“The theater of noise is proof of our potential.”

We welcome entropy, inertia, the maintenance of routine and its dissolution in thoughtless reveries, sex, new products, bright lights and big noises, war; the pursuit of happiness. In our glorious social hives we countenance no deviation from the de facto parameters indicated/sanctified by skilled interpreters/priests of market index matrices in n dimensions. We make up the amoeba-like consumer conglomerates, worshiping as with one mind the great and holy cartel in the Inc. sky: every mega-store is a church; every mall a cathedral; every swap meet a revival tent; every strip mall a roadside collection of shrines. “GOD” is merely an acronym for the “Gross Optimizer of Decisions”.

Can you see your TV as — “Happy Buddha”… {Call now! Operators are standing by!} … “Dancing Krishna”… {Don't wait until this offer expires! Time is limited!} … “Benevolent Jesus”… {Act now and we'll send you this bonus gift completely free of charge!} … “Wise Mohamed”… {But wait! -- there's more!} …? Were your eyes designed for capture? your ears for jingles? your tongue for McHunger? your nose for good buys? your touch for self-stimulation? Were your senses created for denial and/or satisfaction? Could it be true, that there is no truth so strong that commercialized, well-marketed delusion cannot filter it out for the masses? Could it be done in such a way that failing to accept the end product would result in a sense of alienation, a weight of depression, a twitch of anxiety, a pall of disassociation, der Geruch des Außenseiters, Sie niemand — ?

We need no more than the simulacra sold by hucksters at the cost of some undisclosed percentage of our mind’s freedom. While on the other side of the fence millions of animals are sacrificed to the beat of nihilism’s drum — slaughtered and stripped of flesh, ground up and processed, sold in sterile pornographic display cases — on our side of the fence we masticate the plasticized remains of their kindred, heedless of consequences, as images of death-sex penetrate our eyes and fuck our brains out.

While you pray or meditate or rant or otherwise occupy yourself, a portion of your (and my) tax dollars continue to help fund the oppression and death of countless living beings even as a portion of your tax dollars ia allocated to the furtherance of other “Good Social Causes”™ you have only maybe heard about. You (– like me, of course) will not stop paying taxes, and even if a few of us do it is unlikely that our protest will affect any perceptible change in life as we know it. If no taxes were collected, it would certainly have a deleterious effect on society. Perhaps it should not weigh on us so heavily (assuming it does) as it is so far out of our practical control. Maybe it is better not to pay attention to upsetting things… people, places, events, etc. It might be a good idea to sing “Que sera, sera…” with Doris Day and opine with wistful sincerity that a good deal of life is simply not in our control.

Should I not be bitter? I know the value of love in my life, and good people with whom to share it. Most days, I do fairly well at being a good person, a mensch even. What good is it to berate those who run afoul of my unreasonable standards? Who am I to judge? — But isn’t that the crux of the problem? Who am I not to judge? Who am I not to point out that someone is as guilty as I am? So what if they are misdemeanors and not felonies? What is the collective weight of all our misdemeanors? Alone in the depths of the steely night’s bowels, am I alone in such nightmares of self-recrimination and ubiquitous doubt? Of course I’m not! Are monsters no more than a deadly deduction of the children we drown in this societal wasteland? Is struggling with the inept personal management of a species-wide responsibility a perennial one?

How does one human animal contend against the seething abyss of injustice without suffocating in the contemned reality of it? I don’t know… any more than I know why I love so freely the artful folly of our incessant perambulation beneath a sky filled with more mass-produced Sword of Damocles replicas than there are stars to light our darkling way.

Ahhch — tho’, y’know… don’t listen to me.

Listening to: Ryoji Ikeda – What’s Wrong via FoxyTunes