I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive.

(quote: William Saroyan, video: Alan Moore's advice to young artists)

For a minute there I was a nihilist. I came to a philsophical conclusion that I shirked away from telling people because it sounds so bleak and inhumane. The crux is this: that we can never achieve social stability or equality or sustainable prosperity or peace or freedom if our population continues to grow. The thesis, generally, being that a confluence of phenomenon (including but not limited to the Tragedy of the Commons, False Consciousness, the quantitative/psychological constraints of human interaction [i.e. how many people your brain will allow you to know/trust/etc], and a sheer logistical impossibility) strongly suggest that a group as large as, for instance, the United States, could never accomplish utopia. That is, there is no model for governance with a system this large that provides for satisfaction to all of its participants.

First, the Tragedy of the Commons is an observation that self-interest will cause users of a shared resource to abuse their privilege to that resource. In Hardin's original essay he spoke of common grazing areas in a village, but the best way to understand this (I am a transportation engineer after all) is to think of how commercial vehicles (big trucks) operate on our highways. Large, multi-axle trucks do virtually all of the damage to the publicly-funded (i.e. 'common') road system. They do pay higher use fees (above and beyond driver's licenses, fuel tax, etc for passenger cars), and yet without close supervision it would be in commercial vehicle operators' best interest to run the heaviest loads they could at top speed. Human beings cheat to get ahead, they use resources disproportionally, they leave things worse than they found them.

Now, this problem is mitigated in small communities. The home, for example, has many common areas and goods. And they are generally respected because of the authority of the household (complete) and the familiarity between the members. And it could work in a neighborhood, perhaps, where everyone knows each other somewhat intimately and their lives are crushed into shape by their public identity. But expand the numbers of the community to some threshold and people stop giving a shit. This number likely has some connection to the group-sizes that we spent much of our mental development in. Australopithecus hung out in very small groups. A few families. Even allow for a thousand and it might work. But,we live in a country of 300million, in a world of 6billion plus. We are not wired to give a shit about any of these people. The fact that we do is actually sort of weird.

Logistical impossibility doesn't have a link because I haven't heard of anyone who has done a great deal of work on it. The idea is that even in a purely-executed Communist state there would be no way to equitably distribute resources. The same amount cannot be put in each cup, because the things used to fill them are not distributed equally. Arizona does not have the water to survive, but if they are to use the water of some place else how can that water-bearing land be thought to have the carrying capacity of both places? Especially when we humans grow so densely and rapaciously. And live for so long. But further than the efficiency of moving resources around, there is a certain chaos in the economy of ideas when the numbers get this high. anarchists can conspire, religions can procreate, language can vary . . .and in the end you get smaller political communities. These subcommunities distrust each other, formulate nonsensical rivalries. Shun those of the other tribe. Anyway . . .I have many more thoughts on this that I'm going to discuss further in an upcoming blog on Terminalism (this is a name I've given to a philosophy that amalgamates Marxism, Darwinism, aspects of Existentialism, and Absurdism)

»»  read more

"We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence."

(quote: Darwin, video: Wale-The Artistic Integrity

For my American Realism course I have to write a research paper from no less than 8 sources. The only limitation is that it has to deal with American literature written between the Civil War and World War I. After the paltry class discussion when the professor asked those gathered to define evolution, I decided that I need to examine Darwin's influence on the written word as art form. While he was only partially a philosopher, he presented an idea which fundamentally alters the picture of the world. For those who do not accept his theory, there is still this pausing gap, this rigidly logical refutation of their "meaning" that they must come to terms with. After Darwin, god became obsolete as a philosophical device. And 75 years later, Existentialism questioned whether, in a world without god, does life have any meaning? My research centers around finding 'transitional fossils' that indicate a progression out of Romanticism, via Darwin's findings. Was Realism a rejection of Romanticism at least partially because Darwin changed how we see nature and our place in it? Are the hard truths revealed by Darwin reflected in the grittier aesthetic of Realism? Does the art of the time hint at our collective philosophical evolution, does it indicate the Existential anxiety of casting out mythology and order?

I can't listen to American news anymore. Even NPR has been seized with the Fear. You cannot turn on a television (I'm guessing) or visit a newspaper's website or listen to the radio without dire news about the economy. Thousands being laid-off, millions more underemployed, our collective investments dwindling in value. It is all either a temporary downturn, or the undulating spasms of a false ideology as it crumbles. And the working class can do nothing in reaction but save a little more, leave out a few luxuries, show up to work, try to sleep at night. And I have no lack of sympathy for those who have lost their jobs, or who are going through tough times. But a lot of us made bad decisions, or are stuck in undesirable circumstances, or both. And the lesson to be learned from this, especially for younger people who haven't yet bought a house they can't afford or squirted out one too many lil'uns, is that the whole dream we've been sold is a joke. Buy a house, slave away at a corporate job, distance yourself from reality with television and sports, capitulate to the reproductive urge. All these things and more have been marketed to us as the ideal, as the swift path to happiness. But it isn't. And every second you spend willing yourself to someone else's system, is another inch you drift from the person you are. Not to say that you should never get a job and work for the Man. But never let it fool you that this 9-5 is your life. And never rely on another's enterprise to make you happy. Whatever you do for yourself, can never be taken away.

I've been writing quite a bit so far this year. Though less and less of it is presentable. I'm so much pickier and careful and thoughtful and (un)conscious. And so now I write the first five pages of a story at least three times before I settle into a groove. Write out not an outline but an ever-evolving aesthetic manifesto each time I want a thing to become a story. When I was maybe 20-years old, sleepless, I developed a crude analogy for what a story needs to be. The Bonfire Theory of Narrative Craft. Basically, it is this: A story, at the broadest conceptual level, must have three elements. The first is the flames. Flames are what are seen from a distance, what dazzles, what draws someone in or scares away an animal. This is the story's "gimmick", what you describe a story as being about in one or two sentences (Choke is about a sex-addict who pretends to choke for money and affection). The second aspect is the "fuel". How the fire is assembled, the structure of the wood aligned such that it burns at the desired intensity. This is the story's plot, the causality, what actually happens, how all of the events are tied together. The final element is the coals. The long-burning furnace of the fire, the part you bake hot-dogs on. The part you could take with you in a clay vessel on your pilgrimage and use to start a fire elsewhere. This is the theme of the story. What the story has to say, why the story is important to tell. What from the story can a person take away and add to their own experience? Anyway. Good stories are built like bonfires. And depending on how you want it to burn, you have to carefully consider all three of these aspects.


I'm occasionally opining for the Boise Arbiter now. Check it out.

»»  read more

"I want to remember it. I never want to forget it."

(video and quote: Colonel Kurtz-Apocalypse Now)

Civilization is comprised of a network of ideologies. There are religious ideologies, economic ideologies, the ideology of family, the ideology of the military. Each of these is strictly real and material (that is, they manifest in the material world with rituals, institutions, objects, documents, physical inter-relations, etc). There is no escaping ideology without entering a new one. There is an ideology of science and rebellion, of art, of humanism, of philanthropy, of anarchism, of nihilism. You will never be free of ideologies, only incrementally inching into newer and less false ones. Every ideology, beyond being material, is essentially the imaginary relationships of individuals (though this word is now in some ways moot, replace with subjects) to their real conditions of existence. Ideologies emerge, in part, out of long-held misconceptions about the way things are. This misconception becomes an Ideological Apparatus concerned with maintaining its existence and growing arms and legs. And so subtle hierarchies become material discourses on power. Confusion about the universe becomes religion. Misunderstanding of human nature becomes economics. The biological appearance of families becomes the 'nuclear family'. All of these things form a vast, dominant, oppressive force that encourages our conformity, insures our complicity, and convinces us to perpetuate it.

Ok . . .all that thanks to Marx and Althusser. But, I thought this in the stolid quiet of my office at 6am, the world outside my window matte black, if every ideology is based on "imaginary relationships" (even what we think is the truest possible statement is distorted by the limitations of language, even the purest observation is poisoned by our eyes) then certainly, in all ideologies, their will be a day of reckoning. Not only that, but if one patiently observes an ideology in its death throws, he or she will observe what it was about that system that was imaginary, false, a lie. We are currently witnessing a glitch in our economic system. Some think it is simply a setback like the recessions of the 80s or other earlier economic crises. I don't know what the medium-term economic picture might be, and I am certainly no expert. But what I can say, is that in the failures of the current economic arrangement, the lie behind our economic ideology is exposed. Money is not real. It could be, I'm not saying objects have no value and that there is no sound means of acquiring food by providing services. But in America, money is not real. The government pumps numbers into the system, founded on no actual product or material. Banks charge you interest to provide you with electronic numbers that do not exist as anything but imagined agreements. Mortgages are taken out on property, and the debt is sliced into a million pieces like cake. But it is all simply numbers in an electronic system. This is what causes inflation, in all reality. Having more money than value. If things are worth $100 and you divide it 105 ways, you can hardly call each divided unit $1. And yet that is what we do. The moment that we dematerialized money, that we negated raw mathematics, we started the timer on the ultimate failure of the economic ideology.

Likewise, the economic system holds fictitious tenets of human nature. It presumes rationality in all actions. It starts wars and speculates based on the notion that each human unit is identical to the next. It assumes that free markets will flush out the best of the competitive nature deep within each of us and thus actualize us. All of these things are lies. All of them erode the base of the economic system.





I pushed out 10 graduate applications this week. Three 12 hour days of making checklists and sending electronic money and rewriting personal statements and listening to skull-rattling gangsta rap. Sliding that first completed one into the mailbox, I almost heard the click. New human being, new daily bread, new settings on my alarm clock, new skylines, new means of conveyance, new pollution in my lungs, new garbage in my newspaper, new bass in my headphones, new software to write with, new photos to fuck up, new people to alienate and avoid, new dreams at new altitudes, new brands of alcohol. Most importantly: new trade, new 40hours+, new opportunities. The only lesson I can give on this: Remember that what you do for yourself can never be taken from you. Make a plan and hold it glowing in your ribcage like fascists might drag you from your bed pre-dawn. Hold it above everything: carnal desires, food, your health, your happiness, familial obligations, your god, your illnesses and allergies, the law, propriety, comfort, sanity, bills, everything.

»»  read more

"In vacant places, we will build with new bricks"

(video: Paul Newman [RIP] in Cool Hand Luke; quote: T.S. Eliot)

Great stories end and are punctuated by death or departure. And, too, I think our lives are shaped by how we leave and how we die, as much as they are on how we arrive and are born. For the narrative of your live to be of any value it must be fragmented and broken upon hardships, ensconced and mutated by love, stretched thin and cultivated by your work, and fortified and weaponized by your willingness to allow it to change. I have asked for no easy things in life, and despite my fortune I've brooked no accolades undeserving, swiped no credit under false pretenses, assembled no houses of cards that I did not intend to leave to the inevitable wind. Like the myths of Oceania I've always felt my heritage, one I scrapped together from books and hallucinogens and frustration, was to move continually. Make land, and terraform and plant things and watch seasons change, and then disembark. From one island to the next; absorbing, seeing, taking, leaving, until the waters are untraversable and I have to choose sitting still or dying.

All this year I've been on course for one short-story draft a month. I've made it to October, perfectly on course even with a half-dozen things that were discarded on page 8 and mid-month. But now, I need two polished stones from the wreckage so I can mail it to a dozen schools around the country and cross fingers. So it's edit mode for a few weeks, redlining shit I wrote a year ago before I was who I am. As a writer everything that I did not write within the last 10 minutes feels amateur, inexperienced, naive. But the more I read things, and pick through the 120 pages I've committed as draft over the last year . . .there is this thing like pride glowing in my belly.


Seven hundred billion dollars, like some stultified proof that our money isn't real anyway. And then what does the time it took to earn it mean? In percentages, in appendages, in slack-jawed dawns peeling possessions from their packaging. And who are these people that may take it from you? In namesake, in descendancy, in half-solved puzzling over the taut sky darkening. There is no threshold for success, here. Debates pull teeth like 'existential threat', like war undermines our humanity. No advocating violence, but we've killed since time unreal . . .the philosophical catastrophe is that they've come to think our livelihood is their's.

Everything in flux, all ways. Le the universals splinter, spin me blinking, rattle the rented cage of my dented skull. Let the concrete ache in my sodden bones moan. The scalpel that cut me from the motherly carves out wooden identities and arcs dry lakebeds to rest in while storms gather. Only storms and thoughts gather, people collide and swarm. Water finds home where it is low . . .and I am destined to drown.

»»  read more