I Want to Go For a Walk!

I know, I know: Where the bloody-grunge-fuck have I been? Do you want the simple answer or the needlessly complicated one? Short & sweet answer, ever since the start of the Fall 2014 semester at the University of Arkansas started, I've been balls-deep in academia with almost no free time of my own. The really complcated answer involves school, sure enough, as well as relationship issues, a slight 'complication' that arose as a direct result of running out of medication, a road trip to lovely Boulder CO, spending way more money than any human being should ever have to on text-books that I'm only ever going to use ONCE, and a whole bunch of other shit. 

I'm fine, John & I are both fine, school is going fine: For the most part, everything is under control. 

A handful of former squad-mates have been in contact with me with their own alarming news about what's been going on in their lives, both as current and former members of my previous Unit (I deployed as a member of the 40th Expeditionary Signal Battalion to Iraq in 2010, they were a collective clusterfuck of religious fundamentalism and general top-heavy incompetence: From what I've learned recently, not much has changed since I ETSed in 2013.) For their sake, I'm not going to go into what exactly has been going on for them because there's a chance, albeit a small one, that it may put them in immediate danger. That, and I don't think they'd take too kindly to having their personal/professional affairs being thrown all over the internet like chum over shark infested waters.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, I have a unique opportunity coming up soon: A plan is in the works for me to give a small presentation about religious extremism within the American military, as well as issues faced by non-believing soldiers, at the University of Arkansas on March 8th. I was asked by the secular student RSO, Occam's Razors, and I'll be the first to admit that while I'm super-excited to be giving such a presentation, I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing. 

I've never had my own public event like this before, EVER.

Most events like this presented by Occam's Razors are free and open to the public, until I hear otherwise from them I'm going to safely assume that this one will probably be the same. I'm chomping at the bit, but I'm also just a little bit fucking terrified. That's not a whole lot of time to throw a Power-Point presentation together, and I need to gather information from the most accurate sources I can find (I have a few in mind.) 

I'll TRY to stay on top of things & keep you good folks up to speed. The last couple of months have just been tiring and stressful. My vacation in Boulder was fantastic and very well needed, and maybe as I find time I'll write a post about THAT, but for now I'm going to focus on my school-work and coming up with material for this presentation. 

Be good to each-other, dammit.

Fuck Curtis Lepore

The first time I'd ever even HEARD of an app called Vine, I was drunk and bored while looking for stupid videos on YouTube to cheer me up. I happened across a compilation of people behaving strangely in a series of short videos called Vines, I did a little background research into how the app worked & decided to give it a go. While many of my friends have told me of this "stage presence" they seem to think I possess, I guess I just don't have a knack for poorly edited 6-second video clips of myself.

I'd seen his face at least a few hundred times, but for some fucked up reason THIS is how I found out who he really was: 

I admit, part of me didn't want to believe it at first. Being the natural skeptic that I am, I decided to do a little background research & fact-checking, I came across a celebrity gossip site with a small amount of back-story to what took place. I'm a bit dumb-founded that this happened in OCTOBER and I only found out about this A FEW HOURS AGO, but I just have to ask a question here: Even if Smiles "suffered a concussion," and even if Lepore did what he did to her in that state, how exactly is that a mark against HER? Shitty as it is to say this, we live in a day and age where there are people out there who honestly think that assaulting an unconscious person is completely okay, AND IT'S FUCKING NOT!

Just because you have 4.9 million people following you doesn't by default mean that you're somehow better than everyone else, you're just fucking pig with a mobile phone: That's all you'll ever be.

I only ever made 5 or 6 Vines and only one of them ever so much as received a single comment on them. This is not about popularity validating Lepore's behavior, not to get all "Tea-Party" about this but even Hitler was a popular guy, he was still a shit-head. This is about privilege, and not even specifically white male privilege, which I've already done a post about recently, but celebrity privilege, too. If Lepore were living in my apartment complex & attending the same University I do, odds are he'd probably have been on the receiving end of the ass-kicking of his pathetic little life from the Fayetteville Police, but I can't honestly foresee if he'd actually get a sentence handed to him or not. The University of Arkansas seems to handle Title 9  incidents fairly well, as far as I can tell, but I still know of about 100 female students who's attackers have yet to even have cuffs put on them. It's sad, but this is the age we live in.

And the fact that Lepore still has female fans chasing him is absolutely sickening, this is all the proof I need that HUMAN BEINGS DON'T HAVE SOULS.

Fuck it...

I don't want to support or perpetuate ANY ELEMENT of rape culture...

I'm never using Vine again, this makes me sick & I don't want any part of it.

I'd be foolish to think I could convince the cybersphere to delete their Vine accounts as well, I did this to settle my own conscience and to make my own small stand. Screw you, Lepore. You think upon your shitty behavior next time you knock your head on something and have a concussion, I hope the EMTs that pick you up off the ground are more honest than you apparently are. I may not be famous, maybe I'll never be, but at least I can look at myself in the mirror and not see a monster.

YouTube & Google+ might be glitchy about a couple of things, but at least I can edit my videos as I see fit and get AS MUCH TIME AS I WANT!

Volunteer Moderating is FUN!

I've been a devout fan of a particular dating site known as OK Cupid for a good long while now. Someone I met in Iraq (yes, that same someone) introduced me to it not long after we first met. It's not like Facebook or Match.com, it's actually daily comprehensive, the results you get are almost a direct result of the "effort" you put into your profile. Pictures, paragraphs, interests and thousands upon thousands of humbling, hilarious & downright bizarre questions you can answer to better make your best "match" on the site.

And if you've been a good boy/girl for long enough, you MIGHT BE selected to be an anonymous "moderator" for  site content. 

Sound strange? I guess, rather than pay flesh & blood humans to scour the site looking for pictures of penises or Ryan Gosling, they leave flagged pictures and profiles to be whooshed into a cue for moderators to comment & vote on. OK Cupid's site has rules about what kind of photos can be posted and what can't, and every so often some people don't pay attention. On occasion, neither do the "anonymous" moderators. 

Sometimes, the results are fucking hilarious: 

I'd date Optimus Prime, but I wouldn't want to have sex with him.

Turns out it was a fake profile, but still... Is this Magicarp's hipster daughter?

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of legalizing & regulating consensual sex-work, but wouldn't RedTube be a better place to go for something like this? Besides, how do I know this isn't false advertising? Are you SURE you're not a cop? Because if you say you're NOT, then I don't have to do anything you say.

And THIS is why that whole "Friend-Zone" thing is bullshit: You are not entitled to another person's affections if they don't consent to your desires. Move on, get over her. Maybe the "non" sex worker has an available appointment slot, IDK.

I swear this isn't a joke, someone ACTUALLY used this for their profile picture. WAIT, it gets better...

Sometimes people will photoshop their faces onto the bodies of other people/animals/machine, which is technically not allowed. Photos taken with filters with SOME modifications are one thing, but something about this photo set off my gaydar in a bit of a Silence Of the Lambs kind of way.

You caught it alright, caught the BAN-HAMMER!

Every so often, someone finds a profile that exists JUST to advertise really weird things to people, which is also not allowed. 

Then there are moderators who don't pay attention to what they've flagged. In this case, the picture marked Not The User actually DOES feature the user in a very... INTERESTING situation.

Fucking hipsters...

OH WAIT, now it's getting interesting!

...

If you're squeamish you might not want to keep scrolling (NSFW)

...

This guy is actually a repeat offender. Really, WHY?

I just don't get why guys post dick-pics on otherwise public dating sites. What are they thinking? Do they really honestly think "I'mma show my dick to strangers on the Internet, because THAT'LL get bitches to talk to me! LMAO TURN UP!!" If THAT is your honest strategy, or if you just have THAT MUCH free time on your hands, you fail at life & trying to attract the affections of someone just as shallow and insecure as YOU OBVIOUSLY ARE should be the least of your immediate concerns. 

The Story of Z (Part 2)

I only lasted one school year at Maine College or Art, one wouldn't think of a yuppie art school as a haven for bullies but THAT was ultimately what drove me away. And with a little convincing from my new friends, like Z, committing academic suicide and ultimately leaving the school for good wasn't hard at all. After everything I'd been subjected to and not even getting decent grades out of it, arriving at the eventual conclusion "Maybe this just isn't for me after-all" seemed the only logical end to the madness. 

If I'm really going to quit M.E.C.A. and turn over a new leaf, may as well start right now: I was borderline bankrupting myself over mostly useless knowledge that would never land me a real job at the current rate things were going. Sure you could teach people the right way to stretch a canvas so that it won't break apart, how to make sure the canvas is primed properly so that the enzymes in the paint won't eat a hole in it after 50 years, but how the fuck is there a right or wrong way to express ideas and/or feelings onto said canvas? That's just nonsense, but I was spending hard-earned Student Loan money on it just the same.

It saddens me that art is no longer about talent these days, it's about projecting the ideas of a Status-Quo from one direction or another.

There was a fundamental difference in Z's temperament between his different classes that he offered, even when just talking to daytime customers in his shop. He sold dried herbs and some oils, mostly trinkets and services though. Compared to other New Age shops most people have probably been to throughout the United States (or the UK, the two countries where Wicca is most widely practiced) Z's shop had a pretty sparse but very specialized selection of spiritually oriented goods. At the time you could go anywhere in Portland and go look for witchy-stuff, there were two other stores operating at that time with much more selection, neither of which Z had anything particularly remarkable to say about.

He had several repeat customers, mostly fellow students of his from his classes. There were one or two that even worked for him during daytime hours; One was a daughter of his from a previous marriage, the other was a tall girl with rather plain features. He said he had two wives, something which struck me as extremely out of place at the time, but since neither of them seemed at odds with each other I guess I didn't see any harm being done there. To most people this might have sent up a few red flags, but then again I am NOT most people and I didn't feel I had any reason to object or question this.

A recent bout of questioning MY OWN sexuality, to include orientation, made me feel like I wasn't in a position to criticize other adults who didn't seem (at the time) to be harming anyone.

I wasn't sure I was a lesbian, I do enjoy sex with men but with women as well. At that point in time I didn't have terribly many opportunities to experiment, what with having very few to almost no prospects for relationships due to my classmates acting like cunts. Z made it abundantly clear right off the bat what HIS position was regarding LGBT issues: Only straight people could perform rites and rituals effectively, this was due to gay sex (between males or females) negating the natural course of energy and something about the parasitic nature of gay relationships.

Don't get pissed off YET, I'm not finished.

He said that since gays and lesbians can't procreate naturally, one partner tends to feed off the others' energies and that's why we would see one as the "Butch" and the other as the "Bitch." This didn't make a lick of sense to me at the time, rather than try to publicly discuss this with him (which was rarely met well, he could be quite persuasive of his opinions. After'all, we were just students seeking out a self-described Master) I was brand-spanking new to Wicca at that point, I honestly thought that this was how a Coven was supposed to work.

Finding work after M.E.C.A. was a pain in the proverbial dick, I burned every black candle I could get my hands on trying to chase away any bad juju that may have been trying to keep me from finding gainful employment. After four unsuccessful interviews, I enlisted Z's help int he matter. I don't recall exactly what was done, but a few days later I stopped in to say hello and he told me I'd pretty much walk-in-and-take my next job interview with raving success: It was at a comic book shop and I actually failed the interview horribly, so no dice.

My NEXT interview after that, however, was at the Borders Bookstore in the Maine Mall complex and I got hired almost on-the-spot. Surely that's the one he was actually talking about, yes?

I loved that job, the first job I ever had that despite having to work retail I actually truly loved doing. I loved to read, and as luck would have it my supervisors put me in charge of the Spirituality and Religion section: ALL OF IT, including Christianity. Meh, a job is a job, right? Considering that this was divinely provided for me since Z must have done the right spell with the right candles and oils and such, and I was in the right mindset at the right phase of the moon... Look, you're either seething through your teeth or laughing your balls off at all of this and that's fine. I think at this point either reaction is perfectly reasonable to this wad of rubbish, but understand that I had been through the first of many difficult patches in my young-adult life and I really honestly thought that this was a good thing for me.

And sure as Climate Change fellow students would come to the store to ask me about finding books, Z would even ask me to put in an order or two for stuff he needed from time to time, which I paid for. Not to worry, though, he said he'd reimburse me every penny (and for the record no he didn't, but I wasn't going to press the matter with him because running a business in Portland was literally quite a taxing matter) 

So Z had a few opinions and practices I didn't always agree with 100%, that's the same with ANY religion though, right? 

Part 3, coming soon.

The Story of Z (Part 1)

Welcome to late-summer of 2001, Portland Maine. This is my first week of college at Maine College of Art, my first time living out of my parents' shadows and I'm completely alone out here. I'm one of only a few native Mainers in the Freshman Class, almost everyone in here is from a different State or another country. 3D Design class just started about 15 minutes ago, then some stoner-chick runs into the room yelling about New York City being on fire: We laugh, at first. She grabs three people to come with her to the Mr Bagel across the road from the Porteous Building, and there it is on the TV, BOTH of the World Trade Center towers are burning.

THAT was such a serious "Oh-Shit" moment, I didn't think it was real. It had to be either a sick joke or a mistake, I ran back into the Porteous Building, grabbed my stuff from the classroom and stormed out: At least half of my family, including my Father, are from New York City and the surrounding areas (Brooklyn, Manhattan, etc...) 

I'm walking quickly back to the Holbrook Dormitory, I walk right past some dude I've never seen before: He's just standing there playing a long bamboo flute.

I get it, people are panicking left and right, I pass two other students who are in tears: Maybe someone was just trying to do something to distract people from the violence on TV, or maybe this was just something this guy did for fun from time to time: Just stand outside and play his flute, side-walk musicians are nothing new in Portland (although these days they are entirely too rare.) 

I don't think there were any classes the following day, the Dean decided to hold a student forum to talk about what just happened to the world, The morning of September 12th amounted to little more than a bunch of hipsters arguing with each-other. There was talk of war, activism, charities and disaster relief. One or two students who came here from New York had tried to get home to their families, I was still waiting to hear back about two of my cousins (I found out later that day they were in Brooklyn and they were unharmed.) 

I walked out halfway through the ordeal: From where I was sitting, this "Student Forum" was quickly becoming an Ad-Hominem driven farce and I wanted no part of it.

I just wanted to quietly kill some time alone, so I wandered from shop to shop on Congress Street just looking at stuff. One shop was selling the kind of hats worn by little old ladies, another only sold varying types of Irish imported goods. I came across the same strange dude standing in the same strange spot only this time it looked like he was talking to two women standing on either side of him, he made eye contact with me and I gave a friendly nod: I don't know this guy, but I see no reason to be impolite.

This continued for weeks, once regular class schedules resumed: I'd walk past his little shop and say hi, most of the time he'd say hi back to me. As time passed, it became ever clearer to me that my leather-clad metal head self was not welcome among certain circles (the vegan-nazi hipster types that M.E.C.A. is still known for catering to.) At least three or four times a week I'd come back to my dorm-room to find PeTA pamphlets, and on some occasions flyers, jammed under my door. At least EVERY night of the week, my spoiled cunt of a roommate would bring groups of her party-buddies over late at night while I was busy either trying to study or just trying to sleep: Despite the fact that our first day of Freshman Orientation we both signed a mutual roommate agreement indicating we'd each give the other a "courtesy notice" of 24 hours before having company over.  

This is the very same chick that accused me of stealing and using HER kitchen-wares without any evidence to back it up, despite the fact that I had just purchased brand new ones for myself the week prior AND kept the recepit: LOL!

Some manner of non-academic escape was, as with anyone in similar circumstances I suppose, absolutely inevitable. All my class-mates ever seemed to want to do was either go drink or go off to concerts of bands I'd never heard of before: I guess obnoxious hipsters were being obnoxious hipsters long before obnoxious hipster memes on the internet made the world known regarding obnoxious hipsters. This strange dude on Congress Street, who had a name but called himself "Z" for short, offered a pay-by-donation Tae-Bo style workout class after class hours: Perfect! I show up twice a week and pay whatever I can afford to, sans OBNOXIOUS FUCKING HIPSTERS!

Things worked out great for about a month and a half of this, eventually I was coming back to my room to find more and more of my stuff occasionally being vandalized. At first I didn't say anything to the M.E.C.A. staff because I didn't think they would help me: Then one fine evening it literally took a screaming fit before people finally got the message that I was getting sick of this, a BRAND NEW message-board that I put on my door was been completely filled to capacity with not-so-clever dick-drawings ALL OVER AND THROUGH IT.

Meanwhile nobody in the dorm says or does anything to the chick who flips out on drugs, breaks into peoples' rooms and destroys THEIR property (and for some really weird reason mine was the only room NOT broken into.) so I guess that made it okay in their eyes.

I wanted to quit and go home, but something was compelling me to stay. I was worn down to the point that I could barely keep awake during class, I avoided damn near everyone until it was time for my OTHER classes, but even then my participation was just-for-show. After enough harassment from my dorm-mates, I just had almost no energy left and I think Z noticed.

He told me that with some new ideas and a change in attitude I could realize my full potential, whatever that meant. Around this time I had struggled enough with Christianity to give it the boot all together and pick up something else, it just seemed obvious to me at the time.

After all, Z not only led the workout class but also a small Wiccan Circle.

All this simply could NOT have been a coincidence, could it?

Stay tuned for the next installment of the series...

No Actual Skeletons (NSFW)

I just cleaned out my old closet and found four boxes FULL of old artwork I did back in High School. Yes, most of it is fucking awful compared to what I'm probably capable of today. What the Hell did I really know back in those days? Digging up moldy and torn sketches of my friends, a couple of still-life images of a glass bong, an improperly mounted and primed painting (made before I even knew that you HAD to mount and prime a canvas before you could paint on it) of my High School God: Marilyn Manson. 

I guess you can still see paint "scribbles" on the unfinished concrete floor, most of them have been there since 1999. 

I was pretty heavy into Evangelical Christianity as a teen, which was all kinds of awkward for me because at around the same time I discovered Jesus, I also fell head over heels for the work of Swiss artist H R Giger. I also began to eventually realize that despite what my purity-pledging friends insisted, my vagina did in fact very much enjoy having something comfortably nestled inside of it. Later on in college I fell out of favor with Christianity all together and embraced marijuana, drum circles and the far-less-threatening path of Wicca. I meandered and meditated on the phases of the moon, mystical properties of herbs and trying to store my "energy" in crystals for almost 11 years: I used to be a member of a Circle back in Portland Maine being led by a man who apparently still calls himself "Z" and has moved his base of operations to nearby Westbrook. 

Don't waste your breath talking to them, last I heard their official platform is that I never existed.

After a string of VERY fucked up incidents during my deployment, on top of reading some work by Hitchens and Dawkins, I tossed religion aside for good just in time for my 30th birthday. I'm now out of the Army and staying with family up in Maine, but now after going through all this ... STUFF ... it's such a weird feeling sifting through such badly rendered visual representations  of things I no longer believe in (or even want anything to do with.) Not only that, but all of my artwork depicting my inner conflict and turmoil of just being a misguided and sexually repressed teenager is just disturbing as shit to look back at.

How bad could it possibly have been?

Okay, a little odd but not so horrible, right?

The whole Virgin vs. Slut thing, yes that is in fact a severed Barbie leg. A cut-out from a clothing catalog and a postage stamp featuring Mary and Jesus on either end of this strange collage I made in the summer of 1999: I had my first boyfriend that year, his name was Nate. Well, how about something else? 

That's Satan boiling a Furby alive! I still don't trust those little fuckers, but considering THIS drawing was done using ONLY MARKERS (and a mechanical pencil) I thought it was pretty damn good at the time. 

I had a MAD crush on this one dude and so I made all kinds of crazy pictures to try and catch his attention. Images like THIS coupled with scenarios like THAT might otherwise unnerve most people, however he was the one who got me hooked on Nine Inch Nails, TOOL, Marilyn Manson and other things my Pastor told me to steer clear of. We may have fooled around once, maybe twice, back in the day, but nothing really came about it between us aside from an outlet for angst and the very slow dawning of critical thinking. 

Shall we move on?

Oh my...

... Um, yes that is exactly what it looks like: A dragon vigorously fondling a bound and gagged hermaphrodite.

I'm not going to bull-shit with you, I had some SERIOUS ISSUES with sexual identity as a teen: Suppressing sexual curiosity and desire doesn't kill it, it just makes it stronger (and weirder) until SOMETHING bursts forth into the real world. I will say this, I regret not finishing this one if only because I want to see if I can bring myself to do so without choking on my own laughter.

Hey, I did this next one after college...

Holy shit, it's Moogle-thulu! Hahaha, I can't believe I still have this! Anyone want to buy it?

I only lasted one year at Maine College of Art, the other students were (at the time) a bunch of yuppie-scum trust-fund-eating hipsters who made it abundantly clear that I was not going to be welcome among their cliques. The leather-clad metal-head living in a house full of vegans had very few friends indeed, but I found ways to cope. I should note that my first week of college 9-11 happened, and boy it fucked EVERYONE up. 

One more, okay? It's nothing too weird, I promise. 

I painted this rather comical Self Portrait back in 2006, to this day I think it's one of my best pieces ever. 

In truth, this is a close-up shot of the original painting. It's painted on a perfectly square wooden panel, which is considerably more expensive than canvas but I find that I have a lot more creative leeway with a more solid surface. It still has to be mounted and primed, but unlike canvas it won't stretch or tear and I like that: A great piece of work should last a long time. 

There were A LOT of boxes of old, unfinished and decayed artwork. Some of it was too badly damaged to pick up without tearing, a few doodles somehow managed to remain absolutely immaculate since High School: It's a bit like taking a time-machine into an art gallery. 

I have LOTS MORE images, I'll do another post at some point in the future. 

Oh Boy, Mud

I'm an unabashed jerk and I don't make excuses for it, I simply AM. I'm sorry if this bothers you or comes out wrong sometimes, but this has been an ongoing issue that despite my own best efforts I simply cannot change. Then again why do I want to modify any part of myself to make others happy at my own detriment? I'll be 32 years old very soon, I may act like I'm 16 at times but dammit I'm not going to start diminishing myself just because people think I'm heartless, big-headed or even (dramatic gasp) weird.

I have often considered the possibility that I may have Aspergers Syndrome... NEAT!

Recently I may have posted a tweet that offended some people close to me about Roger Ebert's cancer diagnosis the day before his death:

Arguably, that was probably a pretty heartless thing of me to say, as one person pointed out as quite hypocritical. Okay, I can see his point, but riddle me this: How many public figures apologized to Amy Winehouse's friends and family for all the coke-whore jokes? Name one news-anchor or comedian who DIDN'T have a laugh at Steve Irwin's (tragic but predictable) death even when his family were in tears over it, I bet my left fucking tit YOU CAN'T come up with one meager little name.

People suck, and I'm a person. Not a particularly nice one, either. I say things without thinking them through, it's just me: There is nothing I can do to fix this and don't think for a second that I haven't jammed my own foot in my mouth on many occasions in the past, I guess I've just gotten used to it.

I do this so often that I've even gone to brain-doctors and tried medication for it: Nope, turns out I'm just a straight-up bastard.

What is an apology, really? It's a hollow gesture, these days it is, to appease someone to avoid more arguments. This day and age people rarely mean what they say, how can I trust "I'm Sorry" out of anyone's mouth? I have a simple philosophy when it comes to apologizing for anything: 1 When you're wrong, do it right. 2 If you're right, don't do it at all. And 3 Only do it ONCE (for any given offense.)

1 If you fucked up, fix it an apologize in the most sincere way you can muster. Never apologize to someone on-the-fly, it comes off as fake.

2 Think about the situation before you say or do anything, what if someone is upset over something that's out of your control? At that point, how is that your problem? "I'm sorry" "For what?" "It's raining" No, it's no fun because of the rain but it's in no way your fucking fault. And maybe the other person upset with you really is just an uptight asshole, in which case...

3 Never, not under any circumstances, should you EVER apologize for the same thing on multiple, public OR private, occasions (unless you've broken the law and got arrested, in which case see how far apologizing gets you) If you find yourself in a position where someone keeps dancing proverbial circles around you or your 'offense' because they're just so butt-hurt about it, obviously nothing you say will ever appease or satisfy them. If you can afford to, I recommend cutting them out of your life altogether: Who wants to be around someone like that?

When you get right down to it, people can be downright mean. Welcome to Earth, motherfucker.

But on that note, I am going to apologize to Mr Ebert's family and friends for the hash-tagged post:  I didn't know HE had already apologized to Ryan Dunn's family and friends, forgive me please.

But as for the easily-offended and their High-Horses, I ask you to consider this: What happens when you fall off that prancing sack of glue someday? You fall into the dark, thick stinky mud surrounding all the piles of shit you were just trotting circles around.


When that happens, and mark my words it will, I'll be waiting in that same mud to bury you in it.


None of you are any better than I am. 

A Pile of Shit

Being an Atheist won't make you smarter.

My, non-believing types sure are a popular lot lately, no? Could this have been an inevitable consequence of a Post-Bush America? Possibly that young people will look for absolutely any reason to rebel and fit-in at the same time?

When I was in High School, I worshiped the very stages that Marilyn Manson tromped and pissed on: He was brash, batshit-crazy and everyone else hated him. My Mom found my copy of Antichrist Superstar, which I paid for by tucking away my lunch-money, and started going to a support group after work. Any of you who have kids can look forward to such things when they hit about 12 years old.

"Not my kid!" You say? Ha-ha okay, if you say so...

To my horror, Chuck Taylors are back in fashion with a vengeance along with glittered make-up, testicle-choking pants and obnoxious plastic glasses (not all that different from the ones I used to get beat-up for wearing.) But for the first time in a long time, perhaps for the first time ever, doubt and skepticism are the new Black. I can't think of any other part of the history of civilization where openly proclaiming disbelief didn't put someone (in our little corner of the world, there are other countries where Atheists are executed) next in line for being set on fire.

Everyone wants to feel special, the kind of warm fuzzy "I belong" that previously we could always count on the blissful ignorance of religion to provide. So what's with thousands up on thousands of "New Atheist" Un-Holy Hipsters that Hitchens' would Hissy-Fit about had he lived to see this?

Am I glad to see masses breaking away from the ties that bind to blind faith and even violence? Absolutely! But I have to ask if there are a lot of us out there that are in this for the wrong reasons, maybe there are some out there who really are just angry.

As for me, I've had enough of people making lame excuses for their bad behavior and saying "It's okay for me because an invisible dude told me so in this book he wrote."

I understand that people are going to disagree, I've been called a psychopath and a "gun-nut" just because I own a firearm or two. I've been called a whore and a disgrace to women because I openly admit that *GASP* I like sex. I thought this was supposed to be a movement that embraced logic and reason instead of rationalized judgementalism and dick-baggery. You can own a gun without having a violent streak, you can enjoy sex without shaming yourself. How about instead of jumping to conclusions for the sake of public opinion, we actually walk our talk?

Besides, at least prostitutes are honest.

No one likes a bully, or a busy-body and especially a know-it-all. I have been accused of all three of these, but the difference is I can at least be civil with people that I don't agree with (until I am given proper reason not to be, in which case I'd rather just walk away.) The side with the sharpest Zing doesn't necessarily win the debate, if that were true you'd win every chess match you engage in just by flipping the board. Go on, try this and see how far you get.

There's questioning a person's opinions and beliefs and then there's being a bully. Sadly, I seem to be seeing a lot of the latter from the younger Atheists I meet. You don't have to hit someone or call them a name to be a bully.

All you need is something to prove and nothing better to do.