I had too much to dream last night

I woke up this morning with the residue of deep sleep mind meanderings, that the wars that we started all over the world had finally hit home, of mandatory conscription and the continual jet engine roar. Of a city being blown to smithereens, and none of us, having always seen this on screens rather than in front of us, not sure what to do except to run for cover. Constant explosions, complete chaos, omnipresent jingoistic slogans drowned out by the encroaching reality. I don't feel fear, so much as numbness, as if I was expecting this outcome all along.

I don't watch many action movies, but I read the news voraciously, and I can tell when a headline or a visual worms its way into the consciousness and mutates into something else entirely. I've had these kinds of dreams as long as I can remember, but they seem to keep intensifying. I doubt it means anything, but sometimes when I wake up and the world is still there for now, I remember that it's no longer there or never was there for a lot of other people.

scary monsters and super creeps

While the east coast prepares for the storm of doom, we just get a lot of rain, and I was running through the West Side Market Friday night a few minutes to closing time in search of a bag of sweet potatoes and some cilantro. Hung out at the usual spot with the usual suspects talking music and sundry geekery, listening to punk 45s. Kids were running around and playing with balloons among aisles full of records and CDs covered with ersatz cobwebs.

Helped decorate for the big radio station party we throw every year with a night of free tunes and general revelry. Did lots of random finishing-touch kind of stuff, last-minute runs for art supplies and lighting and rock band tour rider items, by the time we were finished, it was time to start, and I didn't bother wearing a costume, just the flannel shirt and the black leather jacket, no makeup, nothing weird. A few people said something to me but they were drunk anyway.

The people-watching was of course fabulous, I had to wonder if some people are just really like this all the time or if they were just playing up that other part of their nature. Not as many unoriginal skanks as a Kent Halloween, a few of the local creepers, enough people I knew that I could mingle freely as both Glenn Danzig and Beavis shilled for votes.

And The Avengers sounded great. I'm a huge sucker for female-fronted punk rock though after taking a hit to the sternum by some crusties, I got out of the pit area after four songs, being too old for this kind of thing. 

The end of the night, we were caffeinated and some of us were buzzed, plans to go nighthawking at the diner down the street deemed irrelevant with the presence of leftover pizza, swank soda, and booze. Conversations about the existence of God, colonialism in Africa, and life, the universe, and everything ensued that kept us laughing and loud until 4am in the dark theater.

And now the daily grind, and bailing my sister out of her apartment situation so that she's not stuck living with some real jerks, and wondering what to do if we've got Halloween shindigs planned for The Kids and the city's decided to cancel it. I fell asleep in class today, but there was so much good time with good people that I'm still buzzed on all the love.

I open up my wallet and it's full of blood

I should have played this on the show this morning, maybe, but there's plenty of other days to be mournful and angry and I feel like I'm permanent blast because it's election season and such. Last night was my grandma's birthday and we had dinner and while my grandfather and I don't see things the same way often, as he listens to way more talk radio than yours truly and I usually have to excuse myself, we were able to agree that as a country we have sucked fantastically (my words not his) at dealing with things, sacrificing freedom for "security," ill-advised ventures into sundry parts, an absurd approach to dealing with the day-to-day, the expansion of bureaucracy, an appalling lack of reflection on the who what and why. We are prideful and cowardly as a country, we continued to pass the buck and consume with gusto, because we're not the ones who are sacrificing anything.

We should have just moved on, he says, instead we've turned it into something else to buy and that cheapens it. Who needs a memorial? Who cares if someone wants to build a mosque over there? Life goes on.

Mind you, this isn't a peacenik talking at all. This is someone who's more close ideological to Glenn Beck than Glenn Greenwald, but even he's getting fed up with all this hagiography and the flag-waving.

I wish we could have done what Norway did when dealing with a national tragedy, sure there were the platitudes of coming together, but not fearing one's neighbor, welcoming increased militarization, moving on after dealing with wackjobs with weapons, not letting it change our day-to-day. I really respect that. I wish we had done that.

And then last night I ran into my movie night/softball homies at the gas station. We watched Stripes and drank sweet tea and talked about the way things were growing up for us, the indoctrination, the propaganda, each of us is a decade removed and grew up in very different circumstances. When I was younger, my anger was more abstract, now I'm way more chilled out but there's certain things that really angry up the blood more than ever. I say, happy to be among folks who aren't fearmongering with WAR ON TERROR! WAR ON CHRISTMAS! WAR ON DRUGS! WAR ON WOMEN!

I'm fed up with people trying to scare me. I'm fed up with other people being screwed over in order to maintain an unsustainable way of living that's starting to unravel. I can't be around the party-line-towers on either side because I find myself far to the ends of either of them. I want election season to be over, because I'm sick of the propaganda and the fact that my whole adult life has been a national nightmare. 

The car is on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows

The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death

The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

It went like this:

The buildings tumbled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies
Picked through the rubble
And pulled out their hair

The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze

I said, "Kiss me, you're beautiful -
These are truly the last days"

You grabbed my hand
And we fell into it
Like a daydream
Or a fever

We woke up one morning and fell a little further down
For sure it's the valley of death

I open up my wallet
And it's full of blood

golden dystopian

Friday night commiserations with sundry friends, philosophical meandering keeping us up til 2am before I drove back to the east side and wondered if the mix CD I made for him made any sense, considering most of it wasn't in English and the sequencing was somewhat idiosyncratic.

I've been walking so much the past couple days, the carnivalesque festivities of Parade the Circle with good people, wandering through the art museum seeing things anew yet also missing the Asian and Islamic art that's been AWOL for years now with the renovations, was mercifully bailed out from waiting for the trolley back to the west side by my old college roommate who worked the event. This is one of my favorite festivals in Clevelandia because I always like seeing what different ideas everyone comes up with every year.

 photos courtesy of the daily rag since I haven't gotten my shots off my camera yet.

A friend of mine calls me as I'm out walking on Sunday afternoon and we kill some time together before he goes to work, driving in his rusty car that makes him look like a "person of interest" despite his legal blank slate, listening to hip-hop, devouring Turkish food and he tells me tales of valet parking (Bruce Springsteen fans treat him the best, Young Jeezy fans were the worst) and of what he's reading in 1970s textbooks found in his grandma's basement.

I don't see much of him anymore and I miss the ease of the conversation and the laughter and the shared love of strange beauty, nature, and good tuneage and the mutual skepticism about the way the world is that comes from growing up around adults who harbored a distrust of the state in all its forms, though those in my world sometimes had memberships in the NRA and those in his were involved in the Black Panthers. He's a car guy and fascinated by machines at the air show but disconcerted by the blase attitude toward blowing things up. I remember us standing on top of an abandoned factory as warplanes roared overhead on Labor Day Weekend and the spooky feelings we got in that urban wasteland.

I head up to the garden to pull weeds and hang out, and I come home with a huge bag of strawberries and me and the lady across the street are picking mulberries off the tree in the back yard and I pick up more at the abandoned church around the corner to make some weird amalgam of granola and fruit cobbler like a good hippie. Some kids walk by and ask if they're edible, I hope the cop watching me isn't going to bust me for trespassing, and there's more berries than I know what to do with. It might be time to learn how to make wine.

I wake up at 1am this morning to the smell of burning and wander through the house looking for the source and realize that if there was an actual fire in there I'd be dead or aflame by now, and also that there's no smoke detectors in my apartment. Fun times. Someone on the bus tells me there was a fire a few blocks over, and when I get downtown there's helicopters in the square and while the press release talks about how it's "occupied" I feel a bit creeped out, like someday this kind of invasion for the week will be normal. Because nothing says Fighting The Man like glorifying the military industrial complex, you know...

we live in the shadow of a dying world

This was my first time at the film festival for this flick, which was shot beautifully (though I am a sucker for neon signs, general urban wasteland, as it evokes melancholia of the cathartic and creative kind.It's familiar to me, I guess.

And I know I overthink everything, that the synapses in my brain are shooting off in a hundred incoherent directions, because honestly most of us don't see beyond ourselves and are often wrong. The policies of Bush and Reagan are blamed of course, and maybe for good reason, but NAFTA was a Clinton thing, and it's been four years since Dubya was in office. Reagan was 30 years ago. Union presidents are just as much profiting off the little guy's vulnerabilities as the bosses, which I see in my own place of employment and when my dad comes home with his blood angried up from Teamster meetings. Everyone boils everything down to the cost-benefit analysis to the detriment of all the people involved.

There is talk about the toxicity of capitalism but also longing for the glory days of big cars and of the glory days of the Cold War when things were good and we made war machines and everyone bought our crap instead of us buying our crap from China. If that isn't capitalism, I don't know what is, and is the answer to the destruction of our communities and souls really found in the making of fighter jets and Christmas garland? I find that hard to believe. There is talk that we lost our "exceptionalism" as a country but I don't know if that's such a bad thing. Now everyone's got the same standard of living as us and look at how great that's turned out.

China came up quite a bit, whether intentionally or not, and one of the people in the film wished that we peons had their same ability to take "collective action" but that kind of worked out badly for lots of peasants who starved, led to a lot of pollution and environmental havoc, heavy censorship and destruction of traditional and beautiful art forms, not to mention replacing one oligarchy with another. I don't know how much it benefits us to replace one kind of suckitude with another.
 
There's always someone bigger to blame, but as I gazed at a big screen full of crumbling towers and broken American dreams, I realize that we are all at fault here.It's no secret that the rich profit off the rest of us, but we are just as selfish. This lifestyle of fossil fuel consumption and urban sprawl was unsustainable. It was the town that Ford built (the film was financed in part by the Ford Foundation, so there won't be biting of feeding hands and there were quite a few digs at Chevy), and eventually the world changed. Technology made assembly line jobs obsolete, the cost-benefit analysis found ways to cut jobs and still maintain the same level of productivity while boosting profit margins.

So it gave me the sense of the waning days of empire. There were others that rose and fell before us, other cities that were once jewels of the world that are mere shadows now, due to war, environmental changes, or the shifts in commerce and power that led to eventual abandonment and disintegration. The list is endless... Samarkand, Timbuktu, Carthage, Cuzco, Mesa Verde, Axum, Thebes. It's hard for me not to look at these places and see our future.