No One Cares — And That's Great!

Embracing Social Solitary Confinement

Truthfully, no one cares. Not your partner, not your father, not your mother, not your brother, nor your sister. This sounds bleak — that there is no support for you to depend on. It turns out that this is the best situation anyone in any era of human history has ever found themselves in. Humans are no longer bound to the thoughts of what others might say. Even if your monkey-brain pushes for community, the trajectory of human consciousness is now pointing toward something I like to call social solitary confinement.  

I have found myself in social solitary confinement for some years now. Social solitary confinement is the idea of voluntarily integrating yourself into society only to benefit your own goals, while emotionally detaching yourself from its members for your own mental health.  I think I have forgotten the time when I truly trusted people, but I don’t think this has made me a bad person. As a matter of fact, it has given me the opposite effect: I give a lot to others because I feel great knowing I have given a lot. Everything great that you do has a positive mental effect on yourself. Doing great things allows you to see injustices done to you with clarity. You learn what is right and wrong. This is a more powerful tool than religion, which normally encourages good deeds because you’ll “go to heaven” or be “reincarnated.”  

I Didn't Order Any Spiders

What I find funny now is not what I would have found funny 10 years ago. Tastes change and people move on. I believe the funniest humor can come from irony and ridiculous situations. Humor comes from when someone goes out of their way to put a character in ridiculous situations that is actually important to a plot, or even have a song that is over the top in production and guitar playing to mock songs with over the top production and guitar playing. The possibilities are endless once we enter this realm of humor, and it only gets better as time passes.

I have always been into music and video games growing up. I never wanted to go ahead and listen to a comedy special or even cared for stand-up. This was so until one year in high school, my friend made me listen to Longmont Potion Castle. Longmont Potion Castle is the pseudonym for a collection of experimental prank call tapes that an anonymous guy in a metal band does in his free time. They aren't your standard Bart Simpson fake name bar prank call. Instead, he calls up different people to get a reaction out of them. His favorite thing to do is to ask stores for things that don't exist or to ask for C.O.D for deliveries he makes up on the spot. You would think people hang up when they're told they are getting something delivered. There was this one tape that LPC released in 1998 called Live From Longmont Potion Castle.

Old Punks and Agitation

Punk is a big chunk of my life and I am more than happy to write anything about it, as I have always had a lot to say about it. Especially its history and the punks I've met.

[The establishment] may also entice members of the agitation to join the establishment by offering them positions within the institution, or they may co-opt the agitator's ideas or rhetoric. Singer James Taylor illustrated how the establishment can adjust when he described what happened to many of the counterculture's ideas and values: "All the things we considered to be revolutionary were co-opted by the big corporations — our music, our radio, the record companies, our dress." — Bowers, Chapter 1.