Thursday, August 26, 2010

Living in The Walmart Parking Lot


My element is the van, on the move, I feel God speaks through me at that point and here I channel some kind of modern song Woody Guthrie might've written. You see, the world is always ending and always being reborn and my goal is to understand what I can about it. I don't want to be an expert at crimping d-sub pins but I do want to be an expert at what encompases my life. Thoreau talked about making an account of one's life. In 1846 that wasn't so hard. What industries does my life rely on? Etc. Well, in 2010 that's a damn hard thing to account for. I'm telling you that something feels wrong with how ignorant we all must be about the small details of our lives.
Ok, so I make the wires that belong in semiconductor wafer slicers. I can check that off. It's intolerable work. Only a man who is chained to child support or a disabled wife would do this job. Only a woman who is diabetic and can not walk fifty yards without hacking or quick smoking a butt would do this job. Maybe that is life with 7 billion people. Maybe we have to hustle and complaining does nothing. I feel that I can't expect someone to do this work, even if it means they have money to buy pot and get stoned and build wafer slicers. I believe this work is dehumanizing and it propagates an inhuman populace. It has to! There comes a point when living requires such complicated, foreign procedures that it's a house of cards. See? We're all relying on a thin slice of a card when there is the whole face of the card we are ignorant about. We put a key in an ignition. It starts. Is that enough?
Our day to day existence of taking the dog to the park or eating or reading suddenly relies on semiconductors and what do semi conductors rely on? Ion injectors? Argon? A gas that is heavier than oxygen so if you breath it your lungs reject oxygen. I'm troubled by these things I can't learn about in a lifetime. I can't account for my life anymore. There was a time not so long ago where a relatively educated person could account for his life. In fact, a poor person could definitely account for his life. In 1845 that person was Thoreau. Walden is his account for his life, what his life relied on at that time. Today, I can not write that book because it will take a lifetime to learn about everything my life relies on. And I don't mean reading about it in a semi conductor manual. I mean working at a semi conductor manufacturing facility. These days I'm further down the value chain so I hardly know anything about semi conductors. But I know that ion injectors and Argon come into play and those things would require more research. It feels impossible, like I'm chasing a rainbow that keeps receeding.
At first I was just singing about a lifestyle that sounds amusing to me. People living in the Walmart Parking Lot. Jesus! Is that possible? Yes, it is. I wanted to pay tribute to those gypsies and make fun of it. But as I listen to the song I realize that when I sing, "We're all living in the Walmart parking lot." I'm not just talking about the people in the vans in the parking lot of Walmart. I'm talking about society as a whole. Like, you all live in houses, but it's reaching the point where those houses are just suburbs of the Walmart parking lot. People living in their vans in the Walmart Parking lot are just closer to the source. You have to drive there; they can just walk out there doors and across the asphalt. So, is that where we are at? Don't answer that question. It's like the convict said to me at the aluminum factory: "Oggy, you only have to look with your eyes."
He was talking about quality control of industrial sized heat sinks but I like to use his words to apply to our culture because after a while your eyes adjust to insanity. You only have to look with your eyes to see what's happening. If you allow the media to distort your vision then you will see Walmart as progress. Our eyes have been poked out. This is a culture of corporate recklessness. I see children who don't stand a chance to develop their own ideas. Their minds are bought and sold from day 1. Propaganda is how to control people and right now I'm seeing a reckless race to the bottom. Media this poisonous can't be by accident. Please find some unconventional independent media to browse. Report your findings to your friends.
Creative Commons License
Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.