Thursday, March 28, 2013
Darkness
When the darkness rolls in there isn’t much you can do but
turn your back. It will wait there patiently until the sun comes up to burn it
off. It comes like a cold wind and rustles the leaves. It laps and rises until it makes total its frigid embrace.
It is a force of nature that has nothing to do with individuals. It spreads far and wide as a civilization decays.
Some call it the black dog, some the black vulture. Its one virtue consists of the blank canvas it offers for creation. Its stark terribleness insists: create or die.
It is a force of nature that has nothing to do with individuals. It spreads far and wide as a civilization decays.
Some call it the black dog, some the black vulture. Its one virtue consists of the blank canvas it offers for creation. Its stark terribleness insists: create or die.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Sex
Good sex is like good music. It happens when the actors involved are communicating - in this case with a language of touch and sensation. Each touch, each note, each input sends waves of electricity, each amplified by the one before it, in a continual upward spiral until a glimpse is seen of that from which everything begins.
In concentrating on the pleasures of another, one loses one's self. In experiencing one's own pleasure, one is made aware of one's self. The two oscillate at higher frequencies and eventually merge until the very question of self no longer matters.
Good sex and good music take many forms. The form that a particular instance will take on depends on the nature of the actors and what sort of purpose they are working towards. Techniques and behaviors don't matter too much teleologically, only insofar as they are useful to each person's expression; however, as catalysts to deeper experiences they do matter almost in an enzymatic function.
Our culture seems to locate sexual activity at two moral extremes: either it is the forbidden act that must be locked up beyond the gates of marriage, or it is a base pleasure that should be pried from one's partner almost like a trophy. These two extremes are symbiotic: they reinforce each other in eternal cycles. Either one exhausts the meaning of sex through debasement, leading to a desperate attempt to lock it away to attempt to preserve it, or one simply seeks it as an object of worship because one has been denied it by an authority holding it beyond closed gates, and the cycle repeats itself.
But really sex is a medium. It is an activity with its own language that can be guided in any direction you choose. It can be merely a reproductive act to be guarded by moralists, or a mercenary act like prying away jewels with a crowbar, or it can be a vehicle that can be used in conjunction with other vehicles to experience the all.
In concentrating on the pleasures of another, one loses one's self. In experiencing one's own pleasure, one is made aware of one's self. The two oscillate at higher frequencies and eventually merge until the very question of self no longer matters.
Good sex and good music take many forms. The form that a particular instance will take on depends on the nature of the actors and what sort of purpose they are working towards. Techniques and behaviors don't matter too much teleologically, only insofar as they are useful to each person's expression; however, as catalysts to deeper experiences they do matter almost in an enzymatic function.
Our culture seems to locate sexual activity at two moral extremes: either it is the forbidden act that must be locked up beyond the gates of marriage, or it is a base pleasure that should be pried from one's partner almost like a trophy. These two extremes are symbiotic: they reinforce each other in eternal cycles. Either one exhausts the meaning of sex through debasement, leading to a desperate attempt to lock it away to attempt to preserve it, or one simply seeks it as an object of worship because one has been denied it by an authority holding it beyond closed gates, and the cycle repeats itself.
But really sex is a medium. It is an activity with its own language that can be guided in any direction you choose. It can be merely a reproductive act to be guarded by moralists, or a mercenary act like prying away jewels with a crowbar, or it can be a vehicle that can be used in conjunction with other vehicles to experience the all.
Friday, March 22, 2013
Friends
We sat around the table talking warmly. I was crossfaded. Too much to drink and smoke. I was sinking into myself, losing grip on language and understanding but unafraid. I sat and listened, fancying that our conversations hung somewhere in the air, quivering like jello, dimly comprehended. The group had bifurcated with two conversations circulating on two separate circuits.
It made me think of something else I wrote on my cellphone maybe half a year ago:
Stoned. Words pouring out like water, whose watery meaning disperses and drifts apart in the social space as the intoxicated others struggle to understand, drawing connections across the widening gulfs, until suddenly, there descends an oceanic silence as the meaning fades from short memory.
The challenge of expressing such a sensation lies in producing a linear, intelligible set of symbols from a multidimensional axis of meaning.
At such times, it is less the precise exchange of symbols of communication and their correct apprehension and more the simple sensations of sound and vision: exchanging smiles, listening to each others' laughs, harmonizing some inner abstract chain of thought, with the language not entirely lined up but sufficient for comprehension, and overall feeling the simple animal sensation of companionship. The language at this point functions as a sort of ancillary noise. Background noise that is not entirely irrelevant, just less prevalent than it usually is.
The experience makes me think of clicking on a wah pedal and leaving it up. The signal becomes a bass-rich blur, with the lower frequencies, the movements brought to the forefront. Sometimes the valve is opened. The fine-grain textures come rushing back only temporarily, and then the valve closes again. Just enough information is captured to continue following those blurry movements.
It is not a state of affairs I'm entirely opposed to, considering the dire context. The language has been colonized by our perverse mainstream social relations and so we must shut it off from time to time. But it is a temporary healing mechanism. It is a state of affairs that should be overcome.
It made me think of something else I wrote on my cellphone maybe half a year ago:
Stoned. Words pouring out like water, whose watery meaning disperses and drifts apart in the social space as the intoxicated others struggle to understand, drawing connections across the widening gulfs, until suddenly, there descends an oceanic silence as the meaning fades from short memory.
The challenge of expressing such a sensation lies in producing a linear, intelligible set of symbols from a multidimensional axis of meaning.
The experience makes me think of clicking on a wah pedal and leaving it up. The signal becomes a bass-rich blur, with the lower frequencies, the movements brought to the forefront. Sometimes the valve is opened. The fine-grain textures come rushing back only temporarily, and then the valve closes again. Just enough information is captured to continue following those blurry movements.
It is not a state of affairs I'm entirely opposed to, considering the dire context. The language has been colonized by our perverse mainstream social relations and so we must shut it off from time to time. But it is a temporary healing mechanism. It is a state of affairs that should be overcome.
Saturday, March 16, 2013
A Little Introspection
I suppose there are hints of tragedy in my own endeavors. I seek to better understand emotional experiences and unselfconscious expression with self-conscious analytics. But tragedy doesn't have to be necessarily a negative thing. It is the exertions that one makes to reconcile contradictions that eventually lead to creation. As far as I understand anyways. Look inside yourself; you'll find contradictions. Embrace them. Create with them. A lot of people are already starting to do that, or have been doing that. Where have I been?
Anyways, it seems like people do change all the time. Perhaps that old cynical refrain that people don't change was produced at a time of stability. It seems to me like in times of instability people are changing constantly. They have to.
I've been learning to turn off the analytics here and there when I need to. They're useful sometimes sure. There's great joy in crafting them. There's also great joy in pure emotional expression and the simple apprehension of the earth and the things on the earth. The two don't have to be mutually exclusive, but there does seem to be an inverse relationship in their relative expression.
Every day walking the tight rope. The trick is enjoying it and harnessing that enjoyment.
Anyways, it seems like people do change all the time. Perhaps that old cynical refrain that people don't change was produced at a time of stability. It seems to me like in times of instability people are changing constantly. They have to.
I've been learning to turn off the analytics here and there when I need to. They're useful sometimes sure. There's great joy in crafting them. There's also great joy in pure emotional expression and the simple apprehension of the earth and the things on the earth. The two don't have to be mutually exclusive, but there does seem to be an inverse relationship in their relative expression.
Every day walking the tight rope. The trick is enjoying it and harnessing that enjoyment.
Friday, March 15, 2013
Relationships
A friend of mine was telling me tonight that the writer James Baldwin, upon growing up in Harlem and then subsequently moving to Europe and seeing other parts of the world, observed that Americans have possibly the most uncommunicative culture in the world.
Now that's a curious observation. Of course it isn't easy traveling to every end of the earth observing every culture in existence and objectively weighing out these differences. But it at least seems relatively accurate to say that as a culture we don't do communication too well. Where else does the great power of Hollywood come from? We communicate with carefully constructed images. And each of us in some point in our lives has altered ourselves in some way to attempt to harmonize with those images, in the hopes of achieving communication. Those images are the bridges that tie us together when the communication fails.
And so we carry on these behaviors in our daily lives. I don't know how many times I still catch myself contriving my own behaviors to line up with some artificially constructed ideal of myself, only to realize that those behaviors are contradicting what my human self is simply trying to do of its own accord.
This is partially where the oppression of a cultural hegemon comes in. The most powerful cultural ideology is going to be the ideology with the most material power to project that ideology. In this case, movies and TV shows get made that are carefully constructed to express that ideology. Many people worship these images, and relate to those that worship and attempt to harmonize with the images as well. For those of us slightly different or aberrant when compared to the images, well I guess we are shit out of luck aren't we?
And so why is it that we insist on relying on these constructed images and fabricated ideals? There is something in our culture that is being transmitted across generations, that is for sure. We have these traumatic experiences as children and are taught that it is better to paper over these experiences and carry on with a smile without addressing the trauma head on. Most people are anyways, or that is how things work when we enter actual institutions. We breathe it in. It permeates the culture. We absorb it without even knowing.
Where in the world did it come from? This stuff? This tight fabric? Well, in the formative years of this country there was great upheaval around the world. Revolutions everywhere. This would seem to be an ideal place to come to for those breaking away. And so the flaming fragments touched down here and there along the East coast perhaps. I'd imagine that people were pretty terrified of each other at that point in history. Security would come through material accumulation and the exertion of wits to further that goal. But now I'm getting into serious complexities that I should probably leave alone for now. Another day will come for such an analysis.
So I guess we are finding out that wits and material accumulation can get you security for a little while, but that gravy train must come to an end eventually. Population saturation, resource depletion, the end of imperial expansion, all of these complications spell trouble for the project of ego enrichment. Now we have a mass of people that has access to less and less things, a mass of people that are going to have to fall back onto those communication skills we have sort of let atrophy. Now we are back to communication. Relationships.
See the problem with constructing an image to communicate with is that to make it intelligible, you have to necessarily amputate a lot of information. So you are left with a limited model that only works with a range of human behaviors.
Setting that aside, what does it take to really establish a relationship? To communicate? We of course have to interact with each other emotionally. And the problem with our emotions is that they reside in a part of our brain that is not directly accessible by our analytical language centers. Such structures evolved to sit on top of the emotional engines, so to speak. So far we've perpetuated an over-reliance on the analytical structures; we have forgotten how to handle our emotions.
To truly establish a relationship with someone, you have to connect emotionally. And to connect emotionally, you have to form an understanding of the other person's emotional make up. Something you can't directly access with language and analysis. Besides experiencing emotional pleasures of another intelligence, you also have to discover the boundaries of that other person, often through trial and error and mistake, which can be very difficult. Especially in American culture, where we are taught to avoid those confrontations.
Those boundaries exist beyond a veil in that emotional engine. With each mistake you make, every time you hurt someone or make them angry, you are discovering a new contour, a finer definition of this shape you are trying to understand. Scary stuff, to be sure. But worth the trouble. As you form an understanding of that person's emotional outline, you know more and more how to interact, and how to communicate with that person. Hopefully, relations smoothen. Less mistakes are made, or at least less catastrophic ones. You experience what approaches harmony. Waves of dissonance subside, the wavelengths growing longer, and the cycles of negative feedback growing shorter.
This will take more time to flesh out. And I think I am out of glucose.
Now that's a curious observation. Of course it isn't easy traveling to every end of the earth observing every culture in existence and objectively weighing out these differences. But it at least seems relatively accurate to say that as a culture we don't do communication too well. Where else does the great power of Hollywood come from? We communicate with carefully constructed images. And each of us in some point in our lives has altered ourselves in some way to attempt to harmonize with those images, in the hopes of achieving communication. Those images are the bridges that tie us together when the communication fails.
And so we carry on these behaviors in our daily lives. I don't know how many times I still catch myself contriving my own behaviors to line up with some artificially constructed ideal of myself, only to realize that those behaviors are contradicting what my human self is simply trying to do of its own accord.
This is partially where the oppression of a cultural hegemon comes in. The most powerful cultural ideology is going to be the ideology with the most material power to project that ideology. In this case, movies and TV shows get made that are carefully constructed to express that ideology. Many people worship these images, and relate to those that worship and attempt to harmonize with the images as well. For those of us slightly different or aberrant when compared to the images, well I guess we are shit out of luck aren't we?
And so why is it that we insist on relying on these constructed images and fabricated ideals? There is something in our culture that is being transmitted across generations, that is for sure. We have these traumatic experiences as children and are taught that it is better to paper over these experiences and carry on with a smile without addressing the trauma head on. Most people are anyways, or that is how things work when we enter actual institutions. We breathe it in. It permeates the culture. We absorb it without even knowing.
Where in the world did it come from? This stuff? This tight fabric? Well, in the formative years of this country there was great upheaval around the world. Revolutions everywhere. This would seem to be an ideal place to come to for those breaking away. And so the flaming fragments touched down here and there along the East coast perhaps. I'd imagine that people were pretty terrified of each other at that point in history. Security would come through material accumulation and the exertion of wits to further that goal. But now I'm getting into serious complexities that I should probably leave alone for now. Another day will come for such an analysis.
So I guess we are finding out that wits and material accumulation can get you security for a little while, but that gravy train must come to an end eventually. Population saturation, resource depletion, the end of imperial expansion, all of these complications spell trouble for the project of ego enrichment. Now we have a mass of people that has access to less and less things, a mass of people that are going to have to fall back onto those communication skills we have sort of let atrophy. Now we are back to communication. Relationships.
See the problem with constructing an image to communicate with is that to make it intelligible, you have to necessarily amputate a lot of information. So you are left with a limited model that only works with a range of human behaviors.
Setting that aside, what does it take to really establish a relationship? To communicate? We of course have to interact with each other emotionally. And the problem with our emotions is that they reside in a part of our brain that is not directly accessible by our analytical language centers. Such structures evolved to sit on top of the emotional engines, so to speak. So far we've perpetuated an over-reliance on the analytical structures; we have forgotten how to handle our emotions.
To truly establish a relationship with someone, you have to connect emotionally. And to connect emotionally, you have to form an understanding of the other person's emotional make up. Something you can't directly access with language and analysis. Besides experiencing emotional pleasures of another intelligence, you also have to discover the boundaries of that other person, often through trial and error and mistake, which can be very difficult. Especially in American culture, where we are taught to avoid those confrontations.
Those boundaries exist beyond a veil in that emotional engine. With each mistake you make, every time you hurt someone or make them angry, you are discovering a new contour, a finer definition of this shape you are trying to understand. Scary stuff, to be sure. But worth the trouble. As you form an understanding of that person's emotional outline, you know more and more how to interact, and how to communicate with that person. Hopefully, relations smoothen. Less mistakes are made, or at least less catastrophic ones. You experience what approaches harmony. Waves of dissonance subside, the wavelengths growing longer, and the cycles of negative feedback growing shorter.
This will take more time to flesh out. And I think I am out of glucose.
Cats and Dogs
The cat's bell rings faintly as she creeps into the room. The dogs are asleep under the covers; they don't seem to stir. She hops up on the foot of the bed and I can see a faint glow of white in the darkness. She sits there for a while watching. Naturally she is afraid of the dogs. They usually chase her off the bed if she tries to get up. This time she creeps slowly on to the bed and settles in a little ball near the end. She just wants to be with everyone, even if she's a bit afraid. It is touching.
Domestic animals are funny. We really have no way to understand their conscious experience. It makes it difficult to communicate with them. The best we can do is chart their behaviors and manipulate them accordingly with collars, leashes, food and training. We have these bucking packets of energy that behave completely differently than we would in an environment we've generated.
I'd like everyone to get along without chasing each other off the bed. Or barking at non-existent dangers or whatever else. But unless you condition the animal a certain way as they grow up, the fully developed animal is what you get. The mold is set. And those instincts can never really be controlled anyway. They don't see the world the way we do.
And there's order trying to impose itself on chaos for you. Two disparate systems of logic with one master system of logic of higher complexity trying to control a slave system of logic of lower complexity, but each of them in the end only communicating with each other on broad common channels.
Domestic animals are funny. We really have no way to understand their conscious experience. It makes it difficult to communicate with them. The best we can do is chart their behaviors and manipulate them accordingly with collars, leashes, food and training. We have these bucking packets of energy that behave completely differently than we would in an environment we've generated.
I'd like everyone to get along without chasing each other off the bed. Or barking at non-existent dangers or whatever else. But unless you condition the animal a certain way as they grow up, the fully developed animal is what you get. The mold is set. And those instincts can never really be controlled anyway. They don't see the world the way we do.
And there's order trying to impose itself on chaos for you. Two disparate systems of logic with one master system of logic of higher complexity trying to control a slave system of logic of lower complexity, but each of them in the end only communicating with each other on broad common channels.
HST on Richard Nixon
"He was so crooked, he had to have servants screw him into his pants."
That's a loose paraphrase anyways.
That's a loose paraphrase anyways.
FYI
"I would not recommend the Jose Cuervo because it's made from a blended corn alcohol, and they add food coloring to make it look like it's been aged in oak."
Weird.
Weird.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Midnight Long Beach
The fog comes in and the bar lights glow pink, purple and turquoise through the thick fog settling over the empty streets. Streetlights glow orange, lending an outline to the black starbursts of the palm trees towering above. Cars swish by in the distance. The fog feels cold and misty on my face.
I walk briskly with a hood on to avoid becoming a target. Overall a pleasant walk through sleeping neighborhoods. Ships sound their foghorns in the distance. The powerlines stretch out over the streets outlined with an orange glow by the streetlights, hanging over the purple-black sky with stars barely shining through. Corridors of streetlights sending orange orbs into the fog-filled space.
Strangers pass in the fog, mumbling greetings and passing on like the wraith-like cars passing back and forth in the distance. Crickets chirp. Generators buzz. The oil refineries out in the distance call faintly.
It is good to be out here walking in the silence. Heart beating. Blood flowing. A brisk pace. People-relations deteriorating everywhere but everyone holding on. Holding tight.
Everyone waiting patiently to see the light.
I walk briskly with a hood on to avoid becoming a target. Overall a pleasant walk through sleeping neighborhoods. Ships sound their foghorns in the distance. The powerlines stretch out over the streets outlined with an orange glow by the streetlights, hanging over the purple-black sky with stars barely shining through. Corridors of streetlights sending orange orbs into the fog-filled space.
Strangers pass in the fog, mumbling greetings and passing on like the wraith-like cars passing back and forth in the distance. Crickets chirp. Generators buzz. The oil refineries out in the distance call faintly.
It is good to be out here walking in the silence. Heart beating. Blood flowing. A brisk pace. People-relations deteriorating everywhere but everyone holding on. Holding tight.
Everyone waiting patiently to see the light.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
This is Water
I stumbled upon this again doing research for a little philosophy piece I put together. It moves me every time I read it. Very deeply.
I realized I need to share this desperately.
I realized I need to share this desperately.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Drugs
There's a way of conceptualizing the drug culture that I don't think gets talked about very much. On one hand we have the usual narrative of laziness, uselessness and depravity that comes with heavy drug use. This is the power narrative. Drug addicts aren't very useful to Capital because they not only don't work very much or at least well, but they tend to deviate away from the sharply ordered and delineated lifestyles that are necessary for one to orbit inside the greater structure.
There's bits of truth to the narrative unfortunately. Many addicts can't fulfill bare essentials like taking care of themselves or navigating the world without outside help. But we should qualify this. All that ever gets talked about within the power narrative is the addict.
Notice the hierarchy that forms. Addicts of alcohol and prescription medications become these tenderly tragic figures that desperately need our help, as they should. But addicts of illicit substances are made out to be these leprous figures to be disdained. There are exceptions, especially if the addict is some sort of famous artist or musician and a narrative could be constructed, but all in all there is a noticeable difference in quality.
Addicts of alcohol and prescription medications are still good consumers. They consume large amounts of legal, taxable, marketable substances...substances whose overall effects produce less dissension in people and serve as more of a valve release or lubricant, depending on the case.
And what of all the people that derive great joy from the casual use of illicit drugs? It is very ironic that some of the harshest judges of drug culture are the Christian conservatives, who disdain those looking to experience the very godhead they supposedly worship. Setting aside an incredibly stringent and austere life of meditation and self-deprivation, it is incredibly difficult for most people to experience the godhead in a modern capitalist society without some sort of chemical catalyst.
What of the working poor, whose deprivation of material goods, peer respect and community solidarity (I'm not talking about everyone, some communities make do with very little) necessarily robs them of the neurotransmitters that make up the neurological facilitation of happiness and well-being? Or for that matter, the working middle class? Should it be such a surprise that so many unhappy people choose a digestible or inhalable chemical that makes them whole, if only temporarily?
The psychedelic experience is an especially wonderful experience to have. Much can be learned by temporarily lifting that damnable briar patch shielding that grows so wildly atop our lower brain thanks to the perverse people relations we are forced into everyday when we enter the market - let me rephrase that: there was a time when we could enter the market, but now the market enters us. Yes, a prickly shielding that, undisturbed, separates us in our daily relations and sends us scrambling for various media in the desperate attempt to reconstitute what relations we have left.
Why else do so many gather in bars in the late hours? Why else is alcohol so necessary to have a larger-scale party with those you might not entirely know?
Hmph but here we are anyways. None of us can choose the age we are born into. It is easy enough to schematize the negative and decry modern society, which I have been doing for plenty of time, but it is much more difficult work to construct the positive conception of the good life and live by it.
If each of us are these organic engines whose function accords with environmental inputs, chemical alteration can help us to experience personal power and knowledge of oneself. It can also help us form lasting bonds with others. One should take care not to replace one's own pock-marked and fragmented personal chemistry with a pock-marked and fragmented landscape of a given chemical itself. The old idea of establishing harmony with the inside and the outside comes into play here. You can temporarily escape chemical hell by adding another chemical ingredient, but in the end the environmental inputs will snap you right back to the given system's homeostasis. Garbage in, garbage out.
The idea in this case is to bootstrap one's way to becoming a better individual, so that one is ultimately able to construct a better environment with which to establish a good homeostasis.
More high-brain nonsense? Oh I don't know. For now a lazy Sunday will do.
There's bits of truth to the narrative unfortunately. Many addicts can't fulfill bare essentials like taking care of themselves or navigating the world without outside help. But we should qualify this. All that ever gets talked about within the power narrative is the addict.
Notice the hierarchy that forms. Addicts of alcohol and prescription medications become these tenderly tragic figures that desperately need our help, as they should. But addicts of illicit substances are made out to be these leprous figures to be disdained. There are exceptions, especially if the addict is some sort of famous artist or musician and a narrative could be constructed, but all in all there is a noticeable difference in quality.
Addicts of alcohol and prescription medications are still good consumers. They consume large amounts of legal, taxable, marketable substances...substances whose overall effects produce less dissension in people and serve as more of a valve release or lubricant, depending on the case.
And what of all the people that derive great joy from the casual use of illicit drugs? It is very ironic that some of the harshest judges of drug culture are the Christian conservatives, who disdain those looking to experience the very godhead they supposedly worship. Setting aside an incredibly stringent and austere life of meditation and self-deprivation, it is incredibly difficult for most people to experience the godhead in a modern capitalist society without some sort of chemical catalyst.
What of the working poor, whose deprivation of material goods, peer respect and community solidarity (I'm not talking about everyone, some communities make do with very little) necessarily robs them of the neurotransmitters that make up the neurological facilitation of happiness and well-being? Or for that matter, the working middle class? Should it be such a surprise that so many unhappy people choose a digestible or inhalable chemical that makes them whole, if only temporarily?
The psychedelic experience is an especially wonderful experience to have. Much can be learned by temporarily lifting that damnable briar patch shielding that grows so wildly atop our lower brain thanks to the perverse people relations we are forced into everyday when we enter the market - let me rephrase that: there was a time when we could enter the market, but now the market enters us. Yes, a prickly shielding that, undisturbed, separates us in our daily relations and sends us scrambling for various media in the desperate attempt to reconstitute what relations we have left.
Why else do so many gather in bars in the late hours? Why else is alcohol so necessary to have a larger-scale party with those you might not entirely know?
Hmph but here we are anyways. None of us can choose the age we are born into. It is easy enough to schematize the negative and decry modern society, which I have been doing for plenty of time, but it is much more difficult work to construct the positive conception of the good life and live by it.
If each of us are these organic engines whose function accords with environmental inputs, chemical alteration can help us to experience personal power and knowledge of oneself. It can also help us form lasting bonds with others. One should take care not to replace one's own pock-marked and fragmented personal chemistry with a pock-marked and fragmented landscape of a given chemical itself. The old idea of establishing harmony with the inside and the outside comes into play here. You can temporarily escape chemical hell by adding another chemical ingredient, but in the end the environmental inputs will snap you right back to the given system's homeostasis. Garbage in, garbage out.
The idea in this case is to bootstrap one's way to becoming a better individual, so that one is ultimately able to construct a better environment with which to establish a good homeostasis.
More high-brain nonsense? Oh I don't know. For now a lazy Sunday will do.
Creme Brulee
In the hip hop world they speak of those that can spit fire. But there also exist MCs that spit marshmallows, high fructose corn syrup and barcodes, when they aren't spitting bile of course. I prefer the fire myself.
Monday, March 04, 2013
Philosophy Too
I suppose this is a good time as any to link to my nascent philosophy blog. Much more work to do of course. But it is a start. I'll put up a link eventually too. But oh I'm tired, and I should really close my eyes for a bit and get my brain to stop yapping.
Scrambled
There is so much happening in my head, I can scarcely assemble an intelligible set of prose to articulate it. Too confused. Too much beer and heavy food.
Sometimes it is better to lay paralyzed and let all of the particulars of the noise in your head crash against each other until a harmonious theme emerges and then you can roll with it.
We watched a movie tonight that tried to argue via emotions and imagery that the LAPD was this beneficent institution with its members held together in relative solidarity. The police officers took up most of the film time and were tenderly humanized, while the entirely black and hispanic gang and cartel members were compressed into these villainous caricatures, draped behind this mysterious veil of great menacing evil. It was like watching an epic and artsy dramatized version of COPS. The whole affair was incredibly manipulative on an emotional level. A particularly violating work of propaganda, made all the more pernicious by the fact that it was put together with the skills of a cinematic artist.
Strange timing, considering the recent events with the LAPD and that rogue Dorner, curiously caricatured by mass media along the same lines (and of course the caricatures are built out of partial truths which lend even more thrust to the propaganda); as the actual facts tell it, the man was driven insane by a culture of sadism and racism within the LAPD, an institution far removed from the humanistic solidarity portrayed in the movie mentioned above.
Sounds a little like Zero Dark Thirty, a movie that's supposed to be well-crafted on an emotional level but that seems to be built on a troubling and enormous lie (a lie that carries with it sadistic motivations itself): that we used torture to find Bin Laden.
Very troubling. These shiny Hollywood movies directed by pretty decent cinematic talent, fabricating these patently false narratives to prop up institutions like the LAPD and the CIA, institutions whose echoes beyond their iron curtains reek of corruption.
And all the superfluous folk, the surplus folk going insane fighting amongst each other for the scraps are supposed to be the true evil.
The thing that really hurts though...is watching family, people you love, vacuum up these narratives and nod in solemn agreement, or shout and cheer as the good guys mow down the bad guys with a volley of gunfire.
So here I sit among people I love very much, their worldviews informed by the propaganda of madmen.
And last night we met for dinner in San Bernardino, a menacing place where even the sunsets look angry. The people gather together in the strip malls, displaying their tribal tattoos and mall-bought "inland empire" clothes. Curiously enough, I think it was the San Bernardino police deparment - which is supposed to be one of the most corrupt and vicious - that attempted to burn Dorner alive and then cover up the facts. Well, after the LAPD shot up half of LA looking for him and not being able to catch him on their turf. Anyways.
Our weak bonds hold together while we eat out together, while we watch fictions together. Oh but these are only ugly moments that pass in time. The warmth comes back when we have occasion to sit (usually outdoors) and converse and enjoy each others' company. The bonds reinforce once again.
And then a phone call in the dark from a warm body. Friends beckon and reach out, reducing this nauseous train of negativity into so much more nonsense. Tribes of networked neurons in my brain vying for attention. I want to listen to them all. But perhaps one should ultimately choose love lest one decides to deliberately become lost.
See? I could have laid there in the dark, letting the chaos sort itself out until I received a welcome phone call. Here I sit trying to scratch something together in writing. But out there warm bodies beckon.
The cat sleeps on top of my coat in the chair. Cars hum by outside. So much more to say but I've exhausted my logical articulation. Back to life now.
And all the superfluous folk, the surplus folk going insane fighting amongst each other for the scraps are supposed to be the true evil.
The thing that really hurts though...is watching family, people you love, vacuum up these narratives and nod in solemn agreement, or shout and cheer as the good guys mow down the bad guys with a volley of gunfire.
So here I sit among people I love very much, their worldviews informed by the propaganda of madmen.
And last night we met for dinner in San Bernardino, a menacing place where even the sunsets look angry. The people gather together in the strip malls, displaying their tribal tattoos and mall-bought "inland empire" clothes. Curiously enough, I think it was the San Bernardino police deparment - which is supposed to be one of the most corrupt and vicious - that attempted to burn Dorner alive and then cover up the facts. Well, after the LAPD shot up half of LA looking for him and not being able to catch him on their turf. Anyways.
Our weak bonds hold together while we eat out together, while we watch fictions together. Oh but these are only ugly moments that pass in time. The warmth comes back when we have occasion to sit (usually outdoors) and converse and enjoy each others' company. The bonds reinforce once again.
And then a phone call in the dark from a warm body. Friends beckon and reach out, reducing this nauseous train of negativity into so much more nonsense. Tribes of networked neurons in my brain vying for attention. I want to listen to them all. But perhaps one should ultimately choose love lest one decides to deliberately become lost.
See? I could have laid there in the dark, letting the chaos sort itself out until I received a welcome phone call. Here I sit trying to scratch something together in writing. But out there warm bodies beckon.
The cat sleeps on top of my coat in the chair. Cars hum by outside. So much more to say but I've exhausted my logical articulation. Back to life now.
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