Distilled Grains

Music by Kouhei Tanaka from the Top wo Nerae 2 soundtrack.

Twitter Sonnet #99

What's a good movie without a spider?
The menu's otherwise just filled with meat.
Steady hands must pilot a TIE fighter.
Palpatine wants an Empress with small feet.
Slow clocks are getting somehow blurrier.
Evident anger is not spoken of.
A domestic dove's a mean courier.
Ancient mints see well animated love.
Inert, affectionate sacks are suspect.
Water can flow unnoticed through the walls.
Dark cats in dwarf closets demand respect.
A strange hotel was built above the falls.
Bowie's blue electric room's got gin and rye.
Yesterday's quinoa had gone hard and dry.

Apparently Artie Lange's already out of the hospital. I'm hoping he'll be back on The Howard Stern Show on Monday. Here's a clip of Stern yesterday discussing Lange's suicide attempt;



One of the things that fascinate me about this is Stern's apparently truly hurt feelings from reading comments about Lange on Stern Fan Network, an internet forum that discusses the Stern Show. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory has been around since 2004, but from within the first couple years that I started socialising on the internet, in the late 1990s, I came to feel almost completely numb to insults on the internet that weren't self-substantiated. Artie Lange said it himself once when commenting on people he met travelling the country; "Most people are jerk-offs." The fact that anonymity is all people need to start flinging petty insults at a guy who just tried to kill himself seems to indicate that a lot of people are only ever courteous because they fear repercussions, that they have no internal faculty for shame.

So, for the most part, the internet masses have become kind of an ocean of white noise to me, except when I occasionally like to view it as a study in human behaviour. But it's refreshing to hear a casual internet user like Stern get angry about behaviour that really ought to be beneath our civilisation at this point.

Though I wouldn't say anger expressed towards people who attempt suicide is necessarily borne of cheap sadism. Once, when discussing suicide in a college philosophy class, I heard a girl very angrily denounce anyone who would try to commit suicide as being selfish, not considering how their actions will hurt the people who care about them. I think I restrained myself at the time from sarcastically remarking, "Yeah, it sucks having such selfish people around, doesn't it?" Shifting all liability to the person who tries to commit suicide is a defence mechanism--it's a way of avoiding the more complicated and possibly insurmountable issues actually surrounding the suicide attempt, and it's also a way of deflecting reflexive feelings of guilt. I doubt there are many cases where someone actually deserves blame for someone else's suicide, but not confronting or acknowledging one's own feeling of guilt will cause it to fester.

Here're a couple photos from this week.