Authenticity

The only authority I respect lies within self-actualized beings representing themselves genuinely rather than through manipulative illusion or honorary delegation.

For many years I regarded paintings of dogs playing poker as cartoonish silliness until I caught on to a deeper humor ranking among the greatest surrealism of all time; there’s not one bone in the body of a dog that can bluff! Dogs are the epitome of self-actualized beings within the domestic scene. Every being in what we consider natural wilderness is authentic.

Such examples are fewer and further between domesticated human beings not already culled and locked away in burgeoning jails and mental institutions. In four years of college I had only one teacher whose authority I recognized because he taught Strength of Materials wearing the dusty clothes he wore while walking a cantilevered I-beam on a construction job he was working on just before class. He brought interest in tension and compression to life more by his body language than the desiccated text ever could.

Some claim acquired authority based on books they’ve read, degrees they've been awarded, marks they’ve made, gods they've worshipped, clubs they’ve joined, elections they’ve won, money they’ve got or plans they’ve hatched for our future. Western civilization is based on such claimers successfully awing the rest of us. Those remaining outside this bond of gullibility exude the authenticity that escapes those testimonies to elsewhere by genuinely representing themselves; self-actualizing before one’s very eyes without needing to claim anything.

Note: This is a republishing of my latest post on the new blog, "…kindness of strangers," in a blatant attempt to get old readers to follow this link back to the future of this page.

BROTHER DAVE, JUSTIN WILSON AND ME

A little boy walking down a dirt road dragging a chain encounters a cigar-smoking, Cadillac-diving, gold-toothed fat-man who growls, “Where’s the post office, boy?”

The little boy says, “I can’t understand you, Sir, because your car radio is making a noise too loud to hear your words.

The fat man mutes the radio and replies incredulously, “This song just won the Grammy’s for Theo, what kind of hick are you?”

The little boy says, “My Grammy’s back at the house and she wouldn’t call that a song, much less music.”

With the hurt tone of one insulted, fat-man whines, “I don’t suppose an atheoist like you would know where the court house is?”

Little-boy answers, “Never heard of the dude and don’t know where the court house is.”

Fat-man says, “You probably don’t know where the highway out of this God-forsaken place is either — and why you pulling that god-damned chain anyway?”

Little boy looks fat-man straight in the eye and says, “Did you ever try and push one of these things? … besides, I’m not the one who’s lost.”

THIRD (IM)PERSON NATION

Being the being we were born to be

takes a far back seat to 

doing the being for others to see.  

The imbalance in the dynamic of nature’s dual cycle engine: eat or be eaten, is the result of having no awareness of the observer within who, from the first opening of each newborn’s eyes, silently watches civilization enacting a mythical script with antagonism towards the natural stage upon which it plays.

All beings display self-awareness by remaining alive. Remaining alive accumulates experience with kinds of food and kinds of predators. The consciousness of a being must make sense of this experience to supplement genetic memory with updates on the present to prolong its life. Making sense of it all could be seen as each being‘s personal narrative, the efficacy of which is attested to by its length.

Unlike their fellow beings, humans have managed to inject a mythical story into the experience of its progeny that transforms the organic eat/eaten dynamic into a mechanistic pass/fail exam with no predators but one’s betters. Being given no credit for the innate intelligence of the observer much less time to become aware of and develop natural curiosities and capabilities as even human parents allow in the wild, the modern human infant is drafted into becoming a civilized adult upon its first inappropriate defecation, having eaten its first meal, the first step in its journey of isolation from nature as it occurs within and without.

When rewards for obedience to others’ nonsense have greater value than remembering it is a game we have a choice in playing, we are civilized; habituated to the game of conquering nature — one we cannot win. That we cannot win is being shouted from minarets and state houses by outraged throngs of people, from poisoned seas and polluted air by the planet. We must cease our antagonistic story of human superiority and become more symbiotic with the body from which we arose lest she shed us, like the diseased narrative we carry by telling our children how we’re supposed to live.

Having western civilization’s myth piped in from every experience involving people since I was born, it seems a bit arrogant to me that I can claim to now see through it to the way things are, to see what the myth is about after its wishful thinking and “facts” are gone. Either I fell for it, or my way was paved so long as I chose to go along and fill in the proper blanks, because I found myself on my own for the first time in an earnest, trouble-free, thirty-four year life; no one left to fail or be failed by. The combination of new experiences and perspectives I’ve had off the leash since make me unfit for leashes evermore.

In the mechanics of story telling there is the trilogy of first; (I), second; (you) and third; (him) person narrative. In the mechanics of Freudian psychology there is the trilogy of id (instinct), ego (actor) and super ego (conscience). Both fields deal with strictly human interaction because nature reads no books or enacts no moral purpose for a conscience to attend. But they are useful to demonstrate the manipulation of human instincts wrought by adherence to the myth by one’s own personal story.

Let’s let “I” be the first person narrative of the “id”: the point of view from the primal observer, the instinctual, genetic memory with which each being is equipped at birth. Then we can let “you” be the second person narrative of the “ego”: the point of view of the seen, being an observable object out there in the mix of nature and society. And lastly, we might let “him” be the third person narrative of the “super ego” judging the effectiveness of the ego’s act in attaining from others it’s personal purpose. Notice the hierarchy of transition from natural, as born ability to live in nature alone at one end to purposeful dedication to the authority of others in the mold of the myth at the other end.

In nature the id serves as a perfect guide to the ego's actions putting it in the way of food and out of the path of predators to attain the longer, harmonious life desired by the super ego. In civilization the id is a dissident silenced by the ego lest it spoil the performance of licking the boots of whoever plays the super ego to be pleased in its story.

Currying approval of the public has such a priority over knowing oneself in the reality of nature that, for many, solitude seems a death trap and in nature, filling the trap with tigers. In these days of wall-to-wall communication solitude must be sought out by painstakingly turning off every device in the house, not that there are that many who would. In nature, approval amounts to not being eaten and having what we eat nourish us. Among men, gaining approval and, ideally, authority, motivates every activity indulged beyond the daily bread — and it’s an arbitrary game — in which eating alone is pitied and not playing makes one the enemy.

Even the games played within civilization reflect its myth of overarching administration by gods or governments and the possibility of sainthood, president or celebrity for the most dedicated to making their version mean something to the most people, as if truth could be created by man, just as he attributes such abilities to gods and their books. Like gods, the pantheon of mini-stars of excruciatingly varied forms of vicarious entertainment have idolizers in virtually every smelly locker room, reeking pit stop, perfumed crotch pit, Oscar walk, radio talk, podium and pulpit — thereby sustainting their reason for living around betting on what happens next on their version of the soaps because it has more meaning than what they do between shows; their own existence.

CHOICE

The most obvious trait of the natural world is the eating. From atoms swapping electrons to black holes swallowing galaxies there is a constant transformation occurring throughout the known physical world. Once you’re born, you’re game to be eaten upon until you no longer exist. Being food for itself, it would seem the prime purpose of the universe is to perpetuate its life. One may extrapolate that the universe is expanding, another that it’s only inhaling in the prime cycle of respiration and yet another that what we observe is merely the growing body of one of the many beings of its size.

One thing for sure is that down here at human metabolism staying alive requires adaptation to the area in which we must eat so long as we can avoid being eaten. Being eaten can be resisted only when the entity is aware of and able to avoid or defend against other life forms, from saber-toothed tigers to cancer cells, munching on its vitality. Realizing how many eggs a woman is capable of hatching, it would seem we have a lot to learn about adapting to our habitat in order to live up to our genetic potential.

So here we are, smack in the middle of a good/bad for us world feeling like we must perpetually choose to either eat, befriend, avoid, defend against, attack, or surrender to events in our conscious life. At birth our motivation is to respond to and learn from the enormous physical growth still going on by stoking those fires with food and our consciousness with experience to better adapt to obtaining the next meal.

The genetic mini-factories pumping out replications of their Dna imbue each with what has been biologically called, epigenesis, and in my lexicon referred to as genetic memory, intuition, instinct, or the inner voice with which newborns are equipped to operate as individuals as soon as physically capable. This evolved memory is of primal truths such as eat or be eaten, fight/flight, fear of falling or caution around fire, like an organic I Ching into which the daily events of one’s life may be inserted like variables plugged into infallible, evolutionary time tested formulas. Human cultures attempting to part from nature have all been too fleeting to register in such a timeless, cyclic history of evolution.

As the infant is introduced to the culture within which is born, its adaptive behavior in obtaining food is influenced by a louder, more insistent memory in the form of tradition. Some cultures traditionally consider nature to be an evil to be conquered and begin educating their young as soon as the results of their eating makes a mess on the traditional couch. In such cultures the young quickly adapt, not to their habitat, but to the rules for conquering nature within themselves by ignoring those “Satan’s whispers” from our genetic memory and without by helping harvest and sell the entirety of our habitat to one another in a race to own the most at the inevitable finish line of planetary poisoning and starvation.

Being so buried beneath the immediate demands of one’s culture so early, individuals rarely get to experience themselves beyond their skills at eliciting favorable response from others, first for food, then for favors. Any reference to self-reliance is in terms of having money to pay others to provide all the necessities of life, which are far in excess of mere food in most cultures considering themselves civilizations. Indigenous cultures still send their youth on walkabouts and vision quests to ensure they are aware of their prime reliance on and responsibility to their habitat in a most symbiotic way. Western civilization’s version of a walkabout is joining the Marine Corps to travel to remote corners of the world and threaten to blow up that porcelain toilet (that another vision quest, the Peace Corps, convinced once indigenous peoples they couldn’t live without) if they didn’t quit fighting the leash and biting the hand that now feeds them.

With no experience of living symbiotically with nature since the presumption of totalitarian agriculture, western civilization relies on faith in authority over the inherent potential of that unbound curiosity with which we are all born:

“I’m hungry.”

“That’ll be five dollars.”

The instincts that could not be sublimated in the civilizing of newborns have been bent to the service of authority. Competitiveness among beings for food in the wild improves the survival abilities of both prey and predator and doesn’t include incapacitating the competition except among civilized people in search of authority. With no natural prey but their own egoistic shortsightedness, civilized humans confuse fellow competitors with the prey — still hungry after all these eons. Herding instinct, once for safety among prey and efficacy among predators, has been warped into might makes right and the inability to live alone in the wild … or the city. Which brings us to the biggest, most painful warp of all. This post was generated by a quote my dear, Lilwave, posted in Facebook the other day,

“The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread." ~Mother Teresa

I hardly know where to begin. The inarguability of such a metaphor mixed between physical reality and presumed spiritual necessity leaves me only the “hunger for love” part to address my response to the quote. Part of becoming acquainted with oneself prior to and beyond being the stylist adapting to one’s culture is discovering the being who exists when one is alone with the natural world so that one cannot be swayed by condemnation or flattery in representing one’s self honestly.

Now here’s where I make the humangoose assumption that I am not alone in experiencing the following — if I am, I’d like to hear from you.  There is a term, agape, which I take to mean the feeling of love for the entire universe, including the misdirected malice of western civilization toward the womb that births it and horrible individual injustices wreaked upon one another trying to make the system work against our nature. This feeling resembles total harmony of every part of my body and it with all other entities in a dynamic generated by learning to choose to be symbiotic with nature by learning from our mistakes if we survive them. Humans are learning by trial and error what their genetic memory could tell them if they could hear it over the traditional memory’s public address speakers.

It may be evoked by solitary meditation, seeing events harmonize all the entities involved such as what just occurred in Tahrir Square, at an outdoor rock concert on a psychedelic, turning the compost and seeing microbes make plant food out of plants, in the fearless eyes of another looking from the same place, or in watching the world turn green at spring sunrise after every miserable winter of my life.

To hunger for love means to me that one has never discovered that fountain within them selves and are convinced love must be acquired from externals like food. Relationships are cannibalistic without agape, to further mismix the metaphor.

“Hey, boy! Whachu doin’ pullin’ that there chain?”

“You ever tried to push one?”

            AGAPE

SHUN THE HAND

Storm against

The bars and stars

You pledged allegiance to

In the molding of your schooling

You are not

Fodder for the warring steel

If you can grow your own next meal

The unfolding of your schooling

Powerless

Against the razor steel

Peeling whiskers from your chin revealing

That Windsor tether to your schooling

Rise up

Dilate the cage of your crumpled form

When you face the truth you’ve long ignored

Since the scolding of your schooling

You are

The key to the cage

Not in rage but the will to disengage

From the emboldening of your schooling

Free

To walk away from your servers

Costing more than that tie could ever earn

No longer tethered to your schooling

This is what my asylum echoed while I was reading Bite the Hand, by my friend Pisces Iscariot at the Far Queue. We're saying the same thing from our own unique reality tunnel. Vive l'varietie

FOR THE RECORD

Rachel nails both big oil and government safety concerns in one swell foop. She also brought national attention to the untended indifference of their merely announcing the miles of boom deployed with no intention of making it work.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

REMEMBERING

What It's All About

Don't let nostalgia cause short term memory loss

•

Protecting
the
United States of America
from
ever
having
to
walk
anywhere.

IF CURSING MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER …

•

RIP Dennis Hopper

THE PLOT (PROPHESY) THICKENS (SICKENS)

Somewhere between learning from experience that the government lies about cannabis and UFOs and witnessing multiple videos of the free fall speed collapse of the only three steel buildings to ever do so, all on the same day, I have been sure of the government’s duplicity and have theorized on a long range ultimate agenda hidden behind the distractions of its public corruption and ineptitude. I have read extensively into the same material Dan Brown has completely bastardized for his popular novels, Howard Zinn's Peoples History of the United States drew from and the dearly departed Robert Anton Wilson so deftly skewered with hilariously scrambled conspiracies in his Illuminatti Trilogy. I guess you could call me a conspiracy theorist. It’s okay, I don’t mind. I prefer not being so dependent I fear to doubt.

Such suspicions were rather idle speculation until I began questioning the ultimate reason mankind finds itself at the threshold of self-extermination through the insane intentional refusal to adapt to the nature of its place of birth. Daniel Quinn showed me the historical transition from hunter-gatherer to totalitarian agriculture as the turning point, but I still failed to grok a reason for it. I suppose I have my daughter to thank for discovering what I have come to propose is the justification that converted relatively symbiotic humans into the scourge of the Earth — the mythology of mankind’s inheritance of Earth’s stewardship from its creator as our special gift is the backbone belief of every monotheistic religion since it permitted man’s slaughter of great swaths of nature to establish his food supply in greedy exclusivity over sixteen thousand years ago. Concentration around the new food depots in cities further cut off man from his natural environment until we come to the war on everything period in which we now exist suspended by our own petard.

That seems to cover how mankind began operating as master of all it surveyed, and I can kind of see how believing man superior to his environment could surface as the genocidal behavior exhibited by small pockets and huge armies of terrorists against their fellow man, but I’d yet found no ingrained mythos in my admittedly shallow research into Xianity and its roots in mythology back to the forcing underground of Paganism.

And then one day on Facebook during heated comment banter with my old buddy Roger about the difference between racism and anti-Semitism someone comes up with,

I see the United States as being an Israelite nation. Being that the US is a ruminate of the Tribe of Manasseh. Both Ephraim (England) and Manasseh (the United States) were son's of Israels son Joseph. We are God's chosen people...however, we have been allowed to go our own way, until we are at the point of blowing ourselves off the planet...then ... and only then, will God intervene. That Is the only way man will learn that his way will not work, and thru that learn to accept God and his Word. So yes, we need to protect the country of Israel because the United States was born from her.

Who knew? Am I the only one who missed this detail? Ah those crazy myths. There’s a set for the masses surveyed and a set for the masters of all they survey. If that tidbit didn't match current events in the unreasonable leniency being shown the genocidal Israeli treatment of Palestinians I wouldn't have even noticed that quote, much less posted on it.

Ceci n'est pas une maison*

This is a PICTURE of Donna's home

The following paragraph is what I was typing when the ensuing paragraphs ensued, er, ah, events occurred (gotta keep the reality and its story distinguishable from one another or I’ll be back in the invisible prison).

Guy DeBord’s spectacle is what I call the tautology of the invisible prison. “When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle.”

Oh, the irony of it all. In the midst of discovering Guy DeBord, often referred to by Troutsky, and reading his Society of the Spectacle, the Dawgranch dawgs break my concentration with their raucous greeting at the gate of perhaps forty members of a TV entourage here to scope out an upcoming scene for an episode of Friday Night Lights in my neighbor’s uniquely styled home evolved as an outgrowth of her life in the bus she parked under a giant pecan eleven years ago.

Ack. The very tentacle of the spectacle has come to annex my everyday direct experience of nature here in my retreat from the grid to integrate it into the spectacle lived by the never-left-the-couch dolts plugged into “Reality TV” 24/7 even when they believe they are out in the “world” discussing the latest episode of Office at the office around the old water cooler bottled water machine.

And wouldn’t you know it, if I sign their disturbance agreement paper, my premeditated tolerance of whatever the hell they decide to do in the course of their production for the spectacle will earn me a hundred dollar share of the big bucks lavished on the preservation of the invisible prison. If they don’t run off or over the hens or tromp through my gardens it’ll be a breeze to do my share, with the first hand direct experience of witnessing the creation of the latest spectacle to be decoupaged onto the ever denser walls of the invisible prison thrown in as education. Yahoo.

*After Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" he lettered beneath a realistic painting of a pipe just to keep the invisible prison visible, and not a prison when one is conscious of tne myth.

HERO

I guess this speech will knock anyone off the fence they ride hoping to rationalize remaining a convenient inhabitant of the invisible prison I speak of so often. I hereby commend to you another unique example of what I call heroes.

Hat Tip once again to Pisces Iscariot at Far Queue

PICKPOCKET

Never having been filthy rich, I was a fool to suppose I knew how the excessively wealthy regarded their excesses. How was I to know that beyond a certain point acquisitiveness saturates the very purpose of living, like alcohol saturates the cells of the liver, in an accumulating toxic cocktail of fear of inadequacy to both fulfill the promised expectations such wealth engenders in competitors, investors and sycophants and protect it from a public suspected of being as unscrupulously greedy as was required for such an accumulation.

I figured that since losing a fin out a wad of bills totaling around a hundred bucks was no big whoops to me, this guy would never miss a million out of his hundred billion. What I didn’t realize was that no one gave a shit about my measly fiver while his every penny had a hundred million dollars invested in a security system and a staff of bean counters, plus millions of anxious stockholders, tax collectors and relatives checking up on their share.

Little did I know how he shuddered off the ghostly chill of envy he experienced when he passed the homeless one-legged vet panhandling at the corner of his downtown Dallas branch office building this very morning. I should have known how mean great riches had made him when I saw him stumble over the man’s only foot in his attempt to ignore his existence and give him only a dirty look as its acknowledgement.

I realized at that moment how this mutated human being had built his ridiculous personal wealth by owning the mercenary corporations' looting public funds in payment for worse than inadequate support of the fodder being made of the nation’s poor in a war of yet more acquisition. The look in this man’s eyes was the look in Humphrey Bogart’s eyes upon discovering leeches on his body in African Queen and I knew — it wasn’t the leeches that wanted some of his financially spun cotton candy wealth he so much feared, it was the ironic leeches on his ability to achieve the happiness for which such acquisition was reputed among slobs like me to be the reward. He acknowledged with his resentment that I was happier than he.

My old gal, Mabe, slapped him back to reality with, “There he goes folks. The richest man in the world kicks a fellow human being like wasn’t one his own self, but I can see his shriveled dick right through that fine three piece, pin striped suit of emperor’s clothes.”

The crowd at the bus stop and for half a block around turned their focus on the kingpin. So discombobulated by interacting with the unvarnished truth available only outside his many sycophant filled ivory towers was he that he reached in his pocket for the bills he’d just withdrawn to pay the new girl to say she understands his torment convincingly enough to give him an erection and slammed them down in my hat.

“Dinner on me and Mabe! All month.”

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: PICKLED BRAIN

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

—Volaire

Someone challenged my perception of the invisible prison within which western civilization lives by saying, “The whole thing is in your mind.”

I could only reply, "That’s the difference between you and me: it’s in my mind, so I can think about it while it is your mind and you can’t.”

Recipe for Pickled Brain — or — Thinking About What We Think With

Test for Ripeness:

1) Can answer all questions likely to be asked within 40 miles of home.

2) Hasn’t asked a question arising from curiosity for the last five years.

3) Takes authority to represent truth from pulpit, podium or plutocrat.

4) Never read a book voluntarily.

Preparation for Pickling:

1) Sever nerve paths capable of reporting unique experiences to conserve the energy normally required to ignore such messages for use in healing injuries caused by the same mistakes endlessly repeated.

2) Surround organ with an environment about which certainty is impenetrably dense.

3) Fill container with a fluid mixture of faith, trust, hope, belief and wishful thinking as a cushion against any latent instinctual resistance to the container.

4) Put on a shelf to ferment for the rest of life in isolation, within warehouses full of mindless millions pickling in their juices in the invisible prison.

Serving Instructions:

1) After aging long enough for all the heresy and doubt to be leeched, the once clear cushioning fluid will gel and turn as opaque as a proven fact. It is nowready to serve reliably.

2) Care must be taken to release the gas pressure of desiccated curiosity extracted in the fermentation process before handling individual brains.

3) Served individually they are digestible as paper pushers, bean counters, assembly lines and lifetime retail clerks. Not recommended for dealing with the vagaries of nature.

4) Served in mindless masses they delight the palate of the democratic process, tax base, demographic retail, preemptive war fodder, righteousness of the mostest and other forms of mob rule by deception of the willingly ignorant.

•

I always wondered how the active verb, “ignore,” lost all sense of personal responsibilitly when the adverb form “ignorant” was applied while “unaware” serves a more precise definition of the condition of not knowing. Ignorant always carries the major context of having willingly and knowingly ignored that of which they are ignorant and their situation is self induced.

•

A sure sign one is outside the invisible prison is inquiries begin searching for something truer than the answers that form the prison walls. Certainty is the border patrol around comfort zone zapping any illegal curiosity. Labels conclude the curiosity of the taught and are springboards into the unknown for those actually learning.

•

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
—Leo Tolstoy

THE REAL WAR

All the different reasons we declare war against one another, whether they’re as small as feuds between personalities or as great as ideological confrontations of corporations enlisting half the world‘s population in a war against the other half, are all mere skirmishes within the ranks of our corporatized civilization’s war machine set on establishing dominance over the nature of the universe as it manifests here on Orth within and without we Orthlings' hides.

Being cells in the body of the living planet, the upright Orthlings’ aggressive antagonism toward and ignorance of the well being upon which our own health depends is as though one’s left thumb nail set about converting the rest of the body into toughened keratin to set things to rights for its own good.

In the spectrum of Orthlings’ reality tunnels from scientific atheists to religious zealots there rarely arises anyone arguing against the so obvious sawing off of the limb from the tree of life whereupon we all perch oh, so precariously.

The method employed by the inciters and maintainers of our civilization’s war against nature may seem more familiar in a much more recent series of events, still being played out, that went into overt motion within the memory of anyone older than four orbits of Orth around Ra, to wit:

Needing a cheaper source of energy to enable its agenda to own lead all of Orth in the future, the corporation, Usuki Inc., made the decision to covertly provoke a war against the weakest of the planet’s energy rich corporations. It sacrificed three thousand of its own employees to rouse the remaining three hundred million to revenge. While the terror reigned, the flames enraged and the dust to which the Temple of Gold had been reduced was still settling, corporate security, in the first competent action since allegedly being caught off guard with forbidden airspace penetration by remote controlled drones terrorist hijacked ornithopters crashing into the temple twenty four minimims earlier, found the identification cards for all of the terrorists amongst the powdered rubble of stone, office equipment and three thousand Orthlings — the only things left in tact. And surprise of surprises — they all happened to be from the alliance of corporations with just the energy resource Usuki Inc. needed.

The stooge Usuki Inc. hired to be its political branch CEO lumped scattered, independent dissident groups together by his declaration of a war of retribution against All Kinda terrorists, to define the enemy and of the battle weary corporate grounds of Aghastfistan to be the beleaguered arena for their strategic war.

For protection of their own employees from the same torture they wreaked upon the enemy, their lawyers defined Usuki’s mercenaries to be “legal combatants” in a war of retribution, occupation and usurpation against any Aghastfistanis who objected, defined by the lawyers as “illegal combatants.” As impossible to justify as the war is, none of the corporations that suck up to Usuki have sucked up their guts and objected, lest they be declared “All Kinda” terrorists as well. And thus the demonization of employees of enemy corporations was successfully inserted into the mythology of Usuki’s employees’ belief system.

The much earlier example of this stragedy scenario was enacted soon after the dawn of the upright Orthlings by an embryonic corporation in the form of totalitarian agriculture needing to morally justify wholesale annihilation of vast areas of naturally evolved life forms. To get relatively symbiotic hunter-gatherer-gardener culture to accept such apparent desecration of their environment a two part fable was forged into their mythology. The first was that all of the nature with which the Orthlings had thrived by communing was a creation of an omniscient being who granted ownership to his exceptional creations, the upright Orthlings. The second part depended on this exceptional superiority to justify the demonization of the traditionally revered spirits of nature by morally prohibiting their sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. It was just such evil spirits they were to blame for the instinctual sense of evil they felt when felling a forest for a freshly furrowed field.

All the violence within the ranks any of the corporate civilizations set on owning and exploiting the nature of Orth is the karmic result of individual’s deeply intuitive acknowledgement that they are contributing to a war against universally inexorable natural forces which thwart their warp at every twist in the path to extinction. It is not really a war when the deaths at the hands of the aggressors encourage once innocent collateral damage to rise up against them whether it is other Orthlings or the entire body of Orth.

WORK

It begins at childbirth. Labor pains. It will always be a laborious process, but whether it is painful has much to do with the variety of creature giving birth. In all of nature, one species has evolved a physical characteristic that pretty much ensures its birth will involve the excruciating pain of passing its cranium through its mothers birth canal.

The surest sign that civilization has become part of human evolution is the unusually large brain to body ratio and its effect on our pain to pleasure ratio. Civilization is so counter to the natural course of life on earth that humans have evolved an over sized organ to keep track of the arbitrary vagaries of civilization’s regulations imposed on the behavior of otherwise natural creatures.

My favorite metaphor for this phenomenon is that of a morbidly obese businessman on vacation, mounted upon a scrawny, wise burro assigned him at the Rubber Rose Dude Ranch, reading from his traveler’s guide he pontificates upon the beauties and developmental possibilities of wherever the steed takes him. When he returns from his ride he must refer to the travel guide to recall his adventure to others, while the burro knows every evolving inch of the same territory by heart.

The Cajun comedian, Justin Wilson, tells a similar tale of a young barefoot boy walking along a two rut road in the swampland of Louisiana overtaken by a Cadillac driving, ten gallon hat wearing, cigar smoking, diamond ring wearing big shot who demands, “Hey, boy. Where’s the Post Office?”

“I don’t know.” replies the lad.

“Where’s the County Courthouse?”

"I don’t know.”

“Where’s the highway to get me out of this God forsaken hell hole?”

"I don’t know.”

“You don’t know shit, do you, boy.”

“I know I ain’t lost.”

In both instances the appropriately named, over-sized modern brain assigns its own values and priorities to an environment that the lean, essential primitive brain understands with the genetically evolved, intuitive understanding of millions of years hanging out on the planet.

Only humans make a job of getting from womb to tomb. The rest of the natural world follows the path of least resistance. Engineers know that work is measured in units of energy spent in overcoming resistance by the nature of the universe. Conquering, containing, exploiting and mutating the nature of individual humans and the environment in general is the proud purpose of civilization’s mission, ostensibly assigned it by the creator of it all. With the exception of the minuscule portion of mankind that remains naturally indigenous, the natural evolution of man has been arrested by belief that he is an exception to the laws of nature granted by an imaginary inventor of it all. Authorities, pushing man’s laws on every newborn, promise that living outside its protection is to risk annihilation by a wilderness whose savagery can only be described in terms of the atrocities man has perpetually perpetrated in the name of his self righteous exceptionality.

The foregoing is to give some depth to my chuckle at the comment on my previous post, Does Not Work Well with Others, offered by one whose life is dedicated to making man’s laws to his own liking, to wit, “… opting out. SELF sufficient, the privilege of distance, so that one may critique free from risk or consequence.” And later on his blog, "…kindly fuck off and crawl back into your hole...or get off the fucking fence you fucking pussy and get into the fight!"

Such a staunch upholder of civilization knows intuitively that the real danger in life is found within the fight to make civilization as convenient to human exceptionality as nature is to the rest of life on Earth.

It is a wry chuckle, I’ll admit.

•

I realize that this post is in violation of my vow to post only fiction on this blog, but I figure that since civilization is the epitome of an ongoing revision of a fiction, perpetuated by those with faith in it and by the faithless unable to envision doing more than going along to get along in the anonymity of mobs relying on quantity over quality, it was within fiction’s purview.

DOES NOT WORK WELL WITH OTHERS

It was the verdict of a two-day battery of psychological tests given him to judge his fitness to work for the earth moving machinery manufacturer known as Caterpillar. In his last semester, with nothing but liberal arts electives on his class schedule, Russ indulged himself in the perks being showered upon graduating electromechanical engineers in the age of the punch card Fortran computer industry’s embryonic stirrings before Silicon Valley was a sparkle in Douglas Englebart’s eye. Trip to Pratt & Whitney in Florida, to Boeing in Seattle, ah yes, this was what it was all about.

He had snorted at the verdict with the understanding that his four-year stint in the Marines before college were experiential evidence that he could work well with others under the direst of circumstances. He’d hated the whole enlistment for the blatant bullying psychology boot camp employed in shaping the minds of killing machines and so spent the rest of his stint observing the culture maintained within the indoctrinated mindset of such unquestioning patriotism. He took the best offer from the best company and entered the private sector as an acquisitive yuppie apolitically against the Viet Nam War.

Several years later, when his eldest entered school he began to recognize a parallel indoctrination in public education as he watched her, and recalled himself, dumbing down her beautiful natural curiosity to satisfy the demands of obedience to the certitude of authority in their idea of what constitutes correct answers to twelve years of probationary examination. The difference between the purpose of the simple military, “my country right or wrong” ethic and the “my truth right or wrong” being pushed by the public education system was one of magnitude not only in scope, but in inscrutability.

The military shouldn’t question orders or they might hesitate fatally and become wasted fodder — at least that’s the modern justification for the withdrawal of direct human participation in the slaughter of humans by the use of drones as we, the “legal combatants,” methodically rub out beings we deem “illegal combatants,” along with the smudge of acceptable collateral annihilation of the civilian population amongst whom they live cravenly hide.

Citizens shouldn’t question authority or they might — what — think for themselves — become an enemy of the state — become unexploitable — invulnerable to usery? The National Security Agency protects the authority of the government by hiding its ways, means and purposes from the very people being manipulated into sycophantic obedience while claiming the secrets are kept from the always potentially envious enemy jealous of our superior standard of living. He could only conclude that they consider citizens to be a likely enemy; if they knew. He never liked secrets.

The correlation of these two parallel Pavlovian processes piqued his curiosity about the human vulnerability to considering information transmitted by words as more valid in describing experience than one’s own information transmitted by bodily sensations. To vanquish all foes was the purpose of the military’s mindless obedience, but what was the purpose the military enforces and protects so mindlessly — against what?

Such ponderings lead him to a conversation with a gorilla named Ishmael who asked him to find the myth of his culture. How had man felt justified in departing from the relatively symbiotic ways of the hunter-gatherer to begin disrespectfully wiping out all local lifeforms to establish agriculture and the ensuing urban aggregation around the food getting places?

He felt like a cicada molting in the spring as he slowly detected the cicatrix of a shell within which he’d lived his entire life. The discovery reawakened observations of the natural world he’d long denied for their stark contrast to the cultural norm of going along to get along. The expansion of his vision formed cracks in the wall of the invisible prison the myth of western civilization is. The husk hangs clinging to his memory of civilization while he carefully extracts his natural genetic memory from the muffled existence it had survived.

He found that, ultimately, he did not work well with others and Caterpillar’s psychological testing was spot on; he would have eventually ceased cooperating with the purpose of an earth moving equipment manufacturer, just as he has the purpose of the earth owning corporation known as western civilization, US branch office.

SHOT IN THE DARK

He died of lead poisoning. He was an avid hunter. He died with his faithful black Labrador, Fetch, at his bedside. No one ever expected to see Gus “Butch” Wayhemming leave this life in anything less violent than combat, capture or taming of some species of animal much larger or wild than himself.

Butch was famous world wide for his daring-do, whether it was wrestling gnu-swallowing crocodiles, hog tying a two ton water buffalo whose heart he cut out and took a bite of while it was still beating, milking the venom from an Anaconda he’d bred from Anaconda and Black Momba parents just to up the hazard of the feat, bagging and stuffing the last remaining mating pairs of fifteen endangered species, or the world’s largest collection of mounted heads in his huge trophy room including three women from PETA. He’d climbed Everest naked, swum the English Channel towing the boat carrying the press, flown over the Sahara desert in a pedal powered flying craft and defeated the Greenbay Packers by himself wearing only a jock strap. There was nothing he couldn’t have accomplished — if he’d conquered death.

His best friend, doctor, masseuse, tattoo artist and publicist, “Smiling” Jack Kelly, was the only person who knew the cause of his death. Although the lead poisoning was public knowledge, no one knew the source beyond the rumor Jack allowed to circulate of his biting the casings off depleted uranium ammunition because that’s what Butch and his vicarious fans would have preferred than the ignominious truth of the matter. Fetch knew too.

He’d retrieved the mallard Butch shot during his daily wake up routine, right after repelling down from his cliffside sleeping sling and just before his ten mile jaunt over the glacier. At the end of that fateful day, Butch was so ravenous he tore into his evening meal with an abandon that ignored the swallowing of a few pellets embedded in the poor duck’s thigh muscles. So stuffed was his esophagus that the pellets reembedded themselves in his flesh.

Yes, Smiling Jack was the only one who knew that Gus, “Butch” Wayhemming was brought down by his own shot in the dark meat of a harmless duck.

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.

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!!!

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