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.