Academic Journals for my Western Religions class

Week 1

General Insights:

As might be a commonly filled gap, I was entirely unaware of Lilith as Adam's first wife in the Garden of Eden. In an allegorical context, this seems to parallel the lecture material of the late Terence McKenna who would (and most likely did) find much kaleidoscopic significance in this version of Genesis. The clout surrounding this version seems mutual throughout the three Abrahamic religions, and the story in itself seems more valuable to Western mysticism than to its Orthodox counterparts. By far, this changes my knowledge and interpretation of Judaeo-Christianity as a whole.

Question: “What do you expect to learn in this course? What do you bring to the course, and what gaps of knowledge and insight do you wish to fill?”

Answer: Religion, in all of its facets, has always fascinated me. As an intellectual, I have run the developmental course of the passive Baptist turned evangelical atheist, swearing off religion and all those who ignorantly believed in the literal interpretations. Over time, this position softened into an acceptance of ambiguity, and the recognition of the symbolic value and allegorical importance of religion as a whole. I wish to learn the detailed ins-and-outs of Judaeo-Christianity as it continues to affect our collective psyche as both a race and a culture. Most recently, the monotheistic authority of the Church was usurped by the desired objectivism of science. When Nietzsche said 'God is dead,' he did not mean that a literal God was dead, but that our attempt at objective truth was dead and dying. I believe that we now live in a time that seems to be positively dealing with what was once a psychological trauma manifesting itself in philosophical nihilism and scientific reductionism. It's like the allegory of the finger pointing at the moon: both religious scripture and scientific literature are fingers. Historically, much of the race has been stuck staring at the finger, when the finger is wanting you to look away and at the moon.

Week 2

General Insights:

The story of Exodus and the rise of the ancient Israelites sheds light on the mechanisms that lead to the creation of a religion. As I stated above, the allegorical value of each religion is incomprehensible in scope, but does not exempt said religions from creating and developing cultish orthodoxies that eventually grow to fuel functionless dogma. This is due less to the importance of the stories, and much more to the use of these stories as tools of power, appealing to the lowest common denominator in order to establish and perpetuate a social control. The three Abrahamic religions are especially in need of constant scrutiny, as their symbols are often historically invoked in demagogic rhetoric as a means to a Machiavellian end.

Question: “What is the significance of the command to not make ‘images’ of God? Note the discussion on the‘tabernacle’ on p. 78.”

Answer: This strange commandment—made most viscerally in Judaism and Islam—has become a dogmatic crutch upon which many assume there is still a strange sort of anthropomorphic God (or Allah) with a humanocentric agenda, yet do not realize that a command forbidding anyone to create images of God is nothing more than the 'finger pointing at the moon,' with said finger shaking at the moon in a desperate attempt to make humanity look—as individuals—at nothing but the moon. It is an allegorical dictate that is, in essence, describing that God or Allah are symbolically representative of the Great Unknown; the massive scope of the reality we live in that cannot be described, discovered, or illustratively depicted (only reveled in). As far as my interpretation goes—aside from the dogmatic twist this demand has taken with the childish evolution of orthodox religion—it is meant to humble the hubris of the human intellect and arrogant assumption by describing that what is represented cannot ever be understood by anyone, ever. It is tantamount to what the late and great Alan Watts once said: “something we don't know is doing who knows what; that is what our knowledge amounts to.” This is not to say we should cease with our curiosities or attempts to better ourselves through philosophy, science, or spirituality; it is only to say that there is no truth in deciding a particular religion or school of thought is in any way objective. In some abstract way, the early Jews (in regards to the 'tabernacle' and the mysterious concept of 'Shekhinah,' a transliteration of a Hebrew noun which denotes the presence and indwelling of Divinity) understood the undeniable mysticism of their God, as well as the elasticity and essential 'invisibility' of truth as a whole. This, by and large, is how dogma evolves; as a result of trying to consolidate a certain amount of static consistency through the guarantee of ritualism, unaware that said consolidation is as impossible as freezing a cloud.

Week 3

General Insights:

The history of Judaism is much longer and much more complicated than I ever ventured to imagine. One of my main motivations for taking a class on Western Religions was due to my perception that I generally understood the basics of Christianity, and had ventured upon my own initiative to learn as much as I could about Islam as soon as I saw polarizing agendas and orthodox prejudices begin to grow in the minds around me. This Islamaphobia was obviously rooted in the attacks of September 11^th, 2001... but have been reignited with the military successes and sheer brutality (physically, ideologically, and otherwise) of groups such as the Islamic State. So, although I know I have many gaps I'd like to fill in my knowledge of Christianity and Islam, my knowledge of Judaism has always been one of complete ignorance. This is mainly due to the convoluted nature of their Holy Books (such as the Torah, the TaNaKh, the Talmud, the Mishnah, the Midrash etc) which I am still having trouble deciphering, but which I feel I'll be one step closer to grasping by the end of this semester. I learned, long ago, not to equate Judaism with Zionism, but did not entirely understand what separated the two as a result of my confusion over whether the Jews were primarily an 'ethnicity' or a 'religion.' With the help of this class, I've come to the tentative conclusion that the Jews—by and large—are a bit of both, but primarily neither.

Question: “What challenges did Hellenism bring to Judaism, and how did Judaism respond? Note the groups and the changes in Jewish ideas.”

Hellenism had a profound effect on Judaism as a whole. Not only did the Jews begin to adopt Hellenistic mannerisms, they also began a cross-cultural synthesis between Jewish and Hellenistic thought. This is illustrated in the writings of Philo, a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in the ancient Jewish diaspora of Alexandria. It is also touched on to a lesser extent in the writings of Maimonides, who was born in Cordoba at the beginning of Moorish Iberian rule (and thus also absorbed much in the way of Islamic thought and mannerisms). By the third century BCE, knowledge of the Hebrew language had declined so dramatically that the Bible was translated into Greek (called the Septuagint).

Judaism responded in fractalized ways to Hellenization depending on the group or subgroup. Some acquiesced and began to adapt, whilst others continued to believe Hellenization and the Greek rule of the Jewish homeland was an abomination that must eventually be ended. After a century of Greek hegemony, a change in dynasty from the Ptolemies (descendants of one of Alexander's generals) to the Seleucid's (the rulers of Syria) finally predicated this end. The Seleucid's bastardized the sacred Jewish Temple by transforming it into a shrine to Zeus. This ignited the Maccabean revolt, which was successful in expelling the Greeks from Palestine and reestablishing a Jewish state. This victory is still celebrated today through the tradition of Hanukkah.

Week 4

General Insights:

It is common knowledge that the Jews have a long and illustrated history of marginalization and persecution—more than a few cases of which lead to either expulsion (from post-Moorish Spain and, at one time, even England) or genocide (in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia). What seems to be historically taken for granted is the grand scale upon which those of Jewish belief or ethnic connection were forcibly removed from Spain in the 15^th century, both as preamble to and because of the Spanish Inquisition. The expulsion was so rapid and chaotic, in fact, that in 1492 when Christopher Columbus was setting off to find an alternative passage to India (and accidentally came upon North America—or the Caribbean, to be exact), he had to launch his voyage from a quiet southern port because most of the major Spanish ports were so clogged with forced Jewish immigrants.

Most of these immigrants found refuge in states under the religious authority of Islam—such as the Ottoman Empire—and began to develop new twists on their ethnic and religious identities, as well as work to the benefit of their new respective homelands.

Personally, it still perplexes me as to why Jews were always specifically targeted as scapegoats. I've heard many different theories on the matter, the most unlikely of which are such theocratic assumptions as “God is punishing the Jewish people,” or that the Jews are at the center of a worldwide conspiracy tocontrol the financial system and such... but others, that do make socioreligious and economic sense, include the observation that the Jewish people (especially in Medieval Christiandom) were marginalized to such great degrees that they were either forced or decided to reside in walled ghettos surrounded by bigotry and paranoid superstition. This marginalization led to the development of a very self-sufficient and introverted culture that struggled with all of its might to resist the political and religious forces demanding its extinction. This magnified the external perception of peculiarity in the eyes of non-Jews, and made them a 'sore thumb' in many societies looking for scapegoats to ease any sense of personal or collective responsibility. This is, quite plainly, what happened in Nazi Germany.

Question: “Is mysticism a comfortable fit for Judaism, or is something like the Kabala, way out in ‘left field’?”

Mysticism, by my standard interpretation, is a good spin to have on any religion. Orthodox literalism is bogged down in useless rhetoric, committing itself to enforcing abstract laws of the spirit as opposed to embracing the fact that spirituality is an individual experience beyond the realm of verbal expression.

In and of itself, Kabala is an incredibly interesting take on the Jewish religion, but in its scope of articulation, it has developed its own specific dogmas and orthodox superstitions (such as the numerological aspect which stinks of a certain form of pseudoscience).

By contrast to orthodox Judaism, I would have to assert that Kabala and other such mystic traditions are radical exceptions to what appears to be very strict rules (hence why the rabbinic movement holds such contention against it) but expresses a more realistic version of and expectation towards religious “truth.” It's brazen cosmological assertion that it holds the key to a form of enlightenment, however, brings it closer to the same orthodoxy it seemed keen to allegorically reinterpret.

The Asterisk (A Personal Essay)

It was six in the morning: I sat in a cab dangling on small-talk with a middle-aged white male cabbie basted in the demeanor of the over-friendly uncle. He asked me about school—I'm hyperawake, paranoid, body pulsing, feeling loose, depersonalized, and lightly psychedelic—my vision wavering as if someone had entered my skull to punch raw brain. I did a gram and a half of cocaine that night; mixed lines with ketamine to simulate a proto-psychosis, but am convinced I may very well have driven myself past the point of no return. I'd been doing this strict mix for over 2 straight weeks, landing myself in out-of-body experiences and coked-out drawls on the floor like a sad, puckered monkey chewing on a lemon it mistook for an orange. Why I led myself to this existential precipice is both beyond me and totally within my rational sympathies if I pretend I am on the outside looking in.

When I was 18—drawn, for the first time—away from smalltown Powell River and into the Vancouver suburbia of Port Coquitlam, my only successful job-find was a McDonald's arched inside a Wal-Mart. The double-insult this presented me as a teenage anarchist pushed me deep into my first true emotional crisis which I only turned to accept after a particular phonecall with my father in which he appealed to me to think of this stint as a 'temporary social experiment'; a chance to learn and breathe this proletarian experience from the inside out. During the pre-Christmas nightshifts, the only customers we ever had were the dark, apathetic silhouette-people Wal-Mart hired to greet the absolutely no one's walking through the door. I incessantly cleaned what was already a mirror-wet floor and made sad conversation with Rosario—the slightly autistic shift-manager with a prickly-shave of a face and an awkward sense of humor I could never come to appreciate and yet always managed to humor in polite obsequiousness. Regardless, it was a form of spread and endless boredom that began to fascinate me; it brought me to a darkness I had never quite known. It was an experience—like all experiences—to be had at least once, to the fullest and truest intensity. To be pushed with reckless sincerity.

Ever since, I have found myself pushing every limit to disembodied extremes—on occasion, to points of such profound irresponsibility or feigned responsibility that I break a particular streak and wind-up on the other dichotomous side of whatever line I unintentionally (or intentionally?) crossed (or broke?) because everything is a social experiment and I've touched the multifarious lives of overworked modernity, residential care aide, dishwasher, Christopher McCandlessesque wilderness jaunt, melancholic Kierkegaard, psychonaut, and now: a short-lived junkie inspired by the excess of Burroughs and the early beatniks all willing to kill their darlings for the sake of blood-stained posterity.

And yet meanwhile—in the cab—I can feel my headache grow perceptively wider from my left temple. Almost like a mushroom cloud over Bikini Atoll I am watching from as safe a distance as the physical body can withstand, according to some calculable hypothesis drafted by Oppenheimer himself. I am constantly amazed at how lucid I am in conversation with this friendly cabby; given that I feel as if I'm about to go schizo, focusing so deftly on the way the streetlights glide across placid puddles moving only with our tires intervention—and the way I keep imagining insanity in the form of a zombie-likeness of myself strapped into an electric chair, skin melting and eyes rolling back in my head as I seizure to metaphysical death—I still laugh away short quips about the blind-leading-the-blind (he has no idea how to find my destination, and keeps pulling over to check a book road-map for 4143 Hessington Place). The only reason I am with him now is that I am venturing to see my girlfriend at her group-house past Uvic where the door is always unlocked for friends and friends-of-friends, she being the only solution to this crisis with her stash of .5 Xanax pills.

I remember those tense moments—with my body and brain as taut as a bow—he would pull over or pull out and my entire existence seemed to move through space and time as if against a wind that was perpetually in resistance—as if my entire consciousness was going to capsize into some form of overdosed darkness. Even when I exited the cab and waved a friendly goodbye to the old man, I could feel my dopamine receptors attempting to fire on empty. This caused a latent buzz that was only solved with two milligrams of alprazolam and my eyes wide shut until my head shut down.

I held her close. I knew she thought I was an idiot.  

*PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A 'PERSONAL ESSAY' ASSIGNMENT WRITTEN FOR MY CREATIVE NONFICTION CLASS, JANUARY 27TH, 2015

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.”"