I am not an anti-police sort of person. I have a couple of friends who are police and, by large, they and their colleagues do as best they can in a thankless, difficult and probably traumatizing job. I think 95% or more of policework happens within boundaries which are tolerable by society.

But then you have the stupid bastard in Oakland who murdered a kid on New Year’s in the BART station — a kid who, by all accounts, was the victim of an attack by a bunch of other guys. The dude is on the ground, he’s cuffed behind his back, he’s got his face on the pavement, there are two policemen on him — one on his neck, one on his back. He looks like he’s struggling a bit, but nothing particularly out of the ordinary.

Until the cop that’s on his back stands up, draws his gun, and shoots the suspect point-blank. With two different people filming him from different angles.

I can’t think of any way this is even remotely justifiable. I mean, I could have kept that guy on the ground with nothing more than a firm hand. His hands were cuffed behind his back. He was face-down. He had another cop holding him. How in the hell did anything about this situation require the use of deadly force? Particularly in the middle of a bunch of other cops? The officer holding the kid’s neck couldn’t have been more than twenty inches from where that bullet hit.

What kind of complete fucking retard psychopath shoots a cuffed, unarmed, mostly docile suspect with another cop holding him right next to your gun?

I hope they fry this fucker. Because there’s no worse misuse of power than to murder someone who not only can’t fight back, but who legally can be killed if he does try to fight back.

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My RSS feed of entertainment news is full of variations on the same headline: “John Travolta is heartbroken over son’s death, sources say”.

As opposed to…? “John Travolta dancing the fucking tarantella over son’s death”? “John Travolta staging massive party to celebrate death of child, hires Katy Perry and Perez Hilton to MC”? “Travolta’s son dies; Travolta shrugs, goes to Starbucks and orders vanilla latte”?

I don’t know John Travolta, I’ve never met John Travolta or his wife Kelly Preston or any member of his family. I don’t much care for his religious preferences, but they are no more my business than mine are his. Of course I feel very sorry for the man and his people. Losing a teenage child must be unimaginably painful. My sympathies extend, as they would to anyone I vaguely knew about whose child died.

And unlike the apparent majority of my countrymen, I’m willing to leave it at that. Because none of it is my business in any way.

Celebrity, in this country, has become a monstrous thing and our central currency. We have no more musicians or singers, we have rock stars and divas; we have no actors, we have action heroes; and many of the people who are famous now are famous for no reason at all. The fact that I know who Kim Kardashian is — despite my best attempts to keep myself out of such things — is terrible. I still don’t know why I know who she is, though I’ve seen her have sex on camera with that awful singer that Burial sampled. But she’s a bad amateur porn actress at best. (And she is bad. Trust me.)

And poor John Travolta, who’s probably out of his mind with grief right now, has to deal with the most contemptible excesses of celebrity media. I feel even worse for the guy because of it.

Please, America, go back to living your own hopeless, soulless lives, and quit sticking your nose into the soulless, hopeless lives of people you see on TV.

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I’m glad to see the last of this year. It has not been awesome for me, mostly. Hopefully 2009 will be better — for me, and you, and everybody. (If your year was awesome, well — 2009 will be awesomer.)

I’m really sad today, but I’m hopeful that I can be a better human and a more successful person in 2009. And that America will be a better place to be in. And that they release Watchmen this year, sometime.

See you around.

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Great TED talk from Jennifer 8. Lee on the history and pervasiveness of Chinese food in America.

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I thought y’all would like to know that my Trinity piece, “Dark Miracle“, is actually seeing print, in Issue #2 of the fabulous magazine Coilhouse, available now! I haven’t gotten my contributor’s copy yet, but the little bits of proofing I’ve seen make it look awesome. So if you like the piece, order the magazine and check it out. (You should order it anyway. Coilhouse is amazing. Zo and Meredith and Nadya are doing an incredible job over there.) I’ve got another piece in this issue as well, a conversation with my old friend R.U. Sirius about cyberpunk and futurism and how he helped me get girls when I was a teenager.

So go to it.

[Full disclosure: I didn’t receive any payment for Coilhouse using the piece. As far as I’m concerned, y’all paid me for the piece a long time ago; I just wanted to see it in print somewhere, and I’m glad it’s in Coilhouse, which is shaping up to fill the void Mondo 2000 left a decade ago. It’s an awesome mag.)

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and, via David Pescovitz over at BoingBoing, here’s a Bay Area TV show called “Net Cafe” episode featuring my friends St. Jude and R.U. Sirius. I was probably already hanging around at this point.

It’s nice to see Jude, who died a few years ago. I miss her.

And yes, this is all very quaint now. It wasn’t then, okay?

(This is also around the time I met Pescovitz, but I doubt he’d remember me; he worked on our Revolting.com project, but I only ever actually met him IRL one time, when the Revolting team met up in Oakland. I was 19, and probably an ass.)

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“She’s gonna try and hug us, oh God she’s gonna try and hug us, goddamn Chinese people always try and hug us, Steve get ready, oh God, here it comes…”

Merry X-mas.

[adorable goddamn pandas via Fuck You, Penguin]

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And I’m off to the parents’ house for sugar comas and Christmas movies — it has become a tradition in my family to round up all our friends who don’t have family in town and aren’t going home for the holidays to come over, eat a bunch of food and watch a couple of contemporary X-Mas flicks on Christmas Eve. Tonight, I think, it’s gonna be Die Hard and Bad Santa.

And let’s not forget the poor old Deus Sol Invictus on this day — after all, December 25th was his birthday first. (And almost certainly not that of Jesus of Nazareth. Remember the whole bit about “shepherds in their fields”. In December, in the Northern Hemisphere? Not likely, not even in Palestine.) It was the first day of the year when the lengthening of the daylight hours was noticeable to ancients, and it symbolized the triumph of day over night.

Which is what Christmas ought to always be about, whether you’re a Christian or not: the recognition that light still shines in the darkness. This has been a terrible year for me personally and for a lot of people in the world in general. But light still shines. We’ve got a man-sexy new President who may actually believe the stuff he’s selling; and hey, gas prices have gone down substantially, yeah?

The light still shines. And I hope it shines for you and yours this Christmas, and that you have the best Christmas possible.

Good night.

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…is that 100,000 years from now, when aliens discover the scattered remnants of what’s left of the human species, the dialogue’s going to go something like this.

“Hey, Zerplax!”

“Yes, Kiplorg?”

“Check out this video the humans left.”

“Okay, what am I…okay, there’s two girls, and…what are they eating?”

“Just keep watching.”

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