more of this kinda thing

A**m's estranged father Ju**s had the epiphany that started a movement which evolved decades later into the Order of the Stone Heart. As he was walking down Wall Street, talking to his broker on his cell, sending a steamy text message to one of his girlfriends, and still finding time to daydream (cuz that's the kind of Dude he was,) J*da* tripped & fell off of a curb. It was then that *ud*s decided that the physical laws of our universe are no longer compatible w/ our way of life. But it took decades of this sort of this sort of thinking and numerous self-help books to give birth to a spiritual movement that sought to turn people into architecture.

hierarchy

In many societies, there is a very definite hierarchy that is to be followed. The caste system in India would be one example. Monarchy would be another. In America, there is a different hierarchy for nearly every social situation. Take a celebrity out of Hollywood and put him or her in a federal prison and you would see said celebrity having to adapt to an entirely new hierarchy. Our hierarchies seemed to be based on ever-changing qualities- aesthetics and social capital. Yet we like to think that we are more libertarian & less oppressive than most societies. But maintaining the illusion of there being no hierarchy while constantly having to adapt to ever-changing social norms is just unnecessary burden. Our politicians, if they are ambitious, feel pressured to be hip & cool, even though this has nothing to do with politics. We deny the authority that our government has over us as long as they convince us that they did in fact inhale & as long as they wear designer outfits. Our way of life would be less stressful if we had a clear idea of who our superiors are & knew how low we should bow.

we got screwed

You ever wonder if
the moment
you were conceived
somebody got to
have more fun
than you ever have?

It wasn’t subject to
life-threatening untreatable
viruses

It hadn’t been depicted
& reinterpreted
& overstated

It wasn’t trite

It wasn’t something you had seen already-
digging through yr old man’s porno mags & videos
or whatever else
he was thinking abt
trying to relive
that moment
when yr unfortunate ass
came to be

Didn’t you run across
some of those same images
the 1st time
you logged on?

I bet you wished that
all you had to contend with
were yellowish stained pages
instead of
beating yr brains
for the right keyword

The old man’s stale memories
are better than the dead horse
that you’re left with

Man I bet there were taboos
in the 60s &
maybe even
on into the 70s

“We shouldn’t be doing this”
or, “This is unheard of”

In Zen Buddhism
there is a concept
called to us
beginner’s mind
where you assume
that you are always a beginner
& know nothing

But now that I have told you that
you already know it & the next person that you tell it to
will have to believe
that you knew it first
rather than me

None of us are beginners
because they experienced it
first

Perhaps we are empowered
by walking in their shadows
but empowerment
can be very boring
like beating every game you have
for your PS3 then having to get
the Xbox or GameCube
or a job w/ Homeland Security

Could we ever be overwhelmed?

Could we ever
penetrate anything
when all those
dark places in your head
are now a part
of the landscape?

Sometimes I wonder
if it’s voices in my head
or just crumbs
of the old man’s neurosis
“Give in to it. It’s all you have.
Might as well before
they make you do it anyway”

Man
they even had a war
kinda like ours
& still got to pretend
that they weren’t all
completely alone

I swear I saw a magazine
from back then
& a naked woman was smiling

This is why we never connect-
our Universe doesn’t exist
because of
its stars & planets & inhabitants
She exists
in spite of them

Her physical laws
are no longer compatible
w/ our way of life

We have only
a few epiphanies left

And then-
there will be no more sarcasm
nothing will be figurative
everyone will be
naked & smiling
in some manner

We won’t have to
dance around one another
anymore.

We won’t be able
to bleed each other dry

We don’t know
when we’re bleeding anymore
anyway
Might as well
wait
for that moment
you were cheated out of
when you came to be.

ain't got no home

http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/I_Aint_Got_No_Home.htm

this song resonates on so many levels. first of all, a song written during the FIRST depression. secondly, the irony of a supposedly all-inclusive multi-kulti utopia that in actuality leaves us all feeling displaced & alone. lastly, me being what i am. but most importantly, that harmonica is badass.

yup.

“To hold a vase filled to the brim,
without spilling anything,
is impossible; better not to fill it so.”

Lao-Tzu, I am certain
has never heard of
diabetes insipidus
which is caused by
having not enough
antidiuretic hormone
and keeps one
forever thirsty

What is a brim
anyway if not
Whitman’s hat & boots?

Would that any man
who expresses disapproval
over that which was
born already
filled to the brim
begin to understand Time

And if he wants
to find said brim
he may begin to ask people
what time it was
rather than what time it is

And when that man
spills over living as if
nothing begins or ends

Perhaps Lao-Tzu’s
Philistine epiphany
will hold him in

Maybe the elements
will have mercy on his brim
and not wear down its edges
until gravity pulls out
that which was always
feral

Our own universe
of which we have drawn maps
still contains
black holes

Some say that Desire
the cause of all suffering
should be yielded to
for its own sake
like a current

I find this problematic
since all suffering
could just as easily
be fetishized

It was Porn
rather than democracy
that we found
in Iraq

Have you ever
fantasized abt
doing a love scene
w/ someone
and getting off
before anything
is actually
experienced?

Without a brim
we would just
stare in one
another’s eyes
all day long

“Better not to
fill it so,”
says Lao Tzu

Since
being a sage
keeps one from ever
singing the blues

Lao Tzu
never sung
the Underwhelmed Blues
or the Never Quite Enough Blues
or even the Insufficiently Distracted Blues

Walt Whitman
being a whore
and not a sage
was well aware
of his own brim

“O Christ! My fit has mastered me!”

He would have been
damned by sages
for refusing
to calculate

“What is less or more than a touch?”



The Ill-fitted
tend to be
lousy at math

Whitman had not reckoned
a brim any more
than he had reckoned 1000 acres
or the earth

“Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.”

So what that means
children
is hear not their sermons
you are the sermon
& you will never spill
any more
than you already have.

See previous post.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia

"Moreover, in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, the protagonist Dagny Taggart struggles to keep Taggart Transcontinental thriving in a world that spurns innovation and excellence. All of Dagny's opponents cite 'equality of opportunity' and the 'public good' as their justifications for opposing free market capitalism and competition."

Scratch Workshop

Have some unscratched vinyl? Know a teenager? You're in luck.

Open Scratch Lab and Workshop - Teens learn how to scratch records. 415-2700. Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library 3030 Poplar Memphis (Midtown) 415-2700.

See next post.

bad pun...or literary gold?

Motif

Latacia Davis is an aspiring novelist who suffers from ADHD. Her unfinished manuscript has generated some interest, but an agent tells her that it is too unfocused to be published. Latacia recently quit her job at the post office to work on her novel. As a consequence, she has no dental insurance and cannot repair the missing incisors that resulted long ago from grinding her teeth while cranked up on Adderall. Can Latacia Davis find a central theme for her novel before she loses any more of her pearly whites?

and wave them like you just don't care

ever think abt how the word "hip" used to imply subversion? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus

hence "hippies."

whose lifestyles were seen as subversive but eventually became status quo. huxley's characters in brave new world were neither tuning in, turning on, nor dropping out when they took soma.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_mind_(science_fiction)

all they ever had to do was give us enough rope.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore

architecture

It seems too haphazard
to be architecture

But once you really note
how we hover
suffocate
impose
but never touch

You start to see columns

Intimacy could only be
evidence of erosion
the erosion that occurs
when fleeting glances
form cracks
between empty words

That occurs in silence
especially when awkward
& not so silent
after all

With the right kind of eyes
we would see that
it was all written in

Nuanced moments
must be built around

Sound structures
must erode

Too much eye contact
leads to quips
abt sporting events
or sex that never occurred
or whatever makes a girl
laugh blush or
feign offense

There is always
enough mortar

The Sphinx
w/o a nose
is still the Sphinx

The dead silence of prayer
can be awkward
though clearly it was planned for
even allotted a specific
no. of seconds before
the next hymn

Early in my day
I was told that I have
beautiful intense eyes
in a brief lapse
b/w carefully structured moments
of customer service

“Who says to someone?”
I asked my Self

“Exactly,”
answered Self.

googling myself

i'm amazed by what i find googling myself. my old poetry that i distributed abt the internet willy-nilly in my mid-twenties which i'm now embarrased of cuz it's a whole lotta angst & not much art. others seemed to like it though. the other chad weatherford who has a page on blogspot & forced me to use my middle name on this one. the chad weatherford who was a delivery man on an episode on melrose place. no record whatsoever of my amazing work as the forehead & spot of short reddish hair behind david straitharn at the bar in my blueberry nights. there's a surfer chad weatherford. i'm proud of the other chad weatherfords actually. of course, googling that other name of mine is just as interesting. you get the teenage killer in omaha, a main character in a post-apocalyptic drama, & a really funny comedian.

It was when Ad** was on tour with his band End Construction that he started getting on the Internet and researching his Genealogy. *u**s had a great-great-grandfather, Dr. H*lm**eirkeche, who had Americanized his name and started our American greeting card industry. The Doctor saw no reason for us to express sentiments to one another personally and was therefore inspired to create a way to pay others to do it for us. He battled constantly with Asian thugs from Fortune Cookie Industries, but persevered and effectively designed a way for Americans to simultaneously Feel and Not Feel. He would have been proud of his descendants, who brought Us robots programmed to enforce Sarcasm on the streets of America, Inc. centuries after his death.

A**m saw some random, possibly homeless guy carrying something relatively lightweight. He couldn’t quite tell, but he would have sworn that it was just a stick. The man was hunched over at the waist and making his walk so laborious that it looked as if he was carrying a suitcase full of bowling balls rather than a stick. “Maybe it’s a stick of some as-yet-undiscovered element,” *d*m thought to himself, “Something with, like, a hundred pounds more mass than it would appear to have.” It was then that **am knew. He understood the guy’s burden. He knew that he had had that same pained look on his face.

The Brave New World wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. A**m had become aware of this at his job. He worked for one of those bookstores that also sold CD’s, DVD’s, soaps, incenses, candles, purses, had a restaurant inside, and provided babysitting services. Each cash register at his store was equipped with an enormous robotic arm designed exclusively to prevent customers from having to do menial tasks such as getting the receipt for their purchase out of the shopping bag so that they could record the transaction in their checkbook, or reaching to get an ink pen out of the coffee mug in front of the register where the pens were kept. There had been litigation over arthritic conditions caused by customers having to reach inside a brown paper bag for a small sheet of paper. The arm itself was a thing of wonder. It moved impossibly slow, made a noise so loud that you could hear nothing else in the store until it was finished, and it often required so much power that the lights in the store would flicker and the other registers would freeze up. But customers would endure all of this rather than reach into the shopping bag to grasp the receipt. And the technological advances didn’t stop there. There were robots to perform almost any task or remove any burden from their owners. There were robots to teach your children the birds and the bees, robots to combine peanut butter and jelly for a tasty sandwich, and even robots to operate machinery which had been designed to keep its owner from having to perform a particular task. Calluses were obsolete. No one perspired. A certain ancestor of **am’s would have been dismayed to learn that greeting cards were written in binary code, leaving only the name of the relative or acquaintance receiving the card. A typical greeting card would read: “Dear Aunt _____: 1001110011110001110011111.” Even subversion was designed to be less problematic. It had long been known that the sarcasm of the younger generation was the intended result of a government program. The consensus was that we had met the Buddha in the road and killed him. Life didn’t have to be a constant cycle of suffering- life could be a Never-ending Groove of Fabuliciousocity!

The conspiracy revealed itself in interesting and phenomenal ways. We were discovering that there were Others among us. Many of the people that we thought were our friends, relatives, coworkers, teachers, and politicians turned out to be a race of shapeshifting bag-shaped creatures from a planet called Duu’ootsche. People realized that so much of the human interaction that had conditioned them to become the people that they were was actually interaction with one of these baglike creatures that had dwelled undetected among us for God knows how long. For all we knew, anyone of us could be one of these alien beings. People started to behave more and more like these creatures, for fear that one of them might think it had been discovered and react violently. There had been several unfortunate incidents that no one wanted to see repeated. American culture was evolving in a way that was designed to appease our visitors from the planet Duu’ootsche. Rock and roll begat hip-hop. Sitcoms begat reality television. The discovery of extraterrestrials on our planet had effectively turned us all into Duu’ootsche bags.

life is a ponzi scheme

baudrillard says that we have created a world where everything is a representation of something else, but our representations have taken on a life of their own to the point where we have no memory of the original. i wonder when we'll finally be so overwhelmed by our war & chaos & terror & crisis that we'll stop studying history altogether. i think we already place more importance on consensus than we do on truth. i remember when they changed the taste of coke, then supposedly changed it back & called it coca-cola classic. my mom had stockpiled some coke, so we had that to drink & knew that coca-cola classic was not the original taste. now of course it's been so long that i have no memory of what the original taste was.