Some say music makes the world go round. For me, this is certainly a reality -- but it also affords me cultural experiences and ruminations that would not be possible if I were to simply hole up in my cave and get liquored up every night. My life has become a flurry of non-paying gigs, paying gigs, playing for booze, playing for the mentally ill, and above all playing for myself. On this particular weekend, the weekend of the famous Arnold Fitness Expo, I was over exposed to a the not so soft underbelly of society -- something I have dealt with many times, but these were strange and wicked times -- and I was only barely prepared to handle it. The Expo, you see, is a massive spectacle. It brings in more athletes, drug dealers and thugs than the Olympics and the Cannabis Cup combined. It is a mecca for all sorts of traffickers, of not only steer steroids, but of human bodies and the souls of little children as well. The only people that this god-forsaken freak show carnival is lacking are the tattooed man, the hunger artist and the bearded lady. Oh, and Arnold took a break from his mission to save the children of the world to make an appearance. A world-class event -- truly.

       The whole thing brings to mind a recent (well within the last year or so) debacle in which a convention of furries shared the same hotel in Pittsburgh as the visiting Milwaukee Brewers. Those guys just wanted to play a game of baseball for christ's sake. The furries so disturbed the Brewers players, managment staff and the retinue of dope fiends that follow teams around these days that the Pirates swept the Brewers in their series. I can't imagine there was much sleeping amongst the frightened players in that hotel. For normal god-fearing persons such as myself, it a strikingly similar situation when going within a 3 mile radius of the Columbus Convention Center on the last weekend in February.

       On this particular evening I was accompanied by an associate of mine, a large man-child named Angelos who smelled of Greek food and Turkish cigarettes. In this situation I needed a quality consultant in lieu of powerful mind altering substances. Angelos was slurping on a cone of gourmet ice-cream -- star anise and candied fennel seed... creeping jesus! What is this world coming to? I'm in Columbus, Ohio, not dippy-doopy Rangoon where at the moment the ruling Junta is rounding up the Burmese Christians with the intent of guillotining them all until the Gulf of Martaban runs red with blood like some freakish algae bloom... but I digress. I have been wanting for good legal counsel for some time -- but attorneys are a rare catch on a Friday in February in the trendy hell-hole that is the Short North. When hemmed in on all sides by illegal activity, it is a good thing to know your legal boundaries at all times.

       We played a set with some good guitar-led jazz -- quiet in order to not disturb the patrons of the gallery, who in reality probably wanted to be disturbed... but out of respect for the director we stayed under mezzo-forte as best we could. The place was swarming with smary pseudo savants... all inspecting the art of these poor souls. We were playing at a gallery filled with art therapy pieces -- the gallery's mission is a noble cause, as far as I am concerned. I hope that one day when I lose my mind I can also make beautiful art -- because truly, some of the pieces in the place were genuinely inspired. These browsing cretins, however, with their tight jeans and teased hair -- these artsy fartsy types, they were out of place. They looked at the art, but I could see in their swiny little eyes that their minds were reeling. They had no idea what they had walked into and their lack of respect and understanding sickened me, so I stepped outside for a cigarette. Next to me was a deranged man -- a veritable modern day John the Baptist -- clad in only sandals and a multi-colored wool blanket... his techni-color dreamcoat I suppose. He was singing the words to a familiar children's song -- though the only words you could make out went something like this: "I wanna be a sheep baa baa baa baa... don't wanna be a Pharisee... cause they're not fair you see..." Nothing is fair for these people. They're preyed upon by not only by crooked cops but the dope fiends and the crack addicts as well. God bless their pitiful souls.

        Then a curious thing happened. A flock of black-clad queers wearing replica masks from that one terrible movie that twists Guy Fawkes into some post-modern revolutionary hero. What a strange sight -- and then I realized what was happening. It was /b/. They had invaded my life once before -- but Anonymous was back and staring me in the face yet again, only this time it was in real life. Kafka himself couldn't have dreamed this up. This whole situation had become affront to humanity. As a general rule, when and where the freakish come out in full force -- one never knows what will happen. Apparently the psychos that mutilate themselves and turn the human body into a sculpture bring out the other crazed types in huge numbers as well. These masked morons were on a mission, armed with pamphlets and fliers and all sorts of strange libertarian propaganda. I made the mistake of interestedly looking in their direction. They pressed upon me a few things and moved on, but a constellation of thoughts had already taken root in my mind.


       To me it is frightening how, thanks to the internet, such large groups of twisted and bizarre human beings are able to congregate. They are now able, using the wonders of modern technology, to meet secretly in the ways that people have not done since the early 1920's in Munich. These people generally do have a few good ideas, but the same thing was thought of the earliest National Socialists -- when they were simply a worker's party that wanted to restore glory and a sense of honor to the German people. Anonymous is waging what they call a war against an equally abhorrent social fungus: the followers of L. Ron Hubbard... but just as the Nazis carried some baggage -- anti-semitism for starters -- Anonymous has a dark side as well. Much as the Deutsche Dolchstoßlegende took root slowly, we are experiencing the spread of these lecherous punks's love of libertarianism and other political ideologies that they are not equipped to understand. I am no guru, but these people are calling for nothing short of the destruction of everything we know and love. The Paulsies and Anonymous are not necessarily the same people, but they have many common aspirations, so thank God we do not have a parliamentary system -- or in about 20 years all these morons that somehow made their way into the Political Science department at the institution of higher learning known as The Ohio State University will have made their way into Congress and formed a coalition of death hell-bent on the destruction of everything we hold dear.

       These chickenshit pigfuckers make me sick, but in this vile year of our lord two-thousand and eight there are more pressing matters. In these dark and depraved times, when in Kandahar women cannot even go to the market without having to be covered from head to toe and little brown children in Guatemala dream north country dreams -- only to fall under a train car and have their limbs shorn from their bodies -- we are disgusting pigs to be worrying such trivial matters. People who are ignorant of the world around them and are ignorant of their ignorance make me sick. I can only pray to the Lord every day that he may lead us to pastures green -- and that he give us our daily bread and gasoline. I still wonder what on earth is going on around me, and just hope that the Lord will someday forgive us for our sins. Amen.