fire/ICE (we all fall down)
“Those who choose to live in denial may eventually be forced to live in fear.”
—George W. Bush, 16 October, 2002
“…forget about your house of cards, and I’ll do mine…”
“…the infrastructure will collapse…voltage spikes…”
“…denial…denial…your ears should be burning…”
“…denial…denial…your ears should be burning…”
—Radiohead, “House of Cards”
1.
FAMILIES:SEPARATED
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
LIVES:UPROOTED
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
MAKESHIFT:CAMPS
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
PROTOTYPE:INTERNMENT
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
DRY:RUN
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
EMERGENCY:ROUNDUP
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
CATASTROPHE:DISPLACED
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
DISASTER:APARTHEID
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
APOCALYPTO:SLOW MOTION
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
SELF-FULFILLING:PROPHECY
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
*
TXT MSG: FWD: redadas at Pico/Vermont, pigs very aggressive, takng cars, arrestng, need people there now! spread tha word.
TXT MSG: FWD: CONFRMD--Border patrol agents deporting people from fire evacuation centers near border. emrgncy press confrnc 2day.
TXT MSG: FWD: The bus was moving east through the Valley, it was late at night, each stop brought another few paisas just getting off their shifts. On their bodies were shirts and hats that bore the logos of the restaurants that form a solid wall of repeated chains all along the saturated boulevard. Sansei, Baja Fresh, Buca di Beppo, Gyu Kaku, Romano’s Macaroni Grill, Pinot Bistro, Carney’s, Ahi Sushi, Daily Grill, Tortas México.
On the Transit TV – Moving Entertainment screen, the English language news was reporting apocalyptic images of red skies, black smoke, aerial tanker fire bomber planes and helicopters dropping orange flame retardant and water. Military helicopters and C-130s. Mansions and mobile homes; hundreds of thousands evacuated. Windswept. Pushed out. Southern California in another state of emergency. Another year of record heat. In the middle of the report, a black man getting on the bus with only a ten dollar bill and asking the driver to cut him a break; the long-haired, bearded driver refusing.
Holding up his bill: “Excuse me, does anybody happen to have change for a ten?”; a paisa in the back of the bus stepping up to break it.
Then the Spanish language news: ICE raids continuing throughout California and Arizona, forty-five people found hidden underneath a suburban McMansion in Maricopa County, images of them emerging from a four-car garage onto bright, clean, white cul-de-sac concrete and pavement, shading their eyes in the glare, marched onto vans and buses; workers pushed off their Home Depot labor center spot by local Orange County police (two forms of identification required from anyone seeking work); another week of record-breaking heat in the upper nineties; middle of October; ozone layer hole bigger (and earlier) than ever this year; new several-hundred mile section of border wall almost complete (portions of the wall burning); burned human corpses found in migrant shantytown camps around San Diego; migrant farm workers continuing to work during blazes, not informed of dangerous air quality risks.
Then Pat Sajak’s Wheel of Fortune Multiple Choice Trivia Question; AP News headlines—World Bank re-examining approach to help poverty stricken nations, plans to encourage more involvement from private corporations to assist the poor; Bush vows to veto health care, again; Beckham and Galaxy lose endgame; James D. Watson reveals digital logic of new face of eugenics—
—privatized DNA; the new social Darwinism; analogic fluid exchange moot; passé; dangerous to your health—
Somewhere just past Haskell, approaching the 405, another paisa got on the bus—The Sandwich Factory—and struggled to ask the driver if he could pay with just the single quarter he had. Again, refusal. “It’s a dollar twenty-five, one way.”
Turning to address the bus: “¿Alguien no tiene unas coras?” Embarrassed, holding up his single quarter.
I reached into my bag with half the bus at the same time, an older paisa next to me the quickest, whipping out his wallet and pulling several bills from a decent, little stack. Next to him, the black guy with the ten dollar bill watching him hand a couple dollars to the younger paisa, nodding and smiling. Then the young guy coming over, sitting down and explaining how he hadn’t had time to get some change after getting off work and running to catch the bus; the older guy telling him not to worry about it.
Another stop; Transit TV signal loop; digital images of apocalypse, repeated. Digital logic of replication. Exact copies; bodies and logos; disaster and shock; black and red skies, looped; people emerging in handcuffs from a suburban garage; bright, clean street beaten clear of shadows; Pat Sajak—A, B, C, or D. No doubt this time around.
*
“On some serious shit, I think the real problem with them is that they’re just straight up haters. They have to hate on everything.”
“I don’t know, I think the real problem is the way they have to be the center of everything. Hating is just another form of egotism, making themselves feel and look superior by dissing everybody and everything else, making themselves the center and everybody else on the outside. Unimportant. Irrelevant. Not to get all academic and shit, but I’m thinking about how the metropolitan center functions in relation to the periphery? The suburbs, the exurbs, the cornfed cowlands, overlapping, the various configurations of isolation and walled-off life. The danger of contact, the need. The desire to withdraw? The train was moving toward the direct center of the city, where I live, away from the periphery of the Valley, away from the periphery of the burning margins, away from the periphery of the military wall, and I was thinking about the people who ride the buses, and the people who cross the wall. I was thinking about the people who build the wall, and the people who die at the wall. I was thinking about the people who gravitate toward the center from the edges, pulled, pushed. The line of fire pushed back and corralled, then windswept and pulled to multiple points of contact and spark, sudden exponential growth, grabbing hold of dry tinder and damaged life—”
—who had her Latino boyfriend dared the tweaky white girl to kiss? A white guy? A Chicano? A second-generation son of a Mexican immigrant? A long-haired, anarcho-hippie-punk with a bike? Whose cheek were her chapped lips aiming for? What color was it? Greasy blonde hair, tight pink, riding-up shorts, various stains, pale pudgy belly exposed, visible scars and bruises. Dilated, glassy. Her boyfriend laughing, their friend Penguin staring straight ahead, stony faced, tripping on a good one. Rushing in, her lips a few centimeters from my face. Pulling back to avoid the contact. Train barreling under the Hollywood Hills.
I was thinking and the voices were muddled. The eyes cloudy, the intelligence unfocused, distracted, mashed. The infrastructure will collapse.
DENIAL:DENIAL.
2.
Okay, first of all:
This feeling of imminent doom and collapse—it’s false. It’s manufactured. Christian. Perpetual fear and paralysis. Reliance on the state/church/daddy to protect & save us from the unfolding devastation and catastrophe. Operate from a place of fear, trauma, shock, dread. Now you’re under control.
And yet, okay, it’s real, right? The disaster is real. The collapse. We can see it. People suffer it and die every day. We watch it unfolding & creeping up all around.
But maybe what I’m getting at is more about the sense of payback in the face of this grotesquely wealthy, unsustainable situation. Who is this “we” that’s living in dread? And what exactly are we so afraid of? Most of the rest of the world is already there. Many of us here are already there, too. Those of us who are in panic mode, it’s because we’re not quite there yet, but we know what’s coming. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll be forced to take the blinders off whether we want to or not. We can see the fireline advancing, whipped by high winds. We can see the satellite photo images of the hurricane swirling, the eye of the storm creeping on us. The polar cap melting, the glacier walls cracking. Even though we ignore it, we know it’s there, we see it—the poverty, disease, violence, chaos, nihilism, that our gluttony has created everywhere else. We see it in the negative, in the absence, in what they work so hard to hide from our view, and what we work so hard to avoid seeing. The hands that made this t-shirt that I’m wearing. The pesticides in the lungs of the human who picked this onion. The ignition firing up the gasoline in my car’s engine; the charred human flesh. The secret, foreign death squads are not so secret, nor so foreign. The Special Ops forces. The Psy-Ops news. The murky black water of privatized torture and paramilitarization. The border grows longer and taller and walls off our fear—but on the wrong side. Caging ourselves in, chewing off our own hands and feet. The shantytowns around San Diego terrify us because they map our future on a 1:1 ratio, they erase all the boundaries, they televise our complicity in the present. Yes, we’re complicit, even if we don’t want to be. Me, you. All of us. Just by being here, on this side of the wall. Even on that side of the wall, we’re all in it, we can’t escape. Doesn’t matter what side of the wall you’re on. All of us will flee together, all of us will burn.
A wide, broad sketch of what’s to come: Disaster, shock, displacement, diaspora, detention centers, deportation, torture, desperate poverty, chaos, violence, police state, paramilitaries, loss.
("But this is what happens somewhere else!")
(“But a bridge in America should not collapse!”)
Disaster apartheid will only get you so far.
*
And another thing:
2012 is just another Christian myth. It will come & go. More misplaced faith in revolution, all the born-again Aztecs looking to the sky for salvation.
Everybody talking about how things are speeding up. I think people are just growing more nervous & desperate. It’s a kind of agitation. Something’s gotta give, something’s gotta give. Everybody bouncing around in this big centrifuge. It’s not moving any faster; there’s just more of us in here and less & less oxygen every day.
These are not momentous times. They’re just televised.
*
“Modern man lives in a state of low-grade vitality. Though generally he does not suffer deeply, he also knows little of true creative living. Instead of it, he has become an anxious automaton. His world offers him vast opportunities for enrichment and enjoyment, and yet he wanders around aimlessly, not really knowing what he wants and completely unable, therefore, to figure out how to get it. He does not approach the adventure of life with either excitement or zest. He seems to feel that the time for fun, for pleasure, for growing and learning, is childhood and youth, and he abdicates life itself when he reaches ‘maturity.’ He goes through a lot of motions, but the expression on his face indicates his lack of any real interest in what he is doing. He is usually either poker-faced, bored, aloof, or irritated. He seems to have lost all spontaneity, all capacity to feel and express directly and creatively. He is very good at talking about his troubles and very bad at coping with them. He has reduced life itself to a series of verbal and intellectual exercises; he is drowning himself in a sea of words. He has substituted psychiatric and pseudo-psychiatric explanations of life for the process of living. He spends endless time trying either to recapture the past or to mold the future. His present activities are merely bothersome chores he has to get out of the way. At times, he is not even aware of his actions at the moment.”
—Fritz Perls, The Gestalt Approach & Eye Witness to Therapy
*
In my apartment, we have this strange problem with ants. They have formed a chain that encircles the doors of the refrigerator and freezer. In several spots, the rubber padding of the freezer door doesn’t quite meet the frame, leaving tiny openings. Although all the food in the freezer is packed tightly in containers and bags, the ants have continued marching into the freezer for several weeks now, where they freeze themselves to death. At the points of entry are thick piles of dead ants, mass frozen graves of hundreds, maybe thousands of ants. We wipe them clean, but they just keep coming back and performing their endless, mysterious suicide ritual. They march into certain frozen death, locked in some kind of chemically and/or socially induced pattern of self-destruction. Their movements slow imperceptibly until they are tiny statues. They pile up in their final bid for body warmth from other frozen corpses.
*
This morning, I found the rat stuck to one of the glue traps that my roommates had set. It was still alive. I didn’t see it at first; it jerked when I approached, and I jumped in response. It had chewed the front edge of the trap away, and with its forelimbs, had managed to drag itself and its trap about ten feet out of the kitchen, toward the front door. Parts of its hind limbs were chewed off. Its breath was fast and shallow as it waited to see what I would do. I watched its lungs working furiously.
*
The most important absence here was the lack of imagination. Everybody choking on their inability to imagine any other way. Giant habitrails. Recycled conversations. Re-mixed beats. Regurgitated rhymes. Frozen patterns of relating to one another, to ourselves. Everybody locked and loaded, ready to roll. Every act another attempt to mask the performance. The theater of everyday life was an elaborate, fascist megaproduction-spectacular co-authored and performed by all of us. We were all complicit. We were all props.
*
Endless marches to stop the war. Dialogue bubbles voicing our dogma on mass-replicated signs. (Hand-made signs demonstrating our individuality and freedom from ideology. And creativity.) Another ritual of chanting.
*
“You really want to stop the war?” _________________ says to me. “Stop your normal everyday life! Stop working! Stop spending money on shit! Stop going to school! Stop driving your car around! Stop shopping at IKEA! Stop buying marinara sauce and soy milk at Trader Joe’s! Stop drinking your double espressos! Stop attending endless meetings! Stop organizing spectacle events (workshops! music! food! spoken word! etc.!) Stop marching! Stop believing in your personal saviors—Jesus, Mohammed, Marx, Proudhon, Marcos, Freud, Magón! Stop checking your Myspace, stop waiting for the revolution, stop being afraid, stop judging everybody, stop writing dogmatic list serve rants, stop acting like such a hater, stop avoiding my calls, stop hiding behind your indigenismo, your liberalism, your feminism, your radicalism, your anarchism, your ismism, stop running in circles, stop giving me that fake smile, stop ignoring what other people have to say to you, stop talking to yourself, stop being such an asshole, stop cutting people off, stop holding back the vomit, stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, stop manipulating everybody to get what you want, stop pretending you’re above it, stop expecting somebody to meet all your unmet childhood needs, stop acting like you have no imagination, stop chewing off your foot, stop wasting our time, stop putting all that shit into your body, stop running in place, stop avoiding people’s eyes, stop interrupting yourself, stop performing for their cameras, stop communicating with words, stop holding your breath, stop fighting to be the center of attention. Stop bugging me. Stop lying to yourself. Stop reading my blog! Stop eating all my circus animal cookies. Stop asking me to sign your petition. Stop touching all my things. Stop spreading your germs all over my stuff. Stop wasting all the toilet paper. Stop using my pans to cook your meat. Stop being in control. Stop making sense.”
—George W. Bush, 16 October, 2002
“…forget about your house of cards, and I’ll do mine…”
“…the infrastructure will collapse…voltage spikes…”
“…denial…denial…your ears should be burning…”
“…denial…denial…your ears should be burning…”
—Radiohead, “House of Cards”
1.
FAMILIES:SEPARATED
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
LIVES:UPROOTED
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
MAKESHIFT:CAMPS
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
PROTOTYPE:INTERNMENT
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
DRY:RUN
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
EMERGENCY:ROUNDUP
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
CATASTROPHE:DISPLACED
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
DISASTER:APARTHEID
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
APOCALYPTO:SLOW MOTION
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
SELF-FULFILLING:PROPHECY
DENIAL:_________________
A.
B.
C.
D.
*
TXT MSG: FWD: redadas at Pico/Vermont, pigs very aggressive, takng cars, arrestng, need people there now! spread tha word.
TXT MSG: FWD: CONFRMD--Border patrol agents deporting people from fire evacuation centers near border. emrgncy press confrnc 2day.
TXT MSG: FWD: The bus was moving east through the Valley, it was late at night, each stop brought another few paisas just getting off their shifts. On their bodies were shirts and hats that bore the logos of the restaurants that form a solid wall of repeated chains all along the saturated boulevard. Sansei, Baja Fresh, Buca di Beppo, Gyu Kaku, Romano’s Macaroni Grill, Pinot Bistro, Carney’s, Ahi Sushi, Daily Grill, Tortas México.
On the Transit TV – Moving Entertainment screen, the English language news was reporting apocalyptic images of red skies, black smoke, aerial tanker fire bomber planes and helicopters dropping orange flame retardant and water. Military helicopters and C-130s. Mansions and mobile homes; hundreds of thousands evacuated. Windswept. Pushed out. Southern California in another state of emergency. Another year of record heat. In the middle of the report, a black man getting on the bus with only a ten dollar bill and asking the driver to cut him a break; the long-haired, bearded driver refusing.
Holding up his bill: “Excuse me, does anybody happen to have change for a ten?”; a paisa in the back of the bus stepping up to break it.
Then the Spanish language news: ICE raids continuing throughout California and Arizona, forty-five people found hidden underneath a suburban McMansion in Maricopa County, images of them emerging from a four-car garage onto bright, clean, white cul-de-sac concrete and pavement, shading their eyes in the glare, marched onto vans and buses; workers pushed off their Home Depot labor center spot by local Orange County police (two forms of identification required from anyone seeking work); another week of record-breaking heat in the upper nineties; middle of October; ozone layer hole bigger (and earlier) than ever this year; new several-hundred mile section of border wall almost complete (portions of the wall burning); burned human corpses found in migrant shantytown camps around San Diego; migrant farm workers continuing to work during blazes, not informed of dangerous air quality risks.
Then Pat Sajak’s Wheel of Fortune Multiple Choice Trivia Question; AP News headlines—World Bank re-examining approach to help poverty stricken nations, plans to encourage more involvement from private corporations to assist the poor; Bush vows to veto health care, again; Beckham and Galaxy lose endgame; James D. Watson reveals digital logic of new face of eugenics—
—privatized DNA; the new social Darwinism; analogic fluid exchange moot; passé; dangerous to your health—
Somewhere just past Haskell, approaching the 405, another paisa got on the bus—The Sandwich Factory—and struggled to ask the driver if he could pay with just the single quarter he had. Again, refusal. “It’s a dollar twenty-five, one way.”
Turning to address the bus: “¿Alguien no tiene unas coras?” Embarrassed, holding up his single quarter.
I reached into my bag with half the bus at the same time, an older paisa next to me the quickest, whipping out his wallet and pulling several bills from a decent, little stack. Next to him, the black guy with the ten dollar bill watching him hand a couple dollars to the younger paisa, nodding and smiling. Then the young guy coming over, sitting down and explaining how he hadn’t had time to get some change after getting off work and running to catch the bus; the older guy telling him not to worry about it.
Another stop; Transit TV signal loop; digital images of apocalypse, repeated. Digital logic of replication. Exact copies; bodies and logos; disaster and shock; black and red skies, looped; people emerging in handcuffs from a suburban garage; bright, clean street beaten clear of shadows; Pat Sajak—A, B, C, or D. No doubt this time around.
*
“On some serious shit, I think the real problem with them is that they’re just straight up haters. They have to hate on everything.”
“I don’t know, I think the real problem is the way they have to be the center of everything. Hating is just another form of egotism, making themselves feel and look superior by dissing everybody and everything else, making themselves the center and everybody else on the outside. Unimportant. Irrelevant. Not to get all academic and shit, but I’m thinking about how the metropolitan center functions in relation to the periphery? The suburbs, the exurbs, the cornfed cowlands, overlapping, the various configurations of isolation and walled-off life. The danger of contact, the need. The desire to withdraw? The train was moving toward the direct center of the city, where I live, away from the periphery of the Valley, away from the periphery of the burning margins, away from the periphery of the military wall, and I was thinking about the people who ride the buses, and the people who cross the wall. I was thinking about the people who build the wall, and the people who die at the wall. I was thinking about the people who gravitate toward the center from the edges, pulled, pushed. The line of fire pushed back and corralled, then windswept and pulled to multiple points of contact and spark, sudden exponential growth, grabbing hold of dry tinder and damaged life—”
—who had her Latino boyfriend dared the tweaky white girl to kiss? A white guy? A Chicano? A second-generation son of a Mexican immigrant? A long-haired, anarcho-hippie-punk with a bike? Whose cheek were her chapped lips aiming for? What color was it? Greasy blonde hair, tight pink, riding-up shorts, various stains, pale pudgy belly exposed, visible scars and bruises. Dilated, glassy. Her boyfriend laughing, their friend Penguin staring straight ahead, stony faced, tripping on a good one. Rushing in, her lips a few centimeters from my face. Pulling back to avoid the contact. Train barreling under the Hollywood Hills.
I was thinking and the voices were muddled. The eyes cloudy, the intelligence unfocused, distracted, mashed. The infrastructure will collapse.
DENIAL:DENIAL.
2.
Okay, first of all:
This feeling of imminent doom and collapse—it’s false. It’s manufactured. Christian. Perpetual fear and paralysis. Reliance on the state/church/daddy to protect & save us from the unfolding devastation and catastrophe. Operate from a place of fear, trauma, shock, dread. Now you’re under control.
And yet, okay, it’s real, right? The disaster is real. The collapse. We can see it. People suffer it and die every day. We watch it unfolding & creeping up all around.
But maybe what I’m getting at is more about the sense of payback in the face of this grotesquely wealthy, unsustainable situation. Who is this “we” that’s living in dread? And what exactly are we so afraid of? Most of the rest of the world is already there. Many of us here are already there, too. Those of us who are in panic mode, it’s because we’re not quite there yet, but we know what’s coming. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll be forced to take the blinders off whether we want to or not. We can see the fireline advancing, whipped by high winds. We can see the satellite photo images of the hurricane swirling, the eye of the storm creeping on us. The polar cap melting, the glacier walls cracking. Even though we ignore it, we know it’s there, we see it—the poverty, disease, violence, chaos, nihilism, that our gluttony has created everywhere else. We see it in the negative, in the absence, in what they work so hard to hide from our view, and what we work so hard to avoid seeing. The hands that made this t-shirt that I’m wearing. The pesticides in the lungs of the human who picked this onion. The ignition firing up the gasoline in my car’s engine; the charred human flesh. The secret, foreign death squads are not so secret, nor so foreign. The Special Ops forces. The Psy-Ops news. The murky black water of privatized torture and paramilitarization. The border grows longer and taller and walls off our fear—but on the wrong side. Caging ourselves in, chewing off our own hands and feet. The shantytowns around San Diego terrify us because they map our future on a 1:1 ratio, they erase all the boundaries, they televise our complicity in the present. Yes, we’re complicit, even if we don’t want to be. Me, you. All of us. Just by being here, on this side of the wall. Even on that side of the wall, we’re all in it, we can’t escape. Doesn’t matter what side of the wall you’re on. All of us will flee together, all of us will burn.
A wide, broad sketch of what’s to come: Disaster, shock, displacement, diaspora, detention centers, deportation, torture, desperate poverty, chaos, violence, police state, paramilitaries, loss.
("But this is what happens somewhere else!")
(“But a bridge in America should not collapse!”)
Disaster apartheid will only get you so far.
*
And another thing:
2012 is just another Christian myth. It will come & go. More misplaced faith in revolution, all the born-again Aztecs looking to the sky for salvation.
Everybody talking about how things are speeding up. I think people are just growing more nervous & desperate. It’s a kind of agitation. Something’s gotta give, something’s gotta give. Everybody bouncing around in this big centrifuge. It’s not moving any faster; there’s just more of us in here and less & less oxygen every day.
These are not momentous times. They’re just televised.
*
“Modern man lives in a state of low-grade vitality. Though generally he does not suffer deeply, he also knows little of true creative living. Instead of it, he has become an anxious automaton. His world offers him vast opportunities for enrichment and enjoyment, and yet he wanders around aimlessly, not really knowing what he wants and completely unable, therefore, to figure out how to get it. He does not approach the adventure of life with either excitement or zest. He seems to feel that the time for fun, for pleasure, for growing and learning, is childhood and youth, and he abdicates life itself when he reaches ‘maturity.’ He goes through a lot of motions, but the expression on his face indicates his lack of any real interest in what he is doing. He is usually either poker-faced, bored, aloof, or irritated. He seems to have lost all spontaneity, all capacity to feel and express directly and creatively. He is very good at talking about his troubles and very bad at coping with them. He has reduced life itself to a series of verbal and intellectual exercises; he is drowning himself in a sea of words. He has substituted psychiatric and pseudo-psychiatric explanations of life for the process of living. He spends endless time trying either to recapture the past or to mold the future. His present activities are merely bothersome chores he has to get out of the way. At times, he is not even aware of his actions at the moment.”
—Fritz Perls, The Gestalt Approach & Eye Witness to Therapy
*
In my apartment, we have this strange problem with ants. They have formed a chain that encircles the doors of the refrigerator and freezer. In several spots, the rubber padding of the freezer door doesn’t quite meet the frame, leaving tiny openings. Although all the food in the freezer is packed tightly in containers and bags, the ants have continued marching into the freezer for several weeks now, where they freeze themselves to death. At the points of entry are thick piles of dead ants, mass frozen graves of hundreds, maybe thousands of ants. We wipe them clean, but they just keep coming back and performing their endless, mysterious suicide ritual. They march into certain frozen death, locked in some kind of chemically and/or socially induced pattern of self-destruction. Their movements slow imperceptibly until they are tiny statues. They pile up in their final bid for body warmth from other frozen corpses.
*
This morning, I found the rat stuck to one of the glue traps that my roommates had set. It was still alive. I didn’t see it at first; it jerked when I approached, and I jumped in response. It had chewed the front edge of the trap away, and with its forelimbs, had managed to drag itself and its trap about ten feet out of the kitchen, toward the front door. Parts of its hind limbs were chewed off. Its breath was fast and shallow as it waited to see what I would do. I watched its lungs working furiously.
*
The most important absence here was the lack of imagination. Everybody choking on their inability to imagine any other way. Giant habitrails. Recycled conversations. Re-mixed beats. Regurgitated rhymes. Frozen patterns of relating to one another, to ourselves. Everybody locked and loaded, ready to roll. Every act another attempt to mask the performance. The theater of everyday life was an elaborate, fascist megaproduction-spectacular co-authored and performed by all of us. We were all complicit. We were all props.
*
Endless marches to stop the war. Dialogue bubbles voicing our dogma on mass-replicated signs. (Hand-made signs demonstrating our individuality and freedom from ideology. And creativity.) Another ritual of chanting.
*
“You really want to stop the war?” _________________ says to me. “Stop your normal everyday life! Stop working! Stop spending money on shit! Stop going to school! Stop driving your car around! Stop shopping at IKEA! Stop buying marinara sauce and soy milk at Trader Joe’s! Stop drinking your double espressos! Stop attending endless meetings! Stop organizing spectacle events (workshops! music! food! spoken word! etc.!) Stop marching! Stop believing in your personal saviors—Jesus, Mohammed, Marx, Proudhon, Marcos, Freud, Magón! Stop checking your Myspace, stop waiting for the revolution, stop being afraid, stop judging everybody, stop writing dogmatic list serve rants, stop acting like such a hater, stop avoiding my calls, stop hiding behind your indigenismo, your liberalism, your feminism, your radicalism, your anarchism, your ismism, stop running in circles, stop giving me that fake smile, stop ignoring what other people have to say to you, stop talking to yourself, stop being such an asshole, stop cutting people off, stop holding back the vomit, stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, stop manipulating everybody to get what you want, stop pretending you’re above it, stop expecting somebody to meet all your unmet childhood needs, stop acting like you have no imagination, stop chewing off your foot, stop wasting our time, stop putting all that shit into your body, stop running in place, stop avoiding people’s eyes, stop interrupting yourself, stop performing for their cameras, stop communicating with words, stop holding your breath, stop fighting to be the center of attention. Stop bugging me. Stop lying to yourself. Stop reading my blog! Stop eating all my circus animal cookies. Stop asking me to sign your petition. Stop touching all my things. Stop spreading your germs all over my stuff. Stop wasting all the toilet paper. Stop using my pans to cook your meat. Stop being in control. Stop making sense.”
posted by kualyque at 20:06
