Sunday, July 25, 2010

Saturday Night's All Right For Fighting


Herman Hesse writes about two worlds in his book Demian. One world is the world of convention, controlled by media and hormones, the other world is the one that is generated by resisting hormones and the media. Here's my buddy trying to resist one or the other at the saloon named after the street where old friends meet the pavement and mopeds roll through stop lights with cops on their tail.
It's a daily battle to fight these worlds, the raging war between convention and instinct. I lose it on most days and stumble past the central little league field with open wounds. We are all manufacturers. We manufacturer things, ideas or junk piled under the carpets of our minds. This junk is piling up and the excuse is that one day the technology will make the junk obsolete, one day the junk will devour the junk. And our manufacturing dreams will become a Jetson's reality. I manufacture words that are recycled trash from the stuffed animals we trail behind us from childhood. I'm like my Buddy, holding my hand up in defense against the attack of the scotch from 12 years ago.

Will our collective ecological genocide lead to some rosy fucking rainbow world where the genocide will be justified? I do not think so. Definitely not. That's fucking ridiculous and if you believe such a thing then I'd like to cross reference your lack of soul to your stock holdings in Apple. THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN. But I'm an easy target, living in my van miserably lurching from one dead end to another. I'm the bogeyman your first grade teacher warned you about so you can justify your plastic Wii cheerleading accessories. The sky isn't falling. Of course it isn't. Steve Jobs would never lie to YOU. That would be...unforgivable...awful...insane. How could that ever happen? No, a rich dude you never met will sell you shit in a basket and you'll eat it up but a kid who played whiffle ball with you from the Elwyn Ave Lincoln Gang big wheel days is a dirtbag. Ok. Choose your friends by their crisp obscurity and your enemies by their hippie vans.

I'm not crucified by your values, I'm living outside the realm of Steve Jobs and it turns out that collateral damage has my van in between the crosshairs. They can't coexist. The wolf and the iphone. They can't live together because the copper mines and plastic factories all add up to a school system full of future electronic engineers and assemblers. Why even have school? Why learn about god? Fuck it. God is in the robots we design to take out our garbage. This nation of devout fishermen and farmers are now south korean piece workers and latin meat packers sucking kidney stones from the balls of bull moose. This is the age of darkness that is full of light from some manufactured source shining on our cleverness in huge warehouses where we slice knee caps off cows for our herd of sheep dogs or robotic men and women in sweaty warehouses cleverly pinning copper to power conductors to god knows what, probably the bomber that will destroy my house. So clever! so smart that we elect monsters to run our country and then stare at tubes of light and drink and complain in vapid obesity. Convention is a grand success. Pay no attention to the man in the van, the glitch in the system, the obscure anomaly, the turd in the pool water. Your world is safe and I'll defend mine with manufactured words shot into the darkness of a parade of the clumsy innocent, the feckless fools, the stumbling maniacs whose laughter is a hollow cry that leads them to the asylum for the wicked.
Creative Commons License
Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.