i mean it actually becomes more amazing the longer you look at it, because at first it’s just some dudes rocking out with guitars but the longer it goes on the more bizarre and weirdly futile their efforts appear to be, like the energy level in the room you are sitting in as you watch them rock out remains the same, you do not feel significantly rocked as the result of their rocking, your life just kind of goes on and the world just sort of keeps turning and still they’re stuck in this endless routine of rocking and then rocking again
like we’re all going to die one day and they’re still going to be rocking somewhere and which of us is really better off in the end
I give her a Fig Newton, just to immobilize her, just to stop it, cause she loves Fig Newtons, I go, “Here honey, have a Fig Newton,” and she goes, “They’re not called Fig Newtons, they’re called Pig Newtons!” and I go, “No they’re not, they’re called Fig Newtons.”
And right away in my head I’m like, what are you doing? Why? What is to be gained? Why do you care? Just, yeah, Pig Newtons, fine, go ahead, good luck to you, go through life, see what kind of job you can hold down with shit like that flying around your head, I don’t care, I’ll be dead. But for some reason I engaged, “No honey, they’re called Fig Newtons.”
She goes, “No! You don’t know. You don’t know! They’re called Pig Newtons!”
And I just, I feel this rage building inside. Because it’s not that she’s wrong, she’s three, she’s entitled to be wrong, but it’s the fucking arrogance of this kid! No humility! No decent sense of self doubt. She’s not going, “Dad, I think those are Pig Newtons, are you sure that you have it right?” She’s not saying, “Dad, I’m pretty sure those are Pig Newtons,” which would be a little cunty, but acceptable, I could deal with that. She’s giving me nothing! “No, you don’t know!”
Really? I don’t know? I don’t know? Dude, I’m not even using my memory right now, I’m reading the fucking box that the shit came out of! It says it! Where are you getting your information? How do you fuck with me on this? You’re 3 and I’m 41! What are the odds that you’re right and I’m wrong? What are the sheer odds of that? And take a bite of the cookie, does it taste like a pork cookie, motherfucker? I don’t think so! Why would they call it a Pig Newton? Oh, it tastes like figs, fucking interesting, isn’t it?
I didn’t say a word of that, obviously, but anyway.
The horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken - with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880’s and 1930’s, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.
This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
Shit, my jeans were probably made up in the Philippines by a little kid who would kill to live as ill as me or some shit. Man I’m dumb, I don’t read enough… some don’t eat enough. Food should be free, what up? It used to be, when it was growin’ on the trees and stuff.
A photograph is made of time as much as it is of light — a frozen shutter-speed-size gap of the present captured within a photo border. Despite this, photographs have always been a way to cheat death, or at least to declare the illusion of immortality through lasting visual evidence. There’s always the possibility that the next photo you take will one day be lovingly removed from a box by some unborn great-grandchild; the Polaroid developing in your hands might come to be pinned to someone’s bedpost in posterity. To update that to more contemporary terms, your selfie on Instagram might be a signpost for the future you of what it was like to be this young.
I don’t want to sound paranoid or anything, but now everything Obama has been doing makes sense. He wants to take away all our guns and then he’s going to come shoot us.
