Methods of Saving Moolah

There’s always these articles in Yahoo! and other such trite sources of information that advise us on ways to save our money. Such as utilizing coupons, driving less aggressively, paying off credit cards with the highest interest first, and other such trivial methods of scraping some extra cash back into the coffers–or, at the very least, simply stemming the flow of money out just that much less.

While those methods, and others, are all important ways to save, I would like to forward some of my own methods of saving cash which I think are more effective. Excelsior!

1) Stop using Mach 3s and dropping $20 every month on razors. Transition into wetshaving (just one upfront initial investment) and you’ll save a lot of cash over the long term. Razors for safety or straight razors are significantly cheaper, and it’s furthermore a more fulfilling shaving experience.

2) Shave your own head. I used to go to SuperCuts or whatever cheap haircut store was around. I kind of liked how sometimes it was a pretty young lass that was cutting my hair. But I also noted that all they ever did was ask me what length of guard they should use on the clippers (as if I was supposed to know). So I realized, eventually, that I could just do it myself. That’s at least $20 in savings every two to four weeks, depending how often you cut your hair. And a pair of clippers is cheap, and they will last you for years. That’s a lot of money saved over the long term.

3) Forgo the gym and go hiking/running/walking. All you need is a pair of shoes. Or invest in a bike.

4) Brew your own damn coffee. I’ve bought a lot of Dunkin’ in my day, and I can attest that it really adds up over the course of a year. It’s the little steady, daily transactions that drain your income. It tastes better at home anyway. And all you need to make your own coffee is coffee and a French press. Forget drip brew; why pay for filters?

5) Hang out at home. You’ve heard of “staycations.” Well, how about “stay ins”? Instead of going out, you stay in. Invite your buddies over. Hang out at the local park. We all need to get out sometimes. But if you make it into only an occasional expenditure, then you will save big time. It’s quite easy to drop $60 in one outing on a few drinks. Drop that $60 on a fine whiskey instead and you could sip at it slowly over the course of a month.

6) Get over yourself and drink tap water.

7) Use the library. Libraries are fucking awesome. You can get nearly any book you want if you are willing to wait for it.

8) Don’t be an organic freak. Buy organic local produce or join a CSA. It’s important to support organic, local, and sustainable use of land. But forget the damn organic cookies and organic cereal. I mean, really. Just let it go.

9) Recognize the difference between luxury and necessity, and make your choices between the two consciously. A car? Sometimes its a luxury or a necessity, depending on where you live. In NYC, it’s a luxury, and an expensive one at that. Movies at the movie theater? Do you really need to see the movie right when it comes out? Is it really better in a movie theater? I find it obnoxiously loud, with way too many trailers and advertisements. In fact, I would rather just read a book. A lot cheaper, and more fulfilling. Sorry movies.

I think that last bullet point is actually the most important one. If you are making your choices consciously, then you are choosing to invest more in certain activities or things because you find them more fulfilling. And thus, it is worth it to you. But there are many things that we throw our money at that are not more fulfilling, and that even degrade our quality of life.

The moral of the story? Spend your money wisely.

Venting/Elaborations

Convenience—luxury—the basking in a belated glow of ignorant ease, is made possible by armies out there embedded in the cusp of entrenched effort. They slog through ungodly tasks and hours, enduring what we would not like to think about, so that we can have what we want, when we want it, at cutthroat prices, in vast arraigned heaps of information and packaging.

Today, royalty includes vast swaths of consumers barely cognizant of their status. You, dear reader, are one of them. You are being served like a pagan deity of yore, a pound of nard for your feet and a waitstaff attending to your every vaicarious bowel movement (BM). You eat food grown, trucked, wrapped and served by ancient fossil fuels that took milleniums to become transformable into rapidly wasted high heat energy. You drive down to the market, where all you have to do to meet your meticulously calculated nutritional requirements is pick off some pre-packaged products from the shelf. You work hard for this privilege, yes: but do you work as hard as a farmer of old, the farmer who rose before dawn and worked past sundown to generate a (possible) surplus? You consider such work to be beneath you, behind you, inhumane, third world.

Do I sound critical, post-modern? Am I deconstructing the dynamics of consumerism? Let me be more clear. I think that the world of commerce and capitalism, generated off of the hard labor of man in conjunction with his machines, is just as it should be. I like to work hard. I do work hard. I work perhaps not as hard as our aforementioned farmer, but just about as hard as I can endure, with sleep deprivation, physical labor, and long hours at all times of the night and morning. I feel at times like I am a soldier, off battling enemies for a society that is barely aware that what I am doing is for their benefit. When I come home from the battlefield, no one wants to hear of my stories, nor will understand them, like Hemingway’s soldier in A Soldier’s Home. I am part of an army of people out there working extremely hard so that you and I can walk into a store and buy what we want without applying any thought to it. Providing service.

There is a tremendous amount of work that goes into providing a lifestyle of convience. And hence, an enormous amount of money to be spent and made. Such is capitalism, and this is its bounty. We can criticize it and predict its demise—ala Marx—all we want, but ultimately, this is the fabric of our economy and the defining nature of our existence, for better or for worse.

But I want to be clear about something else. I do need to whine a little bit sometimes, I need to deconstruct a little bit, critique and discern. So that I can go back to working my butt off and earning my hard-earned cash, providing my customers with the best in customer service. I begrudge no mindless consumer their complacent royalty. So don’t begrudge me my need to vent, my need to be recognized in some manner and degree. I don’t like to complain, or even to talk much about work in general. But it now defines my every sleeping and waking moment. I have to discuss it in some way, shape and form. I have to beg for some kind of empathy and understanding in the midst of the grim reality of my exhaustion.

How long can I do this? How long can I last? Like the soldier who keeps wanting to go back to the front even after his leg is blown off and his mind is frayed, there is something addictive about being pushed beyond your limitations. Something in me, the masochist ascetic who also loves running likes the fact that I am being stripped of all prior associations. Lain bare of my weaknesses, honed by a trial by fire of necessity, of everyday effort. As the trepidations of my initial newbie legs wears off, I grow ever more confidant in my capability. I can live on 4 hours of sleep. I can shed my excess body fat. I can survive on the middle of the night subway amidst sketchy perverts and petty criminals.

I am being shaped by the fires of the city. This is what it is to work. This is what it is to commute. This is what it is to mesh into movement, energy, mindlessness. The city, the compressed motion of commerce, renders us nebulous. We move in multiplicities. We are not one, we are many, defined as one by each other. We are clouds, we are spray, we are bullet points littering across the empty space, sentences to something that is unseen, organized by something beyond that could be cold, heartless, and angry, or could be warm, embracing, and loving, depending on what you make it out to be through the fog of your weary hope.

New Horizons

Thus gainfully employed, I am now having my true “New York experience”, consisting of long public transit rides (2 trains and a bus) in the wee early mornings, people scattered throughout the trains in all manner of exhaustion (you know, when you pass out on a seat and your neck is all bent and floppy like a dead chickens), working with a diversity of youth and old local folk with heavy accents who hold conversations that could only be held in NYC (I couldn’t even begin to characterize it yet; read Don Delillo’s Underworld to get an idea: terseness, machismo, and tangential reference are its defining characteristics).

After having been stationary for so long, being actively on my feet for 10 hours each day on top of 3-4 hours of transit time has been debilitating to my aging body. I wake up sore all over, barely capable of moving. But by the end of my 1st week, the muscles have been slowly adapting, and I have been surprisingly not as tired as I would have thought during my shifts except at the very end, which is either due to the influence of the eternal florescent lighting, or to 14 years of running. In addition to honing my body, I also seem to be developing an accent and the ability to declaim aggressively in an ironic and self-mocking manner.

It’s interesting to see the other side of the grocery retail world, and to realize just how much hard work goes into supplying the spectacle that is the consummate consumer experience. Behind the facade of colorfully arrayed specialty products lies constant labor and activity. All for your convenience, for your grazing pleasure. You walk somnolently through the diversity of choices demanding your attention, picking and choosing wantonly or stringently depending on your personal restraint and desire. It’s a disturbingly unconscious yet powerful aspect of our industrial daily lives. It’s beautiful and terrifying.

One thing is for sure: you can bring in all the tote bags you want, you environmentally conscious people, but take a look at all the plastic packaging that went into the little convenient product that you just purchased. Our lives are built a little too much, perhaps, on expediency. But who am I to talk? I like having the power and freedom to wander through international markets choosing at will just like anybody else. I suppose the question is whether or not we can sacrifice, as a culture and society, a little bit of convenience in order to reduce the amount of waste created in bringing us the exotic products we desire. But who would want to give up the global market? I love exotic chocolate, fruits, nuts, and other fun and delicious items. The crux of the matter boils down to transport efficiency and product packaging, in addition to sourcing locally, seasonally, and organically as much as possible.

But in the meantime, keep on using your tote bags. I’ll be taking a hard look at the packaging waste issues as I become more deeply embedded in my position.

Change

The economy is sinking, the dollar is weak, McCain still somehow has enough popularity to be elected, the age of cheap oil is over, global warming is accelerating and past stoppage time, ecosystems are collapsing, and people are still eating trans-fats like there’s no tomorrow. My oh my, what is an attuned human being to do?

Contrary to the chatter on the news, I see some of these developments as a good thing. Not all of them. Just the ones that will actually wake the sleepers up, like rising gas prices and paranoid banks. As long as mindless consumers could drive their SUVs around, pumping their gas on overcharged credit cards without a care in the world, then why would they care? As long as you can shit downstream, then who cares about the people getting shat on? Well, now they will start giving a shit because shit is hitting the fan and swinging right back into their face.

Unfortunately for most people, it takes a heart attack—maybe even two—before they begin to enact lifestyle changes. The large-scale heart attacks are occurring. But still people sleep, still they sit back, thinking its just all a big burp in the never ending growth of the American economy.

Those days of having everything come easy (for some people) are gone. From here on out, it’s going to take a certain level of innovation, sensitivity, and wisdom, a certain forethought and diplomacy, to work across boundaries and borders and enact successful changes.

This is another way of saying Vote for Obama, you fucking morons.

Overplayed Songs on the Radio

We all know how radio stations have been sterilized and homogenized by large conglomerates such as Clear Channel. It’s almost pointless to even bother turning it on, unless it’s a last hold-out local station or NPR. I think part of the blandness of radio is also the simple, aggravating annoyance of having to always hear the same old perennial favorites played over and over and over and over and over again every single day. Whatever value of freshness and wonder that these songs may have once possessed has been completely ruined by overplay. How many times can you listen to U2’s One or Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing (wait, I guess I could listen to that one again) or EMF’s Unbelievable or Eagles’ Hotel California , etc, before it just sounds like, well, like the same song that it was the last time that you heard it. . . like yesterday, for example. I think that there should be a quota for songs, world-wide. A song can only be played so many times before it must be shelved until a certain amount of tasteful time has elapsed, like a few weeks to a month. After all, there’s plenty of good music out there to play, other than Nirvana or Queen or Nickelback or Jessica Simpson or whatever crap they’re looping as we speak on a station near you.

Here’s a suggestion for how to attain this goal: have a centralized database of songs (operated by the UN or something) that must be accessed by commercial radio stations and advertisers, which logs how many times a song has been accessed and begins to impose a tax after a certain number of plays, with the tax increasing incrementally until no one will have any reason to play it anymore, whereupon it will begin to incrementally decrease until it is free again. Or impose some kind of cap and trade system on songs like they do with carbon emissions. Something. Anything. Anything to end these endless loopings of the same old songs. Anything to force commercial radio stations to start rotating something new and interesting instead.

Alas, I know, it’s a pipe dream. But wouldn’t the world be a much better place?

Thoughts on Money and Poverty

Some thoughts that have been fomenting somewhere in the back of my dome have been coming to the fore as my trip winds down to a close here in Bogotá, and I’ve had some more time to contemplate the bigger picture. One item that I’ve been considering is the changing perceptions I have of the concept of ‘gentrification’. I’ve always been critical of the influence of big money on people’s lives and communities. I’m especially critical of the bland and complacent lifestyles of the well-to-do, the ‘yuppies’, the SUVS, the suburban sprawl, the homogenous franchises, and so on. But my experience here in Colombia has driven me to question some of the aspects of gentrification that before I immediately and completely rejected. This has been due to the fact that when you’re traveling on a budget here, you’re inevitably staying in some neighborhoods that aren’t exactly high-end. And as a traveler coming from somewhere else, it makes you all the more conscious of the presence of poverty, wealth, and the types of commerce going on around you. And when you are looking simply for a bite to eat, or a place to get a good juice or coffee at, you are looking for some kind of welcome, however tentative that may be. At the very least, simply the product you desire, preferably sanitary and with a smile. But in some places, these basic expectations have been hard to come by, for the very simple reason that many businesses here are run by families or individuals that cater solely to a small local market, and have little interest in growing or developing their operation. They will close for weeks on end for the holiday season, they will not provide customer service aside from plopping down your plate and taking your money, and there’s often a sense that they could really care less for your business.

In such circumstances, I have discovered a sudden appreciation for the Juan Valdez Café chain. Yes, it is a franchise, but there are a few things that you can count on when you enter into one of these ‘yuppie’ establishments: 1) friendly, efficient service; 2) clean facilities, with a bathoom; 3) an atmosphere conducive to sitting, relaxing, chatting, and reading. These are aspects, as Americans, that I think we often take for granted in our businesses. We expect—and demand—adequate customer service, clean facilities, and proper delivery of the product. We live in the land of franchise.

Now let me be clear about something: I despise franchises, both as a concept and in their usual effect on local communities. However, when else has failed, and all I’ve wanted is somewhere to sit and read and drink coffee, Juan Valdez has been there. This isn’t to say that I haven’t discovered some great local cafés and what not. I will happily circumvent Juan Valdez whenever and wherever I can. But there have been times when there just haven’t been any other places open, or air-conditioned, or quiet or spacious enough to read in.

Here in Colombia, they don’t have the knee-jerk allergic reaction to franchises that many of us idealistic Americans have developed. They love their Coca-Cola and Postobon, they love their Juan Valdez, and while there are certainly Colombians who question capitalism and its accompanying imposition of materialistic values, as well as the influence of foreign investment, overall, Colombians seem quite happy with name-brands and familiar franchises. And that may have had a subtle influence on my experience here as well. When everyone drinks Coca-Cola all the time, it makes you more apt to grab one and sip it along with your fried chicken, patacones, and french fries.

But I’m getting off on a tangent. What I was getting at in bringing up the subject of Juan Valdez cafés is that there can be a positive effect from the influx of outside money and businesses. As a traveler and tourist, for example, I am bringing in money from outside into the country, and this is good for their economy. I understand when people speak disparagingly of gringos, and I have never been one to welcome tourists into my own community with open arms. Tourists are, in general, annoying, demanding, and most of their money goes to big business. That said, however, in the big picture, I believe tourism is a good thing for a country as a whole, especially if the tourism is encouraged to developed concurrently with local environmental and social concerns.

And so I’ve been extending that thought into the more general concept of the influx of outside money into any local community. I think that gentrification is easy to criticize and despise, but I think that what also needs to be considered is that inevitably, a community needs outside input in order grow. Before gentrification, a community is generally mired in poverty, and there is little potential for growth and expansion. Gentrification, in fact, could be seen as an inevitable aspect of growth and development.

I’m going to ignore for the moment the myriad negative effects that gentrification can incur on the local community (such as simply driving out all the prior, poor inhabitants), which I am fully aware of, and rather move onto the parable of hip-hop. The growth and development of this music mirrors quite well the growth and development of any community when it encounters a sudden influx of outside wealth. Hip-hop started, of course, in the restrictive hard-knock life of the streets. It was a revolution in articulation. Suddenly, disenfranchised youth found a creative and positive outlet for their passion, desire, anger, and thought. Much like graffiti, it empowered them in a way that, at first, seemed unprofitable to the outside world. It began simply as a method for those who had been unseen and unheard to express themselves. And as hip-hop developed and expanded into other communities, and eventually across the globe, it inevitably became commercialized and diverged into the mainstream, and glitz and glitter and glamour now are the name of the industry game. It seems to be dominated by a rich and famous elite, who proclaim at every chance they can their extravagant wealth. While this aspect of hip-hop can and will be lamented by those who love it for its roots in self-expression and rebellion, at the same time, it can also be seen as an inevitable outgrowth of the expansion and development of the music as a whole. This is analogous to the development of any artist who is “discovered” and inducted into the mainstream. Sometimes, and oftentimes, this sudden influx of outside money and influence results in pathologies and the destruction of an artist’s original intent and purpose. But other times, it simply extends the power, creativity, and influence of the individual to a broader audience, which is a good thing, if they are doing anything original and inspiring. And they develop their style in accordance with this extension (sometimes, of course, losing some of their original fans in the process).

But such is the process of evolution and growth. Communities, like individuals, are not steady-state bubbles. They are influenced necessarily by external factors, and they must utilize and embrace these factors if they are to grow. They can, of course, choose to withdraw inward and fight off all externalities, but inevitably, they either must collapse or expand.

So to get back to my original idea: I am beginning to think that external inputs of wealth are not completely undesirable. The problem, of course, is that most of the time, none of this wealth ends up in the pockets of the original inhabitants of a community, and they are either driven out, or they are left to fester in small controlled pockets within the newer developing community. So the problem I think that must be addressed, therefore, is not that of “gentrification” per se: the problem that must be addressed is: how can a community expand and develop its wealth locally, while at the same time accepting, encouraging, and embracing external inputs of wealth?

I’m going to get into some ideas and approaches to that question in another post, as this one is getting rather long. I wanted to first lay down the foundation for it, however, as for me these ideas are a new direction in thought. I’m beginning, basically, to look more at such issues in an integral fashion, rather than simply separating the negative from the positive and looking only at one side. I’m recognizing that the idea of money and wealth is not so simple as rejecting the entire concept of monetary gain. Rather, the idea is to unite the principle of natural wealth with that of manufactured wealth.

Traffic and Fearlessness

It would seem that there is much less fear in general in Colombia: fear of death, fear of strangers, fear of sickness, etc. This translates often into brazen displays of recklessness, such as absolutely insane feats by buses and taxis, but it also seems to produce a greater social cohesiveness—it’s like every man for himself, but everyone accommodating each other in getting everything for themselves. This is seen most visibly in the manner that cars and buses and trucks nearly seamlessly merge and wend around each other in dense forests of flowing traffic, all without any concern for lanes or signals. The vehicles get literally within centimeters of each other and pedestrians, often while flying along at 80 mph on a residential road. Accidents certainly do happen here, but they don’t seem to happen any more frequently than in the States—if anything, the frequency of hearing the sirens of an ambulance wafting across the night air seems to be much less. Thus, much more attention is paid to your surroundings and the people around you, because it is recognized that your life may depend on it.

So it would appear at a glance that life is devalued by this apparent lack of concern for safety, but this is not so. Clearly, people here enjoy themselves and don’t seem incredibly stressed by fear or worry, even if many of them live well below modern “living standards”. This closeness with death rather translates into a relaxed enjoyment of fleeting pleasures. Dancing, music, sitting in the sun, etc. So perhaps it is a superficiality that is similar and contrary to the superficality of modern materialism in its way. In the United States, everyone is frightened of each other, frightened of death, frightened of cancer, etc. And I don’t know that we enjoy ourselves any more as a result of our worry and stress, even though we garner higher standards of living. I also don’t know that our traffic moves any more efficiently or safely as a result of our wider streets, multitudinous traffic laws, and giant SUVs. Maybe we need to just relax and enjoy ourselves a little more, and accept death a little bit closer into our daily existence as the inevitable reality that it is . . .

Copyright Infringement

Copyright law is an interesting field in this day and age of internet decentralized flows of international information. Back when things like music, knowledge, and systems were all packagable and distinct, it was easy to delineate the producer, an audience, and a middle-man marketer. In order to get their music out there and heard, musicians mainly had to get their advertising and packaging done through big name record companies, who of course took all the profits. And the dislocated audience had to pay fees to buy the record, the tapes, the CDs, whatever.

Phish might have been one of the first big names in the music industry that heralded the power of word-of-mouth in the medium of cyberspace. Suddenly, hippies and college music aficianados were re-united, through a grassroots movement amplified by friends e-mailing, chatting, and sharing music on-line. This new undefined medium of word-of-mouth is also demonstrable in the slow but steady growth of homegrown record labels started by artists such as Hieroglyphics (Hieroglyphics Imperium) and Ani Difranco (Righteous Babe). These artists demonstrated that they could make money much more directly themselves by producing their own CDs, self-advertising, word-of-mouth, and live shows.

During the rise of Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella, and all the other various forms of information-sharing networks, the major record labels immediately reacted in panic, fear-mongering, intimidation, and other acts of regressive dinosaurism. For anyone with any clear view of reality, the recording industry is run by a bunch of numbnuts. I’m speaking as someone who was 19 years old at the time, when the free-music-downloading bonanza was at full bore, and I was saying back then that if the record labels were smart, they would start an easy on-line service that charged people to download music. It isn’t exactly rocket science: there is no way of controlling information on the internet; however, there is a way to make some information more easily accessible, and you can charge for it. Just like idiots still shell out doe for AOL when you can get all of that shit for free, all without the “You’ve Got Mail!” annoying ass voice. There’s always a market for lazy people. But of course, the morons that run the recording industry were too greedy and corporate dulled to note that. Instead, they quoted figures of how much money they were losing to on-line music piracy. But what was not calculated in such a figure was: 1) the money they could have been MAKING if they stopping whining and started utilizing the new on-line medium; and 2) the fact that most people don’t have such a large expendable income that they can buy all the music they’ve ever wanted to, and would never have shelled out the doe for many of the songs they downloaded for free.

What’s amazing is that now, almost 10 years later, the recording industry is STILL using Gestapo-like tactics and trying to instill fear in the populace, desperately attempting to save their toppling edifice of an industry. It’s pretty pathetic to watch, knowing that there is absolutely no way that they could ever stop people completely from sharing music on-line. It’s simply impossible. And this leads us to some interesting topics: in a time in which information is easily transferred and accessible, where do we draw the line between producers, and audiences; and where are new spaces opening for evolutionary collaborations, new economies, and a whole new way of thinking?

The fact is, not many people out there feel guilty about ripping free CDs. But nobody would argue that artists and sound engineers shouldn’t be paid for their efforts. It comes down to what one thinks about something like music, art, and all acts of creativity. Isn’t it a community thing? Isn’t it a social thing, at root? Yet somehow such simple acts as creating music have been disassociated from what they are really about, and it has become focused primarily on money. On projecting a marketable image. Such “artists” are pretty easy to discern: just turn on the radio, and there you are. A bunch of manufactured bullshit bent on appealing to the broadest possible lowest common denominator, just like McDonald’s. And the recording industry harvests giant profits off of these namebrands.

I think what is becoming apparent here is that simultaneous with the rise of the new medium for music distribution, there needs to be a new economic medium for artists and producers to make their money, that will hopefully enable them to make money directly, rather than having money be made off of them by corporate douche-bags. In connecting an artist directly with their audience, the internet may open new realms of possibility for music making that were hitherto unforeseeable. And it may just turn out to be a disguised boon for smaller artists who would be more than happy to see their music shared on-line for free to bigger multitudes of people. Suddenly, artists that before would turn out maybe 15 people in a distant city from their hometown may now be turning out 115 due to on-line file sharing.

One thing is for sure: those people who are innovative and creative will rise to the top of this new medium, and all the reactionary dinosaurs (like Metallica, for example) will settle on down to the bottom with rocks tied to their legs.

A List of Ways to Reduce Your Waste

The main problem right now in all of the world, including within each of our own lives, is waste. We waste our time, we waste our resources. Our social, economic, and political systems waste money, people, natural capital, time, and energy. We have all been taught to waste, because we have been taught—and we allow ourselves—to be blind, heedless, and “good consumers”.

Businesses can strive to become closed loop production systems, in which they use a whole systems approach to reduce and eliminate waste. This ultimately saves them money and allows them to become increasingly efficient and agile in adapting to the market. So too in our individual lives we should strive to eliminate our output of waste as well as our input of short-term or function-less products.

People always seem to be confused about what they can do in their individual lives, aside from donating money to charity, to really enact change to regressive and repressive social, economic, and political systems. As in any grassroots movement, the real change comes from within. And then it begins to affect daily lives. And daily lives—the furthest downstream from centralized, sloth-like systems—affect everything.

So as an exercise, I thought it might be useful to attempt to compile a list of ways to reduce waste from our everyday personal lives. I don’t do many of these things myself yet, either, so take these as suggestions and goals. If you know of other ways that individuals can act to reduce their production and consumption of waste, please feel free to add more in the form of comments. Also, think of ways that you can mirror some of these actions within your community or workplace. Sometimes you’d be surprised at what you could change.

Please note also that almost all of the items detailed below will ultimately save you money, in addition to the social and environmental benefits, so please get beyond the dismissive mentality of labeling me as a “treehugger” or “hippie”—that’s the kind of perspective that lends itself to further waste.

1) Purchase from local businesses and food sources as much as feasible.

2) Reduce or eliminate the use of a personal vehicle. Walk, bike, and utilize public transportation. Delimit the sphere of your personal social needs to as localized an area as feasible.

3) Utilize your free time for things that make you feel good, foster interaction with other people, and that are productive. Reduce or eliminate mindless activities such as TV watching. Learn new things. Take classes at your local community college. Check out books from your library.

4) Make exercise a part of your daily existence, such as in biking or walking to work, or biking or walking to a bar or bookstore or cafe. Try to eliminate the perception of exercise as an accessory chore or activity to become more desirable.

5) Cook your own food. Mend your own clothes. Make your own coffee or bring your own coffee mug to coffee houses. Utilize whatever resources you have to do your own thing.

6) Eliminate the use of plastic bags at stores. Bring along a tote bag or backpack to carry items in whenever you go shopping.

7) Stop buying water bottled from municipal sources. Get yourself a Brita filter and drink tap water.

8 ) Buy produce directly from local (preferably organic) farmers; attend farmer’s markets or join food coops.

9) Make your own household cleaning solutions

10) Purchase only energy star rated appliances and lighting systems; convert all of your lighting to compact florescents

11) Insulate your house with energy efficient windows

12) Convert your lawn to a natural food source

13) Compost your food and outdoor waste; utilize kitchen scraps for the making of stock

14) Harvest rainwater and utilize in shower and household use and/or garden irrigation

15) Design and implement a greywater system

16) Reduce your use of paper and wood products; reuse paper as much as possible (double-sided printing) or eliminate altogether through the use of a computer. Use alternative woods, reclaimed wood, or engineered wood products whenever possible when designing and building structures.

17) Take yourself off of junk mail lists; utilize e-mail notification services where possible for bank notices, cellphone bills, etc.

Intelligent Design

A lot intelligent people swear off humanity, because people make a lot of stupid decisions, are easily misled by unscrupulous “leaders” like cattle to the slaughter, eat fast food, and watch stupid television programs and movies. The problem with such a perspective is that it does not take into account that when you are looking at a large mass of humanity, you are not looking at “people” per se: you are looking at the cumulative effects of social/economic/political systems. Humanity reflects the decisions that have been made in how their daily lives flow and in what direction they move. If they are unemployed, violent, and lazy, that is a sign of poor social systems, of bad decisions made by those interests which determine in which direction money moves, in what manner a city is planned, etc.

In other words, “problems” such as homelessness, poverty, and crime are systemic problems of design. Problems such as destruction of the environment, high percentages of needless waste in every sector of industry, and general unhappiness in career choices, are problems that can be solved through better design.

If intelligent people sat down at the drawing board and thought through plans before acting upon them, we could largely eliminate the vast amounts of waste that we each currently create every single day. We could eliminate global warming, pollution of groundwater, and destruction of topsoils. Yes, we could even eliminate world hunger. These are not the perennial problems of human nature, never to be solved. Slaves, illegal immigrant labor, third world underpaid underage workers, and suicidal smalltime farmers do not need to exist in order to support global economies. Homeless people do not have to wander through alleyways muttering to themselves and plundering dumpsters. Women and children and men of all colors and types and sizes do not have to be made to feel inadequate, ugly, and useless. Teenagers do not have to plot out acts of heartless rage. SUVs do not have to tear thoughtlessly through mile wide suburban streets.

We do not have to be addicted to hydrocarbons to lead fulfilling lives. We do not need myriads of multi-colored plastic packaged useless products screaming for our attention in the supermarkets.

In a well designed system, such as Nature’s, there is nothing wasted. What is one creature’s waste is another creature’s food. Everything is recycled, rebirthed, renewed.

American culture has been birthed on action, progress, manifest destiny. Without consideration of the later effects of our actions, we have moved forward to trample dreams, cultures, peoples, histories. 50,000 species of plants and animals become extinct every year, largely as a direct result of our and other industrial nations actions, our appetites, our businesses, our politics. We are indeed the world’s number one superpower, meaning that we are the world’s largest bully, the world’s largest devourer of natural resources, the world’s largest creater of waste. No, don’t point your finger at China. Don’t point your finger at India. Those nations take the exponential industrial growth of the United States as a beacon and guide, rather than as a warning.

Inaction, time devoted to thought, to attention, to observation is essential to action made with integrity. Without this space of critical focus, actions made will necessarily be destructive, flailing, meaningless. Our culture doesn’t live anywhere near “the moment.” We exist either in some state of longing for a golden age that never existed, or we exist in doldrum half-awake states of TV-movie entertainment suckling. To truly exist in the here and now is to go beyond partisanship, beyond political ideologies, beyond economic theories. It is to look at things as they most truly are, beyond yourself, within yourself, as a part of yourself as a part of a team as a part of a community as a part of the global network. Collaboratively, working as a team of designers, each special interest working with every other specialized interest, we can redesign, retrofit, and renew all aspects of social, economic, and political systems to more accurately reflect mental, spiritual, and biological reality.

Closer than you Think

How well most of us control and repress ourselves. We are quite capable of never allowing ourselves to enjoy anything. Rather, we conform our minds into a daily numbness, we are addicted to maintaining normality and status quo. We are afraid to feel beautiful, to reach ecstasy, so we pay others (“stars”) to act these things out for us. Why dream, why imagine anything when fantasies are manufactured for you by Hollywood? Why enjoy your body when there is already a whole industry producing more desirable images?

If corporations had their way, we would be mindless slugs hooked up to machines that force-fed us our automatic daily 24-hour manufactured consumer sludge. We would eat, we would accept, and we would consume; we would be like baby birds, voracious, always wanting to be fed, unable to do anything for ourselves except clamor for more and open our mouths and orifices to be willingly raped by inhuman forces. We would secrete toxic waste, our noses would run with polystyrene, our eyes would tear with pesticides. We would eat fish made of plastic, and lick our wax glossed lips. The world would be barren and empty, but we would be content, swaddled in our tinted tanks, well connected by a series of pipes and wires that would tie us forever into what is known, what is accepted, what has been extracted and dissected and labeled and reduced and derived and bottled and devalued and sold below any meaningful cost.

What is it that makes us human? What is it that makes us alive? What connects us to this thing known as existence? What are we that we can feel?

The water the thirsty man seeks is nearer to him than his jugular vein.

Bad Dream

Years from now, we’ll look back, and we will be ashamed of ourselves. Ashamed of our country. Ashamed of our businesses. Ashamed that we were acting collectively like we were on a cocktail of crack, speed, anti-anxiety medications, anti-depressants, and heroin. We were junkies, addicted to oil, addicted to heedless consumerism, addicted to harvesting nonrenewable resources in the face of the destruction of everything meaningful all around us, addicted to making a few people more and more rich and most people more and more poor. We were manufacturing weapons and selling them to the highest bidder. We were devastating the topsoils of every piece of land we developed. We were polluting the very oceans, the very wombs of life from which we had originally evolved. We were cutting down forests that had existed since before we had a Constitution. We were killing each other, killing ourselves, killing our children.

Worst of it all were not these devastating and inevitable outcomes of industrial capitalism. The worst of it was that in the face of the quite obvious failure of our ideologies and economic systems, we chose to dig ourselves yet deeper into blindness and despair. We allowed greedy, unscrupulous warlords to plunge our country into despicable battles in foreign soils in the name of religion and freedom. We allowed ourselves to become implicated in this pillaging by lending it our full support. We allowed ourselves to become inured by false promises of success, progress, and happiness. We allowed ourselves to think that we had somehow conquered racism, grown beyond sexism, escaped the harness of enslavement, and achieved a free and equitable economic playing field. We pretended that the devastation of the environment, the outsourcing of our jobs, and the ever increasing rifts between us and our children were problems that could be solved through band-aids and half-assed measures and complacent gestures.

Seems like it must have just been a bad dream . . .

City Story III

Jara looked at herself in the mirror, contemplating her curves, acknowledging her beauty. She touched up her eyebrows and slipped into her heels and walked the 8 blocks to her job, brushing by distant strangers rushing to their destinations. The sounds of the city street, a world immutable in its reality, untouchable in its concreteness. Men who hadn’t bathed in months curled into darkened entryways, pigeons stepping blithely out of footsteps with their heads penduluming and mindless. The smell of grease and tar and eggs and somewhere too the ocean in the breeze, and the trees in their square enclosures, all mixed into something indefinable and filled with some kind of ache and loneliness and excitement. Anything could happen, but you kind of knew that it wouldn’t; and even if it did, somehow it would be just like something that had already happened before.

Jara opened the door, catching the sun streaking across its mirrored glaze, and stepped into the air-conditioned lobby, into another sense of manufactured space and scent, a world created to address the chaos outside, an answer to its immutability. Here in this corporate structure the world was exactly as it had created itself according to a law that subsumed and consumed humanity. Nothing mattered, nothing was of value except as it pertained to money, to money that grew endlessly. The people within reflected this demand and were judged accordingly. How expensive the shoe, how much the gym, how big the ego, how connected the family.

But sexuality was acknowledged, albeit grudgingly, to have a force and power which of course was linked also, somehow, to money. A women’s genetic traits as symbols of the fruits of money. All of this available only to the highest bidder. Jara knew how to use what she was God given to play to these moneyed mentalities. They thought that they could have anything they wanted. Let them think that. And then give them nothing.

She flirted, she made loud jokes, she went out drinking. She would let them buy her dinner. But this was where she stopped. She knew that her limited power could only be wielded through the subtlety of suggestion. To allow anyone to fulfill their fantasy of ownership would be to lose all of that power. She would become just another thing, another product, another backroom story. For now, she was unattainable, and thus desirable, and thus powerful.

But people always attempted, of course, to bring her down in other ways. Insinuations about her ethnic heritage, snide comments about her upbringing. But she knew that with these things, too, the greatest weapon was her indifference and mystery. She had made the mistake at first of telling stories about her childhood, before she learned the hard way that anything that she said that was true would be used against her. Now she kept her true self and history hidden from these people. She would talk about current events, the weather, fashion, arts, food. Anything but about herself.

Distant, cold, mysterious, well-attired and full-figured. They all wanted her. They all wanted to tear her down into a powerless, sexed, insecure mess. They wanted her to act like something that they could buy. Something they could use and throw away and forget about in their quest for something else they could never have.

What environment you talkin about?

What often is left out in all the trendy industry talk about environmentalism is that our current culture of rampant consumerism is completely unsustainable. What that means, in everyday terms, is that ethanol will not replace oil. Nor will solar and wind energy. In fact, no alternative energy source will support our current lifestyles.

This isn’t what people want to hear. People want to hear that everything will be the same, the course will be stayed, as long as we pass a few bills and start driving hybrid hydrogen fueled Humvees.

It’s heartening to see that talking about concern for the environment and making conscious decisions to reduce emissions and impact is now an acceptable political, ethical, and economic topic, and no longer relegated to hippies, fringe activists, and bitter apocalyptic visionaries. But it is at the same time disheartening to know that most of the populace still remains completely ignorant of the devastation of their current modes of existence coming their way to a reality near them. The only way we will survive this paradigm collapse is if we can adapt quickly to the dream that has been put aside in our hearts to make way for a flat-land one-dimensional world of commerce, cultural colonization, and mass produced franchise mentalities: the dream of shared plots of land, fresh vegetables, simplicity, and local community. You know, the things that we really want to think that we have evolved beyond, with no hope of return, distant in our immutable individuality and greed.

We’ve got to let go of a lot of the so-called progress we think we’ve attained. The progress of complacency, specialization, and homogenization. The domination of centralized sources of technology, media, and banks. We’ve got to re-wire our brains, re-wire our social relations, re-wire our currencies, re-wire our hearts.

A revolution can only occur synonymously with evolution. Are we ready? Ready to let go of our fears, let go of our illusory separations from each other formed from myths of class, race, and birthplace? Or do we want to keep blindly forging our ways like lemmings towards the cliffside of inevitable gravity from this pinnacle of consumption we’ve created?

World leaders mean nothing. Corporations mean nothing. Banks mean nothing. Nuclear weaponry means nothing.

We—collectively, byte by bit, our desires, our everyday decisions, our subconscious compulsions, our loves, our relation ships—are everything.

Giving All

I think that culturally, through movies, advertisements, and the like, we have been taught that love is about receiving things. Like Valentine’s Day. It’s about getting what you desire. For girls, it proceeds from getting the bouquet of flowers, to getting the diamond ring. For men, it proceeds from getting the poonanny, to getting the trophy. As if all you really had to do was go out there and succeed. Conquer, divide, and rule. Get a nice house, acquire some kids, and there you are. All tied into the American Dream.

As if you just put yourself out there, and worked hard enough, and were good looking enough, then all your dreams would be fulfilled. Some perfect person would walk through the door and everything would suddenly fall into place.

But love isn’t about comfort, ease, and mere fulfillment of desire. It’s about giving. Unconditionally. How many people, besides truly loving parents, really know about unconditional love? We have been taught that the world should center about us (and all the things that will make us feel bigger, better, and more complete). But when you truly love someone, the world centers about them. No matter if they are perfect or not. No matter if they fulfill some adolescent fantasy or not. Simply because they are them.

The things that make us beautiful are the most natural aspects of ourselves, that we would consciously hide if we knew that it was showing. The flaws, the silliness, the shy craziness waiting to be unleashed by adoration. The beauty that we see in the marketplace, the airbrushed glossy masks, are manufactured to fit into some collective fantasy of perfection. But they are not beautiful. They are desirable, simply because they are unattainable. Yes, unattainable. Just like advertisements for products try to sell you some simulation of happiness, contentment, and eternal well-being, if you just had that one thing. But the very idea that you could find nirvana through a product shows just how unattainable such a state of happiness really is. Did it ever occur to you that perhaps it is not in your nature to always be happy? To be perfect? To be desired by everyone?

This reminds me when I was in college, when ‘E’ was making its journey from hippy new age raver desert parties to mainstream clubs and consumer groups. I knew people who were taking E every weekend, and taking more and more of it, attempting to prolong their sense of belonging and connection to other people, the feeling in music, the beauty of dance and touch and scent. These people became ‘E-tards’, and you could visibly see the effects of taking way too much of the drug in their faces, the draining of nuance and groundedness, the flattening and glossy extension into disassociated fantasy. They totally missed the whole point of the experience, just as most people miss the whole point of all ecstatic experiences. It’s not about always being high, happy, and united with all the world. That in fact to prolong such experiences is to flatten out reality, at the expense of yours—and other’s—feelings.

We have to feel everything. We have to feel not only happiness and beauty but also pain and loneliness. And when you truly love someone, you lift up the barriers that separate you from them by accepting everything that they make you feel. You open yourself not only to their kisses and hugs, but their insecurities and pettiness. This is all part of the deal. You can’t have one without the other. Well, you could, but then it wouldn’t be love. It would be a conditional relationship based on your desires.

Some people are happier to flit from one person to the next like a hummingbird, sucking nectar from each one and then moving on before they run into emptiness. It takes a lot of work to hide what you feel from other people. It takes even more work to constantly hide what you feel from yourself.

Try loving someone for more than what you want from them. Just for them. Not only for the beauty in their eyes that first drew you in like flames in the night, but for the complexity and human nature and stark, bare, raw beauty in their hearts. Root yourself down into them deep. Because down here, in this other person, in the darkness of the unknown, in the ripping wind of the void and formless ancient beginnings, you may just find yourself. Complete. Beyond desire. Beyond suffering. Drenched in love. Immersed in love. Drowned in love.

Time to Grow Up

Systems of exclusion—this is what we learned in primary school. Find a niche, fit yourself in, make fun of the kid who stands out (even when you were one of them). This is survival mechanics, biological manifestation, pattern recognition. Learned behavior. Although there was always that part of you that understood that the outcasts, the sore-thumbs, were in fact much closer to you than you cared to admit. That you were in fact dependent on them to give yourself purpose and meaning.

You grow older, and as your awareness of the wider world extends, so too does your need for readily definable enemies. Again, there are given culturally or sociologically established minorities: the homeless, perhaps, if you need something closer to home; or homosexuals; or maybe simply the dark-skinned turbaned men from gutteral lands on the evening news waving guns. “Here, it’s ok,” your peers and consumer media tells you, “you can hate these people. They are different.” And thus, you can pretend to know who you are. You are not them—you are God fearing, freedom loving, money making, success driven. You are clean, you are whole, you are pure.

Maybe you come to realize—or maybe you do not, given your level of intelligence and ability to imagine—that at some level, you are only hating yourself. That you are not representative of some cultural, sociological elite. That such an elite does not exist. That this so-called “elite” in fact consists of a conglomeration of power hungry, unscrupulous warlords, gang leaders, fighting like rats for their little piece of turf. And everyone in between either living their lives heedless, caught in the crossfire, or simply pawns in the play by play, puppets on strings. And this is the part of yourself, this subservient mass of complacent fodder and indignant impotence, that you have been pushing away as an “other” and hating. This is the part of yourself that you don’t want to see. The part of yourself that sits at street corners and begs for money, the part of yourself that turns a trick in the spaces between lamplight on side streets downtown, the part of yourself that sleeps in doorways, the part of yourself that picks pounds of fruit during harvest seasons for a few cents, the part of yourself that crosses the border in the desert without food or water, the part of yourself that talks to yourself in tongues, the part of yourself that shakes uncontrollably, the part of yourself riven, stricken, striped with a subharmonic pulse of the moon that can’t be named, can’t be helped, can’t be driven into the light of the day.

Children are reflective of this rift. They are growing increasingly distant from what is understood, while ever increasingly congealed as an easily groomed consumer group. They are labeled with acronyms, thrown into detention centers, fed with pharmeceuticals, whipped with crafty standardized fill-in-the-bubble questions. Toxins, radio waves, video games, free porn, Doritos, Pepsi, Britney Spears shaved sex symbol trailer trash meltdown, ADD, ritalin, SATs, cellphone ringtones, Clear Channel. You know the rest. It’s overloading everyone. The mercury is raiding the fish. The carbon is filling the air. The phosphates are flooding the deltas.

The world collectively awaits its adulthood. We all need to grow up. The biggest threat to our existence, the greatest enemy to be overcome, is ourselves. Ourselves. Not some Korean, Arabian, Venezuelan enemy. Not some teenaged runt with a trenchcoat and a gun. Not some poor, destitute, homeless, drug addled nameless on the street. Not them. Not other. Just us. Just you and me and our kids and our future. Time to include, accept, embrace. Time to grow up.

The Average American

What does the average American know of the Arab world, of its history, its hospitality, and its music? What does the average American know of themselves, of the vast hidden chambers of their own inner worlds? What does the average American know of the spirituality of sexuality, of what it is like to value another’s flesh like the finest of wines? What does the average American know of empathy, of how to relate to another human being regardless of class, sex, or appearance? What does the average American know of sustainability, of self-empowerment, of vision for the future? What does the average American know of thought, reflection, and observation? What does the average American know of silence?

Are you a statistic? Are you an average? Are you a consumer, a waster, a feeder on the bilge of media scum? Are you another number in a herd, another follower in the cult of nationalism, another ignorant, complacent parasite of trickle-down economics?

No, I don’t think you are either. But this might be what you would look like on a martian nature program on Americans.

Happy Family Holidays from NYC

Here’s another thing that I find interesting about New Yorkan lexicon: when they join a line of people waiting for something, they say that they are getting “on line,” as opposed to what I am accustomed to, which is saying that I am getting “in line.” Also–and this may just be my girlfriend’s family and not symptomatic of the tri-state region itself–I have heard people referring to “turning off” candles, as if they were electrical appliances. And of course, you gotta love the accents, like how “orange” is pronounced as “aah-range” as opposed to the West Coaster’s “ohrange,” or how “god” is pronounced “gaad.” I even find myself slipping into a Bronxian accent at times, as I have a tendency to imitate the speech of others.

I just saw a weird ass Chinese movie, The Curse of the Golden Flower. It’s an orgy of nobility, incest, and death, like Shakespeare mixed with Oedipus Rex and opera. One thing I’ve noticed about this line of Chinese martial art/visual ballet movies (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon/ Hero) is that the women characters, when evincing overly dramatic passion and pain, must mouth breathe at highly audible levels, as if they put a microphone right up to the actresses’ mouth to capture it (probably dubbed in by some industry gimp whose specific role is to mouth breathe the actresses in all of the top Hong Kong hits). The queen in this movie, Gong Li (who has got quite a bosom on her), mouth breathes such that the theater literally quakes with it basically throughout the entire film (there’s a lot of dramatic passion going on here). There’s also a plethora of quivering bosoms in this movie, and it’s kind of a sub-plot delight, to observe the various bouncing bosoms in different lighting and horse riding and ninja battling scenes. So if you’re into copious amounts of heavy mouth breathing and jostling Chinese bosoms, this movie is for you.

New York has been treating me well, I’ve been eating mass amounts of good food and spent a Puerto Rican New Yorker family Christmas, replete with gigantic presents and pernil and rice and beans and a bunch of people shouting at each other to converse. It helped remind me why I no longer care to “celebrate” Christmas, i.e. buy a bunch of junk for my own family members that they don’t need. C’mon people, if you are really into the holiday season, then realize that it’s all about spending time with your family, not spending money. Cut out the whole giving of presents (except to the kids, who of course need to be indoctrinated into our capitalistic consumer culture) and just hang out with your family, share a nice meal, talk, drink spiced wine. Remember when there was that whole Pentagon ad campaign a few winters ago, where they equated buying consumer products with fighting terrorism? It’s ironic, given that we are actually encouraging terrorism (desperate poor people fighting to be heard and empowered) by contributing to mindless products made in “third-world” countries for the profit of corporations.

Anyway, hope you had a good time with your family, as human beings rather than consumers.

Nature Porn

I just went to Yosemite for the first time. It’s a beautiful place in that dappled valley, with the myriad histories witnessed by those glaciated rock walls extending from the world renowned exploits of Camp 4-based climbers to the natives who once summered there, the maize ground by squaws atop rocks. But I have to say that as much as I enjoyed my stay there, and hiking up its steep winding trails, the domestication and Disneylandification of the valley left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

I understand that the wonderous wilderness should be able to be enjoyed by anyone and everyone. But I had the feeling that something sacred was being desecrated by such a wide-open welcoming of the masses. I had the feeling that maybe some things of natural and rare beauty demand a sacrifice to be viewed appropriately. Simply being able to drive right up to Glacier Point takes away from that feeling of awe and appreciation that is felt after one has hiked up to its inclusive viewpoint. And in the valley, there are houses, a courthouse, and a supermarket. There is a bus system that was making its night rounds completely devoid of passengers but right on time (if only South Lake Tahoe had a bus system as reliable and efficient as that). Ever since the valley’s wresting from the Native Americans by greedy, unscrupulous gold diggers, the magical valley has been used more as a profit-generating resort for urban tourists than experienced as the sacred, pristine example of divinity that it is. I would rather not see busloads of Japanese tourists snapping picture after endless picture of El Capitan. I would rather not see suburban-bred pasty people who can’t walk one mile to save their life eating candybars and ogling at bears. And while I understand that the age of enjoying forested areas devoid of insensitive human life has long since passed before I was ever conceived, it still irks me when I see a gorgeous natural place made out to be Disneyland.

I guess that’s the flip-side of the coin in an age where we expect and demand instantaneous gratification, communication, and information. We don’t want to work at understanding the depth, history, or complex beauties of the world around us–we just want to point and click. We want to disembark out of the plane, off the bus, or out the station wagon and say we came, we saw, and we conquered. Come to Yosemite for some good nature porn!

Multifaceted Universe

You think, perhaps, as you are entertained, that you are simply an observer. You think maybe when you sit alone in your apartment watching your TV that you are detached. You might pretend to be completely uninvolved in politics, war, and other issues relating to the outer world. You might tell yourself, and you may be told: I am a civilian, I am a consumer.
But such reductions of reality eventually lead only to pathologies. Looking at a three-dimensional world in one dimension will only get you so far before you see the blood on your hands, or see your blood on other hands.

You are not a mere observer. You are a creator. You are a destroyer. You are not alone, not when every thought and feeling within you have eventual impact on another human being. You are not uninvolved in politics–every move you make has political ramifications. You are not a civilian, you are a potential target. You are not simply a consumer; you guide the market.

Things are much more complex, much more deeply interconnected than we are taught to admit. We aren’t supposed to know that the decisions we make affect people on the other side of the globe. Remember the butterfly of the chaos theory? A butterfly flaps its wings and a hurricane blows somewhere else. Forget the theoretical butterfly. Consider this: you flap your lips and a storm will blow inside of someone else’s heart. Imagine the compounded effects of that.

People watch sports, they gather together in stadiums, they rise together in staggered sequence, their arms rising and falling in the air, the intentional mass reproduction of a wave. It is cute, it is tame. It is like a child trying out a bicycle with training wheels.

People amass into crowds, into mobs, they can grow suddenly violent, suddenly barbarous. Nothing can get in their way. Cars will be overturned, whole city blocks destroyed. It is disturbing, it is wild.

The inherent power in an individual lies in that individual’s ability to identify with a collective. An empowered collective, aware of itself, can do almost anything.

Winter Coming

First snowfall of the season today. Having grown up in Southern California, where the change of seasons is marked only by holidays, I am growing to cherish the feeling in the air when a season here shifts. The winter can be felt approaching, and things grow quieter, and I find myself similarly turning inward. A form of hibernation, I eat heavier foods and crave the occasional coffee drink.

I don’t want to be morbid or to give the appearance that I am dwelling on dark feelings, so please don’t take this the wrong way: in a couple of nights, it will have been exactly a year since a friend and co-worker of mine was found hanging in his room. This isn’t a topic I care to discuss much anymore, but I feel also that it isn’t something that I should be afraid to talk about. I’ve learned something about pain and grieving since then. I’ve learned that grieving isn’t something that you should ever hold onto, but it also isn’t something that you should ever deny, when it comes. It comes less and less now, like residual shockwaves rolling outward from a rock falling into a pond. The rock has sunk down into the deeps, to settle like a solid emptiness in my heart, a quiet stillness where once there was violent struggle, like the ruins of a sunken ship on the bottom of the ocean. Grief comes when it comes, and it rolls through me and then I’m left a little more at peace than before. When it comes, it’s just like it was that first night–the simple question that will never be answered . . . why?

A hollowness that will never be filled, a piece of yourself torn from the deepest essential core of you, the part that connects you to all your friends and family and loved ones. In bridging the wound, you discover at the end of the tunnel that you are even closer now than ever to strangers, to acquaintances, as well as to loved ones. There is a kind of strange and cruel benediction in the healing, in which you find that Toby, through his self-destruction, has shown you the path to greater love. Never again can you take someone’s solitude for granted, assuming that they are alright with being alone. You know now the silent violent churning of loneliness within, and what kind of destruction it can leave in its wake when finally it is shared with the world.

Our culture of extreme individualism has created an environment where people are isolated and lonely, desperately searching for a way to be deeply interconnected but not knowing how to find such access. People use chatrooms, personals, MySpace, clubs, bars, searching searching for someone to see through to their divinity. Hungry to have the chance to show it. Hungry to the point of starving, hungry to the point that when the feelings finally come out, it is monsterous, and violent, and steeped in bitterness and anger.

In European cultures and in the beginning of American society, intellectualism–political and ideological debate–provided fuel for networking and conversation and sitting around sharing drinks and smoking. Now when we go to coffee shops or bars, it is to sit by ourselves or with a single friend. We are allergic, of course, to anything resembling intellectual elitism or artsy fartsy-ness, as well we should be. But we need to find a way to get together in groups, beyond concerts and clubs, a way to congregate and debate and share stories and find a way to acceptance of our differences and a way to understanding of our essential humanity. I guess blogs are a start, and that’s why I do this. But it’s still disconnected in terms of physical interaction. We need touch, we need voice, we need laughter.

Find a way to build this space for people, a place where they can interact without having to be alcoholics, a place where they can talk without having to wear designer clothing. There are, in fact, already places like these all around you–it is simply a matter of opening yourself up to them.

I miss my friend, I miss seeing him everyday. I miss his grumpiness and good work ethic. He taught me never to take anything or anyone for granted. He taught me that you can never know what another human being is going through inside. He taught me that I need to find a way to connect to other people, even when they give the appearance of not wanting a deeper connection. Everyone wants so desperately to be loved and understood. And everyone deserves to be.

Fear as Needling of Futurity

I was beginning to think about the psychic underbelly of homogenized America, the gated communities in which the houses look all the same but not many people can relate to their own neighbors. There’s this undercurrent of steady, unspoken fear running through all of these people toting their status symbols and wearing the fasionable uniforms of first-world privilege. It’s a fear that became horribly, surreally captured by the constantly looped playbacks of 2 passenger planes slamming deliberately into the twin towers. It’s a fear, of course, fed by the nightly news and the Pentagon propaganda machine. But it also, disturbingly, seems to be a fear fed by a prescient collective awareness, a subconscious inkling of what is to come.

Think of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, walking from their parked, polished SUV down 6 city blocks to the opera house. Yes, a rather far distance to traverse by foot in this day and age–but Mr. and Mrs. Smith are fit, trim, health-conscious Californians who eat lots of fruit and vegetable based cuisines paired with red wine. The night is brisk, Mrs. Smith locks up the car and sets the alarm with a push of a button, and they stride, fashionably attired, down the sidewalk. Mr. Smith walks with his arm protectively at his wife’s back, both guiding and establishing ownership. He is afraid of the downtown streets at night, the lounging, leering homeless and drugged, the muttering alcoholics, the catcalling perverted insane. Mr. and Mrs. Smith become aware of how their appearance presents them here as targets, as possessors of objects of desire. Their status–their class–is given heightened clarification–they become uncomfortably aware of how they have set themselves apart, of how their very lives, their unconcious thoughts and habitual modes of being have set them apart. Because here on the street there is dirtiness–and they are clean. Because here there is ugliness–and they are desirable. Because here there is poverty–and they have money to spare. Their fear is palpable, an intensity in the air. They walk a little bit quicker, unspeaking, Mr. Smith’s hand at Mrs. Smith’s lower back, prodding onward, hoping to just be there, to be safe, to be enveloped by the glassed fortress walls of the opera house.

That was a re-enactment of the way it might have looked. Scanning the local section of the paper the next day, you just see another crime in the city, two murders downtown, not even very late in the night, when people are out and about and business is still mostly legit. What’s going on with this world? you wonder.

Because somehow this fear extends beyond simple paranoia. Yes, it has a lot to do with the fear of loss–because when you own something, then you also gain the fear of losing it, you’ve got to start worrying about protecting it, securing it, guarding it. But it’s more than just that. There also is an element of awareness that maybe some of these things do not belong to you in the first place. There is an element of awareness that it is not just about things at all, that it has to do with what is taken for granted. Yes–there it is:

That your very way of life subsists on what is taken for granted.

Thoughts in San Diego

Back in the land of San Diego, a sprawled sunny place streamlined with polished sport cars and gleaming SUVs, a desert beach implanted with flowers and shrubberies from all around the world. The people, too, seem to shine surfacely with some transplanted synthetic reflectant.

I always gain a sense in suburbed cities such as this that the freeways and wide-stretched streets don’t really lead anywhere, that indeed the traffic itself is the most cohesive expression of the cities’ collectivity, the only place where it’s people are somewhat gathered together and united for a brief space of time before separated and off-ramped into some outlying distant gated immunity. In the traffic there is danger, there are fatalities and accidents and fender benders, well-dressed anguished people on their cell-phones standing displayed on the side of the freeway in their full humanity, looking over the destruction of their crunched and dented vehicles as everyone slows down alongside to ogle, wondering perhaps if they too could ever be un-horsed in such a manner.

Swaths of empty pavement seem to best express the landscape of such a city, capped with a vast blue desert sky, the hint of an ocean somewhere in the breeze.

There is of course something captivating in its beaches lined with drugged out remnants of failed marriages and bronzed bodies rollerblading untouchably taunting along the boardwalks. There is some kind of laid-back but primal energy expressed in the waves on the shore that is sometimes glimpsed in the spaces between the reversed baseball caps and baggy shorted uniforms of the wannabe frat boys of Pacific Beach, a kind of stoic and vacant beauty pictured in the frame behind the halter tops and the designer purses of the moneyed sun-glassed mamas of La Jolla.

Everything is spread out and nothing is contained.

Of course what overtly plagues this city plagues every American city, and San Diego alone shouldn’t be castigated or targeted alone as completely unique, although it is certainly representative. Every American city suffers from some congealed homogenized mass of middle and upper classes. Once known as yuppies, although the term, like that of hippies, seems to have lost its force and meaning in the face of cross-pop-cultural fertilization. My understanding of the term is that it referred to the nouveau rich and their love of trendy gleaming franchises. But now it seems like all Americans–except those who can’t afford them of course–love their trendy sterilized franchises. Or maybe love isn’t the correct term, more like non-critically accepted. And who can really differentiate these days between the rich and those who simply live and spend as if they were rich? Everyone of course is simply mimicking Ol Uncle Sam in being good citizens and patriots and living in the glorious happy credit land of endless horizons, where if we all just keep on spending then everything will be ok. This is all tied in with suburbanization and sprawl and SUVs and strip-malls and Starbucks and Pizza Huts and all the other symptoms of decay erupting daily across the face of America.

Because these people, these so-called “yuppies,” are representatives of the fulfilment and end-game of the “American dream.” They are “successful,” they work kind of hard and commute to work sometimes 2 hours both ways stuck in traffic and they drive their beef-hormone and McDonald’s trans-fatty filled children to their football games in these gigantic gas guzzling machines that seem to serve more as symbols of unnecessary waste and possession of space than as functional cars. And these multi-ethnic, one-dimensional Horatios are scattered throughout the suburbs of America, J Crewed, equipped with cellphones and Ipods, and largely uninformed outside of the nightly news propaganda. And they are the hordes of the blinded cradled lifestyles that will be thrown into the cold when our nation hits the wall of economic and spiritual destitution to which it is speeding forward to so recklessly. And as I sit and type this out on my laptop in a Starbucks in La Jolla, yes, I am fully aware that I am included in this prognostication.

Trick or Treat

I spent a capitalist Halloween. Waited in line for what must have been 2 hours in a ninja mask and ski pants and a gigantic conical hat, sweat globules running down my ass. Finally got in so that I could wait another 20 minutes to get a drink. Watched people dressed in attire designed to hopefully get them laid: Halloween club attire. Like creative slut wear. There was another 2 hours of a costume contest run by the local ClearChannel radio station MC’d by a woman in a thong and angel wings. It was tedious and annoying, except for the thong, probably not helped by my state of mind after waiting in line and nearly passing out from lack of oxygen. Once the dancing finally commenced to everyone’s top 40 favorites, there was barely any room to maneuver more than an ass cheek here or a shoulder there. All in all, I finally managed to have a good time once I shrugged off the bitterness of feeling like herded cattle and started just dancing the way I like to, without giving a fuck about social implications. It’s nice to see some slutty girls in skimpy outfits getting down, I have to admit there is some form of redemption for the night in that. Gotta love this culture of consumption for what it is.

You’ve Got A Valentine From Mark! (Shoot it up your ass, Cupid)

So have you found that one who completes you yet, your “soulmate”? According to all pop music and Hollywood movies, this should be the defining purpose of my life. I sure wouldn’t mind finding some chick that somehow resolves all the inner and outer dilemmas of my existence. But from all my experiences thus far, women only complicate things. I’m about ready to throw in the towel on the quest for the Holy Girl. Not that I was really stressing myself out looking for her, or anything. Not that I ever really even tried, in fact. But still, just feeling the possibility of any such a thing existing exerts some kind of unnecessary pressure on my brain. It’s like if you think Santa Claus or Satan exists–you have to craft all sorts of confusing tangential myths simply to address the movement of getting out of bed in the morning. Let’s be blunt and to the point here. Basically, if you do not “possess” someone, if you do not have “someone to love,” then in this society you should be fundamentally ashamed, there is something wrong with you, you should desperately seek to find someone to claim and you should post an ad on Yahoo Personals or something. I mean, it’s almost like if you don’t got nobody, then you can go to the supermarket or the club or the bar or the Personals and buy someone and try them out. Me: I’m smart and funny and rich and I like to lick perineums. You: Bovine and well-endowed and can type up to 80 words per minute. In other words, based on things completely unrelated to anything having to do with divine intervention, you strive to formulate a bond based upon the ideal of simply being claimed. Because once you are claimed, then there’s no more need to stress out about being “one of the losers.” Who wants to be alone, unhappy, unpurchased? Buy me, buy me, buy me!

Who is my soulmate? Who will buy me and use me forever and recycle my soul? Who will complete my fragmented, insufficient self? Who will take my useless days and give them meaning? Who will understand what I can never say? Who will endure my stacatto farts? Who will look beyond my heart-stopping good looks?

Guess I’d better just devote the rest of my time to Allah . . .

Speculative Revolution Part V

Why are people starving?
Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.
Therefore the people are starving.

Why are the people rebellious?
Because the rulers interfere too much.
Therefore they are rebellious.

Why do people think so little of death?
Because of the greatness of their labors in seeking for the means of living.
Therefore the people think little of death.

Having to live on, one knows better than to value life too much.

–lao tzu

so i haven’t been telling you anything you don’t already know. i think we live in a time where it is hard for anyone to claim innocence. stupidity some might rightfully be entitled to, but innocence, no. everyone knows what commercials and advertisements and the media are doing. we’re just trying to make the best of it, enjoy what entertainment is provided, go with the flow. i think many of us are apathetic because of this, because we can see it but we don’t know what to do about it. and so i’m here today to tell what you can do about it: nothing. absolutely nothing. nope. you can’t change the world. you can’t make people’s lives better for them.

part of the whole problem for me has been that i was looking for something to DO. what can i DO to MAKE a change? well, the world is already changing all around me, every second. and i find that a big part of the problem is that i have been ignoring this, engaged as i am in some kind of grand, ambitious endeavor, even though i am not yet clear on what is exactly involved. imperialism, colonization, the abandonment of domesticity in favor of exotic adventures beyond–these are things that have been a problem with our western civilization for centuries. we’ve been looking outside of what we’ve got right here, right now, and instead been focusing on that OTHER, that THING out there, that OBJECT. glory, ambition, making the world a better place–these are the desires of the tyrant. and really, all it is is some form of insecurity. because what i have isn’t good enough. so i’ve got to get more, more. manifest destiny. idealism.

think about your brain for a minute. i have heard one professor describe the two hemispheres of the brain as if they were two separate selves coexisting at the same time, independent of one another, almost with their own identities. right brain and left brain. even within your own body, your own mind, you are divided. and growing up and living your life means learning to balance this, to unify the whole. the two hemispheres must maintain a dialogue, an interaction. the harmonious mind, where neither right nor left dominates.
think of this in terms of male and female relations. we still live in a misogynistic society. males and females act as if they are completely different species, as if there is a gigantic line dividing them, and they are at war. but this is ridiculous. male and female exists within our heads. are we different? yes, we are different. but this difference is something to share, not to possess. when you make love to someone, you understand their body. it is not yours, but you feel it as if you were them, momentarily. and you grow from this into a closer understanding of yourself.
now think of this in terms of international relations. we still live in a hegemonic society. nations act as if they are completely different peoples, as if those lines on the map are real, as if you could look down from the moon and see all the names. what is america doing in vietnam? what is america doing in haiti? what is america doing in bosnia? what is america doing in iraq? what is america doing? nations, territories, bodies of land. these should be spaces of sharing, not lines of possession. we should not enter them with objectives, with purposes, with score cards. not to claim, not to own. not to change, not to make better, not to take and to leave.

most of the evil in this world most likely came from good intentions. anyone with an overtly negative agenda is immediately castigated. but under the guise of goodwill, brotherhood, religious fervor, and love for one’s country the most horrible acts are committed. torture, for example, is common practice by those powers that feel the need to police and occupy another people’s land. routine procedure. they make a man feel pain to the point that he gives up his self-respect and tells them exactly what they want to hear. this is what they call “information.”

Speculative Revolution Part IV

the saying “what you can’t see won’t hurt you” has a certain truth to it. this kind of attitude is inherent in the way we walk down supermarket aisles–we don’t see how these products were formulated, tested, slaughtered, chopped up, and we really would rather not see that. for instance, meat. if we witnessed what is done every day to the animals
that were sacrificed to sit in spongy chunks frozen and wrapped, then we would get sick to our stomachs when we looked at it. but take away the product from the process of creation (or destruction), and what you have is just this detached thing, isolated, hidden behind layers of coding, marketing strategies, masks of complacency. and so what you don’t see isn’t necessarily hurting you–but someone or something else is getting hurt. ultimately, i would argue, it does hurt you. but that’s a different can of worms. let me stick with the idea of blinders for a minute. think about yourself walking down a city street, let’s say on your way to class, or to work. you pass by numbers of people, some you look at, some you ignore, some you look at and then reject and ignore. think about that second when you take them in your eyes and see what they are, or what you think they are. think about that second when you look away. think about that as a form of destruction, as a form of murder. you have rejected them completely, at that moment, for whatever reason. they were not good-looking, not interesting enough, too weird, too yuppie, too not appealing, not worth your acceptance. i am going to make the argument
here that little rejections like this, which occur in an instant and may not even be perceived by the other person, are one of the major problems in our way of perceiving the world and in the way we live our lives. the way you look at others affects them. the way they look at you affects you.
one of the worst things you can do to a human being, or to any creature, is not to persecute it, but to ignore it’s existence completely, to let it pass by anonymously like a thing, like an it, to use it only to get somewhere, like a freeway. alone, in your car, on the street, what are you to anyone else but a set of darkened windows, a moving vehicle, an obstruction, a danger, an irrelevance.
do you think you can handle walking down skid row alone, without the barriers of your car locked doors? the people on the street would eat you alive, would tear you to pieces with their eyes. unless, of course, you learned the mentality of the police force, which is to ignore them as people and see them only as objects, as trash.
it’s easy to ignore the life around you when you’re secure, safe behind fortress tower walls of lifestyle signifiers you are barely aware of. walking the streets downtown are some of the most terrifying and appalling and beautiful and distorted forms of life. many people have become the monsters that society abhors in the news, creates in the inhuman working and living conditions, and leaves to roam the earth, hoping, like victor frankenstein, that this life arisen out of death will just go away and leave them to their imagined romances. you can see it in the people’s faces, hardened and stripped of emotion, devouring whatever they can get a hold of.
and some of these people have become god-like apparitions, goddesses of the night, their eyes liquid fire. i find women from the streets to be more attractive than the skinny teenagers in fashion magazines. and chances are that skinny teenager in the fashion magazine is wearing an outfit derived from the luring designs of the streetwalkers. what i am trying to get at is that there is a relation between the visible and the invisible in society, that there is a direct correlation between mass consumer culture and individual castigation. we marginalize in order to ignore what is not relevant to the lifestyle narrative we immerse ourselves in. and yet, without these margins, without these ignored
spaces, we would not be able to construct the heroic history of our triumphs, the tragic drama of our losses, the totemic identities, the nostalgic yearning for what never was. in order to maintain the polite surface illusion of society, we cover over aberrations, we ignore the dangerous, the unwanted, the unacceptable. we wear masks for the performance.

Preterit Theory

Isis gave me a lap dance last nite. I nuzzled against her tattooed dolphins. And I realized, you know, that sometimes you’ve got to sell yourself in order to feel. To just say, hey, ok, I’m going to perform for you, I’m going to play this role in this game so that we can both get some enjoyment out of it. Let’s throw ourselves forward into the night and meet as masks on the other side. And you intellectual types who try to pretend like they something other than everything, it’s hard for you to let go of your identity, to let go of all this accumulated information about yourself, hours of mirror-time surveillance, replaying selected moments of your history and pasting them together so that you fit into this certain pattern of behavior, progress marked systematically by birthdays. But it’s all in the skin you know. When you are naked with another person, skin pressing together, are you yourself? You are something more, something less, something human. Something creature, breathing. This is your history, pores of skin sweating a deep musk, creating something new. Why do you feel the need to destroy this immersiveness with distance? Why do you watch yourself? You keep trying to keep everything inside, storing it all up like treasure for heaven, thinking that when the time comes you’ll be prepared. The time has already passed. You can’t wait to be saved. You’ve got to sell yourself in order to survive. Might as well enjoy it. Because you’ve got to sell yourself in order to feel. Noone’s gonna come to you and open you up. Noone’s gonna come to you and give you their heart. You’ve got to make deals to get past the pretense, you’ve got to agree to certain rules of the game. And the rules, honey, are this: we are what we don’t give each other. Hell, I’m selling out the system. I’m not gonna have anything left after this clearance. I’m not holding anything back. And who will be able to say, “This is what you are”? Because I’m yours. Because I’m everyone. Because I’m out there. And I’m enjoying myself.

re: dispossession

hey, i hate to tell you but the world is flat, and square. i get my information from mars. you’d better listen.
the good news is that we can set it on fire.

(they have machines sent encircling a distance, maintaining for 24 hours a day 365 days a week the image of the earth as blue enfenced rotundity. turn on the weather channelTM. they will tell you what the clouds look like. they will predict the weather for you.)

i get my information from the voices in my head.

i’ll tell you about our world. this world is flat. this world is square. this world is split into claimed sections, pieces of a pie, all orbiting around the belly-center of the united states of america. Russia may be big, but it’s split
in half.
that’s right. our world exists in the form of image. our world exists in memory. pure memory space. now you stand for what you’ve truly accomplished, for all your successes, for all your purchases.

what have you accomplished?

oh, so you’re filed. oh, so you’re squared away. watch the tv and let it tell you what you look like. you are square, and you are flat, and you can see all the world with the push of a button, with the opening of a cover, with the click of a pointer.
hmm. it’s got pretty good special effects. hmm. can it keep your attention? hmm. it’s cutting away for an advertisement. . .

what
are your purchases? where
are they from?

)i get my information from mars. they’ve sent their machines there but they
can’t get a lock on anything. the truth keeps
shifting.(

so where is the good news? they feed you with all the latest disasters, with all the latest deaths, with all the gruesome images of their tragic wars.
where is the good news? that’s right, open up your bible. that’s right. fold up your hands. that’s right, you should be ashamed. that’s right, you’d better open up your mouths and pray.
alright, now try opening your mind. try looking at the world in 3d. try looking out the corners of your eyes. try listening to the sounds far away from you, to the sounds close to you, to the sounds inside of you.
it’s trippy, isn’t it? alright, now look at yourself. alright, now look at yourself.
where is the good news?
yeah, bend your head down to the board and bleed your fingers til they’re raw. yes, gather together with others in fear and fill the space of a place-time with sound. yeah, sit your ass down and listen.
yeah! get your ass up and dance!

where is the good news?

the good news is that we can set ourselves on fire.

the good news is that we can light each other
on fire.

the good news is that the world cannot be contained. the good news is that we spill out over the edges. the good news is that no matter how hard, straight, and square the information is, we can put it in our mouths
and we can swallow it
in fire.

Tribe

Watching. Distant our minds grow from our bodies. We gaze at ourselves through the television, intelligence pouring from our faces like the fall of water onto rocks, streaks of lightning from a clouded sky breaking into the earth. We become objects, glistening with light, charged forms of desire, tremoring, moving across the surface of time like possessed animals, indefinable symbols.

Do you see the flood, O man in the suit, O man of the mirrored fortress?
Do you see what you have ruined in yourself? Do you think words will save
you now? Do you think that your past will teach you how to breathe
under
water?

There is no narrative that can encapsulate us. We are not a nation, we are not a generation. We are eyes, taking out the world, giving in the world.

We are love,
consuming everything,
holding onto nothing.

(Feb 7, 2000)

Did i say “love”? Such a trademarked term, traditional, safe. Not love, then. It is the experience of the moment i’m speaking of, the pushing forward like the prow of a ship through time, the forward falling pulse of a hi hat in a jazz stream. It’s the refusal to hold back any longer, the sudden spontaneous agreement to let go of everything and let yourself be whatever it is you are doing, whatever it is you are feeling. it is letting every single wave of consciousness that hits you run through you, refusing to stop, refusing to fall back onto what is known, what is certain, what is dead.

so then when you watch, when you sit and gaze at these dead images moving, dancing before your eyes, you are looking past everything you see. you know that these forms are meaningless, these words, these illusions. but you go with it, you let it take you, because you are no longer scared, you know that there’s nowhere that you can go that will take you away from what you aren’t. it is acknowledging that you could never possibly capture it, that you could ever possibly understand. it is accepting that every moment is a death, every moment is a birth.

we are the dead watching the dead,
living somewhere
in between.

Commercializing into Crystals the Eternal

-There’s a kind of semi-formalism going on here. I can tell right off the bat with these kinds of things. Look at the way she’s pulling off the lines; not enough faith to make her fearful, but just that bit of herself, just a small little lick, like snapping a snare to a funk beat. all the rest of the energy seems to go on down behind her face, go on down and
then come on up, breathing, snaking, circular, infinite. I think she knows I’m watching–but it’s not me exactly, it’s that effect that she knows she’s gonna cause in me–that everyone within me who is watching, that distant, silent everyone, all the nameless eyes that scatter across her body in aimless, fleeting moments on the street, when she passes like a dragon across windshield views, stepping gazelle down the sidewalk out the intersection like a dream, floating out of the stopped stream of cars like a symbol. it’s that shuttering moment when you know that both of you are watching, expressionless, divine, somewhere deep within you that burrows down into a hole of nothing suddenly becoming everything, everyone, coating the walls of my mind in alien yet familiar landscapes in some terrible, grotesque vision that breaks then into light, wavering, spitting out flashes of heat.
when i come out, i take a shit and brush my teeth. i go to bed and dream about babies that you can buy and grow in a bottle.

pop life

the whole problem seems to lie in thinking that there is something you could do that would be considered wrong. that there’s some space youre not supposed to fall into, its like a pop beat–if you dont hit the snare at that one beat, youve fucked up the whole thing. so youre walking around avoiding certain things where you think you might do something wrong. and its superstitious, like avoiding cracks on the sidewalk and shit. theres normal and theres abnormal. theres right and theres wrong. youre on and youre off, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. really youre just losing all the time, youre always losing cuz theres that certain something that youre not getting that you need to get in order to be safe, in order to feel that youre something. like pussy, or money, or the new moby cd. our culture has kind of built up a nice myth to cover up this dilemma–the myth of the true love–that there is someone out there who will complete you, the missing rib from your body. so were always running after something that we dont have, because theres something wrong with us, theres something missing. theres emptiness inside, when youre alone you dont know what to do with yourself so you watch tv. but of course theres really nothing, noone that can ever make you more than you already can be, so eventually you run yourself down. but theres always little things there for us to fill ourselves up on before we hit empty again: nice little things like cigarettes, movies, video games, parties, sex. were scared that if we stop, if we dont feel like were going somewhere, if there isnt that snare right there when we want it to be, then were gonna fall flat on our faces, well be just another faceless part of the dead masses. and we will, because weve set ourselves up for it, because weve built our lives so much away from ourselves that when we fall back into ourselves we suddenly realize just how much none of it means anything anyway. we set ourselves up to fall the minute that we assume that there is the potential to fall, and this comes from the decision that we want to climb. but theres nowhere to climb if theres nowhere to fall. theres only one place to get to–and that’s where we are.