9/11

This is a tough one to tackle.  I will try to be as honest, candid, and respectful as possible.

8 years ago, we saw the biggest landmarks in New York get struck by passenger planes, killing thousands of unsuspecting people and leaving a scar in the city.  "Terrorism" to me before that was a problem that people had in other countries.  Little did I realize that it would become an iconic and symbolic word for this decade in American history.

Well before these attacks, there was broadcast evidence of Osama Bin Laden's plans, to strike at the very heart of American life.  The strike was stronger than any of us knew at the time.  Bin Laden's intention was to throw American citizens into a paranoid tailspin and to devastate the country's economy - to alienate us from the rest of the world.

It's hard to point to a cause for anything, especially something as complex as the state of affairs in a whole country the size of the United States.  But it does seem that what a lot of Bin Laden predicted and threatened has manifested itself.  I find this disturbing.  It seemed to me early on that the attack had broken the bubble of safety we had all imagined surrounded us.  It now seems that we were also floating in that bubble and have fallen back down to Earth, worse for the wear.

The way the government responded to this assault, right or wrong, it doesn't matter for this argument, definitely did a lot to make people terrified.  Making statements warning people to not go out into public places like malls, increasing police presence everywhere, going over airline passengers with a fine toothed comb.  It made it so you could not help but be worried about your safety in places where you used to be totally comfortable.  

And, sure enough, people did not make it out to malls and stores in the same numbers.  Retail stores definitely took a hit that year, at the most critical time of year for them.  First economic effect of the attack.  I can't go through the last 8 years of history and speculate as to what led to what, and I wouldn't here even if I could.  Let me at least say though, that by the time 2002 came around, we became embroiled in a poorly planned and poorly executed war in Iraq - destroying priceless Iraqi cultural symbols and historical institutions, killing tens of thousands,  and costing American taxpayers at least a trillion dollars.  It continues today.

I am tempted to rant about all the ethical horrors that the Bush administration sponsored, but as with the economy, the details of this war and this cheap manipulation of voters are not the subject of this essay.  Dick Cheney shot someone in the face and got off scot free.

We are still feeling the effects of this event.  We take many things for granted that we would have been resistant to in the pre 9/11 America.  And our economy is in big trouble.

So many selflessly have given their lives to serve this country and to attempt to save the victims of both the attack and the response to the attack.  So many have died over this one event and the destructive ripples of it reach the whole world.

In this post, I remember, or try to think, in humility and respect, about all these victims.  Then I realize the impossibility of this.  We live in a post 9/11 world.  What would things be like if this act of terrorism had never happened?

May God bless the world and keep it from violence and hatred.  May our wounds finally be healed.  May we put the guns down, talk, and compromise.  May we not let the distrust and fear we have felt destroy us.

got a minute?

Ha.  Now I remember the reason why I actually started this blog, after re-reading my first post.  Far more goal directed than just writing stuff that I wanted to get off my chest.  I lost track of that somewhere, in the lines of this, or perhaps between them? (pinky to mouth like dr. evil)

My last post makes me sound like a bitch.  I don't mind so much taking discourtesy and crap from other people.  Sometimes I start to feel what seems like frustration, but then I remember that all my words for my emotions are meaningless to anyone else. (?)  Actually, I kinda get a kick out of it sometimes.  To feel my temper begin to start to rise only to have me crush it like a bug that I've crushed a million times.  It's unbelievably satisfying to defeat yourself.  

Loudmouth.  Hothead.  Smartass.

One of those guys who's never right, never wrong.

In this blog I have continually demonstrated my weaknesses - as I do by performing any action.

I think about the kind of anger and hatred a person would have to feel to be a murderer, then laugh at myself for believing myself capable of such an act.  (you talk tough then why you shakin like maracas put a gun in your hand you won't murder like b.a. barracas.)

Yet I examine my resolve and discipline.  My ability to justify.  Then I remember that I can't convince myself of anything without daily, tireless work.

I look at a pen that is sitting on my desk and laugh (inside, then after typing inside, outside) at the fact that once almost all non-primary lingual information was spread by ink on paper.  How ridiculous this is sitting in this particular position we find ourselves in now!

Sometimes it's best to put a title to something before you start it.  And read the title to yourself every day.  So that you don't lose sight of your goal.  When your goal changes the work must be thrown away.

My taped up mac with a broken disc drive cost me 1300$.  

mike damage(d)

I remember why I did this blog in the first place, finally.  I can't express myself in a socially inappropriate way anywhere else.  I have to water down my ideas when expressing them verbally (or, even, nonverbally) to someone directly.  It's not a judgment of the people I am speaking to, I know a lot of people could handle the full brunt of my untamed thoughts.  I mostly just hate to see the look on someone's face when something I've said made them uncomfortable.  Sometimes, though, I love that look.  Usually this is with strangers, when someone has done something impolite for public standards and I make a really strange remark either loudly to myself or to them directly.

Allow me to give an example.

I was in line waiting for a movie with Megan and these people behind us (mostly just one woman) were talking loudly about their financial concerns and the things that bug them about their daily life and giving all kinds of details that I just didn't need to know, personal stuff.  So, I started talking loudly - "Yeah, man.  I LOVE talking about all of my personal problems in public so everyone can hear them.  I mean, who needs a psychiatrist when there are people all around that you can force to listen to your bullshit??" or something to that effect.  I remember a specific too.... she was talking (bitching) about giving her kids money.  Like, a kid asked for 10 bucks, and she says "10 bucks?  I don't even spend that in a day!" and I said loudly and clearly, "bullshit".  Like, how about today?  Just one ticket to the movies is more than 10$.  So, you've already spent your money for today, I guess.

Let me just lay it on the line.

I have nice clothes, and a nice mac computer, a cell phone, a car, I take expensive medication, I went to an expensive college, these are all things that a lot of people would not be able to afford.  but around here, the way I dress and groom myself, people think I'm some rich kid who's loaded with money.  I can't find a fucking job and I've been trying for a long time.  I live on something like 14$ a day, which I get for performing maintenance on my house/yard/etc.  I live with my parents.  My sister has been making our lives very difficult for the last 6 years.  On a cursory inspection, I'm kinda pathetic.  I've got my own problems, not the least of which is my own brain constantly betraying me.  I am sick and fucking tired of people making me feel like my life is easy and theirs is so hard.  FUCK YOU!  One of my personal goals is to make as few assumptions as possible, so, when people make gross assumptions about me it just makes me want to scream.

Breathe.

I don't expect the world to cut me any slack, and I fully expect that all facets of my life will become more difficult and complicated as time goes by, because they have up to this point.  I don't want or deserve special attention or sympathy.  I know that I have to work my ass off for every little thing I get, and that I will never get any recognition for any of it.  That is fine.  I would just appreciate it if the people I run into on a daily basis didn't treat me like I'm a fucking jerk.  Maybe this is part of the place where I live... people always say that folks around here are mean or at least callous to each other.  But fuck, I mean, how hard is it to do something small and nice for someone?

Yesterday, I was putting gas into my car (4$, all I had) but I just got into my car and drove out of the parking lot without even filling up.  I don't know, maybe I was distracted by one of the million thoughts that passes through my head in a given second.  Anyway, I quickly realized what i'd done and headed back, just in time for a person to pull into the pump I was at before me.  I went up to her car and explained the situation, asked if she could use another pump please.  she just mumbled something like "they can switch it to another pump".  I went inside and the guy said "ask the person if they'll move" and I said "I tried to."  She was standing behind me at this point and said "switch it, I'm in a hurry."  Like it'd take more than 15 seconds to move the car to another pump.  So anyway, I go to another pump, there are computer problems switching the money, short and long, I am standing there for like 5 minutes.  The woman who was in too much of a hurry to switch pumps so we could avoid all this shit was over putting air into her tires leisurely and smoking a cigarette and talking on her cell phone.  Yeah, real big hurry.  I wanted to make a comment to her - but she just looked so pathetic.  Wrong side of thirty at least, skinny like a drug user, short short skirt over her gaunt, bony legs.  Teeth all fucked up.

I thought to myself, it might make me feel slightly better for a very short period of time to yell and be an asshole, the way I would have 4 or 5 years ago.  My anger quickly melted into pity.  My guess was this woman was not used to being shown kindness by strangers, and thus had no inspiration to do me a favor.  I got into my car and drove off, shaking my head.

You can't use the kindness of others to fuel your own kindness, otherwise your fuel will be dried up really fucking fast.  It needs to be an internal commitment, to be nice even when people are mean to you.  Just because it's the right thing to do and maybe it'll change someone's day or make them do something nice for someone else.  Every time I want to scream expletives or really insult someone for paying me no mind, I need to remember this.  It's much more satisfying to live your own values than it is to play eye for an eye with people who don't give a shit about you.  Even when you win, you lose.

unread, unseen

Well, I'm back for another round.  I can be pretty sure no one will read this but I have to do it anyway.  I have some ideas bouncing around that will probably only make sense once I'm forced to write them out and synthesize them.  It would be cool if someone reads this, but it's not necessary.  I'll probably get hung up on terminology, but hopefully, I will be able to communicate something worth receiving.

The mind allows for the possibility of perception.  From the mind arises perceptions of form and emptiness.  The idea that I am hung up on is that there is no difference between form and emptiness - they are equivalent.  The fact that we are able to perceive them makes them exist in a certain sense, but not a real sense, since we ourselves are not self-existent and impermanent.  The assertion that keeps being made by Buddhist scripture, if I'm understanding it right, is that everything is empty and that the nature of the universe is true emptiness.  Everything that exists, however temporarily, exists due to a cause.  My mind is somehow affected by something which appears external, and then becomes internal because of my perception of it.  By perceiving it, I objectify it and internalize it.  An object I perceive may appear separate from my physical body, but this clearly does not mean that it, or my body, exists independently.

In a sense, my mind is a mirror, and I only have access to the images that appear in it.  The source of these images is the mystery.  However, because I only have said access, I cannot be convinced of the reality of anything.  I have only my mind's interpretation of what it perceives.  So, to comprehend, or maybe, apprehend, the true nature of things, I cannot rely merely on my mind.  This is sort of what I've been hammering at in the past... the communication between one being capable of perception and another.  I think at one point I assumed that the true nature of reality was an unknowable summation of the perceptions of all individuals, but this assigns value, however minute, to each individual perception.  These perceptions truly do not represent reality.  The mind is able to synthesize them to reflect reality.  Seeing things from every living being's point of view at once, if possible, would bring one no closer to the apprehension of what is real than one's own mind already does.

I wonder whether all things that exist only exist temporarily.  This is the impression that I am getting but it is really hard to accept.  If so, it certainly doesn't make sense to get too attached, or even attached at all, to anything.  Yet, we are all already attached to everything else, as we are all part of the one "fabric" of which everything consists.  I exist, but I do not self-exist.  My existence is not at all apart from your existence, from the existence of my ideas or your ideas or from any other thing that can be said to exist.  We "see" differences between our bodies, our forms, and those of others, so we discriminate.  We discriminate to very minute details and make very wide-affecting decisions based on these tiny discriminations which are, really, delusions.

Somebody told me once that Buddhism is about what's in your mind, not about what you, as a person, do.  That is nihilism.  The mind produces karma.  Karma leads to the creation of our bodies.  Depending on what type of karma your mind creates, your next body, or form, may be one thing or another.  Hating the world and escaping into emptiness is not practicing.  Since we are all the same, in order for one of us to escape suffering, we must all escape.  We must help one another in whatever ways we can, without being discouraged from doing so by knowledge of our delusions.  We must help ourselves.  To use the fantastic human mind only for one's own benefit is actually self-destructive, because the idea of self-existence is a delusion.

Thanks for reading, if you did.  I feel better now.

just the sort of nonsense of which i am capable an experiment.

I tried to put on aftershave today but the bottle was empty.  I tried to smoke a cigarette but all i had left was an old half-finished one in my ashtray.  I kept waking up from the cold all night because i promised a display at the aquarium that I would use a blanket instead of turning the heat on.  I took an hour nap before leaving my friend's house last night because i wanted to go to sleep right away.  I tried to plug in my dead ipod just to see if maybe it would work today.  Yesterday I wore slippers to the convenience store and i might do it again.  i need to take my medication before bed instead of in the morning - this is critical.  Animals are unfortunate because they can't hear the teachings of the buddha but the pet ones have as many pleasures available to them as the gods do.  staring at a television screen until my vision is blurry.  i don't want to be dishonest.

i thought of a commercial that could be used as an anti-marijuana ad: here's how it breaks down.  a kid takes a hit of a joint and then all of a sudden BOOOM!  thundering drums and screaming guitars as he has a moment of realization into the camera and starts to dress up in military gear.  He storms onto an air force base, then steals a jet fighter and takes off towards the nearest city, which he lets loose on with missiles and machine guns.  By now he is laughing hysterically and screaming, he "does a barrel roll" then spins into the ground and explodes....then the text appears on the screeen, green, saying harmless....it then fades into gradually invisible smoke particles.

I want to eat a handful of ham.

some bullshit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sobriety_checkpoint

I heard about this shit on the radio yesterday.  This is what I would call an unreasonable search/seizure.  Drunk driving is a danger, yes, but... safety at the cost of all other things?  You can't just randomly stop cars on the highway and test the operators' bodies for certain chemicals.  Or, actually, you can.  While this can, by some argument, be justified as a reasonable policy, what is next?  Cars drawing and testing people's blood before they can start a car?  FUCK this.  I may just be in a bad mood but I've pretty much had it with the attitudes that allow this type of policy to be legal.

Responsibility cannot be forced upon people.  No matter how hard the government tries to force people into making "good" decisions it will never succeed.  There are ways around any human-imposed law or rule.

I mean, if they need someone to clean all the shit off of the Constitution, I will be happy to do so.  They should just ask.

a legitimate concern

Mostly, in this blog, I've tried to be impersonal and only let things about me come through by conjecture and inference.  Today I'm going to throw that aside and talk about something that I think about and that has been an impediment to me in, well, following my dreams I suppose.  Some of my best friends know about this concern but I want to share it more generally.

There's this song.  It's called "Baby Please Don't Go".  It's a blues tune that was written and recorded in 1935 (by Big Joe Williams) but has been done again by literally dozens of notable artists.  The first version I heard of it, and the one that was stuck in my mind, was done by Van Morrison.  It's a groovy song.  Download it.

Anyway, the reason I bring up the song is that many white bands/recording artists, namely in rock, have made lots of money ripping off songs by unrecognized blues musicians from the depression.  These songs were an expression of the misery that accompanied living in such a hard time, and specifically, living in that time as a black man in the south.  This is a feeling that no white person, then or now, could really understand or relate to.  While it's American music, distinctly American, it seems (to me) quite presumptuous and egotistical for privileged white men living in the 1960s (a time of significant gains in social freedom and an economically successful time) to use these songs for their own profit and pleasure.  There seems something terribly false about singing such a song in front of a crowd of screaming fans, having an uproariously good time, and making no mention of where the song came from.

Of course, covering songs is a ubiquitous practice.  And there's nothing wrong with it, I suppose.  Well, maybe there is, but that's not what I'm talking about here.  It only seems unjust that legitimate artists, expressing the deepest and most painful of emotions, should live and die in poverty while years later others live on the high hog by riding their creativity.

Now, as a fan of rock and roll, I must here recognize that if this practice never happened, there would probably be no rock and roll.  That would be a shame.  I guess what's really sticking in my craw is the fact that people (myself included) know the much later covers of these classic, standard songs, and don't know where or who they actually came from.  I remember hearing Rolling Stones Let it Bleed for the first time and being really into the song "Love in Vain", thinking Jagger and Richards were brilliant, and so on - it was some time before I discovered the song was actually written by Robert Johnson.  As I mentioned earlier, it seems to me that it should be the current artists' responsibility, having the people's ear, to educate as to the roots of their craft.  Of course, these artists pay lip service to the pioneers when asked their opinion, but they don't make it their business to give credit where it is due.

One thing I love most about hip-hop is the fact that in a given song, you can and will hear pieces literally taken right out of other songs.  This seems to be a very self-conscious recognition that hip-hop is a building process and every new composition relies on and is influenced by everything prior.  However, the same sort of thing tends to happen where stuff is taken without really any credit being given, so that new fans don't know where they beats they like so much actually come from.  This is not the fans' fault, of course, but it still seems wrong somehow, in a way that is deeply unsettling to me.  [Particularly heinous examples of this can be found, where a large piece of an old 70s groove or something young people don't know is taken and is pretty much used straight up as the beat for a song.  I have a certain person in mind but I will continue to suppress my anger on this subject.]

So yeah, stealing other people's songs, blah blah blah.  This certainly is not the legitimate concern I am talking about, I am just building a case.  I am getting to my actual concern now.

I am a young white man.  I have lived a life of privilege, and, if I'm truly honest with myself, luxury.  I have worked to earn some of these benefits, but mostly, they were bestowed upon me by fact of my birth.  I am very lucky.  Extremely lucky, to have grown up and lived in the place time and skin that I have lived.  While people who know me know that I am truly troubled and have seen legitimate depths of depression and mental sickness, I have been given everything a person could reasonably ask for.  I am Ivy League educated.  I am from an extremely safe and clean suburb in New England.  My parents have been extremely kind and supportive to me my entire life.  I have never known abuse or exploitation.  I have (very) rarely been looked down upon and treated as an inferior person, and I have only because I have rubbed elbows with the absolute elite of this country and of the world, really.

I love hip-hop, and when I say that I mean that the music moves me in a way that no other music ever has and I have love for all the people who have worked so hard to build it into what it is today.  I have used the music so many times to cheer me up when I felt bad, to make me think when I was uninspired, to make me feel strong and tough when I felt weak and vulnerable.  Ever since I started to really listen to it, to shake off rock and roll to a certain degree and start to pursue it as, truly, an obsession, I have wanted to be a part of the music and the community.  Guys like KRS-One, MF Doom, Big L, Ice Cube, Del, B.I.G., Mos Def to name a few, they are my heroes.  I idolize them.  But, one of the things I enjoy so much about them is not just, or not so much, their technical and vocal abilities but their ability to speak darkly and sincerely about their own experience and be striking at society from an oppressed position.  Coming from difficult circumstances and emerging successful, intelligent, insightful, and eloquent, it's awe-inspiring.  I will NEVER EVER be able to accomplish what they have.  

That said, I want to be an MC.  I have a knack for language, some affinity for music, and can hold down a stage.  I am already in a hole in the sense that I've only really been into the music for less than 5 years and have been trying to write raps for even less than that.  The giants, the guys who are really good, have been knee deep in it, or neck deep, since they were kids.  I think that I have meaningful things to express, but meaningful to whom?  When you MC, you're not part of a band.  You are literally putting yourself, or your character I guess, out there for everyone to see and judge and being judged is one of the scariest things in the world to me - BECAUSE AS A WHITE MAN I HAVE NOT EXPERIENCED THE CONSEQUENCES OF BEING JUDGED.  

Whoo.  Sorry.

So anyway, if you're going to MC, you'd better have something to say.  Every time I write something, I second-guess myself.  I can't tell you how much material I've thrown away because I decided either right away or later that it was self-indulgent or ignorant.  I have always been my own harshest critic but I feel like when it comes to something this important, grown man business, it is necessary.  Do I deserve to even hold the microphone?  I don't know.  

One thing that people I've spoken to about this have told me is that as long as you're honest and love the music it's hard for people to hate you.  I'm not sure, but that's fine.  I most especially don't want to end up hating myself for my expression or what it could become.

OK.  That's it for now.