12.16.2003

Music from your formative years leaves an indelible imprint like your native language or your mother's smiling face.

As a term in general usage, "lousy" really needs to make a comeback. It sounds like what it means and it feels good to say. Repeat it a few times. Lousy. Lousy. This shit is lousy, you make a lousy cook. You can't help but feel comforted by the fact that someone invented a word that perfectly encapsulates how you feel.

12.15.2003

Full Article.

"It's never that easy, of course, in Red Sox country, where some half-asleep folks might have awakened yesterday morning to US Ambassador Paul Bremer saying, "We got him," and concluded that the Sox' pursuit of Alex Rodriguez had finally been brought to a satisfying conclusion."

From now on I shall try to treat my own admonitions of worries and preoccupations regarding possible actions as I treat the prattle of loquacious people--I recognize their incoming stream of words, but I give them precious little mental energy.

The holiday season is like a swollen tick. These shopping centers, these megaplexes, these houses--the system is built to swell yearly. Nearly every business puts their fingers in the pie. Even Burger King, Mcdonalds--the acne littering the American landscape, selling impulse food impossible to give as a gift--offer gift certificates as presents. That's like giving gift-wrapped feces. The brain washing is working. "Secret Santa" and other cultural trainwrecks are now commonplace at so-called adult workplaces. Normal American adults do not fully participate in childish holidays such as Easter and Halloween but continue to celebrate Christmas as if they're 8 years old because every single business from Plumbing to prostitution markets their product as relevant to Christmas. On Easter and Halloween, only the candy companies have the audacity to put forth their product.

These cars, these jobs, these people, gifts, families swell to a bloated mass extending the world over. No celebration, no darkness, just lights and sales. I yearn to witness empty malls and shopping centers with crumbling concrete, cracked pavement, weeds overgrown like the culture that built it.

Even balanced, well-adjusted normal young people hate themselves. They haven't been around long enough to become fully accustomed to their own faults. Their faults, like their bodies, are new. It's like the experience pubescent teenagers have where they look in the mirror and see, for a brief instant, a grown person that seems like someone else. When you're young, your faults protrude like ripened fruits. After years of disappearing and reappearing in slightly different forms, your tendencies and faults become accepted and invisible like the shape of your nose.

It also stands to reason that people can accept other's tendencies and faults in the same way that, after a long enough period, they accept their own moles and warts. Longtime married couples probably.

12.14.2003

How does the American media machine figure that Saddam was captured? Below are several reasons which argue that what happened was more like a surrender and less like a capture:

--He was found near his hometown of Tikrit. People surrendering often do so in a safe place. Furthermore if I was really trying to hide from my pursuers, I would steer clear of my hometown.

--Families' "close to him" according to Dan Rather's sources gave him up. Meaning he was turned in as planned by friends.

--This so called tyrant put up no kind of fight whatsoever. He didn't pull a Tony Montana and go down guns ablazing. Nor did he turn the gun on himself a la Hitler. The media portrayal of him as an inhuman tyrant needs to be rethought--this is a man who quietly and with civility allowed himself to be taken into the clutches of his archenemy.

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I take offense to the fact that Hussein was "captured" sporting a beard and then promptly shaved so that he'll resemble his mustached media image. If they were going to shave him, why not shave off the mustache? It was apparently mandated by military authorities to make sure he resembled the image etched in American minds and Tee-shirts in the last decade.
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Nothing was more nauseating than listening to the President's pandering speech regarding the "capture" of Hussein and the heroics of our servicemen and women and all the accompanying bullshit. These speeches are meant to create a sense of American pride. Some atypical phrases and words are "Our great country" "justice, democracy", "freedom" "the Iraqi people". They're full of bold statements intending to rouse American interest and pride. Even American media sources admitted that Hussein's capture would do little to curb Iraqi resistance to American occupation, but yet Bush spoke like this was a major coup for the U.S armed forces and the suddenly oft-mentioned "Iraqi people."