Happy new year

Fun fact: a significant number of Finnish people hate Sweden passionately, and see Swedes as their main enemies.

Swedish people, on the other hand, have no idea that they are Finnish people's enemies, and are normally pretty fucking indifferent to Finland's existence.

Who's winning?

Sometimes I want to pull a Houdini on this world.

It's very difficult to feel merry. But I'll keep trying.

Tired

Why is it so hard for so many people to not be racist, sexist or homophobic? Why is so hard? It should be so easy. Automatic. Why is it so hard, for fuck's sake?

And if these people haven't even learned to believe in human rights yet, how difficult will it be for them to grasp the idea of animal rights?

To be good is so easy. Once you've tried, you know.

#shame-based flashbacks

When I think of certain things that I've done in my life, my head almost explodes and I literally start to scream out of shame. (What a weird image.)

(It looks like this:)



(or it would if I looked like that.)

There are things that most people would find embarrassing but I don't. To me, it's not painful at all to dance alone on the streets.

But lately I've been remembering all these moments when I've tried to be something that I'm not - and I can't stop thinking that it must have been obvious to everybody around me.

And all these moments when I've opened my soul when I should've just shut up.

But in the end, all these moments are important. Without them, I would be less human. I'd have less to say. Being a writer, being a good writer, is about being able to set the shame aside - or maybe not, maybe it's about using the shame, owning it, turning it into something powerful.

This doesn't change the fact that it still sucks.

I'm gonna force it into you

When good things happen to me, I'm always surprised... left waiting for the universe to normalize things by slapping me in the face.

I promise to be less angry and political from now on. At least for a week or something. This whole goodness deelio is getting very tiring.

Oh holy night; on suits, churches, science and speciesism

Ola Salo taught me how to perform.

I've spent 4 nights in Tampere. I have things to explore for my book of ghosts; this city is one of the stops in the story.

I've eaten in a couple of restaurants. Only God knows why waitresses and other people often try to start small talk with me. Maybe it's because I look a bit funny. They usually realize very soon that they won't get anything decent out of me. I'm not good at talking about things that are not ridiculously big and important.

In one restaurant, I ordered ice cream after eating a cheesy pasta. Why the hell am I not a vegan? I know very well what happens in the dairy industry. I can hear the mother cows screaming for their newborns that have been taken away and left alone in little crates. It is nightmare. Why am I supporting it? I think it's because I'm tired of doing the right thing in a world where nobody else seems to be interested in doing the right thing. No matter whether it's about intelligence, morality or mathematics, being better than others is one of the loneliest things in the world.

Or maybe these are just excuses? I don't know. At least I admit that I should change.

Yesterday I entered a clothing store just to sit down on the floor of a fitting room; I just wanted to sit and breathe for a moment. I ended up bying a suit. A very cheap one, but a suit anyway. I've never really had a proper suit. For funerals I've just worn something that doesn't look unbearably disrespectful. But now I have a suit, a tie and all. I look very attractive in it.

This is a strange story.

I'm too close to the book I'm writing now to say if it really is good or not. I don't know. When I'm feeling tired and depressed, which happens quite regularly, it's difficult to believe in anything.

I'm always thinking about the book that I wrote when I was 16. Writing it was like an orgasm. Three years ago I was writing something that I felt was so incredibly good that every person on the planet would want to read it. I'm not that optimistic anymore, but I still think that it's something extraordinary. The book I'm writing now is not as heavy, but... I think it's still pretty great. Maybe I will be a revolution after all. If not, I'll try to remember to smile when I fall.

The most important thing is the soul. You have to be an interesting soul to tell an interesting story. You have to come up with souls that are interesting. We'll see if I can do that.

Yesterday I also just spontaneously entered a big church and ended up singing Christmas hymns with the Christians of Tampere. It was a happy, peaceful moment. Even for an Atheist those things matter. When we were singing, I saw a father helping a young child walk down the stairs. He's like a little dog, I thought, children are little animals. At the beginning of our lives, we've all been pigs and cows.

In the last months, I've sometimes spent hours of my life arguing (or just conversing) with people on a Morrissey fan forum called Morrissey-Solo. It is a strange place. It's not like most fan forums. In fact, it's full of individuals who spend significant amounts of their time explaining how much they dislike Morrissey. They are grown, middle-aged adults, and they seem to be painfully disappointed in Morrissey... Maybe they fell in love with the Mozzer when they were aching teenagers - maybe they thought that Morrissey would be able to save them, but in the end he wasn't, and now they've got nothing but the memory of something that once was?

Morrissey. Attacking the leg of some human.

I don't know. After all, it's difficult to hate the regulars of the site. Most of them are genuinely and exceptionally intelligent. Some of them have beautiful souls. Some of them even like Morrissey. Conversations with them are often... fruitful. Last summer, I spent days on the forum, calling myself 'Oli-ver'. Sometimes I write as anonymous. Writing as anonymous is easy; it's one of the useful sides of the Internet: you can be anyone. For a couple of times I've actually lied just to make my point easier to grasp: "Yes, I do have a child." "Yes, I do live in Norway." "Yes, I eat meat too." Shameful, isn't it. Forgive me. I won't do that again.

The last debate I had was about Morrissey's words on the Norwegian massacre; I already wrote about it here. In July 2011 Morrissey said that what had happened in Norway was murder, but that worse things happen in the animal industry every day. Not the best timing, definitely not the best way to get the message across, but still true.

So I've spent hours trying to understand why certain Morrissey-Soloists (what a word) find this statement so offensive. Interesting and deeply intelligent individuals like Johnny Barleycorn and realitybites (when you google your way to this writing - hello! keep rocking!) keep claiming that what Morrissey said was something unforgivable.

But what exactly is the crime in the words that Morrissey said? I mean, rationally speaking, as disgusting as one violent massacre of 77 teenagers is, an industry that tortures hundreds of billions of animals on factory farms every year is worse. This industry's also the number one reason for things like world hunger and the environmental crisis. (I've said all this so many times before. I'm sorry. I like to repeat things.) To me it seems irrational to condemn one massacre and then give money to a much bigger criminal.

Even I'd got the original quote wrong. These are Morrissey's actual words:

"Despite the love, we do live on a murderous planet,

as you will have seen in the last few days in Norway.

Murder, murder, murder.

Really, every single day worse things happen in Kentucky Fried Shit and McDonald's.

Murder, murder, murder, murder, murder."

These are facts. Murder, murder, murder; that's what this world is. It's a beautiful, melancholic poem, too.

What happened in Norway breaks my heart. Violence and evil in general break my heart. That's the way it should be. But usually people want to ignore the violence they themselves are somehow taking part in.

At the end of the day, the problem we're dealing with here is speciesism. It's the idea that the suffering of humans is somehow holier than the suffering of other vertebrates. Even most vegetarians and animal friends usually agree with it: to say that hurting a pig is as bad as hurting a human being is a tabu. In 2013, Morrissey must be one of the only famous people who refuse to agree with this world view. I remember watching a video where Russell Brand, a vegetarian himself, interviewed Morrissey. They started talking about the meat industry. Morrissey compared it to the holocaust. "No, no", said Russell quickly, "no, no."

You can think it - but don't say it.

Is it something religious? When Morrissey says that torturing animals is as bad as torturing humans, it is considered 'disrespectful' towards humans - but why? As if he was somehow belittling the suffering of humans. He clearly isn't. He's simply stating that as important as it is to treat humans without violence, it is as important to treat non-human animals without violence.

To someone who thinks that animals are worth nothing, a statement like this must be very difficult to understand. I mean... if animals have no moral value, is Morrissey trying to say that humans don't have any value either?

No. He's stating something that, in the end, isn't very radical at all: that we all have moral value. We are all biologically capable of suffering. That's why you shouldn't hurt us. That's why you shouldn't torture us. That's why you shouldn't stomp on us.

I think that once again, the thing that's tearing me away from the rest of the world is that my world view is pretty much as scientific as it gets. I'm usually able to stay quite rational even when it comes to the most difficult of moral questions. When pointless tabus are destroyed, I only enjoy it.

Having a scientific world view doesn't mean that you have to be a loud, repulsive moron who doesn't understand anybody's feelings. Things like pain and suffering and compassion and morality exist. As long as we are beings capable of all these things, we should give great value to them.

So, finally, the point is this: I don't see any scientifically, or morally, valid reason to think that the suffering of a pig is any less important than the suffering of myself. We are biologically equally capable of experiencing the bacic emotions that matter: pain, fear, distress. I may be more intelligent than the pig, but why should that be in any way relevant? How does the ability to do math make pain any more painful? Is the suffering of a mentally handicapped child morally less important than the suffering of a Nobel prize winner of physics?

I mean, to me it's very simple:

if you hurt us, we suffer. Don't do it.

Nelson Mandela's memorial service.

Rebels

I need somebody to save to save me. We'd be each other's heroes, and just exist wildly and gracefully in this dark rotten world.

And we would light the night.

Slowly and very very unsteadily I'm learning.

Sooner or later, I'll find you.

Existence is tiring.

I want to take a break and just float for a while.

PETA kills animals.

There are people who really hate PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) passionately.

As an activist myself, I think that the world needs to become a much better place. I also think that the way PETA is trying to do this is wrong. The problems that they're dealing with are currently the most urgent problems on the planet; as an organization, they could (and should) be informative, elegant and powerful, but somehow they seem to completely lack any understanding of how the human psyche works. They could be talking about the actual problems; instead, they're shouting slogans and taking pictures of naked celebrities. They're taking the focus off what's actually happening to the animals every second of the day, and turning the whole question into a trivial, filthy joke.

I'm sure that the people working for PETA are mostly wonderful, compassionate people trying to change the world. But they should rethink the ways to do it. The animals deserve better than this.

The main problem with PETA is that they're chronically cynical.

Cynical: believing that people are motivated by self-interest; distrustful of human sincerity or integrity.

Exactly. Here's the problem; PETA think that the only way to get people to care about animal abuse is to somehow fool them into it. For PETA this means sex. Take a picture of a naked celebrity and write 'vegan' on it. This makes no sense. PETA's depressing idea of the human psyche is really hurting the animal rights movement, and getting rid of the burden of these mistakes will be a stupid and frustrating battle.

By giving people images of sex you're making them think of, well, sex!, when actually your job is to reach them on a much higher level. You're making them think of underwear models -> you're speaking to the superficial part of their brain. You see, people may be irrational, but they are not evil and they react to violence and injustice when they see it. What you need to do is to speak to the goodness in us. Most people are pretty good. Tell them what's going on. Don't act stupid. Don't drown the message in emoticons. Be graceful, understand the importance of your message, don't do something that the human rights movement wouldn't do. Reach people on an intellectual level. Generate compassion. Generate bravery. Generate togetherness. Your job is done.

Douglas Anthony Cooper.

However, some of the criticism towards PETA pisses me off even more. The team of factory farming has come up with a website and slogan 'PETA kills animals', and a lot of people seem to have quickly adopted this sentence.

It is true. PETA kills sheltered animals. It's weird and hypocritical and they shouldn't do it.

Anyway, 25 minutes ago, I accidentally stumbled upon a series of Huffington Post articles written by a novelist named Douglas Anthony Cooper. He's on a mission to bring PETA down because, well, PETA kills animals.

This could be completely reasonable. But it isn't. It's irrational and strange for somebody who apparently has no problem giving his money to the meat industry.

Okay. PETA kills animals. But the number is really not even comparable to the number of animals tortured and killed in the modern meat industry. If you don't like animals to be killed, then you should not support an industry that kills billions and billions of them every year, and prior to that, treats them in a way even crap doesn't deserve to be treated. Be consistent.

To understand the case of Douglas Anthony Cooper we only need to read these sentences:

"I don't happen to think much of the fur industry -- it's a brutal business. But as many have pointed out, at least furriers kill animals with the intention of producing garments, whereas PETA kills animals because they can't be bothered to take care of them."

As a passionate advocate for animal welfare, dear Douglas Anthony, you should be able to see that to the animal, this means absolutely nothing. The animal suffering for months in a tiny nightmarish cage couldn't give a fuck whether its fur is going to be somebody's collar or not. To the animals, our excuses don't mean anything at all.

I'd rather be a dog that PETA puts down than a fox that gets forced into the world only to live a short life of horrible pain and fear.

Douglas, I think it's great and truly beautiful that you care about animals. But everybody already cares about dogs. You should try caring about the animals that nobody else cares about; they are the ones that need your activism the most.

Wow.

Jesus Christ.

It feels so painfully good to be in love.

Nelson Mandela is dead.

Nelson Mandela was, and is, one of the people that almost make me cry. (I say almost, because I don't cry nearly as much as I'd like to.) It's a matter of goodness. Seeing sincere goodness in another human being moves me more than anything else in the world.

I wish all people were heroes. Unfortunately, most people seem to have better things to do.

I believe that most of us are trying. Most people sincerely want to be good. They just don't dedicate themselves to the cause as radically as some of us.

Lately I've been questioning the whole hero thing. I'm such an annoying, arrogant, immature piece of crap. How the hell could I be a hero? I'm anything but a saint. I was born just as imperfect and ridiculous as everybody else; even more so, really.

But I realize that that's not the point.

Just like there is no courage without fear, a hero without doubt and profound imperfection is not a hero at all.

And so I will fail, fail, and fail again for a million times. I will make an idiot out of myself, get things wrong, seem like an asshole, seem like a hypocrite and forget what's important, but then I will always get back up and push on.

Accept me with my insecurities and imperfections. This is me trying.

I am sorry for being such an idiot.

Please keep believing in me. I'm young and I'm lost, but slowly and steadily I'm learning.

Alcohol.

Last night I wrote sentences that were so deeply stupid that the only thing I can do is make noises like 'hahaha! hahaha!'

I wrote "I'm not as masculine as Morrissey but I'm more masculine than Johnny Marr". WHAT? What does that even mean? The last thing I remember doing is googling for information on Lisa Simpson's potential Asperger's Syndrome. Wow!

 

I need some Jesus in my life.

On the subject of intercourse

At the end of the day, I am slightly homo.

I fall in love with everybody.

Really: if you are a fascinating soul, you'll turn me on. It's this simple.

I'd love to have sex. Unfortunately that's not going to happen, as I don't know any people.

The idea of intercourse baffles me. As a cat I know nothing about human men and women, but I've understood that many women really struggle to get an orgasm, ever, and for men, it's usually a lot easier. Especially if you've never had sex before: what if the mere fucking idea of soon seeing somebody interesting naked makes you come? Does that happen to humans? Is it awkward?

The whole intercourse thing. Penis goes in, penis comes out. What if the vagina is dry and it's all very difficult and the organs just rub against each other in oh such a painful way and everybody's screaming?

I'm sorry. But these are important questions.

And how do people even end up having sex? Do they just say: "Let's have sex now"? How does that work?

Most of us are enslaved by sexuality.

In the end it's really stupid. You just have this urgent feeling between your legs and it drives you into ridiculous things. I like it.

3 years, 5 days

It's been 3 years and 5 days since I started to write Flesh. I wrote the best book that I'll ever write at the age of 16. I haven't been writing it for a while now, I haven't even looked at it for months, but now I opened the file again for the first time in forever, and man it's brilliant. Reading it sort of hurts, it hurts so much that I can't stop making weird noises like 'hahaha! hahaha!' when I browse through it.

The last pages are still waiting to be written. One day, sooner or later I'll do that.

At the end of everything, you can trust me

I am dyslexic in English. I just don't spot the typos the way I should. It's interesting. I don't think I have this in Finnish. Or do I? I wouldn't know.

I went and saw The Hunger Games - Catching Fire spontaneously in the middle of yesterday. I feel that it's my job to get to know the stories and characters that people like. So I sat there in the huge half-empty theatre and fell in love: Katniss Everdeen is the way girls should be. The way people should be. A hero. Thoroughly human, but ultimately strong and brave and trying to do the right thing. (Also, I like her voice a lot. It's very attractive. I like voices.)

Yo.

After the movie, I wandered the dark wet streets (like I always do) and felt tired and hopeless (like I always do) because real people are not like Katniss. I must be one of the only existing non-fictional people around who actually try to function like Katniss Everdeen or Harry Potter in real life.

Real people in the real world are such boring pieces of cardboard. When they should do the right thing, they come up with a comfortable lie and walk away. They give money to things like the meat industry and spit on people who don't. They buy shiny things, take pictures of them, and then put the pictures on Facebook to gain social status. They flush living fish down the toilet. They kick crazy people who dance on the streets, and they laugh at revolutions.

I don't want to walk away. I am the hand that flushes you down the toilet if you flush sentient animals down the toilet. I am the dancer. I am the revolution.

And yes, this is a ridiculous Messiah complex. I think that a world so full of cool indifference needs a certain number of embarrassingly passionate people like me who actually want to play the hero.

We all live in a murderous world

Morrissey was supposed to play 3 songs at the Nobel Peace Prize event in Oslo. Now a lot of people are 'frowning on' his potential performance. The reason for the 'outrage' are these words:

Despite the love, we do live on a murderous planet, as you will have seen in the last few days in Norway. Murder, murder, murder. Really, every single day worse things happen in Kentucky Fried Shit and McDonald's. Murder, murder, murder, murder, murder.

Morrissey said these words in 2011 right after local psychopath Anders Behring Breivik had killed 70+ teenagers in Norway for his obscure racist reasons. Ever since Morrissey gave this statement, every once in a while people have expressed how hurt and outraged they are by his comments.

I understand if you find Morrissey's comments inconsiderate, because they were, but nobody can rationally claim that he was factually wrong. The Norwegian killings weren't nothing, in fact, they were cruel, disgusting and mind-bogglingly violent. But even so, this is basic mathematics in a world where suffering exists:

Killing 77 sentient individuals is evil, but torturing hundreds of billions of sentient individuals on factory farms is worse. (Comparing suffering like this is pretty stupid in the first place, as all suffering matters, but, well, here we are, being stupid.)

After all, the reason why people are pretending to be so hurt and outraged by Morrissey's words is quite simple. To admit that what he said was factually correct would be to admit that we, the Good People, are taking part in something twisted and cruel; something so twisted and cruel that the world has never seen anything like it before.

And we don't want to do that. We don't want to change. We don't want to look at the atrocities we're funding every day. We want to hold on to our burgers and keep pretending that evil is something that only isolated psychopaths are capable of.

And this is what keeps all evil alive.

Argh. When will we learn?

Tommy boy

If someone asked me why I run the streets of Helsinki like Usain Bolt in the middle of the day,

I would say,

"It's because I'm so happy"

or maybe I'd say, "It's because I'm so sad"

or maybe I'd say nothing and just keep running.

Being so charming is wearing me out.

I ate pasta the other day and thought that something must be done with this brain of mine.

17th October 2013

So, yeah, it's been over a month since all this happened so I guess I'll finally write about how I met Morrissey.

One morning I read this: Morrissey will appear at Akademibokhandeln Nordstan in Goteborg (Sweden) on Thursday 17 October to sign copies of his Autobiography.

(It was absurd. Morrissey's finally written his autobiography, and the signing tour's only stop is in Göteborg, Sweden?)

So a couple of days later I was in Göteborg with my sister. We took the cheapest plane and booked the cheapest hostel. And then we were there.

The signing took place at a huge shopping mall called Nordstan. The night before there were already about 20 people queueing. The next day when we joined the line about 5 hours before Morrissey was supposed to appear, the number of people was several hundreds. Young intelligent hipsters, young cool hipsters, young non-hipsters, middle-aged hardcore fans, hippies, handicapped people, activist types, intimidatingly normal-looking people, and me and my sister.

The queue was chopped to pieces using those fences that you see in amusement parks:



It squirmed through the first floor of the shopping mall.

So, there, next to a surprisingly unnoticeable McDonald's restaurant, we waited for hours. I sat on the floor and stared at thousands of people walking by. I noticed things: that there are a lot of very tall girls in Sweden. And a lot of very short immigrant men. And that many Swedish girls wear fur, unlike Finnish girls who never wear fur. (I don't think that the fur Swedish girls wear is real, but anyway.) And that a lot of old men in Sweden wear red James Dean jackets:



Sometimes a passer-by would stop and stare at posters that said WE WELCOME MORRISSEY and then ask us 'Vem är Morris-say?' and my sister would answer, sounding surprisingly Swedish.

At one point I went for a walk in the mall. Harriet Wheeler sang in my ears (because I had earbuds in them) as I walked around in an H&M store without a cause. I was happy.

After hours of waiting, we got to take 15 steps forward. Morrissey should be there in a couple of hours. There started to be something hysterical about the situation. Everybody was holding their copies of Autobiography, leafing through the pages, imagining themselves talking to the Mozzer. A woman with a British accent appeared out of somewhere and gave us little sticky notes, what are those called, I mean these:



Are they just sticky notes? Ok.

On these notes, we were supposed to write down what we wanted Morrissey to write on our books. I didn't know what I wanted Morrissey to write on my book. So I simply wrote down Olli Brander.

And we waited. I stood there, thinking about things that I usually think about, penises and vaginas and penises entering vaginas, and the fact that if somebody's gonna make it, it's gonna be me, when suddenly I realized that I was staring at a morrissey. In fact, it was Morrissey. He was there, 15 minutes earlier than he was supposed to, alive, inside the bookshop, walking towards his signing table that had roses on it.

It was Morrissey. Just 20 metres away from me. It was Morrissey.

People were screaming. I climbed on the fence to see over the heads of screaming people. I stared at Morrissey. It really was Morrissey. His big head. His autistically kind eyes. His underbite:



And now all that happened in front of me. In 2013. Right now. It was weird. He really exists.

I was surprised at how healthy he looked. He really looked healthy, really healthy. For the past 18 months he'd seemed to be on the edge of some sort of physical breakdown. For quite a while, he'd looked like an unhappy zombie. But now that was all gone. He looked healthy and happy, which made me healthy and happy.

The line started crawling. Really, crawling. 10 minutes, one step, 15 minutes, two steps. Morrissey spent minutes talking to every single fan; the fans cried, Morrissey hugged them, Morrissey signed their books and necks and teeth and asses and everything. It was nice that apparently, he was sincerely interested in every fan he encountered, but it was strange and slightly infuriating that nobody seemed to care about the fact that there were hundreds and hundreds of people that had traveled from afar and waited for hours. At this pace, most of us would never get to meet Morrissey.

2 hours went by. The line crawled. Finally there were only just about 30 people or so ahead of us. A girl with tears on her cheeks told the people behind us that Morrissey wouldn't leave until every book was signed. No matter how long it would take, he wouldn't leave. Where did you get that information? I would have asked, but unfortunately, I don't speak.

Then, 15 minutes later, a freezingly friendly female voice filled the air. The voice said that Morrissey had stopped signing and left, but all I heard was frustrated screams. The information emptied my head and my heart and all I can remember is that I started running.

I guess I just simply ran through people's bodies, but 20 seconds later I found myself on my knees outside the bookshop, and a security guard was shoving me in the chest. Morrissey had disappeared. All I could do was curse in Finnish. A screaming punker chick threw her Autobiography at the closed glass door and I understood her completely. I would have rioted too, but I was too tired and empty.



The atmosphere was a lot more chaotic than what it seems in this video ^. There were grown men (and women) crying like the world had ended. It really felt like all hope was lost. For a moment, I almost understood tragic lunatics who spend years of their life on a Morrissey fan forum called Morrissey Solo, every day writing how Morrissey let them down, unable to let go. (The site is full of them. There is something about Morrissey that lingers. You just can't let go.)

After that, my sister and I wandered aimlessly in the night of Göteborg. "People are gonna start dropping very soon," I said repeatedly. I wasn't going to kill anybody, but saying that I was helped a little bit.

The next day on the flight back to Helsinki, having slept for maybe 2 or 3 hours, I read Autobiography here and there, and for some reason, I almost cried. Above the clouds it was sunny, and I felt strangely happy. I didn't want to murder anybody anymore.

I'd seen Morrissey, and then Morrissey had disappeared. And that was part of the magic.

This beautiful male lion

An American TV presenter and 'hardcore huntress' Melissa Bachman posted this picture on the Internet, writing, "An incredible day hunting in South Africa! Stalked inside 60-yards on this beautiful male lion... What a hunt!"

Seems like the whole Internet attacked her after this. I was surprised, since usually when it comes to animal rights, people on the Internet are psychopathic idiots. Not this time.

Or maybe this time too. What hundreds of thousands of comments seem to say is that Melissa Bachman needs to be tortured, raped, slaughtered, and murdered for 'murdering a helpless animal'.

What? Why is everybody suddenly so angry?

These same people have no problem giving their money to things like the modern meat industry. The modern meat industry tortures 60 billion animals on holocaust-like factory farms every year. It is a much, much greater crime than killing one lion. Why the fuck are you attacking one woman for doing something horrible and cruel, when usually you seem to have no problem with 'helpless animals' being 'murdered' every day, all the time? You even pay the bad guys to do it.

Compassion for animals is one of the most important things a person can possess. But don't be a hypocrite.

Things could be worse though. At least the people on the English-speaking Internet are trying to be the Good Guys. Out of curiousity, I wanted to find out what kind of comments the case has received in Finnish media.

So I checked out a couple of Finnish articles. What the comments under the articles said was pretty much that Melissa Bachman is a hot lady, and that these Finnish men would want to go hunting with her and that shooting the lion was great and well done and that killing animals is fun.

What I've noticed before is that, in terms of animal welfare, Finnish people are strangely cold-hearted compared to people in other Western countries. I wonder why this is?

I have no idea. All I can say is: if you, my invisible international reader, are planning to move here... don't. This is a place to get out of.

Every night they play Michael Jackson on the radio, and every night I become more certain that Michael Jackson was a genuinely good person. 'Man in the Mirror' is one of the only important songs that ever get played on mainstream radio, along with 'Where is the Love?' by The Black Eyed Peas, 'Same Love' by Maclemore & Ryan Lewis, and 'Raise Your Glass' by Pink:

P!nk - one of the only actual rebels of rock nowadays.

________________

I'm really good at falling in love.

Probably better than most.

Man

demoman90. do the rest of us a favour, and destroy yourself and all the other mini psychopaths who sincerely struggle to see 'what's wrong with this'.

So in love

So in love it hurts.

With myself too.

What am I doing, gotta stop doing this for a while, seriously, argh

Argh

Dreaming about Harriet Wheeler

Jesus Christ, I have to stop dreaming about Harriet Wheeler.

When I say 'dreaming', what I mean is having nightmares.

Harriet Wheeler sang in The Sundays twenty years ago. Then she disappeared and became a normal person. Then, 15 years later, I found the songs, and her voice is the most beautiful, haunting voice I've ever heard. I am in love with the voice, which is disturbing as I know absolutely nothing about her as a person. I don't want to know, and fortunately there's almost no information at all to be found about her.

My brain doesn't like this.

Lately I've been having nightmares where Harriet Wheeler suddenly enters my life and turns out to be a horrible person. Either an arrogant diva who takes over my house, or a cruel teenage girl who torments people and then becomes a drug addict and dies.

2 hours ago I woke up on the sofa from a nightmare where Harriet Wheeler was a strange unintelligent gypsy mother who just kept giving birth to endless children, and, of course, ruining people's lives.

ARGH, I WANT THIS TO STOP. I'm sorry Harriet Wheeler, I wish my mad brain had nothing to do with you, it always destroys everything beautiful.

I read what I wrote last night. Some questions:

1) Why am I always against everything that everybody else seems to like? When other people like something, I usually automatically find it morally unacceptable.

2) If I tell a bully that he should 'rape' and 'murder' his own children, am I any better than he is?

Life is all about the LULZ

Excuse the quality of this screenshot. I'm too tired to do anything about it.

And it goes on.
I can't remember how I stumbled upon this hilarious dialogue, but I did.

When I read the dialogue, all I did was giggle and all I knew was that this David Thorne person is clearly a funny person. Then I found out that this David Thorne person, 41, is 'an Australian humourist, satirist, and Internet personality'. Apparently he's somewhat Internet sexy for doing stuff like this. I understand why. The email conversation with George Lewis is great.

But it's not this simple.

Soon David Thorne ruins it.

"Did she eat them?"

George is clearly painfully unintelligent. He obviously knows only one way to debate, and this is it. ("We would smash your fucking skull in.") What's disappointing is that David kind of ruins the whole joke by asking whether George's fat girlfriend 'ate' her dead family.

What made the thing so extraordinary in the first place was that David didn't lower himself to George's Neanderthal level. But then he did. He did, because this is the Internet, and the First Unofficial Rule of the Internet is that if you CAN hurt someone, you MUST hurt someone. Hurting others will make other monkeys laugh, and when they laugh, you're socially accepted, and being socially accepted is the only thing that really matters for people like this, people like David Thorne.

George is an idiot. He can't help it. It's very easy to bully him, but the most radical, and ultimately the most hilarious, thing would be to be nice to him.

I wanted to know more about David Thorne. The more information I found, the more I started to despise him. Turns out that Thorne's humour is mainly psychopathic. The more I found out, the more I started to despise myself for having laughed along.

Like many Internet humourists, Thorne is a bully. In most of his jokes, the funny element is how he humiliates people that are a bit slow, a bit sensitive, not so good at getting the joke. The motive is simple: if I do this, the other monkeys will reward me.

The other monkeys are predictable.
David Thorne 'made his co-workers life a living hell' (apparently because the co-worker was a bit dim and listened to Nickelback; every self-respecting Internet badass must know that Nickelback, just like Twilight and Justin Bieber, is on the list of Things That We Hate) and then bragged about it online. Here are some of the reactions.

See Cynthia Chalmers wisely noting that the tormented co-worker should have stopped 'bitching' and instead, left the workplace. Very good, Cynthia.

And when Herb Roe asks, "Why is everyone so happy with the antics of a bully?", here's what Johnny Metall has to say: "Awww, did you guys get picked on too? :D"

It is obvious that David Thorne is a bully. The individuals above^ would probably say that they're against bullying if you asked them. But this time the bully is articulate and funny, so they get confused and forget to pretend that they're Good People. Many of the social mechanisms of bullying can be seen in the comments of these fine people.

I mean, if it's funny and it's on the Internet, how could there possibly be something wrong with it?

One of the creepiest sides of the whole David Thorne thing is that he puts the names, pictures (!) and, in some cases, phone numbers (!!) of his victims on his website for millions to see. Let's hurt people and those close to them, let's really hurt them and see if we can destroy their lives; they don't need their lives anymore, because they were too slow to get your joke.

(There's a small grain of hope that these people are not real; that Thorne himself made them up. I truly, truly hope that this is the case, but I'm afraid it's not.)

Thorne humiliates people who contact him for unusual reasons, and people who are disturbed by his behaviour or defend the ones he's targeted before.

To me, one of the most unpleasant of all these cases (and sigh, also one of the most popular of them) is an email conversation he had with a woman whose cat was missing.

The dialogue continues as you'd expect. Shannon tells David that she's "extremely emotional over this and was up all night in tears", and David, the cool unfeeling Internet person, tortures her oh so hilariously. Shannon, understandably upset about her missing kitten, keeps ignoring the fact that David's making fun of her, while David, once again, torments her in hopes of later making other monkeys on the Internet laugh.

Instead of helping Shannon out, David makes stuff up about his amusingly cool life, pretends to be unable to understand what Shannon's asking him to do and spends time creating amusing movie posters about the missing cat.

Yes. It is funny. I laughed too, but strangely, I think that whether something is funny or not is not the only thing that makes a difference.

But why would you need weird crap like compassion on the Internet? If you CAN turn another person's tragedy into a comedy about you, you MUST do it.

Apparently we're supposed to be on David's side. We're supposed to think that Shannon's call for help is completely ridiculous and unreasonable; Missy's 'just a cat' and Shannon must be a real sentimental lunatic to care about losing her.

I mean, David's got "two clients expecting completed work this afternoon". So instead of spending his day 'making his co-worker's life a living hell', he's forced to waste his precious time HELPING another person. How unfair. I'm glad he refused to do such an insane thing.

Wait... What? It's the Internet and I'm being serious? I'm DEFENDING the sensitive kids and the slow kids?! What's wrong with me?!? Very disturbing.

__________________________________________________________

I guess the difference between people like me and people like David Thorne is that I don't do things like these to other people. I don't want to destroy anybody's life.

If I somehow managed to destroy another human being's life, I would hate myself deeply. And then, if a group of assholes came up to me and told me that what I did was "hilarious", I would hate them just as deeply. Their approval would mean nothing to me. I'd do everything I could to fix the situation and help the person whose life I'd destroyed. Because if I didn't, I'd spend the rest of my days thinking about that person, hating my pathetic self for having done what I did.

I guess that's the difference.

Karl Ove Knausgård

A month or two ago I bought the First Book in the series of autobiographical novels by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård. I don't know why I bought it. I was walking around in a bookstore and I just ended up doing it.

I've read 2/3 of the book. It's a long book and for some reason, most days I don't want to touch it. I don't know if I like it. The most important thing is that you certainly FEEL something when you read it. There are good parts. There are very good parts that make you feel that this is something truly important, something true and brilliant.

At the same time I'm a bit annoyed by Karl Ove Knausgård. He looks annoying. I'm annoyed by the thought of him sitting down and writing 6 Bibles about his ordinary life. Also, some of the things he says are annoying. For me, it was a real turn-off when he referred to his cat as 'just a cat'.

Turns out Knausgård is really hot in the literary circles (of the world) at the moment. People outside the literary circles are reading his books a lot too. Apparently many female readers are saying that by reading Knausgård they've finally got the chance to 'understand boys and men'. When people write or talk about Knausgård, they always say that Knausgård's writing is very MASCULINE.

Why? Because he has a beard?

Anyway, it's good that he wrote this.

Happy Halloween

This blog has become a place for stupid stuff having something to do with James Dean.

Am I somehow in love with James Dean? Lol, no, I don't think so. I'm just becoming increasingly unable to know the difference between James Dean and myself.

Do I even look like James Dean? A little bit. Not much. Not much. But there's something relaxing about forgetting about the Now and living in the 1950's instead. Those were nice times, especially because I didn't have to live them.

Okay! Thanks, Matthew, I'll try this.

Must...
buy...
Pepsi...

Lou Reed and Edna Krabappel are dead.

The House of Ronald McDonald

Watch this.

Now. Did the music move you? Are you crying already? Now that you saw this, will you go out and buy a Big Mac?

Last year, McDonald's launched a campaign in Helsinki. This year they're doing the same thing. Suddenly 50 % of bus stop ads show a sentimental picture of two models with a little girl wandering somewhere in the countryside: An ill child can take a family far from home. Ronald McDonald House gives home to ill children.

Okay. Let's see. One of the world's most destructive corporations is suddenly doing something good and compassionate? Great! But why are they telling this to us so loudly? Why the ads? Why are the ads everywhere? Are we all supposed to go and book rooms in 'Ronald McDonald House'?

Of course not. The point of these campaigns is, quite simply, to use us. 'Children' is a magic word, you see. They say 'ill children' and we become numb and stupid. They say 'ill children' so that we lose our fragile rationality and start believing that, actually, McDonald's must not be evil. McDonald's must be good!

I mean... ill children!

The only point of these campaigns is to make us buy more Big Macs. Every ten-trillionth cent will 'help the children'. All the other cents will fill the bottomless bank accounts of the richest, most cold-blooded men on Earth.

When I was 11, I used to love McDonald's. Of course I did. All children love McDonald's. The food is yummy and greasy. The commercials and advertisements are everywhere. The clown is cool. When I was 11, the highpoint of my week was Friday afternoon when my dad brought me a bag of McDonald's food.

Then when I was 15, I found painful information. It made me realize that I couldn't keep doing this anymore. I had to choose.

I still think that McDonald's food is tasty. If there was no moral dilemma, I'd eat that shit all the time. I like unhealthy food. That's my thing. But when I was 15, I had to choose between what tastes good and what is right.

I chose the latter. And now I eat seitan burgers; they are yummy and greasy, too.

A while ago I stumbled upon this sentence that 200 000 hipsters on Tumblr seemed to agree with: 

Do not associate with people who think they are too good for McDonald's.

I'm sorry, 200 000 hipsters.

I am too good for McDonald's.

I think that what they do to people, the animals and the planet is unbearably cruel. Knowing WHAT THEY DO every second of every day is so painful that sometimes I almost find it difficult to go on living; in terms of suffering, McDonald's is one of the biggest criminals on this planet. Few things are as violent as the way McDonald's treats the most vulnerable individuals in the world.

If you're poor, they'll exploit and abuse you. If you're a cow, a bird, or a pig, they'll cage you, they'll torture you, they'll dismember you, and then they'll kill you. If a rain forest is your home, they'll come and cut your home down. And then they'll leave you lying in blood. Dead or alive. They don't care.

I've heard that in the 90's, being young and cool meant that you boycotted industries like this. Now, 20 years later the young and cool struggle to understand the point of being good. Being bad is romantic, right?

Sigh. What happened to us?

I don't know if I'm good. But I know that I'm too good for this.

I watched a documentary about 'adult babies'; adults who feel safe and happy when they wear a diaper and are treated as small children. It was one of those "documentaries" where an intense female voice with a British accent tells us about oh so perverse and twisted stuff and we get to see how these oh so perverse and twisted individuals live their oh so perverse and twisted everyday life. The point of these documentaries is obvious: we are supposed to look at and condemn people that are different from us. The intense female voice with a British accent knows that we want to watch this kind of stuff because we enjoy the feeling of being Normal, and the feeling we get when other people fail to join the gang.

I fail to see anything wrong with adult babies. I think it's great if somebody wants to be an adult baby. I never have anything against the people presented in these documentaries. I always find them sympathetic and human; I like them more than I like 'normal people'. When a young woman told the camera how she wanted to live her life as a 6-year-old, I actually shouted out loud, "You go girl!"

The first website that I ever visited that had something to do with sex was a site dedicated to people who were aroused by urine and diapers. I was 10 and the website was called babybottle.net or something.

Leonardo DiCaprio's eyes are like two scars

I am the greatest man that ever existed.

I have no relatives in literature. I'm related to people that are not traditional writers. I have my thing and I'm good at it.

Speaking of relations, I'd love to meet a non-human primate. We're different species but we both have hands. Which creates an interesting connection between us. Meeting a monkey is different from meeting a cat. When my eyes see a monkey, somehow my brain sees a human being; I can't help it, we're so closely related. I wonder if a monkey would see me in the same way.

My sister and I usually talk very kindly and passionately about animals. For a long time we didn't really know how to talk about non-human primates, like chimpanzees; it was awkward, it was like trying to discuss humans and call them 'cute'. But we learned. I love all primates, expect not always the human ones.

Btw:
What the fuck is going on

MorrisseymorrisseymorrisseymorrisseymorrisseymorrisseyJimmydeanjimmydeanjimmydeanjimmydeanMememememememememememememememe

I've yet to say anything about the fact that I actually existed in the same building with Morrissey for several hours and that he almost killed me and made me want to kill everybody around. "I'm gonna start killing people very soon," I said repeatedly that night, and almost kept my promise.

And, after all, I would still die for him.

All I need is someone who loves Morrissey like I do and I've found everything I need in life; we can lock ourselves up in a dirty little flat, drink tea and beer, and never get out and slowly die.




According to Morrissey, Morrissey is NOT homosexual. Morrissey is 'humasexual'. Attracted to humans, "but of course ... not many". Just like James Dean. Just like me.

I'm not bisexual. That sounds stupid. But I'm increasingly sexual. I'm attracted to humans, and I don't care if the thing between their legs is a penis or a vagina or something else.

Jimmy Dean, Morrissey and I. We make a good gang. In certain ways, we are the same. The son, the son of the son, the son of the son of the son. What? Yes.

We're all strangely and painfully emotional and all that shit. One of us is dead. Two to go. Wohoo.



There is a person who knits knitted Morrisseys. He/she has a tumblr blog. How heartbreakingly absurd. One of the things that would make me cry if I still did that.

Suddenly I find myself attracted to Miley Curys and Dave Gahan's voice

This story is going to be amazing.

And the book is starting to look quite nice too.

People complaining about treehuggers should either A) get up and, for the first time in their lives, do something themselves, B) admit the fact that the treehuggers are the people making crucial steps in history happen, and that without them, we'd all be screwed.

I'm writing the book I should be writing. I'm Physically Exercicing. I'm talking to new people, almost weekly! There's something hot and new running in my bloodstream. I'm moving in the right Direction. And yesterday I noticed that I was unintentionally wearing clothes that looked kinda good on me. And that I looked kinda good.

I do think there's something valuable in my brain.

The Green Scare - why my love affair with Saga Norén may be forced to end

Although I just wrote an angry and tired writing on a person called Todd Kincannon, he definitely isn't the main reason why I'm feeling angry and tired at the moment. After all he's just a fucked-up individual, who cares; that's nothing compared to a fucked-up society.

The main reason for my tiredness is The Bridge, the Swedish/Danish crime drama television series. (In Swedish Bron, in Danish Broen, in Finnish Silta.)

As I've stated before: I love Saga Norén. Saga Norén is the only reason why I've been watching the series. She's the Swedish homicide detective with Asperger Syndrome; there is something beautiful and fascinating about the character. She's strong and vulnerable at the same time, and always sincere, a bit like Lisbeth Salander, another Swedish girl I love.

So, I like Saga. She's the reason why The Bridge works. She's the kind of character I like to write about, the kind of character I usually write about. I watched the latter half of the first season, and now I've watched the first half of the second season which is currently aired on Finnish TV every Sunday.

Now I'm in pain. I don't want to let go of Saga, but watching the second season of The Bridge has become increasingly painful.

Here's the reason: the Bad Guys in this season are a strange group of environmental and animal activists. They are referred to as 'eco terrorists'. The plot is that these very dangerous and mentally unstable people suddenly attack Normal Society: they start murdering, torturing and poisoning innocent people and then they post videos on the Internet in which they say dramatic things about things like the environmental crisis and animal testing. Their 'message' is that if people don't do what they want them to do, they will kill and destroy everything and so on and so on. They are shown wearing spooky animal masks and attacking Normal People. When they're not busy doing this, they're kicking truck drivers to death or standing in dark cellars whispering to each other like Satanic vampires.

So, in the universe of The Bridge this is what animal/environmental activism is like. These activists are the number 1 threat to normal, sane, meat-eating people who just want to love their children and be Normal without anybody suddenly coming from the bushes and poisoning them.

Cool. Except that this is fiction. Activists like this do not exist in the real world. The term 'eco-terrorism' is a word coined by George W. Bush and his half-criminal buddies in the meat/oil/whatever business. For more information.

Some decades ago homosexual characters in fiction and entertainment always had to die (or just simply get their punishment) before the end of the story. In many ways, today's case resembles the homophobic propaganda of yesterday. Suddenly we have these people that we're slightly intimidated by, but don't really know why, so we have to come up with something. We come up with this.
 
The phenomenon is known as the Green Scare. It is a very handy tool with which the actual bad guys can keep making money while destroying the planet, torturing animals and endangering humans. So, we have these annoying people telling other people that how we make money is highly questionable. What should we do? Hey, what about we start referring to them as 'terrorists' and create this image of creepy psychotic lunatics that you should stay away from?

In the Anglo-American entertainment, the mysterious Eco-terrorists have become a recurring enemy. I don't know whether this has something to do with the sponsors the money comes from, or whether the writers are just excrutiating morons who have no idea what they're actually doing, but I've already accidentally seen psychotic eco-monsters in several episodes of several random TV series: First, Monk (a demonic, balding eco-terrorist killing normal people for obscure reasons), then Law & Order (an unstable girl gets dragged into crazy, violent eco-terrorism, and then the group's members rape and abuse her because well, they are such crazy, violent monsters), then some series with Stephen Fry living in some town (once again, an unstable girl gets dragged into crazy, violent eco-terrorism, this time by a young psychopath named 'Ollie', but fortunately at the end she understands the importance of animal testing - phew).

This time it's personal. This time, for the first time, it's Scandinavia, a culturally 'modern' region that should know better. This time it's Saga. After seeing last night's episode, I actually cried. And I never cry. I used to cry when I was younger, but nowadays I'm physically nearly unable to do it. This time I felt so tired and frustrated that I cried, which was surprising.

The good heart.

I'd understand the use of eco-terrorist demons if they reflected reality. If there actually were individuals behaving in this way in the name of animal or environmental activism, I'd be strongly against them. But they are fictional. People like this, groups like this do not exist. The mere idea of psychopaths deciding to become animal activists is absurd. The point of the whole thing is empathy. In the real world, animal and environmental activists are pretty normal people, people who love their families, friends and dogs just like everybody else. The only thing that makes them different is probably the fateful fact that they are more intelligent and compassionate and have a stronger moral backbone than the average person. Usually they are serious about all the things that matter: human rights, animal rights and the planet all of us live on.

Unlike the people sitting on their comfy sofas eating bacon and whining about treehuggers disturbing their comfortable indifference.

Activists are people who are ready to not only spend their time, but to also risk their freedom, even their lives, to save and help the rest of us. People who are ready to lose everything for the sake of others; humans, pigs and cows that they've never even met but are still almost ridiculously loyal to. These people are ready to go to jail for filming the living conditions of pigs on factory farms, or for non-violent protests against destroying the Arctic.

These people are serious about what they do, and what they do is very heavy and tiring, but at the same time they usually manage to hold on to everything that matters in humanity. Most animal/environmental activists I've ever known (of) in my young life have been exceptionally loving, patient and intellectually honest, and usually also genuinely funny. I'm proud to call myself an activist. Because that is probably the most honourable thing a person can be.

I don't know if the writers of The Bridge realize the impact of what they're doing, but here's the problem: people are not very smart. Most of the people watching The Bridge have probably never personally known a real activist. And then the TV box gives them this image of dangerous terrorists and psychopaths, and how wonderful!

Now we don't have to concentrate on the real problems and the real bad guys! Now we don't have to talk about difficult moral problems, confront the richest bullies in the world and face ourselves as western societies. We can just keep chatting about these scary dark monsters with scary animal masks who are coming to destroy everything and everyone we love.

I mean, this is how animal and environmental activists are like? Right? Right? Why would we listen to people like that?

Let's decide that the hero is our enemy. Then we don't have to stop and listen.

On heroes and bullies, again

I stumbled upon the unfortunate existence of Todd Kincannon, Former South Carolina Republican Party executive director.

Apparently, about 9 months ago Kincannon was watching the Super Bowl when he decided to send out a series of 'racially-charged' tweets in which he 'joked' about black people, Hurricane Katrina, dick-sucking and a murdered black teenager named Treyvon Martin:

Understandably, a lot of people felt offended by Kincannon's painfully unfunny and boring 'humour'. He went on to explain that the reason he did it was that he is some sort of hero, a soldier for free speech, as 'Conservatives' are being oppressed in society and therefore too afraid to say what they really think anymore.

Since then Kincannon has continued attacking other humans on Twitter. For instance Iraq veterans. (No idea why.)

Anyway, a few days ago, Kincannon came back. This time he noticed that a transgender person had said something to him on Twitter. So oppressed Todd courageously said what needed to be said:

What Todd doesn't explain is why being a loser and a weirdo is supposed to be a bad thing.

 

Why do you hate Muslims? You are practically a fundamentalist Muslim.

Or do you just hate the moderate ones?

Yes, Todd. You are evil. Good that the fact seems to have occured to you already.

In most cases, it isn't illegal to insult others intentionally. But it is sad and pathetic that the only way that you could feel conflicted about doing it would be if you had to go to jail for it. Most people have inner compasses like the heart and the brain.

What is interesting about this person is that he's my complete opposite. I've always instinctually identified with the heroes, the good guys, the ones fighting for the weak and little and oppressed. I've always been the kid to stand up for the bullied kids. Todd has probably always been the bully who just simply doesn't get why he shouldn't destroy other people physically and emotionally. I mean, why not, it's fun.

I am, have always been and will always be a hero. As ridiculous and melodramatic as it sounds. I will always be the good guy. Always. For me, that is the only option.

As for Todd Kincannon, the only thing he's capable of doing is looking for somebody to hate. And then finding them. And then doing his best to destroy them.

Why? Because that's the only existence he knows.