A Dizzying Array of Faceless Cogs.

The main offense of the media today is the mirror image of what Edward R. Murrow faced in the fifties. An exact yet opposite replica. The one glaring difference is that the complacency-inducing padding which Murrow spoke of in the early days of televised media has now been replaced by sand-paper. As a result our nation has spawned an entire generation that is, at best, insulted and alienated by our government and at worst, callous and apathetic. A new media is needed. A clean slate.

The difficulty here is that the beasts of yesteryear such as Senator McCarthy were, although aparently unfamiliar with the concept of a witch-hunt, respectable enough to do their own spinning. It may have been a witch-hunt but at least McCarthy himself was holding the torch. The miraculous few who are not apathetic today have no one to point the finger at other than a baffling, faceless wall of beaurocracy and lies.

Meercats will often move in large groups during times of danger so as to appear to be a larger animal with no discernable vulnerability. It should be noted, however, that they do so out of a complete lack of ability to face the threat on any other grounds.

-SLP

Divine Theatrics

I recently came to the realization that the only people who ever tell me to put my hands in the air are cops, armed robbers and Jesus. And while there are several other characteristics that often blur the line between those three, I will try to only focus on the events surrounding this particular epiphany.

Brandon and I had just learned that people will give you suspicious looks when you are on the beach wildly swinging a golf-club while dressed for neither the beach nor golf. We had made it back to downtown and were turning onto North Fourth Street when I finally gave up trying to articulate my recent bouts with debilitating boredom. I was reaching for the radio knobs when my attention was diverted by the booming voice coming through the driver's side window with that distinctive, hollow conviction that is common among ministers who have long ago made the leap from shepherd to thespian. Brandon, whose eyes were immediately brightenned with a perverse twinkle, informed me of what a perfect opportunity this was to break out of this cycle of boredom. So I cut the block and parked below the neon-backlit sign of the Brooklyn Building.

"Amen"s and "Hallelujah"s assailed us as we crossed the street. The minister, a tall, slender, shaved-bald black man in his early thirties, was in the middle of a seemingly passionate, "amen"-laden diatribe that had no real focus but instead touched on nearly every major aspect of christianity. "Because your sins are forgiven. Amen. Because you have been vindicated with his blood. Amen. Because He will strike down all who oppose Him. Amen."

An usher appeared out of nowhere and nervously showed us to the general vicinity of two empty chairs beneath the big, white, circus-style tent. The tent was home to not only the minister, but also a scant congregation consisting almost entirely of middle-aged black women as well as half of a funk band.

In mid rant, the minister aparently decided that a show of humility was in order and he began to walk around amongst the congregation. He paused next to an elderly white man (coincidentally the only other white person in sight), placed his hand on the man's slumping, plaid shoulder and said, "There are some here today that the Lord has called for a very special purpose." Sparadic "Amen!"s and "Preach it!"s erupted as the minister moved on to finish, without ever touching another member of the congregation, what eventually became a long, meandering, fire-and-brimstone tirade. Towards the end the minister resumed the podium while trailing off into some strange chant that is aparently well known among those who frequent the house of the Lord. The band kicked in with a dragging, stodgy tune that resembled "funk" only in the text-book definition of the term. The bassist's fingers crawled meticulously over the frets in a downtrodden manner, making it obvious to all that if his concentration was broken for even a second they would run unbridled through all of the notes hidden in the back of his mind. The Lord wouldn't stand for it.

The conclusion of the song brought yet another wave of "Praise the Lord!"s and "Amen!"s as well as a single, boisterous "HALLELUJAH!" from Brandon. The minister decided to ride this ripple of energy as far as it would take him. It was time for the final scene. The Grand Finale.
"Now, the Lord performs miracles even today. Amen. We have all seen it. Amen. Folks come in here blind and leave sighted. Amen. They come in in wheelchairs and walk out. Amen."

It is usually fairly easy to tell when things are about to cross that line between weird and fucked up. The turning point this time came when the old man slowly began to make his way to the pulpit as the minister concluded his ramble about healing. The fact that the minister never once asked for volunteers or made any indication that he actually planned on doing any healing made the whole scene seem oddly choreographed at first but not enough to arouse genuine suspicion. The band broke out into another not-so-swinging rhythm as the minister, a helper (who had aparently materialized while I was blinking) and the old man stood softly talking in a huddle just below the pulpit. Once a game plan was decided on, the helper broke huddle to stand behind the old man who was left facing the minister. An abrupt, "Put your hands in the air towards the Lord!" and the mans hands shot quickly to shoulder level in a half-panicked motion that is typically reserved for liquor-store clerks. The minister placed a hand on each of the mans shoulders and bowed his head. It was time for the old man to fulfil that "very special purpose" that the minister spoke of earlier. The old timer obliged by falling backwards into the open arms of the helper who lowered him gently onto the grass. Once again there came the inevitable burst of "Amen!"s and "Hallelujah!"s.

Yes, hallelujah indeed. Praise the Lord that this nameless man that no one other than the minister seemed to have any ties with was finally cured. Cured I say! He will never again be afflicted by that terrible mystery ailment with no visible symptoms! Not after the Lord our God purged his body with a divine sucker-punch that knocked him flat on his ass. It was indeed a miracle.

A towel was gingerly slipped under the old man's head as he lay motionless on the grass. Meanwhile, the minister was busy giving his closing words. And what combination of words could possibly do justice to the miracle that was just witnessed by all?

"Thank you all for coming out tonight. And for all of those who didn't come out, you can just tell them that we hope the ribs were good but we had some good food here tonight too... I sure hope somebody cooked some ribs... or some chicken or something."

Bike Week: Local idiots, free adrenaline and the chaos below.

Bike Week, Myrtle Beach 2006. A grand and demented festival celebrating the day that mankind finally made centripetal force our bitch. And I was right there in the middle of it. Illegally parked, mind you.

I was circling the block in search of free parking when Brandon posed a very valid question: "Why do you care if you get a parking ticket in Myrtle Beach?"

"Good point."

After a quick U-turn into a parking spot, we deposited a few nickels into the meter to make it look good for the nearby cop and were on our way.

We had agreed that if anything weird happenned, I was Leo C. Holbrook and Brandon was E. J. Douglas. In a city where most pedestrians have a well-grounded fear of losing an eye to errant ejaculant and "titty beads" are just a few steps away from being accepted as legal tender, it is always best to have a well-rehearsed alias.

Something weird happening in Myrtle Beach is both an inevitability and an understatement. The circus that is Bike Week has its tent-stakes firmly planted in a bedrock of strung-out locals, bored freaks and a myriad of colorful others all thoroughly tweaked on a combination of expensive drugs and free adrenaline.

Especially during bike rallies, the beer flows like the murky waters of the nearby Pee Dee River and it is not at all uncommon to see a man stagger across eight or more lanes of traffic hugging a half-empty case of beer to share it with some thirsty teens on the other side.

On the strip internal combustion abounds. Slow moving chrome glistenning in the neon glow of the city. The warm breath on your ankles as you walk behind one of these idling beasts. The almost musical snarl of three hundred thousand rolling sculptures all being manned and maintained by nearly half a million of mankinds most terrifying representatives. Big, bearded, tattooed men and big, bearded, tattooed women.

At one point we encountered a man perched awkwardly atop a three-foot wall that ran along the sidewalk. He was only wearing two things that were not black; his blue jeans and the enormous pair of fake plastic breasts hanging from a string around his neck. "Nice tits" I said not really expecting a reply considering that the man was visibly drunk to the point that he was having obvious difficulty focussing on the stream of sheet-metal flowing by in front of him.
His head lurched to one side as if it were about to slip off of the pile of body beneath it. He spoke with the distinctive growl of a man who has spent so much time around bikes that he has begun to sound like one, "You think thats funny look at this." At which point he lifted a large leather flap that was covering his lap to reveal a foot-long plastic penis. He then croaked out "How d'ya like me now?"

Yes, the freaks were out in full force and in rare form. Terrible things were happening on the strip so we retreated to the safety of the roof of an abandonned, ocean-front bar to await dusk, the time when the weird energy begins to rise and all the lunatics lose what little inhibition they had. It is best to find a safe place to watch from when the feeding frenzy begins.

On the roof we found piles of crushed beer cans and empty bottles, bridges to other rooves and human sized nests made of matted clothing and fabric. All evidence of some indigenous hobo society. I sat in the center of the roof in the lotus position while Brandon stood and observed the chaos around us. "That helicopter is looking at us." I turned to see what he was talking about. A police helicopter, a "ghetto bird" for all of you inner-city youth out there. I had not even heard it over the drone of the bikes but it was becoming constantly more audible as it changed trajectory to come investigate us.

Me: "What the hell is it doing?"
Brandon: "It's staring at us."
Me: "Stare back at it."

At this point the helicopter was hovering just past the far end of the roof and about 150 feet above the street. "Stand your ground", I thought. "Do not be intimidated by the machine."
After a few more awkward moments of being probed by the camera on the side of that damned flying squad car it finally gave in and flew south. "Bastard... Ok, let's go."

We found ourselves minutes later sitting on a bench on the Boardwalk. The Myrtle Beach Boardwalk, coincidentally, has no boards and is a horrible place to walk. It's a classy place where classy people wear classy shirts that say classy things like "In case of emergency give me head" and "Guiness... Not just a breakfast drink anymore." It's the kind of place where if you sit still long enough some raving idiot will approach you and share with you the life lessons that have served them so well. And that is exactly what happened after just a few short minutes of sitting and observing. I was on the phone with an old friend from the area, Kyle, trying to figure out if anyone I knew was also caught up in the mayhem when some nut-job began poking me in the chest and trying to solicit my help to "fuck somebody up".

Kyle: "Who the fuck is that?"
Me: "I don't know."
Nutjob: "Yo, lets fuck some people up."
Kyle: "What's going on?"
Me: "I dunno. Some crazy bastard is yelling at me and poking me in the chest."
Laughter on the other end of the line. "Tell him I said to fuck off."
Me: "Hell no. His teeth look glued in."
Nutjob: "You should tell him to get off the phone with his bitch."
Brandon: "That's not his bitch."

I ignored the man and finished my conversation while he made violent small-talk with Brandon. After finding out that no one I knew was in town I hung up the phone and decided to join this hellish exchange. He told us that the source of his current woes was the fact that "some punk ass bitch" threw him out of the "club". The "club" that he was referring to was actually a small, quiet, mom-and-pop diner just twenty feet down the boardwalk from where we were. Brandon and I had quietly watched the man get ejected just moments earlier.

Me: "Alright."
Nutjob: "Where are y'all from?"
Brandon: "Wilmington."
Nutjob: "Yo, I have been here for eleven years. I moved here when I was nineteen. That means I'm thirty now yo."
His math skills were top-knotch. Brandon had aparently decided to have some fun with the poor bastard:

Brandon: "Yeah, we are writers from the Star News."
Nutjob: "YO! YOU HAVE FOUND THE RIGHT MAN YO! I got so many stories. Yo, I saw Tara Reid sucking dick in the back of Club Kryptonite. I promote for these clubs yo. I know how to work the clubs ya know what I'm sayin'? Ya gotta cross the floor like this."

For some reason he felt the need to demonstrate this concept by briskly pacing from imaginary barstool to imaginary barstool in his imaginary club filled with imaginary people in the middle of the now nearly desserted boardwalk. Brandon and I watched this uncomfortable spectacle wondering how long it would go on and how it could possibly get any weirder. Then, it happened:

Nutjob: "You can't just sit like this."

He proceeded to take a seat between us and silently stare out at the imaginary dance floor. This continued for some time. For a moment I thought that his heart may have stopped so I leaned in slightly to look for signs of life. Nose-hairs moving. Eyes twitching. Anything that would reassure me that I was not the last person that this weird-ass was ever going to pester. Suddenly he sprung back to life scaring me shitless and yelling excitedly about his need to urinate. "Yo! I gotta piss! But I'll be right back."

He ran off towards the mouth of a nearby alley momentarily pausing en route to terrify a passerby. We needed to quickly formulate a plan.

Me: "Well, if we run he will probably catch us."
Brandon: "Yeah, he IS on meth."
Me: "On the other hand... Run like hell."

While sprinting I removed my hat and fluffed my hair while Brandon took off his jacket. We knew that such cheap trickery would probably not fool his amphetamine fueled mind. The truth of the matter was that he had probably already forgotten all about the conversation and what we were wearing but if he ever saw our faces again, chances are it would bring back fuzzy, detailless memories that would only remind him that, for some reason, he should be angry at us. His drug addled mind would then try to formulate some sort of back-story from half-assed context clues and shards of his fractured memories. Who knows, if we slowed down we could have ended up getting our asses kicked for pissing on his TV or any number of weird offenses that he has suffered in the past.

We ended up several blocks from the boardwalk between the row of ocean-front sky scrapers and the ocean itself. Night had fallen by then but the sand was still warm from the day. The distant rumble of V-twins came in waves with the doppler-effect being heavily emphasized by various alleys. I could catch glimpses of shimmering chrome between the multimillion dollar high-rises as we made our way back up the beach.

One motel had several jacuzzis surrounded on three sides by glass walls. My legs were tense and desperately needed relaxation so I figured "Why not?". As I was fiddling with the door and looking for other ways in Brandon noticed a tourist getting into the Myrtle Beach spirit. "That man is getting a blow-job." We left them to their play (or perhaps work) and tried to gain entrance into the actual tower itself. I had all but given up when I noticed an emergency door that appeared to have been accidentally left open by maintanence. We quickly ducked in and found ourselves in a small room full of locked doors and an elevator. We pushed the button for the penthouse and were upward bound.

The elevator was far more lavishly decorated than my apartment. Black marble walls with sand-colored marble inlays. Chrome railings specifically designed to not show fingerprints and other smudges. All I could think about was that this is still Myrtle Beach and no matter how much this elevator cost, some rich bastard has fucked a hooker in it.

The fifteenth floor consisted entirely of a bathroom, several maintanence rooms and an empty ballroom with an enormous panaramic view of the city. The lightning tearing through the sky in the distance seemed to be at eye-level. The chaos below seemed so serene. So eerily peaceful looking down at what I knew to be a hellstorm of lights and noise and instead hearing only the sound of the wind howling around the corner of the building. This seemed to be a glorious punctuation to the end of this twisted trip. All that was left to do now was dodge building security on the way out, start a dumpster-fire and be on our way.

"And I swear that I don't have a gun." -Nirvana

I am having to call shenanigans on the whole human race at this point. It has just gotten far too ridiculous. I don't have cable and therefore rarely watch TV. And the occassions in which I do are simply reminders of why I don't. TV is a circus. Mostly because TV is just a portal into our society and our society is a circus. Don't believe me? Sit in a mall and watch people walk by. Catch a few bits of conversation. Actors. All of them. Wonderful, Oscar-worthy actors. Walking around tossing out phrases like "It was good to see you again" and smiling while in their head they were jokingly begining an acceptance speach.

Why do we bullshit each other? Why are we required to lie?

We are far more free legally than we are socially.

How many people within your particular circle know exactly how you feel about them?

And if you told them would it change things?

In an ideal society it wouldn't. But thats not what we have created for ourselves now is it? No, in this age of personal computers, horseless carriages and two-ply toilet paper our society stands as a tattered monument to what could have been. Instead we have a nation with a rather high percentage of people falling under the category that the medical community refers to as "fucked up". A redneck who thinks that light-switches and revolvers are interchangeable. A repressed housewife about to explode like canned foods locked in a hot car. A highschool jock tweaked on steroids totalling the Corvette that his father gave him for forgetting his birthday by wrapping it around a tree while trying to outrun his fear of his own sexuality.

Everyone has a skeleton in their closet. We all know it. But no one wants to show theirs first. So they bullshit. And as a result people cry, people die alone, people sleep on the streets, people spend years upon years with someone that they don't know.

This topic recently arose during a discussion via e-mail with Ted:

"The point is, we are all human. We all make mistakes, so why should people go around hiding them? Thats like walking around in a nudist colony covering your dick with your hands."

More on this later. Right now I am intoxicated and feel like reading on my balcony wearing a towel and Santa-hat.-SLP

The fallacy of a human system to prevent hate.

Within an hour of waking up thursday I found myself in the empty grass lot beside the carwash. I was dressed rather sharply (meaning that I was wearing a shirt that appeared to have been ironned) and so was Brandon who was acting as my caddy as I used my 5-wood to hit packets of various condiments at the side of my car.

Co-worker: "What the hell are you doing?"
Brandon: "Quiet on the green please."
Me: "I'm just here to pick up my check. Hey, J.C., can I wash my car?"
J.C.: "Hell no."

The carwash is prone to such strange scenes. It has been visited by every manner of freak and weirdo known to man (including myself). Some are good and some are bad but they all have something to teach you. The most recent lesson was delivered sunday by a group of neanderthals with thick New York accents.

The runt of the litter was a repulsive little wiry man who looked a lot like James Dean... ya know... dead. His comb glided effortlessly through his hair as a result of the frictionless environment created by the pint of grease that I am almost positive came from a can although there is a decent chance that the slimy little bastard oozed it himself. In his native burrough he is probably called something trite and cliche like "Bones" or "Tiny".

His brother was simply a larger, healthier looking version of the former. He constantly sucked on a toothpick that seemed to be almost surgically attached to the corner of his mouth. Together they looked like a pair that the mob would hire out on occassion to do dirty work and use as scapegoats. The kind of guys that "don't know nothin'" if asked.

They were at the carwash with their cousin who was getting his brand-new 300M cleaned. The cousin was a large man of about fifty with such an incredible surplus of fat that it caused his facial features to be pushed into a perpetual scowl. He was impatient and rarely sat down while awaiting his car. Instead he lumbered around on legs that were far too small to support the mass of human that sat atop them. A true feat of mind over matter.

There car came out of the tunnel a little lower on the left side than it was on the right due to two completely flat tires. Upon realizing this all three of them began throwing out words like "lawyer" and "lawsuit" that were meant to intimidate the managers had there been any around. But since I was the only one in the vicinity with any kind of authority and I didn't really give a shit they were just intimidating the employees and one other elderly customer.

The manager eventually arrived as well as the carwash's owner, Doug, who was just recovering from some sort of heart ailment. Doug began to talk to the man and I watched as the situation slowly escalated to the point that both men were weaving intricate strings of profanity less than ten inches away from each other while Doug was popping nitroglycerin tablets. I was instructed to call 9-1-1 and try to get a sheriff's deputy to appear.

"9-1-1 What's your emergency?"

"Well, it's a non-emergency but we have a belligerent customer at Crystal Blue Carwash, 8121 Market Street in Porter's Neck."

"Near Medac?"

"Yes."

"You say he's belligerent?"

"Yes."

"Is he black?"

"What?"

"Umm... I mean... What's his race?"

"Uh... he's white."

"What is he wearing?"

The conversation continued from there. I gave a brief description that included the phrase "he's gonna be the pissed off guy who is NOT wearing a uniform."

I hung up the phone and pondered the conversation that I had just had while watching the live-action version of everything reality shows try to capture but always fall short of. Faces turning unnatural colors. Innocent bystanders being struck by errant spittle. In that one particular moment in time I felt a total absence of all love. Why do people tune in by the millions to watch this? Why did the 9-1-1 operator assume that it was a black guy?

The system is broken... if it ever worked to begin with. Unhappiness breeds unhappiness.

On an off-note, there was a rally recently in Hughe McRae Park in which more than a thousand people who were mostly of hispanic descent (probably all lumped together as "mexicans" during idle talk around the water cooler) gathered to protest Bush's latest method of distraction, a push for a mass deportation of illegal immigrants. Looking around I realized that I was one of only five white people in my field of vision; a woman sitting peacefully on the grass to my left and three large white men to my right holding a giant banner that read "SOMEONE CALL IMMIGRATION".

"Goddamnit..." I muttered to myself and left.

Point to ponder. Humans have only been around for roughly 100,000 years. This means that all of the races share a common ancestor at some point in the past hundred millenia. Not really a long time. The common ancestor for dogs and humans goes back billions of years and we consider them "man's best friend" while we hate other races.

People say the races hate each other because they deem each other as "different" but aparently they just aren't different enough.

Imaginary friends that don't let you eat meat on fridays.

Bolivia, North Carolina. A town named for the sole purpose of fucking with anyone who has a shaky sense of geography. The town's presence is signified to the outside world only by sparse roadsigns that were erected some time within the last twenty years just to see how many tourists would have aneurysms.

"Myrtle Beach 63
Bolivia 21"

Bolivia is the type of town with more silos than people. The kind of place where you could probably get by with drunkenly staggering down the street, stark naked, a look of coke-fueled rage in one eye while the other is half closed, holding a nearly empty case of beer in your left hand while your right is loosely wrapped around the butt of a shotgun whose barrel is sparking along on the concrete. No one would notice. No one is THERE to notice. And even if they were, there is a decent chance that they would be doing the same thing.

On a quick drive down Main Street (designated as such because it's the ONLY street) you will see a convenience store, a couple of abandonned gas stations, some livestock, a bank tucked back into the dense, swampy foliage and a sign directing you to a Buddhist Temple. Since Nicole, Daryl and myself had gotten into the car without any particular destination in mind, that's where we ended up.

The temple rests on a soggy plot of land just south of "downtown" Bolivia. Monks can usually be found wandering around lackadaisically with no particular destination or deadline at the front of the complex near a small southern house that has had a long, painstaking eastern make-over. The temple itself is a massive building perched on large concrete pilings that impart the structure with a sense of levitation or weightlessness.

Moments after you arrive you feel a sudden wave of incongruency. You feel out of place and it's not because you are not buddhist or because you smell funny or anything like that. After a few minutes of trying to figure out why you feel so uncomfortable it dawns on you: You are moving too fast. You look around and watch as a leaf makes a seemingly hour-long journey from canopy to soil. The monks move with glacial speed and seem to red-line somewhere around "mosey".
The first thing that popped into my head after this strange realization was the scenario of an emergency. Something like the forest catching on fire and all of the monks strolling for their lives.

While this delightfully twisted image was rattling around in my brain like the metal ball inside of a can of spraypaint I noticed a very tiny asian man wearing a bed-sheet and fervently waving us toward the old house.

The inside of the house was rather spartan by most standards being comprised mostly of one large, central room whose walls were almost completely covered with various teaching devises and posters of presumably famous monks that seem to be analogous to posters of baseball all-stars in a childs room. The only furniture in the room was a vast expanse of carpetted floor just at the foot of a slightly elevated area where the monk sat. I walked to the far side of the expanse and sat leaving enough room for Nicole and Daryl to my right.

The monk was of an indeterminable age. Somewhere between 40 and 70 probably. He was completely bald and had a decent grasp on the english language although he talked with a stilted pop in his voice that seemed to add punctuation to the end of every word. He had a permanent, yet genuine, child-like smile that, in tandem with his attire, would at times make me feel like I was having a religious discussion with a kid who was wearing the window curtains after his parents left him unattended.

When asked a question he would take a very noticeable pause, during which you could almost see the gears turning in his head before he would respond. This was presumably in accordance with the "Right Speech" part of the Eightfold Path which he demostrated to us using a teaching aid; a piece of poster paper with dozens of lines all intersecting and dividing, creating a path that led all the way from the word "Dhamma" to "Liberation".

The second teaching aid was a picture called "The Wheel of Life" that has aparently been used for more than 2000 years and is often painted on the gateways of monestaries. As you would imagine, the picture is of a wheel and at the center is a pig, a chicken and a snake. The monk pointed to the pig and said that it symbolized greed. He then pointed to a section of the wheel which he said depicts a heaven-like place. At this point I encountered a problem that seems to be universal with religions and decided to ask him:

"But isn't greed a motivation to get into heaven?"

He sat silently for a moment as he always did before speaking. I felt a rush of satisfaction at the prospect of finally having a question answered by a religious figure. Surely this happy little asian man sitting before me won't bullshit me. He won't treat me like the Baptists did. He will never say "You ask too many questions" or "Just pray about it." So I sat. Still. Quiet. Impatiently waiting for his answer. Only about a second and a half had gone by but it seemed like 10. Then:

"What?"

"What do you mean, what?"

"What was your question?"

"How could anyone ever give up greed in order to go to heaven? I mean, if I want to go to heaven then isn't that somewhat greedy? So how could anyone give up greed in order to go to heaven?"

He thought for a moment while looking at me with a frozen expression that bordered on disgusted confusion. He stammered momentarily and mumbled something to himself in his native Thai and then proceeded to duck my question by continuing the lesson as if it never happened.

About an hour later, following a lesson about letting go of material possessions, the monk gave us some material possessions to take with us and we were on our way.

Regardless of my unanswered question Buddhism still makes far more sense to me than any other religion. Not enough for me to subscribe to it in full but more so than most Judeo-Christian religions. I think a large part of this is due to the fact that with Buddhism there is no real need for a "savior", there is just a guy who figured it all out. I still, however, have yet to find a religion that doesn't have glaring cracks in the foundation.

Most religions have something to the extent of a basic Heaven-Hell set up. Most religions also teach that fear and greed are bad but then they use your fear of going to Hell and your greed for Heaven like cattle-prods to corral you into whatever agenda they have whether it be money, politics or just blatant megalomania.

The town that I grew up in had a population of 168 during the 2000 census and it had four churches. I have never set foot in any of them however because I attended Bear Swamp Baptist Church in Lake View, South Carolina. Lake View has had a constant population for the past four decades of 700 people. The town is centered around a church and there is a church on every block and in some cases two. The one I attended had a weekly attendance that varied between 30 and 70 and cycled through ministers every four to seven years. The minister lived in a furnished house on main street that was paid for. He paid no taxes. He had an anual income of roughly $26,000 that was all "spending money". He always asked for a little more. And every Sunday my mom would take me there. I would run the PA system and record the service for the house-bound members while my mom would give her ten percent that went virtually straight into the pockets of a man who made more than her.

Christianity is far too distorted for me to believe. It is obvious, the current political atmosphere is a good example, that this message is the pulp product that filtered out of thousands of years worth of agendas. Besides, I have deep-rooted problems with christianity in general. Questions that never were answered. Questions that were dodged by the good ol' cop out: "Just pray about it." For example: In most protestant beliefs infant deaths go to Heaven. Well, it is horrible to say this but that is not fair. Why should this person skip the test and get an "A" BECAUSE of it? While someone else can try his entire life, really try, for eighty years or more, just struggle everyday to be true to his faith and simply fall short and spend eternity in Hell. When I ask people this question they usually say "Well, its a child. It didn't get to live life so Heaven is kind of a compensation for that." That is still not fair. We are talking about eternity. Infinity. Forever. All in the context of compensation for the child missing out on somewhere around 80 years of life.

Buddhism has the best intentions it seems yet it still falls short of devotion-worthy for me.
I am not trying to attack any religions personally. If a religion works for you then be my guest. I will not go out of my way to destroy what you hold dear. I have been on both sides of this fence. I will never, even though I disagree with some things he said, go back to that monk and try to destroy his faith. It works for him. He is obviously happy.

Live and let live.

Fuck Mormonism.

He died for our sins so we honor him by being inconvenienced

Happy belated Jesus-Day everyone.

Micki: "Yeah, Taco Bell is always open. But thats about it."
Me: "This is your Lord's fault."

Since it was a religious holiday I spent the majority of my time wandering into the center of a forest and becoming inebriated solely for the challenge of finding my way out. I needed to do something to take my mind off the sad truth that I had just come to realize; the fact that with my current wages, I don't make enough money to live. Shortly I will need to go out in search of a new job and my cross-hairs are centered directly on the myriad of local magazines and newspapers. This is all in light of my recent epiphany that I, much like communism, make a lot more sense on paper.

If I could draw a generalized version of the Washington landscape peppered liberally with fat people eating hundred-dollar-bills I could easily make a few dollars as a political cartoonist. Especially in our current political climate. But sadly I am not blessed with the ability to graphically depict the morbidly obese, at least not in the symbolic context of pork-barrel legislation. So instead I will just rip into these bastards verbally.

Where shall I begin?

It would be wise to start by pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of the fact that our country is currently teetering on the edge of using nuclear force to prevent Iran from having nuclear force. Somehow I can't help but think that this whole thing is, at least in part, some very large and dangerously ill-concieved broom to sweep under the rug the ever widenning array of scandals that seem to pop up almost daily like methane bubbles from a stagnant swamp.

The most recent bubble is the fact that six retired generals who were quite deeply involved in the Iraq War are now calling for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. This is an incredible attack that, in the twisted minds of those at the helm, would warrant this large Iranian broom. Sadly though I have to agree with Rolling Stone magazine when they assert "Rummy is not going anywhere. Despite what you may have heard, we still have three co-equal branches of government: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. Neither Dick nor Rummy serve at the pleasure of the president. Along with Bush, they are president.

"Think of it this way: If Cheney is Bush's adult supervision, Rumsfeld is Cheney's. Rummy was Cheney's boss and mentor in the Seventies and that power dynamic remains in full effect. In the Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal, power flows downhill from Rumsfeld." (Rolling Stone, April 14, 2006)

Maybe this is a desperate grab in the dark. They are, after all, running out of distractions.
Maybe what we are seeing is a horrid administration that is finally seeing the cracks in its own foundation. One that knows that sometime in the near future the weight of its lies, guilt and hypocrisy is going to reach critical mass. I hope when Bush reads the paper in the morning, or at least has someone give him the gyst of it, he feels that familiar, panicked, sinking feeling. Like when you are stopped at a redlight and you look into your rear-view mirror to realize that the inattentive driver behind you is not going to stop.

What ever happened to good ol' Scooter? Well, all I can find on the whole Libby situation is an article on Rolling Stone and a couple of new links on The Smoking Gun that indicate that he is calling Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer to testify. "You're doin' a helluva job" Scooter.

To top this feculent pile is yet another shining emblem of our great nations trend of overcoming adversity, triumphing beyond all odds and making it to the top of the hill to look out onto a beautiful sunrise then, for no aparent reason, turning around and running the other way: The Omaha, Nebraska school district is going to re-segregate. Thats right, in early July 2008 there will be three separate yet deliberately unequal school systems in Omaha. One mostly for whites, one mostly for blacks and one mostly for hispanics.

This, along with the fact that theology is being taught as a science at several institutions after being smuggled in under the guise of "Intelligent Design" as well as Bush's early cabinet-meetings with God and all 'round erosion of the separation of church and state are just footprints that our society is leaving in the sand as we back-pedal into some previous century that will keep the Right in both power and wealth.

Murderous deer, Scooter Libby, racism and the morbidly obese.

I felt the urge to write the other day while reading an article on The Smoking Gun about how one of Cheney's ex-minions, now punching bag and general scapegoat, "Scooter" Libby has aparently had enough after being the defendant of, if memory serves me correctly, five felony accusations. Two of which were purgery, which I believe he was convicted of (don't quote me on either of those facts).

The termination of Libby's employment came about rather abruptly after he leaked the identity of a CIA agent named Plame to a New York Times reporter. Although he has taken the brunt of the punishment for the crime, which borders on treason, up until this point it appears that whatever compensation he was recieving for the prostitution of his credibility is no longer enough and the bad blood that has been brewing within the administration is finally bubbling up to the surface. His story now, which seems extremely plausible and, in fact, quite probable within this hellish government is that he had direct authorization from George W. Bush to leak the information to the public.

Keep in mind that on national television just days after the leak the President promised to immediately bring the hammer down and fire whoever was responsible for the leak.
But I didn't write about it immediately. "Let it brew", I thought. I took one last glance at the headlines on Yahoo News before my ride arrived to take me to my car which had been resurrected the day before. There were several headlines about various explosions killing nameless people in the Middle East and adding them to the maddening pile of statistics that casts a grim shadow on this hideous war. There was also a headline about a goose sexually harrassing a woman in New York's Central Park as well as the headline containing the Libby story.

The ride to my car was a mind-numbing, soul-dissolving journey which I know only took an hour and a half but felt like three as my mom droned on about how I should come home more, cut my hair that way girls will like me (thanks for the vote of confidence mom), stop hanging around at the Gypsy because its weird and find a church to go to. She also informed me that kids these days are playing something called "The Choking Game" which we used to refer to as simply "Bullying" and that people in the towns that I grew up in are dying left and right from various diseases and addictions. It has always amazed me that the people in those towns have yet to catch on to the correlation between their diets and their high death rate. If these people could figure out a way to free-base fried chicken and inject it directly into their aorta they probably would. There is a decent chance that several autopsies in the area have revealed whole christmas hams lodged in the subject's left ventricle. She also told me how, as a christian, she takes these events as well as the abundance of "damn inter-racial couples" as signs of the approaching apocolypse. Hypocrisy both amuses and enrages me.

Anyway, after driving an hour and a half away from the ocean we decided to eat seafood and stopped at Dale's. Our waitress was around my age, some sort of modern, slightly diluted version of a southern belle. She has probably never touched dirt in her entire life and seemed like the type who would spend the night in her car if she ever saw a spider in her house. I got the sudden urge to set the building on fire just to see her reaction.

The conversation teetered back and forth between my mother's rants about how the weather lately makes her think that the world is about to end and my random input about various happenings around Wilmington until I finally found a moment to confront her with something that had been bothering me for quite some time. Two decades to be exact. She was talking about some "mexican" person from Miami (they were most likely Cuban) who called her desk at work yesterday and wanted to settle a speeding ticket that they got on I-95 recently.

"I couldn't understand a damn word she was saying and there was a baby screaming constantly in the background. I wish I could work for the Border Patrol. If they couldn't speak the language I would tell them to turn their ass around and go back."

I looked at her and tried out of respect to mask my dissappointment but judging by her reaction it is safe to assume I failed:

"I mean, I am not racist or anyth-"

"Yes you are."

The conversation quickly turned back to some mundane, neutral topic as we finished the meal.

Once home, I said hello to my dogs, one of which is nearly old enough to get his driver's license, and then I threw all of the shit which had been pulled out of my car back into it, hugged my mom, told her that I love her and began the return trip.

My car seemed foreign to me. Mostly because it was clean. I hit the 70mph zone between Chadbourn and Whiteville and my foot got heavy. 65. 75. 83. 90. Deer. A whole heard of them flashing past me for a brief second on either side of my car. I eased off the gas and enjoyed the free adrenaline. A few miles down the road my foot got close to the floor again as a result of the idea that lightning doesnt strike twice. Zap. Deer. Another herd. This time I saw them coming and had time to react but not enough to stop, so I hit the gas and began straddling the center line. God has hired quadrupeds as hitmen against me. He probably pays them with corn and various other grains. They lack the opposable thumbs neccessary to handle paper currency.

Back within the city limits I relaxed and drove the speed limit all the way back to my apartment where the first thing I did was check the headlines. More, or maybe even the same... I can't really tell anymore, headlines about civilian deaths in Iraq. The video of the sexually deviant water foul and some story dealing with gas prices. But where was the Libby story? Why is there a follow-up about some pervert bird but not even a whisper about a crime far more drastic than what chased Nixon out of the White House?

The media scares me. Every once in a while very important things tend to dissappear all together. Someone is masking something. Thats fine I guess. You can only suppress so much shit before you begin to build up pressure and things begin floating to he surface. What we are seeing now, ladies and gentlemen, are the first gurgles of a pot about to boil over. I wouldn't mind being in Washington with a pen and paper when it scalds all of those evil bastards.