Imagine the karma: of a cat.

She's filing a lawsuit against my ISP for data they carried on my behalf.

I


f the Internet were left in the hands of certain webmasters, it would soon be obliterated by liability assessments against all the ISPs and the backbones between them. Don't believe me? Elly claims she's filing a lawsuit against my ISP for data they carried on my behalf. Then there's a couple loopy entries in her guestbook from someone who would take it one step further!

D


o you want to visit a completely horrendous site? I just KNEW you did. But beware, it's chock full of MIDI. Naturally! But wait, it gets worse! Swallowed some poison and the warning label suggests inducing vomitting? I have just the thing. Man, this is a treasure trove of world wide schmaltz, always good for a laugh, even if it occasionally crashes your browser.

Look, Gabby took the tour. She somehow survived, and lived to tell the harrowing tale.

Based on the email response the above paragraphs have spawned, it seems I'll have more to say on this some later day. For now, though, I'd like to say this about Ladies of the Heart. They have a creed that is so blandly pleasant that it means nothing at all. Here's an example:

Live life with enjoyment and laughter, for these are the components of a healthy heart. Touch all those you meet with the joy of Beauty, Love, and Laughter whenever you can, and always leave them with your greatest gift, a smile.

Now what exactly does this mean? It's a string of clichés that might sound agreeable to the morons who read the Family Circus, but is there anything being said here? Does anyone really believe that their greatest gift is a smile? And does everyone we meet really deserve our greatest gift anyway?

It's something they can give Emma Lou in West Virginia when they can't manage to give her affordable health care.

All the writing throughout the Ladies of the Heart website is pleasantly meaningless in the same way. The "art" decorating the pages is similarly saccharine. And the "music," oh the "music." This comes as a reminder that the vast bulk of "culture" out there is a limp Taco Bell burrito devoid of peppers and onions. It's an existential thought really.

Perhaps the main problem with Ladies of the Heart is that they are so eager to be all-inclusive (for womankind) that they've been forced to come up with a charter and a creed that are essentially meaningless. It's the classic problem that also afflicts the "prayer in the school" debate. All our opportunistic flag-draped politicians support some form of prayer in the school. It's something they can give Emma Lou in West Virginia when they can't manage to give her affordable health care. But when time comes to actually write a prayer, it can have none of the profundity and meaning that people associate with their religions; the prayer ends up being as fluffy and vapourous as the Ladies of the Heart creed.

on to issues at hand

I try to avoid pain. I'm even in the habit of avoiding things that once caused me pain but no longer do so.

I


  found myself holed up in my room for much of the day, reading one of Monster Boy's Re/Search books. The Re/Search series is designed to document various aspects of marginalized American culture. The book I was reading today was entitled Industrial Culture and concerned the "Industrial Movement" as exemplified by such bands/performance artists as Throbbing Gristle. People in the Industrial Movement feel that our present age is radically different from past ages in that it is centered on the machine, not the organism. Flesh is there only to do the bidding of the machine. In such a world, pain becomes more a form of entertainment and less something to be avoided. The music, then, is designed to illicit pain responses, as is the masochism and the piercings. Traditional forms of thought, art, music and even beauty are deliberately abandoned or at least mocked whenever possible. Many of the Industrials go out of their way to subvert the system, often employing pranks and guerilla mischief. Reading this material left me feeling inspired. It wasn't that the people described struck me as weirdoes who I should join. Instead, they struck me as fellow travelers. Their phrasing of their reactions to events described perfectly my reaction to similar events in my life. But I'm no Industrial. I try to avoid pain. I'm even in the habit of avoiding things that once caused me pain but no longer do so.

O


n a mission to Barracks Road in the Dodge Dart I purchased batteries, Natural Ice beer and tussin. The batteries were for my 486's motherboard (the backup battery has long since expired and I've replaced it with a device that holds three AA batteries). The beer was for the upstairs refrigerator. And the tussin, that was for later. It's good to have tussin lying around.

B


ack at my house, a contingent of housemates were on the front porch. They'd been to a quarry in Louisa County, jumping off a 38 foot cliff into deep cool waters. As you know, I'm upset with Leah about her bottle throwing Friday night. But she's been going out of her way to be nice. There were no apologies, of course, but she came into my room and was offering me unwanted water chestnuts from her Chinese take away. It's the thought that counts. So I decided to be nice as well. It's easy enough to do.

Brick Mansion Sam was with the housemates, and he'd heard of a "party" at someone's house. We're all big on going to parties, of course, and since I had finally decided to rejoin civilization, I wanted to go as well.

First, though, we went to the Big Brick Mansion to pick up some vino. I ended up being stuck there with Theresa and Deya while the others went on a mission somewhere by car.

Theresa had a big bottle of vino, but for the life of us, despite going through all the drawers, we couldn't find a cork screw. Not only that, we couldn't even find suitable tools. Theresa was desperate for vino (a lack of patience is one of her single greatest failings), so she used a beer-bottle capper on the neck of the wine bottle and crunched it off. This did no good at all; the cork was safely beneath the zone of shattered glass.

For want of things to do, went outside and explored the yard. I have so many skills sometimes I'm embarrassed. Here we are, on edge of the woods, and I was finding edible plants here and there for Deya and Theresa. But all Theresa really cares about are drugs.

That's when I decided that certain English phrases are simply replacements for equivalent primate grunts.

We were all exposing ourselves to poison ivy. Deya and Theresa are immune to the stuff, but not me. I knew I'd have to rinse myself off with soapy water at some point in the near future. When Deya mentioned that Jessika is also immune to poison ivy, Theresa said an interesting thing. She said, "That's really cool." I focused on that line for a moment and considered what a silly thing it was to say. What's cool about Jessika being immune to poison ivy, after all? That's when I decided that certain English phrases are simply replacements for equivalent primate grunts. I think in this case the grunt means "evidence has come in that I am a member of the correct clan." Interpret that as you will.

I think it bears mentioning that by this time I was pretty stoned from the marijuana I'd been smoking all day.

Sam dumped out the vino in the beheaded wine bottle when he returned. He considered the $8 wasted a small price to pay for the chance of no one ingesting shards of glass. Of course, the rest of us considered shards of glass a small price to pay for vino. It was a momentary culture clash, one could say.

the karma of cats

I


  sat in the kitchen looking at all the kittens that scurried across the floor. They were wobbly and comically misproportioned, but I wasn't ignoring their potential as cruel killing machines. That's when I had a revelation. If karma functions with any effectiveness in the universe then how does one explain the behaviour of cats? I explained this to others like so:

Indeed, it seems as though bad karma actually helps an organism within the tough reality of natural selection.

• Cats are cruel to their prey. They enjoy making their prey suffer. On many occasions I have seen a cat worrying a hapless mouse around a kitchen floor, gradually increasing the injury to the unfortunate rodent until it perishes from the agony of internal bleeding, torn viscera and broken bones.
• Thus cats must carry a burden of bad karma.
• If bad karma has any effect on evolution, it can't possibly be negative. Otherwise, how can we explain the evolutionary success of:
  • cats
  • humans
  • English-speaking humans
    ?

Indeed, it seems as though bad karma actually helps an organism within the tough reality of natural selection.

Matthew Hart thought that perhaps good karma in ones life would be balanced by reincarnation as a cat, where the account of annoying goodness could be expended. The others didn't really seem to understand what I was going on about.

"party" at a hippie chick's house

W


e were still at the brick mansion, but finally we were getting our shit together so that we could go to the "party" that Sam had spoken of.

I should note at this point that Matthew, Sam and Leah were on Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms. And they weren't the only ones on hallucinogens. But for me, the only drugs had been lots of beer, wine and marijuana.

We entered one of those creepy deep forest developments that you find in the most upscale Charlottesville neighborhoods. In such places, the trees are tall and stout. Their lowest limbs are dozens of feet above the ground. One could mistake the development for rare virgin forest were it not for the fact that, under the trees, popping up like mushrooms, are the over-sized houses of the wealthy, surrounded by conventional suburban grassy lawns.

The first day he'd strike a blow for the photosynthesis of his grass and cut down all the trees.

I joked to Matthew about what would happen if a redneck won the lottery and moved into such a neighborhood. The first day he'd strike a blow for the photosynthesis of his grass and cut down all the trees. The neighbours would stand at their fences crying sheepishly to themselves, "My god, he's cutting down the trees!" Bararrarrrrrrrrrrrahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

The house where the party was to be happening was one of those -you know- typical Charlottesville mansions. One moment I'm enduring Steve Weiner's hacking up a lung or Morgan Anarchy's spare changing and the next I'm in somebody's mansion.

The hippie girl we encountered in the mansion was a very clean looking blond with dreadlocks. She didn't know about any party, but she said we could hang out if we wanted. She added that the mansion belonged to her parents. Other than that, all she was interested in discussing was drugs. She found a bong so we could smoke Theresa's pot. Then she asked us if we had mushrooms. I thought she was incredibly dumb, even though she was hottie.

The kicker was when we walked through a side room and saw a group of boys hanging out. They all had baseball caps on their heads: Frat boys, or proto-frat boys. She claimed not to know who they were, but her cover was blown.

Out in back, Sam was rolling around in the weeds saying insipid psychonautic newbie stuff like "oh, the colours, oh the vines." We'd been joined by Jenfariello, but soon she left. What else was there to do?

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