one more commodity good.

i think it's interesting how people tend to ritualize the fulfilment of their drives.

think about it. aside from say, breathing, our two key needs, i'd say would be food, and sex. and think about how much people ritualize sex. ie. the whole institution of marriage. and don't even tell me that it's not a need. would anyone even debate that?

i mean, let's think about the theory of evolution, while we're at thinking... assuming an acceptance of a darwinian theory of evolution, every animal is granted traits by the process of natural selection such that they are conducive to their ability to procreate. this whole nifty process of thinking that you and i, writer and hypothetical audience, are going through, is in fact, something to help us get laid. us naked hairless and weak apes had to outsmart bigger and scarier predators that would eat us up like little human mcnuggets, so we developed the ability to think. the ones that did think, went on to have babies and get a little closer to being you and me with every generation. the ones that didn't think, got eaten up. so evolution is referent to sex. so it's a need.

that was a huge fucking digression thats not even remotely related to what i wanted to say... i'm baked as hell! can you tell its exam time? my brain will take any excuse to go on an odd and uninteresting academic tangent.

in any case, yeah. people ritualize sex. and drinking? that gets ritualized too. how about the whole phenomenon of alcohol. how about rednecks squabbling about black folk using the water fountain back in the day?

so food is ritualized in the form of the "family meal," with all its concomitant possibilities in terms of increased consumption, segregation into family units for ideological indoctrination, etc. etc. etc.

and there you have it! a huge long and spuriously* valid lead up to a relatively lame conclusion. i love food. oh i love food, and cooking, and i love going home mainly because my parents give me their debit card and send me to the grocery store to get stuff to make dinner.

thus, for easter dinner today in celebration of everyone's favourite myth about god, i made... a crown roast of pork with sausage stuffing, and roasted garlic mashed potatoes with stilton and port wine cheese, and crème brulée. mmm. plus a ton of wine, really good french red, and some decent australian white. my parents made a bunch of vegetables too, but i'm not into that shit, so i didn't fool with it. and oh it was good. food has to be like my number one commodity good. closely tied with pot. and i got to bring home leftovers and i didn't spend hardly any money all weekend and i wrote a paper and it was just all in all a stellar weekend. and i learned that vanilla beans are the fruit of the world's only edible orchid. and that they're kind of difficult to cook with. also that crème brulée isn't that hard to make. any food where you have to use a torch is just sweet.

fucking alright! plus i decided i want to change the name of my degree from the lameo "philosophy of media writing" to "criticism and critical theory." cos like foucault says, disciplines are a mechanism of power which ensure ideological indoctrination. and critical theory and cultural studies and all that stuff are really interdisciplinary which is what my program is for in the first place. and critical theory is situated at the intersection of english and philosophy and... all the stuff we study in MIT... so, it's basically what i'm taking anyways. i'm just giving it a better name. and maybe i'll pick a few different courses.

and that's more than enough.
bonsoir.

*recall my sober night. using the word spurious made me remember something. in this bar, there was a condom machine in the bathroom. amongst the "French Ticklers" (which "Were not intended for use as a Contraceptive"), and leering Deliverance-looking guys, there was one option called "Big Boy Hard-On Pills." and these were advertised as (and i quote) "Sought After by Millions - the Spurious Erection Enhancer!" now i guarantee you that nobody in that damn town knew what the hell spurious meant. there were probably a lot of rednecks going home that night to have some pretty spurious bouts of fucking. ew.

my sober night.

so the plan was, this weekend, i would leave my pot in london, come home where i did not know any drug dealers, and work on papers all weekend. thus impressing my parents with my diligence and also getting some friggen work done.

can anybody who knows me guess what actually happened?

anybody?

i bet that everyone can guess exactly what fucking happened.

so i have a cottage in a place called rondeau park, it's quite nice yada yada on lake erie, and its in the middle of nowhere. fucking nowhere. so i was there, and i wrote a whole huge bitch of a paper on communications and the construction of community for mit 202. and then i realized that there was no damn way i was going to start another paper right away. and it was like 9:00, and i really wanted to go out. thus i took the first of many sobriety missteps in my evening of sobriety.

sobriety misstep one: so i take two hits of shitty E that i had in my bag from last weekend. i mean they're shitty. i'm talking, so shitty that they might not actually have been a sobriety misstep, cos all i felt was really tense, with the vague urge to chew on something. but they cost me like 5 bucks, so whatever. why not pollute your body with pills of ambiguous content and origin. go for it, ali!

and then i hop in the car and drive into the nearest town. blenheim. haha. anyone who knows the region (likely nobody in the ol' hypothetical audience) knows that this place is dirt. and the bar is, well... über-dirt. the cadillac lounge. oh, shit.

and thus there is me. relatively clean-cut dorky youth with pants hanging off his ass. and two friends that have a penchant for cardigan sweaters. and one friend's girlfriend from his respective uni who i think spent the entire night dumbfounded by the redneck clientele. now some people would say that i'm a long fucking way from clean-cut, but note i said relatively. like, people in this bar were covered in paint. and had mullets. these are mullets and paint on people for whom irony meant they'd have to worry about rust. this is a bar in which there were approximately 10 patrons, and approximately 13 to 17 teeth. total.

and here's me, vaguely tense and not-quite-e'd up off my hits of fucking, drano, heroin, and crushed up glass or whatever they really were. and you can see how i would take...

sobriety misstep two: i bought a beer. now, i ordered a pint of canadian, which was piss, and apparently the only thing they had on tap. one friend who accompanied me informed me that you should never get the draft beer at this bar. apparently someone who worked there had informed him that the taps sometimes say different things, but it's always just a really dirty old keg of OV. oh well. i get the beer and drink it, and then i proceed to make sobriety missteps number three and four. guess what they were? yeah. they were the same damn OV. we decide that OV stands for "old vagina," cos that's what the beers taste like. somehow though, i can't get enough.

and by that point i'm a little woozy, and the entire fucking population of the town seems to pour into the bar. suddenly the dirty-old-people bar gets taken over by slightly-dirty young people. they're all pretty alright though, i knew most of them in one way or another from my years of cottaging around here. and little would you have guessed, but a buddy of mine from home who i buy weed from in london shows up! well fuck, i didn't see that coming.

cos see the way i formulated my sober weekend wasn't that i actually said i wouldn't party, just that i would limit my partying to what i could acquire from my home area. i didn't expect that would be a lot. but, needless to say, buddy showed up and i found a loophole. and then,

sobriety misstep number five: i buy a bag of weed from buddy!

sobriety misstep number six: i go and session the fuck out of it. haha. ooooops. but it's all okay, because i need to end this post and go commit sobriety misstep numbers... probably alot more when i go out tonight, as well.

shit. hahaha.

these things happen!

commodity goods, pt. 3

i think one of the most miraculous commodity goods ever has to be astroglide.

i mean, i've got my hobbies. and they're good on their own. but it's rare that they can't be improved by the judicious application of some wisely purchased accessories. smoking weed, say, is pretty fucking solid, no matter how you do it. but you use some high-quality papers, or a really nice bong, and fuck, you're set. and music? well, music basically is a commodity good. and its commodity status is pretty much essential to its nature. that's a discussion for another time.

so yeah, astroglide. i mean, sex is great. great. but astroglide, like, takes the shit to the next level. drug-fueled marathon sex has never been so easy on the private parts, whether you're male, female, or ... whatever other options there might be.

having sex without lubricant is like... eating dinner without a fork. you can do it, but you just fumble around for a long time, you enjoy it less, and you end up looking like a retard.

having sex with astroglide is like... having your dinner fed to you by god himself.

i mean, just look at the fucking name. astroglide? it's like, you can totally imagine people in the future having sex with this shit. i mean, if i was from the future, that's so what i would use. k-y is just a joke. what kind of name is k-y? i don't think of hot space people getting it on, i think of a wrinkly old man giving a prostate exam. like, a lubricant isn't supposed to be fucking thick and sticky, last time i friggin checked. and the liquid k-y is sketchy. disturbingly unnatural, it kinda creeps me out. especially the warming stuff. what kind of freaky shit do they put in that? it's like satan personally imbued the lubricant with the fires of hell. and i don't need satan to be involved in my commission of sins any more than he already is.

so, yeah. if you're not using astroglide, then do everyone involved a favour, and buy some. go to the drug store, suck it up, and look that seventy-year-old cashier straight in the eye as you hand her that purple box full of magic and wonder. be proud to be purchasing such a fine personal lubricant, and the next time that you have sex, thank the wonders of science!

and me for recommending it to you.

and that seventy-year-old cashier for selling it to you.

just don't think about her while you're having sex.

feel free to think about me while you're having sex, if you want. assuming that you don't already. (har, har)

c'est tout. oh yeah, and it's good friday. let's hear it for jesus, way to freakin' die, buddy!

customer service hell, and commodity goods pt.2

today's commodity good is my favourite commodity good of all... rolling papers. yesterday i went to the tattoo parlour / head shop across the road from my work and picked up a bunch of papers, cos i ran out of the papers that i brought home from france. this got me to thinking about my favourite brands of papers. the selection at my little shop across the street is limited, which is kinda sad. in france, every single little store sells king size OCB slim papers, which are stellar papers. nice and translucent-thin, but substantial enough that they burn really evenly, even when they're rolled into my bigass cones. cos see, in my cones, because of the shape, there's sections where there's just one layer of paper, and other sections where there's more than one layer overtop. the slimness of the OCBs eliminates some overlap, and the papers themselves burn really evenly. no canoeage.

yesterday i bought a packet of rizla silver kings, which are excellent papers. the only problem is that they're kind of wide - i used to not buy slims cos i didn't think they were wide enough, now i actually find that full-width papers don't burn as nicely. the other issue i've got with them is that they're not really full length - they're easily a half-cm shorter than your average king size papers. for my cones, that translates to quite a chunk of lost length. which is irritating. i also bought a pack of kulu kings, which are some of my favourite papers. nice and white, and thick enough to burn slowly without a harsh paper taste. aside from the three papers i've mentioned, the only other brand that i'll use is smoking; smoking blues burn as well or better than the OCB's. zig-zags? don't make me laugh. and i can't remember the last time i've bought a pack of papers that wasn't king-size. regular length joints are a distant memory.

in other news, i'm at work again. so i'm getting paid to write this post. what do you think of that, hypothetical audience?? currently i'm sitting next to the single most annoying person in the world. he's this chunky radio broadcasting student who is so spectacularly nerdy that even i never could have measured up. even in my days of playing wargames with miniatures, i would have thought this guy was a dweeb. he is currently in the process of discussing in-depth the merits of our employer's (toyota) decision not to offer a station wagon model. he, like, takes this job seriously. and reads books that have fights involving wizards and dragons and shit on the cover. i'm thinking i'll stab him with a pen or something. i'll just tell him that a wizard made me do it. with fairy magic.

one guy called me today to check for recalls on a serial number for a vehicle that is presently in Iraq. apparently it wasn't an American vehicle so he didn't know what to do. it wasn't a canadian vehicle either, so it looks like he was up shit creek, recall-wise. but it's like, dude, you're probably getting rocket-propelled grenades fired at you left and right, and living in constant fear of getting suicide-bombed by every brown guy you walk past on the street. fuck, for all you know you're gonna get kidnapped and have your freaking head chopped off, and you want to know if there's a recall on your vehicle? who the fuck is gonna perform the damn recall anyways?! somehow i doubt that there's a toyota dealership in Baghdad. or maybe there is. "Colonialism got you down? Have your car fitted with explosives today, and get on your way to banging virgins with Allah! Only $499.99 for a limited time only!"

and not that i'm mocking you, oh foreign reader, but i really have to mention this, cos it's sheer comedy gold. read the email i got today:

"Brilliant boy, what do you mean interest: little boys.
I'm slightly confused. Is that like I want to teach
kids?
Or in a sexualual interest. or just to be funny?
And one more question... what is the legal consent age
in Canada? Please reply."

well, the answer is d. all of the above. because by pursuing my sexualual interest in little boys, i'm really teaching them such values as: long-term post-traumatic stress disorder, hatred of all male figures, and perhaps perpetuation of the cycle of abuse. plus, i think it's funny when they go crazy and end up killing their therapist/lover in 15 years.

please note, watchful panopticon of the state, that was, in fact, a joke. i'm not really interested in boys, be they little, big, or medium. i just like to say offensive things in profiles.

and that's my story for today.

you, too, can purchase!

instead of going to class, or working on any of my various essays due soon, i decided that today was best spent smoking joints and watching still more aqua teen. i've really got to bust my ass soon. i'm thinking i'll probably just not take any pot home with me when i go home to chatham this weekend, and since i've lost touch with all my dealers there, my lungs will get a break, and the main obstacle to me doing work will be removed.

in the vein of my bitching about cleareyes, i'm thinking that i'm going to comment on the commodity goods that i know and love for the next few posts. because i haven't always been a cynical critic of the commodity-fetishist system. no-no-no, i grew up watching 6 hours of television a day and begging my parents to purchase every damn thing i saw advertised. cos, hell, if it's on tv, it's obviously got to be a worthwhile purchase. everyone knows that. there's a still a pretty wide consumer streak in me.

today i made some kool-aid. see, i've been very recently introduced to kool-aid because my dad is kind of a health nut in a halfassed sorta way, and is in any case way too pretentious to ever have bought kool-aid when i was a kid. and good little upper-middle-class quasi snob that i am, i blindly followed and never even thought to buy kool-aid, even when in my reefer-induced poverty meant that i was drinking water all the time.

but i was out buying groceries the other day, and saw that little kool-aid packets were 6 for 99 cents. i mean, what the hell do you have to lose on that? you can't even get a kick in the ass for 99 cents these days.

and if it isn't just the most miraculous stuff. i especially love how when you pour the red one into water the water is instantly a very violent shade of red. and anything within any kind of range is also red. and as you drink it you can feel the enamel being stripped off your teeth, and you can revel in the fact that this shit never had anything to do with fruit of any sort, despite its being called fruit punch.

thank god for the free market. where the hell else are you gonna get 6 pitchers of drinky goodness for ninety-nine cents?

not in the goddamn soviet union, that's for damn sure.

lit.

phew...

has anyone else noticed the huge fucking difference between cleareyes and visine? namely that cleareyes is a miracle, whilst visine totally sucks ass? like, a few drops of cleareyes and your eyes are just bam! white as hell, no matter how fucking high you are.

whereas visine burns, and makes your mouth taste chemically, and makes your eyes somehow more red than they were before. oh, sweet! that's what i wanted it to do, totally.

um, that's all. time for cartoons and stoned-ness.

fucking work.

the heartless bastard that scheduled me for work at 7:30 am today needs to die. i mean, i love waking up at 6am and all, but what the fuck?! there's no possible reason to have people on the phone at this hour. at least i managed to get in an hour or so of sleep before any management got here. plus, i have the added bonus of being done early enough that i probably won't see my actual boss very much. which is a definite plus, cos i can't stand that smarmy fucker. and when he's not in, then i can be on the internet all i want.

i'm currently pondering a dilemma, namely that of what i want to do for the summer.

my favourite boss ever has called me up, and is pretty much desperate to have me work for him again on his farm. he's the coolest shit; he's down with smoking trees, and just generally such a funny guy. plus he pays me under the table, which is solid, and i'll get a ton of hours with him. and i basically live at his house when i'm working there, so i get meals cooked for me by mrs. farmer, and i don't spend any of the money i make. also i'll get all tanned and (relatively) buff ... since the job is hard-as-fuck physical labour. and he's going to give me a car while i'm woring there. i'd be working with some machinery, but the majority of the job is always picking up hay bales and getting them up into the barns. which is sort of the downside of the job. it's so freaking difficult, and when it's really hot outside it's basically hell. in a much more in-your-face way than this job.

the alternative is staying here in london, at my call centre job. which isn't looking too appetizing, especially today. i work maybe 24 hours a week right now, and i feel like working any more than that here will turn me homicidal. 40 hours a week would mean me showing up with an uzi one day; less than 40 hours a week would mean me making no money yet again this summer. i hate this place with a burning passion and i'd really rather be chucking hay bales in hell. at least there i'm not so damn alienated. it's a good feeling to see a field full of hay turn into a barn full of bales. a hillbilly-type good feeling, but a good feeling nonetheless. however, remaining in london would mean that i'd have a hell of a lot better time when i wasn't at work. the girl that i went to visit in europe is coming back at the end of june, and i miss her inordinately much, for a booty call. i try my best not to, but i can't help it, really. plus most of my friends will be in london; whereas i know nobody out where i'd be working on the farm. so that would be a source of bitterness for me whilst i was there. and let's see, what else. hmmm... i wouldn't have to work 13-hour days here.

so in a nutshell: option 1 means lots of money, no social life, and healthier me. option 2 means lots of fun, no money, and unhealthy me.

gah!

oh, right. and if i quit my job to go work on the farm, then i don't know what the fuck i'll do next year for a job. and i really can't live without this job, for all that i hate it. especially when i've got a school schedule that prevents me from being scheduled for lame-ass shifts like these. which i'm going to make sure i have next year.

c'est tout. for now.

thought of the day: the only thing that can't be achieved through hard work and perseverance is the desire to work hard and persevere.

oh, saint paddy.

i'm kind of intrigued by the strong association of heavy drinking with st. patrick's day. like, why does a bishop that drove the snakes out of ireland inspire us to start consuming unnaturally-coloured beer at 11 am?

but, unlike many questions, this is one question to which i don't really give a damn about the response. because, hey, any socially-acceptable excuse to be hammered all day works for me.

sadly, i didn't start drinking in the AM with everyone else, but it was still fun to watch the results. the funniest story of the day though involves my roommate, who was conspicuously absent from the festivities. nobody seemed to know where he had gone; he just vanished randomly. and when i got home after the bar, he still wasn't home. i was baked and out of it, so i got into bed and was on the verge of sleep, when i hear tap tap tap at my window.

so i get up and let him in, and he is in the bag. i'm talking shitfaced. he started early, and ended up at a kegger, i believe.

and the first thing i notice is that cam is wearing an old man hat, a white golfer type thing which i have never seen him wear before.

"whose hat is that, cam?"
(laughter.)
"i have no idea."

i don't even think he knew he was WEARING a hat. i then notice that cam is not wearing his usual thrift store trench coat, but instead a snowboarding jacket. which is inside out.

"whose jacket is that, cam?"
(laughter builds)
"..... i have no idea."

again, i think that he was completely unaware that there was anything abnormal about his jacket. so, i go for a more general question.

"where were you tonight?"

and, surprise!

"i have no idea."

i think you get the picture. i receive similar responses to the inquiries, "what did you do all day?" and "how did you get home?"

that was my good laugh of the day.

phew.

also, he lost his bag.

the joys of drinking!

late night.

fuck, i smoked a ton of herb tonight. ow...

i smoked that huge fucking cannon last night and i was feeling a little down this morning at 7:30 on the way to work. i got sick last weekend and decided to keep smoking lots of pot whilst i was lots of sick and now my lungs are complaining. bong rips tonight turned into straight up coughing fits.

i used to love bong rips. fuck, i remember the first time smoking out of a bong back in the day; it was out at my cottage, by the beach, with a big ol' acrylic fucker. ah, that was some good times. i remember doin em in my basement, it was fuckin stellar.

but now, it just hurts like hell. i've even got a decent little glass bong, but the shit kills. maybe it doesn't help that my tiny glass bong has a bowl that hold like, a gram and a half of chopped herb. thing looks like a crack pipe.

but you know, these things happen. so i just smoke cannons of joints. and love it.

and um thats my story. i was just writing something while i waited for my aqua teen hunger force torrent to download, so that i could shut my computer off and go to bed. my computer is real fuckin loud. it's got too many fans, and it needs a new heatsink. i have no money though. i spend it all on pot. maybe if my computer got baked it wouldn't think so hard and wouldn't be so hot.

that's all.

p.s.:

pheeeeeeeeeew. 

deontology and teleology in politics.

pseudo-intellectual weenie that i am, once i get to talking about something, i latch onto it for a little while and kinda do my thing. so i'm about to get into a semi-philosophical discussion that's probably not very interesting, because i'm thinking about using that idea i mentioned in my post earlier today for an ethics paper. and i figured i'd reason it out in a rudimentary stoned way before i got to writing an outline. skip this post and read the next one, i wrote it this morning and it's quite a bit more interesting. not to mention shorter.

so basically what i was thinking was about the distinction between teleogical ethics and deontological ethics. in a nutshell, teleological ethics state that moral conduct is valuable because of the things that follow from that conduct. ie, it's nice not to get murdered, robbed, whatnot, so we don't want people to do that. deontological ethics state that moral conduct is valuable in and of itself. ie, there's some intrinsic value to not murdering others, etc.

so in terms of politics then, maybe a teleologically-based political system is like hobbes' social contract, which i love. it's a contract which every citizen makes with every other citizen in agreement that certain things just are shitty when everyone is going around doing them, so we as a society won't do them. and in order to make sure that people won't do them, we'll create a government, that's going to punish people for doing those things.

the ethics of democratic government have some mythic originary teleological nature. which essentially, i think, is the beauty of the myth of america, which is in modern times, i think the archetypal myth of democracy. (forget greece and the french revolution.) it constituted a breaking away from a government that did not serve the ends of the people, but instead acted solely in its own interests. the colonists wanted to be their own country, with their own social contract, so they instituted their own government.

and maybe i'm romanticizing things, but i tend to think that the american ideal, in the mold of the french to some extent, and the greeks to a lesser extent, was very teleological. the parallels between the original constitution and hobbes' "minimal moral set" by which he thought the social contract should be structured are particularly interesting. it was as though the founding fathers saw what was coming, knew that people would vote in stupid ways sometimes, and tried purposely to keep things minimal. don't make laws about the press (though god knows that didn't work so well; that's a different discussion), don't make laws about expression, right to assemble, or right to believe. let people keep their freedom. hobbes thought the same thing. and of course, that oh-so-controversial 'bear arms' thing - hobbes thought that too, when he said that people should always have the right to defend themselves. and oh, coincidence, when things get hairy in terms of government getting big and creepy, when everyone is armed, it's a built-in mechanism for government overthrow.

and maybe the problem, really, in a shift from small, good, helpful, interests-of-the-people government, to big creepy big brother government, is necessarily a shift from teleological government to deontological government. any respectable teleological ethics can't support a government that serves its own interests, that deludes the populace, or that for whatever reason does not effectively promote the best interests of the body politic. because, well, that wouldn't be a good telos.

and in moving from teleology to deontology, we move from my beloved hobbes, to kant. backward, ridiculous, antisocial windbag immanuel kant has to be one of my least-favourite philosophers. (i still think there's alot of value to alot of his stuff, of course. but he's just hell to read, and so full of shit sometimes.) my main problem with deontology is the potential fallaciousness of the argument that morality is intrinsically good. how do we know that? difficult, and totally linguistically-constructed. whereas the argument that morality often causes good things to happen is alot more concretely obvious, when you think about it.

and thus my main problem with deontological politics is that government gets this idea that somehow it's intrinsically good. as a result, all of its laws aren't simply for the benefit of the populace at large, but eventually become focused on the benefit of the government itself and the hand that feeds it (eg, corporations). thus we have defense spending well beyond the needs of the population to support a military-industrial complex. inadequate spending on the construction of a worthwhile social discourse to feed a hungry hollywood. inadequate spending on the poor, the uneducated, the minorities, and the various other margins of society that really need to benefit from the social contract in order for it to function. and an overweight government that sits there and pats itself on the back for serving the needs of the population so damn well.

(digression: why social programs in teleological ethics? isn't that altruism? it's not. because educating and feeding and clothing the kid from the ghetto who shoots you so that he doesn't shoot you in the first place makes you a lot less dead than throwing him in jail afterwards. i'd rather have freedom from being capped than freedom to save on my payroll taxes. besides, i'd feel a hell of a lot better about life, myself, and everything if there weren't people dying in the streets every day.)

so, in summation, i'm burnt-out and i'm ending this post well before i got around to saying much of anything. story of my life. i took a break in the middle of that post and watched the paris hilton episode of south park and my reasoning took a definite downhill slide after that. ha, ah well! what a shitload of writing i did on here today.

we all have our days.

goddamnit, goddamnit, goddamnit.

well, i just spent my last hour of work-related boredom writing this huge bitch of a post about this article, and it got somehow erased, never again to be retrieved. dammit, and it was insightful and interesting and everything good too. in any case, the gist of it was that bush sucks, conservatives suck, liberals suck, and everyone is wrong except me.

fuck.

here's my brief recap, anyways. for those too lazy to read the whole article in question, it's essentially about how the white house is the single biggest manufacturer of propaganda in the world. my response to that, as best as i can remember it is this (it'll get long, too, i'm sure):

political distinctions are becoming ever more meaningless, largely because liberals and conservatives alike are totally in the pocket of corporate donors and business interests. there's no such thing as opposition anymore. the proof? the total lack of attention that such blatant propagandizing gets in the mainstream media. it's the job of the democrats to raise a stink about this shit, and they just plain don't. why? because they do the same damn thing themselves, or at least did while clinton was in power. this isn't even radical-academic stuff á la manufacturing consent corporate self-censorship, this is just straight goebbels shit.

a real leftist should hate this propaganda stuff with a passion because it destroys the ideal of a free and vibrant social discourse, which every bleeding-heart liberal parrot should know is the foundation of a democratic state. and a real right-winger militia fanatic type should hate it just as much or more because he or she knows that this proves big government will do anything to justify its parasitic existence through control of information.

me and george bush are in agreement about one thing. in a post-partisan and increasingly centrist political world, the ideal government needs to pragmatically pick and choose its policies from both sides of the political spectrum.

bush's problem is that in his populist-hegemonic fervor, he's picking and choosing the worst aspects of both sides (or his staff is doing it for him). from the liberal end, we've got a love for bland sound bites and ambiguous talking points, and a maternalistic desire to intrude into individual actions in the private sphere. we've got a thing for bloated bureaucracy, a hatred for meaningful reduction of bureaucracy, and an unabashed penchant for blatant doublespeak. from the conservative side, in turn, we've got a love for backward moralizing, fundamentalist religion, and inflammatory rhetoric. we've also got a hatred for social programs, a serious fetish for private enterprise, and a savage tribal hard-on for war. not to mention truckloads of money. i'm talking fucking bales of money, and an endless line of corporate donors all looking for a return on their investment.

and his pragmatic choices are devoted to what end? nothing less than the absolute consolidation of neoconservative ideals with the goal of maximizing corporate profit at the expense of individual liberty and civil rights.

what, then, do i think the perfect government should have? i thought you'd never ask. from the liberal side, we need that commitment to vibrant social discourse, by which the sentiment of the populace can be adequately expressed - so, no propaganda, and no absolute corporate control of media. we also need a consciousness of the need for social programs in order to shield us from the inadequacies of the capitalist mode, and thereby to allow a fuller, more productive, and more satisfying participation in that mode for everyone. then from the conservative side we need that innate distrust of obese bureaucracy, for we all know that bureaucracies look after their own interests. government needs to look after our interests, not its own, or it isn't doing that job. we also need a strong sense of the value of individual freedoms. the government needs to recognize that the acts of consenting adults in the private sphere are none of its damn business.

and my pragmatic choices aren't for hegemonic purposes, but instead have the intention of reforming government into something that serves the people, rather than the other way around.

so there you have it, a recondensed version of my political philosophy. i could go on for days about the hobbesian social contract, enlightened self-interest, and the implications of existentialism for public policy, but god knows there isn't a single member of ye olde Hypothetical Audience that gives two shits about that. even less so about how the ethics of democratic government have shifted from a teleological ethics to a deontological one, and the negative implications of such a shift. alas, perhaps another time and another place.

this is why i'm not a liberal blogger, or a conservative blogger. cos i'm not a liberal or a conservative person. if i absolutely needed a label, perhaps social libertarian would be best? but i don't need a label, and nor do you. political loyalties are outdated.

in the end, i'm a critical theory blogger. a deconstructionist, a pseudo-intellectual weenie picking away at the mythos by which we structure and constrain our perceptions of reality.

or, for brevity's sake, an asshole blogger.

c'est tout.

p.s. i lied about it being shorter.

ah, the internet!

haha. i added this to my links list, but i thought it merited a quick mention owing to such gems as:

"if you were in the wild and wanted to get drunk, you'd
have to be some sort of scientest. fermenting and distilling shit.
if you wanted to get stoned, you'd just have to pluck a plant and set it on fire."

" vikings have axes bigger than them. vikings aren't scared of anything.
if a viking has to fight a dragon, he just goes all bezerker.
they foam at the mouth and get all like "grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr"

" gang signs are pretty sick.
there is no quicker way to tell the world "hey. i'm in a gang"
if you try to make a gang sign you'll probablly get a finger cramp.
this shows you how strong gangbangers' fingers are."

dig.

oh, and...

read this.

on natural selection.

i'm at work right now. my boss has gone home, and thus i am frittering away my paid time on the internet. oh, joy.

i've been thinking lately (and this is a direct consequence of this job and the distaste for people it leaves me with), that humanity's social safety net tends to get in the way of natural selection too much.

on one level, i think that everyone needs to be taken care of, and i don't really think that society benefits in any way from throwing the elderly on ice floes with polar bears. cos i like old people, and they served us in the capitalist mode for long enough that it should serve them til they live out their natural lives.

but on another level, i think that in order for evolution to keep functioning for humans, we need to give the weak and stupid more chances to die. we live in a culture so damn obsessed with safety, health, and security, that utter morons are allowed to bumble along in our midst, procreating and generally shitting in the gene pool. civilized society insists on keeping its flotsam and jetsam around.

if you're dumb enough to do things that will obviously get you killed, i think that society should leave it wide open. we put up fences along cliffs, we put warning labels on everything, we do our best to save crackheads, and all for what? to keep idiots from dying? why, exactly, do we want to keep them from dying? i, for one, don't want to be in the company of people who think it's a good idea to drink bleach, play near the edges of tall stuff, or freebase blow. let 'em do what they like.

the immediate consequence is that we're surrounded by these dimwits, which is bad enough. longer-term though is that we're not going to evolve, because the unfit are surviving alongside the fit.

don't look at this as some kind of weird white-supremacist social darwinism, now. cos this is above all a problem of white people supporting white idiots. the white people in power already don't give two shits about whether minorities live or die, so that's pretty much a non-issue. (well, it's a big issue, but not in terms of this post.)

hahaha. that was a horribly offensive and poorly thought-out post that's riddled with inconsistencies. still, something to think about. go, hypothetical audience, and poke holes in this trollish mess with incisive commentary!

some more of europe.

i'm not really in a writing mood right now. here are some pictures from europe. maybe i'm obsessing, but whatever, they're nice pictures. da! sorry bout the weird formatting and huge size. i'm too baked and lazy to change.

this is a sculpture made of lemons. from this angle, it looks sort of like a bong, no?

this car is funny.

this is italy.

no ball games, little fuckers!

the mediterranean.

poignant, non?

devastatingly baked at airport, on way to amsterdam.

car parked out front of hotel, amsterdam.

what the fuck do you think a sugar consultant does?

amsterdam pot. mmmm.

oohh, pretty colours.

so many bikes.

why my roommate is the shit.

not just cam, but also his mom. why? because she came and picked me up at work today, to take me home (cos i'm poor and sick), and on the drive home, the following conversation ensued between her and cam. this is really a touching example of mother-son dialogue, i think. keep in mind this is all being said in jest. but it's all true. hence, my roommate and his mom are some of my favourite people, because really nothing is off-limits in terms of humour for them. (this might not be exactly right-on, but i remembered the good bits.)

paddy says something that cam gets jokingly mad at.

cam: "i hate you!"
paddy: "i hate you!"
cam: "i hate you more!"
paddy: "i hate YOU more!"
c: "i hate you so much more than you hate me."
p: "i hate you more than that."
c: "i hate you so much more, it's like you love me."

cam is on a roll.

c: "i hate you times 1000 plus infinity minus 6 but PLUS 7!"
p: "infinity is a concept!"
c: "you're a concept!"
p: "you were an accident!"

SNAP!

c: "yeah, well YOU slept with my father! TWO TIMES, in a three-year period!"
p: "yeah, well, i had a drinking problem."
c: "and that's why i have fetal alcohol syndrome." (that part wasn't true.)

oh, we laughed at that for quite a while. phew-ee. haha. in any case, i just wanted to write that down before it slipped my mind. i feel like hell and this nyquil is kicking in. i'm going to go drink some echinacea tea.

i prefer "marijuana enthusiast"...

so, i finally got my bag delivered today, stupid delta airlines found it and couriered it to me. in that bag was the remainder of my list of strains, which i had feared that i had lost. so here it is, in all its glory - the full list of all the pot that i tried in amsterdam. yes, i realize that nobody is interested in this. but i wanted to organize this and keep it somewhere, so i figured i'd stick it on here in case a pot-nerd like me is looking for something to jerk off to. this isn't quite a complete list; there were a few times where we bought bags and forgot what kind they were by the time we made it to a table. in any case, though, here goes. i've included the names of the coffeeshops where i wrote them down/remembered them.

1. white widow (herb, greenhouse)
2. silver haze (herb, greenhouse)
3. lebanon red (hash)
4. andalucia (hash, andalucia)
5. AK-47 (herb)
6. NL 5xHaze (herb, rokerij)
7. bubble hash "murder" (hash, hunters' bar)
8. citral (herb, hunters' bar)
9. jack herer (herb)
10. jack herer (herb, la canna)
11. royal cream gold (hash, rokerij)
12. christmas pollen (hash, rokerij)
13. kali mist (herb)
14. super silver haze (herb, de dampkring)
15. oceans' 12 haze (herb, de dampkring)
16. blueberry (herb, blues brothers)
17. skuff (hash, grasshopper)
18. silver haze (herb, rokerij)
19. cristals (hash, rock-it)
20. temple balls (hash, dutch flowers)
21. rifman malika (hash, de dampkring)
22. stella blue (herb, de dampkring)
23. zero (hash, greenhouse)

plus a piece of space-cake from abraxas, and hash hot chocolate from rock-it. and two strains that i forgot to write down from abraxas, one from rokerij, and one kind of hash from greenhouse. i was really surprised how many of the coffeeshop names that i forgot i actually remembered as i was writing this list. and who says stoners have shitty memory!

that's all for now. i have a project to work on.

a propos de mes vacances.

i don't want to be back here. i want to be in france, drinking wine, eating baguette with roquefort, and lying in bed all day smoking hashish joints. or in amsterdam, smoking the best reefer in the world. in any case, i'm in an enumerative, listy kind of moode. thus: ala high fidelity, here's some trip-inspired top five lists.

the top five things about france

1. wine - less than two euros a bottle? jesus. little alcohol tax = fun! plus you can drink it anywhere. getting hammered on the way to the bar... love it.
2. ella ja aleksi - the best thing ever. you'll probably never find the songs, but, oh, you've never heard such catchy little finnish children. (what does this have to do with france, you ask? my friend there has a finnish roommate, who showed me these songs.)
3. baguette - 24-hour boulangerie. fresh baguette. ah. 3/4 of my meals consisted of baguette, roquefort, proscuitto, bottle of wine.
4. the neighbourhood - europe really drives home how shitty suburban sprawl is. you shop in your little neighbourhood, you walk everywhere, you support a community, instead of driving from big-box shop to big-box shop and getting fatter.
5. smoking - you can smoke in restaurants, bars, etc. etc. life is good. we smoked hash joints in the bar, too. love it! and a side note to this entry, there's a hookah parlour in vieux-nice, and i'm in love with smoking shisha.

the top five strains i tried in amsterdam (of approx. 25ish?)

1. super silver haze from rokerij - when you've been smoking amazing buds all day, you're burnt out as fuck, and a joint turns you into a giggly mess like when you first smoked in high school... that's when you know it's good. burned a little going down, but the buzz was worth it. 2004 cannabis cup, best coffeeshop.
2. bubblehash from hunters' bar - by far the strongest stuff i tried. not #1 for a few reasons - it costs about 40 bucks a gram, tastes like hell, and it's just too strong. a joint with much of this in it is a recipe for instant passout. the right amount, though, and ... chached-ness go!
3. rifman malika hash from de dampkring - i was a little generous with the hash in the first joint i rolled of this, and i was practically drooling afterwards. completely unable to stand up, and got lost on the way home. moroccan import, tasted delicious. 2004 cannabis cup, best imported hash.
4. white widow from greenhouse - this is on here cos it was the first strain i tried and i got so spectacularly high... really. whether it was the quality of the weed, or what, i'll never know. a couple tokes and my eyes were practically closed.
5. blueberry from blues brothers - won the cannabis cup in 99, best pot. sticky like icky, actually tasted like fruity. rolled a joint that burned for a week and then the cops came upstairs asking us pleasantly to leave while they did a "checkup" of the coffeeshop. having a cannon in my hand, talking to the cops... such a nice time.

top five things i didn't like about europe. cos i don't want to be all, oh europe is so much nicer blah blah pretentiousness. it IS, but let's think critically for a moment.

1. amsterdam crackheads - "hey friend. you think you need to know anything about amsterdam, you ask joey. you maybe need to know something special, you ask joey. huh? or maybe you need some gear? huh? what the fuck, you making fun of me now? what the fuck. i try to help you out, you insult me. what the fuck."
2. leaving - ha, ha. maybe this should have been number one. half cos i miss europe, half cos i miss the constant sex and the affection, i was really moped out on the way home.
3. the lack of customer service - hey, customer service is kind of annoying, and creepy at times. but i missed it in france, because it's an alien concept to them. really, people in stores are such dicks. it's like, we're doing you a favour by offering you these products, fuck you. it's not that annoying all the time, but when you need to actually get something done, it's fucking irritating. at least some people in customer service here are actually friendly and helpful.
4. no pot - amsterdam is the exception to the rule really; most places in europe, it's all hash. i think it'd be interesting to study the political economy behind the drug market, and why it's so much easier to get pot in n/america, but hash in europe. i figure it's cos there's little space to grow in europe, and it's much easier to smuggle hashish; lots more room in n/americ. but less easy to smuggle. border control within europe : often nonexistent.
5. the people - haha. there's lots of nice european people. honestly, they're just not very nice to look at. i don't care what anyone says about french girls, they're just not particularly good-looking. on average, of course. there's always exceptions. but less exceptions in france than back home. haha. that was a very superficial, assholey comment. but i'm often a superficial asshole, so i think it was fitting.

and on that note, the top five things about monogamy. (aka, "being in a relationship," which i really am not, but for the week was close enough to be indistinguishable from such. i like to think of it as a vacation from being so cynical and hateful.)
1. sex - haha. not to put too fine a point on it. but. well.... obviously! i'm sure there's long-term monogamous relationships that don't have much sex. in fact there's probably tons. that's why i'm not really in one. but for a week of kinda-not-a-relationship-or-something, oh, there was lots! plus you get to have sex when you're at your best. morning... after a shower. awake, clean, and preferably a bit stoned, if you're me. with someone that you know well enough, that you've had some practice with... mm. this is compared to what, hilariously drunken sloppy sex with a random, when you're dirty and sweaty and lazy after the bar, awkwardness, etc. etc.... not that it isn't lots of fun that way, it just gets kind of old sometimes.
2. affection - yeah, i like to cuddle and be cutesy and irritatingly couple-y sometimes (but never in public, that shit makes me want to hurl). fuck off, ok? maybe i'm a walking contradiction; maybe i wasn't held enough as a child or something. haha, that's enough about that.
3. company - just plain company is underrated. not conversation, not romance, not intellectual stimulation or discursive formation... it's just nice to have somebody around, especially if you're on the same sort of wavelength. if only to take turns breaking up the hash with. of course, i get sick of having people around me all the time, and i do miss my alone time when i don't have it.
4. ummmmmm... - funny story. see, i thought i was going to have more than enough things to write five things here. but then as i was working on number 2, i realized that basically all of them would have to do with sex, and i figured if they were all separate numbers, it would seem kinda creepy. so i decided to agglomerate them into one entry. as a result, the sex entry is overly bloated, possibly still seeming creepy. likely it should have been shorter, lest i seem sex-obsessed. but i often am, so i think it's fitting. in any case, i've now realized that i can't think of five things without most of them being about sex, proving at once that a) i am in fact, sex-obsessed, and b) being in a relationship pretty much blows, even though it's got its perks.

c'est tout.