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Thursday, November 8, 2012
A Punch Assault
“Post coitum omne animal triste”
According to my understanding that means, “Every creature is sad after sex.” I suppose the suggestion is that after sex, we have nothing grander to aspire to, which causes us sadness. Or perhaps it is but the sadness of another superior moment relegated to the dustbin of memory. In a current context one could suggest men are sad because we are again expected to speak in something other than grunts, and women, well, come on, we all know why they are sad. Men and all. Grunting through our exertions or grunting our sundry disapprovals.
Or approval. Enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan’s swan song to the Batman franchise – his grand final shot if you will. Or so he has stated. It was a hell of a thing. And long – but one could count on length to enter into the ultimate dick swinging contest between good evil and evil evil. There was much grunting, usually exertion based, though more than a little disapproval was grunted as well. Which is to be expected in any film with an animal in its title – or as its protagonist.
It is perhaps prudent to define my terms and Batman is a serviceable example of good evil vs evil evil. We culturally accept his torturing suspects to save the girl or Gotham, because even though such torture is most assuredly prominent in the evil evil category, it is done to prevent greater evil still. As when he blasts through police cruisers like broken toys in his numerous high speed pursuit/evasions – if he is able to save one life, then the 15 he killed or maimed in the process were a small price to pay.
The media of the USA is full of people engaged in some torture or another to prevent the unspeakable from occurring, usually with a digital timer counting down, tense musical stings and some dirty little brown bastard holding out for Allah. In this, we are trained in the distinctions: good evil is when we do it to them/evil evil is when they do it to us.
The Batman’s primary antagonists in this outing are Bane, a giant of a man, an animal himself, who can bend steel in his bear hands and crush a man’s skull with a well-placed boot or bomb or brutal bludgeoning with a side of Darth Vaderesque asthmatic philosophizing; and Selina Kyle, the Catbabe, always appointed stunningly in black leather stripper gear and heels to die for, or from, depending upon her mercurial affections. Of course there are many other bad guys too numerous to mention, all wretched and horrific underworld overachievers and very proud we are of them.
Of course, the title of this essay comes from another bad guy, portrayed by Al Pacino in Donny Brasco, another film of good evil going head to head with evil evil. Pacino played a loser of a mobster named Lefty who befriended Donny Brasco (played by Johnny Depp), an undercover Fed who ultimately gets a lot of other wretched assholes killed – protecting and serving and all. Lefty was seasoning some food he had cooking and applied a punch a salt which led Donny to correct him. And hilarity ensued.
Anyway…
Bane is portrayed as a huge, bear of a man. The cartoon character dressed kinda gay, like a Mexican wrestler, so they gritted his costume up and covered his face with a mask feeding him his precious gas of choice, defining his menace sufficient to make Gotham tremble. Interestingly, the actor who plays the giant Bane is young Tom Hardy (well, younger than me) who stands 5’10”. I think of all the giants put out of work by this average Joe. Or Tom.
Bane mashes a lot of people in the face. I note that behavior in a lot of movies, especially the ones which promote violence as an unfortunate, but necessary, good evil. James Bond, Jason Bourne, all the heroes in all these comic book franchises, films like Fight Club and the Matrix series, every cop movie or western, all got the goodish guys and badass guys kicking and punching and mashing and smashing each other right in the face. A lot.
Seems to me, other than the fact they would all be babbling wrecks trying to put more than two syllables together owing to the repeated head trauma, none of these guys would have any teeth. I mean were you to hit someone in the mouth hard enough to smash their head through a brick wall, their teeth would likely be everywhere not in their mouth. The ground around these fight scenes would look like a Chiclet orgy gone horribly awry.
But at the end, all these hyper-violent men and women (for Catbabe took more than a couple to her puss as well), smile the smiles of well-funded orthodontistry. Sure, one would expect a multi-billionaire like Bruce Wayne to have all manner of new choppers available as needed, but most of the headbangers in these movies maintain their Hollywood pearly-whites on the budget of thugs and mobsters. The majority of street crime vocational opportunities don’t offer dental plans.
Which, of course, is fine from an audience perspective. We all have those nasty dreams of finding a prominent tooth missing or loose. Or worse. It is hard to look at mangled dentistry, regardless how heroic the actions which led to it were. It’s like visual bad breath: avoid the offending cake-hole at all costs.
But in a realistic sense, and these films go out of their way to make the fantastic look realistic, none of these heroes would make it through a film with more than a couple of teeth in their mouths. How could they? Generally, once the blows to the face kick off, these characters don’t have time to get their teeth worked on. And few would stop at the end of a fight and crawl about on the sullied floor trying to gather only their own teeth from the many which most assuredly would be littered there.
I consider this through the lens of 2/3 corpse Ron Kovic. Ron, you may recall, was a young aspiring jock, suckled on Audie Murphy and John Wayne films, who joined the Marines at 18 and lost his body from his chest down by 21, the age he could legally drink in America. Where he lost his America First war fervor was where he lost his manhood: Vietnam. A place he shouldn’t have been because we shouldn’t have been there, denied him and hundreds of thousands of others their ability to walk, talk, see, hear, feel, fuck. Their ability to live.
Kovic says in his book Born on the Fourth of July that had he seen the real cost of war to the people who are engaged in it, not the sanitized, heroic Hollywood propaganda, it would have likely colored his choices differently.
If John Wayne had had his legs blown off, or Audie Murphy had been horribly burned and lost his arms in their war movies; if the soldiers who came to indoctrinate the students at high schools all over the nation had been crippled and maimed (as so many are) and warned all the boys and girls also suckled on propaganda that they would never be able to have sexual intercourse; no families; disappearing friends; limited job opportunities; tragic futures, and a bag and diaper for relief every night for the rest of their lives, how many would have considered what would be demanded of them instead of reacting with the imprudence of patriotism?
“Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.”
Bertrand Russell
In real battles, where actual people engage in life and death struggles with each other, a single bullet can kill or cripple a fully realized person. A single blow to the head or kick can end a person’s capacity to do the things most of us take for granted. When our media heroes are wounded, even grievously, they are never disfigured. Consider John McClane from Die Hard: Here is a guy who in real life would ambulate in a wheelchair and shit in a bag under the best of conditions, but just keeps getting better over the decades. Hard to kill? You bet. Money making franchises assuredly are.
That’s why they don’t show what would happen to these characters were they to actually engage in this behavior: crippling injury. Inability to support themselves or help themselves or those they love. Disfiguring wounds. Horrible burn scars. Batman got torched in the first remake, Batman Begins falling from a multi-storied building, but you’d never know it after the fact. We don’t want our heroes as toothless bruise bags covered in burn scars. That’s too much like real life, the thing we watch these movies to avoid.
Batman has retired by the beginning of The Dark Knight Rises and so has Bruce Wayne, who hobbles around the newly retrofitted, stately Wayne Manor with a cane, a victim of his earlier extra-curricular nocturnal activities. Now, while Bruce does offer us consequence for his sundry amazing behaviors, he still looks whole – no overt scarring, limbs still attached, his teeth look great. Sure, when his shirt comes off, he is clearly a marked man, but only his select women, Alfred, Lucius and we, the loyal viewing audience, get to see that much of him, so his poorly maintained secret is maintained. Poorly.
Some Gothamites (and Bane) have noted that Batman would necessarily have to be mega-rich with access to some amazing stuff. A simple Google search of billionaire industrialists in Gotham in their early thirties and anyone even slightly interested knows who the Batman is. So disappearing at exactly the same time as Batman goes on the lam is one of Bruce Wayne’s many mistakes, perhaps the result of too many blows to the head.
He is confounded by Catbabe and broken in half (in one piece) by Bane and left in the hell hole of, well, some hellish place to die among the scum of the Earth. Here, with a serious untreated spinal break, as well as numerous other trauma-based wounds (teeth still accounted for), he and his fellow annoyers of authority nurse him back to top physical condition and after only 8 years of sitting around on his arthritic ass. Way to go Bruce!
Ron Kovic had the best treatment available to enlistees or inductees in the USA in the 60s and 70s and while not a hellish prison, the VA couldn’t put him or hundreds of thousands of others back together. Of course war is real and movies are fantastic, but clearly boys drawn into warlike scenarios are more inclined to such behaviors, not measuring all the degrees of life between the top of one’s form and death. And boys and girls are trained to define heroism through the lens of distraction: movies, sports, TV. The Web.
Where even the losers look good.
Everyone knows media is fiction, nobody really thinks life can function in such a manner. At least, that is what we tell ourselves. But in reality, people do believe this stuff can happen, and not just a few. Lots of them. People believe impossible stuff they see, impossible stuff they are told, that they read – out of convenience as much as anything I suspect – stuff that defies everything we have come to understand as humans. When an exceptional man is posited, we can accept that because we all know them, or at least of them. A resilient fellow with a ready supply of armaments and bottomless draw from the money spigot could be imagined to do these things, especially with the fine veneer of science and technology applied liberally.
A willing suspension of disbelief.
Young minds dare to hope. Hope they’ll be heroic, hope they’ll survive, hope they’ll impress whomever it is they seek to impress. With no concept of consequences, foolish behavior becomes inconsequential, young minds make terrible choices based upon earlier poor choices and young bodies suffer. Real men, even real men who play Supermen, break under diverse circumstances. Christopher Reeve became virtually 7/8 a corpse upon falling from his horse. Not long after that he went 100% corpse and another man of steel was stolen from a hero hungry public. The earlier TV incarnation, George Reeves, proved to be slower than a speeding bullet fired at close range.
Batman, over the course of the current franchise, has been shot repeatedly, stabbed, burned, punched, kicked, slammed, fallen from buildings, hit by moving vehicles, slammed into stationary objects, poisoned, pummeled nearly into Batjam and finally snapped like a twig. (We won’t even go into his being nuked.) Through all this mayhem and carnage, his teeth remain perfect, his face unscarred, all of his appendages and extremities function and on top of that, he still gets the girl. The advantages of fictional living.
Impossible heroism has its rewards (in the realm of the impossible) but it has its price as well, as generation after generation of young people perceive the human ideal against a marker of the fantastic instead of the possible. When one aspires to Batman-like heroics, the job at Mickey D’s holds a diminished appeal. When we aspire to the achievable we stand the chance of achievement – when we aspire to the impossible or even merely improbable the surety of our failure kills our will to strive. We become observers of life, no longer participants.
And as observers we all know what it takes to spice up any fare – just add a punch assault!
Bon appetite!
© 2012 simmbiosis 10/30/12
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Mental Work
I conversed with my grandmother a while back, on the occasion of her 90th birthday (way to go Grandma!). With beginnings I believe in the mid-west*, she moved to California where she met my grandfather, who had already sired my pop and his brother with his first wife. I had two grandmothers on my dad’s side of the family and one on my mom’s side, but no grandfather there, so I suppose a level of equilibrium was achieved. One grandfather and three grandmothers – it seems almost biblical.
June (name changed to not further annoy her) and my grandfather moved to Florida when I was young and got into real estate. Did fairly well at it by every indication and has had a very comfortable life as a result and good for her. She is a very nice lady and I love her dearly and wish her nothing but joy for the remainder of her turn. She has always been very good to me.
I recall a couple several Christmas’s past I posited the interesting conundrum of how we as a family are more inclined to remember each other on the birthday of someone who probably didn’t even exist on the pagan holiday of solstice than we are on our own real life birthdays. We give each other cards and gifts and phone calls and all kinds of love on a made up person’s made up birthday, yet rarely even call each other on our own. I suggested that if we promoted our own birthdays as much as our culture promotes Christmas, people would more likely remember them.
They just wouldn’t talk to us anymore.
During our verbal visit the notion of mental work was offered as a response to my query regarding the differentials in say, getting paid to sweep a floor or making money making phone calls and such. Note the difference in how these jobs are represented, not only by me here, but by our culture as a whole: getting paid/making money.
We tend to think of people working in janitorial or field labor or mining or heavy industry (as metal workers and such, not management) as getting paid. You get paid a wage to do back breaking work. You make money doing mental work. You get paid for making something; you make money by the use of your mind.
I believe they call that thinking.
As one who has been paid to do physical work and even made money doing mental work, I find the distinction is compelling. As a writer/composer, I do all kinds of mental work, even manifesting such abstracts in the form of the real. For this expressive and creative mental work I get nothing beyond joy of composition and the occasional appreciation of those close to me. The one closest to me interestingly enough is the one most appreciative of my mental work realized.
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” Samuel Johnson
I clearly differ from the esteemed Mr. Johnson on that point, but one would expect such things of a blockhead, so it comes as no surprise. Not that I exist in opposition to making money for my work, my art – to the contrary such income would allow me the freedom to do even more and better art, mental work. I have considered that perhaps one reason I have never been paid for it – ignored over a long enough timeline, it is naturally presumed that one will accept their failings and have the dignity to sit down and shut up. Any level of attention to me or my work will reveal a natural capacity on my part to defy presumptions.
I don’t sit down or shut up.
Nor, given the vast empty drivel polluting the input holes of humanity, do I feel I should. People motivating us to dance, watch, consume, obey and murder, make millions of dollars, while those suggesting that we question, reason, and demand accountability from those who demand our obeisance get paid to do physical work when they’re lucky, while their mental work is marginalized and dismissed.
We who don’t get paid to create, yet do it because we must are artists. Entertainers make millions of dollars, artists make art. What is art? Picasso said this and I gladly quote it because it resonates so with me:
“Art isn’t truth. Art is the lie which makes us see the truth.”
Not bad from a Spaniard, huh? And one who got his work recognized by popular culture and became rich owing to his entertainment value and the cachet such recognition brings. Dali as well, a fully realized artist that got rich off his brilliant promotion. The artist as the gallery.
Popular culture isn’t about truth; it is about commerce, about distraction. Dancing is fun and all but most guys do it by way of getting laid while most gals do it to see how much work a guy is willing to do to get laid. Originally a tribal mating ritual, now it becomes the consolation prize for those who just don’t have the energy for a relationship. Dance all night, go home alone and masturbate. The internet will provide all the stimulation we need.
According to the Nielsen Company, Americans watch on average 5 hours of television a day, 151 hours a month. I wonder if we listened to one source, a politician, preacher or even rap star for 150 hours a month, if over time we would be influenced by them? I wonder how many husbands listen to their wives 150 hours a month, or wives their husbands; how many parents listen to their children 150 hours a month, how many children, their parents?
Television isn’t art, it is not a repository of truth – it is pop culture, a diversion, a distraction. It is a sales pitch most odious. It is mental rest. And the average American gives it 5 hours every day.
There are many Americans like me who give it zero hours a day which means that it exists in an operational state for 8, 10, 12 hours a day in other homes. When I flew back to Florida to visit my grandmother, I noted that it was on virtually 24 hours a day. I spent a week listening to Fox News during all of my waking hours in her house. One station, one corporate perspective, one mindset being perpetually introduced into the minds of those who give it such primacy in their lives – no other influence superseding the ones we electively allow access to our thinking.
Our mental work.
If art is the lie that makes us see the truth, pop culture is the lie that makes us buy.
When I was teenaged and still stupid enough to think I had something going, my dad laid it out for me: physical labor is for chumps. Losers. Brown people. Used to be black people, but since slavery ended they don’t work anymore so the browns and yellows have to do double duty. That’s why our major multi-national corporations put their factories in places like Mexico, or Puerto Rico, or the Philippines. Or China where they have very few black people, likely not working either.
Of course, wrong thinking people might suggest that shifting the manufacturing base away from the nation denied millions of blacks employment while the agricultural labor they were once compelled to do has been placed upon the backs of migrant laborers from Mexico. Or imported from China. I live in California, an amazing agricultural state. We grow among other things, garlic here. Yet at the markets in Southern California, garlic comes from China. Weird.
The popular mythology is that blacks, for the most part, are stupid and lazy. That’s why the people who thought that way forced them to harvest their crops and care for their children. Cook their food. Who better to raise up a bunch of stupid and lazy white folk than their stupid and lazy slaves? Now, even the good slave jobs are gone and Mexicans harvest our food while Hondurans nanny our children. So the blacks for the most part are left with only welfare or crime to sustain them. And we, white folks, are for the most part good with that. Makes the work of the law enforcement community easier: “Suspect is black. Any questions?”
As if to punish them for their impudence for demanding to be treated like white people, we treated them like white people: white trash. They became the coveted criminal set and our society did all we could to confirm that bias. They became not even good enough for nigger work. So we put them and the poverty stricken white folks ruined in any of our alternating depressions on the dole and they became beholden to the state. In food is fealty.
To counter this liberal rubbish it will be pointed out that the system works for all with initiative and successful black entrepreneurs exist in abundance, rich beyond their station through the diligent application of mental work and good old American ‘stick-to-itiveness’.
Is it not interesting then that the blacks we know so well through our sundry media are less noted for their success than their scandal. I could likely name three blacks noted for their success off the top of my head as opposed to easily ten who turned that success into scandal and tragedy. This is not to suggest that there are not as many successful blacks as embarrassing ones; just that our media prefers to focus on the embarrassing ones, often to the exclusion of the others.
Which means we tend to focus there as well. In many cases Michael Jackson was either perceived as the king of pop or a vile pederast dependent on little more than if the question was put to a white person or a black one. Even one of our most beloved black men, Martin Luther King is portrayed in the media as a philandering communist. But he did help the blacker people among us achieve more social parity with white people. Sadly not so much by elevating blacks as diminishing whites, as our economic masters widened the gulf in wealth between them and us to teach us not to be so uppity. We learnin’ real good, massa!
It is estimated, based upon government figures that upward of 80 million Americans are unemployed. I’m not talking about people like my grandmother, old people, (who is still employed – mental work tends to more physical longevity than physical work) or babies; I’m describing people who are able and should be working. Who need to be working. The reason this figure isn’t trotted out is obvious, our economic recovery would be seen for the depression it is and has been for about 7 years. Instead they talk of figures based on unemployment insurance.
Doing mental work as a location manager, I created a company, Locators. Did that about a decade ago. Haven’t done locations for a couple three years, as of now. Because I own a company I am not eligible for unemployment compensation. Which means when I’m not working – or earning, because I’m always working – I am not counted among the unemployed. Independent contractors, business owners, people whose unemployment has run out are not counted. The pathetic reality is one of the world’s major work forces is sitting idle.
Why, I wonder is that?
Could it be perhaps because as the structure of industry changes, there are more and more people doing mental work (management) with all the perks and bennies of such lofty status, which puts a strain upon the bottom line when you also figure in the cost of the people who actually make things and their sundry necessities? Health care, pension, safe working conditions cost more which then reduces the amount the people getting paid to think have available to them.
So they move the jobs to places where that nonsense doesn’t affect the bottom line.
The notion of mental work likely originated in the priestly class where men of lofty aspiration who suffered physical limitation decided to think their way to power. Thus came the river gods and the rain gods and the Sun god and the Moon god and the solitary person in the tribe or community or kingdom who could talk to them. Persuasive personalities with direct access to the afterlife are not the ones you send out into battle or compel to till – they are more akin to shepherds. Even kings initially attained their acclaim by actually going into the battles they encouraged, perhaps until they got smart enough by watching the priests to stay more toward the back of the battlefield. Strategizing. Mental warfare.
As the families of the landed gentry became bigger, likely owing to all the free time they had to lay around and fuck all the time, the smart among them realized they would need things to occupy them as they grew into their inherent wealth. They also realized that physical labor is for chumps. So they invented bureaucracy so their type of people would have mental work to keep them occupied and also allow them to feel they didn’t just get born into a big pile of rich; that they actually earned it. Thinking and all. Think hard enough, hell, you might get a raise.
Fast forward to American lassie faire capitalism and before you know it, you got millions upon millions of people, mostly white, who need something to occupy them that doesn’t require a bunch of sweating and physical strain. Enter the bankers, insurance companies, investment firms, real estate, all sales brokers and law firms, hell, the entire legal system– paper pusheries all.
Work for millions, which keeps us busy making calls, fielding calls, reading forms, legal docs and material so horrid and dull that after a day of wading through it you never want to read again. Instead to bask in the smarmy narcosis of television, distracted and divided.
“Capital must protect itself in every way…Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When, through a process of law, the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd.” JP Morgan
Sadly, as teachers, they have succeeded beyond all of their dreams and their students (commonly herd) have learned everything they’ve been taught so well that we now engage in perpetual war so they have things to gamble on. Things of interest. Men and women with no principle still know interest.
I can state with no equivocation that if all physical work ended today, civilization would end tomorrow. With no food, power or medical (for doctors do physical work, although hamstringed by mental work via bureaucracy) what we know as civilization would become a ravening chaos.
On the other, were all mental work to end today, civilization would continue, albeit a very different civilization – one where all contribute physically to our welfare, not just the least among us. Where survival is based upon actual real life considerations and not merely abstract notions of money and property and divinity. Were those who do mental work compelled to do physical work to survive, I suspect such labor would be held in high esteem and even higher tax brackets.
I fear we have created a growing percentile of our society that not only looks disdainfully upon physical work, but also upon mental work as well. I suspect there are millions upon millions of Americans who think all work is for chumps. That life should be like on TV, interesting and leisurely – at the same time, all the time.
But life isn’t those things always, unless one looks through the right eyes, or more correctly, through their eyes right – it is often tedious and demanding. But through tedium and expectation do we learn to appreciate the interest and leisure we seek to a finer degree. It provides context.
Humans need something to do, not just look at or listen to. Our bodies tell us what we need and often that need is accomplished through physical effort. All of the good things we enjoy come from the physical effort of others and even from our own, if we’re inclined to it. People who give their bodies for our social benefit should be paid as well as those who think about it. Time is life consuming, for all of us. At the end of the day, the day is gone for everyone.
Could be worth thinking about.
*It has been brought to my attention, (thanks June!)(see? this stuff does bring people together) that my grandmother was in fact born in California.
© 2012 simmbiosis
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
The Silent Treatment
When I was a young boyish thing and behaved in a manner displeasing to my parents, something I did often and with a disturbing regularity, they would yell at me and beat me with a belt. When upset, my parents would berate me then belt me. It was pretty scary. And painful. Usually, this expression would be the result of my mom being really mad at my dad or my dad being really mad at pretty much everything. Which he was. Pretty much.
Mom would be mad at dad for all manner of disgraceful behavior and my acting out would inspire her lashing out. Dad would come home and mom would unleash her ire on him and he would share his response ire on my brother and me. We got a lot of attention this way.
As I got older and bigger, it became too weird for grown-up parents to spank nearly grown-up kids, so my mom would just yell and threaten to kick me out and my dad would yell and we’d put on the boxing gloves and he’d beat me up that way. Until I got old enough to hit back. Then he made it clear that should the time come that I could beat him up, he’d kick me out. Beatings in, kicking out. A stable environment to be sure.
So to keep a roof, I took my beatings and verbal debasement, but I did something else which changed the dynamic considerably – I became edumacated. I got too smart for simple angry drunken berating and I learned to fend off physical blows. I learned to defend myself.
Thus in my early teens my dad went from way too much personal attention to the silent treatment. I would do something or say something that would upset him or worse, my mom – I did that a lot. Where before he could work out his difficulties by pummeling me and telling me what a stupid piece of shit I was, now I had become too big a threat: I could hit back while thwarting his blows and I could reason. His position of bully was challenged.
So he would just not talk to me. Weeks at a time. I went from being way too obvious to being invisible. I became a non-entity unworthy of even the courtesy of a ‘hello’ or ‘good morning’ or the honest respect of a ‘fuck you!’ Often, I wouldn’t even know why he was upset with me and my mom would dismiss it, “You know how your father gets….”
It was maddening. It seemed puerile and contrary to communication. While I could talk to him about political and social issues, personal stuff was just not broached. I didn’t find out where my dad was born until after he died. His brother told me.
On occasion, as a childish adult, I will slip into it. I’ll just not talk or respond with clipped and dismissive retorts when pressed, perhaps my dad telling me to shut up so I don’t make it worse. After a period of self-loathing, I’ll remember from where that germinated and open up and own my puerile and counter-productive behavior. I’ll be as adult and discuss rather than as child, “I’m not talking to you!”
And while I do this thing less and less, preferring communication to silent self-pity, I find that it exists abundantly around me. I find that my contemporaries, my friends, family, even my own kids give me the silent treatment. I see others get it from their fellows as well and wonder what we think we accomplish by ignoring each other. The last decade of my father’s life we very rarely spoke and I know I am not better for it.
The last words I spoke to him were to his dying gray face, his eyes staring into a catatonic space with no hope of recovery or communication. I opened up to this wreck of a man only to receive that silence I had grown accustomed to, his final silent treatment. Then he was gone.
Forever silent.
We do ourselves and our loves a horrible disservice by ignoring each other. If we feel upset and hold it in and let it fester and grow, it isn’t the thing that upsets us which drives us apart, it is our perception of it. Our manifestation of it. By talking or otherwise communicating with each other, we expand our perception and our capacity to understand and forgive. We manifest empathy.
We all say and do things which others find distressing or even hurtful – if not, we’re not saying or doing anything much. The safe road is short and sweet and virtually impossible to learn anything upon. Communication entails risk because in it we risk being wrong. We risk having to defend an untenable position. We risk being embarrassed.
To communicate is to make mistakes, but to communicate is also to rectify them. That which silence communicates is dismissive, almost punitive, “You are unworthy of my attention”. Communication is give and take, not just give and give or take and take. More and more we find ourselves in story telling competitions, responding to one story with another. As Marla Singer opined in Fight Club we don’t really listen so much as “Wait for our turn to talk”.
One of the hardest challenges we present ourselves in the West is the challenge of admitting error. Embarrassment is one of the worst afflictions known to man: We kill or die to avoid it. What were duels fought over? “You’ve offended my honor…” You’ve embarrassed me. What is internet bullying? Some kids embarrassing some other kids to death, embarrassing them so badly they kill themselves or others.
With all the horrors we as a species have created and perpetrated, the thing that makes all the others pale by comparison is personal embarrassment. That’s all.
We ignore somebody then must continue to because we’re too embarrassed to explain why we ignored them in the first place. Soon we avoid each other and we don’t even remember why. Or we do, which drives us only further apart. We hold on to that which separates us while casting off all that holds us together.
The justifications are well known: I’m too busy; We’ve grown apart; I’ve put them behind me; I’ve grown, but they’ve stayed the same; I’m too deeply offended to risk expressing why; I don’t like you anymore.
This is not to suggest that any or all of these sentiments are not valid or appropriate. In time we find things in some people we felt close to that we can no longer ignore: things which diminish ardor. Often people will present themselves as close to us to gain advantage; they will feign friendship or even love to get something they seek. This is the very foundation of capitalism – work everything and everyone to your advantage – and we are well versed in it. Often instead of talking, we negotiate. Our relationships become transactions instead of interactions.
Some people are not very nice yet conceal it by shows of affection or appreciation which make us drop our guard – who doesn’t love being loved or appreciated? When people say nice things about us to us or others we find immediate accord – it is natural being receptive to that receptive to us. Sometimes it takes years to see through a clever mask, especially when seeing through it will diminish those false perceptions we’ve embraced. To reject the liar is to lose the lie.
Admitting we’re in a bad relationship or being used by our 'friends' and supposed well-wishers is embarrassing. We appear stupid and naïve. We hate feeling that way. So relations which should end will go on way too long and then crumble when advantage dissipates. And we end up feeling stupid and naïve.
So instead, we embrace the notion that we have infinite friends or worse, no need for them and dismiss those who annoy or challenge us because it is easier than doing the work to maintain relations. Our opinions become more important than our relationships. Our ideas become greater than our loves.
Can amity or love or friendship be so easily derailed by words, albeit stupid, thoughtless or just poorly considered, or by an action which offends? Are a thousand decent actions trumped by a single callous one? Are a hundred decencies trumped by ten indecencies?
You bet.
In our culture people are elevated in many cases for the simple pleasure of knocking them down. Instead of doing the work of raising ourselves, we feel better by diminishing others. It’s easier.
Our media is all about shame: the shame of a politician or religious leader or sports figure or our favorite, the shame of a celebrity. We all figure we’re better than celebrities, hell, they’re just a bunch of show offs. When they get found out to be gay or addicted or queer or brutal or homosexual or stupid, we love that. Take them down a peg, a whole peg!
Tabloids are embarrassment sheets. Newspapers become more tabloidian each passing year: big provocative pictures on the front above the fold, shock headlines and punny subheads. Rumor portrayed as fact, unnamed sources providing dubious reports, scandalizing private indiscretions while ignoring breaches in the public trust. Online, everyone is fair game. Embarrass and conquer!
In silence nothing is communicated but dismissiveness and to dismiss each other is to find ourselves alone, afraid of being embarrassed to the point of never speaking, hearing, never responding. Casting off more and more people we actually care about because we can’t face the risk of embarrassment which comes in explaining why we don’t talk to each other. Most I suspect would rather just talk. The reasons we like each other shouldn’t be diminished by disagreement between us. If it is, perhaps we really don’t like each other.
Affection seeks accord, disaffection, discord.
To love each other is to let each other know, through word and deed. To love each other is forgive and understand. We for the most part can’t know how long we have here, above ground and those things which should have been said and can’t be because we waited too long resound in our minds until our time comes and they are spoken but to the ether.
Speak with those you love before the opportunity passes. Death is the silent treatment, eternal.
7/1/12 simmbiosis
Mom would be mad at dad for all manner of disgraceful behavior and my acting out would inspire her lashing out. Dad would come home and mom would unleash her ire on him and he would share his response ire on my brother and me. We got a lot of attention this way.
As I got older and bigger, it became too weird for grown-up parents to spank nearly grown-up kids, so my mom would just yell and threaten to kick me out and my dad would yell and we’d put on the boxing gloves and he’d beat me up that way. Until I got old enough to hit back. Then he made it clear that should the time come that I could beat him up, he’d kick me out. Beatings in, kicking out. A stable environment to be sure.
So to keep a roof, I took my beatings and verbal debasement, but I did something else which changed the dynamic considerably – I became edumacated. I got too smart for simple angry drunken berating and I learned to fend off physical blows. I learned to defend myself.
Thus in my early teens my dad went from way too much personal attention to the silent treatment. I would do something or say something that would upset him or worse, my mom – I did that a lot. Where before he could work out his difficulties by pummeling me and telling me what a stupid piece of shit I was, now I had become too big a threat: I could hit back while thwarting his blows and I could reason. His position of bully was challenged.
So he would just not talk to me. Weeks at a time. I went from being way too obvious to being invisible. I became a non-entity unworthy of even the courtesy of a ‘hello’ or ‘good morning’ or the honest respect of a ‘fuck you!’ Often, I wouldn’t even know why he was upset with me and my mom would dismiss it, “You know how your father gets….”
It was maddening. It seemed puerile and contrary to communication. While I could talk to him about political and social issues, personal stuff was just not broached. I didn’t find out where my dad was born until after he died. His brother told me.
On occasion, as a childish adult, I will slip into it. I’ll just not talk or respond with clipped and dismissive retorts when pressed, perhaps my dad telling me to shut up so I don’t make it worse. After a period of self-loathing, I’ll remember from where that germinated and open up and own my puerile and counter-productive behavior. I’ll be as adult and discuss rather than as child, “I’m not talking to you!”
And while I do this thing less and less, preferring communication to silent self-pity, I find that it exists abundantly around me. I find that my contemporaries, my friends, family, even my own kids give me the silent treatment. I see others get it from their fellows as well and wonder what we think we accomplish by ignoring each other. The last decade of my father’s life we very rarely spoke and I know I am not better for it.
The last words I spoke to him were to his dying gray face, his eyes staring into a catatonic space with no hope of recovery or communication. I opened up to this wreck of a man only to receive that silence I had grown accustomed to, his final silent treatment. Then he was gone.
Forever silent.
We do ourselves and our loves a horrible disservice by ignoring each other. If we feel upset and hold it in and let it fester and grow, it isn’t the thing that upsets us which drives us apart, it is our perception of it. Our manifestation of it. By talking or otherwise communicating with each other, we expand our perception and our capacity to understand and forgive. We manifest empathy.
We all say and do things which others find distressing or even hurtful – if not, we’re not saying or doing anything much. The safe road is short and sweet and virtually impossible to learn anything upon. Communication entails risk because in it we risk being wrong. We risk having to defend an untenable position. We risk being embarrassed.
To communicate is to make mistakes, but to communicate is also to rectify them. That which silence communicates is dismissive, almost punitive, “You are unworthy of my attention”. Communication is give and take, not just give and give or take and take. More and more we find ourselves in story telling competitions, responding to one story with another. As Marla Singer opined in Fight Club we don’t really listen so much as “Wait for our turn to talk”.
One of the hardest challenges we present ourselves in the West is the challenge of admitting error. Embarrassment is one of the worst afflictions known to man: We kill or die to avoid it. What were duels fought over? “You’ve offended my honor…” You’ve embarrassed me. What is internet bullying? Some kids embarrassing some other kids to death, embarrassing them so badly they kill themselves or others.
With all the horrors we as a species have created and perpetrated, the thing that makes all the others pale by comparison is personal embarrassment. That’s all.
We ignore somebody then must continue to because we’re too embarrassed to explain why we ignored them in the first place. Soon we avoid each other and we don’t even remember why. Or we do, which drives us only further apart. We hold on to that which separates us while casting off all that holds us together.
The justifications are well known: I’m too busy; We’ve grown apart; I’ve put them behind me; I’ve grown, but they’ve stayed the same; I’m too deeply offended to risk expressing why; I don’t like you anymore.
This is not to suggest that any or all of these sentiments are not valid or appropriate. In time we find things in some people we felt close to that we can no longer ignore: things which diminish ardor. Often people will present themselves as close to us to gain advantage; they will feign friendship or even love to get something they seek. This is the very foundation of capitalism – work everything and everyone to your advantage – and we are well versed in it. Often instead of talking, we negotiate. Our relationships become transactions instead of interactions.
Some people are not very nice yet conceal it by shows of affection or appreciation which make us drop our guard – who doesn’t love being loved or appreciated? When people say nice things about us to us or others we find immediate accord – it is natural being receptive to that receptive to us. Sometimes it takes years to see through a clever mask, especially when seeing through it will diminish those false perceptions we’ve embraced. To reject the liar is to lose the lie.
Admitting we’re in a bad relationship or being used by our 'friends' and supposed well-wishers is embarrassing. We appear stupid and naïve. We hate feeling that way. So relations which should end will go on way too long and then crumble when advantage dissipates. And we end up feeling stupid and naïve.
So instead, we embrace the notion that we have infinite friends or worse, no need for them and dismiss those who annoy or challenge us because it is easier than doing the work to maintain relations. Our opinions become more important than our relationships. Our ideas become greater than our loves.
Can amity or love or friendship be so easily derailed by words, albeit stupid, thoughtless or just poorly considered, or by an action which offends? Are a thousand decent actions trumped by a single callous one? Are a hundred decencies trumped by ten indecencies?
You bet.
In our culture people are elevated in many cases for the simple pleasure of knocking them down. Instead of doing the work of raising ourselves, we feel better by diminishing others. It’s easier.
Our media is all about shame: the shame of a politician or religious leader or sports figure or our favorite, the shame of a celebrity. We all figure we’re better than celebrities, hell, they’re just a bunch of show offs. When they get found out to be gay or addicted or queer or brutal or homosexual or stupid, we love that. Take them down a peg, a whole peg!
Tabloids are embarrassment sheets. Newspapers become more tabloidian each passing year: big provocative pictures on the front above the fold, shock headlines and punny subheads. Rumor portrayed as fact, unnamed sources providing dubious reports, scandalizing private indiscretions while ignoring breaches in the public trust. Online, everyone is fair game. Embarrass and conquer!
In silence nothing is communicated but dismissiveness and to dismiss each other is to find ourselves alone, afraid of being embarrassed to the point of never speaking, hearing, never responding. Casting off more and more people we actually care about because we can’t face the risk of embarrassment which comes in explaining why we don’t talk to each other. Most I suspect would rather just talk. The reasons we like each other shouldn’t be diminished by disagreement between us. If it is, perhaps we really don’t like each other.
Affection seeks accord, disaffection, discord.
To love each other is to let each other know, through word and deed. To love each other is forgive and understand. We for the most part can’t know how long we have here, above ground and those things which should have been said and can’t be because we waited too long resound in our minds until our time comes and they are spoken but to the ether.
Speak with those you love before the opportunity passes. Death is the silent treatment, eternal.
7/1/12 simmbiosis
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Spots
I have spots. It’s the weirdest thing, they inhabit pretty much the entirety of me – the outside part anyway. They are everywhere save for the bits that don’t usually see the light of day, the bits of me that are pearly white. Arms, legs, face, loaded for bear – ass, hips crotchal region, unloaded and bare. As they don’t appear where the sun doesn’t shine, I would then imagine them as sun spots.
It’s like a random rash of melanin or Jackson Pollock in his splattering stage blasting me with all kinds of splotchy oddness, skin, hair, spots. Spots on spots. They are of multiple shapes and hues, some have little lumps. Mounds. Like little dermal gophers popped through the surface and left a pile of dark meat. But they’re not gophers, they’re moles. Right there on my me.
I’ve been a spotty fellow all of my life, though never entirely pleased about it. As other freckle face freaks can attest, they do accompany their own peculiar brand of derision. And I can see why: it’s an outbreak of tan on whitey McWhite white skin in strange random patches, a birth mark that covers your whole body. Sometimes, I’ll find myself mesmerized by the splotches on others faces, I imagine people get lost in my spots and don’t hear a word I’m saying. Hypnotic.
Though my dad had the odd spot here and there, I like as not got mine from my mom. She had red hair and is covered with spots. A little bleached out Dalmatian of a woman who mixed it up with a black haired spotless guy and popped out a spotty brownish haired boything.
I suppose I expected them to fade with age, but I’m over half way to a hundred and the little fuckers are going strong. I’ve tried to tan them away but it invariably just makes them darker than the surrounding me meat, cooking out there all lubed up under God the sky broiler. Spots. My fleshy antagonists, we all know what they represent: puerility. Freckles are something little kids have – they make them cute. They are associated with Howdy Doody and Carrottop, goofy, childish, nonsensical, not to be taken seriously.
In adults they are to be avoided assiduously. Think of great humans noted for not only their noble deeds but their freckles. I can’t think of one. A genius with freckles is just a person of spots with some harebrained ideas. The same ideas in the mouth of a non-spotter are often highly regarded.
Actors and other public types with spots do all they can to minimize and conceal them, whereas most guys anyway, don’t walk around on the job site with make-up on – it just comes off weird. So we the spotty must accept our plight as blotched and display our shame for all to see. Some will try to mask under tan in a can or other emollients but then they just turn all leather colored and get derided for that. Most just accept it and find jobs that require as little contact with the public as possible.
But just because our spots make us easily dismissed, do not for an instant imagine our influence as negligible. For the spotty among us work behind the scenes, writing and directing and shaking and moving things where we aren’t seen or readily ridiculed for our impish dermatological clutching at childhood.
Spotters are aware of our position in the social hierarchy, we know that just as we deride others with ostentatious spottitude, that our own is the source of the derision of others. A strange reverence can be found in some spotty types for the really spotty, or worse, the tragically spotty, who may have only a couple of spots, but they take up half the face or something equally grotesque. There but for the grace of genetics…
For yes, I forget my spottiness during social interaction. I can’t see me or how preposterous I appear, all blotched and spotted like some hairless neofelis nebulosa, blathering away about this or that. It is only upon reflection, or a glimpse of these spotty, spotty arms, do I remember that credibility does not come from that which is blemished.
It’s as if the skin can’t commit: am I black, am I white, am I brown, am I yellow, am I red? I most assuredly possess all the assorted hues. Yet this doesn’t make me Everyman. Perhaps my flesh’s lack of commitment makes me appear uncertain (which I am) but lends a visual confirmation, regardless of content that credibility may be lacking. How can such a spotty thing have anything to offer? Everyman as no man.
Underneath, that’s all I am, just a man. Better judged by my action than my appearance.
A man.
A spotty, spotty man.
© 2012 simmbiosis 6/27/12
It’s like a random rash of melanin or Jackson Pollock in his splattering stage blasting me with all kinds of splotchy oddness, skin, hair, spots. Spots on spots. They are of multiple shapes and hues, some have little lumps. Mounds. Like little dermal gophers popped through the surface and left a pile of dark meat. But they’re not gophers, they’re moles. Right there on my me.
I’ve been a spotty fellow all of my life, though never entirely pleased about it. As other freckle face freaks can attest, they do accompany their own peculiar brand of derision. And I can see why: it’s an outbreak of tan on whitey McWhite white skin in strange random patches, a birth mark that covers your whole body. Sometimes, I’ll find myself mesmerized by the splotches on others faces, I imagine people get lost in my spots and don’t hear a word I’m saying. Hypnotic.
Though my dad had the odd spot here and there, I like as not got mine from my mom. She had red hair and is covered with spots. A little bleached out Dalmatian of a woman who mixed it up with a black haired spotless guy and popped out a spotty brownish haired boything.
I suppose I expected them to fade with age, but I’m over half way to a hundred and the little fuckers are going strong. I’ve tried to tan them away but it invariably just makes them darker than the surrounding me meat, cooking out there all lubed up under God the sky broiler. Spots. My fleshy antagonists, we all know what they represent: puerility. Freckles are something little kids have – they make them cute. They are associated with Howdy Doody and Carrottop, goofy, childish, nonsensical, not to be taken seriously.
In adults they are to be avoided assiduously. Think of great humans noted for not only their noble deeds but their freckles. I can’t think of one. A genius with freckles is just a person of spots with some harebrained ideas. The same ideas in the mouth of a non-spotter are often highly regarded.
Actors and other public types with spots do all they can to minimize and conceal them, whereas most guys anyway, don’t walk around on the job site with make-up on – it just comes off weird. So we the spotty must accept our plight as blotched and display our shame for all to see. Some will try to mask under tan in a can or other emollients but then they just turn all leather colored and get derided for that. Most just accept it and find jobs that require as little contact with the public as possible.
But just because our spots make us easily dismissed, do not for an instant imagine our influence as negligible. For the spotty among us work behind the scenes, writing and directing and shaking and moving things where we aren’t seen or readily ridiculed for our impish dermatological clutching at childhood.
Spotters are aware of our position in the social hierarchy, we know that just as we deride others with ostentatious spottitude, that our own is the source of the derision of others. A strange reverence can be found in some spotty types for the really spotty, or worse, the tragically spotty, who may have only a couple of spots, but they take up half the face or something equally grotesque. There but for the grace of genetics…
For yes, I forget my spottiness during social interaction. I can’t see me or how preposterous I appear, all blotched and spotted like some hairless neofelis nebulosa, blathering away about this or that. It is only upon reflection, or a glimpse of these spotty, spotty arms, do I remember that credibility does not come from that which is blemished.
It’s as if the skin can’t commit: am I black, am I white, am I brown, am I yellow, am I red? I most assuredly possess all the assorted hues. Yet this doesn’t make me Everyman. Perhaps my flesh’s lack of commitment makes me appear uncertain (which I am) but lends a visual confirmation, regardless of content that credibility may be lacking. How can such a spotty thing have anything to offer? Everyman as no man.
Underneath, that’s all I am, just a man. Better judged by my action than my appearance.
A man.
A spotty, spotty man.
© 2012 simmbiosis 6/27/12
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Radioactive Man
I am a product of the nuclear age. I was born just as the USA was going into the war of aggression business in earnest. They had just completed the retrofit of Korea – changing the South of that nation into a model of the USA with smaller workers. Whereas in the North, grinding poverty and unemployment ravaged the nation, in the South, huge numbers of the citizens had become fully employed, in their grinding poverty.
And the USA had set up for business, moving their direct aggression further south still, while only declaring a cease fire with the North Koreans. All told, our corporate rebranding cost billions of dollars and ended millions of lives, reputedly even a couple million civilians. Afterwards, with troops still on the ground, and hostilities in abatement but not concluded, the real invasion occurred as business interests saw a huge untapped manufacturing base ripe for the plucking. We would show the wretched commies how to properly make use of populations: build shit for people who are better off. China learned fast, huh?
My father was a veteran of the Korean conflict, it wasn’t really a war (except to the people it blew to pieces and those who put them back together) because according to the Constitution those have to be declared by congress and it was difficult to get them together on the whole invasion of sovereign nations thing. So the president decided for us and things have only gotten better since, because now, the president always decides.
Let me tell you a little about my dad: He was born in 1930 to a British immigrant who had no use for him. His older brother was named Robert, (we called him Bob) but my dad was named Bill, in all likelihood because that was how his father perceived him. Told him that he was an abortion too late. Let him know who the favored progeny was, and it wasn’t Bill.
Bill took to drinking at an early age, 15. Like his stupid oldest son, he was addicted by the time he graduated high school and had set about a course of personal (and other peoples) debasement that left him afraid and alone at his end, the blank stare of catatonia as he hung on until I could tell him to go to sleep, and the poor bastard let go that night to finally find his peace.
He missed WWII but got caught up in the post war fervor and escalating anti-communism which was so popular in the late 40s early 50s, late 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, until the 90s where we started hating Muslims. Bill hated those commies, just like he was supposed to, and before his brain took him on permanent vacation, he had taken to hating those Muslims too. Just like he was supposed to.
So I have no problem imagining him being quite gung-ho for the whole Korean enterprise – some thinking is so bad that we can’t wait to change it, more direct action is required.
That is until it came to his direct action. Because, while Bill was supportive of US efforts to correct the thinking of people we don’t know around the world, he was less so when it came to his body being used for such educational purposes. Like so many, he was an intellectual anti-communist: he wanted his manufactured hatred to be enforced through the use of other people’s bodies. He liked his, which is why he drank disturbing amounts of liquor and smoked about 4 packs a day. True. True Blue.
How do you argue with a drug that calls itself True Blue? I mean, I took LSD in copious amounts and we called it acid. Imagine where I’d be if we called it Virtue. Or Pussy. Drooling in the corner like as not, I’m certain as many imagine me still. Had a little Mercedes logo shaped filter which did nothing I suspect except make the druggie dream of getting a Mercedes. Which Bill did. Blue, he got a blue one.
Bill told me that he wouldn’t go to Korea; said he went in when he was drafted as a conscientious objector, until they convinced him to accept his enslavement with the guarantee that he wouldn’t have no Koreans shooting at him. He accepted a role as an MP in Nevada. My dad, the drunken letch: a policeman. Makes you wonder, who do they turn down? Nobody apparently.
Bill drank on duty. Bill drank everywhere. I got his thirst, but my mother’s stomach, so I would drink and puke and drink and puke. It was a lovely combo. Since I’ve given up drinking, my puking is at an all-time low. Go team!
As penance for not directly blowing up Koreans, or shooting Koreans, or burning Koreans, soldiers stateside got to enjoy their own little hells. Bill told of his drunken exploits with pride, which likely has abetted my druggy bragging rights, a thoroughly stupid thing to brag about, and one engaged in with ardor by so many. The stuff Bill did when he was drunk was nothing to brag about.
But his promotion for Gordon’s Gin always struck me as amusing, so it seemed worthy of sharing, especially so in a world where people write at length about their cats. Here, kitty, kitty. Ah, shaddap!
The USA nuked Japan twice. Nuked a bunch of natives when the wind shifted after they bombed the Bikini atoll during Castle Bravo. But of all the places we’ve nuked and all the people we’ve irradiated, the place we’ve attacked the most? The USA. We’ve nuked this nation close to a thousand times. I’m not making this up. Here is a YouTube link of a disturbing representation of just how fucking crazy we are:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXxPRHkyAvY
Humans and especially American humans. We’re suicidal.
I look at this and think of cutters. Cutters are humans who have suffered such trauma, such psychological debasement that they cut themselves as a way to punish themselves for being inadequate, perverse, or just wrong. Cutters are hurt people who hurt themselves because they feel they deserve it. Nuked the USA 1000 times. Telling.
Bill took part in what were known as the Desert Rock tests in Nevada. It was a military operation called Buster-Jangle conducted from the early 1950s till 1957, where the military would drop an atomic or hydrogen bomb from a plane, or detonate it on the ground and then they would watch what happened to the troops exposed to the detonation from various perspectives. Study the effects is what they called it. Kind of like a kid squirting flammable fluid on an anthill and studying the ants when he lights it.
Bill told of his exposure: said he and his group were in a trench near the test. He said he had a half pint of Gordon’s Gin with him, for emergencies – that Bill, always prepared. He said just before the detonation, he set that bottle above him on the rim of the trench. When the explosion occurred, he said that bottle flew from atop the trench above him, slammed into the back of the trench yet didn’t break. He was very impressed with that: Gordon’s Gin, nuke tested, drunkard approved.
Afterwards, he gathered up his special beverage and he and his fellow grunts charged the area of detonation: they charged the nuke. Just in case it wasn’t dead or something. Then, in celebration for their successful thwarting of the commie desert and its denizens in Nevada, he and his buddies no doubt drank that nuked liquor and regaled each other with their exploits, as soldiers are wont to do. Decades later, regaling his son with the same, expanded and embellished story as story tellers are wont to do.
I’ve often wondered, though, did the nuking of my dad have any influence on me, other than culturally, does it offer me any super-human capacities or is it really only good for cooking? Or burning? I can’t fly, (TSA insists), can’t stick to walls or shoot webs out my ass. I’ve broken, so I don’t think I’m bullet proof, though I’ve had many opportunities to find out, gladly all missed.
The things I can do are because I’ve trained myself, taught myself to do them. The way I think is because I can see things which seem obvious to me, while others think I am imagining them. That clarity I suspect came in part by the government sponsored ingestion of LSD because once I crossed that threshold many of my illusions were swept away, I became receptive.
A receiver.
As a receiver, I accepted things from a neutral position, neither for nor against, observing, considering. In time, when that reception made the obvious irrefutable, the receiver became the broadcaster, sharing an understanding of reality from a different perspective indeed. The active man, as radio.
The radioactive man.
© 2012 simmbiosis 4/8/12
And the USA had set up for business, moving their direct aggression further south still, while only declaring a cease fire with the North Koreans. All told, our corporate rebranding cost billions of dollars and ended millions of lives, reputedly even a couple million civilians. Afterwards, with troops still on the ground, and hostilities in abatement but not concluded, the real invasion occurred as business interests saw a huge untapped manufacturing base ripe for the plucking. We would show the wretched commies how to properly make use of populations: build shit for people who are better off. China learned fast, huh?
My father was a veteran of the Korean conflict, it wasn’t really a war (except to the people it blew to pieces and those who put them back together) because according to the Constitution those have to be declared by congress and it was difficult to get them together on the whole invasion of sovereign nations thing. So the president decided for us and things have only gotten better since, because now, the president always decides.
Let me tell you a little about my dad: He was born in 1930 to a British immigrant who had no use for him. His older brother was named Robert, (we called him Bob) but my dad was named Bill, in all likelihood because that was how his father perceived him. Told him that he was an abortion too late. Let him know who the favored progeny was, and it wasn’t Bill.
Bill took to drinking at an early age, 15. Like his stupid oldest son, he was addicted by the time he graduated high school and had set about a course of personal (and other peoples) debasement that left him afraid and alone at his end, the blank stare of catatonia as he hung on until I could tell him to go to sleep, and the poor bastard let go that night to finally find his peace.
He missed WWII but got caught up in the post war fervor and escalating anti-communism which was so popular in the late 40s early 50s, late 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, until the 90s where we started hating Muslims. Bill hated those commies, just like he was supposed to, and before his brain took him on permanent vacation, he had taken to hating those Muslims too. Just like he was supposed to.
So I have no problem imagining him being quite gung-ho for the whole Korean enterprise – some thinking is so bad that we can’t wait to change it, more direct action is required.
That is until it came to his direct action. Because, while Bill was supportive of US efforts to correct the thinking of people we don’t know around the world, he was less so when it came to his body being used for such educational purposes. Like so many, he was an intellectual anti-communist: he wanted his manufactured hatred to be enforced through the use of other people’s bodies. He liked his, which is why he drank disturbing amounts of liquor and smoked about 4 packs a day. True. True Blue.
How do you argue with a drug that calls itself True Blue? I mean, I took LSD in copious amounts and we called it acid. Imagine where I’d be if we called it Virtue. Or Pussy. Drooling in the corner like as not, I’m certain as many imagine me still. Had a little Mercedes logo shaped filter which did nothing I suspect except make the druggie dream of getting a Mercedes. Which Bill did. Blue, he got a blue one.
Bill told me that he wouldn’t go to Korea; said he went in when he was drafted as a conscientious objector, until they convinced him to accept his enslavement with the guarantee that he wouldn’t have no Koreans shooting at him. He accepted a role as an MP in Nevada. My dad, the drunken letch: a policeman. Makes you wonder, who do they turn down? Nobody apparently.
Bill drank on duty. Bill drank everywhere. I got his thirst, but my mother’s stomach, so I would drink and puke and drink and puke. It was a lovely combo. Since I’ve given up drinking, my puking is at an all-time low. Go team!
As penance for not directly blowing up Koreans, or shooting Koreans, or burning Koreans, soldiers stateside got to enjoy their own little hells. Bill told of his drunken exploits with pride, which likely has abetted my druggy bragging rights, a thoroughly stupid thing to brag about, and one engaged in with ardor by so many. The stuff Bill did when he was drunk was nothing to brag about.
But his promotion for Gordon’s Gin always struck me as amusing, so it seemed worthy of sharing, especially so in a world where people write at length about their cats. Here, kitty, kitty. Ah, shaddap!
The USA nuked Japan twice. Nuked a bunch of natives when the wind shifted after they bombed the Bikini atoll during Castle Bravo. But of all the places we’ve nuked and all the people we’ve irradiated, the place we’ve attacked the most? The USA. We’ve nuked this nation close to a thousand times. I’m not making this up. Here is a YouTube link of a disturbing representation of just how fucking crazy we are:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXxPRHkyAvY
Humans and especially American humans. We’re suicidal.
I look at this and think of cutters. Cutters are humans who have suffered such trauma, such psychological debasement that they cut themselves as a way to punish themselves for being inadequate, perverse, or just wrong. Cutters are hurt people who hurt themselves because they feel they deserve it. Nuked the USA 1000 times. Telling.
Bill took part in what were known as the Desert Rock tests in Nevada. It was a military operation called Buster-Jangle conducted from the early 1950s till 1957, where the military would drop an atomic or hydrogen bomb from a plane, or detonate it on the ground and then they would watch what happened to the troops exposed to the detonation from various perspectives. Study the effects is what they called it. Kind of like a kid squirting flammable fluid on an anthill and studying the ants when he lights it.
Bill told of his exposure: said he and his group were in a trench near the test. He said he had a half pint of Gordon’s Gin with him, for emergencies – that Bill, always prepared. He said just before the detonation, he set that bottle above him on the rim of the trench. When the explosion occurred, he said that bottle flew from atop the trench above him, slammed into the back of the trench yet didn’t break. He was very impressed with that: Gordon’s Gin, nuke tested, drunkard approved.
Afterwards, he gathered up his special beverage and he and his fellow grunts charged the area of detonation: they charged the nuke. Just in case it wasn’t dead or something. Then, in celebration for their successful thwarting of the commie desert and its denizens in Nevada, he and his buddies no doubt drank that nuked liquor and regaled each other with their exploits, as soldiers are wont to do. Decades later, regaling his son with the same, expanded and embellished story as story tellers are wont to do.
I’ve often wondered, though, did the nuking of my dad have any influence on me, other than culturally, does it offer me any super-human capacities or is it really only good for cooking? Or burning? I can’t fly, (TSA insists), can’t stick to walls or shoot webs out my ass. I’ve broken, so I don’t think I’m bullet proof, though I’ve had many opportunities to find out, gladly all missed.
The things I can do are because I’ve trained myself, taught myself to do them. The way I think is because I can see things which seem obvious to me, while others think I am imagining them. That clarity I suspect came in part by the government sponsored ingestion of LSD because once I crossed that threshold many of my illusions were swept away, I became receptive.
A receiver.
As a receiver, I accepted things from a neutral position, neither for nor against, observing, considering. In time, when that reception made the obvious irrefutable, the receiver became the broadcaster, sharing an understanding of reality from a different perspective indeed. The active man, as radio.
The radioactive man.
© 2012 simmbiosis 4/8/12
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Fatal Abstractions
Every day, for as long as I can recall, I’ve considered the notion of my mortality at my own hand. Every day, I consider killing myself. I am not suffering physical agony, haven’t committed atrocity which leads me to seeing offing myself as something deserved, I do not live in horrific conditions. To the contrary, I live about as rich as a man-beast can live.
I have a home reflecting my own sensibility, eat delightfully, enjoy creature comforts and mod-cons and a lot of really hot and gratifying sex. I have talent and capacity and interest and people I love deeply and dearly. I have, perhaps a better life than I feel I have earned.
Don’t get me wrong, I work hard and dedicate my effort to what I set before me – I sometimes achieve a high level of proficiency. While not lazy in a creative sense, always engaged in something to keep brain and body active, alive, I don’t have a good record when it comes to some of our other invented contrivances: I suck at money, god and politics.
I can be political, polite, when the situation calls for it, but I invariably say something offensive, often deeply, if you talk with me long enough. If you listen to me. My suckage at politics is my honesty – I say what I feel at any given moment, not just what I feel the person I’m speaking to would like to hear. This is impolite, impolitic.
As to our god money, I work in creative abstracts and god money is the least creative while most manipulative of abstracts. Designed to control, contain and condition the vast herd of humanity, driven from one uninspiring pen to the next prior to our slaughter, god money is the abstract which makes all others pale by comparison. I don’t work well within its constraints.
The fact of this, is the fact of my inability, unwillingness to dispatch myself. I, in my grand and opulent life, wake often to such despair that I must stay my hand from the pistol on the headboard. I have held it more than I likely should admit, faced its finality with the understanding of the freedom it offers too often for a life lived large, but largely empty. Each day I face a moment or several where I feel so awful that I could wither into nothing if such things weren’t prohibitively difficult.
I suspect the reason for this is that I am a failure. Another abstract notion, yet one so firmly imbued that it daunts me every day of my life. Don’t care about god, don’t think that money is the answer, don’t really give a shit about which asshole is the leader du jour (cause frankly none of them inspire me to follow). And while stating this, I must acknowledge the role money plays in the abstract success – the respect and adoration of ones contemporaries while a consummation devoutly to be wished, still doesn’t keep the power on and food on the plate. You need the big paycheck for that. Reality trumped by abstract.
This is my perplexity. I work in the abstract: writing, music, art are all abstracts which, while moving, cannot physically move things. A song can’t reposition your sofa, a painting can’t fix your plumbing, the finest written expression cannot water your lawn. I know this. As an artistic type, I know this because I have spent my life trying to get my art to do anything and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t just sit there, all smug and self-assured.
Which means I’ve got to water and plumb and reposition and all that other stuff that art would be so much better at than me. Abstracts don’t do anything.
Yet our mess, my mess, is all pretty much related to them. Our different gods polarize us, leading us unto racism through the notion that god favors us, which leads us to disfavoring others. Our leaders further stratify us along racial, regional and economic lines. And money, instead of the means to achieve our objectives has become the objective – all we want is enough.
There is never enough. So we scramble over each other to get as much as we can and its inventors sit back and watch us rip ourselves and each other to shreds to possess its purity of essence, secure in the knowledge that while we fight each other over the table scraps, we won’t be lambasting them over their promulgation of division through economic slavery, so they can enjoy the prime cuts unmolested.
I remember when I was a boy, 20ish, I felt this way. I felt empty and alone and foolish in the face of the world around me, thoroughly incapable of rising to what was expected of me, what I expected of myself. I was a farmer then, facing the day from sun-up: digging, plowing, pruning, planting, irrigating, harvesting. I was a young artistic type then too, teaching myself to write, compose, play music. But art wasn’t economically viable. For me.
So I labored. I have my whole life, on and off. Crafted art for free and cleaned out pipes or built houses or sold crap or made movies (other people’s movies) for money. And not much at that. Hard work pays off for some, good fortune for most who enjoy it, but the vast majority will work hard and enjoy no good fortune – ever. Hard work is no guarantee of success. Ask a field laborer if you doubt this.
This then leads me to suspect the reason for this sense of despair is the notion that I am better than what I do and my inability to overcome my failings is the constant reminder that I am not. I am no better than what I do. None of us are. All of our noble thoughts pale by comparison to our ignoble deeds. When I farm, I’m no better than a farmer (likely the most noble, and least rewarding, profession), when I plumb, I’m no better than a plumber, when I paint, I’m just a fucking painter.
That’s all.
I want to be better than this. I want to be the best at something yet understand with no equivocation that such a thing is beyond impossible but for one instance: I can only be the best at being me. I can only be the best at what I do, not by comparison with what someone else does. I have the experience of no other and no other has the experience of me. I can only be better than I am, not anyone else, just as anyone else can only be better than they are.
Yet that is our social measure – not self-improvement so much as the diminution of others. Best the opponent, crush the opposition, revel in the spoils of conquest. Fight, fight, fight – win, win, win. Those who look different, dress different, think different are to be marginalized and disregarded – superior types succeed, inferior types fail. This is but the caprice of birth, predetermination, God’s will.
Steal the crown, earn it, it doesn’t matter – because it is a crown, man positioning himself alongside god and nothing more than the clamoring of monkeys to be the top banana. For a while. Anyone can be king – anyone born into royalty or wretched enough to destroy any number of lives to wrest such a position from another. Superiority comes from exiting the right vagina alive or killing the right people dead.
Instead of working to be worthy of our fellows, it seems we struggle to be superior to them. This would appear to be the cause of our racism, the notion that for whatever reason, regardless of what we do, we are still better than others around us. Maybe because of our location, perhaps owing to our pigment, likely owing to our beliefs, but for some reason, we are certain we are better than someone else. Usually a lot of someone elses.
My despair is that I can’t live up to what I imagine of myself – I’m not as good as I think I am. If I made oodles of money and had adoring fans heaping me with praise, I wouldn’t be as good as they thought I was. But as it stands, I see impressive work which appeals to me ignored while observing work that appeals to children rewarded magnificently. Gaga. We worship baby talk.
As a joke of an artist, one laughed at – not with, I have sucked this up for my entire adult life. It has led me unto moroseness and self-loathing. When I create, I can contain it, direct it, take power over it. When I am compelled into non-creative endeavor, my spirit withers, my lust for life becomes disinterest and my drive to create languishes. I become positively unbearable. To me. I lose my desire to abide, to proceed.
It is through my relation with my abstracts, my art, that I crawl from my slough of despair and press forth. Disgusting that surfeit leads the glutted to thoughts of termination while starvation leaves the hungry with little drive beyond sustenance. One supposes that there is more than one emptiness and more than one response to it.
Battling abstracts with reality is an untenable struggle – like trying to slay Santa Claus or mate with the Virgin Mary. While food abounds, people without fictional money must starve; with shelter in abundance, people without pieces of paper with numbers and pictures on it must sleep in the elements; while medication exists in astronomical proportion, humans without the right imaginary permissions must suffer its lack. How does one overcome such perniciousness?
Despair, while existing only within the mind, can lead to the permanent alteration of a body.
Abstracts, driven by human action, can kill.
But you still have to move the sofa on your own.
© 2012 simmbiosis 3/13/12
I have a home reflecting my own sensibility, eat delightfully, enjoy creature comforts and mod-cons and a lot of really hot and gratifying sex. I have talent and capacity and interest and people I love deeply and dearly. I have, perhaps a better life than I feel I have earned.
Don’t get me wrong, I work hard and dedicate my effort to what I set before me – I sometimes achieve a high level of proficiency. While not lazy in a creative sense, always engaged in something to keep brain and body active, alive, I don’t have a good record when it comes to some of our other invented contrivances: I suck at money, god and politics.
I can be political, polite, when the situation calls for it, but I invariably say something offensive, often deeply, if you talk with me long enough. If you listen to me. My suckage at politics is my honesty – I say what I feel at any given moment, not just what I feel the person I’m speaking to would like to hear. This is impolite, impolitic.
As to our god money, I work in creative abstracts and god money is the least creative while most manipulative of abstracts. Designed to control, contain and condition the vast herd of humanity, driven from one uninspiring pen to the next prior to our slaughter, god money is the abstract which makes all others pale by comparison. I don’t work well within its constraints.
The fact of this, is the fact of my inability, unwillingness to dispatch myself. I, in my grand and opulent life, wake often to such despair that I must stay my hand from the pistol on the headboard. I have held it more than I likely should admit, faced its finality with the understanding of the freedom it offers too often for a life lived large, but largely empty. Each day I face a moment or several where I feel so awful that I could wither into nothing if such things weren’t prohibitively difficult.
I suspect the reason for this is that I am a failure. Another abstract notion, yet one so firmly imbued that it daunts me every day of my life. Don’t care about god, don’t think that money is the answer, don’t really give a shit about which asshole is the leader du jour (cause frankly none of them inspire me to follow). And while stating this, I must acknowledge the role money plays in the abstract success – the respect and adoration of ones contemporaries while a consummation devoutly to be wished, still doesn’t keep the power on and food on the plate. You need the big paycheck for that. Reality trumped by abstract.
This is my perplexity. I work in the abstract: writing, music, art are all abstracts which, while moving, cannot physically move things. A song can’t reposition your sofa, a painting can’t fix your plumbing, the finest written expression cannot water your lawn. I know this. As an artistic type, I know this because I have spent my life trying to get my art to do anything and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t just sit there, all smug and self-assured.
Which means I’ve got to water and plumb and reposition and all that other stuff that art would be so much better at than me. Abstracts don’t do anything.
Yet our mess, my mess, is all pretty much related to them. Our different gods polarize us, leading us unto racism through the notion that god favors us, which leads us to disfavoring others. Our leaders further stratify us along racial, regional and economic lines. And money, instead of the means to achieve our objectives has become the objective – all we want is enough.
There is never enough. So we scramble over each other to get as much as we can and its inventors sit back and watch us rip ourselves and each other to shreds to possess its purity of essence, secure in the knowledge that while we fight each other over the table scraps, we won’t be lambasting them over their promulgation of division through economic slavery, so they can enjoy the prime cuts unmolested.
I remember when I was a boy, 20ish, I felt this way. I felt empty and alone and foolish in the face of the world around me, thoroughly incapable of rising to what was expected of me, what I expected of myself. I was a farmer then, facing the day from sun-up: digging, plowing, pruning, planting, irrigating, harvesting. I was a young artistic type then too, teaching myself to write, compose, play music. But art wasn’t economically viable. For me.
So I labored. I have my whole life, on and off. Crafted art for free and cleaned out pipes or built houses or sold crap or made movies (other people’s movies) for money. And not much at that. Hard work pays off for some, good fortune for most who enjoy it, but the vast majority will work hard and enjoy no good fortune – ever. Hard work is no guarantee of success. Ask a field laborer if you doubt this.
This then leads me to suspect the reason for this sense of despair is the notion that I am better than what I do and my inability to overcome my failings is the constant reminder that I am not. I am no better than what I do. None of us are. All of our noble thoughts pale by comparison to our ignoble deeds. When I farm, I’m no better than a farmer (likely the most noble, and least rewarding, profession), when I plumb, I’m no better than a plumber, when I paint, I’m just a fucking painter.
That’s all.
I want to be better than this. I want to be the best at something yet understand with no equivocation that such a thing is beyond impossible but for one instance: I can only be the best at being me. I can only be the best at what I do, not by comparison with what someone else does. I have the experience of no other and no other has the experience of me. I can only be better than I am, not anyone else, just as anyone else can only be better than they are.
Yet that is our social measure – not self-improvement so much as the diminution of others. Best the opponent, crush the opposition, revel in the spoils of conquest. Fight, fight, fight – win, win, win. Those who look different, dress different, think different are to be marginalized and disregarded – superior types succeed, inferior types fail. This is but the caprice of birth, predetermination, God’s will.
Steal the crown, earn it, it doesn’t matter – because it is a crown, man positioning himself alongside god and nothing more than the clamoring of monkeys to be the top banana. For a while. Anyone can be king – anyone born into royalty or wretched enough to destroy any number of lives to wrest such a position from another. Superiority comes from exiting the right vagina alive or killing the right people dead.
Instead of working to be worthy of our fellows, it seems we struggle to be superior to them. This would appear to be the cause of our racism, the notion that for whatever reason, regardless of what we do, we are still better than others around us. Maybe because of our location, perhaps owing to our pigment, likely owing to our beliefs, but for some reason, we are certain we are better than someone else. Usually a lot of someone elses.
My despair is that I can’t live up to what I imagine of myself – I’m not as good as I think I am. If I made oodles of money and had adoring fans heaping me with praise, I wouldn’t be as good as they thought I was. But as it stands, I see impressive work which appeals to me ignored while observing work that appeals to children rewarded magnificently. Gaga. We worship baby talk.
As a joke of an artist, one laughed at – not with, I have sucked this up for my entire adult life. It has led me unto moroseness and self-loathing. When I create, I can contain it, direct it, take power over it. When I am compelled into non-creative endeavor, my spirit withers, my lust for life becomes disinterest and my drive to create languishes. I become positively unbearable. To me. I lose my desire to abide, to proceed.
It is through my relation with my abstracts, my art, that I crawl from my slough of despair and press forth. Disgusting that surfeit leads the glutted to thoughts of termination while starvation leaves the hungry with little drive beyond sustenance. One supposes that there is more than one emptiness and more than one response to it.
Battling abstracts with reality is an untenable struggle – like trying to slay Santa Claus or mate with the Virgin Mary. While food abounds, people without fictional money must starve; with shelter in abundance, people without pieces of paper with numbers and pictures on it must sleep in the elements; while medication exists in astronomical proportion, humans without the right imaginary permissions must suffer its lack. How does one overcome such perniciousness?
Despair, while existing only within the mind, can lead to the permanent alteration of a body.
Abstracts, driven by human action, can kill.
But you still have to move the sofa on your own.
© 2012 simmbiosis 3/13/12
Friday, February 17, 2012
Reality Check
Like mobsters the system
Demands its cut from we
Who go to work and try to earn
A little dignity
Gamblers get their income
For the most part duty free
Workers pay through the nose
Subject to buggery
The increasing tax burden
Falls on those who have the least
While rich guys’ rich accountants
Watch profits untouched increased
A predatory system
As corruption self-policed
Serves to always guarantee
That the customer is fleeced
Now lemme get this straight:
The government invents the money
And pays the Fed to print it
Even though Constitutionally
It’s the system’s job to mint it
Every dollar they invent
Comes with a little fee
To pay it off then becomes
An impossibility
This charge for making money
A gambler’s winning bet
Tax payers are the losers
Drowning in invented debt
Yet we bail out the banksters
Thieves who sunk our ship of state
Loaning us back our own money
Of course at the going rate
So some prefer to bank
With people that they know
Not officious strangers
Who we beg to bestow
The money we give them
To hold in their escrow
So we can give it back
To pay them what we owe
Instead of just keeping the paper
Which seems like the smart thing to do
Give it to a banking ass raper
While watching his profits accrue
He swaps it for interested paper
Or plastic, bid paper adieu
Just save it for the bottom scraper
Wiping the savings onto you
Time for a reality check
Accepting only cash for bail
Broken, trapped within the wreck
Afraid that check is in the mail
The post brings me a refund
Department of treasury
While revenuers are shunned
Money cures what ails me
So’s I takes it to Wells Fargos
Government backed: a hundred grand
Payment extracted through the nose
Refund check within my hand
The oh so happy bankster
A sneer upon her damning gob
Just an economic gangster
A bitch: the right man for the job
“So sorry cannot cash it here”
I asked, “Is this not a bank?”
“It sure is and let’s be clear
If it stinks we made it stank”
“But you gotta give it to us
Give to us your little slip
No account nothing to discuss
Submit to our stewardship”
“Barring that go to Wal Mart
They are known to cash them there
They forgo the none or all part
Why they have so much to share”
Cannot cash this reality check
Guarantor in the tank
Stare at this economic train-wreck
So many victims to thank
From the fish tank at Wells
To the freak show at Wal’s
Fresh released from their cells
Because bad nature calls
Owed, our reason rebels
Owned and held by the balls
Come resounding death knells
As the economy falls
Of course drones at Wal Mart wouldn’t cash it
Claimed it had an expiration date
Honor checks which arrive within hours
Seems I was at least a year too late
If you won’t compete within their system
Treat you as though you’re a reprobate
Toy with you while playing with their paper
Start the match already in checkmate
Plastic/paper delightful for groceries
Anticipating pleasures which await
While wonderful wallowing with weirdies
That paper won’t put food upon my plate
Seen as trash this reality check
Balance books balancing blank
Prop up nonsense with plenty of dreck
As good as money in the bank
© 2012 simmbiosis
Demands its cut from we
Who go to work and try to earn
A little dignity
Gamblers get their income
For the most part duty free
Workers pay through the nose
Subject to buggery
The increasing tax burden
Falls on those who have the least
While rich guys’ rich accountants
Watch profits untouched increased
A predatory system
As corruption self-policed
Serves to always guarantee
That the customer is fleeced
Now lemme get this straight:
The government invents the money
And pays the Fed to print it
Even though Constitutionally
It’s the system’s job to mint it
Every dollar they invent
Comes with a little fee
To pay it off then becomes
An impossibility
This charge for making money
A gambler’s winning bet
Tax payers are the losers
Drowning in invented debt
Yet we bail out the banksters
Thieves who sunk our ship of state
Loaning us back our own money
Of course at the going rate
So some prefer to bank
With people that they know
Not officious strangers
Who we beg to bestow
The money we give them
To hold in their escrow
So we can give it back
To pay them what we owe
Instead of just keeping the paper
Which seems like the smart thing to do
Give it to a banking ass raper
While watching his profits accrue
He swaps it for interested paper
Or plastic, bid paper adieu
Just save it for the bottom scraper
Wiping the savings onto you
Time for a reality check
Accepting only cash for bail
Broken, trapped within the wreck
Afraid that check is in the mail
The post brings me a refund
Department of treasury
While revenuers are shunned
Money cures what ails me
So’s I takes it to Wells Fargos
Government backed: a hundred grand
Payment extracted through the nose
Refund check within my hand
The oh so happy bankster
A sneer upon her damning gob
Just an economic gangster
A bitch: the right man for the job
“So sorry cannot cash it here”
I asked, “Is this not a bank?”
“It sure is and let’s be clear
If it stinks we made it stank”
“But you gotta give it to us
Give to us your little slip
No account nothing to discuss
Submit to our stewardship”
“Barring that go to Wal Mart
They are known to cash them there
They forgo the none or all part
Why they have so much to share”
Cannot cash this reality check
Guarantor in the tank
Stare at this economic train-wreck
So many victims to thank
From the fish tank at Wells
To the freak show at Wal’s
Fresh released from their cells
Because bad nature calls
Owed, our reason rebels
Owned and held by the balls
Come resounding death knells
As the economy falls
Of course drones at Wal Mart wouldn’t cash it
Claimed it had an expiration date
Honor checks which arrive within hours
Seems I was at least a year too late
If you won’t compete within their system
Treat you as though you’re a reprobate
Toy with you while playing with their paper
Start the match already in checkmate
Plastic/paper delightful for groceries
Anticipating pleasures which await
While wonderful wallowing with weirdies
That paper won’t put food upon my plate
Seen as trash this reality check
Balance books balancing blank
Prop up nonsense with plenty of dreck
As good as money in the bank
© 2012 simmbiosis
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