My Dreams, PART the second.

A gang of kids, teenagers that is. We’re walking through a city, downtown. There are no people here, and no lights. Who we are as a group and our purpose walking here is entirely unclear. There is one girl though, she is our leader, and she knows the way. She leads us down a set of stairs similar to those leading to subway stations. A big door at the bottom bars our way. It is massive, iron, and has an impossibly complex lock. Our leader knows exactly the sequence to open it, and she makes no mistakes or hesitation in doing so. Inside, there is a large hallway, that goes straight as far as we can see. We start exploring it; it is dark, and there are a few rooms opening off of the hallway. There are not doors to these; they are not rooms per se, they are long and slender, one has a sink and some tubs, like a kitchen or laundry room. The entire hallway and all these rooms are dirty and dark, as though they have been uninhabited for many years. There is plenty of clutter about. We explore the hallway. Towards the end, it begins to open up. We can see sunlight through a big, but open, structure. It is a parking garage. It opens up to the sky, but the bottom levels blend seamlessly into our hallway. Quick, hide! The police are in the parking garage, we can see their flashing lights and cars. Everyone scatters, back towards the door. I hide under the kitchen sink with one other kid, whom I have not yet seen specifically. We tell stories in this comfortably tight place for hours, waiting to be discovered by the police or set free to go home by our compatriots. No one ever comes, but we are happy.


Me, Alex, and JT were exploring this small, two story white house. We were in the second floor, which was only one floor. The room was full of ambient light from the numerous windows. It was dirty and cluttered, full of broken wood and rubble. The front of the house has a strong, black-shingled overhang over the front door. There is a window immediately above this. We are aware of a something, a monster, climbing this overhang, about to enter through the window. Someone gets a piece of wood and makes ready to kill it as it enters. But stop! It’s a policeman, run! We drop our things and flee to another window. Alex and JT jump to the ground, they are fine. I jump-and die. This feeling is indescribable, and I know I will do it no justice conveyed here. Nevertheless. I learn intuitively that I have time to spend with Alex and JT before I leave. We walk down the street with big green trees along the side, in a nice friendly neighborhood (no one is around, it is simply a visibly friendly neighborhood). We are in a big building, full of chairs and bookshelves, just like a bookstore. It is clean and warm and welcoming and we spend hours there, enjoying each other. The carpet and walls, and everything there is colorful, yellows and reds and some greens and blues, in a pattern that is not unusual, something similar to things I’ve seen before. Colors are organized in various shapes and sizes, in an irregular pattern. The feeling of inevitability here is not sad, but. . .appropriate? There is no anger, sadness, or anything of the kind. Time is not felt as slipping away. Only happiness, tinged with an odd feeling of . . .? It is like the cosmic flow of things. There is no emotion regarding this passage, but it feels very cosmic. This is not meant in an “infinity of the universe” sort of sense, but in a sort of mythic death ritual cosmicness. This is the most profoundly spiritual experience I’ve ever had.

Furries

President Sergeant Grim was a slim bastard. Always had his chips in line. He was a man you could set your watch to. In the later years of his career, he moved and spoke so straight and sturdy that they used to stack him up like some stairs to walk on.

That's when the trouble started:

IMPORTANT:

***We were in The Jungle in Bad Axe. I was looking through the comic section, which had a plethora of really old comics that I've never heard of. There were also some furry comics. I forgot the title after leaving the store. However, upon further investigation, I've discovered that they were several issues of "Furrlough," (http://furry.wikia.com/wiki/Furrlough) some stupid ass anthology - apparently, the most succesful furry comic ever published, and the series is over 16 years old, which is cool. Either way, I'll probably buy em' the next time I'm there, unless they're expensive.***

Adam, am I "going" (my ghost, of course. You know) to Saginaw tomorrow or not? Are you going? Are you even home?

Some Thrift/ Some Exercise

Some people might already be aware of this. But the other night, I carried a forty pound (or so) chair on my fucking neck from a curb a block away from the library to my house. It is fucking a killer. Where day at? Down with a frown/ on the town/ a sad clown. Moses, 'cept keepin' it real. Shit. Adam fucking Kranz, are you going to Saginaw on Sunday or not? I could have you *cough* pick me up something *cough*. Secret the Message Decoded. BTW, Adam, have you ever seen Dr. Strangelove? It is absolutely phenomenal. We should *cough* get together and watch it sometime *cough*.

Summertime babes!

De facto is good first day of summer music;
Today began summer, the sun and the warm wind on your face
riding in a car down the main drive
The sun pulls negative rain out of snow, towards the sky
We found this cat, you see
He's a bit of a cat detective, as it were.
He solves cat mysteries under the name of Cat McGruff.
This is only an alias, of course; his real name is Barkster
He likes being petted on his stomach
He's grey and white, with a few other colors mixed in
he's a bit thin and a bit dirty, cleans himself about his flist.

The Show!

Young RJ Kestler moved lithely through the jungle. He was on the tail of a Mandingo Flyster, the most dangerous variety of the Yubunub family. Mandingo called back to Kestler "Get the hell off of my roof!" Kestler had amounted himself to a servile black spearstress, in order to anger the tenacious Flyster. Flyster, you see, had long held a job at the local greebe factory, where he had a boring job. Over time there he had acquired more than his fair share of patience, if I do say so myself. Thus, he was not one to go head over heels at a silly Turista on his rooftop. Thus, Kestler disguised himself as a black spearstress of one of the local Puerbee tribes, which regularly hunted Flyster for his food.
Kestler leapt deftly from Mandingo's roof. Mandingo, clever devil as he is, pulled the earth out from underneath Kestler. Kestler landed in a pile of unjuiced, soiled juicers and juiced, unsoiled soilers. Immediately the juicers and soilers set to work, and soon Kestler was both juiced and soiled. However, the juicers and soilers did not escape unharmed: they both fell victim to Kestler, and became quite thoroughly Kestled.
At this point, Kestler left his pit of Mood for a cool pouch of ORGANIC MILK. He paid hat over collar for the milk, which he claimed was delicious. Later, strolling through the urban jungle, he fell into a stupor unaware. He had been poisoned by a series of long poisonous darts, which grew profusely in the urban jungle. Mandingo Flyster had followed him here!
Overcoming his stupor, Kestler drilled into Flyster's seventh stomach to find the succulent juice he was after. This juice was the final key he needed to get permission to attend that night's concert. The concert was a bunch of young hooligans performing Blink 182's "What's my age again?" on couchs, drumsets, guitars, and telephones. There were bound to be ensuing shenanigans.
Kestler brought the juice back to his mother, who began malleating it. She manipulated it into a doughlike consistency after boiling it on the stove. She formed a doll the size of a small child. She put the thing in her pottery oven. After a few hours, it was done.
Kestler took his mother's carkeys and hopped in the bus. He got to the concierge soon after, where the Floisties had just begun their extensive cover. As soon as he reached the precarious edge of the amphitheatre, where he nearly toppled over. He brought out his camera and filmed the proceeding:
One girl was dressed extravagantly in period clothing, and was dipping a steel infant in oil. A man, about 33, gave a shout. The man was bedecked as an island, and the sun shone brightly on him. His sunny aura seemed to attract the others on the stage to him. A young man in a prudish sailor suit was posing exoticly for pictures. He used a dormant volcano and a city, coated in ash for thousands of years and full of seemingly fossilized people, as his props. The pictures were being taken by a very picturesque gorge.
Ensonced in a cave in this gorge were the chorus. There were several of these. The first were loosely dressed, and played primitive drums and flutes. The second were romantic troubadours with candles and dressing, playing guitars and lutes. Finally, the largest chorus were robots, who spoke haltingly but without hesitation. Their voices lacked emotion.
The drama commenced when Island Man, in his shroud of emotion, had fallen ill, and landed in the fossilized village, near Posing Man. This dramatically upset Picturesque Gorge, who tried to stand up, shaking all the chorusi about. The cavemen, troubadors, and robots got all mixed up, and the robots began ordering everyone into rows based on penmanship.
In the meantime, Posing Man and Island Man had fallen in love, and we all know how THAT is. Thoroughly coated with oil, Steel Baby had been dropped in the oil!!! His mother, not wishing to spoil her dress, grabbed the edges of it to keep them from the floor, and hurried about bustlyingly. Not to fear, the troubadors had fled their robot-ordained lines to save the poor child. However, each of us know how many troubadors it takes to save a steel baby drowning in oil, am I right?
At any rate, there weren't enough, and the troubadors had to call in help from their erstwhile companions, the cavemen. This didn't work, as cavemen don't speak language. The robots, however, showed eagerness to gain access to the oil, to which they were voraciously averse. If a robot could gain control of the oil, he could use it as a weapon and threat against all the other robots, and use them to take over the stage. However, the robots had been programmed for politeness, and they were unable to interrupt Island Man and Posing Man's ferocious bickering. Instead, they had to climb the volcano, which was due to erupt any minute!!!
By this time, however, the troubadors had succeeded in wooing the Dipping Woman, and after making love languidly, they fed her several branches of grapes and fanned her with palm leaves.
They were all spent.

Doublethink

I recently reread George Orwell's 1984, and while reading it I had several conversations about politics with people who seemed to me at the time to be exhibiting Doublethink. This led me to write the following essay, which lacks a decent introduction.
One can hold two contradictory opinions unknowingly; cognitive dissonance only takes effect when one is confronted with holding two contradictory opinions or sees something they believe to be real that contradicts their previously held opinions. Thus, the difficulty in doublethink is not allowing cognitive dissonance to rectify itself. This can be done in the simplest way by simply denying the evidence shown to you that your opinions are false. More difficult is avoiding the realization that two completely contradictory things that you believe actually contradict each other. This is achieved by such a strong emotional investment in beliefs that one becomes unable to question them logically.
This is the challenge set to propagandists: to make people believe things, things which run counter to their nature as decent humans, so strongly that they cannot question them logically. For example, many people have been inundated from birth with the percepts of some moral code, the Ten Commandments and their extensions in Judeo-Christianity, and analogous constructs in most every religion. These codes nearly always include some provision against killing others, and usually go so far as to mandate kindness and hospitality to others. In addition to religious codes, nations often have principles on which their Revolution was made and that their government was founded on. In America these are called the “Core Democratic Values.”
Political figures often play to these sorts of moral codes when running for office or simply trying to garner trust from the people. They are made to seem sympathetic to these causes and promise to enforce these sorts of moral codes over the populace if they are elected into office. In more powerful offices, primarily here those that deal with foreign policy and the military, politicians even promise to spread our moral precepts to other nations.
Kings and Popes launched Crusades to bring Christianity to the Muslims; European and American Imperialists invaded nearly half the world to bring industrial civilization to heathens. Now, Presidents and Prime Ministers stockpile nuclear weapons to “deter” opponents, and invade both right and left wing countries to bring them democracy, or, in some cases, simply to fend off the possible advances of unwanted Communists. Of course, almost without exception, these have been merely emotional justifications for economic motivations.
As the people are the ones who have the power to stop unwanted wars, they are the ones that propaganda is directed against. They have almost certainly been indoctrinated by their parents, teachers, and religious leaders with one of the aforementioned moral codes. This gives propagandists a good base to appeal to when making their pleas, but they must somehow avoid allowing people to realize that someone is using their moral code to persuade them to condone something fundamentally opposed to it.
At this point, propagandists most often invoke a cruel combination of fear and racism. Intense fear is generated by excessively exaggerating the threat to the people. This can be done by either using an incident such as the sinking of the Lusitania or the USS Maine to convince people that they are actually under attack, or by developing mass hysteria, as was done about the Soviet Union during the Cold War and about “Terrorism” today. Usually this entails hype in the media that suggests the enemy has super weapons, like the fictional “dirty bomb” that can supposedly be made from radioactive metals, Iraqi, North Korean, and Iranian nuclear weapons programs, and the hundreds of different absurd weapons the Soviet Union was accused of possessing during the Cold War.
In addition to a direct threat or general fear, propagandists create racial stereotypes and attempt to dehumanize their enemies. These two efforts are vitally tied, because their enemies are the basis for the stereotype, but the effect is to apply that stereotype to all racially similar people. This allows people a slight psychological leeway in which they no longer feel obligated to defend the lives of a certain group. Often, as in the case of the Jews in Nazi Germany, the enemy is assigned blame for a particular ill. Sometimes, a real attack is used to cast the entire race of the perpetrators as terrorists or enemies.
There are two dangers associated with this already cruel doctrine. The first is that an artificial sense of fear of other races can lead a populace to allow their government to enact laws they think will protect them. These sorts of laws in general allow percieved enemies of the state to be denied all sorts of rights, which the populace's moral code has set out in the constitution and otherwise. The problem with these laws is that they can be applied to anyone; usually there is no control over the execution of these laws because the matters they deal with are "sensitive." Thus, a law intended to allow the government freedom in abducting and torturing suspected terrorists can be used just as effectively against political dissidents or even normal citizens exhibiting suspicious behaviors or aquintances. Even worse, the entire thing could be based on a mistake. Overall, these laws are specifically intended to avoid having to deal with consitutional rights.
The other issue brought about by artificially created racial hatred is that it is the basis for the propagandists' creation of doublethink. The fear and hatred people feel for whomever the government and the corporations have directed it against prevents them from realizing how much this feeling runs counter to their personal moral code. When this dichotomy of feeling is presented to them, people often don't rethink their decisions because they are so afraid of the artificial enemy. They have been presented with a mortal danger to themselves and their children, and in the face of this, they cannot realize that the danger does not actually exist.
The final task left to propagandists is to give people an intellectual way to conform their two contradictory feelings. This allows them an avenue to pour their doublethought into when confronted with it by another. That is, it is not the reason they believe what they do; it is simply a shield for it; if it were lacking, they would not change their beliefs immediately upon reflection, but it does supply them with an excuse that allows them to not think when provoked to do so. When someone confronts a victim of doublethink, they do not have to resort to ad hominem attacks, because now they have a reason that actually responds to the criticism being levelled. As we've noted before, a justification such as this usually involves an appeal to the person's moral code. Almost inevitably it claims that the victims of the government's actions will either benefit from them, or that they are not actually human at all, sometimes both.
Thus, propagandists create doublethink by creating an intense hatred of some race or group, drawing on the populace's shared moral code when justifying their actions, which clearly cross the boundary of this moral code. People have an extremely strong feeling invested in both the hatred and their moral code, and somehow do not question the fact that the two blatantly contradict each other. This is because they have such a strong emotional investment in each that they manage to avoid logically thinking critically of either. They are provided with an intellectual justification, but this is simply a mask for their feelings, not the actual justification for them.

Vantrilaquism/Vantrilaquist

Everyone listening to an album frequently, that has really liked? Start, what it is:

I've been listening to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea a lot. Not sure if I can get over it. The Same God-Dammed Thing Happens with The Soft Bulletin, too. Two Damn Contesters For My Favorite Album.

You're... Very Pretty

Has nobody besides me listened to John Vanderslice? Boy, I really like Pixel Revolt.