confusion

Peace Love Unity Respect

Ok, so Saturday morning I checked my email and there was this email from a mailing list I have belonged to for about three years. It was one of those “surveys” you are supposed to fill out and forward to your friends and the person who sent it to you. Now I have not posted to the list for almost two years, I read the posts that come up, but between work/school/living in Europe I never posted. So I figured I would post a reply and see if I could raise a few eyebrows.

Apparently I did. I, very quickly, got two responses that amounted to “who the fuck are you?” So I composed a reply which stated how I got on the list, who I knew and why I have not posted. I sent the reply to both the people that mailed me and CC’ed it to the list. I guess I should have used the BCC because I got a not-so-happy response from one of the two people who mailed me because I had included their email in the posting to the list. Here are the emails:

yeah, so how come you think the scene at Velvet might be considered anything less than ball-stink? it’s fucking eau d’nutsack in that piece. and cut it out with your “et al” and pretending to speak english with your shit-hole typos and yada yada. nobody gives a shit.
GO BACK TO ENGLAND OR GET BLOWN UP IN THE STATES.
no offense or anything. i just haven’t gotten any total shit like this email from you in a long time.
stay off the marmite and steer clear of limeys.

and,

parties are for washed-up party kids and fags.
probably wont be at another one for a long time.
and if i was at a party i would be so drunk i dont think i would know where i was.by the way, thanks for posting that thing with my return address to the whole list so that everybody can know that i emailed you…i dont really like to have that shit broadcast.

Umm, yea, not PLUR.

Now, being poked fun of for spelling or something is one thing, but on a mailing list devoted to party-kids and raver I do not expect that I should be insulted in anyway but jesting. Maybe it is because I am jaded, or an old-school raver (not even that old-school!) but I believe in PLUR. Peace Love Unity and Respect where the guiding principles of the raver/party-kid community when I began raving. The people I met at parties where just nice—and not always because they where fucked up. They believed in PLUR—or at least they practiced it in public.

Over the years I was a hardcore raver I watched the scene change to one filled with much more violence and unfriendliness. I don’t know if the rise in drug use I observed was a result or a symptom of this but the two went hand in hand (don’t get me wrong—people at raves have always used drugs, and always will but the number of people who came specifically for the drugs as opposed to the scene/music/people went up.) The rise in rudeness also accompanied a rise in popularity of raves and techno music—as dance/electronica became more mainstream here in the US I ran into more and more people who would just as soon tell you “fuck off” as smile at you.

So from the response to my first email to the list in a long time I have to guess that the scene has not improved any. Don’t get me wrong, I did get some email’s that where more positive but it only takes one ass hole to make an experience leave a bad taste in your mouth. So my response to all this was:

Given the responses I got to my last email it’s no wonder that the
Liquid Lounge “Family” fell apart. (and I don’t mean just Rose’s)
To xxxx: no offense take and to answer your question, I thought Velvet was better because the people there where a lot less rude than the people who came to buzz. It did not start out that way but over time—to me—it got that way. I agree that there was a ball-stink problem with quite a few of them! If you don’t want to read my yada yada and et al’s then don’t. And I could give a shit about what someone who cannot even type a sentence with correct capitalization thinks about my spelling—I have dyslexia what is your excuse?
Yes, I am a jaded, washed up raver who cannot stand drugged up rude
party-kids/ravers/clubers/or whatever they call themselves. I do subscribe to PLUR.
Flame away,
-beggs

Let the flame wars begin!

It’s Friday night and I am alone in my apartment. Since I have no one to talk to I think I will just keep updating my journal so here is some random rambling:

First of all: I have found out that my computer is in dire need of a bulk update. All the software on my Linux box is old. Not ancient but old. The best sign of this is that I am using Mozilla 0.9.3 and they are one release 1.2.1 (if you don’t use Mozilla then I should mention that they release upgrades slowly and my version was released in the fall of 2000!) In fact my Linux install (RedHat 7.0) is so old that most of the new stuff I want will not compile and I am too lazy to go and download all the updates—one day I’ll just go get a newer version of Linux, time I paid for a real version again I have not done that since the end of last century (literally it was October of 1999!)

Ok, enough geeking out. Second thing: I don’t remember what the second thing was.

Third thing: a cool quote from Piro over at Megatokyo—”Humans love to categorize and organize things. We break up time into hours, days and years. Everything has to have a name, a history, an understanding of it’s origins and must be indexed somewhere on Google. ” You have to love the reference to Google. Or maybe you have to be a geek to love it that much.

Fourth thing: Depression sucks! Let me qualify that. My life is not that bad. I have a Girlfriend, a job, and some great friends. But right now I am just depressed. Partly because it is December and December and January have not, historically speaking, been good months for me. Let’s just say that things happened during these months in recent years and in more distant years that hurt, a lot. Also the holidays themselves are depressing to me as I have never really had a good family holiday life and it is worse because I see so many people who do, and I wish I could know what that feels like. On top of all this I am depressed because I will not get to see my girlfriend at all during the holidays. Which is really depressing—I have not seen her is six months and have no idea when I will see her next. Add to this a dose of seasonal depression caused by getting to work before the sun is up and getting home after the sun sets. And finally my utter and complete lack of enthusiasm for work because I sit at work all day staring off into nothingness because I have nothing to do. The end result of all this is I am just depressed right now.

Last thing for now: Marriage. I don’t understand. Everyone I know is engaged or married—and they are all younger than I am. I think there must be something wrong with me. I want to get married. I want to have a family, a wife and kids. But I don’t know. There have been times when I was dating people and thought, “I would like to spend the rest of my life with this person.” But there was always things in the back of my head which tempered any impulse to run to Tiffany’s and buy a diamond—things like “I need to finish school first” or “I know they are not ready” or “I need to wait, to make sure.” Sometimes I wonder what I do wrong in relationships, I think I push people away somehow, smother their personality or lose my own. I don’t know what I do wrong but sometimes I think I will go through life from one relationship to another, never marry, never have the family I want. Maybe it’s just a symptom of my depression but it adds to my depression.

Enough wallowing in self-pity, the new version of Mozilla is done downloading. Now I’m off to install it.

The Ministry of Sound just announced that they are going to move Nelson’s Column To The Millennium Dome for their New Years Eve party. Now just in case you did not know Nelson’s Column has been in Trafalgar Square since 1843 and it is 165 feet tall (the Dome is 172 feet at it’s highest interior point so it’s a tight fit.) Now if this was any country but Britain and a night club asked to use a Laser cutter to disassemble a national monument, move it across town, reassemble it inside a stadium for a 15 hour party then move it back; the government would say “you are kidding aren’t you?” But not in Britain—they agreed! I have this sadistic hope that the thing is permanently messed up by all this, or even that it falls over while they are trying to put the pieces back together! Who in the government thought this was a good idea? And why?

Go here to read more…

Ok, so I tried to go to DMV today to register my car in DC. No go. The DMV in Georgetown does not no that. So they sent me to 301 C st. But they told me I needed insurance in DC, the Virginia stuff will not work, and I needed to have the car inspected first. So now I have to get up tomorrow and get the car inspected and get insurance. I spent most of my Friday afternoon dealing with this and in the process I got a ticket! F’en DMV. I also had to pay parking at the Georgetown site – $4.00 for ten minutes to be told, “we don’t do that here…” F’en DMV!

That’s really funny when you remember that ‘berliner’ is also the word for a jelly doughnut. The title is from the Bild—a German newspaper who where running a story on a very disturbing murder case in Germany — go here for the Reuters story. But you should probably read it on an empty stomach—it’s gory, disgusting, disturbing and oh, so wrong. It’s like “Citizen X” meets “Hannibal.”