Aug 01 2007

This Changing Country

Tag: Blasphemy, Idiocy, criticismkenn @ 4:10 pm

I think more telling than approval ratings, Congressional hearings that seem to have neither end nor real purpose, ethically dubious wars, cronyism that can result in horrible mishandling of natural disasters, or even the convenient rewritings of history where personal lives are concerned, the current administration’s blatant disdain for the Constitution and the rights it gives American citizens is the greatest sign that not one of these people is of the character to lead this country. We have an Attorney General who perjures himself every time his mouth falls open, a Vice President who would presumably as soon take you on a hunting trip as have you arrested if you dare to disagree with him or his policies, freedoms being stripped away and laws being broken on a daily basis in the name of — oh, right. In the name of those very freedoms and laws, of protecting and preserving them for future generations.

Continue reading “This Changing Country”


Jul 04 2007

Gathering the threads

Tag: Blasphemy, Idiocy, Researchkenn @ 10:52 am

There are confluences surrounding you every day. Coincidence or kismet or destiny — who is to say what the truth behind these twisted path crossings really is?

Perhaps there is a point to finding out the truth behind these links — point of fact, it’s getting at the currents that run underneath the visible, tangible world that drive me to notice these things.

I find myself digging, stretching, reaching, and searching everywhere for these confluences, looking for the truth behind it all. Not so much the meaning of life — not really the meaning of anything, I suppose. The story of life, though. The way that everything comes together and enmeshes, reactions and repulsions.

In the same way that LOST throws out mysteries for which viewers scream for solutions, the universe has it’s own sequence of numbers, it’s own hatches and labyrinths of tunnels, it’s own Others. For me, there are no spoilers sites, no insider leaks, no guarantee, even, of a series conclusion that neatly wraps up the plotline and reveals all the answers.

There’s no guarantee of a prestige.

There is a thrill that comes with finding the connections, of pulling the important meeting out of the air, of recognizing that off all the puzzle pieces that you come across every minute of every day — that this is a piece of the puzzle you’re working on. And maybe you don’t see where the puzzle piece goes, or even have any idea what the overall image is, but you’ve got a piece, a new piece, and you’re one step closer to solution.

It’s tantalizing to find these fragments of the equations, but frustrating again when you realize that one step closer to the solution doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know how many steps away you are.

This week’s discovered connection, coincidentally, is some combination of Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Good, and The Prestige. Magic, untruth, and conceptual virii and creatures of idea. Where does it all lead?

To more reading and watching, if nothing else.


Dec 05 2006

Sixty years on…

Tag: Blasphemy, Cyn, Idiocy, extremes, sexkenn @ 9:28 pm

For all my ability to empathize with other people, there are a lot of things that I can’t understand. The attraction to bondage, S&M, or shoe fetishes, for instance.

Yeah, I’m watching the Betty Page movie. It’s CL’s fascination, not mine (I should note for the people that know her that she — at least to her admission — doesn’t get the bondage or shoe thing, either, those she does have a huge collection of twink magazines).

Continue reading “Sixty years on…”


Jun 22 2006

Parables are cool. My apartment is not.

Tag: Blasphemy, Idiocykenn @ 3:40 pm

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Give a man an air-conditioning unit — and a building that isn’t wired like the inside of Ted Bundy’s head, so that cooling the oven that doubles as his apartment is possible without blowing the 20 amp fuse that helps power everything in the 2 bedroom duplex except for the refrigerator — and he doesn’t get so hot that he immediately regurgitates that tasty little seafood dish he prepared with your gift.

I would call myself Jesus’ editor, except that all of us writers know that editors are the devil’s tools.


Jun 06 2006

The Day the World Went Away?

Tag: Blasphemy, Idiocykenn @ 9:27 am

Today is June 6, 2006, also known as 6/6/6.

Today is election day — gubernatorial primaries and more.

Anyone else see the connection?

I laugh about this even more when I think about Roy Moore using it as an excuse when he loses.

[cue ominous music] … or will he?


Jun 01 2006

616 - The Number of the Best

Tag: Blasphemy, Idiocykenn @ 4:05 pm

See, it’s not next Tuesday you have to worry about. It’s today. Although, if we want to get picky and specific, neither one really works, since next Tuesday is 6-6-06. So it’s like the day of the Neighbor of the Beast, not the Number.

By the way, the 616 thing is real, and funny. So all these years, the Satanists have been wrong (not to mention that they’ve been throwing the goat to the ghosts of Roman emporers, not the evil powers of Hell), and thousands of album covers and patches exist to prove it. Thanks, Slayer!

All this is symbolic and appropos of today much in the same way that some of you view Friday the 13th (me, I’ve always thought 13 was kind of a lucky number, and good for hockey masks, too). I fell asleep for 12 hours last night — dropped off after dinner at around 8 PM, and woke at 11 PM long enough to move from the den floor to my bed, reawakening at around 8 AM this morning. And I still didn’t want to wake up, because it’s the first day of June — the beginning of meteorological summer, the start of hurricane season, and rent day to boot.

I’m convinced that today will bring news of the worst kind. Or perhaps the best. I’m still undecided. Either way, I can guarantee that there will be no 8 PM bedtime for me tonight. No, I’ll be up late, probably working a little or a lot, slinging some alcohol both at you and in your honor (dow nmy own throat, that is), earning my ducats for another weekend.

And it’s not even Friday, yet.


Mar 15 2006

Faces of Sick

Tag: Blasphemy, Idiocykenn @ 1:45 pm

It’s not quite as catchy as Faces of Death, sure, but you could get so much more mileage out of a series called Faces of Sick. You can get an entire volume just following people around Bailey’s for a couple of weeks, for instance.

And then, you could put a camera on me, because sometimes, I’m an absolute moron who thinks he’s bulletproof. I took a week off at the end of February to deal with what turned out to be part one of a sweeps-month cliffhanger of the flu. That seemed smart enough, right? Of course, I didn’t completely take the week off — there was a show to be played, and I don’t miss Exhibit(s) gigs, paid or not. And there was work around the house to be done. And so forth.

As of this past Sunday, I felt the relapse coming on, and forced myself through the show at Dave’s. Not so bad — I drank water all night, avoided alcohol, and took it as easy as I could. Monday, I felt worse, but came into work nonetheless — partially to avoid falling behind again, partially to avoid burning any more sick days. Went home, and promptly fell asleep for fourteen hours. I suspect part of that was my body forcing me to chill out (my original plans involved rearranging my house into the summer format, so I don’t melt in my sleep), and part of it was an under-the-surface depression that has been lingering for a few weeks. Yesterday: again, a little worse, still, but can’t miss the gigs, even if they don’t pay me anything. And can’t miss the cable-access television show appearances, even if I don’t say word one (I like to think it was my contribution to Eric’s fascist leader appearance).

And so today: the flu is passing (all over but a slight ache and a lot of coughing and sniffling), only to be partially replaced by conjunctivitis. Yup, pinkeye. Whee. And I think I might have laryngitis coming on.

Throughout all of this — and over the past two years, whenever I get more than a mild cold — what concerns me is not the illness itself. That’s just a pain-in-the-ass that I do my best not to allow to slow me down too much. Constantly lingering in the back of my head, though, is the curiousity as to whether or not this will be the time that I get another visit from the CIPD fairy, as I did back in December of 2003.

Amazingly, it looks like I never bothered to document all the fun that I had back then, so let me try to do a brief recap here real quick: over the course of a few weeks, following a month-long run of flu followed by laryngitis followed by some stomach bug, I began to lose feeling in my extremities — fingertips and toes, spreading fairly rapidly inward. At the peak, after about three weeks, it felt like I had thick socks on my feet up to my knees, thick gloves on my hands up to my elbows, and there was a constant pins-and-needles tingling at the tip of my tongue and nose. I had trouble walking, because I couldn’t tell when my feet were fully on the ground; so I walked with a cane, and was moving toward a walker. I had little manual dexterity (I have a few things that I tried hand-writing during this time, and it’s comical, to see me writing like a three-year-old with seizures); bass playing was no longer something that I was very good at (and it hurt, too, to get that intense shock with each note), and my ability to grasp was on the decline. Oh, and my balance was terrible, too; showering required constantly holding onto the curtain rod to make sure that I didn’t fall when I closed my eyes.

It took what seemed like a brutal amount of time for them to figure out what I had - blood tests revealed nothing, no vitamin or nutrient deficiencies, no markers for MS or ALS or any number of other exotic-sounding diseases that I might have had. Finally, a few fun neural tests (even if your brain can’t get signal to your fingers, apparently a machine can, and you too can be a frog in a biology lab) revealed that I have a condition called Chronic Inflammatory Polyneuropathic Demylenization, or CIPD (referred to more commonly on the net at CIDP, it seems). The long and short of it: my immune system attacks my nervous system at the trunk of my spine, and no one seems to know just why.

Oh, and before you internet detectives start crying wolf, the immediate response was an AIDS test, and I’m clean. God knows how, but I’m happily disease free after all this time. So to speak, at least…

But CIPD, according to the literature and my doctor, often shows up in people (as does it’s cousin, Guillain Barre) after an illness — specifically, respiratory or gastro-intestinal. Or the flu. They don’t know why, though I’ve heard suspicions that the immune system doesn’t recieve the messages that the body is clean, and so keeps looking for things to eat, and it just so happens that certain virii are remarkably similar to the myelin that surrounds your nerves.

Whee. Lucky me.

And so I spend my sick days looking around the corner, ahead, wondering if it’s coming back this time. They assure me that it will be back — that’s the chronic part of all this, after all. And the treatments involve either steroids — prednisone, which knocks your immune system offline long enough for the nerves to repair themselves, leaving you open to illness, weight gain, and the shakes, not to mention eventual severe liver damage — or plasmapheresis, where your blood gets cleaned. Outside of your body. Not a lot of fun, as I gather, and also leaves you reliving the symptoms towards the end of each cycle.

Not to mention the brief panic that sets in when I sleep on an arm wrong, and wake up with no feeling in one of my hands.

And then you could make volumes of the Faces of Sick series about mental illness. Bipolar disorder can be fun, but enough about me: let’s talk about real sickness. Like people who would want to view “molestation on demand,” for instance.

Y’know, I can wrap my head around a lot of things. A lot. Things that have bothered some people that I’ve known. Things like murder, and brutality, and death. I’ve done enough studying (and maybe there’s a part of me that’s wired just so) that I can empathize with the criminal and the disturbed, and often enough understand where they’re coming from, why they do what they do. But this… It’s beyond me. Not the preferences, or the turn-ons; I think, just like gay men and foot fetishists and even boring vanilla old you and me, what we are attracted to is beyond our control. And the people in this world that are drawn to seeing young children as erotic objects shouldn’t be vilified as much, perhaps, as pitied; as bad as it is for me to be attracted to women that I will never have, how bad must it be for those who find excitement in a ten-year-old?

But those that feel these tendencies should be separated from those who feel and act upon them. With sturdy walls, strong enough to block out the gas that you might fill that room with. Oh, and the walls should have spikes, and barbed wire. And maybe the floor can be made of razor blades, and covered with a thin sheen of lye.

An animal is no different from a man in that it cannot help what it instinctively feels. Man and beast alike, we all get hungry beyond our control, and we all crave things to sate our desires — be they flavors of food or objects of lust. The difference between man and beast is the self-control to act or not act on these desires, depending not on whether we can get away with it but on whether said action is right or wrong.

I say, if you’re gonna run with the beasts, you get put down with ‘em.

But hey, I have a condition, and parts of me eat other, perfectly good parts of me. So what do I know?


Mar 14 2006

Pat Robertson: voice of more Americans than I’d like to think.

Tag: Blasphemy, Idiocykenn @ 5:27 pm

From the BBC online:

On the programme, the 75-year-old preacher responded to a news item about the reaction of Muslims in Europe to the publishing of cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad.

The footage showed Muslims screaming “May Allah bomb you! May Osama Bin Laden bomb you!”

Mr Robertson said the pictures “just shows the kind of people we’re dealing with. These people are crazed fanatics, and I want to say it now: I believe it’s motivated by demonic power. It is satanic and it’s time we recognize what we’re dealing with”.

He went on to say that “Islam is not a religion of peace”, and “the goal of Islam, ladies and gentlemen whether you like it or not, is world domination”.

Mr Robertson said in a statement later he was referring specifically to terrorists as being motivated by Satan.

See, I want to imagine that Robertson is a fringe-type, a nutjob that no one will claim at dinner parties, one of those guys that has been around for so long that even people like my grandmother who watched him all the time would be forced to shake their head at statements like this, with a gentle roll of the eyes and perhaps a whispered, “Oh, Pat…”

You can hear the tsking if you try.

And yet, when I shake my own head enough to clear the cobwebs that Claritin-D (irony of the week: Claritin D is inversely proportionate to clarity) has strewn about my brainspace, I realize that, even if people are embarrassed in public that Robertson has his own TV show, too many of them are thinking exactly what he’s saying.

Hey, fundamentalist Christian bloggers that I’m aiming this at: remember the Crusades. Among other things.

Spirituality is a wonderful thing that is all too often warped and made pointed by religion.


Mar 07 2006

Dear South Dakota: Fuck Off.

Tag: Blasphemy, Idiocykenn @ 5:50 pm

South Dakota: making Alabama look progressive.

Actually, I suspect that Alabama’s lawmakers are really pissed off that they didn’t think of this first. It’s not that I live in a state that is less conservative than South Dakota — just lazier.

No exception for rape or incest? I hope none of you assholes ever has a daughter or wife or grandchild that would need one of those exceptions that you’re trying to get rid off.

People are such shitbags in the name of religion.

A US state has signed into law a bill banning most abortions, in a move aimed to force the US Supreme Court to reconsider its key ruling on the issue.

The South Dakota law - approved by the governor on Monday - makes it a crime for doctors to perform terminations.

Exceptions will be made if a woman’s life is at risk, but not in cases of rape or incest.

(via Warren)

Although I think that Ces had the funniest reaction of all.


Feb 24 2006

What is wrong with the world?

Tag: Blasphemykenn @ 4:21 pm

You’ve got curfews in the Middle East to try to stem the brutality that’s been uncontrolled since we “won the war.”

You’ve got men killing their wives and babies.

You’ve got Kid Rock and Scott Stapp in a sex video, and corrupt politicians while a nation seemingly turns a blind eye, and theft and rape and arson.

All this, and I’m stuck inside on a day like this?

Where did the world go wrong? Oh, Lord, why have you forsaken me.?


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