A Subject That May Take a While (Part 1).

I don't understand Christianity. I'm sure my ignorance is bred from an inability to really give a shit about it in the first place, but it stems from other factors as well. More and more recently I've begun to think about religion in general and about Christianity specifically. My questions have stemmed from the surface level and absurd to the more ideologically probing questions that I really have no way to get a straight answer for. "You could just go to a church and ask away", you say? No. Churches have belief systems based around specific interpretations of the bible and thus, are influenced one way or the other. I'm unaware if there is any church that may be able to put aside its specific agenda, but I doubt there is. With something as personal and influential in one's life as religion, I can only imagine that the subconscience would creep into the conversation and POOF! belief system!
I guess my biggest question about Christianity is the blindness that most people seem to have towards it. Yes, they believe. That's all fine and good. Give yourself a pat on the back; you believe in something bigger than yourself. What I don't understand is what comes with that--an inability to have an open dialogue about WHY they believe and what prompted it. It's somewhat understandable. Religion is very personal, as I've already said, but the unwillingness of most people to ever question there faith or put it under a microscope seems ludicrous. With something as valued as faith it would seem that the best way to test your faith, and thus come to a better understanding of it, is to constantly put it through litmus tests. In very few things in this world can you actually find the value in something through the testing of it rather than just hearing the speech about how great it is. Granted, the story of the bible is pretty convincing (and the "wrathful God" bit is just bad ass), but why take it all in as unrelenting truth? For example, when you buy a lawn mower, you don't get to mow your lawn several times before purchasing it. All you get is the description of it, telling you how much horsepower it has and what the conditions of purchase are and the salesman who just keeps pushing what a great lawn mower it is. It's just the same as reading the bible and then having a preacher preach a sermon. With faith though, unlike the lawn mower, you DO get to take it home and use it. Try it out, see if it works like you want it to. Does it make your life what you thought it might? Does baptism suit you? No? Try episcopal, free of charge.
Not many people seem to take this route though. For most, it would seem that they take a road and adhere to it, not leaving the designated view that their church has taken. I don't know. It just seems that if there is something that important in your life, you would want to make sure that your faith in it is founded, solidly and without need for more question. There is a joy and an easiness that comes with the knowledge that something in your life fits you perfectly. With something as personal (and for most, filled with conviction) as religion, it seems natural to want to test yourself and your faith.
Once again, I have to sight my relative ignorance of religion in general while writing this. I grew up in a methodist family and went to church unwillingly, and sometimes violently opposed to it. I sat in Sunday School and I sat through sermons for nearly sixteen years before I got a job and made sure I always worked Sunday mornings until I left my parents' house. Unlike most people, I found nothing there of interest. For me, church was a place for the old and boring. It never suited me and what I wanted to do with my life, which is principally, to have fun. Of course, it was a good place to become a master of Hangman with my brother, but the church experience itself left a lot to be desired.

Define "Progressive".

Today I read a magazine, or rather, a catalog. That's a bad start. I didn't read the catalog. I looked through it. You can't really read pictures, can you? Whatever. I can't remember the name of the catalog, but underneath the title was the line "Products for progressives since 1979". I thought that sounded interesting. What products would be geared towards progressives? A home abortion kit ("All the tools of a certified practitioner in YOUR HANDS!"), possibly a wide selection of pornography where nice, rich republican girls go slumming and realize the failures of the republican welfare agenda while simultaneously getting balled? I don't know. Or, at least, I didn't know until I opened the catalog. My friends, inside I saw every reason why we fail. I'm not talking the small trivial failures either. I saw the reasons why conservatives and everyone else from every other platform mocks us.
Do you know what was inside? Do you even want to know? Okay. It was hacky sacks and bumper stickers that say shit like "vegetarians taste better" and "I support the separation of church and hate". I always kind of, in some deep I-don't-need-to-know-but-it's-so-ridiculous-I-have-to part of my brain, wanted to know where people get this dumb shit. Now I know. They go to the one stop, all you can shop idiot store. Good job guys. You made all of us look like morons with the most one-dimensional sense of irony ever heard of. Great. Just what I always wanted. Whatever.
The best part was how many bumper stickers and George Bush Bobbleheads there were to choose from. There are so many. The bumper stickers actually had to be broken down into categories like "Social-Economic Failures". In that category alone there may have been upwards of ten bumper stickers that made me A: cringe or B: regret aligning myself with such poor taste.
I think that's how this can all be solved. I need to found a social movement based on those who want to be a part of it. We won't be all that active, and people may mock us quite a bit, but we're gonna be the wittiest, most scathing bunch of folk ever. We will stand for "good times" and using irony in a way that is ACTUALLY FUNNY! Oh man, I can barely wait. While all the rest of you suckers are stuck with your issues and your beliefs and all that tomfoolery, I'm gonna be kicking it with a bad ass crew of funny as shit people who are all into cool junk.
That's way better than being progressive. You should join if you want. Only you probably aren't cool enough.

a rap, a rap, a rappity rap rap

i thought of this hot rhyme yesterday. shit's copyrighted ill-style, son.

every day, i'm either eating granola or gash
move back motherfucker or i'll hit you in a flash
whether is smoking or hiking, my D.O.* is trees
bru-ha-ha, damn, bitch please.

*D.O. stands for direct object

we should be signing off motherfuckers

that last one was made me laugh outloud. people were weirding out.

so:
even amongst shroom eating hippies, i've realized I'm the smelly guy here in NH. I probably should stop eating oranges because they give me gas. but they're oh so delicious.

next, i ran on a mountain today. I listened to the pink razors cd going down accounting for roughly 20 minutes. going back up the mountain took 40 minutes. I had pg.99 to keep me company. shit was brutal.

went on a 2.4 mile hike before that to tuckerman's ravine...in the middle of a fucking pentathlon (sp?) leg four was hiking where they hike to the top and ski down. it was pretty fun to watch them go down. and it's marks the first studded belt and dyed black hair I've seen in a week.

last night, i went to go see some shitty cover band at this place called Red Parka Pub, i had the people i was with headbang while listening to "scentless apprentice." that was pretty on point. anyways, they have double cans of pbr for 2 dollars. I'm in the bathroom chilling at the urinal munching on a box of popcorn (this bar gives you free popcorn!) and drinking my beer. This one guy starts talking to me. I'm now visibly having trouble starting to pee. He then makes fun of me drinking PBR. so I put my hand on his shoulder, while we both are peeing, and say "it's ok..we'll make it through this together."

he then offered to buy me a "real beer." it was delicious. then I left. then i woke up in my dorm room thinking it was noon when in reality it was 8 in the morning; just in time for breakfast.

also, people in new hampshire have never heard of Sparks.

jeff

The Marching Band of Hell

Upon listening to the Nine Inch Nails EP "Broken" earlier today I've made some decisions. The first is that Trent Reznor still rules. The second is that the opening guitar part to "Last" is the exact same riff that Satan wakes up to every morning. I'm not sure by what means it gets stuck in his head or anything though. Maybe he has a clock radio, but one of the new one's with the cd player in it so you can wake up to your favorite song. That would definitely be Satan's favorite song. He would want to wake up to it. Of course it's also arguable that Satan has some kind of power that he can play songs automatically in his head. Not just from memory or anything, but maybe through some kind of "Lord of Hell" brain power that we can't even comprehend. Oh! Nevermind! SATAN WROTE THAT FUCKING SONG! Yeah, he just gave it to Trent Reznor. Yeah, that's it.
Either way, it's my feeling that song rules hard enough that Satan would give Trent the distinguished honor of leading the marching band of Hedll in the final battle between Hell and Heaven.
This isn't as dorky as it sounds. The band of Hell is a very important position. And it's not like he's gonna just have the baton and a whistle like normal band leaders. He's gonna play a guitar (wait for it!) made...from...the...bones...of...angels. Dude is goth as fuck! You think he won't have killed at least a couple of angels by the time the final battle really happens? Oh yeah, dude's on fire.
That's as far as I've gotten with this, but I'll keep updates posted.
I"m also pretty sure that Satan listens to Smashing Pumpkins in his more despondent moods.
Gotta run. Weekend at Bernie's is coming on now and Grumpy Old Men is coming on after it. Someone pinch meeeee.

MAUS

There are a lot of people out there that consider comic books to be..."not cool." By "not cool", I mean, "for kids." "If it has pictures, it can't be significant." I guess that's what people think, anyway. It's like sometime in the past there was some kind of misconception that any comic or Graphic Novel can only be as intellectually stimulating and entertaining as Funky Winkerbean, or, at best, Hi and Lois.
I'm not trying to say I'm an expert by any means. I know as much about comics as my friend Curtis tells me. I know the Frank Miller Daredevil is really good and so is the Brad Michael Bendis version. I know about Sin City, Watchmen and a few others as well. Recently though, I read a book by Art Spiegelman, called Maus. I know a whole lot of people know about this book. The back page tells me it won a Pulitzer Prize and all the reviews are great, so I imagine I'm not alone on this; Maus is one of the best books of, maybe, forever.
The background for the book is the author, Art, talking to his father about his experiences as a Jew living in Poland during the secong World War. The novel glides between the conversations of father and son in the present and the world that Spiegelman creates on the page to detail his father's past.
Ack,I know I'm going to make this into a review or something so I had better switch gears. Let me say that I'm always the first one to make light of an atrocity. I figure I got about 5 years left before 9/11 is fair game. The Holocaust? Yeah, the lease on that being out-of-bounds ended in 1995. Fifty years is plenty long enough. I'm aware I'm only giving 9/11 10 years before it becomes fodder for my joke emporium, but c'mon; I know a lot of people died, but it wasn't fucking genocide. Seriously, every fucking idiot talks about that shit as if it was the end-all-be-all fucking "never saw that shit coming" fucking moment of all time. Fuck that.
Anyway, Maus is really good. You should read it.

check it

i saw my first moose yesterday.

does anyone know what "gorp" is?

DO WHIPPETS!

so the train ride had all the stops and lucklily, the forty year old shakespearean freak sat next to me starting when I woke up in philly. she immediately told me she had a hangover from drinking until 4 in the morning picking obscure lines from shakespare's play and trying to name the play. she also told me that reading shakespeare was like breathing. i tried to find my discman as quickly as possible but then I stopped in order to hear her out. she turned out to be quite fun and the highlight of the train ride with the exception of the old people with their kids buying 4 dollar beers was when she said "I'm interested in other people's babies."

grizzly man is fucking worth watching.

also, kenyans are winning the boston marathon right now. go figure.

The Asshole Email and the Karmic Vengeance of MySpace.

Since the inception of email, it's been a growing habit that people occasionally write to old friends, significant others, and other people out of their past trying to catch up with whatis going on theiur lives. It's one of the greater things about the internet. It makes finding people easy and communication much more simple. Anyone can have their name not be in the phone book, but you're likely to find out a lot about a person just by Google-ing their name, and that's if you can't them on Friendster or MySpace or some other internet meeting ground.
It also happens though, that people you wish you would never heasr from again find you on the internet. It happened to us all, especially those of us who kind of grew up with the advancement in home computers, emails, and growing technology. It sucks, but we get through by ignoring the emails, or by writing back, but writing something curt and disengenuine.
Well, I wrote one of those emails a little while ago. I know it was wrong. It was shitty. But another good thing about email is that you can say the things you need to say without interruption. You can speak as freely as you want and as long as you want. There's no body language that you can read, thus dictating different courses your rant might take. It's a guilty souls verbal utopia.
I wrote my email to a former friend, who would have been more than a friend, save the fact she had a boyfriend who she had kind of feeling for, though it was never clear what kind or how much. I wrote this email through the service that 70 million of us have come to know as MySpace. MySpace happens to be the primary place that assholes like me can find those we've fallen out of contact with to write our "How have you been" emails, or in my case; mournful and apologetic emails.
So I write this email fully aware of how wrong it is. I even acknowledged it to the person I was writing to. Thus begins the waiting. For about a day I didn't check my mail and when I did the "New Message!" sign was up (first off, they need to ditch the exclamation point when you get a MySpace message from someone who isn't already one of your friends. It should just be a period. It's not going to be an exciting message, otherwise.) So I clicked on it and I had not gotten a response from the person I had written to, but had instead received an email from an old girlfriend I hadn't talked to in 9 years. In all fairness, I couldn't complain. I just sent an email exactly like this so it was somewhat deserved. I opened it and all it said was "How have you been?" What the fuck. That kind of email is the worst. It's a mind-fuck in the disguise of an olive branch. All of a sudden this person has come out of nowhere and this is all they wanted to say? What's the point? Why put someone through that if you don't even have some kind of supplementary questionnaire or synopsis of events from your own life? Grrr! But I can't complain, I did the same thing.
I reply to the email, giving her two sentences. This way I've responded, but I kept it short because I don't really want to to talk to her. I wait, I check MySpace again several hours later (yes, I was obsessing) and the "New message!" ic con is up again. I braced myself, "this is going to be the one." I click it and it's an email from a high school friend I haven't talked to in a long time. Turns out she's got a 16 month old baby and just got married to the father two weeks ago in Las Vegas; fucking awesome.
Once again I reply and wait. I know at this point that I'm getting what I deserve for doing what I did. I began forming images of MySpace having a warehouse somewhere, probably in the midwest, where they track emails, finding those like the one I had written. They trace it back and punish you the same way you've just done it. I know it would be wicked expensive and to do, but it would be worth it just for the cruel irony bit.
I get another email. It happened again. For the third time in two days I've gotten an email from someone I've not seen in years. This one is a girl I kind of just fooled around with and then rudely discarded in high school. She's a real estate agent in North Carolina now. Great. Couldn't be happier. Thanks MySpace. I keep getting this kind of stuff drudged up from the past and not the one I'm actually looking for.
It's been almost a week now since I sent my original email. I finally got a response from the girl I wanted to talk to. It would seem she doesn't want to talk to me. She gave me two sentences.

Murder, She Wrote.

I've found lately that I have several issues with this program. I'm aware that I'm approachiung this topic about 15 years after it's window of relevance, but it's bugging me anyway. I guess I should start by briefly reviewing the show for those who might not have watched it or have forgotten about it.
The show stars Angela Lansbury (the crazy-ass mom from The Manchurian Candidate) as Jessica Fletcher, a famous mystery novelist, who gets all ideas for her books from the insanely fucked-up situations she encounters whenever she visits friends, goes on vacations, walks to work, goes out to dinner, and takes out her trash. I'm assuming that's how she gets her ideas. The program doesn't go into her creative process so much.
So, here's the problem; Jessica Fletrcher seems all-together unfaised by the violence that surrounds her daily routine. I don't get it. I'm aware that it's just a television show and one that isn't even on the air, so it shouldn't be so bothersome, but it is. How is it that a woman can find herself constantly faced with death and seem fine? You would think that Ms. Fletcher, who is always surrounded by grief, anger and betrayal--all stemming from a death early in the program--would come to view herself as some kind of Grim Reaper. Whenever she visits her well-t0-do tennis pro friends; one of them dies. Whenever she sees an old friend who's now the sheriff of a small town, some dark secret comes out of his past because of her prodding. Is she unaffected by the pain that follows her?
There's no way any of us, on a daily basis, could deal with the mental weight of personally knowing at least ten people who have killed their rich spouses for the insurance money without requiring some kind of outlet. I've been thinking about this for days now and the only logical answer to me is that Jessica Fletcher takes all of these heinous situations and writes through the negative effects they have on her mind and spirit. And I'm not suggesting she's trying to profit from these acts, but rather that she is trying to deal with them the only way she knows how; she's gonna write a bitchin' novel about it. Whatever.
The other issue I have is with the antagonists on the show. I can understand the first season. Yeah, she's hunted down a lot of murderers, but maybe it was all a fluke, or she was really lucky. After the first twenty or so times though, you should really reconsider murdering your cheating wife when you know Jessica Fletcher is going to be staying with you. It's simple logic. Even if you're witnessing your new bride in bed with another man and there's a pair of scissors right next to you on the boudoire. Hey, think about it. Jessica fucking Fletcher is in the next room. Chill out until the old bat leaves and then cut the breaks in your wife's car or something. Simple. "No fuss, no muss" or whatever that phrase is.
I think those are the only two problems I have with the show. I mean, it also seems kind of weird that so many people take a long look at Jessica and then say "Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle. You're Jessica Fletcher, aren't you?" How many people know the faces of novelists in the first place and in the second place, how many people read mystery novels? I can't name even one mystery novelist off the top of my head. Not one. Yet ten people in every fucking small, broke-ass town in Georgia know Jessica Fletcher almost immediately.

The First.

Testing, Testing. 1, 2. thpthpt!
This is the beginning of what will hopefully be a great endeavor for the four of us. We are all writers of various sorts and talents (or like to project that we're writers) and Dan draws pictures, so we thought that this might be an appropriate forum for us to write, critique, beat up on, and challenge each other's writing.
With any luck you'll be seeing a lot of posts from all of us detailing our various thoughts and misadventures.
Here we go.

The First.

Testing, Testing. 1, 2. thpthpt!