Kids these days A ramble....

 Stolen from the mind of Dr Zodiac, Dave Nesbit's twisted and more honest alter ego.

So occasionally people ask me “What is wrong with kids these days.” First off I have no idea why I get asked this, I'm 43 years old and left physical kid hood a while back. (I think the last stages of it ended somewhere two blocks from the Berlin wall. If you see it, tell it I said hi.) Second and as a matter of clarifying the point, by kids the people asking me usually mean people from their teens to their early twenties. I hate to be ageist here but the adolescent and post adolescent phase seems to be blurring together a lot more these days.

So let me see. I had the joy of growing up in the 1980's and by joy I mean I grew up during an era where it began to dawn on a number of people that we might be well and truly boned as a species. Acid rain was making headlines then. Not that the rain was totally acid but enough to say ruin a paint job for a guy in Ontario, or poison a lake in Manitoba. Nothing too serious.

Next we began hearing a strange piece of news. Apparently sex could kill you. Now this was a shocker for me personally, I hadn't really been having a lot of sex at the time, but the idea had an appeal and my relationship with my right hand was getting a little stale. I could have cheated on it with my left, but I'm strangely ambidextrous. I write with my left hand and throw with my right, and whatever hand I do something with I do it pretty much exclusively.

When you're a teen your body is passing along an imperative. “Have sex now!” I can only speak for guys but I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought a knothole in the fence was winking at them. Just sayin.

And now sex can kill, and quite horribly at that. A slow lingering death that begins with sucks, proceeds to sucks worse, and ends with sucks horribly and with no dignity at all for you.

I think that's when I first heard the call of intense nihilism. Nature is becoming poisoned, your most basic and most entertaining biological processes can now kill you and Ronald Reagan is President and every day some uptight jag off is doing there best to make all the things you like culturally non existent.

It was enough to make the option of carnage and violence for it's own sake seem pretty appealing. I never gave into that voice totally but I engaged in a fair amount of mischief and enough destruction of property to help me feel like I somehow had gotten my own back.

Now let's fast forward to the “oughts” shall we?

Sex can still kill you, our environment is getting even more poisonous and messed up yet somehow it's become less of an issue, grand larceny on a scale unimagined by emperors is less a crime then the national sport, and reality TV has convinced an entire generation that they deserve to be famous for nothing more than being.. Fuck I don't know, a kid with an attitude and a cool name? It's a social sort of training that makes everyone think the camera is rolling twenty four seven and makes every moment or confrontation into a moment of artificial drama.

Every day we as a society seem to reward the worst of what we can be rather than the best of what we can be. To be a celebrity way back when you had to do something worth celebrating. Beat the Nazi's or fly into space with no real idea whether or not the rocket you are strapped to might explode and turn you into a charcoal briquette, or create a vaccine that wipes a disease off the map. (Jonas Salk you the man!)

It's a strange thought for me to have some much as a millimeter of overlap with some of the talking heads on Fox news, or the somewhat more twisted and scarily honest televangelists out there, but we need to get our values in line.

I know a ton of amazing kids who have their eyes on the prize, working to create fixes for our more serious problems. Now we just need to get all the idiots surrounding them to Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

I swear someone could announce a cure for cancer and be told to wait a minute because Lady Gaga is going to show her new look.

We as a society have our culture far more invested in spectacle than in anything that might have any actual meaning. In fact our culture by and large seems to be on a search and destroy mission for substance and meaning. It should be kind of a tip off of our need for it that John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are viewed as the people in the news and in the mass media people trust most.

Spectacle is the art of making people go ohh and ahh at something that means nothing. An explosion of a firework is pretty but the Mona Lisa lasts longer. The people who run the machinery of popular culture are terrified of actual content for reasons too sordid for me to go into here. Just let it be said that if you teach people to just enjoy the surface and not look past it. It makes it much easier to sell a product or idea that way.

Lets perhaps teach ourselves to have a longer attention span. Care less about the superficial and artificial bullshit we are sold daily as news and culture, and maybe make something worth passing onto the next group of kids out there.

The fault is every bit as much ours as theirs. “Whats wrong with the kids today?” In a word? Us. We look at the wrong ones, and make their names far too well known. Turn the channel on your cable box from “Jersey Shore” to Neil Degrasse Tyson. Or turn the damn thing off all together and pat the kid who is learning a thing or two about science, art or any constructive thing on the head and tell them they're the new star.  

Really? I mean really..

Hey everyone Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary! What really amazes me in all of this is the number of contradictions this makes for republicans.
1) Newt trashed Mitt Romney's wealth and his use of it in the election. Now a we all know the Republicans are the party that gave us the term "Job creators" so for Newt to make that sort of noise obviously means he's a socialist.

2)Newt took umbrage to the fact that at a debate the moderator asked him about his ex wife's statements about him wanting the freedom to bone his mistress while remaining married to his then wife. In short an open marriage. Do I have to point out that Newt led the charge to impeach president Clinton over his affair in the White House. While he was boning his mistress and married.  So obviously Newt is against the conventional American nuclear family.

3) Oh he also took umbrage to the idea that he might have actually lobbied on behalf of Freddie May and Fanny Mac or whatever the hell they're called. So apparently these two groups paid him in excess of a million dollars for nothing. Making him a lazy no good cheat. Or he's lying and he used his influence to help these two groups bring much of America's economy to ruin.

4) Which brings us to his big selling point that, he's a Washington Outsider. Unless you count his 30+ years in the house. Or that he was speaker of the house, and then was forced to leave the position after he was busted for ethics violations.

So the republicans of South Carolina voted for a Socialist, Anti Family, Lazy good for nothing or hard working Washington Outsider Lobbyist, with no connections to the system at all, or too many for his own good.

Or the people of South Carolina are dumb as posts and bought a bill of goods. Which leads me to my next great innovation for the church. The sale of pre indulgences for the truly dumb.  contact the good people of South Carolina on a one by one basis, and tell them the Church of Zodiac will forgive their sins, all of them for a fee of ten dollars which will guarantee them entrance to heaven no questions asked.
South Carolina has a population of about 8 million we should be able to clear a very nice profit very easily. And if we're lucky perhaps get a side benefit of a wave of "Heaven seekers" heading to the promised land straight away.

Get to the phones my faithful we have some holy bank to earn.

Taking the day off.

Educate yourself on SOPA and PIPA.

Yawn.... Wait WTF!!!

A long hiatus, or is it hangover I forget.. I got invited to a party in Omaha Nebraska, and I woke up in Reykjavik. Which sounds kind of dreary but is quite full of cute descendants of Vikings. So, I hung out for a bit. Which explains my absence. Of course when I returned someone turned on a TV. And before I could change the channel I saw it was Fox News. So in response to what I saw I must say.

Dear Bill O'reilly and Laura Ingraham

In regards to your comments regarding Planned Parenthood. A dissection of which can be found here.
http://mediamatters.org/research/201201050021 In it you said that the core of Planned Parenthood's business is abortion. Okay now I know that you are both talking heads for Fox News which probably means that you have to fail an IQ test to work there. But truth be told even pair of alleged intelligent people can notice that 3% of a business is not what one would call A core to build a business around. So let me make a few points clear.
1) I like pussy, there is no getting around that. The Cult of Dr Zodiac is a sex positive religion. And truth be told we view sex as a sacred matter to be indulged in with total abandon.

2) What I am and the members of my church are not fond of are STD's pregnancies for people totally unready to be parents, and lack of treatment for the routine infections to genitalia that happen in the course of daily life. The genuine core of Planned Parenthood's business deals with all of these issues. So the Church of Dr Zodiac as a organization firmly supports them in their continuing medical efforts.

3) Did I mention I am fond of pussy? So with that in mind Miss Ingraham could you perhaps not speak on the subject when we are uncertain as to whether or not you actually posses a vagina?

4) BillO. Allow me to say as a fellow Irish American I would like to say that your capacity for passing of ignorance as truth does nothing for your ethnicity at all, in fact you are helping to reinforce a number of stereotypes about the loud mouth dumb Mick. Please change your name to reflect something a bit more ignorant. Perhaps something like Smith or some other English surname.

5)Regarding: Pussy, and my desire of, I'll be honest the only reason it comes in slightly behind air in my desires in life is that it's difficult to enjoy anything sexual when I'm passed out due to asphyxia. With that in mind I tend to respectful of the people who A) provide it and B) maintain it. I have a simple rule on this subject, if you don't respect something you should get none of it. Which is why I am starting a campaign to get women to not have sex with either you, or anyone who is a fan of yours.

6) There is no point number 6.

7) Pussy, I'm a fan, just to point it out.

More new initiatives to recharge the church soon. Now then get out there and absolve some sins!!

More and More and More

It seems like I let myself down writing wise for a while, but currently I can't stop. So here is where I will let my brain hang out for a bit and let the things just dangling have a chance to be seen or heard.

Somewhere toward the tail end of 2011 things went from busy to madly so. Thankfully  all of it in a positive sort of way. Let me break it down for ya. I work a full time job. (Thank the gods!) I am organizing and participating in spoken word shows with the best damn group to work a stage. Organizing film shows at the Pizza Shoppe Collective, and putting together another art/fashion/film show with the Amazing Ann Myers and the rest of the Eventgelical crew.

Then I wrote a few pages of a script and talked Independent Gorilla films into making it. As the saying goes I am busier than the proverbial one legged man in the ass kicking contest. Which is all good. This is the stuff I want to do. All of it I hope are stepping stones to the life I want to lead. It has meant setting aside such things as gaming, and my other geekery, all of which I am quite loyal to and will return to once the time allows.

Somewhere though there is a voice in the back of my mind who keeps talking. You know who it is. My amazing alter ego who plans world domination. Is helping us all achieve eternal salvation or triple your money back, and is quite happy to knock it out with with most any woman willing to hold still. That's right Dr Zodiac's voice is being heard again. Let's be honest with all that's going in my life its hard to see the world around me, but when I do it just seems to be getting crazier and dumber and more insane by the day. Which is the environment he needs to exist in.

A world where Rick Perry makes the dumbest campaign ad ever, Rick Santorum makes the statement that "Healthcare is a luxury" and on and on and on. I am so grateful to these people. In comparison my money mad, power mad sex crazed alter ego is a legitimate alternative to these people. They are all crazy but in a manner that  makes us think. "Same Old Shit." Dr Zodiac is crazy in a way that might make you smile.

So come in lets reform the Cult. The band is getting back together. It's a world full of sin, and we know just how to absolve all of it.  

Trying it again

I have such an odd relationship with blogging. I love to speak at length about the things I love or hate at any given moment. Live Journal helped me to find a voice, facebook helped me build a little bit of an audience, then I got his and... Nothing. 

I wish there was an explanation for my silence but it mostly boils down to time and exhaustion. And remembering what my voice might possibly sound like.  Thankfully I remember now it sounds intelligent, often angry, frequently snarky, hopefully funny, and most of all I hope informative. 

So I am going to try this blogging business again. Starting with a post every week.  Then we'll see how the pace picks up. 

Keep in mind. I like people who are intelligent, even if they disagree with my point. If you make a good point I will respond and enjoy it, if your criticism is simply "fuck you" you'll get ignored or made fun of. 

Also my fingers tend to get ahead of my mind, and while I try to proof read well here but let me know if I mess it up. 

Next time. I have an opinion, or is that a delusion? I forget.

And so it begins

So it begins.

For those of you unfamiliar, I am the legendary Dr Zodiac. Mad Cult leader, Visionary, Mystic and Artist. For the last few years I have been gathering a core group of followers to assist me in spreading a new mental disease. A sense of true consciousness that the world needs to experience. A new spiritual vision, mixed with a simple set of political views. Designed to bring about a true nirvana on earth. All we ask in return is that you turn over most of your free thought and 5 percent of your income. Which is a bargain when you consider that most churches ask you to tithe 10 percent.

I see some of you balking at the mention at the loss of free thought. Allow me to ask though, how many of you are letting someone else do your thinking for you? Do you attend Glenn Beck University? Yell Ditto at that meathead Limbaugh or swear that every Olberman special commentary is the gods honest truth? Congrats, you are turning over your own ability for free thought to them.

The desire to be told what you want to hear is as old as time. Sadly now as much as then people will happily tell you what you want to hear simply to keep you from noticing that their hand is in your pocket and raiding your wallet.

So allow me to introduce you to the first sacrament of the Church of Zodiac. Designed by my head of Research and Dementia and approved by the High Priest himself. When confronted by the great talking head on TV you are to look, listen, actually understand the words the person is saying as they relate to your own life.

Then midway through what they are saying stand up and yell. “DO I LOOK LIKE I GIVE A FUCK?!!” More often then not in the midst of some compelling conspiracy theory about how some politician wants us all to become part of a (Fill in the blank) socialist/fascist/communist Adolf Hitler inspired socio economic disaster. The person telling this little tale needs to hear those words. Preferably very loudly and in his face.

If I may impost a moment of real truth here. The people who own the networks where these things are said have all ready made large campaign contributions to the party they are pissing and moaning about. These contributions have all ready derailed any real system of regulating financial derivatives, and the people who did the most damage to that legislation were democrats. (Senator Christopher Dodd has a lot to answer for here.) This may not be what you want to hear, but it is a small and important taste of an odd and vanishing species known as truth. A taste for it can and should be acquired, and a larger audience for it is the only thing that may save the world we reside on. 

So with that in mind please feel free to look at the talking head on TV and announce “DO I LOOK LIKE I GIVE A FUCK?!” It won't fix anything but will clear your mind long enough for you to have a clear rational thought that is all your own. It will also vent the frustration you feel knowing you are being talked down and lied to constantly.

Next week we discuss the churches method of sin absolution. Prepare to smile your way to paradise!