What keeps me from giving up on love or a settling addiction by another name.

The pride of the content

The many what if?'s that build and we collect over the course of our life are much easier to deal with when our 'what is' is satisfying. Though we could have done better, at least now we can sleep. I'm trying to be fine with that.

Some quotes for like minds.

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows. - David T. Wolf (1943 - )

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. - H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists. -Jean Rostand (1894 - 1977)

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.- Lillian Hellman (1905 - 1984)


No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.- Lily Tomlin (1939 - )

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.- Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves. - Robert Anton Wilson

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future. - Sidney J. Harris

Fuck your weak high class.

Renunciation is liberation. Not wanting is power. What can china give me that my soul hasnt already given me? And if my soul hasn't given it to me, how will china give it to me?
-Fernando Pessoa

Yea, thats fucking right. Botch and NOrma Jean in one fucking post.

Yea, I'm fucking doing it. I've heard about all the comparisons and that Norma Jean are biters and frankly, I'm chalking it up to influence. Any guitarist whose been so greatly inspired by a band or another guitarist knows emulation is inevitable. I think this Norma Jean album makes that obvious, painfully obvious in some moments. I flipped out when I heard the riff reminding me of Botch's Japam. Also died a little inside, but thats another story.

Norma Jean - Oh God, the aftermath

Mediafire

Now, my droogs, Botch.

I only recently discovered this album. Until a week ago, I was under the impression I had all of their shit. I still don't fuckign have all their shit, but this is basically a colllection of the shit of theirs that is hard as shit to fucking find. So shit, here it is. Listen, and listen well.

Botch - Unifying Themes Redux

Mediafire

The world isn't against you, my dear.

It just doesn't care.

Great album, all around. Its too bad bands like this lose steam or whatever and can't last forever. I'm glad they came into existence, though. Its great music for people with a need to listen to music.

Moder Life is War - WItness

Mediafire

Scratch a cynic and you'll find a disappointed idealist.

'YOu're very angry', No no no, discontent. Disappointed in my species. Look at the gift we were given, this great brain, this wonderful brain that can distinguish between itself and other things. And what are we doing? Everybody wants a salad shooter, and sneakers with lights in them, its this merchandise, and a jacket thats got Michael Jordan's picture on it.


This pursuit of goods. On an individual level, its trying to get the newest lawnmower. On a corporate level, its this cut throat dog eat dog killer.

Oh, thats why I'm indecent

People really don't enjoy considering everything, or most of reality. Seriously. I was thinking about how most of the people in the world doesn't even consider alternatives to creationism accurate or rational. I don't think thats necesasrily because they can't sit down and think about what is here and what both we and the universe are made up of, I think its because they never do.

ANd I think they never do because of how consuming these kind of thoughts are. There are tons of songs about this type of thing that songwriters write while stuck heavily in a moment of debate about all that we are. Songs are often the results of those deep, cosmic moments when a feeling so deeply or engulfing is felt. Same thing people usually end up feeling about death. I think that gives us a strong hint at what depression is about. No body gets depressed about having to fucking buy a new keyboard. We get depressed about immense changes that occur and must force us to some how become, what we view as, another person with new characteristics, new ideologies, new abilities, new pass times, new loves, new hates, new boredom, and so on.

And this would explain my pain. To consider all the moments in life that I do does consume me on a day to day basis. In the words of Dostoevsky, "I don't want to lie. Ivowed to myself not to." I don't tell myself death is some transition to a sweeter pasture where God reigns, I also don't tell myself its a burning pit. I hold on to these thoughts about my own death, the death of others, the consciousness of rent/love/food/careers/pain and all else we feel. I guess thats why jokes give us so much solace at times. Make a joke about death, and it seeps out of your unconscious mind and seems less of a threat because it makes you laugh at someone elses misery or something.

And whats worse is I don't let myself misunderstand anything. Nothing. I don't have to know everything, but I want to be able to see the effects everything has on people. And there for every object, is an effect.

Which leads me to what I learned from an essay by Tim Kinsella of Cap n Jazz and, well, if you know Cap n Smhazz, you know what else he was in. He wrote an article about why a bunch of bands from some magazine should disband, but on a larger scale, why most music today is insincere and artifice and said "if TV and reality can be so interwined, past signifiers of rebellion is rebellion, and this is punk rock, why not?" Meaning if tv and reality can be so intertwined, the line between cause and effect blurred, symbols of past rebellions encouraging current rebellion, then why can't punk rock also have that same effect on people? Specifically, I believe the effect he was talkign about was rebellion, but it made me consider just how much we're manipulated by, even without knowing. From the way people talk to you growing up, to the way every fucking street has to have a billboard or some ideal a business believes you should covet.

To go back to my point, I deeply consider what the effect of everything is, and what role it plays in manifesting our perspectives about life and how to deal with tragedy, disappointment, and success. This is a lot to fuckign think about. I say that not as a cry for help or an acknowledgement of triumph. But I do feel that if we should actually make progress, we have to be willign to face our fears of feeling like pawns in the rich's hands or scared as fuck by the thought of what may be inevitable.

And to go back to my original, now almost completely forgotten, point: I suppose considering all this makes me indifferent to and hateful of a lot of things that are supposedly the best things this world has to offer. I may change my position in the future about somethings that I now hate, and as long as I have an appreciation for human life, love, indignation, and peace, I don't give a fuck. I've learned to welcome change in my philosophies, and changing the broad ones can only change me so much. This would be why I don't even consider most of the shit people say, because I know its backed by an artificial love for very unnecessary things in life. I might seem like a bigot, but I'm not. I'm just certain that people don't give a shit about anything important. Now I'm mad.

This moment of veiled narcissism is brought to you by god not helping, music helping, women refusing, and men controlling. Also by knowing that the biggest amalgamation of people in LA in most recent years has been parades in celebration for a fucking basketball team.

Sick of mankind.

Years ago, I concluded that people can ultimately be split into two groups: people who accept reality and people who perpetuate their own perceived version of reality.

Now I see that people who perpetuate their own lie aren't all horrible people. They're also very kind and nice and try to make life seem like what it isn't. We are apart of a society, albeit composed of figments and principles that too were simply created. And suffering is a part of this society, as well as the world at large. To discuss life like we're some leaves at the edge of earth's branches or like life is beautiful as it is, is to lie. It is not beautiful. We have ran the planet to ruin and we done even worse with each other.

The sooner we admit this, the sooner we can work on actually making life as beautiful as it should be. In the meantime, I'm not going to be some fucking optimist pushing aside my logic and telling myself all those people out there, somewhere, that I don't know who are as unhappy as any man or woman has ever been, don't exist or they're just irrelevant. To build a community of empathic beings who may not be the smartest, but understand what it is to be someone else is to bring peace. The only time a person would kill a loved one is to put them out of their misery, and if we reduced our misery, what reason would we have to harm one another?


And with that, I leave a song for the sentiment.

Ceremony - Sick



Sick of drying up in the sun
Sick of this island
Sick of fun
Sick of being sober
Sick of starting over
Sick of Black Flag
Sick of Cro-Mags.

Sick of living
Sick of people dying
Sick of the buying
Sick of trying
Sick of television
Sick of telephones
Sick of homophobes
Sick of condos.

Sick of the GOP
Sick of liberals
Sick of me
Sick of Obama
Sick of head trauma
So very tired of feeling sick.

Sick of living in America
Sick of mass hysteria
Sick of realism
Sick of Buddhism
Sick of long boards
Sick of hardcore
Sick of Baptists
Sick of atheists
Sick of police
Sick of yuppies
Sick of paying rent
Sick of being bent
Sick of hearing lies
Sick of mankind.

Fuck the academy,
fuck it so hard as the laws of physics will allow,
even if one thrust demolishes it entirely.
Fuck it like there is no graduation tomorrow.
Fuck it until it bleeds grammatically correct sentences
from its divisional pores of useless information.
Fuck it with every number 2 pencil the god it believes it is
cursed me to buy.
Fuck it with every research paper I've wasted weekends
writing as a useless condom.
Fuck it while I read up on how to love it and trust its
all-knowing nature.
Fuck it for thinking it knows everything, when its what created everything.
Fuck it.
Just
Fuck it.
Fuck it so as to feel like I did something with my life.
Fuck it so some miserable young man or woman won't have to get fucked
by it in decades to come.
Fuck it for its sins it'll never remiss or repent for.
Fuck it for the poison its planted in the hearts of my peers.
Fuck it for ruining the humility of our species's most intelligent.
Fuck it for being a stupid fucking waste of fucking time.

“We are afraid to be radically honest because it will lead us to face many unpleasant things about ourselves. We are afraid to care because we have learned that in caring deeply, we can be hurt deeply. Our fear of failure causes us, as parents, spouses, students, artists to hedge or withdraw from many undertakings—even life itself, because if we really put ourselves into an enterprise that is criticized or fails, then we have been criticized and we fail. We are afraid to love because love really means leaving the safety of our solitary lives and exposing our hearts where they can be hurt and broken and softened. These are the fears that cause us to bury our lives even before we are dead.” - C. FitzSimmons Allison

Daria keeps shit real.

Condition people to expect nothing and the least little something gets them all excited. - Jane from Daria.

RIP Isis

They've disbanded.

"After you, the flood."

"On the campus of Outlaw College, professors of essential insanities would characterize the conflicting attitudes of Nina Jablonski and Leigh-Cheri as indicative of a general conflict between social idealism and romanticism. As any of the learned professors would explain, plied with sufficient tequila, no matter how fervently a romantic might support a movement, he or she eventually must withdraw from active participation in that movement because the group ethic--the supremacy of the organization over the individual--is an affront to intimacy. Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars with which this life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities. Without the essential (intimate) insanities, humor becomes inoffensive and therefore pap, poetry becomes exoteric and therefore prose, eroticism becomes mechanical and therefore pornography, behavior becomes predictable and therefore easy to control. As for magic, there's none at all because the aim of any social activist is power over others, whereas a magician seeks power over only himself: the power of higher consciousness, which, while universal, cosmic even, is manifest in the intimate. It would seem that a whole human being would have the capacity for both intimacy and social action, yet sad to say, every cause, no matter how worthy, eventually falls prey to the tyranny of the dull mind. In the movement, as in the bee house or the white ant's hill of clay, there is no place for idiosyncrasy, let alone mischief.
A romantic, however, recognizes that the movement, the organization, the institution, the revolution, if it comes to that, is merely a backdrop for his or her own personal drama and that to pretend otherwise is to surrender freedom and will to the totalitarian impulse, is to replace psychological reality with sociological illusion, but such truth never penetrates the Glo-Coat of righteous conviction that surrounds the social idealist when he or she is identifying with the poor or the exploited. Since, on a socio-economic level, there are myriad wrongs that need to be righted, a major problem for the species seems to be how to assist the unfortunate, throttle the corrupt, preserve the biosphere, and effectively organize for socio-economic alteration without the organization being taken over by dullards, the people who, ironically, are best suited to serving organized causes since they seldom have anything more imaginative to do and, restricted by tunnel vision, probably wouldn't do it if they had." -Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

Freud = winner

we ought to be content to conclude that power over nature is not the only precondition of human happiness, just as it is not the only goal of cultural endeavour; we ought not to infer from it that technical progress is without value for the economics of our happiness. One would like to ask: is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, in unequivocal increase in, my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as 1 please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and, indeed, in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man? And there is a long list that might be added to benefits of this kind which we owe to the much despised era of scientific and technical advances. But here the voice of pessimistic criticism makes itself heard and warns us that most of these satisfactions follow the model of the ‘cheap enjoyment’ extolled in the anecdote—the enjoyment obtained by putting a bare leg from under the bedclothes on a cold winter night and drawing it in again. If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if travelling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage, and have probably worked against the beneficial effects of natural selection? And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?

I was thinking a lot about the idea of the self, the self, or as its called from the inside, I. YOu know this strange little thing that everyone has, this odd tiny organ which the surgeons can't touch. One afternoon, I asked myself, what about that noise I always hear, that intolerable noise which comes from somewhere inside my head. ANd I realized that rather like a singer who accompanies his own singing with a piano or a guitar, I accompany my own life with a sort of endless tinkling or an endless noodling or murmuring - a sort of awful inner murmuring of reportage and opinions, idiotic arpeggios of self-approbation - "Yes, this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm doing, and this is the right thing to be doing now, because murmur, murmur, murmur, and this is right because murmur, murmur, murmur, and this is right becasue murmur, murmur, murmur - " I thought about all the isncere consideration which I gave to the future, to my plans, you know, and all the solemn concern I lavished each day on the events of my past - my "memories," as we call them, wiping away a few tears - and I wondered: Was this all tremendously valuable? Or was it perhaps just a bit unnecessary, when you consider the fact - rather often overlooked - that the past and the future don't actually exist? I sit around thinking about them from morning till night, but you know, where are they? Where are they? I mean, they're not here. And God knows they're certainly not anwere else, I would say. And so what is it supposed to mean to me that the trousers I'm wearing were worn "yesterday" by a man with my name, a man who did this, a man who did that, or that they'll be worn "tomorrow" by a man who is going to be doing something or other? It all means exactly nothing to me, because none of these people actually exist.- Wallace Shawn, THe Designated Mourner.

Do we really need to feel happy?

I suppose we naturally pursue the more graceful extreme of our emotions which would be happiness. But with that comes the sadness, loneliness, and depression in the absence of the stimuli that gives us that tingly feeling and shit.

So do we really need happiness? Or are we really only willing to love the idea of a thing so much that we hate when they aren't apart of our life and feel entirely at ease when we have it?

For example: love. Everyone gets lonely without it. But when we do have it, from a family member or a partner, we feel whatever the fuck it is and enjoy the fuck out of the moments so much that nothing else matters (yes metallica).

But at the same time, love must be brought on by people. And with people comes disappointment and blahzy blahzy blah.

So why can't we just be fine, not happy or in a state of bliss, with knowing we have shelter and can take care of our basic bodily functions so that we may see another day with enough energy to make it to the next and so on?

I'm slowly but surely getting over all this happiness shit. If i find a girl to love or whatever, so be it. I'll do everything I can for her, but I'm not looking to getting married and having separated sides of the room and having to watch over my possessions because I'm territorial. I'm not looking to be so attached to another person that I'm actually going to worry about their health when its not the best or go insane when they're not around and don't call.

And I'm not digging the idea of sanctioned suffering for the sake of a paycheck. I'd rather enjoy what I do and keep a fucking roof over my head, be it an apartment or a back house.

He travels the fastest who travels alone.- Rudyard Kipling

There is no reason to live, no purpose to life
only will validated through act justified by result.

see, people aren't really happy, but they try to be. They tell their selves they love every little thing their lover does even it really annoys them. They say the love hunting for jobs though they're still jobless and some other person hunting for a job can't make this month's rent. They get in relationships so as not to be alone. They get all the adrenaline riushes they can in their youth and some in their adulthood while trying to be some ideal citizen that works and doesn't complain so they don't have to fear death until their old enough to not remember what being a kid felt like because the dementia set in and they can only see death as the nearest stop on the high way coming up.

Its so perceptive and it shouldn't be that way. We shouldn't have to convince ourselves to love our pain. But we do because we're selfish and want our life to be great. We want our life to be our own. And its bullshit.

Depressing high five! [/the todd]