Samhain (spooky)!

I love Halloween. I love the pagan roots in the celebration of Sam Hein (a celebration of the dead). Given the recent level of fanaticism in America, I am thankful that the holiday has not yet been banned (let’s give it time though). Who does not love Halloween? Candy, autumn, pumpkins, candy corn (especially the kind with the chocolate segment, or even the intimidating candy corn material pumpkin- the Carpathian Scorge of teeth), and women dressed like harlots pretending that it is just a costume and not some form of breaking free from sexual repression.

Well I’ll tell you who does not love Halloween: adults. After a certain point, dressing up becomes beneath adults (unless they are single males, and are pursuing one of the harlots).  Don’t believe me? Try throwing a Halloween party where the invitee list is full of thirty somethings. The first and most dramatic responses you will get will sound something like this: “Party sounds great. Please don’t tell me we have to dress up”. I think this is one of the stages in a person that truly marks placing your foot closer to the grave. There is a groupthink that encapsulates adults. They lose their creative thinking, individuality, and imagination. Nothing represents this better than adults bitching about having to wear a costume (or perhaps hearing for the fifth time how a coworker spent his weekend picking up parts for a snowblower. Really? Homedepot doesn't carry 3/8s spindels? Bastards. Please go on).

Dress up is fun and is good for you.  Just ask Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt. Actors are really just playing advanced forms of dress up, and look at the amount of gravitas they place on their careers. Halloween is all about kids dressing up as zombies and the walking dead. However, I think what it really does is to reveal the zombies and walking dead that surround us every day at work. The fact that these people take themselves seriously is the most terrifying thing I can imagine.  They must actually think they have accomplished something by forcefully freezing and amputating their imaginations, as if an imagination was some sort of wart or skin tag. I respect the right of everyone to give up on life at some point, I just hope they do not expect me to join them. That’s why I need to get rich. Remember: old poor men are crazy, old rich men are eccentric. Becoming an eccentric is my life’s work!

Of inspiration and demotivation

So as a guitarist, practice is a necessary evil. I hate practice, and I lack talent. The result is that I am not a very good guitarist. Normally I am fine with this and just soldier on. However I was recently exposed to a truly talented guitarist playing an original song. It was fantastic. I could never play with such accuracy, regardless of my practice regimen.

This introduces me to my latest struggle: lack of talent. I currently pursue too many hobbies to focus on one correctly, but I feel that I learn much slower than others. Perhaps it is my lack of focus that has me spreading out my abilities too far, but I doubt this. I have been practicing basketball for several years now and I have to face the fact that I will never be very good. My reaction times are too slow, and practice will not really resolve this. Due to my height, the fact that I am not a natural athlete seems to infuriate many of my teammates. I assume that they spent years wishing they had height, see me, and are angered that I do not totally dedicate myself to playing basketball. I guess I can see this point of view, I just wish it did not result in people dumping so much anger and negativity at me. I enjoy basketball, love the exercise, and enjoy playing on a team. Perhaps my teammates feel that because of my casual attitude the only reason I can play at their level is because of my height?  I guess I would be angry too.

I have been trying to figure out why my basketball playing brings out so much anger in others. It is the sole reason I avoided the sport for so many years. It is also one of the reasons I have chosen to pursue the sport later in life. Kind of a face your fears sort of thing. I have learned many lessons from this, but the negativity is starting to wear me out.  As I learned from my last job, I do not respond to fear based incentives or negative reinforcements. However, in the world of jocks and sports, I understand that it would be ridiculous for me to expect any sort of positivity. Male competition is cut throat, with no quarter given to enemies. I just wish my teammates would stop viewing me as an enemy. I suppose if I was better, they might just hate me more, so I guess I can be thankful at my limited skills.

I can make some good beer though!

All Hail Piels

I would like to honor a true gentleman: Piels beer. This is a beer of true character. A repugnant and skunked character, but character none the less. This beer defines the lowest common denominator (with some notable competition by Golden Anniversary). However it is still brewed and drunk every day. Imagine the low standards of the Piels brewmaster. I predict that his wife is fat and has a low sex drive, his dog smells like fungus, and that his favorite pass time is collecting Rainbow Brite toys (and going to the associated conventions). The perfect man to brew the worst beer in the world.

Why the sudden interest in the wet fart of beers? I had a bad experiment with partigyle brewing (where you make a strong beer and a weak beer out of the same batch). The weak beer came out with some defects. I ran it though some gelatin treatments to strip the astringent flavors out, and ended up stripping all the flavors out. As such, I heard the bowel liquefying comment of "this tastes like Piels" from one of my guests this weekend. This statement was true but brutal. With my gelatin treatment, I was certainly polishing the proverbial turd. And of course it just kept stinking.

Maybe I do like Piels after all. The brewers wife might just have a glandular condition and a fantastic personality that includes a passion for Tales from the Darkside. His dog might be charming. However I doubt this. I will make this promise: Should I see Piels in any sort of bottle, I will buy it. I'm sure it's just the cans that ruin the taste of Piels. However, I think Piels just comes in 40s. Damn that brewer and his stretchmarked wife. I bet she has an oval belly button.

Tales from the Darkside

Remember this show? Tales from the Darkside? It was actually supposed to be a TV show based on the Creepshow movies but they could not get the naming rights. Its on the Chiller channel now. The chiller channel is more scary when one considers the average weight and cholesterol levels of the typical viewer. If I was Nabisco, I would make sure to get plenty of Mallomar adds on that channel right away. Middle aged stoners looking for a channel that plays bad syndicated TV shows from the 80's must love Mallomars.

Great intro on Tales from the Darkside though. I remember watching it after the Big Apple movie on Channel 5 on Sunday afternoons. At the time I preferred Fruit Rollups to Mallomars however. Maybe because my chronically cheap family would only buy the imitation ones with the foul cardboard cookie and the offputing texture marshmallow. They also used to buy the imitation fruit rollups with the bits of fruit in it. Unrolled they looked like the fake vomit you buy at dollar stores. I want my fruit rollups fully processed and with lots of chemicals. I'm American and depend on processed foods!

Here is a controversial subject. Are you one of these wackos that claims to be able to taste the difference between white and yellow American cheese? If so, F you! The only difference is yellow dye. Is your pallet so refined that you can taste yellow dye. If so, why are you not judging wine in France? At least then I would not have to be subject to your arrogant judgements of processed cheese. The nerve of some people!

Simply complex

So let's take a break from the complicated things and focus on the complexly simple. How does one through away a garbage can? If you put it out to the curb, the garbage men will just think it’s an empty garbage can and leave it. You can try putting a sign on it that says “garbage” but the collectors will just think it’s a garbage can and leave it. The only possible solution I can think of is waiting at the curb for the garbage man and then holding a conversation with him about how the garbage can is now also classified as garbage. What a strange conversation. I personally avoid conversations with my garbage man. He seems very angry, and would probably not take my garbage can as it would need some sort of garbage can collection sticker that the town sells for five bucks.

This thread leads me to another thought. Why am I in my mid thirties and have never had the need to throw away a garbage can? It feels like a weird obstacle to be facing for the first time at this point in life. I don’t think that it is a challenge I care to solve either. I will continue to use my “garbage” garbage can that squirrels have chewed through and that fills with rain water even when the lid is on. Life is too short to try to figure out how to transform garbage canisters into garbage themselves. F the squirrels who brought me to this conundrum.


Here is a little Munich pic at Schnieder Weiss beer hall. Sweet Aventinus:

Survival memory

Having just gotten through the worst employment experience of my life, I am now going through a period of strange rebound. Let me clarify my last statement. This was not just the worst employment experience I have ever had, but the worst overall experience I have ever had. The job had all the definitions of a nightmare: abhorrently long hours, predatory and profoundly incompetent management, a cut throat client, and severe stress levels. Essentially an entire facet of my personality shut down and was replaced by some previously unknown personality designed purely for survival. Interesting fellow, but I am glad to see him fade away.

Rather than focus on this negativity of this experience, I want to speak to the wonderful return of my less pragmatic personality facets. I hesitate to call this my artistic side as it sounds like a garbage cliché, but that descriptor really does fit the bill. I can now actually reserve brain capacity for musing and creation, with surprising results.

One of the first rebound effects was the realization of what portions of my personality/memories had been repressed by my survival personality (hitherto referred to as Darwin). For some strange reason that I cannot explain, it would appear that Darwin removed access to almost all of my good childhood memories. The bad and traumatic memories were accessed constantly (the mental illness and social paranoia of my management closely mirrored experiences I was exposed to as a child). This reliving of past trauma is to be expected, but I did not expect the blanking out of good memories as well.

I've learned from therapists that human beings are actually comprised of a "self" which is surrounded by many different "role" personalities, which are like plug ins for certain situations. My Darwin plug in apparently went through a triage procedure, and decided that my kinder, more sensitive side could not survive the exposure to the depths of negativity I endured each down. As such, this sensitive side was packed up and moved to some sort of metal bunker to ensure its survival. Nice move Darwin! I applaud your proficiency and foresight.

So to sum up, what brought up this revelation?  I walked passed a cafeteria display and saw those little cardboard milk boxes you used to get in grade school. I was flooded by a memory of when I was in kindergarten and my job was to take the milk order down to the cafeteria and have them load up this little cart with the milk cartons. I loved pushing this cart back to the classroom and seeing the delight on the faces of my classmates when I came into the room. This is a fond memory and I used to think of it often. However, it has been gone for about half a decade (curiously the same period of my last employment). Welcome back milk memory! Darwin has been honorably discharged!

Ode to the Sociopath

Ahh the Sociopath. Formerly known as the psychopath (now an outdated term that can no longer be used). These are some of the most fascinating individuals on the planet. In the strictest terms, they are not really humans, but aliens walking amongst us. They feel no true emotions and have no empathy towards others (two key defining human characteristics), so what are these creatures? The answer is tricky, but it seems to be a safe bet that this has something to due with evolution. These "mutant humans" see the world in a manner so different that we cannot comprehend it. Mutations are key to evolution, but there are many mistakes that fail along the way, or that need to be drastically refined over long periods of time. So are sociopaths the next step or a doomed failure.

Most humans are relatively stupid. This is easily proven with the large followings that many fundamentalist organizations attract and hold sway over. However, the lowest common denominator still has some form of empathy for the suffering of others. Sociopaths cannot fathom that other humans can suffer, as they cannot feel anything themselves. They steal, abuse, attack, and murder simply because they can. The idea that they are monsters inducing suffering in the world is the furthest thing from their mind.

The most dangerous part about the sociopath mind set is the fact that they believe (and will argue to the bitter end) that they are actually the most self aware and empathetic people in the room. This is because they have spent a lifetime studying the humans around them to learn what "emotion based" lifeforms do on a day to day basis. They then use this "data" to blend in to society and wreak havoc. This relentless analysis and creation ofmanufactured personas is what makes sociopaths truly believe they have self awareness and empathy. Do not try to disabuse them of this belief, as the reaction will be explosive (I have recently been in one of these conversations). The sociopath's greatest fear is humans uncovering what they really are.

So why the rant on sociopaths? They are all in prison or institutionalized, right? Not so. "Functional sociopaths" are all around us (most CEOs fit the bill).  I have had several close relationships with these individuals over the years (both personal and professional). I don't need Area 51 or UFOs to believe in aliens. They walk amongst us and are studying us everyday. Pay enough attention and tune into the right behaviors, and you can become an alien hunter just like me. Just be aware of how dangerous these creatures are. Then have a beer!

9 to 5

What makes a person adverse to risk? What makes a person a risk taker? Following your dreams and aspirations takes a lot of balls, and most people just are not up to it. I certainly cannot claim to be. While I've finally found a job in corporate America that is not soul crushing, I can't pretend that I sit at home with glee anticipating sitting at a desk in an office building all day. Some people might say its pragmatic to keep "your head on straight" and keep a solid career while pursuing your dreams. However I cannot agree. Dreams take your full attention and time. Corporate careers are like awful, insecure girlfriends. They will not tolerate any competition and demand 100% of all your free time. It's not just the 8 to 10 hours you put in a day. Just look at the fact that I am remaining anonymous on this blog so that I can write what I really think. The only reason I am doing so is to prevent any negative impact to my career. This is an important fact. I am shaping my outside of work activities in such a way that I remain corporate friendly. Never forget this additional sacrifice that most jobs demand of people. You are giving up your free speech voluntarily and freely. So while having a corporate career feels pragmatic, I believe that it might be one of the shades of cowardice. Here's to Podster the coward! At this point this is the most balls I can muster. In the honor of free speech, here is a video of Kuch and I in Cologne Germany trying to find our way home.