Anger Is An Energy

Shelley says over here that 'there's something impersonal and dispassionate about anger." I know how well she writes, and how carefully, and so I've been turning over what she wrote, looking at it from different angles, trying to puzzle out what she meant. Can anger really be dispassionate? Is that what people mean when they talk about 'cold anger'? Could that be a bad thing?

I'm pretty sure anger is an energy, cold or hot. I remember being an angry punk, once upon a time. Well, more of a drunken yahoo of a punk, perhaps. Angry though, in between episodes of skipping around like a loon shouting about 'joy'. Regardless, I can't remember a time when I didn't feel rage welling up in me the moment I stopped to think about the glories of our civilization, and the wonder of our achievements.

Call in the airstrikes.

Still, I've always been the eternal optimist, sifting through the dung looking for a diamond, and I wandered all around this planet, wide-eyed, pushing myself to be childlike and unangry. A real hippie twat, basically. Trying to see the god within each and every person I met. Failing too often, succeeding far too rarely, flying my freak flag high. Peace, love and vegetable rights, man. Anger? Love! Rage? Peace!

That worked pretty well for a time, but the drugs probably helped more than I cared to admit.

I'm still expatriate, of course, and I still am unfailingly kind to people, until they cross me. Then, well, then I puff up and turn all the colours of a sunset, and browbeat them until they submit or go away. And then I get quickly unangry again. I'm like that.

I have never stopped being angry at hypocrisy and hate and stupidity and cupidity, either. And yeah, angry at the sinner as well as the sin. Turning the other cheek's all well and good for the meek, but I'm not going to be around to inherit the earth. I just don't have the patience. So, model citizen, me, right? Going around with a big red 'W' on my chest, fighting for the common man, righting wrongs and kissing babies.

Fuck no. But the other thing that Shelley said, that 'anger is the ultimate camouflage for what's really going on in our heads and our lives' doesn't make sense for me, at least. Anger is the the natural and consequent reaction to taking a good hard look at our lives and the lives most of us are shoehorned into, through our own weakness and through the strength of others and through random dumbfuck chance, and realizing that we're going to die. Much too soon, each and every one of us. Ashes or wormfood, or, if maybe scraps for the birds to tear at. In anger, we reveal that we know there can be more, and wish for more, for better, for ourselves and others, and we also reveal that we are too bound by our own chemistry or history to do more than pound the bones and screech like apes before the monolith.

But that's OK.

Because the coin of anger rotating in the air, reflecting those glints of sunlight, has an ouroboros head as well as a tail. There is no anger, for me, at least, that is not backed an impulse similar to the one that some buddhists express when they perform a wai -- palms pressed together, fingers pointing skyward, with a shallow bow. I acknowledge the god within you.

Anger is peace, thwarted. Love, unrequited. The face of god, almost touched. The heartbreaking awareness that you (and so, all) just might not get there, wherever there might be. And ranging as it does in denomination, like our coin flipping up there in the air, the anger can be fire banked against the coming night, or a bolus of flaming tar catapulted at those who thwart the good.

But what the hell do I know? The written word is a lie, and it's possible that I'm just stringing together justifications for my rage, popcorn-garlanding words, holding up another mask, more for the fun of it than from any necessity. I found my own path. Quite possibly not the right one, but it's the one I found, and so that fucker is holy to me.

There was a time when I was one of those Seekers After Truth that the hip, ironic-McDonald's kids tend to laugh at, often with good reason. Looking for some kind of truth outside myself, raging against the machine. Now I'm a model citizen, older and less convinced that any truth that could have any meaning for me lies anywhere outside myself and the threads that bind me to other people.

But I remain angry, and I maintain that that is the outward sign of my attempts to be honest with myself. It's my honesty with the rest of the world, and it's both personal and passionate.

I only speak for myself. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. That's cool.

05:22 PM | () | (0 trackbacks)

GFY

I've been writing these long screeds then changing my mind, stopping and starting and just generally mucking up my state of exquisite zen rage by second-guessing myself and revising.

Revising is just plain evil.

So here, in no particular order, are the hard black slippery cores of the three pieces I'm probably not going to end up writing.

To the Bush Administration (and ever single last one of you Yank bastards who voted for them) :

Go fuck yourselves.

To Korean men, one in five of whom (according to the Korean Institute of Criminology) purchase sex four times a month (thus making it a US$21 billion dollar industry, worth 4.1% of GDP) :

Go fuck yourselves.

To the whorebloggers intent on monetarizing this virtual place of ours (and thus turning it into a sea of shit) :

Go fuck yourselves.

There. That feels better.

02:32 PM | () | (0 trackbacks)

1974

I'll have more to say when I sober up, but for now, a blast from the past.

You fuckers.

07:08 PM | () | (1 trackbacks)

The Truth? You Can't Handle The Truth!

I said this over there.

Hindsight will show how much this (and all the other American campaign related program activities on the internets) have made an impact on the vote for World Leader #1 this year, but I have no doubt that whatever happens next week (and probably in the weeks following, if it's anything like 2000), that if the elections aren't cancelled in 2008, the power of freed-up culture, rumours on the internets, the resurgence of an engaged wired citizenry and the decline of old media and yes, even the self-obsessed wankery of the blogotroposphere are going to kick some political ass.

Gives me hope.

For the moment, though, spread the word, link the link, and take those bastards in the White House down.

Update : When asked for his opinion about these rumours on the internets, Mr Bush had this response for the American people.

05:05 PM | () | (0 trackbacks)

We Are All

A few times in my life, I've felt the Fear. When terror -- long drawn-out exhausting fear -- works itself to such a pitch inside you that you end up punching right through it, and a calm resignation takes over. You understand at a time like that that there's absolutely nothing you can think of doing that might change the flow, to alter events in any way, and you become an observer. Whether it's the cornered herbivore going limp as the predator's teeth close around its throat or a detached zen calm is a matter of debate. Either way, it's an instructive place to sit, in the eye of the storm, wrapped in a mental silence, utterly still.

I feel that way at the moment with regard to the American election. As anyone who's ever subjected themselves to the Comedy Ranting of the wonderchicken is amply aware, I've made clear my feelings about the criminal scum who've left their snail tracks of glistening goo all over the remnants of a once-great nation. Although I've been accused of trying to sway people with my screeds and polemics, that has never been the case, at least not consciously. I was just playing. Writing for me is a ludic thing. I don't want to change your mind, I just enjoy speaking mine, and playing with words while I do it. Maybe even having a conversation.

The rage, of course, was always genuine. It still is. But the fire's banked at the moment. Not a flame to be seen, even if the carbon-black belly of the stove is glowing fiercely. It's not about me, though.

It's about you, my American friends. Much as I've castigated you as collectively stupid, hopelessly parochial, misguided and misled, lazy, fat and terrifyingly unaware of the great evils wrought in your name all around the world, well, I still love you. In the particular, if not the abstract. I was just poking fun. Serious jokes. You always hurt the ones you love, right?

Just like Jon Stewart, I want it both ways, you see. I want to be the funny monkey, and I want to tell hard truths. Serious jokes. I do believe it's possible to have it both ways, and dangerously simpleminded to expect otherwise.

But this time, I'm going to speak plainly, from this terrified pocket of calm, not because it will make a difference to what's going to happen, but because I would be betraying myself if I remained silent. We're begging you, our American friends, our American enemies, our American taskmasters and landlords, our American occupiers and our American pimps, our American sisters and brothers, to do the right thing next week. We're depending on you, all of us out here in the Outlands. We know you don't give a flying fuck about us, really, all us furriners. We know you want what's best for your country, your people, your families. You don't want to hear our opinions about your politics. We understand that.

But do you remember when the whole world wept along with you and averred 'We are all Americans' after that terrible day 3 years ago? It was true, then. It is hard, my friends, to find many who feel that way today.

Many of us believe that what's best for America need not also be what's worst for the rest of the world.

So please. Please. Vote next week. Think, read, put aside your tribal affiliations, and vote. I don't even care who you vote for, because, much as I've abused you all in fun, I trust that most of you are good people, and that if more than the customary 40% 55% [thanks, Dan] or so of you do your duty as citizens and go to the polls, nothing can result but a landslide for the Other Guy.

I'm begging you. We're all begging you. Do the right thing.

09:05 AM | () | (0 trackbacks)

Away Team

We spent the last couple of days AWOL from the Corporate Disneyland where we live, and ventured out into the Real Korea for the first time in a while. Jesus tapdancing popsicle-stick Christ, it's scary out there! Everything's dilapidated, dirty or broken, and that's just the stuff they bother to slap a new coat of paint on every decade or two.

On the upside, I'd forgotten about all the attractive young females -- not many of those around here in Chaebol City, Arizona. She Who Must Be Obeyed did notice my noticing, but by the time I regained consciousness, the wounds had already been stitched up, so it's all good.

A couple of chapters from the Modernization for Stupid People™ handbook that exemplify for me -- this weekend at least -- the Timeless Wisdom of The Korean People:

1) Build condos in one of the most beautiful places in the country, nestled deep in fragrant woods that in October begin to assume such a magnificent symphony of colour as to take the breath away, beside a lake, in the mountains. Then proceed to allow those condos to become filthy, dim animal caves, poorly lined with stained, grafitti'd wallpaper, reeking and unkempt. Ensure that nothing works, and that the cigarette burns in the cheap plastic bog-standard yellow floor-covering are unconcealed by any furniture, other than the lumpy bed in one corner. Make certain that the rooms, while being as depressingly drab and horrible and dirty as possible, cost more than US$100 per night, because you know the fuckin' proles got nowhere else to go. Laugh and laugh until you piss yourself, as the lucre rolls in.

2) Build tawdry eyesore asphalt chancres on the most attractive bits of coastline, buttress them with kiloton sprinklings of concrete tetrapods, and festoon the pleasure palaces gaily with buzzing, flickering neon and bellowing signage. Make sure there is plenty of opportunity for the whores to earn their trade, and make sure that tinny speakers howl out 24/7 the cookie-cutter '80s K-pop that gets the housewives a-rockin' while they're getting drunk and trying to forget what their husbands are doing. Because this is the coast, and the view is spectacular, build a raw fish restaurant underground, and make of the walls vast aquarium tanks, into whose murky depths you can peer, hoping to spy the algaed, parasite-riddled beast that will become your lunch.

A moveable feast, Korea, a moveable feast.

08:51 PM | () | (0 trackbacks)

Ship Of Fools

I don't know what the fuck. I think my brain has been frozen by monetarization, and my heart as well, not to mention my goddamn lilypad-fat keyboard-strokin' fingertips. Sorry about that am I, faithful friends and supporters. Sorry, and silent, and scattered.

Fleeing from the money, I've scarpered around the curve of the globe over and over again over the years, running from the in-the-end unwelcome wealth thrust upon me, and now, since I'm paying for this site to be hosted, I have an urge to spit on it and walk away. I've finally found a way to pay to my host the last of the Paypal-imprisoned dollars I owe -- the dollars you, my friends, gifted me with months ago -- which is good news of a kind, perhaps, but it's all a swampy money-tainted shitswirl in my mind now. Big red bar sinister 'Keep out!' as the favicon.

How fucked up is that when you're disgusted by the idea of posting to your own weblog? Pretty kinda ish, I guess.

So maybe that's it. I don't fucking know. I've had a few, and I'm talking shit again. So here's a song. Rock over London, motherbasters!

PS: I'm comin' after you 'making money from blogging' fucknozzles, if it's the last thing I do in this textosphere. And I'm gonna talk about your magic underwear.

[Update : Note to self when posting drunk - in future, delete 3 out of 4 uses of all variants of the word 'fuck'. Except fucknozzle. That's always a keeper.]

09:34 PM | () | (0 trackbacks)