning, and which often have the most bizarre subject matters. I think perhaps I have inadvertently opened a door into another dimension, some bizarro-land where weirdness and the impossible keep spilling through into the unused portions of my brain. There, they sit and wait until I’m not thinking about anything in particular, then they bum rush my cerebral cortex.

These epiphanies are often cinematic, like I am watching a movie. Only rarely (very rarely) do these visions ever come “true” per se, but it does happen. Mostly, these visions are highly improbable scenarios whose strangeness causes them to remain with me for longer than a fleeting moment.

Here are a handful of my more… interesting epiphanies.

• I once had a vision of a world where Hunter S. Thompson had decided to be a dressmaker rather than a journalist. He himself wore a tutu within his shop, but was otherwise the same.
• I’ve had visions of mountains splitting open and whitish-purplish, jagged lightning emerging from the ground and soaring across the sky, only to dive to the earth again and split the ground wide open. Along this line, I’ve also had visions of great gaping holes opening up in the hillsides and either lava spewing forth out of them, or things getting sucked up inside of them.
• Not long ago, I had a vision of myself as a very old man living in Norway or some other Scandinavian country. On a great icy precipice, I looked out on the sea and realized that I was completely alone in this world, with no friends or family left alive. In the next “scene” of this vision, I was laying on the ground, tears and snot frozen to my face, and my final expression in death was one of great sadness, in the realization that my greatest fear, being alone, had come to pass.
• I sometimes had visions of Asa and I out in a club, impeccably dressed and dancing to our hearts’ content to both fast and slow songs. We make fools of ourselves but have a good time. I also had visions of the two of us facing each other, wearing tuxes and reciting vows in a small church in some out-of-the-way place. *sigh*
• One of the most shockingly embarrassing visions I’ve had was of a gander dressed up in spats, a monocle, and a top hat, with a black lacquered cane tucked under his wing. This bird was trying to convince people of something ridiculous. It was, after all, a “propa ganda”. I’ve had a similar embarrassing vision of a “rap scallion” that has probably already been implemented in Veggie Tales.
• I frequently have visions of being in a terrible car accident and being in the hospital. About half the time, the visions include me meeting Asa for the first time under that circumstance. The other half of the time, I die before ever having met him.
• My visions of the end of the world don’t involve a religious experience, but involve people being stupid and accidentally nuking themselves to death. Not outright war, just human error. Ooooops, and then everyone’s skin melts off their bones. At least, the lucky ones get to be thusly melted. People flee to Chernobyl, the least-contaminated place left on the planet. There, they feed their three-eyed children six-eyed frogs.
• I’ve had visions of vast armies of the undead marching around, fully armored, on spectral horses and with cursed weapons. (Of course, this might be because of Dungeons and Dragons.) People are run down by skeletal cavalry wielding polearms, scimitars, and falchions.
• I’ve had visions of retaining my human consciousness after I die, but being trapped within my body. Alone and completely in the dark, I am aware of various insects and vermin consuming me, and my entrails liquefying and draining away… This idea bothers me less than you might think.
• I have visions of a world where gay people are the norm and straights are in the minority. The straights are kept on breeding farms and all they have to do is have sex to continue the human race, while the rest of the population busies itself with the other affairs of human existence. For some reason, straights don’t mind being in the minority.

****THIS JUST IN****
…
I just had a vision of Big Bird sitting on my face and calling me Snuffleupagus.

God I’m weird.

The End is Near

“The end of the world is nigh upon us, brethren! We are closer to the end than you could ever imagine.”

My great-grandmother used to talk about how close we were to the end of the world. She’d heard it all her life. But she died before it ever happened. All my life, I’ve heard all about how the world is supposed to end “any day now.” People have been saying that for years, and you know what? It looks like things are still going pretty much as they always have.

Still, I look around and see signs that maybe, just maybe, we are inching ever-closer to a point beyond which there is no return.

It isn’t that people are any more or less wicked than they’ve always been, nor is it a matter of there being too many or too few people around. It’s not that science has made almost miraculous discoveries in the last century, or that man is now beginning to regularly travel into outer space. It’s not because there are more global disasters these days, nor is it because people have turned away from God. (As a matter of fact, the world population of Christians is at an all-time high.)

None of those things are why I think we might be approaching the Apocalypse. So, you might ask, what is it? What is it that signifies to me that the end of the world might be just around the corner?

Stupidity.

Backyard wrestling, people. This is what bored kids do when there’s only reruns on TV. They go outside hyped up on caffeine and sugar and try to imitate real wrestling, jumping off tables and pounding each other senseless. You see, backyard wrestlers generally do it for real, not fake like the professionals.

Did this “sport” really need to have a video game made about it? The only good thing I can imagine coming from this is that it might possibly prevent these kids from actually wrestling in their backyards and potentially hurting themselves. Maybe they’ll be too glued to their Xboxes to fracture each other’s sternums.

Burning Man, people. Fucking Burning Man. You might think that as an artist, I am sympathetic to the cause of Burning Man enthusiasts, but come on. Naked hippies cavorting in the desert and using their heat exhaustion as creative inspiration. No thanks. Take your art and go to New York like a good little artist, find a nice venue to exhibit your “shocking” new works, and save your “spiritual enlightenment” for the bars of Amsterdam.

The saddest thing is that I bet these are probably some interesting people. They are just terribly, terribly delusional. It’s been my experience that delusional people are the most dangerous, but also the most fun. I guess being around Burning Man fans is like a double-edged sword. Er… maybe a double-edged granola bar.

No.

Just…

No.

OK, these full-size images are really getting me down. I’m going back to thumbnails. Bite me.

Sports fans. Long the subject of ridicule among elitist circles, they are now growing to be mocked by a wider demographic these days. A good friend of mind remarked that “you know, sports are really gay.” Coming from him, that meant a lot. But yes, sports are pretty banal, and diehard sports enthusiasts, the ones who paint their bodies and wear oversized cardboard shapes and/or foam fingers on their hands, are some of the saddest people in all of existence. They work their sad little jobs for their sad little paychecks and honestly look forward to smearing white shoe polish all over their beer bellies and manboobs on Saturday, decked out in fanciful hats and surrounded by people holding homemade signs that are covered with misspellings. All that pomp and circumstance to watch a bunch of those freaky “physically fit people” move some object back and forth across a playing field. The only rationale I can think of is sexual attraction and/or the lust for watered-down beer.

That ended up being sadder than I previously thought. I need a moment.

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…

…

…

Ok, thanks, I’m feeling better now. But not by much. Do you see what I mean about stupidity? I could go on and on, but Lewis Black and Boyd Rice (among others) already base their careers out of misanthropy and I don’t want to cut into their market share. Ignorance, as a whole, is diminished from the old days, but those few remaining pockets out there are much worse than mere misinformation or simple not-knowing. They are notably unreal and potentially more dangerous than any weapon of mass destruction.

Before I wrap up this post, though, I will present to you the most heart-rending thing I’ve ever seen, and the surest sign that ignorance is still flourishing in some places. I just pray they will outgrow their brainwashing.

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The V-Files: Josh vs. Stereotypes

(Commentary: This is a selection of blog posts where I discuss some common stereotypes and/or the degree to which I live up to them. The “Highbrow Intellectualism” post has been updated with some all-new entries for the lists.)

The Life of a Porn Star
(Original Air Date: 12/18/05)

The Interior Decorator Myth
(Original Air Date: 01/08/06)

Gay = Liberal?
(Original Air Date: 02/25/06)

Highbrow Intellectualism?
(Original Air Date: 03/07/06)

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The Life of a Porn Star

Like many gay men, I want the life of a porn star.

It must be thrilling and exciting to be known by one’s screen name, and to establish one’s screen name as a presence in an industry known for its “big names.” How gratifying would it be to hear people asking for your material by name? “Yes, I was looking for Bacchanalia VI… you know, the one with Kurt Loader in it? I heard he’s in this one scene where…”

There is something timeless and wonderful about living on in the imaginations of horny people for years to come. (Pun intended.) When people want to faciliate sweet, sweet carnality, they will think of you, or turn to something that has pictures of you in or on it. A lot of people would remember you better by the shape of your genitals than by your face, and you would be responsible (indirectly, of course) for the orgasms of thousands, if not millions, of people. Talk about making the world a better place than it was when you found it!

Of course, there might be some drawbacks. Normal milk-and-bread runs to the grocery store would have the potential of being mini-occasions in and of themselves, depending on how popular you were. Any kind of public appearance would run the risk of drawing stares, smiles, and concerned parents shielding their children from looking at you. Then there’s the whole bit about getting burned out on sex, being “used up” by the time you hit middle age, and the fact that once you enter porn, there’s no way to go back, and naked pictures of you will remain in the public consciousness forever and ever. Plus, I don’t ever want to think of sex as being something I’d have to do to put a roof over my head. It’s supposed to be enjoyable!

So, hmm. On second thought, I don’t think I want to be a porn star. The rewards are lovely, but the drawbacks are just too much.

But there is the amateur realm… *devilish grin*

PS. Scott Baio mysteriously appeared on the first page of the Google image search for “porn star” when I first wrote this article; that’s why he’s up there. I haven’t quite figured out why he’s a search result, though.

The Interior Decorator Myth

Sometimes I have epiphanies or what I call “a ha!” moments, where a new idea enters my head from out of nowhere and it somehow makes sense. This evening I had one of those “a ha!” moments. It came shortly after quaffing a teacup of English breakfast tea (no joke). (Unfortunately, I was not holding my pinky out at the time, so the metaphor is only partial.)

As you probably know, one of the lasting stereotypes about gay men is their alleged latent mastery of the art of interior design. Christopher Lowell, Bobby Trendy, and the Queer Eye boys (just to name a few) are doing a bang-up job at perpetuating and playing into this stereotype for mass heterosexual consumption.

Of course I don’t actually believe that gay men are better at designing furniture or arranging flowers than any other men; it’s just that most straight men are too insecure in their masculinity to take up such professions, for fear that they will look effeminate or weak. I think that those who are somewhat outside of the sexual/gender status quo, on the other hand, are less likely to shy away from such jobs, because (from my experience) they really don’t care how they are perceived, since they already acknowledge themselves to be different.

All this, however, was not what dawned on me. What actually dawned on me was the distinct possibility that the “interior decorator myth” regarding gay men most likely sprang from none other than Michelangelo Buonarroti. Think about it. His interior decorations, especially in the Sistine Chapel, are among the most famous and beautiful in the world. When you include the fact that other great artists and Renaissance Men like Leonardo da Vinci were also homosexuals, it is easy to see how the stereotype could have gotten started.

I just think that the fact that one of the greatest Catholic landmarks of all time was painted by a homosexual is one of the greatest ironies of modern civilization.

Gay = Liberal?

A common misconception amongst the general public is that being gay implies that one is of a liberal mindset. This is not the case! A person’s bedroom practices have no bearing on their other beliefs and personality traits. There isn’t a “typical gay,” because there are people of all races, ages, backgrounds, and mindsets that have same-sex attractions. There are gay Republicans, gay Democrats, gay Independents, gay Libertarians, gay Communists, gay Socialists… you get the idea.

(There are, for example, the Log Cabin Republicans, probably the biggest and most well-known organization of gays within the Republican party.)

The reason that gays are often dismissed as being liberal is because liberals generally tend to be more accepting of them, and less likely to call for federal regulation of their intimate behavior. The present pocket of neo-cons in the Republican party is tainting the beliefs of classic conservatism, which valued individual freedoms and lack of government interference in private lives. In the minds of these neo-cons, it would be better to create more regulations and expand government in order to dictate a specific kind of morality to America, rather than allowing people the personal freedom to make their own decisions in intimate matters, and allowing another minority to share in some of the cherished civil rights of the majority.

I am often accused of being a liberal, generally because I frown upon the practices of the current Republican party (which has clearly been hijacked and held in thrall by neo-cons). To some, I am a conservative, since I tend to have old-fashioned views about relationships, courtesy, and whatnot. The truth of the matter is that I do not consider myself to be either, but merely a thinking individual. When it comes down to it, I will examine the various stances of the major candidates running in an election, but I will be much more likely to vote for a candidate who advocates full equality for gays, and I will likely vote against any candidate who is against this equality. Political affiliation has little importance to me, and I will ultimately look for substance over labels. In a hypothetical situation, I would probably vote for a pro-gay Republican before I would vote for an antigay Democrat, and I would probably vote for a pro-gay Democrat before I would vote for an antigay Republican.

Life is too short to accept living as a marginalized citizen; this is my most important political issue.

Highbrow Intellectualism?

Nah, I’ll just post this “gay/not gay” thing that my fellow members of the pink squad have been circulating.

I’m probably not gay because:

1. I don’t have a lisp.
2. I don’t have limp wrists.
3. I don’t go to the gym.
4. I don’t mind going a few days without shaving.
5. I’m more inclined to have a Guinness than a cosmopolitan.
6. I like playing first-person shooter games.
7. I like heavy metal (and other dark kinds of music).
8. My hair is not dyed, nor do I have highlights or lowlights.
9. I have no inclination to get anything pierced.
10. I have no pink triangle or rainbow insignias.
11. I don’t own a single pair of Birkenstocks.
12. I could not with certainty name the location of a single glory hole.
13. I’ve never used (and have no interest in using) party drugs.
14. I have very few female friends IRL.
15. I am able to be around guys completely platonically.
16. I am pretty goddamned pale.
17. I never use the words “girl” or “girlfriend” for anything other than their original purpose.
18. I don’t own a single piece of pink clothing.
19. I regularly burp, fart, and scratch myself.
20. I have zero interest in drag.

I’m probably gay because:

1. I often find myself crossing my legs knee-over-knee.
2. I have 5 pillows on my bed (4 regular and 1 body pillow).
3. I do count Brokeback Mountain among my favorite movies.
4. I have a catty sense of humor, and the wit of Oscar Wilde is a source of inspiration for me.
5. I really like the Scissor Sisters. Really.
6. I like to check out men’s packages out in public.
7. I’ve probably seen more gay porn than Fred Phelps.
8. I participated in an LGBT-themed student group while in college.
9. I am very close to my mother and distant toward my father.
10. I am not afraid to hug. (Especially when the recipient has big, beefy barbarian arms.)
11. I support full legal equality for American citizens that are sexually oriented toward their own gender.
12. I am able to provide a pretty thorough analysis of the pros and cons of various substances that can be used as impromptu lubrication.
13. I own a certain kind of toy that I’m pretty sure no straight men own.
14. I actually enjoyed a couple of the songs from Les Miserables.
15. I love practically all electronic music, especially if it’s dancy.
16. I probably know more about Harvey Milk and Harry Hay than the average person.
17. I don’t think there’s anything more beautiful than the male form.
18. I always tried to sneak a peek in the dorm showers.
19. I asked for a shearling coat for Christmas last year primarily because Jake Gyllenhaal wears one in Brokeback Mountain.
20. When I look at the logo for the Brazilian Institute for Oriental Studies, I do not see a pagoda with a red rising sun behind it.

Goodness gracious, just look at it.

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Twenty-Thousand Blips on the Radar

Wow. My page has been loaded 20,000 times. That’s a pretty respectable figure, still far shy of my total at the other place, but I think their numbers over there are sometimes suspect.

I’d like to say thank you to all my readers and well-wishers. I’m not sure what brings you back, but your presence is always welcome.

To those people who never comment: say hello, make yourself known. We have too little time in life to spend it afraid of one another.

Namaste, me hearties!

The V-Files: Prose-Coloured Lenses

(Commentary: Some old creative writing of mine. The untitled piece actually was written on the date in the title, though it was nearly eight months before I posted it. I’ve accumulated many unpublished pieces over the years; I have a large number of writings that go back to 1999. Most will probably never see the light of day.)

Lonely Road of the Pilgrim
(Original Air Date: 12/16/05)

Untitled 4-27-05
(Original Air Date: 12/17/05)

Corpus Christi Autopsy
(Original Air Date: 01/15/06)

Seven Veiled Maidens
(Original Air Date: 03/27/06)

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Lonely Road of the Pilgrim

We saw the sun arching down the purple sky, frosted with clouds like streaking varicose veins. It was on fire, oh it was, it was. It saw a great dearth of concern and lack of imagination upon the earth when it shone its light upon the godless little heathen boys, and then it said ‘phooey, enough of this,’ and it started its plummet into the sea, far from heathen boys and abusive girls, far from the storm of red lights and rainstorms, when purity sought to remain dry beneath the flowing limbs of the weeping willow. It’s a great tragedy, say the pundits and the philosophers, it’s a real fucking shame that all there is left in the sky to keep us warm are billions of billions of stars, each of them so cold and distant that to put your arms around that one special person would provide more warmth (contrary to popular belief). The heathen boys and the abusive girls note that it gets warmer before it gets colder, and dermatological disasters are the least of all our worries, especially in this age of Revlon and revisionism.

These khaki dreams lasted a lifetime, noted one heathen boy. His name was August, which was somewhat of an unusual name, given his generally lackluster enthusiasm towards all things not involving sex, rum, or Ernest Hemingway. The suicidal ones always got his fancy, got his juice going, and he couldn’t explain it. He pondered all this as he watched that great fiery ball plummet towards the ocean, scouring the earth with raw heat like that summer backseat adventure, sweaty leather and lathered thighs, graciously blushing and rubberized tendencies allowed to drip through for conspiratorial efforts to chain him, August oh August, to that shitty little town where the pugilists bugger the interior decorators simply because there isn’t anything better to do. Without the sun, now, there really won’t be anything better to do.

How can we understand the infinite cosmos when, rather than crashing into the sun, the sun was crashing into us? How can we see the piles of hair that formed below Samson’s head as Delilah did her best for her god, giving him her all, in the service of lust and gracious earnings and that ever-so-respectable goal of selling insurance to acolytes and neophytes who refuse to place their trust in anything with dividend returns lower than 110%. The old goat would watch the hair pile up and think, ‘oh how I wish it was me in his place, being shorn and receiving fantastic blowjobs in return for this lowered sense of religiosity. The shorthairs are always the most evil, you know. Blind and evil, and they always get the greatest sex from the dark-eyed beauties.’ The goat thought all about this before it was dragged away by the mink cartel, and its saddened, lust-filled eyes stared into a sky whose sun had already started to loosen itself from its cusp.

The paperwork dolls fancied up their hair and cast an awkward glance toward the west, toward that holy land that they would never see. How the bits of wood could be aligned in one way to channel the Most High, and yet aligned in some other way to channel its opposite, that hippy symbol of peace and starvation and forfeited Supreme Court chances. They considered the futility of idol worship from the comfort of their Beamers, sipping on kiwi smoothies and checking out the smooth kiwis of the dancers on Broadway. With the artificial glow of Plastic Town, Radiation Lizard-King City-State, they hardly noticed when their Rising Sun arose no more.

In a darkened cloister 500 miles from everywhere, some sort of thing was congealing into a chair not far from a well-made oaken desk. What more can be said, thought the scientist in attendance, to such an amorphous being on such an amorphous quest? There is no doubt that sentient mechanisms could easily overturn this wrought-iron decision, but metal will not stand against metal; it is simply a matter of force, chance, and the innermost alignment of the girl on the 33rd street. When the thing finally congealed into the soft, cushy leather chair in front of the desk, the scientist took his uranium tongs and extracted the ever-loving spleen from the ever-loving creature. Such things must be prevented, and science shall not be stopped from completing its task. It was a dying curse, through tentacled screams and gargling chaos, through eye-filled monstrosities and heartfelt moments of genocide, when some machines would start pumping bile and others would stop pumping guile, and the conveyor would carry life away down the line and bring forth strife into the center of the factory. Some exhaust clouds rose down, out of the black heavens of yesterday-neverwhere, and surrounded the sun, and the sun gagged.

We shall cut off the parts that don’t fit so that the whole may fit properly. Excess parts can be shoved in the chute and dropped into the nail-holes created when we ripped the awning from the stuccoed facade. Did you know that concrete could be used to destroy procreative dreams? This was the question the guilty man thought about while they smashed his balls with cinderblocks. They don’t work anymore, so we might as well cut them off. ‘Mmmmm,’ she smiled and polished her ruby-red nails in the light of a dying sun, ‘my very own gelding, to humiliate for Horus and my bride.’ Her fantasies repeated the same scene over and over again, of smashed testicles and his bearded face upturned in agony. This is retribution! This is how we do it in the Big Town. Brown rice and ecstasy for all the poor starving children, and we’ll make geldings of the businessmen who desire such a fate, or who deserve such desires. This was part of the reason the sun wanted to extinguish itself, but no one cared enough to stop, or even slow down.

The vignettes would never end, should the sins and the trespasses of the heathen boys and the abusive girls continue in this manner. The grim-faced traveler, saddened by the inevitable darkness that comes when light turns away in despair, knew all this, yet continued to listen for another hundred years before doing anything about it. The sun had already begun to fall, and the world continued in its own way, with two-headed dogs destroying their own DNA and all the rebellions taking place to quiet the rebellions that were being planned. A million monsters were never born, and the loudmouthed poison oak of God complained the whole time. A million guns were never destroyed, and the open sores of Azazel wept a sort of artificial sentiment before busying themselves with burrowing deeper into the scapegoat.

The sun was not a large ball of fire, but a small shining jewel reflecting the light of mankind back onto itself. When the light of mankind died, so did the sun, and it fell to earth, like feces falling into a toilet bowl. The traveler stood from his barstool, left a generous tip to the seven-headed barkeep, then left to wander in the darkness, looking for the last glimmer of the fading jewel. His was a lonely road toward a Mecca that no one sought, which was just as well since it did not exist. Seems everyone knew this but him.

Untitled 4-27-05

Blind by the taste, touch, and scent of the perpetual state.

It caters to that basest need,
That need for gratification,
By constantly tonguing the soreness in the soul,
Licking around the debris and tasting your rank savor.

The times pass like dead men on interstates
Driving from cemetery to cemetery
In a shambling void, from a slightly smaller void,
Into infinite bleakness with pink and green overtones.

After all the years and the powers spent racking and hacking into my soul, it seems that the true dawn, the irretrievable loss, will still occasionally make itself present. We remember the old feelings when we first learned the terrible truth of falling upwards and shattering the chalices. We knew all the secrets, the ripe secrets that bled and stank. We hated their secrets and their whispers, for we knew what comes of the dreaded ones.

One cannot possibly conceive of the greatness that lurks behind the mask of change.

It was as if a blind woman were tending to a wounded deer,
Entirely out of her league but with a good heart,
The wildebeest fighting for its life, with every intention to rut with something unlike
The present captive marauder.

Fear is laid low and buried in the silt of spiteful sputtering sparkles…
All that remains is a sort of hollow ache, the last remnants of exploded possibilities,
When healing was desired before the reclassification of the disease into non-disease,
Into something not covered by this slimy insurance policy…

We love our goals now, instead,
We love the things we would never allow in the past.
That which was mocked is now defrocked
And that which was lame is now to blame.

This is evolution, oh God of Hosts,
And the seraphim lift Darwin’s spleen to heaven,
Where it is adorned by the sanctimonious fishers of men and beast,
Seeking to glut their appetite on the unsuspecting
To secure the territory and the right to piss on the vegetation for themselves.

In a great warehouse or whorehouse of some noticeable karma
A great pile of crucifixes grows greater and greater…
And have they been cast aside by the cast-aside,
Or is this the armament of those who damn Darwin but espouse his treatment of others?
The ceaseless quiet machinery watches all, creaks onward, wrapped in jagged love.

Corpus Christi Autopsy

A woman, with taut hair and ample makeup, once approached me and said: “I have seen you. I have seen your kind, more and more, declaring that you have found the Secret, that you know the Truth about Our Salvation, and that it has set you free. This is a lie, because you cannot possibly know such divine truths. You have not been transformed, for you still wear the vestiges of sinful living! You clearly violate the laws of God, proclaiming that you have surpassed them, and that you know God now, and this cannot be. It is clear that you are a demon or a devil, here in our midst to lead us astray and have us all believe in false doctrine, ensuring our damnation. You have perverted the Word, and you represent the gravest wound in the Body of Christ.”

I turned to address her and said, “My gracious judge, thank God that you are not also my executioner! My life is offensive to you, for I have attained something you do not have, nor can ever possess. The secret is in plain sight, dear woman, but you have sewn your eyes shut and refuse to see those truths that would baptize you with fire and upset your order, as Christ upset the tables of the moneychangers. Every man beholds God through his eyes alone; even so, God will only show some truths to some people. Yes, I am a wound in the Body of Christ, in the body you perceive through your willfully blind eyes. But just as I am a wound, you are a maggot feasting in that wound, consuming the very Goodness of God Himself and excreting only malodorous hatred.”

Seven Veiled Maidens

Seven veiled maidens sat upon the plain, the body of the slain one several miles away.

“Peter,” said the first, “will not be missed.”

You knew how Peter was, that old demon. First he denied the Father, then he denied the Son, then he denied the Holy Spirit ere the Beast began his daily roar. He was fond of all the punishments, oh yes he was. The punishments of self and others, but most especially the self. Entire epochs he defined through the roads of his own suffering, and like a glutton he poured on the vermillion roux of self-loathing.

“I fear these changing times,” said the second, “when the dead do not really die, even when they should.”

It was not a surprising war, but it was hardly inevitable. Tiny changes over time amount to movements that no man can predict. To the untrained eye, it was little more than a minor catastrophe. To the untrained ear, it was the sound of machines taken to their logical conclusion. To the wise, however, the flying gears and sputtering sparks told a different story, a tale of betrayal and of loving too deeply the things that hurt us most.

The third scratched her chin and stared into the sky. Through her veil, the sun’s rays bore down a little less heavily, and her eyes only began to water a good while later. However, this water was the outpouring of her heart rather than overexposure to the light. She made not a sound as she sobbed for the future.

Had any historians survived, they would have eagerly recounted the true birth of this nightmare. They would have confessed that the balance was overturned on the day that men found they could use swords as keys. Some of the more esoteric leaders of the community, had they still been living, would have added that every door opens upon a different vista depending upon the means with which it was unlocked.

The fourth, who was called Maylene, said: “There is no place for us to go anymore, since all our roads have been destroyed. Our bodies may move from this location, but our spirit is trapped here on this brown earth, amidst the thistles and the parched grass. There is no one left to care for widows, nor any way to wash our hands.”

Indeed, there were no contingencies left for any of the factions of reality. Through tentacled terror or sheer entropic delirium, the very paint upon the fresco of the third dimension washed away, as if being cleaned by some diabolical pressure washer from a perfectly sterile, perfectly insane dimension. Peter saw to all this, oh yes he did. But feeble revenge is of little import when entire galaxies are engulfed by…………….
by hyperdimensional decomposers.

“We don’t need them,” said the fifth, “as they obviously never needed us. Why do we mourn? As you may recall, our mourning began long before we had a reason to feel anything.”

A dragonfly buzzed around the heads of the seven veiled maidens and reminded them of an air raid, of the type they used to show on late-night telly. The grass was sharp and uncomfortable to sit upon; their black dresses did little to shield their bodies from the prickliness of nature’s phantom limbs. The sun was dull white like phosphorus through gray lenses, and the sky was a brilliant urine yellow.

The sixth reached into the delicate folds of her once-glorious dress and pulled out the final remnants that she had purloined before the controllers had set the seven loose. In her wizened hands, she held a crayon, a small crucifix, a small tin whistle, a grenade pin, and an empty condom wrapper. In her endlessly toiling mind, she envisioned each of these to become relics of the New Earth, symbols of Old Man’s culture, and each of which would receive its own shrine to last outside the boundaries of time and space.

What a sad and strange world, where symmetry was damned and all counterweights destroyed. The black dam was constructed by the hordes of Peter to hold back the swell of humanity’s imagination, and none of the maidens could say whether it was the flood on one side or the drought on the other that had invited the end of the world. Perhaps it was neither of these, but some other portent, some other three-headed snake or twelve-hooved oxen that had shaken the pillars out from under the temple. All the fingers pointed at all the souls, but each soul devoured the fingers of the other, until all were left flailing about in the wasted world with mangled limbs, drowning in bilious and fetid imaginings.

The seventh held the head of the first in her lap and sang to her a song of dreaming, even though none of the seven really felt like sleeping. The song was artificially sweet, for those of their generation and their dimension had never encountered the taste of true sweetness, or the taste of true anything for that matter.

As night fell, the seven veiled maidens disappeared into suffocating darkness, and by the break of the next day, they were nowhere to be found.

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The Feud is Over

I can at last declare that my long-standing feud with my previous blogging residence is now over. The old site has been deleted, which is all I’ve been asking for all along. I’m so happy I could spit.

I am currently debating whether or not to continue the V-Files. It would be nice to close that chapter of my creative life completely. Plus, people for the most part seem not to give a shit about the V-Files, since it’s old recycled posts anyway. We’ll see.

I am also torn about what to do about all my old acquaintances and friends I had at the old place. There are some genuinely great people over there, like Aaron (lunarhunk) without whose help I would not have been able to end the feud. I would like to speak with them all again, but I just don’t know about creating another account… since that’s the prerequisite to comment on the blogs over there.

I must meditate on this most positive turn of events and decide what my next course of action should be.

The V-Files: Queer Politics

(Commentary: On the old blog, I would often post my political and philosophical views on sexuality; this series is a collection of some of my favorite posts in this vein. It is very difficult (if not impossible) for me to separate religion from such discussions, especially since such a large amount of LGBT current events is driven by religious campaigns these days.)

Are There Any Queers In The Seminary Tonight?
(Original Air Date: 09/19/05)

Gay Marriage Is In Fact Traditional
(Original Air Date: 10/03/05)

Intolerant of Intolerance?
(Original Air Date: 10/10/05)

Heterosexuality = Immorality
(Original Air Date: 03/18/06)

Two Angels Discuss Human Sexuality
(Original Air Date: 04/14/06)

~~~~~~~

Are There Any Queers In The Seminary Tonight?

That question almost certainly begs a tasteless joke, and even though ordinarily I’d be just the person to provide such a joke, I’m too pissed to be joking right now.

The Catholic Church has decided to address its sex abuse problem by going around to 229 seminaries and investigating its prospective priests. However, do you think they might look for, oh I dunno… signs of pedophilia? NO. They are not seeking out evidence of pedophilia among the ranks of the prospective priests.

They are seeking out evidence of homosexuality among the priests.

It is an insult and entirely untrue to correlate homosexuality with pedophilia. It plays into 1950’s stereotypes of gay men as perverts who “recruit” children into their ranks. The Catholic Church cites the statistics that 81% of the abuse victims were boys. Why the hell is that indicative of anything?! It is the Catholic Church itself that excludes girls from working for the church! Pedophiles will work their evil on whatever children they have… and what they had was mostly boys, which is directly due to the Church’s own regulations over the roles girls can play in the Church. In other words, the altar boys are a lot more convenient than the altar boys’ sisters that are at home.

This is a witchhunt, and is simply a convenient excuse for the Church to round up all the gays in its ranks and force them out. It’s something they’ve been wanting to do for years, but now the abuse scandal gives them a pretext under which to do so. Why not round up all the pedophiles and force them out? I’ll tell you why. There are far more gay men in the Church than pedophiles, and the Catholic Church is more concerned about removing “the greater evil” right now. And, if any of the gay men should happen to be pedophiles, then that’s just a happy little coincidence that might make all those maladjusted abuse victims happy. And even better… if any of the pedophiles should happen to be gay, then you can bet your frilly, lacy robe that every anti-gay person, from the Pope to Jerry Falwell to Fred Phelps to fucking Exodus International, will say “See, it’s true that gays are perverts! They don’t need the same rights as us! They don’t need to be married!” etc. etc. And they would be happy, nay, delighted to deny the rights (and the very humanity) of 99.99% of the gay population when 0.01% of that population are perverts.

Yes, I am aware that the actual number of perverts among homosexuals is likely higher than 0.01%; it’s higher than that among heterosexuals, even. But it’s still a tiny minority, and you cannot honestly be fair to a group of people by judging them on what a minority of their members do. You straight people… would you want the world to think that you were all fond of scat, just because a small group of men enjoy having women shit on their faces?

If you want to see where the perversion amongst the Catholic priests comes from, try looking to enforced celibacy. It’s unnatural and unhealthy to deprive someone of sexual expression, and it seems likely that it would warp one’s mind in all sorts of terrible ways. If you’re wondering why 81% of the victims are males, don’t blame it on gay priests. Blame it on the disproportionate number of boys in the church compared to the number of girls.

Gay Marriage Is In Fact Traditional

Below is an excellent article that I found here. Those who claim that gay marriage is a “fad” or “goes against God’s plan” would do well to read this article carefully. For more information on this subject, see also John Boswell’s Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.

***********************

St. Serge & St. Bacchus:
When Marriage Between Gays Was a Rite

Jim Duffy

A Kiev art museum contains a curious icon from St. Catherine’s monastery on Mt. Sinai. It shows two robed Christian saints. Between them is a traditional Roman pronubus (best man) overseeing what in a standard Roman icon would be the wedding of a husband and wife. In the icon, Christ is the pronubus. Only one thing is unusual. The “husband and wife” are in fact two men.

Is the icon suggesting that a homosexual “marriage” is one sanctified by Christ? The very idea seems initially shocking. The full answer comes from other sources about the two men featured, St. Serge and St. Bacchus, two Roman soldiers who became Christian martyrs.

While the pairing of saints, particularly in the early church, was not unusual, the association of these two men was regarded as particularly close. Severus of Antioch in the sixth century explained that “we should not separate in speech [Serge and Bacchus] who were joined in life”. More bluntly, in the definitive 10th century Greek account of their lives, St. Serge is openly described as the “sweet companion and lover” of St. Bacchus.

In other words, it confirms what the earlier icon implies, that they were a homosexual couple. Their orientation and relationship was openly accepted by early Christian writers. Furthermore, in an image that to some modern Christian eyes might border on blasphemy, the icon has Christ himself as their pronubus, their best man overseeing their “marriage”.

The very idea of a Christian homosexual marriage seems incredible. Yet after a twelve year search of Catholic and Orthodox church archives Yale history professor John Boswell has discovered that a type of Christian homosexual “marriage” did exist as late as the 18th century.

Contrary to myth, Christianity’s concept of marriage has not been set in stone since the days of Christ, but has evolved as a concept and as a ritual.

Professor Boswell discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient church liturgical documents (and clearly separate from other types of non-marital blessings of adopted children or land) were ceremonies called, among other titles, the “Office of Same Sex Union” (10th and 11th century Greek) or the “Order for Uniting Two Men” (11th and 12th century).

These ceremonies had all the contemporary symbols of a marriage: a community gathered in a church, a blessing of the couple before the altar, their right hands joined as at heterosexual marriages, the participation of a priest, the taking of the Eucharist, a wedding banquet afterwards. All of which are shown in contemporary drawings of the same sex union of Byzantine Emperor Basil I (867-886) and his companion John. Such homosexual unions also took place in Ireland in the late 12th / early 13th century, as the chronicler Gerald of Wales (Geraldus Cambrensis) has recorded.

Unions in Pre-Modern Europe lists in detail some same sex union ceremonies found in ancient church liturgical documents. One Greek 13th century “Order for Solemnisation of Same Sex Union”, having invoked St. Serge and St. Bacchus, called on God to “vouchsafe unto these Thy servants [N and N] grace to love another and to abide unhated and not cause of scandal all the days of their lives, with the help of the Holy Mother of God and all Thy saints”. The ceremony concludes: “And they shall kiss the Holy Gospel and each other, and it shall be concluded”.

Another 14th century Serbian Slavonic “Office of the Same Sex Union”, uniting two men or two women, had the couple having their right hands laid on the Gospel while having a cross placed in their left hands. Having kissed the Gospel, the couple were then required to kiss each other, after which the priest, having raised up the Eucharist, would give them both communion.

Boswell found records of same sex unions in such diverse archives as those in the Vatican, in St. Petersburg, in Paris, Istanbul, and in Sinai, covering a period from the 8th to 18th centuries. Nor is he the first to make such a discovery. The Dominican Jacques Goar (1601-1653) includes such ceremonies in a printed collection of Greek prayer books.

While homosexuality was technically illegal from late Roman times, it was only from about the 14th century that antihomosexual feelings swept western Europe. Yet same sex unions continued to take place.

At St. John Lateran in Rome (traditionally the Pope’s parish church) in 1578 a many as 13 couples were “married” at Mass with the apparent cooperation of the local clergy, “taking communion together, using the same nuptial Scripture, after which they slept and ate together”, according to a contemporary report.

Another woman to woman union is recorded in Dalmatia in the 18th century. Many questionable historical claims about the church have been made by some recent writers in this newspaper.

Boswell’s academic study however is so well researched and sourced as to pose fundamental questions for both modern church leaders and heterosexual Christians about their attitudes towards homosexuality.

For the Church to ignore the evidence in its own archives would be a cowardly cop-out. The evidence shows convincingly that what the modern church claims has been its constant unchanging attitude towards homosexuality is in fact nothing of the sort.

It proves that for much of the last two millennia, in parish churches and cathedrals throughout Christendom from Ireland to Istanbul and in the heart of Rome itself, homosexual relationships were accepted as valid expressions of a God-given ability to love and commit to another person, a love that could be celebrated, honoured and blessed both in the name of, and through the Eucharist in the presence of Jesus Christ.

Reprinted from:

Liberated Christians
PO Box 32835, Phoenix Az 85064-2835
Promoting Intimacy and Other-Centered Sexuality
http://www.libchrist.com

Intolerant of Intolerance?

The true mental acuity of some conservatives is apparent when they claim that liberals are automatically accepting of everyone, which they are not. Whenever civil rights come into discussion, they inevitably whine, “That’s not fair! You’re not being tolerant of intolerance!” Then they deliver the (shocking!) parting shot of calling liberals hypocrites, then they go off to their closets and pray to God that liberals will just go away.

Let me give you an analogy, since Jesus spoke in parables and most of the intolerant people seem to be quite fond of Him.

Let’s say there is a certain restaurant that was owned and operated by a husband and wife. The husband wanted to get a salad bar for the place, but the wife was opposed (“who needs change?”). But, being the good woman who is obedient to her husband (see I Peter 3:1-2), she relented and allowed him to install a salad bar.

Well, once the bar itself was in place, there came the question of what to put on the bar. The man and his wife began to ask their clientele what kinds of things people would like to see on the bar, and they recorded all these things in a long list. Well, the husband had to go out of town on business, and so he said to his wife, “I’m going to be away for a week. I trust your judgment in stocking the salad bar. Here’s the list, look it over and try to please as many people as you can.” Then the husband left.

Well, the woman was still bitter about having the salad bar at all, and so she decided she would show her husband what a stupid idea it was to install it. She went down the list and got everything that had been requested–no matter how obscure. There were the usual salad things (lettuce, carrots, broccoli, cheese, etc.), a few special requests (macaroni salad, Greek olives, chilled shrimp, etc.), and a few unusual requests (fried okra, orange marmalade, Vienna sausages, etc.). The woman hated having to order all these foods or begin procuring them from the grocery store, but she did so in spite of herself. However, once every item on the list had been added to the salad bar, she then took a bucket to a pet shop and made a very special request that a well-traveled gentlemen had jokingly told the couple about, while they were compiling their list.

When the husband arrived the next week, he was surprised to see that there were no people in the restaurant. He went inside, and his wife was sitting there filing her nails and looking smug. He asked where the people were, and she said “Well… they didn’t care much for the salad bar. I told you it was a stupid idea.”

The man walked over to the salad bar and took a look. Sure enough, everything that had been on the list was there, but… what was this? There, in the middle of all the other toppings, was a chilled bucket that contained centipedes, roaches, earthworms, and some other, unidentifiable vermin. The man felt the bile rise in his throat, and he turned away for a moment.

“What the hell is that?!” he asked. The woman replied, “Well, you always say we should try to please as many people as we can… and, remember that old guy who came in here the other day, talking about how they eat bugs in some remote villages in South America? I thought, well, since we’re trying to please everyone, we might as well try to please them too, just in case they ever come by the restaurant. I was just trying to be multicultural, John.” Then she smirked.

“Are you CRAZY?!” he said. “Look, they’re crawling out of the bucket and crawling all over everything else! There’s centipedes in the cauliflower, look!” The woman didn’t seem to care, and she just kept filing her nails.

The business was ruined financially, because some disgusted clientele that had visited the restaurant while the husband was gone had contacted the Board of Health, and they shut down the restaurant immediately. The man, shocked that his wife could be so petty and vindictive, filed for a divorce and found a new business partner.

The business reopened after six months of cleaning and exhaustive remodeling, and vermin was nowhere on the salad bar, or the menu. When the restaurant reopened, the people who remembered the old salad bar immediately went to inspect the new one… and were pleased that the filth was gone. Everything else that had ever been requested was back, and the salad bar became the top-selling item at the restaurant.

So… while the salad bar was not exhaustive in the wife’s sense of the term, it was complete to everyone else’s satisfaction. And, you know what? No one ever came in the restaurant requesting roaches on the salad bar.

***********************

I hope you understand the moral of the story.

Heterosexuality = Immorality

I am aware that this will be an unpopular opinion, but straights must be converted or stopped in some other way, because they are inherently corrupt and morally bankrupt. The biased media hides this fact… because they have been infiltrated by heterosexuals! Many religions talk about the evils of heterosexuality, but let’s look at some of the facts.

-. Exploding birthrates are an ever-present problem among heterosexual communities, due to lack of safe sexual practices and encouragement by antisocial causes to “be fruitful and multiply,” worsening the problem. In places like Africa where heterosexuality is rampant, heterosexuals are regularly causing outbreaks of famine, spreading even to non-straight members of society. Paying for food for all these people is a drain on local and government economies.

-. Warfare is almost exclusively the domain of the heterosexual. The overwhelming majority of deaths caused over the years in all wars were due to straight-on-straight violence. This points to the inherent self-destructive nature of the lifestyle. Often, innocent non-straights get caught up in the hostilities, as the blind rage of the heterosexual knows no bounds. Nearly all misguided politicians, dictators, and other heads of state, including Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Lenin, Vlad the Impaler, Ivan the Terrible, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jong Il, are heterosexuals. Terrorists (including all the 9/11 hijackers) are also overwhelmingly straight.

-. More proof of the inherently violent and self-destructive straight lifestyle is the fact that the vast majority of crime is committed by straights. Everything from petty theft to date rape to involvement in gang activity is far, far more likely to be committed by a maladjusted heterosexual than a non-straight. It is as though some moral compass in their brains is absent.

-. Many heterosexuals argue that they were born that way, that it is “natural,” and that “God made them the way He wanted them.” However, no “straight gene” has been isolated, and evidence points to widespread indoctrination in popular media as being the most likely source of the current pandemic of heterosexuality. In movies, soap operas, novels, and other cultural sources, young impressionable youth are being taught that it’s “great to be straight” and are regularly shown scenes of heterosexual intimacy between people of a young age. From the beginning, our children are being exposed to the trappings of the straight lifestyle, sometimes subliminally and sometimes overtly.

The very word straight masks the true depravity of opposing gender fetishism. Dr. Richard Cox has been studying opposing gender fetishism for 15 years, at Healing Hearts and Healing Minds, a faith-based think tank dedicated to finding ways to successfully cure people of undesired heterosexuality.

“The negative impact that heterosexuals have had on all civilized societies in the history of mankind cannot be overstated,” says Cox, who has been happily married to his partner Peter for two decades. “Without ‘the straight factor,’ many of the worst tragedies of history, like the Rape of Nanking and mass famines of communist China, would not have taken place.” Cox believes that through prayer, earnest effort, and mild electroshock therapy, heterosexuals can be cured of their opposing gender fetishism and be restored to healthy same-sex attractions.

Opposing gender fetishism, according to Healing Hearts and Healing Minds, is a perversion of normal human sexuality that introduces self-loathing into the psyche. By being sexually attracted to people who are different from them, heterosexuals internalize low self-esteem and dissatisfaction with the sexuality of their own bodies. In other words, when a man lusts after a woman, he is inadvertently denying his own body by looking outside himself for his sexual satisfaction. The body was meant to enjoy itself, but heterosexuals avoid all semblance of appreciation of bodies similar to their own.

“The heterosexual should be pitied more than hated,” says Maria Bachs, a graduate student working at Healing Hearts and Healing Minds. “Many of them honestly believe that they cannot change, but this is simply a lie that our permissive society has implanted. Here, we show people that they don’t have to be straight, and that change, real and meaningful change, is possible. Sure, it’s not easy, and opposing gender fetishism never really goes away completely, but we can help people control those urges and learn to try to enjoy normal same-sex intimacy.” Bachs is currently working with other graduate students on a program entitled “Finding Your Inner Queer,” a program that will strategically place trained psychologists at sporting events, livestock trade shows, and other known locations where heterosexuals are known to commonly congregate.

“We expect we’ll meet some opposition,” says Bachs, noting that the APA denounces all attempts at changing an individual’s sexuality. “However, we don’t place any stock in the positions of the APA, because if you take a look at its members, you will see that they are overwhelmingly heterosexual.”

“It’s part of the heterosexual agenda,” says Dr. Cox. “First, they indoctrinate our youth and lead them away from their inborn same-sex attractions. Then, once they’ve amassed their army of straights, our society will truly suffer under their rampant decadence, blatant hedonism, and general irresponsibility.” The end result? A global catastrophe the likes of which the world has never known.

Please, if you have any friends or loved ones who you feel might be at risk for being lured into the heterosexual lifestyle, make it clear to them: it’s not great to be straight. There’s nothing “straight” about it.

Two Angels Discuss Human Sexuality

ANGEL 1: Tell me about human sexuality.

ANGEL 2: In the beginning, God had a plan for all of those who would be His children. He made some people to be attracted to their opposites, in order to produce new generations and populate the world. And he made other people to be attracted to their same kind, to fulfill other roles.

ANGEL 1: Does God not want everyone to have children?

ANGEL 2: God wants humanity to prosper and enjoy the creation He has made, and God’s plan includes every human being contributing in some way. Those who unite with their opposites, they shall be the majority and shall perpetuate humanity. Those who unite with their similars, however, theirs is a special role. To them is entrusted a supporting and helpful role in the plan, in aiding the community, caring for the next generation, and helping preserve humanity’s legacy for posterity.

ANGEL 1: But do the Scriptures not say that such attractions are sinful?

ANGEL 2: The attractions themselves are not sinful, but can open the door to all manner of sinful and destructive behavior. But that is true of any kind of human attraction. The admonishments in the old laws were based on a desire to see humanity perpetuated to the next generation; this desire was corrupted by evil forces seeking to pervert God’s plan, and the elders forgot the helpful role that those of the symmetrical love can play.

ANGEL 1: And yet so much evil is wrought against such people, by those claiming to do the work of God.

ANGEL 2: The Evil One has been successful into leading people away from the truth, but fortunately things are changing.

ANGEL 1: So how does God actually feel about some of His people making pariahs out of these others who have a different sort of love?

ANGEL 2: God foresaw that the minds of some people would be shadowed by fear and hatred, and so he designed humanity to spite the notion that either opposite-type or same-type attraction was superior to the other. The very physical structure of the human body is proof that God loves people of both attractions.

ANGEL 1: I do not understand… doesn’t the structure of the human body illustrate a design for unions of opposing body types?

ANGEL 2: It does. But it also illustrates a design for unions of the same body types.

ANGEL 1: How so?

ANGEL 2: In His infinite wisdom, God placed the prostate inside of males and the clitoris outside of females. Thus, both sexes are receptive to pleasure from their loved ones both internally and externally.

ANGEL 1: How wonderful is our God!

ANGEL 2: Verily.

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The V-Files: The Hollow Souls

(Commentary: This is a collection of posts that deal with one of my favorite themes: fundamentalist Christians and their overall impact on my life up to this point. I find it of utmost importance that my friends and family understand where it is I come from; that way they may have a better understanding of where I am now and my outlook on life. The text of some of these posts has been changed somewhat to represent my current beliefs.)

I Missed Something
(Original Air Date: 08/28/05)

An Exodus of Christians
(Original Air Date: 10/19/05)

Former Conservative…
(Original Air Date: 12/19/05)

The Decade of Denial
(Original Air Date: 01/05/06)

What I Traded
(Original Air Date: 01/11/06)

~~~~~~~

I Missed Something

Somewhere along the line I missed something. I am fairly well-versed in the ways of Christianity, yet I never remember hearing anywhere that Jesus wanted us to hoard guns to defend our homeland. Was it in a memo somewhere? Surely to goodness the modern conservative movement isn’t getting their information from Apocryphal Gospels or anything other than the 1611 King James Version?! And I’m no history major, but I don’t recall Jesus ever telling the disciples to stockpile weapons of any kind, other than the spiritual weapons of God Himself (Ephesians 6:13-6:17). Those verses, in fact, name only one weapon, that being the word of God.

If someone would be so kind as to straighten me out, to show me that my belief that Jesus wanted us to pray for our enemies rather than prey on them is completely wrong, I would be most appreciative. I mean, really… someone in the GOP apparently knows something about Scripture that most theologians are missing. (Well, the theologians that did not go to Liberty University, anyway.) I know Jesus said he came to throw fire on the world, but gunfire? Come on.

An Exodus of Christians

Behold, a very special kind of insanity: Christian Exodus.

With a tag line of “Come Out of Her, My People,” you know this is going to be an amusing read. As it turns out, there is a group of Christians that are totally pissed off about the government’s non-anger involving abortion and sodomy (among other things), and, seeing as how 7 of the Supreme Court justices were supposedly “Republican” but let the country get this way, this exasperated group of souls has said “enough is enough!” They are promoting that Christians all move to South Carolina (I shit you not) and flee from the ungodly in the other states. Isn’t that precious?

Their “big idea” is that they will start with the state of South Carolina, “redeem” it via getting anti-gay, anti-choice, pro-indoctrination legislation passed, and then move like a pack of locusts to some other state to do the same thing, until the entire country is “redeemed” via a more concentrated (albeit nomadic) Christian population in strategic locations. Again I say, isn’t that precious?

I guess these people don’t realize that as soon as they move, the heatherns who are mainstream America will be left to undo their handiwork… most likely gleefully. I certainly don’t see this group bolstering the ranks of Christianity by proclaiming the hallmarks of the religion not to be peace and love, but of tactical relocation to promote fundamentalist legislation and hatred of people who think differently.

I’d go out on a limb here and guess that these people most likely feel that the King James Version is the only authoritative translation of the Bible… and that all others are directly from Satan in order to confuse the masses. But that’s the topic of a different post…

Anyway, the website reveals all sorts of precious gems, such as the fact that they are all members of the Constitution Party, a conservative party that considers John McCain to be of the same level of decadent liberalism as, well… whoever it is that the Republicans are accusing of decadent liberalism these days. The website takes a hilarious twist when the possibility of secession is brought up, with the members of Christian Exodus strongly hinting that, if their “conquer the states one at a time” strategy doesn’t pan out, then they could always just stay in South Carolina and secede to form a godly nation. Civil War II, anyone? Of course the most amusing thing of all is that they have made a conscious effort to not refer to the last Civil War as such, instead calling it by the classic Southern apologist title “The War of Northern Aggression.” When I saw that phrase, I immediately knew the full measure of these people’s beliefs and heritage. I’d be willing to put money on the statement that most of the people in this movement are probably natives of South Carolina, and they’re just looking for people to move there to help them pass their legislation (and fend off the gubmint, if necessary).

Can you imagine South Carolina seceding from the union in the next few years, over whether or not the government cares what you do to your body? In this day and age? Actually, I can imagine such a thing, and it’s really not so bad. In fact, I’d be willing to sacrifice South Carolina if it meant that the fundamentalists would be leaving other states. I’m sorry Myrtle Beach, but I hope you understand. If they’re going to volunteer to move out of the rest of the states and get out of everyone else’s hair, then more power to them. Forty-nine more reasonable states are better than fifty states with a smattering of crazies all over them.

Former Conservative…

I was not always the open-minded, “equal rights for all,” ignorance-fighting, help-the-unfortunate type that I am now.

No, I used to be conservative.

Historically, my family has been consistently conservative, with relatively few exceptions. Tradition always figured prominently in my family, and that is in regards to religion, politics, familial customs, and every other thing you could think of. There were few “ground breakers” in my family, because there was really no need. We were all lower-middle to middle-class, and everyone eked out a living that was decent enough to maintain throughout a lifetime. Sure, we had dreams of winning the lottery or getting an inheritance from some rich relative (what conservative doesn’t look around for such inheritances), but that never happened.

I was raised in a small Freewill Baptist church that had a steady attendance of 30-40 people for each service, slightly less on Wednesday and Sunday evenings. From an early age, I was indoctrinated in Christian values… or at least the values of the preacher. I tried to conduct my life according to the strict moral codes so valued by fundamentalist Baptists; I didn’t drink, smoke, do drugs, “fornicate,” get any piercings, grow my hair long, get any tattoos, grow any provocative facial hair (in keeping with the commandment to not “mar the corners of my beard” as described in Leviticus, something the pastor liked to preach on), say “bad words,” or ever question authority.

As such, when I entered puberty, I became a neurotic, highly repressed teenager. I was so obsessed with the things I couldn’t do, that I began to feel a deep-seated hatred and loathing for people who didn’t seem to care about the Biblical proscriptions against, well, about anything that didn’t involve God or Jesus somehow. If I saw a guy with earrings, I would feel anger welling up inside me, anger that this person could be so ignorant as to get earrings when it clearly says in the Bible that men shouldn’t have earrings.

Maybe.

See, that was the trouble. It became difficult to tell the difference between what the Bible actually said and what was just the personal opinion of the pastor. I didn’t know if it actually said in the Bible that men shouldn’t wear earrings, but I was indeed a traditionalist (as I hinted earlier), and whether or not the Bible actually said it, I still thought it was wrong.

All that I knew about liberals were that they were accepting of all kinds of things that the Bible condemned, and that they liked to tax a lot. As such, I didn’t do any research into what Democrats really stood for, but merely accepted what the pastor and various members of my family told me. Never question authority, remember?

I carried my extreme, quasi-Victorian repression and disdain for open-mindedness with me when I first went to college. I’d been warned that “I’d see all kinds in school, and that I needed to make sure I didn’t forget about God.” Sure enough, in my English and philosophy classes, I got to see first hand a lot of people who thought differently from me. It was very disquieting that the world was just filled with so many wrong people. The presence of “pretty people” was even more painfully felt at college, and my hatred grew ever deeper when I saw people wasting their lives trying to perfect their bodies, when only their souls mattered.

I began to write extensively about my hatred… which grew uncontrollably, seemingly by the day. I realized just how few “pure” people there were out there, and grew to see the whole world as one evil mass, teeming with stupidity and all the things I could never have. Every time I would “slip up” and sin, I felt a tremendous sense of self-loathing, since I felt it was my duty to try to uphold those codes that so many people were obviously blowing off. It was a very dark time in my life, and blackness enveloped every aspect of my being. Alienation set in, and I became a sort of “Christian goth,” an island of sanctity adrift in a sea of evil.

But, in my mind, even that last contention was questionable. My thoughts could never venture from the things that I couldn’t have, and I saw my religion as providing me with nothing as a substitute. And… I grew more and more troubled by the fact that I had certain thoughts in particular… certain homosexual thoughts, and this fact enraged me and goaded me to the point where I was seriously suicidal. The thoughts would not go away, and so, I thought, it’s really pointless to try to live on in such a sorry world, when even my own body sought to overthrow the absolute rule of my mind.

And where was God? Why would God allow me to suffer like this? Why, if I was doing what He wanted me to do, would I still feel so miserable to be alive, so desiring to end my life and in fact destroy this hateful, sinful world? What this God’s plan?

With thinking like this, it was inevitable that I would have a crisis. The tides turned, and everything changed, when I realized to myself that I was gay… and that there was nothing I could do about it. I remember the night when it happened… I was just thinking about everything, knowing the conclusion that was just around the corner, and finally, tears streaming down my face, I said aloud, “I’m fucking gay.”

Once I began to accept this fact about myself… my life had new meaning, and all of my former motivations and actions were explained away so easily, and everything just made sense, and I began having all sorts of epiphanies about the workings of the world. I realized that my hatred of other people was not because they weren’t respecting the Bible, but because I envied them. I hated them because they could have the things they wanted and I could not. They were free to “follow their bliss,” as Joseph Campbell would say, and I wouldn’t allow myself such freedom. Finally, however, I began to realize that I could follow my own bliss… and that there was nothing wrong with it.

(I am still convinced that much of the intolerance seen among conservatives is due to the fact that they envy people who take part in those things that they prohibit themselves from enjoying.)

My spirituality gradually improved, once I began learning about more open-minded branches and denominations of Christianity, and I wholly rejected the Bible’s notion that homosexuality was something that could be abandoned. I realized that this was just based on a primitive understanding of human biology and behavioral science… sort of like how the Good Samaritan pours oil and wine into the wounded man’s injuries. I don’t know of the “oil and wine” treatment ever being used in today’s hospitals. The world has changed dramatically since the old days, and things that were not understood back then (astronomy, the function of the body, etc.) are better understood now. There is still much spiritual insight to be gleaned from the Bible, but I now take the book as being metaphorical rather than literal, and examine passages while keeping in mind the historical context and possible motivations of the authors.

I began to see everyone in a new light, a “live and let live” kind of light. I no longer felt the need to stand opposed to people who were unlike myself, because I realized that everyone was on their own quest to uncover their personal meanings and values in life, and I have my own affairs to attend to without worrying about those of others. Some people were still relatively “behind” in their searching, more or less where I was prior to my great epiphany. Others were living fully realized and actualized lives, free of fear, guilt, and regret.

This was a “kinder, gentler” Josh, one that was not so fond of the socially Darwinistic tendencies of Republicans, nor the xenophobia-with-repression combo of Christian fundamentalism. Thus, I shifted myself toward the left. I finally felt like I was doing the “right thing,” by being with people who actually cared about the well-being of others and sought to ensure that those in the minority were guaranteed all the same rights and privileges as those in the majority. It felt like a cause that Jesus would have supported, one that embraced acceptance and compassion rather than standoffishness and stinginess.

So that takes me to where I am today… I hate labels, so I refuse to say that I am a Democrat or a liberal. But, I can safely say that I am not a Republican, or a conservative. Those labels have far too much hate and ignorance associated with them, and I feel I’ve already felt enough hate to last me for the rest of my life… and I have spent far too much time wandering around in ignorance already to waste another second mired down in the misguided delusions that people use to frighten themselves.

I’m not the vitriolaholic I used to be… I’m losing my taste for it.

The Decade of Denial

In the dark days, when I was most possessed of a self-loathing and hateful nature, I did not like pleasure. Of course, one immediately thinks of the biggies, like drugs and sex, but I included even mundane pleasures, things so trivial that most people don’t even consider them “pleasures” at all. The very idea of “wanting” to experience things just for the “feelings” they induced did not sit well with my purely reason-driven world view, in which human actions should be guided with no input from one’s body. It was me taking moral conservatism to its logical (or perhaps illogical) conclusion, in an absolute shunning of “the world.” From such an extreme point of view, it was clear that people who did not go to such extremes were heathens and hypocrites.

In one of my black reveries, I concocted a plan for a “decade of denial.” Each year of the decade, I would deprive myself of something, and each year, the deprived thing would be something that I felt would be progressively more difficult to do without. It was a madness whipped into discipline through intensely focused self-hatred. I did not enjoy depriving myself thusly, but in my mind, it seemed to be a “better” path than freely partaking of the hedonism of existence.

Thus, the original plan, which was set in motion on January 1st, 2001, included these things which I was to deny myself:

Year 1: Carbonated beverages
Year 2: Chocolate
Year 3: Brewed beverages
Year 4: Red Meat
Year 5: All Meat
Year 6: Cheese
Year 7: All forms of games
Year 8: Television
Year 9: The Internet
Year 10: Air

I made it through the first four years successfully. And the plan for the last one was no exaggeration or joke.

Sometime in early 2004, I realized the madness of my former worldview and renounced my old beliefs, giving myself the green light to be whatever I wanted to be and do whatever I wanted to do. As such, I had no desire to continue living in a decade of denial… but I did want to see the present year to its successful conclusion, sheerly as an exercise in building self-discipline. Last year, 2005, was the first year of the new millennium when I did not willingly deprive myself of something I liked or desired.

Recalling these thoughts and these times just makes me all the more thankful that balance and sanity (indeed, my human nature itself) has returned to me.

(At present, I am going through 2007 only eating meat on weekends and holidays. But nowadays, my motivations are completely different, and I am doing it for the health and environmental impact rather than some sort of masochistic debasement.)

What I Traded

I have the experience of having gone to a Freewill Baptist (FWB) church for fifteen years. For those of you unfamiliar with the FWBs, they are a sub-denomination of the Southern Baptists that shuns the notion of preparing sermons in advance, under the belief that “God will provide the message at the right time.” Every trip to a FWB church is an adventure in extemporaneous preaching… and sometimes spontaneous rearrangements of the Sunday Service. For example, it was not uncommon for the pastor to preach before Sunday School rather than after it, nor was it uncommon for a service to simply consist of people singing various hymns, or people getting anointed with oil or gathering together to pray over or about someone. And no one knew how long the pastor would preach, either. Sometimes he would preach for an hour, sometimes a half-hour, other times only five to ten minutes. If people were ever late coming home from church on Sunday and others were expecting them, the excuse was always “The preacher was long-winded today.” And it was true; he would have those long-winded days, every now and then.

Now, when you hear talk about “Christian fundamentalists,” well, that group most definitely includes the Freewill Baptists. Over the years, I was exposed to a vast array of hardline religious beliefs, as well as general socially conservative notions that I’m sure weren’t Biblically-based but which the pastors felt were important to communicate to the church. I say “pastors” because there were several guest pastors over the years, but they all more or less held the same points of view, and were not afraid to offend, even claiming to be happy when they did so:

“I hope I hurt some people’s feelings today! I’m not here to be your friend and tell you you’re OK just the way you are, I’m here to GET YOU TO GOD!”

Of course, such a statement is a mild way to put the sorts of things that FWB pastors would hurl at their congregations. Among the juicy nuggets of FWB belief that I was fed over the years:

-. Women have no place in the pulpit, and those who do are deceiving themselves, because God says in [insert Bible verse here] that woman’s place is at home, and that God only calls men to preach. Women behind the pulpit have been deceived, because God would never call a woman to do a man’s work.
-. Men should not wear long hair, because it is womanly. Nor should men get their ears pierced, as that’s also womanly and what they did in Sodom and Gomorrah. Only women should get their ears pierced, and even that is not exactly encouraged. And forget every other kind of piercing or body modification.
-. Tattoos are completely out of the question, because they mock God’s handiwork.
-. Children should be made to fear both God and their parents; such fear is the only thing preventing them from growing up to be evil. Children must obey their parents absolutely, honoring their father and mother “as the Bible commands.”
-. All alcohol is bad, and good Christians should not only abstain from drinking it, but even avoid visiting grocery stores and restaurants that sell the stuff.
-. All recreational drugs are tools of the devil meant to take people’s focus away from being good Christians and honoring God.
-. Absolutely no sex until marriage, and even then, only procreative sex.
-. Absolutely no usage of “swear words,” with an important exception: it is OK to use the word “hell” in order to scare people into coming to church (and in that specific situation ONLY). Some pastors also preached against the usage of substitute swear words, “since the meaning and intent behind the words is still clear.” That means you can’t even say “crap,” “heck,” “darn,” or “frig.”
-. Every other belief system in the world is wrong. Christianity is the one true religion.
-. Every translation of the Bible that has come after the King James Version of 1611 has been a tool of the devil in his attempt to pollute the word of God. The “New King James Versions” and “New International Versions” of the Bible (among others) corrupt God’s original meaning and intent.
-. Everything written in the King James Version of the Bible is the literal truth; those who say it is only “metaphorical” are denying the reality of God and thus minions of the devil, seeking to undermine and water down the “good news.”
-. There are NO mistakes or contradictions in the Bible.

Nevermind the fact that Christ turned water into wine, or that several deacons (and guest pastors!) were smokers, or that there were (gasp!) devout Christians prior to 1611, or that there are mistakes and contradictions in the Bible. Somehow they never managed to catch these oversights. Or, perhaps they caught them and decided to let them go, so as not to jeopardize their existing mindset.

It was amazing too how often the pastor would invoke patriotism in his preaching, often talking about the “decline of the country.” In fact, that was, more often than not, the subject of his preaching:

“America is getting more and more sinful every day! This country is on its way to hell, thanks to…”

At that point, he would launch into a diatribe that would include any number of things from the list below.

-. Atheists
-. Agnostics
-. Hypocritical Christians
-. Blasphemers
-. Muslims
-. Buddhists
-. Hindus
-. Homosexuals
-. People who say homosexuals are ok
-. Same sex marriage
-. “Devil music”
-. Pornography
-. Role-playing games
-. Television
-. Alcoholics
-. Greedy people [ok, I might give him that one]
-. People in mixed-race relationships (“they’re creating a nation of children that will be made fun of and feel like they don’t belong!”)
-. Adulterers
-. Teenage and/or unwed mothers
-. Working mothers
-. Scientists (“who think science is above God and want to take the story of Creation out of our schools!”)
-. Anyone who believes in separation of church and state
-. The Internet
-. Devil-worshippers
-. Wiccans and other pagans (invariably considered “devil worshippers”)
-. Transgendered people (“everyone is born the way God wants them!”)
-. Transvestites
-. Abortion doctors
-. Women who get abortions
-. Parents who don’t physically discipline their children

and so on. Quite the laundry list of sinners, eh? I’m sure I’m omitting a few. The years have obscured my memory a bit. After a while, all the hating of various social demographics and aspects of popular culture got a little monotonous and repetitive.

All this… all this was what I traded, when I found my own religious freedom a few years back. I awoke one day from the nightmare and haven’t been the same since.

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The V-Files: In High Places

(Commentary: This was not actually a series on the old site, but a collection of articles that share the theme of my mountain heritage. I’ve always loved the mountains, with my mantra usually being ‘it would be a great place to live if it weren’t for all the people.’ Still, mountain culture is an interesting beast in its own right, and I am a product of my environment as much as anything else. The last article is new, and it discusses some of the psychological effects of growing up in the mountains.)

The Mountain Cemetery
(Original Air Date: 06/23/05)

Winter in the Mountains
(Original Air Date: 11/13/05)

Appalachian Cuisine
(Original Air Date: 02/19/06)

The Comfort of Closed Horizons
(Original Air Date: Unaired)

~~~~~~~

The Mountain Cemetery

There is a cemetery in western North Carolina where several members of my family are buried. It is surrounded by extremely hilly pasture land. You have to open three fences (yourself) to even set foot on the grounds of the cemetery… and you have to close the fences back behind you once you enter to prevent cattle from wandering out. In the spring, when the mountains are all green and the grass has been cut, it might be one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited. The best time to go is when you are alone, and you need a place for introspection and decision-making. There are two or three park benches in the actual cemetery, and I usually go and sit on one of them whenever I’m in need of solitude or must make some sort of spiritual decision. If I luck out, the cows are on the far part of the property and are well out-of-sight. On the good days, the wind rustles through the trees, you can’t hear any vehicles going by, and it’s just you, a little under a hundred tombstones, and whatever divine or transcendental power you choose to believe in. It’s a nexus of inspiration, where the dead sit proudly at the top of this hill overlooking the cyclical progression of nature from now until the end of time.

These pictures are obviously from the fall, when things are less lovely. I plan on taking better pictures this spring.

Winter in the Mountains

Winter in the mountains is simultaneously wonderful and depressing. It’s very nice to have snow, especially for Christmas, and more often than not there is at least a little bit of the white stuff on the ground for Christmas morning. However, winter in general seems more bleak here than it might be elsewhere, since the mountains all around are all covered in bare trees. Thousands and thousands of acres of bare trees, looking dead and isolated, seen against the backdrop of the usually gray and cloudy sky, can be a bit alienating. Add to that the traveling interference that winter weather often causes, and one can start to get the feeling of being stuck in a dying world that is not necessarily inescapable, but is at least difficult and dangerous to leave.

Or perhaps I simply have seasonal affective disorder…

Appalachian Cuisine

Recently a fellow blogger inquired as to the types of food available in my part of the world. Initially I told her about the types of restaurants around here, and I only hinted at the food that is indigenous to this area. Having given it a second thought, I now think it best to go into more detail about the local food of southern Appalachia.

First, a brief lesson in geography. The southern Appalachian mountain range runs through parts of Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia, with parts of the range extending out into Kentucky and Georgia as well. This is the part of the world that gave rise to the popular stereotype of the hillbilly, the poor, uneducated, lazy brute who lived in areas so remote that they were untouched by the modern world. This is also a part of the United States that is deeply immersed in tradition, natural beauty, and a simple, honest approach to life.

The food favored by the locals of southern Appalachia is “no nonsense” food. Chicken and pork are both popular, as historically it was easier and cheaper to raise poultry and swine (rather than cattle) in small hilly areas. Though chickens themselves were often on the menu, they were most often kept for eggs. Pigs didn’t fare as well, however, and various pork products, including bacon, sausage and ham, are frequently on the southern Appalachian menu.

Vegetables comprise a big part of the southern Appalachian diet, a bigger part than meat or bread. Potatoes are especially popular, perhaps owing to the large population of people in southern Appalachia of Scotch-Irish descent. Also popular are green beans, pinto beans, corn, squash, cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes. Home-canning of vegetables grown in the family garden is a yearly tradition; I personally recall being present to help “string and break” green beans for canning, at an age when I was first entering elementary school.

Canning was vitally important to families settling in southern Appalachia, as the winters have been known to make travel treacherous. Families of years past would regularly find themselves snowbound for extended periods of time, during which they made do on the food they had put back in the summer and fall. If you were able to make a pan of fried taters and a pot of “soup beans” (i.e. pinto beans), then you were set to go. Throw in a cake of cornbread, and possibly fry up some “fatback” (an especially fatty and salty type of cured pork), and you were eating well indeed.

Though travel has improved throughout the area and the possibility of getting stuck in snow has diminished greatly (but not entirely), the locals haven’t lost their taste for home-canned veggies and the foods mentioned above. Other favorite staples of the southern Appalachian diet include mustard greens, turnip greens, fried green tomatoes (usually battered in cornmeal), chow-chow (a type of sweet and spicy relish), fried squash, pickled beets, sweet potatoes, and corn, most often served on the cob.

One dish that I recall fondly was something my dad’s mother would make whenever we’d go visit her in North Carolina on the weekends. It was a dish called “kilt [killed] lettuce and onions”, and it was absolutely wonderful, even though the description of it might lead you to believe otherwise. You take a bowl of salad greens of your choosing, thoroughly washed and with stems removed, and you add in some onion. (Green onions work great for this). Then, you fry up some fatback until it’s crispy, and remove that from the pan, to crumble it up over the greens. Finally, the last step is to heat the remaining grease from the fatback in the pan until it is sizzling hot, then to pour this grease over the greens. This is known as “killing” the lettuce. I’m sure this dish can’t be very healthy, but I’ll be darned if it isn’t delicious. It doesn’t sound great, but you just have to try it to believe it.

Aside from traditional dishes, southern Appalachia is also home to a variety of unique foodstuffs. One of them, the morel mushroom (pictured at the beginning of this article), is prized by gourmets worldwide for its flavor and texture. Locally, they are often served fried. Morels closely resemble poisonous mushrooms and should only be gathered by experienced folks.

Another favorite of the area is the “ramp”, the common name for a relative of the onion that is sometimes referred to elsewhere as a “wild leek.” The ramp has a very strong smell, but a surprisingly mild flavor, and the few weeks out of the year when they come in are very happy weeks indeed for many in the area. Common applications of the ramp include frying them up with potatoes, and eating them raw with beans.

I could go on and on about the various subtleties and nuances of food from my native area, but this would be a good place to stop. If you’re from the area, leave a comment and let me know about some of your own favorite dishes.

The Comfort of Closed Horizons

I have lived in hilly or mountainous country all of my life. For me, mountains are and always have been a fact of life, and while I do recognize their beauty at certain points in the year, us indigenous folk generally take the presence of the mountains for granted. As a child, I saw a few particularly round and vegetation-free hills as being possible dinosaur burial mounds. As an adolescent, I vented my angst and teenage rage by driving along the winding roads that cut across and through the mountains, miles away from everywhere. And now, as an adult, I have a deeper appreciation of the mountains that has resulted from my travels abroad.

Several of the places I have visited over the course of my life, such as New Orleans and Memphis, are terribly, terribly flat. When I left the mountains for the first time, I recall a deep sense of dread that settled on me and lasted for the duration of the trip. This is all too much, I thought, the horizon is too broad. Where were the ones who were there at the edge of the world, shielding a portion of the impossibly huge sky from our view? Where were the ones who hastened the descent of the sun every day? Where was nature, insulating us from the rest of the world?

Nowhere to be found.

It may sound odd to most people, but those of you who hail from the hills know what I’m talking about. There is a distinct sense of alienation or anxiety that is felt in open country. It’s an unconscious realization that the world is much larger and much more open than you previously thought. I am positive that the mountains influence the very way we think and feel, and I surmise that this may help explain why certain mountain locales remain stagnant and homogenous over the years: Familiarity is equivalent to comfort.

The mountains keep you in, and they keep everyone (and everything) else out.

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The V-Files: The Living Machine

(Commentary: This mini-series is about a work I wrote many several years ago, when I was a freshman in college. The first part is a story itself, expanded and fleshed-out beyond its original poetic form. The second part is a bit of exposition on the piece and my views on creativity in general. Some of the exposition has been modified from the original version, based on constructive criticism I received at the time of the original posting and on my own re-evaluation of the necessity of subjectivity in all forms of art. It was also for this reason that I chose not to include any pictures with this chapter of the V-Files.)

The Living Machine
(Original Air Date: 02/04/06)

The Living Machine: Exposition
(Original Air Date: 02/05/06)

~~~~~~~

The Living Machine

When I was a teenager, one of the fruits of my literary penchant was a story-cycle in the form of a blank verse poem. It was called “The Living Machine” and its namesake was also its protagonist. The story, in a nutshell, was as follows:

The Living Machine was both the last child of the organic universe, and the first child of the synthetic universe. He was birthed from a womb that lay hidden from all reality, after eons and eons of slowly being constructed from matter collected by black holes. His heart was a dull echo of the big bang, or perhaps an imploding reflection of pure creation… but his countenance reflected the vastness and emptiness of space. Much of his body was constructed of various bits of space debris from lost civilizations and countless doomed travelers, and within the hidden womb, he was nourished by creaking mechanisms, crackling wires, and telescoping tubes that connected and disconnected from his body at varying intervals, moving of their own volition and representative of all the hidden things in the universe.

When the Living Machine had been fully constructed, he broke free of the womb and escaped from it when it exploded, as the incongruous nature of his form caused conflicting realities to happen simultaneously. The last vestiges of his wiring clung to him, and he ripped all the mechanical snakes away from his body, free of their hissing influence… but two snakes remained, as they had nourished him the most, and reflected his universal heritage. Death and Stillness, in the form of twin mechanical serpents, withdrew from holes in his sides and perched upon his shoulders, biting and stinging him with their influence, and began to propel him forward and onward, energizing his circuitry and causing the pistons of his heart to move, but without purpose, and his life to exist, but without meaning.

Onward throughout the emptiness of space went the Living Machine, the only Living Machine, and he destroyed everything in his wake, not because he wanted to, but because things happened to be in his arbitrary path. Stars winked out of existence as he drew near, entire solar systems recklessly spiraled further away from the center of the universe, and he left nothing but a rippling, undulating wake of nothingness as he traveled.

As he traveled meaninglessly, driven by the two telescoping serpents attached to his body, his mechanically-harnessed eyes spied the glimmer of something completely contrary to his very nature: a massive fleet of Spirit Machines. The Spirit Machines, for some reason, disgusted him, as much as disgust could be said to be felt by such a hollow creature. The primary reason for this distaste was the fact that the Spirit Machines saw the Living Machine and knew him to be the greatest threat their world had ever known. Above a tiny blue marble of no significance, the Living Machine was assaulted by millions upon millions of Spirit Machines, which were simply-desiged, unremarkable little containers powered by vacuous notions, morals, dreams, and feelings.

Eventually, through some means unknown to any entity real or imagined, the Spirit Machines managed to overtake the Living Machine by severing the serpents from his body and binding his limbs with their thoughts and feelings. The Living Machine destroyed an untold number of his adversaries, but in the end, they won out. As he floundered there in the grip of an army of Spirit Machines, the Queen of the Spirit Machines began to approach the Living Machine, traveling up from the tiny blue marble, trodding upon the backs of other Spirit Machines to rise to her place in the cosmos, to confront this enemy of hers.

The Queen of the Spirit Machines was the amalgamation of all thoughts, feelings, ideas, and notions, given a self-governing sense of individuality that all the other Spirit Machines lacked. As their designated ruler and the only one among them who could actually think independently, she found great delight in inflicting meaning upon the meaningless, and importance upon the unimportant. The process was excruciating for the Living Machine, as the Queen had her way with him. As the Living Machine began to experience thought, the first thing he felt was the loss of his free will, which was a pain beyond anything that could ever be experienced. And as he found himself beginning to feel, he felt himself beginning to be assimilated into the realm of the meaningful, which was completely contrary to his nature.

As the first act of his free will, the Living Machine sought to continue his original non-mission, and so he violently turned inward upon himself and self-destructed, destroying the remaining Spirit Machines, the Queen, and himself. Invisible and insubstantial debris, half real and half imaginary, tumbled to the tiny blue marble below, upon the insignificant rock where some self-propagating chemical abberations moved about erratically upon its surface.

Eons later, upon the blue marble, the Living Machine and the Queen were both reborn as humans, empty consciousness and non-consciousness populating feeble matter-based data receptacles. They grew up and learned the human way of doing things, but could not deny their original lives, though they were unaware of them.

The Living Machine, who was reborn as a boy, learned in his human-life to try to fill the standard gnashing void within all humans with goodness and love, so he sought this course. The Queen’s avatar was far more successful at recalling the events of the previous life and began to act accordingly, albeit only within the limited human realm.

Drawn to the chaos of the “girl”, the “boy” attempted to gain the favor of the “girl” in the human fashion. The “girl,” however, recognized her former foe, and immediately set to dispatch the “boy” once and for all, to utterly eliminate the Living Machine from the universe. The “boy” was no match for the reborn Queen, who lacked strength and import in her human body, but was still able to command and dispatch vast armies of her drones who shared her beliefs. The visible humiliation of the “boy” satisfied the Queen, and she sought to continue the destruction of the Living Machine that had begun eons earlier.

The humiliation of the “boy” triggered the non-consciousness of the Living Machine to once again reactivate, and the false consciousness of the “boy” was obliterated. Through the mists of reality and the uneven perforations in the fabric of time, the Living Machine was touched by the very hand of the universe and a portion of his power was restored. To onlookers, it appeared as though the “boy” had just discovered a bottle of ipecac syrup and was busily downing it.

Pure destruction free from thought and feeling rained down onto the denizens of the planet, most particularly upon the avatar of the Queen. Two small portals, vortices into unknown dimensions, opened up at the boy’s ears, and the twin serpents that had so long ago been disconnected from his form rammed themselves into his being again, and the cold comfort of familiarity restored the Living Machine to full capacity. With little difficulty, the Living Machine wiped the last traces of feeling, thought, and emotion, the final remnants of the old army of Spirit Machines, from the world… and then proceeded to destroy the pitiful chunk of matter where he had been imprisoned in such a weak shell for so long. For eons, the Living Machine continued to travel throughout the Universe, destroying all that he encountered, and becoming the Final Overseer and de facto Ruler of Nothingness, surrounding himself with the mangled bits of reality that remained from his epic battles.

Upon his throne, built of a meaningless assemblage of debris, the Living Machine found himself unable to fully exorcise the impact of the Touch of the Spirit Machines, so many eons earlier. He considered the fact that both he and the Queen of the Spirit Machines were merely agents of destruction, and that the only difference between them was that hers was the inadvertent destruction that is the inevitable result of all thought, feeling, and emotion; his, on the other hand, was a meaningless destruction, more pure and simple, unencumbered by any sense of purpose, and existing only for its own sake.

The Living Machine: Exposition

Some have asked me about the meaning and symbolism of “The Living Machine.” I hope the following will help shed some light:

It is my opinion that art, at least the best art, doesn’t have a set purpose during its creation. The best art is allowed to run its course, and the artist becomes simply a conduit for the creation of the work. It happens without thinking and without motivation. Anything else is propaganda and baseless artifice.

The story did not begin as a story at all, but merely a free-form word association, or rather disassociation, meaning that I sat down, cleared my mind of all thoughts, and began to type with no purpose or plan. Gradually the story took shape, and I did little to guide it. I did not know how it would end at first.

Eventually, the story began to take on mythic proportions, and as the various chapters/stanzas of the story were complete and I went back afterwards to see what I had actually just created, I began to feel as though some sort of mythic, archetypal story was taking place. In later years, after reading the works of Sean Kane and Joseph Campbell, I’ve come to realize that it has become a sort of personal myth of mine.

Like all good myths, it lacks rationality, often contradicts itself, and presents impossible situations and dilemmas. This is in fact required of all good myths, to get the mind to enter a state of paradoxical thinking. This is the realm of the subconscious and dreams, the realm where symbols have the greatest power and can be most readily applied to our lives. This is the realm of both the religious experience and the artistic experience, and the habitual home of shamans, deep thinkers, and other introspective sorts.

Certain characters and events in “The Living Machine” do parallel actual people and happenings in my life. This was not my original intent (as I had no intent when I started writing); this was simply where the stream of consciousness led me. I was in a very negative place when I wrote it, and I listened to ambient electrical current during my creative process, which most likely influenced the story. What began as a word experiment slowly became a partially autobiographical myth, but then grew to include commentary about nihilism and what it means to exist in the vast empty expanses of a practically infinite universe. Modern myths must both embrace the traditional concerns of man as well as look outward, away from humanity and human life, into the endless abyss, of which everything is a part.

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The V-Files: Life in the Dorm

(Commentary: This series recounts some of the aspects and more memorable experiences of living in an all-male dorm while in college. I’ve included an extra, never-before-aired installment of this series that details one of the more unusual circumstances that I found myself in through my own hand. I’ve also slightly relabeled some of the installments.)

The Building
(Original Air Date: 04/03/06)

The People
(Original Air Date: 04/04/06)

Wanton Destruction
(Original Air Date: 04/05/06)

Midnight Flamers, Drunken Wagers, and Other Hilarity
(Original Air Date: 04/07/06)

The Fall of the White Anvil
(Original Air Date: Unaired)

~~~~~~~

The Building

I had the opportunity to live in a men’s dormitory for three years during my undergraduate studies at a state university. It was not a particularly nice dorm, but I’d stayed in worse. When I was in high school, I participated in a summer enrichment program that allowed students to stay in the adult dorms (which had been otherwise vacated and closed for the summer). The dorm I stayed in for that program was a real shithole, but my dorm as a full-fledged college student was a bit nicer.

The dorm had been built in the 70’s as I recall, and its age showed through in some respects. Now, thirty years isn’t an especially long time, but when you consider the type of folks who populate dormitories, you can begin the imagine the kind of wear and tear that a building will show after years of abuse. Stains and etched graffiti adorned most walls in the individual rooms, and the foyer on the first floor was not terribly inviting, with its “exquisite” dorm furniture and signature potted plant by the door. Perhaps the plant was supposed to make the place feel more like home. If so, then I wonder whose home it was supposed to feel like. Certainly someone smelly.

A men’s dormitory is not known for being a pleasant-smelling place. You never go inside one and say “oh my, what a delightful bouquet of aromas!” Well, you might say that if you possess certain fetishes, but most people don’t say that. On any given day, the smell could best be described as a combination of bleach, moth balls, gym socks, wet carpet, patchouli, and Cool Water, the cologne that was en vogue during my years in school. It wasn’t a particularly strong smell, but it was noticeable, especially on rainy days.

The dorm had three floors, and each floor had one bathroom. The rooms themselves were sparse and did not actually have beds. No, they simply had enclaves in the concrete-block walls, and boot-camp-style mattresses were provided for these literal holes-in-the-wall. It was a weird feeling to get used to, but I didn’t mind it too much, especially given the fact that I was somewhat of a gothling during my college years. Apart from these “beds”, the rooms were furnished with radiators, crude air conditioners, a simple sink, and a desk with two chairs. That’s about it. Closet, drawer, and shelf space was kept at a minimum, and students had to get pretty creative when it came to storing stuff.

There were no elevators; I think that probably goes without saying, but I figured I should say it anyway in case you actually thought state universities came with elevator-equipped dormitories. Each semester I had to haul my belongings up and down two flights of stairs to get to my room. Well, I don’t know if it was one flight or two flights. My room was on the second floor, and I’m not sure if the landing/turn-around zone halfway between the first and second floor was the end of the first flight or only halfway up a single flight. I guess it really doesn’t matter, but that’s one of those things that you might think a smarty-man like me would know. Oh well. I never really cared for architectural details.

That’s pretty much the dorm. Tomorrow I will tell you about the people who called it home.

The People

My dorm was populated with quite an assortment of characters. To give you an overall idea as to what the population of the dorm was like, first think about a population of college-aged males. Now, consider the fact that this was a state university (i.e., no Ivy Leaguers or seminary schoolers here), and that this was entry-level (i.e., not new or desirable) housing, and you can start to imagine the sorts of souls who would call the building home.

We were, by and large, 18- to 22-year-old men. There were a handful of nontraditional students who stayed in my dorm, too; I recall a somewhat creepy man in his fifties living alone in one of the first floor rooms. Overall, the population was mostly young, mostly caucasian and mostly from areas within 100 miles of the university. The vast majority of us were arranged two to a room, with some folks going three to a room and some lucky bastards getting rooms to themselves.

The college years are often described to be the “experimental phase” of one’s life, and there were some truly experimental people living in my dorm. There was a good-sized population of tweakers and those immersed in the party culture; these were the ones whom we’d hear yell from the front porch of the dorm up to their roommates on the upper floors to come let them inside the building, because they were too drunk to use the key pass themselves (or had lost it at the club). Then there was the opposite side of the drug culture, the stoners, who generally posted things on their doors like Calvin & Hobbes comics, pictures of the President that had been edited in Photoshop, editorials talking about how the drug laws are bad, and Tool bumper stickers.

Besides the drug-fueled crowd, there were also some fellas going through the “teenage angst” thing, into their young adulthood. These were the ones who loved to listen to System of a Down and RATM… and loved to leave their doors propped open so others could listen, whether they wanted to or not. They often shouted profanities at everyone (especially their roommates), and were often seen drunk late at night, stumbling towards the bathroom. (They differed from the party kids, since they obviously didn’t care for the “scene” and chose instead to drink alone and listen to music.) Then there were the geeks amongst us, who set up LAN parties late at night and on the weekends to prove their Unreal Tournament l33tness and Half-Life/Counterstrike pwnage. These were also the ones who could provide you with pretty much any software you wanted if you just let them know. They seemed generally delighted to provide people with warez that the recipients would enjoy. They were cool like that.

There were a few other, smaller cliques here and there. There was a small group of Republicans who loved to be pissed off that the rest of the dorm was doing “bad” things. There was a clique of skaters, and a clique of hip-hop superstars and ballers who were embarrasingly white, whiter than Vanilla Ice’s soft and pliant buttcheeks. There was a small delegation of foreign students as well, who mostly kept to themselves and found ways to entertain themselves without actually having to leave the dorm. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few groups with which I had little dealing, or those who were inconspicuous (as there were many).

To protect the innocent, I will refrain from discussing my roommates, other than to say that I had two different roommates over the course of my college education and both of them are/were great individuals whom I count among my closest friends, even to this day.

Tomorrow I shall tell you about some of the many experiences that took place in the dorm, and all the magic and mystery that ensued.

Wanton Destruction

College-aged men like to destroy. I think this is one of the great truths of our times. Adolescents are generally accused of being the destructive ones, but the teenage years are merely the dress rehearsal leading up to the grand-scale production of the college years. Sure, teenage boys may destroy more things, but college-aged men destroy things with more… pizazz. Any old zit-faced youth can smash a glass bottle against a wall, but a creative college sophomore will arrange things so that he can smash a glass bottle with a sledgehammer in class as part of a physics demonstration.

The young men who lived in my dorm were especially fond of destroying the various fixtures of the dorm and continually pissing of the resident advisors (RAs) who were charged with keeping things under control. You would leave your room one morning to go to class and find that the window at the end of the hall had been smashed out; if you looked out the window you’d see broken bottles on the ground below. (And this was a supposedly “dry” campus!) Doors were regularly defaced, especially if you had anything posted or tacked onto the front of your door, and every week, the carpet in the hallways (there was no carpet in the rooms) either had new chunks missing or new stains on the existing chunks.

The bathrooms were the most frequent targets of vandalism, and the destruction there was always most impressive. Over the course of a single year, people managed to not only shatter a urinal into little bits, but to essentially pull one of the bathroom stall doors off its hinges, leaving it swaying there like some half-completed amputation. And it’s not like these were “accidental” damages either; the men in my dorm were a hateful and vindictive lot, and their twisted nature knew no bounds. Once, someone managed to take a sink out of commission by effectively stopping it up with vomit. Another time, we discovered (horror of horrors) a used baby diaper in one of the shower stalls. This may not sound too terribly bad, but trust me: I am omitting the really disgusting things we saw in the dorm.

Sometimes it was like a sick game to consider what it was we’d see next.

“Do you think they’ll vomit all over the bathroom door again?”

“Nah, I think he’ll make it to the urinal this time.”

Though the depravity of my fellow dormers was occasionally amusing to watch, it was ultimately very frustrating. Ninety percent of the time, no one would ever step forward to take responsibility for the actions, and thus the RAs and the university officials had no choice but to charge everyone for the cost of making the necessary repairs, splitting the bill between all the residents. I can’t remember exactly how much of my deposit got consumed due to the recklessness and wild abandon of others, but I do know it was at least two thirds gone when I finally got the remainder of my deposit at the end of my stay. Multiply that by approximately 250 people in the dorm, and you can begin to imagine the kind of devastation that was wrought there.

Midnight Flamers, Drunken Wagers, and Other Hilarity

Here are some more anecdotes that you may find amusing… but be warned! This post is R-rated.

As I mentioned earlier, college-aged men are a mischievous lot. That whole “experimental phase” business really kicks in, and I think a lot of guys see how far they can push the envelope of misanthropy. I think we were all misanthropic, to an extent; college has a tendency to harden you, or at least deaden you somewhat, while at the same time opening your mind to all kinds of new possibilities. People don’t take too kindly to paradigm shifts, and all this angst builds up and is released through both destruction and random acts of mischief.

A perennial favorite in my dorm was the intentional setting-off of the fire alarm. This happened usually two or three times a semester, and almost invariably it was in the dead of night when people would be most upset about having to evacuate the building. I remember once, the fire alarm went off and in my groggy haze, I thought it was my alarm. I kept slapping my alarm clock until I realized it was the fire alarm in the hall, then I uttered a few expletives, threw on enough clothing to be more or less presentable, and went outside with everyone else.

Only one time during my entire stay in the dorm was there an actual cause for the fire alarm to be set: one of the more careless stoners on my floor inadvertently set off the alarm with some… incense or something. (No, seriously, I think it was incense. I don’t recall any drug busts taking place during these fire alarms.) Every other time, it was determined that someone had pulled the fire alarm. I think one time, a guy admitted to doing it accidentally while he was roughhousing with friends in the hallway, but I don’t know if that story held water or not. No one really cared why the alarm had been set, they were all just pissed that they had to go outside, stand around, and wait on the fire department to send someone over to give the all clear and turn off the alarm.

I must admit that I didn’t mind the fire alarms all that much, for even though they were annoying, they were an opportunity for me to check out the residents of my dorm wearing little clothing. There were lots of shirtless dudes, a few with wifebeaters and sweats, and I think even a handful of fellows in just their boxers. Mmmm, the eye candy. I would stand there with my friends, nodding and looking over their shoulders to the group of guys standing a few feet away, their fine young physiques mostly out on display.

Ah yes, the sexual tension. I’m sure a lot of you have been waiting on me to talk about that. Well, there was sexual tension. I would never have admitted it back then, though. You see, I liked checking out guys. I really did! But if you would have asked me back then, I would never have admitted it. I was very much in the closet, even to myself, and I’d always have intense feelings of guilt and self-loathing about my seemingly unstoppable desires and curiosities, like my roving eyes in the showers. I recall that there was a particular bathroom stall that was directly across from the showers, about twenty feet away. Many mornings, I made it a point to procure that stall whenever nature called, so that I could lean over sideways and peer through the space between the stall and the stall door to watch guys getting in and out of the shower stalls. Occasionally my dilligence was rewarded with an eyeful of cute guy. Later that day, I would feel guilty about it, listen to angry music, and write a lot of angsty poetry about how I was broken and how much I disliked queers. Ah, memories.

One incident stands out in my mind as being a particularly awkward situation. I was sitting in my room with the door open (people often left their doors open in those days, I think perhaps to make the room not feel quite so small). I hear a commotion out in the hall, so I go to investigate. Our neighbors were standing there and were obviously under the influence, and they were talking and laughing. The drunker of the two walks over to me and asks,

“Hey bro, how much would you pay me to suck your dick?” He was one of those frat boy types who apparently wasn’t yet at the level of initiation where he could live in the frathouse.

“What?” I said, not believing what I was hearing.

“I said, how much money would you give me to suck your dick? I swear I’d fuckin’ do it.”

“He really would, man,” said the guy’s roommate. “He needs the money.”

“Umm… no thanks,” was my bewildered reply.

“Awww, come on dude,” said the drunk guy, “if you give me fifty dollars, I’ll suck you off.”

“That’s quite alright,” I said, chuckling. I walked back to my room and shut the door behind me. My roommate asked what they were saying, and I told him about the dialogue that had just taken place. I can’t remember his reaction exactly, but I think it involved rolling his eyes and not being terribly surprised, given the kinds of things we’d witnessed in the dorm.

No, not those kinds of things. Get your mind out of the gutter!

Sometimes I think back about that person and wonder if he was being sincere. Did he somehow suspect I was gay? I didn’t think so, because I heard him propositioning someone else as I was returning to my room. Would he have actually done what he said? I don’t know. Alcohol can make people do some strange things. Was he attracted to me? Who knows. I just hope that at some point, somewhere, under the right circumstances, he finally found a nice lolly for his own amusement. (And, well, I guess the amusement of the owner of said lolly, too.)

The Fall of the White Anvil

I have always been an accumulator of strange and terrible things. One of my most prized possessions is a white anvil with black, wavy stripes. It was created for an art class I had my sophomore year, and during the dorm years, it became my most well-known and frequently-mentioned belonging. I kept it on a shelf by the door, because I found it to be a tripping hazard if I kept it on the floor.

One evening, my roommate and I were bored out of our minds, and so we decided to amuse ourselves by destroying AOL CDs. It is a great, rewarding pastime if you have never tried it; it comes with my highest recommendations. We worked on some interesting buzzsaw-like incisions, a duct-tape discus, and a decorative piece for soda bottle tops to go where the lid usually goes. We also would take an AOL CD in each hand, pressing the written side of the discs together and rubbing them vigorously to obliterate the data therein.

Well, I got the bright idea of using my white anvil to destroy a CD. My roommate lauded my idea initially, but then gave pause at my proposed method of execution. You see, the Resident Coordinator (RC), who was kind of like the super for the building, lived on the first floor directly below us, and I knew that I couldn’t go dropping an anvil on the floor, or else he’d be paying us a less-than-friendly visit. So instead, I figured I’d place the CD in one of the crappy dorm chairs, then simply drop the anvil onto the CD in the chair, destroying the CD and avoiding the clamor of a 15 lb. falling chunk of metal. I even had the foresight of putting the CD in a plastic bag first, to keep plastic shards from going flying.

So I very ceremoniously placed the bagged CD in the dorm chair, which I’d moved to the center of the room, and I took my anvil from the shelf and stood in front of the chair, defiance on my face but a wild look in my eyes. Then, I raised the anvil as high as I could, took a deep breath, and let it fall.

I have never read anywhere that, under the right circumstances, anvils bounce. But apparently they do. I watched the anvil land, bounce several inches off the chair, and then proceed to fall to the floor below, making a thunderous clang that we later learned was heard by around a half-dozen guys in the rooms closest to ours.

“Oh shit,” I said, and my roommate was laughing his ass off.

I placed the anvil back on the shelf and went about looking busy, as I expected the RC to come up to see us at any time. He never did come up to see us personally, but we did hear some people talking about it, asking if they’d heard that loud clang. My roommate and I kept the story under our hats, only telling our good friends next door about the bouncing anvil. But it remains one of the most bizarre things I’d ever witnessed.

And the worst thing about the whole incident was that the CD did not break, and was in fact unscathed.

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