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@@ -8,41 +8,46 @@ This was really the first time I started thinking about the shirt as anything mo
 
 This is not the political anarchy of historical figures like Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, Alexander Berkman, Hannah Arendt or other names your probably white, probably bearded professor put on a syllabus. Most of them said *fuck what's wrong*[^1]. 
 
-The shirt feels closer the anarchy you find in writers like Henry David Thoreau or Leo Tolstoy, anarchists more interested in the sum of our existence than individual parts of it.
+The shirt feels closer the anarchy you find in writers like Henry David Thoreau, Edward Abbey or Leo Tolstoy, anarchists more interested in the sum of our existence than individual parts of it.
 
 Despite the shirt, I've never really thought of myself an anarchist. When I was younger I had a lot of what I think is best called rage about the fucked nature of our society. Every young person capable of thinking for themselves has felt something similar. Seeking to understand or perhaps validate this unidentifiable sense of rage at the perceived injustice of the world is what led me to Thoreau and Tolstoy and then later Goldman, Focker and the rest. 
 
-Even now I'm not sure why anarchist thinking appealed to me more than any other. I suppose it was an anecdote to the hierarchical, highly stratified society I grew up in. The idea of creating institutions that worked so well people actually wanted to be part of them was so novel it grabbed me. Then there was the cliche destruction of anarchists past. Books like the Monkey Wrench Gang or slim black volume named the Anarchists Cookbook that I discovered on the shelves of Barnes and Noble in Fashion Island Newport Beach. 
+Even now I'm not sure why anarchist thinking appealed to me more than any other. I suppose it was an anecdote to the hierarchical, highly stratified society I grew up in. The idea of creating institutions that worked so well people actually wanted to be part of them was so novel it grabbed me. 
 
-It would be impossible to explain to anyone who never experienced the pre-internet age, just how revelatory The Anarchists Cookbook was for me. It was filled with recipes of all kinds of tools of destruction. It had plans for brewing bombs, bathtub napalm and dozens of other ideas that struck even my testosterone addled, rage-filled teenage brain as incredibly bad ideas. It didn't steal it because -- of course I stole it -- I wanted to blow something up, I wanted it because it was proof that there were other people out there who thought our society was fucked.
+There was also the "fuck our society" aspect of anarchy. The aspect that just wanted to, as P.O.S sings, "break glass/Not hold a damn sign." If you really believe you can change a system from inside it you fail to understand the meaning of the word "system." And anarchy offers a very direct release from that ridiculous idea. Books like the Monkey Wrench Gang or a slim black volume named the Anarchists Cookbook that I discovered on the shelves of Barnes and Noble in Fashion Island, Newport Beach[^2], didn't ramble on about lawsuits and elections, they drank beer and blew things up. 
 
-Between the thin black, almost self-published quality covers I discovered not polite words about political or artistic anarchy, but something much rawer, something driven by emotion rather than logic, the anarchy of pure destruction -- literal destruction. This is the anarchy no one in our fucked society wants to talk about (or even acknowledge). Political anarchy is ultimately safe. It might rock the boat, but it isn't going to sink it. 
+It would be impossible to explain to anyone who never experienced the pre-internet age how revelatory The Anarchists Cookbook especially was for me. It had real plans for brewing bombs, bathtub napalm and dozens of other ideas that struck even my testosterone addled, rage-filled teenage brain as incredibly bad ideas. But it was there. Actually really existed.
 
-Destructive anarchy is out to sink the boat, often for no other reason than to see what happens. It has no agenda and that ends up being one of two things to people in power. It's either terrifying or unknowable because in that world of power everything is believed to have an agenda, which is to say an aim. This is absolutely terrifying to anyone with anything invested in the status quo. This the anarchy even self-proclaimed anarchists don't like. As P.O.S sings: "probably not welcome at your protest/ Say I'm out of my damn mind/ Looking to break glass, not holding a damn sign". 
+Between those thin black, almost self-published covers, were not words about protesting or campaigning, but something much rawer, something driven by emotion rather than logic, the anarchy of pure destruction. This is the anarchy no one in our fucked society wants to talk about, the anarchy of nature, of the anarchy of gods like Shiva, tk or tk.
 
-The anarchy in the Anarchist Cookbook doesn't have an aim. It's not even anarchic really. It doesn't challenge repressive power or anything else. There's no angle, there's no game. There's just a bunch of recipes for stuff, most of which even I, with only a half asleep high schoolers' knowledge of chemistry, could tell you were unlikely to do anything like what was advertised. The point wasn't that it worked, the point was that it existed at all.
+Protest is the safe game. It might rock the boat, but it isn't going to sink it. Destructive anarchy is out to sink the boat, often for no other reason than to see what happens. It has no agenda and that makes it terrifying to anyone in power. Because in the world of power things without aims become terrifying because they are incomprehensible. They do not play by the rules of the power game.  
 
-I never made a single thing from the recipes in the Anarchists Cookbook. I never even read the whole thing. Still, the book remains for me a defining moment because for the first time I realized two very important things. I realized that was not alone in how I felt about the world around me, and, at the same time, I realized that there was a road through these woods I thought I was walking in alone. 
+I never made a single thing from the recipes in the Anarchists Cookbook.
+I wouldn't regret pouring sugar in earthmover gas tanks, if indeed I did any such thing, but I wouldn't do it again. 
 
-I also ended up learning a lot about destruction. It took a while but eventually I figured out that the destruction most of us are seeking is not the healthy destruction that precedes rebirth, but rather the destruction that brings about personal power. We want to wield destruction. We seek destruction because it gives us power over others. And that's the opposite of anarchy. Grant Lee Phillips had a line that neatly encapsulated the idea for me: "Unlike the famous fable, revolution won't yield a firework show / Unlike the famous fable, revolution won't end on July the Fourth."
+I've found that most of the time destruction is not the precursor to rebirth in our society, but anther tool to wield in the same boring old quest for personal personal power. We want to wield destruction not yield to it. We seek destruction because it gives us power over others. And that's the opposite of anarchy.
 
-I wouldn't regret pouring sugar in earthmover gas tanks, if indeed I did any such thing, but I wouldn't do it again. It's not that I have any more respect for laws, nor is it that I have any less desire to stop rampant destruction of the environment, it's that I no longer want to wield destruction as a kind of power over anything. Anarchism is finally a rejection of power, a rejection of any attempt to wield power over others. 
+Destruction is only one part of the story anyway. Destruction is a single point on a continuously turning wheel of death and rebirth. The wheel of karma in some religions, the alchemy wheel of creation in others. Even Shiva, tk and tk understand that they are but a part of the cycle. 
 
-Curiously the original author of the anarchists Cookbook seems to have gone a similar journey. In one of his many pleas for publishers to let the book go out of print, he says:
+And we don't even have Shiva or tk or tk in our fucked society. We don't have a wheel of karma or creation. We don't even have a female god. And there is no rebirth without a female god. In our fucked society all you get is destruction, the rebirth never happens. Even the rage against that loss, the inability to have rebirth gets trapped and cycles back on itself until it explodes in violence. 
 
->The book, in many respects, was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in ... The central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I no longer agree with this.
+I was clearing out my closet in preparation for our trip and ran across the shirt again. I put it on for a bit. At first it felt starchy, a bit too tight in the shoulders. But I kept it on for a while and eventually it seemed to soften up a bit. One of us had to relax into the other. Perhaps both.
+
+Eventually I decided it was not coming on the trip. I fired off an email to a friend I knew would want it before I changed my mind. But I haven't changed my mind. I don't need it. The trip is already saying fuck our society in some form, a gentler form I hope. 
 
-Destruction is only ever one part of the story. Destruction is a single point on endlessly turning wheel of death and rebirth. The wheel of karma in some religions, the alchemy wheel of creation in others. Even this is one level removed from the world though, the only reason we even see destruction and rebirth as negative and positive is because we're very attached to our current reality.  
 
-Destruction is a problem for our fucked society though. It's a problem for all societies primarily built around male sun god religions. We don't have a wheel of karma or creation. We don't even have a female god. There is no rebirth without a female god. In our fucked society all you get is destruction, the rebirth can never happen. Even the rage against that loss, the inability to have rebirth gets trapped and cycles back on itself until it explodes in violence. 
 
 Without the rebirth, destruction is nothing more than an ineffectual gesture. This, I think, is near the core of why the shirt wants to fuck our society. Or at least this became the core for me -- when nothing can grow out of destruction but more destruction, destruction ceases to serve any healthy purpose. 
 
-It works something like this: rage propels you to action, action turns out to be ineffectual, which leads to more rage, which leads to more action, which turns out to be ineffectual, which lead to more rage and so on until the larger society steps in to deal with the problem.The only way to stop this cycle is to realize that you're trapped in a whirlpool of your own making, missing the larger ocean entirely.
 
-I was clearing out my closet in preparation for our trip and ran across the shirt again. I put it on for a bit. At first it felt starchy, a bit too tight in the shoulders. But I kept it on for a while and eventually it seemed to soften up a bit. One of us had to relax into the other. Perhaps both.
+It's not that I have any more respect for laws, nor is it that I have any less desire to stop rampant destruction of the environment, it's that I no longer want to wield destruction as a kind of power over anything. To me anarchism is finally a rejection of power, a rejection of any attempt to wield power over others. 
 
-Eventually I decided it was not coming on the trip. I fired off an email to a friend I knew would want it before I changed my mind. But I haven't changed my mind. I don't need it. The trip is already saying fuck our society in some form, a gentler form I hope. 
+Curiously the original author of the anarchists Cookbook seems to have gone a similar journey. In one of his many pleas for publishers to let the book go out of print, he says:
+
+>The book, in many respects, was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in ... The central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I no longer agree with this.
+
+
+It works something like this: rage propels you to action, action turns out to be ineffectual, which leads to more rage, which leads to more action, which turns out to be ineffectual, which lead to more rage and so on until the larger society steps in to deal with the problem.The only way to stop this cycle is to realize that you're trapped in a whirlpool of your own making, missing the larger ocean entirely.
 
 Somewhere in the midst of writing this piece I started thinking about anarchism again though. 
 
@@ -64,7 +69,9 @@ This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you how I figured all this out and h
 
 [^1]: The one exception is Goldman, who did seem to believe that almost everything was indeed wrong, and needed to be burned to the ground. But there was ultimately something tamed about most of the political anarchists of the early twentieth century -- like they were trying to tone things down to gain a seat at the table rather than acting on what they often wrote.
 
+[^2]: Fascist Island as we called it.
 
+[^3]: Even this is one level removed from the world though, the only reason we even see destruction and rebirth as negative and positive is because we're very attached to our current reality.
 ---