Potty Mouth

I am become more and more convinced that the driving force in all societies pretty much boils down to who cleans the toilets and why. And as far as I can see most of modern culture has been a concerted effort by white men to yell “not it!” I used to think social order was pretty much driven by access to pussy but this theory has a correlation in that prime pussy is rarely found in the company of janitors.

Since it has been increasingly difficult to force minorities, women and subjugated cultures to do the deed I’ve noticed a new trend, which is to train “the mentally deficient” into this position. While on the one hand I think it’s great to provide job training for the developmentally disabled or persons with severe mental illnesses, I have issues with assuming that the scut work of society is the perfect niche from which they can can contribute. It’s a bit too “Brave New World” to feel really comfortable.

No one wants to be the “it” in this situation. So in the vein of “if they can put a man on the moon...”
If they can invent a self cleaning oven, why can’t they invent a self cleaning toilet?

I Love A Chicago Party, Not THE Chicago Party

Dude you are really sucking at this POTUS thing. I even dragged my nonvoting partner to the polls to vote for you. I really believed in about 1/2 of what you promised which you totally haven’t even begun to deliver on an 1/8th. Everyone thought you were so fresh. What you are proving yourself to be is a typical Chicago democratic party machine politician. Let’s just call you prez Daley from now on shall we?
If you want a second term you better pray some messiah-like independent doesn’t raise up and run against you because you totally ripped off your constituents when you cast yourself in that light .
You really don’t get that we’re no longer straight party people do you? My Dad insists that you’re just cagey, but he’s a staunch Dem. I am not burdened with that loyalty nor are a lot of people my age and younger. From over here it looks like you suck worse than Clinton and only minutely less than Bush.
God I am so sickened of politicians bullshit.

It ain't Burroughs but....

“Suddenly I felt bleak, oddly depressed. It took a moment for me to realize that one of Meyer’s recent lectures on international standards of living was all too well remembered.”

“... so divide everything into two hundred million equal parts . Everything in this country that is fabricated. Steel mills, speedboats, cross country power lines, scalpels, watch bands, fish rods, ski poles, plywood, storage batteries, everything. Break it down into basic raw materials and then compute the power requirements and the fossil fuels needed to make everybody’s share in this country. Know what happens if you apply that formula to all the peoples of all the other nations of the world?”
“You come up with a bleak fact Travis. There is not enough material on and in the planet to ever give them what we’re used to. The emerging nations are not going to emerge - not into our pattern at least. Not ever. We’ve hogged it all. Technology won’t come up with a way to crowd the Yangtze River with (sleek, high powered speedboats).
“It was OK Travis, when the world couldn’t see us consuming and consuming. Or hear us. Or taste some of our wares. But communication by cinema, satellite, radio, television tape, these have been like a light coming on slowly, being turned up like a rheostat control in a dark cellar where all of mankind used to live. Now it is blinding bright, cruelly bright. And they can all look over into our corner and see us gorging ourselves and playing with our bright pretty toys. And so they want theirs now. Just like ours, God help them. And what is the only thing we can say? ‘Sorry, You’re a little too late. We used it all up all except what we need to keep our toys in repair and running and to replace them when they wear out. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.’ What comes after that? Barbarism, an interregnum, a new dark ages, and another start a a thousand years from now with a few million people on the planet? Our myth has been that our standard of living would become available to all the peoples of the world. Myths wear thin. We have a visceral appreciation of the truth. That truth, which we don’t dare announce to the world, is what gives us the guilt and shame and the despair. Nobody in the world will ever live as well materially, as we once did. And now as our materialism begins to sicken us, it is precisely what the emerging nations want for themselves. And can never have. Brazil might manage it. But no one else.”
John MacDonald “The Scarlet Ruse” 1973

Oh happy, happy XMAS.

“and after all, we’re all just ordinary men”

I am normally a person who is very much caught up in an “us and them” struggle. I come quite easily to hate and “despision”. Even when I was much, much, younger and really committed to changing my paradigms I was only able to sublimate my fear and hatred, not cut it by much, and certainly not eliminate or to use the more fitting terminology, cure, it. I am so, still, not cured. However, this new job, has provided me with an un-looked for, surprising, opportunity, at a time when us and them rhetoric is so bitter and pervasive, to get a better understanding of where that dichotomy falls flat in my own psyche.

You see, the gentleman that I work for is a dyed-in-the-wool, old school, white, southern, (possibly Baptist), racist. He’s a Mason and a misogynist. In short, a possessor of oh, so many, of the qualities that exemplifies “them” to me. He barely reads, he’s crabby, picky, demanding, and so very all knowing, with no hesitation in saying whatever shitty, peckerwood thing pops into his head.

But here’s the weird, crazy, and I guess I have to think, great, teaching to me. Not only do I find him lovable but I want to make sure he feels loved and cared for. He is old, he is sick, and life is slipping away from him, while he is simultaneously watching his wife of about sixty five years disappear as she keeps wandering farther and farther down dementia highway.

I now have the perspective that most of “them” is just a whole bunch more of these folks. Life is hard, and they are scared, tired, and baffled that they did just what they were told to, yet things just didn’t turn out at all peachy, or rosy. They did, and do, the best they are/were able, or else they would do/have done better.

I suppose that feeling so threatened by the “thems” is a feeling of looming, oppression by the weight of their historical dominance. The childhood hurt of always being the other. The anger at being churched against my will. Being stared at, talked about, ostracized, it all builds up like keloids. I will keep (at least) trying to calm and cut that hatred.

I will though, reserve the right to feel completely alienated from, angry with, and diametrically opposed to the other them. That cabal of black magicians whose God is the actual mammon, and who have clearly shown that they will throw anyone or anything into the pit to remain our owners.

Fuck you guys. You are the aliens. And I will always fight you in some form, as someone very much wiser than me says, “just because you’re a Buddhist doesn’t mean you have to be a doormat”.

Bus ride blogging

I think I have figured out why I have been a complete wreck, for months, about this election. I’m thinking it has taken the weight of the oppression beginning to lift off to get some clear vision about it.

Call me paranoid or cynical or even nihilistic (the latter of which I would aver strongly) but I have been living under the apprehension and conviction that at any moment, jackbooted thugs (or as Nigel points out, innocuous looking, civilian dressed, death squads) could potentially come kicking my door down and I could just “disappear” merely for thought crimes, for just being who I am.

One might think that perhaps I shouldn’t read books like “1984” or “The Handmaids Tale” or magazines like “The Objectivist” because apparently, even more so than when I saw “Night Of The Living Dead” unedited, at night, at a theatre when I was 10 or 11, and then had nightmares about it for like, 15 years, these socially apocalyptic books apparently have infiltrated my thought stream on the very subtlest of levels and work around in my gizzards when I don’t even realize they are festering so deeply.

In my pamphlet I’ve been working on, about proverbs and lies, one of the first lies I wrote down was “people don’t just disappear”. Because they do, indeed, just disappear ALL THE TIME. It just happens a lot less here than in say, Brazil or Darfur or China. And I think the likelihood of it happening here was increasing every year that the warlock/criminals calling themselves Republicans were in power. Another lie which Frank Zappa reminded us not to believe was “it can’t happen here”.
So, I really hope that with all the flowers and unicorns and sunshine everyone is grooving on (which I don’t blame anyone, it does feel really good at the moment), that we all brace ourselves to do the work, to try to accomplish what needs to be done to try and make this a country where at least it happens here less often.

Oh Man

I feel like I can breathe for the first time in 8 years......

No promises, and knock on simulated wood veneer...

But, maybe, I’m back.

It is still rough, ruff, ruffe, but I feel a little less paralyzed in all lobes of my monkey mind.

Sorry for the freakout/bailout but that’s what happens when your blogger has “issues”. One of which is literally overwhelming anxiety from it being an election season. Man, do I have a hard time processing all that shite. It’s as if it has the properties of a big, sticky wad of suffocating, smeary, putrid, plasticene. And then it’s as if it was shot straight into my mainline just clogging up all my functions and trying to beak apart my heart. Why does it always have to be in fall when I am already struggling through a major seasonal affective shift? As well as why are people such little bitches about it all?

I think...

And yes, I do on occasion do so, and right now I’m thinking that Craigslist is eating my soul, warping my mind and skewing my perceptions of my fellow humans.

It is the dreck of the dregs and I think I need a break from the stupidity and foulness as well as television news, again. (Probably for the next ,oh maybe, a little more than sixty days?)

Guns don’t kill people, the inanity of the masses makes people want to kill themselves.

Honey, hide the forks, my foreheads a-itchin.

Palin

Of course she is “the star” of the new GOP. She is the prisoner who has been Stockholmed so thoroughly that she will gladly put her head in any noose she is told to. Of course there is no resemblance at all to any Muslim woman who would strap explosives to her body. If she was a prisoner of the CIA's they would be trotting her out at funding meetings to justify black budgets.

She is a terrific example that the Christian Right’s techniques, having adopted the indoctrination tactics of cults, (the most basic of which is to control ones environment in order to love bomb them when they are good, and isolate them when they are not), which have been being improved on daily since the fifties, work very well.

This is why my friend, after being locked down in the Moon-y camps for 15+ years is now completely free to roam at will, doing Papa Moon’s work, and his children were born, and remain, totally, already, in.


Note: I realize I generally avoid politics like the plague, but this is more about women, religion, psychology and sociology which I feel like I have some actual credentials in.

He said/she said

He should have said “They are proud of acting ignorant” as opposed to “being ignorant”.
There are several reasons.

One is that those guys are the most calculated, well oiled, hate filled. thanotoser, machine cogs, ever and it sure isn’t ignorance that makes them say such things.

Secondly, every petty psych major wannabe like me, knows you don’t tell children they are assholes but rather that they are acting like assholes.....

Thirdly, you know that really hard thing, that thing about hate the sin but not the sinner? Yeah, theoretically, we’re still trying for that.

P.S. First ever time using a label of politics

Hmmm

Seems like things are pretty bad when Kwame Kilpatrick is John Stewart’s “Moment of Zen”.

Interfacing

Since Nigel has moved in we have gone on two, count ‘em two, outings. This is highly unusual for me. Being out in public, being around people. I think this issue is related to me not being able to register at a new school. I have my comfort zone that I can handle at school and it took a lot to feel OK there and I’m just a little too tired right now to do it again.

But anyway, I got off the bus at North campus and went to two different art shows. One was “Aging With Attitude”. All the artists were elderly or looking to their elderly future. There was some very cool stuff. This was sponsored by the “Blueprint On Aging” agency I was working for until last Thursday.

Then I went over to the “Inmate Art” opening. I saw some people I knew both on the walls and at the show. My old friends Randy and Kim for example. I can use their real names because he does all the framing every year and his name is all over everything. They and their myriad small people were hanging out. I had never even seen these small people before. It’s been a long, long time. I saw Buzz Alexander for the first time since probably 1986. I used to hang out with his kid. I saw a lot of familiar faces that I see around but don’t know personally.

The art was amazing. I only liked about a third of it, but even the stuff I didn’t care for was like getting constantly punched in the stomach. One of the most poorly executed was one of the most intense. Simple coloured pencil. A hooker in fishnets, working the purse, with 666 tattooed on her forehead. Standing next to a 6 eyed, 6 horned devil pimp working a phone and a fax machine. Various minions in the background. titled “Sealed For Life”. My girl can’t really draw but she knew exactly what she wanted to say.
Then there were several pieces by a guy named Frankie Davis. Way out of my price range or I would have bought one on the spot. There is a name for the style but I can’t recall it. Everything is done in coloured pencil. Everything is flat, no depth. No shading. Very stylized. I guess it’s considered some kind of primitive. One was the gardens of Iraq. Another was called “Opening Day” and was a cornfield. The corn is in rows going up, there’s no perspective. Very Incan and Egyptian. Then there were word banners where the crows were discussing the hunting. I can’t describe it, dancing about architecture and all that.
I looked him up on MDOC today. That makes it all the stranger.

Psuedo-Snobbery

Well, perhaps not so psuedo, it’s actually pretty straight up.
I have been thinking recently about the phrase “pseudo-intellectual”. I have to say that a primary failing in this epithet is that unless it’s hurled at me by, say, a street person or maybe someone who has worked at Ford’s for 20 years straight out of high school or something similar, it loses much veracity. Someone from U-M calling me a pseudo-intellectual is pretty much like me calling someone a heifer.

Secondarily, I think someone who would use it in the pejorative sense has probably just spent too much time in a university town. The kind of place where people are sadly bright enough to level an insult that is pretty much saying “how dare you attempt to think”. Yep, happy enough to reap the financial rewards of the bidness of higher education, all those lovely monies accrued from people attempting, theoretically, to think, (but perhaps, more likely, to be merely trying to guarantee a specific income level if I’m any judge), but if that person doesn’t think like they’re “spozed”* to, they’re really just a mere pseudo-thinker. That is so laughable. If you translate it into that very language, “oh, you are just an incorrigible psuedo-thinker” the ridiculousness and pindickery of it suddenly becomes apparent and I will hazard a guess that the motivation becomes fairly transparent.

So what is it then that qualifies one as having the bona fides? The actual living, breathing, tower of power, pinnacle-ness of intellect? It simply can’t, please tell me you don't, have the unmitigated nerve, to measure it by a degree. Because I’ll have one soon, neither of my house mates has one, and thank God, for once, everyone in the house is naturally smarter, and far kinder, than I am. So that would be an invalid and therefore unsound, argument.

Myself, I actually prefer people who make the attempt, be it ever so feeble, to think.
As well as that thing His Holiness says about how “his religion is kindness?” Yah, I think you could be dumb as dirt and probably be far better off well on, down that road.

So I will herein make a vow: That having racked my brain and not being able to recall any instance where I have called anyone either a pseudo-intellectual or a heifer, I will dearly attempt to continue to not use those two particular, hypocritical, epithets in my future life. However because I am, not so very kind in my heart of hearts, I will probably continue to call a spade a spade, and a snob a snob.

* “The Way It Spozed To Be” James Herndon

Pick up the Reeses Pieces

So basically what you’re telling me is that under this administration we have all turned into either an O. Henry story, (The Cop and the Anthem, The Gift of the Magi etc.) A Borax song (She sold her body and he sold his pants - for 50 lousy cents, It’s a miserable life) or a Thom Jones story (vietnam vets with PTSD). Oh yeah or some kind of Steinbeck novel (not the funny ones).
Swell. How fucking quaint and erudite are we gonna get?

6am earworm : Acid Queen - The Who version with the Tina Turner visuals. Perhaps not so odd or unusual, I’ve had fever for what, 6 days now?

I just love making up words

Dreamed this morning that I was trying to buy a house on the “country” part of Woodward. Does such a thing even exist? I doubt it. But man, it was a very cool old rambling ranch with real dirt and trees on a real lot. If I could find such a house in real life that was affordable, I’d consider it. My current one is more Charles Addams-ish. Which is wonderful but I’m looking at all those stairs and down the line will it all be so wonderful when my knees really go?

Anyway, I want to say something about politics. Which is that I have nothing much to say about it in this venue. This is not to say that I don’t care or vote. Or that I don’t have extremely strong feelings about it. Therein lays the problem, my feelings are just that, very strong intuited feelings. I don’t read the 8000 kajillion books about it. I can’t watch the news or I’d stick a fork in my forehead. I get my news from the web and the Daily Show, which in my view is at least better than the lady my classmate met, who gets hers from EWTN channel and Fox.

I was raised by staunch Democrat, ethicistic, atheist, liberal, intellectual parents who slaved us out to the party as envelope stuffers and lickers for months, nay, years, at a time. But I myself am not a Democrat, or a Republican, nor a Libertarian, or an Anarchist or really anything clear or easy at all.

I am someone who looks at the candidates faces and their eyes and says: “oooh that one sleeps with Satan, that ones a huge liar, that one opens the gates to the pit when he/she opens their mouth. (If you’ve ever seen L. Ron Hubbard on film you may notice that very same phenomena.)
Or conversely,
“Hey I may disagree completely with what that ones saying, but I’ll be damned if they’re not completely sincere”

Since I hate lies with a fury and a passion, I don’t favour many politicians at all. Or religious leaders. Or salespeople. Or addicts. Or players. Or military leaders. Or corporate people. Or PC nazi’s. Or extremist’s. Or Fundamentalists. Heck the list goes on and on. I could be a misanthrope, but I’m really not quite, I call myself anthrophobic indicating my uneasiness with and generalized fear of humans. But it’s their words and deeds and not themselves that raise all the issues.

So if you want to talk politics in a learned fashion, and discuss in depth articles, I again refer you to:
http://www.markmaynard.com
Those folks are funny, very learned and sincere and just a little over the top which I end up enjoying.
I just wanted to get that whole politics schmear out of the way, because as you may have noticed, my posts have been and are likely to remain, self serving observations about my relationship to myself, the people around me, and the world that I experience in my head and on the physical plane daily. And not much more.