Qua?

Hypnopompia sets in and I’m standing before my school addressing them about the college’s current state. For the life of me I can’t understand. I begin with the notion that PT’ers are forced to teach 3 credit courses, 3 at a time, to only meet 9 credits, when they need 10 credits to receive benefits. Full-timers automatically get it. But, and with offense, most of those FT’ers aren’t progressive or smart enough to teach 21st century, upper division courses. It’s true. They all resort to their 20th century favs, and only update with those within the same ideological framework as deemed “quality” by some faceless commission or publisher. Both of these facts are wildly offensive and I have nothing but an agitated, actionable response to it and them.

Next, I went into how badly faculty treat students, both through their absent pedagogies and classroom rapport, and through actual statements made about them. If I hear that again when we return to campus, I’m going to speak up loudly. During the holidays, when faculty had “potlucks”, instructors in the break rooms would talk mostly negative about the college, but also the students. Saying things to the effect that they were nothing but stupid and all the instructor did was teach what interested himself. I will admit, I instruct on much of what I find most intriguing in psychology, but I always relate it to the traditional curriculum, and I aways use a pedagogy to inspire my students to entertain and hopefully learn that material. I don’t just go beyond them and enjoy!

On further development of this daydream, I spoke up to those 3 male instructors with several expletives, and violent physical threats, ending with something about taking a chair to their heads to fix their stupid faces. I’m a violent person, always have been. A product of a violent time, world, culture, nation and family, violence was readily applied to me through spankings, then 5-year old fistfights, not stopping until about 28, although some physical trauma through 34. But in that time, I applied violence only as self-defense, never against females, and only early as bullying of my brother (by example). Today at 40 if offended to a certain degree, or with proper causation (probably because it’s deserved), my instinct will be to attack. I wasn’t prepared, but today I am. Am I ready to kill? I don’t own a gun, and if I did, I wouldn’t license to carry concealed. There’s no fun in that culture, a quick combustible flashbang and everyone enters the system as a different person. Dead or prisoner. Victim or violator. But the feel of having to enter the judicial and medical sectors of American culture makes me fear worse. To see myself lose what I am now, to have to pull out the barest of me just to survive -- no one would remember who I am. Dead.

So if I attack and you have a gun, use it. But if we tussle and more, thank you. 1:1 is an eye for an eye. But it is physical, it is mental, it is emotional, spiritual, soulful, chaotic and anarchic. At all levels there is an evening out -- EVENS. “Are we evens?” Do you remember that? It’s how we would “get back” at each other. If you transgressed me, I was allowed to transgress you until “EVENS” was said or yelled or screamed or typed. Physical evens was easiest and most balanced. Mental evens is cryptic, is analogous and represented synonymously, but the overall balance exists when one goes silent or decides to make it physical. Emotion, spirit, and soul inform mental and physical, are both yet are constantly changed by both. When one is engaged physically or mentally, emotion retains its last, as is with spirit in a longer term, and soul once volition decides fate. So ultimately, everything and anything can change the balance, and EVENS tends to be personal, which is why I mentioned chaos and anarchy, examples I use for two of the three 1:1s.

Rather than ideology, this is praxis. This is the applied art of psychology to the individual, but it’s not individual psychology because we all know anarchy. No one is alone. But your solitude can’t be delimited by human alone, either. Songbirds outside my door as a cooler morning than day enters with it. Dogs bark at no one, at everything that doesn’t move. Just as human screams at someone who isn’t there, above in this writing, or laying in the bed next to you. Close your eyes to begin to enter the complete solitude, the fullness of space. Space is everywhere and always filled. Since birth this is its essence and function for me. What has filled it since its start has only come to complete that path for many, and even as I continue to compose after closing that gateway to it, getting there asked that I reopen the entry. There is no complete, but there is complexity. 

Terence McKenna is dead. He lives through video, through writing, and through stories. His impact can be felt in mind, in the new modalities with which to perceive sensory reality, and to an extent, anti-sensory meta-reality. I do believe he and his brother, and his followers go a step too far, but that is EVENS for what and who they will actually influence. The same happens for women’s rights when they start to overamplify their sexuality, or racial justice when small riots and economic diversions complicate the Fed. The excess pulls us all back toward the middle. 

The current give and take is American land versus the human body. The US government doesn’t need to take control of any more land or any more property. In fact, it is happy to move to new technologies, as American consensus sees this need as so. Having wrapped up a future of oil preserves, pipelines projects are halting. In the meantime, mental privacy will be invaded online, and death rights will be stripped from women. If capitalists understand they won’t survive without Earth’s resources, and there’s no realistic life in outer space, humans are resources. They can use our money (hence another round of “bailouts” only 11 years later), use our bodies (arresting, imprisoning, contact tracing, testing to propagate carceral culture), and they can use our spirits and souls (inciting riots; “kneeling” alongside rebels, then turning on them; representative and long-planned acts of removal or cancel).

I’m not with cancel culture, but I’m not with those other fucking fools either. The only case I can make for the preservation of all historical artifacts and monuments is I want to know, need to know, and wouldn’t be anything of who I am if these things didn’t happen. Should we celebrate these individuals? NO. But we should know the historiographic circumstances involving all parties in such an important event in our nation’s history. I think we should have archives or museums for these, and freely-paying citizens can choose to understand this perspective of our nation’s past. I would go to a Confederate Museum in Alabama or Virginia or any other southern locale, especially if I knew they welcomed any variation of American there to understand their history. These places, like zoos or art galleries or sporting venues, can house all the paraphernalia and propaganda imagined, every piece of important matter. We almost do it already, but we extend those objects and symbols into our natural ecology, out of doors. (Funny, Julian Edelman offered similar to DeSean Jackson.)

Anything in open space must not include VIOLENCE of mind, body or souls and spirits of any individual. Facades serve the same purpose. Colors are fine. I don’t mind black and white buildings, but biologically, color facades will serve a very important purpose to reclaiming a stabilized earth ecosystem, so think twice and three times about what color you choose. But environmentalize your spaces again, leave all the rhetoric for inside, just like your skulls, brains and mind, enclosed and volitionally used. And checked. 

The negation that gets me personally, but which I’m willing to sacrifice for the America most of us believe in, is t-shirts. These are facades. It’s not the same as an ornament like jewelry or a watch. T-shirts, ball caps, purses, some pants and skirts, jackets, they all have open space with which to share your message. Most people don’t look at these in depth, usually in passing, but there are always school-based debates about First Amendment rights related to this, and the need for “uniformed” clothing. In most arguments, I’d resort to something like, we can look away, avoid those media, just as I do Netflix or numerous websites, books, magazines, etc. But those are static, unmoving, not forced at places I’d expect a pluralistic understanding of the world. I wouldn’t want to walk into my classroom and see my psychology instructor wearing a MAGA shirt. And yet, I wear controversial and educational pieces all the time.

So don’t leave that argument up to me, but the public and economics-related environments, please, let’s use America the Beautiful and not its rather confused and shitty people right now. Public places is what the art world calls them, I believe. Am I a public place? In a classroom, I am. Is a shirt with a big red letters spelling “CHAOS THEORY” offensive? Or a shirt with Emiliano Zapata on it?

Now we’re talking.