(A Valentine's Day fairy-tale)

Once upon a time there was an alchemist. Older guy, balding, white fringe of hair 'round his head. A little doddering, a little insane and a little, well, out there. But he hadn't reanimated anything dangerous recently and was perfectly happy letting the end of his days wander their way around twisty forest paths and whatnot.

So he's in his laboratory, seeing what he can do with these various elemental forces, distilling this into that, and that into the other. What he ends up with is a beaker filled with a faintly shimmering pink liquid with flecks of gold and lavender floating, one clockwise, one anticlockwise. Picture a kaleidoscope squeezed into a coffee mug. Looked like that, but...transparent. And without the handle.

Oh, and the stuff smelled like hot cinnamon buns.

Problem is, he has no idea what it does or, for that matter, how to use it. So, being the scientist he is, he stages a few experiments.

First: he pours a third of the phial onto a white rose. It shimmers briefly, turns inside out and emerges red. Curious.

Second: he pours a third of the potion onto a slab of stone and watches as it shimmers briefly, turns inside out and emerges as a sparkling diamond.

Third: he fills a bowl with the remaining third and places it in front of a mongrel found on the streets, and watches as it shimmers, inverts and emerges as one of the sleekest, healthiest puppies he's ever seen.

And as he watches this, he realizes that he's created a potion whereby the target becomes the epitome of the fulfillment of man's desires.

And he crumbles, broken, when he realizes he has kept none of the potion for himself.

The Other Road to Serfdom

1) Get a credit card with usurious rates.

The "credit card debt carried by the average American"in the first quarter of 2002 was $8,562. If you pay $200/month, and never incur another penny on the credit card, it will still take you 27 years and 7 months to pay off the card. You will end up paying $13,450.58 in interest, on top of the $8,562 principal. If American children ever became proficient at mathematics, the whole consumerist economy would go belly up. Thankfully, we remain innumerate.¹

2) Give up your land, or any dreams of holding any.

The total area of land mass in the United States is 3,794,083.06 square miles, or 2,428,213,158 acres . The population in 2000 was 286,196,812 people. That's about 8 and a half acres for every man, woman, and child in this great land. If you are measuring your total living space in hundreds of square feet, you will be indebted to a lord. Land is still dirt cheap in Montana, and Alaska still has a reverse state income tax--they will pay you to live there.

3) Forget how to plant, to knit, to bake, to fix things.

While specific knowledge will get you a paycheck in our information economy, it won't fix a leaky toilet. Not so long ago, folks managed to scrounge a living on the prairie living off the grid. The grid is a nice thing--I like crapping in a warm indoor toilet as much as most of you. I also like eating. The more you are disabled by a dependence on "experts," the more cash you need to make.

4) Trust your car more than your legs.

If you do not hold a mortgage, and if you are healthy, the automobile may well be your biggest expense. Payments, insurance, repairs, gasoline, and depreciation suck thousands upon thousands of dollars from your account. Try something radical. If it's less than two miles away, walk. But I have no time! This may be true--paying for a car requires working a lot of hours. Try a bicycle. You'll be healthier, the air will be cleaner, and your world will, paradoxically, grow larger.

5) Fear body odor, halitosis, hairy legs, pimples, wrinkles, and fat.

Spend an hour or two waching prime time television, and study the advertisements. Watch how they work--demean the body, create the need. Let's say you spend a nickel a day on deodorant, another dime on soap, a quarter or so on your razor, another nickel on toothpaste, and 15 cents on mouthwash. Add 2 cents for dental floss. Throw in 75 cents for freshly washed clothes every day. Add them up. Multiply them by a year. You're looking at $500 per year. That's before taxes. And that's without tackling your acne.

6) Pay for your music, your images, your booze.

How many CD's do you buy? How much do you pay for cable? For your internet access? In New Jersey, basic cable and internet services are going to run you at least $50/month, another $600 per year. A top of the line harmonica will cost you $25 dollars. Your voice is free.

7) Trust the voices of people you never met, the words of people who live outside your town.

Rush does not know you. Thomas does not love you. Neither can tell you anything specific about where you live. Neither of them wants to come over for dinner.

8) Fill your prescriptions for Zoloft, for Paxil, for Adderall, for Risperdal.

Yes, I know you need them--that is not the point. If you need soma to get through the day, something is wrong with your day. Your job sucks, but you need to pay the bills. You can hardly sleep. You worry. A month's supply of Zoloft costs $85.99 at Walgreen's. That's over a thousand dollars a year. ³

9) Revel in your patriotic fervor.

A serf needs a sense of community, a sense of "we're all in this together." Root for the flag, for the Boston Red Sox, for the New York Giants--doesn't matter who, just find a group you will bleed for. "A Welsh rugby fan cut off his own testicles to celebrate Wales beating England at rugby, the Daily Mirror reported Tuesday."⁴ Ah, a reason for being. That's what I'm talking about!

10) Put religion over Creation.

If you find more awe inside a dimly lit room resounding with the blare of an electrified organ than you do on the edge of a puddle, you have found religion. You will find more life in the drop of a puddle than in a drop of Holy Water. Religion values souls over life. Genesis says the two are inseparable. I am not a religious man, but on a good day I am a holy one.

You blow me away.

Did you know...

You are what dreams are made from...

All the things we forgot that we loved...

They are all drenched in rain from your eyelashes...

Rain from your soul...

which I keep in silly bottles, with fancy, twirly stoppers...

Like a sailor's LADY...

leaning from her lighthouse...

may I be your lighthouse?...

May I call you

home...

I built you one, you know...

Somewhere beyond my reverent ^conscious...

And my voice, like moss and rust...

and roiling salted sea...

composed for you alone...

(which I imagine with a faint heart...)

A LOVERS LULLABY...

which painted you a photo...

and it looked just like love...

and she was dressed like rapture...

Wearing a gold and crimson silken sari....

and a veil over my eyes...

Because to see...

is to know you...

And to know you is to love you....

and did you know...

You blow me away....

And I....I have no lighthouse to bring me home.

So I gained 7 xp...I saw this upon logging in to write the day's disgressions, and suspected immediately, and this was confirmed by looking at the list of my writeups and their reputations, that I had been given a bunch of upvotes for my random rambling about music.

For quality reviewing? Doubtful. I get the impression there are some big fans of the Residents who saw this daylog and smiled knowingly to their computer, happy that one more mind had begun to be permanently warped by this excellent experimental rock music...and that amuses me greatly. "You're learning," they think....and I am. The more I listen even to the same second (PLURIBUS) disc of Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Huddled Masses that has dominated my listening for the past two days, the more I end up noticing their influence everywhere.

There are the realizations that some of what you're hearing sounds almost like some of the tapes you'd recorded into the night with your friends, a little Casio sampling keyboard that ran on five AA batteries and a Talkboy which ran on another four.....only of course, these tapes are lacking things like skill and proper equipment and a supply of children's books to influence your lyricism....things which the Residents actually do possess...

But hell, some of what we made up in our time sounded pretty damn interesting, and with decent microphones and some kind of multitrack recording device....slogging through unlabed 90 minute cassettes with no notes as to their contents....there was a lot of crap there of course. With other kinds of influences involved, anything that sounded cool at the minute would be recorded, often with long minutes of repetition...and the occasional random babbling for no apparent reason...

But to extract any worthwhile material....record it into the computer so I have additional ways to fuck with it. Although there is a certain charm to holding in the play and fast forward or rewind buttons on the talkboy and recording this sped-up (and often backwards) sound back into the sampling keyboard....and then the tape would be fast forwarded back to the blank space we hadn't reached yet....

Press record....stick the crappy microphone on the talkboy up to the speaker on the keyboard...try hitting the key once, and then repetitively somewhere in the middle...try the high and low ends of the keyboard, which weren't that far apart on a little battery powered thing like this...32 keys. Small ones. Can be hard to play with, but it's fun and incredibly portable....but yeah, then there was the loop button....all kinds of odd rhythms got created by holding down random keys with that, at the high end, then the low....sometimes, often, a few at once. The sound of snapping fingers not being picked up too well by the sampling mike could be transformed into bacon if done just right....keys together looping could get odd, though, the sampling on this jsut sped up and slowed down the sample, so it'd never synchronize up quite evenly, and from the bottom to the top, a sample that could take a full second to loop on the leftmost F key would come out as a little chirp at the rightmost C key....the advantage to this was that you could hold down a low key to get something rhythmic and tap out something resembling a melody with the other hand...

Alright, it's a big digression. But I hadn't fucked around with this stuff in so long and I had just been sent into a minor creativity frenzy on the talkboy and keyboard again tonight by listening to too much Residents, leaving me feeling musical....everything sounds musical lately. The steps and scuffs of my work boots on weekday evening concrete....buzzing sounds....the sound of machinery running around the UPS compound...walking through the building, thinking about composing music for several persons each sitting in a car and playing their one available note, the horn...now that I think about it, another sound of some kind could be made to play through the stereo system in each car, and the "drivers" could turn these up and down....and of course there is always revving the engine...they could possibly even drive back and forth over gravel or something....

Epiphany:

I want to jump out of my skin and have a convulsion.

Tonight, I had the privledge to attend a talk that has opened my eyes about me. About one of my biggest insecurities, period. I found a part of me that's been missing for a long, long time.

You ready to hear it?

Okay, here goes....

I've learned that I need to "let go" and use my unique ability to be a friend to the people in my life, especially those who I get involved in business with. And KEEP and MAINTAIN the friendship.

I fear that people won't want to remain friends with me because of all the negative things I think about myself. I superimpose (or project) my feelings onto them. I think "they won't like me because_____________." when it's really myself disliking me that I'm talking about.

And I know how to fix me too. I got to ditch the little voice that spews all this insecure crap that says "Why would they want to be friends with you once they get to know you?? You aren't _________________ or _____________ and you don't have _________________ and don't act like ____________."

It's amazing how much lighter I feel- spiritually, mentally, emotionally... I've faced the truth, and it didn't hurt. Even better yet, writing it down has cemented it. If I had just kept it in, to myself, I would've reverted back to that insecure me. Now it's in my face, and I can't go back. And quite frankly, I don't want to.