lifeispietzsche

My stepdad went to the church to beg for food, and now there's 3 expired birthday cakes on the kitchen counter.

a) we have lots of food, it's just food EYE bought: gluten/dairy free.

b) the paper bags used to transport charity food, all six, are sitting in the middle of the kitchen, slowly filling with debris. Because my family is too lazy to reach under the counter for the proper trash can.

God bless America.

I've decided to grow my bangs out.

In other news, I uncovered a virtual community where people can post, get this, their OPINIONS. It's actually an online store with consumer reviews and pricing information, but in a fun, personalize-your-own-login kind of way. I was Googling for Dead Kennedys and I got a hit for this advice/review column that a guy published, and when I lurked further, I found that the same guy had posted a review for Juno. Let me tell you something about writers: 99% of them are garbage.

I'm not sure, but I imagine that when the Internet started to mainsteam, JLo assloads of people started thinking they were grandoise intellectuals. Like some guy's talent had seemingly bubbled only beneath the surface before he logged onto his first forum, and cleverly espoused his interests. Now he thinks he's a writer. The Internet equalizes publishing power, so anyone with a half-assed idea can be fulfilled by sites like LiveJournal and Epinions and, you know, MySpace.

Our ignorance about this phenomena is harmful. People's self esteems haved inflated beyond sustainable capacity, and people are thinking, I'm just as clever a movie reviewer as Susan Tavernetti! They've started believing that everyone wants to hear their undeveloped opinions and thoughts, so they tell everybody about why they think Juno sucked, or why Police Truck is the Dead Kennedy's best song, when we really don't want to hear their thoughts, and the whole nice thing about the Net is that we don't HAVE to hear about them unless we're seeking them out on a search engine. Anonymity is the yang of this aspect: people can be ANONYMOUS, and still add "writer" to their MySpace profiles and job descriptions.
Plus, with the Internet providing an equalized forum, people's internal check system has broken down, so when they first feel the nibble of an idea, they just say it, without weighing a) why it matters to anyone else, or b) if enough critical thinking has gone into evaluating the validity of this idea.

So this guy on Epinions said that Juno sucked because the dad wasn't a realistic portrayal of a father whose daughter just got knocked up.
My issue with this is that real writers know that not all characters, themes, etc, are from the same stock. In all art characters, themes, and subjects are supposed to be evaluated on their individualism before their comparison to past or present interpretations (of that particular character type, of that specific theme, etc etc). So Juno's dad isn't supposed to be "the typical American father and his reaction to teenage pregnancy;" he's supposed to be a portrayal of THIS character's reaction to his teenage daughter's pregnancy. After establishing that, you can sit back and think, Now how does this compare with other comedic films about teenage pregnancy? Gee, guess there's not a lot of that subject in this genre, maybe I shouldn't group this character type with any of the others as represented in movies made for network TV (the father who disowns, the father who shouts, the father who retreats, etc). Good job Self.

Yeah, I hate movies when their characters don't fit how I think they should, or because their style was stupid or off for me, but it's insulting to expect the rest of the world, even if through the Internet, to accept that a film or book or exhibit is bad because it doesn't fit with other interpretations of itself.
Sincerely, if you want a film where the characters and situations are even with how mass American society feels or expects them to be, the only safe movies for you are made for TV. It's a business and censorship thing.

Get off my planet.

I'm pissed at a few things; first, the jerk who made the font on this public computer so miniscule; second, that I'm not taller.

"The desire begins with the demand to live not as an object, but as a subject of history -- to live as if something actually depended on one's actions... Damning God and the state, work and leisure, home and family, sex and play, the audience and itself, the music briefly made it possible to experience those things as if they were not natural facts but ideological constructs... If nothing was true, everything was possible."

Lipstick Traces
Greil Marcus

I've decided on the publisher I'm going to submit my first novels to. It's the same one Joe Meno goes through, in affiliation with Punk Planet: Akashic Books. This is the closest I've ever been to figuring my life out. It's good to be American.

In other news,

Shoreline was a fucking. girl. orgy, because of stupid goddamn Maroon 5. The pheromones were thicker than the smell of Pixy Stix. I have never seen so many crazy dances involving noodle arms ever. We were sitting next to, like, a decent-slumber-party amount of 16 year old girls on the lawn, and the whole concert was like a fucking pep rally for them. I don't understand how they could feel so pumped. I mean, why are you excited? Why do your noodle dance if that Maroon 5 frontman guy can't even discern you from the overall audience?
However, Counting Crows: fucking phenomenal. Moving, charged, spectacular. Adam Duritz is our generation’s Jim Morrison: a drunken buffoon. I want more of him like I want more live wardrobe malfunction. Durtiz's whole presence was like a magnificent wardrobe malfunction.
Now, there’s a showman.
See, those teenagers wasted all their energy on the band that ignored their expensive-seats-assed existences, while Counting Crows gave the most engaging show of a lifetime. I mean, it was like Counting Crows grabbed my head and blew Fun Dip in my face.
Thus, despite Maroon 5 and it’s following, the show was not a pain.
I still feel that being in small venues with small bands, that make up for their tiny scale with huge energy, is better than being a pebble on the beach of an amphitheater, even if the band is fabulous and awesome.

This story begins sometime in late July:

before I left for my month in the Midwest, I went to a bar in downtown Campbell with my friend Kat, because she was having a crisis undaming her creativity (we're those kind of people). She needed a new setting, she was getting squeezed out of her apartment by millions of empty cans of Diet Cherry Coke and stubbed out cigarettes.

So we're mired in our comingled creative and personal woe, and intermittantly, this guy beside us speaks to me. The fucker. Middleaged, blonde, bespeckled, has a tat on his calf of a snake wrapped round two bones in the shape of a dollar sign. He asks what my favorite band is, I say Bad Religion, he goes, "Oh, I used to play with them."

I'm like, Yeah, Whatever. Somehow, it becomes a throwdown between our knowledge of punk (as in musical theory and derivances). He was like 50, and supposedly still in 'the scene' because he plays in a ska band in SF called the Uptones (contingent argument: ska's relevance to the original ethics of punk, and overall musical merit [none]).

SO. He's impressed: I wasn't alive when punk became a recognized music genre, let alone when it evolved into a real living thing. I was born after it was already over. But I'm writing a philosophical guide, and that week I was deep in the historical context.

He's like, You should check out my band the Uptones, we'll totally change your mind about ska. I'm like Yeah, Okay. And Kat takes down the show dates coming up. Then he answered his Iphone and Kat was wow'd and he's like, I work at Apple. And we're like, You're a part time ska musician SELL OUT that works for Apple?

He's like, Heck yeah.

The rest: faded into oblivion.

We didn't go to the Uptones shows because I was in Tx. Whatever, we don't like ska, right?

WRONG.

Last night, I saw Bad Religion at the Regency in SF; guess who was filling in for Brett Gurewitz on guitar.

Fuck the world.

In an alternate universe, I would've just admitted, Hey, I'll be out of town during August, we can't make it. Then he'd be like, No prob, here's my MySpace, check out our show calendar and come when you can. Then I could've kept up a polite MySpace repertoire with him, and then at BR, he would've seen me and been like, Dude? Ash? From MySpace & downtown Campbell? Of course you'd be here! Come, let me bring you and your friends backstage! Did you bring a camera, want a picture of yourself hugging Greg Graffin?

The moral, believe everything strangers tell you.

This isn't the first time this has happened. Once Tom Petty sat beside me on a couch, and I had no idea until it was too late.
He does not look the way he sounds.

Fuck the world.

On September the 6th, last Saturday, Sam Francisco passed away at the age of 3.

He lived two and a half years longer than his life expectancy, and is survived by best friends and roommates Ash and Toothbrush.

A Las Vegas native, his favorite movie was Detroit Rock City, and his favorite color was a tie between lime green and white. He loved Chopin and White Zombie.
He is best known by his stint as the Fish in Space, and will always be our nautical astronaut.

There will be no memorial, his remains were irreverently flushed.

I'm hibernating in Texas, evaluating the stock from which I've sprung. My little sister's been held back two grades, the family puppy hasn't been named in 8 mos, and this wasteland community gets the National Geographic Channel on basic cable. I watched a Dog Whisperer marathon on Labor Day, and now the puppy and "other dog" will conga on command. I'm fucking incredible.

Besides that, there's been some personal growth. I've found my Rules, the accompanying guide to my incorrigible personality:

1. Privacy. When I leave a room, I'm leaving you in it.
2. Gender communication. Other women = inferior to me, I don't want to talk to you. At all.
3. Volatile tempermentality. Anticipate the worst in me. No one ever does, you fucking optimists.

The good news is, these characteristics MAY-BE derivative from undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome.
When I say maybe, I mean as in Wouldn't it be great being mean to others and intimidating them with intelligence they can't even fathom, and be excused for it?

"I, on behalf of both the entire neurology and psychology communities, absolve you of any and all guilt for not feeling shame about the things you think about your peers and national community, and also hereby protect you from any and all repercussion from the expression of your total utter disdain."

Thank you Oprah, you're one hell of a lady.

"On top of that, here's a $500,000 grant to nurture your intellectual interests instead of supporting yourself by going to work at Taco Bell."

Shucks, ma'am.

Oprah is the only woman allowed to speak to me.


In other news,

"And you can tell Rolling Stone Magazine, that my last words were... I'M ON DRUGS!"