Vulture Control

Justice is a figment of the romantic imagination, for it does not exist in palpable formulation in the social nexus.

A day like any other day, justice-free and endorsed by major corporations as a slot to place your labor or leisure. The economic questions still loom large. How can we be considered free when our every activity is scrutinized by the hierarchical system which is interested only in power and profit?

These are the ramblings of a fool who read too many anarchist texts. The best formula for a society is a cooperative organization that rests on a community of the personal, no longer sacrificing individual needs for the machinations of greed that sustain the private sector. Check.

In the meantime, people starve in the third world for lack of cohesive farming communities, the social infrastructure of which has been devastated by industrial factories amid the specter of globalization.

There is no commodity not geared towards power and profit, as every commodity is a concrete tabulation of the worker's own wasted time and therefore his death when considering the labor-value that has been stolen from him.

We need a discourse in this nation that argues for the primacy of life.

Gestures of love are restricted to gestures that begin families, not communities.

Families are easily controllable by the commodity system.

The weakening of bonds that once tied people together in a community of emotion have made our living quarters into mercenary spaces invested with the politics of control. Be the same as everyone else and you'll never notice the limitations.

I feel like I am reciting the obvious.

The obvious has been sublimated as the incoherent in service of financial cartels and the intelligensia which distributes currency in the form of acceptable discourse. Once screaming in the streets was a noble gesture of rebelliousness. Now it is a sickness.

We must open new spaces that do not operate on laws of commerce, that are not invested with the commodity's laws. A human space to paint your toe nails or to love somebody without the threat of rent.

Revolutionary thought expects miracles from the working class. Rhetoric binds us to another's sense of cleverness. Reform is the handmaiden to imperialism.

I just wanted a genuine music

to perform to in the rain swept streets,

a simple nomenclature of sounds

that would design a life worth living

amid the artifacts of humanity.

I just wanted a summer day spent

with a pretty girl over wine,

a conversation that meshed with

the notes of our supple liquor,

and a transcendence to mark the occasion as love.

All I got were the red devils of advertising sickness

and a request to quit loitering on the beach.

People Were Beautiful Once

People were beautiful once, I think

while saving seeds after the harvest

while creating constellations beneath a purpled sky gorgeous as consciousness

while breaking open honey mead to share in a celebration of life's victories and defeats.

They got diseased by nationalisms aping words through the mechanical mouthpiece

where desire once held court, they got wretched by payments of sales tax,

they got distorted by television ads selling vagina cream.

They got filled with messaianic delusions pointing to the death of the beloved,

they got deluded by a sequence of images that once seemed gorgeous until it became overplayed.

People were beautiful once I think

when the reason d etre of youth operated in glowing hums the color of living ghosts

when our pulsating palms touched amid the thin tallow of leafs on the vine

when we sang of love over the dollar and harmonized the fruits of our minds with the demands of the times.

People were noble once, people were graceful

not disproportioned in poverty, waiting in a stinking welfare line for the right to go to the grocery store, not saving up dimes for diaper money, not yelling in the street during the heighth of anger caused by a general misunderstanding caused by a dead life.

People had tragedies, people had successes.

Now people got news the color of a clock radio glaring in monotone speech upon the disserations of upper class rhetoric as paltry thin of emotion as grapefruit rind and with an underlying bitterness

Now people get kicked out of employment with no one to welcome them home

People lose their lives in car accidents that go unnoted by the mystified machinations of history piling up court cases and elections against the acts of selflessness taking place in the backrooms of foreclosed houses, people lose their lives to drink, people lose their lives to the plague of cancer

and we don't thank them for their hard work, even after they're gone. They could have said of any of the dead that he was a good grocer that she was a noble office assistant, they could have done anything to enoble the two natural instances that occurs in this commodity maze, that of death and birth but hey we care more about cars in this country as is evidenced by the amount of airtime they get than the humble artists who wear dirty socks, then the machinist who lost a finger, then the teacher who lost their mind.

People were beautiful once, I think

eating plums and mangos in the luminous air

laughing over pointless contests that were feats of skill

delving into the nature of the universe as one discusses a book.

Yes, people were beautiful once

dressed in handmade clothing

and pouring water into troughs for farm animals

discussing actual topics instead of falling into a socially hypnotized paucity of meaning where everything is accepted despite its being out of context.

Yes people invented beauty

to describe the inner parts of themselves that resonated with the reeds of the river

and the ghost face present in the moon glowering through the fog of evening,

people invented beauty to have something fine in which to align the motions of themselves

but now it is illegal, subversive, a rebellion of the heart

to walk through America's corporate towns and cities, looking for a flower of a face

in which to cradle in the arms of the mind. We lost our portraits, our statues, our mirrors

and bought up all the cheap costumes we could find just to feel important in our own minor way and it is almost beautiful the way it is so reasonable but yet there is an old sadness

the age of the relationship between our eyes and the stars

that insists we swam among such asterisms once in the velvet of nature's vestige

that ensconced us with slow supple travels amid the lucent green of forests made to be inhabited by people without machines.

Yes, people were beautiful once.

What you are experiencing is constituted by the light-emitting diodes in your computer monitor. You are no more listening to a human being than you are watching one speak. You are reading a series of data interactions programmed into a network of computer chips and relayed out into a server or set of servers, the machined product of mechanical man gesturing with pixels into the vortex of time.

I suggest a few quality recommendations to improve your experience, along with a couple of insights.

1) Engage in real world activities that break down digital communication barriers. The alphabet is a Western fetish, and breaks down into new territories when spoken in person. If you must communicate by way of alphabet (the technology that insured that orders of the Roman generals were followed by literate lieutenants), do so in long hand through the auspices of the mail system. That way, you create a substantial personal commodity that is not digitally wheatpasted on a series of redundant microprocessors.

2) Recall the pleasures of human interaction, the face-to-face feel of conversation, the pressing anxieties and private joys. We lack humor when we allow machines to mediate our expressions, we lack ecstasy and wonder. What we are on computers are typical consumers pecking away at the great glowing commodity of electronic syncopation that substitutes its wires for our nervous system, that builds false communities of sensation through the work of circuitry. Create a circuitry of expression with roses, delve into the empath mannerisms of colloquial interaction with a kind smile and human heartedness.

3) Understand that the demands of technocracy have demanded that we become electronic, that our speech becomes output and our understanding of external events becomes input. Humanize the dynamic with laughter and joy, break out of your pixelated shells and embrace the soft touch of human movements within the soul of being known as the self's tact.

4) The form of the internet leads to attention deficit disorder. We grasp at subjects in regular speech with weak associations or tenuous bridges. No longer do the internet-educated remain on topic, they bring in disparate subject matter intended for effect as opposed to understanding. "Effect" is a Newtonian principle since dissected from reality by the realm of quantum physics that implies the role of the observer.

5) The computerized domain enhances the role of the spectator at the expense of the participator. Unless you are sufficiently experienced in web site creation or destruction, then your participation is regulated to the form of websites and programs. This cancels out human emotions such as hatred and love. Electronically, we are canceling the human.

6) The beauty is in the streets. Computer aesthetics are as impoverished as the sensitivities of the people who program them. Consistent computer activity lends itself to an autism of the spirit.

Eastern flows of anti-rhetoric

implying direct pointing to growth.

A Buddha in each one of us grows

with the salient knowledge of our awareness

in that all experience teaches without preparing.

I broke my sunglasses the other day

and the world brightened. Shadows

took on hidden dimensions, colors

pulsed in the present, fading into the wake

of the past. A few conversations

lightened my heart. It was good to be alive

amid pain, to know that as an organism,

you are incapable of making a mistake.

Mistakes are products of language, which

is representational. Reality only understands

the shoes that fit with each step into the unknown.

Everything you have heard has been the truth.

the hospital and the desert

The desert's red memory
of skittering lizards and ochoa leaves
mesmerizes our stance on the cracked ground of being
We've opened our eyes in the pulsing morning
to the drawl of dryness known as dawn and crawl from our sleeping bags
with mouths half full of sand to stand on the cool ground
as a road runner scatters his feathers across the flats
and the yucca plants tower, holding water up to the sky.

A couple of well executed bank shots in basketball
caused a commotion, the futility of sports
drearily reflecting the middle class attatchment to fruitless action.
I awoke with sawdust in my eyes to the approaching fiasco
of the rich devouring the poor amid the fabricated morass
of a life engineered with boredom in mind, all the provocateurs
vanished into office jobs and exposing themselves only in bar banter,
lifting the disease away as a veil while the others choked down whiskeys.
Nobody cared about basketball where I came from, the weighted matters
constituting depth discussed at the dinner table instead of a buffet of television
offered to the proctored roles of spectation.

They tried to sell my dream desert
by turning it into a series of freeways connecting nowhere
to anywhere, the land being perfectly flat
for the construction of a new wasteland.
I've seen the ends of consumerism in the halls of the mental ward
and it frightens people to know that the mad are unconcerned with expensive jewelry
or salaried positions leading to death by heart attack,
but few swim away in the natural currents that imply idleness
and labor with a human touch.
I drank a bucket of vodka just to get the stink of the strip mall out of my brain
and I danced with a pretty girl on linoleum who believed in magic
as the materialists outside stole and murdered each other over cheap toys,
we were launched into an aura of forgetfulness as blissful as the enrapturing night's
sight of diamonds in the sky and arrayed in asterisms of mad language made beautiful
by being true. Thunder shook us apart, the fetishisms of order and policy
dictated that we were not to touch each other, our existential rights as humans
were taken away and still we danced inside with our school child crushes, humming
with the back of the television as the news of the day unfurled in colored sweeps of waves
more real than bracketed car chases illustrated by cameras after primetime.

They destroyed my desert,
the place that solidified death into a doorway
with undertones of fuschia inside swirling like a flurry of wind
raking at the leaves of the mind. They took away my desert
with flights to Beijing and logical things that constituted a reason
tinted by a madness so terrible that it was thought of as normality.
They flooded my desert with Seven Eleven coffee cups and Taco Bell advertisements,
they disheveled the sand with banks of concrete, they tore open mesas to house
the rich, they painted over the red of my sunset with hues of hotel pastel that looks
like a child's vomit. I've been thinking
about how to take it back, but I've got no bombs
and no friends to tag along, just a couple of pets and owners
who I drink coffee with that own nothing more threatening than a ballpoint pen.

They destroyed something I had invented in my taciturn way,
that I keep now as fragments in journals and memories secreted away
with foreign lingos calling in euphony towards an oasis of the heart
that rests somewhere undiscovered by the cretins who own institutions
and unmapped by the morons gaping in fuck-pleasure at television sports.
I mean, I am still crying
but the tears mean nothing now but water
and we are still dying
in a place where they won't even offer us a grave without us paying for it.

I seem to believe in a common place where the public can rest
and iterate their sufferings to one another without fear of reprisal
or the existence of shitty ten dollar meals suffocating in fat. We can
build it, they can't make us go. We are millions, they are few. Our dreams
are that of the roadrunner, flitting but organic, and best when we run them
to exhaustion on the ground. Our dreams are millions, theirs are none.
Our dreams are millions,
while they have none.

Whoever said
that being rich
was a license to destroy our nature?

Lady

Beautiful woman

I would like to tell you a few things about myself

however, with the world the way it is

perhaps we should start from there

so that I can see the art in the jewels of your eyes

so that I can tremble by your form

without the adulterated illusions

demeaning the sway in your wineglass hips

with an existence that goes unexamined.

This planet was once as beautiful as you

with rivers for legs and forests sweeping up

in hills of the emerald in your ring,

but the men you know are wretches

the men you know are suicidal

the men you know are owners

of a particular sense of accomplishment

known as murderous achievement at all costs.

This avenue was once as lively as you

with a laugh to tint the marquees

and a sigh to flit tiredly into the midnight street lamps

but it has grown morose with the planning

of the rich who couldn't entertain a city gal

to save their lives. Sure, you will find

it exquisite until they throw you out of bars

for your raucous laugh

until they mar your cocktail dress

with cruelty that artless boredom fosters.

I came from the slums

with a stolen diamond known as intellect

to speak to you in the soft patter of rain

clearing away the smog of solace

to tell you that what you do with beauty

is the burden of your life

and not the choice of the poor in spirit.

So dance amid these luminous ruins

as the moon snakes across an obscured sky

known as the twilight of man

where our inner darkness goes unobserved,

and sing through the cacophony of hatred

with glib play in your eyes

as you contemplate the coming of new christs

who die unknown by bibles, who die

without ever owning a room.

So laugh at their caricatures depicting

an image of yesterday without

even enough living beauty to fit with

the form behind your perfume.

Transcendence

From out of the subway tunnels, here comes the transmuted morass of insane sanity clutching its rum bottle and looking either to attack or to sermonize.

We, my friends, have been caught up in an era of anguish perpetrated by technics which have grown beyond our capable and rational control. Science has promised strength, but proffers only weaknesses to our disheveled brethren clutching their heads in their hands in the stairwells of abandoned apartment buildings. For what use is an ipad to a mother with three kids who cannot receive health insurance for her brood, what use is the external nexus of communication known as the internet when there is nothing vital to be communicated? We live in a hopelessly occluded world of false wants and desires that are formed in us during our precariously fragile psychic developmental stages. Now, for many, the task lay in undoing the damage and once again returning to facilities of reason and judgement in quest of answers.

Outside the bland world of particulars, the monstrosity of ownership enslaves us to our false and real desires. We are owned by masters at work who would have us labor or starve, we are owned by bank tellers who possess smug looks amid the stench of money, we are owned by the commodities that were supposed to be controlled by us which have occupied the very territory of our souls. And without our wits, this is an acceptable permutation of society, this is the structure of everyday life in which we so willingly find obedience and our distorted reflection, in the patronizing attitude of idiocy that amounts to the corporate office and in the needless toil of service positions created because the Protestant work ethic's tyranny has not been overthrown despite more practical considerations of production which suggest that the United States alone could feed, clothe, and house the world in respect to its wealth. Work has become a pantomime, an act, while real experience lay elsewhere.

Reason and judgement would offer charity by dismantling the materialist dialectic of consumerism in order to become orientated towards a gift or potlatch culture. But buying and selling have been mystified as magical acts in our land, supported by cultural mores and a stifling sense that they are real as opposed to symbolic. There is nothing real about exchanging figures of faith for goods and services, it is a fantasy, propagated by a corporate cartel that sees money for what it really is in terms of people's time. That is why each commodity you buy contains a piece of your own death, you worked for your car and the figure it cost should appear to you in terms of months performing actions for others in your job rather than dollars.

Outside the mystifications of business, we ignore the truly spectacular transcendences such as love and justice with the attitude that these are mere idealistic principles, and not based in reality. However, they are a possible reality, and as such cannot be negated where they break out in wild abandon. Their weakness is the same of capitalist business in that they must be participated in, but the advantage of business is that it does not rely on reflective cognizance to assertain its meaning. Love, justice, peace, community, and ideals are all processes which require conscious discernment from their opposites, while an economy that encompasses the sale of landmines as well as the sale of prosthetic limbs knows no discernment of opposites. These ideals also require a forum of discussion, of which there is no current form in our society.

Through a marriage of science to political radicalism, it should be possible to provide for noble pursuits by using technics and production to dominate the baser motivations of mankind through human projects such as sustainable housing and free medical care. However, this requires that the same science which produced the atom bomb declare itself political, as it has hidden behind a shroud of questionable empiricism in the past while remaining married to the policies of the military establishment. There currently exists enough productive power to meet the real and false needs of every individual while minimizing the amount of labor necessary to sustain automated means of production. And yet we exist in the same fashion as Athenian slaves, debased and ignorant, learning to distance our dreams of possibilities from the expanse of reality.

Belief

I believe in a world lived without the illusive poverty that is manufactured

to stretch our souls to belief through fatigue

to break our ukuleles on the knees of modern business

to make us drink ourselves to death beneath the shame of the everyday.

I believe in a street

that smells like childhood reaching in breaths

between the limbs of the weeping willow

mourning all our compromises,

celebrating our victories like birthdays,

holding our instrument to the moonlight in awesome rapture.

I believe in a city

not made by the sacrifices of the poor

hummed through with rapturous musics

and becoming the future by making art decide

our new designs.

I believe in a religion

where the people play like children all day long

beneath the orbitals of the cosmos, mapping

out new universes with the tacit understanding of love

as the stars unfold in twilight

the secrets of our wonder-struck ancestors

who drew breath despite sufferings,

who knew of the magic entrusted to the veldt of life

from the hand of the mysterious,

who knew not that they would lead to you or I.

I believe in you sometimes,

like when you refused your own arrest

and made the police chase you down a well-lit alleyway

to your undoing by poorly placed lemon tree.

I believe in your argumentative nature,

in your refusals against the disseminated idiocies,

in your soft whistle that marks the occasion of secret happiness

undertaken when nobody is looking

for the styrofoam man or woman you are supposed to be.

I believe we have sung too few songs together

beneath the old star-fires

for the angels to take notice in their ledgers

and consider us as friends

while the wars they gobble in gluttony the resources

known as our brothers,

while the villains design new atrocities

while our village refuses to make amends.

I believe that between us we could have found that street, that city, that religion

where the police failed to search due to a swelling of their terror

at the rarity of our harmony magnified

that made our feet escape the ground as we flew through out the air

into geographies mapped by compassions

and mountains marked by love affairs.

I am asking you out of this burden known as modernity

to take up rifles on the steps of any senate

to sew sonnets into bathroom graffiti

and to fall into the divinity known as love played without a care.

On Psychiatry and its Lack of Depth

Psychiatry is a concerning problem for those who have witnessed the abuses of it's authoritarian system of judgements levied on behaviorist grounds towards the minority of souls who process and undertake experience differently than the multitude. Indeed, it is almost a swear-word among artists who's very success depends on the creation and mapping of new experience for the purposes of reflection. It is, in our modern era of scientific enlightenment, at best an entanglement within the scientific aura, a throwback to 19th century determinism used to describing the universe in terms of blind forces that obey Newtonian principals. It is from this viewpoint that we arrive at the bio-chemical model of mental illness, a kind of crude cause and effect explanation based on a a harrowing lack of real data outside of drug reaction analogies and questionable experimentation undertaken in the 1950s, in an era where the brutal procedure of the lobotomy was still a palatable exercise for persons who labeled themselves doctors.

Indeed, psychiatry is also a subject of labels. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder come to mind as ills which psychiatry professes to understand and treat. Yet the DSM remains as crude as a computer punch card machine in terms of proffering diagnoses, and is itself a compendium of labels that rest on other labels of experience for its very definition. Prognosis and treatment of mental diseases remains as simple as glancing at a list of symptoms and treating them according to an appropriately marketed drug or set of drugs that are rife with effects which do not consider the whole organism, both mentally and physically. It seems often that the role of the psychiatrist merely exists to prevent death on the prescribed drugs, otherwise, a pharmacist could easily fulfil his function.

However, what is amiss in psychiatry is not regulated to its labeling propensity or even its insistence that reality as experienced by everyone must remain less exciting than a television show. Psychiatry's main criticism should be its lack of depth and its disconnection from the themes of life; whether physical, social, mental, spiritual, or moral.

The impact of the institution of psychiatry on the physiology of the individual is immense. Not only do modern neuroleptics such as Zyprexa cause weight gain to body distorting proportions of fifty pounds, they also cause involuntary muscle reactions in cases of prolonged exposure, diabetes, sexual dysfunction, stroke, and irregular heart rhythms. The physical symptoms alone should have been enough to ban the usage of atypical antipsychotics, however the political sway of the pharmaceutical companies insured that organizations such as the FDA wouldn't bat an eyelash. Outside of the horror show of bodily side effects, we have the physical dangers and debasements of psychiatric hospitals themselves. It is impossible to exercise in a mental institution where patients are provided with only a bed and a common area which induces sedentary activities such as television watching, on top of which patients are supplied low-grade food products cooked by quantity for the sake of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Besides these common restrictions, the practices of the hospital often lead to forced drugging, abuse from staff and other patients, and the deprivation of any suitable environment that a human being would wish to reside in. Rather, the structure and operation of these institutions appear to be ran for the sake of the staff, where visibility of patients and efficiency in daily routines such as blood draws requires small and inadequately planned facilities for housing human beings.

Socially speaking, the influence of medications tested in the banality of a mental hospital during drug trials where external stimuli and participation is limited can act to create new crises in the patient who must consistently operate in the real world. In short, participants in clinical drug trials are not expected to hold down a job, much more a household, on pharmaceutical medications, while the real-world patient prescribed modern psychiatric drugs is required to undertake these things and more while experiencing extra-pyramidal side effects that not only damage real-world functioning but also lend to the patient's sense of despair when things such as fluidity of speech vanish along with social functioning. It is a huge mistake that studies of medications usually take place within a hospital setting and not in the world at large, that the social impacts of treatments may negatively impact husband and wife as well as mother and child. External social factors such as the level of functioning at work or happiness in social situations are of prime importance to consumers, and should be taken into account during clinical studies as the main factors of the patient's quality of life while on medications.

This quality of drug trials within the social sphere brings up a larger issue, which is the lack of connection that psychiatry maintains in regards to other disciplines. It manages to attack differing conceptions of ontology and epistemology through the bio-chemical model without offering any legitimate answers to deep philosophical questions. By suggesting that mental disorders are chemical imbalances in the brain, the implication is that a healthy brain is chemically balanced, fully ascribing to the 19th century determinist model of the universe as consisting of active and reactive forces. Not only does this void the spirituality of many patients, it sets up a grim portrait of human endeavors as being regulated by the result of different chemical combinations, which is a reductive debasement of human facilities and experiences, both those classified by psychiatrists as 'sane' and 'insane.' If we took human history in terms of the bio-chemical model, we could write off intense human struggles for freedom as 'just a bunch of chemicals,' completely forgoing free will and more transcendent matters of humanity such as the search for meaning in our actions, or the very spirit of existence itself. And currently, psychiatrists are making the entire life histories of their patients irrelevant in terms of treatment guidelines due to belief in the myth of the mind and experience as existing only chemically. Even in terms of their own argument, it has been proven that each person's brain chemistry is distinct, leading one to wonder what exactly among some six billion different brain chemistries could be defined as sanity.

Mentally speaking, the brain exists as a system of neural networks that maintains a complexity and mystery to the observer. The conception that a drug designed only to prevent the release of dopamine could make the brain healthy upon crude cause and effect lines is a ridiculous misnomer that belies the totality of psychiatric ignorance. A brain is not linear, it processes information and experience in multilateral ways that depend on the cooperation of the entire entity, and it still stands to be discussed what exactly consciousness consists of and furthermore, what the mind actually is. The reckless tampering that psychiatrists undertake with their patient's minds is not only amoral, but is also a scientific mistake. The data concerning human consciousness is basically infinite insofar as it is through consciousness that we experience the datum of the world. One should not dump manufactured chemicals into a series of infinite data, just as one should not medicate the developing brain of a seven year old who exhibits hyperactivity. It is a moral qualification that psychiatrists attack with their operation, as it is a substantially physical, social, mental, and spiritual one.

Foccault once said that one day in the future, we will look back with disgust at what was done to those labeled mentally ill in much the same manner as we look back on slavery. It is my hope that within the interests of scientific inquiry and humanism, our Western societies still mystified by their own myths abscond from the usage of psychiatry during a flash of insight which resonates not with the defenders of half-reasoned normalcy, but with the groups of people fighting for harmonious diversity and embracing of psychic difference. As with many things, it is only with tolerance and love that the labeled mentally ill should be treated, and not with the insult of a phrenology masquerading as scientific action.

Most modern day activities are an exercise in masochism. Get up early without asking your biological clock when its time to awaken, shave with inadequate razors in a painful narcissism, start up the automobile and drown in traffic on the way to work. Outside of work, recreation time is a painful re-creation of luxuries which we have to pay for, a trip to the mall or the beach but nothing fundamentally playful or invested with meaning. The sorry state of affairs has become cyclical despite our belief in linear time, the forced merriment of holidays interspersed amid a life of painful drudgery in the names of labor and freedom, which currently are a contradiction in terms.

What is it that we should seek, that is worth the energies of the spirit in this world's planned out maths that exercise their dominance in the form of quantities? Love comes to mind, but yet carries the odors of domination and establishment fealties, and is a quality that cannot be jump started by mere searching. Meanwhile, the strip malls offer the allurements of desire, the books to inform yourself about a life lived elsewhere, the restaurants to sit in and be treated like imperial royalty, the beauty shops to mesh with a codified measure of beauty made objective by its timeliness and frequency, the mortuaries in parking lots, the dumpsters that betray the cost of consumption. The worthy articles that are deemed to have value become the arbiters of our imprisonment within this structure of half-assed materialism, which doesn't praise what it creates but only proffers its creations for the sake of obtaining money, the measure of wealth.

Abstract concepts have yet to make their way into the economy outside of Hallmark cards and pedantic philosophy texts, we have yet to experience true hope, true beauty, true hatred. For it is the articles of our life that remove us and distinguish us from other people, it is innate classism that serves as the measure for our acquisitions and the forfeit of our imaginary gains. Intrinsic human values are absent from economies, in fact most modern economies can be said to be working against such values. A quick survey of items that can be bought to identify us against others in this fetid game shows the lack of loving, the lack of compassion, the lack of camaraderie invested in this common reality of our lives in favor of the sanctity of safe appeals to human greed.

Truly as people we have been pushed away from true participation in commerce outside of a passive role. Nowhere are commodities distinguished by bold human touches and scarcely are they touched by anything but the workings of the specialist technocracy. The thousands of products that do not exist because of our incessant blase manufacturing protocols could fill living rooms with style, artifice, and invention. Instead, we rely on foreign wage slavery to meet material demands while sacrificing auras, we rely on availability over sanctity. In our passive roles with consumerism, we sleepwalk through the moribund castles of the establishment, tripping on their garbage and vomiting dollar bills for the next chance to participate. And in this one-sided relationship, we forget to embrace the auspices of creation and its spirit, we stew in garbage dumps called houses stocked up with all kinds of asinine garbage, and make the mistake of calling our market participation 'democratic' when it is authoritarian in the aforementioned sense.

I challenge you to create something, a map of your escape woven by the cottage industry's tapestry loom. Create a fan that is also a back-scratcher, or an alarm clock that self-destructs, or a work of art detailing the restrained notions of the spirit transcending the mundane in search of the rebellious, in search of that flint-spark known as human spontaneity that is capable of kindling the fires of the actually lived.