One of my favorite stand-up comedians, Emo Philips, tells a relatively benign joke that kind of creeps me out whenever I think about it:

“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”

The connection between the brain, consciousness, and human identity is really a bizarre thing. The brain is this squishy, unassuming organ that resides in the head, and it processes countless actions per second. It is the source of conscious and unconscious thought. It dutifully delegates commands to regulate respiration, digestion, muscle control, and immune system defense. It performs all of these actions in perfect concert with each other, and yet it perplexingly remains a mystery to itself. If it weren’t for the benefit of research and education, a person’s brain could potentially remain unconscious of itself throughout an entire lifetime. The thought of that is strange and unsettling to me.

In Julia Sweeney’s one-person monologue, Letting Go of God, Sweeney aptly illustrates the tension between biological truths and human perception:

When I think of myself as my innermost being, I just don’t think of it as a body function. My brain creates this idea that my “self” is not it “self”. I mean, I think of my “self” as something separate looking out from my eyes, listening through my ears, pulling the strings that make my body move. And that’s because the brain is not able to perceive its own functioning. And this is true for all of us, by the way, right from childhood. When a child is told that it’s their brain that thinks … they don’t think that their brain is them. They think their brain is this thinking, computing machine, something that is added to their “self” to help them understand things. And yet the mind is what the brain does, just like pumping blood is what the heart does.

So what is consciousness, and what is self? And how much room is there left for the existence of a soul? I’m afraid those are questions that I’m just not equipped to answer.

The more I think about my own brain, it seems stranger, and more unfamiliar to me. Yet isn’t that a strange thought to have? My brain — the computing center of all my feelings and thoughts — is unwittingly disturbed by its very own mundane existence and processes. There is a cyclical conflict inside my own head that exacerbates with each revelation, and with each reaction to those revelations. I think of my mind, and I realize that it’s just a function of my brain, and it spooks me to think that there is an entity within myself that can be so intimately intertwined with my identity, and yet it feels so distant and unfamiliar. But then my brain pushes back, almost as if it were offended by the very thoughts that it just created, and suddenly I find my head folding and unfolding in a perpetual spiral of self-doubt and confusion. It all just makes me very dizzy.

I consider the sensation a mild form of madness, something akin to the distress that Linus from Peanuts feels when he becomes aware of his own tongue.

These are the kind of thoughts that keep me awake at night. It drives me crazy, because I know my brain knows better than to provoke a fight with itself right before bed. This is probably where all of the insomnia comes from.

“Good Grief” indeed, Lucy.

“Just look at it!” this opportunist must have said to himself. “That animal’s back is perfectly contoured to form a mobile, steerable seat for my ass, and the animal itself is just tall enough so that my feet don’t touch the ground.”

Poor horses. They got the evolutionary shaft.

Among this bounty of undervalued books, I found and purchased an old, worn copy of Garfield Takes Up Space.

Just recently, I finally got around to reading the book. I love Garfield, and so of course I enjoyed the book from cover to cover. When I reached the last page, though, I came across something that made me pause. On the upper left corner of the inside cover was a handwritten message: “Sassy was there & here!” The ampersand was modified to look like a heart with hooks and bubbles hovering above and below it.

As I’ve mentioned before, I find something fascinating about graffiti in public places. Just as equally, I get this visceral kick from discovering handwritten notes in previously handled books. There’s an entire world out there of subtext, secret monologues, raw opinions, frantic notes, and words literally written between the lines. What a wonderful thing it is to open a book and to immediately understand how the words within affected the reader who came before you. It’s like you’re taking a glimpse into someone else’s subconscious mind, and your shared experience with this stranger suddenly becomes all the more meaningful.

As I stared down at Sassy’s note to the world, I realized how sad it was that the potency of her message had to die so that I could purchase this discounted Garfield book. How many others would have seen Sassy’s note had I decided not to throw this tattered old book into my paper bag?

So today of all days, before the close of the year, I’m getting the word out. Sassy was there & here!

So instead of subjecting you to a trivial, self-indulgent list of things that make me happy, why I don’t I just bitch a while about trivial things that piss me off? Somehow, I think, this kind of exercise strikes closer to the heart of things.

Here is my list of petty grievances, organized in no particular order.

• The misuse of Amber Alert signs, utilized for the purpose of breaking people’s balls. The Amber Alert Program was enacted in 2002, enabling law enforcement agencies to quickly disseminate information about time-critical child abduction cases. Many Amber Alert signs have been erected near highways all over the United States.

  


  

  When used properly, these signs display critical information about kidnapped children and their suspected abductors. More often than not, however, these signs display public service slogans designed to nag you and to remind you of your duties as a responsible driver. During most major holidays, the signs command you to “Report Drunk Drivers – Call 911″. Every Fourth of July or Cinco de Mayo, the signs remind you that “Fireworks Are Illegal”. And on ordinary days, the signs pester you with “Click It Or Ticket” or “Don’t Speed – Save Lives”. Just once, couldn’t the people controlling those signs either post something positive or festive like “Happy Holidays”, or just turn off the damned signs? And don’t even get me started on the Schwarzenegger administration’s proposal to post advertisements on Amber Alert signs to generate revenue for the state of California.




• Dim traffic signal lights with bad visibility from varying ranges. While we’re on the subject of driving, I hate those traffic signal lights covered with glossy lenses that make the entire strip of lights appear to be shut off until you drive within a certain proximity of a traffic intersection. I tried to do some research online before writing about these lights, but I came up with nothing. I don’t have an official term for the offending lights, and I don’t understand the science behind the lenses, but what I do know is that they are ridiculous hazards.

  Most traffic signal lights in the United States are bright and visible, day or night, from any reasonable distance or angle. But there is an obnoxious handful of traffic signal lights on the road that are equipped with these terrible glossy lenses that make all of the colors look dim, and you don’t know whether you should stop or drive through until you’ve almost entered the intersection. “Stop” and “Go” are two concepts that should not be equivocated so easily.

  


• Crowd participation. There’s nothing I hate more about attending a live musical performance than being pressured into clapping along with a beat. I’m not trying to crap on the value of shared experiences, but I’m sorry: crowd participation is bullshit. I didn’t leave my house to act as a ghetto metronome; I’m here to be entertained. Clapping along with a song is tedious, and pretty much every crowd grows tired of the game midway through any song. I predict that shit and roll my eyes every time audiences start it up, and I’m always right. I clap my hands only when I believe that I’ve been given a reason to.




• Gratuitous live, on-location reporting by television news journalists. The news is a highly time-sensitive subject. It makes sense that so many TV news journalists report live from remote locations, because sometimes you don’t have all of the facts until just a few minutes before you go on the air. What I find irritating, though, is the culture of television journalism that emphasizes the importance of reporting live and on the scene at all possible times, even when it’s not relevant to do so. In my television-viewing lifetime, I have witnessed such bullshit as a local news correspondent reporting live and on the scene at 11 o’clock at night from some vacant, outdoor venue where an important event happened twenty years ago. I don’t understand this phobia that news agencies have of allowing their correspondents to comment on recorded images while they sit comfortably in the broadcasting studio.


Problems with audio/visual feeds and disruptions by obnoxious bystanders would greatly reduce if these TV professionals would just broadcast from behind a desk more often.




• Astrology. It’s difficult to understand how so many intelligent people can buy into the concept that objects in outer space have a direct effect on the personalities and behaviors of human beings. We’re talking about objects occupying space hundreds of millions of miles away from Earth. How the hell does the alignment of planets have any impact on my development as a person? If you believe that the positioning of planets at the moment of my birth is an indicator of what’s to come throughout my adulthood, then I contend that the arbitrary positioning of objects on Earth at the moment of my birth also plays a significant role on who I will become.

  I think it bears mentioning that when I was born, my father’s Buick Regal was parked 58 meters away from the hospital entrance. It is because of this fortuitous positioning of my father’s car that I will be a generous person with a sunny demeanor and a strong propensity for juggling, ventriloquism, and taxidermy. Had my father parked 57 meters away from the hospital entrance, I would have been a surly, cranky asshole who hates everything and everybody. I really dodged the proverbial spooky-superstitious-matter-and-space-altering-cosmical-tarot-death-card-Scorpiquarius-Year-of-the-Rat-Gemini’s-Twin-Little-Dipper bullet. Thank Zeus! I mean, I don’t believe in anything else that came out of Greek mythology, but I inexplicably accept this dubious correlation between celestial bodies and human bodies.




• DVD commentary banter containing spoiler alerts. I’m a special features geek. I watch a fair amount of television shows and movies on DVD, and I almost always make time to listen to the commentary tracks. The one conversation that I’m tired of listening to is the one that seems to pop up in every commentary track ever recorded. Invariably, somebody on the commentary track wants to talk about a plot point that will be revealed either later in the movie or later in the episode, but they voice their hesitation since they don’t want to spoil the surprise for the viewer. Eventually, somebody else in the recording booth asks, “Who buys a DVD and goes straight to the commentary track without watching the original content?” Then the commentators have a good laugh over this nugget of insight and carry on as though they were the first people to ever have this conversation. There goes another two minutes of wasted commentary time. That’s two minutes’ worth of lost revelations.

  I realize that DVD commentary tracks are inherently a waste of time, but the least that these Hollywood professionals can do is have the courtesy to get a freaking clue about their own industry before they waste my time with this moronic running gag in their commentary tracks.

  


• Birds that swoop low to the ground when they’re flying across a street. Fuck birds. They can fly while the rest of us can’t, and yet they always swoop down into harm’s way in front of my moving car when they want to cross a street. I’ve nearly crashed into a couple of them in my time. Look, birds: the whole point of flying is being able to crap on us land dwellers’ heads all the while you stay out of our reach. If you birds are going to squander your ability with these daredevil antics, then you deserve whatever misfortune becomes of you when you’re not looking.

On this Thanksgiving Day of 2008, I give thanks for all of these petty grievances. They keep me irritated, they keep me human, and counter-intuitively, they probably keep me sane. Seriously though, fuck birds.

“One day, when I was quite young,” my friend Wendy once wrote, “I saw a graffittied stop sign saying, ‘stop thewar,’ and I spent two days trying to figure out what thew ar was.”

Wendy’s recollection has always reminded me of a story of my own. One day at the age of thirteen, I was waiting in line for a ride at an amusement park. I noticed that somebody had carved onto a wooden post the words, “Jesus is Bord!” I had no idea what that meant, and I kept wondering what this person was trying to say. Maybe it was something as profound and as bleak as, “Jesus has lost all interest in our silly human games.” Or perhaps it was more of a blasphemous non sequitur like, “I am Jesus, and I am sick of waiting in this long line.” It wasn’t until three months later that I realized that the most likely story pointed to two authors: one to write the original message of “Jesus is Lord,” and a second one to carve a capital B out of the letter L. The world seems far more mundane once you take the mystery out of graffiti in public places.

It’s the excitement of the mystery, anonymity, and raw emotion behind graffiti that makes it so intriguing. I have never felt passionately enough to deface a public surface with a drawing or an earnest opinion, but I often wonder what goes through the minds of those people who do. Surely they understand that you can’t change the world by writing on a wall, don’t they? Perhaps they do understand that, but sometimes the most important thing is merely knowing that somebody somewhere can hear you. That’s almost admirable in an idealistic, sentimentally quixotic sort of way. Graffiti is vandalism, and I sure as hell don’t want anybody spraying up my house or my fences, but there’s something so primal and so urgent about it that I just can’t deny the inexorable humanity of it all. Sometimes the desire to be heard outweighs common sense and common courtesy. Sometimes graffiti is fucking cool.

Amongst rapper Mos Def’s many memorable rhymes, an excerpt from his song, Speed Law, has always stuck with me:

Get your power, your masks and capes snatched
Brooklyn take what you can’t take back
I know a lot of cats hate that
All I can say black
There’s a city full of walls you can post complaints at

Perhaps it’s silly of me to romanticize the vandalism of public and private property. Graffiti, after all, is obnoxious. It’s selfish and unsightly and invariably offensive to somebody. It’s the human equivalent of urinating on a tree to mark your presence. Although there is a growing movement of legitimate graffiti artists who have turned the medium into a viable art form, and although some disenfranchised idealists have written some powerful things on public walls over the years, the vast majority of the world’s graffiti amounts to hateful smut or hackneyed catch phrases. I guess as in all things in life, our only recourse is to tolerate the bad along with what little good there is to find.

Like it or not, the desire to be heard is a universal human constant — a necessity like laughter, friendship, water, and air. It is a deeply ingrained need that both inspires and taints the human heart. When Simon & Garfunkel sang about the words of the prophets written on the subway walls, they were tapping into the human desire to be heard in a paradoxical world where people struggle to communicate, all the while the technology enabling mass communication steadily improves. We have our blogs and our special interest forums and our Facebook accounts, but there’s no substituting a blank wall facing a busy street. We pee wherever the hell we want to pee because we are human beings, goddamn it, and we have a right to be heard. Just stay the fuck off my lawn and write on my neighbors’ walls, okay, humanity?

One October, twenty-something years ago, I was a five-year-old boy sitting at the kitchen table staring at a pumpkin. By the end of the night, I would have a jack-o-lantern to call my own. There was no such thing as a child-friendly pumpkin carving knife in the early 1980s, so the most that I was allowed to do was draw a face on my pumpkin, and leave the actual carving up to my grandfather.

Not understanding the strategic disadvantages of drawing on a pumpkin with a ballpoint pen, I did what kids do and gave it a go with the first pen that I could find. Even as a child with a five-year-old sense of aesthetics, I was severely disappointed with my efforts. The triangle eyes were lopsided and round. The triangular nose was centered, but was equally awkward. Worst of all, though, was the mouth.

My intention was to give my jack-o-lantern a wide grin with vampire fangs. I started with the top half of the mouth and drew two prominent fangs that any vampire would be proud of. Then came the bottom half. I started on the left side of the mouth and carefully formed the bottom lip of the smile. As I was arching the pen underneath the top half of the mouth, my pen slipped at the most disastrous moment, and my pen stroke scribbled through the sharp angle that was supposed to be the first fang. I stared horrified at my disfigured jack-o-lantern and slowly came to accept the fact that Halloween had been ruined. Forever. Angrily, I stabbed the ballpoint pen back into the rogue mouth line and scribbled haphazardly with disgust, great frustration, and kindergarten angst. I threw my pen down onto the table and stormed out of the room.

My father let me cool down for about twenty minutes and then called me back into the kitchen. When I reentered the room, my brother Jonathan was still designing his own jack-o-lantern, and my grandfather was seated across from him, busily carving the pumpkin that I had so furiously abandoned. After a few halfhearted attempts to stop my grandfather, the pumpkin was carved, smiling defiantly at me with its hideous grin. I didn’t have the verbal or emotional vocabulary to express this at the time, but as I stared at that orange sphere of immortalized failure, I was overcome with a mix of feelings. I was ashamed of my terrible illustration, and I was embarrassed that my grandfather had so lovingly interpreted my ridiculous scribbling as an honest and credible attempt at self expression. That jack-o-lantern was just as much a testament to my temper and my propensity to quit as it was a testament of my grandfather’s support for his grandson: the young, budding artist who would one day embark on an earnest quest for true inspiration.

Of course, I was five at the time, and I didn’t have the capacity to express all of that effusive sentimentality. I was just a kid staring at the most sarcastic jack-o-lantern in the world, trying my best not to punch a hole through that stupid, taunting face. I guess I’m old enough to say this now, so I might as well say it. When I look back on that day as an adult, I remember those moments with good humor, and with an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Thanks, Grandpa. Happy Halloween.

I’ve grown to tolerate haunts over the years, but I still can’t love them.  I’m still a little sour on the idea of paying money to be hassled by screaming wackos who  get in your face and threaten to touch you, but who never do.  If I wanted to spend money to experience that level of abusive frustration, I’d be much better off visiting my neighborhood S&M strip club.  At least there, they touch you a little after you pay extra.  Speaking of which, part of the reason why I’m a little uncomfortable with haunts is that they subject me to the same kind of mental and moral dilemmas that I experience in strip clubs, but in far more hostile settings.

There’s a similar element of dehumanization involved in haunts as there are in strip clubs.  In either setting, people place themselves on display for your amusement, inviting you to regard them not as people, but as scenery — as props in an elaborate stage production. A stripper on stage transforms herself into an object of sexual desire, and your enjoyment of the show depends on your ability to objectify the performer. The show seems a lot less fun when you you start looking the stripper in the eye instead of staring at her curves, and you imagine her applying your folded dollar bills towards her rent or next month’s car payment.

In an oddly analogous way, your enjoyment of a heavily staffed haunt also depends on your ability to suspend a portion of your human empathy. Within the confines of those haunted mazes, cast members become monsters, beasts, and supernatural fiends. They pop out of dark corners with intimidating growls and screams, or they stare at you blankly in the center of a room beneath a macabre layer of fake blood and graphic wounds, forcing you to find a path around them. When these cast members confront you, you have a choice between recoiling in fear and fleeing the “monsters” at your heels, or laughing with good nature and smiling at the cast members — the people who are placing you in this ridiculous and socially awkward situation. Those who cringe and flee suspend their disbelief just long enough to believe in their tormentors’ lack of humanity. On the other hand, I feel a little guilty for laughing and smiling at the cast members because it almost feels like I’m celebrating my own dignity at the expense of others who would willingly sacrifice a little bit of their own dignity to frighten me. Those are the kinds of situations where I feel like I can never win. I’ve never walked out of one of those haunts feeling anything else other than relief that the ordeal is over.

Halloween approaches fast this year.  Soon it will be the 31st, and then it will be November.  I just need to hold out a little longer, and the whole ordeal will be over.  Freaking Halloween.  What other time of year can you walk down the street armed with a chainsaw and a bloody hatchet and people will regard you with smiles of approval?  I’m just looking forward to better days, when the only people whom I will overtly objectify are strippers and exotic dancers.  Man, that’ll be sweet.

Salvation implies distress, strained existence, discomfort and insistence to persist without so much as an explanation as to what we need to accomplish in our mortal state. The coil, they call it. Coil and recoil, life and death, it’s all the same meager sentiment, this jumbled mess. The debts we retain in life extend further than a grave or the confines of generations or decades, the waves of fate ever failing to respond to our devastation, our indignant rage, the demands and indictments in favor of explanation, justification for indiscriminate destruction, incessant hate. Humanity has been set ablaze, and who in God’s name are we expecting to tend to the flames?

Salvation is change, a means of relief from intolerable heat, and moaning, indefinite need, greed for desire’s sake, the sake of revisions to escape the weight of lamentable lost purity. Salvation is the culmination of dreams, the subconscious growing with ever more contempt, yet each day we rely on those depths to keep us afloat, to live in the exclusion of savagery. Many fail. Yet those dreams drive us forward, mere vessels of tendons, bones, water, delicate flesh, and self-transcending selves in need of a destination worth attaining, a justification for this retched state in which we toil and grieve and exist on the insistence of fear. Such is life, and such is us. Salvation can’t seem to come soon enough.

One of the sad truths about friendship is that proximity often defines it. While humans can be loyal and communal creatures at best, there’s no getting around the fact that our minds and our hearts perceive the world through crude, imperfect increments of measurement, like distance and time. A friendship is a fairly simple thing to maintain when your friend plays a role in your daily, weekly, or even monthly routine. But if one of you should ever pick up and move halfway across the country, you’ll eventually notice your mutual affections tilting on a gradual decline. It’s an inadvertent kind of slip, which somehow excuses the callous inclination to live on and forget.

There’s no use taking it all too personally, though. The hardness of the world has conditioned us all to become emotional mercenaries. We’ll love passionately, listen attentively, and care with all sincerity, just so long as our lovers and friends reside within driving distance. We spend our entire lives in transit between one uncomfortable context after another. Consequently, we’ve developed this urgent desire to seek out relief at every opportunity. And so we’ve devised clever devices like ergonomic chairs, easy-grip handlebars, rubber and foam wrist supports, and, of course, convenient relationships. We’re only human, I guess.

No, I don’t honestly believe that every long-distance relationship is doomed to failure. I do have to wonder, though, why we allow such a trivial thing like distance to end so many of our friendships. Every relationship hinges on common ground, whether it’s common interests, common sensibilities, or merely common affections. When distance suddenly divides you from a loved one, the common ground that brought you together doesn’t magically disappear. So why should distance matter? We all know it shouldn’t. But ultimately, we all know it does.

And yet we lie to each other’s faces during our final goodbyes, pretending as if we’re above such corporeal contrivances like distance and time. And that, my friends, is why I’m not a fan of final goodbyes. We’ve reduced our parting words to the caliber of soulless, disingenuous greeting cards. Real friends don’t tell each other to “keep in touch.” Communication is the sort of thing that’s implied when you find yourself in a genuine friendship. At the end of the road, I prefer sincerity over pretense and tact–a heartfelt hug or a sturdy handshake, and an exchange of stoic words like, “Good luck out there, man. Take care of yourself.” And if I feel like phoning or sending the occasional email sometime afterwards, I’ll make sure to carry through–just the way a real friend should.

KEVIN: So that’s it, then? Your answer is a vague and useless vindication of all things divine? Shiva, Yahweh, Bismillah, it’s all the same, right? Looks like the countless scores of quibbling religious denominations and sects have been fighting over nothing all along. Gold stars for everybody!

GOD: One of the most tragic constants in human history is your talent for oversimplification.

KEVIN: Forgive me, but aren’t you the one claiming that all roads lead to a single path? Isn’t that an oversimplification?

GOD: More like a simple statement of the facts. That’s not to say that all roads are as direct or straightforward as others, but none of them are entirely devoid of direction. Those people who would oversimplify, however, are often the ones who have the easiest time justifying violence and hatred in the name of God. It was never my intention that diversity would lead to such division.

KEVIN: Division is one of the things we do best. It’s a rule of nature. The truth is, humans strive on segregation, and resentment, and prejudice.

By default, we’re sectioned off by continents — but beyond that point, the rest of our divisions are voluntary. Within those huge masses of land that we call continents, we draw borders for individual countries. Some countries get along with each other and form international councils, while most others just sulk in the corner by themselves and mutter threats. Within our countries, we have states, and counties, and cities. And despite all of that propagandized nationalism and cultural identity bullshit, citizens of a country make plenty of reasons to hate each other when it comes to polarizing entities like partisan politics or professional sports. All of that national unity stuff melts away when you’re too busy bitching about the opposing party or screaming death threats at the visiting team. It’s all just fuel for pointless rivalry.

The divisions flow from top to bottom and permeate pretty much every aspect of our lives. I’m not trying to sound like a pseudo-socialist here, but humanity has more diversity than it knows what to do with it. Different skin colors, ethnic origins, governmental philosophies, religious doctrines, sexual orientation–there’s a wealth of reasons to senselessly hate each other. We are all self-transcending beings crammed into a common living space, so it’s inevitable that disagreements would arise. And what better way is there to win an argument than to kill everybody who contradicts you? I’m still trying to decide whether suicide bombers are stubborn brutes who refuse to change with the times, or if they’re actually the next step in human evolution.

GOD: A little fatalistic, don’t you think?

KEVIN: If I were you, I’d worry less about one guy’s pessimism and focus more on the fact that people are blowing themselves up to impress you. How do you reconcile your claims of caring about the world with your apparent lack of intervention?

GOD: As senseless as this will sound to you, humanity has all of the necessary tools that it needs to live in peace.

KEVIN: What am I, a deist? Do you expect me to accept that as an adequate answer?

GOD: You fault me for my lack of intervention?

KEVIN: Of course.

GOD: Just a moment ago, you told me that God should let His children live their own lives.

KEVIN: In an ideal universe, even the most aloof and irresponsible deity would take at least some measures to stop his children from hating and killing each other.

GOD: The funny thing about ideals is that they can differ so greatly depending on the dreamer. Sometimes, not even the dreamer himself can agree with his own ideals.