Hergest Ridge

Google has a bad habit of nannying the user. SafeSearch keeps turning on regardless of how much vigour is used in pressing the mouse button over “I’m not a child, go take a hike and get lost in the forest” button. Well, actually, the caption is a lot less exciting – kind of like the search results with SafeSearch on.

Censorship of any kind makes me mad as a hatter.

I have a CD someone mistakingly bought for me at Wal-Mart – why the hell else would someone buy a CD at damn Wal-Mart? It censors out an instance of a “bad word.” (Shhh, between me and you, it’s bitch. Bitch, bitch, bitch. Bitch.) I can’t listen to it. It’s like someone cut the song’s throat mid-way through, a gashing wound bleeding into my ear, pouring down through to the throat, I start to gag. Well, you get the idea – forget the visual.

Thin as a dime, is what our morals are. Energy, time and money wasted on ideologies. You know what I hate more than censorship? Ideologies. I’ll tell you more – maybe another time.

We all start off with bad directions, and spend the rest of our lives unlearning that taught to us early on. It’s the only way I can explain just starting out, at the doorstep of my fourth decade.

$29.00 in my pocket, banging on the table with an old tin cup, cigarette down to the filter. Fell in love with a gun street girl, dancing in the Birmingham jail.

There ain’t no devil, there’s just god when he’s drunk.

Ce la vie.

All you ever really need to know is in a Tom Waits song.

As if the day was not full enough of moronic, hot air, brain dead Emails, one more passed into my inbox without so much as flinching under the idiot radar. Now my spambox contains more intelligent content than the inbox.

If you’re too busy to read my emails in full, fuck off and don’t waste my time. It’s not my job to redress the issue several times, while you read only the first paragraph of each Email on your Blackberry. I also don’t take kindly towards amending work order after work order, as you slowly realise that your budget is insufficient for what you originally asked for – just as I told you the case would be. You hired me to complete a job. Give me the tools required, and stay out of my damn way so I can complete it.

The audio books you’re “learning from” and are “inspiring you” are killing your remaining braincells along with any semblance of an attention span which you might still posses – my best explanation as to why you can’t get past the first of two paragraphs of an Email. Lay off the Starbucks, put down the Blackberry, loosen the tie, and for once listen to those around you.

Your inability to plug-in into reality makes you and me look like idiots at times we both need to look credible, professional, and intelligent. Don’t be stupid only so you can apologise later. Listen to what I said. Read what I wrote. And it’ll all come together.

The silence spreads. I talk and must talk. So I speak to him and say to him: “Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are just poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony–. Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat, and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up – take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now.”
 
Excerpt from All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

So Gogol Bordello sold out. Wonderlust King is now the soundtrack to a Sony console racing game commercial.

Maybe the song is part of the actual game instead, and that’s how it made it into the commercial?

Either way, I suppose it’s too easy to criticise. The money from such endorsements would likely be a retirement nest egg of its own, but when art becomes annoying due to constant repetition of an excerpt, that’s just plain disappointing.

The white dove came again. (Original entry)

Now quite dirty compared to the pristine white it was the first time around – it looks like it had a rough time out there, and the groomed look is now replaced by a more frazzled one.

Someone suggested this is a run away pet, which would explain a few things. It did not stay the night and I wonder how well it can cope with the bone chilling nights of -40 that will soon sterilise all of the prairies.

 
“Your Gods child.
Their is none greater then Yahweh.”

Contrast the claim with the “method” of expression; Is it not akin to an overall clad mechanic hammering a bolt into place while claiming to have invented the internal combustion engine?

Sure, sure, we all make mistakes (some dumber than others,) yet a large segment of the population feels certain they know for a fact, and can articulate what the creator of the universe approves of and what offends Him. From the minute details of “sinful language”, to “immoral scientific research”, to the “forbidden acts” between two consenting adults behind closed doors. The list is longer than any scripture ever written.

If God exists and the details for “pure living” are in any significant way true, God undoubtedly carries a Law degree. And you can bet that there is enough fine print there so that He can send us anywhere He feels like on any given day, and do so in a legally kosher manner.

With the power to judge, sentence, and carry out the final justice, I suspect blonds and brunettes deceased between the late teenage years and mid-twenties will rule the Kingdom of Heaven. (Preferably those that didn’t die in car crashes, or botched, back alley coat hanger abortions.) Unless of course God is gay… I mean God being a HIM implies gender, and a sexual preference. And we all know God is a he, so he has to have some kind of sexual preferences, otherwise He’d be an It.

Look, even if there is a God, we have no way of knowing what He might want. We’re flies in a bowl of hot tomato soup heading towards His table. Even if we could see and touch Him, our little brains could never, ever know His mind. The same applies to the men of the bible that ran around the desert, making claims of His wishes and intent. Their brains were even smaller than ours, and they believed (no, knew) that the sun moved around the Earth. If they are your best witness in the Court of Truth, you might as well plead guilty now and start that sentence sooner than later.

If “God works in mysterious ways”, the religious as a group sure see no mystery in how much oppression we need legislate on one another, and the precise type it needs be. All this for the “privilege” to sit proud by his side, while many of our siblings, kids, friends, spouses and parents undoubtedly choke on sulfur, flames, and the smoke of burning flesh.