Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Because I Don't Want to Study

Latest Random News:

- I bought a bike from my buddy Carl over at Everyone Is Dumb It is one of those hip single speed bikes. Its super light, very fast and my chances of making it to the age of 24 are slim. I love to go fast and I am an idiot. It doesn't look good folks.

- I am the newest employee of Dakota Jazz Club. This my first real job in the restaurant biz and I am excited. My friend Melinda over at My Roommate Has a Beard has some experience in the resturant biz and has been cluing me in. According to her working at a restaurant is like high school but with even more sex and cocaine. This job is gonna be fucking awesome.

An actual reproduction of a text message conversation between Melinda and I after I scored the job:

Me: Got the job at the Dakota. Holla!

Mel: Yes! Awesome, congrats! When do u start? I can't wait for all the coked-up sex hi-jinks stories! When do we celebrate?

Me: Me and the boss just did 4 grams off the snare drum and I feel like god. i love this job!

Mel: OMG, so dude im totally in class right now, the teach is lecturing and I just burst out laughing. So great.

Me: Yes!

- I just bought a iPod Shuffle. It's awesome, and I love it. I am not a fan of consumerism or brand names but if Apple made cliffs I would probably jump off 'em. That doesn't make any fucking sense. My friend Sarah over at Sarah's MySpace Blog has the exact same model and color (orange).

- My friend Frances over at Frances Lost in Space is in Venezuela being a total bad ass doing bad ass shit. She is 22 years old, in the middle of the Venezuelan jungle near the border of Colombia teaching University level classes on socio-economics and getting harassed by the government (actually more harassed by bed bugs then the government but yeah... a total bad-ass)

Thats enough for now.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Privatization of Violence

I am never enthusiastic to support any kind of violence however I do believe that in a democratic society it is the government, accountable to the people, who should hold a monopoly on over its use, not a private for-profit company like Blackwater, whose name Stephen Colbert pointed out is "cartoonishly evil". Check out their logo:Wow, if that doesn't scream "amoral greedy lawless mercenaries who do the governments dirty work" then I don't know what does.

These guys creep me out. What's even more scary is the implications. The one thing governments, for all times, have had a monopoly over, the thing that might even define them as governments, is the ability to legally enact violence, either on its own citizens or another state. Like so many other government "services" it is being privatized and outsourced, to be held accountable not by citizens but by shareholders.

Here is the latest story on Blackwater from the New York Times:

Another Probe Involving Blackwater


A report on Blackwater by The Nation's Jeremy Scahill

Friday, September 21, 2007

Raccoons in his Eyes

Raccoons in his eyes
Squirrels in his heart and
Bees in his blood
And folds of skin
like warm wax

He opens his mouth to laugh
The squirrels pierce the ears.

Another drink, and another.

“How long have you been…”
Raccoons dance
and dart,
rolling folds find their proper pose

Another joke, more squirrels, another drink

And the bees begin to infect my blood
And the skin on my face disconnects from my soul

I need to get out of here.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The Battle for St. Paul: 1 Year Away

This is a trailer for the Republican National Convention Welcoming Committee, a group of anarchist organizing protests against the Republican Convention coming to St. Paul August 31st.

These are the guys at protest who will be lighting shit on fire and grabbing canisters of tear of gas with their bare hands and throwing it back at the cops.

Side Story: At the last protest I was at I stopped a group of these guys from taking apart this huge float-like puppet thing so that could use the wooden support beams as weapons against the cops. See, while the rest of us are protesting peacefully these guys start shit with the cops and then everybody gets tear gassed and shot with salt pellets. Not very fun.

Point: These guys are nuts. However they do have a sense of humor:



I guess some of these guys were involved in the recent clash between police and the activist group Critical Mass.

The Star Tribune reported that the normally peaceful monthly bike protest was "infiltrated" by protesters who sought to provoke police. I will put money on it that it was some of these guys. However the City Pages write up about the incident made it seem pretty clear the cops where out to beat some ass (anarchist or no anarchist).

While I have political sympathies with them I don't buy into the anarchist ideology or their methods. If I am going to swallow the pill of any radical ideology its going to be Marxism. Meanwhile I will just stick with my incoherent jumble of ideas I lazily call "democratic socialism" and stick to non-violent direct action (no Molotov cocktails for me...)

When a group is vastly out-gunned, be it by the cops on the street or society at large, it is their moral authority that is their source of power. Engaging in violent direct action only allows the authorities to strips us of our liberties beyond legal doubt and strip us of our moral authority in the eyes of the masses. To think one can engage in direct action with out consideration to how it is perceived by the sheepish masses watching us get our asses beat on television is to be either naive or to be a "True Believer"

True Believers: people who want to escape a flawed self by creating an imaginary self and joining a compact collective whole to escape themselves.

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Why we are miserable.

Check out this article by David Wong at Cracked.com. It is a great piece about friendships in the age of text messages, emails and Facebook. He has some interesting points about text messaging (I am personally on the verge of boycotting them) and emails. I suspect the point about emails is that they are so quickly and poorly written. Email seems cheap, fast and informal and our writing reflects that. In my long email exchanges with friends overseas I have been trying a bit harder to write with greater clarity and proper punctuation but I am not usually sober when i do so my efforts have been falling a bit short.

7 Reason the 21st Century is Making you Miserable.
by David Wong

#1. We don't have enough annoying strangers in our lives.
#2. We don't have enough annoying friends, either.
#3. Texting is a shitty way to communicate.
#4. Online company only makes us lonelier.
#5. We don't get criticized enough.
#6. We're victims of the Outrage Machine.
#7. We feel worthless, because we actually are worth less. (my favorite one)