Finding The Walls Of A Box Canyon

How do you fly into a mountain on a perfectly clear day? You don't see it, that's how. You look everywhere but where you should be looking; you see everything but what you should be seeing; you do everything but what you should be doing.
You fail to see that fucking mountain.
You don't fly the airplane like a commercial pilot; you fly it like a student or a child or a fool. You fly it like someone who thinks he is lucky to be in Alaska, someone excited to be out there in the wilderness, like a tourist seeing wolves for the very first time.
You never think to look for it, and so you fly right into a mountain that you didn't know was there.
And within a week, your company hires someone else to take your place, and he doesn't know a damn thing about mountains either.
Welcome to the Last Frontier.

(From The Map of My Dead Pilots by Colleen Mondor)

Persona Non Grata

“He’s probably done.”

Thus I heard confirmed what I’ve been thinking, my path to health is mine and mine alone once again. Melody funneled through the white tendrils of an iPod will have to provide the distraction as I pick things up and put them down again. Here I go again, down the only road I’ve ever known, like a drifter I was born to walk alone.

Course Notes

As I like to leave things to the last day before the last moment, I re-enacted the reason why, with some proactive effort, I’d have been a person of some note. The feedback was mostly positive (“a bit slow”) but no one fell asleep or walked out or threw rotten fruit. A smattering of applause, polite or not, I’ll take it!—just think if I hadn’t procrastinated!

Death Dearth

I’m a slave in a world overseen by Forces largely unseen. My opinion that death isn’t welcome goes unheeded, probably rightly so as I have neither the foresight not the hindsight to understand. I have not been given enough data to make my opinion worth heeding and so I trudge on, hauling my carcass over my shoulders toward that closely distant Light.

Death be not proud …

In Genius

Largely inconsequential, a woman with a “phd” teaches “creativity” and blusters on about our being created in God’s image. A fact which instantly grants us ALL God’s genius for genius. Allow me, lady, to disabuse you: that you hold such an opinion forcefully debunks the hypothesis, “phd” or no.

In Mala Fide

We are all story-devouring machines. Most of us process them and egest other stories which we re-consume in a descending spiral until the only thing left of the story is a nugget of excrement.

Some—those lucky few—produce better stories which they leave scattered about for others of the first ilk to vacuum in, halting their progress, if it can be called that.

Yet even fewer others, The Remnant, produce stories out of thin air (Cf In Genius). Sorry, you can’t be a part of The Remnant because The Remnant don’t know they’re The Remnant. Now go eat some stories.

Andrew Breitbart

No, it can’t be true. Not a 43-year-old man, and certainly not Andrew Breitbart!

I remember with glee the few times I saw him wade fearless into the madding crowds of “astro-turfed” union “protesters” as they hurled a barrage of invectives at him when he asked who they were and what they were protesting. As it turned out, no one had the answer, sheep that they were. They were bussed in, you see, chattel to carry signs of protest, metaphorical beasts of liberal burden.

Breitbart delighted in ripping apart the curtain of secrecy, ignorance, naïveté, and hubris  that cloaks the nefarious goings-on attending too many liberal movements. Furious at the temerity of this man to point out the wildly gesticulating little men behind those curtains, these cockroaches showed their own sense of equity by calling him a homosexual and most assuredly not as a compliment. How urbane.

I feel deep regret to know I will no longer feel that glee to see Andrew literally and figuratively parting the Red Sea of liberal pseudo-intellectual blathering.

Rest in peace, good knight. May your memory never wane in our minds, liberal and conservative alike.

The Usual Suspects

Since I spend a bit lot of time perusing twitter, it is now the primary source of my indignation levels. Yeah, I’ve given up watching television news because I like my TV. (By the way, I’ve given up watching local television news. It’s beneath contempt and I have yet to find I’ve missed out on any information of use. Abolish local TV news.)

And so it came to pass that this came tumbling through my timeline: The “Pretty or Ugly” Video Phenomenon written by a Meg Meeker, pediatrician.

Meeker, MD, reports that “a disturbing activity” has surfaced from our “tween” daughters. Tween, eh? OK doc. This “activity” is so disturbing because it involves “young girls posting videos on YouTube asking complete strangers to pass judgment on them.”

Gasp!

Yes, you heard her: “complete strangers.” OK. That’s it? No! “complete strangers” including “Old men.” Old men? Yes! Old men. AND “teen boys, teachers, pimps, maybe perverted grandfathers.”

As you may not know, but are about to, teen boys are dangerous, maniacal beasts who will, upon watching your daughter’s YouTube video will judge them! As if that’s not bad enough, old men, those sick, sick, sick sicko bastards will also pass judgment!

Oh wait, there’s more! Teachers, too! Wait, not teachers!!? Oh yes, teachers. You mean Mrs. Smith in homeroom? No, not her? Who? Just teachers? And what’s this, pimps?!!

Fuck no, not pimps. Anything but pimps. Pimps passing judgment on YouTube videos. What is the world coming to? Where do we go to hide from pimps watching YouTube videos? Nobody expects the Pimp Watching YouTube!

Oh but the last of this group of malodorous reprobates watching YouTube videos has got to be the absolute degenerative worst of the vile bunch: perverted grandfathers. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Perverted grandfathers, in whom we have placed the trust and care of our beautiful—or maybe not so beautiful, you’ll have to judge—daughters, watching them on YouTube. Pervertedly watching them on YouTube, no less.

Gasp, gasp, and triple gasp!

This bumbling buffoon should be stripped of her medical license, she’s so fucking dumb. The effusion of stupidity, the sheer riptide of “logic fail” in lumping pimps, teachers, and teen boys in the same lecherous group watching YouTube videos.

Here’s the problem: what these stupid girls are doing by posting on YouTube is the same thing they’d have done elsewhere and are possibly doing elsewhere. It’s narcissism at play, attention-seeking, whorish attitude. Trying to tie this to a “neediness” problem stemming from low self-esteem is ridiculous. There are no more high self-esteem people in the world than teenage American girls. It’s preening, pure and simple. Mom and dad “hugging” daughters to tell them they’re beautiful isn’t going to do anything to stem the tide of these videos because it’s got nothing to do with self-esteem.

Even if it did, daddy or mommy hugging a teenage girl has never proved to bolster self-esteem and even if it did, by the time these dumb girls find it necessary to post these videos of themselves on YouTube, it’s already too late. Mommy and daddy have both failed as parents.

The last thing these girls are is “innocent” or “lovely.” How many times have parents and others been positively shocked by the goings-on among these so-called innocents? Girls fighting tooth-and-nail over all sorts of trivialities and posting those videos on YouTube. Two 11-year-old “lovely”, “innocent” girls fought to the death recently, over a boy it is speculated. Lovely.

Some will say cruel things and potentially wound them emotionally and some may like what they see and track these girls down.

Oh spare me! “Wound them emotionally”? Give your daughters self-esteem by “hugging” them because they’re so fragile (when they’re not tearing each other’s eyes out in competition for boys), so lovely (when they’re exposing themselves all over the Internet. Google “self-shots” if you dare) that mere words will emotionally destroy them.

Meanwhile, all those men old men, teen boys, teachers, pimps, perverted grandfathers (I can’t type this without getting enraged afresh) sharks are swimming around on YouTube emotionally wounding these lovely, innocent girls.

Are you so out-of-touch with reality, doc, that you actually believe this shit?! Are you so daft, so stultifyingly stupid, that you think this is the problem? If so, anyone who takes their kids to this pediatrician should have their heads examined.

The Simple Explanation

My back hurts. twitter.com/fwoodbridge/st…
— Fred Woodbridge (@fwoodbridge) February 18, 2012

The New Reality

There is something admirable, but also delusional about the American character which seeks to hack new realities out of life. When it works, many mistake it for creation, rather than merely discovering a heretofore unknown aspect of it.

The truly intelligent understand they’re merely uncovering reality rather than manufacturing it whole cloth. Like Michelangelo's aphorism about sculpting marble, the discerning understand this. The others rail against such an idea of life because they’ve been conditioned to conclude that America’s abundance of opportunity translates to an almost superhuman ability to manhandle reality’s molecules to synthesize a new reality. This is not only possible, it is simple, given the proper mindset, money, and a massive government program.

In this, they’re not unlike those blind men and their proverbial elephant. Whatever one may think that reality elephant is (a rope!), it is an elephant nevertheless, or perhaps regardless.

The wrong-headed approach to reality bending gives rise to such ludicrous conclusions as the idea that gender is a figment of society’s imagination only, amenable to infinite combinatorics.

It hasn’t, can’t, and won’t work. Life will out.