Karl Marx Hates You.

America's pastime is no longer baseball.  It is self-hate.  Our self-hatred comes from our arrogance, and our arrogance comes from our self-consciousness, and our self-consciousness comes from our deep insecurity about how different we are, like a kid on the playground who hit puberty before everybody else.  You see, it works like this:  we think we are so unbelievably awesome that we feel self-conscious for being awesome-er than everyone else (which we actually think is true!), and everyone else hates us and tells us we are ignorant bull-headed Westerners who think themselves better than anyone.  This is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the more we feel bad the more patronizing we appear.  (Operation:  Christmas Child anyone?)  Then we get whacked in the black hole where our souls used to be (before we sold them to the gods of wealth) with our own super-ego because our Oedipus Complex is for Great Britain (RULE AMERICANA, AMERICANA RULES THE WAVES!).

Whammo! next thing you know we're grapefruit dieting ourselves to sleep at night and feeling like the scum of the earth because we can afford to sip lattes and buy new clothes while the rest of the world (whom we ennoble as the all-suffering, persecuted real scum of the earth)  is in a GAP sweatshop working to produce our commodities for us.  Worse yet, are the starry-eyed youth group kids who come back from a short-term missions trip digging church basements in a third-world country and say,

"You know, we just take like so much for granted, you know?  They are so happy, and they have like literally nothing." 

First of all, how many church basements does Guatemala need?  Isn't it high time we actually built some churches?

Second, they have some stuff so don't say "literally nothing" because it makes you look like an idiot.

Third--and I think this is the beating heart of the Western self-hate complex--wouldn't it be so much worse if we actually thought that our iPods and iPads and AE and A&F and H&M and FYI and SUV's and PS3's actually made us better people?  Ask any self-respecting teenager today and what will they say is the most important factor in their personal growth and development?  Odds are, they will not say their parents, and nobody will reply "My Mac because it's so intuitive."

Nay fellow countrymen.  They will say "My friends."  I know this because I have asked a lot of teenagers, and they said, "My friends."  Although I did get one little weirdo who said proper nutrition.

The point is that maybe it is normal and healthy to take these material things for granted.  At my school everybody seems to be playing "fruit ninja" on their iPod touch.  Sweeeet.  After a while, though, they will go to the next thing--the next game, the next iPod, or the next something else to distract them for another day or two.  Then they will develop boredom or carpal tunnel and they will go on to the next thing.  Confuscius say:  "Always it is the next thing."

"Well isn't that a bad thing?" you ask.  "Aren't we worse people now than we were two hundred years ago because we have shorter attention spans and we have more stuff and we pollute the environment?" you quander as you anxiously suck down half a Double Shot Caramel White Chocolate Swirl.  NO.

Let me explain.  What is the legendary loyalty of the Italians?  Family.  What is most important to poor families in Cleveland?  Each other.  Even psychologically troubled and hormone-crazed tweenies love their friends in between vampire romance flicks.  We live in a digital, material age, but we are organic creatures that find fulfillment in the warmth of others, and not in the cold, hard silicone that we buy with our cold, hard cash  (really, we buy it with our cold, hard lines of credit but let's not complicate things).

Of course there are problems today.  I think that culture as a whole is on the downgrade in America and much of the world.

I also think, though, that it is part of a cycle that we saw in ancient Israel, Babylon, Rome, and yes even Puritanical England.  I hate to break it to you but Shakespeare wrote a lot about sex.  Oh wait I forgot that's one of the reasons you hate yourself, isn't it?  You're an uneducated, culturally ignorant Westerner.  First off, no you're not.  Second, watch an episode of Spartacus:  Gods of the Arena and you'll see what I'm talking about.  We love sex and violence, and we give into our sexual and aggressive impulses.  But that's not any worse than what everyone everywhere has struggled with for all of recorded history.  In fact, that's the whole point of Virgil's Aeneid.  Guess when the Aeneid was written?  OVER 2000 years ago.  Don't be STUPID.

"Don't hate yourself because you're rich" is not the same as saying "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful."  The fact that we can have these things and not care about them is also a sign that we can do without them and not be much put off.  If this decade's earlier economic downturn has taught us anything, it's definitely that we can go from top of the heap to bootlicker with a twist of Allen Greenspan's little finger.  We are a generation that gets its kicks out of shopping at Goodwill and wearing old wool sweaters.  Why?  BECAUSE WE DON'T CARE ABOUT STUFF.  The only difference between us and the penurious happy street children of Guatemala is that we have stuff and they don't.  As far as it changes our level of happiness, there is no difference.  We are unhappy because we are spoon-fed self-hate from mass media execs.

So get a "heart" for the hard-working, indigenous people of...somewhere or read a book to a child or build yourself one of these:

But for Pete's sake, don't hate yourself.  If you have stuff, take it for granted.  Please for the love of God take it for granted.  

Anti-London Blog

It has been approximately 6 months since I last posted, which means of course that all the people who weren't following this blog in the first place have double stopped following it, so I'm in the red ink for viewership. As a shameless gimmick to recover my lost dignity and meet some Hot Local Singles who might help me in my quest to find the Diet Tricks That Really Works! and get a FREE Laptop! given away by a third-world-based global marketing conglomerate...I mean Apple, I am going to re-gear, re-furbish, and re-vamp this entire blog.

Well sort of.  I just want to compare how much better it is here at Houghton, NY

than it is in London.  And I don't mean London Ontario:  population twelve Canadians and a hockey puck.  I mean this London: 

And I don't have a whole lot of choice about the whole thing because of this guy.  Jimmy Jim James Vitale. 

He's going to keep a blog about his cool and exciting international life as an honors student, which is why I have to make a blog about my even cooler and more exciting life here at Houghton. 

So that's what's going down.  Check out his blog here. 

That Thing I Experienced Which Was Beautiful: A Guide to Writing Crapoetry

Poetry is the most expressive of art forms (according to poets), and is therefore the best (according to...me). Many guides have been written analyzing the subject, teaching you gullible lunatics who think writing has nothing to do with talent if only we can compartmentalize it enough how to write, how to think so you can write, how to observe so you can think so you can write, and so on into eternity.

But as far as I can tell, there are only a few guides on how to write mediocre poetry. It is a new genre I am developing called crapoetry, and it truly is the only form of writing that I know of which does not require even a tiny modicum of talent. William McGonagall, contending some say for the position of worst poet the world has ever seen, was a master of the crapoem. His piece, The Tay Bridge Disaster, might be one of the most inexpressive, pointless and trite poems of all time. Having studied the great crapoets such as McGonagall, Edgar Guest, and Margaret Cavendish (whose nonsense plagues us in college English courses still), I would like to propose three principles of the Crapoem in the Classical Sense.

1. Try to sound like a professional by using words and sentence fragments out of their original order and by talking in a sort of Victorian turn of phrase. Like Yoda, with a twist of Wordsworth.

Ex. The beautiful woman was being hit on by a bald clown at the circus.

The clown, balding from age and years of mirthless tomfoolery, was making his advances on a maiden fair at his place of witless comedy.

2. P't ap'strophes wh're they' d'n't bel'ng.

An excerpt from McGonagall's Attempted Assassination of the Queen:

And when they know of her coming,
Their hearts feel overjoy'd,
Because, in general, she finds work
For men that's unemploy'd.

3. Try to generalize; you wouldn't want your poem to be so specific as to actually mean something. Or, if it does have to be specific, write your poem about something that shouldn't matter or doesn't matter for the majority of people. For example, Tyler Graham's poem, My Dog Eats Anything begins:

I was reading a book

Then along came my dog
It was eating a taco
That it got from the mailbox
I started reading the newspaper
Then went out to the car

Perfect. Good balance of specificity and meaninglessness.

Combining all three principles, here is my submission to the realm of crapoetry, entitled

That Thing I Experienced Which Was Beautiful

How lovely in the m'rning air

That thing I saw was th'n and th're

It seemed so stately, proud, and true

A thing of b'uty thro' and thro'

I came along a wide road and long

To hear a sound like t' a song

And in that song I heard it sung

That in that thing th' b'uty hung

And swiftly borne on wind and wings

A million other b'utiful things

So b'utiful and fair and free

They brought me tears and tears to me.

Please, hold the book deals. I'm just doing this as a distraction from working on college coursework while it's summer. If you feel inspired by my crapoetry, I encourage you to write your own. In spraypaint. On a building. Or just write it in the comments section at the bottom of this page.

Apathy and ENNUI

Apathy is something a lot of well-meaning pastors, my fellow starry-eyed college students, and motivational speakers who are only in it for the quick buck and book deal talk about. These people are stupid, because all they ever talk about is passion and having passion and finding passion and they never find a new way to say what they are trying to convey, and so even in this way they are themselves apathetic.

Most of us are apathetic. Most of us like things the way they are to some extent, and those of us who don't are probably young or brave or both, and there is only so much room for people like that, because I take up a lot of space, and apathy breeds contentment, which in turn breeds contempt for change, which is generally a side effect of "passion." Apathy can be good because it keeps us from having to take steps back every ten minutes to make sure we're progressing in the right direction. If Thomas Jefferson was right, and we really should have a revolution every 20 years, we would spend all of our time killing each other, and nobody would ever get to enjoy the country we had revolutionized to. Besides, "passion" doesn't usually pay well. Just ask Peacecorps or Americorps volunteers. The Americorps website tells us, "Perhaps the biggest benefit you will experience when you join AmeriCorps is the satisfaction of incorporating service into your life and making a difference in your community and country." In other words, "passion" and "penury" tend to go hand-in-hand. Apathy isn't much of a living, but at least it's steady.

And of course I don't want to diminish what a lot of brave or stupid people have decided to do with their lives. The world needs a lot more of us suckers who can lead by example so the rest of them can stop feeling so dang content about their lives, but let's face it: most of us want to be Mother Theresa in a BMer. We want the glitter covered Hannah Montana's best of both worlds fantasy tripe where we simultaneously are normal people like me and you, but on the weekends everybody worships us, and of course by us I mean me. Everybody worships me. But I'm so humble that I don't even notice.

*pause while I throw up*

Anyways, I don't think apathy is even the problem because I know loads of incredibly hard-working individuals who struggle through the American dream every day at work, and get home in time for the sun to set on their white picket fence, and their children to ignore them for Ke$ha or their new huge LCD screen blaring out the latest gossip and nonsense straight from the evil heart of the West itself, Ryan Seacrest.

The problem is ennui. The problem is chronic boredom. It's a systematic dumbing down of the intellect on a consistent, though probably unconscious, basis. The problem is us finding new ways to keep ourselves occupied with the smallest, most distracting part of our already limited view so we can never see even what portion we might be able to see of the big picture. George of Dalmatia made a Baptistry in Sibenik where individual carved stone leaves resonate with specific musical tones when struck. This is inspiration. The Sistine Chapel was built in 4 years, and was Michelangelo's first major painting. His FIRST major painting. He was understaffed and underfunded, and he still turned out, in the time it will take me to get a useless degree, possibly the most beautiful piece of art the world has ever seen. This is the power of a man with a lot of direction and time on his hands.

Maybe instead of "stop being apathetic," we should be saying, "stop being so freaking dumb." Stop cutting yourself so much slack. Stop thinking about how much you need a break from work or a vacation or an opportunity to "recharge." Stop drinking so much coffee and 5-hour energy, and live your life as you know you should because this is your one and only chance to be everything you ever wanted to be, and to do the things the world never thought was possible, and if you don't take that chance, you will never find the meaning, the motivation, or the "passion" you crave.

Ghanarrhea World Cup Action

here is the truth about Tim Howard. he is such a good keeper that you actually have to suck if you want to score on him, because unless you are 1. Frickin Maradonna or 2. a really sucky player, you cannot score on the guy. he is great against great players. so if any player scores on Howard (Maradonna excluded) the player is insulting himself because good players cannot score on Howard. if, for example, a country like Ghana scores not once, but twice on Howard, this means that they suck twice as much.

a new blog

so here it is. yet again i find myself living the american dream, starting my own blog. i would start a website, but i'm too lazy to learn CSS or C++ or whatever language you geeks whisper sweet nothings into the ears of computers with. so this blog is going to be the medium for my creative genius. it's going to be full of a lot of things like random videos, my own hilarious short stories, snide comments about politics, and other things designed for you to get paid to laugh at because you're here instead of doing whatever you're supposed to do when you're at work. ;)