the human race casually filming its impending doom

Yesterday I saw this video of tourists standing at the bottom of a massive rock slide, filming it despite certain death rolling down the hill towards them. I wondered how a human could possibly be this stupid.

Also yesterday, I saw that the last nine months have been some of the hottest months we have ever recorded on Earth. Of course, anyone with a brain would already have guessed that what with the deadly droughts, heat waves, wild fires, “zombie fires,” and whatnot that have been ravaging all areas of the planet more and more of in recent years.

But we aren’t going to change our ways. We aren’t going to do anything of the magnitude that is required to actually make a difference until the flames are literally engulfing our homes. Then we will be like, “oh shit, this is bad.”

We are all the tourists filming the rock slide tumbling down towards us. The human race is, generally speaking, that stupid. It’s pretty incredible. I wonder if I’ll survive long enough to witness the chaos unfold.

good morning, world

Everywhere I look, I see reasons to have no faith in humanity. I took the dog for a short walk around the block this morning and noticed myriad things that just reinforced my already very healthy misanthropy. One neighbour’s overflowing “recycling” bin was filled with obviously non-recyclable materials, aka fucking trash. Multiple houses in the neighbourhood had their wood stoves going, but the wood is either wet or the fire is smoldering because the chimneys were all belching heavy smoke. I walked by hideous, new, poorly-built houses with white trash families piling into luxury SUV’s — repulsive dumpy aging party animals with unrealistic expectations of what their lives should look like, living with crippling debt just to emulate the lives they see on The Real Housewives of wherever and social media influencer’s pages. I heard people listening to AC/DC and loving it.

I know these are all small details but the picture it paints to me is that most people just don’t care or think about much, and the things they do think and care about are mindless garbage. I like to think I’m aware of important things but I bet the scum I saw today think the same about themselves, so we’re probably in the same boat, more or less. I think we’re all just trying to keep our heads in the sand for as long as possible, trying to ignore the wanton waste and destruction we are all responsible for, hoping to hell that we die before the world becomes too hot, polluted, and drought-stricken, and shit really hits the fan.

you did me a favour when I left you behind

I love smashing glass jars when I take our recycling to the depot. Now let’s just get this out of the way, Bowman:

What does this joy in smashing jars say about me? I mean, I hate waste like crazy. Recycling has its place but it’s still dreadfully wasteful when it would take less energy to simply reuse a thing. So it drives me nuts that when it comes to glass — an easy to clean, disinfect, and reuse product — we instead opt to collect it, drive tons upon tons of it around (and glass is heavy as hell so think of the fuel costs to move it from place to place), and use special processes to break it down or melt it or whatever, reform it, ship it out again. Recycling glass is maybe a little bit better than tossing it in the landfill but not by much so I don’t like recycling it — I don’t enjoy smashing jars because I am so wildly supportive of our glass recycling programs.

And yet, every time I go to the recycling depot, my fave part of the visit is launching each glass container into the metal bin. I’m sure the staff and other people stare and wonder why an apparently normal adult is making such a point to gleefully smash all the glass they possibly can, but I couldn’t care less. It’s worth it. Despite being wasteful and something I can’t abide by, I can’t deny that smashing glass is really fucking fun.

It makes me wonder about the odd drive so many humans have to just break shit. I mean, I am not alone in this, and it’s not just glass. People love watching building demolitions, and hit-to-pass car racing derbies. And when crowds of people celebrate it often turns into a riot where windows are smashed and cars are burnt and flipped over — and the people doing that shit are happy! So why? Why do we take such joy in destruction? My first thought is that doing so is like freeing yourself from the shackles of developed human thinking and living — we live in such highly structured and ordered worlds that I bet it just feels good to free yourself from that in some small way and say “aahhhh fuck it, I’m sick of having to make sense and have reasons for my actions.” It’s probably just a rebellion against the tyranny of a conscious and/or structured existence.

Wow, I think that’s a pretty good guess for me just sitting at my computer, plunking keys while thinking about smashing jars at the recycling depot. Not sure how right it is but it seems plausible and that’s enough for me. Well done, Janie.

^{chaos reigns}

world aflame — hello, 2020

There’s so much debate about whether climate change is real and whether we’re accelerating it, but I don’t think there’s anything to debate. I was thinking about the number of catastrophic wildfires in the world that have occurred in the last few years, and there are a lot of them: this year alone, there are the bushfires all over Australia; the Amazon in Brazil; California in the US; Alberta in Canada; and summer fires in the Canadian Arctic and across Russia. The trend is undeniable — there are more and bigger wildfires around the globe each year.

Normally, BC burns terribly each summer but this year we got off lucky. I think it makes us forget how bad it has been every other year in the last decade. And in 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta was razed by fires — approximately 88,000 people were evacuated, and 1,600 structures were destroyed. California seems to burn every year as well, and on top of that they’re running out of water from consecutive years of droughts.

All of this just makes me wonder how quickly the global wildfire situation is going to worsen, when we’re going to have a big fire do some serious damage here in my community (we’ve had several in recent years but they’ve all be contained before doing too much damage), and ultimately, when we’re going to start seeing mass fatalities and casualties from them. I feel like it’s all an inevitability at this point so we may as well just enjoy the time we have left and fiddle away. That might sound ludicrous but eh, I think lying awake at night or wringing our hands thinking about things we can’t change or prevent is a more ludicrous option.

Just remember that we are all recycled particles of stardust and when we eventually burn to death, we will rejoin the dirt, plants, animals, other people, and yes, even stardust, and that’s a beautiful, amazing thing — there’s nothing to fear so fuck it. Fiddle on, friends.

Happy new year!

Where is my damned scribe?

Most days, I wish I had a scribe running around behind me. I have so many thoughts I want to write about throughout the day — some big, some small — that I can’t remember a fraction of them to start with. Even when I can, by the time I sit at a computer and have time to type them out, I’m no longer interested in exploring that thought. If I had that damned scribe kicking around while I’m driving through town or getting dressed after a massage, I could simply verbalize a whole post and just come back to edit it before posting it online. Damn, that would be easier.

Another option would be a voice recorder. Actually, I think I have one of those. But then I’d have to listen to my own voice and transcribe the words, and I wouldn’t like that. Listening to yourself speak is only slightly better than seeing video of yourself — anyone who is not a delusional narcissist will wince at both of those things. It’s a terrible thing to see the way your mouth twists to one side when you speak, or hear the tiny lisp or annoying sing-songy cadence in your voice. I find that stuff horrifying.

So I don’t know what I’m to do. I mean, today alone, I had at least three, maybe four things I wanted to write about. What were they now? I don’t know. I think one was about how we should be forced to see both the upstream and downstream costs of everything we do. For example, if you buy a car, you should have to sit through a seminar that details the destruction and waste caused by each step of the cars construction (like the mining of the metals and fabrication of the plastic moulding), as well as the destruction and waste associated with drilling for and refining gas and oil so that the car can run, and also the amount of pollution that car will puke forth in its lifetime, and so on and so forth. I think the same approach should go for everything else, too: the food we eat, computers and phones we use for a few years and then throw away, the cheap clothes made by slave labour that we wear, etc. People in the first world should be forced to confront the vast waste and destruction we are responsible for, and we should feel guilty and miserable for it. We deserve it.

Buy chocolate, and you are responsible for rampant deforestation in the Amazon — animals are literally going extinct because you have a sweet tooth. Sleep well.

And that’s just one of the gems I thought about today that I DIDN’T have a scribe to write down for me!

Now it’s a few days later (I’m writing this in fits and starts), and today while I was on a run, I thought of something I wanted to write about. But when I got home, I couldn’t remember the damn thing. I retraced my steps and remembered other things I thought about during other portions of the run, but couldn’t remember the thing I wanted to write about. If only I had a damned scribe with me then. Fear not, though, dear readers — while laying on the floor doing yoga after my run, I spontaneously remembered the lost idea so I jumped up, dashed to the computer, and jotted the basic premise down. I will be delving into this latest masterpiece soon.

But my point is I need a scribe, stat. I can’t keep working like this. I’m hamstringing myself, like Michelangelo being forced to paint the Sistine Chapel with crayons. It’s insanity.

I’m just goofing around. I know I have more in common with this Michelangelo.

wishing for human extinction (again)

this photo just won first prize in the world press photo contest, and it simultaneously breaks my heart and makes me want to nuke the human race off the face of this fucking planet. we are so careless and destructive, and no one seems to give a shit.

if that was a human being trapped in a net, there would be all sorts of global outrage, then the person would be freed and honoured as a hero, then they would become a diplomat or dignitary, then they would make presentations and speak to the UN about blah blah blah. in short, we’d make a big fucking deal out of it if this was a person.

but because it’s just some lowly non-human, this photo will pass without much of a murmur.

that doesn’t make sense to me.

i want to remember moments like this, times when i hate the human race the most, so that i won’t feel so sad about watching us kill ourselves over the coming years. we deserve it. when the day comes that everyone starts dropping like flies, choking on smog and cancers and killing each other for usable land and water, i want to think about this photo, smile, and say to myself, “our race deserves as slow and agonizing a death as possible for all the suffering and destruction we’ve thoughtlessly caused the rest of the planet — this is right, this is fair. there is justice and balance in the universe after all. hallelujah.”

a time for everything, but cooler

because i was recently complaining about how uninterested i am in enslaved’s later ‘hard rock’ era, i decided to revisit the album that marked what i saw as their sudden, steep decline: isa. i just listened to it while doing the dishes. it’s an ok album that has a few moments i like quite a bit, but there’s tons of stuff i don’t like in between them. i give it maybe a 6/10, if i’m feeling positive.

however, i forgot that one of my favourite lines of all time appears in the title track — “a time to burn, a time to build.” i still love it. it pops up about 1:40 in the middle of the second verse, which seems like an odd place for something i find so powerful but i think it actually suits the intention of the line perfectly.

to me, the lyric is sort of a simple, old world norse take on ‘a time for everything.’ what i prefer about this version is the acknowledgement of the apparent chaos and destruction as part of the natural ebb and flow — no more, no less important. just part of the cycle. just a fact of life.

that’s why i like it appearing where it does, in the middle of the second verse. it’s like “this is no big deal. it’s just a simple truth. no need to get excited about it and make a chorus or focal point out of it.”  to me, that inconspicuous placement of the lyric suits its theme: a quiet, confident acceptance of or indifference to these things beyond control, regardless of how pleasant or frightening they might be.

so even though i don’t like isa much, i’m glad i gave it another spin and was reminded of that powerful line. i hope i can remember it when our fucked up world erupts in utter bedlam in the not so distant future.

thanks, enslaved. now get dirge rep back on drums and make some more crazy psychedelic norse mythology-based death metal instead of the limp pink floyd-inspired bullshit you’ve been churning out for the last several albums.

how does it feel?

after just bitching so much about what is not sexy, i wanted to mention a few things that i DO find sexy.

• genuine smiles
• genuine love of sex
• nice eyes
• confidence
• womanly curves
• flesh

when it comes down to it, any real person has the potential to turn me on. for example, i typically love curves on a girl but that being said, there are some olive oyle’s i find really attractive too — literally! like shelley duvall.

 

i bitch lots but there’s lots of stuff i do like. it’s just not as fun to write about that stuff. despite my obsessions with death, depression, chaos, satan, destruction, and the like, i’m actually a pretty chipper individual. i imagine it’s actually because of those obsessions that i’m as happy as i am but i couldn’t begin to say why. at least, not today anyway.

god, i love having a blog. completely, shamelessly self-centered.