tiistai 31. joulukuuta 2013

Happy new year

Fun fact: a significant number of Finnish people hate Sweden passionately, and see Swedes as their main enemies.

Swedish people, on the other hand, have no idea that they are Finnish people's enemies, and are normally pretty fucking indifferent to Finland's existence.

Who's winning?

tiistai 24. joulukuuta 2013

maanantai 23. joulukuuta 2013

lauantai 21. joulukuuta 2013

Tired

Why is it so hard for so many people to not be racist, sexist or homophobic? Why is so hard? It should be so easy. Automatic. Why is it so hard, for fuck's sake?

And if these people haven't even learned to believe in human rights yet, how difficult will it be for them to grasp the idea of animal rights?

To be good is so easy. Once you've tried, you know.

torstai 19. joulukuuta 2013

#shame-based flashbacks

When I think of certain things that I've done in my life, my head almost explodes and I literally start to scream out of shame. (What a weird image.)

(It looks like this:)



(or it would if I looked like that.)

There are things that most people would find embarrassing but I don't. To me, it's not painful at all to dance alone on the streets.

But lately I've been remembering all these moments when I've tried to be something that I'm not - and I can't stop thinking that it must have been obvious to everybody around me.

And all these moments when I've opened my soul when I should've just shut up.

But in the end, all these moments are important. Without them, I would be less human. I'd have less to say. Being a writer, being a good writer, is about being able to set the shame aside - or maybe not, maybe it's about using the shame, owning it, turning it into something powerful.

This doesn't change the fact that it still sucks.

I'm gonna force it into you

When good things happen to me, I'm always surprised... left waiting for the universe to normalize things by slapping me in the face.

tiistai 17. joulukuuta 2013

I promise to be less angry and political from now on. At least for a week or something. This whole goodness deelio is getting very tiring.

Oh holy night; on suits, churches, science and speciesism


Ola Salo taught me how to perform.

I've spent 4 nights in Tampere. I have things to explore for my book of ghosts; this city is one of the stops in the story.

I've eaten in a couple of restaurants. Only God knows why waitresses and other people often try to start small talk with me. Maybe it's because I look a bit funny. They usually realize very soon that they won't get anything decent out of me. I'm not good at talking about things that are not ridiculously big and important.

In one restaurant, I ordered ice cream after eating a cheesy pasta. Why the hell am I not a vegan? I know very well what happens in the dairy industry. I can hear the mother cows screaming for their newborns that have been taken away and left alone in little crates. It is nightmare. Why am I supporting it? I think it's because I'm tired of doing the right thing in a world where nobody else seems to be interested in doing the right thing. No matter whether it's about intelligence, morality or mathematics, being better than others is one of the loneliest things in the world.

Or maybe these are just excuses? I don't know. At least I admit that I should change.

Yesterday I entered a clothing store just to sit down on the floor of a fitting room; I just wanted to sit and breathe for a moment. I ended up bying a suit. A very cheap one, but a suit anyway. I've never really had a proper suit. For funerals I've just worn something that doesn't look unbearably disrespectful. But now I have a suit, a tie and all. I look very attractive in it.

This is a strange story.

I'm too close to the book I'm writing now to say if it really is good or not. I don't know. When I'm feeling tired and depressed, which happens quite regularly, it's difficult to believe in anything.

I'm always thinking about the book that I wrote when I was 16. Writing it was like an orgasm. Three years ago I was writing something that I felt was so incredibly good that every person on the planet would want to read it. I'm not that optimistic anymore, but I still think that it's something extraordinary. The book I'm writing now is not as heavy, but... I think it's still pretty great. Maybe I will be a revolution after all. If not, I'll try to remember to smile when I fall.

The most important thing is the soul. You have to be an interesting soul to tell an interesting story. You have to come up with souls that are interesting. We'll see if I can do that.



Yesterday I also just spontaneously entered a big church and ended up singing Christmas hymns with the Christians of Tampere. It was a happy, peaceful moment. Even for an Atheist those things matter. When we were singing, I saw a father helping a young child walk down the stairs. He's like a little dog, I thought, children are little animals. At the beginning of our lives, we've all been pigs and cows.

In the last months, I've sometimes spent hours of my life arguing (or just conversing) with people on a Morrissey fan forum called Morrissey-Solo. It is a strange place. It's not like most fan forums. In fact, it's full of individuals who spend significant amounts of their time explaining how much they dislike Morrissey. They are grown, middle-aged adults, and they seem to be painfully disappointed in Morrissey... Maybe they fell in love with the Mozzer when they were aching teenagers - maybe they thought that Morrissey would be able to save them, but in the end he wasn't, and now they've got nothing but the memory of something that once was?

yourcatwasdelicious:

morrissey
Morrissey. Attacking the leg of some human.
I don't know. After all, it's difficult to hate the regulars of the site. Most of them are genuinely and exceptionally intelligent. Some of them have beautiful souls. Some of them even like Morrissey. Conversations with them are often... fruitful. Last summer, I spent days on the forum, calling myself 'Oli-ver'. Sometimes I write as anonymous. Writing as anonymous is easy; it's one of the useful sides of the Internet: you can be anyone. For a couple of times I've actually lied just to make my point easier to grasp: "Yes, I do have a child." "Yes, I do live in Norway." "Yes, I eat meat too." Shameful, isn't it. Forgive me. I won't do that again.

The last debate I had was about Morrissey's words on the Norwegian massacre; I already wrote about it here. In July 2011 Morrissey said that what had happened in Norway was murder, but that worse things happen in the animal industry every day. Not the best timing, definitely not the best way to get the message across, but still true.

So I've spent hours trying to understand why certain Morrissey-Soloists (what a word) find this statement so offensive. Interesting and deeply intelligent individuals like Johnny Barleycorn and realitybites (when you google your way to this writing - hello! keep rocking!) keep claiming that what Morrissey said was something unforgivable.

But what exactly is the crime in the words that Morrissey said? I mean, rationally speaking, as disgusting as one violent massacre of 77 teenagers is, an industry that tortures hundreds of billions of animals on factory farms every year is worse. This industry's also the number one reason for things like world hunger and the environmental crisis. (I've said all this so many times before. I'm sorry. I like to repeat things.) To me it seems irrational to condemn one massacre and then give money to a much bigger criminal.

Even I'd got the original quote wrong. These are Morrissey's actual words:

"Despite the love, we do live on a murderous planet,
as you will have seen in the last few days in Norway.
Murder, murder, murder.
Really, every single day worse things happen in Kentucky Fried Shit and McDonald's.
Murder, murder, murder, murder, murder."

These are facts. Murder, murder, murder; that's what this world is. It's a beautiful, melancholic poem, too.

What happened in Norway breaks my heart. Violence and evil in general break my heart. That's the way it should be. But usually people want to ignore the violence they themselves are somehow taking part in.

At the end of the day, the problem we're dealing with here is speciesism. It's the idea that the suffering of humans is somehow holier than the suffering of other vertebrates. Even most vegetarians and animal friends usually agree with it: to say that hurting a pig is as bad as hurting a human being is a tabu. In 2013, Morrissey must be one of the only famous people who refuse to agree with this world view. I remember watching a video where Russell Brand, a vegetarian himself, interviewed Morrissey. They started talking about the meat industry. Morrissey compared it to the holocaust. "No, no", said Russell quickly, "no, no."

You can think it - but don't say it.

Is it something religious? When Morrissey says that torturing animals is as bad as torturing humans, it is considered 'disrespectful' towards humans - but why? As if he was somehow belittling the suffering of humans. He clearly isn't. He's simply stating that as important as it is to treat humans without violence, it is as important to treat non-human animals without violence.

To someone who thinks that animals are worth nothing, a statement like this must be very difficult to understand. I mean... if animals have no moral value, is Morrissey trying to say that humans don't have any value either?

No. He's stating something that, in the end, isn't very radical at all: that we all have moral value. We are all biologically capable of suffering. That's why you shouldn't hurt us. That's why you shouldn't torture us. That's why you shouldn't stomp on us.

I think that once again, the thing that's tearing me away from the rest of the world is that my world view is pretty much as scientific as it gets. I'm usually able to stay quite rational even when it comes to the most difficult of moral questions. When pointless tabus are destroyed, I only enjoy it.

Having a scientific world view doesn't mean that you have to be a loud, repulsive moron who doesn't understand anybody's feelings. Things like pain and suffering and compassion and morality exist. As long as we are beings capable of all these things, we should give great value to them.

So, finally, the point is this: I don't see any scientifically, or morally, valid reason to think that the suffering of a pig is any less important than the suffering of myself. We are biologically equally capable of experiencing the bacic emotions that matter: pain, fear, distress. I may be more intelligent than the pig, but why should that be in any way relevant? How does the ability to do math make pain any more painful? Is the suffering of a mentally handicapped child morally less important than the suffering of a Nobel prize winner of physics?

I mean, to me it's very simple:

if you hurt us, we suffer. Don't do it.

torstai 12. joulukuuta 2013

Nelson Mandela's memorial service.

Rebels

I need somebody to save to save me. We'd be each other's heroes, and just exist wildly and gracefully in this dark rotten world.

And we would light the night.

Slowly and very very unsteadily I'm learning.

Sooner or later, I'll find you.

keskiviikko 11. joulukuuta 2013

Existence is tiring.

I want to take a break and just float for a while.

maanantai 9. joulukuuta 2013

PETA kills animals.

There are people who really hate PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) passionately.

As an activist myself, I think that the world needs to become a much better place. I also think that the way PETA is trying to do this is wrong. The problems that they're dealing with are currently the most urgent problems on the planet; as an organization, they could (and should) be informative, elegant and powerful, but somehow they seem to completely lack any understanding of how the human psyche works. They could be talking about the actual problems; instead, they're shouting slogans and taking pictures of naked celebrities. They're taking the focus off what's actually happening to the animals every second of the day, and turning the whole question into a trivial, filthy joke.

I'm sure that the people working for PETA are mostly wonderful, compassionate people trying to change the world. But they should rethink the ways to do it. The animals deserve better than this.

The main problem with PETA is that they're chronically cynical.

Cynical: believing that people are motivated by self-interest; distrustful of human sincerity or integrity.

Exactly. Here's the problem; PETA think that the only way to get people to care about animal abuse is to somehow fool them into it. For PETA this means sex. Take a picture of a naked celebrity and write 'vegan' on it. This makes no sense. PETA's depressing idea of the human psyche is really hurting the animal rights movement, and getting rid of the burden of these mistakes will be a stupid and frustrating battle.

By giving people images of sex you're making them think of, well, sex!, when actually your job is to reach them on a much higher level. You're making them think of underwear models -> you're speaking to the superficial part of their brain. You see, people may be irrational, but they are not evil and they react to violence and injustice when they see it. What you need to do is to speak to the goodness in us. Most people are pretty good. Tell them what's going on. Don't act stupid. Don't drown the message in emoticons. Be graceful, understand the importance of your message, don't do something that the human rights movement wouldn't do. Reach people on an intellectual level. Generate compassion. Generate bravery. Generate togetherness. Your job is done.

Douglas Anthony Cooper.

However, some of the criticism towards PETA pisses me off even more. The team of factory farming has come up with a website and slogan 'PETA kills animals', and a lot of people seem to have quickly adopted this sentence.

It is true. PETA kills sheltered animals. It's weird and hypocritical and they shouldn't do it.

Anyway, 25 minutes ago, I accidentally stumbled upon a series of Huffington Post articles written by a novelist named Douglas Anthony Cooper. He's on a mission to bring PETA down because, well, PETA kills animals.

This could be completely reasonable. But it isn't. It's irrational and strange for somebody who apparently has no problem giving his money to the meat industry.

Okay. PETA kills animals. But the number is really not even comparable to the number of animals tortured and killed in the modern meat industry. If you don't like animals to be killed, then you should not support an industry that kills billions and billions of them every year, and prior to that, treats them in a way even crap doesn't deserve to be treated. Be consistent.

To understand the case of Douglas Anthony Cooper we only need to read these sentences:

"I don't happen to think much of the fur industry -- it's a brutal business. But as many have pointed out, at least furriers kill animals with the intention of producing garments, whereas PETA kills animals because they can't be bothered to take care of them."

As a passionate advocate for animal welfare, dear Douglas Anthony, you should be able to see that to the animal, this means absolutely nothing. The animal suffering for months in a tiny nightmarish cage couldn't give a fuck whether its fur is going to be somebody's collar or not. To the animals, our excuses don't mean anything at all.

I'd rather be a dog that PETA puts down than a fox that gets forced into the world only to live a short life of horrible pain and fear.

Douglas, I think it's great and truly beautiful that you care about animals. But everybody already cares about dogs. You should try caring about the animals that nobody else cares about; they are the ones that need your activism the most.

Wow.

Jesus Christ.

It feels so painfully good to be in love.

lauantai 7. joulukuuta 2013

Nelson Mandela is dead.


Nelson Mandela was, and is, one of the people that almost make me cry. (I say almost, because I don't cry nearly as much as I'd like to.) It's a matter of goodness. Seeing sincere goodness in another human being moves me more than anything else in the world.

I wish all people were heroes. Unfortunately, most people seem to have better things to do.

I believe that most of us are trying. Most people sincerely want to be good. They just don't dedicate themselves to the cause as radically as some of us.

Lately I've been questioning the whole hero thing. I'm such an annoying, arrogant, immature piece of crap. How the hell could I be a hero? I'm anything but a saint. I was born just as imperfect and ridiculous as everybody else; even more so, really.

But I realize that that's not the point.

Just like there is no courage without fear, a hero without doubt and profound imperfection is not a hero at all.

And so I will fail, fail, and fail again for a million times. I will make an idiot out of myself, get things wrong, seem like an asshole, seem like a hypocrite and forget what's important, but then I will always get back up and push on.

Accept me with my insecurities and imperfections. This is me trying.

perjantai 6. joulukuuta 2013

I am sorry for being such an idiot.

Please keep believing in me. I'm young and I'm lost, but slowly and steadily I'm learning.

torstai 5. joulukuuta 2013

Alcohol.

Last night I wrote sentences that were so deeply stupid that the only thing I can do is make noises like 'hahaha! hahaha!'

I wrote "I'm not as masculine as Morrissey but I'm more masculine than Johnny Marr". WHAT? What does that even mean? The last thing I remember doing is googling for information on Lisa Simpson's potential Asperger's Syndrome. Wow!

 

I need some Jesus in my life.

On the subject of intercourse


At the end of the day, I am slightly homo.

I fall in love with everybody.

Really: if you are a fascinating soul, you'll turn me on. It's this simple.

I'd love to have sex. Unfortunately that's not going to happen, as I don't know any people.

The idea of intercourse baffles me. As a cat I know nothing about human men and women, but I've understood that many women really struggle to get an orgasm, ever, and for men, it's usually a lot easier. Especially if you've never had sex before: what if the mere fucking idea of soon seeing somebody interesting naked makes you come? Does that happen to humans? Is it awkward?

The whole intercourse thing. Penis goes in, penis comes out. What if the vagina is dry and it's all very difficult and the organs just rub against each other in oh such a painful way and everybody's screaming?

I'm sorry. But these are important questions.

And how do people even end up having sex? Do they just say: "Let's have sex now"? How does that work?

Most of us are enslaved by sexuality.

In the end it's really stupid. You just have this urgent feeling between your legs and it drives you into ridiculous things. I like it.

3 years, 5 days

It's been 3 years and 5 days since I started to write Flesh. I wrote the best book that I'll ever write at the age of 16. I haven't been writing it for a while now, I haven't even looked at it for months, but now I opened the file again for the first time in forever, and man it's brilliant. Reading it sort of hurts, it hurts so much that I can't stop making weird noises like 'hahaha! hahaha!' when I browse through it.

The last pages are still waiting to be written. One day, sooner or later I'll do that.

maanantai 2. joulukuuta 2013

At the end of everything, you can trust me

I am dyslexic in English. I just don't spot the typos the way I should. It's interesting. I don't think I have this in Finnish. Or do I? I wouldn't know.

I went and saw The Hunger Games - Catching Fire spontaneously in the middle of yesterday. I feel that it's my job to get to know the stories and characters that people like. So I sat there in the huge half-empty theatre and fell in love: Katniss Everdeen is the way girls should be. The way people should be. A hero. Thoroughly human, but ultimately strong and brave and trying to do the right thing. (Also, I like her voice a lot. It's very attractive. I like voices.)

Yo.

After the movie, I wandered the dark wet streets (like I always do) and felt tired and hopeless (like I always do) because real people are not like Katniss. I must be one of the only existing non-fictional people around who actually try to function like Katniss Everdeen or Harry Potter in real life.

Real people in the real world are such boring pieces of cardboard. When they should do the right thing, they come up with a comfortable lie and walk away. They give money to things like the meat industry and spit on people who don't. They buy shiny things, take pictures of them, and then put the pictures on Facebook to gain social status. They flush living fish down the toilet. They kick crazy people who dance on the streets, and they laugh at revolutions.

I don't want to walk away. I am the hand that flushes you down the toilet if you flush sentient animals down the toilet. I am the dancer. I am the revolution.

And yes, this is a ridiculous Messiah complex. I think that a world so full of cool indifference needs a certain number of embarrassingly passionate people like me who actually want to play the hero.

sunnuntai 1. joulukuuta 2013

We all live in a murderous world

Morrissey was supposed to play 3 songs at the Nobel Peace Prize event in Oslo. Now a lot of people are 'frowning on' his potential performance. The reason for the 'outrage' are these words:

Despite the love, we do live on a murderous planet, as you will have seen in the last few days in Norway. Murder, murder, murder. Really, every single day worse things happen in Kentucky Fried Shit and McDonald's. Murder, murder, murder, murder, murder.

Morrissey said these words in 2011 right after local psychopath Anders Behring Breivik had killed 70+ teenagers in Norway for his obscure racist reasons. Ever since Morrissey gave this statement, every once in a while people have expressed how hurt and outraged they are by his comments.

I understand if you find Morrissey's comments inconsiderate, because they were, but nobody can rationally claim that he was factually wrong. The Norwegian killings weren't nothing, in fact, they were cruel, disgusting and mind-bogglingly violent. But even so, this is basic mathematics in a world where suffering exists:

Killing 77 sentient individuals is evil, but torturing hundreds of billions of sentient individuals on factory farms is worse. (Comparing suffering like this is pretty stupid in the first place, as all suffering matters, but, well, here we are, being stupid.)

After all, the reason why people are pretending to be so hurt and outraged by Morrissey's words is quite simple. To admit that what he said was factually correct would be to admit that we, the Good People, are taking part in something twisted and cruel; something so twisted and cruel that the world has never seen anything like it before.

And we don't want to do that. We don't want to change. We don't want to look at the atrocities we're funding every day. We want to hold on to our burgers and keep pretending that evil is something that only isolated psychopaths are capable of.

And this is what keeps all evil alive.

Argh. When will we learn?