Feminism 101... and what to do about it

I've stated that I'm returning to the academic environment this spring with a specific purpose in mind, that being to put a foundation under my resolve to destroy the current fad and fashion of bdsm that is spreading through society like a malignant cancer.  If I thought I could wage war on bdsm with a firearm I'd buy stock in Remington and Winchester and set about making myself a wealthy man.  But I can't, and I know it, not even with the full and willing assistance of every redneck bigot in the land (which is what those in "the lifestyle" understandably enough live in absolute terror of).  You can't kill an idea with a gun.  So if you can't use a gun (and by extrapolation if a gun won't work neither will a half megaton thermonuclear warhead) then what can be used?

The answer to that is found in an old, old saying:  "the pen is mightier than the sword."   But to bring an enemy within the pen's range requires understanding, a superior understanding to that hosted by the enemy, and that is a critical, critical understanding in its' own right.  Virtually every institution of higher learning is host and home to some form of women's studies as a consequence of the feminist movements of the past century or so.  But in blatant discrimination, and total short-sightedness, very few if any host comparable studies in the masculine.  Perhaps such a course exists, somewhere, but if it does I've never heard a whisper concerning a class titled "Manhood 101." 

It's been ten years since last I was on campus, and if upon my return I don't find some rudimentary beginnings of such a class correcting that discrimination will be high among my first priorities.  If the girls can win equal funding for their athletics using gender balance then by Tesla's swingin' testicles the boys should be able to win a bit of academic support (pun penalty 10 pts... go ahead, cheap at the price) in understanding what it is to be a man so their lives and efforts don't end up co-opted into someone else's agenda (a great many of which are unsavory running down to Sodom and Gomorra grade evil). 

You might wonder what this has to do with destroying bdsm.  It has to do with denying a critical line of supply needed by the enemy.  From my observations a large percentage of the lies bdsm uses to seduce both male and female victims are leveraged from the social shear and psychological stress inherent to the current imbalance in gender definition.  Being a man has absolutely nothing to do with, shares nothing in common with the mechanisms of SCCD (slavery and coercion, cruelty and despair... bdsm restated to take it out from beneath the camouflage of that evils' current psycho-sexual  propaganda), a fact that if ever fully known would debilitate a sizable percentage of their recruitment.

A great deal of the despair bdsm promotes to make itself seem the better choice could not exist if the boys actually understood what it is to be an emotionally mature man not dependent upon the feminine (in this context equivalent the submissive) to validate his existence.  Again, from my admittedly limited observations a fair percentage of those involved in bdsm seem to be there simply because bdsm provides them a framework of gender definition, even though the definition provided is (in their mythology technically gender neutral) actually no more than a light coat of paint laid over the most chauvinistically brutal of obsolete patriarchal methodologies the same folks would utterly reject if presented to them under their original names.

So back to the beginning... what to do about feminism?  Absolutely nothing, except learn what can be learned from the girls about how to go about liberating not a nation or a race but rather a gender from a set of obsolete and unwise social conventions threatening to destroy the very society wherein they're found.

Please don't give up, things are startin to change...

I heard a conversation down at the diner the other night that was the most hopeful thing I've heard in ages.  I heard a couple of rather red-neck good ol' boys discussing climate change... and they weren't cussing it as a lie, they were putting some serious common sense to the problem, the kind of thought that in the long run is what just might turn the problem around.  A most hopeful thing, most hopeful.  These are the guys who feed the nation, and a bunch of folks beyond that, they're the ones who live closer to mother nature than 99% of folks, and they were talking like they were convinced the lady needs some help.  Yup, it was a most hopeful thing because these guys are the kind where if a lady needs help you put the beer back in the cooler and postpone the friday fistfight until you've gotten her taken care of.

I'm not among their number, I'm tolerated after a fashion as one of those crazy damn liberals who every now and then makes a little bit of sense.  But when I heard them talking about how to farm major plots of land without diesal power, when they were talking about the legacy technology of steam and starting the process of figuring out how to bring it back better than it was I was totally amazed, and totally delighted. 

I didn't butt in, I just listened, but I'm totally onboard with the idea of replacing diesal engines with hydrogen fired steam, and for more things than just farming.  Peterbuilt, Kenworth, Volvo, are you listening?  Totally clean burn, nothing but water in the exhaust and plenty of power to take a side stream and leave the combustion air cleaner than you found it.  And, being a crazy liberal and all I was looking a bit further down the line and thinking there's is an awful lot of sunshine falling on the south pacific that could be harvested to crack hydrogen off of sea water, essentially unloading at least part of the energy burden off the land areas.  As a side benefit of significant impact such a change would go a long way towards restoring the merchant marine as a major employer, someone would have to go fetch the full fuel cells and do the maintenance on the production bouys riding the currents.  That... would get the sailors back in the game, and if there's one bunch of folks who can compete with the farmers for making it happen one way or another it's the sailors.   

Painting Fool...

I read of art and artists, and the folks who write about them will usually point to some specific range of time and say "this was his productive period..." and then launch off into what is known of the artist's life at that time, the events leading up to that time.  Ok, it's taken me a few years to understand that strange habit, the first thing I had to understand was what actually drives someone to paint.  Yea, well, if you're smart (that is to say, not intending to destroy yourself) you paint instead of over indulging in alcohol or other mind shifting things to keep your attention focused on something relatively harmless while dealing on things anything but.  As I write it's give or take OH six hundred hours now (that classic Robbin William's "Goodmorning Viet Nam" OH my God it's to damn early to be awake...), and just to flatter me own vanity I think I'm going to pretend that someday someone might actually give a hoot about my paintings and write something about me, and what the whale, they should have something to work from.



No...a study in brown


This one marks the return of a sad sick memory a few days ago, one from that childhood hell house next door.  The memories are buried, thankfully in some regards I suppose, but buried memories are still memories and will still influence what happens after their making.  The memory that returned was seeing feet in the window, feet on a table, and realizing I'd seen similar several times and the screams were always the most agonizing when you could see feet.   They were caning their victims I'm sure, and caning is a brutal and bruising form of pain.  Even the arab and oriental barbarians who still use it as a form of capital punishment set a count of strokes, somehow I don't think the shitheads next door were counting, somehow I think they'd judge when to quit by when the screams started getting to weak to be entertaining anymore. 

How do I know it's a real memory?  When it crosses my thought everything, and I do mean everything, goes flat gray featureless without color or life, without emotion or motion, time stands still and all I can sense is a pain that reminds me of a heart attack, and then when life and light and motion return it's in a rush of pure rage, an anger beyond describing, which I'm sure is why my sleep schedule these days is rolling like a bowling ball down some ally... a piece of the blocking mechanism failed, and the subconscious is trying to get things back in order before something worse slips the line. 

Right.  No, not right.  As wrong as wrong can be, and I don't give a flying fuck who says otherwise.  Which is why I'm filling my time doing paintings, it's so much safer (and less of a temptation) than going out in the country and burning gunpowder practicing quick draw and rapid fire while trying to paint the face of those disgusting barbarian assholes (who are dead of old age by now, dammit, I want so badly to shoot them just for the satisfaction of watching them die and go to the hell they so ripely deserve) onto the tin cans on the other side of the ravine... yea, it's better to just paint, and plan a less destructive but more devestating way of getting to their heirs and descendents still polluting the world of today.  Painting is a good thing to do while you plan, keeps your hands busy and keeps other folks from asking you what you're up to...

The Dogs of War...bow wow m*f*

"Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition…" The quote originated on this date seventy two years ago, a Sunday, a navy chaplain who continued his sermon while chain passing ammo to the anti-aircraft guns trying to defend a doomed fleet. Sunday December 7, 1941… the surprise attack on a sleeping Pearl Harbor, the day to be remembered in infamy, the first day of the United States' involvement in what many will say was the last undisputedly righteous war.

Things have changed a lot since then, and nothing has changed more than the nature of war. Oh, there's still soldiers and sailors, ships and tanks and guns, armies and navies and of course combat aircraft, but the reality has become that those weapons are not the only weapons nor even the most effective weapons. As history has unfolded its' become ever more obvious they're primarily involved with minimizing the residual consequences of how the serious conflicts are being waged. Even without the nuclear arsenals the terrible destructive power of modern weaponry just doesn't make it very feasible for the major powers to engage in old school warfare anymore. Bad for business, very bad for business. But nothing is more foolish than to assume that since the major nations aren't shooting at each other, at least not directly, that they have renounced conflict one with the other. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The most serious campaigns are now being fought on terrain impossible to access before the advent of modern technology. In the days when the Big E and her sisters Hornet and Yorktown stood out of Pearl Harbor to engage their enemy outnumbered four to one it simply was not possible to wage the kind of wars known to the modern world. No, I'm not talking about satellite controlled drones and supersonic stealth aircraft, I'm talking about the ability to access the attention of major chunks of your enemies population, to manipulate and maneuver the developmental parameters of their youth, the ability to wage covert cultural warfare from behind the smiling façade of international trade. The media power to wage such conflict just did not exist.

It's totally ironic, really. The United States military stands ready to unleash biblical grade hellfire and brimstone on fifteen seconds notice in physical defense of the nation, and that's just while they're getting the heavy stuff warmed up, and yet no one had the good sense to challenge the Nintendo invasion. Oh well, we hit back with John Wayne and the cowboy mythos backed up by the Door's LA Woman brand of sucker fuck 'em into abandoning that oh so fragile cowboy ethic in favor of raw animal lust, and guess what? A scant twenty years later they've given up having babies, I think we're going to win that one. That's the Japanese. But the Chinese are a different story… Chairman Mao did a good job of getting them ready to fight, and they I'm afraid are kicking our ass, the caste and class systems of servitude they've operated out of for millennia making a serious try at destroying the once vaunted American freedom of thought, every perversion known to history implanted on the culture and on the upswing as the count of viable fertile families is falling like a rock... yea, I'm afraid we're in as bad a shape vis-à-vis the Chinese now as we were back in that dark day when a battered and beat up Big E was the only thing that stood between the Japs and victory. We live in interesting times. 

To write a Villain...



Baron Vladimir Harkonnen

 I write stories, and perhaps my favorite part of writing stories, other than getting the dang thing out of my head, is the inventing of good characters.  Each character is a unique creature that evolves as the story gets told, the events and understandings within the plot impacting on them according to the nature I've given them just as they would on any human being.  Heroes and heroines are of course where the majority of the focus must fall, they're who carry the tale.  But for a hero to shine that character must be matched against a villain believably evil enough, believably powerful enough, to make his defeat a major accomplishment.

To create a believable character is an excellent exercise in introspection, for the fact is that all any writer can do by way of creating a character is to take some portion of his own persona and build it a different path of evolution whereby the character came to incorporate that fraction of the writer.  To write a hero or heroine is safe enough, most generally what you're doing is amplifying what you'd like to believe are, or would be given the situation, your more noble traits.  The only real risk is allowing ego and wishful thinking to take your character beyond the believable.   But to write a good villain is a decidedly more risky endeavor, for that involves a dance with your dark side, it involves taking what you'd consider one of your weaknesses and building a character where that facet came to be the driving force of a major player in your story.

For this reason a great many villains are flat and rather one dimensional, but the truly great villains are not.  They are full human beings, often almost a sympathetic creature the reader can full understand, understand and empathize with well enough to demand the reader condemn the villain not for any one choice to action but rather with the many choices and actions that all reflect the same weakness never challenged, never mastered.  Where a good hero may carry the plot and action of a story a good villain is as often as not where the moral of a story will ride in the form of a character who portrays the ultimate consequences of allowing some weakness, some deformity of psyche or soul to maintain dominance over a life.

I'm paying a bit more attention to my villains these days than I used to, and with very deliberate good cause.  To build a well crafted villain is to understand the human condition from the perspective of your own weaknesses and insecurities, it is to take those less than sterling attributes and set the chosen one into a scenario where that test of life will be failed and the character sinks rather than ascends. 

To write a working and believable villain is to understand how to understand the real villains in your life in such a manner that they might be defeated.  To write a solid villain is to understand how to avoid becoming one in reality, and when you're in the process of overhauling segments of yourself to go into battle against the evil and pathos of what you perceive as villainy full and complete that understanding is a very good thing.  It can, in the end, save more than your life.

Invasion Training...

How do you train for an invasion?  Hard, that's how.  Run 'em till they puke and then make them get up and run some more.  Abuse 'em, psyche and soul, and see how long they hold unit cohesion, how long it takes to break them down into cliques blaming each other for the life they're living.  Then scramble the pack and do it all over again.  When they're twice as tough as they were at first you begin to think they might be getting close to ready.  You train hard because no matter how hard you are on your boys the enemy is going to be harder.  That's how it is, that's how it has to be.

But that's talking about warfare in the physical... Guadalcanal or Normandy.  But there are other kinds of invasions as well, and truth is you train just as hard for those because the beachhead, that first absolutely critical fifty miles between your back and the water, will be just as defended there as anywhere.  I'm in training for the second kind, and I don't expect it to be an easy campaign.  I'll be going into the realms of those who think, who think, they understand the human mind, and they are not a lightweight foe.  I'm going in to correct some deep errors and deliberate ignorance in their thinking, errors that have over the years given rise to quite a collection of miseries including my prime enemy bdsm.  Those errors have been in that mode of thought since very near its' beginnings.  There are many and a many in there whose lives are dependent on those errors remaining in place, and beyond them there are probably ten thousand individuals for every one shrink whose life of sin and contagious misery is justified on some extrapolation of those errors.  It's going to get interesting, and quite possibly hand to hand (so to speak, actually head to head) before the end. 

So I'm in training, driving myself to emulate my enemies actions and intentions to test my own resilience.  It's a matter of pushing and pulling, grinding and cutting and eating cold food under a poncho hiding from an even colder rain so to speak, compelling myself to face now as many of the thoughts they'll be using as weapons as imagination is able to generate running at 110% under nitrous and a blower.  A great deal of this is occurring along the conscious/sub-conscious interface of lucid dreaming.  Let me tell you, lucid dreaming is a very interesting place to train.  There's simply no telling what the hidden back side of your mind will throw at you when you demand it cooperate with a conscious decision.  But, that is the terrain of the battle when the enemy counterattacks, it's really the only way to go about it.

*chuckle*  But no, I've not seen any monkeys trying to spit out an eel, my symbolism are even stranger than that.  Far stranger.



Bar Card wanderings...

Several times in my life I've given thought to just getting in the *whatever I'm driving* and taking off... leaving town and not looking back.  Of course, anyone who's ever spent any time on the road knows about how long the romance in that lasts, and it isn't very long.  But still, sometimes the fantasy of a carefree life of travel presents itself, and sometimes I indulge it even knowing full well that "carefree" and "travel" really don't do well locked in the same suitcase for any great length of time.  Common sense usually edges into the picture after a bit, but when common sense is feeling benign and gentle it usually takes the form of "hey, you could go around and sell something really neat to the folks you meet..." and the fantasy migrates away from just running away into running for, and eventually to some justification for staying on the move.  Tonight's version?  Business cards, produced on a totally uber cool designed and built by yours truly mobile production facility (that just happens to fit beautifully under the back lid of me old '74 VW bus ;-) featuring quickie impressionistic portraits of the folks I'd meet, so they'd have a really cool card to hand out to the oh-so-hot stranger they might meet in a bar, or better still the grocery store, and maybe the major hot other would turn out to be a true lady or gentleman and they'd fall in love and have themselves a family and grandkids and all that stuff and then when Katie finally says goodbye and goes home some child would be looking at the book of memories and see the card and go "wow... whoawaywow... that was Grandma?"  Yea, sometimes I entertain the fantasy, but only when I really need to.

When you can answer your own question...

[a Hearts of Space free write, an unedited ramble through the backside of me brain... read if you wish, or don't read, I don't care one way or the other, I'm just posting it more or less to take the place of going to confession in a church I don't belong to.]

Sha Haisat: Perchance to dream...

I'm returning to the story of Sha Haisat and Keyanna, interplanetary colonists... a work in progress, the story of Sha, who becomes an accidental  God to his world, no longer truly a man but still of human origin and very much a living God to the humans on his planet, and the long, long, long line of the Keyannas, the high preistess' of the religion that grows up around him, all of whom are true genetic replicas of his original ship born woman Keyanna Tryon, each woman mother to her own replacement concieved to Sha during the wilderness retreat of her trial.

This next set of panels will deal with the months Keyanna hides from the other colonists in the wilderness waiting for Sha to mature enough, as a fixed node, for her to simply talk to him directly.  She brought two months worth of rations, but needs at least three, but Keyanna being Keyanna this is not really a problem.  She has two full Ranger field kits, weapons and tools, the planet is fertile, benign, totally human compatible and she is a savvy strong young woman, she makes do as a hunter and a gatherer in the wild.  But her days living almost feral are not really the point of this next set, for she is also in daily conversation with First, and Second, they who are Sha's southern and eastern adjoining edges in the strange matrix of life that lives below the sands of the equitorial desert, and for a human to speak for prolonged periods with a fixed node entity is most definitely a mind expanding experience... hallucinations and dreams and an almost omniscient portal onto the experiences of the other humans... by the time Keyanna returns to her own kind she is indeed the caliber of woman to be a global high priestess to an emerging society.

Standing woman, standing wave...

I don't make a habit of reposting other people's work, but I'm going to make an exception today.  I'm going to ask the beautiful women whose images grace the beginning of this post to help me make a point.  What I'd like to talk about is actually one of life's deeper questions, a question that has been dodged and ducked, covered up and ignored, proscribed and prohibited for a very long time now that really needs answered.  It's a rather pointy question actually, for as delightfully curved as the subject is, and it goes like this:  What in the name of Noah's pet whales is so intimidating about these beautiful creatures that one way or another society as a whole considers them such a threat???

Please understand, I'm not talking about the women themselves of course.  For them I would hope (me being me and all, hetero monogamous hopefully hopeless romantic that I am) a good and loving man strong enough not to base his ego on her beauty, several healthy children who will become a wholesome family extending many generations from she who was half the foundation of that family.  You know, my version of a happy life.  But that's just me.  No, what I'm talking about is what they portrayed for the photographer's lens when they took on the challenge of portraying not they themselves but an archetype of the idealized woman.  Why would society have a problem with that?

Spelunking...

Originally published March 12, 2012

This post is an attempt to answer the question posed by my friend CJ on the previous post.  She asks “If this kind of image depicts universal psychic pain, why is it always women who suffer it? In traditional oil painting and sculpture, both genders expressed pathos. In bondage art, where are the bound and tormented naked men?”   It is a very good question, and in my opinion it reaches out a great deal deeper into society than simply art.  Regardless of what is claimed by those who produce such images the fact there is such a defined gender imbalance removes such images from the realms of art and into the realm of pornography.

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The males are there CJ, they are.  But the bias against the male in those works is even more pronounced than the bias against the male in “conventional” nude art.  If anything the bias is even more pronounced.  You have to go looking to find such works, and believe me, you want a layer of rubber between your skin and what you’ll be wading in while you search.  It’s a sewer, and no mistake.  I’ve been down that hole a couple of times (wearing full class-A HAZMAT complete with SCBA, so to speak) and what I saw there was both heartbreaking  sad, and informative concerning cePornography’s net effect on the human critter.

Let me preface what I say next by saying this:  the various forms and fashions of sexuality can only reflect the inner state of a life in actions, the actions in and of themselves cannot change the state of a life, at most all they can do is reinforce what someone brought with them.  A great deal of the effort and angst of alternate sexualities is spent to ignore this fact. 

Of equal impact is the fact that cePornography is a consummately social creature, absolutely conventional in its’ essence, totally dependent on cultural biases and limitations to empower the perversions offered.  From that fact it is easily seen that all social conventions will be reinforced in such realms.  So of course in the perversions of pain the conventional establishment Anglo tradition allowing a female the right to display her pain,  emotional or otherwise, will be fully supported while a male (to be a MAN in the eyes of ceEstablishment) is not to show his.  I’d say this accounts for a great deal of the gender disparity seen (or not) in the raw number of offerings put before the public.

The above might account for the raw numbers, but it doesn’t address the underlying why of such works being created in the first place, it doesn’t really offer an emotional understanding of the why of the matter.  It is hard approaching impossible to put an intellectual understanding to what is in fact an irrational emotional construct.  So  it’s time to discard literality, and engage symbolic translation protocols to approximate those used by the collective entities actually responsible.  What follows will be in a format approximating a conversations, a stage script, those speaking identified at the start of each comment.

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You Ride Alone...

Originally Published March 9, 2012

I've been in a totally bummed out mood all freakin' afternoon.  Not even Mel Brooks and Maker's Mark could break it over.  That's what usually happens when that little light bulb above your head turns on, and what the light shows you is something contradictory and sad, yet another set of loops in the Gordian knot of misery that is the human condition.  It's an occupational hazard of being a philosopher, it's what happens when you're chasing some particular "why" and it leads you over a cliff you didn't see coming.  Lord knows I should have seen it coming, it evolved from one of several standing quagmires under consideration.  But I didn't, and now I'm paying the price.  Oh, well. 

It began with the previous post that began as a comment on CJ's blog trying to blow open the reasons behind her very legitimate concern and complaint for debate, trying to move away from indignation and outrage into some mode of thought to actually do something about the problem rather than just vent and repent having noticed it in the first place.  What tripped the whole circumstance was CJ's outrage at a fetish image posted on DevArt, a graphic and frankly rather gross image of a girls tummy deformed and defaced with quite a number of large gauge needles piercing her skin, pulling her skin into knots up her belly and between her breasts to look like the spine of some emaciated creature.  It was worse than disgusting, it was truly pitiful. 

But still, being objective, I had to defend it as being art.  Most certainly art capturing a totally deformed, degraded and degrading frame of mind, but still art. As I told CJ, art makes no promise concerning comfort.  Art is quite capable of communicating a scream of emotional pain, a scream of social agony the artist really has little understanding of.  But a scream of pain can be a traumatic thing in its' own right, inflicting pain on all who perceive it, and CJ was holding forth that art should self censure such screams rather than inflict them on those who have no knowledge of pain at such intensity. 

I tried to point out that image was not unique, that I'd seen many other images of a similar nature, some calling themselves fetish work, others from the deviant side of hard core porn, but all of them sharing the same sense of a scream ripped from the lives of those portrayed by some force beyond their control.  I wanted to point out that the ever growing number of such images, the never changing similarity in the symbolisms they present almost demands the assumption of some common pathogen impacting on the culture.  I was hoping to spark some dialog as to what that common pathogen might be, where it might be possible to intervene with a deliberate intent.  I tried, but I failed.  What I got back were stock out of the box stereotypes of the sort used to dismiss an unhappy thought into the limbo of the socially ignored.

That bothered the fuck out of me, it did and it does.  I was stewing, thinking hard thoughts about my friend, wondering why.  Yea, I was just that deep.  I know better than to wonder why about a why, that gets you going in circles that can be hard to break out of.  Well, in one sense I was lucky I suppose, I broke out of the circle soon enough, but what broke me out of that spiral wasn't so very nice.  I realized something much, much larger than anything involved with art, art was just the catalyst of perception, and it is that realization that is kicking my ass  tonight.

Our culture is dying, there's no denying it.  Every single indicator on the board is deep in the red, every critical system failing if not failed.  The United States of America is on its' last legs as a viable culture.  This fact is becoming known, and of course the associated despair is having its' way with the attitudes of the population.  What I realized is the nature of how the culture is dealing with that despair, where that scream of social agony represented by that gross photograph actually originates.

Of course, of course the culture has to put forth some token effort at saving itself, of course it must.  For the most part those token efforts revolve around the children, children who are the hope of the future.  The battle cry of the day is Protect The Children!  All well and good, but what must the children be protected from?  What the children need protecting from are the same things that have damaged the culture of course, the children are part of the culture.  So what have the dumb fuck hypocrites of America done?  They've focused all their efforts on protecting the children from the least likely of hazards, the one that in absolute statistical fact is the most minor of threats. 

They are focusing a landslide of attention on the evil of children abused in the production of sexual pornography, and what I realized was the overwhelming popularity of that focus is that it allows this totally fucked up suicidal culture to absolutely and completely ignore every other form of pornography attacking the children, the very forms of pornographic thought that are in the process of destroying it!  They can't defend the children against those forms of pornography, those are what the adults are addicted to!  Pistol porn, money porn, power porn, the list just goes on and on, every one of which impacts on the children's lives, every one of which does deep damage, every one of which is socially invisible.  Our society is committing suicide by refusing to admit pornography doesn't have to be sexual in nature.

That's where that scream of pain seen in that photo originates, that is the scream of those who can sense, who can feel the impact of all the other pornographies ripping at their lives, lives that have been betrayed into being totally dependent on the very society that has betrayed them!  The self destructive life styles are just their way of trying to attract attention to what their society has already agreed to ignore.  The poor fools.  They could commit slow suicide on the six o'clock news with a full manifesto as to why and no one is going to really give a damn.  They can't, not without admitting it should be they, not the kids, who deserve to die. 

Shit.  Well, at least it is an answer.  And it fits the observed facts, the observed behaviors.  I was a total fucking fool to ever think art might be stout enough to challenge in against that. No way.  Art will probably do a good job of recording the convulsions generated by the death agony of this land for history to examine at some later date, but the very nature of the people involved with art precludes it doing much more than that. 

Oh, well.  Idiot, get on your horse and ride, you knew when you signed up most often you'd end up riding alone. 

The Sadder Fate...

In the back lore of The Lord of the Rings it tells how the race of Orcs were created from the Elves, unfortunates captured and tormented generation after generation until their nobility and innocence degraded away into ultimate bitterness and despair, how Morgoth the great enemy unable to create true life on his own mocked the creation of life with the corruption of life.  Morgoth was eventually cast out, denied any access to the living lands, in time his great captain Souron met the same fate. 

But the fate of the Orcs lingered on, it is said Aragorn gave them a land to be their own, that they have a place to live what life might remain to them after the fall of their masters.  The King was as generous as fate would allow, even though he must have understood the fate he sent them to.  No tale tells of them after the fall of Souron, their ultimate end is not known.  I doubt they endured long, deprived of the will of their masters I doubt they would have reproduced in great numbers, such despair as would have been theirs does not do good things for fertility.

In my darker moments I sometimes wonder what became of them as the ages unrolled from then till today.  I visit their fate when the fate of my land and times weighs heavy on my thoughts, for surely our world, troubled and evil as it might be, cannot compare to the world known by those last  generations of the Orc.  Free from the will of their masters the comparison between their fate and that of the other speaking peoples would surely have been a crushing burden to bear.  At times I listen to my world, listen to the whispers below the whispers, at times I think I can still hear the echo of their last despair in the first winds of winter.  I hear their laments in so many places, to many places. 

The Orcs of Morgoth are fictional, but there are those whose despair is coming to reprise them into modern reality.  Compassion is the only true antidote, and the resolve that they should be the last such creatures to ever endure mortality burdened to such an existence.  It is the least of things, really, to endure such an understanding, and it is the greatest of things to dedicate all effort to translating that resolve from a passing thought into the facts of history.  It is actually a great deal of what powers my life, when you get right down to it.

Domestic warfare...

I... am a kipple bigot.  I hate kipple, loathe it, despise it.  There is very little I like less than finding the remnants of day before yesterday, or five weeks ago yesterday, dug in and occupying some odd crevice or corner.   It galls me, how it builds ramparts from straw wrappers and a hot sauce packet, half a banana peel and a crust of bread.  It infuriates me how it mans those battlements and mocks the broom, waiting until everyone is asleep to ride out and colonize another corner.  I hate kipple.

Of course it's all part of a plot you see, there's no way it's happening without help.  Me?  I blame the dustbunnies.  They are obviously descended from the Nazi's, just look at their swastika shaped ears.  It is an alliance made in housekeeper's hell it is.  Where kipple likes to dig in the dustbunnies are mobile, mounted, the cavalry of chaos.  Once they formed their alliance everything just became that much harder: the kipple travels with a dustbunny escort, and the dustbunnies take shelter in the kipple's fortresses.  Not a good situation, not at all.

But there is hope on the horizon, soon the poor broom will have something the kipple and the dustbunnies won't be able to defend against.  For all their tenacious aggression they still can't turn the air black with flack, and their doom will arrive from above.  Yes, airpower is on the way.  Death will fall upon them from the skies and there will be nothing they will be able to do about it.  The broom is getting some serious reinforcements... (heavy drum roll followed by the battle theme from "Patton" on a screaming lead guitar ala Hendrix)... the air hose and shop vac are coming in the house tomorrow.  Deal and done, take that suckers!

Can you tell I've gone back to keeping house at my house after a prolonged absence leaving the defense of domestic hygiene in the hands of those who think kipple is first cousin to civil engineering and dustbunnies make cute pets?  Oh yea... it's gonna happen.

*nos walks off whistling... dum de dum dum dum diddly yum dum, dum dee-aa a dum... grin*

The Secret Smithy

Shackles gold there she wore,
Abiding mark from fetters torn
As freedom won for passion's core
Compels a dream of loves reborn
To misted moon by hunting horn
Soft sound the cry all sisters form
Balms willing pain of virgins torn
By thrust of lover quick and warm.
Beguile she now dreamt hunter's heart
His hunger fanned from coals to flames
Full lights the forge of carnal art
Love's secret smith eternal claims
That pride melt down to mold the part
Of lover's shackled heart to heart.

Yet another mindless doodle...



Rebuking Chaos



Sometimes I wonder just what these doodles mean.  They really aren't planned, they just sort of fall off onto the tablet.  I've gotten to where I treat them a lot like gauges, instruments that indicate something about the inside of my head, I'm just not quite sure how to interpret them.  Sometimes one will turn out quite different from the others, and those tend to mark the beginning of a change in deep attitudes.  Not that this one is one such, no, it's quite in the groove with the last few images added to the portfolio... feminine heroic worked in a palette removed from life, the mythic, the legendary, the symbolic.  Now if this was someone elses painting and I'd read from them what I just wrote I'd be wondering if perchance they were getting a bit discouraged, a bit disallusioned, a bit resigned to disappointment.  Nah, that can't be me, pretty sure I've been all of those things for quite some time now.  Nothing new about that, not for me, I've been living besieged by doomsayers of one form or another for a long time now, like most of my life.  There's no way I'm shoring up the battlements of hope and optimism with art, no way.  There's no way I've become so pessimistic about the state and fate of my land and culture, no way.  Yea, right.  And Fidel Castro didn't like cigars, either. 



...

Advice from the Ancients...

Beware and be wary, not all succubi exist only in spirit form: the corrosion of the modern world has allowed many to escape into mortality and they walk among us on a daily basis.  Sadly, the same holds true for incubi, their brothers in corruption.  The older I get the more I realize how much solid psychology got incorporated into the legends of antiquity and is still ignored to this very day.  Ok, yes, I was in a bar recently where the meat market was up and in full swing.  A disgusting place, really, don't think I'll go back there.  I'd rather pass my time someplace where it doesn't feel like I need a condom for my soul.

Study in Black and Blues...

This one, well this one was an accident, no thought, no planning, just letting the fingers do their thing while the mind wandered elsewhere.  It happens, sometimes, when your mind is wandering a fertile place.  I used to have the delightful experience of having it happen quite often when sharing time with the sweethearts who'd entertain with gesture and glance, persona and passion.  They' find a common resonance between hearts and I could let my mind wander in the sweet fantasies they'd portray while snippets of the dreams they wove would fall off my fingers and land on the keyboard.  So since this painting came from almost the same source, perhaps a few favorite rhymes gifted by the lovely ladies might be appropriate... just for the sake of tenderness recalled in a world where tenderness is so rarely called at all...

She a mighty river flows
Smooth to tortured seas
Softening the salt of tears
With her company...

Bring to me that empty place

...that only love can fill,

Lay down close beside me

...trust me hold you still

Until your cry is not to pain

...your shiver not a chill

But rather every nerve brought full

...with any joy you'd will.

Long the night the heroes marched

...between the fell and fen...

And long the night their lovers spent

...in hope they'd see them in.

Darling let me close your eyes with the brush of tender lips

That you might live within this dream that rides my fingertips,

Let me lift you from this place, this troubled midnight stand

Into a realm of glowing light beyond the sins of man

Where love is not a thing of power, possession guarded first

But rather flows in gentle streams to everyone who thirsts.

Found between the light of love

...and flesh where lives the lamp

A subtle zone of power plays

...Where Eros makes his camp.

Set soft the light through evening shade

Set soft the tone of strings

Set soft the gates of heaven's door

To pass an angel wings...

Love so often made of glass

...of several different kinds...

The fluted shapes the blower makes

...or mirrors of the mind.

The muse is an enigma

To the man who feels her touch

For she his heart will open where

A thought dare never brush.

For woman suckles more than babes

She feeds the inner child

Of those she shares her life love with

Across the years of trial.

A broken heart a breach of faith

...a fallen dream's demise...

That covers all the lands in gray

...as teardrops fill the skies.

Lady, roll me like the tumbling dice

When luck is running high,

We'll play for things that mortals know

Make the angels wish... and sigh.

Methinks I'd need a lean fast ship

And a crew with nerve of steel

To slip this line of pirate hearts

And smuggle something real.

No bond of flesh for she and I

...but rather of the mind...

A mating of a man and muse

...that art be left behind.

A softer drama drawn from life

The courage and the heart

To take a wild and wicked world

And work it into art.

Woman flesh makes not a meal

To feed the bodies part

But woman's love a banquet full

To way worn weary heart.

Be with me when the day is new

And the clock our master be

I'll lead the master off a bit

To buy you breath that's free...

Be with me when the day is young

We'll set it to a pace

Will leave us on the shores of sleep

With peace upon our face...

Be with me when the day is old

And I'll build in you a fire

Will take us safe across the night

Beyond all dreams desire.

A vagabond a wandering

Is what I'd mostly been

But there I lingered long enough

To find a group of friends.

***

Dedicated of course to the lasses and ladies of Met Art Live in the years 2006 through 2008, those sweet sisters of seduction who did not seduce to despoil

but rather seduced to free the hidden dreams of hearts besieged... here's to you girls, I do miss you.

The Well: Feet

"Damnation! Talk about a pile a pukin' puppies," was the first thing Tina said when the door was closed.

"Yup," Shelly said as she got settled in, "not much of much at all."

I have to hand it to the girls, they travel in style.  The inside of Miss M would make Rolls Royce take notice.  I was on the jump seat that swings out of the sleeper, I think they stole it out of a Volvo.

"So what are we watching for?"  Shelly asked, busy closing a set of curtains around the windows.

"Tanker trucks," I answered,  "that haul nasty things."

"Oh really," Tina said, and proved she was nobodies innocent. "Like maybe the kind where the drivers all have an Italian accent?"

To Love a Lass...

I've come to the conclusion it isn't wise to try and imagine her, the woman of your dreams, not to much anyway.  Kind of sets preconceived notions in your head that just might get in the way of recognizing her if and when she shows up in your life.  Better to build her in bits and pieces, traits, attributes, responses, but not really appearance.  Everyone has a double, somewhere, and it could really suck if you build a face and then fall in love with her double who really isn't like her at all.  Johnny Walker's wisdom, don't you know...

The Lesser of Two Evils...

There is no lesser among evils

I've learned something this past year.  I've learned that sadists are easier to deal with than masochists.  Why?  Because it's a whole lot easier to hate a sadist, dehumanize them, dismiss them into the abyss with a look or a double tap of hunter hollow point.  Masochists on the other hand have a bad habit of becoming sympathetic creatures leaching onto the more noble aspects of the species,  they like to latch onto the instinct to protect and nurture, have a way of corrupting hope implanting undefined guilt in their victims so they can manipulate sympathy with the acute pathos of the pain they enjoy.  I've come to the conclusion the majority of the harm bdsm causes the world at large is actually worked through the masochists, not the sadists.  Strange as it might sound to hear this coming from me but all things considered the sadist is actually the lesser 

STOP RIGHT THERE

DO NOT FINISH THE CLICHÉ.

It's an old phrase, the lesser of two evils, and choosing the lesser of two evils is not a good thing to do.  At the point you choose one evil over the other you've just invited corruption into your life.  Yes, you did.  Of your own free will you just chose an evil, now didn't you.  Instead of saying there is no viable choice here, they're both unacceptable, you just rationalized some shade of gray from a reality of jet black.  Evil loves to manipulate people into believing they must choose only from the choices it provides.  Point of fact evil spends a great deal of effort to maintain such lies, it really does, and well it should since those lies provide it a great deal of sustenance. 

There's an awful lot of evil operating these days.  There's always been evil, of course there has, but in varying amounts, varying potencies.  However the sum total of active evil does vary across history, and in this time the level of evil is approaching a critical apogee where societies fail and fall into ruin as a consequence of the toxins created by the evils entrained within.  When I say evil I'm not talking about things that are different or non-conformist, I'm not talking things called immoral where the immorality is a matter of a successful but different form of social or family structure of functional design, I'm talking deep attitudes concerning life and love that degrade life from a viable potential for happiness to miserably sterile self deception in direct proportion to the presence of that thought.

As I look about the ascending evil I find most appalling is the lifestyle known as bdsm, the heirs of Sodom and Gomorra who re-entered the modern world by way of the Marquis de Sade during the degenerate days of the French revolution, an evil that uses the symptoms of the psychiatric disease sadomasochism  as barbarian coinage desperate people must use to buy admittance into that imbedded subculture where mental illness is accepted, accommodated to stasis in order that the afflicted lives so supported will return sustenance to evil inflicting their pain and confusion, their jade and despair on any and every other genuine human being of open heart who chances to come in contact.  I call bdsm enemy.

One of the more consistent things I've noticed about my enemy is the common claim they're not so very different, that they're just like everyone else, just... misunderstood.  Misunderstood may well be the truth of the matter, but it is not they who are misunderstood, in point of fact the situation is quite the opposite.

What was misunderstood by them is the difference between civil safety and rational acceptance.  What they misunderstood was that their right to exist free of harassment does not validate as wholesome and acceptable whatever affliction or aberration of life-style might have brought the harassment down on them in the first place.

The responsibility for this misunderstanding is easily placed.  It belongs to the mental health profession for failing to make clear this difference in its' writings and in its' therapy sessions, and for failing to firmly and very publicly reinforce this point when the minions of bdsm began to seek social comfort by publicly rationalizing their afflictions as something fashionable, desirable, a fine new form of recreation for the jaded using this misunderstanding as justification.  Of course, add a quarter teaspoon of paranoid mistrust to the mix and it's equally easy to see why the mental health profession might not want to correct such a misunderstanding.

The inmates of bdsm are no doubt one of the mental health profession's most stable cash crops.  The greater majority of them are members to have a social circle who will accept without condemnation the kinks and anomalies in their personalities, that being one of the larger hidden values of membership.  Of course, once their lives are committed in such a direction the essence of whatever set them desperate enough to seek such company in the first place must never change.  To heal, to outgrow whatever it might have been would eventually set them as outsiders, different, eventually unwelcome and so of course the community assists any member in good standing in not only enduring their afflictions but in maintaining them… that being the true bondage part of the bdsm lifestyle.  In any case, regardless of their... recreations... they have to be mentally stable enough to stay out of jail, keep a job and feed themselves.  Such mundane maintenance as that is what pays the bills for most shrinks. 

What is not commonly understood by the rest of us, by anyone actually, is the exact nature of the damage caused by exposure to this evil, and lacking such understanding the vast majority of folks kinky or not assume that so long as the perversions are kept hidden away, practiced in private, never spoken of in public then there really is no cause for concern.  The evil of bdsm is totally onboard with this idea, it demands its' minions practice a quite respectable degree of secrecy.  And yet those lives do not exist in a vacuum, in a foreign land or on a separate planet, they are intermingled and interactive throughout the macroscopic society of man.

Every affliction has a definable pathology, there's an entire branch of medical science dedicated to such work.  It is their efforts guide the remainder of medicine in their quest for cures.  Sadly, most of their work is done on what's left of those who've already succumbed to some illness.  Equally many diseases are communicable, transferred from one to another, and again there is a dedicated branch of medical science that studies the ways and means of contagion.  But again, that branch of medicine does not consider the ills and afflictions treated by the mental health profession, until very recently the raw data to begin such work has simply not been available.  But now that such data is becoming available perhaps they should, since any claim that mental illness cannot be contagious is easily dismissed.  From the existing work of psychology it is well known that when extreme trauma is excluded the vast majority of the remaining discomforts and disabilities that are psychological in nature have for their beginnings some weighted interaction with another human being.

Anyone who has ever gone spelunking in their own mind for the source of some shadow on their life can tell you as often as not the originating event, the original source of some shadow turns out to be something that in retrospect is actually quite a minor thing amplified and expanded by later events.  Such searches as that are of course the exclusive domain of the one searching, but what of the nature of the amplification?  How often is the circuitry of  amplification provided by another, often without the searcher being aware of the source? 

These days with bdsm providing an ever enlarging pool of those who present aberration as something fashionable who can say how much extra misery and wasted potential is being burdened on society by their influence?  Who can list the rationalizations running down to outright lies being told to the confused of all ages by those whose abnormalities stand as   justification for a perverted lifestyle?  Just how far do the tentacles of bdsm really spread? What is the true cost, the true risk, of allowing such a contagion vector to exist and expand unchallenged?  I don't believe anyone can answer those questions, but I do think society had damn well better begin trying before bdsm creates a true plague of dysfunction.

Maybe you think plague is a bit to strong a word, to scary a word, but plague is the proper word for the potentials.  The mental health profession has worked long and hard to show the damage done by mental illnesses, but only in macabre fiction has anyone ever attempted to show what life would be like should the illnesses become the average, forms of fiction not surprisingly highly favored by those in "the lifestyle."  Still and all, do the math and if the current growth trends of bdsm continue in a few more years you might find yourself in jail for drug evasion and dereliction of therapy living in a society to make the absolute darkest visions of Poe and Dante, Orwell and Huxley seem totally tame and timid by comparison.  More to the point, you could find yourself living in a land where the count of those stable and sane enough to make any meaningful attempt at a self sufficient society has fallen to a minority to small to maintain civilization, much less anything to resemble a world class culture. 

It isn't the utterly obscene brutalities of bdsm... piercing and floggings, torture bondage and the like... where bdsm poses the greatest threat, not at all.  Those things are barbarian beyond any concealment of their true nature.  No sane person will ever be deceived by the transparent lies and rationalizations offered as justification for behavior like that.  While gross and pathetic at the level of an individual sphere of empathy their only real threat to society is found in just how gross and pathetic they really are, sensational enough to keep everyone focused on the naked body writhing beneath the lash and no one seeing the other and more serious aspects of evil bdsm spreads unseen and unrecognized beneath societies' horrified fascination with the pleading cries and screams of ecstasy heard from some masochist reveling in their chosen form of pain.

The true threat of bdsm is in the culture of secrecy and mandatory secret defectiveness it defines and perpetuates, two traits ideally suited to a state of political tyranny.  The true threat of bdsm is how it installs self degradation as an acceptable coping mechanism to answer the stresses of life, a trait most highly prized by con artists and manipulators of all persuasions.  The true threat of bdsm is in how it barters to jade the addictive narcosis of purely animalistic sensation overdriven in exchange for citizenship in a society of the damned, literally, developmentally damned to the misery of perpetual immaturity and confusion, a state of affairs guaranteed to do deep damage to any life and the society wherein that life resides as the years inevitably make ever more devastating the degree of retardation.

The bottom line on the explosion of bdsm into the culture is that it is primarily the result of Psychology failing to consider the Sociological consequences of its' emergence onto the stage of life as a power player rivaling the religions with which it competes for clientele.  In the short sighted vanity of its' youth psychology dismissed the conventions of history as primitive and unneeded without ever considering the sociological forces that caused those conventions to evolve and endure in the first place.  God does not destroy wantonly, Gaia does not cull without cause, there were solid reasons Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed rather than allow the pathogen of their perversions to spread any further into history.  It's time for psychology to admit their share of responsibility for the modern day iterations of the same mode of thought and help correct their error.

Exposing that error will be the first counter-attack in my war on bdsm, and that while I'm acquiring the skills needed to launch a more effective campaign based on statistical analysis of the data generated by the evolving national health care systems considered in conjunction with census data and data harvested by infiltrating and systematically examining social networking websites such as FetLife that serve the pervert community as primary communication channels.  It is my intention not to assert but statistically demonstrate the communicable nature of mental illnesses using bdsm as a first, and most easily recognized as amplifying, contagion vector. 

With such proof in hand it then becomes possible to engage in the political arena to the intent of empowering an expanded CDC to monitor and publicize the regional density of bdsm so that communities might defend themselves and their youth with local legislation. In society as in nature there must be a balance to all things, and predation on a toxic predator is as necessary as any other part of such balances.  The long history of bdsm proves it is as toxic to life and health as tetra-ethyl lead in the air or just plain lead in the drinking water, the innocent deserve ways and means of protecting themselves from such toxin inflicted unwilling... it is my intent to provide them social and psychological weapons, and train them in their use.

In essence I'm going to take away any legitimacy provided by their support group of profit motivated shrinks, and I'm going to seriously damage the secrecy upon which their subculture is founded.  These two campaigns are things the enemy is already afraid of, I can speak of them at the outset.  However these are but two of my major attack plans, and I promise you, they haven't in their darkest nightmares considered where else they are vulnerable. 

But I have.  You might ask why have you?  Bothered to spend so much time thinking and analyzing on something you obviously find so disgusting that is?  If I were in your shoes I'd be asking that question, asking it rather pointedly as a matter of fact.  The answer to your totally appropriate question is I've had a belly full.

BDSM first attacked my life in 1963 when we had the bad luck to move into a rent house right next door to another rent house that was nothing more than a dedicated dungeon for the bdsm freaks of Los Angeles. The neighborhood sat on a very steep hill, terraced, the houses close set. From the fence in my own back yard I had entirely to good a look at what was going on below, and the concrete retaining wall did nothing but echo the sounds up with perfect fidelity. I tried to tell the grown ups, and was severely punished for a "dirty imagination" as if any innocent child could begin to imagine such things. I was seven years old.

I've had to live with that shit in my head ever since. It scorched my life, likely was the destruction of my younger sister's entire life. It took forty years of soul searching and lucid dreaming through the nightmares to surface the source of those screams, the fragmentary images a shocked and traumatized child's memory was able to retain. It was forty years of self doubt and self condemnation for what landed in my memory totally by accident, and totally against my will.  Forty years diminished and stained before I understood what had happened to me.  If it has happened to me then it has happened to others, it is happening to others. 

Ever since then, give or take every five years for all of my life, someone from that realm has tried to seduce me into misery with that evil, with each attempt validating the nature of the evil by exposing more of how that evil operates, the places in the human psyche and soul that it leaches onto, the functions and structures of society it exploits. I've seen bdsm in the raw, what all the lies and all the public posturings are intended to conceal, and it is my immutable and irrevocable conclusion and judgment that bdsm is an ultimately evil thing that needs to be hunted to extinction, purged, destroyed, and forgotten.

They have tried once to often for me to forgive yet again.  I didn't study Rommel to appreciate Patton for nothing, it is time to fight back. Now that I've satisfied every responsibility of this life I have the freedom to do just that, and that I will do. I am going to set in motion things that in the end will destroy bdsm just as surely as the first atom bomb destroyed Hiroshima. 

I will be returning to the university in the spring with a very specific purpose in mind.  Well, maybe two purposes *grin*, but I'll keep you posted on how the second one develops as events unwind.  In the meantime?  I hear a pool table and a brewski calling my name.