Aural Fixation

Cannot stop listening to this song:


It's getting dark too soon
A threatening silence surrounding me
A wind comes up from the islands

When distance fades to stormy grey,
Washed out from the deep of the ocean,
Here I will stand to face your wrath,
While all the others are praying

Calm down, my heart - don't beat so fast
Don't be afraid, just once in a lifetime
Calm down, my heart - don't beat so fast
Don't be afraid, just once in a lifetime

No rain can wash away my tears
No wind can soothe my pain
You made me doubt, you made me fear
But now I'm not the same

You took my wife, my unborn son
Torn into the deep of the ocean
I don't pretend that I love you
Cause there is nothing left to lose

And when silence comes back to me
I find myself feeling lonely
Standing here on the shores of destiny
I find myself feeling lonely

I had a life to give, many dreams to live
Don't you know that you're losing so much this time?
Beyond the waves, I will be free
While all the others are praying

Calm down my heart

The love in you, it does not burn
There is no lesson you can learn
And there are sounds you cannot hear
And there are feelings you can't feel

Calm down, my heart - don't beat so fast
Don't be afraid, just once in a lifetime
I don't pretend that I love you

And this time I'm not scared of you

The Silence of the Ritual

Nobody believes in God anymore. There are moments of clarity in the throes of mental illness, of delusion, hallucinations, anxiety and terror. While the mind is swept up and clarity is lost, the totality of the personality of the Christian is atheistic; it must be because to live our lives in this time is an utter, unblinking confession to atheism. To touch the ground, and smell the air upon birth, is to feel a world and eventually witness a world that is totality devoid of God. Belief does not overtake the Christian, but rather, the mental anguish, the terror, the anxiety forces the actions of the person that wants to alleviate the pain of atheism. The obsessive-compulsive knows and believes their rituals are meaningless, and are embarrassed by them, they, however, must do them to alleviate the anxiety they feel when they haven't acted. The Christian is not far from this. They in truth know they do not believe, but the anxiety of not acting out their various rituals of mind and body overwhelm them with unending anxiety.

It nauseates me to hear thanks to God or a mention of God when people see something wonderful such as a beautiful landscape. All that is great is lost. The person that could have enjoyed the immediacy of the beauty must think of God. Perhaps the anxiety of being overtaken by something, something sublime that makes us feel small, meaningless and unimportant must be destroyed with the thought of God. It is like counting all that is in the world by 7 incessantly. All that is lost, all that is alienated and removed from you so you can in the most petty fashion silence your anxiety, your dread at the unknown. Christianity is a horrific mental illness, and mental illness in part seems to be based in a primordial need to possess, but to go far beyond that need and possess everything. The landscape that should be but a landscape becomes our landscape as created by God for us -- and what disgusting things await the land by these diseased animals through the sheer force of their broken, minuscule, gelatinous brains have taken the cosmos for themselves!

The Ontology Of What Not To Wear

I like to think of myself as very much a contemporary philosopher. The Modernist enterprise for what philosophy and any intellectual discipline should be seemed like a realm for intellectual and creative squalor -- too regimental, too specialized. Why can't pop-culture and theory have a comfortable relationship?

From this discomfort with Modernism, I've decided to bring you a new project within my blog called:
The Ontology of What Not To Wear: A Post-Modern Foray Into What Is Clearly And Distinctly Fierce

To start out with since we've stolen his epistemological terminology, I want to take a moment for Rene "Fashionably Late" Descartes.

I'm highly skeptical of God's existence being clear and distinct, but one thing that is clear and distinct is Rene needs a damn haircut, girl! I know you're busy pondering an absolute, irrefutable truth from which to build all other truths, but maybe you should look into whether or not a demon is fucking with that hair rather than that mind. This is what happens when you separate the mind from the body -- dualism and a bad hair day.

Now on to some more presuppositionless fashion criticism. One of my favorite thinkers is Nietzsche -- note that I said thinker, not dresser. Let's take a look at this hot mess:

Here's Nietzsche probably spying some hot Ubermensch. But he is forlorn because he's never going to get a date with a mustache that is so 1980s Oates from Hall and Oates. Watch out boy, he's not a proto-Nazi! Let's hope his theory of eternal return is flat out wrongbecause I don't think I could deal with having to see that mustache over and over again for all eternity -- God is dead and your mustache killed him -- oh damn!

Thus ends my highly rigorous, nearly mathematical analysis of two prominent philosopher's fashion senses. A truly post-modern endeavor into the unexplored realm of popular culture and philosophical theory.

Plastics and Ethics

The outright rejection of science is an unnerving statement to witness, but in truth, much of our lives go uninformed by higher principles of knowledge. I come to this realization often when speaking to people about their lives and general motivations. Ethics is a foreign notion outside of the burdensomely educated, and even in such a category of people, their knowledge and behavior are usually made distinct. All of our lives are highly fragmented, refined and categorized; it is difficult to relate the knowledge of higher education to the seeming baseness and simplicity of everyday life. It is a mistake, however, and an ailment to live such a way.

Wantonness belief, and I use wantonness assuredly, is a disastrous and destructive way to live. People engage in it daily with little consideration. From horoscopes, to angels, to God, to nearly any baseless claim that might be "affirmed" by anecdotal evidence or the prejudice of common sense is dangerous.

These beliefs are usually justified by the feelings of the believer, allowing them to at will associate any and all things. Human feeling is free to ascribe anything upon an object, and from there, fickle desire, conscious and unconscious, formulates an appearance of correlation. It takes little more than correlation to justify a causal explanation to an undignified and ultimately nihilistic mind. The process by which God gives us the heavens and the Earth is exactly the same as the process by which bald wizards hide poison in my cereal -- a free range of association.

Why are our lives uninfluenced by greater levels of truth?

Science belongs to scientists and ethics belong to half-nude men bathing with young boys. Life is highly fragmented and disjointed because of the naturalization of being, the specialization/professionalization and complexification of our reality. We are taught, we learn and we perceive the world as essential and beyond our grasp. A scientist, while the object ought to be neutral, is actually given to us as a gendered, racial, classed being. Not only do covert sociological categories keep many from an accessible relationship to science, science, through professionalization, remains beyond us as something that only those with a particular type of intelligence can attain.

History too is taught in such a way to reveal philosophy and ethics as something abstracted from our lives; a historical narrative that contains nothing biographical or illuminating to the concerns of a contemporary person. Those fortunate enough to receive a basic education usually never access a philosophical world beyond the epistemological concerns of Plato's cave, and the moral concerns of Aristotle's Nichomean ethics. Philosophy appears dead, cliche, useless and out of touch to most who receive a cursory knowledge of it.

Life aimlessly stumbles along uninformed by the isolated, separate realities of higher education. But the truth of knowledge is that it has existed solely for the desire to live one's individual life better. Ethics is merely the study of the right action to produce the best results in life, and it is informed by what truths we have from our bodies of knowledge. Post-modernity has seen the undaunted rise of nihilism in the form of radical Islam and evangelical Christianity who outright reject science and scientifically-based ethics; nihilism is also rampant in the seemingly opposite world of Scientism and hip liberalism that have not rejected science and ethics but have removed them from their daily lives through professionalization and essentialization. These lives are not informed by the useful, adaptable -- plastic knowledge of good science. Science that is accessible for all to question, consider and improve through epistemologically strict criticisms that cite inspired scientific research; they are rather informed by the free range of human feeling and association, and the total acceptance of an essentialist approach to science that leaves the everyday person outside the business of science, outside the greatest mean to truth we have created to date.

Depp + Bandana = Pirate

I saw some Johnny Depp movie a week or so ago. It kind of sucked, but whatever. It allowed me to realize that Depp's acting, while highly prized and rewarded, is actually a real lusterless turd -- even one so foul, it sinks and sneaks out of sight, ashamed. Well, no, he isn't that bad, but for all the recognition he's received, he deserves an extra special slap in the face for being such a poor actor in reality.

In order to capture Depp's acting, all we need is a typical picture of him doing his thing out in France or whatever country that allows him to live his life as pretentiously and ostentatiously as possible, all the while hypocritically demonizing Hollywood, the industry which supports his absurd lifestyle.

Ah, perfect Johnny, you are a handsome man with the facial hair of an 8th grade Puerto Rican kid. Now, your new movie role of this year will change by adding a hat, keep the sunglasses and the cigarette, and changing the backdrop to the appropriate context. I don't care if this is a movie about the French Revolution and sunglasses hadn't been invented yet! Leave the glasses on and give this guy a sexy ass car that goes with that facial hair!

We have a summer blockbuster on our hands. Depp always plays the same character, himself. It's time for us to stop celebrating this laureled Nicholas Cage. All Johnny Depp does is wear a different hat, and we pretend he's actually being a different character -- he's just being himself with a different hat! And my problem clearly is that at least Cage knows he's a loser and will be in any movie he's offered, but Depp things he's above Hollywood. Thespian? More like ugly mustachioed lesbian that won't make out on the Girls Gone Wild bus. Yeah, rhyming is more important than the semantics, even the syntax of your sentences. You learn that in the hard school of blog writing knocks.

If you want to pretend you're above us, you need to move outside of Nicholas Cage's school of acting, Depp.

Civilization and Its Discontent --ed Fat Kid

There's an invisible war occurring right now in the United States. Every year food, all food in its many shapes and sizes, becomes less of what it actually is and more of what money-hungry capitalist want food to be -- cheap, synthesized plastics. As we've allowed ourselves to become so removed from reality and so unforgivably lazy, capitalists have taken it upon themselves to create services and products that we never once needed before. Everything in our lives is becoming commodified and its true nature alienated from us, as we have no true connection to how things are made, how things exist. Borrowing from a great movie, Food Inc, I recommend you go see it, food is no longer sold as a true, material thing, but rather, it is sold as an idea or a concept of food.

Consider bread, perhaps one of the most prevalent staples in the Western diet. Not that long ago bread was made at home or at local, town bakeries. Now bread has been commodified on a global level of mass production, and many have no conception for how to make bread; they don't know the material being of bread, they're lost in a world of ideas and notions. Anything could be sold to them as bread, as long as you fulfill the notional ideas of bread that float around in mainstream culture. What has happened? Now a lot of bread is fiberless bleached wheat covered in pesticides, puffed up artificially, sweetened with GMO corn syrup, moistened with GMO soybean oil, filled with petri-dish emulsifiers because the product is so unnatural and unstable to hold a proper shape, and filled with two to three preservatives to give the bread a shelf life beyond normal bread that will harden or mold within a couple of days. Many breads also use a dough conditioner that is poisonous to humans, but luckily(!), it is cooked out during the baking process. A bit disturbing though isn't it? A traditional, typical loaf of bread before its commodificiation is yeast or sour dough, whole wheat or wheat flour, water and maybe butter and salt. 4 ingredients including water, so really 4. Processed bread contains roughly 22 ingredients, and no, I'm not fucking joking!!! Many of those ingredients themselves have to be highly processed with numerous other chemicals and processing plants, like corn syrup. The majority of those 22 ingredients are not found in nature, nor are they derived from natural sources; they're created with chemical compounds as much as a plastic trash bag is created. The primary chemical difference is one can be digested without any immediate, apparent health problems.

I'm just talking about bread. It really isn't the worst. A large percentage of your food in the grocery store are just variations of the abundant and cheap soy bean oil and corn syrup, shaped accordingly with soy lecithin and edible plastics to give it the desired shape. Colorants, many which are banned in Europe but legal in the United States, also go into the painting of your food dream, where like i said, you are merely eating soybean oil and corn syrup paintings of foods you think are normal, traditional and the things they present themselves to be.

But that's not it! Food is being taken even further beyond what deceptions exist today. And it's sad when I am nostalgic for old highly processed food because it wasn't as processed as it is today. When I was a healthy, well-preserved and emulsified fat kid, I loved good humor strawberry shortcake ice cream bars. I would slowly run around in excitement at the prospect of its sugary, creamy, oddly pink, weird bread crumb shit satisfying my fat kid desire. This is 15 years ago, not really that long in the grand scheme of things. I was in the grocery store a couple months ago, and I saw one of these bars. I hadn't had one in close to 15 years, at least I can't remember having one anytime recently. I went against my better judgment because I felt nostalgic for simpler times and my boyhood ignorance. Upon opening the packaging I realized that they made the bar about half the size, and yes, I compensated for the fact that I'm much bigger now. It somehow looked more fake, the coloring was wrong, the breadcrumb shit was nonexistent and had no bready-luster. I bit into it. It wasn't creamy at all; it was more like sherbet, but noticeably oily and crappy. They had clearly removed what little cream and sugar had gone into the original crappy ice cream bar. They made it smaller, and it's more expensive now then when I was a kid.

I couldn't believe it. In 15 years, shitty, highly processed food had somehow become even more processed and shitty. To think that kids will grow up and only know this trash. It's unnerving to think about how much food production could change with coming generations as they have no sense of what food really is. Hopefully something can be done now, as I believe we are the last generation that has some sense of what true food is beyond consumer capitalism's deceptive and wallet-filling notions of food.