I've been extremely depressed lately. I manage to escape it for a litte while, but it always comes back. It's because I've been so busy. I've been very stressed out. Today, instead of lazing around the house, miserable, eating, watching TV and surfing the net, I decided I would get out. I have a bike now - Aeron gave it to me. But it's ben kind of rainy and I had nowhere to conceivably bike to, so I went downtown, ran errands, and went to Vancouver Public Library. I should hang out there more often. Away from the house and surrounded by hundreds and thousands of books. And not just books. Magazines., movies, music, computers. INFORMATION. A good thing. So I feel a little better, having been there, but I still feel on edge, like I could get sad again any minute.

So I got a bike this weekend, and a Joy Division CD which I have been listening to incessantly, and I went to a GWAR concert, and I now have a cable to hook up my scanner to my computer. So I do have things to be happy about, but I've still been sad. I've decided to get more exercise, because that's supposed to help if you're depressed. I've got Ovid's Metamorphoses sitting here. I imagine reading great literature just because I want to should help me, too.

GWAR was last night. Definite mixed feelings about that. In some ways they're the raddest thing ever because they're so fucking hilarious. Oderus Urungus announced after they had played their first song, "you are all weak and worthless." Slymenstra Hymen castrated him, and danced with fire, and showed up topless onstage at the end. There was a 10-foot-high T-Rex eating people. Battles with various monsters and pop-culture/political icons. Gallons of blood, urine and jizz. I got some blood on my face and arms. There were disembowelments, there was drama, comedy; gore galore. Nihilism. And tons of growling, vaguely punk-sounding heavy metal that was better than I expected. But something I didn't expect is that, like the hordes of creepy single white guys stuck in 1994, GWAR were a bunch of misogynist, racist rednecks. I knew they started out as college students, so I expected them to make complete fun of the genre, but they didn't escape their own milieu. So although they urinated on an American flag and disemboweled The President (they never called him by name), they also beat the shit out of Saddam Hussein and had a song called "Death to Iraq," which was almost as sick as Oderus Urungus wanting his "human slaves" to beat up Mike Tyson instead of doing it himself because, "frankly, Negroes scare me." Larissa and I were shocked by that more than any of the spewing bodily fluids. Oh, and they repeatedly referred to Slymenstra as "bitch," and when she first came on they said, "shouldn't you be baking or cooking or something?" And the whole plot of her stealing his penis had a really misogynist angle to it. So while she was a monster-slaying sex goddess, she was in the end just a "bitch."

I don't fully understand why heavy metal is white trash music. That probably sounds ridiculous, but seriously. Every art form has a class character, and the redneck misogynist quality of heavy metal and its milieu is what in the end drove me from it. I just don't understand what gore and monsters and fantasy stuff have to do with the white lumpenproletariat. Even Lord of the Rings has a sort of creepy white supremacist edge to it. Because to me, when I was 15, stuff like Marilyn Manson and Pantera were a rejection of straight-laced "conformist" suburbia, but going to a Manson concert and seeing a Fascist-looking Marilyn Manson chanting "we hate love, we love hate" turned me off the whole thing. How are these things connected? Is it the rage and despair of the white lumpenproletariat? How does that differ from the rage and despair seen in hardcore? Money? I suppose the two converge. It makes me angry and it makes me want to peel my skin off in disgust. I guess macho white-guy rock appeals to me. I'm glad, at least, that punks are political, and there are leftist punks who hate the redneck fascists.

I guess the despair of the petty bourgeoisie can go two ways - it can join the working class or it can join the bourgeoisie. And the petty bourgeoisie is the recruiting ground for fascism. And the best people to recruit to fascism are people who hate the world and like beating the shit out of people in mosh pits.

The scene I'm in is for people on the up-and-up. Intellectuals with educations, optimistic, not particularly filled with rage. Postmodernist, feminist, reformist. They think they are the vanguard of culture but they're all just a bunch of fucking yuppies. Fashion is of profound importance to them.

The decay of capitalism.

I fucking hate class society.

I thought GWAR were good satirists, but they weren't. Sometimes the mask becomes the face. I usually hate that expression but I think here it's really true.