jeremyjarratt.com

I was raised as an ordinary kid in a family that didn’t really attend church every single Sun-day but still did so frequently. My friend Mark Carper took me to an anti-rock & roll preacher sideshow at his church, the Colonial Baptist Church in the hills to the East of Nuke City. It was through that incalculably bizarre experience that i came to accept Christ the Redeemer into my heart, lungs, knees, ears, nose, and throat. I even destroyed some of my favorite LPs.

Later i became more moderate.

My grandparents (she a lapsed Catholic, i’m not too sure what he was before they became Methodists), right-thinking they were, didn’t have me baptized, reasoning that i’d do it myself if that’s what i truly wanted. So at the age of 14 i cleansed my spirit like good old St. John (but with just a dab of water, not a whole damn river).

But the whole time i was a devout Christian, i kept asking questions of our Sunday School teachers: Why are there so many religions? How do we know that Buddhism isn’t the one true religion? If killing is wrong, why does god kill so many people all the time when he gets in his moods? &c.

I’d also heard about how the Beatles found enlightenment in the East, and wondered how it could be that those four English chaps could make records so vastly incomparably better than our own Pat Boone, he of such good moral standing and strong Christian faith.

By and by, i grew up, started smoking cigarettes and screwing girls and reading books of dubious moral value. I got turned on to pot and LSD and started realizing that there is so very much more to the universe than this nice, tidy little story we’re all told in Sunday School. I realized that there are simply cultures that are incompatible with the overall Christian blueprint, much revised over the centuries as it had become. It seemed to me that Christianity obviously couldn’t be the One True Religion it heralded itself to be.

Then my uncle Stephen found himself dying from AIDS. Why should god be so incredibly crappy to us humans? After he died, my grandmother noticed that his name was no longer printed in the church directory under our family’s listing. She was understandably incensed, having taken that as an indirect denial of his continued presence as part of the hallowed twinkling in the Lord’s eyes. She pretty much lost her shit over that.

That was the final straw for me as well. I figured out real quick that Christianity, at least in its current incarnation, is about the most phony fucking gig in town.

I explored elsewhere: first Wicca, then paganism and other namby-pamby New Age spiritualities, then North American Indian shamanism, then Taoism, then Buddhism, then Hinduism, then various forms of the occult, then Qabala Judaism (not the Hollywood crap), then more occultism (including Satanism). When i finally found Eris and read the Principia Discordia (i am now a full-ass Pope*), and dove into the Church of the SubGenius (where i am a reverend), i realized what i should have known all along: all religions are full of crap. As far as i can tell, they all DO point to the same thing: lies and self-heresy. I took from all this only two things: the concept of WILL (Crowley) aka INTENT (Castaneda), and the simple damn idea that you should be nice to your fellow organisms, whoever they are, avoiding stupid, fruitless endeavors like hitting them over their heads with rocks (wherever possible).

Having had an interest in science from a young age, i always valued truth over fiction, lies, fabrications, or embellishments. I still see truth as an unalterable thing: all things being measurable, one must have mass and either be at rest or in motion. Relativity does not mean that these values are subjective. Killing another human being cannot possibly be “wrong” for one person, but “right” for another. It is either right or it is wrong. The fact that individual humans can measure the same thing and come up with wildly varying answers only points out the flaws in each of our lenses. There must be a correct solution which is not invalidated by any other.

Therefore, i reject god in all its forms, because it makes no sense in the context of the rest of nature which we have studied for the same number of millenia and have a pretty good grasp of in contrast.

*actually, my title is CounterPope

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Burrito King is crazy awesome. I just had the angriest salsa of my life. Way good everything else, whatever the hell it was.

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Here’s a list of some cool and useful stuff i’ve compiled for Holly’s brother. I thought i’d share it here.

You never have to worry about spyware, adware, viruses, trojans, worms, or other malware, because i’ve already used this stuff, plus i only use apps and sites that are already well-known to be pretty friggin’ excellent. Every one of these sites and apps come with a solid reputation.

All of this stuff is 100% free, except for a few that you can optionally pay for, like Reaper (audio recording). Naturally, i do not recommend downloading pirated software or media content.

Awesome free stuff you have to have, or at least need to know about:

System utilities and just plain excellent basics

• CCleaner
  • http://www.ccleaner.com/
  • Formerly known as Crap Cleaner, this thing wipes out a great deal of the bad stuff that gets into your system
• AVG antivirus
  • http://free.avg.com/
  • free antivirus, one of the best (much better than McAfee or Symantec or the paid ones)
• Avast antivirus
  • http://www.avast.com/
  • also free, also one of the best (also much better than the paid AV apps)
• OpenOffice
  • http://www.openoffice.org/
  • free, open source replacement for MS Office. Includes everything you need!
• Spybot S&D
  • http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
  • Wicked awesome anti-malware
• Firefox, Opera, Chrome
  • Because Internet Exploder just plain sucks and is not secure, try one of these awesome browsers:
  • http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
    • My favorite, you can download every useful plugin imaginable for it. Would you like it to do something different, or look different? No problem.
      • Visit http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox for anything you could ever need it to do.
  • http://www.opera.com/
  • http://www.google.com/chrome

Cool, useful stuff for your desktop

• Rocketdock (desktop dock)
  • http://rocketdock.com/
  • Clean your desktop by putting everything in a fancy-schmancy dock. Lots of cool goodies for it!
• Rainmeter (system monitor)
  • http://www.ipi.fi/~rainy/legacy.html
  • Able to display all kinds of system stats.
  • See also: http://customize.org/transmothra/gallery – i made a config for it.
    • Fits on screens 1440 pixels wide but can be modified.
    • You might have to go into display properties to crank up your display resolution.
• Stickies (post-it notes)
  • http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/stickies/
  • Like having Post-It notes for your desktop. Even comes with an alarm/timer. You can save, send, and share too.

Audio, video, media

• Audacity (audio)
  • http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
  • Great for recording audio, also has some cool plugins for editing/warping sound.
• Reaper (audio)
  • http://www.cockos.com/reaper/
  • Like having ProTools, only better. Trent Reznor uses it.
• foobar2000 (music)
  • http://www.foobar2000.org/
  • Great music player, and lightweight.
• VLC (media player)
  • http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
  • Great video player. Looks daunting, but all you have to do is play video or audio files. It’s one of the few that can open almost any file type. Can also convert, stream, save, etc.
• GIMP (images)
  • http://www.gimp.org/
  • Like Photoshop, but a little scarier-looking. A couple of hours playing with it and you’ll get the hang of it. Powerful.
• Irfanview (images)
  • http://www.irfanview.com/
  • Great, fast image viewer. Can also edit, make icons, convert, batch process, etc., etc., etc.
• DVDFlick (DVD authoring)
  • http://www.dvdflick.net/
  • Put your legally questionable downloaded movies on DVD with menus and everything! Not the best, but really easy to use.
• uTorrent (downloading)
  • http://www.utorrent.com/
  • Download anything you want with this.
  • Best sites for searching are:
    • http://www.mininova.org/
    • http://btjunkie.org/
    • Obviously, use at your own risk. Read comments, look at details, and install anti-malware apps first. BTjunkie even has icons for # of ‘good/bad’ reports per torrent, so make sure to check them out.
      • You can use Peer Guardian to hide your IP address while you’re downloading legally questionable content. Not perfect, but better than nothing.
        • http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/
• TVersity (media center)
  • http://tversity.com/
  • Like Windows Media Center, but free and better. Download podcasts and videocasts and share your video across your home network.
  • If you have an Xbox or some other device for your TV, you can even watch your hard-drive movies/music/photos on TV. Super awesome.

Web sites that you will presently become completely, slobber-mouth addicted to, because they are awesome and will make you WIN.

• Google Calendar
  • http://www.google.com/calendar/
  • You can even remind yourself of appointments via email or SMS to your mobile phone! You can also share calendar events and add other people’s events to yours.
• Lifehacker
  • http://lifehacker.com/
  • Learn how to make life easier, cooler, better, and awesomer. Comes in many flavors, from real-world DIY projects to digital shortcuts
  • I really cannot say enough good about this site. Some of the best tips, tricks, and suggestions i’ve ever found for all areas of life, both digital and in meatspace.
  • Seriously. Wicked awesome.
    • See also: Instructables (my favorite Instructable ever: How to perfectly fold T-shirts in seconds)
• Facebook
  • http://facebook.com/
  • Find old friends. Avoid others. Lots of dumb widgets, and you can “poke” people until their brains bleed. Annoying, but awesome too.
• Picasa
  • http://picaseweb.google.com/
  • Share photos, sync online with folders, etc.
• Flickr
  • http://flickr.com/
  • Photo sharing
• Gmail
  • http://mail.google.com/
  • Best email app ever.
• Google Reader
  • http://www.google.com/reader/
  • Keep up with news, blogs, or anything with an RSS feed with this. Addictive and awesome.
• Twitter
  • http://twitter.com/
  • Like a micro-sized blog. Send “tweets” from your cell phone or via web.
• Wordpress
  • http://wordpress.com/
  • Actual blogging. Best platform there is. Very customizable.
• Indeed
  • http://indeed.com/
  • Job search
• LinkedIn
  • http://linkedin.com/
  • social networking, career-oriented.
• Craigslist
  • http://craigslist.com/
  • Pretty much everything. Ugly but made out of 100% pure WIN!
• BoingBoing
  • http://boingboing.net/
  • “A directory of wonderful things” – weird, cool stuff, plus news you might not hear about elsewhere.
• Digg
  • http://digg.com/
  • Social news site. Most popular submitted stories rise to the top. Addictive, interesting, and easy.
• last.fm
  • http://last.fm/
  • Social networking, music-style. Also download their desktop player. With that you can play music tagged with descriptive keywords. For fun, try typing in “unlistenable.”

If you’re ever looking for killer software (or a web site) that does ‘X, Y, and/or Z,’ just let me know and i’ll point you to something good, safe, fun, and useful.

My username is “transmothra” on most sites – if you run into me online be sure to say hello!

Popularity: unranked [?]

Tonight, after i’d picked up Holly from her car pool in Bellbrook, we went to the Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant there on Wilmington Pike to grab a bite to eat.

Wow, was it icy out! Unfortunately, the worst ice we’d have to deal with was in their parking lot.

Have you ever seen one of those science videos explaining black holes, or gravity, by showing you a marble spinning around a drain? That’s exactly what it was like.

Their parking lot is so uneven. Iced over, it is absolute hell on earth. Naturally, there was not one speck of rock salt to be witnessed anywhere. Wet glass, indeed.

When we first pulled in, we started sliding immediately. We slid to a stop after a good 30 feet, narrowly missing other parked cars and the concrete-lined edge of the lot, which could have done a real number on my wheels and undercarriage. Mind you, i had been doing less than10mph!

Spinning my wheels was the only way to get any traction at all. But no sooner than i would start moving, but the car would start descending down the hill, sideways. We very scarcely managed to avoid hitting curbs and suchlike, but i don’t know how.

This lasted for around twenty minutes.

Did the manager come out to offer to help? Nope. Did i feel like risking life and limb to walk uphill in that unholy, slick, uphill mess of solid, wet ice to ask for help, or tell them off for not salting their Mt. Fuji-like parking lot? Well, yes, but i knew that i’d absolutely certainly slip and hit my head and kill myself at the exact moment the next motorist suffered a similar fate and ran over my still-warm corpse.

Helpfully, the drivethrough window offered employees a hilarious view, which they took in turns, laughing and pointing.

So if you ever see me at a Big Boy restaurant, especially a Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant, please shoot me in the face for it, because i declare unequivocally, right here, that my money will never again come into contact with their filthy, greasy (and very likely cockroach-infested) registers.

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Here’s a new desktop wallpaper i made. You can use it.

In the year 2309, Earth's moon has been terraformed; New Cincinnati is depicted here as Earth looms large overhead. Sources: NASA, Wikimedia Commons: Derek Jensen (Tysto)

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I put together this YouTube playlist of Carl Sagan’s “You Are Here”/”Pale Blue Dot” speech. I highly recommend checking it out.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

“Ann Druyan suggest an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?”

- Carl Sagan

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Holly adopted two new chihuahuas, named John and Zooey. They’re three years old. They were rescued from abuse, which is always the best way to get a dog. Never, ever get one from a puppy mill, or even a pet store (which are usually supplied by puppy mills). Always rescue, and always get them fixed.

Until i get my Flickr stream integrated here, you can click on over to see them.

So far, Speck has been pretty kind, and puts up no fuss when they share his food. John, on the other hand, guards the community food dish zealously. The big fatass.

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omfg where do i start?

today sucked.

preface: we are so poor. that is all about that. we are poor, and it sucks balls. Holly works so hard, and for what? what the hell do i do to make the world any better? not a god damned thing. especially not her world.

on to the viewing…

my old friend is dead. younger than me, dead and gone. i remember yesterday when we were all young and crazy with life and the ecstasy of the world being at our fingertips.

i got there, alone. i killed time rolling a smoke and killing it. i rolled a couple more and walked up. almost immediately some cat comes up for a light. he’s a friend of Jason’s. there is some small talk, then he reveals that there are internal social problems & factioning, a division going on. he calls it childish; “bizarre,” i reply.

after chatting with another of his more recent friends, i mustered up just barely enough guts to go inside. what awaited was hell.

so i go inside and i don’t see anyone i know. except for Susan and Mike, who passed by on their way in. i couldn’t tell if they were ignoring me or if they didn’t recognize me. that was sort of a theme of the evening. they have every reason to ignore me. when i was younger and stupider, i did stupid things and said foolish things to Susan, who i loved then, about Mike, who was actually a terrific guy, really. so there’s that.

i’m in line for about a half an hour, behind a small group of people who obviously bothered to keep up with him in his last years. suddenly i realize that the older gentleman standing idly by is Jason’s dad.

omg. it’s his dad, i thought. omg. is it better that he does or doesn’t recognize me?

see, we used to be really crazy teenagers. really crazy, just completely off the chain and full of joy and insanity. we used to bounce off the walls with energy. we also used to do some questionable stuff. nothing terrible, just not real virtuous behavior. all in good fun, we figured at the time. and it was.

but we got suspended from school once, toward the very ass-end of my senior year, which would have been Jason’s sophomore year, for showing up drunk at a school dance, with liquor and beer in my car to boot. crap. i got him in trouble. i hope they don’t remember that.

he looks at me and we chat, and he doesn’t seem to really remember me well. that’s kind of a big relief.

then the question i was dreading.

no, i said, even though i only live a half hour away, i didn’t really bother to go and see him, as he’s dying, because i just didn’t. because i don’t fucking know, right? i didn’t say it like that, but i certainly meant it like that.

i tried several times to gather a posse together. too many years had passed. i needed a buffer to fill up the empty space of time that had grown like kudzu between us. he and i talked on the phone a few years ago, and the net result of the conversation was, i felt at the time, that he was grown up and doing his thing, and though we were greatly cordial, there was a fairly vast chasm that had come up there in the middle. we weren’t those kids anymore. he didn’t need me in his life. we of course said “we should get together sometime,” and “give me a call anytime,” and neither of us really meant it. though i would have secretly loved to. but you know how it goes. it’s happened to everyone. two old friends, grown apart after too much time.

i loved him, though, and i never stopped loving him. it had just become awkward. that’s why i wanted help, someone to go with me to see him.

so i answered that question. no, i didn’t go to see your dying son in his last couple of years in life. fuck! i wanted to. desperately. i was too scared of that god damned void that had opened up its gaping maw between us to suck our friendship in. i pussied out.

finally, i see him up close.

no mortician on earth really ever makes a dead body look natural. not to me anyway. it’s always a horrific shock to see something that resembles someone you used to know very well lying before you like some kind of expired doppelganger. it was just too unreal. i knew it was him, he just didn’t look… real. that always happens.

the shock, the numbness of it all was overwhelming.

i go outside, roll a couple more smokes, pretend like i’m talking on my phone. anything to keep the questions at bay. thankfully, Travis shows up with his mom. i keep quiet and let them do all the talking. conversations get better that way.

Fred texts me that he can’t show up because he supposedly doesn’t have enough gas. me and Jason were pretty tight back in the day, but Fred and Jason were like peanut butter and jelly. completely inseperable. i am disappointed.

Kevin Holsinger shows up in a little while. the other day i practically cried at the thought of seeing that kooky lil’ kid again. we were never all that close, but i always liked him. you couldn’t not. and we always had terrific laughs together. he doesn’t seem to know who i am, and since it doesn’t really matter anyway, i let the matter be as it is.

later on, Travis and his mom and Kevin and his whole family go out to eat. i didn’t go, it was just too awkward for me. i had a bad day. plus, i needed to pick Holly up from a business meeting. it turned out she got a ride, a fact i knew at right about the same instant as everyone was driving away. not that it would have made a difference.

there was not one single moment of the day that i had any business being a part of. but i owe like hell.

it’s hard when it really sinks in how much you never really mattered in the end, when someone you loved so much and had so much fun with is dead and gone so many years after you last saw them.

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Even on FOXNews, they’re bashing that poor moron. She doesn’t even understand the concept of Africa being a continent and not a country? Wow. That’s really something.

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Finally, the United States of America has confidantly voted into office its first black President, and today is the first day of the Future after all. I am so proud again to be an American.

We owe a tremendous debt to black, female, latino, and other “minority” voters, many of whom have until today been disenfranchised – not just for what they have done today, but for what they have done in the past to bring us to this moment.

I can’t help but recall the more joyful lines of Walt Whitman’s loving ballad to his President:

O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won.

(Of course, i have omitted stanzas which are not needed and do not serve this day; the poem, after all, is an elegy.)

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