Memo From the Crazy Desk

So here we are at the edge of the New Century, taking those first tepid steps into What May Come. The world is aboil with fright, sweat, nuclear dreams, and the harvesting of human lives. Competing Gods jeer at each other, waving flags, holy books, and middle fingers, passing gas. Their respective constituents poke each other with sticks and dicks, and the one with the Big Tanks and bombs runs amok in the Middle East. Never an uglier scene. Crowds of despicable testosterone junkies howling: Dear Good God Goody Two Shoes, cleanse us of the unclean!!

And so the stage is set for what? What comes? Who lurks? What will avail us here in the New Century, the curdling black dawn of the New World Order? Iron-fisted bigots and hypocrites rule the day, snuffing out hippies and dear hearts with dreams of more violence. My mind exploded, infrared, caught in the night fire neither here nor there. Who dreams this bullshit? The Goddess is ugly and vengeful. Terrible indeed!! Kali sits with shrunken tits and a garland of skulls, sulking in a feast of human heads and blood. She gnaws on my heart, beating this refrain: Bullshit!! Bullshit!!

Ah, I am a lucky goddamn ugly duckling evolving. America? Drowned in its own failings, preyed on by corrupt heads of corporations and private nations. Look at those houses!! Holy Jesus in Hell!!! How can a family live like that, a man or woman, knowing the krazy-glued power structure has fallen far beyond disrepair, how to blow through your days with a whistle and a keen eye for good deals? Here, have a token, free parking, get out of jail free. A pat on the back. All is well, all is well.

Okay, that's all fine and good, but what to do? I mean, in the meantime, babies are still being cooked alive so I can drive from here to get groceries. Guilt at some point must become meaningless. And then what, the selling out? The paralytic shock of becoming just another cog consumer, driving blindly from this movie scene to the next? Haha! I love this show! Bought the soundtrack. Ooooh, I saw that band play before they were cool. Fuck all that. What to do??

Here's an idea: let's start a magazine, a press kit, some pirate radio stations. Yes indeedy!! Viva la Revolucion!! We will broadcast these crooked snapshots of our quintessentially American lives and nightmares into the belly of the Beast!! Haha! We have the technology. Easily enough done. The shape of the world is malleable, under our noses, fingers, and open minds and hearts. Yet no more hurt, always acting in the best interest of all and even those we cannot see, do not know, or don't agree with. Solidarity. Life. Who's with us?

Wake Up, They Are Beating You

or Symptoms of Cutural Insanity

Quietly now the spirit rises and this is the way books are written. Hunter S. Thompson has gone to the Big Score in the sky but there's more: a mantle of quietly Christed freedom-mongers boils on acid in the early hours of a new day. Hippies will rise again, angels and wackos cracked out on methamphetamines, drunk and swinging from lanterns with Kurt Kobain and Jack Kerouac. This is not an exclusively male club. Fuck no! Can't be. We need all the beautiful, mature women we can get. Friends all. Holy Christ, this sideshow of terror television has gone on for too long.

More loose lunacy and heresay: it's time to ressurect a Free Press. Hell no, I mean build the fucking thing from the ground up with lego sets and the burning pages of Tom Paine and Mark Twain. Good God! What's this recent fascination with American History and politics doing swimming around my body and soul? Who invited these assholes in here? I'm indigenous dammit--in spirit if not in blood. Fuck--that's it--my Scottish/European blood has come home to roost! My DNA is waking up and it's pure American Ugliness! Shit!

I don't know how many more of these weird surprises I can take. Is this what happens to me now when I'm alone? Hahahah--look. I used to write driveling poetry, who invited this raucous revolutionary in? Too many questions, not enough silence. Enough. Never enough.

we interrupt this whatever it is for the following mental deviation:
you must ride the gravy train into and over gold tombstones
STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER
or nevermore quoth the raven
up in "Heaven"
Elite fat men are
laughing

What is this planet doing? Isn't that the question of the hour? Not 'who can drink who under the table,' 'what's your poison,' or 'do you think the Seahawks are going to perform for us credibly?' That's some weird questions, man. All of them. Who asks these things?

What is this planet doing? Are we all a bunch of joiners hellbent on beating each other to pulps of nuclear fusion, fission, boil the planet up, you're done. Fuck off, listen. Go local. The grains stretch us homeward. Eat off the land, don't buy from corporations. Coffee? What to do about that--hard to grow in the United States.

Legalize everything. What's with this silly notion of illegal seeds and plants? What about illegal animals? It is illegal in many states to keep a ferret as a pet resident in your home. I'm sure they have a good reason--I heard ferrets like to gnaw on human jugulars--but seriously folks. Illegal animals? Since when? How do we stand with these chains all up in our space?

I've got a feeling though that detestable laws cannot contain the human spirit. Call me an anarchist, that's great--a noble trade. Good work if you can get it. And that's another thing--they tricked me about work--made me think work required punching a clock. Or was that my own stupidity to fall into such a controlling trap? Who knows? The architecture of control is still fully embedded in my brain stem. The release towards freedom is the gradual progression of a conscious human life.

Are you awake? Who makes your days? How many books have you read this year? This month? Do you watch TV? What shows, what material? Recognize that the potential of TV technology has been cut off, raped, stunted, made into an obscenity that keeps whole worlds of people stupid. They lose themselves in machinery and tape recorded moments. We all do. We're the walking dead. The sun is burning for a citizenry of fools, charlatans, nobodies, dumb eaters asleep at the wheel in the morning commute.

Our founding fathers, much-lauded, would be so ashamed. A bunch of losers, cowards, lumps on couches, money-changers, philistines, jerk-offs, that's us. U.S.A.! Hooray! Corruption nationalized--the greatest nation on Earth.

To own. This is the new verbiage of the American Character. To own and be owned, the farthest from the Freedom Riders, choking on sterility and lying in crisp laundered beds in sleepling white-halled houses, hallowed with militaristic Christs hung on doorjambs and over the kitchen sink while the corpse of Freedom has long since decomposed. The doors have shut, folks! The bitter ride to Hell has commenced--how do we turn this fucker around?

Wild and desperate characters stalk my imagination. These are the realms of the archetypal spirits. We living must become more possessed by our archetypes, more rooted in feeling, less in rationalization and language. Burn this book.

The classrooms and university halls are filled with scribbling children, drooling, the reprocessed philosophy of consume or be consumed constantly cracking against their electromagnetic spirits, splitting their heads. Terrible Fear! Must earn money $$$$!!! Hellish existence. Hear the fascists knocking at your door? They illegalized search warrants, don't need them anymore--indeed, you are a felon simply for thinking of it. You are a Nazi! You must be extradited, disappeared, extraordinarily rendered. Torched, tortured, brought in front of a jury of strangers to be sentenced to horrible, vague fates or a long wait for an imposed execution. Who dreams this silly fiasco? What happened to compassion? There used to be a heart somewhere, but they institutionalized and incorporated everything and drove three inch thick railroad spikes through the heart. Exploded, sullen, swollen, bled to death, the heart breaks.

We are desperately searching for the seed inside.

Thank You, Hunter S. Thompson

"Life is a gradual release from ignorance."
--Bob Braudis, in Memo from the Sheriff from Hunter S. Thompson's Kingdom of Fear

Hunter S. Thompson made a crackpot career of typing the spiritual rantings of a depraved American individualist high and tweaked-out on the confluence of an inordinate amount of drugs, social interactions, political struggles, and general fearlessness in the face of bullshit. He is an inspiration, as much as the softer, more yielding, pliable, grassy side of me hates to admit. From him as much as Inga Muscio, I feel more free to fuckin' fuck fuck swear the goddamn shitty day away in all my own personal asinine piss-ass rants. Self-effacement is another quality he had, in a weird sort of way. He never let his ego get too big, even as he never let fuckheads walk all over him. He struck an amazing balance between generosity and being full-on 24/7 aware that there are just a whole bunch of assholes out there who will run the fuck right over you and shit-grin to put you away for life.

"Paranoia is just another word for ignorance," or some other such line is found between the covers of Kingdom of Fear. I still don't understand this. Parnoia = Ignornace? I'm trying to do the equation here. I feel paranoid from time to time, but don't consider myself ignorant. And Thompson himself, tweaked out on mescaline and cocaine, twisting around over his shoulder with bulging eyes, seemed ever-vigilant in his defense against the accursed "Them." Paranoia? Ignorance? Two sides of the same rant?

Blah. That bald man blessed us with a human vision of freedom that far outstrips Walt Whitman and his dull Leaves of Grass. Me, me, me, is the credo of Walt Whitman and his super self (take this with a grain of salt please, I've never read much of Whitman--don't much like what I have read--so I don't know what the hell I am typing about). Thompson burned all his credos through his blasted bat-out-of-hell truck drivin' style of writin'. He was all chain smoking until the end, which came for him after he put down a phone on the other end of which metaphorically dangled his young wife Anita. "Hold on a minute," he had said, or something to that effect. Before that, he had been telling her that someone was going to kill him. "I know how these bastards think," he had said.

The political climate was post-9/11 dumbed down U-S-A! PATRIOT ACT(iv?)ism, and Thompson had been talking about the collapse of the World Trade Centers and how the official story was hogwash bullshit, as most official stories are (another thing Thomspon said), and he knew that this made him unpopular with a whole faction of war-mongering fascist bastards. Not one to keep quiet, Hunter kept on, holed up in his compound for sure, but free, free in a way that the majority of so-called Americans in the 21st century don't even stop to think about. On the way to their "jobs" with their "insurance" and doing 40-80 hours worth of "work" (or is it "time"?) a week to either make ends meet (I feel most sorry for these people--not leastwise 'cuz I fear someday not too far from this little slice of heaven I'm soaking it up in I may have to join their enslaved ranks) OR--and these are the fuckers that are truly detestable, pathetic, and dumb--'cuz that's just how it is, folks, and we gotta all get ahead, work hard, and buy, buy, buy our way to the top. Just the way the world works. Fuck those people. If life is a gradual release form ignorance, people like that are dead getting deader.

Stop paying into the machine that rapes and enslaves us all! Wake the fuckity fuck fuck up to the birthright of genius inside of you that guides us all. Quit tapping on Big Brother for guidance. That asshole has led us all into a blind alley and now wants to eat our brains with a plastic spoon, then throw the spoon in the plastic garbage can. Little employed garbage men will come to take the spoon and a whole bunch of other shit away to a landfill, and they'll reprocess our bodies to make a new genetically-modified strain of reduced fat, low sodium Nabisco crackers, which will be sold at a 500% profit. How does it feel to be part of an economic system of exploitation?

Anarchy and the Social Organism

The anarchist's dream is one of absolute freedom and solidarity. No coercion is necessary when humans work together for mutual benefits. Luxury is not an option, yet the loss of luxury is no loss, because when humanity works together in spirit, every movement becomes sacred and every created object becomes a work of art which exceeds luxury.

With no controlling state, nation, or corporate entity, individuals are free to express their unique purpose. Nature or the Cosmos works through each one of us and is alive in us. We are the sensory organs, intellectual faculties, and creative genius of the universe made manifest in human form. Trusting the divine guidance that shines in each heart, governments not only become obsolete, they are seen as profane.

Beauty is a profound compass. When a woman or a man taps into purpose, she becomes beauty personified. To walk one's own unique path is to walk in beauty. Each of us embodies a process of becoming. Impositions from outside only stifle. The true education is to be found by following every curiousity, by taking a multitude of divergent paths and allowing them to wind us in the spirals of our golden means.

Anarchy is a natural, non-violent process of becoming, not only for the individiual, but for the social organism. Wholly organic, this process occurs simultaneously, in fractals. As one individual opens and begins to walk in beauty, so the social organism makes another step in its progressive awakening. When enough individual cells of this social organism begin communicating, new levels of consciousness and self-reflection are achieved by the organism as an organic whole.

Anarchy, then, is in no way selfish, even as it champions individual initiative and personal growth. Anarchy is in no way ambitious. The natural inclination of the individual is encouraged and cultivated as people recognize that the natural inclination of each individual is part of the natural inclination of the social organism. Realizing that she is the social organism, being part of it, the anarchist naturally synchronizes her individual initiatives with those of her greater Self.

The Miseducation of America

"Demandingly obvious is our insistent need to develop a new curriculum based up on the inescapable fact that the survival of humankind is threatened as never before, and that we must discover how to create practical ways of living humanely together as one family of people in a culturally pluralist world existing precariously on this little Spaceship Earth.

Meanwhile we may expect that during the coming decades millions of America's college, high school, and middle school youth will become alienated from traditional values and patterns of American life. Perhaps they should be alienated from our society's obsession with material things, economic growth, status symbols, power and money, and cults of violence, racism and nationalism. They might then become attuned to newer value systems and life styles essential for the new age: the socially moral requirements of universal human empathy, limitations upon human growth, sweeping transformation of present modes of production and distribution of goods and services, drastic reduction in population, development of world political authority, and the like."

From Life-Centering Education by Edward G. Olsen and Phillip A. Clark, published in 1977

The 'world political authority' recommendation doesn't sit well, but otherwise these guys had it right-on thirty years ago. What happened? Clearly this kind of educational reform was never taken seriously, except perhaps in fringe Montersorri or Waldorf-like private schools. The public education system in America has betrayed the youth and become a limb of Capitalism. It's a system that grinds children through years of schooling to produce stay-inside-the-lines (and the box) worker ants in a huge colony of speculative economics. Instead of educating youth to think critically, this system drives into kids a work ethic and a belief in rewards systems, ranking, competition, and hierarchy. The lure of capital gains, the stale dream of suburbia, and the never-ending pursuit of acquiring more collections of crap commodities are the backbone of this monster.

Seriously folks, let's think imaginatively about some alternatives.

Cynthia McKinney's Declaration of Independence

In front of the Pentagon on March 17, 2007, Cynthia McKinney addressed a crowd of peace activists and delivered the following declaration of independence:

"As an American of conscience, I hereby declare my independence from every bomb dropped, every threat leveled, every civil liberties rollback, every child killed, every veteran maimed, every man tortured.

And I sadly declare my independence from the leaders who let it happen."

Read the rest of her speech here.

What is This War?

Inside each one of us "this war" rages. The symptoms of war, genocide, greed, and exploitation we see reflected and refracted in our shared external world are the manifestations of our combined, collective ignorance.

Realizing this, we come into our own power. Dispel the illusions of separateness, fear, greed, hatred, selfishness, and attachment within our own vessels of body-mind-spirit and we cast brilliant ripples of awareness into the externalized world. These are shockwaves of positive consciousness. They bowl over and overwhelm the ingrained circuitry of delusion, fear, and self-censorship that inhibit the expression of other souls into this world of changes. In this way, intimate and dynamic connections are made. Not only do we set each other free, but we do it repeatedly, in progressive positive feedback loops. What's more is we do this collectively, not for ourselves, but for the good of the greater world. Not for our own wills, but for the will of the world soul, the divine will of goodness and beauty.

Peace comes to those who are actively engaged in struggles against negativity. As of this writing, I sense a vast rainbow spectrum of intelligence and compassion beginning to burgeon and bloom from its cracking cocoon. The time of war, separation, and willful ignorances is coming to an end. We will wake and wake and wake again in a progressive series of dawns in which we paint Divine Love onto our skins and onto the varying skies and scenes of our shared world. From our individual, connected hearts, we unravel the skeins of our visionary beauty. With these we shape amazing art objects, buildings, and beings, imbuing our creations with our own spiritual ecstasy, with the energetic essences pulled from the ever-deepening veins of the ever-becoming entities which we are!

And at the end of the day, we love more proudly and with greater strength, celebrating in song, drink, in dance and good cheer, in whatever way we hold dear, we celebrate our love with those we love, inhabiting the homes we have made. When we fall asleep at night, then, we dream untroubled and significant cinemas of creation. When we wake, we carry these symbols of imagination and spirit with us, remain touched by the beings who revealed themselves to us, and continue the good work in which we dispel the urge to fight, building instead the endless colorful steps of coopeartive creation.

Om Shanti. Peace, Peace, Peace.