Fake Email To A Fake Friend

Hey,

How goes it? Long time no see, er, talk. Or whatever one can reasonably deem interpersonal communication to be in this post-modern, post-literate world. How are your folks? Dead? Yeah? Sorry. Shit happens, I guess. No one lives forever.

How’s your job? Still getting paid every week, or was it bi-weekly? Can’t remember. You had decent benefits if I recall correctly. Stock options and other bullshit. Last I heard you got a dividend cheque for twenty-five cents. What did you do with it? The M&M’s machine in the break room? Cool. The peanut ones, or just plain chocolate? Right, right… chocolatey-flavoured icing sugar. Sorry.

I’m drunk, are you? Probably. You always were a miserable alcoholic, but I suppose one can’t fight genetics. DNA is a motherfucker, eh? Always lying in wait with a quart of vodka and a body bag of self-loathing. It’s funny, because I had a dream the other night — the first I can remember in five years — and you were in it, drunk as a skunk and looking to start shit with a group of Croatian tourists by pretending to be Serbian, making fun of Drazen Petrovic at some bizarre indoor amusement park in what seemed like Times Square. Or maybe it was just a porno theatre. You were wearing a Billy Bragg t-shirt, which struck me as odd, since you’ve never heard of him. So it goes.

Anyways, the Croats were having none of it and disappeared, leaving us embroiled in a bizarre game of football with a sea of blond bimbos and Matthew Good. You know, the singer? Yeah, he was there and we were playing some brand of disorganized football, but with gummie worms instead of a pigskin. There was no real coherence to any of it, sort of like when we used to play ball hockey in gym class… just a mob chasing a piece of rubber around until someone got hurt.

Good times.

Well, it was until one of the bimbos started talking shit and I decided to rip her to shreds, calling her a generic piece of consumerist ephemera with no agency and no self-esteem, just another slut to the cash nexus, a useless, brainless automatonic insult to her entire gender. I delivered this blistering salvo with my usual frothing vehemence, only to turn around to see Matt fucking Good staring me down with hate in his eyes. Bastard. I was just taking the piss, right? This little lamb had no idea what the hell I was talking about anyways since I didn’t deliver it via text messaging, but oh no, there he is, Mr. Self Righteous himself. Mr. Six-Months-Past-A-Complete-Nervous-Breakdown-Slash-Suicide-Attempt-”No It Wasn’t A Suicide Attempt.”

Screw him.

So I told him “I was just taking the piss man, I didn’t mean it,” but he’s having none of it. From this point on, we became embroiled in a heated argument over the semantics of feminism and the how and why behind why or why not a male could call himself a feminist, all the while surrounded by scantily clad teenage girls, breathing in their honeydew sweat as they tackle each other for gummie worms.

I don’t know where you got to while all this was going down, but you were nowhere to be seen.

Thanks a lot.

Friend.

You know what? Who needs you? Not I. Who really needs friends? Lonely people. And that’s not me. I have me and I’m the best conversationalist I’ve ever met and the smartest person I know. Ninety-nine percent of people are complete bores: self-absorbed assholes with nothing to add to anything but their own warped, regurgitated, bastardized version of jack and shit.

So if you get ever get drunk (and I know you will) and feel the need to call someone (and I know you will), don’t call me. Take me off your list. Call Matthew Good, Henry Winkler, anyone. Or raise the spirit of Liberace on a ouija board. Whatever it takes. Just leave me out of it.

I wish I had never met you and I hope you have a painful, indigestion-filled existence full of blisters, sores and regret.

But take care, won’t you?

Love,

Me.

Meanwhile, Back In The States…

If anyone has been wondering why I haven’t conjured any new posts for the past week, well it wasn’t just the usual laziness or sleep deprivation. No no. As it turns out, I was out of country. Stateside. Braving the confines south-of-the-border style, living it up in the land of Bush-Cheney and painting New England red. Or something along those lines. Did I have a good time? Yes I did. Connecticut is an alright place. The people are friendly: I found myself in pleasant conversation with strangers more than once and actually witnessed folks holding doors for other bipeds. All in all, the trip was a generally pleasant experience. The bad? Well, I discovered that Rolling Rock’s pleasing aesthetic extends no further than the outside of the lovely green bottle… sure, that painted-on label and blurb about tendering “this premium beer for your enjoyment” sounds all fine and dandy, but it does nothing to disguise the fact that this beer smells and tastes like a week-old blend of rotten vegetables and dishwater.

I also discovered that a city the size of New York is not for me. Dang. I mean, I can see the appeal… I think. But I’d need more than a day in order to fully grasp its magnitude. Experiencing such a place as the average tourist really does the city no justice. One day in NYC is akin to going to a Chinese buffet, gorging oneself on sweet and sour chicken balls within the first five minutes, then spending the rest of the time there in a daze of nausea and regret, cursing Chinese cuisine when, really, all you had was a dumbed-down, highly mediated version of the the genuine article. Harlem was cool, with Lenox Avenue and the Apollo, but the rest of it just seemed like a giant mall full of the same people you’d see at a mall anywhere else in North America. Same stores, same skinny-jean-clad people, but with more filth, odour and garish sidewalk signs. I’ve heard this lament from longtime NYC residents — that the Guiliani/Bloomberg New York is a whitewashed Disneyfied representation of its former self catering purely to Wall Street’s interests, but I really can’t say, having never been to the old New York. So who knows? But I would have liked to have made a pilgrimage to CBGB’s while it was still open.

Late to the party as ever.

So, we rode around on a tour bus for most of the day, looking at objects high above and far below, with billboards as the only eye-level attraction. All in all it was sort of disappointing, but I don’t really know what I was expecting.

I was simply ill-prepared for the sheer scale of a city that large. I mean, I found Montreal sort of imposing at first, but quickly adjusted to my surroundings. With New York, I was in a perpetual state of vertigo at every intersection, met with rows of buildings in every direction for as far as the eye could see, stacks of brick and limestone extending to hazy infinity as though a couple of demigods got into a stacking contest and didn’t know when to quit. The architecture was interesting, with fine examples of both gothic and art-deco, but after five or six hundred examples of anything it all starts to look the same.

And oh! The urban sprawl. We took the train in from New Haven and the concrete became interminable as far as an hour and a half outside New York City. Strip malls, housing projects, overpasses, terminal-grey office towers, billboards and landfills — all of which one would expect in an area with such saturated population density.

But expectation and reality make such different impressions, do they not?

Other than the big apple, the biggest impression made upon me by this country was the change in bumper stickers since last year. Sure, there were still the occasional Bush-Cheney leftovers from last election, but for the most part there seemed to be a major shift in the adhesive sentiment of New Englanders. For every “Support Our Troops” sticker, I observed two or three of the “End This War” variety and even a few peace symbols scattered here and there. In fact, I see way more yellow ribbons around here on a daily basis than I did anywhere in New England, although this may have something to do with the disproportionate number of Maritimers currently being killed in Afghanistan, as well as the fact that one of the biggest military bases in Canada is located mere kilometers from where I currently sit. Regardless, I found these discrepancies to be rather unexpected.

Of course, Afghanistan and Iraq are two completely different situations (since, you know, they are also two completely different countries), but there is seemingly no mention of Afghanistan south of the border, despite the fact that US troops make up the majority of the international contingent currently deployed there. Bigger fish to fry, apparently.

But Americans don’t limit themselves to bumper stickers. They’ve really taken to hanging banners off overpasses — something I don’t recall seeing last time I was there. There were banners of all stripe: the usual POW-MIA, the genuinely touching “welcome home [insert rank and name here]” variety, as well as one just outside Hartford that read “Impeach Bush and Cheney: Nixon Did Less.” Progress? Perhaps. But it’s easy to voice such opinions when the perceived light at the end of the tunnel is mere months away. Where were these dissenters prior to last election? It only took them eight years to get on the same bandwagon as the rest of the civilized world.

Sheesh.

My favorite, though, was a message scrawled in permanent marker across the back of a semi trailer in Massachusetts which read “A message to the traitors: Your game is going down… Who is stalking who?” I’m not entirely sure whom this was addressed to, ‘terrorists’ or Democrats, but either way, I laughed out loud upon reading it. Regardless, the evil doers had better take heed… at least whenever they find themselves at a truck stop, taking a leak before checking their load of fertilizer.

In conclusion, the average American is ‘good people’ in my estimation. Well, they’re certainly no worse than the rest of us. Sure, it’s easy to get irritated at them for being so comically ignorant of the outside world, but put yourself in their shoes — they’re no different than you or me, they just practice their own brand of nationalism; a brand which happens to be enforced by an homogenous culture of commercially driven mass media and the most powerful military in the world. But they seem to be waking up to the reality that maybe not all is as it seems. During my day in New York City, the biggest topic of discussion among regular folk seemed to be the recent dissolution of rent stabilizing legislation and the ongoing process of gentrification among former working class and lower class neighbourhoods, whereby tenants who would have formerly paid six to seven hundred dollars per month in rent will now be expected to shell out a minimum of fifteen hundred each month for the same dwelling. ‘Fair’ market prices.

But what in this market driven world is fair, outside of love and war?

Italics Always Swing To The Right

Most people seem to draw inspiration from their surroundings, from the world, from their friends and acquaintances, but not I. I receive stimuli, but they hardly qualify as inspiration. In fact, going online and reading boneheaded drivel (which has become unavoidable these days on the so-called ‘net’) tends to put me in a bleak mood. Instantly. I try to avoid public forums, Youtube comments, and (most) blogs like the plague, but every once in a while I give in to my constant masochistic urges and, rather than self-flagellate with my homemade cat o’ nine, I browse away. These are the only times when I consider all-out nuclear holocaustic oblivion or indiscriminate genocide against the stupid as a potentially positive development for the human race. Reading the comments of the average ignorant, lazy, selfish, hateful piece of shit internet denizen makes me realize how meaningless opinions have become. As such, I can only conclude that everyone on this shit-hole planet is seventeen years-old. But god forbid if you deny someone their opinion. ‘It’s my OPINION, maaaan!’ Well big deal, asshole. Opinions are about as useful as the logic which informs their naissance (see, I’m like smart or something because I know more than one language and therefor my opinion, unlike yours, matters) and most peoples’ grasp of logic and the art of argument seems to extend no further than that of the average grade-school pupil. But perhaps I’m being too hard on the children. I have faith in the young. Well, I did before 75% of them became riddled with pharmaceuticals because their parents are too fucking lazy (or, in all fairness, overworked) to properly, uh, parent them. But Jesus Christ, let’s defend our wonderful culture until we’re blue in the face or low on ammunition — which ever happens first. I mean, who cares if we’re all hooked on legal drugs… look how cheap flat-screen TVs have become.

I’m successful. Don’t begrudge me my success. I love it. I have nice stuff in my nice house. I have a nice car. I have nice sex toys that I slick up with nice lubricant ordered online through successful businesses which assure me my anonymity, thus maintaining my facade of upstanding Conservative-party-contributing morality.

On my way across town, I cross paths with more than one acquaintance, but I have no time for these people anymore. I avert eye contact, I turn my back to them as I pass; dead to me, every last one of them. Who needs friends? The weak of mind and porous of body. And that’s not me. All I require is alcohol and professional sports — the true drugs of any right thinking conformist; like any good man of the age, I’m a shining example of humanity’s progress towards the evolutionary black hole of success.

I haven’t had a meaningful conversation with anyone other than myself since I was ten years old and I’ve never felt the pangs of love or the eventual heartbreak. I count myself lucky, but luck has nothing to do with it.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling saucy, I imagine my Lexus to be an Aston-Martin Virage. Oh, the fun I have. I sneer at pedestrians, flip them off, mouth ‘fuck you’ against the glass of my climate-controlled bubble and imagine what it would be like to shoot them all in the head with a gold-plated Desert Eagle and watch their brain matter atomize in a flume of glorious red and gray against a backdrop of golden morning sun. These are truly life’s little moments that we should all cherish.

What it comes down to is my simple hatred for mankind. Yet, I’m torn: the things I hate about humanity are the very same things that have allowed me to so easily and readily exploit my fellow bipeds. Sloth, stupidity, selfishness — and those are just the S’s. But I could go on all day about the worthlessness of the average human being and where’s the money in that? Nowhere to be found without an army of politico underlings to do my bidding and where’s the fun in that?

The trick is to accept this simple fact about the species (or, as I prefer, the speces – clever, no?) and move on, avoiding disease and filth as best one can. But learn what you can whilst among the rabble, among the poor. They’re so quaint, aren’t they? With their accents and their Wal-Mart footwear. Some of them weren’t even born here. Crazy world.

But it takes all kinds, and I take from all kinds.

Don’t begrudge me my success. That’d be mighty white of you… fuckface.

Another 365

The calendar is funny. Well, our calendar is funny, since I’m not overly familiar with other calendars, but they do exist and this simple fact speaks volumes on the arbitrary ways in which humans break time up into smaller pieces. Existence is a much easier concept to grasp when one can think of their life in terms of a constant multiplied by a variable and different people and different cultures use different constants to achieve this end. Years, months, days, minutes, seconds and so on, in an infinitely decreasing trend which can never theoretically reach zero. But these are all words that don’t really mean much of anything outside the confines of our own skulls.

Until you die, at which point these units mean even less. Of course, there’s an endless birthday party in the sky waiting for you if you’ve led the good life and bought enough shit to keep the economy jumping during your stay in the temporal realm. If not, look out. Fire and other vaguely menacing things await.

Time is everything, though, isn’t it? Well, it sure is versatile.

It flies, it stands still, it disappears. It serves regret, wistfulness and debt.

It serves competition and greed, but is also the handmaid of sloth.

Time is a limited resource, which explains why time is also money — but that’s another waxy ball of constructs for another time.

More than anything else, though, time hinges on perception. When you’re happy it seems as though there aren’t enough hours in the day, but when you’re in the depths of a depression, time is a bitch goddess with extensive cosmetic surgery and expensive clothing, dangling a clock in front of your nose with one hand while shoving you back down with the other.

“Come on” she says, “why don’t you do something with your life? Anything. I don’t care. Just get off your lazy arse and move around once in a while. Hey! What do you think you’re doing? Back down with you now. Can’t have you getting up, lazy arse.”

Time is oppression, but I guess it’s all we’ve got.

Well, time and the weather.

Tase-O-Rama!

Now that it’s that time of season again, shouldn’t you be thinking of your family? Shouldn’t you be thinking of your family’s safety? What better way to protect them than the taser of your choice, now available at your local Taser City.

Sick of lineups at The Gap? Hasten things along with some harmless high voltage.

Kids acting up? Tase them! It’s not just for adults anymore. Everyone likes a jolt now and then to keep them on their toes, especially the prepubescent (unless they happen to be on cocaine, but how many kids aren’t strung out on blow these days? At least more than half of them).

Is there a visible minority or person of lower social class cramping your style with their close proximity? Tase that motherfo and be done with it. It’s not like you have to be a cop.

Boss giving you a hard time? The “taser in the parking lot” is still better than the “sawed-off shotgun rampage”, regardless of what HR might think. Always looking for fresh blood, that bunch.

And if all that doesn’t sound enticing then consider this: the true sadist, the hardcore misery inflicting fundamentalist set, they really go for a taser. Firearms have a way of being so final where a good taser is the gift that keeps on giving. You’re down! You’re up! You’re down! It’s a roller coaster ride.

And everybody knows that roller coasters are fun.

Much cleaner than pepper spray as well.

So just get in the spirit already and buy one. Incapacitate the first person you see, swipe their presents and run off, laughing all the way. But do it for your family.

Don’t do it for me.

Indie Schmindie

Indie is the new Alternative, curdled homogenized barf;

The Nickelback of 2015 will swap denim for sweater and scarf.

Sweater Rock reigns supreme. One cannot sit through a commercial break at any point during the day without being exposed to a veritable mixtape of pseudo-hipster music. Big bucks. Everyone is cool these days, especially advertising scum.

Everything is cyclical.

Glam went Punk, Metal went Punk, Punk went Hardcore, Hardcore went Metal, Metal went Grunge, Grunge went Alternative, Alternative has gone Indie, Punk has gone Glam.

College Rock was in there somewhere.

In the days circa 1992, just after the Seattle scene exploded internationally, your sister went from Club Monaco sweatshirts and offensively high cut jeans to combat boots and riot grrl dresses seemingly overnight. Poison and Guns and Roses now sucked (well, outside of Appetite For Destruction and the occasional spin of “Talk Dirty To Me”, I suppose they always did); everyone jumped on board just long enough to justify attendance at a vigil, if required.

I never bothered with it all that much. Sure, I liked Nirvana — not enough to actually buy an album, but I remember being struck by the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit as vividly as my first exposure to Sex Pistols footage (to which I was horrified yet strangely transfixed). But oh, the hype! The glorious hype.

Soon children were walking around with t-shirts emblazoned with the word “Grunge” in flannelized font. Columbia House were pushing albums billed as “great grunge!” Opportunistic musicians replaced their ESPs and Deans with Jazzmasters and Jaguars, tuned their E down to D and, well, I guess they didn’t really have to change their visual cues all that much — same hair, more flannel, less leather. Suddenly hair metal balladeers were playing catchup and bands that had previously been unbankable as punk were now hot grunge commodities.

But it didn’t last. Hampered by all the suicide and substance abuse, the industry needed a new, more inclusive label to expand on the conceptual limits of grunge in order to recapture the waning interest of a fickle music-buying public. Something that parents could get behind. Something alternative. Yeah, that’s it!

Alternative!

Initially, the genre was populated with bands taking most of their cues from Nirvana and Pearl Jam (most overrated band ever? perhaps, but they’re so good-natured about it), yet somewhat more cleaned up.

Alternative is to Grunge as New Wave is to Punk.

In the latter half of the nineties, things got even more fad-oriented but stayed within the acceptable bounds of Alternative, which is to say that it was all in the marketing; ska was ska and swing was swing, but since it was being played by young, cool looking quasi-punk rockers it seemed alternative enough to go over well at, say, the X-Games. Or at least on the soundtrack to a cable sports network’s late-night highlight filler programming.

But it didn’t last. Alternative had reached its saturation point, become so blatantly mainstream that this literal loss of meaning could no longer be overlooked. The people revolted! Er, actually they got bored. Either way, the music industry had to do something. New genres! Fresh from the Union Carbide Genre Mill. Namely, vacuous vacuum-sealed pop, faceless one-hit modern rock wonders, rap-metal (if your guitar player wears a hoodie and can only play while bent ninety degrees at the waist, you might be in a rap-metal band.) Other people’s children also figured in there somewhere — Tal Bachman, I’m looking at you.

Luckily the rise of Hip-Hop kept the coffers full, but it was just another stopgap.

Fortunately, Alternative reared its ugly head again under the guise of Indie Rock. Obviously, the two are quite different from an aesthetic standpoint, but their function within the record industry and the record-buying public at large are virtually identical. Alternative was not an actual alternative to anything — Indie is, by and large, not even remotely independent. Both genres are a watered-down version of something else, rendered marketable by a commercial softening of the edges coupled with the porous mentality of their respective target demographics — just more empty words stripped of their meaning in order to serve the greater good. “Art” begins to suck as want becomes need.

But it won’t last. Nothing ever does. Next spring we’ll have a whole new soundtrack for buying shit and fucking indiscriminately. It’s already changing. Electronic music appears to be making inroads within the collective head-space of the mainstream again, reborn as Indie-Dance.

So replace your drummer with a laptop while you can, de-lint your favorite sweater, freshen that scarf and polish your sunburst Telecaster with the spit of youthful corporate vitality.

Get to it. Pitchfork is waiting and Volkswagen is already getting impatient.

Hurry, because the boyband revival — children — is just a shot away.

Just a shot away.

Stickers

She said she’d got it on “nine twelve” and that it was “one of them fee nickses rising from the ashes” and it got me thinking.

Humans have a basic need to stick things on other things. We stick buildings on property, we stick property on soil. We stick meanings on words. We stick fake stuff on our heads when the real stuff falls out. We do this at a rate which far exceeds anything resembling the instinctual marking of one’s territory and in this respect we are alone in the animal kingdom. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that this lone quality is what separates man from beast, never mind our alleged free will; chimpanzees do not plaster their SUVs and Jettas with logos and dolphins do not get tattoos. Certain livestock do, but that’s no choice of their own — they’re just breathing property, m(e)re things for people to stick other things to.

Cattle are not individuals, but make for good eating, footwear and saddlery. Their lives are valuable, but not in the same way as ours. We are beautiful and unique miniature Gods so, unlike cattle, we need to stick things onto other things to demonstrate our divinely sanctioned individuality. What better way to do this than by going to a place of business, buying a glossy piece of adhesive-backed media, removing the waxy backing and then smacking it onto the back of one’s already unique automobile? Well, there’s always the little blue dolphin ankle tattoo, tribal bicep markings or some tasteful characters from a foreign language with which you have no personal investment.

The ubiquitous lower-back tramp stamp is the corporeal equivalent of a “No Fear” sticker on a jeep; tattoos, while still an artform in conceptual terms, are about as edgy as SUV-driving, middle-class suburbanites embracing dog park Buddhism.

But, yeah.

There is no such thing as individuality, dead since the first time someone uttered either “just be yourself” or wrote “don’t change” in a yearbook. Every possible combination of clothing, accessories, haircut and, yes, stickers has been fed through the cultural garbage disposal of demographic marketing; somebody somewhere is all ready to sell heaps of lowest-bidder ephemera to someone who looks just like you, regardless of how many times you might change your mind in the process — they are always at least 1.97 steps ahead of you.

So just cut to the chase and wear it all on your sleeve. Just go with it. Wear it permanently. Embrace your alotted slot in life. After all, life’s a mall and the hours are getting longer every day.

Get a few generic band pins while you’re at it. Get a life, even.

Just leave the stickers alone for awhile. Support our troops, support a cure, support the ballsack. Knock yourself out, just leave the stickers at home.

Whatever happened to the simple Calvin pissin’ sticker? That, my friends, was a product — entirely bootlegged to satiate the simple buying power of a public that made the F-150 the staple vehicle of the Ford family of fine cars. Where have ye gone? No Fear? No, scared stiff. Petrified.

9/11 Man. Niine Eeeleven. That’s what did it. Pushed the freedom down, man.

Osama Bin Laden killed the almighty pissin sticker and I don’t expect him to apologize any time soon. Still, hope lives on in the eyes of eagles and other such shit as now pollutes the prime rear-window real estate once occupied by that mischievous sprite Calvin and his impish stream of piss. Occupied no more.

Pretty vacant.

Where was I on 9/11? Being a good human and looking at internet pornography and thinking up new and better ways of sticking things to other things.

One Dollar Does Not Buy Peace Of Mind

In fact, one dollar doesn’t buy much of anything these days — possibly a shitty cup of gas station coffee, but only if you know where to look.

Of course, if you live near a dollar store (and in the Maritimes, who doesn’t?) you have a veritable cornucopia of fine imported products ready to brighten your home, garden and bathroom. Knockoff toiletries, “Herbal Extracts” shampoo (not to be confused with its orgasm-inducing “inspiration”), foodstuffs of questionable pedigree and all the choking hazards and questionably themed storybooks a morbidly fixated child could hope for (I love Jimmy the Giraffe Gets a Goiter).

All this and still, horizons continue to broaden for eager loonie-laden consumers:

I was in a local Dollarama last night when what should catch my eye but a pregnancy test; for less than the cost of sponsoring a talking-head-approved child abroad, you can now find out whether or not you’re expecting one of your very own. Probably. Well, maybe.

Personally — and I don’t have a uterus so the point is moot — I’d like a bit more reassurance about the whole thing. Like at least two dollars worth… no, make that five — at least as much as the McHappy meals that will, no doubt, become a staple of this prospective child’s diet.

Never Trust a Robot – They Killed Bambi

We are about to confront a future already limned by Fifties trash culture. Sure, the big tail-fin bards of pulp celluloid may have been a bit overzealous in their space-age polymer-drunk predictions of other worldly contact, but who can blame them? Post-war optimism at its adolescent best is always apt to make one a bit quick on the draw, but in the grand timeline of human existence what’s fifty or a hundred years? Sweet F.A. How could anyone have known the IT industry would take so long to get their shit together?

But look at us now. Plugged in and playing 24-7, domesticated Sony robots on the horizon, drive-thru everything and no amount of fairly-traded, ethically produced goods can stop another Wal-Mart customer from being born every 1.97 seconds. Our lives will only become smaller and cheaper in the same fashion as the products that define us like the grainy scan of a carbon copy of a smudged dollar sign.

The Robot Holocaust is only twenty or thirty years off. So stock up on water and reflective tape while you can and, for the love of GOD, remember: if you stop buying useless mass-produced garbage then the robots win.