On Respect for Fallen Soldiers

Someone on my face book feed posted the another version of this picture earlier today. Only the bottom caption read, "Then you don't have a heart."  This upset me slightly, because, despite how moldy, small, and shriveled it may be, I do have a heart. I also have something else. It's called respect. It's a quality that the person who made the click/share bait version of this picture apparently lacks.
        Look at the people in this picture, look at them. Look at the man who fell doing the things most of us cannot do to defend our country. Look at the woman who is staring at him, look at the heartbroken child reaching for someone he'll never hug, or play with, or talk to again. Look at the pain, look at the grief. It's real, it's palpable. It's tragic.  IT'S NOT A FUCKING MEME! 

       Do you think these people gave permission for the picture of one of their darkest times to be turned into a face book popularity booster and judgment tool? Do you think this funeral was held for the benefit of do nothings who want to feel smug by posting a picture they were not personally involved in and then making an assumption about those who won't wallow in the same sense of superiority?  Do the people who post this kind of garbage really think the world revolves around them that much?   I'm pretty much willing to say that "No" is probably the answer to the first question. As for the others; who can tell?
     All I know is this. I won't share the picture as it was. I won't share it, not because I lack a heart and the human empathy that comes with it, but because no matter how small, moldy and disused it is I do have one.  Respect our fallen warriors, my friends, grieve with and where you can, help out their families. Don't share in their humiliation, Don't share pictures that guilt other people into sharing them. They deserve better than that. 

Thank-you,
-Cameron

Subtitles and Suffixes

On today's episode of first world problems: You know what gets my goat? When Dubs or subtitles on anime put a character's first name in the dialogue or on the screen when they're actually being called by their last name. I suppose this is a bit more okay in a dubbing situation where dialogue timing/ lip flap timing might be an issue, but it's really discordant in subtitles as you hear the character say the other character's last name and suffix.

          Japan hosts a very stuffy culture and the way someone addresses someone else holds a world of importance. According to nearly everything I've read or heard about the language even people who have been close friends for YEARS never, EVER call each other by their first name. Being on a first name basis with someone implies intimacy on the scale of being someone's lover or immediate family member. They should at least be able to get it right in subtitles. Anyway, enough whining from me. Just thought I'd get that out there.

How may I Lovecraft your sandwich today?

So, I was thinking of opening a Cthulhu Mythos themed sandwich shop. 

"Dagon's Sandwich Shack; where all the food is crafted with love."  

Here are some of the menu options I've come up with:

• The Sandwich over Innsmouth: A 12 inch sub with turkey on the first 4 inches, Chicken on the next 4 inches and Tuna on the last 4 inches.

• The Sandwich out of time: (Our Paleo option)Thinly sliced roast Bison served with shaved carrots and cabbage on Cashew Pancakes. For Hardcore Paleo Lovers we’ll even hide the ingredients in certain (Absolutely sanitary) places in our restaurant and let you hunt and gather your sandwich yourself!

• The Dunwich:(Our  low carb/ Gluten Free Option): Any of our sandwiches stuffed into the hollowed out and lightly roasted mantle of a squid.

• The Color out of Sandwich: (Our Vegetarian/Vegan Option)Portabella Mushroom Caps marinated in a mixture of olive oil, red wine vinegar and fresh basil and thyme, grilled and served on lettuce, onion and tomato and Crusty Italian Bread dyed with beet juice. Vegan customers can request the same wrapped in red cabbage! Comes with unlimited well drinks!

So what do you think? Sound appetizing? Would you buy a Franchise? Have an idea for a mythos based sandwich of your own? Leave ‘em in the comments below! Thank-you!

-Cameron

Friendship, Pop-Culture, and other difficult things

Sometimes I wish I had it in me to be a better friend. I know I'm not a very good one, I mean I'm there to listen and I can commiserate with the best of 'em, but once the clouds have passed my usefulness kind of comes to an end. I don't know what to say or how to say it. Beyond the basics of greetings and status checks I'm pretty much lost. I don't know how to move things along, how to create a conversation the way that other people seem to do. I don't have a lot to talk about.

    I'm not, it turns out, a very interesting person. I have a few hobbies, but even within those I have a pretty narrow band of interest and beyond that I get befuddled. Throughout my existence I've either been too poor, too busy, or too religious to form the kind of bonds other people do with their hobbies. It astounds me sometimes. A lot of times it makes me envious. Mostly it makes me boring.

    Ask me about a movie, 95 times out of 100 I haven't seen it. Even the (Apparently) best movies in the world have escaped me. I've never seen Pulp Fiction, or Reservoir Dogs, or The Boondock Saints. I've never seen End of Evangelion or Porco Rosso or More than like a half-hour of Princess Mononoke. I've never seen any of the Iron Man movies, or the Captain America: The Winter Soldier, or Thor: The Dark World. I've never seen Citizen Kane, or The Day the Earth Stood Still or Dial M for Murder. I've missed out on a lot. I'd be here for a solid year if I continued to list the movies I haven't seen.  I think a pretty solid rule about this situation would be, if I haven't mentioned it before I more than likely haven't seen it. 

     The same goes with TV shows. I've seen and liked most of Sherlock, but I've only seen one episode or so of Elementary, I haven't seen most of Lost, or Twin Peaks, Or Friends, or Seinfeld or Two and a Half Men or Downton Abbey or Once Upon a Time or Arrested Development, or Firefly or Big Bang Theory. I tried REALLY hard to watch Doctor Who. I couldn't get into it. I KNOW about it through reading and Wiki-Walks and Memes, but I haven't seen it. I haven't had the time, or the interest, or the ability to watch these things and because of it there are times when I just have nothing to say to people who assume anyone who has hit a certain age has grown up with them. 

    Don't even get me started on video games. My friend Manna has heard "Oh, I've never played that." out of me so many times he probably mouths it whenever he asks me about a video game title. I've played video games, I enjoy video games. I just haven't played very many and am not very diverse in the titles I enjoy. If you enjoy video games and assume I do as well, our conversations are going to more than likely be pretty darn frustrating. 

    The same goes with Music, or Art or Books. I like them all, but in very narrow strokes and I tend to enjoy things that or either too popular for "Real Fans" of the mediums to enjoy or not popular enough for most people to be able to relate too. ( Am I a hipster? Nah, couldn't be.) 

   I feel (Surprise, surprise) guilty and paranoid about these things. I feel as if I've failed others when I don't know about the stuff they enjoy and I've got so much to catch up on that the sheer volume of it actually, literally frightens me. I'm not being figurative here, I feel literal fear when I think of all the media I absolutely MUST catch up on to mirror the interests of my friends. I will never catch up. I will never broaden my interests that much. I will never, ever be good enough. 

   I've lost friends over this,not talked with people I genuinely like because I've been afraid that I'll be too boring or not hip enough to their particular jive. I've been weak, stupid, and a bad friend.   I'm afraid that this will be one of the things that eventually chases everyone out of my life. Not the only thing by far, but one aspect of it. I don't know if I can change. I'm making the effort, I really am, but in the end I wonder if I'll ever know enough.

    I wonder if I'll ever be good enough...
-Cameron

Thoughts on Moderation

Look people, it's like this.

You can be incensed that a police officer killed
an innocent person based on the color of their skin
and still be supportive of police in general.

You can be angry that people who took their religion
far too seriously decided to take the lives of car-
toonists and writers and still acknowledge that
a vast majority of the adherents of said religion
don't think or feel that way.

You can hate war and hate those at the root of
war and still honor and support the soldiers
that are willing to spill their blood so that
we do not have to.

It's okay to know that racism exists and that
the current system deals out priveleges to
white people and still acknowledge things
such as classism and know that despite
the priveleges white people get not all of
them are living idyllic lives free from
suffering or oppression.

You can be both cis and heterosexual and
still not have to feel hated,
afraid or threatened that
transgender and homosexual people want
need, and deserve equal rights.

Alternately you can be of a non binary
gender and a non heterosexual orientation
and not have to hate or think bad of every
person who is both cis or hetero or any
combination thereof.

You can support the right for responsible
citizens to own and bear firearms and
still want measures take to make sure
those who are unstable or irresponsible
don't get ahold of them.

You can be a straight man and not
have to objectify or hate women.

You can be a woman...well, sadly
no, you can't really be a woman and
not be afraid of men. Sorry guys, but
our track record and the society we've
built around it kind of speaks for
itself.

There are terrible things around us.
Tragedies abound and hatred is a real
serious thing in the world. What breeds
this hatred and births these tragedies
however is the idea that absolutes exist
in the world. That things have to be one
thing or another. That a person has to be
either rabidly for something or
violently against it.

Not everything has to be serious. Some
things are meant to be fun and enjoyable
and don't have secret messages or meanings.

Right, Left, Straight, Gay, Cis, Trans
Black, White, Rich and Poor. All of
these words mean something and are im
portant, but maybe we, as a group of
thinking and feeling beings have allowed
them to mean too much. They divide us.

Isn't it time we stopped considering
how different we are from one another
and started concentrating on how alike
we all are? Isn't it time, not to elim
inate titles, but to allow them to be
descriptors rather than definitions?

We are the ones building these walls
but we are not reaping any benefits
from them. The time and energy being
used could be put toward actually
making the world a better place.

We don't have to carry a chip on
our shoulders. None of us has any
thing to prove. We can relax, really
it's okay.

We are all human beings. We are all
the same kind, the same family. We
could be going so far if we'd only
remember that.

Then again, I could be doing the
same thing. You don't have to
agree with me, I suppose. As
long as we can still see that
having different opinions does
not have to make us enemies. We should
be fine.

-C Emrys Carrington.

Unsettling thoughts #1

Sometimes certain facts and theories about fictions and fandoms strike me weirdly. This is one of the thoughts I've had recently:
       It has been theorized by some in the pokemon fandom that all the creatures in the pokemon world are in fact just different strains of Pokemon. This includes human beings. My question is this? If humans are pokemon, what prevents other people from beating the crap out of them and capturing them in pokeballs. This would take stalking in a whole, new, terrifying direction. Imagine if you could literally imprison and carry your crush with you every where you go, if you could keep them in a state of suspended animation, alive and in your power, but not accessible forever. Imagine if someone with a crush did that to you!

              I know that this has probably, hopefully, been disproven or debunked by now. I also know I'm kind of bent for even thinking about it, but then again when you think of things like Lavender Town, Cubone, and Yamask, it's probably not all that farfetched. (( See what I did there?)) So, it's time for you, my dear readers, to weigh in. What do you think of this idea? Do you find it frightening? Is it possible or impossible considering other bits of the pokelore? I look forward to your comments.

-Cameron Carrington

Thoughts on Manhood

I expect to lose some "friends" after this, but I've been so damn miffed and hurt about it that I can't keep silent anymore. There are days when I wake up and hate the fact that I am a man. Not because I feel oppressed, not because I don't acknowledge that because of my mental gender and physical sex I have privileges that people who don't share these qualities do not.  I am well aware that in the lottery of life through the sheerest chance the irresponsible idiot that fertilized my egg gave me the chromosome that basically puts me ahead of the game in this society. No, I sometimes hate being a man for another reason entirely.  I am ashamed by the stupid shit my gender/sex says and does.

           If you think the friendzone exists, you need to unfriend me. If you think that you are entitled to sex and or a relationship because you spend money on or time with a woman, you need to unfriend me. I can't say that I never embraced these concepts, but I can say that I've grown the hell up and taken a look at things and discarded these childish and frankly dangerous notions. These delusional ideas and the depersonalization and hatred they espouse and inspire cost the men who hold to them respect, time, and the very relationships they aspire to. These delusional ideas kill.

           If you in any way believe the UCSB shooter was right and or justified in what he did you need to unfriend me. You need to sit down and contemplate what it is to have innocent blood on your hands because you felt entitled to an individual's person, life and body. You need to stop and wonder why your brain is so out of whack that you equate women with fleshlights. You need to get the fuck away from me before you go around the bend in the same way. You need to get away from me before you decide to injure and kill other people and possibly even yourself for a pseudo philosophy of paranoia that makes even a mentally ill person like myself shudder. You need help of a type I am unqualified to give.

            Don't dare come at me with this "It's not all men." garbage either. Shit like this makes it all men. Creepers in malls make it all men, rapists and rape apologists make it all men. Men who feel entitled to and whine about women not being subservient or attracted to them make it all men. Why? It's simple, because it could be any man. The man walking down the street with his hands in his pockets could be looking for a victim. The man sitting on a bus could be coveting a woman who's name he may not even know like she was a car, or a thousand dollar bill and wondering why he shouldn't just take her. A woman cannot actually know what any man at any time is thinking. Every time something like the above happens, any time some idiot loses control of himself and does something disgusting and sub-human it makes it a lot less safe for any woman to be near any man. She cannot be sure that all men aren't predators, what she can be sure of is that if something does happen to her it is more than likely that everyone from her own family to the media will be looking for reasons that it is her fault. Despite the fact that this senseless thing happened was done to her, for no discernible reason, she knows that everyone is going to try to pin the blame on her. So don't give me this "Not all men " bullshit, because it might as well be.

        We do it to ourselves. This society, built by and for men, pushes these roles upon us. It tells us that it's okay to be out of control animals, that men should aspire to be as such. Action movie heroes, sports players, musicians, even our own schools and government tell us that the ideal man is one of violent action and sexual debauchery. They tell us that it is women who must give up their comfort and individuality because men are all barely controlled lust engines and the sight of the slightest bit of alluring skin might topple our reason and force us to do horrible things to them. This male run society devalues men, just not as much as it devalues women.

        I know everything isn't peaches and cream simply because a person has twigs and berries. Men are a lot less likely to gain custody of children for instance and male rape and molestation by females is a reality of which I myself am a survivor. We fuck those things up for ourselves as well though. This male built society favors women in custody battles not because they assume women are the ideal parents, but because we are taught that women can and should be the caretakers, that a man does not and should not want to shoulder the responsibility of parenthood. Men who report rape or molestation by women are laughed at or have their manhood questioned because how could a man not want to have sex? Once the uglies start to bump this male built society tells us our minds and souls should shut up and let our body enjoy it. Men hurt themselves because they have built a society around the idea that women are less than them.  We do it to ourselves, like little kids blaming the stove but refusing to take their hands off the burner.

      So yes, some days I hate being a man. I hate being associated with all of this garbage. I can't escape it however, because I am a man and all of us are responsible for our actions, no matter how much we wish we weren't.