What's Writ 2018

It not Yin or Yang... it's the edge.

What's Writ 2018
by Alfred Lehmberg

Enough is too much! Yeah. I'll write what's writ, written as if to blow a righteous horn from the summary funnel I am levied unasked! 

This aggrieved and resented funnel is via a jealously duplicitous, wholly autocratic, and forlornly hubristic (forget swinish!) society. Society is unmasked, thereby!  Expect no apologies and lesser quarter, eh? That's the way we're going to roll in 2018. So, in the spirit of Festivus, then, it's time to gather around the ceremonial Pole and air a few traditional grievances. 

I'll riff, forewarning, as is my wont. They will be words writ without regard to being read or unread. Extant, I've read them enough for all of us. They mean something to me. They mean something to a shared condition... the inarticulable articulated, at least in aspiration.

To start... Accused of having a "rambling style," I assert that my only defense is that words—to this writer—are but different color paints magically able to change color in association with each other. That's the fact of it. Words are the enlightened thing. Something got right in the Bible...

Sentences are brush-strokes, paragraphs are portraits, and pages are the considered scapes of our experiential sky—the immediately felt presence of the living land and an exciting and unending sky... there can be no apologizing for them. They are all we are and all we can be. Moreover, Wordlessness is the currency of cultural erosion and artistic irrelevancy. I would aspire to constructive relevancy, myself.

What I aspire to write about is the water in which we, like fish, swim. Maybe the reader is not perceiving, as water, the water in which she swims. Perhaps drowning? I'd prefer to try to know it, myself.

...And sincerely, if I didn't have decent credentials I wouldn't hang it all out like this... INVITING society's "favorite-playing" whack with bloody spiked track-shoes! Speaking contrarily UP, OUT, and HONESTLY is an occupation filled with uncalled for hazard, no fooling, I discover. Still, nothing is everything avoiding all but the moments felt presence suspiciously proscribed... what's ignored is missed, regardless. Ours, buoyed by meager senses and smaller cognition, is a very poor felt presence... a humility in that regard is key to a happiness, it is suspected.

Additionally, a loose cannon, even one of admitted small caliber, is a lonely cannon, and all too often a slandered one. I survive.  Artless Arty, Danny Camembert, Richey Red Ridinghood, and one obnoxious little "bastid" from New Zealand would know what's meant by way of allusion, from my own experience. I know of which I speak. Left-handedness is a blessed curse even wielding its literary Excaliber.  Excaliber is not used frivolously... ...It gets colorful over in right-brain territory.

These slanderers, for a record, are the militantly mal-foil-hatted mouthbreathers trying breathlessly to carve out their own craven clout from accommodating backsides. I'll not be so accommodating.  One's victory is Pyrrhic. I won't suffer a trifling. You are what you do. 

An ardent literary if "craptastic" litany of anxious argle-bargles are slanderously iterated by these fatuously homocentric little fish, blithely unaware of their water, even as they push on it pathetically and wholly unaware, I'd presume... swimming in tedious little circles, but illustrating an inappropriate reaction to the stress of an attacking sensible criticism... and a coward's inability to countenance those revolted by your neighborhood mouthbreather's avoidable hypocrisy. You know, attack the critic and not the criticism because the criticism remains to stand.

John Ford, another "favorite" played, criminally persecuted and held in gulag now for over two decades by the elites alluded to, knows what I'm talking about, too, by way of example. Let's remember him in 2018! Bet your ass because it could be! Run even righteously afoul with jealous corruption yourself some time; perceive something in your skies not allowed by an official's officialdom. Life turns on a dime and keeps any change.

John Ford, a genuine intrepid, discovered that the world is infested with soulless serial psychopaths taking great and powerful pains to sharpen the archaic spikes on their "old-world" and archaic track-shoes for sport and profit. The "grinding stone" concerned, in Ford's particular instance, is Ford's obstinately individual and unrecanting backside, betrayed by the bench's rule of law used as a lap dog for the privileged, and its mental health system used to cacoon same, lo these many years! 

Verily, Ford STILL rots in prison for a crime existing only in his accuser's (et al) decidedly criminal mind... to facilitate his accuser's documented criminal agenda. This all happened last century and happens, still!

They hone those smiting shoe spikes to the needle sharpness of a sociopathic shark's tooth... don't they, I've discovered personally, as Ford suffers an extreme first hand, but I'm an old soldier and what's an old soldier to do? Fade away? Mmmmno.

I don't think so. Not this old soldier. ...And it's Festivus!

Thing is, I was good enough for this country when I was killing human beings or destroying property and equipment for it as its convenient cannon fodder cum hired-killer in unending pecuniary wars of aggression, oppression and repression mostly masquerading as a war on terrorism! 

Retired "with all honors," and a past Commandant of a Singular Service School, I'm good enough NOW to teach its sons and daughters how to be compassionate leaders and critical followers, as I did previously with some success in the real world, followers of that which aspires to the relevantly reasonable, realistically responsible, or reasonably enlightened! That, or what's the point?

I would teach them not to suffer tyrants, by God! Or I would have ... in the Trump fueled winter of a horrendous tumultuousness the Nation has never known ...and in a winter of my own? Likely, it's too late for that now... Love for country unrequited...

See? Arbitrarily and unjustly mash us down "here"... We will only endeavor to pop up over "THERE," just meaner! I say true!

Our culture never cops to that because it's a culture, I suspect, the unelected, only, maintain and facilitate or suit their own self-interested prerequisite, jealous prerogative, and over-privileged proclivity. Anything else hurts their corrosive bottom line and challenges cat-bird seats.

As further example, I was myself, too arbitrarily for my money, ash-canned (fired) from a too hard to gain teaching position for lawful activities, ethical expressions, and rational positions... my civil liberties arbitrarily imposed upon... my efficacious pursuit of a constructive happiness derailed... I want a righteous chunk of some rich right-wingnut's  pecuniary ASS for it! See how it works?

I address an ignored grievance, a grievance shared by too many (or it wouldn't even be mentioned) ...and but crickets are heard. That's with ALL respect to the crickets I have heard from, but let's not get too worked up by a metaphor. It's the ROACHES to chap our ass! I'm betting the reader is or has been harried, similarly. That's the point.

We are wronged! We want redress! This fault... this injustice... this turmoil is not ours! Served better we'd be better! Where does this all begin?

Remember high school. I'm betting it hasn't changed much. 

Graduating in 1967 during the Summer Of Love, I was too close to the forest to grasp the contrived enormity of some very suspicious trees! We were rebelling against the old-growth forest for reasons and of needs, as I recall. The individual trees of the forest in which I found myself seemed so hungry for my attention, and, regretfully, it was so few of these trees that I had the wish to understand—more than superficially—and then it was, generally, the WRONG trees. In winter's autumn, this writer sees that now. ...How to teach the potential efficacy of trees... but endure the forest extant, of needs... I digress.

Back to task, 1967. Prior to that it was a time to have the *right* haircut, wear the *right* clothes, be in the *right* clubs and associations, drive the *right* car, hang with the *right* people—a shamefully wasteful romp to curry the favor of—be accepted by—those who made the "official" scene... them and their peripheral adult facilitators. The Summer Of Love put a wrench in the gears of all that. Revealed! Proscribed activities!

Still, though, those elite... and non-elected even then... too many of the advantaged took advantage. A die is cast. Official molds get hard to break. Still, novelty seems inexorable. Change becomes a tidal force. The psychedelic left goes underground, becomes the internet, consciousness is coined and transferred. Conscescence happens.

I was on the periphery of that elite, never quite accepted, but never quite rejected either. I'm a little ashamed to admit that, both ways, but I have to make that painful disclosure to illustrate that I MIGHT know what I'm talking about when I say that the "marginalized majority" outside an "in" crowd are visible to that crowd only as sources of cheap-shot amusement—or as an out and out expendable resource!  That ephemeral, indomitable, and irresistible elite are bred even in public schools—forgetting private ones. Tiers in tiers. Wheels in wheels.

Beyond that, they—a-hem... we, as I came to find out—are valueless, expendable, and invisible. This is not what we *learned* in high school. In high school, we learned about arbitrary class and connected category in an existential reality of authoritarian injustice, rank prejudice, and tolerated wink-nudge bigotry. Came the evolved times and the nascent crawl to equity and gylany from the slimes of Patriarchy and Androcracy, its reptilian racism and monstrous misogyny, slimes currently trying to pull us back... resist!

Being on the uncomfortable periphery of that treasured elite we allude to, some of the invisible marginalized (who *should* have been invisible to me) were not. These were the *geeks* with pocket protectors, the poets, splash artists, and underground thespians. The weird, whacked-out, and wild... the quirky stoners, dorks, and assorted nervous burn-outs or afflicted nut-rolls—those not associated with rally club and the football team—these were a MAJORITY.

They were the challenged and misshapen; they were sensitive and miserable. They were overweight or bosom-less—had acne so bad you could HEAR it sometimes, eh?  Chance-less motes, otherwise strangely colored rainbows of ethnic homeliness and unsettling diversity—all in stark contrast to the relative few of cherished all white-aspirant Ken and Barbi elite-oids. They (we)... were everyone ELSE.

Almost too late I would detect the very real cognitive magnificence of the marginalized group and realize that the seeds of a wondrous future potential—better or worse—were held in the fresh thinking hands of THEIR marvelous singularity! Fuck the "in" crowd and even their gods.

Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, and Steve Wozniak would have been worthwhile people to befriend, back in the day. They were individuals, ready examples of the garden-variety uber-geeken, circa 1967... or so I understand...

The in-crowd of my high school? Well, and knowing a few, most of them PEAKED in high school, I'd wager. If they didn't crash on some privileged alcoholic shore, or inherit *daddy's* going concern, or end up as trophy wives for a descending succession of male in-crowders in failed marriages, they moved on to the shadow-lands of the few, the proud, but that non-elected and shadowy elite. THIS was my aspiration? I don't think so. Dust dry up in there.

Luckily, I'd only gotten a taste of those *enviable* environs to see how ultimately "dry as dust" they truly are. So much for the very transitive value of a short-sighted "IN" crowd. They are "IN" all right. They were (and still are, I suspect) "in"—In self-absorbed, convenient, and perpetual DENIAL of their abject corporeal irrelevancy.

Why? For THEM, a "going concern" with momentum

That part of "them" surviving the drug addiction, decadence, and largely DESERVED psychological distresses... even well insulated from those they'd condemned? That's the bunch to take their unearned turn to pronounce, with the psychotic energy of misery, on the rest of us... ...decide our faiths, fortunes, and futures, it would seem. Seems plain since Reagan. 

I'd surmise that all that is from this faceless bunch sniping originating orders from around corners, starting the whisper campaigns, or denying and complicating an individual's very livelihood for the purpose of having control over those individuals... an oft-repeated theme. It happened to me. I say true.

That's the wing-nut billionaire bunch fronting the sold-out but articulate talking TV-heads in their busy campaign to fan the gonads and sensibilities, of your haplessly clueless brothers and sisters, into the frothy mob of pitchfork-waving and torch-bearing meat bags they can too easily become! It's also the bunch turning some of our kids into early suicides or bomb-making homicidal maniacs, but the point is getting pretty fine already...

We're all at the center of the universe and all those centers are packing together pretty tightly. That's design; we could function alternatively! We could eschew oil and coal for wind and solar, for example.  The finite amount of non-polluted space that we are restricted to—by the aforementioned and shortsighted non-elected—DICTATES that that claustrophobic tightness can only increase as our numbers do.

That is not good news. That is glib understatement.

It's no stretch that even the *best* self-interested (if not self-aware... think reptiles and mammals) social system prosecuting an unchanging and dogmatically rigid continuance will fail, eventually. It always has. That swimming fish alluded to is sometimes thrown out of his water... adapt or die. 

Errant flashes of white-hot irritation fly out of control, finally, in that weaponized and flesh clogged human powder keg of ever-increasing social density... density then precipitating the predictable explosion authoritarians would always foreswear so pretend not to foresee. 

Too, we've FAR from the best social system... perhaps part of the plan, it excuses an ever-inflating professional police force and for-profit prison system, after all... presently near one in a hundred of us in prison. Your garden variety mouth breather won't see a connection. More people in prison, if those vested in for-profit prisons (like our USAG Jeffery Beaureguard Sessions III) have their way. Such is the police state of late thrust upon us... a profitable one.

I suspect it must be the eventuality of a tolerant and rational, if minimal, ongoing liberalism, born from the righteous outrage of the late sixties, keeping those self-repeating horrific instances down to the levels which presently occur! ANY increase in the prevailing level of autocratic authoritarianism would only make that violence occur with much more frequency than it already does. 

We can see those frequency increases now. I can only report how I feel as a victim of that arbitrary and autocratic authoritarianism, a crass authoritarianism on the steady increase already noted. Watch the GOP for ready examples of same. "Both sides to blame" is a myth to sell boner pills and reverse mortgages. No... all of it. All Of. It... is at the feet of what calls itself the GOP.

My treatment makes ME angry! Angry enough for violence? No. But then I have a degree of articulation and can jettison pressure in that manner.

...Others do not, howsoever. Maybe it's these going on psychotropic drugs and murdering people in schools, malls, and at musical events...

I suspect I may know how some of these might feel. America's SON in every category except mindless obedience? I was turned out, turned down, and turned away from a needy billet in America's classrooms for specious, bigoted, uninformed, unenlightened... ...age-discriminating and finally inappropriate reasons, persecuted (this writer offers) under the guise of my interest in UFOs!

Reminiscent of serious threats from the arbitrary-autocratic-unilateralists leaping right out of high-school, I have to fight back! Anything else is default agreement with the social forces ignobly aligned against or truly persecuting the likes of me, and more horrifically and disastrously, individuals not unlike me.

I'm on guard to clear my good name of spurious slanders, continue an interrupted substantive—but clearer—contribution to my society, and live a little closer to the truth... though heavens fall... ...If they could, they should, for my money. 

I'll use the Arts as my efficaciously ethical and individual weapon in that struggle. The pen IS mightier than the sword. That's the history.

I will loudly protest a perceived injustice in just this manner... directly and without gloves. Others similarly affected will fight back (I'm certain) in their own way using weapons of THEIR choice, but whatever the eventual "weaponry," IF that outraged response is blithely and conveniently provoked by the corrupted arbitrary, THEN the consequences for the arbitrary are, albeit tragically (?), richly deserved. Good news? 

Our situation is always a choice for what we could be. You know stupid's not right. There's correctably flawed with a respectful nod to the bottom rank and file... and then there's the impossibly psychotic operating at the behest of top tiered authoritarian monsters and preying psychopaths! Choose. 

"[I'm] a rambler and a gambler and a sweet talkin' [thinking] man... and I love my lovin', but not like I love my freedom*"! Pickle Riiiick!

Read on! 

~~Ã~~

"I cleave the heavens and soar to the infinite. What others see from afar, I leave far behind me." - Giordano Bruno, a "played favorite" scourged by the scurrilous and original deplorables.

*Real freedom... not the "freedom" to suffer squalor in a wing-nut's wet dream where the employer is not required to pay a living wage, for-profit healthcare is unaffordable, and the old, et al, die in the street.