Besides, as all of you know, I refuse to breathe the same shit-reeked air that all you plebs breath in. When I do my shopping, I hold my breath in and sprint through the grocery store before passing out.
You think I’m afraid of some VIRUS?!
Well guess what PAL….I survived aids!
TWICE!
So I was taking a shit at work while reading the Bible (I’m a devout Jehovah’s Witness btw) when I ran out of toilet paper.
“Can you get me a roll, Bill?” I asked
“Sure thing buddy!”
Instead of throwing the roll into the stall, he sat it on the bathroom counter. So I had waddle up to the counter with my pants around my ankles and shit in my butt.
The End
So I was tossing and turning over night, agonizing over a specific question: is pop culture dead?
Of course, “pop culture” can never really “die” so long as there’s entertainment, fashion, etc. But has it fundamentally shifted in a way that requires new methods of critique?
Guys like Theodore Adorno were critiquing “pop culture” way back in the 1940s, claiming things like movies, music, etc. were massed produced commodities and were therefore not genuine (or whatever). But maybe the pandemic and the prolific use of the internet has changed the game.
Obviously these things have changed the way we interact with pop culture, but the question I’m concerned with is: “has the pandemic, and specifically the internet, changed the very nature of pop culture itself.”
(This is all from my dementia-driven perspective, btw)
Anyways, what made me agonize over this question is that everything feels a little passé. When people talk about reading tweets, I’m thinking “you’re still using Twitter?”. Even at 106 years old, I feel like I’m more “in the know” than most 20 year olds. It’s not because I’m “cooler” than them, it’s because they don’t give a shit. So how can “pop culture” be pop culture if it’s not popular?
Please help me. I haven’t slept in 27 days.
“Am I in heaven? What happened to me?” I asked myself.
“ICU,” the doctor said.
THE END
Golden Girls Rebooted
Ep 1: Dorthy has to keep Sophia from escaping the house during COVID lockdown. Blanche reveals she had a questionable fling with Jeffery Epstein. Rose believes everything she reads on the internet and begins denying the Holocaust.
Sorry, I was high on gas fumes and aerosols when I wrote my last post. It kinda went off the rails there towards the end.
So allow me to muddy the waters a bit more.
Fundamentally, I think that “everything is ideology“ (a lot of people have thought about this long before me). And I mean EVERYTHING: objects, sex, relationships, beauty, art…everything. To break these things down to their smaller components would reveal true horror: your food is dead animals and vegetables, sex is exchanging of gross bodily fluids, etc. So we have to sublimate these objects into ideas…hence “everything is ideology”.
Which is perfectly acceptable! Humans are both blessed and cursed by logic and reasoning because these functions often reveal the nothingness behind everything. Thus, REAL truth is terrifying and ultimately meaningless, so the “mask” of ideology is the only “reality” that matters. Sometimes existential dread ensues because of this. Therefore sublimation, in the Freudian sense, is helpful in constructing a healthy view of the world.
Which is why I sometimes praise religion and SOME politics, provided they promote peaceful coexistence and openness. Clearly sublimating into certain ideologies can lead to straight up derangement. So, therefore,“sublimate well”.
poop
Ever wonder how nice it would be to not know how to read?
Or how about being a eunuch? You never have to have sex again. Sounds like a good deal to me.
What about being a monk? You know, never having to talk, being separated from society, and you get to read all day.
Or better yet, how about being a eunuch monk that doesn’t know how to read?
Sounds like my ideal existence.
Part of the reason why William Peter Blatty considered The Ninth Configuration as a true sequel to The Exorcist is because they both attempt to address the “mystery of the good.”
Blatty, from my understanding of course, was a devout Catholic so he understood these terms from a very spiritual perspective. While I find the phenomenon of religion fascinating, I don’t view the universe in that particular way. Nevertheless, I think Blatty was attempting to address a very interesting question, particularly with The Ninth Configuration (the film. I haven’t read the novel)
Much ado is made about “the problem of evil”, but that’s only a problem from a religious perspective. If the the universe is indifferent to our plight, and life is inherently selfish, then there is no mystery. Furthermore, there is no good OR evil…it’s merely a projection of human perception.
Many philosophers have attempted to formulate a model for morality, notably Kant’s Categorical Imperative and utilitarianism, with varying degrees of success. I personally tend to favor something that I heard Bart Ehrman say: I just know it when I see it. However I do find it interesting that nearly every religion has some variant of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.
I don’t think that I have many philosophical convictions, but one thing I am certain of is that I am not a “blank slatist”. If we were born as blank slates, then nothing we do would be possible. Language acquisition itself provides some insight into the a priori nature of our being. What language can tell us precisely about our morality is unknown to me, but I think it warrants further investigation as evidenced by the Golden Rule.
The Golden Rule may not be a “philosophically consistent” principle, but I think it’s intuitive enough that there could possibly be something revealing about it. Empathy might be an example. To my understanding, empathy is a phenomenon that’s scientifically falsifiable, but I’m just spitballing here. Maybe “good” and “evil” are a priori categories of human reasoning, I dunno.
Either way, from both a religious and secular perspective, “the problem of good” needs answering.
“Hi, bookie? I’d like to place a bet on the NCAA Miami game.”
“Ohio or Florida?” the bookie asks.
“Both are disgusting”
THE END
As 2021 comes to a close, I’d just like to remind everyone that if you think the world is getting worse, you’re dead wrong.
Things have always been shit. Always will be. To be alive means to live in tyranny.
Read ancient texts…Ancient Greece or Rome for example…you’d find the same old complaints: the decadence, the spectacle, the tyranny of the majority, the tyranny of the minority, the anguish of having to live in a society.
We’re in good company.
Maybe 30,000 years from now, humans might achieve a higher state of being…one that currently remains outside the realm of imagination. But none of us will see that day. For the time being, we’re just playing our role.
Sure, there are those that are WAY worse off than you or me. But I’d venture to guess that if you can read this blog, you’re doing alright. So look on the bright side, at least you’re not in the drunk tank, at least you’re not begging for your next meal, at least you’re not slipping some digits into the butthole of a paying john, at least you’re not being trafficked across the Pacific Ocean in a shipping container. Think on those people. Depressing? Yes. But with this despair comes opportunity to give a kind word, a shirt off your back, to be a ray of hope in an otherwise meaningless existence.
Face it, life sucks. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be.
See you in 2022.
..and my dick’s small too
The Internet Ruined Everything 