13

Whenever I think about it, I always feel like I am being asphyxiated.

The light, the noise, the incessant chanting of the new year’s eve crowd counting down the final seconds: “Ten!...Nine!...”

Four months earlier I was painting. All in ink, the long strokes pulling against vellum so gently they make no sound. A piece of me not knowing what to do beyond each consecutive second, each second wearing me down into that place I knew so well. I poured over that painting for hours with the manic energy that caused it. I rolled that painting up and put it into a tube along with the wad of twenties that comprised two-hundred dollars, to cover my half of the operation. On the tube I wrote the word, ‘shortcake’.   

            She was called Shortcake. She was this fiery redhead with the voice of a toad because she constantly smoked.  She bartered with her family for a ticket to the rave so she could party with me and Hepp.

Hepp was this feisty bitch. Hepp was the kind of raver that you’d want to have your back on a late night in downtown. She used to wear profuse amounts of carefully applied makeup, it would darken her face to the point that it exhibited this fantastically burlesque character. I liked to imagine that she became someone else when she wore the various layers of multicolored and fluorescent eyeliner. Her chest was heaving as we soaked up the last moments of the year. Her expression matching my own as her dilated eyes gave me a nod of approval while her chest inflated with each deep breath.

“…Eight!... Seven!...”

The crowd roared around us. I give Hepp a thumbs-up unable to even shout out the corresponding numbers . I feel a hand gently touch my shoulder and slip away.

“…Six… …Five!...”

I look to Hepp and the expression on her face is sheer horror. I don’t remember hearing the rest of the countdown.

I turn around and Shortcake swipes at me her hand postured like a claw, her eyes are wild black pools as she falls to the ground in a shock of convulsions. Foam bubbling out of her mouth involuntarily, her body erupts into tetanic convulsions. I can see Hepp screaming at the top of her lungs and hearing nothing but the bass of electronic speakers.

When I lived in Beverly Hills  I told people I was a waiter. I told them that I worked at a quaint little café off of third and Fairfax by the farmers market. I would take the train twice a week into downtown where I stayed on the border of west LA.

In LA the helicopters kept me up at night. I would go on long late-night walks where I would look at gated houses and juxtapose them against the homeless that slept in heaps between the buildings four blocks south.

Somewhere along the way the audience screams “Happy new year.” I hear fireworks in the background, Shortcake is twitching like she is being electrocuted on the ground each person looking on in terror as an involuntary participant in this horrible séance. I jumped forward and grabbed a water bottle out of this guy’s hand. I put my leg under her head trying to get her body sit still, the whites of her eyes skitter at the ceiling wildly, she hard as a rock as her hands flail around striking me in the face. I’m certain she thinks she’s being attacked. I dump the cold water on her face and her body goes limp like a marionette having all its strings cut.

That night it was a breeze bringing the 220 pills through the gate. The security guards always like people that know the routine.

When I think on it, I couldn’t tell you why I gave it to her. I gave it to her. I don’t give anyone anything. I suppose it was out of some sense of pity, even after blood

money had been paid weeks ago, I guess I still felt sorry or something.

           

            Shortcake’s little body jolts back to life in a system of convulsions. I feel like the conductor at a tragic opera. I hold her through the shaking and dump my own water out on her again I feel it instantly through my pants. Her body goes limp again, this time longer.

A deep sense of having no idea what to do pours through me.  

Hepp calls out to her. Her eyes are black rivers of mascara bleeding from her face.

I feel for a pulse from Shortcake’s throat. I look up and shake my head. Hepp’s face erupts into tears.

“Brit…” Hepp pleads.

“I don’t know what to do.” I say. As soon as the words leave my mouth I feel a tidal wave crushing down on us. The tears come so viscerally I scream out.

Somewhere close Lachesis is drawing a thread.

There is a swarm of flashlights. Men shouting out commands, When I look to them I see fear in their eyes. I see pity. I see the humans behind their suits. Their mouths open as if in mid-sentence with nothing to say.

I hoist Shortcakes body from the ground and feel the eyes of the room on me. She feels impossibly heavy and I struggle to carry her. Right as I get her off the ground her body jolts to life in convulsions; she goes stiff and I fall to the ground still holding her. Like before, she goes limp. I make an attempt to get water from a bystander but feel a hand at my shoulder.

“Chesh…Chesh…” Her voice comes out raspy as ever, “…Stop pouring water on me…” Her eyes are immense black pools that can’t sit still.

“I am r-r-r-o-ling so hard.” She snuggles in close and kisses me oblivious to anything around her. She makes a puzzled look at my face,

“A-a-re you okay?”

A part of me tries to laugh but can’t, “I’m doing fine.”

“O-o-oh okay…” She rests her head on me as If I were a stuffed animal that she won from a carnival.

“-You got ‘er bro?” The VIP concierge urges me up out of the crowd.   

  Flanked by security and paramedics and a whole entourage of onlookers we charge up a hidden service stairwell. At the top doors open with a mechanical sound as the cool January air washes over us.

“You probably saved that girls life tonight.” A paramedic later expresses. His tone is so congratulatory I want to crawl under a rock.

I don’t know what to say. I feel like it was more of an act of a desperate drug dealer than of a heroic bystander. I feel like an idiot being congratulated by this med student for something he’s probably done several times before. My hands tremble trying to hold a cigarette. I watch Hepp and Shortcake walk off into the night.

The security guards let me back into the rave.  I tell my best friend what happened, explaining the whole thing in detail, unable to judge me he shrugs and gives me a hug.

“Fuck-it dude, let’s party,” he starts moving to the beat before the words are out of his mouth.  

We dance early into the morning. People come and go, they take photos with us and trade kandy. After the music stops an after party is in full effect at the hotel where my fellow dealers will greet me like family, my girlfriend will draw me a bath as we count money. We march as a proud and conspicuous tribe through the city streets. I pause and take a breath under a large Ficus while I wait for my people to cross the street. The tree’s roots seem to fracture the concrete effortlessly, its trunk looks like a gigantic whale and I am left wondering how much oxygen they produce. Their immense branches grope the sky and their leaves tingle in the morning breeze, backlit by gentle blue light.          

12

This place is driven and powered by those that seek to perpetuate a lie. And it works. A car, a house, the illusion of power, the illusion of grandeur, or anything else, they all trade in this currency.

All the while it remains.

Like the laws that make a superficial sense bind us to this place with their… their… consequence.

And in the same stroke it becomes sickening.

            Listening to the same, worn old professor speak of any sort of revolution that they have no intention of participating in. Talking of a PhD in philosophy, where they should understand that their knowledge lies in the depths of the history of such things, or the ability to research, or some other element wherein they fulfill some kind of esoteric task that ultimately are dubbed ‘an expert.’ Because no matter how much they would like to think that they are one in the same: ‘saying’ and ‘doing’ are different things. We are taught to praise professors that are published, and yet taught to condemn all graffiti as a crime. But isn’t any tagger just as published as any professor. A dichotomy that is not a hierarchy, there is no hierarchy. The very notion of such hierarchy is so fraudulent it’s sickening in its inhumane implications. Nobody can be given power or prowess. It must be earned, and that earning is a collective agreement in the same way that we agree that the color yellow is  yellow. We collectively agree that something is good, and I feel that when something truly is right it doesn’t need to be said. Once something good exists we should simply allow it to proliferate. Minus the bullshit and the approval, good things are apparent. Yet that apparent value has become lost, hopelessly so.       

            If life was a contest of hierarchy, then why would it exist at all? And yet it does, as obvious and clear examples. Hierarchy is the action of surplus, where only the contest for everything is so apparent; and yet my mind is not at rest with those implications because I am not asking what I am supposed to be and do not seek to impose what that is. I’m not an alpha in the sense that a dominant wolf in a wolf pack is. I’m not an alpha in the sense that I have all the money, or the cars, of the political charisma to make me an alpha. I’m not an alpha in the way that I have twenty children and my line will carry on, nor in the way that I have multiple partners like some expression of sexual prowess. I think that the ideal of a hierarchy is fundamentally flawed and as such an alpha is a self-fulfilling concept that is flawed under that system. The beauty of it lies in the ‘surplus’ element; necessarity. Anything unnecessary can be subjugated by that which makes the rules. Rules themselves being arbitrary and established by that force which can exert downward causation on a system, e.g.; control. The thing that I like so much about those human systems is that they are controlled arbitrarily. That is to say, pretty much anything goes. If you are a nerd, you can become nerdier than your nerdiest friends and as long as they continually participate you remain ‘alpha nerd’. The same is true for any element of human existence as they will all eventually become currencies. All elements of existence are always emergent and perpetuate as a proliferatory entity. In short: what is valuable is always subjective as long as it is valued collectively, but under that same banner many systems can impose currency and enforce it thereby acquiring involuntary participants. Quite literally; slavery.

            Because we exist as human we are exploitable upon those most basic of human desires. A sickening prospect indeed, when weighed against how we treat our captives, our enemies, and our victims. But allow me to clarify; they are not my captives nor my enemies nor my victims. And that is the beauty of it; training. I am trained to express the human condition as a whole that I am participatory in, where by no means whatsoever have I participated in the blitzkrieg of the Netherlands or the arrest of someone so obscure as Julain Assange. I would argue that my captives like me emotionally, my enemies are so inconsequential that they don’t matter, and that my victims are not victims at all but rather anonymous people that should devote their energy more efficiently as to not make themselves targets. This is not the truth though, my enemy is this society, it is this cheap culture that doesn’t seem to care for anything deeper than its own self-image. Ironically, this culture so narcissistically entranced by its own reflection it does not even realize that I am here and has no concept of my existence.  As it seemingly mutates into a delicate self-absorbed flower I wonder if this is the evolution of things taking their course. Strangely, this self-important element of our current society does not hinder its ability to exert downward causation on others. So in essence, it is being a slave to no master. And simultaneously it is going to require an astounding paradigm shift to free those which don’t want to be controlled by that which they have no stake in.

 I have no idea how to do this, and in essence I suppose it means I’m just talking. I like to believe that my actions against this system are meaningful, that my cause is noble, and that my vision is pure. But I also know that that is not the case, I know that I am an adrenaline junkie. I will do things for the sake of the experience, and that anyone with motivations like that cannot be trusted with the concerns and responsibilities of others. I am too volatile to be entrusted with something like armament. I am too kind to control something like money and too self-righteous to guard something like faith. I can cook hotdogs. I can mix cocktails. But I cannot sit and accept the lies that our world has become based on so many years ago as virtue and truth.

I had nothing to do with that which came before me. I can only live in the now, and I’ll be the first to say it. The world that I inhabit totally sucks. I can only assume, the world I am to inherit would be the same, it would be a cruel joke of the most heinous kind to leave my successors to such a fate. Come to action, you subconsciously know the score, you inherently know what needs to be done, and it won’t be the bombing of a federal building in Okalahoma City that is going to bring about change. But at the same time, making use of bicycles will slow the oil industry; not significantly, but if nothing else it can tighten up one’s thighs. It is hard to take power without having power, but it can be done. It is a war without fighting and one that cannot be fought. A war entirely based on bringing people to one’s own side, and there is no black and white dichotomy, only the various sides that we all pick with their ever changing fronts. We can never enforce and have freedom. 

11

It’s kind of awesome how flaking on people works. I mean that. It shows a feint of unreliability, in a world where reliability is all that matters. Where we “Know nothin’ in life but bein’ legit.” I like it though, unreliability is the blank space where I can insert my own answer to what may have happened. Like some sort of metaphysical mad-lib, I can make this boring simple life of mine twisted into any number of possibilities and nobody remains accountable. This is my definition of philosophy.

Its like bureaucracy, or something that I would describe in that context. The system-over-the-individual-ness that systems to that effect generate. Confusing, I know.
Think of it in another term though, like describing the wind to a child. You really won’t describe ‘the wind’ but rather the effects of the wind.*

In this sense, the wind isn’t there. We can only show what the wind did, but if we come back to the site where my tree was blown over, we might ask, “So where is the wind now.” And I would respond honestly: “I don’t know.”

In this way Its like a perfect little system. Its like the graffiti subculture, you must participate to be a member. Participation may require work, danger (both physical and psychological) money for supplies, money for travel, money for representation. But it’s only qualification is participation, thereby making voyeurs to this system appear as cowards. This becomes a sociological context when one considers that rebellion in any context is still rebellion and dissent has no boundaries.

The problem is kind of simple but important. In a complex system such as this, discovery and development are one in the same, with relatively few places left to discover our development as a whole is growing more and more limited. I think we are restrained by our own sense of grandeur, I don’t think that a suburban shopping center is necessarily more interesting or more fulfilling than the hiking trail that was there previously but the decision was not mine to make. Not that I agree with the one that was made either. The more I wrestle with the thought of why that plot of native plants was killed to make a parking lot with a Starbucks and a Target, the more I realize that we are a species of quantity over quality that even I have no control of.

So in this place it becomes really easy to see the force of nature that we are. Even that becomes quite profound very quickly. Consider that a severe snowstorm that might hold one back for several hours is analogous to something like rush-hour traffic, which takes place daily. I mean the simple impact of our numbers alone has a downward-causation effect that is comparable to something like living in a constant hurricane. This is not an exaggeration.
  

To this end, I guess it is a series of conflicting systems; family with work, work with government, government with politics, politics with nature and so on. Of course there is no hierarchy, all these conflicting systems on various levels of interaction. Each gaining or loosing influence based on how much you interact with it. In a way, almost self-fulfilling.

  

*(theres nothing there to the apparent eye, but there is a specific sound, there is a motion to the trees that is characteristic of wind, that people become accustomed to and associate with wind)
       

10

(for K Sky)
i dont exactly know how to put into words what I'm getting at but i'll give it a shot
like, their cover art appears to be inspired by one of the most expensive photographs ever taken:(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Cent_II_Diptychon) which is cool and all but it doesn't speak to a fan like myself effectively, i feel it sends the wrong message considering how phenomenally talented they are.

on another note (comparatively) i watched a commercial featuring amber rose about responsible drinking, and she says something to the effect of: 'i might take a limo, or i might take a jet, but however i travel i get home safely' and it just portrays this complete detachment from the issue at hand.
(this isnt the exact video i mentioned but this is a similar commercial that i think still shows what i mean http://youtu.be/WNw-dlq6eog)

its like this trend that involves complete detachment from reality

so i suppose an in between point between diva and techno artist; Sweedish house mafia. Promotes vodka, makes great music. but even then, the last time i went to see them i couldnt get near their stage, and they were really the act i went to see. but on the real, its like i paid to see them and due to external reasons [that are neither the fan's nor the artist's fault] the venue wouldn't allow me to grace their floor. but then to watch them in this ultra overproduced vodka commercial; (http://youtu.be/PDboaDrHGbA) all music and politics aside it kinda stings.
at this point i feel like somewhere it becomes the responsibility of the artist to make sure that ticket prices dont become astronomically inflated, but they do nothing. they promote vodka in strange costumes

its like there is a disparate connection between music and consumerism, and i feel that the more that musicians play into this consumerist culture they don't realize how deeply it drives a wedge between them and their fans, but simultaneously i do understand that, like everyone, they need money    

point being, i don't exactly know where this rift begins, i have no way of knowing when something is overproduced, until it already is (which kind of sucks when you think about it) but i think that 16 bit lolitas are so off the hook, that i just don't want to see them become the aforementioned examples. and i think that imitating an overpriced photograph is not the best way to quell that trend

granted, that may be exactly what they want. and in that case disregard everything i said.

 but as a final example, im a fan of Jochen Miller, his production quality is off the chart. so, given what i had heard on his podcast, youtube, pandora etc. i dropped the buck-fifty to go see him live about a year ago (which is a lot when considering i work as an artist/waiter) and in short, it was terrible.  i mistakenly made the assumption that by being a good producer he was also a good Dj. but then in hindsight, his podcast is just inundated with watermarks, promotions, tie-ins, plugs and commercials. i think this reflected in his live act. and of course i have no access to tell him this personally so he continues to do it, not realizing that it makes him come off as a tool.

tickets to most of the events that these musicians play at typically exceed 70$ (not to mention service fees, parking, etc. etc.)  if the artist is a let-down thats like getting hit with two parking tickets, per person. and considering in the Jochen miller example, i convinced several of my friends to go to the show as well, so then i totally look like an ass too.

its unfortunate too because i feel like artists of great caliber have their talents exploited in the name of profit and thats a real let-down considering that the actual reaper of these benefits typically isn't the artist or the fans but some intermediary that really had nothing to do with the creative process at all.      
     
ps, if 16 bit lolitas are ever playing in La I would love to see them live, and I'd gladly go with you to check it out ...assuming i could afford tickets of course  

   

9

Her name was Hidey. Hidey cause she hides. She lived to be 21, in human years. And before she became a tiny 2lb toxoplasma vector she was a Maine coon. She was a full blooded nutcase, one of those one-person one-cat kind of cats that lived like a roommate, only as a roommate that lives in your room on your bed. She spent the later part of her life living on my neighbors roof. They never minded her, she was a phenomenal mouser, and in the years that she spent with us no house in any proximity ever had vermin. She outlived or outlasted about a dozen other cats, some of which were mauled by dogs, some were devoured by coyotes, others suffered intestinal failure, or simply vanished to never return. She just spent so much of her time on my neighbors roof yowling at me every time I walked out to my car or had any business in the front yard, and it was a long unnerving yowl, she didn’t meow; she roared at you in a snide way.

Hidey was my first cat. There exist several photos of me as a sleeping child with a pair of luminescent glowing over my shoulder. In all those photos right next to my sleeping face this dirty-looking furball staring directly into the camera, it’s wide-eyed stare illuminated on the low-resolution image forever by the flash of some two-dollar wind-up camera. Always in exactly the same place she slept fort the first 12 years of my life.

She is and remains one of the most relevant memories of my childhood. I know this because I remember her as a child when I lived in Chino. I remember her as a kitten, hiding everywhere. She would just come out of the woodwork. Like an alien horror film, first a tail here, a foot there and then she was upon you, rubbing her tiny face against yours and butting her head repeatedly; as if her tiny brain were repeatedly trying to climb into your own, but too much flesh and fur kept it from happening. I remember this even as my memories of Chino seem to evaporate in a constant cloud of construction dust. It was this cow-town with a prison. Now it’s a suburban town with a prison. I often wonder if it will just become an entirely suburban town and if they will just give the prisoners a housing tract with higher walls. As my childhood slips into perpetual memory I wonder what happened to all the cows that were there. I wonder if my grandma’s ranch carries the feelings of adventure that it did for me so many years ago. I wonder if the three families that now live there after they divided her property and knocked out the stables know what it is to ride a horse. But I already know the answer to those ideas, and these are the same people that buy dogs, or adopt cats from their local animal shelter. They don’t find them living in medical warehouses.

We got her from a guy named Ray. Ray was my mother’s best friend for many years. He owns this medical supply company that manufactures catheters. They met in high school, they went to prom together. Ray found three cats that day, and named them all. There was Little-ray, after himself. There was Little-mark, after his partner Mark. And there was Johnny-rotten, who wouldn’t come out of the garage. And no doubt my mother, in her infinitely poor parenting felt that Jonhnny-rotten was a perfect pet for a 3 year old. Which in hindsight, it probably was. The truth is when we got her home, she would not come out from under my bed for weeks. Where she continued to remain as this scared angry little kitten that turned into a ball of claws and teeth at the drop of a hat. To this day I still have lasting scars from lacerations that cat left me. But I think at that age knowing there was a tiny little monster under my bed had a strangely comforting quality. Some people say cats are evil. I am not one to contest this, but rather suffice to say in the world that we live in; it takes one to know one.

It was years later before I accepted the feline form as my banner. I can’t say why because I simply don’t know. But the cat and what it takes to be a cat live deeply in the recesses of my mind in a way that I struggle to explain, but I’ll say it like this;

During my interrogation, the police kept throwing out this word over and over again, wondering why some vandal would deface public property with cats, what was their message? What could I possibly be getting at? And as they said it over and over I began to lick my lips at the thought of the word they were using. They kept saying “mayhem.” Mayhem. Mayhem, the deliberate debilitation of a person or system.

Once Hidey brought home a locust. She found it in a small patch of soybeans that an elderly Chinese couple tended. She brought it home alive and played with it like a child’s toy until she eventually dismembered it piece by piece. The locust probably didn’t view the struggle for its life as a game or that the gradual dismemberment of its body as anything less than severe. But Hidey, made it seem almost comical as if it were a flying spring that needed to be gnawed on each time it was pinned down and when her little macabre game was over, that is to say, when the spring had no more bounce left in it, she devoured as a child eating a half-melted candy bar.

The only other animal that I know of to torment its kill are orcas. I’ve never seen them in the wild outside of documentaries but the scenario is the same. Regardless of what one believes ‘Kosher’ to be, a kill is a kill. Miyamoto Musashi knew this, Hidey knew this, and from a very young age I have known this. I wonder often if the design of a higher predator is fundamentally linked to their experimentation with their prey. I wonder the implications that this has for mankind. In all of its glorious self-proclaimed organization we are and remain the only animal to torture. We don’t even eat our torture victims, which I think is the truly heinous crime. In a weird way it lacks wherewithal as if those proponents of this most obscure activity deliberately start something they have no intention of finishing. And say what you will, Hidey fucking devoured that locust.

I think what makes Hidey last in my mind is not that she was a survivor, but the way in which she survived. Eating bugs. Living on my neighbor’s roof. Yowling at anything that gave her a cross look. I remember her eyes, most of all. They were yellow like a career crack-fiend, riddled with this color that would imply jaundice with striped features in the sclera, these two owl-eyes sat on her face with a cutting stare that could peel the paint off a wall. They sat on her face in a way that appeared as if the daintiest cosmetologist had spent hours applying eyeliner to her. The black circles of her face could have been airbrushed they were so immaculate, which gave such a strange contrast as if every day eye shadow and eyeliner had been applied to accentuate her glowing eyes. As if a homeless person had found a crate of MAC makeup and wore it everyday.

In my world, cats are like homeless people. Or at least that what I told the police. We adopt them like orphans, we take them in like a guy that has a bad run, or a divorced woman that’s down on her luck. They’re dejected intelligent mammals which lack the ability to communicate effectively in a human world, where they can’t reach the button on a crosswalk. As a child I used to foster litters of kittens. Whole clowders of stray kittens have come and gone, they get adopted out to go live out their lives in who-knows-where. I owned other cats, show cats, sissy cats that never leave the windowsill. So I imagine when they were eaten by a coyote their life up until that moment was quite comfortable. I imagine Hidey saw the whole parade several times. Each time that same little squint through her mascara’d eyes, as if to say, “Saw the whole thing. It was gory. How are you, dear?”

I would go out and pick up the parts of a bengal, ragdoll, domestic shorthair, whatever to her observant unjudgmental watch. I often wonder if I’ve lost so many cats that I’ve become desensitized to their lives. I like to think that I just understand them in their own terms. A cat is an ephemeral being, some live long and spoiled lives at the hands of overweight middle-aged women. Some are discovered as kittens in the back of a Japanese restaurant to go home to large Mexican families who smother them with affection for years. Some live rich lives from the entrance to a drain at the edge of town. No matter what they come into our lives for one reason or another and vanish to leave only memories. It’s part of who they are and it is important to respect that.

Hidey died last winter. She was 21. She probably weighed 2lbs as I lowered her into the ground in my garden. My garden is a cat-themed garden. I bought two exotic lilies in her memory. There is a ceramic cat statue to mark her spot, though I move it a lot so that only I know where she really is. I don’t know why I do this. Ultimately I hope to be buried in that same garden, virgin so that I may return to the earth without incident. As we all ponder our entrances and exits nothing lasts but time, I am honored to have spent my time with such a graceful spirit and beckon that the kodama look after her, from the far side of the river. As if that means anything at all.                    

  

   

         
            

8

 There was a time when I could not always see. There was a time when I was sedated in the cheer of the crowd and caught up in all that was populist and superficially righteous. I believed that what was presented to me was the truth, but as time passes I am not as sure. I don’t know if what we are becoming is what I want to be a part of. The whales die. The children fight. The workers work. The artists create.  

I imagine the last of the great trees succumbing to pollution. The last great cats reduced to fat vegetative perversion as spoiled rich children throw garbage at them in a zoo enclosure. Surely somewhere in the world there is a net that wraps around a building to keep its employees from jumping to their deaths. So in some way I imagine the worst of what humanity will do to the earth but the truth is; it’s already being done. I move on like a pawn, one space at a time, lashing out with my left and right to accomplish some goal I don’t even fully understand. And I tell myself often, that I imagine that things get better, I imagine that this world will someday look out upon the tainted oceans, harbors, rivers, and lakes that it has created and see a reflection of itself. I imagine that someday the world may see itself for what it is becoming/ what it has become and feel moved to action. I imagine this, but I know that it is not true. Somewhere in a skyscraper there is a room of people that control millions, and they do not look at their reflections, they don’t feel. Why should they, why should anything. They are a part of something greater than myself they are the game makers of this world, they are the bell that rules this land. But only if I believe it. In short; I have to want, but if I choose not to want I will overcome this.

want for nothing.

But I did not always know this, I didn’t see the world for what it was, I didn’t always see myself as this disposable entity; one of so many others, the truth is that this seeing has been made a weakness in this time. As the time pushes on with the same incessant cycles, the same subplots and situations it makes me wonder what the aim actually is. What is the purpose of all this? What could these people possibly be doing that makes them need to speed on the freeway in a 10 ton vehicle? What motivates this? Why do they listen to the traffic report, why do they obey the laws, the laws are not physically real, they are an idea like ‘democracy’ or ‘justice.’ It does not mean we have democracy or justice but we aspire to. Laws are aspirations with penalty; if justice is not done there is little that can be done. If a man is wrongfully imprisoned for 20 years, the time cannot be given back to him. There are many other examples of time-dependent psychologies, and interestingly; they can be just as easily invented. Like ‘the weekend’ or ‘Disneyland’  

Teach the masses to be happy with themselves, teach the masters, teach the slaves, without becoming the masters or becoming the slaves. Make their needs and desires met, but they don’t know what they need, they don’t know what they want. Tell them what they need, tell them what they want, but do it in such a way that you do not become their master, and do so in a way that you do not become a slave. If you give to much they will become reliant, too little; they will lose heart.

 How do you tell an overblown population that they are important and necessary while at the same time making it clear that they do not need to reproduce, that their time is all they have and there are already too many humans. How do we give without taking, or empower without exploiting? Or take without exploiting, or give without over-empowering? How can we teach without training? I speculate that the idea is simply to do. …Do.

The Human world has become a crazed rapidly proliferating mass that I do not understand how it sustains itself. It is kind of beautiful though, the way in which millions get up when they are told, go to work when they are told, go home when they are told and so forth. All doing this under the guise that they are making these decisions of their own free will and as if the choices were their own.

They’re not. Free will is the illusion that humans cannot shape our minds. To have truly freewill would be the same has have no perception. It would be like a plant, by the time you realized anything had taken place it would be hours after said event had taken place. Something inherently retroactive could have a similar effect, like a memory or a dream.  The mind processes what it perceives, shuffles the information and plays solitaire with the colors and emotions that it saw noteworthy. In a way our minds are not our own. None of our bodies really are. Our intestines lined with Achaea our skin covered in a microbial mat of billions of individual organisms… so how real are the chemical signals I perceive to be my feelings? For that matter how “solid” is my desk? It is made of atoms, which are mostly empty space, yet it is here. How real is the death of my cat if my brain did not release the right chemicals for me to experience it fully. How important is this digital document if nobody reads it?

The truth is, it’s not. Nothing is.       

7

He says something about how when I get older my body will ‘fall apart’. He says something about how life gets harder when I get older, how much more difficult it becomes.
I tune out.

Nobody knows anything anymore. They just talk and talk. I think of the Los Angeles freeways in the rain; the dull red glow of stopped cars and the thick polluted drops that batter down on the windshield. Each car contains one other person, held in a capsule of their influence that money, or sex or love or some other currency bought- but it’s the same. Like a three dimensional sphere of influence made of metal and plastic they truck along the concrete paths lain before them. They put their slogans on windows and bumpers but it’s all the same; the perimeter of influence reaching outward to advertise some other value, some encouragement to their middle school children some word that abortion is wrong, or which political party they’re affiliated with… whatever.

They rush forth through the city, through the signal, to the parking lot. In search of a “good spot” for cheap socks or a meal and in this moment I am… forgettable.

I don’t own a car. I ride a bike, my legs are strong enough to kick a door off its hinges; but I am emasculated in this society, the second-class that doesn’t see the need for all of it. But I do, I miss not having a portable room with custom seating to smoke a bowl in. A private conference room to call from, like a pocketed place that persists in my memory when I had deeper access to another world. I miss all the things that come with the illusion of freedom, but like any illusion removed, one can never go back.

And that, in essence, is what this is about. Could one destroy enough illusion to the extent that there is no going back? Will I reach a point where there is nothing left for me but death? Could I take enough substance to transcend a world of materials?

When we say “take a life” what do we mean? What do we take? We end. We end a life. We end a life with the illusion that there is something more but empirically there is nothing to indicate that there is more than this. And continue to live the lie. And it’s a simple lie and its and eloquent lie but the truth is that none of this is necessary. Not your car or your skyscraper or your money will have any presence it what is to come. We each die alone and how we meet that end is our own affair.  

6

Sometimes I work all day just telling myself over and over, ‘…for the love of doing it.’ Simultaneously I sit in pure astonishment wondering how I ended up in this suburban hell.
I hate this. I hate this computer. I hate this blog. I hate the work I do. I hate my life and almost everyone in it. I hate myself and what I have become. And yet suicide doesn’t teach anyone anything; it’ll hurt those few that liked you and have no affect on the systems in place that drove the individual to their final point. Though, I have a deep respect for those that are suicidal, and those that can carry it out; good for you.

Ironically, they’ll never read this after the deed is done.

There enlies the humor. Nothing is as funny as death; because nothing is as funny as that which is unknown. It’s not funny in a conventional sense but I think as a culture we need to reconcile that most true of all facts; you’re going to die. Not today and not tomorrow but it is guaranteed. Eventually your children will die and everything that you ever knew and loved will be gone. And the world will march on all the same. Time is a relative construct and it never changes it’s like gravity or any one of the various bells that rule our universe that a human mind fails to comprehend. (and I mean Fails; the idea that the inherent mass of the planet keeps me from flying off into some vacuum abyss doesn’t even begin to make sense to me. I get the gist of it, I don’t have a better expression or theory, but in a strictly empirical sense I know of nothing else and for me to speak on a subject like gravity or death would be a fool’s errand.) We can speculate about anything, but the truth is simple we are both ‘in’ the universe and ‘of’ the universe. I like that my brain exists, I don’t like that ages, I don’t like that it can fail, I don’t like that I am a human and destined to a life that is finite. As far as the universe is concerned, I like to think of it in a strangely religious sort of fervor.

            Time is not important without the ability to perceive it. Despite what you may have heard rocks don’t give a fuck about time. They don’t care about gravity. They lack the capacity to care, because they are simply inanimate objects. In this way we understand anything to the effect that we can perceive it (like myself regarding gravity and death) our minds have precognition only to the point that it effects our perception. I can plan where I am going to be in the future but I cannot guarantee it, interestingly I can modify my perceived future by sheer willpower within the parameters of my time, place, and reality. Being realistic is a strength in this matter because it helps gauge what you’re going for, somewhat like understanding the density of an object by looking at it. (and don’t give me some fuck-head counter example like aerogel) You can predict with a certain margin of error that you will probably drink water at some point in the future. As a human the likelihood of it is relatively high and these are simple examples. Taken a step further; things like Oedipal hubris is a fabrication of the human imagination. Useful hubris is the ability to manifest one’s goals which is the only actual application of that idea. This then dissolves into efficacy principles.

Ironically, there is still so much that remains undiscovered. I sculpt in excess of 30 hours a week, I sit there all day telling myself that it will all be over soon enough, that I love doing this, that I wish I were somewhere else, that I have feelings that are important to express. These are all lies that I tell myself over and over again to remain productive. I like to think they are true and I want to believe it, but that has yet to be seen. This is the limit to that ‘useful hubris’ idea; even if I really want to manifest something I am not guaranteed any outcomes. But I do believe that there is something inherently beautiful in the struggle, almost erotic, it is that same feeling that makes desire and want so important. This is in part what makes the human experience so transcendent and trivial. Humans, like all “higher” life forms have desires, human desires are the most abstract and by context the most complex but the idea of desire could be understood as a noble conquest all the same. Want is a powerful driving force, one that should be understood to the level of something like gravity and death. Each planet has its own gravity, each living organism will experience its own death. Similarly each living organism seeks its own desires. I feel that there must be an emergent point when an organism reaches a threshold that establishes desires. These desires then shape the existence of that organism. (…and then I suppose some human will go on to give it a name. idk…) What separates a ficus from a magnolia (two plants that are close relatives in the scheme of things) is some internal driving force that seeks establish some kind of internal property. In all likelihood this is driven by external factors like climate and predators. A ficus next to a magnolia placed in a scenario where they both can thrive in does not mean that one or the other devolves into a more rudimentary form, or that if left long enough in one place their evolution will converge into a purely adaptive form to their specific scenario. On the contrary, the two relatively related organisms will continue to evolve and grow towards the path that they were already on. What fascinates me is this understanding that once an organism reaches a kind of ‘comfort precipice’ it ceases to develop. ( eg: Horeshoe crabs, Ginkgo biloba seem to persist in a world where their inherent design has remained ‘good enough’ for so long that it is hard to understand them as anything but what they are.) That said I think it is an inherently human to develop, a human form is a form that is inherently progressive. The design is not particularly specialized, but is capable of nearly everything that it can focus its willpower at and can be understood only by its own measure.

  That said; it could be deduced that we essentially created ourselves. Each “higher” organism is a product of one very driven cell interacting with another. A single connection that could represent anything but is limited within a reality that it can only become one.   

      

   

5

When people ask, I say that my artwork is a spell. I make street art when I feel that the object of that spell should be directed at society. I make abstract art when I feel that the spell is a feeling that I am trying to release from my mind. In the recent months I have become a decent enough artist to start capturing bigger and more industrious targets but it’s always the same; it’s always a spell. I like to imagine myself as some sort of post-modern wizard that generates images and sculpture that can open they hearts and minds of others. I say this, but my work doesn’t have nearly that much efficacy. I am just a human so my spells can only be human-spells.  

            My friend Brian came home from Afghanistan with shrapnel in three parts of his body. After surgery and a downed helicopter, he was back together no worse for the wear. Upon the completion of his service he bought a blue painting of a eucalyptus tree that I was working on when he came home for the scripted visiting of friends and family as he repeatedly retold his experience. He came by and acquired the painting in the rain, sitting in an SUV filled with his belongings he shoved everything aside to personally hold the piece for the long ride to the high desert. It hangs above his bed, as a childish blue monument that seems to be decomposing in thick blue drops. He once confided in me: “I saw a lotta’ shit overseas, I’ve got some Demons inside of me after all that, but when I look at this... I don’t know… it, it.. just makes me feel like everything is gonna to be okay.” I like to imagine that the painting itself magically and methodically pulled the shrapnel from his body and sutured his wounds and eased him into a deep sleep where he had no memory of what happened in that country on the far side of the world. I know this is a lie, it was military surgeons that pulled the shards from his body. It was time that closed his open wounds, it was time that expired and brought him home.

I like to imagine Brian standing in front of that painting as it eats up every unhappy memory of his life like some psychological sponge. I hope it uproots any demon and fills his room with happy dreams.

 I imagine what a Eucalyptus is; as it sheds its skin from each previous year to grow a little taller and a little stronger. The scars of every previous season fall to the earth in elegant fissured ribbons leaving no memory that they even took place.     

   

4

It bums me out that there never seems to be anything on television that holds my attention anymore. I could blame people. I could blame a specific person if I had to and ironically they are not on television. They know who they are.

They’re not going to read this blog though, they don’t read. It’s not that they can’t, it’s that they don’t.

So in a weird way, I often think we live in a kind of personal stasis: A good friend of mine is uneducated and does not seek education but fails to see the difference between being paid for what one does and being paid for what one thinks. This is not my own concept, I learned it from a school. Somebody taught this to me. I do not follow it to the letter either. But to put everything into perspective one must understand the limitations of their perspective. This should not be understated though; essentially, this is the destruction of our ego. To see beyond oneself one must essentially (and habitually) seek to expand their psychological territory. It is a trait that I find uniquely human. But a similar counter could be made to this as well; if being ‘good enough’ didn’t work out for the dinosaurs, why should being proactive work out for us?

And on the surface it makes sense, even to me; why get out of bed at all if you’re just going to die someday. Death is a guarantee. It is not necessarily that this is always the way things will be but as it stands now we are prisoners and captains to our own lives. Our respective ignorance limits and directs the course of our lives in a subtle but powerful way.
I don’t know exactly what this means. This is the extent of my knowledge. I can say nothing more to this effect than to speculate.

To continue with that note, I believe that what I have to say is important to a level that is something external to my control. That said I am human, or I was, I don’t quite know anymore. I look like you. I talk like you. Technically, I am a common demographic in your population. But the reality is that it could be debated. I do my best to hide it well, but it is not always easy. However this not without its gratification and I find that many of the things that bind me to this world are many of the same things that bind this world together. It is within these routes that I am able to interact with others of my kind, others of your kind, others of any kind and it tends to be rewarding. This world has come up with some very entertaining activities. But I suppose that my whole reason for writing was not simply to occupy time but rather offer a warning; enjoy free entertainment as much as possible.         

3

Because the tattoo of a fractal would look stupid

I can’t do it justice

I don’t think anyone could

But then I tell myself that there is probably a machine that could do it justice

But machienes don’t fucking get tattoos.

Because thay aren’t human. Humans get tattoos,

This what makes them what they are.

 we are the only animal that I know of to exhibit this behavior. 

Im sure theres some other thing out there that I haven’t yet considered that does some similar thing but that’s really not the point.

And sit playing

Singing softly into the  bent iridescent jellybean reflection of my stolen snowboard goggles

And the words coming out of my mouth are beautiful and soft but are not the same

As what’s going through my mind; which is busily, loudly chanting to himself;

“there is no spoon.”

There is no spoon

thereisnospoon…

and the figure reflected in the  curve

of the single orange and yellow lens

tears away at a pawnshop guitar

irreverent to

his sleeping neighbors

obsessive lifestyle

or the feelings of those who will find out tomorrow

there was no big bang.

…not in the sense of ‘before and after’ anyway

2

The truth is simple; freedom is the act of being free and I am not free, I have never been free, I will never be free. I was born into a system when freedom had been modified into some terse cheap thing.

And we leveled the forests to make money, and raped the oceans to make money, and destroyed the air to get us to jobs so that we could make money. And I often questioned this in a soft voice but the fact was resoundingly simple, I lack the efficacy to make a difference. As I sit in a suburban house, without access to a vehicle or firearms, and questions the bare truth. That lays stark naked like a dead 9 year old girl on the side of the road; Disney panties around her ankles: even if I had all the tools there is nothing to reclaim the freedom we already lost. As a multibillion dollar military secures its own future on the blood of others. Coercing every member of itself that the only intrinsic good is that of itself. As army ants must consider that there is no forest, only the hive, only the good of that which you are a part of. And nothing else matters because nothing really matters.

If I were free I would live in a world that did not depend on petroleum based products, certainly plastics are a crucial part of this modern life, but excessive packaging isn’t. We need to be able to defend ourselves, but unusual weapons being used in foreign lands are not exactly self-defensive. This nation does not defend freedom.
I think of freedom in the rolling waves. I think of freedom in the sprawling mountains, in forests that have no parking spaces where the forest service can give parking tickets. Freedom is a place without encroachment, without dependence on money, without excessive…excess. Where we trade pieces of paper for bits of silicon and lithium to stay in contact with our friends and loved ones.

And I ask: Is this Life?

Did this matter? Because the fucking truth is that I cannot share with you or anyone the experiences I’ve had in the rolling waves, or in the sprawling forest. I cannot tell you of the amazing sex I’ve shared. I can only seek to share it as often as possible with as many people as possible. And this becomes problematic in a world where women still seek equality, homosexuals still seek recognition. Plants are killed with impunity and animals are created and destroyed without concern for any intrinsic property beyond their consumeability. And I sit here typing. Because it was the best idea I could come up with given my already preexisting set of parameters that I had no control over. And the great thing about typing is that it requires readers. And frankly reading requires time, and spending time doing something that is even marginally unpleasant is a loss of freedom. Because words are another product and I lack the efficacy to separate my product from anyone else’s product. And as such I become rolled up into the grandiose scheme of this overly manufactured life.

Even my sex is an object of manufacture. Offspring are a financial burden but if you don’t want to face biological extinction you will assume that responsibility or you will force yourself to assume that responsibility and in context you will, in essence, take your own freedom away. It’s absurd, we don’t need slaves with shackles or child workers; the population of this planet is such that we throw our own inherent triviality in our faces and we might as well clasp our own psyche in irons from the onset.

And I know this; there is a woman I have loved for years whose time I hold higher in esteem than anything else and will go to great lengths to spend any moment of myself around her.  I dream often of waking up with her in my bed. I dream of our adventures and wonder how much I could unconditionally love a person of this caliber. But the truth is far less poetic; I lack the efficacy to secure her and she is the type of woman that thrives on security. And though we may share a collaborative understanding of what security is- the truth is the truth.

Freedom, in a sense, is a world without desires.

Freedom is the absence of desire.

In my world, I am not free because I love and continue to seek to love with freedom.                

1

The words become trivial.

Esoteric and meaningless.

And I sit there frozen wondering how I ended up in such a pointless environment

 like the dead space between our worlds.

Where I share borders with others, fronts, and transitions in terrain there is places that I cannot go, things I don’t see
to what avail was this. This place that destroyed so much more than it could offer.

0

to this day i fail to see the importance of writing, i fail to see why it has any relevance, i fail to see why i should spell-check, edit, or modify anything beyond the generally circumstantial stuff.
this is my voice.
with that in mind
 this is what i sound like. these are my words. This is my life.

My name is nothing special.

My words are cheap.

My goals are selfish

My beliefs are realistic.

My past was eventful but unimportant.

I haven’t learned anything enough to consider myself fit to teach.

I feel things that are not there physically.

Sometimes I see things that are not there.

I am adept at lying but I am not pathological.

I am talented in empirical ways.

I am a Nihilist.

My life is my message.