New Sloth Story: Floccinaucinihilipilification

[Sloth]

Floccinaucinihilipilification

Try #1:

American politics totally suck. I know that's a weird way to start a story with a title like ‘Floccinaucinihilipilification', for the people don't know what the word means and think that this is some kind of Biology paper or something. Maybe I am just writing this to be a fuck head.

But fuck it; I am not a fuck head. Or maybe I am a fuck head, but not because I started my story this way. I can explain myself like this… when writing there is sometimes great sense and purpose in deliberately beating around the Bush.

As I sit comfortably in my studio apartment in Northern Europe, my thoughts are on what, if anything, makes life enjoyable and worthwhile.

I have come up with the following ace fucking acronym: ACE

Art: (any kind of expression which attempts to express the eternal within time and space)
Community: (internet, sex, love, talking to stranger in a pub, etc)
Ecstasy: (intoxicants, fantasy, dreaming, play, escape)

But even cutesy acronyms cannot fully display my displeasure at Bush's America right now. His take on world politics is especially baffling. It's equivalent to someone reading the story of Kaiser Wilhelm and the Second Reich and after taking in all the relevant facts they exclaimed, “I really liked the pointy helmets. We should bring those back. Come to think of it, let's invade Iraq.�

I don't think that makes any sense. Bush had good reasons for invading Iraq. He had to keep the Saudis happy and unify his country with a new enemy besides himself. I hope you know what I mean. Maybe not…. in any case this is so far a terrible floccinaucinihilipilification of America. Not even close. I'll try better next time. I swear.

Try #2

I once dated a German girl who thought I looked Jewish. No offense to Judaism, but I should be a Jew. In fact I should be actively recruited by the Synagogue because like me, all good Jews are quasi self-hating Jews. And I am a self-hating American. I am deeply ashamed and skeptical of all the things that make me so American. I should really know better. The fact that I sometimes value money and power over art and love really bothers me.

My mate McCutcheon used to make fun of me because in my early 20's I would sit in Paris and smoke hash from morning until night, playing Nintendo all day, eating McDonald's Value Meals and reading the USA Today. He said I might as well be in Des Moines if I was living like that.

That's true by the way. When I was depressed or hungover I did do those things. And for 6 months at that stage of my life I was depressed or hungover or both quite often.

But when I felt good in Paris I filled three notebooks with bad poetry, outlined 3 potentially good novels, went for long walks around the entire city, read about 100 great novels, hung out in cafes reading music magazines, learned decent French, got a BA degree, visited nearly every museum in Paris, traveled to every major European country, went to night clubs on pills, drank until early morning in seedy bars often vying for the affectations of some lovely (or seemingly lovely at the time) creature, actually getting home with some of them. Not bad for four years.

What were the neocons doing all this time? They were the same age as me… but they were getting law degrees from Southern Universities and grasping at straws trying to deface Bill Clinton, who will go down as the best President in the latter half of the 20th century.

Ahem. This is going nowhere. This is just a pitiful history of the early 90's. I apologize, I apologize, but I will not pull out my eyes.

Try #3

Seven or eight years ago, when I was in my mid to late twenties, I remember touring Italy with my father and my little brother. My father and mother were living in Rome at the time. Since I was living in Seattle and missing Europe, my brother and I flew in for the holidays. After spending a delightfully temperate Christmas day eating pasta and drinking wine, the next day my Dad's driver give us a tour of Southern Italy in a big black Mercedes. We started in Rome and drove to and from Pompeii. I remember thinking Pompeii was awesome. The idea of an entire city-state being wiped out like that is really exciting. It could happen again. It will happen again.

My brother mostly agreed it was cool. He liked the excavated corner shops and the brothels with bawdy pornographic drawings on them. My dad looked around for about half an hour and went to get some coffee, like he couldn't wait to get out of there. I guess he had already been there a few times. He never seemed fascinated by stuff like Pompeii. As a businessman, I think he considered it a worthless pile of rubble. He was impressed by stuff like globalization and speedy service at restaurants.

My parents don't really drink a lot or smoke, so to them if you could get in and out a restaurant with appetizer, main course, and coffee within 45 minutes, then that was a great thing.
Here is a floccinaucinihilipilification of restaurants: I can make better food for cheaper at home and not have to deal with incompetent waiters and $40 bottles of wine that really cost $12 in a supermarket. But there is something romantic about eating out. Especially at restaurants whose cuisine I cannot cook well… like Indian, French, and Thai.

On the drive home from Pompei, either myself or my father spotted a giant post-Renaissance building of some sort. It was about 400 years old and just massive. My father asked the name of it and the driver told us something incomprehensibly Italian, and the remarked that the building was not important, neither being brilliant enough to be a famous landmark, nor insignificant enough to be torn down or remodeled. Italy seems littered with these kinds of buildings. I know history is important and all. I feel it. It moves me. In fact I majored European Cultural Studies in undergraduate college.

My dad and I expressed our surprise that such a large and impressive building could be in such a small town. The thing was the size of the Pentagon. My brother didn't give a shit about it at the time and was listening to his Walkman, probably dreaming about getting back to Rome and hitting the clubs for the loose women and the drugs. But my dad and I were both intrigued and remarked to the driver that the building looked expensive and out of place in such a small town. To be fair, the giant stone structure could have housed every single inhabitant of the city.

The driver laughed to himself and remarked that Americans always thought of everything in terms of money and that was not a proper way to view things. As an American my first response was to think, “Does that mean we don't have to pay for the ride?� but of course it didn't mean that at all. It just meant that the driver got to feel a little less petty (if less wealthy) than his Italian-American counterparts. But he had a point. What does it matter what a large landmark costs to build? Can everything be reduced to money? To a true European, the cost of a successful project is irrelevant. Look at the La Concorde, the Millennium Dome, The Airbus 380, or any of the Gothic Cathedrals. Europeans are into quality over quantity. Look at the chocolate, the cheese, the wine, the vegetables, the artwork, the architecture, the cars, the beer, the list goes on.

We stopped for 15 minutes to stare at the anomaly that was this building. I had a cigarette with the driver while my Dad started to walk around it, giving up because of the sheer massive scale of it. It was too big to walk around just for a lark. I looked through the old glass inside. It was empty. A big empty administration building from the 17th century? It made no sense.

Yes, this building was cool… but it made me think that this building was ignored even though it was in perfect shape and everyone paid so much attention to all those ruins in Rome. I am not talking about the Pantheon, which is almost perfectly in tact and two thousand years old. I am talking about the Forums and the Circus Maximus which look like a sheep field with some stones in it. I fail sometimes to see what is so special about ruins. Even the name implies their worthlessness. As if you can have any idea what the Roman forums looked like from viewing the remaining ruins.

Back in Rome I stared at them. I had seen it all before. It was my third or fourth time to Rome. Visits to Rome all tend to blend together. When I was my brother's age Ancient Roman culture didn't really interest me at all. I was just into the bars. Where's the pub? Where's the club? Where can I score some Class A drugs? She's cute. I wonder if she likes Americans?

Now a bit older, everything makes less sense. Old buildings were now interesting to me but I still don't know why. And you have to admit its a little odd, this reverence for the old. In Rome there are all those 2,000 year-old ruins just laying there right inside the new modern city.

If the ruins were so important why were they left to ruin? Were people that much different back then in the Middle Ages? Was spackle and duct tape such a late invention? How could they just sit there and not fix the shit as it fell apart? Or tear it down and build something else? Was Rome already betting her future on the tourist trade? Will the Staples Center be a major tourist attraction in the 39th Century?

Of course what is the alternative? To rebuild the Forums to their former glory and have it be full of tourist shops and fast food restaurants? That is too dreadful to think about. Too horrible to contemplate for even one second. The Roman Forums with an Armani Express shop? Or an Orange Julius stand? You know it would happen, too. God, I loved ruins after I imagined that scenario. The more ruins the better. Now it all made sense. Let's ruin everything!

I think I lost it again. I flopped up the fucking Floccinaucinihilipilification again. I will do it next time I promise. And they say the third time's the charm!

Try # 4

I haven't been back to Rome in 5 years. I live in Sweden now. Stockholm - a city that looks and feels like its name. Stocky and homey. Not homey in the British sense however, which mean ‘plain' or ‘ugly', and neither homey in the Ebonics sense, which is short for ‘homeboy'. But of course ‘homey' in the standard American sense, meaning “cozy' or ‘having an air of comfortable intimacy or domesticity'. Stockholm is livable. The architecture is ‘stocky' and ‘homey'. But I think I said that already.

I am new to Stockholm. In fact I just moved here. I appreciate everything so much more now. Every day I forget more and more about America and it regains its proper perspective as “that crazy place over there which is suffering it own form of antidisestablismentarianism.�


In Europe it's different. Europe is actually ahead of the USA in many, many ways. It's civilized here. There are no rednecks. There is gun control. People respect each other to some extent. Other Europeans anyway. You may call it racist… and Europe is definitely more racist than America by a long shot. You may call it culture or history. But let's just call it Europeanism. Europe, after hating itself for 50 years after World War II, is starting to love itself again. That's why when Georgie Boy tried to rally the Cold Warriers in Europe he found there was no one left but Blair and a couple of crazy Dutch, Danes and Poles.

If American politics suck does that mean America sucks? I guess so.

Wait. That doesn't mean I think Sweden is a Utopia or that I support Osama bin Laden or anything. I think bin Laden is nothing more than a towel headed twat who fought back. He is like the Middle Eastern Ronald Reagan without the world's largest army behind him. He is just another one of those “I am on a sacred mission from God� assholes.

America kind of sucks because it has so much to work with and settles for so little common denominatorness. Never before have a people done so little with so much. I mean… we Americans could end all wars on Earth and yet we insist on starting more of them. WE could end all poverty on Earth and we insist on furthering the power of the G8 and WTO. We suck.

But on Fox News they say that America is a great and generous nation that gives more money to third world countries than anyone else… right?

Don't get me wrong. I am all for cheap coffee and bananas. But I'd rather pay three bucks for a cup of coffee and know the guy who picked the beans has a health care plan. Oh wait, now we do pay $3 for a cup of coffee and they still don't have a health plan. I bet Howard Shultz has a hell of a health plan though. He owns land the size of several states in South America and the SuperSonics to boot. Remember that the next time you buy a cup of Joe.

Sweden doesn't have Starbucks. Yet. They have Wayne's Coffee. Wayne's Coffee shops used to be green but Starbucks sued them and made them paint all their stores blue. And Wayne's stores were green before Starbucks opened up their first store on the continent. Go figure. The Sonics wear green too. Now you know why. They wanted to wear blue like the Seahawks but Howard Shultz…

And another thing.

The Starbuck's mermaid used to show us her tits. No really she did. She was cool and wanted to have a go. The English call it ‘getting your kit out'. But people took offense to being reminded where the milk for the lattes actually comes from. To show a cow breast is okay. To show a human breast is obscene. Go figure. Who would have thought? Girls your body has been declared obscene by people who make billions of dollars off coffee. Who could possibly be offended by a crude cartoon drawing of a mermaids tits? Americans. That's who. The Starbucks logo pulled a Brooke Shields and now her long hair covers her breasts.

Given a choice between a company worth billions of dollar and no breasts or a company worth millions of dollars and breasts, Americans choose the billions of dollars and no breasts. And people wonder why there is such a high rate of breast cancer in America.

I'll stop there. I think I did it!

America is not the leader of the free world anymore. Maybe I am? Maybe you are. But it's definitely not America. Today, America only uses the concept of freedom to impose its will against its own people and against other cultures who have something it wants. Bush says we have to go to war to “spread liberty.� How can an offensive war do anything but spread misery?

So in conclusion, everything that America was supposed to stand for has turned out to be false… and as regards the never-ending human march for greater freedom and liberty, America in its current state can be esteemed as nothing more than worthless.

That was my floccinaucinihilipilification of America. I do hope you enjoyed it.

[Sloth]

let me know if you have any comments, find spelling mistakes, etc...

[Tommy Martyn]

"Bill Clinton will go down." If it is a joke, well done. If not, change it.

[Tommy Martyn]

I remember the footy chant was either:

GET YOUR KIT OFF FOR THE LADS

OR

GET YOUR TITS OUT FOR THE LADS

not kit out.

I dont know how much stuff there is online, but if you go to the comic Viz which should be viz.co.uk then there might be a link to Proffessor Mellie's profanosaurus. That might clear up any doubt about "kit"