Mujo Lila

Fire-Ball Lightning

2011-06-26T20:39:00.001-06:00

It's a fireball, omnipotent and lonely, the sun, the soul, that spirit that pushes us from street corner to street corner, bus stop to bus stop, rattling off our inventory of woes at light speed in the hopes that maybe we can drop the load and get lighter, feet no longer touching the concrete, drifting like the downy semen of dandelions across the avenues of dilapidated strip malls and buildings that inspire too much pity and grief to attract customers and financial blood flow, and LORD how much of our accomplishments and aspirations in the end resemble vestigial tissues that atrophy slower than hell. And who are our gauges of quality? The narrow attention spans of soap bubble teenagers gushing over anything that promises them the prized combination of individuality and superiority that they crave desperately as a means, a vantage point from which to kick 90% of their peer group in the face from.

It's America, baby, love it or leave it, and I'm all out of love, scratchin itches like I think it'd be interesting to see blood gushing from a hole in my tibialis anterior and fuck the spiders that blessed me with these bumps in the first places and fuck the teenagers eight years too late to still qualify for the title playing the same games of shattered esteem and manipulation like sapphic chimpanzees who've forgotten all about the virtues of sex and spread their legs as a means of political income.

I don't play that game, and I'll dropkick my income into the street knowing full well that mama nature herself intends to support this tree-fiending hypocritical bum until his creative juices are fully ejaculated onto the fertile soil, that's right, the soil, not the sidewalk, the soil (scientific studies indicate that pigs rolling in mud are also rolling in serotonin and when's the last time YOU felt like jubilation without a cruder chemical input?). Someday fragrant flowers will arise from my groins and loins, that or a pointless death in some fool accident but I am far too pissed off at this stage in my life to acquiesce to the teeny voice in my head prompting “suicide, suicide” far too pissed off and hoping dearly for a chance to ascend to a platform even higher than that of a thousand spiteful rape victims unable to integrate the input/output function of their vaginas and/or assholes with the perpetual flow of a world that could care less about victims and their subsequent senses of entitlement. We're all victims, babe, it's just a question of whose victimhood most closely approximates the flavor of the decade.

Behavior is never justified: justice implies an ethereal governing body carefully weighing right or wrong and every god damn sentient monkey on the face of this patient Earth believes that justice weighs right or wrong in her or his favor and the rest of human reality simply has yet to catch up to the divine right of ME.

Justice doesn't kick in until those final moments of loneliness in which a person who has lived all of her/his life demanding justice looks left and looks right for one person, anybody, who will watch her/him die and absolve her/him of the sin of self-importance.

But who am I kidding. Nothing is more important than the self, manifest millions of times over in each and every human being who can gaze into a mirror and say “yeah, I deserve a bigger x than my neighbor.” If not for that, we'd be content with stick huts and smallpox. Ego drives the world, like the getaway driver drives the bank robbery.

My hands are a circuit completed, palm squeezing palm, and endless unspendable tension drifting aimlessly around the loop and my biceps and interosseous muscles wrapping tighter and tighter around each other, a circle jerk that will one day be broken by something worth holding in my twitching, vibrating fingers. I see nothing but extremist futures: in the left hand, I, standing quiet and impenetrable, a beautiful woman (product of cultural taxidermy) at my side, those who my ego has gloriously decried as wronging me rotting in pits of envy below me, in the right hand, the quiet night of modesty and hard work going nowhere, a quiet, solitary man digging his own grave, and somewhere in the middle is my heart pounding like a floor tom hellbent on escaping the kit. Yeah, there's probably a world where everybody wins, but I've lost so many fucking times to losers that I can't even picture it. Maybe I never could, maybe I came onto the track planning to finish my sprint at the lower echelons of human potential and ego bathing in ego, ergo, the trap I can never escape because the exit I can never conceptualize.

Until now.

Motherfucker, and I mean that literally, bitch, look around you, motherfucker, there's another way out and it has nothing to do with your imagination, it's your sensory apparatus cracked wide open and wired to the furthest sustainable pitch possible. That means seeing people without the condemning filters of “strong” and “weak” or “growing” and “dying” or “useful” and “toxic”. That means hearing what people say and not what you want to hear. That means giving up on happiness, because that's as black a hole as despair. That means giving up on progress, because progress stinks of the same rotting swamp as stagnation. I'm fighting for five minutes of tender aloneness with a human being who doesn't need to intellectualize her deepest desires but can act on them. We are computers, mushy, bloody, and weirdly curvacious, but computers nonetheless, and what we are programmed to love, we love, and what we are programmed to hate, we hate, and who is the programmer? Is it you, or is it the spiky billiard balls of God, the omnipotent pool shark hell bent on ballistic probabilities played out on spheres upon spheres upon spheres?

Someday, I will find the command console, and I will decide what to fear and what to embrace, tapping out commands on keys (piano? computer?)from within myself, a conscious Mobius strip, an Escher sketch that not only draws itself but animates itself. To exist beyond the hierarchy of humans scornfully kicking the faces of other humans is the highest platform of all, unassailable regardless of who's climbing fastest and who's wearing cleats that day. To feel the pain of the bruised outcast, and smile, because I am feeling, to feel the warmth of the embraced savior, and smile, because I am feeling, to giggle maniacally as all chemical signals are routed to pleasure, not pain, the Buddhist wet dream, the pragmatic anomaly, Godel's last gasp at the irregularity that both preserves life and pushes it onward, through hills, valleys, and endlessly repeating cycles until at last the cycle is seen as the spiral we always hoped it would be.

Until then, I incubate, my damned busted knee preventing me from incubating picturesquely in padmasana, but incubating just the same, learning the ropes, unraveling the system, and biding my time because on of these days the rampaging free-falling ferris wheel of life is going to drop me in the right time, in the right place, to shine like the blazing ball lightning I know that I am and no petty human concern is going to stop me from cracking open the damn and bathing in the dirty sacred light of sensation unbound and existence unwound. I am God's fingertip patiently pressing the doorbell of divinity, because somehow I got locked out and I just need to get back inside. When you answer, I'll be waiting.

Dharma Tags

2010-01-28T21:42:00.006-07:00

My roommate was sprawled on the couch in front of the tv, per usual, as I walked by. Onscreen, two characters were in a bar, a young, blonde, plastic-sexy businesswoman stereotype chatting up a balding red-haired man with a mischievous grin and an overseas accent. “So, what do you do?” she asks, and, in his charming accent, he replies, “Typical. Only an American asks for your line of work before asking for your name.” Having existed within the United States for 99.5% of my current being, I have no real way of confirming the Americosity of this habit; however, the cultural tendency towards a rapid occupational categorization of a new acquaintance has been an undeniable presence in my life and the lives of many of my peers.

Well-meaning adults, eager to engage in placid small talk with a generation that most of them completely fail to comprehend, relentlessly beleaguer high school and college graduates with some variation on the question, “So, what are you going to be?”, as though whatever occupation they engage in next will define the shape of their character. A couple of my friends, well aware that they were leaving the comfortably numbing routine of the classroom for the chaotically swirling miasma of the cosmos at large, took to answering that particular inquisition with a list of what they ate for breakfast that morning. They had no illusions about the unpredictability of the future and the mutability of their own natures.

By that point, of course, we had all had some practice fielding that nonsensical question. Our high school guidance counselors descended on us during our sixteenth year with omens of a prosperous future that would pass the lot of us by if we didn't figure out our plan of attack right then and there. And long before that, condescending tall people got down on one knee to address our five-year-old selves, garnering puh-ractical answers to the insidious question in the vein of “astronaut”, “ninja”, and “dinosaur.”

My anarchic associates and I were not repulsed the repetition of the question (although it certainly doesn't help matters). If redundancy were our hot button, we would have degenerated into frothy-mouthed madness long ago at endless requests for our names, credit cards, and lighters. No, what rolls our eyes, shakes our heads, and bites our tongues is the preposterous notion that our identities can be defined and solidified. The timing couldn't be worse. After several years of changing voices, growing pains, swinging moods, emerging pubic foliage, and swelling breasts, the idea that our beings are static is a blatant contradiction of the boggling metamorphoses from which we have just emerged. I've heard it said that “change is the only constant,” and I'm inclined to agree.

However, the majority of our peers had the opposite reaction. Alarmed by the relentless upheaval of adolescence, many young people dive eagerly at the promise of stability. In an environment of continuous fluctuation, the conscious mind must remain constantly alert. For those humans disinclined towards perpetual effort, the cons outweigh the pros; our perennial novelty is their tedious hassle. The fewer variables that muck up the equation, the happier these individuals become. The same youths adamantly declaring themselves future architects or software programmers grow into the well-meaning middle-aged interrogaters who once gently cajoled their juvenile selves towards a stable, easily classifiable identity. Where they were previously content to cram their rambunctious natures into rigid personas, now they turn the same obsessively organizing, pattern-seeking mechanism on the rising generation. They seek a word – just one word, any word will do – to which they can attach the being before them, a taxonomical tag ensuring easy filing in their mnemonic catalog.

Several months ago, I attended a lecture given by a New Mexico-based American-born Ayurvedic doctor, in a room full of wide-eyed young hippies and solemnly serious old new agers. The bulk of the rambling, hour-long lecture can easily be condensed into a small list of bullet points:
1.You don't get it.
2.You're in the desert, so drink lots of water.
3.Death is just around the corner, so find your dharma and stick to it.
4.You suckers really don't get it.

Now, dharma, a sanskrit term laden with an overgrowth of meaning, can be ampu-translated as “one's righteous duty” (thank you, Wikipedia) in this particular context. Essentially, the good doctor was stating that we only get so much time on earth, so we might as well figure out the divinely ordained role that we're suh-posed to be playing out and get cracking with it. A recipe for terminal anxiety, if I ever heard one. As though I want to spend my days struggling towards the conviction that what I'm on the correct path. As though I want to lie on my deathbed, shivering, wondering if I did the (yeah) right things with my life.

The man's intentions were good, I'm sure, just like those of my high school guidance counselor and my aunts, uncles, and parents' friends. People waste a hell of a lot of time, there's no denying that, and chronic indecision does not help matters. Authority figures take it upon themselves to usher the young into some kind of meaningful societal role for the benefit of their emerging souls. To that end, I support their effort, as I certainly feel my best when I strike a healthy balance between productivity and relaxation, rather than laying idle and allowing inertia to draw me into a nagging vortex of anxieties. I do, however, take serious issue with the concept of a divinely ordained role, an optimal occupation, a groove superior to all other grooves into which a wandering soul may fall. In my scant twenty-four years of life, I have seen no evidence whatsoever to suggest that God has any real plan beyond shaking up the snow globe and watching the shiny sparkles fall. And to that, I say “namaste.” In a universe strange enough to offer up brilliantly glowing deep-sea jellyfish, psychedelic fungi, and Dance Dance Revolution – and all this before we even leave the stratosphere of our tiny little planet – it's safe to say that anything goes.

But most people seem to be deeply concerned with the validity of their choices, as evidenced by the pathological ferocity with which they typically defend them. I pause in writing this to wonder whether these individuals fear that, just beyond the light at the end of the tunnel, God's waiting with a freshly printed copy of Santa Claus' legendary naughty~nice list, or whether they're terrified that they'll just sink into the murky abyss of consciouslessness with a lifetime of regrets chained to their leg. Perhaps a little of column A, a little of column B. Either way, they regard a challenge to their principles to be a stab at their throats, as though belief and body were somehow interchangeable. Perhaps interchangeable is not the word; for many, defending a belief is far more important than defending one's own body, as evidenced by truly bizarre behaviors such as suicide bombing and hunger strikes. Revolutionaries, philosophers, and poets (and those who consider themselves to be a mixture of all three) speak vigorously of the glory in giving one's life for an ideal – as though the soul lives forever on the crest of a martyr's conviction – and countless fretful mortals jump at the chance to sacrifice their meat for ideological immortality, to rise as phoenix abstractions from the husks of their flesh.

Many black sheep blame the shepherds for this derangement, accusing them of spreading self-destructive ideologies to the flock in an effort to use the herd for their own gain. From my perspective, however, I see a closely linked yin ~ yang of pulpit and pew. The shepherds clearly satisfy the flock's desires for ideological transcendence... superficially, at least. Otherwise the flock, obviously the majority, would trample their ambitious leaders into the sediment. They want spiritual assurance to pull them from anxiety's crushing grasp. Furthermore, these people crave stability, order, and hierarchy; they fear chaos like a housecat fears water. They require dharma's divinely regimented framework in order to function normally. That word 'dharma' again, spat into Wikipedia's mighty ear, computed, and returned to me as “something established or firm” / “a basic unit of experience” / “path of righteousness” / “the nature of an object” / and “supporter of deities”. A supporter of deities, a temple's foundation, a framework upon which noble abstractions are draped; without dharma, glorious ideology slumps to the soil like a beast without bones. If not for the fragile skeleton of righteous conviction, all that is majestic in the human soul collapses into a turgid slug, and we are not worthy, we are not worthy.

From within the structure of dharma, such a word loaded with spiritual frosting and tradition's savory sprinkles is perfectly appropriate. But from without, another term may be more appropriate. If I may borrow a phrase from the meth-addled alcoholic, blue-collar poet, rock musician, and perpetual outsider Isaac Brock (and yes, I certainly take pleasure in pitting the sentiments of such a character against the mighty forces of tradition and society), the outside perspective describes a "custom concern for the people". Not a divine order, not a command from on high, but a man-made mechanism designed to salve our anxieties.

Let me be perfectly clear: I find no fault whatsoever with the notion that human creates order. The human brain's irrepressible knack for drawing patterns out of chaos not only greatly enhances our survival capacities, but rewards us with traffic signals, card games, glorious music, and so much more. The thesaurus, however, feels differently about things man-made. At any rate, I have found fit to adorn myself with several man-ufactured labels – writer, satirist, philosopher, aesthete, musician, artist, trickster, rogue, magician, viviphile – donning the most appropriate persona for any given situation. It serves me well; even a freewheeling cosmic traveler such as myself needs to touch the ground every now and then. Categorizing an element of our environment according to its utility – dharma tagging, if you don't mind – serves many other humans favorably as well, as evidenced by our unbridled propagation across the curvature of our sphere.

We come now to the dangerously swaying bridge over the chasm between concepts, the seam amidst yin and yang, the de-militarized zone in which language quivers and nice tidy phrasings struggle to keep from offending. I've decried a noble thing, spun around on my heel, and now declare myself in favor of it. Either I've lost my mind huffing computer ions and plant alkaloids day in and day out, or I've found a line in the sand to straddle. Said line appears to be an impassable taboo to most, the closely guarded border between heaven and hell, but I've deemed it my favorite path to tread, the only comfortable road between Scylla and Charybdis. You see, dear friend (and thank you for putting up with my pretentious verbosity thus far), my observation is that expecting one's useful dharma tags to remain constant in an ever fluctuating universe compounds anxiety rather than resolving it. One can only think statically in an environment without variables, condemning one to continuously remove variables from one's environment. My dharma tags, however, are sketched in pencil rather than writ in stone; it's (relatively) easy for me to erase one label and draw up another at a moment's notice. And that goes for the labels I apply to myself as well as the labels I apply to my field of experience.

Allow me to clarify another sentiment: I support the notion of a deity that flows from forest to fingertip, filling the cracks between our cells and thoughts. I believe in God (perhaps not the same as yours, but a God nonetheless), and I believe that God speaks to us and guides us in any myriad of ways. I simply assert that God prefers no action or path over any other. God plays the chess board from both sides of the table, and to make things more interesting, inspires the pieces with free will. Too great a degree of predictability, and the game is no longer amusing, as anyone trapped in a deadlocked chess match can quickly attest. Too much chaos, and any living thing becomes totally overwhelmed and consumed by its environment. Too much order, and no being has any reason left to live (see how many consecutive viewings of the same movie you can sit through, if you don't believe me). God sustains life with balance, and we can sustain ourselves with balance. Yes, we can't help but dharma tag elements of our environment. In fact, it's a damn good idea. But we have to regularly update our labels, just like we regularly update the software on our computers, or risk denying ourselves the very advantage we hoped to gain by dharma tagging in the first place.

Soul Dive

2010-01-24T01:40:00.005-07:00

When the stomach is full, the dishes clean, the bills paid, and the workday over, we are left with roughly two options: watch the latest permutation of the same tired garbage on tv, or go diving.

I'm not talking high diving, swan diving, or skin diving. You can wear swim trunks if you want, but you won't necessarily get them wet. I'm not talking sky diving. No parachute required. I'm not talking about muff diving either, although sharing your experiences with someone special is highly encouraged. And I'm not suggesting you frequent a dive bar. For the love of all that is actually worth having on this alternately beautiful and revolting revolving space rock, if you're gonna get trashed, get trashed with class.

Yes, I'm talking soul diving.

I mean, what else are you going to do? You've got what the outspoken Czech psychoanalyst / witch doctor Stan Grof has dubbed a holotropic mind buzzing around inside your skull: a cosmos cleverly and elaborately folded into a fleshy origami lump receiving warped broadcasts from the transdimensional radio prematurely dubbed 'reality'. The outside material world reflects the inner spiritual realms, and vice versa, like the perpetually spiraling coitus of the yin and yang. To keep your gyrating firefly of a consciousness from being completely overwhelmed, you're only capable of examining an infinitesimally small portion of the cosmic transmission at any given time. Much like the endlessly unfolding galaxy in which we dwell, the soul is a massive labyrinth, complete with secret passages, hidden treasure, and stalking minotaurs, and you're bound to wander its vastness by baby steps.

But for the genuine explorer, for the heartfelt aficionado of conscious experience, the handicap is a blessing in disguise. To sprint through the caverns and jungles of inner perception is to miss the rippling emotional waters, exotic intellectual beasts, and aromatic flowers of perception revealing strange, spiritual secrets that could alter our meandering trajectory in ways we can't even imagine. The allure of the unexpected draws the exuberant soul diver ever deeper into the swirling chaos that lurks just inside every seemingly orderly pattern.

And how does one soul dive?

You're doing it already. Reacting to experience, formulating opinions, making decisions, and – provided some sort of action is taken – receiving feedback, and then starting the whole crazy cycle over again. You are soul diving just by reading this essay and responding to it intellectually and/or emotionally. It is not a question of how to soul dive, which is an inevitable process, but how to soul dive deeply. Many of our kind live superficially. They make up their minds and stick to their guns. Time and time again, the same emotion or the same fear bars their path, and they simply accept this as another dead end and continue their circuitous rambling of the shallower tiers of the conscious maze. The longer they circumambulate, the deeper they dig their groove, until they've finally dug a trench from which they cannot escape.

But you and I, we are different. We know better than to trap ourselves that way.

The first step to deep soul diving is to decide to both accept and surpass every obstacle to come our way. Nothing can be denied (not even nothingness! Oh, the limitations of language) and everything must be overcome. This includes every emotion (no matter how childish), every thought (no matter how ludicrous), and every desire (no matter how perverted). The hallmarks of the soul diver are curiosity and open-mindedness. We approach each new manifestation on our path from every possible angle, study its contours and behaviors, and ultimately discover the inevitable passage through and beyond. We love equally the obstacle and that which it obstructs.

Emotions are beautiful, demanding, tempestuous nymphs; do we submit as their slaves or embrace them as lovers? Neuroses are intricate algebras; do we marvel forever at the symbols, or extract the shrouded variables to complete the equation? Dreams are entrancing castles in the sky; do we dwell alone within them or use them as blueprints for something tangible we can share?

The second step is to build a substantial toolkit, and master every tool in it. A good diver never discounts a potential tool, even while selecting favorites. Tools, in this case, are methods for engaging and focusing some part of our massively capable minds: art, meditation, sports, music, certain psychoactive substances, sex, cooking, dance, conversation, martial arts, mathematics, gardening, chemistry, yoga, starting a family, basically anything at all that demands your active engagement. Many people choose to specialize with a small handful of tools, and the interpersonal world tends to reward this sort of behavior. For the sake of preserving one's tenuous sense of identity, it can be much simpler to limit one's expressions to the familiar and established. Furthermore, in the context of career advancement and public recognition, virtuosity and proliferation garner the most attention and approval. Soul diving, however, takes place in a realm where attention and approval are simply another set of obstacles to approach, admire, and overcome. In this context, specialization holds no particular advantage over a broadening of one's abilities and interests. More often than not, open-minded pragmatism and lateral thinking triumph over stubborn habit. Either the key fits the lock, or it doesn't, and it goes back into the pocket until a need arises.

For example, a talented athlete might acquire significant acclaim on the field and make a lot of personal progress through that form of expression. They may develop a high degree of confidence, but that confidence is limited to athletic performance; the phantoms of humility and self-doubt still lurk in the shadows of the psyche. But if that athlete were to take up painting, they would rediscover what it is to fail. The old tricks that worked during gametime have no application on a canvas. They would start at the bottom all over again, working their way up from nothing and struggling until stumbling across the right paradigm shifts. Similarly, an introverted musician who expresses him or herself solely through performance might discover a whole other dimension of their personality coming to light during an intimate conversation or sexual intercourse.

It's a simple equation. This is really all there is to it. Decide to explore, and then do so, by any means necessary. And yet humans with the adequate leisure time necessary for the process rarely choose to embrace it to it's fullest. Futhermore, the practice is rarely encouraged by the pompous shepherds that we wide-eyed wonderers so often look to for guidance. In fact, many people recoil in fear at the very thought of the minotaurs roaming the psychic labyrinth, and vehemently deny the existence of the intriguing treasures the beasts guard. Although fear in one form or another invariably pulsates at the heart of this behavior, those frustrating humans in question express it in a variety of ways. The skeptical scientist derides the value of imagination and the presence of the soul. The puritanical preacher condemns personal exploration as indulgent hedonism at best and the unraveling of the mind at worst. The college professor insists on narrowing scope and limiting pursuits. The ascetic Buddhist reserves his attention for the creamy nirvana at the core of the psyche, throwing away the rest as though it were nothing more than a tacky plastic wrapper. Inevitably, they attempt to create for themselves an atmosphere of emotional comfort by minimizing variables; and, of course, as soon as new variables enter the picture their delicate shelter crumbles like a house built out of graham crackers.

The soul diver, however, is neither delicate nor fearful nor defined in such ways at all. All is intrigue. All is game. All is flavor. All is treasure. Of course, you have the option of coming home at the end of the work day, turning on the television or opening a book, and allowing your mind to idle. And in moderation, certainly, this sort of rest can be beneficial. But just as your body becomes hostile and irksome when denied stretching and exercise, so too does your spirit turn sour without stimulation and exploration.

When born into this existence, we are given the charge of our selves. Our primary goal is to protect and nurture the being that we are; all other tasks are extraneous. Although this work may seem a burden, really it is a privilege, a joy, a blessing. Endless adventures await in your world and in your mind; all you have to do is take a deep breath and dive in.

Being Light

2009-12-05T22:27:00.000-07:00

Whatever interest I had in the writing of Milan Kundera has developed into feral loathing. Fuck you, old man, neurotically constructing hypothetical scenarios so totally cruel and unforgiving that they could never hold a place in the world in which we actually live. So dark, so sorrowful, so morose. If Kundera finds lightness unbearable, then I find gravity to be suffocating.

Reading Immortality, reading of a tormented young women obliviously causing terrible suffering to others, reading of a gleeful vandal arrested for appearing too dangerous on the street, reading of caricatures of famous European poets and composers pushed around like chess pieces in pointless allegories, reading of everyone everywhere losing and suffering, and I couldn't take it anymore. I lashed out and kicked a hole through my bedroom wall. My emotions had been manipulated, twisted, prodded, forced into a dark little pit with no hope and no way out. I left my room and wandered the city and felt anxious and harried and angry, all the pessimistic drivel of Kundera's dysfunctional psyche haunting me like the ghosts that keep schizophrenics from peace of mind.

When I returned home, I saw the book lying next to my bed, picked it up, and slammed it over and over against a hard floor. Then I ripped the pages out in handfuls. Then I took those extracted leaves and ripped them into smaller and smaller pieces. All the while, I informed the absent spirit of Milan Kundera why I was doing what I was doing, why I hated him and his work, and why I was removing him from my life. Whatever stupidity arises in our species, I still have a love for life and a fascination with strange beauty. There is nothing to fascinate me in the cold, abstract worlds of stone and torture that Kundera builds. When I was done, I gathered the remains in a plastic trash bag, remarking to myself how much better I felt. My anger had subsided. The tension had faded to a gentle pulse.

Having read the praises of Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, I decided to see it for myself. After watching petty, selfish people treat each other like shit for half an hour, I turned it off. Apparently, Kundera is not the only one who would rather focus on suffering than beauty. I pride myself on my capacity to see beauty in the every day, in my walk to work, in the reflection of light on the hood of a car, in the cadence of a stranger's accent,. In the first thirty minutes of this film, however, I could find nothing to admire and nothing to laugh about. I'm no stranger to divorce and family divisions, and I have no desire to revisit those scenarios, especially not in such a mundane and soul-deadening movie. I would have preferred a punch in the face; at least physical pain has a way of stilling the mind and awakening one's awareness to the present.

So I turned it off, took off my clothes, and began to dance. Spontanaeity overtook me, and I flailed my arms, shook my ass, tossed my hair, spun in circles, and jumped up and down. I grabbed the bag full of shredded Immortality and threw it into the air, all over the room. When the bag was empty, I grabbed clumps of pages from the ground and tossed them into the air again. I rubbed them over my skin, and chewed them in my mouth and spit them out. I experienced the dismembered corpse of the book in as sensual a way as possible, with the soul-affirming rock music Kundera detests so much blaring in my ears. If the old bastard had seen me, he would probably have dropped dead on the spot. I felt incredible, reborn, alive, salvaged. The demon of gravity, of mundane suffering, left my body. Exorcism. Sorrow transformed into joy.

I still believe it is legitmate to suffer, and I still believe that suffering can be portrayed in a fascinating and empathic way. However, in these two instances, I feel the artists in question failed miserably. I may be somewhat alone in this statement, as critics rave about both these works. That's fine. More and more, I feel I am born to bring something vital and exuberant into this world, an energy that transcends the weight of monuments, of temples, of slaughter, of sacrifice. From time to time, a fountain springs up inside me, primordial, ancient, it has always been on this planet, it has always surfed the cosmos, and however dark and dirty our brains become and however poorly they may reflect the love that is consciousness and however convinced we may become that all is lost, it will outlast us.

“It takes courage / to enjoy it / the hardcore and the gentle / big time sensuality” - Bjork

Cycles

2009-09-20T00:49:00.000-06:00

She melts into plasma and slides into the various cracks and crevices in the opposite wall of the kitchen. There is a squelching noise, now a wet pop signifying her total immersion in the woodwork. Johnny Cochrane stands by the refrigerator, his mouth gaping slightly, his hand raised as if to somehow pull Shelly out of the wall. A pause, and now Shelly's parrot, who had until this moment been resting quietly in his cage on the round kitchen table, bursts into flames with an abrupt and final squawk. The fire immediately spreads to the shredded newspaper at the bottom of the cage, and now spills out onto the table, immolating a gas bill, three credit card offers, and the paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged that Shelly had been making fun of earlier that morning.

Johnny watches the over-sized text smolder, and sighs. Shelly had been so happy that morning, and now she's haunting the apartment complex. The blaze consumes the entire table, and the wood lets out a jagged scream that echoes inside Johnny's startled cranium. A tortured visage emerges from the flames, with enormous teeth and dark, reflective eyes slatted like venetian blinds. The creature lifts a glowing hand, a hand whose very existence seems to twist and warp the passage of light through its immediate vicinity. These visual fluctuations multiply and spread, and the whole scene quickly changes. The tile floor arcs up violenty, the refridgerator rolls backwards, all four walls burst outward launching the ceiling high into the blue sky. The rest of the apartment complex is completely gone; beyond the linoleum cliff of the warped kitchen floor is an interminable ether of cloud vapor.

Johnny crawls to the edge and looks over. Down in the clouds is a dark spot, rapidly growing larger. Closer and bigger, closer and bigger. At the last possible moment, Johnny hops backwards as the mysterious object finishes its approach. It is the trunk of a leafless tree, reaching from an impossible depth to examine Johnny and his tiny satellite of a dimension. The knots, branches, and bark arrange themselves into a face featuring one massive, scrutizing eye. A fleshy vertical gash next to the eye opens, revealing jagged little teeth and a web of curious, roving tentacles.

Johnny opens his mouth and a wall of vibrating tones emerges from his throat. The tree reaches into his mind and plays him like an instrument. Johnny's senses explode with shifting colors and flanging melodies. His nerves tingle, and a foreign presence in his mind communicates the secret to eternal happiness: a series of emotions cycling in a particular order at a rapid pace, each emotion a new-born star, each cycle an orbiting sphere.

The lesson is over, and a new presence courses through his mind. It grabs the gears of time and slows them to a crawl. Every thought swims by slowly, as if stuck in runny tree sap, and every breath is monumental, every lungful a mountain climbed. Johnny realizes there are moments between himself, or rather, moments between himselves. His whole being strobes, light, dark, light, dark. The floor beneath him transforms smoothly into an enormous hand. Bumpy ripples cascade through the skin of the palm, and the fingers prod curiously at Johnny. He looks up into a gigantic grinning pair of lips and two burning white eyes. The substance of this behemoth perpetually appears and disappears in shimmering bands spreading outward from the center of its forehead. Over the apparation's shoulder, Shelly's familiar gaze looms. She's at least fifteen times larger than she had been the last time Johnny had seen her, shortly before she had melted into the wall.

He shouts her name, flails his arms, tries desperately to elicit a nod of familiarity from his love, but her face stays expressionless. Her hair writhes like worms, her hair is worms, her face slowly peels off her head like a latex mask, and beneath the mask are worms, worms, worms, brightly colored worms, changing from orange to green and back again. Another woman, even larger than Shelly-of-worms looms over them all. Her head is so high in the sky that Johnny can not see it, it disappears into the clouds. Johnny stares at her enormous breasts bulging beneath the green, golden-trimmed towel that this goddess has wrapped around her torso. She grabs the folds of the fabric and tears it from her body.

Her torso is a dragon, her breasts are the beast's humongous eyes and her navel gapes wide, revealing a dark, moist throat. The dragon devours the colorful glowing worms in three bites. Green tendrils emerge from between the dragon's eyes, the beast's skull cracks open, and a flower emerges from the crevice. A breeze ushers radiant pollen from the flower. The pollen becomes a lion within a lion, a sun within a sun with a sun. Incredible light pours forth, and at the exact moment that Johnny's visual field goes completely white, black tentacles claw at the light. The sun is being devoured by an octopus of the inkiest, darkest, deepest purple imaginable.

The octopus is Johnny's own hair. Shelly gently lifts his head from between her breasts, and looks at him fondly.
“Did you like it?” she asks, softly.
“Yes. I want to do it again.”
“Give yourself some time to recover.”
“Okay, but let's be clear. We're going to do this again. And again. And again. And again.”

How to have a delicious picnic on the day of society's inevitable collapse.

2009-09-13T17:41:00.001-06:00

I spent almost two hours last night with my headphones on, staring out the window at the leaves of the trees swaying in the wind. That was probably the happiest moment of my week, and I don't mean that in a sardonic way. Anyone who has spent the better part of an afternoon watching waves crash on a beach knows what I mean. And hopefully, all of us who live above ground have spent idle hours on our backs watching clouds turn into various projections of our imaginations and then back into clouds again.

The lava lamp is a charming invention, but it doesn't really hold a candle to nature. Fish tanks also fail to capture that atmosphere of relaxation, perhaps due to the dirty glass, filthy water and that whole captivity thing. Television crams heavy-handed values down our throats, and video games play off our inborn aggressive tendencies with headache inducing flashing lights. No, nothing mankind has invented compares to nature's radiating tranquility.

Barring of course, hurricanes, volcanos, sandstorms, stampedes, swarms of insects, flash-floods, wildfires, earthquakes, blizzards, landslides, and the eternal struggle of predator vs. prey.

But for the most part, nature, and not the city, is the perfect place to unwind. Of course, those of us who spend most of our time in the city never really notice the degree to which the constant noise, the polluted air, and the buzzing of thousands of perpetually discontented psyches are effected our thought processes. A sheen of grey creeps over our eyes, and even if someone drags us by the hands into a forest, we still just see the grey, the disappointment, the glamor not quite as glamorous as the advertisements promised us it would be.

In these extreme cases, one sometimes marches into the woods armed with psilocybin, mescaline, or at least a couple of joints. Dangerous thoughts follow: “Why am I working this dead end job? Why is it that the harder I work, the worse I feel? Why do all my short term goals revolve around purchasing objects that break or disappear within a year or two? Why do my social relationships seem so unfulfilling?” And society, as we know it, collapses into a heap of rubble and consumer goods still wrapped in their colorful packaging.

A human being is a composite of cells. When our cells refuse to co-operate harmoniously as a unified entity, our body develops indigestion, catches a cold, or gets cancer. An eco-system is a composite of organisms living in relative harmony with one another. When the balance is shifted, the displacement of energy courses through all the flora and fauna involved as if they were dominoes. Extinction, over-population, etc. Massive social groups are similar structures. Nations, corporations, religions, trends. Composites of human beings acting cohesively as a unit.

But there really isn't that much cohesion. The president's a jerk. No religion makes sense but mine. Other people's political beliefs will kill us all. A significant number of people go through life with their egos firmly planted between themselves and the rest of the world. Perhaps this is natural. The dualistic divides that result from this sort of behavior may very well inspire the constant cultural evolution of our species. Or impede it. Hard to say. When debating dualistic conflicts in my own mind, I find it often easy to see both sides of the issue. Abortion is a good example. Women have a right to their bodies and unwanted children are unlikely to get the support they need; however, it's really difficult for most of us to accept murders of convenience (unless it's for a beef patty, in which case most of you are all for it). Rather than coming to a resolution, I ultimately come to the conclusion that nothing really matters at all, and I'm just here for the ride. Good-bye, principles.

What that leaves me with is more attention to devote to my biological and spiritual needs. It leaves me with the moment, so to speak. And I choose to spend that moment with my headphones on, watching the leaves flow in the breeze. Spiritual needs, check. Perhaps eating a piece of fruit or a bowl of cereal. Biological needs, check. That leaves me a happy, functioning organism, and that much more ready to participate in society in a meaningful, yet largely spontaneous way. No premeditation. No political or philosophical stance. Just the actions I see as appropriate in the moment.

But most people seem to be wrapped up in an anxious, neurotic frenzy of desires, grasping constantly and never getting what they actually need. Instead, they settle for television, fast food, and lungfuls of cigarette smoke and car exhaust. In most of these instances, I am willing to bet that what the majority of these people need is a healthy light meal and a moment to relax. Maybe a picnic at a secluded beach. Especially strange are the individuals convinced that society will completely disintegrate without the immediate and global application of their political philosophies. They're half right. With people so fixated on themselves and yet unable to help themselves, they become ignorant of each other's safety. They project their frustrations onto their neighbors, while allowing corporations to treat them like livestock. Meanwhile, the corporations annihilate the natural eco-systems upon which we all thrive.

And the collective organism that is the human race, antagonizing itself from the inside out, collapses and dies.

With that, I become exactly what I am deriding, but with one exception: I welcome the change. I embrace the likelihood of society's collapse. Do as I recommend, or do as you feel, or do neither. Whatever happens happens. I learn the most from my most painful mistakes: public embarrassments, rocky relationships, serious physical injuries, etc.. I'm sure we as a people will be overflowing with lessons learned once our towers topple over. In nature, verdant lands become deserts. Deserts become oceans. Oceans become islands, and once again life finds a home.

Death is an incredibly short-sighted notion. We will all inevitably be subjected to that mysterious transmutation of our physical nature. In the meantime, what can it hurt us to live intelligently, at harmony with ourselves, with each other, and with nature? So I say, grab a few friends, a few handfuls of mind-expansion, enough fruit, nuts, and water for a full day, and spend some time in nature, far from the city, far from people's misguided antagonism, and re-learn what it is to enjoy oneself. Perhaps, if enough people do that, society will crumble. But whatever. The tower might fall from the left. The tower might fall from the right. At least, we can say we enjoyed the ride.

Haters, Lovers, Writers

2009-09-07T21:32:00.000-06:00

So many of the books I read (and if my obnoxiously bloated vocabulary hasn't already given me away, I read a lot of books) speak no love for humans. Kurt Vonnegut does his best to portray us without flashy glamour, and still ends up loathing us all. Milan Kundera, for all his humor, seems drawn more to people's weaknesses and failings than anything else. Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe is the only voice of a reason in a city of self-serving shitheads, and even he falls for a pretty dame with a pistol in her purse in every other novel. And don't get me started on Yukio Mishima.

At the moment, I'm over halfway through Black Elk Speaks and my stomach has turned and turned and turned and now refuses to turn another inch. Wasichus shooting Lakota children and Lakota children scalping Wasichus. The warriors casually debating whether or not to eat the slain white men who are brutally and unjustly chasing them out of their land. Whatever.

Humans suck. Why are all the books I read about the suckage of humans? As an unusually literate elementary school student, I developed a raging misanthropy pretty fast. I was betrayed by my own lexicon, and turned myself into a target. Communication was impossible. I was a social outcast from day one. How many other people, unable to form bonds with their peers, vented onto the page instead? Literature seems to be a logical niche for words without ears. The people who'd deride you for writing it would never pick the damn thing up in the first place.

Ah, art. Secret communication in broad daylight. Maynard Keenan once posed an interesting question: Would Freddie Mercury have been half as interesting to listen to if he could have just come out and said he was gay? Would he have written Princes of the Universe? We Are the Champions? Fat Bottomed Girls?

But they're not all misanthropic hermits. Tom Robbins may rail against institutional authority in pretty much all his books, but he also fills them with assertive, playful magicians. Bonanza Jellybean has my heart and she can keep it. I remember reading Another Roadside Attraction on a long interstate bus ride to nowhere in particular and deciding that I would try as much as possible to be like John Paul Ziller. Polyrhythms. Polyamory. Polytheism. If there's one thing this world needs, it's more assertive, playful magicians.

But when the magic fades, and the numb wall of indifference has hardened almost completely, Herman Hesse taps a crack in the eggshell. Sometimes hinting, sometimes nudging, sometimes dragging the petulant mope from the darkness into the light. He tells simple secrets in a river, in a beautiful woman, in a board game, in a pointless, gleeful war between motorists and pedestrians; always a mask for an inescapable Is-ness to which we all perpetually bow and to which we all eventually return.

Henry Miller: another champion of mankind's virtues. Scratch that. Mankind's vices, and the nastiest of them at that. The Dao of Henry Miller is just about the dirtiest Dao there is, exalting both the gaping mouth and the yawning asshole, the starving belly and the exuberantly screaming mind. He could get as excited about Matisse's Joie De Vivre as he could about a prostitute with crab lice. Miller rambles for pages and pages; a leaky faucet of life's praises.

And it's Miller's acceptance of all creation's odd and jagged expressions that reminds me: yes, I do find pleasure in misanthropic writing. I love to creep through nightmares, just as much as I adore wading through wet dreams. The sin isn't cynical hatred, nor purile joy, but stunted expression. A thriving weed means more to me than a wilted tulip. And there is a special place in my heart for the pruned but persistent rose, the blade of grass poking through a crack in the sidewalk, Kundera ducking the Communists, Robbins flipping off the man, Mishima silently screaming his oppressed homosexuality, Vonnegut insisting on the personal identities of every resident of Midland City, Miller scrounging for enough change to survive another day, Chandler leading Marlowe closer and closer to an ever elusive justice, Hesse letting life slip through his fingers like so many rushing drops of water, and Freddie Mercury, who doesn't belong on this list of literary figures at all, who kept on fighting to the end.

Polyamory (Imagined)

2009-09-03T21:27:00.003-06:00

Once upon a time, Freud said something or other about how art, music, politics, and the rough majority of human behavior was a product of suppressed and redirected libido. Of course, regular sexual intercourse did not stop Gustav Mahler, Jimmy Page, or JFK from participating in human culture. On the other hand, plenty of my own artwork prominently features distorted genitalia of both genders, and countless times I've exorcised sexual frustration with a particularly spirited singing session. That energy has to come out somewhere, and god forbid that somewhere be into or onto another human being...

A couple years ago, I realized a painful discrepancy between the women I have been physically attracted to and the women I have been spiritually attracted to. There is no overlap whatsoever. My eyes want one woman, my dick wants a second, my mind wants a third, and my heart a fourth. For a long time, I relied on weird little superstitions, prayers, and rituals to bring perfect female affection my way. Needless to say, these methods failed. Is the hypothetical woman who satisfies every corner of my body a legitimate desire thus far unresolved due to poor luck and ugy statistics? Or just a schism in my mind, a moat protecting my soft, pinkish, quivering little ego from the inevitability of disappointment and heartbreak?

I blame sexy advertisements. Not really, but god I'd love to deface some of those gigantic looming slutty women on the sides of buses and buildings. Rip those perfectly symmetrical airbrushed faces right off. There's no room for angels on this planet, and even less room for fake ones.

Anyway, I have noticed that all my friendships revolve around certain axes, each of them unique to that relationship. That's the beauty of having multiple friends. Not everyone wants to share emotional frustrations. Not everyone wants to smoke pot and draw. Not everyone wants to play music until dawn. With a wide range of associates, I can match the individual to my impulse.

Applying the same mentality to lovers is more difficult, thanks to the delights of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and easily bruised egos. Still, I think it something worth striving for, at least until I find someone who does satisfy all my roaming fingers and strange little toes.

“This unoccupied gulf between spiritual or brotherly love and sexual love corresponds to the cleft between spirit and matter, mind and body, so divided that our affections or our activities are assigned either to one or to the other. There is no continuum between the two, and the lack of any connection, any intervening spectrum, makes spiritual love insipid and sexual love brutal. To overstep the limits of brotherly love cannot, therefore, be understood as anything but an immediate swing to its opposite pole. Thus the subtle and wonderful gradations that lie between the two are almost entirely lost. In other words, .the greater part of love is a relationship that we hardly allow, for love experienced only in its extreme forms is like buying a loaf of bread and being given only the two heels.”

- Alan Watts, from the epilogue of the Joyous Cosmology

A woman for romantic walks under the stars at night. A woman for drinks and tokes and frivolous hedonism. A woman for kinky, furious sex. A woman for deep, sensual lovemaking. A woman to hold hands with and never say a word. Could they all be the same person? I have the capacity within me for all five modes of love and countless more, and if it is true of me then it could be true of anyone. And yet, so many people seem content to force a code of conduct on themselves and a set of rules on their relationships.

Of course, all this intellectualization comes down to one big circle jerk. I too force a code of conduct by expecting certain things out of romance before it ever even happens. The only sensible thing is to pay attention to what is growing in my garden, and give my love to whatever blossoms and blooms, however it chooses to do so.

A woman is not a guitar...

2009-08-30T18:21:00.002-06:00

... But to a guitarist, the two are really damn similar.

For quite a few years, my guitar was a stand-in for a significant other. On good days, she was a megaphone for my soul, a reservoir for energy I could not expend any other way. We wrote together, played together, and, unfortunately fought each other. Like most of the women in my life, she is uncomfortable to sleep next to and impossible to have sex with. Like most of the women in my life, she rips my insecurities wide open, and I stop just short of breaking her neck when she refuses to say what I think I need her to.

There came a time in my life when I had to get a new guitar. HAD to. The old one stank of failure. On her fretboard, my fingers would tap out the same old mistakes, run over the same barren ground. We didn't have good memories together, and I feel already that her new owner is a better match. She was someone else's guitar before I'd ever bought her. The guitar I play now is much more an extension of me, body, soul, and mind.

And yes, I too recoil at the feminine anthropomorphization of these instruments. But the fact is, they are very much a yin to me. They are alive, responsive, charged with creative energy, and they endure the frustrated projections of my confused psyche. And like all my interactions with the opposite sex, no communication could really be had until I learned to let go of what I wanted to hear. Sometimes I fight with she, the woman, and she, the guitar, in a contest of wills to see who will define the music of our relationship. Sometimes I do not even consider the possibility of being pleasantly surprised by another's melody. Sometimes I strain for a narcisstic lead when I could step comfortably into a cohesive harmony.

I play my guitar far less than I used to. I have been far more interested in using, stretching, and more or less discovering my own vocal chords. Chest voice. Falsetto. Throat singing. Beat boxing. I seek music with no intermediary between soul and sound. I want notes I can create in any situation, in any place, at any time. The fewer tools and conditions I need to do this thing I feel constantly compelled to do, the happier I am.

Besides, if I am going to despise anyone or anything for failing to help me actualize myself, it might as well be me.

Similarly, there has been a distinct absence of romance in my life as of late. Romance, for so long, was a jawdroppingly epic opus playing forever in my imagination but completely impossible to translate into any jam sessions or sheet music. The abstract ideal could never translate into reality; I was so insistent on holding the dream in my hands, that I could never see what I was actually grasping. The women I fell in love with were, almost without exception, nothing like the princesses of my imagination.

After getting my silly, expensive degree, after putting my contrived compositions to paper, after stepping away from the grotesque and inappropriate juxtaposition of academia and music, I was finally shown what Nada Lila was really all about. Some friends of mine had taken to having large friendly potluck parties in the enormous duplex they were renting. The crowd had some regulars, but there were different faces every time. The food was excellent. One room was devoted to art supplies and communal creativity (talk about a comfortable icebreaker). Another room had a ping pong table. At one point, we filled a third room six feet high with balloons. The main area of the basement was the jamming space, and to me, this was the nexus of the whole affair.

We had a bass guitar, a saxophone, varying numbers of electric and acoustic guitars, and an arsenal of percussion equipment. The participants varied wildly in performance experience and musical knowledge. Only infrequently were keys declared and familiar songs played. For the most part, people just had at it, grabbing any instrument that was free, trading whenever they got bored, and enjoying themselves to the fullest extent possible. Most of the playerse had little concern for impressing each other, or creating anything stunning and powerful, but it did not stop us from generating some excellent grooves.

Expectations had no place in these events. There was sound happening, and one could either join in, shake their ass, or sit back and listen. Conducting was impossible. Composition was out of the question. The music took on a life of its own, greater than any one player, and we were the sum of its parts. At the end of every jam session, I found myself in a blissful daze, physically exhausted and emotionally purged. Sex was never this good.

But it could be, and eventually it will be. Now I see there is no pre-existing formula, no song to rehearse, no demand to make on the world at large. I can hold no expectations over others. I can force no woman into the mold of an angel. I can insist on no rules of monogamy or courtship. One simply picks up the instrument, listens to the sounds all around, and joins the groove.

Tunes and Tones

2009-08-25T02:36:00.000-06:00

Lately, I've been trying a new approach to songwriting. I need one. Since completing the four compositions that composed a portion of my college thesis, I've had much less love for the songwriting process. I haven't ever really gotten the hang of creating for the purposes of academic progress. I think even my professors recognize the idiocy of judging a creative piece in such a way, but they're prisoners of accredition. On top of that, I've developed a real love for the surprises inherent in jamming. Composing something concrete is just not as enticing as experiencing something fluid.

But I have no jamming partners at the moment. Luckily, I can still jam with myself. My chops are tight enough at this point that I can bang out a simple riff on my MIDI keyboard in one or two takes, and then the layering process begins. Reason software is truly amazing: a drum machine, loop player, and a synthesizer. Sadly, I'm still using v2.5, so my capacity to properly mix and EQ tracks is sonically limited, but it's better than nothing.

So I just play stuff out, record it, and see what happens next. Not much structure, it's very free form, which poses a new set of challenges. The phrasings occur in groups of five, one, or nine measures instead of four. Moods and modes change dramatically over the course of a minute. My reluctance to do multiple takes and rely on the software's capacity to 'fix' slight rhythmic discrepencies gives the whole thing a rougher, sloppier, more organic feel. Which I like, it reminds me of Isaac Brock drunkenly stumbling through his riffs in the earlier Modest Mouse albums. Why should it be perfect? I'll always prefer the swing of a live drummer to the geometric metronome of a drum loop. The current standard for popular music is immaculate bordering on the obsessive compulsive. After an hour or two of listening to record label funded studio gloss, my ears crave the sound of an acid-tweaked Jimi Hendrix touching his guitar in inappropriate places.

She sounds like she likes it.

And on that screaming, moaning, fuzzed up, tweaked out note, I have to give modern studio work props for one thing: timbre. Timbre is no longer the neglected younger brother of the holy musical trifecta, pushed off to one side in favor of the more easily manipulated melody and rhythm. But now, with VST plug-ins, digital effects racks, and boutique stompboxes, timbre is not simply tolerated but sculpted. A whole menagerie of sounds never before available to the ear are now at the disposal of anyone ready to drop a few hundred dollars on the industry's latest toys. NEW timbres, people! There aren't new notes! There aren't new time signatures! But in the past fifty years, an arsenal of new methods of timbre generation have arisen. The technology has come far enough along in the past few decades that one can mold a simple sine wave into the sound of a clinking piano key or a blaring trumpet. Sure, the end result may sound varying degrees of synthetic, but that it can be done at all is staggering once one pauses to consider it.

Billy Howerdel, the deranged sonic genius behind the gorgeous guitar tones of A Perfect Circle, mentioned in an interview that he spent hours and hours tweaking the reverb on one of his tracks. One track. Of one song. Hours. He finally had to be dragged away from the computer. As a lifelong reverb junkie, I can relate. I get so easily lost in crafting tones that I need to set boundaries for myself (“fifteen more minutes and then you HAVE to stop”). Otherwise I'd never finish anything. In Howerdel's case, the end result is the audio equivalent of ambrosia. The guitars on Mer De Noms sound at one moment like the mating calls of primordial lizards (The Hollow), and a choir of cybernetic angels (Magdelena) the next.

Simple metaphors don't do these sounds justice, especially given the synaesthetic manner in which my mind registers timbre. While tremelo and delay sometimes translate visually for me (not in any dramatic way, of course, I don't see colors or anything), distortion registers as tactile mouth sensations. I'm not alone in this; ever wonder why guitar affecionados describe tones as crunchy and creamy? They're not referring to Clapton. Some tones, such as Howerdel's, can even cause me to salivate. I feel rhythm in my pelvis, melody in my heart, and timbre on my tongue.

Feet

2009-08-23T15:13:00.001-06:00

Several months ago, I made the masochistic decision to go running around a rocky dirt track barefoot. I was inspired by an article I had read about the harmfulness of expensive running shoes. I am in love with the human body, and it's capacity to grow, expand, become strong, develop callouses. On that day, I could've used a callous. (As soon as I wrote the word the second time, Ani Difranco's Callous came on shuffle. Three cheers for meaningless synchronicity).

Needless to say, I spent the next several days off my feet. It was a strange kind of bliss. Walking from point A to point B became a directed act of will. The degree of pain, the time it took to move across a room, pushed me into a state of almost zen-like clarity. I had no painkillers, and no cannabis. I soaked my feet in the bathtub regularly, and when I had to walk to the grocery store, I designed temporary bandages out of wads of toilet paper and masking tape.

This was not the first foot injury I incurred in my first month in New Mexico. A week or two previous, I had purchased a six pack of beer, and assumed a wine bottle opener could serve roughly the same function as an absent beer bottle opener. I was corrected in a startling hail of broken glass. Despite my best efforts to sweep the floor, I still ended up with several pieces of glass imbedded in my feet. And yet, I found it immensely rewarding to sit down with a pair of tweezers sterilized by my lighter and slowly dig out the offending shards.

Still, after these two events, my feet did not feel quite right for a month or two afterwards. Luckily, they are back to normal, and, in fact, look healthier than they have in years. Feet are, or should be, a human's constant connection to the earth. It seems strange and inappropriate to me that we place barriers like shoes between ourselves and the natural world. Another feeble attempt to spare precious humankind from the ugly slimy natural world. Yeah, right. Almost as ridiculous as sidewalks, a marvelous invention that becomes so hot in the summer sun that a barefoot ambulator has to dash from shadow to shadow to avoid scalding his/her skin.

At a party this weekend, I encountered a man with kindly eyes, a purple bandana, and a grey beard that hung past his sternum. He had no shoes, told me he rarely wore shoes, and I asked him what it took to live like that. He said it was all natural, all about feeling things out, there was no technique for it. Which makes sense, given that this is a matter of reconnecting with reality, and all the pebbles, mud, thorns, broken glass, and dog shit that comes with it.

An Incoherent Collection of Half-Musings

2009-08-22T01:26:00.001-06:00

Strangeness emanates from my stomach. I can feel it tainting my saliva. Salt. Sugar. Sugar. Salt.Water. Four months in the desert, and I don't miss water yet. Of course, it still pours out of the tap and bursts out of sprinklers hiding in wealthy people's lawns. But there is no ambient moisture here, and minimal rain, and my body reacts positively, or seems to. My body reacts well to the ubiquitous sunlight, of that I am certain. Solar rays grant me more energy than I ever knew in the cloudy, shroudy northeast. Mountains humble me in a way that hills never could.

Am I a drifting mystic? Blue-eyed wanderer of the countless bouncing sprawling dimensions? Or is somewhere a gravity pulling me back to earth? Is my soul a bouy tugged by curious dolphins, dipping below the waves only to bounce back into the sky? To a man who has lived for years in the same town, I am a drifter. To the perpetual traveler, I'm an amateur cosmopolitan. To the spiritually ambivalent, I am mystical. To the shaman, I am another confused stray. Indra and relatives. Einstein on a bus watching trains. Going nowhere.

When alone, my conceptions of my potential actions seem so valiant. In the company of others, I criticize myself silently. In the pauses, I hear myself speak with gentle sincerity, and it stuns me. I remember feeling overwhelmed by the story of the Dalai Lama; specifically the conflict he must feel between loving all beings and negotiating the struggle with/against the Chinese. After considering it, I prayed for the capacity to speak the truth. I do not normally pray, and I did not know if I was asking Buddha, Ganesha, Shiva, God, Satan, or my own subconscious. Perhaps there is no difference. It seems to have had an effect of some kind.

Is the prayer the result of the desire? Would I be this person without the prayer? I can't possibly know. My identity is a confluence of time, events, biological urges, and desires for every imaginable distant jewel. Sitting cross legged, I read the Tao Te Ching over and over, and after a while the ego-devouring ideas don't seem so threatening. Giving up desire for the most beautiful women is another way of becoming satisfied with the beauty of all women. Giving up dessert is enjoying dinner.

Perhaps I have flagged, in my mind, concepts of sincerity in speech, and when my voice resonates, I penalize myself for speaking poorly and reward myself for speaking appropriately. I don't recall ever consciously deciding to implement an operant conditioning protocol, but consciousness is such a small slice of mind pie.

Perhaps god holds me by the tongue with one hand and by the balls with the other.

Drifting mystic? Blue eyed wanderer? Child on a leash? Chained to a distant parent? Always something keeps me from floating into the ether: material possessions, family ties, gravity, ego, morphogenetic fields, my feeble conception of reality, sunlight coming through my window at dawn. Every day, the sun becomes brightest at noon and begins to fade immediately afterward. Never does the sun continue to brighten in intensity. Never does a creature walk without rest. No force surges without resistance, and so paradox is inevitable. The drifter in chains.

More and more, I pay attention to polarity. Magnetism. Electricity. Attraction. Repulsion. Some people say they “listen to their gut”. When I turn to face the wrong path, I can feel the anxiety twisting in my stomach and mind. Repulsion is easy to spot. Attraction...

I am attracted to a beautiful woman and repulsed by her arrogance. I am attracted to a beautiful woman and repulsed by my lack of depth. I am attracted to a stranger in the dark and wonder just what it is I'm attracted to. Do my eyes deceive me? Have they been co-opted by my testicles? Confused by sexy advertisements? For the first time in years, I feel like I can live without beautiful women. Obvious, of course. After all, I've made it this far. To be more accurate, I can live without desiring and striving for beautiful women.

One night she can't take her eyes off me. The next, she barely says a word and looks away. Has she seen enough of me? I remind myself that I can never be as important to her as she is to herself. I will never shine for her the way her creations do. Primate male zips up his package and hits the road.

If and when these questions are answered, more will follow them. I feel complete, insofar as I accept that I am striving towards completion and that this animated state is as close to completion as any living organism can achieve. I am comfortable in flux, resting in a river of senses and sensations.

Marijuana withdrawal is both bearable and intriguing. My emotions are a flood pounding at the dam of my skull. No longer do I watch the carnival of my psyche from a safe and contemplative distance: now I am waiting in lines, riding the rides, gagging on soggy popcorn. In a strange way, I feel the babysitter is gone. With sobriety, I'm on my own, I'm free to do as I please! Does cannabis restrict my behavior, even after my (largely successful) efforts to integrate the altered state into most aspects of my daily life?

On my dresser is a vial of water violet essence. I've been told it has the power to open a door in my mind that has been locked for years. I'm ready. From cannabis and psilocybin to strange friends and distant women to dead-end jobs and masturbatory college courses, I've wandered and wandered and gathered patience all the way. Part of me still begs for a resolution, a denoument of some kind. The wiser part of me just waits.

Pig

2009-05-26T18:22:00.002-06:00

The pudgy, screaming infant flails his disproportionately short, round limps in the air over his monstrous belly. With every cry, his jowls shake and all four of his chins quiver. The child has no discernible neck, a squashed, up-turned nose, and a tiny, curly tail extending from his enormous rear. The only detail that permits the two white-coated doctors in the ward to distinguish the child from a piggy bank animated through some kind of obscene and unnatural black magic is the absence of a coin slot in the infant's back.
“I really do think he looks more like a piggy bank than an actual pig,” says Dr. Joe Hath, a tall, lean boyish man with almost enough five o'clock shadow to pass for thirty-two. “A real pig would be kinda cute. This thing is more like a cartoon on a bad trip.”
“Pigs have a really perfect social order, did you know that?” replies Dr. Vera Ayer, a dark-skinned, bespectacled woman with abnormally full lips. “Much more a rational and co-operative animal than, say, a chicken.”
“So, where does this one belong? A sty or a nursery?”
“Good question,” says Ayer, tapping her lips with her pen and furrowing her brow. “I still think we should ask a third party about the mother's mating habits.”
“Mating habits..?” says Hath, envisioning something other than a pen against Dr. Ayer's lips.
“Well, how many other children does she have? Did any of them turn out this way? Are they all of the same father? Do they look like they're all of the same father? There are a lot of questions just begging to be asked here.”
“Right, such as 'where's the applesauce?'” smirks Hath.
“There's a jar in the mini-fridge in the lounge, one third consumed,” replies Ayer, deadpan. “Has the mother seen her offspring?”
“No, she demanded as much dope as humanly possible once the contractions started. She'll be drooling into a bucket for another hour, at least.”
“And the father?”
“Not a clue. A man roughly her age, size, and shape rolled her out of the back of his pick-up truck and into the ER. Left her right on the floor. Witnesses got the color of the truck, but not the license plate.”
“And the color?”
“Maroon, splattered with mud.”
“I see,” Ayer taps her lips with the pen again.
“So... how long before he enrolls in the police academy?”
“It'll have to be at least eighteen years. And he'd need a driver's license,” Ayer, deadpan again. “Did you know a police officer dies in this country every sixty hours?”
“Hard job out there. All we have to worry about is contracting swine flu.”
“Well, the respirator masks are not just for the patient's benefit.”
“I'm glad you're not wearing one now,” says Hath, unable to miss the opportunity.
“It isn't necessary at the moment.”
Hath stares at her long and hard, completely unable to discern whether she's rebuffing him or oblivious to his advances. Perhaps, he thinks to himself, I am better off avoiding women who don't know how to laugh. But God, that mouth!

Express yourself!

2009-05-24T15:48:00.003-06:00

After a weekend spent gorging on inspirational movies, magazine articles, and books on tape (supplemented with a few tabs of Hoffman blotter), Shim Weary decides that he is going to live his life exactly how it ought to be lived: an honest and sincere expression of himself! According to the educated individuals who scripted all that entertainment for him, a pure, persistent and sun-shiny spirit will overcome all odds. Negative thoughts would just get in the way, so Shim brushes them off like dusty old cobwebs. He skips on down to the thrift store and purchases a new and exciting wardrobe, full of exotic patterns and vivid colors. His next stop is the art supply store, where he fills a shopping cart with canvases, brushes, and cans of paint. Finally, he swings by the music store and picks out a Takamine guitar with dove inlays on the fretboard. The dove is flying free, like Shim's enlightened spirit, so it's the perfect choice!

Fully equipped, he returns home and readies himself for bed. Once under the blankets, he tosses and turns for hours. For years, he had been a wallflower, an introvert, a nobody. Now is his time to shine! A montage of possibilities unravels before his mind's eye. Shim is enraptured with anticipation for the deep and meaningful relationships with the other humans in his universe, relationships that will inevitably unfold once he exposes his truest deepest self to the world at large.

Shim finally dozes off around two AM, and is awakened five hours later by the blaring alarm clock on his bedside table. Today is the day! Time to display his unique personal expression for the whole cosmos to see! But which of his many new clothes to wear first? Shim ponders and considers and matches this with that and those with these and finally his outfit is complete! He poses in front of the mirror and looks with pride at his blue platform shoes, red and yellow striped pants, his pink paisley shirt, his turquoise cowboy vest, and his forest green fedora. Shim is sporting the kind of smile that devours bananas sideways!

He casts a glance at the alarm clock, and realizes that he is fifteen minutes late for work! Well, certainly Mr. Alcatraz at the personal electronics retail outlet would understand. Shim moseys merrily down the sidewalk, nodding at the gaping, pointing, laughing passersby and saying 'how are ya!', 'nice weather, we're having!' and 'hey, you look great today!'. Halfway to work, he spots a big, beautiful daisy peeking out of a snarl of weeds.
“Well, hello there, friend!” says Shim, addressing the flower. It responds with calm silence. The daisy would be a perfect addition to Shim's outfit! He plucks it from the ground and tucks its long stem over his ear. Perfect!

Now thirty minutes late, Shim saunters through the door of the personal electronics retail outlet at which he is employed, and gives an exuberant “Ahoy!” to his boss, Mr. Alcatraz, a tomato shaped man with a rapidly expanding bald spot and rapidly expanding sweat stains on his white button-down shirt.
“Jesus Christ! You're half an hour late, and you look like Richard Nixon's worst nightmare! Did God shit rainbows on you on your way to work or something?” Mr. Alcatraz shouts.
“Oh, no, don't be silly, Mr. Alcatraz! This is just my most honest and sincere expression of my deepest personal nature!” responds Shim with a grin and a wink.
“Your deepest personal nature?!” roars Mr. Alcatraz, his face turning the red of a horny baboon's ass. “I don't pay you to express yourself, I pay you to sell iPod car chargers to trust fund babies! Take that shit off, put on your damn uniform, and get to work! Now!”
“Mr. Alcatraz! Surely we can work something out. You may be angry on the outside, but I know that, deep down, you and I understa-”
“Understand? I'll give you something to understand! There's a line of groveling college grads with shitty resumes just begging for your job. You're fired! Now get the hell out of my store before I call the cops and tell them you're selling dope to eight-year-olds!”

Shim's spirits are low on the journey home, low enough that he's only able to muster a smile for the passersby with no cheer left over for a simple “howdy!”. He holds his fedora in his hands, kneading the brim with nervous fingers. The rent would be due awfully soon, and he'd emptied his bank account purchasing these stylish garments. But wait! Persistence is one of the keys to happiness. Shim smiles, and puts his hat back on his head. There's always a way through the darkness, one has but to look!

Sure enough, as soon as Shim walks through the doorway into his living room, he spots the stack of art supplies he purchased yesterday. How obvious! Shim doesn't need a job, he's an artist at heart. All he has to do is splash some paint on a canvas, sell the results, and the rent will be paid! Shim immediately sits down to work. A little green here, some yellow there, a dash of red and a whole lot of green. At last he finishes, and stands back to admire his masterpiece. Shim scratches his chin; he's not quite sure whether the picture he has painted depicts a melting spaceship built of flowers or the inside of a banana split in direct summer sunlight. Either way, there's a lot of gooey paint everywhere, and he certainly is happy about that! As soon as the paint dries, Shim covers his creation with a big paper bag, and heads out to the art gallery downtown.

As he steps through the door of the gallery, a bell attached to the door announces his presence. The red-headed woman behind the front desk doesn't look up. She's reading a book entitled “The Oppressive Phallus”. A brief image of a penis sporting a Third Reich eagle and swastika pops into Shims' head. He steps up to the desk, and clears his throat, but the woman still does not acknowledge his presence.
“Excuse me, miss” says Shim.
“Yeah? What do you want?” she says, finally looking up. Her scowling lips are as red as her hair and her eyes narrow so aggressively and completely that Shim can't make out the color of her irises. He's taken aback for a second by the ferocity of her expression, but quickly recovers his composure.
“Well, you see, I've painted thi-”
“Let me guess. You can't find a job because you're dressed like Jimi Hendrix after a four-day acid bender, so you vomited some day-glo paint all over an innocent canvas and you're going to try and sell it to keep from being evicted from your rathole apartment next month.”
“Wow. I mean, that's a pretty negative take on it, but yeah, that's why I'm here.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a schmuck like you in here every month. I don't care if you're Picasso, buddy; this is a business, not a grade school art show.”

Shim makes his way to a park down the street, and sits on a bench, muttering the mantra “persistence” under his breath. He can't give up now, he'd only be selling himself short. Pondering what to do next, he strokes the stubble on his chin. It occurs to him that, now that he's unemployed, he's in a perfect position to grow a beard! Life gets better all the time. But wait! Yes, something else just occurred to him. He now has a guitar! And a hat! All Shim has to do is play his guitar with the hat in front of him, and people will put money in it! Ah, busking, the simplest, purest means for a lost soul to express itself to the world at large.

Returning to the park, instrument in hand, Shim settles down and begins to struggle his way through a few chords. His G is slippery, his C is sloppy, and he simply doesn't have the muscle for a good solid F barre chord. Every note he plays sounds like the irritated atonal groans of sleeping goats being awakened by an impatient farmer. He can't put two notes together, but he keeps on repeating his mantra (persistence!). The music is somewhere deep in his soul, he just has to find a way to set it free. In the meantime, he keeps his head down and ignores the jeers of the sneering young people passing by.

“Get some lessons, asshole!”
“Hey, some of us are trying to enjoy the scenery, dick!”
“My three-year-old sister plays better music than you!”
“Hey, loser! I've got a record deal for you, but I crammed it up your ass. All you gotta do is reach in and pull it out.”
“Excuse me, son, but we've received several noise complaints. Why don't you practice at home? Hey. Hey, kid! Are you listening?!”
Shim looks up to see a tired, old police officer with a walrus mustache staring him in the face.
“Christ, son, does your mother know you dress like that?” the officer says, shaking his head.
“Iffsum ee munchree,” Shim replies softly, averting his eyes.
“What's that? Speak up, boy.”
“Um... it's a free country. Sir.”
“No, son, no it isn't. You share this country with a lot of other people who have just as much right to it as you do, and frankly, we think you're an earache and an eyesore. Now, get on home alright? You can be all the freak you want in your bedroom.”
“Yes, sir.”

Shim shuffles despondently out of the park, an obliviously cheery sun showering him with its rays. Inside his skull is a whirlwind of miserable, angry thoughts. In high school, Shim had been completely flabbergasted by the callous and bloodthirsty exploits of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot. Now, they made perfect sense to him. Humanity is a selfish waste! All they want is to preserve their own contentment and feed their own fat faces! They don't care about their souls! They don't care about free expression! Just TV, booze, and potato chips! To hell with them! Shim would start an army of disenfranchised, homicidal hippies and put a stop to... what's this?

A beautiful young woman saunters down the sidewalk in Shim's general direction. Round cheeks, long fluttering eyelashes, pouting puckering lips! Assertive hips that swing from side to side! Long slender legs maintaining perfect balance in precariously high heels! Firm little breasts that will never feel the grip of gravity! She looks like she stepped right off the cover of a magazine in the check-out line at the grocery store! Now that kind of girl would never give Shim the time of day... or would she? It couldn't hurt to try!

“Excuse me, ma'am!” says Shim, taking off his hat in a gentlemanly gesture.
“Ma'am? What?” she snaps.
“Ah... uh... you look, um... really good. Lovely. Fantastic. Uh...”
“No shit,” she rolls her eyes.
“I, um, want to play you a song.”
“Oh, god... no. Please, spare me, I'm too young to die like this and besides I'm meeting someone, so I have to go now, goodbye, have a nice life.”
Persistence! Shim strums his guitar like he's never strummed before, singing at the top of his lungs. The sound of his exuberant serenade rings through the peaceful neighborhood like the yowling protests of a live cat being placed in a rickety washing machine. Up and down the street, doors and windows slam shut as the local inhabitants unanimously decide they would rather deny themselves the fresh warm summer air than endure another second of the cacaphony. In the distance, a dog begins howling furiously.
“Jesus Christ! This is fucking unreal!” says the pretty young woman, sticking her graceful fingers into her innocuous little ears. A tall, muscular young man appears around the corner, and she runs into his arms. She kisses him on the lips as he places an enormous meaty hand on her tight, round ass.
“Hey baby, what's goin on?” he says, a big smile spreading across his well-defined jaw.
“Mark, I need you to kill that screaming creep over there. I think he's insane.”
“Whatever you say, babe.”
Without a second thought, Mark walks over to Shim, yanks the guitar out of his hands, and smashes it over his head with one decisive blow. Shim crumples to the ground, a delicate flower crushed beneath an overturned piano. Pieces of the Takamine rain onto the ground around him.
“Wow,” says the young woman. “I think you really did kill him. Thank you, sweetie!”
They walk off together arm in arm to drink alcohol and stare blissfully into each other's eyes for the remainder of the day. Several hours pass before a pedestrian notices Shim's sporadically twitching body lying prone on the ground and calls an ambulance.

When a sliver of consciousness creeps back into Shim's mind, he is vaguely aware of being in a hospital room, attached to a menagerie of strange machines he cannot quite make out. Turning his head, opening his eyes wider, or moving any part of his body at all appears to be completely impossible. He hears a crying sound from very far away. It's his mother! Another distant voice, calm and neutral, probably belong to a doctor, informs Shim's mother that Shim is in a vegatative state, and will remain so for the rest of his life. Had Shim even accidental control over his motor functions, he would have sighed or maybe even groaned. Instead, he imagines himself doing so, feels bitter, and then imagines himself sobbing at the cruelty of it all.

Several weeks of misery pass, before Shim realizes that he finally has what he has been looking for: direct access to his deepest, truest, innermost soul. It's all he has left, all he ever had, and all he ever will have, until the end of his days.

Meat

2009-05-21T23:54:00.001-06:00

The President of the United States is led through a labyrinth of windowless, featureless corridors. He whistles to himself, snapping his fingers occasionally. His aide leads the way, wringing his hands and sweating profusely.
“We don't know what he wants,” says the aide, a tremor in his voice, “He insists on talking to you, and you only.”
“So, it's a male?” inquires the President.
“Well.. I, uh, I don't exactly know. I assumed it was male. The way it, um...carried? Itself? Was, ah, yes. Sort of masculine.”
“Hmm.” says the President. His aide stops in front of a door, identical to every other door in the hall but for the number 51540 mounted at eye level. The aide gulps, a fluorescent light above hums, and the door opens silently. The room is pitch black. The aide turns, looks into the President's eyes, and says “I'll, uh, wait here.”

The President steps into the room, closing the door behind him. The light switch is immediately to the right of the door, as it is in every room in this complex. The ceiling light flickers on. In the room is an unadorned desk, with an empty chair on the side nearest the President. On the opposite side, sits the Visitor. Its massive, leathery, pale blue body fills the room. Its long neck brings its head almost to the nine foot high ceiling. Three pairs of wide horns extend from its skull, neck, and shoulders. The Visitor, a quadruped, rests on the floor with its legs folded under its massive body. The Visitor snorts through its big soft nose, flutters two pairs of long eyelashes, and turns its head to face the President.
“My God!” says the President, “How the hell did you get into this tiny room?”
“We have our ways” a voice echoes in the Presidents' mind. The Visitor has not opened its mouth.
“Telepathy?” asks the President.
“More or less. Human minds are easy to understand and manipulate.”
“Well, I wish it was as easy for me as it is for you.” says the President, with a smile.
“That is why you have handlers.”
“We call them assistants.”
“Handlers,” the Visitor snorts again. “They handle you, they handle everything. But now it is time for you to handle something by yourself.”
“Why?” asks the President, “If my aides are so much more capable than I, why bother with me?”
“Because what we are going to discuss is to remain confidential. We do not want a bunch of panicking rioting humans, now do we? Your handlers will keep my existence a secret, as long as you do not discuss my actual intentions with them. You will lie to them about what we arrange today.”
“And if I do not?”
“Then your people will panic, there will be much unnecessary suffering, and we will carry out our plan regardless.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It is not a threat, it is an inevitability. Your only practical course of action is to acquiesce. Otherwise you would be responsible for undue anguish among your people.”
“I already am,” jokes the President.
“You are not. You are a figurehead, barely responsible for your own appointment. On the average day, you have no more influence on the happenings of the cosmos than a honeybee or a bale of hay. Today, however, you are instrumental in the futures of both of our species.”
“I'm humbled.”
“You're smug.” Four pairs of eyes narrow, and the visitor pulls one of its front legs out from under its enormous body. The leg culminates in two wide lumps of bone, which the visitor raps once, with a sharp bang, on the tile floor. “Wipe that damn grin off your face, sit down, and let's talk business.”
The President sighs, and adopts the most dignified position he can assume in the swiveling office chair. The Visitor looms its head over the seated President.
“My associates and I have been monitoring the development of your species for quite some time. Your nation in particular holds great interest for us.”
“Should I be flattered?” grins the President.
“You should be quiet. What are you, drunk?”
“I've had a few, yes. What can I say, I do a difficult job.”
“Absurd. The farmers, mechanics and janitors of your nation have difficult jobs. You flap your wings like a rooster in a barnyard trying to impress the other chickens.”
“Come on, now! I am the leader of the most powerful country on the planet!”
“And I am a representative of the most powerful corporation in the cosmos. You are fowl. Quite foul. Human flatulence is revolting.”
“My apologies. You're no bed of roses yourself”
Another angry rapping.
“Enough nonsense, you drunken clown! You will not speak again until I grant your permission! Is that clear?”
The President nods, the self-assured smile gone from his face.
“Now sober up and listen. I come here on behalf of the largest gourmet restaurant chain that has ever existed in known space. We have taken an interest in the people of America because of their ponderous girth. Their bloated midsections. Their jiggling thighs. Their appallingly pungent, yet delectable buttocks.”
The President's jaw lands in his lap. He carefully replaces it, perspiration forming on his brow.
“To my species, and many of the other species that our corporation serves, the gristle and fat of the human race is so mouthwateringly delicious as to be almost addictive,” the Visitor continues. “In fact, with the right seasonings it is addictive. Whether the human lard is sliced into strips and fried, sauteed in its own juices, or pressed into patties is irrelevant. No matter the form, your meat is quite the cash cow.”
“Good lord!”
“I told you to be quiet! Now! This is where you come into play, Mr. President. You will fulfill two roles for us. First of all, you will do everything in your power to impede the efforts of nutritionists and dieticians. Do not allow any so-called 'fat taxes' to be passed. In fact, offer tax breaks to your nation's fast food chains. Let them get away with... murder...” The Visitor licks its lips with a slimy mauve tongue. “Secondly, when your people begin to disappear, you will act as though it is a complete and total surprise. You will be shocked, and you will immediately form a committee to discuss the matter. You will start a task force to search for the truth. You will create new jobs. Your people will like that. They will think you are a good president for being so concerned about them and creating new jobs for them. What do you think?”
“I think... I think it sounds good.” The President smiles, but is not the self-assured grin of a born leader. It is the weak grimace of a man caught between his morals and his self-interest, and more specifically, it is the weak grimace of a man whose self-interest will come out on top.
“It does. In fact, it sounds excellent, don't you think?
“Yes, it does. Very excellent.”
“Excellent. Now, your task force will have no way of discovering the truth. Our technology is far beyond your species' imaginations, so there is no threat of human interference. Just keep them busy, let them think they are making progress, and they will be happy, even as their friends and neighbors are harvested. No one will ever know the facts of the matter, and if you attempt to tell your people what is going on, they will condemn you as a lunatic and drive you out of office. How many of your aides know about our meeting?
“Ah... seven.”
“Well, then. You will arrange for seven untimely deaths. Try and spread them out a bit, don't attract too much attention. Alright, I suppose that's everything. If you have any concerns about these matters, well, we don't particularly care. Your primitive species can not even begin to fathom the elaborate workings of our incredible minds, so there is no point in explaining these eventualities any further to you or any other member of your kind. Now if you'll excuse me, I have an appointment in... mm... Germany... Enjoy the rest of your tenure as leader of America, Mr. President, and grab yourself a hamburger or two. You're looking sort of thin, don't you think?”

Pot Kills!

2009-05-21T22:29:00.000-06:00

Especially if you're standing under five hundred pounds of it when it falls out of the cargo bay of a passing airplane.

A friend to some, an enemy to others. A source of revenue for black market merchants, narcotics officers, and various artists. An anti-depressant. A recreation. An addiction. An inspiration. A political cause. A spiritual guide. It is many things to many different people, and no one seems to agree on how it should be treated.

The American government defines a Schedule I drug as an unsafe substance with no conceivable medical use and a high abuse potential. The list of Schedule I drugs includes LSD, psilocybin, Ibogaine, and MDMA (all of which have uses in clinical psychotherapy and have been shown to be safe in controlled doses and controlled settings), heroin (which was devised for medical purposes and was initially marketed by Bayer, the folks who brought us Asprin), DMT (which is naturally occuring in a large number of plants as well as the human brain), and good old cannabis (whose medical utility has been documented a hundred times over). And yet, somehow, alcohol and nicotine managed to escape the list. Those wily drugs!

Moving on to Schedule II, defined as addictive substances with potential for abuse but some medical utility, we find Ritalin, Concerta, Desoxyn, Dexedrine, and Adderall (all of which were prescribed to children in the very recent past), PCP (which has been directly implicated as the catalyst for at least several gruesome crimes in recent history), and cocaine (ducking out of Schedule I because of its alleged use as a topical anesthetic). Nowhere on this list are caffeine or dextromethorphan. Large doses of caffeine have been demonstrated to cause insomnia, irritibility and severe anxiety, and prolonged use over time can lead to ulcers. Many regular caffeine users feel they must start their morning with it, or else suffer headaches. Dextromethorphan (or DXM) is a principal ingredient in cough syrup, often targeted towards children. High doses of DXM induce surreal dissociation and massive hallucinations. DXM is the psychedelic of choice for many bored teenagers due to its ready availability and potent effects.

Harry Anslinger, America's first Drug Czar, led a massive propaganda campaign against marijuana in the 1930s, claiming that the unpredictable intoxicant could lead to violence, theft, and unrestrained sexual activity. Yet anyone who has interacted with individuals who use cannabis in moderation can vouch for their amiability and general passivity. Cocaine, on the other hand, is notorious as a trigger for irresponsible sex and inexplicable belligerent disputes. And let's take a moment and consider Antron Singleton of Los Angeles, who, under the influence of PCP, received the message that he had to find the devil, kill him, eat him, and save the world. Apparently the devil was inside the chest cavity of his girlfriend, Tynisha Ysais, now deceased. One more time, pot is Schedule I and cocaine and cannabilism inducing PCP are schedule II. Apparently, we cannot trust our government to make clear distinctions about the inherent risk of prevalent drugs.

If it's so illegal, then why do people continue to smoke pot? The high, of course, but let's not forget its utility as an anti-depressant or its capacity to sustain patients with cancer and other terminal illnesses. Pot users report an enormous variety of effects, many of them contradictory. Often the effects of cannabis vary depending on the individual, the tolerance of the individual, the dose, the manner of ingestion, and the particular strain of the plant. One person may report reduced anxiety from smoking pot, and another person hitting the same pipe may have a panic attack. An individual can smoke a joint one day and have a profound psychological reaction, yet due to tolerance feel almost nothing from a joint of the same strain of marijuana a month later. Suffice to say, it is very unpredictable. This is frustrating! It's so much easier when a drug can be easily explained, when a doctor, herbalist, or official figure of some kind can say with authority that this drug is good and that one bad.

However this is never the case. Any drug will have a different effect on different people at different times. This is the nature of the human metabolism. No drug is completely predictable, whether it's an SSRI, a barbituate, a pstchedelic, an amphetamine, or even a cup of coffee. Does this mean people should avoid drugs? Of course not. What means is that people have to be careful and self-aware. This requires effort. How irritating! It's so much simpler to allow other, better-informed individuals to make decisions for us. The ancient Chinese used to have family doctors whose role it was to keep abreast of the metabolic idiosyncracies of every member of the household. This is not a conceivable financial option for the average modern human. In most cases, our doctors simply do not know our minds and our bodies that well. Many people are prescribed drugs that cause them harm! Just because a prescription comes from the hands of a person in a white coat does not mean it is safe.

Recently, Merck, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, was caught fabricating a medical journal to support its products. The same company is currently the target of a grand jury investigation because of the massive health risks associated with its arthritis medication Vioxx. This is old news. The litany of side effects and health concerns crammed into the last several seconds of every pharmaceutical advertisement on television has been a fixture for several years now. Some mock them, some register concern, most tune them out completely. We have other things to worry about: work, money, the economy, getting laid, raising children, keeping our children from getting laid. The general attitude seems to be: “let's leave the hard decisions to the government and just get on with our lives!” Many people go so far as to allow the latest diet trends and nutrition news to determine what they have for breakfast every morning. Much like the pharmaceutical companies, American nutrionists are so enamored with their search for a panacea (and the accompanying momentary prestige and financial reward) that they fail to realize what Ayurvedic practioners in India decuded long ago: every individual has different needs. Certainly, doctors should always be consulted, but ultimately the only person fit to decide what goes into one's daily diet of drinks, drugs, snacks, and substances is oneself.

The alleged logic of our nation's governing bodies is that safe drugs be made readily available and unsafe drugs be banned. As already demonstrated, this is a very questionable distinction, one that varies widely depending on who one asks. And what are we to do with gasoline, glue, and ether? They are easy to acquire, fun to abuse, and extremely unhealthy, but it makes no sense to prohibit their sale because they are part of every day life. The same can be said of beer and coffee, which have been a functional part of human existence for centuries. The health risks of pot pale in comparison to those of alcohol and caffeine, yet pot is an American pariah. Perhaps prohibition is not about the safety of individuals, but the safety of a culture.

Once upon a time, cannabis was a substance of choice for the beatniks and hippies of the 1950s and 60s, along with LSD, psilocybin, DOM, and peyote. These individuals advocated, even if they did not necessarily embody, a lifestyle of creative expression, self-determination, sexual openness, and detachment from the economic infrastructure that maintains the lifestyles of politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen. The hippies, when they managed to organize themselves, told the individuals who believed themselves in charge that they had no right to wage war and demand conformity. This was very frightening to the older generation. Imagine yourself standing on top of a building, looking over the edge, and seeing the bricks, beams, and nails that made up the building's foundation coming to life and running away. You would be scared, too.

Many of these respectable suit-&-tie sort of people witnessed their own children donning tye-dye, dropping acid, and joining the hippie brigades. These parents worked night and day to provide for their offspring, to create a place for them to prosper, and this is the result? So who is the most convenient culprit? The children? They don't know any better. Themselves, the parents? They're doing the best they can. That leaves the drugs...

It is, however, a logical fallacy to assume that these two disparate cultures cannot co-exist. The fact is, hundreds of cultures and sub-cultures coexist all across America today. No two neighbors hold the same set of beliefs about the world, yet America pushes on. There are disagreements, but disagreement is not anarchy. Total conformity has all the appeal of a single note symphony. Harmony comes about as a result of co-operation between differing viewpoints, not from coercive conformity. Potheads can live side by side with drunks who can live side by side with speed freaks who can live side by side with ravers, and they do! Drug use continues regardless of prohibition, and plenty of responsible marijuana users and even responsible LSD users and cocaine users lead productive professional lives, contributing whatever they can to society at large.

Some substances are inherently destructive to the human life form. Cyanide will stop our hearts. Curare will choke our lungs. Nitric acid will melt our skin. Lye will burn our flesh. But many drugs are not purely destructive; after all, there has to be a reason so many people welcome foreign substances into their bodies. The difference between destructive and constructive use of drugs is made within the thoughts and actions of the drug user, and not by any government agency. The American people are blessed to live in the information age, with an arsenal of data at our disposal. Now more than ever, we have the capacity to educate ourselves and decide what is right for us and what is not. We live in the Land of the Free, but so few of us choose to exercise our freedom, because the price of that freedom is responsibility.

So I say this to every stoner, every social drinker, every heroin injecter, every mushroom muncher, every robo-tripper, every Adderall crusher, every ketamine snorter, every paint huffer, and every casual sipper of green tea: be responsible and you will have your freedom.

And if that's not a Catch-22, I don't know what is.

Words

2009-05-21T22:18:00.000-06:00

A word is a word. It is not what it describes. It is a sign along the road, pointing the reader in the direction of the entity it represents. The word “love” is as much love as a sign saying “Jersey City, 25 miles” is Jersey City. Yet we would be lost without words. Words allow us to find our way, and to help others find their way.

Think of the word “car”. Every individual that reads this will envision a different car. A red Ferrari. A Mustang convertible. An SUV. A Model T Ford. A Chevy on cinderblocks in somebody's front yard. And thousands more. When someone speaks or writes “car”, they are well aware that if their intention is to convey specific information, then they must be more descriptive. Otherwise the reader/listener is free to imagine all sorts of vehicles. At times, this is what is desired, and so the author/speaker is vague, but usually it is taken for granted that futher illustration is necessary.

Yet when dealing with abstractions, many individuals, myself included, fail miserably to provide the same sort of context. I am certainly over-generalizing, but hear me out. I feel that quite often, many people assume the definition of an abstraction (and by this I mean any concept without a tangible physical body: love, compassion, anger, hatred, wisdom, friendship, deceit, evil, beauty, truth, race, class, and so on) is concrete and fixed. The assumption is that somewhere in the aether is a cosmic dictionary from which all these abstractions are born. Yet the opposite is true. There are as many breeds of love as there are breeds of housecat. There are as many varieties of beauty as there are species of insect. Furthermore, each individual instance of an abstraction has a life of its own, much like every single Manx and every single carpenter ant has a life all its own. The friendship A has with B is not the friendship A has with C, but the same word is used. The love one has for a mother is a different love than one has for a lover (well, one would hope). Some speak of platonic, romantic, puppy love, but those all have sub-species, breeds, identities. And like animals, plants, and planets, I believe that individual instances of abstractions are born and then grow, change, and die. They are organic in this regard, even if, in contrast to gross matter, they are surges of electricity or cycles of chemical release or patterns of thought within minds.

Now, I imagine the human mind as a labyrinth of mirrors. These mirrors are built out of preconceptions, fears, desires, attachments, expectations, and beliefs. They arise from our organism's attempt to maintain functionality in a world that alternates erratically between the threatening and the supportive, and as such any individual's maze will be erected in a completely unique pattern. No two minds are alike. Our experience of reality is a light filtered through this labyrinth of mirrors, bouncing around these glass walls, and being altered in many ways before being spit back out in the form of words. It should come as no surprise, then, that when people speak of abstractions, they are using them in a personal manner. An individual whose only experience of dogs is of being violently attacked by dogs will think and speak of dogs in a manner wholly different from that of an individual who has always lived in the company of friendly, playful, and adoring canines. Similarly, an individual born to maladjusted parents and prone to abusive relationships will think and speak of love in a way seemingly worlds apart from that of an individual born to loving parents and blessed with considerate friends. Does this mean, then, that these two seperate individuals have no hope of understanding each other?

Absolutely not!

Understanding, however, requires effort. It requires patience on the part of both parties, and a willingness to accept that one's own viewpoint is personally true but not universally true. The latter seems like an obvious statement, but careful reflection reveals that it is one of the most elusive truths in human experience. To understand the words spoken by others, to be able to read the road map of another individual's psyche, one must first acknowledge that one's personal viewpoint is unique to them, that this personal viewpoint is constantly growing, and (much like the growing pains of adolescence) that this constant flux is constantly painful. Instinctively, we humans withdraw from this pain and seek to concretize our viewpoints; and in the same stroke, we paralyze our conceptions of abstractions. This is a natural process, but it inhibits our personal spiritual growth and stymies our ability of compassion. I believe that embracing the pain of change is also natural, if somewhat less inevitable, for humans. There are two significant benefits to overcoming one's own viewpoint: on a personal level, one becomes more emotionally resilient, and on a social level, one becomes capable of alleviating the suffering of others. Many individuals protect themselves from this process by using a belief in an absolute truth. This can be a very dangerous belief, as it polarizes experience and thought patterns into right and wrong. Individuals believing in an absolute truth may very well demonize one or more parties in a discussion or exchange, rather than make an effort to understand the other partyies' perspectives.

Still, one most recognize the value of one's own viewpoint. There are times when it will be useful, and times when it will be inhibitory. To simply discard a personal view in favor of another, and then to hold the new outlook in just as dogmatic a fashion as the previous one confines the individual in the same trap as before. It is not enough to be flexible once; one must be flexible every day. This sort of flexibility is our greatest escape from the prisons of duality. It can rescue floundering friendships, reconcile estranged lovers, enable compassion between strangers, and bless the mind with internal balance and harmony. The polarizing American political system encourages antagonism among its people, rather than open and rational discussion, while depriving the country as a whole of any capacity to regulate itself and keep itself healthy. The same openmindedness and flexibility that builds emotional strength in individuals can also build a stronger, sturdier nation.

Finally, consider the position of the Dalai Lama. More than a political figure, he is a symbol to his people of compassion, love, wisdom, and truth. What he stands for and strives to live for transcends language, yet the Chinese Communists revile him because of the word “religion”. Because their belief system, by default, classifies the Dalai Lama as evil, they feel they must eradicate him. Yet the Dalai Lama must not retaliate, must not lash out in violence. His role is to understand these people and the motivations behind their behavior, to have compassion for them, and to forgive them, and to run from them, to stay alive, and to help his people survive the Chinese occupation any way he can. It is a difficult, straining, and often dangerous position, but it is the path of greatest wisdom, compassion, and understanding.