Today is February 14th

If you like Valentine’s Day, that’s cool. But don’t mistake it for being about affection. Don’t confuse obligation with romance. (Though there is nobility in both.) Don’t let it dictate your behavior. Don’t let it tell you who and how and when and why you love. And if you’re single - either by will or by random fortune - don’t let it give you grief. If you weren’t lonely yesterday, don’t be tricked into feeling lonely today. But if you’re unhappy, don’t wait for any holiday to tell you when to make a change.

Let’s all remember who controls our own hearts.

Have a good one, kids.

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When Your Policy Becomes Your Reality

I think they should change the legal requirements to run for President of the United States.


There should be added a clause that every candidate must live as a poor person for 3 months. Freeze their assets. Make it impossible for their rich friends to give them money. Give them a bad line of credit and no savings. Set them up in an apartment where the appliances are so old that it’s dangerous. With mold in the ceiling and roaches in the kitchen and some weird smell that you can’t identify. Let them pay rent to a slum lord who couldn’t care less when the hot water suddenly stops working in the winter and refuses to replace anything. Give them a job* that pays minimum wage and no health care and probably leaves them eligible for welfare or some other government program and let them have to go through the system to get it. A job that requires being on your feet all day, where your boss ignores certain labor laws. Let them have to get a second job to make ends meet. Let them ride public transit. Let them have to choose between the luxury of electricity or a working phone. Let them have to eat cheap food that is inherently toxic for them, but at least it’s plentiful. Let them clip coupons and buy dented canned goods to save money. Let them learn to darn socks and patch jeans and sew buttons because new clothes are too expensive. Let them get sick and have to take unpaid time off from work and try to find a walk-in clinic they can afford. Let them stay in that world long enough to realize that they’ll never get “caught up”. Let them start out indebted and behind schedule. Let them lose sleep and wake up feeling downtrodden or hollow. Let them learn to suck it up. Let them learn that “picking yourself up by your boot straps” is even harder than it sounds. Let them feel the frustration of a government that tell them, in spite of all this, that they’re lazy moochers.


Then, and only then, allow them to run for office. Maybe they’ll have learned something.




*Hopefully they’ll realize that in the current economy, they’d be lucky just to have the worst job.







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On Not Voting

I've always been a big proponent of voting.It's always been "Look, some people died for this, the least we can do is roll out of bed once in a while and have an opinion about things." But, the way things are now, I don't see myself voting in the next presidential election. There is a complete lack of viable candidates from the right (Mitt Romney is a weak liar, Newt Gingrich is an offensive human being, Ron Paul may be certifiably insane, Rick Santorum is a hate-spewing closet case...) and I'm so disappointed in Barack Obama that it's hard to see straight. Remember all that "Change" and "Yes we can!" rhetoric? Turns out that's all it ever was. It's occurred to me sometime ago, that political change is a fantasy. Socially, we change and politics (eventually,and often begrudgingly) have no choice but to reflect popular opinion. For all Obama has done that seems like change, it has been below the minimum of us progressing as a society. The bulk of what he's done is assist Wall St and willingly kowtow to whoever yells the loudest. He's shown himself as weak-willed and easily corrupted (at best) and coniving at worst. And while repealing DOMA is awesome, allowing NDAA is unforgivable.

I recently spoke with a friend about the current economic climate and the erosion of the middle-class. How, in a Hoover-style approach, those of us who have already been struggling are expected to tighten our belts and suffer a little longer, lest the rich elite start to sense what being only moderately wealthy feels like. How those at the top see poor people with cellphones and use it as a sign to keep pushing, horrified that poor people have the nerve to possess anything at all. "How can they do that to people?" he said (I paraphrase) "How can they be OK with watching their own people suffer, wanting more while it recreates a pre-industrial wealth/poverty gap, with nothing in-between? Meanwhile, the middle- and lower-class allow themselves to be convinced that there's some fictitious welfare mother trying to take their hard earned money and actually elect the people who literally want to take their money?"

The simplistic answer, as it usually is, is fear.

Further into the conversation, a similar question arose in regards to Penn States protecting a child rapist. How the outrage amongst football fans wasn't about the abuse charges, or the cover up, but the firing of Sandusky - their legendary coach. Or how the exact same thing happens within religious institutions (most famously, but not only, in the Catholic church) all the damn time. Why do the higher-ups allow the suffering of their followers? And why do the followers (seem to) approve of or support the abuse?

For an authoritarian system to work, you need two kinds of people: You need the leader, or governing class who are either deluded enough to believe their own hype or, more often, are fully aware they have no right to rule but still want control anyway. And you need the subordinates, who have to believe in and rely upon the authority of rulers.

Be it a government or a religious institution (football being somewhere in-between), the arrangement is always the same. The heads are in charge and have always been in charge. They wouldn't know what to do if they weren't the richest and most powerful. Any feeling of the loss of power (or even worse, a feeling of equality) causes them to lash out at whoever they can blame. This is why religious conservatives get louder as the gay civil rights movement gets closer to a feeling of real citizenry. They don't really fear that marriage or the family will be tarnished. They just like their privlege. They are used to having it all and how dare you want some for yourself. They are deathly afraid of losing what they've always known. They have no idea what it feels like to be oppressed, but they heard from all those protestors that it really sucks!

Likewise, the followers are afraid of losing what they'be always known. Like an ex-convict emerging from a long prison stint, too much sudden freedom can be terrifying. Many find comfort in being told what to do, or, at the very least, believing that all the "big picture stuff" is being handled, allowing them to be reasonably content and self-concerned. They want to protect the governing class and the rich elite, because they've been trained to think that they'll be cared for in kind.

But just like Dorothy, many of us have looked behind the curtain of leaders and religion and heroes to find frailty and flaw. Or sometimes nothing at all. And it leaves us lost. Atheists and anarchists aren't any smarter or better off, because no one has any real answers. When I first paid attention to the OWS movement, I was critical of its lack of focus or any singular solution. But how can we ask a group of people who are essentially a collective scream of frustration to do any better than our president?

I don't plan on voting because I've lost the faith. Politics don't change. People can. So I am trying to put what's left of my faith back in people.

Fingers crossed.
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Bring Your Etch-a-Sketch to Work and Play Your Ukulele

I know I’ve written about Amanda Palmer before, but since she’s only gotten more amazing, it seems another, longer, love letter is due.

It revolves around this song, that was heard for the first time by a crowd at Occupy Wall Street last month:

When I first listened to it, I tweeted that this song is everything that is right with the world. And I still mean it. The song’s not really about playing the ukulele. Well it is, and it isn’t. I considered posting the lyrics here, but jeezum crow, there are a lot. Just look them up (you’re on the Internet, after all) - or, better yet, donate to get the track & get the lyrics with it!

Here are a few snippets:  

“So play your favorite cover song,
especially if the words are wrong,
cause even if your grades are bad,
it doesn't mean you're failing.
Do your homework with a fork,
and eat your Froot Loops in the dark,
and bring your Etch-a-Sketch to work and play your ukulele.
Ukulele small and fierceful,
ukulele brave and peaceful,
you can play the ukulele too, it is painfully simple.
Play your ukulele badly, play your ukulele loudly...”

“...Quit the bitching on your blog,
and stop pretending art is hard.
Just limit yourself to three chords.
Do not practice daily!
You'll minimize some stranger’s sadness
with a piece of wood and plastic,
holy fuck, it's so fantastic playing ukulele!”

The song is about creating. As I’ve stated here before (and in real life, ad naseum) aesthetics are an essential part of being human. Expression is necessary for true happiness and fulfillment. Sharing with others breeds intimacy and understanding. And no, art is not hard. “Good” art is hard, but does it really matter if what you’re doing is good enough to hang in a museum or sell a hundred thousand copies of? Not really, so long as it makes you happy. This is a thing I keep trying to remind myself of - the “do not practice daily” is a wonderful joke on the traditional “disciplined career artist”. Most likely, you’re not going to be able to dedicate every waking moment to your craft. But...dude, calm down. It reminds me of a great scene in Six Feet Under when Claire sees her old college professor. When he asks how it’s going she says “Oh,I haven’t even picked up a camera in months.” He replies “Fuck art, how are you?”

Amanda Palmer is a perfect role model for the Millennial generation. We’re a frustrated, overstimulated, too-smart-for-our-own-good group of young adult children. We work hard and we’re not getting what we were promised out of life, but we’re finding ways to be ok with that, so long as we can pay our rent and eat well enough and still have time to go out with our friends on the weekend. We’re self-made people, we’re making it work with little instruction. We’re blazing new territories with the aid of technology so far beyond what any previous generation could have conceived that our minds should be blown each and every day - yet it we just go with the flow.

It’s so easy to get downtrodden by the current economical climate, the lack of jobs, the political hoopla the state of the world, and so easy to get distracted by the sparkly, dizzying everything-and-nothing-ness of the web. Yet we keep creating. (And the web does help this process when we let it.) We always need to keep creating. Even if no one else will ever see, or the only people who do are lovers and friends and family. And since those are already the best people you know, that really ain’t so bad.

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