A musing
I've been bemused by some of the things that have amused me recently. They're not really all that funny or agreeable or pleasing; rather, they approximate a sense of revulsion that makes me think 'Goddamit, what a world we live in with all these fuckers running around, it's all going to rot and we're all spinning deeper into our self-created miserable fantasy land', and I suppose that in some small way, I get a laugh because deep deep down, to pierce the epidermal layer and grab the guts of our miseries is to raise the white flag — to accept the utter deplorable condition of our human race – and why, it's much more agreeable to be amused at the fruits of our depravities, to chop and quarter the grim darkness into manageable sound-bytes and pithy observations, and by their castration, their overwhelming power to destroy our feeble individual minds is tempered, cause the poor weak little things can't handle the stress of the terrifying sickness (we only use 20% of it anyways, right?) – we would rather live within our safe havens of consumerias and self-imposed brain washings than confront the crumbling world around us.
Sample 1.
New York subways have their own code of behavior. Example one: you always walk on the right as you enter or exit platforms. God forbid if you are entering the subway on the left hand side of the steps while another straphanger is coming up on the right. Trust me kids and hang on tight cause it's not cute or funny like South-going Zax and North-going Zax – don't expect your fellow citizen to make room for you. On a good day post 8pm you might end in a respectable face-off but during morning and especially afternoon commute hours, expect a friendly shove to the gut, a barrage of mutterings and about forty angry people either crashing into you, pushing you out of the way, or glowering at you with red rimmed eyes as by now, you are causing a code red emergency that can result in vigilante justice. Oh yes, the NY human traffic jam is a serious and absolutely dangerous thing. And tempers flare as the temperature dips. Do not look them in the eyes.
Example 2: Do not lean on the poles used for passenger balance in the subway cars. Yes, that means you sweaty and overweight suburbanites – I love how there is always some asshole taking up the entire pole so the rest of us have to squirm and hold onto various railings with our pinky fingers while we tumble inside a rumbling metal box careening through cracked tunnels a century overdue for upgrades. And for all you germophobes — you really think that at some point during your time in the subway, you're not going to inhale or touch some germs? Get over it.
Example 3: Talking loud is grounds for laser beam stares, unless you're a punk kid, the kind of insolent kid who shout as if they're in a stadium concert – front row. "Yo man, Nintendo Gamecube is pussy whipped -- PS3 is awesome!" This is what kids are talking about now? I feel bad for the nerds – the cool kids are have exercised eminent domain over what was once jurisdiction of the geeks and dorks (and Asian kids)...
Example 4: give your seats to the elderly, families with baby carriages, or women. Expect a "Yo, be a man, why dontcha?" if you don't have manners.
Example 5: always try and squeeze in even if the carriage doors are closing. Don't pay attention to the warning signs and the garbled instructions on the broken speakers – stick your hands, feet, body, jacket, book, or any other appendage you have through the grimy doors before they close. On certain lines, if you don't, good luck waiting another 20 minutes for a train that may or may not come due to the "ongoing municipal construction designed to serve your needs".
For a better essays about NY subways, read the rants of this bitter guy.
No wonder New Yorkers have this perpetual pissed off look all the time. Every morning we have to go through the bullshit routine – wading passed the tangled knots of arms and legs and push and shove our way onto putrid trains that transports us to drab cubicles where our lives are slowly and discompassionately deconstructed by the threat of the bottom line. We are crammed into these rusty sardine cans, smelling the dirty guy next to us who probably hasn't bathed in weeks, faces pressed against the car windows, eyes glassy like fish on display, glad in a perverse way to be in the inhumane and possibly not fire safe conditions, because we've been waiting for the last train to come for 20 minutes only to have it rumbling pass because it's at capacity and the passengers are suffocating, their silent screams etched onto their contorted faces.
Yeah, I'm talking about you, L train.
And so I'm amused. Amused when I smile at a passenger only to see a thin-lipped smirk and possibly a frown reflected back. Yeah, I know that was their best attempt to greet strangers, and if that's the New York greeting, then I don't mind so much the vacuous eyes, the drooped bodies and the clenched fists of over-worked and over-stressed and utterly pitiable fellow prisoners in this island play land.
Amused because this scene is repeated throughout the red and blue states. Sure, the subways and the problems unique to Gotham may be absent, but the same vacuous eyes, drooped bodies and clenched fists make their way to work every morning, except it's worse; instead of being crammed in with the throbbing pulse of a million other people, the misery is endured in solitude. Their fingers tap impatiently on the wheel while they fast forward to the day's end so they can watch their babies grow up to be punk kids, temples throbbing about some insignificant report that has to be completed, collars itchy, a slow crawl through rush hour traffic in the wee hours of morning as they mournfully commute from the safe havens of exburbias towards surburbias towards the nerve center of the sprawled, splayed and rotting 'metropolitan areas' that serve as the great displays of our tepid civilization.
Sample 2.
There's a lot of porn out there on the Internet. Besides Amazon, eBay and a few other large companies, retailers have not had a lot of success selling goods via the net. Sure, music purchases are rising and each holiday season the same analyst talking heads bobble on TV to pronounce the increasing percentages of net-based transactions. No one is really doing that great selling non-techie stuff or search engine services over the net. Most of the time, websites are used more as portals to introduce consumers to the brick and mortar services. And the rest of the time, the net is great for porn.
It's a brilliant model, the porn industry. Get your consumers addicted to the freebies like Pictures of the Day and 30 second clips and keep them coming back for more. Get advertisers to pump money through your sites, keep logs of your visitors and attach all sorts of bugs and spyware on their machines for spam and for intelligence gathering about their habits so you can develop more forms of addictions. Then provide VIP access service for a reduced rate of $9.99/month. They have a pretty good scheme. Who would really fess up and say, "Hey dude, my computer was infected because I was looking at porn sites"?
The mutations of new products and services are endless. The basic categories like age and gender have evolved to scenarios determined by professions, locations, and ethnicities – the possibilities for sub-categories are endless – like mitosis on steroids! Hair color, weight, historical periods, clothing, etc. And beyond the subject matter are the multitude of delivery methods: shorts, full length features, real-time cams, fantasies, alter-realities, images, animated images, dramas, comedies and so on and so on and forevermore. Theoretically, you can have a heavyset blond Czech girl-on-girl 18th century midget maids on stilettos comedy streaming Realplayer (wait for the buffer) if you so choose. Trust me, it's weird and loopy and the sub-divisions are multiplying like mold on the forgotten loaf of bread underneath your coffee table. Amazing. It's the most advanced marketing campaign ever, and a great business case for organic growth and open source collaboration.
But the one thing that doesn't evolve or change is the plot progression of porno flicks. The script writers for these things aren't exactly the most creative souls out there. Always the terrific music and the erotic two-step where any sort of foreplay amounts to the girl getting on her knees... can't say that porn isn't amusing.
It's the oldest service offering in our depraved history (wiki the bas reliefs of penises in the ruins of Pompeii and Assyria). Want your website to get lots of visits? Just inadvertently type in suggestive words involving celebrities and body parts and watch the clicks multiply. It's gotten so bad for those of us who want to navigate through the web without stepping in the electronic equivalent of doggy poo that instead of porn, users have elected to disguise discussions by referring to pr0n... come again?
It's amusing. I'm amused because looking at my log stats, I see various Google searches from visitors coming across my site. Apparently, my blog is the first result on Google for 'Perv Princes'. Apparently there are sick people out there looking for perv princes and finding my blog -- although to be quite honest, I would imagine that my post regarding the 'Sex Party' did its part to attract the seedier segment of web users. What ever happened to just searching for Jenna or Tera or basic terms like redheads and nurses? Although depending on the type of search engines you're on, 'perv princes' will bring different results.. Google is still relatively tame.
I'm amused because in my mind, 'prince' is such an guileless word to me -- it reminds me of my childhood bravely reading through books like St. George and the Dragon and the Little Prince and pretending to be a prince riding my stallion Furious and finding lost treasures in the grove of trees near my home. My dad had carved for me my very own wooden sword which I painted myself -- rather sloppily -- the blade white and the handles an awful shade of gloopy blue. I also made my own bow out of a bent reed growing on the edge of a pond. I'd spend sweaty Texas summer afternoons chasing crickets and dragonflies and other companions in the insect world. The one arrow I had didn't fly very far of course, being a rather spindly branch from a hedge in our front yard. On my adventures, there was a tattered cape fashioned from one of Mom's left-over dress fabric -- me a chubby prince dashing through the trees with calf-high blue and yellow stripped socks and a silk cape fluttering behind.
So I'm amused at how exceedingly tangential the meaning of prince has traveled. Porn has taken its innocence (note: I haven't actually explored what a 'perv prince' actually entails) and has made it perversely funny. What exactly does a Prince of Perv do? Is he in line to be a King of Kink?
Pornography addiction is a disease, and like all diseases it arises out of a very human physical need, mutating and transforming into a virus that stagnates the our minds and stunts our nobility. Sure, go ahead and indulge your physical wants, but I'd rather have the real thing, and really, the porn companies are laughing their way to the bank. Porn seduces in a haze of urgency, begging us to have now – to quench the revulsion now, etc.
Like the worst addictions in our society: the pursuit of materialism, the glories in competitive career advancement, the mental junk food from the latest spiritual fad or the self-help treatise, the shallow and nasty and empty relationships — our desires for immediate gratification have blindsided us to the greater sums of our lives. We want to be loved, to be happy and to be secured so sincerely that we resolve to quick answers in material and physical solutions – we buy more things, we work harder and we release our frustrations on others and yes, on easy captivations like porn – to reward ourselves for the miseries, because it is easier to act and not think. We are all actors fumbling through shoddy scripts. Jenna could have been a good actress, I think. But hey, she's making millions from her books and photoshoots.
We don't want to look at the totality of our actions, to carry the ones in our equation – we live in the moment because things are too fast, too fast because our fears of falling behind have made them so, and everyday, the porn industry is thriving. At least, that's what my spam inbox is telling me.
(I'm really going to get more visitors through they keywords in this post – hooray)
i'm your biggest fan! for your manuscript, i would keep the second half of your blog but ditch the first. the second half is a little bit more accessible.
oh josh, how you've changed since high school. i still see you as the innocent violinist of my quartet. looking at pron! what next??
Posted by: kyle | October 30, 2005 at 10:25 AM
yesss! love the critique dude – keep them coming. what do you mean by accessible, as in, more relatable?
Posted by: j.fisher | October 30, 2005 at 10:33 AM
yes, relatable among other things. i feel like the first section is written more for your own amusement, but the second one is written more for me, the reader. the first section is very dense, almost like a poem, and took me a while to get through it (b/c i'm dumb). the second half flows a bit better.
what was your major in college?
Posted by: kyle | October 30, 2005 at 02:12 PM