We need a rampant and rabid reassessment of how we function and the things that we pursue. The goal of life is not to find happiness, to find love, to build a castle  on a hill and protect it at all costs. We are not here to spread love and force religion. We are not here to push values and demand obedience.

We are here for each other. It is a simple thing, but somehow we cannot get it right. We create pockets of matter, spheres of influence, we love our children and our families but we let our fellow man starve on the street. We spend money on vets and toys and food for pets because we love them and they provide us something, but if you don’t watch it you can spend more on a pet then on a human in a short period of time.

I’m not saying that pets don’t deserve a little humanity, but lets share and spread our humanity with the HUMANS first. (It is, after all, a big part of the word.)

The pursuit of happiness is a lie that we have been telling ourselves for a selfish, self-absorbed, cutthroat, possessive three thousand or so years. And I’m sick of it. People don’t seem to grasp that trying to be ‘happy’ always comes at a price, and if you do it right other people pay that price.

Not to mention the zomibism, the weakness that is bred in, the bad diatribes, the lack of coherent logic and rationale, the birth of circular thinking, the need for insulation and yes men, the propagation of a culture that winces at the very thought of a problem that would take away its precious toys and thin tin facade.

Holiday weekend, lots of people with families around, the concept of family togetherness, holiday cheer, too many married people with their drooling troglodytes being mooned over, too many people with conversations about absolutely nothing being greeted with grins. Happiness is a bigger dick contest and no body respects a finely tuned vagina.

It is crass, but I think it is wise beyond its words.

There is a stick, a meter, a metric that people use to define the worth and value of others, and a lot of that stick is wrapped around a personal definition of happiness. Regardless of your personal happiness aesthetic it is still a wrong metric. I go on and on about this with a particular associate.

If you can masturbate like crazy in a dark room covered in your own filth and have mind blowing orgasms every hour and that was what brought you happiness then by all means just keep doing that.

But, there are those out there, who would say things such as “that can’t be true happiness, that can’t actually be fulfilling, it is a sad thing and that person needs help” and you would be total assholes for saying so. Who are you to decide what can and cannot make a person happy? Is it a lack of ambition, is it the crude sexual nature of the act? What is it about that scenario that bothers you and prevents it from being a worthy or true statement? None of the answers that you generate are likely to be rational, they will all be self-defined and coated in thousands of years of propagated nonsense. You don’t like someone getting away with being content with so very little.

You demand that happiness come at a price and come in a certain form.

You are fascists and zealots and zombies and deserve every last bit of misery that can be heaped upon you. But you live in an insulated, self-absorbed world, and you are not the ones that pay the price for the things that you want and the mistakes that you make.

And this is the crux of my argument. Happiness is not about what other people have, it is about what you have. And having things is never about you, it is about other people and what they perceive that you have. Materialism is not about collecting objects, it is about showing others that you have collected objects.

For every person who sacrifices the easy comforts, a warm home, a family around them, companionship, and struts out into the world to find the place they belong, build a business, start a career, get an education, write a book, pursue a dream. People who put off the simple and small things for their own goals, those people are apparently sad and stupid fucks.

Because we all know that any time you defer happiness for a future time, for a higher level, for a more pure aesthetic, you are being a sad and lonely, stupid, insane person. Get what you can now, think never of tomorrow, and whenever possible take take take.

That is the lesson of happiness that I am taught by the world in seasons such as this.

You disagree? Fine do. But give me an argument that isn’t propagated by circular logic and status quo.

No, that sentence doesn’t add up. But it shouldn’t. That is the point.

Specifics, that is the way that most things should be done. Especially things that are gibberish at their base.

So, specifically I am against attack ads that are also commercials for cell phones. And currently I work for a wireless company so perhaps I am biting the hand that feeds, perhaps that makes me more sensitive in general to the issues with them. Perhaps I am simply an angry angry man.

The point is that cell phones are a useful tool, a device that provides constant and immediate communication. And ultimately despite the shoddiness of communication in the modern world, communication as a whole is a good thing. Cell phones enable humanity to stay connected over vast distances and free you from the problems of staying at home to do it. They fuel innovation and creation in a way that is frightening in its magnitude and unsettling in its scope. Our current communications technology makes the communicators from Star Trek look like relics. And it is set three hundred years in the future, in a time when we are all likely to have a phone implanted in us from birth and the radicals will tear theirs out and move off grid to a world of long forgotten personal communication.

Or so I might hope. A freedom fighter in a cybernetic world is a role I would like to pursue. But as for the modern day and its communication devices, they are pushing their way outside of devices that let you speak to others and devices that do anything and everything to shunt humanity off from itself and each other. Each iteration of a phone offers more jangly shiny things that enable the phone to do more more MORE!

A recent commercial airing every few hours and causing me to flee into another room, change the channel, mute and begin cursing in tongues, is for the Droid phone. It does all the things the iPhone can’t, you see. By which it means that it does even more things that a phone doesn’t need to do, a personal computer stopped caring to do, and the human brain should spend time doing. That cyberization thing needs to come along soon, because the people of the developed world will soon be completely (more completely?) helpless in the face of a simple power outage.

I don’t need my phone to give me turn by turn directions, I have legs and I can consult people, maps, street signs, (phone books seem to have disappeared from the streets, which is a sad thing for people who are lost and need direction in a large city they find themselves suddenly in) so many ways to figure out where you are and where you are going, but no, without a voice in giving explicit Google run directives to you you cannot get out of the house it seems.

And it would be one thing if it were being advertised in a triumph of civilization, pinnacle of achievement, look at the progress kind of way –but no– it is marketed as if not having a glowing rod of plutonium sprouting from the phone and sending a beacon to the mothership makes whatever communication device you have a sad troglodyte of a bygone age. Do you spend the weekends sending smoke signals? Psssh, my phone has three different programs (application is such a pathetic term for something that by and large has no applicable purpose) that let me send and interpret messages sent as smoke signals. Isn’t that cool?

Cool, maybe, but can cool go back the way of James Dean, a rugged guy that didn’t care much for rules and wanted to live life by his own terms, a hands on approach to getting through life by means and not an excuse to wimp out when the wifi connection is sluggish?

Technology may be benign in its existence, the good and bad of it up for interpretation and whim, but it is high time we stopped pretending we need this shit and got back to working on problems that actually solve problems, not problems that create problems.

There is a loop hole of course. There is always a loop  hole.

It isn’t that navel gazing is particularly outright detrimental it just happens to be used as a justification for actual effort, for real thought, as much an excuse for philosophy as religion is.

These are all tawdry uses of a fundamentally important step in the creation of self. Introspection is not the enemy, introspection is just a friend that has an amazing propensity for selling you out to the first group that mentions your name.

The walls of a person are sometimes erected to keep things in as much as keep things out, but like all specimens in horror and action movies, the first time you start to sympathise with the monster inside is when it decides to rip through your abdomen and run amok in the facility until someone kills it. Usually with fire of some sort.

As a society we have never moved past the fascination we have with our first invention, and not moving past the first triumph is pretty much the crux of this argument. If you can’t seem to move to goal number 2 and assume goal number 1′s achievement will carry you the duration, then you are very likely to end up in some pit somewhere wallowing until you run out of food.

Emotionally devastated, morally lazy, ethically hypercritical, these are the trademarks of a person who has lost the rhythm, who cannot find the downbeat and get back in step with reality. It is all a complex system of not being where you should be when you should be, and the pointing and laughing will echo less loudly then the sounds of your footsteps as they land just out of step time and time again.

It isn’t always dire, it isn’t always your fault, it isn’t always happy, it isn’t always somebody else’s fault.

And you live with the guilt of the reasoning of the fascination of the seeking for the yearning.

And, yes, that is a sentence, and no, I’m not going to be more clear, the vague feeling is a part of the whole.

We long to fill the void with something, and the longer we shovel information and stuff into the void the bigger and deeper the void gets. Because the void is there to be fed, and the only way to exhaust a void is to ignore it and wait for it to close up on its self.

But a void is a like a headache, to close the core, to settled near the center. Everything you do to avoid it just pumps blood in the vicinity and calls attention to itself.

Distraction is the only way to stop introspection, and introspection has become a distraction from people who are so over saturated with external concerns about their internal selves that they will never find a stretch of solace long enough to notice.

Temp agencies have a place to provide work to people who are inbetween things and to provide workers for places that don’t need the staff for very long. Ultimately a mutually beneficial and even elegant solution to a set of problems.

But what we have lurking in the furtive hallways of the new industry of employment is not elegant or even leaning towards being necessary.

Why is their a job position that basically exists to get people jobs? Why are there employment specialists? How is it that we have created a labyrinthine business structure that actually requires a series of guides to get you from the entrance to the center and back out again?

It has reached a point where finding a job requires a solid starting fee equivalent to a months rent just to hire all of the necessary professionals to assist in looking over applications and resumes, interview coaches, professional references (not references of your life as a professional, I actually mean people who are paid to act as references to hedge your chances).

And it would be one thing (a grim reality, regardless) if this was what was needed to become a VP or manager at a major company, but in TODAY’S ECONOMY (which is a bold and terrible and ephemeral thing that must be spoken of like the plagues of the 1400s) it is becoming increasingly important to shell out this type of gelt just to get an entry level position at McDonald’s.

Gone are the days when nepotism or cronyism could leverage open the doors of commerce (and I can’t believe I am sad to see those days gone), welcome now the days of clandestine teams of ‘proffesionals’ that will get you into the door and through the lobby, covering your back and speaking on blue tooth ear pieces to maneuver you past the security and into the job interview. There a combination of bribes and threats will buy off the HR director and then you begin work on Monday.

Whether you can do the job really has nothing to with it.

And Utah, the loathsome state I find myself eternally tormented by and trapped within, proves this point time and again by trying to be the moral watchdog state within a country that seems to have an opinion on how everyone else in the world should live their lives but forgot how the indoor plumbing worked some thirty years ago.

The laughable portion of a holier-than-thou state is of course the view from the outside looking in. Utah is a state that pays crappy wages to a largely educated populace. Utah is the state blamed for the subjugation and ritual brainwashing and institutionalized statutory rape of children. Utah is the state where it is illegal to swear on a certain street because that street is owned by a church.

Although standing on the corner and shouting things that are obscenities in other lands seems to be okay, they just want to protect themselves from George Carlin’s lovely set of phrases and of course no proseltyzing. That is for them to do to you, not the other way around.

The crimes of Utah are less laughable. More gut wrenching with a creamy center of what the hell and where do you get off?

The focus of this rant is about the newly proposed liquor laws that will be getting voted on at some point in the future. But before I go into that I should touch on the other thing Utah did recently in the world of law making that they had absolutely no business getting involved with.

Remember that proposition in California. The one that was not in Utah? The one that Utah agencies and organizations spearheaded support for? Remember that? That is Utah at work, telling everyone else how to live and what living should entail while remaining far away and out of the loop.

But liquor.

The proposed changes basically fall into two categories. The second of which is that anyone who seems to be getting intoxicated, or shows the least bit of ‘drunken behavior’ is to be immediately cut off and in some cases detained.

Now if only there was a law about detaining people based upon stupid behavior. Or lewd behavior. Or behavior that is offensive to squirrels.

I’m not sure what behavior is offensive to squirrels but when you need a criteria for monitoring and controlling the behavior of someone you might as well go straight to the most illogical and contrived source.

The first portion of the law would require that all liquor be stored and poured behind 10 foot high walls, so as to prevent children form seeing the alcohol stored or poured. He will be watching dad drink it a foot away from him, but the real temptation and essential gateway to being a boozer is seeing all of those neatly arranged colorful bottles and making the desperately difficult transition from liquid in said bottles to liquid in the glass.

My various gods, just thinking about it after 28 years on this planet I have just now realized, that is where liquid comes from, from bottles! Here I have been pouring milk and drinking soda and somewhere in the back of my primitive child-amnesia mind I thought all liquid came from boobies of one or another sorts.

Yes, there are soda boobies, there had to be, how else would we have soda?

But now it is plain and clear to me that there are no liquor boobies. It is those damn bottles, if only some kind overzealous prick in the state department had erected his 10 foot tall walls sooner I would never have used simple logic to figure out how it is that mom and dad got loaded after a hard days slog through the streets of the most backwards thinking state in the country.

But wait, there’s more.

What about smaller places? Places that have ceilings that are only the standard 8ft in height? Will these places be summarily shut and torn down? Will we accommodate them with a square footage requirement and these walls will simply be extra thick? I hope no one in the food service industry is claustrophobic.

On the other hand, a great big wall kept the Mongols out of China, and the East Berliners from bothering the civilized people of West Berlin. So maybe I have it all wrong. Maybe it is time we starting constructing walls in our world to keep the bad things out the way Utah has constructed walls within its mind to keep sense from shouting all of those flagrant obscenities about its captivity.

Perhaps I would be less irate over these tests if they were used at higher levels of business where decisions are made that cripple lives on the basis of higher profits. Maybe I’m bitter simply because I cannot pass the esoteric things. Constructed as they are to be Labrynths of double negatives and rechecks and containing minotaurs both naked in their intent and shadowy in their eventual execution.

And me without the least bit of magic yarn.

There is something unwholesome about being asked questions designed to ‘catch you’ in a trap of logic when the logic involved in the trap is more of a bitter and stupid cousin of hearsay. Whether or not I strongly agree or disagree with the idea of my fellow employees doing their share of the work is really incidental to how much I strongly agree or disagree that the work should get done.

But it the quasi-logic of the ‘ethical’ test if I agree that work should get done but disagree that fellow employees should be testicularly electrocuted (women will have testicles grafted on as part of this process I am assured) for not doing their work I am in fact lying that I think any works should get done at all.

I see each of their iterations and repetitions of questions to be stand alone diatribes about a particular facet of a whole, but apparently they are all the same question that must be answered in the same way or you are LYING, and no one should ever be employed to stock the shelves of a grocery store with canned beans if it is well known that they are liars.

The beans, they can tell, and they will rebel in the stomachs and intestines of all those who purchase the cans.

So its important that we have these tests.

I tell people every now and then that I find sitting and thinking about a solution less productive, and in fact outright more harmful, than simply taking an option and pursuing it until you find exactly what is or is not happening along that path.

I fear stagnation, I fear time that is not utilized, I fear the implications of the bystander effect.

What I did not realize, but seem to be reminding myself constantly, is that their are always more than two options to any situation. Yoda is a great villain in our lives because tells you to do or do not and acknowledges no level of effort that does not reach a goal. Effort is a reward in itself, but it will not ever be a solution.

When faced with several options I should learn to think for a little while longer before just heading down a path. It is true that I have avoided a certain amount of downtime in my decision making, but I have also wasted a lot of effort by not paying attention to clear signs of futility and danger.

The bulk of this argument is supposed to be about something else though. And I’ll branch over to that now. I have done a lot of damage to myself over the years physically, socially, mentally, emotionally, and financially.

I did a lot of this damage from a combination of too much effort that did not lead to a result and too little time spent panicking before running through the next metaphorical door.

I have developed a psyche full of holes and bruises. I have mental and emotional scars, like we all do, but what I’m starting to notice is that they function not just allegorically like their physical counterparts but physiologically the same as well.

Shock to your system is meant to keep you immobilized long enough for the body to process the trauma and begin sending the proper signals about what is wrong. Psychological and emotional numbness does the same, it buys you time to get past the moment and into a safe place to start receiving signals properly.

The body creates scabs as living bandages to protect an area of the body while it heals. An emotional scar exists to protect the damaged bits underneath. The more important part of this parallel is that a scab should not be removed until the healing process is over, otherwise you are just dealing more damage to the areas you intend to heal. The scab will itch, you will want to pick at it, you will convince yourself that its okay enough to see the light of day.

You will often be a little early.

And if you are early enough and the scab is attached well enough, you just might do more damage to the wound than the wound did to you.

We all must be aware of these areas in our lives. Places inside ourselves where we have been hurt and have acted with haste to an area that has little to no risk of being left alone until it was healed.

Much the same way that I kept choosing the next door to dive through, I kept removing scabs that had not completed their task and pushed myself further into pain that didn’t need to exist. I refused to stop moving and become a bystander, but running into a situation that you have no business being in can be more devastating to yourself and the situation than waiting to understand what action was needed.

Which puts us back to a trick of numbing, it gives you time to assess the situation and begin receiving signals. Remember that numbing is supposed to help you get to a safe space to begin the healing process. Unless you risk further injury from attempting to leave the situation, the moment you go numb is the time to get out.

Yes, you can baby a wound until you cause a bigger problem than would have existed if you worked through it, but if we listen closely the signals will tell you which one you are dealing with.

This is not a complete profile of human mental/emotional health. It’s not meant to be, it is merely a way of thinking about what is going on when certain impulses are felt.

We push against those who attempt to pick at scabs, we respond slowly and poorly when numb, we fight or flee when being attacked. That is part of the living process, but to be a proper human you have to rise above pure instinct and enter the realm of reasoned instinct. Your body is looking out for you, but it doesn’t always have the context that your mind does.

So the next time you are dealing with a damaged person, try to find a place within yourself to analyze the information they give you and remember that some actions are just instinct and should not be punished off hand for being what they are; a reaction.

Oh you poor bastards that get shot in the back and pushed in the mud because you can’t learn to behave like proper fucking drones.

You few who have tried time and again to do something to help the world and had your minds and souls mutilated by a system that want nothing more than to chew you up a thousand times more until everyone understands that your place, like mine, is to not question and not move forward.

Stick  your head in the sands, you poor bastards, drink deep of the sand and the dirt. Let it fill you ears and throat and your eyes. Speak not through the dirt. See not through the dirt. Think not, not through the dirt.

It is your duty, you poor bastards, to be trod upon by the steel soled boots of those who want money and power and influence. Stand proudly beneath them and make a bridge from triumph at the cost of lives to triumph at the cost of souls.

Lay down upon the ground, you poor bastards, and make a carpet on which our true heroes can arrive. They are rich and shiny, they think the right thoughts, they move in the right circles. They do what they are told and they are friendly to everyone that is important to be friendly to.

Rise up not, you poor bastards, when your great accomplishments and puny efforts are cast down as fodder for the hate that breeds the fear that creates the power block for those above.

Lay down, you poor bastards. Because you have lost. And you will never be allowed to stand again.

I’m not fond of harming the lives of other people. But I do it to the people I hold closest and dearest to myself with a nearly psychotic abandon. What the fuck hope to you think you have of escaping my wrath?

I am not a hateful person, I am an angry person. I am not a person who thinks that no joy or happiness can exist, I am a person who demands that you earn your joy and happiness.

The True purpose and end of life is not to be happy. It is not to be content, it is not to be the only person who has something while everyone else goes without.

The True purpose of life is to see as many of the ugly, mean, bitter, hateful, pointless, sad, downtrodden, wonderful, insightful, athletic, broken, charming, wretched, spontaneous, fantastic, people around you to the end.

Life is a race, and the finish line is meant to be crossed by everyone.

So get off your complacent asses and turn around and help the person next to you. They may be someone who really deserves it. They may be the last person you ever want to spend 10 minutes alone with, but they are a fellow human being and it’s your eternal destiny to see them through this shit.

I don’t care that it’s hard. I’m not always good at it myself. But the Truth of the matter remains the same.

Everyone is in need of some form of redemption, everyone gets to finish the race, and nobody cares who gets their first or last as long as there are people waiting for you with some kinda refreshing beverage when you do.

Goodnight.