The Patty Winters Show this morning was about Nazis and, inexplicably, I got a real charge out of watching it. Though I wasn’t exactly charmed by their deeds, I didn’t find them unsympathetic either, nor I might add did most of the members of the audience. One of the Nazis, in a rare display of humor, even juggled grapefruits and, delighted, I sat up in bed and clapped.
The Patty Winters Show this morning was about people with half their brains removed. My chest feels like ice.
It’s not his girlfriend. It’s Princess Toadstool. And it’s not a gorilla,” I stress. “It’s Lemmy Koopa of the evil Koopa clan. And baby, as usual, you’re missing the point.” “Please enlighten me.” “The whole point of Super Mario Bros. is that it mirrors life.
I’ve started drinking my own urine. I laugh spontaneously at nothing. Sometimes I sleep under my futon. I’m flossing my teeth constantly until my gums are aching and my mouth tastes like blood.
I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?
But even after admitting this – and I have, countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed – and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling.
A curtain of stars, miles of them, are scattered, glowing, across the sky and their multitude humbles me, which I have a hard time tolerating.
No one cared what we watched or didn’t, how we felt or what we wanted, and we hadn’t yet become enthralled by the cult of victimization. It was, by comparison to what’s now acceptable when children are coddled into helplessness, an age of innocence.
When did people start identifying so relentlessly with victims, and when did the victim’s worldview become the lens through which we began to look at everything?
I concluded with an aching finality that the could-happen possibilities were gone, and that doing whatever you wanted was over. The future didn’t exist anymore. Everything was in the past and would stay there.
All we’ve really done is to set ourselves up – to be sold to, branded, targeted, data-mined. But this is the logical endgame of the democratization of culture and the dreaded cult of inclusivity, which insists everybody has to live under the same umbrella of rules and regulations: a mandate that dictates how all of us should express ourselves and behave.
I sat there silently, staring at him, and immediately ordered a third martini, one more than I usually drink.
The greatest crime being perpetrated in this new world is that of stamping out passion and silencing the individual.
He flirts and asks if I’m a model. “I’ll see you in hell,” I tell him, and move on.
Moral of the story?
Yeah, we all have to leave,” he says. “You said that already.
I also think that Phil Collins works better within the confines of the group than as a solo artist – and I stress the word artist. In fact it applies to all three of the guys, because Genesis is still the best, most exciting band to come out of England in the 1980s.
Luis Carruthers... takes the seat next to mine which means I’m supposed to take off my walkman.
I’ve adapted; these events have toughened me and I’m prepared to deal with this particular topic.
Or maybe when you’re roiling in childish rage, the first thing you lose is judgment, and then comes common sense. And finally you lose your mind and along with that, your freedom.