The Click

Now this is crucial.

This is revolutionary language.

This is a window into a new consciousness, couched in political language to be sure. But nevertheless, this is hinting at a fundamental paradigm shift in the human organism.

Week ???

Spending more time in Long Beach now, I realize that my conclusions were premature. There's more nuance in the populace. Of course, there's always more nuance. Probably more nuance than can be expressed with language.

Like the suburbanites, some city dwellers are friendly, and then some express xenophobia after all. But unlike the suburbanites who usually demonstrate a tribalistic xenophobia, this xenophobia is universal. They avoid contact with really anything on the streets. Some pull off remarkable thousand mile stares and won't even respond to you if you say hello.

Some look even more fearful than the suburbanites themselves. But of course there's fear everywhere. It's, as they say, ubiquitous.

On an evolutionary level, it makes sense. With higher stress levels, we're going to be more keenly aware of perceived threats, and that could be anything that's remotely foreign. Some researchers have noted that aggregate stress levels rise with inequality levels, since there's a larger gap between success and failure, and an accompanying pressure to perform. Intriguing observation but I'm still trying to understand.

I actually find myself completely fascinated with anything foreign, but when it comes to interacting I become nervous. One person had a good point: with high stress, one becomes anxious about whether they can relate to someone else. Social discourse becomes a matter of performance. What does it all mean?

Really the best thing to do would be to relax and try to let it flow. But then I'm drawn back to analysis...to laboring over ideas and answers. But it takes a ton of information and deliberation to come up with a meaningful framework. And by then it is is slowly becoming irrelevant with time. Or you try a different angle and it lights up an entirely different framework with different possibilities. The answer is in group intelligence of course. With many minds applying themselves, we gain a new dimension of understanding. Analogous to the difference between a two dimensional figure and a three dimensional one I suppose. Really all this pain and blindness and uncertainty is a result of the individual straining to lift something that requires more sources of force than one.

Yeah but it comes and goes. Inspiration, elation, creation, and then periods of isolation and despair. And out there in media-space the national mood is black. Something big is coming.

Week One

A week in Long Beach now and there is still not a whole lot in my head. I will say that it is different living in an urban area. More vibrant, more stimulating, but also suffocating; it is person saturation, and with a higher person density comes several subtle constraints on personal freedom that weren't there before.

It is qualitatively different, that is for sure. The difference between being a molecule in a solid and a molecule in a gas perhaps.

The poverty is in your face, not criminalized and brushed aside as in the suburban areas. It is simply there; it has to be. There is nowhere else for it to go. Men stand outside of stores begging. It is agonizing. Doubly so as I am reprimanded for giving. That's right. Reprimanded for giving. This culture has really done a number to our value systems.

And the clouds billow in from the ocean, the strikingly endless ocean that stretches on beyond the bluffs. I spent my second time urinating in the Long Beach ocean last night after spending an uncomfortable hour in a club-like bar. Yes, these clubs are just like the rest of them everywhere else. Filled with hedonist instrumentalists, people flashing smiles and employing language and wit like tools, like crowbars to pry open the carnal riches of their sexual targets. I drank a few rum and cokes, painfully aware that I was surrounded by mercenaries, bobbing absently to mercenary techno music with deadpan female voices singing of, well, clubs and rolling, and so on into another hall of mirrors. Televisions glowed on the walls with surfing footage, maybe for people like me aching to rest their eyes on something distracting. Spinning red disco lights dappled the walls. All artifacts extracted from different eras, all thrown together into a single pulse of incoherence. What were we doing here? What were we accomplishing? I still failed to understand. I couldn't grasp the overall meaning of a place like this, and I don't think anyone else did either. It was about pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, second by second, above all else. The walk back to the apartment after missing the bus was probably the highlight of the night. Moonlit, seaside, lonely, with scattered stragglers finding their way back.

I do like it here though. It is the diversity. The difference of peoples. It is difference that transforms everyone involved. It spreads tolerance. Lowers xenophobia. Near the end of my time in the suburbs I'd ride down a bike path that weaved back behind some houses in Placentia and Yorba Linda and I'd pass all these suburbanites. I tried very hard to say hello to most of them, and to their credit many of them were friendly. But many still had faces of stone. Or fear in their faces as they caught sight of someone who looked somewhat different. The time was usually around sundown, and I saw these crewcut men and slit-mouthed women and it made me think of Rome and declining empire: just people clustered in their mini-tribes, terrified of anything with even a slightly divergent appearance. A nation of civilian police and soldiers, people militant and terrified and guarded inside, terrified of the setting sun, of the coming dark. Scurrying to the safety of their homes.

I too fear the dark, but only as much as it excites me. Within the dark you are free to produce light; you are hidden from judgement. You are the judgement. You are the value-creator that others will later judge by.

Ramble On

She scratches on the door and whines. She's acting strange. Peanut is. I don't know what goes on in a dog's mind, but she seems intelligent and sensitive to me, what with her eccentricities and her aloofness among the other dogs. She knows things are changing. She detects stress and sadness perhaps as well.

My brother sits almost catatonic in the living room, sitting in the dark, bathed in the light of the TV. That's an archetypal image I get in my head for the enslaved American. A subject of the corporate state, sitting narced out in front of the TV. Being fed images that tell him the opposite of what he sees daily. Being told that money is power and he gets some if he puts in a day of honest work. But what he doesn't know is all that honest work is being put in for dishonest masters. They're stealing the honey.

My brother was never employed though. Still, it's dawned on him like many Americans that this sprawling consumerist life awaiting him is empty. He's watching a baseball game and probably sourly contemplating the DMV's rejection of his application for another licence, a rejection that can be traced to the consequences of his alcoholism (or the chemical replacement for the religion that was eaten away by consumerism).

See that's what we are really trying to create in the chaos of this digital mosaic: a new religion. All this rationality is wonderful, but it floats with impotence in a sour, bottomless postmodern soup, commenting on itself on and on until the infinite mirrors disappear over the horizon.

Religion is thrust. It is direction. We need convictions as long as they take us somewhere. And I'm not talking about Christianity. Christianity should have been obsolete at least 300 years ago. Maybe more. I'm not talking about Capitalism either, the religion of the salesman. That one will be around for a while, but should have been replaced 70 years ago. We sure are slow to replace our convictions. That seems to be the moving part with the most inertia, perhaps because of its power. Fools can cling to it long after it has been disproven and it still works. So long as everyone else agrees (or is forced for that matter) to play by the rules. And now that is starting to die.

Rationality, that rationality moves quick. Its flexible. If only our convictions moved that fast. We'd have solved a lot of problems by now.

Back to reality. No use masturbating over what could have been. The fact is we are this strange, contradictory, inefficient, destructive organism. But this is what we are.

At least we know how bankrupt pure individualism is now. That's one binary choice we can skip. That error sticks out, glowing like a filled-in sudoku number. We fizz and bubble, burning through ideas and reacting accordingly, forming according to blueprint skeletons that are etched out within cultures in crisis. Power collects and disperses in cycles, maybe aided by the rise of the same bad ideas that the powerful cling to in order to control and exploit others. Are we doomed to an endless cycle of explosions and contractions? Melting and cooling? Is this the experience of a natural process?

My mom smiles and is always cheerful. I admit it is hard to tell sometimes whether she worries or forgets. Though here and there she betrays the possibility that she doubts. She's saintly really, but human of course.

And I'll never forget, when my supervisor sat there listening to talk radio and he sighed and asked me with a hint of exasperation and candid vulnerability, "What's happening to us, man?" And it broke my heart because I had to tell him that I didn't know. He listened to right wing talk radio and the answer would only insult him. Or maybe he smelled lies and he really would have listened. I don't know.

He looks sort of like a human chihuahua with a goatee. Occasionally there is fear in his eyes, but also a kindness. He humbly holds the company together through his IT work, even as frogman rumbles in and drawls on and on about how much his robotically-controlled stock trades are yielding, and my supervisor sits there acting like he's happy for the guy, and then cracks a few jokes about how he can barely pay the rent. As much as the human in me loathes the frogman, I know that he is innocent in his own way, biologically inclined to be oblivious of others' struggles. It is those that really lack empathy that can collect the bigger fortunes in the business world, if they lack vision anyways. And most of them do now, because those that have the vision are horrified at the state of things.

Every evening when I walk out of the building I gaze down the street with this feeling of utter desolation. I'm trying to listen to the new religion that speaks through noise in my head. But I have lapses.

I can see now how it felt in the 60's. How they too felt that it was the end in the face of right wing madness and nuclear proliferation. Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" makes my heart ache with identification. And I'm pretty sure I haven't even seen what he saw then. I suppose I will though. I suppose many of us will. Many of us are now.

But that radical revolutionary spirit is poking its head up again. Through the despair, pockets of excitement. Something that was thought to be extinguished is re-igniting, beginning to smolder again. But I hope this is it. I couldn't take another period of repression. I fear the plastic face of Reagan. I fear the spirit of the 80's. I don't know how the hippies did it.

Anyways. I could ramble on and on if I let myself. Time for bed. Time to prepare for another day of utter soullessness. Time passes liquidly now. Perhaps because it is erased in memory. There is nothing to remember of the 8 hour workday.

Until the big change. If there will be one. I feel the momentum slowly pick up. A wave that was deep under is rearing its crest.

When Justice is Vengeance

We are talking and they begin to tell us about this adopted kid of their friend's that is a manipulator and a thief and who recently threatened to turn a knife against himself, supposedly to kill himself. He's 15 years old.

"Sure," they say, "the kid was abused very young. But he needs to learn some respect. He needs more discipline. They need to be more strict on him and start punishing him with more harsh methods."

This is the traditional view of crime and punishment. That men are free moral actors and that if they act out then they must be met with enough force to realign them with society's interests, or neutralized or obliterated completely. Individual by individual. Perhaps in stable times this principle can hold at least somewhat decently, however misled it is. But these are not those times. It is telling that this principle seems to rear its head more prominently the closer we approach matters with just our emotions.

But all I see when I hear about and interact with damaged people like this is a deeper, more complex, more deliberate force that is running underneath appearances; this degradation cannot be reversed with brute force. Sheer reliance on force displays to me a crude understanding of not only human nature but of the deeper mechanics of how general reality works.

No, damaged people like this seem to me to be part of a sort of social erosion, a geological process who's causal chains extend far beyond mere individuals. And now, as this erosive force is accelerating under the disintegrating effects of a declining empire, and we are seeing more of these damaged individuals even in supposedly stable households, those with less of an understanding of life itself seem to want to apply even more brute force to counteract these disquieting trends, resulting in an aggravation of the problem.

So the less wise of us grow vaguely uneasy when pieces of rock begin to break off of the edifice. But instead of investigating the causes of this erosion, we pick up the crumbling pieces of this foundation and toss them violently aside so that we don't have to worry about them, or we try in vain to shove them back where they came from, even as the fissures splinter their way further upstream.

Well Let It Out Then

The words aren't coming easily tonight. I sit on my floor with my laptop, staring at the wall opposite of me, listening to the sounds coming from the street, or the lack of them anyway.

It is quiet outside. A helicopter flies by. A car passes and is gone, leaving a wake of hissing air, like a paintbrush passing lazily through a cup of water. The houses are dark. Everyone is asleep in their colony barracks. Good workers synced up with the good rhythm.

Helicopters and planes make me feel small. They pass sometimes noisily, sometimes silently, glinting metal in the daytime, winking with white and red lights at night. They remind me there is a teeming world out there that I haven't yet seemed to join.

See, images of the cosmos make me feel like I belong. Like I am part of something wonderful. But planes and helicopters are alienating. We are putting up sheets of glass and metal to separate ourselves. To make ourselves feel more alone.

But they are inventions of human ingenuity. They are fantastic achievements. They allow us to do great things. I suppose it is the era. I've been in school all my life, my mind crammed with information and directions all the way. Always directions. I had to eventually split off and ignore all the directions and simply explore for myself. But it always comes to the tests. You're right or wrong. Be creative on your own time, whenever that is. But they said to get through college and you'll be fantastic. You'll get a house and a car and be independent. Follow the instructions and you'll be okay.

But I don't feel independent. I work all week and I'm too tired for anything when I get home. I feel agoraphobic on the weekends and I'm tired of the media that is supposed to keep me company in my solitude. I want to take flights to other parts of the world but it is so expensive. I want to see the world but the news says it is falling apart. I want to take a train to Washington to protest with others in pain but the ticket is expensive and I have to work. I want to drive across the country but gas is like chains. Funny, it seems as though the rise and fall of this empire coincided with the ebb and flow of cheap oil. When will we learn?

A recent repair to my car cost me 700 dollars. An entire two weeks of constantly doing something that is meaningless to me. Now my car works so I can continue to write meaningless fabrications to sell more junk that I don't care about. We are taunted with media that says life is short, that one should grip life's passions firmly and enjoy. But maybe only do this in the comfort of your home with the media. Buy some more when you tire of the old. But don't do it in the real world because it is scary.

I feel I am paid too little, but then scold myself for caring about money. I hate money. As an economic mechanism it rewards the mercenaries and the hacks, and punishes the creative and the honest through deprivation (only generally speaking of course).

I ordered a sandwich today and the two employees whispered to each other and I watched them. They saw that I was watching and became reserved and fearful. I wondered if it was about me, or about my observation and awareness, or both. I also wondered if it was just a series of misunderstandings and unnecessary calculations that were keeping us suspended from each other. I wanted to tell them that all of this was unnecessary and that I know what it is to have a meaningless job, and that we are all human and the fact that I am a customer does not make me superior in that instant. And yes, we are all uncertain of what happens next, and that though we are all so sensitive to every little word and body movement and that yes we all have to be so careful and delicate to each other that everything in fact will be okay and that we are all friends whatever the case.

The talking heads tell us that everyone starts with a crappy job and that if you work hard enough you'll be fantastic, but it seems when I search for jobs all I can find are crappy jobs or even unpaid ones. And the numbers tell us that this perception is true. That we as a people are being sold out. We are surrounded daily by lies and cynical attitudes and this is not how a democratic society works. There are people who are living with private jets and multimillion dollar yachts yet we can barely pay the bills and the poor are dying and this is not what they talked about in school.

There is much to be sore about with today's human reality. But there is much more to be glad about with the greater physical reality itself. Life is beautiful and even this disintegrating organism we are trapped inside now will clear the way for something new and exciting. Sometimes I feel I am helplessly tossed between these peaks and valleys wherein I am a completely different person for each with different thoughts and fixations. An idea itself is a multifaced prism that can only be viewed from one angle at a time, though you can choose which angle to view (or simply oscillate from view to view while surging on biochemical waves as in my case).

Dogs are creatures that offer unconditional love and I am reminded of this as I open my door to find one of them sitting on the floor, a smile seemingly spreading across his face as it is revealed by the widening wedge of light. Living creatures of many species can delight in each others' existence. We are pleased with nature's ingenious bio machines. And those little bio machines love us don't they? We give them food and scratches and pats and affection. We are like demi gods.

I strike away at my guitar strings and find the melodies to come much easier and with less contrivance. It is meditation and expression. It is a way out of this labyrinth of constricting abstractions my poisoned mind lashes me with day to day.

Yes, our higher thoughts have become so entwined and overcomplex that they seem to be stifling our emotive engines; they become suffocating as we grow more agitated. Thank goodness there is a way out. Thank goodness we can reset ourselves and grow again.

There is now another me that is forming on its own. It remains hidden and much of it lies in various electronic pockets on the internet and in various corners of my mind that I keep hidden from the squares. My public self is radically different from this self that is still forming, which seems to be peeking out here and there, such as from the growing hair. In fact the difference between the two selves is so stark that psychologists would probably call it a pathology, but I think it is just a new normality. It is a necessity. To survive in this dying system we must be these strange, fabricated creatures that they tried to form in school and at work and in the media but there are these new selves that are ballooning out that cannot be stopped. Such is the nature of repression. It will always come out somewhere else.

I am not entirely pleased with what I have written. Much of it could have been more organized. It could have been more detailed. But it was all supposed to come out this way. It had to unwind quickly as it came to mind or I would lose it or deform it. That is the point of letting go anyways. That is the point of ah...this life this life this life.

More Thoughts On The Problem

Thinking more clearly about The Problem, I realize that blaming our fragmenting consciousness on capitalism itself was a mistake.

After all, capitalism as a term is only useful insofar as it serves as a sort of signpost for the current power structure we find ourselves with. The reality of our current socioeconomic system is that it is so far removed from the concept of capitalism that it is barely recognizable if juxtaposed with Adam Smith's writings.

That's what happens with a foundational ideological framework. It is created within a huge (and rare) expenditure of energy, so that as time passes and mankind itself continues to evolve and even the ideology itself is left to be worked out on a practical level in the field, adjustments and fine tunings have to be made to fit the concept itself to the changing environment. These adjustments are of course made by whatever body of decision makers are in power, so that as a system matures, inferior men climb their way to the top of the ladders and alter the system to enrich themselves, thereby deforming it - how does this happen? Another problem to be tackled another day I suppose. As time goes on, the ideological framework becomes increasingly irrelevant and ill suited for the environment it is applied to, and the adjustments made to it to adapt to the environment (or at least adapt to enrich those at the top) become increasingly convoluted and entangled. This is when an entirely fresh framework must be put in place.

This is the case for spiritual ideas, philosophical ideas, economic, political, whatever.

So to remain on point, the problem with capitalism is simply that it has proven itself unstable, as it encourages power accumulation and resource waste. And it won't be replaced until it destroys itself unfortunately, as those charged with making the change have reached a critical threshold in which their power is nearly absolute.

Capitalism as an economic ideology is simply a product of a greater process: the ever-changing constitution of human consciousness. The Problem can more accurately be defined as a product of a destructive tendency towards hyperindividualism, and the resulting fractures that occur in a societal body as a logical result.

To illustrate, we live in a society where half of our population not only does not believe in helping others that are less fortunate (if they are not of course close friends or relatives), but are aggressively hostile towards the idea itself, as expressed in the widespread irrational hate of socialist ideas. How anyone can fail to understand that this attitude is directly antithetical to a coherent and stable society is beyond me.

Of course, it is inevitable that the system crash. And the crash will give birth to an equal and opposite movement of creative energy. It is a simple physical reality. Great ideas seem to be born out of crises. Those times when it becomes necessary for radical change. It's just going to hurt a little, that's all.

The Problem; Also a Meta Problem Too

So why the endless thinking? The endless avenues of abstraction? Why is it so exhausting to make a simple choice that is based on an authentic conviction? In short, it is a loss of streamlined social thought.

We have too many egos zig zagging away from a coherent standard of thought. This itself is a product of the processes of capitalist thought. The market has become a free fire zone where the loudest persuader corrals the largest amount of interest, thereby gaining power. And so each persuader is in vicious competition with one another, ruthlessly dragging whole social groups this way and that, desperately vying for more influence and thus more material wealth and well being.

What these individuals don't understand is the efficacy of their own effects on the human organism. As each fights to win over the hearts of millions, they alter the herd. Sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes not so much. As these effects accumulate, we become more and more fragmented; more and more schizophrenic, so that in the end result we are each an idiosyncratic mosaic of influences, influences that differ from person to person according to what attracts us most. We are completely out of sync with each other in terms of a larger, coordinated social function.

We have to struggle to understand because there are so many choices. More choices than we can physically cope with. These choices are abundant because our dominant social paradigm has seen to it that we separate each idea from its original environmental housing.

As a mode of thought, capitalism involves a process of extracting an idea from a raw source, and then packaging that idea to be multiplied and distributed to receptive agents for pay. So our society is based upon a market where selfish individuals move through the world, extracting ideas and selling them for profit. This has been devastating.

This process must be reversed.

But dammit, this post seems to me to be a mess. The message itself is shattered to pieces. Could be too much wine. Could be lifting too much weight. Could be a number of things. Articulating The Problem is itself made incredibly difficult by The Problem.

Or I'm just making it all too difficult. Ah well. Rest on it.

Ideas and Flaws

We are all flawed to a certain extent. The trick is to see the flaw not as a deficiency, but merely as a feature that reflects the light in a different direction.

With this concept in mind, we can argue that beauty manifests not as a faceless monolith, but as a unification of diverse elements; namely, the reconciliation of diverted light.

This idea is itself incomplete, or flawed. The chief reason for its giving me pleasure is its propensity to be completed in the future. It seems that many times putting the last piece in place is more pleasurable than actually beholding the finished product.

It feels good to sit back and reflect with a clear mind again. Today was a long day.

The day before, I burned my hand with boiling water, so I took some Vicodin. I guess it was too old, or too potent, maybe a combination of the two. But the next day, I was sick as hell. Now I can begin to understand the meaning of "dope sick." It is truly a horrific thing. A hellish place to be. And I imagine many cases are a hundred times worse.

Note to self: try not to try heroin.

Um

Within two days of visiting Gamespot I was treated to two fully themed advertisements: one for the US Airforce, which was shamelessly presenting its Reaper drone program as some sort of video game and one for Exxon Mobile.

And this isn't Gamespot just selling out. This is Gamespot acting as a conduit for two of the true malevolent forces of our time.

I get this picture of these massive carnivorous robots stomping around and literally just picking up people and tossing them into their flaming maws.

Rubberneck

There was a headline on an internet news site I passed...Video: Woman gets fingers caught in a shredder. Strange. Who's attracted to these things?

On that same note, my mom watches Celebrity Rehab, and my brother watches Cops, and when I tried to express my displeasure at this, they defended themselves and claimed it was just entertainment and that it was actually very interesting. But that's just the thing.

Well, they can't help themselves if they are drawn to that sort of stimulation. Many people are. They will construct arguments to justify that subconscious fact just as readily as I can construct an argument to justify my own aversion. Is it a subconscious tendency that is on a large scale an agent of societal disintegration? Or is it really just entertaining and maybe even useful as a glimpse into the workings (or failures for that matter) of our society. I must take note that the only reason I am at such a tense point of mediation between the two possibilities is because 1.) I have a strong emotional aversion to that sort of outlet and 2.) I have loved ones that are drawn to it, thereby providing two very strong opposing emotions of perhaps equal force. Our emotions have quite a say in our convictions don't they?

To go with my own interpretation, I would say that that is a form of entertainment that trivializes and thus dehumanizes particular forms of human suffering, which starves our own faculties of compassion.

What about a call to action at the end of the show? How about a reminder that yes, these are real people that are going through profoundly painful experiences and how about we look into figuring out how and why this is happening. But no, nothing of the sort. How many people would just sign off after that guilt flood? There's no money there.

Just imagine, you're a star that was once burning true, whether dimly or brightly, and suddenly you are on your decline, hurtling into deep space where you are to fizz out. And the cold, mechanical eye of television is watching your fall, documenting it for millions behind the lens, themselves slouching in front of a glowing screen wearing smirks of amusement.

Maybe some of them cry for you. But what then?

Let me get off my high horse to be more clear. I am one of the crippled. I myself have grown up on these forms of amusement. I feel myself studying this suffering with a touch of abstraction, comfortable in this endlessly conformed suburban colony, shaking my fist and shouting impotently, "someone must do something!" But what? I am comfortable. And I am afraid of suffering myself. I feel vaguely that I have been wronged, but still sit. Passive.

I hope for my sake that part of the action is the thought.

Standing at The Edge of a Hall of Mirrors

Striking thought: I wouldn't be the person I am today if I hadn't met the friends I had. And if I hadn't had the family I had either. All of my experiences I have had with each one has radically changed my character. It leads me to wonder if individuals aren't formed over time in clusters.

Clusters of dialectical development: each connecting two individuals having exchanges with one another, influencing each other. They are then overlapped by other connecting individuals so that the entire social web develops each individual's character. The smaller the web, the more idiosyncratic each member will be as an individual. Further, the more social people are, the more traits are spread into their character, so that they all resemble each other and move about each other freely. And that is on top of cultural influence! TV, cinema, music, video games, all these inputs amassed from a centralized popular culture, an over-web filled with smaller units of organization, each one containing more units themselves, complete with individuals developing with one another.

Modern civilization is incredibly complex.

And so this is what they mean by interlocking systems. Activation thresholds become more understandable. Changes to a culture can spread throughout interlocking systems very rapidly, exponentially maybe, until there comes a point where there are major changes taking place simultaneously across different systems, marking a quality change.

Just imagine the interlocking systems in American civilization! The entire web is being pulled tighter and tighter every day: food prices, gas prices, rude behavior, bad entertainment, crummy jobs, dwindling jobs, the flamboyancy of the rich, mean politics, xenophobia, you name it; everything is self-reinforcing, building more tension, pulling people apart, stretching and straining the web. We will reach a point where we are at a system-wide critical threshold, an activation threshold where the entire population is primed and one pertinent event could throw the entire civilization into a massive quality change.

On Retribution

Sometimes a simple reaction based on emotional undercurrents provides an excellent opportunity for analysis; it serves as a vivid snapshot, demanding an investigation with its lingering intensity.

Today I was driving, lost in conversation, and I suddenly realized the right lane ahead was closed. So I checked behind me and put on my blinker to begin moving over. A white car, which was hovering impatiently behind me, began to drift over as well, but we were both going the relative same speed. Before I could make a move, the white car swerved into the left lane and rushed past me, effectively cutting off my lane change. Naturally, I thought this was pathologically selfish and short sighted. This white car asshole shit fuck (excuse me) could have waited a simple 5 seconds at most (the driver was already behind me) and then passed me if they wished after the lane widened. But they couldn't wait that 5 seconds, they had to cut off my own action and whiz past me.

I was sitting atop a boiling kettle that was heated by experience of the pathological selfishness that pervaded day to day life in America. This feverish need for instant self-gratification, regardless of the neighbor's well-being, has characterized the American spirit for decades now. As this impulse has permeated the top echelons of society, countless human beings have suffered. It is a characteristic that has ushered me to the end of my metaphorical rope, emotionally speaking, even though I know logically that this characteristic is simply a metaphysical quality of an atomizing culture. Still, my emotions got the better of me. So I honked. And then honked several more times for good measure. To express my displeasure.

I suppose horns are designed as a warning signal, a blast of sound to avert potential disaster. But many use it as a cry of displeasure, an extension of our shaking fists. I was using it in this way.

Now, as soon as I honked I was filled with regret. I usually am when I engage in unnecessarily aggressive actions. But I began to think. What does it take to correct this pathological selfishness? Will it be dissolved in a national sea change of consciousness? And what does that sea change consist of? Would it not consist of a wave of negative feedback? The very feedback I am engaged in? Or do we exercise patience and attempt to absorb the bad energy, thereby neutralizing it?

But what is the use of retribution? And how much force to apply before you invoke an equal reaction, therefore canceling out what good you are trying to achieve?

Was my honk a signal to initiate a deep self analysis on the part of the offender? Or did he or she simply become enraged and rebel against it and completely pass over it without a second thought?

Oftentimes, our enemies are guided by their own necessities and belief systems, and when we react to them and attack them, we effectively become their enemies (and not their teachers), thereby insulating and reinforcing their own value system.

Case in point. I was being absolutely hounded by a sales agency last week. I was being called every hour, literally, and I was on the brink of madness, of hulk-like rage and retribution. But when I finally picked up the phone and answered, I carefully kept my patience and softly told her the following: " Sorry but I don't want to waste your time. I've talked to your agency already and am not interested. Please take me off your list." She ended up thanking me for calling, sounding grateful actually, as she was probably an embattled individual (those poor wretches are positively whipped daily and demanded that they pester people during the course of hundreds of calls). I recognized that she was most likely fighting for her wages in a high stress degrading job in which her fear of poverty was causing her to flail against a wall of scorn.

So was this phantom driver a tortured soul? Was he or she simply externalizing the pain of living in a society that externalizes its pain and transfers it to the weak? Do we all transfer the waves of exhaustion that shudder down from the power core of this culture?

Well, if that truly is so, then I acted like a conservative today. But alternatively, if I deny my own impulses, I may hurt myself in the process. A labyrinth of possibilities. But at this point, I'll just go with the former and resolve to cultivate my patience.

Au Contraire

What if the chief peril of visiting a modern psychiatrist lies not in their notoriously subjective criteria for understanding the human psyche, but in the terrifying possibility that modern individualist consciousness itself is in danger of or has already become a pathology?

Here

Nietzsche spoke of a superman that was to emerge, a powerful new consciousness, a transcendence of a still adolescent human. This superman would be an expression of an overflow of power, a will to life, a physical need to outgrow one's shell.

And we are still adolescents aren't we? We swing reason about like a sword, shouting over each other, proclaiming our exclusive claims to absolute truth. We cling to old superstitions and new ones alike. We worship strips of paper and shiny objects. We, with the technical ingenuity and the sheer manpower to produce food and shelter for all of mankind squander our resources on the useless rich and let vast populations writhe in agony.

I myself am caught in embarrassing bouts of weakness, torn in various directions by wrenching emotions I can't find any use for, attributing original causation to links in greater, even infinite causal chains, clawing desperately for meaning.

But within me is a new consciousness, growing, budding out of the soil, showing itself in glimpses but remaining stubbornly hidden. I write and it speaks to me in whispers, I strike the guitar and it sings to me faintly, I dive into the electric internet ocean and am surrounded by it, omnipresent but hesitating to identify itself. I am certain we are on the verge of a great new era, but we are grinding along on firmly pressed brakes, stomped into the ground by fearful, spoiled infants.

The earth tears, but it will repair itself. The question to ask is, will we make it to a new age of enlightenment before the planet reestablishes equilibrium on its own accord?

Let it be, a voice says. It will come in due time. It will determine itself.

The New You

It is like talking to a mosaic. A scrambled image making scrambled noises, the sounds themselves reaching your ears with the quality of sparkling sonic pixels. Pixels! The edges are square, the sounds have a noisy, jagged quality. Perhaps noise is just fragments. And signal is an assembled audio artifact, something we can hear that makes sense to us. But enough of that, the metaphor has gone too far.

Our minds are changing. At least I think they are anyways, that's what it feels like. The more I'm on the internet, the more I listen to new music, experience new media, I can feel it rearranging my wiring. Slowly, subtly, but it's there.

Our communication mediums reach into our wiring. We change along with the rest of the culture, down to the very circuitry. There was once a sadness. I felt hurt interacting with the new human, it felt strange, tragic somehow, as if we were being deformed. But that is going away. It was never the new human that was tragic. It was the strained communication.

That must be the discomfort the elderly experience. To get rid of the unease, they blame the new generation, they say things aren't quite the way they used to be. The kids are different now. They don't have respect, or humility, or some other trait. But the real problem is the communication breakdown. Between slightly incongruent psychological topographies. There is a dissonance.

And maybe that is the nature of a new consciousness being born. First, noisy chaos. Mosaic images, jagged noise, distracted youth, their minds split in all sorts of different directions. A whole lot of dissonance happens as rough edges grind against each other. But slowly the fragments, through repetition and organizational work, will reassemble, and a new image will take shape. Then we will have to shatter it yet again when it has gone stale.

So it seems. It is hard to even think, to reason in a state such as this. And it is hard to communicate. People's attention spans just a few seconds, their inner lives still idiosyncratic. Terrified of the silence that could fall amidst a conversation. The pain of beginning to think again.

Watching things freeze and thaw, organize and disperse, we know that yes, coherence takes work. And we will no longer lean on that previous consciousness that has been so hollowed out by consumerist vacuousness. This is a fascinating new world. Coming to shape as our very minds come to terms with it.

We desire a free existence without self-conscious fear, without the burden of self judgement, but still, we have to check ourselves to make sure we rebuild right. Finding a balance is really most of the work.

And further up the spiral we go.

Back

Back from an Alaskan cruise. It is good to be back. Two weeks is a long time to be on a ship, hiding from reality.

I've always thought cruises are strange. They are a means for the upper middle class to feel opulent for two weeks: exotic locations, a staff dedicated to serving you every minute, rich foods, luxurious facilities...I suppose they are not that strange; cruises, along with other similar vacations and many television programs are a way to live the American dream of wealth. You buy a ticket or sit down with a program for a while and live out your wildest fantasies of being rich and pampered. I understand the appeal for people who still believe in the dream.

For many a cruise is a wonderful experience. They are pampered, they are treated to good food, they get to lie around and relax, and they get to experience sights that are often spectacular. And don't get me wrong, I was grateful to be on that ship. I did eat great foods and I did see great sights. But I also felt very uncomfortable with the artificial society within the ship. Many cruise companies hire men and women from all over the world to serve the guests, to make the experience more exotic and exciting I suppose. But this has a strange dehumanizing effect: here are people from all over the world, people I would love to converse with and learn from and enjoy, and they are dedicated to serving me. They are in a definite servile position, and this is very discomforting.

I talked to some of these people and they had fascinating perspectives, but all of the conversations were filtered through a very strict power relation. I was the customer (though I didn't personally pay a cent) and they were the servants. I was put in an unearned position of power (since I feel money no longer indicates earned power) and this was immediately felt. These relations were complex and numerous, I suppose I could write more in depth some other day.

But here we are, cruising from port to port, being ferried to all the tourist stops and gift shops full of useless crap that thousands and thousands of tourists pour into. And the jewelry shops are like Starbucks in the tourist destinations. I don't know what it is with vacationing and buying jewelry, but people love that shit.

You don't really experience the land for what it is. You simply dance along a manicured, white-washed, consumerist platform that has been graciously laid out by the authorities to collect for their economy.

And the land was gorgeous. The picture above is of the ice fields we creeped through to catch a glimpse of the Hubbard glacier. Here was a glacier, a compressed mass of ice, that slowly crawled its way through a valley, driven by gravity towards the sea, where it cracked and dumped into the frigid waters until its fractured pieces drifted as icebergs out to open waters where it melted to be evaporated back into the water cycle. What an incredible microcosm for the contractions and expansions of the universe! Here was an ice universe, being born and dying and cycling before our very eyes. Of course the cruise line felt the need to blare commentary out of its loud speakers. God forbid its passengers should settle and listen to the cracks and pops and gurgles of a living ice galaxy.

I did attempt to listen intently to the subdued sounds in the waters below. These people need to be constantly entertained, constantly fed, constantly stimulated I suppose. A strange state of being we've ushered ourselves into. I can't event talk about the on-ship entertainment they carried out in the bowels of the ship; I sat through two of them, and they were truly horrifying spectacles.

I thought I would escape American life for two weeks to enjoy wonderful landscapes with family. It was naive of me, I should have known a cruise line of all places would be the perfect setting for an exotic extension of American madness. It was there all around me, like a higher brow Las Vegas on the water, complete with a garish casino where the elderly gambled away their savings in search of the next big jackpot.

Again, I'm not trying to say I was ungrateful and loathed the whole experience. I was happy to be there, and felt indebted to family for including me. However, I was dismayed to find that the American consciousness was truly everywhere, a pervasive force that colored even the most majestic sights. I can't escape it. Much of my life will consist of coming to terms with it and the aftermath, unless there is a vast shift in consciousness.

Follow Through

Incest is a taboo on biological conservatism.

So why don't we have a taboo on social conservatism?

Added note: The comparison is probably not that fair. Add the modifier "extreme" to conservatism and it works a little better. But still...

Bathed by The Backlights

There's an alternate cultural world that is flowering into shape within cyberspace. A world with an increasing vibrance and expressiveness every day, a deepening intelligence that's diving further into unexplored depths, tapping into the wellspring that is the totality of global cultures repressed by the neoliberal consumerist platform.

And now video games really are the shit.

Frogman

He lumbers about the building, gazing over his workers with watery bug eyes. He's an actual mouth breather, he'll stop in the middle of the room and you can hear the watery slurping of his breath passing in and out of his mouth as he thinks. He speaks with a nasally drawl, pouring condescension over his subordinates, standing slack jawed over their chairs as if everyone is a fool and he is constantly exasperated that no one can carry the vast stores of knowledge that only he can.

In reality all he has are street smarts, a collection of miscellaneous bits of procedural knowledge, and several half baked stacks of business self-help tidbits. He makes many mistakes but never owns up to them, passing over them impatiently and reasserting his arrogance on the next subject. He has managed to build a company over the last twenty years, loosely following emerging trends and emulating entrepreneurs around him, and this is something, at least to him. He has the gall to bully people into subordinate positions and manipulate them to suit his ends, which has worked out for him. At least he can buy his iPads and watch his favorite reality TV shows and vote Republican to preserve the empire he has built all by himself, no thanks to the multitudes of morons and incompetents that have worked for him.

He is classically American. And he has no idea how small his world is.

Sure, We Get Old

The dog has a tumor growing somewhere deep inside his nasal cavity. He can't lie down and breathe through his nose, it blocks his flow of air, so he has to pant and gasp as he's fighting sleep, exhausted but unable to dose off.

I'm disgusted by this, that a group of cells can decide to replicate and grow an ugly mass right in the middle of the creature's airway, contributing nothing to his wellbeing, feeding off of his energy, eventually compromising this incredible organism.

That a group of cells can simply form a mass and consume an entire functioning being, completely disregarding it as a living breathing thing...and when he dies after his deterioration is accelerated, the tumor dies. Absurd!

Consciousness. It elucidates the phenomena of daily life and then recoils from them in horror. How did we get to a point of awareness where life, consisting of things that simply happen, can seem so brutish?

Oh but we all have built in expiration dates. Organizations do as well, and whole civilizations. This is the whole ebb and flow of order and disorder. Work is applied to create a singular functioning organism, whose constituents in time begin to meander and separate, until there is a critical point in which the central intelligence or animating principle loses control of its subordinate parts, and the organs become just matter to be recycled. Rinse and repeat.

That's life! But why is death so ghoulish? Well, some cultures don't see it that way I suppose.

Today I spent a couple of hours figuring out what sort of content I should write on a website to sell dressing rooms for retail stores. These are not the kind of problems I wish to be solving. Boring.

Empire

Juxtaposed side by side, the two Charles Ferguson documentaries paint a disturbing picture: our civilization is a tower of wealth that has derived its height from the misery of surrounding kingdoms. Our riches have been accumulated after repressing other peoples to the point of madness, and here our tower sways as it grows topheavy...possessed with a madness of its own.

I find it frightening to be stuck inside this system as it deteriorates. But I can't imagine what a perceptive soldier overseas must feel as he or she watches the news, seeing his or her country unravel, pondering the complete obliviousness of his or her military leaders while surrounded by widespread suffering and insanity, feeling progressively more alone in an alien desert, away from a home that is slowly disintegrating somewhere beyond the darkening mountains.

But despite the horrors of this point in history, I can't understand some of the Christians in this country, referring to their Revelations, beginning to accept from the writings of people who were probably around for the fall of some ancient empire that we are in fact experiencing the end times. I say with some reservation, since I do find it disturbing as well, that I am excited for whatever the next age brings. Plenty of ideas to be explored, and this calcified culture is stifling any hope of a new idea coming to fruition. It is time for something else.

Suspension

As I stared into the eyes of the human animal, a dark realization began to take hold: our logic, our language, our ideals, all of the tenets of our higher intelligence form a delicate latticework which cradles us precariously over the pre-intelligence abyss, a black labyrinth wherein life fights viciously to perpetuate itself.

Just Some Clarification

Freedom is not a metaphysical reality, but a psychological one. Freedom is experienced when an individual can successfully carry out an action within their own array of perceived choices without fear of constraint.

This is how freedom means different things to different people.

This is how authoritarians can value freedom. It is not a contradiction. They themselves are free to do as they please.

When Closed Loops Repeat

Postmodernism is a name for something that is produced when snaking ideas eventually crash into the walls of their own pathways after having run their logical courses for too long; the ideas then become trapped in a sort of stasis, a closed loop wherein old images and concepts are recycled until they become a mulch of meaninglessness.

The academic sphere has long since discredited this trend. It is useful for generating models of macro cognition, giving us new insight into how we produce ideas themselves, since we are given a glimpse of our very ideas being born, but taken to an extreme it becomes a weakness, a nausea that mounts as if we have been churning about in the washing machine for too long.

But our popular culture still seems to be in this phase. Why would it leave the phase otherwise? Just look at the entertainment being produced. Ironically self-referential works of art, sequel after sequel, remake after remake, all insincere products rubbed out by cynical people looking to hit that next pocket of wealth. Look at our political discourse: people referring back to historical statements and ideas for guidance, not even knowing what these things mean! These things in themselves aren't pure postmodernism, they are symptoms. Postmodernism is the intellectual framework behind these phenomena.

For those wealthy and comfortable, recycled ideas keep them in power. Wealth has become an end in itself, and ideas mere means to those ends. Their mistake is in thinking that old ideas can be milked again and again indefinitely. They can't.

Because there are always people who either believe in the old ideas themselves, and become enraged at their debasement, or there are people that have new ideas and want to see them realized.

The fundamentalists, the regressives, cling on to the old ideas and live by them without understanding their essence, like an inverted cargo cult. Instead of latching on to new ideas in a primitive context, they latch on to old ideas in a modern context. They will do damage if they are given control. They are already doing so to an extent. Witness the Tea Party.

New ideas are produced by the only people who are truly free. The birth of these ideas produces huge surges of energy. Civilizations are created and then harden, becoming frail over time as old ideas dissolve in a changing world. And so we repeat.

It feels good to articulate these thoughts, though they are still only partially formed. And then tomorrow its back to work, where my silent hostility makes others uncomfortable. I can't help it. It is hard hiding the physical effects of knowingly living a lie within those walls.

Thank Goodness for Deep Sleep

I sleep peacefully as dog farts descend over my hapless head.

Societies Built on Choppy Seas

It seems to me as if in order to calculate social outcomes, we project our own selves on to others. Given our subjective nature, and the diversity in minds, this could lead to incongruencies and error, lending to a dissonant socialscape.

However as we gather more knowledge, and our minds become more objective, we can begin to understand one another universally and establish social harmony.

Ideally, of course. Chances are probably better that societies will continue to flourish as strange, buzzing power structures, held tight against the internal thrashing of egos in conflict.

Rights

Rights are particular to mankind, a human creation. But they are the inevitable result of an advanced civilization; they bloom in civilized countries like flower petals out of a bud and as a society grows sick they seem to wither and fall away. Though once you have witnessed the beauty of them, the idea cannot go away, not if they are documented and shared. Others behold their beauty and proceed to grow their own, even before witnessing them first hand themselves.

Rights are inevitable because as our society advances, we grow insulated to the natural world. We arrive at the top of the food chain, and so the only direction we can kill for gain is horizontally, in other words, each other. As this practice progresses itself, we grow disgusted of it while we are simultaneously becoming sensitive and soft thanks to the comforts of advanced society. We desire stability, we apply the golden rule of ethics and establish universal rights.

I find the concept of rights so beautiful, I apply them retrogressively to other forms of life, since I apply human standards of conscious to everything to compensate for our ignorance of their subjective experience. Human beings supposedly have the most exquisitely sensitive of consciousness, so it would seem safe enough to judge on this criteria.

I still experience cognitive dissonance when I eat meat, though I'm not yet ready to come off of it. I just hope we eventually find a way to divorce ourselves from the practice. However, even trees have shown to exhibit stress signals when others are cut down in their proximity. What is pain and fear and is it relative? This experience can be traced to the original life form. Where to draw the line? Why not curl up in a ball and die, lest we step on another weed that shrieks in pain and sorrow in its own way. For all the physical comforts we enjoy as a civilized society, I think the intellectual experience has become proportionately more arduous.

Schopenhauer once made a statement about the proportion of good to evil in the world. He was a pessimistic philosopher, though he called himself a realist. Thus his opinion was something along the lines of this: Just compare the relative feelings of an animal enjoying another animal as a meal, and the feelings of the animal being devoured.

For fear of becoming paralyzed before the horrors of the natural world, I tell myself that steak is absolutely delicious. And it truly is. The best we can do now is make slaughterhouses more humane, if that's possible, with quicker, painless deaths. Until we can wean ourselves off of meat altogether. As we advance, this option is more than possible. And it is better for everyone involved, including the environment.

Cracks

Going to parties and clubs, (when I found myself out and about anyways, which is a rare thing these days), I began to notice the fragmented state of the social status of the local youth. People gaze in all directions, some cramming their faces into their opened cellphones, their faces glowing ghostlike. Conversations follow jagged paths of semi-reciprocity, the participants only understanding each other in intervals. I know this phenomenon subjectively. Eye contact is sometimes agonizing, especially for me, as I have to calculate all of my social interactions. It doesn't come naturally. And my head is filled with so many conceptions of what is to be accepted social discourse, it seems I grow anxious trying to calculate and integrate at the same time. Judging from others' behavior, it seems this is more widespread, though this could simply be bias on my part, where I project my own experiences on to others.

Nevertheless, I observe fragmentation. Cliques of people comfortable with each other are atomizing, growing smaller, specializing into smaller groups. Curious, this runs parallel with Gene Sharp's characterization of a society oppressed by a dictatorial state.

Of course, calling our country a dictator state is nothing short of hyperbole, but still, the parallel remains.

Some social scientists talk about instances where there is a loss of centralized and coherent values to be provided to the general population by the ruling class. According to their observations, this loss of a group of values results in a society that fractures, and these fractures permeate all the way into the individuals themselves, resulting in split selves. These split individuals in turn have trouble communicating coherent values to their children, thus perpetuating an atomized society.

A split self is then ripe for two main options:

1. The split individuals can proceed to reinvent themselves, manually putting back the pieces. This can result in bold new ideas and the reinvigoration of civilization.

2. The split individuals, upon perceiving an elevated, grandiose self and a depressed pathetic self, proceed to retain the grandiose and reject, eject, and project the pathetic onto symbols they perceive to be the enemy (scapegoating). They do this while cementing relations with other like-minded individuals in an us versus them schema, thus giving sway to fundamentalist, authoritarian movements.

I think this phenomenon happens in cycles throughout the course of history, and I think we are experiencing this as a civilization right now. There are many of us currently trying to reinvent ourselves, and then there are those of us sitting around complaining about Muslims and wishing that everyone was living in the 19th century again. Thus our polarization.

There are some scholars who worry that bona fide fascism could again take hold, and in American soil no less. Though this is a popular buzzword sloppily used to smear opponents on either side of the political spectrum, the actual pathology could very well rise again, just in a uniquely American form. This possibility is real.

I see terrible splitting in my own family, culminating in the frayed ends of rope that are my brother and I, the strange creatures that we are.

I just hope we can all figure something out before the other guys.

The Metaphysics of Inception (I know I am a bit late)

A strong emotion mates with the prototype of an idea, planting a seed that flowers into dimension upon dimension of logically constructed realities, all flowing out from the original source, growing into structures that take shape according to the nature of the idea in the face of environmental context. Ideas become cross-pollinated, ideas breed, ideas are produced by mankind and mankind is in term shaped by the ideas. Beautiful.

If I wasn't mistaken, Inception was a vivid, exquisitely constructed peephole into the machinery of evolution itself.

This notion of reality moves me very deeply for reasons I don't know. From this metaphysics, it wouldn't be too hard to draw parallels to Clinton's own philosophy (I think it's Clinton's) churned out in Funkadelic's "Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts," a song that brings tears to my eyes every time I hear it.

Afterthought: Inception is less a declaration of concrete metaphysics, and more a meditation on the nature of reality and dreams, as I understand it. This metaphysics was more of an extraction from the narrative, an extraction that could be incorrect, as the director sees it. Ah, another instance of how ideas cross-pollinate. The complexity of this work lends to a multi-faced prism whose surfaces can split light in all different directions, lending a multitude of interpretations.

On Freedom

I've always wanted to believe in the ideal of free choice; that man is master of his own fate in the Great Scheme, and all that. But I continuously come up against evidence for the opposite in the real world.

Not that this is entirely discouraging. Allow me to explain.

Daily I come up against rigid minds; these are hardened, earthy things desperately clinging to the ideas that they were born into. They are closed to revision, incurious to intellectual exploration. They refuse to undertake the mixing of black and white in the noble mission of producing grays.

As time passes, these inflexible minds crystallize further, strengthening themselves against even the most compelling of revolutionary ideas.

Suddenly a snapshot is taken: each moment in the present seems as an instant in stasis; a static slice of our active, predetermined formation becomes visible.

The ignorant drip and freeze onto the frigid stalactites of tradition. The educated zig zag their way off of their theoretical starting points, each agent taking shape according to their prototypes.

We strive to act in accordance with what we really are, lest we break our back against our own predestined forms. But still we change. Or perhaps the environment changes and we stay the same, our shapes altering along with the scenery.

Considering everything, I still believe that it is important to uphold the free ideal; that we are all free agents in illusion. Even if all of this is predetermined and that we are what we were alway meant to be, and we never had control of our futures....it is still important to believe that we are acting as free agents. It dictates our final shape, the final form of our personal crystal. Even if we don't have control, the illusion of control still has the power to form works of beauty.

Furthering a Tired Genre: Horror

I've been meaning to write about Dead Space 2 for a while now, and I've finally finished absorbing it to such an extent where I feel I have a handle on why it has made such a deep impression on me.

I'm a big fan of the series, even more now that its world has been further fleshed out and expanded upon. It is blossoming into a horrible version of Mass Effect or to a lesser extent, Star Wars, where out there in the not too distant universe, horrible things pulse and grow in the darkness.

The entire game is a maddening roller coaster of terror after terror. In pre-release interviews, the developers talked about giving the player moments of triumph when the player feels in control. I think this happens sort of, but most of the time I had the impression that I was simply a miserable victim pinballing my way through a living nightmare.

I was at first uncertain about the bleak violence and gore aesthetic that surrounds the game, more so in this one, as the madness increases. But I started to realize something different about the horror genre in general (well, at least the well crafted, respectable horrors): a good horror piece does not glorify or even justify violence and gore, it presents it as part of the terrible nightmare that reality can present. A good horror piece allows you the very real sensation of what it is to be prey, what it is to strive in a completely hostile and insane environment. Horror's niche in creative art is to show us a perspective that we don't always experience, in this case, it brings us face to face with the reality that strange, hostile entities can grow in the dark corners of the universe, and sometimes we experience them.

Dead Space brings this experience to a higher level of vibrancy. And this is done with loads and loads of startling techniques.

Many have talked about the game's sound engineering and for good reason. The sounds in the game are brilliantly, universally, unsettling. The developers do an incredible job of undermining every potential source of safety and stability. I'm not just talking about the moans and bellows of monsters in distant cabins (and the sound travels with a strange, muffled, metallic sheen, as you would imagine sounds travel in a space station). I'm talking about the sounds of doors and elevators and appliances. Everything makes strange unsettling noises that make your stomach drop, and so you are reduced to darting from room to room in dread, wondering, good god, what is that noise?

And in between the bouts of horrible suspense and horrifying action are segments of even more heightened breathlessness, sections that are almost psychedelic in nature. A series of frantic events will abrubtly unravel at rapid fire in strange, tangential sequences, leaving you literally fighting for your life for indefinite periods of time, lending an even more unnerving edge to the story's pace.

Any sense of consistency is eroded as well. Often you are treated to visual tricks and fakes and soon you can't tell threats from shadows and vice versa. This destroys your ability to calculate and anticipate, key ingredients that dissolve in the true horror mood. The creatures themselves move hideously and grotesquely. Their appendages wave like spider's legs. Their movements switch erratically from slow to rapid. So much attention to detail in every facet of the experience. Every little touch is done in the demonic discipline of triggering our evolutionary fear and disgust responses.

Even the characters themselves are given an emotional edge that I haven't seen yet in a videogame. They react understandably adversely to a malevolent world that is quickly deteriorating. They exhibit real, tormented fear. Some of them undertake that agonizing struggle against madness. Most of them succumb, and you genuinely feel for them. Granted, the developers do add a new character that I really enjoy, a sort of anchor for sanity and hope. I won't say too much for fear of spoiling.

Does all this violence affect me negatively? Sometimes it does. But as I got used to it I felt less like a desensitized bloodluster and more like a sort of desperate cancer surgeon, diligently snipping away at nature's more malevolent anomalies.

Still, we have to back away and ask, "Is the experience of prey an experience we should artificially recreate for entertainment?" On that I am not sure, but generally want to believe this: that art and legend are simulation devices. These are artificial creations that allow us to safely experience a multitude of perspectives while contemplating and absorbing, maybe even being instructed in subconscious ways in the meantime. Horror plays into an old survival instinct, an instinct we would rather not have to use, but given the nature of reality, possibly have use for.

Good horror is honest in its depiction of the horrible. I think Dead Space is very honest. A fictional world is created that is believable, and a scourge is introduced into that world that given the conditions, events unfold exactly as they should, in all their terribleness. The protagonist is a likeable every day kind of guy who is forced inadvertently into a survival trip for the rest of his poor life. But he attacks every problem pragmatically and scientifically (he is an engineer) even as his peers are dropping around him like flies.

Dead Space is a never ending nightmare, but within that nightmare is modern (or eh, future) humanity attempting to solve cascading problems, even in the face of opposing forces of humanity itself, such as the church and corrupt government and corporate predators. Dead Space is very much a timeless horror.

Freedom!

Talking to some of my coworkers, a story begins to take shape of the inefficiency of this company.

Strange agendas, errant egos vying for dominance, a manipulation of human interests as opposed to an honest investigation of reality. The only way this business continues is by pure imitation. Ironic, given our proud, puffing proclamations of innovation and leadership.

We hemorrhage out money through inefficient processes as our moronic president loudly dismisses his workers as morons.

Strange, to imagine these insane ecosystems littered across the country, producing our wealth. In this light, The Office stands as a startlingly accurate portrait of the American office, though we can laugh along with it thanks to its incredible sense of humanity...something we can't do with a realistic assessment of a real office.

Ah, and this is that wonderful freedom we've been talking about! Yes, I'm free to leave any time, though no one is hiring. I can do whatever I want, though the only way to make a living is to subscribe to a system that I loathe. I could go where I want, though thanks to urban sprawl, I need a car and a lot of gasoline! As if I had a better idea of how to run things! "You try and build a civilization," someone could snap at me.

Maybe I am out of line, spewing judgements from a position of privilege. I enjoy all of the comforts of the civilization that I routinely disparage. I could be out in a jungle somewhere, fending for my life while fearing disease and disaster. But living all my life in modest comfort maybe it is my function to put some pressure on the brakes, along with a legion of peers and predecessors. I'm along for the ride in this modern, air conditioned vehicle of ours, but its gone wildly off course, so I and many others believe.

Am I lazy? Ungrateful? Would I mind working a farm? If it meant survival, I don't think I would. They call it honest labor because it directly produces results that you can assess. But the work I do, the ends I work towards, I no longer know what it means. I don't know where we are going.

This society is full of overworked pretensions. Old ideas echoing, dispersing, until they are all but gone.

I watched a couple of George Carlin specials tonight. I realized I love this man. Though he was absolutely nuts. He spent hours in agitation, pacing the stage in a hunched posture, spitting and yelling at a laughing audience that was implicated in most of his admonitions. His critiques were bitterly negative and violent, but in his violent rejection of this gluttonous system of ours, he revealed exactly what he wanted with great passion: something simply different.

When I see these glimpses of passion, I want it categorically spread through all of the land. Unfortunately in this time, thoughts like his rapidly gain ground in the people that already know what's going on and then disperse past that.

Oh well, to freedom, or at least the illusion of it. More on that later.

The Nausea

I gaze out over the Facebook news feed and it appears to me as a spinning centrifuge. I wonder if I should attempt to jump on and join, but I recoil with apprehension, contemplating the possibility of missing the platform and flailing out into the black void of social death, however real that possibility may be.

As I gaze on the social centrifuge spins faster until the landing platform blurs beyond view and the possibility of joining becomes even more doubtful as my social position becomes less and less relevant. Less and less I understand the motion of the revolutions.

That's okay. As I remember, I grow very dizzy standing on that machinery.

Out In The Yorba Linda Hills

The wind is kicking up in waves; I'm sitting out in the backyard, swaying softly like a sprig of seaweed on the ocean floor, listening to the windchimes and the roaring leaves, the leaves sparkling as they tremble in the sun.

I have BBQ and Blue Moon in my stomach. All is well; I'm just a creature sitting happily sedated amidst the Orange County trench in this windy sea.

A plane drones overhead. A spider scurries over glistening tiles. Dogs bark, children laugh, crows call in the distance. It feels good to just experience for once. I've spent so much time analyzing, buckling under the sorrowful data.

Two hours earlier we were walking a trail in the Yorba Linda hills, treated to a view of Carbon Canyon. There's beauty in the landscape, and then my wandering, rapturous gaze meets the affluent housing strips.

Manufactured mansion after manufactured mansion, all painted and shaped slightly differently to feign diversity. Some are slapped with halfhearted attempts at ornamentation, such as Greek columns and Spanish shingles. Beveled glass and water fountains greet sloppily parked Hummers and Mercedes cars, and starkly conformed backyards contain basketball and tennis courts, cabanas, mounted TVs (as if this is necessary), and statue-lined swimming pools. I realize this is the manufactured American Dream. This is the manufactured high rollers' paradise for sale to whoever can afford to live the dreams they've seen on MTV.

Endless loops, spiraling upwards, propel the wealth ever higher. As the mansion becomes mass manufactured, the truly opulent must concentrate even more wealth into outperforming the newly rich buyers. It is in this way that more and more wealth is concentrated upwards, into further absurdly cosmetic excesses.

Meanwhile, the poor lay piled in the valley in trailer homes, the windows facing each other, blinds drawn for lack of a view. The gutters route the dog and horse manure to the cesspool below.

I try to be friendly on the trail. With these thoughts swirling in my head, I would be a direct enemy of all the uniformly white people I pass. My hair is long and my sunglasses and hat speak of me as some sort of deviant. I smile and say "good morning," and they strain smiles back, understandably. My mother, who is with me, eases them with her white suburban appearance. She smiles and laughs and greets them and talks about dogs. Thank goodness for that. I couldn't shake the feeling that I simply wasn't supposed to be there. Which is sad.

Oh well. You could go mad following these thoughts down their dimly lit avenues. It is impossible to tell what went on in these people's minds for sure. I could read the houses, the accumulations of mass produced cosmetic wealth, and come up with reasonable conclusions based on the state of the economy. But it is impossible to tell what these people are thinking. How they would justify themselves.

Best to stick to my Blue Moon, my BBQ, my softly sedated sway. Stop thinking so much. Just continue to do what I think I should be doing.

This Lovely Gauntlet

Listen to your fellow man when he's in pain.

Even when you despise him.

Suffering can be very honest.

Modern Problems

This is a civilization increasingly employing the following methodology:

To become powerful, one must continually consume resources, while extracting the value out of those resources and procuring them for oneself. Then, the waste product that comes out of that utilization has to be passed on to someone else. Eventually, the passage of these materials systemitize into a reliable highway. The direction of the goods of value travels in the direction of the powerful, accumulating at greater centers of gravity, while the direction of the waste travels in the direction of the powerless, accumulating at those depositories. This methodology permeates every aspect of our predominantly commercial culture. The middle, the transitioning agents intent on leaving the powerless to join the powerful (or vice versa) travel back and forth this highway, serving as a midpoint of tension. As the middle deteriorates, the string between the two overburdened extremes frays and eventually snaps, bringing ruin to the entire system. And so the soot-covered masses of powerless rise to re-establish equilibrium.

The timing is very bad. A problem solving system is on the verge of collapse at the very point in time when we should be concentrating our efforts in solving some very serious problems: namely climate change and the rapid depletion of key resources, such as oil and sustainable fresh water sources. This is at a time when the population has reached all new peaks.

Alas, at a crucial turning point in human evolution, when it comes the time to sink or swim, we have people busying themselves with the attempt to repeal a considerably conservative body of much-needed health care reform. These same people, in their infinite wisdom, see it fit to carefully deconstruct the very society they claim to be so proud of. These are people that fancy themselves reformers, but would more aptly be named "deformers."

This strange, destructive brand of reactive conservatism is fermenting all over the world, at a time when it has become very important to rethink our entire strategy for comfortably sustaining ourselves on this planet.

This is the point in the survival horror story when the fear-crazed nutjobs scream at the top of their lungs that everyone must remain in their shelters, when indicators all around them tell them to stride boldly outside and keep moving, to search for new methods. The heroes urge everyone to be brave and move on. Finally, the brave leave, finding rescue, and the fearful stay to be overtaken by natural disintegrating forces. Or demons, or something.

Hopefully in our case the fearful let the brave leave at least, which is not currently happening.

Anyways. Apocalypse this, apocalypse that. I'm sure these are common sentiments when global tensions are on the rise. But when is the end? This ugly recession spread a great wave of suffering, suffering that still continues today; but the powerful resumed their ways. Does there have to be a collapse? Or can we spend several decades in slow decline to rock bottom, where we can rebuild?

These are trying times, sure. But this is a strange, vague, airborne threat that many don't yet see. Our civilization is far too complicated today. It is much more difficult to chart problems, inefficiencies, even evil. With all of our theories of metacognition, relativism, and linguistic constructs, we have to ask, who is saying what? Who is speaking the truth?

Well at this point one might say this is where conviction comes in. Listen to the resonance. How do your beliefs ring with reality? Do you hear harmonies? Dissonance?

The words of Pink Floyd empathized with those waiting in "quiet desperation." Quiet desperation. Now that is a phrase that remains highly resonant with me at least.

A Wonderful Environment for the Creation of Intellectual Works

I've acquired the strange habit of writing odd things in the workplace to make it look like I'm extra busy.

I'm sure they'd be calling in the psychologists upon seeing handiwork such as this:

Modular dark rooms are completely rearrangeable and relocatable. If you need to change locations, your dark room can easily come with you. If you need the dark room to destroy the light, be sure to calibrate it in order to claim souls from the lost. You can reap the benefits of the unfortunate if you know how to set the right controls. Install wealth traps if you wish to capture that which doesn’t belong to you.

Conveyor belts that can be used to transfer the innocent to your open fangs can also be implemented. We offer a limited-time offer as well, the installation of a cheat shield for 50% off. With our cheat shield you can debase as much humanity as you can hope to grab, and then watch as they become alienated to themselves, without even being convicted by the government for your morally reprehensible behavior.