Okay, folks. The first of my much-anticipated new blogs can be found here:

WORLD OR BUST!

It will be about my 16-day trip from London to Beijing via rail. It's not very pretty or well-written yet, but I just wanted to get it up because there are 50 days until I set out and it seemed like a perfect day to launch it!

I think I might "start a blog." But you already have one, Matt. Yes, but...I don't entirely understand the difference between a "Blogspot" blog and a LiveJournal, but it seems as if the former has some form of respect going for it, whereas the latter implies teenager-ish rambling...

...So I think I'm going to graduate to Blogspot, or Blogger.com or whatever the hell. It seems like they are the only ones that are generally linked on respectable sites througout the internet, and they are generally more consistently updated. For better or worse, I am falling to the trend.

I think that, for whatever reason, having a new start will make me newly productive as well. I would like to actually be consistent (and consistently creative) with this one.

As for a theme...well, as usual there are a hundred directions to go in. There is the overarching theme of slowly going insane from exposure to corporate absurdity that is pretty unavoidable in my life...There is my trip to Russia, for which I want to do an absurd amount of pre-planning (reading tons of books on Siberia, making reservations for train, plane, and hotel, etc)...There is my life as a budding lil' filmmaker...There is a whole world of possibilities.

I will certainly keep up with the "LJs" of my friends, but for now I am signing off of this baby -- onward to the future!

There are six people in my "team" at work, and a few months ago our boss left to go to "Corporate," leaving us in this weird free-for-all that has worked fairly well until recently. Suddenly the two members of the "team" who have been here longest have started sparring with each other on the stupidest possible points...

...how should certain emails be worded, what standards of folder-making should be used...it's the most insignificant bullshit I could imagine. I cannot believe that anyone is concerned enough about these things to yell about it.

Still, I'm taking sides. I'm agreeing with the brash, young whippersnapper who has nothing to lose: he wants to include two asterisks before emails involving unofficial transcripts. This is opposed to the hard-bitten old-timer with a heart of gold, opposed to this, and any, change. I actually just heard him say "That's the way it's been, and that's the way it's gonna be." (This is an incredibly accurate summing up of his worldview in general -- about a week ago he was talking about a very mild-mannered and reasonable salesperson and said "What is he, gay or something?" in complete seriousness.)

And of course, of the six people on our "team," three are on each side. The line has been drawn in the cubicle dust. Everyone is grumbling persistently. I just heard the phrase "This is getting out of hand" out of the older guy's mouth. What's getting out of hand -- the level of efficiency and actual sense that is being achieved by doing things in a slightly different fashion?

I was not made for this world.

Stidle8086: 1800 -- Volta created the first simple battery. He used pure silver and zinc discs, sandwiched between muslin damped in a salt solution, developed from Galvani's earlier experiments with a frog's leg.
Stidle8086: 1750s -- The Wimshurst machine was invented. It is used to produce static electricity easily and reliably. Two parallel plates are rotated in opposite directions, which produces a charge around the edges of the plates. The charge is collected by a system of combs.Voltages as high as 50,000 volts can be produced, depending on humidity and other conditions, as well as sparks up to four inches long.
Stidle8086: 1705 -- Francis Hauksbee created electrical effects by putting some mercury into a glass globe, pumping out the air and then spinning it. When he did this in the dark, and then rubbed the globe with his bare hand, it glowed. (He didn't realise it, but he had invented the neon light!)
Stidle8086: 2007 -- "South University has been around since 1899. We're almost as old as electricity!" - [frequently-used quote by the below-described Worst Salesman Ever]
co-worker: you know, i was reading that and wondering where you were going with it
co-worker: but thank you
co-worker: the history made it all the more revolting
Stidle8086: i mean, that's not to mention the fact that "electricity" itself is...as old as the world. there is never a point at which there wasn't electricity, it just had to be discovered. so i guess south university was around previous to humanity.
co-worker: now you're thinking much too deeply for edmc
co-worker: please stop
co-worker: i think you forget that [salesguy] is just being tenacious...
Stidle8086: it's hard to keep keep sight of his tenacity sometimes.

[A conversation that started about the below-described salesguy.]

Stidle8086: "i was a smart 2-year-old, but it was all downhill from there." did you hear that? what a weirdly accurate statement for him to make.
co-worker: he actually said that? that kind of makes me sad. maybe he has very low self-esteem.
Stidle8086: yeah, i was just talking to carrie about that, actually. on one hand it's easy to be angry at a total idiot; on the other hand, he/she might have had a really traumatizing life to make them that way, or at least a very depressing life.
Stidle8086: i guess it just depends on how much control over one's own life you believe a person has.
co-worker: yes
co-worker: that is true
Stidle8086: like whether you can choose to be an asshole or if you have no option but to become one because of your circumstances.
co-worker: i'm not really sure i know what i think on that.
Stidle8086: i kind of tend to err on the side of context/circumstances, but i kind of wish i didn't...it would be a lot easier to just be angry at people rather than "understanding."
co-worker: yeah
co-worker: sympathy is exhausting and makes me laugh less than just mocking and judging
Stidle8086: especially when the reason that i am often angry at people to begin with is because of their total lack of understanding/taking circumstance into context.
Stidle8086: like [constantly angry co-worker], for example.
Stidle8086: in one sense i understand that his anger, frustration, and prejudices (i.e. his extremely overblown hatred of the tattoo lady) are the result of forces out of his control...
Stidle8086: ...but on the other hand, i know that he would never give me the same consideration.
co-worker: i tend to sort of feel bad for [angry man] as well.
co-worker: he's here at 7:30 in the morning and leaves at 6 or later at night. he must be awake by 6am and get home at 7pm. why would he do that? he doesn't even get overtime. he must be trying to escape from home.
Stidle8086: and yet it doesn't make me feel much better about him constantly blaming me for things i didn't do.

===

So where do YOU come down on this issue, reader? Is it an asshole's fault that he/she's an asshole?

Not really hyperbole.

I have been pretty good at not being totally vindictive, but today I am hitting the ceiling in disbelief at these people. Here's just a partial cast of characters:

Tenacious C. So named because of his love for the word "tenacious," which he uses -- like virtually every other word in the English language -- incorrectly, and frequently. Favorite, totally meaningless phrase: "I'm very tenacious with my students." Attended a well-regarded boarding school, his mother is the editor of a successful magazine, and still he managed to flunk out of a laughably shitty party college and end up a drunk, misogynistic salesman at a fourth-rate online school. (In other words, a perfect future presidential candidate.) Way to take advantage of your absurd advantages in life, half-brain!

Pastimes include being verbally abusive to generally nice and reasonable female co-workers (possibly a middle school-like attempt at flirtation, though it is hard to say when someone is so profoundly stunted emotionally), talking about "money and power" with male co-workers who are equally devoid of both, and having a laugh that can only be described as a disingenuous, and somehow more idiotic, hybrid of Beavis and Butthead.

This man sometimes ridicules students by putting them on speakerphone so that everyone can hear what they are saying -- often it is embarassing and potentially personal in nature. He frequently begins talking about how much he wants to drink beer at 11 in the morning, and invariably his stories of the weekend include large gaps in which he was blacked out. The most disgusting part -- the saddening part for humanity in general -- is that he is known as something of a "player," whose romantic encounters are allegedly frequent and famed by the other idiot men. This despite the fact that his hair resembles the "ramp" style you wore briefly in 7th grade.

He contends that he is from "the North Side," though he lives several miles into the "North Hills" and, much like the rest of the tough guys at this institution, would be scared shitless if he found himself stranded in the middle of the actual city, even behind the thick layer of glass in his SUV.

He could not possibly care less about anyone other than himself and anything other than the things he owns, or will come to own. He is almost without a doubt or exception the worst person I have ever met or ever hope to meet. And I have the great fucking fortune of sittting next to him for eight hours -- and sometimes nine or ten hours -- every day.

Okay, anyhoo...That was supposed to just be the first in a series of "profiles," but as you can see I got a little carried away by that one. It might seem as if I'm overreacting, but just consider being continuously bombarded all day, every day by the most despicable person you have ever imagined. This has been my life for three months. I am considering saying something about him to the HR department and at least getting my seat changed.

But hey, this is why I make the big bucks.

I had a very strange dream immediately before I woke up this morning. It consisted of Etta (Book'em, etc) in zombie movie make-up, standing with her face partly obscured behind a set of off-white curtains that were being blown back and forth by a strong wind...She kept holding up various items -- books, small pieces of medical equipment -- and simply saying the names of them in a monotonous, but ominous fashion. Many of these things didn't really exist: I remember a fictional Yes album (with all of the absurd fantastical imagery you would expect from one), a children's book about a family of eyes, noses, ears, etc called the Sensicles (I made this up, right?)...

...Every once in a while she would falter and ask if everything was coming out all right. I was filming the scene and a step back revealed that the window was a set in the middle of a warehouse.

Strange, but weirdly comforting. I don't know why such a bizarre dream would be so pleasant, but it was actually very nice. I woke up feeling creatively motivated.

Two film ideas:

1) A day in the life of a man who almost never moves voluntarily, though he is in no way physically impaired. When his alarm clock goes off, he hits a button on his adjustable bed which rolls him onto a wheelchair, which he takes to a mechanical chairlift that takes him down to the living room. From here he gets into a second wheelchair which takes him to the front door, where he gets onto a Segway in order to travel the 15-20 feet to his car, which has a step that comes out automatically to make it easier for him to enter. The car parks itself and, to a good extent, drives itself. Etc, etc. (I have yet to figure out how exactly to make it clear that he is just incredibly lazy, rather than genuinely incapable of moving.)

In the course of his day, I would like the man to use as many dumbass, unnecessary inventions as possible. Anything that allows him to use even less energy than he otherwise would. An electric orange peeler, a spray bottle with a fan that mists spring water, etc.

The end of the film will just be the man crying uncontrollably for hours at the worhthlessness of his life.

2) A day in the life of a man who believes he is smarter than everyone around him between the hours of 9am-5pm. It will be a documentary about me.

By Matt Stidlolz

[Saleswoman originally from Cleveland is eating a burrito.]
Thai-Phobic Salesguy: What do you call that, what you're eating?
Saleswoman: It's a breakfast burrito, I guess.
TPS: A breakfast burrito, huh? Where do you get something like that -- Taco Bell?
Saleswoman: No, I made it myself. There's no reason to buy one. I just throw beans and cheese into a burrito at home.
TPS: No meat?
Saleswoman: No, I don't eat meat.
TPS [shaking head]: There must be someone up there in Cleveland preaching about being a vegetarian -- my daughter went to college there and became one!

===

This is a man who probably has not been so daring as to eat Mexican food for years, who apparently knows of no Mexican options other than Taco Bell, and who apparently believes that there is a person in Cleveland brainwashing people into not eating meat (or "God-food," as I like to call it).

I can't really describe how much I despise this man.

I think I may have posted this before, but I recently rediscovered this little gem on the internet...It's Orgasmic Sound Explosion's signature Crunk track: Honey, I Crunk the Kids.

I have been listening to some of the "nerd rap" that is out there now and I genuinely think that Mark and I had 80-90% of this shit beat like six years ago. As far as I can tell, you are better than half of it if you are capable of staying on beat. Plus our lyrics are hilarious. Look at this stuff:

VERSE 1:
I got my rims on spin
and my feet in Tims,
peep the gold in my grin
when I open the gin.
Bubbly's ubiquitous,
my den's iniquitous,
fill the jet with Cris,
you need to get with this.
Plentiful platinum,
centrfolds in satin['m],
girls keep clappin'em,
like Bonds keeps battin'em.
Rep Pimpsburgh till I die,
much love to God on high,
offer up some dope pie,
stun fatties on the fly.

CHORUS:
HONEY I CRUNK THE KIDS -- WHAT?
HONEY I CRUNK THE KIDS -- HUH?
HONEY I CRUNK THE KIDS -- COME AGAIN?
HONEY I CRUNK THE KIDS -- SPEAK UP!/WHAT?!?

VERSE 2:
Entice Heidi Fleiss
with magnificent ice,
I throw dice so concise
that my wallet is nice,
I stay drunk,
my dick stay shrunk-
-wrapped in lambskin hunks,
and I'm ready to dunk!
Greenbacks in pockets,
in safes, in banks,
Got hoes on beds,
pitching fits, giving thanks.
Worship at my dick,
like the sermon on the mount,
For the sake of my bone,
I wear a Turin dick shroud.

CHORUS

VERSE 3:
I relax, stack that cash,
amass those greenbacks,
max out my Cadillacs
with fine cognacs.
Blow snow like Don Ho,
and my nostrils are gone;
don't really matter though,
'cause my nose is bronze.
Take my meat raw,
pull that shit off the cow.
It's agains the law,
but I'll shoot the pigs down.

CHORUS

VERSE 4:
Casino floors,
behind locked doors,
Got smooth contours,
like the Scottish Moors.
Stay laced with coutoure,
from the boutique stores,
and I never touched a pigeon
with genital sores!
Enrobe you in chocolate,
Disrobe you if you talk shit,
Walk blocks with a limp,
to collect stock tips.
Slap skins all night,
like bloods and crips,
Don't forget
Loose lips sink ships (no shit?!?)!



Mark clearly wins the lyrical battle here. My favorites of his are: "Throw dice so concise that my wallet is nice," "Worship at my dick like the sermon on the mount / For the sake of my bone, I wear a Turin dick shroud" and "Got smooth contours like the Scottish Moors." Literally makes me crack up every time. And we wrote this stuff in like 15 minutes. Perhaps we should put the ol' rap machine back together, eh?

Salesguy #1: Hey [Salesguy #2], do you like Thai Food?
Salesguy #2: Nope.

(Time passes.)

Salesguy #1: Have you ever tried Thai food, [Salesguy #2]?
Salesguy #2: No, and I don't intend to.

On an unrelated note, I really enjoy taking math classes again. It is genuinely a joy to be doing Trig again.

And this time I am really striving to actually understand it rather than do it well while not understanding why it works. For example, I couldn't go to sleep last night until I figured out why x² + y² + x/2 + y + 1/16 = 0 would create a circle of radius 1 with origin (-1/4, -1). (I think that's the equation -- maybe not exactly it.) It looked more like it would be create a circle of raidus -1/16 at origin (-1/2, -1) and I literally just laid there for maybe 10 minutes mulling over each element of it, trying to figure out how to modify it to mold it into what I needed it to be.

Then the concept of the Perfect Square came into play and I let out a mental cheer of relief and tried to sleep again.

Yay for math!

I guess since I am a June baby, I was really feeling awful about the summer winding down. Felt like the death of a season rather than the birth of a new one.

But there have been recent glimpses of goodness. I forgot that you can still go outside in the Fall, and it's even possible to do that while wearing a hoodie or wool suit (as I am wearing today), which maybe makes it better than Summer. The cool wind even feels sort of...good. The smell reminds me of middle and high school -- and though the Autumns of my youth were generally bittersweet, every year shakes the bitterness off of the memories a little more and now they're almost romantic. Reminds me of running around St. Joseph's Church, setting fire to dying leaves, and never knowing what to expect while taking the bus through the projects every morning en route to school.

Makes me miss Mount Oliver a bit, actually. Mostly it makes me miss feeling like a seamless part of Mount Oliver rather than an obvious outsider. How did I go from running in the streets to running from them? When did that happen?

Ahh, again I'm struck with the agony of attempting to communicate an infinitely distinct feeling. For example, I love how bizarre Mount Oliver is topographically and demographically. On Hays St, you can feel like you are in the middle of an ailing big city neighborhood business district. (The first time Bobby and I ventured there when we were 8- or 9-years-old, I was almost immediately mowed down by a car.) But then far enough down Wagner Ave, you are literally in the middle of the forest. It's like a burnt-out rural backdrop, trailers and bearded men and all. But if you go far enough into the forest, you're suddenly in the projects, where I used to want to live because of how many people were out at any time of the day or night.

On a given day, my friends and I might go up to the busy business district to buy some spraypaint, take it down to a vacant lot in the bare, rural-ish area to practice on blank asphalt, and then start painting a shack in the projects (where once we found an abandoned motorcycle that someone had wrecked after stealing it -- my friend Will knew whose it was and we saved the day by telling the owner!). And there was something inexplicably wonderful about those days.

For whatever reason, these are experiences that can't be recreated in the comfort and, perhaps, good sense of the East End. There was something strangely limitless in those few square miles. Maybe the feeling of it all is something that you can't really feel anymore at this age, knowing too much about the world around us to be impressed by its mass anymore.

Or maybe I just haven't found -- haven't tried to find -- whatever it is that makes me feel that way now. I think it has a lot to do with a progressively stronger fear of everything. I wouldn't do now a lot of the things I did then. Maybe that's a mistake.

Anyway, that's what the Fall makes me think of.

Well, I did pretty well until the second stop, anyway. In fact, for about 20 seconds I was at the front of the pack as far as I know...first we stopped at the Mon Wharf and there were a few people ahead, but everyone else decided to go up Smithfield rather than straight onto the bus lane at Wood St, and I passed everyone up as I raced down Liberty...I made the mistake of not immediately switching to Smallman once we got to the Strip and noticed a few people pass me as I struggled down Penn...

...but when we got to the second stop, Costume World, it looked like I was still in the running. Brad was just a second in front of me, at least. But alas. Here is where the parade of follies began.

1) At Costume World, we were handed gold coins and asked if we wanted a bottle of water. I said yes, but now I realize that: a) I should have just brought my own and b) even if I hadn't brought my own, I should have used a more convenient bag so that I could slip the water into it while still riding. I was still ahead of all but the first five or so racers, but as soon as I took that damned water, try as I might to slip it into my inconvenient China-bought bookbag...I had to pull over and let a bunch of people go past by the time I squeezed the bottle into the damned thing. Lost really important time, but thought I could make it back up heading down Penn en route to the fourth stop...
2) Note to self: LOOK AT THE ENTIRE FLYER. When I saw that the next stop was "The Shooting Gallery," I was worried. I had no idea where it was, but I thought I was at an advantage to stop into my apartment on Butler (on the way anyway) to look it up on the internet. This took much longer than expected, and by the time I figured it out, I was probably at the back of the pack...I raced as fast as possible down Butler and caught up with/passed some stragglers, which made me feel kind of good...

...but when we got to The Shooting Gallery, there was no one there. We all kind of circled around for a bit and knocked on doors, but nothing. I was so frustrated by all of the time that I lost that I just decided to call it a day at this point.

Here's why I should have looked more closely at the map: If you just turn the fucking thing over, there are addresses of all of the stops listed conveniently there. I didn't have to lose 5 minutes looking up a location at my apartment. Also, there is a note that says the stops will either have people handing us things or they would be "taped to a wall at your location." Had I just read that tidbit, I wouldn't have ridden around like a chicken with my head cut off at The Shooting Gallery, instead just looking for something on the wall.

In essence, had I only brought my own water and looked more closely at the flyer, I might have ended up at the top of the heap. After making it up 44th St, the rest of it was a piece of cake: Fly down Penn to Negley to the Sharp Edge, Negley to 5th and down that weird back way to Iron City Bikes, back up to 5th and over the Birmingham Bridge to the Southside Boat Launch, down Bingham to the Commonwealth Press, and over to Armstrong Park. That part would have been basically all either flat or downhill...Easy, easy, easy. So incredibly frustrating.

Well, I guess there's one tomorrow too. We'll see what happens.

It began when the salespeople who ring my cubicle for some reason struck up a political conversation. It essentially consisted of people spitting out neo-con lines on everything -- primarily national security and immigration. This included obligatory pseudo-Indian accents and impressively sweeping generalizations. The real climax was when one woman attempted to articulate and defend a point she heard on the undisputed craziest radio show in the world -- Michael Savage -- and failed because she kept tripping over her words. As much as I genuinely don't care about the opinions of these people on anything, I felt that I was going to grit my teeth to a powder by the end of this brainstorming session.

A little later I went out to lunch, choosing some place I'd never seen before which turned out to be a hoity-toity deli akin to Babycakes in Poughkeepsie, but without almost any vegetarian options. It was terrible.

As I was walking back to work, I noticed a large Jewish family sitting outside of a restaurant -- all of the young boys were wearing yarmulkes. Apparently the couple walking toward me also realized this, as the doofus jock male of the duo started cracking up. His girlfriend asked, "What?" He replied, simply: "Yarmulkes." It was clearly not a matter of affection for them so much as ridicule toward the concept.

Wearing a long-sleeve, button-up white shirt and black pants with a beard and curly sideburns, I am frequently presumed to be an Orthodox Jew. Last week an Hasidic man from out of town asked me the way to Shabbat services and a waitress refused to give me what I wanted because it wasn't Kosher. As such, I have an inclination to break stereotypes that people might have about who they presume I am.

That and my pent-up aggression regarding the Great Salesperson Agree-a-Thon of an hour earlier led me to start chuckling very loudly and antagonistically with/at the aforementioned doofus: "Yarmulkes? Is that really the full extent of what you're laughing at? Have you seen the ridiculous shit that the pope wears?" This seemed to actually amuse the couple, and we simply moved past each other without another word. Maybe they'll rethink laughing at things they aren't familiar with in the future.

No, they'll keep being idiots. And I'll just keep venting my increasing blood pressure by acting like a crazy ranter on the sidewalk.

Stolen from le journal de Benjamin:



I can't believe I've been to all of these places. Wewew.

Okay...with the addition of an actual piece to hold a microphone and a proper carrying case for my video camera, I now have all of the pieces necessary to start filming a real documentary. I am going to need two types of volunteers:

- "Street team." It may not be glamorous, but it is absolutely necessary to send a group of people to every part of Penn Ave from Downtown to Wilkinsburg, handing out flyers to passersby and putting them into the windows of stores. Any other suggestions as to how to get the word out would be helpful...we need as many unique stories, people, and places as possible.
- "Crew." I can't do everything myself in terms of filming, so people who would be interested in the exciting fields of mic-holding, level monitoring, and possibly even DPing/etc are invited to join the cause!

Please spread the word to anyone you know who would be interested!

I love doing stats. I love exhaustively mathematizing everything. Man, maybe some day I'll find a job where that will do me some good...

...For now I am relegated to figuring out exactly how much time per day, every day that I will be working exclusively to pay down my credit card debt.

As it turns out, for 1 hour 33 minutes and 28 seconds of every day for the next year, I will be making money just to hand it over to credit card companies (after taxes). As long as I shovel over $13.82/day to these guys for the next year, I will be completely out of a mountain of debt.

Thankfully I consolidated my credit cards -- whose interest rates recently shot up to over 10% when the introductory offers expired -- onto two cards, each of which has a 0% rate for one year. It is my goal to totally pay down my entire debt by exactly one year from today. If I do that successfully, my credit should be through the roof and maybe we can talk about buying a home, as an investment if nothing else. (I will also write a book about how you can go from a bank balance several hundreds in the negative and two completely maxed-out credit cards to complete financial self-sufficiency in two weeks -- maybe the most incredibly responsible thing I've ever done.)

Pittsburgh: The city where you can comfortably buy a house with an entry-level job.

And in the words of the always-prescient H.L. Mencken:

"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

Looks like he was right.

===

Anyway...After spending about 25% of my workday reading Jay Albert Nock and H.L. Mencken quotes, I realized that my affection is not so much for their ideas but the style in which they present them. For better or worse, I am a total pushover for pithy cynicism.

- "Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?"
- "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." - Mencken

I realized also that the points at which I most enjoy these guys are when I am feeling most misanthropic and elitist myself. Both inclinations have been running high recently.

As I walked outside for lunch, I realized that the vast majority of thoughts I had all day up to that point were in some sense negative. It's hard to think otherwise when you are surrounded by sales people all day. The experience of hearing questionable truths and pie-in-the-sky pitches in surround sound for hours at a time has the surprising quality of breeding cynicism in me.

En route to the bank, the Walk sign came on and I began crossing the street. Suddenly an SUV swept around the corner and came close enough to me that I could smack the back of it instinctively with my hand, yelling "Haven't you ever seen a pedestrian?" This is now my third confrontation with drivers in three days.

The truth is that in some sense I enjoy the sensation of anger. I wouldn't consistently listen to conservative talk radio if that wasn't the case. Maybe I'm alone in enjoying the subtle pleasures of moral outrage, but more likely I'm just alone in admitting it. As with depression or sadness, there is often something viscerally pleasing or at least comfortingly familiar about doses of indignation.

After blowing up at the driver earlier, I had to take a step back for a moment and realize that anger has something else in common with depression and sadness: it's self-perpetuating and doesn't do much for your overall state of mind or well-being.

It's also philosophically inconsistent for me. I watched a few bits and pieces of the Robert Anton Wilson documentary, Maybe Logic the other night and was reinvigorated to follow through on some of the ideas that he extolled. He talked for a long time about the basic tenets of moral relativism, which is a concept I've never been able to deny, even in the deepest throes of Objectivist brainwashing. At one point he notes: "When you keep this in mind, it's very hard to stay mad at anyone."

There was a period almost four years ago when I suddenly came to a very deep understanding of relativism. It just happened while I was driving one day -- I had always believed theoretically in the concept, but all at once I was stricken by the reality of it, like a bolt of lightning. I felt like I was going to drive off of the road at the thought -- in one sense it would be a wreck, in another sense it would just be the reorganization of matter.

For weeks I walked around with this notion stuck so profoundly in my mind that, like Wilson, I found it impossible to feel or justify anger. Philosophical Prozac.

In one sense, the man who almost hit me in his SUV was a jerk and a lawbreaker. In another sense, he had no option but to do what he did. He did do it after all, compelled by an infinite collaboration of environmental, emotional, societal, and genetic factors over which he had no original control. In that sense, I find it very hard to stay mad of him.

But is there any room for choice or responsibility for extreme relativism like this? Is it a total fluke of coinciding factors that I came to this philosophy at all...and if I had no hand in it, what's the point of believing it?

If I'm correct in my high school reading of him, I think Sartre answered these questions by basically just saying: "Okay, so you've figured out the basic nature of existence. Now just keep living your life as if you hadn't." I guess I'll go on that for now.