Duck Dynasty

Are you fucking kidding me, you asshole?

The sheer stupidity of my fellow humans never fails to astound me. We have that greedy, low, cockroach kind of thing going on and we're not giving it up for shit. The wolves take and the opinionated sheep baaa about it, and that's all there is. That's us.

I took one look at the Duck Dynasty dudes, in passing, and knew exactly what I was looking at. I never watched the show, and never will. But I was far from shocked when I heard that the Duck Dynasty Daddy was a racist, homophobic moron. Of course he is. Look. At. Him.

Now, one should never judge a book by its cover. Some of the nicest people on earth are raggedy, hillbilly looking folks. However, if you are a multi-billionaire, and you don the garb of a raggedy, hillbilly looking folk, then you have an unmistakable message that you're trying to put out. [He's being insulting to them too, honestly.]

The family that stars in the Duck Dynasty is rich as hell. They go around looking like that for the television show only. There are pictures of them floating around everywhere where they look like typical yuppie Americana--the kind of people that dine on caviar and wipe their asses with hundred dollar bills. The kind of people that ordinary people "Normies" work for.

I have a friend who supports this fucker, and that person and I almost got into a vicious argument about his 'right to say whatever he wants and believe whatever he wants to believe'. I let the argument go, because it isn't all that important to me as something to fight about. However, this man doesn't believe a damn thing he says about gays or blacks or any other controversial issue that might come spewing out of his mouth. What he cares about is money. Controversy brings money, no matter who it may hurt.

So, gay and bestiality become the same thing for the controversy that it will stir up.

And black people loved slavery for the controversy it will stir up.

Spirituality and the Bible have nothing to do with it. MONEY is GOD to this person. And he'll play you like a piano in order to get more of it. He'll run hot fingers all over your emotional keys in order to keep the fight up, the debate going, and his pockets fat.

The Duck Dynasty will, likely, gain even more viewers from this, and the television channel will, no doubt, allow this person back on the show. This is how it works in America. Kick the underdog, the thing that everyone loves to judge and hate (black, gay, whatever) and get a rise in indignation from the righteous masses that will turn  into more views for whatever it is that you're currently pimping.

It's so "Same Shit, Different Day" it's not even funny.

THE ISSUE IS NOT ABOUT WHAT THIS MAN BELIEVES AND PROTECTING HIS RIGHT TO SAY AND BELIEVE THOSE THINGS. THE ISSUE IS ABOUT WHETHER YOU ARE GOING TO LET HIM PLAY YOU TO HIS BENEFIT. THE GOD HE IS RAVING ABOUT ISN'T SOMETHING THAT HE REALLY BELIEVES IN. THIS MAN'S GOD IS MONEY.

We're smarter than this, aren't we?

...less predictably hate-filled than this?

...BETTER than this?

Daryl, my love. Kick. His. Poser. Ass. 

Review: Lover's Anonymous by Xavier Pierre Jr.

Meet Xavier...

 Xavier is both cold and callous. He treats women poorly, and in searching his character for a reason why, there seems to be no answer. He is on an endless hunt. He is a romanticized panther that is always hungry and always in search of more prey. Xavier meets a string of women during the course of the tale. He is calculating about his engagements with each one. The illusion to the hunting beast is not overemphasized in the way he went about obtaining, undressing, and conquering these women. 

It is a mesmerizing thing, ladies, to watch. 

Xavier is rich, pampered, and lives in the exotic land of Haiti. There is both great wealth and great poverty living hand in hand in this place and you can feel it. Xavier meets different kinds of women, from the wealthy to the poverty stricken. He treats them all the same--as something to catch and devour. And, honestly, there's no reasoning behind it. It seemed to me that there was merely, somewhere within him, the need to do this. Sometimes, he felt guilt about it, depending on who the woman was, but, mostly, I just saw the compulsive need to conquer there, as strong as his alcohol addiction. 

This book will make you flinch. This book will make you mad. And, if you're honest with yourself, you may see yourself in some of these women. 

I appreciate the honesty in the tale, and l liked Xavier--but I'm weird, and I would. I wanted to see him happy in the end. 

You might want to kill him. 

But you should definitely meet him. He has things to teach you about how some men think. And about desperation and redemption. 

__________

And the song of the day is:

..

I really have been good, you fat bastard...
 Merry Christmas and shit:) 

Sign the petition to free Cyntoia Brown. 

Ethan Couch vs Cyntoia Brown

I used to have these terrible battles on Youtube. I can't do that anymore because, while Google owns me, Google+ does not. It's personal like that. Therefore, you might hear anything from me here. In this case, recently, I learned a new word. 

We all did.

If I get something wrong. If my facts are absolutely correct, please bear in mind that I am used to some noble Youtuber correcting me. You may correct me if you wish.



Affluenza: a disease that the wealthy get that allows them to get away with murder.

Ethan Couch killed a bunch of people and is going off to play with horses as punishment. His affluenza was so great he had no respect for the lives of lesser human beings and no knowledge that there could be consequences for his actions. He really believes that he can do whatever he wants, and the justice system is telling him that what he believes is absolutely true.

I could rant and rant forever about how wrong this is. The thing is everyone already knows it's wrong, so what's the point of attempting to take it apart and show that obvious wrongness? I only mention it because affluenza is a cool new (slightly hilarious in the worst kind of way) word and I love words. In adding it to my mental dictionary, I had to suffer the taint of its inclusion. It came with a rolling level of nausea. It made my stomach churn and my head ache. But I had to include it because it is now a real word. The spell checker is not quite catching it yet...but it will.

If a poor/middle class kid had killed all those people, he'd be under the jail now. He'd starve to death in the darkness of human disgust with the rats and the cockroaches that inhabit the shadows of such places. He would have been tried as a person who had murdered innocent people because he couldn't possibly have affluenza. He wasn't given everything to the point where it could be claimed that he didn't know the difference between right and wrong. He would be held accountable for the death and the destruction he had caused--and for the pain and suffering of the families he hurt so very badly.

Normal people, "Normies", I'll call them, don't get to make these kinds of 'mistakes'. No one feels sorry for poor Normies when they commit murder, even when they were abused all their lives, even when they've never known human kindness or compassion. The hardest life of a Normie is ignored when they recklessly or purposely slaughter other human beings.

I'm not saying this kid did this on purpose. I think what I'm saying is that I resent the fact that I've been forced to see him as a human being instead of a monster. ..

What makes one monster different from the other? Is it Ethan's youth which was played upon so heavily during the trial? No, they're locking kids up every day for lesser crimes. The same judge on this case locked a younger kid up for killing a person in a fight. So, it couldn't be youth...

Affluenza. Affluenza. Affluenza. Affluenza.

Word has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

_____

.

Sixteen year old, Cyntoia Brown did not have the luxury of having Affluenza. She is one of those people with those terrible childhoods I was talking about earlier. She was abandoned by crack addicted (I believe that was the drug) mother at an early age. There is a history of mental illness and drug abuse in her family. She did not 'trust' her adopted mother in her early years, and there was all kinds of sexual abuse, including some dude who turned her, at sixteen, into a prostitute. For fear of being beaten, Cyntoia went out to turn tricks and ran into a man who was forty-three years old. He took her home with him. And, she killed him. The man died because the child was afraid. There is strong evidence to support self defense in this case. She made no effort to cover it up. She stated quite plainly what she did and why.

This beautiful child was given life in prison. Her abandonment, the faults of her parents, the years of sexual abuse, none of it mattered when that life sentence was handed down by the court.

I'm not going to bitch and moan about the state of the world. Again Pointless. And besides, I learned from a kind man on Twitter, that you'll never see rainbows if you're always looking down. I want the rainbow here. What I am going to ask for is this:

There is a petition to grant Cyntoia Brown a little Affluenza. There aren't a lot more signatures necessary to grant this now young woman a chance. Learn a little something about her. Learn as much as you had to learn about Ethan Couch...

...and then sign it if she captures your heart. Please.

She takes college level courses, and she writes beautifully...

Cyntoia's Documentary

The Petition


Song:

The Killer, Drowned

I'm working on Chapter 2 of  The Killer Drowned.








When I write for self...It's weird as hell:)

The Invisible People

When I first began writing, I put on this blog, somewhere, that I felt invisible. I produced work after work, and, yet, I never got the interviews or won the little awards that I saw other writers attaining. The companies that I worked for called me "Unestablished". I was an unestablished author, and when it was happening, I really wondered what that meant, exactly. There is nothing in all the world like being on the outside looking in. I could always work for the smaller online companies. The pay was zilch. It felt like the writing world was going on all around me, but I had been placed in this special bubble. No one could see me. No reader* ever spoke to me about something that I'd written. But the companies I worked for wanted book after book from me. It was a very strange way of being, and, only now, have I come to understand it for what it was and is. For a strange little person like myself making the difference will be difficult. Past experience in the field, and even recent ones, cloud my judgement. I don't trust anyone, and that lack of trust keeps me from putting out the many books that I have written and from writing the many more that I could write. 

But this is not what I have come to talk about today. I want to talk about other Invisible People. I was watching something about them, and it caused my mind to go this way. I have a review to write and an incredible author to herald, but I'm not in the mood right now. I will do it soon, because that person deserves it. 

I have invisibility on the brain right now. 

There is a man named Mark Horvath who gives voices to the invisible people of the world. He travels all over talking to homeless people so that we can hear their stories. There is nothing more cruel in society than the way that homeless people are treated. Listening to their stories is like a nightmare. The first thing that is shocking is the viciousness of other people, the greed, and the lust. I am American, or at least that's what is says on my birth certificate, and what I want to know when I watch these terrible stories is this: Have we become meaner? Have the myriad-colored streaks of cruelty and envy and lust in us gone so far, and become so deeply entwined within, that there's no going back?

There are rich people going to luxury resorts that are built like shanty towns. I don't think I've ever heard anything more disgusting in my life. It reminded me, historically speaking, of the times when people were throwing other 'lesser' people to lions for sport. Maybe this is the first stage of that. First, you live in a properly heated, internet ready, facsimile of absolute misery, and when you're having that experience, you want a little more and a little more--until you're bringing in the lions and going on jaunts to test their jaws with your hands in order to see what being eaten by one must feel like for the poor bastard you've thrown in the pit and bet a thousand dollars won't last five minutes...

History truly does repeat itself--over and over again. We gain incredible new technologies and use them to play Angry Birds, we can fly to the stars but would rather fight among one another, and we hate. We hate any difference we can lock on and judge as 'other' than ourselves. Less.

In this world today becoming homeless is a real threat for almost everybody, and, yet, no one see themselves wearing those raggedy shoes. There are people out there, and a lot of people too, who not only step over the homeless in the street, but who beat them and set them on fire. I have nothing, but I give when I can, and, sometimes, I give when I can't and know that I shouldn't. I don't understand how anybody can do anything else. Maybe it's because I had a very personal relationship with a homeless person that was vital to my life. In fact, I would not have had a life at all if not for this formerly homeless person. 

I know that this person was abandoned at fourteen years old and kicked out onto the streets. I know that this person turned to alcohol to ease the pain of that abandonment. I know that person slept on park benches in subzero weather. I know that this person ate out of garbage cans to survive. And I know that this person was not a bad person in terms of just being a human being. I've met much worse people--a hundred thousand times worse--while simply trying to maneuver my way through this writing shit. And those people have cars and money, and are just terrible human beings prone to using people in all sorts of ways for little more than sport. 

We can not keep going on this way. We are turning into something ugly and inhuman. Love isn't as hard as it looks. We have the technology to feed every starving person on the planet. We have the ability within us to take away both the disgusting 'luxury' shanty town and the real ones. I've been told that, despite the fact that I write the kinky naughty love thing, I think like a child. I understand that the way that I think is truly detrimental to my survival in this real ass world. 

But then I meet Yong, and people like her through this video connection with the Invisible People, and I don't want to think the other way. This woman worked all her life and got screwed over by her insurance company. She ended up homeless in a way that could happen to almost anyone. What's wrong with her? How is she a bad person because she is lost?

Mark Horvath belongs to a church, and while I don't much care for the trappings of religion, I admire both the fact that he was able to pull himself out of the depths of homelessness and drug abuse AND the fact that he does what he does today--give voices to the homeless. If you take the time to listen to Yong's story, and you read the comments on her video and some of the others, you will see why I despair. It's hard to love in this world. It's so much easier to hate. Believe me, I know. 

...But it's not impossible. 

Mr. Horvath isn't asking for anything. So, it doesn't cost you a damn thing to look. And guess what, a little 'give a fuck' is absolutely free. 

If we don't start working together, we are going to kill one another like that evil mastermind in every really good story--the one who is so selfish, and so "brilliant" that he wants to destroy the whole of the world...

...and then what's he going to do?

* Edited to include that this is not true for stories I do under a couple different handles, which are legion:)