Roy vs Halloween - Halloween Wins

This will be the second in three Halloweens that I've gotten all dressed up and spent the night sitting at home. At least this time it's by choice. I thought I had something going here with the pumpkin carving and the mask. I've been making a papier mache mask for the last two weeks, when I had time, in hopes of pulling out some sort of crowd stopper this year. But two weeks spare time hasn't been nearly enough to craft anything worth putting on and the mask sits entirely unfinished.

Tomorrow I'm set to help my dad move the last of his big furniture into a new apartment. So the anticipated early morning heavy lifting ain't exactly encouraging me to get out and get rowdy tonight. It's mostly mood though. Call me Boll Weevil, I just don't feel up to it. I might manage some cheap-ass pizza and a rented movie, but a full-on human gathering sounds to be more burden than anything else right now.

Anyway, here's what I might've looked like had I attended your gathering. I did not.


Honey, you can't afford me.

Extremism is Required

A year or two ago I read the teachings of Jesus and discovered that they were nothing at all like Christianity. That they were much better and more profound than anything the Christians in my life - including two years Christian schooling and my father's life-long Seventh Day Adventism - had ever led me to believe.

Aside from being an unflappable peacenik, Jesus, it turns out, was a rabid anti-capitalist. Who knew? Certainly the Christians didn't know. Not by the looks of their opulent homes and driveways full of consumer toys. Not according to the contents of the church parking lot, for sure.

I was so overwhelmed with the image of a spiritual leader who advocated the development of -- can you believe it? the spirit! over the stock portfolio... over the body or even the mind, that I decided to take this Jesus fellow up on the challenge.

He said to forgive everyone, so I did. He said to love everyone. I made a best effort at that. It wasn't easy but it wasn't quite as hard as you'd think. He said to sell off everything and give the money away: Done. "Take up your cross and follow me." Right-o, where we goin'?

This isn't the time or place for my story, but what I gained from doing as Jesus taught was a life rich with challenge, suffering, and most importantly, reward. I gained a life where the world was a game, at some points a sad and desperate game that could still fill the players with despair, but always a game. Life was innately foolish, and yet I was indeed living it. I was a participant! I was alive. And I realized just how often that hadn't been the case.

I eventually lost grip of the fundamentals that led me to the road and kept me in good spirits and good stead throughout my asceticism. When I look back I can see a number of personal weaknesses, challenges I failed to overcome, that eventually amounted and chased me back to our present ease of death. But one of the most surprising deceptions that led me from the good path was the very self-deprivation prescribed.

Maintaining my own lack of goods became itself a distraction from my goals. The struggle to remain poor in the face of opportunity and the good-will of a community became an impediment to the cultivation of my spirit, much as capitalism had been before it -- though surely to no equal degree. I felt guilty when I had more than ten dollars in my pocket and when someone offered me work I regressed into intellectual capitulations. This guilt-laden inner turmoil served only to shrink my otherwise expanding outer awareness back down to the blind, pin prick of self; quite the opposite of my intent.

I've read tales of 'Bud' the Buddha and 'Sid,' Siddhartha. Both end in the same conclusive phrase: "The Middle Path." I hate that term. Maybe it's the phonetic resemblance to "middle class" or "middle ground," but the verbage seems to me to lend itself the air of an enabling device; of a justification for lethargic conformity. It turns my mind to the bourgeois: that race of men who've made a whole from one third chastity, one third sin, and one third vacant opportunism. "The middle path" is so easily misconstrued that the phrase itself may be to Buddhism what Christians are to Christianity - a red herring.

One of my favorite books is 'Siddhartha' by Herman Hesse. Hesse's Siddhartha isn't a prince, but simply a well to do young Brahmin. You might say he's an upper middle class kid at the top of the pyramid, ready to go far in his family's aristocratic circles. But he quickly realizes that the path he's on doesn't go anywhere. Accruing all knowledge, as is the practice of his peoples, hasn't led any of his elder counterparts to true enlightenment, and his own studies have done little to soothe his aching soul. So he heads into the wilderness and joins those who seek enlightenment through suffering; who pursue their inner peace by numbing both body and mind to all the world's woes. They think every thought, suffer every pain, deprive themselves of all comfort until no misfortune can move them one way or the other. Of course, Siddhartha soon decides that for all his pains he is grown no closer to enlightenment and that any relief he has found in these practices, be they of his father or of the wild monks, is merely temporary. He muses, most entertainingly, that he can see no difference between such lofty meditative methods of silencing the ego and drowning his soul's confusions in a bottle of rye. Both Brahmin and drunkard awake the next morning to meet their pains renewed.

His path is long and wild and soon enough he decides to taste the richness of what he calls the child's life, embracing the more common paths of sexuality and commerce. It begins as a game and it is very entertaining and fulfilling when played as a game. But these worlds slowly infect him. He starts to take them seriously and they lose their charm. After some time he awakes to find that he is nolonger pursuing his goal of enlightenment but that he's been indoctrinated into a cornucopia, an orgy of the self -- exactly what he first set out to overcome.

In Hesse's 'Siddhartha' the key is not the middle path, but the fullness and wideness of the Buddha's life that enable his enlightenment. By old age he has seen so much of samsara - the endless cycle of life and it's worries - he's walked through so many of it's layers that he finds his final peace in embracing it all. All is samsara. All is life. All is death. All is suffering. All is joy. All is ignorance. All is wisdom. All is hate. All is love.

It is not the moderation of some middle path that brings Siddhartha home to eternity, but the sheer extremity of his existence; the breadth of his life. In the end he knows compassion and understanding for all men because he has walked a day in every shoe. He finds freedom from want by having embraced the wants of all; by knowing the sincere pursuit of every foolishness; by knowing all samsara to be a necessary elixir that must be tasted in full.

From my personal journey I've learned the greater happiness there is to be found in the absence of the comforts modern existence demands. To those who seek it deprivation is a comfort to the soul, for what's sake they are wise to let the body rot. But where deprivation ceases comfort it becomes penance for uncommitted sins. It is pain for pain's sake and there is no rationalizing it.

Between opulence and destitution lie a better way, perhaps. But it is surely not an equidistant. Extremism is required.

The Pumpkineer

Pumpkin of Doom
Maw and I caught us a twenty-two pounder today. Boy, I tell you, I widdled him something fierce, too. Sure enough'll last him, I reckon! Chaw!



One love.

Summer of the Shark

You people are really fucking stupid, ya' know that? Are you aware? just how ridiculously goddamn retarded you are? Yeah, you nibble-nuts. See me pointing? You!

Just want to take a quick sec to put things in perspective for all you dipshits at home. Every year, I'm told, six-thousand people in the US die falling off of a ladder. There are 1500 accidental deaths by firearms. And around 1600 people win no less than a million dollars playing the lottery. This all per annum.

Now put those factiods in your pocket for a minute (you dumb motherfucker, you) and follow me back to the oh-so distant year of 2001. In 2001, prior to a couple of planes flying into a couple skyscrapers, the news - not the tabloids, now, but the Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, "You're watching CNN," tick-tock 60-fuckin-Minutes, news - was out there for months, screaming at the top of their shameless dollar-whore lungs, about shark attacks. Did you hear me right? Yes, I said "shark attacks."

Early in the swimming season they latched onto an attack survivor's story and for the entire rest of the summer could not shut the fuck up about sharks, attacks, and shark attacks. They were so adamant in espousing the danger to the world's swimmers, that they dubbed summer 2001, "The Summer of the Shark." Yes, I'm serious. I was there. It happened. Look it up.

The results? Coastal beaches everywhere received less swimmers. In other words: You ignant' fucking people actually believed this shit about shark attacks. You actually believed that sharks had suddenly decided to go to war with human beings. Oh, you can try to say you didn't believe it - that you didn't fall for Walter Cronkite's horseshit lies - but the numbers tell a different story. You and yours weren't at the beach in '01. You were at home, on the couch, tuned in to the sensationalist, ratings driven, propaganda that passes for American journalism. You were buying, reading and consuming the very media that was unabashedly lying to you, and in the most blatantly obvious manner. You were enabling it! You were tuning in and paying their sponsors. You were feeding the beast that was eating you alive you stupid human-fucking-waste.

And in retrospect? What really happened in the "Summer of the Shark?" Shark attacks were down 15% from the year before. You were more likely to win the lottery; You were more likely to fall off a ladder and die; In fact, you had a better chance of being struck by fucking lightning than being attacked by a shark in the summer of 2001. They were lying to your face the whole time - all summer long! And you, because you're such a rubbernecking, trailer trash, 'Faces of Death' renting, professional wrestling fan, idiot - lapped it up like a kitten at a leaky cow udder. You ignorant asshole, you.

Now this year, with just two months left out of 2009, that same media that advised you so well about the imminent threat of sharks growing legs, coming up on land, and eating your babies while they're still in the womb, is pulling out all the stops to make sure that you don't forget for a minute about the massive viral outbreak what presently threatens to sweep the nation snuffing out your childrens' lives in a tidal epidemic that's sure to leave more bodies than survivors! Look out America! Run for you fucking lives! It's H1N1! It's 2009, "The Fall of the Flu!" Boogedy woogedy woo, dipshit!!!

As of this very day, H1N1 - aka "the swine flu" - is reported to have claimed all of 1000 American lives this year. Now since you're so fucking stupid, I'll go ahead and do the math for you, and project a total of around 1200 deaths by year's end.

In other words: You are more likely to be accidentally shot to death by a neighbor cleaning a gun; you are more likely to win a million dollars in your state's lottery; you are way, way more likely to kill yourself while changing a light bulb than you are to die of this H1N1 that the media is skull-fucking for ratings' sake.

And so long as it's stuck in there, let's give it a twist and see if we can't break it off by pointing out that 30 times more people will die this year thanks to the good old fashioned, every day, over-the-counter strains of influenza that don't nobody give a shit about right now, because they're all too fucking retarded for this month's "7 Action News: Special Report - Death by Swine" hysteria bullshit.

If you got an H1N1 vaccine, you are dumb. I'm using simple words now; I think I've run out of other ways to express your intellectual lackings. You are dumb. You probably voted for Bush and against socialized medicine. You're dumb. You probably own a Swiffer Sweeper and drive an SUV. You're fucking dumb! You probably think eating at 'Subway' is a fucking diet, because you're really, really fucking dumb, mang.

They have got you! They own your ignorant, cowish ass. You buy whatever they're selling. You lap up whatever they pour in the bowl. You are one ridonculous fucking numbnut motherfucker, you are. And you're the problem, by the way. It's you. Oh, it's all you! You're why democracy don't work anymore. You're why capitalism has eaten the soul out of this nation. Put it this way: You're the shit-for-brains that talks up how evil Walmart is, then turns around and goes shopping there. Cause you "just can't beat the deals. Sure I know it's run by Satan, but it's 2 for 1 on Swiffer pads this week! Who needs self respect when you've got coupons!"

It's the Summer of the Shark, you dipshit. Tune out! No. Not in... Out! Yeah! That's an option. Yeah, if you press the red button again, it actually turns the TV off. No shittin' ya. You know what? "H1N1" is just "leet" text for hiney - as in butt. As in, "We be fucking you good tonight, America. Tune in at 11 for more major-market consolidated-media dick up yo' ass."

God! You're just so fucking dumb!

(That 1600 lotto millionaires figure seems high, don't you think? I'll bet the internet is lying to me... again!)

'Distance' by Long Shot Party

Yep, I'm covering 'Distance' again. This time I've ventured to sing it in the original octave and register. Look out! As always I have little idea what it is that I'm saying here, but I like it just the same! More so, in fact.

After much study I've decided the lyrics to this song, as subtitled by the fansub group Dattebayo, are just wrong. I've come to this conclusion by comparing an alternate lyric sheet to the album-version of 'Distance,' finding the words much easier to enumerate there. It is clear, by the lyrics heard in Long Shot Party's music video, that Dattebayo got tripped up somewhere, presumably by the steady mixture of Engrish and Nipon-go throughout the song.

It certainly wasn't happy news to discover this fault in Dattebayo's translation, since that's how I originally learned this song. It meant breaking myself of the first delivery, which is none too easy - mind you - when you don't speak the language you're singing; when you first learned the lyrics phonetically! Well, eventually it sunk in... as evidenced by the absolutely flawless performance above.

Yes, you are welcome, mankind. You are welcome indeed.