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.