No Hard Feelings…
Three years ago this month I was packing my shit into that rucksack and screwing down the mental armor I knew that I would need to protect the ridiculous fantasy that I could be free. My hopes had been bolstered by people I regarded as heros well after I had learned that they were all degenerates, drunks, drug addicts, malcontents, etcetera etcetera as they either shot themselves in the head, overdosed on drugs, died from long term alcoholism or, on the hopeful side, receded into caves within themselves to nurse their various addictions, one after the fucking other. It was my fantasy that I would somehow forego this inevitable conclusion.
It was only supposed to be 15 months…
At first I worried how I would make it through the time and now after accidentally doubling it I don’t know if I can make it any other way.
But finally it has become too much for me. I used to be able to take it with a country smile, a dopey and humble uh-oh. Oh well oh well oh well… it’ll all work out in the end…. and all those other excuses to not be furious.
Why couldn’t I just graduate school like they had promised? Why did I owe more than 30,000 dollars when it was supposed to be free? Why did they take my G.I. Bill away? Hadn’t I earned it? Did I not get enough awards or volunteer for enough deployments, beat enough detainees? Do you, the Federal Government, realize the predicament you have created in my life?
I’ll never get that bachelors degree, which is a goddamn shame. My credits will evaporate in another year and I’ll be left with 30K in debt with literally nothing to show for it. I showed a lot of promise, but there isn’t much of a chance that that will shine through the way that I’d hoped it would. Without that fucking degree I am condemned to lifting boxes full of widgets or granola until my fucking arms fall off. All that Kant for nothing except to understand the irony of the caustic relationship between means and ends.
So now I’m praying in Chicago to just get into a community college now that they “fixed” the G.I. Bill. I’m praying that maybe they really did fix it and that I can finally live like a real person here in this country, with money to buy some fucking toilet paper. I should have known better than to pray.
They tell me I’m worth half. Exactly 50%. That is how much of a veteran I am. Half. Half the promise. So I’m supposed to accept this like some kind of android. Just shut down twice as much to compensate for lack of energy. Pay half of my bills? Right…
It seems to me that I am just about half of every fucking thing.
To be quite fucking frank, I feel about half interested in being alive to the extent that about half of the time my mind is occupied with the obsessive thought about the easy road. That one simple decision.
No bills forever. No 30K in debt. No broken promises. No hard feelings. No nothing.
I’d make excuses and apologize for raining on your parade, for saying something nobody wants to hear, and for accepting defeat, but I don’t care much any more about hurting anyones feelings. Nobody has spared me any punches in my life and I’ve lived a good deal of it with my back against the wall already.
The fucking gurus and spiritual healers will talk their shit, say I need to spin a pot or get a goddamn massage or some bullshit. They’ll talk in their big empty way about P.T.S.D. and about who we are and how to deal with us and then they’ll walk backstage and take a big old check because everything’s a fucking racket, right? Buy and sell our problems until it isn’t a problem any more.
Well I don’t need a fucking massage or a councilor or reike or hot rocks or a cathartic fucking experience.
I just want the fucking money I was promised. That is all. It sounds so simple.
I want off of this ride, please. I have had my fill.
Filed under Combat Paper
Waiting for the Moon Ladder
Me being in Chicago in the summer has become kind of a joke. My friends all laugh. So he’s back. For now. Like I couldn’t help myself. And they laugh again when I say I’m going to say. He’s said that before. It makes me feel stupid. Has this whole life been a mistake?
I got stuck. It wouldn’t let me go. I wanted to find work and stay the last two summers. I tried. But something always went wrong.
I wanted to get out of this lifestyle. I wanted off this crazy ride. They all think that it is very fun to be free. It isn’t. Or I’m not free, or something. I am scared and poor and broken and the world moves by too fast. I can’t even hide how scared I am any more. I shake like a leaf. Maybe it is just diet.
Art and writing will never be some miracle solution. I was wrong about that. I will never be able to get over myself to be the kind of artist that I would have to be to make money and solve my kind of problems and even if I did I lost interest in the whole pursuit when I look out at these crazy people and this disgusting world they chose to live in and how there is no room for art anymore. Not inside of people’s minds. Silly thoughts don’t pay the bills. That is what scares me the most. It scares me because I believed so hard, and that belief was stupid.
It’s like finding out that God isn’t real all over again.
We joked on the Paper Trail that some day the Moon Ladder would come.
The moon ladder was the ladder that hangs from the moon that we’ve been waiting for. It’s a silly symbol of the slow crawl away from society. It’s the impure hope for fame and money. It is the escape from the rules and regulations of this planet.
DCam would get angry at us because we sounded unprofessional and the curators would think we were taking this whole thing too lightly and all that just made the joke funnier. It was a code. The art world was bullshit. We came for the booze and the money. It is the secret that nobody wants to tell you, so they blather on about the meaning of their pieces. The meaning of my pieces was always very simple: this is Hell. And they called me whimsical.
Anyway, this joke became a philosophy. All of a sudden I was using the terminology with a serious face and a serious heart because I know that I am waiting for the Moon Ladder in every way that I could. I am preparing myself. Sharpening my skills. Building a stronger, governmentally funded financial scheme.
BUT!
For all of that to work I have to survive here in Chicago. I need for this landing to stick. I need a break here. I cannot take this much longer. I have kept myself intact for the most part but I no longer have what it takes to make it “on the road” inside of me. This is where I have to wait for the Moon Ladder. From a grimy studio with a beater and a screen printing set-up.
If it never comes that sounds like a good enough life for me.
The list of things that could go wrong this year is pretty full between waiting on the VA for multiple papers and ratings. There is the looming danger of finding out how to afford going to school for one month without being paid to do so. Then there are the things that can happen which nobody could count on. The kind of things that make you drop cheese on the floor in the grocery store and then pack everything up and go somewhere else because everywhere reminds you of somebody who isn’t there any more. When those things happen it is inevitable that drinkers will drink, smokers will smoke, and runners will run away. And I am all of those things.
Please wish me luck. I need very much of it right now.
Love,
Otis
Filed under Combat Paper
Drafted. Part One.
SM 0258 sat in the back of an empty cafe. Behind the rancid smoke of the cheap cigarette his bad skin was twitching, wrinkling the thin fabric that was tightly stretched over his sharp bones. His eyes were pink around the edges, painful blisters growing at the base of the eyelashes which flashed over vacant eyes held widely open, a reflection of the complicated mixture of a total lack of thought or feeling with a sort of sickly shock. This concoction, though, appeared to be at nothing in particular.
His coffee had become cold between his nervous grippings and letting go’s and mid-motion changes of heart or stomach. He was thinking they were all against him. Job listings were sprawled across the table, stained with coffee and annotated with symbols which had ceased to find meaning any more to their maker who was still occupied staring morosely through the world with a cigarette wrapped between chapped and nervous lips.
They were all against him. He didn’t even need to explain why to himself any more. He didn’t even feel crazy about it any more. They were obviously against everybody like him. He wished desperately for so many years that he would be proven crazy, that nobody would ever make it so clear that they were truly against him, but they did.
They sent him to the war and they made him do awful things and when he said he felt awful they sent him to a room with a bag of drugs and told him not to come out until he could tell them that he was happy. He hadn’t come out for a very long time and when he told them that he was happy he was sure they knew that he was not, but he had been so bad to them that they wanted to believe him as much as he wanted them to believe him. They all knew, though, that it wasn’t true. SM 0258 would never be happy again.
The glow of the cigarette reached the end of his bony, scarred finger and burned the tip that he had blistered the week before trying to clean up the mess he’d made at his last job. Jobs. He put the cigarette out sharply and waved his finger about. The thought of jobs and the new burn caused him to reach for his pill dispenser. It was a neat gadget and he felt good when he held it to his mouth. He hated the feeling of the pills in his mouth. This particular dose did not sit well and soon he found himself in the grimy bathroom vomiting. The sight of all the pills in the vomit made him vomit more. After some time there was nothing left in him so he cleaned his bad face and resumed his gloomy post at the table.
He cleared the job listings away because they made him feel pathetic. He knew the reality of his situation. If he could get an interview he’d probably blow it when they ask where he’d been for the last ten years. No explaining that, especially with the War Crimes Act. If he found a sympathetic employer to put him in some out of the way position the boss would quickly come to realize that between the mental illness which led to all sorts of near violent outbursts and the pills which melted SM 0258 into a sleepwalking, glassy eyed waste of company time and money there was little room to actually get any work done. It was a tale as old as time.
All the people he’d known from The War were having the same problems. He couldn’t even feel special about his condition. That is how against him they were.
The door opened and his eyes became alert. They flashed to the doorway where there was standing a man who could have been anybody, but really looked like he was somebody. His suit was sharp and dark, somehow blacker than black. His bones were sharp and angular. He at once seemed arrogant and relaxed. SM 0258 hated him terribly.
The black suited man seated himself at the table nearest to SM 0258’s and further he sat facing the nervous young man. There was something about the man in the black suit, and it was almost certainly in the way that he moved, that SM 0258 found deeply disturbing. He moved like the mechanized loaders which had loaded into his bomber the horrendous explosive devices which occupied so many of his daydreams. But it wasn’t entirely like the movement of those either. It was as if one of those had donned a suit and begun a dance made to mock the creatures which had given it such a disgusting task to accomplish. SM 0258 hated the loaders because, to his simple mind, it seemed like one of them could also be doing his more disgusting task to drop the payload into the atmosphere over rebellious colonies. Surely they would not wake up at night howling in a way that had proven that no sexual partner could stand. Robots don’t even have sexual partners.
The black suited man that moved like a machine had ordered and his coffee had come but he had not touched it. For that matter he hadn’t done anything, not even taken his eyes off the psychologically fragile veteran sitting across from him who had recently vomited up his afternoon’s dosage of antipsychotics (1,000 mg), antianxiety (800 mg), anti-depressants (1,200 mg) and miscellaneous medicines (2,500 mg). SM 0258 became quickly irate.
“What the fuck do you want you fucking robot? You wanna give me bombs? You drop your OWN fucking bombs!” demanded 0258.
Despite the clearly irrational basis of the remark the black suited man remained motionless. It was only his mouth which moved and made it clear that his mouth was not connected to his face in the conventional muscular way, but in some other, nearly muscular way, which meant without a doubt that this man was indeed a robot when he said “we want you to help us end The Industry.”
The lights went out. The bad face of SM 0258 was visible for a brief period as the cherry on his cigarette brightened, then dulled again, and then disappeared altogether into, presumably, the ash tray, though it very well might have been the extended arm of the robot man in the black suit. It was hard to tell.
Filed under Combat Paper
“FUCKING FAGGOT!”
As I was walking down the street, as weird and gangly as on usual days, I heard a familiar call come from a car that was passing by me at about thirty miles an hour. I wish that I could say that it was unusual to hear what I heard, but that would be a lie, but it would also be a lie to say that even half of my days have not exposed me to this phenomenon of male insecurity.
The words that were said were: “FUCKING FAGGOT!”.
Even before I had my first flood of hormones or figured out the joys of masturbation I was already learning to cower inside of myself from this particular breed of hostility.
In fact, by the time that I started to develop in the sexual way I had already been thoroughly and exhaustingly trained to hate men. My first father had abandoned me and my mother and my next swore at me and occasionally hit me (probably because he himself suspected that I was one of these “fucking faggots”) and the hillbilly tractor boys would beat me with my own shoes while chanting this now familiar terminology which they had also learned before the blooming of their own sexual identities. But I will not launch off into some long winded and unnecessary self-defense, trying to assure you, the reader, that these accusations are inaccurate. To make any explanations now would be degrading in the fullest for both of us.
What I wish to do here is find out why. I want to talk it out.
I’ve always been an “odd duck” if you will, and if you know me I’m sure that you will. From the beginning my dear mother had assured me that I only received this kind of verbal assault because I was unusual, because there was something inside of me which was unlike what was inside of these other boys, and that they were jealous. I never believed her when she said that they were jealous, but I did very much believe that their classification of me was the path of least resistance towards putting me in some box that they could understand.
Even as I made my first lunch time announcements that I was going to join the military, my only hope to prove myself to these boys (which at the time I had desperately hoped to do) I was me with the skepticism of the shit kickers. One of them said: “They don’t let faggots in the military.”
Well, instead of making an unquestionable man out of me, my six years in the military were speckled as heavily with these slurs as space is with stars. I became to know myself as “FAGGOT” and to respond as if it were written on my name tape.
It was during this time that I realized the true nature of this hatred.
They weren’t jealous of my internal beauty. They wanted to fuck me and they hated themselves for it.
Why else would they spend so much time fretting over who it was that I chose to fuck. Certainly they had nothing to worry about. They were mostly fat and smelled always of farts and whiskey. They touched each other frequently, enjoyed watching pornography in large circles of other men, talked almost exclusively of other men as homosexuals and women as “sluts” and “whores” to be fucked (or so often raped) violently and without joy. Of course I would not want, in even the most deprived of landscapes, to ever touch one of these men with anything other than a knife. They disgusted me.
Despite all of my attempts to convince them that I enjoyed the company of women and that I had never even met a man that I could tolerate, much less enjoy the prospect of loving, I stayed in my little easy box. They made jokes about putting me in a dress and gang raping me. One of them pinned me to my bed in an attempt to actually carry through with the act. Even amongst my “friends” I still found myself answering for this perceived “disorder”.
And even now, at the age of 27, I still hear the word regularly. I can read it on the faces of my peers and passerbys alike. Even a few of my ex-girlfriends who had become more like men than women in their fear and deep seated need to please manly men had used the same term for the same reasons that boys had. To put me under them because they were afraid of me.
I have often wished that my life were as simple as to be a homosexual. To be what they say that I am so that when they say their stupid words I could have the anger of the victim and not the questions about what it is in me that causes such disgust and revulsion amongst most men, even those that think they are “over it”.
It is the way that I walk and the way that I talk. But what gives them the right? Nothing. Just their own anger and their frustrations, and, as I am led to guess, their repressed desire to share something with another man through the hateful barrier that they can only cross when they are playing homoerotic games with each other, or preening over sexual conquests with other men, finally feeling the joy that they missed while having their sex.
This analysis isn’t going to get me anywhere. It hasn’t for years. I only want to confront it. I am sick of being a quiet victim who carries inside of himself all of these questions. I am sick of choking back the anger when I hear these words. I am sick of the violence that wells up inside of me when I know that these hateful rapists cover the nation from sea to shining sea sewing future harvests of likewise tormented young men and women who live in fear of the uncontrollable hate of men who hate themselves and what they secretly think about when they are playing their boy’s games.
So I am a FAGGOT, and I’m proud of it. Not because of who I choose to love and to touch and to endure time with, but because it has been my name and it has been my calling for 27 years and I am proud to share it with everyone else who has known its violence.
If this is your name too then be proud. There is no greater height to attain as a male than to be opposite “them” in their own spectrum. Be who you are. Own it. The strangeness that they attempt to classify is just awesomeness waiting to make you into something more than them, and they are sad that they weren’t something more themselves.
Filed under Combat Paper
The Few Memories I Have of You…
On the gnat infested evenings when we, the bitchers and moaners of MotorCycle Awesome, were sitting on the stoop drinking our beers while both bitching and moaning we would see your pudgy frame running on the ridges across the road from our housing complex which we lovingly called TK Plaza. We’d laugh about your dedication while we got fat and drunk. We thought you were crazy.
You wanted to be a Ranger. I never knew why. I figured you just wanted to kill people. I think now that it was more than that. I think you wanted our approval and the approval of other men. You were like us. You were one of the Garbage People trying to prove to you and everybody else that you were more than where you came from. But I couldn’t see that then.
On one afternoon when I was getting back from the Camp I met you in the road. You showed me the tattoo of the tiger on your arm and asked me all about mine. I judged you then because I thought that you were a square. A company man. A yes man. I thought you had a killer inside of you. You were just trying to make some common ground between us. You, the soldier, and me, the hapless freak. You were trying to be my friend in a place where I had none. And I pushed you away because you weren’t like me.
Later that year I was reading books in my room underneath the pornography and dinosaur stickers when I heard a great crashing of bottles against the paper thing wall which separated my room from yours and our house from your house where all the Fisters lived. I went next door to see what the score was.
You were all drunk in the middle of the day, even Sergeant Plaxton who was always a kind of compass pointing towards the true soldierly way. Scut was cooking up one of the large rodents that lived on the island on your grill and talking about how him and his dad and “tag teamed” some woman together. You, Tenasi, Plaxton and Scut had been busy throwing your empty bottles at the wall. The broken remains were stuck in the dry wall. I wanted to laugh but somehow I could only hate. Rooster and Dobber and Deuell all found the scene very funny, however.
Towards the end of our easy deployment you got this wild hair and you started talking about volunteering for this mission to Iraq. How completely crazy. This year had nearly killed me in all of the painful absense of freedom but yet you clamored for more. How was I to understand?
Back at home Christmas came and I’d more or less forgotten you and Hickox and Tenasi and all the others who had volunteered for the mission. I was home from Chicago with my girlfriend at the time, this spoiled rich girl named Laura. I was standing on the balcony of my mom’s apartment in Charlotte. Next door was a member of the unit, a sergeant, I forget his name. As I smoked on story above him he casually said:
“Did you hear about Dresky?” He was putting up Christmas lights.
I remember how the cigarette became unreal between my fingers then. “No, Sergeant. I have not.”
“They hit a bomb. He’s burned real bad. Whole body. They say it burned his face off. His eyelids. Everything.” And still he continues to put up these fucking decorations, not a hint of emotion in his words. In my own head the world had disappeared and I entered into a hallucinatory plane of terror and nightmares. I could see your burned face.
I ran into the back room of the house and crumpled on the ground sobbing under the bed. Soon my mom came to find out what had happened since her nearly happy son had left for a smoke and come back ruined. I tried to tell her but the words couldn’t come out around the tears and I pushed her away. Since then I have pushed everybody away.
You hung on for six months down in the San Antonio burn ward. We speculated on your chances at survival. They say that infection is the real killer with burn victims.
And infection did kill you. Eventually. Six months of eye-lidless pain, wrapped in gauze, forced to stare out continuously at the world without the ability to shut it off. To sleep. To dream. By now your burned face was a nightly host of my dreams. You would come to me in a burning HumVee and you stopped at my feet as flames licked out from where your eyes should be. This is Hell. Every time. You never said a word.
In July you finally died and I felt the most disgusting feeling I’d ever felt. Relief. Thank God that you had found some peace. I made the mistake of vocalizing my relief and lost the respect of everyone in the unit if I’d ever had it to begin with. How could I be happy that you were dead? How could I be happy knowing that you were burned so terribly? As always, even my concern with me and my own happiness rankled in my stomach when I knew it was you who would never again know a day of happiness. Or sadness.
We fired artillery shells from our Howitzers for you. I wrote you a poem that I have forgotten on our guns shell for you. In the moment of silence that followed the deafening thunder of our goodbye, with tears in our eyes, we held our first memorial to you, Dreasky.
Since then I have held countless memorials to you down dusty and lonely roads, on every drug I can find to kill my pain, I have memorialized your life and enshrined my few memories of you and I take them out and dust them off and I cry again to prove that I still can. I will carry you with me everywhere I go. I will live for two inside of the gloom created in your absense.
I have never been able to accept the death of young men for the government. It was a terrible decision to join the military and to meet you and to learn to respect your kind.
Sleep well Dreasky.
Filed under Combat Paper
Dear 555,
On the search for the Modern Artist I find the one truth: fuck you, eat this guilt. And I think of Triple Nickel.
ISN 555. Man. There is no ISN 666, though there may be ISN 777.
Every week I held your keys. They would come back to me with laughing faces. “He still thinks he’s going home. Stupid mother fucker.”
Now, ISN 555, you are a mythology to me. How do you like that?
You never get to go home. That is the evil trick of the whole fucking thing. It is sick, really.
Before the fall you were a drug runner. A lowly servant of the poppy dream sold internationally by your boss who sold his opium cheap and you even cheaper. And for all I know you’re still going to reservations and telling your Escort Team that your interrogator promised you that you would be going home soon as the dust kicked up around you on your way from Gold Building to Camp Four… again.
It was the same story every week.
And now I think of you every time I feel the trap in the promise of God that we could find love and happiness here and that we will be delivered home. I know that I will never go home and that Love was as big a lie as Santa Claus and Democracy that was told to me to keep me in line and to keep me wishing.
I feel as pathetic as you must have felt when I talk of my stupid hopes of salvation. My friends must find my weekly trumpeting of the glories of Art as cosmically hilarious as we had found your years long plight.
And you pray and you pray and you pray and I pray and I pray and I pray. But we both know.
It is never coming.
And if it did, say we were both successful and Allah delivers you home and my God delivers me a day of peace when I no longer have to obsessively create beautiful things only to experience the temporary high of pride which is violently obliterated as soon as every prayer I make is done, say that happened. What then? You’re still a drug runner and I’m still a concentration camp guard. We can elevate ourselves so high as to be above it, but in reality we never will be. All our prayers are worth precisely the time we waste on them. Nobody cares. Not our friends. Not fucking God. Not the law. Not you. Really.
So let us do what the Devil did and dance and play tricks on one another. Lets laugh at our misfortune and turn together in hatred towards that which put us here together. Lets rebel to its fullest until we no longer care about happy days or whether or not people give a god damn about our stupid prayers. Fuck them. Fuck everybody. You and me Triple Nickle. You and me.
We get each other. I know that we do. Just like how the guy who screams all night and I understand each other. I’m your other half. I’m the guilt you don’t want to understand and you are the victim of my ignorance. In each other we can know what we are. Ruined souls locked together by the keys.
My keys. The keys I am so proud to have never lost.
Why am I thinking of you?
It is a summer night. I lay here in bed in this fancy vintage suit elaborating a burden I should be drinking and fucking away. But instead I’m nursing a wound they all say I should heal.
I don’t want to heal. I don’t want redemption or salvation. I don’t want the lies about Love and Santa Claus and Home.
I want to feel it. I want to feel the guilt and the pain so that I know somebody does. The rest of them won’t, of that I can assure you. They are well defended stone houses of psychology. Never a question. But me…
I never want to think of you again. I never want to see your scraggly beard again. I never want to wake up sweating in the night with this horror that each time that I deploy to Camp Delta again in my dreams I am going there because I know that that is where I belong. Not you. You were the innocent one.
I was the one that was playing the Nazi. I was the perfect, sharp, white face of power in love with itself. I was the one laughing at your plea and all of your wasted time. I was the one with your keys in my hand. I can accept that. I want to. I don’t want to forget. If I forget then I am just like them. All the people that we hate together.
Were you the one that told them about Osama?
Filed under Combat Paper
-(-(ART))
While pondering one day whether or not I truly was an artist in its truest and purist sense I came to realize that where the character of the modern artist should be in my understanding there was a vacancy. I innocently set forward to investigate this lack of comprehension of a personality set that I thought should be familiar and my investigations that I hadn’t the slightest real, didactic thing to say about the character of the truly modern artist. By now my curiosity was seriously piqued and I decided undertake an attempt to outline the shape of the artist in the modern world.
There have been artists in the past who have dealt with the increasing stresses upon the individual in post-industrial modernity and they have been lauded as the voices of their generations. Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Man Ray and others defined the DADA and it’s thesis on the absurd falibility of the human experience in the shell shock of World War One. Their two fronted war against the constraints waged against the individual in the industrial and military industrial complexes and against the constraints placed upon the individual in the current art institutions made way for the next generation of war veterans which brought with it Jean Paul Sartre, Theodore Adorno representing intellectual disgust while visual artists like Robert Raushenberg represented a violently aesthetic disgust.
Things start to get fuzzy towards Vietnam. Maybe it was all the cheap acid. Art seems to be relegated to Rock music and reporters from the nether regions of the human mind, strung out on spiritual experiences. Writers like Hunter S. Thompson tear viciously at the last scraps of uncritiqued modern life. But it was Warhol whose perfect work created the very vacuum that I originally perceived. His fundamentally perfect critique on modern life heralded the cultural perception of what I now believe to be a sentiment of: “Well, I suppose there is nothing left to say.”
Musicians have hit certain notes which ring true of the generation. I would gather that we are bored and we are fucked and we are all looking for work.
I believe that it is defining why and how we are fucked that one could begin to identify the fundamental nature of what I will from here call an Anti-Art Culture. Anti-Art was introduced originally as a term to make sense of what the DADAists and Surrealists were up to. Anti-Art was meant to address the disparities in the fine arts institutions and art culture in general which they believed to be following blind orders of faith from the old guard of European art. I do not mean to use Anti-Art here in that way. I mean to use it in order to address a culture which is by its very structure adversarial to the development of a lifestyle devoted to artistic processes. I would like to further investigate this culture in three stages: indoctrination into Art as a marketing device, sublimation of the artistic voice for transition into modern Anti-Art Culture (i.e. militarism, industrialization and institutionalization) and lastly Pharmaceutical assassination of artistic tendencies deemed unfit for service in normal society.
Indoctrination:
I am unfit to speak of the most modern version of “child”as I come from a prior beta generation on which the first waves of the coming Technocracy was tested. My development follows that of Video Game consoles. I came into myself with the coming of the Nintendo, and as it came to realize itself and its appetites it defined for me my own appetites. Together we gathered more pixels and faster play and a third dimension and then a forth when the Internet came. When I wasn’t manipulating an electronic world I was being sent coded messages through the television to go out and buy plastic merchandise. This development happened in a kind of a bubble as I grew up in an isolated area with working parents.
These first experiences with Technology become abstract indoctrinations into the Aesthetic realm in which you can see virtually anything you want to see and if you wish to own it you can do that as well. Our first experiences with Art were to sell us toys and other assorted nonsense, to burden our parents with our illogical desire to spend the money they really ought to spend on things which will benefit if not our development, the development of businesses who do more productive work then to sell children bullshit that they don’t need by filling their heads with Mutants, transforming robots, cats which fight each other with lasers in space, mice which ride motorcycles on mars, a sponge which sings in the sea or radioactive turtles which, instead of dieing, actually become something like humans and they beat people up in the night.
Our generation came to acquire Aesthetic taste in a haze of lies told to us by adults promising us a world which could not possibly ever exist. I will not argue that this is not also the case for former generations as they were also inevitably sold a whole bunch of bullshit in their day. What I am trying to advance is the idea that we were subjects of a new kind of messaging and subliminal training into acceptance of societal coding. Our orders were to buy.
In the tender and traumatic phase between this indoctrination into a consumption oriented reality principle and the moment when we have declared our decisive first step into the fully realized Anti-Art culture of the “adult” world no mending advice is given on how to sublimate the plastic fantasies of youth into the task of fulfilling the expectation upon the individual to fill a meaningful and demanding place in society and so the modern individual is making the first act of free choice away from the subjectively normalized technological environment of the home under the strong influence of this institutionalized madness.
And then there is the time to choose. Ones choices are as follows:
The Military Option:
There is no more formal indoctrination into a fully realized Anti-Art Culture than Basic Combat Training. The mind is trained to repress the impulse to question. Questioning is a necessary pillar of practice in the contemplation of Art and of beauty. When the mind is trained only to accept (especially under the conditions that what is being accepted is particularly gruesome behavior which all warrants serious reconsideration) it loses its sense of comfort with the freedom of a question when the answer is unknown. There are only known knowns for the enlisted soldier.
There is a chain of command which is implanted in the enlisted soldier’s mind and never at any time does that chain of command allow for any serious contemplation of what one ought to do because if the question were taken to a Non-commissioned Officer your concern with the allocation of your labor would be quickly relieved and you would be told precisely what to do. Under these conditions I would postulate that the skill of making individual decisions atrophies though I provide no documentation and my own personal experience runs quite contradictory as I have proven myself to be a rather impulsive decision maker who clearly enjoys making said decisions independently of others. I would not submit myself as a typical member of the armed forces.
During a time of war the impulse to see life as art is sublimated not by command but by survival instinct. If one were to look on the atrocities that man does to his fellow man with a lens of pure Artistic reason their heart would be melted and rendered black by the illogical and often psychotic violence that man is capable of doing unto other men’s bodies as well as their minds.
To see life as beautiful in a “war type scenario” would border on indicating mental illness.
Option #2- The Service Industry:
Even if you choose either of the two other options you will inevitably end up in the Service Industry at some point in time.
In the new world trades and professions are dead. We hock cheap wares at one another now and this is our only real trade as Americans and it binds us steadfastly.
When you work in the service industry you either stand at a counter or waltz about a restaurant or a hotel or any number of unsanitary places where it is your task to either serve people the things that they saw on TV and now either want inside of their mouths or in their living rooms… or both or to clean up the unnatural environments which are magicked into existence by the Corporations for the selling of these cheap and gaudy wares.
Many from our generation have not hesitated to call this reality principle “wage slavery”and in keeping with this tradition I will accept it. A circuit has been created in which a good deal of numbers pass through every citizens accounts but those numbers are often not in the same account for long. A barrage of bills came with the Age of Convenience and money seems to go as fast as it comes for most.
Working for tips at a restaurant buys one little time to devote serious effort into artistic contemplation because most of the individuals day is sold away while the part that is left is divvied out to both completing the beurocratic personal responsibilities but also self medicating the internal anguish that is suffered when your youth is worked away for someone who would never speak to you let alone touch you with an un-gloved hand and you are left with nothing to show for it except empty cigarette packs and unfinished Artwork that was left incomplete when the individual was diverted by these tedious fucking jobs.
But I digress.
The Service Industry is a fine place to while away one’s youth. Nearly every drug you could need can be found there.
Option Three – Secondary Education:
The getting of degrees is very chique in the modern world. One is almost socially intolerable without one. Option Three is very popular amongst those who have chosen either of the other options prior to seeking this new deal. They were a sign of upward mobility, but now that everyone has mobilized upwards we are all crammed at the roof and inundated with knowledge that is incompatible with the constraints of the real world.
One can stave off all of the fundamental flaws in the other Options while in a University. In fact nearly all responsibility can be waved off and success could still be in sights.
Whatever field of study one might choose there is always the relief that one knows they are getting a rounded education in dealing with social hurdles towards a concept of success. One becomes familiar with the debasing critique of one’s elders. One learns very socially valuable lessons in keeping one’s mouth shut until it is one’s time to shine.
The largest advantage to the Third Option is that if one so desired they could, under the umbrella of institutionalization, keep a relatively reasonable glimmer in the possibility of a realistic life as an Artist, though presumably one’s instructors would convince one otherwise by bringing to light the stark evidence that Art, in the modern sense, is not a safe career bet for reasons that will be discussed further later in this paper and that it is best to consider an education in Art an education in how to create the same subliminal messaging that we were subjected to as a generation, to become a facilitator in the rise of the commodification of Art and to have to fight tides of other fellow graduates for ever so few seats on this evil boat which is set to sail. In all fields other than the Liberal Arts creativity is discredited on account of how the individual is not a professional and not capable of having an idea that is more well formulated than the idea’s of the professionals who have previously laid out the rules. In mathematics and science this behavior is necessary. In philosophy however this tendency has been the spark for many inter-ego altercations.
One might wander between all of these Options in the course of a modern life, in fact it would be normative behavior, but always there is the anxiety that is derived from the reality that almost everyone (save for the Stars) will die working for one or the other and by the time that death comes there will be no new and interesting things to say about the task at hand. These lives are so unsatisfactory to those who desire to find a social order that declares Art as its only true principle that some form of refuge is necessary to compensate for the emotional disorder of settling in to a life inside of a fully realized Anti-Art Culture. Which brings us to the third arch of sketch of this so called Anti-Art Culture.
Diagnosis of the Artist as a Degenerate and the Medicating of the “Problem of Modern Life”
Where before the many complications in the living of life were dealt with in lengthy expositions on existentialism or in visceral visual art pieces now the individual is directed to internalize this discontent and to seek a diagnosis for it and to furthermore have the issue medicated so that the individual can resume productive labor.
It is not unusual now for pharmaceutical indoctrination to begin as early as the first onset of character, when the child first starts to exhibit behavior which is good and truly their own. If that behavior happens to be unfit for participation in the institution of grade school then medication is now routinely offered. For example, the tendency for children’s thoughts to wander towards the plastic fantasy they have ingested at the television while bathing in flourescent lighting and listening to the bored regurgitation of facts from teachers who know that ahead of every child is really only the three aforementioned Options is now diagnosed as ADD or ADHD and there is a whole market of drugs provided to these squirrely ones.
Filed under Uncategorized
Prayer:004
our orders came...
we do the good work, but we don't do it for free...
Filed under Combat Paper
Dear San Francisco,
Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary for the American Dream was required reading for modern bohemians. I had always hated him for saying what he said and dooming me and my whole generation to a dreamless workaday life because he was on a few hits of cheap acid when all he had been asked to do was to report about a motorcycle race. But instead he chose to condemn us all to a slow death in a boring world. Had I really hoped that it was still alive? Had I really thought that I would come to San Fran, drop my bags down, and pick up on the ancient powerful feelings which drove my heros mad? Well it wasn’t there.
A breeze was coming off the bay and reminding me of the War in its own special and peculiar way. The only place I had ever felt an ocean breeze was in that camp over the sea. I had come to resent those breezes and all of Poseidon’s whispers of freedom. The ocean mocks us. “Come back” it calls out to us always… and if it weren’t for these things we have to do.
All I could see through my glasses was people with money. Skinny and beautiful bodies draped gaudily in thousands of dollars in accessories. Fake people as far as the eye can see. I breathed in dismay. This would be just another city.
I stayed in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel near Union Square. The room was a surreal Victorian setup with bands of green alternating between light and dark on the walls. After establishing my weekends emo nest and smoking a joint in the bed I went out into “It”.
The mythological charm of San Francisco that I had carried with me was suffering assault. Cars and vapid pedestrians bustled every way and if you weren’t walking up a calf shredding hill there would be nothing to visually distinguish it from any other American city. Busy. Loud. Hectic with commerce. Dappled with homeless ghosts haunting dirty streets. Nothing new.
I walked. I had money for a change, but by now I am familiarized with non-financial participation and I’ve gotten comfortable with walking around cities to see what they have to say about themselves. It isn’t until you have walked down all a cities streets with your head strung out around ten thousand hard to explain ideas and your eyes taking in the story written in the shimmering sidewalk. That is how you learn a city. So I walked.
I walked in the Mission and I found there that Hipsters are Hipsters everywhere just like Wal-Mart and McDonalds. If you’ve known one you’ve known them all. Bodega’s and impossibly small Chinese restaurants where small women yell at everyone and liquor stores and gated doors, shady street people and wide eyed bench mystics. The same stories. I kept walking.
Had a sharp thing in my head. Still pissed off about the lies. Still wondering why the fuck I was in San Francisco. Still hated myself for whining about the same old shit. Still sad our species is as fucked up as it is. Still sick of feeling tired and old and mourning the death of the dream I once had about this place. This too had been a lie told to me. About the spirit of this place. And that lie had been as fundamental in my decision making process as all the lies that we’d been told about the terrorists of Camps one, two, three and four. I had believed in Jack Kerouac’s San Francisco and I wanted to go to that place but it is gone now and that too caused me a great deal of sadness.
I walked by City Lights with my head hung low and deep in anxious thought, a cigarette burned out at my knuckles. How had this come to be? Is the only thing left this tomb of the dream? Is our only last true occupation to be to succumb to domination and then death? Should I just get a job? Is the poetry dead? What more could be said?
The next morning I was in front of cameras again. The professor who was conducting the interview told me that his project was aimed at future generations. He told me that for now people don’t want to know about what has happened and that they probably couldn’t process it if they did because their brains would defend themselves. This was for the future. So they could see what we did.
So I told them what I did.
And when I left another room in smoldering rubble and the fumes of my psychosis are being extinguished by my better judgement the professor’s wife turned to me and told me that I take what happened in Guantanamo Bay harder than any of the detainees and any of the guards and that I blame myself more than anyone else. I looked her in the eyes and told her that that was my job. Somebody has to feel that past. For all of us. And I do. I feel it always. And I do hate myself for it and I do think that I deserve it.
I went for a longer walk then. I walked along the pier stoned just like everybody else. I felt so angry. I felt so alien. Why do I have to be this forever? I wasted all that beautiful pier swallowed in self loathing.
That night I saw Eddy Falcone. We talked about the memories we had and the death of our cult. His anarchist house was having a big discussion about these French men who wrote some book about destroying things and then a train was destroyed and they said that they had done it. Then they were put in jail. The anarchists called them martyrs and I made a martyr out of myself for my own stupid cause by explaining that these were white people problems. There were thousands of Muslims locked up for far less than that, experiencing far worst than that. I have no pity for these idiots who ruined a perfectly good train. I thought trains were good… right? Anyway. Fuck them.
The next day I met with Stephen Funk. We sat in my hotel while I smoked cigarettes and talked about art and how we intended to use it and who our group of artists really was.
Later I walked with Justine and told her how my life had been since our interview. I poked a few jokes about her book and how she had ratted me out for being a whore and I think she took them seriously. At a bar later with her friends I suddenly felt like I could not be around people anymore so I went back to the hotel.
On the bed, naked and stoned again, the TV said BREAKING NEWS. For the rest of the night I laughed as I watched our psychotic nation again waving its flags in the same way they had after 9/11. I heard them say that Guantanamo had been a success even though the information had been “extracted” over six years ago. I heard them praise all of our efforts in making this multi-billion dollar assassination attempt FINALLY come to a close. Fuck this.
But where was the body? After they killed Saddam we watched that fuckers body hang for days. The clip was played every two minutes on every news channel in the media fleet. Now, for the most wanted man in the world they won’t even produce a photograph?
I hate this place. I hate these people. I will never try to change anyones mind again. Let them wave their polyester flags and I will wave mine and we’ll see who’s American Dream is dead.
Love,
Otis
Filed under Combat Paper
The Paper Trail 