Life on Planet Penis

When a persistent blizzard of dicks make wishes come true, expect bad miracles.

We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience.

— Lawrence Law, Images and Everyday Life

The bag was white and sturdy enough that it sat upright, its handles at attention. A red logo and the word “Target” boasted of its origins and loyalties. It was conspicuously out in the open, placed on the edge of the blacktop near my apartment’s parking stall. It was not there earlier that morning when I left for work.

Was it trash? Forgotten purchases?

I peered in and the flies answered. The cat’s head was obscured by red fabric. A rag? Too fresh a death to reek yet. A pet? Maybe not. There’s lots of feral and stray cats about in this cluster of low income apartment complexes.

Who would do this? Why?

Someone had obviously went through the trouble of putting the cat in the bag. Why in the fuck did they leave it here, out in the open in the middle of the day?

I was angry. Disgusted. Sad. Another judgement against humans was recorded. My battling emotions and the senseless, stupid mystery of it all gave no counsel. It was just me and a dead being in a convenient single-use container of branded marketing that will probably outlast civilization.

Whatcha gonna do? Finders, keepers, sucker.

I grabbed the bag and walked the twenty or so steps to the dumpster. But then there was resistance to throw it in. Our language reared its ugly head.

Trash. Garbage. Waste. Dumpster. Disposal.

Stop it. Are you going to bury it? Perform a funeral service? Hunt down the asshole who left it and demand an explanation? Singlehandedly change the world?

I wanted to scream.

I opted to lay the bag in the trash gently, out of some kind of lame respect. And perhaps that should’ve been the end of it, but of course it wasn’t. Not for this ruminator. I sat in my apartment haunted by the Dead Cat in the Bag.

I went back outside to inspect the area I found the bag. There was dried blood here and there further out on the blacktop, not a lot, but proof of violence. A half-smoked cigarette, stomped out. That’s it.

In Jordan Peele’s latest movie NOPE, the exploitation and disrespect of animals is one of the cautionary tales told. He apparently also considered titling the film Little Green Men in reference to another theme of the movie, modern media’s "monetization of spectacle."

In the film, after witnessing an ineffable horror, a main character asks the question: “What’s a bad miracle?”

Peele wields horror with perceptual depth, slowly “peele-ing” back the protective layers of our collective consciousness, one by one, revealing the specters of our behavior and reasoning. It’s particularly effective, because nothing is more horrifying than cognitive disruption. Narrative is lost. Meaning collapses. “Reality” breaks.

The impossible, the unbelievable, the unthinkable, the unspeakable, the unforeseen manifests.

We humans don’t like to think of ourselves as animals, and yet we are.

Not chosen, not special, not superior. Animals. Weirdly fancy, for sure. Still animals.

When abused, threatened, coerced, demeaned, deceived, manipulated, pushed to physical, emotional, and cognitive limits, disconnected from our humanity and the community of life, denied the basics of survival…we react on an instinctual level. The subconscious takes the reins.

We break in strange ways.

Things get deadly. Then, lost in the stories we tell ourselves, we find the terrible outcomes a mystery, unable to connect the dots and make cognitive course corrections collectively.

“When our children start becoming murderers, we typically don’t wonder what’s wrong with the system that’s turning them INTO murderers, we wonder what’s wrong with THEM. Imagine an assembly line that out of every hundred vehicles turns out one that is horribly defective. Then imagine–instead of examining the assembly line–taking the defective vehicle out and shooting it. Then, when the next one comes along–instead of examining the assembly line–taking THAT one and shooting it. And when the next one comes along–instead of examining the assembly line–taking THAT one out and shooting it.”

—Daniel Quinn

Our solution for every ill.

I’m not writing this from some kind of enlightened, righteous position. I’m writing this from a place of desperation. Of exhaustion. Of madness. We are in deep trouble. And every damn day the revelation is nope, the trouble we’re in is deeper than you thought.

I WANT TO HELP IMAGINE A BETTER WORLD BUT I WAS BORN WITH DICKS FOR HANDS.

Thanks, millenniums of brutal civilizational patriarchy! Now I have to vigilantly unfuck myself until I die. While trying to heal the blood-spurting wounds left by your ongoing, likely terminal, curse.

I’m not sure what to do, usually. I’m all tangled and hamstrung and dazed. Certain of nothing. Clinging in the dire face of fuck.

The more divorced our stories of meaning are from fundamental truths, the darker the consequences, the more possible the unthinkable becomes.

The warning: Careful what you wish. Beware the stories you heed, and tell.

There’s a reason wishes come with a warning in our fables. A wish is still (and always) deeply rooted in the real. Deeper than the wisher’s vision and desire. Wishes made by only, and too few, MEN—given too much power, where ego and greed are allowed to run rampant—is the stuff of bad miracles.

This lesson should be clear as day by now.

Setting aside current Penises of Mass Destruction, look at fucking Oppenheimer, since he’s talk of the town again. That guy got so ego-jizzing high on making a big splash for himself, he lead the way in designing the atom bomb. The BIGGEST of spectacles. He would not be deterred. He had a wish, and the military pined for it even more. They moved Heaven and Earth to realize the dream.

I have no sympathy for that guy, or anyone involved. All kinds of options lay before them but they couldn’t imagine them. Or refused to. But they could imagine the quantum and create a beast to sell as a peacemaker and miracle liberator of energy production limits. They could imagine power. And fame.

They chose spectacle, and loosed all kinds of looming nightmares.

Now, even after all these years, Hollywood still (still!) can’t tell the plain, horrible, shameful truth. Instead we get another polished spectacle shoved down our throats, made of half-truths at best. Congrats, Nolan. You made a pretty film of diluted truth instead of a blistering moral condemnation that might, just might, have made a difference.

Can’t have that on our conscience. Leaves a bad taste. Unvarnished truth is not good for profits, or fame.

Ask Sinéad O'Connor.

She told the fucking truth and was crucified for it. All because our poor little brains couldn’t imagine MEN of the sovereign nation Holy Catholic Church, devout followers of the MAN Jesus Christ, would be covering up centuries of child rape and allowing it to continue to flourish, despite growing suspicions that it existed.

Impossible. Not happening. She was a heretic. Just another hysterical, attention-seeking woman.

And we wonder why her life ended up a goddamn tragedy. Meanwhile, the Catholic church keeps chugging along.

When I saw the news of Sinéad’s death, it hurt. She was obviously struggling long before her son committed suicide. But I don’t say this as a “fan,” I say it as a human being. I think celebrity is one of our most disturbing ills. It’s super messed up for everyone involved. I never followed her, and only knew of her early hits, which I enjoyed very much.

You could tell she wasn’t pandering or hiding behind artifice.

She was true.

And then I had a dream about her, which like dreams often go, was really weird.

The location of the dream took place in the trailer park I lived in for the first 10 years of my life. But the trailers and streets were gone. Much of the earth beneath had been removed to turn the whole area into a big bowl.

It was now some kind of farm with people milling around here and there. I ended up outside a farmhouse or some other related structure where a group of people were gathered. Sinéad was there, sitting in the grass, and obviously grieving.

It was really painful to watch. She made no sound, but her face would would warp into devastating grief for a moment, and then she’d shake it off and smile a little. You could tell it took a lot of effort. It wouldn’t last long. That face of pure anguish would return.

No one was consoling her. I really wanted to, but I was afraid. I didn’t want to offend or assume. But her flux of grief continued and it was unbearable. I sat next to her and gave her a big hug. She curled up and buried her head in my chest. We stayed like that for a while.

And then the dream pulled a dick move.

Sinéad looked up at me and pressed her lips to mine. I didn’t know what to do. Kissing seemed wrong. I froze. Then she stuck her tongue between my closed lips and moved it side to side. It didn’t feel like she was trying to kiss. It kinda felt like she was playing a joke.

And then I woke up thinking WTF was that?

I don’t think anyone should feel well adjusted in this world. Those who do, are immediately suspect. We’ve gone batshit mad. Things are not fine. They are not going to get better because our situation is worse than we are willing to admit.

Imagination is dead. Better to participate in the spectacle the best one is able. Better to feed the dragon we know.

Fuck you, Allyson & The Washington Post. Fuck you in all galaxies.

Get back to work. Die on a hill. Vote for old minds and their thinking. Take a vacation to faraway lands. Go buy more stuff. Go solar.

Do not change the fundamentals.

And never, never EVER, speak the truth. We want none of that.