The Stoner Chronicles

March 20, 2003

We discussed "the war" in Ethics for most of the class. I'm still not completely registering the fact that 19 kids I graduated highschool with are waking up in Iraq right now, and i'm pissed off because I have a two-page double spaced essay due tomorrow. Enter the inner-generation generation gap. For once, my family is part of the "educated" clan, and I have no idea while I feel so terrible about that.



March 18, 2003

testing testing, one two three

We were on Queen St. in Toronto, directly across from Left Bank, trying to find a restaurant that Birdman, Angelator and I could agree on. There were protests going on all over the city, from anti war, to solar energy, single mothers and buddhist priests dancing in and around the streets. It was my first time on Queen St. where I could legally eat lunch, and because we couldn't bring weed over the border, the first time I could drink in public. The thing about Toronto is, you can't really tell if it's you changing, or the city. There's a sort of energy that Torontorians emit that will make you feel uncool, that concentrated area between the Condom Shack and the Shanti Baba that you will infinitely reconsider your outfit while standing at a red light with 300 different hair colors and the faint scent of patchouli, polo sport, and marijuana.

In the middle of deciding our lunch fate, a small peace rally, complete with chanting monks, bells and drums, moves in from the right. At that exact moment, an even smaller group of hard core punk rock skateboarders had created their own "rally" with signs they had probably stolen from an earlier demonstration, and moved in from the left. We became lost in the middle for several minutes, caught somewhere between peace and anarchy.

Last night I signed a card we're giving to one of the women at work that will be called in for active duty in less than two days if Saddam doesn't surrender his troops, and on my way home from Toronto that day, I found out Bruce McCulloch got married...

March 06, 2003

"the things we fear most have already happened to us"

so true, robin williams as that creepy one hour photo guy, *so* true...

The richly funkadelic mass that creates most of our modern free-thinking ideals believes that people "want so badly to believe" that there is a God, that there is a reason for doing good, and eventually, there is a reason for death. These people have obviously never stood in line for free peanut butter.

There was a time when I was still Catholic. I was 15, I was raised on the West Side of Buffalo, and Christ was part of my daily regiment. I know now that it would only be a matter of time before I began to realize how terribly wrong Catholicism was for me, I waited three years to tell my mother I had become an atheist, and even after that I felt a great deal of failure, the fact that I will never experience things the way my mother wanted me to, and if you aren't Catholic (or raised in any devoutly religious setting), you really have no fucking idea how hard it is to go against literally centuries of family values.

There is no such thing as "wanting" to believe in God. No one wants to fuck up their life so much that they need to feel something other than pure, beautiful pain. No one wants to believe in something, it's the most accepted oxy moron in society. You believe in God because you *have* to, the same way that people get addicted to scratching lottery tickets or setting their clocks ten minutes fast or slow. It's something that you do to convince yourself that life isn't all that shitty, that it says 10:10am, but you still have another 20 minutes to masturbate before school. To actually believe that one wants to believe is probably the exact definition of what Satan would be, in human form.

There's something inside that twitches at an alarming pace whenever anyone pokes fun of religion. Yes Lynn, I have been known to throw a few Mary jokes in and around, it is the way that the non believers can convince themselves that other people's lives are shitty. It is when we break the boundary, this imaginary line that we've been titty fucked into believing is real, that problems arise. Is there really a need for collapsing the boundaries of human existence? Religion serves purposes that we could never imagine. We try to think that the smarter we become, the better off we are, and if we buy water we'll live longer, and if we make fun of that lady with the rosary dangling from her dashboard, then we don't have to worry about the pusy cluster of blisters that dangles from our genitals every two months. Perhaps we don't see that we're creating our own outlet for pain in the music we listen to, the weed we smoke and the volkswagons or saturns or rocky horror picture show videos we own. By creating a negative attitude towards religion, we create our own. Wake up motherfuckers, you're doing the exact same thing, and by targeting the Catholics, Jews, or even the Christian Fundamentalists, you become part of the big fat asshole that will eventually swallow us whole, heaven or no heaven, tofurkey or swiss cheese, otherwise known as FEAR...

We're all dead in and around 80 years, either way, so let's try and place nice, eh?