March Madness

I love March. Like October, it's a month of almost cosmic change. It's a month of rain and light and furious winds which seem to thrash the last dreary remnants of winter darkness into oblivion. It's a month of turbulence. A month of revolution. Only, this year, those winds, that turbulence, this revolution seems to be tainted with a foreboding sense of imminent doom that I find hard to shake. Like the ghouls of winter depression have fallowed me into this cherished month and are riding the winds of march like surfers on a tsunami. It seems sadly fitting that this should be the month when the already rusty levy of Trumpismo finally breaks and unleashes the flailing ginger Kracken of white rage in all its mighty ugliness. Oh, cruel irony! Thy name is melodramatic blog post.

I speak of coarse about this past weekends Trump rally riots in the Midwest. An event as inevitable as it is disturbing. After all, the Donald has been stoking his compliant audience for months with not so subtle suggestions of a return to the glory days of social unrest when a couple of hardworking pigs and other assorted salt of the earth thugs could drag a limp-wristed hippie such as myself by his long hair to nice, quiet, dimly lit alleyway and bash his fucking teeth in. Ah, yes, the good old days. Yes as dear Mr. Dylan once mused, it doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Grossly, that wind seems to be blowing right out of dear Mr. Trump's ass.

That foresight, however, didn't make it any less depressing for me to spend my weekend watching tryouts for a future race war. As angry black and white men traded punches, I couldn't help wondering aloud "Why the fuck are you beating on each other? You should be on the same damn side!" and shouldn't they be? After all, aren't Black Lives Matter and the lion share of Trump's blue collar supporters essentially fighting for the same thing? A world free or at least depleted of the tyranny of the status-quo's corporate bully state. What I saw in Chicago and elsewhere was one group of poor people beating on another and vice versa, all at the behest of one ego-sick billionaire. The Marxist in me weeps.

I get why some good if slightly ignorant people dig Trump's shit. Seriously, I do. He's the first candidate in years to take on the oft-untouched toxic legacy of bipartisan globalism. A sick pseudo-philosophy of crony capitalist internationalism with a grotesque legacy of mass layoffs, endless wars and third world wage slavery. Racism aside, many of the things he attempts to say make sense but to believe that Donald Trump is the white knight who will lead the working man back to the veritable nirvana of a descent days wage for a hard days work is nothing short of asinine.

Regardless of whether or not this man is or was indeed a secret agent of dear twisted Lady Killary. it takes little more then a cursory glance at the Donald's rap sheet to tell you he's not the fearless leader he currently presents himself to be. A spoiled rotten trust-fund baby handed his daddies already tainted legacy on a sterling silver platter, Donald made a name for himself by throwing people in his loyal followers tax bracket out into the fucking streets so he could turn there homes into gaudy casinos and luxury condos for the one percent. A few bankruptcies later Trump began cutting checks for corrupt globalist swine like Chuck Schumer, John McCain and of coarse the devil herself. Not one dime went to a single antiwar or anti-globalization candidate. Not one measly red cent. Our favorite populist Daddy Warbucks' coffers were welded shut for the likes of Ralph Nader and Ron Paul or any other real working class hero for that matter. If you like, you can choose to believe that the Donald experienced a sudden, miraculous conversion to paleolibertarianism just in time for election season. If you like, you can choose to believe that Santa Claus shot JFK from his flying sleigh. I personally prefer to live in the real world and in the real world, as any corporate crook will tell you, money talks, bullshit walks. And that is precisely what Donald Trump is, a walking, talking, steaming pile of bright orange caviar bullshit, doing what capitalist cretins like him have always done. Pitting one group of poor people against another like roosters in a cockfight. Divide and conquer.

The other side, while certainly not the aggressor is far from squeaky clean themselves. It's easy to mock poor white trash for falling in love with such a shameless demagogue. It's equally easy to forget that many of these liberal know-it-all's fell into the same trap with Obama. The urban left (yes, black people) drank Obama's frothy, empty, hope-wash Kool-Aid without thinking twice to check for cyanide ( and no, that's not a black joke, it's a Jonestown joke. I'm an asshole, not a monster) and lets be real here, Barack's race and his delicate exploitation of civil rights era rhetoric had something to do with that undying loyalty. What's even worse is many more poor people of color are falling for the same line of horseshit from neoliberal Nazi Killary. Check your fingernails comrades, there only slightly cleaner then the Trumpster's.

That's not to say the Obamaites and the Trumpsters are necessarily equal. I'll take the passive, corny love-ins of 2008 over 2016's face-socking festivals any day of the fucking week. But delusion is delusion and both sides of the partisan fence suffer from similar strains of identity dementia (identia?). It's only worse now because of the Donald's introduction of Beer Hall Putsch style street fighter theater.

Identity politics are bullshit. Much like our rigged presidential elections, they only serve to distract and divide poor people in order to keep them from realizing that we outnumber the oligarchs, ninety-nine to one. I'm not saying race doesn't matter. Racism is still a very serious problem in this country but, and god help me for saying this out loud, it pales in comparison to this countries problem of with classicism. The true divider. The majority of people rotting in America's finest gulags today are people of color but nearly all American inmates are poor people. We have had a black president and we will likely soon have a female one but we have never had a poor one and we likely never will with our current economic apartheid state in tact. Hell, race itself is a classist invention. Devised to separate the haves from the have nots and to keep it that way. The western perception of race is no less backwards and anti-scientific then the Hindu caste system. That doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Quite the contrary. It means we have the power to destroy it. We just have to stop punching each other in the fucking face,

Poor people have every right to be pissed and we have every fucking right to revolution. But expecting it to be led by a member of the master class like Trump or Killary or even Bernie is just plain stupid. These partisan charlatans will only tear us apart. A true revolution would bring us together. A true revolution would see inner-city black folks and white ranchers marching arm in arm against the eminent domain laws which rob them both blind. A true revolution would see armed militiamen guarding unarmed Black Lives Matter protesters from violent police persecution in Ferguson. And a true revolution would see an elderly redneck holding a cunt like Trump's arms behind his back while a young cholo smashed his fucking face in. This country desperately needs a real revolution.

Dearest motherfuckers of America, unite and take over.

7 Reasons Not to Vote for President (Yet)

Well dearest motherfuckers, it's that time again. Time to talk about my least favorite subject. Yes folks it's time, once again, to talk about that shit clogged toilet bowl that is the 2016 Presidential Election. I have avoided this dreaded subject like the fucking plague for as long as I possibly could. I mean, shit, I even chose coming out of the fucking closet over this. But I can't ignore this depressing circus of shameless spectacle forever, so here we go.

All in all, my basic view on voting in the 2016 primaries can be put very simply in just one word. Don't. Opt out of this pseudo-democratic charade, stay home and do something more constructive with your time like jerk-off or draw dicks on a picture of Trumps face. Maybe this isn't the most politically correct position to take. "Vote or Die", right? Well I for one would rather fucking die than soil my conscience by voting for any of these trigger-happy rodeo clowns called candidates, so fucking bring it Diddy.

What? You wan't more? well hold your horses asshole, I'll give you more reasons to shirk your patriotic civic duty. In fact I'll give you fucking seven in no particular order. So here it is dearest motherfuckers. Seven reasons not to vote for president, at least not yet.


1.) MARCO RUBIO- I'm not gonna mince words on this one, so if your the sensitive sort I politely suggest you find another, gentler blog. I'm pretty sure they have Lou Ferrigno talking about his 13 favorite labradoodle Vine's on Huff-Po right now....    ....They gone? Cool. Too put it bluntly, Marco Rubio is the official cabana boy of the Military Industrial Complex. He's a charming, brown, scrumptiously fuckable mouthpiece, factory made by bitter old white chicken-hawks to fool America's war-sick heartland into falling in love with the neocon cult of perpetual warfare all over again. He's G.W. Bush for a younger, hipper, more ethnic American Empire. There's just one problem. They pushed the robot off the assembly line a little to early. He looks and sounds like a real boy until he's forced to actually defend his carefully memorized talking points and he begins to short-circuit like R2-D2 soaked in Dr. Pepper. If even a ham-fisted neanderthal like Chris Christie can jam this sexy moron up, how the hell is he supposed to get passed Sith Lord Killary. Oh well, so much for the New American Century. Better luck next time Bill Kristol.


2.) BERNIE SANDERS- Few people on earth piss me off more then this asshole and his mesmerized fan club. It's Obama fever all over again. I am a socialist. I am a lot of other things too but it all comes back to socialism. I have devoted my entire young, tortured existence to the cause of peace, equality and egalitarianism by any means necessary and to here this pathetic DNC whore bandy about the word socialism like the latest Twitter meme makes me want to fucking hurl. Jesus Christ is a socialist. Eugene Debs is a socialist. Noam Chomsky is a socialist. Bernie Sanders is a fucking disgrace. He supported the bombing of Kosovo (and the destruction of socialist Yugoslavia). He supported the Clinton era sanctions on Iraq that murdered half a million children. He supports drone strikes (and wants more of them). He supports the jihadist "rebels" destroying Syria and the neo-Nazi thugs in Ukraine. He called Hugo Chavez, the finest socialist leader of this generation, a fucking dictator and he calls that crooked wretch, Killary Clinton, who he's supposed to be running AGAINST, a good woman and a trustworthy politician as he rallies the wayward left youth into the DNC's filthy pockets. Fuck you, Bernie Sanders. Steal another fucking identity to hide behind because your no fucking socialist and I will never vote for you. Feel THAT Bern!


3.) TED CRUZ- One thing everyone but the most Bible-thumpingest fag-bashers seem to be able to agree on is that Texas Senator Ted Cruz is pure fucking scum incarnate. He certainly looks the part with all the reptilian good looks and charm of a Dick Nixon wax dummy left in the microwave a minute to long. Ted's a grade-A scuzz-bag all right, no arguments there, but if you ask me, he's also one big fucking lie too. Ted passed through two fucking Ivy League schools with flying colors but he denies basic grade school shit like evolution and global warming. Ted's a Tea Party "outsider" but he cut his teeth as a fed in the Department of Justice and worked on arch-insider George Dubya's 2000 campaign. Do I have to say it out loud again? He's a fake! A fraud. A con-man playing hayseed for the gee-shucks cousin-fucker vote and if Iowa's any indicator, it looks like the slime-ball's got it. Not that it's going to be enough to to mean anything other than a future career as a resident honky minstrel in the Huckabeeland of Fox News' Sunday evening slot. But hey, that's where the green cash grows, right? Dollar dollar bill, yo!


4.) BEN CARSON- Who the fuck are we kidding?....    ....NEXT!!!


5.) DONALD TRUMP- I pushed a theory a couple of posts ago that Donald Trump was in fact another foul agent of Killaries soft power plot to steal the White House by hook or by crook. Well folks IF that's true then the old bitch has shit the bed again with another regime change scheme gone horribly aerie. Only this time it's not Libya, Syria or Ukraine she's shitting on, it's the good old US of A and Trump is that shit. Straight from the tyrant's ass. Yes dearest motherfuckers, it appears the orange cunt's gone rogue and decided to make a legitimate go at the White House and we're all in big fucking trouble cause this dumb fuck might actually have a shot, however statistically remote it might be. If you think the Donald's obnoxious now, imagine the ginger Duce with nukes and drones. You just shit a little bit didn't you? It's OK. I did to.


6.) JOHN KASICH- Still can't pronounce that name right....    ....ANYWAY, The Ohio governor is a lot like the state he leads. Boring, polite and judging by that Chinese Kenny Rogers Botox job, fairly full of toxins. He's a former congressman and a Fox News host with all kinds of gross connections to Wall Street and a puke-y melange of other corporate criminals. John's probably best known for joining his mid-western Republican brethren in screwing fire fighters and paramedics out of there pensions in order to rebound from a financial holocaust dicks like them caused. AND he wants to re-invade Iraq because FUCK IT! why not? In other words he's your typical, run of the mill, Republican stuffed shirt. Which is why, ironically, I believe he might have the best shot against Killary. Nobody and I mean Nobody wants to vote for that cackling lunatic. Even her own staffers probably have wet dreams about drowning her in the fucking Reflecting Pool. People would rather vote for a shopping mall mannequin, which is perfect for Kasich, I'm pretty sure that was his minor in college. He's just bland and beige enough to be your average timid voters plan B. He'll never get the chance though, thanks to old Kill-dog's trusty Trumpasaurus Rex. Oh well, there's always Macy's.


7.) KILLARY CLINTON- And then of coarse there's the best reason not to vote, our likely next and quite possibly worst president, Killary Rodham Clinton, a corrupt, war hungry and downright evil fucking egomaniac who literally everyone seems to fucking hate but somehow everyone seems willing to vote for. Why? Well aside from the fact that we're living in the long prophesied decline of Western Civilization, because Killary gets things done.

Killary gets things done for black people by supporting her husband's policies to gut welfare and feed there children to the prison industrial complex in record numbers.

Killary gets things done for women by using her position as Secretary of State to pander to the worlds most sexist regimes in the Persian Gulf for campaign cash and helping to cover up Bill's long history of disgusting, sexually predatory behavior including accusations of sexual assault and even rape (but be careful who you vote for ladies lest Killary's gal-pals declare you a slut and condemn you to hell).

Killary gets things done for the poor by sending there jobs to the Third World and cutting backroom deals with her friends in Wall Street while they recklessly drive the economy into a fucking ditch. Not to mention sending there brave sons and daughters to die disproportionately in her latest "humanitarian" imperialist conquest.

But more then anything Killary gets things done for Killary. Gaming the system, hoodwinking the electorate, lying through her fucking teeth and generally doing everything and anything to be the first and inevitably worst female president in American history. #I'm with her? More like #I'm with Satan.


So there you have it dearest motherfuckers, seven good reasons not to waist your time on the primaries for this country's two most corrupt organized crime families. the Republicrats and the Dempublicans. I'm sure more then a few of these assholes will have probably dropped out by the time you even read this but that's irrelevant. The fact that ANY of these gutless human trashcans were even considered viable candidates to run this drowning country is all the proof you'll ever need that the two party system is hopelessly fucked beyond repair.

Truth be told so is so called representative democracy, an oxymoron if there ever was one. There is nothing democratic about getting to choose which despot gets to run your life for the next four years. It's kind of like choosing your kidnapper. At the end of the day your still going to get raped regardless of the cut of your captors jib. The only real democracy is direct democracy and to my knowledge there are only two political parties advocating such a revolution in this country, the Greens and the Libertarians. Personally, I'm sick of the whole damn left-right paradigm all together. An ideal campaign would unite socialists and libertarians alike. Fuck the parties. I'm thinking something along the lines of Ron Paul-Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky-Lew Rockwell. Marxist blasphemy, I know but we've tried the partisan/purist shtick and it just doesn't work. We need to start thinking dangerously otherwise we're gonna wake up in November to find either a psychopath (Killary) or a moron (Trump) in the White House. It's revolution, REAL revolution or my fat commie ass is moving to Nova Scotia.

PEACE OUT!

Diary of a Queer Heterosexual

I've always had a very complicated relationship with my gender and sexuality and the older I get the more complicated it seems to become. While I've long considered myself to be a heterosexual male I've never really been completely comfortable calling myself straight. Truth be told I feel anything but. Even if my road always ultimately leads me to pussy, it's a long jagged road with many detours along the way. Lets just say while I've never been an L, a G, a B or a T, I am most definitely a Q. I'm a Questioner in every sense of the word and I always have been. I question everything, religion, politics, philosophy, history and of coarse gender and sexuality. I've also come to see myself as another Q. You see dearest motherfuckers I identify as a queer heterosexual. Confused? Me too. Maybe I should start again at the beginning.

Growing up in a conservative Irish Catholic household and a small town parochial school, I more or less accepted from an early age that sin and sexuality were largely synonymous and homosexuality was the worst of them all. I never really gave much thought to the possibility that I myself could be anything but heterosexual. I've been attracted to females ever since little Maggie Marshal bloodied my shins with her tiny wooden clogs in the first grade (which may explain some of my sadomasochistic tendencies) and I had never experienced similar feelings towards a boy. Then OCD happened and just in time for puberty.

As I've discussed here before, my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder has always been wrapped in layers of self doubt and irrational fear. Imagine what terrifies you most in the world. Now multiply it by ten and imagine not being able to stop yourself from thinking about it over and over and over again and you've got the basic idea. And what's more terrifying to a twelve year old Catholic schoolboy then the prospect of being gay. A fate worse than death. During the early days of my OCD, I became obsessed by the fear that I might be gay which was simultaneously deeply intertwined with my greatest fears, isolation, loneliness and dying alone and unloved. You see in my community the basic theory on homosexuals was that while they were in fact born that way, there natural urges were a test from god. Leaving them with only two real choices, live a life of loveless chastity or a life of sinful, soulless evil topped off by an eternity in hell. So yeah I was pretty fucking terrified of being gay. It didn't take long for the OCD to all but convince me that I must be and was therefore thoroughly fucked beyond redemption. No one and nothing could convince me otherwise. Not my parents. Not even my shrinks. I spent months in panicked terror and self loathing until finally I stumbled across a rare moment of clarity. If god was truly the kind and loving god I was raised to believe and if I was made in his image then it shouldn't fucking matter who I loved as long as I was a good person. I came to the conclusion that I didn't give a fuck what my priests and teachers said. I was going to be happy and if that meant fucking dudes then fuck it, I was gonna fuck dudes and just like that the spell was broken.

It took accepting the possibility that I could plausibly be happily gay with open arms to convince me that I wasn't. But I did have a brand new appreciation for the horror that real gay kids go through every day. The fear. The agony. The terror. The self hatred. I came to the conclusion that no one should ever be made to feel that way just because they get a chubby in there own locker room. That was the day I became an outspoken straight allie but I became something more then that. After coming to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with being queer, I began exploring the subculture and quickly fell in love with the community. I was particularly smitten with the anti-assimilationist queer liberation movement of the sixties and seventies. I became fascinated with this underground world of leathermen, radical faeries, drag queens and glam rock gender renegades. It all spoke to me and my rebellious teenage spirit during a very formidable time in my young life and I'm proud to say it helped shape the man I am today.

My universe soon became dominated by queer culture, from movies (Gregg Araki and John Waters) to music (the Smiths, Lou Reed and the Hidden Cameras) to art (Andy Warhol and Tom of Finland) to literature (Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk). I adopted a rogues gallery of queer icons for role models- Allen Ginsberg, David Bowie, Gore Vidal, Kurt Cobain, Frida Kahlo, Harry Hay, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman. The hallways of my personality were permanently vandalized with rainbow graffiti and those colors wouldn't run but my journey wasn't over yet. I would have to undergo another mental crisis before I could fully come to terms with my complex identity.

As those who have read this blog before probably already know, my mental health took a major fucking nose-dive soon after high-school culminating in a series of devastating nervous breakdowns that left me and my sense of self totally shattered. While too terrified of the chaos of the outside world to even leave my fucking house, I did find myself with a great abundance of free time to devote to my favorite pass-time of researching obscure subcultures, which eventually led me to explore the often misunderstood phenomena of transexuality. I found the subject to be engrossingly fascinating but also oddly inspiring. Here was an entire class of people born into the wrong bodies who quite literally risk there lives everyday just by presenting themselves honestly as who they really are. Rather than hide in the dark safety of the closet and live a lie, they get up every morning, put on there make-up and there heels or there denim and there bulge, walk out the front door and fucking strut, knowing full well that every step could be there last. That any day could be the day that some confused, self loathing psychopath, threatened by there courage, decides to eviscerate them with a razor blade. Forget brave, it doesn't get anymore bad-ass then that. And these bad-asses quickly became my heroes and gave this terrified shut-in the courage and curiosity to escape the dark safety of my own closet and explore my own fractured identity. I began to read everything I could find on the subject of gender identity, discovering in the process that much like race, sex was as much or more a social construct as a biological one. In many cultures through out the world there are three or four or even more recognized genders who are not only accepted but often revered. I began to look critically at my own long-assumed gender and I found that a lot of things didn't quite fit into that tight little box of heteronormativity.

At the same time I began to actively engage my long dormant feminine side and with a little help from my own personal fairy bitch-mother Courtney Love and the indispensable wisdom of gender-sage Judith Butler I managed to tap into reservoirs of inner strength I didn't even know existed. In a lot of ways this self-discovery gave me the fire to fuel my busted engine and push my way out of my agoraphobic ditch. My nervous breakdowns left my sense of masculinity totally ravaged. I was only able to put myself back together with the glue of my untapped femininity, leaving me forever altered. I had awaken my inner bitch and like a werewolf, once she had tasted freedom there was know way to put her back in that cage even if I wanted to and I didn't.

So what the hell does that make me exactly? Through my studies I discovered a seemingly endless list of gender identities that fell outside of the traditional gender binary- genderqueer, gender fluid, gender neutral, bigender, trigender, pan gender, third gender, two spirit, hijra. It's enough to make your fucking head spin. But none of them really seemed to fit. Ultimately all the books and websites in the world couldn't tell me who I am. Only I could do that. So who exactly is Nick Reid.

While I've never felt the need to present my feminine side visually, I've never really felt much need to present my masculine side either. With the blaring example of my beard (which I do love), my presentation is largely slacker-neutral. Baggy all-black sweats and t-shirts. I consciously developed this uniform in my late teens in an attempt to reject all social labels but is it possible that subconsciously I was attempting to reject gender labels as well?

While I've always maintained strong friendships with males throughout my life, I've also always felt a much deeper and more meaningful kinship with my female friends. I could feel closer to a girl in a single conversation then I could with a male I had known for a decade. Truth be told, I've always found your garden variety heterosexual male to be a bland and shallow bore. They never fucking listen and they rarely have anything remotely meaningful to say. I've never felt more alien then I did in my high school gym locker room and I've never felt more comfortable then I did skipping class with just a few girlfriends at my side. It's these brief moments of rebellious female companionship that I found myself reliving over and over again during my self imposed exile and it's these memories that kept me warm during some of the darkest and coldest nights of my life.

While I've always been exclusively attracted to females this attraction has been anything but conventional. Aside from the fact that I seem biologically incapable of getting down to hetero-porn, my sexual appetites have always ran towards the kinkier end of the spectrum. I'll spare you the graphic details but lets just say my libido has long been governed by lifelong fixations with corporal punishment, bodily functions and parts of the female anatomy often overlooked by your traditional mainstream skin mags. My ideal woman is someone like Yoko Ono, Bjork or Frida Kahlo. Tiny, ethnic, feisty and a little bit nuts. At the same time I'm also a strong believer that no one is completely straight. While I personally have never seen or met a man I was willing to fuck, that doesn't mean one doesn't exist and I'd like to believe if we ever crossed paths I would be man or whatever enough to embrace those feelings. My point is that even my heterosexuality seems to express itself in uniquely queer ways.

So what the fuck am I exactly? Mostly male? Lesbian in spirit? Gender curious? A bearded bull-dyke with a dick? While all those labels are probably somewhat accurate, it's also probably equally accurate to say that I'm just an extremely abnormal heterosexual cis-male but I prefer to identify as queer.

During the halcyon days of the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement, a loose collection of brave, radical gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals made the decision to reclaim the pejorative slur queer as a label of pride in there rejection of heterosexist tyranny that they could rally around in solidarity. It became a hallowed term of endearment under which all the beautiful, jagged puzzle pieces that didn't quite fit into the straight world could find a place to belong, a place to fit. So I say why not me? I would never in a million years try to take credit for someone else's struggle. Whatever I am, I haven't had to suffer the way most LGBTQ people have and I own that but does that mean I should be forced to be prisoner to an identity that strangles me. That keeps me from fully exploring who I really am. I want to be free. I want to love who I wanna love, how I wanna love. And I wanna be whoever and whatever the fuck I wanna be. And fuck anyone who stands in the way of my emancipation from the heteronormative gulag. Only I have the right to define who I am.

The word queer has a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people. To me it means freedom. Anyone can be queer. We all have it in us somewhere. Human sexuality and gender are too goddamn complicated for tiny little boxes with neat little labels. If I hadn't suffered the way did with my mental anguish I may have grown old and grey without fully realizing how beautifully complex I really am. You see, what separates the queer from the straight is the courage and conviction to embrace these messy unknowns with an open mind and an open heart and to carry them with pride. So I'll say it loud and proud, I'm here, I'm hetero AND I'm queer and your all gonna have to get fucking use to it because wild horses couldn't drag me back in that goddamn closet.

Now if I can only find a good woman mad enough to love this mess I'll be sitting pretty.



P.S. This post is dedicated in loving memory to the late David Bowie, another straight man who gave many queer people of all stripes the courage to be themselves and love themselves for the wonderful creatures they are, myself included. He taught us all how to be heroes for far longer then just one day and I will miss him and love him dearly until the day I join him among the stars.

Fuck Winter

I fucking hate Winter. That single, solitary sentence probably sums this entire post up right there but I need to bitch and your presumably here to listen so I'll continue with my seasonal tirade. I FUCKING HATE WINTER! I hate everything about it. I hate the cold. I hate the snow. I hate the bare dead fucking trees but more then anything I hate the dark. I hate, hate, hate the goddamn dark. Those smug pricks in the shrink community have coined a cute, nifty little term for my affliction. Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD. Oh how clever you little Sigmunds are- "I'm not depressed, I'm SAD" - Fuck you, you malignant motherfuckers, fuck you oh so very much.

Any-who, I have long suffered from more mental issues then I can fucking count but they all seem to get worse on the first Sunday of November, my second least favorite day of the year, when the clocks are turned back and the kinetic magic of October gives way to the dull ache of late autumn. The days grow short and grey and everything hurts just a little more. The regrets of my squandered youth. The fading memory of girls loved and lost. The sick hatred of all the things I fail to be. The roaring rage at the perseverance of the pathologically normal. It all just hurts so damn much, too damn much. There are days when the very idea of leaving my bed, let alone my house, feels like an unbearably heavy cross to carry. But November is nothing. November is pussy shit compared to the frozen hellscape of January and March.

You see the very worst day of the year, for me at least, is the first Monday of January. The day Christmas is officially pronounced dead. December is like a weird little oasis in the frozen desert of my seasonal depression. It's still fucking there but the pain is muted by the warm morphine drip of the Christmas season with it's twinkling lights and fresh baked cookies and shimmering evergreen majesty. It's like falling to the bottom of the deep dark sea only to discover a hidden civilization of glowing, luminescent sea monsters dancing about the abyss. It's the one month of the year that I truly believe in god until it's all over and the lights come down and the cookies go stale and god dies and the magic beasts scatter, leaving me alone again on the ocean floor.

This year's post-noel ocean floor seems even bleaker then usual. January began with a rusty harpoon right to my aching heart, when one of this wretched planet's brightest and most beautiful sea monsters, David Bowie, lost his long secret war with cancer and departed to a celestial plain more befitting a Star-God. I spent a solid week listening to "Heroes" over and over again and writing DAVID LIVES in all caps on the back of my right hand in black ink. Melodramatic I know, but I didn't know what else to do. I still don't.

As if the death of my heroes weren't enough, I'm also subjected daily to the garish spectacle of the most depressingly hopeless and depraved Presidential Election in recent memory, with the GOP's demonic clown car and the rise of the Killary juggernaut. In past election seasons, though still soul-crushing, I usually at least had an underdog or two on the fringe to root for. In 2004 there was Dennis Kucinich. 2008 gave me the rare double-barrel gift of Kucinich and Dr. Ron Paul.The latter hung around to offer a fleeting glimmer of hope in 2012. But in the cruel winter of 2016, even my beloved fringe has been infected by the gangrenous scuzz of Washington and Wall Street. On the right we have reactionary racist  attention whores like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, not to mention the Greek Tragedy that has become of the good Dr. Paul's sell out, fortunate son, Rand. On the left we have Bernie Sanders. Another trigger-happy Fabian fraud who the cheery little, cell phone-sick millennial sheep have once again convinced themselves will save them from the purgatory of there own party. The whole sick, stupid fucking circus makes me so ill I could literally puke my fucking guts out. I just want to scream in these peoples stupid little faces "YOUR NOT MAKING A FUCKING DIFFERENCE MORON! IT'S A RIGGED GAME!!!". Even the second Sunday of March can't save me from this darkness. It might as well be Winter until November. Then it will be Hell-arry.

& believe it or not, that's not even the worst thing about Winter. The fucking cherry atop my frosty sundae of misery is that satanic little greeting card boondoggle known as Valentines Day. A holiday that seems to be tailor fucking made to exploit my crippling fear of dying alone in my own arms with nothing to show for my lonely existence but a pair of swollen, royal blue balls and a crumbling pile of saccharine poetry devoted to girls who could barely remember my name a decade ago. Fuck Valentines Day.

Feeling a little depressed yet? Welcome to my world asshole. But before you begin rifling through your sink cabinet for razor blades, listen to some of my tips on how to survive this ugly fucking season with your wrists in tact.

The best way I've found to cope with the Winter blues, aside from pharmaceuticals (which are excellent) is to try and focus on the little, seemingly insignificant things that keep you distracted from your misery and even give you something to look forward to. It sounds almost stupidly simplistic, I know, but take it from me, it can make the difference between a twelve gauge face-lift and making it to Spring. It's different for everyone but the main things that keep me going during the shit months are listed below in no particular order.


MUSIC- Music has saved my life quite literally and repeatedly through out the years. I doubt very much that I would even be here typing this right now if it weren't for artists like Kurt Cobain, Henry Rollins, Courtney Love, Morrissey and Lou Reed. Sometimes just one great anthem at the end of a terrible day can give you the strength to survive another one. My go to comfort music during these dreary months tends to be up-tempo but wistful stuff like Hole's Celebrity Skin, the Smiths' Louder Than Bombs and pretty much anything by the Velvet Underground, the Replacements, REM or Belle & Sebastian.

CANDLES- There is just something about that mix of Pyromania and Aroma Therapy that buoys my mood on a cold Winters night. Yankee Candles are the best and yes I'm well aware that that sentence makes me sound like a fucking limp-wristed pussy so fuck you. Candles are the tits.

PETS- The importance of human-animal companionship to mental health can't be stressed enough. I personally am a cat lover and my geriatric old tuxedo Killian has been my oldest and dearest friend for well over a decade, even if she does drive everyone else in my house berserk. She sleeps by my shoulder on the couch every night and there is something that is just so wonderfully uncomplicated about those quiet moments we spend together late at night, especially during the frozen heart of Winter when we're both driven by unseen forces to hibernate. All the petty bullshit of the outside world just evaporates into mid air.

CARTOONS & NATURE SHOWS- I know I'm sounding more and more like a crazy person here but ever since I was little, whenever I found myself trapped in my deepest, darkest moods, cartoons were always one of the few things that could lift my spirits and this has rang true through out my often dreadful existence. When I was a kid it was Hey Arnold, Daria, Doug and Recess. During my first nervous breakdown Futurama was the only thing that could get me out of bed. During my second it was Bob's Burgers and the Cleveland Show of all things. Lately it's been Archer and Rick & Morty. Nature shows also seem to do the trick, especially anything underwater. Planet Earth is the best.

FOOD- I can just here the food police creaming themselves over this one as we speak. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not healthy to use food as a coping mechanism. Shut the fuck up skinny people, I've heard your gripe before. But you try struggling with crippling depression without a fucking vice. It's either cake or heroin, pick your poison. When the world is a vampire, sometimes one good meal or even a midnight snack can keep you going and nobody and I mean nobody turns to fucking kale for comfort. My drugs of choice are Denny's and Trader Joe's Mac & Cheese. My Aunt Barbara's chocolate cake is also better than 90 percent of the smack on the streets today though I'm pretty sure she cuts that shit with Fentanyl too. When it's all said and done I'd rather be fat then sad any day of the week. It's the same reason I chose to stay on the anti-depressants. Atkins be damned.

FRIENDS & FAMILY- When life really hits the fucking skids having even just a few good people by your side can make all the difference. If it wasn't for my family I probably would have ended up chewing through a straight-jacket in some laughing academy decades ago. They've put up with all my bugshit weirdness for longer then any saint ever could and for that I couldn't be more great-full. People are a strange species. Just when you've all but given up on them in exasperated disgust, they do something amazing. They make quiet little miracles out of mid air.

The only thing that shocks me more then the human race's bottomless appetite for depravity is there divine ability to redeem themselves through random acts of kindness and it keeps me going, more than anything else, that keeps me going and so does this blog and all the beautiful, nameless, faceless motherfuckers who stop by to give it and me the time of day. It just goes to show even if you think you have no one and nothing, reach out, the results will surprise you. I guarantee it.

Hold on dearest motherfuckers. Together we're going to carry that weight until March.


PEACE, LOVE & EMPATHY.

Strange Rumblings From Oregon

There are strange rumblings emanating from the high deserts of South-Eastern Oregon. A tiny ex-lumber town called Burns has found itself in the icy grip of a slow-motion cold war between to warring tribes of heavily armed white men, each claiming to be fighting for the very soul of the community. All over the fate of two local ranchers named Dwight and Steven Hammond, sentenced to five years imprisonment for a slew of charges, most relating to two alleged acts of arson separated by half a decade. Now a modern day range war feels all but imminent with anti-government militia-men occupying the local Malheur Wildlife Refuge and a posse of federal agents and local lawmen biding there time until they can come up with a plan of attack but this has evolved into something far greater then a local cause-celebre. The entire country seems divided on there typical partisan lines with the right celebrating the occupation as a courageous act in defense of liberty and the left decrying it as a display of macho cosplay bordering on terrorism. As usual both sides are a little right but mostly wrong.

One thing that I've found hard to deny upon carefully inspecting the available evidence is that the Hammond's were fucking railroaded.

Ranchers have existed on the scrub lands surrounding Malheur lake for well over a century now, long before that darling mustachioed imperialist Teddy Roosevelt showed up with his pistol packing federales to claim the west as white mans conquest in the early 20th century. In fact, it was these very ranchers who's hard work transformed what was then swamplands into the verdant meadows they are today. All this history mattered little to the feds who established the Malheur National Forest in 1908. Rather then seeing the ranchers as possible allies in the thoroughly righteous cause of conservation they chose to view there new neighbors as antagonists to there efforts and summarily chose to make the total destruction of there way of life a prime objective.

Now, I know what your thinking, is an ardent and unapologetic Marxist really defending a bunch of private farmers over the federal government? My response to this is pretty basic. Your goddamn right I am. I may not be the biggest fan of the concept of private property, in my ideal world these ranchers would be given control of this land under the guise of a directly democratic autonomous council, but I am a very strong believer in the right for working people to control there means of production and self determination. After all, what is a family farm but a micro-collective. I personally can say that my first introduction to the notion of socialism came not from Marx or Engels but the local Amish farming communities I grew up around. It's not a coincidence that many Marxist insurrections begin in the farmlands.

I also find the idea of an entire community being forced off the land they've worked for generations just so it can be "preserved" for snot-nosed city dwellers to take selfies on to be despicably obnoxious. You see this same kind of shit in third world countries like Belize, Jamaica and Madagascar. A bunch of wealthy urban white people show up to declare someone else's land protected property reserved for first world tourists while the locals are left to put on costumes and play the role of the noble savage for pennies for there amusement. It's called Imperialism and it always fucking sucks.

Like it or lump it dearest motherfuckers but those ranchers are the embattled proletariat in this scenario and the well-meaning tree huggers are the privileged, silver spoon sucking bourgeoisie and this Marxist always stands with the proletariat, partisanship be damned.

With that being said, the Hammond family, led by there patriarch Dwight, joined this proud proletarian tradition in 1964 when they bought 6,000 acres of Malheur adjacent ranch land for there cattle to graze. Over the years they slowly saw there neighbors disappear one by one. Some were bought off while others were ran off, falling victim to the increasingly belligerent feds host of dirty tricks which included everything from shutting down vital country roads to diverting irrigation systems to literally drown out ranches in the fucking lake, Katrina style. By the 90's the Hammonds were essentially the last man standing with there ranch now completely surrounded by federal land. They could have gave up and took the feds dirty money. It would have been a lot easier but they were to damn proud and had worked to damn hard to just let the bastards win. So they stayed and fought the man like lions. Any self-respecting Bolshevik would have been proud to fight by there side.

The Hammond's ceaseless bravery and tenacity earned them two things. The hard won respect of there community and the spiteful ire of a federal government who had failed repeatedly to rid there Shangri-La of these peasants. The bitter rivalry had mutated into an ugly grudge match that could only end with the complete destruction of the Hammond family and by 2011 the bourgeois bastards finally got there wish.

The seeds to the Hammond's demise were sown in 2001 and 2006 with two seemingly standard acts of controlled burning. The first was done with the full consent of local authorities. The blaze, set to remove invasive juniper trees which posed a serious fire hazard to both the ranch and the refuge, inadvertently spread into federal land but the Hammond's put it out single-handedly while the feds sat by and twittled there thumbs. A judge would later rule that not only did the damages amount to a pittance of one-hundred measly dollars but the land had recovered completely and according to some conservationists may have even been improved. The feds, for there part, didn't even bother filling a complaint until they decided to add the "crime" to there mountain of charges in 2013, because fuck you, that's why.

The second burn in 2006 was a desperate act of self defense against the wages of mother nature. In the midst of a brutal lightning storm, the Hammond's found there humble homestead surrounded by a hellish lake of fire. They had two choices, take control of the situation with a controlled burn or be burned alive. They made the only sane choice but got burned anyway. The local heat picked up Dwight and his son the next day and charged them both with arson. Without a lick of proof that the burn had been the least bit criminal, however, they had no choice but to drop the charges. But that didn't stop the feds. They make there own goddamn rules because, fuck you, that's why.

Some five years later and over twelve years after the first burn the federal government charged Dwight and Steven Hammond with nine charges under Clinton's proto-Patriot Act, the Anti-Terrorism Effective Death Penalty Act, which carried with it a five year mandatory minimum sentence and the maximum option of the fucking Death Penalty because, fuck the constitution, that's why.

From day one of this kangaroo court the decks where stacked heavily against the Hammonds. All locals were barred from the jury pool insuring there was zero chance Dwight and Steve would by tried before a jury of there peers. While the defense was given a single fucking day to make there case, the prosecution was given unlimited time and even then the best piece of "evidence", for lack of a better word, they could wrangle up was the testimony of one Dusty Hammond, Dwight's long estranged and mentally disturbed grandson, who was only thirteen at the time of the "arson" he claimed to have witnessed. Even the judge himself declared this poor mixed-up bastard to be an unreliable witness but he was still aloud to take the stand and tell his ridiculous tall tale to the jury anyway because, fuck justice, that's why.

According to Dusty the first blaze was set by his giddy, match-happy kin in order to cover up acts of poaching. Now never mind the fact that this fruit loop and his federal handlers didn't present anything in the way of evidence to prove these claims, any rational human being with half a fucking brain in there skull can tell you that you don't need to burn down a goddamn forest to cover up acts of poaching. All you have to do is move the fucking bodies! & THIS was the prosecutions star fucking witness. There Kato. A half-wit black sheep with a story so shallow and one dimensional that it makes Little House On the Prairie look like No Country For Old Men. It's little fucking wonder that the jury chose to throw out all but two of the charges. Which was sadly just enough for the judge to rob the Hammonds blind. In spite of the nearly non-existent damages caused by the two controlled burns, Dwight and Steven were fined $400,000 and given a single year to pay off the ransom before there ranch would be stolen from beneath there feet, all but guaranteeing the complete ruin of a family who have never done anything to anyone because, fuck them, that's why.

Perhaps feeling guilty about fucking these poor people over so mercilessly, the judge did one half-way descent thing, at least by his primordial standards, and refused to enforce the despicable mandatory five year minimum. Instead Dwight was given three months and Steven was given a year and a day, which I'm sure was little consolation considering that there both fucking innocent. Never the less the Hammond's served out there time with little protest and struggled in vain to scrape together enough cash to save the farm. It looked like the relentless feds would finally get what they had lusted over for so many decades but stealing there land wasn't enough. The federal government wanted more. They wanted to make an example of the Hammonds so no other rancher would follow in David's footsteps and try to take on Goliath again. So the bastards appealed the sentence and sent the Hammond's back to jail to serve out the full five year sentence because, fuck you, that's why.

These people aren't factory farmers or Ponderosa land lords. There just normal, everyday, working class Americans struggling to get by. They payed all there taxes and followed all the rules only to get fucking obliterated by the federal juggernaut for being inconvenient to there Eco-tourism schemes. This Isn't about big government it's about bad government and you don't have to be a flag-waving, chest-beating, beef-eating conservative to recognize that these people didn't fucking deserve this.

But just try telling that to the mainstream left who have wasted little time jumping on the government bandwagon and writing the Hammonds and anyone who supports them off as a bunch backwoods hillbilly terrorists without even taking the time to study the fucking facts of the case.

Now I make more then my share of white-trash cousin-fucker jokes on this sight but that's my right as a lifelong hick, myself. But when I here a bunch of Manhattan trust fund babies shitting on fellow rural folk, that's where I draw the fucking line. These rednecks maybe cousin-fuckers but there MY cousin-fuckers and incest aside that doesn't automatically make them fucking terrorists so eat a bag of flaming dicks New York, you elitist bagel-munching bigots.

Perhaps most absurd of all is the mindbogglingly ludicrous argument that since Black Lives Matter protesters were wooped by the pigs in Ferguson, not subjecting the honkeys to the same treatment somehow amounts to racism. What fucking horse-shit. Can you imagine Huey Newton or Malcolm X making such a stupid ass-backward comment? Never! Whatever happened to fucking solidarity? An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere? Am I really the only one who remembers what the fucking sixties were about?

Sadly, the solidarity most environmentalists today seem to carry is for the trees alone, never mind the people living beneath them. This has become a pervasive problem with the earth first set. They conflate environmentalism with whole-sale anti-humanism. They forget that human beings are part of the ecosystem too and that farmers have peacefully coexisted with the environment for eons. But what do you expect from a bunch of sock-headed, latte-slurping hipsters who have never stepped a single foot outside of a major metropolitan area without a camp counselor. Unfortunately the rural right are also blinded by there own genre of ignorance.

In the days and weeks following the Hammond's re-sentencing, protests began to spring up around the Malheur Refuge, mostly attended by sympathetic locals who gathered peacefully to demand justice for people they had grown to love like family. Unfortunately a more insidious element had infiltrated this grassroots uprising. A small coalition of out of state, self-styled militiamen decided to use the opportunity to lead an armed occupation of several empty buildings on the Refuge. The leader of this little camera-ready coup? None other then Ammon Bundy, son of the infamous Cliven Bundy, one range-legend totally undeserving of his folk hero status. Old Cliven presided over an uncannily similar stand-off in his hometown of Bunkerville, Nevada over his refusal to pay grazing fees, not because they were too high but because he just didn't feel like it or as he put it because he didn't believe in them. Unlike the Hammond's, Cliven Bundy wasn't a victim of big government. He was just a dead-beat racist who took his own community hostage in one big armed hissy-fit.

As it turns out, Ammon is a regular chip off the old block only this time he was holding someone else's community hostage. Now, being the radical malcontent that I am, I have no problem with the tactic of armed occupation in theory, I mean, shit, it worked for the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement. But when you launch an occupation in some one else's neck of the woods without even seeking the approval of the local population, that's not activism, that's Bush-grade fucking interventionism. These bastards didn't even bother giving so much as a heads up to the local Paiute Indian Tribe, the original Hammonds, who have sacred land within the refuge that's currently being violated by another horde of pale face invaders claiming a divine right to there property.

& then there's the goal given for this invasion. After giving the necessary platitudes to the Hammonds, who played zero part in this charade, Ammon announced his real goal, calling for the privatization of the whole damn refuge leaving the land to be sold to the highest bidder. This comes as a surprise only if your unfamiliar with the Bundy's long standing ties to the Wise Use Movement, a nefarious collection of AstroTurf front groups run by the extraction industry who basically sought to hijack elements of the militia movement and turn them into there own private armies in a war to take all public land and pollute it to the point of being worthless to farmers and animals alike.

These people are no friends of rural folk and could give two shits about anyone's property but there own. I've learned this myself first hand in my home state of Pennsylvania were so called "libertarians" like the Koch brothers have shown no qualms about using big government vis-a-vis eminent domain to rob hard working farmers just like the Hammonds of there land so they can pollute many more by fracking the soil into poisonous sludge that couldn't sustain an ant farm and Pennsylvania isn't alone. Just ask ranchers in Oklahoma and North Dakota what they think of the fine patriots who line the Bundy's pockets. These bastards are know better then those jackbooted thugs in the Federal Government.

Yes indeed there are strange rumblings emanating from little Burns, Oregon. A town that has become a symbolic microcosm for the precarious position all of rural bucolic America has found itself in. Trapped between a rock and hard place. Between big business and bad government. At the end of the day it matters little which side fires the first shot when either way it's small town America caught in the crossfire. God help us dearest motherfuckers. Today Burns, Tomorrow Bellefonte.

Fear and Loathing in the Ginger Revolution

Just when I think this election season monster has reached its zenith of gross it chucks up another torrent of vomit and sends me reeling for cover. In a season of gale force puke there seems to be a severe lack of umbrellas to stand beneath.

I found this out first hand while making my rounds about antiwar.com's blog under my nom de guerre, comrade hermit, the other week when a message board for a post on Donald Trump was transformed into a bottomless swamp of nonsensical racist horse-shit by his legion of brain-dead supporters. Just comment after comment of anonymous belligerent barking on what is usually a sensible if poorly attended forum of well-read dorks like myself.

It was like the Newport Folk Festival being crashed by the Aryan Brotherhood. I've never heard so much from so many people with absolutely nothing to say. Naturally, I ended up losing my shit and damning them all as bunch of morally retarded, knuckle dragging, cousin fuckers. It didn't do any good but it made me feel better. As far as I know, those skinheads are still at Newport, blowing wads of would-be sons of the Confederacy in there shorts as they get off agreeing with each other around a bonfire of flaming acoustic instruments (beat that Dylan!).

My point is this shit is everywhere and it's getting worse. I wrote a post on the Trump phenomenon a few months back called the Orange Menace Rises, in which I drew comparisons between the rise of the Donald in the decline of the American Century with the rise of fascism in the ruins of post-World War Europe. At the time I was afraid that maybe I had over reacted a bit. Now, in hindsight, I think if anything I didn't go far enough.

If you don't believe me, just try tuning in to one of that ginger bastard's rallies. They seem to be on every fucking channel all damn day and there always the same. The Donald takes the stage in all his combed-over, Cheeto stained grossness to the rapturous applause of his sweaty, lumpy, snaggle-toothed groupies and spends the better part of the next grueling hour chumming them into a gnashing hate-fuck frenzy with a free-form torrent of proud "I shouldn't be saying this but...." style racism as they eat it up like shit-hungry baby birds. He calls for a Chinese style crackdown on internet freedom. He calls for immigrants to be hauled off at gun point by the trainload. He calls for a ban on all Muslims from entering the country and suggests we should start slaughtering the families of designated terrorists.

Too all of this madness the crowd goes absolutely fucking bat-shit bonkers like every ugly slur that escapes that cretin's sphincter-like lips is a reinvention of the fucking wheel. Sometimes I think he could literally say anything and his ball-capped Brownshirts would dutifully applaud.

The Donald- "I just took a big shit today, a massive shit, beautiful shit, classy, like you wouldn't believe...."

Standard Trump Supporter- "Yeah! You tell em Donald! I shit big too!"

The Donald- "We gotta do something about those lazy Samoans, we gotta do something, I mean I love Samoans, god knows they love me, but they just gotta go!"

Standard Trump Supporter- "Yeah! Throw em all out! I'm not really sure what a Samoan is.... but I'm pretty sure there why my dick's small and I can't get a job!"

& of coarse, inevitably, some brave soul, more often then not, a person of color, will crash the hate-in to protest this despicable spectacle of thinly veiled white nationalism and the ginger fuhrer will sick his plumber-cracked storm troopers on him with the snap of his fingers and this poor bastard will get beaten to a bloody fucking pulp as the crowds roar like Romans at the Colosseum and our nations finest paparazzo in the 24/7 news industry swarm in like vultures to capture the bloody money-shot on celluloid and the cops stand by whistling with there hands in there pockets and Twisted Sisters "We're not gonna take it" explodes from the speakers like the cavalry trumpets of hell. Fade to black and here's Wolf Blitzer to smugly wag his finger at a horror show that his unblinking cameras made possible and we all die a little inside.

There's just something so wrong about all this and I'm not just talking about basic moral decency. Something just doesn't add up. Something just doesn't fucking fit.

For one thing, I've never seen or heard about a cult of personality of this scale developing so quickly. Part of that I suppose was inevitable considering the culture of fear and authoritarianism the GOP has worked so hard to develop over the last several decades. In a lot of ways the things Trump is saying, the xenophobia, the chauvinism, the big dick swinging militarism is just standard Republican boiler-plate stripped of its prime-time ready nuance and laid bare and ugly for all the world to see. Which is a big part of the reason why the parties top brass hate the Donald and the parties mentally polluted little Eichmanns can't get enough him. It's blow-back in the first degree.

But it's more then just that even. Much like ISIS, there is something that feels so prefabricated about the orange menace. It all feels like a story-line lifted from a bad TV movie or a cheap paperback novel bought at the airport. Like Trump is auditioning to play a Dick Tracy super-villain or something. It calls to mind a theory antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo put forward not long after the Donald launched his campaign. The theory that Trump is some kind of false flag, a Trumpchurian candidate, as Justin put it, sent by someone in the Clinton camp to sabotage any hopes the GOP had for victory.

It sounds insane at first until you really think about it carefully. Who is Donald Trump really but a shameless, self-serving, opportunist with an almost fetishistic fixation with the concept of "The Deal". Trump's personal politics before this campaign season were largely right of center at best. He was a pro-choice moderate who showed little interest in immigration or the so called War on Terror. Like any self-respecting billionaire douche-bag, he donated heaps of cash to both parties. Always big business, Beltway insider types like Chuck Schumer and John McCain and he always gave more to the Democrats then the Republicans. Not to mention all the cabbage he shoveled to the Clinton's alone, whom he's developed a very close relationship with over the years. The two even sat front row at Trump's latest wedding.

& just look at how the Donald's ran his campaign. Every move he's made from declaring this countries most eligible minority a pack of rabid rapists to making blatantly sexist remarks about anything in a dress, including his own daughter is almost tailor made to make the GOP look like shit and Hillary look like a savior of sanity by comparison.

& why now? Sure Trump entertained the idea of running for president before but never seriously. It was always some pathetically transparent publicity stunt to shore up ratings or sell books. So why choose this year to take politics seriously? Why choose 2016 to make America hate again?

I believe this question can probably be best answered by asking, who is Hillary Clinton? She is a woman who only agreed to marry a hash-brownie scarfing, serial philanderer like Bill, after his seventh proposal, upon learning of his political ambitions then spent there honeymoon mapping out a ten year plan that ended at the White House. This is a woman who backed her cheating husband's bombing of Kosovo in order to steal attention away from his latest sex scandal. This is a woman who repeatedly turned down peaceful alternatives to the bloodbath in Libya in favor of showing off her skills as a heartless warmonger to the electorate. This is a woman who stepped down from her position as Secretary of State in protest over Obama's refusal to directly bankroll a repeat of her Libyan soft power disaster in Syria.

This is a woman who has devoted her entire miserable existence to the psychopathically single-minded mission of becoming the most powerful woman on earth by any means necessary and she's shown zero qualms about manipulating morons (Bill) and maniacs (Al-Qaeda) both at home and abroad to achieve it and the old Sith Lord is running out of time so why not try a mix of both.

This is also a woman with connections to billionaire media moguls like Haim Saban, that could offer Trump the kind of under the table opportunities a bridge burning, money squandering, trust-fund hump like him could only dream of and he may not be the only pawn in Hillary's grand chess game.

Bernie Sanders is another odd character in this race. A loyal partisan hack and socialist in name only (SINO?) who has always known his place in the DNC and never shaken there apple cart once and now he decides to go rogue and make a maverick run against the parties beloved heir apparent. I don't fucking buy it.

& just look at how old Bernie has ran his campaign. Stirring up and invigorating the very base who cost Hillary the nomination in 2008 only to castrate himself with the now infamous "we're tired of hearing about your damn emails already!" rant during the very first debate, essentially telling the Hillary-sick left "see you guys, she's not so bad, even a rad socialists like me can make nice with her". Like I said, I don't fucking buy it.

It all smells like soft power to me. America's first color war, call it the Ginger Revolution. A well choreographed political upheaval that ends with a career crook in power. A Clinton specialty since the 2000 Bulldozer Revolution in Yugoslavia. Everyone has a role to play and they play it well. Trump plays the arsonist, setting fire to the hillside and sending the terrified moderates running into Hillary's beckoning arms. While Bernie plays the part of the shepherd, guiding the wayward youth vote into the DNC barn and away from the threat of another Nader.

& Madam Killary plays the role of the savior who can only appear sanctified in comparison to a neofascist sludge pile like Trump. There's only one major flaw with this sick little plot. Just like with Clinton's Libyan adventure, she's playing games with the fires of extremism and fires have a tendency to rage out of control.

I sincerely hope that Justin and I are wrong about this. If we're not it could be the final death nail in American democracy's coffin. The only thing that scares me more then Trump and his rabid cult of morons is the possibility that Killary is secretly behind them, either way things are just gonna get grosser till November. Now where did I put that goddamn umbrella.

16 People Who Don't Suck!

In case you fine folks haven't noticed, I'm not exactly a people person. Its not that I don't like people. I just don't like most of them. By my rough estimate, I would say that roughly 70 to 80 percent of people suck, for lack of a better word, at least in my experience. So naturally if a frankly anti-social curmudgeon, such as myself, decides to write a blog it's probably going to be pretty fucking negative and I stand by that. I like to say, in this world we live in, if your not a pessimist then your not paying attention. But, with that being said and seeing as it's that time of the year and this will probably be my last post of that year, I figured I'd give positivity a try. Earlier this year I wrote a particularly nihilistic piece called "My Shit List", where I gave you, my very dearest motherfuckers, a list of 15 people I absolutely despise. So for this post I'm going to do the opposite plus one. 16 people who don't suck! A short list of people I actually admire, adore and, occasionally, out right love. People who I think might just make this dirty shit-ball of a planet a slightly more livable place. Now, as with the Shit List, plenty of my choices are libel to piss the average motherfucker off a bit. These aren't ass-kissers or people-pleasers. There mavericks and iconoclasts and originals and I wouldn't love them if they weren't a little dangerous. So without further ado, I give you, dearest motherfuckers, 16 people who don't suck.


* JEREMY CORBYN- Who better to start this list of professional ass-kickers then the man who's become the biggest thorn in the Queen Mum's wrinkled, incontinent ass. After hopeless decades of limp-wristed Fabian pussies and money grubbing neoliberal jackals, the Labor Party, the current official Opposition and one of Great Britain's two most powerful political cabals, woke up to a new morning and elected Jeremy Corbyn, a committed ant-imperialist and lifelong socialist with a capital S, to the position of the parties leader by a colossal landslide.

 It seems like no one saw it coming except the wily old anti-warrior himself and his supporters. After securing barely enough nominations from his fellow Labor MP's to even make the ballot, England's notoriously despicable mass media had a fucking field day mocking the very idea of a legitimate leftist leading the long embattled left in there dreary island nation. But Corbyn had the last laugh when the common people had spoken and said enough is enough with this watered down Miliband/Blair bullshit, we want someone who wont just represent us but who is one of us and that's precisely what they got.

 Jeremy Corbyn isn't some phony fucking charlatan like America's favorite pseudo-socialist gadfly Bernie Sanders. He's the real fucking deal with a spotless career record to prove it. A man who has dedicated his entire life to breaking all the right rules for all the right reasons. A man who hasn't just dedicated himself to fighting for the working folks in his own neck of the woods but who's waged a tireless crusade for the oppressed in every corner of the globe from Northern Ireland to Palestine to Apartheid South Africa to the Chagos Islands and despite the unbridled animosity of the Quislings in his own sell-out party or perhaps even because of it, the tough old bastard has made it crystal fucking clear that he isn't about to give up his street fighting ways. He's going to continue to raise holy hell for as long as his two legs can stand. Corbyn may or may not be the UK's next Prime Minister but he isn't about to sit on his hands either way. He's already spoken out gallantly against Britain's pointless military involvement in Syria and has fearlessly called out NATO for it's apocalyptic misadventures in Ukraine, even going so far as to call for the UK's exit from the organization, quite literally scaring the shit out of chicken-hawks on both sides of the pond. This ain't your daddies Labor. No sir, this is a whole new game of cricket and my man Jeremy swings a mean fucking bat.


* CHELSEA MANNING- When my dear Chelsea was still living a lie as Bradley she took an oath, as a US soldier to defend the Constitution against all enemies both foreign and domestic and that is precisely what Chelsea has done at the expense of her own life and freedom.

As Army Private Bradley Manning, Chelsea served this country as an intelligence analyst, sifting through heaps of classified documents. After discovering, to her horror, that not only was there a staggering amount of evidence strongly suggesting routine American war crimes in both Afghanistan and Iraq but that her superiors could care less, Chelsea made the bold, selfless decision to leak these documents to the American people via Wikileaks.

What ensued was a shit-storm of epic proportions, as American's, such as myself, watched leaked footage of American gunships slaughtering unarmed journalists in cold blood and then opening fire on an innocent family of good Samaritans who tried to rescue the wounded. All while there killers hooted and hollered like middle-school bullies at a pep-rally and that was just the tip of the bloody iceberg. There were mountains of files, both classified and unclassified, detailing over a decades worth of merciless carnage and treachery perpetrated by the US and its allies in the Middle East and beyond. These documents not only informed and enraged Americans, they also lit a spark in some of America's favorite dictatorships, inspiring kids from Tunisia to Bahrain to rise up against the corrupt puppets who raped them on behalf of the US dollar in what would become known as the Arab Spring.

For all this truth Chelsea had to pay. Once caught she was subjected to a year of solitary confinement under carefully controlled conditions designed to break a brave soldier with a known history of mental illness. Finally, after months of this heartless psychological torture, Chelsea plead guilty to 10 of the 22 charges leveled against her, possibly saving herself from the death penalty. She was ultimately found guilty of 17 of the charges and sentenced to 35 years in the brigs of Fort Leavenworth with a chance of parole after 8. A sentence which everyone from Amnesty International to Reporters Without Borders has condemned for being completely over the top.

As if all that wasn't brave enough Manning still had one lie left to expose, the presumed man then known as Bradley decided to introduce an already polarized nation to Chelsea, coming out as an open trans-woman the day after sentencing, knowing full well the risks she could face being a woman surrounded by caged men for the next few decades. I don't give a shit what anybody says. Forget the fucking genitals. Chelsea Manning is the bravest woman on earth. SHE is a true martyr for the truth, in all its many uncomfortable and inconvenient forms.


* EVO MORALES- In the pantheon of current world leaders you'll find a seemingly endless carousel of Quislings, gangsters and outright psychopaths but then there's Bolivia's Evo Morales. The son of indigenous Aymara peasants, Evo began his meteoric rise to power not as a banker or a lawyer but as a coca grower and trade unionist. After leading a grass-roots coalition of cocalero campesinos to successfully fight a US hatched plot to eradicate Bolivia's coca industry as part of there bankrupt War On Drugs, never mind the fact that millions of the nations poorest citizens depend on the coca crop to survive, Evo used his new found celebrity to launch a successful congressional campaign and soon found himself the leader of the Movement For Socialism party in 1995. Seven years later he was expelled from congress for encouraging protests against the city of Cochabamba's privatization of its peoples water supply and four years after that Evo Morales became Bolivia's first Indigenous president, riding the revolutionary wave of Bolivarianism started by his friend and comrade, Hugo Chavez.

In the years that followed, the once destitute and hopelessly corrupt nation of Bolivia has experienced a veritable Renaissance that's nothing short of miraculous. With an increased hydrocarbon tax, Evo has raised the standard of living in his country to once unthinkable heights, fighting the illiteracy, poverty, racism and sexism that once held Bolivia hostage. Evo's revolutionary program of Evonomics, which rejected the neoliberal gangsterism of the World Bank in favor of a mixed economy, has lead to unprecedented economic growth but Evo didn't stop with Bolivia. He's taken his folksy brand of populist Iconoclasm to the world stage, leading the Third World fight for climate justice and an end to western imperial hegemony, not to mention helping to inspire a whole generation of Latin American leftists to fight for the liberty they deserve. Evo Morales is proof positive that not only do the good guys still sometimes win but that they can kick some fucking ass while there at it.


* NICOLA STURGEON- The Scottish independence movement fell on some dark days after Yes Scotland's failure to win the 2014 referendum which would have granted them the sovereignty they've long fought for. The Scottish National Parties fiery leader, Alex Salmond, stepped down in defeat and a beautiful dream, centuries in the making, to free Scotland from the yoke of English subjugation seemed to be in tatters. As a proud Irish American, I took a bit of a personal interest in this fight and when it failed it broke my heart. It seemed like the Celtic people were forever damned to live in the shadow of the crown.

Then from the ashes of defeat rose Salmond's second in command, A twin-fisted, red headed lassie named Nicola Sturgeon, who took the helm as the Scottish National Parties first female leader and not only rallied the troops but led them to a staggering, landslide victory in the 2015 general elections, taking 56 of Scotlands 59 seats and quite literally wiping the glad-handing pussies of the Labor Party off the fucking map, giving them the wake up call they desperately needed and paving the way for comrade Corbyn's own victory.

The shameless parasites of London's vilest tabloids can yelp as loud as they want. They can cook up a billion lies to slander Nicola's bloody good fucking name because as long as that tireless arse-kicker is leading Scotland, the dream of independence lives on for all of us or as she put it herself, its a matter of when, not if.

* QUENTIN TARANTINO- There are few things more dreadfully boring and predictable then a modern day Hollywood blockbuster. But every rule has its exception and the one exception to Hollywood's interminable banality is named Quentin Tarantino. Over the last twenty-something years, Tarantino has lit up Hollywood like a Norwegian church fire. Breaking every fucking rule in the book with the sadistic glee of one of his movies anti-heroes. No human alive today has done more to bring the underground into the mainstream without watering it down a drop.

Tarantino is the cinematic equivalent of Kurt Cobain, only Quentin didn't call it quits in '94. He was just getting started. His films are a caustic witches brew of high and lowbrow influences, mixing the fearless ingenuity of the Sorbonne with the shameless mischief of 42nd Street. Quentin Tarantino is the reason I still go to the movies.

* ABDULLAH OCALAN- It's often said and not incorrectly so that there are few good guys left in the Middle East. I believe one of those few to be Abdullah Ocalan. The imprisoned founder and ideological leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party(PKK) and the Group of Communities in Kurdistan(KCK) and in many ways the godfather of the modern Kurdish independence movement.

Ocalan began his revolutionary career as a fearless guerrilla of the Che Guevara variety, launching a bloody Marxist war for Kurdish independence from there long time oppressors in Ankara. After years on the run, Ocalan was finally captured by Turkish Intelligence and there CIA handlers in Nairobi. Initially sentenced to death, his sentence was commuted to life after Turkey abolished its death penalty in a ploy to get into the EU's good graces. Ocalan was sent off to the desolate island fortress of Imrali Island where he remained the soul prisoner for the next decade.

This should have been the end of Abdullah's story but it ended up being only the beginning. After years of isolation with nothing to do but read and think (I've been there) Abdullah began communicating with the outside world with a new message. He denounced his former tactics and called for diplomacy and independent investigations into war crimes committed by both sides of the war. He also dropped his former doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist stance in favor of a new brand of libertarian socialism, called democratic confederalism, influenced by his correspondence with American anarchist Murray Bookchin. Part of this new philosophy was a solution to the Kurdish question that called for a border-free confederation of semi-autonomous direct democracies encompassing the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Proving the validity of his new commitment to diplomacy, Ocalan helped broker the short lived ceasefire with Turkey in 2013 but also wasn't afraid to call for a pragmatic return to action after Sultan Erdogan breached the contract with his cowardly attacks on the PKK and there Syrian affiliates in the YPG this year. As Ocalan has stated the "PKK is as ready for peace as it is for war" and I believe Abdullah's plans for peace could help save the Middle East if given the chance to succeed.

 A strong Kurdish confederation could create a mountainous wall between Erdogan and the rest of the Middle East which he seems hell bent on destroying with his ISIS cronies. It could also become a neutral, secular center for regional peace, A sort of Middle Eastern Switzerland connecting Syria, Iraq, Iran and a preferably Erdoganless Turkey while also keeping them at arms length from each other with a safe buffer zone that's very existence would be completely dependent on there unity and harmony. I believe only one man can make this happen. I believe Abdullah Ocalan could very well be the Middle Easts answer to Nelson Mandela.

* JUSTIN RAIMONDO- If your reading this right now you probably have Justin Raimondo to thank for it. His cyber-baby, antiwar.com or more specifically its excellent blog has given this agoraphobic Marxist a forum to vent and be herd. The fact that Justin is a fervent paleolibertarian who probably wouldn't lay a red rose on Marx's grave if you payed him in gold bullion is only a testament to the power of his brilliant journalism and antiwar's message to bring anti-imperialists of every stripe together in a united front against the pitiless American war machine. Sadly, I don't really have any fucking money since the state of Pennsylvania doesn't consider being a Lyme infested, shut-in, basket case reason enough to provide me disability. But if you have a little extra Christmas change this year, consider throwing a coin or two to my favorite libertarians over at antiwar.com. God knows they can use every fucking cent they can get and America can definitely use them around for a healthy dose of the fucking truth. Thank you Justin, for everything.

* EDWARD SNOWDEN- Way back in the year of our lord, twenty-hundred and thirteen Edward Snowden had it fucking made. A gorgeous girlfriend, a house in the Edenesque paradise of Oahu and a six figure job as a private contractor for the NSA. Yep, life was pretty fucking sweet but then Ed decided to sacrifice it all and become an international fugitive from the most powerful empire on earth and why make this colossal sacrifice, you ask? For you, you ungrateful lazy fucks! Edward Snowden discovered that his government, your government, was rapidly devolving into an Orwellian nightmare state and made the brave, selfless choice to sacrifice his sweet fucking life in paradise to educate you fools. So be fucking grateful this Christmas. We may live under constant NSA surveillance but at least now, thanks to Snowden, we fucking know about it. The emperor officially has no clothes. Your move America.

* DANIEL JOHNSTON- Daniel Johnston may go down in history as the worlds most unlikely rock star. A bipolar, schizophrenic, former mental patient recording his own albums with a chord organ and a $59 boombox in his parents Texas basement. But Johnston's sincere garage pop songs of unrequited love and mental illness have touched millions and influenced everyone from Kurt Cobain to Lana Del Rey, not to mention your favorite muckraking blogger and wanna-be gonzo superstar. If a diamond in the rough like Daniel Johnston can make it, why not me, why not all of us.

* ANGELA DAVIS- Before this dear blogger was a commie or even a radical he was an awkward pubescent boy with few friends and far to much time to flip through his parents moldy old back issues of Newsweek and Time magazine. In these crumbling, yellowed pages a young, bored pervert discovered a bold chocolate goddess named Angela Davis, a communist radical who took on the man and won and looked damn fine doing it. My discovery of sweet Angela, as the Stones called her, was not only my introduction to a lifelong love affair with bad-ass women (and Afros), it was also my first introduction to Feminism and the Black Liberation Movement, two movements that would ultimately shape my character in a far more profound way then any fetish for groovy hairstyles ever could and I am very happy to inform you, dearest motherfuckers, since those halcyon days of seventies radical chic, Angela hasn't slowed down a step, If anything she's only gotten bolder with age, taking on everything from the prison industrial complex to Louis Farrakhan's sexist spectacle, the Million Man March and she hasn't lost the 'fro either but you know what they say, black don't crack and in Angela's case black cracks back with a fucking wallop.

* HARMONY KORINE- By far America's most dangerously subversive director, Harmony Korine hasn't just kept American art house cinema alive, he's given it teeth. Harmony's meteoric rise to infamy began in the most unlikeliest of places. As a 22 year old college dropout and aspiring pro-skater, he was spotted skateboarding with some friends in New York by famed renegade photographer Larry Clark, who asked the young cinephile on a whim to help him write a script for a movie about teenage skaters and AIDS. Three weeks later, Harmony handed him the screenplay for Kids, which would become one of the most provocative and iconic films of the 1990's. With Kids on his resume, Harmony managed to get the million dollars to make his masterpiece, 1997's Gummo, a movie so strange, frightening and beautiful that I wont even attempt to explain it. I can only tell you that it is, without a shadow of  a doubt, one of the ten greatest films, of any genre, that I've ever seen. And Harmony has continued his reign of terror from there with ground breaking pieces like 1999's Dogme tour-de-force Julien Donkey-Boy and his latest feature, the gonzo girlie-gangster flick Spring Breakers, in which he transforms Disney teenie-boppers like Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens into AK wielding, bikini-clad, post-feminist anti-heroes, weaponizing there sexuality and using it to blow away any man in there wake. A truly great artist should be dangerous and it doesn't get more dangerous than Harmony Korine.

* SEYMOUR HERSH- Seymour Hersh is kinda like the David Bowie of investigative journalism, he's been around forever and he's still blowing our fucking minds. If your unfamiliar with Hersh's massive body of work then your far to fucking ignorant for this blog and I kindly suggest you take a jaunty stroll into holiday traffic but before you do let me remind you. Seymour Hersh is the man who exposed the My-Lai Massacre and it's cover up. Seymour Hersh is the man who informed us that Cheney was running Abu-Ghraib like a racist Marquis De Sade. Seymour Hersh is the man who revealed Bill Clinton's disgusting bombing of Sudan's Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory for the grotesque crime against humanity it was. Seymour Hersh is the man who revealed that it was likely Killarie's darlings in Al-Nusrah and not Assad who crossed Obama's red line with the Ghouta chemical attacks and Seymour Hersh is the man who ripped the lid off of Obama's photo-op hit job against Bin Laden. Seymour Hersh is the man who separates the truth from the bullshit our derelict government and there parrots in the media feed us. Sound familiar yet? Now go play in traffic with the rest of the Trump supporters.

* GLENN GREENWALD- Real journalists are a dying breed in this country. As I said above, we've still got Hersh but at 78, lets face it, he probably doesn't have much more then a decade left in him, at best (sorry Seymour) and who will take his place, fighting Quixotically against the high tide of government approved horse-shit that passes for journalism in this dying empire of ours. Only two names immediately come to mind. One is Matt Taibbi just down stairs from this entry. The other and arguably the most important (sorry Matt) is former lawyer and dedicated constitutionalist, Glenn Greenwald. There's a reason Ed Snowden picked Greenwald to disseminate evidence of America's burgeoning police state, because he knew that any other so called journalist would sell him out to there masters in the State Department the first chance they got. Greenwald was the one man he could trust in print journalism and he's the one man we can trust too. Unfortunately Greenwald is trapped in exile in Rio, to afraid of being prosecuted and persecuted for doing his goddamn job to go home. It's a sick, sad, sorry irony that one of Americas greatest journalists is persona non grata in his own fucking country.

* MATT TAIBBI- As I said above, there are two journalists America can rely on besides Seymour Hersh. One is Glenn Greenwald. The other is this crazy fuck. After he cut his teeth as a founding co-editor of Russia's gonzotastic English language ex-pat rag, the Exile, which may go down in history as the most bug-fuck avante garde paper to litter the streets of Moscow since Iskra, Taibbi did his damnedest to fill the 45 caliber void left in Hunter S. Thompson's wake at Rolling Stone, as the magazines resident muckraker. But Matt didn't truly hit his stride until he set his sights on the gangsters of Wall Street. No one has been more fearless, more relentless, more brutal and more goddamn hilarious in his fervent jihad against those fucking vultures then Taibbi. Weather he's a smack-hound punk pissing on Yeltsin's grave or the new go to source for all things foul with crony capitalism, Matt Taibbi is always one thing often forgotten by even the finest journalists, entertaining. I'd like to think I'm swimming in the chunky, sea cow chummed waters of his gonzo swift-boat. I should be so lucky.

* COURTNEY LOVE- My undying admiration for this one woman weapon of mass destruction seems to confound everyone I meet, so I'll try to put it as simply as humanly possible for you people with just three little words- she's still here- after everything she's been through and everything she's been put through- she's still fucking here- child abuse, abandonment, addiction, suicide, mental illness and nearly full spectrum vilification and she's still here and not only is she still here, shes still thriving, fearless, brilliant, unbowed and above all else totally unapologetic. No one has been counted out more times then Courtney and no one has risen more times from the fucking ashes to prove all of the doubters and haters wrong then Courtney. It is this dogged strength and abject refusal to play by anyone else's rules but her own that has made Courtney's fans the most loyal die-hards on the fucking planet. We're all freaks like her. The outcasts, the trash, the junkies, the head cases, the sluts, the stepped on and spat upon and we're all still here. Courtney, through her art and her conviction, has given us not only the strength to survive our own demons. She's given us the strength to be proud of our transgressions and to be empowered by the fact that we survived them. And she's given us the courage to demand the respect that we deserve as individuals and to eviscerate anyone who stands in our way.  Courtney Love once said of her friends in the Portland drag community that they introduced her to her inner bitch and she ran with her. I want to thank Courtney, from the bottom of my bleeding heart, for introducing me to my inner bitch. A freak like me couldn't ask for a better Christmas present.

* NICK REID- I know, I know, it's a bit self indulgent to put myself on this list but I've been through a lot since I started this blog almost a year ago. I've gone from a hopelessly lonely shut-in who couldn't see a light at the end of the tunnel with a fucking telescope to a person who now faces the outside world with the trauma-forged courage of a survivor and grain of hope in my pocket. Maybe that doesn't make me a hero but I do think that at least gives me the right to proclaim proudly and unequivocally that I Nick Reid, in spite of what my latent mental illness would have me believe, do not suck and if you've stuck by me this long in my adventures in this boundless void called cyber-space then neither do you and maybe there's hope for this wretched species after all.

Merry Christmas, dearest motherfuckers and a Happy New Year.