the neo-bum

I’m not blogging about rap, about basketball, about who I brought home last night; I’m not writing vapid poetry vaguely masked with dorm-room eroticism; there are no video games or mp3s here, in fact I’m so fucking out of it, or shit, maybe I’m just old – you get to the ripe old age of twenty-eight and you realize you’ve filled in a lot of those holes you dug, or is that burning the bridges you built?

what do we mean by building, friends? all this anxiety about achievement is so very linear. at the same time there’s anxiety just the same: we pretty much know we’re fucked, consistency these days doesn’t get the girl, sticking with the company doesn’t guarantee you a pension…. heck, my social security’s as good as morganstanley’s by now, and I’m pretty much owned by Citibank….

I don’t have a job, and now, a hush falls over the room….

I don’t want to work.

I don’t want to work!

And this has been a revelation. really. It’s been liberating. I don’t want to do anything.

But I would like to somehow carve this desire out of a nineties context of slackerdom, or the eighties neocon context of welfare-mom bum-dom, or the sixties hippie context of drop out and tune in; I’d like to think about my not getting up and going to work as a subtle form of social protest, a lone hunger strike.

so what if I don’t want to cultivate myself? I tried the concentration thing, the career choice thing, it just doesn’t work. I’ll go out on a limb with a metaphor, here goes – it’s sort of like those stories of men who all along felt they were women, and when they finally go through with the surgery, put on a bra, they feel like they’re home….

I’ve shed quite a bit of my achievement anxiety, lopped off my equipment, as it were, and I’m here. I’m home.

It just sucks that I don’t have any health insurance.

Working is the Hollywood solution, I mean, you know where it ends and you know where the next scene is taking you; you’ve got your rising action and your denouement, etcetera; and maybe now you’ve got your Wes Andersons and your Charlie Kaufman’s infiltrating tinseltown, we could maybe use them to represent the freelance graphic designers, the mail-stuffers from home, a vague sense of freedom, but when it comes down to it a movie is still around two hours long, you got the titles, you got the stars, I mean, John Malkovich, for chrissake –

But then you ask, what about money? And I ask, how did working get all wrapped up with money?

maybe in peeling off those gender roles, growing those tits, finding myself at home in my new body, I’m looking in the mirror and realizing… I’m not a man in a woman’s body or vice versa, wait a minute….

I’m a communist!

!!!

God, I’m so naïve. Fuck, like invasion of the body snatchers, infiltration, the enemy within… Is it a choice or are you born with it? Maybe it’s something I can get tortured out of me…


…………….

It’s actually OK that I’m here in America, you know, we don’t have any of the neo-institutionalized co-opted nostalgia for the squats, for the ‘real’ left; this is a bit of what I got out of visiting Europe recently – how do I put this – they’ve got nostalgia for something legitimate.

Here our signals are so crossed we don’t know what we’re nostalgic for; anyway, to even say that the sixties have been tamed (rutinized? sp?) and re-understood to sell sneakers is really a cliché in itself, that shit is old hat; I’m just trying to find the tiniest fissure somewhere to start pounding in the revolution, the revolution…

maybe I’m not just a communist. seems I may be a terrorist.

a terrorist without health insurance and a lot of student loans in deferment.

anyway, seeing as we have no real revolutionary culture on which to build (this is of course setting aside abbie hoffman, the weather underground, martin luther king, and you know, our founding fathers) I’m excited to be in America because the form it takes has the potential to be truly new and kind of weird. and yeah, I’ve read a bit of negri, I know about this whole 'movement of movements' thing, we’re working in a new ‘globalized’ reality, all nodes in a network, a ‘multitude,’ blah blah, but strangely enough that too seems old hat, and not much fun.

And now I’m back onto the apocalypse….. Maybe we can co-opt and reframe the apocalypse. Shed this insidious deconstructionism, ‘moral relativism,’ psychoanalysis; dress ourselves up in our robes and ride in on that white steed. except it gets to be some transgendered neo-communist in martin margiela in an English saddle.
that’s it. if it’s the apocalypse that everyone’s yearning for, why don’t we reframe it for ourselves… incite the apocalypse.

and I mean, don’t worry, it never comes anyway.

apocalypse sometime soon

I've been making jokes over the last week or so about the apocalypse.

The apocalypse is just a little bit funny, isn't it?

Well, really, the apocalypse is just weird. Always just around the corner.... that's the nature of apocalypse(s), it wouldn't be what it is if it weren't imminent. Vague apocalyptic language is protean enough to cover just about anything, so it's generally pretty hard to deny, since the story invariably fits.

This securing of the 'mandate' for the bushies may seem like it's one of the signs of the apocalypse, that's what my jokes have been about, I suppose. But the more I investigate it, it's the tantalizing prospect of the apocalypse that brought this all on in the first place. I don't mean that we have some nihilistic desire to, you know, witness our own demise....

Well, maybe I should start that over again, recapitulating the 'we' here - since I think it's a pretty convincing 'they,' and they do, you know, want to see 'us' burn in hellfire and get swarmed by greedy locusts that bite really hard.

Because that would mean the second coming. Just read Revelations. Or google it.

It does seem a little strange among all this language about crusades and holy wars that we are (literally) engaged in a serious conflict in Babylon. And staging some endless war against those who resist the building of the third temple.

And it seems mostly strange that I get seduced by the woo-woo conspiracy theories. I can't believe I've stooped to mentioning the second coming. Even as a joke.

But its just when you read some of this stuff -- and since the catastrophe last Tuesday, I feel compelled to bone up a bit on my crackpot christian theology, including the political rantings of the bible belt ( www.ivotevalues.com is a real nugget of 21st century regression and political genius (engineered, im pretty sure, by sage Rove himself)) -- I find that this is the problem. Or the solution... being nuanced, mostly intelligent people, 'we' tend to scoff at these clash-of-the-civilizations explanations because we've become cushy and comfortable with the concept, with the assurance, of rational thought. But the attempt to intellectualize our/ their experience is precisely why we'll never get it.

To get it, you have to plant yourself deep in the mind of the dumbass and start thinking (or just stop thinking altogether) about good and evil.

My favorite bit I read over this past week was from another christian cuckoo site, an article about 'what we should have learned since September 11,' let's see if I can just quote directly:

"Evil is real:

We in the West have done our best to move "beyond good and evil." Deconstructionism encourages us to believe that there is no good or evil, only power. The therapeutic mindset says that there is only health or disease. Even in the church we refrain from using the word evil, have softened the meaning of sin, and shy away from calling people to repentance.

For most Americans, the terrorist attacks were evil. The moral relativism that was comfortable on September 10 was shown on September 11 to be a sham. Christianity has a theology of evil that explains events like 9/11 and gives the solution for it. Opening eyes to the reality of evil is the Holy Spirits prelude to opening eyes to the reality of the gospel."

(http://www.pfm.org/Content/ContentGroups/BreakPoint/Other_Content/Online_Features/Jim_Tonkowich/Ten_Things_We_Should_Have_Learned_since_September_11__2001.htm)

So, basically, those jew-commie-faggots in their coastal ivory towers, with their Merchant of Venice pointy noses and Dolce and Gabbana pointy glasses are plotting, scheming and.... deconstructing. That's right, folks, keep an eye on your daughter, lest she stumble and get herself impregnated by some college boy who reads Derrida.
Because, you know, she'd have to have it.

I've heard a lot about the death of rationality these days, the triumph of the absurd, that's also sort of seductive: Watch the world go stupid and then 'we,' the smokers and the homos and the chicks with the assymetrical haircuts can construct a more convincing underworld, maybe there'll be cabarets and speakeasies and opium dens, secret passwords and men wearing mascara.

But wait a sec. Last I heard, last I experienced, no one could even smoke over a fucking cup of coffee in New York City, and the populace let out a mutual, let's say muted, harumph; wrapped a scarf a little more tightly around their neck and stepped outside. That's after shelling out $8.50 for a fucking pack of marlboro lights. It's just these little submissions.....

And I don't want to wax nostalgic about the good old days when there were lots of murders and graffiti and how the 00's are somehow this redux of the newyork 70s (hey, the New York Times magazine already did that, anyway...) it's just that I have little hope for my fellow park-slopies and liberal-arties and F-trainers, or if we want to talk about here, the l-word lesbians, the macrobiotic neo-homemakers and the yoga-pilate-jiujitsu heads.... I have little hope for anything astonishingly original. Shit, i would even settle for artifice: just a little bit of glamour, maybe some tragedy, please????

It's great, you know... we've got gay couples who all they fucking want to do is order stuff from their crate and barrel catalogs, get some financing on their mini-cooper, maybe let their partner get a couple sessions with the acupuncturist through their health insurance, and have a cute commitment ceremony with some expensive flowers......... and this, for the biblebeaters is Rome falling from the inside. Don't you see it's just a haircut, it's coffeetable counterculture?

It's counter culture squeezed fucking dry.

It's not just the democrats you know, diluted beyond all recognition. Difference, dissent is diluted. 'Wordly' america on the coasts, and in Chicago and Austin, they just want a couple of tattoos and to read their Jonathan Franzen in peace, as far as I can tell. Maybe smoke a little doobie. I dunno.

I'm just saying, if 'they' want to see the evil, let's give em some evil, you know?

Actually, I don't know what I'm saying anymore.

contemplating exile

starting a blog is my response, i guess, to being unemployed in a red state.

feels like posting a singles ad.