Alright, I’m calling it: All this nonsense about the cover of the new Weezer album is an intentional, elaborate pop culture satire.

For those of you not following, a brief recap thus far, although I feel we’ve got more to go:

1. Weezer leaks new album cover, is just gigantic face of Hurley from Lost.
2. Name of album is also revealed to be “Hurley.”
3. Information is given by Weezer that this is the result of promotional money being provided to the band from the Hurley clothing company.
4. Denial of this endorsement is later made, however Weezer is demonstrably involved in a Hurley clothing advertising campaign.

Besides the fact that it is unlikely that so much ham-fisted nonsense could ever occur in the climate of a valuable commodity like a new Weezer album, it’s also a sequence of events that is cutely full of mock-bullshit over cross-promotional efforts between commercial and cultural forces itself: The exaggerated effect of Hurley’s huge and singular face, the tongue-in-cheek brainwashing attempt at word association between a fictional character and a brand, and even the stumbly attitude of the independent cool-dude band as they try in vain to remember to not screw up their oh-so-insincere shilling for the sterile, flawless corporation that stands in resolute shadow behind them.

The problem, of course, is that the art in all of this is really found in our reaction to it – it’s a barometer of our gullibility, pointless outrage and even hypocrisy in all sorts of ways that would take a post of its own to even explain.

That being said: Who is buying this?

The act, I mean. Not the album.

We all know the album will suck.

I’m just saying – there is no reason to do any of this if nobody believes it, unless we are supposed to realize we’re being jerked around, and our reaction to that is what now counts. This would be post-post-modern, I think. Maybe post-post-post.

It’d be nice if some sort of big, creative revolution took place soon. I think we’re all world-weary enough for it. I think most of what is being said today, even if we are still all enjoying how clever people can be about it, has mostly been said.

How did music critics feel right before Nirvana came out? How did Weezer feel? I think maybe we all feel like that.

In spite of having written critically a few days ago about dogma in my last entry, and the bizarreness of adhering to a strict code of conduct in our complicated and ambiguous contemporary lives, I have to admit that the idea of it still resonates with me.

I mean, it has always resonated with me: I am that guy who is always quitting drinking. I guess, like anyone, I like the idea of creating some sort of rule or law and pretending that this solves the actual problem. In reality, of course, it just puts an existential street sign at the crossroads of every decision that relates to it. It’s really little more than a shopping list for your preferred existence.

That being said, I’m going to try it. I just wrote them, and they are below. Maybe, in time, they will become far too rigid, and the fact that I’ll know it will be a sign of my maturity to move beyond them, but for now the idea of doing many of these things exists in a haze of contradictory instincts; a couple of streets signs, frankly, could help.

So, every day now, I will breathe, and think that this is…

Who I Want To Be

1. I want to be a person who does not drink alcohol. It is a waste of time, money, health and happiness, and is more driven by feelings of alienation from each other than we can even collectively remember.

2. I want to be a person who is in good health. That means eating well, exercising, getting enough sleep, and proactively dealing with every condition that will come with time.

3. I want to be a person who is sympathetic. I don’t need to use my perceptions and insights to be hurtful to others or myself; with temperance, and understanding, I can use them to help.

4. I want to be a person who is disciplined. With truly hard work, I have the ability to achieve extraordinary things as a writer and comedian – things that I can be proud of, no matter how noisy or impossible the world becomes.

5. I want to be a person who is financially responsible. I want to pay my debts quickly, and avoid incurring them whenever possible.

6. I want to be a person who does not dwell on the past. The past is gone. Obsessing over it has only led me to create situations in which it repeats itself.

7. I want to be a person who has a soul. Most of our culture is not real. It is aspirational fantasy, intended to make us spend time and money out of jealousy and fear rather than love. With this in perspective, you cannot lose yourself, no matter how little you can do about its dictation to you from every conceivable direction. Be cool.

8. I want to be a person who does not mistake pain for strength. After all: Nobody else does.

What do you think?

And it’s a problem for me, because I don’t really want to be successful: I just want to be normal. Transparently human, not fanatical. I’m not in some high-pressure sales field, I don’t need to yell at myself in the mirror about being the greatest. I’d just like to be better, the way that all of us should always want to be, and I have some pretty common life goals. Nothing too crazy.

The issue with all of these self-improvement-ish things, I guess, is that they really seem to be about depriving and programming you out of the evidence of your senses. In discussions about relationships, for example, great pains are made to encourage the reader that the key to being attractive is to be extremely satisfied with your professional life, constantly involved in new and interesting hobbies of unisexual qualities, and fiercely developing your confidence through the ongoing mastery of new skills. If these things about you are true, you are told, the opposite sex will find you alluring because you won’t be subconsciously communicating that you’re a needy, cynical shitbag.

Now, all of this makes a lot of sense, but believing it also requires you to irrationally block out certain things that you know to be true: Mainly, that a lot of people you know who are in perfectly good relationships are completely mediocre and/or dissatisfied at their jobs, don’t do much outside of drinking and watching television, and haven’t learned a new skill since they honked their way through a major scale on a random woodwind in high school.

So what is it really, then, that is so different about you? Where did your intuition about life lose its way? And to the point that you require adherence to all of these maxims that so many others seem to do without, no less.

I have nothing against maxims with regards to their merits, but they are dogmatic. Something about them seems like morally bowling through life with those inflatable dildos stuck in the gutters, awaiting the day that some European director releases a film about how tragic it will be for you to cling to those values when you need to release them the most; when you should just be normal for a change, instead of always trying to be so damn successful.

But who knows? It’s all comparative. Maybe living with maxims is a lot better than living with whatever code buried itself deep into your heart through the experiences of your childhood and adolescence. Maybe you’re better off posting lists of who you want to be and goals you want to achieve on your refrigerator than you are attempting to annihilate most of your relationships drunk on Blackberry Messenger. Maybe it’s better to suffer the mild personal embarrassment of reminding yourself to actually evaluate the decisions you make instead of just following your self-indulgent instincts.

Sure, some people were luckier than you, and got their heads right the easy way; the first time around.

But they don’t make you who you are.

And most people didn’t.

So what do you think? Should people try to structure their lives around rigid rules and rituals in the name of self-help? Or only some people? On should nobody, even if it would help them, because it’s just so creepy and kind of nuts, and it will probably just strike people as insincere anyways?

And yes, you could make the argument that you could do it and reveal it to nobody, and get the best of both worlds, but I don’t know.

Let’s assume, in this example, that you are the kind of person whom people would definitely notice if you undertook a sharp and sudden change of course in persona.

The launch of Facebook Places was a top story today in the Globe and Mail, despite the fact that the feature hasn’t even been rolled out yet in Canada.  To me, this is proof that the entire thing is meta to us – we care more about what Facebook Places says about ‘nowadays’ than we do about whether or not it is actually any good, or any fun.  It could fail to come out here entirely, and the discussion around it would be exactly the same.

Indeed, the commentary pages already swell with the ranks of technophobes and the privacy-crazed, most of whom would probably not be noticed if they were lying dead and naked at an intersection, but of course: There are thieves, both of identity and homestead, at every turn.

Still, for all of my disagreements with them, it is difficult to deny that they at least have a position, which would be more than I could say for anybody who actually supports the advent of this feature as a useful appendage to their personal life.

It’s a good thing, then, that the point of personal life has never been to be useful in the first place.

If anything, Facebook and the social networking movement has driven home the point that the purpose of personal life is to simply to seem as cool to those around you as you possibly can. The smart creator of future functionalities in social media will simply draw on those facets of being in which people already pump themselves through the popularity contest that is our collective existence.

And one of these things – undoubtedly – is how cool the places you go are.

Starbucks, work, and all of the other places you check in with these tools are just noise; rhythmic beats to make it seem like you’re just trying to chronicle your own existence instead of brag about it.  In reality, people want to talk about being at the hip bars, clubs, and parties that will draw a better wind of reputation to them.

But this is how these services change everything: Before, you could just lie about it.  You could sit at home eating Doritos, and then tell someone you wanted to sleep with the next day about how you were at the Drake, and you saw Emilio Estevez.  This is just an example.

What I don’t like about Facebook Places, and the greater incursions on our dishonesty that social media is sure to bring us, is that it could very well signal the end of complete bullshit: The complete bullshit that allows the vast majority of us, who are abysmally average and vulnerable, to function.

Not only as ourselves, but towards each other.  Why do we have privacy?  I’ll tell you why: Because we all have something to hide, and it isn’t how spectacular or deviant we are – it is precisely the opposite.

But we are all attracted to confidence.  What will become of confidence if we are unable to be completely false?  Which merited but thoroughly unsatisfying people might float to the top in such a world?

Then again, there is nothing in the technology to prevent you from checking in at Stones Place even though you are actually at The Rhino.

But believe this: It is coming.

You tried to lie about being cool?  How dare you.  Real cool people only.

Real cool people only!

Could you live without lying?  Even if you told the truth eventually, do you think you could have been loved without it?

Took this picture today out the window of my truck at Queens Quay and York. It has not been removed from any context, because it has none. It was literally an attractive woman standing on a corner with a corporate logo, even attempting to hide her face with it so as to draw more attention to the human (rather than humane) parts of her anatomy.

Did anyone else see this today, or know what it is?

No product, no flyer, no pitch – just a simple attempt at asking foot traffic to think of amazing and unattainable sex the next time they are trapped in the slivers of what constitutes an increasingly narrow differentiation between brands: We’ve all heard the vague truth by now, I think, about how the same three factories in China make basically everything.

And of course, the fact that sex sells is nothing new. Finer points – like its relatively low overhead, and the joy of its assemblage – are better left to the dark architects who secretly manufacture our dreams. John Self made a career of it in Money, and even people who were in diapers in the eighties now profess to know what they were really all about.

One of the most persistent rumours of my youth, particularly at the hockey arena, where men were either forged or mediocritized into indifference, was that the ice crystals on top of the Pepsi can mounted to the soda machine formed the subconscious shape of a naked woman.

The game ain’t changed: It just got more fierce.

Indeed, what exactly is so different about this woman on a corner? Well, you might say that the absence of a product brings it to an all-new low: Our susceptibility to this is just being made fun of now, isn’t it? We’ll endorse anything sexually appealing in our minds, no different than how we do in life: A beautiful person who doesn’t stop talking is outspoken; their stubbornness is labelled as persistence, and even their unambiguous flaws are considered endearing.

And who knows? If I had to take a guess, I’d think that LG is doing this intentionally, by which I mean trying to do it ironically: They’re trying to make fun of making fun of us and themselves, and let us all in on the joke rather than be some sort of evil, faceless conglomerate about the whole thing.

With the recent success of the Old Spice you-know-what, you can expect a lot of this in the months to come.

Still, there are elements to it that I think are uncomfortably dark. In the middle of suggesting that they should take a tightly-dressed woman and make her walk on the street, did nobody flip those words and consider the association it would have with being a streetwalker? I don’t see how drawing attention to the subtle aesthetic border between a clubland party girl and a street-level prostitute does not distract from, rather than support, the sale of microwave ovens.

I also think it says something very unpleasant about the manipulation of a demographic most likely to be enamoured with the consumer electronics that LG creates: Young men, essentially, who are already into their cellphones and gadgetry and maladjusted and shy and stupid and, accordingly, alienated from women enough. That emerging social problem does not need itself catalyzed by the attempt of an enormous company to, essentially, brand a gender.

And, by extension, turn everyone in that gender into a product. Which turns them into possessions.

And then we’re right back where we started.

Then again, for all the Westernized consideration of this post, it is LG, so, you know: Asia.

And I was thinking that maybe I’ll meet God, who will tell me that I really was the only real person all along, and he will be incredulous that I couldn’t figure it out. He’ll say, “Remember how much you liked having dark red luggage, because you could always see it on the spin-belt thing at the airport when you went to pick it up?”

And I’ll say, “Sure, God. I remember that. Am I really dead, or is this another stupid dream?”

But God will shake his head, and continue with his point. “Well, why did almost everyone else have the black luggage that made yours so easy to see? Why would so many people, most of whom you never even met, conspire with strangers of their own to do you this enormous favour?”

God: All he does is win.

And sure, maybe there are a few fake-robot-illusion people that God gave non-black luggage to, but that was just to make it just a little difficult. He set some people to, “Asshole-who-does-not-care-about-Will-O’Neill-within-the-issue-of-luggage-confusion.”

Maybe what I’d like to know is why so many people seem to have that setting put on them for so many more things besides luggage. Why is the almighty doing this for me when I don’t even really like to travel? Why can’t he set most of these zombies to frequently have their wallets fall out of their back pockets when I’m behind them? Why does it seem that random hot chicks only start making out with each other in Cancun, where I have never been, instead of at the bus stop in front of my building?

People have all sorts of questions for God. Mine would definitely be, “What the hell are you doing?”

I don’t think it’s wrong or even theologically undefended that God is kind of a weird dick: Saying He has a plan is just a nice way of saying it.

That is growth; these are results.

But I did not do this because I am concerned with having a physique that resembles that of Tony Horton, nor his financial success, nor his considerable renown. I did it because I want to sleep like him – I want the sleep of Tony Horton.

I do not believe there is any sleep like the sleep of Tony Horton. I imagine him floating into fatigue with the grace of a hang glider, a puff-ball hat wrapped around his torso in bandolier fashion as he tightens the drawstring of his ironic hospital pants yet another inch, the captain of his own mausoleum absolutely. At nine-thirty p.m. precisely, the call of slumber washes over him with the warmth of morphine-ignited death, and he says, “I have problems, perhaps, but I know how to solve them.”

Then, without a trace of cumbersome sexual urge, or consideration given to the aforementioned thought, he falls unconscious. The elves in his muscles emerge from their wiry caverns with a tide of regeneration, painting the dull exhaust of his workout-annihilated ligaments with hot pink spray paint in a speed and arc suggestive of having been shot from circus cannons. Halfway around in the awakening world, the people of the East buzz in furious parallel with the volcanic river of The Tony Horton Bloodstream, a light speed constellation that injects every cell with a belief in itself, and exiles every impurity to the least uncomfortable part of his anus.

But not even the sun and Asia working in tandem are enough of a metaphor enough to describe this phoenix ritual, because while Tony Horton rebuilds, he also dreams: He dreams of his own life.

And then, when he awakens, it becomes the dream that came true.

I want to sleep the sleep of Tony Horton, but I toss and turn instead: Thinking about how I don’t, and maybe more.

And I cannot fix myself – incapacity is all I can hope for, like a handyman unable to repair his vacuum cleaner with his meager tools and no warranty, who must throw it down a garbage chute and blame teenagers instead. I simply have to make myself incapable of being the person that I am at the end of a civilized hour rather than think that I can become somebody else.

But everything I think about, when I think back on it, really can be blamed on having been a teenager at one time. I can’t see Tony Horton as a teenager. He was a robot built by God but imbued with a greater humanity than everyone who is not robotic, which is everyone. That’s classic God – doing His thing. Ad infinitum.

So: The caffeine had to go.

Here is a history of caffeine addiction as I’ve now withdrawingly hallucinated it: A long time ago, everyone was mining and farming everything in sight, i.e. potatoes, and there was a social interest amongst the only people who could afford a decent suit in endowing the citizenry with wonderful pep. Thomas Jefferson was on his way to see Abraham Lincoln with Archie and Jughead when he was struck with an enormous thought: Get everyone all jacked up in the morning so they wouldn’t start the day at 9 a.m. with the thought that lunch was only three hours away. Also, ban liquor.

Of course, if regulators and other social engineers could begin anew in our increasingly sedentary yet psychologically weighty days, you can bet that caffeine would be a controlled substance, and that mini-bottles of hotel vodka would be in the Halloween baskets of our children.

This sounds awful, but there is no doubt in my mind that caffeine is an enormously more insidious substance than booze, and this is why: Booze is mandatorily episodic. Booze ends. A severely drunk man may pass judgment on another severely drunk man who gets hit in the face with a frying pan by his wife for failing to remember their anniversary, but both of them end up passed-out anyways.

Even if you want to keep going, every road comes to a close. Don’t tell me that you can’t quit drinking: You quit drinking every single time you drink.

But caffeine, and what it leaves behind, goes on forever.

So this is what I’m thinking: I’m not such a bad guy. I pay my taxes, and I think that people who have lawns should mow them. I’ll pet a dog that somebody has tied up outside a drugstore. I don’t pretend to not have scotch tape just because I think people should get their own goddamn scotch tape, and I certainly don’t deserve to have a bunch of alcoholics that I’ve invented judge me just because I can’t be like Tony Horton, who probably never even touched a cup of coffee in his life, even though I think he would be a Chai Tea guy.

This is what I would pay to hear any lifestyle guru, anywhere, anytime, simply say:

“You can’t have it all.”

But they never will.

Today I was at the grocery store, and when I was at the cashier, the cashier asked me if I wanted a free bottle of juice from some gigantic pile of free juice. I told her I didn’t, and she asked me if I’d like to donate one for free.

Now, I comprehended the situation immediately: It’s some sort of thing where a customer has to technically volunteer the donation of the item, even though there is no cost. However, it’s also sort of weird, and the sort of thing that you can believably act confused about. When I said that I didn’t want to donate something to charity for free, she kind of gave me a look like I was a terrible person, but I just pretended like I didn’t really know what was going on and couldn’t hear her over my headphones.

But why did I do it? I’ll tell you why: Because I hate stupid technicalities, and I didn’t go to the grocery to be victimized by some strange by-law. Weird little things like this are the sorts of stuff that make me feel like time has been standing still for the last ten years in some weird purgatory loop of guilt-driven, ineffectual, white-bread adulthood. It’s the kind of bullshit that is really that same bullshit, if you know what I mean.

I swear: I just wanted to pick up all the juice and throw it through the fucking window, screaming, “Is this what you want? You want me to donate all the juice? I’m doing it! All the juice is free now! I gave all the juice away!”

So, all things considered, I think I did a pretty good deed by doing absolutely nothing. Do you ever attribute morality to your actions simply by virtue of the fact that you don’t do something really pointless and destructive, despite the fact that it entrenches and compounds your sense of dread and alienation from everyone and everything to not do it, because at least then you would feel alive for forty-five seconds before you were tackled by security guards and imprisoned, and also you’re really hungover?

I do this all the time.

I often feel that lying seems to work well for everyone else. There is something about myself that I am incapable of concealing.

Seems strange, though, that I shouldn’t know better than to be so self-centered by now. I hear a lot about caring for others, and all of it resonates in theory.

In the end, though, I feel like an egg to chicken. Who owes who first?

Oh, I’m just kidding: I’ve got your back.

But I regret it.

But all this is a problem from the context of a pornography business: There is so much hostility and regret alongside even a brief involvement in the pornography business. You cannot say to people, “Well, I was making some pornography for awhile, but then I got offered a steady job again, and I hadn’t been to the dentist in a year, so…”

Even a dentist would hear nothing in the latter parts of that sentence and, fairly, neither would you – months and years after you quit the pornography business, you’ll get the occasional residual cheque, or have to look up something for a prior tax return, and you’ll really roll your eyes. “God,” you’ll say, “That whole pornography business. That was not for me.”

And what about your friends and family? The people you need by your side when life sends a pulse through the market realities of your existence? They’ll all say, “We’re not helping you this time – you made a bunch of pornography. Some people we know bought it.”

My point is that it is one thing to take a brief foray into real estate, or Amway, or a new group of friends who you aren’t sure you’ll ever be comfortable with – it’s another thing entirely to scar yourself with underworld porno money. After all, who wants to live with a reminder of how badly they really did want to break out of their shell, long after they abandon that ambition and go back to the sort of thing you can discuss at a barbecue? And now what are you? You are in two worlds and in neither of them.

And so, whatever you do, don’t undertake a career in pornography unless you’re an extremely decisive person. Don’t do it unless you really have the courage to change who you want to be. Don’t do it unless you have mountains upon mountains of character to withstand nearly everything life can throw at you, and if you can live without everything that sustains you as who you would otherwise exist as.

After all, it’s tough to just make something for a dollar and sell it for two nowadays. The whole era of starting something from scratch is really moving behind us. You hear about a guy who begins a company expressly for the purpose of selling it to some other company, and then you hear about his well-connected parents, and where he went to school, and then he is on television talking about how the secret to success for everyone is to work hard. He wears some very casual clothes to assure you that he has never been involved in anything unkind. None of these events surprise anyone. Complete and utter stupidity and absurdity is the infinite broadcast loop of our culture, and this is no opinion or threat: It simply sells.

The whole point is to make everyone who is really brave and interesting extremely, extremely poor, and to do this until people forget what these things are; until the whole world is sports and fucking and sleep and age. Maybe you see through it, but by then they’ve got you locked in, and you can’t do shit. In the meantime, I don’t mind the person I default towards while between voluntary (OK, mostly involuntary) spurts of trying to emerge as a once-destined-self-made-man. A little security never hurt anyone, or at least not nearly as much as insecurity does, and I am older now and I know this.

But what then?

So if you suffer all these doubts, I cannot think that a career in pornography is right for you, even though I have never had one, and know absolutely nothing about it. Besides: There are many great futures, even though they end, so long as you are in love.