This country sickens me. I detest the very society I live in and the way I, personally, live. I hate the rampant consumerism, the unchecked limitation of my civil liberties, the drug laws – all of it. I’m not being preachy. I don’t care if you listen to me, or if you agree with me, and I sure as hell don’t want your approval, since you are all part of the scum that keeps this society running the way it does.

I’m just fucking sick of it. Religion too. You ask me, if there is a God He/She/It/They has some serious fucking explaining to do. Why were we all dropped in this confusing world full of pitfalls and snares ready to tear us apart the minute we let our guard down with no goddamn instruction manual, no idea how we got here, and no help from anybody? How come we have to make other things suffer to sustain our own life? (vegans, you are not exempt. I’m sure those plants don’t WANT to be eaten any more than the cows do)

If God were an engineer, which metaphorically speaking at least He would have to be, and he turned in a schematic for the earth as a final draft to any engineering firm worth its salt, He’d be fired at on the spot and laughed at on His way out the door.

And it’s not as though the evolutionary perspective of creation is any better! Kill or be Killed, right? Only the strongest survive? What kind of suck-ass world is that? So if you’re born with a handicap it’s just, “Sorry, better luck next time?” I wish there was some way for people to just stop treating each other like shit for a whole year, just to see how things would go.

Anyway, I digress. Things have been weird lately. I’ve been considering a number of possible future careers. For anyone reading this that actually doesn’t know me I’ve gone from being interested in Physics to Journalism to Biology to Translation over the course of the last three years.

I know I want to do something that actually has merit.

I want to contribute to the existence we are all stuck with, to make this place a little less of a hellhole. However, I’d also like to make enough that I’m not destitute.

I don’t know if this is going to present a problem or not yet.

I know that whatever I end up doing I am going to continue to write.

I don’t know why I’m posting this on the internet. I think it may have something to do with man’s search for immortality through his works, or something like that.

For a while I thought about joining the merchant marine. Hell It worked for Kerouac, but I really don’t like the idea of supporting the conflict in the middle east.

I think I’ll try to get a job down by the docks this summer. Something outdoors.

Wow. This post is beginning to sound way too much like a fucking diary entry. Anyway. I should probably sleep or something. Good night all.

I’ve realized that writing is probably what I’m going to end up doing with my life. one way or the other. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but it seems to be the only thing I have a real knack for. I’ve flaked out on a lot of things in my life, including, but not limited to, this strange bastard child of a blog. However, I thiiiiiiiink I may be writing here more. Think. Possibly. No promises.

My writing before was fueled largely by caffeine and depression, and I think I’m going to try and learn to write well without those things now. Hopefully this’ll become something. I’d really like that.

So keep reading internet-people. Or I’ll turn my killer deodorant sales-androids on you.

And you don’t want that.

Well I’m getting tired of it. I seem to be all talk as of late. I get all fired up about something, but I don’t actually do anything about it. This changes now. Each week I’m going to highlight a fucked up situation in the world, all over the world, and I’m going to go into all the gory, uncomfortable details, and then I’m going to tell you how you can help.

I’m not just going to tell you how you can help though, I’m going to give you three choices: The lazy option (usually donating money), the committed option (usually donating time), and the life-altering option (huge changes in your lifestyle).

This week’s subject will be arranged marriages in the Middle East:

Arranged marriages have been around for a long, long time. The first book of the Christian Bible, Genesis, talks about a proposed arranged marriage (between a man and a woman whom he had already raped). Now in this case, the Israelites were just trying to trick the rapist into making himself and his fellow men vulnerable by convincing them to get circumsized (a process that hurt a lot more back then) so that they could take advantage of their weakness and murder them all, but the point remains that both parties were talking about marrying off vast groups of women to random, strange men whom they’d never met like it’s no big deal.

This dates back to sometime between 1500 and 500 B.C.

There are a lot of reasons why people got (and still get) into arranged marriages. Sometimes it’s about providing a child with a stable family, as was the case with 10 year old Nujood Ali of Yemen (information courtesy of CNN). Her parents believed they were putting her in the safe, loving arms of an older man who could care for her better than they could. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a scumbag and repeatedly raped and beat her. Nujood was lucky; she managed to get a divorce.

In many Middle Eastern countries, like Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, marriage is about money. The parents of the bride charge what is called a bride fee or dowry for their daughter’s hand in marriage. Often this results in something comparable to selling a pubescent child into sexual slavery. This also results in what is quite possibly the most bizarre and inhumane form of arranged marriage: bride kidnapping. I’m sure many of you reading this out there in internet land have seen the movie Borat, where the main character, who is Khazakstani, tries to throw a burlap sack over Pamela Anderson and kidnap her to be his wife. This is no joke. It is a regular, accepted method of marriage proposal in a number of Middle Eastern countries.

Typically the would-be groom chooses a woman he want to take as his wife and, in an effort to get around those pesky, expensive bride fees, HE KIDNAPS HER. This was traditionally done on horseback, but is now usually done by car, or if the “groom” doesn’t own a car (which is likely, since his broke ass couldn’t afford the bride fee in the first place) he may even HIRE A TAXI FOR THE DAY.

I will repeat that:

Sometimes in countries like Kyrgyzstan, a man will hire a taxi driver to help him kidnap a woman.

Under the best circumstances this is a fucked-up form of dating for the socially retarded, and, once abducted, the woman may protest the capture and the marriage, winning back her freedom by holding out for many hours while the man’s female relatives attempt to put a scarf on her as a symbol of the union.

In the worst cases, this is little more than an excuse to rape the woman and not pay her family for the use of their daughter’s vagina.

And finally, the worst and most pitiful reason (and probably the oldest too) for arranged marriages: to stop two groups of people from killing each other. In some parts of the world, the only way to get two families, villages, or nomadic groups to get along and not murder each other on a daily basis is to force them to be blood related by marrying two or more members of the families.

More often than not this results in a really bad marriage with a lot of yelling and hitting on the part of the man, who gets away with it, since women are often treated as little more than property in a number of Middle Eastern countries, most notably Afghanistan.

So what would you do if you got sold/traded/kidnapped and ended up married to an abusive sixty-year-old who brutally raped you nightly? You’d probably try to run away, right? Unfortunately, when the ENTIRE FUCKING COUNTRY believes you should be treated as property, it makes it pretty difficult to do that.

Take these two Afghan girls for example (information courtesy of the New York Times). At the tender young ages of 13 and 14, these two girls were married to a couple of abusive old men. Naturally they tried to run away. They dressed as boys and made a break for it. They were caught, by a police man, and sent back to their husbands. For their insubordination they were viciously beaten by a Mullah (religious leader) in a circle of no less than three dozen armed men. Many people videotaped it. VIDEOTAPED IT. Thankfully (sorta) the girls were given forty lashes with a leather strap and were promptly divorced by their “husbands.” I put that in quotes because guess what: All of this? These forced arranged marriages? THEY’RE ILLEGAL IN AFGHANISTAN. That’s right, a goddamn policeman – instead of upholding the law – took them back to their criminal, violent “husbands” for an illegal beating.

Here are some pictures courtesy of the Birmingham News (taken by soldiers in Afghanistan) of a woman who went through a similar ordeal.

But enough of the darkness. Here’s the hope.

The lazy option: Donate to the Red Crosss/Red Crescent. This organization operates shelters for runaway brides, providing them with food and medical care. They also help the widows of these men, who are often treated like whores, and have difficulty going out in public without a man. Sometimes they even feel that it’s worth it to remarry another abusive man just so they can go grocery shopping.

The committed option: Do what I’m doing. Spread the word. Tell your friends. Tell your family. Hell, start a Facebook group. Just do something…  AND donate.

The life-altering option: Volunteer. Go to these places and see these women. Look at the sadness and fear in their eyes and help them live better, freer lives. Put your own life at risk for the sake of theirs. You might learn something.

And that is that. And it’s now 3:53 a.m. and I have to be up by 10 tomorrow.

Signing off,

- Josh

I arrived. Connor was gone. I took out my camera.

There you have it. The riveting tale of the time I went to meet Connor at the docks, but showed up late to find that he had already gotten a ride from another friend, and that ended in me shooting four second long exposure night shots of the moon. (That is the moon in those shots by the by, not the sun)

Until I have something of merit to post,

- Josh

Turns out the world is going to die by nanobot: http://www.good.is/post/scientists-create-nanoscale-robot-spiders-from-dna-molecules/

That is, if it doesn’t die by zombies.

But enough about the ever-approaching apocalypse. You must be curious about my life! I know you are, since all I do on this godforsaken site is post the inane goings-on that make up my day-to-day existence, and for some reason unbeknowst to me, Shutter Junkie still has readers. So:

This summer is going to be rather hectic. I have an internship with a professional photographer in addition to my regular job at Wawa. This totals roughly 45 hours of work per week, not including the journals I have to write for the internship “class.” I use quotation marks here because even though I’m not taking the “class” in a classroom, and I’m not learning from a member of my college’s teaching staff, I still have to pay 1100 dollars to receive instructions from a third party professional. I’m not entirely sure how the school I attend manages to spend that much money just entering the three credits I get from the course into a computer. I suppose it has something to do with the halfhearted glances my “internship adviser” will be giving the journals that I’m required to keep to prove that I wasn’t spending eleven hundred dollars just for shits.

Anyhoo.

Two big festivals this summer, both of which i intend to write about. First, I’m making my way to AllGood, a bluegrass/folk music festival down in sunny Virginia. Notable acts include Railroad Earth, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, Parliament Funkadelic, Darkstar Orchestra (an excellent Grateful Dead cover band), Cornmeal, and Yonder Mountain String Band just to name a few. I have no idea what kind of festival this is going to be, but honestly, I’d make the road trip just to see the Blue Ridge Mountains again. In fact, let me show you just how beautiful they are:

I snapped this picture while on the only vacation I’ve ever taken down in Luray Caverns, West Virginia. It’s one of my favorite pictures. My parents and I had stopped briefly at a roadside pull-off to admire the view, and I happened to have my camera on hand. This was back in, oh, let’s say 2007.

The second festival is, as it has been for the last two years, the Philadelphia Folk Festival. This year should prove to be even more eventful than the last two, since we’re looking at almost a dozen people in our campsite alone. Also, I plan on getting a tattoo this summer. I know. Thrilling, right?

Anyway, I really am working on a secret project this time, one that may merit the creation of – pause for suspense – A NEW TAB IN THE MENU BAR AT THE TOP RIGHT OF THE HOMEPAGE!!!!! It’s just absolutely riveting, I know.

See you on the flip side, internet.

I need to shake things up. I think there’s going to be a road trip sometime in the future, though in who’s car, I can’t rightly say. That’s the one thing I still have to complain about I suppose. I’m twenty and I have to rely on my parents for rides.

I suppose I feel like I’m getting fenced in. Slowly, like how you sneak up on a bug you’re about to crush with a newspaper. I can feel my options in life slowly eking away, leaving me on a more and more set path. I guess it’s just a side-effect of getting older.

Fuck this.

I never let myself wallow in self-pity before and I’m not about to start now. I’m going for a walk. Then I’m going to Glassboro tomorrow. Early.

I’ll let you all know if I find anything worth sharing.

- Josh

That said, I have a bit of news. You ungrateful reader-swine shall soon be graced by a flood of posts by yours truly now that summer is really getting going. Why just the other night I had the most interesting evening with several fellows of the hippie persuasion. We discussed anarchy, Dungeons and Dragons and Electric Apricot over a bottle of Old Crow.

So remember, constant vigilance everyone!

Peace out.

An hour before all of this I found out that one of my favorite co-workers (in fact the one who got me my current job) was found unconscious on the floor of her kitchen. They’ve taken her to the hospital and they’re draining the excess blood from her head, but she’s still in a coma, and they say she’ll be paralyzed on the left side of her body for the rest of her life.

This is not fair.

Life is not fair. Yet, still the world turns.

I’m now sitting in the class that the essay was for, trying to stay conscious. I can feel the sleep clawing at the corners of my eyes like so many tiny wolverines, and I know this is going to be a long day.

Then again, it could be worse. I have pretty damn good life.

Anyway, enjoy your various days fistulanauts.

But for some reason (yes grammar Nazis, I started a sentence with the word but) I started listening to people earlier this year. When my professors told me I should focus on a specific topic, I listened. I tried several other blogs, all themed. I’m sure you can guess how well that went since I’m back here writing to you people again.

So here I sit with a tall cup of black coffee and a pack of unfiltered Turkish cigarettes, (sorry Mom and Dad, I love you, but I smoke sometimes) thinking about what I’m doing with my life. I had thought that settling on journalism as a profession would set my future straight, but all it did was tear the fucker into a million pieces and spit them back in my face. I haven’t felt this alive in months, and I think I’m beginning to realize why. It’s the same reason I really abandoned Shutter Junkie in the first place:

I stopped doing things.

Towards the end of the summer I started planning for my next year at college - getting housing issues settled, swapping classes and the like. I stopped going out and adventuring because I was too damn busy. I realize now that was a mistake. I feel like the last few months of my life have been a grey, hazy blur and I’m sick of it.

I will have no more of it! Lo, I am come again! Once more shall the slavering, gibbering masses that daily travel the interwebs be graced by the greatness of my words. They shall run from my fingertips like liquid mithril, filling those who read them with a sense of awe and wonder the likes of which have not been seen for decades.

That feels good. I miss writing like that.

So there you have it. I’m taking up the mantle of my photo-blog-not-really-a-photo-blog yet again. Once more I shall write whatever I wish, and once more shall you all read it because, if you think about it honestly, you’ve got nothing better to do with your sad, fluorescent-light lives. Hell, it worked for Kerouac and Thompson.

“Oh no!” cry the fanboys, “he just compared himself to Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson!”

You’re damn right I did. They were people just like you and me. They put their pants on one leg at a time, they bled when you stabbed them and their shit stank just like the rest of us. The difference, as I see it, was that they had the stones to admit that and try for greatness anyway.

Fuck mediocrity. Life is just. Too. Short.

Be seeing you.

And with that I bid you good night, rapscallions of the internet! May your dreams be many and filled with wondrous child-like whimsy.