Transdermal

As Jackie Boy would say, you never really quit, do you?

I am no longer smoking. I am not presently, nor have I recently been, engaged in smoking. I do not wish to smoke; breathing, as foreign as it once became, is preferable, cheaper, and more enduring a pastime. I have quit before (for years, in fact), and I have resumed smoking before (idiocy /self-destructive nature?). I do not wish to resume smoking ever again. Not at parties. Not at the bar. Not once a year on my birthday. That is the Devil's talk: "Just one little puff...you can handle that", he claims (lying little horned fuck).

I have a new secret weapon this time. I am delivering my poison transdermally in the hopes that breaking the "habit" portion first will help me maintain my commitment to stave off the addiction that I am nursing along for a few weeks with my new pal The Patch.

Uncommon Quotations and other Contrivances

Someday I shall publish a counter proposal to Bartlett's and their ilk: a tome of Uncommon Quotations, filled with obscure, highly situational, or wildly inappropriate fare. The whole point of the more pedestrian versions of these collections has always seemed to me to be a mixture of self-propaganda / self-aggrandizement ("Look, everyone! I'm being poignant again...here it comes...") and the insincere attempt of public speakers to resonate with strangers. We tell anecdotes to familiarize ourselves, to break the ice, and to illustrate our own literacy to an audience that in all likelihood doesn't know the difference between a person who is well read as a whole, and a person who has a collection of quotation books and Cliff Notes. I would like to present the exact opposite; I'd like to author a book of quotations and anecdotes designed to baffle, alienate, or offend the audience...split the collection into non-sequitur Zen, discomfiting personal revelations from complete unknowns, and the vilest jokes available.

(a):

"Sometimes, when you're not looking, I'm someone else."

This is one of those things you say when people are inebriated or somehow have a tenuous grip on the moment (at a peak of stress, perhaps).

(b):

"My neighbor Carl once told me that he could only prepare for the banality of these conferences by masturbating furiously in the bathroom while choking himself with his tie."

Personally revealing, attributed to someone nobody else knows, and the kind of thing that visualizes easily.

(c):

"Do you know why the douche was invented? Ever try to teach a fotze to gargle and spit?"

As related to me by a 54 year old German immigrant who was quite possibly the funniest woman I have ever met; it even has a certain old-world charm when uttered by a bespectacled hausfrau from Stuttgart.

Cryptic Message from an Old Fool to a New Fool

The world was simpler then, or so the liars claim
Kids today, their elders say, don't understand the cause
Your predecessors all fell victim to the world
While you slept peacefully well, cradled in its claws
And all the sellouts, at the memory of their flaws
Wait for epiphany, absolution, or applause

And the whole world is as fucked up as a hippie with a gun
A mom who killed her kids for love, or a hooker who's a nun
The girl next door, the man upstairs, and rest are on the run
And someday you can pass all of this on again, my son

You'll want to change the world; there's nothing wrong with that
Except the arrogance invariably involved
You'll think you have the whole mess fixed in no time flat
Until you realize some problems just can't be be solved
So rest your laurels on to what you have evolved
It still wasn't you around which everything revolved

And the whole world is as fucked up as a hippie with a gun
A mom who killed her kids for love, or a hooker who's a nun
The girl next door, the man upstairs, and rest are on the run
And someday you can pass all of this on again, my son

Don't listen to or trust a soul, not even me
I'm only rational or lucid now and again
I've spent a lifetime and only lived a moment
Seconds of enlightenment punctuate years of pain
You'll find yourself one day unable to explain
Beyond echoing your father's desperate refrain

That the whole world is as fucked up as a hippie with a gun
A mom who killed her kids for love, or a hooker who's a nun
The girl next door, the man upstairs, and rest are on the run
And someday you can pass all of this on again, my son

Priorities

An appeal to the heavens for divine intervention is nothing to take lightly, but every one I've ever witnessed seemed to be (in the grand scheme of things) a fairly straightforward, self-centered request. "Please don't let this be a tumor" or "please bring my child back" as opposed to "please cure cancer" or "please raise all of the righteous the dead"...and that's being charitable; most of the appeals I've heard personally revolved around not getting caught.

It occurs to me that even tossing about words like omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, certainly a divine authority has priorities. Are we really doing the right thing by asking the being responsible for the movement of the spheres to help us hit lotto, or is that perhaps a distraction from more important matters? The Catholics have a system of intermediaries, but are very plain that your miracle is filtered up through to the Big Guy himself; he isn't delegating so much as he's hiring contractors to implement his designs. He still makes 100% of the decisions, which is perhaps why there are still pedophiles in the church and communists walking the Earth although a significant number of people have prayed for an end to both. It isn't that he's not listening, he just has a lot of shit on his plate. That, and he's ineffable / unfathomable, which makes the whole process damned infuriating because one never knows if something inconvenient is a part of the plan or just something that was de-scoped due to bandwidth problems.

What the world needs are second-stringers; someone who isn't saddled with quite so much. A specialist, if you will. You don't have the architect hauling concrete for the build site, and you don't ask the heart surgeon to put antisceptic and a bandage on a scrape, so why does humanity have the balls to ask the A-List of the divine world to get them out of parking tickets or help you pull a Jedi Mind Trick on the nice police officer and his dog?

For personal matters court then the intercession of unpopular gods, which being burdened with less may attend to you more.

The Continuation of Genius is Madness

A direction of thinking is not unlike a direction of travel, in that distance often determines context. If you travel West long enough, you will inevitably arrive East of where you began; by an analogous condition, any line of thought will eventually follow the curve of human experience back to where it began, passing through what was originally a polar opposite position. This is why people who decry murder will murder to prevent it, why people who fear revolution will stage a coup to save the state, and why people who seek to protect the moral certainty of their position will invariably stray into immorality in the pursuit of that defense.

It is by this mechanism that idealists become extremists.

The Finite Nature of Doing

The outcome, on a long enough timeline, might be temporary; the event itself is always permanent.

New Ghosts For Old Hauntings

The similarity with which crises present themselves throughout the years is astounding.  At some point between November 15th and January 15th, something will randomly fuck with my serenity; it's been that way since I was eight years old.  A winter car accident, the showdown with the old man when I was ten, somebody dies, someone leaves, something breaks...whatever.  Something is going to suck.  Those kinds of things are fucked up enough on their own without being predictable; coinciding with a season that's supposed to be festive is one of those little kicks in the sack that lets you know there is a higher force at work in the universe, and sometimes he's a dick.

Ontological arguments for God aside, I've tried to decipher over the years whether or not these things were truly random, the result of some external machination, or whether perhaps I've somehow brought some of them to bear myself (via expecting the holidays to be fucked, and then subconsciously setting out to tank them because of that expectation).  Certainly more rational than the rather egocentric notion that the Almighty has decided that I have high billing in a retelling of the story of Job. 

In truth, some fall into each category.  This years is purely someone else's seasonal madness made manifest in my holiday, but it still sucks.  I don't blame them particularly; it's the silly season, and I've been there myself.  I'm actually far more pissed off at how it impacted other people involved than over any trouble it caused me,:

To all of humanity, RE: the whole major depression / self-destructive thing -- do your friends and family a favor and put that shit off until March next time.