Walking to Jazz Fest: Saturday 4/27/13

Walking to Jazz Fest is a kindred, yet divergent sensory experience than walking to the Edymion parade in Mid City New Orleans during Mardi Gras.  Jazz Fest is more of a pilgrimage of inter-faiths.  The foot-travelers who park far in the distance pace for the eleven a.m. sets are prepared for the end of the day.  These folk are not startled by the men adorned in feather head-dresses of vibrant red and cerulean bliss dancing on the horse-track infield under a blazing sun four hours later.

The trumpet flower shirts dazzle with squished pinking shrimp.  The walk to Jazz Fest erupts in a check for a tow-away parking sign.  Ration is stamped to the skin as sunscreen crawls like an ooze monster.  Sun glasses, hat, stage cube of artist times, check. 

People form a line before the line.  No asking.  No cops, just volition to be happy.

All the straw hats are in a story speaking to each other all day aloft with a nation of brims having the best seats in the house.  Ladies wear blue sundresses with lazily wrapped matching-hue bandannas above the ridge for mobile shade.  The glisten of lotion screens is in its infancy, but will cry love by noon.

The pace of the walk to Jazz Fest breaks away from noting where one parked in the event inebriation racks one’s compass.  “Good morning” wishes to strangers of other days are traded for “Who Dat’s,” but today nobody is a stranger.  Footmen line City Park Avenue to pass the Museum of Art washing across Bayou St. John.  The language is a wave. 

The less-goers pay $25 to park at the Shell station on the corner to a man with no I.D.  The next hand $30 to pull in at Cabrini Catholic high school for saintly girls.  If only they knew what exiting felt like later.

We are walking shed of our rolling metal.  The sidewalk has a crack.  Water is lodged.  Mud is unavoidable.  Free bypass depends on one’s velocity.  Headphones are sounding out Ben Harper and Charlie Musselwhite to listen to the blues later today on the Gentilly Stage.

The kids of NOLA poverty and neighborly entrepreneurs yell, “Wata, one dolla!  Wata, one dolla!” as the footsteps approach the ice chests set outposts as the walkers are informed, “Four dolla at the gate, you can bring two in.”  The logical economics spurs more pilgrims to pause.  A garden of white rocks shaped in a fleur de leis watches them question what country are we in.

The over-ticketers hold their surplus allotment out as their sunk cost dissipates upon entry.  I have an extra in my backpack.  Maybe I will come again alone next weekend.  Water everywhere, this is New Orleans.

If it were Mardi Gras, the routine would be more enormous.  That party is closer to free.  The dirty on sale is chucked down from floats in February.  This is spring time.  Grass is growing again in late April.  Clouds to Congo Square sing a second line.

Through the gates, the pace spreads to grazing herds at crawfish beignets, soft-shell crab po-boys, couchon de leit, oyster everything, strawberry lemonade and beer drafted cold out fountains sprung from the horse-track itself. 

People at Jazz Fest are sort of like chess pieces.  The squatters carry foldout chairs in mini armies.  The chair-goers are the rooks, veterans stationed with planned anchor points.  Drinking, eating, keeping off the legs, avoiding the sun with placed umbrellas is warfare.  The conversations are sermons in themselves as the world convenes.

The older-hippies with tattoos streaming tanned arm lines service as the bishops.  Dancing like Springsteen or the ghost of Jerry Garcia, the religion of the happy, let be happy is observant.  I am dancing, spotting the diagonally moving people grinning sideways to a tie-die or 401k account depending on which slant the 1980’s took. 

The NOLA couples are the knights directing traffic, holding hands, bringing a vibrant veteran love.  They are old enough to know, young enough to still do something about it.  Sneakers, shorts, sunglasses, T-shirt, ball cap for the male.  Sandals, beacon-colored sundress, fedora with a stick me out ribbon with coordinated loose cloth bag-purse and Ray Bans for the female.  Some bring their children, which means blankets, sunscreen in a spray wafting into other people’s red beans and a hint of affluence given the price of modern tickets.  That or somebody who knows somebody, which is a currency in itself in New Orleans.

The pawns are the tourists.  Some wear beads, dance a bit tight, but most all one can see is the marvel glaze gleaming in some of their eyes.  That this much is possible in such a city, at such a pace is mind boggling to the rookies.  Others come once and return every year.  They know.  The aged-pawns walk with their chin up, peering out as if at an amusement park on where to head next.  Glancing down to pause at stage guides, they march with spouse. 

Others clasp cameras, scoping the distance in lenses unaware of what Rebirth on the Congo Square stage at three forty means.  Some are fraternity brothers, louder, scamming, flexing, posing, pointing in the air in braggadocio about what happened in the Quarter last night.  Others, “Is that Aaron Neville on the poster?”

The Queen is the city itself, flowing peace between all these Republicans and Democrats on different days.  The turtle non-profit pace keeps the river moving.  The bombs in trash cans may be.  They may come down from Boston, but today will shine, because she has to.  The city will protect her people, not from death, but from the virus of fear that pens people in their homes afraid of the small faiths between faces to faces.

That kind of fear pushed away drifts a man to pay a pilot to drag, “Heather, will you marry me?” across the Jazz Fest sky.  This kind of love prompts a man to comment on a band to people aside in a crowd one may never see again or before, but in this gyration of sound there is you and me, and we are brothers and sisters in this sea of bodies.  Yeah, you right.

We are dancing, nameless, limitless.  Where you end and I begin is contextually altered here.  For outside this city, the lack of humid-humanity keeps us at a frozen distance. 

We are left within the musicians as the kings holding court on stage-thrones to thousands by guitar, drum, Fai Do Do accordion, fiddle, bass guitar, rattling tambourine, piano, belting into a microphone.  Brass metal is shaped into bellowing maw-fanfares with trumpets, trombones, saxophones, and tubas.  A pigeon-stepper is an instrument in himself.  This all is said for a kingdom, you, me and peace, love, and we are all interconnected.

Storytellers have a place.  The teepee-lady in authentic dress, tattooed lawyers, real-estate agent mothers, secretary harlots, find kindred love with the black church lady with gray hair for Jesus in a sundress chugging a Miller Lite to soak in Creole skin.  Ladies ogle frat-boy’s muscular exposed shoulders in a juxtaposition of gender sexual peaks.  The staff t-shirt trash pickup paid-to-be-here walk-around-crew smoke cigarettes on their breathers. 

Every cloth is an advertisement for an idea for the plain tribes of black and gold Who Dat’s, bed-sheet gut gator-trumpets, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Pelicans with red and green wings, crawfish claws playing piano keys, the ignominious plaid, the NRA can lick my sweaty Jazz Fest Balls T, irises and trombones, tie-die, Foster family reunion, and Let it Be with a bearded John Lennon. 

The haze of Jazz Fest is speaking to me over a bamboula rhythm.  The pace of the board is of amazing hour upon hour contemplated for you by the collective, if one is willing to let go.

I wander to the days end writing in my shaded sequestration realizing today is like my version of a retreat, to myself in my version of church.  I remember going to the swamps to Manressa Catholic silent retreat weekend with my dad back in 2003.  I think I have finally found a way to have that feeling again on my terms: an iPod, a kindle, a composition notebook, a pen, and the defiant majesty of Jazz Fest with the time to observe.

This gerrymandered silence talks in my head while the world’s decibels ring.  I end the day in the sunlight time by the Gentilly stage where I once say Mumford and Sons followed by the Avett Brothers call out to me, that things were going to be around.  Today will be Ben Harper and Charlie Musselwhite to play the Blues.  The angst and raw love does not disappoint.  Accolades for excellence of years to be here peeks with a blues-cover of Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.”  I knew what song it was going to be by the first drumbeat, everybody in this city does.  

Before the show a drunk-stoned early-forties woman stumbles into my body.  She is announcing, “Happy Jazz Fest, when is Billie Joel playing?  Where you from?”  I inform her he is on the other football field size stage and here, New Orleans, not always, but just moved back a few weeks ago.”  She says, “I was on the coast.  Katrina is a big black bitch and I’m a big white bitch and we are still duking it out.  She broke up my marriage.” 

I say a few things as to the joy of the day and the magnetism of the piano man.  Eventually I pull out my kindle and start reading some book about Einstein’s theory of relativity for a few minutes.  Her friend corrals her and mentions her Defcon level of diminished sobriety. 

I look up at the people around me and say, “Only at Jazz Fest could we have all shared that moment.”  In front of me is a graduate student from NYU, with some Vitilgo depigmentation on her over left rear scapula, hair natural and shaved short with two hanging earrings in the shape of the continent of Africa and glitter over her eyelids.  To her left is a brazen Charles Bukowski blues grinder with a Cannon digital camera on a tall pole to get shots of the man he came to see play harmonica.  He tells me about what the levees did to his house down in Gentilly. 

Behind me is a family crew of two mothers and fathers and a little girl of eight who spilled her snowball on my shoe later in the show.  She was embarrassed and forlorn for the drizzled-sugar ice.  She jumped into her mother’s arms.  At the prompt of their apologies, I turned and said I have a little girl her name is ****, she’s eight.  “How old are you?  What is your name?”  She says, “Bethany, eight.”  I said, “It’s ok,” Then to her parents, “I just don’t want her to feel bad.”

To my right I stood next to a man in a wheelchair named Aurio from Barcelona.  He has come every year for the last five.  He says the wheelchair watchers no longer get to go to the front.  The corporate sponsors complain, but there he was inches away behind the first barricade for the general public cheering on Ben Harper playing the hell out of a steel lap guitar as Charlie brought it home on the harmonica.  

Beautiful day, my it was such a beautiful day.

The quick-porridge Sink

The hours wrap my legs in tendril vines licking like bolo tongues

Rising out of quicksand to ensnare my ankles in tasty salivating ecstasy

That I may release the drive of labor for the reverie of openness

To peer into the contemplation of just how alone I still am

The caked-mud upon my clavicles explains it all

Lungs expand in a restricted pattern as the particles cling despite

My extraction to appear at a table or bed or pillow to chat with keys

Ringed to keys for unknown doors with eyeballs wondering which to keep me busy

With this time I perceive to have

Thinking the sudden movements just make one sink more quickly

Better be still and revel in the oxygen flowing, bronchioles inflating

For now, the blood is swelling into a sharecropper’s dustbowl-delight

To know a portion of this is native to one’s rewards for labor so-justly

As if in all the passage ways of the universe what is pulsating as a burgeoning

Loveliness could not exist without the volition of a wind-sack choosing  

Even if the mathematics of election appeared moot behind the façade

Was purposefulness right there taunting to be priority over the grains and sludge?

Occupying the pit like a beige-bin of porridge, of not-quite oatmeal,

And not-quite a verdant octopus of chlorophyll gridlocked in square-cell walls,

But of the stardust of energy exploded into granules gripping the extremities

Of limbs like a liner around epidermis of energy that was solid and will be again

But for now is the flow of the would-be nothing keeping the breathers breathing

And the movers moving and the sinkers sinking

The what-was never ceased being and therefore is as relevant to the equation

Of occupying a conscious now for this week-work-day task evaluation

As it is in the expanse of disconnect of asset-acquisition and volition to do as one pleases

In these illusion-spaces of retirement typing, imbibing the ale, gorging on the buffet of gluttony

For possessions of task to pile upon shoulders to mask objectives as mandates for survival

So the existential can be kept at a fenced-distance and traded for marshmallow-musts

I am facing you Saturday-Sunday with multiple tickets to a New Orleans Jazz Festival

And nobody in the God-damn universe wants to see the Piano-man, not even me

Rather drown for the hypocrisy of John Lennon and imagine the paper cup slit

Spilling out the pools of sorrow and waves and joy bitch-slap Jai Guru Deva Om  

I am as lost as ever, a vagabond of thoughts for why Louis Armstrong misses home

Thinking I know why, but not sure of the shingle or the hue of paint and all under it a face

Uncertain if the geometry exists scuttling under the porridge to rise out or strangle with me

That if all of this were to be put to order the calm in the hurricane will single out a shadow

Of lovers by an oak tree straddling the girth of a descending branch

Bough tangent to the Earth to rise again after the centuries of reaching for the sky

As if the limb were its own undulating wave of wood, alive, drinking of this wetland city

Escaping the highway call for an animated wonderland of Johnny Cash gone to Jackson

Breathing, just breathing, knowing that this sun is not the one moving,

But then again it is all relative;

I think I might empower my volition to go festing alone today;

and see how that turns out with an extra ticket in my pocket

Adventure Time ho!

Sneeze-Time

The demons crank open the maws and power inside the skulls

Of the non-vigilant sneezers,

That is what Catholic school taught me

On some level that blessings were like weapons

Warding off the notion of the nothingness

With the specter of a war, between the omnipotent creator of all and his enemies

And God like Gandalf in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

Sounds like a real asshole

The white-wizard has the power to send hobbits on flying eagles

The whole way back, but makes them walk the way there

He could have helped, but chose not to

That is the default contingency of such a magician of the universe

So in that case I could see why the fallen-angels would be so upset

With a listless do-nothing in the face of such horrid abomination

So all these bless-you’s flying about in reaction to mucus catapults

I desist in full protest!

I will not say such phrases to my co-workers despite their compulsion

To say such for me; I would prefer silence

For after Google-searching the internet I can find little substitutes for an atheist

I am trying to teach my daughter and me to yell, “Sneeze” as an arbitrary counter phrase or

“What time is it?” “Sneeze-Time!”

As if this near-rendezvous for a future exorcism could be celebrated with playful gusto

It is as relevant as any of our other bodily reactions, science is problematic to ritual

For as time progresses the holes in ritual are tickled like a body in motion

That once set is bound to stay in motion unless acted upon by another force

And those of muted inertia, stoic in time do not move still

The stimulation does nothing, but have stone remain stone, yet

The nebula of the universe are in perpetual flux,

Whether one chooses to peer into the vast darkness or not

My First Two Weeks Back…

I have worked thirteen hours a day for the past few weeks

At the start of fresh employment, plowing the rows from an un-tilled field

Left to weed over and clump after last season’s harvest by my terminated predecessor

The drawers are replete with superfluous papers printed and placed in troves

From six years or more ago until the beginning of this April

Where a man in his early sixties was replaced by a man in his mid-thirties

A Generation X'er for a Boomer and the source code in the computer is

Thankful for the exchange of fresh memory

Openness and exuberance that this prestidigitation of financial data

Accounting minutia and modern commerce is enthralling to those left wayside

To pant as vagabonds for a controlling leader to the chaos capable of penning in

The day’s events of marshaled hooligan transactions into alcoves of accountancy

The spider webs and dust have been white-washed in the synchronicity of

A young-man’s hunger to prove himself in front the other lions

Knowing what he is capable of is not for his pride, but for his sanity

The rural nomenclature of bucolic prisons was a pillory for bovine execution

I could no longer stand the scent of feces bombarding my olfactory processes

With the grievous taint of normality that this could be tolerated as mundane

That I am now empowered to spin Rumpelstiltskin's wheel and turn this sty of

Papers and electronic folder files into a gold-leafed accounting Valhalla

The department will taste my brain swollen from over half a day of thinking

In the pits of problems unaddressed for years and undocumented before Hurricane Katrina

And my exit from my New Orleans shall be my recompense

In the arms of my own fairy tale, I do return absent the softness of a voice

I will work these hours so that I may one day speak again

On a pace, in a place, that is of all things

Worth coming in a place I can call home

A Rant: The Boston Bombings and a quote from Einstein

“The chief object of your attack against me concerns my support of “world government.”  I should like to discuss this important problem only after having said a few words about the antagonism between socialism and capitalism; for your attitude on the significances of this antagonism seems to dominate completely your views on international problems.  If the socioeconomic problem is considered objectively, it appears as follows: technological development has led to increasing centralization of the economic mechanisms.  It is this development which is also responsible for the fact that economic power in all widely industrialized countries has become concentrated in the hands of relatively few.  These people, in capitalist countries, do not need to account for their actions to the public as a whole; they must do so in socialist countries in which they are civil servants similar to those who exercise political power. 

I share your view that a socialist economy possesses advantages which definitely counterbalance its disadvantages whenever the management lives up, at least to some extent, to adequate standards.  No doubt, the day will come when all nations (as far as such nations still exist) will be grateful to Russia for having demonstrated, for the first time by vigorous action the practical possibility of planned economy in spite of exceedingly great difficulties.  I also believe that capitalism, or, we should say, the system of free enterprise will prove unable to check unemployment, which will become increasingly chronic because of technological progress, and unable to maintain a healthy balance between production and the purchasing power of the people.

On the other hand we should not make the mistake of blaming capitalism for all existing social and political ills of humanity.  The danger of such a belief lies, first, in the fact that it encourages fanatical intolerance on the part of all the “faithful” by making a possible social method into a type of church which brands all those who do not belong to it as traitors or as nasty evil-doers.  Once this stage has been reached, the ability to understand the convictions and actions of the “unfaithful” vanishes completely.  You know, I am sure, from history how much unnecessary suffering such rigid beliefs have inflicted upon mankind. 

Any government is in itself an evil in so far as it carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into tyranny.”

Albert Einstein from Ideas and Opinions

I am more convinced every day that the advancement of technology to replace the rudimentary labor of moderately to lower educated members of the human population is incongruent with the health of our human super-organism under a predominant capitalist paradigm.  This excerpt from Albert Einstein’s collection of writings in Ideas and Opinions briefly hints at such dangers and the greater dangers of the absolutism of favoring capitalism, socialism or any exclusive form of economic policy through government.  There are benefits to each, which shift as science and technology progress humans to unexplored life-potential.

I consider myself a champion of reason on all levels.  I often see the governments of our planet as representatives of our inner war between love and fear of our neighbors.  In fear we become an island nation assassinating political candidates, armed to the hilt with gun-factories in our backyards in a circle of mutual destruction.  In love we are at peace that our neighbor could destroy us in the gaps between tyranny and responsible self-defense and mutual assurance of group recompense upon the violator of the peace in a United Nations form of alliance. 

The boundaries of religion to me are the greatest threat capable of spreading ideologies rationalizing hate masked as faith across the universe which jeopardize such peace.  Religion beguiles the masses into exclusivities of disconnect between the promise-maker and reward-provider.  This gap is an unparalleled breeding ground for fear that neuters the coalition of peace.

After the small explosives at the Boston Marathon this week, we can see ever clearer the potential of confusing the risks of volition and the tyranny of fear.  The hypocrisies of drone bombings and the rationalized family members discarded with the targeted ring kindred.  The reality of cities of this Earth which relegate public meeting spaces as petri dishes for fourteen year olds to strap on explosive vests after being told stories or in full recognition of what is to be of their body parts in nanoseconds after detonation is possible in any city in America.  It is possible at the Boston Marathon, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, or Wrestle-mania.  It is possible at a kindergarten graduation ceremony a Carnival cruise ship or the Sears Tower in Chicago.  Death by volition is not a managed-enemy. 

We rush to find out how, why, what if this happens again, oh we caught him and his brother; the threat has passed and fear is watered-down.  The fire is doused for the moment.  The reality of the potential of volition is never gone.  It never will as long as we are free-willed beings capable of such science.  We are capable of such massive death and torture by the volition of a microcosm of our super-organism.  No drones or bullets will ever sever this truth. 

I remain resolute that America would be better to build homes, schools and crops in Afghanistan from September 12, 2001 on in a constant marketing campaign of entrusting the reality that this has been from eons ago a war of the mind.  Peace is a byproduct of such mental battlegrounds.  Justice is an illusion of the fear-filled.  I know Einstein knew this and so much more than I can comprehend.  Encouraging the will of a people to no longer see the power of extremists as their most consistent path to a form of self-sufficiency by endearing them to a coalition of empowered pacifists which does not birth warriors in the ranks of our opposed bathed in ignorance is or was at our disposal, but is forfeited in the hypocrisy of our disconnect from ration that argues that we can confine the volition of the terrorist.

America sleeps with the fear of volition and the confusion of our disenfranchised masses unemployed by factory robots, drive-through computer systems, online-merchant portals and a global textile cartel under the progeny of Sam Walton and his stock-ticker cronies.  The threat of physical destruction of government against government has shifted to the threat of individuals against government as technology has progressed.  The threat of economic destruction of corporation against individual has deteriorated the purchasing power of the average family and calcified the wealth of nations into a jury of billionaires.  The juxtaposition of physical and economic threats upon the psyche of the average citizen leads us each back to confront volition. 

We each must choose between our mutual destruction and our short-term preservation.  We are a people on a sinking island with fewer rafts than humans.  Each raft requires a team of rowers, but depending on who arrives at the raft first, some may attempt to go short-handed or those who wait may be thrown overboard by others who come later.  The balance of trust is our task of life.  It is our purpose, this balance of love and fear.  If we do not see and confront this prisoner’s dilemma reality we will ensure our extinction. 

The healthy form of socialism Einstein alludes to is begging to the Earth to be embraced in the failures of environmental assurances in Kyoto and the lack of a digital-IRS-based single-payer health care system linked to patient economic linkage to care acquisition in the United States to serve as a model for democratic nations to the world rather than a profit-hoarding embarrassment.  The healthy form of socialism acknowledges what the federal disability system and state-welfare systems are in the United States in comparison to factory-robots, defined-benefit government retirement plans and average CEO compensation.  The healthy form of socialism acknowledges the middle-class working people shuffling to abortion clinics who cannot afford more children and the governmental programs that encourage people to use children as cash machines.

We are a world and an America at war with our volition.  We can choose or we can worship a mirage of our flavor of justice.   We all ask, “Do you see me?  Do you hear me?  Does what I do matter?”  I will die believing in the goodness of the majority of people of wanting the same peaceful harmony.  How else have we lasted this long under the threat of volition?

A Rant: the Global Economic State

Imagine a triangle pointed down over another triangle pointed up resting on the ground so that the two form a sort of hour glass.  On the top is money in the hands of a few people and on the bottom is the rest of humanity with a commensurately small amount of money.  Now some may venture into socialist ideologies or misconceptions that the global economy would be better off flat, but they would be wrong.  Capitalism is not evil or horrid or even the entirely wrong premise for progress.  However the unfettered version of global economic capitalism we have chosen to lead us into 2013 has left us with such a disparity with so much of the Globe’s wealth in such a microcosm of people. 

Times of such disparity are not novel, but the manner in which we have arrived at such times ripe for Robin Hood are.  The expansion of technology to replace the average and below average minds of our working community capable of the primary manual endeavors of the past has left a preponderance of the working class feckless to the processing of microchips.  We find our economies more “productive” with a growing human populace externalizing the base needs of the vast majority of people into a state of unsustainable self-sufficiency. 

We are drawn into pondering the very definition of what is an economy. In an economy, the exchange of goods and services flows like blood allowing the individual members of our super-organism to elect to and to participate in gainful endeavors which benefit society at large through labor.  Everyday an individual sits idle the whole suffers.  We bear a sunk cost for the sustenance provided for an individual who could have aided our collective in even the tiniest of financial or non-financial pursuits, yet was either ostracized by a lack of opportunity or by volition.  

The majority of humans seek to be needed, to be seen, to be heard, emotionally and though tactile interchange of toil from the muscles in our arms or the cognitive activity of our brain.  The iterations of potential contributions in any single hour of the planet of the current members is unique and irreplaceable.  To disenfranchise that potential based on an improvement in technology is dangerous.  If we misunderstand the cost benefit analysis of what it means to provide a competitive advantage to participants in a marketplace, who are not beholden to internalize the true expense to our super-organism a short-cut provides, the collective bears the burden while the market participants generally horde the rewards.

We see this in the all-time high of our stock-market equities during a grand-recession.  We see homelessness, cut utility bills, food-stamp debit cards, foreclosures and states suing themselves to reward citizens with federal disability to remove them from ballooning welfare rolls all within the cult of economics.  The disparity is frothing with blame, as if that same man’s father was able to work in a plant to earn his living was respected, and that same man has no economic-home as his paradigm has been replaced by a machine and a profit-sharing bonus to an executive.  Dividends to stock-holders are up.  We do not ask how they are created as long as the percentage increases. 

The living standards of health technology should lead to a healthier society, yet a quarter-pounder with cheese costs less than a head of lettuce or a bushel of apples.  We subsidize mono-crops and CAFO lots and ignore biology or simple gifts of slowing the disparity of the our global economic state into that hourglass.  We never pause in a moment of re-correction, to assert laws of labor, environmental preservation, or maximum-wage through taxation. 

We do not possess a communal understanding that health is not a free market good, just as fire protection is not a free market good.  It simply is not of that nature.  The results of the American medical system are as predictable as the extortionist firemen of early Rome.  The town burned.

The divide of commensurate disparity between the number of humans and the number of dollars is escalating faster and faster.  At what end do we acknowledge the debts of the Earth’s governments are interlinked with this obsession?  At what end do we wrestle with our self-induced extinction over a lottery mentality to wealth?  We could one day be well-off as well.  For this ideology we exchange our grandmothers off to commodity pick-up lines retired from decades of labor and now jointed by their grandchildren from years of useless over-educated degrees and stockpiles of college-debt.

We grow further distant from the tactile nature of being human.  We set ourselves behind digital phones and screens so that we can speak, but not speak.  We can befriend, but not embrace that which we are shoving under the rugs of our global economic ties.  The fifty cent an hour wage to exchange goods across borders is akin to that as Einstein pondered the best design of what would become the United Nations in the advent of nuclear weapons capable of eradicating massive sections of humanity in a blink.  We now face a similar far more systemic and malignant threat to our globe on an economic level.  We face the idea that we do not need each other. 

We imbibe the drink that one store can serve all our needs and that last year’s model should perform better and be less expensive.  So we receive last year’s model to perform better and be less expensive in the price tag, but at such a shadowed cost.  The stores of retirement, health care and time for families are dissolved, raped and shattered in the store fronts of every establishment of the middle class peering down in that triangle from the ticker symbol grins of publicly traded companies. 

Minimum wage means three jobs and the rent still doesn’t quite make it.  Minimum wage means that quarter pounder costs less.  Untaxed undocumented worker labor means Texas has cheap roofs and framed houses and thousands of look-alike plastic neighborhoods the men who built them will never live in.  Minimum wage means you get a multiple of thousand percent less than the guy who owns the place and the world puts a name tag of creator on him and gives a tax deduction at his house of worship so he can be all right with that. 

At what point does the world go on strike?  At what point does the world shift off fossil fuels and sees the Middle East in even greater division?  At what point does China lack the food from its agricultural middle flocking to cities find itself starving and ever militant?  At what point does America see its Boomers bursting bed pans and hip replacements and see Single-Payer as no longer negotiable?  At what point is a $50 Aspirin at the hospital no longer fucking hilarious?

At what point is a teacher no longer the enemy as if knowledge were no longer a threat.  For any of us to decide I have something better to do with my time than work to store grain for the winter for the grasshoppers of the globe.  At what point do we realize the riot is not with our guns or our blades but with our purchase decisions and so in the vile daggers of the triangle above. 

The apparent cheapest option for our emaciated bank accounts is the very option that leaves us starving.  So the world is set to wither to bone if not for those left with choice to choose where we buy, who we buy from and cast our lot with our local business owners whenever possible.  For a few cents more we are really saving not only money, but ourselves.  There are legal assurances we must continue to support and damming legislation we too must fend our survival against, however there is no better defense than those that can vote with our wallets. 

For those who cannot I understand, for those who can, choose.

Peace, love, we are all interconnected.