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.

»»  read more

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.

»»  read more

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.

»»  read more

"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.

»»  read more

" '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.

»»  read more

"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.

»»  read more

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.

»»  read more

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.

»»  read more