A Hectic Life and Times (with your host, Kyran Paterson-King).

Aloha, blue planet.

It's been a very long time. So long, in fact, that I have moved out of my mothers house and into an apartment in the dead-center of the Powell River 'downtown core' with a couple friends of mine since I last graced the blogging world with my presence.

I've kind of fallen out of attempting to iterate everything in my life via the blogspot written word, so I'll really only tell you what I'm about to get up to and why I have decided to finally do a write-up now rather than prior or later.

I've got a bit of a cold, and technically, I should be sitting in my Criminology class seeing as I'll be missing three weeks due to my departure to Europe this approaching Tuesday!!!@@&$@$!!! but I've decided to get my most important chores for the day out of the way early before this cold saps all of my energy by 4 o'clock and I have to drag myself to my last 4 hour shift at work before I leave.

In this case, the chore I'm going to have done for today is the photocopying of important travel documents at the library just down the street from my apartment. Just so, you know, if someone robs me of my passport or it slips out on some train in Toulouse I won't be without a confirmed identity. And I won't have to wait a month or so until the Canadian Embassy is Paris can finally take the time out of its afternoon coffee and donuts to print me off a new one.

I am getting increasingly excited, but I'm really hoping that this cold subsides, at least for the most part, before I leave (so, preferably this weekend if you're listening Mother Nature).
The only thing (or, rather, person) I leave behind is my girlfriend who, regrettably, will not be accompanying me seeing as we met long after all these travel plans had already been well established. I'll be gone for 3 weeks, which isn't an obscene amount of time... but as I know from her week-long trip to Mexico last month... even 7 days is a long time when you're in love.

I feel very blessed to have a reason to look forward to coming back, however. 3 or 4 months ago, I would have seriously considered missing my flight out and beatnik scrounging my way through Europe until they finally decided to deport me. If she's reading this she can know that I'm coming back for her, and not for Powell River.

Anyways, I'm assuming you're all curious as to where exactly I'll be going in Europe. The rough and general itinerary is as follows:
On the morning on Monday, March 18th, I'll be picked up by my father, step-mother, and brother at my apartment at around 6 AM in the morning. We'll spend the morning driving down to Vancouver, where we'll be spending the afternoon before staying at a hotel overnight.
The next day, March 19th, will be similar. I'm assuming we'll spend it tying up any loose travel-ends, purchasing anything we neglected or remembered prior to leaving Powell River, and doing a bit of last-minute adventuring in the city before we catch our plane out at 8 PM.
It's an 8 hourish or so flight, so we'll be flying into Gatwick Airport in London around 11:45 AM on the 20th of March (Western European time). From there, we'll be getting picked up by family at the airport and brought to their hometown (and the town my father was born and raised in until the age of 12) of Canterbury, Kent.
We'll be setting up a sort of 'base-camp' there.

From here, it turns into a little bit of an improv where we're not quite sure where we're going to end up first.
We plan on spending at least a night or 2 in London, and renting a car to drive to Wales to visit some of my step-mothers family in the area and just generally partake in a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. We plan, also, if time permits, the drive from there to Liverpool (although this is a wildcard no ones completely sure of quite yet).

And I, between the 27th and 29th of March, will be leaving my family behind for a couple of weeks to catch a ferry from Dover to Bruges in Belgium to start my solo adventure on the mainland. From Bruges, I'll be catching a train to Paris, where I hope to see one of my favorite bands live, although we'll see how timing plays out.
From Paris, I'll be hopping across to Avignon for a couple of nights, and from Avignon I have to navigate the complicated procedure of finding my way to Barcelona.

I hope to spend a good chunk of time in Barcelona.. at the least, 2 nights.. but my charter flight back to London departs on the evening of April 8th from Saragossa so regardless of when I arrive in Barcelona, I need to be near my departure location at the right time.

After leaving Barcelona for Saragossa, I catch my charter flight back to London, and from London I'll meet with my family and head back to Vancouver on the morning of April 9th.

And there you have it, folks. I'm late for class so I'll keep all y'all updated as best I can.

Preview of "Anarcho-Tantric Hedonism: Addendum" (Sect. 13: Essential Differentiation and the Intrinsic Sin of Global Homogeneity)

In the wake of a lack of new (or, rather, published content), I have decided to give you all a preview of what I've been working on as of late (neglecting a scholarship essay worth $3000 in the process). 

It's been 7 months since I wrote the first draft of Anarcho-Tantric Hedonism: A Treatise, and since, I've had plenty of new ideas stewing in my brain which are now finding expression in an upcoming Addendum treatise. 

Enjoy Section 13, my fellow counterculturalists:

The homeless man of the Pacific Northwest, in a climatological respect, is in worse straits than the homeless man residing in Los Angeles where, despite the occasional rainstorm, the climate is fair enough year-round to facilitate a satisfactory sustainment of the physical body. In respect to social forces and the rate of violent crime for a myriad of mingled and networked reasons, however, the homeless man of the Pacific Northwest is (speaking generally despite the thesis of this particular section) in a better place. In particular I make reference from perspective in my own life, imagining myself homeless on the streets of Powell River, where, despite being satisfactorily fed and clothed, the climate would permit little in the way of bearable living through the winter months. Los Angeles, in a statistical context due to the sheer amount of intermingled lives forced into social co-dependency, would be more likely to house psychopaths with an itch to kill and eyes likely to see the homeless as easier prey than the named and average middle-class white male residing at a physical address, easily located via ZIP codes and other documents of social reality.

The modern world, although on local levels making attempts to address such problems, is of an intrinsic inability to solve them due to its rootedness in conceptual generalization in all fields of thought and action. Coupled with this, globalization represents a trend of attempting to economically homogenize the planet as a whole despite organic circumstance and existentially essential differences which, unallowed to develop in themselves both on collective and individual levels, has lead to the deprivation of something requisite within each of us, represented on a collective level by the economic deprivation of sustainable existence for certain 'kinds' of people known in the dangerously general sense as the 'lower class.'

All of the above is an illustration for the sake of analogy; although truth is represented, the whole truth regarding such issues as homelessness is infinitely more complicated in all respects; from climate to food availability to psychology to appearances to social context in all forms, the world is networked in such a way as to make even my generalization for the sake of description nearly completely null and void, thus proving my point.

Nature in itself is made up of what is similar-but-different; not necessarily inevitable, but inevitable only in the sense that it is.

If we imagine the globe as a wheel representing the colour spectrum (fig. 1), we can clearly see what nature is in its different-sameness; each colour, although different than the next, fades into one another as it is. This isn't to assert that this occurrence was ever a philosophical inevitability, but regardless of such speculation, it is inevitable as it is what it is. From space, too, the same phenomenon can be witnessed. Although the paints added to the Earth by each of our individual personalities, cultural mind-models, political standings, and spiritual beliefs are an invisible paint only available at ground-level, they are still as consequential as the fading of deep jungle flora into desert, and the upwards jut of ocean into land. For the sake of expediency and economy-of-line, we will refer to this different-sameness as the 'natural fade.'

Fig. 1

The requirements of life in the desert are radically different than the requirements of life in the rainforest or the requirements of life in the Arctic. Modern nation-states are a chunky and inefficient expression of the natural fade which, instead of blue sliding into pink and slowly into purple, or Algerians fading into Libyans and slowly into Egyptians, opt for an arbitrary line at an arbitrary point designed and calculated with obsessively microcosmic accuracy.

This obsessive microcosmic accuracy represents an antithesis to the natural fade in which it is not top down or bottom up, but a mutuality between the two with neither taking exclusive reign. It is the compartmentalization of preexisting generalizations into smaller generalizations based on certain areas in certain spaces at certain times. The globalization of economy, although by implication leading to an overall reduction in terribly catastrophic world warfare due to economic interdependence (for example: the Golden Arches theory of Conflict Prevention states that no two countries with a McDonald's have fought a war with one another since the introduction of the franchise into each respective nation), has led to an all-pervasive generality which threatens to homogenize the entirety of the world as if attempting to erase every colour from the spectrum and expand it all into a solid red (which, by analogy, may very well occur in blood as individuals, races, and cultures of all different colours, in both physical as well as spiritual terms, are violently squeezed out of existence as they are not red enough to appease the oppressive artists painting in stiff brush).

What is being illustrated throughout this section is one of two things: the essential differences of populations and as such, cultures, economies, laws, and customs, as well as the way in which these differences are not static or binary blocks of area or thought, but connected and interdependent fades into one another in the same way that a lake flows through a river, down a waterfall, and into the greater scheme of global ocean.

Prior to the age of satellite imagery and the internet, ones experience and point of view within the world were understandably limited and fragmentary, thus leading many to draw lines around what they knew and saw in order to properly orient themselves and give grounding to their consciousness on all levels. This illusory fragmentation, represented in the form of a 'worldview' walled-off from a dauntingly greater terra incognita, stuck around despite the advent of global and somewhat universal awareness, just as often expanding its borders as manning the walls and preparing to fight the now encroaching 'everything-else' outside.

In this day and age, it is often encouraged that one expand their borders and worldviews beyond their traditional outposts. It is unlikely, in modern generations, to find walls built in defence (as their parents and grandparents had done before). Instead, many employ the haranguing and lonely border guard of scientific objectivism to question all immigrants and tourists into their developed sense of reality, denying entry to any who cannot properly satisfy its interrogation.

Although this is a step forward from previous states of mind, it still exists within binary borders which do not completely accept the existence of the natural fade. In fact, it is simply as was stated above; microcosmically reduced generalizations in a blocked and neatly ordered spectrum all revolving around an objective centre (fig. 2).

 Fig. 2

Granted, there is an element of fade, but it is not a progressive flow, and is instead a logical continuity, almost a chain of causality between colours. Some borders are blurred, which in analogy could represent the slow and inevitable disintegration of humanity into proper unity over time, however others stand clear and concise against their neighbours as if there is a relation, but the water in their particular cup cannot be trusted to the ocean. 

passionate thoughts on the bus to work.

Life is what we make it. And through collective decision.. both conscious and unconscious.. humans have made life a tragedy.
A daily grind in the name of 'progress' and symbolic monetary subsistence/ hording.
Does the Safeway employee look absolutely ecstatic at the prospect of a days work?
No. Perhaps he will flinchingly say that he is thankful 'to at least have a job,' but only perhaps 1 in 100 would say, 'yes, I'm honestly glad to be here.'

If money were no object, how much of the current job market would exist?
I could see nobody wanting to work in fast-food (as it was no longer a necessary last resort in the name of subsistence), thus causing the industry to plummet into the mud and disappear forever. The same thing would happen to 3rd world shoe shops, 7/11's, and large grocery stores. All there would be is mom and pop shops established and propagated by the truly passionate of the field, no longer salted with armies of secretly resentful wage-slaves submitting to the fact that they have no way out, and thus will probably abandon their dreams due to the incredible amount of resistance standing in their pre-defeated way.

If the world did not subsist and exist.. at least not entirely.. upon the foundation of money-the-moping-middle-man, society would still be running. And not only running.. it would be a passionate circle of true love where you could look to every shop and artists studio and know it rose from a love of life and that particular profession.. a gentle, burning passion.. and not from the near-death experience of having nothing but $20 in a chequing account while trying to establish ones ideal life.

It would be a loving circle, one that reinforced a true success and pursuit of ones passions and dreams, as opposed to the vicious circle we live in today, where it just keeps degenerating.. falling, falling, falling.. until the human spirit is beat to a loveless pulp save for those who bow down and co-opt and look for their niche in the current system, giving up plenty of their ideals and dreams in the process in the name of a comfortable familial subsistence.

Fuck us. Fuck all of us for our 'rational, reasonable' existences.


Our irrational human passions should be of a much higher stature than any scientific worldview.

Follow those irrational passions, you near-dead sleepy head.

I'm not sure if the angel just smiled, or flipped me the bird.

In the end, a democratic society tip-toes upon the very precipice of a light, flimsy branch against all laws of physics and gravity, constantly snapping to fall to a concrete bone-bust slow-death below.

The concept of a Head of State stands as the subconscious manifestation of Judaeo-Christian monotheism.. only one can lead. Not two. Not three. Not five, nor five million.

Just a single, fallible, ego-float wanna-be messianic man-deity with a superiority complex either pre-imbued or created during a term of office and, in the rare instance when this superiority complex does not appear due to a shred of political and humanistic humility, the very idea that a President, Prime Minister, King, Queen, Sultan, or state figurehead is required acts as the symbolic reminder of its implicit existence within consensual reality itself.

And it seems strange that anyone, including myself, decide to use the term 'consensual' when it is only 'consensual' in a roundabout psychoanalytic it's-your-fault-because-you-do-nothing-about-it sort of way, again harking back to another subconscious manifestation of the Judaeo-Christian cultural mind-model: the 'guilt complex.'

The guilt complex in itself developed through the concept of 'original sin' and the essential darkness and redundant stupidity of Earthly man. It is the reason many still feel irrationally ashamed of themselves after a session of self-stimulated orgasm, and why we awkwardly kick the ground and say 'thank you' to industry for the 'privilege' of ultimately enslaving ourselves to the monetary treadmill against our will.*

There is no such thing as a 'human nature' beyond the natural 'involuntaries' of consumption of food, consumption of water, sleep, exercise, and sex. Man is not inherently guilty, selfish, imperialistic, nor competitive. Each historical era, characterized by a 'historical horizon' in which the cultural mode of the mass of the race has been programmed slowly over the course of preceding eras is what is observed to be 'human nature' by the intellectuals of every time. The mistake these individuals make.. the mistake that the giant Sigmund Freud made.. was to take his observation of the humanity of his time as the humanity of all time.. past, present, and future.. adding his opinion as a dominant ingredient to the mix, thus assisting in the perpetuation of what caused him so much pessimistic angst, as those observed as selfish and outwardly imperialistic were now validated by a theory given the stamp of authority, unburdening them of a potential guilt to the contrary.

Although much can be seen in common throughout the course of human history between the men of 'then' and the men of 'now,' this observation is only made in relation to the common thread of what makes one human. The fact remains that there was a time when people truly believed a King to be divinely ordained, and there is still a place where the female is subconsciously manifested as 'less' in the minds of the both sexes due to the overwhelming pressure of ones cultural mode of existence.

It is not 'human nature' that makes someone who they are on the subconscious level.. it is culture.

The human nature of today is overwhelmingly one of manipulation, egotism, competition, anxiety, and a pursuit of a happiness represented as material and monetary wealth. This is not the same nature of island nativity or contemporary agrarian societies of the third world.

The bottom line is that what is known as human nature is manufactured, and if it is only now beginning to be seen throughout all cultures, countries, and clans it is because of the blatant imposition of free market economics coupled with Western scientific objectivism (to which the arrogant theories of psychoanalysis are now a part).

On an individual level, one is able to 'manufacture' aspects of their own individual reality. This is snuffed and/or defined within an archetype by the manufactured reality of ones overarching cultural mode of mind.
The cultural mind, however, is not an inevitable state and is 'democratic' by its very nature. It is nothing more than the result of billions of voices speaking into the void since the dawn of human awareness, and one can add to the mold as competently as any intellectual giant has throughout history.

The game is only as rigged as you let it become.


*The bare fact that it truly is against our will is masked beneath the societal smorgasbord of career opportunity; were one to attempt to explain that they did not wish to have a job in the first place, the reply would invariably be one of two things: 1: 'you did not have to work [at this particular career],' or, 2: 'well then, you can go starve to death in the streets..' unaware that the only thing starving the homeless is the fact that we not only collectively disagree with their freedom, but also rob them of practical self-sustainment by appropriating every single nook and cranny of the means of bodily (as well as spiritual) sustainment and growth, thus causing them to claw at our feet begging for our scraps. Modern society, if it were truly free, could potentially exist in its current form, but would not appropriate and monetize the organic materials which are the birthright of each and every living creature on any planet gardened with life.    

Life in 2012

visual poetry, I suppose

and water once said to the wall
"Man is a crushed being. Floats like logs on an empty river in a wild with no predators,
because, Man knows, a predatory wild is immoral."
no regrets.

and water once said to the wall
"Can I speak? And if I speak why do I speak this particular language? Beyond my reflective frailties and your broken back, there really isn't much to be said for the anglo-saxon remembrance of loss, now, is there?"

and the sleep in the corner of her bedroom was like a feminist strike for equal wages
there was a resentful bitterness to the way she spat her measured love.

often, she would say nothing as a means to everything,
and everything as a means to nothing,
but either way the only one listening was every one of us, so we couldn't really hear a word she was saying.

some mornings, I awoke to the curious wondering of subject versus object, and sad endings versus no endings, and you know what?
not once did an answer appear and if it did, no way was there a syllable empty enough to describe our lack of a point
so I stopped calling I, I
and started calling I, we
so we slept until 1 in the afternoon with the only shame being that of novelized continuity with its great big book on the cons of finitism we tried to return for store credit only to realize it wasn't Chapters selling, nor the writ of the holy ghost, but instead that particular angle of our face that can only be witnessed if one mirror is placed in front of another with a third to the left

and suddenly, 'I' made more sense,
what a shame?

and water once said to the wall
"all things are all things," and the wall listlessly agreed to nothing.

so we walked to the water and agreed on behalf of the wall
and the water swooshed kindly as we lay out a towel
sleep on the beach.

and the sleep in the corner of her bedroom was like a feminist strike for equal wages
there was a resentful bitterness to the way she spat her measured love
so my nervous flinch began to wonder why the real world teases with stillness, distant mountains, open roads, warm kisses, sunrises, and cold rain
when I still have to get up for work in the morning.

Low Light, Low Life

Hello blue planet!

Okay, this time around, it has been a significant lull of time between this post and my last.. I haven't even gone so far as to update my 'weekly song pick' in about a month.

However.. this isn't without reason or downside.. I've been working pretty diligently on a big project exclusively for my blog. I won't give much away.. but I will tell you all it's a short-story that, at this rate, isn't going to end-up being very short.

I was hoping to have it done by last Sunday evening, but I ended up lacking much motivation and instead opted to sleep, eat, and read for the 2 precious days off.
I was also hoping to have worked on it during the 3 split-shifts I did this past week, but I ended up spending all three days Christmas shopping and running errands (like picking out a sweater that would actually keep me dry and warm in the chill of a Pacific Northwest winter). I apologize for my lack of dedication to the work as of late.. but it will be done and up for viewing by mid-January absolute latest.

Promise.

It isn't really the season to be all that 'jolly,' I suppose.
I have been quite satisfied with my material bounty given of the kind hearts of others this holiday season.. but other than that, a majority of my life has been a little down for the past week or so.

Between working at the hospital psych ward with my client (no further details will be disclosed for confidentiality reasons), the lack of light, the abundance of muggy rain-soaked days, and my overall exhaustion and lack of energy from all of the above causing me to avert most chances at socializing (save for the first time in awhile last night with a friend who is visiting for the holidays after having moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for college), it's been a very lonely holiday season for me.

Not physically.. physically speaking, I've had plenty of people around me. My mom, my brother, my dad, coworkers, the occasional friend, and virtual connection via Skype.. but spiritually, I've felt pretty solitary and drained.

A very large part of me is in a passionate mood for romance right now, which my circumstances can't seem to satisfy, at least for the time being.. and I've had few people with whom I'm able to share all of my feelings, both positive and negative, since 95% of my friends moved away in September.

And I feel like I'm extroverted enough that a healthy social life with some real depth is a very big 'must' for me.. hence why I thrived so brilliantly throughout high-school, and have been quite up and down since.

I apologize to everyone who reads my blog about how down I have seemed in the past few months; it's been a hard year so far, and I only expect it to slowly let-up it's pressure over the course of the next 8 months until I'm finally on my way to Victoria (and this time for real; I've been officially accepted to Camosun College for the Arts and Science program starting September 2013).

I'm also very much looking forward to my European adventure in March; the itineraries are almost complete, and I've got $2000 in the bank as of last pay-check with another $1,500 for the trip alone still to be stashed away over the course of the next 3 pay-cycles.

So, to wrap up.. my life is looking very very bright and promising over the next couple of years, and will be getting brighter with the start of classes at the local Vancouver Island University in just under 2 weeks, as well as the lengthening of the days until the arrival of summer and my epic jaunt to what I consider to be the 'far-east' considering where I'm geographically situated.. but it has been hard over the past 4 months, and that's alright, because that's just the way that life is sometimes and we all have to accept that and also remember that it really does get better.

Keep your eyes on 'It's A Friendly Inferno!' for my upcoming long-short story.. as well as updates as to how things are going.
Sooner or later, my blog ends up housing the most intimate details of my life.. so if you're into that kinda shit..

read my blog.

Peace out, blue planet!