“There’s a crack in everything” –Leonard Cohen
I’m sitting on the patio of a café on Jacques Cartier Square in the old section of Montreal on a Wednesday morning. But what I call morning is afternoon to most other people. The city is picturesque and the women are beautiful with long hair and fantastic breasts in the hot summer streets. The varying architectural styles spanning over two hundred years blend together seamlessly and there’s no discord in sight. The sidewalks are clean and the coffee is fantastic. Bookstores sell works in French and English, and people are easy to talk to. It’s a most civilized place; so civilized in fact, it’s not to be believed. And rightly so.
I know that this perfectly executed cappuccino, the fine cigarettes, the desirable young waitress, the beautiful buildings on this square, and all the other pleasantries surrounding me are a soothing denial of basic realities. Our distractions and desires pull us through another day in the middle of an existential tragedy. Everything we see is a curtain pulled across our eyes to avert our gaze from the one ultimate fact. The beautiful life is a lie, a massive act of denial both on the personal and mass-cultural scale. Nonetheless it’s a n ecessary lie, for without it we’d be scratching our brains out through our eye sockets in a fit of terror. We just wouldn’t be able to come to terms with the truth of the situation.
If there’s a rule in this world it’s that man is a beast, just another animal. Civilized living is a fragile charade. We must kill and/or be killed, suffer never-ending rejection and disappointment, starve, and turn on a self-destructive axis of lies that never leads anywhere.
And yet, in spite of these prevailing conditions we find ways of exempting ourselves from the facts of the situation –at least temporarily. These magic moments of happiness, these feeling of security, cast a spell and keep us in the game. They keep us striving in a situation that’s ultimately hopeless.
And yet, be it false or not, we cannot keep living without hope. Desire is the engine of life. If we should truly awaken from it, then we would simply die.
When people indulge in beauty, desire, or even hope, I can’t help imagining two pigs fucking on the blood-slick floor of a slaughterhouse, totally oblivious to what’s in store for them.
This world, this life, is a slaughterhouse. It’s a butcher shop of hearts serving some master we do not know or understand.
Everyone ought to realize this. We’ve all seen the cemetery, the faded photographs of memory, and the mountains of history we sit lightly upon. It’s a history of crime and disaster, a long-term perpetual massacre where everyone is guilty. Gas masks and monuments riddled with bullet holes are evidence of this. Men were enjoying good wine and classical music while shoveling Jews into an oven by the truckload. The German’s turn in the fire came soon thereafter. Fucking and murder are the norm for our species. If you want to see men release their most vicious instincts, just observe what happens when people are hungry or afraid. The whole daydream of civilized Christian behavior is completely forgotten.
On a perfect afternoon in Montreal it’s easy to forget how these people would respond if they were in danger or if there weren’t enough food for everyone. It’s easy enough to forget that you are on a one-way trip into some sort of terrible personal decline. The pleasantries are just a thin film covering over a black pit of fearful instincts and terrible realities. Even before we had the means to destroy one another, there were plenty of adversaries in the natural world. There’s always been disease and starvation and death. Even in the most advanced society, everyone is still going to die. How can anyone come to terms with this? They can’t and never will.
We all know this, but no one seems to feel the reality of it. There are merely words, rather than a certainty known deep in the heart. If the knowledge did penetrate to that level there would be no way to stifle a scream. These pages are a scream.
The terror of the situation ordinarily remains a secret in plain view. We turn our eyes away. That’s the only way to go on eating and fucking in the midst of a never-ending holocaust, to laugh and continue living on top of a mountain of corpses.
Modern life in the midst of cities and civilization is a fascinating truce between opposite realities. Fear and hope live side by side, trying their best to ignore one another. Systems of safety and rules give the impression of security, while underneath the surface we remain wolves and maggots. The slightest disruption of our system causes man to revert to beast. Why else would a funeral or a mugging seem so terrible? It’s a normal fact of life in nature, but in a civilized world it’s a shocking contradiction to everything we’re striving for. All the aims of our artificial rational world are instantly and totally refuted by something as simple and as common as a funeral. We deal with its incomprehensibility for a moment; then forget it as quickly as possible. But you can’t avert your gaze forever. The coffin is real. So is the freak, the rapist, the beggar, the deathbed and everything else our civilization is attempting to hide or defeat.
If by some terrible magic, we all suddenly came to and understood what’s really happening to us, what kind of fodder we are for mechanisms beyond our understanding, the earth would convulse in flames. Or maybe nothing would happen at all. Maybe the sun and the moon and stars wouldn’t give a fuck about it. And that’s fine too. In Montreal, I can defer payment on life for another day. I light another cigarette and call for my waitress.
July 9, 2008 / Montreal
Monday, April 5, 2010
burning
“How can there be laughter, how can there be pleasure, when the whole world is burning?”
-The Dhammapada
And yet there’s laughter. There’s pleasure. And not just for those who would refuse to acknowledge the fire. The burning world around us even adds to the fantastic lunacy of that laughter. Wild gods in the rapture of absolute tragedy, we say, “Let it burn.”
Denver
March 17, 2009
-The Dhammapada
And yet there’s laughter. There’s pleasure. And not just for those who would refuse to acknowledge the fire. The burning world around us even adds to the fantastic lunacy of that laughter. Wild gods in the rapture of absolute tragedy, we say, “Let it burn.”
Denver
March 17, 2009
existential amnesia
“All gone is as good as never was” –Goethe
“Existence has no memory” –Sartre
“If it is true that what perishes has never existed, birth, source of the perishable, exists as little as the rest.” -Cioran
I got out of bed today around noon and ambled down here to the café. I’m sitting outside on a crowded patio in the warm sunlight of an unseasonably pleasant January afternoon, feeling well rested and happy in spite of last night’s drunken madness and it’s weird fallout. But what I really want right now is to somehow get behind the wheel of a car and drive it west at a maximum rate of speed until I run out of highway and glimpse the misty distance of infinity looming up over the sand and black cliffs of the west coast.
I just want to go, and that’s the truest expression of my spirit. Hit the road and never slow down. My song is the sound of an engine and wheels on the blacktop, the wind whipping through an open window, the loud soaring music of a life in motion and a road that never ends.
But the road does end, and there’s no way around this fact. Life is finite and in spite of the desire to go forever, I know I can’t. The end comes too soon, and I know I’ll never want to let go. I have a strong attachment to my life and it’s beautiful phantasmagoria of brilliance and love. I am terrified and depressed by aging and death in spite of my best efforts to come to terms with the idea.
Death is the ultimate reality, the final word. Man, unlike any other animal, has the blessing and curse of being aware of his fate in the grave. This is what gives us our most unique quality as a species. Man is complicated by his knowledge of death’s imminence, that inescapable end that is impossible to cope with or accept.
There is no solution, although people deceive themselves in many ways to escape the fact. A considerable amount of human activity boils down to just this. The illusive sense of immortality may come from one’s offspring, an important legacy, prolific creativity, worldly accomplishment, or even the wildest religious delusions involving promises of eternal life. I on the other hand feel a strong instinct to confront the terrible fact without deluding myself this way. I’ve got an obsessive curiosity about what’s really happening. It’s a mystery I want to peer into regardless of the emotional cost. I maintain an ideal of bravery and honesty with myself, and I want the truth even if it should prove to be intolerable. It’s a strange and interesting obsession that no one can really explain.
Death’s certainty is the one thing the mind knows, but can never hope to digest. I certainly cannot come to terms with it, nor can I ever hope to accept it. My own personal reaction to this impossible problem is to try and grab the thing by the horns, to barge out of existence in the most confrontational way possible. At this time in my life, that seems to mean suicide. Maybe I will feel differently when I’m older and wiser, but for the time being it appears that this is the best way to approach it. Rather than flee until I can no longer evade the inevitable, I choose the way of Hitler in his bunker. I will not be taken alive by old age, senility, incontinence and physical decay. Mine is not an answer of any sort, but it’s one of many ways of dealing with the total impossibility of an answer. Really, it’s frightening and sad because I don’t want to die.
I guess I can’t know anything certain about it until the time comes to raise a pistol to my own temple and truly confront the strange and inconceivable concept that this thought is to be my last thought. When I pull the trigger the curtain will come down in the form of a paradox of being and non-being. I’ll cease to exist, and with me the whole world will vanish. When it’s gone, there will be no trace that it ever did exist. The zero-glyph circle of nothingness will close over my past in a way that causes it to have never existed. And if this sort of retroactive annihilation erases my existence, what is today? As I sit writing this, my world and I are both positively real. But when I die there will be a backwards-in-time motion sweeping everything that ever was into oblivion. The future will erase the past, with the falling of the hammer on a Smith and Wesson revolver.
In light of all this, I can only assume that here/now is not real and I do not exist. In my perception, reality takes on the suspicious qualities of a phantom. But we are here and this is clearly real, even if only through these human perceptions. That’s the mysterious aspect of it. It baffles the mind that something can emerge from the all-encompassing brackets of nothing. But reality is not carved in stone and nothing has permanence. The idea of permanence is just an unreal characteristic of the mind. Everything is ethereal, just so much vapor dispersing in the empty air. No permanence. No memory.
In the end my conclusion on this musing is that since there’s no real solution, then there’s nothing to worry about. The rest is entirely out of our hands. The impossibility of an answer removes the burden of trying to find one. So we live today and whatever happens tomorrow isn’t our problem. The only thing to do is get on the road and feel the bliss of this fleeting mystery we find ourselves in the middle of. Until the road ends, there remains the speed of life.
January 18, 2009
Market Café / Denver
“Existence has no memory” –Sartre
“If it is true that what perishes has never existed, birth, source of the perishable, exists as little as the rest.” -Cioran
I got out of bed today around noon and ambled down here to the café. I’m sitting outside on a crowded patio in the warm sunlight of an unseasonably pleasant January afternoon, feeling well rested and happy in spite of last night’s drunken madness and it’s weird fallout. But what I really want right now is to somehow get behind the wheel of a car and drive it west at a maximum rate of speed until I run out of highway and glimpse the misty distance of infinity looming up over the sand and black cliffs of the west coast.
I just want to go, and that’s the truest expression of my spirit. Hit the road and never slow down. My song is the sound of an engine and wheels on the blacktop, the wind whipping through an open window, the loud soaring music of a life in motion and a road that never ends.
But the road does end, and there’s no way around this fact. Life is finite and in spite of the desire to go forever, I know I can’t. The end comes too soon, and I know I’ll never want to let go. I have a strong attachment to my life and it’s beautiful phantasmagoria of brilliance and love. I am terrified and depressed by aging and death in spite of my best efforts to come to terms with the idea.
Death is the ultimate reality, the final word. Man, unlike any other animal, has the blessing and curse of being aware of his fate in the grave. This is what gives us our most unique quality as a species. Man is complicated by his knowledge of death’s imminence, that inescapable end that is impossible to cope with or accept.
There is no solution, although people deceive themselves in many ways to escape the fact. A considerable amount of human activity boils down to just this. The illusive sense of immortality may come from one’s offspring, an important legacy, prolific creativity, worldly accomplishment, or even the wildest religious delusions involving promises of eternal life. I on the other hand feel a strong instinct to confront the terrible fact without deluding myself this way. I’ve got an obsessive curiosity about what’s really happening. It’s a mystery I want to peer into regardless of the emotional cost. I maintain an ideal of bravery and honesty with myself, and I want the truth even if it should prove to be intolerable. It’s a strange and interesting obsession that no one can really explain.
Death’s certainty is the one thing the mind knows, but can never hope to digest. I certainly cannot come to terms with it, nor can I ever hope to accept it. My own personal reaction to this impossible problem is to try and grab the thing by the horns, to barge out of existence in the most confrontational way possible. At this time in my life, that seems to mean suicide. Maybe I will feel differently when I’m older and wiser, but for the time being it appears that this is the best way to approach it. Rather than flee until I can no longer evade the inevitable, I choose the way of Hitler in his bunker. I will not be taken alive by old age, senility, incontinence and physical decay. Mine is not an answer of any sort, but it’s one of many ways of dealing with the total impossibility of an answer. Really, it’s frightening and sad because I don’t want to die.
I guess I can’t know anything certain about it until the time comes to raise a pistol to my own temple and truly confront the strange and inconceivable concept that this thought is to be my last thought. When I pull the trigger the curtain will come down in the form of a paradox of being and non-being. I’ll cease to exist, and with me the whole world will vanish. When it’s gone, there will be no trace that it ever did exist. The zero-glyph circle of nothingness will close over my past in a way that causes it to have never existed. And if this sort of retroactive annihilation erases my existence, what is today? As I sit writing this, my world and I are both positively real. But when I die there will be a backwards-in-time motion sweeping everything that ever was into oblivion. The future will erase the past, with the falling of the hammer on a Smith and Wesson revolver.
In light of all this, I can only assume that here/now is not real and I do not exist. In my perception, reality takes on the suspicious qualities of a phantom. But we are here and this is clearly real, even if only through these human perceptions. That’s the mysterious aspect of it. It baffles the mind that something can emerge from the all-encompassing brackets of nothing. But reality is not carved in stone and nothing has permanence. The idea of permanence is just an unreal characteristic of the mind. Everything is ethereal, just so much vapor dispersing in the empty air. No permanence. No memory.
In the end my conclusion on this musing is that since there’s no real solution, then there’s nothing to worry about. The rest is entirely out of our hands. The impossibility of an answer removes the burden of trying to find one. So we live today and whatever happens tomorrow isn’t our problem. The only thing to do is get on the road and feel the bliss of this fleeting mystery we find ourselves in the middle of. Until the road ends, there remains the speed of life.
January 18, 2009
Market Café / Denver
twenty-eight
Walking on a perfect beach with my friend, looking at the sea on my birthday, I wondered why I couldn’t find any sense of happiness. I wondered why I felt 28 dead years taking me down with them. There was no escaping it. There was no more youth. Only the fascinating descent remained. My song, no longer the exuberant anthem of youth, darkened with the bitter low chords of a death march, and has been that way ever since. Let the sun make a terrible roar while it goes down. Let’s look into the grim face of god fearlessly and without any hope of finding light there. We will stab the darkness with our terrible knowledge.
September 1, 2008 / Cannon Beach, Oregon
September 1, 2008 / Cannon Beach, Oregon
from a cold beach
It’s been a calm day on the beach. When we got here, we drove over a hill and I saw the ocean, once again, for the first time. We parked the car and I climbed over a sand dune to take it all in. I walked in the cold surf with Lauren and even took a nap for a little while on the sand. Lauren says happy birthday and throws her arms around me. Everything is pleasant, but I am having a really hard time ignoring how sad I feel. I’m feeling the time. My birthday depresses me. I do not want to admit that time is a limited thing and that I am using mine up fast. Youth is the source of all inspiration. The supposed wisdom of age is worthless. Old people are dead people. Everything right and profound is to be found in youth. Age is just the means of actualizing that innate wisdom. Or at least that's what Hitler said.
Considering the twenty-seventh year of my life, the year I am now burying, I try to interpret the events to find some sort of meaning as to what the hell I've been going through and what I ought to do next. History is simple, but interpreting the chain of events requires the originality of an artist and the understanding of a psychologist. This also applies one who tries to penetrate the meaning of one's own personal history.
Coming of age is a matter of disappointment. When you are young you have faith in yourself and believe anything can be done. You’re sure you’ll be important, talented, youthful genius incarnate. You know everything will conclude magnificently. By the time you turn twenty-eight it has become clear that it's not going to turn out that way.
Real life has emerged as a stalemate of sorts, a halfway meeting of ideals ands reality. But let's not kid ourselves: reality holds all the aces. Hopes, dreams, and convictions are still holding out in a few key strategic positions, but they are locked into and endgame and there's no way out of it.
Yeah, youth is over. You are finally who you're going to be. All the possibilities have been eliminated in a game of existential solitaire leaving just one card: the person you have become. This is it. There you are. The end.
September 1, 2008
Cannon Beach, Oregon
Considering the twenty-seventh year of my life, the year I am now burying, I try to interpret the events to find some sort of meaning as to what the hell I've been going through and what I ought to do next. History is simple, but interpreting the chain of events requires the originality of an artist and the understanding of a psychologist. This also applies one who tries to penetrate the meaning of one's own personal history.
Coming of age is a matter of disappointment. When you are young you have faith in yourself and believe anything can be done. You’re sure you’ll be important, talented, youthful genius incarnate. You know everything will conclude magnificently. By the time you turn twenty-eight it has become clear that it's not going to turn out that way.
Real life has emerged as a stalemate of sorts, a halfway meeting of ideals ands reality. But let's not kid ourselves: reality holds all the aces. Hopes, dreams, and convictions are still holding out in a few key strategic positions, but they are locked into and endgame and there's no way out of it.
Yeah, youth is over. You are finally who you're going to be. All the possibilities have been eliminated in a game of existential solitaire leaving just one card: the person you have become. This is it. There you are. The end.
September 1, 2008
Cannon Beach, Oregon
Daily bummer
There’s nothing in the news this week but inhumanity, mass murder, and a total lack of any sort of justice for those who rape kill and fuck over good people.
Last week, in response to terroristic heckling in southern outskirts of their eternally disputed territory, the Israeli army rolled into the Gaza strip for what amounts to the most shameless display of hatred and brutal violence in recent memory. It was done with American tax dollars and with our full political support. Anyone with the illusion that Americans maintain the moral high ground needs to think long and hard about the massacre we all just saw on television. It was a racial hate crime of the highest degree and we picked up the tab. As of yesterday thirteen Israelis had lost their lives as opposed to the nine hundred or so dead in Gaza. But so be it, they’re not god’s chosen race, right? To a Zionist, They’re niggers and their lives are just so much stinking litter to be burned.
Equally shocking is the reaction on this front. Americans have reacted to the daily massacres in Gaza by switching the dial to whatever football game is on the other channel. Even worse has been the so-called Christian response, which we saw a little bit of here in Denver a couple of days ago at the pro-Israel rally in front of the state capitol. The people that turned out for it vomited all manner of unconvincing rhetoric to justify the actions of a small fanatical race cult that has played this country like a violin for decades. The argument in favor of the murders ranged from senseless comparisons to the holocaust to patriotic slogans to the idea of Israel “defending itself.” As if a thing like this can be called defensive. It’s pretty hard for me to accept that people turned out to take pride in this sort of inhumanity. If I had known about the rally in advance I would have gone over there sporting an Israeli flag with a swastika stitched onto it.
It’s not clear what Israel expects, but they seem to believe the Palestinians will simply dry up and die if they keep the jackboot on their throat long enough. But that won’t ever happen. Hatred will escalate forever, and someday Israel may find itself alone and isolated, peering into the next episode of the holocaust without any protection. And that will be perfectly fitting for them. It will be what they earned.
Let’s not get too sentimental about the poor Palestinians though. Just because they are being evicted from their lands and murdered in mass numbers doesn’t necessarily make them innocent. If the tables were somehow turned they would do the same thing to the Jews. It’s too easy to side with the victims in a world where the strong kill and the weak are killed, regardless of who’s who. It’s too easy to demonize those with the power to do wrong, to never think about what the weak would do if they were suddenly empowered. For instance, in America the guilt tends to be loaded onto the archetype of the oppressive white man. But can you imagine what sort of insane and vicious social fist-fuck would have ensued if the blacks were in control instead? There certainly would be no talk about universal tolerance and reparations for slavery. Oh, digressions.
At this time the real crime lies in the general popular apathy about everything. What happens in Israel is someone else’s problem and to the common American it takes too much effort to read a newspaper and care about what it says. Those who back this sort of violence are few and far between, but those who let it happen through their lack of concern are everywhere. And that’s what we’ll be held guilty for if we ever have to stand and be judged. It looks subtle on the surface, but there’s blood on our hands. We mostly looked the other way while crimes were being committed.
There was also yet another nasty bummer at breakfast this morning carried by disappointing articles in the Times. Looks like the new president has no interest whatsoever in launching any sort of criminal investigations into the sleazy fucked up Gestapo tactics that characterized the last administration’s policies and programs. It gives me the impression that he’s afraid to cross the CIA. Obama basically said he respects them too much to put them into circumstances where they would have to be constantly looking over their shoulder while trying to work.
Really?
Seems like people with the power to commit those crimes ought to be considering the consequences and repercussions. Bush was already talking about doing pre-emptive pardons for these unethical creeps until Cheney put an end to that by remarking that pardons are unnecessary for people who haven’t committed a crime. And there’s the catch. They have not technically committed any crimes. The Bush administration has been so insidiously careful in maintaining their legal cover that even while completely unethical acts were made policy, they kept their asses covered. I wish they had been this thoroughly careful while they were theorizing their bungled war. But the difference is that in a botched war there’s someone else to pay the price. When there’s crime or debacle in American politics, those responsible always walk away unscathed while others bleed for it on some foreign soil. There’s no responsibility. You can ruin countless lives, lie to the public, fuck a country over, be it consciously or accidentally, and then just retire. The worst-case scenario is to go home humiliated and live out the rest of your years in wealthy seclusion like Nixon.
Watching the Bush administration slither out that way has me feeling a vicious desire for revenge. Humiliation is not enough. The man and all his accomplices need to be arrested and mercilessly interrogated on national television. Maybe even dragged behind a pickup truck. We’d have the ultimate reality show on our hands. Producers could pitch it with a title like Executive Fear Factor.
January 12, 2009 / Denver
Last week, in response to terroristic heckling in southern outskirts of their eternally disputed territory, the Israeli army rolled into the Gaza strip for what amounts to the most shameless display of hatred and brutal violence in recent memory. It was done with American tax dollars and with our full political support. Anyone with the illusion that Americans maintain the moral high ground needs to think long and hard about the massacre we all just saw on television. It was a racial hate crime of the highest degree and we picked up the tab. As of yesterday thirteen Israelis had lost their lives as opposed to the nine hundred or so dead in Gaza. But so be it, they’re not god’s chosen race, right? To a Zionist, They’re niggers and their lives are just so much stinking litter to be burned.
Equally shocking is the reaction on this front. Americans have reacted to the daily massacres in Gaza by switching the dial to whatever football game is on the other channel. Even worse has been the so-called Christian response, which we saw a little bit of here in Denver a couple of days ago at the pro-Israel rally in front of the state capitol. The people that turned out for it vomited all manner of unconvincing rhetoric to justify the actions of a small fanatical race cult that has played this country like a violin for decades. The argument in favor of the murders ranged from senseless comparisons to the holocaust to patriotic slogans to the idea of Israel “defending itself.” As if a thing like this can be called defensive. It’s pretty hard for me to accept that people turned out to take pride in this sort of inhumanity. If I had known about the rally in advance I would have gone over there sporting an Israeli flag with a swastika stitched onto it.
It’s not clear what Israel expects, but they seem to believe the Palestinians will simply dry up and die if they keep the jackboot on their throat long enough. But that won’t ever happen. Hatred will escalate forever, and someday Israel may find itself alone and isolated, peering into the next episode of the holocaust without any protection. And that will be perfectly fitting for them. It will be what they earned.
Let’s not get too sentimental about the poor Palestinians though. Just because they are being evicted from their lands and murdered in mass numbers doesn’t necessarily make them innocent. If the tables were somehow turned they would do the same thing to the Jews. It’s too easy to side with the victims in a world where the strong kill and the weak are killed, regardless of who’s who. It’s too easy to demonize those with the power to do wrong, to never think about what the weak would do if they were suddenly empowered. For instance, in America the guilt tends to be loaded onto the archetype of the oppressive white man. But can you imagine what sort of insane and vicious social fist-fuck would have ensued if the blacks were in control instead? There certainly would be no talk about universal tolerance and reparations for slavery. Oh, digressions.
At this time the real crime lies in the general popular apathy about everything. What happens in Israel is someone else’s problem and to the common American it takes too much effort to read a newspaper and care about what it says. Those who back this sort of violence are few and far between, but those who let it happen through their lack of concern are everywhere. And that’s what we’ll be held guilty for if we ever have to stand and be judged. It looks subtle on the surface, but there’s blood on our hands. We mostly looked the other way while crimes were being committed.
There was also yet another nasty bummer at breakfast this morning carried by disappointing articles in the Times. Looks like the new president has no interest whatsoever in launching any sort of criminal investigations into the sleazy fucked up Gestapo tactics that characterized the last administration’s policies and programs. It gives me the impression that he’s afraid to cross the CIA. Obama basically said he respects them too much to put them into circumstances where they would have to be constantly looking over their shoulder while trying to work.
Really?
Seems like people with the power to commit those crimes ought to be considering the consequences and repercussions. Bush was already talking about doing pre-emptive pardons for these unethical creeps until Cheney put an end to that by remarking that pardons are unnecessary for people who haven’t committed a crime. And there’s the catch. They have not technically committed any crimes. The Bush administration has been so insidiously careful in maintaining their legal cover that even while completely unethical acts were made policy, they kept their asses covered. I wish they had been this thoroughly careful while they were theorizing their bungled war. But the difference is that in a botched war there’s someone else to pay the price. When there’s crime or debacle in American politics, those responsible always walk away unscathed while others bleed for it on some foreign soil. There’s no responsibility. You can ruin countless lives, lie to the public, fuck a country over, be it consciously or accidentally, and then just retire. The worst-case scenario is to go home humiliated and live out the rest of your years in wealthy seclusion like Nixon.
Watching the Bush administration slither out that way has me feeling a vicious desire for revenge. Humiliation is not enough. The man and all his accomplices need to be arrested and mercilessly interrogated on national television. Maybe even dragged behind a pickup truck. We’d have the ultimate reality show on our hands. Producers could pitch it with a title like Executive Fear Factor.
January 12, 2009 / Denver
The Scream
The only reasonable sentiment today would be a frantic screech of sheer existential terror. Populations are unconscious and governments are corrupt. The latter is the natural manifestation of the former. They’re gone limp on anti-depressants and TV. People are just comfortable enough for the time being to indulge in that mental laziness that allows there to be quiet on the streets whilst their once great nation is kicked into an early grave by a few shit-sucking pigs on Wall Street and their heavies in DC. The press is on a permanent paid vacation, and even if they did show up for work no one would read the unpatriotic vitriol that’s their ethical responsibility to pump out in times like these. The news would be a perpetual litany of fuck-ups, debacles, humiliations, preacher sex scandals, crime from on high, and masses gone stupid on too much welfare stabbing each other. But there would be no response. We would all collectively skip back to the comics. It’s total apathy from a spoiled people. Let me tell you, people: America is in for something nasty and cruel, and when the shit comes down there wont be anyone else to blame.
Everyone over here is dying or dead inside already, propped up inside his or her cubicle. They are willing to be fed shit by a world they were too lazy to question. We produce and consume at a rate I can’t even comprehend, but it’s all waste. It’s all just distraction from a bigger sense of emptiness. Maybe I can’t prove objectively that there is something in my life worth living for… but I am sure as hell confident that theirs is a dead vacuum. There’s no doubt about it.
We’re making the world hotter and more toxic and even just fucking ugly at a rate of speed that boggles the mind. What was once the front range of the Rocky Mountains, I will only ever know as a strip mall projected to infinity up highway thirty-six. We’re acting like a catastrophic viral infection on this planet. We’re told we’ve gone too far and that burning fossil fuels will have DISASTROUS consequences soon, but no one is even remotely interested in this. Even the threat of disaster does not register in this rotten brain. We’ll never change until change is forced.
Our history, our civilization is a heavy stone wheel headed west and over a cliff into the grave. It’s got more mindless momentum than the few thinking people on board can ever hope to counteract. Nothing can be done, and there’s no way out. Might as well have another drink and watch it burn. Eloquent minds have been reduced to the only sincere expression still possible: hysterical mental stabbing motions.
The ugly and stupid are multiplying geometrically. The noble ones are hearing their coffin lids being nailed shut by a crude and common world that disavows them while openly stealing everything they ever accomplished. Instead of being thanked, the ones who generate progress are being quickly escorted out the back door with a hard kick in the ass. Don’t let the door hit you! Others will take the spoils and use them to their own ends until the wheels fall off and there’s no one intelligent enough left to rebuild them. New populations will rise only to find there’s not much fun left to be had. Once noble races are entering an age of senility and incontinence. There’s no time to be born again. This is no “gold in the furnace.” This is the end.
I’m done.
December 12, 2008 / City o’ City, Denver
Everyone over here is dying or dead inside already, propped up inside his or her cubicle. They are willing to be fed shit by a world they were too lazy to question. We produce and consume at a rate I can’t even comprehend, but it’s all waste. It’s all just distraction from a bigger sense of emptiness. Maybe I can’t prove objectively that there is something in my life worth living for… but I am sure as hell confident that theirs is a dead vacuum. There’s no doubt about it.
We’re making the world hotter and more toxic and even just fucking ugly at a rate of speed that boggles the mind. What was once the front range of the Rocky Mountains, I will only ever know as a strip mall projected to infinity up highway thirty-six. We’re acting like a catastrophic viral infection on this planet. We’re told we’ve gone too far and that burning fossil fuels will have DISASTROUS consequences soon, but no one is even remotely interested in this. Even the threat of disaster does not register in this rotten brain. We’ll never change until change is forced.
Our history, our civilization is a heavy stone wheel headed west and over a cliff into the grave. It’s got more mindless momentum than the few thinking people on board can ever hope to counteract. Nothing can be done, and there’s no way out. Might as well have another drink and watch it burn. Eloquent minds have been reduced to the only sincere expression still possible: hysterical mental stabbing motions.
The ugly and stupid are multiplying geometrically. The noble ones are hearing their coffin lids being nailed shut by a crude and common world that disavows them while openly stealing everything they ever accomplished. Instead of being thanked, the ones who generate progress are being quickly escorted out the back door with a hard kick in the ass. Don’t let the door hit you! Others will take the spoils and use them to their own ends until the wheels fall off and there’s no one intelligent enough left to rebuild them. New populations will rise only to find there’s not much fun left to be had. Once noble races are entering an age of senility and incontinence. There’s no time to be born again. This is no “gold in the furnace.” This is the end.
I’m done.
December 12, 2008 / City o’ City, Denver
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