My peer group – for the most part – is a well-washed mass of royalty. Or, rather, anticipated royalty. Chris Ott at Shallow Rewards puts it best:

Our parents dreamt of doing lots of things and didn’t, dousing their desires to make sure we could explore ours more fully. The working at gas stations and walking miles in the snow…many of our parents had to supplement their family’s income, and wanted better

Ultimately, our parents’ drive to deliver a better childhood is proving a mistake, if a well-intentioned one. We are a generation embarrassed to have day jobs, embarrassed to work for a living. Embarrassed not to be kings and queens.

Ott acknowledges the myth that this wasn’t basically true of our parents’ generation as well. His implicit solution is to work a tolerable job and save your passion for your free time. Here’s where I disagree. While I appreciate the sentiment and the notion that most kids my age should just get over themselves, I take issue with the one-size-fits-all solution. Some people are legitimately depressed by their 9 to 5 jobs, and it seems like a format for living that better serves fictional economic bodies rather than individuals.

I read about a study once that said the average U.S. employee works more hours than anywhere else in the world, but the amount of work accomplished with each additional hour was the lowest. In other words, our attitude towards work keeps us at the office longer with the least amount of payoff. When you have an arbitrary standard of 40 hours a week, you get people extending 30 hours of work unnecessarily. And I would wager that the increased employee dissatisfaction plays a role in productivity as well.

I can understand why the work week was structured the way it is, but it’s one specific solution to an organizational problem that is perhaps outdated. The drive to maximize one’s earning torque doesn’t work for a lot of people. And for that segment of the population there are socialist pipe dreams. In my view, we should be looking back upon this time a hundred years from now and putting this labor schedule on a level analogous to how we view serfdom now. It’s simply an inefficient system for any civic goals you may have. The only realm in which it makes sense is one driven by bureaucracy rather than populism.

And so I think Ott’s solution is flawed. I think that the king syndrome is the product of our fucked up view towards work and leisure, and the problems of polarizing one’s life into those two categories in the first place. We shouldn’t think that we’re special, but we should acknowledge that we are unique. And rather than having a market economy – which is not a level playing field by any stretch of the imagination – create a variety of life paths that so that you can choose how best your talents serve consumers, we should have a system that takes care of economic necessities while allowing for the diversity of human experience.

Fruity, I know. But I’m sick of most people getting nothing just so everyone can entertain the illusion that they could have everything.

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The disturbing thought arrived whilst in the midst of a whiskey shit. Carrying me mercifully away from love’s labor lost was this head scratcher, imprinted as the sole English text on a package of Chinese toilet paper: “Mind act upon mind.” A redundant and misleading statement within the context of Buddhist thought, the phrase is a succinct, grammatically incorrect reiteration of phenomenology’s central thesis.

Was this foresight and kindness on the part of the toilet paper’s manufacturers? Subtle Communist propaganda designed to undermine our way of life? A mental fabrication elicited by William Grant? Whether or not this statement is a message of hope or despair most likely rests with the individual.

Equally unnerving is the slim blue can of Gatsby brand shaving cream, perched on my sink and also visible from my toilet. The identity issues raised by a grooming product named for a character that was little more than a winning smile are further complicated by this apparent mocking indictment of metrosexuality: “For men who want to keep the skin feeling healthy and fresh.”

Go ahead, you straw man pansy, shave up.

In news outside of my bathroom, a Russian spy was poisoned to death in London, representing the second incidence of an unnecessarily complicated Russian spy assassination carried out in the UK. First it was ricin-loaded umbrellas, now the radioactive substance polonium 210. Next they’re going to be tricking ex-agents into eating shellfish during the summer red tide or mixing diamond powder into their cocaine.

The British police seem to be doing their usual miraculously good job–aided perhaps by their terrifyingly ubiquitous surveillance systems. Whatever the case, their work truly deserves praise, especially compared with that of their American counterparts. From investigative effecicacy, discretion in releasing frightening information, and most relevant this week, restraint in using force, our law enforcement agencies really don’t stack up to those across the pond.

While the London guard was tracking down radiation in sushi restaurants and in general finding needles in haystacks, the NYPD–in an operation akin to taking black off of coal–was busy trying to prevent people from purchasing sex and drugs at a strip club. The operation was appartently prompted by spates of violence against ladies of the night and the normally clean-cut, church-attending strip club crowd’s disturbing upward trend towards drug abuse.

Of course, because current laws make these social problems crimes, it is in the interest of justice system bureaucrats to “sting” those involved, rather than have their law-enforcement officers stand around in uniforms and make sure no one gets hurt at the party.

The net effect of this situation is that rather than the sleazy-but-safe red-light and head shop district of Amsterdam, New York and its environs have a sleazy-and-dangerous flavor everywhere you find big-people fun for sale.

While carrying out their work in this nerve-wracking environment, five of the seven undercover officers tasked with getting drug-addicted and poverty-stricken hookers arrested and put in jail got jumpy and murdered an unarmed man and bady wounded some of his friends.

Calling this incident a law-enforment or racial problem is a bit off the mark. Law enforcement problems are what they have in Oaxaca and throughout Brazil (or in Atlantic City, where dead hookers can lie next to the road undiscovered for weeks). Racial problems have nothing to do with Michael Richards or the NYPD and everything to do with unfair distribution of Pell grants or indifference to Sudan.

The rub is that if those officers had been in uniform, the fight that sent the groom out to his car for the imaginary gun would likely not have escalated to that point.

Both Richards and those New York officers made terrible decisions in the heat of the moment, but maybe they couldn’t have done anything else. Phenomenology argues that one’s experience is the only reality, a stance used both to exempt one from personal responsibility and to put it squarely on one’s shoulders.

I will go ahead and have my cake and eat it too and say that I think both tacks are correct. I think crime of passion laws are on the books in some places for the simple reason that sometimes circumstances drive people crazy.

Consider the various massacres involving US troops in Iraq. There are two groups at fault, one of which is made up of the most powerful people on earth, attended to as though they were Formula One cars, and the other is the boots on the ground, typically filled with 18-year-old kids from poor towns thrust into a hell-on-earth situation that never should have existed in the first place.

I would more readily blame those in power, who are old enough to have seen Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now and who really ought to know better.

So Michael Richards and Mayor Bloomberg are making the rounds of ministers and offering their apologies, while little is done to correct the underlying causes of either incident.

It’s only been three weeks since the Democrats regained some power, and it’s already starting to feel like the Clinton years.

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In response to not having a computer I tried to write something in a notebook with the intention of working on whatever ideas landed on the page at a computer later… Instead I had a quickly written rant with no opportunity to tease out ideas or thoughts and the night I thought I might spend a little company time looking around the internet to help flesh things out a bit my manager walked in the room snooping which, obviously, ruined the thought… So instead we have yet another overly emotional, from the hip rant about nothing in particular but transcribed from a notebook and written as quickly as possible on a lunch break in a coffee shop after the girl working there showed me her fucked up wrist she injured in the Odwalla cooler the night before:

Ain’t nothing to do– the traditional rallying cry for bored teenagers, reaction against the frustrations and powerlessness of youth… A million nights of drinking and drugs, thousands of bands, hundreds of fanzines all sprang forth from one shared sensation… We stayed up til’ dawn watching horror movies or playing the same songs over and over again in the motorcycle shop… The Dead Boys beat up hippies and knocked old men down…

In recent weeks I’ve attempted to corrale countless friends into a variety of the traditional activities which were once born from boredom and frustration, but phoned inqueries– what’re y’doing?– no longer find the answer of ‘nothing’… Now people have to wake up early for work, or stay home studying for school or are just too tired to contemplate anything beyond microwaving a meal and watching television… Guess we’ve gotten older and things to do have been found…

Must be a natural progression, through the phases documented by films and books… Hormones run rampant for a couple of years and everyone’s nuts, acting out and picking through their obsessions… Then it’s time to mature, time to go to college and so the band breaks up, the zine doesn’t seem important anymore and another form of acting out and picking through obsessions ensues… By the time we’ve been suitably groomed for entering the work-force the bands and zines have been whittled down to almost nothing, property of the immature and disconnected… Sure, you can set aside a little time on the weekend to pursue your former ambitions or passions or whatever’s less embarassing a term, maybe take a class one night and if you’re up for it you can catch a movie Friday night: but these are now hobbies, not what you do… These things no longer define or identify you…

The flexibility is gone, we have our obligations and we have our schedules… If you’re lucky you enjoy your job– there’s a sense of accomplishment and a sense of worth resulting from every eight hour day… Most people find their way to places that aren’t so bad– the work isn’t terribly demanding, the co-workers are nice enough and the money’s pretty good… You get up and you spend an hour getting ready, an hour going to work, an hour for lunch, and hour to go home, an hour dealing with dinner, an hour trying to relax and an hour trying to fall asleep…

Maybe one day you’ll have a family and a 30-year mortgage… A trip to Europe, a family vacation to Disneyland, a big screen TV and a car… Your sense of what’s going on will become informed by product placement and labor day sales at Macy’s or whatever Junior’s demanding for pulling a straight B average… Maybe one day while cleaning out the attic you’ll come across an old shoebox with that tape your old band recorded, a copy of that zine you used to do, a reel of Super 8– God how embarassing… Maybe you’ll remember people you haven’t seen or even thought about for years and smile, or feel a little sad, or feel a little angry, or feel a little proud or even a little stupid… But you carefully put the lid back on the box and dig around further looking for the fucking Christmas lights…

Well, there’s always your mid-life crisis to look forward to…

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I’m writing this from underneath my desk, with a sheet draped over the sides and my hands locked behind my head. I don’t know (read: care) if you guys are alive out there, but I’ll post just in case.

Is there any country – or even somewhat curious individual – that doesn’t have nuclear weapons at this point? I think there was a long-range warhead down by the trash cans for my apartment yesterday but when I went back to get it (after thinking it over: Do I really need one?) it was gone. Easy come, easy go.

North Korea’s looking to make up for their first embarrassingly wussy test of nuclear arms with a second that they promise will be much more Hollywood. Now anyone who’s anyone in world politics must have apocalyptic power if they want to sit at the cool table. Welcome to the club N. Korea, we always knew we liked you.

I’m pretty sure this exact scenario was brought up at the model UN at my high school, and even with the pugnacious single-mindedness of Acne McFannypack playing N. Korea and the rest of us half-paying attention, we still managed to diffuse the situation during 5th period. No, I know, I regret even making the comparison. It’s just too mind-bogglingly complex and forboding a situation to do anything else but make jokes.

Meanwhile, I feel like this news has fallen upon terror-numb ears. The noise floor of anxiety these days is so high not even a nuclear test by an insane dictator can spike out of it. It’s been all over the news and most people I know are effectively ignoring it. And good for them, I suggest the same if you can manage.

How long did the end of the Cold War last again? I hope you all made the most of those 14 years cuz here we go again. Personally, I feel like I wasted a large portion of them just understanding what the Cold War was in the naive thought that knowledge would prevent it from happening again. So many things I could have smoked instead!

Well now I’m making up for lost time and plan to spend the entire Iran War and obliteration of Japan in a stupor of pills and Humphrey Bogart films.

But honestly, I don’t think it’s pessimistic or alarmist at this point to say that we live in heavier times than I ever thought we would face, and I would encourage everyone who reads this blog at all to write and be heard and devote yourself to producing something for the rest of the world to hear. There are too many voiceless people across the world for us to throw away the opportunities of communication that are literally at our fingertips. It doesn’t have to be profound or even relevant, just expressive. I’m getting the feeling that if you don’t decide to risk something for yourself, it will be risked for you and on someone elses terms.

I don’t want to spend the next however many years cowering under a desk worrrying silently to myself. There’s only room under here for one or two more people and all I brought are some triscuits and easy cheese.

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If I’m not careful, one of these days I’m going to join a cult. I got about ten minutes into What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? before something seemed a little fishy. I paused the movie and did a little research and bam. What I thought was going to be a passively eye-opening brain-fest is some recruitment video for a faith led by a 35,000 year-old warrior named Ramtha.

The film basically makes unsubstantiated claims regarding quantum physics and spirituality that are presented as fact, and satisfactorily lead us to believe that we can manifest our world through positive thinking.

It’s tempting to believe that reality is simply a manifestation of our thoughts, because we can control our thoughts right? And it’s easy to bend the unanswered questions of quantum physics to be evidence of that conclusion, because it’s a blank canvas for your imagination with no real danger of being disproved. This in itself is relatively harmless. The real problem comes from a polarization of outcomes.

People like myself want to believe that these claims are true so much, that once you find out it’s a new age sect (read: cult), the spell of fantasy melding with reality is broken. I find myself hanging in the balance of despair at the thought that any fantasy is impossible in the face of accepting these facts. It’s my speculation that an inability to reconcile or cope with these feelings leads some people to move in the opposite direction and seek out even more fantastic claims that are so unbelievable, they must be true.

The consolation – and in fact what I believe to be a superior solution – is that the mystical or spiritual can be seen in very concrete examples. I’m constantly astounded by the wealth of information constantly flowing before our eyes, and all we have to do is reach out our fingers and watch it bend around our hands. Indeed, if you’ve ever shown someone how to email a photo who has relatively little knowledge of the internet, it can seem like magic to them. I’m not sure that it isn’t. I think that the explanation of something gives it power rather than taking it away. Is a space shuttle trip to the moon more amazing before or after you learn how scientists did it?

I’m surprised that the rise of the internet hasn’t heralded a mysticism of its own. Or perhaps it has and I’ve just never seen it that way. Or maybe the average person doesn’t know enough about how it works to appreciate how unknowable it is. It’s the realization that you’ll never read all the books in the world times a million.

Blogging can be seen as being a conduit for this unknowable stream; a network of priests preaching the gospel to those who will listen. Only this time it’s not abstract, you can see it, and it will answer your questions. Spam bots are creating other spam bots, and the net as organism is building its own anti-viruses. There are too many autonomous entities existing solely in cyberspace to name and they’re growing on a daily basis. Worlds within worlds.

At least this is my protection against the various cults out there. If I suddenly disappear you’ll know that I’ve found the truth and it’s not in books or the net, but actually purchaseable for ever increasing amounts right here in San Francisco.

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