rocksalt magazine - december 2012

FeaturesK. F. Harlock (crithit.org)Sam Hurt (eyebeam.com)Dylan Edwards (studiondr.com)M. Austin Bedell (skweegieisland.com/)Jeanne Thornton (fictioncircus.com/Jeanne)Gilbert Smith (crithit.org/spooky)Antonius Wolfsblut (wolfscum.com)Geoff Sebesta & Gewel KafkaAaron Whitaker (www.aaronwhitaker.com)Jason Poland (robbieandbobby.com)John David Brown (flickr.com/photos/jdbrownpopart)Nouri Zarrugh (www.nourizarrughart.com)Monte Hayward (www.webcomicsnation.com/monte/)Dieter Geisler (dietergeisler.com)Kathleen Jacques (bvbcomix.com)

CoverXerxes Verdammt (wolfscum.com)

CenterfoldJeanne Thornton

MarginaliaJeanne ThorntonJason PolandJohn David BrownKathleen JacquesGeoff Sebesta (unnecessaryg.com)M Austin BedellBrian HorstRodney Barry (http://www.flickr.com/photos/eelskin/)

EditorsGeoff Sebesta & Jeanne Thornton

Printed through the Austin-American StatesmanMade possible through Austin Sketch GroupInquiries? Please email: [email protected]://fictioncircus.com/rocksalt

Rocksalt Magazine • Issue 6 • December 2012 • Be the change that I want to see in the world

bad mother by Jeanne Thornton

DON’T WAIT.

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Do not fret that by the time you are reading this, it is far too late to order products from us for Christmas. Do not fret if it is January, or February, or even the height of summer solstice, as far from the season as you can get. It will always be Christmas in your heart. Christmas will always be approaching you with its hand outstretched, telling you that you have not done enough, whispering to you that no, next year will not be better.

As a courtesy, all the items in this catalog have already been placed on order for you. Although it may seem as though each item is being shipped to you in the most destructive possible circumstance, in fact each will arrive at an utterly random time. Even in terms of visiting disaster upon our lucky readers and non-readers, you will not have the hypoth-esis of an overriding malevolent intelligence to comfort you. And that is a ROCKSALT MAGAZINE GUARANTEE.

If for some reason you wish to cancel your order, please dial the following number:

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We always enjoy working with each and every one of you. Your spouse. Your children. Your animals. Every person you meet and love, or despise. All of them will be with us, together in the spirit and warmth of Christmas.

happy and ever- lasting holidays

fromrocksalt magazine

CHRISTMAS HAS COME FOR Y O U

Imagine the scene before you this holiday season. You are sit-ting in a large armchair with a dog at your feet. Your ankles are swelling with the diminished circulation from the animal’s bulk but you do not care. Per-haps you are sucking a candy cane between your lips. If you are not fundamentally alone, perhaps a spouse with your choice of gender is sitting be-side you on another armchair or on the floor. Perhaps this spouse is raising a cup of some

soothing liquid to your lips. Perhaps it is tea with cloves in it, or alcohol. Perhaps you have children who are always run-ning around your foot, always screaming, always demand-ing and taking, and you work so hard but there is no way you can give them everything, or even anything. You work so hard and no one cares, ex-cept us. GIVE THE GIFT OF COMFORT with these prod-ucts from ROCKSALT MAGA-ZINE. You have NO CHOICE.

food insecurity. Experience the simple fun of trying to feed your family on a declining minimum wage. Major corporations like Whole Foods throw away vast sums of perfectly ed-ible produce and grains every day, but where is the sport in that?

seduction of the inno-cent. Slowly your children are aging and growing farther and farther apart from you. They will never understand your values. Media companies are striving even now to drive them to-ward alternate realities to which you will never be able to relate. You can never win against the future. Call today.

A legAcy of rAcism. Every-thing you have is built on the system-atic exploitation of those less fortunate than you. You can never give back the land your town is chartered upon to the Indians and you can never undo the municipal construction projects heavily driven by private slave labor. Even if you could undo these things, would it not be an insult to those who created it? You are terrible. Call now.

A comfortAble existence predicAted on AmericAn militAry supremAcy. Face the facts! When the United States forces a foreign nation to its knees and forces it to accept our basic cultural assump-tions of an investment/profit culture, we all benefit. The drone militaries of tomorrow will help us uphold this unquestioned dominance. No need to thank them; they are just doing their job. They can not understand you. They are beyond passion.

the ciA coup AgAinst sAl-vAdor Allende. The big mo-ment when, in order to prevent the Soviet Union from having a de facto ally in South America, the US govern-ment decided to depose a democrati-cally elected leader and replace him with a corrupt general for its own con-venience. You know the date Septem-ber 11, of course; this date was not chosen accidentally. Call now!

two-pArty electorAl poli-tics. Does anyone seriously believe this? Each party is given a personal horrible demon that adherents of the other party can in no way accept. Maybe you believe gays should not be married, or maybe you believe that America is bankrupting itself with a series of terrifying, fiscally unsound “entitlements.” In both cases, power is either being handed over on a steady basis to an unelected cabal of corpo-rate persons, or being aggregated in bureaucratic offices beyond the power of elections to reform. They will hurt you and you can not stop them.

wAr in AfghAnistAn. No one wants this anymore but there is no escape from it. Political pressure requires oil prices to remain low and requires that America remain in the region in perpetuity in order to pre-vent more sinister political elements from moving into the power vacuum. The fact that robot planes are killing civilians at a constant rate helps noth-ing. For shame.

inexorAble climAte chAnge. Scientists have warned the planet for years only to find their concerns dismissed for strictly politi-cal reasons. Now it is too late and at minimum, Africa will be swallowed up by terrible coastal floods. Too bad for them. Too bad for everyone.

the certAinty of environ-mentAl crAsh. There are vast heaps of trash filling the oceans, some as large as small states. At minimum the aggregate toxins from the break-down of these trash objects will lead to vast ocean die-offs. There are whales you will never see again.

culturAl biAs. You heard a lot about Hurricane Sandy destroying much of New York City, a place ev-eryone knows from American movies. Plenty of other places that do not di-rectly appear in American movies were also destroyed by this hurricane and got very little attention, far less foreign aid. Even in NYC, Far Rockaway went without power for weeks after Manhat-tan. If you are poor, you go to the back of the line.

inevitAble economic biAs. As every NYC subway commuter knows the G train is infinitely worse than every other train. A homeless passenger once explained this as fol-lows: “The G train stays in Brooklyn. All the other trains go into Manhat-tan, where they pick up the money.” Wealthy people have more money to spare, whatever their actual inclination toward charity or their “goodness of heart” are. They will inevitably spend more to maintain basic public services for everyone. It is unfair.

domestic spying cAmou-flAged As community. Who does not love Facebook? The CIA certainly does, and systematically makes use of the profiles generated by tracking your “likes,” employment his-tory, photographic record, and even movements around town. You can try to opt out of this surveillance, but you will never learn about any events your friends are going to again, and your grandparents, aunts, and uncles who are now on this ubiquitous wonder website will be crushed. You will hurt everyone.

senseless drug wAr. The use of marijuana causes no social harm other than forgetting appointments. Despite this, users and purveyors of this drug are hounded into secrecy or pressed into service as slaves of the for-profit prison industry. It is the investment opportunity of a decade. Our borders are less secure. Every-thing is disaster.

prison industry. Imagine own-ing and speculating in souls. What a lucrative business opportunity. Billions of dollars are spent annually to en-slave people just like you who made the terrible decision to purchase mari-juana or to be born as a less desirable race. The percentage of reform goes sharply down when prisons are priva-tized. What a lucky break. Become im-prisoned today and help our economic pistons to keep pumping.

declining literAry stAn-dArds. Sentiment is now enshrined in novel-writing, where once it was considered the death of any serious effort at literature. Readers of today want comfort and a vague sense of empathy and lush technique rather than a hard, depressing look at ex-istential doom. There is no money in doom.

shorter Attention spAns. If you are the kind of person who is still reading this vast quantity of text, plainly we are preaching to the choir. Most people would not do this. Most people would simply look at the pictures, wait for a basic stimulus/response pairing of laughter or sen-timent, and move on. You are one of the good ones, and it makes you forever alone.

infAntilizAtion of cul-ture. Appeals to ethos and logos are on the sharp decline, while ap-peals to pathos have never been more popular. Do you want to sell a product or convince people to pay attention to your ideas? Why not package those ideas behind the mewling baby face of a cat or a lovable alien or other such mascot? The secret masters of the world will continue running it ac-cording to their vile whims while you are enjoying cute imagery meant to distract you from the fact that the ratchets of circumstance are forever turning against you.

no originAlity. Every idea you have had has been previously done by someone better. That is the nature of ideas. In the past this chronic, neces-sary deficiency was masked by slow communication skills, but now there is no barrier between you and your awareness of your own failings. You are not special. Call now.

offshoring. The basic principle that one should keep ones produc-tion in one’s general location should be no barrier to effective profiteer-ing. The assembly lines that once powered American production are being moved overseas in order to of-fer workers wages that will allow them to make a slightly above subsistence living, ensuring that they will never have enough power to successfully challenge the company’s dominion over their basic existence. You, the American, are the loser in this ex-change. So are they. So is everyone. NO FREEDOM.

lost lAbor rights. The strug-gles of countless union leaders that gave workers the necessary time to dream and imagine has allowed a

generation of young conservatives the freedom to imagine unions as a kind of draconian crime syndicate bent on personally siphoning pints of blood out of the back of an enervated John Galt. The war for basic dignity is being re-versed everywhere around the globe in the name of fiscal austerity. Does this make economic sense? No.

fAding physicAl youth. Each morning greet a face that is more ashen and ghastly than the face that preceded it! You think that it is an illusion, but it is reality. Your skin’s elasticity is breaking down, leading to a fingerprint of time stamped into your flesh that will startle and repel all those who encounter it. What if some-one told you that a miracle treatment had been developed to reverse this process?? That person would be a liar.

fAding emotionAl youth. Eventually nothing will be new or pure. Eventually everything will remind you of something else, and the opportunity to pursue that lost, primal thing will be forever behind you. You can not move to a new town and feel a sense of ex-citement. You can not hear a new al-bum by a band you love and think of it as central to your life in any meaning-ful way. Those days are over for you.

lAck of originAlity. Some-one tells me this whole catalog in Futura idea, even though I thought it was very clever, is exactly what Chris Ware does in issues of Acme Novelty Library that I have certainly read and absorbed without thinking of their provenance. What a crock. I have already made half of this catalog with-out realizing this. I thought it was spe-cial. I was wrong. You will be wrong too, one day.

video gAme metAphors. Credit cards now earn experience points. You “level up” when you make a basic post on an online forum. We are all beginning to think of ourselves as Nietzschean gods with strictly hier-archal and linear modes of progres-sion through the “ranks” of life. These basic feedback loops allow the power-ful of the world to sell us products and services we have no use for.

video gAmes. An entire class of people have nothing useful to say to everyone else. Willpower, long-range planning, and a desire to build a better life have been triumphantly subverted by major corporations and jammed into terrible feedback loops designed to drain the most ambitious of us of both their finances and their potentially world-changing ambitions. Soma is real and it is manufactured

by Nintendo. The revolution came quietly.

Addiction. Although any thinking person has sympathy for the efforts of a sentient creature to escape its ba-sic existential condition, addiction to pleasure of various kinds—heroin, video games, Internet posting, ciga-rettes, alcohol—eventually shrink the soul in a distinctly Boethian sense. We become smaller, trapping ourselves in Skinner boxes of our own making. We forget about the things around us that matter.

mAle privilege. Of course we do not mean you. You are one of the good ones. You “take care of your woman.” You “protect her.” If she ar-gues with a decision you make, she is clearly being irrational and crazy, as her tainted female biology makes inevitable for her. This is what culture has always told you. You will be of-fended if this is ever pointed out. If she doesn’t date you it is because of “ladder theory” or some horrible self-justifying system like this. You are angry right now.

white privilege. Ditto the above. You get to go to all kinds of places and not worry about people assuming that you are there to steal things or make a scene. You do not have to think about race, unless you meet a person who is of another race. At best, you feel bad about the legacy of oppression your race has toward the other race, and you want to do something to help. But there is noth-ing you can do.

going outside. We do not do it anymore. Most of our days are spent staring at small rectangles of light. If you choose not to partake in this development of modern culture, you will be economically disenfranchised. An hour a day of sunlight and walk-ing through slender, whispering trees would be enough, but have you found that hour recently? Will you? You will not.

geneticAlly modified crops. Major GMO companies have won. Soon it will be impossible to find food that is not copyrighted to a major corporation, its natural pro-cess of mutation subverted in order to achieve short term market gains. The “butterfly effect” these decisions will certainly have on our frail ecosystem can not be estimated. The free market can not be regulated. They have won.

generAtion gAp. The swift pace of technology has caused a

vast surge in identity politics that have fundamentally transformed society even from the already-transformed “boomer” days. There is no way for one generation to relate to another. The basic metaphors are wrong. The basic goals are wrong. There can only be confusion and the pace of it will only increase as technology and mar-ket forces deform our very souls.

gentrificAtion. The process of gentrification begins inevitably with good intentions. People will leave the relative “security” of neighborhoods that match their “class” in order to seek cheap rents, more authentic ex-perience, or to do some kind of good work. Whatever the reason, their very presence will unfairly inflate the value of the land to the point that the origi-nal inhabitants must move on.

cell phones. Imagine being told that from now on, you are obligated to carry a tiny radiation-emitting square on your person at all times, or else everyone you know will be angry

with you. Slowly the cancer penetrates your flesh and swells existing tumors and cellular irregularities into mon-strosities. This is what companies call “bringing the world closer together.” You can not opt out.

identity politics. They are not themselves the problem. Rather, they are a lens for seeing the ways in which we, as a society, systematically alien-ate one another on the basis of quali-ties—race, gender, ethnicity, ability—that fundamentally do not matter to the question of our character. As such, they are depressing, and at worst, they cause us to rally around distinct iden-tities to the exclusion of communion with the larger world, at which point they become the problem. Have a full assortment.

mob thinking. Whenever there is a world catastrophe, people will quickly divide themselves into groups to determine which “side” of the ca-tastrophe they are on. In practice, this generally means which solution they prefer. A hideous binary quirk in our thinking allows us only a limited degree of tolerance for solutions an-other person proposes, and once this tolerance is exhausted, we have no real alternative but to demonize our opponents. It is brutality.

sunrises. You will miss far too many of them in your life. Those that you do not miss you will generally see because you have stayed up the entire night worrying about your situation, or because you are on your way to a job that is slowly crushing you. The anxi-eties of your day become associated with the sunrise, making even the sun itself your enemy. Free of charge.

sunsets. Each sunset you see means the end of another day of heal-ing energy from our neighbor star. Each sunset you see means the end of a space during which you might have made a difference to the working world. Now people will retreat to their lodgings or social groups, and the only difference you might make are to the people you already know, and that perhaps you mistrust.

the end of the sun. The sun will nova one day. Our planet will become utterly uninhabitable, the oceans, lakes, and rivers we loved will dry up, and every point of meaning in our lives will cease to exist. Entire do-mains of art, poetry, and thought will become instantly irrelevant to future generations, if the generations that in-habit earth following the next phase in the sun’s evolution can even be mean-ingfully said to be human anymore.

spAce trAvel. It will not happen in our lifetimes. The optimistic predic-tions of shows like Star Trek will not come to pass. We are stuck on our planet, waiting for disaster. Isolated in the universe. One day our children will seek the stars, if they are not too jaded and crushed by all that this planet has to offer.

personAl finAnciAl in-security. Your paycheck will not stretch far enough. All of the good things on offer at different restaurants and stores are beyond your reach. The best you can hope for is a slow, steady accumulation of assets and investments that will one day perhaps enable you to buy a house, or a car, or other major capital good to shore up your fortress against death. By the time you acquire such assets, you will be old.

exhAustion. How do you even cope with how awful everything can sometimes be? Look at this sea of depressing text. Are you just skimming it? Do you care about these things? Do you think that any of this matters to you? Do you somehow think you can avoid these things? I look at you, how you carry on, when all hope is gone. Can’t you see? Your optimistic eyes seem like paradise to someone

like me. That is a bad Depeche Mode song. Do you find it depressing? Rel-evant? What?

music tribAlism. Do you really care about dubstep? Trip-hop? Indie rock? Any of these tribal categories? Do you like how it divides you from your friends? Do you get off on that somehow?

the greAt chAin of fiscAl being. Some of us are born into positions of greater material advan-tage, or some of us use cunning and low tactics to gain such strategically superior positions. The rest of us will end up working for those people. Basi-cally we are all doomed to follow the orders of people who either have no possibility of relating to our plebian concerns, or who have sociopathically disregarded such concerns in favor of making additional money or squeez-ing additional efficiency out of their underlings. We are treated as livestock and short of becoming evil ourselves, there is little we can do.

inAbility to sAve those we love. Have you ever dreamed about being able to “inhabit” the body of someone you love dearly, driving them much as if they were a car or as if you were some kind of voodoo legba, in order to show them by living their life for them for just one day how much better their lives could be? Keep dreaming, because this is forever im-possible. Those you love are doomed by their own upbringing, basic char-acters, and aggregated life choices, much as you are doomed by yours. The best hope you have is to yoke yourself emotionally to a winner, and this makes you a bad person.

ArrogAnce. What the fuck is wrong with you? How could you have fantasies like the above? Do you se-riously believe that if you could just control everyone in the universe for a single day that everything would work out all right? All of your friends and loved ones are clearly insulted beyond measure by the rank arrogance and presumptuousness of this. You have no sense of boundaries. You have no sense of decency.

chAnging priorities. Is it possible that what you cared about when you were a child is what you still care about into your adulthood? It seems impossible that this would be so, and yet we are still encouraged to follow our dreams. What social end do our dreams serve?

the problem of the “oth-er.” We all exist in cosmic isolation. Our attempts to broach the prison of self are all subject to terrible signal-to-noise ratios, and there is no possibility of communicating the totality of one’s being with anything resembling 100% fidelity. Even these words are a poor substitute for communion.

kAntiAn cAtegories. Knowl-edge is power, and the presence of the philosophical categories of space, time, causality, and logical exclusion ensure that in the eyes of God, we are all utterly powerless. Maybe it is better not to know the noumenal, the realms of pure God. It would crush us to be-lieve otherwise.

irreversible time. As long as we learn from our mistakes, every-thing will be fine. This is the lie we tell ourselves, that we would like to believe, and as stubbornly as we in-sist on it, it is simply not true. Terrible decisions are made every hour that lead to lasting consequences. Poor hygiene habits can cause us to lose teeth, hair, eyes long before our time. Unwise marriage leads to a lifetime of gruesome resentments and scarred children. Foolish investments lead to financial ruin and the waste of a life-time’s labor. Our minds can conceive, falsely, of being able to reverse time, and this is the cruelest prison.

A lAck of meAningful metAphysicAl choices. In a Kantian universe, the only people we can trust to provide us with rock-solid information on what lies beyond the veil of death are mystics and mad-men. As Kierkegaard said, “purity of heart is to will one thing.” And as far as the heart goes, this is correct. Yet can not know what lies beyond the veil, and we must one day all disap-pear there.

complAcency. You are going to die. Everyone you love is going to die. In infinite time, every work you put on this earth—be it a child, a good business decision, or some kind of information encoded as artwork—will be lost. But you can not retain aware-ness of this fact. It would destroy you. All you can do is resign yourself to it. This is all we have, all that holds our world together.