SOLITARY REFINEMENT

It was just a way to kill time ‘til the next thing whisked her off on missions she felt honor bound to perform for others or dreamed up for herself. So why does she find herself in front of her computer playing the latest version of an eleven hundred year old game of solitaire whenever she can think of nothing better to do?

When she’d played “Klondike” with the thin meat space symbols for the sorting game, she’d gotten bored quite easily, but this cyberspace version was different for several obvious reasons and a couple she felt she was detecting behind a curtain growing thinner for every hand she let it deal her. She couldn’t tell whether she was penetrating a hidden agenda or following bread crumbs in an occult initiation.

She couldn’t cheat on the computer like with the deck in meat space, but then she couldn’t re-deal hands to learn from amended mistakes or investigate alternative choices during play like the computer could. This was the edge of the curtain that made her realize that whoever programmed it to be able to reproduce the last hand could also have it produce any hand it wanted … for whatever reason. She began to notice that the successive hands seemed to fluctuate in patterns more than a random generator doing the shuffling would allow.

A dead give away was the fact that, although she’d played far fewer games with real cards, she was sure she’d never run the deck twice in a row more than once or twice before but on the computer it happened with regularity. The internet postings of weekly and all-time highs appearing at the end of every game she won (by getting over fifty-two points in a game awarding nine points for cards on Aces) indicated that some players had run through as many as twenty-five successive hands successfully! Over five years of playing an average of seventy games a day, she managed to run as many as five decks successively, with twos and threes occurring with increasing frequency.

Not only did she suspect a discoverable key to increasing her correct choices at seemingly equal forks in the road, she began to suspect that, being hooked up to the internet, her play could be under surveillance and thwarted or rewarded by the design of the program or the whim of the programmer. She recognized the resemblance to her suspicion of Vatican, North Pole and Washington agendas with their angels, Santa’s helpers and illegal wire taps to protect the faith in the pope, rewards for good behavior and the NSA.

The game had always served as a sort of roundhouse where trains of thought took new tangents in the dearth of purpose to be taken up in meat space. The cards themselves often took on character roles in scenarios written by the fancy of her mood. Noticing this business of characterization and dramatization of perfectly neutral objects became a valuable metaphor for the human tendency to bury awareness of present as it is under the baggage of the past purposes for intention inventions. Was this the lesson intended or was she inventing her own?

Out of the corner of her mind’s eye she glimpsed it. Having lost sight of such phenomena before by turning to fully focus on it, she left it on the fringe with the million other ideas in the wings awaiting the correct timing for their appearance to be fully appreciated. Not being zapped to the back of the line made it feel wanted and it reentered the stage right where she’d seen it. Yes — yes it was the same layout requiring the same moves — with all the cards in different places. A sense of déjà vu overwhelmed her and she felt she had recognized the same maze despite the variety of plants and flowers that formed the hedges between the paths — or deeper yet, learned the same lesson being taught despite the variety of mazes leading her to it.

… all out of bubblegum

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass … and I'm all out of bubblegum!"

Just followed Crooks and Liars' video of the 100 cheeziest movie lines on their open thread to John Carpenter's They Live and was slammed in the face with a mirror. Made, ostensibly in reaction to Reganomics trickle-down economics amidst the disco era of '86, I think I missed it protecting one prejudice or another. This morning I watched it and realized that if I had seen it, this blog would be named the title of this post rather than more subtle cheezy line, "…it must be the vapors," from Vivien Leigh in Street Car Named Desire.

In typical, in your face moviemaking, Carpenter pierced the mythos of western civilization by creating an alien race of the shepherds of the sheeple against whom I attempt to refrain from railing quite so directly. With just those pair of glasses, our hero sees the subliminal messages behind the media in helvetica extra bold; obey, buy, work, like generic packaging, and the aliens appear to be skeletons. That may be why I didn't catch it the first time.

IN PRAISE OF "AVATAR"

While the status quotients take pot shots from specialized perches, an entire generation of still absorbent intellects “get” the big picture being painted in glorious praise of symbiosis with that without which we cannot live. In making his latest, greatest attempt to effect the paradigm of man’s meaning in the scheme of things, John Cameron has synthesized so many disparate fields into this movie, Avatar, that it represents the epitome of the term gestalt: the total that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Like the beautifully depicted symbiosis of the Na'vi with the other beings native to Pandora by the twining of opened nerve endings in a gesture of surrendering individuality for the benefit of both, the fields of technical expertise brought together for this production and the very real problems caused by civilization’s attitude toward the body from which it arises encompassed by the story is an entwining resulting in the benefit of all.

The grumblers remind me of the railroad fireman’s lament, diesel putting their stoking shovel out of work, as each of their fields are being drug kicking and screaming into the next generation. Another reenactment of Robert Persig’s Metaphysics of Quality explaining the mechanistic ratcheting effect civilization’s artificial establishmentarianism puts on the otherwise natural evolution of man’s understanding of the living universe in which we are a dependent part.

My love for movies is of a piece with my love of all expressions intended to be of benefit. I am interested in expressions of what I perceive to be intended harm as an opportunity to examine my desire to protect the oxen I’ve made so sacred I fear their goring in the alternative light of as yet considered viewpoints. Movies are a way to put a subject on the table.

When asked his take on Avatar, an author whose book I praised for his insight into the ecstasy of symbiosis with nature replied, exemplifying the blindness of pride in his initialed authority, “I have no answer, because I do not watch movies of this ilk.”

I called him on it with, “Wow, Kultur, you really are a snob aren't you? Or do all of your ilk go around calling out others' ilk just to fit in? How do you maintain ecstasy so far removed from its source — the oneness of us all? “

Confirming his condescending hubris he answered, “BTW. Ilk means type, sort, kind. Sorry about your hypersensitivity.”

An acquaintance asked with whom I’d gone to the movie I mentioned just having seen. When I said I’d gone alone, he replied. “That’s the saddest thing I ever heard.” Hyperbole aside, was this guy implying friendlessness being the only reason for solitude? Or perhaps movies were, for him, just part and parcel of the more tedious dining, dancing, drinking ploy for which rohypnol is the latest keystroke shortcut means to an end? Who knows? In this day when dating means fucking and fucking means something being destroyed, who knows?

Well, I certainly got off on a tangent there, but it may emphasize how deeply I feel the movie, Avatar, can and may effect our possibilities of becoming symbiotic with the body upon which we now act like cancer cells. As all cures for rigid resistance to change in the aged, the natural regeneration of new know-nothing cells keep the possibilities for such a return perpetually open.

CLARITY THROUGH CINNAMON MIST

Click picture to enlarge

This post is the second thing to pop into my mind upon reading Jeff's theme for the next session for 10th Daughter of Memory, Clarity Through a Cinnamon Mist. Since he posted twice last time I said why not? This graphic is the background artwork I did for a band called the Esquires ten years ago, with the clarity that has come through the cinnamon mist of this meditator's mountain retreat over that period.

"Finally a yodood post I can understand!!"

I shall let Cinnamon’s comment quoted above be testimony that I have found the “clarity through a Cinnamon mist” after months of bumping into boulders of obscurity in comments like, “Oh dear friend, I am going to have to take a course in logical thinking to 'get' you! My brain is aching with the gymnastics required to understand your concepts….,” and “…not sure my little brain could cope with knowing that I know nothing,” and “Well I might get credit for commenting, but won't get credit for understanding, 'cause I got lost halfway through..”

On first reading of the theme I saw Clarity, though Cinnamon missed in regard to her missing deadlines for the last couple of sessions. Must be the Mummer cacophony. ;p

BY THE PEOPLE ……

Okay, another anarchist rant about no government able to be fair to all the people — ever! This one is inspired by the possibilities of the internet, with its horizontal conversation between citizens now open and free to most of the world, to be a constant, ongoing replacement of the ultimately corruptible system of representative democracy (resolution: 2 dots per no matter how large an area or group measured) by a searchable sage (resolution:7x10⁹ dots varying with population centers of civilizations and generally increasing over Earth’s surface) one may consult to estimate the probable consequences of one’s intentions prior to acting on them from within one’s immediate locality, and in ripples expanding to world wide concern.

The function of such a transparent, sensitive organism as this network could be modeled on the cellular intelligence of a living body whose information about the world is registered as a gestalt in the form of a full blown hologram of our environment. I suggest that the variety of reality tunnels these individual holograms represent could themselves be synthesized into a planetary gestalt to present to everyone the equivalent of a hologram image of any issue searched to be used, not as rules or definitions needing administered enforcement, but as a guide to personal concern for activity in the area of one’s interest.

The efforts at Photosynth to create a hologram of the entire physicality of earth from every photograph ever posted on the internet could do the same thing for the mental image humanity has of life on earth with the amount of interest determining size, relative agreement in perception the shape, and the relative benefit to the health of the planet the color. Crude, I know, but this is just the first rolling of the ball… anyone?

No more public relations propaganda from corporate politicians promising impossibilities and denying needs, no more population fodder for elite squabbles over resource commodification draped in “for their own good, god and country,” no more secrets. Everything ever posted and open to this sage search engine could be collated into as many categories as have been written about since the alphabet and said since the voice recorder and seen since the camera that could be compressed and expanded like time lapse or high speed photography allow us to see life where there was none and vulnerability in seeming permanent security. Choosing to go against the flow would have no excuse in ignorance. With such a wise insight, who would need to be led?

The western

hi-res version

of the

I Ching

which served

for centuries

at 64dpi.

EVER WONDER…

Did you ever wonder, when you find something unique in your experience, whether it is something unique in the universe or that you are just the most recent observer of something that practically everyone else has known forever and takes for granted so never mentions — intrepid explorer on the curious forefront of inquiry or the slowest wit on the planet? Here’s one of those pragmatic moments of western thought when inadvertently stumbling into a zen understanding.

The theory of universal Darwinism allows as how, despite the exactitude with which genes copy themselves, the endless variation of life forms we perceive is a result and proof of the effect of their earthly environment’s inability to kill the survivors before they could replicate their information. What appears as design to imaginers of some master designer/creator is the natural result of information (DNA) being copied most by those variations that work. What works best produces copies that are that much more able to survive the dangers of living that kill all less able copies. Changes in the environment are always new challenges to and determiners of increasing hereditary complexity.

There can be little doubt whether whatever natural event one observes is unique in its occurrence. Even if it was the same event, the uniqueness of the observers’ reality tunnels at the moment of observation make the chances two people have ever been conscious of the same experience something like ∞ X ∞.

In this way it also leaves little doubt that what is never mentioned is either so indescribable as to be unconsciously filtered out of one’s reality tunnel or, if noticed, so extraordinary as to evoke fear of appearing insane to a culture whose existence defines sanity … or comfortably, civilly pigeonholed into the language of the myth with the facile subconscious mental collator creating reasons to increase the complexity of the language to more precisely separate events into things for expert specialization — denying annoying contradictions rather than expanding the inclusiveness of the categories.

BABEL ON GARDENS OF HANGING VERBIAGE

Ever so often I am stopped in whatever tracks I’m following when I encounter yet another example of communication that makes me realize what a powerful organic intelligence the development of language proves the physical body to be. Language enables one to listen to stories being told around fires since grunts and pointing became not enough. Language is the major cultural development responsible for the extended life expectancy of humans through the improved ability to describe more exactly the location of predators from saber-toothed tigers to omnivoracious viri. Whether language spread from the first word enunciated to become all the dictionaries in the world or from a “hundred monkeys” blooming in diversely separate groups of people is an interesting speculation but not relevant to my inquiry in this post. I am thinking of the process of spreading from any one point and how that must have evolved.

That we can meet another who has never experienced the same culture in which we were born and have always lived, nor we in theirs, yet exchange profound, precise ideas about the natural world if we share the same language, is the most wonderful and damning of all cultural embellishments to human’s natural existence. Wonderful because we can describe in minute detail what we see, feel and think as a means of evoking recognition of a truth, about which the words flutter like butterflies about nectar, as a common experience of something vaster than separate cultures can ever nail down. Damning because when we describe in minute detail what we see, feel and think, the reality of the natural connection of all parties' experience becomes obliterated by an argument over whose symbolic butterfly’s close order drill skills can best the other.

THE KEEPERS

Long withdrawn from the daily activities his cloistered meditations led him to guide the masses to conduct, Jarwal, like the others remained within the shadow of his cowl in their presence. Only the rustling at the ends of his white beard indicated that it was he who spoke.

“When we tell them what they want to hear the truth is irrelevant.”

“When they don’t want to do what we tell them, they question our authority,” responded Mishmocan, his long nose a white dagger tip catching light falling across the void within the opening of his hood.

“Telling them that natural destruction of civilized artifices is God’s displeasure with their disobedience to our advice doesn’t work like it did in the old days. If there weren’t new suckers born every second being initiateded by their parents’ fear, we wouldn’t have inherited what little clout we still enjoy,” intoned the wisest, the oldest of them all. Diabolibré had been in the sirkul since before the ones everyone present had replaced upon their death had joined and none dare ask age, much less his history. It is the kind of awed faith authority requires. After all, hadn’t he trusted each one in private clandestine meetings with the Sacred Secret, with the caveat that each was the sole soul to share and should remain so secretly, on pain of a death worse than the loss of faith? I trust you to keep my secrets, you trust me to tell the truth. What a deal.

“Entrusting their distraction from beholding the big picture by the more immediate concerns of satisfying their cultivated preference for the virtual over the existent to the industriogovernmilimediatary complex has kept more people busier supplying our cruel accrual than any time in history,” observed Count Moore, treasurer of the cabal of cabals.

The normally taciturn Majoroproblemo could stand such quibbling no longer and blurted out, ”Indigenous people and philosophical scientists so atheistic they don’t argue with faith or worship money in the pursuit of wonder are outside our web of control. Poking larger and larger holes in it with the advent of the internet all the time, I might add.”

Jarwal interjected, “Most of those scientists still cling to the belief that humans are the stewards of life on earth, deserving of the sacrifice of other life forms to curious inquiry like so much trade goods, so we still have them where it matters, without their needing to feel justified by God’s permission”

From far back inside the blackness of the empty form of a robe draped over a man seated at the head of the sirkul came a voice speaking in words formed of the notes from a xylophone played in the particular resonant frequency of each of the cowled heirs of their legacy separately leading them each to believe they were hearing their own wisdom discovering, “I am the sole steward of the stewards and of the others gathered here tonight. ‘Tis my sacred secret duty to the one who chose me.”

The fact that the sly chuckle at the end of the thought seemed to come from elsewhere couldn’t be allowed to unsettle them. What works on the sheep works on those supposing themselves shepherds.

COLD Part II

Piddle Pond — Brittle pond

OUR GLASS

A
single
grain
breaks
loose of
the crowd
at a kissing
of the spheres
emptying past proof
of multicounted moments
fully filling futures always to come
in the present so often wasted waiting
killing time 'til the promised revolution
brings the "bottom to the top" solution
for the one's who think they're done
nothing left new under the sun
life's not in the glass
time's not in a jar
we're all in a body
vastly bigger than we are

OH

ohohohoh,

ititiit

is

so vast —

we see it all

words blow away

like leaves in the fall

mouldering in our memory

experience unexpressed feeds

seeds of metabolic metaphors

magnets align forgotten files

connecting all the labels

drawing all the tables

adding up to one

inexpressible

vastness

only

seennees

tootototo

beebebebebeb

beebebebebebeb

lived,devildevil

oh hohoho

THE ENSLEEPENING

They called her Pearliña, for her lustrous grey eyes. They had no idea of her mission in life. It had been theirs too. Both of her parents had a long forgotten memory of their own birth when she opened her eyes and looked out at them as if entering a familiar dream, a slight smile of recognition at the corners of her lips.

His first awareness was of looking back from his location in the cornea through the vitreous fluid at the panorama reflected in the rods and cones at the bottom of the pool. It grew dark just as he felt hugged by his immediate family when the lid closed and their world rubbed her eye.

The super nova was seen by the naked eye from five hundred light years away. Bright enough to irritate the predator into stopping his stalk long enough to gnash after it under the scales around his tentacle pit with his scissor-tooth lined tongue.

It wonders what it is with every fiber of its being. We fibers wonder, “what is this world we are in?” We rely on our bodies to give us answers by reporting their sensations. Sound familiar? We are the infinite questions posed by one with no one else to ask; the ultimate psychotic who might not exist at all without imagining us imagining it.

Pearlña loved to dive for pearls. It reminded her of a mission, forgotten when distracted by her toys. She never found a pearl but she learned a lot about life in the sea. She opened an art gallery of machine parts discovered. after the deep had its way with them. She did so well she even forgot she was diving for pearls.

SIR DAVID SINGS OF LIFE

ARE WE THE DROIDS WE'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR?

Ever since sitting in the hot sun outside the theater in the middle of the Highland Mall parking lot waiting to get into see the movie that coined the term blockbuster, I have been confused about whether I should let the farce be with me or go over to the dork side. Since we ate a lot of popcorn and I sat next to my buddy, Doug Cugini, his farts were with me although we’d gone over to the dark inside to see and be inspired for the theme to the Hole in the Wall’s Halloween party that year, Bar Wars. Even golf was never the same; when shooting par the fours was with us and when hitting a wild shot it was on the duck side.

I am still referred to as Yoda by a few who were around in those days. In fact, it wasn’t ‘til I reread that last sentence just now that I realized where I came up with Yodood as my replacement for the more forgettable blog name of gregraetgar (Green Graphics and (et) Gardens). Troutsky still calls me Greg, he’s so yesterday.

I never made it beyond the introduction of Jar Jar Binks before Lucas’ farce became too much and my DVD player went over to the dark side for that franchise. I have younger friends who revile George Lucas for so reneging on the promise of the series beginngs. We were all influenced.

Whether it was Sir Alec’s suave dismissal of the storm troopers searching for R2D2 and 3PO or Yoda’s convoluted language wisdom, there were sensations much more sublime than mere ears pricked up in this society already aware of the alternate meanings of the counter culture’s lyrics and their startling gestures like putting flowers in riot police gun barrels.

If language evolved in the same way species do, and records since language was first translated into stone and metal symbols testify to that being the case, observing the changing meaning of words to certain groups in the same culture in reaction to oppressive authority and relating that to a match in the variation of race to language, probable religion and national turf we can see that the expansion of the human race from one set of parents involved the oppression of crowding at least as much as much as from the natural curiosity of the individual being followed by the flock if the new ground works out for her.

Observing day old chicks evolve to egg bearing matrons, expanding from a cardboard box to a six by twelve foot coop for their first seven months to tentatively separating further while roaming this eight acre area in the woods by the Colorado River free range for the past three months, I feel like I am observing the expansion of humanity without the trappings of civilization establishing marks of permanent ownership though proximity sometimes raises squabbles with the other species and the years older hens whereever they occur. Squabble is a perfect word for confrontation with a chicken by the way, just like gobble is for turkeys.

These girls of mine, with no training other than copying each other, evolved a language that both sounds identical in words and personal in inflection when they are announcing the arrival of the latest egg or voicing their desire for a corn tortilla treat at the porch door. The egg announcement happens to be identical to every other chicken I’ve heard upon such an event.

So, are our words similar to the words in disparate languages through genetics or through evolving from one language. Are there phrases whose utterance in the right volume and frequency will be recognized by the genetic memory of the primitive brain triggering an override to anything learned since birth? Who is the hypnotist talking to?

I dabbled in hypnotism in my teens and decided it was one of those extremely powerful realizations that lead to my just-because-you-can/should-you choice to leave it as background evidence for my curiosity’s other tangential interests as a more oblique approach to this vast unknown. Justin, over at Memetika has just posted on the Millennium in the Shadow of Freud with links to the excellent videos aired on the BBC several years ago about the use of mass hypnosis through propaganda (bad mind control by our enemies) and public relations (good mind control by our leaders).

If we have buttons that have been programmed and someone knows how to push them, are we not the droids we are inventing?

FREE?

“You’re free to go.”

The desk sergeant’s admission to permission rang with more irony than it could have at any other time in his life. He’d been awake all night, staring at the artwork and thoughts scrawled on scraps of paper missed at lockup shakedown pasted to the walls with breakfast oatmeal over many years by the many disorderly shut in this box within the box that no longer wanted them, kept awake by adrenalated rage. … free to go …

He was still angry, a rage whose momentum was of such ancient origin that reason held no sway in limiting its inclusiveness. Sure, last night was an outrage, maybe even the biggest straw, but the camel’s back was shattered and he tasted the bitter bile of knowing how he’d allowed others to hold his life in thrall to permission for its entire duration. The fires lit a realization that he was part of a completely saturated society, born free, being told their obligations for continued permission from the first withheld affection to the first understood, “NO,” and for the rest of their life. He’d always sensed the bullshit behind it but never thought about it beyond going along to get along.

Nobody knows who the first person to get away with assuming the authority to grant permission was, but logic tells us that it must have been in an attempt to change the natural course of events and that every newborn was advised of such authority in ever widening circles every generation thereafter.

Folks reacted to his occasional objections as if he were just a spoiled baby. “You gotta tough it out with the rest of us, heh heh,” they’d say.

It got so subliminally uncomfortable one day that he found the son, the American, the husband, father, bread winner, tax payer, home owner, car driver, insurance buyer he'd earned permission to be strolling along a downtown sidewalk imagining he’d just wandered in from the Amazon rain forest watching all the busy people doing who knew what. In consensus reality he was in the middle of his work day when he’d left his drawing board to get another cup of machine coffee to change the stale taste of cigarettes in his mouth, overheard the same joke Johnny Carson told the night before and just kept walking down the corridor of executive offices he’d occupy someday if he kept his nose to the cornerstone, out the door, across the parking lot to his car, drove downtown, parked and his indigenous self emerged. His spirit was claustrophobic. It needed this tiny act of rebellious hooky to get a breath of fresh air for however long he could endure the next sublimation.

His dissatisfaction with maintaining his permission from the stifling stability of the status quo so frightened his wife she withdrew from his dreams of sailing around the world by returning to her family home and withdrawing permission to be with his children. Talking trash and trashing his letters kept them in the dark about their father forevermore. When he had the simultaneous realization that she was not going to return and that he no longer wanted her to, he quit his job, driving his car and cutting his, beard, hair and lawn.

Sitting in the front yard playing music with friends in his new found measure of freedom one day, a crew cut chap from across the street in the IBM ghetto where he lived asked him, “When are you ever gonna cut your grass?”

With a coda strum on his guitar and a shake of his long hair he chortled in reply, “When are you ever gonna get to see the wind blowing through yours?”

That was three weeks ago. Last night there was a knock on the door. The instant the latch clicked open he was rendered unconscious by the door smashing into his face after its being smashed into by several tons of meat. He woke up on the couch to the noise of a foot crashing through the ceiling from the attic as a couple of hundred pounds of the meat remarked, “Gee, that’s not gonna help the sale of yer fancy house. Heh heh.” They charged him with possession of two and a half pounds of cannabis they had to have brought with them; he’d never had more than a quarter of an ounce at any one time in the four months since he’d first tried it, but it wasn’t enough for them. Getting him in a courtroom was?

You’re free to go. Riiiiiiiight!!!

COLD

Shivering is the low frequency end of what excruciating pain is the high frequency end.

Lower frequencies than that begin to sauté our butter melding with the wherever as frigid names crackle and flake away like melting ashes. If ever I pick up what remains of wherewithal again, it will not only have to be life threatening, it will have to get me closer to the equator, just so I retain some smidgen of choice in how I stroll and pedal my way to the inevitable compost pile of life’s omniped multicylcle.

Yeah, I don’t like cold. It’s never been a friend of mine. A carton of cigarettes a day are better for my lungs than 10 minutes of non-stop shivering. Not sure what the term for the respiratory equivalent to a heart attack would be, but I suffered one so arrhythmic the only way I survived the night was by passing out so I could breath in … over and over … until a guardian nerf eld discovered me turning blue in the morning in my hammock and fetched an asthema inhaler, melting the problem like butter. I'm still not back to my vigor before it happened three years ago.

Constant, excruciating pain is the white noise that is never gray, anywhere; each cell contributing the bayonetto (an extremely sharp bayonet, sharp even for a stiletto) extremes of its individual displeasure with the less than artichoke dipping temperature to which it is being so unjustly subjected making it move its own butter just to get warm, what a fucking wasteful indignity! My cells hate it when that happens and curse me long after they get their wind back and hit the showers. I am sort of obligated to go along to get along. I depend on a happy body. No body says, “Yo dood,” when me bod’s not with th’ haps.

What bothers me almost as much as this inability to adapt to natural temperature conditions in an otherwise pleasant environment is the findings that wild children (called feral only because of some inbred taboo against admitting we humans could be related to those over which we claim to hold mythically endowed stewardship, like the catholic church seeks sees after wayward little alter boys) have an almost infinite tolerance for temperature variation, implying that if my sensitivity to cold is not some genetic inheritance, civilization can make us incapable of returning to the wild in more ways than by our actions and our thoughts. Obviously we spoil easy … else we’d all still be laying back under the star lit skies out on the old homestead land instead of standing in long lines in neon lit concrete boxes of cities of a mythical homeland to see movies about laying back under the …

If only knowing that could make me warmer. Rub two thoughts together. Throw in some sapling theories for kindling. Watch out for sparks. Turn up the ignorant bliss to eleven … just a short blast from the furnace of insensitivity …

Oops, Mr. Buttersworth, cheap at twice the price, meet Aintyo Mimer, the original copier — snap — blowing by like the wind up toy skirts of — crackle — non-prophet hedges against — pop — faith in all-profit possibilities. Getting’ warmer. Pheuzzzzzzzzzzzz…

"DIRTY"

… was one of those words that never entered his vocabulary for the same reason “fabulous”, “incredible” and “awesome” dropped out. Words that were, or had fashionably become, so ubiquitous as to cease modifying the nouns or verbs with which they were linked in any meaningful way, became mirrors of the speaker by their opaqueness.

“Dirty” was one of his first introductions to how a freeborn boy could be wrong around people who had traded their freedom to choose for lip service allegiance to pop righteousness. The poop in his pants, the soil on his knees and the words he heard daddy say couldn’t all be dirty. People that found dirt always smelled like soap. So how come mother called aunt Donna, who took more baths than anyone in the world, a dirty minded woman?

These questions and observations led him to see that using the word dirty was a kind of unconscious code with which the righteous could recognize each other as allies in finding wrong with actions outside what one must assume they consider their unnaturally sanitary soap box. It no longer mattered whether the modified noun was excrement, soil, reputation, sanitation, sex, ethics, money, job, habit, thought or language in comparison to how clearly it defined the accusing speakers, who were, ironically enough, always describing other than them selves. Imagine that.

His own meaning for “dirty” formulated when he began to feel dirty himself. Finding himself attending class with students who bragged on the obituaries of murdered residents of Carver Village and powerless to find anyone to believe it, or if they knew, to join him in opposing it, he dropped out of his new Mississippi high school and joined the Marines, both to get away and to learn to be more effective in opposing such lynchings. But he felt dirty, leaving such a mess.

Experience over four years of direct contact with and obedience to the military code of justice did nothing to expiate this stain of helpless cowardice he felt. Indeed, it only showed him the immensity of institutionalized enactment of the same kinds of atrocities against people of color in neighborhoods called nations. He talked to veterans returning from the Korean conflict who were just as shot loose from consensus reality as returnees from any of the admitted wars his country wages. If they were fit enough to retain in the service they were often recognizable by fresh material in the shape of rank chevrons removed from otherwise salty uniform sleeves. Chevrons awarded for ferocity in combat granted on the spot in the field. Chevrons taken away for inability to fold up their prize winning talents like the weapons they used by courts-marshal at home. He felt even more helpless to reconcile the increasing examples of other such duplicity dressed in the same flag. Dirty war is a term used by his country to describe resistance to its clean ones.

Over the fifty years since he left the service he tried joining only one more group he thought actually wanted to make the world better. When the company finally announced the product he’d helped engineer to fruition over nine years, he expected he’d begin work on a new project. Instead he was given the task of taking the material, design and performance capacity of his reliable new product to the point that it would break down as soon after warranty as possible to reduce the cost of making something for which the price remained the same, need expensive repairs earlier and increase product turnover. The duplicitous facade was everywhere.

He made a choice between wallowing in the dirty for dominating profit, like oil refinery towns love that smell of money in the air, or feeling the healthy remove from the trough of filthy lucre in the wilderness where the dirtiest he gets forking compost, cleaning chicken roosts and planting seeds feels like the epitome of clean. The word dirty never comes to mind.