When you feel you’re being “played” by a calculated career move? There’s nothing erotic there.

When the automatons at the Playboy mansion show ass cleavage on The Girls Next Door to further their hosting careers on the E Network? Boring rote machina.

When the starlet tramps in constant rotation on TMZ fall out of their cars for the paparazzi? About as sexy as a root canal.

The Hottie is found in the genuine. The authentic. In the real.

In the everyday collegiate hotts who smile for the joy of smiling, and who know not how much they drink. Who stumble and laugh and expect nothing in return. Who blush and tell you to “stop it” when you stare longingly and gropingly at their boobs at 2am, but think it’s okay and forgive you your drunken fumblings the next morning in class.

They are the real hotts of this world.

Not the pablum fed to us on Access Hollywood. Not the carefully constructed media events being promoted in US Weekly and pictures of starlets buying coffee in In-Touch.

The real hotts are not found in glossy magazines or scrambling for attention on TV. They are to be celebrated precisely because they are not seeking us out so we can be manipulated by these conceptual strippers of the mass produced digital age.

We find them, they don’t find us. They are simply being themselves. Librarian hottness of hidden and smolderingly authentic truth. A hottness of the real.

They are the real glories of this universe.” DB1

We found him under a glacier, pipe in mouth and latest blackberry in hand; his welcoming Haiku appropriately deleterious:

Here it is frozen.
Retarded tourists remorse
Blackberry is life

Urdu serf excluded, our collective jaw drop echoed across Wyinglang, and our esoteric host had already noticed our disbelief at the the device he so intransigently clutched. “Brickbreaker is the game of the ages,” he continued, “it is life in micro digital format…” As he passed around a rock bowl of concocted hallucinogenics, the sage of Baltoro began his LSD induced philosophical drivel.

“Brickbreaker, a simple game of reaction where the player moves a paddle to hit a ball that breaks a series of bricks. Bricks vary in durability, and as the game progresses, the ball starts moving faster, and the bricks move downwards, making it harder for the player to score points. The replay value is the obsession to beat your previous score, or to score higher than your friends. There is no end to the game. Once you finish the 34 levels, it reverts back to level one, with a faster moving ball and rapidly approaching bricks. As such, the object of the game remains a mystery, the high score board as the only indication of its purpose. A plethora of people play the game of Brickbreaker. Be it on an arduous journey, a boring teleconference call, or in a neurotic quest to beat friends, Brickbreaker is as ubiquitous as it gets when it comes to pointless undertakings.

Many scholars have attempted to deal with the grand absurdity that is the human quest. The absurd, as many a depressed Frenchman has put it, is the culmination of the human race’s realization that the need for purpose and reason in life is impossible to mollify in a universe devoid of meaning. The universe, in of itself, does not provide the human race with a moral authority, nor a final victory, nor a purpose of any kind. Any perceived meaning is but an illusion, a trick of sorts, brought on by the individual mind to appease personal needs and ensure continuity. Brickbreaker is thus the ultimate manifestation of all that is absurd in life, an electronified version of the Sisyphean tale.

Who is Sisyphus you might ask? The man who was condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down when he reached the top, whereupon he had to start his mundane task again, ad infinitum. You have probably seen him in that red bull commercial, but never realized who he was. As is the case with Sisyphean tasks, Brickbreaker is a parody for the ridiculous. There is no hope of an end, no final victory, and as points are arbitrarily racked, the ball moves quicker and the bricks fast approach the ground. There is no absolute ceiling on points, as you can always score one more. Failure is inevitable, the game will end. And the sight of an end is more nebulous the further you progress. You are predestined, and will eventually die, every time.

Yet as is the case with life, the existential (moot) point of Brickbreaker is the experience itself rather than the destination. The chase for goals, regardless of their futility, makes the quest worth pursuing, thus reversing their initial hollowness. That is what makes Brickbreaker so absurd. The parallels between Brickbreaker and the story of Sisyphus are numerous. But what makes Brickbreaker more absurd is that playing the game is a conscious decision made by the player. Whereas Sisyphus was forced into his task, millions go out of their way to play Brickbreaker with a resolve and passion not overtly expressed by the tragic hero. There is a passion for choice, a passion for Brickbreaker, and quite possibly, a passion for life.”

As we awoke from our trance like stupor, the sage of Baltoro used his blackberry’s GPS feature to give us directions to the nearby village, but only after taking our pins.  Our descent down K2 was a fist full of epiphanies.  What we can hope for in life, and in Brickbreaker, is plenty of playing time, so that on our tombstones, they would inscribe: “He did the best he could. His high score was 33,678! Long live Brickbreaker, long live life!”

And you wonder why there’s so much pent up aggression in this region…First they tell you not to have sex, ever. And now this. He might as well have taken the more direct route of politely asking you to just strap on that C4 and press the red button upon sighting a considerable crowd. Fadel, you dense fuck, go find yourself a chick, take her out to dinner, blow off some of that testosterone.

But before minimal memory retention kicks in, I implore you to consider the alternate scenario in which our tragic protagonist Fadel meets a girl and finds the grey matter to approach her. His behavior changes, so does his appearance, perhaps even his temporary thoughts. Sexual endeavors even become a tangible possibility. And thus the evolutionary chain reaction begins within him… Introversion, reflection, and a taste for the tender. Impressions will matter, ambition inevitable…job and donuts surely to follow.

There he was, a moment ago, thinking alphanumerically, here he is now, evolved, alive, and exonerated.

But before I ascend atop my soapbox, let me first say that those who criticize the Twatter on the premise that they are, in point of fact, not interested in what @mytwatface is currently having for lunch are bunch of twits themselves. The Internet is a free realm, the ruling gods of which allow for the free movement of IP subjects to navigate away from @mytwatface’s lunch table to a more interesting abode. I would actually go as far as to say that some of the people I respect and admire use twitter. The nature of their interests (read: business and or revolution) in their respective circles dictates that sharing information at such a pace is prerequisite to their survival. Others also fall in that category, but enough with the disclaimers. I am in fact an information junkie, but I do believe in our collective responsibility to contribute to the pool for the long term good of our networks.

What troubles me about twitter is the inherent lack of originality it offers to the average twat. The average twat wants to feel relevant, loved even…but at some point in time, a twat must ask itself the most pertinent of questions: can a condensed hyperlink ever truly explain my current state of mind? Is the word limit really improving my speech impediment? Despite the millions of words that result from the hundreds of millions of permutations our alphabet provides, the average twit is nowhere near the level of cogency that one has come to expect from intelligent life-forms…and yet on top of that, the twit is confined by a definite word limit, forcing her to take a supplementary dump on the English language as she resorts to her gag inducing e-shorthand. Fuckin shameless. But to be fair, the average fucktard with an open mic and no word limitation ends up having, well, exactly that.

The categorical imperative that confounds me from using twitter is that of content. What got me on this soapbox to begin with is the type of information being shared through that channel. Most twits make their contribution in the form of a link that is generally accompanied by an adjective signifying their seal of approval. This dangerous avenue of contribution is akin to the facebook phenomenon of reducing expression to a binary state of ‘like’ and ‘dislike’, with the corresponding thumbs-up/thumbs down graphic. The pattern of numskulling expression via parcels of oversimplified clever java code is profoundly frightening. The undeniable intuitive truth remains that people are getting dumber by the day, both socially and otherwise, unless you reside in some digital compost. And normalizing the digression of our motor neurons into 140 character snippets of thought is an absurd devolution of our natural instincts. The collective belief that we now need not elaborate our opinions further accentuates the alienating polarization we so complain about on our various media outlets, yet here we are condoning it, in meticulously decrepit e-curtailed ‘tweets,’ 140 characters at a time. Our lethargic affinities will one day persuade us that sharing a bit.ly link is enough of a contribution. And eventually, as unique twats eventually hit critical mass, we will run out of links to share, because we are all busy trying to impress our followers with the article of the week rather than creating it. And when that day finally arrives, rest assured that servicing our depression by clicking the dreaded ‘dislike’ emoticon will suffice. And what a sad day that would be.

Whilst this blog is probably ensnared in a cul de sac of its own self-righteousness, it arguably makes a plausible plea for discourse. My hope is that it gets twitted on some twatter, the readers of which will come engage in some good old fashioned dialogue, more palpable than the 140-character blurts of arbitrariness. The vast arid that is the comments section is for you to sow. Let no man tear asunder.

If you are so inexorably inclined to convey such fierce sentiment in every other sentence, just say ‘fuckin’ instead. Its more universal, equally versatile, and more comforting for those around you to hear. Freakin makes it sounds like you’re 12. And 12 year olds are fuckin annoying.

- Where’s Susan?
- The flu caught her.
- Oh…
- Oh…

Notwithstanding the pistachio’s rather startling orating abilities, it does make a strong case for another tortuous cerebral expedition. It occurs to me that my writing style is somewhat perceived as vain. And by ‘occurred to me,’ I mean I’ve so been told. It’s not the content, that I cannot dispute, but the actual wording of thoughts. Let me start by first admitting that it is partially in the spirit of vanity that I write as such. However, if my endeavor is to mask the insecurities of my thoughts, then the complexity of my diction has revealed them. This admittance should serve to partially rebuke the common perception of vanity. But more to the point is my commitment to what I write. I love words, because communication is all that can bring us together. And perhaps, if we’re lucky enough to understand one another, we can transcend the boredom of our solitary evolution. Writing prose is a conscious construction of words whose purpose is to communicate a precise message as accurately as possible. If one has trouble expressing thoughts verbally or otherwise, one is naturally inclined to pick the most accurate verbiage with which to convey such thoughts. It is perhaps my intransigence in translating my thoughts and emotions as flawlessly as possible that drives me write as I do, and yet still, many nuances are abated in the process. Words are our only objective medium to state, designate, describe, refuse, offend, sway, and order. While I consume the surviving pistachios and pour myself another drink, I leave you with the words of a man whose thoughts are too remarkable to be paraphrased by this author:

“Prose is first of all an attitude of mind. As Valéry would say, there is prose when the word passes across our gaze as the glass across the sun. When one is in danger or in difficulty he grabs any instrument. When the danger is past, he does not even remember whether it was a hammer or a stick; moreover, he never knew; all he needed was a prolongation of his body, a means of extending his hand to the highest branch. It was a sixth finger, a third leg, in short, a pure function which he assimilated. Thus, regarding language, it is our shell and our antennae; it protects us against others and informs us about them; it is a prolongation of our senses, a third eye which is going to look into our neighbor’s heart. We are within language as within our body. We feel it spontaneously while going beyond it toward other ends, as we feel our hands and our feet; we perceive it when it is the other who is using it, as we perceive the limbs of others. There is the word which is lived and the word which is met. But in both cases it is in the course of an undertaking, either of me acting upon others, or the others upon me.” Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?

“Make a right please, we’ll have lunch in Haifa,” I said to the driver.
“Maybe someday, when that green piece of garbage you carry actually means anything,” he scoffed, referring to my Palestinian ID of course. Silly me. Must have been all that hope I conjured up during the episode I had at the bridge.

Intellectual snobbery, for all its urbane cacophony, is often accompanied with the question of why, and when denied, rational people always ask why. Why can’t I make a right turn? And if the answer is not satisfactory – or even worse – if the question becomes a redundant one, and you are left with a feeling of impotence, anger will surely ensue. Ivy League educated man with money cannot make a right turn to Haifa because his ID card is made of green plastic. Fuck the cause; this is now a personal issue. So far during this trip, every event was an absurd reverse parody of something I have read somewhere. Joseph K, I feel your animosity.

Cattle at Qalandia
Two days and five bribes later, we finally inveigled our way into getting a tasree7 (pass) for Israel. We were told that we had to cross the Qalandia checkpoint on foot, as cars were not allowed in. I’ve seen livestock get better treatment; Antoine Roquentin’s nausea seemed silly and obnoxious during this experience. But to his credit, nothing will get you spiraling down an existentialist thought sequence faster than a trip to Palestine would.

I digress. Palestinians were huddled up in an enclosed space waiting for an IDF officer to press a red button that would cause a revolving door to rotate. They wouldn’t tell you how many they were letting in. The unfortunate ones would hear a sudden jamming noise from the machine, and would experience the physical sensation of momentum as their heads abruptly hit the now motionless metallic barrier in front of them. It seemed as if the IDF soldiers behind the mirror screens were discovering just how much irritation a person could endure. We were the only ones under the age of 60, and it just seemed harsh that the ancient should experience such cruelty. It was an odious sight. When you finally escaped the claustrophobic encasement, you were told by way of loudspeaker, to place all your belongings into the x-ray machine. The IDF officers were nowhere to be seen, all communication was done via microphone, “the embodiment of totalitarianism,” I thought to myself. I had inadvertently forgotten to place one of my many necklaces in the x-ray machine, and as the metal detector made a discordant sound, the speaker followed with the obstreperous announcement: “YALLA KHABIBI, YALLA KHAMOODEH!” I panicked and became maladroit, looking around to see if the voice from the speaker could point me to what wrong I was committing. Other Palestinians in the huddle calmly asked me if I had my belt on, and the checklist went on until I discovered the culprit.

Still reddened by what had occurred, I walked straight ahead to find a bulletproof window on my left. I was puzzled again. There is usually a small slit in the window that would facilitate the handing over of documents. Irritated by my apparent ineptitude, the ghoulishly looking woman behind the window started pointing the nozzle of her rifle to the bulletproof glass. She had a nasty look about her face; much like mine does right before I crush a bug. I hate the sound their shells make as they are dispatched into bug afterlife. I mistook her help for a threat and tried not to panic at the sight of the nozzle, which was now pointing at me. It’s funny that despite all mention of bulletproof glass, I was still somewhat frightened. I didn’t know what she wanted; let alone why I disgusted her so much. The obsequious Palestinian man showed me how it was done. He placed his ID and pass on the window facing the officer who could now see his papers. I cannot remember a time in my life when my ego was so completely stripped off of me. It was a thoroughly degrading experience for me. But the servile Palestinian in front me didn’t seem to mind. He crosses over several times a week and has been inured by the process.

David’s Monster
As we got out of the checkpoint, my sigh of relief was brusquely interrupted by what I saw. “Behold the Great Wall of Separation,” said our Arab Israeli driver. Neither words, nor pictures could ever describe the monstrosity of that wall. It is a seriously grotesque rebuttal to all the progress we have made as human beings. 20 years have passed since the collapse of what is now universally accepted as one of the biggest blunders in international history , but we still have this catastrofuck. People don’t talk enough about this wall. It has a personality. You look at it, and get a desperate feeling that it’s never coming down. It towers over you and makes sure you can never make a right turn. You also get a sense that’s it is trying to tell you something. Stay on your side peasant, there’s no room for conversation here, and thanks for the extra land by the way. Hope in compassion my ass…

Before the heavy drinking ensued, I remember noticing a piece of graffiti that stood out more than any of the Banksy stuff did:

‘build trust, not walls,’

in white block font on a blue backdrop. It was written on the Palestinian side of the wall, but the font color suggested an Israeli might have scribbled it. And thus my excursion into Israel began.