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pen-whipped

these words are Harley Westerholt's experiments with truth, where monsters are turned into pets

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pen-whipped · 4 years

Text

I...Icarus...I

I, Icarus… …not drowned, though punished for my arrogance all the same. My wings, broken and scarred now, once waxed by an obvious air of vanity. I had lovers so beautiful and so plentiful that Hubris himself was inspired to make for me a pair of such pinions that even from willow twigs and candle tar appeared as angelic appendages. And I took flight as if virtue were a wind I needed not for soaring.

And oh these lovers… …these lovers of mine, each as captivating as the next. Each with a beauty that historically possessed men to song and sonnet, to states of madness, and then to war with their own brethren. Each with a brilliance that ages of religions and laws sought to subdue by sanding down the edges and enslaving by dullness. Each and any, any one and all, these lovers of mine! If humans are truly made in the image of gods, my lovers are proof of such replicas perfected.

And I, Icarus… …not one, but all these lovers I had — more than that which centuries of men could amass, save for princes, kings, pharaohs, celebrities, and demigods. Multiples in a day or night. One crawling from my sheets so as to make way for another; I crawling from the sheets of one on my way to another. Any man of flesh would have chewed through trees — gnawed forests of heartwood and chomped entire woodlands down to the roots — if that were gods’ requirements for merely kissing any one of my lovers but once. With his teeth pulped and tongue blistered, spitting bark and gagging duramen, beating blood from the corners of his mouth like gargled poetry, his toothless smile would hemorrhage a joy birthed from that chance gods granted to taste the lips of divinity. The way those born to want for nothing overlook so many blessings, this is a joy I’d either forsaken or had never known.

For I, Icarus… …not just kissing, rather blessed by far more. I made love more than the archer-god’s arrow that stupefies its targets into intoxicated states of adoration. I fucked more than those feral fiends beneath the towers of babbling imbeciles sodomizing anything with an orifice shaped like an O. I tongued syllables to the taste of clitorises that climaxed into prayer-pleas of “oh my god!” and “jesus fucking christ!” as if I spoke to a megaphone aimed directly at the Christian gods.

I… …I knew all the secrets these women told no one; and I knew all the lies they told the world. I listened to the stories each of their flesh scars told tales of; and I read them aloud like triumphant sonnets of a madness passed and a war forgotten. I memorized the lyrics to every curve their body sang, so that the melody was always with me … even when they were not.

And yet, I, Icarus… …before my wings were broken and scarred, I tossed each of these lovers aside the way gluttonous swine do scraps: smearing more on my face and leaving more on the bones than that which a less fortunate and more deficient man would call a feast and give praise to lords for.

And oh! these lords… …these gods of ours, these sinister sadistic psychopathic fucks. They abhorred poor Hubris and that He adored me. Their seeds of treachery planted by providing these lovers of mine, any I so desired. Rooted in my lust, the forest floor blossomed into an overshadowing canopy of trees — trees I had no obligation to chew through, and instead produced the twigs by which Hubris shaped my wigs.

And oh! these wings… …these once glorious wings, broken and scarred now. Dearest Hubris pieced these limbs together with wax from candles that guided him during the long night hours of doing so. Denied by no lover I set sights to, I took flight eagerly. No songs or sonnets needed for soaring. No navigating through madness or war. No wind of virtue gathered beneath my wings. I soared. I hunted Love as if it were a mythology that would never prove true. I chased the sun around an endless globe.

And oh! these gods… …these retched gods, with eyes as wide open as Hell to sinners, with jaws dropped and hanging the way their own disappointment in those creations made in their image does, they gathered together and watched my take-off. Eager as townsmen picnicking for a public hanging — the entertainment of an execution. With their one hand spinning inside the palm of the other the way faith believers go round and round with the idea that any god gives a fuck about them, they watched the course of my flight. They watched knowing the more lovers I devoured the closer I flew to the sun — a sun I chased believing I’d never come near.

And yet!… …the light got brighter until blinding, and still I chased. The warmth drew nearer until scorching, and still my hunting did not stop. T’was as if a pyre blazed with the flames of nativity where a star was at once both born and dying, supernova and nebulae in an instance. And in that very moment of birth and death Love seemed just as real as it always had seemed unreal. T’was a moment best compared to that when one first discovers their god; I suspect. But it was too late. I’d flown too close. The wax and tar of my wings softened. As it melted, these gods — these sinister psychopaths, these sadistic fucks — every last one of them , they grinned and watched my fall.

I … Icarus — the entertainment of a public execution.

And yes… …I plummeted. Plunged, and crashed. Worst yet, I landed near an angel of the sun. An angel that proved to be the consequence of all my disbeliefs, and yet more; she was everything else. All the mythologies ever told of goddesses, all the poetics ever synched to the heart’s rhythm, all the sonnets ever formatted for the sake of love, all the songs ever sang by believers rejoicing in their lords’ names, she was all of that wrapped in a set of fire-feathered wings that blazed gloriously in protection and scorched viciously in retribution. And the ground cringed beneath each of her steps as she walked, as she walked away from the carnage of me lying in the pool of my past and bleeding out every choice that had lead to that moment. And the Hell of it all, the most torturous scorch — it came just before she took flight to leave, and to leave me there broken and shattered. Hell singed as she leaned over and whispered into my ear,

“I … Icarus … I … I really loved you.”

But oh! oh!… …oh that it was too late! I’d flown too close to the sun. Blinded by a truth I failed to acknowledge, the weakness of my wings exposed by their own fraudulence. I lay there in the wreckage broken until I could crawl, and then crawled until I could rise to my feet and walk again. And as such and ever since, these days, dragging the remnants of those wings, my legs carry me as I strengthen them to be as strong and sturdy as those tree trunks left behind from that twig-and-wax project of Hubris’. The weight of what’s missed, that burden of regret — it does seem as though I’ll bear it for as long as I live and breathe. And the scars that remain from that flight of peril, the obvious places where appendages were purged, though they do oft’ remind me of my dear sweet Hubris, they are constant reminders of her …and of that Hell she left me to crawl out from. These scars forever read as scriptures reminding that we can believe something doesn’t exist, but only for only as long as that day when it tries to kill us.

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pen-whipped · 5 years

Text

∞ Wold in an Inch ∞

~for Carlton & Erica~

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∞ Prologue ∞

Never give ‘em the last inch was scratched on the wall of the jail cell next to several pairs of initials with hearts drawn around them. A 12’ X 10’ holding tank decorated with similar slogans and signatures where people seem to have thought about only two things while they were here: holding on to one final piece of anything to control and … Love. The walls, ceiling, and floor were coated with thick grey paint where the scriptures were etched; and a metallic bench, toilet, and sink matched all the blandness. Here I realized that one of the greatest motivators of the world is Love. I thought of The Trojan War. Boudicca’s Rebellion against Rome for her daughters. Rama and Sita. Fairytales and over-stretched history, of course. I also thought about ... Nationalism—the disgusting love of country. Racism—the even more disgusting love at the expense of its hatred for others. Capitalism—the love of material goods beyond need and necessity, at the expense of others. Religion—the love for some version of god or gods and the ideals and values that uphold that version. Movements and Rebellions in the name of Love. And so of course I thought about Ernesto “Che” Guevara and how when asked by a reporter, “What inspires a revolutionist,” he responded after a pause and a grin. “Amor” (Love), he said.

I realized then that the other motivator of the world is this power structure that harnesses the actions of those motivated by Love or some extension of Love such as jealousy, desire, passion, rage. Of the two locals I was locked up with, in this small shithole Texas bo-dunk town, one hospitalized a man who slept with his wife and the other had a physical fight with his own wife. A third man loved a woman so much that he joined the carnival she was part of so as to not ever be without her, and thereby revoked his probation. And me … I was headed to a wedding from Colorado to Austin, TX, where my best friend had claimed the love of his life.

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∞ Rite of Passage ∞

You forget these people exist. Even having been raised around them, with them, and by them, you just forget. I was born and raised in Texas, in their jungle like Tarzan with gorillas. And that’s actually the perfect analogy because right when the state trooper says to me, “With a Black in the White House, Queers havin’ a Christian’s marriage, and dope bein’ legalized all over God’s good country, you just cain’t be too careful these days,” what comes to mind is the evolution chart where a drawing of a man standing upright is preceded by different hunchbacked ape-like creatures. Here, barely across the border into the Texas panhandle, knuckles still drag on the ground. You spend over a decade in the land where people walk upright and you forget the knuckle draggers exist.

Karl Marx tells us that killers first make an enemy of their victims before killing them. This is how the crime is justifiable. Such sociopaths have the same characteristics of a nation that makes an enemy of another nation before destroying it. America and its fictitious WMD ploy that led to the Hussein regime’s demise. A nation ran by a Texan. “Now that’s when the country had its head on straight,” he says peeking through his rearview mirror at me behind the glass that separates the front seat from the back.

Red neck adages—they’re like poetry without everything poetic.

“A good Christian was pullin’ the reigns then,” he continues.

I wonder why they speak in parables—southern draw riddles filled with similes and metaphors. His “Christians,” sound more like “Chrust-yens.” I get it. The same way Jesus’ parables made all the rest of the world understandable for the knuckle draggers in his time, so do the redneck adages for our time. And they loves them some Jesus too. He’s everywhere.

I could take his last adage a million different directions other than the one these handcuffs connected to the yellow rope ran through them and around my waist and back up through my thighs insists that I do. He’s fucking hogtied me. I look at the cuffs and yellow rope and think how man is the cruelest of all animals, for a dog would only bite another dog, but we … we shackle and belittle, demoralize and strip identities, rape and enslave, indebt and un-educate one another to the point that we ourselves forget that others are living, breathing human-fucking-beings. But, even with this in mind, I say with a hint of delight, “And we was all better off when it was,” leaning forward to the hole in the glass divider, referring to when a good Southern Chrust-yen led the nation. Never mind that it was war, poverty, and a greater divide between the classes that he led us to.

To reverse Marx’s notion of the killer, if the victim can make the killer identify him or her as one of the killer’s own, or at the very least as a human being, then the victimization is more likely to cease or at minimum the inflictions lose harshness.

There’s a Bible in the front seat, and I’ve heard numerous Chrust-yen references and seen two crucifixes since I was pulled over: one around the narcotics officer’s neck and one dangling from this trooper’s mirror. So I continue, “Yes, sir. My uncle’s lil’ chapel in Amarillo donated all they could to support both Bushes, Junior and his daddy.” (There’s no chapel. No donations. The point is that I too am a Christian, and even greater so, I too am a Texan—though I was born in Texas, I am neither a Christian nor a Texan; he, however, should believe that I am both).

His eye brows perk up. He glances twice in the mirror before saying, “You from Texas?”

“Yes, sir. Born ‘n raised,” I pronounce with a draw that would win me an Academy nomination. “Up north they still make fun’a my accent.” He tells me he didn’t even notice the accent till now. “I hide it so much, ya know. So’s to not get made fun of up ‘er in Colorado.” … and so the game goes until I’m a human being, and then eventually I’m one of his own and he’s telling me about his family, his farm, his career, and finally I get him to admit why he stopped me. This is only an inch, but it’s something.

I’d like to thank The Academy, first; then my rhetoric teacher; followed by my redneck uncles for the southern draw and simplified grammar.

He’d been claiming I was driving over the speed limit, even though that’s anything but true. Since I don’t have a driver’s license, I kept to the limits the entire drive and planned on it all the way to my destination. Never once drove 5mph more than the limit. And so each time I’d asked how much over the limit he clocked me at, he’d just say not to worry since he’s droppin’ that charge.

“Reason I’m takin’ you in is cuz drivin’ without a DL is breakin’ the law here in Texas.”

But the reason he pulled me over … the reason two K9 Units parked on both sides of my rental car only minutes after I was pulled over … the reason the narcotics officers gave me the 3rd degree interrogation about drug trafficking … is, as he says from under his ten gallon hat, Colorado just passed a law legalizing marijuana, and well, “With a Black in the White House, Queers havin’ a Christian’s marriage … dope legalized in God’s country … you just can’t be too careful these days.”

“Now listen,” he goes on to say, “I realize I’m ‘bout as tight as bark on a tree when it comes to the law. Some may’a just gave ya a ticket and sent ya on yer way, but I believe it’s just as likely fer you to sneak back ‘cross the state line and never return to pay for yer crime. You’d just be whistlin’ Dixie up ‘er like you’d never did nothin’ wrong down here. This a’way,” he says, “You have to wait and see the judge in the mornin’. Pay yer dues and what not.”

I’m shackled like a killer who’d forgot to make an enemy of his victim first. Hogtied like a baby pig that’d escaped the pen. A one-time freed slave who’d left the North and returned South only to be caught without his emancipation papers. I’m thinking in redneck adages. I was driving without a fucking driver’s license for crying out loud!

More laws lead to more crimes lead to more criminals lead to more jobs to catch, house, and process the criminals, which lead to more revenue leading ultimately to more money circulating within the system. Criminals are filters for the process in this way, lab rats exploited for the greater good, space monkeys for the ruling knuckle draggers. Karl Marx claims that in capitalistic societies, the people are concerned more about money and commodities than they are other human beings.

Dogs, on the other hand, well … they just bite one another.

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∞ Crossing the Threshold ∞

It’s hard to believe Nietzsche’s claim that we should celebrate the rebel for reminding us of our enslavement to the system when I’m told to strip all my clothes off and lift my dick and nuts up to show that nothing’s stashed away in some secret compartment.

The first steps to make a slave of an individual are to separate them from their own kind and then strip them of their identity. Separate the rebel from his support group and give him the title criminal, thereby giving a less lustrous title and making the act of any rebellion lose any glory to others contemplating similar actions.

Ranchers hang dead wolves on fence posts for similar reasons. Other wolves are deterred from entering land when they see the carcass of what was one of their own that dared to “trespass.”

Romans left messiahs hanging on crosses to discourage other messianic aspirations.

A simple change in titles shows the power of words.

They take my cell phone and my wallet with all its contents including cash and ID card. No contact. No identity. They take my clothes, which could in many ways show identity. And as I hold my dick and nuts in my hand and he gazes long and hard at my taint, I think, I just didn’t have my mother fucking driver’s license, though I dare not utter a word.

To fight monsters is to become one, Nietzsche says.

I’m handed a green jump suit and a pair of flip-flops, and with that, a new identity. I am no longer the rebel who dared to drive to his best friend’s wedding without a driver’s license; I am now a criminal in the Republic of Texas. I’m a fucking dead wolf on a fence post. Jesus hanging next to others who did not abide by the law.

I am one step closer to the beast’s belly as they seat me next the woman who’s only job is to tag the slaves and send them to their quarters.

“98% of Colah’rahdins that we pull over have marijuana on ‘em. That’s statistically,” she says popping her gum and not taking her eyes off the computer screen for one moment.

I’m not human to her. I’m a product with a barcode that she runs across the scanner. I’m an enemy, soon to be a victim. A rebel turned criminal. I am not one of her kind.

“They come in here cryin’, talkin’ ‘bout how it’s legal up in Colah' rahda. Well it ain’t down here. Those types is ‘bout as welcome as a skunk at a lawn party.”

She’s as poetic as the trooper. Stoic.Short, round, and full of attitude. Dedicated to a system that is more unjust to those who are of no concern to it than it is unjust to those who are offensive to it. Another Nietzsche claim.

As a new challenge arises within me, I notice something in myself that I begin to notice in all human nature. I want to break this preset image she has prescribed me with, partially as a challenge of wits, but also because I want to get as much as I can from her, however little it may be. Even if … it’s just an inch. With the trooper gone and the officer who checked my taint nowhere to be found, this lady has current reign over me like a slave master.

I start the game with the presupposed idea she has of me. I can’t speak in a dialect that makes me sound ignorant and fitting to the image she has of all who come through here; and I can’t speak from the education level I have that is far above her own. I have to speak plainly. To her. Not above, nor below. All we have in common at this point is our current relationship. And that’s enough to work with.

The strategy behind me telling her, “I bet you see the worst of the worst,” is to separate myself from those who are in fact the worst of the worst. And she responds to this.

“You have no idea.”

Now, to connect more with her, I say, “Well, my cousin’s a prison guard at the federal penitentiary in Colorado; and he tells me that every four years a prison guard works, what it does psychologically to him or her is equal to what one year does to a prisoner. You’re still behind bars and surrounded by criminals in here. Man, I feel for ya’.” Now, I’ve further separated myself from the criminals she’s used to and have shown that I am more on her side of the law, even if just through a relative. I’ve also dabbled in some sort of empathy of her situation, shown understanding as to why she wears that frown and never looks a processee in the eyes.

“This job has made me never trust men again; I’ll tell ya’ that much,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong,” and for the first time she turns her head and looks me in the eyes, “I ain’t no fuckin’ carpet muncher though.”

I’m in. Ten minutes later and she’s laughing with me and barely asking the questions the computer screen tells her to: do I have this ailment or that ailment, am I suicidal or have I ever been suicidal, am I addicted to drugs or have I ever been…and so on.

“Listen,” I say during one of the most intense moments of laughter shared between us, “Can I ask a favor of you?”

Her posture shoots straight up and her frown returns. She doesn’t look me in the eyes anymore and she certainly does not laugh. She says, “I don’t know ‘bout that.”

“Calm down,” I tell her with a smile, “All I want to know is if you can prolong this processing. I ain’t gonna lie, an extra moment spent out here laughing with you is greater than any moment spent in the holding tank.”

An extra moment is an inch.

I see her body ease from its defenses. “You mean you ain’t ready to paint your butt white and go runnin’ with the antelope just yet, huh?” And she smiles.

“No, ma’am, I ain’t.”

All I’d done with the trooper was try to get anything I could from him, even if it was just the admission to why he pulled me over. With her I want as much time out of the holding tank as possible, or at the very least, same as with him, I want her to see me as a human being.

I think about life outside of here, how all we do in life is try to get a little more than we have from those who are in control of us or in control of the things we want. A nickel raise from our boss. A better position in the workforce. A higher grade from a teacher. Equity on homes. More square footage in our lofts. Return on investments. Sex from a lover. Devotion from a lover. Love, period. All we want is to get a little more of the control that controls us. And then Nietzsche comes to mind:

This world is a will to power, he says, and nothing besides.

A new rebel comes in and this lady has me stand in a corner while she processes him. She does this twice more before I realize she’s stalling for me. Rather than process me and have them wait their turns, she goes through them first; thus allowing my processing to be prolonged. I am now a human being.

After the third rebel passes through and into his new criminal identity, she finishes my questions, finger prints, and mug shots; and then says, “That was the best I can do. It’s time.”

I thank her. Tell her it’s more than enough.

“Now, walk down that hall to the laundry room," she motions the direction with her hand, "And then we’ll get ya’ in that tank”

She follows me. Doors buzz open as we arrive at them. In the laundry room she tells me to grab a mat, a sheet, and a blanket, all of which are stacked neatly on different shelves next to industrial size washers and dryers. “If you want two blankets, I can do that for you too; but you’re gonna have to deal with the others bein’ jealous.”

“Gladly,” I say.

“Then unroll ‘em and roll ‘em back up together so it looks like a mistake was made.”

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∞Belly of the Beast∞

“It’s gonna be about 12 hours before the judge is in,” she says as the door shuts behind me. The three rebels from earlier are sprawled out on the floor. Same jump suit as me. Same blankets. Same matts. Same flip-flops next to the matts. We are one and the same.

The messiah on his cross did not stand out from the murderer or the thief on theirs.

One lifts his head up and slides his pallet over to make room for me. “Don’t shit unless you absolutely have to,” he says looking at the silver toilet fully exposed in the corner. As he rolls over and back to sleep, he continues, “Even dogs don’t shit where they lay.” The others never move. I make my bed, careful not to reveal that I have two blankets.

I lie in utter silence.

I think first about Martin Luther King, JR and his Letter from Birmingham Jail, where he too was arrested for being, as his jailers claimed, an unwelcomed outsider in their state. Though I dare not think my circumstances are remotely comparable to his and his time in the Alabama jail, I am reminded of him saying in his letter, Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

And though I was not racially profiled, I was indeed profiled. With a Black in the White House, Queers getting married, and dope legalized all over, a change is slowly coming—a change that threatens the way of life where these types of comments are made. To a far smaller degree, my green and white Colorado license plates are Martin’s black skin. And, with everything stripped from me, I lie here experiencing what Martin called, nobodyness.

This cold, horizontal floor is the belly in the beast of order. All laws, all virtues, all values—all of which are based on perspective, are the means to make order from the seemingly chaotic. And this is the bottom of that order. The exploited who arrive here, or any floor like this one anywhere, are merely, as Nietzsche claims of all exploitations, consequences of the will to power, which is after all the will to life.

I’ve become the consequence of a way of life fighting to sustain itself. I represent the other life that strives to grow, spread, seize, and become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is… again and again I claim with Nietzsche and experience it now more than ever … a will to power.

I'm sorry that I can't praise the police department. It is true that they have been disciplined in their public handlings, but for what purpose? To preserve an evil system. I try to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. So said Martin Luther King JR in that letter he wrote from jail.

I imagine the letter I’ll write, and think that it has to be dedicated to my best friend and his new bride. Like the little drummer kid in the manger banging bongos next to bay Jesus’ crib, this letter is all I have to give. And in it I’ll mention how I thought mostly of Marx, Nietzsche, King JR, Lacan, and Campbell. It will only be a matter of time, I think, and I’ll be out of here and writing my own Letter from a Texas Jail.

That very matter of time stretches beyond all previously known flexibilities for time. No prior concept of it exists in here. I clear my thoughts of King JR when one of my fellow mates awakens and asks a passing guard for Tylenol. And when the guard returns with a bottle of pills and a sign-off sheet, he asks the guard what the time is. I’d been to Birmingham and visited the King in his cell after I watched him protest with non-violent means he’d learned from Gandhi, saw him arrested by bigots with faces as stoic and prescribed with presupposed ideals of particular people as that of the lady who’d processed each of us in this cell, I sat next to King JR while each pen stroke gave birth to one of the most widely anthologized letters of our time, and when the guard looks at his watch and says, “a quarter to midnight,” I am in utter disbelief.

You can fit days inside the minutes of a jail cell, so I learn. Centuries in its hours.

The other two wake and ask for Tylenol too, admitting quietly amongst ourselves that they don’t need it. “You might as well take what you can get around here,” one says. And it’s at this moment that we all introduce ourselves for the first time and then tell our tales of capture. After this the conversation goes directly to, and never leaves the topic of, pussy. The variations of pussy from looks to feel, from hair lengths to shaved, from menstruating bloody to (what each of them agrees is the best of all pussies:) pregnant pussy. “I wouldn’t know, honestly, never have had that kind,” I say.

But what I really want to say is …

I want to tell the guy who beat his wife’s lover to a pulp about how Jacques Lacan took one of Sigmund Freud’s studies a layer deeper than Freud himself did. Freud demonstrates that at times children will not want to play with a toy, nor will they care at all about a particular toy, until another child wants to play with it. Lacan studied infant twins who could neither speak nor barely move more than their arms and heads, but would easily and obviously be overcome with a fit of jealous rage when the other sibling would suckle from the mother’s breast. I imagine this guy probably not wanting much to do with his wife until someone else did. He threw a fit like an infinite. Something intrinsic in us seems to want to control everything, even if it is only the desire of the other. A child would rather destroy a toy it cared nothing about than to see another child enjoy that very same toy. It’s about control, holding on to every inch within reach.

I want to ask the other cell mate why he beat his wife. He never tells why they fought, but I'm certain it can be connected to Freud’s idea of the Ego being projected from within us and into our outwardly real world surroundings, creating all things we fear and hate, as well as all things we desire and love. This means all things externally felt and imagined are more than directly related to our inner selves; they are, more particularly, our inner selves externalized. Buddhists have a similar belief that all enemies are only such because we have made them so. No one is our enemy whom we have not made be; and furthermore who our enemy is says more about us than them. These ideas combined mean that all things are manifestations of the Ego. We set all challenges and obstacles in our own way. And so I wonder about this other cell mate of mine; what could he have projected from within himself onto the woman that birthed his children; what fear or hatred brewed inside himself so much that he beat the shit out of her as if she was the embodiment of that abstraction from within himself. I wonder…

I want to discuss the carnival love. This guy loved a woman and didn’t want to be without her, but he’s been cycled and recycled in the system since he was a teenager, and so he had to rebel against an order to be with her. He committed a crime as a child and has been paying for it since through a series of revocations and so on. He’s one of the oldest in our cell but he has a childlike quality to him, an innocence that none of us possess, as if this system has kept him in the state he was in when he committed his crime. I think about Nietzsche saying that at one time in history, people who wronged others in their social group were punished with a severity that equaled the crime; and after that punishment, not only did they not repeat the offenses, but they also were considered to have paid their debt for the offense. Nietzsche claimed in the late 19th century (and I would claim is even more the case in our 21st century) that nowadays people pay for a crime for the remainder of their lives, whether it be through the inability to acquire decent work based on criminal records or it be the continuous revocation of the same crime committed decades prior. The overall goal for the endless un-reconciliation is one similar to medical industries not wanting to find a cure for ailments. People dependent upon and stuck within the system become filters for the process of monetary circulation and are best kept as such, as lab rats for the greater good, as space monkeys for the knuckle dragggers.

I’m thinking these things, though I dare not utter a word of them. Instead, I join in with the dogs and bark about the variations of bitches and pussies as I know them. I would separate myself from the pack if I were to provide my insight to anything other.

It’s here I realize we’re all in this cell due to some relation to love, even if by some extension of it: jealousy, passion, and so forth. I represent the beginning stages: a wedding. The carny represents the next: giving up the self for love and fulfilling the desire of the other. The guy who beat his wife is some stage nearer the end, either right before or directly after she cheats on him. And thus the final stage, the guy beats the wife’s new lover to a pulp. And the cycle is complete in a way that makes an enemy of Love and thereby justifies the system that controls it.

I wonder if it all is really, rather than being about love … is all this … is life and the control of it all really about … I mean … could it be that as the dogs in this kennel discuss nothing more than … could all of life, directly or indirectly, really be about pussy? This is, of course, from a man’s perspective; we could say “cock” for a woman’s, or perhaps some ambiguous sexual connotation to encompass both genders (Freud and Lacan would say both genders are phallic, for even the lack of something is the representation of that something that is missing).

I wonder ... Is love really our own childlike want to control a vagina like a toy? Do we ever leave the Oedipus and Electra Complex stages, where the moment a child first recognizes their own sexual identity, the very next step is to focus libidinal energy on the parent of the opposite sex? Then, all extensions and versions of jealousy and rage focus on the parent of the same sex. Is the guy who hospitalized his wife’s lover not the unrepressed Oedipus Complex, since his desire to possess and control the sexuality opposite his own and destroy the one that is the same as his and therefore the rival to him actually plays out, as if it escaped its subconscious repression? And he, like most of us, dared not think about sharing that vagina, as if it were his little toy that he could not stand the thought of someone else getting pleasure from. He demonstrates how we will throw tantrums that destroy others if they play with or attempt to play with things we claim as our own. We are nothing more than infant twins, each on opposite tits, sucking away and making an enemy of our own brother for indulging as we do. We will beat him to a pulp. Hospitalize or imprison him. Make a repeat offender of him to trap him within the system that supports this behavior because this justifies its existence. Even if it is all over a toy we care nothing about.

The law shapes man into its image, Lacan says, exploiting the poetic function of language to give man’s desires symbolic mediation.

I often think that we are no different from salmon, spending our whole lives trying to get back to the place we came from. We swim up streams of vaginas every chance we get until we die, and sometimes we die by them or because of them. Salmon spawning in the one place it was spawned from. I say vagina, or I say pussy, but really I understand that this is connected to reproduction. This is connected to survival of the species. We humans are a living, breathing organism that strives to grow, spread, seize, and dominate every inch of our immediate surroundings (for us as individuals) until this inch grows into all space (for us as whole organized units).

Everything we do is connected to the womb—that which we crawl out of like Jesus rolling the stone back for resurrection. To die and be born again in the same place, we have to protect the womb. We have to keep it sacred and cleanly, preserve its virgin-like and godly qualities. We have to claim it as our friend, our soul mate, our companion, our wife, the mother of our children. In other words, we build walls of illusion around it like fences around territory. And then we hang dead carcasses on posts to deter other dogs. We have to claim the womb by some way that designates us as the sole owner; meaning, we control it and only we can touch it; only we can play with it; no one else can stick their cocks in it but us; and no one but us gets pleasure from the one we claim as our own. Otherwise … we will destroy it—a Pagan temple where queues of beasts await in provocation. The goddess becomes a fallen statue in her own bed of ash, dripping, oozing, disease infested, and speaking the language of heathens from some dead religion. Decrepit and useless. There will be no rebirth otherwise.

∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫

∞Road to Trial∞

Just before the twelfth hour in the tank, when conversation was dead and sleep was impossible, I lie awake reading all the markings on the walls and floor. Hieroglyphics of the slaves. None betraying the pattern of either keeping control of something or always loving someone. I wonder by what means were they able to leave these marks, but then I see the broken pieces of concrete rock lying loosely about the floor. As an unfamiliar feeling sets in, something beyond boredom and close to devastation, I understand how scratching philosophy into the layers of paint would help ease this approaching panic. A small purpose would be given in this way, a tiny goal, something that lets us and others know we were here, alive, and real; and something that (once again) becomes our own.

I grab a rock and underneath the slogan Never give ‘em the last inch, I start my own contribution, slowly inscribing: and take

The guy who beat his wife, he jumps up as if he’d woke from a nightmare. Sweating and breathing hysterically. He pushes a button on the wall and a woman’s voice comes through a small speaker demanding to know what his emergency is. He can’t speak. He’s hyperventilating. Me being close to panic already, I feel his instability spreading to me. Like some air born pathogen. And from the looks on the faces of the others as they begin to watch, it’s spreading to them as well.

A loud buzzer. The door opens. A guard takes him out of the cell and as he does he says, “Holy shit, this tank’s stuffy’er ‘na horses face eatin’ corncobs.”

The window is completely fogged over, as if we’ve been recycling each other’s breaths for centuries now. The guard stands next to the open door allowing new and cold air to come in. I sit upright, lay a blanket across my lap, wrap another around my shoulders, close my eyes, breath deeply and slowly, and attempt the first meditation of my life. I don’t know what meditating actually is or even what it consists of, nor do I know how to actually do it. But I attempt it anyway, attempting it as I’ve heard of it being done. I eventually calm myself through the process and end up in some place other than where I am.

I journey through Joseph Campbell’s theory of monomyth. Thinking back to Colorado when I, the hero, was called to action as Campbell says is the first step of all heroes ranging from Greek and Roman mythological heroes to Buddha and Jesus. I see the mountains—snowcapped and towering in their implications of a land where it’s okay for Blacks, Queers, and drug users to be human beings. According to Campbell’s theory, after the hero begins his journey, he will first cross a threshold where some foreign creature will take him further into the land of the unknown, or as Campbell says, the entrance to the zone of magnified power … where darkness and danger reside … a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown. The threshold guardian takes the hero closer to if not directly into The Belly of the Whale, according to Campbell. Jonah comes to mind, of course. But also, Dionysus and Hestia. Jason and Medea. Odysseus and the Odyssey. Jesus and the Romans. Me and the knuckle draggers. The hero enters the belly of the whale where the metamorphosis begins. Once inside he may be said to have died, only to return to the World Womb anew.

“Where’d you get two blankets from?” the guard asks me, and my eyes snap open and I’m brought back into my cell. I shrug my shoulders, act clueless, and say they were wrapped this way. “Supposed to only have one,” he says and turns around. And with that our cell mate returns, pale but calmed. He apologizes and goes right to his mat and blanket. Everyone rolls their backs to one another; and still seated upright, I close my eyes to the heavy noise of the door shutting.

Campbell says the hero, upon exiting the whale’s belly, is no longer who or what he was when he entered it, and he is then ready for a series of trials and tests from some awaiting female character—either a goddess or a temptress of some sorts—who has the ability to lead the hero astray or to encourage him to continue his journey. After her, the hero meets a male father figure for atonement consisting in the abandonment of the self-generated double monster—the superego and repressed Id. This requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself … and one must have faith that the father is merciful. This center of belief will be transferred outside of the self.

After a few moments of being lost in the silence, I wake. I grab my piece of the floor, the small chiseled concrete rock, and I continue my contribution to the slogan. As quiet as I can, next to my two words—and take, I press the rock into the paint and drag it into figures forming the words: back every inch from ‘em you can.

With a small purpose, there is no panic. Time is irrelevant. I take careful pride in my lettering and refurbishing the part of the slogan not created by me. I add a comma after the other rebel’s part of the slogan and a period after my own, uniting them as one and the same and ending them together as such. I brush the remnants clear and blow heavily across the phrase that now reads:

Never give ‘em the last inch, and take back every inch from ‘em you can.

I read it and wonder if others will understand it, or if it will be hidden by all the other slogans like the messiah surrounded by murders and thieves. I wonder if others will add to it. I think in years it will turn into a poem—stanzas by those of us who know what it means to own nothing except that final fucking inch. In decades it will become a new decree … maybe. But really I know it will be lost and forgotten once it’s covered with a new shade of grey paint as thick and dense as the power structure that willed it to be. Winds turn sands and hide footprints this same way.

Centuries pass and then the door buzzes and the guard says, “Westerholt. The judge will see you now.”

I throw one blanket to the carny and one to the guy that beat his wife’s lover. The guy who beat his wife, he says to me, “Hey man. Larry’s the impound guy; I know him. He ain’t gonna give you your car without a license. He’s gonna bleed you for every cent he can.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” I say. And the door shuts behind me.

A new lady sits where the first did, but they are one and the same, like Romans to a messiah. She hands me my clothes and directs me toward the same room where I showed my dick to the officer earlier. It’s almost 10am. Within ten minutes I dress, and then I’m given my wallet and cell phone back. And with that, my own identity.

“Directly across the street's the courthouse. Judge’s chambers is down the hall, last door on the left. She’s waitin' for ya’.”

When all the barriers and ogres have been overcome … the triumphant hero meets the Queen Goddess of the World. This is the crisis at the nadir, the zenith, or at the uttermost edge of the earth, in the tabernacle of the temple … The meeting with the goddess is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the advantage of her charity … And if she shuns him, the scales fall from her eyes; if she does not, her desire helps him find peace. So says Joseph in his Hero of a Thousand Faces.

Outside the sun is warm and bright and opposite everything from where I just came. I breathe and taste the air like a newborn resurrected from the womb. Squinting and yawning and stretching. Each vehicle that passes is a truck of some kind: dualies, F150s, and old farm pickup trucks. The buildings are from some other era, pre 20th century. No stop lights in either direction for as far I can see. It’s like a dream. I’m lost on some time travel expedition. If a horse and buggy came down the street and stopped to watch two gun slingers pace and draw on one another, I would not be surprised in the least.

Down the hall of the courthouse and in the last door on the left, I wait to see the judge in an office with Jesus décor all over. Crosses hang on the walls. Bibles on the shelves. Magnets on the filing cabinets: several with proverbs and one with a picture of Jesus holding a lamb. A picture on the wall shows a man and a woman holding hands and walking on the beach toward a sunset that colors the entire scene shades of orange. At the bottom of the poster it reads, Our love is designed by Jesus. And though it’s a silhouette of a male and a female figure holding hands, it’s obvious they are a white couple. A white, heterosexual, non-drug using couple, designed by Jesus himself. I am in God’s country, at least this version of god; and I am about to have one his own protégés pass the same judgment on to me as they would have he himself pass it. Since he hates Blacks, Queers, and junkies I think it fortunate, at the very least, that I am white, heterosexual, only on the proper occasion do I use drugs, and it helps that I really am originally from this god fearing jungle.

She yells from the courtroom next door that she’s ready for me and the secretary gives me a nod. “She’ll see you now,” she says as if I was too stupid or not worthy of hearing the judge’s yelling myself.

The courtroom is empty of people but filled with antique wooden chairs with red velvet cushions aligned in scattered rows. Her desk is at the front of the room. This is not the typical courtroom you see on TV depicting the 21st century. This looks like an elementary school from a time when plainsong and national athems filled the rooms. It’s still haunted by such chimes.

An old white lady with short and tightly curled grey hair peers over the rims of glasses at me as I approach. I ask her very politely if I may take a seat at one of the two chairs across from her desk. The game has already begun; I know the one inch I want from her. I no longer use the dialect I did in the tank where pussy was the topic. I now speak with a language even elevated above that I did with the lady who gave me my slave tags. I follow our introductions with lots of yes ma’ams and no ma’ams. And when she gets a pencil out to start figuring the total fines, I quickly mention that I am an English instructor at the university back home and so math certainly isn’t my strong point. Simultaneously I have informed her of a respectable career as well as humility exposed through a personal weakness. We laugh a bit at my expense: the joy of all I’ve been through and the circumstances that caused them. I admit fault repeatedly, bring up the importance of the wedding, and I most certainly mention being originally from Texas myself. And not two seconds after she tells me the total for my fines, I ask for my inch.

“Your Honor,” I say, “I wonder if you might consider giving me anything for the time I served in your jail. I spent nearly 13 hours in the tank and just wondered if you can give me anything for that. However little it may be. I would be more than grateful.”

“Well, we don’t give anything for time less than 24 hours served,” she says. And just as I nod in understanding and tuck my chin to my chest, she says, “Usually… that is,” and she smiles. “How ‘bout this?” She scribbles through the original total she’d written down, which was just over 400 dollars, and she draws a new figure that is just under 300 dollars.

It’s not much, but it’s something.

I shake her hand and thank her. And I notice, Joseph Cambpbell was right, scales do not fall from her eyes.

∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫

∞Atonement∞

One step closer to getting out of God’s country, I call Larry’s Tow. After I tell him who I am and ask for directions to his impound lot, he says, “Hell, boy, I’m out-n-about. Only two clicks from ya’ now. I’ll pick ya’ up.”

The final step for Campbell’s hero is confrontation with a male figure who holds the key to either life or death. In my case, the final figure holds the keys to my rental car. And I’ve already been warned by my cellmate that once this Larry guy discovers I have no driver’s license, he’ll care more about money than he does about me as a human. He will see me as some sort of cash cow ready for the prostate milkin’, or something like that; I’m sure. But, as Campbell claims, the hero must have faith that this male figure is merciful. Paralleled with Freud’s claim of the Ego’s projections becoming manifestations, the hero must transfer his inner mercy outward and onto this male figure who then reflects it back as an act. In other words, I have from the time Larry picks me up on the corner near the courthouse until wherever his impound lot is to pull out all the same inch winning tricks I have so far.

As I stand on the corner in the centermost part of this Wild West remake, an oversized truck with a diesel engine’s purr pulls up next to me and the door swings open. “Hop own in,” says the old man. In a Western flick, his name would be Stretch. His boots rest at the bottom of his long thin legs that are wrapped tightly with denim. His belt buckle protects his entire midsection like a shield. Button collar shirt with stripes and his lip’s fat and full of chew. “Colla’rahda, huh? Bet it smells like pig’s shit and cow guts to ya’ll when ya’ll come down here to the panhandle.” And he’s right. The stench is everywhere. Breezes are unwelcome; all they do is spread the horror. “Ta’ us, down ‘ere, That’s the smella’ money, son.”

I don’t hold back. I fire at him with a southern draw, because I know my time is limited. I have to become one of his own and he’s already attempting to separate me from being such.

“Born an’ raised in the panhandle, sir. I know the smell quite well.” With that, I talk about Amarillo being my hometown and I thank him repeatedly for picking me up. Then I continue on with all the same previous strategies as those I used to get every single inch I could from everyone who had some control over my life within this last 20 hour period:

Get those in control to identify with you. Match your language and intellectual level with that of their own; you cannot have those in control thinking you are smarter than they are and you cannot give those in control any reason to believe that you are dumber than they are (one insults their intelligence; the other confirms their stereotype). However, you must behave in a way that lets them know you are aware that they are in control; this will keep them from feeling as if they need to remind you who is in control. This is indeed the classical dialectic of Master and Slave. The slave must know and accept his position, so that he can maneuver through all the barriers that create this position before he can free himself from those very barriers. In other words, a slave must know he is a slave and all the ways in which he is a slave before he can free himself from slavery.

The recipe for making a slave:

• Remove one individual from his or her own people: family, friends, and any other social group.

• Further separate the individual from all people who speak the same language as him or her.

• Just prior to basting, brush away any previously known identities (this includes everything from the individual’s name to associations they identify themselves with).

• Add new identity in 2 parts: Part One. Give the individual a new title, not a name in the sense of a Proper Noun (this should be something derogatory, something that lets the individual know every time he is summonsed by this title that he/she is at a lower status than his master and/or all those who refer to him by this title). Part Two. The slave should no longer be considered an individual. Their new identity should have him/her assigned to all groups similar in stature as their new position, thereby also losing any individualism. Nigger, Queer, Dope-user, White-Trash, Criminal — these are good examples for both Parts One and Two.

• Prior to adding the slave to one holding tank with no windows to the outside, an act of humiliation should precede (public nudity often works well). The walls of the tank should be painted a dull color so the slave gets no stimulation at all. The tank should also be no more than 12’X10’ in diameter. If a tank of this sort is unavailable, a cage or a shack directly behind the master’s mansion should suffice, so long as the cage or shack is in similar condition as all other animals’ cages on the same property.

• Beat, whip, or whisk the slave at your leisure and to a pulp that is to your liking.

• Serve to a God fearing Christian; and Enjoy!

And since this is the process to make a slave, the recipe need only be reversed for the slave seeking freedom:

• Do not Enjoy! Get/be/remain angry (History shows that angry people are those who shift the course of mankind)

• Do not serve the Christian god. His book and ideals promote slavery (amongst other things like homophobia, patriarchy, servitude to a master [even when not a slave as the current topic], narcissism, and murder of those that are different in any way).

• Consider all beatings, whippings, and whiskings as Nietzsche claims of all things that do not destroy us. Even if they truly do not make us stronger, believe it is so while it’s happening so that you may get through the process and eventually overcome it.

• Remove yourself from the confinements of the master’s tanks, cages, shacks, and even the shadows of his mansion. Position yourself in a way that makes it impossible to be caged (i.e. do not drive without a driver’s license).

• Get your identity back, and associate yourself with those you identify most with, and those whom encourage your self-expression.

• Master the use of language (knowing when and how to use its variations among whom)

The whole reality and its effects lies in the gift of speech, Jacques Lacan says, for it is through this gift that all reality has come to man and through its ongoing action that he sustains reality.

Never has this quote rang truer than here in this desolate Texas dirt-hole town, where language creates both a law and a belief system that imprisons someone for something so minor in its true essence because of how it is greater in its implications. That is to suggest: the act of driving without a driver’s license is not the same threat as the driver and what he represents when coming from a place where value systems are different. But language is the bridge of the dialectical process; and though language enforces, language is used to challenge the enforcer's words. Those who use language like whips and chains to control others as they will themselves into positions of power through it should not be surprised when someone uses language and lashes back in a way that calculates repositioning that same power, even if it is only by an inch in favor of the one lashing back through tongue and pen.

At the impound lot, Larry and I are like old buddies talking about high school football in Texas being better than college football in other states, and Texas women have asses like no other women on the planet (I don’t give a fuck about football. Give me Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, and King any day. Talk about Campbell and his “follow your bliss” philosophy. Rhetoric and its power to seduce and manipulate. And I damn sure don’t care about Texas ass no more than I do pregnant pussy. But Larry doesn’t need to know any of this). I never lose faith in his mercy; and I’m projecting my inner belief outward and on to him. Tough I dare not do it without the assistance of words, for I believe in the power of language irrevocably.

In this tractor garage just on the outskirts of this shithole Texas town, the lot is filled with locus shelled cars and tow trucks and trailers. And in here, Larry sits at a desk and adds up my cost. Just as he tells me the total, another 300 and something dollars, he orders some other gentleman who's legs dangled out from underneath a truck to go fetch the red hatchback. Instead, just as I hand Larry my debit card, his partner (or employee or whatever he is) rolls out from under the truck and walks right up to us and says, “He ain’t got no DL, Larry. Trooper Walkins told me last night about ‘im not havin’ it. We cain’t let ‘im outta here in that car.” His greasy cap and brown coveralls become the focus of my hatred.

I turn directly to Larry and ignore ol’ Skeeter, or whatever the fuck his name is, and say, “Larry, I just wanna get home. I’m 50 miles from the Texas border and all I want is to get back to Colorado. I ain’t got no one who can even come get me.”

Larry puts his face in his hands just as ol’ Skeeter, or whatever the fuck his punk ass name is, says, “Cain’t do it. Larry, you ain’t even considerin’ doin’ this; are ya’?”

Skeeter is about to get a drop kick to the fuckin’ throat and a karatee chop to the bridge of his nose right when Larry says, “I don’t know why, but I am considerin’ it. 31 years in this business, and I never have allowed it once." He pauses. Shakes his head. Looks up at me and says, "Why this time, I do not know.”

I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell everyone why … because while I was here in God’s country … I fought, through the use of language—the only tool I’d been afforded and the only tool they did not strip me of—for every last mother fuckin’ inch that was rightfully mine to begin with anyway.

∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫∫

∞Epilogue∞

The drive home was done at neither one mile over nor one mile under the speed limit. Until I crossed the state line into New Mexico, I felt like a slave on the underground railway. My palms were sweaty; I had cottonmouth; and I kept looking in the rearview mirror for police or troopers. All I wanted was to be back in the north. The moment I was in New Mexico, everything felt differently; and as I approached Colorado, the mountain range in the distance made me feel at ease. I felt proud to call Colorado "home." I imagined the mountains representing this strange place where black people are accepted, gay people are allowed to love one another, recreational drug use is permitted. I imagined just over the approaching mountain range, Colorado as this land like OZ where witches and flying monkeys all walk upright and don't drag their knuckles on the ground, unicorns and fairies prance and frolic beneath rainbows, more gods than the Hebrew wolf hanging from a cross are celebrated, music plays in streets of gold, dogs chase only their own tails, and police and state troopers spend their time focusing on real crimes.

I missed my best friend’s wedding. The only request he made to his bride to be in regards to the wedding, he said that she could have everything she wanted for the wedding, the only thing he had to have … was me there. It’s been nine days since Carlton and Erica’s wedding and I have not stopped typing this essay since I got home. Every spare moment I found has been spent in front of my laptop laying down this story. I believe dogmatically that language creates and sustains our reality, controls us and gives us the ability to control. And so this story about language, told by way of language itself, is my attempt to capture a moment in time, to control the narrative before it slips away. This is my gift to Carlton and Erica. But more so, it is my apology to them both. Two of the most powerful words in the world, said in any language at any time, are I’m sorry. And though it will never make up for the ceremony I missed, I have just said how sorry I am in just over 9.6 thousand words.

Carlton and Erica, I’m sorry.

I’m so sorry that I missed the ceremony of your union.

I love you both dearly—forever and always…

One Love.

~Harley

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pen-whipped · 6 years

Text

Hood Ornaments

...for Jeff...

My brother Jeff was a pretty ma' fucker. I'm talkin' movie star kinda shit. He had golden tanned skin, and these piecing blue eyes. And he had these nonchalant eyelids that lay lazily as if nothing he ever saw impressed him.

When I say his eyes were blue, I mean that they were stark and alarmingly so. The kind of blue he and I only saw in pages of brochures that depicted places we thought of only as fantasies, places other people thought of only as weekend getaways. Those endless oceans and cloudless skies, and those fantasies too, all wrapped up in the blue of his eyes.

He had this thick, curly, dirty-blond mop on his head. This hair of his - always overgrown and such a fucking mess. It would hang down in his face and catch the smoke from the cigarette that barely hung to the side and bottom of his pouty Elvis Presley lips.

Jeff was foul as shit too. A fool for sure. Careless and reckless as all hell. But he was cool. So cool. He was cool as fuck to me. James Dean kinda shit. And to this day, he's still my favorite human being to have ever walked this planet. His older brother - what a badge of honor.

And likewise, I was everything to him. He thought I was the cool one. And he didn't care about anything else either, just me. He'd tell me all the time too. And he'd go on and on about just how crazy he thought girls were about me. But me, I could see how girls melted into puddles of absolute gooey mush around him.

What a dangerous pair we were, the two of us. Even our mother's friends was tryin' to fuck us. We'd brag about it to each other — who got more girls and who got which girls first. And we especially liked to fuck the daughters of rich people, people we thought were rich anyway. And I suppose we enjoyed that for the same reason we enjoyed tearing the hood ornaments off Mercedes Benz and Cadillac cars at night after stealing booze and pills and money from the pockets of whoever's jeans it was that lay passed out in bed with our mother. Runnin' the town amuck, the two of us.

But fucking and breaking shit — that was about something else. That was about getting a piece of something we couldn't really ever have. That was about "fuck you" to the fathers and the money we never had or knew anything about. That was about "fuck you" and your every day vacation lives that we could only fantasize about, while eating some snack we stole from the local grocery just to have something to eat. And that was about damaging it all in some way too. That was about raising hell around us, so that the Hell outside of the one we lived in had more demons, and so all the less a Hell ours seemed by doing so.

But what did we know anyway, really, about anything? Two young boys homegrown in the hood (not even the hood, rather the gutter of the hood). And the only thing we had was the bragging between us: empty condom wrappers for proof and a story to tell, and an ornament from some Benz or Caddy we’d snagged on the way home from some rich girl's house - still reeking of pussy.

But what did we know about sex, really, about being men, about what it meant for those families taking vacations to places we only saw on brochures. We knew nothing. And we had nothing. In fact, all we really knew and all we really had was each other, and we knew it. And that's really what part of it was all about — fucking daughters and damaging property (those things men cherish most) — we were setting the world on fire so that we could sit around the flames and tell each other stories about it, so as to make a campground of our purgatory…

And it's been about 20 years now since I lost Jeff. He died so young that he'd never see the error of our childish ways. All I have of him now is this reflection in the mirror that sort of looks like him, only a lot older, and a lot less pretty than him.

And I've since been to those places on those brochures; they’re nothing but cheap fantasies. I’ve since bought houses in those neighborhoods; they're nothing but mausoleums. And I don't steal to eat anymore; there's just no need to these days. And I’ve since realized that those men aren’t really rich either; they never were. They were/are all just swimming in debts that make stupid young boys from the gutter think they are rich.

But more times than not, I do find myself wanting to brag to Jeff — especially as I leave the house of some well-to-do women, still reeking of her. And I find myself wanting to snatch the hood ornament as I pass her Benz or Caddy in the driveway, or whatever vehicle she owns. Because I miss him—his stupid hair and his pouty lips and his beautiful blues eyes. And because he was everything to me. And because I want to damage the world that took him from me. And because I want to burn it all down to send flames up to the heavens so that we may sit around them together, and I can tell him stories about all the hell I'm still down here raising…

#brother #big brother #hell #sex #coming of age #cadillac #mercedes #blue eyes #elvis presley #james dean #loss #grief #hood #gutter #gutter rats #poor boy #longing #raising hell #brothers #blood

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pen-whipped · 6 years

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The Day You Called a Shadow “Nightfall”

We’re all living in a black & white sci-fi flick. That’s how it felt to me that day. All the fuss about and all the preparation for a solar eclipse. All the neighborhood kids running around with their NASA-approved, ultraviolet protection, paper sunglasses. I imagined an episode of the Twilight Zone where kids discover X-ray vision in the local theater’s 3-D glasses. But of course, only after the kids sat through an entire government issued propaganda film would the glasses get the X-ray capabilities. The film would seem harmless enough, just a bunch of ‘god and country’ and repeated promises about how men and women that behave properly receive nice, safe lives with such amenities as cross-country motorcycles and luxury motorhomes, camping sites at different National Parks each summer of their twilight years, and a local burial plot for after that final summer’s end. The kids leave the theatre feeling unaffected, but they slowly and almost unnoticeably stop questioning everything. And looking through the red and blue plastic lenses, they see only a prescribed reality where comfort and surplus are met with a misunderstanding of all things otherwise.

....At least that’s what I was imaging anyway.

My ex-wife called that same day. She was hysterical. Not because she thought I died in the car accident she’d only learned about through social media. But rather because if I had died, the two of us had not spoken in so long, there was a real chance that what was said last between us wouldn’t have been from the heart. Our hateful words and wrongful deeds can haunt us; but given one last chance for final words of amends, they may not. And so I wondered: what would anyone of us say to some lost loved one, if given one last phone call to do so? And that’s when I texted you. It had been a while since we last spoke, and I wasn’t sure how it had ended.

Here’s another silver-screen psychological thriller, I imagined. “A magical phone that gives one last call to the deceased,” says the show’s narrator with his smooth and ominous sounding voice. “Just tell the operator the name of the deceased, and she’ll connect you.” The show would explore the idea of who most people would choose to speak with, and if more people would refuse to make the call or if more would ask to call Jesus, Muhammad, or Krishna. Of course, in this “5th dimension”, this “dimension of the mind,” this “middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition,” these things always come at a price. Monkey’s Paw type’a shit. Speak to the dead and some thread of reality begins to unravel. Speak to a god and the seams of your sanity begin to unravel.

Of course my ex was as sweet and witty as ever. We just picked up at once like nothing, the way old fiends do. We did eventually speak about this so-called “Great North American Solar Eclipse.” And we made fun of all the locals driving north to Wyoming for a better glimpse. I quoted Hunter T. here and said that the “Great Whites, with their asses that wouldn’t feel an arrow, are the most dangerous creatures on Earth.” This also speaks to when they’re not warring for resources and vacation spots, as I suspect Hunter intended. During this time, for example, their motorcycles and motorhomes clogged the interstate north bound, rendering it unsafe and unusable. It was like a mass migration of pale-skinned sun-worshippers making their pilgrimage to Cheyenne. A Hajj of sorts. A journey to consult an oracle. ...Only, in all honestly … not even close. Nothing religious or meaningful about the herds of these pasty humans behaving precisely as strangely as they’d claimed other beasts do during these types of cosmic shifts.

I said to her — my ex — this woman that always was as fascinated with living as me and equally knew the urgency of doing so, “Everyone’s lives have become such that they’re this fucking desperate for a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” Then she pointed out that people have always been desperate for such things. It’s just that this time, the most any of them have to do is drive and not stare directly at the sun. Surely that’s doable for most of them. And surely that’s the key: most people do want a life enriched by experiences; it’s just that few would risk anything for them, hardly any would work hard or make sacrifices for them, and next to none would willingly suffer any amount for them. Here it was on a silver platter for all the silver-spooners in this 5th dimension on the silver-screen. And that’s when you finally texted back: “sorry for the delayed response. in WY for the eclipse.” Of course you weren’t dead or dying. As for a god or goddess - well, that’s arguable. But the seams of both my reality and my sanity began fraying all the same.

When the moon finally nudged in between our planet and the sun, the way one cuts in on two dancing, the tone of everything changed. The outside lighting and shading blurred everything into a photo edit — hiding flaws and enhancing fortes. Brush, Smudge, Render, Blur. We were all living in an Instagram filter. Ludwig, X-Pro. Juno, Lo-Fi. Which filter depended entirely on geographical proximity of the celestial dance. This became a Twilight Zone episode itself, one where the real world is augmented by the virtual. This episode depicts a life where everyone has perfect hair and thousands of friends, is successful and adventurous, only eats gourmet dishes that are arranged artistically. No one connects to the internet except to view things as they really are: un-cropped, not color enhanced, not always kosher, and not sensationalized either. And the only personal pics posted to social platforms are those of flaws and misgivings.

That day, however, in this reality, birds silenced and crickets loudened as if night had fallen, as if the planet was confused. Days later, to add to the confusion, you too would call. You told me that the drive to Wyoming was worth it, even if only to see a moment of nightfall during the day. You didn’t know what I meant when I asked about all the great whites (‘forest through the trees’ type’a shit, I suppose). I just went on imagining that instead of a moon positioned in front of the sun, it was a giant saucer-shaped UFO — and not even a good one either, just some kitchen pots suspended with strings and shitty camera tricks. All the hundreds of great whites tailgating in open pastures with Christian bumperstickers and USA flags on their motorhomes, I thought surely their glasses had some capabilities that mine did not. And their quiet, safe lives were proof that they’d behaved well enough to deserve whatever the glasses revealed. At least that’s what I was imaging anyway...

But at that time for me, that day — the day you called a shadow “nightfall,” I mostly ignored the hysteria and just posted to various social media formats in its stead. I uploaded pictures of wounds and updated other info about the auto accident that kept me bedridden. And as I became increasingly less interested in the so-called once-in-a-lifetime experience, I began to slowly and almost unnoticeably question everything. It wasn’t long after that more calls, texts, and visits came in from people I also hadn’t spoken to in many years. Everyone trying to get that last good word in with the deceased, I thought. Nevertheless, amends were made. I suppose cellphones are magical that way. Then I waddled with cane to the outside just in time to put on my paper and plastic, Nasa approved, UV protection, 3D/X-ray vision, super shades and looked for the frayed edges of a reality that no longer existed. You were gone. And all I saw was the moon’s silhouette as it made way in front of the sun.

#eclispe #eclipse2017 #hunter s thompson #hst #twighlightzone #3dglasses #nasa #xray #onceinalifetime #instagram #instagramfilter #jesus #jesuschrist #zombiechrist #zombielastsupper #edgeofreality #hajj #oracle

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pen-whipped · 7 years

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The Rabbit Hole

(for my friend that asked to remain nameless)

Just west of Colorado Springs, Colorado is a town tucked so neatly on the side of a mountain that the entire place rests on a slope. Buildings look half as tall on one side as they do the other. Ma’ & Pa’ shops and taverns line the main street, while houses hang off cliff sides. Usually, walking the streets is a nearly perfect 50/50 mix of locals and outsiders, and it’s obvious who's whom. It's like one part hemp jewelry and sun skirts and the other part Fossil watches and Polo t-shirts. Not today though; it’s raining. No one’s out. So this visiting burlesque performer—whom I’ll refer to as "Ms. International" (because she’s a professional performer who trots the globe)—she and I stay in the car and watch the slanted town just as one would a movie at a drive-in theatre: through the windshield.

After Colorado, Ms. International tells me, she and a handful of other burlesque stars are going to Australia for a two-week tour. Burlesquers in the "land down under" makes me think about the rabbits Westerners took there and offset the ecosystem. I imagine burlesque with no known predators in Australia, resting at the top of the food chain and disrupting the order. I hope your guide there is better than I am here, I say to her, referring to the limited information I provide of the town as it plays on the windshield screen. Then I’m off the rabbits and on to bigger thoughts, thinking about how burlesque is conquering the planet these days like colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. All “–isms” of Western affairs—Burlesque-ism, brought in for sport and game only to multiply exponentially and cause chaos among the natives.

Through the rainy windshield the buildings bleed together and become one, washing into a collage until it all looks like the same mess. I mention the rumors about the little town having more Pagans than any other city in the nation — another really bad tour guide informational bit. Not like devil-worship Pagans, I clarify, more like earthy hippies. And Ms. International’s quick to say she understands. There’s only a moment’s pause before she slides her eyes toward me beneath her droopy Jessica-Rabbit-like eyelids, sort of the way a crook in a cartoon would when looking around to make sure no one was suspicious of the crime about to be committed. Then she says out of the side of her mouth, I practice Santeria, ya know.

I don’t know. All I know is the moment she says she practices Santeria that Sublime song jingles inside my head. I don’t let her know this song reverbs in my skull and gets stuck on repeat of the only four lines I know from it, even as our conversation continues. But the guy in the song says he does not, in fact, practice Santeria anyway, and he also ain’t got no crystal ball. But Ms. International immediately has my curiosity in the palm of her hands like a crystal ball, clouded and hazy and swirling about, ready to discover some fortune.

I remember another line in the song, something about poppin’ a cap in Sancho and slappin’ a chick down, and I ask Ms. International exactly what Santeria is. For some reason Voodoo comes to mind, I tell her. The song loses its lyrics, limited as they are, and becomes a hum in my head. Background music. Score for the film melting on the glass movie screen before us.

And so she gives me a history lesson — more informative than, but about as brief as, my tour guiding of the rain soaked town - which, by the way, we are no longer giving much attention to since this Santeria bit is far more intriguing and has an internal soundtrack, same four vocal lines mixed with bad humming as it may be. While both were heavily influenced by Africans via the slave trade, Voodoo grew from the mixture of cultures in Haiti. Santeria, she explains, grew from almost the same mixture, only in Cuba, so a dash more Spanish - which inevitably means a dash more Catholic. It’s what the slightest difference in any recipe will do, I’m thinking, wondering about an offset of the slanted mountain town’s perfect mixture of Pagans and Yuppies, thinking neither is like the rabbits in Australia since they seem to have created a perfect ecology of economic trade; perhaps this is a capitalistic version of Santeria.

Sancho better run and hide if he knows what’s good for him, because daddy’s got a new .45!

She tells me how the slaves would pray to the Catholic idols. Little bobble-head figurines of The Virgin and other saints, I’m imagining, thinking that at the bottom level of a ship at sea, bobble-heads would really sway and look alive. They we’re actually praying to their own gods, she says (only Ms. International doesn’t say, gods, she says, Orishas). They used the Catholic saint figurines as disguises, she continues. So long as the Spanish crew thought they were praying to their completely non-fictional santos and not some make-believe Pagan gods, then they would permit the slaves their prayer.

This, to me, I say, is all religions. Rain soaked and bleeding together. A chimera bobble-head with the hair of its main swaying over its goat-like body and serpent tail. They all borrow images and ideas from one another. The town through the windshield. Silver screens and drive-ins. Christians in Australia — they took more than rabbits for game to hunt; they took the fucking Easter Bunny too. An entire ecosystem ruined.

Of course my ignorance of Voodoo makes me think about pinpricked dolls and headless chickens. And so now I have an image of Pinhead from Hell Raiser as a bobble-head dancing on my dashboard. Its head swings to Caribbean grooves that come from some white guy singing about sticking the barrel of his .45 straight down Sancho’s throat, like a needle in a cursed doll.

My silly thoughts do not hide my true interest though. I’m rather intrigued by this new knowledge, this history and philosophy and religion all meshed together: a syncretism — a new “–ism” in the confinement of my car. I want to keep Ms. International talking. Teaching me. Her knowledge is like wild hares escaping to Aboriginal planes.

I respectfully ask Ms. International if she believes in or practices any kind of sacrificial killings. A question logically in sync with my ignorance. I do in fact make offerings to certain Orishas, Ms. International says (only, I now know Orisha means god). Each Orisha requires specific offerings for specific blessings. An offering means you give something up and is very much a sacrifice in this way, but, she says, killing animals is done only by high ranking spiritual leaders — Santeros, Babalawo, and others in the hierarchy — those atop the food chai. And it’s only done in very rare occasions.

When you give something up, something is given in return, Ms. International says. And when you take away from others, something is taken from you. So taking the life of any creature carries great risk.

Now I’m thinking about American Indians saying thank-you prayers to a dying buffalo as they rip its heart out, then making use of every square inch of its body. This is Eucharist type-a-shit. To be at one with the Earth in this way. The universe. Buddhism comes to mind. Hippies. Yuppies. Hindus. Karma. Christ on the cross. It’s all watered down and drenched, bleeding together as one. And even though I don't admit it, I think about that Cosby girl, Lisa Bonet, in that movie Angel Heart, dancing around a camp fire in some Voodoo trance while strangling a headless chicken. And still, that fucking song, jingling away about Sancho stealing his girl. But now, this deep in the hole with Ms. International, I see that just as Sancho has taken, so shall he soon lose something - lost via the barrel of a .45 straight down his punk ass throat.

It all comes together in a way that makes sense. And I tell Ms. International one of my favorite quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Man recedes as fast on one side as he gains on another." Technology, I say, is a perfect example (though this comes from no place of wisdom on my part since Emerson uses the Geneva watch as an example in the essay this quote is from: "Self-Reliance"). Look at all the world around us and how it developed new and fascinating amenities; we can travel by car, plane, and boat, but we’ve lost the ability to walk great distances; we can send emails, text, and Twitter but we no longer speak verbally to one another. Man has a fine Geneva watch, Emerson says, but he can no longer tell time by the sun itself. And I’m thinking about the slanted town’s people, one half with hemp bracelets and the other half with Fossil watches. Neither can tell time by the sun. And with this and so many other similarities and offset relationships, both sides bleed together and become the same mess. I recognize truth in Emerson’s claim; I always have. I explain to Ms. International that I also believe the opposite to be true. Emerson says that through any gain, a loss naturally occurs; and so contrarily, I believe that through a loss, so too would a gain occur. A sacrifice. Whether given or taken. One and the same.

I realize that I myself do believe in sacrifices, Karma, Jesus on a stick, Pagan witches burning on a stake, bobble-head shish-kabobs. It’s all the same, I say to Ms. International. Hypnotized by the water on the windshield. Every inch of Christ's body was used like a buffalo, salvation for those still living, feeding off his remains. Flesh of my flesh. Here and now. Give and ye shall receive. Eye for an eye and all that shit. We are all Pagan Christian Santeriaist Voodoo Children of the Corncob Buddhists. All of us—floppy-eared mutant beasts offsetting ecologies because we have no known predators. Even Ms. International, as she sits in my car, changes me with new knowledge like wild hares on my plane head. It's what we hope education will do. Experience and awareness passed between us to bring us all together and make us one and the same. A mess. A collage. Watered down. And in this way, we are all soaked the same with Truth. All of us are like rabbits in Australia, something in a foreign land burrowing holes and multiplying, wreaking havoc where order resides, and destroying the natural habitat of ignorance.

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pen-whipped · 8 years

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GHOSTS

I’m sitting in the courtyard of what once was the largest monastery in all of Tibet. It housed over 10,000 monks before the Chinese invasion. Today it houses around 400 monks — a number that’s up drastically since the invasion’s end. Just my guide and me, sitting on the edge of a courtyard wall, waiting for the rest of our tour group. Our legs dangle and our heels lightly kick the ancient stones. I turn to him, who’s Tibetan, and I say, “A lot of monks were killed here; weren’t they?” I read his eyes like an open book. A sadness sinks in, as deep and convoluted as poetry. I’ve now inquired about the “unsaids” — the words I’ve been looking for. Like Dead Sea Scrolls. Lost manuscripts of Shakespeare. Words that would change the canon. And yeah, I can read them, sure. And prior to coming here, I did. But I long to hear them spoken by one of their own.

But these murdered monks, these are the things he doesn’t speak of. We’ve been on this Chinese-approved tour for days now and he’s never mentioned these things or even these types of things. And these are the things he wants to talk about, that he doesn’t want to talk about, that he’s not allowed to talk about. But these are things I want him to talk about, that I want to know about, that I want him to be allowed to talk about. The truths. Untold and suppressed. Not the candy-wrapper “liberation” bullshit that China sells. Not the pseudo-truths that China propagates. These unsaid truths have filled the gaps of every other thing my guide has said thus far throughout our entire tour, like the ghosts of some past that’s been following us all along. And I want to hear them, those truths. Even if just in whispers. I want to know them, even if they are just that — ghosts, posing in place of those things that once actually were.

Our heels stop tapping the wall when he says, “You are right.” Then he pauses. His eyes lock onto mine, as if investigating my intentions, wondering if I can be trusted, wondering if I truly believe in ghosts. “Very many died here,” he continues. Softly and then in whispers. “Very many were killed.” And as his head bows and his chin tucks to his chest, the courtyard becomes silent all around us. Everything hushes itself to listen, to see if the unsaids are actually coming out from hiding between the gaps of spoken words. Like the Tree of Knowledge dropping forbidden fruits, and then all the rest of the garden cringes with anticipation. And I wait. On the edge of my seat on the edge of this wall somewhere on the edge of a civilization that’s at the edge of its own demise. And it’s just the two of us here, us and this haunting silence, when his mouth opens again. His lips part by the beginning of a word and then a breeze rushes in and silences him — almost, it seems, as if to protect him from saying too much. For unhinging his mouth with an untamed tongue could be dangerous. And the wind stirs the sand on the monastery grounds, turning it into tiny tornadoes of dust that dances frantically around, as if the ghosts of monks running from the red soldiers that slaughtered them here in this very place.

And then a group of Chinese tourists enters the courtyard loudly. Hacking and spitting. Taking selfies and group photos. Throwing trash on the ground and polluting their air with laughter. The unsaid words wince back into hiding. We watch the new visitors and our brows fold over, and I say, “I bet you hate guiding Chinese tour groups.” And he quickly says to me, “I refuse to.” And when I ask if it’s because they’re so crass and disrespectful, he says, “No. Not that.” And he looks me into the eyes again, saying nothing. Saying everything. And I understand. I get it. Completely. Because if I were him, I too would refuse.

But needing work within the economy that has ruled their lives since the Chinese occupation, Tibetans not only guide the Chinese on tours of their holy structures, they also help build the roads and railroads that the Chinese come to Tibet by. They sweep the streets outside the Chinese shops that now surround the Tibetan neighborhoods and temples. They clean the public toilets where Chinese shit and piss. They collect the trash that covers the lands that are no longer theirs. They mine the resources that fuel the very industry that causes them to need these jobs in the first place. And even though the invasion and subsequent occupation were generations ago, the uprising was only crushed in 2008. And even though they are now far outnumbered in their own homeland, even though they will never get back any of what was once theirs, the Tibetans hold on to a dream of something other than what currently is.

And never mind that this dream will never come true, that it will never become anything more than a poem performed by some angry slam-poet Tibetan kid or a song sung by some nostalgic Tibetan traditionalist. Never mind that this dream will not change the fact that theirs will be a tale with and ending much like the American Indians’. Never mind that this dream had little effect when the entire world competed in games on the very soil where, and at the very same time that, Tibetans struggled for basic human rights. Never mind any such things. Because this dream, regardless of its outcome, is what currently remains.

This dream — a ghost that haunts the Tibetans. Dressed up as Hope, it stands in place of all that once was and all that currently is, and it wears the garbs of what it promises will be. And since letting go of Hope exposes how unbearable reality is, and how untrue that promise of “what will be” actually is, they cling to this dream. After all, clinging to Hope is how most people deal with their inability to accept the end of something, whether it be a part of life, a way of life, or life itself. It’s the same way, and is done for the same reasons, that biblical monotheistic believers cling to the idea of an afterlife and pray wishfully to the ghost of a crucified man.

My guide looks at me. And that lost poem on those pages of his eyes, it says, “They can take our lands, make a circus of our traditions, commodify our relics, hijack our entire culture, but they can never take the dream I have of how it once was, the dream of how I hope it will one day be again. This much is true. This much �� if nothing else is … is mine.”

“I want to have more children,” my tour guide says, staring out at the ghosts of monks that have reincarnated into these Chinese tourists. He turns to me, and with forbidden words, he whispers, “We need more people if we’re going to ever have any kind of power.” And then I see it again. That dream. That fucking dream. Forever haunting him and his people — a Buddhist bunch who claim that to alleviate suffering, one must master the art of “letting go.” And yet here they are, all Tibetans, faced with the greatest challenge yet … of letting go, literally, of everything.

I stop reading the sadness that stains his eyes. I stop inquiring. We both turn back to the silence, with heels tapping the ancient wall. And we watch as the ghosts turn back into a courtyard breeze.

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pen-whipped · 8 years

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The Bus Ride Tragedies

Gears grinding somewhere beneath the floorboard go on and on as if greased with nothing but aggravation. There’s a recognizable agony there, and it somehow surfaces from beneath all the chicken coos and the murmur of a language I cannot understand. Filled with animals and people, this old bus is tired. It bitches and moans like some cramping creature under a full moon. Not even the brays of overworked mules struggling beneath the weight of their yokes in nearby fields sound as miserable as the collective noises of this bus.

The green and orange shell, dried to scaly chips from the sun, was obviously painted decades ago when it was meant to look more like a Magical Mystery Tour Bus for the Hindu gods honored (or dishonored, depending on one’s perspective) by their ornamented portraits on the ceiling. But these faded sherbert hues make this bus look more like an oversized chaotic clown car as it carelessly leans almost completely over each of the corners it rages around. The tires hug the edges of the mountain’s dirt road only a rusty wheel-well’s length away from disaster. And I ponder how unnoticed such a tragedy would be. This bus toppled over a cliff. A drop in a bucket of water.

And like a clown car, it’s overstuffed with people too. Some straddle the luggage and poultry cages on top like rodeo riders. Others stand packed in the aisle so tightly they have to wrap their arms around strangers’ shoulders and waists just to fit. The rest of us sit three and four deep in the two-person seats. But no matter one’s position, we all sway and bounce in unison with every turn and bump, with every slam on the gas peddle and every stomp on the brakes.

I’m squeezed somewhere between the irritation of the guy next to me and a glassless window that taunts the possibility of me not getting out of Nepal alive. And that irritation, seething next to me and burning my ears with the edges of its steamy, barely comprehendible English, it has something, if not everything, to do with me telling that very guy that I’m from The States.

His disdain provokes accusations of my “American wealth” and confessions of his and all his countrymen’s lack of wealth. He insults his own people as much as he does me. For as best I can understand, he says Westerners take advantage of Nepal’s economy, while the Nepalese silently beg for Westerner’s money with an exchange offer of obedience. I take none of what he says personally. I easily recognize his unhappiness with me as a reflection of the unhappiness with his own condition. And in some ways, after all the poor people I’ve encountered while in Nepal, all of whom were beyond kind to me, this man seems like the most honest among them. In fact his honesty makes other Nepalese’s reactions to me appear more as he’s suggested: like those one would expect from an apprentice to a tradesman, a squire to a nobleman, a child to an elder kinsman. You see these same behaviors back home when a valet hands the keys back to the Bentley owner, when a maid exits the penthouse suite as the occupants enter, or when a CEO walks through a cubical farm. There’s a bowing of heads and lowering of eyes that mistakenly implies respect and kindness. But it’s either acquiescence or conditioned acceptance more than it is anything else. A curtsey of social compliances. A silent agreement of hierarchies. That bowing head and those lowering eyes are nothing I am used to receiving, nor are they anything I hope to get used to. But I do wonder, because of this angry guy on this angry bus, if all other Nepalese were as kind as I’d originally thought, or was that kindness, as I now suspect because of this guy, an effect of their condition. Have I mistaken weakness for kindness? I wonder .... was that hand of charity giving or taking?

I do not have wealth. And in my country, though not completely stricken with poverty, I’m only a paycheck or two away from being so. I worked extra hours, saved money for years and borrowed more to make this journey to Nepal. I tried to explain all this to the guy sitting next me. I even tried to explain that, of all the places in the world, I chose to visit Nepal because of the landscape, religious culture, and the rumors of the Nepalese’s kindness, and not, as he accused of me, “because the exchange rate makes me a rich man.” Those things—land, culture, communities—those are wealth, I said. But quickly, I came to terms with the fact that there is no way to tell a poor, hungry, and desperate man all the ways in which he might be rich. And in fact one would be wrong to try and do so. So I just keep staring out the taunting window, as he fills my ears with the jagged words of a broken language.

He stuffs my ears with his discontent and I drift off, recalling a conversation I had with my friend JL a couple years prior when were backpacking parts of Peru. The poverty there looked like the poverty here in Nepal, which I now assume looks like all the poverty resting on the outskirts of the wealthy parts of the world. JL and I were in heavy disagreement after I suggested that neither the slavery nor the poverty that Capitalism in America originally prospered from had disappeared, but rather they both had reinvented themselves in order to hide in plain sight. He thought I was delusional and promoting Communism, a typical assumption of one who critiques this structure. But we had trampled through some of the worst ghettos in that country, and I saw there a condition I was familiar with. But more so, I recognized this condition as a global one. Bits of my own childhood washed over me when watching Peruvian children play in mud … inside their grass brick houses with dirt floors. Though what I know is not quite as harsh, this is a place much like one I know all too well, one where my mother used to boil water on the stove for our baths and wash our clothes in the tub by candle light. For new clothes, we dug in dumpsters in rich neighborhoods. And for breakfasts, we ate toast, so as to make it seem different than the bread we had for dinner the night before. My two brothers and I, beneath the broken wings of our tattered single mother, we were keenly aware of our condition. And we would have kicked the kneecaps of anyone who tried to tell us all the ways in which we may have been rich, and they would have been wrong to try and do so.

Back then in Peru, for the first time in my life, I could see that very particular type of poverty that developed in early industrial nations, the kind where the poor wade in the scrapes of the rich and then agree to a type of servitude because the system demands it and leaves no option for anything otherwise. These are necessary byproducts of the structure, made from it and made to support it, upholding the weight of those that reign on top of it. In other words, the poverty and slavery made by and for this system are as they’ve always been: both the foundation and the framework of this system. In deed, crucial pieces. It could be said one of two ways: without them, the system does not work; or the system creates them as necessary byproducts. Maybe it’s both; who knows? But as this system spread across the globe like the infection it is, so too did its byproducts, its foundations and frameworks.

And I was telling JL this, back then, somewhere near Machu Picchu, next to trains that had paintings of Peruvian field workers on the insides of the boxcars. The paintings were blatant propaganda. They depicted golden-skinned workers in fields with white-teethed smiles, wearing ceremony garbs. But any passenger on the train who wasn’t too busy taking selfies and sipping warm lattes could see the actual workers in the fields alongside the train tracks. They had dark skin and wore neither smiles nor ceremony garbs. To put it into context for North Americans: imagine a train that goes through the southern states sometime during the epoch of slavery. Painted inside the boxcars are black people with pearly smiles, wearing colorful African outfits, holding up fluffy white cotton bolls like they were mana from the heavens. And this is not to suggest that Peruvian field workers are held against their will and forced to labor away beneath whips and chains as our history’s slaves were. Instead, it’s meant to suggest that to this very day distractions coat the armor of this global ideology that pressures people in ways similar to that of our country’s history of slavery. The work is the same. And what’s worse, whips and chains are no longer needed. The harsh edges have been rounded. Dulled to perfection. For this structure has adapted, this structure that was built on indentured servitude and slavery. And in place of its once overt disillusions and impossibilities, workers are now transfixed by its illusions of possibilities.

These practices and their results, though they have spread to other nations, they have not been abolished in the States. Rather, as Bukowski suggests, they have “extended to include all colors.” Americans, JL and myself very much included, we are all too ignorant, too conditioned, too complacent to recognize and/or do anything about these reinvented forms of servitude and their subsequent slums. We are all preoccupied with arguing and fighting each other over arbitrary differences. Races. Sexes. Abortions. Guns. Immigrations. Prostitutions. Religions. And so on. We’re like a field of slaves fighting amongst ourselves over hog scraps, not even noticing the plantation masters that sip sun tea from fine china with their pinkies pointing outward as they watch us from their iron-gated balconies like gods in some heaven we’ll never know.

These reinvented forms of slavery and poverty, they exhibit the obvious instinct of self-preservation this capitalistic system exhibits. And both work based on two principles, sort of a mixture of what Marx calls “mystification” and what Freud calls “sublimation.” The outsourced slavery and the worst of the poverty that derives from it, they are hidden from the American public’s view, where only our blind eyes turn toward these large parts of the world pressed hardest beneath the corporate masters’ thumbs. Americans, fooled by all the glittery and veneered trinkets the system produces more for the profits they create than for any other purposes or intents, are alienated from the worst conditions this structure imposes on people — those of other nations as well as our own citizens. It’s the ol’ “out of sight, out of mind” adage. And by this, we learn how distance dictates empathy. For the further removed we are from despairs, the more we focus only on the mirages of prosperity. It’s like sitting in that boxcar and only seeing the paintings of joyous field workers and not seeing those that actually work tirelessly in fields alongside the tracks. And on the other hand, as suggested already, the plantation mentality still rules within the U.S. borders. Most of us still serve masters, and do so much like “house negroes” on plantations: with few goals in life greater than serving “mas’a” whatever he wants or needs, so long as he feeds us scraps from his feasts and gives us a shack for a home that rests in the shadows of his mansions. And as much as both the impulse to enslave and the natural want to be ruled seem to have vanished, in the psychoanalytical sense of “sublimation,” these things have merely transformed into more socially acceptable forms of themselves. They are both as ever much present and as ever structurally necessary as they were when cotton and tobacco were grown and harvested by slave labor.

My words went into JL’s ears just as harshly as the words of the guy sitting next to me are forced into mine. And like JL then, I’m not hearing any of it. I haven’t been listening for some time. Instead, I’m staring out the window of this bus, out and over the edges of a cliff’s threat. Tragedy no longer taunts so much as it seems like an empty promise, just an escape route that would only lead back to the beginning of it all. For if this bus were to go tumbling into such a tragic end, another would surely come clambering in to collect up whatever passengers survived. Maybe, by some hand of charity, those survivors would then get a discounted bus fee.

This archaic transit system is all just a rattling metaphor of this global economic system. Microcosms on wheels. These buses are market shop kiosks open for business. They’re dirt road, rolling banks “too large to fail.” Each is a small fish waiting to get eaten by a bigger fish waiting to get swallowed by a whale. These machines just pack in people who pay fees to be placed as one among crowds whose presences provide profits to whomever owns these beasts. And this one — this particular beast, this fucking monstrosity with its sun dried paint job, its chickens cooing, and its bitching and moaning — it kicks up dust and wags a tail of black exhaust that flaunt its disregard for anything but its own purpose. And that purpose, along with what this bus is and what it does, are all indistinguishable. Even the caricatures of gods with blue skin, multiple arms, and elephant-trunk faces that peer over the shoulders of passengers can not disguise what is all now so obvious to me.

And never mind that these gods are distractions, or attempts to be, just chipping paint in the coating of this clown car raging through the Himalayas. And never mind that all passengers beneath these gods have bowed heads and lowered eyes like they are either begging or in prayer. And never mind that there is no difference between begging and praying, asking and giving, kindness and weakness, clowns and gods. Not so long as the difference that matters most remains - that difference between wealth and the lack of it. The same difference that causes the Nepalese Rupee to have more zeros before its decimal point than almost all other nations’ currency. Never mind any of this. Because all that currently matters is this one guy, this guy sitting next to me with his head up and his eyes raised and glaring. He snaps off English words into shards of syllables that sharpen just slightly enough to slide into a comprehendible cynicism. And as much as I do truly wish he would shut the fuck up, I know that without him, without his own bitching and moaning, I would have been fooled by the mirages of prosperity, the haze on horizons in a country where weakness wears a mask of kindness like an elephant-faced clown god. I couldn’t see that until him. None of it. I couldn’t see this minion machine working for the global monster, its wheel wells collecting rust and dust and the stones it kicks over. In fact, this guy, though he too is a stone kicked by the system, he is one that remains unturned. And by that, he is a kink in the armor. The arrow that strikes The Great Achilles in his hind leg and makes of a god a mere mortal. And because he refuses to accept his condition quietly, all others exude theirs distinctly. And by his own squeaky belts and his rattling muffler, the world is exposed as a bus ride for the passive and meek.

I shout at the driver to let me off at the next stop. We can not get there soon enough.

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pen-whipped · 8 years

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This Woman

This piece is dedicted to said "best friend," whose name I left out for obvious reasons, but you know who you are.

I read somewhere that when a man dies, the lice nesting in his hair escape in terror to his pillows. Similarly, I read elsewhere that a lonely man’s sheets fill with the strangest of women. The worst of you will think I’m comparing women to lice; the better will think it’s loneliness to death. But those who are correct will see that it’s neither of these things.

This woman keeps telling me over and over just how attracted she is to my mind, but you’d never believe her the way she keeps grabbing for my cock. She asks me to leave my glasses on while she puts it in her mouth. And because I know her father wore black-rimmed glasses like mine, I just cannot play along.

If there is truly but one women in the world, as I’ve read some place else, and she just wears different faces, then surely it must be the same for one man. Every man my mother was with beat her just like the one before him, all the way back to her father. When they put hands on her, she’d run and hide behind me - me in nothing but my Superman undies standing with chest out and hands on my hips like a protector of the queen. They’d walk away, dicks swinging and knuckles bleeding. I felt strong and proud. Bulletproof.

My best friend holds his fist up, clenched with white knuckles and shaking. He slowly punches the air - thrusting his fist outward and then pulling it inward. He keeps repeating this motion, in and out, and says, “How can I compete with this?” He’s just informed me that the girl he’s fucking likes his whole hand inside her. Says that the entire time they fuck, she’s just waiting for his hand. “What’s that feel like?” I ask. And all he says is, “You don’t wanna know. Being jealous of your own hand is confusing.” “No, not that,” I say, “I mean, what’s fisting feel like?” And he just shakes his head and says, “A warm, wet glove.” I laugh and ask if his masturbation has changed. “You know, like angry sex, sort of grudge fucking your own hand.” He doesn’t share in my humor.

Like lice, I jump from this woman’s dead body. I roll over to the other pillow. She’s shaking and can’t speak, like she’s in shock. “I’ve never had one like that before,” she says; only it sounds more like: Nev-rad won-ikat biffor. Stroke victim vernacular. “Yeah, me neither,” I think, referring to a lover as strange as her. But I’m lying to myself. The one before her was just as strange and the one before that was stranger, and the further back are the strangest. While she revels in her orgasm, I wonder just how lonely I must be.

At the bus stop, a young woman sits next to me, reeking of cigarettes and trying to hide her black eye. She scribbles in a notepad with elementary handwriting and then catches me staring. Because she pulls her lapel over to hid her cleavage, I insist, “I was looking at your notebook.” She apologizes and then tells me she’s a poet, asks me if I’d like to read a poem. So I do. “I dabble in words myself,” I say after reading her child-like rhyme. I hand the dogeared book back to her, but she immediately pushes it back toward me and says, “Can you read this one then?” She flips the pages. Tattered and abused. “And tell me what you think of it, please. I haven’t shown it to no one.” The poem is about her lover and how the only time he doesn’t hit her is when she’s holding her infant. It’s a terrible piece, written poorly, but I tell her my favorite line is the one that says, “When he’s angry, he reminds me of my father.”

This woman tells me a big dick is nothing if a man can’t operate it. She’d rather have a small one with a skilled professional working it. Luckily for me, she’s just interested in my hand. She does exactly as my best friend said his girl did the first time he fisted her; she says, “See if another finger fits... and another ... and one more ... do you think the whole hand will fit?” As if she didn’t know already. But it doesn’t fit. Not until she coaches me. “It’s not like punching,” she tells me, and I’m thinking of my friend slow-punching the air. “Turn your palm upward and make a fist more like you’re grabbing a wand.” And with that, it slips right in. A warm, wet glove. I ask her if she knows “[best friend’s name, excluded for protection].” She lifts her head up and says, “Huh?” I can’t help but feel like a puppeteer. An orgasmic ventriloquist.

When this woman says to me, “I don’t usually do this, but...” I wonder if she knows how many women before her have said the same thing. But I wonder even more if women think men are such fools to believe this line. Like, who’s really tricking who here? We pretend we’ve never heard the line; they pretend they’ve never said it and whatever it is we’re about to do is really out of character. We both pretend the other is oblivious to our lie. It’s the way a dog brings a stick back to his master, not because he enjoys chasing the stick, but rather because his master gets so much enjoyment from throwing it.

The young woman from the bus stop calls. I had jotted my number next to a sloppily written haiku: “All men are the same / Not one unlike his father / I’m just like my ma’.” I wasn’t sure she’d actually reach out to me, being as this was a move expected of the most typical male - right next to a poem about typical males. Naked, she looks skinnier than I imagined. “You’re not like the rest of them,” she says to me. Her ribs poke out farther than her stomach does and her entire tit fits in the palm of my hand. “You’re gentler. Like you care about what a woman wants.” I read her nipples like Braille.�� “Turn over,” I say. Doggy style makes beasts of us all.

This women says my mind is beautiful. Full of pain and intelligence. A cocktail of the past and the present, mixed readily for a drunken future. “I’d like to be a part of that,” she says. I think she means my future, until I see she’s staring at my crotch. She’s the third one this month to say I’ll be the first she’s ever fucked that she wasn’t in love with. “Where there is love there is life,” I read somewhere. And so I wonder about the lifeless love that has filled and stained these sheets, as she tells me a lie I pretend not to have heard many times before. Either we’re all the same or there is nothing different about us.

When I was 14, my body started developing muscle. My two younger brothers weren’t far behind in growth. By 16, we dared any of our mother’s boyfriends to put a hand on her. We waited for it. We wanted it to happen. We longed to make up for all those before when we were too young and too little to do anything. None ever dared though. Not at this point, or any after. We three princes stood in Superman poses at our introductions. Protectors of the queen. Ready to fist fuck their face and wear warm, wet gloves of blood if they so much as thought about harming this woman. All those strange characters in her bed, leaping off of her and onto her pillows like lice. I wonder how lonely she must have been in her crowded sheets. I did read somewhere that we are, after all, each of us, most alone in a crowd.

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pen-whipped · 8 years

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Den for Robbers

One month ago today, I stopped eating meats. Q. Why? A. Because Fuck Everything We’ve been Taught and Sold.

We grew up with eating habits based on a food pyramid designed to manipulate us into being consumers that benefited the agriculture industry, and we’ve since become even shittier consumers whose diets mostly benefit the healthcare industry. The people of this nation are sickened with an ignorance that extends beyond lack of education and into physical states; and from there, behaviors and habits develop and extend into the market place. We are the perfect herd for the Masters of Capital. All we want is a hotdog, a cold beer, a sports game and a dated god to spew some sort of cathartic experience at. Give us these things and we’ll tithed away the hours of our lives and states of our well being.

We are a nation of short attention spans ready for cheap experiences. Easily amused. Few actually want to compete in games, for example - to train the body and the mind to know a sport; most would rather just sit back with sodas and franks and watch others compete - like little pretend kings in a stadium, yelling obscenities at a TV screen. In this same way, people would rather watch travel shows than to document their own travels to some unknown lands. Many would rather watch porn than fuck something. And in this very same way yet, people would watch someone prepare for them toxic meals because they’re cooked and delivered promptly, rather than come to know nutritional foods by spending time with them. The body, after all, is a temple that so few worship anyway.

And that’s it; people don’t want authenticity. Just sell ‘em a copy; they’re buying. Give ‘em imitations and interpretations, because people do want to know about things; they’re just too afraid to know the real experiences of things. It’s fear based, sure, but it’s partly because people don’t want to learn anymore than they need to, to physically do anymore than they have to. They’re so goddamn scared to know what’s outside of everything they’ve been taught and beyond everything they’ve been sold. They’re content believing solely in the comforts of their routines and the subsequent safeties of those routines. They’re pacified with limited knowledge, bliss’d with ignorance, and they will not question orders so long as they’re given a shack to live in and shiny trinkets to stare at.

Such docile creatures. They create a market place by losing themselves in the herd, for the land owners will cater to them for profits - like formula-fed veal in a cage. Sadly, once lost in the herd, people become absolutely terrified of discovering who they really are, so much that they end up hating anything and anyone that is unlike them.

I get it though; it’s easy to follow other sheep, to follow the herders, to know their gods and their dogs that chase us like bad habits. It’s easier to adopt a way of life than to find one’s own. After all, as Kant suggests, “Man is an animal that needs a master.”

I just think that if lies have been propagated through diets to us as children, then surely lifestyles have been propagated through mortgages and car payments to us as adults. And I wonder: are these particular debts -the house and the cars- not the modern day equivalent of “40 Acres and a Mule,” reparations for our mistreatments, “hush money” for our servitudes? We’ve been greased, grafted, and given hand-jobs that keep us pacified and complacent since we were grade schoolers. And our universities continue the indoctrination, creating a nation of indentured servants. Oh how they sell us hopes and dreams of escaping to a New World. And we buy into that shit, only to end the short journey indebted for a lifetime by the student loans that came from those Masters of Capital. And we become the very acquiesced cattle they feed to us, like cannibals, becoming exactly what we eat.

But … wait... Q. What’s any of this got to do with me no longer eating meats? A. Fuck if I know. I’m just rattling my chains. But maybe there’s freedom in eating habits, in finding what works best for oneself vs just doing as we’ve always been told, thus avoiding the consumption platter the masters want us addicted to. Maybe I’m just throwing a tantrum, like the toddler that won’t eat his pureed meats, or like Jesus in the temple tossing scales and coins, flipping tables and birds, screaming “This is a house of prayers, not a den for robbers!” Or I’m Gandhi boycotting government goods, spinning yarn, fasting on foods, and feasting on my own disobediences. Or I’m Che in the jungle trying to rally a coup, Malcolm in prison reading a dictionary, Martin at the podium pronouncing my dream. Or maybe I’m all of that, and all of them - everything they’ve taught me to be based on ideas sold to me for the small price of my entire life, though not at the expense of my well being…

UPDATE: No longer vegan. Lasted 8 months. :)

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pen-whipped · 9 years

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The 4th Glass

“You can not drink enough wine to make the world more tolerable. In fact, the buffoons will only seem more foolish, the foolish more naive, the naive more ignorant than the ignorant are intolerable,” said me to myself as I poured myself a fourth glass of wine and sat down to write this - whatever this may be.

Everyone knows the fourth glass is the last glass. And no matter how optimistic one is, the bottle can never be all the way not full; it’s empty, goddamn it, no matter one’s perspective. The parallax view can never shift that far positive.

And I’m no H.S.T., no E.A.Poe, no Bukowski. Intoxicants do not make me more poetic or more articulate. Quite the contrary. No F-ing Scotts Fitz in my Gerlad. There’s no Ernest in my Hemingway. But there is also no shotgun in my mouth - the chaser Hemingway and Thompson used to put themselves down like useless mules, muted and muzzled with muskets. I’ve been drinking sour grapes and they stain my mouth and slur my words, but that does not mean that thoughts stain my pages the way students’ dicks did Cheever’s slurring tongue, the way blood from the best of writers splattered the walls behind their typewriters that sat next to whiskey-stain rings around glasses all the way not full. But, wow, seriously - what epic endings to such tragic tales. Writers usually do have a flare for the dramatic.

On the upside, I still have wine in my glass and something to say. That is, my words are neither half filled nor half emptied, but my glass is. And I sat down to write, not to join the ranks of the alcoholic writers whose throats choked down bourbon bottles, Capote cocks, and eventually gun barrels, but rather because our contemporary world is in flames - burning with intolerance, ignorance, naivety, foolishness, and buffoonery. I wanted to write of one or more of those things, and so I poured myself a glass of wine, then two, then three ... and then eventually this fourth, because as Hemingway says, “an intelligent man is forced to be drunk when spending time with fools.” And then I wondered, after serving myself this fourth glass of wine and telling myself how drinking does not make the world more tolerable, where should I begin?

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pen-whipped · 9 years

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#HASHTAGTHIS,BITCH! ~How Categorizing Lives Equates to Thinking like Those that Take Lives~

“Empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight.” ~Interstellar, Dr. Mann

Through our online podiums, let us hashtag things in order of importances, and let the things we do not hashtag be grouped together as one large category of lesser importances. (See: sarcasm - ˈsärˌkazəm - noun; the use of irony to mock or convey contempt). We see cops killing so many people these days that it’s becoming too cliche to hashtag a victim’s name anymore. #WhiteCopKillsBlackMan is becoming such commonplace that death of an animal seems more important and more worthy of our relentless, burning-spirited, in-your-face, #This,Bitch Hashtags. We throw hashtags up like they’re grenades ready to explode with worldly change once they hit. But guess what? They’re not … and they don’t.

But here’s the thing our hashtags have provoked recently, and I’m guilty of this too: wondering how people can be so terribly upset about the loss of a family pet or the story of an abused pet, while seeming completely unconcerned about the murders of innocent people. This speaks to how, as the epigraph suggests, our empathy is conditional. And lately, just like many others, I’ve questioned why it seems people are more upset about #CeciltheLion or some celebrity dead from natural causes than they are about the murders of #TamirRice, #FreddieGray, #EricGarner, #SandraBland, #SamuelDuBose, #2many2name. However, the more thought I gave these questions, the more I realized that this line of thinking is quite peculiarly the same as that which caused such murderous tragedies in the first place.

“Absurdity!” you proclaim. Well, mull it over with me for a second.

Recall that in “The Animal that Therefore I Am,” Jacques Derrida goes into great philosophical detail about how standing naked in front of his cat made him think about the mistakes we humans make when convincing ourselves that we are somehow separate from the animal kingdom. This idea of separation, based on ontological differences or otherwise, I’d argue is the first step toward the sociopathic tendency where one believes he/she is superior to another or others. Sociopaths first make enemies of their soon-to-be victims in order to justify their crimes to themselves. First, I am not like “them;” then I am opposed to “them;” then I am greater than “them;” and then I may do to “them” as I please. It’s starts with separation; it ends with victimization.

Once we believe we are no longer part of the animal kingdom, we can kill animals without any regard whatsoever for their lives. They become food, clothing, and trophies, because we are superior. We even destroy Earth as if we are somehow not a part of it, as if even it were somehow inferior to us. And once we have divided our own species in these same ways, by such arbitrary differences as skin color and dogmatic practices, then that same superiority-complex develops within our species and leads to immeasurable atrocities waged against one another.

In turn, our language simultaneously reflects and upholds this exact line of thinking and the actions that proceed. Imagine, for example, if it were not as nutural and rightfully fitting to say “white cop kills black man,” but rather, based on different circumstantial occurrences of course, it was our truest nature to say, “one of our brothers killed one of our brothers.” Imagine also, for example, if rather than saying, "a heinous man killed a gorgeous lion,” we naturally said, “one of our brothers killed one of our brothers.” Imagine a world that compels such language, and then imagine the affects such language would in turn have on that very world.

You might then argue, “What you say for the lion must be said for all creatures. And so a mouse surely can not be as important as Sandra Bland, nor a bluejay as precious as Tamir Rice. A horsefly is no Freddie Gray. A wasp is no Eric Garner. And an ant is no Cecil the Lion.” In response, though I’m no Buddhist, I would invoke here the teachings of The Buddha, where all life is cherished and none is considered greater than the next. All life is equal when considering the interconnectedness of each and the vital role each has in the greater scheme of things.

“If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly our whole life would change. ” ~Buddha

And so in arguing that one life is more significant than another, based on some reason developed from illusive differences and backed by ferocious hashtags, we expel thoughts with language that reflects and upholds the same line of thinking that plagues the minds of power-trippin’ egomaniac murderers. And though the symptoms differ greatly, we are in deed infected with the same pathological condition as those that kill without regard for life. By arguing that one life is somehow separate from others and then categorized based on a level of our own prescribed importances, we speak in terms of division, as if we are somehow not all part of the same oneness - which, I remind you, is that same first step toward that detrimental superiority-complex.

By any given means, we are all truly one family. And we’re losing sisters and brothers – two-legged, four-legged, winged, and otherwise – and we’re still losing sisters and brothers at an alarming rate, all murdered by the hands of those most ignorant among us, those who truly believe that they are different, separate, and somehow superior. We mustn’t think as they do, nor speak as they would. Instead we must unlearn such languages and practices, so that we may begin to see the world and all its life forms for what they truly are: Interconnected as One. If we embrace any difference as unique to our species, let it be that which recognizes that the differences among all species do not outweigh the similarities that connect us all. And let our empathy extend far beyond our line of sight, so that we may find among ourselves "a generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion for all things,” for that is what The Buddha said. And believe it or not, he said it without a fucking hashtag.

"In separateness lies the world’s greatest misery; in compassion lies the world’s true strength.” ~Buddha, #this,bitch.

One, Harley

note: if you think this essay is in response to or an attempt to undermine #blacklivesmatter, then you’ve missed the fucking point entirely. I understand #blacklivesmatter as a means of reconnecting a removed and vital piece to an entire unit, which is precisely what this essay speaks to, and I’m sorry you’ve somehow missed that.

#black lives matter #blacklivesmatter #eric garner #ericgarner #sandra bland #sandrabland #freddiegray #tamir rice #tamirrice #buddism #ferguson #samuel dubose #samueldubose #icantbreathe #vegan #vegetarian #animal rights #buddhist #human rights

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pen-whipped · 9 years

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"We're All Mad Here" ~the violence of cartoons disguised as cute expressions for "Freedom of Speech"~

Pens held high above the chants of “Vive le Satire!!” like revolutionary fists. Hundreds of thousands march to the chants of the pens being “mightier than swords.” The war cry becomes “Freedom of Speech!” And yet with all the undertones of war being waged, we fail to see any of these efforts as violent. The explanation is simple: most of us have a distorted perspective of what violence is.

Generally, we think if a crime is not committed or if no person is physically injured, then no act of violence occurs. And yet we know verbal abuse can completely ruin a person, be it bullying, domestic insults, libel or slander. A person can be battered with words or depictions just as they can with fists or blunt objects. Even greater, the power of words can strip people of their identities. And greater yet, an entire ethnic group can be wiped out of existence through persuasive language without a single crime being committed and no physical damage to any one person of that group.

The strong arm of hegemony is controlling, domineering, and often very violent - though the violence may be perpetrated by hegemonic tactics that seem as harmless as drawing a cartoon.

We know the might of the pen, of its words and depictions. We’ve been chanting the slogan for centuries. And we know that satire, as Chesterton says of it, only angers men because it is true. While the pen’s might is unquestionable, what’s true of satire, however, is not always what satire claims, but rather what it reinforces. Since the victors are always, even currently, writing and rewriting history, it’s possible to write out of existence an entire race of people; see: white Jesus or white Moses. Point is, even if what the pen writes or draws is satirical, it’s power is mightier than most realize, and that might is often violent.

Imagine this: “We’re just cartoonists,” they say. “These are just depictions and words.” All valid points to be considered when referring to Charlie Hebdo, right? But not so valid when referring to early twentieth century Jim Crow cartoonists. Why is that? One may argue that the two cannot begin to be compared, and yet at the receiving end of the satirical comics is a marginalized group - a group that suffers because of a stereotype sustained by the comics. In this way, the cartoons become tools - even if they are tools of truth that destroy a fictious dogma (I say this as if I don’t believe truths are subjective, but I do) they are tools nonetheless. And if they are tools used to deconstruct a culture, than they are tools of oppression. And if they are tools of oppression then surely they are tools of violence.

In the West, great value is placed on free thought and free speech with the ultimate goal of developing into freely found identities. But we fail to see that even our freely found identities must fall within the lines of the hegemonic boundaries. Because of that, we should question the validity of free thought and free speech, for it might just be as Hitchens mocks of Christianity’s so-called free will: “I know I have free will; the ‘big guy’ ordered it so.’” Think of freedoms this way: We have the freedom to choose whatever shoes we want to wear; yes, but only if we chose from these available manufacturers and distributors. The other options are to either do without shoes or to learn somehow to make our own, and to do either of these latter two things often makes one seem mad. I’m of the camp that chooses my free thought and my free speech from the provided manufacturers and distributors, but what of those who chose to do without the provided freedoms, so to speak, those who chose to make their own? The answer here is simple as well: They are considered mad. But, their madness can be altered, we believe. We can rehabilitate them, even if this means poking them with sticks until they change.

If freedom to develop an identity based on freedom to think and say what one will is of the greatest values, then to rob someone of this would surely be of the greatest crimes. Yet, the West is endlessly—i.e. constantly and knowing no boundaries—changing the landscape of other cultures so that it better matches our own or coincides to the benefit of our own. Entire cultures have changed and continue to change in this way. Usually we call the complete annihilation of one ethnic group “genocide,” knowing good and well that few, if any, crimes are greater. We easily recognize the violence of genocide; it's familiar. But if an ethnic group can be annihilated without laws being broken or with the support of international communities, especially without any kind of assault or murder, then we simply call it “reformation.” We can take naked savages that utter babbles for language and pray to Earth gods, and we can educate them into well dressed, good English speaking, Christian god fearing members of society. And we will see nothing about this as wrong doing or having anything to do with violence. In fact, on the contrary, it will seem as if a good deed and a favor had been done.

We could argue that much of the Charlie Hebdo massacre has to do with control and the lack of control. The violence that adheres to the hegemonic control does not seem violent, but appears rather as cute expressions of “Freedom of Speech” for a society whose highest principles are said to be free thought, free speech, and free will. The murderers, in turn, are the retarded representatives of those refusing to be controlled, coerced, or changed, be it by cartoons or some other form of those mentioned freedoms. Here on the side of satire and the freedom to say and think what we’re allowed to say and think, we would do right to remember what Immanuel Kant says: the only way to secure social servitude is through freedom of thought and freedom of speech, to do otherwise provokes rebellion.

Simplified, what the Charlie Hebdo massacre depicts is the age old school tale of the cool popular kid picking on the socially awkward unpopular kid. Eventually, after months of ridicule, the awkward kid punches the cool kid in the face. Subsequently, only the awkward kid gets in trouble because his response is the type understood to be and recognized as violence. This is the stuff school shootings are made of. You can back any toothed and clawed creature into a corner, taunt it, fuck with it, and make it feel threatened only so much before, no matter its size or how scared it is, it bites or claws back. Sadly, the biting or clawing back only angers taunters worse, and even justifies more bullying tactics, even seeming to warrant physical abuse.

Mosques in Paris have since been vandalized in response to the Hebdo massacre, and the chants are turning to “violence begets violence.” Violence begetting violence is exactly what this essay is about. I’m just suggesting to take it all a step or two further back and see all forms of violence, even those invisible violences that are now hidden by that war cry of “Freedom of speech!” If it's easier to understand, view the satirical comics as hate speech and the massacre as an act of hate. Hatred begets hatred. To that, I am certain many will say that the two madnesses don’t compare, that cartoons cannot be compared to murder. I will neither contest nor agree to such claims, but rather conjure the words of Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat and suggest that “We’re all mad here,” all of us. Charlie is mad. The murderers are mad. I’m mad, certainly. And yes, even you, you’re mad too. Otherwise, "you would not have come here."

#charliehebdo #jesuischarlie #jesuisahmed

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