Amanda Lynn & The Couch of The Blooming Youths

I'm not one to dismiss institutionalized turmoil, but it really seems like Syria is being victimized as many nations took advantage of its early struggles in a greedy and power hungry attempt at domination. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, the UK, and the U.S. all have their dicks dipped in Syria, stirring the pot, and it's frustrating to be a part of a country that is openly “kicking them while they're down”. Syria caught a snag during the Arab spring and the localized inner conflict was merely the first domino that fell. 

It makes plenty of sense why people don't waste their efforts trying to understand what's going on in Syria because it is very multi-faceted and involves many different dimensions like the capital gain from natural resources and the imperialist gain from “giving them a taste of freedom”, but that doesn't justify having a total lack of perspective on the issue. Civil War, Cold War, Holy War. Though it's not mentioned in our books or assignments, I personally believe we're also seeing still the aftermath of Oliver North and Reagan's acts of high treason when they sold weapons to Iran and gave the money to Contra. That just adds another dimension. Everything is connected and the mess in Syria goes back decades, but this is merely my own limited perspective and opinion on the matter.

Syrians are fleeing their homes and leaving behind their roots- where they come from- because they are under attack from so many different directions. I wouldn't say that most people would be thrilled about bundling up their entire lives in a duffel bag and taking a life-threatening journey to another land in hopes of a better life just for kicks. Refugees are human beings with hopes, dreams, families and traditions, simply trying to survive in a life they did not choose to be born within. Nobody has that choice. Many Syrian refugees are fleeing to Europe because they are granted asylum there. (To be honest, if I were a refugee,  coming to America would be my last resort given the popular backlash and negative response to accepting refugees I have witnessed.) 

Their ears are ringing.

Tangled corpses litter a muted wasteland, and there they lie sleeping and mangled,

trapped in death among an unknown existence.

Nuremberg Trials Nov. 1945

Death breathes heavily down our necks as we kindly swivel to stand proper.

Face to face with the enemy.

Blind to what is the vile reflection of ourselves,

we unravel our scrolls and recite redundancy.

Disregarding the darkest parts of the human condition,

nations become lost in the hunt for an evil creature,

one of which has mastered the persistent game of evasion.

And though nothing can be found or solved from this endless search of invisible monsters,

humanity is on trial and will stop at nothing for the verdict.

As if that would solve the problem,

A final solution to justice.

Banishing those unlucky enough to be human,

they proudly stand high atop their pulpits and chamber pots,

Fingers stiffly pointed,

raised like guns,

firing round after round in hopes of a swift victory.

But the human condition only revolves so slowly,

It grinds and churns,

recycling remains of societies through the weak and human concept of time,

dizzying and unfathomable.

“Shame on you! For humanity has risen above,” they exclaim.

Huddled in a dusty courtroom, surrounded outside, they are public rubble.

Freud has a heyday, frolicking through the minds of the accused.

Evading persecution, evil had slithered its way into brain tissue.

The search party gathers in awe around a diagnoses:

Disproportionate sadism riddled with twisted fathers' ties and the tenderness of a mother's rotten womb.  

It's meaningless,

the pain.

For pain is nothing but a word – a splotch splattered across paper.

Flecks of colorful paint, oozing and splashing onto the pure, innocent, harmless white canvas.

As white as a lamb's pelt.  

And grown men plea ignorance.

Feigning madness to compensate for public, social, collapse.

Reduced to definitions, statistics, grammar, trials, error.

Twenty two sets of hands responsible for millions of lost souls once fitted to piles of shoes.

Everyone among the living remains innocent while the ears of the dead keep ringing,

Smashed and scattered among barren fields,

The wind howls through their porcelain skulls.

They live among the dirt now.

Flowers grow and grass sprouts unknowingly, through the flesh of an empty past,

silent and sleeping forever.

For humans to commit such an act would be too harsh a truth to face,

so we step aside and let our sideways glances lead the way.

“Let god do with them what he will,”

“Let the holy one decide,”

I feel embarrassed to be human. I'm not sure why, but the first thing that comes to mind is the fact that ego is such a prevalent and disgusting thing to me. What I see around me, people who pretend as though they are not human animals, as though they are flawless to an outrageous and impossible extent. It's blatant blindness to deny that they are imperfect. I see that it's the imperfections that make a person perfect and I don't believe it's healthy- this idea that humans should strive to become this vision of perfection. It's subjective and it's unrealistic, the idea of perfection being god like- which is inhuman. And in any case, not real. Fiction. Fantasy.

It's as if people are believing in god, but it looks to me that they're believing that they are god.

Humans are gross, loud, arrogant, greedy, vile creatures. But it's not this that disturbs me. It's that the majority of humans don't acknowledge these innately human characteristics. It's to be shunned or suppressed, but what I see is an imminent explosion. One can only suppress something for so long before it combusts.

Why do humans pretend that they're more than? That is my question. And in asking this, I can visualize somebody asking me as well, “why do you have such a low standard for humankind?” To one, my faith in humanity appears low, but to me, I am merely acknowledging that humans are a species with emotions and opposable thumbs with which regards itself in highest esteem. And I don't think we as humans should be giving ourselves too much credit.

 LISTEN UP ALL YOU MARTYRS OF "PATRIOTISM": I'm sick of seeing you pushing the blame and focusing on people with mental "illness" or mental health "problems" for the what's wrong with our country. If anything, mental health issues are a DIRECT RESULT OF THE actual PROBLEMS IN OUR COUNTRY. You are directly contributing to the real problem - OUR PROBLEM - OUR SOCIETY'S PROBLEM of excluding people because we don't understand nor take the fucking time to understand or accept them. 

Happy Comix-In-The-Mail Day to meeee. (from left to right),

Rosetta, an anthology of several awesome underground graphic novelists. Check. It. Out.

Snake'N'Bacon's Cartoon Cabaret - I have no clue what it entails, but Michael Kupperman is amazing.

Trinity, A Graphic History of The First Atomic Bomb by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm; I was able to read a snippet of this in one of the Best American Comics Series and I had to have it.

And of course,

"I shaved my legs for this?!" Her bleached blonde hair had fallen awry from the fancy updo she got at the downtown salon, four hours earlier, four hundred dollars later. Dried, dead, useless.

She looks at him, baffled, offended.

"I can't do this", he says.

"Well, you're balding!"

"Well, you're painfully stupid."

Strike four, he hopes, so she can leave, and he can go on with his painful existence, lamenting his lack of faith in humanity.

But she stayed.

Plopped down on the hotel bed, he could smell the scent of chemicals coated on her body. Carefully concocted for a target audience, the undying struggle to achieve some sense of femininity, she was the perfect example.

She stood, arms crossed, in front of the television.

He reached for the remote and turned it on. 

Her snide tone interupted the updates of the day's murders.

"WHAT is wrong with you?"

"Lots of things." He focused intently on her green dress, where the moving pictures hid, as if he was interested, as if he enjoyed watching television, all for the sake of ignoring her out of the room, out of his life.

"You don't like me?"

"I wish I did, but that would require me to go back in time and never attempt to have a conversation with you... about anything."

He didn't want to be mean. He didn't want anything, really, except to enjoy his own company alongside a fresh bottle of Gin.

Women like her weren't special.

Her arms dropped to her sides.

He felt bad for her,

but only a little.

And her orange-brown skin looked even more artificial in the harsh hotel light. Her hip bones protruded beneath the drapery of her dress.

Is this what evolution has provided humanity to indulge in? To enjoy?

What is beauty? What is my perception of beauty? What is wrong with my perception? Who's to say anyone's perception is right or wrong? What is wrong with me?

In the midst of his thoughts, he failed to notice her dramatic departure,

along with the rest of his cocaine.