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.