These sorts of responses would often end such encounters. In the South, in those days, crazy people were given a great deal of latitude.
At present, in my night-time dreams of the time, I often find myself in the company of Chuck at the intersection of two major streets that cut through the area near our school, North Decatur and Clairmont Road. In waking life, Chuck and I, in order to avoid confrontations with neighborhood boys who viewed us as "hippie f*ggots" did not venture beyond this demarcation point. The landscape beyond was fraught with peril.
Even in adult life, Chuck never ventured far from home, and when he did, he was fortified with drink. Many times, at transition points in my life, my soul summons dreams of Chuck and me, our hearts ... filled with yearning -- yet we stand diffident, to the point of paralysis, at the intersection of North Decatur and Clairmont Road.
The world outside of the boundaries decreed by outward circumstance and imposed by one's fears is fraught with uncertainty to the degree that it is veiled in mystery. There are legions of authoritarian bastards and mindless bullies about. Regardless, one must venture forth. One does have allies -- the spirit of departed friends and inner daemons with quicksilver wit, et al.
The future is always uncertain. But Raccoon Boy will be there to meet what comes.
Climate Change denial. Political duopoly. The corrosive effect of empire, maintained by militarism, on a foundering republic. The noxious food manufactured and consumed under corporate state oligarchy.
The catastrophic consequences that the demise of the public commons has on the human personality, in combination with the societal repercussions of a populace that receives the vast majority of information from within the bubble of an enveloping media hologram attendant to a grid of authoritarianism that determines and degrades the criteria of almost all experience in the corporate state.
Yet these unhinged conventionalities do not create a catalyst to action, but inflict angst, ennui and anomie. How can this be? By what means does passivity before and complicity in one's own debasement become normalized? By small bribes as reward for compliance and severe consequences for attempts at defiance ... that is how. This state of affairs serves as the sine qua non for any reign of oppression and cultural track towards catastrophe.
If an individual is coerced into conformity by his/her livelihood being threatened, even by implicit means, angst will be experienced. As a result, one will attempt to find a means of relieving the incurred sense of unease. And this is where the small bribes, that serve as palliatives to ease angst, come in.
If challenging (seemingly) implacable power results in a termination of employment or a stint of incarceration, of which, a record will follow one through life, most will find the repercussions of defying authority unbearable. One's image of oneself would be endangered, or so it seems, by such a circumstance.
Yet what are the consequences of submission, in regard to one's sense of self? Because, in order to submit, an individual must shunt from consciousness the painful implications of one's predicament, a general diminution of perception occurs. Thus, for example, Climate Change denial is but part and parcel of a larger, enforced cosmology of deception, both personal and societal in origin.
At our present rate, the oceans and seas of the world will be dead in less than half a century. Humankind has become a mindless, devouring leviathan. Slice open our collective belly and the ill-gotten bounty of our besieged earth will be disgorged.
What is the music of the spheres? asked Schopenhauer. "Munch. Munch. Munch."
Yet, tone-deaf, and rapacious, we are devouring the world in a manner that is closer in form to a banal pop song; a pestilence of ditties, resonant of the landfill, is descending in the form of consumerist locust.
When our days are denuded of depth, meaning and inspired purpose, we gorge our bellies in an attempt to alleviate the ache of emptiness. The operatives of the corporate/commercial hologram have induced us to devour the planet like a serving of Hot Pockets. Yet the emptiness within only grows.
We have been enticed to believe that remedy will be found in more of what caused our misery in the first place. Relief, even redemption, will be found in yet MORE. Thus, we come upon the insatiable leviathan that glides within. We are lodged in the monster's belly, wherein we mistake his impersonal appetite for our own. In this way, the consumer is consumed by the collective.
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