Wasting Light.

So you rise
out of ashes and dead leaves,
lively lips eager to resuscitate hope,
though on I go aching to make my way alone.

Whispering promises,
voice a hypnotizing melody.
Yet despite the seeming sincerity,
this cynic clings to suspicion.

I fear this need in me
goes deeper than the marrow.
So strong for so long yet still
itch for my heart to go feral.

Wasting time and precious vitality
trying to defeat this gravitation,
this revolution that brings us
ever-closer to collision.

Just push me away or pull me close
I could sit on this fence until the end of time.
Just pin me down or run away
I’m running down here,
wasting light.

People-Watching.

I realized today how I could watch people all day. Analyzing their appearance, studying their body language, paying close attention to their tone and use of voice, considering their choice of clothing, attuning with their vibe and try to catch emotions, maybe a thought or two if I’m lucky. Weaving all these elements into stories in my head, wondering how close I might be to actuality. And I thought to myself that if I ever have a kid, that’s one of the games we’ll play: we’ll people-watch and try to imagine what the stranger’s lives are like. And then he’ll tell his friends at school all about this time he spends with his daddy and they’ll beat the ever-living shit out of him because his father is infinitely lame. Yay for me.

Human Pride Parade.

Maybe be we need a Human Pride Parade. Emphasize our similarities rather than our differences. Maybe then we can all come to respect our multilayered diversity, see its inherent survival value, honor individuality and personal freedom and as a consequence EVOLVE as a species. Black and white and yellow and red and straight, gay, bi or -asexual, man, women or transgendered: all holding hands and celebrating and thus nurturing what they have in common, what binds them.

In NLP, they tell you to define your goal in positive, not negative terms. Say something you do want rather than focusing on what you don’t want. Like the person on the ledge that the person hanging out the open window is trying to lure towards them in order to save their life.

What, in every movie or television program you’ve seen, do they say to the person on the ledge? “Don’t look down.” And what do they immediately do? Its because the person has to think about what they shouldn’t think about within the context of not thinking about it. By just focusing on a positive goal rather than a negative one — for instance, “keep your eyes on me” — you might get better results.

If wholeness is what you want, don’t increase focus on your distinction — not alone, anyway.  We need to empathize with people to truly understand them, and for most the ability for them to empathize is dependent exclusively upon the person’s similarity with them, so a Human Pride Parade, or even an international holiday, might allow us to reinvest attention upon our similarities, and therefore smooth the road and lube the tubes for empathy.

Fight.

Run if it suits you.
Turn your head, distractions galore,
wall of denial forever higher, ever-thickening.

I’m going to chose this conflict,
fight this fight, for
everyday is just another battle in the war
and we’re all on the front lines.

No use sticking your head in the sand,
ass bare and tempting to the vicious
jaws of reality.

And so I’m standing tall,
head pushing my way, open eyes strained,
passion pushing my soles against
the warmth earth.

Fake.

“Why are people so fake?”

 
“They feel they would be misunderstood if they were authentic, or perhaps they fear they would be understood and the social consequences would be just as devastating. They may have adopted this inauthentic lifestyle for so long that they have actually lost touch with who they really are, have forgotten themselves. Or, perhaps worse, they have mistaken themselves for their own facade, and so are fake only because they feel they have no other choice. In any case, the fakes are made all because they care more about what others think about them than they care about being who they are. It‘s kind of sad, really.”

Notes on the Existential Peepshow.

The senses of all the species on this planet are related. So the senses of an organism that evolved on a different planet would have developed senses on an entirely different basis. Our senses developed and survived because they have survival value within the environment we develop within. The relationship between our view of the world and the world as-it-is ends with that. We’re not seeing the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we’re receiving an existential peepshow.

Would the rendition of reality they experience be more valid than our own, less valid, or (the cop-out) of equal value in their own contexts?

What means of experiencing reality would be appropriate for space?

Escape.

Books, movies, video games, and — most commonly, ever-more prominently — sex and drugs are repeatedly labeled as “escapisms,” which has always fascinated me. People get stuck not so much on the notion of escapism but on what inherent characteristic escapism implies resides in the one who practices it: namely, weakness. People see those utilizing these escapisms as doing so because they are too weak, immature, afraid to deal with the real world that those who do not utilize escapisms have to deal with, and suffer under the mighty reigns of.

Well, fuck those associations.

Think about the notion of escapism. What are we escaping from, where are we escaping to, why are we trying to escape? The accusation of participating in an escapism always brought to my mind the image of us living in a prison, and my escapism acting as a sort of short-term parole.

They’re just jealous. They’re too afraid to leave these familiar prison walls, and they want you condemned to the same fate.

Ask yourself this, about drugs, forever christened an escapism: why is drug use higher in some places than in others? Regardless, the more drug use in a specific area, the less people in that area, it would seem, are happy with that area, at least without the use of said drugs. If we are to judge a culture by any meaningful standard, it must be by how satisfied its respective populace is. So the more drug use, the more the society would appear to be failing. The populace feels trapped and has nowhere to hide, run, escape from the feeling but within, and so they seek out tools that allow them to fall in the zone, find comfort within, while blotting out as much of the external environment and circumstances as conceivably possible.

Ever wonder why meditation developed in the East, by poor people in the fucking desert?

There. Now you know.

PSiBooth.

The first thought came as the result of over a month of almost nightly viewings of documentaries, television shows and specials regarding contact with the dead: if EVP is evidence of what some claim it to be, isn’t it about damn time we stop asking questions on tape and then play it back afterward by turning up the gain?

It seems that if this is a valid way to communication with the deceased but not departed, we could so easily make something a bit more fit for two-way communication. Isn’t there a computer program that can play back the sounds in real time, so we can have immediate feedback and engage in an actual conversational flow with the disembodied? There’s no reason we cannot upgrade from EVP to the PSiPhone, the way I see it. And to cut out other possible source noise, wouldn’t it make sense to feed the microphone into a sound-proof booth and merely instruct the entities that if they want to communicate that they must do so through the booth? Making it in the form of a casket would be an asshole thing to do, so that’s not recommended, the exact shape and size could be no larger than the typical head and shoulders, perhaps. Or phone booth size.

One disadvantage of this would be that you would have to set up and take down the booth in whatever haunted location you elected to visit, but depending on the specific design that difficulty would likely only be somewhere between a minor to major pain in the ass — nothing that cannot be done. One might claim another drawback, specifically the fact that the booth will only work if the deceased entities want to communicate or leave any signs of their presence, but for the most part one must confess that this would be pretty much the case anyway.

Then I began thinking of the advantages offered by the booth: after all, if the entity has to enter a controlled environment in order to communicate (which would be no threat to the disembodied, we can safely assume, as there is clear indication moving through matter is not much of a problem for them), why not point all the conventional ghost-hunter devices — the EMF detectors, the IR cameras, the thermometer — in that direction, place them in that controlled environment. And that guy who videotapes television static over and over to get ghostly images: can’t we kind of add that to the EVP, hook up that whole process in the controlled environment of the booth as well, so that perhaps we can also have visual evidence, hopefully in correspondence with the rest of the data feeds from the rest of the instruments? Upgrade that PSiPhone to PsiBooth.

No doubt these are pricey items, but those who have and are willing to invest the money in ghost hunting at this level are purchasing these devices anyway, and the only difference here is bringing those devices together in order to get the best possible range of data. The only things that would be required that extend beyond the typical investment in a high-grade ghost hunting excursion would be a small television and the materials needed to construct a small, sound-proof booth. As an additional benefit, any evidence you catch in the booth could be measured by multiple devices and provide the strongest evidence. And it would blow the fucking Spiricom out of the water. We can stop passing notes with the ghosts and playing hide and seek with them like paparazzi of the dead, annoying fans of the phantasm, and really start getting some evidence and top-notch interviews.

The Only Difference That Matters.

My species never ceases to amaze me.

I was watching a political show online the other day and I was listening to a woman argue her point. I could see that she honestly, sincerely believed it to the marrow. It struck me that this woman and I were different at the most fundamental level in a psychological sense. Not because she was a woman, mind you, and not because she was black, but because she believed that democracy and the constitution were infallible. That the Constitution was a sort of secular Bible; that what was good, evil, real and fantasy was subject to vote.

She believed in the founding fathers and majority rules. I hold no such value in either.

The founding fathers certainly didn’t believe in a woman’s right to vote, or a black’s right to vote or recognize either of them as anything more than property, for that matter, which makes her positions on the Constitution and democracy rather curious to me. At that time most of those who were recognized voters would have voted to maintain ownership of slaves — did majority rules in that case justify the total lack of recognition of a human being’s natural rights? If so, it would certainly be consistent, considering her argument that homosexuals shouldn’t be permitted equal rights in a certain state because big daddy democracy upheld medieval mindsets once again.

But consistency isn’t always an indicator of truth. And unlike her, I believe in the evolution of thought and values. In basic human rights. And despite that it will make me look like a total asshole once again, I can’t help but regard people who think like her as idiots, and these are the kind of idiots that will do this species in.

Itch of Anima.

How you itch to possess another,
to enchant me like before,
bait and hook to reel me in,
just to throw me back overboard.

You’re rising out of the ashes once again,
not a phoenix but a buzzard reborn.
Not a tall glass of water, but a stiff drink,
a shot without a chaser, the pretty bullet that left a bleeding hole.

You became death, I promised for the last time,
then your corpse cast a shadow that survived
A looming poltergeist an old soul can’t shoo away.
I’m an addict to the bone, you‘re the drug I can’t escape.

Running through my mind with broken glass for soles,
leaving a path of shredded dreams, disemboweling hope.
Dig six feet up, born out of soil once more,
echo my regrets to me, a fucking melody that I
dance in time to every day of my empty life.

So you rise out of the ashes again,
albeit in phantom form,
haunting me through little signs
that trigger slashes and strikes
of recollection.

Dragging me down
to the most primal needs,
an animal is awakening, fueled my lust
And this strange need for something more:
the most potent aphrodisiac
instinct has in store.

How I know you itch for another masque,
to play with me like before,
lour me inside with hypnotic eyes
just to kick me back out the door.

No.

I won’t be left bleeding alone,
caked with dirt in a ditch this time.
I’m on fire, but I’ll rise out of the soot
a whole soul that glows libertine, lighting
his own way along his path on his own two feet,
fighting shadows alone on into the night.