story shapes

i find myself thinking about story again, the power of narrative and it's function in human perception of the world in which we live.

I've been working at a community garden and something about pulling weeds and an encounter with a small snake brought back visceral memories of my childhood working in the field – or perhaps it was the rear forested area of the garden, like a grotto under a tall green canopy not unlike the areas i played as child, in a world of my own imagination yet very much influenced by the stories that I watched in movies and read about in books. Curious to me now how a vacant lot with tall trees could entertain me for hours and hours, how i could see it as something fantastical and full of adventure. From the stories of Indiana Jones to the Swiss Family Robinson, narratives, characters, events and landscapes all blended together to shape the way I saw and experienced the world.

The stories I knew as a child laid a structural foundation for the ways i engaged the world around me. This leads me to believe that stories are the framework for the way humans see the world and how they engage it. As we grow older the stories become more complex in relation to the development of more complex emotions and ability to reason. Science is really just a story, a way to explain the world, and when we believe these explanations they shape the way we see the world.

I think of certain tribal cultures whose world view was shaped by the oral stories passed down from generation to generation that shape the way each human member experiences the world... and i wonder how the world must have looked through their eyes and their mind, through the stories they knew and believed in.

Then i think of the power that story has, the power to shape the way humans see the world. A dominant story can rule the world, hence the spread of religion and political ideologies. Hollywood and the mainstream media in the USA indoctrinates the populace with story: this is how it happened, this is what it means. And you either believe it or you don't, because you compare it to a different story you read/heard/saw elsewhere – OR – you experienced it firsthand and have your own narrative account based on personal experience, which is what all story originates from anyway. We cannot imagine things that we do not have some sort of perceived experience with. All stories, no matter how fantastical are based in human experience, either first or second-hand, with the world.

I feel like i've written about this same subject a hundred times and perhaps am constantly repeating my words and arguments, but for some reason it comes back to me and always astounds me – story and the power it has on the way humans see the world.

How would my life be different if i had known and read different stories? If I wasn't indoctrinated with Christianity and Capitalism? Or, in my case now, super-saturated with diverse and competing stories from around the world? What if i only ever knew one story, just one?

unloaded

this body spills out off the shelf of reason, boxes of cereal and canned vegetables

this body is a heaping pile of things consumed for breakfast lunch and dinner, eyes licked clean the television screen and hours of sucking down the streaming digital feed

spilt like milk on linoleum floor peeled back and brown at the edges, water stains and food residue that no one wants to clean, will never be cleaned

everything let loose with the hounds
out to wander and sniff about
a world out of bounds and limits
running through fingers
flooding rivers and roll out to sea

tossed like a crew with no vessel
formless and free
over sunless days spilt into starless nights
twenty eight legs kicking in the moonlight
strewn out upon the endless bobbing tide

now they're just shoes without connotations and questions without lamentation.
rationality evades action and everything unloaded to ebb with the wind and the sea, without an american dream to sew up the seams.

...and if the world is ours for the shaping then give me a hammer and thread and i'll give up my head for dollars or cents so i can pay the rent and my credit card debt, eat breathe sleep in condominium sleaze and walk the boulevard of corporate greed.

Blog Redux | the stampede

I've made over the look of my blog with a choice photo taken by my friend molly while visiting brooklyn. A lot has happened in recent months and i haven't blogged much, but i intend to start writing again, from a fresh perspective and with new insights. I've lost my job, been a month in Perú, and am re-discovering a lifestyle i'd forgotten since summers in high school. My life is in tumult (or perhaps it's the whole world) and it's mad beautiful, troubling and fiercely fascinating – where it all will go is... anyone's guess... but i'll definitely have my say along the way, right here: my platform for poetry, rants and rambles about life.

I'm all dust a hooves right now, a million horses charging across the land, mane caught in the wind, flirting with the leaves of trees like a storm's savage caress, all blown over, blown out and something wild.

how slow can you go?

maybe not slow enough yet. not slow enough to see, to hear, to learn.
still rushing through life as though it were a race to some triumphant finish line
or just not paying attention to what it is that i'm actually doing in the moment.
mindlessly going. doing. keep busy. do it quickly. go. go. go.
in the past few days i've injured myself in several small ways: cuts, bangs, bruises and scrapes
all from not paying attention to what i was doing because i was moving too quickly. not noticing.
is it naive or wise to believe that everything in life can be seen as a lesson?
and when did i stop learning lessons from life?

speed can keep you from the lion's jaws

for me, there are no lions. no jaws or sharp claws.

why so fast? what haste? what urgency?

this time in my life is a gift.

it is time for me to look, listen, and learn. go slow. even slower. slower. ever so slow.

the other

there's a cloud creeping up on me about to surround me, envelope and become me.

i realized some things about my life today. one: that i live somewhat isolated from a whole other order and working of life, of people and processes. and i believe myself to be a man of the people, that i care for all people, the poor and destitute, the working class - because I have worked to serve others who are in need. but i am not who i believe myself to be. yes, i have in my work life done much for community development and serving the people but i have always lived separate and in my own time rarely engaged that realm. I have for the most part only had friends who are just like myself: college educated, from well-to-do middle class families and with decent paying jobs. I spend my time in hip bars and cafes and dimly lit restaurants – occasionally venturing into the cheap ethnic establishments to take advantage of the low price and "authenticity" – doing all this with people who are just like me. But that's about the limit of my engagement: tourism.

What am i getting at here? Am i classist because i've been blind to my own class - just going along with what I know, what's just like myself? And why am I like this? Is the determinate factor economic or genetic? What separates people into these different but parallel worlds?

I want to know the other. I want to walk into that world that to me seems so outré and mysterious and get lost in it and feel it run it's way through my pores into the core of my being and stir and shake and mix.

I want to deeply feel life again. I want to connect.

the end of the road

how many times can it be said: it's all coming to an end

say it every day, see it every day

it's all coming to an end, it must come to an end

how many times can it be said before it ends?

ending is a process

the beginning of the end is where we stand

what can be accomplished at the end of empire that doesn't end with empire?

what, if anything, will remain?

certainty has been shattered

the paved road that stretches out before me is deteriorating into the horizon

the road does not continue, does not get better

it ends in a time and place without roads and where roads cannot go

our patch of the universe is transforming into something yet unknowable

all I can see is the end of what I know – nothing beyond

all I can say is that it's all coming to an end

here i stand

here, as it all unwinds:

walking these solid canyon streets of brick and stone where fallen petals blow
with trash and viscous limbs of trees stretching and swaying above broken concrete

in what direction should I go? jobless, aimless, restless and remiss
to get back on track with a life I don't miss
my mission forsaken
my soul overtaken by gilded dreams that once raised my head to heaven
and my body to labor
to toil
a slave to an empire floating on oil

break it all down, each brick and carrot on a stick
see past this trebuchet of tricks
beyond this civilized glitz and ignorant bliss

the earth, the land I love and miss
eaten, beaten and raped
by a mongrel species of malevolent ape

here I draw a line, between me and the street
from this moment on I will no longer walk that way
day by day remove from me
these customs of control, glutton and greed
walk away from the towers
to the end of all streets
onto the land that lives beneath

stars that guide the aboriginal mind
into a rhythm in tune with all life
rejoin the tribe
unite

here is what i understand:

that man does not hold the power in hand
to live free of the world upon which he stands
nor the power to hold, to push and to pull
the delicate and diverse parts of a whole
into a separate order to serve his own

man must dance for rain
live at the mercy of the clouds
be ally with the ants
flow with the order of the earth
and the arch of the sun
live simply
take only what is given
and give back to thank
keep the balance
listen to the waves
live with with Life

and if not, Life will remind him
Life will revolt
by sea and storm
fire and plague
triumph over science
and trivialize his technological tricks
show him he is powerless
ignorant and insignificant
to the great order
the protector of Life

Life itself is a thing alive
intent to preserve living

modern man has become a cancer to Life
a mutation that has turned against the body

here is what I know:

repent and find balance or perish

here i stand
my back to the street
against the city
ready to leap

eat.breathe.sleep | apocalypse

a train wreck a day keeps the kids at play

each day feels like a train wreck
sometimes it's exciting
because it was a train full of bankers, automobiles, and corporate retailers
sometimes it hurts
because it was the train you were riding
and I wake up the next day
sore or sober to another derailment
whistles blowing
sirens screaming
metal and men strewn about
in crispy spring sunlight

DEPARTURES/ARRIVALS

how can anyone doubt that the entire fabric of this civilization is falling apart
yes, a reason to rejoice
but as anyone who's ever experienced a bad automobile accident knows
you don't pick yourself up from the wreckage, knock the dust off your shoulder
and go on with your daily life
there is shock
and trauma
that hangs
on you

ALL ABOARD

Why are we not angry? I feel like I should be gravely disappointed in the generations that preceded me - at my parents, the boomers - the generation of greed - whose manic desire for luxury and excess has at last ruined the world. They're the ones who built the sprawling suburbs of cheap and uniform model homes, spent their weekends motoring around to flex their several credit cards in shopping malls and their nights on the sofa flipping station to station while shoveling their mouths full of fast and easy factory food. Thank you, mom and dad, for making the world I've grown up in a total shit show train wreck. I really wish you knew better. And if you did, I really wish you had tried harder to change things. But now I just watch you decay in your McMansions with the pitiful and wasteful world you built around you...

...which gives me even more of a reason to ensure that things change or the world I pass to the next generation will be even worse and they'll wonder the same thing: why didn't they do anything to stop this? how could you leave me with this wasteland!?

FULL SPEED AHEAD

I read a few articles in the New York Times tonight. Some worthy quotes from an article on the death of conspicuous consumption:

Maxine Frankel, 59, a high school teacher from Skokie, Ill., said, “I think this economy was a good way to cure my compulsive shopping habit. It’s kind of funny, but I feel much more satisfied with the things money can’t buy, like the well-being of my family. I’m just not seeking happiness from material things anymore.”

“It’s kind of like we all went overboard,” said Ms. Taylor, 33. “And we’re trying to get back to where we should have been.”

“Though the recession was always talked about in economic terms, we felt really strongly that, in fact, it was a crisis of culture,” said Tracy Johnson.

Ms. Johnson has advised clients to focus on quality rather than quantity. Malls redecorated in screaming red “sale” signs are not the way to go, she said, because “if you just give people the opportunity to buy more, you’re not matching up to where their minds are.”

Carol Morgan, who teaches law at the University of Georgia and whose husband has a private law practice, said she felt a responsibility to cut needless spending. “That is probably something that is a prudent thing to do in any event, but particularly now I see it as the right thing, as the moral thing to do,” she said.

“It’s disrespectful to the people who don’t have much to flaunt your wealth,” said Monica Dioda Hagedorn, 40, a lawyer in Atlanta. “Everyone’s going to pull through together, or everyone’s going to sink together.”

Sounds like some of the boomers finally get it... finally...

And a few more from another article by the Times' boomer voice of reason, Thomas Friedman:

We can’t do this anymore. “We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children.”

“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

“When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us, ‘What was it like? What were you doing when it started to fall apart? What did you think? What did you do?’ ”

MAYDAY MAYDAY

what world will we wake up to tomorrow? there are still so many trains hurtling forward on paths of destructive progress, each one a whistle blow away from becoming wreckage and without brakes, because they were never installed.

I'm already sick of weathering this shit storm and it's only just begun. But the reaping of the rotting fields, vast and superfluous as they are, must continue. We must let it all fall apart and die, even as it disrupts our lives in the present and as things proceed to get worse – because they most certainly will. Hell, we should even do our best to make sure they fall apart, die, and don't come back. Where's the exterminators when you need 'em?

Before I shut my eyes for the night only to wake up to more chaos tomorrow, I can only hope that I live through this great collapse to see better days and that the life I have lived was for the lives of those yet to come – that they may live in a better world than the one I was given by my recent ancestors.

bright

awoken by bright sunlight
blinds i refuse to close
like a bedroom door
so that some sun may find me
dreaming heavy and blind in the
bright morning light

not as cold as I expected
walking to the bus stop
despite arctic winds
chill to bare skin
everything illuminated
in such sharp contrast
cracks in concrete
crossed shadows of bare trees
a stranger to this world
of brick and bleach
brighter
even the lines on people's faces
as they held seat and stance
seemed overexposed
to my naked eyes' glance

all the lines of wakeful life
washed away in morning sunlight
dark as the night
is a vast sea of white

no beacon
no moon
to capture my sight
unprotected open blinds
huddled between windows
of naked open eyes

wake me in time
my dear sun
wake me to see
it all wash away
in bright sublime sea

this is now

this is me ^

now: 4:48AM Saturday

sick and unable to sleep because of the medication I'm taking.
I feel like I haven't been this sick from a cold since I was a kid.
I work with kids everyday. now I'm sick like one.

my hair looks so wild in that photo... and I'm afraid to lose it, to go bald and patchy
but it's destined to happen. it's in my genes... and it's already starting.

Physically, I'm not growing up anymore. Now it's time to be an adult homo sapien.
Perhaps I'm at that age when most people start to grasp desperately at their youth
trying to maintain the appearance, hold on to that feeling before they start to grow old.

I think of my parents and how at my age they were already married and starting a family;
careers and a house; dogs. Yet in some ways I still feel young. Not ready for marriage or a mortgage now.


I'm considering going back to school in a very serious way. I want to start non-profit organizations and sustainable businesses. I don't have the skills to do that right now.
I need training. Need to go to school to learn how. So I can do what what I really want
to do with my time. Right now, I just feel like I've hit a ceiling in the non-profit world
and I'm not going to get any farther than this unless I learn more.

oh wow, this reads so bland.... but.... this is now.

watch and listen

"i don't mean
to seem like i care about material things
like my social status
i just want
four walls and adobe slabs for my girls"

hinged

I've completed a full orbit around the sun as a new yorker
and I'm not sure what qualifies one as becoming a "new yorker"
but something in the way that I now feel about myself and the world
is hinged to this city and its ways
has shaped me
has become me

I like it here, despite all the vehement nastiness I've blogged about for the past year. new york city is home. i think i've come to accept it for what it is, all the good and bad all in one.

even winter doesn't feel quite as cold

hinged. as i contemplate moving away from this place, moving to south america or spain to live and work on organic farms, learn the ways of plants and soil. can i leave this hard place i've softened into? or should i stick around, venture further into this abyss and become a multi-solar new yorker?

hinge: a central point or principle on which everything depends....

the fragments of ice were oddly floating up the hudson
retreating north away from the city and the sea
scraping against one another
a thousand car wrecks
a conversation about the weather
beneath subdued golden glow
by frozen mountains' shadow sown
break and scrape
in unison flow

civil discontent

rolling over from my last entry:

my pissy attitude about civilization AND an unapologetic assault on the suit / costume

two steps back and a few days later I still feel the same disquietude towards civilization – a manic skepticism I feel I've possessed all my life. And as I engaged this civil discontent with a self reflective skepticism (as in, what's at the root of my feeling this way) I came to a number of interesting speculations:

1. western civilization is old, played out, boring - like being stuck playing the milton bradley board game Monopoly all your life. I just can't bring myself to play another round no matter how many times they re-design the board and game pieces. Now it's "green" monopoloy....

2. my personality / being / whatever you want to call it - isn't the type that takes well to highly ordered and mechanized structure. By this I mean civilization is a structure. It's organized by rules and blunt geometry (mostly rectangles). There are signs that tell you what to do and where to go. Basically, the whole thing is a constructed environment, both physical and mental, that gives direction and creates order. I have direction and order of my own. I don't need or like, for that matter, being told what to do and how to do it. I rarely read instructions or follow directions. I intuit processes and paths, mechanics, etc. I make my own way.

To look at it simply, I'm not a follower. If you think of it from a biological perspective, social colonial species (living in colonies) usually have some sort of social order amongst the members of their community. Some, termed alphas, are the ones the others follow. I don't know enough about why this happens, why some are biologically/genetically alpha and others are not – especially in the more complex social order of the human species. But biologically, genetically, I'm not a follower. I also don't feel like I'm an alpha either though. I don't want to lead people, eventhough I suppose I do take that innitiative in certain situations.

Hmmm... I'll play this out in a scenario: if I was with a group of people lost in the wilderness I would likely end up one of the people leading the way. Yet, I have the tendency to not care much for those who can't keep up and am likely to leave them behind. So, if there's another leader in the group, I'm content to let that person lead and look after everyone else while I go out and do my own thing, explore the terrain and places others could not go, scout obstacles and alternative routes, then rejoin the group and share my findings or just socialize, lend a hand, maybe lead for a little bit. I'm pretty much all over the place, can't keep one role.

Put me in civilization, a highly structured society where things are ordered and set - established - and I get bored. That's knowing myself and why I, personally, am discontent with civilization.

As for Costume and Suits – I have to admit that I, just like anyone else in society, wear costume and partake in civil performance. Only, like my own being, my costume isn't from a set of established styles. It doesn't follow order or rules so much. It's a reflection, or projection, of who I am. Likewise, suits or store-bought looks are merely projections of being or role – though I might argue that the suit is strict uniform, moulded with an image of authority, like a police uniform, which easily identifies the wearer as part of a particualr group with established roles in society. Perhaps that's why I dispise the suit, or any uniform, for the mere fact that it just doesn't fit me. I can't conform who I am to an established role. I think some people wear suits and uniforms and it gives them a sense of being, a sense of direction: "this is who I am"..."because I wear this suit I must act like a person is supposed to act who wears it" – most likely because they need to be directed. Without it they don't know their role. they don't know what to do. Costume, then, gives some people a role to play, an established and ordered directive.

Stepping back and looking at all of this, I guess I understand civilization more – and perhaps people less. I have no idea what it's like to be a follower and therefore cannot sympathize nor understand their plight. Maybe civilization is their saving grace. What would these people do without it? without their uniforms and established roles? How would they know what to do, where to go, how to behave? And now, as the established structure begins to crumble, I guess we'll see...

to complicate

because perhaps my life is too easy and I get bored...

so why not make it more complicated, eh?

I wonder, just now as I type, am I unappreciative of all that I have?

...probably.

yet I must complicate this already sophistic state I find myself in – this skin!

Am I stricken with manic ennui? Who am I even asking? Why do I type thoughts into questions as if someone were there to answer? Mad skin and bones.

I am aloof, or I act aloof (because it is just acting, I suppose) – to this whole haul of civilization. I care not a thing for it. It's boring and played out. Really, I'm so over it. Like suits.... what the fuck? suits? And there exists a whole sub-culture of people who buy them and wear them and perhaps even believe in them and whatever they represent. An example: An unemployed friend of mine was recently lectured by a middle-aged woman (relative) about the absolute necessity of wearing a suit to an interview, declaring dogmatically with such fervent conviction that no one gets a job in New York without a suit.

I got a job in New York without wearing a suit. Fuck the suit. Who really cares anyway except for people who wear suits.... fucking suits....

Another thing I must rant about: shopping. Gawd! shopping! Can we just stop buying shit already? There is so much shit in the world right now and people still want more. I just don't get it. Or perhaps it's the shoppers who just don't get that they've been duped by madison avenue's scheming tactics of the advertising industry – hired by, you guessed it, mega corporations owned by the mega rich – to convince people they need to buy their crap that's made in 3rd world countries by impoverished peoples. Why? Why do people need watches and handbags – who ever came up with that shit? And that's just a slice of the whole damn big picture of civilization that I'm so so so ready to be over with.

Hair product.... people who style their hair with product: a sure sign they care about the materiality of this culture – the plasticity of this tyrannous absurdity that BILLIONS believe in!

Living in New York City I can always point out the more civilized with ease – they're just so much more put together in a way that really sets them apart. stylized. they look like well dressed mannequins. store bought styles with couture profiles. OR. almost a costume, as if they're going for some vintage look worn by mannequins decades prior. Really, both are costumes for people who are merely acting a part. Why do people care that much about their costume? Unless they care about the whole performance to which they are a part....

The thing that irks me is that this is all so king-and-queen medieval pagentry! Why do the wealthy rulers have to parade around in highly stylized costumes? So that people know they're the rulers? What if no one cared? Would they still dress up? And perhaps that's it – these people need other people to care about them, to envy their gowns and jewels, fancy cars and mega mansions. Otherwise, they're just like everone else.

Therefore, acting and costume become a way of separating oneself from others – to differentiate – to complicate – so as to draw attention to oneself. And because we are apes and thus behaviorally immitative, we are more likely to follow and immitate those who are different from the rest – or at least pay them our attention, listen to them as they proclaim themselves rulers and spout our decrees. Ooooh, well, they look important, they must know what's right – and what a marvelous gown!

It's primeval trickery! And people have been duped for centuries!

the sad, disgusting reality is that this is the operating system of society that has been used by civilization for thousands of years. If you want to get something done in the civilized world, you play by their game, use their language, wear a costume and act the part....

For a treat, I'm going to take a stroll down glittering Madison Ave and snap some photos of mannequins and window displays to share with readers of this blog! How delicious does that sound?