"Looking for the good in everything is equally as misguided as looking for the bad in everything." – Joseph Curiale

"No one knows how truly bad he is until he has tried very hard to be good" – C.S. Lewis

It has been a foggy year, give or take a few foggy days and, though many of you will dismiss my less than amazing tale as the mere fantasy of a mind completely overcome by cheap mota and mezcal, I beseech you to take my banalities with all seriousness. Boredom, the kind of vein drying, bald headed accountant boredom I have endured and returned from the brink to howl of, I assure you, is not the passive creature that rain-stymied children sulk about. There is a form of living blank, like the -isness of an arctic whiteout or the businessman's weekend, bland-storm beige, where the stark knowledge of so little is as much madness as the psychedelic chaos of knowing all. Life could never be so short as to inspire a reconstitution of this featureless, goal-less walkabout of insufferable waiting into a moment with yet something to seize. How it finally came to an end I cannot say. I expected no end to ever come nor that the end would be in any way a respite. Does one expect, if one passes into hell and abandons all hope, that yet there may be an exit?
The last thing I remember is someone screaming (children at obnoxious play some witnesses tried to persuade me . . . oh, how the mind reverses its view when you flip it on it's back) and the sounds of gunfire (could have been my sandals floppity slapping on the soles of my callused feet, but what kind of story would that make) as I ran for the bus and narrowly escaped the black mystic shadows of Oaxaca in favour of the cowboy booted, polka stepping, Felipe-Calderon-ass-kissing north. For the sake of sanity one should never assume that any move is for the better. As Sartre asserted, one does not decide this or that for the sake of good or evil, but simply because one must choose. Leaving one dissatisfying thing in the hope that the next will answer our existential lack is a silliness we all indulge in from time to time. The entirety of modern marriage and the subsequent divorce industry are built upon such delusions. But as Buckaroo Waldo Emerson knew, no matter where you go there you are. This is not to say that a change of atmosphere is not a fine breath of fresh air, but that a breath of fresh air cannot fix what's wrong with this old world.
A re-breath of re-fresh air. I once lived in Mayberry and re-plotted my return, my re-escape. It was built by an American go getter in the middle of poverty, sugarcane and Porfirio Diaz, peopled by one of each kind of professional, presented as employment and security and modernity and equality to the shoeless. It was meant to be a Utopia. It occurs to me that what crouches beast-like in any concept of a perfect -isness for humanity is the access to things. Food and shelter are never enough when one talks of perfect being. In the corporate socialism or the "Integral Cooperation" which informed my Mayberry, there were row houses, durable shoes, 8 hours of sleep, eight hours of work, and eight hours of culture, railways and shipping lines, irrigation ditches and straight, wide roads, built without a single thought as to how invading armies might become baffled while trying to find the corporate offices. After all, the invaders were the ones who started the city. Here, I thought, closer to the top of the pyramid of needs, were people with more and more on their minds.
What becomes of Utopia once it has been established and the taco stands are set up outside the baseball stadium? It becomes of course a shopping mall, a place where one can get what one wants and what one wants is, and always has been, more: the self glutted with its greedy desires. Utopia rips open a hole and teases the wound continuously agape with the promise of what it will stuff it with: more utopia, heroin, beautiful women, endless and affordable beer, superb food, cars, sunshine and good teeth. But does the fruit never rot on the vine in paradise? Death, Wallace Stevens reminds us, is the mother of beauty.
Mayberry is not a place on a map. It is a dream of contentment. People, even those in our ill perceived paradise, in truth live in the suffering world and take their respite where it is offered. For those of us who think we have arrived in Mayberry there is only the hell of our complacency to enjoy. Schopenhaur's suffering or boredom. Mazlow's hierarchy of needs does not peak in an enlightened and philosophical society, rather a self contented yawn and sprawl that would remind us of the insides of our eyelids if we actually felt or thought anything.
Where is it that one finally runs away to? Inside the mind, deluded and isolated from "negativity" or to the beach where the waves and whiskey wash away concern and let the world destroy itself without dissent? How do we maintain our discursive, connected equilibrium when everyone has receded into the passive, egocentric skull and painted all the windows black? "I just want to be happy" we all piss and moan, but could we really stand it? What we really want is to be left alone and not perturbed by such dismal thoughts. That, we think, we can translate it into a kind of happiness. TV is happiness. Sex is happiness. Drunk is happiness. Happiness is happiness. Hell is other people. But happiness, heaven, I suggest, is sheer boredom, irresponsibility, gluttony. Hell, other people, suggests responsibility. Utopia is a product of hell, the responsible answer to it's question, a need perceived, a factory built, a shopping mall stocked, a consumer duped, a dismally boring heaven created, a boredom suffered, a need re-created, a need perceived, a question made.
My error was not the desire to run away, it was not returning to a place I once lived and expected to be the same, rather it was to believe that I wanted to live in Utopia. It was everything I could have asked for. I asked for peace and I got it, boredom on a platter to stare at without rhyme or reason, only to have and poke and ponder and not even feel good about. It's as my mother says to the kids running around her house and picking up all the bric-a-brac, "It's only for looking."
I have stared into the wee hours of the day and imagined myself an observer. But I have not been observing and I have not been living. Boredom is not a place or a condition attached to paraphernalia. Discontent inspires dreams of paradise, but paradise inspires discontent. In the myopia of my boredom, in the malls of Utopia, I dream of discontent and continue to desire . . . Utopia.
It has been a foggy year but there may yet be an exit.

"For thirty years people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don't. Everything about me is a contradiction and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There is a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them."- Orson Welles (1915 - 1985)

"It is in vain that we search for an essential difference between good and evil, for their constituents are the same. The crucial distinction lies in their structure, i.e., the manner in which the pieces are assembled. Evil is disintegration, an angry juxtaposition of alienated opposites, with parts always striving to repress other parts. Good is the synthesis and reconciliation of these same pieces." – Charles Hampden-Turner / Maps of The Mind

Hamlet: What have you, my good friends, deserv'd at the hands of Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?
Guildenstern: Prison, my lord?
Hamlet: Denmark's a prison.
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.
Hamlet: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o' th' worst.
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet: Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

which in english means day of the thousand chers

2nd law of thermodynamics and evolution

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo/probability.html

Christian Right Lobbies to Overturn the Second Law of Thermodynamics (joke)

http://www.sullivan-county.com/id3/thermodynamics.htm

Gracias por fumar

In personal game news, it seems a power surge has fried my old faithful xbox black. I was in the middle of a particularly challenging boss battle in Stranger's Wrath when clouds of black smoke suddenly huffed from the poor old creature's vents. Strangely enough it was at almost this point in the game two or three months ago that the police interupted my diversion to steal a few of my things ... including Stranger's Wrath. I replaced the game through a roundabout process which took a good month and a half only to play the game up to more or less the same point and be shut down by manic electricity. Giving this a positive slant which is really not my way, I guess I have an additional reason to buy a 360 when I get to Canada. But what then to do with the stack of original games i just bought and had shipped to me here in la jungla? Whatever ... strange priorities really.