Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Weeble Wobble


Have you ever been in an improv free-for-all with twenty people on a stage built for four with a woman up front who’s being all Kristen Wiig while you’re stuck in the back with Bernie Sanders wearing a Ronald McDonald costume from the 1970s? There’s maybe three things you can do that don’t involve violence or sexual innuendo and none of them are funny. It’s not that no one can see or hear you, but that the possibility of being anything other than a caricature is impossible. If you have a bratwurst in each hand you might be able to say, “Hey, I’m the guy who works with props!” but that guy’s got less personality than Hillary Clinton wearing an all white pantsuit. 

I’ve adapted to my new reality by creating mental cartoon likenesses of the people who live in my apartment building. There’s Eeyore, the guy who hobbles along with a cane mumbling in a slow Southern drawl about how painful his titanium hip is. The Weeble Wobble Twins, meanwhile, waddle wherever they go, usually uttering gibberish while miraculously remaining upright even while falling down. There’s the Fruit Lady who each day dresses in one bright but uniform color from head to toe be it yellow (banana), purple (grape), red (apple), or orange (orange). Then there’s Kooky, the middle-aged lady with the coke-bottle glasses who bumps into and bounces off of everyone she passes in the hallways. Earlier today she actually clung to the wall as I approached, apparently for fear I might run her over. The hallway is about ten feet wide, but she seems to perceive it as a mostly vertical space.

It’s becoming more and more difficult to find people any more and by people I mean human beings who appear as and act like human beings as I have imagined human beings appearing and acting. Maybe Donald Trump is not a surprising accident but a cultural mile marker for where we are on the road of civilization. Being a genuine person is passe, it seems. Caricature is the zeitgeist. Understandable when 140 characters defines the limit of attentiveness. But that would require understanding which is an ever rarer commodity. Complexity is acceptable only when it is reduced to simplicity. 

I was with a bird that was chirping the other day and a young woman walked up to chatter. The bird flew away and I was instantly lonely. I would have been merely alone if she hadn’t been there, but instead I was put in the exhausting position of having to simulate what passes as a conversation between occasional acquaintances in my neck of the woods. I made an important discovery, though: I have attention deficit disorder in the presence of droning trivia and minutiae. Talk to me about international relations, the best practical joke you ever pulled, or the vagaries of sexual positions during the course of lovemaking and you’ll have my attention for hours. I admit, though, that I have a significant disorder when it comes to being able to listen to how difficult it is to find a parking spot at Target late on a Friday afternoon. Enduring that is not my gift. I am either a lightning rod for this sort of thing or there is an epidemic of talking about things of little import that mildly upset us as a means to find easy, comfortable, and hollow agreement: “You like to eat food? Whoa, so do I! Man, it’s like we’re twins who were separated at birth. I just get you without even having to say anything. Don’t get me wrong, I’m gonna say all kinds of things, but almost all of them are going to be about how I don’t like being too hot or too cold or how I hate paying bills. Still, I just got this strange feeling that when I make a comment about how cloudy it is today, you’re gonna agree with me. We’re just on the same wavelength, know what I mean? Course you do! Hee Haw!” 

I think we’re moving toward a culture in which each person will be assigned a word at birth that will determine his or her economic role in society. A “Next” person will work as a postal clerk or at the DMV, a “No” person will work on insurance claims, a “Want” person will buy things, and a “Keep” person will run an antique store. Of course, there will be diversity. Not all “Sex” persons will be prostitutes; some will be the Johns who pay the prostitutes. A “Kill” person may be a soldier, a police officer, a hunter, a worker at a slaughterhouse, and so on. Of course, this potential future is dependent on a greater and greater reliance on simplicity and emptiness as prime values. 

I wish we could skip ahead to when we’ll just stack each other on top of each other, disassemble, and then start stacking each other on top of each other again. That would keep things very simple and there could be no complaints. Well, there’d be an allowance for complaints, but they’d be limited to two characters so I’m not sure how much coherence could be conveyed. The only thing that could probably be assumed if two characters popped up on a digital screen was that it was likely a complaint because saying anything other than what bothers us will have gone out of style … except for the pollyanna people, but that potential problem could be solved easily by using only one character. It makes sense: one character for “yay” and two characters for “boo!” Beings who relate to one another with the complexity of a light switch. Up, down. On, off. Yes, no. Fart, smell. We're getting close. Even now, communicating using the range of a dimmer switch almost always leads to a response of "TLDR." 

Why have a brain? If you’ve been provided with a tool that is more advanced than every technology that has ever been created then why not use it? It’s sort of like buying a top of the line computer with every possible app and only ever using the word processing software and watching YouTube videos. We have massive hard drives but we run so few applications with them. Few of us even attempt to write our own programs; we just download apps developed by others and run them pretending that “they” are “us.” If I ask you who you are, you may as well say, “I’m an iPhone 6 using Twitter.” Or whatever. I’m pretty sure we have greater capabilities than we’re demonstrating. Pretty sure. I can only speak with certainty for myself and even then I am a little queasy about speaking with certainty for myself.

If the wrong way to be is the right thing to do then lean heavily on anecdotes. When abstraction and concreteness collide in a metaphor it’s time to issue a severe weather alert. Just because you believe you can doesn’t mean you think you can. Usually, I would .stop. .write. .here., but this is an unusual occurrence. But not that unusual.

I feel sacrilegious. No, sanctimonious. No, sacred. No, no, no. Silly. Yes! It’s often difficult to find the right symbol to represent a fleeting experience given that even a fleeting experience can only be adequately expressed while simultaneously using the entire vocabulary of twelve different languages developed in different eras and in diverse geographic areas. Imagine writing or painting or performing for decades in an attempt to capture what you experienced between 12:15:13 AM and 12:15:14 AM on August 5, 2016. No, don’t imagine it. You can’t. Contemplate it. Or just consider it. Maybe wonder about it. For however long you think will be useful for you. But what if you don’t know whether to contemplate, consider, or wonder? And what if you don’t know how long to contemplate, consider, or wonder? Or whether you should do it for only a few minutes right now or if you should devote a half hour every morning to contemplating, considering, or wondering? 

Do you see how easily this could become your religion, the basis by which you determine what you believe and how you decide what is valuable? Suddenly that little exercise has become your life project, but not as an artistic or expressive form through writing, painting, or performing, but through daily ritual contemplation, consideration, and wonder. The vastness of what was experienced between 12:15:13 AM and 12:15:14 AM on August 5, 2016 has exploded exponentially beyond a lifetime of description or conveyance. It’s becoming the foundation for a worldview through which everything from morality to politics to dietary practice is determined. That moment has become the moment through which all other moments gain meaning. It is the “Aha!” moment, the moment when your life and all life began and ended, and all subsequent moments can only exist in service to herald that one moment and all moments prior to that moment existed only to foretell that moment’s eventuality.

For once you have converted, through the daily practices of contemplation, consideration, and wonderment, to your experience between 12:15:13 AM and 12:15:14 AM, a time and experience you refuse to name for fear of reducing it to a distortion of itself, everything that has been, is, and will be spirals inward and outward from “there” in such a way that, eventually, you and all others who convert to the contemplation, consideration, and wonderment of the experience of that moment (whether experienced directly or consequently by others born much later) will become increasingly disoriented and disconnected from that moment’s experience through the experiential realizations that the fleeting experience of that moment does not exist. Next will come disillusionment followed by despair until you and all other converts hit rock bottom and collapse as it is no longer possible to deny that your worldviews and ritualistic practices are hollow. After a period of paralyzing numbness that can be described most adequately as nonbeing while being, each of you may blink and focus your gaze on a clock, digital or analog, at exactly 3:34:29 AM shifting, in a moment, to 3:34:30 AM on Day X of Year Y. In that moment, each of you will awaken, rejoicing in recognition of the new (and improved!) “Aha!” moment that has revealed itself through yet another fleeting experience.

Amen.

Saturday, August 13, 2016

Jawbone of an Ass


You know those “Dole” stickers on bananas and other fruits? They’re actually patches to help them quit using pesticides. So when you’re picking out fruits, those without patches have never had a “pesticide addiction” whereas the others have. “Well, I don’t want to be prejudiced so I’m going to eat the banana that has lung cancer.”

Meanwhile, Dole is developing vitamin patches for humans who have quit eating fruits and vegetables. Transdermal delivery of nutrients, it is believed, is superior to ingesting vitamins and minerals in pill form. Some guy in marketing thought of that. It’s coming. You’ll see.

Fashion trends often portray shifting signs of status. It will not be long until dried and preserved body parts—human and animal—will be worn in various ways to denote social standing or cultural significance. In the beginning, the practice may be quite simple.Men advertising large penises will pay top dollar for the cock of a horse to dangle from a belt tied around their waist. Of course not everyone will be in favor of such public sexual displays and religiously zealous types may wrap their daughters’ mid-sections with interlocking human rib cages, as a sign of both chastity and virginity.

In New York, women wearing the long finger bones of famous dead pianists will be one example of a person who comes from high society, always carrying in her purse a certificate of DNA authenticity for each phalange. On Wall Street, men will pay top dollar for the largest manes from dead lions. Clothing drives for the poor will likely give away rat skins sewn together by nuns as a means to help the homeless stay warm during the coldest months.

In Sweden and other northern European countries, the trend may begin with everyone wearing otter tails of the exact same length so as to not make anyone feel inferior or superior to others. Among indigenous tribes still practicing their ancient traditions … not much will be different. In China, wearing large bellies of various mammals and humans will come to be seen as signs of prosperity, good fortune, and health. The larger the belly, the greater the status. In small villages, the largest pig belly may be worn by elders or traditional leaders. In the largest metropolitan areas such as Beijing and Shanghai, a variety of huge bellies, some even larger than the person, may be worn as individuals move about the city, commuting to their various jobs, roles, and responsibilities: rhino stomachs, hippo stomachs, elephant stomachs, and the like will undoubtedly catch the eye of many and lead to spontaneous genuflections among the masses nearby, those wearing such modest bellies as sheep, cows, and even giraffes.

But the most prized bellies in China and southeast Asia will be those of deceased fat men or women from the Western world. For a time, this will lead to a black market killing epidemic of those with obesity in Western hemisphere. Terrorism will become a worry of the past as a result. However, this practice will also lead to major lifestyle changes in relation to eating and exercise in the New World. Companies like McDonald’s, Burger King, and Arby’s will go out of business and foods such as ice cream and donuts will become nearly extinct. As a means to counteract this problem, Americans, Canadians, and Europeans will face a wave of kidnappings where both young and old are taken to underground bunkers where they are force fed lard like geese as if to make foie gras, but with doctors trained to keep them alive as long as possible. Once it becomes known that there are few if any naturally occurring obese people in the West, however, the fad for obese human bellies in Southeast Asia will fade. 
In Japan, men and women will wear suits of whale blubber covering them from head to toe, using snorkels to breathe. As moving independently will become impossible, robots will roll them around the cities and other technological developments will help them communicate with one another. In the Middle East, men will cover their bodies with the beards of other men they slay. Women, meanwhile, … well, it won’t really be known what animal or human parts women are wearing because they’ll still be covered head-to-toe with cloth. 

As these customs continue to change and develop from country to country, new forms of societal hierarchies may form, including changes in economic and government structures. In the U.S., decision makers deciding on forms of socially acceptable things to say among various peoples will wear the jawbone of an ass around their necks. They will gather annually in abandoned badger dens to decide who can say what with impunity.

As a means of appeasing racial and sexual tensions and divides, the jawbone men and women, made up of all races, ethnicities, genders, and religious creeds, will provide each person of a particular race, religion, gender, etc., certain words which had become disparaging and offensive to certain groups. White people, for example, will be allowed to say “nigger” without consequence. However, they will be the only people allowed to say the word as even black people will be forbidden from uttering it—not by penalty of law, but by social ostracism and the probability of losing jobs, scholarships, etc. Black people will be the only group who can say the words “spic,” “wetback,” and “beaner.” Men will be allowed to say “cunt”; women will be the only group allowed to say “whore,” “pussy,” “dickless wonder,” and “you throw like a girl.” Hispanics will have exclusive rights to “queer,” “faggot,” and “dyke.” Lesbians, gay men, and transgendered peoples will have the rights to “chinks,” “Injuns,” “guineas,” “Pollocks,” and “whitey.” Asians will have “breeders,” “Nazis,” “junkies,” and “kikes.” Jews will be given “cocksucker,” “bitch,” “motherfucker,” and “cracker.” Protestants will be allowed to say “fascist,” Catholics to say “commie,” Muslims to say “retard,” Hindus to say “towelhead,” and Buddhists will have the right to remain silent. There will likely be others, but this should provide a hint of what is to come.

Those wearing jawbones of asses will come to be hated by all as they will, in time, exempt themselves from being called anything derogatory. At that point, a social revolt will occur in which all races, ethnicities, genders, and creeds will unite to use all of their worst words against the jawboned causing them to wilt under the pressure of hateful language and cry for a day. After that, everyone will realize that they have taken the first step toward utopia. All animal and human body parts will be shed and this practice will spread globally from the United States around the world culminating in a full day of universal orgiastic sex. What happens beyond that is anyone’s guess.