Laid off

I am laid off. It's a funny feeling to be without a job/social-purpose-beyond-what-you-think-is-cool-in-life-etc. Mind you, I do believe, as I'm sure that many of us do, that what takes us beyond Kierkegaard's depths of despair and into anything that gives us non-divinatory happiness usually doesn't have anything to do with what we do to make money and the interactions within society that have to do with money, which as will be my point, is everything. It's odd that our interactions with society, American society, generally have to do with some kind of commerce.  And I was about to refute this statement with the fact that I don't have children and that children could be some path towards self-fulfillment absent of the dollar but after having taught in the NYC public school system for several years I know that from dealing with the bureaucratic structures of the NYC DOE that this is not the case. I also see from my freinds who have children their need to shop shop shop, their education included. Children do not escape commercialization and commodification.

There's so much crap to buy and shopping itself has been intertwined with self-fulfillment and national identity. Macy's is going to have a Martin Luther King Season White Sale next year. There's always shit to buy for every occasion and why shouldn't there be? We need to express ourselves vis a vis what we can buy and this directly links us to how much and maybe more importantly, what kind of money we make. If our identities are related to what we buy and we can not buy what we need to express ourselves then we have unfulfilled identities. We have incomplete visions of ourselves. I stare through a morning shower fog at my naked self in the bathroom mirror. I can make out a nipple, half of a face, a black spot of ambiguous pubic hair which could possibly just be a Ty stuffed animal of some sort, collect them all.

I'm Defriending Someone on Facebook

I have defriend someone on facebook.

Pertaining to a conversation with a friend about a friend of his (the defriended facbook friend). I wanted to give this person the full benefit of the doubt since we were going away with her for the weekend. Previous to this past weekend, I only didn't like her because of bad, corny, not funny jokes, a general lack of passion and a lack of personal style. Which for all measures can be ignored when summing up the meaning of someone's character. These are merely trivialities when other great pieces of a person should be considered with more detail. Jimmy Carter doesn't have outstanding style, and I love him. Over arching to all of this is the one thing that trumps and turns on the garbage disposal, the machine grinds affability, fish heads, orange rinds, coffee grounds and sharp splintered pieces of dry chicken neck bones, is the intent to make another feel uncomfortable without any hint of humor or without any hint of playfulness.

"You were wrong so chances are that I will have to fact check you about anything you say because you'll probably always be wrong again"

This statement's has been ringing in my ears for the last couple of days now. This statement, among others said to me, was said with no jest and no smile. She was serious. Moreover, if there was any intent at a giggle then I can only assume that her lack of giggles have no intent to amuse or disarm but rather without her intent they create the opposite and is the nascent force that puts people on guard with defenses set as deep as any crocodile filled moat can be. One can say that intent is not at the root of her actions; yet, parallel to a statement that implicates her innocence vis a vis the naivite akin to a murderous asp is an implication then that it is a matter of nature driving her actions. Wherein, intent and bitchicuntfacedness have enmeshed into each other helix-like and only some mixture of magic, science, and exorcism can extricate and sort the mess.

She also has dark hair on white skin which shows up very clearly on her arms. One can only imagine the misadventures of her anal hairs. Happy go lucky pirates they are not. Mole-men with head lamps and shit-picking picks maybe?

I think ultimately that I feel sad for her but not sympathetic, sympathies are reserved for those that I find with redeeming qualities. My sadness is in her blindness. She must be miserable since I'm sure that someone in her life has always spoken to her as callously as she speaks to others. Could you imagine never knowing why people don't like you? Could you imagine not having any propensity, or propriety really, to know what is socially and interpersonally acceptable? Goes back to one of my favorite thoughts. No matter how far you look. what you are looking for is really within yourself. Her problems are so within her anus with the mole-men picking away at her colon walls. What glyphs from ancient cultures do they find there? What messages of colorful bison with flint tipped spears pierced into thick hide are there on her shitty colon's very Lascaux walls?

Friendly's Orientalism

I sent the following email to Friendly's about their use of the word Oriental on their menu.

I , and I am sure that there is a host of other Asians, am personally offended that you use the term Oriental on the menu. For all intents and purposes, the politically correct term is Asian. Look at what McDonald's has on their menus. They are much better than you. For you to use Oriental, as in your Oriental Chicken Salad, is a pejorative connotation akin to another restaurant, that I will not mention here, that gave the name of Negro Fried Chicken Pizza to one of their pizzas. It was delicious but that is beside the point. Doesn't that sound bad, Negro Fried Chicken. I think it does. Please correct this as soon as possible on all of your menus. Please remember the importance of semantics in our delicate world of words. If you want the new American Asians to come to your establishments and not the buried and biased laden Orientals with their big round hats to come for a nice scoop of ice cream with the pretty whipped cream and some delicious fried brown goods all served by some of the loveliest waitresses on this our God's green Earth, correct the matter on your menu. As a side note, will you bring back those great dresses that they used to wear, the cute gingham ones with the little bow that were tight and nice and short? I don't want to have to write anything like this again. It hurts me. There are the stains from my yellow tears on my key board now.

I've finally been published in the Times

http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/the-orphans-of-ireland/?scp=2&sq=ireland&st=cse&apage=7#comment-36507

I'm comment 156. I believe

Where do the Irish keep their armies?

Up their sleevies.

Vampires Sex Death

Vampires make love to the desperate and repressed. In a way, god bless Margaret Atwood, it is a rape fantasy of a sort. Wherein, a despotic, undead creature forces itself upon its victim and the victim is converted into the likes of the creature itself, becoming a death/sex slave to its own appetites. The victim has been released from its own repression and can express itself in the two things that network TV loves to dually exploit and admonish, sex and violence.

"Free yourself,
be colorblind,
the rest will follow."

Bite someone happy.

Virginia Woolf and Sausage

On March 8, 1941 Virginia Woolf wrote:

“And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.”

On the 28th of March, 1941, Virginia Woolf filled the pockets of her overcoat and drowned herself in the River Ouse. Accepting death rather than facing her debilitating mental illness.

Facial Hair and Aesthetics: A Manly Experience

After the buzzing had died and it was time to see my refuse in the basin, the whisps lay like the fallen forests on Mt. St. Helen's denuded flank, I see that my facial hair is a measure of my maturity and manhood. But really my mustache and beard are thin. And these discarded pieces of me are cause to speculate on those that have seen Jesus christ in the crotch of an old tree or the dent of a rusted can, others who read catastrophic and life changing events at the bottom of teacups and still others who have seen the jagged peaks of the immense Annapurnas as Buddha's perfect delicate toes. However, more important than these trinkets of spirituality, what herculean tombs of knowledge have you found felled and tangled like Pollack's paintings in the cuttings of your manhood black against the white porcelain of your sink?

 

When I was working as a bartender, the manager didn't want beards or facial hair on the men, even less so on the women. I didn't really care. I can go 2 or 3 days without shaving and not be noticed. At the time I think I was an anti-facial hairist because of that, but also from taking on my manager's prejudices. And there is some embarrassment to that kind of familiarity with a man like him, to share in the slightest of affections, as much as I do like the man who was oft mistaken for an oaf or an intelligent neanderthal, a genius of a neanderthal. Ah, Yorick, I do miss the rides on your broad back. Although, I have to admit that taking on this odd prejudice was probably more rooted in my own jealousy and repression. It has always been easier to go with the flow, regardless of the stupidity and polluted sludge hampering the flow. It is a mistake that I've made often for the sake of my own perception as a mellow character and the projection of that persona to others. I, as it has turned out beyond the jagged and uneven steps of my youth, am not that mellow, in actuality I am an ineffective and fragile cage for gaseous mellowness. Inside I have tiny little motorcycles racing around me like an act in a chain link ball at the circus. I am filled by men dressed as powdered red lipped clowns and shiny heroes chasing each other in sysosophian circles, riding motorcycles that fill me with the stench of gasoline and the roar of two stroke motors. 

Yet, another voice against the facial hair at that point in my life was also the prevalence of the boy-band and how each profile of members like Boyz to Men had to prove their band's name by physically exhibiting a tangible association to being a man. They had funny little lines on their faces that were akin to Popeye's anchor tattoo that formed the little goatees and mustaches, twitches of Kandinsky-esque strokes that slashed across cheeks and upper lips like the finest of artistic compositions to rival the millions of years of labor and effort it took the cosmos to make the picture of the man in the moon. Beyond all of that, maybe it just seemed like it was just too easy of a measure to gain instant fashion. If not a two to three days' lapse depending on the speed of hair growth at the end of which time one could proclaim that yes, you had changed and taken on a new persona. Ladies, I am a cheap and affordable version of Justin Timberlake. Take me.

I had a girlfriend at the time who commented once after seeing her ex that he had some very sexy mutton chops, Wolverine sexy. Really I should have concurred. But really, I was jealous. I knew that I could never command such manliness on my own face. That kind of wild animal erection-cum-facial hair was elusive at best (Did I ever say how back then in my twenties I could fuck like 6 or 7 times a day. It would only last about a minute or so each time but string that together and good and godly times are to be had!). Anyway, after that experience of jealousy I think I began to look at men with brilliant facial hair of the type that was unattainable to me. My prey was not the boy band welps, nor the boy band wannabes, but the men who were truly able to express the inner vision of their souls, of their manly necesity with the nuances and flair of a brilliant star's twinkle, of such subtlety and sublimation that maybe one wouldn't even notice the voice that spoke from behind the curtains but that the curtains themselves were the spectacle to be experienced. They need not open for us to be entertained. Shakespeare and Chekov were felled by this competition with just a few strokes of the imaginative razor.

Watching Others Blink

(Spanish National Basketball Team making chink eyes in Beijing)   We are nature yet we have a bad habit of differentiating ourselves. It's a tendency of our very limited brains for us create strict and stupid polemics like the man v nature conflict we learn in third grade and then apply it to the world as a paradigm. There are plenty of destructive species, ants and other insects to say the least that interfere on their neighbors and bring the quality of life down in their neighborhoods. We are just able to see "nature", see the ants, balance out with the destructiveness. In the great scheme of things we are just a very very small footnote. We can do lots to fuck things up but it's really nothing compared to the millions of years that a star considers less than the batting of its eyelashes. I think that we're self centered in that what we see of our own destructiveness is only relevant because we did it. A cum stain on a black polo shirt, a deep deadly hole dug on the beach in a runner's path. Ultimately, I do agree that we are fucking things up and not making it any easier for ourselves or posterity, but there is a much broader perspective, a much less self relevant perspective to be had. None of this will matter, nothing that we do is really that important but to ourselves, but to the illusory hope that the things we do are permanent. 

...of miles and mind.

In matters of miles and mind I have traveled at great lengths to find myself. Without much success yet but I try. I have looked beyond the obvious membranes of skin and soul for what might be my redemption because those with guilt are always in need of redemption. I am, unfortunately, one of those. Mind you, I want Jesus or the Buddha but I don't want to travel any further in that heavily trodden path carved into earth and hills as if from the passage of so many burdened asses. My strides would die in those deep ruts. Nobody, I feel, should have to travel like that against their own wills. There are too many ideas accepted in the name of God by the following fodder-like sheep without the proxy of walks through their own gardens and graveyards, through hikes in the mountains and through hikes in the madness. I would prefer that disembodied arms stretched through fluffy clouds descending from the heavens and garnished me with celestial robes and that angelic virgins with their soft breasts touching my back like dragonflies skipping from leaf to leaf, were to bathe me in a river of clear water or a muddy toad infested puddle from my childhood,  cleansing me of the many stains on my skin and the many sins of my guilt. That would be easy, wouldn't it. Fortune never found me there. Fortune is not my friend like that and I am alone to find my own way. 

The Troll

The troll lives inside all of us. We sit under the bridge jealous of those that are able to cross it and move on. I often think that the troll was given birth to by the unfortunate event of a homeless person living under the bridge who was relying upon it for shelter. A person who with such audacity as to take advantage of a municipal work, not intended to be for the benefit of any one but for the all, had become demonized to the point of trolldom.

But who knows? That same person could have brought fear with them and extended it to the passers by. We all know how capable humans are of doing that. You know how capable you are of such transference. Or was it the surprise and shock of the passerby to jump in alarm at murmur or mumbling from a lost and lonely madman beneath their feet? An eye darts at you between the bridges planks and finds your fear. Or is it that this very madman makes us uncomfortable when we are laid bare and vulnerable to one who sees us but whom we do not see ourselves? The troll with his power is deserving of such a question as to what makes us fearful of him, as to what makes him fearful of us. Is the troll a thief, are you a thief, dishonestand taking advantage of the fearful? 

But What Does this have to do with Sausage? Remember that we travel so far away from ourselves that we forget that often times the thing that we are traveling to is nowhere to be found but within ourselves. The troll is within you and therefore you must know who and why the troll is what it is. You must take that thing outside and create within. The sausage is made of itself and stuffed into itself. Try to be the sausage that you know you can be, not some cheap imitation of yourself aping yourself.