Category: WTF

On The Murder of 26 Teachers and Children in Connecticut

My son, who attends an elementary school, is a little freaked out by the fact that someone would go to an elementary school and gun down little children.

I’m freaked out too.

I don’t understand this. This is quite possibly the single most horrific thing I can imagine a single person doing. His only connection to the school was that his mother was a teacher there. I come from a family of teachers. My mother is a teacher. I’m an empathetic person, but I still cannot fathom someone who could do this. My empathies go to the children who at ages 5 to 10 had to fear for their lives, and many lost them.

What happened today is a wound on our collective psyche, more deadly and more horrific than Columbine. And already the pundits are turning today’s events political. I’m disgusted by this.

Today is not the day to cry out for gun control, although I have strong feelings on that issue. Today is not the day to talk about God in schools, although I have strong feelings about that as well. Today is not the day to make your political argument on the backs of 20 murdered children. Keep it to yourself today. We can talk about these issues another day, but today, go to your children and hug them. Appreciate that you have them, and that they’re ok. I just did.

I’m a what???

I find that sometimes people assume that because I unabashedly and vocally support gay marriage and homosexual equality, that I must be gay. I find this incredibly amusing. That is similar to saying that if I support racial equality, I must be black. Or if I support gender equality, I must be a woman. Or if I support animal rights, I must be a dog.

I am a white heterosexual middle class [human] male. I am privileged in every conceivable way with the exception of my lack of religion. I have nothing tangible to gain by supporting equal rights. I do so because it is right. I reasoned myself into this viewpoint, because I can find no logical reason that any human because of their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or any other method by which we arbitrarily segregate ourselves should be denied any rights that are given to others, including myself.

I support equal rights with no expectation of a reward in an afterlife, but ironically those who do believe in an afterlife tend to be those who do not support equal rights. By accident of birth I receive that which should be given to every human regardless of the genetics of their own birth.

If you do not support equality in any of the forms in which it has had to be fought for, why?

Humans is dumb

To be honest, I don’t blog here for you, I blog here for me. I enjoy getting a little attention just like everyone else, but if I never got another page hit, I’d still keep blogging. It’s like therapy. I put the innermost thoughts and feelings out here for the world to read, knowing that nobody (or at least mostly nobody) I know reads this shit.

That said, every so often I’m a little curious if anybody is reading it, and if so, how they got here. One of the nice things about a blogger account is the fact that they give you those stats for free.

But then, of course, I’m inevitably disappointed, as life is wont to do. How do most people find my blog? One of three ways.

  1. That stupid metaphysical post from a couple of years ago. I fucking hate that post. I’m tempted daily to delete the fucker.  That one seems to get the most hits.
  2. You may have noticed that many of my pictures from older posts are missing. That is, unfortunately, permanent, and the reasons are complex. Well, not that complex, but I’m not going into it today anyway. Even so, I seem to get a lot of hits on my Religion series of posts, where I made a series of demotivational posters titled “Religion: I’m not afraid of gods, I’m afraid of their followers” and put several images of religious abuse including the twin towers. One of them gets a lot of hits. Which one? the stack of naked men from Guantanamo. Seriously? You sick fuckers.
  3. I get a lot of hits for some combination of the words “Lindsey Lohan nude”. Because a while ago I put up a joke post titled that which had basically no content. Yep, I get the guys looking for nude pictures of Lindsey Lohan. You sick fuckers.

I was hoping to get a mild following of people with similar issues, possibly people who want to engage in dialogue. As you can see, I have almost no comments whatsoever. It’s not the kind of thing to drive me off from writing this blog, like I said, I don’t do this for you people, but I was hoping for a little reassurance that the rest of the human race isn’t made up of a bunch of sick fuckers. Still waiting.

It’s gonna hurt like a sonofabitch when…

So I finally did it today.

Anybody that’s been following me on my blog or on twitter knows that I’ve been struggling with a recent break up. What’s been hardest about the breakup is the abruptness and the finality of it. Not even a post break up “hey let’s get together for coffee and talk about this” sort of thing, just a “go the fuck away” e-mail and then pretty much nothing.

Well, not completely nothing, that’s not fair, but a fair amount of surfacy shit. Frankly that kind of crap pisses me off. If we’re going to try to be friends afterwards, be my friend. Don’t give me small talk. I hate that shit. If you want to talk surfacy bullshit, find someone else to talk to.

But that’s neither here nor there.

I’ve been trying for weeks, nay, nearly two months now, to try to get a little time to talk about things. She seems dead set against that. Having dropped the meds that seemed to have been giving me extreme anxiety and obsessive tendencies, I’ve returned to a slightly more normal frame of mind. It’s a good thing, but there’s been a few side effects I wasn’t happy with. Like the good memories starting to fade. I wanted to keep those, but… well, what the fuck. I think trying to keep them was making things harder for me to handle.

I had a bizarre dream about her last week as the meds were starting to fade. It was very strange. I don’t often remember my dreams, so when I do, you know it was somehow kind of jarring. In this dream, we were actually having the post-break up talk. We were in a house, for some reason, I think this was a house we were going to move in to. Don’t ask me, I had no plans or intentions to move in with her, but there it is. In the dream, she told me she had been pregnant, and she had an abortion. Within the context of the dream, this hurt. In fairness, I had mixed feelings, but the strongest one was that she had kept this from me. It’s the sort of thing I would have wanted to know, know what I mean? She was a little harsh about telling me this too, like there was some kind of simmering anger just under the surface. It wasn’t apologetic or caring at all. I’ve kind of come to see her this way somewhat. Side effect of the last couple of months, I suppose.

So as little as a few weeks ago, I would have woken from this dream and immediately felt despair. That was me from a few weeks ago under the meds and obsessing and anxious. When I woke up, I was a little sad, but mostly annoyed that I had had another dream about her. I kind of want that shit to stop already. I’m ready to move on now. Would my subconscious please fucking cooperate now thank you very much?

So I’ve written a couple of notes to her, but I never sent them. I waited, then deleted it later. I wrote several of these. Each successive one a little less crazy than the last. Finally I lost all desire to do this at all. Until today. In my therapy session today I told the therapist about the dream. Basically what he said was that everything in a dream is some kind of metaphor for what’s going on with us. His best guess was that the pregnancy and abortion was the relationship. It started suddenly, and just as suddenly she ended it. Yeah, I can see that.

At the same time, I’ve been starting to see how me-on-the-meds must have seemed to her. In a way I can’t really blame her for freaking out and cutting me out of her life. I was probably a little…. ahem… intense. That’s not me so much on a normal basis, so at the same time I kind of feel like I didn’t really get a fair shake, but who the fuck said life was fair, eh? I had my shot, I blew it, it’s over. Too bad, so sad, get the fuck out.

So I wrote one last note today, basically saying that I get how I must have made her feel, and apologized for it. Sent it, and now, well, I think I’m done. That’s as close to closure as I’m going to get. I doubt she even read it, but that wasn’t really the point. I had my say finally, and she’s free to respond if she wants to. I always make time for people who are important to me. The opposite isn’t always true though.

What’s most surprising about the last week or so is how my attitude has basically turned to “Meh”. It’s over, I know it’s over, and it doesn’t really bug me all that much anymore. I’m finally starting to move on with my life, do a few hobbies, actually get work done at work. Somewhat. The open office bullshit at work is fucking killing me. I need a little privacy to get anything done, but that’s a whole nother rant.

The “Meh” attitude is cropping up in other places too. Without going into too many details for various reasons, someone else did something that just a few weeks ago would have hurt me severely. This last week, it bothered me for a little bit then I pretty much said “meh, fuck it” and moved on. Another potential relationship was shut down I was ok with it. Well, not ok, I just feel sort of numb to it all now. Sort of like watching this shit happen to someone else in a movie.

I’m still suffering depression, but it’s just depression now. More of a general malaise. The meds I was on increase dopamine, which might be good for me a little later down the road, but I need heal now, so I’m going to stay off of them a little longer.

So, I suppose that was my good-bye letter. I’m ok with this relationship ending as much as I can be, and I wish her well. I hope she finds that right guy she’s hoping for, but I think she’s got her own issues to deal with first. I would have been happy standing by her side as she did so, but she didn’t want me there. What’cha gonna do?

But women, one parting piece of advice. If you’re going to break up with a guy, for whatever reason, fucking talk to him. Don’t break up over e-mail then refuse to talk in any form with him other than text. That’s fucking bullshit, and it’s chickenshit.

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You do not have the right to not be offended.

Facebook is always an interesting place, where an eclectic assortment of ideas tent to bubble around the surface. I just saw a picture go by of a woman holding a sign (it’s a popular meme) which read something to the effect of

I’m an American, but I would never make a video that mocks your faith. I am offended by that. Yadda yadda, don’t remember the exact words.

So my initial gut reaction is

Yeah, let them know how kind and understanding and tolerant Americans are.

Then I think

The fuck we are…

Then I think

The fuck! I don’t agree with that sentiment at all.

Call me an asshole. I am. But I haven’t been following the events that have occurred in the middle east recently too closely, but as I understand it, it goes a little something like this. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on any of this.

  1. Some yahoo makes a video that mocks Islam.
  2. Muslims across the middle east are mortally offended by it.
  3. Said “peaceful” Muslims riot in response to their offense at the video.
  4. People die.
  5. Video maker is now a bad guy, Americans everywhere condemn him

I have a slight problem with this. To illustrate my point, let’s take this same scenario but turn it on it’s side a little bit. Let’s say it went a little like this:

  1. Some religious yahoo makes a video mocking Atheists, or makes false claims about them. Say, something like this:
  2. Atheists across the country are mortally offended by it.
  3. Atheist riots occur across the country in response to the offensive video.
  4. People die.
  5. Who is/are the bad guy(s) now?

Bill O’Reilly would shit himself with pleasure if that happened. His “War on Christianity” would hit non-stop status.

The point is this: You do NOT have the right to not be offended.

I don’t care who you are or where you live or what bronze age myths you believe or choose not to believe. You do not have the right to kill because you’re offended by something. A few years ago I condemned a nutjob pastor from Florida for threatening to burn a stack of Korans which set off a set of riots in the middle east which put American lives at risk. I was wrong. I take that back. While I still think he’s a dipshit and should not have done it, the blame for this was put squarely on the wrong shoulders. It should have gone on the shoulders of the people actually doing the killing, not the fuckwad who pissed them off enough to do it.

I don’t know what the content of this video is, and I don’t care. It could show Muhammed being prison raped for all I care, that’s not the point. The point is that no video gives anybody the right to kill. And only religion seems to get a pass on this. Only religion could inspire someone to be offended enough to kill. Only the assault of someone’s precious religious beliefs make us sympathize with murderers. I don’t give a fuck what was in that video, those people who killed others are murderers, period.

Sure, Let Me Debase Myself And Lie Down In This Puddle So You Can Walk Over Me My Dear.

This is going to be another post about my relationship issues. If you don’t like those kind of posts, feel free to go somewhere else. You know what, fuck you. This is my fucking blog, and I’ll blog whatever the fuck I want.

So basically I had a really shitty day today. I found out that not only had the short sale on my house fallen through, but that today was auction day. In other words, I found out exactly too late to do anything about it. Even if I could have done anything about it. So I am no longer a home owner. In fairness, I hadn’t lived there in two years anyway. The worst part about it is the major hit my credit rating is going to take. Foreclosures stay on for ten years, not seven. My ex wife fucked me pretty good on this one. She did it intentionally, I’m sure, but the best part of the whole thing is where she says it’s my fault. No, I’m not kidding. She refused to find any kind of work whatsoever, or to support herself or her children in any way whatsoever, stopped paying the mortgage, and made sure the house went to foreclosure. And it’s my fault. You seriously can’t make this shit up.

Add to that the fact that she wants to move out of district so that she can move somewhere she can afford to. The unbelievable injustice of the fact that a father who wanted his children and was perfectly capable of supporting them and could have easily kept them in the good school district in which they live lost them to a mother who refuses to support herself or her children in any way shape or form and cannot afford to keep them in the school district, but wants to move them to a poorer school district. Somehow she has been determined to be the better parent. Again, you can’t make this shit up. If somebody put this in a book it would be deemed implausible. But yet, it happened.

And just for good measure, I found out my copay for my therapist is so high that I can’t afford it. So not only am I dealing with a ridiculous divorce, an insane financial situation as a result, and a difficult breakup with my ex girlfriend, but I can’t even afford therapy anymore. At times like this I start to wonder if there is a god, because if there is, she hates me. It seems implausible that all of this could happen to one, basically good person. Yet, it did.

So moving on, my ex girlfriend and I are occasionally talking again. Yesterday she had some crap happen, so being the good friend that I am, I stopped what I was doing and made time to listen. Because that’s what I do. It actually wasn’t all that convenient for me to do so, but I did anyway. And not just because some part of me still hopes that I can salvage a relationship out of this. I would do this for pretty much any friend.

Then today all of this happens, and I need someone to talk to. Guess how many people were available for me? Yep. Nobody. Not even my therapist, because… well… fuck you republicans and your fucked up privatized health care. This system only works for the wealthy. Fuck you. And if you’re not wealthy and support these fuckers, fuck you too. You’re fucking me as well as yourself, and that makes you a fucking moron. Fuck you.

So I’m thinking tonight, because, well, the only person I have to talk to is myself. So if you say I’m crazy for talking to myself, fuck you. You weren’t here for me either, fuck wad. And I realize something: that was my whole relationship with her. She would get frequent headaches, I would rush over there and give her a long backrub. Number of backrubs received: 0. Even my ex wife had a better record than that. Every time she had something going on, I would patiently sit there and listen to her. When I felt the need to unload about  something, I got some variation of “shit or get off the pot”. If I got irritated about that, her feelings got hurt.

And then I think “Exactly what about this relationship am I missing?” It was a little one sided. Actually it was a lot one sided. Yet, I still miss her and would probably go back if I could. Fucking why? What about this woman am I missing? Why am I so drawn to her? These are questions I can’t answer. My only guess is that there was more to it than that for me. She was at least an intellectual equal, and probably an intellectual superior. She had her own career and life. She was independent and strong. She made a difference in peoples lives. She was good at what she does. And something about her is magic. Her voice, her mannerisms, everything. I can’t explain it. Basically it’s not a good relationship for me. I know this intellectually. My heart will catch up eventually, I just have to be strong for now. That’s the real trick though. I’m not strong.

Anyway, just random thoughts. I had nobody to share this with, so of course it goes out to the world  on my blog. I suppose it’s all part of learning to be alone. Being alone sucks ass, by the way.

Oooh, I HATE that guy…

I’ve been reading a book called Quiet about the introverted/extroverted personality types. My ex girlfriend had recently read it and described it to me, and the topic interested me. Anybody who gets to know me intimately knows I’m an introvert, but it’s not always obvious to everybody. I’m certainly not the “Hi how ya doin lemme kiss your baby” type of extrovert, but I try to not be too soft spoken at work. Maybe it’s more obvious than I think. When I told my ex girlfriend that I was an introvert, her response was “Duh!”.

What’s most interesting though, is that I’m getting a better handle on exactly what kind of introvert I am. It’s not all good news. The most recent chapter revealed to me that I’m the kind of introvert who adjusts to social situations based on cues. I get my ideas about how to behave and interact with others based on cues I receive from them. In other words, I’m a different person to each person I interact with. Kind of like that salt monster from the early Star Trek episode. Put me in a room with too many people and I don’t know who the fuck to be. This is one of the reasons I have this blog and my twitter account, it’s about the only time I really get to be the real me, however pathetic that might be.

I found myself in orchestra rehearsal the other night being the extrovert. Socializing with this person, then with that person. To be honest, I hate socializing. I’m not half bad at it when I have to be though. I can be quite animated and entertaining when the situation calls for it.

I have to wonder if this is a factor in my string of failed relationships. It’s certainly something to bring up with the therapist. This personality type can be viewed by others as deceptive and deceitful. I really don’t see myself that way, but I have to wonder if that’s how my personality type comes off. It’s really more about trying to fit in and not do social faux pas. A basic fear of rejection. An extreme fear of rejection. And I take it hard when I am rejected, like my recent break up. This could be a factor in why I stayed in a marriage that was obviously broken for almost the entire duration for far longer than I should have. Long enough to have two kids, and for those kids to grow up to be big enough to be damaged by the ensuing brutal divorce.

I’ve noticed a trend recently: people don’t seek me out. Let me try to explain that more. If I don’t try to start some kind of interaction with my friends, the interaction tends to not happen. It reminds me a little of the game The Sims. In the game, if you don’t constantly call up your friends, the relationship atrophies and they stop being your friend. However, in the game if you don’t call your friends for a while, they’ll call you and say “what the fuck, dude?” In real life that second part doesn’t seem to happen with me. The relationship still atrophies, but it seems like if I’m the only one interested in preventing that. If I don’t call for a while, nobody calls me.

This worries me a little. Is there something in my personality that repulses people? Is it this quirk of adjusting my personality to each person? Does this drive people off? Am I really that guy? The guy nobody really wants to hang out with but is willing to put up with so that they don’t come off as a jerk? Introspection never goes well for me. I keep coming up with this kind of crap.

I would really like to know, though, why this seems to be the case. There seems to be some basic flaw in my personality that makes people like me ok but not really want to be around me more than they have to. I don’t know what it is yet, or how to fix it. I need to fix it though, or I’ll never have a successful relationship. I don’t count my ex as a successful relationship. She was wasn’t in it for any kind of interest in me, she was in it because she could live off of me without having to have a life of her own. She still does. Thank you, state of Kansas.

Anyway, no great revelations in this post, just questions that I don’t have answers for yet. Maybe I’ll have some in the weeks to come.

Atheism+: What the F*** is it???

During one of my frequent twitter rants that I’ve come to be known for, I ran across a tag that kept coming up in the tweets of others that I follow: AtheismPlus. I was intrigued. I started asking around, doing searches, and eventually ran across a blog post by Richard Carrier with seems to have started the whole movement. I believe it was this one: http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/2207/. Feel free to read it for yourself. It’s ok, I’ll wait.

Did you read it? It’s ok, I’ll wait, I don’t mind, you should go read it first. It’s not the last blog post link I’m going to send you to. Go ahead.

Ok, I’ll take your word for it. So my take on it was: Hm, sounds like they’re taking Humanism and rebranding it as AtheismPlus. But there’s more to it than that. The whole idea seems to be about taking these people and saying we don’t want these other people so we’re going to have a new movement that’s just the people who believe what we like.

Don’t get me wrong, the beliefs they espouse are good ones, and I could easily join the AtheismPlus movement without cognitive dissonance. Richard Carrier is also a writer and speaker that I greatly respect. I saw him at Skepticon IV last year, and really liked his talks. But what bothered me is this: this is exactly what happened to religion. I don’t mean Hindus vs. Muslims vs. Christians vs. Mormons, but Lutherans vs. Baptists vs. Methodists vs. [about 600 other denominations here]. I don’t think this is going to work out the way they want it to. If the atheist movement goes down this path of splintering into smaller and smaller groups, the atheist movement as we know it will falter and die. We are more effective now than we have ever been because we are united, and the religious can no longer ignore us. If we become a bunch of small denominations of atheism, they can ignore us again.

Not to mention the fact that when you add a belief system to atheism, you take one of the more ridiculous arguments of the theists, that atheism is just another religion, and make it suddenly true. I kinda have a problem with that. Humanism starts out with the precept that it’s a belief system, and atheism is one of the ideas that it is based on, but it doesn’t try to rebrand atheism. It’s something else entirely. I consider myself to be a humanist, even though I’m not very involved with them.

So, basically I said all this shit, and a shitstorm came back at me. One side coopted me as an ally, another side told me I just didn’t get it. I managed to avoid some of the hatefulness that seems to be going around out there, but it still freaked me the fuck out.

Many well known personas whom I normally respect in the atheism movement seem to be into this and promoting it. A handful of others seem to be opposing it. Apparently I’m supposed to hate Thunderf00t now. Fuck that.

A brilliant, well thought out blog post by someone I consider a twitter friend is here on the subject: http://evolutionchild.com/2012/08/25/a-take-me-to-your-leader/

You didn’t read that, go back and read it now. It’s one of the best posts on the topic I’ve seen yet, and largely sums up how I feel as well. I’ll wait.

I was a little freaked out by all of this, and I don’t like where it’s going, but it seems to be happening all the same. So here’s my final say on the matter. Please don’t come to me with any more AtheismPlus crap after this.

I quit.

I want out of the atheism movement all together. I am not going to pick “sides”. I am not going to pick a denomination of atheism. That’s bullshit. I was on my own before I found the atheism movement, and I can be on my own again. Atheism was already rather disorganized before this and now I apparently have to pick a new denomination. Fuck no. I’m the Cowboy. That’s what I am, and that’s all I need to be. I’m an atheist, I’m a liberal (well, not exactly but just roll with me here a minute), I’m a musician, I’m a lover, I’m a writer, I’m a geek. I’ll watch you guys from a distance and see where things go before I decide if I want back in.

Web anonymity is a relative concept

As I’m going though the obligatory post-WTF-Just-happened breakup retrospective, It occurred to me that the Dr. Cowboy persona has a few too many tracks back to me. It’s just a little too intertwined with my real identity. When your girlfriend who just dumped you has a close family member who works for a rather high profile web company which happens to know a lot of information about, well, pretty much everybody, you realize that it’s possible that may have been a factor.

Soooo…. I’ve made a few changes to put a little more separation between the Dr. Cowboy persona and my real life. They need to remain separate for various reasons, not the least of which is I bitch a lot about my life here, and it’s not necessarily a good idea for those close to me to know about it. Anonymity is a good thing. It protects my professional career from my private ranting, and protects those close to me from being hurt. Well, except for the handful of people who know me in real life who also know about this blog. That can’t be helped.

At any rate, the number of touch points between my personal/professional life and the Dr. Cowboy persona has been significantly reduced. It’s still possible to track me down, but it’s a lot harder now. There’s a few side effects to that. The most notable being that past posts are still tied to a blogger profile that I’ve shut down as much as possible. Future posts will occur under this profile, but it’s still me.