A Planet Of The Apes Thanksgiving

 

     We are a nation of six year olds that have never been loved by our parents while being fed a steady diet of Ritalin and Mountain Dew.  It seems that a larger than it should be portion of Americans would rather die than act collectively for the greater good.  And by the greater good, I mean not spreading an airborne plague amongst ourselves by simply covering our dirty mouths.

     Since when did dangerously lethal amounts of stupidity become known as bravery?  Wearing a mask while out in public is not a difficult thing to do and it is not a sign of weakness.  I don't know where you've been just as much as you don't know where I've been so we'll all cover our filthy gaping maws when we leave the house.  That's the new social contract.  If you don't like it get the fuck out of society.

     It was only a matter of time before this country was faced with a crisis that it couldn't bomb or buy its way out of with its “exceptionalism.”  COVID does not give a shit what the stock market did today and I am still dumbfounded and infuriated by the elected officials and media personalities that said money was more important than our elders so they should be sacrificed to save the economy.

     This virus is not a wedding in Afghanistan so it can't be taken out with a drone.  COVID should not be framed with the terminology of warfare.  It cannot be swiftly beaten back with “Shock and Awe.”  It can only be dealt with by very smart people who are not camera ready and people like that are in short supply these days.

     I've been stuck in my house since March, with no end in sight, because wanting to be constantly entertained was suddenly seen as a Constitutional right.  All of these gun toting rugged individualists that are unable to live without haircuts, high school football and Applebee's can go fuck themselves.  I'm not willing to die for some shithead that thinks it's their solemn patriotic duty to go out to a restaurant after watching children give each other concussions.  It's weird how these assholes fight to the death when there are pickles on their sandwich but offer up a deafening silence when it comes to cops murdering with impunity and hysterectomies being performed in our concentration camps.  I guess anything beyond fighting for the right to a mani/pedi is a bridge too far for some people.

     I am so exhausted from hearing the incessant whining about not being able to attend sporting events and not being allowed to drink in bars.  Every one of these unliterate lumps somehow became an epidemiologist over night and claims to know more than actual scientists.  When geniuses like Rand Paul end up getting laughed out of a room they cry about being marginalized and that their opinions should be heard.  Here's a newsflash: ignorance is not a point of view that needs to be discussed or given equal time to.  Go read a book that wasn't written by a sports writer or a TV preacher and then maybe you'll be invited back to the table with the grown ups.

     I have only been to two shows this year and I probably shouldn't have gone to either one of them.  I definitely should not have gone to the second one.  Even though it was outdoors, it was a super spreader cluster fuck of a day once people got a few beers deep.  It was not worth risking my safety to take some pictures and play road crew for a day.

     Sitting on a shelf, I have a stack of tickets from shows that were cancelled this year.  Some of which were scheduled in venues that will quite possibly be gone by the time this is all over.  Against Me!, Bad Religion with War On Women, Bikini Kill, Control Top, the Eviction reunion, Fuzz and Rage Against The Machine.  I was also supposed to see Anti-Flag and the Homeless Gospel Choir on multiple occasions as well.  Add to that the numerous local shows that would have popped up on a week's notice.

     I was supposed to go on a mini-tour with Killer Of Sheep back in March which didn't happen.  There was going to be some sort of shenanigans revolving around Submachine's 30^th anniversary that I was more than likely going to have some level of involvement in and none of that happened either.

     All of my coping mechanisms have been taken from me.  No punk shows, no movies and no restaurants.  I've also been avoiding record stores and the comic book store as much as possible because people are disgusting animals with no regard for others.

     Writing has been a struggle because coffee shops aren't safe to go to.  Trying to write at home has some serious problems for me.  I end up getting distracted by chores or saying fuck the chores as well as the writing and end up going to sleep.  Sitting at a table for a few hours when there is nothing but the blank page and a trough full of coffee in front of me forces me to do the damned thing instead of sitting at home where everything is competing for my limited attention span and I end up doing nothing.

     As some people have thrown caution to the wind with COVID because they got bored with it, I have taken an opposite approach.  I have tried to become more disciplined with my habits.  Going out less and less, being more mindful of how close I get to people at the grocery store and lowering the amount of people that I'm around.  Making sure that I wear a mask any time I'm around someone I don't live with.  I am sick of this shit so I will be taking my quarantining and isolation to extremes.

     All of this is to say that I could give a flying fuck at the Moon about you wanting to go out to dinner and spend holidays with your relatives and their dumb uncovered faces.

     Science and a virus that will kill you don't care about your feelings and that you can't drink in a bar so shut the fuck up, wear a mask and stay in your goddamn house.  This all would have been over by now if you had listened the first time.  We as a society didn't earn it so we don't deserve to have fun.

     This is playing out like so many science fiction stories.  Unknown disease springs up.  People start dropping like flies.  Government officials think they can punch this unknown disease in the face while ignoring the medical professionals.  I can't wait until we get to the part where there are apes riding down the middle of a famous city street on horseback.  We are so close to the end of humanity and too stupid to save ourselves.  Between COVID and climate change, I don't know what will happen first, Dune or Planet Of The Apes.

Anti-Rage-Bad-Sabbath

     As a music fan, I couldn't help but notice a rather odd trend that has kept popping up over the past several months of civil unrest.  Dumb ass white people in my age demographic that never bothered to pay attention to the lyrics of the music that they listen to.

     It seems like every few weeks some flesh bag that lacks critical thinking skills takes to social media to go after Tom Morello, from Rage Against The Machine, to complain about his, or the band's, politics.  I can't help but feel embarrassed for the person that tries to wage this needless war of words.  As if it will have some sort of effect on anything.

     These would be internet assailants never seem to bother to even check Tom's Wikipedia page.  If they did, they would learn of the history of activism that he was raised with and that he also has a degree in Political Science from Harvard.  Whether you agree with him or not, Tom Morello is no light weight in any sense of the word.  The other weird thing is that they never seem to figure out until it's way too late in the conversation that he's Black and they don't quite know how to process that.

     How people have missed that Rage Against The Machine skews slightly to the left for the past thirty years is beyond me.  Especially coming from people that are my age and grew up with the band.  That was during a time when it took effort to obtain music and we had to go out and buy CDs in order to listen. There were no smartphone applications that streamed poor quality sound to you and paid the artists fractions of pennies.

     Rage put their intentions on Front St. from the beginning.  From the name of the band to the Buddhist monk, Thic Quang Duc, burning himself in immolation on the cover of their first record, how was there any question?  And I'm not sure how dense you have to be for the lyrics not to clue you in.  The vocals weren't garbled or lost in the mix.  These were not Fugazi records where the wisdom was hidden in the metaphor and turn of phrase.  They were right there up front, loud and clear with their message.

     The artwork on every album wasn't subtle either.  There was a collage of books on the inside of Evil Empire that I used as a summer reading list once I had some form of income.  I scoured every used bookstore in Pittsburgh trying to track those books down.  That was the record that started to show me that there was more to existence than my white bread upbringing.

     A similar thing also happened recently with Black Sabbath when they put out a “Black Lives Matter” shirt printed with the font from Master Of Reality.  The “Keep Metal Stupid” contingent freaked out because, again, they never looked at the liner notes or paid attention to a word that came out of Ozzy's mouth on those first four albums.  Was “War Pigs” not clear enough?

     These dipshits also never bothered to learn anything about their supposed favorite band.  The members of Black Sabbath grew up in a part of post World War II England that was hit very hard because Birmingham was a factory town.  They grew up in the devastation left by war and were writing their songs during the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.  They were writing about what they knew and what they saw going on around them.  With that collected experience and their history of hooliganism and drug fueled antics, how would Black Sabbath be in favor of police brutality and overreaching authority?  I guess that turns some people off when they discover that their musical heroes aren't bootlickers pushing faux rebellion that is easily marketable and spoon fed to the masses.

     Of all the bands on the planet, Bad Religion and Anti-Flag have had to deal with this as well.  Unless you were repeatedly dropped on your head as a child, there should be no confusion as to where either of these bands are coming from.

     From the cross-buster logo to album titles like The Empire Strikes First, Bad Religion has always been very forward with their messaging.  Did Greg Graffin use words with too many syllables in “American Jesus” for some people to understand?

     And in a very forrest through the trees situation, some people couldn't figure out that Anti-Flag was a political band. Not only is it in the band name and every album title they've ever come up with, it's in every song and pamphlet's worth of information in the liner notes.  I don't see how there is any confusion with “Die For The Government” and “Fuck Police Brutality” which are two of their earliest songs.  They weren't hiding anything and nor should they have to.

     If you don't like art that makes you think or challenges your preconceived notions and willful ignorance, I don't know what to tell you.  Maybe go listen to Pennywise or Blink-182 or some other mediocre bullshit for dullards, like the Offspring.  Clear Channel has several stations that are filled to the gills with songs about nothing that are readily available to provide extra mayonnaise to your bland diet of flavorless culture.  All of this feigning outrage and pearl clutching is tiresome and these people are boring.

Assholes On A Rampage Or White Male Supremacy Is One Helluva Drug

 

     Well, yesterday was the day (11/3/2020).  We'll find out if the giant wave of stupidity and hate crashes harmlessly against the shoreline or if it will drown us all with its vitriol and selfishness.  My hope is that forces of common decency can pull off one last trick before humanity flushes itself down the shitter.

     Walking around my neighborhood has me feeling less than optimistic and my anxiety has been running rampant.  I've been filling the house the sounds of John Prine and The Clash to help keep the demons at bay and that seems to be helping.  Keeping the television turned off and the phone on the other side of the house have also been good decisions.

     I have gotten really tired of local media trying to put forth this idea that Pittsburgh is some sort of forward thinking haven of progressiveness.  It's really not.  Especially when the majority of people in this town get their information from sports talkshow hosts.  It was very unsettling how every one of these dipshits became epidemiologists overnight and were spouting bullshit over the public airwaves all because grown-ups playing games went away for a while.  And when sports did come back their little brains couldn't grasp the idea of athletes kneeling in quiet protest or withholding their labor when police are murdering people on an almost daily basis.  Sports and racism go together in Pittsburgh like chocolate and peanut butter.

     While in COVID lockdown, I've been passing the time with home improvement projects so the house that I shouldn't have bought doesn't fall over.  One of the more peculiar downsides of this has been making the acquaintance of the asshole down the street.  He flies a B*ue Lives Matter/thin blue line 'Merikkkan flag on the front of his house while also flying a “Don't Tread On Me” flag.  Something tells me that he doesn't know the meaning behind at least one of those two flags.

     Since I don't want to be dressed in my usual black cargo pants/shorts and black t-shirt while working outside in the sun, I'll throw on one of the many shirts that I've collected over the years from marching in the Labor Day parade.  The designs that my union prints on these shirts fall squarely into the “America, Fuck Yeah!!!” category so I see no other use for them other than to wear them while doing yard work.

     Mr. “Don't Tread On Me” always sees me working on the house while he's walking his dog without a leash and not picking up after it or while he's setting off fireworks in the middle of the day.  I'm guessing he sees the sappy flag store patriotism printed on my shirt and has made the mistake of thinking that we are like-minded in some way.  His topics of conversation always stop just shy of whining about the large Latinx population of the neighborhood.  This asshole has only been in the neighborhood for a few years as compared to my sixteen years so he bristled a bit when I said the area has been that way long before I moved in.  He also gave me an odd look when I told him my concerns over the early stages of gentrification that are starting to happen with the uptick in house flipping that's been going on.  He didn't really seem to understand how I could think gentrification was a bad thing.  The next time I'm working in the yard I'll be sure to bring out a boombox with “Cop Killer” playing on a loop.  From the looks of his Virginia license plates he's probably an ICE agent here to hassle the locals.

     To help break up the day while I'm day jobbing from home, I've been going for long walks around the neighborhood as soon as I punch out.  I can't go a hundred yards, in any direction, from my front door without encountering T*ump merchandise.  From the typical campaign yard signs to giant flags to window decals that cover the back windows of pickup trucks.  This shit is everywhere and the people that display this nonsense give off a vibe of confrontational pride about it.  Good for you.  You spent $39.99 to tell me that you're an asshole.  In my mind that shit is the same as a swastika.

     I am very worried about how these assholes are going to react regardless of how the election shakes out.  I remember walking around Downtown a few days after the election in 2016 and being surrounded by drunk white boys screaming “Yeah, T*ump!!!” on every street corner.  The mindless violence that these people are capable of at the drop of a red hat is alarming.

     So much for being “Stronger Than Hate” while also having a complete disregard for the teachings of Fred Rogers.  All of these so-called Christians falling in lock step with the antithesis of what that man stood for make my brain hurt when they start quoting him.  The great selfish “Fuck you” of it all will be on full display for at least the next few weeks.

     When I woke up this morning, I was shocked to see that several numbskulls that look like pudgy versions of my high school bullies and gym teachers were elected to public office.  They also happen to be the spitting image of toxic masculinity and white supremacy.  As my stomach sank, I immediately thought of the Kurt Vonnegut quote: “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”

     One of the sadder parts of this is knowing full well that several members of my immediate family voted against their nieces and grandchildren's futures. I don't know if it's short sightedness, selfishness, some religious bullshit or pining for a time period that never really existed but it's disgusting to me whatever it is.

     No matter the outcome, we are so collectively fucked beyond fucked.  I guess I'll start looking into filing for political asylum in New Zealand.