Christmas 2015

It is warm as May
The squirrels and I fight for the empty road and
Tease the holiday
Convenient treats and yesterday's news
Expectations drained from the commons
and safely sequestered in living rooms
I escaped from their high chairs 
And the pity on their spoons
Free from their cheer
as that faded ribbon with polka dots
Tumbling along the edges of the asphalt lot
Little lost orphan and the longer sun
Waiting for the rituals
Of the grown ups to be done

The day noone died

It was a day that no one died

The roads scrubbed clean of carcasses

Crews of muscled men descended

laughing through their coffee breath

upon their splintered handles leant

engaged in smoky argument

Their children's minds on wicked play

Engines revved at rabbits

Instead they passed the time away

with less lethal teenage habits.

The nurses at the hospital

Bantered in the break room

They patched skinned knees and moved with ease as

technicians hosed their stretchers

Frantic counts along his beads

The funeral home attendant paced

He plucked his pristine suit of lint

And grumbled for the lack of rent.

The gasping grey in rattling rooms

Over them their loved ones wept

their cheeks flushed full blown rosy red

sat up and asked for lively tunes

Each snake basked quiet fat with food

since yesterday

All predators had found their prey

In hiccoughed sleep with kin they curled

beneath the trees with chalk marked bark

Breathed a sigh their leaves unfurled

The loggers had begun their strike

They rubbed the resin from their blades

And lunched on cabbage in sunny glades

Production on the killing floor

Had halted for demand was poor

Weapons had malfunctioned

Piled high in dusty shops

with pastel tickets round their stocks

A loner woke with pernicious plans

his gun slipped from his sweaty hand

feverish he called a friend

who brought him bullion and sent

him up the stairs straight back to bed

When darkness dared the museum clock

that tracked the doomed still stayed stopped

Insects gathered round the lights

Then soared in swarms to safer heights

Clear windowpanes bared each abode

Through tenements and corner pubs

Friends gathered raising frosty mugs

Enemies conspired

and to these ends retired

Knowing what to do

But somehow still unable to.

Grape

Vines crouch stealthy, wide leaves like watchful ears,

Tender tendrils sparring with spears

Gentle caress of the aggressive greens,

They rush the road with speed unseen

And offer their blue bounty

All over the county.

 

In her yard with a bunch in her hand

She’s popping jelly bellies,

Squeezing sweet amniotes from velvet coats

She whispers, admires each

Then mashes them with mercurial feet

 

They are a secret she will never share

Since she knows they only grow there.

 

 

From the Messiness Desk

The disheveled gene, one of my favorite discoveries from the decades of genetic studies performed on fruit flies, is found in individuals that keep messy test tubes and have disorganized thorax hairs. If this variant exists in the human genome, I most certainly possess it, since like my dipteran counterparts, I am a terrible housekeeper with a rumpled head of hair.  When I first read about the disheveled gene, I felt better to know that my sloppiness might just be out of my hands since I am often overtly hostile towards it: sometimes feeling so defeated and despicable that I malign myself with long strings of abusive language emanating from my very cruel superego.

I do try preventative measures, but no matter what interventions I attempt, they only work for so long. Despite double checking the lid of my coffee cup to make sure it is tight, I always end up with a stain on my shirt at the end of the day. No matter how many times I tell myself that the pants go in this pile and the shirts go in that one, by the end of a week they are mashed together, or strewn all over the room, I put them back, they do it again. I have to keep recopying my “to do” lists, just one of the common tools I use to reduce the stress I feel from being so disorganized, because they very rapidly become tattered, stained, illegible, and festooned in hideous doodles. The words “just put the keys in the same place every time” sound so simple, but for some reason impossible to implement. Interestingly, this persistent feeling that my world is going to chaos any moment and it is my job to be constantly vigilant in order to prevent this from happening is probably the primary source of my unending anxiety as reflected in the dreams I have: thousands of fast slick, wriggly creatures in my custody escaping from their cages, mountainous piles of things collapsing despite my efforts to keep them contained, impossible numbers of customers pouring into my section, a panorama of evil bearded men huffing kittens, and me trying to stop it all from happening. These are all symbols of chaos in my dreams, and the messiness is the symbol of chaos in my reality.

The desk I am writing on right now is empty. It has to be in order for me to think.

 In contrast, another messy person I know, my good friend The Blasphemer from the Hinterland, appears to very comfortable existing in his filth and, if he even has a desk, which I am not sure about, it was rendered unusable by being buried under stuff back sometime around the Nixon administration. The Blasphemer isn’t a hoarder, though my favorite item in his house is a cabinet full of a dozen cans of expired evaporated milk, he’s just a slob. He spilled a bag of dried macaroni on his kitchen floor and left it there for two months. He has bookshelves and dressers but I don’t think he knows what they are for, preferring to use other storage surfaces, usually the floor or his bed, since the space on his tables is already cluttered with electronics, tools and parts of musical instruments. It is unclear where his trash ends and his living space begins. Maybe he’ll clean it, maybe he won’t. If he does it’s just because he’s afraid it might offend one of his infrequent guests, like a mouse. His family did an “intervention” several years ago. He still resents it and the only evidence that it ever happened is a hanging pair of perfectly matched towels, aligned on his towel rack, never used and covered with dust. For some reason, I yanked them down one day and tossed them into the slurry of clothes spilling out of his hamper and flowing through the doorway, crashing like grungy waves into the tattered guitar cases stacked up in the hall.

We are two messy people, one constantly trying to extinguish this aspect of her nature, the other fully embracing it.

This is why when The Blasphemer sent me a recent University of Minnesota study linking messiness to creativity, something that both of us value, I was initially grateful that some kindly neat people gave us the gift of scientific data to defend ourselves with. However, after reading the article more closely, I became aware that helping those of us in possession of the disheveled gene did not appear to be the main motivation for this project. The main motivation, I realized, as always, was to assist rich capitalists.

It wasn’t enough to just say “this is what we found” and “this is how we did it”, the researchers felt the need to justify their research by explaining how the data might be utilized by the higher ups at the “company” to manipulate the minds of the working class stooges in their employ, since scientific research into human behavior only matters if it can be used to enhance productivity. Though this effort did give this creative person the million dollar idea of becoming a “messiness consultant”, it also made her very unsettled by what seems to be consistently at the heart of human behavioral research: reducing working humans to programmable machines in order to aid the capitalists in their efforts to generate personal wealth.

There are a few things wrong with this picture. First, we are not machines, we are individuals. We are not reproducible, interchangeable, expendable, unquestioning, and completely susceptible to conditioning; there are just too many variables at work in the human mind to impose generalizations. Give us a messy environment and we’ll suddenly start creating? Then, if our creativity gets too wild and we start thinking too much, possibly even coming the conclusion that forty hours a week working for “the company” is taking up way too much of our precious time and besides, it’s shortening our lives and we’re not getting paid enough to do it, all the smart bosses have to do is switch over the neatness model and suddenly we’ll start obeying the rules? What?

Not only are we not machines, we are not even fruit flies. It is probable that the fly with the disheveled gene is not even thinking about trying a relaxer on her thorax hairs, or organizing her pupae more efficiently. The genetic governors of her central ganglia are not mitigated by varied and complicated cognitive factors: assimilated cultural expectations, emotions tamed by the ego, psychological damage from parents that abandoned her, guilt from not being able to attend her sister’s graduation ceremony.

You see, an empty desk is not always the sign of an empty mind, sometimes it is the sign of a messy person who equates messiness with impending disaster and therefore tries to prevent it, or a person that needs a “blank slate” in order to get started. If my boss tried to influence my creativity by insisting that I had a messy desk I would spend the day panicking, distracted, paralyzed, and unable to think. The Blasphemer, on the other hand, would not start suddenly obeying the rules if his boss insisted on neatness. He’d just quit without telling anyone, get his next few meals out of a dumpster and compose a heavy metal song to redirect his anger in positive ways.

It seems to me that the purpose of neuroscience is not to reduce people to tools to be swung this way and that by the foremen of the capitalist hierarchy, but to learn about all the factors that come together and produce an aware person, to carefully tease away and examine each piece. Equally important is to explore the manifestations of these interacting pieces, the infinite combinations mitigated by experience and time that produce somebody totally unique. Fine, science does not have to consider the whole, maybe this is the job of the arts. But, please, we do not need to get approval from the capitalists every time we discover something cool about our infinitely complex brains, we do not have to justify our need to understand.

Let’s dump the bosses off our backs.

The Galt is Coming!

Dear Screams,

 

It is time for me to stop fucking around and work seriously on my novel. It took me a while to realize that the piece of shit that I had written before was not a novel at all, but a plan. When I had this epiphany it made it easier for me to accept that I had to start from scratch, since as a "plan" it was not wasted time. Now, I have this world in my head. I have my characters' backstories. Now all that is left to do is write a real book with fleshed-out characters and to allude to the structure of society without explaining every last detail. A book where I show and don't tell, you know, like you're supposed to do. So the "plan" was for me, not for public consumption.

 

The book is called "The Galt" and yes, it's about that libertarian society that all these libertarians fantasize about. I'd say it's the antithesis of Atlas Shrugged. It's 1984 set in a different world and, just for fun, it's set in 2084. The society is totally "free" in that there is very little government intrusion into people's lives (but not so free as it turns out). The government exists but only in three branches: The People's Judiciary (a court system based entirely on lawsuits for all crimes) The People's Bank (controls the fully electronic system of exchange) and The People's Security (most security is privatized, but this branch maintains a small border guard and runs the public prison system, there's a private one as well). There are some rules, but very few. The society follows the five pillars of the Galtian Way:

 

To always act in self interest

to always reach one's full potential to accumulate material wealth

To recognize that failure is the fault of the failed

To recognize that charity breeds parasitism and parasitism destroys society

To recognized that from liberty follows purity.

 

Parasitism and Charity are Crimes against the economy, while other crimes such as murder, rape, etc., are crimes against property. These are the only two types of crimes. The government, however, cannot originate lawsuits, so all crimes are brought to the attention of the Judiciary by private citizens. All regulation is "natural": The competition principle, reputation principle (or buyer beware), Insurance principle, lawsuit principle and contract principle make government regulation unnecessary. The Wage Exchange calculates wages based on supply and demand (run by the People's Bank).

 

Since this is the future there are all kinds of technology that makes a "free" society possible. For example, there are drones and surveillance everywhere, so it is very hard to get away with a crime. Also, homes are mostly self contained systems and do not have to be hooked up to municipal supplies, and roads are obsolete since cars are airborne. The VICE, which is a small chip inserted behind the occipital lobe, if a person wants it, serves lots of functions ranging from personal security to health monitoring. 

 

Temporarily, the society (which is located in Ohio, Pennsylvania, upstate New York and West Virginia) is necessarily closed off from the rest of the world until it gets its act together. Most citizens accept this inconvenience. However, as the book unfolds one discovers that the true purpose of the society is not to create a libertarian paradise, but to enrich the lives of a few very clever Oligarchs (Known as the Invisible Hand). Not if my band of intrepid but unlikely revolutionaries have anything to do with it!!

 

Anyway, I've said too much already! But it's time for me to write this stupid thing, from ONE person's point of view instead of nine. So, I'm not going to add to Screams From Suburbia for a while. I will miss my adoring fans.

 

Love, Lara   

A Fish Tale

Fish eyes stare everywhere but nowhere thorough the soft pink light.

A gurgling, a disturbance in the water, a song, but it was slight.

Rudders beat shadows like a mixing bowl

Sleeping weeds yawn, tumble and roll.

 

Then our weak eyes drifted from a lateral station

and met as though in violation

Timing so precise what could it be

Other than rebellion against the sea.

 

Evolution sliced our fins

Where your fingers formed you pulled me in

And pressed my scaleless skin upon the reef

Scraping my fragile flesh, a forceful beat

I bled like a river into the sand.

Not aware of my wounds, only the pulse of my new hands

 

 

Letter to Sarah M.

 

Dear Lara,

Thank you for contacting ChangeOfAddresses.com. As stated on the website's terms and conditions, if any errors were made in processing your address change, or if any of the information provided to us needs to be modified, we'll be happy to make the appropriate corrections for no extra charge. Additionally, we are able to reverse any address changes that were made on your behalf if you would like, but please note that no refund will be given if an address change is reversed. Refunds will only be offered for duplicate transactions processed on www.changeofaddresses.com. For more information, please visit http://changeofaddresses.com/terms.

You may reference www.changeofaddresses.com for complete details on pricing for the services provided. Please note that ChangeOfAddresses.com is not affiliated with the United States Postal Service, as disclosed on www.chanegofaddresses.com.

Sarah M
Change Of Addresses Support

 

 

 

Dear Sarah M.,

If only one could harness the energy human minds use to plot ways to take advantage of one another and apply it towards alleviating suffering in all of its ghastly forms. If only the affection that human hearts feel towards their families and their properties and their shiny objects could somehow be gathered and devoted to this end. If only systems operated to ease human burden rather than piling more on its back.

You see, Sarah M., I am having a crisis of faith. I am not blaming you for this, since the advent was evident long ago, but as the last nail in the coffin, the final strike of the hammer that secured it is still ringing in my ears. If I could just go to sleep in my coffin, or somehow find the strength to burst out, this fate may not trouble me. But the truth is that I am dead.

 

"How can you be dead when you are thinking and writing, not to mention hearing a ringing in your ears?" You ask, puckering your clean, satisfied lips and clutching your tan bosom with veinless arms. That is a clever point Sarah M., but since you are quite probably a machine your astute observation does not surprise me. In fact, as sure as I am that I am dead, I am sure that you are a machine, because if you were a human, you would rise from your cubicle and shout "I cannot live as a thief and a swindler any longer! My heart is swimming in despair!" you would throw off your chains, storm out of the stupefying fortress in which you spend your empty life and toss yourself naked into the mud.

 

A human would respond this way to your condition because, like a thief who strikes vulnerable houses at midnight in black nylon, your stealthy tapping under florescent light is the same, but worse, since you are living a life of pretense. Superficially convinced that you are better than a common crook because you steal with the armor of small print to defend you and you have a picture of your new baby on your desk, a golden cross around your neck and walls of framed computer vomit behind your bobbing head.  And also unlike a professional thief, who more than likely steals from those of means, you steal from the poorly resourced, for whom small sums of money are not really money at all, but sustenance and another day above the surface of the water. If you were human your conscience would be crawling like a pile of horny bugs.

 

"But you are having a crisis of faith about human nature. So, could that mean, that what you describe is consistent with my humanity and not proof of its absence?" You say, typing furiously on shiny black keys, your hacked blond hair streaked with red, perhaps to symbolize the blood you are about to drain from the vanquished, or your refusal to conform. Like when you got your tattoos, you only refuse to conform when conformity allows it. I know your type, Sarah M. Like your thievery, your rebellion is a fashion, a façade, stamped with authenticity by the regulators because it is not an overt threat to the integrity of the seams of the capitalist tapestry.

 

"Pishaw!" You spit, and your spit lands on the corner of your favorite quote, which you are proud to say you have embroidered yourself into a small white pillow while watching back to back episodes on your new couch fashioned from the skin of your victims, and the quote says something about accepting things that cannot change, "Buyer beware! It's all there! All you needed to know was there!" you speak in rhymes, for some reason.

 

I will take responsibility for my end, but you must take responsibility for yours. My only excuse for falling for your swindle is exhaustion. That, and I am a person who is ignorant and a sucker and all of those things you say I am. I'll give you some insight into my mind, Sarah M. I am aware of only two things that compel me: a desire to create and a giant clock ticking over my head. These are the forces at work in my brain.  You see, practical concerns such as documents and insurance policies and rent agreements and deadlines and the accoutrements of capitalism puts me in a psychogenic fugue, so I avoid them, or when faced with them in an unsurmountable blockade standing in the way of my carrying on, I give them the least amount of time possible. This is where I made my mistake and clicked on your site instead of the right one and failed to read the small print or see the logo.

 

But whereas my state of mind is not a choice I make, your deceitful business is. This deception on top of your crooked means of survival places you further out on the leading tail of the bell curve of human dignity than those  common thieves we discussed. Only murderers and corrupt politicians trail behind you. I'll send you a glossy colorful brochure if this would help to illustrate the point.

 

I am sorry, Sarah M., for I realize I am being harsh with you. I blame this carelessness on the crisis of faith. The crisis of faith has turned this romantic into a cynic, this idealist into a misanthrope. I scowl openly now at strangers, thrust my anger at screeching children, malign expressions of public intimacy. I mutter terrible things under my breath following the slightest infraction of my convenience on disturbance in the field of my lethargy. Why, just yesterday, I shouted at young lovers, "Get a room! No one wants to view your pathetic slobbering. Slobber, as you know, is brought about because your hormones have kicked you into fight or flight. I advise you to flee! This slobbering will get you nowhere but the VD clinic or divorce court!" .

 

I used to smile at young lovers, Sarah M. I used to think that I, too, could step high and glow with the thrill of new romance. Actually now even more than when I was young. Since you are probably young, Sarah M., your head full of television fantasy, I will tell you that despite the lies of T.V., a woman becomes more beautiful as she ages since all of her muscles relax and her mind expands and she...she...well, never mind. This is my former self speaking. Before the crisis of faith. More consistent with my cynicism, I will just say that a man does not become more debonair as he ages but is curdled by cowardice.

 

That was not a digression. That was me trying to bond with you by offering maternal wisdom. If you are not a heterosexual woman but instead a man or a machine or a member of the LGBT community or some combination of those, the advice still stands: do not listen to the lies of television, and the sentiment still stands: I am a cynic but I'm trying to fight that cynicism by forgiving you and being your friend.

 

What we need, Sarah M., besides sustaining the ability to love, is a cause. A cause would awaken you from the foam-walled theatre of office life and would revive me from my coffined death. Camus, who I am now reading since I have the time thanks to not reading the service agreement of Changeofaddresses.com resulting in me being swindled out of forty precious dollars and culminating in this loving relationship you and I now share, in his letters to a imaginary German friend, discussed a truck full of doomed French prisoners. Some of these prisoners had committed acts of resistance against the German occupation, and some had done nothing at all. Fear paralyzed the innocent but pride lifted the spirits of the guilty. Facing the execution was easier for the latter group. This is how powerful a cause can be.

 

So where is the enemy towards which we should launch this cause? The enemy is not you. The enemy is the system of American style capitalism. It is a metal machine with no lubricant. It grinds and crushes spirits. It molds joy into perfect blocks, lashes them with a pretty ribbons and sells them for a dollar a piece. Or maybe less if nobody wants them. Art is a computer barfing on a page. Love is a blood soaked common rock from the belly of the earth bubbling up in the fountain of an asphalt parking lot. Anger is a tee-shirt. Freedom is death machine.

 

You get the picture, Sarah M. We are sisters, surviving like hungry rats in an apocalypse. Let's join forces. But first, be a peach and refund my forty dollars.

Dear, Lara,

We're sorry to hear you are not happy with the services we have provided. Although it is our policy not to provide refunds in this circumstance, as all promised services have been rendered at the time of payment, we will make a one-time exception in your case and will refund the full amount. Please note that your change of address order has not been cancelled with the USPS, so if you would like us to please let us know as soon as possible. We hope this resolves the situation to your liking. Please allow 5 - 10 business days for your credit card company to process and reflect the refund in your account. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

Regards,
Sarah M.

Where the Restless Rest

 

I clear the frail white skins and bloated bodies off the soaked bottom board

 

A clumsy guard darts at me, quickly seized by the rain and the cold,

 

I stretch my hand striving to feel the lively vibrations of the sequestered horde,

 

And eye the crippled house empty of memories and heavy with rot and old

 

My lungs squeezed tight as a tarp

 

The bees play my song like a carefree harp

UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!!

So, I'm storing a few pics of my art pieces here until I can find something to do with them. I need to have an on line portfolio or something. They don't belong here!!



BLOCKS:

 

LABEL FOR HONEY:

TERRARIA: 

TABLES:

TINY DREAM CANVASSES: 

POSTERS:


 

Here's the mural I painted on the walls of my bathroom in Shrewsbury, MO

Press release from the GUERILLA SCIENCE desk

I have had asthma all of my life, a mild case in which I go months or even years without symptoms, but occasionally I'll have an exacerbation that is at best annoying and at worst sends me to the Urgent Care Clinic for a few hits off the huka machine. Because it is usually mild, and there is no predictable pattern to these flare-ups, but also related to my general distrust of the chronic use of pharmaceuticals, I'm not on any maintenance medication and remain satisfied with using my rescue inhaler to control symptoms as needed. So lately, as in for the last month or two, I've been coping with a daily wheezy episode or two and so I pulled out my old inhaler and started carrying it around with me. It wasn't until after a week of using it that I realized something remarkable. I realized it was empty. Despite this fact, it had been completely effective in obliterating my symptoms.

Intrigued, I continued to use it, with the full knowledge of its vacancy. As of this morning, this little trick was still working, and thank god, because I don't have thirty extra bucks lying around.

Could it be the obvious classical conditioning explanation that my long time use of inhalers has trained my brain to associated the sensory experience of using an inhaler with relief for my lungs??? If so, how long can this effect last? It is not quite the placebo effect since I am consciously aware that the ticker is on zero, and I can tell from the taste that there is no medication in it.

In conclusion, if this effect can be demonstrated in a controlled research study performed by people less lazy and more qualified than me, it would save us asthmatics lots of money and really piss off the pharmaceutical company that has been raking in the bucks since the lack of competition due to the (appropriate) removal of CFCs from our inhalers has resulted in the (unexpected) disincentive to produce generics and thus has dramatically inflated price of these life preserving medicines. They may even sent out the thugs over this one! Come on, scientific community, we have nothing to lose but our albuterol!

Go Blow!

Earwigs

Flower Power

Define Your Terms

we're getting a t.v.