Frivolous as Fuck

Let me tell you about my armor.

I was in Los Angeles with my first girlfriend.  We were staying the week with her cousin or step-cousin or some form of cousin which involved reproduction and marriage some number of siblings away from her parental units.

We were staying in West Hollywood, specifically.  By Rodeo Drive and all of the ritzy shit.  It was really nice.  Then again, I liked everything about that city, from the nicer parts of San Vicente, down to Muscle Beach (and the rest of Venice Beach, where every other store front is somewhere where you can obtain a marijuana license and every OTHER store front is a place where you can get a bowl to smoke it in), and even out towards the parts of Little Armenia that I got to see.

Anyway, I wanted to go to the Hollywood Guitar Center… because it’s the motherfucking Hollywood Guitar Center.  I told this to my girlfriend, and we planned to get there the next day.  Now, granted, it was not a solid plan with transportation and all of the details worked out, but for those of you who know me, saying that I’m going to do something a day in advance is like a normal person planning the rest of their life out.

So the next day comes, and we walk to the mall, and we’re hanging out there for a bit before we head up to the Guitar Center.  As we split up briefly, we reconvene and she informs me that she’s getting her hair done.  Fully done.  Completely did.  And colored and shit too.  This was easily the most polarizing experience to which I had been privy in the girlfriend-boyfriend paradigm.  I was pissed.  This process would take several hours, where I’d be left to wait around, even though we already had plans, and she made impromptu ones that involved only her and took up a sizable chunk of time.  So what did I do?

I walked to the Guitar Center.  Something like over 2 miles uphill.  I didn’t realize how far it was.  I took a straight shot up, past San Vicente, past Santa Monica, up to Sunset Boulevard, and then headed east, knowing the address only in my head.  Just walking.  My parents called.  I talked to them for awhile and then realized my battery might be low.  I had to turn off my phone to save it.  I left my girlfriend a quick message letting her know vaguely where I was even though I wasn’t even sure.

And then I kept walking.  On my own.  Alone.  Through a really normal-ass part of Los Angeles, if there is such a thing, though 85% of the white people I know would call it “sketch” or some bull shit.  And then I got there.  I stayed at the Guitar Center for a couple of hours I think.  Fooled around with the Strat a bit, but that was nothing I couldn’t have done in any other Guitar Center.

Then I went downstairs.  They had vintage guitars up on a wall, the gross value of which was, I shit you not, a couple million dollars.  I went out into these humidified catacombs full of vintage acoustics, and found this Gibson ‘74 twelve-string and just sat there.  I think I stared at it longer than I actually played it.  It was perfect.  About 6,000 dollars perfect, if I recall.

The sun was setting though (on Sunset Boulevard, no less).  There was a girl from high school that meant a lot to me.  I turned on my phone, and left her a message.  She had been to California and loved it, so I told her all about my experience with what little battery life I had left.  Then, on Santa Monica I think, though I’m not sure, I crossed a vintage t-shirt shop.

I was drawn in.  I don’t buy vintage t-shirts.  I don’t give a shit about my appearance and I’m not a hipster.  I’m good with directions so I wasn’t lost or anything, but I wasn’t exactly at home and being caught in the middle of a big city in the middle of the night after walking 4 miles isn’t the greatest situation.  But I went in anyway and looked around.

Just as I was about to leave, I noticed that they had a section just for bands over in the corner.  So I looked around.  I was looking for a shirt for my mother, who’s really into rock music.  I couldn’t find anything I thought she’d like though, and just out of curiosity, I poked my hands into the ‘A’ section and flipped through.

And then I saw it.  “Alice in Chains.  Rooster.”  I didn’t check the size.  I didn’t even hold it up to myself.  I looked at it, smiled, and took it up to the cashier.  It was overpriced as shit.  But I didn’t care.  It was perfect.

By the time I got back it was dark.  My phone was dead, and I don’t think my girlfriend was sure how to get back from the mall to where we were staying, but luckily enough, there she was right outside the building on the phone trying to call me.  Her hair looked alright, I guess.  Her best friend left a slew of hateful comments on my Facebook wall, and I cried the rest of the night feeling like an absolute asshole for ditching her.

I haven’t felt bad about it since.  I can tell you which shoes I wore that day.  Whenever I walk in them, I remember where they took me.  I’ve never felt that alone and felt that happy at the same time.  Everything was buzzing.  Not euphoric but… it was just right.  She cheated on me a few months later, broke my heart and whatnot.

You don’t even have to guess what shoes I started wearing when I found out.  More importantly, the day after I found out, you know exactly what shirt I put on.  It’s me.  It’s a second skin.  It’s impenetrable.  And it’s my armor.

Every hard day I’ve had, that I knew I was going to have, I either decided to wear that shirt, or just happened to be wearing it.  When I broke up with my girlfriend of over 2 years because of my own deteriorating situation, that just happened to be the shirt I wore.  When I was capping off my major and presenting to the faculty and students who I cared about, even though I didn’t care about my major anymore, that was what kept the painful reality at arm’s length. 

And so much more.  So many more days when I just needed a lift.  So many days where I needed to feel the identity of myself echoing through a room and returning back to me.  I’m not into material possessions and all that but, there are a few things that I would have to radically change my mental and emotional tempo for if I lost them.

And today was hard.  The hardest day I’ve had in a long time.

But right now, nothing can touch me.  Not even my mistakes.

Not even the ones that I regret.

“Ain’t found a way to kill me yet…”

Not even the one that I regret the most.

I just keep walking. 

Skeeter is what I want, Skeeter is what I neeeeeeed

(via pizzzatime)

arkenciel:

librarianpirate:

whiskey-robot:

christiantheatheist:

In a simple experiment, researchers at the University of Chicago sought to find out whether a rat would release a fellow rat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it could. The answer was yes.

The free rat, occasionally hearing distress calls from its compatriot, learned to open the cage and did so with greater efficiency over time. It would release the other animal even if there wasn’t the payoff of a reunion with it. Astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free rat would usually save at least one treat for the captive — which is a lot to expect of a rat.

The researchers came to the unavoidable conclusion that what they were seeing was empathy. 

Fuck yeah kindness!

Life is basically good.

rats > humans

I wish people took more philosophy classes, or that at least the professors they had went over more contemporary stuff.

I say that because all-too-often I see people looking to the animal kingdom for things like compassion.  One girl in my capping class gave her entire presentation on animal consciousness, and cited… I think it was zebras? as an example of clear cognitive compassion in animals because they protect the young in the herd even if they aren’t their own young.  (And, clearly, the animals are programmed this way.  It’s not “compassion,” it’s not “kindness,” it just fucking makes sense to do.  They’re not scouring a range of options.  They’re animals.  Situation A provokes response A.  I’m not saying they’re not capable of more but, we have no evidence to suggest that certain behavior isn’t just certain behavior).

First of all, what is compassion?  I don’t mean definition-wise, I mean in reality.  What kind of cognitive process is pain?  Pleasure?  Empathy?  We can talk about these things in terms of the type of fibers that they stimulate in our nervous system (c-fibers and d-fibers and whatever the fuck), and, either additionally, or exclusively, we can talk about the type of behavior that we exhibit as a response.  Yet that’s for our nervous system.  That’s for our biology and our psychology.  How do we end up with these grand archetypal schemes of “PAIN” and “EMPATHY”?

It turns out though that we have a really hard time actually figuring out what the fuck pain is.  What the fuck empathy, pleasure, what the fuck these things are.  

And, if you just point to the response, if you just say “oh, well, pain is something we can point to that serves the same function across species,” then you have this weird problem of completely ignoring the qualitative way that these animals are and you find yourself instead just projecting some framework that we have for ourselves across the spectrum of creatures.

Granted, we have a good reason to believe that pain, whatever the fuck it is, across species, serves a pretty similar function.  We don’t like it.  We learn and actively avoid things that cause it.  But then “pain” is just a helpful way of talking.

But empathy seems a bit more complicated.  And we have no reason to give the rat a lot of credit here.  We have NO reason to believe that the rat is displaying something like altruism.  It might RESEMBLE an altruistic act, but that means fuck all. 

You know what, I don’t even know why I typed this much.  It should be obvious that this experiment shows absolutely nothing significant.  I don’t understand.  We have plenty of reasons to think that animals are intelligent, but what exactly does this show?  If you woke up in some room with a stranger, and they were obviously in a cage suffering, you’d help them.  We don’t even need to drag ethics or compassion into this.  It just makes sense to do.  Bah.

(via molliemonster)

(via pushthemovement)

rgshadowy:

i think this should be chermernder instead of charmander.

I’m really tempted to go on a rant about how dragon dance isn’t a viable move for charmander and his evolutions.

But I’ll behave myself.

(via chemcloakedschemer)