Daniel

TV just gets on my nerves. More specifically, commericals get on my nerves. I'd rather pay extra money to not have to watch/listen to commercials. They totally ruin the TV experience for me. In fact, I hate going to people's homes where they have the TV on all of the time, and having to listen to more obnoxious advertisements. They make my skin crawl. Some documentaries are interesting, but I am always alarmed at how much misinformation comes out of them. I think I could seriously do a documentary about how documentaries lie. For all the commercials you have to watch, they should be damn accurate! =)

I have no idea what you are saying to me right now. If you are following your own path, why are you quoting other people as an example?

I've always hated that Ghandi quote. Civil Disobedience is a fantastic concept, and when employed correctly, can produce fantastic results. You can try to Ghandi method if you are willing to be ridiculed, beaten and still possibly not win. Beatings and humiliation do not necessarily result in victory. In fact, it seems more likely that they will not. You can follow in someone else's footstep and hope what worked for them will work for you, or you can be inventive and come up with your own plan.

ScaryGuy's complaints are totally legitimate, regardless of whether he is competition or not. No need for this ad hominem logic to make his analysis seem any less to the point. City Club is horrible. The only thing it has going for it is how long it has been around. Every other thing about it is shit. Its age would be relevent if the place wasn't such a giant shit hole that will ultimately be(if it already hasn't), ironically, the nail in the coffin for the local goth "scene". The only reason I go there is to make fun of people, and I can't even do that often because it is the exact same cast of ridiculous people at the place every week. So, even the comedy is stifled at this point because of redundancy. The music sucks. The music is stuck in 1997. It is the same DJs doing the same shit every week. The only guest DJs are also the same DJs that come and go. They have been playing the same songs since I moved here in 2000, and those were the same songs DJs were playing in Indiana(a place known for being behind the times) three years before that. KMFDM "Anarchy", Covenant "Dead stars", NIN "Head Like a Hole", Beborn Benton, Apoptygma Berzerk, And One, Garbage, etc, etc, etc. It is 75% the exact same play list week by week. This doesn't do anything for "the scene" but make it age poorly and get boring... which is exactly what it has become in this city. No one cares about anything but the same songs, and the same club. Show turn out for "scene" shows is horrible even if someone does a fantastic job promoting. Other clubs suffer attendence problems while City Club is packed. I hear the argument about them playing whatever packs the dance floors. This is the result of a long line of shitty DJs. Good DJs would get the club dancing to new songs and styles, moving past the old stuff with time. I mean, how did the shit they are dancing to now get popular? Someone had to introduce that shit to them. This may be more the management's fault than the DJs, but whatever. The club is filthy and unsafe. I'm afraid to touch anything there. I smell worse leaving City Club than I do any country dive bars. That is totally frightening. The building should be condemned. I've heard more horror stories about muggings outside of the club, spiked drinks inside, etc, than I have from even booty shake clubs, which is also frightening. City Club is about as pleasant of an experience as Harpos. I'd sooner pee on the dance floor than in the bathroom, but I wouldn't do either for fear of catching any potentially mutated airbourne genital warts that certainly is floating around. Being heavily frisked going in, and the way the staff treats their customers is completely unacceptable. It doesn't end with the ridiculous frisk you receive at the door. Watching them barge their way through the crowds pushing people around, yelling at them, and being as unpleasant as possible is, to me, completely ridiculous. It is overkill. Why people think this is ok is way beyond me. The layout of the place is horrible. The dance floor is too loud to really talk, even though the sound system is about the worst I've heard in a well established club anywhere. The area with seats is pretty tiny, messy and usually occupied by the same clique every single week. The dance floor always looks like some sort of vile beer swamp. The chairs are covered in brown film. This is why I don't meet up for DGN night. I can never understand why people don't go do other things than City Club. You go to City Club just because it is there? That's so horrible. There are dozens of "places to go". Sometimes people go to that club on both Friday and Saturday in one weekend when there are other "places to go". Who cares if the other places will be there next week or not? Isn't that what message boards, email and phones are for? There are other things to do out there. In fact, you'll find there are a LOT of other things going on that are vastly superior to that place... in fact, you'll be hard pressed to find anything worse. I just don't understand the appeal. For under 21 kids, I can sort of understand, but that is about all. It isn't a comfortable place to chill and talk to friends. The music sucks. The dance floor is gross. It is in a place that should be condemned, and the staff are unnecessarily rude... why the hell do people go there? Just because its there? That's totally silly. Once in a great while, maybe... but it seems insane to go regularly. It seems even more ridiculous when there are so many other places to go... which is more or less what I do. I go elsewhere. There are plenty of other places to go and have fun, why waste time with that shit hole? It seems too much like making the best of a bad situation when it is all completely unnecessarry. Also, I lived in Indiana for 25 years. I know what it is like to live somewhere with no club at all. That was far more interesting than City Club every weekend. Sitting around rolling d20s is cooler than City Club. A friend was commenting how the goth scene of the 90s is turning into what the hippies of the 60s became. It is a bunch of old eccentrics who never change, and just get stuck in their routines, listening to the same ten bands the rest of their lives and never branching out to do anything new or unusual. If any place in the world reflects this observation, it is City Club and the static crowd that shows up there week after week dancing to the same songs from 1997 over and over again.

I am very interested in politics. I do, however, feel a bit of despair when it comes to "the system". I don't think it is very mutable anymore. I feel, very strongly, that in America, people are too complacent, and too stupid, for effective action. I am neither left nor right. I generally fall in line with libertarian and anarchist ideals, but still feel government does have rolls it should play. I think government should be a more loose system of regulation, and the only "large" effect it should have is directly benefitting its people. One could argue that is what it does, and my response will simply be that there is way too much of it. I will never agree with a multi-billion dollar war when people are dying in our own country simply because they lack medical insurance. But, to my original point... I don't believe effectively changing "the system" is possible by the American people. For one, there isn't a common cause you can get enough people to rally behind. You can't find a common cause that will create a solid, effective body of people that are capable of bringing about lasting change. When you see instances of rallied people, all they seem capable of doing is protesting, which ceased being effective in the mid-60's. The major media is too damn large to compete with unless some major, serious ass funding were to become available. I don't mean millions of dollars either. It would take billions to compete with the existing media in the US. Even then, the best you can ever hope for is a level playing field. What it boils down to is 1) I see a system and government that sucks. It hasn't started sucking with Bush. 2) A population of people divided on stupid issues, and unable to unite behind any one, general standard 3) A population of people who, even if united, are ineffective and incapable of action due to gross underfunding, fueled by misinformation, and too lazy because of the comfortable lives they are living which they do not want to jeapodize. People constantly want to bait me into political discussions. I bite sometimes, but in the end, I see nothing coming out of it. Even if we came up with some good ideas at the end of the discussion, we lack the power or means to do anything with it. I know I seem to be "doomsayer" about a lot of things. I know I seem pesimistic, like nothing can come of anything. This is actually untrue. I have a lot of hope and a lot of ideas about how to live, and function in this world to bring about a real, positive difference. I believe in these things because I have done them, and witnessed first hands the predictable and positive results. I just think people need to think smaller, and more immediate. Maybe I will make a thread about that sometime. But, in relation to this thread, and other "big" topic threads... I see no point. Sort of for a lot of the reasons Critter mentions above, but for many other reasons as well. There are simply better things to go after and focus on.

I have fairly concluded that most of these "big" questions are unanswerable for a variety of reasons. One, I was a philosophy major, and philosophers for thousands of years have been spinning their wheels on these subjects. Many philosophers wiser and wittier than us, that is. In the past few hundred years, scientists have been spinning their wheels on them. Personally, I think the scientists have a much better chance of cracking these questions than any philosopher. Since I am not a scientist of any kind, and have a research budget of zero, it just seems like a bunch of wheel spinning to focus on origins or creators. I mean, seriously, billions of people have been trying to crack these problems, what makes you think you somehow are able to solve them? But, let's take the next step. What are these questions going to solve? If we discover a god exists, is it going to change the world? Is discovering god going to force he/she/it to take a greater role in our existence? Is discovering our origins going to alter people's ethics/morality, or lead to some other life changing breakthrough? Would discovering these things have a greater effect than say... finding a cure for cancer or diabetes, or creating an engine that is fueled by water? Or discovering a sound ethical system that people all around the world would embrace that would create lasting peace and harmony within humanity? It seems if you want to spin your wheels on unsolvable problems, it would be to solve a problem that would make a very definite difference in your life, or other people's lives. If you just enjoy working on these sort of "deep" issues like you are Morpheus in the Matrix movies, then hey... why not? Is it more productive than watching Survivor? Sure! It isn't all lost, because like TheDark said, amazing break throughs can come from interaction and debate. It just seems like it would be better fascilitated by focusing on a more productive topic. Note. This is all coming from someone who used to do little else than debate these sorts of topics. I spent quite a few years pursuing these discussions with zeal. So, a lot of this is hindsight. What the fuck was I wasting my time for?

Time is just events happening in sequence. It isn't a manmade construct, but it sort of depends on human narrow scope of perception to experience it.

If there is a creator, I certainly care about it. However, it is an unsolvable problem, and energy would be better focused on fixing problems that can be solved. I guess, even still, a creator is of mild significance. It either no longer interacts with us, or it does so behind the curtain in a way that doesn't lend itself to our needing to know about it. With that said, all evidence and reasoning point to no creator. Unless someone can provide an extremely compelling argument for the existence of a creator, it is an idea that is better shelved.

Personally, I don't think there was a beginning. I'm not a physicist or anything, but I have never been able to wrap my mind around the idea that everything had to start somewhere. Time is just a sequence of events, and it is possible that there was simply never a first event. And there is always the problem of "what caused whatever caused the beginning"? Infinity seems as reasonable of an explanaition as any other. Of course, I don't care how things began. At this stage in my life, it is more fruitful to focus on problems that are actually somewhat solvable. I realize discovering our origins would have a huge philosophical impact, but the chances of ever being able to actually solve that problem are extremely slim.

I have a number of songs that remind me of Laura. Many of which were "Laura's songs" that she kind of introduced me to. Others are tracks that have long stories and relate to me personally in a variety of ways, but became very poignant after she died. I'll post two of them here now: Coil's "Where are you?" : "Where are you? Are you hiding from me? Are you still looking for things that no-one else can see? Where are you? Are you in some place that we cannot reach? Are you bathing in moonlight or drowned on the beach? Where are you? Are you surrounded by things we cannot penetrate? Is the cage you love the home you also hate? Your fear of death attracts such strange objects Smothering you, hiding you, don't let it spoil you Show yourself so the others may see you So the others may feed you They want to be near you If you can't get enough of your hypnotic injection Then it's time to put an end to this invalid function Poor little ghost boy Let me be your human toy Where are you? No-one's seen you for years Have your wounds grown wings? Are you feasting on fears? I can see your dark corona is eating into you You're surrounded by things we cannot penetrate Is the cage you love the home you also hate? Life lies with the scissors inside her The surgeon was a butcher All of us are wounded, anaesthetised in A&E Numbed by stuff we should not see Each of us lies bleeding Our rivers intermingling Poor little ghost boy Let me be your human toy I'll wrap my last kiss in a bandage Current 93, untitled from "Soft Black Stars" : i had gathered some flowers to lay upon your face though you were not gone from the realm of the quick i saw all the rainclouds being driven on forward by horses long numbered and featureless and free and i wanted to call you a wife though i couldn't stop glancing at the signs and the four heads of men and all that they carried and the four wombs of women and all that they promised and i wanted to write for you songs poems and bibles your face spotted with pearls and hand-cuffed to Christ but i couldn't stop watching the signs i had seen the news that the Trojan beast already and not yet no longer near nor close at hand nor at the door is finally here the great in the small and i couldn't stop watching the signs in the stars

Panacea and Knifehandchop - Street Chic

The Cinematic Orchestra - Man with a Movie Camera

Ribs and BBQ sauce, of course. Is this alien head smiley cool, or I am missing something?

No. What do your hands smell like?

Stunt Rock - Regret, the musical

"Do 46 in a 45 and they can and will give you a speeding ticket" I wish Detroit would be like this.