EXT, MURKY DAYLIGHT, ENDLESS CONCRETE PLANE, LONG SHOT. Catapulted SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS INTO THE FUTURE our hero JASPER, white, mid 30s, clean cut, finds himself standing before a colossal, pyramid-shaped MONUMENT 150 meters high. It is the green patina of long weathered copper rich bronze.

Pavement — somehow translucent, showing motion? movement? traffic? beneath — stretches to the horizon on the three visible cardinal points. JASPER can’t see past the MONUMENT. It could the only feature of all the known world.

MEDIUM SHOT Stepping forward on the slightly springy, iridescent concrete? to put a palm on the immovable, cold metal, JASPER can see the MONUMENT’s pattern. The motif resolves itself into 1/4 scale skulls; stacked at 43° to the greening sky.

A MAN, 20ish, looks Finnish, dressed in the monochromatic clothes of a retiree, is somehow disgorged by the pavement, a few feet from JASPER. He steps forward and throws a handful of something semi-visible, glitter-like at the MONUMENT. It makes no sound as it disappears into the metal.

JASPER

Excuse me. What is this?

MAN

(Has gentle accent, vaguely Canadian and Hindu at the same time)

Grain Flats.

JASPER

What?

MAN

What?

JASPER

(Points to the MONUMENT)

MAN

Put when the bounce. Finally.

JASPER

(Shakes his head in confusion)

MAN

After the war.

JASPER

This is a war monument?

MAN

Yeah, no? You okay?

JASPER

What does it mean? The skulls?

MAN

Well, they just guessing. No one’s an idea how many really to the Z.

JASPER

What…? This is meant to be an accurate representation of how many died?

MAN

(Shrugs)

JASPER

…Which war was it?

MAN

World War M.

JASPER

An alphabetic designation. I don’t… Unbelievable.

MAN

What “alphabetic designation?”

JASPER

You know. A, B, C. To M. What does that make it? 13? My God.

MAN

Nothing about the alphabet. It’s Roman numeral.

CUT TO WHITE. WISH IT AWAY. BELIEVE IT’S EVEN POSSIBLE IT MIGHT GO.

Georgie-porgie, pudding-pie, kissed the girls and made them cry.

Every credible study has shown that sexual orientation has no affect on parenting ability. HRC Political Director Winnie Stachelberg

I’ll go one further. I strongly suspect that gay parents aren’t just as good. They’re better.

Most, especially white heterosexuals, have never had to dwell one minute in consideration of their role in society and the world. The level of introspection they are compelled to undertake is all but nill. When you have never spent much time thinking about who you are, and why, and what it all means, you just can’t be as good a parent as someone who has. It won’t take 20 years of research to back me up that gays are generally encouraged by life to undertake a higher than average degree of self-examination.

On the other hand, most people—gay, black, white, striped, or otherwise—are lousy parents anyway. If you’ve never been particularly good at anything in your life, why would you be any better at something as difficult as raising a child?

I guess I’m out of words for calling someone stupid. I am sad.

This guy on the bus this morning was lecturing another guy on the bus this morning about what a mess Arizona is and how when they started it the company wasn’t really doing any Java so of course it was a mess. The guy on the bus telling the other guy what-was-what apparently didn’t start at Amazon till after Arizona’s predecessor, Atlas, was dead and flushed.

Atlas was a monochromatic, multi-million dollar experiment in just how really awful Java can be. 18 months to 22% code complete. 80% user abandonment rate in favor of a quite difficult set of command line tools because the UI was so bad and it was so, so, so slow. Anyone who has the words Amazon and Atlas on his or her resume in the same entry should not be considered for employment anywhere but the DMV. In fact, if the statute of limitations hasn’t passed, you might even consider dropping a dime.

Then on the way home a couple things happened. I didn’t have drinks with Peter Keating. A cop was nice to me. And someone on the bus was reading a book that was about loving life and not being a thief.

Now it’s okay. You’re all safe again. I can even enjoy these phenomenally Anglo enchiladas without getting the least bit upset.

aardvark tongue length.

Ask your mom, sport. She’s a regular zoologist on the topic.

alternate spellings of Mohammed

I’m not sure how to spell it but it’s pronounced: os-wee-pay.

article of prejudice

It’s “the.” Try it yourself. I don’t have a problem with blacks. I don’t have a problem with the blacks.

Barnaby is a stupid name

Ha, ha.

BOURBON AND ANGER

I prefer a beer back but I’ll try it if you recommend it.

alternative word for crack whore

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When should you take a iq test?

Sometimes it’s unnecessary to take an IQ test to get a fair approximation of one’s IQ. For example, if one can’t even use the most basic parts of speech—like articles—correctly, one is surely in the 85-90 zone at best.

can a tiger kill a bear?

A bear, specifically the Kodiak subspecies of brown bear, aka grizzly, can be more than 1,500 pounds of ground shaking muscle.

A tiger, specifically the Siberian subspecies, can be more than 675 pounds of silent death in a fur coat.

So, at first blush you might suspect the bear has the upper hand. But size isn’t always the final arbiter of physical confrontation. Cats are natural born killers with one of the least efficient digestive systems in the animal kingdom specifically because they are so good at killing that they don’t have to worry about how long a meal lasts. Bears on the other hand are more prone to scrapping, and the surreal amount of hot lead that it can take to bring down a Kodiak is well documented.

Unless it’s a large grizzly, my money’s on the tiger. If it is a grizzly, it might go the bear’s way but that will be one sorry ass looking one-eyed gimp bear if it gets out alive.

2004 saw a little over 1.8 million page views for Sedition·com. And, all c-bombs aside, I was on the debate team, I did get a 5.2 GPA the same semester, and the ability to detect irony is most all that separates the wheat from the chaff.

V.

I have to congratulate you. This whole spreading freedom thing really is working out.

Did you know, for example, that you can now buy private property in Vietnam!? I had no idea.

Do you know why? Because they got left the fuck alone till they realized that commerce and ownership is in everyone’s interest. Blah, blah, blah. Bonk, bonk on the head!

I almost went into teaching high school. It’s such an electric time for the mind. They lie about so much then. They don’t tell you how you’re being held back. They don’t tell you that Michelangelo carved the Sistine Pietà before he was 25. That Isaac Newton developed calculus a bit younger than that. What is known so deeply at 16, that life is all but over at 25 and all but gone at 30, isn’t anything but Truth. School, except for that one, sometimes, teacher is nothing but social gelding, graduating social skills enough for Retail or Burgertown.

The emotions without a name in any dirt born language, the intensity, the clarity. I knew at 17 I was smarter than I ever would be again. Every year some sophistication, insight, and control improves, but about the rest, I was right.

School, like all bureaucracy and public works where there is neither punishment for ineptitude nor reward for excellence, gravitates toward the lowest point possible. Of course it’s a waste. Of course they can’t see it. You do. Unless you go ivy league, you’ll see the same or worse at university.

The things I wish I knew then: What’s right is what’s right because it keeps you sane and in self-respect; those are things that matter. Loneliness is always temporary and it’s not the worst thing, by far, in life. Happiness isn’t wrong and it persists past its weaker cousins. The ones who don’t get it don’t matter; you can’t get mad at them, you can’t blame them; they’re not in your way, only you are.

You’re twigging early to it. It’s not fun but it’s good. A lot, I mean most, don’t get it till they’re waist deep in a 30-year mortgage, a fictitious marriage and a stack of babies, with a cheap seat at the cube farm, hair growing in the ears.

I’m not sure why you thought to write me. I’m glad you did. Don’t toss your moment or surrender your clarity. Don’t flinch.

I started a quote database project recently. I’m spending real cash money to get it going. That’s how serious I am. I eat instant macaroni and $2 Vietnamese sandwiches of leftovers on baguettes for lunch to save money but I’m paying editors to gather quotes. Well, “paying” is a bit strong. Money is changing hands though.

I remarked in an email to one of them that I used to write art reviews for The Taos News for a dollar a column inch. I always thought they’d fire me for the unflattering reviews I wrote. There are 120 galleries in a town of 10,000. It isn’t even airport quality. For example, there was a $9,000 painting by Bill Rane in the Taos Inn lobby that looked like it was framed by rolling it in mud and kindling.¹

They semi-fired me after all. They said it wasn’t because I had irritated many millionaires making money by rolling ducking in trash and colored glue but because I write in incomplete sentences. Like Steinbeck. Or Shakespeare.² It’s especially amusing if you’ve read the paper.

Barnaby called majenta unquotable, yet a quote from his entry into issue #8, “Reactionary Fungi,” was the third quote added to the database. Contrary to what Todd Dead White Mountain might have you believe, I’m not a crypto-fascist, however, if it were in my power to physically compel every adult in the temporarily-un-free world to read that essay, I probably would.

Maybe Oscar Wilde could get away with playing the quotable game shamelessly—or maybe he didn’t after all—I can’t. So I must call attention to it. Reverse psychology. Fragmented. Sentence.

I used to make a dollar an inch. I guess for some people that wouldn’t be much but it worked out okay for me.

bioterrorism discussion questions

Were you aware that the plain old 100% natural flu killed at least 20,000,000 (20 million) people less than 90 years ago?

Did you know that 2,000,000 (2 million) children will die this year from diarrhea caused by non-partisan bioweapons like cholera?

Were you aware that more Americans will die of pneumonia in the next month than were killed by terrorists on September 11th, 2001?

Can you think of a way that a can of gasoline can kill more people than a few envelopes full of anthrax? (hint: think Sadie Hawkins and the gym with only one working exit, now add a chain and padlock.)

Did you notice that without any causal biological vectors at all we’ve become trembling sacks of cartilage?

Queries from the Weblog Addressed #1. All topics, questions, &c will come directly from the weblog. The answers will come from Ireland and Kentucky with just a skosh of ergot.

things not to say when firing someone

We’re really looking for someone with a little less melanin.

Your co-workers constantly complain about your huge breasts being distracting.

We’re not letting you go because you stink, but Jesus that odor helped tip the balance.

Severance pay. Blow job. Severance pay. Blow job. Seems like it would be an easy decision, doesn’t it?

Do you hear that? [silence] It’s the sound of the job market shouting out your name.

I have to let you go because your replacement has shown much less aversion to to a blumpkin now and then.

You know, even though the company has broken about 16 Federal statutes this quarter alone, firing you won’t be one of them.

I just have to ask you since you’re leaving: are you like clinically retarded or is it just a bad case of ADD or what?

We have to lay you off because we have too many people in this division. If 3 or 4 of them were to die in an office shooting or something, we’d have room to take you back though.

What do you say to a goodbye pork?

There are a few reasons why I really must insist you stop equating George W Bush with Adolf Hitler. I apologize if it seems like I recently did the same. It was only for the punchline.

It’s offensive.

Hitler was directly responsible for the torture, enslavement, and slaughter of millions of people. He sparked fires that caused the deaths of 10s of millions more. You know how they showed the photos of soldiers killed in Iraq on 60 Minutes? If they showed the dead from WW II, the show would need a name change, say, 12,000 Hours.

Those people didn’t perish to become a convenient metaphor for your crappy little editorial. And as long as there is a single death camp survivor alive, if you say it in front of me, I will be hard pressed to stay out of prison.

It reveals your ignorance of anything that predates Friends.

What did Lyndon Johnson do? Who was the president who also executed a soldier for desertion? How many times did Nixon lose the presidential election? Which party was infamous for voter fraud? Why were the American hostages in Tehran freed?

In 50 more years the 8 that we’re slogging through now will be less memorable than the 15 minutes a pudgy intern spent on her knees.

It’s completely out of scale.

Hitler forced most of the countries of the world into war; from the end of Africa and the depths of Asia to the top of Finland and ’round the Sargaço sea. He altered the world in ways that have taken 60 years to get over and they’re still not gone.

Bush has done a little economic damage. A handful of soldiers above the peacetime norm have died on his watch. He’s been responsible for the deaths of Iraqis approximately equal to 1/6^th of the number his father killed. In short: he’s a total underachiever, nowhere near the league of earth movers like Hitler or even petty pseudo-despots like his dad, Reagan, or Clinton.

Your bullshit, self-centered, Gen-Y hyperbole may pop you a metric-scale stiffy when you say that your crappy Friday night was the Bhopal disaster all over again, but it’s not true and you only feel like it is because you’re a fucking upper middle class sociopath.

Until the Democratic party is abolished or someone you know is executed for a “Fuck Bush” bumper sticker, it’s an exponential difference in scale. Come back to reality where mole-hills are mole-hills.

It undermines salient points.

It makes you an ass-biting coward.

If you really think Bush is as bad as Hitler, or even close, it would be your duty to humanity to stop him. At any price. If you think he’s Hitler and you’re not out at auntie Em’s practicing day and night with a Remington 700 on an empty case of Bud to be ready the next time he’s in your capital, you’re a coward. And you’re not, so you are. Eat the crow and let it go.

It’s only four years and you could have a law degree and a local political office or your own PAC by then if you really care.

Before you spend another 4 years bitching about how smart you are, Ted, let’s review, shall we?

Oh, I think there is plenty of blame to go around.

My whole family loves music. About half of us are musicians to some level of competency. My mother is a classical pianist and a fair folk guitarist. My old man can play some guitar and I guess he played the recorder and this or that at one point. He’s passed playing much but damn if he doesn’t still love music. I’ve seen him shell out several hundred bucks for a single collection. He’s got drawers and drawers full of CDs. A couple nice amplifiers and various media players and speakers. Considering all the vinyl and hardware iterations, just thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars.

I’m a musician. I resist the temptation to put it in quotes as I resist the temptation to prefix it with professional. Either is fair. I’m so far out of the game, it engenders suicidal feelings but I’ve been paid to play and I’ve written several hundred compositions, some of which are, without reservation, excellent.

At the height of my chops I happened to be living at my parents’ house for several weeks. I had just banged out about 20 new tunes, from Sari-el to Nickel Girl with Copper Lips, almost all winners, and was practicing a lot to get ready to start playing in public again, even if it meant solo.

I was at the end of the practice set, playing The Fate of Man on my American made Jackson Soloist over midi tracks of drums, bass, and trumpet, when my old man stepped into the room. He’d been listening and I’d been getting it tight.

He said, “That sounds really good.”

What? Awesome. First nice thing I can remember him saying about anything I’d done in years. The only previous feedback about my music had been, 1) Turn it down, and 2) That’s pretty dark, isn’t it?

He allowed me about 30 seconds to bask in the rays of duodecennial paternal approval before working around to inquire what it was exactly I was planning on doing to make money in life.

Before you trot out the Phyllis Schlafly Strap-On™ to celebrate with a weekend of WASP-style hedonism I’d like to remind you—your memory does seem to be slipping lately—of other entries on Time’s “Person of the Year” roster.

• Yasser Arafat and FW de Klerk
• Ken Starr
• Mikhail Gorbachev
• Deng Xiaoping
• Richard Milhous Nixon
• Teng Hsiao-P’ing (pre transliteration spelling reform)
• Ayatullah Khomeini
• King Faisal
• Joseph Stalin
• Nikita Khrushchev
• Joseph Stalin
• Jeff Bezos
• Adolf Hitler

So, yeah, I do suppose he earned it. First thing he ever did earn.

My “friend” Barnaby, aka CM, is sort of from LA. I say sort of because I don’t like a single damn person who is from LA and I have to mitigate it somehow. I guess the amount he’s not from LA approximates the amount that I like him after all. ANYWAY.

Absolutely everyone in LA is almost famous or better (and none of them walks). Because this is true, Barnaby introduced me to Billy Bob Thornton one night. I’m sorry I didn’t know who he was to become then. It would have been more fun. It was 1990 or so.

To that starlet or pouting aficionado of other people’s children thinking of getting back together with him, I would like to remind you. The night I met him he was all over the 17 year-old exchange student from Rome we were bringing back from the beach with the others. He picked her out of a van full of teenage girls. Stop pretending like you didn’t know it before I told you.

Newly updated! Your fun and easy guide to wholesale destruction!
Building Nuclear Weapons for Dummies (Expanded from 2001 Edition)
Fissile starter kit include 100g each! U²³⁵ & Pu²³⁹.

New in this edition!
† Materials enrichment on a shoestring.
† Radiological devices without critical mass.
† Expanded index of poorly guarded US nuclear facilities.

Rats may, and often do, climb into warm car engines on windy winter nights if you are unwilling to litter your house, yard, and watershed with diphacinone, brodifacoum, and warfarin. Anyone familiar with rodents knows the ro to the dent means those bastards have to chew constantly to keep their perpetual ivory machine from self-destruction.

While strictly speaking there is nothing edible in an automotive engine, there are plenty of plastic parts and wires to chew on. Apparently many of them have something to do with making a car start in the morning.

Bus poetry. Always alliterated anti-climatically. Blow me.

But really. No change, had to walk to get change. Sidewalk past offramp funnels one into a dark, urine soaked corridor not wide enough to entertain an umbrella. 100 feet of street lamp free no loitering signage between the Alaskan Way and the cyclone fence protecting the shipyard’s 0.5% inspected containers from political ad hominems punctuated radiologically.

But really! A blow job in that space?! Stinking so badly of the rain catalyzed piss of 150 different men that my R-complex sent my hand rooting for a firearm no longer inhabiting that pocket; missing for the permit is 13 months expired. Rolled up umbrella almost an arnis stick. Hold your breath and swim for it.

Walking past them, barely enough room to avoid brushing. Him looking up past me with a remarkably disinterested face. Somehow able to avoid eye contact even when my eyes break his line of vision. And him, on knees, bent further still b/c the customer wasn’t a tall man. Spaced face waiting for an order to be filled, or for the pleasure to drown the stench of competing pheromones.

Barely enough room to avoid brushing. What has happened to etiquette in this country?

Sex, especially public sex, really should have rules. The wife and I established the following and I beg you to consider them as well.

• Not with the good silver.
• Never in a graveyard; excepting Halloween.
• In hotel and restaurant kitchens, use hairnets.
• No sex in the same room as the Pope, even if he’s asleep.
• Check the elevator timing before going for it.
• Do a spot test with all new substances on a small patch of skin before the full application.
• Know your state laws and their loopholes: e.g., most live animals are illegal.
• 3 or 4 hours indoors is fantastic, 3 or 4 hours in the noon sun is a trip to the ER.
• Keep the help out of it (unless they’re on the way out).
• 115° is exciting, 150° is dangerous.
• Don’t tell the cops you’d really prefer to finish up before talking with them further.
• Organic fruit is healthier.
• Someone has to watch the road; flip a coin if you have to.
• If it can get lost, it will get lost. Tie a string or a 20lb test to it.

Now please try to enjoy yourself with a similar level of decorum.

great dream campus. the one with the sunken steps that’s off sort of by itself with the trees on the opposite end from the dorms. the building itself is one long, large hallway (taller than wide) with large rooms full of expensive furniture off it all the way from end to end.

there are also doctors’ offices on this campus (a medical annex) that remind me of the police building from UNM (while i was there, not the new one).

the house was also like the dream harvard house with the large basement where i’d lived on both levels at one point or another.

in the house (seeming smaller than usual and quite dark—it was dark) i was sitting with someone having a conversation or some food. there was a woman in the other room (i couldn’t see her, only heard her) playing meaty kashian music on an acoustic stringed instrument. the sensation of hearing it was like hearing in hallucination. it was loud and the tone of the instrument was thinner than an acoustic guitar would be and it should have been quieter too but it was extremely loud in my ears. from the inside of my ears.

the person i was with told me to go talk to her. i went and sat on a couch opposite her with a coffee table between us. the instrument was pretty. it looked like a cross between a mongolion instrument and a banjo but it was made of dark wood. the neck was not wide. she was amazing on it and played for only 3-4 seconds after i sat down. i remember thinking that it was polite she stopped right away to talk with me. and that i wouldn’t have stopped if i were playing that same music.

she had bangs cut in her jet black hair. she looked like a cross between helena bonham carter and that thin pretty brunette that’s always in mammet movies. her eyes were lined but i didn’t notice any other makeup. she was pale in the dark. her voice was pleasant and entirely american.

she was trying to console me for someone’s death, i think. i wasn’t sure. i just knew that someone was going to try to facilitate some tears and i didn’t feel like crying. i expected maudlin or heavy handed tales but she started to tell me about an after hours raid on a dairy queen, presumably led by the person who had died.

her story telling was in prose poetry. easy to listen to but you had to concentrate to get a story out of it. they broke into the dairy queen and someone wanted a chocolate drink and this was very funny for some reason b/c they only had chocolate syrup and it was cold anyway. the tone of a dairy queen raid in place of a “we-will-all-miss-him” was not silly at all in the dream. it was serious and beautiful and i found i couldn’t concentrate on her words b/c i was concentrating on not letting her open my emotions like so many poorly sealed tupperware containers.

Image/post removed at the very polite request of Ms Graves.

Arafat is dead. Don’t think about it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t bother about it.

You have a few minutes that you wanted to do so? Talk about this man instead: Anwar Sadat [more].

Where Arafat was a murderer, Sadat was a soldier. Where Arafat was a terrorist, Sadat was military commander. Where Arafat was a duplicitous toady, Sadat was an imprisoned freedom fighter. Where Arafat was a thief, Sadat was a reformer. Where Arafat was revered by every human swine who ever blew up a Jewish school bus, Sadat was assassinated by the very same because he deserved his Peace Prize.

You have a few minutes that you want to spend discussing what would make the world better? What could possibly solve the problems between Arabs and Jews?

Spend your time reflecting on a Muslim leader who did just that. Don’t waste your breath on a corpse that’s finally out of the way.

EXT, AFTERNOON DAYLIGHT, PARK, MEDIUM SHOT. A husband, JIM, 40, handsome, athletic, clean shaven, sits on a picnic blanket with his wife, DORRIS. She is blond, 40 but looks 50, or maybe 55, probably was really good looking once.

JIM is wearing a pale blue Oxford, open to his chest. DORRIS has on a tennis bracelet with about 50 carats of pure DeBeers. The picnic spread is crystal and silver.

DORRIS

(Handing Jim a glass of zinfandel.)

I noticed Jim wasn’t looking at me the same way anymore.

JIM

I know relationships have their ups and downs. But, I mean, I love being married to my wife…

LONGSHOT. Visible now is a Rolls Royce limosine, a mini-buffet, and a beautiful 19 year-old Latina, CARMELA, in a maid’s uniform tending a silver chafing dish.

JIM

It was time to face facts. I hadn’t had a natural erection in the nude company of my wife for 10 years and the amyl nitrate was starting to do me harm.

DORRIS

(Setting her wine glass down.)

Without putting too fine a point on it, I reminded Jim that his prenuptual agreement would come into play if he didn’t start holding up his end of the marriage.

CLOSE UP of CARMELA, blushing and looking away.

JIM

So, I asked my doctor about Viagra.

ZOOM OUT, EXTREME LONG SHOT of the picnic party. They are on the most beautiful hilltop imaginable. Birds chirp in the background, the sun is starting to set and the deepening cerulean sky is shot with rays of pink and green. The world is supremely beautiful.

NARRATOR (VOICE OVER)

You don’t have to find her attractive. You don’t have to be in love. You don’t even need the desire to lay her. You just need one little blue pill. Ask your doctor about it today.

FADE OUT from TITLE CARDS and DISCLAIMER.

I don’t care if I forgot your birthday again, I’m still your friend.

#10, You don’t know what’s important—you better figure it out.

The things you think you want, you might not. The things you think are important to you, they probably aren’t. The trick in life is twigging to it early enough to have the time for the knowledge to be useful.

Go see “Fight Club.” On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. You’re going to be dead any day; maybe today. Find out what’s important, to you, and don’t let it go.

#9, Love and sex overlap but they are not the same thing.

No moral judgement or high horsery. Just learn it. You will thank me someday.

#8, Don’t be sloppy with your guns.

We all have to destroy now and then in life. Whether it’s firing someone, breaking up, putting a suffering pet to sleep, ratting out a friend to save him from ODing, whatever. Pain is a given. Less pain is what you are shooting for. Shoot straight.

#8.1, Just break up.

When it’s time, just break up. Don’t call again. Don’t write more. Don’t think about the things you could have said. Just break the fuck up.

It doesn’t matter who did what to whom or why or when or even how many times while whoever was watching. It means fuck all in the end.

The things that normally sane and thoughtful people will do to each other while on The Outs are horrifying, humiliating, and can be life changing in long-term, crippling ways.

#7, Common sense is more important than formal education.

#7.1, Don’t believe anything that can’t be shown.

Contrary to what PT Barnum prompted David Hannum to say, there is not a sucker born every minute. There are 210 suckers born every minute. If it sounds too good to be true, it’s not true. Eg, the cutting of a single Lamb’s throat to save every child molester since Eve went down on Cain is neither a reasonable nor a demonstrable proposition. And therefore:

#7.2, Organized religion is wrong and it’s okay to say so.

There is not one impartially documented miracle in history. No one is born knowing God. You get a certain flavor forced down your throat like a communion rape. There are 100 religions out there and most of them say that the devotées of all the others are going to Hell. Do you believe in God? The odds that you’ve picked the wrong one are 99:1. Because you’ve never been out of Shitburg, GA you don’t know that there are other religions and that Christians are, at most, 30% of the world. Or that half the Christians think the other half are going to Hell too. I’m an atheist and I think Catholics go to Hell.

There is a powerful and important place in the minds of men that religion inhabits but the Host that grows there by dogmatic decree is cancerous; eroding the ability to be responsible for yourself; eroding thought; eroding ethics; eroding common sense.

#6, Be nice.

Do it for yourself—not them. Back-stabbing wins battles but it loses allies and therefore wars. Aggressiveness opens doors but it closes and draws the bolt on two for every one it opens.

Nice guys don’t always finish first but they don’t usually have to move or change a flat without help either. You will attract people in your life who are like you. There’s no way around it. Being an asshole may well generate friends, but they’ll be unreliable assholes too.

#5, Pain is not an illusion.

Saying that pain is an illusion is on the face a way to embolden and calm oneself against awful experiences, but it’s dangerously dismissive of something that exists to improve and protect us: pain.

#5.1, Pain without dignity is not heroic.

Being a victim does not make you a hero and it doesn’t mean you deserve a book deal with HarperCollins. It’s too bad that happened to you but quit acting like you deserve a door prize for it.

#4, War is Hell but Politics is the Devil Hisself.

Before you don a beret and grow a goatée, learn some history. From the opening skirmish of the Peloponnesian War to those killed in Persia yesterday, war has been fairly constant and has ended at least 50,000,000 lives. Politics, however, has been completely constant and in just the last 100 years governments have been directly responsible for the deaths of 170,000,000 of their own citizens.

#3, Mind your own business.

Don’t play match-maker, don’t play couples-counselor, don’t bank roll friends, don’t make job referrals, don’t talk about personal issues with strangers. You might think this sounds unfriendly, but the opposite is true. Keeping your nose out of others’ asses is the Mile 1 marker to Real Friendship.

#3.1, Bust in when it matters.

Rarely, really rarely, you should get involved and be in the middle. If you find you’ve done this more than 2 or 3 times in your whole life, back up to “Mind your own business” until you get the hang of that.

#2, Own up to it.

Taking responsibility is the only thing that will make you strong. It’s the only thing you can count on not to let you down for good. It’s the only thing standing in your way.

#2.1, Being selfish isn’t just okay, it’s right.

Selfish doesn’t mean you want a new car to impress the chicks. Get it? If you want the new car to impress them, the reason you want it isn’t selfish. It’s the opposite. You want it for someone else.

The things we really want for ourselves tend to be much healthier. And if you aren’t taking care of yourself, you’re useless to everyone else anyway.

#2.2, You’re going to be wrong.

Don’t make asinine stands just because your feelings got hurt. Pretending you weren’t wrong will not make you right. It just makes you a joke.

You want to be right so bad? Try this: I was wrong.

#1, Ignorance is weakness and suffering.

Learn the fables. The grasshopper was an ignorant fuck who had a great time till lay-offs came around. Fortune comes into it and some are paid more or less than they earn but most get pretty much exactly what they deserve out of life. What did you do today to make your life better? Unless you’re on the way to bed, you still have a piece to try for. It’s in your power to improve your mind right now. Everything you do to make yourself better makes the world better for it.