Jingle Bells is playing throughout the mall, it must be time to consume. The mad rush is on, millions of parents are lining up to buy Highschool Musical dolls for their horrible little children, and I'm the one to shuffle them through the register while trying to sell them insurance on socks. By all means, tell me the story about how you only spent $5000 on gifts last year and felt cheap so this year you're doubling it. You seem to have several hundred people in your family that are somehow all important enough to receive gifts, so why not? Be sure to break it up into several purchases, pay only with checks, and stare at the register with your vacant expressions while saying "I thought that was supposed to be on sale" for every second item. Half of you look at me with a face like your alarm just went off five seconds ago and you're still in a state of being both angry and asleep at the same time, but I'll keep a look of absolute neutrality while I balance being expected to smile and being pissed off that I had to wake up at 5 AM so you can buy things you don't need.

There's something special about being misanthropic and working closely with the public in a job that illuminates every negative aspect of humanity while keeping anything positive out of sight. I'm expected to meet quotas of buyer protection plans and batteries sold, and it's my fault for not being suggestive enough if they decline. After that leather-skinned beach blonde has spent five minutes bitching about the manager not giving her enough priority, I have to find a way to insult her that will bring me satisfaction while still being subtle enough that she won't pick up on it. It's a delicate balance, but I find the best way is to reassure her about her purchase using sentences that would normally require blatant sarcasm, but I say it in a completely nonchalant and sincere way. You'll think I'm being polite and making small conversation while you wait, and I get to be condescending and relieve boredom.

Another common thing is to think about whether or not death would be preferable to going to work, and logic usually concludes that the former is a better alternative. I look at it as I do with most things in life, as a spectrum that goes from left to right, with left being bad and right being good. The day naturally starts out in the center, as it does with everyone. After the first few seconds of delirium, the spectrum makes a strong and sudden shift towards bad as you realize that your day is going to consist of work, followed by school, followed by studying, followed by sleep. It steadily moves further towards the left as you lay in bed after hitting the snooze alarm, knowing that in a few minutes you'll have to force yourself to actually get up. You get up and put on your uniform, the entire time thinking about how unnatural and dehumanizing the whole process is, and just how pointless your life is right now. You arrive at work and your boss says that you're going to be working at the register all day, and the needle moves another notch to the left. For the next five or so hours, it will be a constant journey towards bad. The line will never become shorter, everyone will complain, the manager will delay your lunch break, and as soon as you finally leave you have an exam to look forward to. Your free time comes at around 10:00 PM, at which point your meter is dangerously in the red, and you begin to study for tomorrow's test. Repeat this every day with one free day a week that gets wasted because all your friends are working and can't do anything interesting.

People are far too afraid of death, which has always struck me as contrary to the religion most people seem so devoted to. Being alive is fine, and according to religion they have eternal bliss to look forward to as long as they didn't have any fun while they were alive, but nobody actually wants to die. That one moment has a primitive fear attached to it, which is strong enough to procrastinate on their suicide. This is based on the assumption of an afterlife, and theorizing that it doesn't exist would make our entire system seem hopeless. That one shimmering speck on the horizon dies out and all that's left is a life of work with no reward at the end. Perhaps if everyone wasn't so devoted to the idea we could structure ourselves in a way that allowed for enjoyment without death as the gateway.

So say there is no afterlife, just for the sake of argument. Once you die, that's it. The electrical signal in your brain fades, and all you experience for the rest of eternity is a void. You don't get bored of it because you can no longer think, and your very consciousness ceases to exist. You have become nothing, which I would look at as the ultimate neutrality. No possibility of good or evil for an infinite amount of time. Logically, this is a step up from being constantly in a negative state. By leaving behind all the burdens you have moved towards the right of the spectrum, and have actually improved your life by ending it. No more waking up or falling asleep. No more meaningless expectations or things to pester you. An eternity of peace that you're not quite experiencing.

This is still horribly depressing, but only if you assume that there's a chance that things would have become better had you stayed alive longer. Given the general trend of the world, I can assume that everything is going to get progressively worse as time goes on in just about every aspect of life. Unless you happen to be rich from the start, you'll get poorer and poorer as you age. Inflation will increase, you'll keep getting denied the raise, gas prices will go up, and eventually you'll be at the point where you run out of the money you need for basic survival. At this point you take out loans to pay your bills, so you get charged interest by the bank. They eventually seize everything you own and either send you to jail or you become homeless. You starve to death out on the street behind a dumpster and are found two months later by two children that strayed from their parents, and the police are unable to identify your corpse. Dead and forgotten by the world, let's move on.

Option two relies on a deontological perspective which says that you can't predict the future under any circumstances. If you shoot someone in the face, you have no way of knowing if they'll die or not. It's kind of a stretch, but works well as the antithesis. Say you do get that raise and everything works out fine. You climb the ladder and become president of the company, where you make billions of dollars for doing nothing, sleep until noon every day, and spend your free time buying sports cars to show off to your other rich friends. This is much less probable than the other possibility, to the point where it can safely be discarded as mathematically insignificant. The sort of thing a five year old kid says while he's fantasizing about being an astronaut or professional football player.

So taking both sides into account, death looks like a pretty decent option as far as things go. You could finally leave all those horrible things behind and there's either something interesting waiting for you or nothing at all. Either one will be a plus for the steady worker, I would advise going out with a bang by suicide bombing a Giuliani rally, but that's just a personal preference. Quit your job and spend all your remaining money on all sorts of fun illegal things before you go. Do all the things you wanted to do, and maybe once you're done with it you'll be enjoying yourself so much that you decide not to kill yourself anyway. Either one is good, and probably won't matter too much in the grand scheme of things, but this is about you.

I'll stick around a while longer because I have shit to do, I just need to take enough time off to actually do it. Endless nothing is boring anyway, I'll just have to compensate for my spectrum being continuously in the red by giving it a huge jolt towards the right on the days off. Enjoy the holiday season, there's garbage that needs buying and you're the one to do it.

I recently got a job at Toys R Us, which is an excellent choice of employment on my part because I don't like children once they advance beyond the age where they learn to speak. I chose the job because at least half of the employees happen to be close friends and insisted that I apply. Now I get paid for standing around and doing what I would do in my spare time anyway, with the addition of the occasional soccer mom buying her three year old daughter Baby Bratz dolls. It's important to train them to be whores from an early age, after all. If our infants were crawling around without being coated in a thin layer of eyeshadow and red lipstick, I would feel like our values were being compromised. There has been a single instant during work that has been thought provoking, the rest of the time being filled by trying to sell buyer protection plans to customers in an attempt to make them pay more money to insure items they don't need insured. I have yet to figure out why it's necessary to ask someone if they want a fifteen month policy to cover their Rubik's cube, and don't want to interact with anyone that would agree to it in the first place.

This moment was fleeting, five seconds at most. While I was at the service desk asking one of the managers to perform some menial task, a woman walked by with her child in a stroller. The child could not have been more than a year old, but seemed somehow out of place. The look in her eyes was not the familiar one of excitement and wonder, but a complete lack of comprehension. The surrounding environment was completely foreign and unnatural, there was no genetic programming to prepare her for these sights. As she looked around with wide, confused eyes at the colorful devices it struck me how unnatural the whole process was. This infant did not want toys. She didn't know what a Barbie doll was. She wasn't craving the newest play set from Fischer Price. She had not yet learned to need these things like so many others have.

So based on that moment my job is quite clearly worthless and does nothing more than spread the materialistic and selfish mentality of humanity as a whole, but I already knew that from the beginning. I could approach that mother, who is oblivious to just how important that moment was, and insist that she not contaminate her offspring with advertising tactics and forced gender roles. That she maintain that confusion for as long as possible, because the store I work in shouldn't be allowed to make sense. I work as a purveyor of philosophical blindness, my sole purpose is to drag people as far away from Nirvana as possible. You need the new Hannah Montana CD, and yes I think she's a very talented singer. Your daughter would love the new My Little Pony doll, they're very popular with other girls her age. I strongly advise that you sign up for our credit card so that we may take over your life. The check is fine, we'll just need all your personal information so that the company can sell it to advertisers who will flood your mailbox with sales catalogs. If we send enough, you'll see another item that you need and you'll come back and give us more of your precious money. I am here to destroy the innocence of children and make your life even worse than it already is, but I do it with a smile. You get a wooden train just so that it's a fair trade, so enjoy it.

I imagine an exemplary cashier at a major retail outlet would do well in politics. We both hope that if we grin wide enough you won't notice the sodomy. I'm trained to look at you as a tool for making the company owners richer, so I'll sit through the orientation, say how customer service should be the number one priority, then get hired because it seems like I'll be a good employee. I leave out the details about how I only applied so I can work with Sam and joke around all day. Collect carts with Jason and treat it as a fifteen minute break while we stand around and laugh. Work in the games department with Nick and discuss the new games that are coming out. Customer service is just a secondary part of the job to me, but I put on the facade of caring about my work. My only goal is to get the customer away from me as fast as possible so that I can go back to doing something important.

Upon review, I end up as a decent employee who gets along great with his coworkers. I get paid for giving people the short-lived and meaningless satisfaction of knowing that there's one less thing they need to buy for their Christmas shopping. I would never dream of buying any of the items in the store for anyone, but if the customer insists I won't verbally question it. Inanimate objects are an important part of their existence, and they're willing to waste their lives away in an office so that they can return home and give their kid another thing he was complaining about so that he'll shut up for a few days. Children are just another obstacle, and I'm someone to help them overcome it. What a brilliant way of looking at the family unit.

That's all fine, and I could justify it by using misanthropy if I really wanted to, but that child in the stroller shakes the foundation. The mask slips off for a second and for a few minutes I think of myself as having been assimilated as part of the evil entity. I think to myself "Maybe there is something inherently wrong with what I'm doing, how can I rectify this situation?" Somehow, I have to balance out my version of good with their version of good. It may be a few minor things, but I can feel like I'm making a change in the end. If a mother asks if she should buy an item that complements another item, I'll use the opposite of suggestive selling techniques and insist that she not do so. One less item to occupy her toddler, maybe she'll have to use actual human interaction now. Whereas others would look at taking toys away from children as a bad thing, I look at it as a removal of distractions and an opportunity to glance at something real.

No more damned illusions, your money will never buy happiness so stop trying. Teach your child to read rather than relying on Dora The Explorer. Give your child some real music rather than this Disney bullshit. Reject false evolution and advance the path of primitive behavior rather than trying to cover it up. There's no point in being creative if it's handed to you in tangible form, use some imagination instead. A five year old doesn't need a $150 electronic space shuttle, just give him a cardboard box and tell him to figure it out. Stop buying my shit, I have no faith in it and you shouldn't either.

"How dare those egotistical slobs demand something of us? We own the companies, we make the shows and the movies. We produce the entertainment that they rely on to brighten their day. We are TV. We are cinema. How DARE they demand that we pay them when the only thing they're responsible for is writing every word that our actors say?"

Well, Mr. CEO, you've always favored explosions and gunfire anyway, so perhaps you can patch up the missing dialog with more action. The plot isn't important, just have the actors scream a lot and shoot at eachother for an hour and you're guaranteed to have a box office hit. Everyone complained that 300 had too much plot at the beginning and not enough battle scenes, so that should be a clear indication that not only is it not necessary, but it actually takes away from the movie. As soon as the title fades from the movie screen, have Leonidas stab a Persian in the eye with a spear and keep the violence going until the credits roll. Words need not make an appearance at any moment.

Though the idea of movies having no creativity and relying entirely on special effects as a quality barometer may appeal to someone like Michael Bay, it's unlikely to produce any more "great movies". Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas isn't a cult classic because of the scene where Duke is firing his gun out in the desert, and American Beauty didn't win all those Oscars for the blood at the end. The Daily Show won't exist anymore without all those inconvenient people at the bottom writing the words that Jon Stewart is saying, and Colbert will die with him. The two top ranking shows on Comedy Central are gone, all because nobody wants to pay the real creators.

What arrogance. It's like a man is giving you money for doing nothing for several years. You enjoy being given this money and grow used to it, then the man says that he doesn't want to give you quite as much anymore. You get angry and demand that he keep giving you money, so he calls you an ingrate and stops giving you any at all. Some people have grown accustomed to doing nothing and profiting off the creativity of others, and yet have the nerve to try and negotiate with their source of income. The writers aren't even getting the majority of the profit that comes from their work, that goes upward.

So what could justify refusal to bargain with the Writer's Guild? They want a share of the profits that are made from DVD sales and the internet views and the folks in charge would deny them? They should be thanking the writers for making them so rich, and giving the writers anything that's requested without any hint of argument. Greed blowing up in the face of the greedy is a glorious spectacle to behold. An artist is selling a painting and he decides on the price, so the writers will do the same no matter how much the buyer complains. If they don't like it, no more art.

But this is a slap in the face of the people that actually enjoy the art. Those at the top look at it in their usual way by assigning it a dollar value and determining everything based on that number. Anyone who actually enjoys the show is affected by this numerical method of categorization, and it's not like the men with all the money have any real barrier preventing them from sharing the profits and keeping everyone happy. The greed of the few is trickling down and making the masses unhappy, and this does not sit well with the masses.

The most likely outcomes are either that the rich are starved for money and agree to exploit the writers slightly less than before for the sake of being diplomatic, or that the writers are no longer able to strike for economic reasons and must continue to put up with the conditions set up by the people who buy their scripts. The former would be the favorable outcome from people with a conscience, but they're not the ones making the decisions. It will be interesting to watch how this unfolds, and will serve as a good test of whether or not human decency will manage to prevail.

Mankind has a long and diverse track record of inventing things that are horrible. Be it the latest sniper rifle that can shoot through ten feet of solid concrete or the DVD Rewinder, no physical object can match the basic flaws in the mind of the species that is responsible for them in the first place. The most irksome to me is perhaps political correctness, an invention of man that can be placed in the same category as war and money. Anyone that gets angry at something runs the risk of offending people, so let's try and remove the very language that expresses anger and all use Newspeak instead. I'd say that the people that stand for censorship are gray, lifeless parasites that exist only to attach themselves to creativity itself and gain momentary glimpses of pleasure from knowing that they're making the world worse, but all I can say is that they're doubleplusungood and hope they become unpersons in the near future.

What's really terrifying is when this carries over into other areas of daily life. The next time you step foot in a supermarket, stop for a second and listen to the type of music that's playing throughout the store. Chances are it's going to be a song that's a slight improvement on elevator music. Something so dull that it will serve as an acceptable subliminal background noise, but just bad enough that anyone having to actually work in the store and hear it looped every four hours is likely to list it as one of the reasons why they quit on future job applications. The managers were fine, it was a good work environment and you got along well with the customers, but hearing Mmmbop by Hanson played three times every day put you in such a bad mood that the only way to cheer yourself up was to hear a small child crying to their mother about not getting a Snickers bar. As soon as those tears and screams begin, it's like trumpets of heaven stripping away the noise pollution and replacing it with the immensely satisfying sadness of a small, innocent creature.

This is for obvious reasons. Some fucker in marketing would tell you that people buy more from the store when there's soft rock playing, and I would dissect every element of that person's life just so that I could find more things to justify my limitless hatred of them. Just once, I would like to go into Ralphs to buy my single gallon of milk and hear death metal playing over the intercom, then stick around for the rest of the song to hear the customers saying how they're offended by the lyrics about sodomizing the corpses they dug up from the local graveyard, and would rather listen to Sheryl Crow instead. I don't even like death metal, but it would be such a surprise that I would buy more useless shit just out of respect. Anything to kick me out of my auto-pilot and brighten up my day just by knowing that there's someone high up in that company that isn't named Ron and doesn't yell at employees for not wearing name tags while working a job that doesn't require customers to ever acknowledge your presence.

The mentality we have isn't a positive thing in any real sense, only in an artificial sense. It breeds the sort of people that go to work, smile at Bob and greet him good day, then say "I fucking hate that guy" once he's too far away to hear. I want to be able to tell Bob that I'd like to tie him to a chair and beat him repeatedly with a metal bat and not feel like I'm breaking some important code of society. I want to tell the soccer mom that her children are not special, and that by having six of them she's doing nothing but contributing to overpopulation. That your band sucks, and that your office job means your use in life is limited to being an organ donor. That everything you have ever done, thought of doing, and ever will do in the future is wrong. That your life is meaningless, that your dream of becoming the assistant manager does nothing but show what a boring idiot you really are, and that there is no more hope in the world for you. The person on the receiving end would greet this with "Yeah, well fuck you," and Earth would be a better place to live.

This is but another dream in a long line of dreams that will never happen. We need to be courteous and respectful to each other, and instead of having your cashiers tell the annoying customers that they should be subjected to scaphism, the proper policy is to say "We're terribly sorry that we can't help you at this moment, but we sincerely hope that you'll continue to shop at our fine establishment in the future." Not in my store. I would train my cashiers that the proper response to a customer arguing that their coupon for 30 cents off their chocolate chip corn dogs isn't expired would be "GET OUT! GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY FUCKING STORE! DRIVE BACK TO YOUR GATED COMMUNITY IN YOUR H2 WITH THE ROMNEY 08 STICKER ON IT AND JACK OFF TO THE O'REILLY FACTOR LIKE YOU DO EVERY NIGHT, THEN CURL UP IN YOUR FUCKING RECLINER BY THE FIREPLACE WHILE LISTENING TO RUSH LIMBAUGH ON TAPE AND THINKING ABOUT HOW YOU ENJOY BEING EVERYTHING WRONG WITH HUMANITY! YOU FILTHY, OBESE, PRO-LIFE MORON, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY FUCKING STORE RIGHT FUCKING NOW!"

My business would probably suffer a bit, but it would be worth it. Raises will be given to any employee that manages to make a customer say anything along the lines of "You're right, I've been putting too much importance on saving trivial amounts of money, and there's no excuse for buying these in the first place. Thank you for making me realize what a fool I've been." I'll have a terrible reputation in terms of customer service, but be number one in customer enlightenment. Enjoy your money, Albertsons, I deal in the trade of ideas.

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I turned this in to my English class as the weekly freewrite, not changed in any way. I'm anxious to see what comments my teacher writes on it.

600 square miles burned, 1300 homes destroyed, 350,000 more evacuated, an estimate of 910,000 people darting from the flame, and a satellite image of Southern California makes it look like the entire state has taken up smoking. The wind is as relentless as ever, the fires still not controlled, and people caught in the middle left with an ominous black smoke cloud that filters out the sunlight leaving the land draped in apocalyptic orange. 361,000 acres are left as little more than a gigantic black cigarette burn in the wake, and after not too long statistics stop losing their meaning. How does one comprehend 910,000 people? With the deaths of three people it's possible to gain insight into the lives of those three. Learn where they worked, how they grew up, hear stories about their lives from people that knew them, but statistics are more impersonal. You can't think of 910,000 people in terms of individuality. It becomes nothing more than an impersonal number by which damage can be assessed. A handy reference while doing a research paper on the effects of the 2007 fires in Southern California to make the report look more professional.

Already there's talk of the coming failures in the system. They will receive the sort of federal help that the survivors of Hurricane Katrina were granted, the insurance companies will deny their claims and perpetuate the image that you're insured unless something bad happens. There will be paperwork, lots of people in business suits saying that they're sorry, and the history of humanity will have another scar for the pessimists to glance at and cringe. Already there are rumors that the fires were started by Al Qaeda, showing that it never takes long for the Paranoid American mentality to blame a major disaster on the invisible enemy that's everywhere at all times and that must constantly be feared lest we be caught off guard and murdered.

Going by the more widely held idea that it's impossible to tell if the fires were even started by arson, I think it's better to avoid jumping to conclusions. This is not 9/11 all over again, there's no need to start with the conspiracy theories yet. Another Loose Change video circling around the web and making everyone hate the government serves no purpose at the moment, that can be decided based on whether or not Bush decides to give Schwartzenegger the requested money to help pay for all the damages after the fires are extinguished and to help get supplies to the people that have been evacuated and are now residing in baseball stadiums and shelters. Even if he doesn't, the negative repercussions come later. The fire is far from under control, and even the self-obsessed evil would be unwise to ruin its own image by denying help to those obviously in need.

Being in the moment is a different experience entirely. It wipes away all the frivolous nonsense and manages to shock people back into rationality. Knowing that there are people you knew in high school that are attending Pepperdine and might have their college burned down, or talking to them online as they say they have to clear out of the area because they can see the fire over the hill sends a different message. It's no longer about who should get the blame like it usually is, it's about focusing on the important issue of how you can help out your fellow man in the meantime. The only thing more ominous than the smoke is the knowledge that all sorts of bureaucratic hellfire is going to occur after the flames have died down and everyone will go back to sleep.

But despite the inevitable inundation of excuses, this is a glimpse into what may very well be the true spirit of humanity. Only the cataclysm can pry their eyes away from the everyday distractions and make them focus on the big picture. Those images of people in a frenzy, grabbing their children and fleeing will work as a tool in addition to being an account of the devestation; a necessary and forced awakening that transcends the political division, the selfish mentality, the superficial ideology. An almost ethereal positive reaction that occurs only as a side effect of all the sadness and despair. Another one of those fleeting feelings, but one that contains no hint of malice despite being surrounded in darkness. Somewhere in the wreckage, the fire will leave a sparkling diamond of what humanity as a whole could be.

2:30 AM, and I can't help but wonder whether this senseless nocturnal lifestyle serves any practical functionality besides "I'm not tired enough to go to sleep right now." Looking at it as a means of discouraging myself from watching TV works, since the only thing playing on every channel are commercials for Girls Gone Wild and a bunch of idiots grinning about Extenze. If pharmaceutical companies have taught me one thing, it's that I can become a respected doctor just by wearing a white coat, hanging a stethoscope around my neck and standing in a doctor's office. If I actually needed any of the pills these people are telling me I need, I would go down to the doctor's office and he would prescribe them to me. "Do you wake up tired in the morning?" is not a good enough excuse to make me head down to the hospital and demand some Ambien so that I can fall asleep at night, I'll just keep going to bed at 4:30 in the morning and waking up at 2:00 PM instead. If I actually did buy some Ambien I'd probably just end up taking it and then procrastinating about actually going to sleep long enough that it would reveal that special side-effect that they don't talk about. For some reason they don't bother to stress the fact that it becomes a hallucinogen if you don't retire for the night right after taking it.

If nothing else, it reveals interesting things. I usually just end up browsing YouTube for something worth watching, and there's something funny about Mitt Romney telling a terminally ill person in a wheelchair that he would rather see the guy die from muscular dystrophy than legalize medical marijuana. This is the best humanity has to offer? This is our republican front runner and possible future president? How can creationists keep up the idea of intelligent design when basic observation of human behavior would suggest otherwise? At least if they took the side of evolution there would be nobody to blame. I'm tempted to say that creationism is a valid theory at one of their debates, but argue for the side that God is like a kid shining a magnifying glass on an anthill. He designed us poorly on purpose just so that he can have some entertainment as we all kill each other and fill the world with bureaucracy and prisons. Not the most popular religion, but I'm willing to be diplomatic. Christianity is wrong, but so is atheism. God exists, but he's an ass.

But perhaps that's looking at the wrong people. Politicians haven't been looked at as heroes since the great depression. It's like everything after FDR has just been a downward spiral and things are only going to get worse until a nuke "accidentally" goes off somewhere and the whole world fires off everything they have at each other. Considered tragic to some, but I won't really care since I'll have seen it coming. Every country in the world killing off another country, and every single one of them doing it for the right cause. These are not the heroes of the world. I respect the comedians, artists, musicians, great writers and poets, all the people that create something for other people to enjoy. The people who don't make it a life goal to be more powerful or rich than someone else, and are unwilling to compromise their integrity for the sake of a higher dollar amount. Bill Hicks, Hunter S. Thompson, Alex Grey, Jimi Hendrix, all of them managed to transcend the twisted view of the American Dream. They had tapped into something more important than having the most money in the world, and instead chose to refine that special something they had found.

There isn't much point in being one of the super rich types. After a certain level of income I would run out of things to buy, and my billion dollars would sit in the bank while I occasionally took out $20 to buy a movie off Amazon. After a while it just becomes money for the sake of having money, without any actual use for it. You can buy a giant mansion that you don't need, a fast car despite that you can't drive more than 80 miles per hour anywhere, trick some vapid trophy wife into marrying you so that you can pretend you're attractive, then after that you have to be creative. There's nothing you can buy that's going to add any real value to your life, and the only goal I have in my life in terms of money is to have enough that I can live somewhere and pay the dogs in the credit card and loan companies enough that they'll leave me the hell alone. Ideally they wouldn't exist, but they're so ingrained into America that unless someone physically kills the people running them the problem will never be resolved.

I tend to idolize the hippie culture of the 60's and be upset that I missed out just because it serves as a fine example of what the world could be, despite all the flaws that came with it. The premise was so attractive that hundreds of thousands of people were flowing into the Haight-Ashbury and it couldn't sustain itsself anymore just because of the sheer population of the place, which then led to crime everywhere. You couldn't let your cat outside because a speed freak would eat it. I would have liked to see the good conditions spread out further, rather than having a central gathering area that didn't function correctly. Events like the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock everywhere you look, rather than soulless, manufactured garbage like Hannah Montana selling out concerts at $3,000 a ticket. A counter culture that would be so powerful that it would destroy the current one and no amount of politicians sending police to beat the hell out of war protesters and kill them with shotguns would be able to stop it. Reagan could send in the national guard to shoot CS into all the funerals he wanted, but people would actually fight back. Suddenly we go from beige colored skyscrapers and negative assets to a bigger version of the countries that are actually worth living in. Patriotism might actually be justified for the first time in several decades.

Just a dream, however. That ephemeral wisp of hope that rockets out from the depths whenever I query what a good world would be. John Lennon's "Imagine" made a reality. No fear of hell or nor need for compromise in the hopes of heaven, no devotion to country or personal God, no sense of need for material objects and therefore no greed, and everything ends with "And the world will live as one." Not in our current state, that's for sure. I fear Hicks's prophecy may be the only reality left, and that his vision for the future will also fade into obscurity while the divisions grow stronger. My only real hope remains unrealistic at best, and only the seemingly inevitable worldwide holocaust will be the deciding factor.

Wes Anderson is personally mocking me. Making a new movie, advertising it everywhere, then showing it in about five theaters in the entire United States. I didn't know he was going to take "Now showing in select theaters" to such a new extreme. The solution seems to be to wait for it to come out on DVD, then buy it and place it next to every other film that he's ever made, just because I like him that much. If only the feeling were mutual, it wouldn't be an hours drive to the nearest theater to see The Darjeeling Limited.

Not only that, but now I have to refer to an online guide on MLA formatting to determine whether or not I need to underline the name of a movie. Though I wouldn't go so far as to say that the English language is stupid, it has adopted some rather abstract and pointless practices for the sake of being formal. It seems like the equivalent of the SAT test. Learn a rich and diverse cornucopia of grammatical nuances and rules to abide by when citing references, then leave school and the average person wipes their memory clean of the information. Important aspects of life command a solid place in long term memory, so maybe our very biology is fighting against learning this sort of intense refinement of thought, which is problematic when you describe yourself as an English major. Push through it, get the degree, then try and use it after college in moderation so as not to appear pretentious. Nobody wants to be the sort of person that's lecturing their friends on the differences between the usage of "effect" and "affect."

Not to say that most of the current social trends are any more interesting. The current model of the average teenager is completely paradoxical and the fact that it's been maintained this long is nothing short of a miracle. The basic formula has always been to eliminate the old way once it becomes too boring, or to rebuild after the previous structure has either self-destructed or has been killed by a certain ruling member of society that didn't happen to agree with it. The new generation has adopted the "emo" culture, and there doesn't seem to be any concrete reason as to why. The fundamental idea of the emo culture is that every other way of living is terrible, but so is this one. The music is based on how much the members of this group should hate themselves and that the world is a cruel place, so they all don black makeup and write terrible poetry about how their parents won't buy them a new cell phone. This is of course parodied on many occasions by me, just because I enjoy the concept of shadenfreud.

But why is anyone attracted to this sort of lifestyle? How does it perpetuate itsself? By all logical standards it should be rejected at first sight, and anyone who's actually miserable enough to follow it will eventually perform the highest and most honorable act there is in emo society: killing themselves. Despite the fact that it's naturally repellent to potential newcomers and self-destructive to those who are already in it, it's still present just about everywhere. On my brief journey to the Thousand Oaks mall I would see large amounts of these people, usually moving in groups of three. The males wear tight girl jeans that look ridiculous and have haircuts that resemble Flock Of Seagulls rotated 45 degrees around the top of the head. They wear chains that aren't connected to anything and black lip rings. It resembles a warped and dulled down version the old punk scene in terms of style, except now instead of cursing the name of the government and everything associated with it, they hate themselves and cry a lot about nothing in particular.

Maybe it's just designed as the complete opposite of the hippie generation. The general mentality then was to love yourself, everything else, and wear colorful and clothing to express that. Now it's hate yourself, everything else, and wear nothing but black. Instead of Jimi Hendrix and The Byrds we have My Chemical Romance and Fallout Boy. Hopefully this forms a cycle, and in 40 years everyone will once again be filled with "creativity enhancers" and trying to get rid of all this negative energy. This will be followed shortly by futuristic Lyndon Johnsons and Richard Nixons demonizing all these happy people that are spreading the word of peace and understanding and outlawing the very way of life, then the futuristic Charles Manson will form a murderous LSD cult and add a few nails to the coffin. Then everyone will get jobs working in a large, beige colored building with a stack of papers on their desk that needs filing and the professional title of "Assistant manager of regional distribution and marketing demographics research." The company's name is "Smith & Smith Associated".

As for me, I'll just laugh at everything within my field of vision and continue sleepwalking through the omnipresent daydream with a cheery smile on my face. There's no point in securing a false sense of self-loathing for yourself. Stop writing poetry that includes lines like "I am a black crow crying tears of blood as I drink from the deep well of absolute blackest despondency," I used to write those for high school English assignments during the poetry section of the course as a way of seeing if the teacher was dishonest enough to tell me that I was creative. I'd like to think so, but certainly not because of that.

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What boring nonsense. Someone give me a fucking topic to write about for my next English paper so I don't keep writing this shit, or my next one is just going to be about how 12 Oz Mouse is the best show ever made.

Most of my blog posts are poorly written ramblings I write for my English free writing class. this week's installment:

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I don't think of myself as a very good consumer. I don't think I've bought anything from a store in over a month, and I don't have any intention to do so any time soon. Advertising doesn't work very well since I always look at it as a test for the companies. A general rule is that the less a commercial has to do with the product they're supposed to be selling, the less I trust them. If you have to try and be funny to sell whatever it is you make I'll just assume that you have to compromise for the fact that it's terrible. So far Geico is at the absolute bottom, they've shifted away from the direction of saying anything about their insurance and instead made their ads about modern day cavemen and talking geckos. At least it's not surprising to find out that the company is run by people that fit into the collective idea of "they," and that they buy speed cameras for the police so that drivers get tickets and have to pay more money for Geico insurance.

It's too easy when there aren't any companies that are trustworthy anymore. I think I'll just sit here and write about why I don't trust these companies based on the ads they make.

Countrywide Home Loans - There are too many businesses in the world that don't do anything other than shift money around. The friendly looking spokesman talking about how low the interest rates are and how easy it is to borrow money from his company isn't going to get rid of the negative image of loan companies. The basic formula has always been to give people money and then cripple them with interest to the point that it takes them 50 years to pay it back and end up paying five times the initial amount when it's all added up. Keep on smiling and saying how great you are, I'll trust you because you're wearing a suit and look professional.

Truth - Non-smokers are far more annoying than smokers. We already know that smoking causes cancer, you're not giving anyone any new information. I doubt that there's a single person out there who's going to see this and suddenly have a revelation. "Cigarettes cause cancer? You've got to be kidding me. I'm going to stop smoking these things right now." I'm almost tempted to start smoking just to spite these people. Walk right up to them while they're throwing dolls into a trash can to make a point about infant mortality or something and blow the smoke right in their face. "My god, these things are fucking delicious."

WIN THIS PS3! - Answer this question that everyone in the world can answer and win this free video game system. All the credibility of spam emails and pop up ads on internet sites. At least they're more tasteful than the "How many people died in the Virginia Tech school shootings?" one that I saw the day of the Virginia Tech shootings. I guess it doesn't take long for the brilliant minds in marketing to jump on a national tragedy. "A bunch of people just died at some school in the east, let's capitalize on this!"

Perhaps I'm just too cynical. Maybe there are some companies out there that have basic human decency, but none of the big ones seem to show it. One of the few fantasies I have is a world that manages to function without money. There's certainly no need for any of this intentional deception, but without the motivation of monetary gain I figure it would sort its self out completely. No stocks, economy, corporate fraud, nothing.

I've distanced myself so much from the consumer society that it doesn't even make sense to me anymore. Feeling that I'm obligated to get a job, I went down to the Thousand Oaks mall for the first time in about a year and can't figure out how any of the stores maintain their existence. There are about seven stores that are devoted entirely to selling sunglasses, about nine that sell nothing but diamond jewelery, and the majority of the other stores sell clothing. I didn't know there was enough of a market for sunglasses that there could be more than one sunglasses store in any given location that could sustain its self. Does this mean that there's some massive demand for this specific, obscure item that I don't know about? Buying a pair for five bucks at a pharmacy isn't good enough, so it's necessary to get multiple pairs and buy them from fancy stores where all the employees wear black business shirts with ties and slick their hair back. There must be a high concentration of oculophiles living in my general area that stroll around on the streets with a pair of shades hanging around their necks, wearing another, and a third pair pushed up on top of their heads, and I can only wonder why I haven't seen any.

I've had a long running hatred of diamonds. The idea that you only love someone if you're willing to buy them a small, useless rock is completely absurd. If the argument that being shiny is the reason it's symbolic of love, buying a cubic zirconium for $10 should be just as valid, but that's never seemed to work quite as well. The only reason diamonds are significant is because they're expensive, and the idea of attaching a dollar sign to what's supposed to be one of the greatest and most pure human emotions is disgusting.

Becoming the model consumer has no appeal to me. I think I'll continue to get my kicks from human interaction rather than attempting to gain happiness by surrounding myself with things that I don't need. A billion dollars and all the fancy gizmos that technology can produce are never going to be acceptable substitutes for the fundamental things that make a life worth living, no matter how much the materialistic viewpoint disagrees with me.

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WALL OF TEXT. PEOPLE? MORE LIKE SHEEPLE, AMIRITE LOL? My aim is to scare away the two or three people that might actually read this. The joys of being irrelevant to the new generation of Newgrounds users.

If that wasn't enough, PHYSICS JOKE!

NOBODY READS BLOGS. NEWGROUNDS IS MYSPACE. "AMERICA IS THE BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD," SAYS UKRANIAN FOLK SINGER LEGEND CELLARDOOR6.

DRUGS RUIN LIVES; THIS COULD BE YOU IN THE NEAR FUTURE.

I spent it watching Chaser's War on Everything and reading shit for sociology class.

I should go to another country and get drunk. Or just do it here. It's not like anyone gives a shit. Maybe tomorrow.