Readers,
I AM ALIVE.
It’s been a while. My last post was kinda dire, but I’m still kicking.
It’s mountain bike racing season and I’ve been working as support at various events in Northern California. The pay is not great and the days are long, but I work with cool people and get to be outdoors in beautiful locations. It’s been enough to keep a roof and buy food (I even bought badly needed new tires for my car), so it’s a win.
At multi-day events, I regularly put in +/-100,000 steps, which is close to 50 miles. My feet tell me to fuck off and I spend a couple days not moving after. I have a five day stretch this week as a grand finale and I may look like this after:
Come on, Star Trek. That’s some janky tech for a future that has figured out faster than light space travel.
[Distant screams of “NERD”]
Anyhoo, I wanted to leave you this note to let you know I’m okay and to give shout outs to people that helped me with donations and moral support. First to family and close friends (you know who you are), I love you. You bailed me out. And to three mostly strangers: , , and . What can I say? Thank you, thank you, thank you for your blind kindness and support. Since there’s three of you and you’re all writers, I’m taking it as a wink and a nod from Hecate, liminal goddess of transitions, boundaries, crossroads, thresholds, and portals. She’s pretty witchy, too. 😉
And now without further delay, the words.
—C
Groomed, sedated Molded, mated To task oblivious To ritual vigorous Contagious, viral Ego’s denial Addict’s fate-spiral Suffering’s instruction Brutal dysfunction Unending destruction This, the work we cannot see This, the phantom machine This, the vision This, the world we weave Momentum, inertia City, Suburbia The damned utopia To Moon, Mars Other stars Its scent blows This, how the story grows We sow the meme We break the Beam Beautiful, glorious Us, laborious —Fatalism, from my poetry collection UNFU CKTHE WORLD
The times swim in effervescent conflict and my mind is an old soul to self-war. The two feed off each other until there’s nothing but a high wail of discordant grief. The joy and wonder of life flattens into a limitless battlefield.
Of all cursed things, my car sometimes becomes a sanctuary. My mind loosens and wanders with a bird’s eye. I become absentminded of where I’m going. I miss a turn or exit occasionally.
Thoughts thaw and mingle. Slippery epiphanies find unexpected paths and correlations. Driving denies recording them so I let them go and hope they return of their own accord when I sit down to write.
It’s a kind of faith.
Music has an important role as well. I find that the “shuffle” feature on music apps chronically play only a fraction of the songs added to my library. To combat this conspiracy, I play my music alphabetically by song title. This way every song eventually plays while retaining some semblance of randomness.
It all has something to do with motion. Melody and lyrics. The confluent flow of scenery and coaxed emotion.
“Meditation by automobile” could be a description, but that also sounds dangerously delusional, just like the collective present.
I just call it The Zone.
—
My thoughts are settling as the landscape scrolls by. A song I haven’t heard before begins to play. It’s a good song, one of those tracks you find on an album that isn’t pop gold but lands all the same. A personal hit.
The melody sighs, its arrangement sparse and humble. The voice is tender, with a call both reflective and melancholic—a compilation of expression that always has a home in my heart.
As the lyrics pool in my ears, the presently raging fires in Los Angeles and the cruel circus preying on the destruction flit through my thoughts. An urgent voice warning to abandon empire as it circles a vortex of existential crisis, crying for crucial shifts in value and meaning, pleads to no one but myself. My unsure but dogged ache to endure and to somehow be of service during these consequential times gnaws at my bones.
I look at the car’s stereo display to see what the title of the song is. The screen says Fire Escape, by Foster the People.
It’s all too on the nose.
🎶 Save yourself, save yourself, yourself 🎶
The idea of “saving” anything—myself, others, whales, forests, democracy, whatever the darling may be—has lost its naive and limited scope. All those years of all that believing and meddling and striving and emulating and posturing and justifying… The short-sightedness of control and conformity has taught hard lessons. Man, the scar tissue stuns in its abundance.
My understanding is now wider, deeper, and profoundly humbled.
To justly scrutinize the whole arc of a life, and by extension the collective, during these times is an unwelcome unveiling. Imprinted reason and meaning is undone. All the past and present intention becomes a funhouse of folly. It’s an estrangement of perception and identity that eats away at one’s domesticated and homogenized experience.
Sometimes the revelations feast. Sometimes they fast. Always they hunger.
As an acolyte of metaphor, the humanization of a fire escape tolls my heart. Built in response to past failures of imagination and design that ended in tragedies, a fire escape just sits there, waiting to be of service. No conflict, no force, no cajoling, no exclusions or requirements.
Is the building on fire and you’re trapped? Use it! See another day and ponder how lucky and miraculous it is to be alive. Because the dead make no choices.
It’s how I’m trying to show up in the world now. Some may judge this as too passive, but I think there’s a universe beyond control’s musts and shoulds. Time for all hands on deck to be of service however possible—a decentralized ministry of kindness and support. Now is not the time of the inflexibility of masters or the empty promises of celebrity saviors.
Why argue and vie and scheme over how to resurrect a corpse rather than bury it? It is a time of mutual emergency and aid, not for more performative thoughts and delusional hope-dipped prayers.
I was walking to my car a few months ago and happened to catch a glimpse of my apartment manager through her office’s window. She looked dismayed. The Trump administration’s sadistic shock and awe spectacle was in its opening salvos. I felt like she looked and I made the split decision to go a talk to her.
She’s a black woman and I’m your typical middle-aged white male. We’ve talked briefly before, but didn’t know each other beyond brief pleasantries while conducting rent-related business. I walked in and said hello. She put on a smile and asked what I needed.
“I don’t need anything, I just wanted to say that I know things are really scary now and I’m scared too. If you need anything, you know where I live. I got your back.” I said.
Her forced smile faded and I could see an invisible weight lift off of her. She sighed and said thank you. We talked a little about how crazy and stupid it all was. About how insecure we felt and the worries we had. I wished her a good day and left.
I don’t share this as a humblebrag or for seeking social clout. I think I did the bare fucking minimum, given our state of affairs. We need to know others are looking out for us, especially from my demographic because we are most likely to be a Trump-aligned threat. Especially by the vulnerable demographics now under direct attack.
We’ve been taught to make narrow plans in pursuit of accumulative gains. In the descending chaos, the reflex is to grip tight.
This inability to let go of our crumbling artifices is the garden of fascism. The more one has invested and benefited from our way of living, the more one defends against relinquishing it. Values and behavior contort. Acrobatic justifications and hide-the-pea solutions flourish. Villains are manufactured to burn at the stake.
Fear chains us to past interpretations and familiarities and patterns, all of which have already brought us to today. Why would they, no matter how managed, ever lead to different outcomes? We are unprepared for the consequential returns on our domination. Our hubris remains, undiminished.
Among the measures of radicalism, the idea of abandonment is seen as wholly alien. No side of the known will give it a stage. Giving up? Inconceivable! That is a forbidden land of thought. Meanwhile, the inevitable choice remains—renounce our insatiable hunger for power over life, or have our lives ripped away by billionaire-funded boot heel brutality as the elder god wrath of environmental physics lays waste to all.
Yes, it’s a lot to swallow. Too much. Yes, one will feel despair. But despair is not the end. It is a necessary step towards honest acknowledgment and action. There is no feelgood path towards the fundamental change required of us. Future generations will celebrate our bravery, or they will curse our cowardice.
What’s easier is to demand “solutions” of such truth-bearers. “But what are you doing to help? All you have to offer is doom.” Our inability/refusal to discern the unyielding truths of our time turns us against each other. We make deflective demands and hurl demeaning labeling when we better serve ourselves and each other with deep reflection.
We narrow the path forward in cyclical regression, or we widen it with revolutions that can only begin within our own minds. This requires a dark night of the soul. A shedding of belief and false faith. If there’s anything that I’ve learned as I’ve tumbled through 55 years of life, it’s that fundamental change begins not with grand pronouncements and programs, but with failure and deep loss. The humility of grief is the price.
Instead of fighting over how to live and who rules within the towering inferno of the known, what if we fled? What if we imagined ourselves as fire escapes?
UH-OH
After a beat the next song began and I immediately recognized the frenzied intro. It was time for some stabby in-my-face whiplash feels.
🎶 I'm a fire starter, twisted fire starter 🎶
Synchronicity picked the perfect mirror with The Prodigy frontliner, Keith Flint. The fact he wears an American flag-themed shirt in the music video seems prescient now. Like many firestarters, Keith fashioned himself as a spectacle of combative contractions. In the end he hung himself.
In a world built by fire starters, I too desire to start fires. Current events spur dark, violent thoughts and fantasies about what to do with those who are using it as an opportunity to seize power and inflict fear and pain and suffering with gleeful impunity.
My smoldering desire is troubling.
Violence is so deeply embedded in our collective civilization as to be ubiquitous. Its stain can be found everywhere. Much of it is passive and invisible—a ghost in the architecture and machinery.
We even sensationalize it. The reality TV program COPS premiered in 1989 on [hindsight intensifies] the Fox network and is one of America’s longest running television programs. Nineteen years earlier, George Lucas pointed a dark mirror at us and our fascination with authority and violence in his movie THX 1138.
The obvious physical form manifests regularly despite our punitive controls of law & order or military might. To experience it personally though, unsought, from another human whether in a position of authority or not, dispels the vicarious voyeurism of blockbuster superhero and action movies, first-person shooter video games, beloved law enforcement genre shows, and cage fighting events.
I have experienced that violence. In one particular instance while doing a mindless young adult jerk thing at a serendipitously wrong time, I thought I might die. The vicious physics of full-grown humans is unforgiving compared to that of childhood scuffles, and when it is focused upon you, all the fiction and romance of how to handle it is literally beat out of you.
Just like one can be outgunned, one can be out-meated. The complete loss of agency at the hands of another is pure terror.
As a child, my single parent mother did not teach me how to physically defend myself. She would not allow me to have toy guns. I understand her motivations and values, but the realities of the world did not care if I was being raised to be nonviolent.
We were poor and living in a trailer park where the children roamed unsupervised much of the time. The children acted out what they were experiencing upon each other. Being naturally sensitive and non-aggressive, I was a safe target for the bad behavior. Neighbors eventually took pity upon me and taught me how to defend myself.
This did not end the bullying or turn me into an aggressor, but combined with another trait shared to me by my mother, I gained a shield against the world. That gift was a slumbering dragon fierceness. Perhaps it’s an ancestral gift, perhaps it’s a trauma response. Poked enough it awakens all flame and fury. Unchecked it can be abusive. Upon me by my mother, it sometimes it was.
Mother’s dragon was restless but mine sleeps deeply. It requires a lot of prodding before it cracks an eye. The bulling would routinely revisit child-me but when the dragon emerged, even when I got my ass handed to me, it became known that I would fearlessly take my pound of flesh. Impunity lost, the bullies found new targets.
Watching America undress into full-frontal fascist-laced mafia state autocracy, directly threatening and demonizing ones I love and many others with no voice or power, my dragon is beginning to stir. I’m not sure what to do with that. Yet.
I look to our animal cousins for guidance when it comes to violence: it’s extremely risky, so avoid it unless absolutely necessary. Even predators choose wisely. If their prey puts up too much of a fight, they will abandon it to avoid injury. I believe violence in defense of an attack is natural. Attacking a disarmed and fleeing combatant shows no honor.
But do we really know how we will react in a situation we’ve never actually been in?
Being fierce does not mean we must sacrifice kindness and support for others in need. Being fierce is not the same as being aggressive.
These times will twist and tear at our humanity in ways never experienced before due to the scale and reach of technology. Desperation and propagandized vilification will be used as tools against our better selves. As favorite truth-bearer
says, “Know your morals, write them down, and do not deviate from them no matter what.” I think she’s right.Get clear. You will be tested.
Help Me, Zen (I Don’t Think So)
“How to be” and cope in these times of decadence and decay is an adventure in dissonance. Our established reality is falling apart. War is on the rise and democracy is unveiling as an elaborate illusion. Government officials and their surrogates are openly doing crimes. Bragging about it, even! Corporations do not truly care about anything beyond the utility of everything in fulfilling their billionaire boardrooms’ narrow goals and imperial ideologies. The internet, even though it still occasionally produces some clever comedy gold, is cursed beyond redemption. Phones are silicon cocaine spyware shrines to a gestating A.I. god. Escalating climate chaos randomly picks a “fuck this place in particular” somewhere on the planet at any given moment and some day it will be YOU.
I’m not Buddhist, though I find the practice more palatable than the Abrahamic religions. All of these religions were born during the rise of Empire, which we still find ourselves trapped within today. I find the religions of empire untrustworthy due to their placement and importance of humans within the cosmos (especially men), even as I agree with small patches of their teachings.
I’m not an atheist, either. That’s the realm of asshole absolutists. Some are cool about it, but they all fail to see the correlation of their surety to the inflexibility of faith. Agnosticism is neutral ground, while somewhat embracing the Mystery, but isn’t much of a polestar.
I’ve settled on a personal curation of animism as a compass, which fully embraces the Mystery without attachment to hierarchies of power or human superiority/divine provenance. Animism predates the rise of empire by thousands of thousands of years. It comes in a jungle of flavors, none competing to be truer than another.
It’s a belief system that envisions “that all material phenomena have agency, that there exists no categorical distinction between the spiritual and physical world, and that soul, spirit, or sentience exists not only in humans but also in other animals, plants, rocks, geographic features (such as mountains and rivers), and other entities of the natural environment.” 1
Yeah, super weird. But so is quantum mechanics. We are just as capable of replacing what we would consider supernatural belief with destructive fallacies and myths such as the economics of capitalism and technological-fueled “progress.” It’s where the meaning-making points and the values it fosters that steer our fate.
Don’t misunderstand—I think scientific inquiry is valuable. I just think that science is a meaning-making tool that is not immune to the influence of the value system in which it operates. For which is more dangerous, an offering to a tree sprite or the cold, calculated doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction?
Animism is a cosmically inclusive worldview of belonging and reverence. One of humility and respect that values communion. All is alive, all is sacred. There is no separation, no need for a path to enlightenment or salvation. Heaven, nirvana, Gan Eden, the happy hunting grounds, are already here. We live within it. We ARE it. Can’t you see that?
Native cultures all over the world figured that out long before western civilization and the advent of science. Just because they used mythical stories to explain and preserve the knowledge for future generations doesn’t invalidate its vital message.
We do not need to continue to choose righteous severance.
Detachment’s toolbox (not necessarily the buddhist definition) is modernity’s psychic safe room and we use it to hide from our inextricable relationship to other people and groups, all other life and the natural systems that comprise the planet. There is no escape. What we do to the rest, we do to ourselves. These demon-haunted times are a beckoning to lay down our swords and return home.
Will we? It’s a thriller.
YOU MADE IT TO THE END SO YOU GET A PRIZE
A sister from another mr. & mrs. sent me this. Remember, joy is an act of defiance during dark times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism