Another year is slowly—dare I say tediously?—drawing to a close, and the air here in the Combat! blog offices has taken on a philosophical tang. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of the Christmas season. Maybe it’s the end of an undeniably weird decade. Maybe it’s that we’re 32 years old and spend almost every night alone reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in our house in the mountains. Probably it’s something you did. The point is, time moves forward with the inexorable confidence of like a time train or something, and we mortals can only note its passage. Change wins the day with the coming of every night, and the only certain thing in our lives is that each of us will eventually die. In the meantime, we have trend pieces. Won’t you join me in the news of the day? Who knows—it could be your last. Merry Christmas, everybody!
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Friday links! Spectacle of morality edition
It’s Friday, and that means it’s time to look back in evaluation of the week that is about to finish having been. If you’re like me, you’ve been paying extra-special attention to being good lately, in the hopes of getting that Barnes & Noble knock-off Kindle that costs as much as a regular Kindle for Christmas. The problem with being good, though, is that it’s awfully hard for other people to notice. So much of being good is about not doing stuff, especially stuff—stealing, looking at boobs, I think farting—when no one is around to see you anyway. The problem with personal morality is that it’s so personal. If only there were some way that I could make a public spectacle of my goodness, so that all the world would be forced to acknowledge what a moral/books-equivalent-of-a-Zune-deserving person I am. Oh, well. I guess I’d better just resign myself to reading books printed on wood pul—wait a minute! What if I looked to the morality of others? If I were some kind of self-appointed superintendent of other people’s goodness, I could not only make a spectacle of my own righteousness, but also relieve myself of the burden of scrutiny of my own actions. It’ll be like having a maid to clean my kitchen for me, while I accuse her of adultery. Or something. Whatever it is, it’s going to be awesome, at least for me. I guess for everybody else it will be kind of irritating, but what are they going to do? Turn my own righteous indignation against me? That’ll be the day. I just hope nobody has thought of this alrea—oh, dammit. It turns out the totality of world culture beat me to it. I guess I’ll just go back to documenting their craven attempts to aggrandize themselves by pointing out the foibles of oth—HELLO! We’re back in business.
The unpopular position: Your kid is a public nuisance
A bunch of assholes
I’m 32 years old, which means I’ve reached the age where many of my friends have either had children or admitted they have a cocaine problem. Of the two groups, both keep going to restaurants, but only one conducts its business with anything resembling discretion. This country has a child problem. It’s not the children themselves, who after all will ensure the continued existence of human civilization if we can avoid a nuclear war, and serve as a source of high-protein food if we can’t. It’s the parents. Like the lifelong smoker who thinks his jacket smells fine, they’ve spent so much time with their children that they regard the presence of a shrieking, silverware-drumming homunculus as the default human condition. It’s not. The default human condition is loneliness, as any 32 year-old man who works out of the one-bedroom apartment where he lives with his stereo can tell you. As such a man, I regard the presence of children in restaurants, coffee shops and airplanes not as some sort of force majeure, but as a force vous douchebags, and I believe you should take responsibility for it.
Friday links! Sudden onset of winter edition
It’s sixteen degrees in Montana, and word ’round the Combat! blog offices is that today’s bitter cold is part of some sort of pattern that might last for months. It seems like only a week ago we were in sunny California, kind of posting vague reminders that the outside world existed between bouts of eating and abruptly falling asleep. All that is like unto a dream now, as the cruel winds of the national zeitgeist or possibly just some regular geist howl and batter against our windows. It’s really sunny out there, too. That’s the worst. Fortunately, we’ve got the internet to keep us warm, and there’s enough absurd stuff going on out there to keep one burning with indignation throughout the sharpest cold snap. Except our toes. Our toes are going to be cold until April, and we just need to accept that.
Happy continued fundamental themes of Thanksgiving!
For much of America, the Thanksgiving holiday and the brief interlude of cooking at home, gathering to converse with friends and loved ones, and savoring of simple material comforts it induced are over. Now it’s time to use the internet and buy shit. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is historically the biggest shopping day of the year. That’s because most Americans work so much that they really need to seize any day off they get, in order to have enough time to buy stuff. It’s a damn near flawless system, and we must defend it. Here in Los Angeles, our woefully diseconomic Thanksgiving continues in spirit if not in calendar, and all consume leftover turkey and pirated DVDs. Perhaps we shall not get the last Nintendo Wii. We will live one more day as free men, however, and if you are reading this at home, Combat! thanks you and reminds you that it is still not to late to skip the store. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.