musings.

so it's 8pm on a saturday, and i've got three more hours to go at work. i went home and got baked on my lunch, so i'm okay. though being stoned at work is only moderately better than being not-stoned, because it's still mind-numbingly boring. plus, 90% of the activity i do here involves reading, and i find that bakedness isn't particularly conducive to reading. most other things, yes, but reading like, a novel or something involves a sort of concentration and fixation that i find hard to sustain when high. but i am reading the washingtonienne archive and getting all sorts of prurient satisfaction from the sex lives of the ruling class.

anyhow, this is just going to be a hell of a lot of pointless musings over the next three hours or so. interspersed with long breaks of me doing other things. yet thanks to the glory of the written word, you won't even know that i've been gone. it'll just look like this:

and then you'll know that i spent some portion of time doing something that was not writing. likely getting food, or a drink, or rolling a joint, or frittering my time away on the internet in some non-blogging fashion (though likely by reading blogs). oh, the beauty of the paragraph. time collapses and is finally made orderly by the text.

a lady just called me parce-qu'elle voulait dire qu'elle avait toujours eu du bonne service de toyota, and it was just so special. that, more than anything is what makes me hate my job. the mindless idiot losers who rant and foam at the mouth are the ones who et any attention and for whom anything happens. whilst when nice ol' granny lady calls in because she's really happy that everything is fine, i just say thanks, and she's completely forgotten. people like her should get a damn gift basket or something. thanks, lady, for brightening my otherwise-irritable day. the squeaky wheel gets the grease, i suppose.

that's always the way, and i think it's one of those sad unassailable facts about human nature. fearmongering trumps hope, sensationalism trumps substance, and the fear of the negative always seems to trump a desire for the positive. that's essentially the impetus behind the conservative shift in america and anywhere else that a conservative shift might occur. the meek pale liberal saying "here's how i can try to make your life better" is alot less telegenic than the fat ruddy conservative saying "we're all fucked unless you do whatever the fuck we tell you! be afraid, little weenies of the world, be fucking afraid!" and then even the weenie liberals give in and say, oh no, the world is a big scary place and we need to defend ourselves against it! shut the fuck up, all of you. the only reason you guys have anything to defend yourselves against, is because other people who think exactly the way you do, think they need to defend themselves against you. your defense is another's offense. the act of 'defending' by necessity creates the entity against which all must be defended. and now the bridge has been crossed, it's been burned. when everyone is pointing guns at each other, only an idiot would be the first one to put his or hers down.

i hate having to use the phrase "his or hers." i wish that english was still elegant like french, and we could just say ils without worrying about it. i mean i know, apa guidelines and all, and i believe that everyone should be entitled to equal linguistic enfranchisement, but it's such a damn hassle, and it's so inelegant. we need a neuter possessive pronoun. i think i'm going to have a protest. a pronoun protest. and you know what really pisses me off? profs who say that it's acceptable to use "hers" as gender-neutral. feminists like that are to chauvinists what fundamentalist christians are to fundamentalist muslims. identical in all but name. (and, yeah, picky things like car-bombings, but i say it's merely a question of their respective situations and political power) oppressed groups who don't demand enfranchisement but instead a reversal of the traditional oppression.... well, they just deserve to stay oppressed until they understand the real definition of equality.

this made me wonder... who actually waits in line for a bar for that long? 1 and a half hours? i mean, 10, 15 minutes is pushing it for me. and i mean, obviously some people have to be waiting that long, or else there wouldn't be a lineup that long. not the kind of people i'd want to hang out with, though. like, you're just going into a crowded room to get wasted with your friends. why wait to go into one, when you could not wait, and go into a different one?

ummm.

that's enough.

delusional old man rambles a bit, is ignored.

today in the vatican, a silly old man in a dress gave a long, boring speech. in a move closely followed by the world's elderly and/or foolish, he confirmed once again that the growing community of religious idiots thinks birth control, same-sex marriage, and freedom are all serious dangers to the moral fiber of humanity. furthermore, he advised the applauding throng of dimwits that sex itself was pretty questionable, and that every time two adult heterosexual partners engage in it, they had damn well better be married, and in the mood to raise another irritating child.

idiots of the world on hand to listen to this geezer prattle on gave his words a few moments' thought, and then promptly forgot them. after a few hours of smug self-satisfaction and fingerpointing, they happily went on with their lives, as before, engaging in adultery, fornication, sodomy, bestiality, licentiousness, contraception, bawdy talk, cunnilingus, fellatio, masturbation, on-line viewing of pornography, titillation, dominoes, the "charleston," and the lending of money at interest.

on ethics, the law, and SWAT 4.

so, i've been playing a hell of a lot of swat 4 lately. it's pretty addictive. and kinda weird. a simulation of being a cop is just so interesting. it's even more interesting when i'm smoking a bowl whilst i order my squad to thunk some old lady with a beanbag fired out of a shotgun.

while i'm playing, it raises some interesting ethical issues. (yes, i CAN and DO apply critical theory in a lame, baked way to every damn thing in the world. buzzkill, i know.) so according to this game, everyone that's on the scene, no matter who they are, has to be zipped up in these little zippy plastic cuffs, cos, like, you never know who's gonna whip out a gun and blow your brains out. but this puts you in the interesting predicament of sometimes having to put the taser to a nurse just because she doesn't want you to tie her up and leave her there on the floor. which is pretty idiotic. like, you could obviously just cuff her whether she wanted you to or not. but still, say it's a burly guy who you don't want to wrestle to the ground? i mean are you really justified in dealing these people a hell of a lot of pain just cos you're afraid they might cap you in the back? cos i mean, it's a legitimate concern.

like, one girl who was dressed all nicely and was entirely not "Suspect" looking material whatnot was not "complying" (aka putting her hands up) , so i pulled out the taser thinking, god, i have to electrocute another innocent bystander. and while i'm about to hit her with it, she pulls out a gun, and i zap her before she can shoot me. and it's like, wow. good thing i didn't just leave her there. (at this point you are thinking, what a fucking nerd. how long can he go on about this for? a long fucking time, lemme tell you.) not only could i have tasered her without receiving a penalty for "unauthorized use of force," but i could have capped her in the knee and yelled at her, and still been within the bounds of my rights as a simulated officer of the law. so i mean, i'm as ACLU as the next guy, but maybe people who won't just shut up and let themselves get cuffed when there's heavily-armed maniacs running around deserve a few thousand volts. unless they've got a pacemaker and they die. so cops should just say, hey, you got a pacemaker? with the taser out, and then hopefully the implied threat will be enough to shut them up.

and the whole 'unauthorized use of force' thing also got me to thinking as well! every damn thing gets me to thinking. and that's why i'm up at 2:30 in the damn morning.

in the one instance i was thinking about, i used my magical sniper control feature (which is so fuck'n cool. oh shit.) to cap three militia-type dudes that were walking around in the room of a building with AK-47s. and i got deducted 30 points, for unauthorized use of force. but come on. these people are not just casually exercising their constitutionally-protected right to bear arms. they're in a building that's been occupied by terrorists, they're dressed like terrorists, they're armed like terrorists ... i think that anyone would be justified in leaping to the conclusion that they're probably terrorists. i don't know what real-world limits on usage of force would say about something like that. but i say, from the perspective of a nerd wanting to get more points and a citizen wanting to save the lives of police, rather than terrorists - if these obvious terrorists can be picked out of thin air by a sniper on top of a building and have no chance to fuck with anything, they oughta go for it.

a different unauthorized use of force penalty got deducted when i emptied half a clip into the back of another cop, who happened to be standing between me and a criminal type. now ... that seems pretty justified i guess.

haha. if you read to the end of this post, then congratulations, you're probably a nerd like me! talk about video games for that fucking long; who do i think i am?