Online Persona Unsolicited

I recently signed up for Flavors.me and scrutinized my font, domain name and page design for so long I neglected going to the gym and running errands before work (thanks, Internet). I chose neutral everything to evade criticism, but what version of myself would ever leave out the color red or select Times as my font? After reviewing several other websites, I found one that did everything I was advised not to do---it refused to conform. After thinking this through long enough to actually make myself LATE for work, I realized that this person's persona matched the type of thing he does for a living. I’m talking about San Francisco columnist, Mark Morford, who writes edgy articles for SFGate. He’s offensive, vulgar at times, he attends Burning Man annually and in his spare time, teaches yoga in the Castro to stay centered. Is it fitting that his website font looks like it was pasted from a Sons of Anarchy Netflix preview? Yes. The answer is yes. And the answer to the question posed inwardly is that online representation is a personal one. Decide first who you are, then decide what you’re selling from your skeletal closet. Filters are fine, tact is fine---unless you’re Gordon Ramsay and are paid for being a jerk---but if those things are not unique to you, there’s a good chance you’ll fall into the milk-toast conformist category that nobody finds interesting. Be interesting, be yourself, but by all means, represent yourself, because bad publicity is better than no publicity at all, or so they say.

Summer Gardening 101

When Life Gives You Cucumbers

Make Lemonade

To Drink While Pickling Said Cucumbers

Because What's the Point of Growing Things

If Your Glass Isn't Always Half Full?

The strongest drug that exists for a person is another human being.

When you try not to love someone, though your irises are fixed glassily as distant mist forests, you still curl into the crushed coastal waves of their skin, as if their body's hollows magnetically draw you in and their every breath fits your broken breathing---then you know you love them like crazy, like you can't resist the chemistry that is him. 

Like, 

like, 

like you can't choose who you love, it just happens and despite all attempts to harden and contain, you soften in their bed: pliable, cuddly, sweet, infantile, sick. So sick that you need rehab to stop the fix. So sick that you must melt your own skin to stop it from soaking up that touch with such tingling euphoria.

A Post-Modernism Post

“Perhaps the crescendo of this gloom came only a decade and a half ago when anthropologist Marc Augé made his dismal conclusion about the nature of human interaction in physical space in his Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Augé suggests that our sense of place, as old as humanity, is coming to an end. Building on Marcel Mauss’s idea of place as a “culture localized in time and space,” Augé distinguishes places—locations in which individuals with distinct identities form human relationships that in turn accrete, creating the sediments of history—from non-places—spaces of transition absent of identity, human relationships, or the traces of history. Augé’s non-places are in-between spaces…” (Varnelis 18)

Varnelis’ use of the word gloom foreshadows humanity’s seemingly inevitable decline. Post-modern literature is thick with the robotic suburb battlefields and global decay found in Paolo Bacigalupi’s short story The People of Sand and Slag. Additionally, Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep projects the lost capacity for emotive response in humans common throughout post-modernity. Yet authors wage hypothetical wars in recognizable, semi-measurable spaces. These senses of “place, as old as humanity, [are] coming to an end.” The emergence of a new dimension, entirely hand-crafted is as invisible as imagination without key components such as viable power-sources, network connections and accessible databases. This intangibly populated model fits Varnelis' paradoxical frame described as “spaces of transition absent of identity, human relationships, or the traces of history.” Non-spaces exist with relevance because we (mortal gods) assign importance to them. The world wide web spread like a plague, statistically congruent with rising instances of obesity and ADHD. How does an army of 7.5 billion not-so-strong fight this invisible foe? Post-modernists predict mass extinction of humanity as we know it, and I predict the next world war will take place in a non-space inhabiting every home, market and government agency. The rise of the Internet marks the fall of geographic divides; countries formerly claiming terrain will fight to control a virtual realm instead. Gloomy is just one way to describe a robotic age—whether referring to technological animism or sub-human humans. However, if Varnelis’ non-spaces truly are in the state of in-between, the future’s pivot could shift any direction like a Deleuzian Rhizome. Humanity's survival is both determined and patterned after the collective force effectively connecting the past with the future.

No-Shave-November Should Be Forever

I love the rough hair on men's bristly faces

In class I daydream---imagining the flat-handed stretch of my palm

Pressed against the brittle-soft-whisker-grains of a stranger's cheek

I close my eyes to the perceived stinging intimacy 

There in the stubble: the breathing regions---textures of closeness

These men, animals really, with beards 

Covering their soft spaces

I'd place curiously-thirstily-exploring fingers upon their jowls

Masks of keratin cloaked with coarse winter growth

I find myself seeking that melting fusion where I'm singed 

In traces of masculine unshaven skin

Comparing Notes

I Want

To Master

The Unmasterable

You Can

Build a Bridge

Walls, Dams, Roads

I Can't

Measure Them

With Rulers and Marks

But You

Can't Break Apart

A Poem or Make it Work

This Science

Is Messy, Glittering

The Way a Crushed Heart

Drips When

A Doctor of Something

Somewhere Can't Fix it Me

Tricky Little Tuesday in an Insanity Vent

Today I want to smash the sky into metal. Dripping pearl mercury in rivulets of gray. It's a gray day with gray eyes and gray skies. Violence is the answer. We have to find the sun.

I focused on my phone and found synthetic lights only. Superficial icons in iconic flares of symbolic representation. I saw social media squares with authenticity suspiciously absent in there. Only images and avadentities with flat faces were seen, the fabricated size of compact digitized screens. Since when is a square ever normal in nature?

Changing keys. The writers and inspiration of my being dazzle my mind with this nebulous starry-eyed wisdom supplied. Satirical words pop in sizzling skillets of resistance---unrest and political quests steaming in prose. My friends blog, my dog blogs---I don't have a dog, but if I did, her paws would leave ink-trails instead of mud. In an industrial age, the universe is fully mapped. Is silence the only space left to fill?

It's all been done. Some things are cooked overdone and many things need subtle raw undone-ing. The polluted sky rots minds into mechanic fusions with computerized life programs left as solutions. My life is not a program. There is no foreword, no organized, formatted table of contents. No rave reviews mark my papery back with cries of genius or thumbs pointing any which-way-direction from notarized critics, dead or undead.

Instead, I attend university to unlearn all I've ever heard about the everyday human condition. I deprive myself of sleep, then eat too many plates of weird concoctions I call nachos when I can't cope with a single new idea injection, like analytical botox, into my unscholarly psyche. Sequestered and robotic, I plug into classes and textbooks with my Ucard only, our flat and compact replacement-identities. I can't remember what yoga was like. That's where I breathed real gasping breaths, deep and cleansing. Suffocation is painful and real.

Now what, metal gods? Now that we've killed all life forces, the taxiing taxation of taxes and human taxidermy leaves emptiness and shell hazards for attorneys and parking enforcement to pick up on their daily endeavors. I bleed in mercury too, but a smashed eternal sky won't crumple into me seamlessly because the trappings of responsibility have too firmly a fixed grasp with their intangible devices.

What's left? Nothing I guess. Except maybe music and memories and sunsets and dreams.

I cannot, simply cannot continue at the pace of expectation and remain exceptionally sane.
We have to find the sun.