Demons

"I ain't sayin' you fellas are, and I ain't sayin' ya aren't. All I'm sayin' is -- Times have changed. Even old fellas like me are more accepting than we used ta be. I'm not saying I think it's right. All I'm saying is, times have changed."

The old man at the Scoreboard says this to Gabriel and me, the 47th time we are assumed to be gay in the last...week.

(If I keep writing about this, does it look like -- you know -- "The lady doth protest too much"?)

I tell Lee Ann: She says, "It's just because you two are so stylish."

I've never thought of myself as terribly stylish.

***

Today, payday, "pay" day, and I learn my account is overdrawn, not 30ish dollars as I feared, but $150 or so. Including fee, fee, fee, fee, fee, fee, fee, fee.

Money is something that I've never understood and never made sense to me. Usually I don't care. Today, I want to cry.

But crying is what the Gay do.

I want to complain: In the schools, you are never taught about financial literacy, about budgeting, about debt, about credit -- especially not about credit. And I wonder that it's on purpose, and want to Rage Against this system, and then I think about "politics," my radicalism, and how much of it is only my desperate way of distracting myself from the actual lived difficulties of my day-to-day my life.

It's so easy to have passion and feelings about political matters: They are far away, they are unchangeable, your rage directed that way is a way to make you feel better about stuff for a minute by diverting your energy toward something you can't do anything about (as opposed to your emotional life or your psyche's health or your wrecked relationships or your job or your budget), which makes everything easier, because you exhaust yourself mentally & catharsize (notaword) (it is now) without having to go through the difficult process of doing anything.

(In the preceding paragraph, the word "you" means, of course, "I.")

(& ask yourself: What is this "radicalism," scion of the American bourgeois?)

***

Or sometimes politics exhausts itself and I flee to my fantasy worlds.

A dozen storylines, characters, places in my head, most of it unwritten.

This is what I'm thinking of today:

There are two characters. One has spent his life a conservative, struggling to fit in with his society's individualism and militarism and masculinism. He has failed, and failed, though kept this failure a secret from his current companions, all of whom are from elsewhere, and at the very last finds himself questioning the values he learned as a child.

His name is Josther, he is 7 feet tall and green skinned and carries a sword and he is from Io, the volcanic moon of Jupiter, terraformed by advanced Singularitarian technology to support human life. He finds himself now in the company of a band of outcasts, pirates and revolutionaries from an asteroid civilization called Archipelago, in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune. In this moment he is on a planet far away, a "primitive" world of smallish folk that make their living herding giant echinoderms like land-dwelling starfish; a world which has now been invaded by a horde of Ionians acting in the service of Marishta, the Witch-Queen of the Galaxy.

You with me so far?

Josther, questioning his own society's values, turns to his friend Arok for comfort. Arok: Once, he was a priest of the Galactican faith, the dominant religion of the Archipelagan society. Looking around him, Arok saw the corruption to which the priesthood had fallen into. He saw the chiefs, kings and nobles of Archipelagan society living in luxury and starving their peasants and ignoring the simple truth that the asteroids survived thanks to ancient technology which was failing; that, in fact, Archipelago was dying, and these men with power did nothing but enrich themselves. And Arok began to secretly support the Revolutionary Command, based on the hidden asteroid, Haven 3. And eventually left the priesthood with a younger woman, a novitiate priestess, whom he would later marry, and became a leader of the resistance movement, though never abandoning his faith.

They are talking about religion. Josther is an Ionian pagan, worshiping fiery war-gods that live beneath the volcanoes and reward skill in battle and cast aside the weak. Arok tells him of the Galactican concept of Redemption. ... I have written out a stretch of dialog between the two, including a long speech by Arok on this topic, but in order for it to be tolerable, it is necessary that it comes after scenes of wonder and terror and battle and sorcery. Some of that is written, some sketched out.

It may be that this will be my project tonight.

***

Can I tell you a little more about this story, these characters?

I wrote a short novel in October called The Dreamers of Caldren.

It's about 8 people on a ship. It's called Ship. They travel around space and time, planting human DNA on millions of far-flung worlds. They stole the ship from Marishta, the Witch-Queen, who now pursues them across the galaxy. I told you before that they are pirates, brigands, rebels.

The Dreamers of Caldren was one of my favorite things that I ever wrote. It is flawed. It doesn't remember who its main character is. Its middle is, maybe, too short, cop-out-ishly so. All 8 are not as developed as they could be.

I tried to write more adventures.

I wrote one story about how they go to a planet 10 billion years ago and encounter a nightmarish alien Power that tries to kill them and instead makes its home in the mind of one of the crew. This story was not very good.

I wrote the story I talked about above. Except that it was too short. And too scattered, focusing on too many POV characters. And I committed a ridiculous cop-out at the end.

I tried to write a story called The Planet of the Field Mice. This is honestly my favorite. It's about a world in a billion years. Humans have evolved into thousands of species, and all of them are sentient, and all of them live on this world: And so, there is nothing to eat but OTHER SENTIENT BEINGS!!!! So it's about ...

That was the problem. I couldn't figure out what it was about. Which character? I tried to write it from 4 different POVs. Dumb! Now I want to return to it too and I don't know how.

I don't know how, I don't know how.

So when I'm stressed or tired or sober I flee to this world and a Ship and these characters, I know them all, they are living in my mind and crying because I keep not writing their stories, and maybe they will remain unwritten, and this will be sad. I don't want them to fade into Mnemonic Oblivion They must be writ soon or forever disappear.

God of drunks and would-bes shine your light on me.

It is only a mess of silliness and not too much to ask.

Exogenesis!

Other Notes

Because that last post struck a dark note, and because bicycling through sunlight to work today was a joy, here are some other things in a neutral or even happy tone:

• I have decided that I love the song You Never Even Called Me By My Name, by David Allan Coe. It is one of the songs (the other is, sigh, Freebird), that we hear every time we are at the Scoreboard. This irritated me, until the other night we didn't hear it, and I was sad. Then Lily played it the next night instead of Billy Bragg in attempt (I imagine) to irritate me, and, instead, I was elated.
  

• Speaking of music at the Scoreboard: somehow, playing Bauhaus got us a free pitcher of beer and an invitation home for veggie burgers and other, um, vegetous refreshments.
  

• And finally, I have left the following items in Gabriel's car:

1. My AmeriCorps hoodie;
2. The umbrella his boss gave me;
3. My plastic water bottle, which is now illegal in Canada
4. The Order of Things, by Michel Foucault.
   

• Were he to return them, I would be delighted.

• Special thanks to "Stuff I Left in Gabe's Car" for giving me more points with which to fill this post.
  

Groping Toward Catharsis

Another Monday, another late waking, I sleep too much anymore.

Here is my recurring dream: I am standing near an entrance to a cave or dungeon. There is a demon waiting there, and I have to go alone to face him. I am always too afraid. Sometimes I seek out allies (usually elves of some kind); always they turn out to be empty and useless and nothing but twinkling lights. I have to go alone, and I have never been able to.

Question: Is it because I enjoyed Joseph Campbell so much (particularly during formative years when I was shedding my Christianity) that I dream in Jungian archetypes?

***

We all have to go into the cave alone.

***

Spring in a World a moment; but I am not wholly a fool, a holy fool. Or maybe sometimes syntax is the better fate; and wisdom should be first; but I cannot, holy, kiss you. & "write the saddest lines."

(These poems are little demons that run around the forests of my brain like wild animals -- or are they domesticated, and has my mind become a farm-- milk the e.e. cummings cow & slaughter that lamb se llama Lorca.)

(a shadow at her waste, dances on her balcony -- I watched you melt as I recited. But the past is dead and I ducked out & fled into the Pittsburgh night. & faraway, dreaming dreams of -- revolution, social change.)

***

Yesterday I planted a garden but it will not grow. I think. Maybe it will, and we will enjoy a nourishing carrot grown guerrilla-style in the forbidden yard. But I should have read a book about soil first.

(The Yard: Emblematic; the quiet violence of everyday life. Domination democratized; an American dream. Be sure you kill the dandelions.)

I have: Heirloom cornseed, pole-beans, squash. My current quest, then, is a place for a three sisters garden. I was thinking the courthouse lawn.

***

I am out of talk, again.

Random Days, Random Thoughts

• There is a very important article at Counterpunch today. Read it! Highlights:

My own [Stan's] anecdotal evidence, without using worm castings but using simply composting mulch on organic compost over non-compacted soil, is that in 12 square surface-feet, one can grow three species of food, with six plants each... producing okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, bush beans, etc. Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the little critters from taking more than their share. Last summer I had one cucumber vine that produced around 50 mature cucumbers, totalling well over 20 pounds of food, for around three months. By rotating seasonals, it is easily conceivable to take a 12 square-foot plot in a temperate zone and raise 100 pounds of food a year... being very conservative. Neither Syngenta, nor Cargill, nor Archer-Daniels-Midland want you to know this.

They want to sell you mass-produced food, for money... which you have to work for. Let us not forget that Enclosure (forcing people off the land, or separating them from their land) was the method used to compel people into the monetized industrial economy in the first place. A 12-foot garden bed is three-feet by four-feet. How many of these can you build on a half an acre? The key is always in the design.

• The young children at work have decided to befriend me, for reasons I cannot fathom. Lately they have been asking me from time to time where Shelby is. Today -- not for the first time -- I informed him that he had died. Again. Eaten, it seems, by evil goats. Result: A delightfully graphic picture of Shelby being eaten by an Evil Goat is now hanging up over his desk.

• Has anyone else noticed this: There is a house in the middle of Roseburg with chickens in the yard. I mean the middle of Roseburg, downtown; and I mean a whole fucking swarm (or mess or flock or whatever a group of chickens is called) of gigantic chickens almost as big as the turkeys that run around the college just hanging out in this yard.
  

• It makes me wish there were hundreds and hundreds of chickens just wandering about town, allowed to eat what they want. They're a good bit sightlier than pigeons, and if there were so many of them I would never feel bad killing and eating them.
  

• In fact if you did that, and banned all the cars, and increased taxes and used them for the bus, and got an Amtrak station, and forced people to use their useless lawns to grow food, and maybe let some other animals wander about too, and instead of planting ornamental shade trees planted apples, walnuts, etc as shade trees, and confiscated all the private property, and required of each citizen a contribution of -- say -- 40 hours of public community service/week, which could include everything from tending the trees to teaching to building a house to patrolling the streets, in exchange for which each had the right to partake freely of the communal food supply, housing, medicines, schools, & all this was regulated by a governing body consisting of the whole citizenry of: a given house; a given street; a given neighborhood; a given quarter; the entire town,
  

• Well if all that was true then this would be a pretty darn good place to live.
  

Things on Other Peoples' Minds

My mind is relatively vacant and I don't have many thoughts to write, so here are some thoughts thought up by other thinkers:

Jon Zerzan, in interview with Derrick Jensen:

I would say Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate all forms of domination. This includes not only such obvious forms as the nation-state, with its routine use of violence and the force of law, and the corporation, with its institutionalized irresponsibility, but also such internalized forms as patriarchy, racism, homophobia. Also it is the attempt to expose the ways our philosophy, religion, economics, and other ideological constructions perform their primary function, which is to rationalize or naturalize—make seem natural—the domination that pervades our way of life: the destruction of the natural world or of indigenous peoples, for example, comes not as the result of decisions actively made and actions pursued, but instead, so we convince ourselves, as a manifestation of Darwinian selection, or God’s Will, or economic exigency. Beyond that, Anarchism is the attempt to look even into those parts of our everyday lives we accept as givens, as parts of the universe, to see how they, too, dominate us or facilitate our domination of others. What is the role of division of labor in the alienation and destruction we see around us? Even more fundamentally, what is the relationship between domination and time, numbers, language, or even symbolic thought itself?

Peter Kropotkin, "Anarchist Morality":

The idea of good and evil has thus nothing to do with religion or a mystic conscience. It is a natural need of animal races. And when founders of religions, philosophers, and moralists tell us of divine or metaphysical entities, they are only recasting what each ant, each sparrow practices in its little society.

Is this useful to society? Then it is good. Is this hurtful? Then it is bad.

Nestor Makhno and the Dielo Trouda, "Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists":

Authority is always dependent on the exploitation and enslavement of the mass of the people. It is born of this exploitation, or it is created in the interests of this exploitation. Authority without violence and without exploitation loses all raison d'etre.

The State and Authority take from the masses all initiative, kill the spirit of creation and free activity, cultivates in them the servile psychology of submission, of expectation, of the hope of climbing the social ladder, of blind confidence in their leaders, of the illusion of sharing in authority.

Emma Goldman, "Anarchism: What it Really Stands For":

Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails. Religion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began. Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress.

Property, the dominion of man's needs, the denial of the right to satisfy his needs. Time was when property claimed a divine right, when it came to man with the same refrain, even as religion, "Sacrifice! Abnegate! Submit!" The spirit of Anarchism has lifted man from his prostrate position. He now stands erect, with his face toward the light. He has learned to see the insatiable, devouring, devastating nature of property, and he is preparing to strike the monster dead.

...

Just as religion has fettered the human mind, and as property, or the monopoly of things, has subdued and stifled man's needs, so has the State enslaved his spirit, dictating every phase of conduct. "All government in essence," says Emerson, "is tyranny." It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual. Referring to the American government, the greatest American Anarchist, David Thoreau, said: "Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instance losing its integrity; it has not the vitality and force of a single living man. Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice."

"A Las Barricadas," a song of the Spanish Revolution:

English:

Black storms agitate the air
Dark clouds prevent us from seeing
Even though pain and death await us
Duty call us against the enemy

The most precious good
Is freedom
We have to defend her
With faith and valor

Raise the revolutionary flag
That carries the country to emancipation
On workers feet to battle
We must destroy the reaction

To the barricades
To the barricades
For triumph
Of the Confederation

Espanol:

Negras tormentas agitan los aires
nubes oscuras nos impiden ver.
Aunque nos espere el dolor y la muerte
contra el enemigo nos llama el deber.

El bien mas preciado
es la libertad
hay que defenderla
con fe y con valor.

Alza la bandera revolucionaria
que llevara al pueblo a la emancipacion
En pie obrero a la batalla
hay que derrocar a la reaccion

A las Barricadas!
A las Barricadas!
por el triunfo
de la Confederacion.

No One Much Liked This

But this is my blog and I can post whatever I want.

It was the heady days of 2006, and the Iraq War was at its fiercest. Casualty rates were climbing, car bombs were a daily event, and all around me ten thousand hipsters got drunk and had sex with each other.

Meanwhile, I have always loved rousing drinking songs, you know, pound your beer on the bar and singalong and There's whiskey in the jar! and the like.

So I wrote a little ditty in response to both of those inputs. Nobody much cared for it and a friend whose brother had recently been deployed threatened to beat me senseless if I ever sang it at the bar again. But perhaps with the renewal of conflict between Iraqi government forces and the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al Sadr, it regains some of its relevance.

Either way, here is A Rousing Drinking Song:

Oh! Look at the beards on the little boys faces
And check out that girl with the choppy black hair;
Somewhere a child wails for her mother
Her mother's intestines are strewn through the air.

But pour me a Pabst and please turn up the jukebox
Cause Morrisey's singing my favorite sad song;
They're gunning down towel-heads in Al Sadr City
"Iran is supplying Moqtada with bombs."

But don't trouble me with these troublesome politics!
Saturday night's here, I want to get laid.
Sing Allahu Akhbar and get in this car
And drive to the playground and hit "detonate."


O-oh detonate, O-oh detonate!
Oh drive to the playground and hit "detonate!"
O-oh detonate, O-oh detonate!
Sing Allahu Akhbar and hey! Detonate.


There's talk of a draft but that doesn't affect me;
I'm a graduate student with lots on my mind.
They'd never send me to go break into houses,
To murder and rape and be murdered in kind.

And if bodies keep piling in Baghdad's black morgues
Without legs or arms or a hand or a head,
Then I'll walk around campus and carry a sign
But it's just not my kind decapitated.


It's just not my kind, It's just not my kind!
It's just not my ki-ind decapitated;
It's just not my kind, It's just not my kind!
No, my kind don't get decapitated.


We're all very hip here, we all know our music,
We're all working hard on our novels and plays.
The guns in the distance they just can't concern us
As much as the haircuts of four guys on stage.

But somewhere a soldier is killing a child,
Somewhere someone's bumper says Support Our Troops.
Someday they will learn that even white liberals
Helped steal their oil and smash all their hopes.


And then it's my kind, And then it's my kind!
And then it's my kind decapitated.
And then all of us, And then all of us!
And then me and you get decapitated!

Update: Small Victories

In the last five days, no one has deleted my name from the "Notable Residents" list on Roseburg's Wikipedia entry:

Steve Thomas - Popular blogger and journalist, known for his flamboyance and hard-hitting interviews.