Ukraine is key to Europe

At some point around 2am on Thursday I had woken up to see a text on my phone from Evan that RISK would be opening at this show, making it their official debut. Peach offered to drive as they had planned on a quick practice at the cheese factory beforehand. After sitting through an hour or so of traffic we arrived at the Fulton Market around 6:30, unloaded the equipment real quick to the front door and proceeded to search for parking. I pointed out a spot in front of semi-truck right around the corner where Peach performed some highly shady parking maneuvers, including backing up into the HUGE truck behind him. After that minor ordeal we returned to their practice space, through the epic walk in freezer of seemingly endless gourmet cheeses (including some 8-year old Extra Sharp Cheddar, more on that later). I think it took more time to load everything in and down the dark stairway to the basement than it took for them to actually play. They set up and ran through their set once while I broke down weed for the remainder of the evening. Before I know it we were dragging the cabs back upstairs and loading them into "Niohoggr", formerly "Nifelheim". All the vans the company uses get their names from Norse mythology (Yggdrasil included). Now I've driven some "worn-in" work vans in my time but this one emanated noises from the engine and various bearings and connection points that began to sound more organic the harder the gas pedal was pushed, where it would usually take a second or two for the the gas to actually kick in when pressed upon.

We arrived at Summercamp a little after 7:30, where Danny pulled an epic U-turn on Kedzie to park almost right in front of the house. So we loaded out, smoked, and began to file into the basement, where maybe 20 people had gathered. Now I've only been coming to shows for only about a year and a half and am meeting new people at every one, but I didn't recognize 99% of the crowd tonight, and very young they seemed. I noticed while Risk was setting up, the several kids right up front socializing, slightly amused that they might not be ready for Evan when he grabs the mic and begins assaulting the crowd. And as I learned that evening, Evan's small stature and boyish looks (complete with Hitler Youth hairstyle) are just scenery; dude is a maelstrom of fearsome moshing violence.

Instead of just saying who they are, they turned it into a song: "We're Risk", that Evan screamed and then proceeded to attack us up front. He ran full speed, and due to his low center of gravity as opposed to mine up high he was able to push me against the wall...or where I thought the wall was. There was actually a closet there, door open, that I fell all the way into, smashing my shin on something on the way down, dented bones now on the left to mirror those on the right that I got about a decade ago when I slipped and hit my shin on a steel trailer hitch. I immediately got up and tackled Evan against the opposite wall, crushing others in the process, and then throwing him back up front in time for "Do Drugs". I was thinking of saying how it's refreshing to not hear a straight edge message, but grindcore shows and alcoholism/pot-smoking seem to go hand-in-hand, though Risk is pretty far from a gc band. They tore through their last 3 songs, the highlight probably being Evan pointing at people individually while singing "YOU! YOU'RE STILL IN MY HEAD!" followed by stomp-moshing, then closing with their Repos cover. First show success. Though Evan mentioned afterward: "I don't think these people like hardcore." They have a show coming up on the 27th @ Albion House (Black and Blue debuts), and it's bound to be far more destructive. Come get your face knocked off of your face.

We then disassembled the equipment and loaded the van back up, put everything in a nice order, tarped it and went and got some tacos at La Cocina, which I persuaded Varg into buying me. We returned filled with some damn good tacos al pastor, but we had missed the next band, so we stood out back, smoking and drinking NON-ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES. Hercules from Omaha played next. Having never heard them, I wasn't expecting anything, good or bad, but they really tore it up. Their music would shift between fast screaming over blastbeats into weird 70's arena rock style guitar riffed breakdowns, which I was surprisingly enthused over. That's one of the greatest things about coming to these sorts of low-profile house shows: you're almost always bound to discover for yourself a really great obscure band. Would totally see this band again.

Scare Quotes played after them. The super fast grind wasn't bad, but what was really great was being told how horrible I am in this world for being a straight white male. I was just overpowered and moved by own guilt. But seriously, I totally appreciate your stance, but telling a bunch of hardcore kids about LGBT equality is preaching to the choir. Have you seen some of the haircuts here? These kids don't care. "America fucking rules!"

We spent the next 40 minutes or so in the back alley, smoking (tobacco), drinking (root beer) and (apple juice). Ya know, I never thought I'd be in favor of banning any sort of drink, but holy shit does 4Loko make people obnoxious as fuck. Not that it bothered me; I thought it pretty humorous to watch dudes scream at each other while they're standing face-to-face and have it be a friendly conversation. Whatever band was next we missed as we stood out in the cold, sharing acid and mushroom stories with certain members of Socially Retarded and some strangers.

At some point we were back downstairs while Retarded was setting up, taking up a lot of extra space with Aleks' monstrous case of effects pedals. It seemed to take forever for them to actually get situated, all the while feedback was dreadfully humming throughout the narrow basement, creating that aura of tension, and impending disaster. What followed could only be described as "disastrous", but in the best possible way. I've seen SR 8 or 9 times now and I've never seen such belligerence from the band. It was absolute mayhem in that basement with the most senseless, ignorant moshing I may have ever seen. Jimmy was jumping off the bass drum, hitting unsuspecting fools with his guitar (not on purpose) all the while getting clobbered by waves of drunken goons. It appeared people were trying to hug or strangle Varg from behind. At one point, Aleks' entire case fell off its stand while still producing warped electronic tones and him standing there with a drunken smile, an effects pedal in one hand and his middle finger up on the other. The movement of the crowd was chaotic with people jumping and falling left and right. This one dude was on the floor and as I went to pick him up, he began purposefully convulsing, kicking his feet all around, "seizure mosh" I guess. Jimmy again mounted the bass drum only to slip and bring down a couple cymbals before jumping back up and smashing back into us. I recall him raising the guitar up and pressing it against the ceiling in a sort of triumphant pose while guttural noises erupted from the amplifiers pressing towards their threshold. Someone jumped on my back at one point (still not sure who) and we two-man moshed for a good 15 seconds through the maniacal crowd. I don't think I've ever been so enamored with being a mindless mutant among many others, having a great time at all our expenses. And as far as I could tell, no one got hurt at all. As their set ended and I thought the mania would cease, the singer Mitch turned around and charged me. Figuring I'd just go with it we almost made it to the very back taking out bystanders and throwing each other around like idiots. These guys have had some memorable performances, but they really raised the bar with this one.

We returned to the cheese factory around midnight or so to load everything back down in the basement, have a celebratory PBR, and eat some unbelievably good cheese: white cheddar and garlic dill cheese curds, basil colby, smoked string cheese, and what I've now found to be the greatest cheese ever, 8 year old Extra Sharp Cheddar. It just crumbled apart when pressure was applied, and I tried to eat as much of it as I could. It's kind of strange in a way, eating food that was formed when I was a sophomore in high school, but I didn't care, for its savory goodness far exceeds any sense of rationality or moderation. Beer and cheese is how every Risk show should end.

I like it here.

An interesting debate came up recently on the CHC forums, which I lurk but never post anything myself, regarding whether the local hardcore scene was some sort of unified movement or just a social club. By and large, I find it to be the latter, but I hold no judgment on that being a negative thing. Humans are naturally social creatures. Earlier in our history we were tribal-based; people adhered to groups of whatever their ethnic background was. But as humans dispersed and culture diffused, these disparate groups began to intermingle and form new entities. Thus it has ever been. Today's America, in its mindless pursuit of monoculturalism, has allowed for groups of more extreme-minded individuals to gather in its opposition. And so countless stubborn, conflicting viewpoints emerge over subjects that require logic and integrity.

The weird thing I've picked up on in hardcore is the potential for some sort of pointed, united movement to form from it, but the pitfalls that accompany such a formation (groupthink, close-mindedness, lack of empathy for others not of the group, etc.) are so disdained by those who would be members, that it's not likely to become such an organization. Of course, there are the subsets of crews within the scene (FSU, skins, whatever), but constitute a much smaller presence than in previous days. These groups are based on a certain exclusivity and a seemingly natural volatility. It seems most of the people in hardcore at large, aren't interested in a stricter scene of old where only crews could mosh (and you'd get a beatdown for stepping onto the dance floor). Like I said, it's a social club, but one with individuals more willing to stand up for their viewpoints and fight them out if necessary, still under the loose banner of "hardcore".

The views and ideas amongst us are so wildly different though. The music is about all that's communally agreed upon, but still, not everyone is going to like every band. That's what keeps the scene social and not...something more. Some people drink, some to ridiculous excess, some abstain all drugs (except for caffeine for whatever reason, definitely a drug), some don't eat meat or consume any animal products and write really angry songs about it. I'll just say, I completely respect anyone's decision on what they do or don't put into their body, but I don't think you promote any sort of "positive message" by NOT doing something. Some bands write almost exclusively about what they don't do, and I feel that then lacks a complete message. But it's not really my business to judge how you feel on a certain topic; that's your business, and if you can't make those words resonate with the music at a particular frequency, then I'm moshing to it, simple as that. Remember, friends, it's not about what we take into ourselves, it's what we put out into the world.



I remember that show being bogged down in controversy over a piece of paper that turned friends against one another. But I also remember none of that shit mattering during this 10 minutes of sheer ignorant moshing from the crowd and the ear-shattering set by the band. I really like how Evan's chain can be heard rattling through the wall of abrasive noise. I was ready for someone to lose some teeth, get a concussion, or have their jaw broken by 20 pounds of steel to the cranial area. Somewhere along the lines all this violence translated into solidifying the bonds of friendship. Most people would see this as insanity, idiocy, hateful or all three. To me, it was fun, and somehow meaningful. Words hardly do justice to the sensation of being at a show where both artist and audience go to great personal risk for a few minutes of enjoyment. Moreso, to find purpose in a country that has devalued so much throughout our lives. Once you start understanding the big picture of lies and delusion that constantly bombard us in ways both latent and innocuous, you start understanding the extremes that certain forms of art embrace, all the while stripping away the bullshit we've built in order achieve the illusion of comfort. It has always been the point of hardcore and metal music to try to find a real voice in a world beset everywhere by deceit. The music has to be loud, harsh, fast, invasive, dissonant, cacophonous, and unappealing to the masses, who seek to shun out the harsher aspects of reality. We can't shy away from the inimicable nature of our existence, we have embrace it and all the suffering with it, and that just can't be expressed in the context of social norms. How could there be any question about these genres of music and their logical evolutions in a world gone so neurotic, so fixated on bullshit idealism, a world where frauds have all the power and social respect, even though so much of their disingenuous nature is omnipresent? We've all been swept up and consumed by overbearing and insidious social institutions without context to their place within our own natural order. We're a part of the madness, and this is how we make sense of it.

Even though this show happened back in March, I still watch this periodically and am reminded of the that indescribable feeling of triumphant defiance against all those who would oppose, those who maintain the delusion of ideals and feelings over reality.

do the devil's work

10/29/10 Halloween Party @ Albion House

Just some highlights: Diego after a Loko and some shots singing to the Buzzcocks, drinkin/smokin with Charlie Numbers and HippieVarg, Hate making me enjoy Hatebreed's music for the first time in my life (and Eric digging me out this sweet Amy Winehouse shirt), learning the "beard bump" as a greeting, moshing to "Gimme Some More", Diego's pole dance that no one saw during "Nervous Breakdown", finally buying a copy of Weird Brain #1 (excellent writing from Spider: "It's so easy to pose and pretend to feel hate or anger or dissatisfaction with aspects of one's everyday life, but I want that only truly mad, dumb, ugly, morbid, and spiteful assholes with no lives outside of hardcore to read this. Do what you want and get what's coming for it, you fucking fakers."), that Atalanta accent like a sweet Georgia peach, smokin GC and PK, and sharing "I love you"'s with John Caution Voorhees as he held a (real) machete inches from my face, no homo, that ridiculous carnitas burrito at Lassos around 2am, and finally, Varg snoring louder than Integrity was playing in my car on the ride home.



Last night was a glorious return to the Caputo Halloween Party. Lots of awesome drunkenness and stupidity all around as well as some epic guido-ness from Nico and Anthony at 3am when they decided to kick everyone out: "Get the fuck outta here! You're drunk, just like ya paaarents! I'm goin to sleep, GO THE FUCK HOME!"

The highlight though had to have been taking a ride in Mach 1 after a blunt and drinking down about 8000% of my daily vitamin B12 needs and listening to Integrity's "Those Who Fear Tomorrow" full blast synthesizing with the ungodly roar of that 4.6 liter V8. Somehow the quick breaks and crescendos kept coinciding with acceleration and I felt exhilarated by their harmony.

The weather is absolutely perfect right now: cold, life decaying with the season's last colors clinging to darkening branches, that rich effluvia of crumbling leaves piling up on the curbs and sidewalks to be thrown wildly around into eventual dead ends. Happy Halloween. Go do the Devil's work.

let go but don't give up

I just want to commemorate the odd satisfaction of being in someone's presence who you know hates you down to the marrow all the while you feel indifferent to it. It's a trivial victory and only a momentary fulfillment, but I'll be damned if it doesn't feel good to be on the other end of that situation.



"i've got drawers of photographs that died at birth
and stacks of abandoned drawings
solitaire across from unread books
the piles grow but still i sleep
dream through the motions
the same
why this house is never clean
all things considered i'm the only one here
i can only do what i've always been told
all i need is some time
now is the time to drive this last nail into the coffin
bury this shit into the ground so we can fucking move on...
THE END
this is the fucking end
BURY THIS SHIT IN THE GROUND
SO WE CAN FUCKING MOVE ON"
-Bad Business, "Journey to the Center of the Earth"

This year has been largely about learning the value of non-attachment. The relief is immense that I feel over simply not caring about certain things/people anymore. It's nice to belie grudges and bad blood and just move the fuck on, unhindered by meaningless guilt and a preconceived notion of being slighted when, in actuality, the reality is that most of it just doesn't matter. I haven't felt this free in years.

Pacific Cuba

(written on the drive home from Mountain Home, Arkansas)

Serious people with the realest of hearts, handshake
with violence with no suffering.
I'm stuttering when I have something to say.



ashes of camels
hash embedded in floorboards above&below
clinging to a worn out shoe
scrape off a little sacrifice wherever I step

the grinding away of perception's hooks
the empty road at deadly speeds, none of you on my brain
the empty road and becoming it

Heavy eyes giving way to split-second
caffeine delusions
when there's no dexterity on board
higher than the mountains leering back
tracing rusty fence lines with one red eye
from the seat of a convenient monstrosity, that god
has given Us to conquer

I'm as much the illusory sky and beyond
as much a worker in the factory gargantuan of my homeland
the centrifugal life, never flying off to extremities
average and white, safe and clear, ignorant
of death and strife

hands and eyes to this road
transfixed on the right speed
where I can dissolve
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX


As we flew on 4 wheels spinning hot against concrete in August Ozark sun through towns like Old Joe(no population listed) and Midway and Mt. Olive we had the music of Carnivale with that slow mournful banjo echoing minutely against distant mountain faces I would wonder about the people there, what kind of lives they lead in these quiet pockets of gOD-fearing Arkansas life. I hail from an unremarkable suburb in the middle of the Midwest with so many other unremarkable people, trudging through this uninspired life and an ever-diminishing consciousness. We spent countless hours touring these backroads largely filled with forested mountains and the occasional incursion of houses antique and new. And driving here, a place I'd never been, I felt so at home. No strip malls, no billboards, no construction, motorists few and far between. Just me, one friend, the mountains and that solemn banjo, the kind that would be heard at hill-folk funerals.



I don't come from these parts, but my father's family were originally from wilderness of West Virginia, true hillbillies. I believe in genetic memory and their untold generations spent in the backwoods must be embedded in my brain, a yearning for that insular life on land. So now I know: when I want to be far away from I where I live, I just want to go back home, to where I've never been, but where I know I belong.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX


To those who don't comprehend, I feel the same about you, your faith in society in family in make-believe, that all you choose works out for you and you alone. You're just characters in a story already inscribed, a crutch made of style and service to the non-existent. I'd rather be honestly miserable than falsely happy. Humans are all born diseased. The only cures are self-induced chemical catharsis, foreign chemical cataclysm...and exegesis. Hate is love decayed and deranged, affection not reciprocated, apathy freedom. Without terror in our hearts we are hibernating, waiting, paralyzed by our own electric drool, pathetic stimuli can't fulfill our extant purposes. Perception is a lie swallowed whole and reality alone can choke your throat. Perception is a wash, a gleaming of the truth; the grist of your mind has to be broken down over time.

revolution is this evolution

Sea of Shit, Socially Retarded, Chest Pain, sick/tired, XbrainiaX @ Spider Skull Island (Kostner House), 9/30/10

It's like last winter in Dekalb all over again, but the three S's (retarded, tired, shit) have all gotten better since then. And it was my first time seeing CP and brainiaX(who were apparently very difficult to get out here; way to be coercive, Robby), both insane grindcore/pwv bands.

As usual, we arrived to find that no one would be going on for awhile, so Old Style was acquired at the corner store. Not a bad night to just sit out and drink anyway (fake edge). Familiar faces gathered steadily throughout the night (even Diego showed up, and he's too cool for this shit) with lots of booze and smoke being passed around. Sea of Shit went up first and played their first demo for the last time; they were good as always and those early songs fucking rip, maelstroms of hatred and spastic outbursts. The dual vocals provide two voices of tension and loathing; the drummer's are about as grim as gets as far as hardcore goes I know Peach is big on them, so I throw him around ignorantly in the pit a couple of times and spilled my first of many beers on the floor that night. I felt like an asshole continuously spilling beer and having cans strewn about, but I picked some up that weren't mine and disposed of them properly, keeping karma in balance. At any rate, SoS played their short but solid set and we got into more drinking, now with Gonzo & Bello of S/T and SR who'd just arrived.

Socially Retarded has been one of my absolute favorite bands since I saw them in Dekalb late last year. I remember being hooked on them as soon as they started playing and their lumberjack-looking singer proceeded to punch and slam as many people in the crowd as he could. Their lineup has changed since then, sans Omar on drums and Jimmy on guitar. Of all people, they acquired Varg Campos on bass, ya know, the fag who wore a dress when he was with Nachos(slur used with his permission). They've also added a new dimension to their wall of sound with Aleks manipulating a giant case of effects pedals and noise-making implements. I should also mention his moshing that night was some of the most beautifully ignorant and maniacal moshing I've ever seen, especially in such tight confines of the basement. He gave me whiskey, too, so they should definitely keep him in the band. SR doesn't play their older stuff anymore, but their new material is just as brilliant in its sinister grinding and abhorrent(in a good way here) vocals synthesizing in a wall of vicious noise, not replicating to you the full measure of emotional alienation and angst, but actually transcending it. Every time I see them now, they seemed to have gotten better, tighter. Their last show here, Mitch, the singer, got caught under a pile of 3 or 4 people, but never lost the mic or had his vocals phased. People this night were smashing him left and right, but he was unwavering, seething a very real hatred, but for me, equals a good time.



From this point, my memory gets a little hazy, but I have all the important plot points retained. I believe Chest Pain played next, to a very receptive crowd responding with senseless moshing and people even quasi-crowdsurfing in a basement with maybe 7' in height. It should also be noted the typical sarcasm of a Chicago crowd. The singer of CP was thanking everyone for coming out and setting up the show and whatnot being met with heckling and their sexuality being contested. Solid set.

I think at this point we went to get more beer and encountered Diego on the way; I was just approaching drunkenness at this point. We got back and ended up being to wrapped up in drinking to catch S/T's first few songs. I stumbled down there and pushed through overly-crowded basement to get up close (if there was a fire...), where I promptly opened another beer in their honor and commenced with much ignorance and hooliganism. All the times I've seen the them, the crowds were either completely out-of-hand or totally placid. This one was the former type, plenty of beer and mayhem; I think it was during this set that I smashed my left knee on the ground, after slipping in beer that I most likely spilled. Their second-to-last song was "Banishment", the perfect tune for getting stupid, even without knowing the words. If you like drinking and grindcore, sick/tired is your best bet.

XbrainiaX closed out the night. They tore through a ridiculous number of songs at the speed of coke metabolizing; the moshing was even more hectic than earlier. In the last couple of minutes, I took either a fist or elbow to the left eye which knocked out the right frame of my glasses as several others and myself were all toppled simultaneously. I tried fervently to grab the loose frame but I was denied and had to stand there holding them until the set was over and then I would begin my desperate search. Luckily they ended shortly thereafter and the frame was mere feet away, albeit scratched as fuck but still providing my right eye with improved sight as I write this. Yep, I'm an idiot. This band still killed it though. I was lucky enough to be in attendance for one of their rare Chicago appearances.
....
...
..
.
.
.
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I return with no proper ending for the review, but full of some of the best cheese I've ever been privy to as I watched RISK practice in the basement of a factory for said dairy product. Their sound seems to go for a mix of groovy rock n roll and blistering hardcore, bordering on black metal, one of vocalist Evan B's major influences. Honestly though I was more interested in the free cheese and I was not disappointed. This band might be pretty good, too.











Now I'm bordering on the state of weary consciousness into sleep and listening to Converge, making it sound that much more intense, the lapses of a waking mind allowing sound's perception to permeate further into more normally imperceptible levels of brain activity....something like that. The cheese, I think, is functioning like a drug at this point.
"I got a headful of ideas, and they are driving me insane"
Good days they have been recently. It comes with not trying to change the world so much anymore, but rather, moving with it and merely adjusting my own interactions and whims. But there is so much more value in the soundless expression in simply KNOWING something as a real thing, a loss of dichotomy between ideas and actuality. That's where so much distress lies, in that disparity. I find peace of mind in the breakdown of that strange partnership that keeps one debilitated, no longer drawing that fine line between futility and perseverance, but in encompassing all of it. Dread and despair dissipate, simplicity manifests itself...and this is definitely the most positive article I've ever written here.

"This machinery is very ancient, surely we have heard this before."

harangue to put this bullshit in order

"Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,"
-E.P.

There is nothing good about you, there is nothing evil. You can try for external beauty all you want, but we're all ugly at heart; humans must create the wondrous, out of our crippled and contradictory existence. Bloated with gaseous beliefs that dissipate in the atmosphere, we are born and bred to believe that our world follows a moral process, of right and wrong. That's fiction. Our minds have been making it up for thousands of years. It's so much easier to demarcate the world on moral values and divide people as such. It's so much simpler than facing reality and the inimical, organic process to which it adheres. It's scary to think that the universe doesn't give a shit about you. It's terrifying when broken down, but you learn to understand the fear and awe of being so insignificant in an infinite existence. Seriously think of what it will be like to die without the safety nets of heaven/hell or reincarnation or spirits or what have you. That your life will just go black and you're gone, you will no longer perceive. Such a pure and indifferent process. To my fellow citizens in this day and age, death always has so much empty, moralistic connotation, replete with strange rituals for the corpses and the desperate belief that they're in a "better place". There is absolutely no basis in that. No god gave you a "soul" to return to hIM. You're an electrical charge powering a brain too advanced for the monkey body which houses it. Once you die, that charge is dispersed into the ever-flowing energy fields circling through one end of the universe to another. So in a way, reincarnation could make sense, but not with the religious overtones of karma (which none of you idiots understand; I see people abuse the term constantly). Your energy simply gets redistributed into the same energy powering us all. You're not special, no one is.




It just seems that the world becomes too much for these fellow denizens and they're forced to rest upon a fictional foundation of anachronistic nonsense which holds the hollow ideas of the past in such a bright shining light that, when one gets close and looks it in the face, they see the rotten and empty insides; they're just scraping off decay, and living for it. From this observer's experiences, this is the root cause of hipsterism. And this generation especially is so keen on fulfilling some sort of past aesthetic and self-serving idealism. So much so, the world where the rest of us are living (Hi, over here) becomes indistinct, muddied, a world too vast to come back to, because living in the past is so easy, so boundless in its selective morality and self-gratification. This is not to say the past doesn't offer us anything; quite the contrary. But people nowadays seem to be more focused on past trends rather than ideas that could, I don't know, matter.

Ezra Pound once said, "Literature is news that stays news". But now we live in this strange time and place where information has become so abundantly prevalent, that, by and large, it becomes spurious. There's so much all the time bombarding your brain, and with any information from the past so readily available, good ideas just get washed out with the rising tide of vapid, selfish idealism, culture that promotes entertainment, distraction and "fun" in lieu of profound, lasting art that reverses psychologies, that breaks intellectual chains, the kind that shows us how very small and insignificant we are in this constantly shifting and completely indifferent universe, that there is the greatest beauty in knowing that we are part of the big picture, and not each of us a picture to their self.

(Misanthropy and humanism do not exclude one another. I don't trust, agree with, or really even like most of you, but I understand that we are all in this together, and I'm trying, honest, to bring something more constructive to this world that continual negativity over the largely worthless human race. God I just hate you all so much sometimes, but, regardless of my personal feelings, I know that we must work together, as the much more selfless social creature we evolved into before bullshit like religion, economics, mass agriculture, advertisement, pointless bigotry, pathetic hipsterism, prison-like schools, prisons run by inmates, fake food, products to promote abject laziness, the neuroses of the young over love and sex and all the anxieties transferred to them by their weak, self-centered, ineffectual asshole parents who are more concerned with their personal time and checkbooks to give a shit that the generation they're raising will one day run things, and all the elders will be dead by then, so no harm no fail; the outcome looks to be quite precarious; I'm sleeping less, but it doesn't have to be this way. We are capable of so much more, and superior things as well. The process of achieving that in this hyper-fattened world, though, will be grisly to say the least.)

"This is your target, people. Aim well." - Scott Levy