Tag: gaming

Unbearable Cruelty

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 1 Comment

2menWe were walking a block-and-a-half home tonight after watching a recently released movie.  About thirty minutes from the end of the movie I closed my eyes and withdrew the custom-fit Etymotic ear plugs I wear around my neck every day, and tried, really tried to isolate myself from the movie.  I knew that it was already too late to stave off the consequence of watching a film which included the graphic horror that the characters (humans) performed on one another.  I’d swum well past the breakwater and already found myself caught in a riptide of emotion that I prayed I could withhold until after we said goodnight.

And then it happened: starting from deep in my core, an ache, dull, almost quiet; but it sank, then caught fire and spread throughout my torso, finally exiting by way of heaving sobs and weeping.  I wretched as though vomiting; it had to come out like bad liquor; all at once I wailed, it was impossible to breathe; my partner grabbed ahold and hugged me; and I asked the same question I always ask when this happens: Why are people so cruel to each other?meanpeoplesuck

Whatever degree of resistance we’re born with or develop as a means of survival, when it comes to cruelty I find it absolutely unbearable and I must, in order to keep my wits, distance myself as quickly as possible, or shut my eyes which is partially effectual by eliminating the video portion.  An apparent afteraffect of my mental breakdown in 2008, one of my widely known characteristics disappeared.  This capacity was a basic tenet of survival in my career: an unusual and boundless tolerance of unwarranted and often gratuitous domination, insensitivity, and publicly verbal assaults by senior executives.  Post-breakdown I was no longer immune from feeling, really, really feeling the appalling and sorrowful inhumanity most humanity ignores, approves, pities, politely acknowledges while respecting civil decorum, or determined is very profitable as entertainment and implants it in scene after scene of recent motion pictures, or spends millions of dollars to create brutal, vulgar, savage, and murderous atrocities then market to our children as toys, or a sympathetic and comfortable populace helplessly citing the excuse approved by concerned yet tolerant bourgeoisie and the proletarians alike, “I mean really, what can I do?  I’m just one guy?”

TRY EMPATHY AND INTOLERANCE AND ACTION against any expression of cruelty by a human being!

And if that doesn’t inspire you to get involved, how about when you witness any expression of cruelty by a human being?dalaikindquote

But if neither works for you, place yourself in an environment where one human being (them) has dominion over another human being (you), and experience how it feels to take both barrels of cruelty.  And not just once.  Any time. Any where.  And fighting back gets you fired, sued, incarcerated, or killed.

We’ve got groups throwing blood on fur donning women; hordes marching on behalf of the inhumane treatment of animals for experiments; prohibition of foie gras in Chicago due to the mistreatment of the goose.

Really?  I mean, really?

Our cruelty to each other must take precedent: It’s intolerable, inhumane, unjust, and in no uncertain terms has it ever been, or will it ever be fodder for entertainment or a toy for a child.

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Allen Ludden, Help Me Please!?!?

~ Harlan Didrickson

Had I known, the moment after initially accessing the internet via winsock or an equally cryptic amalgamation of geeky gobbledygook, that membership to the exclusive clubs (known as websites) would require not just one ridiculously preposterous secret knock-knock (login) followed by an incomprehensible, ludicrous, wacky, loony, cockeyed, screwy, and off the wall cavalcade of letters, numbers, symbols, and smoke signals resembling hieroglyphics or purposefully enigmatic code which 99% of average humans can’t create much less reproduce, I’d have hung up my telephone receiver/modem and exclaimed, “let those living in a foreign country, speak a foreign language!  Here, here we speak English: literal English: whole, cream-at-the-top, decadently-indulgent, Nym-sister inspired (Homo, Syno, and Anto), dipthong-declared English!

My internet usage is appropriate to my demographic but I currently store 200+ logins and corresponding passwords!  Two Hundred!  My password manager is the electronic equivalent of my pop’s workbench: more than half the crap he’s kept, when asked, he’s got no clue what it does, where it goes, when he used it, or why he’s kept it.  Same with me – but don’t ever, ever delete any login/password combination – EVER – because that’s the one you’ll really need!  And where do you keep the login/password combination to your Password Manager program?

I’m currently enduring the arduous task of searching through four years of notebooks (like the guy that pitched the winning lottery ticket) for a login/password combination I cleverly disguised as a common American idiom of which I was certain I’d remember because it was part of our vernacular in 2009 like Aberzombie.  Remember Aberzombie?  Can’t you just picture yourself around the Starbuck’s counter catty hissing that the size 2 no-foam-easy-skim-extra-hot-cappucino is such an Aberzombie?  Like that: that’s like what I’m searching for: that’s not what I’m searching for.

To the internet community at-large (especially those responsible for the L-SAT level login/password combination requirements):  Why not invent an easier (and more pleasurable) method of identification?  I’d like to suggest a pair of lips closely resembling your husband/wife/lover; boyfriend/girlfriend; Clooney; Roberts; Jackman; Beyonce which, when kissed, captures your DNA and compares it to the DNA profile they’ve got stored.

Tongue however, locks you out.  That’s just freaky-deaky.

The Run For President Is A Bully’s Pulpit

~ Harlan Didrickson

Me?  I deplore competition.  I have hated competition since I was very young because, I assert, I was a fat child (that was before it was sassy, vogue and fattering – my modern form of flattering, as in “are these jeans fattering?”) and competition was synonymous with failure and embarrassment and yet another reminder that I was one of the periphery boys.

Although I joined seasonal teams through high school, I was never competitive, i.e. an athletic threat, to any opponent.  I weathered all those losses because it was smarter to belong to and be a loser, than to be a loner and a loser.  Loner losers were to high school what a duck that clangs is to a shooting gallery: irresistable to insecure men that accumulate trophies as proof of their asserted dominion.

Haven’t we witnessed too many examples of the tragic consequences when potent, tightly-wound, explosive or obstinate pack leaders torment the dissimilar, solitary and contradictory by exhaustive humiliation, unyielding fear, and physical harassment to an exasperated degree of hatred and revenge expressed externally as murder or the lowest depths of hopelessness that the victim’s acrimony and contempt is so great and that their thirst for retribution will never be quenched, so they turn inward to find their self-inflicted exoneration and release from misery.  When did we, as a nation, agree that in order to succeed we’ve got to hit the disenfranchised with such a degree of “shock and awe” that they’ll eventually submit to extinction?  When did we, as a nation, adopt bullying as our de facto reaction to threats and danger?  It’s the exact moment that the practice of instilling fear into the minds of the voting public by egregious negative attack campaigning accusing the opposing party or candidate of misfortunes, errors in judgement, or personal infractions so dubious or diabolical, that if the opponent won the election America would resemble the wasteland once known as Cherynobl.

When bullying is permitted, incited, or rewarded as a rite of passage or a strategy in a competition, it reinforces a recent and troubling change in our idea of sportsmanship.  Competition used to be the identification of “winner” as one that was better at <whatever> than his/her opponent(s) and was able to prove his/her superiority by way of fair, impartial, and equal sportsmanship.  Competition has become the identification of “winner” as one that was better at pointing out weaknesses, instilling doubt through repetitive and escalating degrees of fear, taking advantage of the recent breakdown in civility and propriety by deliberate and calculated unearthing, followed by wanton pillaging and inference, leading up to the zenith: a quiet, little leak to cable news outlets which, within a few pre-dawn hours hits all the major wires and airs as the lead story on every morning news program and goes viral in time for most voters coffee break.