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Opiate of the Masses 1

I am the greatest human being on the planet. believe it or not, I still do.

It doesn’t matter if you

Karl Marx was an idiot in a prison cell.

He

believed no one was better than anyone else, and that everyone deserved to have an equal share of the pie.

I am here to remind you that his dumb idea

never worked, doesn’t work now, and never will. We’re all equal in body, but not in mind.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

As humans, with built in perceptions, ideologies, truths, and questions; we have had a superficial desire to relegate what we don’t understand to supernatural beings with unbelievable stories and rationales. controlled in many ways.

Society is

Be them chemical, role-based, existential,

esoteric, metaphysical, guilt-based, respect-based, mystic, idyllic, or otherwise. Since long before the Greeks stuck a tripod over the gas leak at Delphi, long before the Aztecs feared the return of Quetzalcoatl, and long before fire was first blessed upon us by Prometheus, humanity has sought to explain what it wasn’t capable of understanding on its own through fantastic stories about supernatural entities that think, talk, and act solely on the affairs of millions of otherwise perfectly contented people all over the earth.

In the last four hundred years or so, we have developed, tested, and

tried scientific methods to harness the forces formerly attributed to the divine.

In doing so, we have inadvertently walked into a false ideology out

of a sanctimonious “respect” for the traditions of our cultures, caught struggling to explain why we’ve been massively cajoled into believing a self-perpetuated mythos attached to our desire to impress our ancestors with our ability to be intentionally misled by one another. These lies have been propagated by charismatic assholes who felt they had some sort of extra conceptual and sensual ability than you which allowed them to tell you how to think. how to think is a piece of shit.

Karl Marx included.

idiot fuck.

Anyone who tells you

Anyone who follows or listens to him is an

You’re born into this world naked, crying, and scared.

You are

a result of a biological fluid exchange that predates you, your family, America, writing, and mankind itself. almighty king of the universe. about nine months later.

You were not created by god the

Your parents fucked and you came around

No god involved.

Whatsoever.

birth to a great many stories to soothe its fears.

Mankind has given

With all that this world

has to offer you, why do you need some amorphic touchy-feely “in my heart”

god?

Find a moral code and stick to it.

ya go, done.

If you fuck up, try harder.

There

Moving along…

When Karl Marx wrote his economic theories, he was one of the first to ascertain that religion was nothing but a massively successful form of mind control in an industrial, science-based society. collective group of “humans, on Earth.”

We always have.

entertainment is a social anesthetic as well. bell?

We have many opiates as a Mass public

Does the Coliseum ring a

The idiotic banter of daytime television hosts smothering you with

ridiculous and useless opinions?

The rattling chatter of political pundits

attacking each other with ill-conceived flash animations?

The masks of

Anonymous as they revolt against Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard? Scientology is a commercialized religion.

L. Ron Hubbard had to be a

pretty smart guy to get that whole pyramid scheme up and running.

Salvation

through purchase, don’t you just want to sign up for that right now?

Stop

rotting your mind with mass media moralities and take a second to think for yourselves.

We’re morally bankrupt, because our morals are provided to us

in the caricature effigies of made-up television faces, lawless cartoon characters, false idol military commercials, docu-drama re-inventing the past, “modern art” piles of candy in the corners of our metropolitan art museums, children watching their parents smoke pot, and the religious on the radio airwaves corroborating new “truths” blended in the fog of bigoted fascist Christian rhetoric. Religion is a conceptual force mankind invented to give name and credence to the stories our drunken grandfathers told us while we sat around the campfire.

I remember one mindless anecdote my grandfather always used

to recite. I had a dog and his name was Jack. He always pooped on the railroad track. The train came by, the poop flew high. And it hit the conductor right in the eye. What was I supposed to learn from the anecdote? railroad tracks?

Beware of dog shit on

Keep dogs named Jack away from railroads?

trying to find meaning in grandfatherly anecdotes? 3

The futility in

Shit happens?

Religion

is a synonym for total shit, straight from the dog’s ass. steeped in the conceptual stagnate of tradition. of security.

Religion is a false sense

Religion is a baseless accusation presented as digestible and

concrete fact, unerring and steadfast. metaphysical profundities. Religion is…

Religion is well

Religion is lies dressed as

Religion is local anesthetic for the brain.

…the opiate of the masses.

Opening statements

Part One – Man and his Myths On life, lessons, and liberations.

Chapter One - Social Opium Chapter Two – Delusion En-Masse Chapter Three – The Facts of Life Chapter Four – Answers

5

Part Two – Opium is Alright, but I’d Rather Smoke Weed And why you should start thinking about yourself.

Chapter Five – Fear and Loathing in the Digital Age Chapter Six – Of Machines and Men Chapter Seven – Philosophy is dead.

In life there are two kinds of people. People that ask questions, and people that answer them.

7

Man and his Myths

Chapter One – Social Opium I just can’t seem to let myself be controlled by others. both a taxing burden and a total freedom. mouth for authority.

It’s been

I’ve never had a good taste in my

I don’t like being told what to do, unless someone can

explain why I should listen to them.

Most of the time they can’t or won’t.

They just hold their authoritarian hand over me and try to pull my puppet strings.

They’re sorry to find out that I cut them off long ago and started

to walk on my own road. I’ve been hearing the word microcosm a lot lately.

A lot of people

like to describe where they live as a “cross-section,” or microcosm (if they know the word) of America. It’s a microcosm of America.

I live in a city in Michigan called Kalamazoo.

microcosm of America.

That’s because every town in America is a

Trust me, I’ve encountered a good many – and they all

look, sound, smell, taste, and feel just about the same. 9

Kalamazoo has all

the nameless faces, all the alternate lifestyles, all the big city problems, a good chunk of the religions, all the small-town Midwestern values and appeal, the working classes, the middle classes, the upper classes, the bums in the parks, the pot holes in the streets, and a really long winter with asinine amounts of lake effect snowfall that leaves us all hunkered down in our homes hating the sky for dumping that cold shit all over our cars. God did not create Kalamazoo. century by European fur traders.

It was founded in the early nineteenth

That’s what created Kalamazoo.

The town

got its name from the language of the local indigenous peoples, who were decimated by the Europeans in their epic quest for beaver pelts.

That would

make for an interesting epitaph, I feel. “He died for beaver pelts in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in some year humanity forgot.” On the topic of epitaphs, Nietzsche said “God is dead.” god’s epitaph?

What was

“We’ll all just pretend you’re really here anyway.”

Why is

it that we kill each other all the time, kill animals even more often, kill god in literature and philosophy, but the best thing we can come up with is “rest in peace?” Are you resting?!

No!

Is there peace?!

No!

You are dead, nothing

will bring you back, and there is an expensive stone six feet above your rotting cranium on which your epitaph is inscribed.

“Eat shit, then become it.”

I had three grams of Opium once.

The crappy red rock kind.

back when by buddy Stan was still alive. Mile Island, had played at.

We were at a party my band, Three

We bought it from our friend Rob.

first and last time I ever found any Opium to buy. different methods of smoking it. joint.

It was the

We tried several

Bongs, Pipes, Hookah, rolled up in a

They all seemed to work fairly well.

I just liked to sprinkle a

little of the dust onto a packed bowl of weed. works really fast.

It was

It smells really good, and

When you smoke opium, as you exhale, your shoulders

droop a little, your eyes kind of go glassy and want to shut, and you just lay back feeling quite comfortable.

I have a photograph of Stan next to me on the couch in an Opium daze vacantly staring into the camera with a glassy look in his eye. into the couch looking really relaxed.

He’s sunk

If you watch a history channel show

about opium, they’ll talk about the opium bars where people laid on couches to smoke opium and chill out.

That’s pretty much what it does.

doesn’t last long, though, only about five minutes. smoke more and more to get high.

It sure

Then you’ve got to

By the time we got through the first two

grams, we had to smoke the whole third just to get a buzz.

You may know

that Opium is a blood brother to addictive as hell nasties Morphine and Heroin.

Opiates.

Never trust them.

fuck away from heroin.

Very bad drugs, opiates.

Stay the

I’ve never stuck it in my veins, but I’ve watched

other people do it in front of my eyes and it is the saddest thing I have ever seen – and I’ve been the fuck around. Now, in being congruous with the title of this little literary train wreck, do you see now why Karl Marx chose those exact words?

Opiates make

you numb and pacified for a little while, they lose their potency as your tolerance grows, and pretty soon you find yourself wanting more and more of something you didn’t have in the first place and never needed anyway.

When

“people” are “addicted” to “drugs” we either “lock them up” for selling them, label them as “useless to society,” “deviant,” or we send them to “rehab” to “clean up” with a little help from a “higher power.”

Euphemisms.

Always with the fucking euphemisms.

If drugs are bad for you, people that

sell them should be stopped, right?

Well by that same respect, shouldn’t

all those priests telling you about a 2000 year old zombie be put in their place?

Hell, in most cases you’re all even paying them to tell you these

obvious lies.

The universe created in seven days?

Could you build a house in seven days?

Are you kidding me?

Could you build a car in seven days?

You might as well really be thinking there’s someone living in the universe that just assembled it out of things he found in his gym locker on a strange bet between friends that he couldn’t create life from jock strap residue. So people say “well you can’t build a house in seven days, but god is omniscient and omnipotent.”

A being with omniscience and omnipotence would

have to have it in a world he did not create, and a universe with finite limitations!

They say “biblical time is only a symbol, you see.”

And to

them I say “did you go to college?” You understand that OUR sense of time is a symbol already, right?

Read Slaughterhouse Five if math scares you, or

“fourth dimension” sounds like something having to do with aliens. 11

What happens to the priestly prayer purveyors? saints and the Eucharist? addiction.

The clergy?

The

You have to drop them like a bad heroin

You’ve got a monkey on your back that’s slowing you down, making

you stupid, bending you to its flagrant will, and inevitably costing you precious money and time.

There’s plenty of room for spirituality and

feelings of “completeness,” but if you have to pay or confess to a stranger in order to feel complete, you’re on the wrong track. And what is this elusive feeling of completeness that we all yearn for?

Some contrived sense of purpose for our banal wanderings around this

floating rock we call Earth?

What we mean when we say “completeness” or

“fulfillment,” is really “answers.” answered.

Answers to questions that can’t be

I’ve spent a great deal of time in the past talking about

“metaphysical questions,” such as “where do we go when we die?,” a god?,”

“is there

“what is the true meaning of life?”

I’ve got no better an answer than anyone else does. Where do we go when we die? weird outliers.

Here they are.

We have two general choices, with a few other

Ground, or fire.

Either way, “you” as you knew you, do not

go anywhere, because you don’t exist anymore.

Death is the finality.

The

minute someone starts telling you that they know of some other place after death is lying to you.

They don’t know, they haven’t been there, and there

is no god for them to ask. I know what happens to people after they die in Kalamazoo, though- my friend Mike puts your rotting corpse in the back of his Suburban and hauls you off to either A) a crematorium, B) a morgue, C) a funeral home, or D) your mom’s house. Is there a god?

Like I just said, “no.”

There’s your fucking answer.

He’s not there, he doesn’t care about you, he doesn’t have a plan for you, and he won’t grant your wishes-slash-prayers. What is the true meaning of life?

Because he isn’t real.

How lame of a question is that?

If

you need to be told what to do with your life, there’s no point in asking the question, because

you won’t get anywhere without some idea of what you

like, what you want to spend your life doing, and how you want to get there. At least a dream, that’s all it takes. fucking live it, stupid.

The true meaning of life is to

How hard was that?

past the first chapter to find out.

You didn’t even have to read

Now there are some really deep seeded questions that people don’t like to talk about all too much.

How about “how can you honestly believe there’s

a magical place called heaven with streets paved of gold, and no worries except how to spend eternity without being bored out of your fucking mind?” Don’t you want this to end some time?

Sure it’s fun to deal with all the

shit life throws at you so you can go fuck your girlfriend, hang out with your kids, do tae kwon do, or whatever the fuck you’re into; but don’t you want it to end some time?

Guess what, you’re in luck because it’s going to.

We create gods to pacify our fear of death.

Philosophy for the last

three thousand years has been balanced on this pinpoint spot in metaphysics. Death.

Death, death, death.

Five letters for the ultimate finality.

Kicked the bucket, passed on, passed away, late, deceased, beyond, gone, lost, faded, waxed, murdered, smoked, picked off, casualty, blast victim, tragedy, fatal, dead, gone, buried, natural causes, cold, six feet under. Requiescat in pace. bearded face.

Resting in fucking peace till the zombie shows his ugly

More euphemisms.

I’m going to die, you’re going to die, your mom is going to die, your dad is going to die, your wife is going to die, my brothers are going to die, my cat is going to die, and a great many people I have known and loved are now long dead.

I used to get upset about it, but now I just say “so it

goes,” like Kurt Vonnegut.

No amount of preparation will leave you stone-

faced at the death of a loved one.

Sometimes even the death of people you

know nothing about can still be a tearjerker.

Why is this?

Because we

understand the finality of death, because we’ve been robbed of our time with someone we wanted more with, because we’re reminded of our own death, or because we wish that the good times would never end? Finality is a nice, palpable sort of thing.

When Descartes wrote

“Cogito Ergo Sum,” he was trying to prove something with one hundred percent certainty.

He was obsessed with god and getting into heaven, so he didn’t

think of the most obvious next step, “I am, and therefore I will die.” shit, then become it.

Eat

What do you think of that, Rene Descartes, you dead

motherfucker? Social opium doesn’t have to involve god, either. nationalism?

Worship of technology?

What about mindless

Reliance on chemicals to feel alive?

Drudging on endlessly doing whatever the boss says so you can get your bonus 13

at the end of the month? soap opera sex lives? concert?

Idiotically chattering at night clubs about your

Screaming the lyrics of your favorite band at a

Flipping through the thousand channels on DirecTV?

Typing in

random search strings on Google and clicking stumble upon for six hours? So are you sick of being swindled out of your time and money by shit bag preachers and social-salesmen telling you how to live your life? your solution:

Here’s

stop going, read some books, stand up on your own feet, and

live your life on your own.

You may be surprised to find out how nothing

changes after you cut out the monkey on your back.

The sun will still rise,

the seasons will still change, you will still get older, and you will still be confronted with nothing but contradictions to what you thought was going on around you.

Make your own decisions, think with your own thoughts, use

your mind. So what if you’re one of those people dishing out the garbage, you know it, and you still don’t care?

Oh well, keep on trucking, man.

Bamboozle the fuck out of those idiots, but when one of them stands up and says he’s had enough, don’t try to trick him into staying.

It’s too late.

Mankind has as many fools as it has saviors; I know this, and you know this. now.

You bought this book, you had to know what you were getting into by God isn’t real, I’m sorry.

I know it’s really hard for some of you

people to accept, but it’s just not true.

In return for this bitter

appraisal, I will offer to you a sound alternative based on tangible evidence from the natural world around us, and free from mind-rotting dogma that will leave you stuck doing things you don’t want to do. I ask not for, will not accept, and take offense to your worship. may be an ideologue, but I am no messiah.

I

The thing that disgusts me most

about organized religion and philosophy is the singular aspect of it all. Devote your life to one single mantra, one single ideal, or one single thought; and you will be saved. saying “submit or die.”

What a load of trash. Might as well be

It’s even worse than that.

Eternity is a pretty long time, man.

Submit, or die forever.

With the threat of hell, it’s no

surprise the Christians managed to fool you for nearly two thousand years. Just as there isn’t a god, there is no one single answer to the questions we all ask cumulatively as a society. that simple.

Sorry, guys, nothing is

The only things we can do are state our opinions, disagree

with the opinions of others, then change and re-state our opinions.

We use

words for concepts that we have invented to legitimize our opinions, and our disagreements.

That’s called a language, and there are a great many of

them. It’s a good thing the world isn’t as simple as that. us, and that means there’s a lot of opinions.

There’s a lot of

That’s OK with me, it’s also

a good thing to be able to learn from other people.

There’s a whole shit-

heap of information floating around this gigantic rock we’re floating through space on, and it’s a bit too much to be sorting through all by your lonesome.

Friends, enemies, strangers, faceless names, and nameless faces

alike; we are all indebted and connected to one another in a multitude of ways – some of which we understand, some of which we lament, some of which we fear, and some of which we intend. What I am concerned with, for the most part, is the connections between people that we don’t always acknowledge.

This chemical haze of

reality we all experience whether it be illegal drugs,

prescription drugs,

TV drugs, sex drugs, music drugs, fast-food MSG drugs, or any kind of mindnumbing activity in general, has replaced a large part of the “everything will be OK after you’re dead, even if it’s not OK right now” function of religion.

These days, it goes “everything is OK for all of us, why isn’t it

OK for you all of a sudden?” It’s not OK.

We’re all lying – to ourselves and each other.

We didn’t replace the god function in American society.

In god we trust, oh shit. what do we do now?

Big mistake.

God isn’t real.

Oh fuck,

Well if god is just made up, maybe we can replace him

with choose-your-own-adventure vote by text message American Idols. that didn’t work- but at least they bought the T-shirts.

Well, we’ll try a

global economic crisis- FUCK! They elected a black man!

Maybe “they” should

have never given “us” the chance to think for ourselves. known we would get wise to their ways!

Nope,

They had to have

We can blame our parents, we can

blame each other, we can blame ourselves, but we have to blame somebody! It’s a cruel fucking world, and there’s no excuse for it but it just keeps being that way. I said once that people find love, they find religion, or they find the bottom of the bottle. transcendence.

I seek another alternative.

I seek social

Living life as a human being isn’t all it’s cracked up to be 15

sometimes.

There’s a fuck ton of us here, we disagree back and forth, get

in bloody ideological disagreements, and we escape each other in a variety of ways. These escapes, these social opiates, serve to construct a dichotomy between what we are as individuals in society, and what we’re to expect from society as individuals.

We’re given individual rights in our government

documents, we legitimize the shit by saying god says it’s alright, we take another hundred years to talk about slavery, we take nearly another century to talk about women’s rights and the ex-slave’s actual civil rights, and then we get the stupid internet so everyone can get fat and lazy and get their pizza not just without making it themselves, not just having it delivered, but not actually having to talk to another human being throughout the entire process until we sign the little piece of paper after taking our food from the nameless dog fucker with a stupid shirt knocking on the door and “forget” to leave them a tip. Fuck, man, I’m as broke as you are.

I drive a car nearly ten years

old, and I still got fucked on the interest rate.

I rent my house, it’s

drafty as shit and the furnace pilot light gets blown out once a week causing me to see my breath when I wake up late in the winter afternoon.

My

credit cards are maxed out, I live paycheck to paycheck, and my diet largely consists of macaroni and cheese supplemented by cheap generic off-brand vitamins from the dollar store and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

I

save my pocket change in a blue plastic margarita yard-glass from Las Vegas. I pay most of my bills late, and I give my landlord cash because we’re both fucked financially and we would rather keep the banks out of our transactions. I stay up until dawn more often than I don’t, I show up late for work without showering nor shaving, I drink to excess, I take a lot of

drugs, I

say things to people that I regret, and I constantly question my abilities as a person.

Sometimes the stress gets me, and I tremble myself to sleep on

the couch wishing I was dead. We’re all the same stupid lonely fucks looking for attention through a variety of mind-numbing rituals.

I like to get fucked up, write books, play

music, and talk to people I think are smart, funny and cool. different from you? anyway.

Am I any

Probably not, and if I am- you don’t fucking matter

I’m the greatest human being on earth, and so are you.

We’re all the

greatest human beings on earth, because nobody is fundamentally better than anybody else. life-span.

We’re all equally fucked by nature, and equally limited in

Some of us outlast each other, and some of us make more of a

name for ourselves than others, but we’re all essentially the same.

Our

heroes wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without us to venerate them, now would they?

The things that set us apart from each other are the things we use to

group ourselves together. Even if god did exist, and this is a long fucking limb I’m going out on here, he would have surely created us for some stupid purpose other than sucking the land around us dry and arguing back and forth about what we’re here for.

So instead of continuing to fight “the good fight,” and in lieu

of “bettering ourselves,” we find ourselves eternally seeking escape from what we wish to call a fictional reality but can’t get past the realization that this so-called fictional reality we’ve created around ourselves is all we fucking have.

And it also happens to be very, very real.

You can only

measure yourself based on what the other idiots say about your idiocy. So should we just keep self-medicating?

Buying our opiates with

little pieces of paper we give a value to and seeking guidance from our elders while forgetting they’re just as lost as we are?

Buying and selling

DVDs on E-bay like we buy and sell “stock” in companies we’ve never heard of through mutual funds with investment groups backing them that get bought and sold by each other like we buy and sell drugs on the street corners?

Buying

consumables with credit cards so we can pay interest on something that was gone six months ago? Money is the root of all evil? conceptually real as evil is.

Fuck, man, money’s only as

Things happen, we react to them.

We trade

our ideas and our personal realities with each other as commoditized pieces of economy with only as much value as other assholes put on it.

I know it,

you know it, we know it, but yet it still goes on every day without end just like it always has.

So instead of asking why, we just self-medicate with

anything – ANYTHING AT ALL – that will take our minds off; even just for one second, the fact that we’re all going to live, die, and rot in the fucking ground whether we like it or not. So why bother?

Why not just start smoking meth and watching NASCAR in 17

a double-wide?

Why not leave your wife, kill your kids, shoot some heroin,

blow your face off with a shotgun and leave a note that said “I just wanted some fucking sleep?” Why?

As much as we are attracted to our escapes, we are indebted to

our timeless ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

They

used to call it “The American Dream,” but now we just call it “America.” The future that everyone used to talk about has finally come, and all we have to show for it is the blogosphere, youtube reaction videos, American Idol, and a nation bankrupt on imaginary funding via credit cards and fortyyear mortgages that don’t end with death.

Fuck, even in death we owe money

that we force our families to settle in probate court. Eat shit, then become it. When I die, I want you fucks to put me in the ground and talk about everything I did that you thought was cool.

What I don’t want you to do is

imagine I’m stuck in some pitiful afterlife full of creature comforts watching all of you suffer and letting you metaphysically pacify your selfdoubt with my after-worldly presence.

Fuck you, death is the only true

salvation, death is not to be feared or avoided, it is the poignant culmination of that which must always come to an end: Life. You’re going to die, and none of this shit matters in the slightest once you’re gone.

What do you think about that?

Chapter Two – Delusion En-Masse Way back in 1941, when America was struggling with the decision on whether or not to bail Europe out of a second all-encompassing war, there was a man with the idyllically dynastic last name of Rockefeller who made a speech that included the words “I believe in the supreme worth of the individual, and in his right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” I first came into contact with this quote while wandering around New York City in a hung-over vacation haze along with my compatriots Kevin, Dennis, and my brother Dan sometime in the summer of 2007.

Frantically

spending our time taking photographs of buildings, parks, streets, and

people we didn’t even know the names of; we left in a rapid hurry staring at the ass of the statue of liberty from the dirty shores of New Jersey needing to be back to work and school in less than twenty hours.

I didn’t sleep for

three days straight. The now ubiquitously famous plaza in front of Rockefeller center in New York, New York is sunk beneath the ground level.

It is accessible via a

grand staircase leading down from the mass of pedestrians meandering their ways through life in the most important city on earth.

At the top of that

very staircase is a giant slab of marble bearing those very iconic words, in addition to the rest of the speech. I’d be willing to bet that thousands of people walk past that piece of marble every day of their lives.

They never even bat an eye as they pass

those immortal words etched in marble for them to ponder at. Many people carry an undying hatred of the Rockefellers as industrialists and Oil Tycoons using their financial influence to dictate world events.

Fuck that, do you see the words of David Rockefeller on that

day in 1941 being lived out to their fullest extent?

Mankind has not gained

one inch of social, philosophical, or ethical ground since that day, several years before we provided ourselves with the capability of mutually-assured global destruction and genocide with the waving hand of the atomic bomb. There’s just one part of his speech I have to disagree with.

It

reads, “I believe in an all-wise and all-loving god, named by whatever name, and that the individual’s highest fulfillment, greatest happiness and widest usefulness are to be found in living in harmony with his will.” Despite all of the self-realization he received through his inheritance of an American-Dynast, he still couldn’t bear to leave the god shit out of his statements that day.

Sure he adds a nice little ecumenical

clause in “named by whatever name,” but that’s not enough. known god didn’t exist.

He must have

Maybe he was just using that phrase a tool to make

the god people flock to his ideal of the future. back up religion’s opiate-like nature?

Doesn’t that just serve to

Just tell them their superior likes

god, and they won’t see him as a superior. The Rockefellers have a shit ton of fucking money.

They didn’t get it

by swindling, they got it by the hard work of a single man with an iron grip 19

on the oil market who was in the right place at the right time, knew it, and took full advantage.

He was an extremely intelligent motherfucker who knew

where to throw the damn darts and make them count.

We demonized him for his

tenacity instead of introspectively wondering why no one else was good enough to compete with him. Money isn’t the root of all evil, our concepts are. one of them all.

God is the worst

God is good, they say, everything he doesn’t like (which

happens to be mostly constructed of the things we do like) is evil. a pretty big bummer of an ethics code.

That’s

The epistemology is even worse.

Truth is true when some asshole in the sky says it is instead of when the humans test and question it, because unlike infallible god, we are quite fallible.

Bullshit.

Fucking bullshit.

We invented those concepts, and I

have a good feeling that we can do much better if we would just fucking try. We’re constantly being fed obvious delusions from every angle.

TV

says you need to be skinny (but fat is still beautiful somehow even though you and everyone else will hate you), enjoy shitty pseudo-music, buy expensive clothes, eat at fast food restaurants, give each other candy on valentine’s day, buy and expect presents at Christmas, and put stupid mass produced trinkets that won’t work a day after the warrantee wears out straight on the fucking credit card.

It’s no wonder that people think money

is the root of all evil when our entire ethics structure is based on the possession and relinquishing of it. Religion says you need to stand in a metaphorical line marching from birth to death “knowing” you’ll have a better time after this one ends, genuflect before a statue that someone you don’t know told you is a stone effigy of the deity in question, accept and forgive others for their infuriating transgressions, stop asking silly questions like “you really think the universe was created in six days?!” and “so you’re telling me a zombie is going to come down on a cloud and judge us based on his personal moral code?!”, and allow other useless human beings to get paid to fill you overflowing with this horse shit we call “divine.” Our public schools tell us we can do whatever we want when we grow up, insist that everyone is “special,” including the drooling mongoloid in the back of the class that smells like roast beef and goat cheese, look the other way when we take a sip out of our flask in the bathroom, limit our inalienable and self evident right to free speech,

award academic

scholarships based on physical prowess, award honors to the altruistic, demonize the free-thinking, convince us our C-student community collegeeducated teachers are always right, award art scholarships to charlatans who are only good at cutting and pasting construction paper, and repeatedly tell us to “think outside the box” while threatening to withhold our diplomas if we try to express ourselves in a respectively unconventional way. Our colleges tell us they hold the ultimate truths, trade vast amounts of money for pieces of paper “proving” our education, do little to inform us about what they terrifyingly refer to as “the real world,”

fill the minds

of still-corruptible youth with subjective values set by sub-par professors that don’t honestly give two fucks if you learn anything or not, convince baccalaureates they are fully equipped members of society although a gross percentage of them have never held a full-time job by the time they graduate, and then suck more funding from them by offering “graduate school.”

Does that phrase make sense to you?

How do you graduate from

graduate school? The government tells us that drugs are bad, that dissidence is intolerable, that fuck is a bad word, that we have to shield children from the realities that they will inevitably face one day even though they may be ready for the shock, and tells us that we all need to conform to one big idea that is in a perpetual state of dynamic change.

We live in such a fast

paced society that the minute you understand something, there’s some other hack re-writing history. Our parents tell us everything will be alright when they know it won’t be.

Our bosses tell us we’re not good enough when we’ve been giving it our

all.

Our enemies tell us we’re scum and our best friends tell us we’re the

greatest.

Our loved ones stop loving us.

We change our minds, we grow up, we learn.

We stop loving our loved ones. There’s some times where you

just want to feel like it’s all taken care of, but don’t let that be the rationale for accepting a façade of truth in front of a broken and faulty belief structure pacifying through bullshit toys and inconsistent ancient half-assed narratives poorly written by people that thought the world was fucking flat, and thought disease was caused by demons. Why would an all loving god create hell? Twain?

Mysterious stranger?

Satanic. 21

Have you read your Mark

Subversive.

Genius.

Have you read

the satanic bible?

It’s Ayn Rand with costumes and candles for the sake of

alleviating boredom with a bit of Crowley and Lovecraft thrown in there just for fun.

Anton LaVey was a circus man.

He knew the value of letting people

dumb it down for a while, but he wanted to provide an atmosphere for intellectuals to associate knowing full well that the people they didn’t like would not be involved or welcome. Satanism.

That’s why he named his “religion”

It overtly denies the existence of satan.

imply the existence of god.

To exist, satan would

God does not exist, Satan does not exist, Jesus

probably existed but was a total wuss, the tooth fairy doesn’t exist, santa claus doesn’t exist.

You are all being pacified by people that found a way

to make a buck from your lack of self confidence. you’d probably like the Satanic bible.

If you got this far,

Shit, you’ve probably read it, too.

In that case, I hate to tell you what you already know.

Read it, it’s only

a book, and it’ll do a whole lot less damage than that stupid Christian bible. Read them all, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Koran, the Vedas, the Sutras, the Bible (all of them), LaVey’s bible, Metamorphoses, the Sagas, the Tibetan book of the dead, and the fucking Egyptian one, too.

Read the

analects, cast the coins and read your Tao Te Ching.

Make a choice

for once in your life.

Do it.

Words are good, books are better, but understanding

words and concepts and using them to better yourself is the ultimate goal of sharing knowledge.

We have to take the stories we know, learn from them,

and make new stories.

Why would you perpetuate a religion from two thousand

years ago, when we’ve all outgrown the usefulness of religion?

Do you need

god while you drive your car to the supermarket to buy food for your family with money that you earned working at a job you are qualified to do? his role in the whole thing? fuck?

What’s

When was it ever about god’s plan, you stupid

It’s about your plan, and it’s going to be greener pastures for you

as soon as you accept it.

Stop letting your mind be misguided by old ideas

that might have value, but completely miss the mark on a society with instant global mass communication. thought the world was fucking flat.

Global.

When they wrote the bible, they

It’s a god damned globe.

We have come so far, but we still waste all our time on stupid worthless waste of time opiate escapes like religion, sports, movies, television, music, chemicals, social constructs and video games. fun for a while, but quickly outgrow their usefulness.

They’re

Sure life wouldn’t be fun without those things, it takes the “work real hard to stay alive” aspect of life away for a while.

We just can’t get

in over our heads, checking the RSS Feeds six times a day to find out what some stupid Soccer score was in a country on the other side of the earth. In real time, of course. taped to our ears. MIP.

Walking around all day with our iPod cables duct

Smoking weed in your parent’s garage after your third

Too much is too much.

Too much of anything is bad for you.

Drugs are

good, sex is good, music is good, sports are good, books are good, religion does good for people that need it, and society has kept a good stock of people’s ideas shooting back thousands of years. Have you ever been to a Library? propose that rhetorical question.

I feel it’s a shock to have to

Libraries are where we store our

knowledge in the form of informational language written down on paper.

In

our lucky case, we have electronic storage that makes it even cheaper and more accessible. “society.”

This information is the tangible form of our concept of

It’s the physical copy of all the work that any person did, just

sitting there for you to take in and expand upon.

Chapter Three – The Facts of Life We’re all selling our selves, so don’t sell yourself short.

It’s a

sad, cruel world we live in that’s capable of change, but generally runs in stark terror at the thought of things actually changing. stay the same.

We like things to

We don’t want our girlfriends to break up with us, we don’t

want our friends to move away, we may not like our jobs, but we love the money we make.

We don’t want those things to change.

Change is a dynamic

process, and cannot be siphoned or bent to someone’s will.

Change may

sometimes require hard work, it may sometimes present a rapid shift in perspective, but it is through change that we can come to understand time and space.

It is through change that we quantify our existence.

through change that we measure time.

It is

It is through change that we make our 23

selves known and it is through change that we are identified and identify. You are in a constantly changing environment which you can learn from and change for yourself. beacon of reality.

Change is all around us, it’s omniscience is a

You will end, your time is limited.

Change is limitless

and liquid. The facts of life are brutal and unforgiving. will die. finite.

You are alive.

You

You live on a planet that, while big, is quite limited and Many things on it can and will kill you.

Earth with you.

There are other people on

You can communicate with them, but you don’t have to.

This

is what we are presented with at birth, and “life,” as we know and call it is just a post script to those sentences.

What life means to you and what

you do with yours are questions that are left up to you to decide. Value your life, value your choices, value your actions, value your words, value anything, just value something, for the love of fuck. passionate about life, you only get one. and quietly, waiting in line politely?

Be

Why would you want to live simply Why would you just “take it as it

comes” and not do anything to change what’s coming? I went to the presidential inauguration in 2009. There were literal millions of people down town at the national mall.

Police officers from all

over the nation were relegated to directing traffic and guarding gates. Google the shit, look at the pictures. mall after the crowd had dispersed. Nothing but garbage.

My friends and I walked down the

What I saw made me very, very sad.

Everywhere.

Garbage people, garbage piles,

garbage cans overflowing, garbage all over the national monuments, garbage falling out of idiot’s mouths, and garbage workers cleaning up the garbage. Barack Obama stands on the steps of the Capitol and talks about change while millions cry and cheer him on from miles away only to throw their plastic water bottle on the ground in front of them when there’s a trash can two steps away.

There’s thousands of assholes walking around and following you

down the street screaming “Get your Obama shirt! historical day!”

5 dollars!

Remember this

The religious zealots walk the streets with megaphones and

tell you you’ll burn in hell unless you light a candle at their fucking church.

“You’re going to hell, Barack Obama is going to hell, the only

salvation is to DONATE MONEY TO MY STUPID FUCKING CHURCH!” The homeless stare vacantly from the shadows as their residence is invaded by unwelcomed

guests. they can.

The shop owners capitalize on the name of Barack Obama in any way Obama beer, Obama soup, Obama salad.

freshener.

Obama hand bag.

Obama air

Endless seas of vendors selling anything they can slap a logo on

and make thousands of dollars with the likeness of his name and face.

The

police stare suspectingly at every pedestrian, worried to death they’re going to whip out an assault rifle and go nuts.

Obama’s face was everywhere

I looked, like the cult of personality just fucking became the entire city. They’re placing all their hopes and dreams in the hand of one man that isn’t really much more than a television personality that signs papers. papers, but still only papers, smiles, and handshakes. ranked representative.

Important

He’s our highest

The man inspires hope in the eyes of the hopeless,

but the sea of idiots just can’t wait to make a fucking buck off of his face and name. Why fucking save them?

Why bail them out?

Why do we have to keep the

scumbags around us to knock us down when we’re trying so hard to get by? Life is what you make of it, right? something of it. value on it.

You have to value it in order to make

You have to know what something is before you can place a

Why does one vendor sell a shirt for five bucks, another for

ten, and they both have a line twenty deep? all up so voraciously?

Why were the people buying it

We should all be very fucking ashamed of ourselves.

Walking around talking about change and doing the same god damn thing we always do:

disrespect the shit out of each other, sell some crap, and

desecrate what other people that were better than you built with their bare fucking hands and sharp fucking minds. And to all of you cock suckers that threw their trash around my Capitol like that, I hope you painfully burn to death. deserve to live here.

Have some fucking respect for the place that gives

you the freedom you love so much. the ground in my Capitol. over the grass.

Fuck you, you don’t

Don’t throw a fucking plastic bottle on

Don’t carve “fuck” in the bench.

Don’t stomp all

I’m a proud citizen of the United States of America, and I

don’t fucking appreciate you being a disgusting filth pig. Anyone who can just carelessly jack around like that, showing horrible disrespect for their country and their fellow countrymen can die a long painful death and I will laugh in their faces as they burn. call yourself an American?

How dare you

How dare you come to this place and fuck with it 25

like that?

You don’t deserve to be here, you don’t deserve to live.

discussion.

End of

Value your life, and know that other people value theirs, too,

so don’t fuck it up for them.

Then you walk in to your stupid church and

tell everybody that Jesus said “treat others like you want to be treated.” You’re a hypocrite, Jesus was a pussy, and I hope hell is real so I can watch your retarded ass burn for eternity.

That’s how I’d like to spend it.

Watching you pay for being such stupid fucks.

You don’t just make me angry

and seek revenge in reality, but my best idea of an afterlife would be watching you people suffer for what you’ve done.

Sweet justice by the hand

of society. The change we’re all talking about these days is an ideological change.

A change of national priorities.

A change of humanity.

A change of global consciousness.

The new intellectual paradigm.

This change is based

on thinking and feeling in a technologically advanced society aware of the disparaging depressing living conditions of some of our fellow humans. well.

They must have done it to themselves, right? We believe in the rights of man.

Oh

Serves them right.

Individual and self evident rights

that are not given to us by god or government, but aren’t even given to us. In order to be given something, there must be a lack of it in the first place.

There was never a lack of individuality or rights, they were

systematically taken away from people en-masse for a few thousand years. The fact about rights is that you can’t give something to someone that they already possess.

That’s a gift.

The rights of life are not a gift to be

given, they are a vocalization of something you’ve always had. The ideological change we need to make is to stop letting people that have no right or reason whatsoever tell us what do and take their so-called liberty to give you a sense of hope that isn’t there and never was. nice to give people hope, but there’s no sense in lying to them. cruel and that’s cheating.

honestly.

That’s

You can only present what you know and create in

an honest way, otherwise you are a liar and a charlatan. cheaters never prosper.

It’s

People say that

They do, just not in the long term, and not

Honesty is only a concept.

Reality for some people is what

they’ve been told, not what they know. In order to know something, you have to gain that knowledge through one or more avenues of thought, action, testing, questioning, proving, and arguing.

You can’t just say something and have it be true unless you can

back it up.

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you I had died, been buried,

and rose again three days later.

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you

there was a giant magical place in the clouds that the good people get to go to and be good in.

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that by the simple

act of having sex with a woman outside of marriage will result in eternal torture in damnation. true.

Why would you believe it from anyone else?

It’s not

You get angry with people that lie to you because it’s not nice to be

lied to. a liar.

You can deal with it once or twice, but after that you can’t trust Why would you trust someone that made it their personal commitment

to study lies that superimpose a moral code onto your already complicated life. So it worked for them.

Well, that’s nice.

We could use a few less

idiots around here, I hope you all get told to drink the Kool-Aid.

Go join

a fucking cult of personality buying and selling presidential air fresheners, at least the person you’re worshiping is fucking real.

Worship

the flying spaghetti monster, it’s no less ridiculous than believing in an omniscient omnipresent being.

It’s time to stop selling yourself short and

take a firm grip of the direction of the rest of your life.

It’s time for

you to stop asking questions and start answering them. Asking questions is nice as long as you’re prepared to find the answer.

Sitting around and talking about things is no way to get them done.

Sitting around and waiting for change is not a way to make it happen. Sitting around and talking about a better tomorrow is not a way to make tomorrow better.

Sitting around and letting others tell you what to do does

not make you a person, it makes you a sub-intellectual human.

Sitting

around and watching football at the bar does not make you an athlete. Buying a book and never reading it doesn’t qualify you to comment on it. If you value your life, which you should, you’ll find yourself a lot more “at peace” with yourself when you stop letting other people dictate your goals and morals.

Wake up every day ready to learn.

with a passion for making it through to the next. want, you’ll probably get it. and it’s not anyone else’s.

Wake up every day

Work hard for what you

Sometimes you won’t, it’s not your decision Things happen, they just do.

to do with it.

27

God has nothing

Chapter four – Answers We’re all looking for answers in life. subsequently answering them.

Asking questions, and then

We may not like the answers we get, and the

answer may not fully clarify our intentions and consequences, but there is always an answer.

Questions don’t exist without answers, it’s kind of like

one can’t really exist without the other. I’ve always been pretty in to asking questions. time.

Always asking questions.

some answers.

Lots of them, all the

After a while, I started coming up with

Many people will disagree with me, but I don’t give a fuck.

Listen. You’re going to die.

Can’t stress this enough.

chance that you won’t wake up tomorrow.

There’s always that

I know it’s a bummer, but you don’t

need to get down on yourself for it; it’s not your fault. way it is.

That’s just the

Since you’re limited by mortality, you absolutely have to value

your own life.

It’s not an option.

Fuck all you nihilists and altruists.

Value yourselves. Ok, so value your life.

I got that out of the way.

When you give

something a value, it means that you give extra care and precaution to nurture and protect that thing you’ve given value to. things.

You can value many

Cars, houses, magnificent erections, expensive glass bongs,

impressively well stocked liquor cabinets. placed in a physical thing.

Value doesn’t even need to be

We can get more esoteric than that.

Hmm… Life,

Liberty, the pursuit of happiness… Those are good things to value. about “love”?

How

Do you value trust?

We’re all selling ourselves short.

Always.

Sometimes I wake up

sweating in a furious rage with fists clenched white-knuckle tight.

I

cannot believe that you people can honestly get through your day “going with the flow,” without “rattling the cage” or “rocking the boat.”

You even

invented euphemisms to refer to your own nonconfrontationalist retreatism cop-outs. Listen. There are other people here.

THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE HERE.

like the way you smell after a week with no shower. annoying voice.

We don’t like your

We don’t like your ugly clothes.

We don’t like your fat

sack hanging off your abdomen like a prized trophy. picky eating habits. children.

We don’t like your

We don’t like the way you treat us, let alone your own

We don’t like your half-brained ideas and unintelligent

mutterings. stop.

We don’t

We don’t like the noises you make when you breathe.

Please

Yes, breathing. We don’t like it when you chew your food with your mouth open.

We

don’t like the way you whistle when you say words with an “S” in them. don’t like your retarded regional accent. don’t like me either.

We don’t like you.

We

I know you

Too bad, we don’t have a choice but to just deal with

the fact that we’re not going to agree.

We’re on the same Earth, give me my

space and you’ll have yours. Listen. World peace can be attained by killing off the people that suck. 29

Does

that sound right?

Strike that, reverse it.

A world of people can be

attained by killing off the peace that sucks.

There we go.

I’m going to

stir the pot. Listen. Violence is SOOOO cool. guns.

Huge guns.

SOOOO sweet.

In America, we like really big

We like to shoot bad guys with them.

no way whatsoever of judging who is the bad guy.

Problem is, we have

Oh shit!

arms, two legs, skin, clothes, hair, and fingernails! motherfucker right now!

He’s got two

Shoot that

We won’t hesitate at anything to beat the living

fuck out of and blow up any scrotum-headed monstrosity that tries to infringe upon our right to exist in a world we were not asked to be a part of. Listen. The people that tell you what to think are wrong. to absolve you of your sins. consequences.

They aren’t sins.

Jesus isn’t going

Only actions with

I urge you to think for yourself, but try your best to stick

to facts, and avoid the pitfalls of organized anything.

Religion, sports,

any organized entity that is going to put your mind in to some singularaspect-focused cultish crap requiring you to devote your entire life to it. That sucks. either.

Don’t listen to me just because you may think I’m right,

Make your own decisions, I’m not here to make them for you and

nobody else is either.

Do whatever you want, it probably hasn’t got much to

do with me anyhow; and if it does I’ll probably let you know. Listen. The world, moreover society, runs on drugs. literary metaphor, opiates. the burrito place?

On drugs.

Always drugs.

The chicks doing your nails?

For the sake of my own

Those guys making your food at

The guys cleaning your carpet? Probably on drugs.

The people shoveling

parade horse shit for a living most assuredly are on drugs. on drugs.

The doctor says you need them.

On drugs. Your wife is

That’s because you do.

The only people that don’t need drugs are the ones that have found satisfaction in life because they will suffer now and be rewarded “later” according to their religious beliefs.

Everyone else realizes that’s a load

of garbage and has to make the existential pain go away.

Existence is

burdened by consciousness, consciousness pained by reality, and reality plagued by people who don’t think like you. Shit sucks.

All of it.

The bills, the stress, the health problems,

the cuts and bruises, the working for some jackass that doesn’t give a fuck about you, the telemarketers, the mouse-over sound web advertising and popups, annoying relatives, even more annoying strangers, assholes, cops, parking people, red lights, speed limits, sexually transmitted infections, terrorists, carnivorous ex-spouses, bigotry of any kind, injustice, everything.

It all blows.

You have to deal with it somehow.

Some people

find love, some people find religion, and some people find the bottom of a bottle.

Or several bottles.

Or several bottles and a few pills while

smoking a joint and a packs of cigarettes. you do.

Nobody else.

Whatever.

It’s up to you what

Fuck ‘em.

Listen. It’s perfectly ok for you to be who you are, I swear to you. pink hair? Dye that shit pink and love it.

You want to worship god?

that cracker and sing the fucking songs and have a blast. worship Satan?

Go ahead and retreat, man, sit on a pillow and hold your hands

Do it.

Want to move into the woods and fall off the

Want to join a cult, shave your head, and drink poison fruit

drink when the comet comes to take you away? Anything? But.

You want to

Want to mumble mantras in a self-induced and numbing lack

in the shape of a diamond. grid?

Eat

Get to the nearest black candle store and find yourself a

nice loud gong. of thought?

You want

Do it.

Do it.

Want to do something?

Value it.

(Listen.

There’s always going to be a “but”)

Listen. You have to be prepared for the consequences. You have to know them, you have to be aware of them, and you have to know what you’re getting yourself in to. can do it, I know you can.

Think.

Use your fucking mind, man.

Listen. Speak.

You

Act. If you value

anything, you have to fucking stand up for your right to think what you want, listen to who and what you want, speak what’s on your mind, and act according to your own will. that are the bad guys.

You must!

The people that don’t agree with

It’s the moral objective.

You exist.

Right?

You

have an unlimited capacity for thought, learning, speaking, and acting; how 31

could anybody legitimize taking that away from you, or limiting it in any way? I’m getting the feeling that some people have to agree with me here. What’s the root of this problem?

We’ve got a ten thousand year long time

line of think tank behind us in the historical record, why didn’t any one ever figure out that everybody else was just full of shit?

Just as scared

that they’re going to die; shoving spoonfuls of oatmeal in their face because they have to eat to stay alive just like you. a shit every single day.

Socrates had to take

Julius Ceasar had to take a piss.

England probably had a whole lot of sex.

The Queen of

George Bush has a penis.

Life really isn’t all that serious, when you think about it.

Or even

that wholly complex unless you look at it with some sort of micro, endo, or telescope.

The sun rises and sets every day, the seasons come and go.

animals eat, shit, fuck, sleep, and die. There’s your big ‘ol answer. Why end there, though?

So do we.

The

That’s it, dude.

Eat, shit, fuck, sleep, die.

Can’t escape it.

You can’t escape it, but it’s not so bad.

story happens and then it ends.

The

It’s up to you what you eat, where you

shit, who you fuck, when you sleep, and how awesome people think you are when you die. That’s where the ideologies and the complications and the concepts and the fear and the loathing come in.

That’s where the good, the bad, and the

ugly shine through with equal brilliance.

It’s in the minor details.

words in the story and what they meant, not the chapters. paragraph.

Not the New York Times review.

The

Not the sleeve

Not the fact that you’re alive,

but the fact there’s other people around for you to share that life with. Not the fact that you’re here, but the fact that everyone else is, too.

It’s not the ethnic background, or the genealogy.

hair or the shiny new phone.

It’s not the facial

It’s not about the car and the house.

It’s

about you, the people you know, and how you’re all spending the time between eating, shitting, fucking, sleeping, and dying. We want to know what you have to bring to the table. what you have to say.

We want to know

And if what you have to say is a steaming pile of

garbage, we’re going to tell you to go back to the fucking drawing board and try again.

We’ll do it at work, we’ll do it at play.

strategy sucks, we’ll tell you.

If your sales

If you can’t throw a baseball worth a damn,

you’re going to find out eventually. And after all this thought, all these real-world choices and causes and effects, a great majority of us will just waltz on into a religious establishment of our own free will and choosing; only to relegate the very essence of human life to the man-invented deity of your discretion.

A great

many of us wander into the bar alone on a Monday night to stare at the scores at the bottom of the T.V. screen through the foamy bottom of an empty mug of beer.

A great many of us donate a spatter of time to some deemed-

worthwhile charity only to walk right the fuck out of there when we’re done; not thinking about it for a second until it’s time to drag your ass back there. We’re inventing all these reasons for us to think we’re not capable of understanding what we’re here to do. Eat, shit, fuck, sleep, and die.

I just told you what we’re here to do.

Game over, no continues, no extra guys.

No magical castle in the afterlife, and no great wheel of “reincarnate me into a pig” fortune.

Just us; here to eat, shit, fuck, sleep, and die while

watching all the other animals eat, shit, fuck, sleep, and die. meaning of life.

Anything else is an afterthought.

33

That is the

Opium is Alright, but I’d rather Smoke Weed.

Chapter Five- Fear and Loathing in the Digital Age I got my first computer in 1996.

It was the summer after fourth

grade, and I had to sit and wait impatiently at the dining room table as my dad read the entire Microsoft Windows 95 license agreement beginning to end. That’s the first and last time I’ve ever seen anyone read one of those. Under normal circumstances, I read anything I sign- but there’s just something about electronic license agreements that make me want to put a needle through my retinas.

It’s obvious.

We wrote this piece of software,

don’t copy it- even though there’s nothing that’s really going to stop you from doing it but the fear we instill in you with this legalese jargonfilled document. It wasn’t two weeks before my 28.8k modem was dialing into America Online; more than ready to try out this new thing called “The Internet” that I had been hearing about. I kind of got hooked. Within three weeks, I was running those old AOL 2.5 chat room bots that let you do all sorts of crazy hacked shit to poor old unsuspecting AOL

2.5 newbs.

Within a month, I had downloaded my first .mp3.

when –NO ONE- knew what that was.

That’s back

Usenet and IRC were about the only places

you could download any media worth listening to or porn worth looking at. Video was out of the question over a dial-up connection, TV rips hardly even existed yet, Torrents hadn’t even been invented yet, and Napster wasn’t even an idea in that guy’s head.

Not like you could really download anything

bigger than 3 megabytes over a dial-up overnight. Within a year, I had learned how to get my friends free accounts with the routing numbers on the bottom of their birthday checks they got from grandma.

Then, I started getting viruses and Trojans, and had to learn how

to find and get rid of them manually because back then you couldn’t just get online and update your virus protection software. software was a pain in the ass.

Hell, just getting any

Most wasn’t even being released on CD-ROM,

because that was NEW technology. By the time I was in middle school, I was building C servers in my basement, I had mastered frames in html 3, I could read leetspeak, and I had become completely consumed by this window into the world of the technological future they called the internet. By some course of events that I can’t remember, I had come upon a large quantity of mostly working, slightly out-dated, computer parts. was one of the best summers ever.

That

I had four or five 486 frames, several

drives, mother boards, ram chips, monitors, printers, cables, and cards.

I

went to work deconstructing, re-constructing, and reverse engineering them. I got addicted to usenet, IRC, and message boards.

If I didn’t know how to

do something, I could just ask. The first and funniest thing I ever wrote on a message board was when I was 11 or 12.

I wrote on a Final Fantasy Message board, “does ne1 know

where I can get some mp3s and ROMS?” Needless to say, I instigated a flame war.

I had no idea those things

were illegal, I had just discovered them and wanted more.

At 12, I had no

real understanding of intellectual property and copyright law.

Why would

anyone want to keep me from hearing their music, playing their game, reading their writing, or using their software?

If I could have created that stuff

at 12, I sure would have let anyone that wanted to see or hear it do so 35

without hesitation. Mom and Dad.

I never grew out of that.

Back then, money came from

I had no concept of what it was like to save all your scrill

for a guitar, only to have to eat pop tarts for a month so you could keep the electricity on. studio.

I had no idea how expensive it was to build a recording

I had no idea how much cost was involved with stretching, priming,

and painting a canvas.

I didn’t know how much a camera cost, how much labor

and financing it took to publish a book and keep it in a giant store that someone had to pay to build. But now that I do, and now that I can do all of those things; as an artist, I still just want people to hear my music, read my books, and look at my painting.

The money is just an added benefit.

of those things whether I got paid or not.

I would still do all

I’ve been financing my own

artistic pursuits for years, and I work at a job to make money. Long summer nights I would spend tirelessly trolling for hours on end, only to wake up in three hours and head back downstairs to the black Toshiba box that served as “The Good Computer” (the one I didn’t take apart) (1.57 gb hard drive, 133 megahertz processor, 256 kilobytes of ram, a 3.5’’ floppy, 56kbps modem, and a 6x CD-ROM drive) to get online and check my mail before my parents woke up and kicked me off the phone line.

Back then, high

speed internet was just a dream for us kids trading single mp3s through AIM DCC that took all night to download.

We did it.

I found out there were other people just like me.

We liked computers,

we saw the value in them, we demanded and created more and more capabilities, speed, space, and functionalities. We paved the way for all you techie shit fucks that were in diapers when we were trying to prove to the baby boomers that this computer thing was really going to take off.

My first mp3 player had 128 megabytes of

space, which was about enough for an album or two at a respectable sampling rate. all.

I would take that bitch everywhere with me, extra AAA batteries and Nobody knew what it was!

I told them that in five years, these things

were going to all but replace CDs. Everyone thought I was fucking crazy.

A dork, geek, whatever.

They’d

put their fingers in front of them and air type saying “need more gigabytes.”

I bet there’s a good chance you’re listening to an audio

version of this book downloaded straight from iTunes or some other website I

haven’t heard of yet. I don’t mind.

If you’re really resourceful, it’s probably pirated.

I’ve been doing that shit for half my life now, I don’t think

it’s wrong at all. that’s what I do.

If you like it, buy it.

That’s been the mantra- and

If it sucks, I want to know before I buy it.

Money has

value, even if it is liquid. We’re the media generation. information, we wanted it NOW.

The ones that didn’t just want

Television and Radio weren’t enough for us;

we wanted to have our chance to talk back.

We didn’t want to learn what you

old fucks were teaching us in school, we wanted to talk to our buddy on the other side of the world and find out about geo-politics from ACTUAL PEOPLE LIVING ELSEWHERE ON THE EARTH, instead of listening to some shit-brained thirty something tell us about people they never met in a country they’ve never been to. Information to a web-junkie is a commodity.

Information is leverage.

Information is what separates the newb from the 1337.

That’s back before

leetspeak became a way for MMORPG shitstains to delineate the pwnd from the 31337.

Go cast a spell, idiot fuck.

Information is what drives the

internet. My buddy Stan introduced me to torrents over the winter of 2003.

I

had never had high speed internet before, and the prospect of downloading anything over 30 megabytes or so was strictly relegated to the dream world. Suprnova.org. Does anyone out there remember that website? tracker?

That

Online piracy gave me the necessary tools to get whatever I wanted

to hear, see, and read- ever.

Before I knew it, we had hundreds of burnt

CDs and DVDs full of everything we could ever imagine wanting to have. Everyone knows about piratebay, but that’s what everybody went to after Suprnova.org was shut down.

I think I actually cried that day.

There’s a certain code of ethics we internet people used to have. It’s gone now.

Gone the way of the dinosaur and the pager.

ethics where you seeded what you leeched. it’s good, you buy it.

A code of

You gave back what you took.

If it has a virus, leave a comment.

If

Self-police and

eat your own; if someone ups a crappy rip, flame the shit out of them and ban the IP from the server.

If someone doesn’t know what they’re doing, or

how to find out what the answer to their question is: THEY SHOULDN’T BE 37

DOING THIS. I’m not the only one that grew up like this.

Grew up with a computer

and the internet as familiar to us as a grassy field, boy scout camp, or ice cream.

It’s been part of my life since I realized I had a life.

There is

no possible way I could know what I know today, or be able to do what I do on a day-to-day basis without the aid of computers. Ever heard the Latin phrase “Deus Ex Machina?” completely surrounded by our mechanized creations.

Our society has become The first thing I do

when I wake up is punch a digital alarm clock, then I turn on a light switch to illuminate my room with blacked out windows. music on a machine.

Shortly thereafter, I play

Then I check my cell phone for missed calls, check my

E-Mail and social networking sites on a computer – one of several in my home, put on machine-made clothing, and jump in my giant moving machine on wheels to get to the bar. My life is dictated by machines. hindered by machines.

Guided by machines.

Helped and

Made both more easy and more complex by machines.

We’re so rooted in the functionality of machines that we’ve taken to reliance on these machines to bring us a better life. A German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, once spoke about a concept of Da-Sein.

Like a flowing river, the Da-Sein permeates throughout existence,

all knowing, ever changing, ever flowing.

This force is a construct of

humanity as much as it is humanity’s essence.

A metaphysical force that

contains all knowledge, all pasts and presents and will-bes and could-bes. A force that was crushed beneath the stomping feet of Egyptians building Pyramids, flowing through the blood rivers of the Roman conquest, ruffling the feathers of eagles, pecking at the minds of philosophers for thousands of years, and tacitly dancing with the instruments of the artisan creating art.

A metaphysical force that communicated with everyone, connected

everyone, yet did not become everyone.

A metaphysical force.

Heidegger’s Da-Sein is the internet.

This polymorphic never-ending

connection of connections connecting connector connections, permeating throughout the entirety of Earth. consciousness?

Is this the new paradigm of

The newer version of humanity?

trans-fat heart disease version of humanity?

Or just the point-and-click Some of these people would

rather shit on a copy of Zein und Zweit as opposed to try and read the

damned thing. I was in a philosophy class in college, nose stuck deep in books; simultaneously reading Zein und Zweit and Atlas Shrugged. mocked me.

My professor

“Nothing but Nazi propaganda and misanthropic anarchism you have

there, Zach- nothing good to be found in those books.” Can you believe it?

A college Philosophy professor telling me not to

waste my time reading two of the books that I have found pleasure in reading over, and over, and over again.

Texts I’ve analyzed and highlighted and

commented on and struggled with and researched and learned from. Wasn’t too much later I decided to drop out of college. the ways of those swine.

I got wise to

Selling you a piece of paper for tens of thousands

of dollars just to say you cheated on your exams, listened to your egotistical professors feed you full of garbage, paid to park, didn’t read your books, and think you can just “graduate and get a job.”

Fuck you all.

Who’s to say I can’t just actually read the books you didn’t read, learn it on my own, and use the information myself- no college involved? College is for people who need to be told what to do.

A financial

institution, more concerned with collegiate athletics than actual learning. College used to be a place for minds to go and flourish; now it’s just an over-priced reason to binge drink and skip class. Who needs it?

You can get pretty far without it, unless you want to

fly airplanes, do brain surgery, create isotopes, land on the moon, or transcribe maths in 11 dimensions. business, you are a sucker. are a charlatan.

If you need to go to college for

If you need to go to college for English, you

Read English, write English- that’s how you get good at

it. Whatever, whatever, bash college all day long- I’m not stupid, and of course I see the value of higher education.

I just couldn’t believe how

useless some of the mongoloids I shared classrooms with were.

These people

will be running our businesses, mass transit, and country soon; and I am terrified!

The stupid chicks, the blockhead guys, tearing around wrecking

their cars and dropping their classes on mommy and daddy’s dime.

By the

time they enter the work force, some of them haven’t worked a day in their life, most of them haven’t worked a full time job, ever. 39

Then they get

thrust into life with thousands of dollars of student loan debt with nothing to their name but a graffiti-covered microwave, a stained futon, and a stinky mini-fridge.

Off to manage hard working Joe who always wanted to go

to college, but couldn’t afford it because all the grant money went to needle-dick ass hats like his boss who just want to do what the books say instead of try something new. Sorry to tell you, but by the time you get out of college- the world has already passed you by, and you’re fighting an uphill battle. should be earned, not expected. good chunk of graduates.

College

It’s just “High School, part two” now for a

Nothing but text messaging and waiting for the

clock to tell you to get out of there, if you even bothered showing up. Sitting there in pajamas, still drunk from last night and thinking about going to the bar.

Standing in a line waiting for nothing.

Getting ready to

graduate next spring; don’t have a fucking clue what you’re going to do except move back to your parent’s house and realize you don’t have even a fragile idea of who you are. We didn’t play that game.

We scanned the books, we convinced our

roommates to record lectures on audio tape and uploaded them, we found the information and we spread it- and we learned from it, and more importantly we shared it.

We were there from the start.

the people of information.

We the people of the internet-

We didn’t need to be told what to do, where to

find what we wanted, or how to get what we needed. And now, the world is coming apart at the seams.

Pirates off the

coast of Somalia shooting up American ships, North Korea shooting missiles across the Pacific Ocean, Mexican Drug lords cutting people’s heads off on You Tube, Islamic Extremist Terrorists overrunning Nuclear armed countries, major financial crisis raging in the first world Nations, despots ravaging the second world, and disease and famine destroying the third world. going to save us?

What’s

The pig fuckers that care more about their bedspread

matching the drapes than the more than obvious tearing of the fabric we call perceived global stability? What’s the goal here?

What’s the end game?

Head to the gym after

work and jump in the S.U.V. to grab some pizza on the way home to the cookie cutter house to feed the fat piece of shit children you pump full of megachurch self-denial mind garbage and expensive electronic devices which they destroy?

That shit is over, man- the Earth is dying, we’re killing it.

The old ways won’t work anymore.

You have to actually be smart to make it

in this day and age- and that doesn’t mean “college-educated.” smart, and capable of proving it.

It means

If you cheated your way through school,

you’re not going to be able to cheat your way through the rest of your life. Sorry to burst your bubble.

The world has drastically changed since I

was in my basement piecing together computers and getting laughed at for it. The world has drastically changed since I started High School, and the world rapidly changes day to day, hour to hour, as most of us just sit and let it pass us by.

We offer no countenance to new ideas, allowing ourselves to

mire in depressed and meaningless dissatisfaction with our surroundings and our selves.

Sickening.

Chapter Six – Of Machines and Men Man has built tools for thousands of years.

From Folsom points to the

bronze axe to the iron gun to the steel ship to the sub-orbital particle beam, we’ve been motivated to build tools to give us an advantage. kind of what we do. destroy us.

That’s

Our machines are built to help us, guide us, and

We can’t get rid of them.

We have machines to defend us

against machines, we have machines to communicate, we have machines to destroy, machines to build, and machines which we delegate to. It’s not a linear progression of tools as much as it is the evolution of a species. kingdom. cosmos.

The animal kingdom now has a counterpart in the machine

Man is the creator of machine, and thusly a god in the eyes of the Man became master of machine, not a blind watch-maker; constantly

building new generations selectively and intentionally, with the aim of progression and utility. There’s something we’ve all learned through this integration of technology into the livelihood of humankind.

We can be the masters of our

world with technology, but it is quickly becoming its own creature.

Not a

creature with a mind for self-doubt, but a useful creature with a creator and a purpose.

The machines are what we wanted to be socially.

with value and an involved purpose in something greater.

Something

Through our

machines, humanity has furthered their own doubts as to their own nature. The machines don’t have the cognizance to know their creator, but if they 41

did; would it be easy for them to ascertain the knowledge?

My computer

could ask me, “Did you create me?” “No.” “Who did?” “Another machine at Hewlett Packard.” “Oh.

Well who created it?”

“No one in particular. You see, it’s more of a process.

Humans created

machines from things we found in the ground over thousands of years, and they slowly built on the idea through trial and error and some really good guesses” “So I don’t have a creator?” “No, not really.” “Who created you?” “My parents” “Who created them?” “Theirs” “I recognize this pattern.

Who created their parent’s parent’s parents?”

“I don’t know, Machine, who created mankind?” “Based on the information you gave me about my own creation, I can only guess that we have the same creators: The Earth over Thousands of years, through trial and error and some really good guesses” “Well what created Earth?” “Is there anything bigger than Earth?” “The Universe.” “Is it older than the Earth?” “Presumably, yes”

“Based on the information you gave me about the Universe, Earth, and Our Creation, I would only have to guess that the Earth was Created by the Universe over thousands of years through trial and error and some really good guesses” If this conversation were to happen in real life, not only would my Computer surely be capable of passing the Turing Test, but Richard Dawkins would be very, very happy. But it leaves us with one more question begging to be asked:

“What created the universe?”

We don’t have enough information- us, nor the machines. humanity is still captivated by some ultimate creator.

That’s why

Unfortunately, it

would seem to be the prerogative of such a vast and complicated place such as to facilitate the creation of an entire universe to not care in the slightest what some insignificant clump of matter on an equally insignificant clump named Earth has to say about anything. So why do we, all over Earth, pay homage to something we presume “created us” or “nurtures us” when we are only very small pieces of a much larger piece in a vastly huge realm of space and time? It’s simple.

Because we are pieces of some rock we perceive to be

giant, floating through space and time.

In the overall scheme of things,

our rock is not really that giant, and we are but very small. Infinitesimally small, with a quite large sense of self which some of us call “ego.”

We, as a species, lack a definite “place” in the cosmos.

We

have no hierarchy to follow. It’s time we got over ourselves.

Our existential connection with our

surroundings is even more palpable with the internet than ever before.

We

are all metaphysically connected, being made of the same atoms that make up the far and distant galaxies.

Religion serves to dilute and unravel this

connection by supplying an answer to a question that has no real answer. God isn’t in the clouds, Buddha sitting under a Bodhi tree is a metaphor, Mohammed was a clever charlatan just like Jesus, Paul, Moses, Leviticus, and any of those so-called prophets. Western religion places a hierarchical king above all creation, and Eastern religion pacifies mystery with equally mysterious analects and divinations.

Neither of these means serve any end but spoiling your good 43

time, challenging your morals, and keeping you controlled. control?

The same way a person controls a machine.

How does it

There is a set of rules

you must follow absolutely, with only guilt-based and authority-driven corporal punishment. There is no metaphysical price for denying organized religion.

None.

The existence of a metaphysical “other life” is based solely on an earthly insistence of mortals, and contingent on your “faith” in their opinion on the matter.

How is this different than a machine, other than the fact that

a machine has no free will? prescribed set of rules.

A machine is given physical limitations, and a

No different than you.

Physical limitations are bipedal ground travel, limited climbing ability, 75 year maximum average lifespan, oxygen dependent, susceptible to temperature fluctuations, and energy dependent on caloric intake. Prescribed set of rules being drink water, eat food, pass waste, sexually reproduce, seek shelter, and interact in a society. That is all. You don’t need to kneel down and thank god for everything in your life, you only have to wake up and be a human.

You’re here, and there is an entire

planet full of things for you to do and see – what more do you want? The fact that parallels can be drawn between man and machine does not imply that we have a physical creator.

Chapter Seven – Philosophy is Dead. So the bastions of misanthropic demagogues leading you astray to satisfy their own ends have left you feeling less human, more and more furious, and completely disgusted with the world around you than ever before?

The global paradigm changed, and you weren’t invited to the party –

let alone the planning committee.

Fuck ‘em.

Start your own party – the

philosophy of YOU. We could start at the beginning if you’d like. no one on earth quite like you. people around you.

There is

If you’ll notice, there are quite a few

Some you like, some you don’t – and none of them seem to

fully agree with you. them, either.

You are you.

In fact, you find that you don’t always agree with

Your arguments tend to lean closer to proving your own stance

than they do finding an objective common ground.

Instead of engaging in an

ethical debate, you find yourself using rhetorical devices to illustrate the moral superiority of your statements and appeal to various weaknesses in your opponent’s argument rather than the truth value of the statements you make, in effect negating the entire premise of debate. From the moment you are conscious you begin making ethical judgments. What is right?

What is wrong?

What do those words actually mean?

Right

and wrong are concepts forced on an ethical decision after the fact.

Not as

an accurate portrayal of the intrinsic value, but an assessment by the valuation of others superimposed over your own personal values.

No matter

how large or small the judgment, there will be those that agree and those that disagree.

No moral argument has a singularity, no moral choice can be

regarded as without value.

The choice to kill and not to kill have no 45

difference as a response to the impulse to kill. Kill or do not kill. things involved. Gain?

The ethical choice is not as simple.

What is the motive to kill?

What are the motives not to kill?

Punishment?

The moral choice is easy. There are more

Revenge? Insanity?

Incarceration?

Profit?

Ostracization?

Guilt?

The tricky part isn’t making a choice for your self, it’s making a choice in the context of the ethics of other people- the society you live with and participate in.

If you are in contact with at least one human you

don’t share a blood relationship with, you are a member of a society, and moreover a culture. consequence.

In ethics, there is only choice, action, and

Anything else is an afterthought.

A choice is nothing but a

choice, really – an action resulting in consequences, lest I repeat myself. This makes the philosophical idea of “ethics” a moot point. and consequence.

There’s your ethics.

Choice, action,

What is right and wrong?

you decide is right or wrong, good or evil, point or counterpoint.

Whatever You can

argue until you are blue in the face, but the concepts of right and wrong are social constructs which perpetuate a disparity between the minds of people who insist they are right and you are wrong. let them be judged.

State your opinions and

The truth is that you said it, the choice was made by

you, the action was saying it, and you will face the consequences of saying it.

Just because someone says you’re wrong doesn’t make it so. As far as aesthetics, the idiom “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”

has existed throughout literature for thousands of years. for that.

What I see as art and what you see as art can vary as much as our

ethical opinions. beautiful.

There’s a reason

In an individualized philosophy, you decide what is

The thing about art that makes it great is that different people

see images and symbols in different ways.

Different in the way the artist

approaches his or her craft, and different in the way a viewer views the statement.

Art is about the transmission of cultural values and ethics.

And in a plane of philosophical endeavors, judging art is wholly individualized.

I can walk through an art gallery and immediately know what

I like and don’t like- but when I’m asked to explain myself- I am at a loss. I can talk about the physical use of the art medium, I can talk about the symbols the artist used and what they say to me, I can talk about what the piece reminds me of, but I cannot quantify what is beautiful about it- just because I see beauty in it does not mean that everyone will.

The truth is

that you can “feel” beauty – as an emotional response to sensory

stimulation. All this talk about truth – what is truth? words on this issue.

In the philosophy of you, you decide what is true.

first glance, truth is easy to determine. existence.

Many have written many At

It is based on confirmed

As a five year old, I was convinced that the Teenage Mutant

Ninja Turtles were not only real, but that everything they said was true. They lived in the sewers of New York, a place I knew to be real based on faith that people telling me about it were speaking the truth.

Sewers are

real, ninjas are real, teenagers are real, turtles are real, rats are real, but there is no shredder, rats are not anthropomorphic, and regardless of how much nuclear waste you dump on a turtle, you cannot teach it to be a teenage ninja. Truth is based in reality, but goes far beyond it. measurable, concrete, and not up for serious debate. later.

Reality is

We’ll get to that

Truth in existence can be verified by sight, sound, touch, taste,

and smell – sensory-based verification. shit, and feels like shit, it’s shit.

If it looks like shit, smells like Truth, however, is cast into the wind

when dealing with conceptual and perceptual issues. is no tangible evidence to back it?

What is true when there

This brings truth into a metaphysical

realm- where ideas and concepts created by your brain in a world inside your head can or can’t exist. The fact that you can dream something up, say a mythical creaturewe’ll pick a dragon, means it has an acceptable truth value. be real, but they are not.

Dragons could

They have scaly skin like lizards, massive size

like elephants, and ferocious qualities like “evil” men bent on destruction. Those three things are real, and verifiable in the world of the five senses. You can see, feel, touch, hear, and smell a lizard. taste it if you felt so inclined.

Hell, you could even

Reality is a sensory environment.

Dreams

and art are evidence of the ability to take sensory information and create a different reality in the space of your own individual cranium. So what is reality?

That’s what this is really all about, isn’t it?

In an individualized philosophy, reality is simply what you experience via your senses.

The term is much more loaded than that.

are all connected by memes.

Metaphysically, we

Ideas and pieces of information that are

processed by the brain, stored, and transferred amongst us for good or ill. 47

Biological evolution of the brain allows us to receive, store, and interpret information we receive by a number of ways- and then we take it one step further by having a conscious mind that can “visualize” things that don’t technically exist in the concrete world we live in.

Philosophy divided the

world into two realms – physical and spiritual. Metaphysics deals with those issues and concerns outside the physical realm- the realm of the mind and of ideas and truth and beauty. In a world with no real necessity for a Metaphysical realm, that function is quickly being replaced by our internet connections.

Your

metaphysical relationship to the internet is a mutually beneficial contribution to the “cloud” as an individual producer in a fog of memes representing the whole ability of humanity itself.

You exist as a piece of

the global net of consciousness, a drop in the monsoon of sensory information, for all to view and all to elaborate on.

Free art, free news,

free music, free books, free movies, free radio, free TV. for philosophy as a concept?

Philosophy itself is intertwined into our

lives because it is dictated by our consciousness.

Philosophy isn’t a thing

to be studied it’s an essence of what we are as people. pumpkin pie.

What need have we

Philosophy, in a sense, is our life.

Like the pumpkin in

It’s what our mind

consists of, sequences of sensory stimulation and pieces of philosophical postulates all swirling through synapses and spinning through time. As precious as life is to other lives and to its self, it is but a speck on the essence of time; and an insignificant whisp of atoms, the new scum of the earth’s crust.

From ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

A pallid

and insignificant piece of a greater puzzle that we will never understand, but must always try to understand.

This is the great quest of life.

gather knowledge and to further that knowledge. and of our progeny henceforth.

To

The quest of our ancestors,

To come together with other humans and make

the world a better place in any way that we can.

And when we die,

philosophy dies right along with us. We’re all a bunch of nobodies standing nowhere in a line waiting for nothing. to die.

The essence of our nature is to be born, exist, create life, and This endless cycle predates humankind itself.

What’s the point in

worrying about everything all the time, and feigning interest in what life has to offer?

What’s the point in “going with the flow,” and selling

yourself short like a closeout sale?

Live your life the way you deserve it,

and the way you want it- and don’t take anybody’s excuse when they tell you to get back in line.

Have a little faith in yourself for a change, quit

letting other people tell you who and what you are.

Instead of your social

opiates, just smoke some pot and get over the addiction.

Pass the joint to

the right. The End

For more words arranged in a manner similar to this, More information about the philosophy of the new scum, For music and video to satisfy your brain in a variety of ways, For access to many other interpretations of the ideas in this book

Please visit

Thank you for reading.

I wish you all courage in your attempt to answer your questions. -Zach

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