STREAM OF SOLEMNITY

Friends,

I hope you are alive and well.

Today I was going to launch the Serious Topics series with a ramble about the stigma of mental illness. But some events have taken place in the world and I feel like I should say something about that:

Terror, people. If it takes a well-coordinated, large-scale attack on a city that is the designated hub of culture and romance on this planet to get people to understand that ISIS is everywhere, then I won't be upset about the "selective outrage" that follows.

I understand that most people in the U.S. don't dream of honeymooning in Beirut or have close friends spending Thanksgiving in Kenya. Beirut & Kenya are not hubs of romance, and that's okay. But ISIS did strike those places too and it didn't quite make the headline news here. And if it had made the news, would we have cared so much? No, we wouldn't.

In the last week though, ISIS has been very busy and very successful in doing harm in many places, including (now confirmed) planting a bomb on a Russian airplane, killing 200+ people.

And ISIS is here too, people. In our country. Right now. Masterminding the next big strike on their Playstation grapevine. 

Anti-Culture Conversations w/ Vin and Juliet. Realistic panel.

What can we do? Well, for one, we can all get on our Playstations and become citizen spies. We can all stay home which is a good idea but would contribute to the death of society {Meatspace!). We could censor ourselves and never talk about what a douch-y prophet of god Muhammed is, but then the terrorists would be winning. We could outlaw all religions, but that wouldn't stop people from doing things in accordance with what they believe.

Or how about this--We could live in a strict police state where everyone was heavily surveilled and every enclosed space was patrolled by "good guys with guns" and metal detectors and bomb-sniffing pooches.

If we want to know how to live in a world where radical terrorism could overshadow the "lone gunman who never got laid" at any moment, we could ask an Israeli or Palestinian how they live in such a world.

The fact is--there are too many people in the world. Until we understand how to populate the earth in direct proportion to its resources, there will always be an overflow of humans into the margins where anger, poverty and desperation live. Hoplology 101.

Cartoony panel. With visible brain activity.

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There. Sorry to get preachy about shit that has yet to affect me personally. But I truly do see the potential for it to affect everyone (American, Canadian, Venezuelan, Australian, East European, British, South African, et al…) Global threat. Hoverboards be damned. Jet packs too.

Surreal panel. Enjoy.

NOW HERE'S SOME CREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (CONDENSED):

I can't decide which I fear most--the world or my mind. Lately I'm caught in this full-size Chinese handcuff. A painful isolation drives me outside to see other faces, hear other voices. But what I see & hear is humanity's fading beauty, skins with customized lesions & shrapnel caught in the throat. Monstrous Humanitor, cackling inhumane at itself in the mirror. Robbing itself at grin-point. Selfishness ringing in operatic mezzo-soprano sing-song conspiracy notes. A cordial baritone dictatorship linking the food-chain to the fence. I run barefoot and destitute back to my cavernous skull, where once I found whatever I wished to be true. Where fantasy now meets solitary confinement.  10-14-15

Don't dilly dally with that ball and chain. Step right up to the plate glass sunrise. Answer your phone on the first prophetic ringtone to take down dictation to a crumbling dictatorship in an Arabian Springtime for Hitler--what a jerk! Get to work on your new screenplay about the guy with the car, and the gun, and the ego. Be sure to find time to masturbate to your coworker's wardrobe malfunction, whatever it may be--running hose, missed tampon, open zip bar code for I'm in the closet but get and come me in the bored room. 10-23-15 

Morning grey as a twisted spine. That's more like it, November. I've slumped in this waiting room crushed by eye contact and body odor so long I can't remember how many times I sang Happy Birthday into debt. Copy right, copy left. Over the shoulders of dying doctors shake the salt. Put some pepper in your step and in your diet to live forever. I only have the appetite for waiting. A trapezoid once so triangular. A mountain moved by humans becomes a plateau. A tablet crushed and snorted becomes your wild imagination. 11-10-15

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Good-bye Friends. I send you love through my computer screen, because that's the best I can do right now.