Anna, Ch. 1

After her mother left her father, Anna heard voices.

--Father:  I don't want you seeing that boy.  He's black.  In this country things are different.  Tell him you can't go out with him.

--Mother:   He's such a nice boy.  He's so polite.   I worry that you won't have any friends.  I know its been hard on you moving all the time.

I am the spy.   I'm changing my name to Julie.  They won't know me here.  I talk funny. 

--Grandmother:  "Its all your mothers fault.  Where are you going to college?  You've got to go to college in this country."

--Mother: "I don't know Anna, Veterinary School is very difficult to get into.   I don't want to see you fail like you did before."

But I don't want to get a business degree.

--Father:  I don't want you seeing that student at Augustana. What are his parents like?  Isn't his brother in trouble with the law?

He's dead now.  He was my closest friend.  He still comes to me at night, before I go to bed.

--Father:  "I want you to go to school near Springfield.  You can live at home."

I hate this job.  Its not what I want to do.  I want to get a job outdoors [sic].

--Father:  "You are lucky to have a job.  I worked hard to get you that job.   If you stay in this house, you have to respect me."

All men want to do is have sex.  I have morals and not am going to have a one night stand.  I want a family.   I want a house with a white picket fence in the backyard.

--Mother:  "Take you medication.   Have you seen your counselor?   I'm worried about you.  Its not normal to see things. What is all this talk about witchcraft?"

--Father:  "I don't want you seeing that man.  He's 35.   He's too old for you.   You are not allowed to contact him while you live in this house. "

I can't tell my father that we are talking on the phone or that I am staying with you tonight.

Mother:   "Danny is a nice guy, what time should I pick you up from his house tomorrow?"

I've got to leave Springfield.   This place is stifling me.   I need rent money.   I'm saving everything I ear.    I want to go to Colorado and work in a job involving conservation. 

My stomach hurts.  

We are all Caterpillars, Ch. 3

We are all Caterpillars
Downloaded links of life and death, love and loss
Seen on a touch screen
Off planet tourists from some far away orbital platform
Frail bodies out of proportion and not quite human.

We wait for the voyeurs
A cave filled with Mastodons
Impersonal reality, not threatening, not observed.
Who can get there first to capture the glyphs on the wall
for digital posterity?

Politely refusing to discuss death
endlessly distracted
This is not reality
our version of reality
but only the authorities can handle that

Maybe we will find the prize video
something to show proudly to friends
imagine something chaotic
raw moments of blood and pain
uploaded to a personal space.

Leonard Faux-en.  green tea, wine, exercise.

Scenes inside a Gold Mine, Ch. 11

Imagine what it was like to receive wisdom of Copernicus (1473-1543), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)  or the Greek Aristarchus of Samos (310BC – 230BC) that the earth orbits around the sun. It may not seem like much now, but it must have been seriously disconcerting back then.  No more God creating humans to be at the center of the universe.  Instead we just lived on one of many orbiters around one of many suns.   Kinda takes the wind out of your sails.  Also gets a lot of religious types threatened, and when threatened, there is always retaliation.   Lets shoot the messenger!

But we survived and created a whole new type of religion of sorts.   The religion of physics.  The belief in one universe, generated from a few mathematical truths and principles of symmetry which describe a universe where everything can be calculated, predicted and understood by the human mind according to human constructs. 

Now even that belief system is being assaulted--from within.  New theories in physics like eternal inflation and string theory suggest that the same fundamental principles from which the laws of physics derive may lead to a multitude of  universes, with many different properties. 

But here is really what I really want to get at:   Its not just that our universe is one atom in another universe in an infinite progression of universes.  As disconcerting as that would be, its still too easy and its still based on human constructs of space.  And I'm not talking about space like in "outer space."  "Space, the final frontier, these are the voyages of the starship Pseudopumpkin..."  Instead, I'm talking about how we perceive the world around us as consisting of discrete objects in space and time.   What I'm proposing is something even more radical.   Just as the old notion that the earth was the center of the universe was a human centered belief in reality, the belief in discrete atoms all arranged to coincide with human perceptions of space/time is a similarly antiquated belief system.  What if there was no space? Can you imagine a multitude of universes without space?  Where there is no me, no you, no distance between the me and the desk?  How can we even perceive no space, no time, no distance.  My head explodes.  Rather, my head implodes with a crazy claustrophobia.   

Can a fish understand the goji berry growing on the foothills of the Himalayas?   Can the fish even understand a mountain?  Or is it also possible that we, like the fish, are living in a universe inherently incalculable by our science and comprehension?  We may never get out of the water to see the light of day.   Maybe its because we are not Gods--despite the fact that we are legends in our own minds:-).

How I Spent My Day, Ch. 1

Wake up at 5 am.

Meditate for 15 minutes with my Insight Meditation App timer (I have found that when I wake up early like this, it is easier to fall back to sleep if I meditate, concentrate on my breathing,or focus on an object for awhile. I think it settles my mind down).
 

Sleep until 8 am.

Wake up again and realize that I missed my favorite Saturday morning yoga class with my favorite teacher.

Eat millet with Jalapeno sauce for breakfast.

Attend Zen mediation group sitting.  (This is Saturday--after all)

Eat roast beef wrap with guacamole for lunch. (the ingredients of which were purchased at Food Fantasy and the bargain bin at Kroger).

Take nap (continue to shirk all responsibilities of daily living).

Pick up the woman who just had an abortion the day before and take her to the Christian Music Festival at the horse barn (of course, I was not the father of the kid--I did pay for it though--In fact the last time she had an abortion I gave her the usual talk about having her partner wear a condom--a lot of good that did).

Wonder what it all would be like to be a Christian and to be a true believer (after all, unlike a secular music festival, there was a lot more smiling  going on)

Leave the Christian Festival, forget about being a Christian.

Listen to a Podcast from the CBC on how modern spiritual practices can make you selfish and unhappy.

Internalize podcast message to realize that my whole life is pretty self centered (After all, what have I done for anyone recently except pay for their abortion and parking ticket?).

Forget about the message of the podcast.

Go to another music festival that was a fundraiser for supporting the legalization of hemp.

Drink wine at the foot of a tree, then hide the wine and go back into the music festival.

Dance at the music festival.

Go back outside and drink more wine (then go back inside).

Listen to speaker at music festival.

Pontificate that I could have given a better presentation than the speaker at the music festival.

Eat some sort of chick pea wrap that was cold for dinner.

Go to a different bar that has better vanilla porter beer in a tin can.

Drink the beer, wipe off the blackboard walls (tabula rasa most thrilling).

Go back to the music festival.

Dance some more to the Hot Bag of Donuts.

Leave the music festival.

Download old Joy Division, new Savages and new Parquet Courts on Emusic.

Go to sleep.

Dream.

Wake up.
 

Things that Don't Go Together, Ch. 16

Time Travel and Heidegger

What is it with all this time travel business?   It seems like every fricking science fiction story I read this year has some variation or permutation of a time travel theme.  Take a look at Gardner Dozois' "Years Best Science Fiction" each year for the past decade and see what I mean.  And with movies like "Looper" the formula seems so cliche.   All this going back in time to change the future business.   Of course, that is not to say that there are not cool time travel stories like "Things Undone" by John Barnes.   And cool time travel movies like "Primer."   I only mean to say that the time travel theme is ubiquitous.

Why are we so obsessed with time travel these days?

I supposed that Einstein may have opened the door for all this speculation with time dilation and the twin paradox business. Space time curves near a large mass.   So you can mess with time and space depending on where you are observing it.   Like in a black hole. That kind of business.

But time travel notions started long before Einstein.  Even Mark Twain and Dickens dabbled in it a bit.  But what I'm getting at is a specific kind of time travel--the time travel machine. Like H.G. Wells' Time Machine.   A human technology that can manipulate time.  Or more specifically, time as just another resource that we can manipulate with a machine.  Time as a commodity.  And I don't think its any accident that Wells wrote the Time Machine after the technological age had begun.  When the natural rhythms of preindustrial life centered around the sun and moon were replaced by a machine and a rigid factory work schedule.   The technology surrounding time is even more advanced now.   How can we "maximize" time, cram the most we can into our day using our little hand held smart devices?  All these concerns are new for humanity.

But getting back to time travel.   And Heidegger.   Heidegger critiqued modern technology as it “puts to nature an unreasonable demand that it supply energy, which can [then] be extracted and stored” for man’s purposes. Under conditions of modern technology, “the earth,” as Heidegger notes, “reveals itself as [only] a coal mining district, [its] soil as a mineral deposit."  What I'm getting at is that it is not a stretch for humanity to now view "time" as just another resource (like nature) to be manipulated by our technology.

But it seems like the notions of viewing time as just another natural resource is taking another step toward abstraction that would cause Heidegger, former Nazi sympathizer that he was, to roll around in his grave even more.  For unlike nature, time was always an abstraction.   There is no "time" you can dig into to grow your crops.  It always was an idea.  So with the time machine, we have a machine that can manipulate an idea.  And given that we are obsessed with "maximizing" this idea or manipulating the idea of time for our usage, I guess it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that we would also be obsessed with a machine that can manipulate time for our benefit.

Give me those old fashioned science fiction novels, where we are exploring new worlds that could actually be out there in the stars, instead of all this time travel crap--unless of course, its very good time travel crap...lol

We Are All Caterpillars, Ch 2

We are all caterpillars
Though dying
we are nowhere near dead.
A corpse sprouts new life on the forest floor
not so much undying as unliving.

It takes an eternity.
A beetle polishes off the bones
after the ants, maggots and intestinal flora.
Our best build an agglutination of debris, donations and larceny.

There has been time for education. 

Burning down a tiny candle

for a litany of fact

Transmitting a ring side view.

Staying out the time at the speed of light

Massive as a moon

Wide as a galaxy

Fragile as a dragonfly's wing
Touching in the distance.

Don kisses in the Cyrillian.  Anna recounts her visions to the audience.   Pagans and conspiracy theorists abound.

Tattoo You, Ch. 12

There were some interesting characters on the road.

Everyone knew Ninja Kitty.  He was 20, but he had been on the street since he was 13.  He was one of the most intelligent people I have ever met.   Immensely intelligent.   He had this amazing insane outfit:   kitty ears,  black pants, and a black shirt with hundreds of pockets he had sewn in himself.   He had everything you could ever need in his pockets.  A walking file cabinet.  He could have come straight from a Dickens novel.

Ninja Kitty had a dog named Kanoche.   The dog followed him around on his bicycle.   He had the coolest set of wheels, with these custom decorations and a black basket in the back that Kanoche rode in.  

Velma from Alabama was another cool chick I met.   She was also very smart--she had bachelor's degree in biology or something.   But she always said that she was just not ready to go straight and try to get a job and live a normal life.   And I respected her for that.   She knew what she wanted and that made a lot of sense to me.  Like why get married just because you have been with some guy so long?

Everyone had these cool nicknames.  I was called Wasabi.  There was also Shaggy, Slug, Popcorn, Pippin, Hopalong and a host of others.

Being homeless made getting a job a drag.  I was working at Ulta but then they hired this new general manager who was a total bitch.  She found out I was homeless and then started fucking with my scheduling, calling me at 7 in the morning and telling me I was late for work and crap like that.   So I got fed up with it and quit.

There was nobody in San Francisco I really cared about.  That dude I was hanging out with--Rory--its not like I was that into him or anything.   I view it was like a modern romance.  He was on disability because he has a gunshot wound.   Its like he kinda has his shit together, but kinda not.   He has a medical marijuana growers card so he could be making a lot of money if he every got his act together.   One time in a hotel room he got really really angry with me and started choking me.  I thought I was going to die.   I picked up the phone and called the cops.

When we first started going out with Rory it was almost like rape.   I tell him that now when I'm pissed at him.   I used to tell him to stop and screamed at him.  Kenny came back and I wanted to leave with Kenny.  We wanted to leave together.   But Kenny ended up finding out about Rory and that caused all sorts of problems.   In the end, Kenny started hanging out with Layla.   I didn't trust Kenny anyway.  I don't trust any of them.   It got to the point where I started saying whats mine is mine and what's yours is yours.  It sucks that it started to be like that because that's not what it was supposed to be about.  But I'm not going to take care of Kenny, not going to take care of Rory because they don't pay me back.   Anything I gave them, they would just take it without giving me anything in return. 

I had plenty of opportunities to leave with travelers but it just got hard for me to trust people or do anything anymore.   So I just started withdrawing and spending more time by myself.  As soon as I get back there I'm going straight up north to get out of that mess and get enrolled in school at Humbolt State.

 

Tattoo You, Ch.11

What are you worried about me for?   I'm going Morocco. Its the total language immersion program at Humboldt State.   Humboldt State, where the rent is cheap and the psychotic boyfriends who almost chocked me to death are a memory.  Of course, as I just told you today, one of them gave me another gift that I have to take care of this week.   I've gotta be more careful.  When I get to Northern California, I'm going to start practicing abstinence.  I'm getting a place on my own.  Someplace quiet.  I'm sick of spending the night in a room with twenty other people and the constant drama.

Anywho, it all started when I left with that homeless guy Spud from Mississippi. I still remember the night we left.   We were watching the Hot Bag of Donuts in that bar in Divernon.  After you left, we smoked a blunt with Zack.  

I thought things were going to work out with Spud and me.  I thought that he would be like the perfect traveling companion.   He's a crust punk.   He was helping me drive.   We were so stoned  the whole way there.  We must have taken every scenic route we could.  Every sign that said scenic route and boom were were off the interstate--staying at some campground.   It was all good in the beginning.  We went on the loneliest road in America.  I was so full of hope then that I was doing the right thing.

So we got to Occupy in San Francisco.  And Spud disappeared for day spangling.  Then he came back and then Andrew, Spud and I wanted to drive up north to see the Redwoods.   Bad idea.   It was the worst trip I have ever been on. We were dumb.  We tried to build a fire in the National Forest which of course was not allowed.   The Forest Rangers caught us right away.  Then we ran out of water.   We were looking everywhere for water.   Then we were lost and out of money.   Some Mexican hunters finally helped us.   They were like "little girl, you can't go into the forest without any water."  Like I said, it was a bad idea.   We made it to Redding, California and were stuck in a Wal Mart parking lot because my brakes went out.  We were wandering around trying to find some mechanic who would fix the car cheaply.   Then we really really really started hating each other as much as three people could.

Andrew disappeared.  He came back later but I was already with Rory by then.   But I still was seeing Andrew.  I'd call him up and he would come running to meet me.  I was in Berkley then.   I didn't like the place.  That was were Rory got shot right next to me.   Some drunk dude was shooting wildly.   I didn't like the people there.   There was a girl there with multiple personalities.  There is so much mental illness among homeless people.  It really opened my eyes to a bunch of things.  But I never really fit in there.   They used to think I was stuck up because I was looking for a job wanted to finish my college.   I didn't want to be around all junkies and meth addicts who lived near the landfill.   Maybe I was being judgmental.  But I was sick of it.   Sick of being taken advantage of.  I let the junkies store shit in my car and they totally trashed it.  Now it smells like urine.

And there is such a gang mentality on the street.   The GDF (Grateful Dead Family), would put a red mark on you and beat the shit out of you.  It happened to one of my friends who didn't do anything.  The GDF occupied the Telegraph area.  Then there were the Juggalos. They say that they are a family but they are nothing more than gangs.  The whole thing is fucked up.  I understand the need for a family and community but they are all fucked up.  I've seen them jump people for nothing.

At that time I really felt alone and wanted companionship.  But they treated their women like shit.  Like I was at their disposal. Like they could lift up my shirt whenever they wanted.  Starting in about November I started to retreat into my own scene.....(cont'd in Ch. 12)

Silster Wilster, Ch 14

Hey look at that empty building there in South St. Louis near Broadway and I-55.   I remember when it used to be a Big Lots. 

Someone who doesn't really care (SNCare):  I feel your pain Sri Pseudo.  

That's not the worst of it.  Sure that one hurt, but I got over it.  I was absolutely decimated after the TJMaxx up at 270 and Florissant closed.  I couldn't sleep for a week.  I still have flashbacks.   I  have take a different route on the way to the airport now.   Its just too painful driving by where it used to be.   All those special times I had carousing through the clearance rack.  All those special bargain she, I mean that I found.   Never to be repeated.  Lost forever.   Part of me died when that store closed.  Since then, it just hasn't been the same.

(SNCare):  Like I said, I feel your pain Sri Pseudo.

No, I don't think that you do. I just don't think you appreciate what its like to lose something like that. Sure, you have your highs and lows. But I bet you have never felt the ecstatic sensation that comes with merging with an article of clothing that retails for $180 that you are able to purchase for $9.99.   So don't tell me you can feel the loss associated with that.  You just don't know what its like.

(SNCare):  My heart bleeds for your loss.   You are right, I just don't know how you feel.   I really don't.   But I am here for you.

Thanks.   It means a lot that you are hear for me.   A big lot actually.  I'm sorry, this is just so difficult for me.

(SNCare):  Its ok.   Here, put your head on my shoulder.   There you go.  Do you feel better now?

I was so Maxxed out.   But you Marshalled me up.  

(SNCare):  What are friends for?

Hey, I feel better now.  Want to go to Kroger's?   I read in the newspaper there is a big sale on all their organic food this weekend:-)

We Are All Caterpillars, Ch 1

We are all caterpillars.

The first man to greet the morning

Spent the night as an ape.

Slowly munching on our leaves

If I could see the future

It would be the door that never opens twice

At least not until it does

All legs and no eyes

The least secret thing in the universe

Are places built on other places

In the sweet morning dew