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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