Millennials For Bernie and Other News From The Modern Gutter

Wow 2016 has certainly been a year, between celebrity deaths, political chicanery, imminent race war with shooting-a-day news, terrorists wilding out everywhere, a surprise coup in Turkey, and the grand return of Pokemon combined with augmented reality, the Age of Indifference seems poised at the cusp of its Golden Age. It's almost possible to forget the insanity of the first four months of the year based on the last three months of the year. It's almost possible, even tempting, to think that we are at an all time high of crazy happenings


But things have been shitty for a very long time, haven't they? And it's probably our fault. In fact it is certainly our fault. We've done this. Some of us try to do better, some of us try to fuck things up, and the majority don't care. I like to think I fall outside of all these groups. I don't care; but I do. I want to do better; but I don't. I never really considered the option of making things worse... it seems there are plenty people on each side of every confrontation who can do that better than I could ever hope to.

So I was trying to come up with a good overview of the past ten months or so but there are so many squawking heads yakking about it that it doesn't matter. Plus, I'm a piece of shit idiot with nothing new to add or a redeeming perspective. Suffice it to say I get it: everything looks pretty grim. Things looked bad in 2003, and they look roughly as bad now, except there is more bad stuff? (I'll look into this after I kill myself, because fuck making that graph.) But there's also good stuff: like consumerism! So I'm going to recommend some pretty good stuff that'll help you get through July without killing yourself or fantasizing about killing every last human in an insane laser drug apocalypse in a doomed attempt to fix Earth and right all the wrongs.

4 Media Products Recommended by the Sloppy Blogger in Lieu of Depressing Screed About Modern World

Functions of Extreme Worry and Anxiety in Modern Society

These days most anybody is or knows someone who is very on edge, suffers from Professionally Identified Anxiety Disorder, or suffers from bouts of Extreme Worry (a disorder which includes subsets like '90's style extreme' and 'extremely incapacitating'). I see this more and more often. While I am fortunate enough to simply be extremely paralyzed by it, I realize looking around in my life that plenty of people seem to function nominally well under such pressures. A minority of acquaintances have more serious issues and the effects aren't always immediately apparent, but when I stop and think about it I can see hints of avoidant behavior and other quirks. I used to always write them off as high-strung but I've come to a number of realizations in the past year especially.

I mean I've gone long stretches without worrying too much, or with only minor worries blown out of proportion. Every now and then something relatively important will fill me with a sense of dread that cannot be banished. I refer to those most often as moments of clarity. I had a few such moments when I lost the ability to write effectively for this blog, and killed it, and knew that I blew it, and didn't have the energy or drive to replace it with a better one. I've had such moments about about personal relationships, and they've have kept me from the blessed realm of sleep. I regularly get the sensation of growing dread when I think of my life. I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one, and I've seen people with much less fucked-up lives than mine worry outrageously.

I've seen lots of unhappy faces on the streets. I assume most of them are facing some kind of anxiety. I can't blame them. There seem to be about a million things to worry about. There are always hundreds of things going on. You're missing out. You're probably sick with something. There are new illnesses every day. The planet is not dying. The world is under attack by fanatics who think the planet is dying and want to ruin your standard of living because they're hippies. People are out to get you. Lies and murder rule the streets, maybe even the world. You're going to lose your job. You're unemployed already and nobody will ever hire you. You'll never be in love again. The love you're in is falling apart. You're not in love, of course, you're far too rational for that. You're over-thinking things. You're not living your dream. Someone somewhere is stealing your dreams from you. You're insufficient for your dreams. Your dreams are killing you.

Morning Show Blues

Yeah, one of those situations where there is at least one radio going on at all times, with the attendant morning radio personalities... I have been thinking and I must say it is even worse than I remember it. Morning radio is like the ugly older sibling of late night television. Radio - not only do they play the same song at least five times a day until you hate it with a more intense passion than you ever loved it (and gain the power of recognizing it immediately even faintly heard from a distance), but they've got the terrible idea of hiring sycophantic dickweeds to blabber excitedly and laugh (at me, the underemployed schlub? Go on talking about your coffee and cream, your wife's ass, why you hate winter) for a 6 - 9 or whatever morning show.

I'm sure there have been radio morning shows that are not completely oppressive and distressing for non-morning people. You know the kind of person I mean: coffee or not they are unlikely to smile, form a coherent sentence, or laugh for the first hour they're awake and working. To some varieties of them (for instance myself) the sounds of morning show hosts going on and on between ads and eerily upbeat music is worse than static, or any aggressively unremarkable or annoying song.

My brain, even when it is still half in the realm of sleep, does not approve of a bunch of modestly personable DJs doing their annoying and useless job while I add value to the region by trading my labour power for a ridiculous and mildly depressing pittance. Cognizant of the fact they earn more than me (and get to laugh out loud all the time, come up with groovy insider jokes, great phone interactions, crazy stunts, far-out contests, and yawn level jokes), I do feel a mild bit of resentment as well as annoyance. Change the station? Why risk it? You'd be surprised at the intensity with which some folk despise public radio, the music of the great canon of composers, and silence (my personal top choice for morning vibes). So what is left to me?

Answer: The annoying squawking of overpaid manchildren, combined with a hellish interplay of blaring advertisements and generally non-morning music. I don't do a line of coke or a bunch of trucker pills when I wake up, so their braying hijinks and high-energy excitedness is completely jarring to me. It is even mildly painful to the very core of my soul. I don't get pumped up by their dreary and doctrinaire choice of songs either. I don't enjoy these audio clowns, and even if they were funny, had material worth listening to, I would be hard-pressed to listen to them. Plainly put, I've only ever heard one or two radio morning shows I didn't hate, and even those were most often kind of boring.

Most stations advertise their appreciable web presence. So I wondered, who in the hell would go to the website of a radio station and check up on the blogs, latest news, and pictures from the morning DJs? I can only come up with a few major sources of traffic: intensely lonely, credible, or bored people, and the mentally ill. Otherwise incomprehensible. Plainly put, it always astounds me how much effort is put into the background of the world, where we while away our mortal hours generally enduring things we don't like. I mean, hell, I write a pretty non-important blog generally about non-topics... I add white noise to the internet. There's at least some difference between me and the morning DJ with laughter in his voice and more energy than anyone needs at that hour.

Generally I turn the radio down to reasonable limits and grit my teeth and do my work quickly so I can move elsewhere and do something else somewhere there is nobody pretending that the morning is a great or funny time (unless you stayed up all night, or are waking up to do something other than be underemployed in a mostly stagnant economy). Even the mildly funny shit, which is scarce, is run into the ground faster and deeper than a solid gold locomotive dropped from orbit. I don't know how people can stand it... you can get used to it, sure, but it is specifically just an unpleasant feature of life to me.

I've been listening to radio for years, when I was really uncritical none of this mattered to me as long as a good song came on, like the one by Aaliyah or that other one by L.E.N., or that later RHCP song about taxis or something. The era-defining hits of yesteryear were also generally overplayed and eventually annoying, and I ought to remember that, but they stuck with me, and some of your old favorites and mine are still being overplayed. I used to spend a lot of time in the company of radio, but have lived without it for many years now in the future, so coming from silence or chosen tracks to the hilarious cacophony of jokes and marketing and grut rock just adds a small element of objection to my day. Gotta blog about those awkward things, unavoidable things, and heartwarming things.

Now, if you're a morning show DJ and you're reading this and you are saying to yourself things like, "This fussy little internet geekblogger doesn't understand my dedication and verve, or the pain which I know as a morning show host, or that my slightly exaggerated manner is meant to help others deal with the pain of morning workaday life. A venerable and hallowed tradition. The skill of talking too much for minutes at a time was one I inherited from my father, who was himself a morning show DJ." Nah, man, this isn't personal and I'm not a geek... I acknowledge it's my problem I find you annoying. That you dessicate my environment with your wireless sonic depredations is just my perception of it, and I am the wrong kind of judge in this instance. In the end, I keep listening out of apathy, a perverse and ironic joy of laughing at your base shitness, and obviously for a chance to hear myself on the airwaves and win that hundred dollar wacky trivia question. Play those canned sounds again – you know the ones – and teach me how to lose my self-awareness... does your laughter taste like ashes to you?

Februrary 2014: I Will Not Miss You

Jay Leno left the Tonight Show earlier this week. Could've been yesterday but I have been inundated with reports about Sochi 2014 - most of them concerning a little thing called the Winter Olympic Games. Already, the biggest opponents have attempted to hijack a plane in order to put some heat on the organizers... the odds of some kind of crazy shit happening in the open (let alone the stories we won't hear till March or later) are high enough to keep everyone placing money on the most outrageous tragedies, disruptions, and events. The Vancouver 2010 luge death might end up looking like a mild sprain, when all is said and done in Sochi.

An entire unit of the Russian Army is patrolling the Georgia/Russia border, and the stuff those guys are getting up to is no doubt quite interesting and compelling, but their opponents have sworn to engage in the sort of chaos-terrorism that military action has not yet been able to completely prevent. I am not reporting this to be gleeful or glib, but dozens of years of military retribution have only managed to stoke the flames of resentment. Even the Cossacks have been called in. While the hijacker/bomb-threat guy is getting beaten up by security personnel and interrogated to within an inch of his life, and incarcerated in a post-gulag gulag, the games must go on. Bookies are refusing to take bets on terrorist activity, citing a worldwide surveillance apparatus and generally bad odds of anything major going wrong (the latter excuse seems questionable to me).

Surely they will, but there is more trouble than just the threat of violence and bomb blasts. There is also bad press, blistering social media output, and international confrontation. A major ideological schism has haunted the Sochi Olympics since last year, and that is the spectre of Russian homophobia, which is not quite so much a regional thing in Sochi. For a while, in late 2013, it seemed as if a few countries might boycott the games, but abandoning the athletes on human rights principles was ultimately considered unthinkable. I am not an expert and I have not been following the issue closely, but I don't think a single country ended up boycotting the games for the beaten and dead gays of Russia.

User Comment Rodeo: Generation Text; Its Detractors and Malcontents

A recent CBC article claims a few things so startlingly obvious that the sound of a gong ought to be looped over it. The findings demonstrated, and you might want to sit down for this one, that people who texted more (don't sweat, the breakpoint is 200 + texts) often tended to be less thoughtful than those who didn't. Also among the findings was the gem that the 200+ text club was (30%) more likely to be fixated on "wealth and image than an ethical life". Now, as unsurprising as this study's conclusions are, they are of limited truth.

Firstly, only teenagers or immature adults can actually muster up the energy to text more than 100 times a day. Yet I can be surprised by texting culture. At 15 seconds per text, 100 texts would only require a time investment of 25 minutes. Scale that any way you want, and remember that serial texters are quick, and it's easy to conclude that a serial texter can text 400+ times a day and still have lots of time left over to socialize 'face to face' (oh shit, that term is going to get worn out in the next few years). This 'texting' business, which is correctly SMSing business, has for many years now been a cultural crisis in the making. We all stepped in it with full confidence, so now we get to suffer it. Suffer the outrageous extremes of an increasingly dim and unfunny era.

You can already see what kind of User Comment Rodeo it's going to be. The best kind. Because you know the ageists, the trolls, the dickweeds, the self-described experts, the geniuses – in short the whole, illiterate, unwashed, entitled, self-satisfied mass of the public – is going to unable to prevent themselves from puking their word nonsense onto this story like tainted cocktail shrimp at a bad house party. Listen up, I know that serial texters are often total wankers. I understood years ago that they lacked the self-reflection expected of a great ape, dolphin, or crow. Don't forget that this study is biased: note that it focused on first year students. Don't buy into the hype without thinking critically about it first. First year students are so rarely aware of themselves that the study is unfair and biased. It stooped for low-hanging fruit when there are plenty of studies that can judge the adult narcissist sociopaths in business, finance, and politics.

But enough of my ado about nothing; let's have others' ado about nothing:

The cream of the crop, my friends. These posts were not only so good that some people voted for them, but upwards of 200 votes were cast per comment. Can you spot the deafening irony? Should I even bother? Instead, bring your attention to the post by the user named 'bootselectric'. Oh, how the point is missed. The biggest cop-out, btw, is getting fired by text message. That shit actually happens. Oh and nobody 'embraces their lives' around anything. Anyways, all of these posts (worthless activities on a worthless medium - yes I understand the height of irony that is my acknowledging this) were voted for more than 200 times. Irony.

User Comment Rodeo: Pot Still a Huge Deal

It's downright unhealthy. It'll drive you crazy and ruin your life. It's a gateway to worse things. The User Comment Rodeo is, in fact, all of the above – and more!

Marijuana, for God knows what reason, is still something people get riled up about. Despite being illegal, it is found everywhere, in most countries. In certain places it is policy to execute or imprison people for marijuana crime: the stakes get higher than the high. Its legal status in free countries, and surrounding discussion, is one of the most indicative dramas of our epoch. 

Every time legalization fumbles, the same crowd comes out to jeer. Many consider it the finest part – the choicest cut of commentary – but in many ways it is a joyless spectacle.

Sensationalism is never where the show's at. There are finer tastes (even though it is understandable to ignore them). Consider the above: a beautiful and puzzling moment in the blizzard of opinion – another beautiful snowflake. A natural, logically formed moment in time, among all the rest. Arguments are always made noticeably better by:
1. Organization
2. Rhythm and Repetition
3. Dope

You can't be afraid of the deep end in this business. The shallow end is easier to understand, but what you miss out on is nuance. Don't fear the deep end:
1. It's Deeper
2. Paying Attention
3. Digression: Creates Perspective

Morality is key, because let's face it: user comment boards are highly influential and very important for public discourse. The picture they paint will always be a masterpiece. But to paint a masterful picture, the artist must reach into the soul of the audience – pulling on the heaviest of heartstrings and reading unthinkable terrors

User Comment Rodeo: Inexplicable News Mess

I'm going to ask you to look closely at the thumbs-up/thumbs-down ratings closely for this article. Then, if you're interested in seeing cultural relativity destroy the world, check the number of comments and comment ratings on your favourite news website, but only from more serious stories. I'd like to know how this skews, because I personally got bad, bad vibes from this particular UCR.

There's a particular show called Here Comes Honey Boo Boo that is on 'The Learning Channel' and originates from one of America's numerous sweaty armpits. Piecing together what I know of this show is it follows a family of small-town/rural, southern Americans as they go about being consumers, being a loving family, and systematically destroying their health with energy drinks. It's probably just a fever dream from a febrile and dying era, but it has the sort of mass appeal that can only come from TLC shows post-2000. To be very honest, it's probably just another disposable momentary cultural flashpoint.

Stumbling across the story itself was as bizarre as it was concerning. Why would PETA care about a snowballing television program. Why would they make a bigger deal out of one ironically named chicken than out of the millions packed into shitty chicken barns, pumped with medicine and hormones, and generally grown in as unappetizing and unethical a manner as possible? I might never know. I guess PETA watches a lot of TV, even more than about 80% of people I know, who also don't know or care about this cringeworthy Honey Boo Boo business.

I found out that a chicken named Nugget is more important than the economy, and that the public finds it PETA's attitude towards this chicken more important than even the failing economy or rumors of a vague, oppressive, and menacing oligarchy. I found out that this silly chicken named Nugget was a lightning rod for opinions. And people hate, I mean Hate, PETA. It's crazy. This rodeo is going to be tame, but holy hell was I taken aback. And the numbers of votes. Staggering. And people missing the point. The best part was the big numbers, though, all for these great internet comics who really got a chance to shine: