A Freewill Manifesto

I have been writing a lot of music recently. The latest is up on the myspace page for your listening pleasure. The most recent was a song I wrote yesterday called 'Smother' and it's one that's been on my mind for a while, and it just magically wrote itself last afternoon. Nothing makes my soul rejoice that writing new tunes.

myspace.com/airscale

There's a subtle line between what we generally want and what we need. A want is more of a selfish thing by nature, but then a need is generally subjective. A want can also be coupled with a need as both can exist within the same context simultaneously. Our minds and bodies are loaded to the gills with things we both need and want to do, such as breathing. That simple will to experience and to survive is as basic and pure as the act of breathing itself. The heart pumps as if it were a subconscious afterthought. Impulses shoot down the length of my spine faster than the human mind can calculate and send signals that type these letters, that push these thoughts into the open, into the wild imagery that accompanies my inner thought process. It's how I can associate a smell with a phase of my life that has been lost and forgotten, but in that moment of smelling honey roasted almonds mixed with the smell of Earth and freshly cut grass I can instantly be transported ten years previous to a time where I was living in a tent and traveling the country with a faire. It's how I can overhear a lover's quarrel at a table on the other side of a small cafe and be reminded of my parents in my adolescents arguing about money, time, and the merits of marriage. It reminds me of the want and the need to be happy, and to feel justified living in the moment.

We spend most of life developing patterns and coping mechanisms, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to break out of them. Trying to find the truth in the lies of the past. The lies we've been told, and the ones we've even perpetuated. It's no small task to envision the things about yourself you'd like to change, those are both wants and needs. In our youth we're still growing and developing, sucking up all the stimuli of life like a ripe sponge full of absorbency. As we get older, we begin to understand how we effect the things around us, especially in relation to how we receive back what we actually give. As the years go on we realize the first steps of self discovery were ones that were started under different pretenses ranging from selfishness and peer pressure to selflessness and a general want to further ourselves. Life is something that perpetually moves us forward, and as we grow it becomes counter productive to live in past events save for moments of reflection and finding familiar footing. Our emotions set us apart of most every other living thing on the planet but only in the sense that we been able to forge expression to express those emotions. We've learned how to provoke it and how to induce an emotional response just as easily and quickly as that impulse travels down the length of my spine to outstretch my arms and firmly embrace someone in a hug.

I look at around at our society, and as I watch it with the idea of needing and wanting I see how the constructs of our society are formed and are constantly changing. I also see how our culture has been forever shaped by coping mechanisms and habitual undertakings. I look at metropolitan cities, these mammoth buildings, those long spires of progress and engineering. The close quarters of people who live above you, beneath you, and next to you. The ones who play Van Halen at 78 speed at eight in the morning. The ones who have sex into the wee hours of the night keeping you awake with the rhythmic tapings of the bed post against your side wall. The sounds of car horns from a nearby intersection. The lake shore waves pounding the sandy beaches that lay just 50 yards from the asphalt. We walk the miles of beach, the blocks of pavement, past everyone else's life. We walk past their struggles, their joys, their passions, and the ones to which we've even included ourselves into. We gather and attract certain people to us, for the short term as well as the long haul. We build support systems of social context and like minded mentalities in order to revel in the pulp of existence. The need and want to be happy, within ourselves, is a happiness that bursts from within. It's human nature to share, to relate, and to express all of that which our physical containers take in like the first conscious breath to which we greet the day with.

The need for life, and the want to survive are the basic tenements of existence. The need to express and the want to relate are our most basic methods of enriching and enhancing that life. The surrounding ourselves with hobbies and fascinations. Of building a world around us with our own two hands regardless of form or measure. Laying our hands down in the proverbial cement to lay witness to the impressions we've made and that have weighed heavily on us. The need for self discovery. The want to better ourselves. We all do this. The guy sitting on the couch at home playing video games into the wee hours is just as much searching for his own inner voice as the man who's backpacking across the Northwest territory in search of the perfect vista with which to view the sunset. The things we tell ourselves for motivation may seem infantile or absurd to someone with a different justification for life, but it doesn't dim or dull it's necessity. It doesn't downplay the fact that a side effect of breathing is finding your own thing to do in the world.

Parents may not understand and lover's may quarrel, but we're all basically the same in terms of need and want. It's not always as easy as saying you'd want a million dollars, when really you only need enough to cover next month's rent. It's the journey in between. It's the sticky notes we post to ourselves on the inner walls of our subconscious reminding ourselves to take a deeper breath, to smile a little broader, to hold an embrace a little firmer. It's when the involuntary becomes directly influenced and affected by everything we have going on around us. It's how opening our eyes to a city skyline can be just as fulfilling and affirming as gazing out over a mountain ridge. We don't need to want, but it is our nature to want to need.

Ah, politics... like a pain in the side of a long distance runner. Like every woman in America who wears those big bug eyed Jackie O sunglasses. Like a tug of war with war vets who don't have a right arm. Like a one legged man in a polka competition. Like Walt Disney coming back from the dead and pistol whipping the Disney think tank that drums up publicity by sensationalizing a fifteen year old girl as a slut. Like a Clinton with a Pinocchio nose. Like how auto companies can't even give away SUV's but football players are still signing up to be their spokesman. Like when someone is driving like an asshat in traffic they're much more likely to be on a cellphone than drunk. Like any news organization declaring itself to be fair and balanced whether it be Fox or NPR. Like how oil companies are still raking in record profit. Like how all of our oil lies under middle east sand.

The last of the big primaries today... Clinton will probably take Indiana while Obama will take North Carolina. Indiana will be close, North Carolina will be a little bigger as far as margin of victory. Clinton will proclaim victory. Obama will proclaim victory. On and on and on and on... all those corn huskers and clam shuckers will be bickering for months about results and polling data while all those people hoping Al Gore will play the savior is sipping a mixed rum drink on a beach somewhere not taking sides in the whole affair... because he's still slightly bitter that this country even allowed an election to be close enough to let that brainless putz of a President steal it out from under him, and then get re-elected in what has become known to me as the Bush re-election war, otherwise known as the war on terror, otherwise known as the war in Iraq, otherwise known as the oil company profit margin, otherwise known as the lube in the ass of middle class America, otherwise known as the reason we have a recession, otherwise known as derailing of the poor by corporate America.

...and people ask me why I don't go into politics. Like how someone's former pastor somehow speaks for a member of his former perish. I was baptized by a priest that carried a torch for kids who carried candles, so what exactly does that say about me... like a pope who was in the Nazi children's corps and later an aircraft gunner... anyone seen one of those million dollar paintings hanging in the Vatican, the kind that if they took a few them and put them up for auction could end world hunger with the proceeds... yeah, what about that?

Enough with this silliness...

I for one would love to see a little anarchy

You know, I just found the Liz Phair bootleg tapes from before Exile In Guyville came out... so amazing.

Who's to say a weatherman doesn't lie
about it currently being 40
instead of 30
because yesterday he predicted it
and there's a bookie in Ronkonkoma
taking bets on the temperature
and he's the type of guy who
A) doesn't like to lose
B) has no qualms about throwing a body in a river
so he kidnaps the weatherman's girlfriend
and sends a letter on looseleaf
describing in great detail
the sort of horrors which would befall her
if the temperature isn't to his liking
and just before he went on the air
he had a moment
where he questioned his own integrity
he studied his maps
his jet stream graphics
he crafted his eastern daylight weather map
programed his slide like clicker
and went on the air
delivering a forecast that included snow
even though the temperature
was 40 degrees
and when he threw it back to Johnny
who proceeded to ask about the snow
and in reply the weatherman said
love knows no season
like a world frozen over
by someone who believes
the over/under on a forecast
is something other than nature's work

There's nothing worse than going to your car at 2am, and after placing the key inside the door, you slightly and ever so gingerly go to turn it, as you have done no less than a thousand times before, only to feel the key give and completely break off in the lock.

There's many terms that could fit that moment appropriately, but having no spare, there's really only one that covers and captures it completely...

"fuck"

Indulge me in a rant...

I find it funny that the great folks of LJ are planning a general strike on what is normally the slowest day of the week on my list. There's so much more important things going on with the world, really, why should I be so overly concerned with the fact that a corporation who's affiliated with the Russian government is canceling free accounts and censoring things that they find to be questionable or indecent. We've got Tibetans being killed in protests in Lhasa, we've got the five year anniversary of the Iraq war, we've got the Clinton and the Obama two headed monster thing that it is, the corporate naming rights to Wrigley Field, the fact that oil companies are still, to this day, bringing in record profits, the President is selling off the poor for the rich to get richer, the thousands of green card solders who are not legal American citizens even though they're fighting in an American uniform in the Middle East, the fact that genocide goes unnoticed in the American media, things like our economy, that has been operating in the far deep red for far too long, which is dwindling down to a point so low that we have lost the powerhouse status associated with American industry, as evidenced by the fact that Indiana just reported it's 3rd largest jump in jobless claims in history. Of course now people on here want to protest because of the new corporation's policies and what they're doing. It reminds of when SBC bought out AT&T and raised their rates for the same shitty and over-priced service, but you didn't see anyone calling for a boycott of phone service, god forbid.

There's so many things about this world that stick in your crawl enough for you to feel motivated to do something, blogging isn't one of them in my mind. I find the idea of a blogger strike to rank up there with the idea of the student protests at UCLA a few years back in support for affirmative action. I'm not speaking out of apathy, but corporations have been doing this for years, and all this proves is that no one really gives a shit until someone starts digging trenches in their backyard... a very American way of protesting. I rarely comment on people's journals, and I post only a couple of times a week depending on what's going on in my own life. I read the people on my lists, it adds to my day, but I find the idea of protesting livejournal for one day to be like trying to impose a gasoline strike for one day. It's a futile effort. In short, most of what they offer on here is a free service, and they still offer a free service, they just want to include ads in all the new and prospective accounts. I've had a paid account for a couple of years, and never have I paid for the service myself. People have donated their money and bought me a paid account, and aside from the number of icons one can have, there's not much benefit to it as opposed to just remaining of free account status. See the idea here is that profit is driving the decision making process of the people who now control livejournal. Is this really a shock? Are we being caught completely off guard by the fact that this company who bought the blogging service from another company is now revamping the site for maximum dollar value?

People want to organize one day, that's their right, but one day isn't going to make a lick spit of difference to the corporation. I've seen a few people here who are advertising the strike who are just leaving livejournal outright, which doesn't make much sense to me either. You're going to advertise and call for a one day general strike but you're leaving the service anyway? Isn't that like protesting the war in Iraq the day before you plan to relocate to Canada? It's like the original owner of livejournal. He's bitching now because of his loss of input and creative control, and doesn't like the direction of service. Hey, that's what happens when you sell your idea off for the sake of making money. You lose the ability to have any say in what goes on with it. You can buy your new house, your new car, and set yourself up in a new life and casually glance back and go, hey this shit isn't right. It's too late, though, you've sold yourself out, you've given the power over to the corporation all for the sake of a greasy buck, and now you're going to complain that you don't like how they're running things.

Corporations don't do charity, unless they get some really good PR or advertising out it. They don't give things away unless what they're going to get back far outweighs their initial gift. You can't fuck the devil without a condom and then complain because your genitals itch. That is directed at the previous owner of Livejournal, who choose to sell out the service for a profit in favor of corporate control. Then that corporate entity turned around and sold the service to an even bigger corporate entity for more money. So everyone will now migrate over to a new journal service which will render itself mute by the fact that there are no large communities on there and it to will either fade into web obscurity or will be bought out by a larger corporation in efforts to turn a tidy profit in spite of the people who made the site what it is. They'll go Facebook or Myspace, or the plethora of other services that exist on the web that specialize in blogging until the next young upstart creates a haven for people online and concedes their creativity and their ingenuity over the thought of making money. The only way you can control that is to actually band together and do it yourself. Create something that speaks beyond the ideas of monetary ethics and financial security. Buy a website, lay down some bread and do it yourself. If you lack the education needed than go use the resources available to you on this great grand invention called the internet and educate yourself.

This will no doubt rub some of you the wrong way, my intent is not to belittle or insult you or your intelligence. I have a great respect for the people on here as I've journeyed with them through their lives over the course of the past few years. It's said because this is my journal, this is my place to say what I think and feel, and whether it be on some corporate monsters server or some independently run website, it's still my page and my volition and creativity that forms the content here. I will not have some corporate sponsor dictate to me how I think and feel. It may be shitty of them to do what they're doing, but it's also very much in their nature. You want to make a difference, call for a week long strike, give alternative options for people who want to actually make a difference instead of just citing the bad and the guilty. Information is indeed power, but only when you use the information for a purpose and towards a goal.

...with a little help from the green water in the Chicago River.