AUTHOR.CALHO: If I didn't write it, I would be hitch hiking cross country to Maine and then Alaska in that order. While taking frequent breaks to spread leaflets. And sit in diners. And write on things because I wasn't at a computer. I may still do that in a few years. Writing this also helps me forget about and better understand the limitations of being human, and keeps me busy enough to allow me no free time to burn the world down.

THEMATIC.ABOUT : Collapse often. The things that hold people together and hold them apart and scatter brains. The things that make thoughts go boom. The things that ooh and aah and [expletive deleted]. Sometimes poking around the margins where responsibility ends and the only one to look to is the Original Equipment Manufacturer and say "but, I already pressed 9 for more options and the menus are exactly the same. Can you just replace it?" The answer will be: "please hold." Sometimes hanging out in dark corners. Sometimes following the train tracks. Looking for ways out and ways in and all the while sharing the things seen and heard and done and drawn and written and scorched and healed and teased and caged and dreamed along the way.

4/12/11

Po Mo Meta Strikes Again and Lost Keys

I've been busy. Trying to keep up my end of 7 straight days of growing pains and metallurgy and using my brain hard enough to make it cry uncle and develop traumatic locker room bully memories of its own. This is not to say that I haven't had a few moments of quiet and also a few moments of utter emotional seizure that sent me running for cover to ball up under my blanket and rock myself to sleep. Yeah, that happened. But it's okay. We can't all be that bad ass from that one movie all the time. Or even some of the time. I have my flashes.

In one of those moments I was out in the park with a friend (good company is one of the few things that can get me out of my apartment. That and having nothing edible. And even then, that's enough to get me like 150 yards away. Just far enough to nab some eggs and cheese from the store. Good company is rare though. I'll go far for that. Sometimes run. Well we were talking and what I've realized is that the bubble is very large. No wait. The world outside the bubble is very large. I was referencing college and the sheer massiveness of the world outside of a campus and the interlocking experiences and attendant frameworks of interpersonal exchange.

12 hours later was when the brick I threw up came back down and broke my skull open and the idea came running down the side of my face. I'm not free. Still not free. Not even close. In fact I am so deeply chained, what I have understood to be freedom has practically blinded me. I'm not talking about the retarded discussion of citizen's rights, or what it means to be an American, or the bondage of physiological death marching on, or determinism, or fatalism, or any of that super global ridiculously wide in scope stuff. I mean in terms of things as simple as "I want to go to X place at Y time to do Z. So I will." I guess it's been so long since I even had the space to collect and exercise free will at all I lost sight of the scope ... not the scope... the spectrum of freedoms.

It's a different kind of bubble. I'm still learning what I can do. It's like when I have to figure out how to walk again some days except it's a bit bigger than that. Like learning how to make a fist or teaching your left hand to do things to make your right hand's life easier. No, it's not even that. A little bit bigger. When that thought hit I realized that I'm still interned. Still incarcerated. It's just that I'm out of the torture and modification wing of the center and I've broken a window (with a little help) and now I'm in the yard, but there's still a massive gate and fence around the yard and on the other side of that fence are more cells and then a visitors yard. Now I can get access to that visitors yard and its nice to see familiar faces, but I've got so long to go.

It's post modern slavery. Or maybe just meta jail. Kind of like super jail except nothing hilarious or awesome happens. Everyone starts out in meta jail. That's why kids hate being kids. I'm sure part of them knows they're basically post pre modern slaves. The original slave. The adolescent. But eventually as they get older their parents give them the keys, sometimes right off the bat (and then they run out and do a shit load of meth and die and self correct the problem... haha no, just kidding. that's awful. and also not self correcting), to the cell doors and then the yard and then the rec rooms and the visitor center and the white trailer with the rose tinted curtains and the kids keep the keys. I never received my keys. They're lost. Permanently. So by the time I'm supposed to be 40 and in possession of all the sets of keys a 40 year old should have, I will instead have a pair of bolt cutters and a cloth wrapped shiv and maybe a few pilfered i.d. badges and a square of carpet to throw over barbed wire. I'm still in fucking meta jail and I didn't even realize it.



It was a depressing thought. A depressing realization. But that's what industry is for. I just have to keep digging and cutting. Maybe if I do gain actual freedom before this is over I won't shut myself down. I don't know yet. I still have a ways to go on this record before it's complete anyway. Plenty of time to think about it while I work. I thought about people that get to enjoy the luxury of doing what they love so much that they end up hating it some days. That must feel nice. Better than doing what they could care less about so much that that... I just wish I had my fucking keys. It's not that I think things would be different. It's that I know they would.



///Bjork - "Domestica" ... where have I put my keys? Beautiful song. Beautiful lyric. Beautiful time to get some rest and try not to worry too much. The mirrored mirror of po meta anything can be quite claustrophobic sometimes. Which is why you should always keep a brick in your back pocket.
at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)