The prophet returns

As I already mentioned, it's been a rough few weeks.  I'd also like to ice that sympathy-cake with a thick layer of "I've been sick for almost a whole fucking month" too.  But something truly amazing happened today... happened to ALL of us.  Today may be the greatest day I've had in a very long time, and the greatest day that you, my lucky students, will have had for a long time as well.  Are you ready for your petty little worlds to be transformed into something exponentially more magical?

The prophet has returned.  The almighty sage of literary wonder has graced us with his/her fleeting presence yet again, and bequeathed to us another astonishing masterpiece.  Please gather your loved ones and sit down.  Let me present to you the next powerful chapter in an evolving series from none other than the author of "Bryan Nee Eat's Twinkies:"

As you may well have suspected, upon seeing this, I had to pull over on the roadside to weep, catch my breath, and calm myself.  I'll now gladly give you and your loved ones some time to experience your initial "double-rainbow-esque" emotional release as well, and possibly time to change your pants too - take your time.

Have you finished wiping away those tears of unbridled joy and childhood astonishment?  Excellent.  Now if you haven't read this author's previous work, please do so now - it will put the following explication in proper context.

"Less yah sweat more yah get...."

Now I'm no Matthew Arnold or Sainte-Beuve; I don't truly engage in literary criticism as much as I simply report on initial reactions and "gut instincts" in a stream of consciousness fashion.  As such, right off the bat, I'm noticing more meter, rhythm, and rhyming than the author's previous piece.  It may be fair to say (s)he is experimenting with new techniques, or simply throwing us for a loop.  Also, I was quick to notice the four periods following the poem rather than the more typical 3-period ellipsis.  This being the author's second work, we are driven to draw comparisons; for instance, once again in regard to technique, I've noticed that the letter "e" is the only one to be presented in lower case form - a stark contrast from the last poem.  I sought the intuition and laser-like examination skills of a colleague in the english department at my university - he surmises that the usage of "e" in this work may serve as an actual concrete example of the poem's overall theme.  In other words, one may "get more" (achieving emphasis) from "sweating less" (using the lesser case of the letter "e") - by lessening the value of "e", the author has actually emphasized it and made it stand out.  Deep stuff, right?  Who knows; we can only make conjectures at this point.

Enough about technique for now, let's venture into the possible meanings behind this enigma.  Immediately, I thought of the similarity between this work and a more common saying that goes something like: "accomplish more by doing less."  This catchy tidbit graces the pages of many self-help and zens of this-or-that books.  Perhaps the author is arguing for the same idea here, but it's a stretch for me to believe that an author of this magnitude would lead us to such a simplistic conclusion.  There must be so much more here.  For some strange reason, I was also reminded of an old Chinese or Japanese saying that goes something like the following: "The more you sweat in peacetime, the less you bleed during war."  In fact, the Navy Seals also have a motto that derived from this old proverb.  Now if taken at face value, the author's work alludes to the opposite - that by not working hard, you may in fact reap more reward?  But perhaps (s)he's purposefully presenting us with such a paradox?  I'll leave this conflicting notion for all of you to ponder.

I could go on, but as I mentioned last time, my assumptions will only taint and bias the meanings and emotions that each of you derive from this work.  One thing is becoming more certain though - it appears that we may see more of this author's work in the future.  This is his/her second offering to us, and we can only pray/hope/dream for many more to come - creating an unrivaled canon in our literary and social culture that many generations to come will certainly appreciate.

(Again however, there's a very small chance, very small, that this was done by a gaggle of fucking 20 year olds, huffing glue and pounding Four Loko, running amok and spray painting shit on the same railroad overpass as last time - but this is CLEARLY unlikely)

Have a great... whatever it is you do.

Well, just because I'm subjecting my poor wife to one of the shittiest Christmas' we've ever had since being together, doesn't mean that the rest of you should have a horrific time too!  So in order to be all-inclusive and politically correct in wishing you all a fantastic holiday, let's play "choose your own festive message!"  Pick the words of your choice from each set in brackets!

Have a...

[merry | shitty | happy | congratulatory | miraculous | drunken | kinky | thunder-fucking-awesome | loving | hate-filled | criminally insane | joyous]
...

[Christmas | National Chocolate Day | Channukah | Kwanzaa | Generic Holiday | National Pumpkin Pie Day | Solstice | Boxing Day | Las Posadas | National Egg Nog Day | Winter]

and enjoy your...

[presents | dradle | human sacrifice | ritual candles | stockings | ceiling-anchored Vietnamese fuck-basket | religious readings | family | friends | liquor | gifts | video games | emotional breakdown | aneurysm | fruit cake | fist fight].

May many more come to you in the near future!

(P.S. - To my dear Mrs. Cynicism, my deepest regrets that we're forced to endure some of the worst creatures (my "family") to ever poison the human gene pool during this Christmas and over the past few weeks.  I swear to the god's of liquor & crazy that next year we'll do whatever you want with whomever you want.)   

Someone kicked my life in the nuts

Holy shit!  I have a blog?!  *sigh*  Let's cut to the chase - Dr. Cynicism has been in a very dark place for the past few weeks.  I recently tweeted that if I were a bartender, my go-to cocktail in recent days would be 1 part depression, 1 part anger, 2 parts apathy, and 2 parts self-loathing.  Not even having the energy or desire to write a fuckin blog post sums it up nicely.  But then again, I'm a professor - a scholar, a researcher, a teacher.  It's my job to pass wisdom on to others - my students.  So today's lecture will instruct you on how to have a proper 2-3 week disconsolate slump of self-loathing.  After all, if you're not going to do it right, then don't do it at all you lazy mofos.

Let me begin with a quick word of caution.  Lately this blog hasn't been living up to its name; the cynicism has been lacking, or mediocre at best.  Today we'll make up for that in a big way, so students with a weak stomach are excused from class.  Today, you are going to be fed a shit-ton (this should become an official unit of measurement in the metric system if you ask me) of pessimism, slathered in a viscous black syrup of anguish and self-defeat.  Let's look at things from the following perspective... sometimes our always-half-empty lives are rudely interrupted with fleeting periods of happiness or excitement, just enough to get our hopes up, so that when TRUE reality sets back in, we have to fall on our faces as we stumble back into the world of stinking shit that we all really live in.  So there's a quick tangential argument for why happiness sucks; to steal a movie quote: "FUCK happy."

Okay, on to today's diatribe: how to experience a 100% bona fide period of despair.  Inevitably, everyone accomplishes this in different ways.  That said, the following is my prescription for a few weeks of bleak hell.  Your homework, if you choose to accept it, is to add your own suggestions - use the comments to tell me what best fuels your slumps in life.

Food
Nothing does a self-abhorring body better than junk food.  Go all out; bottom-shelf-shit all the way.  Do your grocery shopping at 7-11 for fuck's sake.  Specifically, we're aiming for a diet loaded with high quantities of fat, sugar, sodium, and refined/processed "bad" carbs.  For meals on the go, I highly recommend the holy trinity of fast food (aka The Triple Bypass): McDonalds, Taco Bell, & KFC.  Make sure to super-size, up-size, or fucking gigantify everything.  Also, stay away from water - replace all fluid intake with Coke/Pepsi or Mountain Dew.  Now don't think you're limited to only the aforementioned places, you can eat like an asshole just about anywhere.  Take the following meal that I had at a hardly reputable steakhouse the other night:

 

See?  Even at a fine restaurant where Texas and/or rebel flags are proudly flown outside, you can feed your desolation!  You see before you: 1) a heap of pulled pork smothered in BBQ sauce nestled upon a bun soaked in butter, 2) a sweet potato overfilled with brown sugar, cinnamon, caramel sauce, and covered in toasted marshmallows, 3) the gratuitous pickle spear, and 4) a side of cheddar cheese fries with bacon and ranch dipping sauce!  That out-of-place salad in the upper corner belongs to the hippie-glass-half-full-Whole-Foods-shopping-optimistic wife that was doing her best to coax me into seeking the guidance of a psychotherapist before I ate myself into a diabetic coma and/or heart failure.  Lastly, it's debatable as whether to include drugs and alcohol as "food" in this category.  But my guess is that you'll be ingesting enough of these substances during your fit of personal anguish that they could actually qualify as a food supplement.  Bottoms up mother fuckers!

Music

Music is to mood as the goat is to the t-rex in Jurassic Park (and you thought those stupid SAT analogy questions would never come in handy, BAM!).  Everyone is wildly different when it comes to musical taste, but I find that a concoction of the following does the trick.  To fuel my loss of desire to exist, I like to throw some Depeche Mode, a little Radiohead, The Smiths, The Cure, and a touch of VAST into a blender for a quick melancholy smoothie.  When the mood shifts toward bitterness, I like to kick it up a notch, filling my head with Tool, Alice in Chains, a few select Led Zeppelin songs (like this and this), and a few others from the rainy city movement.  Inevitably though, burning anger and hatred take the reins at times... that's when I turn to the "big guns" like Crowbar, Soilent Green (album names like A Deleted Symphony for the Beaten Down and Inevitable Collapse in the Presence of Conviction speak for themselves, no?), Pig Destroyer, and Eyehategod.  For those of you doing homework this week, I'm eager to get my hands on more music based on your suggestions.

Activities

This is easy - nothing.  Why the fuck would you want to do anything when your entire existence is overwhelmed with indifference, lethargy, and hopelessness?!  Other than eating, you should be spending most of your time on the couch watching shitty TV, shitty movies, playing video games, or just napping in Cheeto-stained pajamas.  If you must do something, then I suggest engaging in constant negative rumination about how much you hate your family, how you've made horrible decisions in your life, all the ways your life could be better, and making mental notes about where all the liquor stores and gun stores are in your town.  You should be actively avoiding things like work/career obligations, household responsibilities, productivity in any way/shape/form, personal hygiene, and any activity that would bolster self-respect.

I could go on and on with this lecture, but frankly, I don't give a shit and I've already lost interest.  I've got some drinking to do.

Lysol and FUDs

A local Thai restaurant apparently takes clean hands VERY seriously - as evidenced by their choice of "soap" available in the men's restroom.

Also, on a mostly-but-not-entirely unrelated note, I just ran across a product that absolutely needs be shared with all of you, if you're not already intimately familiar with it.  It's called the Go Girl.  Honestly, any attempt that I make to describe it or make fun of it will fail miserably compared to the magical and whimsical experience that can be obtained from their website and video.  Click that video link, right the fuck now.  Enjoy.