|
plum
|
|
The geographical frontier has always had a special place in my heart, since it seems to be that region-psychological and spiritual as well as physical- where the most admirable qualities are brought out in people. In those rare moments in human experience when we set forth into the Great Darkness it is almost never because we have to, even though it may improve our chances for long-term survival. We do so in defiance of our little pre-planned destinies; we aren't satisfying hunger, quenching thirst, providing for our families, or building our houses. Rather, we are transcending all the basic necessities of our existence. The universe becomes the setting for a fascinating new story with us as the heroes, instead of a harsh landscape to be endured.
Of course, to be a hero who has the inner strength to explore and enjoy doing so- to be someone who is more than just a survivor- an ample amount of that trait known as manliness is required. I know no other word for it. The historical figures I idolize most were those who distinguished themselves by actually contributing something positive; not those who, though they were just as daring, carried their crew through rough seas or succeeded in fending off monsters. I have more respect for Wernher Von Braun, for example, who, although his early work was for political ends, well knew the scientific and technological implications of his rockets, than for Robert Oppenheimer, even though the latter's contributions to science were more profound at the time. Sadly, the prevailing ideology of today seems to be almost exclusively devoted to keeping our boat afloat: repairing the leaks and bailing out the water, and, far from looking into the distance with wonder and excitement as to what journeys tomorrow may bring, praying there isn't a storm on the horizon.
The worldly frontier is long gone, and all countries now contain only varying degrees of the global monoculture. Once they taste it, they can't ever turn back- at least not unpretentiously. The next frontier is stuck at the edge of a vast sea-interstellar space- and it won't be expanded again for a long time. I would go to Zambia or Borneo or the deep Uruguayan jungle in the spirit of Hemingway or Kipling or Joseph Conrad, but since I live in an age where every metre of land has been meticulously mapped by satellite, I would constantly know where I am in varying degrees and this would defeat the purpose of exploring. How silly would it feel to go trekking along some African plain with a camel by one's side, enduring extreme hunger, thirst, and dangerous animals, only to face the jeers from a passing tour bus full of fat tourists, snapping away with their digital cameras. Were Hemingway alive today, he might well be apprehended by armed bandits, stripped of everything he owned and sold on the streets to the highest bidder. Great explorers of past centuries, intrepid though they were, stole so much of the glory from future generations. They had more diseases, strife, violence and hardships, yet, paradoxically, they seem to have lived fuller; what they lacked in medicine and good government they made up for with adventure and good ol' fun.
It is the four or five generations in between the planetary and interplanetary (or interstellar) frontiers that must suffer the scourges of that limbo: an excess of complexity, mediocrity, circumspection and yes-peace. Particularly before the 20th century, war served the important function of cleansing societies of excessive, oppressive, and ultimately trivial social and psychological idiosyncracies. The soils of morality, convention, and tradition need to be shaken up every now and then. Otherwise, they begin to choke the younger generations with their outdated rules, draining their exuberance and creative energy. Without some balance to unchecked feminine utopian utilitarian ideology, the very foundation on which such an edifice rests, colossal though it may be, will crumble.
In this age of arrogance and cynicism people like me are looked upon as being somewhat naive and juvenile. But isn't unhesitating conformity to a mentality that is mostly unproductive and negative more juvenile and naive? When we stop believing in things beyond building our own little nests-common dreams- haven't we lost something that justifies being here in the first place?
Whether or not I will ever contribute anything to the building of an interstellar spacecraft, at least I have learned that I aspire to be one of those people who are very serious about what they do with their time, who work diligently at new, revolutionary technologies that offer new hopes and possibilities for humankind, and who believe in things far greater than building a house and raising a family, even during those times when it seems no one else shares their optimism.
The man I want to be may not be any smarter than the man I am, but he does use is brain a lot more. He drinks less, and smokes less weed. He has a clear plan of action that he follows each day, to a tee, and he works much harder towards his goals than I am currently. The man I want to be is far from the man I am, but I am becoming more like him with each passing day. This gives me a good feeling.
Imagine how exhilirating it would be to go on a murdering rampage with a big noisy chainsaw, in some Chinatown shopping mall, chasing hordes of terrified Asians, trapping and cornering them inside the little stores, the chainsaw echoing throughout the entire building. You wouldn't be a demented killer; on the contrary, you would be, quite simply, a cleaner, cleansing the world of their pathetic lives, shattering their pathetic little fantasies...
What would go through your mind if you were standing by the side of a road in 13th century England, and a knight on horseback came galloping by, slicing off the head of some unfortunate peasant (something not all that uncommon in those days)? Would you gasp in horror, or would you shrug it off and just accept that such things happen in life; some win, some lose, not unlike...the whole natural world?
No, life has no real value at all, not in any objective sense, and subjectively "value" is nothing more than an idea; a word. The palace you take such pains to build is, in the end, just a coffin. The universe does not "dance" for us, the stars don't really "shine"; that's all just a movie that's easy for us to see and live in. The entirety of our knowledge is just a long, tedious story that never actually happened.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Maybe I'll move back to Mexico. Rent has a lot to do with it, but the people, the climate, and the overall atmosphere has a lot to do with it too. My grievance isn't so much with the capitalist system as the kind of people that it's geared for. People who make thousands of dollars per month might not see the rent they pay as being that big a deal, but for people like me who make hundreds of dollars per month, it is a big deal. When I was living down south, my rent was just $600 pesos/month, or $130 Cdn. For that I got a beautiful coastline, great friends, great sex, and a respectable job-Teaching English at a private school- a lifestyle that suited me quite well. In Canada, I pay $450/month to live in a crime/drug infested neighborhood, with people that I hate, doing work that I despise, for dirt-shit wages that don't even pay the fucking rent, let alone buy me the food and alcohol that I need just to cope with living here. I'm beginning to think that I don't belong in this post-apocalyptic nihilistic world. Or if I do, then I don't belong here. I'm moving, for good. That's all there is to it.
|
|
|
|
|
For a man to try to get inside a woman's head is enough of a stretch into insanity, but to try to get inside a insane woman's head...
I blame it all on David Letterman. He made me a Passions addict. He started a regular segment on his show, showing moments from the series that explored the new, uncharted depths of what horrible acting could be. Of course he just wanted to get laughs-which he did- but for me it was a totally WTF? experience. Seeing that crazy old lady throwing a fake monkey down the staircase just made me want to learn more about insanity (and what constitutes horrible acting). So I'm now a Passions regular, but not for the same reasons as the middle aged housewives. And I doubt that they indulge in marijuana and harsh vodka shots chased with cheap beer while they watch it.
Bad acting offers to the viewer a new way of seeing things: the visions of the scriptwriters shed light on reality in a way that's analogous to Sartre's description of life in occupied France. He professed that he never felt so free as when he did under Nazi rule. When the pressure to conform is in your face, then at least you can step back into the chaotic void to try to understand it, but when it gets under your skin, then there is no escape; you've become one of the rebellious converted.
I picture the writers of Passions as a bunch of well dressed young men hanging around a New York studio with their feet up on the desk, their laptops sitting in front, looking dreamily into the afternoon sunlit streets, saying things like
"Didn't we marry that bitch off already?"
"Yeah, but who's gonna remember?"
Passions is like TV stripped right down to its rawest purest element. Not that anyone would be interested in that element.
I suppose that television moments have a special place in my heart, even though I'd like to think otherwise. One of my earliest memories was when I was just 2 years old, looking at the space shuttle on TV. It was sitting motionless on the tarmac, for what seemed like hours. Where are the astronauts? Are they afraid? What will happen when the door opens? Instead of seeing a bunch of waving, smiling men, will we see blood and guts strewn throughout the interior?
|
|
|
|
|
I've begun buying organic food, for the first time in my life. They sold me when I read the heading over the organic section: "No toxins". It was then that I realized I'd been involuntarily poisoning my body during my entire life. Well, not really. Organic food is actually an organic scam; they just use a different kind of pesticides, and get away with charging you more for basically the same food. But if you buy organic you might feel more naturelle.
I didn't stop there; I figured why not push this fucking health thing all the way, just to see where it takes me. It happens that there's this health food store just down the block from where I live. So I went there for the first time, asked the lovely ladies some totally ignorant questions, and came out with a small bottle of cod liver oil. It is an excellent source of vitamins, the ones I never gave a fucking frolik about. This is just the beginning of my journey into the world of strange health stuff. A health food store is like building up a character in a video game. They have headings like "brain", "energy", "longevity" "mood". It's like deciding what kind of person you want to be. The whole idea of this definitely struck a chord deep within me, and I will likely become a regular customer there.
This is of course the little Hitler and Mussolini inside me, the one that strives for freakish perfection and wants to live forever. If I'm patient, he's sure to wander off again, eventually. Maybe.
I consider work to be analogous to my duty as a soldier in this new war, which is a war of humans against nature. A soldier never fights for himself; he does so on behalf of an ideology, which is really a justification -a lie- fabricated by a minority to motivate a majority in their favour. Seldom do I ever get along with a boss I have, since they always assume that I'm just working for money-that I'm just as greedy as they are. But that isn't true; I only work to survive. There is so little that money can give me that I don't already have or that I haven't already experienced. So many people these days don't seem to understand that excess material wealth could be an ideology that some don't believe in. How ironic it is, that so many who are convinced to believe in it don't genuinely believe in it.
We float along inside our little dream-bubbles. Where or what or when or who I am doesn't matter anymore. It's just me and the little dream bubble that I carry around with me.
I no longer have the urge to travel, not on planet Earth anyway. When I was nineteen I took a language teaching course and went to Mexico and taught English for a few months. Instead of discovering some genuine esoteric remote enclave of innocence, I found little more than aspiration towards the lifestyle that I had just left. Mexicans, like most third world people, want pretty much the same that we want. They just get less of it. Sadly, they really do have a lot more of that, they just don't know it.
I've recounted that story here before, about when I get drunk and took a bus to god knows where in P. Vallarta, and I got left off in some place between the outer jungle and the inner town. And as I walked along these ramshack buildings, I came upon a bunch of women in the streets laughing, then found a gang of Mexican teenagers getting high (and I became the centre of attention). Just one of those moments I will never forget- nor will I ever try to recount the experience in words or film. I want that memory in its trueness to remain lodged deep within my unconscious unscathed by modern society. It was so precious that it has partly shaped the man I am today.
The basic needs of people tend to get transformed, somehow, into worldwide religions. Only the select enlightened among us see us for what we are.
Regardless of all this, things are going OK for me. It's surprisingly easy to accustom oneself to material minimalism, especially when working full time again would be redundant to my cause. Sacrifice all my time for the cause of hope. Ha!
My God, the nihilists won the war. How the hell did that happen? If Hitler had won, we wouldn't have any dumb reality TV shows or moronic celebrities. We would have colonies on Pluto by now.
|
|
|
|
|
You can live and die quite easily on drugs, because any justification you would require for doing either is provided to you instantly.
I'm not putting down drugs, but I am saying that they are a form of cheating life.
Life says that you must strive for happiness; drugs say that the world you're in is already happy, so why bother striving?
Drugs enable one to see into that deepness that doesn't require your being alive in order to exist.
The reality that drugs let you see doesn't know or care who or what you are.
You step aside and laugh at everything the sober mind thought of as being sacred, right down to the earliest childhood memories.
Heaven sprawls itself out before your feet; the golden path has made itself just for you.
|
|
|
|
|
The guy down the hall from me just moved out, and left me a microwave oven and his big Sony TV. So I sat next to it for two days, constantly flipping between the four channels, looking for something entertaining. It was a post-modernist experience: a collage of unrelated pieces with no context or order or continuity whatsoever.
Finally I got a used VCR at the Goodwill store, and now I just use the TV to watch movies. This is becoming habitual, but I consider it part of my education for a possible career. I have five different ideas for scripts that I'm working on. So I put in a movie, roll up a joint, put up my feet and lose myself in other worlds, pausing it occasionally to roll back to the fridge for a beer and take notes on the structure and emotions in the films.
There's no rule that I know of that says work can't be fun.
I was inspired to write screenplays by dreams I had-the actual sleeping kind. During some of my dreams, I actually thought I was watching a movie. Sometimes it was a very interesting, thought provoking one. I am learning that writing a good script is probably analogous to writing a good symphony. This explains why there are so many horrible movies. No matter how talented you think you are, it's damned hard work. It's fun, but in a demented way.
I am beginning to like the city. It is the land of extremes. The hub of the world. My home.
All monetary value is rooted in photosynthesis. The most powerful merely have the largest pipeline to the sun. As it burns, so too burns all our wealth. The past, and all we think we've learned in general, is becoming increasingly worthless. Those who prosper aren't the ones who look down. They look up, like baby chicks in a nest, with their beaks wide open.
I met a stripper online. She's from Las Vegas. She fell in love with my words-rather my ability to choose words. She's convinced that we are destined for each other, and she's flying to the airport anyday now to come and live with me. How did it come to this? It was just a game to me. She hasn't even seen my picture. I can't even afford a taxi to go and pick her up. Yet she's gorgeous. Just twenty-one years old. What am I going to do?
The soil is contaminated. A foul stench lingers in the air. Something isn't quite right.
The caribou are becoming scarce. New technologies, new pipelines, new oil fields are marking, stunting, defining their once illustrious advance through the wild. People all over those remote Northern villages are concerned about their livelihood, their family, their dreams. The cruel, dark hand of want and scarcity is falling upon them for the first time in their lives.
There seems to me to be far too much happiness and love in the world. How many are working to spread the noble values associated with pain, suffering, death and destruction? These causes are crying out for new, bold leadership. Should I be the one to take the torch in hand, to lead people into a new dark night of evil and horror?
Serial killers perform the important function of cleansing nature of excessive, wasteful, polluting decadent human bodies. They keep in check the human tide of destruction upon the world. They are cleaners.
Yet through their eyes, they do it for fun and excitement, or at least they should. They should kill at random, in such a way as to never get caught, and there should be no suicide getaway plan; their own death is the absolute worst thing for their cause. Nor should they be anti-social, depressed, or even emotionally unstable or mentally unhealthy, since this just makes them deperate victims, or even worse- martyrs. A cool killer always has a trademark, like a howl. Or perhaps something ghastly and freakish-something "inhuman", like a bark, or a shriek. This should be contrived, not an expression of the soul, since part of his glory is being a spectator to his own actions. A cool killer is proud to be a monster. Many people are secretly in awe of his fully realized divine power, and he revels in his newfound fame.
Of course this is all just speculation for a character in one of my films.
Well, not really.
It is a new day.
The ground is falling.
The mushroom clouds of hydrogen bombs silhouette against the glowing red clouds of dawn.
There will be more violence, hatred, and fear.
But we will reinvent our cities.
We will regrow the forests.
We will build new spaceships.
|
|
|
|
|
When I first arrived in the city, I slept in my car, in a parking lot on the beach, for about two months, until I found a job and an apartment. There were usually about four or five other guys in cars that slept there too. Some of them, I learned later, weren't actually homeless, but why they spent the night there I'm not sure, and wasn't sure I wanted to know.
On one rather brisk Sunday evening, in November 2002, when the lot was nearly empty, I made one of my common treks to the liquor store. This had become something of a routine during those nights, since without anything to drink I would have to spend the night cold, lonely, and bored. Alcohol made the late night radio talk show hosts much more entertaining. Also, since I wasn't paying rent, and I was still getting pogie checks from my last job back East, I could afford it.
So I picked up a few brew and a bottle and drove back to the beach. I parked in my usual spot, at the end of the parking lot by the woods, far away from the other cars, facing the lake. The sun was setting dramatically. It was cold, but the fresh humid breeze felt good. I turned on the radio, and cracked a beer.
After about an hour (or maybe it was a few hours, I don't quite remember), I was getting bored. I decided to fire up the engine and do a little exploring around the lot. As I drove back towards the entrance, I went very slowly, not even touching the gas, so as to ease the rocking I went over the enormous potholes. It was a long way to the parking lot entrance, and with the car dipping every which way it felt like I was on a boat, sailing amongst the swells of the ocean.
I finally got there, after about half an hour of sailing, and stopped at the highway with my headlights off. The smooth pavement beckoned my inner demons, but I knew that I was loaded by then and had no place to go anyway. Rather than going further, I determined that I must do a Rockford maneuver.
I wasn't sure that such a stunt would even be possible with a front wheel drive POS cheap import. But with the gravel and soil, I thought I might get lucky. So I shifted to reverse and plotted out my course in the rearview mirror, while revving up the engine. I let go of the clutch and off the car went. But before I wanted to yank on the steering wheel, the bouncing from the potholes made me lose concentration, until I lost control altogether, ending up with the rear tires stuck over two concrete dividers.
That was the last time I drove.
I lunged out, swaring at the dividers and the potholes. I grabbed the bottle and walked towards the lake, soon forgetting about my shitmobile and my little adventure.
It was, after all, a beautiful night. The little waves gently rolling up, and the clear sky and the moon made things very serene and moody. It's easy to lose oneself in the enchantment of the natural world by merely turning one's back to the city. In the far distance was a ship- a large fishing vessel, or perhaps a freighter. I downed another nice gulp of whisky and decided to wave it down, to hitch a ride back to Nova Scotia.
It was then that the policeman arrived. There were no sirens, no lights, nothing, just poof! An on duty policeman, in uniform, appeared right beside me.
He asked me what I was waving at, and I pointed to the ship in the distance, which was obviously Eastward bound, and was already turning in my direction, having noticed signal. He looked for a few moments, and said he couldn't see any ship anywhere.
This made me quite angry. He looked like a kid that I used to pick on way back when I was about four years old. I told him that he was just a silly little asshole, that it was his job to be an asshole, that this was the only reason he was hired, and it was all he had to offer to the world. Then I told him to go and mind his own fucking business.
From that point up until when I woke up in a holding cell, everything is pretty much a blur. I found myself very sore and disoriented, lying on a cold hard floor, next to a man from some Arab country talking about how the Iraqis were going to kick the Americans' butt, because Saddam was a man with balls of steel who lived by his wits, whereas Bush was just a pappy boy.
As for the actual jail, they put me on the nigger range, and of course all the niggers tried to taunt me and intimidate me. They sounded like a pack of wild hungry mongrel dogs. So I just stood with my back to the wall, expressionless, until the niggers went away and the black guys came to respect me and make polite conversation.
|
|
|
|
|
I quit smoking cigarettes and cut down on my drinking over the last few years. I have since last year adopted a rather rigorous exercise routine.
I don't read the newspapers anymore. Whenever I get a radio, a TV, or even a phone I have to give it away or throw it away after a few weeks, sometimes after a few days.
All I have in my apartment is books, New Yorker magazines, and my sullen offline computer.
I have been putting more effort into keeping everything clean and orderly. Anything I don't need, I no longer have.
All of the philosophical questions I once had I have answered.
All my writing projects except for one, a scientific one, are little more than me entertaining myself with the mass of images I've accumulated in my unconscious during the short time I've been on this planet. My memories are like toys that the child that is my imagination plays with.
If my work never blossoms into a career, it will not be a loss at all.
My inevitable mortality looms like a dark spectre. But I refuse to make it my enemy, as so many others do. I prefer to see my life as a wonderful gift, something that never needed to be, but happened anyway, against unimaginable odds.
There is something objective about the preciousness of life. It isn't precious because our fear of death makes it that way. It's sheer value is written into our genes.
It's what makes the species of primates who are lords over the Earth adopt a fighting spirit in everything they do that is worthwhile.
If we are fighters, we should fight for things, not against things. We should take command of our little ship, instead of spending all our energy just keeping it afloat, while drifting aimlessly and being blown about.
|
|
|
Showing 11 - 18 of 18
·
1
·
2
·
|
