To Be Recited In A Gravelly Tom Waits Voice

My defense, if I felt I needed one, is that I always tell people far in advance that I am really not a very good person, and I am not to be held responsible for those who don't believe me until I show them.

A Thought For The Day

When you focus on the differences between the past and the present, it seems that we are living in the future. When you focus on the similarities between the past and the present, it becomes apparent we are still living in the past.

Excerpts from "Things I Have Learned"

Since 2003 I have been keeping a log of ideas, points, refutations and theses called Things I Have Learned. Some of it has been spun out into real essays, some of it is being saved for my 800-page Crackpot Manifesto. Here are some small pieces from it.

If you knew someone was going to die, you’d be nice to them, wouldn’t you? Remember that everyone IS going to die, and act accordingly. Pity is not a weakness, but the fear of weakness is.
---------------
The ruling class pass laws against certain behaviors and activities called "vice." Vice means "everybody does it but no one is supposed to admit it." These are a convenient set of laws for the ruling class: as they control the justice system they need not worry about their own vices while at the same time they can use the vice laws to imprison people when necessary. On an individual scale dissenting voices can be discredited or silenced; on the scale of entire populations this provides for a large and booming prison labor business.

The ruling class is comprised of two factions: the "conservatives" and the "liberals." The conservatives believe that the people can not be trusted and so must be kept firmly under control. The liberals believe the same thing -- the only difference between factions are the proposed forms of control. That the people must be kept controlled is never in question. The alternative to this false dilemma -- the evolution of consciousness, both in the individual and in groups, so that the people can learn to take care of themselves without control -- is marginalized and dismissed. And why not? If people did not need to be controlled there would be no need for a ruling class to control them.
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The problem with the Global Village is that the number of village idiots the village has increases exponentially the larger the village gets. By the time the village is global the crowds of idiots chanting nonsense all but drive out anything intelligent or even intelligible. Indeed, this is exactly what we have seen happen with the Internet. It is perhaps this sense that the barbarians of nonsense are perpetually at the gates of one’s conscious world that leads to the obsession with things being “real” or “natural.” (Note the popularity of “reality TV”, hip-hop’s cultural obsession with being “real”, and even the marked demographic increase in the natural foods market as a few examples of this trend as it appears in different forms.)
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Conspiracy theories fall apart because they assume conscious human decision where unconscious human behavior is a simpler and more probable explanation.

The true conspiracy is the conspiracy of self-deception, which we’re all in on. Every character is a part of the Order.
---------------
Honey isn’t natural— bees make it!
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What if the alphabet was not comprised of letters, as it is today, but rather was made up of tiny aspirin tablets?
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The Pax Romana was a sham. the whole duration saw many wars of conquest or to quell rebellion (as well as numerous reigns of terror on the home front). The idea that wars don’t really count if they don’t take place on native soil became the foundation of the American Empire.
---------------
Comparing the parallel aspects of Oneness and Nothingness to binary numbering: In binary the principal importance of a one is that it is not a zero and vice versa, whereas the importance of the One and the Void is that they are the same. The gift is the curse. The punishment is the reward. Life is a double-edged sword, but still, it's just one sword. The chicken IS the egg.

Found Art

speaking of constant struggles for self-control

i got another optimus prime
it's pretty ridiculous
not only the phrase "i got another optimus prime"
and all that entails
but also
the optimus prime himself
he's the movie "protoform" version
remember how in the movie they came down as comets?
that's what he transforms into
he's all like bluish gray
and he transforms into a bluish gray comet
he is the least optimus prime i have
unless you count the gorilla
which you should
because i have him too.

A Brief Manifesto

July 2006:
I
will not be trapped by this world
nor fall prey to the pitfalls and snares
laid out by those asleep to prevent awakening
I will not be guilted
I will not be shamed
I will suffer no expectations
save my own.

The Antichrist (or, Snappy Answers To Stupid Bitches)

May 2007:

I was already in a bad mood when I walked out of the Shop Rite. Why I was in this bad mood is another tale for another time and one I will most likely never tell so insert your own bad mood experience and vibe with me. I was already in a bad mood and, as I walked out of the Shop Rite this lady standing outside flagged me down to cough up a contribution to her cause. Normally I would just politely mumble an excuse and move on, or, if the cause was worthy, actually hand over some cash. But today I was in a bad mood, as I have now said three times, and the cause was D.A.R.E., so I decided to have some fun as an alien on this planet. The sign said "DARE to resist drugs and violence" so I turned to her with my best sweet sincere smile and said "But I like drugs and violence!" She frowned for a second -- I had deftly leaped right off of her script and she needed time to recover, but recover she did and like a champ too, countering with "But these are kids we're talking about!" Nice move. Appeal to our culture's idolization of children as an abstract. I smiled again and replied "Yeah, I liked drugs and violence when I was a kid!" Another frown almost instantly covered up and she came back with "But we're talking about fifth graders, not high schoolers!" As if she was tacitly admitting that she liked drugs and violence too, and further that she probably fucked half of her high school class, but that fifth graders existed in a purer state and we needed to protect them. With my money. So I smiled again, this time nothing sweet or sincere about it, and said "I liked drugs and violence when I was in fifth grade." Another frown, another pause, and then "Okay, have a nice day." "Same to you," I said and walked towards my car, content that later that night that woman would, over the dinner table, tell her husband how that afternoon she had met the Antichrist.

On The Topic Of Failure

"Tried to fix my shortcomings, I just came up short..."
- Joe Budden
The truth? I consider myself to be a failure.

I do not consider myself to be a failure because I have failed by the standards of society -- the college degree, the prestigious career, the home in the suburbs with the 2.3 kids -- although I am certainly a resounding failure by any of those standards. I don't consider myself to be a failure by the standards of society because I do not consider the standards of society.

I consider myself a failure because I have also failed by my own standards. I have failed to actualize myself, I have failed to act on the things I have learned. I figured out that love is the answer, that perfect love casts out fear, but I prefer to shun love and remain enshrouded in the fear. I see the path I must take and I refuse it. Knowing as I do that I am the only person I can control, I do not control myself. I keep my head in the clouds of a future that does not exist. I tell myself that I am a prophet, that my function is to be the gadfly, the crazy old man in the church tower ringing the bells, John the Baptist to one who has yet to come. The truth is I am paralyzed by fear. I have failed to conquer myself through knowledge. I have failed to pursue other avenues to conquer myself. I have failed to forgive myself, to forgive others, for the wrongs that have been done to me or by me. I have failed to use my talents and knowledge to uplift humanity, using it instead to amuse myself. I have failed to keep my darker side in rein.

It does me no good to recognize that each one of you is also a failure by my standards.

Optimus Prime Died For Your Sins

(I just went out and picked up the 25th anniversary re-release of the G1, original, Optimus Prime. Doing thus I came one step closer to re-claiming my lost childhood. In honor of this happy occasion here is one of my most popular essays, also available in my book, If You Don't Give Me Heaven. Originally written sometime in 2005.)

I cried when Optimus Prime died.

As a child I had already had to accept that they killed Jesus and that they killed John Lennon – in fact, to look around the world it seemed like most everyone was crazy and people kept killing each other right and left. Back then we still lived under the bombscare and it even seemed like somebody might kill us all some day soon. When Grandpa died I numbly came to terms with it though the whole concept of death seemed very unfair. Already I began to understand that one day I too would die – it was in the fine print of this contract that I couldn’t quite recall signing. But all of that was the real world. The world of cartoons, the world of children’s stories, was a sacrosanct place where ugly realities like death weren’t supposed to tread. Then Optimus Prime died. It was as if one day Elmer Fudd killed Bugs Bunny or the Big Bad Wolf ate Little Red Riding Hood. It wasn’t supposed to happen. And certainly not to Optimus Prime.

Optimus Prime was an inspirational figure in my youth. Leader of the heroic Autobots, his motto was “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.” It said so right on the back of his box. And who could disagree with that? Or rather, since it seemed the world was full of crazy people intent on depriving each other of basic freedoms, who should disagree with that? More to the point, Optimus Prime was willing to fight to preserve and protect that freedom. He was willing to die for it.

While other Transformers’ vehicle modes were sleek and sexy -- race cars, jet fighters and the like; Optimus Prime transformed into that most utilitarian of vehicles; the tractor trailer. As John Lennon (another dead hero) once sang, “A working class hero is something to be” and a tractor trailer is nothing if not working class. He represented the values most important for a leader; a sense of self-sacrifice, undying compassion and a respect for life in all of its forms; values hard to find in actual world leaders then or now. Optimus Prime didn’t command his war against the Decepticons from some “undisclosed location,” sending young ones off to die to make him and his cronies richer. He was always to be found at the front lines of the action, doing his best to keep the collateral damage down and protecting his own. Though born millions of years before Christ on a faraway world his actions reflected the teachings and values of Jesus more than many so-called “Christian” leaders.

So I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising that they killed him. I mean, they killed Socrates, they killed Gandhi and they killed Martin Luther King. The older, wiser and more cynical Noel isn’t surprised that they killed Optimus Prime too. If being a compassionate and selfless leader was easy then our history wouldn’t be so filled with criminals, robber barons and predators sitting on thrones or in Oval Offices and living well off of the suffering of the multitude. It must be that there’s a price to pay for sticking up for principles. The older, wiser and more cynical Noel understands this well.

But inside me still is the child who doesn’t understand this, in tears because it doesn’t seem fair that the world is full of pain and death. I wish I could speak to that child, to tell him that it will all be okay. That they bring Optimus Prime back and in the end we all benefit because of those who, like him, have been willing to be sacrificed. That one day the world will be more like Lennon’s “Imagine” and less like a cruel and pointless joke. I wish I could wipe away his tears and comfort him.

But I cannot find the words.

Bounded In A Nutshell

And what am I supposed to say?
Somehow I'm in
a game I ain't allowed to win
and then I'm told to play?
Know my role, throw my soul away?
Until I'm old and gray?
Then they'll lay Noel in a hole to decay?

The Social Contract: Not Worth The Paper It's Written On

The other day I got into a debate with this character who tried to defend his position by talking about the "social contract." You ever hear of this? I will save you a trip to Wikipedia and explain it Reader's Digest condensed-style. The social contract is some fruity abstract concept that came out of the the so-called "Enlightenment." When you hear someone talk about the social contract, it is a sure sign that they are some ivory tower intellectual that does not live in the real world. What it is, is supposedly we have all agreed to hand our own individual sovereignty over to a governing body in exchange for mutual benefits we could not achieve on our own. (With of course, the governing body usually getting the lion's share of the "mutual benefits.") Know what the problem with the social contract is?

I never signed it.

Did you? Did anybody?

Now I realize this seems like a pretty glib argument at first glance, but take it a step further. I also never signed the U.S. Constitution that is the literal foundation of the government I am supposedly bound to. There's some kind of "tacit approval" that I supposedly give just by existing on the land that I exist on, but I explicitly deny any such tacit approval. My position is extremely simple: I am not beholden to the laws of man. I am beholden to my own conscience and common sense and that's it. Armed people are real. Cages are real. If I flout the laws in too direct and obvious a fashion, armed people will put me in a cage. That is all real. If I go too far armed people will kill me, and death is also real. (Actually, of course, death is an illusion of this frame of existence. I was never born and I will never die. But that's besides the point.) But the laws the armed people say they are enforcing are not real. Get it? Now, common sense tells me that I want to avoid having armed people imprison or murder me. My conscience tells me that I don't want to do anything to other people that I would not have done to me. So, despite my bold pronouncements as a self-proclaimed outlaw, I am actually at worst a pretty harmless person. Harmless as the dove, you might say.

Wait, I take it back. Besides my conscience and common sense I am also beholden to the physical laws of the universe, but my hunch is that this is only because I am at a low level of consciousness. I suspect that for highly advanced consciousness the laws of physics are about as flexible as the laws of man are. Again, that is neither here nor there.

The point is, your individual sovereignty is derived directly from your connection to God and no body of people can take it from you. What you choose to do with it, whether to hold on to it or to give it up, is entirely up to you.

Next time: Remember when they made Doritos in Mountain Dew flavor? What the heck was that about?

Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)

"Get off the Earth."
- Sam Loyd

A lot of people seem to be upset about the Earth again. It's like every decade or so the zeitgeist suddenly becomes concerned with the state of the environment. In the 70s it was called "Conservation." Cartoon heroes did battle with polluters. Dr. Seuss wrote The Lorax. Then in the early 90s it was called "Ecological." People started celebrating Earth Day again. Captain Planet aired on TV. Now, it's called "Green" and was seemingly kickstarted by Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Everyone out of the blue is suddenly worried about the environment.

Everyone but me.

Don't get me wrong. I take the whole environment thing very seriously. It's terrible the mess we are making of the eco-system. It's awful all the species we have driven to extinction through our short-sighted pursuit of profits. It's terrifying to think of all the destruction that will be loosed as the Earth tries to regain some kind of balance. Between melting ice-caps and mega-tsunamis the Earth is going to swiftly become an unhospitable place for us to live.

And that's why I'm not worried.

If you speak to me on the real you'll recognize that this is a drum I've been beating for years now: we need to get off the Earth. Seriously, there is like an entire universe out there, y'savvy? It is crucial to our development that we leave the home planet behind. If the Earth is the mother, after all, then this entire time we have as a a species still been living in our mom's house. (Take it from me -- I've lived my whole life in my mom's house.) In these terms, the past is prologue (as are the present and the foreseeable future) for a history that has not even begun yet.

And why not? It's not like we don't have the technology. What we lack is the desire. In the 50s space was exciting. Then we went up to the moon, sent a few probes a little further, and decided the whole thing was dead and worthless. My pal Attila says it best: "Why would I want to go into space? The Earth has everything I need!" It is exactly this mentality that is keeping us here. That's why I do not fear the damage we are doing to our home-world; why rather then bemoan it I almost embrace it. Only when the Earth is so fucked that we can't live here anymore will we have the drive necessary to leave it.

And it's not like we're ever going to leave for good. The Amish, for instance, will always be on Earth. But with the bulk of us gone? The Earth will heal itself. Christ, the bio-sphere survived a massive asteroid collision and a fierce nuclear winter. I'm sure it can survive some non-biodegradable landfills and a pinch of smog. When we are no longer tied to the surface of a planet for our development -- when industry is off-world; when a ever-growing population now has an infinite space to fill -- the bio-sphere will not only recover from our damage, it will probably continue to thrive and grow.

The first polluters, remember, were anaerobic single-celled organisms who forever destroyed their own eco-system and permanently altered the Earth with their main waste product, an extremely toxic and reactive chemical. What was it called?

Oxygen.

A Prayer For Closure

(2008 Intro: I wrote this like five-plus years ago, during early 2003. Looking back I like it a lot, though it was really painful to write. As I recall I was drunk for the whole second half of it.)

“Those who come together for no good reason will part for the same.”
— Chuang Tzu
This is it. No Great American Novel, no scribbled sheet of pseudonyms, no hope to get the point across. Just this. Cheap catharsis and a prayer for closure. None of this story is true.

The basement. My basement. Our basement. The floor is strewn with boxes packed with abandoned plans, forgotten dreams and trash held onto for far too long. The end, if such a thing exists, is waiting for me down there. I see it in my mind’s eye, the entire arc of betrayal and lost promises playing before me like a video in fast-forward. This is how it’s been since it began to end, like I read the script in advance, seeing the future unfold, knowing all the moves beforehand. Knowing the final outcome. And acting anyway. Moving towards the end.

It’s almost over now. The end is nearly upon us. The final stretch of the journey is always the toughest, after you’ve used up all your will and resolve and strength on the miles previous but have a distance yet ahead of you. We’d managed to drive each other crazy, and like frightened and wounded animals we’d begun blindly striking at each other’s weak spots, hoping to deliver the blow that would permanently sever the bond, free us from this path we’d gone down together.

She’s in the basement, of course. Emptying the washer of laundry she’d left soaking there while she was… out. I take a very deep breath and step downstairs. “I’d hoped to save this for when you were ready to leave,” I say, my voice struggling to remain cold and detached. I try and remain unemotional in any confrontation, and this is hardly every confrontation. “But my sister wants to take me to dinner and I don’t have time to wait for you to get your act together.” She tenses slightly at the barb; she has already moved out of this house behind my back and this is just a last-minute sweep for her precious stuff. It’s been a long journey, peeling through layers of deceit like rotten onion, knowing what I would find at the center and begging that please God I’d be wrong this time. The downside to expecting the worst is that there is little more than a grim satisfaction at being proven right. It’s been a long journey, and the most painful one I’ve found myself on, but the terminus is in sight and it’s just a matter of soldiering through a few more miles. By this time I’ve come downstairs and am standing face to face with her.

“The thing is,” I’d said, sitting on the edge of the bare mattress in my old room, my old life, “I’ve kind of been in love with you all this time, and I don’t think I can do the friendship thing anymore.”

I am always performing, even when there’s no one around. I’ve always felt that my life was a third-generation carbon copy of Shakespearean tragedy, and I never hesitate to lift from fiction to enhance my own epic. “It’s the ‘Michael to Fredo’ speech,” I say. “You know how it goes.” The Godfather trilogy had been one of our shared things, maybe. There was so much I obviously never knew, and now there was no point in bothering to try.

“Sweetie—” she starts to say.

“Shut up,” I say, knowing how it hurts her to be told to shut up, furious that she would still call me that after all the confession and revelation upstairs not five minutes earlier. I clench my teeth until it hurts and then continue. “You know how it goes.” Clear throat. “You’re nothing to me now. You’re not a friend, you’re not a lover, you’re not family. You are nothing.” Now comes the finale. I grab her head by the sides, pull it to mine and kiss her violently on the lips. When I let her go she shakes her head and scrunches up her face with bewilderment. Is it possible she doesn’t know, she doesn’t get it? I thought it was a bit too derivative and obvious, but if the point was lost then… then nothing. This was never about her. She never even existed. We’d been two vessels, lost at sea, that had drifted together and thought that it meant something. We’d learned. My time was up here anyway. Finish playing the part and move on. New roles, more challenging, await me.

“I loved you once,” I snarl and head upstairs, already doubting that I ever did.

My sister is waiting on the front porch. “How’d it go?” she asks. My sister is very concerned for me, as is everyone, but not comfortable expressing any emotion, even the emotion of concern.

“With any luck,” I joke through tearing eyes, “I’ve just written myself into her permanent pantheon.” Through the corner of my eye I see her upstairs now, on the phone with someone. Him? Why does it even matter? The end came, the end went, and this is the beginning of something else. The king is dead, long live the king.

But nothing ever ends. Life doesn’t follow the flow of fiction, where all questions wind up answered and all conflicts resolved. Happily ever after, anything ever after, is a downright fraud. Even trying to pattern life after fiction like I had just done offers no true control over the reins of fate. Just easier to make myths about. All the dirt we pile on our ghosts only holds them at bay, and nothing, not even this cheap catharsis, can work a true exorcism. Pray as you might for closure, it never comes.

I light a cigarette and exit stage left, leaving the house and a very large part of me behind when I go.

The Marriage Essay

"What are they complaining about? I just wish that the next time my girlfriend asks me when I'm going to put the ring on her I could say, 'I'd love to, honey, but you know it's against the law..."
- from some comedy album Doug played me

I don't think that the government should be able to say whether or not gay people can get married for the very simple reason that I don't believe that government should be able to say anything at all about marriage. That's not the government's place. It'd be like legislating on hair-cuts. Marriage is an entirely personal thing. Or, rather, marriage is actually an archaic institution that dates back to the days when people were considered property, but if we are going to keep it relevant in these so-called modern times it should be an entirely personal matter and completely up to the discretion and choice of the individuals involved. Same sex, different-sex, as many spouses as you want, whatever. It's a personal matter.

Now, my personal opinion on this personal matter is that marriage is for tools. I don't mean to imply that if you get married, you're a tool. I will come directly out and say that if you get married, you're a tool. Sorry. But that's just my opinion, and seemingly my opinion alone. I would hate to see it made into a law. Wouldn't you? Probably. You tool. I'm getting sidetracked again. My point is that this is two thousand and eight, for fuck's sake. Why is gay people getting married even an issue? Civilization as we know it is teetering on the brink of collapse, the center cannot hold and the barbarians are due at the gates. This is what we have to devote our time to? How about rocket ships?

Let me say it again, rocket ships. We should be building giant rocket ships so I can get on one and leave all you idiots behind. Or super-heroes. Wouldn't the world be cooler if we had super-heroes? All I'm saying is, think about it.

Capital Punishment Paper

(For this class I was taking, June 2005:)

The system of capital punishment, or the death penalty, has been with humanity probably since the first days of civilization. Certainly every civilization has historically had some method of condemning its citizens to death and executing that sentence, be it the Chinese tearing the condemned apart with five horses or the infamous guillotine of the French Revolution. Perhaps it is related to the similarly-ancient practice of human sacrifice, the ritual killing of people in an attempt to appease supernatural forces. While of course the death penalty is not intended to appease supernatural forces but equally abstract concepts such as “the law” or “society,” the end result is the same. As of 2004 the United States ranked as the nation with the fourth-highest number of executions, beat out only by other nations known for their civility and enlightenment: Vietnam, Iran, and China (at number one with a whopping 3400 reported executions in 2004.) There are many people that believe that this ancient establishment of capital punishment is still necessary in this day and age, but a growing minority of people disagree, believing that for various reasons the death penalty is ethically or morally wrong. I am one of this minority.

Why? Quite simply because I believe killing is wrong. If killing is wrong then it of course follows quite logically that it is wrong to kill. In logic this is called a tautology. I cannot argue why I believe killing is wrong, since this is based entirely on my own opinion. For all I know everyone else is right and killing is okay in some circumstances, though everyone’s inability to agree on what exactly those “some circumstances” would be doesn’t do much to convince me. More to the point, if there is no universal right or wrong then in the absence of an absolute external moral code I can only go by my own personal feeling that killing is wrong.

Is there a benefit in executing criminals versus keeping them alive and imprisoned? In a short-sighted sense it certainly appears so, which explains why our short-sighted ancestors always permitted capital punishment and indeed many short-sighted advocates still support it. But in actuality it frequently costs more to execute someone than to keep them alive (using “humane” methods like the electric chair – whacking someone with an axe is of course still pretty cheap) so in a purely literal manner it seems the least cost would be to allow criminals to live. Does this benefit society? I would argue that yes, it does, since a society with no death penalty has no blood on its hands, or at least less blood, and also no one has to be put in the unfortunate position of being executioner.

If we are ever going to reach a point where killing is not permissible in any shape or form we must agree not to kill or to permit killing ourselves. Especially given that innocent people do get convicted of capital crimes and some are even wrongfully executed -- if the end-goal is a society where innocent people do not have to fear wrongful death, a system where innocent people are wrongly put to death is clearly not a well-thought-out answer.

According to many traditions ranging from Buddhism to quantum physics, there is no fundamental difference between self and other, observer and observed. Labor leader Eugene Debs once memorably said "…while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." Personally I do not want to live in a society where I can be put to death by the state for any reason. Obviously I would expect any such reason to be spurious because I have no intention of committing any severe crimes but even if I did I would want to be given a chance to redeem myself. Kant (amongst others) argued that we must only endorse rules we would allow to be universal -- if I want to be forgiven I must be willing to forgive.

Worse, the death penalty seems to be aimed at the worst parts of human mentality -- bloodlust, thirst for vengeance, emotion over rationality, etc. -- and is based off of the mistaken idea that two wrongs make a right. Two wrongs do not make a right, they make two wrongs. To do evil in the name of fighting evil is still doing evil. The most famous counter-argument is usually put as such: "What if someone killed your mother, wouldn't you want to see them dead?" To which I would have to answer that yes, I probably would like to see that person dead, but the whole purpose of society is that it is supposed to be driven by higher impulses than my own irrational and emotional responses to situations. For that matter, there are many people I would personally like to see dead and even a few people out there who would love to see me dead, but none of these personal opinions can or should be used as a justification for the irreversible taking of human life.

Another common argument put forth by pro-death advocates is "They (the capital criminals) lost the right to be human by the severity of their crimes." Says who? Who could possibly make that call? Who wants that kind of responsibility, and who could take it without being corrupted by it? Executions on trumped-up charges have been a favorite way of getting rid of those who are politically inconvenient or in disfavor since the dawn of civilization. (Recall what happened to Jesus or the many wives of Henry VIII if you doubt this assertion.) To my mind this is a greater evil than any evil a system of capital punishment could or does prevent and the only way to remove it is to forbid the state the power to decide life or death.

A third argument dismisses my own hard-line “killing is wrong” stance with an off-hand "It's all fine and good to say killing is never justified, but what about in the real world?" The problem with this is that objectively speaking there is no real world. The real world is what you perceive it as and what you create it to be. As long as you keep justifying killing as a solution to problems there will always be at least one person in the world who believes killing is justified. I believe killing is not a justifiable solution to any problem, not even in the defense of my own life. I cannot stop the universe from killing me -- rather, my death is so near to being inevitable that for all intents and purposes I must consider it such – all I can control is whether I live my life with a clean conscience and without getting blood on my hands.

But my own personal favorite argument for the death penalty, perhaps because it is the one I favored when I was pro-capital punishment as a teenager, is “Rabid dogs need to be put down." This seems like a pretty succinct case until you realize that we are not discussing rabid dogs, we are discussing human beings. More to the point, the reason rabid dogs need to be put down is because there is no way to cure them. If there were a way to cure them it would certainly be unethical to choose killing them over curing them. The antisocial behavior characterized by capital crimes can be cured in humans and if it is only at a small percentage right now that is arguably due to insufficient attempts at cure over punishment.

In conclusion, here is a counter-ethical question: you are provided with solid proof that your existence is making the world an overall worse place for everyone else and that your immediate removal would make things better for everyone else. As a result the state (or similar sovereign body) plans to execute you. Do you concede and go to your death like the lamb to the slaughter? Remember, it has been proven to you that your death will benefit everyone else. Can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, right? Greatest good for the greatest number, right? Will you go along? Many people take a laid-back attitude about the idea of other people having their rights and their lives deprived of them by a corrupt and inefficient system of "justice," because as long as it's someone else, it's okay – but is this the mentality of a civilized and ethical person or is this the mentality of a child?

Stigmata Shoppe (A True Story)

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Mean Dreams

"My brain is haunted, with mean dreams..."
- The Notorious B.I.G.
I’m dreaming about this dog. It’s one of those things where you’re watching something on television but you’re really there, and the narrator of the TV program is explaining about this dog. He said, it was originally named Spike but that later it was also called Charlie. I remember thinking “I like that name better” because of course that’s my brother’s name. Now, it’s raining out, and the dog is running around yelping in pain, saying “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I remember feeling very sad for this dog. All in all this was a very disturbing dream.

So then in the morning I was in the kitchen explaining the dream to my parents. My mom said the dog represents my brother. I said, obviously the dog represents my brother, I was even sort of aware of it during the dream. But what does it mean? What was wrong with the dog? Why did it keep saying “I’m sorry”? My dad said the dog was probably rabid, which is to say hydrophobic, so it was panicking because it was caught out in the rain. Also, he continued, the dog wasn’t really saying “I’m sorry,” it was just barking and it sounded like “I’m sorry” – like the dogs that are trained to bark “I love you” (or “rhi rhuff rhoo” or however you want to transcribe dog sounds). My dad is always good for rational answers to these things. Too bad my parents are really in Baltimore for the weekend, which I remember as I suddenly come awake in my (almost) pitch-black bedroom.

I know, I know, it was an awful trick to play on you, making you think I had woken up and I was really still dreaming. It was an awful trick to play on me, too. Now I am alone in my room and it is very dark, like when I was a child, and like when I was a child I am terrified. Specifically, terrified that there are things in the room with me. I keep sensing movements and hearing sounds but I am too scared to move. Petrified, you might say. I keep almost drifting to sleep but I am forcing myself to stay awake because there might be bad things in the room with me. The rational side of me is saying that I am drifting to sleep, that’s why I keep thinking there’s bad things in the room. All the more reason to force myself to stay awake.

Suddenly I open my eyes and I see my door is noticeably ajar, when it had been shut before. I can see a little light from down the end of the hall, enough light to realize that my door is now open when it wasn’t before. Now I am really terrified. I keep thinking to myself, why won’t the sun come up so the room isn’t so dark anymore? I have no idea how long this goes on but it seems like hours.

All of this ordeal ends when something grasps my right hand through the blanket and my hand starts tingling. Some voice with a distinct Elvis-type accent starts muttering things I do not understand or do not remember. My inner reason is telling me that there must not really be anything there, my hand is just asleep, which explains the tingling. But I can’t explain away the Elvis voice and I can’t move my body. Suddenly I realize that the reason I have not been moving all this time is not because I am too scared to move but because I can’t move, not even if I want to. Between this and the Elvis ghost I am finally so scared that I wake up.

Yes, again, I was really still dreaming. I know, I know, what a dirty trick. Imagine how I felt. The room is now blue with twilight and I sit up. It is 6:30 in the morning. I say, out loud, “If that was all my subconscious, fuck you; and if it was something else fucking with me, fuck you double. Fuck fuck fuck.” Then I got up and I stayed up. It took about an hour for me to be convinced that this time I really was awake and not still trapped in some nesting dolls recursive stack nightmare.

Giant Lemurs

Did you ever hear about the giant lemurs of Australia? Don't bother now, they've been extinct for centuries. For thousands of years they roamed the land happily, doing whatever it is giant lemurs did... now, they are all gone. Wiped out. But by who? Who was responsible for this calamity? The Patriarchal European White Male? The soulless industrialist out of touch with nature? Christian missionaries with an inquisitorial zeal? No, no, and no. The giant lemurs were killed off pretty much single-handedly by the native aborigine people. Yes, that's right, the good and simple aborigines, living in harmony with nature and in the dreamtime, picked up their yo-yos and their boomerangs and hunted an entire species of large mammal to extinction.

I'm not even sure what the moral of this story is, other than the obvious.

File Under Current Events

"People are right-wing, people are left-wing;
angels need both wings to fly"
- traditional

Today, stopped at a traffic light, I saw something I have never seen before: people protesting for the war. At the intersection of Rt. 9 and 9D in Wappingers, protesters flanked both sides of the highway. On the left were the peaceniks: aging hippies with one last shot at relevancy and foolish idealistic kids. They had handmade signs bearing slogans like "NO BLOOD FOR OIL" and "STOP THE WAR." I've seen those guys before. Today what was different was that on the right side were the warmongers. These guys, late-sixtyish-year-old men with beer guts and baseball caps, held up signs saying "SUPPORT THE TROOPS" and "LIVE FREE OR DIE." These signs were pre-printed and uniform; a sharp contrast to the DIY aesthetic of the crowd across the highway.

And me? As usual, stuck in traffic and impatient for the light to change. Personally I think both sides are wrong. Or not wrong -- misguided. Metaphorically tilting at windmills. I don't like war, but I know that at this time in history it is still necessary. War drives technological development. And, until we are immortal post-humans with godlike powers exploring the infinite universe and reshaping it to our whim, technology has a looooooong way to go. So: war. But by the same token it is our goal to one day no longer need war to develop, and vacuous slogans about supporting troops or how freedom isn't free do nothing towards this goal.

While I was entertaining these thoughts the light changed and I drove off, leaving the protestors of both stripes to recede to a spot in my rear view. I had moved on.

The Logic In My Dreams

"I don't understand the logic in my dreams."
- Ice Cube
In my dreams, last night, electrical revulsion. Years of buried pain and betrayal and sadness as visceral physical response. It was... cleansing. Sharpened my focus. When I awoke I marveled at how real this physical sensation had been in the dream; abstract intellectual observation quickly writing over concrete emotional feeling.

This is how its been the last few years. In my dreams there is something speaking to me. One night it is these mindless zombies (not zombies in the rotting George Romero sense, zombies in the A.I. thought experiment sense) that are coming toward me; one has replaced my sister. I scream, "Are you me?" Crypto-solipsism and dream logic combined.

Another dream; I am in a horror movie. Wander off from main cast, knowing the killer will come for me. In bleak hotel hall, dimly flourescent lit. I start yelling to whoever, "Okay, I'm tired of this movie now. I want to go home!"

The rushing roar is all around me; somewhere between tidal baptism and nitrous oxide. I am floating in black static and it is roaring. "Are you with me, God? Please don't leave me. Don't leave me God."

I look out my window into the woods (that no longer exist) and I see ambulances in the distance, emergency vehicles. A soldier appears outside my window and tells me the dead have started coming back to life.

The planets are right outside my kitchen window; large on the horizon and clustered like together like freshly-set up billiard balls. Marc and I go outside and the house is adrift in space. I point to the planets, larger and more looming than before and I say to him, ever the guru, "Those are us too -- consciousness manifesting itself in unconscious forms." I wake up and I realize that this applies both to my dream planets and to the planets that really are. More crypto-solipsism.

Outsider Logic (And Other Tales)

(all pieces from various times 2006)

OUTSIDER LOGIC
In this tired world of mothers and motherfuckers I have been driven underground. Love songs provide clues for future historians. Characters are typed in lines on the same page where I am scrawled in the margins. I am not shaped for sportive tricks. I will not play your reindeer games. I have teetered at the edge of the wheel long enough to recognize the cycles. They become familiar as friends because they do not change.

DREAMING IN TETRIS
Those were the days that I was dreaming in Tetris. When I shut my eyes I would see blocks falling, rotating, accumulating through some twisted tropism into a tower as tall and as doomed as the one at Babel, fighting gravity in vain. Even the waking world wasn't free from these flights of reverie -- any grid pattern such as tiles on the floor or wall would become the platform for the game to continue, the universe a Turing Machine that was emulating Tetris.

BETWEEN CLOCKWORK AND CARBON PAPER
There is nothing new here. Everything there is to say has already been said so we simply repeat the words of others. Rolling white paper quotes off of toner-black tongues. We go through the motions as if actors or automatons; repeating cycles that can not, will not, do not stop. There is nothing new here.

THE SCREAM
There is a scream in me that is building; a scream of confusion, of frustration, of terror and trepidation; a deafening and destructive roar. I dare not let it out, not for the fear that it could collapse and crumble these confining walls, but for the fear that it would have no effect at all, that it would pass through the air useless and unnoticed. So instead I simply stand still, listening in silence to this scream in my head.

The Mousetrap (or, The Terrible Futility Of Revenge)

May 2007:

I was angry when I realized that mice were getting into my snack drawer from under my bed. So duct-taping a cardboard cover over the open back, cutting off their access, wasn’t enough for me. I set a mousetrap. Not a humane mousetrap — a snap-your-neck mousetrap. I slid it under the bed behind the snack drawer and let it go. I was angry at the time. I was not angry, however, when I found the dead mouse in it two days later. I was horrified. It is one thing to be angry and wish death upon something or someone, it is something else entirely to follow through on that wish, to plot death and carry it out, to set a trap and kill a mouse. I felt terrible about it — this mouse, who for all I know was bringing food back to its children, did not intend me any harm and I murdered it for daring to trespass on my snacks. As I lifted it up with a plastic bag over my hand and placed it in the trash can I whispered a prayer for its soul, hoping its death wasn’t long and drawn out, that it died instantly and not injured scared and alone. I asked it for forgiveness, prayed for my soul as well. “You deserved better,” I said as I shut the lid on the trash.

I Don't Believe In Democracy

"People tell me that if you don’t vote you don’t have the right to complain. But I never voted in American Idol, either — does that mean I can’t complain about Kelly Clarkson?"
- overheard

Now let me right off the bat start with, when I say I don't believe in democracy, I don't mean there's another form of government I would prefer. I don't mean that democracy has been tried out and proven a failure. I mean it in the same sense that I don't believe in unicorns -- because though I have heard about them all my life I have yet to actually see one myself. I saw Santa Claus up in the sky when I was a kid. I've seen a couple other UFOs since then. One time I woke up from a particuarly vivid and surreal dream to find a giant bearded face watching over me. But I have never seen a democracy. Like many great, world-changing belief systems (i.e. communism or Christianity) democracy is not a failure because it has been tried and failed but rather because it has never been tried at all. Certainly not on a large scale. Athens? Only the elites could vote. America? Blacks only got the vote 138 years ago, women only 88 years ago. Convicts still can't vote -- which in a prison-industrial society like ours leads to a large disenfranchised class that is taken for granted.

Besides, not to split hairs, but even if everyone in America had the vote, the true powers of the federal government are not democratically accountable. Much of the power of Congress is in its committees, which we do not and can not vote for. The selection of Supreme Court justices is not democratic at all, and everyone already knows about the electoral college and how it, not us, truly picks the president. Everyone since 1876, at least. And seriously, it's a bit late for democracy to be tried out on a large scale anyway. Thousands of years ago when the Athenians coined the term, democracy was a revolutionary step, a quantum paradigm shift. Before democracy, someone had power over you and you had to do what they said since they controlled the military. With democracy, you get to pick the person who has power over you... and then, you have to do what they say since they control the military. That was thousands of years ago, like I said, and I find it hard to believe that this is the best system we can come up with. Scudder Klyce, in his referenced-more-than-read classic Universe said that democracy was right and every other system was wrong. If you're interested in his proof, I recommend you track down a copy of the book like I did. My belief? Asking which form of government is the best is like asking which type of cancer is the best. Democracy might be the best form of government but on the real when are we going to evolve to the point that we don't need to prop up a government to watch over us anymore?

Here's my proof that any form of government is doomed to fail, that the very notion of government is inherently flawed. Ready?

1. Government exists because people cannot be trusted or relied upon to do the right thing of their own accord. Instead, they prefer to rely on an external authority to punish or reward them.

2. This external authority, "government," is comprised of people -- who cannot be trusted or relied upon to do the right thing of their own accord.

What's the solution? A meta-government to watch over the governors? A meta-meta-government to watch over them? Stack meta upon meta until it's one meta too many and the problem is still the same.

Instead of debating whether this man or that man would be a better leader, lead yourself. Throwing aside the shackles of external authority, whether as god or government, is a crucial step towards reaching our true potential. This is an election year, and everyone has an opinion. My opinion is rather like my opinion of American Idol -- I don't vote for it, I don't care who wins. Because, like American Idol, the U.S. presidency is just a machine designed to generate loads of bucks for the shadowy capitalists behind it. Lead yourself.

The Woods

Outside the window in my room, for as long as I've been alive and more, has been the woods. Not the woods in some strange Jungian poetic fairy-tale sense, where the forest represents the unknown and unmapped, the alien and frightening; rather the woods in a completely literal sense, with the forest right outside my window. These woods featured quite prominently in my childhood; bizarre sounds coming through the window at night as I lay in my bed on Star Wars sheets and desperately tried to tune them out, to find peace and sleep. My friends and I explored these woods — or we would have but I had no friends in those days. Instead I recall my father taking me on nature walks through the woods, dim recollections of a few lifetimes ago. I can't recall the wise things my father said and how they forever changed me - I wasn't paying any attention. I had this little clear plastic box with a magnifying bubble in the lid and if you put a bug in there you could see how the bug looked at a higher resolution, a precursor to HDTV. Or sometimes my grandfather would take me into the woods to let me shoot his BB rifle. There was this swamp in the woods and I remember one time it was frozen over and I was playing on it and I fell in and I got in a lot of trouble because I was supposed to be doing my homework not cavorting around some icy swamp. At the edge of the forest, where my house sat at the top of a dead-end street, was a mulberry tree, and picking its fruit -- sometimes sweet, sometimes surprisingly sour -- was a favorite summer activity.

As I got older the woods remained a source of poignant memories, if not quite as innocent. One February my friends and I snuck out at four in the morning and ventured into the still-dark woods to destroy a fort, built by the bullies from the trailer park on the other side of the swamp. It was one of those triumphant childhood victories that you see in coming-of-age type stories. Except I never actually came of age. Later, my first love and I would sneak off to the woods to have furtive and fumbling sex amidst the brown leaves floor and the dead and hollow trunks. Like you see in coming-of-age type stories. A few times in recent years I would look out my window and see a half dozen or so deer nibbling the leaves of the forest perimeter. There were even still reports of polecats coming out of the woods and overturning garbage cans, though I never saw any myself.

Today, they are knocking down the woods. To put up "lower-income housing". And in today's frightening economy, who can even blame them? Now when I look out my window instead of the comforting haze of green I see heavy earth-moving machines rolling about, transforming the terrain through their blunt and brutal rituals. Driving up the hill towards my house I see the wide expanse of sky where before I saw the jagged line of tree-tops, the horizon wiped clean and left blank. The berry tree was knocked down, though in truth I hadn't tasted its fruit for years. The adult world is different. You can drive. You have money. If you want berries, you buy them at the store. If you want to learn about nature, you turn on the Nature Channel... in HDTV. If you need to set up lower-income housing, you knock down the woods. It's logical. It makes sense. Who wants polecats rummaging through their trash? Who wants deer running out in front of their car? I'm no romantic fool - I know that where I sit now was once woods too, until they knocked it down and built my house here. What I am witnessing outside my window is just another note or two in a symphony that has been going on for ages. The truth is, these woods were an aberration, an odd and wonderful anachronism, and it was time for the new reality to catch up.

My niece doesn't view things as phlegmatically. We went for a walk through what can no longer be called woods after the machines and their blue-collar operators had left for the day. What was it Oppenheimer said? "I am become death, destroyer of worlds." It was unrecognizable. Wood chips and soft upturned earth carpeted the land. The swamp was drained. I was stunned... not because of the destruction but because with the old trails destroyed and the land laid bare the whole area was so small. In my mind I had always pictured it as vast and unending, a metaphor for the universe itself. Sarah scoffed as only a child who is pure at heart can. "I can't believe they're doing this!"

"I can," I replied with adult wisdom or cynicism. "It's the way of the world."

"It's stupid!"

"Honey, that is the way of world."

About a month ago, completely by whim and at random, I took a quick detour back into the woods. They had fallen into terrible disrepair, even before the contracts were signed and the machines rolled in. The mouth of the trail had been covered up by years of lazy neighbors dumping their raked leaves and pine needles right in the front, and it took me some effort and navigation to forge my way back to where the trail cleared again. Still, most of the trails were grown over and it was obvious no one had traveled them in quite some time. Others were quite obviously still in use as evidenced by the beer bottles and food wrappers in various states of returning to nature. I don't know why I did that, walking out into the woods that time, but I am glad I had the chance to because even though I did not know it then, it would be for the last time.

They're tearing down my childhood, and I feel nothing.

The Dirty Truth About Industrialization

There is a tendency in some circles to bemoan the industrialization of the world. How does the song put it? "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot"... what a vivid image!

Now here's the real story. For all of human history from the beginning of civilization on, every society on Earth used slavery to accomplish their goals, and for a very simple reason -- do you want to build your pyramid, Cheops? So despite the fact that as Frederick Douglass put it "there is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him," slavery nonetheless remained an entrenched human institution for thousands of years. It was, so they say, a "necessary evil."

Until when? Until the Industrial Revolution. With the development of machines that could do the physical work that captive humans were doing, slavery was an evil that was no longer necessary. And amazingly enough, right at this time for the first time in history abolitionist movements popped up at various points along the globe independently of one another. A perceptible shift in the zeitgeist that led (ostensibly) to the end of slavery. And why? Because of industrialization. Big sooty factories and sludge pipes in rivers. Tell the Lorax he can kiss my ass.

Superstitions

"To attempt to be reasonable amongst unreasonable men is itself an unreasonable endeavour." - proverb

I was driving down Red School House Road when the black cat suddenly darted out in front of me. I braked, swerved, and managed to avoid hitting it. As I continued to drive, I recalled the old saw about black cats crossing your path and as a preventative measure I pulled the lucky cigarette out of my pack and lit it.

Make your own comparisons, contrasts and conclusions. Battling ancient superstitions (the black cat) with modern ones (the lucky cigarette) is all well and good but superstitions are still superstitions. We are a superstitious (and cowardly) lot, humans, with such an advanced capacity for reason but still as robotic and programmed as one of Skinner's textbook pigeons. This is why thousand of years into our development we are still living in the Dark Ages.

The truth is I don't believe black cats are bad luck; I once had a black cat and it wasn't until she left my path that my luck tailspun. The truth is that I don't believe in the power of the lucky cigarette either; all cigarettes are bad luck, a locus for bad karma and negative thought-patterns. So what sympathetic magic was I attempting to invoke on the twilit Red School House Road? Grateful that I had not stained my soul with this animal's death, I chose to stain my lungs with smoke and hasten my own.

On the way home I thought, I must write about this. An urge, a compulsion. A drive, if you'll forgive the awkward attempt at double-meaning and pun.