weighed against
Last night I drank a Coke-Cola. It tastes a lot like nickel to me. Maybe because my lips were chapped or the bleeding in my mouth after I had bit my tongue to make it stop wriggling.
I shutter in my repetition which translates more and more everyday to a ritual of codifying spaces of my mind, giving me a tangible measurement of time. The pearls of my life are consumed one by one, and gather at one end of the scale. There is the past, and it is weighed against the pearls yet to be consumed, the future. To my delight, the scale tips a little more to the future even as pearls are removed and given to the past. This happens because more weight is taken on by the threat of scarcity.
There is a life in the expenditure of the future to the last line, the last drop at the bottom. I am given the vision of the beginning and the end because I have the courage to cut and mete out the present. There is a life in the full bag becoming empty, and the coins disappearing, and the teeth falling away from the mouth, and the last rise of the chest; and in everything that has lived, in minutes and seconds meted out are the moments of the mundane yet significant: the last itch that was felt, the last kiss given or received, the last bowel movement, last erection, last blink, last swallow, last word–my first word was "no", but what will be my last?--That last little pearl is more valuable than everything that was spent, and tips the scale to the floor.
Absolutely, it will be melted down to its purest liquid form and injected straight into the heart. I thought about all of this, after I had confronted the television I hate. I wouldn't watch it, and the small glimpses I'd catch from my family starring at it perpetually would make me empty and sad. They always said "Don't do drugs, they'll make you dumb." I think T.V. is worse.
It's a highly addictive form of recreation which even at its best presents two-dimensional misshapen worlds which watchers fall into, believe in, live in. We watch the President, Paris Hilton, CSI, and whatever shows make us laugh. Some of us feel good when the home team finally wins a game. Some of us even watch Oprah to no end. Through the tube, we get an idea of what the world is like outside, what other people are doing, and what we are supposed to be doing ourselves. But none of it is real.
T.V. is money for the advertisers; the programming is not going to encourage us to be independent thinkers. None of us watch our hope-starved children, our masses of poor, our darkest realities. We’ll watch ourselves to no end as we fail.
Communism failed because of the greed and the desire for power over others inherent in human nature. Capitalism will fail also, in this country, for the same shortcomings. As the economic gap widens between rich and poor--and that is not contestable, it is indeed widening--and the money stops trickling down altogether (money has a tendency to go upstream, not down), T.V. which so beautifully renders the lifestyles of the rich and famous, will serve as a tool to incite the have-nots into a revolution. It's not a prediction, it's simply a logical turn-of-events; it happens in every society every couple of centuries or so. The oppressed feel trapped and have no way out except through violence, and heads will roll so... Stay Tuned.
I shutter in my repetition which translates more and more everyday to a ritual of codifying spaces of my mind, giving me a tangible measurement of time. The pearls of my life are consumed one by one, and gather at one end of the scale. There is the past, and it is weighed against the pearls yet to be consumed, the future. To my delight, the scale tips a little more to the future even as pearls are removed and given to the past. This happens because more weight is taken on by the threat of scarcity.
There is a life in the expenditure of the future to the last line, the last drop at the bottom. I am given the vision of the beginning and the end because I have the courage to cut and mete out the present. There is a life in the full bag becoming empty, and the coins disappearing, and the teeth falling away from the mouth, and the last rise of the chest; and in everything that has lived, in minutes and seconds meted out are the moments of the mundane yet significant: the last itch that was felt, the last kiss given or received, the last bowel movement, last erection, last blink, last swallow, last word–my first word was "no", but what will be my last?--That last little pearl is more valuable than everything that was spent, and tips the scale to the floor.
Absolutely, it will be melted down to its purest liquid form and injected straight into the heart. I thought about all of this, after I had confronted the television I hate. I wouldn't watch it, and the small glimpses I'd catch from my family starring at it perpetually would make me empty and sad. They always said "Don't do drugs, they'll make you dumb." I think T.V. is worse.
It's a highly addictive form of recreation which even at its best presents two-dimensional misshapen worlds which watchers fall into, believe in, live in. We watch the President, Paris Hilton, CSI, and whatever shows make us laugh. Some of us feel good when the home team finally wins a game. Some of us even watch Oprah to no end. Through the tube, we get an idea of what the world is like outside, what other people are doing, and what we are supposed to be doing ourselves. But none of it is real.
T.V. is money for the advertisers; the programming is not going to encourage us to be independent thinkers. None of us watch our hope-starved children, our masses of poor, our darkest realities. We’ll watch ourselves to no end as we fail.
Communism failed because of the greed and the desire for power over others inherent in human nature. Capitalism will fail also, in this country, for the same shortcomings. As the economic gap widens between rich and poor--and that is not contestable, it is indeed widening--and the money stops trickling down altogether (money has a tendency to go upstream, not down), T.V. which so beautifully renders the lifestyles of the rich and famous, will serve as a tool to incite the have-nots into a revolution. It's not a prediction, it's simply a logical turn-of-events; it happens in every society every couple of centuries or so. The oppressed feel trapped and have no way out except through violence, and heads will roll so... Stay Tuned.
posted by daneatkinson at 15.12.05
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