The Fall of Iraq and Syria to "Caliph Ibrahim"

The desert sun gathers laser-light momentum, seething through the mist-like sands of southwestern Iraq.

Pressing an advance from Arar, the capital city of the Northern Border Province, the Royal Saudi Land Force reaches the troubled border and awaits potential incursions from the newly-announced 'Islamic State' (formerly ISIS, or ISIL). Lieutenant-General Qassim Atta, spokesman for the Iraqi Army, officially disparaged the move after Saudi allegations that the soldiers manned at the border had been "ordered to quit their posts without justification," claiming this to be an attempt by the Saudi's to undermine Iraqi Army morale.

There is a strange irony about the presence of the Saudi army at this border post of history, as it is the same arbitrary demarcation between desert and desert that the American and coalition forces crossed once in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm, and once again in 2003 for Operation Iraqi Freedom. After 8 years of war and slow bleeding on the part of the American military industrial complex, as well as the greater American economy (and, thus, world economy), President Obama declared an end to the occupation in 2011, completing the total withdrawal of all combat forces by the end of December the same year. In their place, they left President Nouri al-Maliki to his own devices, forced to brave the remainder of the dusty, blood-strewn road towards Peaceful and Egalitarian Democracy all on his own.

As can be expected in a country long torn and trashed by war and systemic totalitarianism, Nouri suffers from a Nixonian paranoia. Constantly fearing there was and/or is a Ba'athist plot to overthrow him, he implemented his own systemic form of totalitarian sectarianism by expunging all with a Sunni religious background from the armed forces and as many high posts of authority as his power would allow. Founded less on any disdain for Sunni practices, and more on the historical Sunni connection to Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party, Maliki tore the country in two and created a system of dangerously implied polarisation. Although this did not cause the current crisis in the country, it almost seemed to organize the stage itself and hand the keys to the backstage dressing room directly into the blood-and-sweat caked palms of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his rag-tag team of battle-hardened Sunni extremists.

The situation seems to lose a peg with every passing day. The fog of war hangs viciously over the entire region, with every report of a victory or defeat remaining unsubstantiated in the face of zero empirical observation. The tides of changing fortunes seem to edge at the sandy rockshores of ISIS gains without really sweeping in to any true Iraqi advantage. The Kurds continue to push for unconditional independence in the face of unproductive insults and accusations to treason from Maliki and his cabinet, showcasing, once again, Maliki's paranoia and uncanny talent to polarize the opposition. It almost seems as if any attempt to remedy the situation would end up being counterproductive across the board, leading to future issues liable to fractalize in complexity ad infinitum. This, perhaps, is why the United States sees nothing but future issue were they to ever intervene. At this point, the situation in Iraq, regardless of whose fault it is, is centered around damage control as opposed to solutions. The most tragic fact out of all of this is, however, that this seems to be the wisest decision available to all who are involved. At least for the time being.

The official creation of an Islamic Caliphate is an unprecedented victory for radical Islam, and the most significant gain since the attacks of September 11th, 2001. It seems highly unlikely that the Islamic State will remain victorious with all long-term variables considered, but the symbolic triumph will act as a match-to-oil for jihadists worldwide in the years to come. At the tail end of June, the Islamic State even went so far as to physically destroy the border posts and checkpoints between Iraq and Syria, allowing a free flow of men, weapons, and other supplies on both fronts. They also released a video in which a group of militants held their respective passports from their countries of origin up to a camera and tore them to bits for the world to see. Soon afterwards, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (now known as 'Caliph Ibrahim') called upon Muslims the world over to flock to the new Caliphate to join the war and strengthen the society as a whole. He asked Muslim doctors and scholars to join the emigre in an effort to develop an 'intelligentsia' and reignite the Islamic Golden Age. This was followed by the double-standard of threatening the Christian community in Mosul with the choice between execution, or paying a 'religious protection tax' known as 'jizya.' The Christians were, understandably, more content with fleeing east into Kurdish territory to find asylum.

This kind of double-standard, between a demand for Muslim intelligence and the imposition of medieval religious law (which, let it be noted, would not have been tolerated or implemented under the Prophet Muhammad) has become one of the hypocrisies key to understanding the Islamic States fractured message. As they crucify their enemies in public squares, they attempt to foster a desire for Muslim intellectualism, causing all Muslims of moderate and rational intelligence to publicly denounce the group for its barbarism, and denying it any sense of international legitimacy.

The interwoven intrigues of Middle Eastern politics continue to exacerbate the problem ten-fold. With the Sunni majority Saudis coming under warranted investigation for having funded Sunni jihadist groups like ISIS in the past, and Iran trying to protect itself in assisting both Ba'athist Syria and Shiite Iraq, it seems unlikely that any solution.. whether permanent or temporary.. will be reached in the foreseeable future. Adding to all of this chaos is the reignited war between Israel and the fractured remains of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip... it is geopolitically impossible that Israel will calmly stand-by and allow ISIS to become wholly successful in neighboring Syria. They are already at odds with Hamas, which is battle-hardened and motivated to fight after assisting Bashar al-Assad in fending off the moderate rebellion. Should the Islamic State see any more concrete success in the field of battle, you can bet that Israel will begin to take stock of its situation, and fight back. It may be, perhaps, that Syria's ultimate vindication of its crisis will come in the form of a violent Israeli intervention a year or so down the road... and it will be a catch-22 for all who are forced to become inexorably involved in this globalizing conflict.

Depictions, Part 2

Up as early as the dawn, clouds sifting leftward westward shimmer and drip-- half like empty crystal void, half like deep-ocean Mariana's Trench with happy-little-pockmarks all up-in-between.

What in the Heroes am I doing up so early on a Thursday morning? Not sleeping. Downloading new video games via Pirate Bay. Watching old-analog-rendition documentaries from History Channel circa early 2000's-- one doc in particular about U.S. government tests on unwilling (and largely unknowing) civilian populations. I as the orifice and experiencier of the world at large, all at ONCE THRU THE EYEZ and at TWICE THRU THE BRAINIAL CRANIAL and out thru the thoughts and words and cramped headspace full of starships, pornography, eloquent and twisting sunrise dimensionals...

The Internet? It'll make you the universe as-if you weren't the universe already!
Straight through the blood and sweat and 'it's-too-earlies-for-this.' You wanted a bit of laughter, and that's exactly what you got.

Though it time-lapses across my faulty-flick'ring eyelids, I can tell past the Buddha-Bottle-Buddha-Themed-Beer sitting empty on the windowsill amidst a wild collection of coffee cups and power converters that the Sun sees the Capital Letters that were written out line-for-line in Times New Roman across my RNA-DNA slow-Saganite Cosmic Poetry by God the Author.

Eyelids are heavy and yet inverted and living-- real and concerned with loving the affair of life rather than the marriage! Life as an unofficial longevity-but-not-forever kinda thing.. like young love, old love, marriage, too, when you really get down to it.. just confused little souls feeling pulled to one another in the proverbial Dark Under the Sunlight and Illuminated by Aurora Borealis Forever-Daytime-Forever-Nighttime-Forever.. Syrian rebels waking up on a Monday morning to the sound of gunfire and ALLAHU AKBAR's in distance.. creeps, yea, a television Evangelist preaching God is Love and God Treats His Children Like Children (discipline the soul, yes? discipline the soul!) (kill the widow and ask her why you did it)

All the preaching homelessers who think they've found God in the same dark alleyway they found their snot-drenched headaches every casted winter night-- neglected by the Government, always remembered by the God-- Lucifer (Government, Passivity, Watchful Indifference), and God (A Few Dollars Here and There, A Shamanic Vision at Franciscan Ascetic Extremity) aaaahhhh all bungled-up and waiting for a Savior when the Savior is themselves or the debt they owe to Royal Life Ltd. and we wait like the rest of them, they angry over my no-dollars-to-spare ("look, I make rent, I grab groceries, I pay debt. In all likelihood, you have more money than I do right now. I'd love to help you out if our poverty's weren't so close to kissing") all such rudeness in one respect and yet delinquently honest.. how I can admire the travelling Hippie Bands reckless abandon and yet never forget to fear Abandon..

and all the preaching Home-Leasers.. the strangeness' clad in glass and patchwork straight-black perm-pressed leadership stench and pastel markers smeared across the sidewalk.. ".. if you take away your consideration of the company's weak future bond equity, there are three different ways we could tackle this project.." busy-ness-man.. snarky and corrected with a Job To Do. But Who Am I?

A Job To Do. A Job To Do Do Do Do.

NOT so much A Job Well Done (Never Quite A Job Well Done) (serendipity has a crease-and-fold collective opinion of our concrete jungles and military juntas.. "'I can't even watch the game tonight.. Brasilia is the capital of Brazil?' 'Sao Paulo, you drunk buffoon.''No, Brasilia!' 'Sao Paulo!'")
stupors, collect-calls, drag-queens, militant armies and school shooters in bullet-proof vests all the best all the best.. what I wanted was a reason to crease my forehead all adult-like and say to the kid, "I really think you'd do a lot better in computer networking.. check the job statistics! international openings are through the ROOF.." and she sighs at the weight of every crush-ed dream coalescing into filmy-slime-froth at top of inadequately-heated Cream of Mushroom Soup.. what silty salty shit.. all the parochial worldviews of the 20th century being swallowed in the Liberal Boom and Bust, Boom and Bust, Boom and Big Busty Bitch Sucks Bloated Balls (click the link and see your fantasies pass Disney's red-light and hit anal penetration with a vintage glass bottle of ol' Coca Cola Noir)..

After a sleepless neverend night, I stayed up and bored on the black leather couch with my roommates cat waltzing in-an-out-an-in-an-out still confused at his relatively recent move to our war-zone clone of a home.. poor bastard of a cat, names Tonic.. has a bred sister named Gin.. drink a cup of joseph trying to finish illegal-pirate of newest Splinter Cell (sadly o'sad it demands too much on the vide-ah card and lags all creative and bleepy) all the steam from my shit-preground coffee in'ah French press doves upward to the window and the clouds sifting leftward westward shimmer and drip.. I contemplate concerta to stay perked-out and take a shower, pop just that, XL release concerta.. not sleeping makes it strangest experience, uncomfortable at first.. pressures in lower jaw, electric tightness at tips of front teeth and I talk myself down on the 6 to Royal Oak Exchange via Downtown all freaky-vibed anxieties about my blurring vision and perhaps eternal cross-eyes I avoid looking at reflections cus they father me out of my bedroom, warm sanity.. warm seance dance-arounds-a'naked-and-praise.. I feel okay now, though. Better than okay, I feel elated and awake as if I slept a solid 9-some hours and Alex to left writing stories of horse-drawn labor with Petter on Skype telling tales of his not-so-gladness to be home in Norway for another 3-weeks.

A group of hearty-look hardly-look investors in stock business pajamas march past in strange rabble on way, perhaps, to next coffee joint down road. The unfamiliar block next to window I sit near seems as mysterious in existence as Diagon Alley.. where in the fuckssakes is it, exactly? I once ventured to find out and came across library courtyard I tagged as future-reading locale. The hungry sun above was at snowblind potential and eating away at my lack of protected retinas. I've stopped worrying about protection as it all dis-integrates equally careful.

And it's our covert motives that give us reason to shame-- unrealistic to be ashamed, but ashamed you'll be anyway for disliking the guy or avoiding the girl and slithering into a fetal position to deflect the ass-flack from Moral Mike. You escape yourself successfully, and douse the city in gasoline machines for another 15 years 'til our fossil fuels shivvy dribble flop fade into literal thin air.. bubye.. the sun is getting brighter with every passing minute, it's all summery out and I'm inside typelocking myself to a circumferenced earth at the tip of my bleeding fingers. I'm just waiting for apostrophe, and realize that, some day, I will be a fuel source too (you're welcome, Succeeding Race).

and all races are inevitably lost. This is not the cynics drawl.

it is optimism.

the land of opportunity

Betwixt of any sense beyond experiment, I sat on the bed between shifts and out-whipped the bag of Concerta given to me by Matt, o'timey hard-worker-soft-souled Matt, who felt, perhaps, that I had a legitimate reason to explore this legal avenue of pharmaceutical mind-manipulation for reasons he would rather fathom in retrospect. I popped a single pill, and voilà, the legal-cocainnabinoid began to flow between my red and white blood-cells playing cops and robbers.

It is when I feel nostalgic that I feel the need to write. I remembered, at work, with all those strange everyone-elses faces gliding past (and myself annoyed at the general lack of positive reception "Hello there!" "h .. i ." is one sour-looking businessmans sultry whispered reply.. once, a woman told me 'look, I know that you are told to say hello at the door to everyone who enters, but I don't like it. I just want to shop in peace, and no, I don't need any help' and without case to what my managers could say, I somewhat-hissed-back, "if you don't want to be greeted, then perhaps you shouldn't walk into big private corporate establishments to find the books you're looking for," and she shrugged and muttered some piss-talk under her breath and glided upstairs to find a copy of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead or Machiavelli's The Prince to validate her bitter attitude, I bet, the sour witch), my time spent living in that backwater Esso suburb of Port Coquitlam back in 2011 when Occupy Wall Street was still a hungry potential, not yet bogged down in procrastinates over herbal teas and talk of chakras and enlightenment and how the typical Wall Street businessman probably never had a real orgasm and hence had never truly satisfied the energies now burnt-to-crisps inside their Root Chakras or whathaveyou, where I believed I would find a better, more interesting world further from the musty-smallness of forest-drenched rain-drenched Powell River, only to discover I may be right outside my front door, but that's EXACTLY where I was, no further than right outside my front door.. I mean, for Goddaskes, I was born in Vancouver, this isn't a culturally-shocking move to New Delhi or Kathmandu--- and so on and so forth is how I once berated myself thru constant cycling thoughts of no-escape, I, a little walking hell of devils-advice and panic disorder-- the Great Big Port City of George Vancouver only succeeding in further overwhelming my already delicate attempt at false optimism thru self-voided Buddhist smalltalk as I travelled from bookstore to bookstore reading Alan Watts in shady attempts to save-myself but only digging my walking grave even deeper into the soil of feared-insanity.

Port Coquitlam itself was a small-town wearing a business suit and holding hands with an angry father forcing him to college for computer networking as it's the most economically viable market at hand.. at first, I did not see this. I saw my idolized imaginings of Vancouver (never Port Coquitlam), the shining water-reflected skyline of my past and present legacies, where my father once snorted cocaine with a bohemian group of someones, and my mother tried LSD just to prove to her friends how bad it was (and lo and behold, what a terrible time she had!), all this Otherness, Strangeness, yet still Connected-- an Otherness with which I was taken, left to whisper into empty Campbell's cans so-as to speak with the city from a distance, two children growing older together 'til my inevitable return and our agreement to share costs on rent.

I returned, as planned. I returned, and found that old-best-friend hating the Homeless and loving the Rich-- spending time with the Peppy Plutocracy whilst enslaving the Middle Classes (first Letter Capitals to Assist YOU in Grasping my Anger with All Five Thumbs) and the horrors I saw in my already delicate state, all the starving addictives slouching-inching down the sides of dirty old walls, the only thing missing a smear of blood to follow their corpseish collapse, all just the footnotes to history, the footnotes to wealth and progress-reality, all footnotes with no shoes O my God O my Goodness and O Canada, Our Home and Native Land!

It hurt like it did, but I felt powerless and gaited. Felt like it were just as well me (cus it just as well is), I, in Vancouver.. Great Big Port City of George Vancouver.. saw the end-stretching-cold-legs of Nietzsche's Dead God.. those in cutthroat-black-suits armed with calculators and wives could afford private jets and yearly trips 'round our globular strangeness whilst others had to beg and berate and debate and break-down to get a crummy old bagel and a past-due mostly-empty jug of old milk and perhaps a 'side of fries with that order.'

What crushed me so much about this playing a Witness to God's Death (or, not so much a 'witness' as a relative asked to the morgue to identify the body) was my intuitive grasp that this is the poverty of the First World.. this is not as bad as it gets and on a scale of 1 to 10 this would only be a 3.. all the poor and displaced of Eastern Europe.. Moldovan families indifferent to the whims and what's taken.. someone called me a Socialist and said I would later grow out of it as 'reality' angled its rearing-ugly head to chop me smithereens like it did so mercilessly to the Poor and Irrelevant.. I looked at them and still look at people like them and think 'that is evil unsure of itself.. that is evil unaware... that is evil and evil is  evil to watch..' the Evil Act being the use of Money to purchase the world, demanding us all to pay royalties (mass royalties) for the privilege of life so afforded by them.. (the Sons of Daughters of God first stabbing their father then stabbing themselves then locking away and ignoring their young brother with cerebral palsy 'cus he could never be armed with a calculator, nor wife)..

I learned, thru practice, to cope with these evils as laws-for-now. Coping did not mean tolerance, nor did coping mean agreement.. I had charged at life expecting hugs and bottles.. what I got was hugs and bottles.. all while I watched over the shoulder of whoever embraced me at the time and saw young-others doing the same, where are the hugs and bottles..? they sank into the nether as the crowd ebbed past, ignoring the cries of pleading love, pleading love over time so traumatised as to distort this love (so inherent and implied in the Heart) into confusion, confusion into loss, and loss into hatred.. as the crowd ebbed past, the crowd ebbed past..

After 3 and a half months, I moved back home to Powell River.. the soggy ol' calm of what I already knew.. the warm arms of the rest, the warm arms of water-reflected sunsets.. and I got my hugs and bottles.

but was this really a happy ending?

perish on the sand-drawn cross

Called in sick to work, disappoint the boss, cus of a terrible vodka hangover I framed as the flu.

'I've got the cold-body-shivers and a bucket next to my bed. I'd be no help to you, trust me.' Thankfully, one of the friendlier dishwashers agreed to work the shift in my absence. My hangover eventually plateaued into one of those fried-brain poetic calms, where you're pretty sure that terrible habit of yours shaved a few minutes or days from your life, and yet you're in some sort of involuntary (yet accepted and mostly secretly-desired) state of meditation and trance with the world. People walking past speak of strange, complex lives, with their own problems, their own triumphs, romances, fears, and aspirations.

Two young college-boys, dashing, laugh with each other at Habit Coffee. My debit card stopped working for some strange reason, with the machine reading 'insufficient funds' as the cause, and yet I managed to check my balance via online application, and I still have a solid $15.86 available so something is clearly wrong. I explain this to the baristas at Habit, and the girl understands my first-world plight, gives me a free cappuccino as a result, and I sit there at the clearest panoramic window overlooking the corners of Yates and Blanshard thankful for the kindness and finish Part One of Kerouac's Desolation Angels (Desolation in Solitude).

Vodka, echw. I spat at the brink of vomit above my dirty toilet seat, perhaps the more unhealthy fact-of-the-matter is that I somehow managed to keep it down. So it rots away my stomach and eats away at my liver. Disgusting. Although the prior stupor was quite nice.

On my way to the Public Library (where I sit now), some girl with a summer-skirt was unbeknownst of the fact that it had folded somehow at the back and as she ran for the parked 11 (Uvic via Uplands), everyone could see her thonged ass and they all looked back, forth, back, in dirty-awkwardity (I included) wondering what was ruder: telling her? or just watching her spring away? I think I heard someone make a quip remark about it, and yet glanced away and forward as to seem unaroused (their partner was with them, holding hands and all, avoiding the lumpy desire and lust that always appears in short bouts during moments like that).

I need some sort of adventure, tasting the potential of existence as I called in sick to work and immediately felt better once the shadow it cast was delivered from the day. I think of Alex and Petter, with their motley crew of savages, riding highway 101 toward San Francisco. Last I heard, they had stopped over in Portland and perhaps had said hello to our friend Tad in the area. I wish I could have gone, felt the road glow in preternatural beauty and ecstatically bongo'd every breath. I haven't felt the true excitement of freedom and travel in so very, very long. Always, the thought of debt and labour. That's the niche I've crawled into for the time being, and I owe a lot to the friends who wait (without hate, without anger) for me to pay them back. I have some sort of shameful asceticism in the way I work now, as if I cannot just up and quit as I may often do, because I'm doing it for the friends who kindly (perhaps, dumbly) propped me up with coin. Even if most of it goes to an insatiably hungry MasterCard Troll living under a bridge of self-immolating sadnesses and post-modernisms, at least my fridge is full of food.

I lost my passport anyways, they would have stopped me at the Peace Arch and turned me back to Canada without exception. That's a modern border for you, there isn't much room for kindness. Just pragmatism.

Dirty, terrible, clean-cut pragmatism.

That house, at 989 Dunsmuir, the place I call home in the Land of the Shoaling Waters, is exceptionally lonely on days like this, even with Jen there reading her Charles Bukowski and offing a few comments about the gratuitous masturbation oft-depicted in the book. I feel trapped, at times, by all those machinations I so deftly opposed as a teenage anarchist. In principle, I still oppose them. Most intensely when they trap me, although the World of Capital has successfully alienated me as a member of the proletariat work-force and somehow twisted my passion into believing that the ways of economy and rat-race are just 'laws of nature.' If this is true, which I believe for pragmatisms sake they are (dirty, terrible, clean-cut pragmatism), there really is no such thing as liberty, and what we have called 'liberty' is nothing more than a giant civilised liability within which we are all guilty until proven guiltier. Yes, because I owe it to myself and to the landlord.

I realize, often, the endless love-hate relationship with existence that one calls 'life.' It seems undeniably true that everyone is in this same jam, secretly loving something, and at the same time secretly hating it. The distinction between 'love' and 'hate' quickly becoming redundant when they are found together drinking champagne at the dusty corner-table of the most indescript and ugly bar in the alley of eternal psychology.

My back hurts, my brain 

clicks, it's all a little 

melancholic; trapped,

finicky, yet calm, 

hopeful, excited, and

real. About everything

all

at once.

How can you write like a beatnik in an age of eternal connectivity? Just keep writing messy, weighted passages, whine-and-dine frustration, and cling on to dear life as if it were better in a lottery ticket? Dream of a rucksack revolution, ask yourself how you're not brave enough to be a Dharma Bum? Would you not question your motives in rebellion, keep yourself at arms-length for sake of self-hatred, and posture yourself on the sidewalk insisting it's not pretentious? 

Ah, all the vagueness and all the creeps, all the I-guess-I'm-happy's and all the success stories mingling with each other on this planet-rock. Some sort of hybrid productivity asking to be heard. Writing about liberty and livers, both accepted as ok and yet all take a beating in the face of silence and revolt. There's a science to all this, no? Some sort of belief in mandalas and star-signs, opening portals to Lemuria to take a weight right off your shoulders. I am Atlantis, and I am sinking. 

A cigarette doesn't care, and neither do I. Addicted to a moribund desire to live. To really live! Not just add a few more moments to longevity by swallowing a carrot twice a day. Not just brushing my teeth twice between sunrise and sunset to avoid halitosis. Not just sitting and waiting for language to speak on my behalf. 

Be-half, be-whole. Be-yonder, lose yourself. Be-yonder, and travel. Be-yonder, and forgive. Be-yonder, and don't forget. Store those memories and add them to your landscape, next time you drop acid, run amok through those stairwells and fields, re-introduce yourself to your life and remember the every's forever. Become highschool you again, where you'd sit on your mothers porch June mornings on your third cup of coffee, writing a poem with the drive of existential freedom unpresented with fears of rent or labour. You want fast-food? Bum the change off your poor mum, and meet your old friends down at the local A&W. These days really don't last forever, and thankfully you were smart enough to avoid working all those years. They will remain the best years of your life for.. perhaps.. your whole life. 

Some mornings, you would wake up late on a Pro-D day, sipping a fourth cup of joe and watching the Antique Road Show on CBC because it's the only half-interesting thing playing on a late Tuesday afternoon. Your mothers couch was leather at the time, placed closest to the deck window with some sort of ferny-plant right next to it making peace with the forest. You would get lonely at times, and it wasn't until you graduated that you noticed how beautiful those 4 high-lined stick-trees standing in the desolate firth as the last remaining survivors of a clear-cutting operation really were, the way they softly bent in the wind, some sort of anchor whether rain or shine. Your mother would be at work, your brother would be out, or at dads, or upstairs, and for half-hours at a time you would stare at those trees, warped slightly through the lens of your houses very old glass. To you, it seemed, the world could be meaningless, and these trees would go as a happy reminder of how calm and archaic and beautiful this meaninglessness was. Watching them always quenched a blurry hunger in the soul. Something happy this way came. Something tricky and simple.

I could never really reach myself back in those days. Not anymore, anyways. That old me no longer had a phone, had tossed it in a creek in a fit of idealistic rage. That old me was living in a tent somewhere, squatting on private property and working at a bakery north of his old town. He still worked there, last I heard. Every summer evening, he went swimming in the ocean, wafting along on his back to think and pray. He was a Buddhist if I ever met one, reading the Diamond Sutra and the Upanishads, cracking the ice of belief with Alan Watts's 'Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown,' and preaching to his friends in cyclic arguments to prove the fundamental futility of theory. He's the kinda guy to shock you off your feet and make you wonder. Really wonder. Whoever he's become is on the road to wisdom. Whoever he thinks he is has never mattered. He's just waiting on the world to change. 

Fancy.

Above me, the patterned cascade of skylight-window in the library courtyard hints at sunset coming. I contemplate the warmth and company of Tom's house a moment and wonder if he'd like me over. I think again of Petter and Alex way down there in Cali-forn-ya. A holy pilgrimage to Big Sur, and I still wonder where my passport is. If hunger and destitution weren't a block to intention, I'd be everywhere at once right now. I'd watch this very sunset from the top of Mount Baker, and yet be singing along to the Rolling Stones with Petter at my side. The Irish country would be rolling by again, and I would wonder where I am. The happy patch-work of County Cork would invite me to the Ring of Kerry where I would wait and sip a cappuccino, pouring over maps of Ireland in hopes of finding my hostel, as I'm sure I booked online. 

The warm-red stonework of Whitstable village in Kent comes to mind. I think of Auntie Marcia and Uncle Bob, soaking up the sunlight with their solar panels and selling it back to the grid. I think of Powell River and its wilder-middle-ness, the parade of endless trees stretching east out unto Calgary. I think of every public washroom I have ever defecated in, and wonder how noisy or silent they might be right now. I think of Sooke, and its sticks. I think of Salt Spring Island and my first collapse into adulthood. I think of work, and how I haven't missed a dime I've spent. 

I think of wine in an Irish bar, that night I was in the homely town of Bantry, with its rainbow homes and ancient churches, reading my 'Pocket History of Ireland' in disbelief at how far I'd made it on my own when that strange old fellow Eugene came up to me and struck up a conversation on world events. He tried to sell me vitamin supplements, toting it all as a saviour. I wrote him this poem a day later, a year ago, and think of him now:

49 years old, names Eugene.

We talk politics like a plane 

doing laps over planet ours,

North Korea threatens bursts

of lightening and Irish businessman 

defaults on debts to UlsterBank in

the mighty Americas. He tells

me to guess his age and to be 
nice I take a medium sum of 
35 (white lies). He tells me 

why he looks so young at 

49 and tries to sell me a healthy 

soul as if he were an angel of loves-

yerself or a devil 

of capitalism pecking at 

exposed heels. Tells me 

he used to be drawl, pizza-

faced, suicidal before 

production loved a spiritual 

lung. Tell me what! Tell me 

WHAT! 

When life gives you lemons, 

hug the lemon tree. Seems 

the angels have sold out and 

they're nice enough.

He really was a nice guy. 

Noam Chomsky: The Dimming Prospects for Human Survival

“To put it bluntly, in the moral calculus of today's capitalism, a bigger bonus tomorrow outweighs the fate of one's grandchildren.”

I can't help but wonder if this modern time-bound carelessness is a result of the Western reappropriation of mystic Eastern philosophies into orthodox, hollow self-help guruism. Albeit, 'living in the now' is an important virtue to practice if one can read the statement between it's every line; but could it be that humanity is using the New Age interpretation of 'nowism' in a Freudian sense, giving an innocent thought and intuition dangerous creedence and affirmation in the morally degraded limelight of advert-culture (better known as 'public relations')?

How shallowly and carelessly this cultural 'nowism' is flaunted does not bode well for the salvation of the human race as anything more than a fad. I have studied Eastern mysticism and religion long enough to know that 'living in the now' implies a non-denial of fear, worries for the future, and the occasional flood of bleak hopelessness throughout every extremity of the body. It implies an unconditional acceptance in such a way as to make one a blatant hypocrite in the field of theory and rational interpretation, and yet in proper flow with the 'Tao' from its highest pole of absolute delight and calm acceptance, into its depths of burnt-bone despair and coinciding fear of human pettiness. It is the acceptance of one and all as both an angel and a demon. To keep blind faith in the goodness of humanity is to deny the possibility for evil and to be defeated by it once witnessed. To stay blindly angry and bitter over the human race and deny its level of implied goodness and purity as a cynic is to deny omnipotent love and the largely well-intentioned actions of most of the race. The cynic, more than anything, hopes to be proven wrong. But will always deny what is right in front of them when being 'proven wrong' seems imminent. Ignorance is bliss, and to trap yourself within the limited confines of optimism or pessimism is to remain intrinsically tied to ideology. Western Zen, or, as I prefer to call it: 'nowism,' is an ideology.

And ideology is the reason humanity is about to perish. It has always been our number one threat as a race.

“Instead of simply telling students of Zen that they cannot control the mind, the Master must show them. So he tells them all to eliminate desire through different denunciatory practices. They go about doing so in different ways, whether it is simple self-denial or full-on retreats into hermitage deep within a forest or mountain range, bringing only the bare necessities to the point of very much starving themselves. And then, after months of practice, they return to the Master and he says, “Have you discovered the truth yet?”

Some of the students may rant on about transcendental experiences and having realized a ‘great truth,’ but then the Master laughs and says, “It was all in vain. You still desired not to desire.”

And, in annoyance, one student asks, “Master, how is it that we cease our desire not to desire?” And all the Master has to say in response is, “Ah, well, now you get it.”"

30/03/2014 self-anthropological field notes

Usually I can't write inside my own home.

So I'm not. I write while I sit on the back step of my basement suite, looking outwards onto the pristinely cut middle-class lawn, partitioned at the base of two sheds to separate us from our vertical neighbours. There's a floral-patterned white sheet blissfully dazing softly in the mellow breeze. I can hear seagulls, lawn mowers, laundry ventilation, and lifting aircraft in the distance. Birds chirp on all sides. My slightly-mutilated iPhone sits atop my newest intellectual fling-book: Native Peoples and Cultures of Canada. Karen Armstrong's A History of God sits to the left of an empty plastique of Canada Dry ginger ale.

I work in 2 hours, give or take a few minutes, meaning I have to be showered and ready to go within an hour and a half. I, in part, desire a cigarette to celebrate a day like this (slightly haunted by the visage of flooded nicotine butts in a cup we have utilized as an ash tray, an empty pack of Canadian Classics from a potluck we hosted upwards of 2 months ago lies patiently at the other end of the outside table) as these are the times I find best to choose the smoke-aesthetic over the phantasmal possibility of longevity.

I am getting hours enough between Chapters and the Clay Pigeon, but when isolated into one or the other, it makes me worried that my foothold in both is precarious, at best. Tonight I intend to approach my boss at the Clay Pigeon and kindly (yet assertively) let him know that I'm going to need at least 3 nights a week at this restaurant if I am going to comfortably survive. If hours don't start picking up likewise at Chapters, I will have to kindy assert myself in the same way 2 weeks from now. Of course; I did only start there again about a week ago, so I'll give it a little time for the dust to settle before I start pressing hierarchical buttons.

Jen is reading her new book in my bedroom (Scar Tissue by the lead singer of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers). We both slept late for having remained up until the wee hours of the morning partaking in psychonautic adventures to the antipodes of the mind. Tomorrow morning, I start work at 11:30 at Chapters, so I am thankful for melatonin and let's hope it works this time around.

About a week ago now, I tried to quit using the antidepressant I am on cold turkey. Although my mood felt much more stable in the wake of the sudden cut, I experienced some of the typical (yet disturbing) withdrawal effects which go hand-in-hand with a daily habit of chemical ingestion. I experienced the strangely intriguing skin-wave medically known as 'brain zaps,' in which an occasional pulse will ricochet most prominently within the skull, yet dipping to every other extremity of the body in a fashion that the name accurately conveys; it's like a great big static shock throughout the entirety of the brain (as a source point) which moves in surrealist shock waves through the rest of the body as if I had been fooling around with a wet fork in my teeth and an open electrical socket.

As well as I could understand and as much as the limited research on the phenomenon could tell me, it's just my synapses blazing off in a fashion that implies the continued assistance of the chemical intervention. Due to the lack of escitalopram, the 'brain zaps' are the brain in spaced-out confusion assuming the chemical is still present to 'zap' from one-end synapse to another.

I ended up going to a pharmacy for an emergency dose of 5 pills a couple days ago, as I soon learned that, although the withdrawal symptoms do dissipate over time, there is a chance that going cold turkey can cause a 'snap-back' effect in which the brain will return to its prior state of chemical imbalance (depression and anxiety in my case). Not wanting to risk this, I am instead cutting my dose at intervals of 3 days to slowly wean off in a way my chemistry can manage. The first three days, I cut my dose by 15% and bit off (give or take) 75% of a pill. On the fourth day, I cut 25% and only bit half. Today is my last day of a 50% dose before I cut another 15-25%. At this rate, it shouldn't be much less than a week before I am completely off the drug.

There is plenty more to say; but these are my field-notes for today. I've got to get ready for work.

Huzzah, blue planet.

particularly EVERYWHERE

It's been far too long since I have, in any respect, updated the readers of my blogsphere to what I have been up to and where the hell I've been in the last 3 or 4 months. Many of you may well have picked out intimate details via my stream-of-consciousness prose posted at occasional intervals over the past while, but it still has certainly not been enough to fill in the blanks.

To begin: the stream-of-consciousness prose paragraphs and pages I've been publishing have been parts of a poetically-licensed autobiographical work I've began writing titled: The Mystic Hat of Esquimalt. The 'Mystic Hat' derives from my eternal affinity with toques of different style, pattern, and design.. and the intimate relationship which begins to form between said toque(s) and I as a result (at least in terms of how they each affect my self-image and contribute to a betterment in my self-confidence due to my unusually irrational insecurities regarding my hair). It is written in a style heavily influenced by famous Beat author Jack Kerouac (for those of you who are somehow not familiar with him, his most famous works include On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Big Sur). It may be a naive and young affinity with Kerouac's irresponsibility, alcoholism, and brilliance.. but he was the first author to truly wake me and cause me to feel a work 'in my bones;' as opposed to reading him, I witness the flow of his words and feel him in the most intimate and subliminal of ways. As such, I am attempting to achieve the same sort of effect in my writing, but in a modern context which takes into account the effects (positive, negative, or otherwise) of modern culture-concurrences like the internet, vast technological integration, antidepressants, sedatives, psychedelics, and, as I like to call it, the 'beautiful melancholy of the digital paper.'

For those not familiar with what 'Esquimalt' means, or as to where it is, it's the township I've been living in since the end of October 2013. After moving to Victoria on August 9th of the same year, my attempts to live completely on my own quickly caught up to my financial neglects and inabilities. I convinced a friend to move down to the city and live with me so we could split the costs and, after sleeping in my living room for almost a month in my one-bedroom suite in Quadra Village (located between Downtown Victoria and the University of Victoria), we found a basement suite in the adjacent Township of Esquimalt that was within a realistic price-range. Although the both of us had preferred not to live in Esquimalt (as it is slightly out of the way, plus not quite as enthralling as the Downtown core or periphery), it was the only option we had at the time and, as such, we took it. We have both grown to love the place to some degree.. however I, personally, have a desire to eventually vacate the area in favour of a neighbourhood within or in proximity to Downtown.

Regardless of my general indifference to Esquimalt, it is only a 10 minute bus ride from Victoria proper, and does indeed have plenty of beautiful things about it. It's a strange blended mix between the poor, the addicted, the well-off, and the retired. Along most of Esquimalt Road, one gets the impression that a good percentage of the Townships residents are living off EI, Disability Assistance, or a meagre welfare income. Not that I wish to generalize or make it seem as if they are less for this observed impression.. just that it often gives off an air of melancholic defeat by forces of economy and social convention greater than oneself. There is very little 'victory' in the air, I suppose.

That being said, it also fades into homey areas which bode a grandmotherly or grandfatherly vibe, with British-style colonial housing from the late 19th and early 20th centuries acting as confirmation of comfortable pensioners mellowly enjoying the twilight years of their lives. It is also home to areas overlooking a pristinely mysterious ocean, such as Macaulay Point. These are my areas of preference on the rare occasions when I finally work-up the motivation to go on a jog. 'Esquimalt,' as a word, is usually translated to "place of the shoaling waters." It originates from a name for the area ("Ess-whoy-malth") that the Songhee's people coined in what Kerouac would assume to be a 'primordial era of glowing impressions' or some such poetic subliminality. The area is also home to the Pacific fleet of the Royal Canadian Navy, with the naval base itself being a literal 7 minute walk from my front door.

Somehow, my move to the neighbourhood played into the cult-of-personality and personal 'mythologising' echoed by my new group of close friends. A good friend of mine one-day coined me as the 'mystic hat of Esquimalt,' and the name stuck, as both an official 'nickname' of sorts, and an appropriate name for my novel. As is, the novel is in a state of limbo due to my moody and sensitive nature; my assumption that the novel will never be good enough, among the throng of other artistic disturbances very familiar to one who puts their soul to the light for the world to see.

I have been oversaturating myself, as well, in the never-ending expletive flow of current events, paying attentive and detailed attention to the developing situation in the Ukraine; the fall of Yanukovych to the Euro Maidan movement, the subsequent pro-Russian protests, and the out-of-left-field annexation of the Crimea by Putin and his administration following a referendum in which 95% of participating Crimean voters cast in favor of joining the Russian Federation. Said referendum, however, is seen as having been illegal by the majority of Western powers, the interim Ukrainian government, and the ethnic minorities within the peninsula itself. Russia now poses a very real military threat to the rest of the Ukraine, where the eastern half hosts a large ethnically Russian population which Putin may say need to be 'defended,' and will thus justify further territorial incursions to the theorised point in which he could push as far southwest as Moldova and absorb the pro-Russian Soviet ghost-state of Transnistria. Whether or not this is even a possibility remains to be seen.

Around the world, everyone has had their eyes glued to the sky and the ocean in search of Malaysian flight MH370. From wild fringe-theories including aliens and some sort of Bermuda Triangle scenario, to more benign assumptions such as a fire in the cockpit that choked out the pilots and caused them to lose contact before crashing somewhere in the Indian Ocean or the jungles of Malaysia, the entire situation has quickly become one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history. For the sake of why-the-hell-not, I'll delve into my fringe-theory regarding what may have happened (I am by no means saying this has occurred at all).

Remember the mass-stabbings of civilians at the Kunming rail station in the Yunnan province of China earlier this month? Chinese state-television blamed it on secessionist militants from the contested northwest province of Xinjiang, in which the ethnically native Uyghur people have been massively repressed by Chinese authorities for the past few decades. Islamic extremists apparently run rampant in the area, going so far as leading to sword attacks on police officers attempting to 'keep the peace.' Since roughly the beginning of a centralised communist China, the authorities have been flooding all the contested provinces (including Tibet) with Han Chinese. Such a colonial influx has the obvious consequence of nullifying 'referendums' of any legitimacy, as well as effectively neutering the natives of said areas of any meaningful representation. This causes Tibetan Buddhists to resort to radical protest in the form of self-immolation, and the ethnic Uyghurs to use physical violence against Chinese authorities, targeting military, police, and bureaucratic institutions.

My impression of the Kunming stabbing spree is that it was a false-flag operation on the part of the Chinese government to justify further repressive measures in Xinjiang. Once again: this is all wild speculation on my part, so please take what I'm saying with a grain of salt.

Malaysian airlines flight MH370 was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it went missing. Many Chinese citizens were on board when the plane mysteriously disappeared into thin air. It is my batshit crazy assumption that the plane will eventually show up (whether as a functional whole with everyone alive, or as a shattered wreck), and the entire incident will somehow be tied back to Islamic extremism. The Chinese state-media may assert that it was the work of violent Islamic separatists from Xinjiang province, and thus justify further repressive measures by authorities in the region.

Honestly though, I really don't know. But it's certainly food for thought, and another fringe theory to add to the thousands already accumulated throughout intellectual circles the world over. The thing is: the plane could be as far as Kazakhstan, and even if it isn't Uyghur separatists, there is some speculation as to if it might have some tie to al Qaeda or the Taliban, potentially having landed somewhere in Afghanistan with all 239 passengers being kept hostage for one socio-religious objective or another. I guess we'll all know for sure in 2016 when it's finally aired as a subject on the History Channel. The obvious assertion will be that it must have been taken by an alien force from Alpha Centurai (the same aliens that helped us build the Pyramids of Giza and the lost city of Atlantis).

As well as all this playing-the-crazy-witness, my girlfriend of 3 months will be moving in with my roommate and I in mid-April. It's a leap of faith on both our parts, but seems like the right choice at this point, and makes the most sense in terms of economy. She is from Florida, and wishes to potentially put school on hold for a year or two to figure herself out and work in Canada. As of now, she is still waiting on the acceptance of her application for a work permit, but we're both sure it won't be much longer.

I am still very much in debt to multiple companies and friends, but will soon be able to start making larger payments with the financial alleviation provided by my girlfriends move. I recently re-obtained my job as a Customer Experience Representative (CER) at the Chapters bookstore downtown (which I am massively excited about, seeing as combining work with books and fantastic co-workers is a recipe for a very important form of happiness). I also work as a part-time dishwasher at a gourmet restaurant in the same area called the Clay Pigeon. The people I work with are stellar, friendly, and very intelligent. They also have a very good sense of humor, and this, combined with the meditation of the dish-pit and one ear perpetually plugged into podcasts ranging in topic from current events to Terence McKenna make it a job I don't plan on leaving anytime soon. If I can combine my part-time evening shifts at the Clay Pigeon with my part-time floor shifts at Chapters to get somewhere in the range of 30 to 40 hours a week, I will be a very happy camper for the next little while (providing I can still make time for my art and the band I am starting with a couple good friends.. as well as exercise, which I don't get enough of).

This sums-up a satisfactory-enough synopsis of what my life has been like for the past while, and as a result, I hope you all feel an inch closer to enlightenment. I've forgotten how therapeutic and relaxing blogging can be, so I believe I'll be returning to it as much as I can afford time to as the spring and summer months roll on.

One love, blue planet. I'll see you as soon as I look up from this screen.

All societies must be based on a basic sense of human empathy.

This dictates prosperity (as measured in contentedness and general satisfaction with life), social and individual longevity, and how successful a given society will be in fending-off the constant threat of totalitarianism.

The modern world is a world of man-made tragedy; upon what we believe to be our own free will we are ushered into self-bondage and creative self-destruction. The virtues of totalitarianism show themselves in the fact that, capitalism, as an ideology born of existential nihilism, creates material and neutral mid-points (such as currency) which rule over us in lieu of Hitler's, Richard II's, and Kim Jong-Il's. In totalitarianism the choice is black and white; you can either fight the obvious power, or you can join it. The power has emotions which can be grouped as malicious or benevolent, creative or destructive, good or bad. The power has an implied morality and thus a meaning, whereas in capitalism, one can fight it yet find themselves feeding it with open hands. One can battle and realize they're battling no one but themselves. In the face of obvious moral wrong, the practitioner of capitalism can shrug and state that the fault lies in the rule of outward circumstance falsely and abstractly represented via modern finance and economy and, in doing so, can state that it is nobodies fault. It's simply the 'way things are.'

As a form of social organization, capitalism arranges resources and the whole of humanity in such a way as to create 'winners' and 'losers.' As the rich get richer, the poor get poorer; as the winners keep winning, the losers keep losing. Everybody lives in their own abstract economy which creates an illusory bubble in the mind segregating the raw honesty of the world into 'mine' and 'not-mine;' altering what should and is implicitly understood into something which becomes explicitly stated and thus clunky, inefficient, and enslaving. 

In the modernized mind, it is often a point taken for granted that, on its subliminal and basic level, the world is a dark, terrible place full of murder, strife, war, and death. Although this is a half-truth, it is not the full truth, and the level to which this truth has been affected by the mutuality of reality and concept is so socially unconscious that many's modern perceptions are affected by hear-say and headlines as opposed to the good and neutral seen on a daily basis. It is a given, despite the degradation of the modern intuition to the contrary, that the good practiced, accepted, and generally carried out far outweighs the bad as significantly as the Pacific Island of Vanuatu is surrounded by the seemingly endless drift of ocean itself. In a moral context, of course, the good does indeed require the bad to prove its virtue. 

If one were to moralize the world and the universe in its entirety, one would find mostly neutral and good. The negative is something that the human mind finds near-unfathomable; basically impossible in its very existence. It is as such that the intellectualized mind is fascinated with it, and easily overwhelmed by its crush of nihilistic strangeness, finding in it a vortex of disbelief created out of a lack of acceptance (which, in itself, is one of the many manifestations of negativity which one must hypocritically learn to accept). 

This fascination, in which one is constantly stating, “I can't believe this has or could occur!,” is advertised in the bombardment of modern media culture, now globalized to establish the individual mind as a sort of phantasmal battlefield between good intentions and meaningless harm. 

Instability.

Keyword: instability.

Mid-May and the room has a blue cold, runny nose, condensation clasping the window like a quiet leech. Through the narrow chinks of my cavern, I can glimpse a computer surrounded by world in peripheral; fish eye vision like religious fervor, I realize life has made a lasting impression on whatever I am.

whatever I am. 

Dream fades to life, life fades to dream, some alien language crash landed on Earth and now we all speak English (except, you know, the ten thousand other dialects all branched from the Indo-European earth worm). People like to say that everything changes. Nothing stays the same. Doesn't the fact of change never change? Does that not make constants a possibility, even if only within the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics (capitalized! it's a name and 'Quantum Physics' likes playing the smiling subtitle ( :) ) ) now I wasn't in Copenhagen the day a jury of physicists decided on Reality; but I was in Reality (capital R) so I'm sure that counts for something.

They say they don't know who 'they' is; as if a brief allusion to a greater network somehow invalidates the point (but 'they' is the 'you' you decide to ignore; the 'you' composite of influences 'you' simply grew around; 'they' is the part of yourself 'you' keep tucked away comfortably like a newborn child that doesn't know any better).

contextual rant (old)

Everything is in context. You can't tell a member of the 'first world' that they should feel good about their predicament regarding 'trivial' matters by stating, “others have it worse. Look at the starving Ethiopians or the embattled and shattered populations of Syria. Don't they have it terribly? Don't you feel better about your situation now?”

The whole social contrast of 'at least you're not here' or 'at least you're not him/her' is a completely sadistic and deprecating way to appeal to misfortune in the modern world. The appeal that 'someone else has it worse than you' is only important in the context of realizing what needs to be changed. The fact that someone has it worse than you should NOT be something that makes you sigh in relief. For example.. someone complains the rent is too high, and the traditional retort is, 'well, just be thankful that you aren't homeless and sleeping on a sidewalk.' Whew! Thank God someone is collapsing to their knees from hunger and struggling through a solid 8 hours of slumber amidst the drunken screams of club-goers and late-night adventurers remaining deliberately indifferent and ignorant to their very existence and plight for basic subsistence.

If we were to level the playing field (as it should be- lift the lower classes into the happy medium of comfort + subsistence, knock the upper classes off their high-horse of excess and into the same rational category), we wouldn't have to retain or develop a logical compassion for each individuals plight in the social context provided by their monetary net worth and/or material 'successes' as measured individuals. The fact that we live in a society which harbours the deadbeat and immoral ability to let you starve to death on the street or.. conversely.. accrue irrational and entirely unnecessary amounts of monetary symbolism and luxurious excess is the root of the 'first world problem'.. itself being nothing more than a single symptom of a much greater disease present within our society and within each of us as solitary individuals who become more and more estranged to the world and universe around us as the cancer of capital indifference spreads nearly unchecked.

The whole cultural narrative is to simply demand that each person 'get over it,' whatever 'it' might be... showcasing the underlying zeitgeist of forced apathy which allows the system to proliferate and flourish as-is. 'Get over it.. move past your failed relationship, forget about her. Forget about the collapsing ice-shelves, the endless development of strip malls and economic colonialism the world over.' Should we not, instead, be telling people to give a shit? To wake up and care about things within the vicinity of their own personal lives enough to fix them? How can we expect us, as a species and as a generation, to wake up and work towards a solution in the greater scheme of things if we're telling them to submit to the inconvenient roadblocks presented by life?

“It is above as it is below.” You care for both.. or neither. What you present in your microcosm will be reflected 10 fold in the macrocosm.

“Am I a part of the cure? Or am I part of the disease?”

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012, Powell River, British Columbia, Canada (8:17 AM)

So, it's only the beginning of the week and I've already been up and down. Yesterday I felt myself in a trapped square of 'consequential' exhaustion, which reminded me how unfree I was in the fact that I couldn't simply take an hour to lie down. I felt like the pure deliberation of life was sucked away.

The childhood love of delineated exploration and pure poetic feeling is gone to the average working adult. I get glimpses of it on very relaxing weekends, and on nice mornings staring at golden orange clouds waiting for the bus.. but then I consider the fact that I cannot just follow a trail to sit under the clouds to adoringly rest and meditate, otherwise i put my livelihood on the line. It feels like such an absolute and complete oppression, when my nature and THE nature is denied.

How many 'logical' arguments could be made in the favor of livelihood as opposed to true life? Plenty.

Logic and reason have distorted the reality we once inhabited as children. Not only that.. we live our lives on the basis of logical reason, causing war, manipulation, nihilism.. and then we try in vain to solve those same problems with logical reason, unaware that doing so is standing on the same fucking ground and pushing 2 futile chess pieces back and forth.

The solution to war, manipulation, and nihilism lies outside of a compromise with logic and reason. It lies in also not ignoring the evils of modern everyday livelihood with a 'well, what are you gonna do? Gotta work to live.'

I head to work as I write these words, and know I'm going to be pushing myself harder than I ever would if I had a choice. I take responsibility in the name of symbolism; in the name of logical abstraction which has lost nature, thus causing a gap only solvable my radicalism; whether the radicalism of denying society and dropping out, or the radicalism of destroying society to start from square one.

The idea of 'time' I find to be the most incredible of oppressions. I book off 80% of my current present to a place I would still not rather be, when I could be doing so much more for myself and the world if I had the freedom to do so and didn't live under the paradigm of pain-is-temporary, pride-is-forever. When I see worker-bees, I see cowards afraid of true life and true death. They waste their lives trying to secure an unguaranteed amount of 'time,' by wasting their 'time.' Then they try to make sure they work for the upkeep and survival of their children by abandoning their children at a daycare or school, only to lord their 18 to 20 years of work for their benefit over their heads when they come of age to force them license to follow in the same footsteps. This gives people the disgusting and reprehensible choice between freedom or family, as if they can't have both; because, in the modern world, you really can't have both unless you're willing to go to incredible lengths not supported by your cultural operating system to do so.

There are niches in the modern world, each being different to every individual.. in my case, investigative journalism is the freedom niche I aspire too.. but only a certain demographic fulfill such dreams, and in doing so, modern society forces them to condemn thousands more to far less than their potential or want. Because if you and I are going to be investigative journalists, someone still has to pick up our garbage, right? Someone still has to serve us at the counter, right?

Personally, I believe dependencies on such positions are the result of an intricate web of confusion, abstraction, and redundancy that could be solved in a revamped society; however, I won't address that here.

Everything I ever suspected about jobs prior to ever getting one has been 100% correct, and the further I plunge into the world of the working man, the more glad I am I avoided a job as long as I did. With attitudes such as, 'it's not that bad,' it was easy to see I was condemning myself to something obligatorily dark, deep, and bloody depressing.. creating a physical reality backed up by far-reaching symbolism which forces you to sludge through unnatural depression, exhaustion, and force in order to survive.. and if you are strong enough to resist the pain of the proletarian, you may come out successful with dreams fulfilled on the other side of the minefield. Others get so overwhelmed and taken by the invasive and violent darkness and they tumble into it for the rest of their lives, having lost the will to attempt climbing out.

Even looking at the bright beautiful sky in the distance while sitting on the bus on my way to an 8 hour shift, I know as an absolute certainty that there is a gross injustice being carried out against me and the rest of the human race.

I guess that's all I've really got to say.

I just feel like I'm treading on a sidewalk of soap.

self-love

setting myself down on an anvil pillow. sleep is an anvil pillow. anvil and stone are a suicide dressed in 8 hours of mini-Godheads.. you become a repeat offender in the ever expanding realm of emerging fractal patterns sewn upon the quilt you lay across your sleepy bones like rushing water in an underground cave miles below the Yucatan Peninsula..

by electronic firelight they lay on my leather couch with the scraps of bedding I could afford to share, as if for some reason I can't escape the money analogy and see this, too, as a transaction.. buying.. a transaction.. as transfat is to nutrition.. money is tao.. my hate for money is tao.. I'm a love-and-lost buddhist like every other dreamer before me.

I'm tired of giving myself a handjob.

All I ever give myself is a handjob.

I refuse to bend over and at least try to give me a blowjob, or go to the next level in love and fuck myself.

I keep telling me to do it. Keep grabbing my own ass during passionate tongue-twisters but I keep on insisting that I just CAN'T go any further.. rationally I may be right, but irrationally I still get shrieks of jealousy because I see that bastard sneaking out to kiss girls all the Goddamn time as if I didn't exist. As if I wasn't always watching.

I stalk myself. It's a terrifying state of affairs. No matter where I go, there I am.

Watching.

One night, I invited me over, and as usual, I gave myself a handjob, yet refused to go any further.

This was the straw that cracked the camels back.. and come 4 AM I kissed myself softly on the forehead as I slept and slipped into the night, hailing the first taxi to sail past me on the concrete river.

I awoke slowly the next morning and.. still dazed.. noticed I was nowhere to be found.

A great grief flooded my solar plexus and moved into my hopeless bones.

I had not even left a note. What a bastard I am!

I had not even left a note.

The rest of the day was spent in sordid grievance. I shivered, lonely, under my ever expanding realm of emerging fractal patterns sewn upon the quilt I lay across my sleepy bones like rushing water in an underground cave miles below the Yucatan Peninsula..