fire department water bottle

Last night I bought nine pizzas and brought them to the local fire department at the end of their practice night. I just wanted to say thanks to them for the work they do in the community (I can’t believe anyone volunteers to get up in the middle of the night, unpaid, to help humans, regardless of what kind of scum those humans might be) before Jenn and I move. It was really nice. While I was there hanging out with them one of the firefighters offered me a plastic bottle of water to drink. I didn’t want it because I hate the plastic bottled water industry, and I wondered why they would be drinking those instead of using glasses and drinking tap water, and now that we know that microplastics are literally everywhere I don’t understand how anyone can be so blasé about needlessly contributing to such a massive problem.

I wanted to go on a tangent about these things but I was there to do something nice for people who routinely give insane amounts of themselves to their community, so instead I thanked them and accepted the bottle of water. The person was being kind, and I needed to simply appreciate that. My head almost exploded in the process but it was the better thing to do.

Event Horizon on a boat

I’m on the ferry again. Heading to the mainland. Cripes, what a hellscape this place is. I think what makes the ferry so particularly awful is that I am confronted — nay, overwhelmed — by a tidal wave of humanity that I usually avoid. I mean, I try to grocery shop early in the morning or later in the evening just to avoid the throngs of mouth breathers. I rarely go to concerts anymore. I (generally) avoid shopping malls. Ok I guess that’s the best comparison I have for taking the ferry, it’s like going to the mall in that there are tons and tons of people, and a good portion of them are despicable. Today there was a tall lumbering idiot carrying his approximately two-year old spawn. He was walking at a snail’s pace, impeding the progress of everyone behind him but he was totally unaware, he was too busy cooing like an imbecile at his progeny. Said progeny had dual snot-clogged nostrils, running and dripping down into her mouth. She coughed into the crowd of people around her several times, dad didn’t care. She was having a fit, crying about whatever happened to be in her line of sight at any given moment. She repeatedly hit him in the face with her hands, her blanket, whatever, and he kept acting like it was cute, the god damned dimwit. “Oh wow! Oh my! Blublublublublub [or some other dumb ‘fun game sound’ he made up].” I wanted to scream, “YOU ARE RAISING HER TO BE A MONSTER, YOU FOOL.” The people behind me were a pair of rough-looking middle aged men who kept swearing loudly and making smart ass scum comments like “where is a guy supposed to smoke dope and drink booze on this fucking boat,” over and over. Euurrrrgghhhhh, loathing. Then a human seated near me watched some worthless videos on their phone at full volume. I’ve been thinking lately that that is a red flag to me, a sign that a person is not conscientious or considerate of anyone around them. They are self-absorbed, entitled. Prob deserve to be tossed on the pyre to burn alive.

And that pretty much sums up my feelings on traveling with BC Ferries. It’s a flaming bastard of a hell ride. Not a good place for a misanthrope.

A child seated in front of me has turned around and made eye contact with me twice. He is maybe five, six. Young enough to still be cute, endearing. I’ve smiled politely each time but am acutely aware of the fact that he will grow into some kind of monster very soon.

my chickens are a microcosm of the problem with humans

I think I need a few more chickens. I hate these times because when you add a few new hens, they are at the bottom of the pecking order and all the hens above them beat the shit out of the new girls, push them around, etc.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of this is that the chickens who are now the bullies were at one point the ones getting bullied themselves — when they’re at the bottom, they are meek and get treated like dirt, but the second they fancy themselves above another hen, they are thrilled to have someone beneath them they can kick around and abuse. I hate seeing formerly mild, sweet hens turn into monsters.

And guess what — yes, you know exactly where I’m going with this — humans are no different. I see it every day. In the flesh, on the news, everywhere. Even the kindest, sweetest people can and often do become vile fiends simply because they can. The only difference is the scale of the horrors which humans can birth — you’ll never see a chicken engineer genocide, for example.

We are literally no better than mean chickens. And we’re actually far, far worse than them. It’s so fucking sad.

Bonne nuit.

the feel-bad movement

For years, I’ve been saying that the movies I enjoy most now are the ones that make me feel the worst — like, the opposite of a feel-good movie. I want a feel-bad movie.

Also for the last few years, I’ve been thinking a lot about the music I want to write and record for myself. There isn’t a lot of truly nihilistic, misanthropic death metal out there, and what is out there is mostly trash. I hate that. I want more high quality, anti-human death metal, so that’s what I’m going to make.

It wasn’t until the other day when I had a conversation with Cody and Dunya about these topics (at their very nice new apartment) that I put the two of them together and realized that I want to join the feel-bad art movement. Or start it, since there actually isn’t one that I’m aware. There are just a handful of various albums and films I love that make me feel like shit, and I want to add to that catalogue.

So there, that’s basically my latest mission statement as an artist: I want to make good quality feel-bad art, that makes me feel wonderfully awful. If I end up starting or being part of an existing movement, hip hip hooray, that’s nice, but it’s not necessary.

another one from the vaults: i hate the human race

I just found this one in my drafts folder, and I don’t know why I didn’t post it either! I really like it.

***********

Yesterday on my morning hike, I was thinking once again about the cult humans have for human life. I was thinking how, if we would look at our place on the planet from another perspective, I bet we’d feel very differently about our race.

I mean, if we put ourselves in the position of any virtually any other species on the planet and could see from the outside that there is one species that covers virtually the entire face of the planet, annihilates countless other species with total disregard, wipes out and transforms entire landscapes to make room for more of its kind, creates so much waste, trash, and pollution that it is poisoning itself and every other living thing on the planet, and shows no sign of changing its absurdly destructive habits, we’d say, “we need to stop those things, pronto.” We’d view humans on this planet as the most widespread, extensive, colossal infestation of vermin possible. We would see right away that we need to cull billions of humans, stat.

But we suck, and aren’t good at other perspectives, so instead we just perpetuate our bad habits: we continue to kill everything else on this planet, continue to pollute and destroy the very place we need to live, continue to try to save every possible human life while at the same time holding our foot down on the throat of every other living thing here.

The conclusion I came to yesterday is that the human race subscribes to a cult-like belief about humanity, and that belief is that nothing but humans matter.

I oppose this belief. I oppose the cult of humanity. I oppose humanity. I oppose humans.

no one thinks they’re responsible for their bad situations anymore

I disagree with this sentiment:

It really sums up a problem I have with society at large these days, which is a refusal by individuals to take ownership of their mistakes. Yeah, BC and Canada’s drug policy still need a lot of work, but that’s not what drives individuals to try drugs, get hooked, become addicts. There are myriad factors that come into play there and no matter what system or policies are in place, you will never stop people from doing drugs, and thus you will never stop all the problems that go along with drug use — homelessness, crime, overdoses, etc. So blaming “the system” for an overdose death is an oversimplification of an incredibly complex situation, or it at least fails to mention that it’s also a failure of the individual, their family and friends and other support networks, society at large, the human brain, etc. There’s a ton of blame to go around so I don’t think it’s fair to lay it solely or even primarily on government policies.

Also, I wish that we weren’t just talking about opioids for these last several years. What about alcohol and its devastating effects on society? Liver cirrhosis, kidney failure, drunk driving, bar and night club fights, spousal assaults, drunks falling and hitting their heads, etc — alcohol kills countless people in a variety of ways and has been doing just that for thousands of years but I never hear shit about it, everyone just accepts it. And our medical systems are constantly overwhelmed by people with alcohol-related problems — if alcohol suddenly disappeared (and people didn’t riot or go into DT’s, I mean) our hospital beds would suddenly be half empty. Why don’t we talk about this more, and why don’t people claim that all these problems are due to our alcohol polices and not the people drinking the swill?

Oh well, who cares. It doesn’t matter because the problem isn’t the policies (although yes, they do suck) and it’s not the drugs or alcohol. The problem is humanity — people will always like to get fucked up on drugs and booze, and they will always suck at moderating or controlling those things, and that will always lead to problems like deaths and overwhelmed health systems.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. With 8 billion mindless human insects devouring Earth’s resources at alarming rates, I think we should be celebrating any and every human death, personally.

Oh shit, that reminds me — new tangent. The other day I heard some scientist on tv talking about how Earth is definitely going to die one day so if humans want to survive, we have to get on with populating other planets, and I was horrified. Can you imagine if we are successful at that, so even when the sun swallows Earth the nightmare of humanity would continue elsewhere, ravaging other planets, wiping out other life forms? Our eventual extinction is the only thing that has been giving me hope for the last several years so this idea was quite unsettling. I guess I just need to remind myself that once I’m dead, I won’t be able to know or care whether the human race lives or dies. Not my problem then.

people really suck at getting along right now

On the top of Mt. Tzouhalem in Duncan, there used to be a big metal cross that had been there for decades. It was a local attraction, everyone hiked up there and took their picture with it. Don’t ask me why. Anyway, at some point some vandals tore it down, likely due to the church’s involvement in residential schools across Canada and the damage they did to generations of indigenous people. But lots of indigenous people in the area are Christian so some of them were upset to see it gone. This all started a conversation about whether or not to put another cross back up there, which I think was a good conversation to have — figure out what the majority want, and do that. Makes sense to me.

But then some people who thought they knew best and didn’t care if anyone felt otherwise went ahead and put a new cross up there.

Then some other people who didn’t care what other people thought went ahead and painted it rainbow colours.

Then some other people who didn’t care what other people thought went ahead and painted it orange, in commemoration of the residential school shit.

And now, some other people who don’t care what other people think have torn the cross down again.

I think all of this is a perfect example of what I’ve been saying for several years, which is that people really suck at getting along right now. People at all areas of the the political spectrum have really strong opinions and think that anyone who disagrees with them is a sheep, a fascist, a racist, etc, that only their opinion is right and any other opinion is totally nuts and not worth considering. And it’s people like this who keep fucking with the cross in a never-ending back and forth of “what you did was stupid so I’m going to fuck it up now.”

It’s a grim example of where people are at these days. We suck at communication, we suck at understanding other points of view, and we suck at compromise.

The Tzouhalem Cross saga: just another example of one of humanity’s big problems.

^{Personally, I hate the cross. But guess what, my life will somehow go on even if most people decide it should stay.}

We need to ask ourselves “why” more

I just read about a man in the US who died two months after receiving a genetically modified pig’s heart transplant.

Think about that: scientists genetically modified a pig, raised the pig (probably in the cruelest circumstances that we would never dream of subjecting a human to), in order to take its heart out (also something we would never do to a healthy human) and put it in a human.

One question: why?

We’ve got eight billion people on this planet already. We can stand to lose a few, especially the ones with defects like bad hearts. Why go through the ridiculous amount of work to try to make a heart for someone, for anyone? Why go to such lengths to save human lives when we have too many as it is? Why subject another creature to such cruelty?

Because humans are obsessed with humans. We have built a cult around ourselves. I think it’s completely fucked up. I don’t think there is any justification for these actions.

This is actually my second misanthropic post today. I wrote another one before I washed the dishes but it was so miserable that I had to put it in the draft folder for now and revisit it later to see if it’s the kind of thing I want to share publicly. It’s just that kind of day, I guess.

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.

a short lightning round

There’s a big rain and wind storm starting right now. The news and weather stations keeping calling it a “bomb cyclone.” I’ve never heard that dumb term before in my life. What’s wrong with “wind storm”? I feel like that term is as viable and easily understood as ever.

And before this was the “heat dome,” instead of heat wave. And in recent years there was a snowmageddon, and a snowpocalypse. Have millenials taken over weather news or something? What’s with all these new juvenile and over-the-top names, when we already have perfectly good ones?

Blech, I guess the weather news is just catering to more millenials and their love of this kind of thing. I bet the next big weather event will be called “ninja turtle pj’s 90’s nostalgia low muscle tone/soft-bodied/chubby gamer who calls in sick so they can binge watch Netflix super tsunami.” Whatever, I’m happily hunkered down here, cleaning the house and listening to chillwave radio while the “bomb cyclone” does its thing outside. I liked watching the wind blow all the leaves off the maple trees, they were swirling around and it was a very pretty, very classic fall scene.

Speaking of chillwave, for some reason this morning I spent a bunch of time listening to new-to-me metal: Primitive Man, Circle of Dead Children, Vermin Womb, Joy, Clinging to the Trees of a Forest Fire, I forget what else. None of it was bad but none of it did anything for me at all. Then I put on chillwave radio and it’s great, totally hits the spot. I wonder what’s going on with me. Do I just not relate to metal as much as I used to? I still hate the human race — more than ever before, actually — and I still would love to listen to music that captures all the awful feelings I have, so I don’t think I’m outgrowing metal. Yeah, that’s not it, because I’ve come across some metal I love lately (like Jupiterian, for example). I think I’m just too familiar with metal to accept any of it that doesn’t knock my dick into the dirt. Rob Mitchell said that once, I don’t know what it means but I like it.

Ok now to do some more house cleaning. I want to move the corn plant closer to the window in the guest room but also keep the fan somewhere that Liam can access it easily when he’s drumming. Decisions, decisions.