Boom.

This is the first of a bunch of posts that are just reposts of things I said on  a message board once. These are not well edited and I don’t care. When I was a bit younger, my Dad was an instructor at an Agricultural college in butt fuck nowhere (technically a place called Burdekin Australia, which is in the north east part of the country) - A redneck hell hole. They fairly regularly did 2 week short courses on various stuff farmers might need to know. Butchery, cattle midwifery, small motor repair, sheep shearing, and of course - demolitions (and a bunch of other shit I don't remember). Its more or less standard that pranks will occur when you gather a large number of yokels into a relatively small space with lots of high explosives and large stupid animals. One year the butchery instructors had played a prank on the demolitions guys - by stuffing several car exhaust pipes with sections of cow intestine, fresh from the cow. So the demolitions guys got a little revenge - they threaded about 240' of cow intestine with det cord (courses on rendering a live cow into steaks produces a lot of excess offal), and strung it in the tree line, about 25 feet up surrounding the butchery instruction area (Classes were done outdoors mostly - no indoor space). During the classes lunch break - they detonated the cord sequence. If you've ever played with det cord - you can set timing and direction of the blast when you detonate. The blast was directed down and towards the middle of the very large instruction area. The contents of 240' of cow intestines, and the majority of the intestine tissue covered literally everything, and everyone in the immediate area. I cannot describe the horrific nature of 20 or so guys, holding sandwiches and cups of coffee, surrounded by tables and butchers saws and knives and shit - covered in half cooked, half digested cow shit and cow intestine. When you make farmers on a butchery course puke - you know you've done well.

“Rage, Loathing and Discontent”

 

I’m an aging hippy railing against kids in designer flairs. A middle aged punk, scorning kids who pay a small fortune for a hair cut that looks like it was done with spray paint and super glue. I’m the saddest cliche of an angry youth – I’m old and watching the things that I was angry about taken away, washed out, made lame and corporate by hipster douche bags.

 

A friend made a post in his blog, suggesting that Loathing was a product of Fear and Ignorance. I protested – I loathe most the things I know best. Anger and powerlessness, the inability to influence the things that make us angry – that’s where loathing comes from.

 

I feel antique talking about my generation in the past tense. I’m not even thirty yet. I’m on the bleeding edge of technology. I have so much counter culture that it’s leaking out of my ears. But apparently it’s time to start chasing kids off my lawn or something. Because kids wearing baseball caps with the brims flat and stickers still on them infuriates me – that’s how kids with downs syndrome wore their hats back in my day. How am I supposed to know which kids can’t get out of the way when I try and run them down with my car now? Fuck!

 

My generation doesn’t have a name. We’re the bleeding edge between Gen X and Gen Y – We grew up with the internet and learned about biology with highly pornographic learning aides. Our major pop culture influences started when Kurt Cobain died and ended when My Chemical Romance weren’t laughed off the stage.

My generation was characterized by anger, at the world and everything that was wrong with it. Sarcasm, Irony, loathing, apathy and rage were our club membership badges. Bill Hicks was our prophet. Nivana, Nine Inch Nails, Rage against the Machine and Tool wrote our protest songs. There was a swell of anger against the world and everything that was wrong it. Racism, sexism, reverse sexism, stupid political correctness that gave us nonsense phrases like reverse racism and reverse sexism, homophobia, all these social wrongs that we were trying to change.

Now I see those same hall marks of association, sarcasm, irony, loathing, the humour and the musical styles parroted and parodied by hipster douche bags. But when I look through their anger and see them wearing slogans coined by my heroes, on fucking t-shirts and baseball caps that they bought from mass marketers, I don’t see anything directed towards the world at large. I don’t see any altruism or any selflessness in the motives. All I see is bitterness and longing. Self deception and dellusion.

 

An actor I heard give an interview once said that in the old days, you were famous because you were special. The most remarkable people were heroes to the world, everyone knew them and wanted to know what they were doing because they were special. Children idolized them and strove to be like them because they wanted to be special as well.

Now the world has changed and people are special because they’re famous. The world treats famous people like they’re special and now instead of seeing children idolizing the qualities that made someone famous – we’ve learned that you don’t need to do anything in particular to be special. You just need to be famous. If your daddy is rich enough and you stop mid fellatio to answer the phone, and then let the video leak – you can make yourself one of the most famous people in the world. You can be paid millions just to go to parties. You can get a record deal even though you can’t sing. You can be in movies even though you can’t act.

All the echoes of my heroes, all the secondary characteristics of the people I admired and respected, all the secondary characteristics of my own youth are being adopted and perverted now by people with none of the primary characteristics. Their rage at the world is all about unfulfilled narcissistic fantasies. The only thing they want to change is how much attention everyone will pay to them.

Maybe I’m just romanticising my own faded memories. Maybe I’m just another bitter old man, waving my cane at the whipper snappers on my lawn. Maybe my anger and my inability to change the direction that the world seems to be moving will just lead into loathing.

Maybe I’ll dress like I’ve got downs syndrome and go fit in with the crowd.

Hold this space

This is a placeholder blog. Over the next few weeks I'm going to consolidate some existing writings here and start placing my future writings here.

I intend to talk about writing, common sense, self awareness and self improvement, sexuality and technology - and whatever other weird shit I'm thinking about.