Ch 5 part 1 – Factory Farmed Intelligence and Spiderman

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Chapter Five – Factory Farmed Intelligence and Spiderman part 1

118

After graduation I made staff for the state student council workshop.  Mr. Pete invited me and three other guys to stage the facility.  I felt a bit like a Catholic altar-boy.  Nothing was offered or even insinuated.  The staff was split fifty-fifty by gender.  The set-up crew was male.  My female partner was a one-year veteran from Baton Rouge, painted face, the home-coming-queen Molly Ringwald-Breakfast Club-type. 

The workshop passed.  Many of the attendees assumed my ordained authority conveyed by a staff t-shirt made me older.  My blue eyes and short stature were hidden in plain sight, shielded by misdirected assumptions.  At the closing ceremony I read a poem I sent in with my staff application in front of the workshop.  Large crowds or one-on-one I was fine.  Ambiguous groups of three to ten were a huddled gray fog.

Later in the summer the staff had a reunion out in Osceola Parish on the outskirts of a town called Nottoway.  The place was full of Indian names for banished Cherokee land.  Tracer Robertson was the son of the Parish sheriff with an under-age-drinking fun-land out in the boonies.  All the staff were invited, even the virgins. 

We rode around in the bed of a green pickup truck like hay bails.  We drank vodka and Kool-aid from a plastic-cup-ladled ice chest.  Beer was pressured through kegs.  Staff paired up like an ABC-Bachelor-pad reunion of Louisiana’s brightest youth leaders.  I had apparently applied to be part of this hedonistic version of teenage socialite-Mensa.  I was one of these chosen few; fucking, sucking and puking. 

In the afternoon Tracer supplied a makeshift-rope launch-pad from an inebriated thirty-foot cliff side with a picnic table runway to launch clothing-optional high-dives into the float-away creek below.  I watched.  The dork in me had bypassed these moments in high school.  I was not use to gregarious drinking. 

This place was like a landmine field of permissions that never existed.  I kept wandering around in my head on who to ask for or what to want.  Whatever I was, I was not this.  I was not a preppy-suicide.  I was not a cheap-fuck or binge-friend waiting to pledge.  If this was what college was on the face plate of Friday nights, then my compass was prematurely demagnetized.  The metronome was striking again.

Cross-talk stretched the cosmos of distances between planets.  Stars flushed over the cow-patty pasture.  A few of us stared up from a pick-up truck bed.  Cows mooed incessantly beyond the fence.  Around three a.m. I threw up red-blood-glycerin-sugar serum.  In the wretch I contemplated the perils of drinking so publically alone.  I sipped and swallowed the occasional word, but nothing much was said.  People mingled, moved, and consumed.  I sat drunk in a lawn chair staring at ignorant munching heifers standing like moonlit mannequins.  Kids revolved to vomit into the overflowing-stench garbage can by the shitter.

119

In the early morning Tracer’s friend, Paul from some bayou town with an Hebert-accent, only George Costanza would give a second thought to, started up Tracer’s green-monster pickup truck.  The afternoon before, we piled in the monster to go down to the creek.  Paul went to see if some irreplaceable item was stranded at the scene of our debauchery. 

Along the way the truck flipped into a side ditch.  The wheels must have skid on the gravel road the parish prisoner’s probably laid on the side.  Damn prison labor, you never get what you pay for.  Paul was half-crushed between the dented-in cab and the earth.  The zombies noted the thud.  The waking dead amassed.

I never knew much of the politics of the place.  Apparently in the middle of nowhere, it is more about who you know than what you can do.  The recovery process seemed counter to Bear-Grills-style survival tactics in remote environments. 

We went home estranged.  We were told the sheriff’s son mobilized his 911 to daddy.  Paul ended up living, just knocked out.  Alcohol was trumped by the physics of morning country roads.  John Denver lamented travel plans.  In the back of my head I thought, “What if seven a.m. had been seven p.m.: twenty-one dead salute flung into trees to bleed martyrs?” 

We all knew Tracer could be governor of Louisiana one day.  Besotted deaths tend to truncate or haunt careers. Tracer was a svelte squawk-box politico Democrat with a GQ grin and cleaned up nice in a suit.  Tracer was a twenty-first century Huey Long biding time.

I left thinking how weird Nottoway was from everything I knew.  Everywhere is somebody’s home.  Johnny Cash had to grow up somewhere.  Where you’re from does not always make you who you are, but Nottoway was surely no New Orleans.

120

I started my freshman year at Tulane University in the fall as an engineering major.  Somehow life plopped me into a lineup of physics, chemistry and laboratories for each.  I took psychology, calculus, computer science, anthropology and a writing seminar, whatever that was.  I had a twenty-one hour line-up in the gun turret.  What the fuck was I thinking?

I was living at home, commuting like a good boy.  I was saving parental resources and attempting to avoid the evils of American debt.  The campus was a parking lot of phantom faces, shipping in and out like tower of babble ghosts incapable of mutual conversations. 

Tulane was full of Northeasterners on parental scholarships.  These were kids that didn’t have to pawn their books for vodka, pot or even cocaine.  Their stipends came in wire transfers.  Petit-Four Woman and Trust-Fund Gentlemen with guaranteed futures clogged the entrails of Tulane plodding in Birkenstocks.  Some faked comfort on a credit card.  Others were like me, mutant-hybrid’s of loans and SAT scores.  Most locals had a parent-employed at Tulane, which got around the debt-gargoyle inside this cathedral of higher-learning lecturing nostril to nostril.

The campus was a chowder bowl of Coke, pot, Adderall, Prozac, Oxycontin, speed and tabs.  The school was the demand end for the governmental housing projects supply chain.  (Wal-Mart ain’t got nothin’ on the Magnolia, Calliope, Melpomene and the St. Thomas.)  $2,000 in Colombia sells for $30,000 in Mexico to $100,000 to American distributors.  Four year Tulane education post-debt was around $130,000 without aid. (Tuition 17 a semester, books, fees another 3, on campus housing food another 9, plug some interest on top.)  Those digits will sound like a gallon of gas for a nickel given time and Wall Street.

Tulane was a Mecca-glutton of recreational drug use belching out scraps for St. Baptiste High School and a dozen others in uptown New Orleans.  Some black youth in a ninety-eight Oldsmobile gets pulled over.  The New York license plate Lexus keeps rolling towards the dance floor.  Who’s the public enemy?  I drove past them all.

I bought books, sat in class and went home, studied and worked.  I had rotating jobs: a local video store clerk long before the Netflix invasion, office supply store grunion and delivery driver aficionado.  My greatest employment was in appearing busy in between having something to do at my shit-jobs.  I paid for car insurance to drive to class and could afford not much else.  At least the video store rented pornos.  Those pretty much kept us in business against the Blockbuster computational-capitalistic prudes.  Blockbuster tried to sue us because our sign looked like a ticket like their sign.  It was sort of like McDowell’s and McDonald’s in Coming to America. 

(Ha, Ha, viva la Netflix, Red Box revolution, brick and mortar is dead.  We all die to the juggernaut of a usurping modern economic paradigm!  Lawyers can’t beat that bitches.  Go cobble your horseshoes with your VHS and DVD stocks.  Veruca Sault is weeping digital tears.)

121

I was organized.  The calculus of physics escaped me, but the algebraic nature of chemistry made sense.  The movement, the derivative rate of change of physics was mutable.  I could never catch up to the integration.  The fourth dimension was a mysterious bitch. 

It seemed pointless to try to guess where one object was going to be when.  To figure out how it all held together simply required the proper allocation of elements to maintain the stasis that prevented chaos.  That I understood.  Chemistry had a natural answer.  It was mandated by electron to orbit around the nucleus of thought.  It or you had to muster the patience to process through the unveiling.  There were two types of math brains.  The geometric-physics and the algebraic-chemist are polar opposites.  One is spatial.  The other is ordered in reciprocating balance.  I was the later. 

I failed my physics final and got the first D in my life.  When I questioned the connection between the final exam and the information taught to date to the Chinese PHD-in-materials professor yelled at me and told me he should have failed me.  I guess I was not ready to try to figure out the time a sound signal would reach two submarines moving underwater in opposite directions given rates of speed and changes in depth and distance.  I was not worthy of the Navy.  I never caught on to the parallels only that maybe my brain and his came from different hemispheres.

Sidney-October 8, 1992 -It is amazing how fucked-up this university can be.  My registration is mangled from some administrator.  Living on campus sucks.  I have no privacy.  The Sysco-food is sickening.  Vinnie and I rarely get time alone.

I read the poems you sent.  I can’t believe you had the nerve to read you poem in front of five hundred people at LASC. 

122

I started reading my poetry at an open-microphone night at the Dragon’s Den bar in the French Quarter my senior year in high school.  I never met a lot of friends there, but I blared my belligerent rhymes.  My poetry was naïve and honey-twisted about love, absence and unintentional ignorance.  I remember Reverend Goat and his bone lyre and the dread-head Caucasian Jimmy Ross and his tales of never getting laid once when he lived on Erato Street. 

The Den was grimy, upstairs to a Thai restaurant.  The friendliest rats New Orleans had to offer transitioned to and fro the near-by Mississippi River wharf.  The balcony was a rickety plastic-chaired landing-pad that overlooked the U.S. mint across the street famous for its half dimes.  You could get whiskey and watch the mules pull the tourist buggies around the eastern edge of the quarter.  New Orleans is not much of a north and south town.  New Orleans is a more depends-on-the-bend-in-the-river and you-might-have-to-head-east-to-go-to-the-west-bank sort of town. 

My parents gave me freedom to roam.  Despite high school being over, tethers were irrelevant.  I was usually the horse that stayed in the gate.  I remember one Friday night in high school I went to hang out with Michael in New Orleans East.  I forgot to call my parents in those pre-cell-phone days.  I arrived home around four a.m.  I had never neglected their conference like that before.  Maybe such an oversight was par or passive action for some less-deliberate teenagers.  For my parents it was a call of crisis. 

My mother and father were both awake.  My mother was angry.  My father met me with a single phrase before retiring to a morning settle up, “Boy, if I hadn’t spent so much on your God damn teeth I’d punch them all out of your head.”  He raised his fist, shook it slightly and headed to bed.  He had to wake for work in two hours.

123

In college, I made a more concerted effort to communicate my itinerary, which rarely deviated from nothing and dull.  I had a few friends in the Towns Students Association for in-city commuter kids at Tulane.  It was TSA for me, before TSA was the penis-cupping synthetic-sense of security Federal TSA.  (It’s ok, ladies and gentlemen; we used our billion dollar mind-reader.  We detected the thought to conjure the explosive from this granny’s geriatric diaper on the flight to Salem.  All is well.  Apocalypse averted.  Sage Francis said, “Racial profiling will continue with less bitching.”) 

My TSA met in the basement of the university center.  We had a cell of lockers and a no-reception television.  We played Nintendo specializing in Super Tecmo Bowl.  QB-Eagles, nose-guard insta-sacks, Christian Okoye bowling-over defenders; this was the first sports game to track stats and maintain real NFL rosters.  We had little tournaments to recreate misspent-indoor 1980’s childhoods. 

124

In my computer science class I met Amile from Indonesia.  Amile was a Muslim.  He drove a Mercedes and possessed some sort of wealth created from the mining of gold and sulfur in his family’s dominion on his island home from people working for $5 a day.  I was a novice in other religions.  Rafael was Jehovah’s Witness.  Tulane was a land of a migratory waterfowl descending Northeastern Jews.  I knew nothing about Judaism except that the females could smell the Jesus on me when I would ask them out. 

Amile spaced his prayer mat to Mecca based on the chime of an electronic clock in intervals of obedience.  One time I hung out at Amile’s apartment and marveled at the imported furniture, knick-knacks and baubles while he was off knee-down to the mat.

In the silence we listen to ourselves.  We describe ourselves to ourselves.  In the quietude we may even hear the voice of God.  Who knows what those words sound like?  What tongue churns the syllables of note; the accent or the dialect?  We barter with the narcissistic arrogance of a human paradigm to memorize text like passwords to heaven.  We lost touch at semester’s end.

125

I went out for Halloween in the Quarter alone to see Soul Coughing at the Howling Wolf.  Mike Doughty was waxing a pale moon in front of an upright-bass.  A dancing Chinese-dragon-type donkey in costume paraded across the stage like a line of cocaine.  I was dressed as Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, with a mow hawk and a green army jacket, absent the gun. 

The French Quarter on Halloween is a pantheon of veiled debauchery.  New Orleans does not need an excuse to mask.  Halloween brings out social commentary beyond Point-Break bank-robber presidents.  We have sexy-negligee-professional maids to clean our grills and lampooning satirists to roll our bellies.  Monster-tongue devils march next to the standard, “Repent Now” Jesus savior crosses affixed to the arms of condescending do-gooders in the middle of Bourbon Street.

126

There was an eat-pray-love reject inside the Howling Wolf.  The guy was swollen in cock-strong bag of shit-powdered-doughnut confidence.  He recounted his glory days of putting a beat down on some poor bastard.  I could surmise the Affliction-shirted gentleman leading the discourse was named Stanley based on his repartee with the bar tender.  I rather enjoyed the king’s speech until he added an anecdote about being a junior at Tulane University.

Stanley’s diction and lexicon got me thinking on the subject of curse words.  How could it be that this guy’s SAT scores and financing options were commensurate with mine to matriculate at the same institution of higher learning?  It was not so much the cursing, but the usurping power in language that Stanley gave curse words to replace so many superior alternatives 

Curse words have apparently become omni-meaning, ubiquitous nukes-of-speech.  They are hidden behind every cobweb of childhood.  We are shielded from their sting, their four-letter-ant pinchers.  When we finally get to use them unabated, no one has divulged an acceptable context for utilization on the evening news, radio, or dinner table.  In the chaotic preservation of our auditory innocence, these words become all meaning, all parts of speech as if an entire language or at least its own broadly adopted dialect is manifested for the word fuck. 

Diagram the sentences and participles kids: fuck, fuck, fucking, fucked, fucked up, give a fuck, fucking awesome, fucking terrible, all within or external to the auspices of fornication, hurt and love.  The magnanimous power of fuck exudes a profound dominance to transcend mere context or jurisdiction of grammar.  Fuck is the Robin Hood of language.  Fuck is the people’s champion thieving golden-uses where the thesaurus would clearly assist and fuck says, “No you will use me instead,” With laser-beam accuracy fuck’s arrow point perspicuity of language will split the quivers of comprehension so that your listener knows exactly what the fuck you mean.   

What could we do with a profanity enema like a shit from an asshole on a cunt bitch fucking a bastard who wants to exist in a normal conversation with out people pleading irate that these cocaine words are inflictions of pain to hear them to convey the parts on our bodies or practices we partake in bedrooms or bathrooms or broom-closet classrooms?  What would Dr. Seuss do?  What would you say if he asked you?  Would speaking them in public diminish their potency or would we just be talking about excrement, carnal pleasures or a six inch span mashed between our thighs?  What would you do if a third-grader asked you, “What does each of them mean?”

Would you define them like Webster’s?  Would you recognize that the initial use the child heard them utilized in was in some random basket-of-language having nothing to do with such logical straight forward definitions.  In being honest would you reveal an ugly reality that is under further examination much less to fear than the monster-sized four-letter-lexicon the word has been allowed to become under the drug-like prohibition we have decreed? 

Curse words, fuck in particular, appeared so ravenous, as I aged.  I found myself nauseated at the idea of saying fuck, because the illusion of youthful prohibition made the word a cliché brand name, like McDonalds or Wal-Mart, where the marquee was rampant.  The words were substantially ruined.  If we could have just treated them plainly from inception the ticker symbols in their syllables would never have attached.  I would be less adamant about their potential, and love them each honestly.

I wondered how television could fine networks millions for one utterance of cocksucker or camera shot of a quarter centimeter of female nipple or an obtuse enhanced-angle of a waxing lunar buttocks cheek, yet allow billions of bullets, murders, decapitations, wars, and Law and Order S.U.V. episode sodomy on parade.  If I was a kid I would much rather have a woman come into my house to expose her breasts or a man call me a cunt-faced shit than point a gun in my face. 

I hoped to volunteer for the department of education to hand out pamphlets outside public restrooms for proper definitions in America’s public elementary schools.  Then the plethora of better-suited words could ameliorate this lamentable nation of pitiful confabulating fuckers and proper uses could abound.  Alas I am hopeless.  Maybe I should have started with Stanley, but he probably ended up as a bank president or a trader with Lehman Brothers.

127

The night ended peacefully.  Stanley was champion of theoretical battles.  The irresistible bliss of the evening disseminated amongst the masses.  I headed to my car to bus past gutter-mouth Beelzebub hoping on the street car on my way out the French Quarter back to my parent’s home. 

On the drive I saw a costumed-skeleton crew rush past a couple dressed as Alice and the Mad Hatter.  The bone-men dispensed what looked like pepper spray at the Lewis Carroll heads.  The dark mist forced the haberdasher and school girl to duck.  

I thought about reporting the event to the NOPD, but the police can not even find all the dead bodies.  Basically if the cops did not have an event on film with prints on the gun and a perpetrator without connections; then serving real time for gun violence in NOLA was more a weekend stay in OPP (Orleans Parish Prison.)  Spray mace was a junior high fist fight.

Sidney-January 30, 1993 - I have a grad student for Freshman English.  He used to be a punk with multi-color hair and now he looks fairly normal.  He says my writing is too academic, whatever that means.

It must be nice for you to sleep in your own bed, use a clean bathroom without twenty other people and eat real food.  Sometimes my roommate, Marianne is so annoying I could cry.  She has a habit of bringing up personal topics that no one wants to hear.  I think college is a little overrated where maturity is concerned.

I am finally dating this guy for who he is rather than who he appears to be.  Vinnie is a big guy.

128

After the bulge of my first semester, the structure and the roadblock of physics led me to abandon my first major of engineering.  I entered the business school to pursue accounting.  The paths to solutions were logical.  Four corners of debits and credits, window and doors.  Everything connected it was just a matter of time in seeing answers, revealed.  Like all true magic acts, there was no magic.  There was only what you did not have the benefit of time to notice going on behind the curtain.  Revenues, expenses, assets and liabilities extrapolated into tomorrows and reflected yesterdays.  I was at home in the pragmatism. 

How could I consider one of those liberal arts majors and yet desire post-graduate employment?  I figured I owed somebody to be mature about the matter.  I could not embroil myself into a bullshit unemployable major that cost one hundred grand.  I would not eat the bait of self-esteem.  I was so sure of its true nutritional value that being an appetizer or dessert, never an entrée of a meat providing man.

Accounting to me came across as the root of logically interpreting the base of modern humanity.  It was like with accounting I could understand why when A went up B went down.  Surely there are a myriad of disciplines in business: economics, finance, marketing, ethics, but accounting was the language. 

Accounting was the most concrete, the foundation in post-microchip society, where humans are just trading digits in electronic accounts, for dollars we never set eyes upon.  After my first semester in engineering, I realized my brain was not slanted far enough towards the side of mathematics as the other students in the program.  I was cursed with balance that like in most political parties leaves one homeless. 

As a male, I felt this strong compulsion to be employable, to be pragmatic about the opportunity my scholarship window provided and the highways of liberal arts majors seemed selfishly indulgent.  I loved writing.  I thoroughly enjoyed psychology.  However those avenues frightened me a bit as impractical given this urge in me to accomplish this primary objective of college, to be able to get a job.  So faced with such a crossroad, I chose business school and then accounting and management.  Sometimes in retrospect, I feel naïve in my over analytical and misinformed approach as an eighteen year old contemplating such life-altering paths. 

Accounting predicted at best what was, kept pretending to a minimum and told on itself in the fine print if you scoured.  You have got to respect the criminal who can explain to the whole world how he is going to steal and then pulls the money out the banks in broad daylight without need of a single bullet.  In repeating the cycle the thief confesses how much he pilfered the period before and goes right after the same cookie jar.  The trick is to always take the same number of cookies.  The honesty in the sly science of business amazed me.

College was an excess of self-indulgent focus.  Mothers, fathers, siblings, and bit players took a back seat.  I had the jurisdiction of one escaped inmate deciphering protocols and decibel levels of discretion.  I was consulting with a firestorm of my adolescence burning for a free thinker rising into hope and other such disasters.

129

I had a political science discussion-based course with a bunch of pre-law students.  We thrashed thoughts about our human social contracts.  Everybody got riled up to argue the position of how things could have been handled, of why things fell or thrived.  There was mandatory polarization and group project break downs.  Some point had to be optimum.  It was assumed the ideal process was behind the covers.  Grades were at stake.

The course helped me notice how humanity is always searching for a reason; to answer why.  We want to fill in the blank with a sufficient title to parch a thirst for a solution with another man’s dictated dissertation for the rationale of the unexplainable: God, terrorism, treatment of the poorest being cursed, the wealthiest being blessed, or the Earth’s vulnerabilities to the decay under man’s infecting vices.  Why all of it why? 

Must we encapsulate freewill in a candy-coated synopsis of management bullet-point evening news head lines?  Who to vote for, when, what problems will be solved and why they are problems.  We Frankenstein-birth hot button issues waiting like a mob to burn down a candidate’s house if the ploy is not addressed on Election Day.  Then we rush to conclusions about the way life will play out.  We pocket our assumptions and move on to the next question before waiting around for test results.  We live in a mirage of government budgets, Google journalism and political sound bites to stem inspection primarily to displace the onus from our own consciousness.

I was blind.  I was idealistically unaware of what it meant to pay taxes, harvest another man’s bread or to show true cogitated concern in order to feed him.  I was a snot bubble punk in the rubble of my own youth crawling out for sun light with out a pre-affixed label.  I grew up and saw my government as no longer just a fallible God, but as me and my neighbor and every wrong every punk-song barked out glaring in the mirror.

130

I began to think in collective terms.  At one point in my twenties I wrote this American Manifesto as an internet blog on our government, health care, prejudice, education, debt, prisons and taxes.  I was a Gen Exer trying to make sense and lend unrequested input.  It was a ridiculous rant to sort my brain.  The words came sporadically like Sidney’s letters, but the words were still me yelling at the shadows in my cave praying to contribute a granule to our world. 

I am an expert in nothing, but my own interpretation of what it means to be human.  I am a ground dweller squawking back at this chicken-sky.  I have no Harvard-convincing credence or bully-pulpit diatribe.  I am just one bird in the factory-farm line up. 

Some of what I wrote was researched.  Most of it was my own gut experiences.  I did not want people bitching to identify my factual failures or condemn my bevy of bullshit.  All I was trying to do was help us think, move and get to better.  If some splatter of my sentences prompted people into action to contemplate their fruition, then I encouraged them to band with me.  If the words propelled others in the opposing direction, then I said mobilize to stem the tide.  Progress is multifaceted and is no single man’s canine to command.  Harry Truman said, “It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit.”  

I questioned my own inferences and conclusions.  I hoped that maybe one day one of the many in this world who are so much smarter, more well-read, and who have braved the pale blade to actually live, may guide me out of my misguided spectacles of impersonating a font of sage discernment.  Nothing ever came of it.  The blob just sat in the oblivion of the internet bulimia like a rancid omelet fermented from months in the sun.  Desperate flies seemed to be the only ones capable of finding the vomit.

131

As I wrote the blog, I heard intermittent sounds in my head like a cheesy graduation where the commencement speaker of the moment told me, “Go out there and make your mark.  Take on the world.”  The speaker says, “This is how I got to where I am and as I gaze in the audience of over-indebted, eager, and naïve university graduates, I see hope because you have not been corrupted by the machines of the working world to dull the potential paradigm-shifting blade of your zealous enthusiasm.” 

Littering my time I tried to pick up Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.  I got about a third through it before the girth and the labored minutia of someone trying to hide an imperfect, yet necessary political rant inside another story about a railroad company got old.  Sometimes the writer should just come right out and say it, but who wants to listen?  Rand wrote other books where she did, but who has the time to read?

I saw thinkers like Rand and Milton Friedman on one end and Karl Marx on the other.  Rand had understandable daddy issues with the Bolshevik’s.  None are villains or heroes.  Humanity thirsts for simple directions.  The reality is, economics is like religion, when we venture too far over to the extreme, we have to take a breath, and admit there is no panacea.  I think all great thinkers know this, but eventually other people start to hijack their words or ideas to feed the vampire to be right, a need for a why and an answer.  No one owns right.  I wish we could breathe in the synthesis; left or right.  If we sort love and fear the answer will appear in the comingled raw humanity shrouded behind our frightened fragilities.

Sometimes I looked at some of the tenants of objectivism from Ayn Rand.  I saw our metaphysical world in its objective reality for what it is regardless of my place in it.  I could see the stark and absolute honesty that permeates from frank discussion.  Our ability to ask questions and admit ignorance invites the opportunity for growth.  I never could get on board Rand’s occasional crazy-train with her judgmental rants about helping people who are shit-out-of-luck being the problem with society.  Nobody practices altruism in the extreme, yet humanity will always trump money.  Extremes have two sides and each is dangerous.

Even using Rand’s own logic, we can ration what is in our self-interest and ignore the problems we create for others to collect our profits for only so long, before we are forced to recognize our interconnections and thus it becomes in our own self-interest to assist our fellow man.  I saw a healthy balance, but we needed to let go of fear to get there.  These thoughts never left me; I will perpetually ponder them.

132

I was entrenched in school, learning on a solo-track.  My brother Tim moved back to New Orleans.  He started pursuing an education for a career as a psychologist after failing to find work after art school.  Tim set aside his dreams of being a heavy metal bass player to try to fight the salmon-stream into the workforce in between night school.

Sidney-February 12, 1993 - I hope you have a sweet Valentines Day, even if you don’t have a valentine.  Sometimes, I do not understand how you can be so alone.  I have always been surrounded by people.  I do not understand why or how.  Things would be easier if you lived on campus.  I just hope the best for you. 

I was heading towards my sophomore year still a virgin of so much.  The mythical allure of virginity, what else do we publically applaud people for having no fucking clue how to do what they are doing like presidential primaries? We bible-pedestal the females up.  Virgin guys are put in a giant McDonald’s Dante’s spectacle gonad-ball pit to wander around head-under spelunking like lost sheep in their own personal blue-balled hell. 

Sometimes as a guy I found it easier to see dating like how cattle operations work.  There is one big-balled bull that gets to mate with hundreds of heifers.  No matter what I ever said or did, I knew I was not the alpha-bull and never would be.  Women can say all this heifer shit about wanting romance, support, and kindness.  All most women seem to want is a grin, height, a jaw line and manly swagger to lay the line.  Insides are secondary.  Evolution is primary.

I asked a few girls out.  I participated in a given number of feckless nonproductive conversations garnering vapid measures of intimacy with a handful.  Maybe I was too picky.  Maybe I was too ugly or shy or sequestered in my own selfish penchant for over thinking reckless abandonment of self-definition. 

Sometimes I preferred solitude than battling the bridge to trying to reel in a Fugu puffer-fish and try to dissect it properly.  I was no pancreas surgeon.  I had better luck trying to learn Japanese.  Maybe I had too much to say with the trip wires of first impressions.  Maybe I was just a goofy short schmuck on a losing streak with an F in flirting.  Blonde daddy-issue girls with Chi Omega bordered license plates on yellow Ford Mustangs and Phi Gamma Delta keg profiteers could go on without me.

I felt the colony of leaf-cutter ants crawling around in my own soil-subway tunnels.  How could any of this mud-mass be reciprocated?  Where could I find a brave lady of termites out there with her Australian subterranean mound, not infiltrating some domestic-wood destruction cliché, but natural with powerful depths, a woman intricate and layered?  Where was that corazon de oro?  Where could I see the metric weight to balance my scale in this customary system? 

I bartered my own loneliness.  The scent of mundane-plastic-commercial fashion statements alienated me.  I would rather stay quiet in the bush to hunt or wait to fish in remote deeper waters.  These stow-away six-legged creatures in me repelled mosquitoes like deet.  I did not want cheep blood bite sensations.  However beautiful a moth’s patterned wings, I did not just want to see a flight when the lights went away.  My own arrogant insulating narcissistic hermit with his own bible-perseverance perpetuated asceticism.  
Continue to Chapter 5 part 2