Uncertainty - Look What the Cat Dragged In

Old, never published before. Now seems good. 

Sunday, September 20, 2009

"I find this uncertainty exciting and embrace the indecisive nature of my work." - I don't care.

My computer, crashed. My cell phone, dead. I couldn't ask for better circumstances.
It came suddenly.

For me, I've never felt the desire to slow down, become one in isolation. But I love being abandoned in the middle of nowhere. I love being inaccessible to humanity, no one has any idea where I could be. I love that. Stranded, helpless, in the wonderful vastness of nothing.

Now, I hope that great expanses of technology collapse. Some say, solar flares are gonna burst up 'round the year 2012 and that will demagnetize everything and destroy computers all over. Makes Y2K look weak.
Or, better yet, the poles are gonna shift (in 2012 again) and demagnetize everything again. No more laptops, iPods, or 3G networks. Fuck it all.

I don't really believe these fantastic theories, but one can dream. I want to be sent back to the stone age. All great things must come to an end.

But until then, I have my moments of isolation, where I have no perceived audience, where my rules are my own, where freedom is it's own weight.

In the desert, I imagined it much differently. Everything hot, with a warm filter on the lens. Sweating heavy, til it dribbles down the bridge of my nose, dabs my lips and I can taste nothing else.
I would extend a stiletto and cut down the forearm because I wanted the swelter to mingle directly with my blood. Would anyone understand that? That I need fire in my veins.

I would have brought a gallon of water and enough bread for three days. And I'd pour the water over my head, til it soaked into my salty flesh. I would have fed the bread to the vultures. I would have screamed and run my fingertips over cactus needles, sewing them into my fingerprints.

But what did I expect? Instead, I walked for less than ten minutes, drank what little was left in a small water bottle and discovered nothing. I found the burned out wreckage of a car, perhaps set aflame in the desert by drug cartels or the Mafia. But nothing else. I returned to air conditioned slavery and schedules and homework and paychecks, directly deposited, every two weeks.

Starving! Thirsty! Delirious!

The End can't come soon enough.

(appendix):

A second visit to the desert proved more fruitful. Where were we, the other end of the planet? It was darker than a basement, the stars like old, white Christmas lights.
We happened upon some bombed out shell of a brick house, inside, nothing but the remains of pests. Nothing even infested this place anymore.
Of course, we burned it all. I flicked cigarette butts into the underbrush, hoping to "accidentally" start a blaze, but it didn't happen, of course. I pulled out a flare and it bloomed like the sun and wielding it like a torch, chased Luke through the wilderness. He swung a wooden bat at me, but even as I stepped back, my voice advanced with eerie strength.
"C'mere, c'mere," I said. Yet, it was not I that spoke.
The flare burst in two directions. Eric sparked up a bonfire and the flame grew luminous and green.
The air is not natural here, I thought.
When the flare started to dwindle, I threw it into the fire and the whole blaze turned red as blood. I darted off, blinded and snagged myself on a rusty barbed wire fence. I was able to snap it back and the wires crumbled in my fists.

In Rotation: Against Me!, Crystal Castles, Magnifico

 
In Rotation
Cliché punk, pleasing incoherence and raunchy Euro fun
Troy Farah
Published on 07/08/2010

Artist: Against Me!
Album: White Crosses
Rating: 2/5

If you’re in a punk band in this day and age, you’re entitled to a lot more scrutiny than other genres. It’s that age-old question: is punk more about the attitudes and lifestyles or about how one plays a powerchord?

Everybody Poops but Not Everybody Eats! - Free Book Download!

So teaching kids things is important and all, so I went out on a limb and drew up a kiddie book called Everybody Poops... But Not Everybody Eats. It's about world hunger.

It seems important to teach kids how to poop, how to recognize colors, how to count, etc. But they're saturated with that, so I wanted to teach them about something no one really talks about - starving slowly to death. That's important, too, right? I wouldn't know. I don't actually have kids.

Maybe you're thinking this will give children a negative worldview. Or will it give them a realistic worldview? Flip a coin. They're gonna grow up to pop Prozac just like mommy and daddy anyway. Why not expedite the inevitable?

You can download the book for FREE and decide for yourself. Don't tell me you're above experimenting with your kids. You're already gonna treat one of them better and see which ones becomes more successful. So take this a step further, B. F. Skinner, and scar your children for life with my cheery colored pencil drawings of hunger ravished people. You'll thank me later.

Download here!

P.S. The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This means you're free to copy and share this book, but you can't sell it. Let's make the world a less hungry place. By thinking about it. That works, right?

Chugging Past Collectivist Consumerism

One of the weirdest pitfalls of consumerism is collectivism. Nearly everyone I know who owns a house has a room for junk filling. In some cases, an extra room just for storage is a huge plus when shopping for a new home. Those that aren't so lucky rent one of those dozens of Armored Storage cells, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded 24-7 by rent-a-cops and surveillance cameras.

Laptops and iPods: MC Chris and Math the Band

I saw Math the Band and mc chris this past weekend at Tempe's Clubhouse. I didn't know who either of them were a half-hour before the show, but I had an extraordinarily good time. I took videos too, which came out sucky, but I decided to upload them anyway because I have a weird hobby of saturating YouToob with crap.

I'm OK With Giving Up

( note: I'm in the process of moving my blog to filthfiller.com I just gotta learn how to use an FTP server. )

What a good way to kill an afternoon. The clown is Bernie. The music is fienix.

Tijuana Diary: Fabricated Poverty

So this was it. We were homeless now, crouched low in the overgrowth behind a university gym. To us, home. Smoking cigarettes, our hands placed over our sleeping bags and blowing twisted smoke rings at the branch canopy above us.

"This is the taste of freedom," Levi was saying. "The best cigarettes are the ones under a night sky."

"Isn't this kind of patronizing, condescending, you know?" I puffed, cringing, paranoid of every sound. "Like, we're homeless, but we're only tourists. We can escape this whole thing tomorrow if we wanted."

"What do you mean?"

"We chose this. We had a bed for the night and we chose this. Urban camping. But is it belittling to those who can't choose it?"

"Even if this experience is fabricated, it still means something," Levi said.