Life Alert!

On the couch with my sweet love, eating sunflower seeds, enjoying music, watching the baseball performance. Commercial comes on, I've seen this product before. The volume is off, so it's just the images.

Worried old lady looks spooked, old person writhing on the ground (image gets fuzzy and stained an odd color, to let us know the old person is damaged), next we see "good news, relief" face, fire fighter and paramedics, happily ever after... you know this ad?

I've probably seen an ad for Life Alert! a few hundred times (I watched the Price is Right with my grandparents for years), and never before has this it induced the recognition of what the advertisement is so clearly announcing:

Elderly American humans live alone, and in a space that they believe is just waiting to claim their life — their own home. Scared and destroyed... press a button and someone will come save you — this is a thrashing condemnation of the health of this culture.

What the fuck? Life ALERT! Their website claims that they, quote: save a life from catastrophe every 11 minutes!

Horrifying. Frail old people living alone, living alone, living alone? Old people live alone... bizarre.

The Warden at Kid Prison Calls for a Walk-Out

School is the death machine — totally fucked. I know we all "know" this, but please, I ask you, spend a moment with that nugget of truth. Dream on it if you will. Don't allow your self to idealize what school "could be". It isn't that. It is the systematic normalization of coercion, or, more directly: the way kids learn to sell their time to something they don't want to do... the beginning of their end.

Get a move on: save the little ones from that which poisons them. Say something to someone, especially if that someone has kids.

Where does the critical mass kick in? Just pull your kid out, quit your job or whatever if you must and get a parent/child business of sorts (what?)... inaction is our great weakness — the reasonableness that instructs sending your kids to school is insanity.

They are your children! And that school is a house of the dominant culture. Don't let them go to that house. Come up with something less awful. You can do it.

Boom... For Real?

Pardon me? They didn't kill the black guy? Oh, I see... yet... they didn't kill him yet (Hours later, Troy Davis, murdered by the state, with help from...)

If this is a "wait for the angries to go home" ploy (like the smell coming from the not-at-all-the-same-thing delay in Tim DeChristopher's sentencing), I'd expect a little blow-back.

Any doubt that this delay is a Justice-say-what? cost/benefit move? We sure would love to do the right thing here — poison this nigger black african american (colorblind era) guy's body — a body that had the chutzpah to send violence up the ladder of authority — until all life ceases... but is it worth it to follow our hardened principle of destroying human beings with black skin? It sure seems like a lot of people are acting like "doing-what-we-do" is a problem... Let us pray.

If they didn't already have a riot on their hands, they will now — assuming they ultimately go along with the death ritual (which is not to say I'm getting all ginned up with riot punch, but check it: since killing the colored folks is this culture's most sacred rite, it's only fitting that this would be the catalyst for a BOOM FOR REAL.

I'll go back outside now.

Enjoy


As a below bonus, I was generous enough to transcribe the Important President Teaching Announcement from this morning, or whenever:

searching for a speeding ticket in the Mega-Macro-Cosmos

In what I'd call misfortune, I recently recalibrated my taste buds to the moribund flavors of mass reality — see previous post as a guide to the things I was dipping my head into.

Energies now revamped, possible sights of gettin' weird anchor the moment. The alien has revisited me, ready to be further metabolized.

PKD and Terence, I offer a nod for the connections they've bridged:

I actually had to develop a love of the disordered & puzzling, viewing reality as a vast riddle to be joyfully tackled, not in fear but with tireless fascination. What has been most needed is reality testing, & a willingness to face the possibility of self-negating experiences: i.e., real contradictions, with something being both true & not true.The enigma is alive, aware of us, & changing. It is partly created by our own minds: we alter it by perceiving it, since we are not outside it. As our views shift, it shifts. In a sense it is not there at all (acosmism). In another sense it is a vast intelligence: in another sense it is total harmonia and structure (how logically can. it be all three? Well, it is).

That's PKD via a McKenna essay

And here's a nearby mushroom I've had my eye on on:

It's called Coprinus comatus (sleepy astronomer?): common and I suppose mild (relative to the more astonishing fungi)... however, it exhibits a stunning, and speedy, physical cycle. You can see how the gills are deteriorating into a black drop with mucous-like texture. It has released its spores, and will be disintegrating further quite rapidly, perhaps I'll update.

Enjoy

I sho' wish weez had the Al-Juzeruh channel

The A-Rab tee vee show got a website too! Kind of boring though... they showing da same stuff weez getting on our shows...

World powers rush in to rebuild Libya

By unfreezing assets and offering loans, governments from London to Beijing are extending help to the 'new' Libya.

As the endgame of the Muammar Gaddafi regime plays out in Libya, members of the international community - from world powers to oil companies - are gathering to discuss their respective roles in the country's future. Decades of partial isolation imposed by Gaddafi have left the oil-rich country's economy reeling from a raft of sanctions and its government in a diplomatic no man's land.

The rebel government, or National Transitional Council (NTC), has said it intends to change all that. In comments published on Wednesday in an Italian newspaper, NTC chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil said the "new" Libya would build "strong relations with other countries, based on mutual respect and co-operation". Going by Wednesday's flurry of diplomatic action, foreign countries appeared eager to reciprocate.

The enjoyability of listening to assholes talk-up Al-Jazeera as some form of "real" or perhaps even "honest" news source (that's right... NEWS!) has risen exponentially in the last 6 months or so, you surely agree? 


So do call Comcast, or whoever, and demand — hell, write your Congressperson — that we have Al-Jazeera too (we earned it!)... without it we won't know what's going on! And that would be terrible... because other people's business is the only thing worth knowing.

Stop Making Money!

Go get some paint (don't fucking buy it, scrounge it up) — some white spray paint being your easiest move... it's around. Find one of these signs, and tag it.

STOP is already there. Just add "making money"... and walk away. Fuck, skip away... cuz you just had some fun.

STOP MAKING MONEY!

Mantra.

Worth Repeating... and repeat

Take both arms, bend them into an air hug, stick this place in the middle, and squeeze it good. The same ole' question: "what can I — lonely ole' me — do about all deez big prahlumbs?" Amateur Seer Justin comes up with the goods (especially for those of you, like me, who are members of the "not terribly opposed to a few more decades of enjoyable life" sector of the population): find your fucking imagination (this will not be easy) and re-skill yo'self... cuz our old skills are, if I had to bet my sturdiest shovel on it, fucking bullshit.

I hush, show you a chicken butt, and point you at the Domestic Injustice chapter of Big Dada:

As if to say...

Quinoa on its way

The ugly truth about things like the war on drugs is that the problem is not the war on drugs, the problem is that our system needs a permanent underclass of easily exploitable labor to function. As things get tighter, the size of this underclass has to expand, which is why unemployment has doubled, and why elites are attacking our social safety so unmercifully. The conditions of uncertainty, despair, insecurity, hunger and powerlessness are not new, they are just being applied at a broader scale and people who did not think those conditions should apply to them by virtue of their education, intelligence, heritage, or whatever else are finding out that this is not true.

Something will have to give, and that something will have to be everyday people finding ways to engage this system not just destructively, as hacker groups like Anonymous or as acts of civil disobedience, but also by finding constructive alternatives. Most people want to live fulfilling lives, most people have deeply held grievances with the status quo, but the question that plagues them, that they find unanswerable, is what they can do about it, or whether anything can even be done. This is a lack of imagination, and an internalization of a dangerous meme about civilization and industrialism; as Margaret Thatcher once said, there is no alternative. There are obviously alternatives, but they are not going to come wrapped in plastic, or in a hand book. They are not going to be handed down from on high like the Ten Commandments. Its going to be the tiny revolution of every mind, and the follow through of every body, to the best of whatever circumstances they are in. Our system has very deliberately deskilled the laboring American work force, and made the good jobs completely technically specified. It is easy to see why people cannot imagine existing outside of this context, there experience and existence is completely embedded within its premises. To begin extracting ourselves from this mess, we have to begin reskilling ourselves. There is no time to lose, every ecosystem on this planet is in terminal decline, scientists are warning that the ocean is already into an extinction phase owing to our industrial growth paradigm. Weather systems are changing dramatically, and as expected, food shortages have already begun appearing where drought and floods are destroying crops all over the world. The only alternatives offered by our system is more of the same, we have to start finding our own.

I hit those cucumbers with something hard and then add gin!

These characters are friendly with lentils

 Since this picture was taken, I ate these. And then pooped them back into the garden (serious?)

Almost as delicious as money!

Wanting for Something To Do

I'm a bit lazy. Inertia. Can't help it. So I need to present myself with useful things to do (oh, and I don't sleep a lot... long days). While I do enjoy the hours of my life immensely, I often just wander around, or whatever, when I don't have work to do. Finding useful things to do gets tricky, because almost everything that the culture encourages me to do is counterproductive to the way I'd like-to-go through this world.

A few months ago, the school that employs me had a "service learning" event. All bullshit, obviously. They talk about ending the "walk for water" that many humans — especially women, the video tells us — have to suffer through. Predictably, the neo-libs who design these programs are desperate to get these women in jobs and schools. That's right. Rather than walking for water, the Water People who are trying to get us "involved" are all-about girls and women going to school and working jobs. (They also talk a lot about building roads, as if roads aren't responsible for death and destruction on an enormous scale — moving people and things is a bad idea... we clearly can't handle it).

Anyway, I tell my students that walking for water is an excellent way to spend one's time. It would be nice to shut down the factories and punch the assholes responsible for polluting the world's water supply — another useful thing to do. Scorecard:

Good: walking for water, punching industrial polluters (literally and symbolically, I suppose)

Bad: Going to school, having a job, building a road.

I'm very popular with the school's administration.

I'm not sure why I'm telling you that anecdote, I'm writing to present one of my new "things to do":

1) When I shower, I use this soap that my mythically beautiful wife-like creature makes. It's nice. And it's not toxic or anything like that (you have, perhaps, seen these commercial soaps that have little polymer "scrubbers" in them... fucking insanity).


2) Rather than letting that water wash away into the industrial water processing system, I plug the drain. Scoop it out with buckets, and go dump it in my rain barrels (this time of year, we use a lot more water than the barrels collect... so this is a very useful thing to do).

That's all: natural soaps, plug the drain, haul the water to the rain barrels. Use it to water the garden = something to do.

Goodnight.

I have an idea for a "fad"

When meeting someone, what one does physically is inherently impacting. It matters to you and to me. This stuff gets noticed and processed... at least somehow, some of the time.

I suggest to you: the next time you "meet" a new human, stretch your body. Yes-yes... stretch while speaking. What type of stretches? You may wonder.

Something with a little umph (perhaps something common, like a calf or hammy), like you really want it, feel your physical self, extend it. This would be good on several levels:

1) Obviously, people who stretch are healthy. Those who don't, are not. Those last two sentences are infallible, cosmic truths.

2) Exposing your grace and health may set your fellow human beast at ease. Wounded animals are more terribly frightening than healthy ones. Without anxiety, you'll be free to skip the bullshit posturing.

Give it a try.