DEFENDING GENERALITIES: A REMEDY TO

THE FUTILITY OF POLITICAL POETRY

When operating within the realm of

specifics we limit the scope of our

capabilities - focusing so tightly on our

observations (a plural noun intrinsically tied

to the past) that we don’t cultivate the tools

necessary to integrate ourselves into the

present as it rapidly becomes the future. The

details bog us in a swamp of symptom

solving bialogues that refuses to

acknowledge the disagreements at the core

of our argument. A core is an abstraction:

the center essense where the seedlings of

essential truth are born and grow into trees

of comprehensive understanding. This is

where discussion becomes an honest

dialogue about the lenses through which our

worlds are viewed, and the difference in

those contexts and assumptions holds the

secret to unlocking an empathetic

comprehension of each other’s beliefs on

specifics and generalities.

DUTY VS. JOB: AN ATTEMPT TO

UNDERSTAND OBLIGATION’S

RELATIONSHIP TO EMPLOYMENT

To complete one’s role in society is to

commit to finding the cog in the machinery

that you can relish the process of becoming.

Our obsession with completion has led us to

prematurely assigning these cogs to their

supposed human counterpart and asking the

human to focus on mimicking their cog

efficiently. By losing the exploration, we’ve

deprived ourselves of discovering our true

fits - where self-motivation can naturally

inform an effectivity needed for growth. It

requires patience, but the payoff for

allowing our citizens to be rightfully placed

instead of forcing together ill-fitted

machinery only to have to replace it when

the gears’ teeth are ground to their unusable

gums is monumental because our duty

would be inspired and infused with

divergent thinking.

OBLIGATION AND DEMANDATION: HOW

THE MONETARY UNIT HAS CHANGED OUR

RELATIONSHIP TO GIVING AND

RECEIVING

Worth, as a word, has become chained to

coinage - our creation out of a perceived

necessity to define objective value. The issue

with coinage has become it’s polygamous

demands to be universally regarded as a

truth teller. Just as it would be difficult to go

on a date with a lover and their other lover -

money has become the bearer of awkward

experiences for humans as they rectify their

relationship differences with the one they

mutually admire/stalk. The result is that

those that control more become possessive,

feeling entitled to demand more - spending

becomes a relinquishing of worth and this

act of charity deserves to be repaid with an

equivalent respect. Those who are less tied

to coinage find themselves guiltily

requesting participation - receiving payment

comes with an obligatory service to those

generous enough to do the bestowing. The

indebtedness created undoes any generosity

within the transaction itself, leaving us with

a stagnant system unable to adapt to the true

worth of individuals.

RESISTING THE URGE TO TEST: AN

ARTIST’S LIFE IN LESSON

To wander implies an aimlessness that

artists understand lives at the threshold of

motivation. We reside on this tightrope

between useless and shifter of tectonic

plates of social change, knowing that within

the realm of the seemingly inane is where

inspiration bites us and yet the ego that

compels our journey forward lives in the

dreams contained within this promise of

immortal recognition. Our attempt to dwell

in continuation finds us defining ourselves

as students - not of any categorizable idea,

but of life itself. Schooling summons to

mind the post-industrial-age institution that

centers itself around the test, but, just as in

any educational system, this quizzing is a

distracting checkpoint whose utility lies in

its brag - its proving of lessons learned to a

higher authority whose opinion we hold in

esteem. In this analogy, the audience

becomes the authority of the artist and their

completed work: the demonstrative proof of

worth. This ego building process is far from

unnecessary - it is part of the swinging

balance that forces forward our movement,

but to require of one’s self a showing of all

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work is to test without time for reflective

growth. This tightrope is a delicate walk and

yet important, as to balance one’s arrogant

display of one’s own ideas with the foraging

and imbibing of the earth’s fruits is to

maintain a morally based motivation.

BEYOND MONOTONY: HOW

STANDARDIZATION HAS DESTROYED THE

FLOW IT WAS MEANT TO PROTECT

If we continue to hold growth in esteem, we

must attempt to understand the variables it

is correlated to. We should look not just to

correlation, but also the relationships it has

defined through causality. Bottlenecking

stems from our growth fetish. We can either

deal with this by forming tributaries for our

new found mass to be distributed between,

or we can search for spaces where growth

has been absent from the narrative of

progress and reassign our additions to where

they can be supported. Though the second is

the option that involves less materials, we’ve

opted for the first out of fear of demanding a

change from the involved humans. But our

manmade growth cannot keep up with

natural growth, and instead we are left with

Rush Hour: A frustrating inefficiency that

causes resentment of our fellow man - easily

avoided if we held on to our arbitrary

schedules a little less stubbornly. It’s one of

many examples of humanity creating a

system in honor of efficiency, but then

refusing to relinquish it when it no longer

defended that concept.

THE NECESSITY OF FINDING MOMENTS OF

MEDITATION AS THE POLITICAL

PENDULUM SWINGS

As technologicalization sweats through our

political and economic systems an

awareness must be paid to the speed at

which we thrust ourselves back and forth

across the spectrum. We are a snowball of

change, only achieving growth through the

steady accumulation of mass. But just as we

can’t allow the speed of the shifts perceived

necessary to dystopically distort our truths -

distancing our world from the reality in

which it exists, we must maintain a healthy

fear of stagnation that would allow apathy to

melt away any possible cultural growth.

THE TOURIST INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX:

GENTRIFICATION THROUGH

STERILIZATION

When traveling to a place we attempt to

travel also in time to the vacationland our

destination was before our presence was felt

- we desire to voyeuristically peek into a

space without the inevitable change we

implement by visiting. Therefore the

employee of the tourist industry focuses

his/her efforts on vacuum sealing the most

desirable moment of existence. This task, an

impossible one, results in a harnessing down

of humanity-growth for fear that evolution

will refuse economic-growth forgetting that

the economic-growth itself manifests a

magnetism of monetary moguls that

enforces eventual evolution of the humans

whose growth you were attempting to stifle.

The addition of a currency based oligarch

invites a class jealousy that encourages

stratification that cyclically invites more

class strife while simultaneously destroying

the pilgrimage sight the system was meant

to protect - the emerging of class-structure

being antithetical to the preservation of time

previous to the that structure’s existence.

Our solution is simply an awareness of the

virus-like nature of our presence; complete

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with the necessity of being flushed out of the

system or succumbing to the natural habitat.

This also involves an incumbency upon the

industry behind tourism to refuse placation

of the foreign body. Comfort should be

furthest from its motivational forces,

demanding instead a release of the virus’

toxins or a release of the virus from the

environment. When the guest is no longer

given the false premise of home, we also

allow the home to adapt through dialogue

with its guest - we are encouraged to find

meaning in each other’s being as opposed to

the sterile stagnant separation necessary to

maintain mutual comfort.

METEOROLOGY: THE IMPETUS OF RURAL

DEPRESSION

AM I BEING RUDE? RECOGNIZING

RESPONSIBILITIES: REAL AND IMAGINED

Guilt is always a delusion; sometimes

healthy. It is a delusion that fills one with a

fearful stiffness rife with compulsions of

socially uncomfortable fits of self-reflection.

In these moments we must take advantage of

the guttural vulnerability we’ve discovered

and utilize these moments to journey deep

into our own motivational forces. In

opposition to our instinct of problem solving

our way out of the shame spiral that is

forcefully nudging us towards its center, we

should attempt acceptance and in the

attempt mine out the analytic gems

uncovered in the subsequent imaginative

whirlwind. It isn’t important if there is truth

to your mind’s creations, only that your

mind has brought you to this space and now

you must make the most of your playtime. In

the end assume you are responsible because

it will inevitably push you further into the

depths that are in need of a healthy

excavation.

THE ARGUMENT FOR A FOOD SERVICE

DRAFT

Guilt defines the relationship the served has

with their provider. Guilt, helplessness,

unawareness, and frozen awaiting. That guilt

offers a needed understanding of one’s

ability to be thrust above through no action

outside of the lottery of life. To combat the

luck inherent within a heredity defined class

culture, it’s necessary to force one’s self

onto every rung of the caste ladder to

remember that the ladder’s rungs are less

vertically aligned than we want to think of

them. They are a haphazardly jumbled pile of

firewood with certain privileges given to

specific rungs. It’s only when we don’t

demand our societal partners participate

across the spectrum of roles that rungs

begin getting cast in spotlights of

superiority. In order to live in an empathetic

society we must force ourselves to have as

many chapters in the roles we play as there

are rungs available to hang off of.

MENUS, CEREAL AISLES, AND THE

DELUSION OF CHOICE

Freedom implies a purity of possibility in

which a clarity amongst options that does

not exist is needed. We can clamor our way

to a stockpiling of choices, but the attempt to

accomplish is fruitless as no summits can be

reached if your peak is infinitely high.

Instead we stand on plateaus pointing

downward in eager comparison, illustrating

our superior distance from the bottom when

we should look skyward and realize we are

all equidistant from our non-existent

destination. I seek not to claim that any

intangible acquisition is hardship without

reward - that movement up the mountain is

simply wasted effort, but rather to claim the

journey is its own destination - that we must

savor the process of acquiring new choices

instead of heralding these opportunities as

fruits of our, all too goal oriented, labor.

THE UNFORTUNATE SIDE EFFECT OF

CROSS CULTURAL EXCHANGE: A

HOMOGENIZATION OF TASTE

As the inevitability of globalization sees

fruition we seem to be caught in the midst of

a worldwide competition of ideas - our

citizens forced to assert best paths at each

fork with which our, now unified, world is

presented. But by making these choices we

are flattening our horizons, relinquishing

the opportunity to broaden our landscapes

through forced communication based

attempts to compromise our

incompatibilities. We lose, not only the

diversity of ideas, but the diversity of

happinesses inspired by disgust, shock, fear,

and sadness. By treating our cultural

differences like legs on a march madness

bracket to be completed by an ever

expanding population containing a rainbow

of contexts, we sacrifice the obvious: that

because worth is relative, stuff needs the

spectrum of stuff that surrounds it in order

to maintain its value. On a globe that seeks to

undergo a makeover at the hand of the

rolling pin, it’s necessary to resist comfort.

Instead we must opt for a sometimes

disconcerting epilepsy of color in fear that

our world becomes blanded by reduction.

THE NECESSITY OF IMPOSING

STRUCTURES THAT FORCE FAMILIAL

BONDS WHEN CREATING SHARED SPACES

Sharing differs from collective ownership in

that ownership implies a right to the

decision making process, whereas to share

only demands that we recognize how

necessary consensus is in the creation of our

decisions. Therefore a space we share needs

to emphasize a form of communication that

allows for selfish demands, resentment of

emotional outbursts, petty complaints,

prolonged arguments motivated entirely by

personal insecurities, and complete

forgiveness - the trademarks of the

consensual process - the trademarks of a

family. Creating bonds that hold as tightly as

those formed by family without dedicating

the time that family implies is an

impossibility only defeated by a hegemonic

trust that will take generations of cultural

shifts towards siblinghood with fellow

human. We must start this process now by

assuming a radical optimism of the

possibility this paradigm adjustment. We

must begin by treating each other like

family.

STOLEN GOODS: A MEMORANDUM ON THE

DECLINE OF CULTIVATING PERSONAL

RELATIONSHIPS THROUGH THE

CONSUMER PROCESS

The role of customer will be played by us - a

character lacking a necessary addition to our

personhood, whose objective thrusts our

narrative forward knowledgeable of the ease

with which it can be fulfilled through

forming a human bond. This bond is not

sacred, and yet should be revered for its

power in the movement of goods and the

movement from desire to completed task - a

completed task that is a link in our

ever-growing chain of human history. It’s

only through the growth of the faceless

provider of goods that we’ve departed from

our role as faithful buyer to the much

simpler: stealer - seeking a self-imposed

absence from the formerly relationship

forming process of purchasing. Even when

we don’t take 100%, we no longer find joy in

a mutual benefit because we can’t foresee

that respect being reciprocated by such an

inhuman presence. We opt instead for a

battle for personal rewards - separating

ourselves from society.

HELD HOSTAGE BY TRADITIONALISM: A

TREATISE ON GENERATIONAL

DEFAULTISM

Children will forever be tied to our

perceptions of the future. The “hope” that

we optimistically pine for is a response to

our frustrations with the present - an

imaginative exercise allowing us to leave

behind the failures of the current. With this

creation of a successful overtaking of our

past mistakes we achieve growth, but in

order for this adaptation to maintain its

plausibility we cannot chain ourselves to our

parents. Instead of placid acceptance of

rituals passed down we must take our role as

children seriously - actively refusing the

advice of our forebearers until our stubborn

tantrum finds us treading water lost, alone,

and further away from our destination then

when we started. At that point we can call

out with our tail sheepishly between our legs

begging for the assistance of age-worn

wisdom. But rushing to the plea for help is

harmful to progress, whereas placing

unhealthy barriers between you and your

ancestral roots leaves you stranded and

separated. While neither is a positive

solution, erring on the side of

self-obsessiveness over selfishness at least

affects only your own being instead of

dragging society down with you.

PRIVILEGE IS INCOMPETENCE:

RETHINKING VICTIMHOOD

If this were a personal story I would talk

about that time I sat still, the only male left

on the bus as my Nepali brothers jumped off

in search of shovels to re-dirt the road so we

could un-halt our travel, because what was I

going to do with a shovel?

A MATHEMATICAL DEMAND FOR DEPTH

IN OUR CONSTRUCTIONS OF ROLES

Constructing the recipe for efficiency will

inevitably lead us to the problematic

ingredient of defining archetypes. These

limiting predictions of a human’s being may

be nearly as multidimensional as the muse

of which it is attempting reflection, but by

sake of being a creation it cannot capture the

infinite intricacies of the person. The person

is in constant revolution against the now -

seeking comfort in continuous evolution -

appeasing oneself with the idea that these

adaptations save them from definition. But

we worry that resisting stagnation simply

deludes us into thinking we have security

against our fear of role confinement because

the movement itself can be defined. By

attempting to capture a more accurate

reflection we dig deeper by one dimension

and seek to reflect not just the being at its

place and time, but the derivative of the

being - the shifting that is occurring that

insights our future. But this delusion of

being undefined is steeped in truth for we

won’t fully realize our selves in the now until

we investigate the derivative of our

derivative and the derivative of that

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derivative of our derivative and so on until

we’ve explored the infinity of evolutions

within our self-evolution - only then will we

have found the role we are to play, and that

investigation is one that can only be

accomplished by one’s self because only a

self has a view of their own infinity.

PHOTOGRAPHY: THE UNNECESSARY

DESIRE TO CAPTURE FLEETING MOMENTS

AND REPROCESS THEM AS FOREVER

FADING MEMORIES

We seek to achieve the unattainable goal of

slowing down the momentum that thrusts

us away from being past nostalgia and into

forgetting so that we may spend as much

time existing in each moment. The trouble

lies in the word achieve. With any

achievement there is process and

completion - there is a goal strived toward

and then accomplished. But, like attempting

immortality through living longer, your

process implies the impossibility of your

goal. This lengthening of nows is not simply

delusional, but also divides your life into an

infinity of infinitely long paths for us to

schizophrenically multitask between; leaving

us drained and regretful by the time we’ve

finally achieved death.

HORNS, EXCLAMATION MARKS, AND THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF TONE THROUGH FORCED COLLECTIVE COMMUNICATION

PRACTICES

Communication has the inherent flaw that it

is attempting to take a personal thought and

manipulate it for transport to the communal

consciousness. For efficiency’s sake we

condense a series of feelings that share

enough traits to be assumed similar across a

societal platform into a singular expression,

and ask the breadth of humanity that that

expression now spans across to accept its

meaning as consensual truth. And yet that

span has its limits and cannot claim to

contain beings as a whole. Instead we are left

with exclusivity via culturally designed

linguistic barriers that alienates those not

bred under the zeitgeist. And, more

dangerously, the overuse of these efficient

commonalities dulls the expressiveness of

the original intention. This blanding of tone

is causing an amnesia of color - laming the

exuberance that exists at the extremes of our

emotional spectrum.

EASE DESTROYS WORTH AND HOW THE

CAR RUINED THE PILGRIMAGE

To have a destination is to have a goal

separated by distance, and the distance we

are most trapped into abiding by is time. The

usefulness of a goal comes both from its

completion and the process needed to

discover its accomplishment. Without the

journey the destination becomes irrelevant

and, though it may feel like an archaic

correlation, a journey’s transformational

properties are unfailingly linked to the time

spent in the journey’s presence. With time

comes focus and exploration - a combination

capable of powerful self analysis imposed

evolution.

THE INTANGIBILITY OF MONEY AS THE

CREATION OF THE BEGGAR STATE

Choices have been conflated into a single

abstract object in our unending journey

towards the unreachable destination of

efficiency. This dream of finding within

goals an only fills our heads with dreams as

to what that dream can dream, and

imagination is not bound by the globe’s

creations but rather by the mind’s - a world

so infinite it can’t truly exist. Its

impossibility presents only the symptom of

the pandemic that is rooted in a chilling

dystopian motivation: a greed for efficiency.

This misunderstanding of efficiency as

something an individual can acquire and not

as a societal goal to be accomplished by the

community as a whole is confusing the

placement of our motivational bullseye.

WHY CURRENCY AND RELIGION CANNOT

COEXIST

God, in all forms, is an attempt to manifest

the illusion of the omni. The creation of

money has accomplished, at least, an

omni-ability - a stretching of our desire’s

tentacles to encompass entirety. But it’s not

the war waged between these two

behemoths battling for our worship that

makes their mutual presence impossible.

Nay. War can be a sustainable practice as

long as casualties don’t outpace growth, and

by their nature of describing infinity their

growth can never be outpaced. The problem

exists in the effect the battle has on the

process of worship. This is a process

centered around collective offerings finding

a way to redistribute themselves amongst

the mass that has participated in the process

to begin with. Each person’s offering is

personal, and as it becomes collective we

begin to hear the symphony of voices that

our society yearns to compose. When we

stack our offerings - create a collection to

give individually, we lose our voices as the

orchestra attempts to play as many

symphonies as there are instruments, and

the music of humanity becomes noise.

CELEBRITY WITHIN A CONTAINER: HOW

SMALLER BOUNDARIES CAN INTENSIFY

WORSHIP

Popularity is in the eye of its cliques

beholder. Cliques are but naturally forming

cults - culture defining itself through an

efficiency motivated categorization, and as

with any faith-formed group a hierarchical

model becomes difficult to resist. The leader

is created as a necessary reaction to

directionless followers - the courted has no

aim until a courtship has begun - a cliff has

no purpose until lemmings find their way off

it. This organic occurrence demands of its

hero a responsible caring for it’s minions,

and of its followers a patriotic evangelism of

their leader’s exploits. The fewer aware, the

more fervent the propagation must be

because the cult’s growth becomes dire -

extinction: a fear always worthy of

contemplation. Reciting the praises of

another has a brainwashing effect -

convincing the reciter of the words

themselves as the repetition imbues the

statements with a subjective truth. This is

not to say that the enthusiasm is false, but

rather the result of a search for enthusiasm -

the words behind the feeling meaningless

for the feeling is the meaning. The main

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reason a book gets finished is that it gets

started.

THE TALENT SHOW’S ROLE IN OUR

MISUNDERSTANDING OF ARTISTIC MERIT

If we are to believe that art is a joke played

on its audience to trick them into a state of

intellectual and emotional vulnerability, as I

implore us to do, its value cannot be tied to

its inability to be created again anymore

than it can be tied to its moment of being

imbibed. An ability to challenge norms is not

an ability at all - it is a desire - it is a passion

and thoughtfulness coming together to

create a demand for cultural reinvention.

But this, importantly, is unrelated to skill or

talent. Art is not cultivated through practice

- unless that practice is of the process of

expanding boundaries. You cannot get better

at art, only be deeper. Art does not see you as

a contestant: pushing to the top through a

clamoring rush up the pile of competitors. It

sees you as a its muse: collaborating with the

infinitely large group of muses that Art hires

to collectively create its vision.

A talent show should be about people who

can make w’s out of their tongue or can

identify soap flavors by smell. It should stay

as far away from Art as possible.

COLD WARS ARE ART? THE SPACE NEEDED

TO INSPIRE BOUNDARY EXPANSION

Competition cultivates meaningless

expressions of better than thou, me, us,

them. In those attempts to milk reality out of

our bragadociousness we discover the edges

of our creative existence. When the

competition is maintained between two

opposing forces equally singleminded in

their search for victory over answers, the

drive becomes narrower - the pinpoint

pressure urging the surroundings of the

possible to encompass a larger area. The idea

that through our own self

obsession/analysis/actualization we force

the world to fathom redefinition is also Art.

DEFYING DEFINITION: A REFUSAL OF THE

STAGNANT NATURE OF TRUTH

A PESSIMISM IN HUMAN NATURE AS A

REMEDY FOR SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION

The individual and society are at odds

insomuch as individuals are defined by their

variety whereas society, by its encompassing

nature, has no variance - one cannot have

variability from one’s self. Therefore to

govern the individual by the same process

with which we observe and regulate society

is a ludicrous proposition - lazy by impetus,

villain-creating by practice. To place faith in

humans to push positively forward is an

optimism valid a majority of the time, but to

lie complacent with a majority success rate

is to refuse the option of viewing a majority

as pure by finding faith in society itself.

Society’s progress is net positive if the

average citizen of said society is good, which

also implies that probably a significant piece

of the human puzzle is not good - evil, bad,

contextually ruined through

political/economic constructs, etc… So to

govern a group one must have a pessimism

in the group’s members - for its members

may or may not take advantage of a system

for personal gain, whereas if the whole

undermines its laws in favor of itself we are

still treated to a societal win. Psychopathy

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exists, but fear of a psychopathic society

stems from a myth invented and propagated

by those eager to maintain their loopholes.

Assume a group will do good, but and

individual cannot - either out of a malicious,

self-serving intent, or out of an inability to

understand a world outside of one’s self.

A PLEA TO RECREATE THE UNIVERSAL

COMMUNALITY OF FIRE

We have all stared wordlessly at fallen

branches as they breathe their final gasps,

blessing us with a loving warmth and the

accompanying emotional outburst of light

that illustrates their sacrifice for our

comfort. We’ve all held our hands close not

wanting this woody martyr’s beautiful

destruction to pass in vain, as the colors for

rivers against gravity’s tug and transform

into a final vengeful attack on our lungs and

eyes leaving us with only its discarded scent

to remember it. We’ve all watched as our

poking and prodding extracted use and

beauty from the formerly dormant and then

kept watching as our efforts completed the

cycle - the extraction leaving our dormant

pile at an even deeper state of dormancy.

And never once has anyone said: “Hey man,

get your own fire.”