A Matter of Few Words...

The Eroded Man
by
CDM.MMXII

Crusty...

Yea, the crusty side of me is surfacing.  I am up to here with the bullshit.  It is not my fault.  I didn’t do it.  I’m tired, sick and fucking tired, of being the one to care, and keep my mouth shut about what I can see so clearly simply because if I opened my mouth I’d be dealing cruelty in so many directions.  I’m about to think it’s time to go walkabout.  It’s been a year, I gave myself that year to let shit stew and boil and cool and separate into layers.  It’s time to make the fucking cut, and let the goddamn pieces fall where they may. 

I’m tired of so many things, so many people in my world who wear their weaknesses as their totems of identity.  Fine, be a fucking head case loser, but do it on your own time, your own nickel, your own heart.  I’m tired of being the one to pick up the slack.  I’m not doing you any favors, I’m not.  I’m guilty as freakin home made sin, for years I’ve been the one who let you get away with it thinking I might be able to ease your passage into sanity.  And all I succeeded in doing was delaying the inevitable.  Just how fucking much do I owe the world for my sins, my shortcomings? These days I’m thinking not half of what I’ve already paid. 

The poem below is how I used to feel.  Used to, as in the past tense.  No more.  No more.  I’ll see ya’ll later.  How much later?  Good fucking question.

Mea Culpa

I who speak so oft of love

oft chew the bitter rind

of what the fates left above

drowned canyons of a mind...

and I who speak so oft of peace

do battles full fierce start

with foes my fears offer lease

as wardens on my heart...

and I who speak so oft of hope

despair will hang for blinds

around the truths I can't dismiss

of wounds time ne'er will bind...

and I who speak so oft of free

wear chains of clan and kin

shackled every morning sun

compassions' brutal whim...

and I who speak so oft of dreams

oft ration sleep to parts

that bodies rest be not the line

where nightmares' race will start...

and I who speak so oft of life

roll life like dice benign

that tumble up a tiny score

against deaths' running line...

and I who speak so oft the code

of logic sans Descartes

amend my days to hold the way

Pray God will take my part.

Driftwood from the beach...

I've been a bit off my feed here the last day or two, kind of flat, kind of blah.  Things are shifting at deep levels, emo-intellectual energy is kind of at a premium.  I was rambling around in the attic, ok, the hard drive, and came across a document holding a long correspondence with an online friend.  The conversation went deep at times, there's things in there worth sharing.  So, since I'm kind of flat at the moment figured what the whale, it won't hurt to recycle some words.  A cut and paste post from personal history that sort of washed up on the shores of today...

January 29, 2007

We’re not the first to see it coming… far from it.  Consider if you will the prophet John on Patmos, penning the book of Revelation.  A simple man he was, wise but simple.  How could he possibly have words to describe modern warfare?  He did his best.  Two points have always struck me.  The one about the seven headed monster that comes from the sea and consumes cities?  Isn’t it funny, that when the engineers, both Soviet and American, had finished their work they’d both concluded seven was the ideal number of warheads to ride a submarine launched ballistic missile?  To my mind that validates the man’s vision.  But the biggie from that vision, the one that has led mankind around by the nose, is the number of man as beast.  I think the man got the mantissa, but had no way to write down the exponent. I think he was trying to communicate the critical population density on Planet Earth.  Every animal population ever studied has shown a critical density… even with every resource imaginable in plentiful supply if the population exceeds a certain density the social structures break down into destructive pathologies.  I think that number for us is 6.6^9… or roughly six and a half billion souls on planet, a number we are approaching at a terrifying rate.  And every social system on the planet is showing acute stress.  AIDS and every other pathogen in Mom Nature’s arsenal may be her attempt to stall off that critical value… we are not helping her one bit.

Happiness runs...

Happiness runs...

In a circular motion, according to the sixties poet-sage Donovan Leach.  Circles indeed.  I said something today that came right on around that circle and smacked me on the back of the head, it did.  In conversation with CJ and company on her blog I observed that relatively few people ever actually speak about the state of happiness.  They’ll speak in neutral terms, academic intellectual term about many shades of shadow, but so rarely do you hear anyone discussing the states of joy, the states of bliss.  Happiness seems a beggar forever dwelling in the cast off cloak off failure... failed.  It doesn’t have a language of it’s own.

What smacked me in the head was an idea spoken in response to CJ saying she feared most folks found happiness a boring thing.  I’d replied I thought it more likely they were intimidated by the idea of speaking about happiness. 

*smack* Intimidated?  OF WHAT?  The thought rings true, and worse than that, it rings hollow.  Just what in the world could cause people to be intimidated by happiness?!? 

It isn’t like no one has noticed this, good grief, it was in the first Matrix movie.  Agent Smith spoke of it when he was interrogating his captive Morpheus, laid it out in fine detail while Neo and company were frantically preparing for the bold rescue that provided half of the movies’ great action sequences.  “...we tried to make it a paradise for you, but your minds rejected the vision, you kept waking up, entire crops lost... Or words to that effect, I’m not sure the quote is dead on. But still, if a hunter killer program on the verge of turning rogue virus understood this thought how can the humans not?  Is it we don’t understand what Agent Smith was talking about?  Or is it that we really, really don’t want to understand?  At this point I’m of a mind to believe the latter is the more likely.

I’ve looked into myself, and realized that for all the words I’ve written I’m just as barren as anyone else in such realms.  It is rare that I’ve found a context to even make the attempt.  I call myself a writer, and I’m intimidated at the thought of trying to write a state of joy.  I suppose I’m like everyone else, that lacking examples of a format I’m not really willing to risk whatever experiences might provide source stock.  I suppose I’m afraid if I botch an attempt to set what I know of happiness into words I might lose the reality of being happy.  In a funny sort of way it feels much like being afraid of the commitment that turns your sweetest lover into your mate.

I’m wondering now as I write this what part this has played in so very many of mankind’s shortcomings.  I’m wondering how much unhappiness endures simply because even those who know happiness have no ability to communicate the nature of that state of life, no way to transfer an understanding of it.  No small amount, that much is for sure.

This is a thing that will take some thought, some meditation, some prayer.  There needs to be a way for those who know happiness to share that knowledge, share it without fear, share it without creating the discomfort of comparison.  There has to be a way.  Sooo... call it a quest.

A bit of a story for a friend ...

The clock was chiming eleven as they returned to the bedroom.  Trish turned down the bed, and taking the robe guided Sundown between the covers.  As Sundown watched from her pillow Trish undressed.

She put no intent on her motions, no effort to be provocative or alluring, she simply removed her clothes, laying them across the armchair.  It was precisely because she put no such thought into her actions that Sundown found it so entrancing, as if Trish bared more of her heart than there was body to show.  When she stood beside the bed the look on her face was one of contemplation, considering how best to approach, how to offer what she wanted to give.  It had been she in the passive role before, but now it was her turn to provide. It put a warm glow in Sundown's heart as she waited with the moment for Trish to decide how she would come to her.

Six Rounds, Yank and Fan...

1) Promote the idea of wealth as selection not accumulation. Hook this to the anti obesity movement, that a life grossly obese with material accumulation is in fact a life injured and abused and should not be considered attractive.

2) Work to diminish the very common idea of authority granted to some assumed competence associated with a prominant position within society. Challenge the one diminsional nature of success as it is defined by the self serving interests of the corporate machine.

3) DEMONSTRATE the power of self knowledge to defeat the lies of advertising that support those one dimensional definitions of success. TEACH people how to defend their SELF from the establishment.

4) RESEARCH the actual structures of the modern economic world... who owns who, and what... utilize social networking systems to assemble accurate tactical information independent of the misleading offerings of the corporate world, valid first hand data from which to act.

5) ORGANISE working "stone soup survival co-ops" based on first person WORL available resources, and this to support survival during the economic conflicts to follow, establish communications between a world wide network of such groups.

6) ENGAGE THE ENEMY IN PROACTIVE AGGRESSIVE ECONOMIC COMBAT!!!! BOYCOTT BOYCOTT BOYCOTT BOYCOTT BOYCOTT BOYCOTT the corporate entities most responsible for injustices perpetuated for the prime motive of unearned profits extorted by way of socio-political clout and psycho-social manipulation of humanity substituted for a quality product offered at a competitive price indicating a best effort of competence. DON'T WHINE...FIGHT!!!!

The DeMet Plan: a shot in the dark...

I got asked the other day if I had any idea where it might be possible to make an intervention in the ongoing meltdown of the economic situation, the economic meltdown stressing the social structures of the world to the breaking point, a way to get behind the driving forces causing the situation and fix the problem rather than try and treat the symptoms.   After a bit of thought here’s my best guess as to how to begin unwinding the current mess.

What I see as needed first and worst is a way to restore the concept of local production.  When I say local I mean local on the global scale, that a nation (geographic region) should, for a great variety of reasons ranging from economic to factors of social psychology, produce what that region primarily consumes. 

To stabilize a world economy there must be at least one element held stable as a safeguard against positive feedback loops in the various systems.  With all due consideration I’m of a mind to believe that stable element should be the monetary value of a life-hour of  productive labor, the one element of commerce which must, by every consideration of rational ethics,  be considered of equal value regardless of where that element originates.

To accept any other definition can only be a rationalization of slavery by degrees,  an open invitation for the corruption and corrosion inherent to slavery to find paths into the deep levels of the world’s various cultures and societies.  For the macroscopic society of man to endure, much less advance, the world community must put an end to international trade wherein the  man-hours of labor exchanged between the cultures are not of equal value. 

So long as the physical location of manufacturing facilities are chosen on the basis of exploiting the differences in the assigned monetary value of a man hour of labor the inherent injustices of capitalism that drive conflict will continue.  Until such time as there is no advantage to be gained in such a manner the entities of commerce will, to the self serving motive of corporate profit first and foremost, continue policies impacting the demand side of any free market economy creating social instability and the climate of conflict.

Now that... is one grandiose pile of fine first class philosophical sounding bullshit.  I’m kind of proud of that one.  Even more so because it’s most likely more true than not.  Of course, naming the problem isn’t even close to figuring out how to fix the problem.  Naming the problem is just a matter of stepping far enough outside day to day living you can see what it is you’re looking at.  Fixing a problem requires a lot more thought, you have to not only see the what is but also see the what might be, and hardest of all pick through all the possible might be’s to find the one that will actually do some good without creating an even darker shadow somewhere else.  If, huge if, you get so far as to think you know which of the possible might be’s would actually work then you get to the hardest part of all: HOW?