Distractions Will Destroy Us.

I really wish I could think about anything else to write about, I really do.

I mean, I could blog my latest open-notebook poem, but that’d be way too hipster for Tumblr and we’d all get those The Oatmeal animations eating the motherboard. I’m not that severe.

Instead, I’m writing my second-to-last English department thesis on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and I can’t help but write a blog post about how awesome this novel is.

I read this in my junior year of high school, when I was first figuring out what it was to be a human being that educators didn’t understand. I found solace in relating to Helmholtz Watson, the poet in the story, whose individualism no one really understood. So there’s that, right?

This is like the third time I’ve read this book this year. I’ve identified myself as a Huxleyist (not as a Marxist, which I once thought). I’ve read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. I fucking loved it. I can’t not notice advertising and blatant appeals to the masses anymore.

It’s made me a better poet. I see through the bullshit when I don’t want to fully accept it, and that makes me appreciate language more. The only person other than Huxley I can think of when I say that is George Carlin. Who was also a Huxleyist.

Ars Woetica

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few days reading over passages I flagged when I read 1984 and Brave New World back in high school. I’ve also been reading some of my own academic writing from my first few years in college, and I’ve noticed that a lot of my writing contains the basic principles of, well, if Aldous Huxley and George Orwell had a love child.
A paranoid, society-hating love child.
Even some of my entries on this blog have this characteristic. There are a few posts from when I was in the Economics course (a place where I learned very quickly - toward the end of the semester albeit - that I did not belong in the classical mindset), where I cited certain instances that made me contemplate American consumerism and, well, pettiness.
I found two basic, slightly unrefined rants from my sophomore year, where I mused over the concept of the modern distraction.

I do have to say, I guess my write-child takes after Huxley more. Though it does have Orwell’s eyes. And paranoia that the government will stifle intellectualism until it suffocates. But I love my style no matter what it grows up to be. It’s my child, after all.

I find that a lot of people tend to dislike 1984 and Brave New World because they’re so pessimistic about science, politics, and the future of humanity.
But then again, I guess that’s why I like them.

Al Gore Facts

I was watching An Inconvenient Truth in a tired stupor, and somehow, my twitter quickly became flooded with “Al Gore Facts.” I believe it started when I noticed that my ripped copy of the film had Spanish subtitles, and I quipped that “Al Gore can be boring in two different languages at the same time.” I apologized, saying that he was pretty cool in my book, but in my book, he’d be a kung-fu master battling kung-fu treachery. Here’s what happened:

• If Al Gore was a kung-fu master, he’d use a scissor kick instead of a scissor lift.
• Al Gore doesn’t need a recount, he needs a re-counter-kick.
• Al Gore was the Vice President because that’s where he put the balls of people who disagreed with him. In a fucking vice.
• Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize because his kung-fu kicks are more powerful than dynamite.
• Al Gore churns out three things: award-winning documentary films, best-selling books, and pure, unadulterated pain.
• Al Gore’s Prius is a motherfucking Transformer.
• Al Gore wanted to make an apple pie from scratch, so he traveled back in time and created the universe.
• Al Gore won’t run for President again because “running” is too slow of a pace.
• Al Gore didn’t “invent” the internet. Al Gore looked at his computer screen and the internet was scared into being.