Posts Tagged ‘de-evolution’

A Whole Lotta Love For The Unlovable

Saturday, November 20th, 2021

The more I hear talk of “societal progress” and the like, the more numb I become when I see heaping piles of evidence of societal regress. It feels as if there’s no logic in the world we live in, a world where killers walk free while the kindhearted are rendered powerless. “Disappointed, but not surprised” is a sentiment I’ve been seeing around a lot lately, and it’s not hard to get disappointed at how cruel humans are towards each other. Why is it that, when the public good needs protection, the only response is the enforced individualism of useless culture wars? I thought we were supposed to judge each other on a moral basis, not on arbitrary factors like the relative pastiness of our skin. Or maybe we are judging each other on our morality: the ones least interested in protecting human life get put at the top while the bottom of the chain belongs to the people who just want us to all get along. There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing how blatant this display has become.

It’s easy to forget the things that bring joy to life when such emotions and chaos are swirling all around you. Yet I’m still reeling from DEVOtional two weeks ago, and it’s painful knowing that it’s going to be five months until I get the chance to congregate with all those beautiful mutants again when DEVO hits New York. But that weekend also gave me a renewed vitality and sense of worth in a world where I constantly feel shoved to the background in favor of the usual army of apathetic conformists. Being my true self was an advantage for once.

Smooching The Moon

Tuesday, October 19th, 2021

It really does feel like time is a human construct sometimes. A month ago I was navigating train lines, electronic refrigerator doors in drugstores, and music festival crowds in Chicago, yet it feels like a lifetime ago. I have a long awaited trip to Cleveland and Akron in less than a month, and the wait feels like double that. In the meantime my schedule has been fuller than ever. It is as exhausting as it is worthwhile, and it feels like everything now is in preparation for the future. Whether that future is near or far depends on the situation.

A big part of my busy day, as always, is observing other humans, which is hands down one of my favorite hobbies. There’s nothing more fascinating than examining the personas people form in both real life and the digital world. There’s a lot of dichotomy involved with reacting to what others do. Example: knowing that there are couples whose supposed ultimate fairytale courtship moment of Luv included the phrase “I AM WEED” makes me simultaneously lose all faith in humanity and gain hope that I’ll someday find a boyfriend. It’s all about trying to maintain a positive mindset in depressing times. If even the most delirious, vapid, overindulged humans can find mates, that opens up a lot of doors for the rest of us. And you’re going to have to make judgments if you’re going to get anywhere. Too many people act as if they aren’t “judgmental” as if judgment isn’t an innate component of human/animal nature. Deciding that funky smelling milk isn’t safe to drink is as much a judgment as choosing the people you choose to surround yourself with. Some people are entranced by the stench of that rancid milk. If observation has taught me anything, humans are often very flawed creatures.

Asserting yourself and the things you associate with opens the door for others to make judgments about you. Too many people hide their best traits out of fear; too many people cover up their flaws to pass under societal radars. It makes you feel almost grateful that there are people so proud of declaring that they are, in fact, weed, because at least they’re being honest. This makes it easier for the rest of us to make correct judgments and stay as far away from them as possible. It’s going to be refreshing to indulge in some freedom of expression with people who aren’t afraid to be themselves and aren’t marijuana courtship string bean swamp creatures in the process.

A Few Words On The Celebrity Gossip Machine

Monday, September 13th, 2021

It blows my mind that there are people who don’t believe others deserve the basic right to privacy. So many people in media authority make immense profits off of the most useless and manufactured celebrity gossip. Glutting mainstream newshubs with this empty information tells the masses that world conflicts and political corruption are of no concern when baby scares and wedding fiascos exist. It commodifies the human experience to a systematic extent—how are we supposed to escape it? It’s a bafflingly cynical line of work.

While heinous acts of terror and rape deserve to be dealt with accordingly, celebrity gossip culture places all forms of human fallacy—from murder to making fun of another grown human person with a fully developed brain on the internet—under the same umbrella. The real problems hold the same magnitude as adolescent he-said-she-said. It only promotes a crippling twenty-first century hypersensitivity and, at times, viciously targets people who, in the grand scheme of things, never actually hurt anyone. Getting distracted by these meaningless items only allows the real offenders to scurry away scot-free in the meantime.

For the people receiving the feed, keeping up on such “news” can become an addiction. As human beings, we are all faced with varying levels of insecurity regarding our inherently selfish and prideful nature. Seeing a person in power who has done a supposedly “bad thing,” no matter the magnitude, tears down the curated, perfect image that stood so prominently before. The true, flawed nature of man is put on full display. It elicits almost a sense of pride in the lowly observer, who now feels superior than the persona-person for having not committed the same crime—or, in the most likely case, not getting caught doing the same thing. With enough repetition, the hypocrisy becomes commonplace and irremovable. As long as the happy buttons in the brain are being pressed in time with those on the “volume up” control, all is good from the armchair. Nothing of actual substance gets done, and the world keeps on disintegrating as usual. What the observer fails to realize is that no-one is inherently better than another, for we are all sitting here waiting for the earth to be consumed by the sun, preaching the gospel while whipping ourselves for our sins behind closed doors.

09/11/2021

Saturday, September 11th, 2021

Since I could first cognitively think, September 11 has been a day of lecture. Every year on that day, my teachers would take a special few minutes at the beginning of every class period to reflect on and explain their personal 9/11 experiences to us. It was an attempt at contextualization for our young, burgeoning minds who never got to live in a world without taking your shoes off at the airport or the Department of Homeland Security.

It sometimes feels unreal that, as much as I may relate to the adult role models who surround me, they knew waters that I will never swim in and no one ever can again. The pool is remodeled, and all those changes can’t be undone, and all I can do is read the recounts, look at the old photos, and try to understand the facts.

I never intend to speak for my entire generation’s perspective, though. As much as my generation gets classified as a homogenous cluster of activists and freethinkers, I know first hand how blatantly ignorant and close minded some people my age can be. Sadly, looking at the world through the clearest lenses I have, it’s quite safe to say that most of them will retain their false pride for the rest of their lives. While some love to argue otherwise, cruelty and selfishness know no generational restriction. Just look at the response that was unleashed twenty years ago, when not blindly saluting the flag in the name of Middle Eastern slaughter was “un-American.” I wonder why Muslim hate crimes in America have yet to reach pre-9/11 levels after they skyrocketed in 2001. Humans here aren’t as nice as the propaganda makes them out to be.

With American flags waving in the wind right beside Trump 2020 signs, it seems like barely anyone has learned from the jingoism, the violence, the hatred. But was learning ever the point? The wildfire continues to rage, and people continue to suffer in cruel ways supported by deep roots. The fostering of close-mindedness and suppression of critical thought that billowed up like clouds of debris smoke resulted in a terror that was homegrown, not some tricky bogeyman from abroad. It is a terror that has culminated in the destruction of lives and the obliteration of common sense, and there’s just no going back.

You can decline the supersize Freedom Fries offer with your Happy Meal, sure. But when Big Daddy has force fed you blind submission to the powers that be your entire life, isn’t succumbing just so much easier?

What’s In A Headline…

Friday, August 27th, 2021

NEWS FLASH: “Inside Fortnite’s Disastrous Martin Luther King Jr. Tribute.” Now that’s a headline you can’t make up.

What happens when you put a bunch of clueless, bootlicking children in front of a money hungry fake hologram of Martin Luther King? You get the trivialization of civil rights history, that’s what! No going back at this point…

Poor News Report

Saturday, August 21st, 2021

It’s 2021, and the boys are back in town—the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan boys, that is. Almost twenty years after the American military sent the Taliban’s government went into exile, they’re back in power after America’s (truly weak sauce) withdrawal. You would think that twenty years of occupation would have produced some hurdles for the Taliban to climb, but their regain of what they had lost was sickeningly swift.

It’s the miserable end of a miserable war that has been going on since before I was born, one that, looking at the plain hard facts, ultimately proved useless for the greater good. The money has been spent, the death toll is still staggering, the weapons suppliers are doing exceptionally well, and the innocent people of Afghanistan, humans like you or me, are back to being incessantly victimized by an excruciatingly oppressive and fundamentalist state. Got enough of rose-tinted late 90s-early 2000s nostalgia? Try going back 500 years, when women weren’t permitted autonomous thought and simple forms of recreation were considered a front against the man upstairs. Heaven on earth, truly.

But is that really that different from the country I reside in? You can rejoice in the streets about how a man in a blue tie is in office, but that isn’t stopping the men in red ties, the conservatives, our own Taliban, from trying to exert their own archaic control over the populous. Bills proposing the restriction of voting rights, abortion, and gender expression continue to pop up like kernels of butter-drenched popcorn at the movie theater, granted that movie theater hasn’t closed down because of a local spike in COVID-19 cases.

The COVID problem is also an important matter here, as leagues of religious fundamentalists claim that wearing a mask for the safety of others in the middle of a worldwide pandemic is some ungodly offense. Vaccines, too, are seen as satanic, as they’ll apparently rape your body with either a tracking chip or reptile DNA, depending on which science disbeliever you ask. All this when hospitalization rates of those who abide by these reckless behaviors are spiking from their selfishness. We’re going back once again, back to when leeches and snake oils were used as cure-alls. Mind, these are the same people who also want to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and other innocent people in the name of the lord, just like those Taliban boys over there.

And did we all just forget about when the so-called patriots who believe all of this tried to pull their own takeover at the Capitol building last January? I witnessed the attempt at insurrection on live television, and I can remember it like yesterday. Unsatisfied by Biden as the country’s choice of president but fully aware that his election win was genuine, I had innocently turned on the news hoping to simply observe his presidency be validated, because seeing democracy actually happen successfully is pretty satisfying in today’s perpetually corrupt hellworld. I was aware that the moment was one that would be placed in the history books after months of incessant “Stop The Steal” squabble calling for another four years of Trumpolini (like the country hadn’t been decimated enough by the first four). I also expected counterprotests at the scene by those delusional goons indoctrinated into his suicide cult of personality, because you can’t help but do so after four years of fringe conspiracy insanity becoming mainstream political discussion.

What I ended up seeing was a nation’s people mobilized against itself, their brains rotted by lies and conspiracy, exerting violence in the name of tyranny, the decimation of what remnants of democracy we still claim to cling to. The halls of the Capitol became the stomping grounds for a horde of neurotic rednecks, a deranged militia free to roam in defilement of something once considered worthy of protection. All sanity and sense of what should be was forcibly ejected out the window. The patients had taken over the asylum.

It still unsettles me to think about; I never would have expected for the world’s forces of de-evolution, those dangerous delusions, to catalyze such an attack, to go that far off the deep end. People died that day. Many others feared death or worse. It was a nail in a coffin.

But we’re America. We’re united. We believe in freedom—freedom to treat others like dirt because they’re different than you. It could never happen here, could it?

My Living Room Is My Best Bunker

Saturday, August 14th, 2021

Group oneness is an essential catalyst of change on any meaningful scale; the higher the manpower, the more widespread the effect. While movements of this nature can only function by targeting an “enemy,” this does not contradict the goal of unity when the target serves an actual threat to a more fulfilling world. Work of this manner, however, becomes impossible when we are taught to fear things or groups that do not actually cause harm. We are told that nebulous forces carrying both widespread control and inherent inferiority—paradoxes—are out to destroy all that we know that brings us comfort. But is all that we know really beneficial, and is much of it really worth saving?

Irrational fears supposedly help us protect our “freedom”—our gas guzzling cars, our insecure belief systems, our dirty blue jeans—yet they only restrict us to strategies of division and conquerment. The “other” is a lurking threat, and you’d best amplify your greed as much as you can to prove that, no, you will not become one of “them.” Exiting one’s comfort zone becomes betrayal, a crime. These fears keep us from enjoying new experiences or any form of change; we are left to our inoculating bubbles, safe but inexperienced and idiotic. We are told to live in fear.

It reminds me of a narrative that has sparked my attention recently. It regarded a pale-skinned man with a wife and two children of differing sex, a dog, and one car. They lived comfortably in a suburban Colorado development just far enough away from society to put him at ease while close enough to it to assimilate him to the eyes he knew were always watching. His preferred methods of faking conformity were leaving to work at eight in the morning five days a week and hosting backyard cookouts featuring homemade lemonade and Frisbee. Repairing his car in the driveway was his second favorite hobby, though this lingered far behind tending to his obsessive thought patterns which demonized all who surrounded him. In a way, his constant state of paranoia paralleled that of men weaker than him, men who had completely rejected methods of assimilation and retreated to the seedy backwoods of America in avoidance of the truth. To them, the facade of normalcy and wholesomeness in a world gone mad was not worth it when hoarding firearms in a remote cabin was a possibility. Our subject, however, had not succumbed to the call of the wild, primarily out of fear that the effort he had put into the construction of his life would be wasted should he abandon his family and the suburbs. He shared their same fears, but he owned a shame that the others had let go of long ago: the shame of looking like a crackpot to others.

He still read the daily paper during breakfast the old school way like his own father had, and he still carried Chick tracts in his briefcase to leave in public restrooms. He took three little white pills a day, and so did his wife. Meatloaf was always dinner on Mondays, and every weeknight, before the nightly news came on, each family member would go to their bedroom, put on the custom fitted military grade combat uniforms that he had special ordered for everyone, and then gather in the darkened sitting room. They would then situate themselves on and around the couch as they faced the television set tuned to their channel of choice, watching intently and completely focused should any violence or staticky primordial material come leaking out of the screen in a direct attack on the concept of the nuclear family itself. He held his rifle during these sessions should anything happen. The television remained unplugged and covered by a floral print sheet at all other times. His children were not allowed to leave the development, and his wife rarely did.

Our hero, who lives in a perpetual time warp, seems bound to the model family as propagated by America’s post-war culture of the 1950s. His obsessions prove wrong the common assumption that rises in divorce rates, single parent households, and mixed relationships have made the nuclear family ideal extinct. As much as some would love to say that old traditions are being eradicated (for better or for worse, depending on which side you’re on), they still exist and inform our ways of living (for better or for worse). Our hero falls in the latter category—he is still trapped in his bubble, so deathly afraid of popping it that he armors himself against a world that cannot attack him (and would most likely accept him if he offered himself). Sound familiar?

Also, his mistrust of his television set appears to be an exaggerated version of the relationship most of us hold with technology. Despite suiting up in defense of it, he still makes a ritual of its consumption. We may question how much surveillance our computers have over us, but we still use them. We have to. So-called technological progress has strong-armed us into a love-hate relationship, an endless battle between tradition and progress, one that perfectly sums up our hero’s sad existence. The same patterns reverberate on, sometimes in different colors or speeds, but always fundamentally the same. There is no end; the news channel runs twenty-four hours a day.

Neuron Power Outage To Armageddon

Thursday, August 5th, 2021

In Ken Russell’s Altered States, protagonist Dr. Edward Jessup’s psychedelic exploration of his psyche culminates into his physical mutation into a self-sufficient, antimatteral being of the most innately alive of the organs: flesh. His appearance in this form may be warped and inhuman at a glance, but his embrace of the hairless flesh most commonly associated with homo sapiens makes his transformed state a distinctly humanoid one. Was he not conducting his experiments for a deeper understanding of human consciousness in the first place? His research ultimately draws a dark conclusion: that mankind is an innately selfish race. In his superhuman form he reaches the peak of individualism—he needs no support to exist, and no one is capable of doing so unless they, too, want to give up Earth’s realities and join him in his subconscious realm, a realm dangerously leaking into the real world. He transcends his humanity by embracing what makes him most human. Jessup would have let this physical representation of his ego take over, too, if he hadn’t kept enough self awareness to save his wife from the same forces. Empathy to the rescue.

Of course, self exploration, whether done hallucinogenicly or sober, is not inherently bad. In many situations, it can catalyze positive internal change that can be reflected onto the surrounding world. But one must be wary that one’s retreats into the self do not manifest degenerative delusion.

Sadly, it seems that our current generation is not being taught values similar to those that ultimately saved Jessup. He still kept a grip on reality even when his curious mind sucked him into the monkey man microscope screen warp speed world of his subconscious. Today’s world, on the other hand, offers no escape from the epilepsy inducing acid flashback that is pop culture. Deeply rooted traditions of primal self satisfaction—earlier in the film, Jessup regresses to an apelike state before embarking on a rampage, a friendly reminder of how we, too, are nothing more than animals—are not changed, but encouraged. From birth, we are bombarded by unregulated flashing images, exaggerated facial expressions and cartoon realities, infinite streams of worthless matter lurking behind clickbait headlines. Political pundits and their battles become increasingly caricatured, turning nightly news into WWE. Nothing really matters, except for the hyperactive manchild’s exploitation of the child’s feeble mind. As long as you think the junk food you’re guzzling tastes good (or you don’t mind the side effects), alles ist gut.

Maybe we are all still children in some respects, still trying to process information and make sense of the insanity swirling around us. Most, however, question not what they see, staying on whatever the “correct” track is as dictated by meaningless societal trends or whatever makes them feel more self righteous. And considering the bust bum brainwash world we live in, where facts are opinions and lies reap in the profit, the consequences of such complacency are too often detrimental to those with their heads in the right space.

Absurdity reigns, so what should we do about it? Embrace it. One does not silence another by cowering and covering their ears. Much like how sustainable forms of energy begrudgingly coexist with fossil fuels, not all noise is pollution. Use it to your advantage. Submit your social commentary under the covers; weave double entendres into your speeches; force the world to grab that dinged-up shovel and start digging, because there’s a lot left to uncover, and it might just be worth your time.

There’s No Place Like Home (To Return To)

Tuesday, July 20th, 2021

Why do you think babies cry when they exit the womb? Because they don’t want to leave the security of floating weightlessly in the warm ooze that granted them life, but they are forced to take in the new world’s air. Tethered to our moms, we are free in our primordial atmosphere—at least, until we are ejected against our will into the cold, harsh world we unconditionally grow to accept. And aren’t we all now grown and looking for something warm and cozy to counter our troubling environment?

I look in the sky on this hot summer night and see a faint speck of light becoming more and more faint by the second. It is a high tech device, Sputnik-like, more advanced than any regular plane. There is a little man in there. He sits in his cockpit consoled by a padded suit and the fact that there is no one dirty there to peeve him. All of the ship’s controls are within reach of his grubby hands. He knows what he is doing. His destination is the moon.

He is too large and scrubbed clean for Earthling soil. He is exiting Earth and its societies to prospect his own world in an cushioned anti-gravitational frontier, a world all his own. One mother is returned to while another is left to rot.

Once there, he will be able to survey his home planet from a distance farther than most could imagine being in their lifetimes. He will see what space junk scraps see when they drift by, not swayed enough by gravity to make a crash landing. He will see a planet that lies in his perpetual grip, but only then will he be able to create the physical illusion that he is holding it, like how he squished peoples’ heads from afar as a grade schooler. He will see a planet in dismay. Maybe he will see the fires raging across the land from space when they were not included in his earthly penthouse view. He will think of all the little people who would do anything to spacewalk in his boots and how they will never be able to touch him.

In his mind he remains afloat forever, cultivating his own society free from Earth’s clutches, one where only the purest and most accumulous are permitted. Scientific understanding and discovery play no part when he has already discovered the truest depths of human selfishness. But these visions exist only within his dampest dreams, and he must return to reality sooner or later. He would never want to risk looking different than you or me.

Shame that those who need to get pulled down to Earth most, are the only ones who hold the means to escape it’s gravitational pull.

Born On The Third Of July

Sunday, July 4th, 2021

Well, I’m one day deep into my seventeenth rotation around the sun! Adulthood has never felt so close.

The day before my birthday (two days ago), I was taken on a (successful) record shopping excursion to celebrate. Afterwards, on a whim, we stopped at a farmers market not too far away just to see what was happening. What we saw was a hellish site: endless vendors of new bootleg merchandise (colorful phone cases; flimsy accessories wrapped in thin plastic bags and piled into “$3 each” bins; mechanical squeaking toy dogs with Terminator eyes); a disturbing variety of Confederate flags and Trump 2024 trucker hats; county fair style foodstuffs contrasted by unvaccinated Amish girls peddling homegrown produce. The outdoor venue—I didn’t dare venture inside any of its buildings, including the “small animal auction”—was populated by an unmasked crowd facing the heat for the chance to consume, consume, consume before the barbecue weekend kicked in. I cautiously bought one item: a stand hawking five dollar bootleg music posters happened to have a reprint of an old DEVO concert poster (from Hawaii, of all places) in surprisingly good quality. Considering the essence of their theory of de-evolution wafting around me at that moment, it seemed fitting to rescue it from its dusty prison.

The aforementioned 2-DEVO, now safe in my home.

The whole experience reminded me a lot of today’s holiday. From birth, I have been told that America is the world’s melting pot, a place where people of all cultures can gather and become one in perfect harmony. I would later learn of this hypothesis’s futility on a fractured planet with such a stark divide between those who get fair treatment and those who are not allowed. Yet what I saw on Friday reminded me somewhat of such a utopian ideal. All present at that market, whether merchant or consumer, dark skinned or pasty, young or old, obese or twig thin, wheelchair bound or able bodied, vaccinated or not, were equal. Everyone was allowed to indulge. And I cannot recall seeing a single mask at that gathering, giving everyone a chance of contracting something. It was as if the COVID-19 pandemic was done away with in a flash, allowing these ugly Americans to shamelessly expose their collective selfishness with even more pride than before. “Who cares if COVID remains a mean mistress to some; if I can’t consume and obtain, I am nothing.” Simultaneously, while the toll of death and destruction from this summer’s heat wave continues to rise, these same goons don their No More Bullshit baseball hats and declare that humanity’s collective decimation of Earth is nothing but a hoax. The sales slashes, on the other hand, are real. The land of freedom for some, not all; the home of a primarily brainwashed and complacent populous. Lovely.

I got the chance to breathe the day of my gestation completion anniversary, whupping my 5K time in the morning and partaking in an exquisite birthday dinner that afternoon. It was nice to have a break from being constantly reminded of your mortality and actually feel kind of special. I’m a human being with consciousness and an ego. I worry about the state of the world a good amount. But I also like good food.

I do feel a bit older, though I’ve felt internally older than my actual age for a while now. Having to persevere through the world’s worst for seventeen years callouses you like that. Yet just like Frankenstein’s monster, learning about our world and how it functions from the perspective of an outsider often wears me down to primal emotions of sadness, anxiety, anger. It’s a dwarfing gangliness that is near impossible to permanently eradicate. But it’s refreshing to take a walk on a lighter, more fulfilling side every once and a while.