I have post-traumatic stress syndrome! For two years!

Hmm. Someone, or some thing, seems to have stolen my comments. How did this happen? How did this happen???

A conversation with Scott tonight brought up some issues which I had never really considered, and as I started reading The New York Times, I found while reading a certain article that I had no choice but to continue thinking about these issues. In the portion of the conversation that I'm talking about, we discussed the different opinions on Welfare between liberals and conservatives as an example of the two groups' underlying mindsets. I attempted to describe my understanding of the way liberals view the phenomena that conservatives derogatorily refer to as "tax and spend". They see it as "Democratic Socialism", a democratically elected representative government using certain tactics of socialism to provide for the common good. The federal and state governments, in this opinion, should have control over certain industries, making them public services instead. Examples are the federal postal service, public schools, public transportation, public libraries, Medicaid and Medicare (practically the opposite of the insurance industry), and various forms of police (rather than hired security forces). Maybe even the military, as opposed to hired mercenary groups (which would certainly be a possibility; Republicans should look into this, given their affiliation with the NRA and their desire to privatize other government services, like Social Security). I mentioned to Scott that the federal government in the 19th century probably would (and should) have attempted to make the railroad publicly owned, but iron, coal and railroad tycoons were too powerful for this to happen. This would still work for the railroad today, and for air travel, rather than bailing out Amtrak and the failing airlines.

I got to thinking what other industries might be better as government-owned services, and what was preventing this from coming to be. The services I mentioned, now provided by the government, generally go unquestioned, except for schools (one of the goals of conservative Republicans, as seen in the attempts to provide school vouchers, is to privatize public schools). Some of my other examples have somewhat of a dual life: there are both public and industrially owned bus services (Greyhound); the federal postal service is not the only way to send mail and packages (FedEx and UPS). What reasons might there be for these services to be provided by the government and funded by taxes, while others are privately owned and "provided" for a fee? If the government can sell postal stamps to pay for shipping our letters, why don't they have a similar service that provides us with energy? Why should corporations sell us oil and electricity?

The conservative response is that these industries are controlled, and benefited, by market forces. Roughly, we are given options: different corporations compete, and certain companies become successful and bigger and are able to serve us better. Prices change with the market, and the market insures that they never become unreasonable. Conservatives believe that this is the best, and only, option. But these market forces caused, as an example, the California energy crisis, which would not have happened if the government provided our energy, or even set price limits or had stronger regulations. The conservatives argue that price limits and regulations (like environmental policy) interfere with market forces. (Incidentally, the energy industry made billions in the California energy crisis, and it has been discovered that they also had a hand in creating it by using market manipulation.) Now, I'm not an expert in the field; I don't even claim to have a great understanding of the issue, so I'm willing to admit that this is an uninformed opinion. But for what it's worth, I see no benefit to having energy be privately owned and sold. As far as I can see, market forces in this case are entirely to the companies' benefit, and do not help the public.

My understanding of it is that market forces allow for change and growth by giving the consumers options. The companies who provide us with X are driven to improve their version of X, or make X as inexpensive as possible. These are definite benefits. However, they apply to some things and not to others. To elaborate, I considered whether the government should own the food industry. The only example I could think of was school lunch, and I think that shows why this would not be beneficial. Food would become constricted, boring, lifeless. There would presumably be no diversity in restaurants, and few options in supermarkets (there would be only one brand of everything). However, these industries are only one aspect of "the food industry": that of refined products. The raw material is produced on farms. And I see no reason why the government shouldn't own farms (and as a side note, they could then fully regulate those factory-like conditions that make me consider becoming a vegan again). Farmers are not competing to provide better products; they don't have to. The product, in this case, is a natural resource. The industry of food production is mainly concerned with things like pest control (which requires government regulation to make it less environmentally harmful), foreign competition (they work with the government to help stanch this), making food production cheaper (and getting government subsidies), and advertising (those "got milk?" or "beef; it's what's for dinner" commercials are created by The National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board, and America's Beef Producers, respectively. I couldn't find a website for either organization, but I found that the NFMPPB is a government organization, industry governed and USDA monitored, designed to create more demand for milk. Oh man am I ever going to have to do more research on this. The ABP, conversely, is the advertising wing of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. At any rate, these organizations' sole purpose is not to improve their product, but to make it look better. I cannot begin to describe how upsetting this is to me; this is detrimental, not beneficial. It is everything wrong with "market forces". The NFMPPB was set up by an act of congress, the Fluid Milk Promotion Act of 1990. More on this later). The companies compete, but I can find nothing in their competition beneficial to the consumer. Anyway, this industry is similar to the energy industry in that both are providing raw materials, and could, in my uninformed opinion, be owned by the government without any harm to consumers.

As I found in some quick internet research, these industries are profoundly influenced, even helped, by the government. The government regulates activities that are environmental concerns, gives contracts to companies to provide services for the government, helps in advertising and research (seeing as these industries provide essential public services), etc. Now, this seems like a lot of work to keep a minimal level of governmental involvement. The result seems mainly to be that the industries produce very rich companies with monopolies, who allow for small amounts of competition, and are occasionally massively harmful (Enron, cruel animal conditions, oil spills, pollution on the part of both industries, a trend toward unhealthy fast food, and so on almost ad naseum).

I'm getting too tired to continue writing, but I think I can now continue to read the newspaper at peace from my damn intruding thoughts.

I'm coming to a view of life in which the only worthy actions are personal and idiosyncratic, incapable of being described as meaningful in uncircular language but meaningful nonetheless. The basic "points" or worthy actions of life can easily be identified. One need only examine cats. They eat and sleep, and long to mate. These actions need not be described in other terms (such as "desire to propagate the species" or "to extend individual life"). They are instinctual and, for the cat, at least, ends in themselves. Mulder need not contemplate the reason that he watches birds; he wants to eat them. He sleeps for sixteen hours a day and has no reason to regret it as lost time; it is simply part of "life" for him to sleep sixteen hours a day, and he is not missing anything because there is nothing more important or worthy of his time. He plays with Flagg not out of an ill-defined wish to remain in contact with his brother, define his own identity through others, or anything else. It's just fun. It's not even a way to take up time. It's just fun.

Humans have problems coming to grips with life defined this way. They need goals, causes for which they are willing to fight. They need entertainment in order to fill time, and are not content with sleeping sixteen hours a day (it's quite possible. I've been on a schedule of sixteen hours of sleep, sixteen or even eight hours of wakefulness). The reason for this difference, broadly speaking, is that humans have language. This has effects which are not immediately obvious. I don't have the capacity to explain why, but language leads naturally to questioning one's life, feeling a need for more than the basics of life, just generally having needs associated specifically with humanity (some examples: wanting to provide for oneself and one's family and not being satisfied with having others provide for them; feeling nostalgic for events and associations of early life; keeping in touch with friends; educating oneself); these desires are dependant on language, as they can be articulated, and thus existant, only through langauge. Take as an example the particularly human desire of wanting to "do" something (in which the vocal emphasis is placed on "do"; frequently appears in cheap fiction and screenplays. "You know. I want to do something with my life." It means, in general, doing something worthy or fulfilling, something seen as important, "making a difference". The statement is so cliched and specific to movies that people generally don't say that precise sentence, but most people, if questioned, would express this desire and it is, really, quite a broad unspecified desire; it is banal until it becomes specific); this idea is inseparable from the concepts like "doing" and "meaning", which in turn are dependant on language.

This need arises from langauge, and is met only through personal language. General terms of our culture like "having a career", "helping others", or "feeling excitement" only have empty meaning, but they are inevitably personalized into individually meaningful terms like "making modern poetry", "creating a home for experimental artwork", "understanding and appreciating indie rock albums". People get medical training and may or may not achieve fulfillment by becoming local doctors or doing medical research and experiments. Politicians obviously desire power, but also desire to enact policies they perceive as beneficial to the community they "serve" in. Students study business and get jobs at specific companies doing specified tasks, which are fulfilling for some people, and not for others. A public relations position, for example, might fulfill a person who wants to challenge himself and see how well he can deal people and their concerns, although he probably doesn't care much about the company he works for; a different person who doesn't have this goal, or another goal which a public relations job meets, would likely feel unfulfilled, bitter, and depressed in a public relations job. It is the same for any action. There has to be an individual desire which the action fulfills, or else the activity seems pointless. These desires obviously gets incredibly specific, since there are countless possible actions, and each person chooses his activities out of these possibilities based on which incredibly specific actions suit him.

This theory of life sees "happiness" as the supreme goal, though not the meaning. Meaning can only be found when general concepts are ignored and one focuses on the actions which fulfull him. These actions then take on metaphorical meaning, such as (in one of my personal action-goal sequences) "I go to work in order to make money so that I can pay off my debt to my parents, which I find desirable because I wish to no longer have them as an authoritative force, because they prevent me from realizing the fulfillmlent of my desires by looking over my shoulder; also, it allows me to buy things without going into further debt, and I want these material things to fulfill various desires too numerable to state here; also, it allows me to socialize, which fulfills my desire to create an understanding of, and give meaning to, "myself" and "my personality", past events, the communaction of concepts, etc. The job itself is immaterial, and perhaps demoralizing, for a variety of reasons which I've been meaning to get down in one place eventually.

In this example, it can be seen how actions which are not inherently meaningful (paying off debt, buying CDs) becoming meaningful because of their relationship to each other, my past, my understanding of myself and the world, my goals etc. It is a circular meaning, vague and almost entirely unquestioned, shaky, illogical, and unjustifiable (either to myself or to others), but nonetheless meaning. If there is some "higher" meaning to life, I'd like to know it.

As a sidenote, though an important one, the same thing can be said of goals which are generally seen as more lofty, like "benefitting society" or "bettering oneself". These rest on morals, which are just as idiosyncratic and personal as the goals described above; the only difference is that the are shared by "societies", or at least perceived that way. As moral philosophers of the past have shown (sometimes unintentionally), these morals are just as shaky and illogical, even unquestioned and vague, definitely unjustifiable (despite what Ryan Mowhar and the Christian moralists claim). Even so, they help to provide meaning to the personal goals. This creates the metaphysical assumption (or, to use a less derogatory term, "belief") that there are layers of existence, since morals appear to be above personal goals. There are some morals, and some desires like "the search for truth", which seem to the metaphysicians to extend beyond individual societies to include all of mankind. God, although conceived of before all this philosphy, came to be seen as inevitable, as, if there are the layers of the individual, the society, and humanity, there would logically be a supreme "layer" and authority.

Just some thoughts.

First I listen to The Mouldy Peaches and find it enjoyable. Then I read the AMG one-and-a-half-star review. Then I listen to it more and like it better on each listen. Does it follow that according to the AMG review, I a member of the "indie cognoscenti"? As a side note, I've noticed that every time AMG gives an album five stars, it's unquestionably a five star album, and they're often right in their ratings under five stars; but somehow they are ludicrously off, say, one fourth of the time . . . although never wrong when they give an album five stars. Note how: Meat Is Murder is given three (yes, three) stars; Full Force Galesburg is given two-and-a-half; fuckin' Electr-O-Pura is given only three stars. Now, obviously their ratings are their call; but these albums manifestly deserve higher ratings, and never mind allowing critics their own judgement. About music I am not relativist. Electr-O-Pura deserves at least . . . more than three stars. Um. Yeah.

I am a goat
In a moat
With a boat.

Who's got the crack?

This is Mulder (Mulder!!!!)!! I have taken over You's blog because he doesn't feel like writing. Can you get me some meat? I'm reeely hungry. Man, I could sure use some meat right now. I remember this one time, when I had some meat . . . that was pretty cool. Mmmmmmmmm . . . mmmeat! Yeah. I remember that time. Aaaaaaaaaaaand, last ni-ight, I was, I, I had this dreeeeam, and, I was on the porch and the people came up to me, and, they, gave me some meat! And. Do you want to read my novel? Man, I sure would like to eat some meat.

Tonight was a reminder of why we go to the Double TT. Surely it can't be the food. There's better food at home. It can't be the service, because you're gambling on which Donna you get. It's not the atmosphere, which can be summed up as "You are here, and this is nowhere and everywhere." It's not because it's the only place that's open, although that helps. No. It's the conversation, first, foremost, and always. Where else can you meet a man named Lazarus who is willing, even happy, to take on three pseudo-Johnnies in a conversation that starts, "What is the soul?" Where else can Scott realize that the person who had been talking to Lazarus before us attends Scott's philosophy course at UMBC? Where else can four people sit in a booth and inspect squares representing The Mind and Wisdom? Where else can a man offer ten dollars to drive him home, that home being six minutes away?

"See the bells up in the sky,
Somebody's cut the string in two."

I slept for twenty hours, from 9pm Sunday until 4pm Monday. I had fallen asleep listening to the Dog on Wheels EP for the first time. I had slept well the night before, and hadn't done anything much on Sunday. I suppose I'm just losing the will to live, Asuka-like, now that I can no longer synchronize with my Eva.

Several weeks ago, I told a girl at work, named Melanie, that she should join my band. She was about the fifth person I had told (not including Scott and Anne), and I didn't expect anything. She plays drums and guitar, and this could be useful. Today, she came up to me and said, "I'm going to join your band!"

I said, "Okay, but I'll have to run it by the other band members." Then over my break I thought we would need some sort of audition, so when I saw her again I said, "You can join once you can play every guitar lick on The Velvet Underground." I handed it to her, but she said she should just buy it, since it's probably good. Well, I don't know, guys. At first she thought The Velvet Underground was the name of our band. That doesn't sound good. But then, should she actually buy it and learn to play all the guitar parts, she should have no trouble playing anything we think of.

"Get out of the city, and into the sunshine.
Get out of the office, and into the springtime."

We're fucked, aren't we? Israel has gone 180, with a peace-minded Palestinian leader unable to make any inroads with the blowhard Sharon. Bush said the war in Iraq is over, and declared the massively embarrasing debacle to be the first victory in the "war on terror." It's been discovered that SARS remains in the bodies of those who have "recovered". And Congress is all set to give into Bush and topple our teetering economy. There's some natural disaster nearly every day, most recently an earthquake in Turkey that killed at least 100 people. (Not to mention the people, at least 44, who died in South Africa when a bus veered off a road and crashed into a resovoir.) Oh, and the IRA still isn't disarming fully. And it's kind of trite in the face of all this, but the music industry is continuing its wrongheaded attack on mp3s. And then there's the insidious trend of the Bush administration slowly revoking civil rights (they're now requesting a larger domestic role for the CIA and the Pentagon, attempting to give them the right to subpoena Internet providers, libraries, credit card companies and the like to produce material such as phone records, bank transactions, e-mail coorspondences, borrowed books . . .).

In other news, Scott and I are planning to hold a pro-war rally tomorrow at UMBC campus. I will have signs saying "More Blood for Oil", "Jump on the Bombing Bandwagon!", and "This Scud's for You, Syria!". Anyone who wants to come should e-mail Scott very quickly and hope that he reads it in time.

I think I understand poetry now. See, I was walking down Main Street smoking my newly bought Marlboro lights, and composing some lines in my head (that's the only time I really write, is when I'm walking alone. I start on one thought and progress from there in walking meter: Hey let's talk about Buddha got a kitty made of tin; got eyes as black as Poloroids before the picture comes in). I started thinking of Anne reading "America" on the park bench in Fell's Point, and I realized that I was thinking of "America" the same way that I think of songs: as a whole, an entity separate from its creator. Like, "Man, 'What Goes On' is a really great song." Something from The Velvets' mind which is now in mine. And I was thinknig of "America" in the same way, as a really cool whole that exists only in words but creates a concept in my mind. I could then think of other poems in the same way, although not many, because I really havent' read much poetry. It makes me want to pick up my Norton Anthology again.

Where do the motherfuckin cheese go at? Where'd the motherfuckin cheese go at? Motherfucker. Where do motherfuckin cheese go to? Bitch where the motherfuckin cheese at? Motherfucker. Where'd the motherfuckin cheese go at?