Gumption on wet rocks

Berries for the triumphant

Alive one more day

——————

The blue eyed pirate

scrambling up through thorny thwartage

sings to the trees and plays for the burning sun.

And I,

falling far and faster

am euphorically fearful.

So do your worst, bedraggled swaggler

For I cannot even see the ground.

—————————————–

Today, by blind persistence, we emerged triumphant. Neither rain nor our own self-induced delirium could stop us. Climbing up and up over wet rocks, the skies opened up and showered us with blessings. We were rewarded with blueberries, rainbows and a general sense of enchantment.

From the mountain’s precipice to its bellows we scrambled and scampered, dripping wet and growling for more. Higher Lower Faster Deeper.

The fact that my body and mind were rusty, unclean from the night before didn’t matter. I felt (feel) more real and alive than ever. Precariously perched on a rock with death straight down on three out of four sides, the fear was not gripping but flowing like a strong current. It raced and coursed through me, my body beguiled by my mind’s appetite for adrenaline. But today was not my day to die, so I surrendered.

I’d rather feel fear in life than be comfortably dead. Due to our own horrible ingenuity and insured survival we have come to an existence almost empty of the fear of imminent danger our ancestors knew. For this reason I welcome the fears that may take hold of me and spin them back upon themselves.

The thought of being numb to fear is the most terrifying thought ever.

Warm, sleeping hand on my breast

I wait for nothing

(What a wonderful form is the Haiku!)

…Success that has been achieved through hard work. Strength of character and will ensuring that ideas come to fruition. The responsible use of power and wisdom gained through experience…

(from paranormality.com)

Remember also that the concept of death is integral to both the practical and the psychological maintenance of the nation-state, not least of all with respect to the role it plays in the constitution of a national identity.  When we think within a framework that distinguishes between human beings based on whether or not their deaths are for us to mourn, we allow ourselves to be banded together by the forces that benefit from the construction of a boundary between Us and Them in the first place.

Here is the flag that will be laid upon the graves of fallen soldiers across the country today:

I always loved the flag as a kid, and in fact I still do.  But that flag is not me; it does not symbolize, embody, or even bring to mind the way I relate to others.  And to me, the buried at Arlington National Cemetery are fallen daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, and sisters and brothers before they are fallen Americans.

Aliens have been all up in the news, y’all. First, on Tuesday, José Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory, said in an interview with the Vatican’s daily newspaper that the possibility of extraterrestrial life is a hypothesis which “cannot be excluded” and that he does not see a contradiction between the Catholic faith and belief in–or the existence of–aliens.

(Forget for a moment that Corrado Balducci–chief exorcist for the archdiocese of Rome, close personal friend of the pope, and (oh yeah) Vatican official–has openly discussed the reality of ET contact on Italian TV, emphasized that it is deserving of further study, and indicated that the Vatican is closely but quietly pursuing the UFO/ET phenomenon.)

Just a day later, Britain’s Ministry of Defense responded to mounting calls for disclosure (via Freedom of Information Act requests) by beginning the phased release of its so-called “X files,” which is what the press has taken to calling any set of official government documents pertaining to UFO sightings and/or possible ET activity.

Clearly, the Vatican and the MoD are engaged in a full-on media battle for cool points in the hearts and minds of UFO enthusiasts the world over. The question we must ask is clear: who wins the hipness war?

To answer this question, we need to establish some criteria. What are we looking for in a truly hip alien-related news byte? What’s so damn sexy about disclosure, anyway?

The Vatican/MoD case is tough right out of the gate because each side is an aged, powerful, and traditionally stuffy institution in whose shadows it is easy to imagine much sexy danger, mystery, and conspiracy-type activity going on. That’s basically the ideal type of organization to find saying anything in the public sphere about aliens, and for one simple reason: they’re exactly the kind of people you’d expect to know what was really going on (that is, if there really was anything really going on…like, for real…). Both stories are instantly extremely hip, then. Just imagine James Bond investigating UFOs for the MoD or reptilian overlords walking the halls of the Vatican. Hip…and hip.

The relative hipness of these stories should therefore not be judged merely by what one’s imagination can do with them. Other criteria suffer similar problems of equivalence. How much fodder for conspiracy theories do the stories provide, for instance? How useful are they to those who would try to extract the truth from between their lines?

For my money, the Vatican’s story has to be cooler. The MoD may have released a bunch of “data” in the form of these files, but the Vatican has done what all UFO/ET enthusiasts secretly crave from powerful institutions. That is, they have said very little in fact, but what they have said will fuel wild speculation for months to come.

…that Boone had an underground black metal scene. They crawl out of their caves on the nights they are summoned to dance unabashedly, morbidly mad painted faces and all. The thing they enjoy most is a good party crashing, as I witnessed not two nights ago. Before then I honestly had not the clue as to what black metal was. And what a time to find out. It was my friend’s birthday party, and he wanted a black metal theme… and damn if he didn’t get it. I arrived late after trying to bake a cake, get all dressed up and flirt with a beautiful gender-queer friend all at once. We put together the most deviantly sexy costumes we could muster, including breasts bound with duct tape and homemade angel wings from a duck I butchered myself. Yep, we took it there.

So we arrive to find everyone head banging in a creepy metal way, faces painted black and white as death, shotgunning PBRs and growling obscenities. By the time I was halfway done my bottle of Vampire Pinot Noir syndicalnickel propositioned we bring our party to the bar, where a dance party was supposedly in full swing. By some fateful miracle we find the few sober people and they agree to drive everyone, who are by this time are only speaking in metal growls and rasps, groping indiscriminately and instigating public acts of S&M.

One might think this would be stifled once we got into the public eye… but it had only just begun.

We arrive at the bar, roughly 15deep, looking terrifyingly debaucherous, and refusing to pay a cover. We were just too metal to pay a cover. Walking in we noticed maybe a dozen people sitting backed up against the wall like they knew what was coming and were very afraid. That fear was well founded. We descended upon their cute little party like wolves in heat just newly discovering how powerful their bodies are. Audacious and fearless we quickly transformed the place into our own little world of lusty darkness, pulling our victims into the tangle of sweaty painted bodies and only releasing them once they gave us what we came for. Innocent bystanders must have thought we had all taken a large dosage of MDMA- but we were just momentarily embodying our greatest fearful fantasies. Somehow the face paint and constmes catalyzed a metalicious mob mentality- and it was contagious. That shit went viral. Soon we had most of the patrons totally immersed in our game of pain and pleasure, making out with us in corners and right on the dance floor, with us and our friends, simultaneously. We succumbed to the heathen in each other, creating space for the fantasies we wouldn’t otherwise let ourselves have.

The next morning after hours of adoringly violent love making, combat boots and all, we laughed half drunkenly in the sunshine on the front porch, half out of pure self-satisfaction and half at our own blatant absurdness. We had created another world, one in which death was a welcome phase of life, anyone could find love and pain never felt so good. The Boone black metal scene should emerge more often, and show the rest of this town what a bad-ass night looks like.

Until then, at least I know a few more people who wont mind if I try to suck their blood under a full moon.

The Hillary Clinton Deathwatch

UPDATE:
Hillary + Failboat = pure internet glory.

Prior to coming across this piece, Wilber hadn’t so much as crossed my mind for many, many months.  I spent a few days intensely researching him and his “integral philosophy” a couple of years ago and walked away knowing that I disagreed with him about something important, but without a clear sense of just what that had been.

This interview throws things into sharper relief, if only by a small but noticeable margin. The main focii of the conversation are science’s relationship to religion and what distinguishes Wilber’s ideas from New Age spiritual movements.

I’ll post some thoughts later about some of the significant points where I think Wilber has it wrong…or at least not quite right. But the first thing I notice upon reading the interview is this: I can’t recall the last time I vacillated so quickly between such strong agreement and equally strong disagreement with somebody’s ideas (literally sentence by sentence).  I do love a man who makes wide-ranging, sweeping connections between otherwise disparate realms of thought and intellectual history…mmmm…