Oops

I had a post congratulating myself for 500 posts, but I have since realized that 95 of those posts were drafts. So really this is the 450th published post.

I feel pretty stupid for nit-picking over such things but for some reason I feel compelled to publish.

Some of us become pretty anxious about fixing pretty trivial errors that everyone (and the relentless march of history, and the cold churnings of the cosmos) will soon forget, or never notice in the first place.

More on Desire

Desire can be directed at a seemingly unlimited array of objects, but that array is artificially shortened by the preferences of the dominant culture: in this era, through the means of mass media. So desire is partially socially directed. 

Of course, one could desire to be free of the culture that values a limited array of desires that have lost their luster. Though such a desire runs the danger of never being fulfilled. 

I'm not so sure the Buddhist prescription of denying oneself desire is appropriate in this age. Those ideas were formed in another time, though I doubt I fully understand the deeper philosophy. And the philosophy itself seems so malleable that one can shape it to assist one's own purposes in a completely different context.  Besides I'm not so sure desire itself is so problematic, only when it is directed at unfulfillable or destructive objectives. 

One should be able to decouple one's own desires from one's own person and be able to honestly asses the merits and implications of such desires. Above all one should remain flexible with one's own motivations. Easier said than done certainly. But worth a try. 

Something to Say Somewhere Like Facebook

Learning to multitask by taking a shit and playing guitar at the same time.

Concerns from a Borderline Schizoid

It is very easy to hurt people. Perhaps in moments of thoughtlessness, we roll over the metaphorical toes of our peers simply by over-assertion of our opinions and dispositions. Take an individual dedicated to a strict schedule and a crystalline and linear conversational style and put that person in a room with another individual that may be scatter-brained, meandering, and genuinely unconcerned with structure of any kind and watch the tensions build.

As the room grows crowded, one begins to tuck in one's elbows to resist collision, yet the possibility remains of accidentally bumping into someone regardless of the precautions taken.  

The mere occupation of space becomes the displacement of someone else who could very well possess a just claim to that same space. I myself have found myself wishing I didn't have to take up any space at all. Extension can be so painful when one collides with others.

But then a paradox arises. That very environment you find yourself in often desires your engagement. People want to know you and - in an ironic twist - can be quite hurt when you refuse to engage. The more you diminish yourself out of fear that your positive presence may hurt another, the more you deprive those who wish to know you their points of interface.

Our social space seems to behave like our physical space. We see forces of attraction and repulsion and the strange turbulence that can arise from the resulting contradictions.

Hamlet understood that the more one over-analyzed the situation, the more paralyzed one would become when it came to action in regards to the situation ("to be or not to be" and such things). Well, he understood it perhaps too late and then everyone died! Certainly not the best solution to contemplate at the moment.

Biology can point to the beginning of a solution. Or less of a solution and more of a point of simple blind progress: living things grow rudders - fins, limbs, antennae, etc. - in order to navigate the physical world. Where are our social rudders? Does simply thinking about such matters help to chisel them out?

Yes, the era of the individual is over. This is the era of the social.

With a Sigh

The thing about desire is that it seems to be unlimited in its manifestations: it is activated upon every beautiful sight. And it has to be suppressed...more so in proportion to the amount of resources one lacks to fulfill it.

And us superfluous folk have to fight over its remains. And thus the daily cruelty that constitutes our social lives is explained.

Old Pictures Cont'd

For some, looking through old pictures is incredibly intoxicating and pleasurable. Nostalgia can envelope one in a warmth through remembrance. We do tend to discard the bad memories or at least dull them. And the good ones light up again somewhere in there.

But many times, what these old pictures remind me of is the soft violence with which we are torn from our loved ones and deposited into various pockets of material and social isolation to serve Capital. This drift and this deadness in my chest... I think of communities born out of displacement only to slowly dissolve once again, their constituents wandering, waiting to take root and make connections that are to be broken once again.

One misses everyone at once. One begins to entertain fantasies of a golden community reformed spontaneously out of all one's favorite acquaintances, family, friends, and other loved ones. Perhaps these sorts of naive fantasies form the basis of multiple cultures' conceptions of heaven and utopia. The accumulation of the Good.

Another night of wine and silly old man thoughts coming out of the head of a young adult. Dreaming of a mythical time in which "everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

Let's Flood the Place with Guns

Another shooting. Another popping gasket in the machine.

There's great pain in being separated from the ones we love. Especially with the understanding they're not coming back.

I wonder how it feels to get shot. Pain itself must be the subjective experience of a community within us separating. A spear of metal wedges apart cells and they shout an electric "no" upon being divided, their peers removed from a collective living vessel of animated matter. Each of us a civilization consisting of civilizations. And we gather as individuals in civilizations to survive.

This one is old and weak. Each mass murderer a slow motion thread tearing in the fabric, removing other threads in the wake of its destruction...a loss of clustered integrity.

The Greeks knew their tragedy through their plays. We sense ours when we turn on the TV...if vaguely.

The curious thing about the tragedy as an art form was that certain thinkers saw it as both an end and a beginning...perhaps that strange paradoxical point at which the snake eats its tail. Nietzsche saw it as the offspring of the Apollonian and  Dionysian forces: the forces of light, form, and reason versus the forces of darkness, intoxication, and the primordial origin respectively. The work of art itself was an attempt to create and shape a controlled process of destruction, perhaps to come to terms with it.

Hegel saw a hyper-concentration of contradictory forces in which a thesis is met with an antithesis and after a certain threshold of countervailing forces, a new synthesis was formed which was to become the new thesis, a process whose zenith (or nadir, depending on how you look at it) could be construed to be tragedy.

So tragedy is quite horrific at first glance, but one take-away could be that to come to terms with it and move on, we must as a collective learn to go with the flow, even if it means plunging ourselves back into the primordial unknown after taking one last glance at the crumbling order.

The only problem is that after each great crisis many thinkers feel certain the end and the resulting new beginning is to come, only for the old system to recover and reconstitute itself with new symbols, postponing a genuine revolution.

Is there even such a thing as revolution? Or is it all simply a never-ending rollercoaster of waxing and waning waves of energy, their wavelengths oscillating across history into eternity?

Portland

The landscape of Portland is electric green, due in large part to the voluminous rainfall the city gets every year. There is a high density in vegetation and it permeates the grid; the neighborhood streets are covered in dead leaves. Moss grows everywhere: trees, roofs, sidewalks, much of it doesn't stay dry for long.

There's something happening in Portland, much like there is something happening in various (mostly urban) pockets around the country, and the spirit is probably analogous to what was happening in places like San Francisco in the 60's, though now the ideology is slightly more refined and weathered...less naive. It seems to be quietly spreading in places like Long Beach and Berkeley as well: semi-urban places where the money is less concentrated (though still present) but the landscape resists the isolation and resulting social alienation of the suburbs. 

The actual downtown area is mostly like other cities' downtown areas: there are pockets of resistance but as a whole and as a function of our current economic system, the city is dominated by the moneyed types. It is the only way to subsist in an area where the rent shoots sky-high in accordance with population saturation and the universal human desire to be where the action is. The wealth concentrates and shoots up in the form of sleek glass towers, much like the inverted version of a cave full of dripping stalactites. It is saddening to view high end businesses displaying huge colorful messages like "Peace, love, unity" in their windows, the product of the relentless marketing impulse to shapeshift to meet the surrounding conditions of its environment to draw in as much customers as possible. The messages, while nice on their face, merely reflect the sensibilities of the surrounding progressive neighborhoods and end up becoming contradicted by the very operations they are trying to promote: to sell aggressively in competition with others in the area and become enriched and as a consequence serve to further divide the surrounding environment. The homeless sit on the streets right outside, cups in hand, mostly ignored but occasionally recognized with nervous glances by much of the fashionably-dressed passerby. 

But just across the bridge amid the sprawling green neighborhoods lies the authenticity I've been hearing about. This arrangement reminds me of Long Beach: centralized concentrated wealth surrounded by neighborhoods where this "new stuff" springs up in shoots like the first greenery out of a winter thaw. All of the most earnest restaurants are supplied locally by nearby organic farms. The underlying ideology is familiar: conserve energy while taking care to take from the environment with minimal disruption, while attempting to share the wealth with even distribution and re-injecting it into the places from where it was taken, as opposed to extracting as much of it as possible and then moving on when stores are exhausted, which is an impulse that has gotten us in so much trouble today. Such an ideology reflects an inversion of values that have become corrupt, values that upon taken to their extremes, only served to destroy. Small restaurant owners now experiment with communal seating and flexible pay-what-you can price sets, all indicative of a deeper instinct to mend a social fabric that has been frayed. And such trends are at least rubbing off on the larger commercial businesses, which is good enough of an effect for now. Though more must be certainly done. 

The winters are colder with much more rainfall than California, but I definitely want to go back and learn more, as well as continue to understand the other areas around the world that embody such ideas, and grow due to the magnetism their cultures generate. It is the best one can do at the moment. 

Name Change

Yep, signing with a new name now. Simpler and probably more appropriate. And it will be consistent with a philosophy blog I've been working on, though I've been procrastinating on that so we'll see how it goes.

Storm

Tonight it is hard to sleep for no particular reason. I listen to the wind outside howling. Waves and waves of compressed air particles flowing up and over the hillside. The weather can get angry out here; a glance outside can reveal furious clouds billowing out over what suddenly look like hardened mountains, almost as if they are crashing up and over the mountains and throwing themselves into the sky in a rage.

And that all precipitates a system of dark clouds that upon arriving plunge the land into silence and stillness and snow gently begins to fall. 

The Hunter

We got into the warmth of the barn and they were all chatting jovially over right wing politics, cursing Obama and the debt among other things. I ignored most of it; I had almost decided not to come because of how outnumbered I’d be in terms of political sensibility. I didn’t want to be surrounded by the right wing toxicity that I find so distasteful.

But a combination of the gin I had before and the anonymity of being amidst a crowd whose din rose harmlessly into the barn’s rafters left me feeling a bit more easy than I anticipated. It was easy to ignore much of the rhetoric, and being among peers and somewhat intoxicated, the men were cheerful and playful and not too resentful. Initially they regarded us with suspicion; the young raise red flags almost by default among the conservative-minded. But they became increasingly comfortable with us. Some of them anyways. Others wore closed faces, but it wasn’t too offensive.

 The beers and spirits flowed easy. We walked out to the cold and viewed the white light dying behind the clouds, urinating out beyond the halo of light around the barn with our backs to the giant Irish wolf hound barreling into us for attention. And then back into the warmth and the light of the barn.

We caught the host in the back of the barn amidst boxes and boxes of ammunition, pouring himself another drink and lighting a fat cigar. We asked about the wicked-looking assault rifles he had sitting on his back workbench, and he dove into a discussion over weapon function, assuring us that he selected weapons carefully for varying range and utility. He had three assault rifles and a handgun in that corner of the barn alone, and an ungodly amount of weapons in the house, at least a few in every room.

He picked up a loaded variation of an Aug and showed us the sights and action, cigar in his mouth pouring out smoke in between swigs of whiskey. His voice had that Clint Eastwood rasp and his face had the same sour expression. He got to talking about hunting.

“Oh yeah I’ve lived on deer and elk meat for years at a time. It can keep you and your family fed if you do it right.

The head is a hard target to hit. A very small area. I’ve seen guys blow off the bottom jaw and the elk is still alive. You’ve got to go for the chest area. If not the heart, you can get the lungs when the bullet mushrooms. Does all sorts of damage in there. If you hit the heart you lose a good portion of some of the best meat. And you’ve got to get the thing bled fast, if not the good flank meat can go really go to hell.

After a while you develop an ethos, you see. You’re out there stalking this thing for 4 hours. You’re exhausted, he’s getting worn down. It is a game of attrition. I’ve seen these elk do things that I never thought they could do. This one would circle around several times and then jump some six feet off to the side out of nowhere and then the chase would be on again. We’d continue that all day. You’d be exhausted near the end, wondering if you can really do it. It gets to where you reach this understanding. He yields and you take him down and it’s as if he’s giving you permission and you thank him for the struggle. At that point even dressing down your kill seems like an impossible task. But you do it. You get through it. And then you look yourself in the mirror in the morning and you feel like a man.

And yeah, I’ve killed a lot of things. You get good at it and it gets pretty fun.”

This man was a warrior. The kind of guy that reads into killing like many guys read into fixing machinery: analyzing it and judging it on merit in terms of how effective and skillful one can be. The reverse of a surgeon perhaps, distilling destruction and deconstruction into a profession and an art, making virtue out of the economy of shutting down a living thing. And doing so with maximum effectiveness was seen to be a mark of strength, or of greatness at its peak.

As horrified as I was (looking at deer all month, I found myself enraptured by the sheer beauty of their construction, and could not imagine wanting to kill one, much less hurt one) I found the man quite endearing in a strange way. Perhaps it was a dark part in me that I suppressed so long ago (but never destroyed) that allowed me to comprehend his position and relate to him, as radically different my own sensibility is. It was his sincerity that was so endearing, his seriousness and his commitment to his own ethos, his own authenticity so to speak, that I could recognize and relate to. Unlike many of those right wing types, who derive their identities from propaganda and military movies, he had a firm conviction that he was ready to back up. And he probably could kill a man.

And there are people like this all over the country, crouching in their homes and clutching their firearms, ready for a break in state legitimacy. Such is the warrior phase in the life cycle of civilizations, when the systematic machinations of businessmen break down and the chieftan strongmen rise and seek to take with force what they believe to be theirs.

Better to attempt to communicate with and connect with such people. There is a lot of hot talk about another civil war between the red and blue cultures. But I don’t think it is that simple. And I think we all know who would win in a fight. 

Grey

It rained all night and it has been drizzling off and on all morning.

Everything is yellow, brown, and grey. In the valley below the fog waxes and wanes, lapping at the trees below, and then within seconds surges up the hill to cover the house. Dark mountains that were partially obscured by low clouds now vanish.

Pockets of air of varying temperatures and condensing water vapors...ecological systems giving birth to these phenomena...the mountains and the air passing over them and bodies of water, forming ghostly oceans that rise and recede. Great beauty.

It feels like a gyp, here at the end of November and dismal rain instead of beautiful snow. At least there's the fog.

Arctic ice the size of the continental US melted this month. It feels strange to be sitting out here thinking of such things, isolated up on this hill looking out over the valley, all so peaceful and majestic yet under the impression that we are doing a terrible amount of damage to the very carefully-tuned environment we’ve found ourselves surviving in.

And yet the machine churns on almost of its own accord. 

Watching the Weather Change

That was a lovely Perfect Circle line I want to think (or was it Tool? maybe Tool) repeating with some light percussion and strings. It comes to mind today.

The snow is melted, leaving the hills yellow and brown. Dark clouds have come in with the wind. Standing out in the wind, one is swayed back and forth as one watches the swaying grass, which results in an effect in which one feels one is underwater.

Listening, there is the roar of the wind and the rustling grass and brush. A creaking gate. Some cows graze on the hill in the distance. Every once in a while a cow moan drifts up the hill. Sometimes the caw of a crow, or the bleat of a goat. At one time deer were fucking: they make strange bleating and yelping noises when they do so.

A series of dull percussion: gunshots. It is still hunting season. Stories of a group of hunters surrounding a herd of elk and massacring them make me sad and angry. Hunters shooting from their cars, that sort of thing. There are hefty fines for such things. So what then is hunting? What is the motivation for such an act? There's people who just need food sure. But acts like that? Senseless cruelty.

Best not to dwell on such things. Watch the weather.

Clearing Up Some Matters

1. It seems there is an inconsistency in my attitudes concerning car travel in various posts. These inconsistencies can exist across time because the inconsistencies themselves are generated by mood. As a passenger, one can really enjoy a car ride. As a driver, the experience can oscillate from quiet contemplation and pleasure upon viewing the surrounding environment to hot anger, frustration, or simple boredom. The solution is something automated on rails, certainly, since we already kind of follow rails: the road. To cling to the automobile as the dominant mode of transportation is to cling to what should be a waning illusion of control. But of course, mass transit would exist between and within major city centers as the dominant form of transportation for most of the population. I have no problem with people taking out personal vehicles for various needs in such a context. The agitation arises from the fact that we are often forced to rely on cars.

2. It occurs to me now that it isn't strange that we co-exist with the forces of winter. Much as we fear and loathe the idea of freezing and yielding our energy to the negative non-energy of the cold, the same is true of an overabundance of energy and heat, which is more likely to happen, since its happening now. Life exists within a balance between extremes, going from one to the other but tending toward an equilibrium in the middle. Energy is not lost or created, but eternally circulates.

Self-Imposed Constraints

Strange, out here in the expanse of the countryside, we huddle in a house for warmth, our minds not expanding with the wide wilderness but contracting within the house, due to not just a crushing cold outside, but increasingly constricting symbolic forces of finance. Its cold hand squeezes everyone...it reaches into the country, so long as everyone remains hooked up to the Market.

The shivers pass in waves. We find ways to relate to each other as humans and there is a brief exchange...and a brief thaw. And things begin to tighten up again.

The Great White North

Such a name is jokingly brought up in these parts because mostly everyone here is white. Though I think there is something to be said of the aesthetics that are raised from such a title, which can be quite fitting for this place in the winter. Here it grows very cold. Profoundly cold. The cold is everywhere. One steps outside and is struck by the cold: it pulls at one’s body all over, as if seeking to plunge the world in its monolithic frigidity. It lingers in one’s legs and arms long after coming in from the snow. It takes time to warm, and even then, there are pockets of the cold lingering about the house. It would take enormous amounts of energy to eradicate it all. It brings to mind science fiction accounts of those Martian settlers who complain that the sand is everywhere, all the time.

Of course, there are places further north that are even colder and whiter, given such criteria, but this place grows quite cold and quite white in the winter, which is enough.

But there’s great beauty in this total cold, and the total whitening of the landscape. The landscape glows white, even at night, and in the sun, the snow shimmers as each individual flake melts away, only to be reconstituted over night with fresh snow.

It’s almost the opposite of striving life: whereas in life you have pockets of energy seeking to consolidate themselves and perpetuate themselves, here you have a monolithic cold death, a negative force seeking to stop everything in its movement, draining its color. And yet we coexist. Life indirectly supports itself. Rabbits burrow under the shed to keep warm, deer chew on plants striving to survive, their external brown shoots hiding the fact that under the frozen ground they are insulated and subsisting with thriving green roots.

Best to leave the rest to images.  Textures this time. 

Why the Obsession with Writing?

To attempt to encapsulate what’s going on in one’s own head and hopefully share it intelligibly. In this regard, language can be very difficult. It isn’t easy to capture everything one feels and convey its full meaning to one another; perhaps this is one of the deepest roots within modern man’s madness. But such an endeavor can be very rewarding, and it is certainly essential to our survival as a species. Best to cultivate it and attempt to understand it better, so as to exercise it more effectively.

Cars ≠ Freedom

Out on the road, upon viewing the profound beauty of the outstretched landscape, I wanted to write, take photographs, and simply just contemplate the colors and contours of the land. As a passenger, one is free to do so, but when driving a car, one is struck not with the boundless freedom that is often articulated about such an activity, but a suffocating sense of entrapment. One is trapped manning the wheel, working the pedals, and remaining ever- vigilant towards the surrounding environment, lest one is subverted by some roadside obstacle, or even another driver. One’s attention is forced on the simple act of getting from one place to another, and for safety’s sake, one is only allowed a fleeting glimpse and a contemplation of the surrounding beauty.

Relative speed, gas levels, money, the ongoing basic functioning of the engine, all these things occupy the driver’s mind and interrupt chains of thought in cycles. Everything becomes worse in populated areas. One is forced to contend with the intrusive motions of many other drivers, often impatiently weaving lanes, tailgating, cutting off, braking, and engaging in whatever other annoying habit they have to resort to in order to get to their destinations a few seconds quicker. Many of these drivers are almost completely solipsistic, betraying a shocking disregard for our social reality. Communication is non-existent, and one starts to feel as if one is viewed as merely an obstacle, and not another human being. Perceiving this, others drive more defensively, aggressively closing gaps and denying even the efforts of benevolent drivers to traverse the road.

Such a landscape mirrors the breaking down of the individualist ideology, and offers one a glimpse of the new emergent paradigm, at least in one’s imagination. One has to ask: how did we get here? And where are we going? There was once this distinct American idea that every individual should have their house, their car, their nuclear family, and a vast array of consumables at their disposal and that a cluster of resources like that is the key to individual freedom. Let’s leave aside the fact that many of us have either lost such a cluster of resources or could never hope to acquire many of the things once ostensibly guaranteed to all (or at least guaranteed in spirit), but what about the effects of such a lifestyle on culture and the environment?

We are left with a wasteful suburban sprawl in which transportation distances are maximized in even populous areas. Cities are spread far. Road congestion is high. It takes a working car and abundant fuel (which has become quite expensive) to do anything. Fossil fuels, upon harvest and utilization, are some of the greatest contributors to our growing climate crisis. Not to mention polluters. And all the water wasted on endless fields of artificially transplanted plantlife. Go down any rural highway and behold all the run-over animals. Does wonders for one’s mood.

Culturally, man is isolated within the walls of his suburban tinderbox and within the vessel of his car, surrounded by his idiosyncratic music, watching his idiosyncratic entertainment, everyone constantly walled off from one another. Consequently no one understands one another. The art of communication is being lost.

Is this all the consequence of the car? Or is the car the symptom? I’d argue the latter. Again I would argue it could be traced back to ever-evolving ideologies. Cars and suburban units isolate us sure. But what of the increasingly idiosyncratic subgenres of art and entertainment? The increasingly fragmented and segmented subcultures, all steeped in entirely different sets of language and aesthetics, all divided off from one another?

Is this some nefarious government/international power elite plot to atomize us, thus rendering us easier targets for social control? Probably not. Social fragmentation makes control easier sure, but even the government and the largest corporations show signs of fragmentation: disintegrating bodies whose deteriorating contours are traversed by the most inertiatic, ambitious, and egotistical individuals, all on a purely instrumental level, a mere game of who makes it to the top of the power symbol pile without anyone really understanding the true nature of things.  All of the abstractions and lies built upon lies are merely covering over the fact that no one truly understands what’s going to happen. Those with the most resources only appear to be in control, since they do still retain certain elements of material control, but do they know in their minds what they are doing? Where their own society is going? Probably not, though there could be some cynical instrumentalists in the bunch, pushing the buttons that they know work while pretending to be something else.

What is the answer to this grim, mocking game, this system of manipulation that claims to be a natural state of life? Well, we stand here left with a fraying social fabric, torn asunder by egos that believe themselves to be free and unaccountable without noticing the many connections they are a part of, and are currently severing. The answer is to reconstitute that fabric. But in which way?

Fascists would choose violence. Reconstitute the order by reassembling by force some mythical past state of order. Revolutionaries would reconstitute the order by generating an entire new framework; some wish to do this with violence, some with peaceful means. A new framework would be in order, yes, and there is no shortage for model frameworks dreamed up to solve our problems. But the real trick is transitioning to such a framework while maintaining stability, without total societal collapse or cascading cycles of violence.

One way to re-imagine society, instead of designating everyone you don’t like an enemy to be cleansed, is to re-emphasize the social body. Such is one of the architectural/transportation antidotes becoming quite popular among progressive ecological thinkers: tightly clustered urban centers connected by generous lines of mass transit. I would prefer the mass transit to be either suspended or buried, so as to preserve as much of the surrounding wilderness as possible. The city centers themselves would be free of ugly, dangerous, and divisive parking lots, parking structures, streets, highways, freeways, etc.  They would be engineered to harmonize with environments, minimizing and rationalizing resource use and maximizing greenery surfaces. Buildings would live and breathe. Communities would have various places to actually congregate and interact, hopefully rendering extinct the solipsistic man.

Encouraging ideas to say the least. Such bright visions of society (though perhaps unrealistic in the near future) help one trudge on through the increasingly cold and grey contemporary one. I think of sitting on a high speed train and reading, writing, and surveying the surrounding, unspoiled landscape while I am sitting in a car, mind going numb staring at an endless road or a sea of red brake-lights. One shouldn’t feel trapped in a steel box, or a wooden one, all their lives.

On the Road Going North

There is much to be said about being in a silent car out in open country. The vast landscape offers a soothing contemplation of natural aesthetics, and affords the mind room to start to wander and the thoughts crop up on their own and sink deeper as the time goes on. Music can help or hinder this process, though I prefer the dull roar of the wind against the windshield. 

They say that wherever you are, or wherever you go, you are still yourself. I  suppose there's some truth to this, but it seems different environments encourage different clusters of moods as well. In an office I am a schizotypal melancholic, literally aching with despair and agitation, thoughts fogged and scattered. In Vegas I am a pathetic hedonist, my raw mind passively responding to the hypersaturation of stimuli and plagued with the steady need for pleasure. Out here on the road my mind is clear and serene and I can think again. Of course until the hours start setting in and the sun goes down, and all one wants to do is cozy up in a hotel. 

Part of it must be the natural beauty of the landscape. This is a beauty that is natural because it simply just is. The mountains curve off into the hazy distance, cut into by the winds with capillaries of eroding soil stretching like veins off the mountains and down into the valleys. Everything proceeds as it should and lies there as it should. One is not offended as is sometimes possible when one surveys human construction, which often stems from some deep ideology or another. 

For example, one can become quickly annoyed as one starts to approach the city and the billboards start cropping up. It seems as if marketers are universally banal and humorless. Every once in a while a billboard can be pretty clever, but usually these things are cursed with the intellectual frivolity shared by those with the merchant's ideology and the obsession with accumulation. A burning need to sell and convince leaves little room for deeper contemplation, and so the resulting messages end up resembling diluted cliches and ripped off ideas. This is even worse in the red states, where numerous billboards (often decadent) compete with sappy religious billboards and the overall clash of values can appear quite grotesque. 

Of course, I could be supplying a false dichotomy. After all, is not the human condition as it should be as it stands now? Should we not appreciate it as yet another natural formation, competing ideologies and all, which it is? But such is the experience of being human. Explosives are quite natural but we curse them for blowing off our fingers. To be located within the human organism as a human individual is to love and hate. If I was a sentient grain of soil rolling off the top of the mountain, I'm sure I would be cursing my fellow soil grains for failing to arrest my decent, though such an event on a cosmic scale is simply inevitable and just.

Another virtue of land travel is the gradual transformation of the landscape. As one moves on, one is treated to display after display of great natural beauty...displays that melt into one another. The end result of this is the contemplation of a more cosmic beauty, a beauty that emerges not by virtue of a static image or even a sitting landscape but the contemplation of the greater arc of change. Desert creeps in with patches of sand across pastures until the scene is transformed and a great desert stretches beyond the horizon. Mountains appear dimly in the distance and then suddenly loom dark blue and majestic high above the road, only to melt away into great stretching fields once again. The same with great clouds and distant storms. Roads curve to suddenly reveal great canyons with layers of rock that progress from yellows and browns to bright oranges and reds, with shimmering rivers snaking away far below. And all this going through gradual change itself as the sun rises and sets, whole arrangements of color and shadow coming and going with it. Such is the ideal state of nature. 

I was surprised to find an egalitarian human nature out here on the road. Drivers are very conscientious and gladly move to the side if you come up on them. Truckers move to the left lane if there is flashing lights or indications of trouble on the right, regardless of whether there is an obstruction or not. Everyone tries to stay out of the others' way and the overall effect is pleasant. Not like the constant anticipation of threats and challenges experienced in the city. Perhaps on the open road, one is not impatient because of the vast distance and monotony, and can afford to relax and be generous to the other drivers. In the city drivers become selfish and solipsistic, perhaps due to the depersonalization and oversaturation of stimulus resulting from high population and the struggle for resources. 

This can explain the attitudes and paradoxes of the red state individual especially, which can often seem pretty puzzling considering the contradictions between their demeanor and their ideology. Generally, those in the red family unit and smaller communities act like communists, but due to the peculiarities of pack mentality and language, adhere to ideologies completely hostile to any social solidarity, such as the neofeudalism championed by politicians of both of our opposing factions today. People out here are nice and gracious. But throw in a word or two that has a certain charge and soon enough they are sputtering hackneyed arguments for capital punishment and female disempowerment. Ah, but it is all much more complicated than that of course. Always worth contemplating anyways. 

It is nice to be dispositionally distant from the usual politics of deception. I guess the sham elections are over and we can enjoy 4 more years of the same sociopaths and war criminals that have been ruling us forever anyways. And so on and so on until the end of empire, wherever that end is, if such an end is possible. But for now some rest, and a little peace. The land doesn't care for such matters, and it is always nice to listen to the land again. 

I'm out here typing from Salt Lake City. In 2 and a half hours or so, it will be time to move on. Further North then. 

Vegas, Baby

Ah, Vegas! The greatest towering, glittering monument to extraction there ever was. The entire city exists for it. Its palacial halls and casinos can be quite beautiful, with its artfully lighted landscapes and dazzling decorations, all juiced with resources vigorously squeezed from its visitors like lemons. The patrons wander the halls like empty husks, their ghostly faces showing vague dashes of hope for regaining what it was they lost. The city takes and takes. It takes everything from the symbolic power in money as its hotels mark up cheap rum and coke mixed drinks thousands of percents to the water and energy squeezed from the surrounding region to power this wasteful monstrosity in the center of the desert. HST was right to obsess over the horrors pervading the Vegas night: this truly is the epicenter of the distinct American drive to grow endlessly and dominate; this showcases the voracious, cancerous appetite for senseless expansion and the bottomless need to trade pleasure for pain, a bottomless need that results in the powerful building tottering, topheavy towers of pleasure upon the compressed foundations of the powerless in pain. If New York is the symbolic concentration of the American man’s material ambition to create and impose order on chaos, Vegas is the underslung id, the dark animal struggle for pleasure and power prettied up with dazzling light and awe-inspiring crystallizations of wealth. Wall Street tries to hide such impulses in endlessly baroque structures of symbolic deceit, and the largest corporations try to hide such impulses underneath obfuscating brands, imagery, and propaganda, but Las Vegas extracts openly and proudly, rewarding the lucky with riches and pleasure and spreading a false morality by condemning the loser (those who lose by chance no less) as weak and lacking of self-control. 

This is the distinct American hydra, cutting itself off of all History in its quest for self-definition, but in the end cycling through a series of false faceplates borrowed from other times and cultures. Witness the rich pulling their expensive cars up to the Palazzo, which is nothing but a great faceplate emulating some vague European style, which is merely fixed like a mask to yet another chain of casinos, over-expensive restaurants and bars, and shopping malls. But I bet those patrons feel oh so European! Walk on down the street and oh my goodness more casinos, restaurants, and stores! Here you can feel like a pirate, or an ancient Egyptian, or a circus-goer, or the hypermodern man, without comprehending in the least what any of it means!

Yes, extraction, extraction by symbol, by monetary transfer. And this is all administered and mediated through an apparatus composed of those simply trying to get by. The numerous attendants and receptionists and tellers and doorman all stand there statuesque, administering this system of extraction and domination and attempting to distance themselves from the endless waves of patrons they see built up by spectacle and ground down slowly (or quickly) by mechanisms carefully, statistically tuned to rob.

I witnessed the apparatus firsthand during my first and last visit to a strip club. The club was tucked carefully behind the main strip, out of view but easily accessible with a wink and a nod to anyone who just asked. That’s how it works, you see. First walking into the place, one realizes one is doomed. Completely empty, a row of girls sitting in the back in chairs waiting for someone to walk in, their disinterested faces buried in their cellphones. And they descended on us as soon as we sat down, offering us water that mysteriously disappeared after they isolated us and took us separately off to the back rooms to pressure us into asking for pleasures wildly priced. They understood that most men are far more vulnerable to a pouting, beautiful woman than a thug with a baseball bat. But one is struck with all sorts of conflicting thoughts in such a place. These poor women were starved. Do we accept a service? Will it help these girls? How much money will they get? But isn’t this debasement? What were we even doing here? I told a pair of girls in the back room that I simply couldn’t afford for one of them to get naked and dance in front of me. They cooed that I was much more honest than most guys, and one of them offered me a cheaper lap dance, which I reluctantly agreed to. We even talked a bit of politics. She was a sweet girl and seemed genuine at moments. I actually felt awful when she told me she was going to start the dance, and then awkwardly grinded her ass on my lap, perhaps dimly taking note of my whiskey-and-despair-flaccid member. She showed me her shaved pelvis and I felt nothing. I smiled at her and thanked her and dragged myself miserably to the stage, putting a few bills in the g-string of a dancer and then trying to strain and sit there and watch her take it off and dance naked. Another hungry girl approached me as I sat down, perhaps failing to notice I just got done with a lapdance. I had to turn her down and after that I simply left to wait outside for a cab. An ugly place. This is reminiscent of various anthropological studies across cultures and time. Often when a community disintegrates and social life degenerates into mere market logic, women tend to become objectified and traded amongst men for various uses just like this. And then this provokes a paternalistic backlash with reactionary men repressing their women in order to avoid this. So it seems women get the shaft either way. Good enough reason to be a feminist as any.  

Outside, the doorman has his face buried in his phone as well. In front of me loomed Trump tower, a staggeringly ugly monument to gross incompetence. Brilliant rewards for the most daringly corrupt and defiantly useless. Such is the society we enjoy! Yes, these are the snapshots of Vegas.

Of course anyone would wonder why people do it. Why would they flock here in droves to be dazzled and then battered about and robbed? Well, one would have to acknowledge that Vegas does give something back after all: it entertains. The patterns of superficial gains and resulting loss it induces takes one through an emotional rollercoaster, instilling hope and dashing all that away, perhaps to make room for fresh naïve hope once again. It can be quite thrilling. And one must credit the excitement of the sheer multitude of spectacle: of all the competing imagery and diversity of performance. There are brilliant shows playing all week, and much thought goes into much of the landscaping and some of the architecture. Such luxuries could once be enjoyed by a middle class with a bit extra in disposable income perhaps, but we know how that’s going now. No, this place is mainly a playground of the wealthy now, or a killing ground for those willing to part with what little they have left.

I do have to express thanks for Vegas. It never ceases to be a muse. It gets the creative juices flowing with its sheer display of contradictions. Such a beautiful, blazing, sparkling place built and crystallized on such monstrous human forces. Vegas has never ceased to fascinate me. I despise it (perhaps one despises it more the more one learns) just as much as I am bedazzled by it. So thank you, Vegas. You got me writing again.

And all this here in the middle of such a beautiful desert. The painted rock glows in the setting sun and the features of the surrounding mountains make it appear beautifully alien and earthly at the same time. One could do much worse than simply taking a bag of shrooms and some firewood and camping gear with some friends and simply leave the road and wander into the desert before one even arrives at Vegas. One could definitely have a more meaningful and rewarding experience. For hundreds or even thousands of dollars less. Hah! Such is the true value of money!

Well, the Buddha had it right. Desire generates suffering because one will either always desire more or have their desires frustrated. His teachings resonate now because he too was living in a particularly violent stage in history when various empires were vying for domination. So it goes: as the objects of desire increasingly become concentrated at the top of a given power structure (as empire calcifies and a ruling elite insulates itself against the rest of the population, securing more desires and desiring yet more), one has to either be frustrated in their pursuits of desire, or fight their way to the top, inflicting more suffering. Unless of course one is a sociopath, and then such an environment would seem just right. Buddha’s suggestion was simply to stop desiring. And Jesus’ was along the same lines. What these religious prophets had in common was that they advocated a departure from the existing constellation of affairs in order to generate a new one. Perhaps to generate a new constellation of desires that is this time fulfillable (of course one would have to stretch the definition of “desire”)? Political revolutionaries generally advocate this as well, just in secular terms. Religious prophets advocate an escape from the existing reality by generating a new ideological reality, while the revolutionaries call for the generation of a new material reality, which is itself based on another ideological framework of course. But is either option any longer available? Is existing in an alternate ideological reality desirable? Is a complete material revolution possible, considering today's decentralization of power? Or should one learn to grow just as one is through the cracks?

In the end, everything is highly interconnected and multi-faceted. Vegas can be an engine for extraction and weird epicenter of various forces where genuine people can meet and have fun. One's own experience can be radically different from another's, and inform one's opinion of the place. I'm just reading into my own experience of the place. Projecting my own melancholy. My own ideology. I'm satisfied.

I'm disappointed with my visit and grateful. Such conflicting emotions can exist at the same time. We are strange creatures. And so is Vegas. 

Lull

For now, a stillness. There is nothing in my head.

Insomnia

Not usually a problem really. But I've lost an hour of sleep tonight. More now. As I awoke my mind swam to focus amid numerous shapeless anxieties that were slowly decaying as they were cut into vague shapes and packed back into my subconscious. Miles Davis haunted my thoughts, but as I listened only the air conditioner hummed overhead and the faint sound of voices drifted up from the alley: alien people whom I should be sharing communion with but who are only exciting my raw animal anxieties, fresh, exposed nervous wire anxieties sizzling free and electric on the surface.

Yes, a scared animal that has found itself suspended within cubes of lumber, drywall, and glass...calcified cells of silently vibrating matter hanging there after bubbling up in the long chemistries of relentless history. Simply suspended here, wondering, where is society? Who cares for the ones breaking off and falling down through the cracks? Well, we do of course, but we aren't the ones with the material power. The ones who care for the ones falling are those falling mostly, and the rest? Well.

This economic trauma feels as a deep ceaseless gash opening beneath my feet: a yawning abyss opening underneath. I've had a soft, comfortable floor under me too long, and now a great black maw underneath, which was always there, waiting, makes itself felt, its presence alien and horrifying. But what good is life if it can't travel down its own churning whirlpools, to be transformed when it emerges from the other side?

Strange thoughts from a strange brain, flowered into being amidst a strange, vast cold universe that seems absurd and senseless upon naked viewing, but that upon opening up and activating the right circuits appears warm and beautiful and right. Waiting for it.

Blackness

The struggle for identity is not simply a dislocated search in the dark, but an upward swim against the forces of a society that has already decided one for you.

An Update on the Concept of the Machine

A common objection to neoclassical economic ideology is that the ideology posits people as rational pleasure-seeking machines and that reality is much more complicated than that, and any attempts to mold policy away from real observations in order for it to resemble the favored ideology tend to make things pretty miserable for everyone involved.

I think this objection is partially true. It would be more accurate to qualify one's definition of "machine." If we are talking about the machines humans make, then you can you point out that neoclassical ideology makes use of an old conception of a machine that is built on a simplified understanding of what machines are and how they work, because this is an old ideology that was beginning to be formulated not long after the Industrial Revolution when our technologies were simpler.

So the understanding is simplified because we made simpler machines back then. Human intellect often makes analogies between observable reality and its own invented technologies to better understand things. It provides a framework to organize all that data. Lots of data gets lost when the framework is more simplistic. So ideologies like these can be useful for certain expediencies, but they shouldn't be clung to when they are becoming outdated.

Really all living things are sorts of machines. But they are highly complicated machines that are produced by mechanisms with millions and millions of years of evolution behind them, whereas human machines are very crude and simple in comparison because their life span is roughly equal to when we started to make tools. But then we are learning more about the natural world everyday and our technologies reflect those deeper understandings as we apply what we have learned from nature and even our own technology to better manipulate the world for our own needs.

But yes, it is always a bad idea to attempt to make reality resemble your creations. The former is potentially infinite and the latter is a construct. Reality will very dependably refuse to be crammed into a temporary box.

Valve Rules

Not sure about what is being omitted or not, considering the author is employed by the entity he is writing about, but Yanis Varoufakis is a highly reputable and insightful economist so benefit of the doubt is probably applicable.

Also kudos to Valve for choosing this man (and not some hack like most corporations do) to be their in-house economist. Also, the subject matter this man is discussing (ie alternatives to command-control corporate capitalism) is not something that is usually allowed to be discussed on a blog owned by a for-profit corporation. The comments are very good as well.

Of course, considering the nature of Valve and its organization and its owners' philosophy, all this shouldn't come as a surprise either. The massive success of a company like this given the current environment is very encouraging. These are exciting ideas. 

Also if we didn't already know this, Valve rules.

Good Lord!

It occurred to me that I usually write as if the writing was a sort of heat exhaust: a release valve to exercise inner pains. A time of inspiration to be sure, but this could lead to an asymmetrical representation.

Too dark! A perpetual rollercoaster drop in which one blacks out. The beauty of life is found in the highs juxtaposed with the lows. It is all there, as it should be.

Resolve to write the joys, just as well.

Like Me

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Paolo Soleri

"By the age of thirty-five, Paolo Soleri, who was born in Turin in 1919, had already chosen to dwell in the Arizona desert and experience it as a way of life. As he did so, he began to reflect on urban architecture and the environment. From there, his interest grew exponentially, and he came to sense great synergy between different types of knowledge, thus resisting the tyranny of fragmentation and specialization."

A Conversation to Have With The Boss or (Insert Authority Figure)

"Come in. Sit down."

"So what's up?"

"You're fired."

"Fired huh."

"Yeah fired."

"What for."

"What for? You don't work. We have to ask you again and again to do what you should already know you need to do and we are sick of it. Just sick of it."

"..."

"What aren't you going to say something?"

"Do you know what it means to be human?"

"What?"

Do you...know what it means to be human. Sort of cliche I know. But it is worth asking."

"What does"

"What's your son's name?"

"My son? Why would you"

"Tom...Tom right?"

"Yeah it's Tom."

"He's got some problems huh? Tom?"

"You have no business"

"Just listen. Tom's got his problems. I can tell."

"And how's that?"

"Body language. Choice of words. Eye movements. I can tell."

"Okay. Sure he does."

"But what do you feel for him? What do you want for him?"

"I just want him to take care of himself. And he's"

"He's drinking? What."

"Yeah he drinks too much."

"Yeah I figured."

"I just don't get it. I gave him everything and he just bogged down."

"So kick him out of the house."

"I can't do that. Where would he go?"

"Right so you care about him."

"Of course I do!"

"So why not everybody else?"

"What? Because he's my son."

"Right we all feel that way. We feel that way with family and close friends. But think. Why not everyone else? What makes them less deserving?"

"It's just how"

"Yes?"

"It's how it works."

"Sure it is how it works. But why not ask the question? If you never ask such questions how would you ever know otherwise?"

"What does this have to do with me firing you?"

"Firing someone now is like throwing them out in the street. Do you understand?"

"It is not"

"So let me rephrase things. Why not relate to everybody as if they were your family? Why the fear? Why the contempt? Don't you know that life can be beautiful?"

Phew

Better to write more frequently I suppose. The ol' muscles are getting weak. Sometimes it is hard to write. I sit in the car in the commute and feel nothing. I sit at work and my head is full of ideas with nowhere to go. People behind me talk much about nothing. I sit at home and am only filled with sighs. Hope it is a phase.

A rich inner world fades in and out of view at least. Connected to a whole pulsing nervous system desperate to express itself under the cracked concrete of empire.

I realize hedonism is not necessarily or completely evil, but merely pitter patterings of a people trying to tap what's left of emotions that were long extinguished after being dragged down by dying ideas. Creation is salvation, as it always is.

Caffeine

I had a coffee this evening and now I'm jacked up and can't go to bed. It triggered a manic state. I watched a political documentary and my head was filled with Utopian ideas and then I played guitar for a bit and felt like the world was good and this is our time. Maybe it is. I also know I'm going to wake up tired and depressed. The dehumanizing morning commute will pit me against faceless steel beasts all vying for some arbitrary winning position, everyone racing to their despised jobs. Well ok I'm projecting a bit but still.

Caffeine does that to me. But I fall for it every time. I do feel pretty good right now. My head is racing with memories and I long to connect. Though I'll probably contract again at least until the work week is over. Every weekend I have fleeting glimpses of beaches and sunshine. I'm partially free for a bit and its over. The memories flash past like strobes. Their fragmentation and incompleteness and near-fulfillment make my heart ache.

Caffeine is a drug. It made me high. It is permitted because it allows us to work better or something like that.

Everyone goes by the coffee maker every morning at work and gets high. And then works like manic hamsters to fulfill some meaningless task. Well not everyone. But probably a majority. Then they go home and plug up their gaping holes with TV. By god consumerism is madness!

Maybe we know that everything is coming apart in slow motion. But still want to live as if it isn't. That's ok. Human nature and all that. Hopefully we don't get to a point where everything dead is in suspended animation, ready to liquefy past a certain point. I think Poe has a story about this.

I'm betting we manage to evolve before the liquefaction. But it's just hard right now. That's ok too I guess. Hopefully sleep soon.

PS: What a dreadful post! But I'm really in a better mood than my writing conveys right now.

PSS: For example - what this political documentary articulated was all the political mistakes we've made. How the powerful have tried maniacally to control every aspect of existence, and how the powerless have tried violence and tyranny to break people free of Capitalist ideology, and how it has all miserably failed. And really all that's left to do is relate to each other on a human level. All of the solutions tried thus far have relied on endlessly contrived political philosophy and alienating violence...all acts of radical separation that have made things worse. The answer is simple and it lies in how we relate to ourselves: openly with trust and compassion. Of course, the practical matters to work out are another thing entirely. Though I feel we can do this. I feel strongly about this, and translated those strong feelings to guitar. So usually when I play guitar, it is somewhat playful but also mechanical to continue improving articulation. Practice routine and all that. But every once in a while, when infused with the emotional sentiments that come with the celebration of life, the music takes on life itself. This I think is what leads to good music.

A Quick Note on Something I Dunno

Now this idea is muddled and vague, as it was formed in that no-man's-land between consciousness and dream state as I passed in and out of sleep.

But say the ideas you traffic in and the emotional way in which you interface with these ideas can translate to your interactions in the material world.

Let's say you hold a certain position, a dogmatic religious position, such as a specific religious doctrine. Well we can imagine the shape of your thinking self as that of a square: it is sharply delineated and it takes on a very specific shape that is only compatible with other similar ideas. And so if you come across another individual idea or even an opposing idea, those rigid delineations clash with one another until either the opposing side yields or you both become more rounded.

I conceptualize it like this because square-like shapes in the material world behave this way when they are placed together. And I don't know much about audio engineering, but it seems to me like the signals that are designated as "square" produce tones that actually sound like they have an edge.

And so it follows if you allow for more nuance and flexibility in your intellectual positions, you will end up a more rounded, organic shape that doesn't clash as harshly with the other ideas to be found in the world.

Of course, squares are perfectly okay in the world of objects, but then when it comes to people it is probably a better idea to not be grinding each other into dust all the time.

Eh, okay. Something to build off of later.

See This is What I'm Talking About

My ambition for working with video games took a long, slow death. It began to accelerate when I tried to write about them professionally, which was a time that happened to coincide with the fact that the largest game publishers had consolidated their power and were engaging in more and more abusive, monopolistic, anti-consumer practices. That and their monopoly power was suffocating the creative powers within the culture, filtering out the truly innovative ideas (or only co-opting them when they proved their worth in the market within a smaller project) and pumping out derivative sequel after sequel. 

The anger was there. You'd think pieces on these developments would be highly resonant and popular and attract traffic for the media site, but I was told we had to be "sensitive" for the advertisers and the companies we had to contact for the scoops. Such is the corrupting logic of money: when the larger attractors that money flows in and out of are corrupt entities, the surrounding activity (which must be powered by monetary infusion) must take on the qualities of the entities that provide the resources. This is exactly what has happened to corporate media. It is not that these media outlets generate propagandistic news consciously (well maybe some of it is) but that in order for the news to be refined to a state in which the corporate media organ can accept it (advertisers are ok with it and it doesn't anger the entities the news is covering) the news media itself has to be reduced down to a specific, stylized message pleasing to power. Which happens to be a useless source of information to anyone without power. Which is a lot of people now. 

But then the question arises: What about the developers? For example, what if I fought my way to an influential writing/directing position where I had the power to produce video games with these messages? Of course, some do get through. But the low probability of reaching such a point...is it worth trying? Forget undertaking an ambitious, creative project in some large risk-averse corporate studio. Given the nature of centralized, organized video game development, all of the means of production have been consolidated and owned within a single central entity, causing the costs to skyrocket (along with the increased demands in technology and expertise due to the increasing complexity of video games of course). And these risk-averse businessmen won't have anything to do with something that isn't guaranteed to turn massive profits. Of course   there's the growing indie games sector (which is wonderful) which was probably partially produced because of the climate I've described, but then there is always the chance that those projects themselves are co-opted. You always hear about studio owners selling their studios to larger companies, which end up appropriating the development team to simply keep pumping out the material that was so successful, ignoring any further creative innovation. Or the franchise itself is bought and now some corporation earns all the rights to it. 

And what are the chances that one can make it in such an environment? We of course need some sort of income, and many of these endeavors require great financial sacrifice. And given the chances of actually making it out there, who wants to play the lottery with their life? Employment is tenuous and the US state provides the most pathetic economic safety net in the developed world. Good luck finishing that game if you get sick and don't have health care. But now I'm starting to ramble on past my original aim of this post, which inspired the screed in the first place. What about the developers? The workers so to speak? 

We can sit around all day complaining about the abusiveness and greed and coarse taste of the large companies, but what is happening to the workers beyond their iron curtains? At least above and beyond what we can infer? Well there's a good article on Gamespot (that really surprised me) that discusses this. And also to my surprise, the comments are encouraging (sites like these are notoriously full of petty, deluded, spoiled child-like people that are repulsed by earnest talks like this). 

This article is why I'm writing in the first place. Of course the article doesn't go far enough with a solution. But then why should it? Unions are no longer a serious answer to these problems. Our economy - across every sector of production - is dominated by corporate entities whose very nature is to accumulate profits and grow and conquer. We are left with a multitude of growing private imperial powers. And to gain control of one of these powers, one has to virtually be a sociopath. These power structures inevitably corrupt the individuals that seek to operate them. 

We are left with people like Activision CEO Bobby Kotick telling investors: "I think we definitely have been able to instill the culture, the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we are in today. And so, while generally people talk about the recession, we are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression." 

Now I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the language of a Machiavellian dictator. This is an autocratic power telling investors (people who know nothing of and care nothing about video games other than their profit-generating attributes) not to worry because their employees are scared and motivated out of fear to produce quickly games that will make a lot of money. Translate this economic language into the political and you have a serious problem, a dangerous attitude that is actually quite pervasive among the powerful in this country and really the rest of the Capitalist world at this point. This is the language of the tyrant. And this attitude is everywhere.  

Every work of culture and material product is reduced to an artifact to be produced that must be produced in such a way to generate great wealth for a small group of disinterested people. To hell with the workers. To hell with the fans. As long as we get ours. And unions! As if unions can counteract this vast economic power. A power that when left to itself, further consolidates and displaces those opposed to it. It has always been an uphill battle and it always will be, so long as we think like this. We are not a society of individuals whose dangerous selfish desires must be counteracted with opposing forces. We are not in eternal competition. We are not to fight each other over every aspect of our culture production. No, that is because we are all vastly interconnected far beyond anything we can understand logically at this point. We are essentially one. We've seen this theme come up again and again and when will we learn? Why treat ourselves this way? 

Well, at this point I have to throw up my hands. It is easy to grow angry anew over every fresh insult, but really this system is so fundamentally corrupted, not even indignation will put it back together. This is why thinkers around the country are more and more interested in not a revolution or dramatic reform, but the slow deliberate construction of a parallel, alternate society. 

Quiet Friday

The room is dark, though strips of pale light coming in through the window slats bathe the back wall. Outside a window burns muddy yellow across the alley, where the occasional voice rises up. Black women are talking and laughing excitedly in the courtyard. A motorcycle belches in the distance. A vacuum cleaner howls next door. The night is buzzing outside.

I imagine the bars and clubs are filled up downtown. Took a bike ride down there last night to meet someone at one of the bars. Thought I was doing better with social interactions but it definitely took a few beers to ease my body and mind out of lock-up. Keep working at it I guess. Met some people. I wonder if I appeared as rigid as I felt.

It's funny how deeply wired we are to mirror each others' moods. We search faces. Body movements analyzed in the peripheral give us signals we encode in terms of what it means when we move like that ourselves. We judge everyone by reinterpreting their signals and behavior as things that we ourselves do and act accordingly. I wonder how accurate this system really is? We do share universal patterns of thought and action, but it can't always line up perfectly. The inner life is so much more complex than the physical expressions of it. But we have the basic idea at least.

We are remarkably networked. And these networks seem to obey certain physical rules. A depressed person in a group of three can really pull down the mood fast, but a depressed person in a group of 10 is easier to ignore and the behavior is absorbed less. And as each person adjusts to one another the new system state manifests other behaviors that eventually lead to yet another system state, as if waves or something pass through. I think of fire moving through a forest.

It's also striking how many people ignore these connections and rationalize everything in terms of individual motives, as if we were all isolated islands that simply materialized whole in the physical world. No. We grew in the world and grew as a result of our own connection with ourselves. We are connected to everything and everything is connected to us.

I imagine the rich are pretty socially insulated, but they are still plugged in. Many of them must know deep in the back of their minds that something is wrong.

 "Everyone is on edge here because we are all packed in like rats," he said. In every direction I occasionally hear someone arguing or fighting. Maybe. But people were like that in the suburbs too. And I even saw it in Montana. The fabric that binds us socially is wearing down. You can actually see it in the behavior of money, which is supposed to only mean anything because we share it. It leaks out everywhere. Our freedom of movement fades: an array of choices disappears like dying embers. Mistakes become more costly. Stress rises. Why do social bodies break? Why does the pleasure principle and the will to power pool in insulated social groups?

Yes, everyone knows something is wrong, but it cannot yet be fixed, because not enough people know how. Because in the end as a mass we are social. We behave in accordance with others. All the more evidence for us to reimagine ourselves as a wavelike property. And so everyone vibrates with one another even across a colony of isolated dwellings.

Plenty of time to think alone here. A car hisses by in the alley. The cat stretches on her cushion, her white body faintly luminous in the dark.

The TV is glowing dully, as I've let it sit idle for a bit. The Xbox Live Dashboard is becoming an increasingly pathetic site, and really everything with advertising. There is a desperation in the ads: bright intense words, endlessly contrived messaging, childish appeals to excitement. It's like they don't know what to do anymore, and simply study us as if we were objects and damn there's gotta be the right combination of words, sights, and sounds to make us buy. Please buy!

It's okay. There are in fact an increasing amount of people who can better understand reality, and do in fact know what must be done, and they grow together and connect together with every passing day. I like to think I'm one of them. This alone gives me peace and patience and I can sit here in the dark.

Them Too

Buddhists seek freedom as well. Zen Buddhism appears to be in part a reaction to the highly formalized, traditional, self-conscious Japanese culture.

Christianity, Islam, and I believe Hinduism also arose and were cultivated across various epochs in which various empires were in their peak of violence and/or decay, in which much of the population was profoundly constrained. Like all great religions, they eventually became highly formalized and authoritarian over time, but if one digs to the core of those bodies of thought, one finds that same impulse towards freedom and a general inversion of decadent, destructive values of empire.

Buddhism does seem to remain the more timeless of the religions. Mahayana Buddhism anyways. There are those inevitable calcified, authoritarian outgrowths of Buddhism that involve ritual and adherence, but Buddhism properly practiced is probably the best component for spiritual understanding and highly relevant and effective for overcoming modern madness. It is also highly adaptable; it's almost like the scientific method of spiritual thought in that way.