So I was walking up Murray Avenue earlier today, sipping my “venti” mocha frappuccino (God dammit, I thought “venti” meant “medium” and “grande” meant “large!” Stupid pretentious Italian-esque names…) and trying to justify buying from a giant, evil corporation of +5 evilness. (Not that I’m entirely sure what makes Starbucks evil, unless you can count pretentiousness as evil, but it’s a giant corporation, so it must be evil somehow.) My reasoning boiled down to something like: “Well, I could buy coffee from the 61c Cafe further down the street, but I don’t want coffee. I want a chocolate milkshake with a thimble of espresso in it. Then I want to race home on a kick-ass sugar rush and italicize everything.”

My first love was when I was a young teenager, enduring the middle school years in a Catholic school. Let’s call her “Melanie.” She was beautiful, and I was in love. I never did work up the nerve to tell her how I felt, and when the eighth grade year came around, I went to a different school. So, I later learned, did Melanie. Only then did I learn that she had felt much the same. The terrible regret of what might have been, if only I had said something, haunted me for years. It drove me to never lose anything again for fear, and so I have. I have failed for incompetence, for ill luck, for bad timing, for all manner of other reasons–but since then, never for fear. I often wondered, reflecting on how much I have changed since then, what happened to Melanie; what path she traveled, where she was, how she had fared. Those questions were answered for me last Friday, when she stripped down in front of me and gyrated her vagina inches from my face so that I would stuff a single American dollar into her garter.

Let’s go over the facts. The basic, undeniable, I-thought-this-was-known-to-pretty-much-everyone facts.

1. People can’t find out about new music if they don’t hear it first.

On the first day of school, an exhuberant Jessica ran across the playground to her friend Brittany. Breathless with excitement, she described the new boy band she’d discovered over the summer. Their music was catchy, their lyrics made her swoon, and all the members of the band were drop-dead gorgeous. In fact, she was already picking out what wedding dress she would wear when T.J. inevitably proposed to her.

In 1833, Charles Lyell introduced the name “Holocene,” or “Recent Whole,” for our current geological epoch, stretching back only 10 or 12 thousand years. This makes the Holocene an incredibly young geological epoch, the shortest by far. The International Geological Congress in Bologna adopted the term in 1885, and it has been the accepted terminology ever since. The preceding geological epoch was the “last ice age,” the Pleistocene. It lasted for two million years, and while it was marked by significantly advanced glaciation, this was not the unremitting state of affairs. The Pleistocene had regular interglacial periods, during which the weather would turn warmer and the glaciers would temporarily recede–just like today. These interglacials typically lasted an average of 10 - 20 thousand years–just like ours. In short, the “Holocene” is not a new geological epoch, as much as we might think that the grandeur of human civilization’s appearance should be reflected in the ages of the earth. It is a perfectly typical interglacial. The Pleistocene–the “last ice age”–never ended. We’re still in it–we’re simply in a bit of a warm spell.

Reverend Davidson Loehr has written an extremely important article documenting the fact that the political and economic system of the United States is, at present, best described as fascism. I reccomend everyone check it out. You can find it at Information Clearing House: here.

However.

This is a very important article, but it contains ideas which are both extremely false and extremely dangerous. In particular, Reverend Loehr says:

I don’t read a lot of fiction anymore. I made a valiant (at least I think so) attempt to keep myself awake through Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel, but ultimately failed. And I want to learn how to live primitively! Maybe it was the asinine caveman stereotypes… and the stuffy prose… and her annoying habit of shoving our civilized social ills onto the shoulders of a species she didn’t even know enough about to know that they showed no signs of having a hierarchy, much less the “strict” one she describes, and what what the hell is up with Ayla inventing freaking everything?!

Officially announcing Anthropikon MMV, Friday - Sunday, 16 - 18 September, 2005, at Seneca Shadows campground in the breath-taking Monongahela National Forest in wild and wonderful West Virginia. We’ll be sharing a great weekend camping experience, sharing primitive skills and discussing all kinds of philosophical and pragmatic issues. There’s no agenda, but we think you’ll find this to be the closest thing to a tribe you’ll find short of a real one. Only 29 slots are still open, so contact us today to register!

Just an announcement to draw your attention to the sidebar, where, under “Pages,” you’ll now find “The Vault.” This is where we’ll be stashing all our delicious media. Of special note is Tyler Kimble’s incredible half-hour documentary, Yu Koyo Peya. It is primarily focused on Peak Oil and the role it may come to play in the collapse of our civilization. It does an excellent job of framing the problems in a primitivist view. His conclusion is probably one of the most inspirational visions of the “afterculture” that I’ve ever seen presented in such a cohesive fashion. We are also mirroring two of Nina Paley’s cartoons, The Wit and Wisdom of Cancer and The Stork. Finally, you’ll find a number of PDF’s listed, including papers I wrote for various college courses, interesting scientific papers, and such classics as Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons.”

As I type this, the hilariously blatant propaganda of Anderson Cooper 360° hums in the background. For those of you who didn’t get to see tonight’s special on Cindy Sheehan, let me sum it up for you: she is a filthy liar who hates America and cynically seeks fame.

You see, while Cindy Sheehan claims that Bush was cold and unsympathetic to her when he met with her a year ago, two other parents of dead soldiers found him rather compassionate. And John McCain was with Bush when he comforted some of the parents, and he said Bush was real nice! Therefore, Cindy Sheehan is a dirty, dirty liar.

On Sunday, August 7th, employees at a Texas Wal-Mart murdered a man for shoplifting some diapers and a BB gun. Well… to be fair, he was also taking a pair of sunglasses and a package of BBs. The terrible economic loss that Wal-Mart will suffer from these goods certainly justifies the torture and death of a 2-month-old boy’s father.