I Scream . . .

Author: Annie Wilkes

I scream, you scream, we all scream: Get the fuck away from me and leave me alone!

Everyday I hope, there is something better, something more, something I’m missing right in front of my fucking face. Love, I have no idea what that means beyond my immediate family. I get attached too easily to people, I care (I guess as opposed to love) too much it seems. I am trusting and sometimes people think naïve. If I only ‘care’ it’s so much easier to push people away and hurt them before they hurt me. I trust implicitly upon first meeting, but am reassured all too soon and easily that I just don’t like most people. No big deal, I’m not the kind of person to have a lot of close friends, the ones I do have, like 3 or 4 that I talk to on a regular basis don’t even live where I do, with the exception of my sister.

I don’t often come across as optimistic or happy-go-lucky, I find that a bitter and/or sarcastic remark could easily define my day, but underneath it all, I am hoping, happy and most days content. It helps to know that on any given day I haven’t fucked up someones life intentionally or my own. I work my ass off for everything I’ve ever wanted but know full well I am spoiled and could get what I want by just asking.

This is going to derail now. I must have been someone incredibly fucked up in a past life, because I do believe in that shit. The following events took place within a 3 ½ month span of my life. I can’t make this shit up.

My sister’s significant other has a best friend who has professed his love for me, he doesn’t even know me. I’ve never hung out with him, probably haven’t said more than 20 words to him in my life and he continues to tell people he loves me. It really helps that he’s 10 years younger and drunk almost everyday of the past 5 or 6 years of his life and has no front teeth. This may be the most normal of suitors at this point.

Lets see….my next love possibility was like an uncle to me my whole life. 50+ yr old man, whose wife I adore invites me over late one night for a night cap, while we were at my parents house one evening for a friendly game of Texas hold’em. I had fixed him a plate of food cause he was too drunk to do it himself and it’s what you do for your elders, right?! Wrong. True story of “no good deed goes unpunished.” This man is also a drunk, goes on month long benders, pisses and shits himself and continues to invite me over. His wife left him a couple years ago for her sisters ex-husband.

Who’s next? Anyone? Anyone? Yes, the smelly older gentleman who just moved to town who offered to pay me to cook for him. Under certain circumstances this should be taken as a compliment to being a great cook. Given the events of the last couple weeks of my life I wanted to cry, not to mention this man was asking my brother about “available” girls in this town. I felt dirty, for no other reason than I just did. I still can’t look this guy in the face, he was very adamant on the phone, as if he kept offering to pay me would have made me change my mind the 4th time he asked. I may need to go puke now.

The only man I was sure I had ever loved disappeared on me shortly after I graduated high school, he is 3 yrs younger than me. So the last time I saw or talked to him was September of 1996. I only know this because two months ago he found me on a social networking site and reminded me of the last time he kissed my face and knew it would be a long time before we would see or talk to each other again. He then proceeded to tell me how much he still loved me, would do anything for me and would fly to see me immediately if I helped him figure out how much a ticket would cost, oh wait, “Get a quote for one for my son too. What am I going to tell my wife?” EXCUSE ME?! FUCK YOU. Stop calling, forget you know me, WHAT THE FUCK?! WOW.

The fucked up portion of this story follows two weeks after the last part of my love odyssey. In my last relationship, and I use the “r” word loosely, it lasted a year and was more of a relationship than I had ever known in my little over three decades of life. There were promises made, four letter words exchanged and bliss if in fact that’s what it was. After leaving town for more work there were a few phone calls one or two emails and then this person must have fallen of the face of the fucking earth. And then, one month short of a year since I last saw his face, I ran into him. I saw him in the airport, I was sitting talking to a friend and I looked up and he was standing there, looking at me from across the terminal. He then proceeded to turn and walk away, he had to get on the escalator and put a floor between us. I sat there somewhere between a second heart shredding and the joy of the memories. I had to go to the bathroom and hurl, fortunately for me as soon as I came out of the bathroom my flight was boarding.

So now I’m hanging out with a dude (who I thought was cool) until a week ago when he told me for some fucked up reason that he liked my older sister but he also has a crush on me. “Hold that thought, gotta fly away for a vacation, hang out with my ex and two kids, call me!” HO-LY FUCK!

I am now sure that whoever I was in a past life, my dismembered, beaten and broken body is lying in an unmarked grave somewhere and whoever I knew in that life does not search for answers to my mysterious disappearance.

I wish, I hope.

Guest Post

Author: Xenos

Let's just pretend, for the sake of argument, that there is a god. What sorts of characteristics should a god have to be worthy of worship? Modern Christianity seems to hold that their god is omnipotent, omniscient, both omnipresent and "supernatural," eternal (yet able to step into time when direct intervention is needed), and the epitome of goodness. On the other hand, the gods of most polytheistic cultures (except the Hindu god Brahman) were far from any of these absolutes, yet considerably more powerful than humans, including controlling the forces of nature. For this reason if no other, they were at least worthy of attempting to appease. But aside from the priests and/or priestesses of these gods, did anyone really worship them? Or is/was the average polytheist's relationship to the gods mostly another area of application for rational choice theory (maximizing self-interest)? I am specifically concerned with the traits of rationality and consistency, but we can certainly attempt to consider power, knowledge, and goodness in relation to worshipability.

As you might have gleaned already, I do not believe in god. My wife does. She believes that earth is probably the only planet in the universe with intelligent life. I do not. My whole train of thought revolves around these two differences in beliefs. Apparently Stephen Hawking is now warning the denizens of earth that extraterrestrial life, if or when we encounter it, is likely to be much more advanced than we, and to treat us as Columbus treated the Native Americans. My wife scoffs at him as if he were proposing the looniest idea she’s ever heard.

Of course, he’s a world-renowned theoretical physicist specializing in cosmology...and we’re not. So he may have a pretty good idea about how realistic such ideas are, probably better than my wife or I do, anyway. So I wonder how she can be so quick to dismiss what he’s saying. But then, I also realize that she has a dramatically different perspective.

If you believe in god, especially the Abrahamic one, then you probably take the Bible as a primary source of information about how, and why, the universe came to be. You may be willing to see the human interpretations that are actually written there to be only a figurative understanding of actual events, but you probably think that god created the whole thing in a sequence more or less congruent with one of the two versions given in Genesis. And you probably think the point of it all was to create mankind, to set us all up for this test of faith that is life, in which we each prove our worthiness to spend eternity in god’s presence, or something like that.

And the Bible doesn’t say anything about folks from other planets. So then, there must not be any. God didn’t create them, so they don’t exist, and anyone who says they do is obviously wrong. Never mind that that’s what they said to Copernicus, Galileo, or Columbus. But again, I’m in danger of appealing to empirical evidence instead of hard and fast rules laid out by god in his ghost-written diary. So, even though scientists who study space may have scientific reasons to believe that there may be intelligent life from other planets, that’s not an available avenue for arguing with a theist, at least not until some extra-terrestrial alien has made its presence known beyond all shadow of doubt (I think even most bible-thumpers now recognize that our planet is more-or-less an oblate spheroid rather than a suspended plane).

So, if we pretend that god exists, and that god is male enough to call “he,” and that he created the universe (or multiverse), and is eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent (yet supernatural) and unequivocally beneficent, then why did he create such an utterly huge universe just to put life on one tiny little planet? Surely, being omnipotent means he could have just created our solar system, or even just our galaxy, and still given us plenty of stars for our night sky. If he needed to make sure that we had certain minerals and chemical elements floating around, he could have put them all in our galaxy. He could have legislated the laws of physics differently, for god’s sake. As an omnipotent creator, absolutely nothing would be impossible, so that also means that nothing is/was completely necessary. It was all arbitrary, based on his desire to create it the way he created it. So why such a huge universe in which to hide our tiny little planet? Maybe to give us a nearly infinite frontier, so we’d always have more to strive for? But that leads us back to justifying sciences like astrophysics and cosmology.

So, it seems that god, if he exists, and if he has the qualities ascribed to him by the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic faiths, and if the Bible is really supposed to tell us all we need to know about such things, is irrational, and maybe a bit neurotic.

And since we’re discussing god and rationality, can I ask about the changes that god went through between the old and new testaments? I mean, what happened to that guy? For thousands of years, he was a tough-love, discipline-minded, vengeful tyrant who told us to stone people to death for breaking the social rules he gave us. Then suddenly, he was all about giving up worldly possessions, loving thy neighbor, and turning the other cheek. It was like he did a bunch of acid and became a hippie. Yet aside from the specific rules that Jesus changed (and the ones that we have simply decided are too silly), the rest of the old testament is still supposed to provide guidance. Huh? How are we supposed to know what god wants when he apparently has at least two dramatically different personas? Is this maturation, a phase, or a personality disorder?

So, if we pretend that god exists, and has the aforementioned characteristics commonly ascribed to him, and if the Bible is his idea of a manual for directing our lives and societies, then it would make more sense with this god, as with those of the polytheistic pantheons, to follow a rational choice model of appeasement rather than to worship a neurotic schizophrenic who may send you to paradise, or tell you to murder your child.

Together Under the Sun

With the sun, a banner, a barter of the highest order, in celestial trade for our relative comfort back on earth, all our hopes. We shattered silence with the voice of our emptiness, raised in a world without end, a walled city, founded on a fount of fear and threat. 

In 1961, Paul Schaefer, self-appointed Lutheran minister, former Hitler Youth and former Luftwaffe medic, stepped from his plane onto the Chilean tarmac. In photos he is seen smirking. Perhaps it is because he has escaped justice back home for his crimes against boys. And perhaps it is because his true legacy lies before him. 

He purchases a large parcel of fertile land with the money he has collected from his followers. In time he brings them to Chile and from there they start to build a walled city. Within the confines of his city Schaefer’s followers develop the empty land into a seeming Utopia lush with gardens, crops, a bakery, a hospital, living quarters, an airport, a massive arsenal of weapons both brought in and manufactured on-site and even a secret maze of underground tunnels that wind beneath the colony, giving Schaefer a way to flee if necessary. 

As he establishes his stranglehold on his people through fear, intimidation and abuse, he also eventually cultivates a relationship with the newly-minted Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet, a military man, seizes power from Salvador Allende through a U.S. backed coup. 

Pinochet has many enemies, both real and imagined, a side-effect of deposing a democratically elected leader through violence. Pinochet develops a systematic plan for torturing and executing those accused of being his enemies. Unfortunately for Pinochet, his torturers are not very skilled, and thus are often unable to get much in the way of confessions from their victims because the torturers are so heavy-handed most of their victims die long before anything of value can be beaten out of them. 

By the time Pinochet is in power it is 1974 and Shaefer has virtually mastered the art of control. In fact, there is supposedly good reason to suspect that Shaefer has learned much of his torture techniques from some of the most notorious fugitives in history - men like Josef Mengele. There is also reason to believe that Schaefer’s colony is virtually a waypoint for other Nazi fugitives being funneled into South America as a sort of evil underground railroad. Schaefer, seeing opportunity fall directly in his lap, offers Pinochet his expertise on the arts of torture and murder. It’s a match made in Hell. Schaefer gets the umbrella of official protection he needs, as well as an utterly ridiculous charity status for his colony.

Shaefer is not only a revolving door for the world’s worst, however. For him, Colonia Dignidad is more of an outward expression of the way in which he wishes the world to be. He is fully established in a position of ultimate power. He surrounds himself with young boys, charged with all sorts of menial tasks at his whim, and he sexually abuses them as he sees fit. This literally goes on for decades. He creates layered and immutable laws designed to keep families apart, to keep men from being sexually involved with women. This plan is so well executed that he is able to keep his congregation from producing any children for 15 years. On the occasion that someone eventually does happen to become pregnant he separates the parents not only from each other, but also from their newborn until the child reaches the age of 6. And on, and on, and on, etc . . .

As what I imagine is a way of endearing themselves to the surrounding locals, the Colonia hospital takes in the Chileans and provides them with world-class medical care. As the Colonia’s reputation grows outside of its walls, a growing number of Chileans actually long to have their children live in the compound in order to get an education at the Colonia grade school. Many of these Chileans are trained to become loyal followers of Schaefer’s cult of personality, and many of the young boys are also sexually abused. 

Eventually, in 1990, Pinochet voluntarily leaves power as a response to pressure from the Vatican as well growing international dissatisfaction with his legacy, and is replaced by a newly-elected president, Patricio Aylwin (an opponent of Schaefer’s). With their governmental protection revoked, and as members of the Colonia escape and get the word out on what really goes on in the compound, it is a matter of time before the authorities raid the Colonia and attempt to capture Schaefer. 

Somehow, Schaefer is able to escape with a staff of thugs and nurses and eventually makes his way to Argentina. He is able to remain there, undetected, until 2005 when he is finally captured and brought to trial. 

He died last week. He was 88. 

In the footage of his being brought to the courthouse in a wheelchair, he looks at peace, calm, he gently smiles. 

There is no way to measure the damage this one man has wrought on the world. 

The colony is still there today. There are attempts at contrition from this outpost of evil, many of those so willing to comply, to enforce his madness, free to live out their days in the Chilean sun, utterly outside of the justice they deserve.

Charlie Chaplin Speaks

OPEN LETTER TO FELIPE CALDERON

AUTHOR: CONGO76

Mr. President, in an effort to promote goodwill and relations between our two nations, the United States and Mexico, I am requesting that you provide our citizens with exactly the same provisions, entitlements and rights afforded to your citizens here in the United States. It only seems fair since you consistently speak out against how your citizens are treated unfairly here. In fact, let's examine why your citizens do not stay in your country in the first place.

Your economy is hampered by structural weaknesses that limit Mexico’s potential for future growth and job creation. Mexico’s workers are generally low skilled and have less schooling than workers in advanced industrial economies. This deficit in human capital manifests itself in stagnant labor productivity and real wages, as well through the existence of a large “informal” labor sector that deprives the education, health care, and social security systems of crucial tax revenues. Income distribution remains highly unequal; about half of Mexico’s population lives in poverty. Read it one more time and get a clue.

First before we migrate to your country, illegally of course as we have no desire to actually become citizens, we're going to require employment. I feel that since your citizens afford themselves our Constitutional rights we should have access to Mexico's Constitution protection as well. Case in point would be Article 123 which affirms a variety of labor rights, including the right to organize and an eight-hour workday, and provides for the protection of women and minors in the workplace. Furthermore, I feel that Article 27 is going to need to be circumvented because it imposes stringent restrictions on us as foreigners in regards to land ownership. I realize the amendment to this article in 1992 eased some of these restrictions, I just want to ensure your rules don't apply to us.

Secondly, I feel that when I disagree with how the government of Mexico conducts its affairs that all illegal aliens, Americans that are in Mexico illegally and who are not citizens, should be allowed to protest in your streets all while carrying the American flag. Your citizens do it here. Please inform the Policía Federal Preventiva before they commit another human rights violations upon us, that your Constitution prescribes an activist state that will ensure national autonomy and social justice. Which of course should be awarded to us even though we've made zero effort to become a Mexican citizen. If you do not change your laws or Constitution to accommodate us then we will take to a media blitz never seen before of labeling you a racist and a Nazi. We may even resort to accusing you of being a Fascist pig, even though it is entirely impossible to be a Nazi and a Fascist at the same time. Since most of your citizens don't make it past the eighth grade they won't know the difference anyway and will agree with us. Can you afford that type of attention in the media?

Thirdly I feel you should pass an act similar to our Nationalization and Immigration Act of 1952 which will grant automatic citizenship to any child born within your country borders and allow for the mother and/or father to stay within Mexico based off that child's citizenship. Making Americans go to the US Consulate and filing a "Consular Report of Birth Abroad"  is really bothersome and time consuming. Of course it wouldn't be fair to expect the parents to have to actually become citizens, pay taxes, get a driver's license and join in on the dream of coming to Mexico and making your dreams come true. We're also going to require access to any and all government social services and support, to include free medical care, because we're entitled to them. Please make sure all of the forms are provided to us in English as well, after all, we are just dumb Americans and can't be bothered with learning Spanish. Even though it's predominantly spoken in Mexico, Central and South America.

In the end Mr. President until you level the playing field in regards to American citizens in Mexico I think you should shut the fuck up. There are reasons you're citizens are leaving your country in drones and yet you do nothing about it. I guess the more people leave your country the less problems there are for you to deal with. In the words of General Santa Anna himself, "I felt that it was rather anawkward affair for the President of one republic to be thus catechized by the President of another."

UNACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR

GUEST AUTHOR: CONGO76

This is my first contribution to The Blind Butcher and will do my utmost to follow the art of skillfully whining, madman rants, miscreant behavior and yet deliver the straight dope as this appears to be the creed here. Timeo Danaos  et dona ferentes, I always say. It has come to my attention that we live in a new era in which people feel they can say whatever they want to you without recourse. This is commonplace and it does not relegate itself to one sector of our society. Quite frankly, it has an Machiavellian odor that is reminiscent of the smell of ass or maybe even Bigfoot’s dick. It's as if a Black Plague of rudeness has cast a blanket over these people. These self anointed taints have convinced themselves that whatever type of language they decide to sling your way is justified and normal.

In the past I have made numerous attempts to reason with these people notifying them of their unwarranted verbal transgressions. To no avail they continue to make disparaging remarks one can only liken to the scene in Fantasia where the brooms continually bring water into the house even after the sorcerer commands them to cease. In trying to deal with these people I again interject civility in an effort to stop their rude behavior. Unfortunately, there is nothing civil about these types of people. Even after you repeated notify them that you find their demeanor and words insulting, your requests seem to fall on deaf ears. Pants are all made the same and we are all required to put them on the same way. You are no better than I.

These types of people have you in a precarious position. Because you are an adult you are expected to conduct yourself as such. Fair enough, I agree. As an adult you can not resort to meeting on the playground and clean some one's proverbial clock. By the time you reach adulthood you should be able to reason with people without resorting to opening a can of "whoop ass". Unfortunately we seem to be dealing with mindless siths who possess the manners that can only be found within a primordial soup.

Well I don't know about the rest of you, but I have taken up my sword and shield and have set forth on a quest to do battle with these moronic assholes. I freely joust and regurgitate equal doses of what is dished out to me. The irony in the whole thing is they act shocked and offended when you provide them with the same stomach churning confrontations. How dare I talk down to them or say rude sarcastic comments. To this I say, put a rectal thermometer in your mouth and go away. To quote the Highlander, "There can be only one."