Lazy day, unable to do anything but sleep. Slept til three after being up from 8 til 11, then back to bed. I could be there now and sleep easily. Maybe barometric pressure has something to do with it. Maybe I've been on the go for the last three weeks, rarely a day to self, then today, my own, and tomorrow I go to town all day. Today, a day off, I rest. Tomorrow, at it again. I'm worn out from going and worn out already from going again tomorrow. All of the going has been good, no problems, just one after another, too much of it. Today I get a break and can only sleep. Tried to read, but it put me to sleep. Been awake a few hours and still feel like a bale of cotton is lodged in my head. Idly scrolling facebook, articles and videos of the cop in Texas, again, freaked by zoo animals out of their cages running wild around a swimming pool, outta control. Now the victims are blamed, like corporate media usual. I see another case of a peaceable situation, cops enter the scene, immediate mayhem and violence erupts, all of it the cops. Even if there had been a purported fight between black guys, maybe, maybe not, fights wear themselves out. Bully whiteman thug beats up black teenage girl, gets all carried away and hyper like he's in Afghanistan beating up a Muslim girl for Caucasian Jesus.
No matter all the ways it can be justified, the frenzied cop struck me a bit overzealous, but then I'm a pacifist, so what does my take on it matter? Watching this whiteman thug's performance, running and rolling like in boot camp, going for his gun, I saw a video game in the cop's head, him the hero who shoots everybody around him and walks away, cranks up a new Corvette and drifts into the sunset among urban ruins, a trail of dense white smoke. Because hyper violent video games are legal, like hyper-violent tv, it's against the rules to question their social value. The videos I see of cops shooting citizens in in-yer-face cold-blooded murder, several times in the back, over three hundred times into a wrecked car, no righteous justification can excuse. I come from a time when "civilized society" was how we liked to think of ourselves. The Reagan Trojan Horse turned the government on the people. Aspiration to a civilized society has faded into the forgotten past. The rule now is to kill, maim, suppress the poor, emphasis on black, arrest the mentally ill homeless, throw them in prison without charges, arrest poor people for the thrill of putting them through the trouble and expense of court with fines they can't afford and jail or prison time, people without recourse. Bullying is all I can make of it, legal bullying. We're no more a civilized society than a Christian society, especially the fundamentalist version that usurped the word Christian and twisted the meaning to its opposite.
We're divided now between people who call themselves Christians and the Christians embarrassed by identity with the word's new meaning, feeling the need to explain, I am not that. The propaganda of misinformation has turned word meanings upside down in so many instances, words don't mean their meaning anymore. Though I don't enjoy living in a society so willfully given to propaganda, I find it interesting how the propagandists use the fluid nature of words and understand the range of what can be done with words, poets of manipulation. When somebody comes at me with, you-needta, you-oughta, you-gotta, you-should, I back away. It's time for a commercial break. Go to the kitchen, get a piece of cold pizza out of the refrigerator, return when commercial over. People who come on like commercials used to annoy me, now I feel sad for them reducing themselves, their humanity, to commercials. And it saddens me further when I realize there's no bridge between us, like there's no bridge between me and Pizza Hut advertising division. It's a one way thing: you oughta. The only thing I can say is, not necessarily. And that pisses everybody off.
A flash: sitting in the coffee shop one afternoon when the stools at the bar were all taken, in one of the two cushioned chairs waiting for my turn to get coffee, a woman I know in a friendly way came in carrying a big laptop. The other cushioned chair was unoccupied and she sat. Glad to see ya, How are you, I'm fine, how are you? You needta, you gotta, you oughta, you should. Every sentence she spoke began with these demands in this order. Each one was something I don't remember and didn't even hear because it related to my interest in no way all, and I don't listen to sentences with those beginnings. She came from a belief system I don't share, wealth. Then she said, You're supposed to. I put up my hand to say, halt, and said, "I don't do supposed to." She looked at me in shock, like to say she already knew that, questioning herself, why did I say it? She jumped up from the seat like a firecracker went off under her ass, and ran in a bee line, a line straight as drawn with a ruler, out the door. I don't even want to know what was behind that. My suspicion is she was rambling in unconsciousness and I turned the light on. Maybe she embarrassed herself. I don't know. She is of the society that edits meaning out of everything they say. Seeing her go out the door, I thought, What a pathetic life. I'm so grateful to live among hillbillies.
photos by tj worthington
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