Meme Me, Baby

Memory

 Remember when you had one?  Before the crucial cortical sheath began shrinking ... the hippocampus started behaving like a slow-moving hippopotamus ... vague nostalgia for memories you have to assume you once had, but can't for the life of you recall.

Never Mind.

Remember when the world sort of made sense?
Uh ... not really.  Unless ... you mean ..?

Remember when cigarettes weren't bad for you?
I can't even remember when you weren't bad for me.

Remember when you had hair?
Did I ...  Oh yeah ... no, wait ...

Remember that song?  How did it go?
Can you hum it for me?
Sorry, but I'm not falling for that one again.

Remember when you weren't a total dick?
I used to be a pussy, but I guess I outgrew it.

Remember the days of blissful innocence before the 2nd law of Thermodynamics went mainstream?
Shit!  Maybe if everything wasn't falling apart before my eyes ... I ...

Remember when identity wasn't completely unidentifiable?

You used to be a person, so what happened?
I think I was the victim of a crime ... or it may have been a disease ... something conceptual ... probably.

Vocabulary was the first casualty. 
So what are you now?
I'll take a stab and refer to myself as a holographic projection of few words.
A strong silent illusion.
And yet so real even my own family members can't tell the difference.

***

In certain parts of the world, the amygdala is frequently mistaken for an armadillo,  is hunted and consumed as an important source of emotional sustenance.

I don't know what it is ... I just don't feel like myself.

It has been hypothesized that the meme is a living entity, lodged in the brain, capable of mutation.
I call my meme Mimi.
I'd marry Mimi if I could.
This, then, is an example of the power of a culture to exert control over a hapless, memory-impaired population.

I woke up one day and didn't know where I was. Turned out I'd been living in a foreign country for the past twenty years.
I went to a doctor who diagnosed a long-term state of dissociative fugue.
I wandered out of his office without paying.

State of the Onion

Okay, I admit it.  Along with literally hundreds of other people around the world, I tuned in for the State of the Union yesterday.  Primarily for the opportunity of watching the grim-faced, anally retentive Republicans do their best zombie impersonations as they stared with death ray intensity at President Obama.  Who, let's face it, was talking about all the things they rabidly oppose - progressive government, economic equality, environmental responsibility, intelligence, consciousness, etc.

Not to mention the added bonus of having John Boehner, House Republican zombie leader, lost somewhere in his own private narcissistic fog, sitting directly behind the President. What is up with this guy's face? He either has a serious drinking problem, or a secret tanning bed in his congressional office.  Did anyone else notice the  I'm a total prick and proud of it  name tag he was wearing?  You had to look closely.

As good as Obama's speech was - one especially appreciates the subtly he employs while giving the finger to the right wing rabble - the highlight had to be the 'other party response.'
This is the Republican's chance to drag out one of their so-called rising stars to point out in simplistic jargon why everything the President just said is wrong. This time it was Joni Ernst, former Iowa pig farmer turned Senator, who gave one of the creepiest little political rebuttals in recent history.

Incredibly, the talking heads on CNN pronounced her efforts commendable, well done, compelling, even.
Sure, if you're into scary, smiley-faced robot women. This is the sort of woman who's all  I am here to help you, humans,  until you turn your back and the long titanium claws come out, and the next thing you know you've been lobotomized and suddenly talking like a conservative Republican.

Credit where credit is sue, however. Joni's poignant story of having to wear plastic bread bags over her shoes while walking fifty miles through ungodly wilderness to her one room, Christian fundamentalist school house definitely plucked at more than a few heart strings.  This is a woman (maybe) who, lest we forget, went on to major in animal castration at a highly regarded Iowan community college.  Still, I wonder if these plastic bags were re-used, at least recycled, or simply thrown in the trash? Are Joni's makeshift shoe covers still lying somewhere in an Iowan landfill? Her launching a search to find them would definitely be a savvy public relations move for her next campaign.

Not satisfied with Ms. Ernst's televised triumph, the Republicans also trotted out their big guns, the big three, as it were, a.k.a. the primary Presidential wannabes.  Paul Ryan, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.

(Hey, If Paul Ryan married Rand Paul, he'd be Paul Paul. Or would Rand Paul be Rand Ryan?)

I swear, these three guys could star in their own horror movie, and they wouldn't need any make up.

The saga of three Republican zombies trolling the red states, feasting on the remnants of liberal flesh.
 
Whatever you do, don't look at their eyes.  Eyes that say,  I know I'm lying my ass off, but I'm clever enough to get away with it, particularly among my dumbbell constituents.

Ted Cruz' eyes also remind us that  a) you don't have to be particularly smart to go to Harvard  and b) you don't necessarily have to be sane to be a Senator.

Talk about some scary shit!   But then, hey America, you asked for it....

Sheepishly Aclimating To The New Year

Late-Breaking News Flash: Cue maudlin music.  A new year has apparently started. I know what you're thinking. When the hell did this happen?  And thanks a lot for informing us, we who attempt to systematically ignore the devastating effects of passing time, who can with a certain amount of concerted effort convince ourselves that it's still 1976.

Any chance this is nothing more than a mean-spirited rumor?

Afraid not. Time is a cosmic phenomenon, more or less immune to the petty, narcissistic concerns of time-obsessed humanoids.

Oh well. It's not as if last year was anything but a big disappointment. Not as if anything is slated for change this year. According to noted futurist and prolific author Fredrick Crust , we can pretty much expect more of the same, only worse. Last year's intermittent insanity becomes this year's full-blown psychosis.

Religious idiocy (pardon the redundancy) continues to thrive, terrorists continue to terrorize, continuing to believe that indiscriminate murder is their first class ticket to paradise. Yeah, that makes sense. Has to be a joke, right? I mean, how dumb do these people have to be to actually buy into this crap?

Let's see, I have no job skills, my mother consistently withheld love from me, girls refuse to have sex with me, the weather bugs me ... me, me, me ... I might as well just kill a bunch of people, shout something insipid about God and go directly to paradise.

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda is now referred to in the media as a brand. Supposedly, compared with more extremist nut-job groups such as ISIS (Insane State of Iraq & Syria), Al Qaeda is perceived as fairly banal. Mainstream, even. How long before we see Al Qaeda boutiques popping up in various cities, offering jihadist fashion options for non-believing infidels. Why be a terrorist when you can simply look like one?  Call it Martyrdom through Merchandizing.

Back in the land of the free / home of the mostly mindless, the newly elected Republican-led Congress has taken power.  Not only does it already have the lowest approval rating of any Congress is history, it also lays claim to the lowest average I.Q.  And here we've been wondering how stupid people must be to vote Republican. Turns out they were clever enough to elect people even more stupid than themselves.

See, we're not as dumb as everyone thinks.

True, but you do realize that the Republicans won't do anything to improve your miserable existences.

Sure, but at least now we'll know why.  It's called being an informed participant in the democratic process.
 

 Sadly, no sooner had the New Year commenced than a 2-year-old in a Walmart store (where else would this happen?) pulled a handgun from his mother's purse and shot her in the head. Yet another tragic incident of gun-related violence in America, guaranteed to have absolutely no impact on the prospect of increased gun control.  But at least it provided the N.R.A. with a new angle of spin for their insidious propaganda machine: Guns don't kill people, toddlers kill people.

Welcome to the Year of Sheep and Goats!

Publish or Perish

... though the two are certainly not mutually exclusive.

While no clear cut statistics are presently available, there is ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that the process of getting a book published can be fatal to writers.  Time alone is frequently a critical factor.

Typical Agent Guidelines:  "Response time on initial query: six to eight months; on a partial or full manuscript: three to eleven years."

*In all fairness, literary agents have also been known to pass away while considering a writer's submission. Which of course leaves the writer wondering if his or her writing was in any way directly causative of the agent's demise. Hard to perform at your best when you're constantly worrying about who your writing might kill next.

** Note:  If the worst happens and reading your novel kills the agent reading it, it's probably not a good idea to resubmit to another agent in the same agency.

"Hi. My novel apparently gave your colleague a fatal brain aneurysm, but I'm wondering if you'd like to take a crack at it?"

Mentioning the potential lethality of your book to another agency, however, might very well get your foot in the door, so to speak.

Other not-easy-to-swallow-literary-agency-factoids:

Most U.S. agencies continue to employ the standard disclaimer:  We receive several hundred submissions a week, so be patient. Also don't be surprised if you never hear back from us in this lifetime.

So figure a couple of thousand agencies operating at any given time, each getting several hundred submissions a week. Do the math, come up with a conservative estimate of ten million submissions a year. And you're thinking wait a minute, the vast majority of the planet's population are semi-illiterate dumbbells, so who the hell is writing all these books?  Are these the same people who can't sing, yet feel justified auditioning for American Idol?

Or you may hear this from an agent:

"Absolutely loved your query, was up all night reading it - actually I read it 137 times - but unfortunately, after near-infinite soul searching, am forced to conclude that your project is not a good fit for my current list."

And, of course, one of our personal favorites:  

"Don't be discouraged by this rejection. The publishing industry is entirely, overwhelmingly - some might say pathologically - subjective."

Which is a blatant lie, or possibly an inside joke. The publishing industry is actually a monolithic object. Perusing a random selection of literary websites we discover that the object most sought after by an overwhelming majority of agents is something called YA  NA. Which leaves us then having to figure out what YA  NA might be. It could be the name of a Chinese ping pong player, or possibly a Chinese panda, but that would only be relevant if the Chinese had somehow secretly taken over the US publishing business.

In which case the absolute best thing you could be at this moment in time is a Chinese female writer, willing to toe the party line for a profit, but not above the occasional dissident-sounding paragraph, with a penchant for historical, family-oriented romance fiction (no incest, please), as long as no one actually takes off any clothes and all kissing occurs with mouths closed.

Turns out YA NA actually means Young Adult / New Adult, referring to teenagers and people in their early twenties.  So basically you can be a YA or a NA, but not both. Although there are a large number of NAs who continue to behave like YAs.
 Still, one cannot resist the obvious question:  When was the last time any of us have witnessed anyone in either of these age brackets reading a book? 

The equally obvious answer:  YAs and NAs do not read, but they do shop, often compulsively.  As with their  OA (older adult) counterparts, the thrill is in the buying of the thing, not so much the having and / or using of it.

 This also explains why, for example, an 850 page tome on the Franco-Prussian War can become an instant N.Y. Times Bestseller.

I absolutely have to have this thing.

It's called a book, and you will never read it.

So ... what's your point?

It further explains why I'm currently working on a Dystopian Paranormal YA Romance about two fifteen-year-old Chinese junior high school students whose budding love for each other is only overshadowed by their desire to reconnect with the extraterrestrial parents who abandoned them at birth on planet Earth.  

   

 

Girl with Gun

Long assumed lost to the ravages of fading time, misplaced memory and mainstream publishing indifference, the final manuscript of the late, great, obscurely brilliant and clinically insane writer, Henry Hank Clatterbuck, has recently been excavated in, of all improbable places, an outdoor flea market in Ulaanbaatar. As an homage to Hank, the first tattered chapter is offered below.

 

Bang, Bang, Honey Pie

(part 1)

Gaze, if you will, upon this exquisite piece of weaponry, the man is saying, his thick, rubbery-looking lips almost blowing a kiss on the word weaponry. Pay particular attention to the cold forged steel, he says, stroking the long barrel with his stubby fingers, like he might start sex moaning any minute. Does look cold, I have to admit. Wouldn't want to be touching it in the middle of winter.

The sort of firearm that defines a man, he goes on. Who he is, why he is. Cuts right through all the sentimental crap of the confused male identity whiners and their politically correct hangers on.

I'm standing there with Skimmer, who's technically my Dad, but I've always called him Skimmer. Dad just lacks realism. Not that I doubt it was actually his seed that intervened in some convoluted fashion with my Momma's egg. No way around that incontrovertible fact. Just that he's the sort of man you can't exactly imagine as a Dad. More like a big, moody, unpredictable baby. Not that I don't sort of like him. He's got his occasional good qualities, although good may be a stretch, and definitely don't stand around thinking you can count on them in a crisis.

Care to hold it, the guy asks Skimmer.

Skimmer sure does. He grabs it by its pretty pearly-looking handle and does that judging-something's-value-by-its-heft thing. Looks like he's shaking hands, or exercising his puny arm muscles.

Go ahead, the guy urges. Smell it.

Skimmer raises the gun to his nostrils and takes a long serious sniff. Closes his eyes, seems to be enjoying the odor, although I'm wondering how something made of cold forged steel can smell at all.

Now tell me, the guy says, his face all pink and puffy with pride or something. What does that say to you?

Skimmer has to think about this for a minute and then says, Uh, clarity.

The guy looks only half pleased, but says, Yeah, that's a good one. Anything else?

Well, Skimmer says, glancing around like he's hoping angels will suddenly appear and whisper the correct answer to him. Freedom?

There you go, the guy smiles, showing plenty of less than beautiful looking teeth.

There he goes where? I'm wondering. I am familiar with the concept of freedom. It's what people are always whining about the federal government stealing, also what Momma claims she has none of, owing to the unfortunate circumstance of being married to a man like Skimmer. But how a gun says freedom, I can't figure, although judging by the grunts of approval from all the men standing nearby, I may be the only one.

One giant of a guy with a big bald head and scary tattoos up and down both arms slaps Skimmer on the back, shouts, “Right on, my brother.

Skimmer seems pleased that he's all of a sudden so popular. Generally people tend to avoid him like a disease.

Yeah, Skimmer says, she's a real little beauty, isn't she?

For a stupid instant I think he may be talking about me, you know, like being an actual human Dad, making an announcement to the thick-necked multitudes that some things – i.e. his darling daughter – are a lot cuter and more interesting than some dumb gun. No such luck. The way Skimmer's caressing the thing, his eyes going all moist, like he's just met the one and only true love of his life, it's pretty clear that in the shriveled up universe he inhabits, I barely exist. 

Hello! Remember me?

 

Skimmer makes a move to hand the little beauty, which by the way is anything but little, back to the guy behind the counter, but you can tell his heart's not in it. He's like a guy who can't make up his mind, knows he should, but would prefer to just stand here forever, to the end of time, doing nothing.

Maybe the little lady would like to hold it, the guy says to Skimmer, who stares at the guy like he's suddenly speaking Chinese. Huh? he says.

The guy uses his eyes – eyes, I notice, that are starting to look a lot like the eyes of a snake, the kind you sort of think might be smiling, but turns out it's just doing what it does with its mouth right before it bites you – to steer Skimmer's bewildered brain over and down to where guess who is standing.

Oh! Skimmer says, like he's just figured out some big mystery that's been tormenting him his whole, stupid life. How about it, Honey Pie, he says. Wanna hold the gun?

In case you're wondering, no, Honey Pie's not my real name. It's just what Skimmer calls me when he's in a good mood, or when we're in public and he wants to come off looking like he's some sort of nearly normal person. Meanwhile, why would I wanna? I'd much rather be holding a hotdog, or maybe a puppy. I shake my head in what I hope will be a definitive fashion.

Never too young to start, missy, snake eyes says, leaning over the counter towards me, at least as far as his big jelly belly will tolerate.

No thanks, I say. Guns are bad things, I say. They maim and kill on a fairly regular basis.

Talk about the deadly silence of outer space. A hush falls over the entire place like a giant mute tidal wave. I'm guessing if looks could kill, I'd be a goner. Skimmer appears like his head might explode.

Just an opinion, I shout. It's called free speech, in case your dumb brains are wondering.

"Trust None Of What You Hear, Less Of What You See **

It's all happening right there before your eyes, but you don't see a thing. You went blind thirty seconds ago from the sheer dull dumbness of it all. Where's all the beauty gone, you howl into the mirror - not that you had any idea you were standing in front of one. Ah, but then do not fail to discriminate between appearance and Reality, you remind yourself; how things seem as opposed to how they actually are ...  unless, of course, how they really are is simply how they seem. Why assume otherwise? Your perception, as limited as it may be, is all you've got.

Hey, that's some scary shit. I mean, there must be a better answer. Dark matter, for example? Don't that count for something?

Yes, all that dark matter in your head no doubt explains why you're such a dim-witted idiot.

Today's Joke Section

Two schizophrenics run into each other on the street.
Schizo one says, "Hey, who the hell are all you people?"
Schizo two says, "Terrific, I'm hearing those damn voices again."

Why did the Radical Nominalist cross the road?
Because doing so demonstrated absolutely nothing.
(Wait a minute, is that funny? I don't get it.)

Why can't you believe anything elementary particles tell you?
 Because they make up everything.

Enough! My perception of you is rapidly deteriorating.

In any case, worrying about how things appear is pretty much passe, at least on certain news networks, which now speak exclusively in terms of optics.
As in: What, in your opinion, are the optics of the current situation? One might also speak of optical implications, of which, apparently, there are many.

Things no longer appear, they have varying degrees of optical relevance. An ugly person is now referred to as optically challenged. Not being able to see eye to eye is simply a matter of optical divergence. The gorgeous girl who just started working at the local convenience store is someone you optically obsess over. You're spending a ton of money on worthless crap in order to maximize optical opportunity.

Finally, you work up the nerve to speak to her:

"I'm smitten by your optics and would very much enjoy some form of ocular contact with you. Does that strike you as something you might be optically open to?"
At which point she punches you in the eye, screaming, "Stay the hell away from me, you freak."

An optical illusion, by the way, remains an optical illusion. An optical delusion, on the other hand, suggests an egregious misuse - either intentional or as a function of genetic defect, of the prevailing optics.

To sum up:

What we see is all there is. Our near-compulsive inability to actually see it goes a long way to explain the ongoing tragedy of the human condition.

** From a Bruce Springsteen song. Name the song and win an all expenses paid trip to the upcoming, semi-annual Bloggers Conclave in Mogadishu..



 
 

Fragments of the Day, Courtesy of CrazyWorld.Com

We've got individuals on top of buildings.
People on buildings?
That's correct.

They were screaming and yelling for help.
The people?
We believe so.

You've been out in the crowds looking for um, right?
We don't know what we're facing.
Are the criminally insane involved?
On the top of buildings, you mean?
Is that where they are?


What's the big deal about fuck, anyway?

Ex: A brief dialogue utilizing fuck...

Fuck!
Yeah, what the fuck?
Who the fuck knows?
Whatever, man. It's fucked up.
I don't even fucking care anymore.
Fuck it!


I think before we even think about it, first things first.
What even is it, in their eyes?
They told me, we all he got.
What do you make of that, fact?
I'm not gonna second guess.

The healing can't begin while we're still picking at the scab.
Uh.....
It used to be they could stand in one spot.
It was demonstrable at that point.
Well, it's out of our hands now.

So what if you're lucky enough to be on TV?

You can call someone a crazy son-of-a-bitch; cannot call someone a crazy fuck.
Bastard, okay; Shithead, not okay.
Last thoughts, Chuck, then we gotta go.
Fuck you! And my name's not Chuck.

*If you're super lucky enough to be in a movie:  you can call someone a motherfucker just before shooting him in the head, but ladies, you better make sure you're wearing a bra when you do it.


uh, the more uh, of uh, them the uh, better
explain what you mean
people is in over their head, is all
are you suggesting that multiple individuals are sharing a single head?
a mysterious woman Josie is all of a sudden reading a script
she didn't use the F-word, did she?
still no reason to shoot the bitch

(wait a minute, can he say bitch on the air?)

I'm in angst every day.


Sometimes you see images like, this..............