"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
-Mark Twain, American novelist/writer/lecturer (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910)
RE: Contents of your life
Seize it tight in your hands.
The present.
A life living for others ain't a life worth living for..
If you consider yourself as a brainless door
A painless whore, a sex tool to serve desperate bachelors
Never met happiness until she retires
Who ever conducted her to set her desires on fire
Models in magazines, she only admires
And gets back to life satisfying sexual desires
I'm twining this movie scene back to modern society
Where you'd get to see the complete complexity
First and third worlds, separated by these subtle screens
Disgusted, ignorant as can be in scuttled scenes
You can say I'm exaggerating, but I'm literal
I'm nothin' but the truth, proof, this example's simple
When I open my mouth, ample examples tape your mouth
Simple mathematics, the system's systematic
I'm asthmetic, if you see runners become dope addicts
It's hard and strict, rules making you become convicts
Be a prick, if you still can't figure out then suck a dick
Get a nick, maybe you can see our king's sick
He wants to rip you apart, slash your hearts - that's his art
Play your part, realise your life's set as a chart
Flick a brick with tricks, see how quick the clock clicks and ticks
Most of our lives been spent satisfying the sick
It's sick, they've been ripping benefits and we go through this shit?
The times spent in the office, but why can't we just quit?
If we could all just relax, sit back and think about it
Quit our jobs, settle for something we can commit
Twenty years down the road, see the life story we unfold
Then there's no reason we should end up as scapegoats
Danger, risk, every rhyme is a weapon, is a dagger
But the truth rejoices, I'll rather roll than stagger
We can all hear silence in every voice, the future poise
Loneliness in darkness, choiceless in every choice
So the next time you see fucking screens in front of your face
Save yourself from wasting life away in this place
If anyone wanted speed in their fucking life to succeed
Then well you could aimlessly heed what the greed needs
.. The cherished present, the relished future..
The present is gratifyin', everyday is satisfyin'
I reached for her hand and held it tight, the feelin' so mystifyin'..
It's unbelievable, but I've never came closer than this
Man in bliss, this chance probably never comes closer, I can't miss
When I reminisce about my sad past, mistakes, I won't repeat
I'm not gonna be a victim for another case of deceit
I don't promise, I don't owe to no god no dogs, no clocks no time
I'm not sure she's mine, but I know that she drives me outa my mind
From the first time we met, we started closer than close, love I suppose?
So this was the path we chose, only we know, our story forms prose
How I used to change my targets like changing clothes, but now I know
No matter where I go, my emotion has grown, so let's just start.. Slow.
23rd October 2006
Unforgetable.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
The evidence?
His arms were straining, while he just sat down alone with his heart paining
His palms stained with bloodshed, not literally, on his passage to gain things
It's a saint thing, people got him gunning down with invisible weapons
Invincibles in them, time ticks by, breathing heavier at every second
Regret, guilty conscience struck in him, angels of devils got him staring
So you see him standing on the stage starring, roots of evil got him earrings
Hot things, we had to shot him, stab him, grab them, heck, just leave them mourning
Grieve them mornings, fifth in line for the scorning, gift in the mind, saying 'sorry's
Till they wake up in the morning trembling and scrambling, guilty in the heart
Filthy in the art, this moment they could be saying they really suck
And the next time they could be kings, shame to be deceived, clings
Blink, now wishing they sink, wishing they be selling onion rings at burger kings
Hunger kings, equipped with acquisitive heart, now I feel pain in the butt
In the neck, how great if they could just spit and spat and just tell the truth, but
In the deck, we shuffle and scuffle, angry at everytime they drive us mad
Revive the sad, when they know I could be the truth, now tell me who needs the proof?
Who needs to move, they pointing rifles at us, ganging at us, banging at lust
Dissapointing us, we were the ones who were appointing trust, unjust..
Now nobody knows who to trust, burning money in hell before they rust
So all I ask, "Do they mask? What's their task?" They disgust, "IT'S IN THEIR BLOOD!"
Hiddin' guns in the mud, put on a false face 'cause they start cryin' hard
Dying hard, I could consider trying hard to discard 'the card'; wild card
Burning in the greed of flame, rid of fame, how much I wish I could meet the tamed
I need my name, speaking in the creed of game, who's insane, now 'STRIP THE SANE'
This time I lead them through the lake of clarity, all to shake reality
Clean the face of the charred, praise the scarred, now now, show me what's 'true charity'
Nobody ever proves the verity, only put me through insularity
Hollerin' how lyrically overflowed I am with vulgarities
Sanity! God is prononouced Saint-ly, this dog denounced words of the bible
In this time that we live in, from the air that we breathe in, SWORDS ON THE DOUBLE
His palms stained with bloodshed, not literally, on his passage to gain things
It's a saint thing, people got him gunning down with invisible weapons
Invincibles in them, time ticks by, breathing heavier at every second
Regret, guilty conscience struck in him, angels of devils got him staring
So you see him standing on the stage starring, roots of evil got him earrings
Hot things, we had to shot him, stab him, grab them, heck, just leave them mourning
Grieve them mornings, fifth in line for the scorning, gift in the mind, saying 'sorry's
Till they wake up in the morning trembling and scrambling, guilty in the heart
Filthy in the art, this moment they could be saying they really suck
And the next time they could be kings, shame to be deceived, clings
Blink, now wishing they sink, wishing they be selling onion rings at burger kings
Hunger kings, equipped with acquisitive heart, now I feel pain in the butt
In the neck, how great if they could just spit and spat and just tell the truth, but
In the deck, we shuffle and scuffle, angry at everytime they drive us mad
Revive the sad, when they know I could be the truth, now tell me who needs the proof?
Who needs to move, they pointing rifles at us, ganging at us, banging at lust
Dissapointing us, we were the ones who were appointing trust, unjust..
Now nobody knows who to trust, burning money in hell before they rust
So all I ask, "Do they mask? What's their task?" They disgust, "IT'S IN THEIR BLOOD!"
Hiddin' guns in the mud, put on a false face 'cause they start cryin' hard
Dying hard, I could consider trying hard to discard 'the card'; wild card
Burning in the greed of flame, rid of fame, how much I wish I could meet the tamed
I need my name, speaking in the creed of game, who's insane, now 'STRIP THE SANE'
This time I lead them through the lake of clarity, all to shake reality
Clean the face of the charred, praise the scarred, now now, show me what's 'true charity'
Nobody ever proves the verity, only put me through insularity
Hollerin' how lyrically overflowed I am with vulgarities
Sanity! God is prononouced Saint-ly, this dog denounced words of the bible
In this time that we live in, from the air that we breathe in, SWORDS ON THE DOUBLE
Never wanted to ask for trouble, provoke your beliefs that you called it
But we people living just to prove it.. It's stupid isn't it? It's just stupid..
Predictions proven true?
But there's so many people livin' in this god damn world..
Is it a mere coincidence?
Tryin' to discredit the works of people by sayin' it was written..
So where's your evidence?
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
The Ex-Worker's Collective (November 16 2005)
To all readers of my blog, this is a
MUST READ: =)
The Contents of Your Daily Life
How many hours a day do you spend in front of a television screen? A computer screen? Behind an automobile windscreen? All three screens combined? What are you being screened from? How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously?
Is watching things as exciting as doing things? Do you have enough time to do all the things that you want to? Do you have enough energy to? Why? And how many hours a day do you sleep? How are you affected by standardized time, designed solely to synchronize your movements with those of millions of other people? How long do you ever go without knowing what time it is? Who or what controls your minutes and hours? The minutes and hours that add up to your life? Are you saving time? Saving it up for what?
Can you put a value on a beautiful day, when the birds are singing and people are walking around together? How many dollars an hour does it take to pay you to stay inside and sell things or file papers? What can you get later that will make up for this day of your life?
How are you affected by being in crowds, by being surrounded by anonymous masses? Do you find yourself blocking your emotional responses to other human beings? And who prepares your meals? Do you ever eat by yourself? Do you ever eat standing up? How much do you know about what you eat and where it comes from? How much do you trust it?
What are we deprived of by labor-saving devices? By thought-saving devices? How are you affected by the requirements of efficiency, which place value on the product rather than the process, on the future rather than the present, the present moment that is getting shorter and shorter as we speed faster and faster into the future? What are we speeding towards? Are we saving time? Saving it up for what?
How are you affected by being moved around in prescribed paths, in elevators, buses, subways, escalators, on highways and sidewalks? By moving, working, and living in two- and three-dimensional grids? How are you affected by being organized, immobilized, and scheduled rather than wandering, roaming freely and spontaneously? Scavenging? (Shoplifting?) How much freedom of movement do you have--freedom to move through space, to move as far as you want, in new and unexplored directions?
And how are you affected by waiting? Waiting in line, waiting in traffic, waiting to eat, waiting for the bus, waiting to urinate--learning to punish and ignore your spontaneous urges? How are you affected by holding back your desires? By sexual repression, by the delay or denial of pleasure, starting in childhood, along with the suppression of everything in you that is spontaneous, everything that evidences your wild nature, your membership in the animal kingdom? Is pleasure dangerous?
Could danger be joyous? Do you ever need to see the sky? (Can you see many stars in it any more?) Do you ever need to see water, leaves, foliage, animals? Glinting, glimmering, moving? Is that why you have a pet, an aquarium, houseplants? Or are television and video your glinting, glimmering, moving? How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously? If your life was made into a movie, would you watch it? How do you feel in situations of enforced passivity?
How are you affected by a non-stop assault of symbolic communication--audio, visual, print, billboard, video, radio, robotic voices--as you wander through a forest of signs? What are they urging upon you? Do you ever need solitude, quiet, contemplation? Do you remember it? Thinking on your own, rather than reacting to stimuli? Is it hard to look away?
Is looking away the very thing that is not permitted? Where can you go to find silence and solitude? Not white noise, but pure silence? Not loneliness, but gentle solitude? How often have you stopped to ask yourself questions like these? Do you find yourself committing acts of symbolic violence? Do you ever feel lonely in a way that words cannot even express? Do you sometimes feel yourself ready to LOSE CONTROL?
[Copied entirely from http://exworker.blogspot.com/2005/11/contents-of-your-daily-life.html]
Think about what was mentioned in this post..
Consider what determines our lives..
Is the over-emphasis on the result rather than the process been puttin' us off about the present? Is the future was so important, what about the present? What makes up the future? The present. So cherish everyone and anyone who spends their time with you. You might never ever get the chance again in your whole entire lifetime. The present is just so cruel. It makes up your future, and your history. =)
Cherish. Relish every single moment to the fullest extent. =)
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives"
-Annie Dillard, poet/writer.
MUST READ: =)
The Contents of Your Daily Life
How many hours a day do you spend in front of a television screen? A computer screen? Behind an automobile windscreen? All three screens combined? What are you being screened from? How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously?
Is watching things as exciting as doing things? Do you have enough time to do all the things that you want to? Do you have enough energy to? Why? And how many hours a day do you sleep? How are you affected by standardized time, designed solely to synchronize your movements with those of millions of other people? How long do you ever go without knowing what time it is? Who or what controls your minutes and hours? The minutes and hours that add up to your life? Are you saving time? Saving it up for what?
Can you put a value on a beautiful day, when the birds are singing and people are walking around together? How many dollars an hour does it take to pay you to stay inside and sell things or file papers? What can you get later that will make up for this day of your life?
How are you affected by being in crowds, by being surrounded by anonymous masses? Do you find yourself blocking your emotional responses to other human beings? And who prepares your meals? Do you ever eat by yourself? Do you ever eat standing up? How much do you know about what you eat and where it comes from? How much do you trust it?
What are we deprived of by labor-saving devices? By thought-saving devices? How are you affected by the requirements of efficiency, which place value on the product rather than the process, on the future rather than the present, the present moment that is getting shorter and shorter as we speed faster and faster into the future? What are we speeding towards? Are we saving time? Saving it up for what?
How are you affected by being moved around in prescribed paths, in elevators, buses, subways, escalators, on highways and sidewalks? By moving, working, and living in two- and three-dimensional grids? How are you affected by being organized, immobilized, and scheduled rather than wandering, roaming freely and spontaneously? Scavenging? (Shoplifting?) How much freedom of movement do you have--freedom to move through space, to move as far as you want, in new and unexplored directions?
And how are you affected by waiting? Waiting in line, waiting in traffic, waiting to eat, waiting for the bus, waiting to urinate--learning to punish and ignore your spontaneous urges? How are you affected by holding back your desires? By sexual repression, by the delay or denial of pleasure, starting in childhood, along with the suppression of everything in you that is spontaneous, everything that evidences your wild nature, your membership in the animal kingdom? Is pleasure dangerous?
Could danger be joyous? Do you ever need to see the sky? (Can you see many stars in it any more?) Do you ever need to see water, leaves, foliage, animals? Glinting, glimmering, moving? Is that why you have a pet, an aquarium, houseplants? Or are television and video your glinting, glimmering, moving? How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously? If your life was made into a movie, would you watch it? How do you feel in situations of enforced passivity?
How are you affected by a non-stop assault of symbolic communication--audio, visual, print, billboard, video, radio, robotic voices--as you wander through a forest of signs? What are they urging upon you? Do you ever need solitude, quiet, contemplation? Do you remember it? Thinking on your own, rather than reacting to stimuli? Is it hard to look away?
Is looking away the very thing that is not permitted? Where can you go to find silence and solitude? Not white noise, but pure silence? Not loneliness, but gentle solitude? How often have you stopped to ask yourself questions like these? Do you find yourself committing acts of symbolic violence? Do you ever feel lonely in a way that words cannot even express? Do you sometimes feel yourself ready to LOSE CONTROL?
[Copied entirely from http://exworker.blogspot.com/2005/11/contents-of-your-daily-life.html]
Think about what was mentioned in this post..
Consider what determines our lives..
Is the over-emphasis on the result rather than the process been puttin' us off about the present? Is the future was so important, what about the present? What makes up the future? The present. So cherish everyone and anyone who spends their time with you. You might never ever get the chance again in your whole entire lifetime. The present is just so cruel. It makes up your future, and your history. =)
Cherish. Relish every single moment to the fullest extent. =)
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives"
-Annie Dillard, poet/writer.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Dream..
"Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today."
Dream..
Surreal, irrational, fucked up in this damned city life
So real, rational triumph over exams, live and strive
I'm the sort of person who never showed no concern
Living up like I'm dead to see relations worsen
All I ever yearn is for people to ever learn
Enough's never enough, earn enough money to burn
Earn till one day you see cash on the floor and you spurn
Mid-thirties, mid-life crisis, pallid face, weak hearts churned
Retards' turn, back to cycle without havin' a dream
Paving' a scheme to fight against this throttlin' regime
Sleep, before birth, only one motion, no emotions
Dead back to where we started, get the notion?
Everything goes back to zero, so why be hero?
This disease's viral, driving all my rivals spiral
See the mass have one hobby: kissin' people's ass
But how long can they ever last? These people never last
The dream's yours to dream, pride and glory, yours to scream
Down the stream, suddenly a terrible thought bleams
Imagine, if we had one chance to fight this regime
Take it or leave it, make it or heave it, "I'm the supreme"!
Imagine we overthrow the 'god' of our lives
And we finally have the say to take the drive
Who needs the ruler? The master-mind.. A farceur?
If we ever did so, we would never let a dollar
Determine our lives.. Confusion over the stereo
Look here, living a life with a dream over the radio
Dream..
Surreal, irrational, fucked up in this damned city life
So real, rational triumph over exams, live and strive
I'm the sort of person who never showed no concern
Living up like I'm dead to see relations worsen
All I ever yearn is for people to ever learn
Enough's never enough, earn enough money to burn
Earn till one day you see cash on the floor and you spurn
Mid-thirties, mid-life crisis, pallid face, weak hearts churned
Retards' turn, back to cycle without havin' a dream
Paving' a scheme to fight against this throttlin' regime
Sleep, before birth, only one motion, no emotions
Dead back to where we started, get the notion?
Everything goes back to zero, so why be hero?
This disease's viral, driving all my rivals spiral
See the mass have one hobby: kissin' people's ass
But how long can they ever last? These people never last
The dream's yours to dream, pride and glory, yours to scream
Down the stream, suddenly a terrible thought bleams
Imagine, if we had one chance to fight this regime
Take it or leave it, make it or heave it, "I'm the supreme"!
Imagine we overthrow the 'god' of our lives
And we finally have the say to take the drive
Who needs the ruler? The master-mind.. A farceur?
If we ever did so, we would never let a dollar
Determine our lives.. Confusion over the stereo
Look here, living a life with a dream over the radio
I'd might as well be part of a fabric to be sewn
Never get to see the whole picture, let the truth be known
I'd be encaged in your pets' cages, my rage
Against the world, against anybody who takes my stage..
If the truth is no shame, we wouldn't be taking the blame
Till the day we die, we let our dreams keep burnin in flames..
In the game.
"Ignorance is not bliss-- it is oblivion." -Philip Wylie
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
The Ex-Worker's Collective (16 Nov 2005) Part 2
Do it yourself. (de)Classifieds
More important than any other resource is the raw awareness that you have the power to change the world—this is the hardest one to develop and share, and the most essential. It doesn’t help to give your endorsement to political representatives, social programs, or radical ideologies when the fundamental problem is that you don’t know your own strength.
Self-determination begins and ends with your initiatives and actions, whether you live under a totalitarian regime or the canopy of a rain forest. It must be established on a daily basis, by acting back on the world that acts upon you—whether that means calling in sick to work on a sunny day, starting a neighborhood garden with your friends, or toppling a government. You cannot make a revolution that distributes power equally except by learning firsthand how to exercise and share power—and that exercising and sharing, on any scale, is itself the ongoing, never-concluded project of revolution.
What you do today is itself the extent of that revolution, its limits and its triumph.
You can.
You can make a potato into a battery by putting a piece of copper in one side, a piece of zinc in the other, and attaching wires to each. Add more potatoes or other vegetables to the circuit for more power.
You can suspend banners from helium balloons tied to power lines, if you want to make them particularly difficult to take down.
You can create a seam sealing two sheets of plastic together by cutting them with a hot razor blade—try this for do-it-yourself lamination.
You can get play your favorite music backwards for a new listening experience by taking a cassette apart with a screwdriver and putting the tape reel in backwards; better, record it onto another tape on the third or fourth channel of a four track recorder, then listen to the other side of the second tape.
You can compile a monthly calendar of events that include free food (art openings, city council extravaganzas, etc.) and circulate it to hungry people.
You can approach restaurants and grocery stores as a representative of a charity group, asking for their leftovers. You should be able to gather enough food this way to provide for a number of people—perhaps a free grocery program for a poor neighborhood, or a weekly communal meal in a public place . . .
You can establish a community garden, with lots open for people to grow their own food, or volunteer programs for them to participate and share in the harvest. Lots of people have yards that go untended, and there’s always those abandoned lots . . .
You can put glass etching solution (hydrofluoric acid) on the windows of corporations or agencies that you think need a wake-up call, if a brick would attract too much attention; if you want to make it clear why you’re doing it, try applying the solution through a stencil expressing your message! If a brick is called for, You can dress up nice, carry it in your purse, and apply it without ever having to take it out.
You can really wreak some havoc on videotapes in noxious corporate rental stores, etc. with a powerful magnet. The same goes for computers, of course.
You can short-circuit any electric or electronic machine by introducing salt water into it. Once upon a time vandals would do this to soda vending machines, causing them to spit out free soda and change.
You can save the “postage paid by addressee” envelopes you get in junk mail to send back stuffed with more junk mail—or, better, with love letters to whomever opens them, begging them to seek a better life.
You can soak the ink off some canceled stamps with alcohol—better, cover the stamps with a thin layer of soap or water-soluble glue before mailing; the addressee can soak off the soap or glue.
You can use lemon juice or urine as invisible ink—heat up the paper, and it will appear.
You can take the clear adhesive envelopes available free at unmanned Federal Express stations everywhere and put them up on the walls of city streets, corporate elevators, gas station bathrooms, etc. with secret instructions or maps to buried treasure inside.
You can protect yourself from the effects of tear gas by covering your mouth and nose with a rag soaked in vinegar or lime juice and wearing swimming goggles; when not wearing the goggles, put them on your forehead with the inside facing out, so they won’t fog up.
By putting a weight at the bottom, You can insure that the big banner you drop from a building or freeway won’t blow in the wind.
You can make massive inflatable structures out of thin plastic sheeting that folds up to a small size convenient for smuggling into unexpected environments. Even if you couldn’t sneak a fan in, you could still spice up a street demonstration or public event by stretching one over a hot air vent on a city street—presto, a sixty foot missile silo towers over the Inaugural Parade.
You can carry a marker in your pocket and get in the pleasurable habit of altering your environment everywhere you go—by adding “capitalism:” at the top of DEAD END signs, for example, or “LIES” across the display window of corporate newspaper vending machines. . . or writing “ballot box” on trash cans during an election. You can make your own ineffaceable graffiti marker by combining 80% Rustoleum and 20% mineral spirits in a shoe polish applicator or similar device—how about a deodorant container with a dry eraser inside?
You can make those paper stickers you scam from the local copyshop more weatherproof by covering them with clear packing tape.
You can go to stores that sell house paint and get mis-mixed buckets for little to no cost. Think of all the things You can do with paint. Make woodcuts with potato stampers, or linoleum, for example—or make a stamp out of shoelace with wire through it, shaped into a word or line image.
You can knit your own clothes in the time it would take you to earn the money to buy them prefabricated, and in much more pleasant environments.
You can keep warm in winter by lining the inside of your clothes with plastic—this will work best if you place the layer of plastic right next to your skin, although it will make you sweat a lot.
If you are traveling and need water, You can open the outside spigots at most gas stations and many other buildings with a good wrench. These spigots generally have one of two kinds of handles which can be attached to them for operation; you could carry both handles with you, for surefire access to water, if you happened to find them unremoved.
You can get drinks at fast food restaurants by retrieving a cup from the trash and asking for a refill.
You can find fabric (napkins, tablecloths, etc.) for making patches, banners, etc. in the laundry bins behind restaurants.
If quitting your job leaves you with more time on your hands than you know what to do with, try baby-sitting nights for single mothers—there are thousands of them longing for a chance to go out and have a good time. If you have a circle of dependable volunteers, you could organize an alternative day care collective—there’s a real shortage of those these days.
If you have more food, shelter, time, energy, love than you need for yourself and the ones who depend on you, You can find others to share with. If you have a room empty in your house now that your daughter has gone to college, you could lend it to a homeless writer or traveling activist, for example—or if you have more sources of free bread than your team of urban hunter-gatherers can possibly take advantage of, you should see if You can get in touch with striking union workers.
You can write to companies informing them that you really enjoy their product, or that you were shocked to find you had purchased a defective item. They’ll probably send you free coupons.
You can buy an expensive electronic video camera with a liberal return policy, and shoot all your footage and download it onto a computer before the return deadline, if you want to make a movie or documentary for free. You can do the same thing with fancy musical equipment for a few days of recording, or with . . .
You can get free press passes to attend concerts and similar events simply by approaching the promoters as a representative of the media. You’ll probably get more privileged treatment than any of the paying customers. A press pass might also help you to get past security or even cross national borders in an emergency.
You can set up a fake activist webpage for the F.B.I., to keep them busy and misinformed; at high-surveillance demonstrations, You can leave unmarked boxes and bags all around town, to keep the bomb squad busy and entertained—better yet, put little letters in the bags for them, or fragments that all together spell out a message.
You can improve your chances of being picked up and treated well while hitchhiking by dressing in dark pants and a white shirt with a tie and perhaps a name tag—that is, as a young Mormon on mission! Pick up some free Mormon bibles at your nearest tabernacle for authenticity. If anyone asks serious questions, what better form of cultural terrorism than to spread a little fun misinformation? This disguise might also help you to get away with other things . . .
You can protect your home from police dogs by laying down a thin line of cayenne pepper across each doorway. The dogs will pause to sniff it on their way in, and won’t be able to smell anything else for a while.
You can make a hand warmer by filling a cloth bag with dry beans (and rice, or corn) and microwaving it. It should retain heat for a couple hours. If you get hungry, You can always cook and eat your hand warmer.
If you need to create a false identity in an emergency—for example, at a hospital, when you have no money or insurance—You can simply make up a name and give your social security number with the first five digits as they really appear but the last four changed. If you offer a distant false home address, it will take longer for them to find out you have played a trick on them.
You can give your friends tattoos with a clean safety pin and India ink. For branding, heat a shaped piece of coat-hanger with a small blowtorch.
You can make paper maché (for puppets, or uncommissioned public sculptures, or . . .) by heating three parts water and two parts corn starch until it becomes thick. Let it cool a bit, and apply it to newspaper to make it stick together.
You can make puppets for street demonstrations that double as shields for self-defense by reinforcing them—with an internal fiberglass base, for example. Cut in half, the larger-sized cylindrical traffic cones might be useful for this, and they are freely available.
You can make wheat paste by mixing three parts wheat flour and one part corn starch, boiling that in water (at proportions of two parts starch to three parts water), and cooking it down to a paste. Hurry to stick up posters everywhere with it before it dries. You can keep your wheat paste warm and wet longer in winter by carrying it around in a drink cooler. Try variations of the recipe until you find a personal favorite.
You can encourage strangers to share their brilliant ideas with you and everyone else (and make public space more interesting!), by wheatpasting fliers with wheatpaste recipes on them all around your city—along with a headline reading “call for submissions.”
You can make stencils out of cardboard or clear plastic acetate and spraypaint your own artwork and ideas everywhere. Alternately, You can apply house paint through the stencils with rollers. You could make a “handicapped” stencil and make all the parking spaces at the mall handicapped spaces (this might be easier to accomplish if you had a flatbed truck with a truck top on it and a hole cut out of the flatbed for street access from inside). You could make a stencil a hundred feet long out of a roll of thick paper, and apply it on the street in two minutes with three people—one in front, unrolling, one in the middle applying the paint roller, and one in back, rolling up.
You can take those priority mail stickers they give out at the post office, stencil your own designs on them, and put them up anywhere in instants. The post office will send more of them to you on request—but beware, misusing them is a federal offense, of course.
Speaking of spraypaint, when you see billboards that make you uncomfortable, You can reverse the effect by adding a clever phrase or picture of your own. If You can’t reach them, You can attach a spraypaint can to the end of a long stick and operate it by means of a lever and pulley, or put paint in a long-distance water gun (a “super soaker”) and get your point across more simply. Try between three and five in the morning—the floodlights are often off then.
To apply paint from a distance, You can also fill up light bulbs or Christmas tree ornaments with it, and throw it. On an entirely different topic—has it occurred to you that the Achilles’ heel of riot gear is that the wearers need to be able to see out?
You can remove advertisements (from the subway, the bus, the bus stop . . .) and replace them after adjusting them in subtle ways. You can do this with the labels on food products in the grocery store. For a more advanced project, try this with the name plates on businessmen’s desks or professors’ doors, or the commemorative plaques at historic sites. For post-graduate work, try kidnapping time capsules from corporate skyscrapers or universities and replacing the contents with information about what it was really like way back when.
You can make projection devices to project messages or images onto the sides of big buildings, to get a point across without actually touching them. A smaller scale, subtler application of a similar concept would be to remove the “WALK/DON’T WALK” screens from crosswalk signs and replace them with your own message screens.
You can set up short-range pirate radio stations by key intersections, broadcasting site-specific messages on popular frequencies around the clock, without attracting the attention a citywide pirate radio station would.
In street warfare, it might be useful to know that You can easily set the dumpsters outside of bars on fire—the bottles and cans inside all have the residue of alcohol on them, after all. Just douse the inside with a bottle of whisky or similar substance, push a couple of them where they need to be, and throw in a smoke bomb for ignition.
You can still get almost all the books you need at the library, especially if you ask them to order the ones they’re missing. Many libraries also have free video borrowing, for movies. If You can’t use the internet to get free recordings of your favorite songs, go to a local college radio station; act like you work there, and tape whatever records you want. For free cassettes, write to Christian evangelical groups asking for listening material.
If you are a high school student in the United States, chances are You can get your school to pay for you to take college classes, if the classes aren’t available there.
You can set up your own library, with all the books and magazines and records and videos and clothes you and your friends already have available for everyone, so no one has to buy anything. Whenever a band comes to your town to play, have a part of the door money go to buying a copy of their record for the community to share.
You can find food, flowers, furniture, clothes, building supplies, and more precious things left out on the street in front of houses in the suburbs, or in dumpsters. You might have more luck finding building supplies at construction sites at night, though—or just wheeling them out the back door of a corporate “home repair” chain on a cart. You might be able to return some of the items you rescue—such as food that has passed the expiration date—for money or store credit. For a more thorough approach, track down local distributors—a juice distributor will probably throw out whole dumpsters of good juice before the expiration date, because they cannot be shipped to stores in time.
You can go to college campuses at the end of the semester and collect incredible amounts of discarded food, clothes, and furnishings—and all the bicycles that have been abandoned to rust on the bike racks, if you have a good set of wire cutters. You could start a “free bikes for kids” program with these. If you need more, dress up and go to the local police station—chances are they’ve already collected scores of forgotten bikes the same way you did.
You can establish a “yellow bike” program for your town: get a bunch of cheap bicycles, paint them all an ugly yellow color, and leave them around town at specified drop off points so people can ride them from one point to another. Voila! Public transportation that is both free and autonomous.
If You can get a password from a student, you should be able to use the computers at the local university for everything from email to printing out fliers. If You can borrow a student’s meal plan card, You can go into a college cafeteria with a backpack and come out with enough food to feed yourself and some companions for a few days.
You can get a job working for a company you don’t respect that has a resource you need (photocopies, food, information, art supplies . . .) and hold it as long as it takes to smuggle out what you want. A circle of friends could do this together, each supplying a different resource.
You can get as many credit cards as possible, run them all up to their limits purchasing useful materials, and then declare bankruptcy. If you wanted to, you could write them all letters announcing that you were acting to avenge all the families whose lives have been ruined by debt—though this might get you in trouble. Or, better: get together a circle of people who are committed to supporting each other; each year one will run up massive debts paying for the needs of the group, and then declare bankruptcy. There should be enough people in the group to cover the years until the bankruptcy period of a participant is over and the process can be repeated.
You can put on public puppet shows for children that get important information across to their parents as well. You might be able to arrange to give educational presentations at local schools, too. If you know students involved in a student group on a college campus, they can probably arrange a speaking engagement for you that would pay a significant amount of student funds—which could go to the worthwhile cause of your choice.
You can make a piñata in the form of a politician or monstrosity (such as the “free market,” the “loyal officer,” etc.) and have a piñata party at which, when sufficiently beaten, the piñata spills out party favors such as candies, little books, or invitations to the next special event. Try doing this in a public place during times of unrest.
You can make quite an impressive, arresting noise by shaking a large piece of sheet metal.
These should be easy to find unattended at construction sites.
You can blow fire by holding a torch (an old 100% cotton t-shirt wrapped around a bent coat hanger) and spitting a cloud of paraffin lamp oil through it. Be sure not to swallow it, and have both water on hand to wash out your mouth and a towel to keep your face dry so you won’t blow yourself up.
You can use the personal ads at the back of the local newspaper for a novel recruiting tactic: “Capitalism sucking the life out of you? BiWF, 27, non-monogamous, seeks lovers of life and liberty to form a revolutionary organization. Only those serious about playing need apply.”
You can spice up a first date by resolving to get in trouble with the authorities for something dreadfully embarrassing by the end of it. Don’t tell your date, of course.
If you have to work, You can organize a union with your fellow employees to gain a little leverage over your workplace. Once you pull off a sudden strike, or get support from a larger union organization, the management will be forced to take you seriously.
You can organize rent strikes to make your landlord take care of the problems with your plumbing, heat, electricity—but it would be far wiser to get together a circle of trustworthy people to invest in a communal living space together. In the city, you could use the space as a meeting place or center for the performing arts; in the countryside, you could grow enough vegetables to feed a lot of people. You can organize exchange programs with housing cooperatives in other cities, so You can move around if you like without having to rent from strangers.
You can give your friends massages on a regular basis. That can help everyone stay relaxed and feel close.
If your lover is a woman, You can find her g-spot by putting your fingers inside of her with your palm facing up and moving them in a beckoning motion exerting light pressure towards her belly. If he is a man, try the same thing a few inches further back!
You can practice a variety of daily rituals to get in touch with and establish power over your fears: try being naked with your friends and then strangers, being intimate with people of the sex opposite the one you are used to touching, walking alone down familiar and then unfamiliar streets blindfolded, starting frank conversations with strangers, climbing ladders on water towers—nothing can multiply your capabilities like confronting the limitations you have set for yourself.
You can take advantage of a thousand different little attempts people have already made to establish community—neighborhood associations, punk rock scenes, bowling leagues, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, church choirs, high school clubs, student organizations, knitting circles, hobby groups—as starting points for working towards larger, more radical, durable, ambitious communities.
You can travel across the globe, hiking or skateboarding or hopping trains or driving cars for cross-country delivery services or working as the saxophonist on a cruise ship, and everywhere you go you will find people looking for holes in the fabric of this so-called reality. Together, You can cut these holes—by masterminding unexpected street festivals, carrying out occupations and permanent rent strikes, playing music that blows the roof off the world, seizing chances to leap up and shout out truths no one dares to express, charging off into the unknown on wild, unheard-of adventures . . .
You can get together with a handful of friends and discover that you have the power to create history. Everything depends on this.
You can write to this address, sending a donation for postage if possible, to get more reading material—or more copies of this publication to give to your friends, slip into newspapers in vending machines, leave in public bathrooms, put on the magazine rack at the gas station where you work, read over the air during your radio show, plagiarize and modify to your own needs:
Spencer Kuzara
241 N. Main St.
Sheridan, WY 82801
U.S.A.
(Copied from http://exworker.blogspot.com)
More important than any other resource is the raw awareness that you have the power to change the world—this is the hardest one to develop and share, and the most essential. It doesn’t help to give your endorsement to political representatives, social programs, or radical ideologies when the fundamental problem is that you don’t know your own strength.
Self-determination begins and ends with your initiatives and actions, whether you live under a totalitarian regime or the canopy of a rain forest. It must be established on a daily basis, by acting back on the world that acts upon you—whether that means calling in sick to work on a sunny day, starting a neighborhood garden with your friends, or toppling a government. You cannot make a revolution that distributes power equally except by learning firsthand how to exercise and share power—and that exercising and sharing, on any scale, is itself the ongoing, never-concluded project of revolution.
What you do today is itself the extent of that revolution, its limits and its triumph.
You can.
You can make a potato into a battery by putting a piece of copper in one side, a piece of zinc in the other, and attaching wires to each. Add more potatoes or other vegetables to the circuit for more power.
You can suspend banners from helium balloons tied to power lines, if you want to make them particularly difficult to take down.
You can create a seam sealing two sheets of plastic together by cutting them with a hot razor blade—try this for do-it-yourself lamination.
You can get play your favorite music backwards for a new listening experience by taking a cassette apart with a screwdriver and putting the tape reel in backwards; better, record it onto another tape on the third or fourth channel of a four track recorder, then listen to the other side of the second tape.
You can compile a monthly calendar of events that include free food (art openings, city council extravaganzas, etc.) and circulate it to hungry people.
You can approach restaurants and grocery stores as a representative of a charity group, asking for their leftovers. You should be able to gather enough food this way to provide for a number of people—perhaps a free grocery program for a poor neighborhood, or a weekly communal meal in a public place . . .
You can establish a community garden, with lots open for people to grow their own food, or volunteer programs for them to participate and share in the harvest. Lots of people have yards that go untended, and there’s always those abandoned lots . . .
You can put glass etching solution (hydrofluoric acid) on the windows of corporations or agencies that you think need a wake-up call, if a brick would attract too much attention; if you want to make it clear why you’re doing it, try applying the solution through a stencil expressing your message! If a brick is called for, You can dress up nice, carry it in your purse, and apply it without ever having to take it out.
You can really wreak some havoc on videotapes in noxious corporate rental stores, etc. with a powerful magnet. The same goes for computers, of course.
You can short-circuit any electric or electronic machine by introducing salt water into it. Once upon a time vandals would do this to soda vending machines, causing them to spit out free soda and change.
You can save the “postage paid by addressee” envelopes you get in junk mail to send back stuffed with more junk mail—or, better, with love letters to whomever opens them, begging them to seek a better life.
You can soak the ink off some canceled stamps with alcohol—better, cover the stamps with a thin layer of soap or water-soluble glue before mailing; the addressee can soak off the soap or glue.
You can use lemon juice or urine as invisible ink—heat up the paper, and it will appear.
You can take the clear adhesive envelopes available free at unmanned Federal Express stations everywhere and put them up on the walls of city streets, corporate elevators, gas station bathrooms, etc. with secret instructions or maps to buried treasure inside.
You can protect yourself from the effects of tear gas by covering your mouth and nose with a rag soaked in vinegar or lime juice and wearing swimming goggles; when not wearing the goggles, put them on your forehead with the inside facing out, so they won’t fog up.
By putting a weight at the bottom, You can insure that the big banner you drop from a building or freeway won’t blow in the wind.
You can make massive inflatable structures out of thin plastic sheeting that folds up to a small size convenient for smuggling into unexpected environments. Even if you couldn’t sneak a fan in, you could still spice up a street demonstration or public event by stretching one over a hot air vent on a city street—presto, a sixty foot missile silo towers over the Inaugural Parade.
You can carry a marker in your pocket and get in the pleasurable habit of altering your environment everywhere you go—by adding “capitalism:” at the top of DEAD END signs, for example, or “LIES” across the display window of corporate newspaper vending machines. . . or writing “ballot box” on trash cans during an election. You can make your own ineffaceable graffiti marker by combining 80% Rustoleum and 20% mineral spirits in a shoe polish applicator or similar device—how about a deodorant container with a dry eraser inside?
You can make those paper stickers you scam from the local copyshop more weatherproof by covering them with clear packing tape.
You can go to stores that sell house paint and get mis-mixed buckets for little to no cost. Think of all the things You can do with paint. Make woodcuts with potato stampers, or linoleum, for example—or make a stamp out of shoelace with wire through it, shaped into a word or line image.
You can knit your own clothes in the time it would take you to earn the money to buy them prefabricated, and in much more pleasant environments.
You can keep warm in winter by lining the inside of your clothes with plastic—this will work best if you place the layer of plastic right next to your skin, although it will make you sweat a lot.
If you are traveling and need water, You can open the outside spigots at most gas stations and many other buildings with a good wrench. These spigots generally have one of two kinds of handles which can be attached to them for operation; you could carry both handles with you, for surefire access to water, if you happened to find them unremoved.
You can get drinks at fast food restaurants by retrieving a cup from the trash and asking for a refill.
You can find fabric (napkins, tablecloths, etc.) for making patches, banners, etc. in the laundry bins behind restaurants.
If quitting your job leaves you with more time on your hands than you know what to do with, try baby-sitting nights for single mothers—there are thousands of them longing for a chance to go out and have a good time. If you have a circle of dependable volunteers, you could organize an alternative day care collective—there’s a real shortage of those these days.
If you have more food, shelter, time, energy, love than you need for yourself and the ones who depend on you, You can find others to share with. If you have a room empty in your house now that your daughter has gone to college, you could lend it to a homeless writer or traveling activist, for example—or if you have more sources of free bread than your team of urban hunter-gatherers can possibly take advantage of, you should see if You can get in touch with striking union workers.
You can write to companies informing them that you really enjoy their product, or that you were shocked to find you had purchased a defective item. They’ll probably send you free coupons.
You can buy an expensive electronic video camera with a liberal return policy, and shoot all your footage and download it onto a computer before the return deadline, if you want to make a movie or documentary for free. You can do the same thing with fancy musical equipment for a few days of recording, or with . . .
You can get free press passes to attend concerts and similar events simply by approaching the promoters as a representative of the media. You’ll probably get more privileged treatment than any of the paying customers. A press pass might also help you to get past security or even cross national borders in an emergency.
You can set up a fake activist webpage for the F.B.I., to keep them busy and misinformed; at high-surveillance demonstrations, You can leave unmarked boxes and bags all around town, to keep the bomb squad busy and entertained—better yet, put little letters in the bags for them, or fragments that all together spell out a message.
You can improve your chances of being picked up and treated well while hitchhiking by dressing in dark pants and a white shirt with a tie and perhaps a name tag—that is, as a young Mormon on mission! Pick up some free Mormon bibles at your nearest tabernacle for authenticity. If anyone asks serious questions, what better form of cultural terrorism than to spread a little fun misinformation? This disguise might also help you to get away with other things . . .
You can protect your home from police dogs by laying down a thin line of cayenne pepper across each doorway. The dogs will pause to sniff it on their way in, and won’t be able to smell anything else for a while.
You can make a hand warmer by filling a cloth bag with dry beans (and rice, or corn) and microwaving it. It should retain heat for a couple hours. If you get hungry, You can always cook and eat your hand warmer.
If you need to create a false identity in an emergency—for example, at a hospital, when you have no money or insurance—You can simply make up a name and give your social security number with the first five digits as they really appear but the last four changed. If you offer a distant false home address, it will take longer for them to find out you have played a trick on them.
You can give your friends tattoos with a clean safety pin and India ink. For branding, heat a shaped piece of coat-hanger with a small blowtorch.
You can make paper maché (for puppets, or uncommissioned public sculptures, or . . .) by heating three parts water and two parts corn starch until it becomes thick. Let it cool a bit, and apply it to newspaper to make it stick together.
You can make puppets for street demonstrations that double as shields for self-defense by reinforcing them—with an internal fiberglass base, for example. Cut in half, the larger-sized cylindrical traffic cones might be useful for this, and they are freely available.
You can make wheat paste by mixing three parts wheat flour and one part corn starch, boiling that in water (at proportions of two parts starch to three parts water), and cooking it down to a paste. Hurry to stick up posters everywhere with it before it dries. You can keep your wheat paste warm and wet longer in winter by carrying it around in a drink cooler. Try variations of the recipe until you find a personal favorite.
You can encourage strangers to share their brilliant ideas with you and everyone else (and make public space more interesting!), by wheatpasting fliers with wheatpaste recipes on them all around your city—along with a headline reading “call for submissions.”
You can make stencils out of cardboard or clear plastic acetate and spraypaint your own artwork and ideas everywhere. Alternately, You can apply house paint through the stencils with rollers. You could make a “handicapped” stencil and make all the parking spaces at the mall handicapped spaces (this might be easier to accomplish if you had a flatbed truck with a truck top on it and a hole cut out of the flatbed for street access from inside). You could make a stencil a hundred feet long out of a roll of thick paper, and apply it on the street in two minutes with three people—one in front, unrolling, one in the middle applying the paint roller, and one in back, rolling up.
You can take those priority mail stickers they give out at the post office, stencil your own designs on them, and put them up anywhere in instants. The post office will send more of them to you on request—but beware, misusing them is a federal offense, of course.
Speaking of spraypaint, when you see billboards that make you uncomfortable, You can reverse the effect by adding a clever phrase or picture of your own. If You can’t reach them, You can attach a spraypaint can to the end of a long stick and operate it by means of a lever and pulley, or put paint in a long-distance water gun (a “super soaker”) and get your point across more simply. Try between three and five in the morning—the floodlights are often off then.
To apply paint from a distance, You can also fill up light bulbs or Christmas tree ornaments with it, and throw it. On an entirely different topic—has it occurred to you that the Achilles’ heel of riot gear is that the wearers need to be able to see out?
You can remove advertisements (from the subway, the bus, the bus stop . . .) and replace them after adjusting them in subtle ways. You can do this with the labels on food products in the grocery store. For a more advanced project, try this with the name plates on businessmen’s desks or professors’ doors, or the commemorative plaques at historic sites. For post-graduate work, try kidnapping time capsules from corporate skyscrapers or universities and replacing the contents with information about what it was really like way back when.
You can make projection devices to project messages or images onto the sides of big buildings, to get a point across without actually touching them. A smaller scale, subtler application of a similar concept would be to remove the “WALK/DON’T WALK” screens from crosswalk signs and replace them with your own message screens.
You can set up short-range pirate radio stations by key intersections, broadcasting site-specific messages on popular frequencies around the clock, without attracting the attention a citywide pirate radio station would.
In street warfare, it might be useful to know that You can easily set the dumpsters outside of bars on fire—the bottles and cans inside all have the residue of alcohol on them, after all. Just douse the inside with a bottle of whisky or similar substance, push a couple of them where they need to be, and throw in a smoke bomb for ignition.
You can still get almost all the books you need at the library, especially if you ask them to order the ones they’re missing. Many libraries also have free video borrowing, for movies. If You can’t use the internet to get free recordings of your favorite songs, go to a local college radio station; act like you work there, and tape whatever records you want. For free cassettes, write to Christian evangelical groups asking for listening material.
If you are a high school student in the United States, chances are You can get your school to pay for you to take college classes, if the classes aren’t available there.
You can set up your own library, with all the books and magazines and records and videos and clothes you and your friends already have available for everyone, so no one has to buy anything. Whenever a band comes to your town to play, have a part of the door money go to buying a copy of their record for the community to share.
You can find food, flowers, furniture, clothes, building supplies, and more precious things left out on the street in front of houses in the suburbs, or in dumpsters. You might have more luck finding building supplies at construction sites at night, though—or just wheeling them out the back door of a corporate “home repair” chain on a cart. You might be able to return some of the items you rescue—such as food that has passed the expiration date—for money or store credit. For a more thorough approach, track down local distributors—a juice distributor will probably throw out whole dumpsters of good juice before the expiration date, because they cannot be shipped to stores in time.
You can go to college campuses at the end of the semester and collect incredible amounts of discarded food, clothes, and furnishings—and all the bicycles that have been abandoned to rust on the bike racks, if you have a good set of wire cutters. You could start a “free bikes for kids” program with these. If you need more, dress up and go to the local police station—chances are they’ve already collected scores of forgotten bikes the same way you did.
You can establish a “yellow bike” program for your town: get a bunch of cheap bicycles, paint them all an ugly yellow color, and leave them around town at specified drop off points so people can ride them from one point to another. Voila! Public transportation that is both free and autonomous.
If You can get a password from a student, you should be able to use the computers at the local university for everything from email to printing out fliers. If You can borrow a student’s meal plan card, You can go into a college cafeteria with a backpack and come out with enough food to feed yourself and some companions for a few days.
You can get a job working for a company you don’t respect that has a resource you need (photocopies, food, information, art supplies . . .) and hold it as long as it takes to smuggle out what you want. A circle of friends could do this together, each supplying a different resource.
You can get as many credit cards as possible, run them all up to their limits purchasing useful materials, and then declare bankruptcy. If you wanted to, you could write them all letters announcing that you were acting to avenge all the families whose lives have been ruined by debt—though this might get you in trouble. Or, better: get together a circle of people who are committed to supporting each other; each year one will run up massive debts paying for the needs of the group, and then declare bankruptcy. There should be enough people in the group to cover the years until the bankruptcy period of a participant is over and the process can be repeated.
You can put on public puppet shows for children that get important information across to their parents as well. You might be able to arrange to give educational presentations at local schools, too. If you know students involved in a student group on a college campus, they can probably arrange a speaking engagement for you that would pay a significant amount of student funds—which could go to the worthwhile cause of your choice.
You can make a piñata in the form of a politician or monstrosity (such as the “free market,” the “loyal officer,” etc.) and have a piñata party at which, when sufficiently beaten, the piñata spills out party favors such as candies, little books, or invitations to the next special event. Try doing this in a public place during times of unrest.
You can make quite an impressive, arresting noise by shaking a large piece of sheet metal.
These should be easy to find unattended at construction sites.
You can blow fire by holding a torch (an old 100% cotton t-shirt wrapped around a bent coat hanger) and spitting a cloud of paraffin lamp oil through it. Be sure not to swallow it, and have both water on hand to wash out your mouth and a towel to keep your face dry so you won’t blow yourself up.
You can use the personal ads at the back of the local newspaper for a novel recruiting tactic: “Capitalism sucking the life out of you? BiWF, 27, non-monogamous, seeks lovers of life and liberty to form a revolutionary organization. Only those serious about playing need apply.”
You can spice up a first date by resolving to get in trouble with the authorities for something dreadfully embarrassing by the end of it. Don’t tell your date, of course.
If you have to work, You can organize a union with your fellow employees to gain a little leverage over your workplace. Once you pull off a sudden strike, or get support from a larger union organization, the management will be forced to take you seriously.
You can organize rent strikes to make your landlord take care of the problems with your plumbing, heat, electricity—but it would be far wiser to get together a circle of trustworthy people to invest in a communal living space together. In the city, you could use the space as a meeting place or center for the performing arts; in the countryside, you could grow enough vegetables to feed a lot of people. You can organize exchange programs with housing cooperatives in other cities, so You can move around if you like without having to rent from strangers.
You can give your friends massages on a regular basis. That can help everyone stay relaxed and feel close.
If your lover is a woman, You can find her g-spot by putting your fingers inside of her with your palm facing up and moving them in a beckoning motion exerting light pressure towards her belly. If he is a man, try the same thing a few inches further back!
You can practice a variety of daily rituals to get in touch with and establish power over your fears: try being naked with your friends and then strangers, being intimate with people of the sex opposite the one you are used to touching, walking alone down familiar and then unfamiliar streets blindfolded, starting frank conversations with strangers, climbing ladders on water towers—nothing can multiply your capabilities like confronting the limitations you have set for yourself.
You can take advantage of a thousand different little attempts people have already made to establish community—neighborhood associations, punk rock scenes, bowling leagues, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, church choirs, high school clubs, student organizations, knitting circles, hobby groups—as starting points for working towards larger, more radical, durable, ambitious communities.
You can travel across the globe, hiking or skateboarding or hopping trains or driving cars for cross-country delivery services or working as the saxophonist on a cruise ship, and everywhere you go you will find people looking for holes in the fabric of this so-called reality. Together, You can cut these holes—by masterminding unexpected street festivals, carrying out occupations and permanent rent strikes, playing music that blows the roof off the world, seizing chances to leap up and shout out truths no one dares to express, charging off into the unknown on wild, unheard-of adventures . . .
You can get together with a handful of friends and discover that you have the power to create history. Everything depends on this.
You can write to this address, sending a donation for postage if possible, to get more reading material—or more copies of this publication to give to your friends, slip into newspapers in vending machines, leave in public bathrooms, put on the magazine rack at the gas station where you work, read over the air during your radio show, plagiarize and modify to your own needs:
Spencer Kuzara
241 N. Main St.
Sheridan, WY 82801
U.S.A.
(Copied from http://exworker.blogspot.com)
The Ex-Worker's Collective (16 Nov 2005)
Divided And Conquered
Over a century ago, a famous writer quipped that the industrial worker was "a mere appendage of flesh on a machine of iron." Today, that description can be applied across the board: each of us is no more than an appendage of flesh on the vast machine that is our society, for our lives and communities are atomized into isolated sectors. If we want to change the whole of life, we must first become whole again.
Separation: the Disintegration of the Self
Modern man's activity is compartmentalized: it is divided and subdivided into separate components which can only interfere with each other. He experiences life as an ongoing conflict between achievement, romance, social responsibility, fitness, relaxation, adventure, and so on, because all these pursuits seem to be mutually exclusive. He would like to spend more time with his wife, but if he doesn't stay at the office another hour he won't be able to advance his career, and then he has to go to the gym to firm up his belly and ward off poor health. . . and there's that damn vacation at the beach to plan for, and world news to catch up on, before he even gets to think about being romantic with her. Perhaps he buys that Mozart CD that the advertisements said would relieve stress and help focus his concentration skills—hoping some new medication will serve to fend off the symptoms of a life in which he never does anything for its own sake! Perhaps he would like to get involved with some sort of volunteer social work, but doesn't know where he would fit it into his schedule; he has a hard enough time just taking the time out to watch his favorite sitcom, and even that doesn't provide him with much relief from his busy life. Meaning, of course, is absent everywhere when life is disjointed; without unity of self in his pursuits, the modern man can find no lasting satisfaction in any one of them.
Compare this with the integrated, holistic life of the "savage" or young adventurer. For her, there is no distinction between working and playing, between spending time with her friends and lovers, taking care of her practical needs, and seeking pleasure. She moves through the world, finding sustenance and getting exercise from the same activities, using her creativity with her friends to weave a daily life that is both challenging and familiar, at once adventure, livelihood, and religious ceremony.
Perhaps you've experienced this kind of lifestyle before, when you were doing something that incorporated every aspect of your being into a perfect equilibrium. We all need to find ways to integrate our lives, so that we will not always be trying to make impossible choices between equally necessary pieces of ourselves. . . and if we want to make this world a better place, we have to find ways of living that are revolutionary in their very nature; for politics, activism, or social responsibility as a separate domain of life, as a hobby or part-time operation, can never outweigh the effects of the rest of life.
Example:My friend Mark practices Yoga to focus and relax himself. He is also an artist and musician, who often travels around the country with his work. Mark realized one day that when he neglects his exercises on the road, he still feels focused and relaxed in ways that he simply couldn't at home without Yoga. He concluded that the voyage itself must be a kind of Yoga, perhaps the same kind of Yoga referred to by Ken Kesey in his eulogy for Neil Cassady:
"His life was the yoga of a man driven to the cliff-edge by the grassfire of an entire nation's burning material madness. Rather than be consumed by this he jumped, choosing to sort things out in the fast-flying but smog-free moments of a life with no retreat. In this commitment he placed himself irrevocably beyond category."
Specialization: the Sub-Division of Labor
Just as our individual lives are fragmented by compartmentalization, our society is fragmented by ever-increasing specialization. Every sphere of life is relegated to the care of an elite core of specialists, who administer it without consulting the rest of us. Every profession is divided and subdivided: from scientist to chemist, from chemist to biochemist, from biochemist to pharmaceutical neurobiologist until no one outside a handful of experts can understand what is going on. At that point, the division of knowledge itself becomes authoritarian, for it grants small groups of people vast powers over others who cannot even fathom what those powers are.
Becoming a specialist is a self-selecting process: only those willing to concentrate on learning one subject to the exclusion of all else can excel at it. Thus the engineers and computer programmers with the greatest skills are willing to work for the government building weapons of mass destruction and cracking the codes of "subversive" groups, for they have never taken the time to reflect on what the effects of their efforts might be. They simply do what they have been taught to do, for whoever provides the chance to do it.
Each expert in this system of specialization is able to do his job well, in a vacuum, but unable to see the larger whole. Without an analysis of the part he plays in society, he sees it as an external force, acting on him without his participation. And the people who form the various parts of the machine are unable to relate to each other to take action together when they want to change something about the world they are making, separated as they are spatially and socially and psychologically into their individual spheres; in fact, each tends to conceive of problems in terms of its needs versus those of the other components of the machine: the library would get the funding it needed if only it wasn't going to the linguistics department, etc.
Specialization also discourages the rest of us from being well-rounded and understanding the workings of our society. Painting is left up to artists, the maintenance of our cars to automechanics, social change to professional politicians or amateur activists. The more complicated technologies become, and the more alienating the terminology used by those who work with them, the fewer of us are able to exercise any control over our environments: "Call the repair man," we chant, waiting in intimidated ignorance and powerlessness. Similarly, all of us but the recognized "artists" miss out on the joys of being creative in the aesthetic world. The true value of a painting cannot be captured by purchasing it in a gallery and hanging it on the wall; it lies in the moment when the painting is conceived, when the artist is comparing sketches with her comrades late one night, arguing about narrative and form, and has a sudden, exhilarating insight. This is something we must all take part in, each with our unique talents. The supposed divinity of artists, and the expert credentials of the art critics who deify them, just like the genius of scientists and the arcane knowledge of locksmiths, have fooled us into denying ourselves this irreplaceable pleasure.
The role of the political activist as authority and expert paralyzes the rest of humanity in correspondingly disastrous ways. Saddest and most absurd of all is the way so many political activists unconsciously act to alienate others, the very others with whom they hope in theory to find common cause. Conditioned to believe that they need to be superior to others to have value of their own, and believing in the scarcity economy of self which demands that they stake out their identity in contrast to the identities of those around them, today's insecure activists mistakenly presume that they somehow benefit from showing off how much more knowledgeable, more committed, and more ethical they are than everyone else.
Specialization within political circles is equally crippling. Oblivious to each other's efforts and the strength they could wield as an alliance, single-issue activists agitate about their chosen topics in parallel ghettos; marginalized into a thousand individual campaigns, they exhaust themselves trying to cure the symptoms of the dominant system, rather than developing a resistance that could undermine the world order that is ultimately responsible.
When being active is no longer an off-putting specialty, and partisans of different struggles are able to find common cause, the world will finally change.
End Segregation! Integrate our lives!
Somewhere across the world there is an underground circus or punk rock band on tour as you read this. Unbeknownst to themselves and others, they carry with them the seeds of a new and yet ancient social structure, which could totally transform the ways all of us live and interact. Within the group, responsibilities are shared and valued equally, and whenever someone wants a break from doing something or is curious to learn about something else, people switch roles. No one member's participation is less important than anyone else's, whatever their individual strengths may be, for the cooperation and contentment of each is crucial to the functioning of the group. Each member's daily activities satisfy her various desires: she feels at home with her friends while she travels through new environments, she makes art that simultaneously entertains and educates others, she gets exercise and learns new things repairing the van, she has adventures collecting food and other supplies through an urban hunting and gathering that does not conflict with her anti-consumerist ethics. Best of all, she no longer has to distinguish between her own needs and those of the people around her, which eliminates the greater part of the stress of human interaction. Together all the participants function as an extended family, and the positive atmosphere is so strong that over time they are able to lose some members and gain others without losing any momentum.
Yes, we'd have to downsize and restructure our whole civilization to follow the lead this merry little band offers, but for the past few centuries we've been struggling to deal with the difficulties of not living in such communities—and we haven't had much success. If we're going to struggle anyway, it might as well be towards a utopia in which our lives encompass can everything the cosmos has to offer.
(Copied from http://exworker.blogspot.com)
Over a century ago, a famous writer quipped that the industrial worker was "a mere appendage of flesh on a machine of iron." Today, that description can be applied across the board: each of us is no more than an appendage of flesh on the vast machine that is our society, for our lives and communities are atomized into isolated sectors. If we want to change the whole of life, we must first become whole again.
Separation: the Disintegration of the Self
Modern man's activity is compartmentalized: it is divided and subdivided into separate components which can only interfere with each other. He experiences life as an ongoing conflict between achievement, romance, social responsibility, fitness, relaxation, adventure, and so on, because all these pursuits seem to be mutually exclusive. He would like to spend more time with his wife, but if he doesn't stay at the office another hour he won't be able to advance his career, and then he has to go to the gym to firm up his belly and ward off poor health. . . and there's that damn vacation at the beach to plan for, and world news to catch up on, before he even gets to think about being romantic with her. Perhaps he buys that Mozart CD that the advertisements said would relieve stress and help focus his concentration skills—hoping some new medication will serve to fend off the symptoms of a life in which he never does anything for its own sake! Perhaps he would like to get involved with some sort of volunteer social work, but doesn't know where he would fit it into his schedule; he has a hard enough time just taking the time out to watch his favorite sitcom, and even that doesn't provide him with much relief from his busy life. Meaning, of course, is absent everywhere when life is disjointed; without unity of self in his pursuits, the modern man can find no lasting satisfaction in any one of them.
Compare this with the integrated, holistic life of the "savage" or young adventurer. For her, there is no distinction between working and playing, between spending time with her friends and lovers, taking care of her practical needs, and seeking pleasure. She moves through the world, finding sustenance and getting exercise from the same activities, using her creativity with her friends to weave a daily life that is both challenging and familiar, at once adventure, livelihood, and religious ceremony.
Perhaps you've experienced this kind of lifestyle before, when you were doing something that incorporated every aspect of your being into a perfect equilibrium. We all need to find ways to integrate our lives, so that we will not always be trying to make impossible choices between equally necessary pieces of ourselves. . . and if we want to make this world a better place, we have to find ways of living that are revolutionary in their very nature; for politics, activism, or social responsibility as a separate domain of life, as a hobby or part-time operation, can never outweigh the effects of the rest of life.
Example:My friend Mark practices Yoga to focus and relax himself. He is also an artist and musician, who often travels around the country with his work. Mark realized one day that when he neglects his exercises on the road, he still feels focused and relaxed in ways that he simply couldn't at home without Yoga. He concluded that the voyage itself must be a kind of Yoga, perhaps the same kind of Yoga referred to by Ken Kesey in his eulogy for Neil Cassady:
"His life was the yoga of a man driven to the cliff-edge by the grassfire of an entire nation's burning material madness. Rather than be consumed by this he jumped, choosing to sort things out in the fast-flying but smog-free moments of a life with no retreat. In this commitment he placed himself irrevocably beyond category."
Specialization: the Sub-Division of Labor
Just as our individual lives are fragmented by compartmentalization, our society is fragmented by ever-increasing specialization. Every sphere of life is relegated to the care of an elite core of specialists, who administer it without consulting the rest of us. Every profession is divided and subdivided: from scientist to chemist, from chemist to biochemist, from biochemist to pharmaceutical neurobiologist until no one outside a handful of experts can understand what is going on. At that point, the division of knowledge itself becomes authoritarian, for it grants small groups of people vast powers over others who cannot even fathom what those powers are.
Becoming a specialist is a self-selecting process: only those willing to concentrate on learning one subject to the exclusion of all else can excel at it. Thus the engineers and computer programmers with the greatest skills are willing to work for the government building weapons of mass destruction and cracking the codes of "subversive" groups, for they have never taken the time to reflect on what the effects of their efforts might be. They simply do what they have been taught to do, for whoever provides the chance to do it.
Each expert in this system of specialization is able to do his job well, in a vacuum, but unable to see the larger whole. Without an analysis of the part he plays in society, he sees it as an external force, acting on him without his participation. And the people who form the various parts of the machine are unable to relate to each other to take action together when they want to change something about the world they are making, separated as they are spatially and socially and psychologically into their individual spheres; in fact, each tends to conceive of problems in terms of its needs versus those of the other components of the machine: the library would get the funding it needed if only it wasn't going to the linguistics department, etc.
Specialization also discourages the rest of us from being well-rounded and understanding the workings of our society. Painting is left up to artists, the maintenance of our cars to automechanics, social change to professional politicians or amateur activists. The more complicated technologies become, and the more alienating the terminology used by those who work with them, the fewer of us are able to exercise any control over our environments: "Call the repair man," we chant, waiting in intimidated ignorance and powerlessness. Similarly, all of us but the recognized "artists" miss out on the joys of being creative in the aesthetic world. The true value of a painting cannot be captured by purchasing it in a gallery and hanging it on the wall; it lies in the moment when the painting is conceived, when the artist is comparing sketches with her comrades late one night, arguing about narrative and form, and has a sudden, exhilarating insight. This is something we must all take part in, each with our unique talents. The supposed divinity of artists, and the expert credentials of the art critics who deify them, just like the genius of scientists and the arcane knowledge of locksmiths, have fooled us into denying ourselves this irreplaceable pleasure.
The role of the political activist as authority and expert paralyzes the rest of humanity in correspondingly disastrous ways. Saddest and most absurd of all is the way so many political activists unconsciously act to alienate others, the very others with whom they hope in theory to find common cause. Conditioned to believe that they need to be superior to others to have value of their own, and believing in the scarcity economy of self which demands that they stake out their identity in contrast to the identities of those around them, today's insecure activists mistakenly presume that they somehow benefit from showing off how much more knowledgeable, more committed, and more ethical they are than everyone else.
Specialization within political circles is equally crippling. Oblivious to each other's efforts and the strength they could wield as an alliance, single-issue activists agitate about their chosen topics in parallel ghettos; marginalized into a thousand individual campaigns, they exhaust themselves trying to cure the symptoms of the dominant system, rather than developing a resistance that could undermine the world order that is ultimately responsible.
When being active is no longer an off-putting specialty, and partisans of different struggles are able to find common cause, the world will finally change.
End Segregation! Integrate our lives!
Somewhere across the world there is an underground circus or punk rock band on tour as you read this. Unbeknownst to themselves and others, they carry with them the seeds of a new and yet ancient social structure, which could totally transform the ways all of us live and interact. Within the group, responsibilities are shared and valued equally, and whenever someone wants a break from doing something or is curious to learn about something else, people switch roles. No one member's participation is less important than anyone else's, whatever their individual strengths may be, for the cooperation and contentment of each is crucial to the functioning of the group. Each member's daily activities satisfy her various desires: she feels at home with her friends while she travels through new environments, she makes art that simultaneously entertains and educates others, she gets exercise and learns new things repairing the van, she has adventures collecting food and other supplies through an urban hunting and gathering that does not conflict with her anti-consumerist ethics. Best of all, she no longer has to distinguish between her own needs and those of the people around her, which eliminates the greater part of the stress of human interaction. Together all the participants function as an extended family, and the positive atmosphere is so strong that over time they are able to lose some members and gain others without losing any momentum.
Yes, we'd have to downsize and restructure our whole civilization to follow the lead this merry little band offers, but for the past few centuries we've been struggling to deal with the difficulties of not living in such communities—and we haven't had much success. If we're going to struggle anyway, it might as well be towards a utopia in which our lives encompass can everything the cosmos has to offer.
(Copied from http://exworker.blogspot.com)
The Ex-Worker's Collective (17 Nov 2005)
The Unabomber:
A Hero For Our Time
Pop quiz: what is it called when one of the finest minds of a generation picks a few individuals who are personally involved in the destruction of the environment (a timber-industry lobbyist) or of the attention span and reasoning ability of tens of thousands of Americans (an advertising executive), and kills or maims them in the pursuit of finding a voice for his concerns about social issues... concerns that otherwise would be heard by very few? Clearly, it is murder.
And what is it called when a nation of overweight barbers and underpaid clerks, of lazy unemployed middle class intellectuals and talk-show-educated housewives, of cowardly fast-food-chin managers and racist sorority girls, conspires to execute this murderer in the name of protecting the glorious status quo from his obviously deranged "mad bombings"?
The death penalty. And rightly applied, too, in defense of the right of forest clear-cutters and professional liars to continue bending our world to their vision without the danger of being molested by those who prefer redwood forests to Quik-Marts and sonnets to detergent slogans.
Seriously, and rhetoric aside, what is the difference between the two situations? In one case, a single person evaluates his situation and decides upon a course of action he feels is right. In the other case, millions of people, who are not very used to making up their minds by themselves, feel strong enough all together to strike out blindly against an individual who does not remain within their boundaries of acceptable behavior.
Now, our gentle and moderate reader would no doubt like to object that it is not fear of the free-standing individual that prompts the outcry against this terrorist, but moral indignation—for he has taken "innocent" life in his quest to have his ideas heard, and that is wrong in every situation.
But this nation of petty imbeciles is not regularly outraged about the taking of innocent life: as long as it fits within the parameters of the status quo, they don't care at all.
How many more people than the Unabomber have tobacco companies maimed and killed, by using advertising to addict them at a very young and uninformed age to an extremely harmful drug? How about the companies that advertise and sell cheap liquor in impoverished neighborhoods filled with alcoholics? How many citizens of third world nations have suffered and died at the hands of governments supported by such corporations as Pepsi Co., or even by the U.S. government itself? And how much animal life is destroyed thoughtlessly every year, every day in death camp factory farms... or in ecological destruction brought about by such companies as Exxon (our reader will remember the Valdez) or McDonalds (one of the better known destroyers of the rainforest)? No one is particularly concerned about these abuses of "innocent" life.
And indeed, it is harder to be, for they are institutionalized within the social and economic system... "normal." Besides, it is hard to figure out who exactly is responsible for them, for they are the results of the workings of complicated bureaucracies.
On the other hand, when one individual attempts to make his criticism of these destructive systems heard by the only really effective means, it is easy to pick him out and string him up. And our hypocritical outrage about his wrongdoings compared those of our own social institutions shows that it is his ability to act upon his own conclusions that truly shocks and frightens us most of all.
Our fear of the Unabomber as a freely acting individual shows in the attempts our media has made to demonize him. Details of his life, such as his academic achievements and his ability to live a Thoreauan self-sufficient existence, that would normally occasion praise, are now used to demonstrate that he is a maladjusted freak. Random and unimportant details of his life, similar to details of any of our lives, such as failed love affairs and childhood illnesses, are used to explain his "insane behavior." In speaking thus, the press suggests that there is no question at all that his actions were the result of insanity, pulling away in terror from the very thought that he might be just as rational as they. Newspapers print the most arbitrary and disconnected excerpts of his manifesto that they can combine, and they describe the manifesto as being random and disconnected—they even describe it as "ramblings" with a straight face, despite the well-known short attention span of today's media.
But it is not necessary that we accept the media's typical over-simplification of the case. The Unabomber's manifesto has, as a result of his efforts, been published and widely distributed. We can all read it for ourselves, not just in disconnected excerpts, but in its entirety, and decide for ourselves what we think of his ideas.
Do not be frightened by the Unabomber's willingness to stand out from the crowds and take whatever actions he believes are necessary to achieve his goals. In a civilization so stricken with mindless submission to social norms and irrational rules his example should be refreshing rather than horrifying; for his worst crimes are no worse than ours, in being citizens of this nation... and his greatest deeds as a dedicated and intelligent individual far outshine those of most of our heroes, who are for the most part basketball players and cookie-cutter pop musicians anyway.
At least, given the chance as we are, we should read his manifesto and come to our own conclusions, rather than allowing the press and popular opinion/paranoia to decide for us.
(Copied from http://exworker.blogspot.com)
A Hero For Our Time
Pop quiz: what is it called when one of the finest minds of a generation picks a few individuals who are personally involved in the destruction of the environment (a timber-industry lobbyist) or of the attention span and reasoning ability of tens of thousands of Americans (an advertising executive), and kills or maims them in the pursuit of finding a voice for his concerns about social issues... concerns that otherwise would be heard by very few? Clearly, it is murder.
And what is it called when a nation of overweight barbers and underpaid clerks, of lazy unemployed middle class intellectuals and talk-show-educated housewives, of cowardly fast-food-chin managers and racist sorority girls, conspires to execute this murderer in the name of protecting the glorious status quo from his obviously deranged "mad bombings"?
The death penalty. And rightly applied, too, in defense of the right of forest clear-cutters and professional liars to continue bending our world to their vision without the danger of being molested by those who prefer redwood forests to Quik-Marts and sonnets to detergent slogans.
Seriously, and rhetoric aside, what is the difference between the two situations? In one case, a single person evaluates his situation and decides upon a course of action he feels is right. In the other case, millions of people, who are not very used to making up their minds by themselves, feel strong enough all together to strike out blindly against an individual who does not remain within their boundaries of acceptable behavior.
Now, our gentle and moderate reader would no doubt like to object that it is not fear of the free-standing individual that prompts the outcry against this terrorist, but moral indignation—for he has taken "innocent" life in his quest to have his ideas heard, and that is wrong in every situation.
But this nation of petty imbeciles is not regularly outraged about the taking of innocent life: as long as it fits within the parameters of the status quo, they don't care at all.
How many more people than the Unabomber have tobacco companies maimed and killed, by using advertising to addict them at a very young and uninformed age to an extremely harmful drug? How about the companies that advertise and sell cheap liquor in impoverished neighborhoods filled with alcoholics? How many citizens of third world nations have suffered and died at the hands of governments supported by such corporations as Pepsi Co., or even by the U.S. government itself? And how much animal life is destroyed thoughtlessly every year, every day in death camp factory farms... or in ecological destruction brought about by such companies as Exxon (our reader will remember the Valdez) or McDonalds (one of the better known destroyers of the rainforest)? No one is particularly concerned about these abuses of "innocent" life.
And indeed, it is harder to be, for they are institutionalized within the social and economic system... "normal." Besides, it is hard to figure out who exactly is responsible for them, for they are the results of the workings of complicated bureaucracies.
On the other hand, when one individual attempts to make his criticism of these destructive systems heard by the only really effective means, it is easy to pick him out and string him up. And our hypocritical outrage about his wrongdoings compared those of our own social institutions shows that it is his ability to act upon his own conclusions that truly shocks and frightens us most of all.
Our fear of the Unabomber as a freely acting individual shows in the attempts our media has made to demonize him. Details of his life, such as his academic achievements and his ability to live a Thoreauan self-sufficient existence, that would normally occasion praise, are now used to demonstrate that he is a maladjusted freak. Random and unimportant details of his life, similar to details of any of our lives, such as failed love affairs and childhood illnesses, are used to explain his "insane behavior." In speaking thus, the press suggests that there is no question at all that his actions were the result of insanity, pulling away in terror from the very thought that he might be just as rational as they. Newspapers print the most arbitrary and disconnected excerpts of his manifesto that they can combine, and they describe the manifesto as being random and disconnected—they even describe it as "ramblings" with a straight face, despite the well-known short attention span of today's media.
But it is not necessary that we accept the media's typical over-simplification of the case. The Unabomber's manifesto has, as a result of his efforts, been published and widely distributed. We can all read it for ourselves, not just in disconnected excerpts, but in its entirety, and decide for ourselves what we think of his ideas.
Do not be frightened by the Unabomber's willingness to stand out from the crowds and take whatever actions he believes are necessary to achieve his goals. In a civilization so stricken with mindless submission to social norms and irrational rules his example should be refreshing rather than horrifying; for his worst crimes are no worse than ours, in being citizens of this nation... and his greatest deeds as a dedicated and intelligent individual far outshine those of most of our heroes, who are for the most part basketball players and cookie-cutter pop musicians anyway.
At least, given the chance as we are, we should read his manifesto and come to our own conclusions, rather than allowing the press and popular opinion/paranoia to decide for us.
(Copied from http://exworker.blogspot.com)
Frustration..
Feel damn frustrated now.. Just wrote finish a piece that I think was quite nice.. Then I had to accidentally click on the cross on the window.. And I went on to click on 'Don't Save'! Lolx.. Damn frustrated.. Like I wasted my 1 hour for nothing.. Haix..
Anyway I'm damn lazy to rewrite it.. But I just happened to come across some essays in my file that I haven't read for quite some time.. Felt it's quite well-written so I felt I should post them online for anyone to read. =)
The following posts will be extracted from http://exworker.blogspot.com.
It's some lazy blogger who hasn't blogged for damn long..
But personally I find his previous posts inspiring. =)
A food for thought. =)
P.S. His posts are damn long I know! =P
But take ur time to read if you're interested.. This guy's intellectual is.. Wow.
Anyway I'm damn lazy to rewrite it.. But I just happened to come across some essays in my file that I haven't read for quite some time.. Felt it's quite well-written so I felt I should post them online for anyone to read. =)
The following posts will be extracted from http://exworker.blogspot.com.
It's some lazy blogger who hasn't blogged for damn long..
But personally I find his previous posts inspiring. =)
A food for thought. =)
P.S. His posts are damn long I know! =P
But take ur time to read if you're interested.. This guy's intellectual is.. Wow.
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Gettin' Back.. What was rightfully ours.
Post-prelims.
Do qualifications mean that much?
Maybe it can get us a job in the future.
But hey,
I don't see how these information's has got any relevance to the world we're living in, neither can I see how all these load of information's gonna help us in our lives in the future. Like hey, we can live our lives normally without knowing how to find the angles in a triangle or a circle.
Have you ever thought like why are we doing all these shit in this system?
If we all continue to do things averagely, and if we continue to do what others want us to do, we're never going far. It's like we're being used. Literally being USED.
So what do we do with the computers that are outdated? What do we do with all the worksheets you have completed in your course of education? What about the countless number of handphones that you no longer find it fashionable? Think about all the materialistic possesions that ever came in your way. What did we do with them when we no longer need them anymore?
We throw them away man.
We throw them away..
Like they never existed.
So is the establishment gonna just play our lives?
Then throw us away when they're done with us?
All the funds set aside for all the senior citizens.. You think they're real?
They're just there to let this new generation feel that they're not making use of us.
Let us consider this.
The establishment pockets some money through the taxes ripped off the working class.
They pump it into the bank accounts of the old.
And there are two possible outcomes to where the money goes.
EITHER the old people spend it away, and the money goes to the working class, and back it goes back to the goverment in this so-called 'MONEY CYLE'.
OR the old people are so thrifty, they just refuse to spend their money. They eventually die. Now, the money goes to their offsprings through the will they've written, or the money goes back to the 'kings' who will pump the money back into the industries.
See, everything is just a cycle.
A motherfuckin' cycle.
I'm not trying to focus everything on money.
'Cause money is just some virtual thing that makes a man act funny.
Neither am I saying that money is not important though.
Bob Dylan said:
"What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."
Maybe it can get us a job in the future.
But hey,
I don't see how these information's has got any relevance to the world we're living in, neither can I see how all these load of information's gonna help us in our lives in the future. Like hey, we can live our lives normally without knowing how to find the angles in a triangle or a circle.
Have you ever thought like why are we doing all these shit in this system?
If we all continue to do things averagely, and if we continue to do what others want us to do, we're never going far. It's like we're being used. Literally being USED.
So what do we do with the computers that are outdated? What do we do with all the worksheets you have completed in your course of education? What about the countless number of handphones that you no longer find it fashionable? Think about all the materialistic possesions that ever came in your way. What did we do with them when we no longer need them anymore?
We throw them away man.
We throw them away..
Like they never existed.
So is the establishment gonna just play our lives?
Then throw us away when they're done with us?
All the funds set aside for all the senior citizens.. You think they're real?
They're just there to let this new generation feel that they're not making use of us.
Let us consider this.
The establishment pockets some money through the taxes ripped off the working class.
They pump it into the bank accounts of the old.
And there are two possible outcomes to where the money goes.
EITHER the old people spend it away, and the money goes to the working class, and back it goes back to the goverment in this so-called 'MONEY CYLE'.
OR the old people are so thrifty, they just refuse to spend their money. They eventually die. Now, the money goes to their offsprings through the will they've written, or the money goes back to the 'kings' who will pump the money back into the industries.
See, everything is just a cycle.
A motherfuckin' cycle.
I'm not trying to focus everything on money.
'Cause money is just some virtual thing that makes a man act funny.
Neither am I saying that money is not important though.
Bob Dylan said:
"What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."
and Dorthy Parker said:
"If you want to know what god thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."
Now look, we have two choices in our lives.
1) We do nothin' about this, and we end up being entwined in this endless vicious cycle, or a vortex like I'd prefer to call it, and waste our lives away like we never lived before.
Now look, we have two choices in our lives.
1) We do nothin' about this, and we end up being entwined in this endless vicious cycle, or a vortex like I'd prefer to call it, and waste our lives away like we never lived before.
Nobody's gonna remember nobody.
2) We break free from this system, live our life like we want it to. Live your lives to your fullest extent, and let everybody know the truth.. That's the reason why people spread the words of truth.. But why is it that some people just don't get it?
No one has any right to control our lives, nobody has the right to stop us from doing what we like. Nobody should take away our freedom..
So take back what's rightfully yours, and not anything more..
The sad thing about this is, nobody ever listens..
Everything bears a consequence.
Think about it.
Now, I solemnly stand by every statement I ever stated..
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