The Penguin

Image from American Psychological Association ( apa.org) Just like all of you, Gentle Readers, I'm struggling to come to terms with the number of school shootings occurring in this country. I'm not going to wade into politics here; blame whoever you want - the gun lobby, lax mental-health support, the free availability of assault-style weapons, the breakdown of the family, whatever - just don't blame the victims. Something needs to change, and it's not our attitude toward violence: we cannot become numb. We must fight this rise in savagery by whatever means are available to us. It's a bad cliche that human beings are inclined to violence. From the beginning of our history, and quite a ways before that, we've been maiming and killing each other as casually as batting our eyelids. Everything from war to crime and punishment, on down to domestic abuse and self-harm, we're infused with bloodthirstiness and a savage intent to create pain. While we ...

(I wrote this article for a coworker at my print shop. He liked it but said he couldn't use it, due to its frankness; I here reproduce said article for your enjoyment and edification). You see it all the time: the Discombobulated Print Customer. They enter the print shop, confident and smiling, ready to pick up their print order...and in about ten minutes come out the door with a bag and a lost expression, trying to figure out how their booklets ended up with every other page backward and still costing $300. This customer will go home, sit at the kitchen table, and flip aimlessly through their pricey and useless booklets. Slowly their expression darkens. A real acid feeling has settled in their stomach. The print shop might have explained everything in detail, but it roughly amounts to: “Sorry not sorry, it’s your fault, give us money.” The customer doesn’t have the first clue what went wrong, they only know they feel ripped off. That print shop just lost another customer. If...

Punch-Drunk Love  (2002) Directed and Written by Paul Thomas Anderson Starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson Punch-Drunk Love is a surrealist rom-com. Then again, it's an underdog story. Then again, it's a bit of a drama/thriller...let's cut to the synopsis, shall we...? Adam Sandler stars as Barry Egan, a novelty-business owner with deep social issues, part of which stem from dealing with seven overbearing sisters who run his life an berate him constantly. He meets the lovely Lena (Watson), and appears to have the perfect scam going with Healthy Choice pudding, but runs afoul of a phone-sex extortion ring. Barry's hard road to love is fraught with exasperating humans and frightening circumstances, and he must find the courage to finally be himself and flail through the obstacles in his path in order to win Lena's heart. Paul Thomas Anderson takes all the elements of a fairly standard boy-meets-girl story and plays 52-card pickup with them. From ...

When do issues stop being as important as which side you're on? I've been asking myself this question a lot over the past five years. So often political and social arguments seem to fall along the exact same lines, over and over, regardless of the arguers or their  intelligence level - they parrot the party line, as though they are trained spokesmen. Otherwise well-educated, well-meaning people will jump to the defense of the reigning sociopath, simply because he claims to support "their" issue. Objectivity comes off as wishy-washy; reason is a cursable offense. Even truth becomes negotiable - so long as "our side" is upheld. This isn't some new, modern plunge into pre-revolutionary polarization. It's a side-effect of the human instinct toward tribalism. We're social animals, after all; social interaction is, for us, as primal an urge as reproduction and feeding. Loyalty to a group is not in itself good or bad, naturally; it's how the ins...

Apologies to Frank O'Hara; I'll have to read your poetry collection at some point...in the meantime it's a damn good title, especially for a post on the melancholy of living in "interesting times". It's Spring, or damn close, which means Mad Season is upon us - March Hares, floods, weather twitching between subzero and 60º F above...spring is a lovely time, yes, and being Orthodox Christian I have a soft spot for Easter; but there's a menacing side to the season people rarely talk about. The sap is rising, everybody's horny, rams take a sidelong look at each other and think, "I want to bury my horns in his skull" along with car doors, barn sides, and unsuspecting farmers. It's manic season. Check the statistics on incidence of psychotic break, and I'll bet you dollars to donuts they'll be significantly higher from March to May. It was actually May 20th, 2010 when I had the nervous breakdown that changed my life; now every year a...