… from the asylum of my natural mind

Commenting on the end of Countdown a friend lamented, “I don’t trust CNN these days.”

I couldn’t help but reply, “Trust?”

“Any of them?”

“These days?”

“Read Peoples History of the United States, check out Democracy Now! But don't lay trust on anyone but yourself, and don't do anything until you can.

Sorry Steve, those weren't really orders from me to you, just a brain fart about how trusting externals is the source of all misery and the company it keeps. It was the things that helped me realize why love is a source of pain when gratitude for feeling it at all is not enough reward and requital is demanded, like a whore taking payment — burdening loved ones with trust breaks better bonds.

I’ll go blog now.”

I guess I get a bit worked up around words like trust, faith, hope, prayer, wishes because I have seen through Maya’s veil to behold her natural beauty and realize it was all a vale of tears over such illusions woven so finely the world appears against us when we don’t get our way, as if it’s supposed to care because we wish it. The veil covers up the beauty of the present with the clothing of the past tailored to ellicit obedience from the future. What a fine tuned grinder the innocence of now is put through to accomplish tomorrow’s menu. We never see life as it is as we focus on the parts that fit our purpose and get blindsided by hopes become wishes become faith become trust become assumption become expectation become fact until — wham, a contradiction become powerful on the momentum of a life of denial.

All these ephemeral illusions to the power of just wanting something, from a dolly to a place in heaven when one’s done with making Hell of Eden, weave the world within which civilization believes nature is chaos to be conquered and put to work. Being warm and dry with food on the table is never enough for people believing in gods who create worlds by merely willing it so.

I am learning to love life more by freeing it from the fragmenting duality of expectation and let the story unfold as it will, despite my running narrative. I’ve learned the truth about trust is that the external object of our faith is not the determiner of our satisfaction, but the scapegoat for our own judgment of how reality can be made to work for us as opposed to learning how it behaves with or without us to better work with it.

The confusion introduced by my education delayed a realization of how the idea that existence has a master plan, a preexisting purpose, limits the comprehension of the universe and behavior by a far larger population than merely the creationists who swear by it, as mankind destroys the only specimen we’ll ever have on the assumption of knowing why it exists before having a clue as to how it exists. Getting clues from purposeless observation seems to lead me into endless fascination. Purpose observes through a pinhole in a cell wall gleaning anything that might be construed to be fact in the ongoing fairytale of mankind’s godlike “conquering” of nature.

PEOPLE WATCHING

Legend has it that the Native Americans first photographed by white men believed the camera was stealing their souls just as their lands were being usurped in the westward expansion. The clairvoyance of these early inhabitants was matched by their ability to dance among the girders to construct the nation's first skyscrapers without fear of falling.

In the early 21st century the development of the cell phone made photographers of everyone. An internet application called Photosynthe allowed a global collation of uploaded photos to form a virtual world as solid as the density of photographs taken. Governments, always afraid of the citizenry’s learning of their duplicity, developed surveillance techniques enabling records of public events to be seamlessly complete both visually and historically.

By 2052 the only reason to leave one’s house would be to take pictures of reality. All social interactivity was conducted over the internet by organic computers ingested by the users as symbiots. Reproduction decreased to the point that the birth rate was a matter of concern for the survival of the specie who’d abandoned their bodies, volunteered their souls and integrated into the matrix of vicarious prosthetics once only found so complete among rabid sports fans.

In 2114 there were two distinguishable species of human, the dormant and the awake. The awake lived and played in the reality the dormants only dared to dream about. The lack of reproduction among the cybernetically isolated dormants resulted in a world view shrinking with fewer and fewer picture takers going less and less far from home. The awake kept track of the dormants’ limited world of interest to inhabit the places they’d abandoned and return to natures ways undetected.

Let there be enlightenment.

UP IN YER FACEBOOK, BUDDY

On a thread that asked what can be done about nuts with guns I began”Each person lives in a different world, their version of reality if you will…” when I realized I had the makings of a blog post to express, so here we are.

Thirty years ago I was friends with a group of folks occupying three adjacent houses communally in a South Austin neighborhood. Two marriages, graduations and other things to do split us up until a 25^th anniversary gathering brought many of us back together for the first time. I realized then how extreme our different directions actually were despite our copacetic coexistence in the eighties.

I had dropped out of a nine year yuppie track at IBM and most of them, ten to fifteen years younger, were preparing to climb into it. There was only one out of forty among them who even wanted to share a joint. It was the starkest example of subverting individual potential into service of the American dream I’d ever experienced … a veritable who’s who of international nuvo riche…I was a fish out of water.

A year later I was searching for traces of the woman I never quite got over and tried Facebook out of last-ditch desperation. I haven’t found her, but I did find a plethora of people I’d known in the past who friended me when they saw I’d joined. One of them was part of that communal group who it appears has gone yet another route to the American dream. After several months of increasingly volatile Glenn Beck informed posts, my friend, “Codger”, peaked out by making his profile picture a gunsight and defying anyone to show evidence that Palin/Beck/Fox had anything to do with the Tucson massacre way before anyone had, just as Palin herself had removed gunsights from her web site.

By pointing out how inflammatory he was being, his cadre of tea party crones came down on me with personal attacks as incoherent as Loughner’s web postings. I unfriended Dodger this morning and will hopefully remain out of the line of their fire. This confrontation also found saner heads who’d known Codger from childhood and were worried about his sanity … thus the thread this post is an attempt to address.

The only solutions to gun violence is to cease manufacturing them … as clear and impossible as outlawing war in a civilization believing in ownership. Although I detest all reasons for guns with exception of subsistence hunting, I cannot help but share the sentiments of citizens who cannot trust a government who clearly does not trust its people, as demonstrated by the furor over wikileaks exposure of government duplicity.

The best fix I have heard of for gun violence is, like all law enforcement and medicine in western civilization, pathological, not preventative. It is to digitally code every bullet so that the anonymity of the shooter disappears. The effectiveness of such a change is bound to have a preventative aspect for crimes where detection is inevitable.

But if you’re around the bend enough to spray a group of anonymous people with automatic gunfire, getting caught is no consideration … in most cases the nuts have offed themselves … unless, of course, they are in the employ of a crime boss or a warring nation. These aberrations have plenty examples of killing being a justifiable solution to problems, no matter how loose the connection between three office buildings being imploded justifying two national wars of annihilation and being fired from your office job justifying going back to the office and putting everyone out of their miserable jobs with a machine gun.

I can imagine no solution to mass domestic murderers except better friends unafraid to intervene, a partial fix is coded ammo and less available firearm capacity.

… NOT MY OX, YOU DON'T …

There are fixes … and there are cures. 

The wretched excesses of our source of wealth being a growth industry became an undeniable blight on the American dream when the cheap litter of the disposable economy settled like leaves in suburban trees and lawns and awoke comfy family’s sense of outrage enough to become a national disgrace. There was enough momentum; had we wanted to cure the problem by clamping down on products and packages to either be biodegradable or recycled through the manufacturers, we might have done so. Here fifty years later it has become apparent we should have done more than plant a tree, a shrub and a bush and don “Don’t Mess with Texas” bumper stickers.

What did happen? Eeewww, get it out of sight. The dumpster and bulldozer industry flourished and the ugly truth of our disregard for Gaia was swept under patches grafted over her skin or injected into her circulation system at sea ——anything to get and keep it out of sight. That was the fix.

I have been aware of most such faux fixes intended to keep down awareness of inherent skullduggery ever since, from the purpose of the NSA, the Warren and  the 9/11 Commissions to the excuses of the oil industry swallowed whole cloth by petroholic nations.

What prompted this post was an interview Rachel Maddow had with Paul Rieckhoff about the New GI bill and the influence his veteran’s group IAVA has had in its passage. In speaking of plans for next year, he mentioned addressing the alarming suicide rate of veterans. Wham, it hit me again.

Suicidal or otherwise mentally incapacitated war trauma victims are the canaries in a mine who are being treated as aberrations rather than the tip of an iceberg just so the mining industry can go on. Why would veterans want to cure the cause of the suicides’ problem, when they and so many that have gone before them have all been so thoroughly, obediently invested in its perpetuation. Our wars, food industry and gluttonous litter are to be kept out of the sight of polite society lest we glimpse the Ugly American.

I thank “God” for requiring the kind of faith that believes such cosmetics are both a necessary and an adequate cover — “He” makes them so obvious to we of little or none.

Often, what must be cured must have a fix on to survive.


The fix for Wikileaks' heroic exposure of national disgrace is to band together to criminalize the people's hero and perpetuate what he sought to cure.