Ok not to get too academic but I want to analyze a terminology I throw around alot; post-modernism. Post-modernism is often compared to 'decontructing' beliefs, words, symbols, social realities, or 'inherent or natural truths.' It is really just a way of questioning things that are assumed to be 'true' and these things are usually said to be such due to being created by social institutions/cultural ideologies/religions/science. I have come to the realization that as fun as conflict theory and Marxism are; it's hard to find all the answers needed to explain humanity on a more philosophical/psychological level. It is also remarkably hard to remain an optimistic humanist when examining the entire world through a paradigm that is the equivalent of 'hungry hungry hippos.' Meaning they want us to believe that everybody exists solely to batlle over the remaining pieces of a diminishing pie. This, to me, is a terrible over-generalization of humanity. I don't leave my house everday to try and covet more commodities and land from my fellow humans. I believe that the top 3% (whether you ascibe to it being corporate CEO's, global economic terrorist sects like the IMF, World Bank and G7, politicians, or various other nefarious background characters) are the ones creating such a mythos...not the people trapped within the world they have created. I always like comparing it to monopoly; we can't all be bankers and we have to become callous assholes to succeed at winning (capitalism anyone?)
I refuse to believe that human beings are inherently greedy, callous and egotistical. Maybe because I grew up in a small town I have a different view of the world, but even driving around Boise I see people helping others when their car breaks down, giving change to homeless people, and various other instances that would beg to differ with the aforementioned views. I am currently working on my own shortcomings and (you may notice a recurring trend in these writings of mine haha) I am working on purging myself of years of apathetic, nihilistic, egotistic rhetoric that has plagued me over the last decade. It is so easy to become this way because even though I believe humankind is relatively benevolent in nature...the world is still full of a multitude of assholes. However it is so hard to get over being burned by others that we always seem to shut down the borders of our own little worlds, it's all too easy to get by in our current society by drawing the shades and locking the doors (metaphor alert!)...ok I promise the academic shit is drawing to a close. This idea of locking doors (to our insular hearts, to our social groups, etc) leads me to the next point I want to make...puppetry
I sometimes think of life as a form of live action play or puppet show (probably due to a revelation I once had on mushrooms as a teenager). Meaning that even though we may have mountains of pre-scripted responses, memorized lines and wardrobe changes; you never know what might come next or what the background scene might be. It's live drama and not edited television, one person enters a new scene and the entire dynamic changes and so on and so on. It's a more metaphysical way of saying "you never know what tomorrow brings" and as cheesy as it is to say it; I believe that it is still a fairly true statement. One person can easily change someone else's entire life (if we choose to let them in) whether it be a lover, teacher, friend, child, etc. However, our own personal walls often lead to the prevention of meeting these people, this brings me to the goddamn puppet show...sorry I really am not an egomaniac I just really enjoy creating metaphors and analogies.
The Puppet Show- ahh the puppet show, let's get a little metaphysical for a minute here...Think of your brain as you hands, your actions/thoughts/dispositions as the strings and your 'public sphere representation' (aka how the majority of world sees you or what you are presenting as 'you') as your puppet. I suppose it could be stated as your puppet being your brain's avatar. No one can literally 'see' your thoughts, history, or 'soul' all they can really see is what you present yourself as. I'll go ahead and use myself as an example, and we can use my favorite watering hole, Mulligans, as my puppetry background or 'scene.' When at mullies and in front of people I take on the role of 'useless j' quite frequently (at shows as well, especially when I am onstage in front of a microphone). Useless J is everything I want to be sometimes, he is confident, nihilistic, drunk, high, funny, crass, impervious to death or pain, he has a million friends, he is incapable of becoming offended, etc. If any of you have seen me on a good night at a show you have seen useless j. I had a bit of a shit experience the other night at mullies and it has led me to realize that the useless j armor I had constructed over the years has now become somewhat inadequate to 'protect/represent' myself nowadays. Maybe it's the sense of optimism I am trying to create in my life. Useless J was a bitter marxist who had little trust or utility for real emotions and positivism. Useless J ignores racist, sexist, or other dangerous jokes that some people spew, because at the end of the day J is just looking to 'comingle' and avoid taking a stance on anything because a stance implies ostracization from others.
So the other night 'J' watched a couple people whom he kind of knew spew some verbal shit that cuts right to the core of 'me' to a couple of people I literally love more than 95% of the people in my life. Of course there were extenuating circumstances (wasn't sure how close they were to the victims of this verbal assualt) and a few other things...but the sour taste of choking down my ideals to appease social situations has not yet left my mouth two days later. I guess you could say that my brain is outgrowing the puppet shell it had created. So I've recently made a vow to myself (for myself) to never again allow things like this to occur. I have no need/desire to have more 'bar buddies' and I have reached a point in my life where I no longer crave fighting or physical altercations (as opposed to the kid who grew up fighting everyday at school) because fighting quickly becomes 'assualt and battery' once one reaches adulthood. Not too mention I have an extremely dark angry side that I guarantee almost none of you have seen, because I have no use for that side of me and have vowed to rid myself of such actions. That being said, I cannot help but get a bit crazy if you have the temerity to fuck with those I love... do not ever test these boundaries with me.
Wow, I am getting really off topic here. The point I was trying to make with these past two metaphors is that the world seems, to me, to be an evershifting background scene for our public representational puppets to act upon....haha I like how it took two pages to reach this conclusion that is encapsulated within one sentence here. This leads me to my third and final metaphoric conclusion (I love likening life to games, weird I know) Musical Chairs. Do you all remember the childhood game of musical chairs? Where you march around a circle of chairs, goose-stepping like little neo-nazis with your classmates, until the music stops playing and you all scramble to find a place to sit? The irony of the game being that there are less and less chairs each time and when one cannot find a place to sit; they are now 'out.' I always sucked at musical chairs because I did not understand the importance of shoving a little girl out of my way to 'win' at a fairly unfun game. I think that America (and the tenets of capitalism and neo-liberalism) is a fairly similar 'game' right now. We get so caught up in maintaining our own little puppet worlds that we sometimes forget to look around ourselves and outside of our own little worlds (scenes). I don't think it's anyone's fault per se...this is the enviroment in which we have been fostered and the mythologies we have been indoctrinated with. But I do think that we are capable of realizing what we are doing, and with consciousness comes a greater responsibility to ourselves and others. Sometimes we need to stop and look at the puppet we have created to represent ourselves and what kind of backgrounds we are currently acting within.
I doubt that I am the only one of you who feels that maybe it's time to redress my puppet's wardrobe and maybe make it reflect who I really am a bit more. I know it's a scary feeling to abandon familiarity. I was thinking about life and death this morning and of all the close brushes I've had with death (car wrecks, having guns pointed at me, overdosing, being poisoned, etc.) and I think the scariest occurances that have plagued my memories weren't these brushes with death but rather ones dealing with life. That terrifying feeling of telling someone how you truly feel about them, admitting your 'foolish' dreams to others, creating music or art in front of strangers, etc. are all 'scary' in their own ways. They are scary because they are representing the 'real' you more than the day to day avatar you show the rest of the world. I have decided that in my own life it is time to start practicing what I sociologically/ontologically preach in my day to day activities. I am in no way implying that any of you reading this (the three of you that read through all this bs) needs to change their life or that my life is somehow more 'enlightened.' My purpose here, going back to post-modernism, is that I hope some of us can sometimes stop and look at our thoughts and actions and try to examine what is really behind them. Stop accepting things because 'that's just the way things are' because these type of neo-liberal mythos only further fuel the systems of isolation and mistrust that 'they' want us to live in. We only have one life and I have decided that it is perhaps time for me to try and live it with a more accurate representation of who I am or who I want to be.
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