Kevin Tucker

The Disgust of Daily Life

2001

Retrieved on February 21st, 2009 from littleblackcart.com

Preface: Towards Autonomy

Our culture suffers from an extreme personality disorder. It seems that it is wearing so much armor, that it forgets it’s even connected to its’ body. The face is so preoccupied with make up that it forgets to look down.

We’re built ourselves up so high that we forget that we need our foundations to stay afloat. We just say, “Here we are, now let’s deal with it.” Nowhere else can this be clearer than in our ‘race for the cure’ approach to life.

It surrounds us. It is BP selling stuffed ‘endangered animals’ toys with fill ups. IT is Phillip Morris out to find the cure for cancer. It is Weyerhauser protecting the wilderness, and Police protecting urban youth from violence. It is Monsanto feeding the staring ‘third world’ children, and Channel One teaching ‘first world’ children.

This is it, the dichotomy of good and evil (life and survival, damnation and salvation, dictator and leader, take your pick), which underlies the conquests of ‘progress’, comes down to public relations.

Sink or swim, has been changed to float with us and you’ll worry no more. We plunge into “It”, the undying, righteous, creator/sustainer. You can live forever, but the fine print is getting harder to read as we drag on and lose our vision to the luminescent glow of TVs, in-store track lighting, computers, and streetlights.

We want more than anything to never die. This constant search for limbo permeates our lust for life, since pure freedom doesn’t have the catchy jingles that its’ zombie replacements willingly offer.

The dying desperately grasp to the life they’ve never had.

Obsessions with the progression into a future of such technological magnitude that we need never even breathe for ourselves, compressed with an over-reluctant ness to push the ‘past’ further behind (onto ‘e-history bookshelves’), has placed us into a ‘might is right’ corner where ‘the Ends’ (progress and growth) have presumptuously justified any ‘means’ which may arise (bio-devastation or avoidable diseases, perhaps).

And where does a cure fit it?

The search for cures is a part of the unquestioning ideology of civilization. To search for a cure is to ‘level the playing field’, so to speak. A cure presumes one is needed, that the problem is naturally occurring. This turns cancer, retardation, and stupidity into a natural genetic ‘mishap’, rather than what they are, results of the ‘means’ to a non-existent ‘end’. The search for such is digging our own graves. The cure for one problem is the cause for the next, and as long as we isolate each problem, the cycle is self-perpetuating.

What we need is solutions. We can’t turn a blind eye to the foundations of civilization, and we must ask ourselves if this is really what should be occurring. The reasoning for the entire social order must be brought into question.

Only when this is done can we stop sacrificing for the future, and start living now.

The Disgust of Daily Life

Enter the headache. It comes and goes and with such regularity that you don’t even notice it anymore. There may be a connection, but for all you know it could be the only one this hour, this day, week, month, year.

Enter the medicine. Small, yellow, simple; take two and call the doctor (or just take the word of the one in the ad). In go the pills, gelatin covered to slide down your throat as the chaser to your diet Pepsi.

The acids in your body dissolve the slick packaging on the pill, which delivers 4 into your organs where it proceeds on throughout your body till 4 ‘hits the spot’, Chemicals are exchanged, you no longer feel the pain, problem solved. That is for now at least.

Conflict, resolution: A problem arises and half an hour later, it is solved. Brief periods of excessive information at a slightly increased volume flood in, it soaks in, the time passes by (it took forever at the time, but seemed like nothing in retrospect), Life is unfolding before our eyes.

Life becomes your sitcom. You become the plot of the love you never had. You dream of the kiss that comes after the misery and toil at the hands of a deranged killer or the pursuit of material desires (somewhere over the rainbow). You become the hero, you become the villain, you are the lover, and you are the free rider. You are immersed in a world of make believe, new twists and turns are available for $3.59 a night, the ‘must see’ addition only requires submersion into prime time. The excitement of a life hand crafted by well-paid dreamers and advertisers engulfs your world, and passes the time until that point,

It is called disassociation; it floods our lives and is imperative to the survival of civilization, Life is now a series of points, the path has been laid out before you, but there is a guide.

Take the hand, look both ways, there is safety here for you (your Guiding Light or knight in shining armor).

Stage one: your parents are the absolute authority. They know all, not in a literal sense, but reality becomes subjective for all intensive purposes.

Segue, stage two: your parents gradually give way to state-certified teachers. Your subjective reality intermingles with true or false points of positive reality, sometimes multiple choices, but don’t dismay, there is only one Right answer.

Stage three: the strength of the segue is now based on a sliding scale of wage/value. Some occasional breaks, but the path is now being called “destiny” or “fate”. The alternating authorities are now molding into one.

You have a longer chain in this realm though. You are free range now, just so long as you roam back for the slaughter. The world of work is the most beautiful prison you ever existed in. You don’t want to be there, but it is the necessary evil. The base of happiness (which is now being blurred into ‘satisfaction’) is judged off a scale of bearing; how much better off you are, or more commonly stated as, how much worse things could be.

Just as stages one and two build up to this, stage three leads to stage four (naturally, of course). Stage four takes on a new face though. You can now relish in the thoughts of graduating from stage three, the reward comes in the form of being granted the authority to guide in the previous stages. The only authority left now is the one that you’ve heard of all this time. “God”, the lord of lords, savior, etc., the one you have feared, and thus, respected (the father of fathers), now is holding your hands. You can be taken back at any time now, A is beyond you, just enjoy your last breaths of life on earth.

There arises a problem. At some point between the second and fourth stages you began excreting blood. Your stool has become less solid and sometimes you are worried about the problem, but it could go away. You pass it off as long as you can, but at some point you think it is getting serious.

You immediately think to call the certified, all knowing doctor, the one who has conquered the world of medicines, the healer of all that ails you (it’s all in the title, Ph. D). However, you picked up on the taboos of talking about such unpleasant (albeit necessary) bodily functions. You delay further; Dr. Advil pushes the pain further and further into the future.

This can’t go on forever, at some point you hit the physical bottom (literally, in many cases), and decide it is time to seek the medicinal cyborg (an extension of the institution of medicine, such a field of pure, absolute knowledge eventually fades into the technological dreamscapes). A series of tests are done, and the computer spits out a list of possible malfunctions in the flesh machine (your body). Using acquired knowledge that can only merit professional opinion (or fact, as you may refer to it), you follow the instructions laid out on the official receipt that you are given. You then take this from location A, pusher, to location B, dealer. Further instructions are available on the bottle (same bottle with varying sizes, all malfunctions are fixable by the same formula of ‘the pill’ [available in liquid or capsule]), just be wary around heavy machinery.

System error, 911 a ‘slight’ problem has been overlooked. Return to step one, the medicinal institution, and this time seeking other variations of the read out on your flesh machine status report. From there you will be pointed in the direction of the proper cyborg, who will give you a receipt for the proper cure.

Repeat until desired results are met.

Back to your television, perhaps purchased from Best Buy or WalMart, the physical formulations of the imperialism that is inherent in civilization. You see them everywhere, and as they drive out what lied there before hand (either A nature [scenery] or B a store carrying similar products owned generally by locals [the aspiring CEOs or just the perpetuators of a town sized version of the same imperialistic force, but they know your name and smile at you when you walk in.]).

The surroundings are becoming more like ‘home’ and ‘home’ is expanding at the speed of light produced by machines created to manipulate the miracles of the natural world. Black tops, bright lights, security cameras, smiles at the cost of an hourly wage, the prescribed “friendly” greeting, the cold, hard cash being electronically transferred into your account (work being translated as a dollar value existing in writing on bank statements). The buzz of ‘science at work’ dulls you out into passive existence in a high-speed world. Ideas are turned into products so clever that you can’t pass them up (you never knew it existed, but you can’t live without it). You are plugged in, and now you are living at the speed of innovation.

We are really moving now (can’t you feel the excitement?)

The television you have just purchased has been further across the world than you might ever dream of going. Each circuit board has more than likely been through the ‘nimble fingers’ of a woman between the ages of 17 and 25 in a ‘developing’ nation. This is the global interpretation of stage three. It translates into being pulled in when needed, sifting at a ‘station’ in a dimly [it warehouse with your eyes up to a magnifying glass for sometimes 12 hours a day, until you are no longer of use to the global megamachine.

This is the ‘magic’ of making a microchip smaller than a cracker with more ‘memory’ than the human mind, the “computer made of meat”.

It walks into the new area where it can be produced at a price so as to be available to every American. This traditionally is a small village, primarily self-sustained by small scale, localized agriculture (social stagnation and inequalities will exist, but not towards the like of the coming storm), and in some cases, hunting and gathering (a mere fraction, as the ‘powers that be’ have almost succeeded in closing this chapter of history).

The factory owners have recently seen the amount of labor being wasted on such work-less, morally deprived living, and realized the potential.

The steps of development begin here, at conception (the dirty thought in someone’s mind, or wallet). The new strategic point has been marked off, and no better time than now to buy in.

The next steps vary; it follows a formula laid out by the would-be computers that will be referred to as academics, the creators of facts.

The amount of product that could be acquired (A) minus the amount of development (B) compared to the “long-term” (taking into consideration that academics aren’t always the best foreseers) effectiveness (C [overall profitability]). B consists of such things as the raw material costs and such things as costs of possible force required to ensure plans going accordingly.

The rest is history.

If there were to be a eulogy for civilization, the final words would be, “it was reasonable.” And so it goes.

The headaches are becoming stronger and more frequent, and you are beginning to notice that the bleeding has only gotten worse (occasionally resulting in the vomiting of a mixture of blood and half digested, pesticide soaked ‘food’). Your persistent visits to Dr. Cyborg have only resulted in nausea, dizziness, fainting, migraines, and so on, (and yes, you can no longer operate heavy machinery at all). The price of prescription and status reports have exceeded a price that could take a few generations to pay off. You grow tired and stage four is coming closer to completion point by point.

Your faith in the medicinal institution is lingering. You see other possibilities (such as herbal remedies), but the information has been buried into history and you haven’t the strength or time left to dig them up. There is nowhere left to turn, so you keep going along the path that brought you here.

The cyborgs have produced a list of possible flaws that gave way to your weakened state. The list is extensive, and nothing is for sure, but we’re coming around one strong point, genetics. You have bad genes, and can only hope that your malfunctions can help to pin point the ‘bad genes’ in the future, and then we can navigate the prospective nanotechnology to destroy these ‘bad seeds’.

Many have a strong faith that there is a fifth stage, they refer to it as the afterlife. It should not be seen as any kind of coincidence that as we move onward into Progress, there is an overwhelming appeal to this ideal.

It goes as follows, life on Earth is a test. We are here because we seek the next life as a part of the “Eternal Light”, and as such, we have to follow all the rules so we get the good side (heaven) instead of the bad (h-e-double hockey sticks, we dare not even speak its’ name unless it is in the words of the creators of God [or their modern day translators]).

This changes the whole outlook on how things are. It’s not so bad to merely ‘get by’ when the stakes are raised. Take another look at the foundations of civilization.

A basic tenet of civilized life is the dedication to Progress (the ideology that not only is there a ‘perfection’, but it is attainable, and should be sought after). The whole ideal that there is ‘perfection’ is based on the argument that it does exist, which remains on the side of reason (grounded in facts) since it cannot be disproved: innocent until proven otherwise.

Dedication to Progress has us running in circles, and there really is no end, there cannot be. A situation could always be ‘technically’ improved, as long as this is true, there will never be ‘perfection’. It lies at the end of the rainbow; just follow the golden covered road. So we’re sacrificing ourselves to feed the apparatus of civilization, based on an impossible idea. It’s a pretty big pill to swallow. But if we keep our heads up, following the rainbow, it doesn’t seem so bad. As long as there is a destination, the journey becomes more worth it (The progression of stages can also be seen mirroring this as turning the question of are we there yet?’ into the answer of ‘not yet, but soon’.).

The eventual situation of bringing together the conceptual heaven and the physical Earth makes it all a little easier to chew. But faith tends to linger against the test of time.

The ‘developing’ continues.

At first it doesn’t seem so bad, the factory is built and life goes on. The future isn’t so clear yet. Some try to live on as they had before, but it’s not so easy.

Complications arise; factories require a large amount of ‘resources’. These are extracted by any ways that are seen as necessary for producing the end result, profits. Holes are dug in the soil to extract raw materials, trees are destroyed to make way for roads, airstrips are made, docks are required, lots of noise, lots of everything. The ecosystem may suffer from shock, but no one cared to look.

The people notice it, but no one is listening to them. They get in the way now, and they are becoming prospective labor. They are also placed in strategic zones for water extraction. Somehow the “savages” realized the importance of living closer to (previously clean) water. Can’t have that anymore.

Life sources give way to strategy for profit making, more bang for your buck. The factories not only take in water though. They need somewhere to dump their waste. The water is right there; the stream could just carry it off. Out of sight, out of mind. It is reasonable of course.

One other problem. the televisions require chemicals in order to guarantee that the machine functions as is intended. These aren’t to be taken lightly, but they are anyways. The workers can account for this, those who can still function that is. The ‘developing’ areas become wastelands, but forget about it, that’s there not here. “You can’t stop Progress!”

It’s called disassociation.

It’s coming a little closer to home.

This time you go to the new “Specialist”, and the news is going to require more than a receipt to be turned into bottles of ‘Pill’.

They say you have cancer. They discover a lump in your breast, testicle, brain, throat, lung, what have you, and A contains a tumor, a black mass of decaying tissue, which will soon infect the rest of your body. That is what hasn’t been destroyed already.

You aren’t the only sick one though. Some say the Earth is suffering, but the ‘Experts’ say it’s getting better or it’s not so bad.

Years of pouring chemicals into the air, water and soil, is starting to take As’ toll. The Earth develops a tumor, but it’s different than it’s animal version. In one main instance, it doesn’t just infect the air, but eliminates it.

There is a hole in the ozone layer that is the size of the United States. UV rays come pouring in; it takes a significant increase in skin cancer of humans to get attention. The amount of coral reef is heading towards extinction. We see no value in A perhaps, but you don’t miss 4 till it’s gone.

This isn’t enough to slow down Civilization.

We suffer from the Midas touch. Everything we touch becomes gold.

We see through the eyes of reason, it is our epistemology, and seeing is believing. Everything we encounter is scaled off our base of reason, which translates to resource value. This is a flaw that could prove to be fatal.

In the distant enough future, everything is ‘resourceful’, it’s just a matter of where you draw your lines. This is a flaw. By rating things on this scale, we, are judging only by lines that we know of.

It is absolutely impossible to understand the function of every bit of the world. It cannot be done by anything or anyone, and there shouldn’t be a reason for wanting (or needing) to do this. The fact that we think this needs to be done says more about our current situation than anything. Civilization doesn’t appreciate criticism though. That however, isn’t going to keep our ‘short sightedness’ from creeping back up on us.

They say that the cancer may be caused in part by inheritance (’bad genes’). Someone aside from Midas may be quick to point out that exposure to Dioxin (one very commonly occurring carcinogen) in small amounts over a relatively short amount of time can be stored in fat cells and carried on through birth for up to seven generations. This is quickly overlooked.

Time to dig deeper.

The failures of our well-reasoned, scientific ‘breakthroughs’ are quickly stashed away in the pages of history. We have a very hard time dealing with problems like this, they would force us to question the basis of Progress itself if we looked any closer.

We don’t have to dig very deep to find the examples of lead paint or numerous pesticides. But where are we going with this? They turn deeper inside our cells.

Wrong turn.

Dig a little deeper into the pages of history. Not too long ago a man named Adolf Hitler discovered the problems of ‘genetics’. Those who profit may be very quick to pass off the genocidal results of such reasoning. Perhaps they just don’t want us to try to stop it before it goes beyond our control.

One of Midas’ two faces is completely blind.

The cancer in your cells is the result of excessive exposure to carcinogens. The constant low level radiation from your television, computer, track lighting, fed to that from the dangerous levels of UV rays, adding to the Nutrasweet in your diet Pepsi, which contains Phenyethelene (a well known carcinogen), on top of pesticides in your food, burning gasoline in the air, smog and everything else considered a ‘necessary evil.’

The headaches may have been the result of constant exposure to this, added to the constant level of “white noise” coming from televisions, machines running, cars, horns, music, and so on. Pressure from work didn’t help it either.

The medicine that you took for the headaches didn’t cure that though. They merely covered up the pain and the problem remains. However, this didn’t come free of wear on your body. The excessive acids have been taking their toll on your intestines. They are now thinning out and you suffer from internal bleeding. This is the bloody stool that you have been leaving behind. The damage caused by cancerous cells has left you unable to heal sufficiently from this.

It was reasonable at the time though, and so it goes.

There may actually be more than five stages. In fact there is extremely strong evidence that a stage exists between four and five.

It would seem that faith begins to linger as stage five comes to a close, and this does actually make more sense.

The entire system of stages is as much a fabrication as that of time, order, superiority, and so on, but the concept of an afterlife (specifically heaven or hell) is an extreme abstraction.

Essentially, when you die, your body will decompose and you will once again, become a part of the Earth. You will spread through life forms for millions. of years and in this sense, the Earth is your ancestors and future generations; ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This is a part of life, it is the cycle that never ends and never begins. We never leave this life, but our relationship with every animal, plant, tree, etc., changes with our composition.

This is the way that life is seen when you participate in the community of life. This no longer includes us.

We have rejected the community of life by the creation of civilization. Once things became centered on human needs, there wasn’t really room for much else. It may start with the best of intentions, but there’s ‘no stopping Progress.’

Every being manipulates its’ environment, this is how the world is meant to work. Things ‘even out’ in a sense. In a community there are always acts to ensure balance, this is the only way that things can carry on.

When a group of humans found ways to see themselves as a ‘species’, separate from the community of life (as superiors, in the image of god), balance no longer becomes an issue.

When something has just been working for you (dare we call it instincts!), then it would be strange to question it in great detail. Perhaps this is why civilization moved at the rate that it did, but we won’t know either way. What we do know is that it violently moved beyond its’ bounds and could continue to do so only by eliminating alternatives, and there is no balance in war.

By declaring ‘superiority’ over the community of life, war is being declared. It isn’t a battle that you can just win and wall away from; it is a constant state of baffle. Things remain ‘in the air’ so long as it is conceivable that your power can be taken from you, so therefore you must always be on the offence. It really is a ridiculous idea.

Midas is being born.

You drive along the highway. Along side the road there is occasionally a well-dressed monument at the point of death for some ‘innocent’ victim of technology.

Each marker is decorated so that it may draw attention to the area, perhaps so that the victims’ family can receive more attention for their loss, or when this is done, it seems that there may have been some reason for the persons’ untimely demise. For whatever reasons it is done, it usually does nothing more than help the family dwell in the ‘unjust’ situation.

Most people hardly notice the markers, and if they do, they occupy a small amount of that persons thought (what if that was for someone in my family ... nah, not to me). We think back to the car pushers. They show us more videos of prosthetic humans ‘surviving’ high-speed collisions. The simulation really does wonders for us, our confidence is bought, we drive with the satisfaction that if we were to run directly into a wall at 60 miles per hour, that we would only end up seriously crippled, but still alive. We are safe, and as the ad says, we have found freedom.

It is called disassociation.

We’re going a little too fast now.

We’re wondering how it could be construed that we are declaring war on the community of life? We are of course, animals; therefore, as natural beings still exist in the natural world. We have a big future ahead of us.

We start with the simple idea of planting seeds of our favorite foods, so that we can have more of the ones we like. We continue our ways of gathering and hunting to sustain, only this time we have the added bonus of more of the good stuff. Over time, we start wanting a little bit more, why eat a piece when you can take the whole pie?

We start becoming more dependent on a certain situation. The last few years, the crops turned out better by planting them one way, and after a second trial and error, it finally starts making more sense to us. We work with the soil now; we have become masters of manipulating it so it produces more of the good stuff. A strong taste has been developed; we’re starting to get attached to a certain way of life.

A minor re-evaluation could put the whole situation into perspective, it’s not to late to jump ship and move on. The only problem is, it only takes one small group of dedicated individuals to change the world. And so it goes.

We become spoiled now, and start growing more. The readily available, predictable food supply and a tendency to settle within an area leads to an increase in the population. We want more, then soon after we need more. It is called addiction.

The cancer is becoming more and more of a problem. It has become apparent that the constant exposure to low level radiation has greatly affected the ability of cancerous cells to move about and take over your body. This is treated with more radiation; a counterattack.

All of this is taking its toll on your body. Working has been long gone as an option of payment for all of this, and you are becoming weak. The hair that you died into perfection biweekly is now starting to fall out. Walking becomes harder than you could ever imagine. You lie in bed staring out the window. There is a longing for all the life you wish you had, but it’s moving further away now. You tell yourself it’s too late, but there is an even greater reluctance to just let it go at that.

The future is looking grim. You know that someday soon, the person that you saw barely conscious in a hospital bed, being kept physically preserved by ‘life’ sustaining technology, may very well be yourself.

You wish you had begun digging earlier; they are now starting to prepare your grave. Disassociation comes in as denial now.

We can begin to see the patterns that will emerge. It is no longer just planting a few favorite crops, but planting a lot of them now.

System error. Over time we are beginning to realize that we aren’t the only ones that have a favorite food. Insects are also a part of the community of life: balance. They stick with certain plants, because it works best that way. We started centralizing those plants though, and all of the sudden there’s a lot of insects now too.

We all have our favorite food in bulk in an easily accessible area, and the insects aren’t the only ones centralizing now.

Human populations have increased and come together at this point, and they intend to be staying a while.

System error. All of these humans are not exempt from excretion. All year round in the same area builds up. Compost is filled, and now there is becoming centralization of fecal matter: this is a definite problem. Balance is being lost, due to new permanent factors are being added to the unsuspecting area. The predator of the predator of the pest is now moving in. The scale is getting way too heavy on one side.

Midas is still blind to this. There’s way too much excitement in eating as of yet. Out of sight, out of mind: onward into history.

It seems that it’s becoming harder for people to let go of life.

There will never be ‘affirmative’ scientific data verifying that your ‘life’ can be held onto postmortem, but most people can share their experiences with it, when they are open.

The spectacle of ghosts has become one of great interest. We could call this stage four and a half. It seems that the lingering of faith becomes most apparent here. Somewhere in the back of our minds, as we get closer to death, there is the feeling that something isn’t right.

Hope for the future has suddenly become more hope for a second chance.

We realize we are no longer able to let go of life because we have been cheated. We think that we will live forever since we are now adding to the replacement of the community of life, life as dominators.

We realize that our participation in the advancement in the spectacle of civilization may have been a sacrifice not so easily justified. We lived for human life to live forever, but we wouldn’t even know what it felt like to life for even a moment.

Perhaps the state has done wonders to keep us in line under the illusion that symbolic immortality, with the hopes of becoming real, is worth dying for. It is our ideology, our epistemology, but Midas suddenly wants to know what the warmth of another being feels like. So much prospect, so little time.

The search for perfection is getting old now, and we are pissed off about this.

It turns to anger. Your whole body suddenly drops and there is a moment of confusion that is so much to take that you wish you were dead so you didn’t have to decide where to go now. You thought picking the right laundry detergent or best electric beard trimmer was hard, they don’t matter so much any more.

You look for everything and anything that will affirm yourself, but you are feeling that something is missing. You still have questions, and you’re not about to let go until you get some satisfactory answers.

The highway is speaking. It is not just a stretch of concrete, pavement, and paint.

Look closer now, what do you see?

It comes alive. It no longer just sits there, it is mocking you; all this time and you never even knew it. We have cleared out forests, flattened and put holes in mountains, drained the Earth, spent thousands of years to work on this thing that has now encompassed us. To think we put it there for our benefit!

It has overpowered us. It can’t just sit there, it needs constant repair, and each time we feel relieved that the work is done, but we find ourselves hard at work again the next day. We built an empire, now we have to maintain it. We are its’ slaves and it is our master.

In order to have the paper that this is printed on, there had to be that highway. There had to be trucks to transport, machines to copy, machines to make copy machines, extraction for oil for trucks, rubber for wheels, pulp for paper, and so on.

The system is a trap. We can’t look at it from isolated angles; because it has every tentacle wrapped around us so tight that we forget they’re there sometimes.

The concrete laughs back at us. It swallows a human life (the non human life has been pushed off the road, a part of the standard maintenance) to make an example. We are the slaves.

A few groups formulate to try and deal with the issue, but they forget to keep digging.

Some say there needs to be stricter enforcement of driving, maximum levels of blood alcohol, and more laws on the book. Cars claim the lives of more people a year than an entire major war.

A movement called Mothers Against Drunk Driving pops up and becomes a household name, there is yet to be a Mothers Against Driving.

It is called disassociation.

The colostomy bag you are now having to use is half full of blood.

Time is running low.

There really isn’t anything to say to the dying that will make it all better. All we say is we are sorry. We shed our tears and live in the mourning of the dead ones.

It really is understandable though.

Death is a part of life; it is something that should never be mourned. Our loved ones pass on, but we should take happiness in feeling them all around us. The plants growing from the ground are a part of them, the birds singing, the fish swimming; everything is the extension of that being now. There is never a doubt that they will be missed in their previous state, but we can only find more comfort in the state of nature in which they are now interlaced.

We refuse this though. We treat death in the most obscure manner. The body is painted and displayed to loved ones, while every bit of them on the inside now sits in the dumpster of a funeral home. They are filled with chemicals now, and this is what we are crying to.

A person who has never seen the deceased in life is now painting them to look the best they ever did. It makes no difference that they never looked that way; we just can’t handle seeing them dead. It’s not helping. It becomes harder to move on when we are worshipping the disguised body of the person we once knew, which is now anything but that. We dress them up and make believe that they have found happiness now in a dream world that we can’t touch just yet. We make it easier on ourselves by displaying the corpse as if they were just sleeping.

This has more bearing than it seems. We hold dearly to the lives we never had, and we refuse to et others slide through. We scream and cry out, ‘why did this happen?’ but we’re afraid to look for an answer.

Its becoming harder to find a corpse that died of sincere ‘natural causes’ anymore. More lives are being lost to the diseases of civilization; these include cancer, AIDS, sudden infant death syndrome, drug overdoses, fatal ‘accidents’, suicides, gunshots, ‘territory disputes’, and so on. If we refuse to see it for what it really is, it won’t just go away.

You feel it again. Your body is dropping. Such an intense mix of emotions, you couldn’t even pin one of them. The extremes stand out; anger, fear, depression, you want to destroy something, you want to hold something, such a mix only results in helplessness. You have found a definition of the word ‘void’ only in this instance.

It’s all there. We scratch the surface of life daily, but we feel we have wandered too far. Somewhere on the brink of fear and desperation lies your breaking point. Everyone has one, and it has different meaning to everyone.

It can’t be taken in any way, and can be dangerous or it can be the greatest thing that every happened. It opens up a world of possibilities. The problem is, that we are so isolated. For many, this is the point of suicide, rampages, drug problems, or so on. We are reaching out, but the only hand that we know of is consumption, be it of medicine, alcohol, products, anything. We see the person hitting that point and we want desperately to reach out, but something is holding us back. It is the same hand. It is saying come float with us and you’ll never worry again, and it isn’t lying.

It will take us for the ride of our lives. Through hills that can only exist via electrodes, machines that provide the pleasure of never having to do anything again, the love that will never leave you, the sex that will create and fill you desires, everything. If you fall into it, there is no turning back. But if you accept, it is accepting death. It is accepting a world devoid of possibilities, devoid of life. Everything is planned, everything works, and nothing will ever go wrong. You may feel a void from lack of non-mechanical compassion or even communication, but it will eventually find an electrode to kill that part off. It is utopia, and it lies over the rainbow. It suffers a fatal flaw though it is only an illusion.

There are no more distinctions to be made. The problems and draining we feel inside is the same as the problems that are draining the community of life dry. Every bit of medicine we take, every hour of work, every dollar spent on food, is connected. These are the costs of an experiment gone wrong.

Being reasonable is no longer an excuse. It absolute cannot go on any longer.

We have come to see life as a problem. Something that could be made better, but we wouldn’t know what it feels like. We catch a glimpse of it every second of our life, but we don’t know what to do. We look at it isolated and afraid, and turn back to what has been made comfortable for us. We are slaves, freedom is right in front of our eyes and we aren’t reaching out.

There’s a community out there waiting for us. It is hurting by our pain, because our pain is draining its’ very soul and life sources. Our desperation and search for Perfection is bleeding this planet and ourselves dry. We are tired, we are scared and we are very, very angry. We want more than anything to reach out to the person on the edge and to fly with them beyond the realms of our technological, industrial nightmare. We keep waiting, and saying, ‘any minute now it’ll get better.’ The exit doors are right there on the side of the screen; all we have to do is stop waiting for Perfection and stand up and walk away.

This is the other dimension open at the breaking point. This is the most important moment in your life, because no more than ever it is easier to say, ‘not another day’, with all your heart, soul and being and mean it.

We are raging inside, we are so wound up that we die of stress before we pour out and hold the person sifting next to us. We keep telling ourselves that we can’t go there, but we can. The door is wide open, the totality is internalized, and liberation comes from the inside out. Act on your rage and your love, there is peace only in imperfection. Letting go of control is the greatest joy in the world, and there is no better time than now.

It’s not enough to say we’re sorry anymore. Everyday Civilization goes forth on its’ journey is more time lost. There is too much at stake. Every pill that is popped, every seconds worth of smoke, every mile that is driven, every second a body is preserved on a machine, every animal in a cage, every new link on the chain, every bit of Progress, is taking us a giant leap towards a dead end.

It’s time for us to say, “Not another minute!”

Now let’s find our home again.

What is the Totality?

It is the high residues of hazardous and potentially lethal chemicals inside your fat cells. It is you sifting inside and turning on the television or computer on a beautiful day. It is you shopping when you are depressed. It is the feeling you get that something is missing. It is your worries that a fire may destroy all of your possessions and your plans to try and take them with you. It is the thought that tells you to go on a diet. It is the excess fat on your body. It is the headache that won’t go away. It is the bleeding in your intestines from years of pain alleviating drug use. It is the birth defects of your children. It is your killer when you die from a car accident. It is your savior when it attempts to fill your void for you. It is your carpal tunnel syndrome. It is your tumor. It is your expensive coffin and burial clothing. It is the drugs you take when you need an escape. It is the bulldozer that destroyed the woods you might have known so well. It is the towering skyscraper that makes you feel forever tiny and powerless. It is your boss. It is minimum wage, it is maximum wage.

It is your prison, sometimes with bars, sometimes without. It is all your fears. It is what is keeping you up at night. It is the lock on your door. It is the bullet in your gun. It is your noose and your tie. It is that thing that you don’t want to do, but you feel that you have to. It is the turned cheek. It is the cold shoulder. It is the ad that tells you the internet will provide affection for you. It is the new appliance that you never knew existed, but you can’t live without. It is poverty. It is inequality. It is the sink or swim economy. It is the thing that has categorized you. It has stopped you from doing the things you want. It is what makes you jealous. It is your hate. It is your love. It is your purgatives that you feel might be somewhat strange. It is your clenched fist. It is your mace spray.

It is the police. It is the nightstick. It is the protester and the media which tells you, not to listen to them. It is the corporation which creates a new truth for you daily, one which provides you with the knowledge to buy what they make with confidence. It is the gold star you earned in kindergarten. It is the A you got in high school. It is your college degree. It is your paycheck. It is your therapist. It is your bill from the medicine you bought to ‘fix your brain’.

It is the ache in your back. It is your swollen knees. It is your worsening eyesight from the incandescent glow of our institutions. It is your hearing loss. It is the ‘white noise’ that drives you crazy. It is your adrenaline. It is the tears that pour down your face after a sad movie. It is your longing for a dramatic romance with a happy ending. It is your lust for sex. It is the objectified woman, and the powerless man. It is the rapist. It is the murderer. It is the thief. It is the profiteer. It is the worker. It is the dead union organizer.

It is the solider that is willing to kill and die for cheaper oil. It is the victims of a government enflamed over unwillingness to follow their way of life. It is the activist hung for saying they don’t want to be killed for profits. It is the rubber bullet. It is pepper spray. It is the extinct species. It is the dying world. It is polluted air. It is tainted water. It is the accident at the nuclear power plant. It is the oil spill. It is the break in the pipeline. It is the brakes that failed. It is the dwindling biodiversity. It is the patented seed. It is the farmer killing her/himself with the pesticides that were going to make life better. It is the seat belt that mangled you, but didn’t kill you entirely. It is the blood dripping from the cut you got at work, but can’t afford to let it heal. It is the concrete beneath your feet. It is the stairs you fall down. It is the train that went off the tracks. It is the plane that blew up. It is the boat that sank. It is the drink you take to just forget it all. It is your misery. It is your world.

It is everything to you. It is civilized existence and the mindset which maintains it.

It is what makes devastation seem not so shocking. It takes you through the day. It dulls you out at night. It gives you nightmares, it gives you dreams. It is your feeling of not having of not having accomplished enough. It is your desire to have a child to complete yourself. It is the physical and mental barriers of civilized life. It is civilization and it has become you. It is a mindset. It is power. It is physically reinforced to block off the reality of its powerlessness by mediating human existence from the natural world. It is the feeling of superiority, which supplies the reason to destroy all else. It is unnatural. It will fall, but will you fall with it? It is personal and it is individual. It is defeatable and it’s defeat is needed for our liberation, as well as for that of all else that human kind has set out to conquer and overpower. Freedom is only a thought away. Liberate the mind and the body will follow.

Postscript

These essays focuses on the disgust of ‘everyday life’ with the hopes that we will realize that there is something inherently wrong with the very tenets of civilization. They are meant to be read not in a defeatist manner, but with the hopes that we will stop saying, ‘and so it goes’, and start acting by a new dictum of ‘not another day’.

The existence of civilization is dependent on us to maintain it. It is hollow armor, so to speak. There are forces within that can do whatever possible to keep control, but that force is of the same material as us. We are all animals, we are all a part of nature, but we have denied that connection, the community of life will welcome us back into it.

The need for action grows everyday out of desperation on every side of the court. All the incidents that people are talking about and trying to individually account for and rate on the scale of importance are all the same problem.

We are lost to each other and the world. We live in within feet of each other, but we don’t know a thing about anyone. We pour out into the machine that has only aided our isolation, and grab at anything that comes our way. We need the community we left desperately, and our ability to get attached and addicted to any possible ‘replacement’ only shows this desperation more clearly.

We keep looking ahead for our hopes in the dreams of civilization, the dreams of Progress, the dreams of technology. We are searching for utopia, and will sacrifice ourselves to get there. We are searching for the pot of the gold at the end of the rainbow. The problem is that it doesn’t exist. We’re hunting unicorns.

The signs of decay and desperation are not some kind of academic distinction or argument. The totality isn’t something that has been made up; it is civilizations’ defense mechanism. It has made us so proud to have the extra link on our chain, that we will kill to defend its’ name. We are slaves to it, and it is dragging us down a twisted journey into the impossible. The signs are all pointing that it ends, not with success, but elimination.

Children aren’t gunning each other down in school because they were just ‘born bad,’ they just can’t connect anymore. There’s nothing here for anyone. We’re growing tired of the broken promises and waiting to see over the next virtual hill. Life has never been more monotonous and meaningless than it is right now. It’s time to say, not another day will be wasted maintaining an impossible empire, not another day will wasted waiting for the pot of gold, not another day will we subject ourselves to an impossible dream.

Our submission to the system is our domestication. It can be broken, and should be. We’re missing out on too much in life to run around scared in our culture of fright. We have too much to lose by subjecting ourselves to this life any more.

The revolution starts here.

It starts with us realizing that money doesn’t grow on trees, but food does, that commodities won’t enhance life, but just bring us closer in and make us more dependent. What will you do when your belongings are lost, where will you be? The computer will never miss you, only those who make money off techno-addiction.

It starts with us reconnecting. It starts with ending the boring cycle of civilized “love” and start finding out what it really is. It starts with ending dependence and begins with individual freedom. Only when we are entirely autonomous can we develop relationships that provide compassion and joy. As long as we see life as a ‘resource’, we will never know what life really is.

It starts with us reevaluating how we see ourselves. Why are we looking in mirrors, why are we tanning, why are we hiding under painted faces, why are bleaching our hair out? We must look at the root of where our self-image and projection comes from. Why do we do what we do? Why are we ashamed of being animals, and thus smelling like them? Why are we ashamed of bodily functions? We all do them.

Once we start digging there is no turning back, and we should settle for nothing less than the simple ‘right’ to exist freely.

“Our feral energy will rip civilization into shreds and create a life of wild freedom and intense pleasure.” —Feral Faun.

So what do we do now?

We need to start living, and this must begin at basic levels. If we don’t confront ourselves, than we could never confront the world. This should never be a reason to not take action on other levels though.

Individuals are not to blame for their own condition. There are two types of civilized people, those who are domesticated (born and raised in the system as a part of it, this includes leftists as much as right-wingers), and those who continue domestication (while there are exceptions, this breed was made in order to consciously move the flow of Progress in its’ desired direction). It is important that the two be differentiated, for one can be blamed for conditions, the other can be liberated.

To liberate a person from domestication must be on those persons’ terms. Doing otherwise will only turn one ideology into another, and the cycle will only perpetuate. This means that one should never profess to ‘know more’ or have some ‘divine knowledge’, in order to move forward we have to take off all our armor. There will be no new leaders, masters, or bosses. Anything that makes allowances for such must be abolished (most specifically property has been shown to posses this condemning factor).

It is never liberation to simply move a being from one life to another, they must find their own way. No two people will ever find themselves in the same way. The most you can do to liberate a person Is to show them that they are not alone. That the world exists out there for them, that their individual problems are not just individual problems. We are all suffering the greatest loss conceivable, and it should be no surprise that suicide rates, depression, addiction, and drug use find new all time highs every year the system is maintained. You can’t fight the problems of domestication with more domestication; this has to be accounted for. It’s not enough to attack this isolated, because that’s how the totality is designed to attack. It must include all aspects of civilization, because they are all of the same root.

More than anything we must make sure that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past... Many have pushed forth the idea of a society ‘based on harmony with nature’ that still maintains many of the harmful aspects of civilization.

It is more important than anything that we be realistic in our approaches. We must critically move forward in a manner that is wary of any utopia type claims towards Perfection. For this reason, vie must include critiques of every aspect of the mess we are in now.

One of the greatest centers of debate ties around technology. People treat it as something that is neutral, which is an example of how the totality works. It should be kept in consideration that technology has risen in accordance with civilization for Perfection in the name of Progress. Anything done in this manner is of no purpose to another society.

Technology serves as a great example since it is something that has become intertwined with our lifestyles, and thus should be more seriously subjected to critique. Technology is inherently it’s a ideology. It serves itself and requires technology to continue producing.

Say for example there needed to be a large amount of axes (an axe chosen because it could serve as a tool if made individually [which is not uncommon), but when is made in bulk, serves as a perfect example of the ideology of technology.). However, in order to mass produce axes, there needs to be machines to aid in the obtaining of wood, this could be a chain-saw, other axes, or large industrial machines designed to cut down trees themselves. There needs to be machines to help obtain the raw materials for the blade, many of which result in mining of sorts (which has so many problems that it would be problematic to try and sum them up here), as well as materials for sharpening the blade. In most cases some kind of forge needs to be set up, as well as some kind of fastener, both of which could be massive machines or production lines. On top of this, there needs to be a way to transport them, exchange and take care of those whose sole job it is to carry out these operations. ‘This requires that there be a division of labor, thus work and so on.

It would be a utopian claim to think that a system such as this would be entered in freely and function efficiently. It seems that an efficient movement would be one that rids all aspects of property arid drudgery, which are at the root for the rise of civilization.

With this said, the only advice I can offer is to put this down and start living, and hope this is of some use. The future that we see before us is looking very gloom, but it should be kept in mind that this system is dependent on us and its’ machinery to maintain. It is week, and will do whatever possible to try to cover up that fact.

We are the gears, the cities, the future, and we can stop the megamachine. Not another minute shall we live for Civilization. it’s time to start living,

Kevin Tucker, May 2001.