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..

fragment prose

so let's start this stream on Monday night.. it's a new friends 21st birthday party (chanting, 'now you're legal everywhere! how does it feel?' 'meh.. overrated') and we're sitting on a freezing cold December beach trying to start a fire while my toes sweat inside my shoes and then begin to freeze oh so uncomfortable it's got to be an infected cut almost.. I've been chain-smoking all night for no particular reason save for perhaps that consistent headrush which pushes me into the kind of manic I like, rapping to an unlikely porno-funk instrumental in Pete's car on the way to the beach, it's the one thing I can do that everyone gives me kudos for, verbal versatility.. it's so cold, as in it's too cold to even be all that much fun, except in the dark when I think no one can really make out the details of my face (god I kno I'm not ugly, not that ugly, somewhat attractive I think actually depending but still) I begin opening up under the cover of some measure of anonymity, now endowed with a perceptive wit not quite felt so often.

There's some guy lounging around the fire that keeps saying he's thankful for drugs during 'gratitude circle' in which we each give our name and something we're thankful for and once we've all had a turn, we throw our hands up in unison and bellow, 'ahoy!' he finally admits that he's very high on acid but that it's too dark to trip out on anything all that interesting so he's enjoying the fire, and he goes off on some tangent about how all drugs should be legal, someone retorts back, 'I dunno if I could hand somebody a latte while high on acid.. work just wouldn't work' to which he replies (in all seriousness) 'really? I dunno, I think most things would be better if I was high all the time.. could just stick a blotter in my coffee every morning.' another fellow, one whom nobody knows, appears out of the darkness beyond the flame as we are blessing the air with a jam session.. he's too stereotypically hippy in my mind and I almost expect him to introduce himself by saying, 'hey man, consider the lilies' but instead he shakes my hand quite vigorously and begins telling everybody about how he is going out to a farm on the Sunshine Coast the following weekend to experience ayahuasca for the first time. I tell him I'm from the Sunshine Coast and am shocked ayahuasca is something that has ever existed anywhere near me.. I begin asking him how I'd go about organizing some such session for myself and he goes on some rant about 'it's all vibrations, man.. you put the intention out there, and people will come to you, you know? it'll just happen, you just have to be ready' seeming to be shutting my question down for confidentiality or sumthin so I respond with, 'well, you're sitting beside me right now, eh? vibrations, dude. all me.' he silently refuses to go much further.. probably stoned or too lazy to give any info, as confused as anyone would be in a situation like that.. he, too, later gives me kudos for a freestyle, calling me a 'real poet' and asking for 2 cigarettes in exchange for some pot, patting me on the back with 'I'm giving you more than 2 cigarettes worth but it's cus you deserve it.'

Eventually Pete and the rest of the friends I'd arrived with decide to venture home, probably the cold and frankly I can't blame them.. I consider following, but end up reckoning I might have a better time if I stay (despite the fact that I work at 12:30 the following afternoon and it's already close to midnight and my place is on the other side of town and oh well in the actual fuck it's'all good that's why jesus invented taxis)

- - -

creating something in silence (save for keyboard clacks) is a practice in subliminal listening. Thought is like air and you can hear it whispering through the trees of your foresty dendrites.

Misery mixes with ecstasy and love mixes with confused dislike-- for 11 days straight, I've been losing myself in the phosphene glare of love for a girl named Sasha.
She insists she's not a Xanax junkie, but by my standards I'm still not sure if I'm convinced altho this seems like an unfair snap-judgement that still hurts her feelings. Perhaps she needs it, and I'm just blanked as the next heretic to go on trial in the pharmacratic inquisition.

For the first time the other night I experimented (incorrectly) with DMT. Sprinkling it over a packed bowl of tea (marijuana), I drew back a breath and felt nothing more than life as a conceited dream with a strange alchemical hangover-fear of psychosis.

- - -

in the crazy clasp of a darker place is the beginning of a laughing statue and it was nothing like any of this as far as the ketamine kept me floating above every objectivity so who was I beyond the flattery becoming bespecalled across my essence by surrounding loveships in-order to my left-: Sibelle, a mysterious artisan I believe all writers with a habit to smoke most certainly would (or have) fallen in love with at some point after an introduction; she's got these feline eyes of curious enamour and curly, short hair like Picasso curls and a soft, tough speech to her (INTEGRITY!!) perhaps a hard nut to crack sometimes but worth the effort to sit and get to know her, highly definitley one of the most beautiful women I've ever met-- where the existential confusion in her eyes twists to a smile in-which manifested is happiness-of-the-absurd, she secretly loves everybody like we all do but won't quite venture forth into extradimension to mention (to mention) ((but she does now because drugs bring us into Mind At Large as Huxley called it))

Greg-- a well-spoken sage of preference to beautiful confusion, a legitimately happy Boddhisatva who has found his bliss in the random number generator of life.. he showers everyone with praise and every love he harbours is a very very true love you just want to hold him close and cuddle, me particularly in a way that forgets the homoerotic connotation that says 2 men can't hold hands as good friends.. who invented my mind anyway? a culture vulture? or culture as represented in sculpture? forget it, Greg is a good looking fellow but not just that he has the brains and brilliance, there is no doubt in my mind he is eternal. sometimes I wonder if he forgets me in the throng of university personages like Kelvin has, but what a beautiful place to start-- I'm glad I met him and he is already a best friend.

Hunter-- classiest person I have ever met he's got a crick in every step that softly whispers his manifestation of the human condition in an art-gallery frame for centuries of witness to come. He is quickly taking the place of a very best friend to me but I never like to say there is one above the rest as it's impossible to make love exclusive.. but he has always been in my life in his rusty little class-car Jerry (or so it feels) and I hope the four of us know each other unto death... a soft-hearted punk-rocker with a temporal soul of glowing brilliance and lucidity, I love the guy like a long-lost brother I intend to never lose again; he is somewhere between on-screen and behind-the-camera in all situations, like a movie character who appeared to show us all Holy Moments needn't be framed becuz yer eyes are cameras and this is the nature of reality (a filmmaker if I ever knew one).

- - -

spasmatic shadow (a wordy exposé)

I finish Chapter 35 of Kerouac's 'Big Sur' as things begin to heat to a shatter and decide I've got something to write about as well.. picking laptop off of the carpet still-buzzing in a never-sleep mode sipping chardonnay from a floral mug, having just finished a hearty supper of spaghetti with meat sauce prepared by my roommate, Isaac, upon my unmade bed between completed chapters-- as Kerouac shivers through his alcoholically delirious existential crisis of slow suicide I have the appearance of memories in my head and parallel universes where things have happened differently, and perhaps I wouldn't be so strangely lost and redeemed on an almost daily basis yet it's alright as long as I know it's alright, all of this being confirmed for me during a beautiful trip on mushrooms the night prior in which I could not help but be socially anxious in the presence of others-- unable to complete full sentences-- but this did not rob the trip of beauty despite..

and I imagine a world in which Anya and I had never parted ways so violently.. or rather, at all.. as I eat my spaghetti and remember the slow summer days we spent together in bed for hours, naked, speaking of whatever and nodding off to nothing until finally I would lurch upward and begin working on a brand new hip-hop track for the dirty of the panic attack mixtape vol. 1 in the nude and in her presence in her dreams.. in this parallel universe I imagine we are naked in my unmade bed this very evening until Isaac knocks to tell us the spaghetti is ready so we leisurely dress and silently slip into the kitchen to make a plate, return to my bedroom and perhaps undress again, eat the spaghetti and comment to each other how delicious it is and how good of a job Isaac has done in preparation.. eventually she dresses to use the washroom and grabs our dirty plates as she does, peaking through Isaac's open bedroom door to state a sincere thanks, to which he sheepishly yet appreciately replies, "oh.. oh, not a problem." 

Instead, I, high as a kite as a God as a star as a lover, text her at 3 in the morning amidst a cuddle of 5 fellow friends and shroomdoers all fast asleep to state that the trip reminded me of when we were at a festival in July and I, high on acid, began to freak out from the endless cocaine thump of terrible music in the distance (brainzapbrainzapbrainzap) and she simply held me all night whispering 'IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou' under her breath to such a silent extent that I had to later ask whether I hallucinated it or not (to which I didn't) and that it reminded me that I am still in love with her despite everything and that I will always love her and that I'm so deeply thankful that she is still in my life..  she still talks to me the following morning via facebook but avoids speaking of the text, never responds to the texts.. perhaps a strategem of hers in which she looks on me with pity as still being stuck on the end, and wishes to be the all-benevolent Saint of What Has Come to Pass by 'wisely' denying the sincere gesture even so much as acknowledgement.. or, perhaps she is still just as in love with me but knows it would lead nowhere healthy (at least not now) and as such keeps quiet keeps quiet keeps quiet for her sake.. our sake.. who knows.

She's got some other lover or as such something now whereas I just don't know so I avoid the question incidentally leading a couple girls on and not meaning to goddamnit I really was sorry for that but narcissistically pleased in a way.. maybe I'm as low as I imagine, and it's only on drugs that I realize "THERE ARE ACTUALLY PEOPLE WHO LIKE YOU, IDIOT, NOT EVERY GIRL TRIES TO FRIENDZONE AND DO YOU EVEN NOTICE WHEN YOU FRIENDZONE ANYMORE OR DO U JUST LET IT GO TO YOUR HEAD LIKE 'AHH, LOOK AT ME, I HAVE THE POWER TO FRIENDZONE, MEANS I'M IN THE RIGHT HAHA, FAAAANTASTIC'.. do you even FUCKING NOTICE when a girl actually LOOKS AT YOU LONGINGLY ANYMORE? or do you ALWAYS JUST IMAGINE they're just TRYING TO BE NICE cuz you're some WEIRD WANNABE FILLING YOUR VOID WITH ATTEMPTS TO SPREAD YOURSELF LIKE DENSE BUTTER on a CRUSTY, COLD PANCAKE?"

and it probably all boils down to my assumption that I am ugly and who can love my tired weather-beaten face when I haven't slept, because I can't, fuckit.. I try to fill my perceptive void lack-attraction with another kind of beauty I can love, arsty farsty summer craft poems and exposé rivers like this one I ride in a white-water raft to feel the turbulence of my soul and hope just hope I won't tip over and crack my skull.. 

oh, there's the shore.