Here's an alternate theory.
The universe is like a multiplex or cable. It exists for entertainment purposes and there are various storylines, characters and situations.
Strictly speaking, it's a multiverse. There are multiple genres, depending on the director and the target audience.
Some of us are characters in a cosmic sitcom. Others are cast in a John Carpenter slasher flick.
This explains why one person might pray to God for a parking space and get it while somebody else turns their back for a few seconds in the supermarket and winds up with their kid's severed head in a ditch. The lucky folks wind up in light romantic comedies, the unlucky get cast in a Wes Craven movie. For some people, the universe has purpose and meaning and happy endings. For others, it doesn't.
It depends on what movie you're in.
Sunday, January 23, 2000
Saturday, January 22, 2000
Joke Universe
There are times I suspect this is a joke universe.
The evidence is overwhelming.
Take names. Names are too fucking close to the money if you ask me. Like some 18th century novel with characters like Craven Pridewell or sumpin.
The guy who brings us glee is Jackie Gleason. The woman who tripped up Clinton was Linda Tripp. Ross Perot is an anagram of "sore sport." And, of course...
The kid everybody's making a fuss about is Elian Gonzales.
Elian being an anagram of "alien," natch.
If somebody handed me that in a story I'd say Come on...Just too damn obvious, dontcha think?
...and hand it back for a rewrite.
The evidence is overwhelming.
Take names. Names are too fucking close to the money if you ask me. Like some 18th century novel with characters like Craven Pridewell or sumpin.
The guy who brings us glee is Jackie Gleason. The woman who tripped up Clinton was Linda Tripp. Ross Perot is an anagram of "sore sport." And, of course...
The kid everybody's making a fuss about is Elian Gonzales.
Elian being an anagram of "alien," natch.
If somebody handed me that in a story I'd say Come on...Just too damn obvious, dontcha think?
...and hand it back for a rewrite.
Saturday, January 1, 2000
Y2K
As I write these words, Y2K dawns.
The whispered fears of terrorist attack are not now reality. A mushroom cloud isn't looming over San Francisco, New York City, Atlanta, and God knows how many other cities. Our President, Congress, the Supreme Court and Regis Philbin are not now dead. All of them. The Pentegon is not in flames.
This is not the calm before the hellstorm.
This is not a final answer to the poet's question: Yes, as a matter of fact, the world will end in a bang. An impossible bang that makes your ears bleed, stabs a knife in your heart and turns your brain to jelly.
This isn't a bitter, hellish interval of waiting, waiting, waiting.
This isn't the end.
The stable assurance of an electrical grid isn't now, already, a distant memory. Along with any hint of social order. This HP computer, my faithful electric servant, hasn't changed to a dead slab of plastic. Along with all of our other "smart" machines. All clocks don't read 12:00, 12:00, 12:00, in the fibrillation of a grim electronic seizure. Dull, red, blinking lights don't confront us everywhere. Blank screens don't stare back at us like the empty eye sockets of so many hollowed out skulls. No. Wrecked, flaming cars don't surround us. The mindless mob isn't panicking in the streets. The traffic lights aren't dead. The lines of communication aren't cut. The endless babel of words and images has not been stopped. The vast universal silence isn't closing in like a shroud of death.
I do not contemplate my own death. Or the deaths of millions and millions of others.
Yet I laugh, bitterly.
What isn't happening isn't happening. What can't be started cannot be stopped. As the ineluctable tsunami of chaos doesn't close in, in the moments before it doesn't engulf me, I know only one thing.
Somewhere, in the growing fear and chaos that isn't happening, the fucking consultants who hyped this Y2K shit aren't getting any work.
For that, at least, I am grateful.
The whispered fears of terrorist attack are not now reality. A mushroom cloud isn't looming over San Francisco, New York City, Atlanta, and God knows how many other cities. Our President, Congress, the Supreme Court and Regis Philbin are not now dead. All of them. The Pentegon is not in flames.
This is not the calm before the hellstorm.
This is not a final answer to the poet's question: Yes, as a matter of fact, the world will end in a bang. An impossible bang that makes your ears bleed, stabs a knife in your heart and turns your brain to jelly.
This isn't a bitter, hellish interval of waiting, waiting, waiting.
This isn't the end.
The stable assurance of an electrical grid isn't now, already, a distant memory. Along with any hint of social order. This HP computer, my faithful electric servant, hasn't changed to a dead slab of plastic. Along with all of our other "smart" machines. All clocks don't read 12:00, 12:00, 12:00, in the fibrillation of a grim electronic seizure. Dull, red, blinking lights don't confront us everywhere. Blank screens don't stare back at us like the empty eye sockets of so many hollowed out skulls. No. Wrecked, flaming cars don't surround us. The mindless mob isn't panicking in the streets. The traffic lights aren't dead. The lines of communication aren't cut. The endless babel of words and images has not been stopped. The vast universal silence isn't closing in like a shroud of death.
I do not contemplate my own death. Or the deaths of millions and millions of others.
Yet I laugh, bitterly.
What isn't happening isn't happening. What can't be started cannot be stopped. As the ineluctable tsunami of chaos doesn't close in, in the moments before it doesn't engulf me, I know only one thing.
Somewhere, in the growing fear and chaos that isn't happening, the fucking consultants who hyped this Y2K shit aren't getting any work.
For that, at least, I am grateful.
Welcome to the 21st century
21st Century Schizoid Man
(King Crimson -- Fripp & friends)
Cat's foot iron claw
Neuro-surgeons scream for more
At paranoia's poison door.
Twenty first century schizoid man.
Blood rack, barbed wire
Polititians' funeral pyre
Innocents raped with napalm fire
Twenty first century schizoid man
Twenty first century
Twenty first century
Twenty first century
Twenty first century schizoid man
Death seed, blind man's greed
Poets starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs
Twenty first century schizoid man.
Twenty first century
Twenty first century schizoid man
Twenty first century schizoid man
Yeah. Welcome to the twenty first century.
Friday, December 31, 1999
Party like it's 1999 ...
The new century approaches. Happy happy, joy joy.
You know, if the turn of the last century was any indication, you might want to save the confetti.
Thursday, December 30, 1999
Mind your manners
Mind your manners, they may come back in style.
My Dad used to say that. So far it hasn't happened.
That's the problem.
This social decay and fear and loathing on all sides? The end of civilization as we know it? The grim slide into the abyss? Our jolly ride in the hellbound handcart?
It all boils down to bad manners.
In the South, for years, we've had good manners because in the South, for years, most of us have had guns...except for black people which, fortunately, has now been largely corrected. Now everybody has guns!
Which is why you're not going to see any Columbines in this section of the country. You may get the occasional chalk outline or two in the High School Gymnasium but none of this mass slaughter shit.* Why?
First, even the dumb jocks down here are smart enough to assume that a deranged social outcast in a trenchcoat is probably fairly well-armed.
Second, if the "Dorks for Satan" ever do blow off their A-V volunteer work for an extracurriculur killing spree, they would find, not a helpless pack of sheep for the slaughter, but a well-armed student populace.
Down here, we treat each other with respect because everybody knows that everybody else is potentially armed.
At least, that is, until all these outsiders with their fancy ideas and metal detectors started coming down here from up north and taking jobs in school administration.
It's all about manners.
Yes. I may drive like a maniac, but I'm a polite maniac. If I see you've got your turn signal on, I'll let you change lanes in front of me -- after which I'll have the common decency to slide over to the next lane, after using my turn signal, then speed up to get ahead of you, then change lanes again, and get back in front of you. I'll be way the hell in front of you. Even then, I'll use my turn signal.
Because you might shoot me.
But now our manners are going to hell.
The water fountain at the YMCA I go to now has a sign: PLEASE DON'T SPIT IN THE WATER FOUNTAIN. Can you see what a commentary on society it is that we actually need a sign like that? Like some guy is going, hock, hock, hocckkkkkkk, working up a nice, phlegmy blue oyster in the old mouth cavity ready to send it hurtling like some snot meteor into the drinking fountain -- but, then he stops -- ohmyGOD, there's a sign! Oh, I didn't realize they had a problem with that...thank God they warned me in time! So he swallows it. Gulp. Right.
What's next?
PLEASE DON'T WASH BALLS IN SINK.
THANK YOU FOR NOT MASTURBATING IN SHOWER.
THE LACK OF STEAMING TURDS ON TILE FLOOR IS APPRECIATED BY EVERYONE.
Which is what they say in the movie theaters: SILENCE IS APPRECIATED BY EVERYONE...instead of: SHUT THE FUCK UP. No, no. We don't want to put it that bluntly. Better to say it in the inoffensive passive voice so our moviegoers will work their way through the following enthymene:
SILENCE IS APPRECIATED BY EVERYONE
I AM TALKING
THEREFORE: IT IS NOT SILENT
THEREFORE: EVERYONE WILL NOT APPRECIATE THE LACK OF SILENCE
THEREFORE: EVERYONE WILL NOT APPRECIATE ME
HOWEVER...
ASSUMING THE CONDITIONAL HYPOTHETICAL THAT I STOP TALKING
THEREFORE: I WILL THEN BE SILENT
THEREFORE: EVERYONE WILL APPRECIATE THE SILENCE
THEREFORE: EVERYONE WILL THEN APPRECIATE ME
ASSUMING I WISH EVERYONE TO APPRECIATE ME
I WILL WANT IT TO BE SILENT
I WILL THEREFORE, THEN
STOP TALKING
Far better than the much ruder SHUT THE FUCK UP, dontcha think?
But the movie is running and everybody's still talking. Subtle hints don't work with rude motherfuckers.
My Dad used to say that. So far it hasn't happened.
That's the problem.
This social decay and fear and loathing on all sides? The end of civilization as we know it? The grim slide into the abyss? Our jolly ride in the hellbound handcart?
It all boils down to bad manners.
In the South, for years, we've had good manners because in the South, for years, most of us have had guns...except for black people which, fortunately, has now been largely corrected. Now everybody has guns!
Which is why you're not going to see any Columbines in this section of the country. You may get the occasional chalk outline or two in the High School Gymnasium but none of this mass slaughter shit.* Why?
First, even the dumb jocks down here are smart enough to assume that a deranged social outcast in a trenchcoat is probably fairly well-armed.
Second, if the "Dorks for Satan" ever do blow off their A-V volunteer work for an extracurriculur killing spree, they would find, not a helpless pack of sheep for the slaughter, but a well-armed student populace.
Down here, we treat each other with respect because everybody knows that everybody else is potentially armed.
At least, that is, until all these outsiders with their fancy ideas and metal detectors started coming down here from up north and taking jobs in school administration.
It's all about manners.
Yes. I may drive like a maniac, but I'm a polite maniac. If I see you've got your turn signal on, I'll let you change lanes in front of me -- after which I'll have the common decency to slide over to the next lane, after using my turn signal, then speed up to get ahead of you, then change lanes again, and get back in front of you. I'll be way the hell in front of you. Even then, I'll use my turn signal.
Because you might shoot me.
But now our manners are going to hell.
The water fountain at the YMCA I go to now has a sign: PLEASE DON'T SPIT IN THE WATER FOUNTAIN. Can you see what a commentary on society it is that we actually need a sign like that? Like some guy is going, hock, hock, hocckkkkkkk, working up a nice, phlegmy blue oyster in the old mouth cavity ready to send it hurtling like some snot meteor into the drinking fountain -- but, then he stops -- ohmyGOD, there's a sign! Oh, I didn't realize they had a problem with that...thank God they warned me in time! So he swallows it. Gulp. Right.
What's next?
PLEASE DON'T WASH BALLS IN SINK.
THANK YOU FOR NOT MASTURBATING IN SHOWER.
THE LACK OF STEAMING TURDS ON TILE FLOOR IS APPRECIATED BY EVERYONE.
Which is what they say in the movie theaters: SILENCE IS APPRECIATED BY EVERYONE...instead of: SHUT THE FUCK UP. No, no. We don't want to put it that bluntly. Better to say it in the inoffensive passive voice so our moviegoers will work their way through the following enthymene:
SILENCE IS APPRECIATED BY EVERYONE
I AM TALKING
THEREFORE: IT IS NOT SILENT
THEREFORE: EVERYONE WILL NOT APPRECIATE THE LACK OF SILENCE
THEREFORE: EVERYONE WILL NOT APPRECIATE ME
HOWEVER...
ASSUMING THE CONDITIONAL HYPOTHETICAL THAT I STOP TALKING
THEREFORE: I WILL THEN BE SILENT
THEREFORE: EVERYONE WILL APPRECIATE THE SILENCE
THEREFORE: EVERYONE WILL THEN APPRECIATE ME
ASSUMING I WISH EVERYONE TO APPRECIATE ME
I WILL WANT IT TO BE SILENT
I WILL THEREFORE, THEN
STOP TALKING
Far better than the much ruder SHUT THE FUCK UP, dontcha think?
But the movie is running and everybody's still talking. Subtle hints don't work with rude motherfuckers.
Wednesday, December 29, 1999
The Policeman is your friend
America, of course, is now totally humped. We've all been given credit cards so we've got a little breathing room before they ship all our jobs to China and say SURPRISE.
Kinda like musical chairs. We're all dancing, lalala. The music stops. If you don't get a rich person seat you get to spend the rest of your life picking for recycled hypodermic needles in the garbage dump. It
can't happen here? Bullshit.
See, we don't have secret police in America. We have undercover cops...that's different! And of course it's different when the undercover cops are driving unmarked police cars. What's up with that? I mean, fuck, that's the secretpolicemobile, that's what that is. I mean, fuck it, I can deal with the cops if you've got a sporting chance.
If you're such a braindead chump you don't notice the motorcycle cop hiding like Jaws in a little alleyway, dada...dadada...if you're not constantly alert, constantly scanning for cops you DESERVE to get a ticket. But when they fucking sneak up on you in a black SUV that doesn't even look like a cop car? That's not fair! Goddamnit, I thought this was America!
So I see the lights flashing in some black SUV that's magically transformed into a copcar. The cop's waving...doing this cop-mime: You, yes you, asshole. You. No. Seriously. You. I caught you, you.
So I stop. He gets out and says...
Cop: Was there some REASON you were compelled to endanger your life and the lives of others by driving like that?
It doesn't occur to me to squirm in my seat and say...
Me: Reason? Poor city planning, by God, that's the reason! Come on, man...you can't honestly expect to cram this amount of vehicles on such an inadequate road system without...
Or...
Me: AGGGGGHHHH, oh God officer, God, this is so embarassing, I'm about to have an attack of explosive diarrhea, aahhh, I've gotta get to a toilet, ahhhhh...
Or....
Me: Officer, I sweartagod there's a man up ahead of me PULLED A GUN ON ME! In an SUV just like YOURS! I was trying to get his license number when...
No, no.
I just shake my head like Goofy and go...
Me: No. Uh-hyulk. Nope. No good reason, officer, hyuk-hyuk-hyuk.
He says...
Cop: I have to tell you. The way you were weaving in and out of traffic, changing lanes like that? That's some of the WORST driving I've ever SEEN.
I don't have the balls to say...
Me: Worst driving you've ever seen? Goddamnit, I drive like that EVERY DAY. I've been driving like that for TEN YEARS and nothing's ever happened to me because I'm GOOD AT IT, goddamnit. I've got the reflexes of a race car driver...the reflexes of a cat!
Nah. I just shake my head in sorrow and offer some cringing, insincere apology. Yes sir, officer this, officer that, because I don't want him to slap reckless this and endangering that to my ticket.
You can't fight the system. I know it. Now they're putting up fucking SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS in every intersection...but it's not a police state, no, no, those cameras are for your protection, citizens! That's different!
God, the hypocrisy. I'm fucking pissed off about it! I'm boiling with moral outrage!
The fact he gave me a ticket has nothing to do with it whatsoever.
Kinda like musical chairs. We're all dancing, lalala. The music stops. If you don't get a rich person seat you get to spend the rest of your life picking for recycled hypodermic needles in the garbage dump. It
can't happen here? Bullshit.
See, we don't have secret police in America. We have undercover cops...that's different! And of course it's different when the undercover cops are driving unmarked police cars. What's up with that? I mean, fuck, that's the secretpolicemobile, that's what that is. I mean, fuck it, I can deal with the cops if you've got a sporting chance.
If you're such a braindead chump you don't notice the motorcycle cop hiding like Jaws in a little alleyway, dada...dadada...if you're not constantly alert, constantly scanning for cops you DESERVE to get a ticket. But when they fucking sneak up on you in a black SUV that doesn't even look like a cop car? That's not fair! Goddamnit, I thought this was America!
So I see the lights flashing in some black SUV that's magically transformed into a copcar. The cop's waving...doing this cop-mime: You, yes you, asshole. You. No. Seriously. You. I caught you, you.
So I stop. He gets out and says...
Cop: Was there some REASON you were compelled to endanger your life and the lives of others by driving like that?
It doesn't occur to me to squirm in my seat and say...
Me: Reason? Poor city planning, by God, that's the reason! Come on, man...you can't honestly expect to cram this amount of vehicles on such an inadequate road system without...
Or...
Me: AGGGGGHHHH, oh God officer, God, this is so embarassing, I'm about to have an attack of explosive diarrhea, aahhh, I've gotta get to a toilet, ahhhhh...
Or....
Me: Officer, I sweartagod there's a man up ahead of me PULLED A GUN ON ME! In an SUV just like YOURS! I was trying to get his license number when...
No, no.
I just shake my head like Goofy and go...
Me: No. Uh-hyulk. Nope. No good reason, officer, hyuk-hyuk-hyuk.
He says...
Cop: I have to tell you. The way you were weaving in and out of traffic, changing lanes like that? That's some of the WORST driving I've ever SEEN.
I don't have the balls to say...
Me: Worst driving you've ever seen? Goddamnit, I drive like that EVERY DAY. I've been driving like that for TEN YEARS and nothing's ever happened to me because I'm GOOD AT IT, goddamnit. I've got the reflexes of a race car driver...the reflexes of a cat!
Nah. I just shake my head in sorrow and offer some cringing, insincere apology. Yes sir, officer this, officer that, because I don't want him to slap reckless this and endangering that to my ticket.
You can't fight the system. I know it. Now they're putting up fucking SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS in every intersection...but it's not a police state, no, no, those cameras are for your protection, citizens! That's different!
God, the hypocrisy. I'm fucking pissed off about it! I'm boiling with moral outrage!
The fact he gave me a ticket has nothing to do with it whatsoever.
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