My wife is downstairs playing the Wii right now.
A peaceful, synthesized soundtrack trinkles up the stairs and overwhelms the loft with a sugary, hypnotic melody. I am trying to concentrate on my political blog but can’t help feeling lulled into a somatic sleep by the music, a wakeful dream.
She is playing The Legend of Zelda, a little blond dude running around collecting coins by busting open pumpkins.
I think it’s a front for a Leftist cult, imbedded with secret codes.
After hours of playing, you reach a secret level that exposes an organized conspiracy of shocking proportions. You discover the Illuminati’s underground chamber, with the plans for world domination hidden behind a wall.
Link, and therefore, you, go through a sinister portal to nefarious ideas.
Mind Control from Nintendo.
That’s why I don’t trust video games.
There’s too many flashing lights, it fucks with your head, like the banned Gnarls Barley video.
There’s just too many ways for programmers to invade your mind. Too many senses to be stoked.
Plus, too many buttons to push.
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I walked to the store tonight.
The moon hung upside down and looked like a melon rind, a smiling face without eyes. A star blinked, or a satellite. Fast food bags lay flat and run-over on the asphalt, bugs hovered over grimy black puddles. The city felt like a video game to me. A place of constant danger or amusement. A maze of role playing.
It seemed unnreal.
I’m an old fashion Atheist looking for a religious experience in a modern world.
A world where neon restaurant menus stay lit up all night after they’re closed.
Where it’s acceptable to dance in public with headphones on, but not to share the music with everybody else.
Where everybody pisses their pants when the stock market tumbles, whether they own shares in AT&T, Apple, or ACME Anvil Company, or jackshit.
A world where people look at me like I’m crazy when I say that fire hydrants are cartoon dogs that smile at me.
The truth is, if there is such a thing anymore, we’re masquerading mannequins. In a hyper-trendy culture, where anti-trendy is ‘in’, we pantomime ourselves all day, then come home and don’t know what to do with ourselves, sit on the couch with our arms folded on our chest.
There’s a general, suffocating fear of the future, still, we drunkenly continue down our path of energy-sucking consumption, like cows being led through the slaughter house, traipsing through the deadly conveyor belts with Dolce Gabanna blinders, while disco balls throw light around promiscuously.
We know something terrible is coming, but we all have different ideas of just what that is. Environmental Destruction. Terrorism. Economic Collapse. Health Epidemics. Who knows?
The modern world is a shifting kaleidoscope of entertainment and stimuli, fear and media manipulation. Anything of note and weight is discarded by the side of the Super Information Highway, nothing heavy than a feather can fit through those tubes.
Truths change daily. With each hasty news cycle.
Religion is a television show.
T.V is religion.
There are galleries that sell $100,000 works of art by a grafitti artist that tells the Rich they’re rats and Capitalism sucks.
To coincide with the second day of auctions, Banksy updated his website with a new image of an auction house scene showing people bidding on a picture that said, “I Can’t Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit.”
The machine wins when it devours its dissenters by putting them to work.
When college kids film themselves rocking out to Lincoln Park with Che Guerera posters behind them and posting it on Youtube.
Perhaps Earth really was settled by the rejects of Golgafrincham.
> The Modern World by Wolf Parade
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Sometimes I get a case of the ‘don’t want to leave the house’, but nothing like this woman.
The boyfriend called police on Feb. 27 to report that “there was something wrong with his girlfriend,” Whipple said, adding he never explained why it took him two years to call.
He said the boyfriend had brought the woman food and water during the two years and told investigators he asked her daily to come out of the bathroom.
“And her reply would be, ‘Maybe tomorrow,’” Whipple said. “According to him, she did not want to leave the bathroom.”
The house had another bathroom he could use.
It reads like a Raymond Carver story or maybe Bukowski, but this woman is real. This happened. She didn’t want to leave the toilet, she didn’t want to get up. She was that dysfunctional, that depressed.
You could say she was really down in the crapper.
[Rimshot]
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“If life is a game of ping pong, I’d rather be the ball than the paddle.” — Buddha’s remarks upon seeing the sport of table tennis for the first time in 1937.

