"I wanted the whole world or nothing"

(quote: Bukowski; video: 'lil Wayne-La, La, La)

I've been accepted to attend the MFA program at the University of New Orleans in the Fall. This after several rejections and a wait-list at the University of Texas. There's been a whole set of penciled-in plans waiting for this, coiled up waiting to be sprung. . .so now it's 2.5 more months of work, the new tradition of Sasquatch, a month-long escapade through Turkey, Albania, Croatia, perhaps Italy, the Czech Republic, Spain. I've been out of school a year now, and I can scarcely summarize those months between. Only a montage of beer cans and books and rubbing my forehead in consternation, the glow of the screen, the smell of ink on airplanes, napping off the grindstone week, a few of those times when you're at the bar or on some friendly couch and the light and the collective BAC are perfect and you can genuinely tilt your head back and cackle.

--
There's bound to be good times, and those less good. And in the murk it's easy to become distrustful and vacant-eyed and an inch smaller than your skin. Now's the up-time though, and if you don't let yourself feel the ecstasy than you were a fool to feel its opposite.

--
What I was thinking about whilst paying to park:

When we were fresh out of the forests, planting the first maize and trading the first beads, all this capitalism made sense. It was an imperfect but simple means of distributing the value to be had by working the natural world. This was before the printing press, before programmatic government, hedge funds, ________-industrial complexes. And then we slipped out of that world, gradually inching into an inorganic technological sphere. The industrialized world is one big city now, one could travel around the globe on commercial flights and never leave the airport--it would be like one horrifying trip to the mall, with bizarre ethnic districts and periodic, uncomfortable naps. The natural world we once inhabited has become a space administered and owned by corporations and government. In the age of post-survivalism, everything is owned. And because everything is property (where government control of land, for example, can stand-in for commercial ownership), the time-tested value of capitalism becomes perverted. Where once food, durable goods, and raw materials were the only items up for exchange--now everything is. Everything has an abstract and quantifiable value that can be traded for other things. Ideas have become commodified, sex, health and disease, kindness (in the service industry, each smile you give has an estimable dollar value). Time itself has been commodified (I certainly didn't decide to work from 8-5). . . .No solutions or grand philosophical statement. . .I just find it interesting.