Kant Believed in the Bible

Hard, strange weekend. I find myself wondering (a) when a human being becomes a means to another human being's end, and (b) if I would want my actions to be universalized. And I find myself drawn to the greatest promise ever made:

I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

Today's Musical Insight (Crucifixion Edition):

Every finger in the room is pointing at me... I've got a bowling ball in my stomach, I've got a desert in my mouth - figures that my courage would choose to sell out now...

A Sad Story

From Andrew Sullivan:

I remember a story told by a friend during the plague years. He was visiting a dying friend in hospital and a couple of beds down the ward from his friend, the curtains were drawn around a patient. From behind the curtains, he could hear a man softly singing a show-tune. "Well, at least that guy's keeping his spirits up," my friend remarked. "Actually," his dying friend replied, "the man in that bed died this morning and was taken away by his family. That's his boyfriend. The family won't let him go to the funeral or ever see his spouse's body again. They've kicked him out of their apartment. It wasn't his name on the lease. So he's just sitting there, singing their favorite song to an empty bed. It's the last time he'll get that close to his husband. The nurses didn't have the heart to tell him to leave yet. He's been there for hours."

Homosexuality is the moral perversion here?

The Most Beautiful Song...

The rain is perfect - exactly as I've always envisioned "Iris" being performed.



Today's Musical Insight (You Can't Put This Any Better Edition):

You're the closest to heaven that I'll ever be...

Neatosocomplicated

I remember why I quit that goddamned myspace.

It’s always in the shortest second, in the tiniest moment that you realize that all your cowardly ambivalence is a farce, and a tragic one; you want to run and grasp and tear and shout, but all you manage to do is clench and swallow. And then the inborn opiate we prefer to call ‘hope’ mercifully arrives to dilute the moment, and little by little it’s over – rationalized, rejected, repackaged as ‘jealousy’ and advertised with words like ‘immature’ and ‘evanescent’. The loud-mouthed truth-teller in the back of your mind is bound to notice, however, that what you’re feeling is not immature and certainly not evanescent and, in all likelihood, not even jealousy.

Only two people knew the truth about how I felt about this person. In a complete reversal of habit, she was one of them.

For a moment today I thought about joining the Army. And why not?

I understand there’s a conspicuous deficit of well-to-do white boys.

I supported this senseless war in the beginning.

A small part of me still believes in it now.

Does that make me crazy? Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe we’re crazy.

Probably.

Today’s Musical Insight (Eight Seconds Left in Overtime Edition):

And suddenly I’ve become part of your past – I’m becoming the part that don’t last…

A Tiny Request to My Liberal Friends

Take it easy on the drug companies, eh?

Flashback: The awful year and a half between the winter of 2004 and the spring of 2006. If not for Wellbutrin, Zoloft, and the frantic efforts of at least two incredibly skilled and amazingly patient doctors... well, I don’t know how likely it is that I’m here at all. When they say they’re in the business of saving peoples’ lives, they mean it. Imperfect as the system is, they do good work.

Take it from me.

I know what I’m talking about.

Today’s Musical Insight (Best Song Ever Composed by the Hand of Man Edition):

You can’t fight the tears that ain’t comin’, or the moment of truth in your lies; and when everything feels like the movies, yeah, you’d bleed just to know you’re alive…

Romance

I like stories like this:

A BRITISH man has met and married a 22-year-old woman after, by his own account, dreaming of her phone number and then sending her a text message.

Today’s Musical Insight (True Romantic Edition):

The years went by, the boy wished he was dead – he found seventeen girls and still wasn't wet. He went to his Papa, his Papa said: "No, those girls are all your sisters, but your Mama don't know."

I Still Write Here…

…but I do most of blogging elsewhere now. Brooke McKean and Hanady Kader came across this post – which I shamelessly advertised on the Daily’s comment forum – and asked me to shorten it to 250 words and submit it for this upcoming Free Speech Friday. Take that, Samuel P. Huntington.

There’s an email I’ve been putting off sending since January. I told myself I was going to write it and send it tonight, and that’s it. That’s it. Well, it’s past ten and I still haven’t done it.

Here’s what I’m afraid of – the banality of emailing back and forth with an ex. I think your new job sounds great, how’s that damn math class treating you?; me, my quarter is off to a slow start, locked the keys in the car other day; gotta go because the phone is ringing or the stove is on… and the passion – even the forlorn passion of reminiscing, lonely and depressed, about old times – slowly slips into the realm of the overwrought and boring, and you begin to forget why you cared about this amazing human being in the first place.

Can you imagine something more horrible?

Today’s Musical Insight (He Was Crucified for Me? Edition):

Don’t stop here, I lost my place… but I’m close behind…

And Now for the Real Thing

This is quite satisfying. The Broken Watch can now be reached here. I'm up to six posts and have already taken on fundamentalist busybodies of the Islamic and UW variety in my inimitably futile way. Hooray for self-righteous self-love.

Today’s Musical Insight (April Fools Day is an Anniversary I’d Rather Forget Edition):

“I didn’t know that we, we could break a silver lining. And I’m so sad; like a good book, I can’t put this day back. It’s a sorta fairy tale with you…”

A Premature Plug

I like this blogging thing, and I'll have very little to do this quarter. So I'm building a newsblog, in the tradition of my new journalistic idols. Stay tuned. And the tiny, um, niche market(?) of people who read this little shrine to Kaasa narcissism shouldn't worry - I'll still have plenty to whine about here.

Today's Musical Insight (Guitar Hero II Edition):

“This bird you'll never change, and this bird you cannot change - Lord knows, I can't change, Lord help me, I can't change…”

A Throwback to Myspace

Back in the day, I joined myspace mostly for the quizzes. Well, I couldn't help it...

Your Kissing Technique Is: Perfect

Your kissing technique is amazing - and you know it. You have the confidence to make the first move. And you always seem to know what kissing style is going to work best. Sometimes you're passionate, sometimes you're a tease. And you're always amazing!

Are You a Good Kisser?

[Giggles]

You Are Most Like George W. Bush

So what if you're not exactly popular? You still rule the free world. And while you may be quite conservative now, you knew how to party back in the day!

What Modern US President Are You Most Like?

Umm...how should I feel about this?

Hitchens: In the Heart of Darkness

I’ve just finished Love, Poverty, and War by Christopher Hitchens, the collection of reviews, essays, and columns that he published in 2004 to well-deserved acclaim. Reading through these particular selections, one keeps imagining Hitchens chuckling slyly to himself as he dives into his own canon, cutting and pasting his old contrarianisms into a brutal, gorgeously-written volume of heresy. His reviewers are right to say that the result is impressive. He may as well have called it I Bloody Well Told You So.

And then one reaches the Vanity Fair column entitled “Pakistan: On the Frontier of Apocalypse,” written in its namesake country a little more than a month after 9/11. As an enthusiastic and often dogmatic fan, I have trouble chewing on this bit of derision:

“All-male crowds, with no outlet for their emotions after listening to inflammatory sermons from the mullahs or the Jamaat-Ulema-i-Islami Party demagogues, spilled out of the mosques and displayed what I can only call an attitude.”

I hate it when a single chapter or a single short story or a single essay cast a shadow on an entire work. This article, detailing a trip to the Orient in the aftermath of the region’s most important geopolitical event in two decades, scowls at the anxiety of the people living there. And it scowls at the reader too.

Hitchens is a creature of the mid-twentieth century left, a Nation-contributing former Trotskyist whom people keep comparing to George Orwell. As a journalist, though, it seems to me that he takes his cues from Karl Marx, who covered the American Civil War for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune quite brilliantly. Empiricism and materialism were the cruces of Marx’s critical thinking, but in truth he never ventured far from his moral center. Dismayed as he was with the “contradictions” and exploitation of Yankee capitalism, he never ceased to be disgusted by the arrogance and banal evil of the feudal atrocity that was “Southern civilization.” Hitchens writes in the same polemical vein – his journalism is always accurate and always pointed, always fair and never balanced.

But “Pakistan” is an unsettling, distracting departure. Traveling in a Pakistani border city he “used to love” five weeks after an attack on a pair of American cities he loves more, he garners some discomfiting satisfaction out of annoying the locals. Roaming through the refugee camps (the attack on the Taliban next door is understood to be imminent) on the outskirts he happens upon a man selling t-shirts bearing the image of Osama bin Laden. He begins to haggle with the vendor, and a crowd of nervous people begins to form around the white English-speaking man who suspiciously wants to buy a souvenir celebrating his country’s sworn enemy. When the agitated crowd demands to know why he is not scared to deign to show his (full) wallet in front of them, he taunts them with “Why should I be scared? Muslims do not steal from guests.” Narrating the scene, he remarks that he never uses dehumanizing terms like ‘teeming’ and ‘seething’ to describe a crowd, and tastelessly opts instead to evoke a “peripheral” vista of “writhing, baffled beards and mustaches.” It’s painful to the reader that Hitchens clearly does not appreciate the irony of his revulsion with these peoples’ “miasma of self-pity mingled with self-righteousness.”

Shall we be clear? His criticisms of this society’s sexism, fear, demagoguery and autarky are legitimate. But they are not truly Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens’ work is almost invariably informed by Marx’s journalistic ethos – an appreciation for context, an exceptional knowledge of history, and a nearly universal empathy for downtrodden and exploited nations. And his writing is almost invariably what I call eloquent, a union of the writer and his character, his purpose, his subject, and his subtle mastery of the craft.

The diction, the syntax, the construction of metaphors – yes, Hitchens cannot help but write elegantly, but in this article his instinctive eloquence escapes him. He is not honest. He is not angry. He is not gentle, even in his polemical way. He is superior, and superior in the very way that Joseph Conrad found so odious. One critic put it well: He is an Englishman in a hot country snarling at the natives.

At the First International, Marx was engaged in a heated leadership struggle with Mikhail Bakunin. After he had won the narrow vote, he sneered, “Bah! I do not trust any Russian.” In the weeks after 9/11, most of us had thoughts possessed of the same spirit. But like Marx, we had the grace to be somewhat ashamed of them, and managed to avoid publishing them in a compilation of our best work. “Pakistan” is a bane on an otherwise masterly book, and one exceedingly worth the read. On the thermometer of intellectual merit, this article sits considerably below its author. For shame, Mr. Hitchens.

Today’s Musical Insight (Sarcastic Anticlericalism Edition):

“Sunday morning’s every day for all I care, and I’m not scared; light my candles in a daze ‘cause I’ve found God…”

"This world you must have crossed..."

A few moments ago I was strolling about Safeway in search of Dr. Pepper, and Stevie Nicks was beseeching me, Can she sail through the changing ocean tides? Can she handle the seasons of her life? … I don’t know.

Eric Blair said once that he’d never written anything good that wasn’t about politics. I remembered that reading my last post – contrary to whatever I’ve convinced myself of in anticipation of the moment I open my grade page, I’ve never written anything good that wasn’t in love letter form.

(I like to think of George Orwell as a friend. A pen pal. Which is why it’s okay for me to use his real name.)

The notorious question came up again last night – is being in love alone enough? I would, of course, like to think so. But love is never alone, and when we talk about love “alone,” we usually mean love accompanied by a healthy dose of sheer misery.

Back to Oly tomorrow. I plan on sampling the fish and chips at that little pizza-and-clam-chowder café on the boardwalk. Care to join?

Today’s Musical Insight (Wuthering Heights-Style Romance is Not a Good Life Choice Edition):

“You said, ‘You don’t know me, and you don’t even care.’ Oh yeah, you said, ‘You don’t know me, and you don’t wear my chains.’ Oh yeah, you said, ‘I think I’ll go to Boston, I think I’ll start a new life, I think I’ll start it over where no one knows my name…’”

(I knew about this song before you did.)

Is it Irony?

It was the perfect way to end a quarter during which I was compelled to produce, for three separate classes, a full 47 pages of strained lines of reasoning, contrived nuances, and trite metaphors: “So far, you have written two essays for PolSci 273, and you are about to write another. Is the process of writing these essays a form of domination as Foucault understands it, or is it a path to freedom? Explain your answer.”

In the wee hours of the morning that this paper is due, when I’m on the last leg of a finals week of an unexpectedly taxing quarter, you better believe that it’s a form of domination.

I’m actually proud of a lot of the writing I’ve done this quarter. Not all of it is absolute drivel. I’ve had the opportunity to dress down many published writers who are smarter than me, without the attendant risk of these folks ever finding out and responding in kind. It’s like a scholarly guerrilla war. Christopher’s Id force pokes through in his treatment of Michael McFaul, the eminent Stanford political scientist and Russia specialist:

“McFaul’s rumination is mystifying, drenched as it is in the language of insinuation (everything ‘now seems inevitable,’ but ‘nothing seemed preordained,’ and ‘perhaps’ this is a great achievement?). Considering, moreover, that he precedes it with a list of all the things that might have gone wrong, we have no idea whether he regards the dissolution of the USSR as inevitable. But McFaul’s intellectual contortionism does provide us with…”

“Fully embracing, it seems, the obsequious connotation of the word ‘apologia’ as a label for his article, McFaul moves on to lament the personal demonization of Yeltsin. After all, he argues, ‘it is wrong to assume that one man could have the power or ideas to guide or crash Russia’s revolution...even a larger-than-life personality like Boris Yeltsin.’ This contention merits a response, if only because patronizing homilies like this are the kernels of irresponsible revisionism with a human face.”

That’s right. I went there. Did you catch the allusion to Gorbachev's political sloganeering in the last sentence? Gloves are off, bee-yatch!

In other news, thank God this quarter’s over.

Today’s Musical Insight (Don’t You Want Somebody to Love? Edition):

“If I don’t say this now, I will surely break…”

Please Don't Read This If You Don't Know Me Very Well

Sarah once told me about this exercise she had to do in a Beginning Acting class. It was supposed to teach the importance of symbols, I suppose, and how to develop empathy for the character you’re playing. The student would hand the professor his or her wallet and then stand up in front of the class. The professor would pull out random objects and ask a question about each one, until he suspected that he’d hit a potent emotional nerve. He would keep asking questions until he had followed the entire path of memory and feeling back to the object’s emotional core. She told me tales of football leviathans breaking down inconsolably.

And here I sit, not with a random picture or receipt or to-do list out of my wallet, but with that damn speech medal from 2002.

The YD-CR debate went quite well, but it’s turned me into an emotional wreck over the past few days. Fuck me. I know better than this. Public speaking carries too much baggage for me...weird, no? And right before finals.

Ha! Right before finals! Yes, on Friday I realized that I wanted to go home for a couple of days – that I couldn’t take being in this shitty apartment anymore, that I was constantly on the verge of crying, that I missed my mom and I missed my sister, and I missed Sabrina and my brother and my dad even though I wouldn’t get to see them, that I missed the goddamned cats and the high school that’s just a few blocks from my house, that I missed thinking about Sidney Carton and what I would do for the girl I loved and about the naif politics of "overcoming suffering" while smelling the smell of the backyard when the sun is going down; I realized that my dad was serious when he said that after Chelsey graduates he might move to Longview or some place where he’s not even in the same city as my mom, and that that devastates me despite my… strained relationship with him and the fact that he’s right about not having any reason to live in Tumwater anymore, because I’ll graduate from college the same year that she graduates from high school, and I’ll go God knows where and my brother will go God knows where and my sister will go God knows where, and my dad will live someplace new that reminds him of fucking Montana, and my mom will stay and maybe even sell the house, and that then, finally, passively, tranquilly, in a quiet way that everyone will probably keep to themselves, my family will kind of be over.

Today’s Musical Insight (Never Let Me Get Married, Because Getting Divorced Would Absolutely Kill Me Edition):

“So fuck you, fuck you, fuck you and all you didn’t do. I said bleed it, bleed it, bleed it, there’s nothing in you anyway. And do you hate me, hate me, hate me, hate me so much that you can’t let me out, let me out, let me out of hell when you’re around?”

"Sing without a reason..."

What do you do with the artifacts of a broken promise? What if you are the responsible party? I suspect the answer is the same in either case – I keep them in my sock drawer, along with a box of Eclipse, a few of those little bottles of liquor, and (…ahem…) contraceptives.

Through no fault of my own, that “drink-sodden former Trotskyite popinjay” Christopher Hitchens has become one of my favorite writers, and not just because he gives words to my inarticulate misgivings about the contemporary left’s infuriating multicultural etiquette. He’s also one of the few adults still defending the Iraq War, and I think that’s admirable. He beat the criminal demagogue George Galloway (truly the incarnation of Ellsworth Toohey) in that debate in New York, a fact which any intelligent and honest person can understand. Jon Stewart is the only person I’ve ever seen challenge him successfully, which redoubles my respect for them both; isn’t it a testament to the state of the modern media that Hitchens’ only intellectual equal is on Comedy Central at 11/10c?

In an interview with The New Yorker, he famously declared that the three most overrated things in the world are lobster, champagne, and anal sex. I find this remarkable because I never thought anyone would put lobster and anal sex in any sort of category.

YD-CR debate coming up quick, and I wish I had Galloway’s soapbox talents. I’ve discovered this is more of a jeering, crowd-pleasing, contest of insults than classic L-D…which I have no qualms with. I was nominated(?) because I’m a decent speaker, and I accepted because I enjoy attention. The only problem – I’m not funny. Or smart or quick. We’ll see how this goes. Maybe I ought to bone up on my Prime Minister’s Questions in anticipation of the main event…

Today’s Musical Insight (Feel Better, Sarah Edition):

“There’s still tomorrow, forget the sorrow – and I can be on the last train home, watchin’ past the past the day as it fades away, no more time to care, no more time today…”

The Temporary Sunshine of the Occupied Mind

So get this. I open up blogspot, I read my last entry, and I’m like, “Double-yoo-tee-eff, mate? What the hell kind of writing is this?” Ick.

First Young Dems meeting tonight. Starting things in late January…hmm, what kind of a track record do I have with this? (Thoughts on Barack Obama to be posted later.)

I believe in a novelist God. History repeats itself in the most bizarre ways. It foreshadows itself so cleverly that you don’t get it until the punchline.

I’ll admit it – Aristotle, much too smart for me. Furthermore – CHID 205, yup, kicking my ass. (Sigh…that feels better.)

Zack and Becca are still together. Sarah and Christian are still together. I checked Facebook and it says Peter and Nicole are still together. It’s because he’s an evil monkey that lives in my closet. No, it’s true. Chuzzah for continuity. I wake up one day and suddenly everyone’s healthier and stabler than me.

I’m so glad we’re able to talk like this.

‘Tis all, children. Go to sleep.

Today’s Musical Insight (I’m Serious, I’m Going to Bed Now Because I Have So Much to Do Tomorrow Edition):

“The record won’t stop skipping, and the lies just won’t stop slipping, and besides my reputation’s on the line…”

Sometimes I Mope

Okay, so my last post may have been a little heavy on the self-pity.

I think the problem is that I’ve been reading too much Marx lately. Strangely enough, Karl and the proletariat remind me of my simultaneous first encounters with unanswered love and radical politics, and re-reading all of this stuff puts me in a very Wuthering Heights-soap opera-dark romantic sort of mood. Hegel, Marx, Molly, and Makyia, the Communist Manifesto and “Iris,” Lord of the Flies and Sidney Carton and 9/11 and LD debate – it’s all tied up in quite a bizarre web of cold intellectual analysis and passionate reminiscence. And that’s why I’m in this mood. Plus I’m sick.

Forgive? Really, you should be blaming Glenn Mackin and Stephen Hanson, two UW professors that assigned communist propaganda the same week.

Jesus, how’s this for an arrogant intellectual post?

Germany – the home of the west’s finest philosophers. Germany – the strongest land power in Europe that still secretly hopes to one day rule the world.

Don’t let the EU fool you.

Today’s Musical Insight (Sidney Carton Literary Edition):

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”

An Open Letter To You Target Bastards

“Dear Target and Similar Major Retail Shopping Centers,

Fuck you.

There is no need to start putting up the Valentine’s Day displays at so early a date. This is not a major shopping holiday on the order of Christmas, in which I’ll be buying your shit for everyone I know. I don’t need five weeks to shop for your cheesy chocolates and poorly-written mass produced love letters.

Furthermore, those of us who are not likely to have a valentine by February 14 take exception to your reminding us of it at every bloody opportunity. You manage to penetrate every free crevice of urban space with your advertisements, which is a price I’m willing to pay to live in such a shamelessly decadent consumer culture. I do not, however, appreciate that the subtly condescending, exclusionary content of that advertising – ‘Everyone’s going to have a wonderful Valentine’s Day! If you have someone who cares about you, that is.’

I venture to suggest that many of us will not enjoy such a privilege.

Respectfully,

Christopher Aaron Kaasa”

Yes, I’m not excited for this Valentine’s Day season. I knew that I wouldn’t be, because there’s very little chance of this year measuring up to last year. THE SCENE: A crisp night, immediately following a handsome dinner at a dimly lit romantic restaurant. We walk back to the bus stop, pausing to dance in full view of the Seattle skyline.

“You know, Chris Kaasa, I think you’re exactly what I need right now.”
“You know, I’m pretty sure you’re exactly what I need too.”
“Something different?”
“No. Something Lauren.”

Punctuated by an adventure in the church ravine, in which I learned my Valentine was much more of a man that I was.

Maybe this website shouldn’t be posted on my Facebook. Bah, who cares?

Enough of this. Shut up, Kaasa. I need more mental discipline. Resolved: No more fretting about the past for the next seven days. Punishment: If I indulge in such fretting, no more Oreos. Ever again. Ever. (“But…”) EVER!

Besides, there’s still time, right?

Today’s Musical Insight (Chris’ Blog in a Nutshell Edition):

“What’s the point in all this screaming? No one’s listening anyway.”

PS – If you have managed to find your way here, rest assured: These are idle musings and nothing you have to worry about.

A Little Late, But Always Worth Mentioning

John Kerry made a bad joke about President Bush. Characteristically, one of his sentences was so long and the syntax so hard to follow, that it was easily manipulated by his opponents. He embarrassed himself.

The Republicans responded. They embarrassed themselves. They embarrassed us all.

Kerry finally lost his temper. He called them “hacks” and even challenged John McCain. And for once, he was clear, he was simple, he was biting, and he was precise when he said the following, the words I’ve been searching for all these past six years:

“The Republicans want to debate a straw man because they’re afraid to debate a real man.”

We should never have stood for it. But now we’re learning.

Today’s Musical Insight (“Out of this long political darkness, a brighter day will come” Edition):

“They come, they come to build a wall between us; we know they won’t win.”

The Forlorn Bastard

I haven’t posted here in a long time. Well, I refuse to apologize for it.

Just got back from the U-Bookstore. I had to go and buy that Marx anthology for Mackin’s class…again. To my shame, on my way out I walked right past the old woman selling Real Change at the back door. Yes, that’s right, carrying a collection of the writings of the godfather of scientific communism, which I had bought for the second time in six months, I averted my eyes from the homeless woman selling the contemporary progeny of Marx’s thought… Hmmm. I’ll write it off as one of many inevitable “contradictions” of American corporate consumer capitalism.

Hurray for alliteration.

Would you all like to know something I’ve never told anyone? Ever? Not friends, not girlfriends, not family, not even therapists? Alrighty then. I thought you might.

I wrote a play in high school. End of junior year, beginning of that summer, and finished it up at the beginning of my senior year. Yes, it was only a first draft. Yes, naïve politics crept into it. And yes, like all the products of adolescent creativity, it was really only a confessional.

The plot was pretty simple – and I insist that this was completed before the first Sayid episode of Lost was produced. We have a secret police agent working for a depraved regime in a country that’s going to be invaded by a superpower soon (remember, I’m writing this in 2003). Though the government’s days are numbered, he still has a job to do – finding, interrogating, torturing, and killing dissidents and rebels. The man hasn’t lost his soul per se, he just leaves it at home, inventing complex moral rationalizations of his work that go something like this – “I work for an evil man. I do evil things. But my evil permits good to exist, etc., etc., etc.”

So one day, investigating a bombing, he comes across a familiar face among the rebels he arrests – wouldn’t you know it, his first (unrequited) love. As it becomes clear she has the information he needs, it also becomes clear she represents his opportunity to abandon his pseudo-philosophical nonsense and save his own soul. The tension builds as he orders his cronies to torture her and comes to a head when it’s time to kill her: “Jonathan… please… don’t…” is her last woeful plea, and his last wasted chance. He stands anguished and silent for a moment, then orders her to her death.

The only decent part of the whole thing is the last line, delivered by the protagonist in one of his philosophical monologues: “…and humanity will be what it’s always been – a dog gnawing forever at the heels of deliverance, never slowing down to let it pass, never running faster.”

The line has two points. The first is fairly clear. We’re faced unavoidably with choices that are stark and obvious – one will make our lives better, the other will make our lives worse – and with remarkable frequency we choose the latter for no real reason at all. The second is more nuanced and…oooh…ironic. In his last little speech, this guy is doing what he always does, insulating himself from the moral weight of his choices by extrapolating a general rule about mankind, making his very real decision to kill a loved one into an abstraction, an algorithm, a tragic but inevitable law of existence.

What’s the point of all this, you may ask? I’m really not trying to tout an accomplishment. I don’t like this thing very much.

The point: because I wake up thinking I’m Jonathan Holbrooke more than I like to think about. I did this morning. It’s okay, though. I’m changing, finally.

Also because “Axiomatic Christophometry” is a retarded blog and I wanted to get it off this page.

Today’s Musical Insight (Repentant Bastard Edition):

“I don’t want to the world to see me, ‘cause I don’t think that they’d understand – when everything’s made to be broken, I just want you to know who I am.”