Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Creating Grimalkin Lane

Today, Gunderic Mollusk and co embark on a new adventure: trying to create a comic book publishing company from scratch. So far, it's just an idea.

It all started from the most innocuous of moments. To preface, My stepmother, a self-made woman who came to America to create opportunities for herself, gave me one of the most compassionate interventions that I've ever experienced. I'd clouded myself in the realms of the spiritual, escaping into magic for magic's sake as my reason for being, in hopes it would give me an answer. She more or less laid it out that if I didn't make a change in my life, I was doomed. I honored her words, yet shelved them for the rest of the trip. The door blew open to our home in South Philly while I had my childhood friend from Delaware, his mistress and her cousin over for carousing and musing, catching up, et cetera, without anyone noticing. My roommate enters, and of course his cat-preservation instincts kick in fiercely, prompting my erstwhile compatriot to hit the road. It made for an awkward evening, yet the confluence of events overwhelmed me. Being the teetering emotional Tower card I am, I've let no one, not even myself, in on exactly how deeply my existential woes had cut into my being. I fainted a few times, and eventually my roommate, in his infinite compassion, helped me to the bed.

Dare I say it, it was a great time to hit a "ripple" from a previous psychonautical experience. I hadn't listened to my inner promptings up to this point; I merely reported them. I hadn't listened to the voice that told me that if I continued to ignore this drive for purpose, I would self-destruct. My stepmother... really hit it on the nose. Her primary quote was as follows: "Without financial independence, you can't achieve mental independence." I realized that, even though I don't much care for the ways money works, or the process of making it, I can put it aside for a goal that I find enriching. In my head, I've had little musings about post-human stories trapped in superhero conventions, superhero stories trapped in self-referential neurosis, and all manner of these things, but I haven't written a blessed thing outside of tables of correspondences and thousands of rewritten character histories, changed names, and an endlessly complex interpretation of supernatural abilities. If I get keyed into anything organizational, be it cleaning, folding laundry, doing the dishes, putting paperwork in order, and anything along those lines, I'm methodically unstoppable until I hit a wall. I need to use this to create this company. I want Philadelphia to have a comics scene. I want to make a home-grown pile of wierdo comics for people who like both forms of media under the name Avatar, who like canceled TV shows, who want to take control of the effect of the superhero medium and create marketing for compassion, sincerity and the evolution of mankind. I want to see Lance Evaporator onesies on babies who'll make the new economy that'll permit free energy. I want to see Gunderic Mollusk patches on the beat-up jeans of art school vixens who innovate art therapy programs that prove that society needs autistic, bipolar and schizophrenic kids, and it needs to find some better ways of translating their viewpoints aside from pills, pressure and paper trails. Yeah, I want to change the world. I want to make comic books. I want comic books to change the world. This is how I will do it.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Skanda lies bleeding, pierced by his own spear

We air the grievance publicly, yet not really. The catharsis occurs through this internet medium, and thus, our own identity as an individual becomes more complicated, bringing the notion of individuality to a possible conundrum in which the matters, as filtered to create this toy persona, express even less than the little we understand from actively living. The extent to which we take these personally comes from awkward moments, seeing the pictured body of a person manifest in close spatial proximity, wondering if, perhaps, you really know anything about the person inhabiting the body pictured, or if somehow through some internet quibble you've said or done anything to set this person against you, precluding their conversing with you. How does one understand collective value with so many proxies and conditions? How much do we allow these conditions to pre-emptively deny experience? That said, it's the due of the manic/depressive and the psychotic to sense few, if any, social barriers. Remember when those folks just did shrooms with the local fauna and had jobs set up for them? Remember when choosing that path didn't have the same social stigma and terror behind it?

I suppose it's my dharma this round to feel connected to the world, still. Maybe next round I'll do the renunciate dance, or at least I'll tell myself that to get over sadhu-envy. I feel like I have pressure to adhere to civilized structure, as I've few faculties to remove myself from it. Do I create those myself, and if so, what do I choose to ignore in order to maintain a certain level of being "psyched out" of doing anything?

Knowledge ends up little more than odd cues more or less resembling sentimentality's stodgy, logical cousin in the perspective of the observing conscious medium. Sometimes, it pay to remember that wisdom and ignorance are a polarity, and stupidity has its own virtues. The collective will have an infinite amount of opposing values. How do we understand the revulsion we have toward opposing values within ourselves? How many of us have devolved to the bumper sticker displays of our conviction and conscience? Do we need to laud our ignorance, or use our charity to justify our hardened hearts? What happened to compassion? I mean, really? What happened to sincerity? So far, I hear the word and the only whisper I get is "oh yeah, like Fugazi." Is Fugazi really the last bastion of sincerity in the world? I mean, I don't even really like listening to Fugazi. Why are we always seeing an attack, or making up fake enemies we can't see? Wouldn't we rather look at that, faint, dying little pulsing heart at the bottom of the tree, weakly beating like a child dying of leukemia, trying to keep us all together, trying to unite us as One? Why must we fight the Adversary around us instead of heal the Unity in ourselves? When did the heroes stop building and creating? Where's our next Hammurabi*? Where's our next Alexander*? Where's the next Lorenzo di Medici*?

*- I'm well aware these guys were dicks. Just sayin', we could use some major constructive cultural shifts into realms imagined.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Tintinabulae

God... dammit. So, after a heavy psychedelic experience some time in the beginning of autumn, I've been waking up, slowly but surely. It's been tough on both ends. I just... I don't know what I expected out of choosing this path in life, and I don't know if I've even chosen anything aside from justifying self-indulgence and lassitude. I don't know if I'm making a case for "The Other Guys." I'm damned inept at anything involving paperwork, and basic job applications seem so threatening. I'm doing okay, financially, in that I have food and shelter. That's better than a lot of people in the world, but I wonder if I'm just wasting opportunities for something more fundamental, something more involved with humanity. Is it okay that I don't care?

On a spiritual and experiential level, I understand that I'm a part of this global organic chemical reaction. Thing is, I still feel really uneasy in this place. It's lonely and sad. The frame of reference of my consciousness is from a member of a communal species who has a hard time communicating. I don't know if I'm ever getting across my feelings, and I really try, in a bunch of different ways to do so, but it rarely comes out close.

I used to have faith. I used to call on the universe. Whatever would call in me wasn't anything deserving of an answer. Adversaries develop from half-baked ideas on social constructions. So much of our universe seems dependent on our own inventions. We cope with the pain of compassion by denying God; we justify our cruelty by accepting an all-loving God who will "make it all okay in the end," only on the value of belief instead of action. We invent silly dramas amongst broadly-writ charicatures of human interaction in the hopes of understanding the universe better, yet instead fall back into persistent delusion. My mind cannot stand simply being. It doesn't enjoy anything of this world. It seeks destruction more than anything else, and oh does it hate. It hates the constant hum of instinct and its lack of finesse at achieving its satisfaction. It hates the fallacy of language. It hates this half-baked enslavement to concepts and ideas that masquerades under the names of "culture." It hates the empathic sloth of intolerance and the methods used to enforce it. Pff. That's my favorite: "Can't abide intolerance."

I feel like my senses have been screaming for release. I feel like my nervous system swings between a conflagration and charred remains. I'm exhausted perpetually. I wish I had courage.

I wouldn't feel so much antipathy if I didn't feel an equal amount of love for the universe. I just wish I had a better idea of how to operate, a better idea of what the hell would constitute my center. Whatever had served that purpose has disappeared.

So then, I wonder: if we have a purpose to build and create, we have an equally valid purpose to destroy. In what ways can each individual utilize destruction in the best way possible?