Beat Hour

Suddenly the lights came on and the house was transformed. There was a small stair down into the kitchen where the TV stood, and to the left of that kitchen was a room for garbage that more resembled an alley. In any case, there were five of them. Mostly ambiguous looking, but there was one man, a transvestite (like men who wear dresses because it turns them on, not a transgender person), very skinny, with no shirt at first and muscles that had wrinkled and gnarled with age. He had a shriveled face, and long grayish white hair, about to his shoulders (as I have now). And I went aside with two of them in the garbage room, and killed them somehow. Dad struggled with two, and the Transvestite was taunting mom in some way. I came back to the kitchen, he went into the garbage room and came back as an old woman in floral dress, but still the same-ish shriveled face and pronounced beady eyes that pushed up to her skin. All the weapon I could find was an oak stick with two prongs, just right for punching her eyes out. But I held the stick in her eyes, and it had little effect. I struggled to wedge it with one hand between the skin and eyes and really get at those eyes. She had a knife in her left hand, and walked forward slowly and menacingly. Sometimes making thrusts. I got my left arm around her hand as we backed up into the old first kitchen, and felt the stick was going to feebly break below her eye sockets, and called for help but had the strong feeling none would come. And then I woke up.

I was mesmerized by HealthCare.gov cat.

When I was a kid, you had to “be somebody” to really have your opinion heard. Back in the days when not every person spoke with the authority of every sort of critic on the planet: Music; television; movies; art; food; dress; politics; religion; family. In a time when critics were considered a pretty low form of life, unless they were productive. Siskel and Ebert (before there was Ebert and Roeper, which became just Roeper, which hasn’t been a thing for 8 year) were held in pretty high esteem, because despite being assholes, they gave a little something back. A nice experience watching them; giving props and recommendations to films you’d otherwise never hear of, while still managing to piss people off for destroying beloved populist films. Other than that, wanting to be a critic was sort of like wanting to be a used car salesman, lawyer, or a crack dealer.  When I was about 7 years old, my brother would put on ‘Award Shows’, rating and giving accolades to everything from our home videos, to video games, to his fantasy wrestling lineups, and movies. Of course, he was making them for an audience of three: just him, a video camera from 1989, and his little brother. But he’d spend months putting those things together, and hours recording them. They seemed so well produced and authoritative. I wondered years later why nobody else really cared what he thought. Why, here was my brilliant older brother, putting on an award show that was just as good as the Oscars. But I still wanted to be just like him, so when I got a little older I started writing down my lists of favorite games, songs, movies.. I’d mostly wind up awarding the same movies and the same games and the same songs or albums year after year, until I outgrew it. One time I even spent about a week cutting out confetti so I could throw it after announcing my ‘best picture’ winner to my bulky VHS camera, which was about the size of my torso and weighed 20 pounds. I thought, one day someone was going to respect my opinion. My reviews, my likes and dislikes, were going to be held in esteem by a lot of people. Somewhere. I’d have to work hard, get a degree in film studies or whatever, Starting writing columns, work at a magazine or newspaper. But eventually the smart phone generation came around and ruined everything. Nobody reads newspapers anymore, and everyone seems to be at each other’s throats. When I started really using the internet often, man was it the greatest thing. I had my own MSN space, started uploading my reviews and strategy guides and awards. Made my own graphics. Still only producing content for just myself, because I didn’t have any idea about message boards. So, the internet in about the year 2000 was a much nicer place. It was a lot of kids and a lot more older people than the middle aged. There was a big ‘wild west’ feeling, like you could do anything. The concept of ‘trolling’ didn’t exist, but one of my first personal internet experiences was watching a girl get harassed, really dirty stuff, by some asshole on MSN Games or whatever it was called then. I inferred that ‘lol’ meant ‘that’s low’ by the fact that people were ‘lolling’ at this person very obviously being inappropriate and hurting someone’s feelings. So, I unwittingly ‘lol’d’ too. Yeah, 8 year olds are pretty dumb. But there was none of this shit where people are throwing conspiracy theories at each other, while other people try to debunk or else embarrass them. There was no ‘KYS’ and no ‘drink bleach’, no ‘I do not speak with trolls, please educate yourself’, and maybe just a little ‘I did you mom’. I should note, though, that cell phones alone aren’t what really spurned on the era of toxicity. Prior to that, communities like 4chan - where previously ‘Nerdcore’ groups usually gave social outcasts a place to belong - were more like the popular kids’ table than anything the internet had ever seen before, perennially interested in the virtual equivalent of how big those jeans made Becky’s ass look. The atheist community was on a crusade to convert all religious people who stepped into their hyper-liberal domain, thanks in large part to Richard Dawkins. Everyone who had ever read one of his books was on the internet, waiting to turn any discussion about snow cones into a desecration of the Koran.  Now everyone is permanently hooked up to the internet. And while the atheists have moved on, and 4chan isn’t sending Justin Bieber to North Korea every week, our whole species is dying from negativity. Even into adulthood, I never heard the word ‘cunt’ before the new generation of internet users started throwing it around. Youtube, the endless march of the comments section (admittedly, it’s a lot better now than it was from 2008 to the advent of Google Plus). Websites like Yelp encourage people to voice their complaints, and thus 11 reviews are louder than 40,000 happy customers. Reddit, Imgur, the war of downvotes. Trump, Clinton, Sanders: the American spiritual civil war that’s so infectious that most people in distant foreign countries are highly invested and might as well be voting. But I think I figured it out, all the toxicity. It all goes back to my childhood. Everyone wants to be a goddamn critic. Everyone wants to be known and seen, and heard. The best way to do that, and critics have spent hundreds of years building this technique which comes naturally to the attention seeker, is to be a complete and uncompromising asshole. To hate, to spill that hate like hot soup in the laps of friend and foe alike. Our species, connected to the internet, is a giant cycle of self-deprecation. The more people who can hear us, the louder our thunder of opinions. And here I am. Back to writing some little blog to myself, just like years before. And no amount of thumbs ups, or views, or likes, or notes, or comments, will ever mean my or your opinion will ever matter. Just like, humans have always been assholes, and critics have never mattered and will always be forgotten. That’s why, I’m going to stop having an opinion. When I make a comment, I’m trolling. When I’m talking about politics, I’ll do my best to give unadulterated statistics and nothing more. The world doesn’t need another critic.

My friend, over about 8 years, used all the rooms in the house as his own bedroom, including one large apartment in the back annex. I remember, when we were about 13, sitting at one of the back upstairs windows with him, and he’d watch one of the neighbor girls half a block away getting dressed. The girl’s parents had just been killed in a car accident, which still didn’t exclude her from some casual peeping. I don’t know why that memory comes to mind, except I wonder what happened to those kids and that girl, and how life went for them after we parted ways. We had a lot of great times in that house, more than I could ever recollect here. Eventually, I was there when he moved out, and the place was completely empty. He moved into some little house down the street, I guess it was too much for his dad to take care of anymore. I still revisit there a lot in my dreams, where I’ll show up on the porch and his mother is playing the piano by the window. Sometimes we’d walk down the alley here, and that little house in the foreground was a beautiful dark wood, surrounded by weeping willows. The whole neighborhood was shrouded in trees back then, and appeared dark all the time. Now my friend’s dad’s garden has all been uprooted by a handful of owners who dismantled his paradise a few dozen plants at a time. Now the trees have all been chopped down, and the classical Frank Lloyd Wright house has been “brightened up” with hideous siding and white columns and a door they picked up from Home Depot. The annex on the back of my friend’s house has been sealed off with siding, the great porch at the front has been ripped off.  I guess one doesn’t have to live too long to see their childhood ravaged by time.

Love this lady.

Our whole society has its face buried in a newspaper.

I met a beautiful woman in the grocery store one morning. She had two kids, in her early thirties, single. Blonde, thin, very fit. Her face was slender, and her green eyes were always beaming, and she often wore pink lipstick on her tiny lips. She introduced herself to me, I don’t even remember how anymore. We connected very fast, and soon we were doing everything together. We’d meet when she got off work at places like McDonald’s and just sit and talk. She consoled me through my bills, through ex-girlfriends and rivalries. I’ve never before in my life seen a more empathetic face. One night we fell asleep at her parents’ house. My last memory of her was wrapping my feet around hers as I pulled her in close. Then I woke up, and pulled back the covers, and my cat meowed loudly at me for moving. I both love and hate dreams where I fall in love, and especially hate not being able to remember what all happened.

I found a pub in Japan named after a Beatles song, Ob-la-di. Just thought it was cute. I wonder if it’s mainly frequented by Westerners. There’s another bar in the same building next door, as well, with a Japanese name and Japanese signage. 

A lot of the time you can't really see the sky. Just flanked on all sides by ascending tree lines, and forests on the horizon wherever there's an open view of the valley. I live near Cincinnati, and so my home is in the Ohio river valley. It's very lush in the valley for much of the year, fields that never seem to end flanked by 600 foot hills. Then at the top, it turns into rolling hills and more fields and forests. I live on the Indiana side, and it's very scenic to me, even in the winter. Very rustic this time of year. It's always cloudy, and maybe a bit creepy sometimes. There's no hipsters, but Hoosiers are very rude and dumb. They'll walk right into your car, never looking both ways before crossing the street. They don't like different people; they don't like thin people or people who are 'too light' or ‘too dark’ respectively, and they distrust young people especially. It's all older people (40+) because anyone who hits 18 and has a choice gets out of here immediately, and at least moves to Cincinnati. Well, it's not as bad as I make it sound. But I love the land, even if I'm not fond of the people.