Armadillo Contour.

I scrawled this in a notebook last year after an English professor I had said that morals are necessary for a state, nation, or any form of civilization to survive. Which got me thinking about how actually, if an appropriate level of fear could be instilled in the populous, morals wouldn't need to even be considered. Then I wrote some more and eventually came up with this. I found it today while looking through a box of papers and I thought I'd share it since it's about time for a new entry.

On The Subject of Morals

The issue of morality has been hotly contested for years, whether morality is a relative or flexible entity or whether what is moral and what is not is fixed and unchanging. I charge however that morality is nonexistent, that it is only fear by a different name.

After all, the things we have deemed to be immoral are simply the things that humans have a natural fear of. Murder is immoral because we fear our own death or the death of others close to us, lying is immoral because it is a form of betrayal which we fear, and thievery is immoral because we fear a loss of profit or of our material possessions. Slavery is immoral because we fear our past and because we fear our own oppression, homosexuality is immoral because we fear difference.

The adherence to the things we currently label as moral is furthermore inspired by fear. Human beings stick to the teaching of their religions because they fear Hell and the wrath of an angry God, causing a lack of faith to be deemed, immoral. We deem breaking the law to be immoral because we fear imprisonment, shame, death, and loss of profit.

However, this raises another query, if we deem all things that cause us fear to be immoral, then should not the very act of deeming something immoral be immoral in and of itself. After all, to enforce the immorality of any act under this theory, one must first find something to make others fear the act. (E.g. wrath of an angry god for non-believers, death or imprisonment for murder, or the shame of being branded a liar, etc.)

Anyways, with that said...though perhaps unfinished, I'd like to announce to the whole one person who reads this that I'm making another blog where I'll be exclusively reviewing CD's I find for cheap, or that I already own. Which essentially means I'll be going over music that hasn't been new for years.

Oh well, it seems like a good idea at this time.

Asphalt Diaries

Gather round children, or adults, or teens, hell I'll even welcome you tweens into this circle as well. No babies though...I find that their syntax and ability to spell is poor at best and thus they will not bring anything to this text based discussion/lecture with room for questions at the end.

I recently attained employment, as you may or may not be aware. As for what I do, I work at a grocery store and though there are a few aspects to the job there is one thing in particular I should like to talk to you all about. And it is this:

Carts.

Yes, carts. Carts make me a bitter man on a daily basis. The moment the hour to round up carts rolls around I become jaded, some may say cynical, and inwardly full of loathing for my fellow man. For on carts, you see the worst in everyone, their sloth, their malice, their greed all float to the surface like oil on water.

They leave their carts in the middle of parking spaces, allow them to roll away, or push them onto raised areas for plants. All so they can avoid walking the width of a car to put a cart in a corral or the front of the store. They may see you pushing a row of carts, and to save a precious second where they could ask if they could stick the cart on the end of the row, to which I would surely respond positively, they will shove it into the gap between the cars so that a second trip must be made to retrieve it. And they do it knowingly, watching as your optimism is chipped away one cart at a time. Even when asked if they'd like you to take their cart they will often ignore you, and jump into their car and drive away, I imagine laughing or scowling.

There has been a lot of concern about obesity and the lack of fitness in the population as a whole, quite seriously I believe the epidemic could be fixed out there on the asphalt, with a few extra steps each day they can be on their way to making this nation lean and fighting fit once more! Or even in the stores, youth obesity could be dented by making your children walk around the store instead of pushing them about in those "novelty carts" which may have a car or some other thing kids supposedly dream of driving or riding in. Am I suggesting that this move would be the cure-all for this wave of obesity? No, but every calorie counts.

So, friends, Americans, countrymen, foreigners who know English or who are reading this through a translator I would encourage you all to work in a supermarket. A strange recommendation you may think after what I have said, however I believe if you all experience this bitterness, and taste this cynicism for an hour a day our current generations will be better for it, and perhaps our future generations will not need to learn this lesson from the internet, but they will be taught by their parents that to be lazy with carts is a deed fraught with evil.

This may not have been an excellent read, and I'm sure it was far from well written but it must be said and hopefully it may be heard.

Go See The Parrots Kiki

Last time I failed you, I quit and everything fell apart rather quickly, I fear I aimed to be too lofty in my goal. This time around however I shall remedy that problem and instead of daily updates will be aiming to update merely once a week, along with my best friend Jake whose blog you may find in the blog-o-dex.
This time I shall not let you down and a new post you shall see each week, and with that short message I would like to say

Welcome back to Interzone.

It's Tourist Class I'm Afraid.

In case you'd noticed, the titles of each work generally has pretty much nothing to do with anything.

Boys Do Cry, But I Don’t

10 PM
cleaning out time
dragging bags of waste,
rotting chicken from the stock room
and what appeared to be mold
with bread growing from it,
under the burnt out street lamp
now standing bat-blind in the night

“Fuck Tommy, what are we doin’
is this all we good for
haulin’ shit from here to there”
deftly lighting a cigarette while speaking
“you want a drag
helps ya cope and such”
he offered the glowing cig to me

“Nah man, I ain’t like that”
I say, as I open the dumpster
and arc the bags into it’s gaping mouth

“Don’t smoke, don’t drink
bet you don’t get laid neither”
he said, in between his loving drags
“what the fuck do you do?”

“I haul shit from here to there
and I do it,”
I said distantly
“with class”

I Thought We Were Done Doing Weird Stuff

I like unnatural line breaks, damned if I know why. All the same, here's today's entry, and little to no description before it, you're in luck today it would seem.

Some Days They Have Free Coffee Here

Mid-afternoon and the place reeks
of dust and faux-intellectualism
and I sit alone at a table
pen in hand
scrap of aged construction paper
swiped from the children’s section,
they’d be pissed if they knew
how I was stealing their paper
and sometimes their crayons
and writing the things I write with ‘em

So I sat, and stared at the paper
while staying vaguely aware
of the four-eyed rats who flock here
so they can play up their intellect
and fake that they know
about life and art and beauty
and sometimes they think I’m one of them
when I’m sat alone staring at paper
and they’ll ask me if I’m a writer
and I tell ‘em no
so they ask me if I’m working
and I tell ‘em no
so they ask me if I’m looking to read something
because if I am they’ve got something
which they claim I simply must read
but I tell ‘em no
then they ask why I am here
like I’m intruding on their lives
and I look at ‘em and say

Because some days
they have free coffee here
and they glare and walk off.

And I’m glad to see ‘em go.

Our William Tell Routine

Well, one day in and my goal to write something new everyday is flawless. So here you have it, the first thing I've sat down and forced myself to do. It might not be wonderful, but there are definitely some parts of it I like, and if you're into getting morals out of stories then I encourage you to try and find one here, state what you think it is, and why. Perhaps I'll tell you what I intended later, until then enjoy and I hope to hear what you think.

Herald

The ashen sky remained surprisingly still, only the silky grey clouds lapped at the skyscraper windows, rolling gently, dizzily across the horizon. Below however, the masses were wide-eyed in horror, some prayed, some wept, and most all panicked. Grocery stores were flooded by the fearful flocks of men and women as they packed in crying for canned Corn and Beans at 49 cents per tin.

These crowds subsided eventually as crowds will do, for it may have been the end of days but given the choice, people prefer to die in comfort, curled up on a rug in front of a fire with the dog and wife nervously playing Scrabble. As if by giving Armageddon the cold shoulder it might simply pass them by and wander back into the night sulking like a child.

Minutes ticked by and the city streets they were empty save for one couple, who strolled down the promenade arm in arm, giggling gaily at one of those jests which is so common between lovers. “To you two young fools down there,” shouted a man from a balcony, “do you not know what today is?”

“Of course I do sir,” came the joyful reply, “and what better time to live, as we have yet to die.”

The pair on the street tumbled about with unbounded glee, the man on the balcony merely sighed murmuring that he had tried. As the balcony door shut the skies tore asunder with a great flash of light, and there was silence broken only by laughter.

Some time later, shy as a schoolgirl the light receded blushing pale pink against that grey silken sky. The buildings remained though their tenants were gone, Scrabble words stood half-spelled, and the cans of Corn and Beans so carefully stored in cellars proved to have been a pointless endeavor.

However, one couple smiled at each other as they giggled gaily and strolled along the rest of the promenade.

Hide Your Eyes

Another blog polluting the internet, clogging up this series of tubes or taking up space on the big truck depending on whether Senator Ted Stevens is right or wrong. Worse yet it begins by referencing an outdated meme, sickening really.

All the same, it's started and here to stay. From this point on I'll be attempting to post something new everyday until Summer, though it'll mostly be attempts at short stories, poetry, prose and the like I'll be tossing in reviews of things that ceased being new ages ago and other such things on occasion as well.

I hope you'll join me for the duration of this exercise in futility.