Saturday And Some Stuff And Things

Maybe I'm doing something right.

Maybe.

I don't fucking know though.

You feel me?

Can't even dress it up.

Anything that ever worked wasn't cuz of the white boy in me.

I wanna mean that.

Loosely connected thoughts.

Back to the lab again.

Just tryin' to live.

She told me, "May you find your worth in the waking world."

I picked up the controller again.

She shook her head and insisted I had learned what I needed to learn.

The waking world.

Back to the world.

To try and live.

Ordinary man.

Trying to live.

That's all.

I sit down and think that I want to write a bit. I turn on some music and notice that I’m not getting any sound. God damn it. What the fuck is going on? Check volume in Windows. Check that the right playback device is selected. Test playback device. Nothing. God damn it! I then realize that the TV my computer is plugged into has the sound turned all the way down. 

I’m angry today. 

Fuck CEOs. Fuck you if you are a CEO. 

Fuck the carceral state. 

Fuck The Supreme Court. 

Fuck Tucker Carlson. 

Fuck white nationalism. 

Fuck white supremacy. 

Fuck capitalism. 

Fuck Jeff Sessions. 

Fuck the War on Drugs. 

Fuck the lawyers who fix shit for rich motherfuckers who do bad shit. 

Fuck Goldman Sachs. 

Fuck Chase bank. 

Fuck Capital One. 

Fuck Netflix. 

Fuck the Democratic Party. 

Fuck the Republican Party. 

Fuck fascism. 

Fuck fascist superheroes. 

Fuck the state of Israel. 

Fuck SWAT teams. 

Fuck the NFL. 

Fuck the New England Patriots. 

Fuck Tom Brady. 

Fuck Robert Mueller. 

Fuck James Comey. 

Fuck the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Fuck welfare reform. 

Fuck Bill Clinton for welfare reform. 

Fuck Bill O’Reilly. 

Fuck Paul Ryan. 

Aight. That went on long enough. 

I wrote nothing on Monday or Tuesday and that frankly is unacceptable. 

Are you still reading? I don’t really care if you are but it’s nice if you are. Thank you.  

Yeah. So.

I don't think I got myself too many human followers. I guess I'm going to be dusting off this blog a little. I don't know that anybody is going to be paying the least bit of attention but if you are, hey. Don't be a stranger.

My name is Paul. I'm 40 years old. It stands to reason that I'm probably too old for all this but eh. It is what it is.

I've spent a lot of time in the Twitter roleplay scene writing various original characters. If anybody from that scene stumbles across this then hello. What's up? Obviously Twitter is quite fucked up these days due to the machinations of the muskrat.

It occurs to me that people I may actually know in real life might stumble across this. I think that is unlikely but I guess I find myself in a bit of a "not giving a fuck" era.

I play guitar. I started playing right at the end of 2020. I'm not that good but I play every single day. I primarily play acoustic.

I run a decent amount for physical and mental health reasons. I'm at almost 300 miles this year.

I'm a stoner at times.

I'm an ex-evangelical that was raised Catholic. At the current time, I'm coming to terms with the fact that I don't believe. It's only very recently that I've been honest with myself about that. It sounds clichè as fuck to say it's been quite a journey but it has.

Yeah. Aight. Later.

I’m reasonably certain there is an alternate timeline where America descends into fascism to the strains of “Holding out For a Hero” by Bonnie Tyler. 

Even as I sing along about pining for a street-wise Hercules, the spirit of eternal fascism tickles me. 

This song pines for Charles Bronson in Death Wish. 

It’s calling out for a version of Walt from Gran Torino who doesn’t have a redemption arc. 

It’s calling for a cop who becomes like The Punisher in real life. 

Umberto Eco wrote of the cult of heroism. 

This song could be the hymn for the cult of the avenging hero. 

How I Learned to Love the Lord

What follows will be the most honest attempt to date to explore a particular period in my religious history, specifically the period of time where I could be described as an Evangelical Christian.

At the current time, I am a sincere agnostic. I have no idea whether God or any gods or goddesses or supernatural beings exist. Like many people do, when the chips are down and shit is looking bad, I might beseech whatever gods may be out of desperation. I do however have a lingering suspicion that our ultimate reality is spiritual rather than material.

I was raised to be a Catholic. I’ve been to confession. I’ve taken communion. I often got tapped to read from the scriptures at Mass because my voice was clear and deep. I was never confirmed though. On paper, I’m still Catholic. I went through school with largely the same group of kids from kindergarten through about the 9th grade. See, in the 9th grade, shit got a little crazy. I did something I should not have done. To this very day, I don’t really know why the fuck I did it. The best answer I can give you is boredom. You also don’t think too deeply about the consequences of your actions when you’re a teenager. I mean, how the hell can you? I’m told the brain is still developing at that age. Anyway, I wrote up a few bomb threats and emailed them to various students and the principal of the school. I got in a world of trouble. I was suspended and then basically expelled from my school and my teenaged ass ended up getting charged with a Class B felony. This was back in 1999. This pretty much ruined my freshman year of high school. No Catholic institution would let me enroll because of this incident. They did not want to take the chance that I was the next school shooter. You also have to keep in mind that the infamous Columbine High School massacre occurred while my case was making its way through the juvenile court system.

So, there I was. I was a scrawny 16 year old kid who had just been exiled from everyone I’d pretty much ever known. It felt like my fucking world had ended. I was pretty sure I had ruined my fucking life forever because I was a dumb teenage kid who had no perspective. When the time came for my parents to stick me in another school, they found me a small, private school that was run by a local Baptist church. I wanted no part of it. I had seen TBN. I had a pretty good idea of what went on there. This type of religion seemed utterly brain dead to me.

I went. I barely fit in. This was a strange place, man. Nobody ever used profanity. There was no social dancing. Every single textbook was published by a company called Abeka which meant theology snuck into pretty much every subject. The theory of evolution was an Anti-Christian hoax inspired by Satan and man clung to it out of sinful pride. When other regions of the world were discussed, it had to be spelled out in black and white that the dominant religions there were false if that religion happened to be anything other than so-called biblical Christianity. There was also a really right-wing bent to the history we studied. Nelson Mandela was a terrorist and a communist. The Great Depression was greatly exaggerated by communist propagandists like John Steinbeck. It was like going to school in an alternate universe.

I looked around and it seemed like there was a lot of genuine love between people. These people seemed to care about one another.

I’d been in Catholic school my entire life and I saw so much cruelty there. I didn’t see much of that at all among these people. They had something and I wanted it. Holy shit. This seems like the narration for an episode of The 700 Club where a former stripper is about to convert but it’s accurate.

I was a kid. I had made the biggest mistake of my life. It was a mistake that had sent me away from every friend I’d ever made. I hated myself. It was easy for me to accept that there was a darkness inside of me that had driven my actions. Maybe it was my sinful nature. Yeah, it was my sinful nature. I gradually came to believe that Jesus Christ was the answer.

I can recall getting on my knees one night in my bedroom. I asked God for forgiveness and accepted Jesus. I can remember feeling my eyeballs heat up and being aware of a really bright light. I can also recall my ears buzzing. It scared me shitless. I believed I had been saved.

Skip forward in time to today. I’ve had a lot of time to reflect upon what happened. My conversion happened during a personal crisis. The thing about crises is that they eventually pass. What “saves” you in a crisis might not be what you need after it’s all over. Truths that seem iron clad in a crisis might not be so iron clad when you have time to catch your breath and think a little.

At 11 AM, the pledge will be recited 

Call the number on your screen to report 

anybody who ain’t sufficiently excited 

about being free to do what the fuck we tell you 

while the red, white and the blue 

fly above 

and burst your hearts with love 

God, guts and glory 

goes the story 

of a nation that kicked ass and looked good doin’ it 

Light from the Lord God spread to the world 

by us 

Evil and darkness flee 

Get your WWIII commemorative pin today 

to trigger the snowflakes and the pussies 

on your way to church 

to hear the padre preach about how Jesus woulda dimed his neighbors out to ICE 

cuz it’s the law 

If there was anything that Jesus was about, it was the law. 

Bless the nightsticks and the guns 

Bless the kevlar and the riot shields 

Bless the blood in the streets and bless that liquor to forget all that shit 

or to get nutted up to lie under oath about it

or to just live here 

in the land of the free, the home of the brave 

one nation 

that got the goods on all of us 

Dad bod and the mind of a philosopher king.

It’s.. hey. I don’t really think I’m a king. It’s me being  braggadocious. 

White fear weaponized runs the machine. 

Porn bots keep following me like it's cool.