i think its been years since i posted last. well I'm back in the u.s. and I'm leaving again soon and i wanna vent it out a little.
in this city in the south. I'm out of the wintertime. its warm. i have an art job. these are the good things.
sooo..streets lined with open air cafes..? nope, this would be the perfect place for it with the weather, but they haven't made that here. and who would really want to sit out near the street with all these cars going. ...bike lanes? wrong again. I'm almost the only one in the city who uses the sidewalk. i can go for miles on my skateboard and maybe i only pass 1 or 2 people. ..they look crazy, or homeless. ..does it say weird things about me to? and the roads are packed with cars. There is no city train or street cars and the buses stop running early. How is my attempt at making less pollution and liberation from automobiles viewed? I was told that I'm irresponsible for not having a car.
At work people care very much about money. Obviously. The same songs are played over and over. I will shutter for years at the mention of any of these Christmas songs i hear everyday. Even my coworkers recognize that its damaging our Psyche.
I will just say about my job that I very much enjoy the work, it is making visual art, and its at a place where everybody is suppose to make people happy on there vacations so they can get back to there jobs and there lives. ..ok, i guess i ended up telling everything almost.
then back to home after work where the people incessantly zone out to movies and video games to supplement experience to there fragmented and half-lived lives. they are at the movies now while i borrow one of there computers.
the people are always thinking "get for me, get for me". They aren't interested in understanding what is going on in the world. They don't want to hear about it. I'm sure that very few understand how close we are now to having a nuclear weapons accident, or how we will know with in 10 years if there will still be humans on this earth in 100 years or not. They don't know and they don't want to know. They will keep going to work everyday, getting for themselves, hearing the same mind numbing songs over and over, driving isolated home with there own songs playing, and into the house huddled around the T.V. with aliens fighting on it or vampires or some other boring fantasies. If you try to tell them about it they will resist it. If you are going to have any conversation about it then you are just being a bummer to them.
I remember when I was doing some peace work years ago we talked about how there is a psychological way to make war impossible and we all know that they use clever psychology in making people into warriors, but I think there is also a psychological way to make subversion impossible, and i think they have figured it out. Its working.
They could have created a paradise here, but instead it more resembles Mordor. Actually it reminds me a lot of Bangkok. Oh, and if you decide to have a philosophical conversation you might be equally let down. They will say "not now" but they will mean "not ever". This place where I'm working...it reminds me of the sultans palace in Turkey or the Forbidden city in Beijing. It is walled in and paradise on the inside. Beautiful tropical plants and animals. And outside the walls are the noise and traffic of everyday life.
ooooh, they're home. I gatta get off this computer now. More to come soon.
