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The Bastille of Everything Beyond the Eyes

CEE

    It would figure a contentious nation like ours, sported an outer fringe, neo-Founding Father, named, “Paine”. As surely as the onomatopoeia of his surname, the author of Common Sense, but for the rigidity and customs (today, Standards and Practices) of his era, immediately communicates to one by feel, why he spent the days of Lexington and Concord, doing what I currently do. Unlike George Washington, who, by all accounts—until drafted by “name” friends to ride for our original Cause—was content to elder, gnarl, sicken and die as a monied Virginia squire, the anarchist Thomas Paine, exemplified my mother’s branding of Me as a carbon copy of my Dad: “Nothing’s ever good enough!”
    Rigidity and customs with no signing off on Tina Fey’s # count of “vagina” uses, make Thomas Paine but a name in 2017, one we think stood next to Franklin as he took quill in hand, or fired until gutted on Bunker Hill, or had a noose slipped around his neck, regretting he had but one life, as the other, he’d traded to Lucifer for magic beans. But, our “Paines” are with us, today, which would be terrific, as I believe in inclusion if I don’t have to hear the shit. Mom’s family has a history of hearing problems, so I might get lucky, but, that’s not the fix I want. Only having cable television turned off for near a decade, has kept me breathing, above ground. You know the lone reason, why life is NOT Orwellian, yet? We get to choose whether or not we have a Telescreen in our dwellings.
    Of course, there are all kinds of Telescreens. Everyone gets to share on the WWW, don’t they (just buy the MP3 of whatever song I don’t want you to play for me—you’re askin’ for it, if you tread where others blat their, “Don’t Tread on my picayune personal obsession”)? Me, I do it with Old and New wrapped, pig-in-a-blanket into Mobius blanket, and as though I wore a Roman collar, held a hatchet in one hand and a 7^th cavalry sword in the other (google the famed depiction of abolitionist John Brown, by John Steuart Curry, except, I don’t play facial hair). Others, must voice their “‘peen-yun”, as I said in The Thing in The Lounge at Wagon Wheel. “‘Peen-yuns”, understand, are houses of cards of links and blogs and shares by those likeminded, battened into paper sailboats of “facts”. The New Painesinthe, want to share. Sharing, is so important to them. Many, claim they are “reporting”. Most of the many, lie the title of “journalist”. A hefty percentage of the most, call patronizing spin mixed with a worldview in place by the time they could vote, “truth”. And something Tom Paine himself called, “the Bastille of the word”, is both enemy and friend, Big Brother and Ste. Jean d’Arc, Decaprio and the other one, the one who had him put in the iron mask, the other historical guy there, you know. The Bastille, or let’s now say the Spandau of any word, any concept or ideology, Cause, hope for More’s Utopia or halfbaked bright idea, any thought as prison, has both prisoners and jailers. Because of our cyber friend, The Loch ‘Net Monster, anyone makes everything anything—to my mind, only without objection, in that addicts get to die as they choose. And, when it comes to the “how we all should live, folks” Helpful Hannahs, imprisoning comes in whole, spoken litanies, through bad social behavior, a twist cone of the super-organized, Key Clubbin’, frown-at-you-forgetting-to-remove-your-shoes, “but that’s what the rulebook says” kids, and the one in almost every Real World who, screw you, was going to take the private bedroom, if it escalated to cops, and ran on COPS.
    A lot of clips and news as “reported”, rambles, spiced with insults and reminders it ain’t the 20^th no more (like you need to tell us—Crystal Pepsi, we hardly knew ye...). These people count on you not sitting up straight to click away, giving them time to build their nucleus. Time, they require like an iron lung, as their viewpoints echo the animation in Liquid TV’s “Stick Figure Theater”, but not as nuanced. If said news views were stated in their pure form of bumper sticker sloganism, these wise-eyed, wisecracking wiseasses, would come off like the so what-middle of the Actual Planet of the Apes—Dr. Zaius, kneejerking away: Charlton Heston is a hostile invader, as he told them he was from Fort Wayne. “A fort!” concludes simian Torquemada, and even as a boy, I’m rolling eyes heavenward, “God, what a stupid asshole!”
    The behavior of pundits and pun lovers cum activists is tired, and died as insightful, with George Carlin. The rhetoric, I find inane. That they think it a call to arms, has me wondering if nitrous oxide is still sold over the counter. It’s as though because unionism exists as entrenched in America, the genome of acceptance or apathy can be exploded into some Fidel-came-out-the-hills bit, where people impossibly ride in jeeps standing up, gun butt to hip, and never go tumbling after Jack and Jill. The rhetoricians, especially the ones FAR too obsessed with DC Comics, I think believe Underdog’s Super Energy Pill, was real, and somehow can be recreated with classroom asshat behavior and a dash of Noah Webster. “BlahBLAH, ‘sheeple’! BlahBLAH, a populace willing to be led!!” ‘Makes you start reflecting if, maybe, Uncle Wiggly was a historical figure. Perhaps a revolutionary. (?) I have to love this concept of learning by grammar school recess. “If you don’t know the new words I learned at camp, you’re a fartypants, and I will tell you you are, in front of others, until you suck my words. And I will make up words. And logic of my own. I’ll butt in, overtalk like a phone solicitor. Make sure the real boogereaters hear me use my new, neato keywords. Jeer. Snipe with sneers. Mug, like I’m having a doody in my shorts“ (possibly explaining those with the “artwork unfit to be a Halloween mask” masks). It’s a structured technique, dipped Achilles in the Pool of Condescension, but it’s no child of Freud, Zig Ziglar or the NSDAP—it’s Professor Bitter Buns having reawakened your inner “wash the other kid’s face in snow”. Assuming you forgot that hot hollowness, to begin with. Or are blessed, and know it’s hateful.
    Payout, here = Reasoning and argumentation, are about winning, as in any conflict.
    It truly is fish or starve. You agree to have sex or you don’t. You have the baby or you don’t. Sandaled toes stick north of the Boundary Monument at Tia Juana, or they don’t. The cop drops the hammer or he doesn’t. A pipeline is built or it’s not, finished or it’s not. Relative temperatures say, “Dead Earth in a few decades”, or they don’t. Words of any sort, can be openly uttered by anyone who chooses to use them. No one likes to think of this as a lifetime pit fight, where you have The Bad Guys and The Not-Quite-As-Bad Guys. But, proof’s in the pudding. A friend long ago, confronted re: the intractability of another in a minor matter of game rules,
    Q: “Why do you have to have your way?”
    A: “I don’t. It’s only that, if I don’t get my way, someone else, is going to get theirs’.”
    It’s really very simple. “Manichee, Manichee!”, a little mockingbird keeps singing. When it comes to Intended End Result, Highlander, there can be—startin’ to get the picture? “Winning”, et al = Given Way = Control = “The Decider” = if-an-oppositional-path-leads-to-success-as-proscribed, then, Firesign, “everything you know, is wrong!” This could well include all the sciences and their data, the place of Zero in mathematical configuration, and your life mattering, if the Mount Olympus-gang click, “Dislike”. Success, is All. I champion Jaqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls), e.g. it is The Public, who decide greatness. Or genius. Via success. Success, determines “correctness”—if it doesn’t, I insist argumentum ad hominem be granted validity across the board. We’re all jailers and their prisoners, or none of us are. POV, comes with the handcuffs of yielding to any fait accompli. Doesn’t matter, if ugly, angry, hate-spewing Quasimodos, build an ark out of leather and balsa wood, then jump up and down while we sail to our goal. Did We Get There? “Yeah.” Well...
    I’d throw in, assuming people in main would rather not be led, is in itself, foolish. Evel Knievel, trying to jump the Snake River thinktank. I take my cue from the 90’s Aussie series, Brides of Christ, the poor, dumpy nun who could not assimilate Vatican II and cowered on the floor before the Mother Superior. You want “human”, Mr. Guy? THAT’s IT. All the taunts and “read this article you’ll find gibberish”, all the “let me prove you don’t exist” or Sunshine Mankind as word games, won’t cut it, don’t cut it. FAIL. Some, if you opened up History like a website on the update, would hump pre-Magna Carta to death. Let’s emphasize the “whole”, of inclusion. It’s living South Park as ethic, in that all oxes are gored in the fullness of time...all oxes, and no one can censor that or interfere. There’s room for those who cry to be led, and room for those who wish a life as naked, shouting, “Point of order!”...but, that elbow room exists only as rigidly stratified. Unversality, cannot exist as fully overlapped. There is room for us all, apart, among thinking/believing/POV gens, these here and those over there, and for my group, I dibs a Far and Away land grab which forces personal enemies to relocate...but, the roads will be jammed for a few years, get used to that. A Bunch, Have To Move. It’s multi-mini-Germanys, pre-Bismarck, because the next alternative, if we descend the scale, is “stay palette-overlapped in the mud of IDIC (“infinite diversity in infinite combinations”, yeesh), but then, STFU”. Even I’m willing to do that, and stow your rejoinder, but how many out of 100, are going tick a lock on their syllables, for a referee’s count of 10? I suppose we could pass laws, then enforce them, strictly. “I don’t know. Third base!”
    Okay, no Stratified Earth, No Shutting Up, as God Knows, every shaver-me-lad with polysci chin stuck out, pouts, “This is FREE!”...let’s descend the scale:
    Wow. Uhh, okay, “we all live together as we presently do, but ladle in that ‘Law’-thing as stated, all decisions final, the arbitrator is our god.”
    No? Okay, next lower choice...here we all are as now, say whatever we want without any restrictions (‘cause we’re FREE!!), and if I kill you, then it’s all right for your brother to kill me, and one of my number kills him, and it’s a free-for-all from Dogpatch, USA, but with Matthew Brady pix of corpses and HD vids of weeping children.
    What? No? Well, I’m afraid the next level is the bottom one. The gutter one. Run out in the street and start unloading, NOW, goddam us, every one. If you’re in a missile silo, draw on and begin winging your partner until he trades his key, thumbprint or retina scan, for his momentary life. The bottom level of Solutions of Tolerance, is redux. Romney’s Etch-a-Sketch, as I like to call it. Mainly, the sound you hear if you listen close on the shake. That’s the sound of one hour after Man agrees not to agree to disagree. Man isn’t agreeable, no matter the diaper lads and iron au pairs. There are many who have shrunk to watching the flower live, or who cannot continue, as the pain of struggle is too much (I was there, once). There are also those who go into that good night or just hang out all night, laughing like psychotics as the distilleries laugh all the way to the bank. In main, however, it’s The Main Event, and brackets multiplicative. Too many, though I and ten thousand went away, will still refuse to shake hands. It doesn’t work like 60’s and 70’s dramedies, where we fight and jibe but still are friends. In this—I will actually call it “latter day” moment, it’s personal honor and dignity bursting, John Madden as his own cartoon, through your taunts and belittlement and faux parental barbs, re: “ego”. You betcha it’s ego, but not “fragile”. Holy. The “I”, is beyond reproach, if this carries over to interference by control of thought and breath and movement. Protocols for these, cannot be grandfathered in. You don’t jack with motherboards. Han Solo shot first, boom goes the dynamite. Trying to recreate understanding past Freudian development, with the 9th grade male bonding of “blowing shit” married to Freshman Logic as mental fencing destroying your foundation like it’s boot on Paris Island, has reached mutation level. The post-secondary process is backing up with fails, stubs, negatives, corruptions and the black tater chips you used to only find one of, in any bag. There are now, HELLO!!, all Bastilles and no roofs. Every voice, IDIC making sick and “blog” the sound of puking, making the process of indoc...brain wa...education, one of low yield, with much higher odds of a 180 who turns right back on his Fronk-en-steen. And, that sounds so singular, doesn’t it? Compute the factors, and multiply.
    Put briefly, any real fighters, old and new, will never concede, each for their reasons, but dug to China, it’s for Self. Goof face, acidic remark, blahblah bullshit, have you any sense, rarely cows. It’s too late in the Timeline. Jade, is a hard substance. No fighter keels. And, look out, you have harmed the One True Self of Iron John Doe. No, he can’t reach through the monitor. But, you’ll never bring him into the party line. Not now. Which leaves Washington, DC, most of its measurements tipped into a 9-member panel of “Who cares what Jefferson meant, I don’t play that shit”. It’s the bully-God concept I shared with you last year, but no danger of prayers unanswered. Providing the deck is stacked in your favor. Or marked well enough. Or you hold the lone Serra Angel. Point driven, it’s a game. Are you there to lose it? Ah, I thought not. Then, I just won this one.
    Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, someone gonna take the stein full a’ change to a Coinstar machine, and someone gotta accept it wasn’t him/her/letters in the spectrum. If we’re talking cards, dice, miniatures, “Axis and Allies Cold War Continuation” or Richie Cunningham catching quarters off his elbow, so what? Chill, Dick Dastardly, you’ll get ‘em next time. So, you lost your tenth straight at Triv. Pursuit, big deal. You Know You’re Obviously Smarter. Games as parlor, come and go, unless it’s Rachel Dratch’s finest hour and a hardcore goes apeshit. Losing at control of ‘who’ controls which tweaks of the one, Ultimate Reality, means at least 4 years in a nation-sized minimum security prison. Well you know, No One in prison, is ever “guilty”, and even today, many facilities field boxing teams. The men on these squads, command immense respect...but here, the analogy breaks down, as any prison is a large “box”, but America is a box of what constitutes “normal”...which, keeps being altered. And, it’s 4 years of low current shock, no matter a single decision made, no matter pols and bills arranged like chips at the Vegas tables. I refer you Above, to the “fails, stubs, negatives, corruptions” which chum post-secondary processing. The mutations, the lone wolves. I’ll advance the radical theory it’s wrong to claim lone wolves as tabulated, have always been there, but now societal tensions bl’hbl’h-babbleshit. No, these came naturally, Tinker to Evers to Horace Mann, through every advancement as mistake, every legislation in error, every taking of scissors to what might well disgust but wasn’t broken. Again, you could have left Man as he was, and burned all which you thought up. Buried your anger. Taken life as an endless, unchanging chord of “Is”. Or, you could have kept all the metal crap secret, only for top echelon, directed Man’s life quietly and he who spoke of it, disappeared. Cut to a high school friend and I as Duelling Cosells on the NFL Highlight Reel, “But, NO...!”
    If I told you I avoided having children, because children put their parents in nursing homes (check the stats), I’d receive no sense, only horseass emotion. Yet every monster created, though the purpose be noble, though dreamers strive for good...no. Gonna hit the game show buzzer on ya. Maybe give ya a “Tonight Show” rim shot. Every stronger, suped-up, more powerful, larger, expanded, megalithic entity newly made, crushes the flower when you attempt to show Beauty. The one I’m speaking of, is composed of millions, and would define Beauty and Ugliness for you. That, is the equation, Ruk. Existence, survival, must cancel out programming. Hence, the System destroys Itself, Rock ‘em Sock ‘em. Not bad, but Ant Community is cleansed best, via the postwar method—get gas can, lightly pour into cracks, then bonfire match tossed. Pretty final. There isn’t a lot of equivocation. This, too, is natural selection. “But, can Satan cast out Satan?” old Bible pals would ask.
    No. But, then there’ll be only one.
    Credits. Look for your keys.

CEE

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