Subjective Morality

Archive for February, 2009

I can’t remember most of what came before this, but oh well. I was in a building that looked somewhat like my high school, only there were no windows and few doors. It was just a hallway basically. Apparently it was under control by Nazis. We were in one of the hallways, sitting on the floor, and the Nazis told us to put all our money into jars. The people around me kept calling the money (which looked remarkably similar to dollars) crackers. I said, “Wait, aren’t they called Krakows?” Nobody paid attention to me. The lead Nazi man then told us to take off our clothes and run to the next hallway, but nobody actually took off all their clothes. I took off my pants but had trouble taking off one of my shirts (I had two) so I was running after the other people trying desperately to get this shirt off. I suppose the lead Nazi man didn’t like that as he ran after me yelling. There was a door near me and I figured “Why be killed by him when I could try to escape?” so I ran out the door and instantly heard the sound of turrets firing. I ran back inside, scared, and the Nazi man shot me twice in the arm. I faltered back against the wall and that’s when I woke up.

Happy birthday, Darwin!

The boy sat at his desk, homoerotic thoughts plaguing him. Thoughts about boys and naughty things. He had been warned against those naughty things before by those that are no longer there; those that are but a mere memory in the fabric of existence.

The boy had a magazine in his backpack. A pornographic magazine that he had unwillingly stolen from his now-gone friend’s house, special in the fact that it was a gay pornographic magazine, displaying all sorts of naughty things happening between consenting adult males. His backpack was against his leg, which was shaking in a manner best befitting a nervous tick. He looked around: all was silent and empty. He reached for his backpack, intending to retrieve the magazine. “No,” he said to himself, his hand poised over the zipper. “No.”

He stayed his hand, kicking his backpack away from him, leg still shaking. He looked away from it. He bit his lip. He started sweating.

She had watched. Watched as the man she used to love began vigorously licking the black woman who’d been standing there for well over a decade; watched him slither his serpentine tongue across her bosom. She could not believe what she was seeing, watching, experiencing. The figurative sound of her heart rending in two was far more than just merely palpable; it was inescapable, filling the chamber with the screams of agonized heartstring. He had not noticed, nor had he cared. He continued flailing his tongue about, laughing deep in his throat; a diseased laugh, a diseased man. She wept.

Once again in our lovely little cesspool of America, we have an athlete/superhero caught doing drugs.

It doesn’t take much thought to figure out why this keeps happening. Athletes are stupid, stupid people do drugs, therefore, athletes do drugs. Quit being so shocked. And you know the only ones who’re shocked are those people in the upper-middle class who watch ABC News (blegh) and take their three kids to soccer practice every day and drink Starfucks while pretending that the world around them is just oh so perfect. You know, those mundane and boring fuckers who think drug dealers should be put to death for “corrupting our youth”.

Well, then again there are the fangirls (or boys) who want to sink their tiny, effeminate fangs into Phelps because he’s such a “hottie” who’re screaming “Why would Michael do such a thing?!” as if they know him.

And then these fuckers have the sheer nerve to think they can control people simply because they’re popular or considered role models.

Why is he even famous? Because he can swim? Well so can fucking doIphins, but we’re not extolling them as role models. I thought parents wanted their kids to be doctors and lawyers, not fucking fish.

I guess that’s just how much this sports-mentality has warped America.

Sports are useless. Athletes don’t deserve much money. Buy your local farmer a drink sometime, they need it, and you need them, especially in this economy.

In totally unrelated news, the half-brother of Obama (yes, that one) was caught with a joint and arrested in Nairobi.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is the story of a shepherd who travels the countryside of Spain in search of adventure, his dreams, and love (kinda).

The first sentence in the book is “The boy’s name was Santiago.” Coelho then proceeds to never use his name again, simply referring to him as “the boy” or “he”. The boy’s parents had wanted him to be a priest, making him attend a seminary until he was 16. He doesn’t want to be one, however. He tells his father that he wants to travel; to see the world, and the only people who travel in his village are the shepherds, so he decides to become one. His father basically says “OK!” and gives the boy three Spanish coins to buy his sheep. So this wonderful father sends his adolescent kid off with no training, no supplies, and three silver coins to herd a bunch of sheep across the Spanish countryside alone. What great parenting.

The first scene is that of him settling in with his sheep to spend the night in a dilapidated church with a sycamore growing out of it, in a way foreshadowing the ending. The boy has a dream in the church about going to Egypt and finding a hidden treasure:

I dreamed that I was in a field with my sheep, when a child appeared and began to play with the animals. The child went on playing with my sheep for quite awhile. And suddenly, the child took me by both hands and transported me to the Egyptian pyramids. Then at the Egyptian pyramids, the child said to me, ‘If you come here, you will find a hidden treasure.’ And, just as she was about to show me the exact location, I woke up.

Once, when the boy was bargaining to sell his sheep, he meets this merchant’s daughter, who marvels at his ability to read, and is instantly enamored.

Maybe we’re all that way, the boy mused. Even me—I haven’t thought of another woman since I met the merchant’s daughter. Looking at the sun, he calculated he would reach Tarifa before midday. There, he could exchange his book for a thicker one, fill his wine bottle, shave, and have a haircut; he had to prepare himself for his meeting with the girl, and he didn’t want to think about the possibility that some other shepherd, with a bigger flock of sheep, had arrived there before him and asked for her hand.

It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting, he thought, as he looked again at the position of the sun, and hurried his pace. He had suddenly remembered that, in Tarifa, there was an old woman who interpreted dreams.

I think the ‘bigger flock of sheep’ thing is a veiled penis reference, but no matter. The boy arrives at Tarifa and asks a gypsy to interpret his dreams for him. Why didn’t he visit the merchant first? We’ll never know. The gypsy doesn’t tell him anything ground-breaking: there’s supposedly a hidden treasure at the pyramids and he must go and find it. Simple.

The boy does the rest of his errands in Tarifa, trading his book, shaving, refilling his wine, etc. and goes to the city plaza to drink some wine and read his new book. He isn’t thinking about the book though, he’s thinking about sheering his sheep in front the merchant’s daughter so she could see that “he was capable of doing difficult things”:

He had already imagined the scene many times; every time, the girl became fascinated when he explained that the sheep had to be sheared from back to front.

While he’s in the middle of his erotic sheep-shearing fantasy, a creepy old man comes along and bothers him, trying to strike up a conversation. The old guy is persistent, much to the boy’s chagrin. Long story short, the guy is King Melchizedek (hereafter referred to as King Melchie) of Salem, and he’s here to teach the boy about “personal legends”, which is a fancy-shmancy word for one’s predetermined purpose in life. Now, being an existentialist, I think that’s total bullshit, but this is long enough without a rant on existential philosophy. The old man says that he’ll tell him how to find the hidden treasure in return for one-tenth of his sheep, because he wants the boy to complete his “personal legend” (I wish Coelho had picked a less-weird word for this). The boy grudgingly agrees and gives the guy his sheep. Well, guess what King Melchie’s advice is? Go to the Egyptian pyramids. Useless old bastard. He gives the boy two stones, which are supposed to be used in making decisions; one stone representing yes and the other no, and the boy chooses one randomly without looking. He only uses them once or twice in the entire book to make unimportant decisions. King Melchie’ also says a bunch of other shit, which the boy quotes almost every other page from now on. It gets annoying. Very annoying.

The boy sells the rest of his sheep for the money he’ll need to get to Egypt. He boards a ferry and crosses the Mediterranean Sea, landing in the city of Tanger. Not being familiar with the people, he trusts some guy he meets at a bar to take him to the pyramids, giving him all his money from the sheep. The dude flees the boy in a market, stealing all his money. This is one of those rare moments in the book where Coelho says something true: most humans are greedy, selfish bastards.

The boy, penniless and in a strange place, wanders around for a day looking for a job. He finds a shop that sells crystal glasses and offers to polish the glasses for the owner. The guy hires the boy, and the boy offers suggestions that would make the tiny glass shop better, such as building a display case. The shop thrives.

One day, the boy and the shop owner are having a discussion about dreams and such. The shop owner, being a muslim, believes it’s his religious duty “to visit the holy city of Mecca.” But he’s afraid to because wanting to go there is better than having been there, or something like that:

[I]t’s the thought of Mecca that keeps me alive. That’s what helps me face these days that are all the same, these mute crystals on the shelves, and lunch and dinner at that same horrible café. I’m afraid that if my dream is realized, I’ll have no reason to go on living.

How emo. Well that’s kind of a damning philosophy, isn’t it? Dreaming of going to Mecca keeps him alive, but he has to go there at least once or he’ll burn in hell, supposedly.

After a working for over a year, the boy has enough money to get back on track for Egypt. He plans to travel with the glass shop owner’s suppliers who ride caravans through the desert. He goes to the suppliers’ corral, where he meets a pissy young Englishman know-it-all (Lawrence of Arabia?) who’s seeking an alchemist at the Al-Fayoum oasis who purportedly has the Philosopher’s Stone, you know, that thing in the first Harry Potter book. The Englishman is antisocial until the boy takes out the two stones King Melchie gave him. Upon seeing them, the Englishman exclaims; he’s seen those stones before, and takes out his own pair (another genital reference?) and asks the boy where he got his. The boy tells him about King Melchie, who seems to have also met with the Englishman. Then they start talking about how their both meeting the king is an omen. Ugh.

The caravan leaves Tanger on camelback. The boy and the Englishman continue their conversation and talk about how there’s no such things as coincidence, and blah, blah, blah. They become careful friends over their trek. A tribal war is ensuing in the desert and the caravan must be careful where it travels.

They arrive at the Al-Fayoum oasis to warm greetings from the locals, and they’re ordered to give up their weapons. The Englishman immediately starts looking for the alchemist, asking people where he is. No one tells him until they ask this girl:

Finally, a young woman approached who was not dressed in black. She had a vessel on her shoulder, and her head was covered by a veil, but her face was uncovered. The boy approached her to ask about the alchemist.

At that moment, it seemed to him like time stood still, and the Soul of the World surged within him. When he looked into her dark eyes, and saw that her lips were poised between a laugh and silence, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke—the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love.

Love at first sight. Sickening. The girl’s name is Fatima, and she seems to treat the boy as, well, a boy. She points the Englishman in the direction of the alchemist’s tent and he goes immediately like a whipped dog. Fatima leaves and the boy goes off and does whatever. The next day, the Englishman tells the boy about his encounter with the alchemist. The alchemist refuses to teach the Englishman until he turns lead into gold. While the Englishman’s trying to do that, the boy is busy flirting with Fatima, going to the well where she gets her water every day to talk to her. Coelho doesn’t do a very good job of convincing the reader these two are in love. It seems more like one of those relationships based on necessity. She wants a husband, he has a penis. Now they’re in love. Let’s celebrate.

The next couple of days, the boy has a dream that the camp will be overrun by one of the warring tribes. He goes to tell the chief of the camp, and he says that if the boy is wrong they’ll kill him, then gives all the visitors their weapons back. After leaving the chief’s tent, a man on a horse rides up to him and talks about stuff. This horse dude is the alchemist we’ve been hearing so much about. He imparts some mubo-jumbo words of wisdom and leaves.

The next day, the rival tribe attacks and the soldiers are able to thwart it because of the boy’s prediction. The chief hails the boy and asks him to become counselor of the oasis.

Later that day, the alchemist talks to the boy. The boy has doubts about what he should do next: stay with Fatima and become counselor to the oasis, or leave for Egypt then come back for her. The alchemist says some more mumbo-jumbo and they decide to leave together, following the latter plan.

On their way, the boy and the alchemist are captured by an enemy tribe. The alchemist gives the chief all of the boy’s money in exchange for their lives, exclaiming that the boy is an alchemist and could destroy the tribe’s camp by turning himself into the wind. The chief gives the boy three days to turn into the wind and destroy his camp, and if he can’t, he’d kill them both. The boy is scared shitless because he has no idea how to do this, but the alchemist, in his infinite wisdom, says, “Well, you’ll have to learn; your life depends on it.” How useful.

The three days pass, and the boy takes the chief to a cliff overlooking the camp. The boy faces the camp and then starts talking to the desert. Yes, you read that right. He talks to the mother-fucking desert. The desert asks the boy, “What is love?” (I immediately heard that stupid Haddaway song in my head) and the boy goes off talking about how the food chain somehow is love. The deserts basically says, “WTF? IDK.” The boy asks the desert to help him turn into the wind, and the desert says that it’ll give him its sands but he needs the wind as well. So the boy starts talking to the wind.

The wind pretty much says the same thing the desert did: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, dude. I can’t turn your fat ass into myself. I’ll blow for you, but why don’t you ask the sun?” The boy asks the sun, who also doesn’t know how to turn him into the wind (you’d think a flaming ball of gas would know that) and suggests he ask God. So the boy prays, turns into the wind, and appears at the destroyed camp. Yeah, God’s such an asshole that he’d destroy a bunch of shit just because a little boy asks him to:

The men were terrified of his sorcery. But there were two people who were smiling: the alchemist, because he had found his perfect disciple, and the chief, because that disciple had understood the glory of God.

The following day the general bade the boy and the alchemist farewell, and provided them with an escort party to accompany them as far as they chose.

Wasn’t he a chief just a second ago? I believe there’s a big difference between a general and a chief.

The boy and the alchemist stop at a monastery where they ask a monk if they can use his kitchen. The alchemist melts some lead in a pot on the stove, then takes out the Philosopher’s Stone and turns the lead into gold, breaks the gold into four pieces, and hands them out (can you break a chunk of gold into four pieces with your bare hands? I think not. Such is the awesomeness of the alchemist). He gives one piece to the monk, one to himself, one to the boy, and the last to the monk in case the boy comes back in need of it, saying “Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.” The boy and the alchemist go their separate ways and the boy keeps heading to the Pyramids.

As he approaches, his heart tells him that he should “[b]e aware of the place where you are brought to tears. That’s where I am, and that’s where your treasure is.” Whatever. When he rounds the top of the next dune, he sees the pyramids lighted by moonlight and instantly starts crying. Pussy.

He starts digging where his tears fell. He digs and digs and digs, when two men come up behind him and take his gold (so now he’s poor again. That alchemist sure is prescient). The two men wonder what the boy is digging for, and, thinking it’s treasure, force the boy to keep digging, beating him half to death when he finds nothing. Bruised and bleeding, the boy screams that “he had twice dreamed of a treasure hidden near the pyramids of Egypt.” The two men think he’s crazy and one of them says this:

You’ll live, and you’ll learn that man shouldn’t be so stupid. Two years ago, I had a recurrent dream, too. I dreamed that I should travel to the fields of Spain and look for a ruined church where shepherds and their sheep slept. In my dream, there was a sycamore growing out of the ruins of the sacristy, and I was told that, if I dug at the roots of the sycamore, I would find a hidden treasure. But I’m not so stupid as to cross an entire desert just because of a recurrent dream.

Then the two men leave. There’s no hidden treasure at the pyramids. I think it’s obvious where this is going.

The boy goes back to the monastery, gets the gold the monk was keeping for him, and travels to Spain, back to where the church is. He digs under the roots and finds a chest full of Spanish coins. “I’m coming, Fatima,” he says at the end of the epilogue. Evidently he’d rather spend time copulating than visiting his parents who he hasn’t seen in years.

The End.

Now for the bitching.

The whole ‘I’m gonna go to Egypt and find some buried treasure!’ thing was totally fucking pointless. Why couldn’t he have just dreamed that the damn treasure was under the tree? Oh. Yes. You need a simplistic plot with a poorly executed ending that’ll make kids go “Wow!”. Mr. Coelho is definitely no O. Henry; that ending just comes off as cheesy and stupid. It would’ve been a better book if the two men had beaten the boy to death right before he found his treasure. That would be a far truer statement about life than this ‘you can do anything you want!’ bullshit. No, sometimes there are things that people just can’t do. In the untimely scripted words of Heath Ledger’s Joker, “[People] are only as good as the world allows them to be.”

In short, The Alchemist is the skeleton of a story trying desperately to be more than it is or ever could be, and in so doing, fails miserably. It’s like a starter book for bullshit new-age philosophy and I can’t help but laugh when it tries to sound mystical. The writing style is simplistic, but not in a good way. The simplicity and over-reliance on narration sucks all the emotion and depth from the story. Most scenes where the boy is supposed to express some sort of feelings are anecdotal, narrated, or lacking of any meaningful dialogue. What’s left feels cheapened and incomplete. It beats you over the head constantly with it’s meaning, which isn’t even slightly ambiguous. “Follow your dreams,” it says. “Follow your dreams. Follow your dreams! FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS GOD-DAMMIT!” A lot of the so-called “wise” statements in the book make absolutely no sense, such as the numerous references to ‘The Soul of The World’. I tried. I really tried to understand what the fuck this “Soul of the World” thing is, and I’m still scratching my head. Coelho tries to explain it in an interview: “[A]ll religions tend to follow the same light. in between the light and us, sometimes there are too many rules. The light is here and there are no rules to follow this light.” What? Nonsensical gibberish to me. Coelho has no artistic finesse in my mind, and I can’t fathom why Bill Clinton read this (as Coelho says in the introduction). At least it’s a quick read; quick and painful.

I would not recommend this book to anyone, especially children. It’ll only make them sad when they realize that their dreams will never come true, no matter how much they believe or try.

like omg this dude came up to me one day and asked me if I’d like to you know get in his car or whatever so I did and he took me to his house and showed me his collection of rotting fish corpses and like idk why but just the sight of those corpses with their big bulging eyes and pale pink gills made me really horny like I just felt like I wanted to fuck a complete stranger on the street like that one time. you remember right? that one time when I fucked Josh in the bathroom and the condom got stuck inside me and he was like trying to pull out but he couldn’t? kinda like this whole think in iraq huh? yeah so anyway he like tried to put one of his dead fish in my vagina but I was like no dude and he just stood there for awhile and stared at me with his mouth half open and I was like dude you ok? and then he just threw the fish at me and it hit me in my boobs like my boobs that haven’t fully developed yet you know? no you don’t cuz you have the biggest boobs in the entire school, Stacy, I so wish I could have boobs as big as yours just so I could stick them in Josh’s face and say eat it! eat it you cocksucker! but I already know what Josh’d do he’d like totally hit me in the face, you know? like that one time when his condom got stuck in me in the bathroom and he like got really frustrated cuz’ it was hurting him, you know? so he just starts beating me and beating me and I’m like crying by the sink while he’s standing over me with that really stretched out condom and he’s just looking down at me with disgust but then he starts trying to pretend like nothing happened and he starts apologizing and shit and I’m just crying there cuz’ I’m hurting and it hurts oh so much. I’ve never hurt like that before, except for that one time when I was in my room and I tried to lick my own clit and I ended up spraining my back with my tongue right on it and I can’t move so I’m like stuck in this awkward position with my tongue on my clit and my mom comes in the room and starts screaming at me and calls me disgusting and says that I’m an agent of satan and then she starts hitting me with her broom and it hurts so badly, Stace, it hurts so much but I can’t move so my back just feels like it’s about to break in two when my dad comes and starts beating my mom calling her a crazy nazi bitch and all this shit and my dad came up to me after he was done beating her and she was crying in a corner and he says he thinks I look hot. can you like imagine that, Stace? he said he thinks I look hot and for some reason that reminded me of that time with those freakily sexy fish corpses that made me so hot and like how that guy just ran down his stairs leaving me in his livingroom thing so like idk if he was ok or not so I slowly walked downstairs and like when I get down there I find him hanging by his nipples from the ceiling by two clamps hooked up to a car battery and like the wires are all around his throat and he’s just hanging there twitching occasionally and like idk but I couldn’t resist, Stace, I started masturbating right there and then over this dead dude’s twitching electrified corpse and I swear to god, Stace, I’ve never come so hard in my life.