David Blue

Give Voice to Hunger

The world today is a wealth of topics and perspectives, but daily biological functions are universal.

Everybody gets hungry, and we are in the everybody business!

Carter Wilkerson has been hungry for some time now, according to someone familiar with the matter. Yesterday, in agony, he resolved within himself to cease the toleration of his famine, and bravely typed a message on Twitter to Wendy’s — a national chain of restaurants where people often eat — pleading for justice. He wanted to know just how many supporters would have to stand up for his wellbeing before the company would do the right thing, and provide him his deserved nuggets.

As the whole world watched, they replied: 18 million retweets, and Carter will be able to eat.

Helping Carter is very easy: just retweet!

You won’t just be helping him, either. You’ll be letting all of your followers know — along with anyone stopping by your profile — that you like it when people eat, and that you like to eat, too! That passerby might just be looking for someone who also likes to eat and decide to follow you! Bonus!

The previous retweet record is about three million, so it’s going to take a lot of supportive allies, but hey — what’s more important than eating!?

I love eating and food more than anything else in the world, and that sentiment — as well as sharing it with others — is an essential component of my identity. I’m so lucky that my lifetime is spanning the greatest renaissance in the history of human communication.

Without intellectually and culturally enriching technologies like Twitter, how would Carter tell the world that he is hungry?!

How would I?

Thanks in large part to our generation, the exchange of ideas is more democratized than ever, and Twitter has played a huge role in establishing today’s current social media palette. If the speculation as to the likelihood of its demise has any basis in reality, perhaps it’s time for us to begin securing its legacy.

I don’t know about you, but I want to be remembered for my food memes, not my stance on whatever current affairs garbage happened to be bouncing around.

Regimes, ideologies, public figures, corporate entities, and human lives come and go, but I will always have to eat!

I mean, come on.

I don’t give a shit about Syria; I’m hungry!

Ha!

And you don’t want to talk to me when I’m hungry! I lose all self-awareness and abandon any control of my person!

My friends (the ones who like to eat) and I have been using a new word we made up to describe this primal, pitiful state of being: hangry. Hungry and angry!

The best jokes are always the ones involving the consumption of food and its tremendous power over my life.

Hangry me? Unprincipled. Rabid.

A thief? Possibly.

A liar? Probably.

An abuser? Who knows?!

Food is everything to me, and meals are the milemarkers of my life.

What am I doing after I finish this piece?

I’m going to eat.

What would I do if you walked in the room at this moment with a delicious, gooey chocolate cupcake?

Abandon the job, of course!

And give you everything.

Good email.

Good email.

For God's Sake, Just Sit Down to Piss

“Apathy Misconceived”

		* <b>You do not <i>actually</i> want to attain a state of true apathy</b>, trust me.
		* Chris Cuomo exists.
		* Z-Ro
		* Apathy is even argued for in the Christian Bible. (The opinion of other people does not matter, only God's.)
			* <a href="https://blog.bible/bible-blog/entry/3-bible-verses-for-when-you-feel-judged-by-others">3 Bible Verses for When You Feel Judged By Others</a> | <i>Bible Blog</i>

			  Galatians 1:10: "Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ."


	* Chapter 2: "Music Taste Through Generations"

	  "Boomers' Destructive Generational Tastemaking Disaster"


		* Quote From <a href="https://bilge.world/bandcamp-streaming-music">the Bandcamp Essay</a> 
			* It's bewildering how content we are to abruptly abandon the substance music had to our teenage selves out of misconstrued justifications for our classic fainĂ©ance – actively choosing to subject our public ambiance to thousands of replays of “the best” records in favor of dipping even the most cowardly toe into unfamiliar waters, even when the opportunity cost is inherently halved – only to then have the audacity to evangelize our dilapidated conceptions of “good music” to our children as we demonize the music of their generation, depriving them of a very essential rite of their cognitive development.<b><u> I can think of little more reductive, repugnant, reckless, or racist crusades as a model figure than indoctrinating your child with an inherent distaste for their own culture</u></b>, and nothing more deeply alarming to hear from the mouth of someone born in the 21st century than shit like “Queen was better than any rapper will ever be,” or “real musicianship will die forever with Eric Clapton.” It’s unfair and unnatural: imagine if your high school classmates had consistently turned up their scrunched nose at the living whole of rock & roll, declaring Scott Joplin to be the last musician they could stand.
			* Consider if the industry-wide customer experience standard for the musical ambiance in 1970s American eating and drinking establishments was entirely comprised of works by John Phillip Souza, and the most prevalent cultural revolution manifested itself something like the following: In countless popular films set in the time (and the stories told today by your parents of their youths that informs them,) a group of popular high school boys – generally three longtime childhood friends and a single addition from the previous summer with an Army Dad and a moderate bad boy aura that’s made him one of the school’s notoriously attractive students and the somewhat-abusive leader in the pack. After spending some time trying to convince the other three (the crucial moment for his case being the bad kid’s rare moment of sincerity trope) of its guaranteed social, sexual and financial ROI, they seal their agreement to start a band with a four-way saliva slap. Imagine if in the progression of this exhausted old tale, it remained entirely classic (and boring) when it faded to a “THREE MONTHS LATER...” ceiling shot of the four the in full, gleaming, performance-spec get-up of the presidential marching band in their garage, and it was revealed that they’d they practiced “The Star Spangled Banner” every night just to make the girls swoon in the film’s resolution with an encore of “America the Beautiful” at an unsanctioned (and very patriotic!) house party. Would you have made out on your first date with someone in your 80s high school Chemistry class after they’d was about but suffice it to say that it’s absolutely fucking bonkers how often I encounter “Sweet Home Alabama” (and other tunes I’ve already heard hundreds of times throughout the first third of my existence, conservatively) dripping down from the overhead speakers in all manner of big retail stores, where it’s inappropriate and unwelcome. Even from the generous assumption that every single one of them is an objective masterwork of composition, the amount of affection the American music listening audience has for the same 500 singles is on par with our rampant gun violence in terms of our unanimous tolerance for ridiculously illogical habits. I’ve been sitting in a cute, moderately trendy coffee shop on the corner of the major avenue of access to my cute, moderately trendy Portland neighborhood for an hour now, and I’ve recognized every single one of the tracks played just a bit too loudly on the stereo. I’ve been sick of them all since Middle School. That one Bow Bow Chicka Chicka thing
 How very charming. <i>“The 70s, the 80s
 the one-hit wonder channel!”</i>
			* Contrary to the popular hipster narrative we’ve just defeated, it’s not the popularity of the lineup that makes these experiences so distasteful, but their <b><i>regularity</i></b>. It doesn’t take a doctor of psychology to observe that tireless exposure to any given work of art inevitably erodes its value, yet we continue to expend resources saturating most mundane spaces in our society with an unyielding regurgitation of the same brackish pop culture symbols as if we’re trying to either induce a canonical vomit, intentionally obliterate the Yelp! reviews for a distant future museum’s “North America Enters the 21st Century” exhibit, or <i>both</i>.
		* This issue is not unique to American society nor to men, really, but is entirely the sickness of white boomers and gen Xers. It is an anomaly that has genuinely and profoundly perturbed me for virtually the entirety of my existence as a culturally literate entity - certainly longer than any of the other disturbances addressed in this volume.
		* The process of jazz becoming mainstream (which I think it had definitely by the 1940s.)
		* "<a href="https://medium.com/extratone/boomers-tastemaking-disaster-bb66330d2f29">Boomers' Destructive Generational Tastemaking Disaster</a>"
	* Catcalling
	* Clothes
	* Stuff we should <b>keep to ourselves</b>
* Credits
	* "I'm laughing at you and the best part is you won't truly understand why, in any deep and meaningful way, for another 20 years." - <a href="https://mastodon.online/@JustSomeGuy/104689299479520224">JustSomeGuy on Mastodon</a>

Actually
 I think you can do both, sorta.

Actually
 I think you can do both, sorta.

The latter would seem to be a spreading disease at the moment.

and yet we’re still forgiven

and yet we’re still forgiven

see what we have asked of this land:
juicing zea jabbing through
chapped flats

see what we have asked of her soldiers:
contentment,
submerged alone in nuggets of 
petrified human safetyglass

shower of obliterated abstracts;
white like love,
but no shards large enough to make out a face

The language here is some of the most insightful I’ve ever seen on the subject, if I’m interpreting


The language here is some of the most insightful I’ve ever seen on the subject, if I’m interpreting effectively. (I could just be extrapolating.)

You cannot make a living as a “writer.” That is — the ability to effectively (or even extraordinarily) arrange words has no inherent value. It’s a good start, however, for some of the writing professions in which you can.

Journalist, copyrighter, editor, even poet or (now) blogger can be lucrative, technically. But you should never, ever launch into any of them expecting to profit in the near future. (For the latter three, probably near-not at all.)

I can’t think of a single notable author who considered fiction a money-making pursuit, and there’s reason for that: if you set out with the consideration of your audience required to write-for-profit, you’re going to end up with something generic and still unprofitable. And — if there is any objective ideal for a creative work — is it not originality?

Forgive my self-promotion, but I recently spent a good many words around this subject, sorta. (Keep in mind that they have no inherent value.)

E

It came to my attention today that my good friend Sonny Moore (commonly known as Skrillex) Tweeted “E” from his BlackBerry at 0732 CST on May 15th, 2010. If I’m ever given the opportunity to interview him, I’ll begin by questioning his choice in smartphones. (Can you imagine how awful the Twitter for BlackBerry client must’ve looked in 2010?)

From what I’ve sampled of his art, I’m confident he’s an emotionally intelligent man, and probably not house producer Joel Zimmerman (commonly known as Deadmau5.) The most arresting evidence supporting this supposition is hair. Sonny Moore is not house producer Joel Zimmerman. I could be wrong, of course, but that’d only mean that both Sonny Moore and house producer Joel Zimmerman possess a slightly above-average ability to slow time and examine us as we obliviously go about our lives in slow motion. It could even be possible that house producer Joel Zimmerman is examining my big ole' ears at this very moment in mild distaste. I guess I’d be able to hear him if he scoffed, but I think it would be down-pitched and extraordinarily terrifying.

Considering, allow me to tangent shortly and ask house producer Joel Zimmerman to keep any newfound otorhinolaryngological judgments to himself, if at all possible. If you must speak, Mr. Joel Zimmerman, please try your best not to frighten me.

Lots of individuals in my circles frequently chide Skrillex about his alleged misunderstanding of corporeality. While it is true that he’s been known to occasionally forgo performing at events in favor of desperately demanding answers from his audience to questions like “how big am I?” “how are we able to breathe in here?” and “who is the whispering lady who turns off the sun?!” I don’t think he is befit of such a reputation. In fact, I think Skrillex’s ability to make his irresistible clanking is one we should all aspire to hone. While we are kept on edge sometimes by the day-to-day stresses of contemporary life, Skrillex is able to clank them away and see the world from the broadest, slowest perspective - as a demigod.