Pointy pointy point points

So now that everyone’s been inundated with talk of refugees, migrants and Syria and can’t bear another moment of it, I will finally say a thing or two now that no one will be listening, and I shall do so in the meagerest point-form fashion:

• When I say I would prefer that Canada give more help to them, this is not tantamount to saying I wish them granted citizenship. I’m immediately thinking of safe harbor while the matter of amnesty might perhaps be addressed more globally. I’m thinking of the concept of foster parenting if you will, whether there is existing functionality to serve such a concept or whether I am, in effect, proposing that such might be created? Okay, obviously I haven’t thought this out! It is simply an inclination that I wish help for these people!

• I’ve been asked: do I want to “let everyone in” to Canada?

1. Sure. I don’t care. I don’t self-identify as Canadian and I don’t give a rat’s ass who does.

2. I don’t actually give myself any credit whatsoever for making “Canada” what it is or for the tremendous comforts, privileges and (dark-seeded) indulgences that it provides us. I do not feel even remotely entitled to claim deserving of them (though I do enjoy them!) while other peoples of the world are not. I can’t identify with such a conceit or understand why, in the past, I surely did. I can’t recall what rationalizations I once perpetrated. I only know it stemmed from the illusions of our bestial tribalism.

• I’m sick of foreigners coming in and stealing our jobs and using up our welfare! I am told. Yeah. I don’t get that at all. The Canadian economy is built on immigration. Immigration creates material needs which creates jobs. And our immigration policies do very well, thank you very much, at bringing in hordes of wealthy immigrants who take large portions of foreign wealth out of their economies and into our economy for our benefit.

• They have made a mess of their own country, I’m told. Why should we let them mess up ours, I’m asked.

Well that’s very interesting because blame is a very dicey and largely illusory concept, isn't it? Who are “they”? My guess is that the ones who are fleeing for their lives are not as responsible for “the mess” as those they are fleeing from. Isn’t that a fairly safe assumption? As for our own innocence, are we not making a mess? No? Really?

One could find himself sitting in the dirt because he owns no chair, saying, “Fuck a duck, have I ever made a mess of my life! My ass is in the dirt!” or one could find himself sitting in a big comfy chair saying, “Ah! What comfort! I am a success! This is no mess!” But if you did not earn that chair by working and paying for it legitimately; if you stole that chair from Guido The Brain Basher and he knows it, then who has made the bigger mess? If Guido is on his way to pull you out of his chair and bash your brains in, then the sitter in the dirt is looking like less of a mess-maker than you, don’t you think?

Guess which circumstance I’m metaphorically assigning to Canada?

I think we’re thoroughly deluded. I think that all of our economical and environmental practices are deeply flawed – nay – criminally corrupt; entirely unsustainable. As a nation we’re totally exploiting poorer countries and turning their labour into our wealth. That cannot go on forever. That we’re exploiting our natural resources exponentially beyond their rate of renewal is not even remotely debatable, even by the ruling classes (those unnaturally rich and running government, media and corporations) who constantly distract us from this insurmountable crisis in the making.

We sit around sucking our thumbs, nodding our heads to a fantasy democracy totally controlled by a few corporate-owned-and-operated parties who pretend to be diverse as long as we are dumbbells and only listen to their scant differences; the li’l issue o’ the day, and don’t grasp that the world and the environment are rapidly furiously changing in the eyes of global context. The real physical world is NOT conservative! To me, these parties are in fact all monstrously conservative by any real point of view, and then we elect the most conservative; the one most dedicated to preserving our slave systems and the least in touch with global reality. Have we not made a mess when in fact democracy means that the government is accountable to the people and it is the people’s responsibility to dismantle an ineffective or corrupt government and build anew? That is our responsibility which is over and above the responsibility to vote. We imagine that the media is enforcing some kind of accountability which is a farce. The mainstream media only plays the watchdog role in the most superficial manners. It never confronts the government in any way damaging to the institution! We “Canadians” are beyond inept. The time for rebellion came a long time ago. We’re a bunch of sissy-pantses!

The threads that hold our entire society together are incredibly fragile and completely interdependent. When the systems start to fail, by god, they are all going down and our society will melt down into complete chaos. And the primitive remains of it will swiftly convert our tech-slave society into an overt slave society and this will be a horror. People will be the new oil.

Of course it’s really easy to deny all this when we’re sitting around in our comfy chairs with no fears about Guido. None at all! And why should we? Because Guido ain’t coming for us, after all! He’s coming for our grandchildren who we purport to love.

Could I be wrong? I would love to think so. Maybe technology and resources will provide ever-deeper opportunities for exploitation stretching beyond the Earth; our solar system; the galaxy, etcetera, as required to sustain the ultimately-unsustainable human slave paradigm well into the future. But I really doubt we’ll be able to make that leap before the crash.

And if you’re in denial, let me throw you a little hint. When the day comes that western governments start saying, “Yeah, we need to repeal minimum-wage legislation – just as a temporary measure – just to get the economy stimulated,” that will be the sign that clinches it. That is when covert slavery has begun the irrevocable shift to overt slavery. And the end will be nigh. If you’re still alive when that day comes, you soon might wish you weren’t.

Strangely I feel no dread or rage over any of this. To me it is all a logical forecast and perhaps not a certainty. Where there is life there is hope, says Stephen Hawking. But hope, without action is the greatest sin of all. Hope, without a plan is just dumb. And the only plans and action I see are by marginalized people who truly act out of love and not selfishness and who are swiftly labelled by the powerful as radicals and eco-terrorists and such, and we buy into these labels because we’re dull-minded ass-backwards sheep who are just eager to hear that our lives are A-Okay!

Baaaaaaahaaaaa!

Oh well. Perhaps we’ll find the miracle that accelerates our stalled evolution (the functionality exists I have reliably witnessed!) and another miracle with which to enlighten even the power-mongers who hold all the cards. And armies. Meanwhile I live for today, looking for ways to improve and be less a part of the problem and more a part of the solution. That is something joyful and something we can all take part in.

Well, so much for point form. I tried!

#92: What reason can there be?

January 29^th, 1979, San Diego California: Sixteen-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer walked onto the playground of Grover Cleveland Elementary School with a gun and opened fire. She killed two adults and injured eight schoolchildren and a police officer.

When the media report came jittering out of the telex machine at WRAS, the campus radio station of Georgia State University, it was read by the Irish musician who’d been sitting next to the machine, preparing for a radio interview.

When journalists demanded of the killer: “Tell me why,” she would only respond: “I don’t like Mondays. It livened up the day.”

How could there be a reason for something so senseless? the musician thought. His imagination supplied the answer: Because a silicon chip inside her head got switched to overload.  

#92

I DON’T LIKE MONDAYS

By Bob Geldof (The Boomtown Rats)

1979, Ireland

I always sensed something haunting behind these strange lyrics and never understood their origin until today.

Peak: #1, UK

Geldof reflects on the song and its consequences:

#93: Love songs can’t be wrong

I don’t get sucked into country songs often at all but this super-catchy melody and ridiculously romantic notion did the trick:

#93

HEARD IT IN A LOVE SONG

By Toy Caldwell (The Marshall Tucker Band)

1977, USA

The airy flute, uplifting tone and sappy message in the chorus all sound so happy but, it’s a country song, remember. So get into the verses and it’s just sad. The wrangler protagonist has fallen hard for the woman who has anchored him too long at his latest stop along the road (long enough for his boots to get old), but his nature has finally won out and so he must break both their hearts and move on. Oh well. What can you do? Men are dick-heads.

Peak: #14, Billboard Top 100.

This was by far Toy Caldwell and The Marshall Tucker Band’s biggest hit. Toy’s brother, Tommy Calwell, bassist for the band, passed away in 1980 at age 31. Toy, lead guitarist and primary writer, died in 1993 at age 46.

Samsara

I probably shouldn’t have posted the link to this trailer on likebook with the message, “Everyone needs to see this.”

I keep forgetting about the unwritten rules of likebook. The more wisdom, intelligence or relevance you dare try to slip into a likebook post, the more that likebookers' uncanny substance-detectors alarm and the faster everyone scatters for the exits. God forbid we attempt to engage there, in dialogue aimed at improving our lives in any truthful or noble sense.

Oh, but it’s perfectly fine to pretend at it of course. It’s perfectly fine to re-post inspiring quote-image decorations which sound noble and which we pretend to have consolidated for ourselves and found them without flaw. What the hell, right? As long as a sound byte stems from some unfamiliar source, it must be right. Right? As long as it doesn’t come from any of the losers we know (who must secretly be as dull and phony as we secretly just-maybe fear we might ourselves be) then it must be legitimate. After all, there is one reliable constant in the universe: Our personal friends and associates will never be smarter, wiser or happier than we are. And they will never know something important that we don’t know first. This is the law pronounced by the ego which controls us. The ego that is the centre of your universe. And all of this conceit will run smoothly for us as long as we never learn anything or believe that anyone you know has learned anything. And this way we can merrily proceed, head in the sand, toward our oblivion. Easy Peasy.

Now, if your own ego tells you that you are better than that, here’s one way to demonstrate it:

Watch Samsara. Not because it is an excellent movie among movies. Not because it is different. Not because an incredible amount of time and effort and impartiality went into it or because of the great investment in top-quality film or its astounding imagery. Not because I say so. Not because I am a film buff whose frame of reference covers more than 2000 titles. 

Watch Samsara because it is an incredibly valuable tool if you actually have a mind that gives a damn about truth or knowledge or reality. If you have such a mind then this is a tool not easily replaced and if you take a pass on it, then you are forever less equipped to comment legitimately about the world you like to think you know.

It is not that these images will directly reveal things you didn’t know existed (well, maybe they will. In fact I might myself have been taken by surprise by a couple things). But it is your own mind that can reveal things to you when you look at things you know but from a different direction.

This film is a different direction.

accoutre /əˈko͞odər/

What are the tools of a writer? A keyboard, paper and pen? A desk?

I don't think so. Even imagination and practiced literacy are but screws and nails. What are the real tools of the storyteller?

Skepticism. Restlessness. Empathy. Courage.

account /əˈkount/

So many ills so many suffer and so often. The sorrow, the loneliness, the perceived injury. The jealousy and inferiority. Suppressed guilt and shadowy fears and on and on; a dreary roster of insanity. They weave their webs through all our days and leave a trail of suffering that is almost universally misunderstood. So accustomed to it all, it only feels like living; like the cost of doing business. But this living death is a tragedy born of illusions. We cannot see the bigger pictures; the miracles of our brilliant existence; our starring role in the great drama of the universe. We cannot access the only truthful perspective; the global perspective from the narrow channels, like foxholes, that we have dug for ourselves.

“We will pay the price but we will not count the cost.”—Neil Peart

accompany /əˈkəmp(ə)nē/

A lot of people tip their hand; reveal perhaps, why they are single when they talk about their idea of sharing their life with someone; "having someone special around," they say, "to make my big moments more special."

For me to ever be lured back into some permutation of couplehood, I would have to be so in love that my moments would play second fiddle to those of the beloved. It seems like many of you are not looking for a companion but for a witness.

acclimate /ˈakləˌmāt/

“How doth the city sit solitary that was once full of people.” Leviticus 1:1.

The poet Michael Gaultieri pointed me toward this passage and it has haunted me greatly at those times I have felt so utterly alone. I have stared out windows at alien cityscapes, mystified. I have not adjusted well. Disinterest breeds silence which is taken for concurrence and for all the good that does I might as well be playing a mummer.

To be more assertive? Is that the answer? Or am I spending time in the wrong places? Should I invite further evolution instead? Perhaps further exploration is more the right idea, which can be achieved, of course, in new places as well as the familiar.

acclaim /əˈklām/

People ask me if I have been published yet. Writers tell me to get my ass in gear. I understand their curiosity and concern. But having something published is not the prime goal and never has been. It is certainly potentially useful in the right circumstance but it is still only one component of a wide enterprise: to effectively champion harmony through evolution… through art.

The right thing must be published at the right time. And whatever currencies arise from that must then be leveraged wisely.

For the most part I think to myself, I don't want anything published unless it's so right, that the world needs to hear it. And I wonder are those standards out of reach of my ability. It seems like I'm always overreaching. Whatever I accomplish on the page, I envision something more.

accident /ˈaksədənt/

How did I come to enjoy what privileges I have; to inherit such a seemingly rare space?

It is hardly flattering to peruse the more obvious strains of causality which led here through curiosity, courage, integrity, insight, revelation; from child to writer to seeker. How humbling to find that failure is the theme. Failure at marriage, career and Christianity; at social climbing and reputation-building. All the towers I could not build beyond the first couple floors. And as they crumbled, how visible the path became.

Is that the only way it is done? It is one theme I think but I have never assumed it’s the only way.

ac·ci·dence /ˈaksidəns/

Leaving aside that we are among the most spoiled and perhaps luckiest (at least on the surface) of the communities of Earthlings, I am grateful to be a native speaker and writer of English. What a royal pain it must be to try to learn it post-childhood. So deranged, arbitrary and variable in its structure. So much wiggle room.

What better playground for the writer and poet? Every English word is a toy for the imagination. No matter what I want to say, there will be a dozen ways to say it; each a different flavor.   

My regression

I suspect that I am moving toward improved insight into what is going on with me (and what is not going on with me).

I have interpreted the changes in my life as a personal evolution (of consciousness, generally) and I have regarded my less enlightened behaviours – at times occasional, at times more frequent – as a slipping backwards; as a regression of that evolution, and I have never worried about that in any way. I have never prioritized the journey. I’ve never said, “Oh I must keep evolving. I must be a saint by this date and an angel by this date…!” I have made no assumptions about any ideal path. I have been inclined to think that this “regression” has kept me more relatable to certain people and not so estranged from them; in effect having more capacity to communicate effectively, which is important as I have felt a burden and duty to offer myself as much as possible as a guide to the less initiated, in the absence of any more qualified guide within reach. Through the period of rapid evolution I was sensing new hurdles to communication because I was forgetting what it was like to suffer certain perceptions. I could remember the ends of paths but not their beginnings. I felt I was leaving some people too far behind; out of reach.

Having read A New Earth and connecting superbly (indescribably so) to Eckhart Tolle’s explanations of what so-far appears to be the same mental journey and landscape (much work to be done analyzing that), I find myself looking at myself more through what I perceive as his perspective which feels very useful. In doing so I must consider that evolution and regression may not be the most useful terms here. Tolle seems to say that it is more of a toggle switch to be “awake” or “asleep” at any given moment, which does feel right to me, and I must wonder, is it more useful to say that I am generally just falling out of the habit somewhat, of being awake; mindful; conscious; present or whatever (I’ve yet to hear a term for it that feels definitive).

There is no doubt a pattern that I am awake most of the time that I am alone (which is often, per my priorities) and awake much of the time in others’ company but probably not a great majority of that time. I often catch my own lack of presence in the middle of the act and I am sort of laughing at myself before the last offending words are out of my mouth and I have tended to see this as me granting my imprisoned ego little recreational holidays; time off for good behaviour. This was perhaps conceited of me as I must ponder: No, this is the ego being fully in charge at these moments. Yes, I think that is more the case. It’s creepy to think of the ego playing possum in this way but it makes sense.

What may have slanted my views on regression until now is that the rewards of peace, joy and freedom do not entirely depart through periods of more instinctive (asleep) modes but I wonder do they only linger as academic comforts in those moments, rather than fully genuine. It invites the more crucial question. How do I ever know when my state is genuine and full and not just academic? Tolle (and the Healer) propose a simple test for that which I can not so far consolidate.

I am pondering at this moment that maybe a more mindful habit is on the rise again as my concerns about being reachable or relatable; the capacity to communicate, are perhaps dissipating. The Healer, who has graciously listened to much of my personal story without doubt or prejudice, suggests that teaching is more a matter of practice and experience than staying relatable. She suggests, in essence, that I may have “evolved” spiritually but not as a teacher.

The fact is, I am currently much in doubt about both my abilities and my qualifications as a teacher. They may both be deeply lacking and if so, that is okay. She also suggests that I may not be nearly so alone in my circumstance as I have felt. She is subtly suggesting that I might find myself at home in the woo-woo community, a term she applies ironically to herself and her peers; the practitioners of reiki, tai chi, qigong, meditation etc.

In other words, the burden of guiding may not be falling on my shoulders so much after all. I don’t know if she might be right. I’m not sure how accurate her idea is of all that I have been through and perceive, but there is work to do to clarify these matters and new experiences to be had! The Healer knows Tolle’s work but I must read and re-read his works and take stock of how much he explains myself and my journey as well as how much he does not. This will shed more light on all of these questions.

Perhaps continued evolution is my inner purpose while guiding is a potential with regards to my outer purpose, remaining to be seen.