On Cabin In The Woods, As a Game Change and On Its Holes

Hey, there’s spoilers in this article.  If you’re wondering whether or not you should see Cabin in the Woods but don’t want to be spoiled, here’s the scoop:  I really enjoyed the movie, I recommend it to everyone, even if they’re not horror fans.  So you should go see the movie.  Then come back and read this.

On the London Riots

There is a movement, being pushed by armchair pundits and talking heads and politicians everywhere, that the London riots were almost entirely perpetrated by young hoodlums who just wanted to loot things.  It’s as if no one other than kids on the dole was out those nights and the only things they wanted were to burn things and steal shoes.  Why is this?  Because they want to discredit the entire thing as the work of asshole criminals who had nothing but nihilism in mind.  It makes it easier to sweep things under the rug and to turn public opinion against that sort of civil disobedience.  Want proof?  The same thing happened in the Canada riots — you know, the ones that you only remember because of that couple kissing on the street, the post-Katrina looting, and every other riot in a “civilized” country going back as long as I can remember.  Riots in 3rd world countries are generally considered heroic revolutions, but once you get a good enough GDP, it’s impossible for the riots to be anything but criminal acts by bored teenagers.  The sad thing is, public opinion doesn’t even have to be pushed very far in order to provoke a reaction of that sort.  The news shows can just run reels of idiots breaking into stores and burning cars and if that’s all they show of it, that’s all most people think of it.

Thing is, though, that the riots lasted more than 4 days.  Four days is a long time to be fighting against riot-geared police (Riot cops are just the regular cops in different uniforms, the distinction is made so you don’t connect the brutality of riot actions with the actions of every day police officers), flipping cars, and torching buildings just so you could get your hands on the latest Nikes.  Four days is plenty if you’re mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore, however.

There’s an article in the Montreal Gazette online ( http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/London+rioters+resent+media+image+hooded+teen+thug/5233682/story.html ) that states that a lot of the rioters were from housing projects who are now incensed that the image of the London riots is teenagers stealing shoes.  They say that the riots were about class warfare and community unity more than anything else, about the disrespect paid to them by authorities of all stripes and the disregard paid them by the same.  I’m inclined to believe them, and not just because I have anarchist leanings, but because these are the people who were actually there as opposed to the handful of reporters that got nearby and filmed as much as they could before they got scared off.

There’s a funny thing about violence and mass destruction.  When you’re doing it in your own region, it’s unilaterally declared to be asinine and criminal.  However, if you put on a uniform and do it in someone else’s region, it’s the most noble thing anyone could do and god help anyone that criticizes those heroic men and women.

Why I Just Can’t Quit Cena (some of you will have no idea who that is, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read this)

Every week, on Raw, I go through the same drama.  John Cena becomes an abusive husband who’s only bad when he drinks and I become his disillusioned wife who still loves him even after the hospital stay.  I hate the way he wrestles, I hate him as the Face of the WWE, and I hate the Rock-Cena rivalry — the sole purpose of which is to officially pass the torch at wrestlemania next year.  I hated that Cena having the title was so important to two different storylines that they had Rey lose it the same night he won it, and I thought I was done then.  Then he showed up Monday, picked up a mic and won me back again, so I had to break down and try to figure out what was so endearing about him.

Let me start with some explanation.  Cena came to the WWE during a really long hiatus I took from wrestling because I couldn’t find myself caring about it enough to watch.  I’d play the games every now and then, and I’d have no fucking idea who half the characters in it were or how their relationships and stories fit together, but I didn’t give too much of a shit because I always made create-a-wrestlers.  I didn’t have those years to buy into or be converted to Cenationalism, I only

So… What’s going on.

For the last 8 months or so, the entire country has been under the grip of “hyperpartisanship” as Democrats and Republicans have been wrestling in the streets for control over the political discourse of the nation.  A lot of ugly things have happened during that time and everyone’s picked their teams and split off and started their no-holds-barred game of Federal Dodgeball.  Problem is, no one seems to know what’s actually going on.

Let’s start with basic civics and political science.  Governments can only stay governments through use of power.  Governmental power comes from two sources:  Authority and Sovereignty.  Sovereignty is the power wielded by governments to enforce their rule, be it through force or works.  Authority is power given to the government by it’s citizenry, voluntarily or not.  Governments cannot maintain their rule without power from both sectors, but can use power from either sector to enhance the power in the other.  A government that uses its sovereignty to force authority through fear of reprisal would be totalitarian in nature, while a government that gains it’s sovereignty through the authority bequeathed it by the populace would be democratic in nature.  This is all incredibly simplified to make my points, and is missing lots of variables and gradients.

A Letter I’d Send If I Believed It Would Amount To Anything

Mr. President,

In your campaign, you made statements and promises that you’d be bringing all the troops home at the earliest time possible.  We’re now two years into your term as President and all we’ve managed to do is reduce the number of troops there and start an air war in Libya.  In that time period, we’ve also seen dramatic surges in the extent that the Federal Government will go to promote security at the cost of liberty, with the introduction of backscatter scanners at airports and the insistence that entering the security area of those airports is voluntary relinquishing your rights against search and seizure and free speech.  Key provisions in the Patriot Act have been extended to 2015, Guantanamo Bay remains open, despite your promises to close it, and through all of this, the major issues taken up by pundits have been a war on unions, a fight on abortion, and whether or not Common is an appropriate guest at the White House.

What I’m getting at, Mr. President, is that the past decade has taken us as a nation into two horrifying quagmires of wars and a myriad of extra security and suspension of freedom in this country with no seeming purpose other than to fulfill the horrifying vision of the future that George Orwell had when confronted with the realities of Soviet socialism.  We’ve got self-perpetuating wars on enemy ideologies, a loss of rights disguised as being for our own good, and definite class chasms starting to form between the haves, the have-somes, and the have-nots.  All that’s necessary on that front is to declare the haves to be the party leadership and the have-somes to be the party members, then move all the have-nots into ghettos to do the menial tasks.  Then simply eliminate all those who are too smart for their station through force or coercion.  The perpetual state of war will ensure maximum patriotism from the party members as well as keep industry going through war-time production.  It will allow you to ration resources to all the party members and plebeians.  Combined with convinced your populace to accept security theater over personal liberty, you might not even need to develop individual surveillance to keep your state in check because you can rely on them rolling over on anyone they think is being less than perfect and therefore a potential terrorist.

The only thing that could really use some work is removing the faces and identities from the fighting forces so that no one in the state can have any emotion towards them that you have not already dictated and scripted.  Oh, wait, Predator Drones.

So my question, Mr. President, is “When do I get to find out what’s inside Room 101?”

I’m Writing Because I Think It’s Important Somehow

It’s a weird feeling, being depressed and not being sad.  It really throws all your concepts of cause and effect of the disease into a confusion.  It makes sense that being sad would cause disturbances to your sleeping and eating habits, would kill your motivation to do things, and effect your socialization.  But when you start getting symptoms without the assumed cause, suddenly you are forced to ask if sadness is the root of the depression, or if depression is the root of the sadness, or even if sadness is just another symptom that you mistakenly gave too much power to.

I feel heavy, and all of my decisions are now based on the amount of work required to accomplish any goals.  going to the bathroom and smoking require very little work, but making a sandwich doesn’t have instant-enough gratification at the moment, so I’ll pass on eating until my stomach begins to revolt against my brain and starts telling me that I’m dying.  I’m only writing this right now because I somehow feel it’s important for people to know what’s going on with me when I’m going through things they don’t seem to understand.  Everyone says they understand, but everyone seems to be able to function just fine most of the time.  They get a day or two in the dumps, grit their teeth and go forth and do their routines.  If it’s really bad, like a breakup or a death, then they take a week off then work through it over the next month.  70% of the time I’m perfectly fine, sometimes better than just fine.  That 30% that remains is a struggle to remain active and to do simple things like spend less than 12 hours of the day asleep and get enough food in me to survive and to interact with people without becoming too irritated to be in their presence before the social obligations are over.  It seems weird after the fact, but everything about even my closest friends and family and girlfriend will piss me off to no end when I’m depressed and isolationist.  The way you drink might just make enough irritating noise that I just want to slap the cup out of your hand.  Your trademarked and predictable reactions and speech patterns will drive me up the wall.  Your quirky urges will transform in my head to unbearable compulsions that I just want to shake you out of.  My brain translates everything you do into a reason to distance myself from you.  And then I sit in my room, alone, wishing I wasn’t so lonely and wishing people weren’t so hard to get.  Or, more correctly, wishing people would just throw themselves into my life.  Perfect people.  People who won’t irritate me.  People that essentially don’t exist.

And yet, this time, I’m not sad.  I don’t have a catalyst for the depression.  I’m just depressed, and incapable of fighting it.  Even this little bit of writing I’m doing isn’t much help.  It should feel good to get some of this out, but it’s just a chore.

My Adventures With Francis

Francis Mbong is my case manager at the Central Oklahoma Community Mental Health Center where I’m hoping I’ll get some help dealing with my depression.  Francis is an old black guy from Africa somewhere, which means that not only is his accent hard for me to understand, but english is not his first language and he mumbles like an old man at times, all of which add up to me having an incredible time trying to understand what he’s saying at times.  He also has no idea how to relate to me, which is understandable since we come from such different cultures.  He’s from a normal upbringing and social structure, and I’m a dork who does geeky things.  He reminds me a lot of Rafiki from the Lion King, which is probably horribly racist, but that sort of thing’s ok as long as you admit to it and then claim not to be racist.  I’m not racist.

Our first meeting was an hour-long showcase of his computer illiteracy, as the first meeting is always data entry.  I’d expected that it would be nothing but filling out forms where he’d ask the question on the form then try to match my answer to the best on the program he was using.  I just didn’t expect that he’d have a typing speed of 1 – 3 seconds per keystroke and an occasional reminder from his AV program that it wants an upgrade.  I really wasn’t expecting that a full 40 minutes of the first meeting would be me staring at him while he typed, and the other 20 minutes would be me asking him what he said so I could answer the questions.

The next two meetings, he asked me to identify 4 symptoms of depression and 3 coping measures for each, then entreated me to go out for walks as a coping measure because “it will bring joy to the heart, and to the eyes, when you see the birds in the sky (accompanied by flying bird motions with his hands) and the squirrels running across the ground (accompanied by what were supposed to be squirrel motions with his hands but kinda looked like morse code tapped out on his knee by someone with severe arthritis)”.  He also told me that the air outside is better because the air inside is contained and the air outside is spread out.  He demonstrated his point by turning on his oscillating fan.  When the subject of playing games with my friends as a coping method against isolationism, he insisted that I should play dominoes or checkers.  He asked me what my living situation was and whether or not I had a girlfriend both meetings, as if he couldn’t be bothered to remember or take notes on these things.  Then he told me McDonald’s was hiring and that no matter how shitty a job is, money in the pocket will bring me pride which will help me defeat depression.  Seriously, he ran through the exact same script both times with little to no change between the meetings.

Also, I was supposed to have an appointment to see if I needed meds.  It was scheduled February 26th originally, which was the first open date after I was officially accepted into the program the second week of January.  However, the doctor I was scheduled with came down with something that week and ended up pushing me back to the first open date after that, which was July 12th.  Francis has made it his sworn duty to try to get them to push my appointment forward so that we can actually do a full treatment plan as he intends to.  However, I get the feeling that there’s not much followup on that, as every meeting since that point, he keeps asking me how the meds are going then expressing absolute shock that no one has called me to schedule earlier.

This most recent meeting, the fourth I’ve had, was somewhat surreal.  I’d had the sleepless day that I outlined in my previous post, and i managed to get a whole hour of sleep before going off to the meeting.  So, there I was, tired and surly and not really in the mood for a lot of bullshit, and Francis decided today was Talk About Getting A Job Day.  It might have been a fun and interesting time if I’d been awake and feeling combative, but I wasn’t.  Apparently Francis wasn’t either, since he dozed off at least four times.  Suddenly, my meeting with Francis had turned into a Family Guy sketch, where someone does something annoying once and it’s funny, then they keep doing it through the “not funny anymore” stage, right past the “murderous rage” stage, and straight to “ok, i guess it’s funny again”.  He’d start a topic, pause to make his point, then doze off.  A minute or two later, he’d come back, look vaguely confused, and then reorganize himself and try to start a new topic.  Through this, we did the “how’s the meds?  Haven’t seen the doctor yet.  What, how can that be?!” conversation, and he even remembered that I live with roommates.  He finally bothered to ask if my girlfriend was one of my roommates, but forgot that I’m on food stamps.  Then, when it was all done, he marched me over to Wellness to get a dentist, where we were informed that the dentist program was being dropped, but I could get a general practitioner and we set up an appointment for that.  After that, I was supposed to go by Mazio’s (a local pizza place) and McDonalds to apply for jobs, but I was too tired to do any of that and I just really really don’t want to spend my days smelling of grease and failure anymore.  I suppose I should, since he set my next meeting for the 18th and that’s the first thing he’s going to ask about.

To sum up, my case worker at the COCMHC is really kind of unintentionally funny and not at all helpful, and he kinda looks like a baboon.

things that actually keep me awake at night (or day, if you want to be technical about it)

Some days, I have problems sleeping.  Everything will be going to plan — I’ll be tired, it’ll be the end of the day, there’s nothing impeding me from crawling into bed — and I’ll begin the process of going to sleep.  All this entails is taking off my clothes, lying down, and making sure the sheet and comforter cover me while I wait for sleep to take over.  I hit this point where I’m about to pass out, where the world is fuzzy and warm and my brain is tuning out, and that’s where I can completely screw the pooch.  You see, if I do anything, anything at all, other than succumb to the bliss of sleep, including the act of noticing that I’m on that threshold, then I’ll fail to go to sleep and then my brain gets angry with me in response.

So, there I am, sliding back into consciousness and my brain decides that since it’s got nothing better to do, it’s going to replay every nagging lost scenario it can get its hands on at me.  Well, not every one, it usually works them back in chronological order, tangenting itself along the way.  Nagging lost scenarios are those little battles you have in life that you lost, but you totally shouldn’t have, and it’s irritating that you didn’t.  I replay them and rework them the way they should’ve gone, adding actions and dialogue on either side for the rest of the night.  It’s a lot like talking to yourself, except without any of the vocalization.

Today started with a dickhead healer we had in one of the new heroic instances on WoW.  Actually, I should probably state that if a mere mention of WoW or any of the other dorky things I do causes you to cease reading out of anger, you should probably stop reading my blog.  So, this healer spent the entire instance halfassing his way around the place while demanding that we all step up to his elite level of play.  Even after he got his ass waxed repeatedly on a boss that he claimed that wiping on would be sad and that if we couldn’t beat that boss we should just quit.  I chuckled, and apparently my brain wasn’t happy about it so we tangented over to an old nagging loss from around three months ago.

I was playing my pally, which I’d spent the week grinding from 20 to nearly 60 by just doing dungeons, due to the instant queues in the dungeon finder — which not only puts together a group for you in specific or random dungeons with players in your entire battlegroup, but also teleports you directly to the dungeon when the group’s together and ready — and the fact that grinding two toons to 85 through questing made me never want to questgrind ever again for at least a month.  So, at the tender level of 56, I was queueing into BRD for the 3rd time that day when the healer of the party had a shitfit over my gear.  My gear which was completely cultivated out of doing dungeons all day every day for a week by then.  Of course, the game’s changed a lot since BRD came out in Vanilla, so now there’s new stats and things to put on armor than just armor and attributes.  Not that anyone under the level of 60 needs or uses any of those stats, since the gear in that level range just wouldn’t put enough secondary stats on to make a bigger difference than attributes and armor would.  But the healer, Pizzatime, took one look at my gear and declared me too squishy to be a decent tank and summarily came to the conclusion that I was a DPS primary using DPS gear and trying to tank for the faster queues.  I’ve been having that argument in my head for three months now.  And usually when I should be asleep.

Sometimes, the argument in my head is what I should’ve said to Moose to avoid him telling me to fuck off permanently.  That sort of thing tends to lead to what I like to call A Bad Week.  A week with such depression that I don’t even have the desire to masturbate or make sure I’m eating when I’m hungry.  Bad Weeks happen, and I’m trying to get help to make them stop, but so far I’m just treading water in bad cognitive behavior therapy while waiting for a psychiatrist’s appointment to get a mood stabilizer or something.  Such is life.

Is It The 80′s Again?

So, what’s going on in the news on the political side of things?  Congress is trying to fix the economy by letting the richest people and corporations keep more of their money, which is also supposed to increase tax revenues, which all sounds suspiciously like what I remember about Trickle-Down Economics.  Leadership on a national level is having issues with unions, but this time they’re not threatening to strike and cripple the air travel industry.  A wave of patriotism and divisive politics has swept over the land with people practically demanding that schools enforce the reciting of the pledge of allegiance every morning and allow, even promote, school prayers.  Half of America is completely scared that an outside group is going to destroy us, only this time it’s Muslims and not Communists.  All we need now is flag burning, punk rock, and actual congressional investigations into illegal wars and arms trades and we should be all set.

Seriously, though, who set the DeLorean?  We went through the 90′s, which I recall being an uplifting boom economy and an enlightenment period to the 00′s, which were so bland and fast that people are calling them the lost decade, to now, which is a lot like the 80′s all over again.  As I remember to do so, I’ll give my take on the issues I’ve seen lately, and I promise not to go out of my way to find an opposing viewpoint unless it’s actually relevant.

Henry Rollins turned Old today

Today is Henry Rollins’ birthday.  Today, Henry Rollins turned 50.  Suddenly, Rollins moved from the unending middle-aged space he occupied into the same age-space my parents occupy.  Pushing Rollins into the Old category pulled what remained of my resistance to being old kicking and screaming into my middle age.  The moment I found out Rollins was going to be 50, I suddenly realized that I’m in my 30s, and that all the pretending about being an old 20something was over.

It’s like an aging domino effect.  Every year, the people I look up to get older, which makes the younger people I respect get older, which pushes my clock just a little farther.  Except nowadays, I’m looking at time in the terms of 5 years or 10 years and milestones so when the domino falls, it seems like I’m suddenly getting yanked farther and farther from where I thought I was.

Henry Rollins is 50.  I’m no longer in my 20′s.