050320
I am in need of a release. Just a general release of energy. It’s not good, healthy energy, either. It’s some awful, dark, fear-aggression thing that has me jerking my head around all over the place at the slightest rustle of just about anything, really. It is a primal fear which originates at the top of the spine where the very most ancient part of our humanity resides with all the dread it had to face then just to live another day. It is dread, actually. I feel actual dread at the prospect of continuing on with my life status quo doing the same thing I have been doing and pretending that we are not in the middle of the collapse of society as we think we know it. Or as we want it, rather. Or maybe even need it.
There are some of us left in the world, particularly here in the U.S., who are connected closely enough with the civil unrest of the sixties, that we can appreciate it in a more tangible way than the youth of today. We can get some sense of the brute-force energy directed like a Tyson-uppercut at the jaw of our elected power structure in the forms of student and civil uprising and a couple of people with the Balls, figuratively speaking, and eloquence to get noticed and get traction. I have my parents, both of whom were teens in 1968, for reference to what things were like then. So, some of us can relate to those times through direct reference or even just through the general leftover air of the Power to the People movement and the vapor trails of hope left over from a society that was on the verge of discovering that PTTP was not just a slogan, but an actual thing. That power is, in fact, a reservoir of wisdom and knowledge built up over millennia which can and should be accessed at any time by anyone who wishes to learn from past mistakes and/or build on established strengths. This power should only be put to use by people who genuinely want to do good with it. To corrupt it by any other use is like stealing from your grandparents when they are already on a fixed income. It’s despotic and unforgivable and I want to sharpen a stick at both ends for that fat orange sow who so brazenly flaunts the fact that he is doing exactly that.
Anyway, so I am connected to the sixties through my parents and they are connected to the fifties because that’s when they were little kids so that is the time in which their little brains and minds began to consolidate information and form lasting memory pathways, to a large part. And that time was a time when the middle class was thriving, largely due to the fact that we made our own shit, and a lot of shit for other people. But we also made TV. Leave It To Beaver, Mr. Ed, Gilligan, Looney Tunes… A whole bunch of harmless, escapist, wholesome crappy shows that were goofy-funny and gave those kids the message that this is how things are supposed to be because this is largely how things are already. The people who made that first TV also made it through the war and built a whole new way of life on the backs of steel workers, construction, road and infrastructure creation and upgrades, etc… and they were strong and resilient and then they just set up camp in front of the TV, assuming their kids would go ahead and continue this glorious utopia they had set up. The problem is that they gave up just a little too soon. They spent too much time voraciously eating red meat and running through barrels of oil and then…wham. Kennedys dead, Vietnam, Nixon, racial injustice and high tension, acid, music…pure nutso. But the strangest thing happened. Because (I guess) there was such a huge psychic divide between the Big Nap of the baby boom and the juggernaut of creativity brewing within the boomers themselves, somewhere along the line the umbilical cord snapped and these boomers figured out that they could actually rearrange the country and make it better…actually better, if they could just muster enough of their ranks with powerful communication skills and genuine charisma to come forward and lead them. The problem, again, lied with the age divide. Also the issue that anyone who did come forward was killed. But there were just too many of the old guard left who did not want to vote for a candidate who clearly had the best interests of the people as the primary goal, rather an older white man who looked kindly and seemingly had the Ozzy and Harriet life, as evidenced by the stepford family with which he resided. And that was basically it. Oh and also this notion of “retirement” began to worm its way into the national consciousness, completely setting people up for failure by promoting the idea that people just stop working (contributing) at some arbitrary point in their sixties. But it almost worked. They almost had it.
Things are much different now. The ages bleed together more profusely. We now have a bunch of generations that are actually defined but by which I am regularly confused. I know I am gen-x but then there are millennials, gen-y, and gen-z. wtf. I am 46 and there are actually at least two “generations” after me? Anyway, to my point, people have babies at all walks of life, these days, and these arbitrary dividing lines are really much blurrier than the way they are portrayed. Perhaps because this is the case, we may have reached a tipping point where enough of the population is young enough, progressive enough, and astute enough to notice that we are currently being ruled by a witless cave troll with the social awareness of a wolverine and the morals and appetite of Tarrare. Not that swapping presidents would accomplish anything of any real consequence… That will take some time. Engineering a slow-burn style of anarchy takes careful planning and lots of interchangeable pieces and contingencies in case something catastrophic happens, like a war or a pandemic, which it will because that is the best way to gather mass attention away from a cheap grift. But…the point is that it is possible now, assuming that the cultural age divide is as important as I think, to aggregate all of these post-boomer generations together and enable them all to formulate a commonly-held system of beliefs which could eventually transform into the basis for a new system of—something. Life, maybe, or at least the act of living. Maybe base it on Universal Moral Law or something…I dunno. Just give a shit. That’s really all I ask.
I’m really just super tired right now. Really threadbare. My head is so mixed up I am usually in a state of rigor and I am basically paralyzed by anxiety also. It is actually difficult for me to even write this. But, Christ, I can only take so much and be quiet about it. Why do people consider the most trivial things so goddam important while they basically ignore the psychic pain in which they, themselves, struggle to breathe every day? Why do we respond to every single fucking minor irritation with rage and reactive aggression? Why do we struggle to feed our own brothers and sisters while we force feed ducks and cattle so privileged people can eat their livers and petit filets? Why do we seem to make all the wrong choices? Are we really this much like a virus? Will we just eat our host until we are forced to either move planets or die along with it? We’ve cut our space budget so much that space exploration is now left to the private sector. This is something about which we were once MOST PROUD! We put a person on the moon and when they got there, not only did they do science, they drove around in a fucking dune buggy! Will we have enough visionaries like Elon Musk in the future who care about exploration and learning and have the resources to exploit that care? Will we ever drive dune buggies on Mars? It seems as though exploration and learning for the sake of themselves is no longer in fashion. It doesn’t make enough money.
Fuck it…mortgage the earth itself and all her gold and spices.
These questions are but a small percentage of the thoughts that whirl non-stop around my head and have caused this dread. I have a difficult time pretending to be anything close to happy. I cannot focus on anything for more than a few minutes, and I am afraid to go to work (NOT because of covid-19). The media calls it “covid fatigue” or something like that but covid is only the the thing that tore off the bandage and exposed just how raw and huge and just how not-healed the national wound is. A wound that began when that first person figured out they could exploit another person and end up a little ahead on the deal. Original Sin of Economy. Probably happened before recorded history. But if it were recorded in some cave painting somewhere, it would be a picture of a fat, white douchebag offering someone three small rocks for two huge ones or some bullshit like that.
It’s about to storm…I do love a good storm.
-C
Oh yeah...Bonsai is pretty cool. I've been dabbling. And liking. #BONSAIDanielSan
