Spiders vs. Nazis
Oh, where do I begin? A lot of blog worthy things happened over the last few days and I’m having a hard time trying to think of where to start, so I guess I’ll just start with Mud.
Mud, oh man this guy. You know those really stereotypical drug kids in movies? The ones that talk kinda slurred, never make eye contact, are incredibly spacey, can’t focus, and are always either high or looking to be? Well Mud was the template for these people. When we first arrived in Buffalo he was sitting on the front porch (though not a resident or even close neighbor to the stellar residents) and somehow managed to make nothing but irrelevant contributions to our conversation. I use to play this game I invented called the “Completely Unrelated Noun Game” whose simple rules went like this: Participant one would say a noun, “Tree” for example; then participant two would have to say another noun that had reasonably nothing to do with trees, like “Firemen.” This would go back and forth at a quick pace until someone either broke pace or said a related noun. If participant one responded to “Firemen” with “Hose” he would then lose. Play it sometime. Lot’s of fun and much more difficult than it seems. I say all this because Mud quickly revealed himself to be the unwilling champion of this game. Case in point, sitting around that first night we somehow got onto the very serious subject of priests molesting children and how or why it occurs, all of us offering our own theories, and out of the blue Mud interjects, completely serious, “Yeah, like 9-11.” 9-11?!? How September 11 had anything to do with our conversation only Mud knows, but apparently that knowledge also prevented him from understanding why our response to his point was poorly contained laughter.
The next evening, Freddy, being the nice guy he is, decided to accompany Mud to the corner store to buy some beers. While walking Freddy smokes on a cigarette he bummed from Mud only moments before. This is a new thing for Freddy, smoking (and don’t get me started about how lame it is to start smoking at 23, or at any age for that matter), and so it was only a little confusing when he soon developed a headache and started feeling groggy. He brought this up to Mud, who casually answered with an enthusiastic grin, “Yeah, cause they’re dipped in formaldehyde.” Freddy was furious but Mud couldn’t understand why. To this guy, formaldehyde on a cigarette is like icing on a cake. To Freddy, it’s a reason to go to bed very early and very concerned. Luckily he was ok and we all learned a valuable lesson.
After two days in Buffalo and four meals at Amy’s Place, we packed up, said our goodbyes to all the great people, and headed out just as winter showed up.
On our way out of town we stopped at Wegmans for lunch. Wegmans, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of entering its blessed doors, is the most amazing grocery store ever. Like, if God had to go grocery shopping, he’d shop at Wegmans. I wouldn’t be surprised if he shopped there anyway, you know, just to marvel in the glory of what someone else has created for once. The store has everything edible you’ll ever need and then about a million other things that you didn’t think you needed before. It’s like Ikea for food. It looks like this from the parking lot in the snow.
For those of you not privileged enough to live in the Northeast, I would suggest taking a Wegmans related road trip sometime soon. It’ll be well worth it. Tell God I said hi and to try the sushi, it’s delicious.
About a week ago, while walking somewhere with Freddy he posed a very typical Freddy type question when, out of the blue, completely unrelated to the topic at hand he asked, “Would you rather live in a world run by Nazis or giant eight-foot tall spiders?” I thought this was a ridiculous question and initially laughed it off. But he demanded an answer and so I stated that since I am extremely scared of spiders I would probably prefer to live in a world run by Nazis. Now don’t get me wrong here, this does not mean whatsoever that I’m pro Nazi, but in hypothetical worlds where hypothetical things happen, I’d hypothetically prefer to live in constant fear of dying by gun or gas than by asphyxiation followed by ingestion from a giant, hairy, fanged (and let’s be honest here, the spiders that take over the world would have HUGE fangs), killer, world dominating, spiders. I thought this answer was a no-brainer but apparently I was wrong. When the hypothetical was brought up later that night Garrett decided that he disagreed and that he would prefer a world run by spiders. This led to a series of intense debates that have occurred on and off for most of this last week in various locals throughout the Northeast. Garrett seems to think that he would be safe in a giant-spider run society because he could get a gun and just kill the spiders, like they do in the movies. This logic is faulty on numerous levels and I’ve tried explaining this to him but he doesn’t seem to listen. So I would like to take this time to lay out why a Nazi run society would be preferable to that of an eight-foot tall giant-spider run one.
First of all, we need to go back to the question at hand which was about who would you rather have in charge of the world. The question assumes a prior defeat on our part. It is not a question of who would you rather battle, but whom would you rather submit to after the battle for world conquest has already finished. Garrett, and many others who sided with him, couldn’t move beyond the battle element of the hypothetical. I personally blame movies, video games, and television for this, because those media outlets glorify violence and battles so much that many people, including members of my own band, cannot think of a world outside of that. They cannot even answer simple hypothetical questions about giant spiders without their minds reverting to violence. And frankly, that’s just sad. Poor guys.
So, moving on, we have established that the choice of who would you rather shoot with large, presumably automatic, guns is one that is irrelevant and should be saved for another time (although here I think I would still choose Nazis since they would be smaller and a much more difficult target, ergo, a more formidable opponent). But let’s think about a world run by Nazis and why it, though still being very much hellish, would probably exist on a lesser circle of hell than that of a world run by spiders, which I doubt Dante ever descended deep enough to see. The thing is, while Nazis demonstrated many characteristics that made them seem sub human, while they possessed utterly minuscule traces of humanity, they were still, on a very base level, humans, which is also what you and I are. What does this mean? Well simple, it means that Nazis need the same basic things we all need for survival. They need similar shelter, food, and communication systems as all other humans even if their actions are anything but human like. That means that in a Nazi world there would still be a need for modern means of production, therefore, there would still be a need for the modern workforce. Everyone knows that Nazis are lazy and don’t want to work in factories, and would therefore keep people alive in order to provide for their Nazi needs. They would have systems in place that we could understand and interact within, and those very systems could keep us alive as well.
But what about spiders? Do spiders need agriculture? Do giant killer spiders need telephones, internet, modern housing, Starbucks? No. No they don’t. Which would mean that they don’t need us either. They just need something to secure a web to so they can eat any old thing that wanders into that web. Even puppies. That’s right. Puppies. Spiders would eat cute little Labrador retriever puppies, without thinking twice. They would wrap those adorable puppies in their webs of death, inject poison into their puppy blood streams and then eat all their puppy insides. Would you want to live in a world run by eight legged, hairy, giant, fanged, poisonous, puppy eaters? Neither would I.
It’s a simple, albeit terrible, choice, one that I hope none of us ever have to make. But just in case Freddy was onto something, just in case this world might come down to choosing between those two terrible fates, I hope that by reading this tour journal you will know be informed, empowered, and able to make the right decision.
Oh, and the shows the last couple nights have been awesome. You should have been there.
Brett
