The Kids Are Wide Awake & Dreaming--How About You?

[On September 1, 1939, the same day that the German army invaded Poland and started World War II, lightning hit and killed 835 sheep that had been bedded down for the night on the top of Pine Canyon in the Raft River Mountains of Box Elder County in northwestern Utah. Rain from a passing thunderstorm wet the ground and sheep, causing the lightning's electrical discharge to move completely through the herd of female sheep and lambs. The next morning, fifteen sheep (out of 850) were found alive but in a dazed condition. The sheepherder was knocked temporarily unconscious, but escaped death because he was in a tent. However, burned spots on his canvas tent revealed he probably missed the fate of the sheep by only a slim margin. (Photo courtesy of National Weather Service.)]

We Are All Individuals (who like 2 live very close together).



It was Evelyn who first got me thinking about the kids.


She told me of the surprising number of under 25 yr olds that she'd recently met who were AWAKE!

And by awake I mean they're celebrating their bodies and minds--ridin vibes and feelings--being free to be whoever they want to be. Finely attuned to the beauty within.

They grew up not believing in the dualities that even those of us a few years older remember as being so polarizing—black vs. white, gay vs. straight, women vs. men.

These kids perceive human relationships as being essentially fluid and as a result dont overload them with unrealistic emotional expectations.

They are lighter than the rest of us--and I don't mean "skinny".

They aren’t guilty or burdened by the ressentiment that Nietzsche found so poisonous. They make up the heart of the heart of the "Millennial" demographic, for whom the event of 9/11 simultaneously confirmed and denied EVERYTHING they'd been told by their parents and other authority figures for the duration of the 80s and 90s. They've grown up waiting for the other shoe to drop. They've grown up with the worst American president ever. They tend to be crafty with a preference for DIY designs. Many are what I call "participatory architects" of online social networks--early adapters who blog streams into the internet bit torrent (pinging the light phantastic)

In a Craigslist, post-Napster world, many kids (as well as babies of all ages) are already living in an enlightened internet--call it Web 3.0--a spinning/spun reality of heightened consciousness which social objects are created without the intention of making money, not now or in the future, and "value" is placed instead upon bartering and sharing goods and services across a network.

Some other AWAKE kids are Luddites, without email addresses or cell phones, who communicate with through the telepathy of a shared vibe and a mega-chill attitude towards life.

These travelers have no need for stinky, overripe notions such as "destination" and "time". Nomad hunter-gatherers and dumpster divers with their beards and boots and dogs and long poems painfully typed on antique typewriters with ink filled keys and squinting smiles as they call out to you from the platform, that they "know it's all gonna be ok" and that they will be in touch via the cell phone network of our MINDZ.

I want to create fiction that provides a station along the way--a place in which the kids--as well as anyone who is a kid at heart--can rest and tell stories and maybe fall in love.

A place where they can catch their breath and catch a glimpse of the new reality that they're dreaming into being.

Avatar Rock (i dont need 2 know y mix)

My Avatar is the Eye I became when I watched her die--a huge blue, all seeing eye, linked into the circuitry of the universe

That was her gift 2 me:

I see you seeing me seeing u seeing me.



(swoon summer suckapants)

I see the endless game of those who fixate upon that which they think will make them happy--perhaps another person, a job or an object--something that they purchase, something that they OWN.

I see the blowback of that special misery known as disappointment.

Instead why not try becoming a teenager again and going thru a new puberty that leaves u sensitized and soberly stoned off the wonders of the world all around u

I will be the Eye,

bloodless and cold

An Emerson to yr Whitman

Inspired. A Shimmering, reflective surface.

Watching, Seeing, Being seen


(the kids are makin avatar rock in their bedrooms after school)

Cue the music: it begins with a single note played by guitars and synth pads building over layers of instrumentation and samples--a cheering stadium crowd shimmers with glorious distortion as carnival melodies and whale calls and baby cries are dubbed into the mix. The wavy gravy production expands and spills over the sides before tightening into the syrupy thick bass riff from what sounds to me like Dr Dre's hit from '92, "Deep Cover" which is itself prolly sampling the riff from somewhere else.

Everything and everyone plays their part: Snoop Dogg and gangsta rap and chrome steel gunz blazing spaghetti western stylez--synth soundtracks scuttling like tumbleweed across the canyon floor. The unrelenting sun becomes Sauron's piercing gaze high above the peaks of Mordor and then the white glare of the projector beam as yr transported back into yr seat in the movie theater.


(there's a whole world in there)

I have an Avatar, therefore I am...

Be Nice or Leave

The summer of the red pill is also the going to be the second summer of love--can you feel it? It's gonna be bigger, faster, stronger and BETTER than the last one.

The 60s are dead. Long live the 60s!

No rules or regulations, except the Dr. Bob tag i saw all over NOLA--"Be Nice or Leave."

An addendum to this could be, "Free yr ass, and the rest will follow."

A great orgasm is like a meal of whole, fresh, locally grown foods. There are many different ways to prepare it--to slice and dice and withhold, but in the end, the best way to eat it is to just bite right into the raw goodness.



Internet black holes

Summer of the Red Pill

I'm from New York, but lately I've been living in a New Orleans of the mind. The world and my place in it got washed away, just like that city was washed away when the levees broke. By returning to the garbage, to lay claim to it and then to clean it aside and turn it into gold, isn't so much a rebuilding as it is a rebirthing--fitting as "NOLA Rising" is one of the slogans of this burgeoning renaissance. It seemed the perfect place to take this stripped down, NAKED walking talking BLOOMING version of my former self on the road, so that I could practice letting it out--thru my pen and my smile and my dancing feet in my high-tops.

NOLA is the kind of place where charm and the ability to HANGOUT DEEPLY will see u thru on a chilly spring eve even if u dont have any money in yr pockets: I walked the streets for hours past porches with music streaming out of living rooms and bars and living rooms that might also have been bars and people sitting on the street who called out Hello! and I smiled and spoke with them a little while, about this and that, music and life and travel, telling them about my city of plastic and concrete tiers lit-up by neon vines, a 24 hour city, an aching, battered and bruised place like this one

(except with more pretension and more money and all the stresses and strains that money brings along with it...)

Later on I was alone again, having shook free from a few drunken stragglers who wanted to know if a tough girl like me carried a can of mace (I told them I didnt need to). I pulled my hoodie tight against the cold night air and crossed train tracks that cut thru a small green field as brilliant, unfamiliar stars lit up the sky over the levees.

Who am i to tell it? No one, that's for sure. Im like the Jewish peeps in "The 10 Commandments" who followed Moses and kept doubting him and their survival, despite the miraculous works he showed them. His staff had turned into a snake--plagues and other disasters had struck the Egyptians, just as had predicted. But even after all of that, it's still human nature to develop doubt in the face of adversity. There's that tremendous scene when Moses and his people are run up to the shores of the raging Red Sea, with Pharaoh's army closing in behind them. Charlton Heston has a killer expression on his face when he turns from the sea to face their doubts. He half looks like he's going to laugh, because to him it's undeniable--time and time again, he tells them, you've seen the power of God, but still you don't believe!

It's shocking when I consider the sheer NUMBER of times over the past couple of years that I've had the audacity to push God away despite something completely godlike having happened. Even if something had warmed and strengthened my heart and helped me to wake up, I still resisted it CHANGING the way I lived my life.

In those times I'm like Neo when he first hears about the Matrix--he doesn't want it to be the case, despite all of the questions that its existence answers, he can barely handle the truth and wishes for it to go away.

The good news is that there is another part of Neo that only wants truth--not illusion. Part of what makes him The One is that he was not too emotionally invested in the superficial things of this world. He was already suspicious of people and systems and the government. He was hungry for the next level--yearning to wake up and be free.

This summer will see many Neos--from many places all around the world. Most of them will be young, but there is no age limit...

Everyone is invited to help turn the garbage into gold.

do u know what it means to miss new orleans?

Have you ever stayed away too long--from home, from family, from friends? Were there times when you went out too far and lost yr way? Do you know about becoming untethered from the voice inside of you, so that fact and fiction change places and nothing makes sense--for a few seconds, for hours, for days? What do you know about darkness? How do you feel about the FACT of yr death waiting out there with an invisible inevitability that's hidden yet huge, like the fog covered ocean? Are there other things you can't escape? Do you have something branded into yr brain for the rest of yr days--something you saw, something you did, something you can't totally remember...?

ever seen somethin go down?




Do you know about love?

Last Night's Sleep (420 Full Moon Mix)

Two Receivers

The fever she is burning, the birds they are chirping...

Sick and stubbornly refusing to take anything except my usual girly smoke, I passed out early last night and ended up wide awake at 4 AM. There was a pleasant buzzing in my brain and though I still felt achy and congested, I no longer felt tired. I decided to stay up and hung out online as my blinds glowed a dark and then bright blue. The witching hour, i kept saying to myself. Normally I'm scared of the dark but I wasn't last night. I felt awake and alive--oddly refreshed like the other day when I walked out of the tiny Voodoo Museum on a side street in New Orleans. If I closed my eyes i could pull up the afterimage of several of the statues--terrifying as they were I wasn't scared, the afterimages glowed brilliantly in the dark neon against my eyelids and were, like the statues themselves, neither bad nor good but just THERE--wild and visceral and childlike and mischievous but no more evil than a hissing cat. They reminded me of people I'd partied with back in the day--grinning like maniacs with cigarettes and candy offerings piled all around them. They were like the skinny drunk gay boys out on the piers, gregarious demons that danced close to the wound-like opening where that which is hidden is just barely kept from oozing thru to that which is known.

Cuz let me tell ya these boyz had things that they wanted to teach us...

Dirty children from drunken mothers; the witching hour is the time for opposites to exist together: for purity and disgrace, the sinner and the chaste...It's a time of oneness, for things that can't be conveyed with words--for light that's not yet light, but enough of a grim force nonetheless to be able to part the darkness like thick hanging drapes over the leaded glass of a dive bar window.

The hazy time when Saturday nite becomes Sunday morning

The feeling of being so close yet still so far from God...

(A receiver inside me was switched on high. My right ear was ringing.)

Later, a little after 6, i was racked with deep joint aches and sweaty fever chills before i

finally managed to fall asleep again.


Do you see the moon?

Well, it sees you...

Transportation 1

The other week, when it was still freezing, a tall, gaunt man walked onto the packed subway car at 42nd Street with no shoes or socks on his feet. He had black curly hair like Jesus that fell in long tendrils around the stiff upturned collar of his dirty green puffy jacket. His face was not unlike Jesus's either. In a tired-sounding, yet unwavering voice, the man said that he had AIDS and no where to go. His feet were long and skinny, flat and olive in tone in the middle and chapped and shiny around the edges. I felt those around me shift as they turned to look as well. We'd been packed like sardines since Wall Street, enough time to have already burned through the initial hatreds that spring up between strangers crowded on top of one another.

As the man spoke the motor rattled like it was going to break apart and two babies screamed relentlessly.

When he finished he held out his can and started walking down the aisle, at which point something happened and the feeling in the car changed. What it was exactly I don't know--but you could feel it radiating up and down the rows of people. It was a mix of happiness and relief, like we were letting loose and celebrating some one's life after a long hard day spent at their funeral. Suddenly everyone was reaching over one another with wadded up bills...the sight of the green was surprising and seemed somehow fake at first--dollar after dollar being stuffed into his can, "God Bless You, God Bless You!" the man was saying, over and over in stunned amazement.

I've never seen such a response to a pan handler. The compulsion to give to him was overwhelming, and the instant I handed bills over to him all the rest of my money become meaningless tissue, as did all of the things it could buy.

He stumbled off the train at 59th street--had he stayed much longer and there would have been a pile of iPods and shopping bags and credit cards at his bare feet.

The doors opened at 86th Street and I wanted for nothing.

A Dream.

madworld

Last night I dreamt that I was standing in the living room of my old house. I couldn't see my parents or brother but I was very conscious that they were close by, perhaps right in front of me. Everything was blurry, but I knew it was my old living room from the way it felt to be standing in it. In the dream there was a sense of sadness because I was dying. I was choking on a long strand of thick paper that was stuck in my throat. The paper was folded in little pieces, with a word on each segment. I was trying to pull out the paper as fast as i could so that I could breathe again but i already knew I wasn't going to be fast enough. There was too much paper and too little time.

I felt myself disconnecting from myself, the way a kite must feel when the string that tethers it suddenly slips from the fingers of the child holding it...there was no blame and no real sense of regret, there was merely the passing over from form to formlessness, something that seemed so scurry in books and movies but was really close to nothing, like the sound of a flag flapping or a word turning into a sigh.

Sort of.. break it.. down like this

Gonna stay holed up in the phat pad lab like the old daze and turn everything off and on at the same time--the perfect mix of input and output, like i'm a system... a sound system...the ginormous kind they drag into fields for raves. Boomin out knowledge as deep as beats. I've got amplifiers on my fingers and speaker sponge for brains. I've got my earbuds in with eurocrunk coursing thru like electricity itself and my fingers on the keyboard with words stumbling out at different speeds like Tetris pieces. They don't belong to me, I just see them on their way: they are left behind like half-dead orphans to tell our story, the one about this time at the end of time when the wind and weather are working to blow away all of the surplus--the dirt and vegetation that cover the bare roots of life.

Everything im doing currently is about getting closer to this veiny grip--the timeless enactment of the tenuous hold the living have on their mortality. I'm interested in live roots. Roots reggae, roots rhymes, roots rainbows. The root orange of a sunrise, the root ache of loneliness...I collect root pebbles from the collective body rock...

To get closer to the root means to get out in the world. One finds the center in the circumference, the success in the near constant failure.

Sometimes I’m zapped thru with a feeling of power

Of AGENCY and of time welling up behind me, on my side, getting my back…

Everything’s within reach:
I walk past the Conde Nast building

or a large happy family

or a fashionable bag left casually swinging on the back of an unattended chair

I could have that shit, I think

if only I cared enough to take it.

From a file in the "Sterling Fassbinder" folder...

varekay

TRUE and I listened to “Little”, by Vic Chesnutt. She was lying across the couch—sick--but nearly recovered from a nasty summer cold. I was supposed to be taking care of her. Meanwhile my stomach ache got worse by the second. I'm always harboring these crazy longings to have a chilled-out time with just the two of us, but when it finally happens I can't pull it together.

She sang along to the music, sweetly mimicking Vic’s loopy Georgia drawl.

“’A cup a day to curb visibility…’”

She closed her eyes and shuddered.

“Tea time,” I announced, hating the shrill note in my voice.

I pushed off from Fitz’s prized easy chair and headed to the antiseptic kitchen. He was still in Chicago, picking up sad and skinny indie rockers. “Can’t get enough of those assymmetrical bangs,” he liked to say.

“Hey.”

TRUE’s hand suddenly shot out and grabbed my wrist. I jumped and stopped in my tracks.

“Sterling.”

I looked deep into her blue eyes. For once they weren’t glassy.

“What is it?”

“Have I taken it too far?”

I peered down at her hand. Her grip was tight.

“How do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Tell me.”

I didn't know what she meant, but I liked the conspiratorial tone she was using. It made me feel a part of something.

“I think it’s art for art’s sake.”

“Really?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Oh, come on!”

“What?”

“You only fuck around like you know what I’m on about.”

“That’s right. What are you on about?”

“You haven’t got a clue, do you?’

“I might have half a clue.”

“Oh, yeah?” she shook my hand free. Her eyelids hung low.

“Maybe you do, what the fuck.”

“You’ve got to rest. I’m going to make the tea.”

“Fine, fine,” she arched her back and collapsed with a sigh against the pillow. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her so tired.

"Sterling?"

"Yes?"

“Just tell me one thing…”

“Yes?” I said.

“Are we still recording?”

Theory

At the end of Madame Bovary, Flaubert leaves Emma's dead body on display, sparing his readers nothing, even the way the rigor mortis makes her stiffened lips separate.

I don't think Flaubert was cold hearted. It's just that his words were more important than his characters.

Words are EVERYTHING for a writer. When it's really happening, the plot is born fully formed from out of the top of the heads of the words.


nk

Thank Heaven For 7-Eleven

(long exposure)

Some days are spent dreaming away the storm, that gripping grey of fear that has the ability to turn me into a sick animal, twitching and cowering in the darkness. I call them my acute depressions since they come and go so quickly, usually within the span of a couple of hours. They used to happen frequently, every week or so, now, after years of therapy they are rare. It usually begins as voices of doubt--in particular HIS voice, that of the albino wasp, Fitzcarraldo prototype who stung me so long ago...dooming a part of me to wander sleepless ever since, haunting the hills of England like a pale blue eyed, white faced demon in a nursery rhyme.

Let it go...i tell myself, give the burden over to God, but when such a storm strikes Im usually too late. All that's left is to cling to the sliver of a silver trace that is still me against the suffocating whiteness--a white so filling it turns the world black with the nothingness of death. A white that's the opposite of fertility, the opposite of nature...

There im allowed to see, before the lord pulls me back.




sightings

Pioneer Daze

I love weekday mornings when i dont have to go to work. I feel so cozy listening to the traffic reports. Today I got to spacing out over something i read online--the hypothesis that because human females dont show obvious signs of being in heat (i.e., our butts dont turn red when we're ovulating) it was necessary for humans to develop symbols referring to things that were not immediately apparent. A woman would use a symbol to refer to her horniness or lack thereof.

Just think--a fuck me flag is at the root of every single thing every communicated by one human to another--all of the handshakes and butt wiggles and winks and thumbs-up and hoots and hollers and drunken speeches and break-up phone calls, not to mention shakespeare and receipts at the gas station and The Onion and "kick me" signs and all of those zillions of emails filling up SPAM folders as we speak.

Sweet!

Turbulence/Halo

Via Flight404 and ffffound via the treehouse and the cave.


It was a wonderful mini-holiday. But then something happened. I was stressed and took it out on him. Words came out of my mouth like weapons, frightening me, because it was reminiscent of when I used to drink and wasn’t in control of my actions.

I apologized repeatedly—desperate to be relieved of my guilt. Of course the fact that he immediately forgave me only made it worse.

“I ruined our vacation,” I told him a few days later, when we chatted online.

He assured me that I hadn’t, and referred to all the good times we’d had during our trip.

“I would do anything to take back those few minutes,” I said, and I meant it—I felt there was no limit to what I’d give to go back in time.

He told me to stop worrying about it…we chatted about other things…but eventually I returned to how bad I felt.

He told me again to let it go, and then wrote;

“I like to leave my sadness in the moment, I don’t like to carry it around - try it, it feels good.”

I was so dumbfounded by this simple statement that all I could type back was:

“Ok.”

Could it really be so simple? I thought again about my drinking days, and how I finally decided to go to AA. At the end of my 3rd meeting, I wandered alone towards the door, uncertain if this was the right thing for me, and whether I was doomed to feel this terror in the pit of my stomach forever, when an older woman of about 60 came up to me and asked me my name. I told her and she told me hers and remarked that she’d never seen me before. I told her I was new.

“Welcome!” she said, in that impossibly warm and affable AA way. She put her hands on my shoulders.

“It’s going to be OK,” she said, “You don’t have to drink anymore.”

I looked back at her in flabbergasted disbelief. She might as well have told me that from now on I’d have two heads. I realized I’d long stopped considering drinking a choice. It felt like an obligation…a punishment I’d be forced to carry out for the rest of my sad, black-out ridden existence.

“It’s true,” she said, “you don’t have to anymore. It’s over now.”

I remember falling forward and sobbing unabashedly in her arms while others cleared away the empty Munchkins boxes and folded up the folding chairs. As we stood there, the complicated patterns of my life that I’d always thought were set in stone melted like snowflakes on my shoulders. Outside a million conversations ended and a million brand new ones started as the traffic lurched forward, stopped, and then lurched forward again. Birds beat their wings and satellites switched their angles, but this perfect stranger and I kept hugging.




Processing

New Age

grrr

In the same way that certain highly skilled MCs spit the realness of a situation and call witness to a way of being over the dj’s beats, I spin platters of words to create fake universes that overlay the “real” one. Writing=collecting and assembling. I like to cruise the middle class thoroughfares with my remote control out and my antennas UP. I imagine that I’m an archeologist from the future and that all this is picturesque ruins. For the sake of what they will not be able to find, I examine those things too ephemeral to survive into a new age, like food and paper and conversations. I try to read what I can in faces and body language. I take note of fashion—the way the denizens of NOW comb their hair and tie their sneaker laces. I try to rely on the tools that everyone has to piece together a situation. Intuition, foresight, hindsight…(the clock on the wall says a quarter past midnight) I occasionally take breaks to get something to eat and take a walk, with my iPod shuffle (Grimm) turned up and my antenna resting at half-mast and a bit droopy, like sailors on shore leave…


Velvet Underground, "New Age"

My post "Zombie Apocalypse" on Reality Sandwich...PLEASE GIVE ME SOME COMMENT LOVE!!!

Prom Song 89

This place up north snowbound, with hunters on snowshoes and violins over a drum machine, everyone drinking beer and tea and wearing hand knitted wool sweaters with gigantic floppy collars that could cover their faces and Vaseline on their cheeks as outside the streetlight casts dark green, blue green and then purple over the softly perfect snowdrifts, the footsteps and wheel tracks from a few hours ago caressed smooth by the wind hums alongside the CV and cell phone signals and satellite radio waves, keeping long distance drivers out on the high way company with steady streams of similarly themed songs...endless mix tapes riffing on a nearly specific time and place, otherwise known as a "sub genre".

im thinking of overweight baby mamas wasting away on payment plan couches deep in the desserts of daytime television, as dishes pile high in the sink, the drain ringed with food resin and im zeroing in on the trash overflowing with a white cardboad box sitting proudly on top--it's corners still tight and bright label mostly intact...pink and white icing smeared on the see-thru cellophane window, which was once the peephole onto a promise of paradise.

2008

Family Guy is on and I'm thinking about the girl out there on 1st ave, the homeless black chick who has the aged look of people sleeping rough but based on her sing-song voice and style of dress is most probably young, in her early 20s at most, huddled in the half shelter of a Verizon phone booth outside a bodega--the dingy weird one with the rotting cantaloupe and the crooked astroturf covered ramp leading to the front door. She's very pretty, small boned with delicate features and glassy, baby bird eyes. Her knobby shoulders are always hunched high and her hoodie pulled tight. Sometimes I put some money in her paper coffee cup. I wonder about how she got there and on nights like tonite i wonder about how much longer she'll survive, and it gets me to thinking about everything that I say that i want and everything that I seem to be waiting to make happen and the whole situation stops making sense to me.

I'll never forget the bright and brisk morning, the first truly COLD day of the year a month or so ago--i ran into her away from the phone booth, which was strange cuz I'm used to seeing her framed by it--out on the sidewalk she seemed even smaller.

"Hi," I called out to her, already searching in my bag for my wallet.

"Oh," she said, crying out in pain--"please help me! I'm so cooooold!" She held out the word "cold" until it matched the length of the wind blasts that coursed through her tiny trembling frame. Usually she was upbeat, cheery, even, but on that morning the pain and suffering were coming thru on all channels.

"Here you go," I said, and pressed the money into her hands and then kept making my way without breaking stride.

A half way up the block I was suddenly seized with the urge to hand my apartment keys over to her.

Why not? I thought, I'll be at work, what do I need it for?

I imagined an arrangement by which she stayed at my place during on weekdays so that she could keep warm and use the innernet to find a job, using my address as hers. I'd be her hero, and she'd keep my place nice and neat while she pulled herself together. Wouldn't I want someone to do the same for me? Especially if it was another young woman who was offering, someone I had a vibe with--someone who wouldn't be looking for any kind of payback except the kind that comes from helping someone out?

I crossed the street, not slowing down, waiting until I was some distance away before finally looking back, where all I could see were other figures on the sidewalk, the currents of the crowd having quickly closed around the temporary estuary my exchange with her had created. I thought of islands and continents, planets and galaxies, all caught in the same stream that we were in. Everything appeared so clearly: sunlight moved like a camera across the shiny black asphalt, illuminating bank receipts and bottle caps, coffee thermal guards and plastic pull sleeves curled up like dead leaves.

Daft Punk thundered in my ears, the wind blew my hair back--I felt blessed, me--an idiot asshole was being shown the geometry of that which was irreducible. A Lacanian knot, water going down the drain in a tight, sparkling rotation, spinning like my records back home.

All the while i kept to my New Yorker pace. Undecided. Touching the keys in my jacket and feeling the surge of something that perhaps God was asking me to do but being unable either to do it or think of another viable option. I thought of all the things that could go wrong--how she could steal all my stuff or smoke crack and burn the place down. Or spread lice around, which almost seemed worse. Plus it's not only my stuff that's at my place... So instead I walked along, and other thoughts crept in... about work and after work and my writing. I started to retreat towards that space where the characters live--the other world in my head--but I pulled myself back because I didn't know what to think about what had just happened with the girl.

I front like I'm a part of the change that's currently underway--the one that will effect every aspect of our lives. It's the reason why so many of us find ourselves simultaneously blogging and tweeting the same thoughts--it's cuz there's a globally shared vibe radiating thru the air like a tuning fork tone causing us to re-conceptualize en masse the symbolism of money, the slow torture of our jobs, the terrible trappings of monogomy and the so-called "nuclear" family... Like Gandhi and John Lennon I want to practice love and discuss how we treat others, eradicating the out dated notions of nations and foreigners and instead concentrating on the potentiality of our shared humanity.

How can I be the person that i claim to be and not do something to help her?

Inside my head the call to change kept sounding, and I kept trying to come up with answers. I'm slowly moving past the point of trying not to hear it or of sty ming its blast. I don't want to cover-up and remain unconscious. Instead, I continue the pattern of living my life and getting interrupted--being forced to reconcile all that I feel and believe with the way I live. But this too, is a part of it. In order for the question to truly engage us as a question--in order for it to grab us and shake us and drag us towards an answer, it has to appear as inconvenient, just like the "truth" that Al Gore rocked on about. What he really should have called it was "An Inconvenient Question"--because the real truth comes from just such a query--one that takes us towards the heart of our own existence and undoes all the foundations to that which we hold dear. We have to be forced to choose--to take account of the worth of our lives against a greater goal and to allow ourselves to come up short--before we have any hope of realizing the MAGNITUDE of what is at stake, and allow the question itself to take control of our lives, and not the other way around.

Tonite as the wind blows and the TV laughs and the innernets glow like diamond studded highways I will wonder again about where she is and if she's ok--casting my thoughts far out, like gigantic empty nets that tow in dark, unknowable things that lie like half-dead whales on the shore.

All along the question sounding on repeat:

"How do I live a life worth living?"

Station 2 Station

"...the return of the thin white duke, throwing darts in lovers' eyes."--David Bowie, S2S


It's time for a "real" post, i keep telling myself. Something that's not from the book-in-progress, like the last few, but a BLOG post, a Raymi-like stream about whatever. This was the equation i tried to blur in the early days of BRANDTRUEBOY. The so-called "Realness" of a piece was measured by its length divided by the amount of time it took to write it. As a way of fucking with this I worked long and hard to make the characters' posts read as tho they'd "just happened" in a stream of consciousness transcribed hurriedly in dimly lit bedrooms and cafes in between slutty, stoned adventures. I purposefully made spelling and grammatical mistakes--I took the crystallized thought conglomerates that had formed between the pressurized folds of my brain and smashed them into pieces that i scattered across my innernets. The meat of the matter was expressed in sautéed and stir-fried bite-sized chunks of posts and comments, and flavor was what mattered most.

I designed Freudian slips and remembered to occasionally forget what I was talking about.

I played with notions of doubles, twins and ghosts. I had couples fucking in front of mirrors--infinity ripped open for a nano second or 2.

Fuck identity. Fuck copyrights.

We are on the eve of a brand new Renaissance, the scale and achievement of which will far surpass that of the last one. Whereas the last great explosion of thought was in actuality a revival and revision of the philosophy, art and science of the Ancients, (especially the Greeks) this time it will be that as well as the taking of the next step. The whole question of the relation of the Self to the Other is not, as it turns out, going to be answered but changed into the question of the self and the other...without capitals...thereby representing interchangeable social objects between which neither one is master...hence the distinction between them will blur. I think this is and will result in a fundamental change in the way we think.

I don't find it coincidental that the tsunami of three years ago struck in the same manner as the change which has already begun--the crest of the wave was so long, that in most cases it did not approach the shoreline as a towering wall of water, but as a slowly rising slope, the front of which sizzled towards civilization with foamy fingers, as tho giant Neptune himself was fully outstretched with his hands reaching for the shore.

I'm not making light of or belittling the tragedy of what happened three years ago by likening this deep mega change to those huge destructive waves that destroyed everything that had the audacity to be standing in its path. There will be no stopping the change, no stopping the onslaught of our own past, dredged up like the million year old sludge from the ocean floor that the waves plastered across living land.

So many will be playing on the shore when the change rolls in--they won't know to have already taken higher ground IN THEIR MINDS.

This used to be real estate
Now it's only fields and trees
Where, where is the town
Now, it's nothing but flowers

Technology will be rendered at once meaningless and the only thing that matters. The failure of systems will create the need for better systems which will not fail. This new network will become that which defines us, as humans.

Here I am, blabbing on about all that will be, all that is already unfolding, opening up like petals on a black bough before the rain. All you have to do is stand still and you can see it. But enough about that. Yr the only one i tell this too. All my life my goal has been to fit in. I'm lucky--what makes me a weirdo is mostly not obvious. I remember back in high school in Jersey. We'd be sitting at the counter in Dunkin Donuts, high out of our heads with a cream and sugar filled coffee when not one, not two but 7 cops come strollin in for their fried dough fixes. I had to act like I belonged there, like it was all the most logical thing in the world, which of course it was, to anyone but me, who already felt like another species but added to this feeling was now one of being high, and not only observing everything that happened but actually UNDERSTANDING crucial things about the way it was all set-up, life liberty and the pursuit of cash, there in the crossroads state, with its strip mall mentality and stages that were all too small.

Fuck the police, i muttered to the clouds in my coffee.

BRANDTRUEBOY style fakin faker


Like any one of your standard “artist coming of age/realization of destiny” Hollywood flicks, my story begins in the wilderness, where I have wandered for many years. In this case, the wilderness is encompassed by the tiny dimensions of my studio apartment. Nevertheless, it stretches long and far, wailing thru electric bulb lit dust and weed smoke with the frantic ecstatic twang of indie rock guitar solos. In here I go to places few have ever been, and fewer still have been able to convey.

Ever since I was a child I knew that I was going to make something that no one had ever made before.

It coulda been a bomb or a bridge but it turned out to be a blog.


i hang out over here sometimes---check out this post on television. I commented as dancypnts. Join up and lets get some of our cukoo flavor in the mix

hello, innernets

I’m on some Invisible Man, Geto Boys steez: I sit alone zoning out in my four cornered room that’s lit-up super bright with thousands of watts of halogens, xmas lights dangling in thick bunches and black votive candles courtesy of Urban Outfitters, specialists in post-teen recluse fashion.

I’m afraid of the dark and afraid of food and waiting to evolve.

12212012

prime time of yr life


Revolution Next Level is about learning to live outside of time—it’s about realizing that the true history of the Earth is not one of man’s “progress” over nature and himself, but it’s a history of Spirit—of the continuing evolution of our collective consciousness. All my life I’ve studied the mistakes of my parent's generation so that I could try and take their victories to the next level. I found out about the freedom riders and freedom writers and rally criers, the hippies and the beatles and the beatniks. The muhammad ali's and stonewall queens and steve mcqueens wearing leather driving moccasins. I loved/hated all that shit. The more I read, lived and learned, however, the more I realized that there were no mistakes at all--only lessons. I realized that although on the surface the revolutionary spirit of the 60s had been swallowed up and vomited back out there existed a deeper level where ideas had taken root and grew hot house flower-underground green power style. The government crackdowns, assassinations and imprisonments of entire movements, as well as the burn out and drug fueled violence of various individuals is no match for the power of the ideas that were passionately exchanged.

Peace, equality, safety and food for all people. These ideas weren't going to just get shut down by one or two (or three) subsequently lame decades. The 60s were the death knell--in the 70s, 80s and 90s we lived with the corpse of our old ways of thinking and being. We tried to reactivate it, Frankenstein-like, by sucking the world's energy into our American pie, but 9/11 proved that all things really must pass, and American/Western dominance itself turned into a fine white dust on that funeral blue morning.


I’m through analyzing where everything went wrong and critiquing the finer points of the manifestos and ideologies authored by those who blew up during the extended play summer of love…the way the government and personal greed derailed the shit they were working on... I'm more interested in picking up where they left off. They undertook journeys and dismantled mythologies, clearing the way for something new. There was young vs old--not by age but by newness of thought. Many of those folks are old now, but they can be young again if they get back to work. They can be young again with me.

Read Gandhi who influenced King...read the Koran that influenced Malcom X and then read The Autobiography of Malcom x that influenced Spike Lee who influenced Tribe Called Quest who influenced ME.