Five men were recently absolved of accusations of rape. The charges were brought against them by a girl who recanted her claim. Though there’s a lot of noise about “innocent until proven guilty” in this country, these boys were thrown in lock-up, held on exorbitant bail their low-income families could never hope to pay and some of them were suspended from their schools. All the result of mere allegations … which have turned out to be false.

Rape is obviously very serious, but so too should be protecting the innocent from false accusations and unlawful repudiation. Like it or not — under the tenets of our justice system — even if someone did perpetrate an act that violates the law, there should be no recourse for punishment BEFORE a guilty verdict is delivered in our courts. However, preemptive punishment, regardless of guilt, is not new in this country … this purported land of freedom and democracy … more like of hyperbole and outright lies.

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Almost everything I experience sticks in my mind. I have so much information in my brain that serves no practical purpose, it’s patently absurd. My propensity to recall music lyrics or dialogue from movies is a useful party trick. I can even recall mundane details from other people’s lives, told to me in passing, that the people to whom it happened eventually cease to recall.

Having a long memory is so much more of a curse than a blessing.

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Page views are down because output is down. Not as though I’ve monetized this thing, so tracking how many times it’s been viewed is little more than an exercise in gauging the little niche of interest I’ve staked out.

It’s a good sign that a handful of people still will tune in despite nothing new to see, but if I alienate that readership by not providing new content, I’ll be back to utter obscurity instead of nearly utter obscurity.

The dearth of writing is the result of a dearth of inspiration. Sure, there have been things to write about, but as angry and vitriolic as this place can be, I’d much rather it not be used as an outlet for woe. Woe has been in large supply of late and using it for inspiration is like trying to fashion a skyscraper from literal horseshit.

On the train last night, a bum was making his rounds. But this bum wasn’t like the bulk of his cohorts. He wasn’t asking for money or selling a sob story for years on end about how his house burned down the week before … he was belligerent, abusive and confrontational.

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I’ll start with an unattributed remark:

“Fucking a single, never-wed mother is akin to picking up a used condom off the ground and putting it on your dick.”

And this segues nicely into my desire to talk about a single mother who, at 2 a.m. on Mother’s Day, took her three-year-old for a drive. To make it interesting, the mother was both high on pot and drunk on alcohol. She was driving with some man, ten years her senior and not her baby’s father, in the passenger seat (or, depending on the source, the man was driving but, since the woman was brought up on DWI charges, it would imply she was operating the vehicle).

Regardless of the facts, let us assume this drug-addled, unwed mother was driving and is directly responsible in crashing her vehicle of the severe head trauma done to her little girl, who may not survive. The girl has swelling in her brain.

Let us assume the mother is not terribly bright. Let us also assume the baby’s male progenitor was no savant, either. Is it then safe to assume this young girl, however innocent, does not have a lot of intellectual potential? Even less so now that mommy mashed her brains. I know it is callous to say so, but I think dying might be this child’s best hope.

This woman should have never had a child. She is obviously unfit to be a mother, even if one only weighs her lack of judgment in drinking AND smoking pot and then driving WITH her child in the car. Add to that argument the flagrant stupidity of this woman and it raises the question of whether people who fail to meet a certain intellectual threshold should be permitted to breed.

Personally, I think Aldous Huxley’s illustration of eugenics at work is the most practical solution. I think people like this woman should only be allowed to breed in a regulated manner. Perhaps it’s draconian and intrusive, but I think procreation should be as regulated as anything else, if not more so. Why can we tell people what they can and cannot drink and at what age, what they can and cannot smoke and at what age, when they can drive, where to legally sleep, urinate, defecate, and so on and so forth, et cetera, etc.

I don’t think a race of “supermen” is the answer. No way. Stupid and dangerous that would be. If everyone were brilliant and beautiful and talented, none of those things would have any worth. There need to be degrees of intelligence, beauty and talent. An economic view is essential when considering the implementation of a caste system. Let’s face it, if everyone were of the same ilk at the current 99th percentile, we would have no garbage men, carpenters, electricians, road workers or anyone to do any essential, infrastructural work of any kind.

To return to Mr. Huxley’s position, society requires Deltas just as much as it does Alphas and Betas. Gammas, too, would be necessary at the very least to fill in that degree in the scale, to say nothing of the important functions they would fulfill.

However, in an unregulated society like ours, a woman like this baby-mangling drug user, is free to copulate with whichever lackluster genetic candidate that is available and make — scientifically speaking — progeny with traits most likely of the Huxley Delta variety. She then either damages this progeny as she’s done or, as in myriad other cases, this progeny grows up having a life devoid of direction, purpose, good parenting and quality training / education and becomes exactly what the mother and father had each been: a societal drain.

This woman is to be blamed for her lack of personal responsibility and her dearth of mothering skills, but so too is society to be blamed — and perhaps more so than the mother — for this travesty. There is a paradoxical disconnect caused by the rhetoric of freedom AND the “sanctity of life” posited by America’s inexorable religious underpinning. It underlies many of the social mores in this country. This paradox is responsible for letting human tragedies like this unfit mother have children to damage with her poor judgment.

Subsequently, Americans wring their hands at the horror and the sadness of this crime, the harm done to the innocent and defenseless child that depends so heavily on the care of her mother and is irrevocably harmed by its absence. This aggrieved response is just that, a response. A reaction. Reactionary and, as such, too little and far too late.

A proactive approach needs to be taken to prevent things like this from happening.

People should not be free to run amok and procreate like animals if we are all to subscribe to the lie that humans are something better than upright walking primates. Mandatory — and temporary — sterilization should be considered for young men and women. People found to be carrying a communicable sexual disease should be quarantined and barred from spreading that disease. Only if active steps are taken to eliminate the undesirable elements from a situation can the situation be improved.

Let’s not totally disregard the other option, which is to cop to that we are all just upright walking primates and there should be no laws. Give in to entropy. Let everyone run amok. The laws of nature will take care of everything just as, in the case of the drug-addled woman and her little girl, it did in mitigating the damage done to the human race by the woman having bred.

The other day, a friend of mine posted a story about a St. Louis Cardinals fan wearing a shirt. The shirt said something about Chicago Cubs pitcher Carlos Zambrano that was deemed to be not just offensive, but “racist.”

Gasp.

The shirt said: “Zambrano mows my lawn” and had a silhouette of a sombrero and poncho-wearing man pushing a lawn mower. Ai, Dios mio.

Maybe I’m just insensitive, but the last time I looked, the landscapers I saw were Hispanic. I’ve noticed too that the guy who makes my egg sandwich at the deli is Hispanic. It seems that a lot of the Bodega workers in Spanish Harlem are Hispanic, too. I’ve taken note of these things. Does that make me racist?

If the shirt said “Zambrano sells bottles of Tropical Fantasy” would that have been a problem? Probably. Everyone knows that the man is a professional ball player who throws a baseball and makes millions doing so. Obviously he’s NOT selling Tropical freaking Fantasy soda at the local bodega. I guess what’s offensive is that someone has pointed out the correlation between Hispanics who mow lawns and that Zambrano himself is Venezuelan.

Do people really get upset when Irish and drunk are used synonymously? Is it racist to say that Italians eat pasta? I’m sure there are Irish who aren’t drunk and Italians who don’t eat pasta. Just like there are Chinese who don’t own a laundry and Arabs who don’t run a dukkan. Just like there are West Indian people who aren’t selling jerk chicken and low-budget movies with all-black casts. But in all of those cases, there are many who do. I may be wrong, but I think there’s a difference between stereotyping and racism.

Is it fair to lump someone in with a group of other people simply because of their appearance or their lineage? Of course not. Is it harmful? I really don’t think so. Humans, as a species, are not terribly bright. They tend to economize when it comes to thinking … that is to say that they do it as little as possible. It is much easier to make associations and to generalize than it is to look at every instance critically as a unique event.

There are fine lines between organization and stereotyping and racism. Just classifying someone can be an offense. People like to identify themselves as different from some group and the same as another. Take Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. They’re both Hispanic but, in my experience, neither wants to be confused for the other.

I don’t really care if someone confuses me for a Swede instead of a Dane because, let’s face it, I’m only part of the latter and that came from people who emigrated 140 years ago. But if someone confused me for a Canadian, I wouldn’t mind. A Briton? Who cares? Maybe that’s because white people have no “race” in our society.

White people are often the exception when it comes to race, unless it’s some neo-Nazi shit about the “white race” and bullshit supremacy arguments, or it’s the so-called “people of color” railing against whitey for the wrongs that “albino race” has perpetrated against them.

“People of color” is a term that annoys me because it’s exclusive. I’m not a huge fan of exclusivity. I’m not a proponent of dividing people up by class, culture and color. I don’t like seeing it put into practice by oppressor or oppressee and I absolutely despise being lumped together with “white people” who care as little for me as they do for “people of color.”

The point is that there are real issues and then there are contrivances. I’ve been told by many that my worst flaw is that I have no sense of humor when it comes to myself. I take myself too seriously, in other words. I’ve gotten better at getting looser about it, but sometimes I still take umbrage with shit I should let slide or laugh off. I don’t get upset about stereotypes, though. If someone doesn’t want to take the time to see past their preconceived notion of me, that’s their issue. It doesn’t affect my life and I don’t need someone to step in and stand up for me and rail against how unfair it is.

Yet that’s what people have seen fit to do with the Zambrano shirt. Big deal. So Hispanic people do a lot of landscaping work. So someone decided to make a, perhaps, tasteless joke about a rival team’s pitcher using a stereotype. I bet Carlos is wiping his tears with his millions. The only people who tend to care about this shit are white people who’ve decided to be indignant over every racial affront due to their own overwhelming guilt for their privileged lives and opportunist INSERT-RACE-HEREs who want to hear themselves speak, grandstand and be on display.

I saw too a shirt that said “Horry Kow!” with a Cubs logo that has slanted eyes. It was supposed to be a reference to a Japanese Cubs player named Fukudome (to whom I like refer to as “Fuck you, do me”) … lampooning the difficulty many Asians have shown to have with the letters L and R in Engrish. I mean English. God, forgive me.

I thought the “Horry Kow!” thing was funny. I also think “Fa-rah-rah-rah-rah” from “A Christmas Story” is funny. I also had to see the Fukudome joke shirt to get that it was supposed to represent an Asian person saying “Holy Cow!” … reading it in plain text made me go: “What the fuck is a horry kow?”

I speak Spanish and I’ve encountered people from countries where my dialect seems strange and accented who thought what I said was funny. Did it make me mad? No. It WAS funny. These idiomatic quirks are endearing. In my experience, people almost universally love accents; they’re interesting and entertaining. Yet some people see fit to get angry when someone points out a difference in another person’s speech.

It often seems like society is heading towards a place where no one is allowed to be parodied or made fun of because, god forbid, someone’s feelings might get hurt. Boo-fucking-hoo. Yeah, I want to live in a world where everyone is such an oversensitive pussy that the slightest criticism elicits suicide. Wouldn’t that be grand. Fuck you. Grow a pair.

A seventeen-year-old got gunned down the other day.

A major, New York-area newspaper posted the story on their website, along with the surveillance video of the kid getting popped in the back of the head. The article, like most online, allowed readers to comment on the story. The vast majority of the posts are that the kid got what he deserved, he was a no-good thug and, of course, that black people are animals and this kid’s life and his association with a gang and his grisly end are proof of his race’s inferiority, and his death is a benefit to society.

I’m not shocked anymore by the hate people spew, but I don’t think I’ll ever cease to be appalled by it.

Will I cry over the death of this teenage, gang-member father of a three-year-old he sired at age 14? No. Life has consequences. You get involved with people who have no regard for human life and there’s a good chance you’ll get your brains blown out by some coward sneaking up on you from behind. The worst part of it is that the murderer is just as likely to be a member of the same gang than a member of a rival gang. The kid who got popped was trying to leave the Bloods and get his life on track, according to reports.

Still, as unsurprising as was his violent end … the hateful — not just callous — response of the bigoted, racist readership of the aforesaid newspaper … is sickening.

This harks back to my last post about interracial couples and the racist invective that gets spewed in response to that. It enrages racists to see people of different races expressing fondness and love for each other, especially in the most intimate way. The only thing hateful racists appreciate and understand is the venom they spit. I wonder if they feel offended when someone of a different race hates them reciprocally … or if that just becomes the proof that justifies their own hatred. I imagine it’s the latter. The racist motto could be “I hate therefore I am … and you hate me because I hate you so I hate you, and so on and on…”

I’m not upset that this kid is dead. I didn’t know him. It has no bearing on my life whatsoever. Objectively, it’s sad when any kid gets their life snuffed out. It’s sad when a teenager is more acquainted with death and violence than he is with joy and harmless fun. His death is a symptom of the disease that infects this country, which no one wants to recognize … Americans are so bamboozled by the lies of freedom and equality and this being the “Greatest Country on Earth” that they refuse to cop to the contrary evidence staring them in the face, and the contradictory proof they vomit from their hateful mouths.

How boring and how miserable it must be to desire to never be challenged, to never try something different … to consider the faces of everyone you know and be comforted that they all look just like you. Insular, racist, bigoted idiots make me angry and make me sick. The Internet is like the inside of the walls of an apartment building; it’s teeming with roaches who are bolstered by their anonymity to post the loathsome bile any decent person would be embarrassed to have thought, let alone ever express.

My friend over at Twunch wrote a rather lengthy and, as always, entertaining post in which, with the fourth point, he touches upon interracial relationships. To synopsize, a St. Louis publication ran an image of a black man and a white woman kissing and a deluge of racist tirades ensued in the online comments.

I work for a publication with readership like this. Any time there is the remotest whiff of race in an article all the anti-social racist creeps who, unfortunately for us, have computers come online to spew their vile hate from behind the cowardly veil of anonymity.

I make no attempt to hide my dislike of people but I pretty universally dislike according to one principle: if you’re stupid, I dislike you.

Now, stupidity can come in many guises.

If you can’t take care of yourself or manage what you eat and you are subsequently corpulent and repulsive looking and you take up so much space as to infringe upon the space of others, I will dislike you. Importantly, if you are a corpulent person and I am forced to interact with you and I discover that you are a nice, engaging, otherwise thoughtful (aside from taking up other people’s space) person, I will cease to regard you as a corpulent abhorrence and instead see you as that wonderful person you’ve proven yourself to be.

I also find it quite fair for you to tell me to go fuck myself for not trying to see the beautiful person inside you from the onset. But that’s not going to happen, I assure you.

I don’t like smokers for the specific reason that anyone who willfully pollutes their self must hate their self and anyone who willfully pollutes others must also have the utmost contempt for others and I abhor and despise inconsiderate people more than all the fatties in all the world. I do have friends who smoke but, considerately, they do it when not in my presence.

But no one irks me more than the patently stupid and, in my experience, no one is dumber than a xenophobe … anyone who hates that which is different simply because it is different — be it because of skin color, religion, sexual predilection, etc. — is dangerously stupid and deserves to be shunned, ridiculed and ostracized.

I’m white (that’s for those of you who don’t know me). I’m in a relationship with a black woman. My last relationship was also with a black woman. I love black women. I don’t discriminate, but I have my preferences and let’s just say that me and black women seem to have a mutual-admiration-society-thing going that simply does not exist between me and white girls. White girls are the last ethnicity I would choose to date. Does that make me racist against my own people? I don’t think so. I would never eschew a white girl unless I were faced with a better girl of a different ethnicity.

White girls, in my experience, think they’re special by default. They’ve been touted by our society as the ideal of beauty and I think it’s gone to their collective heads. I believe even perfectly ordinary white women, with their thin lips, flat asses and everything else I could do without, actually think they’re more beautiful than a gorgeous black woman with a nice, big, round ass, a tight little waist and beautiful, full lips.

I guess that’s the white woman’s perogative; she’s totally entitled to think of herself as beautiful … but I’m not required to agree and I don’t need to bend over backwards to try and win the affection of an unspectacular, plain white woman with a distorted sense of personal pulchritude that would force me to take those great lengths … just to obtain something that I don’t find valuable.

As for the coupling of black men and white women? I love it. Please, black men, take them … be my guest; I don’t want them. And, while you’re busy with the white women, I’ll be more than happy to entertain the black ladies you’ve divested of your attention and affection.

I have found recently that I do regard with disdain homogeneous couples. I admit it and it’s probably irrational and wrong, but it’s motivated by my belief that people who breed with people who look just like them are effectively inbreeding. I think it makes evolutionary sense to combine one’s DNA with the most diverse DNA available to therefore create the strongest offspring. Has anyone noticed, by the way, that the vast majority of bi-racial people are fucking beautiful? But I digress..

When I see an all-white family and their blonde, white kids I often think “Yeah, like we needed more of them…” and I think the same thing when I see black women with kids I can deduce with a fair amount of certitude to have been fathered by a black man. Oh, and when I talk about racists, I’m not just talking about white people who hate brown people … I’m talking about all those brown people who hate white people too, and who hate each other if they’re not the right shade or type of brown. It’s ridiculous.

I’m not about to take up a crusade to force people to breed inter-racially, but I do think the subsequent generation of humanity would greatly benefit from not having some contrived reason to hate each other. And there’s that gorgeousness factor, lest you forget.

I realized today that I like footballer John Carew because I imagine that’s what my kid would look like, and I would hope he wound up being a world class footballer (though my first choice would be that he play hockey like one of my favorite players Jarome Iginla — and what prospective dad wouldn’t dream of having boys as beautiful and talented as those two?).

The likelihood right now of me having kids is pretty slim; I’m not ready to be a dad. I’m nowhere close to considering marriage. But I’ve got a very strong inkling that if I decide to get married and have kids, it won’t be to and with a white woman. I’m not saying I couldn’t magically fall in love with some white lady because I know to never say never, but I can safely say the likelihood of that is incredibly slim because the desire just isn’t there.

And all the racist motherfuckers of the world can suck it.

Went out for drinks on Saturday after my hockey game with my girl and a good friend of mine (who’s also one of my teammates). On our way out of the rink, we ran into another member of our team and, absent mindedly, I invited him along to drink as well. He said he wasn’t quite sure he could; it would depend on if he could find a parking spot near the bar.

Only after he accepted the invitation did I realize I’d invited a totally xenophobic, right-wing racist out to drink with me, my black girlfriend and my friend, who’s probably the most easy-going guy I know. I decided I wasn’t going to let the night be ruined by the inevitable negativity and hateful vitriol the guy would spout and tried to devise a plan to defuse it. Still, there was a chance he might not even show considering he couldn’t find a spot.

So, the three original participants in the bar plan sat down and ordered drinks and were halfway through our round before he showed up. I do, often, try to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I thought right then that maybe he would refrain from being a conservative curmudgeon.

The first thing he did is mistake my girl for my ex. You know, because they’re both black. What’s the difference, right? The guy had even met my ex, though I concede it isn’t as though he knew her well. The two women look nothing alike, however … unless one is looking through proverbial glasses of a certain, not rose-colored, tint.

So, being diplomatic, I informed him of his error by specifying with a story in response to a racist comment he made about Mexicans, an anecdote about an apartment advert I’d seen on 4th Avenue in Brooklyn while walking with my EX (the advert said: “Two-bedroom apartment for rent. Nine Mexicans OK.”) Still, I’m not sure he even got the distinction and surely took my story as an affirmation of his own dislike of “wetbacks.” In reality, it was just an incredulous example of something shamlessly overt that lends credence to stereotypes that have arisen from the actual boarding practices of people who cram in tenants to make the exorbitant rent — with the added hope of allaying the awkwardness of his racially motivated mistaken identity moment.

The sequence of epithets is all out of order in my mind, but I recall making a joke intended to make look ridiculous his irrational dislike for gay people. My recollection was that he was making generalizations that encompassed a teammate of ours, who plays on my line and who is a good friend of mine and one of the best players on our team. I stuck up for him, and there was the usual line: “I don’t have anything against him, I just don’t want him near my kids” or something equally absurd. It was when the diatribe about abominations and the like happened that I jibed: “Conservatives should change their minds about gay marriage. If they’re so off-put by gay people having sex … everyone knows sex stops when two people get married.”

Blech. I could go on and on. The bottom line is that it was painful and awkward, albeit informative. Sometimes, in the cirlces I travel, I become less aware that there are people out there — even in this city — that hate everyone who is even remotely different. I don’t forget that these fearful hatemongers exist, but I’m always a little surprised at the magnitude of their conviction and the inexorable nature of their beliefs. I imagine it must be sad to occupy such a small world with such a narrow view of things, but I’m not that interested in delving into the intricacy of hate and fear. It seems pretty miserable and misery can be infectious.

At least I know better now than to extend invitations to toxic elements. I had a naive moment of team-building and camaraderie but I’d do well to realize that while some of us may be teammates, we’re not friends. We just wear the same jersey for an hour and a half, once a week. It would be a good idea to recognize which people are those with whom I have only some laundry in common.

The blog title’s been a misnomer for a while, now, so I haven’t had any inclination to write along the theme of being downtrodden and fighting against the endless barrage of adversity. That’s not to say I’m not still downtrodden and fighting against [...] adversity, but that’s not going to stop until I’m a rich, white man … no matter how much it may actually subside.

I’m going to cross to Mason-Dixon line for the first time in ages and add a whole new state to my list of places visited. I haven’t left the confines of the Greater City of New York in so long, I can barely remember. Aside from occasional forays out east, I’ve been stuck here. Haven’t crossed the Hudson in nearly three years excepting a couple of hockey games I saw in Newark.

It’s my own doing that I haven’t left here. I don’t have (nor do I want) a car. And I haven’t had anywhere to be with pull enough to drag me out of my Brooklyn-and-Manhattan existence. But I’ll be going to New Orleans in a couple of weeks and it will be nice as hell to get the hell out of Dodge.

There’s an election coming, if you weren’t aware … potential for big things, particularly that whole “only rich, white men can be president” thing getting the kibosh. I’m excited that someone without a Christian name who doesn’t fit the honky-bloodline criterion could be this racist-ass nation’s head of state. It’s absurd to me that misogynist places like Pakistan and Indonesia have had female heads of state and we’ve not had one, nor have we had a man of any shade darker than a fluorescent light bulb.

Still, whether it’s BHO getting elected or cracker-ass McCain, it’ll be more of the same in this country. More stagnant, bipartisan bullshit.  More historic than a black man becoming president would be someone who isn’t a Democrat or a Republican getting elected. Fuck, would I love for that to happen. Every four years it’s a Hobson’s choice. I vote on abortion rights and keeping the government out of people’s bedrooms, and since I’m not rolling in dough, Democratic tax policies tend to benefit me a little more than GOP ones. I wish there was a candidate who represented me along the gamut of issues, but that just isn’t so in a system where both sides are identical except that one openly hates anyone who isn’t an arrow-straight, church-going, xenophobic, ignorant, war-mongering misanthrope while the other side is slightly more tolerant.

Blech. On a national level, it’s still a beatdown. Locally, though, things are looking up.