d.g.k goldberg had two sets of rants. One was the sporadic entries in this page. The other was a short-lived Yahoo Group called The Daily Hate. I have entries from both here...
From the Site
04/22/02
09/22/01
08/10/01
04/2001
The Daily Hate
02/13/03
02/14/03
09/05/03
09/08/03
09/09/03
09/1203
From dgk goldberg
(04/22/02)
The Bloody Web Baron who has spent most of this weekend doing a lot of mind numbing work up-dating this website says that I need to rant again. I suppose he’s right. Some one has to be right and it is never goldberg. Really. Never. I am never right, usually misguided and often toxic. I seem to create chaos wherever I go, or at least be attuned to it, aware that the woman chattering on her cell phone near the frozen foods is a breast feeding mother with engorged breasts who is about to innocently use a pack of frozen peas to soothe the hard swelling and by a mistake of a store employee get arrested for shoplifting and . . . you follow the scene.
Need to rant? Most of my fiction is one long wail, rail, or rant and quite frankly, it exhausts me, you see there is this southern gothic horror thing about the demons that . . . and the sequel to Skating (which I suppose I should mention is nominated for the Stoker) and my I guess you call it mainstream novel that has me in tears even when I don’t have PMS because it was all built around the protagonist immigrating to Israel which makes a lot of sense now, doesn’t it?
I’m not certain . . .
I don’t believe . . .
Maybe no one reads this stuff. . . . it reminds me of when I lived in Hartsville, South Carolina and a DJ (night shift) killed himself on the air. No one knew until the morning man came, the same 45 played over and over. “Snoopy versus The Red Baron” (Incidentally Baron Von Richtofen was shot down yesterday April 21th) anyway, the poor wanker was found with his brains splattered on the floor by the morning man and that record playing over and over.
No one had been listening during his dramatic on-air exit from this mortal coil.
A young woman I worked with in Southern Music in Hartsville who was, as referenced elsewhere on this website, the first woman I knew who carried around nekkid pictures of herself offed herself shortly thereafter. The funeral home screwed up her make up, blue eye shadow on one eye, green on the other. I have since found that an alarming number of women carry around naked pictures of themselves. I don’t.
Later, one of the dearest friends I made in Hartsville, I have a painting, one of his last in my office, killed himself.
No wonder I had to go back to Hartsville for the first time in decades because of this novel I am writing about the young woman and demons.
A dear friend from those years, probably one of the first people I had odd off-kilter maternal feelings for found me recently through the wonders of the Internet.
I do wonder about the Internet. If maybe all these blips on the screen, all the people I think I communicate with near daily, are real, maybe I am just emailing myself.
One of my Internet friends is rearranging his life today; it has to do with his wife’s religion, appliance boxes, and the beach. It’s all too strange and besides, even were it not I wouldn’t tell you anyone’s secrets save your own.
On strange: today is Earth Day, April 22 and I can’t help sneering because Ira Einhorn the putative founder of Earth Day murdered his girlfriend Holly Maddux and stuffed her in a footlocker in his closet. Now, let me clarify: I do not find the murder of Holly Maddux the least bit amusing, she was by all accounts a rather innocent and nice young woman. And even were she not, I’m not a big believer in murder as a way to communicate. I feel a tad too much sympathy, a there but for the grace of G-d cold wash of fear because years ago I was subject to enthrallment to charismatic men who spouted absolute nonsense and treated women like stage props. I very much have the impression that Holly was a prop, a bit of business in the latter part of the third act. We all deserve better than that.
However, on the other side of page, that Ira Einhorn, benign hippy gentle giant guru to the intelligentsia offed someone and then was so horrendously stupid as to keep the decomposing corpse in his closet? Well, I’m sorry that’s funny. It just is. And the dimwits who supported him in their drooling willingness to believe that his prosecution was a CIA plot amuse me endlessly --- I wonder if they line their clothes with tin foil.
Happy Earth Day.
Me, I’m gonna use a lot of Styrofoam to celebrate Ira.
(9/22/01) - Top Of Page
It's almost Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and instead of atoning for my sins, I desperately want to commit more sins, all manner of sins, immoral acts, violations of societal norms, outrages against public decency and minor violations of the law suddenly strike me as neat, neat, neat, and groovy.
In the wake of September 11th's massive monument to mortality I find myself full of regret --- not so much for what I have done, but for what I haven't done. In the face of death-potential I can't ruminate over the Bad Things I have done or habitually do, they seem small, petty, completely irrelevant and my guilt (such as it sometimes is) over them seems an unwanted indulgence akin to the bottle of not-wonderful bath oil I occasionally pick up for no reason other than I want something.
Bath oil is never what I want. Not really.
I want to do Bad Things that I won't confess. Instead, I buy bath oil and mascara. And looking at the sheer enormity of our nation's tragedy and the ludicrous amount of mascara on my desk, I am struck by a juxtaposed still life in ashes.
Heard from Micky after she took a walk in Manhattan and saw all the fluttering posters of the missing. "All dead. And who will have the heart to take those flyers down."
And I wonder not about who these people were and what they did, but about what they didn't do . . . the skipped cheese cake due to dieting seems a dreadful loss, the night they didn't go out and get shitfaced because the Yankees lost seems a dreadful waste, the floors they mopped and the laundry they folded seems trivial --- but the times they didn't dart out of their apartments at 3 AM to talk to the nutters near the e train exit seem tragic . . .
I feel cheap even saying that, I'm here in the mildew and incest infested southland and I'm geographically and intellectually a vast distance down the interstate from New York ----- and, I am imposing my own amoral values on all those folks who won't ever go home again. Which brings me to more values imposition. . .
I am sick of hearing about how we need to understand why the amorphous 'they' hate us so. I find that thinking more repugnant that Falwell's flight of lunacy into a twisted tale of Sodom and Gomorrah redux.
We-need-to-look-at-how-US-policy-caused-this? Right, and then after that we can sit down with the terrorists at a potluck supper (lentil soup an essential, hashish brownies necessary) have a huge Oprah-fest, break into a chorus of Kumbaya and after the group hug we'll all understand each other and play nice.
It is not a question of whether we go to war. War has been brought to us. When a nation's citizens are attacked within her borders, that's war. We are at war. How we conduct it remains to be seen.
I've always bought into "those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it." (For the record, and just cause, I am fully aware that is the correct version of the quote I twisted into the title of "Doomed to Repeat It" about which more in a second.) One problem: we don't, as a planet, have a history of war wherein one of the parties doesn't have a clear identity or a country per sae. This is different. This is the beginning of new history.
The world has changed. Yet, I find myself annoyed at folks who think we need to cancel life --- stop ballgames and concerts because we are at something that if not war is a reasonable facsimile thereof. I think that dishonors the dead. I think that the way to honor the dead is to live, to live fully and freely wringing each moment of joy out of the chaos and miasma of mortality.
In the Warsaw ghetto, they wrote, they sang, underground theaters produced shows, and violinists played on street corners. They did this while dying of typhus by the thousands, while being rounded up and shot or shipped off to death camps, while starving to death. Can we do any less?
So this year, on Yom Kippur I'll repent. I'll regret every temptation I let pass me by, every time I let reason and responsibility rob me of pleasure and every wrong turn I did not take. I'll atone for the energy I wasted arguing with the incurably stupid, the times I was "too busy" to hang out with friends and the moments I reined in my writing because I feared going "too far."
I'll resolve in the future to go too far, too fast, and too recklessly.
Which brings me back to Doomed. The poor child has escaped, it's out in the world and you can get the booger from Barnes and Nobles, Amazon, the Design Image Group website and maybe from your local bookseller --- do me a favor, try to get it from your local bookseller and seduce him, her, or it into ordering a few extra copies and putting them on the shelves . . . Commercial break over.
Regrets: I am not a writer who enjoys having written. I hate whoring books, trying to self-promote, and looking at my work on a printed page. I love writing. The problem with Doomed is that it's finished. I already wrote it.
End of rant, back to writing.
(8/10/01) - Top Of Page
I haven't been right since Earnhardt died. Of course, there are numerous people who'd testify in a court of law that I've never been right. I'm fascinated by cowboys, pirates, people who dance on the edge of cliff. I'm scared of everything. Literally. Everything. Even taking an aspirin feels like a renegade act, a flirtation with death. My heroes have always been outlaws, except I'm not particularly fond of Tim McVeigh, however, it does creep me out that in high school I dated a guy that, once he entered the army and got his hair cut off, looked a great deal like McVeigh --- and the guy I dated in high school was from Terra Haute, Indiana where McVeigh was executed.
Coincidence?
Hell, yes. The world is absolutely full of random events, coincidence, fragmented bits of things that seem to have meaning.
One of my heroes, a family therapist named Jay Haley, explained "You can't not hypothesize. Humans are hypothesizing creatures." If someone walks through a room we theorize about why they walked through the room . . .
Which, of course, segues into stoned sophomoric discussions of logic: the birds flew over the building before the professor entered, did the birds bring the professor . . .
I actually always found the discussion of what happens to all the disappearing socks as relates to journeys to alternative universes more interesting.
Socks interest me more than birds.Another coincidence: I've spent most of this week transfixed by news reports from the Mideast - particularly this one.
--- I keep going back to a clear memory of standing in front of that pizza restaurant in 1999, it was near there that I ran up the largest one call phone bill of my life calling Goat to tell him I was no where near Netanya where a pipe bomb had just gone off . . .
On a parallel street, Yoel Solomon, which runs right behind the pizza place is my favorite bookstore/cafe in the world. Walk up Jaffa Road a block east and you stand in front of the kosher Dunkin' Donuts that Jenny, the protagonist of "Lamed Vav" stands in front of . . . the entrance to Me'a Sharim is a block from the pizza restaurant.
One of the reasons I've always liked to travel outside the US is that it seems things stay the same elsewhere --- or at least more than they do in Charlotte, NC -- my favorite pub in London is slightly older than the USA, I expect it to be there during my next incarnation . . .
But, I guess things change everywhere.
(April 2001) - Top Of Page
My bio note is a fucked up mess. That’s fitting. I should fuck up my bio - I’ve fucked up my life any number of times. And even, or especially now, when things seem calm, secure, more-or-less stable, I have a constant feeling of impending doom - like there is something --- maybe leaving my keys on the second shelf in the hall instead of the third shelf that is going to inevitably cause a disaster in my life. Maybe my failure to buy coffee on Tuesday is going to start a chain of events that leads to cancer, desertion, bankruptcy, complete rejection, or worse.
I feel like that all the time. Every minute. It’s no wonder that I can barely decide between pizza and suicide most nights --- they both seem rational choices.
I didn’t want to write a bio note. But, you have a web page ya’ gotta have a bio note. It’s some kind of rule. Maybe. Maybe not. But I kind of sensed that it would be cheating to avoid the bio note so I wrote some lame drivel that is more or less true.
That’s the problem with the truth. The stuff I make up is much more interesting. And the bio note was ipso facto about me, I did not become a writer to tell you about me. I became a writer to tell you about yourself.
I’ve decided to blame Scott Nicholson for this web page. I seem to vaguely recall him ragging me about being the last writer in America without a web page. He has one. My dear friend and partner-in-crime, Julie Anne Parks, Thelma to my Louise, has one.
Brian Hopkins my brother and everybody’s dear friend has one. I didn’t have one. And I was quite happy in my Luddite bliss --- but someone - I think it was Scott told me I needed one. Scott also believes that if you hear a name three times some weird magic happens and you buy his book or do his laundry or something just cause you heard his name three times. So maybe it was Scott who told me I needed a web page --- or maybe I was drunk at a con and someone else said it and Scott wasn’t even there . . .
THE DAILY HATE
Today I Hate (February 13, 2003) - Top Of Page
the extinction of red lipsticked canasta players with delusions of queendom.
Once upon a time long before Oprah and female empowerment the middle class was the refuge of an exotic strain of misplaced monarch, women with negliees who left the imprint of lipstick on coffee cups or martini glasses and merrily spent money they did not earn of things they described as needs while relagating their Ward Cleaver-ish spouses to a shadowy unimportant half-life where money was made.
They had beautiful manicured nails and a wardrobe with outfits for a range of essential occasions along the lines of playing mah jong or bridge, getting a tan without getting splash by the kids, going shopping and entertaining.
They entertained marvelously well the charge card weilding amazons of suburbia and were able to justify the expense of household help and silver trays by a near religious belief in the important of entertaining --- usually its importance to the career of the shadow spouse who was absent during the working hours.
Fuck Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique --- what these ladies did was more exciting than any career and in each group one royal lady reined spending, drinking, dieting, facialling, and bridge- playing with manic abandon --- always the one idenfiable by her heavy gold jewelry as the leader of the pack.
She did nothing this queen. Save arch an immaculate eyebrow and insult by implication lesser beings who wore the wrong shoes, sent their children to the wrong ballet lessons or left their homes without lipstick.
She ruled by sheer elemental force and despite her wealth of neurosis guilt was not one them. No guilt over being an inadequate wife and mother or not having a career --- these sorts did not need careers they were simply wonderful by viture of proclamation and shoes that always matched their handbags.
These were the women who wrapped their sweaters in scented tissue paper long before Martha Stewart --- they'd have burned Martha Stewart in their back yard grills for despite their ability to design clever centerpieces they left rain boots piled in the foyer, dishes in the sink, and had asteroids of dust floating through their environments when they were between maids. Besides which Martha never left the kids waiting at school because of an excess of old fashioneds in the early afternoon.
What they did was spend money well. Money they did not earn. And yet it was their money. They were entitled to it and spending it --- on matching towels, sets of matching bras and panties, lampshades, and madras shorts was their vocation, avocation, and art form.
I hate it that they are gone. That the gorcery stores no longer harbor slightly snockered women in high heels, perfect hair, gold earrings, and the scent of Chanel # 5 crashing their buggys into the detergent displays because of an extra scotch and soda attributable to annoyance of the neighbor's dog destroying the pansies again. I hate it that they are gone.
Of course, if they WERE NOT gone. I'd hate them.
Today I hate (February 14, 2003) - Top Of Page
all those earnest pudding-faced thirty-something women with chin length bobs and their male counterparts in LL Bean flannel eagerly buying lots of duct tape "for the children."
First of all I suspect that people who regularly own duct tape already know that the possibility of sealing your home against a biological weapon with duct tape is the equivelant of using Kotex to control a flood.
Come on people. Really. A "safe room" --- yeah, the nuclear holocaust has come, the four horsemen rode in and here we are in the family room playing scrabble by flashlight and snacking on rice krispie treats for 12 hours after which the deadly virus/burning debris/other awfulness will blow over and we can get cable television again.
Maybe it's a plan to jolt the sluggish economy, you know, let's get everyone to buy duct tape and plastic sheeting that will put the economy back on track. Nope. No one in government is clever enough to think like that.
I mean, REALLY. People really think that a biological attack will come after the fifteen minute warning giving folks time to retreat to their safe room or even better they have Made A Plan (one woman who looked suspiciously like the sort of homeschooler who reads her Bible all day while her kids eat countless peanut butter crackers and make potholders but are spared having to sit in a classroom next to anyone godless was on television last night with her neatly printed family emergency plan. she had headers like "emergency meeting point" in large boldface type. that'll save her life, yeah, no one with the right font ever dies.)
The energency meeting point is even worse than duct taping out the diaster. Your home is bombed, your children are radioactive, your neighbors have bubonic plague, not to worry, saddle up the SUV and head for the emergency meeting point, never mind that the roads are huge holes and your non-smallpoxed neighbors have morphed into urban rioting cannibals.
am i the only one that recalls a poster from the cold war? "In case of a nuclear attack put your head between your legs. AND kiss your ass good bye." The most annoying thing about these people lining up in the parking lot of their local home improvement stores to quaver to the camera in their warholian instat about how frightened they are and how they must have ducttape despite severe shortages of same is that the seem to have just now realized that the world is a hostile place.
the world has always been a hostile place. people die daily. children starve. old people are trampled. buses careen off mountains. trains collide. derranged jehuvah's witnesses show up on your door randomly and the pizza delivery man is shoot by a sniper three feet from your door and has the lack of professionalism to bleed on your pepperoni.
the globe is covered in a bunch of little wars that cnn doesn't report on because we all need hourly updates on who joe millionaire will choose or who got voted off the island.
most of the human race lives in grim relentless poverty and dies horrible deaths and even here in the lovely USA we are heir to hideous isolation, crippling lonliness, or worse having to put up with each other.
duct tape that you idiots.
as for me and mine, we're ordering pizzas without pepperoni. it's the only way to be safe.
Hate (September 5, 2003) - Top Of Page
It has been an incredibly long time since I shared my venomn and vitriol with you and it does give me pause to think of all you nice folks out there putting up with unspeakable horrors, overwhelming stupidity, and just plain tackiness and being too busy or too kind to hate people for inflicting themselves on you.
I am sorry that I have been absent so long, but rest assured that even when I neglect my posting responsibilities I HATE. I hate long and hard and with an obessive rage that makes Stalin look like he was just kind of not in a good mood some times.
And, as it has been so long I feel obligated to give you a superfical rundown of who and what I have been hating. The full scope of who and what I have been hating is far too long to list --- so expect the next message and the next to also let you know what causes me to grind my back teeth and think fondly of the black death . . .
So, a short list of what I have been hating (more to follow)
People who dump on old people for talking a lot and being slow, these twerps post to message boards about the trauma they experiance when old people ask questions, drive slow, or block supermarket aisles. Old people know that death is at the end of trip. They are wise not to hurry. What is the virtue inherant in moving fast?
People who hate young people, esp. young women, for being loud and showing skin. Look we only get about five years post-puberty to look good, after that it's the onset of sag, wrinkle, flab and fat. These kids who show skin are having fun and improving the urban landscape. Shut up and enjoy them.
George W. Bush. Yeah, I know, I have a lot of help here. But, this is one I can't help.
I do not, however, hate Brittney Spears. She really can't help it and I like her new haircut, it makes up for a lot.
Writers who think research means reading two tertiary sources on the Internet, one guidebook entry and a Ladies Home Journal article, who don't understand how to look critically at a primary source or understand the fallacy inherant in trusting a single case experimental design.
The sour Skittles. They may have ruined my world. Seriously.
People who have not bought a copy of my second novel Doomed to Repeat It.
People who think it is clever to assess people by geography. Many different people live in many different places.
wherein our anti-heroine lists a few more things to hate (September 6, 2003)
Whilest I was on hiatus from posting albeit not from hating, oh no,gentle readers, I am therefore I hate I encountered many, many, things to loathe, despise, and disdain. Keep in mind that no behavior is too unobtrusive, no cultural refferant too obscure, no bit of debris too far removed from the zietgiest for me to hate it. Hate is, after all, what I do best. At times, hate is all that I do . . .
I hate the purple pill. I will die retching and choking in my own bile before I ever consider asking my doctor about the purple pill or any of its misbeggotton cousin-pills that are frequently advertised on television. I hate drug company adverts showing either serious looking folk dressed in a fashion vaguely similar to the hostess of "The Weakest Link" who appear to be having an epphinay, benignly near-middle-aged shoppers (and why is the wife getting the husband's pills? Did they ban him from the pharmacy after that little incident involving toffee and surgiacal gloves?) or the World"s Most Beautiful Retirees gathered together in a park wearing the same clothes and doing something suspiciously like T'ai Chi. Why do all these healthy active people need drugs for aliments that the commericals often don't disclose? Why should I list all these drugs and ask my docter about them?
I hate people who only speak one language making fun of anyone who speaks English as a second language. As a subset of this hate, I hate people who send that Internet drek about English signs seen in foriegn countries. Other than Spanish how many non-English signs do we have in most cities. If the people sending that crap with the "sign in hotel in Tokyo" that implies the desk clerk will put a poodle in your puddenum or "sign in Thailand" that indicates that women's skirts will be shaved or any other cutesy poo aren't- foriegners-dumb drivel has a passport I want it ripped up immediately.
While I am at it I hate the entire freaking hate-the-French cause they wouldn't play desert war games when we told them too crew. Never mind the faulty reasoning behind the "we saved their bacon from Hitler" therefore as a democracy they should do what we say arguement, the point is that they are a soveriegn nation can have no obligation to join us in an act of imperalism. One's allies assist one when one is acted. One's allies are not obligated to help one act others. I have an immeasurable depth of contempt and loathing for folks who now or ever refferred to French fries as freedom fries.
I hate people who voted for Bush and are now moaning about the economy. That's right up there with stabbing yourself with a knife and being startled when it hurts. I moan about the economy but I did not vote for Bush. I have a right to moan.
I accept child proof medicine caps but what the fuck is gowing on with food packaging. If I starve to death one of ya'll please sue the idiot that put lettuce into bags that require surgical dexterity and tools to open.
a subset of hatred (September 8, 2003) - Top Of Page
As previously observed hatred of George W is easy, it's cheap, a lot of people do it and maybe my efforts in this direction are not really needed but as an American with some vestige of patriotic feeling I feel it incumbent on me to do my part in what I see as a time of national crisis.
However, today I do not hate W nor the people who voted for him, per sae. I hate the people who continue to believe the illogically constructed swill that oozes out of his simian smile. I could more easily forgive ethnic or racial hatred based on a morally flawed albiet rational arguement than the bizarre words of our president. He says the Iraqi people are better off so they are. Okay over 110 degrees, no electricity, no water. Better off? By what standard. Yeah, Saddam (who is currently in Thailand drinking umbrella drinks with Ben Laden) was Not Nice. He was Not Nice to his own people, whoever the fuck they are, the last time I checked "the Iraqi people" were serveral different ethnic groups. Many African leaders are Really Not Nice. We aren't dethroneing them. In fact, I find Bush himself Not Nice, between the Homeland Security Act (there's a nightmare for all you guys that read military sci-fic) and the way he offends my Aesthictic Sensibilities he's a major chicane on the race track of life. BUT we're stuck with him for awhile.
All of that aside, he gets on tv and says:
there were weapons of mass destruction
things are better in Iraq
the bombing of the World Trade Centers is linked to something we destroyed in Iraq (maybe gold toilet seats)
And people believe that.
I find that disturbing. Really.
Tomrrow I have to go to the grocery store. I hate that entire process to an extent you can't fathom. First of all the primary reason for going is to get food, something I really can't figure out and don't understand. And grocery stores are full of people all doing and saying objectionable things. Oh, the horror of it all is overwhelming.
But nothing in frozen foods or produce is quite as horrible as the certainity I have that people believed what George Bush said simply becaause he said it.
today I hate food (September 9, 2003) - Top Of Page
You would think, wouldn't you, that between evolution and the technological revolution that we would have figured out how to live in a food-optional fashion. I understand that there are people who like to eat recreationally and that's fine, okay by me, you don't interfer with NASCAR broadcasts and I won't bother you while you're chowing down. Hell, I have even been friends with bowlers, I am a real liberal. All of that aside I cannot for the life of me understand why in a world where billions of dollars have been gleefully spend on medication to alleviate toenail fungus (there's a life-stroying silent killer if ever there was one) no one has tacked this silly, humilating, time-consuming need to eat.
I was going to go to the grocery store today. I simply couldn't quite make myself do it. Besides, whatever it is that I would have theoretically bought would have been no more or less appealling that whatever it is that is already here.
I wish I could just take a pill.
Finally succumbing to the horrid human need to eat I stared at the content of the freeze and grabbed the easiest option. Forzen meatballs. If the Japanese can grow square tomatoes and square watermelons, why are meatballs still round?
I nuked them in the mircowave and dumped some hot mustard on top of them assuming that they would meet my nutritional needs for the next 72 hours I returned to my lair to work. You know, work, that stuff that is interruptedby all that eating and sleeping that wastes so much time.
The meatballs, since you asked, were horrid little rabbit turd like things with dollops of chinese mustard making them seem like the relicts of highly kinky albeit unsavory events. Oh, well.
While I was working. You know, the only reason I fucking HAVE for living and hence making these random feedings essentail, one of the vile little meatballs escaped beneath my desk.
I risked my spinal health wallowing about on the food looking for it and wasting precious time I wanted to spend working (see above) but never found theerrant meatball that I assume has moved through some warp in the universe to your house and is even as you read rolling around beneath your desk. I make this assumption because beneath my desk I found, a huge heavy brass lamp suitable for clanging over the head of a victim should one be in the mood for a random homicide, three mouse traps, 3,657 wrappers from a variety of flavors of Starburst fruit chews, bank deposist slips from five years ago and a series of mysterious wads of paper. Upon examination the mysterious wads of paper seemed to be either Kleenex or paper towels with some form of vicious fluid on them leading me to logically conclude that in an alternate universe a teen age boy who should be doing his Algebra homework is instead slipping through a warp in the fabric of the space/time continum, and using my computer to watch porn while he jerks off.
Nothing else can explain the paper under my desk.
So, it's only logical that my lost meatball is under your desk.
All of which explains why I hate food. It's a damn waste of time that distracts me from work.
Hate (September 12, 2003) - Top Of Page
Today I hate America On Line. I typed it out so that the phrase "hate America' would appear in this message and insure that the security forces who are even now actively eroding our civil liberties would put each and every one of us on some list.
Hating AOL is something that a lot of people do for a variety of reasons. I try to avoid hating things that already have a lot of people hating them; it's a waste of my energy. And it concerns me that it will somehow make me part of some hitherto unknown "community" --- being on a list of potential Enemies of the State would amuse me. Being a member of the Enemies of the State Community would be unbearable.
Today I hate AOL specifically because when I pulled up AOL the front- page news told me that John Ritter was dead and then in small letters, itty, tiny letters beneath it the page told me Johnny Cash, John Ritter Die.
When fuck. I'm not all that ignorant of deluded. When June Carter Cash checked out earlier this year I didn't think Johnny would be far behind. The video of "Hurt" is damn near a Bob Fosse "All that Jazz" swan song BUT to give star billing in death (not that I think Cash cares) to the twit from "Three's Company" over The Man in Black is just wrong. Wrong. Really wrong.
I read the article about Ritter. I had to, once the first fluttering of hate stirs in my heart I go into obsessive mode. The article contained an odious quote, from Tim Brooks, author of ''The Complete Guide to Prime-Time Network and Cable TV Shows.''
''He never aspired to be Hamlet,'' Brooks said. ''He was a true actor of the people and television viewers really bonded with him as a result.''
Bonded with? John Ritter the "People's Actor"? It's like Diana-ja vu all over again. Maybe John and Princess Di are smiling down from heaven where they take care of all the dear dead little puppies or some damn thing.
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