gravity

a friend of mine once made a statement to me that was really a request. asking me to make a promise, a covenant. he said,” if i’m still here [in this city] when i’m twenty-five, kill me.”

he was a man wise beyond his years. the gravity here is different. stay too long and it becomes inescapable. here i see people try and fail. i've watched those that don’t attempt anything and still fail. eventually all get sucked down into the fault line that courses thru the cracked broken heart of the city. a broken love. split. ever shifting. it grinds people up between aggravated spiteful tectonic plates. the city’s first and primary fault is the line that runs thru its heart.
they try filling it in with limestone and ignoring the groaning tremors.
the blank eyed minstrel sings songs of loss in front of the liquor store. the lost and confused wander the street and i think they get it better than the rest of us. the delusional, those stricken with schizophrenia, with autism and downs. they live a better life. each year another shop springs up and disappears by the following summer. houses perpetually for sale. factories abandoned. lots vacant like eyes that have seen too much of this place.
it’s finally getting to me. the pull is getting stronger. gets harder to pull myself up off the floor each morning and move. doesn’t seem to have any meaning or purpose. autonomic function. i play my role. the dissident the passive curmudgeon, prophet of doom, nay sayer.
but there is something else......
there is a disdain for progress. the city sneers at enthusiasm
carrying the ethos, “don’t work too hard. makes everyone else look bad.”
punished for effort. for optimism.
unwelcoming. foreboding. weighted gloom.
hope springs and a dead fish with poisoned eyes floats up in it .
the wise and the wary come and go in the night. the bright and hopeful either get their shit together and get up and get gone. some try to leave after a life time but always find themselves back here. to get digested, consumed like so much limestone.

what is it about this miserable bastard of a city that keeps me here? what brings in outsiders? with their new and unweathered perspectives, keeping life long residents on their broken porches with their cars up on blocks?

far be it for me to take the optimists view.....
but i think that it takes a view from the outside coming in to see it. the bird’s eye view. seen by the migrant fowl that has followed the lake’s shore. followed the waves to find herself here. that judges it objectively, seeing through the dust and without the concrete cataracts that the locals peer at the city with.
i can’t help but see the ugly, maligned, malignant. the diseased shit birds and mangy squirrels the old drunks by the creek and the bull neck coppers that know them all by name. terrified post-urbanites biding their time until they can move away, the junkies with meth rotted teeth.
but there is something sublime, something beyond the natural pull of the town that draws me to them.
staring thru chain link fence at broken buildings and homes at flocks of birds that ignore the nature of this place. hearty weeds and wildflowers defiantly blooming. the flora grows low and stocky. hardy and sparse. fighting against the gravity up out of the cracks in the sidewalk over crumbling brick and disused buildings. nature pushes its way up thru crumbling masonry and inches across worn brick work. it sprouts from places the city didn’t plan, the potted plants all smile in their plant souls at the free and liberated flora. uncontrolled growth.
foreign weeds and vines come from out of town. the willfull creepers like veins across the arms and steel branches of the city work their way up and over stubborn architecture and to the light, immune to the pressure that afflicts the terrestrial inhabitants. poisoned ivies become the antidote to municipal malaise.
music echoes nightly from down home bars, honky-tonks and phony English pubs. mixing with rumbling sounds of trains passing through the town, never stopping. whimsical folk played to fresh faced long skirted girls in unfriendly bars. tribal beats emerge from unsuspecting parks with their broken play equipment and rusted bleachers. slow jazz trails out apartment windows above women’s second hand clothing stores. police sirens and night time helicopter pitter patter. women yelling from bedroom windows at grubby, happy kids who are still playing, in the abandoned lots and fields, out well after the lights are on.
brilliant graphitti lines tunnels along wooded trails. that course beneath freeways and worn and warped, faded asphalt roads. nature wages a guerilla war against the occupying forces of industry and commerce. the politicians, industrialists and the dope pushers. many inhabitants who are not uncommonly more than one of these.
at least the addict knows nirvana when he finds it.
you can always see the sky. no gargantuan imperial edifices obscure the view, no smouldering towers. birds pass over unaware that they are meant to fall out of the sky. gristle for the mortar of the cities warty craggy hyde. many faces and facets. benign and malignant. pure and desolate. a scarred beauty in constant internal war.
this is as good a place as any. perhaps more so because of what you have to do to get there. your half-assed shit that would fly in some college town or snooty big city burrough won’t get you enough to pay rent. in fact you’ll have probably spent your rent money to do it.
this is about endurance. struggle is the reward.you better mean what you are saying. put it all in what you are doing. or you’ll never be forgiven.

on a May day i sit down by the creek legs crossed, eyes closed. listening to the water wash over the rocks and shale. the sun rises and greets the school children and the hung-over alike with a yellow haze that warms the skin as the birds begin to chirp.

i never want to leave.

keep it up

disabled by the powers that be 3 times tonite.

but up and running long enough to spread the plague.

i'm gonna get all of you nazi swine.

freedom of speech, just watch what you say.

here's where i question things.

is it any surprise that less than 3 hours after i post an inflammatory remark about fox news onto my

facebook page i get shut down and my info can not be accessed?

quote" the cure for swine flu is simple: stop watching CNN and FOX . and tune out the rest of the fear mongers."

for those of you that don't follow, i'll explain.

facebook is largely paid for and operated on by the U.S. government. they threw millions of dollars at Mark Zuckerberg to make this website to help you find old friends and make new contacts which seems an awfully benevolent gesture even for these titans of charity, free speech and all around good will.
while the other friendly social network tool that you all love and use MYSPACE is owned and run by NEWS CORP a.k.a the FOX media mega-corporation.
and there is no small ammount of cross marketing and contamination between these entities.

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/01/8701.ars

to stay on the conservative side of conspiracy theory i say that Rupert Murdoch put his dirty cash in on this thing just because it's a great way to subject people to an endless barrage of advertisement and to use their personal details to cross market and cull demographic information and to unwittingly sell out their dear close relatives and long lost friends to the corporate marketing swine.

simply by adding a photograph of your friend to their site and tagging it with a name you have voided all rights to privacy, theirs and yours. making the images and likenesses thereof property of the corporate industrial complex that they can utilise, disseminate and manipulate for their ad campaigns, spambots and ultimately for whatever they wish. you are now their property. whether you signed up or not.

we have deprivatised ourselves.

willingly.

unthinkingly.

try not to let it distract you from your game of scrabble.

return to your relaxed and docile positions.

fill in another quiz about celebrity sex videos.

go back to sleep.

now there can be no assumption of benign or altruistic reasons for the U.S. government's involvement in this one. they are rather disinclined to using public funds in something the voting public would actually use. what interest could the powers that be, the ruling class, the war mongers and lobbyists have in a quirky social website that is designed to collect pictures of citizens, organise and catagorise all of their family, friends, acquaintances linking social and business networks? why would they want to invest multiple millions into a free site that does nothing more than track all of the cultural, political, commercial habits of people and allows them to share freely their opinions all all things in their life from gardening to church and state?

i mean what could they be hoping to gain by funding and ultimately having complete totalitarian access to a massive database that tracks every physical location of its users by IP address and that stores, collects and monitors all the habits of citizens to a degree that no census could ever accomplish, that even the best cold war agent would not have been able to access. to know all the things that people do not speak of in public. and to get them to completely and totally surrender their legal rights as free and private citizens and those of their friends and colleagues.

the patriot act was the first step.

and don't think because you live outside U.S. borders that it doesn't affect you. the last 50 years of world history prove that if it is in the interest of the American government then its corrupt and monstrous tentacles will reach it and the world will not raise a hand.

the war machine has carte blanche to do as it will to protect "freedom" whatever it is they think that is this week. their basic principle centers around the world serving the whims and pockets of the munition makers and oil merchants. they will protect freedom by enforcing their military might upon whomsoever declines to cooperate with them. branding all as enemies of liberty and as terrorists even as they wage illegal wars and campaigns of horrendous slaughter on soil that is not their own. fighting the good fight on behalf of people that don't want their help and killing them in the process.

look up friendly fire casualties as compared to veterans and soldiers actually wounded or killed by the evil enemy's hordes and tell me who the terrorists are.

you are being watched. closely. the ghosts of the Nacht der langen Messer hangs over us.

Orwell would have slit his wrists and taken a nice cold bath with a toaster

if he was around to see it get this far.

you've believed their media, their hype and scare tactics. you've absorbed it all and perpetuate it around the same water coolers and kitchen tables at which you gossip about celebrity misconduct and talk about what you think your neighbour is doing in his yard and who he lets into his house.

it's all your fault and you've done it to yourselves.

passively.

without question.

they are coming for us.

sleep easy.