An Idea²

 Currently, there is a man outside my door changing the oil of this hoopty directly in front of my house. He is in a cowboy hat. He does not speak English. I think, with some certainty, he rents a room next door. They are often working on cars in front of my house, carelessly. He is similar to you, but he does not read. He will not have the time to read this. He is too busy working on that unsilenced, unregistered, shit-box to find the time to read. I know this because they have been out there futzing with broken-down jalopies since the day I moved in. All I do is clean up garbage from the front of my place that is left there by people and their vehicles. There are easily two dozen tires in the alley right now that were dumped there by some junkie that was paid off by one of these fly-by-night tire shops.  

To inhabit Denver is a bask in fucking paradise. It is a city devouring itself. It is an ouroboros, a symbol of infinity, in the worst fucking way.  

I think of it like speciation. The diffusion of evolution. The cutting edge that bisects our two kinds.  

I sense it in these strange ways, case to case. The answer to a peculiar question: why you? Why am I writing this to you [redacted]? As if it is subconscious to me that I feel so adamant that you, specifically, are the audience I wrote this for. 

Again. Why you, mang? And I Wrestle with this. Is it because you were within earshot? Is it because I worked with you and needed someone to rant at? And in my heart of hearts I believe it is more than that. I think that the universe crossed our paths for a reason... and I imagine that you do not feel the same way. I’m just keeping you from the television aren’t I? Keeping you from something more palatable than the complaints of an employee you used to have. Through situational manipulation you contributed to the termination of. In its way; facilitated. And you’re aware of that. You know what you did, and how you did it. How you used the resources available to enable the desired outcome, but we’ll realign our objectives and circle back to that one to increase shareholder value as we better synergize our processes with the goals of the organization.  

I think the pressing thing for me, now, is this persistent earworm that I must have heard at least a dozen times: “I’m a man of God.” Always said the same way, always a recitation. Man of God. And to assume that I am imagining the same Judeo-Christian god, I have to wonder; what does that even mean? I could approach it a different way for every time I heard you say that with conviction and it would be giving it too much credit. There are no other ways to understand that in your frame of experience, only the one. Only the vocal bumper sticker that you self-identify with. Which is fine. Grass green. Gas, Cheap. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. (“I’m just 5 years away from retirement, which is better than your retirement because you’re on the new program that is literally worse in every way and I'm on the old one. Buh-wuh what are you gonna do about it you fucking wage clown? Should’a been born earlier.”) 

 

If we are speaking in this context of the Judeo-Christian God. And you are a believer of it, a “man of it” do you think that that entity will not be able to understand how utterly underhanded you have treated those around you? Do you think God will not see your betrayal of me? Your lack of action day-in and day-out where you could have made any effort to make the world a better place (even by bettering yourself) and instead fidgeted with the minutia until it was your turn to retire? To Die? And still, in every sense you did what was asked, did what the other men told you, behaved in a way that did not cause turbulence, went along with the expectations, and were rewarded with the sense that it was ‘right’. But it was imaginary. 

Like your god. 

 A fiction that was repeated so religiously, it became a kind of righteousness. Doesn’t it feel like religion is correct-ness? Because that is imaginary too. It is a fiction so deeply integrated into the perception of self that it has become inseparable from personal identity. And through that you may have community, social circles, sense of purpose and such, and that is nothing to make light of. But, do you think so little of your God that they cannot see you for what you are, as it pertains to me? What does it mean to believe in a god that cares nothing for it’s creation?  

Why would a perfect being, need to be worshipped?  

Why would evil exist in a world with God? 

 

Either you believe in god, or you don’t. But you would have to believe in a god as simple as your understanding, which is observably lacking in both scope and breadth, which fills me with this sense that seems so clear to me. Some combination of a disingenuous belief in God, or a disingenuous God, which is the fiction of a mortal mind, a character. One that can be anything they need it to be, for any reason, at any time. To be used as justification for anything, whatsoever. Because, the truth is the truth. And the truth is, God’s not there. Just man, with all of his vulgar, lazy, self-righteousness and the pantomime of concern that masks the reality: the throughline that enables the systemic sexual assault of children, the annihilation of the Palestinian people (for example), and the historic destruction of uncountable lives and people like you is all one in the same: God. A character-McGuffin that allows you to justify anything, which I can only imagine feels like some kind of smugness as you betray those around you without concern or effort. But the deepest circle of hell is reserved for traitors, and from my perspective you are a traitor of your own design, an ouroboros devouring itself in it’s own fiction. A ‘man of god’. What god? Is this the god being referred to on the side of that metal recycler, where it says, ‘Praise the lord’? 

A god that enables and facilitates human suffering through drugs and theft and metal?  

What god? A fantasy of a perfect thing, perfect being, creator of the universe, by way of the unimaginable power of the unimaginable. The endlessness of how small we are does not fill me with the codependent feeling that I should adhere myself to a hypothetical something that I imagine to be greater. Somehow, it seems disingenuous. 

In the way that corporate jargon is the manner for which people without ideas or direction can appear to be relevant in a conversation that they don’t belong to. ...Can I get a hallelujah! A hallelujah for the disingenuous. Because the thing is, Gil. The thing is; this is all a conversation that nobody belongs to— 

 

It is merely their attempt to inject themselves into its own narrative. 

When I first came here, I envisioned some kind of western empire, some kind of western cultural ideal that can develop into the future. A synergy of neo-city-states comprising a western empire. Los Angeles, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, a Chile to the Argentina of middle America, but what I found here was different. While the music is good, the positioning is useful, but the truth is; it’s not worth it. Nothing about this place is as advertised, the mountains are classist, the city is overtly disrespectful, the entire culture has no sense of preservation; they trash it (and themselves) constantly while rich, white, airheads celebrate its self-serving, deeply institutionalized nature. (I think of that statue that’s like 4 stories tall downtown, two white, hominid, figures dancing. They could be any color, but it’s the whiteness of them that speaks without speaking.) Truly this place is the trains and the factories and the airport. Nobody gives a fuck about this place and I could not fully grasp why, but it was sitting right there in plain sight; It’s not worthy of it. People give a fuck about Portland. People give a fuck about San Diego. But Denver makes it impossible to. Denver makes you feel, prevalently aware, that there is no God.  

I think of all that vile trash that we cleaned up every single day at Elyria. Probably one of the single most pathetic excuse for a park I could possibly imagine. (Truly, beyond my imagination.) A vast parking lot on 2 sides. Bordering up against a chop-shop, and the most run-down barrio that the ghetto could muster. And they trashed (and I mean trashed like an 80’s hairband rockstar’s hotel room) multiple times a week, and we cleaned it like slaves to the public, picking up their pig knuckles, and cards and beer bottles and cans and butts, and used condoms and syringes, over and over again. No matter how many shootings took place there, the city worked tirelessly to normalize this as a every-day thing. And now, the lot catacorner to the park is a datacenter. Blocking all access to it from the west, making it feel, somehow, even more of an all-encompassing dead end. And the datacenter is going to tent-pole the cost of living in Elyria, the price of power and water is going to spike for all the residents because one unwanted company is driving the price up for everyone. And, it’s extremely unfair, but how I feel isn't the indignation of a colonizer mindset capitalizing on the situational advantage of unimaginable wealth, but rather a much more domestic assertion: —fuck’m. They haven’t given a shit about their community for decades upon decades and now big/bad industry is here to slice a fat hog and they are too incompetent to even realize it. The same pisanos that trash the place are there, sitting by all the chain link fencing the construction has assembled around them utterly incapable of understanding the context of what is happening. Because they are clearly too stupid and drunk to grasp that they are being caged on two fronts simultaneously. And, I would feel bad for them, for what’s about to happen to their community, the institutional throttle that is going to strangle Elyria for years to come. But they don’t even deserve the time of day for that. We have already done our best for them, and they vandalized and trashed it. And now their entire community is about to be savaged by and industry that is so devoid of scruples and merit that it feels, deserved.  

 

Denver cannot ascend from this reality, the reality it has created, because it is deserved. They let these trains take everything; they let these oil refineries do whatever they want; they let these housing syndicates turn all the housing into ‘financial products’ and the homeless wander every-single-street looking for any opportunity to beg, “borrow” or steal. In has no inherent production, save for its geographical location; it is merely a stop along the way to somewhere else, some other terroir that produces something of worth.  

 

Meanwhile, we produce imagination. Data center produces data, so that the data that it produces can be purchased by data brokers, to sell to companies to gather more data, and man makes god to produce more followers, to spread the word of god, so they can produce more religion, (so they can work harder, so than can do more coke.) 

Its a fucking franchise of nothing, and it makes no sense why anyone would believe in this shit. But our beliefs have a way of shaping us, and that shape, as it pertains to the future, is not yet written.  

 

The brass of it is, with the coming revolution, it is not about the worthiness of this city, or the devoutness of belief, or the righteousness of the call— we are bifurcating into myriad species. Like a fractal, we are becoming many from one. Speciating.  

It is not A or B or C things that we are becoming but utterly every imaginable thing, we specialize every day, how many decades of specialization take place before we are utterly dissimilar to where we began? And it is a clumsy, clumsy process. Like a mudskipper or a seal, evolving into and from water. From the desires of self we become as I imagine how the little flaps on a sugar glider would become wings so too shall humans. Be we do not have little flaps to float on, nor do we need them but rather our evolution is one of the mind, one of mentality, our thoughts become us in ways we never imagined possible. As if through our own dressing of the mind we are becoming the product of our minds. A sort of psychological ouroboros of personal evolution. That up until now has seemingly always led to a crusade.  

And I wonder how God fits into all this? As if we are becoming our minds eye of what we can imagine. But instead, what they imagine is servitude to an ideal. But what could it possibly amount to beyond other ideals? I imagine it like ferrofluid spiking into many points from one amorphous mass by some invisible force that seems indiscernible from magic.  

We are to speciate into our constituent ideals. Everyone playing their part, uninterrupted by the cacophony of one another, unconcerned with their realities, it is as it must be; a blind fracture into anything and everything, all at once. As we micro-evolve with each passing day into, whatever. 

 

Framed by anything we could imagine;  

How do we imagine the moral logic of our world to work? 

Or not work? Or no logic? Or no imagination for anything else? ...Or no morality?  

 

Said plainly, the revolution is not some future warzone but rather the differentiation of our species into progressively more specialized roles that will shape our evolution in the long term. As we experience this process all of the voices involved, which is basically everyone, contribute to the cacophony of psycho-social psychosis that we are involved in as they shape themselves into whatever it is they are becoming. A huge portion of the planetary populace believe in an imaginary character, despite all evidence to the contrary, and we are absolutely trapped by a reality of our own design, as if the jungles of the mind are beginning to overtake everything, subsuming all of us to one-another’s will.