mormons. (heavily biased post)

everybody knows them... but nobody hangs out with them it seems.  it's really easy to point them out on the street, because they are always wearing the same thing as the other mormon they are hanging out with (which is usually fitted too loose), and they never look like they know where they are going, despite their convictions.  oh, and yes, there's the book, too.

i was recently approached by two young what-i-would-call evangelists on the street.  i was coming out of a coffee shop and was giving my dog some treats when they asked me what kind of dog i had.  i told them.  they quickly proceeded to the point by asking if i'd ever talked to "guys like us."   they actually said that.  i asked if they were mormons and they nodded their affirmations.  i told them i had and that i was not interested.  they asked if i needed help with anything.  i pictured them trying to handle my dog as i sipped on coffee and smoked my cigarette while walking home from balzac's and ripping apart their indoctrinated state of mind.  i thought against it being that my girlfriend would be rather displeased if i did this and our dog somehow made his way into traffic.  as would i.  i told them i was ok.  i did decide however to stay and chat.

i asked them when their religion started.  i should have known it was the beginning of time.  that was really stupid of me.  i then asked when it entered historical context and was quite surprised by the young man's answer of the early 1800s.  of course, since the beginning of time all the way through to the early 1800s is a pretty notable gap for the words of god to be missing from the picture, for which i was assured there was a simple explanation:  there were powerful people who didn't want people to know these things.

i'm going to stop this reliving-the-moment rant right here and just say what i want to say about mormons and whoever else thinks it's ok to try and spread the virus of their delusions (dubbed as such as the belief in a thing which has no scientific descriptors is a mind problem) on to unsuspecting passers-by.

(at this point, i'm checking out an unfinished draft several months after the fact, and no longer am with said girlfriend or said dog.  i really miss the dog.  just for clarity.)

(so it seems as though my job here is to finish this entry by saying what i want to say, and so forth... i'm definitely wondering if what comes to mind now even faintly resembles what i was thinking when i was probably interrupted by aforementioned "ex.")

these people who approached me were in their "formative years."  it's interesting to me now that simple things like phrases play a key role in the development of a person's mind.  repeated phrases work better, if your aim is to shape someone's perception of things, as evidenced by successful campaigns aimed at convincing the masses to inhale an obviously lethal substance called cigarette smoke.  people can be driven to do and think things that are quite contrary to their best interest, en masse.  it's as simple as that.  and as far as mormons and any other person or religion who claim to kneel at the feet of a wrathful creator are concerned...

God.  help them.

funny vegan.

firstly, i would like to say that i am a hypocrite.  this is due to the fact that i eat meat.  i don't eat it with every meal.  i probably don't even eat it every day.  but i like it, and being that i haven't made an attempt at being a proper vegetarian or a proper vegan, i am able to justifiably claim that i feel like poop if i don't eat meat (i would probably feel fine if i took supplements and made other necessary changes in my diet, which makes nothing of what i'm saying actually justifiable).  the real hypocrisy here is that i honestly believe humanity as a whole would be better off economically, spiritually, moralistically, culturally and in terms of average physical health and over-all enjoyment of life, both ours and theirs, if we were all vegan.

i believe this firstly because of the inherent and necessary suffering the animals we eat, wear and sometimes sleep with endure as they involuntarily yet flawlessly play out their role as the commodities of man.  secondly because of the sheer labour and costs involved in raising animals such as livestock and poultry.  they say spending money is good for the economy... this seems invariably to include the wasting of it as well.  which brings me to my third reason for believing veganism is the way, which is space.  it is absurd how much usable landmass the industrial agricultural sector takes up on the surface of our planet.  what's more though, is the amount a farmer yields when he raises animals, and the amount of food a farmer yields when he hangs out with a much smaller amount of animals and raises crops.  i'm not an expert on this subject by any means, but from what i understand, in terms of weight, the animal-raising farmer yields hundreds if not thousands of times less than the happy and radiant veg-heads.  it's no wonder the raising of these animals (aka LIVING BEINGS) has been over time methodically bent and shaped into a streamlined very efficient machine which cares for nothing but to move and turn just as it was designed to do... which was, of course, to make money.

all in all, us meat-eaters, all a bunch of real assholes.  or just plain ignorant.  one or the other.

anyway, this was all just some preamble before getting onto my anecdote.

so i'm talking to this vegan.  we'll call this person a girl with the name of Al (short for 'animal lover').  i was jokingly saying that she shouldn't use the railroad anymore given that a man died as every mile was built.  al told me that this is the same argument people make about plants having feelings.  at this point an interview i'd read some years ago popped into my head about plants having feelings.

in a book of interviews, ones conducted by Richard Metzger in this compilation entitled Disinformation, on the publishing label by the same name, is an explanation of a study warranting the notion that plants do indeed have feelings.  i don't even remember if it was a botanist or what who collected the data, but a man decided to hook little electrodes or EMF wave readers or some other science-ish thing to measure the fields of energy being put out by plants.  then he decided to put two plants in the same room, with the whole room between them, and diametrically opposed.  plant A had all the electrodes on it and nothing would happen to it other than constantly having its mind read.  plant B would have no electrodes on it but instead have a timed apparatus nearby ready to drop a cinder block (or something just generally heavy and crushy) on it.  he timed it basically to just drop the brick when no one was around to the effect that if the plants happened to react energetically to the presence of other life, that factor would not affect these results.  the possible botanist concluded that it is highly likely that plants are aware of life in three dimensions made demonstrable by the screaming plant A.  that's right!  when plant A was crushed, plant A registered on the meters as flat out screaming.  how fuckin' weird is that?

two questions: what do we eat now?  and, why did Al tell me this was bullshit?

 she just wouldn't have it.  regardless of any lack of logic and whatnot, i just thought it was funny that Al doesn't think plants could possibly have feelings.

i stole happiness/the bitch of babylon (medley)

money and music...

so this is the situation:  i've been participating by my own volition as a medium for Music for about 16 years.  it started before that though, with a failed attempt by my mother to get me stroking keys at a very early age, and if i remember correctly, what amounted to many failed attempts at stirring interest within me for the guitar.  at around age 10 or 11 i joined navy league cadets wherein Music would force me into dancing with it in a very strict and regimented manner.  i played the snare drum in a marching band.  lots of fun, but had to ditch that at 12 because drum lessons were starting, and they were on the the same night as cadets.  so, no more shiny shoes for me.  in all, i took 6 years of drum lessons.  i figure that's lots.  since my first encounter with music, i've played in probably 6 or 7 bands, and have been really happy with the outcome of just one of them, which is not disappointing, because some people don't ever get to be in a band, and that would be worse than my predicament, which is only ever having been a founding member of one totally awesome instrumental psychedelic space-rock band.  those were good times.  anyway.  since then, as though i were some sort of solipsist, i've been learning lots about music creation software.  this, to some, might sound like an automatic music maker.  it's not.  it's like a synthesizer (which is like a really nuts piano), just way more powerful.  i've also been singing a lot, and playing a four-string guitar.  all in all, what i'm basically trying to say, is that i'm confident i could create, record, and possibly even master the score for a film, the tracks on a rock album, video game music, backing tracks for hip-hop, electronica... you name it, i could probably do it.

suffice it to say, music is not turning into money.  and i know i probably sound a tad like a whiney little bitch right now, but shit, i've probably put in at least a couple 10s of thousands of hours into this, and i don't even have a drumset anymore cuz job security doesn't exist unless you really like motorboating balls every now and again and i had to sell a lot of my gear so as i could eat and buy cufflinks and whatnot.

i think i got a plan though.  it might be a stupid plan, but it's a plan.  it starts with acquiring gear.  and to do that, being that it's hard to make an extra 10 grand here and there...

i've got to sell hip-hop.

reader: really?

me: really.

concerning title

"all the world's a stage..." i never know if there is supposed to be an apostrophe after 'world' and before 's' in that quote.  here i am, thinking i know how to properly implement my native tongue.  well, at least i'm not the only one.  it would be pretty funny if i had written the title of my first blog in an incorrect fashion, as it is shakespeare i'm quoting.  and yes, i am too lazy to go to the top right-hand corner of the screen and wikipedia the quote.  or, i'm just in fear of looking assish.

that's all for today.

first blog of life.

now, considering the chosen title of my first blog of life, i think it's important to note that this is actually the second, in terms of blogs i've been exposed to.  i did not write the other one but, yes...

i read a blog once.

and i mean that.

it was a friend of mine who had created it.  i saw a link to it on facebook and wondered a: if this is likely the most appropriate time or not to discover what a blog is, and b: of course, i wondered what a blog is.  of course i knew that people wrote them, but i didn't really know if there was a standard by which they abided in their writings of them.

judging by this tiny sliver (relative to the vastness of the blogging world, which i think i still don't care about, but who knows) of exposure i've had to them, it turns out you can pretty much do anything you want with them.

...and i'll do just that.