Donuts Which Are Evil and a Tool for the Creation of a Systematic Hellscape

Think about how you feel when you eat a donut, if you do so.  If not I describe in personal terms: First, the soft delight of chewing and ingesting.  But if you know anything about crack, it is a lot like crack.  I'm sure someone has said it's the crack of the food world: a cheap guzzle and rush surge almost instantaneously concurrent with the ingestion, a rush that rumbles along your gullet searing intestinal excitement in its exhaust, whee!  Adrenaline or the chemical equivalent thereof.  And then the inflammation begins, or so I assume, because as a tissue bruise flares up in the wake of the wake, so too I become heated and brutally quick-tempered, mood shearing off some stupid cliff I have navigated again and again in pursuit of the ethereal delight Donut, and irritation, irritation, oh the crash of total disgust, a wave of rotten irritation cutting in bone level, this is your physical form all whacked out and You are subject to It.   

Listen, I know it's not just me.  One night in full fledged Donut Rage I defenestrated the remainders from a picked over dozen, and in the morn, those birds who gathered over the alley to sun themselves in the dawn were force-chirping like possessed madmen, talking violently over each other, a cloud of clamor so inappropriate to the new rhythm of the day.  The donut feast was down to crumbs and those birds were juiced.  So it's like a basic chemical thing, I'm saying, and the donut thus proves to us its insidious form, so legal, so tempting.

So it worries me, you know?  That cops are constantly munching on these Wheels of Tyranny.  It is a hilarious stereotype - and it is right under our nose.  Sure, there are a lot more big-ticket problems of our police state, desperate institutional habits that sustain and develop man's criminal desire to herd other men, a culture of fear and terror.  And certainly society is not in a place where such bureaucratic nightmares could just dismantle themselves, nor be dismantled by the small crowds which can only keep them in check, not defeat them.  So what can we attack?  I say Donuts.  Our American cops are all juiced up on this frenetic disc, casually abusing a truly dangerous substance - one which influences anger, short-temperedness, and deep set irritation.  Sure, I might be a little sensitive, but it's even worse that these guys are stuffing their faces with multiple Rage Cakes in a shift like a junkie trying to get up to just feeling normal again.  I realize I am making a bit of an assumption, based on a cultural rumor and, you know, common sightings of actual cops actually hanging out at corporate donut chains.  Do all cops eat donuts?  I think we probably need to see some numbers here.

It sounds mocking, but I could not be more serious about a general concern for positive state of cops bodily mood and temper.  We need some real data exposing the real physical effect of Demon Donuts on a man's general composure, do it the whole way with a control group and stuff, how does an immediately threatened and bureaucratically protected man react, especially given easy access to weapons.  (Well, I'm pretty sure that document lies deep in some files somewhere.)  I deeply suspect many trigger fingers quaking in some stage of donut withdrawl, absurdly trying to handle ultra power of gun technology, have gone haywire and murderous, spasmodically tweaking in that forgetful wash of adrenaline amnesia.  Real ugly stuff.  It's just another layer - some kind of glaze or frosting, I suppose - on the wretched story of American inner turmoil, unresolved problems of ultra-normativeness, and maybe we need to see how exacerbated the problems have become, right there in our news panic boxes. 

Though it seems cute to focus on this fluff issue when the problem is so dark and deep, I am a big fan of oblique tactics, wielding absurdity as a weapon.  And let's not forget that, at a basic level, these cops need to be punished.  They work at the grace of the taxpayers yet violate the deep ideals of communities - they seize power and act accordingly, violating laws at whim, using physical assault and intimidation as a first resort, exercising the greatest inhumanities under immunity.  They enforce and are therefore in some large way responsible for creating the violent society which we have accepted as norm.  Sure, there are arguments in their favor, but what I am saying is that we need to assert our own power as their funders and say - Hey! You are doing a lousy job!  You are punished!  Go to bed without dinner!  You don't get to spend your day rewarding yourself, and guess why?  Because it's for your own fucking good.  Maybe if you stopped treating your own little temples like shit silos, you might come to recognize the holiness in every human being around you, and start doing your job with some fucking respect. 

BAN THE DONUT 2015

F I R E

Smolder

Burn

Ignite

Active State Energy Transforming

Desire

Determination

Painful emotions

Consumption

Heat

Digestion

Bomb

Smoke

Obsession

Torch

Illumination and Shadows

Purify

Cure

Cook, Stew, Roast, Toast, Melt

Log, Tinder, Kindling

Stoke

Forge

Metals

there is no fixed nature of the tree nor me

there is no fixed nature of the tree nor me

well stated

"... But a study of any mystery tradition, unless it be purely historical, requires that preconceived notions be set aside, and that the system be judged solely on the merit of its efficacy.  One must use the word efficacy because that is the only valid measure of a metaphysical system.  Does it work?  But how do we establish whether it works or not?  The answer to these questions is certainly not to be found through the present methods of the sciences, or of the humanities, which are predicated on those of science; data is collected and analyzed empirically.  And since those ideas known as "The Mysteries" do not lend themselves to this sort of attack, being in high degree irrational [emphasis mine], they may be denigrated even by historians...

"The problem arises in that to study any aspect of the Mysteries the investigator must himself or herself become a part of the system.  A person must evaluate it from the inside, which may make it appear that one has abrogated investigative objectivity.  Today's academicism does not allow for the acquisition of knowledge through intuition and psychism, an attitude placing it in paradoxical contradiction to a high proportion of those great thinkers whom the humanities study and purport to revere.  In the humanities, the universities have deteriorated into observers of, rather than participants in, the development of mankind's creative and intellectual faculties."

From The Qabalistic Tarot, by Robert Wang 

Modern Dance is Stupid

Why am I picking on poor old Modern Dance?  I wonder.  But it just drives me nuts.  I guess it can all be summed up by my friend Chris who observed: "Why are they always cracking out of eggs?"  Don't pretend like you haven't seen this routine - a body compressed, perhaps squatting, receives some musical cue of "life force" and proceeds to unfold, rise, stretching and extending limbs into space ... and always with a particular quality of movement, ugh, that quality of movement is the worst.  How to describe?  "Sensual" (or gross) ... graceful, flowing, light or syrupy ... urging, questing, yearning ... and acutely "beautiful". There is an arrogance to the movement quality of modern dance that disturbs and bores me, in this premature assumption of "beauty" and the way "beauty" can really stifle an art form.   Case in point: "always cracking out of eggs" - can we, as artists, strive for a little more in our expression than basic life processes? 

Now of course the disclaimer is that radical concepts can be and are applied to dance on a regular basis - certainly folks out there are doing revolting, compelling, chilling and otherwise unusual things with their body medium.  Of COURSE this happens, thank goodness.  But there is a common form that is a plague among us, which thrives basically as a veiled Erotica Lite, an excuse to view young bodies in various extremes of pushing, pulling, straining ... whirling, leaping ... and always a slave to this unique Standard of Beauty, where all movement flows, strides, bursts, and whirls with smooth suppleness.  This diatribe isn't against erotica, but the mundane Playboy-style erotica that "modern dance" mirrors - an endless repetition of the most inviting, the most presentational, the embodiments of Ideal which pretends seduction as it imposes arrogant distance.  For the price of a ticket we are afforded a view of the human woodland animal of time immemorial, muscular, svelte, powerful, pendulous, with pointed toes and fluted fingers.  Each of us is afforded a body, but only the dancer's body is allowed to approach a pure ideal of Body Beauty, apparently, and we are intended to be awestruck by the grace of their exertions.  Well, I'm not buying it.  I watch these arrogant young people put on their arrogant young dances and vampirically feed from the envious and awe-ful gaze of the cramped, the withered, the limping, the cubicle bound.  I find this effort to whitewash the body pretty distasteful and rude. 

How about the Modern Dancer's portrayal of emotion? This is where dance painfully crawls out of the realm of theater.  They could have stopped at pantomime, but someone had to turn on the music ... egad, the choices of music ... suddenly the actions of the everyday are translated BIG, grand, arms are FLUNG, heads are WHIPPED, hands are clasped over chests that swell as the dancer inhales, deeply, attempting to communicate the pleasure or pain of human experience through body medium; body responding to "life" as represented by "music".  Well, the whole thing is just embarrassing!  Really!  I mean I can't be the only one acutely embarrassed, cringing and shrinking in my seat, can I?  Please tell me you, too, have seen "confusion" or "anguish" conveyed by some fingers to the temples, eyes closed, head rhythmically tearing back and forth ... and just gritted your own teeth and held your own breath until it ended. 

You know, the fault lies probably not with the dancers or the choreographers or the medium or the art form, but probably with audiences that don't really ask for too much.  I mean Playboy is a big seller, you know?  They wanna see good looking people do good looking things, and they want it to be neat - like, over and above the everyday world, but "nice", too: glorious, masterful, positive and essentially escapist.  This modern dance I am railing against is the equivalent of Hollywood endings, reggae festivals, ice skating - slutty "art forms" that demand little and offer lots of soothing salve and mind escaping.  Just let our bodies prance across your vision and stir your "soul" - you relax and take a load off.  But why do I care?  I must, myself, gravitate to art that I "like" - though it may be uncommon and slightly abrasive, it probably turns out that my soul is getting stirred in a very similar mindless way that humans enjoy or even require from their culture.  I just come from a different planet, so I like different things.  FINE - but not fine!  

Because: dance is pretty awesome.  Bodies are pretty great.  But there is a whole heck of a whole fuck of a lot of shit that you can do with a body in front of an audience of bodies for the purposes of entertainment and communication and expression that are not this form of "modern dance" that I find so embarrassing, limited, and moronic.  There is so much potential to a body in space being observed by other bodies in space - why resort to boring old grace and beauty?  Much like my extreme disappointment with the dance form "Contact Improv" - which sure sounds like infinite possibility, but actually ends up being a fairly limited format - I am impatient for all of these "modern dancers" to finally get fed up with being so goddamn graceful and exquisite and really start to use the medium for something more than an ego trip.  Ahem.  

In Defense of Superstition

Superstition does get knocked a lot.  What is the critique?  That it is not rational enough?  Certainly there is a hand-me-down field of superstition that warrants the criticism.  Friday the 13th, for example - how many know the origins of this, why we are instructed to feel ominous because of it?  Many real energetic centers of doom-feeling have lost their power and relevance over time, but hang on symbolically in human being "irrationally" enough (without knowing why) that thus entertaining any particular paranoia regarding invisible connections to dark forces seems dumb.

But what about superstitions that are superrational?

Here I am defining superstition as: the belief in persistent dark or evil forces that seek to progress one's own undoing through some chain of events.  I guess a lot of folks get stuck on the word "belief", but we cannot deny the perpetual presence of chaos, decay, collapse, death that are endemic in time and space.  These are the "dark forces" that any human not otherwise charmed senses from time to time, creating our very understanding of the external reality existing beyond personal control.  But to impart that forces could exert intent or consciousness is of further difficulty in any "defense" here - such is the struggle in describing the invisible, metaphysical realm, and that is the disbelievers' eternal edge.  

Belief itself exists.  Do you believe in belief?  Not necessary.  What we call "Belief" stems from a valuable human power and ability of attention.  That ability forms the cord by why which certain dominating forces (for lack of a better word; often economic in nature) can grab our attention and manipulate us like marionettes.  It is the same cord that the faithless depress in perpetual drunkenness and which the faith-deniers sever, losing their connection to the vast and rich invisible world around us.  O! Invisible All. 

But what if our belief could fashioned scientifically?  With rigorous observation we could watch the patterns of life and death and all in between around us, as Shakespeare.  You would have to exercise your belief first - again, belief being itself established and not requiring "mere belief" to exist, unless you were interested in chasing some rabid fractal down through a realm of mirrors.  Fine for a sunday afternoon, but we have to get to work here.  First you would have to believe in the possibility of some relatively subjective (ie pertaining to you, the ultimate subject) cause-and-effect chain.  I think that science can and absolutely should exist with total acceptance of subjectivity and quit this charade of objectivity, but that is another essay.  The point is that you are an infinitely small viewfinder in the scope of All, so you are only ever going to get little scraps and bits of information that only you, in all your glorious tiny subjectivity and infinite variety, are afforded.  Comparing subjectivities is eventually encouraged, but the first step requires a certain amount of faith in the things that are being revealed to you, in the order in which they happen.  A well developed belief-ability is observing not for the purpose of matching up just any old concepts, but to actually perceive or detect a kind of actuality (truth) and likeness in the natures of coinciding objects, weather, and human circumstance, and potential connection among these things.  Following clues, if you will.  Putting attention to suspicions.

This incoherent map of intent reveals an eventual destination, which is the manifestation of the power of belief, which is "it works".  Any active user of belief can tell you about the presence and function of belief in their life.  Again, in this process, subjective testimony is not to be doubted.  It is actually all we got.  What we need to be rigorous about is To What End.  A human can represent utter subjectivity, but when faced with The Other, needs to be kind of vigilant and ruthless about accurately reading externals - especially in present age, which is just loaded with seduction and facile suggestions that require the borrowed human energetic attention to thrive (often the machinations of mere men).  Truth must be decoded, and then thus the only trustable source is your own code, inasmuch as you are trained to be attentive and demanding your truth.    

Certainly this power-known-as-belief can be harnessed and utilized.  In the realm of superstition, we can have legitimate fears and paranoias.  We can foretell them by antecedents, as if we are reading the sky for weather ... We can observe the old mysteries of black cats and cemeteries with a light mind, feeling the accurate prickle... We can notice objects, symbols, names that tend to creep out at the worst time, keep an eye out for their recurrence, and be cautious in calling their attention.  It is right and natural to bristle, because as a human body you are utterly fallible to the forces of chaos and disaster, and hopefully have retained at least a shred of the instinct to self-preservation.  But we need not be frightened or crippled by fear - we can take an active involvement in our own superstition.  

Develop your own superstition today!

Personal Pain

Sometimes when I am courting excess drug use and party atmosphere, I fall into a kind of "spiritual exhaustion". It feels like a wet, uncertain sliver opening up in my breastbone. I find it difficult to feel confident - a slippery nervousness that gets jostled with every breath. Usually it will close after a good amount of sleep, or after a relatively sober time passes. It is undesirable state, of course.

But recently I had opportunity to more deeply explore this feeling. The circumstances and influences were manifold: a bit of drug use, but also premenstrual tendency toward weepiness, a ripening moon, and mounting sleep deprivation. All this mired in the middle of 24 hour Twin Peaks marathon, and exacerbated by intense interpersonal social scenario.

Possibly the most important factor here is the Marathon. Twin Peaks is a serious piece for me, and I developed this event - open to the public, put on at a community center - primarily because I had a desire to ... realize the series as a complete work in time, a whole. What would that be like? Though I've viewed it a dozen times, I have never dedicated that full chunk of time ... it was an experiment of sorts. ... I would do it differently in the future. The series is simply too uneven to be consistently compelling, with the extreme dramatic climax happening midway and losing steam afterward. But that climax ... with all its horrific, overwrought, poignant sorrows ...

With the progression of episodes happening in succession, it was easy to let the terror and despair compound upon themselves. And I was feeling emotionally unstable. AND there was the aforementioned "intense interpersonal social scenario". I can't be too specific there - suffice it to say that I was perceiving, experiencing, what (in my paranoid state) amounted to a complex but thorough rejection - personal insult - through a group of people whom I had found myself growing complicatedly closer to over the last month. All my delusions of blossoming friendship ran up against this cold wall - I felt so disrespected - and yet - what was my behavior? I could not resist - I got closer. I sat myself in a chair right outside the knot of this group of people. The feelings of betrayal that their chatter inspired in me blossomed ... the sliver of nervous exhaustion grew! To a full, round disk of raw, wounded insult. I would realize this intense sensation in moments, blinking on with each burst of their laughter, and I was fascinated by how huge it was in my body. It had grown from a sliver to command my entire chest, from shoulder to shoulder.

Finally, I took control of this feeling of emotional wounding, and sustained focus on it. When it rose like a tide, I seized it and held it in place. ... My entire chest felt ripped, trembling, agonized from this absolutely pure Rejection, and somehow, I began to savor this feeling. It made so much sense - the deeply horrifying murders on the screen, the portrayal of extreme and devastating loss, and my own sudden ability to really, truly experience Intense Personal Pain, to hold the horror in a ravaged body, to feel the depths of something so terrible. This concept of garmonbozia - pain and suffering - established in the TP universe guided me, no doubt. Having achieved some kind of revelation in my being, suddenly the offending social circumstances - still quite present - sunk into the background. It was all no less insulting, but being trapped in this vibration of something so Wrong, so Awful, brought a detaching transcendence, a grievous personal suffering crystallized in a perfect, unstable, degraded physical sensation.

I have always felt quite tenderly towards grief, and been comfortable in the presence of depressed individuals - I mean I don't try to create depression or grief. These things naturally occur and I guess I "enjoy" the subdued feeling they create in others, and my inclination is to help find some measure of relief for that person. I suppose it amounts to something more than hanging out, when depression is present - there is a goal, there is emotional work, there is the opportunity to change and shape circumstances and response. But this was my first experience of "crystalline, transcendent grief". I don't know why this should be a positive experience for me, but I can return to the memory with fondness. The recently cultivated feeling still echoes in my chest, and I am proud of it. Why would this be?