Conformity, in its own strange way-- despite the dictates of the radical
individualism that had gripped the Western mind over the 20th century-- is
always present in human affairs. For instance, to communicate effectively we
have to speak and write according to a set of standards in order not to be taken
as barbarians, or even visitors from the planet Mars. Most of humanity is
directed by an internal radar that tells them what is "in the range" of
acceptability, or what they simply discard like squirrels foraging for food. If
these mammals find "a nut" that is rotten, so to speak, they jerk their
heads and instinctually cast it aside and simply look for another one. Human
affairs are a little bit more complicated, especially when we're jammed into
modern communities in which we have to live together in an economy of
specialization, and "the nuts"-- so to speak-- can rage back and bring another
level of absurdity to this vale of existence.
Growing up, what a shock it was to realize that I was never going to be on
the cover of "Tiger Beat" magazine. Or when Katie called my house
sometimes, her friends tittering on the line, just to toy with my ignorance of
"Gap" culture and the hottest hits on the radio.
Katie was the kind of girl who wanted to be popular, but just never quite made it. She was too fat, too insecure, and her eyes were always moving around as if she was "hungry" and looking for something.
What occurred to me when she was pulling her mischievous pranks at my expense, was that in our own way, we were both wretches-- and one was only exacerbating the wretchedness of the other. I was "feeding her hunger", like coal being shoveled into a furnace, and even as I listened to her lead me on with teasing questions about vapid pop stars of the day, it seemed that society seldom rose up against its oppressors but only crushed down on those beneath them. To rise up would take risk and effort, and it seemed so much more gratifying to take the cheap way out and pick on someone lesser.
However, to a certain extent it is our choice to be "unhappy" and "unlucky"
by the decisions we make, and how they compound into a river of consequences
which most folk don't want to get swept into if they try to help, once they see
the true nature of the source. I think I
always had a deliberate blindness, an urge to be great-- like a battleship-- the
H.M.S. Bismarck, perhaps-- trying to barge through the Panama Canal but getting jammed because it was over-laden with the freight of pomposity. The ship would
hardly turn around, but would push forward and tear the hull while ripping out
the sides of the passageway. While people on land would scream at "The
Captain",
he would put his hand in his coat jacket as if he was posing for a portrait and
draft a declaration of war. Needless to say, I wasn't very popular.
I was conforming to what my ego said was "great", but not to what the world realistically required to function on a minimum, common level. I was also very lazy, coasting along on my "puffed-up" reputation of what I thought I was, or should be, without really working toward anything. It was very easy to fall into elaborate throes of self-pity, drinking deeply from the cup of sorrow because of what I wouldn't do for myself. All because I refused to conform, impaled gruesomely on the stake of my own stubbornness.
And when I look at all the unlucky
characters out on the fringe-- whether you're talking about "Wavy Gravy",
Terrence McKenna, or Timothy Leary who made constant fools of themselves
"staying true to their ideals", I
figure that if these people didn't have the sense enough to see that there was
something terribly rotten and odd about how
they led their lives, then I can't help them. . . . . nor should I share in their
fate. For even in my deepest depths of despair, I had a compass, if not higher
standards, and could see that these guys were bizarre.
You always take a good, long look at someone who is asserting an idea and listen closely to your internal radar. . . . . D
o they look and sound like a reasonable person? Are they too uptight? Or kind of scraggly and eccentric? Ask myself: the more I learn about this person, would I trust him with the keys of society? The folks with the wildest ideas, or the most extreme rhetoric, or the screwiest backgrounds and spottiest track records, are those whom are least fit to be in charge.In this tendency of extreme Western individualism, paired up with dime-store existentialism, that always asks "who are you to say what is normal?". But the results speak for themselves. . . . .
The Beats were mostly a bunch of spoiled trust fund kids who shot smack and sodomized each other.
There was Patti Smith-- the punk poetess-- who read aloud this incendiary poetry about revolution, but weighed only 98 pounds and was not one to sling a machine gun and go down to the barricades throwing Moltov cocktails. She spent her days mulling around with a depressed, pouting mouth, shoplifting from department stores out of some elaborate, "Marxist reasoning" and shacking up with Robert Mapplethorpe who photographed himself with a bullwhip up his ass to the outrage of middle America, nearly destroying "The National Endowment of the Arts" as angry conservatives rampaged.
There's theory, then there's action. AND REACTION. In nature, it is the extreme deviations in a group that challenge, or even change the course of direction in a population, but remember that just as there are new possibilities, neither can you escape reality's claw. Live with it.
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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
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(Rheeee of Crickets)
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("I heard that, Missy!")
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