Posts published in August 2011

Question:

I work for a media company. We’re quite busy lately, and I would like to send our interns, who are unpaid college students, on the occasional coffee run, but it seems wrong somehow. I know they wouldn’t be learning anything, but isn’t it better for the company to have an unpaid intern and not a paid employee do this?

If I am correct in my assumptions, you work for some miserable nameless drone factory spreading the disease of capitalism across the world. You seek to poison minds with your Christian agenda. Though I do not support your doctrine of the light, let us examine your question from an intellectual standpoint, something I am sure you know nothing about.

First, if you are going to draft students into working as slave labor for you performing menial tasks, is it really so inappropriate to send them on other less educational menial tasks? Nonsense. Banality is banality. Whether they are filing a heart-crushing stack of paperwork or fetching coffee for you and your lazy officemates, what’s the difference? Both are a supreme waste of the students’ time. What could they possibly be learning from such nonsensical tasks as you have appointed them? Don’t waste the time of people you actually pay to be there on something as foolish as coffee runs. Use the slaves.

In the darkened days of college, I spent the longest winter of my life working as the intern at a local radio station here in Trondheim. I took the job primarily to steal blank cassettes on which to release my countless, brutal black metal projects and demos. Everyone know that cassette tapes are the ideal medium for distributing black metal demos. Only sell-outs would use CDs. And digital files? Worthless.

During my internship I was sent out for coffee many times, but did I ever feel like it was a waste of time? Of course I did. It was an enormous waste of time as are all internships. Therefore your interns are wasting their time by just being there, so if you waste their time in turn by sending them for coffee nothing is lost.

You know what, maybe you should all—paid and unpaid—go on coffee runs all day. Then your pathetic propagandist media empire would crumble into dust as is the fate of all humanity. I beseech the wolves of the new moon to feast upon your bones.

Hang yourself.

Soundtrack: Darkthrone’s “Transylvanian Hunger”

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Editor’s note\\\ This is the first of a bunch of advice columns I’ve written for Vox Critica in the character of Torgeir The Black Metal Extremist. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. -TBL

The world can be a tricky place to manage and we all need a little help from time to time. But, all too often, the advice giver is just as messed up as the givee, what with all their pretensions about what’s right and what’s wrong and all the hang ups that come with giving advice for a living.

If something so insignificant as whether or not she regularly changes her underwear bothers you, I suggest you stop analyzing her and start thinking about exactly what is wrong with you. Let me ask you some questions. What is normal? What is hygiene? If your vile lifemate has not changed her filthy undergarments for two weeks, what does it matter to you? Who are you to impose your fascist standards of cleanliness on her? What do you find, and I quote, “gross” about this? Are you some paragon of virtue who has never worn the same socks two days in a row? Who are you to judge this woman? When did you first recognize that you were a vile worm?

Do you look down on me, Torgeir, when you learn that I once wore the same leather armor for months without removing it or cleansing it of blood?

Many years ago, in the grim light of a winter’s dawn, as smoke rose from the embers of a recently burnt church, I raised my knife to the sky and plunged it into the chest of a man I had formed my first band with, a man who brazenly accused me of not truly being committed to the cause of purging this country of Christianity. When I felt his heart pumping blood all over my hands and I saw the light dim in his eyes, I knew that I was the victor. From his floating rib I fashioned a necklace as a grisly totem of my triumph. And what was the point? Nothing. There is no point. We are meat and when I took his life I changed nothing. His wasted existence is just another moment in time so vast and incomprehensible that our pathetic, weak, human brains can never possibly understand it. We are led by nature to believe that we have meaning and purpose, but this is a cold, dead world that will consume you and then forget you even existed.

To put this into words your feeble mind can comprehend, if you do not like that she does not change her bra for two weeks, liberate yourself of her. Stop being such a weak-willed worm and do what you must. In the end nothing matters at all. Do you think future humans will look back and care in the slightest that she did not change her bra? No one will ever even know she existed, just a stain on humanity’s poisoned genetic lineage. Soon she will be in the ground feeding worms and you will be dust.

Stab yourself.

Soundtrack: Emperor’s “Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk”

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