Nineteen Eighty-Four

The year of one of my sister's birth. A year after my own. A year in which the Cold war was still a brewing although about to become stagnate. A time when Reagan was busy stretching the O ring of the middle class and the charts were in love with Phil Collins. But Im talking about the Orwellian world of 1984 here. If you feel overly pressured by the world's vice grip around you then you should perhaps gander at 1984 by George Orwell. I am no biblical LIbertarian but this book does have some very ethereal qualities that will make you shake in your reading slippers. It has some of the clearest and cleanest prose I have ever enjoyed. The symbolism and considerations formed within its own well constructed master narrative is phenomenal. What a mind it would take to swallow such a world of ideas passing it into such a clear and all encompassing story. This is not just another Stalin era dystopian tale for me. There is something going on in this book that screams to the ever present problem of power and the fallible spirit of man. Power and its arms of oppression are a malleable force. The shapes that we ourselves are molded into fit into a patchwork of souls to create a warming blanket for acute power interests. Our conscience attacked from within and without constantly, sought out for the greatest crime of all that of not being "Sane" in an insane world.

"Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves." Orwell - 1984

Peeing gives your feet time to think....

Below is a ridiculous little jotting I found sitting here at Nostalgia sifting through my journal( a google doc :) from my touring around days earlier this year. This is apparently what my restless and slightly inebriated mind comes up with in the middle of the night. Its funny to read something you apparently wrote yet you have no memory of ever writing it. Especially something so ridiculous. Although it is just silliness emptied from my mind's subconscious bladder I thought that I would share it... Much like me my mind enjoys peeing in public.

So here you are..... in the pitch of night in some unfamiliar abode in the Midwest. You fumble through an unfamiliar hall called to action out of a deep sleep by nature and empty bottles of Sam Adams. Remember how you are a traveling hermit? Is it any wonder you find yourself yet again confused in foreign situation? Your senses of time, place, being and location of the bathroom are ever subject to this precarious uncertainty. You are constantly entering and leaving new worlds with every fickle moment that passes. Anyway back to this moment... A yellow beam from a hall hung night light like a beacon bleeds with a flickering pulse on to the hall floor and wall. The light the color of hobo teeth creeps from the hall on into a room reflecting off a floor’s surface obviously of the non-carpeted variety. Linoleum you think?! Linoleum! That’s a good sign you semi consciously deduce as it indicates perhaps a bathroom or laundry room. You prepare to enter.

With a blind man’s hand and half the arm attached to it you reach awkwardly around a wall corner and in. You fumble until an involuntary flick of the light switch illuminates the white waterproofed room. Most of you immediately starts to deal with an intense stabbing light but your lower brain only feeling natures call emits a cerebral and non-auditory “score”. You shimmey back and forth ever forward into the room while a stabbing white light assaults deep beyond your eyeball skins. Your eye lids flip out overreacting to the light. The rounded skin curtains with lashes are dancing like a single winged moth with epilepsy causing the light to come at you with an unbearable flutter. Because of this the light that does make it through annoyingly pees into your stream of consciousness. In this situation you hope beyond hope that this is indeed a bathroom and you’re not about to pee into a Washing Machine.

You continue to blink, shimmey and fumble with hands out but finally you find yourself sitting on a toilet. Although your anatomy dictates a standing position you are sitting simply to avoid the effort of aiming your yellow business. With your peepers still adjusting your tucked back naughty zone semi-involuntarily goes to work. You regret your laziness to stand and aim as now the B vitamin contents of the newly purchased mystery multi vitamin from a drugstore in Detroit cannot be visually accessed immediately from the source. You peer down between knees and pale blonde speckled thighs. Between your legs on the floor you notice a tag flipped the wrong way coming out the side of the bathroom rug.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54t0iyp_udc
(For more info on sitting while you pee watch this instructional video)

The underside of the tag is something sewn in Swedish. Hmmm IKEA has apparently made to the heartland your mind’s voice grumbles. You are confronted with an upside down backwards word that reminds you of perhaps a species of deer with a name composed with every vowel available on the wheel of fortune. You immediately feel the hasty fabricated cheapness of the rug on the bottoms of your special feet.

Now the bottoms of your feet you remember are like a more tender and silky version of a baby's butt. This tenderfoot quality unfitting for their use as the sole ambassadors to the harsh and abrasive Earth has been provided by a lifelong and hypervigilant campaign of over protection. Like a pale and frail young prince isolated in an ivory tower they are tender to a fault unable to handle the real world. However, as a result of this effort your porcelain feet can now take in the world like a god gifted sixth sense.

You see the bottoms of your feet are like a magical scientific instrument unlike any other. They can feel, see, taste and communicate in a universal stream of sense beyond imagination. Your feet upon the bathroom rug senses the strands of cotton separated between the feeling from the pseudo strands of plastic spines woven into the rug. With your feet’s sixth sense the components of the rug are broken down into a chemical language of elements. Atoms are counted. They back it up a bit now as Urine content is assessed, tasted and interviewed. Bacterial colonies are visited by diplomats from your foot’s grand network of sensory outreach. You sense a particularly interesting bacteria named Teri, Teri the Bacteria. Teri enjoys deep sea diving and molecular monopoly. Like any bacteria she tastes terrible. Moving on your sixth sense dives deeper into Teri beyond her cell wall and plasma membrane. Swimming through the cytoplasm deeper through her single spaghetti like string of DNA. Your sense commutes deeper breaking into a single nucleotide a universe of scope and activity in itself. Cornered off is an atom and your sense dives deeper towards it.

Your sense dodges off pesky electrons as it travels into what now seems like a football stadium of open space. It approaches four balls of protons and neutrons. You say hello and you peel back the skin of a proton and reveal a super massive black hole among a universe of its own but quickly reseal it out of fear. You peel back the skin of a neutron and reveal a supernova among another universe exploding out with a force that would make a billion nuclear bombs feel like morning drizzle. With wonder and amazement still boiling up in you, you quickly reseal the neutron. You ponder the profundity of it all but before you can make any sense of it you are finished with your yellow business and immediately shoot upwards and walk off the rug. Your eyes now adjusted to the light you flick the switch and now try and make sense of a new pitch abyss of darkness. Again you enter a new world.

Prayer for America!

In light of the way the Republicans have change the word "old" into the word "new" with their "new" Pledge for America. I thought I would share with a prayer to Darth Vader Capitalism that I have written that explains in a little more detail just what they are praying for this coming election.

Dear Holy Facist Corporate America,

Please benevolent Corporate Darth Vader Capitalism we pray before you today with faith that you will hear our humble calls for the apocalypse. Please oh lord continue to pollute our planet into that Wall-E movie world, while doing so please continue reduce everyone to a chinese slave worker with your chosen knights of bankers and ceos as our overlords, give us Health Care that spends more on Air than on Care. Please oh lord give us lower and lower infant mortality. Give us more and more and MORE War and conflict, Especially the kind that is insanely costly to most of us and extremely profitable to your chosen ones. Give us more Socialism for the Chosen ones you know the ones who truly deserve it. Please keep that Median income on its way down to hell where it belongs right next to ethics, justice and common sense. Just please continue to spread the income Gap to Alpha Centari. Tighten the grip around our democracy's balls until they finally finally fall off. Keep the puppet show in Washington Alive oh lord with your hand so far up its ass that your finger tips serve as eyes. Please continue to agitate the Israely conflict just for fuck all fun, also continue to reach inside a woman's Uterus and make choices for her. Keep the smoke screen of Racism against Mexicans to stall any rationalization of immigration to keep that nice beautiful brown flow of cheap labor coming into our land (the way we secretly desperately desire). Please continue to sell that ego and ethos laden snake oil to white trash and loud mouthed cocky red faced white middle class men to hijack their own needs in favor of their lower brains ideas of about themselves. Oh and of course keep that Hypnotizing watch of religion on our side where it belongs. Blessed be the Manipulators of the meek oh lord. Please keep diligently working to wipe away that dirty Human face to our democracy and economic system. Replace it with your benevolent sky-nett capitalism as you have been doing. Anyway Lord we must now dine upon these Ferraris sirloins and these Fabergé egg omelets. So to conclude we ask you these things in the name of the continued R-ape and Pillage of humanity, Amen.

Man's Search for Meaning - No Really No Excuses

Just finished a re-read of Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and thought I would write down some purpley prosed praise to the author rather than paint a portrait of him to hang on my bedroom wall..... I cannot paint a stick figure

This book burns the weakest parts of my soul with a realism and an inspiring insight like some kind of existential napalm. It sticks to everything in my life that I have ever let slip into the void of an existential vacuum or worn on my sleeve. A giant dick of No Excuses slapped me in the face repeatedly while reading this book. If you ever wished to vent your frustration over your suffering, toil or depressed dread over any aspect of life perhaps imagine that Victor Frankl is among your audience.

He is a sage of the human condition. His philosophy, mind and body has stood among the waters of humanities darkest hour. He boils up an amazing stew of his own thought but throws in a little Nietzsche, Sartre, Spinoza, and Dostoevsky to flavor. If I can grasp anything from this book it is the realization that you must stand up against the tornado of everything that is this shitshow called modern life. Compelling one to find meaning among life like a Mendelian Monk changing the world, your world forever. Even when life has stripped you of all comfort, joy, status, personal identity, family, friends, work and even your own self conception there is still not only meaning to be found in the future but power and meaning to be found in that very suffering. Suffering can sharpen the very tools of responsive awareness of your world that allows one to cut meaty chunks of meaning out of it moment by moment. Whether youre climbing a mountain or digging your own grave you are compelled to cut, cut and recut your life’s meaning.

In a biography of an experience Frankl commandeers his greatest suffering to become the point at which he discovers everything necessary for achieving meaning and overcoming anything. Taking that meaning for him the completion of his manuscript and theories on logotherapy and translating it into a concise and constructive life changing psychological method for addressing a range of tears from housewives to suicide risks. In this effort Frankl transforms his analysis of the life and psychology of the concentration into a beating heart of solid philosophical gold. He offers something for everyone. No one can escape the added benefits the ideas of this book poses to a more thoughtful genuine life.

We are at a point in time when 40% of people seeking mental health help from professionals do not have a single biological or neurological identifiable disorder but rather just an existential vacuum that once used to be called the soul. For instance YAVIS(Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent and Successful) make up over a 25% of Psychological Counseling treatment dollars. Mormon Housewives, and over achieving student "sufferers" now turn to Zombiefying drugs and pop psychology self help books for "answers" before they have even started to begin asking themselves the right questions. Others turn to worse options Ocyodon Coladas and meth for void assessment. We are a Prozac and Meth Nation for fake christ's sake. Man's Search For Meaning should be a required reading to be considered a Human Being.

I’ll admit I am butchering any calm cool account that this book deserves. Perhaps I am wearing the purple prose tinted glasses of recently read author adulation and if this comes off as such than I implore you to read the book and call me out.

Fools Gold: Inside the Glenn Beck Goldline Scheme

Infographic by The Big Picture

Im just going to let the world know right now that I believe that I am developing a bit of a serious Cormac McCarthy fetish. My esteem for his work seems to be turning a dangerous corner towards serious stalker fiction writer Man-crush. My friend Erin turned me on to him a few years (and over a thousand pages) back and I havnt been the same Jex since. I have just exfoliated my mind grinding through the pages of yet another McCarthy Novel No Country For Old Men. A fun spa treatment for the mind treat that I want to recommend to everyone.

( Long Pause for census bureau guy at the door. Im now on the social grid )

Im not sure what it is in particular about his books that gets my goose every time. At first glance maybe it's the Baby scalping cowboys or Post-Apocalyptic cannibals eating newborns in his books. Perhaps its the blood that runs, gurgles and sprays all over the pages but I think that upon closer inspection getting past the grinding gore it becomes really those streaks of humanity, the human condition and man's search for meaning that fill his books in the most profound ways. He really just puts man/woman out there in the universe and after doing so has this pragmatic way of articulating a deep anxiety of the world that bellows loudly into many of the same dark places that we forget about or overlook. He lays it all out on the world like a card dealer skillfully dealing his last hand. In his book he has this loud and concise voice of god, Hemingway meets Faulkner meets old wise Grizzly Bear prose that I seem to always eat up smiling like cow tongues boiled in Whiskey. His style is a true testament to some of that old fashion real Amuurican pragmatism in writing that has at times left our literary scene. Im left wishing that Cormac McCarthy is somehow my long lost wise great uncle. A haggard wise and grey old man living in some impossibly desolate corner of the forgotten west spitting deep wisdom at me in between naps on a creaking old porch.

Anyhoo all praises aside, I Just wanted to share a few resonating sentences of his with yall. Hoping that if you havnt read any of his books that you consider picking one up.

"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."

— Cormac McCarthy

Monsters of Eyes in shades

(Excerpt from a speech given at a literary conference in Tucson AZ.)

Prof. Hollywood Green

Associate Professor of English Literature at Grove City College speaking at a 2010 Spring Conference in Tucson Arizona celebrating the work and life of Henry James.

Ladies and Gentlemen with so much fine scholastic intensity shared on the subject of Henry James proceeding me I thought it might be permissible to deviate a bit off the subject. I had some very relevant remarks prepared but have decided to share a few thoughts I have recently had a little outside the given curriculum so please bare with me.

Ladies and gentlemen today I was accosted while on my merry way to this very conference. Amidst the gleam of a sweltering Tucson day a vagrant drenched in sweat and the sorrows of society confronted me after I had just made a fresh purchase of coffee. His hand was outstretched signaling me for some kind of payment. I must admit my initial reaction was that of resignation, as he had offered me no service for this expected payment. I admit to being a bit naïve but this is not a common occurrence in my armchair corner of the country. Ironically here in the greatest country on Earth(America) we find ourselves burdened with an over abundance of the residentially impaired. An epidemic of the disease of homelessness is growing faster than our waistlines for reasons all too complicated to consider here but the question of what is to be done still remains. It is on this subject that I wish to address you.

I know I am just a lowly man of Letters and I know this is a conference on the life and work of Henry James but I have taken this dilemma onto my conscience. This disease clogs our city streets with shopping carts and covers our pubic restroom walls with feces. These lost wandering urban hermits give the image of our grand prosperous country a fat lip but perhaps we can turn that plump frown upside down, turning our burdens into blessings. Why don’t we give them a chance at a true productive purpose in life? Give them a job title other than degenerate scallywag. Given our dire situation and mission would it seem so crazy to propose placing solar panels on the homeless? Catching the rays that fall on the homeless to power the rest of us still devoted to working. Killing 2 birdie burdens with one stone. Turning our army of the unemployed into an army of sunray miners.

One doesn’t need to look at a haggard and worn bum long to realize that he spends a lot of time in the sun. The bleached hair, faded salvation army clothes and a face cracked and embossed to a weathered brown screams sunshine. Imagine if we somehow employed a solar panel in-between the bum and sun think how we could all benefit. Something along the lines of large solar sails, panels, hats or trench coats made from solar fabric for the homeless to sport while they are walking about doing their favorite thing…Nothing.. We can fit these daywalkers up with new solar hats maybe take away the Hot and Ready little Caesars sign or furniture liquidation poster-board and give them a solar panel. The homeless like a monster made of eyes remind painfully reminds us ills of society in every direction of their gaze. Ills we all do not wish to think about. This ingenious plan would place sunglasses on all the pairs of eyes these homeless monsters possess protecting them and us.

Give the bums portable battery packs to be charged by the harnessed sunrays from the solar jacket worn by the bum. Now rather than being a terrible drain on the social grid they power the electrical grid. Their pathetic existence can actually charge our iPhones. If implemented now when you are accosted on a city street by one of these putrescent street daemons for change you can rethink that always awkward “not for you scum” response and give them a few quarters because hey they help provide the power for the lights on your garage that keep them away from your property at night[when they’re off duty J].

To get the bums to comply with their new task we could entice and regulate them with drugs and booze. For the mentally insane we employ psychologists to convince them that their solar jackets keep aliens from eating their bag of cans. At dusk we have the sun soaked bums trade the battery packs back for cases of mouthwash and antifreeze or balloons of heroin or baggies of meth or magic invisible space tokens. Its a win win.

When thinking about policy that will shape society it is important to remember that human beings respond to incentives and bums of course are part human. With these new incentives a now well regulated and trained bum will follow the sun wherever it goes to keep their life’s meaning(drugs ,booze or cans) flowing, operating much better than a stationary unit.

Not all cities drenched in the smelly garbage juice of homelessness have sunny climates so using my model for incentives we can lure the sun catchers to hotter sunnier horizons. We can lure bums from the sunless north with mini bottles of vodka on fishing line dragging them slowly along the way to waiting buses that will transport our Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis bums to Phoenix, Death Valley and Tucson. Getting people to help out with bum fishing will not take much in fact my guess is that we would be overrun with volunteers.

I know I may be getting over excited and all this may still remain shocking to you but as a solution it is just as dirty and inevitable as excrement so get off your high horse and wipe your ass. I am talking about climate change! I am talking about the green revolution! I’m surprised that Al Gore and his climate magicians haven’t thought of this sooner.

To riff on Joyce Kimler think that the homeless who like the ever-present beauty of a tree also sit and stare at god all day and raise their arms to pray(to aliens). If we can just redirect that praise to the sun and put a solar panel in their hands we can give the bums purpose in real life while giving our digital society the juice it desperately needs. The time for this ingenious plan is now. Like Robert Herrick we must make much of time, we must catch those sunrays while we may oh time is still a flying, for this bum wasting away in the sun today, tomorrow will be dying.