Excerpt WIP

What times, it’s hard to even know where to begin. There is no beginning, no end. There is only now, only the smashing present while our human minds swirl in wild abandon of what was, what is and what will be. Also on what we once thought was, what we once thought is now and what we thought would come. Fear and loathing in the collapse of America, fear and loathing in the crumbling of this delusional empire. You have to be crazy to understand what’s going on in the world right now. You have to be crazy to understand where we’ve really been. They’ll fight you to the last; your own mind will sometimes fight you, trying to beat off the nagging truths. It’s easy to get lost in it. It’s easy to feel paralyzed with fear and worry. Times like these make you appreciate all the more the people that came before you, those that fought tyranny, and those that put their lives on the line for an idea. The truly maddening part of it is watching your fellow people continue to engage in the false two party paradigms, those that still believe in the democrat/republican game. You know they are still so far off from the truth. They are still enabling a mortally flawed and corrupt system. You see visions of the future. If others could see these same visions they might start to begin to follow your lead. I am trying to lead but it is lonely out here on the perimeter. The challenge is to reject many of the beliefs that you once held and to accept this new reality while still staying sane enough to somehow continue to function in this new reality that is existing simultaneously within the old paradigm. I somehow just try to stay the line, stand here on this land even if I am all alone and full of fear, doubt and legitimate personal suffering. It seems a fool’s errand, a homey little Americana cliché “back to the land.” Well, for me, it is a life and death situation. For me there are sides forming all around, not just red vs. blue, not just white vs. black, gay vs. straight, Christian vs. Muslim, pro-life vs. pro-choice….all these divisions that do not serve us but only serve the corrupt paradigm that must be crushed. We have to learn to love each other. We have to learn to accept each other. We have to reach out to one another. We have to reject our consumption upbringing. There is a spirit that belies all things, an energy that vibrates. This spirit has as its antithesis a vibration of death and fear. We have been corrupted by the latter and forgotten about the former. We continually choose fear instead of faith. We need to turn it all on its head. We need to have faith, faith in ourselves, and faith in one another. We need to set down our phones and look each other in the eyes and start having a real conversation about this country, where we’ve been, where we are and in what direction we are moving. If screaming worked I would scream. If fasting worked I would fast. If killing worked I would kill. But the only thing that works and the only thing that has ever worked to combat these forces is love. How do we elevate love and sympathy over hate and prejudice? Ah there is the rub!
Why care? Why get involved? Why not just worry about yourself and your own concerns? I can’t answer that question. I’ve always cared. I hid it down deep for different periods of my life but it always came back. I tried to play along to the grand game being played on this chess board called modern life. But ever since I first took consciousness I have felt ill at ease at the social structures and strictures of this society. As a child I was the one who asked his parents’ questions like “Why do we go to war? Why do people have to kill each other? Why do so few have so much while so many have so little?” Questions like these will get a first class ticket to crazy town if you keep asking them and refuse to accept the “that’s just the way things are, honey” dismissals. My parents were raised during the nascent of the American empire, the 1950’s, when heavy manufacturing and industry in America were going to solve all ills. It was a glorious time so say the advertisements from that era. It’s a deep shock when you realize that your parents had been brainwashed just like you into believing in the American dream. Madison Avenue had us all figured out long ago. We weren’t difficult to buy. Not difficult to buy at all.
“So you’re saying progress is a joke and we should all go back to pre-industrial times?” Nope. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that progress in technology and industry has surpassed progress in the realm of human evolution. We are straddling two eras as they drift further apart from each other. I’m saying we need to take the best aspects of progress and apply these things to major world problems instead of making those problems worse by keeping this broken system on life support. I see visions of a future where small communities again thrive, where corporate outfits are seen as the enemy of the common man, where people begin to educate themselves again, a new renaissance in American individualism, commerce and society. When the spell is broken and we return to the goodness that is in all of us and turn away from the selfishness of blind consumerism. I don’t care if it is a lofty ideal and utopian fantasy. We have to carve out this place for ourselves. Any sort of social progress took place because of enlightenment and fierce determination and hard work in the face of overwhelming odds.
Living here on this farm these past few years has been an insanely evolutionary, luminary and revelatory experience. My mind is still in the process of taking in all the information and trying to make sense of it, trying to analyze it and figure out a way to go from here. In my mind I am already trying to live post-collapse and I often feel like a crazy person because of the thoughts in my head. I know I’m not alone but it is hard to tell when you are out in public who might be seeing the same things as you. I connect with different people from different backgrounds all the time who all share a commonality in that they see the monster rising just like I am witnessing it. These are frightening times that are electric with history and reverberations throughout time and space. A coming together of everything at once, all disparate elements and particles held together by the self-same glue. Everything is infinite but for some reason most of us are stuck in the prison of the finite even though the infinite is absolutely everywhere and everything. It is the grand illusion that has to be smashed; the separateness, the dissociation, the otherness, the “us” and the “them”, the inner and the outer.
Then there is the mind fuck that some of the ancients were most likely more intelligent than us, that we are not actually the apex of human evolution and consciousness but perhaps just a deeply demented and disturbed inbred off-shoot.

We Own the Shame.

Flickering light on the tomb,

the theme song from The Young & The Restless

permeating the womb.

Years upon years upon years of encoded electronic images.

Face the screen, look forward to the dream, plan your life

around the scene. Joystick, controller, touch tone, cell phone.

It’s new! It’s improved! This one’s smaller. This one’s wiser.

Keep your head buried in the wires. Addicted to the diction.

Too strange to be fiction.

Playtime for hours. Pavlovian towers. Devolution of a species.

Crap trap the whole thing's tapped. This is what we've been working towards.

Don’t call. Don’t talk. Text me. I don’t want to see your face or hear your voice.

Just send me the codes already. I don’t care.

These lies are becoming threadbare.

Reveal the zeal with which our souls are being stealed. (sic)

I don’t know but I’ve been told. Once there was a way,

but everything must be bought and sold.

A soul cries out in the wilderness, manna in the form of prana.

Or is it prana in the form of manna?

Must be electrix, must be Celebrex, must be freezone, ozone,

motorhome, no place to call your own.

Run that treadmill as fast as you can.

All hail the Toucan Sam. Slam bam, thank you Ma’am.

Great balls of fire, send me your ire.

Burn some tires, the flames licking higher.

The black smoke disappears into the atmosphere.

We’re here. We’re queer.

We’re funny little creatures, scurrying ants

in and out of the plants. Bubble canopies of rubber and steel,

aluminum, windshield glass, we got no class.

Burn that gas, tap that ass, work that dick.

What's making us tick? If everything is okay...

Well, then I guess I’m the one who’s sick.

But this shit’s got to change. Are you ready to name names?

CIA hurricane? Get ready. You know who’s to blame:

We are the game. We own the shame. We flew those planes.

Nothing will ever be the same.