Murphy’s Bye-Laws

This weekend, two boys were convicted of raping a drugged girl at a series of high school parties. The details of the case are disturbing, as are the details of any rape case. In fact, it was reported that she was digitally raped, which somehow doesn’t seem as bad as more violent rapes (not saying it is better). The part of this story of this Steubenville Rape Case that elevates it a few levels is the conspiracy to brush the whole thing under the rug by a shocking number of adults in this town, and how this sort of thing is pretty much institutionalized into the community around their football team.I’m not going to rehash the details of this case as there are plenty of other better sources, but I do want to use this story to demonstrate how institutions work. As Butler Shaffer wrote about in his book “Calculated Chaos,” institutions become less about the purpose for which it was formed or organized and becomes about protecting its very existence.

Football has become an institution willing to sacrifice education and morality to further the institution in Steubenville. Read the rest of this entry »

There may not be a person alive that has been able to honestly look back upon their life and not found embarrassment over some event or action or thought. This is all a part of growing and maturing. I talked of this a bit in Extreme Moderation way back in 2008, but focused more on how I jumped into ideas with radical fervor and then mellowed, as if I had to go full Anikan Skywalker and destroy all the existing beliefs totally before I could be comfortable wavering from the new-found ideas. Now, as I look back, I see lots of changes in my thinking.

I feel I could write rebuttals to my old posts. Not all of the rebuttals would be drastic and likely contain no 180-degree shifts, but mostly there would be subtle changes that make, what I currently feel, important distinctions. So maybe they wouldn’t be rebuttals so much as added nuance.  As I occasionally indulge my ego and randomly read from the archives, some of the things that stick out are my attitude toward things or the manner in which I had written it. Perhaps I just didn’t communicate the thoughts well enough; I probably got lazy or lost track of the thought before I could finish and simply tied an awkward bow on it and hit publish to be done with it. Not to mention just the overall quality of the writing itself, which I’ll leave for judgement as harsh as necessary.

Awkward bow: Anyway, I could have written this is a tweet: @pintofstout I have been blogging long enough that I could write rebuttals to my own old posts. #progress. Sukghrghaougaoivbmi

I’m a podcast junkie. They’re like talk radio without the hackneyed character personalities, without the trite politics, without the over-analysis of sports, and without a single mode or format or subject or…constraints of any kind. Some can be like radio plays, old radio programs centered around music and lovingly assembled by the host disk jockey and not just overplayed corporate playlists, educational programs, funny and informative interviews, straight comedy, or interviews more like deep meaningful conversations. The availability and the lack of constraints of podcasts are a major benefit, but I’ve been noticing some constraints forming in my consumption of podcasts.

First, what is the ideal length for a podcast? The size of the file is hardly of any consequence anymore, so it really is about the listener. Alfred Hitchcock said “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder”. Exceptions can be made when the story needs to be told, but intermissions are the exception, not the norm. As demands on my schedule have increased, my movie consumption has dropped dramatically. Movies aren’t portable, but I take podcasts on my phone and listen at work, in my car, and whenever I’m able to. Read the rest of this entry »

I was going to start posting select quotes and links to individual posts in the comments of a link to the category I put on Facebook, but I’ll just make a new post instead. So here are some of the greatest hits from the “Voting” category, listed chronologically form newest to oldest.

Political Football – In our elections, our two-party system breaks down not into Democrats and Republicans – who the mindful observer can tell you are nearly the same party – but offense and defense.

Sacred Cow Tipping – From the last time Big Bird was the hunted:  Any cut in budget is going to get a rise out of whoever is losing that money, whether it be your local zoo’s librarian or the in-house commando employed by your local kindergarten. On the Queen Mary scale of things, these cuts are mere shouted farewells to the pier that aspire to be deck chairs. Yes, they are simply rhetoric, but effective rhetoric.

Ghosts in the Machine – Our ideological armor, while making us feel nigh-invulnerable to inconvenient slings and arrows of paradox, mainly only gives us tunnel vision and greatly slows any progression toward our perceived destination.

 Chorus of Conformity –  If an actor is reading from a script they didn’t write, their voice wasn’t heard, even thought they were physically speaking.  So how does an election actually equate to voices being heard?  And whose voices?

We’ve Come So Far? – The institution of oppression is the same; changing the face, color, or gender of the institution won’t change its nature.

The Second Coming of Ron Paul - It would be a third coming now (the man is insatiable!): A more general answer is the focus of many mainstream libertarians recently on fiscal and entitlement policy; which, if the eyes are squinted just right, looks sort of, maybe, like the Republican Party – or their supposed platform, anyway.  Mr. Paul’s governing philosophy is refreshing (compared to other choices) in certain (not all) areas of policy-making to libertarians (like hanging out with ugly and dumb people to make one’s self look better or feel smarter by comparison), but does this deserve the reverence and fanaticism some of his followers are overcome with; fanaticism strong enough for previously avowed anarchists to attempt to confiscate the non-believing heretics’ libertarian credential cards?

No Votes for Non-Believers - From the first time Mitt ran. I had some fun with it: Opposition to non-belief drops off in the electorate with the Easter Bunny and further still for the Tooth Fairy (much to the disappointment of the P4PP).

Meanwhile, Down at the Crossroads… – Strangely enough, the devil doing the dealing is always virtuous and honorable, if not deceitfully cunning, in that the contract is always enforced to the letter.In that regard, America would be better off dealing with the devil than voting in the coming year.

Stale as Office Coffee – Office coffee smells like coffee in the little pre-measured pouch, aromatic and enticing, even hopeful.  It looks legitimately like coffee when it brews.  It even taste a little like coffee in the first few seconds of its existence.  But all hope is quickly dashed after having more than a taste, and all that remains is the weak bitterness of dashed hopes and the stale shame of being fooled again.  It reminds me of election years.

Of Other People, By Other People, For Other People – I must have been ticked off when I wrote this one:  Theoretically, a democracy would have the many owning the government and its actions, but in reality we own nothing.The only thing voters and citizens have control of is the curtain hiding the folks at the controls.

Liberal Descent or Open-Minded Liberals Have No Room for Dissent - A fun little parable or something: About the time I started paying attention, I hear A___ comment that she doesn’t really vote anyway and that I’m a conscientious non-voter.The Stranger stepped into the light at the corner of the bar and opened his Holy Book of Bad Arguments and prepared to quote prodigiously.

Tearing Down the Wall Between Church and State - All these assumptions he makes regarding the nature of atheists are like Humpty Dumpty sitting on top of the imaginary wall built between church and state, dangling his feet over one side and completely ignoring what lies behind him.

The word “blog”, in the context of language, is still a newborn. It has undergone changes in its short life, though, in my estimation. What was once a web log, posting short updates several times throughout the day, ahem, logging what was going on - so much so that the hyperbole of posting the mundane details of meals and other daily routines was permanently and pejoratively attached to the word “blog” itself - became a place for individuals to post thoughts, essays, pictures, etc. as an individual. So in most cases I know personally, blogs are now repositories for personal thoughts and essays with some actual blogging thrown in for good measure. Some of the distinction between a true blog – as in web log – and a personal website is frequency of postings; logging something requires frequent updates. Of course, an event benefitting from a log is likely to be a finite event that comes to an end (in most cases, not all).  Events continuing in perpetuity suffer from infrequent updates or fading into the mundane. A personal site continues and doesn’t follow any particular events, solely, though some events may be temporarily tracked in blog-like fashion. The personal website is still saddled with the name “blog” even when they aren’t really a true blog. There are reasons why this is so, and reasons to want to get out from under the word “blog” altogether.

“Blog” has become an umbrella term to encompass many things for several reasons, most of them stemming from software. Read the rest of this entry »

I find myself saying today, “Man, I’d like a drink right about now.” I say this fairly often while having a trying day at work. Yet, when I leave work and go home where I’m free to have a glass of Scotch or a beer, I often don’t. At first, I thought it was because I didn’t feel comfortable having a drink for therapy like that; it just seemed seedy and sad. Today, though, I think it may just be the atmosphere where one is free to imbibe that I long for, that atmosphere being the polar opposite of being in a stressful work environment. So, when I get home, seeing A__ and the kids decompresses me enough that the desire for that escape is already diminished. It was never about being drunk anyway, but just being in a place where one could imbibe and relax, chill out, and laugh about what a shitty, shitty day everyone had.

So I’ll go home tonight and feel refreshed. Maybe I’ll have a drink. At that point, it doesn’t really matter. Cheers.

The church sign reads “Pray for Rain”. The church sits on the edge of a town surrounded by corn and soybean farms. When did all churches have to have the message board signs with quippy lines? There are only so many ways to use homonyms to refer to “sun” as “son”, and isn’t the implication of the evolution of religion from sun-worshipping cave-dwellers to spin-off story worshipers obvious yet? The sun has been a particularly vengeful god of late, punishing the land with extreme heat and offering up only humidity and the passing squall, like a cry of agony born of the torture it can’t hope to relieve, for moisture. The land is so tortured and broken the little rain is washed off or evaporated before the hardened ground realizes it has fallen.

Walking past that sign headed out of town on the road that divides our neighbor’s corn fields, I could feel the longing for rain in my bones. I thirst with the rest of my surrounding earth for rain. Is my thirst their thirst communicated through some unseen connection?Do I require rain for quenching or perhaps for a cleansing? I feel the absence of that life-giving liquid like a piece of myself is missing. Perhaps being composed mostly of water, it feels like a separation from my roots, like a child from its mother. I thirst for the land and trees and dying vegetation turning brown as in death.

It would be fair to call me a social media tramp. It seems I’ll go home with any medium promising to call. Twitter and this webpage – I hesitate to use blog because I’m not logging anything but the defacto time spent writing – would surely be enough to convey most thoughts and utterances. Then along comes Tumblr. Tumblr is a sleek, streamlined blog service that removes many backend blog activites and capabilities making it easy and fast; like Twitter for longer than 140 characters, which is what I intended to use it for. It eventually turned into a place to dump more personal, short-form writing and comments (shorter than blog posts, anyway; not that there is much difference).

I called the Tumblr blog “Lost Messages” based on a statement in an entry inspired by the Gonzo Gastronomy blog around last Valentine’s Day, “In this age of information, the message is the first casualty.” Inexplicably, I made the url a play on the site name and an old blues song: rollingn.tumblr.com. Anyway, there have been a few things written there that could have went there or here and so I thought I’d share some of the ones that went there and not here.

Read the rest of this entry »

A while back (March of 2009) I had actually finished a short piece of fiction I felt quite good about. I had a concept and managed to complete it somewhat successfully, so I had some friends proofread it for me and give me some notes. I reread it after almost three years and found several parts that were quite unsatisfactory. As usual, I am always in a rush to get something out here or am exciting to have completed it, that I never take the time to revise – I mean really revise. So I revisited this piece and revised the shit out of it and boy did it feel good. While I’m pleased with the improvements I think I made in the story, which I think are significant, I still feel it didn’t live up to the original intent and vision before I started. I’ve come to terms with this.

So here is the old version if anyone cares to see the before and after: Escape (2009). There is at least one other story under the Original Fiction category, too (also unrevised and prematurely posted).

Escape

The black felt sack was yanked from his head.  His scalp burned where his hair was ripped out.  Lingering pain tormented his battered knees and shins.  Carl had felt every bump in the road through the cold, gritty floor of the empty cargo van.  He had lain in the dark of his hood with only boxers and an undershirt for warmth.  The course rope cut into his wrists and knees.  His weary muscles found little respite now in the heavy steel chair.  Carl squinted into the bright sunlight and tried to see the men standing around him.  The light only made his head ache more and amplified his fatigue.  Fear for one’s life was exhausting. Read the rest of this entry »

Just watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and came away entertained. It was a fun, silly, and very stylistic jaunt. The music was subtle and haunting and seemingly just out of reach, perhaps due to it being either a very electronic score or recognizable songs sung in Portuguese. I’ve always been a lyrics guy; eating up the poetry, humor, or the message in the words, but this film and the soundtrack – absurdly incorporated into the plot, or perhaps the setting, of the movie – made me realize something I only felt as a reaction without analysis. This film has spawned lots of thoughts that have brought me to the keyboard with urgency when bed and sleep are the more rational choices. The realization that I enjoy the music of songs sung in a foreign language, with the lyrics becoming like another instrument rather than message, was just the gateway to some serious shit.

So I watched the movie, laughing intermittenly, while A__ slept before the opening credits were finished. She lay curled on her side with her feet and legs across my lap. As the movie was wrapping up and Bill Murray strode in slow motion with a boy on his shoulders leading a crowd and then leading his team or family, I looked at A__ and the little baby bulge under the blanket. There are little humans who are pretty dependent upon me. When that thought landed, I had to realize who I was and reconcile that with who I have been thinking I was. I am a creator of this family and a leader who needs to lead. (Holy crap, I’ve had a part in creating two humans!) Like Steve Zissou who eventually came to terms with who he really was and started leading those who depended upon him and found his stride again. I guess it is time for the reality of that little blond-headed kid who thinks I’m pretty swell to come to rest on my mind. It only took a year and a half.

Now that I have felt the weight of who I am now, I felt as if I have molted the old me like a skin that was just too small, and felt immediately more mature. It was a good feeling and the absence of fear was a welcome hallmark of the new state of affairs.