Style Sections

Megalulz.  The NYTimes style section is so fucking wonderful.  I love it.  I was so taken by a recent article that I penned one about my own scene, names changed to protect the virulent:

Jonathan Albert Robertson, who has a bachelors degree in Hospitality Management from Phoenix University, hit bottom professionally last summer when he lost his job as a cashier at the Smithfield Street Adult Book Store.  Vying for jobs mucking horse stalls for Pittsburgh's mounted police squad and transporting blood samples for the methadone clinic, he had been too hungover to go to any of his interviews for five days in a row.  "They couldn't even lie to my PO," he said.  "Fuck those bitches."

It's a story familiar to anyone seeking to land a job that will pay for a mattress and a Fentanyl habit that's just, like recreational, and definitely not a problem.  Peter Morrison, 25, who writes poems and stuff and graduated from Antioch College, where he thinks he did an independent study, got a job at the Andy Warhol Museum, where he skulks between poorly curated galleries, sleeping in folding chairs whenever it gets slow.

"I submitted an elaborate exegesis proving that Andy Warhol is the reincarnated spirit of Ptolemy," he said, "but the museum Director just told me that it was an unctuous and supercilious shibboleth."

Which explains how a bunch of them ended up, on a crisp November night, huddled together on the kitchen floor of a Point Breeze apartment just nearing the fourth plateau of a serious trip on dextromethorphan hydrobromide.

It was a nightly opportunity to engage in the nihilistic pursuit of self-effacement in a doomed effort to overcome the inherent suffering of existence, a roving clubhouse of degenerate drug fags self-exiled from reasonable society, more willing to believe that Dick Cheney piloted holographic airplanes into the twin towers than that succor even exists in this untethered world of ash and pain.  Fueled by heroin and ketamine scored from some black dude in Lincoln-Larimer, impressive tolerances, and the imperturbable immortality conferred by not giving a fuck, yo, members spend their hours filling the air with talk of the DXM angel, Calsutmoran, the best material for making a tourniquet, and the filmography of Alejandro Jodorowsky.

They've been catching the eye of some dudes who sell drugs at the bar down the street.  "I don't know why they're gonna buy from a bunch of nig-nogs," said Marco DiMarco, a well-known bookie with a small business selling stamp bags on the side.  "You can't trust 'em.  They'll kill you sure as look at you."

"Shut the fuck up, bitch," replied Latasha Wallis, a bartender with a degree from the Fantastic Sam's Beautician Institute and Convenience Store.

"Aw you know I ain't racist," DiMarco laughed.

Young, web-savvy, and too strung out to consider the consequences of their actions, this group of friends blames their own fundamental lack of employability on the flawed character of everyone else in the world.  Joe Batlack, who worked as an administrative assistant once, summed it up: "I was just like, fuck you, you can't fire me, I quit."

They envision a kind of Weimar debauchery that will ultimately culminate in an apocalpytic orgy of doom.  "I pretty much figure there will be like some kind of conflagration soon anyway," Robertson shrugs.  "Fuck it.  At least I don't have to fill out a time sheet or whatever."

Morrison was less chipper.  "I'll probably be dead by the time I'm 30 anyway.  Or else the aliens."

The Time Being

It was only a matter of time, but the alacrity with which the usual reprobates leapt to tell us that The Elections in Egypt prove the need for Occupy Wall Street to join up with the Donk surprised even me.  It's a silly bit of rhetoric: the "secular and liberal Egyptians", whom this particular Digby-manqué is eager to overcredit for the so-called Revolution, were out-organized at the ballot box by religious conservatives.  These religious parties are some kind of Egyptian analog for American Republicans, or perhaps the American Tea Party, which is either synonymous with the Republican Party, or else is a group that captured the Republican Party via "participation", or else is a group that was co-opted into the Republican Party, although perhaps in the process of being co-opted it managed to exert some rightward political pressure on the Republicans.  The writer is a little confused on the point.  On the other side, par contre, Egypt's secular revolutionaries are like Occupy Wall Street, or like American liberals, and their failure to organize will repeat the failure of Egypt's irreligious revolutionaries to organize, although Occupy Wall Street is not so much encouraged to organize itself as it is to let itself be co-opted by the Democratic Party . . . like I said, a little confused.

I will gladly pay you forever for a hamburger never

So yesterday I asked why we would bomb Pakistan.  The WaPo obligingly answers:

The latest U.S.-Pakistan crisis is threatening to undo months of efforts to mend an increasingly frayed relationship, and could also undermine the Obama administration’s strategy for gradually ending the war in Afghanistan.

 OIC. 

Flame On!

If a nuclear weapon were to be detonated hundreds of miles into the atmosphere above the continental United States, the resulting electromagnetic pulse could destroy the nation’s electric grid and render impotent all elements of society that rely on electricity. In short order, many aspects of American society would be thrust into the early 19th century.

-"Protecting America from the EMP Threat"

Well, someone's never heard of the Kármán Line.

The Temple of Boom

What is the game in Pakistan?  Good lord, even Gee Dub was smart enough to steer mostly clear of Pakistan.