They could care less about you, they could care less about me

The number of people I'll even talk politics is down to one hand. I don't want to hear the partisan ranting. Both sides say the other side's wimpy or crazy but a vote that has the potential to screw over anyone who pisses off The Powers That Be was pretty damn close to unanimous. But it's different when the other side does it, right Dems? Oh he's not doing enough to keep us safe and he's a wuss, Reps? We can argue about abortion and gay rights but look at what we're doing to the rest of the world.

Have you crawled out of the echo chamber at all and taken a look around in the last six months to a year to ten years? Didn't think so.

I couldn't sleep last night, and lay awake staring up into the darkness feeling the despair of inaction, the weight of encroaching authority, of two minutes hate involving abstract enemies, of a population so numbed by pleasure and violence, every year seems more and more like a brave new world in 1984. I used to think my distrust was just an adolescent pose, now it's only grown more intense.

I've got nothing hey but I'm a star

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival."

In his chapter in 'The Four Loves," C.S. Lewis describes platonic friendship as a beautiful thing that is often derided and in some cases feared. When people discover common ground of one kind or another, it inevitably generates suspicion among one's overlords, especially when they do not recognize it for what it is.

"Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.
... In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, "Here comes one who will augment our loves." For in this love "to divide is not to take away."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)


As I'm now older and a cog in the machine, conforming to dress codes albeit relaxed ones and on my own terms and a semi-regular schedule, I thought that my days of being against The Proverbial Man were behind me, but it seems that acting like a normal human being, in the sense of consuming caffeine and having the pleasure of working with likeminded souls with whom compact discs and lengthy tomes are traded with regularity, is somehow threatening to the order of things, and I'm not even in the corporate world.

"For us of course the shared activity and therefore the companionship on which Friendship supervenes will not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. It may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends. In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? - Or at least, "Do you care about the same truth?" The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer."

There's something wrong with people who obsess over money and networking and whose only interest outside of that is the minutiae of micromanagement, the toxic gossip of small minds, all done in a socially acceptable way. What's wrong with them? They don't buy into this. Someday when they're older and wiser like us they'll understand..."

It is supremely ironic that in a place dedicated to reading and study and the pursuit of knowledge, that the Powers That Be are often suspicious of these very things and the friendships forged along these lines, of people who read books that are neither pulp mysteries or primers on how to be rich, who listen to incomprehensible music, and follow news that has more to do with Central Asia and the Middle East than what so and so and whatserface is up to. The irony is astounding.

But hey, I've been here four years, others have been here longer, we still get along, and what better way to celebrate the absurdity of life but with some ephemeral Daria?

you know what? you know what?

I'd rather know that something is wrong and be told than to let it continue to go on to have the shit hit the fan now rather than later, but I feel my internal organs shudder when I get the impersonal communication devoid of context and enforcing a suffocating conformity to a norm that makes next to no sense outside of boardrooms and in motivational books.

I will smile and nod and say yes of course you're right, I laugh too much I smile too much, I'm too fucking human. I don't buy into this, but I'll pretend to because I need to eat.




But in reality I will say what I need to say, and not so much for cowardice as survival. I will try not to cry. I'm feeling resentful and not so much ashamed as understanding that the language that we speak is different than the language of those in power, that they will never understand us, and that we don't want to lose our souls to be them.

At least I have Kristin to cathartically rock out to in the car on the way home.

one more thing to put in line / one more thing to waste my time

So the economy of my state depends on the prison industry and people drinking themselves into oblivion or some combination thereof, we can't fund NPR but we can drop bombs in Libya, even though life is hard in the rust belt, it's way worse other places, and the family is suggesting strongly that I invest in a security system because I live in the almost-hood but what's the point if the cops don't come when you call anyway. Besides, given my clumsiness, I'm the kind of person that would trip the alarm on my own as it is.

I don't mean to sound so surly, but listening to powerpoint presentations of bureautechnocracy in all of its mind-numbing banality will do that. To think about all of these people who think they should know all your business, under the pretense that it's for your own good is spooky as anything, whether it's those who see us peons as expendable human resources or the general nanny-statism that has become the norm over the last decade.

I know that I participate in my own forms of escapism as much as those I deride for obsessing over the Kardashians or the last episode of whatever people are watching on TV, hence the nights spent honing artistic skills and writing my Chinese Democracy of an unfinished novel.

Ah well, I'll be going home to crash from the comedown of all the coffee I've drank, finish up that damn midterm, and try to retrieve my brain from the absurdity of modern life. And while this band really isn't all that good, this song is pretty awesome for those days when I just need some abstract angst and Butch Vig-produced power-chordness that sounds an awful lot like that guitar sound on 'Nevermind.'