Fare thee well

He wore a tie stamped over and over with a tiny golf club and had a mop of hair that looked heavy from having soaked a chestnut spill. In a first betrayal of my low-bred worldview, for which I’d later learn to nurture a healthy insecurity, I ridiculed him and said he looked like a nerd. In my defense, the swoop had yet to sweep its way westward from Georgia to Texas in 2001. He’s moderately gray and taking hair dye salon recommendations from me now.

He was one of those peripheral friends, a pledge brother from out of state who was a token Jew and who liked to drink whiskey, maybe. That was what I knew of him in 2002.

In 2003 we took a trip to Mexico, having liked a previous Bordertown jaunt with the gang so much. While messaging a girl (who is now his wife) with one of those archaic devices with T9 predictive texts, he looked up late and had to swerve to miss a glacier of retread sitting in the middle of the lane on a dusty stretch of highway. My sprite and whisky moved in a big wave but largely stayed contained, save for the spill on my hand which I lapped up, lips full and wet like a lover’s passion. The cop who pulled us over didn’t seem to appreciate the smell that results and lingers when whiskey and sprite cohabit, and I only remember of her a curled, snarly lip. Though I’d later learn that the inhabitants of a vehicle are accustomed to the reek—literally having given birth to the slow and overarching stench that hangs, with the heaviest of the air molecules hovering above the steering wheel—I think the policewoman was a lesbian. I cracked my door and rolled my plastic bottle of brown sprite under the vehicle and after twenty or thirty minutes I was given the permission to drive the car.

He went to jail for some reason. I’m not a lawyer so it strikes me as reckless to speculate as to why. Maybe I’m just old school and journalistic like that.

Keys in hand, I drove to Mexico alone. He would have wanted that.

I drank alone in a cut-off shirt and later slept in the front seat, across the border and next to a shuttered textile factory in a fashion I would describe as “with one eye open”, but to this day I could swear I got a good five hours complete with some REM. That’s not bad, considering.

On the way back to school I figured I’d stop and see what’s what at the jail—I had his car, after all, and if it wasn’t too big a pain in the ass it was probably the least I could do.

It was noon.

They told me to wait so I tried to lie down in the lobby. The plastic molds of the seats were too hard and unaccommodating and the criminal justice staffers kept looking at me funny. I yelled a lot and acted crazy. I thought it was quite natural that a severely hungover idiot would be the one tasked to pick up a jailed driver, the next morning. I’m still not sure how that didn’t occur to them or how that doesn’t logically follow, but I’ve since learned to pick my philosophical battles more practically.

I ate Sonic and remember, this was back before the Sonic boom ((no pun intended)) of the mid-2000’s which saw a sleepy Oklahoma-based quick service restaurant grow to a respectable national brand, so that’s saying something. I even spent, like, a dozen dollars on magazines at a grocery store—isn’t that ridiculous? I don’t think I’ve done that since. The last dead cat bounce of Print Media, Inc.

Six or Seven hours later, he was released and we drove back to town. Thoroughly exhausted from the travails, I assumed it was an understood fact of life that we would be forgoing the boozy concert scheduled that night. He assumed the opposite which, upon our reactions, made for a mirroring effect despite our two faces being so structurally different. That was the day that I knew this guy had the chin of an Irish boxer and I accepted that he would always be a hardier specimen of human, than me. As he dropped me off I turned to him and would utter what would later become both a running joke and the cornerstone of a deep and honest friendship: “That was the hardest night of my life.”

I didn’t understand how the guy who had just gotten out of jail and had (what was at the time for such young, privileged men) an impossible weight of misdeed and misfortune hanging over his head could have riposted “The hardest night of YOUR life? You asshole”. Hadn’t I explained about the delay and the chairs that didn’t allow for me to lay flat?

From that moment on, however, we were inseparable. We had a bond like I imagine bank robbers or soldiers had and grew to be the best kind of kindred spirits. That is to say, best friends whose forays into life’s dark dangers will die with us, not out of shame but rather out of respect that we should not cause undue stress and worry to our loved one’s regarding events whose statute of limitations have long since expired anyhow (R.I.P. N. Holloway).

When he moved to Dallas, I’d already been here for two months. He picked up my bed and a few other things and drove them to me. In the last fifteen years, outside of those two months, he’s always been no more than two miles away should I need help; a couch to sleep on, a short-term loan to bail out my alcoholic and irresponsible ways, a lawyer to bail me out of jail, a friend with which to share a meal.

The Godfather of one of my children,

The guy whom my parents think is weird,

The smartest person I know (and I know them all),

My financier,

My attorney,

My enabler,

My best friend*.

Fare thee well.

*Submissions re-open again in August. Contact for guidelines.

What do you do to remain violent in modernity?

It has dawned on me that it is likely a relatively new phenomenon that an able bodied man in the prime of his life does not use violence for basic sustenance in food and shelter, doesn't use violence to promote himself in sexual selection, celebrate in violence when the conqueror and has evolved away from teaching the ways of severe violence to his children whether it be against animals or other men.

At top of mind (from reading the aforementioned book on Comanches), just as far back as 150 years ago, if you are a native Texan, your grandfather's father was likely savagely killing other men, impaling, torturing and likely enjoying it a little bit too. It was either that or his kids were being stolen, his wife was being gang-raped and he was being killed and tortured with his testicles in his mouth or burned to death on a skewer. Respectable men and not just trained militia and military -- preachers, lawyers, sheriffs, teachers, land owning gentry-- were hardened in the ways of killing fellow man.

Men that could be fit, and later were in Andrew Jackson's case who lived the rest of his life with lead in his body from a duel he survived, to be a President of the United States used violence as an acceptable tool in their problem solving kit of life.

Sixty years ago we had a massive World War that sped boys through the threshold to manhood in warp speed and provided a built in rite of passage. These boys and later men were in general shown to be wise, judicious, smart, strong, responsible and reasonable people. The greatest Americans to ever live, as we so dub them with the "Greatest Generation" moniker, was nurtured by violence. 

If we treat that last statement as one devoid of irony then it must be held as evidence, the exhibit A (or B or C), that violence as a psychological or character trait is endemic to the success, "goodness", and glory of the American people.

And yet, today and in the recent past, we have attempted to "evolve" away from it. Outside of the USMC on the front line or whatever and the dispassionate poor mired in poverty (a modern day "Noble Savage" in the J.F.Cooper archetype), there is a conspicuous lack of violence both in our culture and everyday lives as we hold keeping peace as the higher and more noble ideal in much the same way we view humility as being superior to pride.

The question then is: Is the lack of violence a good thing? On an intuitive level we would knee-jerk a response "Yes", but I think the more important question is: What are the social costs?

To you personally: What do you do to keep refined your sense and ability to impart violence in a modern world?

Do you watch or participate in physical sports like football, boxing and MMA type training?

Do you get drunk and high and shoot semi-automatic guns with your buffoon friends?

Do you shoulder check people at baseball games or otherwise get in bar fights?

Do you get online and call people fagets and virtually talk shit/e-fight?

I, for one, need to focus on being a better American by way of being a better man, I think. Excuse me while I have a glass:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI-mDTdeKR8

The Old Man and the Sea

When a book like The Old Man and the Sea is made the icon and becomes a synecdoche for “Made-in-the-USA” literary genius, for an entire generation, it generally means that for it to be made palatable enough to become the zeitgeist of mainstream America and to reach the level of ubiquity it has, it had to be distilled to a point where the original compounds have been removed. What is left – this sober and simple caricature of what was once an intoxicating and clever portrait- becomes an object that is all too easy for the subsequent generation to view with a sense of cynicism or outright dismissiveness. The afore, coupled with my memory of my father making my twelve year old brother read and write a report on this book as a form punishment for some reason, led me to thirty years of “The Old Man and the Sea” avoidance.

It wasn’t until I recently finished a hackneyed, heavy-handed, and disastrous first draft of a manuscript that I thought it imperative to read this book and only then because of a selfish and fancifully sociopathic turn. I had inadvertently titled my MS with the same compound sentence structure: The ___ and the ___. 

Once I realized this I had to read the book. I mean, Hemingway was not only one of my favorite authors but one of my life’s idols and even though we respectfully disagreed on matters of taste, like Victorian aesthetics and terse, Spartan sentences, maybe there was a fundamental driver that compelled us both to independently arrive at a similar naming convention. My heart swelled when the thought first flowed to my brain; did we share a muse?

I’ll save you the suspense. The above compound sentence structure is one of the most common found in the English language and I am an idiot. 

What I did find, however and finally to the point, is that I really enjoyed this novella and thought it to be very profound and illustrative of, if we are lucky (or unlucky, as one may argue), an honest acceptance of our own old age, a review of our life lead up until our old age and what it has meant, and ultimately the inevitable end of it all.

What I read was not just a story about an old man fishing, but the story of love and sacrifice. This story is the song of the stoic and the ballad of the martyr. It is simply an understanding that life as we know it thus far (and likely have always known it) is inherently an exercise in futility with which the only control one can hope to wrest is the control of your attitude and how to give other people pleasure and love. 

In my opinion the sea was a wonderful metaphor a vast and treacherous life that is intellectually unknowable by virtue of our physical and mortal limitations compared to the deep secrets and power of said vast and treacherous sea. The entire lifespan, experience and expertise of one man with a sole focus, who in this case was “born to be a fisherman”, cannot but put a dent into what can be truly known. Our fisherman, old, frail and barely able to “fish” anymore had in his short span only come to really understand the dynamics and characters at play in a small pool of water north of Cuba. With what hope can a man truly know the world and life if he is disabled with a built-in expiration date that makes investigation of every inch of the sea impossible? 

One can’t, I think the author argues, but one can make the best of his nautical miles and pass the lessons on to our inspired youth with love and sacrifice.

The Irony of People Who Do Not Believe in Evolution...

The Irony of People Who Do Not Believe in Evolution, Why Mainstream Christianity in the West is the iPhone of Religion, and a Case for Why China is More Evolved Than America.

Let me first acknowledge from what perch I derive my view. I am an Absurdist through and through and as such, I find staunch and devout atheists just as annoying as the similarly described religious.

To expound on my personal belief, the first thing you need to know is that my belief presupposes that, as a species, we have realized that our survival is more likely encouraged if we group and work together. (There is a meaningful distinction I should make here in that "group together" does not mean every human being should live, this is as paradox in that it is concurrently exclusive and inclusive.)

To that end, religion in general and the flavor of Christianity that is mainstream in America, is equal to all philosophical beliefs in that it is nothing more than a construct to help groups, by way of individuals, survive this world.  Whether it be a philosophy that inspires one to live for its own purposes, a religion that obligates one to live in a certain way, or any of the other infinite possibilities a human mind can conjure up and put a flawed and mortal sense of belief or faith in, the dictation of a behavior code and pattern is being adopted to promote the creation of a standard; a standard which will serve to stabilize the (also, perhaps, infinite) possibilities of human behavior in an attempt to, as a group, avoid being lost in the human ignorance and resulting chaos of our material universe and world.

My personal belief further dictates that because we as a people and a condition cannot know inherent meaning for life (ergo, we cannot know "God"), we are free to conceptualize and implement whatever the fuck philosophy (or religion, which can be used interchangeably at this point in my explanation) we want as long as it helps to yield the result of our survival. It is in this way that religion is nothing more than the best product our species has been able to produce for easing the lives of and maintaining the order for our kind. (As a side point and at the risk of delving into political philosophy, it’s my belief that this is why until the modern era you see religion as a basis of laws and rights, as well.)

Because our species has evolved to believe that the best case for survival is through banding together and creating standards to promote harmony and convenience for the most basic needs of human life, and because philosophy and the group adoption of said philosophy is a product of this evolution, one can only surmise that philosophy is a product of evolution, ergo religion is a product of evolution.

It is in that sense, not through a pejorative or dismissive tone, that I say Christianity in the West (and specifically in America) is the equivalent of the iPhone and Jesus was Steve Jobs. Jesus (or his executive handlers depending on the Apocrypha to which one subscribes) and the latter, evolved iterations that we see today, is a democratized product whose design is very easy to digest without much work or thought.

The packaging of a product that solves the human problems of having to work to create a personal meaning to live is important because instead of each individual being compelled to actively live, experience, think and create a philosophy by which to live, the inheriting or otherwise accepting a philosophy that one has not earned (or in the modern case, even understands) eliminates the need to know and critically think about anything in the world one lives in, and instead frees these specimens to eat, sleep and procreate in larger numbers.

It is in this way that religion has a tipping point from being beneficial to survival to detrimental to survival, through the encouragement of the procreation of people who have shown a propensity to be indoctrinated as well as have exhibited a lack of appetite for critical analysis*.

Because as a species we have historically ascribed the philosophy that encourages the survival of the group, it can be deduced that societies birthing larger percentages of a population that has not inherited cheap dogma, defined as any philosophy not sufficiently earned, is more evolved. If we are to accept the aforementioned definitions and controls then logically we can interpret that China is an example of a more evolved society than America **.

Notes

*Religious people who have come by their religion through a personal interest, study, or experience are not included in the inherited and indoctrinated as it could be said their philosophy is just as legitimate and valid as any other.

** China has reports of 60-80% of its 1.3 Billion people as non-religious or beholden to an inherited doctrine (780 million on the low end). America has reports of 20% of its 313 Million people as non-religious or beholden to an inherited doctrine (62 million).

#MothAnkles

Moth Ankles is my metaphysical alter ego; a fatalistic, devil-may-care man who struggles to exist in a world with no inherent meaning. 

Born from the homage to the indomitable Cocaine Biceps aka Galaxy Knuckles aka Thor Molecules aka Ghostface Killah, the original iteration of this self was known as Meth Ankles.

As time wore in and my alter self became more self-aware, I was awoken to the depressed realization that I had a severe lack of cowardice. It was with this in mind, coupled with my deep love for the 19th century golden era of Russian literature that I evolved as the enlightened and absurd "Moth Ankles".

The Ironic Case of Vladimir Putin an original essay by CutTheCrackJack [Draft]

[U][B]The Ironic Case of Vladimir Putin, an original essay on how an autocrat of the state exists because of the democracy of life.[/B][/U]

By most all biographical accounts, of which there are many, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has an affinity for vodka, stout German beers and telling vulgar jokes in even the most formal of settings.

Putin, in an effort to properly frame a vanity worthy of his post, will only deign to tranquilize bears, tigers and whales, ride horses through the Urals while topless and, though elaborately staged in the heavy handed way usually seen in the regimes of cherub-faced fat kids, when he swims the breast stroke for 200 meters in rivers or cliff dives into the Black Sea, his proud Slavic torso conjures up none of the silly and amateur shame one equates with the North Korean propaganda machine.

This is the profile of a man who, with a hard to substantiate at $40B in net worth, is estimated to be one of the world's richest men and who tops the Forbes list of “[I]Most powerful man in the world[/I]”.

Putin is also a 5'7, 160 pound, 61 year old man with a wedding singer-bad quality comb-over and a weird overbite thing going on.

He is not particularly intelligent or gifted, is not from a storied family or of wealth or prestige (actually, there is evidence that points to his actually being a pauper, ill-bred and being adopted), and he owes much of his amazing vertical march from the nadir of Russian society to his current perch on the peak to interpersonal relationships, risk and luck.

Relationships. Risk. Luck.

If those general ingredients sound vaguely familiar and comforting it is because those are exactly the same platitudes we stir together and sell as "The American Dream." Isn't it easy, then, to see how Vladimir Putin evokes such interest and fascination, if not outright empathy from American men of ability and ambition?

Ideologically neutral, joining a movement for only so long as it suits his personal and political needs until it no longer serves the self, Vladimir Putin embodies many of the characteristics of a generation- one that we deride here in America- that we call "The Millennials."

--

 “You can do anything” I reiterated to my son after subjecting him to Pixar’s 2007 film Ratatouille whose democratizing and feel-good mantra “Anyone Can Cook” is underscored by the story’s ethereal donor Chef Gusteau.

And isn't that the point, that anyone can possibly do anything?

Almost. I hope to explain, and through great irony, how Vladimir Putin the despot ruler and indisputable bad ass of the world is one of the greatest threats to the world's torchbearer of Democracy* because of our world's inherent democracy vis-à-vis fatalism.

--

Anyone can do anything.

What I've left out up to this point is that the above is not true. At least it is not [i]entirely[/i] true if one realizes that what is omitted -- what we either don't say, realize or consciously know-- is that our life and accomplishments are inextricably slaves, chained to what exists as the current conditions or the foreseeable future conditions (which becomes a current condition) by what we can materially affect.

So what does that mean? Truly then, we cannot do "anything".

The extreme examples we see in history**, or anecdotally, are really not amazing and otherworldly feats but only extremely (and relatively) valuable outcomes from optimal conditions, within the confines of material space and time (which is our metaphysical limit). We are fated to exist in a world with preset physical laws, societies, culture and relative morality. To the extent we can affect our world is fated by our corporal temporal shelf-life and viability within the sandbox we were placed.

So what were the optimal conditions that gave rise to Russia being ruled for the last fifteen years by a poor, orphaned, wholly average, arguably sociopathic but otherwise nameless guy?

Extreme image crafting.

If you are on facebook, image crafting is something we see everyday through our network of friends and peers. At it's essence, it is manipulating and leveraging information (whether it be words, photos, locations, etc.) in order to affect and project an outward image in whichever way the crafter deems ideal.

Putin had the perfect opportunity to be an image crafter.

Putin joined a KGB that, contrary to popular American romanticism, was not a vodka-fueled mixture of the Russian version of the Soprano’s and a Mexican Gulf Cartel with a splash of 007, but was rather a bloated, bureaucratic version of our volunteer armed forces who sit behind desks.

He dicked around for a while making minimum wage in East Germany as the equivalent of a middle manager that kind of rises up through the system and gets a little savvier with each bump in raise and responsibility instead of petering out to the peter principle*** in St. Petersburg (okay, that was obnoxious I'll edit this out) until getting a break by way of a relationship he fostered to get into politics. Nobody can really explain the truth about this relationship as these two men, Putin and Sobchak, when asked even have conflicting messages and widely varying accounts of how their partnership came to life. How even now the real arrangement between the two men can be obscured with individual agenda and egotistical lobbying is because of the optimal condition Putin had the fortune of being in, which is to say his entrapment in a closed political system with an unremarkable career in the KGB.

By the time Putin reached an unlikely position of prominence and influence, he was able to basically invent his own credibility and qualifications without any of the negative blow back that we’d see in more transparent political and societal systems. Simply put, Putin had the good fortune of growing up in a time and in a society that allowed him to write his own ticket by giving him the liberty to create his own back story and mythology.

In these optimal conditions, that of statist Russia “Anyone can be anything” if one can will it as Napoleon with deceit and mere say-so, creating a true democratic dynamic. This democratic dynamic is what lead to Putin become the antithesis of democracy, and I for one am tickled pink (no pun intended).

[i]Notes:[/i]

The presupposition is that one's psychological and physical make-up is ideal and optimal within whatever conditions one finds oneself being born into. In this instance, being a sociopath with a sizable ego and a modicum of luck was inherent to Putin and a genetic advantage.

* Democracy is Not My Standard: An Essay by CTCJ
http://cutthecrackjack.blogspot.com/2013/04/democracy-is-not-my-standard.html

**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory

***http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

I am sad for Justin

Gosh, that video above of Justin Beiber trying to fight the paparazzi is sad.

I know it's supposed to be funny and I'm supposed to take joy in making fun of this guy, but all I see is a tragedy. The poor guy never had a chance.

Once he got famous, as just an innocent little boy, his fate was sealed. I'm of the opinion that nobody can be well-adjusted and emotionally healthy if subjected to the celebrity machine, in our society, before or during those transformative years where our brain and psyche and psychology are developing. I think being used by the celebrity machine at an early age causes an acute flavor of mental illness what likely he will (if he doesn't already) and others like him (who, just off the top of my head who I've read about on shaggy include Lohan and Amanda Byrnes) suffer.

The best and most noble thing you can do is to martyr yourself for your family. He should maximize his earning potential, procreate as much as possible, put a shit ton of money into accounts for his progeny with stipulations like "must never act/record/whatever in Hollywood" and "must go to school" or it's forfeited, and then self-medicate with whatever interests and pleases you, living like an emotionally stunted and developmentally arrested "hedonist" who, in an ultimate twist of irony, is irrationally hated by all the "normal" people who misinterpret his confusion and misery as undeserved privilege and new age douchebaggery.

Seriously, I've seen more sympathy and understanding for convicted killers, homeless people, and other criminally insane than the hate for celebrities who fall off the deep end.