this is water, this is water, this is water...

i miss vandalism, do you miss vandalism?

Violence against property can be so cathartic. Busting up some beer bottles with a .22 is alright but it isn’t the same as throwing a brick through a big-ass window. We just smashed some pumpkins off the back deck into the ravine below but that just whetted my appetite. Sometimes I miss the self involved little punk that got to break shit without thinking about the consequences to others.

(image via The Office)

(image via Ferris Bueller’s Day Off)

(image via  La Femme Nikita)

(image via Stranger than Fiction)

(image via Groundhog Day)

acid

(image via La Femme Nikita)

mumblelard systems recoveries completed 8:49 P.M.

service resumed

thank you for your patience

(image via Brazil)

mumblelard has intercepted of additional hostile attack code

service interrupted

(image via Alien)

mumblelard service restoration process start

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(image via Office Space)

mumblelard emergency recovery procedures binders immediate review

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(image of Charles Crumb’s graphomaniacal journal via Crumb)

mumblelard to engage central services support via land line

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(image via Brazil)

mumblelard detects signs of malicious activity

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(image via Office Space)

mumblelard is experiencing a production system failure

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(image via The Matrix)

it’s kind of strange, isn’t it? how the mountains pay us no attention at all. you laugh or you cry… the wind just keeps on blowing.

Friday was movie night with the girls.  In honor of the independence day holiday we watched the film, Red Dawn, a document that was apparently leaked from some timeline adjacent to but vastly different from our own. In this movie, Darry and Pony Boy and Two-Bits’ little brother are all jocks and wind up fighting a guerrilla war against some kind of pan-national invading army.

This is a low gore, high explosive, and high body count war movie with a recurring camping motif that was fun to watch but had its serious side.  Its few topical allusions to early 1980s political scenarios did not provoke any interest from the girls. The identity of the good guys and bad guys are pretty clear with the exception of a few rogue vichyists, but that was enough to make this more than a straightforward action movie night. We had some interesting discussions about the logic and logistics of a war of occupation and other war related topics that included:

• It would be smart if they found some army outfits and put them on. (from the monday morning general)
• The reeducation camp and territorial occupation versus the domination of a population.  If the bad guys want the town, why don’t they just kick all of the people out, why are they keeping them in jails? (Finn. It is complicated enough to explain the balance of individual rights with a responsibility to our society as a whole.  It feels impossible to explain the absurdity of abandoning this balance and using force and threat of death to try to dictate this sense of responsibility to an individual. That is what bad guys do, no one really knows why.)
• Why is Tom Eckart’s face bleeding when Jed and Matt see him through the fence at the reeducation camp? (Bad guys.)
• What does it mean when he says “Avenge Me!”? (He wants his sons to kill the people who are going to kill him. How to explain the line between resistance and revenge?  When should you stop turning the other cheek?)
• How many people are in a squad? (via the little general, I had to look this one up.  It is roughly 10-12 for movie purposes.)
• Why is he telling them not to cry if their families just died? (After the wolverines (Archetypal warrior behavior plus the psychological distortions inherent in warfare of any kind)
• What does medieval mean? (The word was used to describe the state of a city that has been under siege for several months. Primitive, dangerous, brutal conditions associated with an earlier period of human history.)
• Drinking deer blood as a rite of passage for a hunter after his first kill. (Fallie said, I wouldn’t want to do that, but if we had to, I would.)
• The betrayals of their own people by the mayor and his son. Vichyists. (see occupation versus domination.)

I was glad that they were asking serious questions, but the experience was not without it thrills.  A lot of fun was had watching rocket propelled grenades blow up cars, buildings, tanks, and guard towers.  We all agreed that we would like to take a trunk full of RPGs to the junkyard for a little shooting practice.