If
I had
grown up
in a stable household
with
two well-adjusted
and loving
parents
studied hard in school
graduated with honors
gone to college
gotten a degree
found a decent job
met a wonderful girl
fallen in love
gotten married
and lived
happily ever after
what
in
the
hell
would
i
have
to
write
about?
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Walk Amongst The Dead
All my life my parents keep telling me,
Doesn't matter if I want to, doesn't matter if I care.
Doesn't matter if I enjoy doing it, as long as it paid well.
I see my future laid out before me,
Like it's predetermined and I can never break free.
Destined to walk amongst the dead,
Become fat, grouchy, song-less like my dear household pet.
When I was a kid I used to ask my parents for money,
As if happiness can be acquired through material quantity.
It can't be manufactured, bought, sold and wrapped on layers of neat boxes, papers, plastic and other chivalry.
Can only be found in activity, experience and people that mean so much to me.
My only safety is in danger, disaster and anarchy.
I look at all those stupid upper-class,
With their mansions, pools, and boring jobs.
I smile knowing someday I will be free,
And it seems that they never will be.
"Do this things, here you will earn money"
Doesn't matter if I want to, doesn't matter if I care.
Doesn't matter if I enjoy doing it, as long as it paid well.
I see my future laid out before me,
Like it's predetermined and I can never break free.
Destined to walk amongst the dead,
Become fat, grouchy, song-less like my dear household pet.
When I was a kid I used to ask my parents for money,
As if happiness can be acquired through material quantity.
It can't be manufactured, bought, sold and wrapped on layers of neat boxes, papers, plastic and other chivalry.
Can only be found in activity, experience and people that mean so much to me.
My only safety is in danger, disaster and anarchy.
I look at all those stupid upper-class,
With their mansions, pools, and boring jobs.
I smile knowing someday I will be free,
And it seems that they never will be.
Just Like The Movies
We're sitting on the beach, Under the moonlight sky
Beside the campfire, I whispered to your ears;
"You're so beautiful tonight"
You respond with a giggle and a smile,
And told me you we're falling for me,
With seriousness in your eyes,
Then you let me kiss your cherry lips. .
We're both covered with one blanket,
Staring at the stars,
You told me all your fears, your dreams and everything. .
And we made love under the dark blue sky.
We would smile, laugh and talk about how beautiful those stars are that night.
Never mind those awful mosquito bites on our naked skin.
Remember when I told you that story when I was a kid?
I used to think I could talk to bugs and ants,
I didn't eat any of them, or set their house on fire!
You told me you we're six,
You used to get stuck on top of trees.
Unable to come down until your father could get to you,
You're rosy cheeks turned blue.
We both burst out laughing, til tears comes down our face
Like children we play, hoping the sun will not come up
When morning comes a new, We pack our sleeping bags and heads to the unknown.
Together we embrace the future, and hope that it will be. . just like the movies.
Beside the campfire, I whispered to your ears;
"You're so beautiful tonight"
You respond with a giggle and a smile,
And told me you we're falling for me,
With seriousness in your eyes,
Then you let me kiss your cherry lips. .
We're both covered with one blanket,
Staring at the stars,
You told me all your fears, your dreams and everything. .
And we made love under the dark blue sky.
We would smile, laugh and talk about how beautiful those stars are that night.
Never mind those awful mosquito bites on our naked skin.
Remember when I told you that story when I was a kid?
I used to think I could talk to bugs and ants,
I didn't eat any of them, or set their house on fire!
You told me you we're six,
You used to get stuck on top of trees.
Unable to come down until your father could get to you,
You're rosy cheeks turned blue.
We both burst out laughing, til tears comes down our face
Like children we play, hoping the sun will not come up
When morning comes a new, We pack our sleeping bags and heads to the unknown.
Together we embrace the future, and hope that it will be. . just like the movies.
Join the Resistance: Fall in Love
Falling in love is the ultimate act of revolution, of resistance to today's tedious, socially restrictive, culturally constrictive, humanly meaningless world.
Love transforms the world. Where the lover formerly felt boredom, he now feels passion. Where she once was complacent, she now is excited and compelled to self-asserting action. The world which once seemed empty and tiresome becomes filled with meaning, filled with risks and rewards, with majesty and danger. Life for the lover is a gift, an adventure with the highest possible stakes; every moment is memorable, heartbreaking in its fleeting beauty. When he falls in love, a man who once felt disoriented, alienated, and confused will know exactly what he wants. Suddenly his existence will make sense to him; suddenly it becomes valuable, even glorious and noble, to him. Burning passion is an antidote that will cure the worst cases of despair and resigned obedience.
Love makes it possible for individuals to connect to others in a meaningful way—it impels them to leave their shells and risk being honest and spontaneous together, to come to know each other in profound ways. Thus love makes it possible for them to care about each other genuinely, rather than at the end of the gun of Christian doctrine. But at the same time, it plucks the lover out of the routines of everyday life and separates her from other human beings. She will feel a million miles away from the herd of humanity, living as she is in a world entirely different from theirs.
In this sense love is subversive, because it poses a threat to the established order of our modern lives. The boring rituals of workday productivity and socialized etiquette will no longer mean anything to a man who has fallen in love, for there are more important forces guiding him than mere inertia and deference to tradition. Marketing strategies that depend upon apathy or insecurity to sell the products that keep the economy running as it does will have no effect upon him. Entertainment designed for passive consumption, which depends upon exhaustion or cynicism in the viewer, will not interest him.
There is no place for the passionate, romantic lover in today's world, business or private. For he can see that it might be more worthwhile to hitchhike to Alaska (or to sit in the park and watch the clouds sail by) with his sweetheart than to study for his calculus exam or sell real estate, and if he decides that it is, he will have the courage to do it rather than be tormented by unsatisfied longing. He knows that breaking into a cemetery and making love under the stars will make for a much more memorable night than watching television ever could. So love poses a threat to our consumer-driven economy, which depends upon consumption of (largely useless) products and the labor that this consumption necessitates to perpetuate itself.
Similarly, love poses a threat to our political system, for it is difficult to convince a man who has a lot to live for in his personal relationships to be willing to fight and die for an abstraction such as the state; for that matter, it may be difficult to convince him to even pay taxes. It poses a threat to cultures of all kinds, for when human beings are given wisdom and valor by true love they will not be held back by traditions or customs which are irrelevant to the feelings that guide them.
Love even poses a threat to our society itself. Passionate love is ignored and feared by the bourgeoisie, for it poses a great danger to the stability and pretense they covet. Love permits no lies, no falsehoods, not even any polite half-truths, but lays all emotions bare and reveals secrets which domesticated men and women cannot bear. You cannot lie with your emotional and sexual response; situations or ideas will excite or repel you whether you like it or not, whether it is polite or not, whether it is advisable or not. One cannot be a lover and a (dreadfully) responsible, (dreadfully) respectable member of today's society at the same time; for love will impel you to do things which are not "responsible" or "respectable." True love is irresponsible, irrepressible, rebellious, scornful of cowardice, dangerous to the lover and everyone around her, for it serves one master alone: the passion that makes the human heart beat faster. It disdains anything else, be it self-preservation, obedience, or shame. Love urges men and women to heroism, and to antiheroism—to indefensible acts that need no defense for the one who loves.
For the lover speaks a different moral and emotional language than the typical bourgeois man does. The average bourgeois man has no overwhelming, smoldering desires. Sadly, all he knows is the silent despair that comes of spending his life pursuing goals set for him by his family, his educators, his employers, his nation, and his culture, without ever being able to even consider what needs and wants he might have of his own. Without the burning fire of desire to guide him, he has no criteria upon which to choose what is right and wrong for himself. Consequently he is forced to adopt some dogma or doctrine to direct him through his life. There are a wide variety of moralities to choose from in the marketplace of ideas, but which morality a man buys into is immaterial so long as he chooses one because he is at a loss otherwise as to what he should do with himself and his life. How many men and women, having never realized that they had the option to choose their own destinies, wander through life in a dull haze thinking and acting in accordance with the laws that have been taught to them, merely because they no longer have any other idea of what to do? But the lover needs no prefabricated principles to direct her; her desires identify what is right and wrong for her, for her heart guides her through life. She sees beauty and meaning in the world, because her desires paint the world in these colors. She has no need for dogmas, for moral systems, for commandments and imperatives, for she knows what to do without instructions.
Thus she does indeed pose quite a threat to our society. What if everyone decided right and wrong for themselves, without any regard for conventional morality? What if everyone did whatever they wanted to, with the courage to face any consequences? What if everyone feared loveless, lifeless monotony more than they fear taking risks, more than they fear being hungry or cold or in danger? What if everyone set down their "responsibilities" and "common sense," and dared to pursue their wildest dreams, to set the stakes high and live each day as if it were the last? Think what a place the world would be! Certainly it would be different than it is now—and it is quite a truism that people from the "mainstream," the simultaneous keepers and victims of the status quo, fear change.
And so, despite the stereotyped images used in the media to sell toothpaste and honeymoon suites, genuine passionate love is discouraged in our culture. Being "carried away by your emotions" is frowned upon; instead we are raised to always be on our guard lest our hearts lead us astray. Rather than being encouraged to have the courage to face the consequences of risks taken in pursuit of our hearts' desires, we are counseled not to take risks at all, to be "responsible." And love itself is regulated. Men must not fall in love with other men, nor women with other women, nor individuals from different ethnic backgrounds with each other, or else the usual bigots who form the front-line offensive in the assault of modern Western culture upon the individual will step in. Men and women who have already entered into a legal/religious contract with each other are not to fall in love with anyone else, even if they no longer feel any passion for their marital partner. Love as most of us know it today is a carefully prescribed and preordained ritual, something that happens on Friday nights in expensive movie theaters and restaurants, something that fills the pockets of the shareholders in the entertainment industries without preventing workers from showing up to the office on time and ready to reroute phone calls all day long. This regulated, commercial "love" is nothing like the passionate, burning love that consumes the genuine lover. These restrictions, expectations, and regulations smother true love; for love is a wild flower that can never grow within the confines prepared for it but only appears where it is least expected.
We must fight against these cultural restraints that would cripple and smother our desires. For it is love that gives meaning to life, desire that makes it possible for us to make sense of our existence and find purpose in our lives. Without these, there is no way for us to determine how to live our lives, except to submit to some authority, to some god, master or doctrine that will tell us what to do and how to do it without ever giving us the satisfaction that self-determination does. So fall in love today, with men, with women, with music, with ambition, with yourself. . . with life!
One might say that it is ridiculous to implore others to fall in love—one either falls in love or one does not, it is not a choice that can be made consciously. Emotions do not follow the instructions of the rational mind. But the environment in which we must live out our lives has a great influence on our emotions, and we can make rational decisions that will affect this environment. It should be possible to work to change an environment that is hostile to love into an environment that will encourage it. Our task must be to engineer our world so that it is a world in which people can and do fall in love, and thus to reconstitute human beings so that we will be ready for the "revolution" spoken of in these pages—so that we will be able to find meaning and happiness in our lives.
What if everyone decided right and wrong for themselves, without any regard for conventional morality? What if everyone did whatever they wanted to, with the courage to face any consequences? What if everyone feared loveless, lifeless monotony more than they fear taking risks, more than they fear being hungry or cold or in danger? What if everyone set down their "responsibilities" and "common sense," and dared to pursue their wildest dreams, to set the stakes high and live each day as if it were the last? Think what a place the world would be!
Love transforms the world. Where the lover formerly felt boredom, he now feels passion. Where she once was complacent, she now is excited and compelled to self-asserting action. The world which once seemed empty and tiresome becomes filled with meaning, filled with risks and rewards, with majesty and danger. Life for the lover is a gift, an adventure with the highest possible stakes; every moment is memorable, heartbreaking in its fleeting beauty. When he falls in love, a man who once felt disoriented, alienated, and confused will know exactly what he wants. Suddenly his existence will make sense to him; suddenly it becomes valuable, even glorious and noble, to him. Burning passion is an antidote that will cure the worst cases of despair and resigned obedience.
Love makes it possible for individuals to connect to others in a meaningful way—it impels them to leave their shells and risk being honest and spontaneous together, to come to know each other in profound ways. Thus love makes it possible for them to care about each other genuinely, rather than at the end of the gun of Christian doctrine. But at the same time, it plucks the lover out of the routines of everyday life and separates her from other human beings. She will feel a million miles away from the herd of humanity, living as she is in a world entirely different from theirs.
In this sense love is subversive, because it poses a threat to the established order of our modern lives. The boring rituals of workday productivity and socialized etiquette will no longer mean anything to a man who has fallen in love, for there are more important forces guiding him than mere inertia and deference to tradition. Marketing strategies that depend upon apathy or insecurity to sell the products that keep the economy running as it does will have no effect upon him. Entertainment designed for passive consumption, which depends upon exhaustion or cynicism in the viewer, will not interest him.
There is no place for the passionate, romantic lover in today's world, business or private. For he can see that it might be more worthwhile to hitchhike to Alaska (or to sit in the park and watch the clouds sail by) with his sweetheart than to study for his calculus exam or sell real estate, and if he decides that it is, he will have the courage to do it rather than be tormented by unsatisfied longing. He knows that breaking into a cemetery and making love under the stars will make for a much more memorable night than watching television ever could. So love poses a threat to our consumer-driven economy, which depends upon consumption of (largely useless) products and the labor that this consumption necessitates to perpetuate itself.
Similarly, love poses a threat to our political system, for it is difficult to convince a man who has a lot to live for in his personal relationships to be willing to fight and die for an abstraction such as the state; for that matter, it may be difficult to convince him to even pay taxes. It poses a threat to cultures of all kinds, for when human beings are given wisdom and valor by true love they will not be held back by traditions or customs which are irrelevant to the feelings that guide them.
Love even poses a threat to our society itself. Passionate love is ignored and feared by the bourgeoisie, for it poses a great danger to the stability and pretense they covet. Love permits no lies, no falsehoods, not even any polite half-truths, but lays all emotions bare and reveals secrets which domesticated men and women cannot bear. You cannot lie with your emotional and sexual response; situations or ideas will excite or repel you whether you like it or not, whether it is polite or not, whether it is advisable or not. One cannot be a lover and a (dreadfully) responsible, (dreadfully) respectable member of today's society at the same time; for love will impel you to do things which are not "responsible" or "respectable." True love is irresponsible, irrepressible, rebellious, scornful of cowardice, dangerous to the lover and everyone around her, for it serves one master alone: the passion that makes the human heart beat faster. It disdains anything else, be it self-preservation, obedience, or shame. Love urges men and women to heroism, and to antiheroism—to indefensible acts that need no defense for the one who loves.
For the lover speaks a different moral and emotional language than the typical bourgeois man does. The average bourgeois man has no overwhelming, smoldering desires. Sadly, all he knows is the silent despair that comes of spending his life pursuing goals set for him by his family, his educators, his employers, his nation, and his culture, without ever being able to even consider what needs and wants he might have of his own. Without the burning fire of desire to guide him, he has no criteria upon which to choose what is right and wrong for himself. Consequently he is forced to adopt some dogma or doctrine to direct him through his life. There are a wide variety of moralities to choose from in the marketplace of ideas, but which morality a man buys into is immaterial so long as he chooses one because he is at a loss otherwise as to what he should do with himself and his life. How many men and women, having never realized that they had the option to choose their own destinies, wander through life in a dull haze thinking and acting in accordance with the laws that have been taught to them, merely because they no longer have any other idea of what to do? But the lover needs no prefabricated principles to direct her; her desires identify what is right and wrong for her, for her heart guides her through life. She sees beauty and meaning in the world, because her desires paint the world in these colors. She has no need for dogmas, for moral systems, for commandments and imperatives, for she knows what to do without instructions.
Thus she does indeed pose quite a threat to our society. What if everyone decided right and wrong for themselves, without any regard for conventional morality? What if everyone did whatever they wanted to, with the courage to face any consequences? What if everyone feared loveless, lifeless monotony more than they fear taking risks, more than they fear being hungry or cold or in danger? What if everyone set down their "responsibilities" and "common sense," and dared to pursue their wildest dreams, to set the stakes high and live each day as if it were the last? Think what a place the world would be! Certainly it would be different than it is now—and it is quite a truism that people from the "mainstream," the simultaneous keepers and victims of the status quo, fear change.
And so, despite the stereotyped images used in the media to sell toothpaste and honeymoon suites, genuine passionate love is discouraged in our culture. Being "carried away by your emotions" is frowned upon; instead we are raised to always be on our guard lest our hearts lead us astray. Rather than being encouraged to have the courage to face the consequences of risks taken in pursuit of our hearts' desires, we are counseled not to take risks at all, to be "responsible." And love itself is regulated. Men must not fall in love with other men, nor women with other women, nor individuals from different ethnic backgrounds with each other, or else the usual bigots who form the front-line offensive in the assault of modern Western culture upon the individual will step in. Men and women who have already entered into a legal/religious contract with each other are not to fall in love with anyone else, even if they no longer feel any passion for their marital partner. Love as most of us know it today is a carefully prescribed and preordained ritual, something that happens on Friday nights in expensive movie theaters and restaurants, something that fills the pockets of the shareholders in the entertainment industries without preventing workers from showing up to the office on time and ready to reroute phone calls all day long. This regulated, commercial "love" is nothing like the passionate, burning love that consumes the genuine lover. These restrictions, expectations, and regulations smother true love; for love is a wild flower that can never grow within the confines prepared for it but only appears where it is least expected.
We must fight against these cultural restraints that would cripple and smother our desires. For it is love that gives meaning to life, desire that makes it possible for us to make sense of our existence and find purpose in our lives. Without these, there is no way for us to determine how to live our lives, except to submit to some authority, to some god, master or doctrine that will tell us what to do and how to do it without ever giving us the satisfaction that self-determination does. So fall in love today, with men, with women, with music, with ambition, with yourself. . . with life!
One might say that it is ridiculous to implore others to fall in love—one either falls in love or one does not, it is not a choice that can be made consciously. Emotions do not follow the instructions of the rational mind. But the environment in which we must live out our lives has a great influence on our emotions, and we can make rational decisions that will affect this environment. It should be possible to work to change an environment that is hostile to love into an environment that will encourage it. Our task must be to engineer our world so that it is a world in which people can and do fall in love, and thus to reconstitute human beings so that we will be ready for the "revolution" spoken of in these pages—so that we will be able to find meaning and happiness in our lives.
What if everyone decided right and wrong for themselves, without any regard for conventional morality? What if everyone did whatever they wanted to, with the courage to face any consequences? What if everyone feared loveless, lifeless monotony more than they fear taking risks, more than they fear being hungry or cold or in danger? What if everyone set down their "responsibilities" and "common sense," and dared to pursue their wildest dreams, to set the stakes high and live each day as if it were the last? Think what a place the world would be!
What does capitalism make people value?
As Jeanette writes in her article on product and process, under capitalism our lives end up revolving around THINGS, as if happiness is to be found in possesions rather than in free actions and pursuits. Those who have wealth have it because they spend a lot of time and energy figuring out how to get it from other people. Those who have very little have to spend most of their lives working to get what they need to survive, and all they have as consolation for their lives of hard labor and poverty are the few things they are able to afford to buy-- since their LIVES themselves have been bought from them.
Between those two social classes are the members of the middle class, who have been bombarded from birth with advertisements and other propaganda proclaiming that happiness, youth, meaning, and everything else in life are to be found in possessions and status symbols. They learn to spend their lives working hard to collect these, rather than taking advantage of whatever chances they might have to seek adventure and pleasure.
Thus capitalism centers everyone's values around what they HAVE rather than what they DO, by making them spend their lives competing for the things they need to survive and achieve social standing. People might be more likely to find happiness in a society that encouraged them to value thier ability to act freely and do what they want above all else. To create such a society, we will have to stop competing for control and wealth, and start to share them more freely; only then everyone be completely free to choose the lives they most want to live, without fear of going hungry or being shut out of society.
They're buying your happiness from you---steal it back!
Between those two social classes are the members of the middle class, who have been bombarded from birth with advertisements and other propaganda proclaiming that happiness, youth, meaning, and everything else in life are to be found in possessions and status symbols. They learn to spend their lives working hard to collect these, rather than taking advantage of whatever chances they might have to seek adventure and pleasure.
Thus capitalism centers everyone's values around what they HAVE rather than what they DO, by making them spend their lives competing for the things they need to survive and achieve social standing. People might be more likely to find happiness in a society that encouraged them to value thier ability to act freely and do what they want above all else. To create such a society, we will have to stop competing for control and wealth, and start to share them more freely; only then everyone be completely free to choose the lives they most want to live, without fear of going hungry or being shut out of society.
They're buying your happiness from you---steal it back!
Loversong
We were young and strange and we transformed space.
What savage desire moved within me?
I promised to bring you here and make you fall in love.
We felt a wild strength here inside us,
The delerium and fright of freedom.
I found my own voice,
And I spoke to your absence in the warm dark.
I wondered what i'd left behind.
Here your eyes reflected yellow flowers.
And my hands were filled with shifting sand.
Your letters pressed against my wet cheek,
And your hands on me here in that starry field.
The night's pulse made me dizzy,
And i sobbed on a foreign street for the loss of you.
The orange sun slipped slowly behind dark hells.
And the world seemed bigger than it ever had before.
Like · · Share · Delete
What savage desire moved within me?
I promised to bring you here and make you fall in love.
We felt a wild strength here inside us,
The delerium and fright of freedom.
I found my own voice,
And I spoke to your absence in the warm dark.
I wondered what i'd left behind.
Here your eyes reflected yellow flowers.
And my hands were filled with shifting sand.
Your letters pressed against my wet cheek,
And your hands on me here in that starry field.
The night's pulse made me dizzy,
And i sobbed on a foreign street for the loss of you.
The orange sun slipped slowly behind dark hells.
And the world seemed bigger than it ever had before.
Like · · Share · Delete
A is for ANNA.. and ANARCHY!
The following words will not save your life; that, my friend, is up to you.
"Anarchism" is the revolutionary idea that no one is more qualified than you are to decide what your life will be.
--It means trying to figure out how to work together to meet our individual needs, how to work with each other rather than "for" or against each other. And when this is impossible, it means preferring strife to submission and domination.
--It means not valuing any system or ideology above the people it purports to serve, not valuing anything theoretical above the real human beings (and animals, etc.), fighting for ourselves and for each other, not out of "responsibility," not for "causes" or other intangible concepts.
--It means not forcing your desires into a hierarchal order, either, but accepting and embracing all of them, accepting yourself. It means not trying to force the self to abide by any external laws, not trying to restrict your emotions to the predictable or the practical, not pushing your instincts and desires into boxes: for there is no cage large enough to accomodate the human soul in all its flights, all its heights and depths.
--It means refusing to put the resposibility of your happiness in anyone else's hands, whether that be parents, lovers, employers, or society itself. It means taking the pursuit of meaning and joy in your life upon your own shoulders.
For what else should we pursue, if not happiness? If something isn't valuable because we find meaning and joy in it, then what could possibly make it important? How could abstractions like "resposibility," "order," or "propriety" possibly be more important than the real needs of people who invented them? Should we serve employers, parents, the State, God, capitalism, moral law, causes, movements, "society" before ourselves? Who taught you that, anyway?
*for independent men and women, full time revolutionaries, punk rockers, activists, musicians, artists, human beings.. And for anna.
Life can be beautiful when we start to break free!
"Anarchism" is the revolutionary idea that no one is more qualified than you are to decide what your life will be.
--It means trying to figure out how to work together to meet our individual needs, how to work with each other rather than "for" or against each other. And when this is impossible, it means preferring strife to submission and domination.
--It means not valuing any system or ideology above the people it purports to serve, not valuing anything theoretical above the real human beings (and animals, etc.), fighting for ourselves and for each other, not out of "responsibility," not for "causes" or other intangible concepts.
--It means not forcing your desires into a hierarchal order, either, but accepting and embracing all of them, accepting yourself. It means not trying to force the self to abide by any external laws, not trying to restrict your emotions to the predictable or the practical, not pushing your instincts and desires into boxes: for there is no cage large enough to accomodate the human soul in all its flights, all its heights and depths.
--It means refusing to put the resposibility of your happiness in anyone else's hands, whether that be parents, lovers, employers, or society itself. It means taking the pursuit of meaning and joy in your life upon your own shoulders.
For what else should we pursue, if not happiness? If something isn't valuable because we find meaning and joy in it, then what could possibly make it important? How could abstractions like "resposibility," "order," or "propriety" possibly be more important than the real needs of people who invented them? Should we serve employers, parents, the State, God, capitalism, moral law, causes, movements, "society" before ourselves? Who taught you that, anyway?
*for independent men and women, full time revolutionaries, punk rockers, activists, musicians, artists, human beings.. And for anna.
Life can be beautiful when we start to break free!
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
