Death City Dispatch

Out along the sandy shores Barren, devoid of precious ores I'll sift through driftwood under the moon I'll skip rocks across the dark lagoon

The wind will howl, shapes will shift Creatures peeking through tidal rifts I'll keep on walking further out Away from all I care about

The sun will burst out from behind The clouded nature of my mind And in the new day I will go Collecting sticks and sand and snow

  The grass rolls gently on the plains Ideas wafting through my brains I'll sit and watch the days go by The sun forever creeping towards that western sky

I've been in this apartment almost two years. I haven't really touched much since. Of course I put in furniture, but for the first few months I lived here the walls were completely bare. I didn't really mind it, but in the back of my head I thought people were pretty weirded out by the lack of decoration. Only people with mental illnesses have no pictures. They also have padded walls to bounce off, probably because of all the scary things they see popping out of the woodwork. I'm not quite yet ready to call myself crazy for this reason but I've since put a decent amount of stuff up on my walls. My bedroom is still completely bare.

Apartments, like all things, slowly decay in peculiar areas. First it was the excess oil in my bathroom paint dripping down the walls. It's confusing to see a bunch of nasty tree sap slowly sliding down the walls, but as a young guy you forget these things exist after awhile. 

Second were the floors. I don't remember them being in the best shape when I moved in, but now there's several spots in which I could probably fall through to the basement or insulation given the right moment and humidity. I recently learned that there's some nature law that dictates you're never further than 10 feet away from a spider. As cool as spiders are, I'd rather not find out just how many of the buggers are performing pest control beneath my floorboards.

Finally, lightbulbs started going down in rapid succession. Being lazy, I didn't really pay too much attention to the fact that I was down a light in every room in my house. I figured less light would help my sleep, help me relax, give the house a more "analog" look or whatnot. When the last bulb in my living room went blank, however, I decided that I wanted to wait another 3 years and 40 acid trips before I started lighting candles and performing virgin sacrifices for light so I went to the market.

I shuffled off to Safeway to restock. My bag had lightbulbs, milk, vitamins and olive oil. Do you take your B-12? It's supposed to give you energy. Jury's still out. 

I came home and got ready to do some manly repairs. I took the box of lightbulbs out of the bag and read the packaging for the first time. Daylight bulbs. Cool, I like daylight, everyone likes a nice bright room right? I screwed a few in and pulled the cord on my fan, ready to bask in the hearty glow of the artificial sun. 

I realized my mistake a second later. Hideous, cool light washed over everything. These were the brightest lights I'd ever seen in my life. It was like I was in my office at home, but even brighter and more miserable. At least at the office you have a few freaks who bring lamps to work to avoid the fluorescence. Right now my options were only darkness and beluga whale white light illuminating every speck of dust on my floor. I started freaking out because I couldn't even perform a basic task like buying lightbulbs. Is it a curse of being young that the stupidest, most insignificant things cause deep existential crises?

I decided I could not simply return these bulbs, but rather that I had to atone for my stupid purchase by making these work somewhere in my apartment. Since I already hated the dullness of my bathroom, I figured I could add some vampire-proof lighting and pray for the best.

I didn't think finding a use for completely ridiculous lightbulbs could make you happy, but if the small things can cause you to question everything, maybe they can answer a good bit as well. These lights take a cloudy, miserable, apocalyptic day and turn it into a spectacular midsummer's day. I'll never get my five bucks back for buying these things, and they're still a preposterous thing to own. But I've got sunshine on a cloudy day, and it's all thanks to my own brilliant brand of stupidity. In the end, I really can't complain.

The past is another country. The present is an island. The future is peering into other borders beyond it without ever leaving the shore.

You could call it voyeuristic if we weren't all offering ourselves up - or begging - to be seen. Or that's what I tell myself that's what we're all doing here.

Turn on the radio. Open a new tab. Pull a different tab.

Listen to the sounds of other countries and the echoes of their vanished kingdoms. You can relate to their stories, you can't really understand. They're not secret, but they're not meant for you either. Your presence on the horizon is perceived but not sensed.

And so too are you aware of mysteries you know of but cannot feel. I have the warm yet uncomfortable feeling of listening to the swelling soundtrack for a montage in a visual spectrum I've no rods and cones for.

The glory of modern technology. Reach out and touch someone (Mostly ourselves, if we're being honest about the distribution of use. But that's another story, right?)

I laugh when folks say the vast assemblage of flesh and circuity is destroying sociability and connection. As if being aware of the connections you would never be a part of otherwise devalues the ones you'd have had anyway. It's a small city after all. The routes are navigable most of the year. Worry about the ethics, the morality, the meaning of it all later. In foreign walls theology is silent. It's never that you're alone, it's the realization you're straying too far away from home.

So you ground yourself. Close the tabs. Turn off the radio. Put on a record. Into a practical imitation of a past, a fine substitute for another country.

I was arguing against it's existence as it descended. "Their missiles don't work," I knew, and said to the missile that clearly worked. They don't have a viable warhead, they're bluffing, and they wouldn't pick a nothing town in the mountains for their one sure shot if they had one. My protestations didn't matter. The bomb fell. The missile worked. I turned in horror seconds before the blast to duck behind a cement barrier, but life as known was done.

I woke up from the Cold War. Not a literal cold war, not one I could prove with facts, but one where my dreams played in slow motion the death of my hometown, letting me live for as long as possible that exact moment of annihilation.

I joked that my hometown, with its university researchers and government labs, was 3rd on the Soviet's list of places to destroy, after Washington and New York. Apparently all of America though the same about their hometown.

No wonder we're insane about this. I've had one dream, once, as an adult. I can't imagine what that childhood was like, but I know now the psychicconsequences. 

You too would divert billions if there was a chance they could destroy your childhood nightmares.

Stress is an occupation. Deadlines are a heartbeat. This morning, it looks like the only thing of consequence anywhere in the world isn't in the right beat. Stress is an occupation. Dive into the recent past, comb through the archives of last Thursday. The vault isn't closed yet, but it will be soon, and these scraps have one brief gasping for life. Deadlines are a heartbeat. Switch the music to progressively increasing tempos. Take the right stimulants. Stress is an occupation. Up the dosage. Deadlines are a heartbeat. Exhale at the end of the day, turn off the looping ambient soundtrack. Stress is an occupation.

Take time off. Take an hour off, a dinner off, maybe a whole movie and a talk with housemates. Deadlines are a heartbeat. Crack open the laptop, run through spreadsheet after spreadsheet. Soundtrack your relaxation with the mechanical clink of work never done. Stress is an occupation. Calculate the hours off this week, divide them by liquor. Type faster. Wait for inputs to change. Deadlines are a heartbeat. Cram in that freelance project, edit the all-consuming hobby. Banter, constantly, through the void. Write on a fast-erasing bathroom wall. Stress is an occupation. Reason that you've done enough. Crack open one for the caves, one for the carriage, one for the delay. Clock out of work. Deadlines are a heartbeat. Leave home.

Feel the flask on your inside pocket. Listen to it, rocking like waves on the sea.

Stress is an occupation.

Go inside, make small talk. Get asked about your job.

"Oh, what's it like?"

Deadlines are a heart. Beat.

Part One

Part Two

A fate worse than death

The uncaring wind still blows

Just pay the damn fine

So, Iceage's new album, You're Nothing, just came out, and unsurprisingly the controversy about whether Iceage are a bunch of Danish neo-Nazis is probably going to resurface since Pitchfork gave it a  Best New Music tag. We already went through this whole song and dance in 2011 when New Brigade came out, and the argument is pretty well trod at this point.

As the Chicago Reader post I linked to points out, using imagery in poor taste or subversively isn't exactly new for punk music, or popular music generally. Joy Division and New Order are, even without looking at anything other than the names, pretty obviously appropriating Nazi symbolism. It's worth noting though that the original sparks of anti-racist rock and punk in the UK, though, were not because folks were concerned with basically unknown bands such as Joy Division, but because of superstars such as Eric Clapton and David Bowie making rather explicit declarations of sympathy for fascism and white nationalism in spite of their relatively politically anodyne music.

All that said, Iceage's actual music doesn't contain much in the way of lyrical appropriation of fascist or white nationalist imagery. They do absolutely have some lines that are pure de Maistre - "nature is violence, bow in its grace." Iceage explain drawing lyrical inspiration from Bataille, (as have The Men), whose own relationship with fascism is complicated but sympathetic. There is nothing like the Dead Kennedys' satirical Nazi references or Joy Division's explicit invocations of Rudolf Hess, which makes it hard to tell if what many believe to be Iceage's allusions to be authentic, imagined, or ironic. If the band dealt with the themes more directly, it would be easier to tell if they were trying to be subversive, transgressive, irritating or true believers. 

Once we get to the level of what band members listen to or do in their free time the question gets even trickier. Sure, Iceage has a Jewish drummer and they're friends with some anti-Nazi Danish bands. On the other hand, Eric Clapton, despite doing an album with B.B. King, is an unrepentant supporter of Enoch Powell. At the point where Iceage praises both a German NSBM band and the seminal anti-Nazi outfit Crisis in nearly the same breath, where exactly does the trolling end and an authentic interest begin?

As someone interested in European intellectual history and military strategy, I've noticed weird fixations with fascism and right-wing extremism aren't exactly unique to punk rock. Anyone who's seriously reflected on postmodernism cannot miss the frequent appearance of a deeply intellectually serious interest in fascist concepts and those of pro-fascist thinkers. On the military side, integrating lessons and intellectual capital from revolting ideologies is basically routine, and it isn't hard to show where Nazis, Stalinists, and Maoists contributed to each other's and to liberal democracies' military thought. That's leaving out entirely the military geekery that tries to separate fascination with the practice, tools, and aesthetics of World War II from what the Nazis actually did and fought for, which still raises quite a lot of controversy among the Avalon Hill wargaming set today. But not nearly as much slack gets cut for punk bands, because unlike people who pretend to command Panzer divisions in board games or write esoteric defenses of fascist thought, skinhead punk bands get involved in streetfighting, hooliganism, and other manners of nastiness that has left lasting animosities in much of the scene. On the other hand, I would pay good money to see a bunch of postmodernists beat the shit out of each other for referencing Heidegger and Schmitt when they weren't supposed to.

Of course, it's also important to remember fascism did not appear ex nihilo so much as it appeared ex nihilism, and a great many other intellectual, political, social, and aesthetic influences that animated the early-mid twentieth century. You can find plenty of avid readers of Nietzsche among both the far left and right. Fascination with violence and defiance of conventional morality aren't exactly unique to fascism and you can find examples of it in popular music at least as far back from folk and later blues veneration of outlaws and murderers. In the case of punk, Counterculture attitudes, Counter-Enlightenment themes provide plenty of fodder for pissed off kids. At the most basic level, using shocking imagery is often just one finger in the bird a lot of bands across genres want to flip to society.

It's interesting to counterpoint Iceage with Swedish punk rockers Holograms, whose song "You Are Ancient (Sweden's Pride)," which, if you go into the song looking for it, sounds like a veneration of Viking conquests at first, but pretty obviously reveals itself to be a parody of Swedish nationalism. Indeed, there's nothing really coherent about a nationalism that can't decide if it wants to venerate the pagan conquests of the Vikings or the country's protestant heritage, which Holograms cleverly contrasts with Christianity's admonishment of pride generally.

On yet another hand, you get Iceage's fellow Copehagen punk outfit Lower, whose song "Pictures of Passion" contains a pointed reference to fascism.

It's one that Lower takes pains to explain in aesthetic terms, as they point out in a Pitchfork interview:

Pitchfork: The EP title comes from a lyric on "Pictures of Passion". On the song you also describe this image as "a relic of fascism." What are you singing about?

AT: It's a picture of any show anywhere where one person is the center of attention.

AR: We thought it sounded cool. All of our shows have been static as fuck. No movement, no blood, nothing. It should be that way. There is no reason to dance or fuck around in a pit. The word "fascism" is just a way to express how you feel when you're onstage and you can walk on heads and oppress whoever's watching you. It's not about Lower, though, and I don't think you should bring political issues into it. It definitely doesn't have anything to do with actual fascism of Italy or Germany. It's just an image. None of us are fascists.

That's a much more direct and believable way of addressing the issue, but it's not one the lyrically cryptic Iceage seems interested in resolving. Ultimately there's not much that seems immediately coherent about the combination of Iceage's influences, images, and relationships, either. Of course, I'm not expecting a band to have a coherent ideology, but unfortunately, when you attract attention for something like fascist influences, it's hard to convince folks your references aren't intended to be subversive when that's the only hint of politics they see. Nevertheless, a simple desire to be subversive or transgressive could exonerate them from charges of being some kind of Straussian ultranationalist Trojan Horse, but might still show they "flirt with fascism," for some other reason. Then again, on aesthetic grounds, plenty of artists have done similar or worse things for a variety of reasons beyond genuine belief in fascism. Or, by establishing the primacy of aesthetics over the objections of liberal politics, are these bands secretly reaffirming the fascist aesthetic justification for politics by placing the fascist aesthetic beyond political reproach? No, probably not, but if somebody besides me who knows more about political theory than music wants to tackle Iceage with me, we can start a panel or something. Or a really boring band.

As for the moral implications of all this, honestly, I'm probably going to keep listening to Iceage if this is the worst their presumed politics throw at us, the same way I'll keep listening to Eric Clapton despite his totally unironic and frequently reaffirmed admiration for Enoch Powell. I get that this is, in part, an issue with the question of "hipster racism" that comes with the territory for publications such as Vice and Pitchfork and frankly I'd rather get in and read arguments about punk bands than Girls (which may well be a good show but it appears the price of watching it is committing to a program of basically unending debate consuming far more of my time than the show itself ever could). You're Nothing is still an album I'm enjoying a lot, and if they come through the city again I'd probably go to their show again.

In any case, this was before we started this little blogging project, but it's also a good time to note that Lynyrd Skynyrd's genuine and unmistakable love for the Confederate battle flag and the stupid Lost Cause idea that you somehow can't be proud of your Southern heritage without invoking the treasonous act in which it initiated the worst war in American history in defense of the worst institution in American history. I'm from Massachusetts, you don't see me going on about how great the Puritans, Shay's rebellion and Salem Witch Trials were. The idea that the Confederate flag had been "hijacked" by extremists is particularly laughable since the damn thing only exists because it was a symbol of violent insurrection against the United States.

In Skynyrd's statement, Gary Rossington said:

We know what the Dixie flag represents and its heritage; the Civil War was fought over States rights.

Ah yes, the state's right to abrogate its commitment to the Union in order to prevent the possibility of legally losing the ability to keep human beings in bondage. At least he didn't call it the War of Northern Aggression or the War Between the States. Is Gary Rossington on twitter, because I'm totally down to have this argument too. Stick to the guitar, Gary.

Here is the thing about this city: it doesn't end. There are physical boundaries, but they spill over into the definition of sprawling urban miasma. The city is bigger than the district, and practically bigger than the states it straddles. And it doesn't stop there, because it doesn't ever stop. It's name is in the mouth of everyone with ambition, and if one's art is not about people but instead treats them as a medium, you'll end up here. Maybe not exactly, maybe not perfectly, but it's in you, and wherever you end up, that boardroom or small castle, that's life pretending at city. 

It's also a temporal state. There's a difference between living in the city and sleeping through it, but the strands weave in and out. You start with the news, with the tempo of fact exposure and reaction, and you breathe it, til you find yourself passing through security checkpoint and metal detector to finally sit down at a proper meal, a family style affair. Barbecue, wooden tables, paper napkins, heaving portions of potato salad. You talk with your compatriots, note the hoodies milling about, and as you're heavy with americana you note the vested figure screaming on the other side of the metal detector. You exit through her crater, and find yourself back in the tempo of news, back in the small whispers slipping through the machinations of thousands. You're in the city, but you've always known that. You open your mouth and it spills out of you, spreading thin and indomitable like a slime mold across the land.

“When he took office, Pope Benedict’s well known stands included the assertion that Catholicism is “true” and other religions are “deficient”; that the modern, secular world, especially in Europe, is spiritually weak; and that Catholicism is in competition with Islam. He had also strongly opposed homosexuality, the ordination of female priests and stem cell research.”

The New York Times discovers the Pope is Catholic.

Additional Times reporting today also highlighted that an area bear’s bathroom preferences included defecating in forested areas, while additionally noting that recent studies showed the sun was highly likely to consistently rise in the East and could be forecasted with similar regularity to set in the West.

Thomas Friedman then wrote a column noting that while Pope Benedict had managed to dig himself out of two holes, he has to be careful not to make a hash out of the hot potatoes he found there, because while Irishmen might like hash, in a hot, flat, and crowded world, French fries are served at McDonalds everywhere, which he is pretty sure keep people from going to war still.

Friedman then called on Arne Duncan to become the next Pope, whereupon he could negotiate a peace deal in the Middle East, a grand bargain in the U.S. Congress, and integrate the Vatican’s supply chain using high-speed rail.

Frank Bruni blamed the Pope’s decision to resign on the possibility that he could now just sit around binge-viewing Netflix and eating foie gras off of a gravy-laminated bacon-plate.

First I moved to the hood when I needed breathing room I just sit on my stoop, that's a hood living room And the very first day my debt was less than my pay I bought so much champagne I was in debt again I'm just sayin' - I'm a product of my environment Look around me, nobody's saving for retirement And I admit, that's not the way my momma raised me But when I got a raise was the last time momma praised me It pains me - how the line from wrong to write might shift No American dreams when he works the night shift With the symptoms of depression but the news calls it recession And the cure is not contentment so we answer with aggression That's the lesson - we need to bleed for all that's good, which Used to mean so much but all that's left is being hood rich.

AROUND the time that Netflix released an entire season of “House of Cards” at once, so that viewers could gorge on all 13 episodes, a friend sent me a plaintive e-mail about the way that foodie-favored restaurants give her no option other than gorging.

This is an extremely reliable indicator that the columnist's opinion on broad national trends will be informed by data and a wide variety of indicators across varied and relevant demographics.

She misses salads. (Yes, it’s possible. Really.) She’s nostalgic for healthy sides. In one place where she recently dined, she ordered kale, only to find that it was fried and, adding insult to artery, pummeled with candied pancetta. In another place, slivers of pastrami accessorized an unsuspecting salmon. She encounters bacon on brussels sprouts, bacon in sundaes and martinis, bacon, bacon everywhere, along with marrow and liver and lard.

“It’s all or nothing,” she wrote, flagging a dichotomy: cooking in trendy restaurants has never been fattier, while the trend of “cleansing” with a severe regimen of liquefied fruits, vegetables and nuts has never been hotter. Feast or famine. Binge or beet juice.

"Oh my god, I just can't get kale without meat anywhere!" Hey, guess what? There's this thing called Yelp. If you live in a major urban center - and if you're going to places that serve kale with candied pancetta, there's no damn way you don't, then there is no way in that pantheon of culinary options you cannot, with the aid of the internet, find a restaurant that serves food you like. Maybe do this instead.

It's so hard to be cool when all the cool people are doing things you don't like, I know. But to just think that if these people had bothered to, I don't know, choose food on the basis of places they like rather than on the basis of what cultured food critics think is good. For example, I do not like restaurants that charge me obscene amounts of money to eat tiny amounts of artfully prepared food on a weird looking plate. Since I choose my restaurants on the basis of what they serve rather than what is "trendy," this has not been a problem for me, and I am not inspiring apocalyptic NYT columns, which I suppose makes me culturally irrelevant like everyone else who doesn't have a psychological breakdown over kale salad preparation.

I turned from her lament to the front page of The Times. It reported the accidental death of someone participating in the X Games, a magnet for “extreme athletes,” as the article called them. The word “extreme” stuck with me and struck a chord. We compete extremely (look at Lance). Work out extremely (look all around you). Eat extremely. Watch extreme amounts of whatever we’ve decided we love, which we love in extremis. Even our weather is extreme: superstorms, Frankenstorms, snowmageddons.

Wow, "extreme" phenomena would attract more media attention. I wonder what kind of motives in a free market of journalism would draw coverage and attention to phenomena that fall outside the standard distribution of normal activity.

Also, that Frank Bruni is trying to link weather patterns with Lance Armstrong makes me want to weep.

And of course extreme campaign spending has contributed to extreme partisanship, the left seeing little merit or valor in just about anyone on the right, the right seeing the whole world with a tunnel vision that’s extremely eerie. The deficit of comity has led to the imminent spending cuts known as sequestration, which is an extreme answer to Congress’s failure to agree on a course of moderation.

And of course you said this. While I see no requirement to defend the current iteration of the American government as particularly admirable or functional, the notion that partisanship is at all time extremes, for whatever the reason, is beyond stupid.

Extreme partisanship is people beating the shit out of each other with blunt weapons in Congress. Extreme partisanship is several decades of people committing murder, arson, and terrorist intimidation against fellow Americans. Extreme partisanship is massive riots, witch hunts that end in trials, and civil wars. But you know, internet trolls these days are like, SO CRAZY.

Moderation. Remember that? It was once held up as an indisputable virtue, virtually synonymous with prudence. Don’t get too carried away with any one thing. Don’t become too set in your ways. That was the message from parents and teachers. That was the cue the culture gave.

My fancy restaurants don't serve kale the way I like, clearly prudence is dead in America. Why cannot we return to the more humble days when urban megalopoli served more traditional forms of kale salad? Why cannot we return to the days when public school teachers taught children the simple life of enjoying foie gras without unnecessary embellishment? Why cannot we avoid the dangers of becoming set in our ways, which totally wouldn't involve losing our mofugging minds when it becomes difficult to order kale the way you liked it at fancy restaurants?

But America these days is an immoderate land of fixed opinions and outsize fixations. More and more we wallow: in our established political philosophy; in our preferred interest group; in our pastime of choice; in whichever health routine we’ve turned into a health religion.

If you were to take IBM's supercomputer Watson, allow it to read only New York Times opinion columns for years, and then accidentally let it fall off the back of a truck into a puddle and then had a relatively technically adept middle schooler try to put it back together, it would probably give you something statistically indistinguishable from these sentences after you performed a hard reset and asked it, "How ya feelin' buddy?"

I BLAME the Internet. Well, that and social media and cable television, with its infinity of channels. 

In theory our hyperconnectivity and surfeit of possibilities have broadened our universes, speeding us to distant galaxies, fresh discoveries and new information. But in reality they’ve just as often had a narrowing effect, enabling us to dwell longer on, and burrow deeper into, one way of being, one mode of thinking.

SPOILER ALERT: Frank Bruni will reference one website (Slate) and three cable news channels (Fox, MSNBC, and CNN) in this column. In mid-19th century America, opinions were so fixed that people were hacking each other to death with broadswords and seceding from the Union. In mid-20th century America, people were denouncing basically anyone who disagreed with them as communists and trying to prosecute them, while U.S. federal agents and troops had to escort black children into schools and later investigate or clash against anti-war protesters. Here is Pat Buchanan's advisory to Nixon on visiting Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow in 1969:

It would outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue, and perhaps worse... It does not seem to be in the interests of national unity for the president to lend his national prestige to the argument that this divisive figure is a modern saint.

It's a good thing that people back then didn't have the internet to confirm their opinions or who knows what kind of horrible things people would have said, believed, and done!

Whether you’re predisposed to a conservative or liberal view, you can set your bookmarks to Web sites that reinforce what you already believe, take a similar tack with your Facebook and Twitter feeds, and turn for news to Fox News or MSNBC, each an echo chamber for like minds.

Wowee, the internet is an instrument that can be used by people to suit their preferences! Surely this must be a debilitating force in American political life, because clearly before the invention of the internet, average people with vastly fewer options for information consumption would be more frequently challenged to change deeply held beliefs and political opinions. It is a shame this America is gone, where the average working family could sit down together at a New American Cuisine restaurant and rationally contend about the moderate cases made by a wide variety of dissenting viewpoints, a process probably aided by their ability to know that they could order salad without the fear of candied gourmet meat being added to it. God, what happened to this country?

Also, that Bruni laments the drop in viewership of CNN and uses that as a metric for Americans receiving thoughtful challenges to their conventional wisdom either tells you that Bruni is a condescending Platonic sophist who thinks that Americans cannot consume information more complicated than a Lolcat image macro without the assistance of a talking head, or else implies that CNN popularity is the cornerstone of American civil society, a thought so repulsive, that, if true, it would drive me to become either a monarchist or join the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

There’s more extremism on the right than on the left: President Obama’s health care reform and push to raise taxes don’t come anywhere near the socialism that his Tea Party nemeses, themselves much more rigid, rant about. Above all, there’s gridlock. It’s hard to make much progress when reciprocal distrust is this extreme.

Is Bruni trying to say that Democrats are moderately extremist? Or would the argument that Democrats are extreme be too extreme for the NYT column viewership? Or, can he not think of examples of extremism but is so wedded to his own fixated view of moderation that he must, for moderation's sake, point out that there is some Democratic extremism? Anyway, thank the lord that somebody is finally taking the bold stance of condemning gridlock and distrust.

We’re immoderate not just in our affiliations, but also in our impulses. “Work Out So Hard You Vomit” proclaimed a headline on Slate.com not so long ago; the story with it presented a tour through the long, grueling trials to which the fitness-intent subject themselves.

It's definitely not an example of epistemic closure, confirmation bias and lack of challenging one's own worldviews to give one Slate article as the sole data point for your supposed national trend.

Never mind studies that suggest that moderate exertion — less than 20 miles of running a week, not more, and at a stately pace — bodes best for well-being. A growing group of people want the more extreme experience of military-style boot camps and obstacle courses like those in the Tough Mudder program, whose adherents forgo the treadmill and its individual TV screen for the exhilaration of crawling under barbed wire and swerving around flames. Bye, bye, Jack LaLanne. Hello, “Full Metal Jacket.”

Clearly the problem with America is that too many people are running more than 20 miles a week and doing Tough Mudder. Doctors everywhere are urging the Surgeon General to speak out about the danger of exercise extremism, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff warn that Americans may be "too ripped" to safely fight for the armed forces.

I’m even more impressed with our food obsessions, being such a food-obsessive myself. Organic, gluten, lactose, carbohydrate: people structure whole diets around binding vocabularies, and not always because they have an affliction compelling them to.

And actual diets, by which I mean those aimed at superfluous chins, are flamboyantly ascetic, with solid food exiting the equation for three days, for five days, even for 10. The BluePrintCleanse, the Cooler Cleanse and other retail juice fasts have surged in popularity over recent years. Sales of juice extractors are also on the upswing. Even our self-punishment is indulgent. We binge on deprivation.

And we binge, period. Over the last decade, ambitious young chefs have jockeyed to one-up one another when it comes to fried, funky excess. I thought the situation had reached some gluttonous apotheosis with the Los Angeles restaurant Animal, where a porky meal I ate in early 2009 included foie gras on a biscuit doused in both maple syrup and pork-sausage gravy.

Food obsessive complains that moderate food obsession has now been hijacked by extreme food obsession, contributing to national cultural decline. Can you think of the massive number of Americans who are suffering because their hyper-competitive gourmet chefs are no longer willing to serve them foie gras biscuits without gravy?

Also, since when is putting maple syrup on stuff 'extreme?' Maple syrup is delicious and you can put it on normal food, such as pancakes. Or you can be a jerk and stigmatize it because you thought it made a meal, the name of which is literally FAT LIVER in French, and comes from a force-fed duck, unhealthy and excessive.

But since then, there’s been renewed respect for poutine, a dish of French fries, gravy and cheese. Chicago welcomed Au Cheval, where there’s potato hash with duck-heart gravy and a fried bologna sandwich. And a place in Queens went ahead and called itself Salt & Fat. Its beet salad has pepperoni chips. Its apple salad has candied walnuts and speck. And the foie gras comes with bacon brittle.

Okay, poutine is actually pretty awesome and as far as I can tell, there is not a poutine trend sweeping the nation, which is a shame because Americans already like things with French fries, gravy, and melted cheese anyway and have for years. But yeah, seriously, we're assessing a national problem with food on the basis of places that serve duck-heart gravy. Just go to Subway or something if this is really a problem for you.

The verb “binge” applies as never before to television viewing. What Netflix was acknowledging with its “House of Cards” release was the widespread habit of storing up hours of a favorite show or buying a whole season so that you can marinate for an entire weekend in Claire Danes’s twitchy dread. So that you can choose your one mood, your one note, and revel in it.

If the television show you watch just has one mood or one note, it might be a bad television show. Especially if it's Homeland. Interlude:

Also, few people I'm aware of actually like a show "store up" one they like intentionally so they can watch it all in one go, it's because they're actually busy and are moderating their television consumption on the days the show airs. Maybe Bruni's anecdotal sample is superior to mine, but most people who like a TV show and are able to watch it on the day it comes out do so.

But when does a luxury become a rut? And if we each hunker down in some tightly proscribed burg, don’t we lose common ground? That possibility explains the fusty maxim of “moderation in all things,” which wasn’t so much a wet towel over passion as a caution against single-mindedness. And a warning about bacon.

This part is the best part, because only other people who moan about not being able to eat the gourmet foodie nonsense prepared the way traditional gourmet foodie nonsense was, I don't know, ten years ago, and who extrapolate political moods from their Netflix viewing habits and accepted conventional wisdom about politics would ever actually identify with the arguments in this column and find it at all persuasive. Yes, eat your foie gras right, watch one episode of Homeland a week, and Congress might be able to come around.

At least he didn't mention high-speed rail.

Wake up to the chaotic aftermath of the night before. Half-empty bottles, clothes, and confetti litter the room. Look around, trying to find the horizon between the ceiling and the floor. Spot a small fox-like puppy, meandering about amongst the sweaters, takeout boxes and flotsam. Her fur is a blonde-red, her body is rippling with muscle, and her mouth is absolutely hairless and brimming with razor sharp teeth. Try to run as it pounces at your shins, harmlessly playing, at least for now. Call out to your friends, trying to piece together how you've arrived at this situation. See them enter the room with another dog, this one beautiful, blonde, almost human-like, but with those same savage teeth encircled by a hairless mouth. Freak out at a dog's best impression at lips. Wonder how these animals got into God's creation plan, let alone the house.

Lose focus and regain it, only to see the fox has grown into a full-fledged wild beast. Helplessly watch as it eagerly jumps at your neck, still playfully, still so close to ending everything in an instant. Realize that the time to leave is already minutes in the past. Open the door. Try to cajole the creatures to leave you alone, alone to return to your hangovers, safe from the terrifying specter of death. Become wary of strangers, especially  your strangers, those horrific demon dogs with hairless lips. Realize the mutts aren't leaving their newfound home and run out into the hallway.

Scream for help. Find two men in the lobby, preparing luggage carts. Are you at a hotel? Realize they don't speak english. Attempt spanish, and somehow convince them there are indeed two wild beasts with bare flesh around their lips dangerously close to threshing all humanity in the hallway. Walk up to the dogs. They're anxious, with wild eyes ready to strike. Realize that you've been trying to call animal control, and that you have no phone, and have seen no phones since awakening. Watch as the commotion builds, people trying to corral the dogs, wary of their lips baring their gums and ferocious teeth. Waiting for one to strike. Waiting for the blood.

Wake up in a cold sweat at 7:30am wondering what kind of sick fucking chemical concoction somehow decided to release itself into your blood stream last night. Remember that you literally had a drink called "They're all bastards" the night before. Indeed they are. Indeed they are...

-ism

Journal 2.1.13- saw an Unman again today. It was lurking in the shadows, rubbing it hands together and smacking his lips. It's turned towards me, and as it blinked in the new brightness of the light, I could see its nictitating membrane. Long legs. Impossibly pale with deep bruises and clammy skin. It strode towards me. It's breath was hot and smelled of grapes gone bad. It gurgled "Soon". I tried not to vomit as I turned and quickly walked away

  Journal 2.2.13 - I can't walk past the stadium without hearing the unearthly braying that echos from inside. Everyone in this city is avoiding it and no one will talk about it. Every person here looks sleep deprived, I suspect they've got the dreams too. Got called to another murder/ suicide in Otterbein this morning. It's the third this week. They seem to be increasing in number and getting farther and farther away from the stadium. I told the Chief we need to widen the zone of exclusion but he just shook his head and tried to light another cigarette. He doesn't need to say anything. Even Stevens, who lives in Bowie, reports having the dreams.  Broadening the cordon won't help. We all still see it.

Journal 2.3.13 - This city is tearing itself apart. I spent the night trying to find the sick fuck who is hunting down and eating homeless people. They posted me to the Canton command center for the day shift. I hoped to get some sleep, but when I walked in, I found that the entire command staff consisted of Unmen. No way i'm sleeping around those things. The mass drownings in the harbor got so bad we had to deploy FOXTROT 7 to spotlight floaters for the patrol boats to pick up. The chanting of the crowds is becoming unbearable. It's a dirge like thing- deep and resonant from someplace hollow in their chest. This day can't end soon enough. I'm gonna sleep for a week after this is all over. Fuck I hate playoff season.

With his latest exploits, Rob “The Gronk” Gronkowski once more thrusts himself upon the football-watching world’s collective consciousness via his stubborn refusal to not go gentle into that good night. However, given my lifelong love for all things New England Patriots, I find myself enmeshed in an existential struggle to reconcile this unabashed man-child with the core of my own personal belief system. In short, how can I love Rob Gronkowski and still love myself?

I am an intellectual elitist. I associate not with the oft-mocked portrayals of my fellow New England fans; my speech is rhotic and my “A”s are short. Despite this, while regional factors obviously played a large determining factor in defining my fandom, nonetheless, the philosophy of New England is one I can easily support. In the past decade, the Patriots have created an organization where the sight of owner Robert Kraft hanging out on the sidelines with Henry Kissinger is an unsurprising image, while the notion of head coach Bill Belichick smiling seems an impossibility. The Patriots dominate not through the brute strength or prodigious talent of its players, but rather through executing a well-designed game plan perfectly and stretching the rules of the game to their utmost. Under Belichick, there is no room for fun or braggadocio, only competence and cunning. Though cast as an Evil Genius, Belichick is my Evil Genius and thus the latter part of the title matters far more than the former. 

Yet into this den of solitude enters Rob Gronkowski, the dialectical antithesis to Belichick’s stoic thesis. Gronkowski is a stupid, reckless, physical monstrosity of a tight end who obliterates the competition by routinely performing athletic feats never before seen from those who previously played his position. Above all else, though, Rob Gronkowski appears to be a Bro. The Gronk drinks from beer bongs. The Gronk poses with porn stars and dislikes being injured “to the max.”  The Gronk dances away his sorrows. 

For all that I am, I am not a Bro. I have never attended a frat party, done a keg stand or worn obnoxious neon lax pinnies, and I have no desire to do any of those things. In Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre observes, “In life, a man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing.” Therefore, because my self-drawn portrait contains no images of basements riddled with discarded glow sticks and vomit-encrusted Solo cups, I should despise Gronkowski for embodying what seems to be the Platonic ideal of the Bro. 

And yet I cannot for the simple reason that Rob Gronkowski possesses a joie de vivre so powerful that he rises above Brodom and instead becomes the physical embodiment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch. According to Nietzsche, the Übermensch, closely tied to the death of God, is a transcendent individual capable of creating a new set of creative, life-affirming values motivated purely by a love of life and the physical world we all inhabit. In order to attain such a status, Nietzsche presents a series of metamorphoses the spirit must undergo, the last stage of which being the transformation into a child. From Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “the child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’ For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred ‘Yes’ is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.” Such is the Tao of Gronk. 

To further emphasize this point, consider Gronkowski’s most infamous utterance, “Yo soy fiesta.” To the undiscerning, this quote may appear to be little more than the Spanglish musings of a simpleton, however, even if inadvertent, there’s great truth in the phrase. In Spanish, both “ser” and “estar” are ways of conjugating the verb “to be”. While “estar” usually signifies a transient state, “ser” implies permanence. Thus, when Gronkowski uses the “ser” form he clarifies that his existence as a fiesta is not a passing emotional state like anger or sadness, but rather a perpetual state of party. Now and forevermore The Gronk is party; party is all he knows.

This basic tenet of Rob Gronkowski’s existence creates the essential distinction between him and Bros. All Bros are degenerate forms of The Gronk because The Gronk is what all bros aspire to be but can never attain. Through their CEOs and Corporate Hos parties, salmon-colored pants, and backwards baseball caps, Bros try so hard to achieve that which The Gronk simply is. Sure, Bros can party, but they will never be party. The sad irony is that through the very act of trying to be The Gronk, Bros render such an accomplishment impossible. 

It is through this important realization that I can at last resolve my existential crisis. My love for Rob Gronkowski can be meaningful because he, as the Übermensch, operates on a plane of existence that outstrips my own. Once more in the words of Nietzsche, “What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the Übermensch.” Though we are all painful embarrassments to the unstoppable force that is Rob Gronkowski, we need not fret for The Gronk is too happy to care. 

While God may be dead, mercifully, The Gronk lives and he will rage, rage into the dying of the light. 

Dejo los errores de la noche anterior en la cuneta. Tienen peso que nadie debería llevar. Los calles en este hora duermen. Nadie está afuera de casa. Los autobúses van sin pasajeros a sus origines, las luces apagados. La policia vagan por los calles, buscando para alguien que aún tiene ganas a destruir la ciudad. El cielo tiene un colore entre oscuridad completa y un azul intenso. Yo monto con mi caballo, buscando un respiro del frío. Pensando de todo que quiero.

Pero cual es lo que quiero? Estar casi muerto como los calles? Viviendo justo antes del momento que el sol se levanta sobre el horizonte? Así que no quiero algo diferente de todos. Quiero la felicidad. Quiero un amor profundo. Quiero estar montando no en la oscuridad, sino la luz brillante del sol. Los sueños que me escapa no me permite tener estos sentimientos. Estoy atrapando en este purgatorio entre la noche y la mañana. Las horas cuando los calles van sin conductores, antes de la canción de los aves, antes de las personas deberían estar en el mundo de los despiertos.

Pero que hago yo? Sigo montando. Hacia la felicidad. Hacia la libertad. Hacia una cama familiar. Hacia el sol, que se viene un nuevo dia, con oportunidades de lograr todo lo que deseo. Sigo montando hacia la madrugada, hacia la razón que me puso aquí.

Last fall, I was turned on to Seattle indie rapper Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop,” a fun song with a ridiculous beat that issues a blanket challenge to consumerism by exhorting the thrill of digging for wacky shit on the racks at your local Goodwill. Paired with a hilariously kitschy video that parodies the fancy cars, designer brands, and near naked girls that populate most contemporary music videos, it was one of those songs you instantly wanted to share with all your friends and that motivated you to dance like a silly lunatic.        

Now it’s a few months later, and suddenly “Thrift Shop” is the most popular song in America. This fame has brought the inevitable oversaturation of the song that occurred with “Gangnam Style,” “Somebody that I Used to Know,” and countless other catchy numbers that your average bar grinds into the ground every couple of months. However, its popularity has also brought the seething impotent rage of hipsters who find the song, and Macklemore himself, as representative of middle class privilege, rap for people who don’t like rap, and Bar Mitzvah music.

 Two things are most perplexing here. Firstly, if you find the song so deplorable, why not write about it sooner? The video’s been bubbling just below the surface for months now, yet writers for two hipster magazines don’t know about it or find it importantly thematic until now? This is especially odd considering his far more serious cut “Same Love”, a seven minute rap ballad about gay marriage that is critical of homophobia in the hip hop community has been making waves for about the same amount of time. Making the leap to either of these videos in the past five months, or researching any of his older works would've destroyed the pretext on which both of those articles were written. Flying off of the popular hatred train and without proper context, however Macklemore is suddenly anti-hip hop and for white people, despite a long history in the Seattle scene and collaborations with conscientious acts such as Blue Scholars. Is this trolling or has #slatepitches really become this powerful over the last couple of years as a concept? If they had spent five seconds trying to see what this dude was about, they could've avoided wasting their (and now my) time on hating on this guy.

Secondly, there is this argument that going to thrift stores is really for poor people with no choice, and therefore you’re privileged if you shop there for fun. This is absolutely ridiculous, especially when you consider his audience, which is people in their 20’s who, outside of cushy consultant jobs straight out of school or rich parents that paid for college, probably aren’t floating too high above water right about now. Are thrift shops a last resort for many people? Absolutely. But thrift stores also hold a large amount of merchandise that is both practical and styling for people of average means(ironically and unironically). If you need a suit and can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars at a department store, you can find a serviceable one on the cheap at Goodwill. If you want fun ties that aren’t the conservative boring crap they’re hawking at the mall, and don’t want to be ripped off at the flea market, thrift shops are the place to be. Due to the advent of shit quality-but cheap stores like H&M, you can either pay 20 bucks now for a pair of shoes that are going to fall apart in two months, or you can buy one that used to be quality and needs a bit of TLC. Sometimes, you're better off with the damaged goods.Living in the city, and especially this city, is ridiculously expensive, and a lot of people can benefit from a trip or two to the local thrift (if it hasn’t already been gentrified out of existence.) Thrift stores give a lot of clothes, furniture, books, and other flotsam a second chance of being used and loved. As a nation that throws out a massive portion of our edible food and continues other wasteful and embarrassing practices, at least these stores insure a portion of our human output isn’t entirely put to waste.