updated fuck-our-society and moved the kids neglect piece to the unused

arc

2 files changed, 18 insertions, 10 deletions

diff --git a/fuck-our-society.txt b/fuck-our-society.txt
index 7be0091..3d7c825 100644
--- a/fuck-our-society.txt
+++ b/fuck-our-society.txt
@@ -1,22 +1,30 @@
-Many moons ago I was down in Laguna Beach at the now long gone Tippecanoe's clothing store when I ran across a relatively innocuous dark olive green shirt. Probably handmade, it looked a bit like an old-style baseball jersey, with a number three in red on the front pocket. On the back it had a cheery serif script that read "Fuck Our Society", flanked on either side by anarchy A's in padlocks. You bet your ass I bought it.
+Many moons ago I was down in Laguna Beach at the now long gone Tippecanoe's clothing store when I ran across a relatively innocuous dark olive green shirt. Probably handmade, it looked a bit like an old-style baseball jersey, with an iron-on number three in red on the front pocket. On the back it had a cheery serif script that read "Fuck Our Society", flanked on either side by anarchy A's in padlocks. You bet your ass I bought it.
 
 I was in a band back then, I played quite a few shows in it. But this was Orange County CA in the mid to late 1990s, I didn't wear it out much. Once, on the way to a show, we stopped at Trader Joe's to grab a snack for the road and while we were standing in line I felt a tap on the shoulder. I had been conscious of wearing the shirt since I got out of the car so I turned around expecting some kind of confrontation, but it was a tiny woman, not much over five feet tall who looked me up and down and then smiled and said, "I like your shirt." 
 
-I've never really called myself an anarchist, I'm not even sure what that would mean. Anarchy was the only political-ish thought system that's had any appeal to me. But even its appeal is pretty weak. I have read most of the notable political anarchists, Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, Alexander Berkman, Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky and others, as well as the more figurative writers one might call anarchists like Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Albert Camus and Oscar Wilde.
+I've never really called myself an anarchist, I'm not even sure what that would mean, but anarchy was the only political-ish thought system that's had any appeal to me. But even its appeal is pretty weak. I'm just not interested in mammalian territorial status.
 
-While I sympathized with, for example, Focker's notion that political institutions -- possibly the biggest problem humanity faces -- grow out of an irrational belief in a higher authority, particularly the singular authority of sun-god religions like Christianity or Islam, at the end of the day I am not an anarcho-syndicalist. I have no interest in the political aims of anarchy. 
+Still, I read most of the notable political anarchists -- Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, Alexander Berkman, Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky and others, as well as the more figurative writers one might call anarchists like Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Albert Camus and Oscar Wilde.
 
-I am occasionally drawn to a more P.O.S-style anarchism, the kind that's "probably not welcome at your protest/ Say I'm out of my damn mind/ Looking to break glass, not holding a damn sign", which is not to pigeon hole P.O.S, just that he's good at defining the appeal of that space. And it has appeal. Having looked at something as massive as an earthmover with a bag of sugar in hand... it has appeal is all I will say about that. It's ineffectual, but then relatively speaking almost everything is, that's the world.
+While I sympathized with, for example, Focker's notion that political institutions -- possibly the biggest problem humanity faces -- grow out of an irrational belief in a higher authority, particularly the singular authority of sun-god religions, at the end of the day I am not an anarcho-syndicalist. I have no interest in the political aims of anarchy. 
 
-There might be dark nights and sugared gas tanks in my past, but that's not the anarchy I ended up believing in. That's not to denigrate the more violent anarchy. It has it's place, but when I wore that shirt I had something else in mind, something I have been thinking of for years now as "magical anarchism".
+And while Thoreau has been a guiding figure in my life, the others never quite sat right. For example I don't agree with Wilde's solution in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, but I definitely agree with the problem:
 
-Magical anarchism is the anarchy of travel and empathy, the anarchy of completely unzipping your head, the anarchy of gift economies, the anarchy of completely re-arranging experience with psychotropic chemicals. And yes, the anarchy of freedom from stuff.
+> With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
 
-I don't entirely agree with Wilde's premise in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which is to say the beginning of the quote bothers me:
+I don't think the answer is the abolition of private property. I'm game to try. It might work, but you can achieve the latter without it. That is, you can abolish your own private property and stop wasting your life in accumulating things. You can live rather than just existing. Property has little, if anything to do with it. See Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning.
 
-> With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
+Having exhausted the political and artistic political I discovered the more immediate arachism of destruction. Personal and otherwise. These days I just channel that energy into singing P.O.S lyrics -- "probably not welcome at your protest/ Say I'm out of my damn mind/ Looking to break glass, not holding a damn sign" -- which is not to pigeon hole P.O.S, just that he's good at defining the appeal of that space. And it has appeal. Having looked at something as massive as an earthmover with a bag of sugar in hand... it has appeal is all I will say about that. It's ineffectual, but then relatively speaking almost everything is, that's the world.
+
+The more violent forms of anarchic behavior have their place. Yes, even destruction for its own sake. But when I wore that shirt I had something else in mind, something I have been thinking of for years now as "magical anarchy".
+
+Magical anarchy is the anarchy of travel and empathy, the anarchy of completely unzipping your head, the anarchy of gift economies, the anarchy of completely re-arranging experience with psychotropic chemicals. And yes, the anarchy of freedom from stuff.
+
+Magical anarchy if founded on the belief that our individual experience of the world is profoundly narrow and the full dimensions of what's permissible and possible are unknowable. Given this limitation, when in doubt the safest assumption is the positive assumption. Which to say nothing is ever an "or", but an "and".
+
+For example, what any other creature on earth is thinking is unknowable, but they are thinking. All of them. The animals may not have thoughts we would understand or even recognize as thoughts, but they are thinking. It's taken 200 years, but science can even prove that they're thinking. Given that, it's probably safe to extend the same idea to the plants. Perhaps even the rocks. Perhaps the planet itself. The safe assumption would be to assume that your inability to experience the planet as a whole as "thinking" is a limitation of your observational systems, rather than proof that the planet is not thinking.
 
-I don't think the answer is the abolition of private property. I'm game to try. It might work, but you can achieve the latter without it. That is you can abolish your own private property and stop wasting your life in accumulating things.
 
+The default mode of being in magical anarchy is empathy. Everything is unknowable as a direct experience, but you have your own history and the remarkable power to listen. These two tools allow you to construct a limited and very poor imitation of the experience of others and can help form tiny bridges between their soul and yours. It's an incomplete and sometimes nearly impossible thing, but it's what we have and we do what we can with what we have.
 
 
diff --git a/kids-neglect.txt b/kids-neglect.txt
index 5287bf5..8237d4c 100644
--- a/kids-neglect.txt
+++ b/kids-neglect.txt
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-I have an published piece sitting on my hard drive about the fence I built around our front yard. It does a bit a pontificating about the great sorrow it caused me to put up the fence, being a westerner at heart I dislike fences, fences are what land barons use to keep people like me off their land, me turning around and building a fence... well, see...
+I have an unpublished piece sitting on my hard drive about the fence I built around our front yard. It does a bit a pontificating about the great sorrow it caused me to put up the fence, being a westerner at heart I dislike fences, fences are what land barons use to keep people like me off their land, me turning around and building a fence... well, see...
 
 But the thing is I have kids now, I need a fence to keep the rest of the world from interfering with my kids.