snow

xenos phobos

I’m a picker, a poker, an itcher. I can’t leave things alone. It is the same for when I have a pimple; I will perform the operation myself. I have no problem watching myself in the mirror as I adroitly execute the act. This goo that surfaces from my pore or broken skin does not disgust me as it has already interloped with my body. I have no repulsion, repugnance for it per se. I squeeze and pop it more for obsessive-compulsive satisfaction than anything else. True, I don’t care for it’s ugly visual presence but the act of popping brings itself great delight.
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Not so with other people’s zits. Other people’s zits are filled with puss and disease. I wouldn’t want to pop or touch them. Looking at the whites of the centre of other people’s zits fill me with a fear of putrid filth and contamination. Maybe they oughta wash their face a little more often, huh? Hey and you know, go easy on the chocolate candy and chips.

I find this quite interesting. I cannot deny the fundamental love hate shift between myself and another: It is in my mind that this pimple popping illustration exemplifies undoubtedly the pure innate aversion we have to strangers. Why is it that other people’s puss seems nastier than our own? Why can we lick our fingertips after eating something delicious but recoil at the idea of licking an unknown’s? Why is it that we view other people with such disdain? Could it be that xenophobia is hard wired into our bodies?

As an example, look at someone you know. Someone you know and love. Now imagine that you are that person. Pretend that you don't exist anymore that you are in their body and that you see the world through their eyes. You think the way they do, smell the way they do, touch the way they do. Your self is gone. When I think of this I am overwhelmed with grief: Lost and forlorn, bereft of home, the universe makes so much less sense and feels so much less welcome. I reject this fantasy and want nothing to do with it.

As an exercise I would like to ask every one of you natural born pickers and itchers and pokers to squeeze someone else’s pimple. No need to terrorize someone that you do not know, just ask permission from a loved one; your child or lover or extended kin. Consider it a form of therapeutic emancipation. It will be part of your pathway to self-actualization. This will be considered a step in your liberation from the confines of small mind provincialism.

Join me in this celebration of freedom! Say No! to bigotry and Yes! to love in all its state and form.

2 + 2 = 4

Dear George,

Forgive me I realize that it’s been a while since I’ve written to you. I guess I've been having too much fun. You have no idea about what it’s like here now. In many respects, you were right, however, it certainly wasn’t the way in which you had envisioned. Let me explain.

Just a few days ago, I was on the phone with the phone company seeking some information. The pleasant sounding female automated voice at the other end suggested that I submit my voice for their voice recognition protection system. Intrigued, I followed her instructions. After replying to all her security identification questions she told me to repeat the special phrase for recording:

My name is xxx and this recorded voice belongs to #%X?!!-Inc. In a stupor I began to respond. In fact, the humiliating truth is, I repeated the entire phrase. She quipped "great! Now repeat one more time."

I think it was then that a strong unpleasant feeling began to surge from my stomach upwards. No, not vomit; rage (rage no longer consumes me, though I will not deny that I keep it for special occasions). George? This is the thing that I want to tell you.

It’s that you were right. You were right about big brother, just wrong in the way that it would mingle within our lives. Our world is pretty and bright. We can purchase it in parts or in whole and in any colour that we want. At times we may be perceived as vacuous, gormless, but we are too busy choosing the right skin colour to notice.

We have 24 hour television, convenience stores, gas stations, technical assistance and more! In our world everyone is beautiful and if they are not we have remedies and cures or money back guarantees. There is no grey, there is no monotone. It’s the overwhelming information that we are given and the intoxicating banality in which it is swaddled that seduce us.



Take for instance this recent story about a car thief who was convicted wholly because a mosquito was found in the stolen car carrying his suckled blood. We should feel good about this story right? The virtuous have nothing to be upset or worried about. But I’m worried George, very worried. I am worried that we aren’t worried enough.

It’s an outrage it is. It’s an outrage that my insides can become the property of a large corporate firm or a government security system that embrace its monetary profit as its principal interest. Always one must ask the question; what’s behind the one-month free subscription, the free bag of chips? At what cost and at who’s expense do we del$riously procure a graphite pencil? We mustn't delude ourselves; our toys and medals that parade our home will not save us or compensate for selling our soul.

pigeon

sublime

"LQC has been tantalising physicists since 2003 with the idea that our universe could conceivably have emerged from the collapse of a previous universe.
Instead of a universe that emerged from a point of infinite density, we will have one that recycles, possibly through an eternal series of expansions and contractions, with no beginning and no end."

Dear Emmanuel,

I claim no expertise in either loop quantum cosmology or Kantian study. I claim nothing but this figment letter to you. On a lazy Sunday morning, wrapped under my goose down, watching from the bedroom window, front seat centre to the stage of my private universe, the blowing snow from my roof as it tunnels itself in cyclone fashion, I get to pontificate as detached observer such things as the meaning of life.


As I look at the sinuous tufts of snow I consider wouldn’t it naturally make sense that life is infinite? That everything recycles? And I smile as I consider this a strangely religious way to look at the ‘origins’ of the universe. Simultaneously I think what an existential joke this is then, that there is no genesis, that each time we point to a dot, the original dot, another one forms from the haze of the first; from the negative space; the void; the trace. Think inside the box. Think outside the box. As long as we think in relation to borders there will always be a frame to break. (yes yes; turtles all the way down) Is life without frame? If life had thought would it be laughing its brain off at our funny little measuring apparatuses and contraptions? Who wouldn’t? Who in the know, alas, we are out of The Know. What we know comforts us, even if it may be unpleasant. But the unknow is the most powerful. The Unknow. The attempt to understand The Unknow is maybe our biggest compulsion. Is searching for meaning our collective unconscious addiction? Are rulers and scales and mathematical equations vice: Kindred to cars and technological toys and the bottle and the syringe and the laboratorium and the bag of chips and the frantic shopping list and the cigarette and the pick pocketing and the shoes and the corset and the books and boxes and boxes of rare and special things?

Emmanuel, is this not, to date, the finest exemplary example of the sublime: The notion that the big bang was not the beginning but just another notch in the infinite line of life?

yours truly,

s

hands

I am a woman of my word and for proof I point to these. They don’t seem like much; stumpy digits attached to limb. My best friends they are however; my lovers all ten of them. The palm soft and yielding can stand the pressure of full force animation. Touch, hold, cast, pummel. Too mottled for carpel tunnel.

my inauguration

This is my new home. Welcome. It's the dead of morning. It's the born of winter. It's a new road. Here is my beginning. From other places I come. Not a true neophyte but I have been known to be sometimes foolish. Sure on my feet, in my heart, on the street. Hesitant in my brain, resistant to pain and to things that are always the same; I get locked into a groove that nulls me and dumbs me down. Every once in a while I need a good shake-up. I come from other places. Here I am in the dead of morning. The sun has yet to show its purply pink hue.

Anything can happen.