Jul 4

Jul 4 You, Me, and Problems With the World

I watch and like a lot of movies. A few years ago one of my friends asked me to make a list of my Top Ten All-Time Favorite Films. It couldn’t be done, so instead I made a list of 15 films that are also some of my all-time favorites. A few months ago I was wondering what would make my All-Time Favorite Books list if I was asked that. Despite not actually being asked, I thought maybe I’d share the information anyway in the extremely unlikely case that it hadn’t occurred to someone that that’s something they might want to know. I quickly realized such information was essentially socially unacceptable, would in all probability get me on one or more NSA watch lists, and reminded me that “oh yeah, you’re alone in life.”

In high school I dutifully earned what I imagine to have been the lowest grade point average in the history of public education – at least for a student with an attendance record as spotless as mine if you don’t count the last semester of senior year when I skipped every other day of school. But by that time my truancy was met with only half-assed consequence: a Saturday detention; half-assed in that how I handled that was to skip it too, and I never heard anything of it. Persistence. I wonder now if they were then lamenting they championed such “life skills.” They’d given up. I’d finally dissolved their will to break me in. Yes, It’s Possible. But that’s really all some other story.

Before I won the war they still fought their battles. I was habitually pardoned from classes by being sent to in-school detention, a fantastic place full of friends and fun characters and headed by a pleasant ex-cop who’s ex-wife had nearly murdered him with his own gun on suspicion of infidelity. He would put on Clapton CDs and one time I made him laugh so hard he cried real tears with a comic I’d drawn about the story of why I’d been sent to detention that day. He asked if he could keep it and I let him. In the days that followed I found out from my other teachers that he’d shared it around with the rest of the staff, and the last I heard he’d framed it and it was hanging in his house. But I keep digressing.

In detention when I wasn’t drawing, playing with Silly Putty or crafting paper electronics I would read. I read the books for English too quickly and I’d fail the quizzes (when I bothered to do them) because I didn’t remember the inane details they wanted you to for no other reason than to prove that you’d read it. I read a number of Neil Gaiman books in detention and American Gods became my Favorite Book of All Time. It would later be usurped by The Arrangement by Elia Kazan, which years later stands to this day as my Favorite Book of All Time, and I not only highly recommend it but downright urge you to read it. And so my would-be provisional All-Time Favorite Books list began (and begins) as such:

The Arrangement by Elia Kazan
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis

And there was no cause for alarm. I continued, adding three more. Then stopping to think of more candidates looked at my list... And deleted it. The rest of it was and is, although in no particular order:

My Twisted World by Elliot Rodger
Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski
Manson in His Own Words by Charles Manson, Nuel Emmons

If I had continued, Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter would have assumedly also made the cut. After that the list would have gotten better, but also actually much worse, with the inclusion of one or several other non-fiction books by Atlantis and ancient astronaut proponent Charles Berlitz such as The Philadelphia Experiment. Maybe generally innocuous enough on it’s own, but a gravely serious raised eyebrow multiplier when paired with the “manifestos” of infamous murderers.

I put manifesto in quotations because of my disdain for it’s tacky buzzword connotation and thereby derivatively general use. A word relegated by culture and “the media” to almost exclusively refer to the documented thoughts, feelings, and opinions of moral, ethical, societal, political and/or historical pariahs we’re expected to hatefully dismiss without inquisition or curiosity. How did that sentence make you feel? Probably the same way that sharing my list of All-Time Favorite Books would have made someone feel: like I idolize and/or champion the aforementioned infamous murders and their ideals.

I do not.

I do, however, relate. Not to their murderous intents, or socio-/psychopathic ideas. But to the origins of their mentalities. Their isolations. Sometimes their frustrations. Sometimes, to some of them, their dreams. And with a lot of the things I can’t relate to, I relate enough to the rest that I can understand. And now for the sentence that further cements my lifelong rap sheet of social suicides: I feel like I was almost one of them. This I believe.

Not almost one of them in terms of killing and murdering innocent people. Not almost one of them as if I almost did or planned to kill or murder innocent people. But along the lines of one who got away. Almost one of them in that, by luck of the draw, or by the skin of my teeth, or some other applicable idiom, I retained a thing or things that none of them did. A thing or things that stop any of the rest of us from thinking that things like killing people is a good and/or the right idea. But that singularly without that thing or things, that I’d probably be one of them. Because the truth is that anyone can become a villain. And that nobody is a monster.

Charles Manson, Ted Kaczynski, Elliot Rodger – even world-class fuck Adolf Hitler; these people weren’t/aren’t monsters. They weren’t/aren’t pure evil, evil incarnate, or the Devil himself; they were/are people. They were men, who once were boys. And somewhere along the way, one or several or many things went wrong. And they grew to think incorrect things. They developed bad opinions. And they so little as made bad decisions, and so much as did terrible things. And this, circumstances providing, can happen to anybody. But mostly men.

So I read their words (except for Hitler’s because fuck’m), and to varying degrees between them feel I understand and/or relate to these people more than any of my oldest or closest friends. And that’s both a lonely feeling and a scary thought. And I live here and now and exist in this world and see and hear the general consensus about these people and the lows we should think of them and the disregard expected of us for their accursed “manifestos” and I want to scream and/or blow my fucking brains out because these books and every writing of their kind are some of THE MOST IMPORTANT FUCKING THINGS KNOWN TO MAN.

Case in point: Elliot Rodger. Everyone wanted a media blackout on “the shooter”. Miserable “faggot” “fuccboi”. Aim the spotlight on the victims. Give them his fifteen minutes of fame. Ignore the problem. Insult the issue. And for God’s sake, whatever the fuck you do, do NOT read his piece of shit manifesto, why would you do that? Instead vacuously dismiss all concept of cause or reason and tune in next time for our weekly killing spree. Makes us feel good, don’t it? Knowing we’re not subhuman pieces of trash who take innocent people’s lives. Except, of course, for our advocation of any/all wars. Because...............................................$?

Rewind. One of the movies that made my List of 15 Films That Are Also Some of My All-Time Favorites was Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary The Act of Killing. If you haven’t seen it you adamantly have to, additionally because it should more decisively persuade you of sentiments expressed in the entirety of this diatribe in a vastly more immersive way: through sight and sound. During a Q&A at a local screening that was itself equal to the film, Oppenheimer revealed that when filming began he had initially begun following up on the victims of the 1965 Indonesian communist purge. (OT: Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is as a manifesto obviously an evil book and thus communism = bad. Capitalism is correct and cue Country Joe McDonald.) This thread would later become Oppenheimer’s 2014 companion piece The Look of Silence, however it at that time became apparent that if one really wanted any answers about the (or any) tragedy you have to ask (or investigate) it’s perpetrators.

May 23, 2014 – Isla Vista. Fourteen random people fall victim to Elliot Roger and happenstance; six of them killed. One thing connects all of the victims, alive or dead: they were all killed/injured by Elliot Rodger. He drove the car, he pulled the triggers. And in as many as more than one hundred thousand words he told us why. If we learn why we can learn how. How to help prevent things like that happening again. And again. And again. Knowledge is Power. The More You Know. But y’know what’s even more important than that? High horses. Looking down on people. Having people to put beneath us to in turn boost ourselves up. Feeling better about ourselves by contrasting our morale standards with the unethically-inclined. And that’s the real fucking tragedy. It’s honestly unbelievable that much of any of this shit should happen after Columbine, let alone as much of it that actually has. And will. Because what’s more important than moral superiority? Certainly not countless human lives. And just like that the incessant warfare too makes sense.

Freshly flunked out of high-school I had a new best friend. He was a drop-out like me; a friend of friends, of whom almost none else were drop-outs or detention dwellers, and nearly all of whom have since gone on to do things like graduate college and have careers. But so we had that in common, and as it turned out a bunch else, and thus in the usual way in which such always occurs we became best friends. I’d bike over to the grocery store where he worked nights, and rushing his duty of hauling the carts in from the lot and emptying the trash cans, he’d steal some beef jerky and we’d play frisbee in the parking lot or drink sodas on the roof. We both had creative ambitions and we’d sit around for hours in the defunct Putt-Putt or playgrounds after dark and talk out our ideas.

When I was 19 my best friend set his apartment on fire while his pregnant girlfriend and her mother were asleep inside. He’d left my place about three hours prior to doing it. That’s about how long it took him to get the gas and shit. If what the court gave him sticks he should be out when he’s 75. That morning when the detective came over and told me I basically said “huh...” Afterward I got in the shower and cried.

We visited him on a weekly basis while he was still in town. He’d done something fucking terrible, and he was in jail where he belonged, but he was still my friend. They put him on suicide watch at first and he had to wear the turtleshell. He somehow broke a few of his teeth while he was there. He said it was from falling and hitting a bed, and I don’t have any reason to believe that’s not true. His ex-girlfriend, who suffered burns from the fire and was flown to Wishard, gave birth to his son before they moved him to Pendleton.

We wrote each other for a long time. He was scheduled to move cell blocks sometime soon when I too moved and didn’t know where I’d put the letters with his address. After a couple months when I still hadn’t found them I tried to call his mom but she never answered. I left some messages and she never called me back. I haven't seen or heard from him since. I probably should have tried other means by now but anymore it’s just been so long. A decade as of October 2018.

On June 24, 2017, one of the friends who went on to do things like graduate college and have a career got married. He met his wife nearly a decade ago, a couple weeks after “the incident.” The rest of us in our group of friends were all groomsmen, and for the first time in too long we were all together in one place again. All of us except one. It’d been so long since he’d been around I don’t know if the sentiment registered with anyone else. When I mentioned his absence to my girlfriend I began to cry. I’m also crying right now.

While in prison Jon was diagnosed with some form and/or degree of schizophrenia and I think something else that none of us can remember. He was at least regretful if not remorseful after the fact, but I never really learned why he did it. Maybe if I’d kept up with him after all these years it would have finally come or even trickled out. At the very least I know he didn’t have a dad. But anymore that’s all I really know. I berate the usage of the word manifesto but have in the past turned around to use it in a bit of tongue-in-cheek shock-and-awe about how some day I’ll write my own. I at some point resolved to call it You, Me, and Problems With the World, a title stolen from a YouTube vlog I saw in 2007 in which the “vlogger” says many things, including: “If you don’t sense that some things could be improved... fuck you.”

I currently have no plans to actually write a “manifesto”.

Sometimes I don’t know what else to do but ride my bike 20+ miles while listening to pop music and cry, because I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. And it’s all fun popular song lyrics to everyone until it’s real and they want nothing to do with you. Because you think the Unabomber had some good points that didn’t involve letter bombs. Because you think Elliot Rodger’s My Twisted World is one of the most important reads since words were invented. Because you were best friends with a schizophrenic convict. Because you punched a guy in face who fucking deserved it. Because you're apparently the only person that can see the entire world is a fuck, drenched in despair, neglect, and unresolved pain. And all the other endless shit that all too often makes being alive entirely unbearable.

I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.