Las Vegas

07/02/2011 / epic posted in Rant, Road / No Comments

I try to establish analogs in order to verify whether something new is acceptable or not.

So, for instance, I’ll look at Amazon.com and compare it to a high street, and before that to a market town, and those analogs are, to my eye, really no different and so Amazon is OK by me.

Makes sense?

So today I just happened to see a repost of a Twitter post – yes, like others, I refuse to call them ‘Tweets’ – while randomly checking my feeds which I have, due to travel, been very bad about checking lately.

And this day that I decide to check is the day that someone decides to repost a post to a link to some words that someone decided today was the day to write, and my analog for that whole chain is, maybe, sitting down at a table someone left a newspaper on, and that newspaper is open, and the story that you happen to see when you glance down is one that happens to be terribly relevant, and I like when that happens, and it just did.

I have spent several weeks driving around America, as I do from time to time, and it is the same, and worse, and I didn’t see much that was improved, as I define improvement anyway. I saw fatter people and more of them, and distracted people, as always, but somehow now more distracted. I saw blight everywhere I went, and I can’t lay it all at the feet of Wal-Mart but some of it, surely. I saw car dealerships and gigantic malls closed and/or mothballed, acres of empty parking lots with new weeds beginning to show through the cracks in the pavement, bare concrete pads where lampposts stood, and I lay blame for those disasters on the idiots that thought Americans could spend more than they earned, and borrow against their overvalued homes indefinitely. I saw businesses and communities gone, and not because of a recession/depression, but because they weren’t sustainable. I don’t know where all those people went. Maybe to stay with relatives.

I saw a whole country starting to look more and more like Detroit.

I stopped in Las Vegas, like I do every time, and every time I do, I have forgotten that the last time I left I left disgusted and said I was never going back. On the Strip, midnight on a Sunday, and the escort services now have barkers on the street slapping brochures at you. I don’t remember ever seeing that before.

What I saw that I have seen before is that no one seems to be having a good time. No, but I’m serious. I saw lots of drunk people, naturally, and lots of young girls trying really, really hard to look like escorts, which I don’t quite understand, and lots and LOTS of families with small children out, on the Strip, at midnight. I don’t get that at all.

I saw people either pissed off or frantic to get somewhere. In the casinos, as I watched my friends lose money, I saw unhappy people at the table games, or those strange robot/zombies at the slots. Outside are the people trying to get somewhere – a casino, I’m guessing – and in the casino are people losing money, which I don’t think they think is fun.

I ended up calling it a night. Because nothing is going to happen at midnight on a Sunday in Las Vegas that is going to grow me, or move me further down my road, or advance my process. I’m going to either A) Eat, which I shouldn’t do at midnight; B) Drink, which isn’t really my bag; C) Gamble, cause I’ve got cash to spare, right?; D) Go to a tit bar*; or E) Get a tattoo, and I just got another one so it’s too soon for that.

Point being, none of those things are of value to me right now so I went back to the hotel and went to sleep and left early the next morning.

This trip – not just the drive but the whole process – yeah, it gets a little lonely. I feel like there isn’t much support, and when I float the next destination or the next dilemma or the next breakthrough, I get a lot of blank looks. So much so that I’ve stopped really discussing it with anyone.

And what happens is, I feel isolated and right there on the hotel nightstand is the remote for the TV I very much don’t want to turn on and when I do – after I get past that feeling of sticking my head into a jet engine – is this feeling that I’m a bad American.

I went to Vegas and had a really awkward, awful time. Because it’s a joke. Soft porn, get rich quick, all night, all you can eat shrimp buffet laser show. Yeah, no thanks. Las Vegas is, in a word, nasty.

So back to today, and I find – via http://www.thenewnomads.com – a summary of the things I’ve been distancing myself from. And within that list I see new ones and more concise definitions of ones I’ve struggled to define, and it’s reassuring, and refreshing, and motivating.

I’m at altitude, and when I ordered lunch yesterday I ordered a Reuben. And see, when I order food I actually think about what my body needs. Novel, I know. I’m saying, I don’t just get the yummy I’m craving. I want what I eat to have purpose. So I ordered beef and a stout for the iron. Because I’m at altitude, see? So yes, it tastes good, but it has a purpose.

And as I’m eating my Reuben, I begin to think about beef, and how horribly inefficient it is as a food, and how incredibly destructive it is, environmentally. I think about how fuel has to be refined, and more fuel used to haul that fuel to get it to the equipment that plants and harvests the grain on the farm that used to be a forest before it got cut down to make room for the farm, and the fuel that has to be used to haul that grain to the elevator and then to the mill, and more fuel to get it to the feed lot. And the diesel in the train that hauled the coal that powered the plant that made the electricity that pumped the water to feed the grain, and the water that went to the feed lot, and the fuel that hauled the beef to the distributor, and the coal that made the electricity that powered the freezer where the meat was stored before it was put in another truck full of fuel and hauled up here so a few ounces of it could be in my sandwich.

Thinking things like that is very un-American. I’m an American. I feel bad when I think like that.

But thinking at all, that’s not so bad. That’s a human thing.

So today I decided to let my humanity trump my citizenship. As I recall, those wig wearing fellows back in the day, The Framers, they were into this whole Enlightenment trip, and they let it trump their British citizenship and loyalty to the crown. Apparently it’s not always a bad thing to place values over nationalism.

I enjoyed the sandwich. I’ll probably eat another at some point. I’m conflicted about my existence in a consumer culture. I don’t know if I can ever escape it, or change it, or accept it.

At the very least I can continue to improve myself, and continue to think, and continue to be open to words and ideas and thoughts that find their way to me, and challenge me.

I’m happy I checked my feed today and saw that repost of that post of that link to those words.

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* The best thing that can happen at a tit bar is also the worst thing that can happen at a tit bar, and that is, you fuck a stripper. For free I mean. Most anybody can fuck a stripper for cash. But see, they know that. So convincing you they really like you is for the schlubs and the schlubs then spend a grand on bottle service and PlayStation rooms. Most everybody knows the ‘but this stripper really likes me’ trick and naturally, it doesn’t work that well anymore. Except on schlubs. Stripper Trick v2.0 is to give the impression that said stripper actually likes you. Not in the fake ‘this stripper likes me’ way, but in the ‘yeah I guess we’re going to hook up later’ way. And since she’s ‘your girl’, you spend a shit load of money keeping her all to yourself all night, and then something comes up and she has to bail. But ‘I’m working Thursday…OK, gotta go. Gosh I’m sorry…’ And yes, as awful and expensive as that experience is, it pales in comparison to actually hooking up with a stripper. Cause if you fuck a stripper you will almost inevitably end up dating them. And rather than date a stripper, I’d recommend you just deprive yourself of adequate sleep for 3 months, burn a big pile of money, and piss off a cop and/or bouncer and/or drug dealer. Cause that’s what her real boyfriend does for a living.‡

‡ Yes, I dated a stripper. My god it was fun.

Less

04/07/2011 / epic posted in Images, Road / No Comments

Last night I very suddenly decided to turn off my mobile phone. I did, but to be fair, I can still use the browser, email, and IM features via wi-fi. If I find myself using those features too much, I’ll toss it.

I also have no TV. That’s been since 1997, although – again, in the interest of disclosure – I do stream sports online sometimes, and I’ll catch some Nova/PBS from time to time.

The last thing I need to let go of, and I plan to do this in the next few weeks, is internet.

The practical complication is revenue/commerce. How does one make a living in this business without internet?

The other complication is how to move away from something that has become, over a period of years, such a part of my life. And understand, I’m not hyper-connected. I never have been. I’ve never had MySpace or FaceBook accounts. Some IM and chat but not much. I send (sent) a few texts a day.

But even though I wasn’t a total internet slave, I was (am) online during nearly every waking moment, and especially during that 7 to 5 daylight prime time. In the evening I workout and read and spend time with actual people, but during the day I’m online a lot. Streaming music or sports talk, looking things up, checking email, buying shit on Amazon or eBay. Not much, but it is a permanent connection and I know I just need to tap that browser key and Opera will pop open and I can, in a few seconds, check something on Wiki, or stream some Soma FM, or order a pair of shoes.

I suspect I’m not the only person who does this. Regardless, I’m not happy that I’ve been baited into accepting what is – or is becoming – nothing more than a conduit for targeted advertising. Not only accepting, but embracing to the point of feeling my life would be more complicated or more difficult without it.

When I go to someone’s home, it is hard not to notice that a loud TV is the center of the home. It has a place of honor in the largest room, and all chairs face it like pews in a church. It’s loud, and naturally everyone in the room has to speak loudly to be heard over it.

I sit in a restaurant and watch people sitting a few feet from actual people pecking at smart phones instead of, you know, interacting with their dinner date.

It is not that I do these things. It is that I’m offended by them, and I don’t wish to have or use the same technologies that cause/allow such behaviors.

It is not that I’m some kind of internet addict collecting fake FaceBook friends like baseball cards. It is that I don’t want to use a technology that exists primarily for those people and their attendant exploitation.

Because really, you didn’t think all the government subsidy of wi-fi network deployment and smart phone development was just cause they liked you, did you? No, it’s to provide a place where you can buy shit you don’t need. Because we’re a consumer culture, and our only real value is as consumers. No, but it is. They even call us that. Consumers. It’s a job title. It’s what we do. We buy cheap, disposable shit we don’t need and can’t afford, and in a year or so we replace it. We prop up the economy with consumer spending. We don’t build things. We’re becoming too stupid to engineer things. Fuck sakes, our biggest export is recycleable garbage.

America’s biggest export is trash. The detritus of our never ending 8th birthday party.

For now, my life is quiet and getting quieter, and I notice the noise and the hectic more acutely each time I’m exposed to it. A TV blaring up in the corner of a laundromat. My first exposure to The Jersey Shore, although I was aware of it and what it was. Still, I wasn’t really prepared for it. Silly, loud people screaming at each other, and fighting. That’s all it is. And this is some kind of cultural phenomena?

That’s the new normal, and I find it so irritating that I’m actually nauseated. No, but I am. It makes my stomach hurt.

I’d like to distance myself from that sort of thing, and if it’s everywhere, then I’ll have to distance myself from everywhere. I haven’t sorted that part yet.

For now, no more phone, and by May, no internet. Details TBD.

 

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Slippery

03/28/2011 / epic posted in Images, Road / No Comments

Tension is the thing. And the thing about the thing is, tipping too far to either side eliminates the tension, and it’s just a thing, but not the thing.

I did this a few years ago, because it was fun, and because people asked what I was up to, and because I enjoyed, a little, gloating about my trips.

So, what happened was, the trips derailed. Spectacularly. And the disclosure swung around and bit me in the ass. What I had done was intentional, obviously, but not malicious. It was a continuation of the previous, just telling people about the trips, but feelings get hurt, and things are brought to other people’s attention, and it all imploded.

See the thing about art – and it’s all art, everything we do – is the part where we show it to other people. And the thing about that thing, for each of us, is why.

The best description I have for art is, it is each of us telling the story of what it is to be alive. I like that quite a bit. And everything we do, naturally, is us telling that story. Some people paint or make sculpture or write songs. Some people live a certain way. Other people actually tell stories – their stories – about what it is to be alive, to be them.

So where is the break between living and telling the story of being alive? For some people it is nonexistent. Think of every ballad you’ve ever heard. All those aching, raw, confessional, pleading lyrics. Got that in your head? What is the difference between that song, and a FaceBook post? Other than talent.

What I’m asking, and what I’m trying to define, is that tension. The confessional, total disclosure aspect of contemporary American culture seems sad and silly to me. But what is the difference between the day to day online confessional, and all the books, songs, photos, paintings, poems, and movies that have been created, each of which was, usually, mostly confessional? Why is one ‘art’ and the other a tragic expression of vacuous consumer culture?

Cause see, the thing about the art all of us create is, we want to show it to people. No, but we do. And there is that tension between shoving it in people’s faces – Look what I made! – and waiting to be asked to show it.

I am told we are social creatures. I’m told we need to socialize. This is said with a casual obviousness. When I ask what socializing is, not many people can answer. Interaction. Talking. Connecting. Networking. Lots of buzz words and cliches, but not many people can actually answer.

My answer is, socializing is when we get together with someone else, and tell our story of what it is to be alive. Socially, romantically, or with family, we each have a need to tell and hear those stories. We have a need to exchange art.

What the internet has allowed us to do is tell the story to many, many more people, and also to do it anonymously. Because sometimes telling the story can be hard, regardless of the medium.

I know artists – actual artists – who are very shy. You have to drag work out of them. But you know they’re artists because they told you. They want you to drag the work out of them. I know artists that are happy to walk you through their studio, or play you their demo, or do a scene from the play they’re writing.

I don’t think the shy artists are conning me into asking. I think – I know – they’re shy but they still have that story to tell. And the others aren’t arrogant, they’re just in a different place.

It would be simplistic to say we all need to be seen to exist. That we need to have our story seen or heard or read or touched to make us exist, but there is something to that. I believe that is why we feel such a need to make and share art, in many forms.

But the thing is, even with the need to make and share ourselves that we all seem to feel, there is still a tendency to see in others who share too much a vanity or selfishness. Musicians leave the room when they play you a demo, because grooving to your own track makes you look like a weirdo. Photographers deflect compliments by pointing out every flaw and error in the image. Chefs pick their own dishes apart. Even though we all seem to want to put ourselves out there, and know that others do as well, we still attempt to minimize our willingness to actually cop to it.

It is not as though I am compelled to purchase a domain, build a site, select and edit photos, post them, write thousands of words, and post those as well. I do this because it feels good to do it. I have a few – literally just 3 or 4 – requests to keep people up to date on my traveling carnival life. Easily done with email and text. There is no need for the rest.

And I’ll actually cop to the fact that being recognized as the guy who travels all the time, and writes the weird pseudo-philosophical jibberish, and takes the grainy black and white images is enjoyable to me. Not to say my identity is tied to others perception of me, but how others perceive us can have value, both emotionally, and practically, as a way to check ourselves and the quality of our work. I’m saying, I like my photos. I don’t just sit around scrolling through them, but I’ll catch one on screensaver now and then, and open it, and dig on it. I know I like it, but to hear others like it, or another, that confirms to me that maybe I’m not the worst photographer to ever pick up a camera.

So it’s the tension, yeah. To exist as an entity independent of outside opinion or influence or input, but also to be linked to people, emotionally, practically, or for business. There’s a simplicity and a peace in complete withdrawal and isolation, as I have found. And there’s a pleasant distraction to be found in complete immersion, as I have also found.

For now I am willing to share a bit, but not as I used to. Caution and decorum and gravitas demand I dial it back, but humanity and emotional avarice compel me to share a bit.

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Source Code

03/20/2011 / epic posted in Images, Places, Rant / No Comments

For what it’s worth, this is the actual stream from last night. It is possible I will deeply offend, literally, everyone who reads this. Not my intent, but at least it’s equitable. And naturally, this is all just my opinion. So come meander with me.

I heard a clip of Miss South Carolina – therefore…and…such as, the Iraq? – and BabyCats asked what the fuck that was all about, so I fired up YouTube and played her the clip. Down among the comments was something to the effect of, ‘Yeah she’s dumb as a rake handle, but she’s hot so she’ll marry a rich guy, settle down, vote Republican and have a great life,’ and that’s all good. That’s the American dream.

But what I thought was, rich guy doesn’t want to buy a car he can’t drive, so being hot isn’t enough. Rich guy is going to want to bang his trophy wife. So if you choose to go down the trophy wife road, you’re going to fuck a rich guy, and he’s going to buy you shit. Yeah, you might have kids and be a family, and have a nice life, but you wouldn’t have those things, and that life, and that path, if he hadn’t been rich and you hadn’t been hot. And to go one layer deeper, not just rich and hot, respectively, but also willing to participate in a transaction of money for sex. As long as both parties keep it in the back of their minds that money can be lost, quicklike, and looks fade, almost inevitably, and either one of them may wake up one day to realize they have no more assets to leverage during negotiation. Or mediation. Whichever you prefer.

And the thing is, I have absolutely no problem with arrangements like that. You’ve got to run what you brung. If a dame is hot but dumb, and a cat is rich but unappealing, by all means, come together on this. That is, as I understand it, how these things often worked before Falling In Love™ and being in a relationship became something we do for entertainment. We’ll circle back to that.

I think prostitution should be completely legal at every level. I truly believe that keeping prostitution illegal is denying hot, dumb, shady dames the right to use their talents for monetary gain. I’m not being funny. That’s not a gag. I think it’s not fair that a chick who has a skill set that could make her $5K a weekend can’t capitalize on it. And it’s significantly more offensive to me if that’s her only skill set. On the other side, it’s totally fucked up that a rich guy – or woman, if we’re being fair – can’t pay hot tail to have sleepovers. It hurts no one. It affects no one. It’s private, and it’s capitalism, so naturally, the party of capitalism and small government and deregulation is passionately opposed to it.

I’ll paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson – badly – in one of his letters. He said he’d do something other than write, if he could. It was all he knew how to do. It was the only thing he could do. That was the paraphrasing, by the way. This next part is me again.

No one asks a coal miner why he doesn’t do something else for a living.

Me: You should do something else for a living.

Coal Miner: This is all I know how to do, and it is something I’m good at, and it’s the best money I can make in this state, and my family has done it for a hundred years.

Me: Well, you could move your family to another state and work part time jobs while you go to college, and hope you’re suited to it and able to maintain a decent GPA, and after you graduate – if you graduate – you could hope to get into an internship or something, and then get hired, and maybe in ten or twelve years you’d be all set.

Coal Miner: You buying?

Me: Nope.

Coal Miner: Then get the fuck out of my face.

No one asks people with back breaking jobs why they don’t do something else. That question is reserved for people with gigs that appear to be ‘fun’ or economically irrelevant. Crack dealer, writer, artist, hooker. Why don’t I do something else? Man, I can’t do anything else. This is it. And it’s not hurting anyone. This is what I can do, and what I’m good at. This is my aptitude.

And from there the stream led to other inequities in the application of skills. How and why people end up where they end up, doing what they do. What people are willing to do to get what they want.

Someone told me once that all it takes to be rich is wanting to be rich. If you want to be rich, you’ll be rich. I disagreed. I said, ‘Shit, everyone wants to be rich. Not many people are. Your theory is flawed.’

She told me most people that think they want to be rich don’t want to be rich. What they want is to be players, and ballers, and the landed gentry, and more successful than their neighbors, and more successful than the guy their high school girlfriend ended up marrying. They want to get married and have kids and have a fun life and take vacations. They want consumer electronics and Escalades, and in-ground pools, and the kids in private school. They want to be happy. They want everything that money buys, but not money itself. They do not, in fact, want to be rich.

People who want to be rich, all they care about is that pile. They drive old Buicks and live on beans and rice. They work 16 hour days. They shop at thrift stores and live in tax auction houses and send their kids to public school in hand me downs, if they bothered to have kids at all. Cause how do kids make that pile bigger? If it doesn’t make the pile grow, it has no relevance to them. They don’t look rich, and that’s how they get rich. It is its own occupation, separate from whatever their revenue stream is, and it is all consuming, and to do it properly you need to be a little amoral and a lot ruthless, and very, very few people are those things, or if they are, are willing to come to terms with it. You need to be willing to redistribute wealth, from the poor and desperate and stupid and vulnerable, to the you. That’s why so few people make the move from middle class to wealth.

Instead, people go into debt to show how wealthy they are. And the middle class keeps itself poor by spending like they’re rich.

There is disagreement on this. I have repeated her theory to people over the years, as I just did here, and there is pushback. I am told that The Elite keep the middle and lower class down by lobbying for shittier and shittier schools, deregulation of banks and lenders, deregulation of industry, pollution control, and unions, and all the rest.

And this is where the stream ties up a little bit.

Yeah, maybe rich people do that. Maybe they work to keep people down. Maybe they do that and so the fuck what?

The common complaint from the left and the right is that the other party convinces its members to vote against their own self interest. OK, here we have a group of people actively voting in their own self interest. Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to do?

Hot, shallow chick has to work her way up, but in the right town, with the right agent, she can make $200K a year as an escort. To a lot of people, that’s just not fair. But in a way, it’s the most fair thing of all. That’s what she can do, and she’s found a way to do it. Well, hedge fund manager has found his little niche too. He’s a ruthless prick what can network, and he does, and he acts in his own self interest and stays rich. He does what we’re all told we should be doing.

Morality is a condition of surplus. We only worry about morals because we can. Morals are entirely conditional, and therefore, totally fake. If you had to stab someone’s eyes out to save your kid’s lives, you’d do it without hesitation. You’d turn into an animal in a nano-second. Visualize it. Embrace this uncomfortable thought. Accept it.

Hooker and hedge fund manager have transcended phony morality and act in their own self interest. Good for them. We should all do the same. Many people tell us to do the same, they just gloss over the ultimate destination of a ride like that.

To come at it from another angle, if any of us had sudden access to the type of political influence a fuck-zillionaire has, how many of us wouldn’t immediately inflict our personal vision of utopia onto the rest of America?

And that got me thinking about Michael Moore. Cause see, those founding fathers weren’t that hot on democracy. It wasn’t important to them. They wanted a constitutional republic with limited democracy. I recently saw Alexander Hamilton referred to as a treasonous bastard for pushing Federalism. Shit man, they wanted to make George Washington king. But I was taught they didn’t want a king. Ah, I see, they just didn’t want that king. Much clearer now. Either way, they wanted freedom, not democracy. The democracy fetish cult came later, and it was a back-door for people to get their candidate who couldn’t get elected elected, by allowing people who couldn’t previously vote to vote.

Yes, I am at war with grammar. I’ll choke grammar till it pees its pants.

So Michael Moore has, I think, made his position on redistribution of wealth clear, and if he, or one of his rabid union fans, if one of them suddenly had access to, say, the presidency, what would happen?

Don’t worry. I’ll beat up conservatives too.

If Michael Moore, as an example, thought he could be governor of Michigan, he would run and he would make Michigan, I believe, the most pro-union, socially just state in America. He’d make California look like Kentucky.

Pat Robertson would do the same thing. And in six months women would all be wearing floor length wool skirts and submitting to pre-wedding virginity exams, and all the ‘mos would have been rounded up and gassed.

Cause see, no one likes a dictator but everyone knows they’d make a good one. A fair one.

Kaddahfi (sp?) has a shit ton of fans. No, but he does. He’s a ruthless dictator what represses with the repression, and, what, 30% of Libyans think he’s doing a damn fine job. So if Michael Moore or Pat Robertson could fix everything that is wrong with America at the expense of, say, a quarter of the population, wouldn’t they do it? Wouldn’t any of us? That’s a straight up greater good calculation, just like Spock did when he got into the phone booth reactor. Tyranny of the majority? Well correct me if I’m wrong, but can’t a majority vote for a president who will place supreme court justices who will vote in support of an amendment that trumps that pesky part of the constitution? See, we even did it legal like.

Personally, I do think corporations and corporate interests and banks have spent the last 30 years systematically dismantling the American educational system. They’ve corrupted and totally taken over both parties. They’ve deregulated the shit out of every industry in the name of ‘job creation’. They’ve leveraged media – entertainment and journalism – into a propaganda machine generating avarice on one channel and fear on the other, and the solution for both is to buy shit we can’t afford with money borrowed from banks they own. They’ve fostered anti-intellectualism and homo-phobia into a toxic stew that sees any activity not devoted to Jesus or profit as somehow suspect. They’ve taken over, and made us all slaves, and pretty much destroyed America for the 21st century, if not forever. When it collapses they’ll take their money and move to a new place and America can finally stop pretending it isn’t a banana republic.

And I have to say, if it wasn’t them, it would have been someone else. Communists or Evangelicals or some other group. Hyper-capitalist sociopath happened to have just the right skill set to get it done.

The only possible logical argument I’ve heard, the only one that isn’t just jealous and pissy, is that the inequitable distribution of wealth is hurting people, and it therefore doesn’t pass the criteria for being all good. Well, Mr. Moore’s plan would hurt people too. People would lose fortunes their family spent centuries building. But see, every plan hurts people. The ‘doesn’t hurt anyone’ clause can’t be a criteria for the macro, only the personal. We are animals, animals eat other animals. Usually in the most horrible ways. Animals rip each other apart alive. Animals eat animals that are still kicking and screaming. It sucks, but that’s how it works. Life eats life.

It seems so not fair, but if you lean back a bit and do a bong rip or three, you see it’s not just the most fair thing, but the only fair thing.

What you’re saying is these people, this group, should have acted against their own self interest. They should have done the thing you would not have done. And I would not have done.

And from there I started thinking, we care because we believe it matters. We care because we think poor people being poor isn’t fair, or ‘mos not being deported brings God’s wrath, or too many niggers get welfare, or psychopaths can schedule a meeting with the president, and those things just aren’t fair. But feeling that way about those things, each of those opinions, they’re just beliefs, and while our beliefs might seem really, really deep and real to each of us, they aren’t.

Cause see, for every issue you or I feel strongly about, there is an exact opposite opinion. I shit you not. For each of the things I just mentioned, things that we’ve all heard very compelling arguments for, you and I both know and have heard equally compelling arguments against.

For every guy who’s pro-union cause his daddy was a union man, there’s another guy who’s anti-union cause his daddy was a union man, and both of them, each of them, their logic is sound and defensible. Because it’s totally subjective and arbitrary.

A: It’s just a clump of cells. Making abortion illegal would be like saying I can’t have a cyst drained.

B: Cyst doesn’t grow up to be self aware.

A: People shouldn’t starve in the wealthiest nation that has ever existed.

B: No. They should contrive a means to purchase food.

A: Corporations have too much influence on government.

B: Wouldn’t you like the same amount?

A: I’m sick of minorities sucking my tax dollars.

B: They’re Americans citizens utilizing a legal social support structure.

A: God’s judgment is upon us.

B: Which God was that?

A: Lazy Mexican wants to take my job.

B: Which is it? Is he lazy, or after your job?

How each of us feels about these things is totally subjective, and totally arbitrary. There is no right answer, even if each side pretends theirs is the right one, and the only one.

We just pick, like we pick Ford or Chevy, and that’s our brand, and our party, and we’ve got plenty of valid, heartfelt, sincere, defensible, and totally bullshit reasons for picking it.

If values and beliefs are that arbitrary, they are, in fact, not real. They don’t exist. They’re just some shit we say and think and feel, but they aren’t real.

They are electro-chemical reactions in our brains, and five minutes after our heart stops beating that electro-chemical activity will stop and those beliefs will evaporate.

And anything that flimsy isn’t real enough to fight over. Sorry.

All this drama, and fighting, and all the left/right/right/left and god fighting the godless and money fighting the poor and hippies fighting oil companies, yeah all that shit is shit we do cause we don’t have anything better to do. All the media fear mongering and reality shows and video games, and the bar on Friday and Saturday, and falling in love, and arguing, and breaking up and make up sex and hate fucks and cheating and resolution and all that shit. Party activism, and marches and rallies and sit ins and forums and comments and at the end of it we choose between identical corporate sponsored puppets. Sitting square eyed watching old Japanese women pulled from rubble, and the animation of the fallout spilling across the Pacific, and Libyan night vision tracer fire.

This is what we can afford to do. Fuck-zillionaire doesn’t do this shit. He’s got better shit to do. He’s got to make sure this is all we have to do, so we’ll keep doing it, so he’ll be able to stay a fuck-zillionaire.

I say, let him do it.

That girl, the one that told me why people aren’t rich? She told me something else. She told me if you want to know instantly what the most important thing is, to you, look at what you have. Every choice and decision you’ve made since you were 15 was for the specific goal of getting something. Look at what you have, and where you are. What you have is what you wanted. It’s not always apparent, and there are unintended consequences. That’s the part you have to participate in, and be chaotic and vulnerable, and understand you didn’t want to be in jail, but you did want to be respected, so you were a baller, and you got what you wanted, right up to the jail part. Or you’re stuck in a loveless marriage with a cheating husband, because you wanted the security of marrying a rich, shallow man who will trade money for sex, and now he’s trading it to someone else while you sit at home at 40. You got exactly what you wanted, minus the unintended consequences, of course. Those are grim examples. There are plenty of people with exactly what they always wanted, minus the bad stuff, and they’re happy as a pig in shit. But whoever and whatever you are, stop pretending you’re a victim of anyone or anything. We are all where we have put ourselves. If you want to be someone else, or somewhere else, get after it. Just realize the commitment it will require, and if you’re not up to it, don’t bother.

So me, I say we go climbing and act like the animals we all secretly know we are. I say we eat the berries that make us see the colors, and swim naked and let the sun bake us. I say we lean back under the Milky Way so bright we can read by it, and all of a sudden that cute girl we saw at the crag like five hours ago is sitting down next to us at the campfire, and she’s carrying two beers.

I say, fuck it. I have exactly what I’ve always wanted.

</epic>

Solved It

03/17/2011 / epic posted in Images, Rant / No Comments

Took a bike ride with my pal the other day and got to talking about what it all means.

See me, I think none of it means anything other than what we decide it means. Straight up existential trip. And I was trying to articulate this, and what I find is, when I choose my words carefully so my meaning is clear to someone else, it often makes it more clear to me. As though I’m explaining it to myself.

It can be a little unnerving out here, and I wonder sometimes what I’m doing, and why I live on the road, and where I’ll go next, and how it will all end up. I don’t plan on living past 50, so that shouldn’t be an issue, but what if?

What I know is, my government at all levels lies to me with such consistency that I no longer notice or care. Law enforcement is increasingly out of control and resists oversight, so I don’t trust that entity. My schools taught me a variety of fairy tales and histrionic bullshit. Math and science they did alright, but their version of American and world history was literally just made up nonsense. Churches – and specifically, Talibangelist churches – are becoming simultaneously increasingly politically relevant, and increasingly delusional. No, really, Jesus™ was a warmongering hyper-capitalist and we should live by his example. Banks merged with investment firms and insurance companies and bought the government that wasn’t honest to begin with, but we’re cool cause our free press will root that out. Except journalism has become just another reality TV show, with no goal other than profit, and scooping the competition in the now 30 minute news cycle. And I hope Kaddhafi sends Japan a ‘Thank You!’ card for having their big eathquake/tsunami/meltdown party on the same weekend as his brutal repression soiree.

Corporations hire former congressmen and senators as lobbyists, and they hire lawyers to write laws to be handed to current congressmen and senators to be read on the floor of the capitol and voted on, and passed, and signed into law. The excuse being, naturally, what does a congressman know about cable TV, or energy development, or pollution control, or cell phones, or mortgage oversight? Who better to write it than an employee of the industry it’s going to benefit? Besides, they have a 1st Amendment™ right to sit down and chat with lawmakers in private and off the record, same as I do. Except, congressmen and senators don’t sit down and chat with regular citizens unless they need a cripple or a minority small business owner or a wounded veteran to prop up at an event.

What I’m saying is, everything I was told to trust and believe in is turning out to be either fake, or actually malicious, or just so far removed from my life as to be irrelevant. I considered activism, but I have to recognize that the anesthetization of our population has been so thorough, we’ve been so completely mesmerized, that any voice speaking out loud on either the left or the right is painted as a disturbed and disgruntled lunatic. As though that person is only bitching because their own life hasn’t gone well, or they have a personal stake in change. Yeah like those Founding Fathers™ were proxies for other interests? No, they did that crazy shit cause they didn’t like the paradigm as it affected their lives. They wanted to fix something in their lives. ‘Meh. Just a bunch of pissy whiners that couldn’t make their businesses succeed without changing the rules,’ right? Left or right, if they were trying it today, they’d be shredded by the press and dismissed as a dangerous fringe element. And as an extra kick in the face, don’t think what’s happening in Libya wouldn’t happen here if the crowds got big enough. Without consensus, as long as we keep fighting with each other, the money will keep distilling upwards, and no matter which side gets pissed off enough to actually do something about it, there will be an entire other side to ‘keep them in check’. But really they just keep the grist mill grinding, and we keep racing to the bottom.

So yeah, obviously, I’ve thought about it all as you can see, and it’s too frustrating to participate in or even observe. I don’t watch TV anymore. I tried PBS only for a while, but it seemed every other program was the noble and inspirational story of a retard, lesbian, or single mother. Yeah, I can see why conservatives hate it. I tried talk radio for a minute, but that’s just Jerry Springer for people that pretend to know or care about politics. Really it’s just a forum to bash the other side, whichever side that is, and be validated, and be famous on the radio, and have your voice heard. Just an echo chamber. I tried conspiracy radio, but I noticed it’s a barely disguised re-issue of the John Birch paranoia. I tried sports talk radio, but it’s the same every day. Literally. There are only about 8 variations in the behavior of athletes and the way teams and seasons track to the same inevitable and identical conclusion every year. I tried reading comments and forums on political and news sites, and that’s potentially the most disturbing of them all. Pure hate and barely contained violence. I have no doubt, if a person’s street address was tagged on their comments, people on both sides would actually drive to those addresses and murder people. A hastily formed opinion based on biased and incomplete information is worth a human life? You bet it is.

What I’m left with is a realization that I’m essentially alone in this life, even among my friends and family. What I was told was real, ain’t. What I was told about life and afterlife and eternal life, yeah, that’s all made up. Horatio Alger was a propagandist. Bishops hid evidence of felonies, itself a felony, and no one went to jail. Banks blackmailed the government with threats of panic and martial law. Cops writing traffic citations are how cities stay afloat financially, but follow any car – even a police car – for 15 minutes and the driver will violate a traffic law. Lawmakers gleefully pander to emotional misfits conditioned – on both left and right – to vote against their own self interest. Journalists ignore it all, knowing our attention span couldn’t tolerate another Pentagon Papers or Deep Throat. Instead they trust it to iReporters with camera phones, and it’s all got to be video. No more words. Video only.

I am almost completely tuned out, and turned off, and off the grid. I need to reconcile communication and revenue with my need to stay disconnected and at peace, and that will be that.

Is this sustainable? That was the question, and the topic, and what I’m addressing. Is it sustainable to be out here on the edge of what qualifies as existence in America? Is it safe to be this marginal?

It is, in a strange way, the most sustainable way to live. Because it is so bare bones, so basic, that it takes barely anything to maintain it. I have nothing to lose, materially or financially. I have a few possessions, but I accept that they aren’t really ‘mine’ in the context of an infinite universe. We’re just occupying the same space for a minute. Perhaps in some alternate reality, rather than me owning them, they own me. I have forgone the idea of happiness, and in so doing, I find myself, strangely, more at peace, and more relaxed, and somehow more happy. I accept that I’m not entitled to happiness, not in a world that has such suffering. By letting it go, I have relieved myself of the attendant guilt when I’m not happy, and the relentless pressure to do and buy things that will make me happy. By letting go of media defined concepts of success – which in America are virtually all monetary – I’m free to pursue success as I define it. I can find joy in any meal, since as an adult I have not eaten for a few days straight, not by choice, and I endeavor to make what I eat as meaningful as possible. I eat what I should, not what I want to, but since I’m grateful for it, every morsel tastes like a feast. By letting go of the idea that I will live forever through heroic medical interventions after I have abused my body into malfunctioning, I accept my own mortality, and I accept the reality that it could happen at any moment, and I value my life more for that reason, and I’m not afraid of it. That fear of death? Yeah, it’s guilt and shame. If you really believed in Santa Jesus you’d be ripping out that breathing tube and turning off the oxygen. Cause you know you’re going to zip to paradise and be in presence of the lord for eternity the instant you check out. So why are you working so hard to stay here? Cause you don’t believe a word of it, and you fight to stay alive just like every other dumb animal organism on the planet, or you’re scared to death of the unknown. It’s a paradigm, handed to you, and bundled with anti-intellectualism that reinforces the myth that thinking about shit is either what a pussy does, or a sign of mental illness that we should medicate away. Thinking? Yeah that’s not a mental illness. Emotions? Ups and downs? Not a mental illness. Optimism? Despair? Also not signs of mental illness.* They’re the behaviors of a healthy consciousness sorting out the trick to being alive.

By letting go of the paradigms I was handed, and creating my own, I find purpose and meaning.

Who knew it was that easy?

</epic>

* Driving the wrong way down a one way street with 4 flat tires in the middle of the night, nude, calmly saying you need to get to the Hilton? Yeah, that’s mental illness. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I’m saying ADD, bi-polar, OCD, hyperactivity, SAD, and all the other normal ups and downs of life that are now over-diagnosed based on corporate pharma funded ‘research’ are how we’re losing our identities and individuality. Some people are just assholes. What you do is, you find new people to hang out with. You don’t modify the personality of people you can’t stand.

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