Capital of Nasty Electronic Magazine
Volume VII, Issue 9, AD MMII
Monday, May 13, 2002
ISSN 1482-0471
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"Trial by jury is a direct descendant of the trial by battle of 
medieval times. In that system, a litigant hired a champion, or 
knight-warrior, to fight it out on the battleground with his 
opponent's champion. In theory, God would not permit the wrong 
person's champion to win, so that (in theory) trial by battle 
ensured perfect justice. In practice, I am sure, medieval litigants 
wanted to know their respective champions were in good physical 
shape and well versed in the art of battle, just in case God might 
be pre-occupied with other things at the time of the trial.
 
So it is with modern criminal trials. The fundamental premise behind 
our system is that lawyer-champions are well versed in the art of 
courtroom battle. If the defence lawyer doesn't have well-honed 
courtroom skills, the system fails. Unless, of course, God happens 
to be watching that day."

 -- Neville Ross in New York Magazine, 16 Jan 94, pp 7-8

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"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, 
terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, 
Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had 
brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace 
and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock."

 -- Orson Welles, The Third Man (1915-1985)

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1.  Where Are We Going...
2.  Nice Guys Finish Last
3.  Tainted
4.  'American Gods' by Neil Gaiman
5.  When Community Coffee Turns Corporate
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This week's Golden Testicle award:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view.php?id=50323

Kaboom: The Suicide Bomber Game

-------------------------------------------

1. Where Are We Going...
A Bedtime Story for the Children of North Korea

By Konrad the Bold

Something is just waiting to go wrong in North Korea. The country 
has been stuck in a steady decline since the Soviet Union collapsed 
and stopped acting as its sponsor state. With chronic food shortages 
and a changing political landscape, North Korea's leaders may 
eventually realize that it's only a matter of time before the shit 
hits the fan. Remember that scene in Das Boot when the sub is stuck 
on the bottom of the sea with no engine power and the water pressure 
slowly crushing the hull? Now replace the charismatic captain with 
an uninspiring, lethargic fat man and you have a good idea of the 
situation in North Korea. In other words, don't count on any 
miracles. 

So far the state has gotten by through political agitation. They'll 
build a couple missiles, cause a little scene by test-firing them 
over Japan then make some concessions to the west by agreeing to end 
the missile testing in return for aid. Once in a while they'll play 
China and Russian off each other since both of them like using North 
Korea as a tool against the Americans. If that gets boring they'll 
warm-up ties with the South and get some hard currency from South 
Korean tourists. What do they get in the end? Chump change. One step 
forward, two steps back.

None of these options are long-term solutions. No amount of 
political posturing will change the fact that the country is slowly 
starving while the economy is going nowhere fast. It's been pretty 
obvious for a while that the country is facing constantly increasing 
internal and external pressures and it's only a matter of time 
before something cracks. North Korea's leaders will eventually have 
to face up to the facts and say, "The jig is up, boys! Let's get the 
fuck out of here!" The problem is: there's nowhere to go. If all 
hell breaks loose and there's a popular uprising, a government 
official from the current regime might just be persona non-fucking-
grata. 

No kidding; North Korea's is the leading contender for the world's 
most authoritarian state - a country where people must wear badges 
showing their country's leader. If the government collapses and the 
people find out how much money their government officials have been 
spending -- in the middle of a famine -- on propaganda billboards, 
spying on people who collect water-bottle labels, and enriching 
themselves. well, some of the them are going to be very, very pissed 
off. Those officials will have little luck finding shelter in other 
countries since North Korea is a pariah state. What nation would 
publicly protect the leaders of a country that has spent the last 50 
years in a state not even seen in Russia since the days of Stalin? 
Even China wouldn't accept them once the world realizes North 
Korea's government has turned the country of 22 million into a giant 
work camp with worse conditions than in the infamous Chinese 
prisons.

Since the big shots can't leave the country, and want to avoid being 
part of a going away party of the type given to Mussolini or 
Ceausecu, they're going to be pretty anxious about preventing their 
regime's seemingly inevitable collapse - or at least trying to turn 
that collapse into a smooth transition. The question is: who can 
they turn to for help? China? Russia? The USA? 

South Korea and Japan, the two most obvious candidates, can be ruled 
out right away. The South Korean government rightfully considers 
North Korean leaders to be murderous bastards that should be shot on 
sight, and the North Koreans would find it pretty hard to negotiate 
with Japan after spending the last 50 years convincing their 
populace that Japan wants nothing less than the destruction of all 
Koreans.

Would the Americans be willing to help North Korea, even in the 
unlikely event that they were willing to remove Kim Jong-il as their 
leader and start reforms? I think not. Let's face it: since the 
collapse of the USSR the world's bad guys have been in a pretty sad 
fucking state. They just don't make `em like they used to. Iran, 
Iraq, North Korea, Osama Bin Laden. all amateurs compared to the 
Soviets. Putting things in perspective, what's the World Trade 
Center compared to the threat of TOTAL FUCKING NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION? 
That's right: The USA is running low on viable enemies. How else can 
you justify spending billions on weapons when you've got the worlds 
largest military and no real threats to speak of? As anyone who's 
been following the latest Star Wars project knows, the answer is 
rogue states. As long as the American public believes there's a 
reasonable chance of a nuclear attack from the "axis of evil", all 
that tax money spent on the military may not seem so crazy.

But who are we kidding? Today, the world's bad guys don't even have 
a cool name like `The Evil Empire'; all we've got is the `axis of 
evil'. I think we can all agree that the dark side is getting pretty 
pathetic when their name sounds like First World War-era propaganda. 
Instead of an evil empire we've got Iran and Iraq, two poseur states 
about as threatening as suburban 15-year-olds blasting gangsta rap 
out of the windows of their mom's minivan, and a North Korea that's 
run by an Asian version of Oscar Wilde, only less menacing. That's 
not an axis of evil, that's the three fucking stooges, people!

A nuclear attack by Iran? Not gonna happen. Iraq? Yeah, right. 
Despite what you may have heard, Saddam Hussein is not crazy. He's 
not going to launch a nuke at a country that will respond by wiping 
Iraq off the face of the earth, even if he has nukes to begin with. 
If you think Hussein is the madman the media make him out to be then 
consider this: He's the one running his own country, getting driven 
around in limos and sleeping with nubile young broads every night, 
while you're working for a living like a chump! No, he's not crazy. 
He'd rather go on murdering his own people and boning Ms. Baghdad 
instead of getting involved in nuclear shootouts he can't win.

With enemies like these, the US simply can't afford to lose the 
animosity of North Korea. What you lack in quality, you might as 
well make up in quantity. Not that North Korea itself is actually 
dangerous - they can't even get nuclear technology from the 
Russians, and I think that says a lot. Hell, the Russians would sell 
nukes just to piss of the Americans. It's easy to imagine Vladimir 
Putin saying "Off course ve're villing to sell nuclear vorheads. 
Just for old time's sake - to make zee Amereekans piss their pants. 
But North Korea? Zey are amateurs! Baby, I vant to help you but geev 
me somethink to verk with! Zee fucking Koreans don't even have hard 
currency. Even Osama Bin Laden offered 300 000 shekels and a camel!" 
Face it, even if ol' Kim Jong-il did get a nuke, don't expect a 
nuclear attack from a guy that's so scared of flying he'll spend 
three weeks on a train rather than board an airplane. 

If help from the US can be pretty well ruled out, what about Russia? 
Russia has pretty close ties with North Korea and, like China, uses 
them once in a while to prod the United States. Fine, since the 
Americans don't have diplomatic ties with North Korea the Russians 
act as a proxy negotiator for the west when it suits their 
interests, but that's about as far as their willing to go. The 
reason is very simple: influencing North Korea basically means 
bribing them with some kind of aid package, and Russia doesn't have 
money to throw away.  The Russians have got enough problems of their 
that they won't be spending big dough on a country that, to be 
honest, just isn't that important to them.

That just leaves China. Like Russia, China has good relations with 
the North Koreans and they've got an interest in ensuring the 
stability of a country they share a border with. Unlike Russia, 
China has the money to support its wild adventures on the frontiers 
of geopolitics, so it seems reasonable they would be involved in any 
major change in North Korea's government. More importantly, China 
has had a lot of success in the transition that the North Koreans 
would be looking to make: a transition from a centrally-planned 
economy run by a corrupt, one-party system to a market economy run 
by the same corrupt, one-party system. As was the case in Russia, 
many of China's leaders realized decades ago that their economy was 
going all to hell. China's latent free-market tendencies were not 
the result of some limp-wristed desire to improve the life of the 
workers, but to stop an economic collapse that would mean losing the 
party's grip on power. Any North Korean politician that isn't too 
stupid to notice the noose that's been materializing around his neck 
these past few years has probably started watching China pretty 
carefully.

Something big just waiting to happen in North Korea, and it looks 
like the regime's options are pretty limited. Look for major changes 
in the next few years, and don't be surprised if they turn to the 
Chinese for help. Remember folks, you read it here first.
 
-------------------------------------------

2.  Nice Guys Finish Last
(And They Don't Deserve Your Sympathy)

By Jason MacIsaac

I've known quite a number of men who go on about their "Nice Guy" 
problem.  

You know the Nice Guy.  He's kind, he's sensitive, he respects 
women.  He doesn't think solely with his cock.  He's madly in love 
with the Nice Girl, and is in state of limbo, waiting for the day 
when she realizes Nice Guy is the one for her.   In the meanwhile, 
it means being alone on Saturday nights, trying to remember what sex 
feels like, and wondering why you try so hard to be nice yet never 
get rewarded for it. Will there come a day when you're more than 
just a "good friend?" 

You know the Nice Girl too.  She is the kind, attractive, 
intelligent and funny girl who is dating the Jerk Boyfriend.  Repeat 
the Nice Guy's mantra: "He doesn't deserve you."  Jerk Boyfriend 
treats her like something scraped from the floor of a bus station 
washroom. He doesn't appreciate her.  Hell, he might steal from her, 
cheat on her, give her a disease, get her in trouble with the law 
and a few credit bureaus. He might even be openly abusive. Nice Girl 
will not leave him even though there is no compelling reason to stay 
with him.  When she's "fed up," she leaves him for a few days but 
keeps coming back, agreeing to give the Jerk an infinite supply of 
one last chances.  The one time she honest to goodness dumps the 
Jerk Boyfriend, the Nice Guy's hopes soar that this is finally 
it.but then she finds another Jerk Boyfriend like the last one 
instead. 

Through all this, Nice Guy patiently listens on the phone while she 
cries away the night over Jerk Boyfriend's latest escapade, and 
maybe even contemplates suicide. The Nice Guy picks up the Nice Girl 
when Jerk Boyfriend abandons her 20 miles south of the Middle of 
Nowhere at four in the morning.  The Nice Guy's shoulder is 
constantly soaked because of her crying there.  The Nice Guy would 
cut off a finger if he could get the Nice Girl to go out with him, 
but she won't.  She "considers you a friend" and "doesn't want to 
ruin what we have."  Instead, she continues to date Jerk Boyfriends 
even though the Nice Girl's Level-Headed Best Friend might be urging 
her to go with Nice Guy instead.   The Nice Guy is slowly being 
driven insane by the Nice Girl as he asks the heavens why she just 
doesn't get it.

Recently, the Nice Guy phenomenon has caught the attention of pop 
culture. I've seen webpages dedicated to Nice Guys, and there's a 
lot of sympathy built up for them.  I even used to be a Nice Guy.  
And yet, I have absolutely no sympathy for Nice Guys.  Zero.  You 
whiny bunch of losers deserve everything you get.

That was harsh, wasn't it?

Sorry, it's true, and you need to be told. Because like the Nice 
Girl, you just don't get it.

If you find yourself in the situations I described above, you are a 
Nice Guy, which, as we all know, is a synonym for "Doormat."  And as 
long as you are one, you will never, ever, get the Nice Girl, and 
you are severely compromising your ability to attract any woman.  
All of your efforts are wasted, and the real irony is that the Nice 
Girl isn't, and she's not really worth having to begin with anyway.  

Explain to me exactly why the Nice Girl should get together with the 
Nice Guy.  Because Nice Guy will treat her with respect?  Ah, but 
you do that already, so there is no reason.  The Jerk Boyfriend 
provides the fantastic sex and the thrill of being arrested with his 
stash when the cops kick in the door. The Nice Guy provides the 
sympathetic ear and bail money.  She's got two men fulfilling 
different roles.  The arrangement is perfect, it doesn't need fixing 
in her mind.  Yeah, she kinda wishes that her boyfriend wouldn't 
share needles, making it necessary for frequent visits to a walk-in 
clinic for the HIV test, but what the hey?  Nice Guy is always there 
to drive her and hold her hand, and maybe even buy dinner 
afterwards.

In the world of addiction counseling, they refer to something called 
a "facilitator."  This is a person who supports the addict, however 
unwittingly.  A person who lets an alcoholic stay with them and 
drink the days away because "they'll die on the street otherwise" is 
a facilitator.  The facilitator is well intentioned, but in fact 
they just make it easier for the addict to continue behaving the way 
they do, and ultimately contribute to the addict's vice.  That's 
what a Nice Guy does.  He makes it easier for a Nice Girl to be a 
Nice Girl.  Nice Girl will never change as long as Nice Guy will 
wipe up the spills for her.  

I know this, because I used to be a Nice Guy, and spent my time 
chasing Nice Girls.   No, I never did land one.  I finally learned 
my lesson when I was courting an extremely attractive young woman.  
She was intelligent, compassionate, sexually uninhibited too.  Oh, I 
wanted this one. But she was also--to use the clinical psychiatric 
term--severely fucked in the head, more messed up then an Alabama 
trailer after tornado season.  Her perception of herself and the 
world around was so off that she probably couldn't recognize the 
above description of her, even with my name attached to this.  

The breaking point came one night we were talking about a very 
emotionally charged subject.  She got me talking about my something 
very important to me, kept pushing me for details, which I gave her, 
and got me so emotional about it, that I started to cry.  She gave 
me a deep, sympathetic hug.  And as I started bawling, I suddenly 
realized that there was no way in hell I was ever going to be with 
this woman.

Why?  Because she was uncertain who I was until I started crying.  
Earlier I showed sensitivity that hinted I was a potential Nice Guy.  
But I also let her know that her body was certainly a source of 
fascination for me, so that showed signs of Jerk Boyfriend.  The 
mixed signals confused her.  She had to get me into one category or 
the other, and she did.  When the tears started rolling, now she 
didn't have to respect me anymore.  She had the two parts of the 
equation, and I fell on the side of the clean-up man while the other 
guy got to run around and have all the amoral fun.

At least until I wised up.  See, the problem with Nice Guys is that 
they're the same as Nice Girls.  There's a pattern of abuse going 
on.  Nice Girls never recognize the pattern of abuse they go 
through, even though Nice Guy is always pointing it out to them.  
"You know, many women live healthy, rich lives and don't need to 
make up stories about walking into walls to explain away their 
bruises."  Nice Guys also never learn that when Nice Girls sob "You 
were right, you were right about everything" doesn't mean "and I'm 
going to change things now that I know this."  She's using you for a 
specific reason, and like a chump you keep on giving it to her.

Now, Nice Guys reading this, because they really aren't too bright, 
are probably assuming that I'm advocating being the Jerk Boyfriend 
instead.  Not at all.  Jerk Boyfriends are indeed scum.  It's fun to 
be one when you're young, but as you get older, the women get 
smarter.  Think a woman in her late 30s who is the CFO of an 
insurance company is gonna put up with that shit?  No, the women at 
that age who will tolerate Jerk Boyfriends are truly bleak, and 
Jerks know it, but they can't get anything better.  There is a price 
to be paid for the cowboy antics of your 20s.

There are also those who will interpret what I'm saying is that what 
women want is to be treated like dirt.  I am not saying that either.  
What I am saying is that people who cannot love and respect 
themselves cannot truly love and respect others.  The failure of the 
Nice Girl and Guy is the failure to love and respect themselves, and 
that's very serious, it's something people should seek help for.  
But if that help is not accepted after 10 tries, as far I'm 
concerned the Helper has done plenty and now it's up to the 
Recipient to get off their ass while the Helper moves on to someone 
smart enough to listen.  By the same token, if the Helper keeps 
helping after 100 tries and a large financial investment, they're a 
lost cause too.

They say love should be unconditional.  That's.stupid.  Love is too 
precious to be unconditional.  For example, love should be formed 
under the basis that the other person doesn't beat you, steal from 
you until you're destitute, and most importantly, does not abuse the 
love you give them.  This is what a Nice Girl does.  To tell you the 
truth, I don't really see any reason to land a Nice Girl.  If she 
can't figure out that she deserves respect and is worthy of a real 
man (or real woman, if that's what's going on), who needs her?  

If I were to treat my current girlfriend badly, well, I live 18 
floors up, but I could die 18 floors down.  I totally respect that 
about her.  Not that I'm afraid of her, but I respect the fact that 
she loves herself enough to not tolerate lots of shit.  I hate women 
who are pushovers.  All of my girlfriends have been tough. A lot 
tougher than me, now that I think about it.  And I feel that a woman 
who can and will put you through a plate glass window for messing 
with her, especially if you're her boyfriend, is a real woman.

If you want to break the Nice Guy/Nice Girl cycle, you can't be a 
pushover.  Nobody, man or woman respects a doormat.  When I worked 
in a restaurant, you know who made the most tip money?  The servers 
who were borderline hostile.  Know who made the least?  The 
asskissers.  If you don't love and respect yourself, nobody else 
will.  Nice Girls do not truly respect Nice Guys, and I believe that 
even Nice Guys, for all their supposed patience and understanding, 
don't respect Nice Girls either.  You think you can play 
psychiatrist to this basket case, and be the one to change her, 
don't you?  For all her faults she's not a puzzle to unravel, Freud 
boy.  She's a person too.

If you really must land the Nice Girl, the only way to do it is to 
put a price tag on your time.  She calls you at four in the morning 
because she knows you're there and will always get her out of any 
jam.  This time, tell her you're asleep but will be there in the 
morning, or at least around noon.  Make it clear that you're no 
longer the Get Out of Jail Free Card.  If she really needs help--but 
more importantly wants help--by all means give it to her.  But if 
she doesn't take it, shrug your shoulders and walk away.  Make it 
clear that your patience is not infinite, and if she wants your 
help, she has to start helping herself.  It probably won't work, but 
hey, a real woman will notice you're a man who doesn't give out your 
love so foolishly, which means your love is worth something.  Get 
the picture?  And Nice Girls, the same goes for you.  All you have 
to do to get respect and love is to decide to be worthy of it.

We are taught to be giving and forgiving.  These things are good 
things to be. But we should also be taught emotional triage.  Give 
your love abundantly to those who appreciate and respect it, and the 
rest will just have to be ignored if there isn't any left over.  We 
can't save a person determined to drown.  So there comes a time when 
we have to stop rescuing them, and tell them to swim instead.

---
Jason MacIsaac thinks Rusty's trying to tell us something.

-------------------------------------------

3.  Tainted

By Jakob Straub

I was born the day John Lennon died; the poor man was shot in New 
York City in the year 1980. Later in my life, I got to know that 
among other things, Lennon had said, "All you need is love."  As 
great a simplification this may be, I still find the subject rather 
complicated, though that may be a failure on my part due to lack of 
experience. 

Just the other day, a friend emailed me a copy of an article he had 
found in a women's magazine (I still have not asked him how he came 
across that one). The apparently female author was going on about 
the search for the one and only love at the age of fourteen, first 
kisses and more, and just when I was about to drop my friend an 
exasperated mail asking the point of all this, I recognized the 
author's name as that of a girl back from school. So the second time 
around, I read the piece more carefully, but I only succeeded in 
nursing a latent nagging thought to a major self-doubt: this girl I 
used to know published an article -- in a national magazine, that is 
-- about things I have not got around to experience personally to 
this day.

I felt kind of like a voyeur when I read about how a boy took her 
face in his hands and kissed her on the tip of the nose and on the 
mouth, and I have got to be careful there, because I do not intend 
to tell you what I have done so far in imitation of Romeo and what 
not. I will only relate this little bit: my love-live was put to 
shame by that fourteen-year-old guy, so admittedly, I'm not a 
connoisseur when it comes to loving. And yet I feel I know something 
on the subject of love, though mostly not from my own personal 
experiences. I am referring to that sort of common knowledge we all 
acquire through the process of coming of age, until we realize it 
does not have the slightest bearing on what happens to us anyway.

Just take the idea of the love of your life: how do you recognize 
'the one', what makes true romance? The man of a girl's dreams will 
always ride into town on a big white horse, prince in shining armor, 
white knight, whatever, and even the most hard-boiled workaholic 
bloke will turn into a handsome, caring lover, forsaking the high-
society wench he was about to marry for the working-class girl 
revealed to him by angel's voices or a bright light from heaven. 
Sounds familiar, sort of Hollywood? True, this is what you learn 
from movies like "Pretty Woman" ; girls devour them curled up with a 
box of Kleenex, and guys commonly write them off as 'chicken flicks' 
for precisely that reason. Conclusion: "Romance is dead. It was 
acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, 
and sold off piece by piece."  Thank you, Lisa Simpson, I would not 
have guessed otherwise.
 
But give me some slack here; I grew up believing sternly in the 
existence of rules like how you are supposed to always kiss on the 
first date. There is more stuff similarly misleading: all this talk 
about 'the bases', for example. Employing expressions from baseball 
may seem like a strange way of describing the previous evening's 
date (as in "We made it all the way to third base.") when no one has 
a clear idea what each base actually represents, but then those 
expressions are utilized mostly by popular guys (i.e. 'jocks') whose 
popularity is directly connected to their affiliation with the 
football team.

Maybe grasping sports-related metaphors was beyond me because I 
resembled more one of the 'geeks' or 'nerds'.  You know, those 
silent guys who get invited to parties only for laughs and whom you 
can spot by their pimply and bespectacled faces, but I may be 
stooping to the level of movie-induced cliches again. However, this 
merely goes to prove a point, namely that films only add to the 
confusion that is inherent in love anyway. Seems I was spoiled a 
good deal by them. "The goddam movies. They can ruin you."  -- 
already Holden Caulfield knew this.

Now there was a sixteen-year-old boy simply overwhelmed by love's 
confusion, totally tangled up in an emotional landslide: "Girls. 
Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. The really can."  Just the 
one to idolize when you are the same age. I would like to say that 
Holden Caulfield introduced me to the inevitable suffering that is 
the twin sister of love, only I learned about it prior to reading 
The Catcher in the Rye. Raised eyebrows everywhere now, what am I 
talking about? I knew that love can hurt a great deal before I ever 
felt that pain myself, and believe me, I learned it from The 
Peanuts. Of course I used to laugh at those cartoons as a kid, but 
what I remember above anything else is how Charlie Brown was shaken 
with grief when he dropped such lines as "Nothing takes the taste 
out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love."  Sure, he was a 
pathetic blockhead who never managed to walk up to that little red-
haired girl and ask her out, but when you sympathize with him, the 
feeling of "Good Grief!" just sticks like spilled diet-coke after a 
week.

Especially when it is rubbed in more by other means: music is an 
institution at least as important as Television and the movies when 
it comes to understanding love, and it is an equally misleading 
guide as well. You might probably remember from your own teenage 
days that listening to music can be a tool to drown out complaining 
parents (with the volume cranked up far enough, that is) or whatever 
else keeps bothering you in life. I took it one step further and 
began to strongly relate to certain lyrics. As with poetry, a lot of 
songs concentrate on the subject of love, which to some proves the 
redundancy of pop music. To me, it provided an endless source of 
knowledge I could also have acquired 'the hard way', but why 
experience the disappointment of rejection when pop songs can tell 
you all about it? I admired Robert Smith's self-declared search for 
the "perfect pop song", and the attempts of his band The Cure (the 
name says it all) at it were titled "Lovesong" or "The Lovecats" and 
clearly showed that love meant denial, pain, betrayal, suffering and 
sorrow. Until today, The Cure's definition of pop music seems to be 
a lonely guy singing in the rain about his broken heart.
 
Nirvana hit in the same vein, only more vigorously. Ever since the 
release of Nevermind, which featured the 'teenage anthem' "Smells 
like Teen Spirit", their music was definitely pop because it was 
popular. The songs also connected love to desperation and confusion 
with lyrics such as "I love you I'm not gonna crack", emphasized by 
Cobain's vocal gift which consisted of being able to vent his pain 
and misery in sustained screams at the top of his lungs, and you 
just had to relate to that. One of the 'truths' to be found in this 
music was that sadness would always prevail over love; this was 
underlined with the final statement Kurt Cobain made in 1994 when he 
committed suicide, leaving behind a lot of confusion. I could name 
other artists in addition (and I have not even proceeded to 'the 
classics' such as Elvis Costello yet), but the overall effect 
remains the same: before first love even considered making its entry 
into my life, I had armed myself with a collection of records. Not 
only did they predict how everything was going to turn abusive 
sooner or later, but I could also rely on favorite songs to provide 
me with comfort and solace at the times of sadness, since they were 
about exactly this kind of suffering.

I can hear you now, saying that the only thing suffering here is my 
credibility if I claim I really believed in all this. It is not as 
if I did not realize how blind belief creates self-fulfilling 
prophecies; looking at the world from a Leonard-Cohen-angle will 
make you discover cracks in everything, and I for one know it leaves 
you bruised in a way. But what is cause and effect here? To quote 
Nick Hornby: "Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was 
I miserable because I listened to music?"  By the time you arrive at 
the question whether the music or the misery came first you cannot 
even tell anymore, but what it boils down to is the question whether 
art is an imitation of life or if life is imitating art.

"The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious" is what 
Lester Bangs, "America's greatest rock critic", had to say on the 
topic. Nevertheless, I am tainted in the way that I am more than 
willing to regard every song in which someone is lonely in a way 
(and in another generalization I just assume this is true for the 
whole of pop music) as spookily relevant. I do not even have the 
consolation of saying it has done me any good, because it is indeed 
true that everything I gleaned from my Library of Musical Knowledge 
has not worked out to have any useful application in 'real life'. If 
you grant music (as well as books and movies and for that matter all 
of the aforementioned examples, anything that makes you feel) a 
central position in your life, you will constantly absorb an 
emotional energy from it, and once you have started to feed on that 
turmoil, love can in consequence never mean mere contentment.

People say that you will always remember your first love, and seeing 
now how I fell in love with music, I realize it is true. You might 
claim that all this is just another excuse for how I ended up like 
the men in Doris Day movies, but the unhappiest people I know are 
those moved to tears by their favorite love songs.

---
In his free time, Jakob keeps wondering what Calvin Klein's daughter 
thinks every time she reads her father's name on her boyfriend's 
underwear. Contact him with clues at jake.the.snake@web.de

-------------------------------------------

4. 'American Gods' by Neil Gaiman

By Melissa DeWilde

Think of America.  Think of the people living there and who have 
lived there.  The Vikings, the Indians, slaves.  The immigrants from 
Ireland, Japan and everywhere in between.  Now imagine the gods they 
brought with them: the spirits, the leprechauns and demons.  

These gods were abandoned.  

The gods of new technology replaced them.  Trains, malls, the 
Internet.  But the old gods are still alive.  And they need belief.  

Shadow is a man who has nothing to live for.  Just out of jail and 
newly widowed, he is recruited by the mysterious Mr. Wednesday on 
the way to his wife's funeral.  Shadow soon finds himself on a 
cross-country trip helping Wednesday recruit the old gods for a 
fight against the new. 

'American Gods' cost me sleep.  There were funny parts, there were 
sad parts.  It is sexy, spiritual, amazing and wonderful.  If you've 
never read a book in your life, start with this one.  

Neil Gaiman is the author of the highly acclaimed 'Sandman' comic 
book series, and has written with the Discworld author Terry 
Pratchett in the hilarious 'Good Omens'.  Some of his other works 
include the fantasy 'Stardust' and 'Neverwhere'.  Gaiman is already 
an English treasure.  'American Gods' makes him an American one as 
well.

---
Melissa is not bitter.  They just draw her that way.

-------------------------------------------

5. When Community Coffee Turns Corporate

By REVSCRJ

Everybody has some superpower.

I don't mean 'heat-vision' or 'inhuman strength', but the quirky 
link to synchronicity that one holds for one's entire life because 
it is a reflection of who you really are in regard to the universe 
on some incredibly deep level.  For some folks they are blessed with 
the ability to find the only parking spot within 12 blocks, for 
others all they have to do is look at the ground and there will be 
some spare change while others yet, for some reason, never have lost 
a game of rock-paper-scissors.

Now, most people don't think that they have one and the reason for 
this is that their power either is so obscure that they don't ever 
notice it -- like every time they kick a rock it bounces an even 
number of times -- or it doesn't come into play, except in very 
particular instances...

My power is of the latter.

I used to be known as "The Angel of Death for coffee shops" because 
every one I had worked at by this point had closed up on me within a 
maximum of a year from my arrival.  One can imagine that, before I 
realized the 'cosmic' nature of my power, I was pretty disturbed and 
pissy about my bad 'luck'.  I felt victimized by circumstance, like 
invisible pullers-of-strings were laughing at me -- I mean as soon 
as I'd start to stabilize BOOM I'd be unemployed again.  Real funny.

Funnier though, I must say, when I began to understand -- it was 
like I was touched by God.  One of the better examples of this was 
when I worked at a place called PG Roasting Company, a cafe` in 
Pacific Grove.

I knew how to do this job before I stepped through the door so 
training time was so negligible as to be non-existent. Normally, one 
is gradually introduced to co-workers during the training process 
with this odd aura of inferiority -- asking prices, where things are 
stored etc., -- so the actual establishment of one's self with them 
takes awhile.  This didn't happen here.  I was done with training 
within an hour of my first shift, so during lulls in business the 
conversations I had with my co-workers were fairly deep.  You know, 
"who are you, what do you believe" kinds of talks.

This one girl, Kieva, asked me -- off the cuff, no introductory 
statement --"Sean, how many women have you slept with?"

I looked over at her and said, "Four".

She responds with, "Wow, that was fast.  You keep pretty close 
track, huh? Think about it a lot?"

"Damnit Kieva!  It's only four!"

Ended up living with her years later in San Francisco while I was a 
video editor (q.v.).  Odd how the world loops circumstances that 
way. There are so many patterns in existence, it's unerringly 
beautiful.

So, the "Angel of Death" thing.  One time I mention it to this girl, 
Hai, and she responds:

"Ahem.  I don't think that we would be voted Best Coffee Shop in the 
Monterey Area three years in a row, just to have you come in and 
close us down because of some 'mystical ability' you believe you 
have!"

I just nodded and smiled in the most placating manner that I could.

About four months later a corporation buys out the business, which 
was an odd experience, but I'll get to that.  I bring up to Hai 
that, technically speaking, PG Ro.Co. had closed while I worked 
there.  She scoffed:

"I don't think that this counts Sean, I mean we didn't close down, 
all of us still work here... it's just the ownership that changed 
hands."

I nodded and smiled again.

A woman who went by the inhumanly foreboding, vaguely nauseating job 
title of "Corporate Observer" came to our store.  I have met two 
"Corporate Observers" in my life and both of them were sheer 
unmitigated evil.  Frankly, I don't think they are even human.

These two women had totally different behavioral approaches and yet 
they shared a certain gleam of insectoid emotionlessness in their 
eyes.  It made these women truly abominations (they were both women, 
by coincidence, but I have seen similar traits in the eyes of male 
sales reps and the criminally insane).  It was as if their eyes were 
merely camera lenses... some abhorrent subspecies...  

Anyway, this Corporate Observer came to "just check out the new team 
members [big smile], see how the business is run and tell the big 
guys back at corporate" -- god how I hate the use of that word to 
denote a location -- "what's up with the new store in PG!"

She was all smiles and offers of possible benefits and paid time off 
-- the basic corporate carrot, you know -- while assuring everyone 
that we all were safe in our jobs and wouldn't be replaced.  Lies, 
of course.  I had a hard time looking her in the face, what with 
those glassy dead things staring back at me.

A month and a half later, we were all fired.

The day that they informed the staff that there "were going to be a 
number of personnel changes" was my day off, but I am a caffeine 
junkie and will REALLY take advantage of the employee-drinks-for-
free rule.  The meeting was almost over as I walked in. I set my 
stuff down and tried to be as uninvolved with them as I could while 
getting my drink when Hai walks up to me.  Her face is deadpan and 
grim. She says:

"YOU did this.  We are all fired.  YOU did this!"

I nodded and smiled.

---
REVSCRJ is a writer/musician living in Monterey, California. 
Constantly on the verge of homelessness, he hopes that you enjoy his 
work or else his life has been in vain. Contact REVSCRJ at 
revscrj@cloudfactory.org to lodge complaints, notify of lawsuits, or 
receive spiritual advice.

-------------------------------------------

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