If you had to go your entire life without Sandwiches or Football, which would you choose?

I'm serious. I don't know the answer.

Facebook Dinosaurs

Remember the days when Facebook started? I joined August 2004 as a freshman at Ball State and vividly remember the first days of my relationship with the site now half a billion people use. It felt my use of the site was illicit for some reason; a place where only people our age existed. A place that we could do or say whatever was on our minds. A place where it was justifiable to glorify the stupid shit we did on Fridays and Saturdays.

We are all for the most part six-year-old Facebook users. As odd as this might sound, at the same time we are Facebook's oldest people. Remember when you had 150 friends? Then you went through school and have 500. Now your grandpa is on Facebook, gazing at the picture of you slamming jello shots on new year's (or doing bear crawls on St. Patrick's day). And he, your grandma, their friends all feel they need to know you. Now you're up to 1000 friends. What is going on here?

With the society's emphasis on a person's need to control the amount and type of one's personal information on the web, our collective online documented history has been left up for judgment by people who haven't been online as long as we have. As the oldest on FB, we draw the most scrutiny. Because my uncle views pictures of me at a bar playing a young coed's leg-guitar, that becomes a cause for a family sit down across the state about my condition and the life choices I've been making (real things, people...). Before that same uncle was on Facebook, anything was possible. Now, I have to control the content of my profile because some 40-year-old (and 2-year-old FB user, mind you) says I have to. Well eff you, sir.

I remember back in my day when bitches were poking bitches for fun, and Fox News wasn't reporting it on the horrors of it. I remember before all the companies, the causes, the kids and kin were running Facebook. I felt comfortable the display of my reckless youth was for everyone to see, because it was -- and still is -- hilarious. Nowadays, if I so happen to be sipping a beer at a bar and some hussy snaps a photo of it, in the back of my mind I can't help but think I'll be chastised for it. Call me old-fashioned, but the Facebook as I knew it died when it started having real people on it. Now every time someone in my family tells me "I love you" on my wall, it honestly makes me want to vomit.

Exactly like I did after drinking too much in college, when someone photographed me and showed the world how big of an idiot is was. And like it still should be today.

I'm done with Facebook.

A slow jam from the past for your evening...

Oh yeah...

A great article

Don't know if anyone else thinks about struggling with the process of growing up, but I ponder about this kind of stuff on the reg. The indifference, the selfishness and the lack of caring about really anything is getting old.

John Moore sent me this and I'm trying to use this as a guide to building a foundation of a more fulfilled life.

An adapted commencement speech from recently deceased author David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide last Friday.

"There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

If at this moment, you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude -- but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real -- you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue -- it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often described as being "well adjusted," which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphal academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default-setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home -- you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job -- and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid g-d- people.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth...

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do -- except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line -- maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible -- it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out."

Courtesy of WSJ...

Lazy "Author" Apologizes to Fading Readership

Yeah, I know.

I'm a P.O.S. for not putting anything on this in a while. I'm going to try to pepper this thing with more everyday analysis, mixed in with inspiring/hilarious articles and rocking songs to spice things up again.

Anyway, back on my way to Indy. California was great, hard to even write anything about it because it came and went so quickly. A couple things about that state: It's fast and expensive. But for all the right reasons. Also, Ron Jeremy's essence should be bottled up and sold. That man smells phenomenal. On a visceral, tangible level he literally must use the finest combination of soaps and shampoos while spraying a high-class, subtle cologne. Celestially, I think he smells like I would guess a cloud would smell. Mind-blowing how someone you would never guess has any pleasant exterior qualities would smell magical.

Mid-Year Resolutions

Between June 1, 2010 and June 1, 2011 I'll be accomplishing two things.

1.) Lose 44 Lbs.

2.) Not wear underwear.

Stay tuned...

Of craigslist and chatroulette

The advancements society has made in the internet age are remarkable.

We accomplish once-monumental tasks at the snap of a finger and click of a mouse. Each day lately, I’ve explored some nuance of the web I’d yet to sample (I’m working on a really sweet RSS feed). It’s difficult to keep up with what’s new when I haven't grasped entirely the things I claim to know. I still don’t understand both Facebook and Twitter to their full extents, although it’s on my agenda.

Anyway, the culture we’ve fostered on quick, efficient task management can be a great thing (email vs. post office, online shopping vs. going to the mall, etc.). But many times the internet is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad place.

Craigslist

I have two qualms with craigslist.

To qualify these statements, let’s operate under the assumption that I trust everyone I do business with on the internet, mmmkay?

I purchased a 60” DLP TV before the Superbowl XLIV after my main man Jake moved out. Upon deciding on my move and learning the shipping cost, I realized I needed to sell it quickly. Due to its free-ness, I trusted (smart!) craigslist to let my business handle its business.

When aiming to pawn my beast of a television (still for sale!), I found a seemingly legit (but really not legit) buyer after a few hours. She would handle the shipping, send me a bank approved money order and be out of my life forever. All seemed hunky-dory. After a couple weeks the money order didn’t come. I realized I was duped.

I mean, yes, she said she was a deaf-mute woman from Seattle who was buying a television for her cousin in Indianapolis, so making phone calls were a no-no. But is it really my fault for believing her? (Of course.)

In my world, people of every type get the benefit of the doubt on the first try. No matter what defines you, you’ll always get a shot with me, regardless. Even if you’re a Helen Keller-type from the great Northwest, I’ll let you buy my TV! That is, until you burn me. The check never came, and I haven't put any effort into selling it anymore.

Nonetheless, television is still on the market. Dedicated Hombloggers, I challenge you to please fucking buy it, for the love of god.

Craigslist exists as a prominent tool for informal job hunting. I earned my internship at Luck Media and Marketing through a vigorous perusing of CL. So it has its benefits. The lack of a quality filter is a problem.

Most of the issue is with the applicant (read: yourself). Applying for jobs is a brutally mundane and tedious process. It’s a lot like baseball. If you connect on three out of ten at-bats, you are considered a good hitter. Same for applying. You’re going to miss a lot. I did.

You'll get to the point in the application process where you really stop caring about what you are applying for, just so long as you're applying. You play the numbers. Job quality takes a backseat to desperation. Nothing matters other than the existence of a job opportunity, and you're going to apply for that job because you are poor, mindlessly bored from applying for jobs all day and basically a whore to the system. You convince yourself you'd enjoy jobs you have no business applying for; jobs you are far overqualified for. But hey, jobs is jobs, man.

When I saw two listings that said “Looking for a PR/Content Writer,” I was resigned in viewing both of them. First was an herbal foods supermarket chain. It seemed pretty legitimate, working for a company given decent wage for work-from-home tasks. Not too bad. I applied, spent two hours on a proper resume and cover letter then submitted it. Granted, the company did have a Thai sounding name to it, I talked myself into thinking this was a valid company owned and operated by non-Americans who could use my services in translating their broken words to proper, readable English (I was wrong).

Diving deeper into the company's offerings, I was taken to a products page where I was (not) surprised to see the 'healthy foods' they spoke of wasn’t quite that. If by ‘healthy’ they meant ‘alters your health’ than I guess that’s not entirely false advertising. But ‘foods’ is certainly not a proper way to describe this.

Yes, I learned the position I sought after for hours was not a grocery store in need of PR/Content writer, but instead a company looking for a shameless man to SPAM you about a red bull with powers of ‘enhancing the activity of sexual hormones in men’ and ‘nourishing the body’s reproductive glands’ (with NO sugar, NO caffeine, and NO CALORIES. Tell me more!). Needless to say, Luck Media and Marketing seems like more gainful employment. Going to concerts and getting free awesome CDs might be a better job perk than bringing home free cases of liquid Cialis (cheers!)

I’m drawn to craigslist, though. I will continue to look at what kind of free shit I can get. But do trust that I won’t be so naïve next time I seek employment.

Chatroulette

The title of this post promises some musings on chatroulette. Here they are: Don’t go to chatroulette. Everything you’ve heard about it is true. I’m all for freedom of speech, but never should exist a forum where teenagers and grown men are placed randomly in the same room with no regulation or consequences. Everything you’ve heard about chatroulette is true. Anything goes, and it usually does. On the metaphorical tower that is the internet, chatroulette. is the end-place when people shoot down through the basement’s trap door. It’s lower than low. Yet I can't take my eyes off of it.

Thanks for reading, here’s a portrait of Carl Weathers.