I am an extension of the apparatus. I am its business end, its interface, its worn, sometimes warm, sometimes wet functional protuberance. I am where the proverbial rubber of the apparatus' ideology meets the functional road of the masses. I am its mover. I am its shaker. I am its giver and its taker. My body gives it life. My behavior gives it substance. My pain gives it conviction. My screams give it voice. My death gives it immorality. It can be a flag but its meaning, its symbolism, its utter significance for every teary eyed follower is written in my blood, which I willing gave to close the circular argument in which it caught me. It moved me. I move into the path of destruction for the sake of it. My body is memorialized in it. It flaps in the breeze. That's my spirit haunting it.
I am a the moral significance of the machine. I operate it. It moves me. I move it. I feed it my time, my money, my gas. And it provides me a projection upon which the most whimsical of fantasies take shape. Conquering the space and time between point A and point B is not travel. No sir. That's freedom. I will protect it with my life for it is an extension of my citizenship in a free country. It is my badge of privilege. It is my extensible reality. It is my best side. I move forth in the world showing it. If I dent it, it becomes my shame. I paint my politics on it in so many adhesive messages. This machine allows me a public space for my own personal graffiti, and so I project. I tell the world that I'm proudly atheist. I tell the world to be forewarned that I'm, in fact, transporting precious cargo, my child. I proclaim to the world that my choice of brand is as important as my choice of political party. I let the world know that this machine is, in fact, one of many that I own. Yes, through this machine I present to you my fitness as a mate, my fitness as a citizen, my role as a member in our society. I am free in this machine, yet every turn I take requires close observance to speed limits, lights that indicate when I must stop, and directions that indicate where I must go. Where am I going? Why is it so far away? A conspiracy emerges, but the conspiracy is deep structure to a cleavage that I chose upon participating in the world that was made for and justifies the use of these machines. They are articulations, sentences, functions, a grammar of functionality through which I speak freedom, I speak common sense, I affirm the reality of the society that this car underpins and makes sensible and common. I am complicit in it by recognizing it as a reality to which I must contend.
"That man ain't right in the head." My step father used to say. He was commenting on a man who lived in a motel and who walked everywhere he needed to go. He was a university professor who had sworn off the niceties. He was a man perhaps with a phobia of automobiles. He was a man who had lost his wife in an automobile-related accident. None can fault him for his reaction. He had to do it to not forget his wife. Yet others, on the inside of their cars looking out upon him, couldn't help but notice that unlike us in our cars, he was no longer anonymous. He wasn't hiding behind the tint of windows or shade. He wasn't hiding behind a half ton of metal carefully designed and marketed to my demographic. No, he was using his own two feet, strapped into sandals, to go to an fro like a Jesus or a Gandhi. but he was just that loony fixture in that small town where he walked. "It's best to remain anonymous," seemed to be one of the messages that car ownership provides. No longer a Jesus or a Gandhi, this man walked the town, his message warped by the sensibilities in the ultraviolet filter of car windshields that passed him by. Each framed the faces that peered out while they framed the light of the world that came within. A strange moving world picture, and we continually find ways to affix a screen to our apparatus for the sake of being its audience.
Why are we afraid to be close, to confront, to put up with relative strangers? We are all human are we not? Why do we love the image projected from a satellite in space of an actor who plays a person that he or she is not while we live mere feet from people from whom we are worlds apart? I stand, sit, sleep, eat, shit, cry, masturbate, dream, fantasize, scream, fight, write, and moan alone a mere 20 to 30 feet from people I hardly know. I am white. They are black. I am alone. They have each other. We are human yet our ideas, our sensibilities, our values can be so far apart due to the choices we made, the actions we chose, the lives we chose to lead. Yet we still eat, sleep, shit, cry, piss, die mere feet from each other. Concrete and brick are all it takes to erect a psychic barrier between ourselves. Our music choices, our television viewing habits, our eating habits all help define our lifestyle and our identity yet we don't share this with each other. Even the windows the provide light to come in are blocked up to disallow the bored or curious neighbor from peering in. And so we remain in our homes. They are our boxes, our velvet-lined cases, where we store our personal menagerie of me-things. An "I" that lives separately from my body resides there. Fire, floods, and burglary remind us of this. We continue to invest in the object qua fetish. We collect some mindlessly while most collect dust.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
Notes on a dark comedy
Man molests child. Man goes to prison and suffers abuse from inmates. Man goes to in-house counseling services.
As man serves out his sentence child goes through her own counseling and coping. Child explores the dark side of adolescence. Child becomes a teen, and begins to explore her own sexuality. Teen cuts herself. Teen does drugs. Teen realizes that after man who molested her, she hasn't allowed to let anyone touch her psychically.
Teen contacts man in prison. Man in prison is grateful that he has a pen pal. Teen doesn't reveal her identity nor how she tracked down her molester. Man is free and meets up with teen. Teen strap attacks man. Man's prison experience accustoms him to being sodomized.
Teen's strap-on dildo contains a plastic softener substance known to mimic certain hormones. Man begins growing breasts. Now a woman, the teen suffers a double mastectomy from breast cancer. Woman has no tits. Man has them. Man takes it in his butt, woman delivers him this using her cheap strap-on with the plastic softener known to mimic certain hormones. Man's body continues on its confused existence. Man then contracts prostate cancer. Destitute and dying, the woman accompanies him. As he lays dying, she reveals her true identity. The man views this as his penance. Man is buried with the woman's strap-on. Now middle aged and sexually militant, the widowed woman who married her sex-offender tries to start over. She cannot.
Woman who lost her innocence to a child molester. Woman her lost her tits to cancer. Woman who lost her husband to cancer becomes a killer. She begins hunting down the executives for industries that produce carcinogenic chemicals. She establishes herself as a dominatrix with a very select clientele. She plays the submissive role in order to get some of the high-powered execs into her home. Her tit-less body allows her to play the child role. She relives her violent past. She turns on each of the executives that she's lured in and rapes them with a special strap-on, one that causes serious internal injuries resulting in the bleeding death of each executive that she lures to her home.
As man serves out his sentence child goes through her own counseling and coping. Child explores the dark side of adolescence. Child becomes a teen, and begins to explore her own sexuality. Teen cuts herself. Teen does drugs. Teen realizes that after man who molested her, she hasn't allowed to let anyone touch her psychically.
Teen contacts man in prison. Man in prison is grateful that he has a pen pal. Teen doesn't reveal her identity nor how she tracked down her molester. Man is free and meets up with teen. Teen strap attacks man. Man's prison experience accustoms him to being sodomized.
Teen's strap-on dildo contains a plastic softener substance known to mimic certain hormones. Man begins growing breasts. Now a woman, the teen suffers a double mastectomy from breast cancer. Woman has no tits. Man has them. Man takes it in his butt, woman delivers him this using her cheap strap-on with the plastic softener known to mimic certain hormones. Man's body continues on its confused existence. Man then contracts prostate cancer. Destitute and dying, the woman accompanies him. As he lays dying, she reveals her true identity. The man views this as his penance. Man is buried with the woman's strap-on. Now middle aged and sexually militant, the widowed woman who married her sex-offender tries to start over. She cannot.
Woman who lost her innocence to a child molester. Woman her lost her tits to cancer. Woman who lost her husband to cancer becomes a killer. She begins hunting down the executives for industries that produce carcinogenic chemicals. She establishes herself as a dominatrix with a very select clientele. She plays the submissive role in order to get some of the high-powered execs into her home. Her tit-less body allows her to play the child role. She relives her violent past. She turns on each of the executives that she's lured in and rapes them with a special strap-on, one that causes serious internal injuries resulting in the bleeding death of each executive that she lures to her home.
The psychosexual relationship to nature
Slavoj Zizek has made hay out of the environmentalism movement. He calls it the dominant ideology of our time. He likens our views concerning the ill consequences of not respecting the environment to the fall from grace contained in the genesis narrative. He uses mobilizes religious imagery to support his claim that ideological analysis is the proper way to frame environmentalism in popular discourse. Let's think of an alternative.
I see it as a sexual relationship. I see a psychosexual connection between our activities in relation to nature and nature's own actions upon our body. We are natural organisms. Nature passes through our bodies, and our range of psychosexual behaviors focus on these passage ways. The mouth, the anus, the penis, the vagina, all connect us to natural concerns such as rhythm, pollution, and cleanliness.
If our connection to nature has a pyschosexual profile then the dominant trope is sadomasochism. We're either inflicting pain and hurt upon nature or it's visiting that same pain upon us. An endless cycle of give and take occurs. Nature negates our comfort, and we oppose this negation through the construction of microenvironments. Boats, cars, planes, our homes are all microenvironments through which we attempt to keep some things out. We attempt to live upon the earth on our terms. Only occasionally do we have to endure the discomfort and dangers of extreme cold and heat. We almost always have a microenvironment to which we can retreat.
We fuck the environment and get fucked by the environment.
I see it as a sexual relationship. I see a psychosexual connection between our activities in relation to nature and nature's own actions upon our body. We are natural organisms. Nature passes through our bodies, and our range of psychosexual behaviors focus on these passage ways. The mouth, the anus, the penis, the vagina, all connect us to natural concerns such as rhythm, pollution, and cleanliness.
If our connection to nature has a pyschosexual profile then the dominant trope is sadomasochism. We're either inflicting pain and hurt upon nature or it's visiting that same pain upon us. An endless cycle of give and take occurs. Nature negates our comfort, and we oppose this negation through the construction of microenvironments. Boats, cars, planes, our homes are all microenvironments through which we attempt to keep some things out. We attempt to live upon the earth on our terms. Only occasionally do we have to endure the discomfort and dangers of extreme cold and heat. We almost always have a microenvironment to which we can retreat.
We fuck the environment and get fucked by the environment.
Monday, July 12, 2010
a place to write
I just need a place to write. I need a place where I can legitimize my connection to things, the world, people. I suppose other activities exist, which help solidify this connection. I chose writing, or writing chose me.
Some activities, when deeply engaged in them, reveal the secret of invention. Kairos is a word that notes how events are gauged from the vantage point of the not-so-distant future. The occurrence of events and the actions, which set these events in motion, are incidental. Yes, we may gauge an effect in our actions upon our immediate world. The world also pushes back in its casual revealing before us. This idea is nothing new, and I'm certainly not sure why I'm rehashing it in a lighter format.
I need a place to aim. I need a place where I can focus my energies into a workable semblance of creativity. I hang my ideas on words, in their arrangement, their spoken cadence, the meaningfulness for me. What is it that may bring another to read my words are unknown to me. Even if they find intrinsic appeal, it's a foreign experience.
I generally hate me. I am always directing scorn at my appearance. So much have I done this that I wish myself invisible in social settings, by erasing my body from its own native sociality. This has the effect of mystifying my own secretions and excretions. In wishing me gone, I've come to view the parts of myself that I cannot wish away as pathologies. They confirm my fundamental lack of control.
I ache for a deep friendship. Two bodies touching, trusting one another. Yet I cannot accept my own body. This complicates relationships because my pathology spills over into a general grouchiness. I vacillate between closeness and distance. I become irritable. I burn with desire, then I burn with hate. I am a ball of tightly wound emotions. I stand alone. I walk alone. I eat alone. I remain ethical and moral in my vacuum. With nothing to test me, nothing to tease me, nothing to tempt me, nothing to please me I remain inert, a dusty relic of my flourishing humanity, my hygge, my happiness and comfort among others. I eat alone. I wash my own dishes and my own clothes. I pick up after myself alone. With no one to complain and no one to complain to I do what I please when I please. I have utter freedom and no wills to oppose, no human laws to break by living alone. I like being alone. I enjoy its confirming absence. Some embrace the oneness of it all. I embrace the none-ness.
Why construct a religion, a daily routine out of identity with the none? That would be peeling back the onion. I don't think many want to get deep with themselves or contemplate the things and the nothings they echo in song. I sit alone, not wholly understanding of my religion nor am I much of a good follower. I'd be the first to erect the laws and the first to break them. I dig deep, and still I cannot embrace the meaninglessness of life. I cannot necessarily accept the tranquility of life's maddening unraveling of my own beliefs. Over time, we lose this battle and then we die. It's a strange way of bringing the nothing into one's life. My grim reaper, my harbinger of the encroaching chaos that will envelop all of us in the end is in my harboring this fugitive called nothingness. It's the outlaw in this story, and while I feed it it pays no kind favor back. It's motives are incidental, and I better watch my step around it. It will destroy me in the end. All I can do is to lean how to avoid getting caught in its tango. It's a dance I will never win.
I'm thinking of a woman I know who is perfectly unattainable and also unavoidable. My throat is tight from anxiety, longing, and stress about her familiarity. I fear judgment. I fear the evaluative stare of others. It's character is hidden within the datum of interaction mostly cobbled into the nonverbal actions. The body once again reveals its hand in this dance between things. We are all things, and I place such undo emphasis on significance. But my poetry is just a distraction, window dressing for the real identity, the thing-ness and otherness of one another and of oneself. This thing-ness promotes an awareness of a there-ness without offering an explanation for existence. I am somewhere in a room. Shame shoots through it like a ray of light, and from this light cast upon my presence I extract meaning. I cannot explain myself. I just am, and for that alone I am ashamed.
Some activities, when deeply engaged in them, reveal the secret of invention. Kairos is a word that notes how events are gauged from the vantage point of the not-so-distant future. The occurrence of events and the actions, which set these events in motion, are incidental. Yes, we may gauge an effect in our actions upon our immediate world. The world also pushes back in its casual revealing before us. This idea is nothing new, and I'm certainly not sure why I'm rehashing it in a lighter format.
I need a place to aim. I need a place where I can focus my energies into a workable semblance of creativity. I hang my ideas on words, in their arrangement, their spoken cadence, the meaningfulness for me. What is it that may bring another to read my words are unknown to me. Even if they find intrinsic appeal, it's a foreign experience.
I generally hate me. I am always directing scorn at my appearance. So much have I done this that I wish myself invisible in social settings, by erasing my body from its own native sociality. This has the effect of mystifying my own secretions and excretions. In wishing me gone, I've come to view the parts of myself that I cannot wish away as pathologies. They confirm my fundamental lack of control.
I ache for a deep friendship. Two bodies touching, trusting one another. Yet I cannot accept my own body. This complicates relationships because my pathology spills over into a general grouchiness. I vacillate between closeness and distance. I become irritable. I burn with desire, then I burn with hate. I am a ball of tightly wound emotions. I stand alone. I walk alone. I eat alone. I remain ethical and moral in my vacuum. With nothing to test me, nothing to tease me, nothing to tempt me, nothing to please me I remain inert, a dusty relic of my flourishing humanity, my hygge, my happiness and comfort among others. I eat alone. I wash my own dishes and my own clothes. I pick up after myself alone. With no one to complain and no one to complain to I do what I please when I please. I have utter freedom and no wills to oppose, no human laws to break by living alone. I like being alone. I enjoy its confirming absence. Some embrace the oneness of it all. I embrace the none-ness.
Why construct a religion, a daily routine out of identity with the none? That would be peeling back the onion. I don't think many want to get deep with themselves or contemplate the things and the nothings they echo in song. I sit alone, not wholly understanding of my religion nor am I much of a good follower. I'd be the first to erect the laws and the first to break them. I dig deep, and still I cannot embrace the meaninglessness of life. I cannot necessarily accept the tranquility of life's maddening unraveling of my own beliefs. Over time, we lose this battle and then we die. It's a strange way of bringing the nothing into one's life. My grim reaper, my harbinger of the encroaching chaos that will envelop all of us in the end is in my harboring this fugitive called nothingness. It's the outlaw in this story, and while I feed it it pays no kind favor back. It's motives are incidental, and I better watch my step around it. It will destroy me in the end. All I can do is to lean how to avoid getting caught in its tango. It's a dance I will never win.
I'm thinking of a woman I know who is perfectly unattainable and also unavoidable. My throat is tight from anxiety, longing, and stress about her familiarity. I fear judgment. I fear the evaluative stare of others. It's character is hidden within the datum of interaction mostly cobbled into the nonverbal actions. The body once again reveals its hand in this dance between things. We are all things, and I place such undo emphasis on significance. But my poetry is just a distraction, window dressing for the real identity, the thing-ness and otherness of one another and of oneself. This thing-ness promotes an awareness of a there-ness without offering an explanation for existence. I am somewhere in a room. Shame shoots through it like a ray of light, and from this light cast upon my presence I extract meaning. I cannot explain myself. I just am, and for that alone I am ashamed.
Friday, July 2, 2010
looking up the winners
The winners are the people that completed their degrees. I'm one of the losers. I looked up one of the winners today. She works in Denver. She does statistical modeling for some company called Corona. I'm sure she lives comfortably in the city with the purported best dating scene for 20-35 year-old singles. I wouldn't know much about dating scenes, although my last date was when I lived in that area. Muncie, Indiana was certainly not a place to find a lady or even to settle down. As I've noted before, a brown aura hung over that town. I'm still stained.
My aura is dead. It fizzled out. As I've said, I'm one of the losers, and I live eternally in the penumbra of my past failures. I cannot come to terms with my quitting, nor could I come to terms with my finishing either. I was in between. Now I barely get by, and it has its romantic or exciting moments. Mostly though I find myself cooking up deranged fantasies and living by them. I find reasons to remain alone. I find reasons to alienate my few friends. My cat moans endlessly, and I continue to ignore her. That's my life. I scribble into this little diario on occasion but have nothing truly life-changing to say. Here was my recent insight.
People laugh at my jokes for reasons unknown to me. I make the jokes for reasons that are known to me, but their appeal for others is unknown to me. I accept that they are a mystery to me and the in-between I bridge with a joke is a mystery. I'm giving up my jokes. I'm in a sour mood and I sorely want a life make-over. I want to get serious, get a job, and move the fuck out of this place. I don't care where I go. I just want to head somewhere else. I need to mix up my life, and acquiring a job would help me do so. I've used this excuse before. I told myself in November that I had some writing plans. I've written 0 sentences in completion of those plans. Six months in and I've nothing to show for this year--another wash in the sand, another fragmented kelp frond cast into the surf, pocked with cigarette filters, drowned in the echoes of last night's party. Why do I write? Why do I propose? I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. Even my half-sister's hopes for my employment have gone unanswered. Nothing. I haven't talked to her since she came into town and treated me to a brunch at Casa Gallardo. That was a pleasant moment. Now I stand here, no prospects, and a cryptic message that went unanswered. "My boss wants you to do something." Then I called her back on the wrong day and she never returned the call. I know what her boss wants me to do, get my shit out of her inbox.
I look up the winners because I'm not one of them. They're the context for my own sorry text, a tear drop serves as my period. A frown functions as a quotation. A moan fills in for the vowels and a sob for the consonants. I stand around wondering why every time that I get this way nobody wants to entertain it. They just tell me to suck it up and shut the fuck up. I want to stab a fucker in the heart for trying to tell me how to live my life. I live it how I please, and I've resigned to living alone because I refused to have any affinity with the dupes and the sleepwalking wounded that surround me. I'm not sleeping. I'm well awake and scared shitless like a mouse in a sticky trap.
I write myself in circles and seek out those who write what I wish I could do for myself. I sit down with any project and lose all interest in the doing. There's a measure of anxiety that accompanies the act of writing for an audience, be it a teacher or a panel of experts on a topic. I'm a phony. I'm a fake. I'm speaking into the air. Is there anyone there that understands my snowflake unique bullshit tripe of a message? I wished that girl in the audience did. Man, she was so beautiful to perceive. Her friend, a panel member, was a bit rough at the edges, and asked me the time. I guess that was her attempt at having me behold her. I beheld her mind. She was all rough otherwise, but like a busted up looking tin can, the contents remained glistening and nutritive. She had ideas, not botulism. She's gone now too. I'm certain that she has her PhD and either lives stateside or moved back to that country that her accent revealed as something Eastern European.
All things are 'no' things. They are overdetermined by their 'not this'-ness. I'm a 'no' thing to any other thing. Things are things. That's the only symmetry a thing shares with another, the logic of naming. The thing will always buffet any attempt for the word, the logos to shape it. All the logos and the thing can do in concert is to motivate my own attitudes concerning the thing, its moral character, its consequential nature.
My aura is dead. It fizzled out. As I've said, I'm one of the losers, and I live eternally in the penumbra of my past failures. I cannot come to terms with my quitting, nor could I come to terms with my finishing either. I was in between. Now I barely get by, and it has its romantic or exciting moments. Mostly though I find myself cooking up deranged fantasies and living by them. I find reasons to remain alone. I find reasons to alienate my few friends. My cat moans endlessly, and I continue to ignore her. That's my life. I scribble into this little diario on occasion but have nothing truly life-changing to say. Here was my recent insight.
People laugh at my jokes for reasons unknown to me. I make the jokes for reasons that are known to me, but their appeal for others is unknown to me. I accept that they are a mystery to me and the in-between I bridge with a joke is a mystery. I'm giving up my jokes. I'm in a sour mood and I sorely want a life make-over. I want to get serious, get a job, and move the fuck out of this place. I don't care where I go. I just want to head somewhere else. I need to mix up my life, and acquiring a job would help me do so. I've used this excuse before. I told myself in November that I had some writing plans. I've written 0 sentences in completion of those plans. Six months in and I've nothing to show for this year--another wash in the sand, another fragmented kelp frond cast into the surf, pocked with cigarette filters, drowned in the echoes of last night's party. Why do I write? Why do I propose? I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. Even my half-sister's hopes for my employment have gone unanswered. Nothing. I haven't talked to her since she came into town and treated me to a brunch at Casa Gallardo. That was a pleasant moment. Now I stand here, no prospects, and a cryptic message that went unanswered. "My boss wants you to do something." Then I called her back on the wrong day and she never returned the call. I know what her boss wants me to do, get my shit out of her inbox.
I look up the winners because I'm not one of them. They're the context for my own sorry text, a tear drop serves as my period. A frown functions as a quotation. A moan fills in for the vowels and a sob for the consonants. I stand around wondering why every time that I get this way nobody wants to entertain it. They just tell me to suck it up and shut the fuck up. I want to stab a fucker in the heart for trying to tell me how to live my life. I live it how I please, and I've resigned to living alone because I refused to have any affinity with the dupes and the sleepwalking wounded that surround me. I'm not sleeping. I'm well awake and scared shitless like a mouse in a sticky trap.
I write myself in circles and seek out those who write what I wish I could do for myself. I sit down with any project and lose all interest in the doing. There's a measure of anxiety that accompanies the act of writing for an audience, be it a teacher or a panel of experts on a topic. I'm a phony. I'm a fake. I'm speaking into the air. Is there anyone there that understands my snowflake unique bullshit tripe of a message? I wished that girl in the audience did. Man, she was so beautiful to perceive. Her friend, a panel member, was a bit rough at the edges, and asked me the time. I guess that was her attempt at having me behold her. I beheld her mind. She was all rough otherwise, but like a busted up looking tin can, the contents remained glistening and nutritive. She had ideas, not botulism. She's gone now too. I'm certain that she has her PhD and either lives stateside or moved back to that country that her accent revealed as something Eastern European.
All things are 'no' things. They are overdetermined by their 'not this'-ness. I'm a 'no' thing to any other thing. Things are things. That's the only symmetry a thing shares with another, the logic of naming. The thing will always buffet any attempt for the word, the logos to shape it. All the logos and the thing can do in concert is to motivate my own attitudes concerning the thing, its moral character, its consequential nature.
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