The end of my generation, part 1: Wannabe Rappers

In my neverending pursuit to understand my idiotic generation, I came to a realization. Luckily for myself, I chose to shun society until I turned about 19, and now, two years later, I wish I had continued to listen to my first instinct. In the pointless time I've spent in University, I've done far more to notice styles and catch up on my generation's lack of it.

Now, most decades, or generations of people in Western society are categorized by some term, which follows a close relationship with their clothes. From the free-love anti-bomb of the 60's, the Disco "tightpants" of the 70s, to Yuppies and Generation X, and the brief flirtation in the mid-late 90's with "Generation Y", to yes, even the wife-beating "let's pretend we're a family with values" of the 50s overshadowed by the Cold War, each have distinctive qualities that define them and make them easily recognizable.

This got me thinking: What will my generation's youth be defined as? Using the power of the internet and my bus rides throughout the city every day, I managed to narrow it down to the dominant styles - each are distinct enough from the common flow of jeans-and-tshirt people, and both are frequent subjects of ridicule from anyone with any kind of common sense. These people are the lowest common denominator of my generation, and thus are how older generations assume we all are.

But like our burned-out hippy parents that gave into the man after realizing that they were suddenly the ones with power and money, I forsee that these styles have dismal ends. So I have handily outlined what these are for future reference and "I told you so" creditials. Today: Part 1 of this (at least two-part) series, The Wannabe Rap style.

The wannabe Rap style: You're white but you wish you were black, or failing that, a hip hop star. Eminem has given you all the inspiration you need to prove that growing up in Suburbia is just the same as growing up sleeping on the streets, and even though you've never touched a gun before and you don't know where the safety is on it, you'd definitely be able to bust a cap in anyone over even the smallest of arguments. You spend all your money on bling and designer clothes, wear basketball jerseys of players you've never heard of but their name sounds black, and of course you're nothing without your pin-striped cap put on to cover your right ear - but failing a cap, you've got some sweatbands. Accessorizing is a must here; you're not the baddest motherfucker in your middle-class hood unless you've got at least $250 of jewelery. If any single piece of clothing is less than 100 dollars, you're worse than ghetto, which you don't know what that word means but it's gotta be good cause everyone says it.

You have a slavic devotion to hip hop and rap. 50 cent is your god. You totally understand what it's like to be him, growing up on the streets, dealing rock, which you assume is coke but aren't sure, and getting in drivebys. That is simply your entire life to this point.

Your dream is to sleep with as many girls as possible, and with your 'hood, you frequently refer to how they are 'bitches' and that you're gonna get some play any day. She'll go down on you unquestionably, with her DD breasts and 100-pound body. After you've slept with her, or got a blowjob (which you'll later tell your friends was sex), you brush her off to venture to the next girl, but of course, if she dares to move on, she's a slut. You are incapable of loving a girl - although you have no problem with lying to their face about it to get action. You call the shots in a relationship, or at least think you do, and don't understand when she's mad. You assume it's because she's a bitch.

You dabble with weed to start, which quickly becomes your favourite (and only) pasttime with your friends. After getting high a bunch of times off other people's weed, you realize you need money to support this habit. Getting a job is out of the question, cause you're a gangsta and working is for losers and bitches, so a small Break and Enter is in order. You're successful at first, but each attempt gets you closer and closer to getting caught, and you get cocky. You finally get caught, and your friends have hung you out to dry, fleeing the scene before you could. You try to escape but trip over your baggy clothing - but you're lucky, and get a slap on the wrist punishment, which you assume is you "putting the man in place". You're now terrified of getting sent to prison, but that's not enough to deter you from petty theft.

You venture into more hard drugs, enjoying the high more and more - but it's more and more expensive, too, so you start selling whatever you can - except what you wear. That's part of your skin now. You've become a junkie, but you luck out while baked and find a girl. She's willing to put up with your bullshit cause she's partially retarded, but you don't care cause you can't stop staring at her chest. She has the potential to pull you out of your spiral, but you ignore that... after all, you're a gangsta.

Years have passed by now - you've got no job still, no prospects, no education, but you sure look pimp to 15 people, and everyone else is a hater. You need money, so you get a temp job while learning how to deal drugs. Your addiction to drugs eventually gets you fired, but it doesn't matter anymore cause you've become adept at selling drugs.

You have squabbles with other hoods over something retarded like land neither of you own or something either of you said. If it's not directly related to you, you get pulled into the fray 'backing up' your hood. It's a success! You get revenge by stabbing or beating someone from their hood - if you're lucky, they die. Otherwise, they get back to their base. Things are great for you and your crib - and there couldn't possibly be any reprecussions for this.

Of course there is, and a overblown gang war is started. You get your hands on a gun, and although you're clueless to how to properly use it, you've watched enough movies and music videos to assume you do.

From here, one of two things happen.

1: You get into a firefight with the other gang, and are successful. You held the gun sideways and didn't get shot, and got away with minimal collateral damage. One of your crew is hurt, but your personal "surgeons" get the bullet out and then start drinking away the night. You wake up in a puddle of your own vomit and with a killer headache, and after stumbling out into the day, life is great for a few weeks.

But then the cops catch up to you. You know they're close to catching you, and because you're on coke you're extremely paranoid about getting caught. Unfortunately for you, you have a mild OD and wake up in the hospital. There's a court case, which you lose horribly but end up in rehab first by a stroke of luck.

Six months later, you're declared healed, and head out into the world again, ready to instantly forget what you've just been court-ordered. But wow, you're getting older, now in your late 20s. You find out your crew is a shade of it's former self, some in jail, others rehab, and a retaliation took place while you were in rehab, so some are dead too. You get high and drunk to honour them, and are caught a few days later committing some random crime, but again, are let off with community service. You ignore it, break parole on something minor like getting drunk or breaking curfew. You end up in jail - your worst fear.

You're a pretty boy, and those few months are terrible. You've done things that have scarred you for life, and your asshole sure is sore, but now you've got ex-con streetcred. You've got no place to live, and your crew is strangely rejecting you, or at least, what's left of it. Your girl is long gone, moved on to someone you kind of know, but you pass it off as she's a bitch.

You've got nothing going for you, but you still think you're badass. You get way over your head trying to get back to the top, and you're gunned down by a rival, or arrested in a raid. If you're not dead, you're now in jail for the rest of your life.

2: You get in the firefight, and you suffer heavy losses - apparently they were expecting you, or they had better guns. You tried everything, even holding your gun sideways, but it didn't work. Half your crew is injured badly (including yourself), or dead, or the smart ones didn't go and left the crew (the bitches). You're in hospital for awhile, and the recovery is long, but you haven't forgotten what's happened. You're in your late 20's, but the ragged remains of your crew band together for the last stand. It's the night before your attack, and you're getting high/drunk to prepare. You've got a bigger gun from a guy that knew a guy, but the word spread too quickly - the rival knows you were coming, and they attack first. If you're not gunned down right there, you again suffer bad injuries and are back in the hospital. You've lost a lot of normal functions, and it hurts to move sometimes.

You're just short of 30 when are released a second time. You find a new girl, clueless to where the first went, and try and clean up - you get a temp job, which turns into your permanent job, you have a few kids (if you haven't had a few already that you dunno where they are but still have to pay child support). You wonder how your life could have ended up this way, so dead-end. At least you stayed out of jail - but just barely. You still get high from time to time, but nothing hard anymore - your girl has threatened you about that, and you listen because you're scared of living on the street like you claimed you were from back when you were 19. You're a burnout, but you sure looked badass in your early 20s. You regret everything but refuse to admit it to yourself.

Your girl leaves you before you turn 40. Dejected and useless to society, you turn to drugs again. You either get arrested or OD. If you're not dead, you're in jail, and just want to see your kids again. But their mother won't let them see you - and who could blame her? You'd cry, but you're too manly for that. You've wasted your life.

But you looked cool when you were 19.

Part 2 "Emo", next.

-Mark

Bigger Boys and Stolen Sweethearts

It's been just under a week since my last ranting - truth be told, working full-time really has taken it out of me, and my beloved internet has found itself neglected of a would-be linkslutter. However, there's still been a few issues that have "arisen", so to speak.

I'll be the first to admit that a lot of people use XP illigitemately - but honestly, who gives a shit if we're screwing over a monopoly that's screwing over the consumer? Personally, I only use XP because it's the most popular platform that I know everything is made for. There's a Mac in my household, but yeah.. Mac.. no. I don't have the patience to learn all the intricases of Mac when Windows gladly fills my time with its endless problems.

But just the other day, I got a message, 6 months after I installed XP clean onto my system, that my copy of XP "may not be legitimate - you may be a victim of software fraud".

Gasp! You don't say, I'm a victim of getting something for free that I should be getting for free anyway? And what's that, you say? I'm inavertedly taking money away from Bill Gates, the richest man on the planet? I'm so ashamed of myself. Oh wait - I live below the poverty line (technically) - and I really don't feel like paying $150+ for a system with countless bugs.

However, this little notification stored itself in my taskbar and wouldn't go away. Like most unused icons in the taskbar, if you forget they exist for a few days, they'll be hidden. So I just figured that if I ignore it, it'll go away.

Not so. Apparently this little fucker stays there all the time until you buy a legal copy. Well I was having none of that BS cluttering up my neglected taskbar, so I partook in some investigation to get rid of it - but no matter what I searched, the only way to seemingly dispose of it (for now) is to actually spend money... so screw that. I tried living with it for a few days, but found that it was an aesthetic headache, and I went into my sluething.

But this brings me to my handy little solution. All I had to do was go into the taskbar options, select the icon, and put it to "hide always", and poof, it's gone, at least off my visibility.

Which leads me to my final point. It seems that Microsoft just assumes/relies on people's general computer illiteracy to get by. Most people wouldn't have a clue how to get rid of that, or make it "go away" by proxy. Microsoft tries to appear legitimate, but given their exploits of routinely screwing over both the competitor and the consumer and avoiding being broken down (except for that one case, but yeah, do you feel like there's competition in the market now) for the better half of two decades. . . it doesn't happen. I mean, how many of you actually READ what the security updates are doing, or do you just mindlessly click "yes" so the popup will go away? How many of you have EVER noticed a performance boost from any update, ever?

It's just a thought - when I disabled the updates to stop the notifier from pissing me off, it "warned" me that I'd stop receiving critical updates. . . critical what? What has Windows EVER done for ANYONE apart from suck but be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time (ie: The 80's, when everyone was high on coke and buying shit).

In my ideal utopic world, companies wouldn't be huge dicks. Oh, how I dream sometimes.

-Mark

Knifes and Razorblades

Okay fuck it. I'm now breaking into the world of larger text adventures, only because I'm too lazy to constantly change the options. So enjoy being able to actually read my blog now. Let's move on.

So I'm riding home from work today, when I see a sign on a church yard. Usually I just laugh or scoff at how retarded the sayings are - because some idiotic proverb is not going to get me to join their cult. But this one got me pretty pissed off, for a variety of reasons...

It said "If evolution is real, then why do mothers still have only two hands?"

OH. I just stared at it for a bit - I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised, considering most churches get extremely arrogant when they know they can get away with bullshit like that. But first things first...

Okay yeah, it's mother's day soon, so I can see why they'd play off that angle. I dunno how the hell that'd get anyone to go there, but whatever. But more importantly, they're trying to guilt me into Mother's Day BS. Consumerism is pretty intertwined with Religion, especially the mainstream Christian ones. Look, I care about my mom, blah blah blah, but I really don't give a shit about Mother's Day. I don't live with her, and I'm pretty much anti-buying anyone something cause a company tells me too.. so Mother's Day really doesn't mean much to me - and yeah, some people will call me cheap, others a jerk, but they can fuck themselves. Unlike most people, I have convictions that I stick to. I hate religious and forced holidays - I'm more of the spontaneous nice/gifts. Anyway, getting off topic. So the sign was odd in that it promoted mother's day.

Oh, and let's not forget that it's pushing back women's rights. "Only two hands"... which pretty much implies that they do everything around the house/work, and take care of the kids. Yes, let's just shove them in a traditional role and thank them once a year for it. They're important for once a year. They do so much, but let's forget about it the rest of the year until we're guilted into thanking them in the most insincere way - by trying to buy their affection!

But most importantly about this sign, was it's little backhanded nadslap to politics. Let's take a relatively pointless holiday and make some rip at Evolution! Well if God knows everything and is all powerful, why the FUCK didn't he CREATE mothers with more than two hands? At least according to evolution one day she may have more.. but if she does, then she's an unholy hellish freak that God would shun. Because she wouldn't be made in his image. What a retarded theory, by the way. But hey, I'm sure creationism explains everything perfectly - except, you know, everything. I mean, don't give me this bullshit about God giving man the power to do whatever he wants, because he's all knowing and he would know beforehand that it'd turn into a major disaster where we kill each other over retarded shit (by the way, we've been killing ourselves for about 10,000 years. We're sure learning from our past).

If God really did create man, he fucked it up and then gave up, or God is a sadistic son of a bitch (maybe he's a cutter?).

-Mark

(Guitar Solo)

So I've been working full time like a chump now for a week and a half or whatever. The job isn't excessively terrible, although unbelieveably monotonous - but that's not what I'm bitching about today (I'll save that for later).

What I am bitching about is the simply awful names companies are coming up with for their products. I mean most computers are just a jumble of numbers and letters that nobody understands but assumes that higher numbers and more letters = better computer, but there's a lot of mindless shit names. I mean the "Happy Meal"? What the fuck. You won't be so happy after those burgers congeal and block your heart and you die...

Or how about cigarattes? "Lucky Strike"? The only luck you'll get from smoking that is getting cancer and living with cancer for years, watching your health deteroirate while your family gives up on the medicare cause you're "not worth it anymore". Lucky you.

But specifically, there are some AWFUL names for alcohol (I work at a liquor warehouse... go figure my rage would lead here). While piling booze on skids, My co-workers and I have found booze like "Fat Bastard", booze that requires a Mensa membership to spell, and my personal favourite: Golden Wedding.

Golden fucking Wedding? That sounds more like a porn movie, not a wine. Honestly, just think about that for a second. Go to your friends and say "Wanna have Golden Wedding tonight?"
Or what about an actual golden wedding? "You may now piss on the bride."

I can think of a billion better names for a wine. And another thing - if your wine is the colour of piss, that's not something I'd want to advertise.

-Mark

Good luck on guessing this post's song.

You only sleep with girls that say they like your music

God my back kills.