Before You Know it, You End up With Bedbugs
Rattlesnake Won't Shake
Is it possible to update Livejournal without talking about Livejournal, and without analyzing social media? Just so you know, I don't actually want to vent about those 2 things, as I feel I have rambled sufficiently on both before. However, when you make so few updates, in a world of daily updates, it seems like an explanation is in order (for some reason). Deep inside I realize there isn't really an explanation in order, but I feel socially responsible to provide one. Perhaps this comes with being raised with emphasis on "good manners" or something else.
I don't regret being raised like that though..I think it comes in handy when ordering people around in a regulatory fashion. I recently had to oversee a gruesome disposal of decomposing meat and seafood (not art-related, obviously). The minute the guy opened the door to the freezer my olfactory senses were utterly blasted to hell with the passing of the most awful odors: ammonia, bloated corpses floating in pools of feces, fermented fruit juices intermingling with fish rotting in direct sunlight. Needless to say, the whole fridge had to be emptied out, and I had the hard task of telling someone to do it - right then and there - in a dark, forsaken convenience store, the single (entrance) door closed shut, no windows, flies swarming, the owner's wife covering her nose and mouth with an isopropyl alcohol-soaked paper towel. The guy was a real sport and was able to empty the fridge with a dirty long-sleeve sweatshirt tied over the lower half of his face.
But, I want to get back to the subject of good manners, or at least closer to the topic. See, I recently spent a couple of days in the close company of family, which I never do, and this means that I was more awestruck than usual by the horrible feeling of being in someone else's reality tunnel. I was visiting my dad and his wife, and my grandmother. Basically I was there to see my grandmother, given that she's saved me from economic ruin a few times in the past (post-college, post-grace period). Naturally I had to deal with her reiteration of approved approaches to living: short hair is good long hair is bad, elbows don't belong on the table, one must only buy what they need, nothing is more important than families being together, there's no place for pessimism, and all kinds of other stuff. Being that she is very old, it is easy to give weak lip service to a lot of these ideas, or to casually agree while gently nudging her onwards in telling whatever story she has interrupted to tell me what to think. I can deal with this, especially while sipping alcoholic beverages, but it was very difficult to deal with the surrounding environment.
Without going into obnoxious levels of detail, I will briefly explain the interior design within the house at which I stayed. My dad's wife has a real obsession with decorating, and she covers every shelf, counter, table, bare corner of floor, or visible flat surface of any kind with decorations such as designer teddy bears, framed photographs, small figurines, fake plants, and so on. Most of the above is set in accordance with the seasons/holidays. The one consistent thing, besides the individuals in the photos, is the "inspirational signage." If you can appreciate the term then you know what I am talking about. There's a couple of lengthy signs, but most consist of simple phrases or combinations of verbs. Most of it repeats a mantra of LIFE/LOVE/FAMILY/HOPE/PEACE, but reaaaaaally heavy on the family element, to the degree that the mind in disagreement feels assaulted.
Being in their bubble I felt heavily self-censored and suffocated. There was a strong feeling of not wanting to be there (expected), but also a general acknowledgement that it is not really their fault for making me feel uncomfortable and irritated - it's my baggage. As I've come to understand it, they are sharing a cultural-religious delusion, and such things are perceived as normal as seen throughout the course of human history. To put it simply, their combination reality tunnel is certainly more acceptable than mine, and it isn't likely, in my opinion, that they even acknowledge how another might perceive their bubble in a negative way. I certainly feel out of place emotionally, despite figuring it out.
I think the signage and decorative mind control has a lot to do with this feeling of mental suffocation. The pungent odor of poutporri being ever present throughout the house gives a sense of being tangibly suffocated. On nearly every shelf there are staged photographs of family get togethers. Smiles real and fake leer from within ornamental frames, many bearing the same mindless verbs. The whole place is very heavy on the repetition of abstract concepts, such as love, hope, peace. In a place like this I feel so much hatred towards these concepts taken as some divine truth. It is likely impossible that I could ever make any of one of them truly know and understand it.
Luckily, avoidance of conflict is common among us, so there were very few entry points into debate. Some part of me wanted an emotional explosion to occur, but that part of me is weaker now than it used to be (5 or 6 years ago) so I soldiered on through the cycle of eating and digesting. So much eating was also rather uncomfortable,..just that feeling that you are "supposed to be" eating more, especially at the request of the hosts. Overeating to be perceived as strong and healthy, grateful, etc is a truly bizarre to me. I understand that it is, to someone else, a familiar, comfortable cultural thing but I have existed for long enough away from it that I find it to be a foreign and weird concept..like gorging yourself till you can't move comfortably and then stiffy relocating yourself elsewhere to sit and digest while waiting for the next few hours to pass so that you can gorge yourself again.
Summer has been rough, and has regularly left me feeling on the verge of some colossal breakdown inside and outside. The feeling of being trapped plays out in a very anxiety ridden manner. What's absurd is that I live pretty well considering what I pay at my current residence. Following through with moving in here was capitalizing on an opportunity, which came with some very positive attributes. Now it is hard to give up this spot because of the few positive attributes left - think money, proximity to current job. To imagine what I could be paying to live in a cockroach motel, with a broken toilet, collapsing ceiling, a burgeoning bed bug population 2 apartments away..it's frightening to consider. I could write a whole entry on an apartment I investigated the day before yesterday. There were cockroaches scuttling around on the floors, walls, and ceilings,there were stray chicken bones and cat shit nonchalantly lying among graded homework assignments, tangled earphones and vacant food packaging; a real fucking piece of hell. The despair of the this place was almost too much to bear, but like Christ hobbling under the heavy weight of the cross to which he was to be nailed, my cohorts and I carried out our designated tasks, wearily collecting information to erect an unwanted case that will haunt our dreams and that will probably be open for a long time, and will take up space somewhere on a hard drive or in a filing cabinet,...a bad experience to outlive us all.
That said, somehow, probably because it is interesting like a car crash, I enjoy working in such a chaotic and absurd environment, though it does make the day to day more stressful than I'd prefer. The time spent at work flashes by compared to other jobs I've had, and to the point where it is a bit scary watching the years flicker past like an ill-remembered movie, bits and pieces sneaking into my dreams to emerge in sleep. When awake, such fragments drift between real and unreal. There are so many faces that I can't place, people that recognize me who I usually don't recognize in the moment that our eyes lock - I acknowledge them anyway,..and maybe sometimes we really don't know each other. I wish it weren't so hard to stay in the "real world" and there were some "opt out" version where I could abandon the sense of selfhood required for carrying out a life consumed by occupation. But it's an accepted fact that the world is fucked up, and all arguments to the contrary can usually be expressed in some of the most detestable bumper stickers.
Instead of rambling about civilization and environmental collapse and all sorts of existentialist conclusions that inherently mean nothing, and in the spirit of the current Internet 2.0 (waste)landscape, here are the top 5 worst bumper stickers/decals observed on the regular:
1.Coexist - Seems that this sticker is meant for those that don't believe in any religion in particular, and those that believe in all of them within some personalized system. For all of those who fervently believe in their religion of choice (or fate) this sticker is a fucking joke. It basically marks the car of a person who is being "tolerant," but can't commit/doesn't see the light, etc.
2.Stick Family - This one so often appears on SUV's and the like, because it excuses, either intentionally or unintentionally, the "necessity for having a big car. It's the whole big car mythos: I am a big man or a strong mother figure, and I need my big protective car fortress because I am more valuable than other people who have no spawn to shuttle around from school to soccer practice, from dance class to summer camp.
3.Baby on Board - Close to the above in arrogance, but worse because the graphic of the baby is often that really stupid one - where the baby is wearing sunglasses and a dumb hat, and because it suggests that the operator of the vehicle has an excuse to drive in any possible way that might be inconvenient to surrounding cars. The idea that truly special cargo is being carried is just really depressing in a profound way for me.
4.Political Stickers (American, Left or Right)
Maybe it is an unwise decision to include this category because during those moments when I'm driving and I see a real whacko driving a car covered in political propaganda, it truly brightens up my day. However, the notion that you have to tell people who you voted for or what you think is right in accordance with a spoonfed political ideology is just obnoxious - keep it to yourself, motherfucker.
5. I can't narrow it down further here, but will just lump in preachy Vegan stickers, and bad neo-Pagan puns, all manners of Christian stickers that try to convey a message, "My Child Graduated From 'X' University," "My Child Is In The Military," etc. Maybe, now that I am thinking about it, this list, if actually fleshed out, would spare very little and that's because I am a curmudgeon. But the important thing to remember in this day and age is that my opinion isn't important, and maybe that's a big part of why I can't hang with Social Media Internet.
On a final note, let's enjoy a list of the various drinks I have concocted and enjoyed this summer, excusing their frequent consumption on having to live with a fucking douchebag for a housemate (he's just moved out):
1.Mexican Michelada - Now I'm not talking about mixing Clamato and Beer together. I tried that at the opening of the summer, but wasted so much Clamato, being unable to add very much of it to the drink. It didn't taste good by any stretch of the imagination and is mostly sold in 16 oz size and up. After doing a bit of reading about Clamato I decided that it most definitely is garbage, being a high-fructose, watered down tomato beverage. So, I've been using canned Tomato juice, a little clam juice, Worcester sauce, Maggi Jugo Seasoning Sauce, Tabasco sauce, a little salt and black pepper, fresh-squeezed lime juice, and Bohemia Pilsner (the BEST Mexican beer I've ever tasted and a good beer in general).
2.Chilcano - Got a bit bored of these by late June and they are really dependent on having a tasty Pisco around. Course the ginger ale adds all kinds of sugar which makes this a poor choice for a late night beverage.
3.Gin and Tonic - Last summer was all about perfecting the Spanish Gin and tonic, but this summer I said "fuck it" to the notion of including juniper berries and lavender and pink peppercorn and a bunch of other stuff, and made it the British way, with Gin & Lime, and (most importantly) Fever Tree's regular Tonic water, which has now spoiled me and rendered all attempts at using cheap tonic water unsuccessful.
4.Mezcal Mule - Tried a few variations on this but the best result was rather accidental, with no attention to measurements. However, at some point I could no longer rationalize using delicious mezcal for summery cocktail experiments as it is too expensive and too enjoyable by itself.
5.Pisco Sour - Well, this is always a bit of a project to make, and I never seem to add enough simple syrup to do it the "right" way. Plus it requires that I have a carton of egg whites sitting around. But, there is really something about the foamy texture and creamy mouthfeel that has kept me coming back.
Is it possible to update Livejournal without talking about Livejournal, and without analyzing social media? Just so you know, I don't actually want to vent about those 2 things, as I feel I have rambled sufficiently on both before. However, when you make so few updates, in a world of daily updates, it seems like an explanation is in order (for some reason). Deep inside I realize there isn't really an explanation in order, but I feel socially responsible to provide one. Perhaps this comes with being raised with emphasis on "good manners" or something else.
I don't regret being raised like that though..I think it comes in handy when ordering people around in a regulatory fashion. I recently had to oversee a gruesome disposal of decomposing meat and seafood (not art-related, obviously). The minute the guy opened the door to the freezer my olfactory senses were utterly blasted to hell with the passing of the most awful odors: ammonia, bloated corpses floating in pools of feces, fermented fruit juices intermingling with fish rotting in direct sunlight. Needless to say, the whole fridge had to be emptied out, and I had the hard task of telling someone to do it - right then and there - in a dark, forsaken convenience store, the single (entrance) door closed shut, no windows, flies swarming, the owner's wife covering her nose and mouth with an isopropyl alcohol-soaked paper towel. The guy was a real sport and was able to empty the fridge with a dirty long-sleeve sweatshirt tied over the lower half of his face.
But, I want to get back to the subject of good manners, or at least closer to the topic. See, I recently spent a couple of days in the close company of family, which I never do, and this means that I was more awestruck than usual by the horrible feeling of being in someone else's reality tunnel. I was visiting my dad and his wife, and my grandmother. Basically I was there to see my grandmother, given that she's saved me from economic ruin a few times in the past (post-college, post-grace period). Naturally I had to deal with her reiteration of approved approaches to living: short hair is good long hair is bad, elbows don't belong on the table, one must only buy what they need, nothing is more important than families being together, there's no place for pessimism, and all kinds of other stuff. Being that she is very old, it is easy to give weak lip service to a lot of these ideas, or to casually agree while gently nudging her onwards in telling whatever story she has interrupted to tell me what to think. I can deal with this, especially while sipping alcoholic beverages, but it was very difficult to deal with the surrounding environment.
Without going into obnoxious levels of detail, I will briefly explain the interior design within the house at which I stayed. My dad's wife has a real obsession with decorating, and she covers every shelf, counter, table, bare corner of floor, or visible flat surface of any kind with decorations such as designer teddy bears, framed photographs, small figurines, fake plants, and so on. Most of the above is set in accordance with the seasons/holidays. The one consistent thing, besides the individuals in the photos, is the "inspirational signage." If you can appreciate the term then you know what I am talking about. There's a couple of lengthy signs, but most consist of simple phrases or combinations of verbs. Most of it repeats a mantra of LIFE/LOVE/FAMILY/HOPE/PEACE, but reaaaaaally heavy on the family element, to the degree that the mind in disagreement feels assaulted.
Being in their bubble I felt heavily self-censored and suffocated. There was a strong feeling of not wanting to be there (expected), but also a general acknowledgement that it is not really their fault for making me feel uncomfortable and irritated - it's my baggage. As I've come to understand it, they are sharing a cultural-religious delusion, and such things are perceived as normal as seen throughout the course of human history. To put it simply, their combination reality tunnel is certainly more acceptable than mine, and it isn't likely, in my opinion, that they even acknowledge how another might perceive their bubble in a negative way. I certainly feel out of place emotionally, despite figuring it out.
I think the signage and decorative mind control has a lot to do with this feeling of mental suffocation. The pungent odor of poutporri being ever present throughout the house gives a sense of being tangibly suffocated. On nearly every shelf there are staged photographs of family get togethers. Smiles real and fake leer from within ornamental frames, many bearing the same mindless verbs. The whole place is very heavy on the repetition of abstract concepts, such as love, hope, peace. In a place like this I feel so much hatred towards these concepts taken as some divine truth. It is likely impossible that I could ever make any of one of them truly know and understand it.
Luckily, avoidance of conflict is common among us, so there were very few entry points into debate. Some part of me wanted an emotional explosion to occur, but that part of me is weaker now than it used to be (5 or 6 years ago) so I soldiered on through the cycle of eating and digesting. So much eating was also rather uncomfortable,..just that feeling that you are "supposed to be" eating more, especially at the request of the hosts. Overeating to be perceived as strong and healthy, grateful, etc is a truly bizarre to me. I understand that it is, to someone else, a familiar, comfortable cultural thing but I have existed for long enough away from it that I find it to be a foreign and weird concept..like gorging yourself till you can't move comfortably and then stiffy relocating yourself elsewhere to sit and digest while waiting for the next few hours to pass so that you can gorge yourself again.
Summer has been rough, and has regularly left me feeling on the verge of some colossal breakdown inside and outside. The feeling of being trapped plays out in a very anxiety ridden manner. What's absurd is that I live pretty well considering what I pay at my current residence. Following through with moving in here was capitalizing on an opportunity, which came with some very positive attributes. Now it is hard to give up this spot because of the few positive attributes left - think money, proximity to current job. To imagine what I could be paying to live in a cockroach motel, with a broken toilet, collapsing ceiling, a burgeoning bed bug population 2 apartments away..it's frightening to consider. I could write a whole entry on an apartment I investigated the day before yesterday. There were cockroaches scuttling around on the floors, walls, and ceilings,there were stray chicken bones and cat shit nonchalantly lying among graded homework assignments, tangled earphones and vacant food packaging; a real fucking piece of hell. The despair of the this place was almost too much to bear, but like Christ hobbling under the heavy weight of the cross to which he was to be nailed, my cohorts and I carried out our designated tasks, wearily collecting information to erect an unwanted case that will haunt our dreams and that will probably be open for a long time, and will take up space somewhere on a hard drive or in a filing cabinet,...a bad experience to outlive us all.
That said, somehow, probably because it is interesting like a car crash, I enjoy working in such a chaotic and absurd environment, though it does make the day to day more stressful than I'd prefer. The time spent at work flashes by compared to other jobs I've had, and to the point where it is a bit scary watching the years flicker past like an ill-remembered movie, bits and pieces sneaking into my dreams to emerge in sleep. When awake, such fragments drift between real and unreal. There are so many faces that I can't place, people that recognize me who I usually don't recognize in the moment that our eyes lock - I acknowledge them anyway,..and maybe sometimes we really don't know each other. I wish it weren't so hard to stay in the "real world" and there were some "opt out" version where I could abandon the sense of selfhood required for carrying out a life consumed by occupation. But it's an accepted fact that the world is fucked up, and all arguments to the contrary can usually be expressed in some of the most detestable bumper stickers.
Instead of rambling about civilization and environmental collapse and all sorts of existentialist conclusions that inherently mean nothing, and in the spirit of the current Internet 2.0 (waste)landscape, here are the top 5 worst bumper stickers/decals observed on the regular:
1.Coexist - Seems that this sticker is meant for those that don't believe in any religion in particular, and those that believe in all of them within some personalized system. For all of those who fervently believe in their religion of choice (or fate) this sticker is a fucking joke. It basically marks the car of a person who is being "tolerant," but can't commit/doesn't see the light, etc.
2.Stick Family - This one so often appears on SUV's and the like, because it excuses, either intentionally or unintentionally, the "necessity for having a big car. It's the whole big car mythos: I am a big man or a strong mother figure, and I need my big protective car fortress because I am more valuable than other people who have no spawn to shuttle around from school to soccer practice, from dance class to summer camp.
3.Baby on Board - Close to the above in arrogance, but worse because the graphic of the baby is often that really stupid one - where the baby is wearing sunglasses and a dumb hat, and because it suggests that the operator of the vehicle has an excuse to drive in any possible way that might be inconvenient to surrounding cars. The idea that truly special cargo is being carried is just really depressing in a profound way for me.
4.Political Stickers (American, Left or Right)
Maybe it is an unwise decision to include this category because during those moments when I'm driving and I see a real whacko driving a car covered in political propaganda, it truly brightens up my day. However, the notion that you have to tell people who you voted for or what you think is right in accordance with a spoonfed political ideology is just obnoxious - keep it to yourself, motherfucker.
5. I can't narrow it down further here, but will just lump in preachy Vegan stickers, and bad neo-Pagan puns, all manners of Christian stickers that try to convey a message, "My Child Graduated From 'X' University," "My Child Is In The Military," etc. Maybe, now that I am thinking about it, this list, if actually fleshed out, would spare very little and that's because I am a curmudgeon. But the important thing to remember in this day and age is that my opinion isn't important, and maybe that's a big part of why I can't hang with Social Media Internet.
On a final note, let's enjoy a list of the various drinks I have concocted and enjoyed this summer, excusing their frequent consumption on having to live with a fucking douchebag for a housemate (he's just moved out):
1.Mexican Michelada - Now I'm not talking about mixing Clamato and Beer together. I tried that at the opening of the summer, but wasted so much Clamato, being unable to add very much of it to the drink. It didn't taste good by any stretch of the imagination and is mostly sold in 16 oz size and up. After doing a bit of reading about Clamato I decided that it most definitely is garbage, being a high-fructose, watered down tomato beverage. So, I've been using canned Tomato juice, a little clam juice, Worcester sauce, Maggi Jugo Seasoning Sauce, Tabasco sauce, a little salt and black pepper, fresh-squeezed lime juice, and Bohemia Pilsner (the BEST Mexican beer I've ever tasted and a good beer in general).
2.Chilcano - Got a bit bored of these by late June and they are really dependent on having a tasty Pisco around. Course the ginger ale adds all kinds of sugar which makes this a poor choice for a late night beverage.
3.Gin and Tonic - Last summer was all about perfecting the Spanish Gin and tonic, but this summer I said "fuck it" to the notion of including juniper berries and lavender and pink peppercorn and a bunch of other stuff, and made it the British way, with Gin & Lime, and (most importantly) Fever Tree's regular Tonic water, which has now spoiled me and rendered all attempts at using cheap tonic water unsuccessful.
4.Mezcal Mule - Tried a few variations on this but the best result was rather accidental, with no attention to measurements. However, at some point I could no longer rationalize using delicious mezcal for summery cocktail experiments as it is too expensive and too enjoyable by itself.
5.Pisco Sour - Well, this is always a bit of a project to make, and I never seem to add enough simple syrup to do it the "right" way. Plus it requires that I have a carton of egg whites sitting around. But, there is really something about the foamy texture and creamy mouthfeel that has kept me coming back.