Friday, December 9, 2005

Things I Hate 1

I am not a very angry person. I don't yell much, and it takes a lot to upset me. But there are a few things that get to me. And so I present an installment of my ongoing series: Things I Hate.

System of a Down: Look, I don't expect much from popular music these days. I'm not one of those elitists, I just think that Sturgeon's Law is universal: 90% of everything is crap. But if I'm going to enjoy some music, I require at the very least a modicum of talent. System, you guys suck more than a drunk cheerleader in the locker room on homecoming weekend. Seriously, horribly bad. I would go so far as to say you are the worst band ever, even worse than Nickelback. At least Nickelback has the skill to blatantly rip off Pearl Jam, Creed, Staind, and the other seven hundred identical bands around. You thought you'd be clever and try something new, but forgot that such things require innovation and vision, not utter shittiness. That was your mistake, and now my ears are paying the price every five minutes that I am foolish enough to listen to the radio.

Dirty Bohemian Hippies: I think every college campus has these types hanging around the fringes. Most have dreadlocks, there's usually a dog clinging to life on a chain nearby, one of the guys is wearing a skirt, they smell like the bowel contents of a three-week-old corpse, and they're probably going to bust out a hacky-sack or perhaps a fucking fifth-grade recorder if you stick around long enough. They will inevitably ask for money. I am a socialist, okay, I'm not down on the poor, or the homeless. It is hard to get and keep a job when you couldn't get a decent education, and you got raped at fifteen and couldn't get an abortion because the fundies keep fucking up the system, and you have a name like Shanikwa or Muhammed that turns the rather fair-skinned employers away. But you dirty folk aren't poor out of necessity, you're poor because you just decided you wanted to stand around all day instead of learning or working or creating. And maybe that's a valid choice. But would a shower every now and then kill you?

Christian Fundamentalists: I've got no real beef with Christianity. Honest. If you want to believe that an invisible man created the universe, then raped a virgin and the bastard child needed to die to somehow forgive all of humanity for the invisible man's original mistake of creating faulty humans in the first place, by all means. If it makes you feel better to think that if a plane crashes and somebody survived, it is because the arrogant invisible man heard them babbling to him and punished the other two hundred people because they didn't, no problem. If you believe that when the aforementioned faulty humans got all uppity, the invisible man told a guy to build a boat and then retrieve two of all untold millions of species -- including every disease-causing bacteria and virus -- who then fit on this boat and had enough food to survive for forty days without the carnivores eating the herbivores so that a flood greater than the total water capacity of the planet could wipe the slate clean, knock yourself out. If you think that in the near future, dragons and plagues and falling stars are going to show up before the bastard child of the invisible man appears in the sky with a sword in his mouth and rotting corpses are going to fly out of graves, who am I to argue? But I do have to ask: are you fucking insane?

Until next time...

2 comments:

  1. Your take on the "fundies" is harsh but accurate. Its a shame they make no effort to expand their minds. The truth is hard to take sometimes thats why we have comforting mechanisms like religon or alcohol.

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  2. Obviously, this post was a little tongue-in-cheek, but anyone who knows me knows that one of my biggest pet peeves is not religion in and of itself, but the free pass religion so often gets -- whether you're talking tax breaks or the general feeling that because it is personal it is free from being questioned.

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