I’ve fallen in love in three countries, been in love in five, and said I love you in four languages. I’ve “I love you”d, “te amo”d, “phom rak khun”’d, and “wo ai ni”d my heart into rhythms of maelstrom, eagle wing, and temple ruin. I’ve lived as though love is the meaning of life, but most importantly, I’ve lived… and loved. For that, I give thanks.
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Are we really going to keep talking about the last 50 years of evolution in American culture as though it hasn’t been massively informed by different types of drugs and their effects? Even if you never did them or you don’t do them now or you lived then or live now choosing to turn a blind eye to them, you live within a culture informed by drugs, one that has been so for over five decades. I mean, up until the 1960’s humans were basically the same model human we had been for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Yes it’s true the world has always been constantly changing and in the hundreds of years leading up to the 60’s this change had significantly picked up its pace, but until the 1960’s these changes were still not happening at a pace that demanded humans completely remodel our inner landscapes of psyche and soul to adapt. The human psyche was allowed to maintain itself while adapting appropriately, or at least as best it could be expected to do so, in step with the progression of the time. Then: pot, psychedelics, the sixties. The human psyche got blown the fuck out like the burning contents of a building in backdraft. (Boom.) And just like in the wake of any long profound night spent indulging in psychedlics and beating back the frontiers of what our minds accept as possible at least one morning of recovery is required, so too was such a period of recovery required by the culture. In fact, the culture required decades of it. And for that first decade, the seventies, what better drug with which to relax the comedown than heroine, the new guiding narcotic of the times. Slow-paced syruped drawl, apathetic, relaxed, tortured, seedy, going through its own pre set motions. Then on came the eighties, and us, ready to bump our way out of that chemically induced down, and so came cocaine. Self-centered, posturing, over-confident in its own over-indulgent low quality output, artificially fast paced, and containing within endless amounts of shame and stupidity when viewed through a sober lens years later. Crack cocaine had its own dominant stint as the culture began to break into those who’d turned back from the tidal wave of white walled froth they’d been following, and those who’d ride the wave right of the cliffs of false glam and into the pebble strewn lows of alleyway blowjobs and five dollar slices of the only dream they had left. Crack wouldn’t have its own decade, though at the onset of the nineties you’d hardy know it. Still, it would hit so hard the vibrations still thrum in streets and neighborhoods that share more in common with Bosnia and the broken old Eastern front than they do their own country. Truth be told the waves each drug made in its day still eddy and express in corners throughout this country, but none continues to guide the culture like the zeitgeist puppeteers they had been. Even when club drugs hit the culture in bulk, late nineties, early millennia dos, they made waves only at an undercurrent, and were satired and snarked at in sync with their use, as though the culture had been made self aware enough not to completely lose itself in the same sort of indulgences it once had. And now the culture has found its footing. It’s like the middle aged forty year old who’s done with the drugs but who’s also seen enough in their day not to judge the mistakes and missteps of others. Someone who knows enough not to narrowly focus their own morals and ideals as a universal standard. Someone who does not need religion in the absence of their own self made hard earned pseudo spirituality for now there is no absence. Someone who’s fallen in love with things and beings so diverse their notion of love no longer contains only what their own experiences have informed but accept too all manner of freak and fetish and quirked expression of love and lust as possible, even if not so for them, than someone. (Obviously, this is not an academic essay. Mostly projection, opinion, what I see from where I stand with minimal research given. Enjoy.) I love hand made things. Things taking time and toll and inherently flawed. I love words beginning in x, where the x is no x but instead a Spanish j, or all manner of acrobatic Aztec, words like fossils buried beneath sun-baked browns, twists of lenguas long dead and forgotten. I love the long arm of the Milky Way, when I’m the only one around to see it. I can’t say why for sure, though I suppose this is true with most things I love. I suppose it’s something of a requisite. That all things loved transcend logic and explanation. I love smiles that can’t help themselves. I love strength that won’t betray a smile. I love girls in hijabs for all the wrong reasons. Fuck it. I love what I love, but that is not the point. The point is simple: the point is that I love. Period. That’s all there is, and all there needs to be, the alpha and the omega of me. I love. I love. I love. And I love that too. © Dylan Amaro-McIntyre, 2013 In the beginning we were not but possible, a vibrating collection of quarks that language is ill fit to define. Then we were dust, that same impossible nothing but now nothing together. The first seeds of “us” and “them”. The first attractions leading dust into cloud, and then cloud into flame, and then flames into Suns and we were Suns then. We were Suns bending in every direction hiding alchemists in our bowels and we boiled in our depths dreams that held weight that would one day beget life, and then we died. And our ashes scattered and we were reborn each a thousand times. We were Suns again, some, and we were planets in free fall, and we were all manner of dust and cloud and rock in between. We were rock and we were water and we were life clinging to crags on those rocks and drops of that water hurtling through empty boundless black, and even now we still are. We are vibrations become form, and form finding thought, and thought growing far beyond its original intention. We are the actuality of a possibility, or perhaps, maybe, just an inevitable conclusion of our own specific beginning. Either way, it goes without saying that our very existence is, to both say the least and say it all, strange as fuck. Words can never and will never do that justice. But the fact that we are billions of years into this thing, consciousness sprang forth from [what?], is something to at the very least appreciate. Because trust me, whatever you believe about what happens to you when you die, wherever you think you might go, I can just about guarantee you that whatever part of you that may move on beyond this life is not the “you” that you traditionally identify with. (More on that later maybe.) Life’s a wild ride, but it’s also a one-way trip. Enjoy it. Appreciate it, and appreciate that us just being here and capable of considerations such as we are is all at once beautiful and wondrous and humbling and awe inspiring, but above all it's just plain fucking weird. Considering everything we are and all that we’ve come from I can think of no better way of framing our brief conscious existence amidst the totality of the Universe itself then to liken it to a very brief but very brilliant moment of clarity tucked away in some crazy impossible acid trip. The Universe and God are one and the same… as are we. © Dylan Amaro-McIntyre, 2013 I don’t place any higher value on an American life than I do an Iraqi life, they’re human lives, one and the same. I don’t think being biased in favor of our country will ever amount to anything positive for the world. That being said, I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m biased against our country either. I think at one time I may have been, but more often am mistaken as such for my willingness to speak out in favor of they who wear the face of the “enemy”. I say that to say this: What happened 12 years ago was terrible, a tragedy so immense in its scope and unfamiliar in our cultural landscape and collective memories that we still wrestle to make sense of it today. But when I reflect on the amount of innocent lives lost the world over as a direct result of our military reactions, and then overactions, I can’t help but think they deserve their day too.
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” ~ Jessica Dovey “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”— Martin Luther King, Jr |
AuthorRhymer of words. Speaker of sounds. Ancestral conduit. And cool as shit. Archives
March 2015
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