Recon

Friday, October 21, 2011

Occupy Bloomington: A Case Study

So I've wandered by Occupy Bloomington a few times. I truly expected it to be the same group of losers sleeping in People's Park but the parkies were strangly absent. There is a surprisingly large group (well, 35 tents worth) of protesters although the ones I talked indicated that the majority of them were "day trippers" and so were not truly "Occupying" the space. That isn't the thrust of this article, though-I just want to harp on a particular point.

One of the ladies, apparently an IU employee, has a sign that says "It's easier to buy a gun than my education." The IDS gave the gal a write up that you can see here. I don't know this lady, but I want to harp on the content of this sign for a moment.

Seriously, goddamnit-in what world should a gun cost the same amount as four, maybe five years of room and board as well as professional instruction in hundreds of subjects? A hunk of machined metal is always going to be cheaper than five years rent and hundreds of hours of professional instruction, and no law could possibly change that.

Furthermore, in what world can I get the government to pay for part of the cost of my gun, and float me a low interest loan for the rest? That would be pretty sweet; you put zero down on a firearm and rack up some debt against the chance of you using that gun to make more money in the future? Hell, unless you enlist in the army, the government won't even subsidize firearms training; you can't even write it off your taxes.

I don't mean to take jabs at people who hate corporate cronies who operate under color of law-I hate those fat cat fucks too. But this has nothing to do with the corporate crimes of the cronies receiving taxpayer bailouts because they threaten to crash the economy; it is a direct assault on my god given rights as a sentient human being in the name of a "right to education" that doesn't exist anywhere in the Bill of Rights. It makes conflict between the Liberty Sphere and the Occupy Wall Street movements inevitable.

Your focus needs to be on punishing the guilty-the cigar chomping bastards that robbed the taxpayers for billions-and nothing else. It shouldn't come part and parcel with a laundry list of entitlements, and it damn sure shouldn't be packaged with a hostility to my existing rights.

The cheap conservative snark would be "What was she smoking LOL" but let me tell you, America-I'm stoned as shit and that still don't make a lick of sense.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Completed Manuscript Boogie

Yeah, you read the subject line right. I'm boogieing. (Boogeying? Buggering? Buggering sounds right. We'll go with that.)

This book has a unique distinction among bedraggled three ring binder manuscripts cobbled together by stoned hipsters-I've already gotten paid for it. I wrote the whole fuckin' thing on the clock at work during down times. The call center biz is onerous and depressing, but not without advantages for the modern slacker.

You have all (hopefully) seen the preview of the Codex Kalachnikova below. I don't think it will be anything groundbreaking-a Conan novel with Kalashnikovs, a sort of Walter Mitty piece of derivative trash with a few Piers Anthony cheap plot puns and a lot of Watership Down references. I'm not trying to change the world, just cash a fuckin' check. I'm okay with straight to paperback for all three volumes of the prospective trilogy; that would be three more paperbacks than I have previously sold.

So how did I finish the fucker, with so many other projects left strewn behind me like discarded syringes?

I just wrote man. I just wrote 2000 words every night until I was done. And if something sucked, or I hated it, I kept it anyway and wrote on with notes written in the margins to change it later. I didn't get bogged down perfecting it while I was still creating it; I just created it first and printed it off at the end of the night and filed it away in a cheap three binder. And when I went back to work the next day I did the same thing again. It was...disturbingly simple.

In the end, even if no single person besides me ever reads this shit, it feels good to have finished something.

Monday, October 3, 2011

Thoughts Over Menthol

Joo know whas fucked up meng?

(I'm Mexican today, run tell your friends. This is good herb we've been blessed with lately, praises to the most high.)

So I almost always get 100's when I go get cigarettes. There are a lot of reasons, but mostly because Benson & Hedges only come in 100's and I'm used to it. And I mean, the price is the same.

Hold up, the price is the same? For more tobacco?

Think of this for a moment. The taxes on the product are so high, that the actual size and content of the product is irrelevant. And not six months goes by before someone else slaps a sin tax on the eeeeeeeebil tobacco companies.

Doesn't that just make you want to dump a bunch of cigarettes in Boston Harbor?

Thass fucked up meng.

Keep smoking, kids, or Grandma's check is going to run out and she'll starve. If the uptight bitch would have just smoked this whole time she'd be dead by now, but she didn't and you need to pay someone to wipe her ass for all 129 years of her life. You don't want granny to starve, do you? Buy your fuckin' friends a pack.