A violent rise of energy is just the ideal antagonist to being stuck. That creative itch that nags at you for a lifetime becomes a rash easily enough when you cannot satisfy it with an outlet. The fucking midwest is like a stretcher, fastening your limbs for protection while at the same time restraining you from saving yourself. Art, in the middle of the United States, consists of a framed picture of a barn in the wintertime. Art, is a sketch of fruit next to a bowl purchased at Marshall Fields in the fifties. Art is a mix of squares in a quilt pattern, which more importantly has a practical use in the winter.
Practical is not something many Art Schools teach. Practicality is almost the opposite of Art, if you were to simply the term to expressionism. Yet here, in the midwest, it’s practical that is celebrated, and not the opposite. That’s why the racist attitude towards Mexicans does not exist here. People have no problem with Mexicans taking lower-income jobs, that’s practical. They just don’t understand why Mexicans won’t learn english (impractical).
Practical is the reason mid-life crises exist. Head-down, full ahead speed at the most practical life is a great way to miss out on real experience. Straight through college, data-entry jobs, kids and a house, taxes, death. Not the ideal list of exciting life-choices. Yet the people of the midwest launch themselves towards these goals as if they were the bees knees…that phrase brought to you by the midwest. Then in the middle of their lives, it’s always the same “Oh Shit, what have I been doing?” It’s time to look back on their lives and wonder why they were so practical. Then they buy a car that makes their dicks feel bigger…
Practicality breaks the spirit and promotes the bored. It puts helmets on our football players. It puts the rubber in sex. It’s the reason we haven’t got jet-packs.
Jet packs. I’ll rest my case here.
So, Practicality, fuck it.
There’s two forms of young artists. There’s the young bastards who grew up surrounded by art. They’re unstoppable and brilliant wildfires of talent. They blossom early and sell out quick. They’re bored by the time they’re twenty five. They’re divorcing and suffering by the time they’re twenty six. They’ve written their best work at thirty three and they’re seeking the ghosts of success for the rest of their lives. Or they’re happily swimming in alcohol by then.
Then there’re my favorite kind, the wildfires surrounded by allegorical blue-collar firefighters. These artists grow up in a “work hard, head down” landscape, few of them able to grasp an opportunity to express themselves. Art is there for fun, for social reasons, but it’s nothing that anybody above twenty understands to be a career. Spending time working on art is literally like stealing money at gunpoint from these artists friends and family. However, if able to break through the long suffering years of sarcastic comments and biting lectures, these are the ones that create the absolute best works of art.
Man, but the media’s just gone crazy with how bad alcohol is nowadays. And the baby-boom-tubers have come to believe everything they hear. Have a drink before seven o’clock or after seven’fifteen, you’re a fucking alcoholic. You’d better get your ass to meetings, you’re going to destroy the lives of your family and friends and ruin your own.
If you didn’t know a thing about Ernest Hemingway, you probably still picture him in your head with a mojito in hand. Or Fitzgeralds other love affair with gin. Writers and artists used to drink like whales. Nobody ever said anything. Point is, the beating and brainwashing of a value system that seeks to destroy self-expression can only be vanquished by liquor. Sure there’s health problems to come, but at the expense of a flurry of brilliant words on the page, I have to say fuck it. Let a guy have a drink. Let the girl fall all over.
Let the socially awkward bastards break out of their shells, drink, fuck, fall-down and write all about it on the way up. Alcoholism or art? Fuck it, art.
A couple weeks ago, A-List of celebrities went down to Comic-Con and raised the popularity of “nerdom”. The news stations covering the debacle cited popular movies and television shows such as “Big Bang Theory” or the recent “Transformers” and “Terminator” movies and the upcoming “Green Lantern” as reasons why “nerdom” was becoming such a big element in the entertainment industry. Yet when watching these A-Listers at the Comic-Con or reading their interviews, I got the succinct impression they were all brown-nosing the fans who paid to get in.
High profile stars taking command of comic book heroes means fuck all to the geeks or nerds who spend thousands of dollars to goto Comic-Con each year. In fact, the highest profile of star the average Comic-Con attendee wants to see is Dolph Lungren or Kevin Sorba. Mainly these greased ball, pale, socially awkward nerds care more about meeting the creators of their favorite stories than the idiots starring in them on the big screen. Stan Lee and Frank Miller have faces born for radio, but millions of collectors have their autographs on things as stupid as cereal boxes.
It was the equivilant of a group of high school jocks deciding the school’s “Magic the Gathering” club was the new “hip” place to hang out.
But I guess the thing that really pissed me off the most about the whole thing, is how horrible the zelous marketing creatives and money-grubbing producers have made the big-studio versions of comics. Did anybody see X-Men Origins: Wolverine? It fucking sucked balls. Or Daredevil? Or the recent “Terminator Salvation”, which was the “Jar Jar Binks” of movies. Maybe if the industry knew what made a great comic, or why the nerds migrated to Comic-Con each year, I would respect them wanting to butt in. But they haven’t gotten it right since the first Spider Man.
So, as for buying into the new popularity of Comic Con, Fuck it.
For once in the history of mass media and the 24 hour news cycle, everyone’s got their fucking tongues tied. Not many disasters have occurred like the oil spill. Everyone knows who’s to blame, there’s nothing the intellectual scum-bags on the hill can say to fix it, and there’s absolutely no way for them to prevent future spills. World runs on oil. There’s only an estimated amount left to last the human race till 2040, and not many of the cretins running things right now will be alive by then.
The therapeutic solution to the problem? Two schools of thought seem to be reigning supreme right now on that issue; the ostriches and the headless chickens. Half the world is digging their heads into the sand and pretending that there are no repercussions to the problems they are causing daily. They want to believe that things will gradually even out to the way they were in the past. The oil will magically regenerate on its own before we run out. The gulf spill will fix itself after a while. The price of gas and food shooting through the roof mixed with an already shoddy economy will not bring us to the brink of anarchy. Meanwhile, bigger problems are on their plate. They need to know if Lindsey Lohan will go to jail or not. And who directed that new Kate Perry video.
On the other hand, there are the headless chickens running around. They’re aimlessly pointing fingers at everyone. They’re calling for the end of all oil drilling, all nuclear dependancy, all mining and logging operations. They’re no better than that dude on the sidewalk with the “apocalypse is now” signs. They have no idea what repercussions the end of such ventures would have on the world, the balancing act our world leaders and big capitalists actually play keeping everything running efficiently. How would fruit get to the Midwest without oil? What would happen to the ivy league schools without electricity? Every headless chicken out there refuses to hear stories about the daily riots in Greece. They’re the test run for when everything goes to shit. Better save up for that gas mask.
And of course, both sides curse the other for being the evil harbingers of death and destruction. That’s nothing new. Thanks to mass media, we have been led to believe that emotions must play into the sides we choose. News is boring. But opinion on that news is entertainment. And emotional persuasiveness is the quick and dirty hook they use to reel us in day after day. Vice President Biden reminded me the other day on the Tonight Show, something the fathers of the constitution truly believed (except for Aaron Burr), “No matter what side people are on, they’re trying, they truly believe, they are working to make a better (America)” I’m sorta paraphrasing, I think that’s close anyways. At least that’s promising. Maybe there’s a secret group of birds formulating a plan for the future. I hope they’re not geese, I hate geese.
So Fuck It — to the headless chickens and ostriches.
Life is centric. Experience plays a large hand in that. You can project yourself into someone else’s moccasins as much as you want, but the truth of the matter, is nobody will ever understand anyone else. There’s an interior in each of us that we constantly attempt to share. That’s why many conversations start with the weather. If two people can agree on that similar experience, in twenty five more ideas, they could be soul mates.
But the great depths of experience hollow out our similarities as life goes on. That is, as one progresses onward in life, his unique experiences increase and the chances of similar or shared experiences with another decrease. For instance, whereas many people who grow up and live in the same town all their lives tend to relate and befriend others that do the same, a person from that town who moved away and has traveled all their lives would not relate to such experiences. Same thing happens to friends after college, too much shifting happens and suddenly only very small amounts of shared experience are all you can relate to each other.
I know that’s fucking obvious, but here goes what I’m getting at:
Now,
With the internet, a whole other realm of experiences lies at one’s finger tips. The internet builds a entire alternate set of unique experiences separate from physical reality. Something as simple as the understanding of emoticons can alienate you from your identical twin. Kids talk about websites like they were pages from a novel, articles in a magazine. They breath information people just didn’t have in the past. The internet has taken those twenty five sentences to “soul mate status” and turned it into two hundred fifty thousand and seventy five steps.
My friend Adam’s parents liked the same two bands when they met. They liked The Mommas and the Papas and Jim Croce. These two bands covered enough common ground in their relationship that they were able to comprehend each other on a deeper level. They’ve been together for 30 years or so now. All from two bands.
Anyone fucking reading this that has only listened to two bands in the last two hours?
We’re the casual sex culture, we’re the lost communicators. Those few people that can dig in with another individual are burying their heads in the sand and turning away from the world. There’s a band on the North Eastern shore of Ireland that I fucking love. Never seen them. Have you heard them? Do you understand why I love them? Can you draw from the millions of other musical experiences that i can? Then I can’t connect with you.
But even if nobody else sees the throw away culture and lifestyle a waste of time, I stand proudly and say Fuck It! What a mess almost everyone I know is. Everyone distant from each other pissed off at the less-than-instantaneous communication texting or instant messaging provides. Everyone leaving a voicemail. Everyone sending an email and holding on. Everyone skimming through pictures of other young singles on websites trying to read “life experiences” in a list and find someone with enough “almost similarities”.
A few of my past relationships have been killed by long distance. Fuck it. If I had really wanted them, I would have gone and been with them.
Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. Goddamnit open your fucking eyes to the world. Grab a friend by the hand, turn your phones off and walk through the park. I guarantee the world will end instantly! And no, I’m not technophobic, I love it, I’m a big fucking fan of technology, but as far as building a relationship with others, finding a real friend, being lonely online and playing farmville or some shit on Facebook, why not just reach out to those friends. See them in person. Put the screens on power-save and go have a catch.
So, I guess…
Casual sex culture? Fuck it. I want some meaning in my fucking life.
Sometimes I feel like my head is split in two. My crazy workaholic side likes to live in the office taking care of business pushing paper and shoveling shit. On the flip side, my destructively chaotic artistic self spends it’s time shooting off into light-space-time-clouds-dreams you name the cliche all the while plotting to put an Excalibur sized blade through the heart of the asshole who’s still delivering on someone else’s terrible tacky project. In the meantime, keeping the peace I guess, my conscious self becomes a shell of a personality while trying not to let the heated inner turmoil rise to the surface.
Work for what you want. Makes sense.
Go where the money is. Got it.
Stay in it to win it. …ok.
True talent rises to the surface. Sounds promising.
Now’s the time for sacrifice. Wait…what?
Sacrifice is what you do when you’re losing, remember? When you’re down a goal, you pull the goalie because you’ve got nothing left to lose. When you’re in a hell-hole on the battle field, one guy stays behind so the rest can retreat and get away. If there’s seven people in a life raft in the middle of nowhere with nothing to eat. That’s when you sacrifice. Not after you’ve completed umpteen years of school and are at the peak of your abilities. That’s not when you put aside your dream and hold-up the mediocre talentless fucks who haven’t and won’t ever figure it out.
Sacrifice is an enabling evil word. It sounds valiant and heroic. “Oh, I’m going to sacrifice my energy and spirit for the betterment of the whole.” Shit, dude, fuck, man, you’re getting played!
Day in day out, life doesn’t stop. Time doesn’t slow down. You’re either stuck, spinning or rolling. Mostly, the day we live in has produced a lot of stuck people. In twenty years you won’t see any films made about 2010 in which a graduate gets out of college and gets a nice cushy job at the most influential newspaper in the world. That shit just doesn’t happen anymore. There aren’t even any jobs at inner-city schools. No, we live in a society of stuck.
Or they trick you into spinning. Technology is changing everything, but business stays the same, that is, business stays ruthless. Bright eyed and bushy tailed wizards of the new age emerge from the tunnel of institutional education to find an “opportunity” with the trolls and ogres of the dark ages of corporate wars. What goes up, must come down. These cynical boomers can’t use their blackberries, but they’ll whisper sweet nothings in your ear until you’re the only wheel moving the train forward with no leverage to become an engine.
Who’s rolling, is anyone rolling? Or are we all spinning in sacrifice? Will the fresh, eager, spark of excitement over the endless possibility of life fade away before an adequate amount of sacrifice has been made?
Sacrifice? Fuck it!
Fuck you happy people. Or so it seems. Is anyone really happy day in day out? I used to think that was the case. Then I grew up and learned that adults are all messed up and always miserable. They just hide that stuff from the children. Man, head trip.
What drives me everyday to make myself into something? What takes the bag of bones out of bed every morning and breathes motivation into it? The hope that my life, my actions, my goofiness can invigorate some kind of amusement in others. I’m not too cool, I’m not all about the dough, I’m not a happy go lucky yokel. No, fuck it, I’m going to be fucking weird and make some people I know happy. Make everyone amused, slightly. That’s the new age. That’s what a baby or puppy video is all about. Are they grandiose truths etched together over ten years by a brilliant but troubled soul? Fuck that. They are bursts of pleasure. They tip the day’s scale of happy/sad.
What truths do I need to find? Fuck truth. It’s out there. Let someone else go boldly looking for it. If I ever come across truth, may it be random, may I be hammered and stumbling and may I mistake it for a yard sale. The truth is, I could use a good paperback.
What the bloodsuckers don’t realize is how often it’s only about helping yourself, and if I’m going to help myself, I’m going to help others. Not help society. Not help a company. Not feed some homeless people. I mean people that I care about. It’s about reach. Who’s out there you can make feel special? Stop looking in the mirror. Digging a pit of self pity and centric spacial relations is that path paved by the media mongrels who want you to buy things. That’s why if your ass is sagging, you have to buy shape-ups. They will literally help you “shape-up” your life. It’s a fucking metaphor, don’t you get it? Almost everything marketed is meant to allow the consumer to feel special, self-conscious and self-centered so that they’ll buy it. So, ok, the bloodsuckers get it, but they don’t have it right. Don’t listen to the bloodsuckers. Fuck vampires.
Pride? Fuck it. Sacrifice it. It’s the key to happiness.
So this is what it’s like to dislike religion. To sit back and wonder how people can just listen. Just listen and listen. Never question. Yes yes yes. What’s wrong with religion is it’s absolutes. You absolutely must never be unfaithful to you spouse. Never. Live with an endless abusive struggle of depression and alcoholism or neglect until death do you part. Not to condone cheating, but in an absolute sort of way, religion condones abuse and neglect.
What do they call what I am again, humanist? Think for yourself. How many saves would that have on our society if everyone were meant to follow that scripture? Do I really care if Joe and Ed are raising kids next door? Do they do murder? Do they touch the kids? No. They’re normal guys, maybe “plumbers” if you want to get Republican cliche about it. Or do I really see any evidence that recycling saves the planet, or does it all still end up in the same dump at the end of Butterfield Rd.? What do you call this again, existentialism? Maybe. I’m just trying to say, if it makes sense to you, do it. If it makes sense within society’s guidelines and you’re happy, what’s so wrong with it?
Mostly, society’s guidelines are built to protect the human nature from it’s primitive instincts. Don’t kill, don’t be evil, don’t forget to pay your taxes…
It’s the obsession with the trillions of rules set in stone by religions around the world that causes such grandiose world conflict as well as the enormous inner-crises that cause self-destructive madness in otherwise normal workers around the world. . They’re basically messing with every level of human existence. They called the “Age of Religious Dominance” the “Dark Ages” for a reason.
There’s something to the teachings of religion. There’s something to the Ten Commandments that was important enough for us to pass it along generation to generation. But lately, there’s a whole lot of folks reading the ol’ Bible a lot closer than it was meant to be. Ever heard of metaphor you fucking idiots? Holy scripture or not, it’s a book, written by some guys way back when, maybe they were antisocial pricks, the whole thing was a joke and human history after the Old Testament has been one big joke. Or maybe they made just a couple of mistakes in one of the most important and greatest books ever written. To error is human…to listen to everything you’re told and walk and talk like a robot, well, that’s not human, it’s being a fucking robot.
What’s the land of opportunity mean anymore? A land of bitchy whiny assholes who’ve never had a real hard time. Think your life sucks? Think it’s a tragedy you have to drive an hour to that Steak and Shake? Think it’s a crime you can’t buy an iPad every month?
Not to reiterate a depressing line of reasoning done injustice by yuppie know-it-alls who don’t eat meat, but America doesn’t have it bad. Try living in a hut. Try eating leaves cause you’re so hungry there’re sores covering your body. Fuck your shitty emotions, you haven’t seen it bad.
Land of opportunity. Opportune to blame everyone else for your lack of triumph. Opportune for sending anger to those who try and help. Opportune for the lack-wits who want a grandiose engagement because they turned 16. Opportune to be over-privileged and self-indulgent.
What if I did say “think of the kids”? What if I did mention the rockets hitting suburbs in Afghanistan or Israel. Think they don’t like Lady Gaga? Not into Harry Potter? Snap out of it. How would you live if your life was threatened everyday? Would you read a fucking book? Would you watch some fucking crazy bitch dance around with angel wings? Or would you spend every minute trying to love the ones around you? How often we go without expressing love to our family nowadays because.
Because they forgot to grab extra soy sauce. Because they pissed you off. That’s the life we embrace. Encourage triviality. Lack of perpetual danger brings about perpetual boredom. Circumstances must be dwelled upon. Momentary lacks of judgment can ruin your life, not bullets. Not scalping. Not dishonor. Not idealism.
Idealism and honor are forgotten buzz words. Embrace synergy, fuck politeness. Embrace the dope, fuck the genuine. Honest efforts are laughed at, because what’s important is no longer what you’ve gained respect for, but what you’re known for as a sensation. Let’s all laugh at the men and women who’ve worked their entire lives, to the bone. Let’s all let’em know they should have just posted their dog on youtube and made 1000 a month on click-throughs. Let’s give any WW2 vets heart-attacks while we dress up as Nazis and have sex. Let’s mock care.
We can’t care. There’s nothing to force us. The opportunity is so abundant in this land, we can’t see it anymore. The majority of us will continue to tube-feed the things we’re told will make us happy. The majority will take opportunity as a hand-out, while the ones who dream of ever having one dry up and fade away.
Land of opportunity? Fuck it.
When you close your eyes, where do you go? Beneath the layers of dust, dirt, grit, skin, muscle, bone and blood you exist on another level, another place. Internal. External. Mind. Body. Where do you place importance? How do you find a balance?
Can you swim fifty laps? Do you have four degrees? Can you fuck anything that moves? Have you reached an inner tranquility?
Or can’t? Haven’t? Wont?
Does Fear eat at you?
How far along did you get in the funnel before it ended and your life spilled in a hundred pieces? We are pushed, prodded and directed for eighteen years. If we enjoy it, we’re given another four, or eight, or longer. But then, that crucial internal compass may have always pointed North while your external being went South.
Not their problem.
When you spill out of the tunnel of suggested societal idiocicracies heralded daily by Oprah and the six o’clock local news, it’s assumed the pressure put on you to carry that momentum of will keep you in line. On your chosen path.
How often I see that is not the case. Friends living on borrowed wants and goals. Fake struggles for the next wrung of a ladder they’re unable to identify beginning to climb themselves. It’s an uncontrollable slide, not a race for the finish line. No wonder so many fall off in the middle of their life.
One more satellite package, one more horsepower, one last golden plated button on your new jeans.
Obsession over people who were not funneled. A newer tragedy, though taking the place of the catastrophic boredom of previous centuries. The intense need to wear the same socks as your favorite movie actor. Repetitious turrets of witty cartoon dialogue in every social situation. Were our ancestors such programmed and equation balancing individuals? Did they seek out the etchings of Thomas Jefferson’s sex-documents? Were they impressed by John Philip Sousa’s racist interviews?
The clusterfuck is worse when the funnel is clogged. Graduates on their happy way to a mundane life now find themselves spilling through a crack made by some other group of lost souls called the Baby Boomers. Pressure to continue, but nowhere to go. Mistaken for lost individuals who have always been cast aside for finding their direction was all wrong all along. The only difference between the basements ends up being how hard upstream they have to fight.
The American Dream always rearing it’s chiseled hard and sexy unattainable form in a dance beyond your fingertips. It flaunts the capitalist shroud of get rich quick or sing it to stardom while behind you an American Nightmare of cancer, flu’s, gays and terrorism, on a twenty four hour news cycle, pecks away the soft comfort of a failed life. Anything can kill you now, everything is bad for you, but if you die or get cancer, you’ll get your five minutes of fame. Just tweet it.
So tell me, when you close your eyes, where do you go? How high in the sky, how deep in the snow? Is there a different person there? Do you see him slowly fading to a subconscious rage as his needs are unfulfilled? In this closely woven world of technology there’s little time to analyze how hard you’re sprinting towards the wrong end. There’s no room to think in between youtube and the television. There’s no room to argue with the color of the money you make. There’s nothing but alcohol for the boredom of a failed funnel. There’s no price but boredom for a successful one. And if you find yourself able to stop on the slide, shoving your feet into the cracks and holding up the pressure of a world shoving you down, you may be able to see through it all and realize the madness of the whole system. There’s no way to escape, but to accept your fate.
