THE NAKED ANIMAL

I was cruising the internet recently in an attempt to gather information about my theory of the day: that the number of countries and world renowned thinkers who hate us is multiplying in direct ratio to the rate at which we're getting collectively dumber, causing an isolating ignorance that is perhaps the most insidious invader of freedom.

One phrase popped into my head: "Dumbing Down," or more precisely, "The Dumbing Down of America." I wasn't sure of its provenance, but I took it on as I do most such memes, as a clue from the collective consciousness. I soon found out that the phrase originated with lifetime educator Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt's book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, which indicts an elitist cabal of social engineers for making our children stupid systematically in order to create a new legion of completely mindless consumers and menial workers. If that sounds like science fiction to you, just look at how many other educators have agreed with, and applauded, her.

Now, whether or not you believe there's a totalitarian plot afoot by the moneyed elite of the world to turn the rest of us into drones for the satisfaction of their queenly coffers or not (remember, even paranoids are right 10 percent of the time), you, like I, if you know how to read and use a computer, are probably wondering why the lowest common denominator seems to be holding ever firmer sway over nearly our entire culture, and how on earth it continues to fall lower and lower. I sometimes feel helpless in the face of so much bluntness (hey, I get razzed even by my FELLOW ENGLISH TEACHERS for using "big words"), which is one of the various reasons I escape so often into the sharper contours of the dark side, where people don't go around in a fog pretending everything's okay. Finding a new kindred soul or even ranting with my friends (about the same things, over and over again) always brings a little light to the subject.

What really brightened things up that particular day was that my "dumbing down" search unearthed some of the smartest, most incisive writing I've run across in recent memory, yielding no less than five solid, non-repetitive pages of worthwhile links. Many of these links were to great blog posts, such as this one from one of my favorite radical anonymous sites, and this super-concise observation of the phenomenon by Bob Geiger, the blogosphere's Yellow Dog Democrat. Here's one by Shalana Millard for the Democratic Underground, in which she perspicaciously points out that the only thing scarier than the possibility of the radical right having stolen the election through fraud is the possibility that everyone (i.e. more than half of the voting public) really is stupid enough actually to have voted for Bush.

And here's my favorite of the batch, a beautiful manifesto about the problem, its causes and its possible solutions, written by Manuel Valenzuela for the Axis of Logic, a thoroughly marked crossroads of liberal viewpoints on modern culture. Valenzuela's piece has a bewitching cadence that is sometimes strongly (and charmingly) reminiscent of Yoda. It's the technique of beginning a sentence with an adjectival phrase that does it: Falsely happy are the ignorant, for they know neither what they know not nor that they know not. Things like that (though not that exactly, don't worry).

But outrage and eloquence prompted by the dumbing-down problem is not an exclusively liberal response. Here's an article from the conservative Eagle Forum that (with typical white male defensiveness) equates the dumbing-down process with emasculation, and here's one from right-wing talk show host Neal Boortz, whose comments I am surprised to agree with 100 percent.

The conundrum in all of this is that the liberals are attacking the conservatives and the conservatives are attacking the liberals for a problem that runs much deeper than the schisms between opposing political or moral (is there a difference anymore?) ideologies. We have all been giving up our own personal power in exchange for the shepherding comfort of a powerful civilization for so long that we have no concept of what the freedom to enjoy our own power might unleash.

But the dumbest mistakes of all in this hugely erroneous equation are people like me, who know about all this,know about it and feel about it in deep, resonant ways, yet willfully court denial in order to get by in our already stressful enough lives (thank you very much!), relying on some kind of vague spiritual/cultural sea change (it's bound to happen, right? turn, turn, turn...)while the fundamentalist religious fanatics who are hijacking our reality from all sides adamantly go about their almost instinctive business of sending us all even further down the dumb hole.

Being an idealist, though, I see the acts of some Democrats who are vocally reneging on their previous gift of imprimatur to Bush's war machine as evidence of a coming turn in the complacency-vs.-involvement tide. With this post, I burst through my own membrane of complacency into full involvement in my own destiny, and remind myself that right thought without right action amounts to right nought but rot on the hot dot.

Huh?

Anyway...Fly! Be free!

Categories: education, politics, conspiracies, culture, freedom, trends

What follows has turned out to be what amounts to a collection of thoughts pursuant to an autodidact's master's thesis on the subject of comparative philosophy and the nature of reality. If that sounds too serious for you, read this instead; it's a recent post from "Uncommon Denominators," Joe Kane's blog about his "peculiar struggle for a commitment to principle-based living (absolutes and ideals) as a young American in a swiftly decadent culture." It's mostly about movies, but we're talking about the same thing.

For those who don't mind following the truly necessary noodling of a right-brained intellectual (which means I take things in through the apparatus of the mind first, not necessarily that I'm brilliantly book-learned, though I haven't done too bad as far as the reading of world texts goes in my life; and also that I do it in a completely idiosyncratically creative, disorganized fashion [that's the right-brained part]), allow me to continue my quest for philosophical soundness.

In an earlier post I referred to one of my premier vital links, the Anarchology Research Society blog, as "a thoroughly academic philosophy that mirrored my own idea that every single thing in the universe, from the tiniest quark to the universe itself, is a true, integral whole in and of itself, and that we interact synergistically to create copacetic collective entireties." In Anarchology, these various entities are described singularly as "a truth moving through its freedom" interacting with other truths moving through their own respective freedoms to create collective, or "plural" freedoms in which they may move together; and these plural freedoms nest inside each other like paragraphs in books to form a protective shell of universally known stories that amount to a system of agreements that come to be regarded as the immovable elements of reality.

Hmmm, I don't know if I explained that very well, but it was a damned good stab. The far more erudite and scientifically rigorous Anarchology Research Society seems to be a small group of student and professor scientist-philosophers who are in the process of creating a new theory of life in the universe that redefines what we see and experience from the bottom up. I say "seems" because there is no information about the blog authors, except that they are indeed the authors of the blog, anywhere--and they don't answer comments. I say "in the process" because the blog leaves their theory hanging with a final entry entitled "What is Truth?", which ends with the final tantalizing lines:

So truth, even cosmic truth, is subjective.
We will continue this discussion of Truth in the next letter, 'What is Freedom?'

Now, what I mean by "from the bottom up" is the most important part of what I mean, because it strikes at the very heart of what is wrong with our world today (insert any take on that topic here, and I'll most likely agree). The "bottom" is the very first basic unspoken assumption that we all make when thinking about absolutely anything, and that is, in simplified terms, that any being is separate from its environment; when he looks at the world around him, he is viewing something different and apart from himself. This is the core import of what is known as Plato's Doctrine of Forms (circa 4th century BC), upon which all modern science and thought is based. On top of the viewer being separate from her environment, Plato also posited that the environment itself was separate from--was in fact but a shabby stand-in for--the pristine integrity of absolute truths, which were supposed to exist as actual entities in their own ethereal realm (somewhere outside the cave, in a realm where only the Philosopher Kings were wily and brave enough to wander...[harumph]).

It's interesting that I should have entitled my first book as a play on Plato's simile of the cave. I didn't know what I meant, really, back then, except that Plato's Garage was my way of philosophizing in a more than glancing way about cars and our symbiotic relationships with them. I didn't quite know what I thought about Platonic thought and what it has wrought, but since reading the wonderfully written Anarchology Research Society blog, I've realized that the subject-object worldview that Plato forwarded into reality so efficiently is in fact responsible for all of the schisms that manhandle, maul and haunt our minds, morals and civilizations: good and evil, love and hate, lustful and chaste, fate and free will... the list goes on and on. I also think Plato was an elitist, a philistine and a self-repressed homosexual, which thoroughly explains to my satisfaction his intense pushing of the idea that sex was an earthly distraction to be transcended in favor of more enriching activities, such as contemplating those precious perfections that existed elsewhere. Plato was basically the west's first famous self-hating faggot (just look at that face), and the schism between sex and spirit that holds the world in its murky grasp is the most insidious branch of the great river of thought that we somehow got directed into thanks to the dear ol' dysfunctional dad of Western thought (yeah, Plato), and in which we're still flowing, haphazardly, further and further away from integration into separation and conflict.

Argh, I need a mediator sometimes. Someone to bitch slap me when I get too fancy on my homely soapbox. The point is that there's an alternative to the Platonic subject-object paradigm, and it's just as old, perhaps even older, than Plato's deal. It is known in psychological parlance as subject-subject reality, as opposed to subject-object. The Anarchology Research Society gives credit for formalizing this way of thinking to Zeno, a contemporary of Plato's and premier member of a rival school of thought informed by Xenophanes idea that "all is one." Hmmm, very interesting. Sounds kinda new-agey, right? Jung also touched upon the idea of subject-subject consciousness, and these days, Harry Hay, who brought the idea to the cultural semi-fore through its integral position in the philosophy of the Radical Faerie movement (a gossamer, diasporic web of fabulous flouncing freedom fighters with whom I strongly identify; it's one of my sidebar's vital links), is credited with its re-introduction into the framework of human thought. It is also the basis of epistemology, and of ontology, both of which strongly inform such "futuristic" scientific things as quantum physics and artificial intelligence research. On the other side of the planet, and through osmosis on this one, too, now, it's responsible for the tenet of nonduality that dominates all Eastern philosophies and religions.

I believe that the idea of "all is one," also known as "omnology," is even more ancient than the ancient Greeks or even the more ancient Asians. Again, I hark back to the kaleidoscope of arcane knowledge that my Turkmenistani ESL student displayed last semester. We were discussing world religions, and he brought up the research of a Russian scientist who has been finding references in ancient texts to obscure phenomena, such as ocean currents and the exact movement of the stars, that scientists have charted only in the last hundred years. We spent that entire class period discussing the possibility that we harbor within us prehistoric, probably innate, connections to the kind of wisdom we now think of as being either ultra-complexly scientific or ultra-unprovably metaphysical. Proving nothing, we both nonetheless decided it was probably true.

That student was very good for me because we ended up having the sort of dialogues, ironically, through which Greek philosophers plied their theories. He helped me refine a lot of my ideas about the world through these impromptu lessons (in which the teacher became the pupil), and, in essence, led me in a roundabout way to the Anarchology Research Society, which finally pushed me off the fence about the effects of Platonic thought upon reality and its horrors.

What it all amounts to, in the end (or is it in the beginning?) is that I can finally, truly believe in my innate understanding of the "all is one" idea because the Anarchology Research Society has made my mind understand it. For someone who, unfortunately (I think [tee hee]), still uses his mind as the default filter for most things that fall within his radar's grasp (though I am getting better at letting my emotions do the walking and talking), that kind of intellectual gateway is key to a fuller self-understanding and healthy integration, both of which I'm courting with fervor these days.

If you're also a seeker of synergy and feel flummoxed by the insane indelibility of the schisms that keep us from being whole, but you can't seem to "just let go" like all the new agers have been telling us all our lives, take a look at the Anarchology Research Society blog. It may not have the exact same effect of opening previously-closed doors on you as it had on me, but maybe you can follow its signals through the Web to find your own intellectual links to intuitive urges. I'm not a hundred percent sure why yet, but I feel this connection is indispensible to our arsenal of attributes as we transform our reality into a more balanced and less terrifying one. It has something to do with another "New Age" (damn the denigration of that term through charlatan-laden marketing brouhaha!) notion about the merging of science, philosophy, spirituality and art into one universal discipline of creativity-nurturing and wisdom-cultivation. Or something like that.

With a sigh of relief, I'm glad to defer that topic to a later post, since I now have to get ready for my second shift at the ol' ESL "college," (Can I just say how much a split shift SUCKS?!) where my evening students will either be half asleep, ready for a nightcap (or six) or rabidly demanding serious grammar drills. I just love to be kept guessing, I really do.

And thanks to you fellow confused intellectuals and other interested bystanders for noodling with me!

Categories: transformation, philosophy, faeries, healing, holistic, synergy, omnology

Mommy, Mommy, I wanna be a human billboard!

Okay, I know I may be coming late to this phenomenon, but people are actually getting ads tattooed (some permanent, some temporary) on their bodies for cash. I don't know why I say "actually," though, since it surprises only some ativistic, prudish gene deep in side me somewhere. An outrage, I say! Have you all gone completely mad?!

But no, that voice rarely wins out in the long run. I was moved, if somewhat bemused, by this woman's story, which gets to the heart of the matter: Money is our collective problem, and we'll do anything to get enough of the stuff to live, even if it is degrading and dehumanizing. So there. As the highest-paid "living ad space" who is not a celebrity to date (the fad started in the early years of this century with a world-class boxer being paid $100,000 to wear only a temporary tattoo ad), she now has a permanent tattoo on her forehead that broadcasts the name of an online casino. Her price? A measly ten grand, but as she bluntly puts it, "To me, $10,000 is like $1 million." I'm more in the "$1 million is like $1 million" range, but I get her point. Money is hard to come by. And selling your flesh to the highest bidder is far more preferable to slaving away in some menial job while being grossly underpaid and casually oppressed by lower management dickwads. Yeah, I totally get her point. I'm interested to know if there's any fine print about how she has to respond when asked about the ad. I wonder if she has to give a pat, marketing-developed reply per contract, or if she can just say, "Go fuck off and look it up on the internet yourself."

Madison Avenue apparently sees this as an "interesting development," but not much more, populated by misanthropic philistines as it is. What I mean by that is that mainstream advertising must be offended by the in-your-face-ness (ahem) of the living ad space phenom because it involves far too much icky personal negotiation and agreement with the consumer, whom they prefer to keep at the long-arm-of-the-media's length and manipulate from afar. The puppet is far too culpable in her own string-pulling in the human ad space scenario for the taste of the tastemakers.

But for cagey companies like the afore-alluded-to online casino (I won't actually say it's name here, 'cuz I think I should be paid for that, like everyone else, tee hee), which brings the consumer in on the hideous all-encompassing joke of capitalism's ability to brand all that it touches, daredevilishly balancing lowbrow ironic humanism with state-of-the-art profit growing, it's a case of market-psychology synergy that is opening up yet another previously unpredicted niche in the ever-mutating global economy. And it comes courtesy of our sparsely-populated, but always culturally-enchanting neighbor to the north, Canada, oh Canada.

Here in California, I knew a few white trash godlings in high school back in the early 1980s who were way ahead of this trend--there was one with the Pontiac Trans-Am firebird insignia tattooed on his chest. And then there were the legions of random bikers who were willing to have the Harley insignia tattoed on their arms or (in truly mid-century macho fashion) on their calves. It's a working class tradition, really. At least now they can get paid for it.

If you think you're ready to sell your body to the man, check out this site, and this one, where you can register to be paired with advertisers who want to buy it, in the style of an online matchmaking service. Think about it: It's just like being whore, only you don't have to (get to?) have sex as part of the bargain.

Now that's progress!

Categories: news, culture, marketing, trends

Every meditation or self transformation course, seminar or workshop I've experienced in my lifelong search for inner and outer peace has urged the development of one essential skill: neutrality. Supposedly there is an integral power to a neutral viewpoint that allows one to make decisions that are beneficial to the whole rather than to one side or the other.

Yet I've always felt an essential disconnect between the neutral zone and the world of action. When I find myself in a neutral state, whether through meditation or any other semi-conscious equilibrium management technique, I feel all-encompassing as well as completely isolated, and the urge to speak or act in any way whatsoever escapes me. Being neutral feels good because things don't bother you, but in order to reach that state, you have to step back far enough from the turning cogs to see that the whole machine really doesn't matter in the long run; and when you do that, the impetus to oil the moving parts and keep the factory running on schedule to meet market demand disappears. At least in my experience. If one lives in a quantum universe, how can one truly care about which side of the quantum envelope is opened as possibility becomes reality?

It seems impossible to decide what to do once one realizes one can do anything.
The sum of knowledge is the gap between what you know and what you know you don't.
The actions of commerce take place on the battlefield between ethics and economy.
The commerce of actions takes place between self concern and the good of the many.
Life is a fusion of matter and spirit that partakes of both but understands neither.
The mind is a wall between reality and illusion on which one scribbles grafitti.
Language is a technology we use both to create and to fend off the great unknown.
Even our most expansive theories can't untie the original knot of creation.
God is not an answer. All is one is not an answer. There are no answers.
Life is a fusion of matter and spirit that depends on caressing the conundrum.
It is lived most fully in the space between this and that, which has no name.

Meanwhile, the waking world demands that thoughts be named, decisions made and actions taken to further goals. So I think I'll decide to take a walk to clear my head--if only that were possible!

On second thought, who says caressing the conundrum is not sufficient action in and of itself? I think I'll instead spend my time more thoroughly investigating a blog I've just found that delights in the unabashed, non-stop caressing of the conundrum: Visible Origami.

Go ahead, live the paradox. Intuit the unknown. Quantify the void. Weave the mystery. Dislodge the mote in the unseeing eye.

And to all a good night.

Categories: philosophy, meaning, mysteries

A Wayward Guide to THE NAKED ANIMAL and his Vital Links

Oh, words are trains, for moving past
What really has no name.
--Paddy McAloon


Sometimes I get so wrapped up in the search for meaning in a meaningless universe and the struggle to succeed in a heartless system that it takes a steady, driving attack through many layers of bullshit to get back to my innate sensibiltites. And what are the innate sensibilities of the Naked Animal? They are simple; singular, in fact: The Naked Animal believes in the Golden Rule, and that's about it. Remember that one? Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

Yes, that's sophisticated English to some eyes, I know. In a recent casual survey, I found that nine out of 15 American adults over 30 could not tell me what the Golden Rule was, and five of those puzzled over the meaning of it for way too long once I uttered the phrase. Never fear, for there are thousands of other ways to say or describe it: What goes around comes around; What goes up must come down. Karma, some call it. You get what you give. It's the basis for all world religions, we learn it in kindergarten if not earlier on the secular side, and every pop star in the world has crooned about it in some way, yet real-world evidence of its machinations is slim. The best of us struggle often futilely to treat our small circle of closest loved ones with the respect we all deserve, while the stress of our daily lives keeps us from reaching out to people in need the way our hearts would like us to do.

Or maybe it's just me. I'm an idealist. And I'm not a frustrated one. I believe that consistently nurturing my ideals, in myself and in the world, is a worthwhile cause even if none come to fruition.

You really don't have to worry about believing in anything else if you follow the Golden Rule. Entrenched beliefs are harmful, anyway, as they can stop us from growing; one stays most salubrious with as few as possible blocking up one's circuitry.

What would a world in which the Golden Rule and no others in particular were meticulously followed look and feel like? Balanced, peaceful, full of straightforward, unsyrupy love. In other words, a hell of a lot different than the one we live in now. Our world's so out of balance that it's a wonder we don't go spinning right out of orbit into the nearest black hole. We can't see each other for what we really are or anything else for what it actually is because we don't even know ourselves. More and more people every year make tons and tons of money helping other people find themselves, or get in touch with their "spiritual sides" (as if they're flat, with two opposing surfaces); it seems like we're all struggling and pushing to get somewhere...but where? We've all been packing our bags for so long now that we've forgotten how to lock 'em up, send 'em through security, and actually board the flight.



"Finding out is the booby prize," my comrade-in-arms Philip is fond of saying when I get wrapped up in the what, why, where, when, who and how instead of the everlasting now. That used to really get my hackles up. "But I want to know," I'd whine. "I want to know what we're doing here and why we're doing it and where we're headed, and I won't stop searching until I find out."

I still haven't stopped, but I've realized that the search is its own discovery. And since I've gleefully jettisoned my need for resolution, my mind has expanded, making room for new information, which can't help but come rushing in at about six megabytes per second these days (Thank you, Comcast!) if one is willing to open the floodgates.

One day, my floodgates wide open as usual, I set out to find a thoroughly academic philosophy that mirrored my own idea that every single thing in the universe, from the tiniest quark to the universe itself, is a true, integral whole in and of itself, and that we interact synergistically to create copacetic collective entireties. Within a few minutes, I'd stumbled upon "Anarchology," an unfinished symphony of philosophic thought (which I'll be taking a more thorough look at in a later post) that takes complexity theory one essential step beyond its analytical roots. In a balanced world, the collective realities we create would continue to multiply in logarithmic progression to the greatest benefit of every single component of the master sum; in an imbalanced one, they stagnate and crust and confine, causing a great deal of pain and malformation in all sectors, like cancer tumors.

To use a less harrowing image, I'll turn to the good ol' web. Ever since I was a little kid, I've had a strong native understanding that everything was intimately, multidimensionally connected. That's what Charlotte's Web was about, at least to me. Throughout my childhood I saw and heard and read echoes of this web analogy in everything. I only slowly realized that everyone else in the world did not necessarily think this way--an important understanding for any budding idealist, since one can't be an effective idealist until one sees that one's ideals may not reflect everyone else's. At that point, idealism becomes a sort of activism in that one is just another human fighting for what he thinks is right, no matter how lofty one's conceptual framework might be. My job now is simply to do everything in my power to repair the oh-so-tangled web we've collectively woven (and the one I've woven around myself); and if required, spin a new one.

In fact and also in a virtual manner, that is already happening. Not only was I able to find academic validation of my childhood-spawned all-is-one philosophy that day, but I also found an analog or annex to everything that obsesses my mind and feeds my soul. This is reflected in the "Vital Links" section of The Naked Animal's sidebar, which represents my "chosen reality"--you know, like a "chosen family" instead of a nuclear one. The connections there create a template for my own version of the new and improved human web. The sentences I string together here over the coming months will hopefully help to fill in some of the gaps.



With projects like BBC's h2g2, an online "guidebook to life, the universe and everything," fashioned after Doug Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and spearheaded by the author himself, the Internet is filling in lots of gaps very quickly. It is now, at the very least, an ever-more complex interactive catalogue of human thought and knowledge; couple that with the way the Web works, through synapses and connections that scientists have compared to frontal lobe activity, and we've got a virtual collective human brain in the making. We can already manifest almost anything we want, be it resonant or discordant, material or etheric, at the fiddling of a few buttons. It always thrills me when fantasy crosses the line into reality. Now where are those personal jet packs the space age promised?

According to Howard Bloom, probably the world's most active evolutionary thinker and writer, even more amazing things are just around the corners of our minds. Bloom is a scientist who is systematically merging science, spirit and art to create a "Grand Unified Theory of Everything in the Universe Including the Human Soul." Almost unbearably energetic and prolific, Bloom has already written more than any normal person could read in a lifetime. His website-that-ate-Manhattan, "Howard Bloom's Big Bang Tang Tango Media Lab," not only contains over 3900 chapters of the ever-expanding Theory, but also a multidimensional journey through the past, present and future of the human experience that fuses all disciplines, specialties and other paths into "a common search for creativity, empowerment, and truth." If you ever wanted a definition of life in ten words or less, there ya go.

There's enough solid thought and raw passion in Bloom's work alone to completely redefine reality towards a radically better way of living for the whole world, and he's just one in a large, interconnected circle of elastically-inclined geniuses, Buckminster Fuller, another unabashed idealist, being my all-time hero of the genre.

Bloom is running a close second, though. He comes complete with his own bullshit detector and a sly way with cynicism that covers the pessimistic viewpoint before its afficionadoes have had a chance to say nay. This is an important additional element to transformational science and philosophy in today's world, where cynical thought processes have become so ingrained that we are made to feel embarrased by earnestness the same way we're urged to feel ashamed of farting and burping--all three phenomena being entirely natural human processes.

I disappeared into the Big Bang Tango Media Lab for about 12 hours straight one day last week. Though I barely scratched the surface of even one of its many layers, I came away with an intensified feeling of awe and understanding that is now blending into a kind of instinctive wisdom that words cannot navigate.

Then I disappeared into the alternate universe of blogs, and it created the same transcendent effect. Here's a blog, for instance, by a respected but unheralded professor in Finland who's doing the same work Bloom is doing in his own quiet, academic way.

But it was the pulsating patterns of random insights and personal stories posted by my fellow less-informed seekers and observers that sent me, with a sort of scientific precisioin, into a state of ultra-productive lucid dreaming. The ability to engage in and produce a spontaneous combustion of wisdom and spirit is by no means confined to the superiorly-educated and well-publicized.

Now, I think I've introduced enough melding of science, philosophy, spirituality and art in the above paragraphs and the rest of my sidebar links that I don't need to philosphize about it any more than I already have here. My own philosophical construct (remember, the Golden Rule) is incredibly simple and I like it that way, though I do enjoy taking the old gray matter out for a brisk romp on a regular basis--don't want it to get flabby, y'know. Please explore my links at your leisure to expand your own inner and outer universes, and follow where they may lead--most likely to your very own chosen reality.

Meanwhile, I'll be doing what I think I do best: looking at the everyday in novel ways to reveal connections unseen from other viewpoints. Now that I've synthesized this cache of inter-connective information, I feel I can get on with it. I don't promise any arrivals at glamorous destinations, but I do guarantee an interesting trip.

Bon Voyage!

Categories: philosophy, spirit, meaning, omnism, anarchology, leaders, transformation

A few days ago, my roommate got a link from a concerned friend about this drug, designed to combat homosexuality and effeminate behavior. I saw immediately that it must be a hoax, and clicked on the little "No on Prop 313" button in the lower right hand corner, which took me to this blog, concerning the writing of an article for the New York Times by an ex-gay born-again Christian fighting against Prop. 313, which would outlaw the use of the drug. The one post on the blog is many pages long and feverishly written, and the 136 comments the post received are equally impassioned. The whole thing is thought-provoking and even feather-ruffling, as well as being well-written and entirely fictional, and I'm sitting there going, Wow, this is a true specimen of native Web art--though it seems that many people have taken it for the truth, which makes it all the more scintillating.

Dig a little deeper and you'll find this: an intensive interview on homomojo.com with the creator of the blog and related "ad," one Benjamin Leo, a New York City engineer who also happens to be one hell of an experimental writer/artist. The interview works in tandem with the project itself to delve into the attendant issues (fear of homosexuality, the insidiousness of the drug industry, internalized homophobia--there are many) and to discuss the related topic of multidimensional art that blurs the line between reality and illusion...and as it blurs, it disappears for a moment, fusing the two in an embrace of holistic truth.

Now that's good Internet!

Categories: language, art, glbt, issues, blogs

The Animal has been extremely busy unraveling the mysteries of the universe while practicing the fine art of manic-depression management, the former being a piece of cake compared to the latter.

Being manic depressive is like being a tiny diamond needle on a vinyl disc that can't seem to get in the groove. You scratch through it as you skid up and down into wells and over hills on either side of it, and you get a hit of its synergistic power as you skip across it, but it remains frustratingly out of your control to stick with it and simply let the music play.

I used to create extreme sine waves with my dives and flights for radical experience and instant enlightenment, but now that I'm a little better than before, my deviations from the groove are less dramatic. I am able to traverse the dark and the light with the same intent I have always had in my rises and falls--to create and/or gather useful information and experience--without having to go nearly so high or so low to fulfill it, and in between I manage to surf the groove for days, even weeks at a time. The groove is not outrageous or any other adjective of extremity in affect. In fact, the groove feels just right. The music that rattles around your head is broadcast over the loudspeakers of your life when you get in the groove, and it feels just right.

Still, there's work to be done. When isn't there? Just right feels a little uncomfortable to a being who has never really experienced the Mama Bear phenomenon before. So the Animal still has highs that are a little too unstrung and lows that are a tad more grueling than he'd like in his attempt to reconcile his maniacal self to the gentle balance of grooviness.

This past week I allowed myself to become completely embroiled in the petty disturbances of self maintenance, most especially making a living. I started out on Monday exhausted after an over-indulgent weekend (Just in case anyone was wondering: Yes, it is possible to have too much sex.); and when I get tired, my always-lurking bile-spewing, pessimistic, unrepentantly harsh side takes over.

On Monday and Tuesday, I railed endlessly against the gross inequalities and foul misuses of power in this world like a demented preacher, screaming at the top of my lungs while smoking a cigarette, swilling black coffee and listening to psychedelic trance music real loud on my way to work. My poor, meek Asian ESL students didn't have a chance: If they weren't ready with an answer, I went to the next student, and the next, and the next, if necessary. And they were being blessed with none of "Rob's super-kooky ESL moments." Das Instruktor was on patrol, and taking no prisoners. One of my usually talkative students was so flabbergasted by it that he couldn't get one sentence out the whole week, and I relished it, as he was also spending a lot of those sentences airing his bigoted views about the American populace.


And now I'm relishing it even more, because I'm through with that school and its impossible Japanese-style bureacracies. The administrator there, a Japanese woman about my age, had made such a virtue of paperwork and formal etiquette that I have an ongoing image of her wrapped head to toe like a living mummy in sticky, red tape the color of blood, her words muffled by the wad that's stuffed down her throat. Thursday was my last day and, of course, I had about six pages of completely pointless paperwork to do. On Monday I'm off to teach at a school that openly shares with its teachers the fact that most of their students wouldn't be there if they could stay in the U.S. without a student visa, and trusts them to behave accordingly without having to adhere to a bunch of tight-assed rules and regulations. In addition, I don't have to either wear a tie or drive to the valley anymore. So life started looking a little better by Thursday afternoon.

On top of that, I got cable internet installed, which thrills me with its speed, and ordered a complete cancellation of all phone company services, though I won't be getting a new cell connection for a few days yet, and that made things feel even lighter.

And then, just to make sure I got the most out of my little trip down depression lane, I realized that I had no idea how to set up a local area network to include my roommate's wireless computer, even though I knew I had all the equipment I needed (namely, a modem, a router, and all the right cables). Both Philip and I nearly had apoplectic fits about it this morning, realizing that we were going to have to pay the cable company something like a hundred bucks plus twenty extra per month just because we were too computer illiterate to figure out a simple connection. I was so uptight about it that my heart was pounding way faster than usual, my nerves felt hot and I walked around the house screaming profanities like a Tourette's Syndrome sufferer, scaring the hell out of my sweet-as-hell cat.

And then Philip and I sat down together, made a few calls, did some prying and finally figured it out. It turned out that all we had to do was turn everything off, connect it all up the way we wanted it, then turn it all back on again. Et voila! Not only do we have much better internet accessibility than we used to have (SBC DSL) for less, but suddenly the wielding of worldly powers was within my realm of talents again. I felt in control of my own reality as I hadn't for--well, really, it's been a couple of weeks to tell the truth; a couple of weeks of feeling like life was nothing but a futile attempt at immortality, doomed to be crushed at the feet of the monsters who had hijacked our reality and recreated it in their own vile images.

But now I say, "Filthy Monsters, I DENY you!" and poof, they are gone, only misguided humans and misguided groups of misguided humans with impossibly large and dysfuctional egos once more. And I apologize to my roommate and my cat, though I'm still fiendishly gleeful that my repulsively racist now-ex-student felt the lash of my demon's hooked tail....

And now I've got some of my favorite music playing in the background, and I'm in the elusive groove. The groove is a simple balance between inner and outer forces. The groove is what people are talking about when they talk about living in the moment. It's the line between the yin and the yang; in fact, it's the infinity symbol that the two lines of opposing yin-yang entireties make when overlapped, endlessly spinning like a hoola hoop around the hips of your own gravity's center. When you're there, you're there; nothing more and nothing less; and there's little to do but enjoy the flow and its fluctuations, which flutter like bright moths on your event horizon.

Yet despite the fact that I get it, that I feel it through and through, feel the truth that it is and the gentle power that keeps it spinning, I'm really still not all that sure that I deserve to be here. I know that's silly, a trick of the ego, yet I can't help getting annoyed at that little voice that urges me to see myself as less than whole and perfect as I am.

Hey, you! Yeah, you, buddy, back there in the peanut gallery. You shut your mug while the show's running or I'll have to come back there myself and straighten ya out! Ya got it, buddy?!

There, that should do it. That's about it for manic-depression management today. More on the Animal's other recent endeavors (i.e. unraveling the mysteries of the universe) in the near future. Don't you just love the near future?

Categories: depression, transformation, work, groove

"Skaters, this is your final warm-up."

This is one of maybe two- or three-hundred tunes, jingles and snippets that randomly take hold of my mind, popping up frequently like those flashing website ads, at the top of other thoughts, distracting my attention.

I was a figure skater as a kid (that's me at eleven in the picture--gold medal, woo-hoo!), and "final warm-up" was the term competition announcers used to signal our last minute of practice before we'd have to wait in the wings for our respective turns to perform. I was a high-strung child with no native self esteem to speak of, so I was working without a center, and no matter how prepared I was, you could always lay even money on whether I'd skate a flawless program or wipe the floor with my ass--I was roller skating, the white trash cousin of ice skating--same tricks, same everything, except we weren't on TV, we carried 20 extra pounds of weight in wheels, bearing and plates on our feet, and we skated on a rubber or cement floor covered in a creepy rubberized glaze instead of a pristine sheet of ice. At the Bakersfield Civic Auditorium, in the center of my hometown, where the state championships were held every summer until recently (they moved to glamorous Fresno), we skated on the basketball court.

In my adulthood, the once-dreaded term has taken on a cozier connotation--it signifies the beginning of the televised figure skating season, at which annual point I become a temporary ESPN2 junkie for the next six months. I've been following the epic evolution of the sport of figure skating, absolutely rapt, since I started skating at age seven. When I quit at fifteen in favor of concentrating on my education (and on the usual--sex, drugs, punk rock, etc., though I did manage to graduate cum laude from UCLA in '88), it became my vicarious way of participating, a phenomenon that is unsettlingly analagous to the way an ex-high school quarterback will latch onto Sunday football as a lifeline to the physical and mental rush of competition, and to the fulfillment of a talent that he still feels must be lying latent somewhere deep inside his aging bones.

I don't spend the rest of the year thinking about skating or keeping up with what my favorite competitors are up to, so the season sneaks up on me, which can be a delight. Last Sunday I was deep in research about the nature of time, when I was rewarded with a noontime bon bouche of Skate America--the season's first open invitational. Lots of skaters wiped the ice with their asses (and you don't just get bruises on ice, like in roller skating, but wet, half-frozen bruises that thaw into inky blots), but their were a few amazing highlights that sent chills through my nervous system. In fact, some of the best moments of skating that I've seen have made me bawl like a baby with wonderment and appreciation. Yup, I'm really into figure skating. It's the one geek card I carry. And if you're as big a nut as I am about it, you'll soon be able to read my analyses of the ongoing drama on my new figure skating blog.

But I wasn't all that tuned into the skating that was taking place onscreen that day. No one captured my attention the way it was yearning to be captured, so my mind got fixated on the phrase--"final warm-up." I repeated it over and over, silently, in the endless, surreal conversation I've been having with myself since the dawn of my cognizance, touching off a string of metaphorical associations.

First, it was ninety degrees in the shade after two weeks of downright chilly weather, and I felt that Los Angeles, always obliging when she wants to be, was giving us her "final warm-up" before slipping casually into a cool, damp quartet of months. YES, we do have weather in Los Angeles--it's simply custom designed to fit the ever-morphing idiosyncracies of the city and its population. Along with the skating season starting and the time change--always a discombobulating event, even if it does happen twice a year--this tender afterthought of summer helped to form a triple-headed announcement of a cyclical shift that is always profound, if familiar.

I also feel that I've reached my own "final warm-up" period. After a year of battling cancer during which I learned more about myself and my connections within the universe than I had in the previous 38 years combined, I have broken through many walls that used to seem impenetrable, and I'm finally taking on the management and development of my life with the vigor and dedication it deserves. I'm ready for my close-up, and I'm goin' for the gold. Now, I'm not sure what kind of gold, exactly, it will be, but I'm going for it nonetheless. No more false starts. I take my place in the arena and face the crowd.

Last night while I strolled through the Halloween free-for-all on Santa Monica Boulevard I was faced with my political self, and I took a good look at it for the first time. I have long pussy-footed around my truth so as not to sound too radical to people who are naturally more content with the flawed world and more solidly third-dimensional than I am, but it has done nothing for me except cause undue frustration, and I'm sick of it; we're in far too urgent a situation for such dissembling. The truth is that human culture is in peril due to America's lack of meaningful leadership. As the wealthiest country on earth, we carry a sort of noblesse oblige to lead the rest of the world, most of which looked up to and emulated the US until recently, humanely and creatively into the future. Instead, our country is being kneed in the groin by the same kind of fundamentalist fanatics that have disabled and disenfranchised much of the Middle East. And anyone who believes that Bush was actually elected to the presidency either in 2000 or last year is courting willful ignorance, which has probably now passed baseball for the title of America's favorite pastime.

So there I was entering the fray with my roommate and brother-in-arms Philip, who had thrown together a truly SICK gender-fuck drag at the last minute,
when I heard someone on a bullhorn yelling out that it was time for Bush and his incipiently theocratic regime to go, that if we enjoyed walking the streets half naked in freedom and pleasure, we should take a look at our government and see how they were threatening those rights and forcing passion or dissent in any form into the dark corners, where they can be quarantined (okay, he didn't say exactly that) - and that there was going to be a mass action tomorrow, all over the country, in which people would leave work at noon and gather on the main thoroughfares of the major cities and demand that this ineffective, narrow-minded buffoon of a CEO leave the boardroom of Americorp immediately, and that the corp itself be radically redesigned. (I use the corp moniker with impunity because there's no other reason for nations or borders than economic and commercial ones -- I dare someone to refute that.)

Despite the kaleidoscope of critters on the street, I was drawn to the voice, where I picked up some flyers and read all about it, poring over the words that so closely echoed my own deep feelings while I slowly inched through the crowd, oblivious to the mellow madness through which I passed.

I'm looking forward to cocooning through the winter with my healing self and my lovely, lovely figure skating, but it's getting harder for me to comfortably and casually cocoon. Life has gotten too prickly. I used to think that if I couldd make myself happy, then the fucked up world could go fuck it's mother fucking fucked up self (see here for how poisonous I considered civilazation two years ago, when I began this blog, then forgot about it), but after many years of trial and error, and finally running away from society altogether--and bang into my own mortality--I've found that a major reason for my unhappines is the state of the world. Especially our dear country. The beautiful, brotherhood, sea to shining sea and all.

Just over half of us voted last election, but most of us sure do find plenty of time to complain about what's going on now because of that. It's no wonder that the conservative press villifies the liberal press for being whiny--I hate to say it, but it's true. It gets tired hearing how stupid right wingers are and that they're doing everything wrong when we're willing to kowtow to them the minute they swing their little dicks around, as when the entire Senate wimpily gave Bush the right to march into Iraq. Let's cut the hypocritical crap and do something about it. It's time. This has been your final warm up. We are ready to meet the enemy. The cavalry is not coming to whisk us out of this on its intergalactic horses. Intention now must become action, for the sea of change does not favor underdeveloped currents. Posting about this here is my first truly concerted contribution to turning the tide of stupidity and intolerance, and I'm thinking about staking out my own corner along Wilshire Boulevard tomorrow (I'm thinking Wilshire and LaBrea, in front of the old diner there) to join the action whose tenets so moved me on that sweet, warm, final-warm-up kind of night that Halloween turned out to be this wicked year.

Happy All Soul's Night, and to all a good dose of lovin' from within and beyond.

Categories: politics, snippets, backstory, skating, holidays, weather, recovery