Blogging to Death

The annual convention of Global Bloggers Anonymous was held last month in Helsinki, Finland.

(a country, by the way, that is a lot easier to get into and out of if you're holding an E.U. passport. The Fins, for reasons not entirely clear, are particularly hard on Americans, who were confined in an airport holding area for several hours, forced to watch re-runs of Christian fundamentalist reality TV shows.

One perceptive blogger cleverly pointed out the glaring contradiction of combining the phrases Christian fundamentalist and reality, although a group of Baptist bloggers from Boise, Idaho briefly interrupted their impromptu prayer session to point out that paradoxical might be a better choice.

Which only proves that it takes a paradox to know one ...)

A perhaps more pertinent question was posed by another, strictly non-affiliated blogger, who inquired,  "What the hell is a Duggar, anyway?"
No one knew for sure, but the general consensus was that, whatever it is, the Kardashians are most likely involved.

Speaking of which ...  the vastly popular blog dedicated to this incredibly self-photogenic family - "Let's Send The Kardashians To Another Planet, A.S.A.P."  has already raised 20 million dollars for the proposed journey.
True, that's barely the cost of enough rocket fuel to get them all to the moon, but hey, it's a start.

 Meanwhile,  Is Jim Bob Duggar one guy or two?

Possible answers: 

"Who the fuck would name a kid Jim Bob?  Has to be two guys."
"Who the fuck cares?"
"Sounds like the name of a used car salesman in Alabama. Not only does he sell you a car you don't really want, but by the time you get home, you're pregnant."

Other Highlights From the Conference:

*Blogging has now replaced flogging as the preferred form of punishment in Saudi Arabia.

*The quirky ISIS blog,   "I'd Rather Blow Myself Up Than Get A Blowjob,"  is actively recruiting new bloggers.  If you can write snappy, incendiary prose, grow a mangy-looking beard and agree that the world should end as soon as possible in a mindlessly gruesome bloodbath, apply at the ISIS retail outlet nearest to you. (all successful applicants can expect a 30% discount on all ISIS merchandise)

*The World Body of Official Counters (vaguely aligned with the World Bank)  now estimates that there are approximately two billion active blogs on the planet.  That's one blog for approximately every 2.5 people.  So any day your blog gets five or more hits should be considered an unmitigated success.

*Lamenting the shrinking attention span, the disappearance of short term memory and the plummeting intelligence among the human population, bloggers are increasing adopting what's known as the Mini-Blog format.  It's basic tenant: Shorter is better; virtually non-existent is best.

For example, the popular mini-blog,  Not Worth Wasting Even Five Minutes On,  limits each posting to a single sentence fragment.

A recent one asked readers to complete the following:

"I don't know what ... "

Responses literally poured in.

"I don't know what to think."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"I don't know what that awful smell is."
"I don't know what method I'll use when I murder you."
"I don't know what to do about my paralyzing depression."

Exciting stuff, n'est pa?

Paradise Lost / part 1

Desire:

I  ...  you, he says, choosing to omit the word.
You? she wonders.
Yes, that is to say, the randomized field of quantum interference within which I may or may not ... reside.
Are we entangled, then? she queries.
In my imagination, certainly.
Do you  ...  me  as merely a commodity?
More as an imperfect reflection.
Can fragments fully love?
Intertextually, you mean?


Which version of modernity (post / post-post / meta / pseudo / alter) is he aligning himself with?

These thugs, what exactly do they want?

Is post-irony even conceivable?


Five billion years later, the universe has reached a state of total and irreversible entropy. The weather forecast calls for temperatures hovering right around absolute zero across all of space/time. His desire, needless to say, has cooled somewhat. Obsession, however, is indestructible. A single human thought takes a million years, and yet he cannot help himself thinking it.

Do you  ...   me? he asks, the omission of the word saving him perhaps 500, 000 years.

Without admitting to the depths of her emotional vacuity, she's inclined to consider it extraneous.

Let me think about it, she says, and I'll get back to you in 2 million years.

Her saying this, of course, requires 3 million years.  He can't even fathom the math, the frozen interval of the impending wait.

~

"These displaced people are living on golf courses. "

They are perhaps seeking the singularity in an increasingly standardized world.

Many of them are too poor to even rent clubs, let alone own a set.

In the midst of a tragedy of this magnitude, is golf even relevant?

"In either case, our forces are fully deployed."

Worst case scenario?

I'd prefer to defer comment until after the inevitable blood bath.

~

Even as the chaos, as meaning is mistaken on the molecular level, as ...

She feigns surprise at his advances / would have preferred something slightly more fictitious

She thinks: He sees himself as a genuine protagonist, while all I see is a jumble of ontological cliches.

Overblown, absurd, hysterical, she says.

My desire? he asks.

No.

My attire?

No.

My ... 


As for the sex; assuming, that is, if; senseless, sublime, almost sensual, more stylized than substantive; surfaces, almost but not quite, touching ...

He chalks it up to a straightforward electromagnetic divergence; she, sighing, ponders numerous, highly implausible outcomes.

 

The Murky Dark Side Of Y.A. Fiction

... Or how I learned to get comfortable with the F word.

Submitted anonymously by Steve Druzinsky, who clearly doesn't understand the meaning of anonymously, but no matter. Steve, who says he's seventeen, living in an obscure town in one of the I states -  Iowa? Idaho? Indiana? Okay, there are only three, so one of those - is obviously a budding talent in the suddenly very hot Y.A. sub-sub-genre of  Filthy Flash Fiction For Adolescents.

 F * * k 

Light screaming through an exposed window straight into my fucking eyeballs. Fuck me for forgetting to close the fucking window shade before falling into this fucked up bed. 

Fuck

Fuck

Fuck

Get fucked!       Go fuck yourself!       Fuck off! 

I

        Am

                     Totally

                                        Fucked

Okay, you've probably already figured it out. I use the F word a lot. A lot, a lot. A fucking lot, actually. Thing is … it's not my fucking fault. I have a condition, a sort of mental disease. Single Word Compulsion Disorder is the technical term; S.W.C.D in the parlance of the verbal minimalists that constitute the mainstream of the psycho/medical establishment. Shrinks like talking in abbreviations; meaningless sound bites; sparse, choppy sentence fragments meant to convey that a) the burden is entirely on you, the patient, to keep the ball rolling, and b) they don't really give a shit one way or the other. It's a bit like trying to pry secrets from a Chinese postmodernist with a serious opium habit.

Maybe if I had some fucking opium to smoke ...

                                                                              ... was too fucking stoned to utter sound

Take Doctor Rick Rasmussen, for example – call me Dr. Rick – my first therapist, back in the days when nobody had ever heard of S.W.C.D. It was more or less assumed that I was nothing more than an angry little shithead with a runaway foul mouth; maladjusted in the extreme; blatantly narcissistic; classic sociopath with a tendency to self-mutilate. The sort of kid who tortures animals as a hobby. Fantasizes the murder of teachers and family members. Left unchecked, will almost certainly evolve into a serial killer.  Sorry, don't you mean fucking serial killer?

"So, tell me," Doctor Rick says. "Why do you think you use the F word so much?"

(Okay, if I knew why, I wouldn't be here talking to you, would I?)

"I don't fucking do that," I tell him.

"You just did it."

"The fuck I did."

"Fine, I'm just going to keep count of your F word usage."

Great! My parents are forking out a hundred and fifty bucks an hour for this fucking quack to count my fuck usage. Meanwhile, who even knew that Dr. Rick could count, or that he was the sort of sick fuck who would actually consider doing it? But there he was, after each one of our sessions, presenting me with the official fuck results for the day.

“Based on my calculations,” Dr. Rick says, “you've used the word sixty-seven times in the past forty-five minutes.”

“What word?” I ask.

“You know what word.”

“I fucking do not.”

“There, you did it again.”

“Fuck!”

“And again.”

“You know, even for a shrink, you're fucking weird.”

“Keep going. If you can make it to a hundred in the next thirty seconds, my partner will owe me fifty bucks.”

“You made a fucking bet? The fuck is up with that?”

“Excellent!”

"Fuck you!"

"Uh huh ... "

Things got a bit better later on when some fucking scientist discovered the tiny mutant gene fragment responsible for my condition. It was genetic, therefore nothing deserving of blame, although I was inclined to blame my parents, except I'd already put them through so fucking much. I mean, seriously, how many times can you remind your father that he's the World's Best Fuckhead Dad before it's starts wearing on his capacity to express paternal love? Or like trying to thank your Mother for the fried eggs and English muffin breakfast, but instead hearing yourself blurt out, "fuck you for the fucking eggs, Mom-fuck."

Keeping in mind that these are the sort of people who actually employ, Oh My Gosh! to express surprise.

 Without even a trace of self-reflective irony.

Fucking God forbid.....

Still, I vividly recall the day I could shout out with near-absolute conviction that it was not my fucking fault. I was a mutation, a sad and worthy-of-pity watered down version of a normal kid. I was handicapped. Fucked up beyond all hope. I began to look forward to handicap express lines at the bank, reserved parking spaces, special discounts from drug dealers and prostitutes. Problem was, nobody really cared. Even people who pretended to care about everything couldn't be bothered. Oh yeah, right, was the predominant sentiment. Go ahead, blame any and all reprehensible behavior on some obscure, hypothetical and probably made up, anyway, brain ailment. It's like some fucked up kid who bludgeons his grandmother for the eleven bucks and thirty-two cents in her purse, then claims it was the god-awful smell of her perfume that made him do it.

We're all victims, in one way or another.

Still, I had to believe there was a glimmer of light at the end of this fucking tunnel.

But then what the fuck did I know?

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.