ADD Isn’t A Real Thing

Attention Deficit Disorder.  Let’s analyze the name of this “disease” for a second.  It implies that one is not generating enough attention, that there’s a deficit of some sort measured against a norm.  What’s the norm?  How do they measure attention?  Is there such a thing as too much attention, perhaps Attention Abundance Disorder?  Or is it, just maybe, that doctors and pharmaceuticals need a reason to sell you more pills?  Or maybe we, as a society, need something to label our kids with when they are not sitting perfectly still in class and paying 100% attention to a boring teacher babbling on and on about addition and subtraction?  In other, to unload our responsibilities as parents and teachers onto a convenience pill.

Just ram this pill down their throat and turn them into zombies.  Problem solved.  Oh, and that’ll be $600 a month for the rest of your life.  Oh, and another thing, we’re not really sure what the long term effects are, so we’re probably gonna get you later in life when other “disorders” crop up.

Economic Slavery

Could there be a more effective form of slavery?  If the 1% control access to all the resources, what can the 99% fight back with?  Sticks and rocks against 200 ton bombs?  This is your lot as an employee.  Bottom line, to quote 50 Cent: “Get Rich, or Die Tryin’”.

OK, so you’re most likely not going to get rich, ever.  So what’s a brutha to do?  I don’t know, stop working so damn hard and breaking your back to line the pockets of the king(s) you work for.  Whenever I catch myself putting in the slightest bit extra at the slave pit, I ask myself if it’s worth it.  Given the choice being fired for “poor performance” or stressing myself out to get something done for a maniacal, corporate lackey boss who’s only goal is to “look good,” the former typically is winner.  The latter has never come to fruition (too many liabilities for firing someone).

God Loves Me

God is trying his best to make a believer out of me.  He seems to place opportunity in my lap, but I ignore it every time.  I’m talking about opportunities to get laid, which as of the last two years has been a subject that I receive a big fat F- in.  But God keeps on throwing young, attractive women into my path and I keep ignoring them like they don’t even exist.  But anyway, thank you God, and keep up the good work.

What we have is a world full of beta males.  The slow destruction of the earth is in direct proportion to the number of beta males that inhabit it.  As the  number increases, so does the rate of destruction.  Why?

The bottom line is: lack of sex.  Reproduction is really our only purpose on this planet.  Propagate the species.  In the wild, the natural order of things makes this easy, where the dominant males reproduce with any female they choose.  And kill or make subservient the beta males, who very rarely get an opportunity to procreate.

With humans, we’ve eliminated the natural order and elevated the weak to power.  It’s an imbalance that’s taken hundreds of years to cultivate.  In numbers, the betas can control and develop “societies” that punish the strong, so that they, the betas, have more opportunities to fuck.  That’s why they invented things like marriage, and the concept of “slut.”  It’s a control mechanism to keep women from following their natural desires, which in most cases is to fuck any and every available dominant man they come across.

Now we have a mutated species, where disease and conformity are the norm, and any natural display of power outside the system is punished severely (prison, financial sanctions, etc).

But still, betas lack the sex that a normal, healthy, dominant man receives in his lifetime.  The 80/20 rule still applies, no matter how many controls they try to put in place.  80% or more of the female population is fucking only 20% or less of the men.  That means the other 80% or so of betas still get sex, but not from the variety that the 20% enjoy.  And the girls they are banging, their wives and girlfriends (women under contract), are out banging the 20% behind their back.  Think those kids are yours?  Maybe you should think again.

So without an abundance of sex to occupy their time, beta men need something else to fill that void.  Thus is born careers, pursuit of power and money, and the myriad of other destructive behaviors that is essentially a scorched earth mentality; if I can’t get all the sex I need, then fuck the earth.  Every technological advancement we have around us is the result of this behavior.  When we moved out of the jungle, we lost any semblance we had of our natural being.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing being a beta, if you accept your role.  Unfortunately, most of the 80% are unable to do this.

It’s a little far fetched, but not so distant from the truth.  Where are you, in the 80% (most likely) or the 20%?

I’ve wasted my youth.  Pissed it away on drinking, partying, video games, TV, and other forms of time wastes.  I’ve consumed the only precious thing I’ve been given, time.  Spent it on worthless pursuits, if you want to even call them pursuits, complicit with the system in every imaginable way.

You wake up one day to find yourself fragile, finally realizing what all those old people were telling you when you were young.  The realization that when you reach a certain age, you are incapable of recovering the time you’ve pissed away.  And now you most certainly are destructible; recklessness is all of the sudden frowned upon, unlike the days of a teen.  Being set on a path of self destruction usually leads to just that, although at the moment when that realization hits, you’re not ready to fly over the edge.

But the real enigma is what could’ve been, what is the line between wasting time and spending time wisely?

It’s probably a safe bet that we, as comfortable living westerners, waste most of our time inventing excitement and manufacturing “experiences.”  Unless you’re in a real struggle to survive, which these days means making enough money to pay bills and eat, then escape is the only outlet to combat boredom.  Think about it, you have a decent job that pays at least OK, you have a roof over your head, plenty of food that you’ll never ever have to worry about acquiring (at least not in the foreseeable future), and an unending appetite for something more.  What that something more is is intangible, can’t be defined, and is most likely the result of having every basic need taken care of and then some.  A void, I suppose, that needs to be filled.

If I had it to do over again, I’d make different choices.  Who wouldn’t?  Not to avoid mistakes, but to involve myself in more interesting pursuits, other than just shrugging them off and going out to party with my stupid friends.  Now it’s too late to recoup that lost time, but not too late to reinvent and begin something worthwhile.

WARNING:  Contains truthatoods and other factoids that may deter you from working your hardest at your shitty ass job.

Dear Employee,

I would like to thank you for all the hard work, long hours, dedication, and sacrifices you have made to help in my quest to line my pockets with gold.  You’ve made me an extremely wealthy man, and in the process I’ve fed you booze, teased you with hot girls, and given off the illusion that “we care.”  And boy did you buy it!  In fact, you bought it so much that I paid you as little as I could get away with; the bare minimum amount to keep you slaving away for my glorification.

To show my appreciation, I’m spending millions of dollars to throw myself a ridiculous, over blown, ego stroking party, where you’ll be able to stand at the base of a 15′ stage and worship me as I parade around as if I was a rock star.  But don’t even think of getting close to me, and it would probably be best to not make eye contact with me either.  I’ll rope off a special section for those suckers who paid to have the honor to lobby for my company so the laws would land in my favor and I could rake in even more money for myself.  Oh, and there’ll be plenty of booze on hand, but only the first two are free, the rest I’ll be making a huge profit off as you overpay for them with pleasure.

The best part of the party is, it doubles as a PR stunt and actually gets the media thinking that my company is a great exciting place to work!  Instead of sharing the wealth with the people who have worked hard to make me a filthy rich man, I’m spending it on myself.  Is that really a surprise?

Your’s Truly,

Egomaniacal CEO

p.s. Ha! Ha! Fuck you!

Have you heard the new single from the freshly reunited Van Halen with David Lee Roth?  It’ll only take about 10 seconds to figure out it sucks balls and that most likely the rest of the album will suck balls as well.  Not to mention how tired Van Halen has become since 1984 through the Van Hagar years.

The most interesting thing about Van Halen is they were more popular (i.e. sold more records) as the one dimensional Van Hagar than as the original with DLR.  Why?

I think it’s two things.  First, they were more generally appealing as Van Hagar, writing more radio friendly songs and not being even remotely experimentally, unlike the original, more dynamic version.  Second, they found the winning formula with 1984, which rocketed them into popularity.

But there’s something more interesting going on here.  As the edgy, often times experimental Van Halen, they were a better band.  And by better, I don’t mean more musically gifted.  Rather, they had a rabid fan base that anticipated every record, every single, and every concert they produced.  They looked forward to it and was willing to plop down money to be a part of it.  Sure they didn’t make as much money or sell more records or get more radio play, but they had something going that could’ve lasted a very long time, something that Van Hagar destroyed the second they formed.

There’s a big difference between making a record for your truly rabid fans and the general masses.  As a rabid fan, you want them to be pushing the envelope, even if they go a little too far and it’s unlistenable.  You want them to experiment with different styles, different sounds, different instruments even to try and go beyond what you’ve heard from them before.  It’s not always going to work, but your loyal, rabid fans will most likely support you through it, unless, of course, you shit in their mouth and keep producing crap.

Or you shit in their mouth by becoming hugely popular, which is exactly what Van Hagar did.

I’m not saying they sold out.  They couldn’t have, because how could they have known that Van Hagar would be more popular than the original?  But what happened did destroy them, creatively, musically, and financially.  They became hugely popular and as a consequence, they became a commodity.

When you’re making a record for the general population, you can’t be experimental.  You can’t push the envelope, because if you fail, that’s it, people will jump off the bandwagon and abandon you.  So in order to continue the level of popularity, you have to keep churning out the same hit (garbage) and keep following the formula and keep appeasing to the executives, the distributors (radio in this case), and the generic housewife who just a few years early, had no idea who you were.

And the worst part of all, when you reach a level of general popularity, nobody cares any more.  Even though they’re buying the album and going to your concerts, they don’t care.  Because when you eventually fizzle out, when your formula becomes old, they have something else to glom onto, the next big thing.  There’s always someone on your heals who can follow the same formula, except they’re younger, better looking, more appealing, fresh, etc.  When that happens, you’re toast.  Career over.  It’s very hard to recover once you’ve been tossed aside.

Bands achieve longevity by flying under the radar and appealing to their core rabid fans.  As a result, they become richer than any megastar super band.  The lesson here?  At all costs, don’t become a commodity, build something that a handful of people care about and the rest will fall into place.