So I've got patches on my jean shorts right now. And I'm getting ready to put some more patches on. Some of my friends would consider this pointless, and even juvenile. I do have enough money to go to the Thrift Store and get a new pair for three bucks, don't I? Well, actually, at the moment I'm picking up change off the floor to put enough money on my transit card to get to work tomorrow, but tomorrow I'll have some cash, so why patch up these jean shorts?

For a long time in my naive punk rock youth, I tried to look very "punk rock" without considering a lot of the reasons behind the dress. There are some people who have probably been waiting a long time for me to say that. There, it's out there. I appreciated the aesthetics without accounting for the historical or social significance, let's say. So why am I still dressing like a giant hobo idiot man-child?

Here's some politics made personal for you.

I want to do certain things in my day-to-day life. I have determined them to be generally good things to do and think that they fall in line with living out my political beliefs. For one, I want to support independent music. I try and support independent artists, and while I'm not always the best about buying albums, I make an effort, especially with smaller touring bands, to at least give them some green to take out on the road with them. I'm gonna subscribe to Razorcake with my next paycheck.

In tandem with that, I want to give less money to corporations in general. That's why I try to avoid chain fast-food outlets and don't buy clothes from anywhere but the thrift store or punk bands.

I also want to consume less in general. The staggering amount of waste in this society is, uh, staggering. I just want to reduce my size of the landfill. I figure I owe it to the future generations after all the action-figure blister packs I'm directly responsible for. Not to mention the petroleum-rich action figures. Sweet Raptor Jesus.

Anyway, in the course of being a total badass over the past few years, I've shredded more than my fair share of jeans. My standard tactic is to get one pair and wear them out completely, until the crotch busts out, the knees blow open, and the pockets are just pathways for change from my hand to the floor.

But patches! Patches, my friends, are key to saving these jean shorts. I will reduce my consumption by using a needle and some thread. I'll use patches to actually patch my clothes and in the process I will not only support good bands but I will also not add to my landfill pile. Also, I will produce some badass shorts.

One of the most irritating things in the world is being mistaken for a Democrat.

I hate arguing with a conservative about politics, because somehow they've been trained to nitpick and chip away at arguments by Fox News and the general hysteria-mongering nature of the Republican party that's been in full force since the mid-90s.

I find politics engaging, if only because of the weird freaky numbers of it. The Good Doctor Thompson was a sporting man, whereas I am not, but he was still able to transfer some of his enthusiasm for the bizarre sideshow that is American Politics unto me.

The problem is that I tend to get wrapped up - in a two party system you're always stuck rooting for the less of two evils.

So I voted for Obama - does that make me a Democrat? I admit, I had high hopes for him. I got a little hooked on what that irritating columnist in the Trib calls "Hopium" and maybe I was being unrealistic.

But Obama is a better President than John McCain would have been. You know why? Because with another four years in power, those controlling the strings of the Republican party, like Limbaugh and Rove, would have continued their reign, and Sarah fucking Palin would have been set to run in 2012.

I feel like with Obama in the White House, we might stall the encroaching capitalist death system for a while, and maybe have time to fix some things, before this country swings back to the right. Or shit, maybe we can take this opprotunity to splinter the two-party system. That'd be pretty entertaining.

Another thing I hate is Obama being called a Marxist or a Socialist. He's not. That's retarded. Glenn Beck is a fat sweaty moron, but even Dennis Miller thinks he's stupid.

I now turn you over to George Carlin.

So I woke up early this morning to make sure I went and voted.

My dad has been hard at work pushing for the candidate opposing the incumbent mayor. And really, the mayor of my little suburb is about as incumbent as you can get - he's been mayor for like thirty years.

I went to the polling place and was asked if wanted to use an electronic ballot. I didn't. I'm usually down for using gizmos, it probably stems from watching sci-fi movies as a kid. But electronic voting machines fill me with liberal paranoia and dread, due to various reports about vote-flipping and other fraud.

I told the sweet little old lady that I'd rather use a paper ballot. She was taken aback, and remarked that there wasn't many paper ballots.

I told her I'd prefer it, because I had read articles about how the electronic voting machines could be tampered with. This seemed to offend her on a personal level, and I told her that I was probably just being paranoid. She then proceeded to talk about me with the elderly woman who had been in line behind me.

Then I took my paper ballot and voted for the Independent candidate for mayor. Huzzah for me, I guess.

I'm nearly done with another semester of this college shit. I've really gotta pass my Logic class. I should go downstairs right now and print out the sample exam so I can work on it before the test tomorrow. God damn, I've just gotta work at it, but it's the most irritating thing in the whole world.

Bert came in with a riff yesterday, it turned into a song fairly quickly. I'm thinking about putting all the lyrics down on paper in one place. People have asked me for them before. I feel really good about the band. We're progressing as a musical, uh, unit. Like, when we make songs, they sound like they're all made by the same band - there's a unified sound, kinda.

We took the song title from a line in Robocop. Not from the scene depicted below, we just like that scene. That yuppie gets his shit wrecked by the ultimate robot made of fail, ED-209. If you don't know what I'm talking about you're not watching enough Robocop.

Here's a link to the demo, if anyone is interested.



Kiss the Mayor's Ass Goodbye

A man's defined by the choices he makes
Lives the lifestyle that it dictates
Insurrection starts at home
(starts at home)

The last gasp
of a dyin man
in a dyin land
with a head of sand
all the lies
through bright teeth
look what politicians
have done to me

All those bright shining liars
have buried me up to my neck
and when I look around my city
I swear there's nothing left

And so on.

I need to draw again. Drawing is fun. I miss doing it. I think I should start practicing - drawing a bit each day. Maybe I'll steal an old drawing tablet from my sister's room.

I should also try and post on this thing more, too.

But eh.

I'm working from home, but not doing very much work. Oh, well. I should pick up the pace but I just got baked and I'm enjoying it.

There hasn't been any acid for a while. That's kinda shitty. I mean, I feel the need to get severely twisted.

"Why I must walk this earth with the bright-eyed liars and titans of inner filth shall ever plague me. That the universe should misspend one mote of its grace and bounty on a fool like that is all the evidence I need that the throne of the Lord sits empty." - Ramses Luther Smuckles, regarding some asshole.

Sometimes, there's just not enough justice in the world. Sometimes, you are, in fact, surrounded by piteous scum and you have to suck it up and deal with them on vague, uncertain terms, because to do otherwise - that is, to do what is correct and righteous - would be inopportune.

In most cases, a serious verbal dismantling of the pathetic individual in question would be more than sufficient. The individuals I speak of, naturally, have faults and hypocrisies that run so cavernously deep there is no adequate comparison to the common foilbles of the average man. These people I speak of are horrendous. Make no mistake, my friends – these are the dogs that no one would’ve missed or wept for at the pound’s gas chamber. They shit on your rug and do it without any endearment, they are stupid and cruel and lick your hand with your blood stains on their teeth.

In any case, last night I found myself face-to-face with such horrendous goons, caught in a social situation I was enjoying until they were unceremoniously dumped in my presence. The person who brought them there, incidentally, was someone who had previously agreed with me in my assessment of these goddamned bastards.

Discussing the situation this morning over microwaved cheeseburgers, I realized that for a certain amount of time, people like that had been absent from my life. This renewed feeling of frustration at sharing my breathing-space with these bottom-feeding gill-fuckers made me remember one sure-fire method for stress relief – totally wreckin’ shit up.

In the old days, frustration would build and take its natural course. Call it sensitive people entering the modern American service industry as idealist youth and having their souls crushed by the utterly cruel and cheap machinery of it all. Every week, a young person working in the service industry for the first time would be exposed to an entire segment of the population, a segment unknown to them until just that week, that is effectively making the entire goddamned world worse, in a sort of slow-motion holocaust of callousness, idiocy, greed, and petty behavior.

So there is no direct solution – even the aforementioned verbal dressing down is ineffective in light of the sheer, staggering numbers of these shitbrained reptiles.

The old way was to play some hardcore punk rock, get exceptionally rowdy on alcohol and sometimes even drink some cough syrup and really embrace the maddening nihilism of it all – and wreck up the joint. Throw some bottles at the wall, knock some shit over, scream and yell and kick and tear and shove and slam until you are a sweaty, sometimes bloody wreck. And that was bliss.
I need to get some dinner plates and a baseball bat and go out in the backyard.

So Barack Obama has been President for one month now. My in-browser spellchecker still has no idea what to make of his name. It has suggestions, but it still cannot decipher what exactly I mean.

Not to jump on a cheap metaphor, but I’m also fairly bewildered.

The Republicans are raising hell, as I expected – they’re a very efficient opposition party. It didn’t take long for me to understand that phrase “the loyal opposition” that the Democrats found themselves saddled with for a time. The Republicans are anything put the loyal opposition. Their customary tactic is to imply a lack of patriotism of their opponents that Democrats would never be able to get away with.

But really, fuck all that. I hate talking about the two old parties of fuckheads so I won’t do that right now.

Like I was saying, I’m gonna use a cheap metaphor and compare my current feelings on the new President to that of my spell-checker – I’m confused, because I don’t know what he is. I keep expecting him to fit a mold. I’ll figure out what special interests he’s pandering too or who he’s in bed with, and then I’ll find the angle at which he’s fucking the average American and the oppressed people everywhere, and then I’m gonna kick myself for voting for him.

Or maybe I’m being paranoid. I know I’m paranoid, actually, but I know what I see. I dropped acid last weekend and went to a basement punk rock show at Jim Sludge’s house. Teenage powerviolence mayhem (Socially Retarded) at maximum velocity, fueled with fine grass, a bit of booger sugar, a five-liter mini-keg, and two tabs of mind-melting madness. Mark, my favorite tortured artist friend, came out and we eventually began debating the larger “whys” and “hows” of things.

It’s hard to make things out, beyond the fact that sixteen year-olds tear shit up for that crusty, super-thick, heavy, brutally fast tempo-shifting version of hardcore punk called powerviolence, but I do remember saying one thing to Mark near the end of our marathon argument session. At some point after we learned how to use a can opener to pull the center out of the tops of our Old Style cans, I downed one beer and attached the can opener a fresh can. As I was turning the handle, I looked at Mark and said, “I don’t know how to talk to you if you don’t believe in the giant machine that’s killing everything.”

It’s strange, this punk rock business – if nothing else, it’s a good way to kill yourself a bit quicker and have a fine time doing it. But there’s also that fine streak of revolutionary spirit – and if there’s one thing punk rock has taught me it’s to question everyone, because most everybody’s full of shit. That’s why I love punk rock – even when it’s pretentious, that pretention is marred by the raw ugliness of everything else. And the best of it isn’t pretentious at all – it’s simply growling madness at a hypocritical world (“Nothing”), or owning up to your own personal faults (“I Can’t Stop Farting”).

So I don’t want to trust MaximumBarackandRoll. Not quite yet. I voted for him because the alternative to too horrible to consider. Sarah Palin was being set up to be Bush 2.0 (now with tits!) and it made me nauseous and horrified at the same time. Nausiffied.

Spell-check doesn’t know what to do about that, either.

But now that he’s in office, all I hear about the President is that he’s doing one thing wrong, or another thing wrong, and all the problems that bother me (like, say, Leonard Peltier being in jail for over three decades now) are still festering like an open sore.

And then, I remember – it’s been a fucking month. Everyone needs to chill out and see how shit goes down – myself included. I’m still worried about all the things I worry about. But I’m not ready to write off Obama yet – he still might actually be a good leader, who does his best, in the Vonnegutian sense, at least. If you don’t know what I mean by that you need to read a lot more Vonnegut.

Also, I went to Cock Sparrer’s MySpace page – they look like a bunch of fat old English fucks who would probably be the loudest, drunkest guys at the local “pub” or whatever. They’ve got a pretty damn fine live version of “England Belongs to Me” though – I’d like to hear that pumped out at some ungodly decibel level – singing along with a massive chorus of shitfaced UK skinheads would be a fine thing if you’re properly plastered.

I lost my virginity at nineteen to a seventeen year-old punk rock girl with short bleached-blonde hair and Cock Sparrer t-shirt. I don't really dig on Cock Sparrer too much, but "England Belongs to Me" is one of those all-time classic punk rock songs.

So my band is playing a show tonight . . . the gear is all over the place . . . but now I'm thinking about getting a van. Hmm. I also ditched what should've been my first day of class today. Oh, well. I'll go to all the rest . . . or at least I'll try.

I hope those magic tickets work . . . I want that chemical edge tonight . . . gonna drink some 40oz. and snort some pills and see what kind of social ills await me.

Have a better place to have a New Years Party next year.

Firstly - I fucking think Christmas friggin' sucks big hairy chode. Firstly. Secondly, it's a good thing there are PBRs chillin in my downstairs fridge, because - thirdly - THE BABY JESUS CAN SUCK MY NUTS. That's right I fuckin said it. Also, kinda thirdly, like third-and-a-halfly, I fucking hate church, and I had to go last night. I know, dudes, I know - not thrash at all.

So maybe you noticed that there's a hot chick and it's a "XXX-MAS" instead of regular lameass "X-MAS" - well you probably guessed why already, because it's totally way fucking more wicked that way. Anybody who doesn't thing so is probably some kind of lameass sucker.

I was totally chilling out all baked in-cog-nito-style with my family and we were watching the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie which is rich is thrasher dudes from the late 80s all with their caps turned up thrash-style and whoa, dude, they were wicked awesome all stealin' shit and bein' led by a young, blinged-out Sam Rockwell (dude from Choke and shit) who in the end DO THE RIGHT THING and team up with the Turtles. Fuckin' awesome.

Anyway, that didn't make up for how lame church was. It was laaaaame as all hell. Lame, lame, lame - totally not thrashin at all, brosefs. Inferior to thrash in every single aspect. In fact, it was so lame that I cannot even bring myself to talk about it.

SO ANYWAY, in order to make it A MUNICIPAL WASTE XXX-MAS, I shall go distribute copies of Art of Partying to all the unfortunate children in the land who have had the unfortunate position of not being blessed by the gift of WAAAASTE!

So there's a family Christmas party today. Every year the more well-off cousins on my mom's side of the family get together and exchange gifts. I hate going, because it is boring and awkward and, well, to be honest, they continually try and get me to be Santa.

That dog won't hunt.

Anyway, instead, what I think I shall do today is stay in my pajamas and smoke weed out the bathroom window. Kurt once told me how he got stoned in his bathroom with his parents home and just ran the shower. The steam from the hot water covers up most of the dope smoke. I've never looked back. This pipe's for you, Kurt.

So I'm burning a CD right now - crazy old-school, I totally know. Assholeparade, Municipal Waste, Government Warning, four albums (two by AP cause they're short as hell) and one CD. I feel like I'm seventeen again.

Unfortunately, what I should really be doing is acting like I'm twenty-three and about to take a Statistics final. I've gotta pass this final because I've got to pass this class. I really, really hope I don't fuck this up. I don't know why I can't study math. I swear to Hunter  "Raptor Jesus" Thompson that I'll pass every other class. But fuuuuuck, man. I fucking hate math.

I'd rather try and record some demos that I found on an old tape.

Well, here goes nothin;.

So . . .
I hope that one day I will write. So maybe this is practice. I'd like to wake up at 9AM and then write for a while. I think I mentioned this already.

I think the quickest way I can do that is to finish school. I should've hustled to the bus this morning, but I didn't. It was cold and I felt lazy. Ah, well. The real problem with school facing me right now is suddenly twofold - I've got to get good grades, not just for the sake of getting good grades, but also because I fucked up and didn't register early enough and now the classes I need next semester are full. So balls. I've also got to get good grades to ensure my parents don't flip out because they've wasted their money for the hundredth time. Although really I think (while I certainly have wasted money) I only totally flunked one semester and one summer school class, and those are the only classes I've ever flunked in my whole life.

But whatever. I'm totally done with this school bullshit for now. The sooner I'm done, the sooner I can focus on writing, moving out (hopefully that will happen sooner), and the band. I have absolutely no faith that getting my BA in Sociology will get me a better job. None at all, none whatsoever, nada. I'm gonna end up either continuing to work at my mom's research office or (hopefully, if possible) getting another (again, hopefully) $9.00-an-hour job downtown. I don't think there will be any job-getting, not unless MaximumBararckandRoll saves us with millions of "Environmental Jobs" or what-have-you.

One thing that I'm noticing about the aftermath of the Election is that it's like waking from a dream. I'm remembering all the shitty things I learned about the US Government. This all started when I was younger - when I started learning about Vietnam, about why we were there.

It's interesting, my natural, socially-ingrained interest in firearms is what led me to suspect something was awry. The stories of the original M16 - taken from a superior design, made cheaply, and awarded a government contract despite being a piece of shit unfit for wet, muddy jungle warfare - made me look twice at why Colt was awarded that contract. It also gave me a very clear moral picture - Colt used clout to get its inferior guns into the hands of our troops. Our troops then died in the mud trying to clean their jammed Sixteens. They went to war for, supposedly, the good of the American people, to defend their homeland. They ended up being killed for cheap, ugly, greedhead reasons.

This is why Thompson was a patriot - because these kinds of things made his stomach twist in his gut. And they happen with alarming regularity. Cheap, economicly-conscious decisions that shatter families and murder children. This is the real shame that America carries with her. And for a time I wasn't sure it would ever get better.

When MaximimumBarackandRoll won the contest, with plenty of money from his supporters, both rich and poor, I was deluded - I wasn't thinking clearly. I was ecstatic because my man won, but then, slowly, over the next few weeks, the realization that nothing had quite changed - not in the fundamental ways that needed changing, anyway - and we were still slogging forward, our hands covered in blood, has taken its toll.

Anyway, yeah, I should've gone to class. But whatever.

So Thanksgiving was like, "Here the fuck I am assholes" this morning which kinda sucks ass cause you can't wear your thrasher jeans just cause they got a broken zipper and your dick slipped out like one fucking time and it's all like, "Fuck that" but then you eat turkey and then you get shitfaced, so that's cool, cause you're all full and whatever.
But yeah whatever it was lame and kinda sucky cause your stupid uncle was all "Blah blah we got a nigger in the White House Charlene, can you fucking believe it?" and being a fucking sucker then your smart-ass fifteen year-old cousin got all offended and started yelling about these dudes called Native 'Mericans.
Apparently these Native Mericans were like totally thrashin it up and then these lame-ass churchy dudes from England were like, "No thrashin Native Mericans" and the Mericans were like "No way, gotta thrash" and chuchies were all "Yes way, have these blankets" and the blankets totally had the Plague or some such shit and then the Mericans had to be all "Can't thrash, gonna die" and it was very fucking lame.
I was totally baked as shit and eating this green bean casserole that's fucking rad but thinking about the Mericans and all of a sudden, there is this insane sound like some motherfuckers just tearing shit up outside on the street, like van tires totally wailing around the corner and this insane double-bass drum beat. Like budda-da-dudda-ba-dudda-ba-dudda-BAM-BAM-BAM and this totally bitchin' van comes flying through the front of the fucking house and I realize that it's totally the fucking MUNICIPAL WASTE VAN and then the motherfuckers are all fucking shredding all in my family's fucking face and all these crazy people come out and some totally wicked-hot babe hands me a forty and I fucking drop-kick the turkey in my uncle's face and do a wicked stage-dive off the table which I guess would be a table-dive but whatever.
Nah, that didn't happen. But it woulda been fucking rad - I would have been stoked, which is close to being stoked, but not quite. It's like, hypothetical stoked or something I dunno. But yeah that's why there was a question mark in the title cause you don't know if it's true but maybe you can make it a Municipal Waste Thanksgiving if you hold true thrashing values in your heart.
But yeah, later I went and smoked a bowl with my cousin in the garage and then my buddy Boner came over and we had some beers and listened to some tunes and I was full so I guess Thanksgiving was a little bit of a Municipal Waste Thanksgiving but still, if that shit I wrote about had happened that would have been wicked cool.
Later

So begins the holiday drinking season.

Where's the party at, you ask?

Dan Walsh's house.

It's bizarre - I'm twenty-three years old and I'm gonna go drink in the same basement I've been sneaking beers in for seven years now. Go figure. Didn't I just get done saying everything was different? Ah, well.

Here's to kicking off a three-month bender.
 

So . . . life is a lot different for me than it was when I used to post in this thing.

Writing has slipped away from me, and that's something that happens to me from time to time. I really don't enjoy it. This is me making a conscious effort to get back into the habit of writing. I hope nobody realizes I've started updating this thing again for a while.

Things are different, like I said. I won't go into the minute details, but I think this thing might be markedly different because of one major change since the last time I posted. Barack Obama is President of the United States of America.

I grew a beard, then shaved it off. I'm trying to quit smoking. A black man is the POTUS. I've got a nice, sweet girlfriend who tolerates my neuroses and bad habits, my eccentricities, all that. Where does this leave me? I think it might've been easier to write when I was miserable. Maybe that's a cop-out, I don't know.

I actually started writing something a few months ago. I might serialize it on here, possibly. It's kind of about Obama, but it's mostly about me. I realized how much of my life is informed by the attitude towards America. It sounds very strange, but I harbor a very deep connection to the country and the legitimacy of the claims of value it places on freedom and democracy. When I saw the lies of the Bush Administration, and all the broken promises and blood involved in all American foreign and domestic policy throughout history, it flew in the face of the sacred ideals I was raised to believe.

But that could all be just a bunch of whiny bullshit. Who knows? Can I blame George Bush for a downward spiral? Probably not. But it makes a nice frame for a narrative.

So, we're not afraid of science suddenly wrecking things anymore. Not so much, anyway. Like, we're not afraid of nuclear-mutated giant insects, for instance. It's interesting that, looking at horror movies, since Romero released Night of the Living Dead in 1968, it seems now more and more the trend is that science'll fuck up, and let something loose that'll turn our neighbors and friends into deranged homicidal perverts, or whatever. So the science is one step removed, which I think is nice. It's still responsible, but what we're really afraid of, the zietgiest seems to suggest, is what our friends and neighbors will do with what science discovered.

You know what I think is scarier? What government does to science. To indulge in paranoid fantasy, let's go back to 1981, when the BBC ran this headline:

Mysterious Virus Kills Homosexuals

How about this for a flick - an in-the-closet government research scientist in 1980 discovers the United States Government's secret plan to test a biological weapon on the homosexuals in New York City and has a race-against-time type conspiracy deal. Y'know, with mysterious phone calls, tense visits from high-powered officials, chases through parking garages, helicopters with searchlights . . .
Of course, our homo-hero would have to die at the end, so morons wouldn't be offended. Also, though, if you look around - he obviously failed.

When you're told to be quiet all the time, not by people per say, but by the environment that has been made around you, sometimes you just start shouting. Then people look surprised, or hurt, or angry. If you're lucky, you can explain it away as a result of strong drink.

This is all wrong, is what it is. How can you not see it?

Either way, I'm planning my escape. I can't force myself to care anymore. It's just really hard to tell what's artificial and what's not. Legitimacy is too hard to grasp, so I might just have to settle for temporary satisfaction. Even that's getting difficult to come by around here.

Luckily for me, there's an unused drumset upstairs. And I've got all the time in the world, for the next two months, to learn how to play some Ramones songs.

 . . . and Prepare to Squeeze . . .

I'm gainfully employed again. I can't do this forever. I need to get out from under this system of beaurocracy, customer service and nametags. I need freedom to make my own path in life without being tied down. Fucking hell.