16

Sometimes you must be critical of your own thoughts. At all times you must be critical of your own thoughts. You must extrapolate and articulate and reverberate them through the caverns of your mind. All the while remembering that you share a common reality with others.

It truly is the worst trick in our ‘verse. To have to share a “reality” with other humans; and that truly is essentially what reality is: the place where other people interact with you. It can be modified by modifying their interactions with you. It can be limited by the interactions that are executed, and expanded by increasing the interactions and generating the potential for more interactions to be held.

(I imagine this a bit like celebrity-ness. You become open to all suggestions and all potential interactions. …but it could be annoying because it might lead to a dissolution of self)

The challenge lies in the belief that dissolution of self is a beautiful idea, but it is not real. Some pop celebrity/Dali lama/politician is a dissolved reality, and you can’t reliably trust a dissolved reality. In a weird way of saying this, it is as though my words are a message in a bottle that I am sending through time, by making them semi-permanent in a digital realm. But the very act of tailoring those words from my reality and preserving them in any context is to pervert them as they enter yours. The ink in my message will become altered as it rides the currents of time to reach your reality, it will already have been obscured by the time you read it.

Our ideas age rapidly. Our interacting realities interact form all sorts of losses and gains in time. I speak with my grandfather and I can see that his mind is trapped in an era that has passed, he cannot even see that much about himself. This man has no concept of what art is, music is always the same flavor in his ears, and in the airforce when only 4 bombers came back from a mission in which 32 were sent out he shrugged it off because god would forgive him and his country would praise his patriotism. Even though his peers died at his command; I mean technically, it was the Luftwaffe. Technically, it wasn’t directly his command. But realistically his reality contributed to the end of their reality. More than 300 realities ended that day, and they were just measured by their service to a larger subconscious reality.  

That’s the weakness in this whole thing: realities can be ended. It is a part of all histories anywhere; people can be killed.

Do I believe that Jesus should have been killed? Probably not, had I lived in that time I would have seen the humor in what he was doing and laughed in support.

But do I believe that john wayne gacey should be killed? Absolutely. Realities that are that twisted should be ended, even if I were forced to do it myself I would. Which is to say; if this person were present in my reality I would go out of my way to end his.

That’s the point though: our population is immense. It is so immense that no person could see all other people in a human lifetime. It is so huge that reality stretches on beyond one human lifetime. There are realities that will go out of their way to impede on the realities of others and we will call them disorders, and we will call them evil; but they will come into existence none the less and they will be dealt with ad hoc. Our collective reality is as infinite ‘in’ reality as the universe. It spans on beyond the reach of our time. Modifying it a little or modifying it a lot makes no existential difference, because we won’t even realize it. (as we cannot realize what might or might-not have been)

I think my favorite aspect of this enters my mind as though our personal consciousness enters into this plane of reality (our personal reality, not the collective that is shared with others) like a needle with thread making a single stitch into a plane of fabric, and it is impossible to know how many other planes of fabric are being stitched into this one, and it is equally as impossible to know how many planes we are stitching ourselves into. All that I seem to be aware of is that we have a needle-and-thread-like dichotomy in this aspect of reality. I have no idea if I came from anywhere, I have no idea if I will go anywhere and all the while I have something in me that seems to animate flesh. I have some aspect that needs to take a shit every so often. And the synergy of the two seems to wonder if we need to exist to not exist. Do we come into being to become something else? Will it be ‘being’ at all if I’m ‘dead’?      

I would speculate that our realities are modified by the depth of our perception and our sensitivity to the outside world. Desensitization will lead to a limitation of reality (which is annoyingly self-fulfilling) but it is valid in the same sense that we cannot dwell if we wish to proceed. And it must be recognized that some will wish to dwell. Some will wish to hold you back and some will wish to spurn you forward as they perceive their own realities. But all of them will play out and then go on to the next level, whatever that may be.     

15

And I stand there in the darkness, train blaring out its horn into the otherwise still night.

I wish this fucking neighborhood would shut the hell up!

They come over like zombies with direction. Their purpose already evaporated from so many before.

They don’t know that though.

He throws a bike into the abandoned yard. I freeze in place like some tweaker-fighting scarecrow. I stand there paralyzed with anger. There is no weed left for them to take. Just me in this dark yard; shovel in hand. Wearing the same uniform they use, like the Nazgûl they come over the fence, bearing bypass pruners, loppers, and oversized pocket knives in their respective pitches to rob me of my plants.

Each night for the last several months it’s been this way. We wait them out.

We wait for them like fucking idiots.

It has come to this. In the depths of me something has become infected. Where I once imagined the first of my mangled girls as an accident, I am overcome with relief that my shovel was within arms-reach. Feeling light in my hands, there isn’t another object in our whole operation that feels more trained in my hands.  

I imagine I’ll go for their eyes first; then their neck. Maybe I’ll lop their heads clean off after I take them to the ground. Nice and clean.

We’ve never issued the text before: “Alpha protocol.”

It wouldn’t even matter, if I could get them in the ground in under an hour. They’re gone. Just like that, gone.

At this stage in the game I don’t even care.  I want violence and vengeance.

Realistically though, we are but ships out to sea. My best friend faces deportation. My mother is fat. My roommates are all addicted to the drug. And we fight on, surrounded on all fronts in an unstoppable rising tide of desperation.

And I wait in the dark gripping my shovel as if it is some umbilical cord that will connect me back to the earth through violence.

Realizing we cannot have what has been lost. As we can only speculate to what could have been. And it is the curse of our reality.

14

The other night I was stopped on my bike by a Riverside cop. This same night, Chris Dorner killed one officer and dramatically wounded another on Magnolia. The two incidents were about an hour apart. After I was stopped the cop searched my bag and let me be on my merry way becoming another chapter in our endless catch-and-release police program. This kind of thing has happened to me so many times I can’t even remember how many individual instances like this have taken place. The truth is I don’t care to think about it, in the same way that the cop, Officer Spillman, kept questioning me about all my DUI experiences that I didn’t care to talk about. Just repeatedly interrogating me at random, or for his part; “stopping a cyclist for riding on the curb” and this, apparently was cause for reminding me of all my short-comings as a civilian. Luckily I didn’t have any of the drugs or the usual paraphernalia that I carry around with me everywhere, and so it made the illegal search of my person and my belongings short and shitty, but not as shitty as it could have been.        

A deep part of me feels that Dorner is a harbinger of what is to come. I admire his ability to reap vengeance on the corrupt abuses of power that California and America has suffered through overbearing law enforcement. But it’s nothing new. They spend our tax money like the kind of people that can squander another’s money. (Buying Segway personal transporters; what the fuck?) I can’t stand it, in fact I hate it.

It is a symptom of a larger problem people bureaucratically absorb themselves into our government, like lobbyists, law enforcement, politicians, and military contractors and then they feign that everything they do is out of some sort of necessity. As if cops need assault rifles on a suburban beat, but the firearms manufacturers lobby for guns as if they were school lunches and eventually all police everywhere own their brand of ‘standard issue’ firearm. The politicians; paid for by one source or another enter into a race for profit from mega-conglomerate corporations, that are then backed, promoted, and in turn back and supply our government, typically in the form of military. (but there are others) Along with this comes the illusion that everything becomes necessary when it is paid for by an indirect supplier: everything is made necessary as long as the bill gets passed on to the people. This is just a microcosm of why and how our government doesn’t work. There are other things. It is not lost on me and its not lost on the American people. When Spray paint costs an astronomical 10$ a can and the buffing of graffiti costs $100 a linear foot, it’s just a bunch of bullshit and everyone knows it. Chris Dorner was burned alive in a cabin that was set on fire by police officers who were trying to undermine his rampage killing streak that stemmed from the corruption of law enforcement.  Laws are abstract. The laws need to change. Each passing day we move closer and closer to a police state, the America that was is becoming more and more like the ”reds” that they feared so much so many years ago.

In Riverside, if you drive down Arlington avenue, every signal has a camera or a transistor or is in fact a flashing, ticketing camera signal it is lined with signs that post your speed and flash lights if you exceed various speeds and this is all very interesting because the street itself runs through the most suburbanized part of Riverside. There are nothing but concrete walls on either side for miles. Behind the concrete walls there are tract homes with little or no land, and a few sparse designed little parks that close at eight, wherein, after eight the police will stop you and search you. They go to bed promptly and get up around the same time so they can all sit together in traffic on the way to, wherever. They come home together in traffic and start the cycle over and over again. On the weekends they drink and mow their small lawns (if migrant workers didn’t already get to it during the week) and this is a ‘respectable life.’  

This is unfortunately, reality. This is what the future is becoming. Boxes to live in that they pay for. Cars to get us to work that they must insure, fuel, maintain, register, and license all at personal expense. And then they do it to themselves, “no respectable lawyer could be taken seriously driving a scion.” The sect of humanity that I seem to be a part of is certainly a blind one. California has been bought over so many times, that it is becoming a stockyard for immigration and labor. Each successive generation is rolled-up into the fabric of this place, and if they resist their fate is sealed: Poverty for the artists. Incarceration for the dissenters. A respectable monotonous life for the skilled and unskilled alike.  And it’s all cheap and pointless. What options do they have? They are controlled by the constructs that have positioned them in this way.