Apparently Jesus Looks Like Kenny Loggins, Circa 1981

In the wake of what has turned out to be a pretty busy weather day on the East Coast (with thankfully none of the Armageddon-esque predictions about New York or DC being swamped, though there is significant damage all around), it seems a little silly for me to come on here and talk about the end of the world like I had planned to some forty-eight hours or so earlier. You see, when I heard that Irene could hit New York, the center of everything culturally about America that I either love or loathe with ill-hidden envy, I was taken aback.

Maybe, for once, the doomsayers had it right, the "end-times" crowd who not only believe that the world will end in their lifetime, they damn well pray that it does. You know the type, mostly church-associated and all "Jesus will rise and smote the infidels" or some other such stuff that we former believers (or former wannabe non-believers) associate with superstition (the feeling, not the amazing Stevie Wonder song of the same name). I could scoff at such things before, but as the threat from Irene seemed more imminent, I began to wonder: maybe it could all end?

Part of this, I'll admit, is the little boy in me, the one that sat scared straight as some old-timey preacher would come at the invitation of the local pastor and give a fire-and-brimstone sermon about how we're living in the end times and it's only a matter of time before the trumpets from on high tell us to duck and cover, and while we're down there kiss our arse goodbye (thank you, XTC). Part of it is a real fear, however, that for all my "worldly" knowledge, acquired more from books than from worldly experiences (such as warfare, genocide, and an enemy hellbent on destroying me, though God knows that Hulk Hogan tried) is no match for the unknowable, the illogical, the "doesn't fit with what science tells us", because I come from a part of the country where science is still a dirty word.

Logic holds no candle to the idea of Jesus or God just saying "to hell with it" and scrapping the whole plan, in many people's eyes.

My grandmother asked me to read a book called "Heaven Is For Real," about a little kid who apparently visited Heaven and regaled his folks with tales of the afterlife for a time, seeming to confirm that, well, Heaven is for real. I smelled "power of suggestion" and "doctoring" when I saw that the father was a preacher, as well as "blatent political edge" when it turned out the co-author also helped write Sarah Palin's book. So I was not in a place to naturally accept that everything this kid says is "for real."

Now, having read the book, I can say that if this kid thought he went to Heaven, and if it's a comfort to his folks that he says he did, who am I to judge? I know that faith (as opposed to religion) offers hope to the hopeless, and even the cynical part of me would like to believe that there's no harm in comfort. Say you're a victim of the Holocaust; would you be comforted by the idea that after you die, you're pretty much gone? Nope, I'd hope the victims of the Holocaust especially but anyone whose death came in awful circumstances in general might have something more to look forward to than just "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." Hope is just a four-letter word, but it's up there with hate and love as being one of the more powerful four-letter words in our language.

That being said, I feel like some gentle, perhaps unintentional, coaching from the parents might have gone on behind the scenes, perhaps helped along by a child's natural imagination. I say this because my niece, who is six months old, has an old remote that her daddy gave her to play with. She can point it at the TV and pretend that she's doing something to the TV (perhaps to freak her out, I could be behind her with the real remote the next time she wants to change the channel and do so). I don't doubt the sincerity of the family, but I do think some grasping at straws might account for some of the more fantastical claims. And underneath it all is the idea that perhaps the end times are right around the corner.

To me, that's the most dangerous thing about religion, whatever your belief system. Trafficking in Armageddon-speak doesn't do much good for a mind easily led by suggestion, like mine was as a kid (and maybe still is, if I can take the doomsdayers seriously when it comes to Irene), and it strikes me as almost the opposite of what Christianity in particular is about. Turning to your religion to smite your enemies, to lay waste to them, is what happened on 9/11, which is about a week or so away from being ten years old. That's a version of "old-timed religion" that isn't good enough for me.

Basically, if you are of the mindset that the world is gonna end and the Bible says so, I wonder about you, I really do. After all, I might not know the Bible backwards and forwards, but I do remember that part about "no one will know" when the world ends. Also, that little thing about being kind to your neighbors, no matter how disgusting their "BBQ sauce - old family receipe involving lime!" is. Heaven may be for real, but I'm guessing you can't get in if you take pleasure in other people's pain when you think you get to go right away while they have to wait a thousand years. Sorry, sounds a little unfair to me.

I think a lot of the end-timers think that, if the world ends today, all their problems will be solved. Poppycock, I say. Problems don't last, but people can, and do, survive the worst of what life has to bear, especially if (but not necessarily mandatory) some matter of faith is within them. Call it what you will, but I'd like to think there's something more to this than sitting in a Starbucks waiting for my heart to stop after one mocha latte too many (I don't even know what a mocha latte is). I could be wrong, however, but I hope I ain't.

Oh, in the book there's a picture of what some little girl thinks Jesus looks like. Trust me, hold it up to a pic of Kenny Loggins from the Eighties and you'd swear they're identical. Blasphemous to believe that "Footloose" could be the anthem of Heaven? Yes, but it sure beats "Your Momma Don't Dance (And Your Daddy Don't Rock and Roll)".

Good night, and good luck

Ah, The Irish

I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, in part because the thought of a black man running this country seemed so dire to the many small-town racists I call neighbors that I had to do my part to make it a reality. Also, I identified with the whole "dad out of the picture/raised by mom and grandparents" angle of his story, and I caught a speech of his at Clemson, on campus, where he captivated and amused us in equal turns. The guy could deliver a speech, and whatever else you can say about him, he's done that much for a fractured nation after the Mad Libs style of the former Malaproper-In-Chief.

But I'm not sure that he'll be much more than that, when all is said and done. And it's not because he hasn't tried, but because he's been stopped at just about every turn by an opposition that, going back to Nixon, traffics in the victim mentality while simultaneously victimizing those it deems as its very oppressors. You can's spell Tea Party without KKK, in my opinion, and all those who oppose Obama just because of who he is, as opposed to what he stands for, do so with a panache and a visual appeal to the dumbest among us that leaves little doubt how far they'll go to "take our country back."

Before Obama, I thought Bobby Kennedy was the last decent human being to run for the office, and that was with the knowledge that he'd approved wiretaps on Martin Luther King, among other things. But we live in a world where our politicians spit out family values while fathering a whole other family or two on the side, so I prefer the honest ones (the few honest ones) who own up to being fucked-up, but self-awareness is not prized in political debate. I didn't even have to watch the GOP candidate debate to tell you that most of them would blame Obama for everything that's ever gone wrong in this country. Obama will be a historic president for his race alone, but they would have you believe that he's consulting the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao while sacrificing white virgins to his heathen gods. Obama is not a saint, but he's a damn sight more appealing than the dunderheads currently angling for the honor of trying to unseat him.

That includes the "not a candidate" candidate, Sarah Motherfuckin' Palin. She's a political beast unleashed on the body politic who will gnaw at the very fabric of American democracy before someone has the good sense to tell her to go to hell. She is John McCain's gift to America after he's gone, his giant "Fuck You" to the country that failed to elect him when he ran as himself, and thus had to reinvent himself after Bush screwed him over as a tried-and-true conservative when he was probably the furthest thing from it prior to 2000. The John McCain of back then was like Willie Stark in the early part of All The King's Men, the John McCain of 2008 was more like Willie post-governorship, after he'd been corrupted.

If I were alive in '68, I would've voted for RFK, and I will vote for Obama in 2012, because someday I can tell my grandkids, with my head held high, that I helped elect the first black president of the United States (and perhaps got him re-elected, too). But if he doesn't win, and some idiot from the Tea Party's "hot list" gets in, I won't worry too much. It's a little crazy to get invested in politics to the extent that you threaten to leave the country if the other guys win. Besides, whatever else, this is still the best country on the planet in terms of opportunity, even though sometimes it feels like that opportunity is getting harder to reach. One reason I can't vote GOP: I ain't got enough money. The minute I realized that, almost over a decade ago, I decided that I could never vote for such monied assholes (unless, of course, I get a shitload of money. Then it's GOP all the way, baby!). So I don't care who the Repubs run, I ain't voting for 'em. And if they win, I'll talk bad about 'em all I want. Unlike certain members of my family, I am not bitter enough yet to piss on other people just because they don't agree with me. I went through that phase and was unbearable. Nowadays I just hope for the best.

Because I'm guessing the best we can manage under President Bachman or Romney is nuclear war with Canada.

Bacon & Eggs

I cringe a little when I run into someone I know that I haven't seen in a while, especially if I haven't seen them since before I got fired from my library gig. It's not that I'm a horribly unfriendly person, but I know that the polite, well-meaning question of "how are you doing" will come up.

How am I doing? Do you really want me to answer that?

If they had asked that last summer, before I got the hotel breakfast bar gig in late July, I probably would've broken down crying and wailing at the unfairness of the world. Nowadays, apart from a growing desire to be rid of the small little town I've called home for far, far too long and the nagging fear that I won't ever write anything substantial anymore, I would say I'm doing okay.

Really, I am.

In consideration of all the things that could have happened to me (getting squashed by an out-of-control truck, turning into a zombie, or being forced to sit through one of the "Twilight" movies), I got off pretty easy. And while my situation isn't ideal, it isn't soul-crushing either; I've been around long enough now to know that bad stuff often does, and damn it being a cliche but it's true, happen for a reason.

Sometimes that reason is to rob you of your ill-earned sense that "at last things are going my way," but it was ill-earned. You were a jackass. You kinda had it coming.

But anyway, back to "how are you?"; I've had to field that one quite a lot, and nowadays I can say that I have a job, it's not a career but something to pay the bills, and hopefully I get something going on the job-that-could-be-a-career front soon.

I will say, I'm shocked when I run into someone I knew from high school who is glad to see me, because often this same person would be someone that shunned or picked on me during said high school era (not that I made myself an unappealing target, having the nerve to get acne and glasses right before the most important phase of puberty and thus maximum attractivness to the opposite sex). Maybe I was better-liked in high school than I thought. Or maybe it's reassuring to them that the guy who always said he was gonna leave Walhalla is, alas, still here.

I wonder sometimes if anyone I graduated with ended up doing what they wanted to do with their lives. Odds are no, but maybe they're doing something enjoyable that they didn't know they'd like when they wanted to be God-knows-what back then.

Anyway, I'm not going to any of the reunions until I have one of the Kardashian girls to hang on my arm and draw envy from the crowd with (even if her dead-eye stare betrays her Kardashian tendency to look prettier than her personality ought to be)

Saturday

Not much to say today, just that every song should now begin with Jason Derulo saying "Jason Derulo" so that maybe, just maybe, the world can see how ridiculous this is and stone the bastard (in the Old Testament sense) out of his and our misery.

Okay, let me explain: every Derulo song seems to begin with Mr. Derulo (obviously afraid that we won't know it's him) saying "Jason Derulo!" (yes there is an exclamation mark in his speech pattern there) so that we know who the artist is. Think about the biggest artists who ever lived, when did they begin their songs by saying "The Beatles!," "Velvet Underground!," or "Vanilla Ice!"?

Exactly.

Just something that annoys me a little. Anyway...

The Obligatory Casey Anthony Post

As you may not have heard if you're Osama Bin Laden (and thus dead), Casey Anthony was found not guilty of the more serious charges against her (including that tiny one about killing her daughter). And as you might expect, this is a topic of some discussion in the nation at this time, with media talking heads exploding over themselves to try and explain why the jury is so stupid.

To that, I say....shaddup!

Yes, I think Casey Anthony is guilty of something. I didn't follow the case as much as Nancy Grace did, but when someone goes a month before reporting their kid missing, you have to believe there's more than just simple negligance going on. Let's get that out of the way.

But in a trial under the American legal system, you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone is guilty of the charges they are alleged with. What the jurors have said is, the prosecution didn't prove its case.

Before Nancy Grace can explode through yet another hideous hairdo, she needs to remember that the legal system, while not perfect, is the best one we've got, and vigilantes don't need any encouragement.

One thing that stuck out to me was when Grace started bellyaching about Anthony's possible moves to write a book about her case so as to make money. What the hell has Grace been doing for the past however many years since the story broke, doing episode after episode about this case and basically engaging in a smear campaign (admittedly against a reprehensible woman, but still)? Trust me, any argument she makes about "rights of victims" is bullshit; it's about Nancy Grace's right to make a buck exploiting a tragedy. And we're all party to it, because we watched Nancy and those of her ilk make what was a tragic but nondescript murder case into a national obsession. It's the OJ Syndrome all over again.

Now then, who wants to talk about The News of the World and what a sack of shit Rupert Murdoch is?

The Mating Game

I come from a family in which pet-owning is almost mandatory (it's amazing that I've gone as long as I have without a pet myself), and so it should be no surprise that animals are drawn to us. One such animal is a beast of a dog that my grandpa inherited from my uncle. He's an old soul, he's probably on his last legs, and he's fixed so that the only damage he can do procreation-wise is maybe some light dry-humping. My sis started moving into a house a few blocks down from us and brought her two dogs with her, one male and one female. I go up there occasionally to visit, and wouldn't you know that the dog that lives with me and Gramps has to follow me up there or sense my presence and arrive some minutes after I have. Of course, it could be the female dog that gets his attention; she's fixed, but you wouldn't know it by how much she likes to jump around. Like I said, the worst that these two together could get up to would be some dry-humping. But it's still nice to think their passions might co-mingle.

Sometimes I feel like the older male dog when I'm talking to girls in Clemson, which is where I have to spend a significant chunk of my time because I work downtown. I'm in my thirties now, and I've never really had anything resembling a "relationship" with a member of the opposite sex. Mostly this is my fault, but it doesn't help that, in some of the circles I ran in as a much younger person, the girls I knew were superficial, stuck-up, and tethered to dickless wonders of boyfriends (not bitter much, am I?). Now, with a more healthy view of myself (for the most part), I still feel a little like that guy who would get all worked up over a girl, only to find out she's unavailable, and thus give up entirely.

"Bros before hoes" probably didn't exist as a phrase when I was a kid, but it's long been the code by which I live. Simply put, if a girl would cheat on her boyfriend with me, why wouldn't she cheat on me with some other dude? Also, the karma retributions are manifest; let's say her last boyfriend gave her the gift that keeps on giving (i.e., some sort of VD). I get to pass that on like a chain letter.

I've been thinking about this lately because I'm so old (well, to my mind anyway) and the girls I meet are literally girls, between eighteen and some point in their early twenties. Women my own age, around here anyway, are all married to their second or third husband, tied down by a litter of malcontent kids, and somewhere on the wrong side of "letting it all hang out." Plus, I suspect that a lot of them are on meth. You see a lot when you work in the customer-service industry, as I have for most of my working life.

I guess it's just a question of what I want versus what I can get. When all your experiences have been mixed, it's hard to know when you might actually have a shot. I still sometimes make the mistake of thinking just because a girl says "hi" to me that she wants my body (a reasonable assumption, right?). I remember once, when I was working at the Clemson university library, I'm pretty sure an older woman hit on me. If she hadn't reminded me of my grandmother (because when I say "older," I mean "remembers where she was when Kennedy was shot" older), who knows what might have happened? Then again, I could have been misreading the signals.

My options are thus: girls who are younger but not hung-up on any age difference (I'm thirty-one, not seventy-two. If they want to date me, it won't be for my money), women my own age who aren't attached and are looking (harder to find in this area), and crazy old ladies who want to mother me and shower cash on me like I'm some child prostitute that their husband brought back from Thailand (okay, bit of a stretch, but I'm thinking outside the box). I say all this not as a means of generating sympathy or even a pity-whatever (though that would be nice, it would improve my batting average). I'm just tired of meeting the love of my life and then meeting her handsome husband, to paraphrase Alanis Morrisette.

Also, if any rich older ladies see this and are open to it, I can be your boy-toy. I hope you like 'em a little on the love-handles side.

Smile, It's Tuesday

Happy 4th of July...weekend, it's just now July 2nd where I am so I feel a bit premature about yelling "happy 4th of July!" when we're not even there yet. Go figure, I'm a stickler for waiting until the appropriate moment to celebrate our nation's founding.

Well, scratch that: the lamestream media's officially-sanctioned version of events that led to our nation's founding. You know how they distort things, making it sound like we forgot to do anything about abolishing slavery right off the bat, or kept Chinamen from coming over until we needed railroads and were too lazy to build them ourselves. You know, that sort of thing.

American history, when you're an idealistic kid, is a very different animal from what you learn as you get older (assuming you learn anything, what with the condition of American education). When you're a kid, all those guys on the poster that goes around the wall, the dead white guys who are recognizable because some of them are on the money that you have for lunch that day, they seem like nice guys. A little hard to gauge in terms of how much they like to party, but you're guessing that Lincoln would do the Electric Slide while Teddy Roosevelt shot a bear just for the hell of it, and Franklin Pierce would be doing jello shots off Rutherford B. Hayes' facial hair. Maybe you didn't think of such things when you were a kid, and I can't say that I did either. But for the most part, you knew the basic facts about America, and were content.

Then, say, you read about the whole Indian forced-resettlement thing (basically pushing them to the Pacific, until we decided that we wanted that too), everything to do with being black in America (at the lib I used to work at, there was a series of books called "You Wouldn't Want to Be A..." with some historical context, usually like a "Titanic passenger" or "Jamestown colonist." I once suggested "You Wouldn't Want to Be a Black Person in America 1619-1955 or So"), Jewish, Irish, any other kind of "-ish," and sharecropping. A lot of bad shit has gone down under the banner of the Stars and Stripes, people.

But I think that's a good thing, in a way. We're the most powerful nation on earth (well, except for the Chinese), and we're looked up to (well, except for the time that ex-cheerleader was in charge). We have made amends somewhat for some of that bad shit, but we could do more. But I think we'll get there.

We don't need the idealized version of history, the one that says nothing bad ever happened and if it did, it was the pinko liberal homo Commies' fault. We need an honest appraisal of where we've been, what we've done, and what we got right. So this 4th of July, take some time to appreciate the real America, the one that shows up at your barbecue three sheets to the wind and intolerant of the Irish. Because as fucked-up as this America is, he's got some redeeming qualities. He never molested you, right?

Happy Independence Day, bitches!!!