Legend has it that Charles Bukowski hated Mickey Mouse more than anything and thought it was blasphemy of the highest order that somehow a soulless celluloid corporate intruder started passing itself off as the source and effect of creativity and dreams. Maybe he thought children finally bought off on the finger instead of the moon it was pointing to.

In America today you’re close to abusing your children if you don’t take them for the full Disney World experience. This means all four parks, the water slides, the mickey mouse ice cream bars, the fireworks, the $12 a day parking (current 2009 price), the fast pass planning sessions, the folded up maps covered in sucker spit, the forever passes that guarantee you’ll overbuy on the initial experience and be back for another round someday, and the laughter and smiles that a $130 a day ticket price per person can give you inside a simulated environment at sometimes psychedelic pitch.

But don’t mistake this essay as an anti-capitalist anti-corporate rant against the mouse and friends and those who impose him on us as a right of passage to adulthood in modern day America. The Internet is littered with those kinds of essays and they all have root with Hank Bukowski so go directly to his poetry if you want the raw deal from that angle. This piece has more of a soul searching purpose coming from a father who happens to wield a heavy keyboard and a large magnifying glass into his own heart.

This Disney shit is expensive so let’s get that out of the way first off. My parents had to help us pay for the trip with their time share dollars and they bought some meals, paid for the rental car and dozens of trinkets, etc. etc. ad nauseum. Disney nickels and dimes you to death with every step and you’ll pay for it with more than blisters and a possible heat stroke from the sun rays of the sunshine state. But there is a value you get in exchange for your money. You will learn a lot about yourself.

And you gain perspective through the laughter of your children and this brings me to my final point, the reason for undertaking such an absurd engagement in the first place–your children. Disney World claims to be the place where dreams and wishes come true…for a price. The price isn’t just money although there is certainly that element of cost. And the price isn’t just time–as parents, we plan and scheme for months with books, maps of the park, budgets and reservations.  We rent the mini-vans, pay for the overpriced ice cream and hot dogs, and hurry up to wait in stupid lines that no sane person should ever subject their loved ones to.

The true price of a trip to Disney World is the effort you put into it in the moment.  This is also the true price of being a supportive member of your family–working with your spouse, your children, and your extended family to support each other in times of need, celebrate each other in times of triumph, and mourn with each other in times of grief.

As parents we are each responsible for shepherding the flame of creativity and passion that our children are born with inside the spirits of their nature. It’s a small, flickering combustion immediately thrust into a dark wind storm and many of these lights blow out before they even get a chance to melt the wax around their wicks. Some babies are tossed over the cliff like animals minutes after they’re born and some suffer far greater tortures that play themselves out slowly over the years so that the candles that once blazed blue become red in an inferno that burns as much of the world as a sociopath can reach in the blood lust of their wailing.

But some of these flames, if sheltered effectively with great care, can leap up to light the darkness enough for the rest of us to be able to build shelters that protect generations. Our job as parents isn’t to raise businesspeople who carve up the resources of the world for the few in their circles of influence. And neither is it our job isn’t to raise soldiers whose greatest gifts are to kill or die trying. And we should definitely not allow our children to become criminal succubi who eat the light and give comfort to darkness. History has always been at the mercy of untethered children whose parents shrugged it off.

The highest calling of parenting is to keep the creative flames of our children alive long enough to connect them with the source of light which ultimately binds us all. This responsibility of shepherding the flame in my children means more to me than all the writing I will ever produce in my lifetime because I believe the very act of pouring hope and sanctity and the freedom to express it into a young mind heals the world around us all for lifetimes ahead.

If a cost of doing that is to buy into the corporate capitalism of a cartoon mouse and a few of his cronies; to pay a fool’s ransom in ticket prices, parking, and deep fried calories; to hold my daughter’s hand while she gets her picture taken with some poor minimum wage schmuck in a fluffy costume; and to wait in lines longer than the the toilet paper meltdowns of soviet Russia–then so be it. As parents, we are in the business of saving the world from its own madness and the bigger the lie, the more children will believe it. The lie is this–Tomorrow will be brighter  than today. We should all be praying to be in error about this being a lie and we should each be pouring as much faith and time and love into our children that we can squeeze from this moment right now.

Because in the end, everything could depend on Goofy and this fucking mouse making good on their promise about dreams coming true.

photo credit: deadrobot

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The [psychological and biological] phenomenon whereby when a large area is suddenly illuminated, the light seems to appear first in the center of the patch (rather than appearing all at once) and then spreads outwards towards the edges. When the light is extinguished, the edges disappear first and the center last.
–Dictionary of Theories page 2–

A good short story should follow Abney’s effect in the opening sentence by being a concentrated burst of energy which captures the reader’s immediate attention but which also contains the entire kinetic possibility of the full story. A novel, on the other hand, expands the scope of this principle and its execution meaning the first three paragraphs serve the same function as the first sentence of a short story. Likewise, the first chapter of a novel begins the kinetic expansion of the story the way an effective first paragraph of a short story does.

It’s helpful to understand Abney’s effect when pacing the focus and flow of both short and long fiction. Beginning with a concentrated center full of explosive narrative potential and then allowing this energy to dissipate outwardly in all directions is the key to creating interesting and effective fiction, the primary difference being the size and scope of the story itself (i.e. the shorter the fiction, the smaller the narrative sphere and kinetic energy needed to carry out the narrative to successful completion).

All observable phenomenon is subject to Abney’s Effect including the creation of successful narrative fiction. The Universe itself is an explosion of space and matter from a single concentrated point of energy which expanded outwards in all directions simultaneously. Excellent writers will respect this model of creation as the foundation of generating effective and successful fictional art.

photo credit: bandita

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I want to improve the execution of putting small things back into their place around me.  I have no patience for moving dishes to put away pans.  I detest the minutia of having to walk downstairs to put something back where it is supposed to go.  I’m pretty stinkin’ lazy when it comes to maintaining the space around me in physical order.

That’s what’s natural to my spirit and drive.  But that doesn’t mean I have to be subject to my spirit and drive. I recognize that, as a human being, my mind is the most valuable asset I own–the only thing I truly own outright and clear.  I was given my mind at birth and I have grown it over three decades.  I have abused it at times.  I have neglected it at times.  I have refused to listen to the value of its experience countless times.  But it has remained with me–always working, always collecting, always organizing things into the most convenient places.

My mind is just like me as your mind is like you. My mind is me as your mind is you. Our minds work with the same biological mechanics but the emotional movie clips within our minds contain different stories.  It is these stories and our willingness to engage their narrative as it is happening, which determines the differences between our mortal lives.  The choices we make determine the people we are.

Many people I have spoken with of late, some of them close to me, are acting like the end has already come and gone, ready to roll willingly into the graves they have dug for themselves in their minds. But I have a message for those people:

The world is still spinning.  No one has died of hunger in the streets yet.  Our houses are still warm and our milk is still cold.  We still have a vote to exercise in two weeks.

Americans have never been defined by the choices others make for us.  Rather, we will continue to be defined by our resistance to the effects of the choices others make for us and therefore to the choices themselves.

• We do not have to have an economy built on an ever-present system of warfare and conquest.
• We do not have to allow the scientific method and the collective body of its wisdom to become chained once again under the cruel master of organized faith.
• We do not have to cater to the most ignorant among us–who live their lives on the level of scurrying marsupials concerned primarily with their own health, wealth and progeny at the expense of everyone else’s.

Hatred, ignorance, violence and (worst of all) laziness are all natural to our collective spirit and drive.  But this doesn’t mean we must subject ourselves to their deleterious effects.  We are the most intelligent known creature ever to evolve to personal consciousness in our solar system. But we are each pulled by primordial forces which must be overcome internally before we hit that level of sustainment we need to detach ourselves from this planet and become an interstellar traveling species, a logical evolutionary “next step” we rest on the cusp of at this very moment.

We have to learn the patience and execution of action needed to put the little shit back in its place every time.  If we can’t make the personal choice to create order in the spaces around us then we may as well dig our mind graves and roll into them while they’re fresh and the worms are still hungry.

photo credit: flattop341

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It was a gray and wavy day when the U.S. economy finally fell apart–like cellophane placed unskilled over a pencil eraser.  It was October 3rd, 2012–almost four years from the day that the Great Economic Credit Reform of 2008 was passed.

Columbus, Ohio has always been known for its bars and restaurants and today was no exception despite the reality that there were very few functional public establishments left after the credit dried up.  Many businesses and institutions floated their immediate future on credit–their payrolls, their current stock, their long term viability–which meant that when the easy credit dried up so did their long term prospects, their option to own their current month’s payroll, and the stock on their floors.

When people stopped buying they also stopped building.  The construction industry, from the timbers in the forests to the cranes on the 87th floor–was all predicated on the illusion of an ever-growing future fueled by inexhaustible resources.  This was the 13th most ignorant fallacy of reasoning that American citizens had ever deluded themselves over.

An inebriated man shuffles with the scuffle of worn up and worn out tennis shoes that he lifted from the empty racks of a Kohls store that had been abandoned for three years.  The shoes didn’t match but they were the same size.  The man became the country and had been looking to remove its burden from his shoulders with every drop of whiskey he could beg borrow or steal.

After walking nearly three hours in the brisk windy streets of Columbus, the man finds the bar in which he will take his next drink.  Columbus still retained a bit of its former beauty as it lay nestled and forgotten on the banks of the Olentangy river.  George Washington’s best friend surveyed this land and found it agreeable and planted a flag and started a war with those who lived around here before them.

The drunk saunters into the bar and sits on the floor next to a man wearing a snipped off tie and a fairly clean but wrinkled dress shirt.   The drunk takes a shot of whiskey from the beast of a bar man with his handle bar mustache and balding head.  Whiskey is the only drink anyone serves any more because it tastes like the failure now the foundation of everyone’s lives. And everyone drinks for free as long as it lasts.

They had seen it all being lived around them and they worked for their mortgage and their kids education and their two vehicles and the gas that went in them. They bought firearms and took classes for the permits.  Many of the towns and villages across the country became self-enclosed and isolated as that was initially the place that the multitude of hopeless and helpless gathered to seek strength in numbers.  The problem was that human beings had become so isolated in their worship at the alter of the Cult of Individuality that they had forgotten what it meant to work in a close-knit community.  There was much violence and murder in the early days of the collapse, back in ‘10 when they were saying words on the 24-hour news channels like blip on the radar, small setback or the always famous potholes in the road to recovery.

The drunk man who was now the country looked at the drinking man with the clipped tie, gestured a toast and both drank to pissing into the void.  The drunk asked the man what was with the tie.  The man told him that he was one of the last financiers left trying to save the global exchange market and that when it had finally died and the body had grown cold, he grabbed the scissors on his desk and clipped his tie.  He said it felt like the right thing to do.

The man gestures to the bar tender for another shot and doesn’t look at the drunk but talks to him all the same.  He says that we live in a world of scarce resources and these scarce resources, based on their price and the other party’s willingness to pay that price, are supposed to be allocated to the most efficient uses.  That’s what market pricing does–it puts a value on our limited resources and makes sure they get to the most effective places.  It’s the beauty of the free market when it’s unhindered by political regulation.

He pauses and reflects a moment and asks if the drunk ever read that book Atlas Shrugged.  The drunk says no and the man goes on.  He said that the people leading us were pretty much the scum of the earth.  He said that our country just went financially bankrupt, that we didn’t even make it 250 years without suffering an economic collapse of the collective value of our labor.

But then again, he says, leadership all over the world, in business, politics, and even art has been morally bankrupt his entire life.   He says that our politicians took our currency (which wasn’t tied to physical assets like gold that can be weighed and measured), and they created a bunch of fake value in the treasury which had no merit, no backing, and inspired no faith in other countries around the world.  He said that our currency used to be considered as the world standard of exchange in value and stability and now look at it.

The clipped tie man takes his drink and says the thing he was created to say, possibly to this drunk and possibly in this place.  He says a thing so powerful and true that it could have saved the world if the right people had been wise enough to listen to it and act when they had the chance to do something about it.

The man drank the whiskey, gritted his teeth and kept his eyes closed as he talked.  He said the standard of our currency is the standard of our character.

The wealth in the vaults of a country’s treasury is supposed to equal a portion of the collective value of its citizens’ labors, dreams and ambitions.  Our government sold off on our dreams in 2008 and they didn’t even think twice about it.  He says, I wonder what the founding fathers would have thought of that. He says that he told a lot of bad lies in good places in his life and wondered what the founding fathers would have thought of him.

The beast of a bar man walked up with two amber colored bottles.  He offered them to the drunk man who was his country and the snipped tie man who was nothing anymore.  The drunk reached out and took the bottles and handed one to the man with the slouched head who still sat next to him.  The bartender said that those were the last two he had, hell probably the last two in the city or all of existence.  He kept them cold in a bag he placed in a secret spot of the Olentangy and that these were the last two cold ones left and the men looked like they would put the best use use to them.

The drunk looked at the bottle and smiled.  He said hey do you remember these?  The labels on the little mountains turn white when the beer gets warm.  The man looked at his bottle and the drunk saw the tremor of a smile threaten the gloom of the man’s mood.

The drunk put his arm around the empty man’s shoulder, clinked his bottle to his and said here’s to pissing into the void.  The man straightened up a bit, looked at the drunk, raised the last cold beer he would ever drink that had the little label that turned from blue to white and he said we’ll do it better next time.

The sun slipped away and the banks of the Olentangy settled into the darkness one more time with the people who loved living in the drunken peace of its presence.

photo credit: DerrickT

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In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a paragraph and murdered religion.  Sure, it was a slow death but a death it was.  He wrote:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

He predicted that in the absence of religion as an organizing force of society, the Will to Power would rise first in nations and then in individuals who would lead those nations.  He didn’t predict the exact personalities and I’m talking FDRStalinHitlerMussoliniChurchill blues here people.  But he did a pretty solid job of calling the rules of the game.  And those leaders during WWII had some serious power, Jack.  And they each brought it about by willing it to be so.  If you’ve never read the book Will by G. Gordon Liddy (of Watergate and talk radio fame), go pick up a used copy today; that dude forgot more about willing a situation  into  order than you’ll ever know, scrub–so don’t even try to compete.

The Will to Power was all that existed to compensate for the subcutaneous insurrection that took place when Nietzsche declared the idea of god, the image we each have in our minds, to be deceased and dysfunctional.

Joseph Campbell once gave the best explanation of the problem with religion.  He said something like: God, the word “God,” is a metaphor which points to a mystery that absolutely transcends all our knowledge.  The categories of thought which break reality into constituent individualites which are then analyzed and responded to cannot contain the experience of what the word “God” is pointing towards–something completely beyond our knowing.  The great mystery.  The void.  Sunyasha. Paradise.  Heaven. Bliss.  Nirvana.  Shall I go on?

Listen to the Tool song Lateralus and you’ll feel what I’m talking about on this.

Anyway, Campbell continued by saying that if you want to think about God you may say, “Is God one or many?”  One or many–these are concepts still within the categories of thought, what the Indians call Maya.  The metaphor is pointing to something–and you can’t even say “thing” because things are in time and space.  It’s pointing to some transcendent unknown beyond the entire structure and nature of our five senses and ability to analyze.  Campbell taught that all religions were constellations of metaphor and ritual which when acted within could put the individual into accord with this unknowable reality.

And the difference between an atheist and a theist is that the theist believes these religious constellations to be historical facts that actually happened and aren’t just symbolic of a higher truth we can all reach through different methods of worship and thought.

And the atheist knows that the metaphors are not facts, so they’re lies (hence, “God is Dead”).  Both theists and atheists are slaves to the Petulant Worship of Faith or Reason which have nothing to do with reality in the moment.  With truth for its own sake.

So once you see the structure and nature of experience and its ending (death) as an accepted fact, you understand that the purpose and meaning of the metaphor is pointing toward infinity  and you can be chill with it like John Coffey in The Green Mile.

What happens when you sit with something or someone long enough?  You get to know them.  How many of us are brave enough to say we’ve really sat down with death and accepted it for the concrete steel titanium fact that it is?

And finally accepting it, doesn’t a great freedom spring up in the moment?  Can’t you feel it in your chest lifting you, prompting you to breathe in and capture this moment like a Ferrigno biceps flex with both arms.

Who knew it could be so liberating finding out and accepting every one of us is on death row without reprieve and that we have an opportunity to rattle our cups against the cage and make some good old fashioned fucking noise before we go?

We then may look around ourselves and see our children for the blessings of energy, commitment, and love that they are.  Thank any deity you can toss a corn hole bag at if you have someone at home who loves you unconditionally and will take whatever bullshit you’re dishing out assuming you’re willing to accept theirs also.

The Will to Power will finally die out in the early years of the 21st century and good riddance.  The light of Science may yet shine on our society in benevolent ways instead of the malicious shadow its been casting since the Gatling gun was invented.

Science as an institution is based at its core on constantly proving itself wrong and challenging its fundamental precepts in order to move forward and gain a larger and deeper understanding of the outer space universe of sociology, physics, and biology.  And I can feel a new social-spiritual uprising upon us, a phenomenon which intelligent historians and sociologists like Paul Johnson (my favorite historian by far) call “Great Awakenings.”

I submit that we are in the presence of the beginning swell of the next Great Awakening in the history of our human species and that this one will wipe clean the hatred, bigotry and unforgivable ignorance currently plaguing our collective mind.  It will neutralize, once and for all, the Will to Power as the primary driver of human social and psycho evolution and bring on the age of the Micro Tribe, a social unit of physical and technological structure where we draw circles of trust around ourselves and those we love and interact with the world through these trust fields.  Compassion and reason will be the currency of this new age while fear and ignorance collect dust in the back our minds and hearts.

Elysian Fields are there for individuals with enough courage to sit with and accept the ultimate fact of existence–death.  And despite the inevitable destruction of oneself, still see beyond it to the enormous opportunity of seizing this moment to live a life of betterment for yourself and all of those around you.

Peace and prosperity don’t just happen.  They have to be willed into existence at the same time by a lot of people.

So what the fuck are you waiting for?

Photo Credits:

1. photo credit: Blanco-Larsson
2. photo credit: Rubink1
3. photo credit: citizen higgs
4. photo credit: deep_schismic

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