Isn't life worth taking time to try to save?

Last night I was struck by some things my friends were saying about current world overpopulation issues. I was amazed at how many of them suggested violent revolution or war as the only plausible solution. The sample of the population that these friends of mine may represent would be the blue-collar, creative and artistic, alcohol and marijuana consuming, no higher education experience part of the work force. I had to wonder how many on this level might feel this way. I am hoping that they are a minority but when I thought about some of the things I heard while working construction last year, I fear that they are probably not just a few.

I am not trying to hold myself on a moral high ground, but the thought crossed my mind that I am indeed thankful for my years spent in college that have made me aware of other possibilities. They mentioned the necessity of the deaths of a few hundred thousand people as casually as if they were talking about taking out the trash. Unfortunately, the conversation got cut short before I could bring up education as a method of birthrate control or even the idea that the part of this problematic concept they were not considering was the fact that a few hundred thousand human lives is not just a faceless number. Had I more time I would have suggested that they think about it in terms of having all of the people closest to them being part of that number and then asking them how they felt about it.

This tendency for people to over-simplify and dehumanize life, turning it into an expendable six or seven digit number on a page, really disturbs me. The fact that I fear this opinion is being held by more than just a few of my friends makes it even scarier. I won't pretend that I have the answers, but before we go touting the death of thousands of individual human lives, it stands to reason that we exhaust all of the other non-violent possibilities available to us first. I know it will be harder, and take more work that way, but damn, aren't we past taking lives for the sake of simplicity by now? Hasn't history taught us that much?

And so it begins...

I saw my first political add on television today (I don't watch much t.v.) and immediately a feeling of utter disenchantment bubbled up inside of me. Everything the add said was such a blatant crock of excrement that I could hardly believe it. Do they really expect us to believe these empty words anymore? After everything that has happened in the past twenty years, I really don't even understand why they still feed us such bullshit. I would be so much more likely to vote for the man who just laid it on the line and told me the harsh truth of the matter rather than playing to the same over-used and outdated cock and bull stories that have been the norm for longer than I care to notate. Just what is the harsh truth? Well I will tell you, if you are too dumb or too lazy to figure it out for yourself:

Freedom is not real it is an ideal. Chasing freedom is aiming high while knowing that we will never hit the mark. The government lies to us daily, this is a fact. Their dishonesty has always been a fact and we might as well get used to it. Any politician who claims to be honest is not only a liar, but a condescending idiot who is severely underestimating the intelligence of his or her constituency. Politics is a dirty business when you strip it of all of its bows and two-thousand dollar lingerie. There is nothing even remotely noble about it and it takes dirty businessmen and criminals to really get anything done with it. You gotta' know how to fuck to be good at it. Maybe that was not the original intent, but it sure as hell is the state of things today. Politics equals prostitution; but when we really get right down to it whores need to eat to don't they?

What's wrong with prostitution really? If this is a "free" country favoring enterprise, equality and individual rights, don't loose men and women have the right to capitalize on the basic carnal urges that they specialize in to make enough money so that they can enjoy themselves as much as possible? Doesn't everyone have the right to the fulfillment of their basic human needs and perhaps a little more? Isn't that what this country is all about? Shouldn't the real moral fault here lie on the heads of the Johns and Joans who patronize them?

If you want to make the argument that "these parasites are preying on the weak" well, you're right, but that's nature for you. Predators eat smaller and weaker animals. The simple answer is to make the weak stronger, but that takes work, so yeah, lets keep blaming others for our mistakes and never learn to grow and deal with our consequences ourselves. That's continuing in our great tradition isn't it? Hallelujah. God be praised and God bless America.

In case you think I have digressed from my point, you are wrong. I suggest you look up "extended metaphor" on wikipedia then think about it a little bit more. All the cues are there. All you need to do is watch the news, read up on the history of the past fifty years, and do a bit of objective critical reasoning to see what I am getting at. I am not going to do the work for you because 1) I have already done it for myself and 2)that's one of the sources of the problem in the first place.

You want the truth? Well ask Jack, and when he says "you can't handle the truth" punch him in the face and then beat the information out of him. You won't get the truth that way, he will probably tell you whatever it takes to get you to stop slamming his teeth into the concrete, but if you really want the truth then all you have to do is "Seek and ye shall find," but even seeking is probably a bit more complicated than that innocent four letter word might imply.

It takes bigger stones than most possess to even prepare for the search for truth, but I will give you a hint: step one is the surrender of the self. Step two is: well, step two is find your own damned step two and see where it takes you.

That was fun.

So the world thinks we are wrong... Who cares?

Do we really care what other people think about us? When I saw Kurt Vonnegut speak last year, at a lecture at the Ohio State University, he quoted Susan Sonntag, saying something about a theory that roughly twenty percent of the population can decide for themselves to practice “good” behavior or to practice “evil” behavior and that this percentage is equally distributed; but the other eighty percent of us, can go either way depending on which side is louder in its appeals to our reason. I would like to place myself in the ten percent that chooses “good” most of the time, but I acknowledge that even that action shows me defining myself by someone else’s behavioral theory and thus, quite possibly, places me in the eighty percent that follows. This causes me to wonder if it is even possible for me to make choices based on my instinct alone; and then I wonder if my even my “instinct” is influenced by outside forces.

Postmodernists often posit that we can never truly be ourselves. Everything we know is based upon an agreed upon collective by others, which, if we are truly honest, could be wrong. Just because the light switch has turned the light on every day we have flipped it, does not mean it will turn on tomorrow. The bulb could burn out, there could be a short in the wire, or the cosmos might shift and unmake everything we have come to understand… I know it is far-fetched, and that a lightbulb is an over simplified metaphor for something that is so big, but no one can possibly tell me with complete certainly that the cosmos will never shift. It is something that cannot be known. Thus, everything we think we know is based on the principle that it has worked so far.

Like everything else, what most would consider “decent” behavior is based upon this very same uncertain structure. Barring theological discussions that would presume that a moral pattern has been set in motion by a creator, and focusing on just what we can experience tangibly in our day to day lives, we assume certain modes of behavior in order to get through our interactions with others as smoothly as possible. This behavior is learned to fit in with the people we want to associate with. We adopt their mannerisms in order to gain their acceptance. We justify our experience by how we relate it to others, so it should follow that yes, we do care what people think about us.

So what do we make of the fact that the majority of the world is now turning against what America is doing in Iraq. If decent behavior is defined what the majority of other people think, how will we, in our everyday lives react to this world majority disagreeing with our government’s decisions? What do those decisions say about us as individuals? As Americans, do we stick by our government as the thing that defines what binds us as a country and reject the behavior models that the rest of the civilized world is agreeing on?

Returning to the possibly theological/philosophical discussion of what motivates us to seek decency: I wonder just how important it is to listen to our instincts and learn to separate our own voices from the noise caused by the voices of others. Are the postmodernists right and we cannot possibly separate our true selves from the noise? Or, ignoring the argument that a “true self” does not exist, can our honest attempt at trusting the “decency” that is inside us still lead us in a direction that would better our world?

It is now time to start thinking outside of the box. The majority of Americans seem to have trouble with trying to define themselves by anything not American. We tend to see ourselves as privileged and outside of the rest of the world’s judgment because of the high-minded ideologies our country was founded upon - ideologies, I might add, that we fail to live up to on an hourly basis. Like a sophomoric adolescent, we forget that the cultures, the parents, which have spawned us, have seen and experienced things that we have not. There are and will be times when we can and should learn from their wisdom and right now is one of those times. There is something that feels very wrong about what the Bush Administration is doing in Iraq. When I quiet the noise and listen to my breathing, when I meditate on connecting myself to something bigger than me, bigger than the government, bigger than the things that unify the people in this country, something that connects me with my fellow man no matter where he comes from, I feel that something is wrong.

The Room

We wish to escape the room but are held transfixed.
Bound by our lust to a world of dramatic understatement,
its prosaic imagery making mockery of mind,
smut exciting frenzy for fulfillment,
We watch hungrily
as confusion and ambition play at an angry, awkward coitus
just out of reach of our weak and groping fingers:
sight, smell, the feel, the sounds
of love/hate fucking mocking popular salivation.
Standing in silence we are found going blind
outside ourselves, disconsolate from wanting
and desirous of damnation as answer to
our all-consuming catechism.

Contrary to popular belief
there are few who care;
and bedlam waits there, smiling,
practicing airs, teeth gnashing,
while disconcerting stares,
blurry but visible still
drive the patient insane.

Inane broadcasts laughing
between the lines breaking
the iron chains of wanting
only to forge them anew, hardened with poisoned steel.
The collars and braces chafe
the bruises blister, burst and begin to seep
allowing the venom to exercise its occupation.
The frequency of hallucination swells.

Believing we are no longer tethered we tug,
pull forward and choke our voices,
wear the skin from our wrists during the struggle.
Believing we are no longer chained we smile,
cough until crimson strands adorn our gums
and deposits in the gaps between our clenched teeth.

And the old ones smile stains.
and the old ones remember the days
when they were first aware of their being here,
they remember those who modeled their rememberance –
jostling them into introspection with secret smiles
and what was left
unsaid, only gestured:
like nods between comrades who've seen too much war.

But let the record note nonchalantly:
the smiles have grown less enthusiastic as the years
have harvested convolusion in a horn of plenty.

They offer advice:

speak of their lives in hoarse whispers,
no longer able to cry out.

While we,
still drifting in and out of conciousness
can force ourselves to listen,
can choose to lend an ear,
Even as we massage the contusion over our own crushed windpipes,
fight to make out the words over the ringing,
with dried blood caked hands,
the taste of rusted metal thick
on our tongues, the scales still stuck
on our eyes releasing us
from the responsibility
of knowing.

And the old ones smile stains.
Those who have stretched their chains,
so that escape does not seem impossible
but still leaves us to wonder why they've not broken free.

Rubbing my eyes

The bright white civ is ominous and overbearing,
I cannot see straight through to anything next.
These are visual stimuli devoid of a meaning,
the purpose and promise outside of the text.

Don’t blanket my eyelids with markers and moments
Don’t paint the cat backwards in the plot of your book
Sit still inside the lines; don’t splash the water;
And God forbid so he won’t ever need to look.

Why?

My first reaction was one of selfish anger. Lost in my own dreamworld, I was taking delight in the day and encouraging my own forward momentum when this terrible tragedy occured. I am now utterly ashamed because my first thought was: "How dare they?!?" and not "oh my God, those poor people."

This was a lesson for my own vanity. Sometimes I take great pride in the love I feel for my fellow man and it o'er shadows that love itself. The love is genuinely there, but is one of the most damning functions of pride to rend the good of something to a mere facade. It is like doing something nice for a someone and then running around telling everyone what a great person I am for doing it. Even if I don't do that, if I feel like I should be rewarded then I am in a poorer state than the man who just acts on his first selfish impulse. At least he is being honest.

I am leaving the rest of this up, for my own reminder.

Fucking cruel inhuman bastards...

I was having a fantastic day, I was light-hearted and exhuberant, taking care of business and poking fun at solemnity when a string of gunshots sent nature's wild-hearted creatures into a panicked stampede.

Campus Massacre: Gunman Kills 30 at Virginia Tech.

What the fuck!?!

I am so sick of this shit.

Fuck these monsters and their hatred.

This part still applies:

I cannot understand the rationale of people who put their own problems so clearly in the forefront of their thinking that they cannot see the sun. The sky is blue, tomorrow's a new day, and no matter how bad problems seem to be, there is always a better way than violence.

Evil is a very real and very complicated thing. I want so much to be able to live where it is not, but I fear it would come with me wherever I am.

Vonnegut is dead

An image of Bruce Lee with his ass-kicking face on is the last thing I see as the computer screen flickers off. Kurt Vonnegut just died. God I could use a beer, I think to myself. But it is too late to buy beer. Damn Ohio decency laws. What the hell are they good for anyway? What jackass decided that being unable to buy beer at one in the morning would indicate how decent we all were? City leaders with self-conscious, half-assed desires to keep up appearances of morality? Some rich republican housewife, greasy and painted like that bitch Tammy Fay Baker, with mascara streaming down her fat face:

“Won’t somebody, please, think about the children?” She whines in a timorous contralto. Show her a photo of a starving third world child and she tells you to be proud that you can live in America. Yeah lady, I am really proud. In fact I was just thinking that the other day as I sat down in front of the T.V. to drink a fancy Vanilla Chai drink with soy protein that cost me five bucks. Four eight ounce servings per bottle, you do the math. I cannot deny my privilege. I flipped through the channels for a minute or two, then turned the damn thing off in disgust and went to study my Chinese. Pop-tarts commercials are even propagating the beauty myth now.

I remember watching an old man hobble onto the stage at the Ohio State University Student Union with a cane. The air was throbbing with anticipation. I sat among thousands of others and listened to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. as he gave what he said was his final public talk. What I saw both inspired me to keep writing and depressed me terribly. He knew his days were numbered and he used his last big college audience to let us know that, maybe, we should just give up?

“Don’t worry about money,” he said (in so many words). “Just follow a career in the arts. Paint a picture, write a poem, sing a song. I’ll sing a song right now.” His off key and gravelly but nonetheless soulful voice rose above the failing sound system. They were having trouble with the speakers all night, so I missed some of his words, but I could hear his song clearly. It doesn’t matter what it was, the point was that he was singing. He was near the end, as far as he was concerned, and he was singing his heart out to a bunch of kids. People complained that he was too bitchy:

“I expected him to be funnier, but he was all doom and gloom. Now I am depressed,” I heard someone say. Well that’s why there is Prozac, I wanted to say, and Beer. If the message is too hard to take, we can always just grab a beer, park our kiesters on the couch and watch T.V. until every brain cell that still carries the memory of when we saw a great writer speak his mind freely is hooked up to a suicide machine.

“He basically just quoted his last book,” was a frequent complaint. Maybe it was because I hadn’t read his last book, but it hardly mattered to me. When someone like Kurt Vonnegut talks, I don’t care what he says, I’ll take it into consideration. I don’t care if he’s an old man, crippled and disenchanted, bitching about his knees or the fact that his voice isn’t as loud and clear as it used to be. Christ himself would have given him the benefit of the doubt, if he didn’t pat him on the back for hitting the nail on the head.

All he was asking us to do was create something beautiful. To look inside ourselves and find whatever it was we wanted to say and say it however we wanted, just as long as we were saying it. Now that he is gone, are we so far removed from the wisdom of our elders that we cannot even consider the last wishes of a dead man, one of the strongest voices for humanity that this country has heard in the last century? Was he right? Are we all just too high, metaphorically or otherwise, or too lost to care? Has the focus of this country shifted so that the only things that matter to us now have nothing to do with the things that make us human?

The day after he died I imagined him sitting on a cloud and laughing at the headlines on CNN: Anna Nicole Smith’s Bastard child – oh wait, she has a daddy now, yay – and some old bigot who forgot his manners. I was angry. One of the greatest writers and humanitarians of the last century dies and some Bimbo’s illegitimate child takes precedence over his obituary. I was angry, but Mr. Vonnegut would be laughing. Why shouldn’t he be? He finally got out. He told us he was looking forward to it. He sat on a humble chair, with both hands clutching his cane, his eyes searching the faces of the swarms of disenchanted college students who seem to have come to hear him mock G.W.:

“I’m just an old whiny man with nothing else to say,” he said. But that’s not true. When he died, he made one of the most important statements he could have made by letting us know we are on our own now. He said what he needed to say, now we have to start raving about impending comets and the fifty-first state of denial. We can only hope that others rise to pick up his fallen torch. I will do what I can, however small of a promise that is. I only hope I am strong enough to hoist it high enough to do it justice.

The night that Kurt Vonnegut died all I wanted was a beer. Realizing I could not have one, I killed the messenger and closed the browser window. My wallpaper was a black and white shot of Bruce Lee, looking intense. He is another hero of mine, now dead, who fought the world to make a point about humanity. I laughed and turned the computer off.

On Valentines day

I sat in confusion on my futon resting on the hard wooden floor, embracing the cold of my room and looking at the large oak bureau with mirror and my collection of the few memories I still cherish, the ones that I cannot let go of. You gave me some pictures when you finally understood that I never wanted to cause you pain, pictures and a Chinese coin from the T'ang dynasty tied with hemp.

I hung the coin on my rear-view mirror. When I am in the midst of driving, lost in thought, I check behind me obsessively. The pictures I put on the mirror on the bureau. My reflection is framed by these tokens of memory every morning.

When I see them, on this cold day in February, I look back in your rear-view mirror when you were taking advantage of twilight's reflections and voyeuristically capturing the people in the jeep behind you: double exposure, without double exposure. I look back on the reflections of my home town through your camera: a field with tightly rolled round bales of hay, arranged in an skewed line. The sun was cascading through the clouds bathing the serenity in a lambent glow and it enabled me to understand, as if for the first time, where I come from and what has influenced me.

Remember the time when you kidnapped me? Was it the same day that you took both pictures, or just one of them? We were laughing as we made our way back on 161 until that officer pulled us over. We were nervous, but he simply smiled at us, said he understood that it was a beautiful day and was just checking to make sure we were not drunk. He told me I had to keep you in line. What a nice man.

On that day in February, the memory of these summer moments made me warm again, but I could not move. The remembering done, I was brought back to reality by the cold of my room, it is freezing and my only company, these phantasms, provide warmth only when I get lost in them. When I am found again, it is colder than it was before.

Every, single, god damned morning, when I look in the mirror, I am still boxed in by the past. Why can't I just let go?

Howl-lelujah

In preparation for this blog post on Ginsberg, I am readying some tea and clicking Thelonius Monk on the stereo… Of course, when I say tea, I mean camellia senensis and not cannabis sativa as Ginsberg and the Beats would probably be talking about, though if I had a little of that, this post might really bop. I am also going to re-read “Howl” so I can be on the right vein when I dive into this… and, done.

In simplest terms: I love “Howl.” When I am in the midst of quoting the lines, which I have to do out loud, It makes me wish I was alive in the fifties and I could chill with those crazy cats, take drugs and talk into the wee hours of the morning or the next day perhaps the day after that when my body just can not take any more of the abuse and shuts down of its own accord. For that is where it ends. The Beats lit up the world for a while, and if I were some extra-terrestrial reading the book of history up to that moment, in the midst of their existence I may have had hope for things to turn around, until the wages of their self-destruction finally took them down, snubbed out their glow.

As I read “Howl” I always get caught up in the who’s. I pass over the first line, and get lost in the rhythm of Ginsberg’s world. The rhythm is such that it is often that not until I finish the first section that I remember the opening lines: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” (2865). It is like getting lost in a jazz solo, the power is in the moment, and not until it is all done that one can listen back over the recording and consider the meaning of it all. It is like the beats themselves: history buys the record, listens back over their momentousness then puts it away. They were alive then, that’s what they had to say, and they burnt out. It is really, really sad. I weep for them and the countless others who have followed that path. Hunter Thompson, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs: the insight they possess, the drive to live and breathe that is so inspiring that it makes them do it all at once and then they are gone and no-one pays attention to them because they are "deviants" and "addicts."

late post on Barn Burner

I found it hard to escape the bias given to me by creative writing workshops in my reaction to William Faulkner. As a writer, I exist more on the Hemmingway side of the spectrum: I appreciate short and to the point sentences in my fiction. So I found it hard not to want to put in periods and edit the hell out of Faulkner's complex and unnecessarily long sentences. I do not know why he decided to write like that, but it has been my experience that those I have met who practice that kind of writing, are often pompous windbags who care more about self-gratification in showing off their intellect, than they care about telling a good story. One of my instructors called that type of writing “masturbation on the page.”

It took some meta-cognitive exercising to get myself out of that mindset in order to appreciate a sentence like: “He merely ate his supper beside it and was already half asleep over his iron plate when his father called him, and once more he followed the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless limp, up the slope and on to the starlit road where, turning, he could see his father against the stars but without face or depth – a shape black, flat and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat which had not been made for him, the voice harsh like tin and without heat like tin: “You were fixing to tell them” (Faulkner 1793). In the end I decided to define it more as prose poetry than short fiction. I know that good writers know no genres, but as I am still a novice myself, it helped me to appreciate it more by playing with the definitions.

Faulkner’s descriptions, the depths he visits within his sentences capture the certain complexity of the scenes that he is trying to describe. There are a lot of levels to this story, and every sentence helps convey that meaning by making it difficult to read. If I swallow my bias, and my own favoritism towards concisely written story telling, I can appreciate this difficulty for the way it reminds me of life itself. Life is difficult: there are layers upon layers to how we see the world, if we are thoughtful, just as there are layers upon layers to how this boy sees the world. Many times, these layers do not come one at a time, but rather all at once, and making sense of each moment is very important to understanding the whole story.