the whirlwind is in the thorn tree

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You know what i should do?

I should visit John this summer. Take a week of vacation and fly up there and just hang at his place for a few days, and then fly back. He lives just down the road from Dulles International, i wouldn’t even have to rent a car. I want to see how that guy is doing in person. It sounds like he has a pretty normal life… or maybe he’s a meth addict and his girlfriend weighs 500 pounds and they live in a shed! Probably not. God, i just want to travel more. If i had tons of money, i would go different places all the fucking time.

You know what i should do?

Be utterly pathetic and date online. Especially now that i have an apartment that i’m not ashamed of. Just put an ad on Craigslist that reads “fat geeky white guy seeks fat geeky girl of any skin color. I have a crappy job and i’m not much to look at, but i’m pretty responsible and loyal and probably fun to hang out with if you’re a geek. Let’s geek out together, you fat geek goddess, you.

I might get lucky. I’ve given up looking for a posting like that from a girl on Craigslist. EVERY woman in this area sounds exactly the same, looking for a guy whose “rugged, good with his hands, is honest with yourself first and foremost, goes to church, tired of playing games, likes to have a good time, treats me like a lady, likes sports and live music, wants to get to know my children…

You know, rednecks.

You know what i should do?

Score some of this Adderall that everyone’s talking about. I think it would help me focus and help me achieve my long-term goals.

You know what i should do?

Take some more ibuprofen. I tripped on a curb tonight and smashed into the pavement full-force, and my right knee is throbbing. Oh, it hurts. My left knee is already kind of fucked up and i don’t want to fuck up the right one, too.

Damnit, this is the third weekend in a row with no overtime. They’re killing me. I want… to go… to KRH.

You know what i should do?

Listen to this Johnny Cash album i downloaded for my brother. And this Jay-Z/Kanye album i downloaded for the hell of it. Nah. Not now. Later.

I should… pet Luna! Hey, puppy puppy puppy.

Hrrrrm.

You know what i should do?

Rant about politics. So check out this latest dispatch from the leader of Teabagger Central….

“As a father and a husband, I’m torn over what to do. I need to be there for my children. And yet at the same time, I can’t stand by and watch them transformed from free people into slaves to the state, economic units to be managed and nudged and “fundamentally transformed” by social engineers and bureaucrats who treat them as drones in a beehive. So I fight on. It is with fear and despair that I now gaze upon my country. What used to be the last best hope. Destroyed by selfish, self-serving demagogues and political animals who advance through deceit and emotionalism, and who have managed to weaken the Constitution in such a way that they’ve finally made it work for them — in our names.”

Honestly, what world do these people think they come from? For the sake of brevity, let’s ignore the rest of the world and 99% of all human history, and just take 400 years of America into consideration. Let’s go back and think of all the people who lived as slaves and displaced natives and indentured servants. Let’s think of all the poor sharecroppers, miners, farm hands, and factory workers making 25 cents an hour. All the people born in tiny farming communities, controlled by older family members, pushed into a church from birth, who had no real choice but to live constrained by their region’s mores, in debt to landowners and bankers, beholden to some form of local arisctocracy. The women controlled by husbands and tied to childbearing. The immigrants in their ghettos, the sailors with scurvy and missing teeth and chilblains and goiters. Anyone in the West caught between corrupt lawmen and brutal gangs. Basically, 95% of the people of the past…

…teabaggers look back and sigh, and say “oh! Those people were so free! Not like me, the poor modern slave!”

Don’t they realize how good they have it? We have more freedom now than ever. To do anything. The benefits of the last 25 years have been enormous. I like to stop and pay gratitude to the awesome freedom that just having Photoshop + an internet connection has given me; i can achieve so much artistically at so low a cost. I’m only limited by my time and desire and skill. And if i don’t want to be an artist, so much more is available.

And all these middle-aged people do is bitch. They don’t want freedom; nearly all of these nuts COULD go off into the wilderness of Canada and live off the land if they so chose. But they don’t want that, they want to stay here in civilization, and enjoy all its benefits, and gripe and moan about how fucking unfair it is that they don’t have EVERYTHING. It never occurs to them that, were they to be born in our marvelous free past, that they might have been a slave, or poor, or oppressed in some way. They all assume that they would have been some kind of wandering cowboy who strikes it rich as a railroad tycoon.

Derp, derp.

You know what i should do?

Reveal the secret of the Illuminati!

After reading loads of Robert Anton Wilson and thinking about it, i think i finally know exactly who and what the Illuminati really were. Bear with me here, this gets speculative.

“The Illuminati” was a title used by several interrelated groups in Europe that formed within Masonic lodges at various points in European history. It was an intellectual fad that seemed to have two main goals — railing against hereditary monarchy, and the elimination of church authority in favor of a Deist conception of god or no god at all. The Illuminated Ones, as they called themselves, never achieved visible power, but greatly influenced intellectuals and leaders in France and the American Colonies.

When you stop and think about it, hereditary monarchy held in place by religious authority must have been the most galling idea imaginable to people with functioning brains for thousands of years. Imagine if we, today, lived in a world where George W. Bush was ruler-for-life, and not through an electoral process — however shady — but because his father simply installed him, and he was issuing edicts and starting more pointless wars, all while trying to produce a male heir so that the throne wouldn’t go to the husband of Jenna or Barbara. Dude, we’d be angry all day. We’d seek out fellow non-zombies and gather in our homes, or certain isolated taverns, and say over and over again, “it doesn’t make sense, it’s a ludicrous system. If a god exists, and i have my doubts, i hardly think he’d want the imbecile heirs of a conqueror to have absolute authority over us for an indefinite time! Crap, there has to be a better way, a more logical way to organize society. Look at all these fools around us, why don’t they understand this?”

And that’s why they developed code words, and secret handshakes, and an air of mystery. They were afraid of being jailed or having their reputations destroyed by the 85% of people who thought that the king was the king because God wanted it that way, and ifyou don’t agree you’re unpatriotic and want France to win.

And i guess many of our Founding Fathers, the really brilliant ones like Franklin and Jefferson, were big fans, and considered themselves “illuminated.” Hence the eye in the pyramid on our currency. Hence the office of the President. They had stumbled on to a secret that most people didn’t accept — that God wasn’t in control here, and that authority was conceived wholly by Man and thus could take any form we wished it to.

And judging by Franklin’s activities, they also discovered another secret — casual sex was fun and great, and the whole marriage-God thing was just more superstition. Venereal disease is a possibility, yes, but that’s purely a medical problem best solved through science.

And basically, they won. Gradually. Monarchs faded and were replaced by democracies. If there’s an equivalent of the Illuminati today, it’s in China. Or it exists in the form of every non-persecuted Western intellectual who spends their time writing about how capitalism is an insane way to organize society, and there’s gotta be a better way.

I bet if you could meet a real Illuminati member from 1750 and spin a wild tale about them “controlling everything” throughout history, he’d stammer and say, “what? No, man, we were the underdogs. We were just some smart people hiding in the shadows and trying to change the world, and in my lifetime, it seemed that almost no progress was made. Did you guys ever get rid of those damned kings, i hate them so much, they control everything!”

I mean, this makes sense, right?

You know what i should do?

Stop typing and go do something else.