Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit

Virtual stocks are down 46%

HOW WILL I FEED MY NEOPETS???

the squid is a fucking asshole

As Beck once said, I've got the fucking fucked-up blues(sssss). That's why I decided to make a soundtrack to my life, courtesy of Grooveshark. I you took the time to listen to it, I love you. If not, I don't blame you. I do suggest you get a Grooveshark account though. Since you don't have to download anything, you can perfect your mad mixtape skillz.

Hu-fucking-zza.

#4 etc., etc.

A malnourished "pffft" sounds escapes as I flip through the cardboard box of 12" inch vinyl. Best of Vanilla Ice, Red Velvet, The Sound of Riott Grrrl, etc., etc. You see, I collect vinyl rarities. Not rarity as in '+$100;' but 'rarity' as in "mid-70's abortions." My apartment is stacked with these. My favorite is probably Devil Got My Woman: A Brass Tribute to Skip James. Nobody knew how to play their instruments so it makes me feel better about the trumpet case under my bed that's collecting dust. None of these albums are particularly thrilling, but that all changes when I find the Holy Grail of the lot: The Old Testament - As Narrated by Winston Churchill. The Old Testament amuses me beyond the fact that it's profoundly fucked up; it's the response it gets from Christians.
"The Old Testament is in the Bible for a reason!" cries the defenders.
"It's totally irrelevant!" retorts the critics.
The reaction is not unlike two overweight Metal Gear fans arguing over whether Snake's Revenge is canon or not. It's obvious that Snake's Revenge was just a poor effort to boost sales in America, and the real sequel to Metal Gear is a Japanese exclusive.

Uh, so I've heard.

#3 its not mean if its type 1

The next stop of the day is Saint Nicole's Hospice. I love going there, but my enjoyment is severely dulled by the bus-ride. Milken Urban Transport System's busses have a habit of attracting over-ambitious parents in their late 20s and obnoxious babies. It always reeks of processed cheese and diabetes, two important factors of Americana...and some three-year-old brat just threw her Cheerios on the ground. It was an actual bowl of Cheerios, milk and all. I can't fathom how any sane couple would want to spend the rest of their life trapped raising a lost cause. I swear to fucking God, I will kill everybody here if I don't kill myself first. Oh, I've arrived at my stop. I walk into the shop and a college-bound hipster greets me at the door. "Welcome!" he says in a patronizing manner that's followed by a barely audible "...to Hell." Hell sure does smell like dust.

#2 my degree in philosophy has paid off

I'm at McDonald's. My hamburger is overcooked and my coffee tastes like unflavoured tea. I don't care about the tea; I'm more concerned over the hamburger. How can processed beef patties be overcooked? I ponder this while the manager, a tall 27 year-old male with a buzzcut, complains to his inferiors that Chelsey wasn't on MySpace last night. Across the room sits a man with ragged clothes chewing on a McGriddle. He looks at a kid with a Happy Meal longingly, as if a die-cast steel toy would make his life infinitely better. He then looks down at his artificial foodstuffs and sighs. I know it doesn't matter, but I refrained from putting any ketchup on my fries as a sign of sympathy. Some brat is blasting his iPod as loud as possible, and I can't help but notice that he's listening to the god-damn Smiths. I shed a tear as I walked out of the quasi-restaurant; not for the kid or the homeless chap, but for the cute cashier that winked at me. This McDonald's is thirty minutes away from my apartment. Our love was never meant to be.

#1 are you self-actualized enough to commit suicide?

This is an entry from my diary in 2017.

"I got up around eleven forty-six and ate some cold pizza. At eleven fifty I checked my e-mail to see if my song had won a radio contest. It didn't. "Huh," I said to myself. I put on my favorite Elliot Smith album for a while and stared at the carpet. It smelled like 1998, but the tag said it was made in 2001. The rigid threads of the carpet left an imprint on my skin, and it looked like I had a tropical infection. It was twelve seventeen now and I realized that I had to make the day pass. I hate weekends; I have nowhere to go because all of my friends are dead. Aren't school-shootings just peachy? I work at a deli that primarily sells honey glazed hams. I earn a modest amount of money. My boss is a big fan of post-modern art, and to "motivate" us he had a picture of Jesus rendered in CG technology that came out in 1995. While my iconoclastic co-workers were terrified by this image, I found it kind of amusing. Jesus looked so sad, yet he had a loaf of bread in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other."

"Radiohead" presents: "Kid A - A Tragedy In Ten Acts"

In his book Killing Yourself to Live, Chuck Klosterman wrote an article about
how the album Kid A accidentally predicted 9/11. Do I believe it? Not completely. Did it respark my interest in Kid A? Fuck yeah. I listened to it constantly the night I read the
article, and had it playing on my iPod when I fell asleep. The next day, I
listened to it on the bus. Needles to say, I was engulfed. It was then when the
album really clicked with me. Seeing the possible narrative
behind all of the vocoded droning really got me interested. Kid A went
from being the most overrated album of all time to being one of my favorite
albums of all time. Now, I understand that the
article might have been an excuse to wank over Radiohead; but it was an
interesting read. While Chuck Klosterman explicitly says it's about 9/11, I have
a different approach. Kid A is about the human reaction to catastrophic
disasters in general. If you really care enough¹ about my theory,
here's a song-by-song interpretation of Kid A.

Everything In Its Right Place

This should be rather obvious. Everyone wakes
up; it's business as usual, and the disaster (your pick) has yet to begin.
There's nothing out of place, as Thom Yorke says. The deep synth proceeds to
fill the room, and it feels like you're drowning in a sea of pillows (interpret
that any way you want.)

Kid A

"Rats and children follow me out of town."
Every one's going to work (or school) now. This is the part of the day everyone
will have to alter (or suppress) after the [insert disaster here] because they
were so calm in retrospect. Obviously they aren't to blame for feeling so
normal, but it's kind of sickening to think that everything unfolds when you
leave your house, and you don't even know. Then...

The National Anthem

This is when the shit hits the fan. The bass
kicks in, the music gets heavy, and impromptu jazz solos kick in. "Evey one is
so...near." Every one's so crowded; what's going on? In one specific part of the
globe, it's utter chaos. The insanity of this song can't be overstated,
especially when it follows after a song like Kid A. The track ends with a
haunting violinesque sound and a guy saying "What's
wrong²?"

How to Disappear Completely

Every one's so crowded; what the hell just
happened? The shock is too great for us to handle at first, so we give reality
the benefit of the doubt and assume this is just a horrible dream. "I'm not
here/That's not me/This isn't happening." Everyone grows a gizzard and stares at
the sky in a tranquilized state.

Treefingers

If Kid A was a play, Treefingers
would be the intermission. It's a lyricless track that divides the album in two
parts: the world before/during, and the world after. Grab your popcorn and get
back to your seat.

Optimistic

This is kind of tricky. Optimistic really
sounds like a song against capitalism³ (The big fish eat the little
ones/You can try the best you can, the best you can is good enough.) Optimistic
is a song about waking up, mainly because that's what the first 30 seconds feel
like. It's not as sudden as The National Anthem, but it's considerably heavier
than Treefingers. We're realizing that this is indeed a reality, but we're still
a little dazed.

In Limbo

And now the government kicks in. The song as a
whole feels like a mix between the softness of How to Disappear Completely and
the speed of The National Anthem. "You're living in a fantasy," in other words,
this is much worse than what you think. Much, much worse. In fact, the
government might be overplaying it a bit, but you're really living in a fantasy,
man. Wake up.

Idioteque⁴

Holy shit, this is really happening.
I mean, I knew it was real, but Christ, this is serious. That's what's in the
mind of the logical folk out there. The others, however, are caught up in the
hysteria. "Who's in the bunker, who's in the bunker?" Who can we blame/who's
doing this? People are flipping out, and making split-second decisions based off
of this fear ("Women and children first, and children first.) The beat is
erratic, glitchy, and vaguely threatening.

Morning Bell

Now that the worst is behind us and people
have calmed down, there's a fake, somewhat tacky feeling of unity across the
globe (the beat is kind of frantic, but it doesn't reach the level of
Idioteque.) "And everybody wants to be your friend" Does it really take a
disaster to unite us? Perhaps. The worst is behind us now, but what about the
future? Every one's trying to look happy and friendly, but that doesn't erase
what happened ("The lights are on/But no body's home.")

Motion Picture Soundtrack

The end and the epilogue. A depressed
Thom Yorke sings over an accordion playing a slow, melodic tune. Now living in
the supposedly post-disaster world, there are voids that we have to fill (maybe
with red wine, cheap sex, and sleeping pills, as the lyrics suggest.) "It's not
like the movies/They fed us on little white lies." Hollywood will undoubtedly
cash in on a disaster that reopens old wounds. These movies have a happy ending
so the moviegoers aren't completely depressed, but we know that it's all a lie.
"I will see you in the next life."

About a minute-and-a-half gap of silence, and
then a chorus slowly starts to drone. Two minutes of
silence, and the song ends.

There's just one thing that kills my whole
theory: the lyrical process. Thom Yorke had a major case of writer's block after
the insane success of OK Computer, so it was time for experimentation.
Yorke wrote lyrics and verses on scraps of paper, crumpled the up, and threw
them at a top hat. The scraps that made it in were the lyrics he
used⁵.

Footnotes, footnotes,
footnotes!:

¹ I'm sure you all
do!

² This is probably
one of my favorite moments in any album ever.

³ This would make
sense, considering Yorke is very involved with politics.

⁴ Incidentally the
best track on the album

⁵ The same process
David Byrne used when he was writing the lyrics to Remain in
Light.