I am not dead; just sleeping

snarf

so anyway i think more about being dead than dying, so when m is talking to me about smoking and lung cancer, i think yeah but I only worry about increasing my chances of dying -- and i'm not so sure how much that happens -- and not about how bad it is. and i do know how bad it is. my granddad died of it, and it was fucking horrible. but you don't really picture yourself in the role, do you? don't ever see yourself as the patient, the line out the nose, the gown....

jeezus that's fucking horrible just to think of yourself in the role but i don't. i never cared much about the health side of smoking, and i still don't. i distrust the statistics because i think people want you to stop smoking because they simply hate the idea that someone might be enjoying something they don't.

do they though? it's hard to know what people are really thinking. i read in the paper that anna bligh, premier of qld, wants to change licensing hours because it was never intended that people should drink and gamble at 7 in the am. but if you want to drink and gamble at 7 in the am, what's the problem though? do people really care that much about other people enjoying what they don't enjoy? does anna bligh though?

what does a person like anna bligh really think? does she really think? you could go crazy trying to unravel what people really think when they are liars by trade. and sometimes i think that's exactly why i am unhinged. you become unhinged when you try to love everybody but they are so fucking unloveable. don't try it. it's better to be indifferent. i recommend that.



bear

so anyway, obv. calling a bear Muhammad is not insulting to the prophet and everyone knows that. Muhammad is the most common name in the muslim world, and there are doubtless thousands of teddies with that name. so the swordwaving is just muslim nuttiness, right? no, i don't think so. i think the sudanese are acutely aware of american meddling, particularly from missionary types. i don't think the bear lady was a missionary type, but teachers are in most ways indistinguishable from missionaries to the untrained eye anyway. and that the teacher was a brit is immaterial: we are pretty much seen as indistinguishable from yanks, on account of being their toadies.

the argument that the imams have used to fire up the crowd is that it's an insult to islam to make images of Muhammad. yeah, okay, but obv. that would only apply had the bear been intended to represent the prophet, rather than simply sharing a name. after all, none of the mexicans who call their kid Jesus thinks they are creating the son of god, right? sudanese people are not idiots, despite the appearance presented by a howling mob of swordtards. they are perfectly able to grasp that the bear is just a bear with the name Muhammad. but they don't care. they hate the west and embrace the opportunity to express that hatred. and before we start piddling on about their hating our freedom etc, no, actually, we've earned it.

apparently, this will damage our relations with sudan. you know, that's the kind of thing i think, who gives a shit? i know oil is important but we don't have to kiss the arse of every piece-of-shit mob that has it. it's a long way down from being an empire to being champion grovellers to the world's fucktards. but somehow, the role suits us.

tune

so anyway, sometimes you're listening to songs on shuffle on itunes, and you hear something you don't recognise, and you're thinking, what's that. but you can't just point at the itunes tab in your taskbar and get a tooltip that shows what the song is.

but you can point at the icon in the system tray. this means I can't hide inactive icons if i want that functionality because for some reason windoze thinks itunes is inactive. i don't pretend to understand this stuff. i just put up with it.


forum

so anyway, i fucking hate online people today. and every other day. i hate the sheepfold dynamics of forums. i just never fit. what it is, everyone has their things that they are comfortable with. the comfort zone can be narrow or wide, but in a lot of places on the net, you get bunches of people who all have fairly narrow comfort zones. often, this will involve behavioural things, particularly swearing. i didn't really grasp that there were (young) people who genuinely have a problem with it until i went travelling to china and met a guy who would not even say shit. well, i knew there were people who didn't swear, and some who pose that they don't like it, but not that there really were people who viscerally disliked it enough for it to be an issue between them and other people. but there are. this is just one instance of the kind of thing that people build into their comfort zone. so in a forum what happens is that when the group is quite small, there are norms that are functions of the comfort zones of the few people in the group. the norms will obv. depend greatly on the people themselves. they are not necessarily broad social norms--because the small groups may not be representative of society as a whole.

may not? definitely are not. the interwebnet has far more cunts per megabyte than meatspace, and active forums, particularly in things that interest me, are twat magnets. poker players, for instance, tend to be clever, good at maths, socially uneasy (always looking for hierarchy but not actually good at being with other people); in other words, autistic. quasi autistic, i should say. because they are so bad at interacting normally, with rough edges, these people tend to prefer artificial interactions: games, oneupmanship, bets, structured activities (like arbitrations or turf wars on wikipedia). they make rules that they pretend are norms, but they don't have broad currency, and often run against broader norms.

my problem is that i'm comfortable with a very broad range of behaviour and personality types, and i just don't like the norms in most places. they all amount to "be nice, we're sensitive", and i'm always thinking "fuck that, being nice is booooring". which it is, but these people would not be comfortable with unboring. see, the weird thing with me is that i'm like, you people are all cunts (and by you people i pretty much mean the whole six billion of you), but it bothers me a lot less than it should. i just don't care enough to care. and not just because i'm numb. because i'm just not moved by how people are, and never really have been, except in the most passing, silly micro way.

bollocks

so anyway, i have an unremitting pain in the right bollock. i'm not alarmed yet, because zenita caught me in the bollock the other night and i'm pretty sure it's just that, maybe it was bruised, whatever. but you know, things get blocked, so there's a little bit of edge in it. i would hate to die in a stupid accident, or even lose a bollock in the same way.

actually, i would hate to die, full stop. not too worried about bollocks though. who needs them? i've done my procreating. it's not like i have enough sex to need two bollocks.

i only care about dying because i can't bear the thought of not seeing my kids grow. i am curious. of course i also want to prove i can parent my son to manhood without his becoming a retard like me. we are all like that if we're honest about it. i don't hold out high hopes of it. being a retard has all sorts of ramifications, and this is one of them. i suppose, to tell the truth, that i don't even care if he gets fucked up. so long as i love him and he loves me.

i don't know whether that's a big ambition or a small one.


art

so anyway, modern art is shit. but you already knew that.


Amis

so anyway, Amis=arsetard. but you already knew that too.

posted by Dr Zen @ 8:23 pm