I am not normally a guy who is scared of seeing blood (remember theater???), but after the saw went right through my fingernail and down the side of my finger there was a lot of blood flowing out and the woodshop supervisor comes over and says:

“You were pushing the wood the wrong way.”

and all I could think of was I’M BLEEDING WHY CANT YOU TELL ME LATER FFFF STOP THE BLEEDING!

Man.

But hey, Tryst went in for surgery half an hour ago, where the doctors will try to cut the growth out. The procedure will take about 6 hours.

I’m not a gambler in life, but let’s keep on winning, shall we?

We went at around 8. The place is a little way off the Ashby Bart Station, in a bar called the Starry Plough.

The first thing you notice about the bar is the walls. Absolutely covered with photographs of personalities from the 70s, along with a call to revolution neatly scribed on one side. Looking around at the people sitting at the tables, you have no doubt the political stance they have.

It was wonderful.

I hesitate to say that this is what I came to college for, even though that’s what I said, because it reeks of elitism. It’s like writers who act like what they do is some lofty thing that’s above the lives of everyone else, who forget that they write about lives – of (relatively) ordinary people, and that they’re never above anyone else. The place was full of intellectuals, but it was honest. The cover charge of $7 made sure that any pretentious hipsters were driven away, and in the end you get something pure and simple. You had people who did spoken word and listened to spoken word because they genuinely liked it, not because it looked cool.

3 hours. 3 hours of freewheeling line and verse, with a girl talking about stagefright, a guy duo doing a piece about hip hop being an anthem of survival and not of violence, a 70 year old woman talking about getting off (you had to be there, it was fantastic), another one about motherhood, and on and on.

3 hours of spoken word. Everybody there pouring their hearts out, pouring their time and soul and words into something, not with pride but with humility. This is what college is about. This is the shit.

The biggest problem in a capitalistic society is that there is a huge emphasis on money. (Obviously.) Being able to make a lot of money or to hold a lot of money is unconsciously held as one of our highest virtues. People I talk to know that I rag about this, but it’s very telling that the American Dream consists of working your way into suburbia (house, spouse, two and a half kids) after getting a reasonable amount of income. In order to have influence and fame in society, you need money. In order to become a politician, you need money. Exposure, endorsements, campaigning all takes money. So what we have is that all of society’s influential leaders come from wealthy backgrounds, and their decisions tend to benefit the wealthy. (Hi Bush.) This becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.

Which is not to say that industry and hard work, a key component of the American Dream, is a bad thing. There’s something to be said about the pride of individuality, but often industry walks hand in hand with selling yourself into an office job, or a blue-collar heavy labor job, or something that you equally hate. Virtues such as creativity aren’t valued and rewarded the same way that wealth is. On one hand, this is good. It ensures that creativity is almost always genuine, because there isn’t profit in being a charlatan. Nobody will want to “pretend” to be creative because it isn’t as profitable as going into business (and cheat people of money there). On the other hand, this leads to huge numbers of children being told as they’re growing up to “be a doctor or a lawyer”, because making a lot of money really is more important to people than creavitity.

The current education system compounds this problem. Instead of encouraging an individualistic approach, i.e. because different people learn in different ways there should be multiple approaches to teaching students, we have a highly deterministic and rigid system where performing well on testing ensures your future. Art and music and dance are, with the exception of art schools, always the lowest priority in school curriculums. Hence, those talents are never developed within the system (note how every artist always discover their talent doodling at home or singing a song on the radio) and only those talents valuable to mass industry are rewarded.

This is not surprising, seeing how public schooling was created largely because of the manufacturing industry, but it is nevertheless problematic.

State socialism will not work. A system where the state owns everything stands very closely to oligarchy, and in turn, a dictatorship. The state is too prone to corruption, and as we saw with Russia, will inevitably choose to serve themselves. State socialism is doomed to fail just as much as dictatorships will.

So is central organization the problem? Perhaps. We have seen small anarchist societies work in the past, but this is because of strong interpersonal ties and community. This dynamic may not scale well to large society, nor is it necessarily desirable. There is no historical example of anarchism working well for nations, and for it to legitimately work would require a vast unlearning of key human tenets (abandoning ownership and embracing sharing, for one) and new systems to support that type of thinking. Learning to accept sharing over personal ownership is no less impossible or contrary to human nature as is our mutual agreement to wear clothes or choose not to smoke (there will always be outliers and exceptions), but for the moment it is so impractical and far off in the future that this would not and should not be the society we should build. Perhaps one day, when enough transitional periods have gone by that we think differently, act differently, then this should be reconsidered.

We have seen limited forms of anarchy at work. The internet, in particular communities such as Youtube, caught our existing governments (along with the rest of the world) so off guard that they never acted to prevent it. Think about it. The internet is decentralized. Anyone can make and upload a youtube video, anyone can make a web page. Wealth barely figures into the equation other than some basic technological costs. On the web, anonymity means that you are judged by what you say and not what you are. You are judged by content, and you can be judged by anyone. There are various forms of organization (google and so forth) but they arose through the system and the reason they are dominant is because they do better. Again, judged by merit. If one day a better search engine comes along, there is little that Google can do to stay on top.

So at the very least, creativity and the social aspects of our society are best done through a fluid and organic manner, where no one is judged by anything but what they provide. All content is freely available to everyone, and in cases where it isn’t (music copyrights), there is an automatic resistance.

On the side of the economy, a limited form of capitalism isn’t a big deal. The problem is when capitalism gains political and social power (bombardment of advertisement, lobbying, etc). Branding and commercialism and mass production are here to say, whether we like it or not, but as long as it is kept in moderation, it’s fine. This means guarding against monopolies, as we already do, treating large companies more harshly than small businesses, meaning less tax cuts for big companies etc, and the elimination of lobbying and any measure of corporate support to the political arena. Advertising should definitely be scaled back from what we have today – perhaps for tv commercials to only play between shows, such that people can easily choose to avoid them if they wish, or we can utilize technological controls. Internet ads can, through firefox extensions, be completely blocked out by users who choose to, and this is an approach that should be examined as a potential model.

The problem with “anarchy” as a whole is that it doesn’t apply to all aspects of our society. There needs to be a central government, at our point in time, if only to ensure rights are being upheld and to enforce regulations. Courts need to stay. Various regulatory institutions, such as the FDA, need to continue to exist to protect the consumer against companies. In terms of RIGHTS and SAFETY, the government needs to still be in play.

This may sound somewhat like the “small government” approach, and you may wonder why, then, I don’t support the conservative party as much as I “should”. The main issue is that the conservative party is at the moment heavily influenced by corporate power (Bush’s tax cuts, etc) and also because they’re too trigger happy with foreign affairs. Government should never, ever, ever be involved with corporations and should only serve as a regulatory agent over them.

I will also note that the current so-called conservative party does not hold most of the same ideological positions that the founding conservatives did.

So..

yeah.

Now, we have buses.

Most of the time people on AC Transit choose a spot and just…stare, ignoring everyone around them. Sometimes, you get someone who wants to talk. Tell a story, talk about troubles, whatever. Even more rarely, they’re actually good.

I was riding back today when a (fairly old, gray-haired) lady started reminiscing about going to Richmond High back in the day, and how in high school she got her first car as a gift, and it would be the love of her life. She didn’t look at anyone in particular, she wasn’t telling somebody the tale, she was just talking, to whoever would listen. I looked around, and the fascinating thing was that people around her, slowly, looked up from their cell phone screens, or took out their headphones, or turned from staring out the window aimlessly and watched her.

And they listened.

She spun her tale, like so many spiders spinning around silver threads, and people were captivated. It’s a rare gift to be able to do that. She’s in every way, I think, what a modern bard can be. Board a bus line, spin tales for those riding along, people come on, people get off, and in the middle is the storyteller.

Wouldn’t that be a life.

That’s why making public transportation a widespread thing is so important. Making buses and trains more than just “for people who can’t afford cars”. Sure, there are other reasons for public transportation, reducing emissions and congestions and all that eco-friendly hoobaloo (which is admirable, lest anyone is mistaken), but that’s my reason. The social ramifications. Making the bus more than just a vehicle for people, but for their stories as well.

An unreasonably large black spider suddenly crawled out from behind a bookcase along the wall right towards where I was sitting in the corner of my bed. All eye level and shit. I practically threw the keyboard and mouse off my lap, leaped to my feet, and stared at the fucker while indulging in some hyperventilation. It was way too big and scary too try to kill through normal means. What if I didn’t perfectly nail the hit and it scurried and maybe fell and landed on my wrist? My wrist! Where I keep my skin! More than once, I thought in panic about running to get help despite the hour, but I tried to imagine the perspective of an outsider being called into this situation. I knew that no one else would take the threat seriously. I needed weapons. 

I edged nervously towards the door, trying to judge whether it would bolt once I had gone, in which case I would be unable to end its threat and simply know that it was somewhere here in this place where I sleep at night. When I had reached and quietly opened the door, I bolted soundlessly for the kitchen, whereupon I snatched up a giant wad of paper towel and donned a pair of thick oven mitts. They reached about 3/4 of the way to my elbows. I still felt naked, but without a big suit made out of plastic I had no other immediate ideas, and I needed to return quickly before the monster returned to the shadows. 

It sat perfectly still where I had left it. Maybe it was feigning innocence. Maybe it was waiting for its chance. I considered my position. In order to make a killing strike, I would need to move quickly, and I could not do that until I had found my balance after standing upon my mattress. Kneeling would be more stable, but a retreat would be sluggish and clumsy. On the other hand, if the spider moved while I was standing, there was a decent chance that I would panic, lose my footing, and fall, possibly killing myself on the surrounding furniture. I took my chances. 

I’ve always been a man of cursed fortune, but my luck is blessed. In a crisis, I somehow manage miraculously to scrape past danger. However precarious, my balance did not falter, and my blow was true. My shielded hand stuffed the wad of paper directly upon the intruder’s form and pressed; I breathed for a moment and crumpled the edges inward so as to hold the body of my victim inside (for I could not imagine my trauma should its corpse fall onto my pillow below). 

Suddenly, an impossibly large and too-many-legged blackness ran upwards along the wall–toward my head. I flung myself backwards in reflex to flop my back upon the mattress and flip to the floor. Panting in mortal fear, I watched the unharmed beast track along the wall, back to the bookcase from whence it had come. How had it survived–and so unscathed? It must be stronger and flatter than the many other spiders I had battled over the years of this crippling phobia. I was running out of time, and I needed to be sure. 

I grabbed a long piece of cardboard, leaped onto my mattress, and slammed it directly against the damned arachnid, with my left hand holding the edge for stability and my right pressed against the surface. I heard myself cry out as I made the blow, and when my weapon met that wall my right hand was immediately aware of a bulge directly beneath it. I pressed hard with my palm, and then I quickly flipped the hand and rubbed my knuckles back and forth against the cardboard. When I had been as firm and thorough as possible, I tried to pull it back, keeping my right hand against the bulge so that the body could not fall to my bed. It was difficult to pull at the edge through the oven mitts, but I eventually got it. The spider was squished. I hastily folded its body within the cardboard and disposed of it. I was breathing and sweating heavily. There is a rounded and cracked indentation high on my wall from the killing impact. 

I killed that spider so hard that I broke the wall. I’m still pretty freaked out. 

I really don’t like spiders.

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