diff options
| -rw-r--r-- | dear-internet-commenter.txt | 17 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | fuck-our-society.txt | 84 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | root-down.txt | 30 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | unused.txt | 81 |
4 files changed, 128 insertions, 84 deletions
diff --git a/dear-internet-commenter.txt b/dear-internet-commenter.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..62b867d --- /dev/null +++ b/dear-internet-commenter.txt @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +Dear Internet Commenter, + +We are fellow denizens of an especially lovely planet full of wonder and beauty. + +It's also full of ugliness and horror, but let's focus on the positive for a minute. + +The bad news is that even in the best case scenarios we only get to ride this lovely planet around our sun some seventy or so times. That's assuming we're well fed, clothed, sheltered and in good health. Most of the world is none of those things. Some of us are, which is incredibly fortunate for us. + +I say this mainly to offer some perspective on why I have elected not to engage in a conversation with you. + +It's nothing against you specifically, but here's the thing: professionally I write about software, the web, privacy and a small halo of related issues. In the grand scheme of things, nothing I write about professionally matters at all. + +Software does not matter. Gadgets do not matter. The web might matter, I'm undecided on that one. But the point is you (more than likely) want to argue with me about something that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of either of our lives. + +It's not that I don't care about your opinions. I might. I don't know. It's difficult to value to opinions of people you don't know. And we don't know each other and it's unlikely that we ever will. Again, this doesn't mean I don't care about your opinion, it just means I don't know and, given the constraints of our existence here (time limited), we probably both have better things we could be doing -- walking in the sunshine, playing with our kids, watching the sunset from a mountain top, making coffee by a fire just before sunrise, eating tacos, or what have you. There are a lot of amazing things to do out there. Arguing on the internet is not one them. + +Most likely you disagreed with something I wrote and want to express that. So in that sense you had time for my opinion and here I am telling you I don't have time for yours and you're thinking that that is not fair. You're totally right. I apologize. But it is what it is. diff --git a/fuck-our-society.txt b/fuck-our-society.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 4330927..0000000 --- a/fuck-our-society.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,84 +0,0 @@ -Many moons ago I was down in Laguna Beach, CA 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. My friend Ruben asked me to play with his band on the side, I'm pretty sure just because he wanted the shirt on stage with him.But this was Orange County CA in the mid to late 1990s, deviations from the norm simply didn't happen. I didn't wear it out much. Wearing it has always been a kind of performance. I haven't warn since I moved back east in 1999. - -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." - -This was really the first time I started thinking about the shirt as anything more than something for shock value. Once you get past that initial shock though, the shirt raises more questions than it answers. What is our society? Who are we? The shirt is deceptive in that way. At first is seems like banal, simplistic view of anarchy, "fuck capitalism" or the like. But it's not. The shirt isn't picking out some part that's wrong, it's saying fuck *everything*. Everything? Everything. - -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, 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. - -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. - -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. - -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. - -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 wouldn't regret pouring sugar in earthmover gas tanks, if indeed I did any such thing, but I wouldn't do it again. - -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. - -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. - -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. - -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. - - - -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'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. - -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. - - - - -Magical anarchy is to anarchy what magical realism is to realism. It's anarchy of the senses; anarchy that defies logic in pursuit of something more. It's the anarchy of travel and empathy, the anarchy of completely unzipping your head, the anarchy of gift economies, sex and psychotropic chemicals. The anarchy of finding yourself alive, existing for a time on the most beautiful planet in the known universe. - -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. - - -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. - - - -This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you how I figured all this out and how you can too. But I don't know. I know the psychotropic compounds found in some plants helped. I believe that those compounds are here for exactly that purpose, but I don't know that they will help everyone. - -[^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. ---- - - -But of course the Anarchist's Cookbook is ultimately only half of the story. It's about destruction (for the most part). That wouldn't necessarily be bad, except that in our fucked society we don't seek destruction. Destruction is the first stage of regrowth. We never seek that. We give it lip service, but that's not what we like about destruction. - - -An often overlooked part of the Anarchists Cookbook is that it's not just bomb recipes and bathtub napalm. - -The book's take on destruction is more general that that and includes recipes for brewing LSD and tk for more personal, though potentially no less violent, destruction of the ego. This would end up being the far more personally useful form of destruction, breaking down the ego to discover the fragile and temporary nature of that construct and how to escape it for longer and longer periods of time. - diff --git a/root-down.txt b/root-down.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0e4ec12 --- /dev/null +++ b/root-down.txt @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +One of the interesting things about moving is the archeology it requires, digging through layers of accumulation to reveal yourself. The longer you've been in one location the more stuff that's accumulated. As far as I can tell there is no real way to combat the detritus of the world seeping into your space, saving cutting off all contact with the outside world. I imagine monasteries are generally immaculate; the rest of use get out the pick axes and clear the rubble. + +At first I spent a lot time thinking how hard it is to move, but then I realized it's probably no harder to move out than it was to move in. Moving out just happens to severely compress time. You acquire over the span of 10 years. You un-acquire in a matter of weeks. + +But in between the crap, the dirt as it were there are the occasional shards of pottery and other things of interest. It's fun re-discovering this stuff. + +Many moons ago I was down in Laguna Beach, CA 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. My friend Ruben asked me to play with his band on the side, I'm pretty sure just because he wanted the shirt on stage with him.But this was Orange County CA in the mid to late 1990s, deviations from the norm simply didn't happen. I didn't wear it out much. Wearing it has always been a kind of performance. I haven't warn since I moved back east in 1999. + +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 felt like that was probably the shirt's high water mark. I don't think I've worn it since. Why do I still have it? Fuck our society's obsession with keeping things. I fired off an email to a friend I knew would want it and it's gone. + +This particular purge is probably the biggest I've ever done, both because we've been in this house the longest and because I've made the most money. Money, no matter how frugal you might be, seems to breed stuff. It's not the purchases or the money that bother me though. Not even the dumb things like the $1300 TV that's now worth essentially nothing. It's the little things I did not stop myself from getting. It's the lack of personal awareness they demonstrate. The old banjo that caught my eye at a junk shop outside of Nashville, the old mailing label and postage box set, the antique cards, the mediocre books that could have been checked out and returned and the coffee mugs. How many coffee mugs do I actually need? + +All these little things are symptoms of my failure to appreciate without possessing. + +I pitched it all into boxes and dumped it at my favorite local charity thrift store. + +Not everything goes though. I'm not a minimalist counting up my possessions. Not yet anyway. The bus may not be huge, but it's downright roomy compared to traveling with only a pack. We also have a storage unit for now. There are things I don't want to throw away, but which also don't belong in the bus. Like old photographs, which are probably the most exciting artifacts to stumble across in a moving dig. + +It worries me sometimes that it's always the same photographs I discover whenever I undertake these excavations. The photographs I have are a reasonable catalogue of my life from roughly when I dropped out of college until about 2001 when I switched to a digital camera. There are no physical artifacts documenting anything in my life for the last 15 years, save a handful of prints from our wedding. + +On the plus side this keeps the entirety of my photo collection to single shoe box. But I wonder. I wonder how much fun it will be to dig through your parent's hard drive in search of your youth. Will the hard drive even spin 50 years from now? Will there be an operating system and image viewers capable of reading all those zeros and ones? Do you have anything that could read the tape archives of 50 years ago? + +I don't normally advocate for buying stuff, but a [Fuji Instax printer](http://instax.com/products/printer/) is on our short list of trip purchases. I want to leave my kids a record of their childhood that exists outside these digital walls. + +That's always the hard part of these excavations, figuring out what actually has personal value and what doesn't I find I'm often wrong. I thought the banjo and the books had value to me, but they don't. Five years ago I almost threw out the photos. Now they're the only thing I might try to save in a fire. Sure I scanned them all so I have digital backups, but I remain unconvinced that the digital will outlast the physical. + @@ -1,3 +1,84 @@ + +This was really the first time I started thinking about the shirt as anything more than something for shock value. Once you get past that initial shock though, the shirt raises more questions than it answers. What is our society? Who are we? The shirt is deceptive in that way. At first is seems like banal, simplistic view of anarchy, "fuck capitalism" or the like. But it's not. The shirt isn't picking out some part that's wrong, it's saying fuck *everything*. Everything? Everything. + +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, 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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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 wouldn't regret pouring sugar in earthmover gas tanks, if indeed I did any such thing, but I wouldn't do it again. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + + + +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'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. + +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. + + + + +Magical anarchy is to anarchy what magical realism is to realism. It's anarchy of the senses; anarchy that defies logic in pursuit of something more. It's the anarchy of travel and empathy, the anarchy of completely unzipping your head, the anarchy of gift economies, sex and psychotropic chemicals. The anarchy of finding yourself alive, existing for a time on the most beautiful planet in the known universe. + +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. + + +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. + + + +This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you how I figured all this out and how you can too. But I don't know. I know the psychotropic compounds found in some plants helped. I believe that those compounds are here for exactly that purpose, but I don't know that they will help everyone. + +[^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. + +--- + + +But of course the Anarchist's Cookbook is ultimately only half of the story. It's about destruction (for the most part). That wouldn't necessarily be bad, except that in our fucked society we don't seek destruction. Destruction is the first stage of regrowth. We never seek that. We give it lip service, but that's not what we like about destruction. + + +An often overlooked part of the Anarchists Cookbook is that it's not just bomb recipes and bathtub napalm. + +The book's take on destruction is more general that that and includes recipes for brewing LSD and tk for more personal, though potentially no less violent, destruction of the ego. This would end up being the far more personally useful form of destruction, breaking down the ego to discover the fragile and temporary nature of that construct and how to escape it for longer and longer periods of time. + + +--- + Beauty is subjective though. Maybe you don't see the beauty in the Travco, maybe you see a petroleum guzzling ecological disaster on wheels, air conditioning or no. Fair enough, though I would strongly suggest looking into one's own energy before passing judgment on another[^2]. [^2]: You can calculate your rough carbon footprint over at tk, though do consider the backstory -- the average house [weighs 500,000 pounds](http://old.seattletimes.com/html/asktheexpert/2002122968_homehay19.html), much of it wood that had to be clear cut and hauled around. I don't know the footprint of building a Travco, but I do know it only weighs about 5000 pounds. Then there's a coal we don't have to burn to generate electricity... Check out Bob's rather lengthy post on this topic over at [CheapRVLiving.com](http://www.cheaprvliving.com/blog/proof-that-off-grid-vandwelling-is-greener-than-housedwelling/). |