Tales From North Platte

I'll be here until  Sunday.  What the social life in this town is like these days I don't know.  It's shit cold at night and I haven't even considered stepping out.  I would guess that there's still a great deal of macho posturing and alcohol/meth intoxication that often leads to nasty fights, but like I said I don't know.  Thankfully this town does have its very own tabloid in spite of its size so that you can know who's being arrested for this or that almost as soon as it happens, from anywhere in the world.   It's tawdry yes, but if you saw the television news here (I believe that this is something like the second smallest town in the US with a major network affiliate)  you would agree that there truly is not anything else of interest that happens here.  You won't find me in the blotter though.  I'm staying in, like I said.  By day I gorge on Christmas candy and cheap coffee.  By day I gorge on Game of Thrones and 'Blue State' bourbon gotten for half price from the City Discount Liquor  .  It's a good life, though certainly a  comatose one and improper to maintain for any great length of time.  I'm happy. 

I Don't Hear Much About Youth Culture Anymore.

Apparently these guys are a big deal? 

I no longer feel the same passionate,  faintly homophobic hate crush for boy bands that I felt towards the N'Sync and The Backstreet Boys as a youngun,  but I still dislike and distrust them rather deeply.  I've always sensed a faintly totalitarian smell about them   And now here comes this outfit who willingly call themselves .... well, if you take away the Pakistani kid it would just be four uniformly blue-eyed Anglos calling themselves 'One Direction." right? Can you imagine the fuss there'd be if some Rammsteinesque Teutonic metal band had a name like that?  People would be fucking appalled and rightfully so.  These little junior-mint stormtroopers are no less horrifying. 

This is What I Bought My Stepfather For Christmas

He loves it with utmost sincerity. 

Children's Cartoons on the Eve

Would it be proper to explain to small children just how brutal of a Hobbesian murder hell existence would be if everything alive were endowed with human level intelligence?  Is Charlotte's Web in particular part of the War on Christmas, an act of secret Kosher/Halal propaganda?   Here in the rural US anyway the greatness of that tale is taught to us as a matter of objective fact, just like Shakespeare.  If it were indeed revealed to be an act of foreign subversion this whole time everyone's belief in everything would be completely broken.  Pity that. 

Christmastime New Now

I made the drive from Lincoln to North Platte, Ne for the Holiday just today. There was a blizzard on Wednesday, and the slow lane on westbound interstate 80, the one furthest from the Southern Hemisphere's sun, was still covered with ice that had stuck fast even after plowing, so that from Lincoln to Grand Island cars formed a giant snake in the fast lane, crawling at abouts thirty mph while trying to keep a grip on the road and avoid being the cause of a pileup.  Sometimes one of us would attempt to pass when the congested lane slowed to near nothing, turning into the frozen lane and rolling at about 25 until we once again found a space in the safer lane.  After Grand Island it was past noon and temperatures rose to just above freezing.  This thawed the ice and improved driving conditions to near-normal.  Still what is normally a three hour drive took me six this time, and damned if I didn't make it motherfucker!  Grinding my way past yet untidied pileups and overturned semis so completely shredded that their drivers must surely be dead.  Terrible shame for them, but I'm afraid it doesn't stop me from feeling a little......

........... about myself.  I realize it would have been a lot smarter to wait until afternoon before leaving.  I probably would have reached the folks place at nearly the same time and would have spared myself all the danger and stress I've gone through today.  All the same though...

I especially remember this woman in a Honda van who came up behind me during the hazardous stretch.  She tried tailgate goad me into speeding up and when this failed she got into the frozen lane to pass me by at about forty MPH or so.  As she passed me I noticed that she was listening to an I pod,  with several children in the back and Georgia license plates.  So yeah, a woman from the land where no one knows what ice is blindly rolling on the autopilot assumption that freeway = fast while her children slept peacefully in the back.  I never saw her van in the ditch as I carried on so; they got lucky. 

What I Want To Know Is

Yes, the suggestion that one cannot be a man without owning a lethal weapon is offensive.  (Not that I don't have that covered anyway.  I do own a car, thank you very much, as well as several dozen batteries and several dozen socks with which they could be easily combined.  )  But what's really strange to me is why Bushmaster chooses to advertise its own product by depicting a giant snake who has swallowed a Bushmaster whole and is now laughing at how easily it triumphed over its already digested owner. 

I Have a Pretty Consistant Way With My Coffee

Normally the level of sugar I put in a cup will rise and fall with the warmth of a given day.  In the cold season I take it completely black, mostly.  This morning however I awoke with a strange need to be coddled, so I filled my cup with three sugars even though a storm is coming and it's already damp.  Then I spent several hours drinking more while dressed in a sweater & socks sans underwear or pants, covering myself with a blanket while I looked out the window at the languidness of winter life.   This urge to be pampered is rare like I said but when it does come it has only ever been myself who has been able to satisfy it.  As a show of affection from someone else it simply carries too much weight, a presumption of the intimacy I have always despised.  The most ecstatic moments of my life have always come when I've had these long allotment of hours to myself, a feeling of wonder lightness and joy in being that I am not niether able or willing to share with another in any capacity.    I cannot now imagine any comfort in family, sexual partners or any other varient of 'US' that would ever be worth the cost of losing these times.  It pleases me to see the noise grime and fetid fecundity of Summer be gradually overwhelmed by the proper order of things. I am a Northerner. 

I'm going to Go ahead and Go Full Hippie Here

I would even go so far as to say that the behavior of the USA's most famous strain of culture cancer towards the nation of Mexico has been downright rapish, and that this may perhaps be something to keep in mind the next time you're feeling grumpy about a street sign or storefront that happens to be written in Spanish.  They do have a full compliment of Burger Kings' Radio Shacks and Starbucks too ya know.

Hey, I know You!

Didn't you used to be the world's oldest person?


To change the subject to something slightly more substantial, soccer, the World Club Cup is undeniably the real deal now.   Not that fans of the European 'Great Clubs' and Occicentrists in general won't try to deny it, all the same.  There is, to be sure, an attitude within this game similar to one of the many things that are quickly poisoning myself against college football.  This can be best described as a cowpox echo of racism. Call it 'Leagueism' or 'Great Club/Program ism', a feeling that the Great Teams from the True Elite Leagues are always and forever better as a matter of essence, even in those years when the small fish prove that this isn't so on the field.  But then the fat cats are only able to get away with this because of the worldwide army of whores, myself included, who mostly ignore our own 'small time' national leagues in favor of fucking the European stars. 

Now, having said all that, I'm afraid that Corinthians' extremely blah performance in their own national league means that I won't be able to promote them very much in the following poll.  No one can honestly deny that leagues are more scientific than cups and one does have to judge a team's entire resume if they aim to judge it properly. You would agree? 

1. Barcelona
2. Juventus
3. Manchester United
4. Bayern Munich
5. Corinthians
6. Porto
7. Real Madrid
8. Paris St. Germain
9. Shakhtar Donetsk
10. Dortmund


Contenders.  Velez Sarsfield, Inter Milan, Manchester City, Lyon

Well

I suppose this was fucking predictible. 

I remember in the days after Columbine there was a sign somewhat in vogue around real American parts.  'Dear God why didn't you save the school Children at Columbine? '  'Sorry, I'm not allowed in schools.'   Truly, there is no more effective advertisment for the God of Abraham then to portray him as meglomaniac demanding constant flattery on pain of death.  The last place I saw the sign was at a hair stylest in downtown North Platte while I was a teenager.  I remember that while she chopped my mane she talking with another customer about the obvious utility and moral rightness of spanking ones' children, and how terrible it was that the PC bureaucrats were taking this good and neccesary power out of parents hands.  Of course the actual truth is that it is known; not believed, not softly felt, but indisputibly known, that spanking is of absolutely no help in building a succesful adult. But of course the problem with accepting this would mean not only accepting ones own self as wrong but ones own parents grandparents and on down through the mists of time as wrong.  And of course suggesting that grandpa can possibly be wrong earns a spanking.  But anyway let's return to the central point. 

I think that the loong insistance upon public school prayer, (Rapidly on the wane now though it is, and thankfully so.) can be easily related to today's NYT    column about how we seek second-hand immortality through group identities.  Passing down one's beliefs to the next generation, by force as some feel entitled to do, is obviously a big part of this, and of course it's very obvious that religious beliefs are more closely associated with eternity than secular ones, at least for those who haven't convinvced themselves that the two can be mingled in one perfect bloc of certainty.  It is clear that the denial of ultimate mortality and helplessness ishe spine of  chauvinistic attitudes and behaviors.  However abhorant these behaviors can sometimes be they are still based on recognizably human feelings that normaly should be sympethized with.  In the case of forcing ones' religion on the public however I can and will not sympethize. The reason is that for all the language of selfless devotion to God and the Founding Fathers behind it the forcing of ones' religion is really about aggrandizing oneself and nothing more. It is about establishing oneself as a God that future generations will bow to in unquestioning fear. It is evil.

Jesus

If nothing else, I am really in no Goddamn mood to hear about if only the teachers and/or young children had been armed like all Americans constantly were in the golden age of the True Path.  Beyond the guns there is nothing particularly wicked about US culture that leads to these things.  There have been psychopathic killing sprees in China, Europe or any other place you can think of.  One cultural factor in all of these places might be the patriarchial pressure upon frustrated men to be ; exceptional &decisive factors upon their own social environments.  Even now in the immediate aftermath I can not stop myself from trying to analyze and comprehend in my own way, which I suppose makes me typical.  Mostly though I am only heartbroken and sick.  If you are one of those who thinks that praying for the victims would be of any help then do so, absolutely.   I'm just sick myself.  I don't know what to do except to feel helpless and fucking sick.  god damnit.

Something New Everyday

I had no idea that it Lindsey Buckingham was the one who did the 'National Lampoon Vacation' song.  Learning that just now gives me a very real trivia orgasm.  I'm more susceptible to those things than most other people. 

For some reason, the video is jarringly self-important in comparision to the film.  The water, I think, is about the best case of faux-symbolism one can ever hope to find, unless I missed some elaborate joke here in my half-paying attention. 

Well I'll be Damned, is This really Happening Then?

I'm looking forward to the radical postmodern anti-Defense Department already.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves. 

I do Believe It's Late Enough

for even the timid to post a footie club top 10:

1:  Barcelona
2. Juventus
3. Man United
4. Bayern Munich
5. Porto
6. Real Madrid
7. Corinthians
8. Shakhtar Donetsk
9. Lyon
10. Dortmund

Contenders:  Paris St. Germain, Inter Milan, Velez Sarsfield, Manchester City

12/12/12

The next perfect number day on the Western calender is 2/2/22.  I'll be over forty by then, assuming I'm still alive, which is something I know that I really shouldn't do.  I feel as if I should do something epic on this day.  It is in its own way much more significant than just another birthday or Christmas.  Maybe bury some prized possession of mine somewhere out in a frozen cornfield to either dig up myself fifty years from now or leave it in my will for whatever heirs I might have to do so, or maybe just dinner at the Indian restaurant here in town, or maybe today is the day I march to the top of a tall building, rocket launcher in hand to finally challenge God to a no-holds barred fight like I've always intended to.  Maybe an especially savory pizza with soulful tasting sausage and plenty of mushrooms.  In my spiritual journey I have become utterly convinced that assuming that the apocalypse must be dramatic is pure masturbation.  Reality will simply turn off like a switch is what's going to happen.  Exactly the same as what will happen when we all die mundanely in bed on our own account. 

I Admit It

Silvio Berlusconi's existence is darkly reassuring to me.  It's comforting to know that the United States in general, and especially the conservative rural interior I'm native to, is not the only place in the free world where majorities of complete fools will place a sociopathic rat in a position of great power.   Whatever it might be about Italy's culture that leads anyone to willingly support this creeping letch with delusions of omnipotence is not my place to dote upon.  It goes without saying that we have failings of our own.  Still it's amazing that this man fails and fails again and yet simply will not die;  in a strictly political sense I mean.  Though I suppose he is, (doing wikicheatpeak now)  76 years old. 

Overnight

It got cold enough to lightly freeze the running water in rivers and creeks around Nebraska
.  I suppose that's enough to compell me to surrender my Yankee pride and concede that yeah, it was rather uncomfortably cold yesterday.  One major difference is that these Northern fronts usually hang around for about a week and bring some snow with them.  This one has done neither.  Temperatures have already returned to their December 'norm' (There's really no such thing on the Plains) of mid-thirties or so.  Perfectly comfortable if you're under the sun in your coat, scarf, gloves, etc. 

I read an aside in the NYT yesterday about the Syrian rebel who digs Johnny Walker Black.  but has now taken to playing Islamist in order to placate therocracy minded suppliers.  I have no geopolitical point to make in this observation.  Or any point at all really.  I would only say that I was pretty indifferent to scotch for a long time.  It's  as I've aged and lived through some truly cold holiday seasons that I have come to learn that a dose of high-grade scotch to a savory-filled belly on a freezing day is God-damn orgasmically good.  Some Jameson in the winter is even better still.  Bushmills can do the trick too.  I have an uncle who's a total fuckass otherwise who brings some of that stuff around at Christmas and that's good on him.  Nothing more for today comrades. 

My Thoughts On This Valiant Nebraska Girl

*To address what's truly important first;  I appreciate middle-era Green Day myself and have always thought it rather underrated by the public at large.  I can't say I adore them at the level of Dylan Queen or P-Funk but hey, 'Warning', 'Minority',  'Brain Stew/Jaded' and 'Walking Contradiction' are all perfectly solid tunes.  Of course all anyone really remembers from this period is 'Time of Your Life' and the way it Borg Assimilated every modern rock/soft rock/top 40 radio station or high school related function for a full decade after its release; and that's a shame. Still it's no fault but our own that pablum sells. 

*At a somewhat more serious level.  I hope that no serious pundit or social will use this incident as a pretext for the next codgery kids-these-days rant, claiming that the mass access to fame provided by Youtube, Facebook, etc. is raising human foolishness to levels never even dreamed of in the good old days; because that simply isn't so.  People are precisely as stupid as we have ever been, no more and if anything a good deal less, in spite of the myriad examples of stupidity like the above that are still out there.  It wasn't the woman's on-camera end-zone dance that got her caught anyway. Rather it was robbing a bank in a small village where everyone knew everyone and knew exactly who they were being robbed by immediately.  That form of stupidity is by no means particular to our own time and certainly doesn't rely on modern technology. Not that Al Capone or John Dillinger ever shunned the limelight anyway. 

*  Finally, in punishing this woman, I hope that the judge and jury in punishing this woman do take into account the fact that what she did was quite indisputably.  I am not such wannabe-trickster nihilist to suggest that being funny attones for threatening lives destroying property or child abuse, but it counts for a hell of a lot alright?  Yes dear, the system truly is nothing but a game anyway, and it's one that you just lost on an unforced fumble.  The ones who are truly smart and dangerous enough to realize that the system is just a game are the ones that go into banking.  Everyone knows that. Several years from now, when you're parolled and hopefully somewhat wiser, we can go on and on about how the search of purpose leads people of all ages to do and think stupid things; how the young seek purpose in dramatic self-destruction while the old seek purpose in stasis and mindless dogma, or even how these two impulses feed off each other in war, terrorism, etc.  Feel free to call me up when you get out, and be sure to let me know if that band gig of yours looks promising.

Mule Is USA

Stamina of a camel, climbing prowess of a mountain goat.  Guranteed to get you to the highest peak, hottest jungle or deepes driest nothingness alive and in one piece,  so long as you're not too old when the journey begins.  A mongrelized misfit for a mongrelized misfit people, exponentially hardier and harder working thean those thoroughbreds made weak by incest to satisfy the aristocracy fetish of the Old World.  When the war comes these triple crown winners shall be nothing but dinner and their bouquets of roses shall be our garnish.  The Mule meanwhile shall live amoung us as our comrade and our brother together we relish manly toil.  The mule is of the people and we shall reign as one body forever. 

Post 400

Be cartoonishly epic in everything you do.  If you are unemployed then amen but you must eat beans and watch General Hospital with enough passionate glory to make the Gods shudder in their very thrones upon holy Olympus. 

Seek conflict for it's own sake.  You must convince yourself that any refusal to eat your special raisin bread cookies is a life-threatening insult or else verily you are already dead. 

When the New Order comes it shall truly be the greatest day of life.  Not that you were ever with them, of course not.  Still the look on your neighbors faces, after year upon year of laughing while you stockpiled on guns and sardines and now forced to knock on your door beging for your help.  You'll give them your help alright.  for you are a rightous man.  Still the pleasure of it.  By God it will be so wonderful.  You realize now that your honeymoon sex with that whore of an ex wife was only a plae echo of the glory to come. 

 

What it comes down to see is work ethic and love.  Love what you do more than you love your children and love the great men who made your work possible more than yourself.  Amen but verily all else must flow from that.  Love your lot in life and become your work as an act of war  then amen but the answers must surely come.  God bless.  

 

 

Here and There

Their reasons are of course their own and they are perfectly entitled to them, and it is also true that this Enrique Nieto received only a plurality of the vote, not a majority.  Still I'm mystified as to why any large group of Mexicans would ever trust those fuckin shyster Death Eaters from the PRI ever again.  Though their official policy positions are vaguely leftish the PRI are an truth a aideological mafia in political clothing who leeched the southern folk dry for nearly a century.  Now here they are again.  Duly elected by all reasonible accounts, yet the amount of penance paid for the amount of harm they caused seems shockingly brief to me.  Thankfully the human race as a whole seems ever less inclined toward submission and it's unlikely that these jokers will be able to get away with anything near the levels of tyranny and corruption that they have in the past.  Maybe. 

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I'm curious man... are you a completely bad faith actor or; is there some part of you that, out of natural fear, honestly refuses to accept that some level of innate mortal vulnerability is unavoidable?  Have you truly convinced yourself that there is such a thing as perfect control over one's own fate?  That it's humanly possible to be eternally vigilant and prepared against any threat?  That victimhood can always be staved off through sufficient force of will?  Or whenever something shooty happens do you simply go into bullshit autotron when you say 'If only victim X had been armed'?

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The group stage of the UEFA Champions League is often criticized as being hopelessly dull and/or weighted in favor of the big name teams.  This is true in no small way.  Yet also true that it is we the common fans, acting as a worldwide army of shameless bandwagon frontrunning bastards; who create the financial incentive to favor the aristocracy and are therefore responsible for the competitions' bloated contemporary shape.  They shouted out who killed the Kennedys...

Yet in spite of all that there will be some interesting drama in the last jag of group games on Wednesday afternoon, American time, involving my adopted club of Celtic.  The Bhoys (We are so intimate enough for me to call them that:) are tied with Portugal's Benfica for the second and last survival spot in Group G on seven points.  The Portuguese hold the tie-break on head-to head record, so that a win would put them in the last 16 no matter what the papists do.  The catch here is that Benfica are playing their last game at  Barcelona, while Celtic will be home with already doomed Spartak Moscow.  Overall I'm feeling pretty good about, if you'll excuse me, our chances. 

Celtic's best recent performance was probably back in 2007 when they took eventual champions AC Milan to overtime in the second round.   They acheived this by intentionally playing for 0-0 and penalties the whole way but fuck it, underdogs gotta do what they gotta right?  A wildcat run similar to what those Cypriot guys acheived last year would be very cool.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves. 

Not That It Hasn't Been Clear for some Time Now

But something is well and truly fucked up within the bowels of American football culture.  At the personal level this means that, as a Nebraskan, there is alwo something well and truly fucked up within my own 'native culture.'  There's the UNL Cornhuskers of course, but also the related fact that most Husker males play at least a few years of organized football.  I was tight end and secondary, still remember the basics of blocking and tackling, and it can be resonably presumed that most men one sees on the Lincoln streets do as well. 

I do see with the same blinding clarity as everyone else how much of a filthy, poisonous, corrupt, evil little game this is.  Yet my boyhood love of it is still there.  Aye.  Perhaps last night's reminder that the home team will never, ever, ever be elite again will be enough to free some of us from this chauvinistic, patriarchial, blindly authoritarian hate fuck that sucks the blood of legitimate education like a horde of lampreys.  Time will tell.