BEDA 2: Kalamazoo Exodus

I have to leave for work in ten minutes. This is the perfect time to start writing this blog.

August is coming up on me pretty fast, a lot faster than I thought it would. It's one thing to say "I'm going to move out of Kalamazoo eventually," or "next year," but when it starts to be four months the reality of it is a little daunting. I have to find a new apartment and a new job in a different city, and that's a process I'm not looking forward to. But it's something I have to do.

Last night was my friend Paul Rich's final Kalamazoo hurrah before he moves onto bigger at better things in St Louis, and something became apparent to me: we're all on our way to somewhere else. The people that I associate so closely with Kalamazoo will not be here five years from now, and if I were to stay I would watch them trickle out one by one. I like that idea in one sense, because it makes me optimistic about the future and happy for everyone because their ambitions will lead them to better things. In another sense it makes me sort of sad, because Kalamazoo is so unlike my hometown. I can always go back to Commerce and see familiar faces, friends and family that all live in one convenient place. But five years from now, and maybe in less time than that, I suspect Kalamazoo will be virtually deserted of all the people I knew here. They'll all be somewhere else, and big nights out at the bar and parties with these specific people will be an indefinite thing of the past.

That bums me out, but it's not all bad to leave the past in the past.
Here's to the future.

BEDA 1: It begins.

Oh sweet Jesus, day one and I already don't know what to write about.
I feel sort of inclined to write about April Fool's Day in some way or another. Sort of tough though, since I haven't pulled any pranks today and I'm not really interested in the origin of April Fools.
I think instead we're going to talk about Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzche is going to shatter you world view and then beat you to death with his mustache.

Nietzsche is one of those guys that you hear about all the time but that you've probably never read. For me he was never required reading in my education or a man to whom I attached any specific ideas. Instead he was a name peppered throughout movies and television to make a character seem smarter by having read him.
Example:
"I don't get you Locke. One minute you're killing boars, the next you're quoting Nietzsche." - That guy from LOST who died when he climbed up in the drug-smuggling plane, and then it fell.*
Basically, I wanted to read his stuff for two reasons. One was to see what all the fuss was about. My second reason is this: the most masturbatory thing I do, besides fine-tuning my facebook page to make me as interesting and likable as possible, is to read great and notable authors who I already know I will agree with.
Everything I ever heard about Nietzsche before I read any of his work led me to believe that I would agree with and enjoy him. There is something dark and existential about his reputation. I just recently heard a critic of Chuck Palahniuk's say that he writes like a 16 year old who has just discovered Nietzsche and Nine Inch Nails.
I can think of no greater endorsement.
So, it's the case with Nietzsche as it is with Noam Chomsky and Leo Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I can sit and read these works and say "Yes! Exactly! This is exactly what I was thinking! I am exactly as smart as Leo Tolstoy OMFG!"

So anyways, I'm reading Nietzsche's The Gay Science right now (the title of which applies to the combination of wisdom and laughter) and I'm really enjoying it. More on Nietzsche later this month as I approach the end of the book, but for now I'm going to leave you with some of the lines and passages that have struck me so far in my reading:

"What is new, however, is always evil being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and old pieties; and only what is old is good."

"Believing that they possess consciousness, men have not exerted themselves very much to acquire it; and things haven't changed much in this respect."

"Blindly raging industriousness... is represented as the way to wealth and honor and as the poison that best cures boredom and the passions, but one keeps silent about its dangers, its extreme dangerousness. That is how education always proceeds: one tries to condition an individual by various attractions and advantages to adopt a way of thinking and behaving that, once it has become a habit, instinct, and passion, will dominate him to his own ultimate disadvantage but 'for the greater good.'"

"So far at least, culture that rests on military basis still towers above all so-called industrial culture: the latter in its present shape is altogether the most vulgar form of existence that has yet existed."

"What the workers see in the employer is usually only a cunning, bloodsucking dog of a man who speculates on all misery..."

*Sorry LOST fans, this is not the precise quote. But it does express basically what the actual quote was getting at, so get off my back.

Blog Every Day in April

It's been about a month (and a half) since my last blog entry. For any and all of you who enjoy reading my stuff, I apologize. But I have a good reason!
Blogging is hard and I have stuff to do.
Alright, neither one of those is totally true, so let me clarify.
1. Blogging is hard.
It's not that blogging is particularly hard. By definition blogging is a form of writing without real rules or restraints or guidelines that I have to follow. I can just rant in a relaxed, conversational tone for a page or two and be done. The real problem is that, since I know people read it, I want the blogs to be good. Maybe not completely amazing, but also not a total waste of time with lots of lazily constructed sentences and spelling mistakes. And this kind of attention to detail and subject matter takes time, which leads me to my next point.
2. I have stuff to do.
Sort of. I work a full time job, but that's not really the half of it. I have this book I'm trying to write and these books I'm trying to read and video games I need to play and a dog that needs walks and a girlfriend that needs cuddling. I've got a lot on my plate, more or less, and it's difficult to make time for the hour or so it takes to write a blog when I know there are other things I could be doing. I mean, Final Fantasy 13 is in the other room for Christ sakes.

Anyways, I've never lapsed so hard in my blogging as I have this past month (and a half) and for that I apologize. Don't worry though, because I'm going to do something totally over the top to make up for it.
I'm going to blog every day in April. Man, it's gonna be a lot of work.

An author I'm familiar with named Maureen Johnson came up with the idea a year (or two?) ago to compensate for her own lapse in blogging. Since then it has become kind of a thing in the nerdier parts of the internet in which I dwell, and I think it's a good idea.
These blogs might actually help me to write blogs the way they're supposed to be written. That is, nuggets of ideas instead of essay-length diatribes about books you haven't read. Also, there may be a return to politics and more frequent looks into my life, which may not be interesting but will at least be constructive for me.
So there you have it! My proclamation to blog every day in the month of April, the end of which will also mark the one year anniversary of this blog. Hurray!

See you in April, suckers.

Education

I know I already did a blog about education, specifically my laughable experience throughout the public school system and college, but what can I say? I'm in the mood to bitch about low standards and the dangerous nature of a country full of stupid people.

First of all, I think that teachers should make as much money as doctors, and that the training and work load should be equally as rigorous. Classroom sizes should be smaller and students should be graded on their creativity, inquisitiveness, complex thinking and problem solving, rather than the ability to memorize facts that are quickly forgotten after the taking of a standardized test. The goal should not be to push as many students that don't know the difference between "their, there and they're" through the system. The goal should be to produce generation after generation of thoughtful, rational, intelligent people. As it stands, the motto seems to be "get an education so you can get a good job." So, what? We end up with a bunch of money-worshiping adults who were able to get through with their basic education without ever understanding that the entire point is to actually become educated.

It really bothers me that people aren't willing to just pour money into the educational system. I literally believe that a higher standard of education is the solution to all problems in this and every other country. Because when the population is better educated and people are able to think more complexly about things, shit will actually start to make sense. We live in a country where creationism is still taught alongside evolution in public schools, where gay marriage is still largely illegal, and where a growing number of absolute psychopaths want Sarah Palin to be president. As though, to paraphrase another internet blogger, the problem with Bush was that he just wasn't stupid enough.
I'm beginning to think that the typical state of our nation's schools is similar to that of Springfield Elementary. Do our text books refer to the Civil Rights movement as "trouble ahead?" Are the kids drinking rat's milk? WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

It's as though being stupid is just sort of this secondary thing, not really consequential in the larger scheme. Compassion, intelligence, goals, appreciation for life itself, all fall to the wayside, and why? Is it money? Is it religion? Is it a social stigma that instills a distaste for school in children stronger than that of broccoli?
I don't know. But I'm frustrated.

Real Life Stories 4: The Casino

You can get lost in the slot machines like you can get lost in a forest. Rows and rows of them twinkle identically off into the distance. Each brightly lit grouping is surrounded by its own handful of chain smokers in sweat pants with twenty or fifty or a hundred dollars worth of credits pumped into their machines. The old days of buckets full of nickles and manual arms that you crank yourself are behind us, it appears. Everything is button operated, which takes away the charm for me, but not more so than the tacky bullshit they paste over the front of every machine. A casino is a thing that I don't think I could conjure up in my imagination and fake if had I never been to one. I couldn't make this shit up. Ladybugs and Greek Gods and lions and wolves and Elvis, they're all there in big plastic paintings above computer screen slots. Empty drinks and dirty ashtrays don't last long on the ledges of the machines. The place stays clean like a four star hotel, despite all odds. They are overstaffed to the gills with servers and security and the place runs so smoothly you don't give them a second thought.
Walking through the rows with a whiskey and coke in hand I feel just a touch like Thompson, or at least I wish I felt like him. I am to Thompson what a casino in Battle Creek is to Vegas, so I guess it all fits together. This isn't exactly what you get in Nevada, but it's the same breed of ugliness and desperation. Everyone here is so poor, wearing the kind of old sports jackets that were popular in the nineties that you can only find in thrift stores now. They're overweight and they walk with limps and they have bad haircuts. Where do they all come from? I wonder if some of them plan to make a fortune counting cards or betting big money at this casino in southwest Michigan. One man I see only has one eye, and the other is replaced by blank, disfigured skin, as though it were melted shut. At the same moment I smell something like burning paper and I wonder at the coincidence. Or maybe that rich scent in the air is pure oxygen being pumped regularly into the building every so often, and I just happen to be under a vent. A friend of mine told me they do such things, though I thought it was illegal. Who knows? Who knows what pure oxygen smells like, for that matter?
I like to gamble for a few reasons. One is that the feeling of winning, even just a little bit, is basically unbeatable. When the cards and dice start to go your way, even the most stoically atheist (and I am pretty stone cold on that front) start to feel that some force or energy is working with them. Another is that I feel I'm pretty good at it. I play poker and, though I lose more than I win, I take second more than I lose. I was surprised, beyond anything else, when the blackjack dealer took twenty dollars in three hands, which lasted for about thirty seconds.
That said, I was not surprised when a twenty dollar bet on black at the roulette wheel paid out and I doubled my money. And I wasn't surprised that another bet of the same denomination did the same. And another. And another. Above all, it made sense to me.
When the five of us packed back into the car at one in the morning, only two of us came away ahead. Turning twenty dollars into one hundred isn't a magic trick, but it certainly feels like one.