Philosophical Boons of Thinking for Yourself

Submitted this for a scholarship essay, deadline snuck up on me, so its kind of thrown together.

It was a Catholic upbringing in the face of a barrage of cross-cultural noise, unfounded curiosity, and dire dissatisfaction. I first thought of myself as godless in my youth, 8 years old perhaps, and was stuffed through Catechism and eventually Confirmation by parents who apparently didn’t know better or thought I owed some blood to their tradition. They weren’t devout to their spirituality in any way, but thought exposure to it would be healthy for my morality. I always doubted, but found myself unable to publicly denounce what I increasingly considered bullshit without some awkward conversation with family. I kept it to myself.

My atheism is much more informed now, a hunch expanded by voracious reading in all arenas: science, history, psychology, philosophy. I can express the nuances and have tried to develop an understanding of all the tendrils and requirements relying on nothing requires.

There are benefits, believers and apologists tell me, to believing in the Judeo-Christian tradition or any other supernatural architecture of reality. Comfort with cosmological “truth”, the ability to sleep at night, a tidy and explicit moral compass. I must argue that atheism, the belief that no supernatural intelligence governs our universe, has benefits outweighing each of these.

Atheism has granted me tremendous freedom. Subscribing to it early in my youth helped to remove the illusion that the authorities in my life represented my needs. I am of the conviction that the seed of many of our social ills is that we believe our security and authority is a requirement. Authoritative teachers are installed to maintain order in the minds and actions of children who thrive on chaos. The police state exists to maintain the status quo and repress change. Religion exists so that someone else’s concept of right can be enforced even in your heart. Understanding that there is no cosmic authority, and not just for my convenience but as a matter of fact, I must shoulder the onus of determining my own order. It is up to me to decide what is right and wrong, and it is up to me to investigate, think, learn, discuss and experience in order to shore up or reconstruct this philosophy. A mind can only go so far on intuition and spoon-feeding, and I think the result is a society in which individuals only feel they’ve done wrong when they’ve tripped the alarm.




Atheism has alleviated the terror over every mistake I made along the path to self-discovery. I have, like everyone, made mistakes. I often carried a certain book too far down a path before realizing I had misinterpreted it. I often caved to some base instinct. However, living outside of the concepts of sin and eternal damnation allow one to change. I don’t live in fear that I’ll be struck down by some impossible lightning bolt, but rather I can thoughtfully conceptualize the inevitable future inherent in my actions. The freethinker’s philosophy, when bound to truth and rationality, changes as the facts come in. Realizations are allowed to swell into revolutions and are not immediately thrown out because they don’t fit under the capital letters of Commandments or Christ. We all have an innate sense of morality; it is thinking that this comes from outside of ourselves that leads to “immorality”. Restated: we all already know the difference between right and wrong, it is the assumption that they are arbitrarily right and wrong that leads to problems. For example, when a child sees a parent acting in what may be called universal immorality (something that offends virtually everyone), that example becomes a seed for later action because the child is indoctrinated that the Rules are handed down from Authority.


I’ve graduated college once now. Out in this posturing assemblage they call the real-world; trying to make a few dollars and find some solace. If I believed that all that was required of me to have a “successful” life was to follow ten rules, accept some mysterious savior into my life, and breed then I’d be part way there already. An infinitum of rest in the clouds awaits. Upon review, however, I find that this mindset is harmful. We have a civilization that believes the total sum of their significance relies on what happens to their “soul” after they die, fortunately many of the rules that get you into heaven also have a positive or irrelevant affect on the world we live in. But the thought that your presence here is not of significance, that you are not a fundamental (if tiny) particle in the teeming masses is not only careless but indignant. It matters what you do with your life. It matters because every action you are responsible for has externalized consequences. You live in this world, damn it, and having your head in the clouds (literally) fucks everyone else over. Atheism has allowed me to accept that nothing will happen to me when I die. This is my last and only chance, and I had better make it count.


All told, atheism or more simply an unwillingness to accept the belief systems handed to me, has allowed me to transcend the inhibitions and hang-ups that may have plagued my parents or people like them. This is not to downplay their humanity, I love them dearly; but I've found that by questioning assumptions I've gained the freedom to accept the truth when I find it.

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"Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood"

So, I'm often distracted by grand ideas (in length and requisite effort if not potential quality)such that one overlaps the other and every few weeks I find myself planning some protracted novel. Perhaps this is my inability to create neat little capsules of fiction. Below is the a three or four page excerpt of something that I'm currently kicking around . . I think this might end up being a ten page chapter that works as a stand-alone.


Bob and I had driven all day through the water. Passed with the secure herd of a few other tail-lights and destinations, down into scummy, ankle-high brine. Watched the others, no license plates or convenient signs to warn us, pull off onto higher-ground or make U-turns with spraying rooster tails. Bob and I moved like the water; naturally, bound by the same hills. When twilight became actual darkness, we were alone with the whooshing beneath us and the disorientation of our headlights beaming out over the reflection.
I sort of dozed. Considered the claims that if we persevered there was a place we could catch a plane. Bob, moaning in a way I'd learned was the wrath of delirium tremens, stopped the car and swung the door open. He stood in the metallic ding of the running car for a moment, waiting, and finally hurled the last few slugs of dried bagel in his stomach. The water at his feet gushed forward from the momentum of our car, and little whirlpools of salt-water and his vomit spun around his pantlegs.
Somewhere around halfway, we saw the neon smudge of civilization ahead and sighed. The white rip of knuckles on Bob's left hand relaxed and moved to rub his forehead. The place was called Ciro's, written in lit, cursive red. It was a diner, familiar-looking, perched some thirty feet above the road. He wheeled the car into the sloping parking lot without conversation.
There was one customer sitting at the grubby counter, pensively shoveling apple pie into his mouth with one hand and stuttering a drum solo with the fingers of the other. A ruddy waitress, uniformed in a puke green number with black trim, said something to him that thinly veiled her disgust. She turned to us, practically a girl, and asked in her twang if she could “ha'p” us.
We took seats at the counter, at Bob's gesture, and exchanged experienced hellos to the other patron. Me banging the dandruff out of my hat on the flat of my hand. Amber brought us coffee and a nearly invisible cook in the place's nethers waved a spatula at us. It smelled like the docks.
“How much further is the water?” Bob asked, to everyone.
“Fuck if I know,” our neighbor said “I been here almost a month now waiting for goddamn Shevitz to pick my ass up”
“Who's Shevitz?” I asked. Jesus Christ.

“Shevitz is the fucking Jew that stranded me out here in the goddamn ocean without a truck.” He replied, reaching for a cigarette, his grip fierce on the soft-pack.
“Hardly answered the man's question, did'ja Tom?” Amber said, moving to fill our coffee cups, now emptied by one swallow.
“
If you want to know how far the water goes to the south, truth is, I don't really know. It's been here, right in front of the diner, for a coup'a years now. But things changed . . . .”

“Does it get deeper?”

“Not too sure, this time of year. Depends on a lot of things. Only one way to find out . . .”

Bob and I ordered Bacon-Lettuce-Tomato sandwiches with french-fries, though I didn't know how we were going to pay for it. The cook in the back, just white eyes buried in a brown face, looked delighted.

“I tell you what,” said Tom “I'd be half-inclined go with you. But I don't know as I give a shit anymore.” He was smoking now, his second course in a cycle that must have gone on all day.

“We've got to get to Marston.” I said, first declarative out of my mouth in hours. I felt the twist of drying saliva in my throat, pulled my dingy hood up onto my head. “Trying to catch a plane.”

The cook in back laughed, and stopped himself on the heel of his palm. His eyes apologized.

“Don't know if that's going to happen . . not with what I've heard comin' outta Marston.” Amber said.

“Well, we've gotta try.” I say, “No other real options, the way Bob and I see it.”

Tom nods his head, but won't deign to probe our intent. We may be fugitives or refugees, he didn't care. He pulled at his beard a little bit.
“Worth a try, out on the coast you never know.” Tom said. He had settled a bit. I wanted to credit the cigarette; but he looked at me.
Bob was flush, his forehead now tight wrinkles of anticipation. He took a tone livelier then he'd had in days. It had been a rough morning, followed by a trying day, and finally it seemed we might get some rest. He started to tell Tom and Amber the shit we'd slogged through that day, stopped short when he realized they knew the travails better than he and then winced and shielded his eyes from the fluorescent lights with his left hand.
“You alright?” Tom asked. The way a trucker asks another; I saw him saying the same thing to strung-out truckers in slimey South Dakota shower stalls.
“mkay. Just a little woozy. You,” He looked at Amber, cupping his left eye now like it had caught shrapnel. “Wouldn't happen to have any booze, would you?”
“Sorry,” she poured herself coffee, “Tom drank just about all of it in the first week. You need a drink that bad?”
“Yes.” I said, he'd be embarassed to say it himself.
Bob was now rolling his forehead on the cold metal trim around the counter. A dull moan and the word “ . . .libris”. Amber came around to our side of the counter, pulled up a chair to include the three of us, and pulled some items from her apron.

“You want to smoke some of this? Its not booze, but it might keep out the shakes.”

We did. And she broke up a cigarette and mixed a few pinches of brownish marijuana in. The cook gave a little exclamatory. The sizzle of bacon mingling with the pot and the dead fish smell of the sea.

“Frankly, since Tom. You boys are two of the only people we've seen . How many guys came in here the other night Tom?” She began, as though we'd provoked her.

“”s about a week ago Amber, or more. There was three of 'em. Sons of bitches threw us a goddamn pity parade.” Tom had now removed his trucker hat and swiveled his chair around to point his crotch at Amber's head.

Bob moved to scrape a chair across the dirty floor, Amber had stopped mopping more than an arm's reach from the counter. And the cook, a Peruvian I think, walked out with an identical plate in each hand and set them near us. He pulled a chair around to get a seat inside the circle and Amber lit her pregnant joint as the power winked out and wound back up. Bob eyed the sandwich; later he would tell me that he saw maggots writhing inside of it and didn't know if they were real or he was dead. He waited for me to take a bite and dry-heaved once sharply.
Respite often leads perspective by the ear; and as I ate the day's first meal the impetus for all this dragging ourselves along water and Bob's puking his brains out coalesced in my stomach. A warm ball of purpose.

“C'mon Bob, you've got to eat this man. You need something on your stomach.”
“He going to be alright?” Tom asked me, finding something in himself stirring after a long stretch of the same.
“I'll be fine,” Tom said. “It comes in waves, and builds until I can't handle it anymore. I'm going to lay on the floor.” He exhaled and raised the joint for anyone to grab, purposely avoiding eye contact that might terrify him. When he landed on the ground, not delicately but with an “umph”, the sweat ran from his head onto the tile and left a smudge with the texture of his hair.
“What's it like?” Amber asked. “Describe it.”
“He's really better at that sort of thing,” Bob looked at me with one eye, and then back toward the floor. “But it's . .uhh . . the worst hangover of all time. And you see things that make your skin crawl.”

“What are you seeing right now?” Amber asked, the tail end of a hit.
“I'm seein' . . .I'm surrounded by pigeons, and they're mouthing my childhood nickname.”
“Jesus Christ.” Said the Peruvian.
“I'm seeing a . . Tom's battered ex-wife leaning over his shoulder, wafting in his cigarette smoke . .” Bob has his head in his hands, covering his eyes. Tom looks wary, snuffs out the cigarette. But he doesn't say a word.

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Books I Read This Year

Books I've read since the jump (just over 6 months now):

The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken:
Seemingly valid approaches, however impossible in implementation, to the concurrent problems of class warfare, corporate greed and environmental exploitation. I tend to be an advocate of big picture approaches, and here Hawken examines the very root of our daily lives. Reading this book, I came to understand that there is a fundamental flaw to the manner in which we conduct business, and to continually ignore it is to hasten our own collapse.


The Autobiography of Malcolm X:
For me, provided tremendous insight on perhaps the most influential figure in black culture. I had been woefully ignorant of his accomplishments, history and lifestyle and found him to be nothing short of inspirational. A true rebel who found out through daunting trials that the revolution starts within. X went from being, essentially, a street thug (albeit a particularly calculating and skilled one) to being perhaps the most disciplined, hardest-working firebrand of America’s past century. One of very few martyrs in our recent history.


The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil:
A great deal of hubris and self-aggrandizement from an individual just shy of deserving it. Illuminated the facts I needed to argue for something I’ve felt for a long time; that we will inevitably merge with our technology. Were you aware that currently there is a complex, evolutionary algorithm at work somewhere in NYC that is monitoring millions of dollars in investments with an amazing track record? This book is full of ponderous updates on the progress of artificial intelligence.



Waiting For the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee:
Obviously influenced by The Great Wall by Franz Kafka, but chilling nonetheless. There is something inherently surreal about a settlement out on the frontier, waiting to be pounced upon by barbarians, or rather waiting to pounce on noble savages in their midst. This book had some extremely powerful moments; stark, painful, reflection on an Absurdist agony.



Dune by Frank Herbert:
I've already talked about this here



The Silent Cry by Kenzuburo Oe:
Not very good at all. I used to really like Oe.


Collapse by Jared Diamond:
This book provides great context and historical background on why civilizations fail. From Easter Island to the Vikings to modern day China. We live beyond our means, simple as that, and as long as we continue to measure things in purely monetary, short-term units we are destined to fail.


The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme:
Hilarious, beats Samuel Beckett at his own game. The story essentially revolves around the transportation of a quasi-dead, partially mechanical godhead across the countryside. He is at once full of rage and lust and innocence and stupidity. He inspires both awe and pity. Fascinatingly written, but occasionally overwrought in its strangeness.


As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:
I have had this book since I was 16 and then found it too difficult to follow. Now, reading it, I see why Faulkner is considered such a great writer. Nimble and funny. He is capable of making one feel exactly how he wants in the mere architecture of a scene. And the way Darl describes things can make you weep at the timbre of the words on the page. Near the end is, I venture to say, the single best "action" scene in all literature.


(BTW, this is my 100th post. Go me!)

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"Ars longa, vita brevis"

So this was my final paper for poetry class, an interview with myself:

First question, why bother?
Bother writing, or bother getting up in the morning. I’m not sure the first can be answered without referring to the latter. I can’t say writing poetry was something that I wanted to do up until the last couple years. Even now I tend to cringe saying that word: poetry. I always wrote stories, since I was a little kid, and have always found some sort of pleasure or at least temporary satisfaction in creating characters and situations or adapting the events of my life into something of interest. Poetry really came into its own, in my life, while I was at university studying Civil Engineering. I had written poems previously, as a teenager or whatever, but looking back they are vaguely embarrassing. Things you write at that age, no matter how genuine your intent, sound immature. They sound like they have a philosophical latency that requires another half decade of experience at the very least. At university, I found my time was consumed by mathematics, the application of scientific principles, et cetera. I didn’t have a great deal of free time to construct meaningful fictional stories. Poetry became this sort of release that I could indulge in on the margins of my notes. Five or ten lines, hopefully mirroring some of that efficiency that engineering convinced me was crucial for everything . . . .





So, not being a student of liberal arts until recently, would you consider yourself a sort of “outsider” to the literary world?
Not at all. I suppose my literary education has been a bit unconventional. Public education only really scratches the surface of literary studies. So back in high school, and this continued into my college years, I read everything I could get my hands on. While in class we were spending a half-semester on Beowulf I was reading the Beats, Sartre and Camus, Nietzche, Buddha, Henry Miller, Kafka, Hesse. I didn’t delve into poetry headlong the way I did other works, but I was deeply familiar with Ginsberg and Corso and Kerouac’s poetic works. I also tried to familiarize myself with some of the “classics”, Shakespeare and the like. I think I was very well-read and very deliberate in what I read over those years. I’m still very influenced by the work that I came across in my personal studies.

As far as poetic works, what other individual or movement would you say most influences you?
Poetically, I think I can sort of see of certain influences hold some reign over certain aspects of the poetry I write. For example, though I don’t think that my poetry mirrors Kerouac’s strongly I am an advocate of the sort of spontaneity that he emphasized. I used to try and practice that with fiction as well, but the results were not entirely satisfying. As far as the spiritual or cognitive elements that I am trying to provoke, I must say that I try to do what Kafka did. I think there’s this capacity in surrealism to better explain the real world. Or at least make it substantially more interesting.

More interesting in what way?
Well, the movement of surrealism, no matter what anyone else says, originates from the dreamtime. We’ve attached science and psychology and the crafts of various arts to it, but surrealism would be a non-starter, especially for the audience, if we didn’t all have some familiarity with the logic of dreams. What’s interesting about what Kafka did (and this feat was likewise accomplished by Oe and Barthelme), is that he was able to turn the logic of the dream, elements of the dreamtime, and the stunted architecture of dreams into a sort of universal image of our subconscious. He created a sort of mythological environment that played by the rules of dreams and thus indulged in this sort of secret logic that all of us sort of understand. I want to try and create the architecture of the same sort of mythology through the briefest glimpses.

Forget subject matter for a moment, as far as tone. You don’t seem to be afraid to use rhyming or alliteration, what is the motivation there?
I listened to a lot of hip-hop. Listening to hip-hop made me feel like poetry was still vital and was actually important to our culture. Poetry became something other than self-indulgent navel-gazing written by dead people. The power of hip-hop comes from several aspects, but to answer this question, listening to Aesop Rock or The Roots I came to understand the effectiveness of beauty in sound. Whatever experience one is trying to transmit to the audience, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have a beautiful sound. To some extent the opposite is true. However, I think something that sounds beautiful strung together (and this is related to rhythm and rhyme and alliteration and all these other devices) has a much greater chance of burning a hole in a reader or listener’s mind.


When you say “self-indulgent navel-gazing written by dead people”, what exactly are you talking about?
I don’t mean to speak ill of the accomplishments of the proponents of this tradition. What I mean is that poetry became important to me when I realized that it could do something. That what is often considered the “best” poetry often, upon closer inspection, falls apart when you try to determine why its actually important. For example, Ezra Pound had wonderful thoughts on poetry and probably on life in general (I find his biography fascinating), and yet his poetry fails to either dance or make me want anything or imprint any experience on me. I don't even care to know why it fails in these things, it simply does. Contrarily, I would submit that I love William Blake. So who knows.


What is the importance of image, in poetry; or where do you think it falls in the priorities of a poem?
Image is crucial, in that in our understanding of how memory works and how emotive impulses are aroused, we have a strong bond to the visual. In photography, an art form that may have very well been dismissed early on, the power is in the image the photog obtains from the world around them. A powerful photography puts us in that instant and yet universalizes the instant; appeals to a common, or somewhat common, sensibility. Imagery in poetry can work in the same way, though because its textual it is perhaps more difficult to convey an image. Thus in poetry, the thrust isn't accuracy or framing or lighting the thrust is in the delicacy of the diction. There are particular words that strike a chord, much like the image of a child in Bangladesh with a bloated belly strikes us. And a poet has to focus on the essence of that image, to somehow convey what that image conveys in a line or two.

How can poetry stay relevant in our culture, in spite of technological advances that might push it to the margins?
As far as duking it out for a place against film or whatever, poetry doesn't need to “fight back”. It will remain relevant, and I would think perhaps increasingly more relevant, in impoverished nations. It will remain married to modern music as well. I think poetry is such a broad thing; when we don't try and convince ourselves that artistic culture falls into these neat little buckets it will remain relevant as long as we have something to say.

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" . . .and if I don't respect it enough, fffade away it will"

Someone important to me has made a life-changing decision. Decided to forego potential fortune and legacy and comfort to have communion with her own fatal elements. We all know what we want, we've all known it since our earliest years. We spend our lives trying to convince ourself otherwise.

I spent some time last week with a colusses. A tall Irish surgeon who found the thread in his life and followed it until he finally sat drinking tequila with me and blessing the mountains he finally got to call home. He's saved countless lives in his day, raised a dynamic family who genuinely loves each other, made friends with success. He encourages everything. He encouraged even my timidly laid plan for the next few years with a refill to my Don Julio and a serious request to know what I'm reading in class.

Ideas for stories I have neither time or patience for fill my pockets, and as I wait for files to download or the coffee to brew I pull them out and ponder them. Fish for their remnants in my hastily forgotten dreams. Put opening sentences in my mouth to examine their texture, hold them out again in the light to make sure they're solid enough. I make mental notes of nervous tics and always suggest to my comradrie some alternative ending to this thing we call now.

Once or twice each afternoon a car would drive through the ankle-high water, see the lights of Ciro's, unsubmerged, above them and pull up the incline to take a break. Sometimes these drivers would meeerely get out, visor their eyes to the sun, and look south-west down the road at the water as it stretched out before them. Sometimes they would kill the ignition and walk into the restaurant befuddled.

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Poetry Manifesto

I wrote this for class, but I rather like it:
I write things people call poems, first and foremost, out of pure selfish pleasure. And if I didn't know better its likely every line I trailed out would be self-indulgent dreck. Sketches of drug intoxication, or sex, or the time I nearly punched a cop. The impetus, the Neanderthalian urge underneath the artifice and my naive attempts at happiness is the rambling vexation that emerges as I emerge from sleep. I write a lot of things: stories, terse e-mails, technical memorandums that people half read and nod at, invectives toward the government, text messages that mean two or more things. But poetry is how I think in the wee hours bookending my day, and for some squashed 15 minutes throughout when I'm left to my own devices. Often spontaneous, I keep whatever has surprised me and stilled my world for its instant.

And yet the flawed intellectual in me disallows meandering. It scoffs at mere spontaneity spilled out for its own sake. After all the dreams have been distilled, and the swarms of context and image have been wrangled; it all has to mean something. Every time I write a word there's a twinge of pressure and futility. The burden and anonymity of millenia stretched out behind us like entrails from a mortal wound. And yet profundity and enlightenment is no genre, see we've got our Buddhas and our Christs for that. And a poem need not solve world hunger or clothe orphans. It is momentary relief for instinctual anguish, its a lozenge or catalyst with which to understand the simultaneous pain and joy of existence. Poetry is the contradiction of pragmatism and idealism, balanced delicately on the tips of our tongue.

Our language; English, Hindi, the whole mess, utterly fails to explain the unseen 7/10s. It's mere woodblocks of archaic things arranged just so, names for animals and afflictions that hold no weight when unmatched by experience. And poetry is the attempt to convey experience, in the broadest sense. It's an attempt to illuminate the notochord.

This language, kept in tidy, grammar-school boxes, is our Rosetta Stone for the minds of our brethren. Without the placeholders of individual words our meagre understanding of each other would grind to a halt. They are our units of cultural memory, and they have only agricultural as rivals for our most important innovation. They carry us thru life, these words, and yet each one is merely a symbol briefly representing some minuscule component of this ever-changing reality.

But the experience of life demands more than words floating in the ether. Movements of the mind that go unexplained, joyful frustration at the virtually intangible; these things demand new symbols and their complexity requires towering new assemblages of those same grunts and moans we murdered our way out of the caves with. They are all we have.

And just as any Webster entry means some idea or observation, so does Naked Lunch and hip-hop and Zarathustra. Some things in the human experience are so complex, so subtle in their relevance and so difficult to elucidate that we must write Finnegan's Wake, Some require a single sentence with only the most tenuous relationship. Some require us to scream from our rooftops. Poetry, not merely our codec for the submerged, is also our means for communicating the uncommunicable.

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Honesty, Hormones, Humanity

Over cold black coffee,
I learned to talk less.
Learned to pace floors in warpath.
And how to pass polygraphs.
A shoe with a thumbtack.

By apathy newscast,
I'm servile as a eunuch,
A tendril of raw wonder,
smashed before I knew it

There is a reasonable debate, in my mind, over the necessity of truth in writing. I am of the belief that, for the sake of the art, any fabrication is acceptable. That is, I never learned to pass a polygraph, however as a metaphor this statement fits some calloused groove of how I've felt about life over the past few years. I've learned to lie for the sake of personal freedom or in defiance of authority. It's a declaration that I find it acceptable to lie to the institutions that loom large over our lives.

My life has been interesting, I don't know if it would inspire good film as of yet; but as a writer I see moments where it might have been more conspicuous, more meaningful. Hypotheticals that may have revealed a greater truth about the microverse we inhabit, possibilities riding the coat-tails of actual events that speak more succintly about what the event really meant. Chronological manipulation that says more about the architecture of my experience than a strict, wholly factual diagram ever could. And think of life, is it merely the events that mattered? Or the what-ifs, the possibilities, the longing for unlikely returns and separations, the way a dream trickled into consciousness until it became the lens you viewed life through. Truth, cold empirical facts, have their value in the sciences, in politics, in the courtroom; and it is here where anything else represents corruption. But in trying to transcribe the caterwauling human experience into a single tome, or a few lines of verse, the "truth" is far less important than commitment to reality. I make things up when I write, but in an effort to pull back the curtain further. And never to conceal. That being said, an attempt to glean a factual understanding of the events in my life via this blog or online writings may prove futile. And in fact, I'm considering a partitioning of my online posts between this and myspace. The former for topical and "artistic" endeavors or musings, the latter for personalized ("true") accounts . Of course, these buckets may not be clear-cut and I won't be scratching my chin thinking how I can fulfill some obligation that I haven't outlined in black marker.

Keep it real out there.

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The Funniest Thing that's happened all year . . .

It's got to be tough to live a lie. Spending any brief moment of inactivity sweating over indiscretions, bartering with the almighty to keep your hideous secret to yourself. In every public gesture knowing full well that your artifice is a sham.


Ted Haggard, champion of Evangelism, pariah of born-agains, Creationists, political activist and ally of the pious and moral (I can't say that with a straight face) president, is a gay man who has struggled with his sexual identity and impulses for all of his adult life. He also may have a drug problem. I know gay people and I know drug addicts; the former having no adjective that fits them all and the latter being a pitiable sort. A reasonable person, especially one who's life is devoted to forgiveness, should see nothing wrong with homosexuality and at worst extend a helping hand to the drug addict. Haggard, on the other hand, has been stamping his brand of moral rectitude all over our culture with a self-hatred that he could seemingly only extinguish be distributing amongst others like him. While not the most hard-line homophobe in charge of a church, he held office with the National Association of Evangelicals (a body representing the tilted ideology that favors legislation like the marriage amendment), he lobbied against gay rights, he belittled Richard Dawkins for arrogance. Think of that, a hypocritical, irrational preacher with political influence and a history of secret homosexual rendezvous with prostitutes telling a man of science that he is arrogant.
As a human being, Haggard deserves our sympathies during this difficult time. However, as an idea (and a man who heads a mega-church and presided over an organization representing millions is more an idea than a man) he needs to be exposed and ridiculed. Not for being a gay man and not for being a drug addict. But for being an asshole who hates himself so much that he won't be satisfied until you hate yourself. For dragging our culture further into confusion and denial. For working in direct opposition to the forces that could have liberated him from his life of fear.

Moreso than the event itself, I'm piqued by what this all means for religion. Obviously it says little about the truth or implausibility of religion; but what does it say about our culture of religion. What are we, rational thinkers and people trying to do our best, to make of posturing, self-important "prophets" when it is learned that they are in fact their own worst enemy?

My impression of these events reinforces what I already thought. The puritanical religious tendency (that is, the impulse to push one's morality onto others) is bred in fear. Fear of oneself and the misplaced reaction toward the masses. What's most perplexing and troubling about these revelations, these particular ones and those uncovered in the past, is that Ted Haggard is still sticking to his guns. Homosexuality is still "wrong" to him, and he refers to the mess as a deep, dark sin. I disagree. The "sin" is that we live in a society, perpetuated by cowards like Ted Haggard, in which we have to hate ourselves for being ourselves.

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Nausea

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable"
-JFK

Good Night and Good Luck. I'm humiliated to be an American citizen, and the next educational institute I join will be in another country.

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"Told the truth to get what I want, but shot it with no shame"

In order to maintain some sense of propriety and not reveal the fact that I’m actually a raving lunatic, atheist and struggling artist, I am taking an exam called the Engineer-in-Training. People in my field take it so that they can grow up to be professional engineers and advance their careers through a serious of bureaucratic hoops, none of which are particularly relevant to where I want to be a decade from now. I’ve finally convinced myself that if I am going to take this exam and thus began the tyrannical onslaught of studying the same shit that gave me nightmares not so long ago, I'm going to teach it a thing or two. After a couple weeks of ruining sleep, annoying passers-by, screaming expletives out into our suburban neighborhood, compromising fragile relationships and virtually forgetting the Word I will be prepared to sit in a room with a few dozen other preening Gentiles and give ‘er a go. The fact that this test is one of the expectations required by the program I’ve decided to undertake does not escape me. Even still, my hatred for the role of this nonsense in my life has me vicious, bloodthirsty, willing to sacrifice sanity in order to bury this ridiculous “test” of my completely unused skills in a shallow grave. Somewhere that wild animals can get to it. I'm good at my job and this proves nothing.

It’s not that I mind hardwork, see, I just feel like I’ve given enough. This is supposed to be my time, and it is being compromised. This exam, more than anything, has made me realize that I must escape this function in society or I will not survive it. I’m pregnant with literature and corporate America does not offer maternity leave.

On that note, I’m feeling the affect of taking two classes on early Saturday morning, usually still hung-over and sweaty from the bad behavior of Friday evening. My poetry professor looks me in the eyes when he talks and criticizes the smallest increment of my writing, the same flaws he completely overlooks amongst everyone else.

Some poor soul, the vibrant hatchling of pure brilliance, has decided that I might be worth a shot after all; the entire arrangement buttressed with disclaimers that she merely brushes off. We've read the same books in seperate time zones and batter our way through life in full contest of astrological phenomenon that we share a birthdate. The argument may be that nothing has changed, but I'm starting to feel as though I might actually exist here.

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" '97 I blacked out, who's been paying all my rent?"

Phone's been in the shop for a week or so, sorry if you've been trying to get ahold of my lazy ass. Shouldn't be a problem from here on out.

So it seems like every week they've got me holed up in some hotel room, feigning expertise and hiding my buzz. Tonight I'm in the SLC soaking up nothing, last night I walked around Boise with this girl in the smiling visage of the full moon. This girl, man. I hope I can stay in Boise for a couple weeks straight upon my return. I'm getting the urge these days to stay up late and ride my bike home in the frost and dark, hints of orange sunrise just out of view. When I make it home I write poems about the promised land and the indistinct nature of the truth, immediately casting them into the trash for the CIA to find. There's something about those moments.

I drove across some beautiful country today, by myself, listening to Kool Keith and thinking up ridiculous stories. Characters and places and events, boiling in a microcosm that somehow explains the surreal world we live in. Simple symbols for something inexplicably complex. At every kink realizing that the truth is far stranger than any fiction I could create.

I'm simultaneously reading the "Autobiography of Malcolm X", "Invitation to a Beheading" by Nabokov, and "The Extended Phenotype" by Dawkins. I have dreams about doing bong hits with the writers in a parking garage. They agree on everything and when I wake up I realize that the revolution will in fact be on television, but it will not arrive as some pedantic telethon, but rather in a multifarious rush of conflicting truths. Crackheads executing senators, scientists escaping in pods, shamans astral projecting to somewhere with more readily available opium.

The answer is none of the above, if someone asks, because we haven't even figured out the right question yet.

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"I'm from the D, I got a whole lotta game"

-Having money is less fun than being broke.

-Current events give me the feeling that I will serve jailtime before I die. Possibly without habeas corpus and without a warrant.

-I am in the least trusted minority in this country

That is all. Sometimes bullet points get across the point better than prolonged paragraphs. Here's a poem I wrote for class:

Pilgrims with mental cases
stage patient take-overs of
radio stations and banks.
No thanks to impotent rage
heaped upon foreign threats.
Locked doors fail to prevent
inside jobs with domestic intent.

I'm waiting for a tsunami
to splinter Our stilted house.
And fill Our condoes of coincidence
with the filth we've trickled out.
My advice? Post-incident
lay amongst the drowned,
recall your fatal instincts
and hide valuables in your mouth.

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Goosebumps

For whatever reason, when I read this story it reminds me of the value of human life and gives me hope for the future.

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Neural nets and the delicate nature of reality

Assuming for a second that this philosophical enjoyable concept, delivered to us by the mystery of quantum mechanics, that observation gives shape to events and characteristics from their former amorphous cloud of potentiality, is true. That something only really becomes factual when observed by living things or the measuring devices they've developed. Now, of course, this isn't the whole truth, but on the subatomic scale there may be no better way to explain it.

With that stated, let's extend this understanding of how things work into the larger sphere and postulate that you and I and all this rest of us are shaping reality via sensory input. What this means is that our lives serve as the interface between possibility and what actually happens. Some theories of quantum physics state that there are an infinitum of dimensions, one for each possiblity (down to the subatomic level). If observation settles this reality in this dimension, then our ability to observe is a key component in the construction of this universe.

OK. So consider observation. If I see something happen, literally anything, what does it mean if I keep it to myself? It becomes part of a micro-reality that exists for me within the larger sphere. It does not detract from the truth or illusion of it. By keeping this to myself, it still happens but what is the event's relevance to the larger sphere of reality? That is what is meant by the "if a tree falls . . ." koan.

What I'm coming to is that I believe that symbolic expression, beginning with cave drawings and eventually leading to the written and spoken word, and all other arts along with the practices it made possible such as the sciences and politics, allows these micro-realities to be networked in a manner that creates a more cohesive fabric. Consider this: human beings have a long and illustrious history. However, up until the point that we were actually able to manipulate elements of our environment with symbolic logic virtually everything about us is unknown. There are literally a cloud of possibilities for what may have happened in those times, narrowed down only by our ability to interpret left-overs, in metaphor just like the swirling potentia of the electron as it exists "somewhere" around the nucleus.

As language began to develop the possibilities began to narrow. Suddenly we know things about ourselves in ways that would have been impossible previously, because our technology has allowed us greater exposure to the observations of one another and managed to mark them "outside of time" (not chronology, but the possibilities for some particular characteristic for some previous time X have been reduced to one).

What's interesting about this reality we've created is that the actual "truth", what holds up under the most difficult scrutiny, can become irrelevant and limp in the face of the "truth" our Reality has co-opted. For instance, consider the fact that the belief in God is widespread. Under close scrutiny the operational definitions of god (those most of the world uses to carry out their daily lives) falls apart. However, the fact that this component of the reality we've created is so strongly reinforced by affirming communication (i.e. the relay of observations through symbolic language) that it is a force to reckon with. Whether or not god exists, he exists socio-politically and any entity who wishes to make some change to Reality must deal with it. In politics we often find smaller cases, for instance the "truth" that the media decides to operate under often becomes more important to the unfolding of events than what would actually be the "truth" under a higher scrutiny (here scrutiny representing essentially more calculated observations and more comprehensive expression with symbolic language).


What's more startling to me than the above observation (and that statement almost feels like a pun at this point) is that if we are to carry this metaphor of observation=reality out from the atom and apply it, making rational decisions about the relationship of components on that scale to components on this scale (i.e. the precise location of an electron=the precise date of birth of an individual or something along those lines), then the question must be asked "If we never learned to speak, could we be sure we even existed?"


I'm dying for some intelligent conversation, so if this spurred any thought in your head, please share.

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My fellow Romans

The cinema of me sitting
on a hotel bed.
Lights out. Televised national event.
Thinking of what I'll say
at Tuesday's city council meeting.
Dreaming of molotov cocktails
and seeking the contrails
and epiphanies of my youth.
Red-eyed at a failed institute.

Something changed inside of me last night.
On official business I took spare time to wander around this strange town I found myself in. In the dark. In the rain. I scrambled up a privately-owned foothill, smoked my smoke, and looked down at the past. Seeing still-burning memories in the way puddles caught streetlights. Felt the burn of lost love in the curve of the road away from me. Remembered that I once felt some terminal connection to the Fatal Elements. That I once knew inter-dimensional travelers by name. That I once changed everything within my sphere, and then did it again.

I returned to my room, high on contradictions and clean of history. Falling out of my clothes in anticipation that I'd shortly write the greatest sentence of my life. And I did. And I can't share it because it was only meant for me.

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Madness, Mythology, Morality

It hardly needs to be said that we live in interesting times, compared to the past we cannot say definitively whether today's madness exceeds that of any past generation but I believe we can comment on the potential for worldwide consequence to localized mistakes. We are far more capable of fucking up everything than we have ever been before. I posit that developments in virtually every relevant arena suggest a shift towards a new Dark Age in our consciousness, despite the fact that many individuals and truth-seekers have fought so hard to maintain the loftiest of trajectories. Such a claim can not go unsupported, and so here I detail the evidence:

We, at least in the US, are growing more stupid and we're proud of it.



We are, in fact, less likely to trust our goverment and it's becoming
more difficult to do anything about it.


Our government is practically run by oil companies with no long-term plans for what happens when we run out. This while energy consumption and population around the world skyrockets.

Our media is in the hands of relatively few corporations, many with political interests or motivation to sell you crap. For this and other reasons the media has been uncharacteristically and detrimentally easy on the current administration

We live in a "free country" that has a higher proportion of its population in jail than any other nation on earth.

Take a look at the way we divide federal money. We spend over half of our money on the military, paying off debt (frustrating in light of the Clinton-era surplus) and funding a corrupt and inefficient healthcare system. Very little of our dollars goes towards education.

I could go on and on about these sorts of things, but in truth we are all already quite familiar with them. I do not propose any solution, but I'm mad as hell. I'm embarrassed that we've mucked things up so badly and further humiliated that we seem to be doing very little about it.

I would argue that our social consciousness has failed us. For a multitude of reasons we seem to look the other way. In a compartmentalized society I suppose its easy to assume that the job of administering the human experience must belong to someone else because our parents and bosses never suggested we do anything about it.

It occurs to me that, while all of these problems are worth working on individually, there will never really be any change without a revision to the social consciousness and a return of responsibility to the individual. To my mind, the only way to do this is through the increased efficiency of the transmission of ideas. More effective art, systemic encouragement of new ideas, and motivators other than the broken system of capitalism that go us into this mess.

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"If you ain't saying nothing you the system's accomplice"

As mentioned in the previous post, I've presented my first piece of writing to workshop. It was a modified version of a poem you can read in the aforementioned post as well.
The reaction was positive all around. The girl that has something negative to say about everyone's work seemed to really like it. The out of place (look who's talking) guy who never says anything talked for several minutes about it and actually starting talking about his personal life. He thought the frustration and impatience I expressed in it were particularly poignant. The professor, contrary to his normal MO, went around the room asking every student what they thought of it (usually he simply allows the conversation to arise organically). He also changed our reading assignment after discussing my poem because he thought we were ready for "poems that are about ideas". This was all very encouraging to me, and I'm starting to feel like I'm doing the right thing.
I volunteered to be the first person to present material for workshop in my fiction class as well. So we'll see how that goes.

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I've often said, to myself at the very least, that I feel my morality and sensibility was informed more by Nietzche and the Buddha than my father. As such I know the value of plucking attachments from your wings and I know to expect agonizing loneliness when you try to do what your soul is urging. I'll stop short of saying I wish I never moved here and leave it at the statement that I'm not sure what I'm doing here. There is no time for remorse. But I will admit one thing to a sympathetic audience: I'm lonely as hell. I'm shoring up strength, finally, but the last few weeks have been difficult.

I've had two full days of class now. A radical transition from both my previous idle weekends and my last academic foray. I share the room now with a mixed bag of objectives, people who think differently than me and young professors who did what I should have. I am honestly trying to connnect with them. I submit my first piece of writing, a poem, for critique this coming Saturday. You can read it below:

Feel the fade into existence
as one thinks of
wasted time in patience.
A phalanx of idle listeneres,
an overreaching blanket statement.

Every bureau drawer
another form to prove statistics
or unexplored foreign soil
dismissed as overly simplistic.

And everywhere I go
I get the sense I've barely missed it.

I'll say only one thing for it, that its very different from things anyone has submitted so far.



I'm looking for a group or organization to join to either somehow contribute to this community or at the very least feel like I'm part of it. And yet, it seems audacious for me, an alien, to get involved in politics. Every charity is operated out of a church, and the Idaho Athiests have limited their activities to cleaning up trash along one short stretch of road. Boise State has nary a single organization that piques my interest. If anyone has any advice at seeking these kinds of opportunities out, I would appreciate it.

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"Dog, I was having nervous breakdowns, Like 'Man - these niggaz that much better than me?' "

There's no one to share this moment with. I've got a picture of James Joyce by me, and Darwin, and Muhammed Ali, and Kerouac. They don't talk much, but they're a constant reminder of what's possible with courage and an open mind. Tommorrow I'm going to pop a bottle of champagne, by myself, and listen to Manu Chao. Pumping my fist or jumping in the air once for every time I lost my nerve and found it again. I know going back to school isn't some final victory, I've really only made it to the trailhead, but I think it was Talib Kwali who said "If you don't celebrate then there's no reason to fight". There's a PhD somewhere up ahead, and I'll be drinking champagne then too.

I'm fresh out of the college of engineering, something I was never enthusiastic about. I could posit a thousand reasons on why I chose that path, but I'm not ashamed to say I wanted financial freedom. You see, I spent most of my formative years a slave to small debts, my main benefactor lording every benefit over me. The constant bug in my ear about failure and the cost of living. I rebelled as much as I could, ending up in the back of cop cars and the like, and that bug started telling me that I had become a failure. You might say I did all this, worked my ass off to be an engineer, to prove that voice wrong. I'm not greedy and all my money goes to the mission, but I make more money than the cop that jabbed me with his night stick now. I make more money than these adult bullies who told me I was nothing 4 years ago. Money is one language those people understand, and if you listen really close mine says "Fuck You".


But I digress. I'm going back to school now. To get a degree in something I've been practicing since I can remember. When I moved out of the suburbs my mom showed me a story I had written on construction paper with crayon when I couldn't have been older than 6 or 7. I've done a lot of things in my life: made a lot of friends, changed a lot of minds, earned the love of a great person, gained a lot of knowledge. But maybe my personal favorite accomplishment is what I'm going to set my alarm for tommorrow. I made it mom, I can do whatever I want now. And I'm happy. I hope you're proud of me.

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To a giant, a torchbearer, a friend

JKS:

What is brilliance? Really? There's this assumption amongst those of us who are not brilliant that those endowed with this adjective ar the "lucky" ones. Our time together together forces me to scoff at this claim. Brilliance is not luck in any sense of the word. I do not mean that this quality has no genetic foundations, but that it is enflamed by a choice in life. A smart man chooses to be brilliant when he seeks to understand himself fully and further to crystallize this awareness with a perspiration that extends beyond mere work. Brilliance, I learned from you, is not a state of being; it is a lifestyle, a relentless pursuit of individual, and eventually universal, truth. It is, I dare say, a religion dedicated to the power of the mind.

Just as well, brilliance is not analogous to hitting some ephemeral jackpot. It ensurs a life of demands, of burdens, of late nights alone and tired. It is not easy. In this way it seems offensive to call your "fortune" mere luck. It was neither simply given to you nor shall it lead to a life a blissful comfort. If it were not for individuals such as yourself, we would still be picking bugs from one another's hair. WE are the lucky ones, your brilliance is a gift to US. Above all I am grateful for your existence, and reflect on our mutual influence as a point of great pride.

I, as you well recall, entered your world. I elbowed myself some room in a fellaheen cavern your particular band of suburbanites had claimed in the 'hood. Itching for acceptance, opportunistic, giddy at the chance to prove myself amongst a group that demanded so much from its members. Confident that I had something to offer in the way of a philosophy or an edict or at least some diasporic drum to beat as we fought off crackheads and swilled cheap beer. I wound up on the winning end, even with respect to your commentary, I feel I derived so much more from the experience than I contributed. I am who I am today because of my two years spent maximizing potential with you and your community.

People's fondest memories are often of cliched events that occur to one degree or another in everyone's life. Marriage, the birth of children, graduation from college (hold on, I'll come back to that one). Many of my fondest memories, and granted they are not all crystal clear, are of half-intoxicated conversations with yourself about the fundamental truths of life. We dug as deep as two young men could some of those nights, and although we were seldom unaided, I credit your relentlessness, your wit, and your disdain for convention. We left few stones unturned in those days, and even now as I come across new ones I question what your opinion might be. I have come, in my cynicism, to eschew what others might do; you being the sole exception.

There was always the sense that the chaos we held in our hands during those times was far too instable, far too beautiful to maintain itself. That there'd be some inevitable explosion sending many of us to far-flung lands to spread this vague and powerful gospel. It has indeed happened in the blink of an eye, and I attest that we're all gradually becoming the people we really are.

I can't say I was stridently criticized, but I've always felt the implication that I was too serious in my opinions and ambitions. Our friendship, based on an understanding steeped in the sort of all-encompassing scope I've always tried to think in, showed me an example that contradicted this creeping feeling. The most successful individual I knew was likewise one of the few individuals I felt matched or exceeded my seriousness. We all spend our lives trying to ignore the future, thus it is so rare too find someone simultaneously living ahead of us and thriving in this time. Your nod of approval to the occasional thing I've done has been more encouraging then the heaviest of compliments.

We'll keep in touch, on the fringes between doing our thing. Providing one another reports on the successes we're having, the ignorance we struggle with, the brand new things we create. So much is expected of you, sir, that the burden must be nearly overwhelming. I know that this is your optimal environment. There is not option of failure, it's not even mentioned; The question is how high will you fly? I expect nothing but the utmost, and in fact I think we may be doomed without it.

_________________________________________________________

As an aside and an afterthought I wanted to bring up a tiny little story from our recent past. Do you recall graduation day? The bullshit ceremony with self-entitle foreigners disrupting a half-assed ceremony. Remember how we took our families to dinner together, our folks with nothing to say to one another? There was a hugely symbolic moment there, somewhere between fending off a desperate crackhead while our parents tried to snap pictures and returning from yet another ceremony to wax in the sunlight and pack a celebratory bong. This may be a cliched event, but there was nothing stereotypical about that day or a million others. I will never forget it.

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Singularity, Sustainability, and Standardization

There was a time when a Saturday night spent alone bothered me. When I felt that it somehow relflected on my social health or my adherence to Their System. Weekends served as the requisite balance of a week in "the shit" as a veteran might say. With both a moderately stressful job and the constant spectre of academics I frequently felt inclined to rampage around the confines of my living room and stamp out all my frustration.

Things now are different. My job is not stressful and the only negative aspect presently is that it consumes too much of my day. School is just beginning, but as I'm diving into it with an enthusiam unprecedented in my academic career I welcome all manner of burdens. This evening I selected to stay out of the fray. I wanted to stay home and read and collect my head. Think about the singularity and how to cut through the obstacles that hamper us. Think about how to do something as new as possible. Think about the shimmering future.

I'm reading a book called The Ecology of Commerce, something I'd recommend to anyone. It poses an argument that may have once seemed intolerably hippy-esque, and yet is conceptualized in such a way that I believe it would make an impression on even hardened business men. (In fact it has, see this documentary http://throwawayyourtv.com/2006/08/corporation.html ) It does not inveigh capitalism or suggest a impractical return to Adamite communal living. The author in fact extolls the value of capitalism because he feels that it has often led to innovation and that it more closely aligns with human nature. He believes the concept must be extrapolated, however, to be more about the total value of a good or service handled in commerce. We, via the tools of business, are stripping the planet of resources at an alarming rate, this is undisputed, but what is interesting is the offset of costs from the importer to the exporter. America has relatively high environmental standards, for example, but that's merely because we can push off all of our nastiest work onto another country. His essential point is that our consumer culture, because it represents the resources we obtain from the earth and the energy/materials etc that we return to it, represent our ecological footprint. And that without a sense of balance in this we are bound, in reality by proven scientific concepts in the fields of biology and ecology, to destroy ourselves. The eventual penalty for causing an imbalance in our fragile ecosystem may take generations to play out, and in fact it may already be to late to convert to sustainability.

What I find most interesting about this book so far is that he almost shrugs off the modern environmentalist movement. Well-intentioned, he thinks, but trying to put out such small fires that it really accomplishes very little. The author's solution to this is hopefully forthcoming, but at some point I think it becomes consumer choice. What kinds of products does one buy? How much energy does one consume? The thought occurs to me that we have a very difficult time even obtaining those sorts of metrics. Sure, we can ride a bike to work instead of drive a car, but how much energy is consumed to produce the sandwich we eat at lunch. How much energy (and I'm not talking simply fossil fuels here but total energy, a portion of the limited amount the sun has showered us with over the last few billion years) is behind me typing this sentence?

The first step a government could take in such an effort would be to somehow standardize a unit that represents energy requirement for production. It could be made up of pre-defined categories. For example a value per unit weight for transportation, a couple appropriate typical values for agricultural products by unit weight (meat would have one, wheat another, etc), a energy per unit weight for other materials (plastic, metal, wood, rubber, etc). Essentially come up with a list of values that covers as much as possible, fairly generally. Then, require manfacturers to include the actual cost of things, in this sense, on their label. Since all the values are predefined the manufacturer simply has to enter data about his product into a spreadsheet and have it spit out the overall energy value. Even better, with the increasing power of computers you could stratify energy costs by geography or other variables.

Something similar to this could also be established for pollution.

Would this work? I have no idea. It would be hard to implement of course, but then again we have nutritional facts on virtually all of our food and that doesn't seem to be breaking the banks of the government or food manufacturers, but who knows? What is for certain is that consumer choice will not be as powerful as it can be until consumers have the facts available to them to make a choice. What is also for certain is that we are a democracy and as nation spend an ungodly amount of money, so if we demanded this it would eventually happen. Think big business would go for it?

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Pro-gress

I've crossed something of a threshold. I've written just about 70 pages on my book and, as I predicted, my thoughts on things have changed significantly. I'm actually fairly happy with the way it has turned out thus far and the storyline seems to have become stronger as I add elements or modify things along the way. These subtle changes, however, have led up to the need for a serious re-thinking of the book. It has in no way been killed, but I now need to find a way to artfully shoehorn new "things" into it. I'm going here this weekend to breathe some fresh air and think about it and read through it several times. If anyone is bored and would like to read it (I would say a full read-through might take something like an hour and a half) and give me some constructive critique I would be eternally grateful. Let me know and I can e-mail the whole thing in a PDF or something.

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Safe in Heaven Dead

I saw a documentary on Kerouac last night that painted him in a way I had never quite seen. Or perhaps my opinion of the man and his work has matured out of adoration to genuine analysis and critique. Reviewing some of his words, I still find them uplifting in the most profound way something can be. Exuberant in joy to the point of suffering for it, post-modern anguish to the point of joy.

What I saw in him, and heard from those who knew him and some that were around when the cultural bomb of On the Road came out, was that he held in his hands the dual traumas of wanting nothing more in life than to be taken seriously as a writer and the refusal to accept convention. He could, say his contemporaries, "write in any style you want". He choose to write exactly what he wanted with no capitulation to expectancy or form.

His slide into the alcoholism that would eventually contribute to his death was a result of his impossible success. He was trying to kill himself the only way a good Catholic can. There was nothing left to do.

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Eccentric Crackheads and Moss-Covered Statues

Wheel freely if not
in the name of speakeasies.
Repping self-same
hands dealt over the buzz
the crowd felt.

Be numbed by divine wealth for
how seldom we sell
grand stories to ourselves.
Crumbled statues of Luke and of Matthew,
pelted the path you will
follow, for the way is
no longer circuituous and black
and no longer deemed foolish is it to laugh,

---

Without recourse,
battle-hardened conquistadors
crashed faces, razed planted acres
and destroyed more than mere
stories on paper.

Erected billboards to
celebrate heroics, but now
the gummint owes to
an ill-formed corp. Known for
broadcasting secrets in the form
of Agnostic preaching.
Its like we can't even keep
this war from reaching the people.
The truth leaks thru holes,
that we can't even see thru.

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Practical Ways to Prepare for the Coming Resource-Apocalypse

It has in fact arisen several times in casual conversation at work. The looming possiblity that the fossil fuels we depend on for every single component of our lives may run out. Or, comically more tragic, we will destroy ourselves in efforts to obtain more by the barrel of our guns.

Its common consensus among the well-educated in our society, even moreso as one flees the bloated corspes of the manufacturing industry in the midwest, that a gradual shift towards alternative fuels (including nuclear) could have saved us. Especially if it had been initiated 20 years ago.

While I like to believe that we will find some solution to this problem in the very short term, the optimist in me blanches at the horrors the realist describes. Every aspect of our life is dependent on petroleum. Our personal vehicles run on them, our goods are shipped in diesel-burning trucks, nearly everything we touch is made from polycarbonates. And there is evidence that the stuff is running out, or at least running dry in the areas that we've been getting it for a generation or more. Some experts predict that, with the development of China, we could see critical depletion before the end of our lives without a sharp turn towards consciousness.

I don't intend to pose any radical solutions, though I've heard of many and could make a case for a brighter future. I am currently much more interested in the shift in the human dynamic that would occur as a result of this. Indeed, it is a problem overwhelmingly nebulous in nature. What would the circumstances be? How gradual of a shift? What would the stages of societal change be, and how would one affect the next? What other global problems will complicate matters?

In America at least, we could expect a gradual increase in prices. There would be further outcry from the public, of course, efforts to further develop doomed energy infrastructures such as hydrogen, revisions to gas taxes, hopefully a consumer demand for more efficient vehicles. The costs of all goods would increase in proportion to this increase in gas costs. It will begin to cost more to fly. I think it would take a long time before the cost of plastics became noticeable, but I guarantee in this scenario you would eventually see the price per pound of plastic as an international consensus on value much like gold or silver now.

Within America's borders we would see an increased striation between the haves and the have-nots. Certain individuals would be able to carry on "normal" lives for extended periods of time. Being able to finance not only fuel costs but the purchase of alternative fuel machinery. A political conspiracist might argue that the cost of any machinery using alternative fuels may be kept prohibitively high. I don't know if I would make such a claim or not.

Enough pressure in this situation (add global pandemic of your choice whether it be AIDs, global warming, population, pollution, the fallout of nuclear war) and the breeding ground for revolution is created. It seems that uprisings occur when one nation (say the US) is so divided in measurable terms that it becomes two unique entities. Those with resources and those without.

What an exciting time to live in, I have to admit. Not that I would look forward to warfare on our streets. But to experience such a monument in human history, to have it all (as a society) and lose it because we couldn't see the writing on the wall. We would have to bear responsibility; all of us. And admit that, in reality, we maybe didn't deserve this fantastic world we created for ourselves.

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All Systems Go

The last remnants of measurable contact with the home planet are fading, I'll grant that. The last qualified arrangements with labels in booktitle English have permanently switched to default, ordinary. If I ever belonged to some sprawling empire, or postmodern tribe (pick your metaphor) my membership card is becoming gradually invalid. There are still vibrant communications, still sounding boards that I test my illusions on, still drinking partners that I couldn't be more excited to talk to. But things are drastically different now. I'm in the interzone between that glorious configuration of time and space ; poised and ready to paint the world I now live in bright orange. Filling out the preliminary paperwork to leave a streak across the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps my number has finally been called.

We made a decision that was for the best, her and I. And I think whatever temporary dream we posted was merely our attempt to return some normalcy and familiarity to the daunting and fluctuating present. We've thought better of it; practically grown-ups now with teeth-gritting resolve to do what is in our best interest. Willing to cast our seeds into the wind, yes, but only once we're confident that they will take root. The best of luck to us both.

I have a new influence in my life; and its difficult to believe it has sought me out so diligently. They provide perspective for this "thing" that I'm doing. A role model for levity, a critical ear, a notice that this life is in fact wide open. I expect nothing out of it and thus am pleasantly surprised. I plan nothing for it, and thus get everything I want plus more. If I've learned anything its the value of steering impulse; that is the beauty inherent in spontaneity and the cold thrill of gambling on hints and flutters. Oh life.

I haven't met my summer challenge, purposely defined as overly aggressive and mind-numbing. Not that I made no attempt, or am even truly giving in now; but I learned a great deal in this summer. Made changes organically within myself at a rate I never thought possible. Learned that I will never write the GAN until I accept the dual traumas that I can and that I'm not yet ready. Perhaps this is a time to experiment and learn, what I might call research and development, rather than a time to shift into full production. I have so much to learn about the Word, and its coming to me in an incremental ecstasy. Besides, what one writes is made up of the chaos and beauty of their life; elements stifled by long nights in the basement. Although there have been a great deal of those as well.

That being said, I still am working fairly diligently on my novel. Its making more sense now, and less sense. Its being crowded out by other inspirations, by poetry, by the unbelievably humbling novels that I am reading. And admittedly by the successes I am having professionally and socially. But its never far from my mind, and what's more I'm finally beginning to feel qualified to speak on these themes.

Defunct priority set
for a priori fretting 'bout death
Disregard dishonor like poker
players laying bets.
Accept a far-flung concept of courage,
though the internal workings
proved inept at best.
These are the presets for
descent living in the US.
These are the meaningless jabs
at getting ahead.
These are the demons I think of
lying in bed.

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lucidity

I had a lucid dream last night or early this morning. A persuasive vignette of a gauzy afternoon in my own living space. Laughs in extended echoes that recalled childhood discipline like boards of Canada introductions. A burbling fugue pushing up a mound of sand as evidence for its presence. A conversation with familiars that was anything but, and a sudden impulse to see what time it was.

The scene lacked something, or rather held some surrealistic quality that dispersed me haphazardly across a tightly scheduled calendar, and bound me in the vagaries of sunlight in midsummer. The clock, identical in construction to the one I regularly reference, displayed a dynamic and nonsensical barrage of images. I knew then that I was asleep downstairs, and I resolved to check in on myself. There was no fabled ability to fly, no ability to conjure fantastic animals or part bodies of water. Perhaps I could have done these things, however I found myself lacking in grand ideas or even the leftover brain wattage to muse creatively. I was intently focused on holding together the small universe that I knew existed only in the confines of electro-chemical mechanisms. Whole rooms constructed elementally and organically within my memory that showed no flaw simply because it would be impossible for me to recognize. I had to go see myself.

The dream ended when I made it to my room and flicked on the light. I think my brain may have been unable to deal with the implicit paradox I was about to create. I woke for a brief second and then fell back into a nightmarish vision, filtered in red, of urbanized hillbillies and their retarded spawn. I'll save the details.

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The Tiva has Landed

At first she was a little uneasy . . . .




Then she hid for a little while . . . .



But she finally came around and seems to like it here . . .

I'll take good care of her, I promise.

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Gutteral, godless, gone

I hesitate to post this, because I can't give it much context. All I can say is that it belongs in the same larger piece as this.


They rode 6 deep in the van; noxious vapors trailing behind their dilapidated conveyance as they shuttled along the canal. The driver, Umberto, was an immigrant with no allegiance to any system but Umberto’s; he was in it for the scant 50 pieces a week it afforded him. Riding shotgun was the nameless elder statesman of the revolutionaries and former chief of the Palanq tribe; his 90 year-old eyes looked out over the dashboard in anticipation. A faded black tattoo snaked up his neck to his ear. Between them Charlie, a scar-faced teenager and former speed junkie, racked the chamber on a Kalashnikov and signaled back to the twins for ammunition. The Ignatio twins, olive-skinned and battle hardened, took a pause from smoking exaggerated “war spliffs” to slide a bandolier across the scratched floor of the van. They snickered in their private language.

G rode in the furthest back seat, olive dungarees rolled up around his knees and a holey white-tank top pulled up around his neck like a Palestinian’s scarf. He rested his arms on the cracked vinyl to either side of him, absorbing some flittering cinematic element, inhaling evanescent blue smoke from the twins along with exhaust, the pungency of guano and the sulfuric miasma of their dying homeland. Today was to be their day, even if it were their last.

G sat up from slouch and took the spliff from the twins, hand-rolled private stock from a shaman who’d carried on the teachings into modern times and died by helicopter gunship for it. It was partially for him that G now carefully loaded the RPG launcher, lined up the indicators and fingered the shoulder-strap into the ready position. Murder was not the sin that They’d committed, for death is an easy thing. But oppression, the malevolent will to power, willful ignorance of the consequences; these were acts to be avenged. The death of Mol’twiki had been the catalyst, the final piece of evidence in the case that his people must fight back or be buried alive next to him. There was a rage at the base of G’s spine that distanced from the cannabis; serving to objectify it and attach strategy.

The van bounced along the rutted gravel road running next to the putrid Kumpuerto Canal. Those still cognizant enough to pull themselves out of their hovel made a living rowing boatloads of ayahuasca and mushrooms 17 miles up the canal to Kumpuerto; a village that once thrived on export of bananas and small plastic components, but now lay a veritable smoldering heap of industrial waste. Umberto slowed the van to allow a spindly legged old man cross, he was swathed in a purple robe befitting a centuries dead ruler of the basin. He looked through the windshield, all the back way to G’s prominence and furrowed-brow leadership. The old man, Ip, had once owned a dime store just north of town; G recalled his kindness to even shoplifting local children. He hobbled across, letting their van pass.

Ip now fished for mutated Boto corpses out of the canal, and piled them up on the side of his dwelling: a crouching hut made from Fed-ex boxes he had obviously fished from the stench as well. G double-checked his weapon. Charlie threw an apple out the window into the dirt where Ip could easily reach it.

G’s attention turned to the twins, that personified duality of hindsight and foresight, who gestured up the road to a white delivery truck careening towards them. The side of it pockmarked with bulletholes, the driver’s door a rusty flap slamming back into the frame with each bump. A passenger in black uniform kicked a local woman out the back doors, her arm breaking as she hit the hard-pack at 35 miles per hour. These were corporate men, heathens from Panama or Texas whose actions were even more despicable then their bosses. These men did not even make fortunes from the exploitation of Kumpuerto, they merely did as they told.
“It starts now!” G yelled, sparking Umberto’s fishtail to align the broadside of the van with the delivery truck’s face. The men inside barely noticed, still laughing imperial hyena laughs at the poor women writhing in the dirt behind them. Charlie popped through a crude hole in the van’s roof, supported by the old chief’s remarkably strong shoulders, and unloaded a spurt of rounds into the windshield of the truck. The men in black uniforms died without so much as a yell.
“Umberto, get that truck back down to the Coves before the copters fly over, Chief take Umberto’s spot. We’re taking this van right up to the gates!”

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i learned something yesterday . . .

There is much to be said for semantics, that is the meaning of the particular components of language that we use. Variations in emphasis between individuals lead to a staggering fraction of our arguments. Our ability to even communicate about vast fields of thought (quantum physics, existentialism, etc) is limited by the mere lack of terms capable of describing it. This is not a concept to be dismissed; that is, a disagreement over semantics is quite notable chiefly for the reason that our word-symbols are the most direct facsimiles of our thought-symbols. The reason I can discuss this with You is because we have as human beings (and to a lesser degree as English-speakers) come to a general agreement on what each of these words means.

I raise this issue because I want to talk about the word God. For many thiests it calls to mind a nearly-physical entity of semi-predictable features and uncanny similarities to you and I. For agnostics, the word refers to a possible entity consisting of something between energy and spirit. For athiests its a spark of foolishness, an old term no longer relevant. And yet, one cannot deny that there is something at work that we cannot understand. Even the most diehard fanatics will reach the point, in argument with their athiest counterparts, that we just don't know. And even if we can pretend to know some vague details about this "god", it would hardly inform us to a greater depth about what our relationship with it should be. The word god, for all intents and purposes, has lost meaning whether there is something in place that would fit 'neath that descriptor's umbrella or not.

So here's what I propose: Let's replace the word God with the word Life. Stretch an extant symbol to cover something we do not universally understand anyway. I think that a Christian or Muslim would agree that God is a fundamental component of this thing we already call Life: steering it, perpetually adjusting it, initially creating it. And I believe that athiests would agree that this word is big enough and powerful enough to deserve a reverence on par with that which the religious bestow upon their diety. "Life" is sweeping, comprehensive, and belies, at the very least, that some fundamental structure is at play. It suggests that there are in fact "rules" whether or not there is in fact a "ruler".

So, how does this work? Consider the direct replacement of the word life for the word god in these predictable quotations.

"God will test you" becomes "Life will test you"
"Thank God for my good fortune" becomes "Thank life for my good fortune"

It sets up, even in the skeptical, a certain reverence, understanding and appreciation for life that can keep one quite grounded in reality and balanced in perspective. It even allows for practical prayer to serve the purpose of indoctrinated reminder of how great life really is. What I mean is, what if every day, no matter how bad you felt, you knelt down and meditated on the vast beauty and reward of life. Not to thank some elusive god or ponder your adherence to inapplicable rules, but simply to wonder in the complexity and profundity of waking up in the morning. Wouldn't this generate a healthier mental state, a gradual understanding of oneself, a firmer dedication to exuberant joy? Wouldn't this be a realistic and more effective spirituality.

What's interesting as well, for the convert, is that trying to subsitute Life for God in our more superstitious mantras automatically points fingers at the wrong-headed:
"God wants our praise" becomes "Life wants our praise", a ludicrous statement that suggests something as ethereal and vast as life and the universe is a victim of the same petty emotions as us.
Likewise for a phrase such as "God punishes us" becoming "Life punishes us", there is no punishment, Life merely is and either we are an unfortunate statistic or our choices doom us.

Anyway, my point is, who needs god when you have Life?

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Sometimes I can be a bit reactionary.

This frustration requires
some third party patience
to assuage it
and some schooled fan of truth
to resuscitate my batt'rees
A hand to clasp when I'm terrified
and a matching knack for many things.

And what a statuesque solution she is . .
and what a forward thinker.
With every passing moment further
reveals her inner figure.

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DUNE

I recently read Dune by Frank Herbert.
I don't want to summarize to a great extent, but a comment on its scope, precision architecture and character design is neccessary.
The story is vaguely familiar to Lawrence of Arabia and containing other elements that would eventually influence most likely every science fiction novel after it. Simultaneously, which I understand is often imitated but never quite as good, it works in all the political and family dramatics of Shakespeare and the hero myth of Mycenean Greece (and in fact both the themes common in mythology and the theme of mythology are handled beautifully within it). It has an interesting comment about the action of chemicals on the brain (perhaps what influenced me to write this) and their potential relationship to the evolution of man in both memetics and neurology. In my opinion, it tackled some difficult concepts of literature that I don't feel educated enough to talk about yet. And did it as good or better than many "great" writers of the mainstream (I'm looking at you Sinclair Lewis and Tom Wolfe)

After spending a great deal of time sweating and pacing out the details of exactly how a story will fall together (and anything I've done is an Aesop fable compared to this), I could appreciate how nuanced the chain of events were. How high-context and weighted the interplay between even second-tier characters.
And the main characters suit their roles like gloves. The Baron Harkonnen is a piece of filth and I truly hate him. Paul Muad-Dib is in the bad-ass hall of fame in the best way possible. His father version 0.5 of him, with regal trimmings. And on down the list.

Anyway, recommended highly.

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" We are all, if we already knew it, already there"

"Little boy you're not allowed to stay
You have to evolve inevitably
And I've sure come a long way

The road up ahead is so unclear
Back slidin down the bottom of beer
Nobody knew if I would make it here"
-Cee-Lo Green

I've been embroiled in a mythological love story since sometime shortly after the day I learned to fly. Eye-gouging tales of deceit and passion be damned; my scars are all healed and my eyes, while intact, see the overwrought capacity for everything around me to fail or succeed. What I've learned in the last few years screams a clarion across the physical path I've taken. She-I sits next to me-her. She-I keeps me-her going. From the laps of mediocrity to the slum of all slums, across this once-free nation to a place that reminds me of the future I always dreamed of. This is her path too.

Fuck prophecy, I refuse to bolt-down anything as dustblown as the day after tommorrow. And yet there's no faking it. Some of these things were meant to happen. Even if the only divnity steering them was some universal element of me. Something we all have and wield when we need to. And while no words I send will make you understand this, I've seen everything with that third eye.

There's nothing hard about this, except admitting that. Even in the most severe declines your bhindu-prana will carry you. Even in that darkest day death can be your solace or your impetus. I don't want to die yet, I know that, and I don't think I could until I'd given it my best. I want to be the Buddha freeing my fellow man from his mental chains, etching lessons upon the rocks, subsisting on the impossible margins simply to bend reality. I want to be Nietzche, leaving a twisted, contradicted memoir of my dreams so that young children will have the courage to defy their parents. I'm humbled by my inability, but I want these words to change the world.

I've known fear, still know it well. But have come to understand it's place. There are times to spit upon it, times to neglect it, times to sail into it guns blazing, and the very rare time to acknowledge it. This is not the fear of violence or rapists in the alley, this is the fear of life itself. Forgive my sudden spirituality, but we were not born by an act of fear. And neither should we live by them.


Pull a lesson from this ethos; like a flower from a meadow. Time heals no wounds, and yet I can only credit my occasional tendency to float in it's cool current to any success. Sometimes point feet downstream and grit teeth, sometimes fight for air and relief, sometimes reach the opposite shore and bask in the sun survival proves you worthy of. Always know when it's time to swim again.

I feel wise sometimes, like I should gather children around to tell stories to. But when they appear, laughing and creating, I see that I still belong among them. And I hope that I always will.

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Anger

AS many of you know, I occasionally stumble around my insulated world in an enraged stupor. Smashing items of value, cursing like one afflicted with Tourette's, beading sweat on my brow. Essentially making a fool of myself. My recent move has bolstered my lifelong attempt to quell this behavior: sunny skies, friendly co-citizens, a cushy job and an apparent end to the dark period of my academic career. Residual anger, in general, is now ventilated through exercise or gathered and dispersed in virtiolic packets reserved for The Man.

And yet triggers still exist. The father that I am gradually estranging from pesters me like I'm a child away at summer camp; prolonging his cowardly parenting strategies well into my quarter-life and in general being both counter-productive and self-pitying. I find that I only answer one out of his three calls, and that last one sends me into a glass-shattering fit.

The other trigger is a left-over task from my days as an academic engineer (see, although I'm employed as an engineer I work in a field that seldom leads to the blistering frustration of being hunched over equations that simply won't work or leafing through manuals arranged by retards). In the field of engineering (and my branch moreso than the others) it behooves you to attain what is called "professional licensure". This process is intended to make sure that the individuals that design the bridges you drive on, the buildings you work in, the water you drink and the landfill you throw your garbage in will not some day lead to your death. It's taken very seriously in the indusry and, in general, I have no problem with the concept.

However, what enrages me is the process of studying for phase I of the exam process. In October I will be taking an exam (and missing what will most likely prove to be a crucial day of my Fiction and Poetry Writing Classes) entitle "The Fundamentals of Engineering". It's not the most difficult exam ever developed (something like 70% pass it on the first try) and it's likely that if I can simply maintain my patience I will do fine. However, as I attempt to study it now I find that every single question falls into one or both of the following categories: "I will never use it" or "I have never learned it".
The issue leading to the first of these categories is that I work in a relatively new and niche industry that pulls none of it's operating principles from a textbook and applies very few of the "Fundamentals" of engineering save simple mathematics and an overall understanding of systems. The second category is aggravated by the fact that I graduated from a half-ass school that is on the verge of losing it's accreditation.
Beyond these two issues, studying for this mindfuck of an exam is further "enriched" by the fact that it's 90 degrees out and I have the choice between going kayaking, working on my novel, or relearning differential calculus. I must say my patience is running short.

Thus while I am happier in general out here I was naive to ever think that all of things I disliked in life would simply evaporate. And I understand now, more than ever, why I need to get back to school and get that second degree. And the third. And the fourth.

After this lament, though, I feel I do need to lend my anger some credit. Without my almost ridiculous lack of patience I would have accomplished a great deal less in my life than I have. My anger got me through school because I became so pissed with the rote tasks that what was at first simply my dissatisfaction turned into a fistfight that I refused to lose. In general, I have been able to turn what seems like useless rage into a tool for burning down obstacles and kicking in doors. The trick, I think, is to maintain that element of my volatility while somehow keeping it on simmer during the downtime. I need a way to increase the precision of this thing, and thereby reduce collateral damage.

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The Hive- I can laugh again

I'm going to have to handle this delicately . . . .

According to the Selfish Gene theory all of us, from a biological standpoint, are merely sophisticated machines constructed to insure the immortality of our genes. Over time, genes that produce machines better at surviving are successful in carrying on. Out of this arises familial love; because we share much of our genetic make-up with our relatives we have an inherent desire to protect them and care for them. However, so the theory goes (and I'm not attempting to refute it, this idea has literally changed my life) at the end of the day the purpose of our bodies is to prolong the existence of the genes that make us up.

This extends to all animals with the important exception of "hive" or "social" insects and corollaries in other animal families such as the naked mole rat. These species, typified by having not only queens responsible for reproduction, but a litany of other non-reproductive roles, do fit into the Selfish Gene under the caveat that they are essentially one organism. They share the vast majority of genetic information and essentially have become a cooperative team for the purposes of accomplishing the same goal that the individual organism accomplishes in other species.

It has been suggested that the Selfish Gene theory leads the believer to a sense of pointlessness. It certainly chips away at one's sense of self-worth; and is utterly the opposite of the idea that one is god's precious snowflake.

However, taking the concept of the hive animal, I propose a compromise. (someone is going to crucify me) I propose that, arguably with a feat of semantics, take on the label of hive organism. I think we may be trending towards this as it is, and certainly by taking several million steps back it certainly appears that mankind is working together towards one big. . . well, towards one big something or other. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the hive there is one reproducer, (the queen)constantly churning out spawn with very little genetic variation. Every other member of the hive has a specified, assigned role that is absolutely required for the stability of the community. It could be suggested that these animals live exclusively in carefully controlled environments because it limits the amount of roles required and thus simplifies overall organization. Thrust these hives out into the open and new roles may form (though it's more likely the community would simply die from the exposure). What I'm suggesting is that we consider mankind a hive of an infinitum of roles and an unlimited number of reproducers. I agree that this seems to directly contradict the idea of the hive animal, but listen. . . .

The hive animal works to support the proliferation of one set of genetic information. With a leap of semantics one could argue that mankind is, in general, working together to support the proliferation of one subset of genetic information. That is, the set of genes that make us unique and make us human. The 1% that differs from chimps, whatever. Our diversity in roles helps to insure that we are nearly impervious to any threat. Our revolutionary approach (at least amongst hive animals) to spread the role of reproduction is merely our understanding that it is simply another role and the undisputable fact that diversity (in the peripheral genetic information) is better for the hive in the long run.

Two major arguments that I can see coming against this immediately, and my half-assed answers to them:

1)With enough hot air you could extend this to any animal:
Not true. No other animal has constructed the institutions, language, infrastructure or government that we have. No other animal shows similar levels of cooperation (except for . . .hive animals).

2)Hive animals have one or two roles, easy to organize. If we have an infinity of roles, are you suggesting that there is some kind of organizing factor within us?
Absolutely not. I think that a set amount of skills have developed (scientists, artists, etc) that help us survive. At this point it's a crapshoot whether or not an individual will have skills relevant to the community. However, as any given skill exists somewhere in the gene pool, it's bound to surface particularly if it proves useful. Diversity insures new combinations that will, in turn, proliferate if they're proven useful

In short, do I think humans are hive animals? I'm not sure. And I'm not suggesting that I've proven anything or even neccessarily argued something I whole-heartedly believe. What I do think is that there are tendencies in us toward this behavior (and it should be noted that hive behavior is not only a highly convergent behavior, but it also occurs in mammals). Also, an adoption of a modified hive-like behavior may be truly beneficial.


Anyway . . .I put this out here to discuss it.

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