O WHAT A TANGLED WEB.. (Part Two)

Lately I’ve been sucked up in the notion that humanity has been tangled up in freedom in the guise of permissiveness. The powers that operate and design the system I was born and raised into, surreptitiously, benignly or malevolently or not gave me permission to be all that I can be, except apparently to change or even buck the system. There were very proper channels in which to succeed, publicly and materially at least, I needed acknowledgment from the system if I wanted to be rewarded by the system. Hence the systematic resume, the career-climb, the acquiescence to established systematic mores. Buck the system you either became outlaw, derelict or at best a rootless lone ranger on the fringes of a foreign landscape not of your own making, an unproductive pariah free to pursue only your most private triumphs and degradations. Deeply yearning for acknowledgment but only on your own terms. But collective humanity doesn’t function on your terms. You’re either productively with us or against us. No matter how much you perceive that collectivity as criminally flawed, outrageously amoral, war-mongering, power-hungry, blatantly nepotistically unjust, oligarchical and essentially despotic, it remains the system you were given to work with and there we are….

Of course you’re free to protest, but if you don’t do it through proper channels who is going to listen anyway? Especially when there are so many proper channels coming at you from all angles with all but irresistible authority, and so many in the collective so deeply submitted to its’ inevitability, be it the homeless derelict, the food-stamped charity-case, the regular working-stiff or the thriving purveyor of something you didn’t know you needed in the first place but now you know you can’t live without it…., those who have either mastered the proper channels or succumbed to it’s self-touted progressive inevitability, Your failure or your success, nobody to blame or congratulate but yourself…

For much of my youth I felt trapped by my inhibitions, which only in hindsight do I see as basically decent respectfulness, willingness to please and remain on friendly terms with anybody and everybody, something I knew I had to overcome if I wanted to get ahead in this world. Any notions of spiritual growth took a decidedly dull backseat pew amid the barrage of unlimitedly uninhibited excitement of what I was being daily fed intraveinously into my mainstream blood-lines through TV tubes and movies and rock ’n’ roll fictions as facts…I was not only being given permission I was being actively encouraged, blatantly media-and-peer-pressured into behavior that deemed common decency and respectfulness as naïve, unsophisticated woeful afterthoughts of a repressed enslavement to the merely mundane, if I had any ambition at all I needed to run away and join one circus or another, promiscuity and drug-use par for the unshackling course….All I have to do now to confirm the re-arranged state of my being then is to go to a library or bookstore and browse the plethora of biographies, autobiographies of my more iconic peers, clearly documenting the backside sexual and dope-fueled carnage they were effecting on their own and my frontal lobes, such exotic, erotic exemplary philandering hi-jinks and finagling a determinedly naughty boy like me could only dream about….I was sold a dream. And no matter what behind-the-scene nightmares they may now reveal, there is rarely if ever a note of regret that maybe the fame and fortune and pleasure-palace experiences were not worth it after all…After all, nobody would be reading this book otherwise… I remember Eric Bogosian doing a sketch about an exhausted rock ’n’ roller hired to convince kids not to do drugs, but couldn’t resist anecdoting about those amazing times when the band was totally out-of-their skulls on some shit or other, he couldn’t remember what, could’ve been anything…Fucking amazing! But don’t do drugs, kids…..And don’t fuck too many beautiful models, trust me, after a while it just gets boring…. Know what I mean? No, of course you don’t…You were never famous like me….It’s the price we had to pay… No mention of any price the mere dreamers might have had to pay struggling to emulate their idols…. Not knowing at the time their idol was currently cold-turkeying off heroin…Or if they did. in the press it t seemed touted like a badge of honor…Genius is all about going to the edge and beyond…… Audie Murphy went to World War Hell and back, it’s what made him a hero. If he’d conscientiously objected he would have been a coward and a villain…But he wasn’t a genius, so his movie-career and box-office potential soon tanked….War heroes come and go, but Keith Richards lives on forever, all them full-body blood transfusions? Truth or fiction? Who knows, it’s all show-biz! You’d need to talk to the real promoters….Talent will out! But only if it’s reproducible, packaged, promoted and distributed through proper channels, we can make you or we can break you, depends which is most systematically profitable…?? Otherwise, you want a narrative, we’ll give you one, how about becoming a tree-hugging, peace-loving, pot-smoking, porn-watching lazy-assed hippie (sic Todd Snider) and being cheered on for accepting your lot in life….Or composing sentimental twaddle for Hallmark, which ironically might not be such sentimental twaddle if it didn’t need reinforcement on an industrially manufactured greetings-card….

For many years I assumed I was in control of my own narrative., even while drifting along with any wind that blew me in a different direction, I felt I was flying far enough under the corporate establishment radar nobody would ever haul me up onto the carpet for not doing my job. My life was my job. I did somebody else’s work only enough to keep me alive, accepted no boss I couldn’t undermine by simply moving on. As Norman Mailer once wrote “where there’s movement there’s hope!” As a young man I took that literally. Neither ever fully in the system nor clearly out of it. Harder and harder to get fully out of it without being eventually moved on or arrested for trespassing, not bio-genetically modifying your food-supply or lacking the social credit to survive a weather-weaponized drought, drenching or scorched earth policy… But let’s not get paranoic, man, long as we got some legal weed and nacho munchies, praise the lord and pass the Pink Floyd album, need to listen to The Wall again, you wanna experience some real neo-Nazi police-state transhumanistic super-technological tyrannical matrix at work and play…..Just another brick in the wall, dude! ?????

It came as a genuine shock to my system to be articulately and credibly told I might want to consider my life had been systematically funneled down my road to an unthreatening nowhere by an ingenious and malevolent intelligence intending to uproot humanity from its’ common nature and separate it from its’ divine origins with a ruthless agenda of deceit, slaughter and morality fairy-tale inversion. Defy the stars in the heavens and recreate their own pyramidical paradise here on earth, with a self-elected ruling elite at the top, a buffering buffoonery of house-slaves in the middle and a mass of field-slaves at the bottom to do all the dirty work! It’s the Wizard of Oz, except these wizards are not cartoon weak-kneed clowns with a megaphone and there may be no happy ending unless we wake up from this matrixed holly-wooden spell-binding movie-house and take a clear look around at what’s really going on in this apparently chaotic world, which is in truth a composed orchestration of the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the technologically befuddled in the middle becoming more and more complacent and compliantly serviceable to their obvious masters…. I either believe it or I don’t…???

I heard this song recently on the local independent radio WPKN, some guy explicating how to write a hit-song : “you gotta sing high, then you gotta sing higher” Now I paraphrase : something about having your hair mussed-up but not looking like you meant to have it mussed up as you get romantic, tell someone they’re beautiful, then “repeat the line”, “repeat the line”, “repeat the line”….:Never heard of Kenny White, but I thought it was fun. Should I thank God for youtube? And of course local independent radio! It’s one resource I’d support if I had any spare change, still systematically labor-induced counting me pennies, have enough trouble supporting myself….