I have been doing it ever since we heard about divesting in South African companies in the 1980's, but now more than ever: BOYCOTT SHELL! (as well as all the rest of the oil and car companies). As I ride my bicycle in my neighborhood, it just seems absurd that so many people just keep driving their cars and supporting these twin industries, oil and auto. We're just digging our own grave. The ozone layer high in the atmosphere is down significantly over many parts of the world now, not just over Antartica, and this spells certain major problems for all of us. I briefly read an article in the paper yesterday about a glacier in Yosemite National Park in California melting away completely in the next ten to twenty years, something unprecedented in human history. The implications of this are that water supplies from the annual snows in the Sierra mountain range will be radically diminished in the next few decades, leading to problems in crop lands and all sorts of subtle environmental degradation. The list just goes on and on.

All civilizations die. Ours is more ugly than the rest, and instead of artistic architectural ruins, we'll leave only twisted, rusted wreckage, concrete scars, and desolate bio-mutant landscapes.

What is the deal? Are we so deluded by the blitz of empty mass entertainment that we don't really care about whole villages of people being decimated? When I see a Stop sign on a street corner, I say to myself STOP, and think. The thoughtlessness in modern society is just amazing. As humans, we are destroying paradise faster than you can imagine, and in its place go the crudest, cheapest kind of architecture, roads, homes and lifestyles. As I ride my bicycle effortlessly, quietly through this uglyness, I chant a quiet mantra: Turn the roads into gardens. The simplicity of it just rings well. Everyone loves a garden. What better antidote to the endless grid of asphalt herding us as mass day laborers for the corporate machine. Get off the grid, take a curvy, breezy glide on a bicycle--now that's heaven. Like a bird, you can just whiz through the air, with great views of every detail that you miss in a metal gas-guzzling, poison-puffing death machine.

The fortunes of the masses pop out of cookies. The fortunes of greedy corporations come from the pockets of the masses.

When was the last time you just entertained yourself? Not going to some multi-million dollar movie, or bought some slick CD with great graphics and some big name, or rented the latest plastic movie on video at the local Blockbuster. Now there's a name for you. Blockbuster: their actual function is that they bust the social fabric of our neighborhoods with their mainstream spew of meaningless drivel called movies.

Entertainment. Now look at this word. It sounds like something is being done to you. Where's the engagement? The participation? It even sounds like some kind of electronic spray, getting you down into some kind of passive drone mode. Sleep, work, and entertainment. Where's life's journey here? The psyche is reduced to some kind of obscure academic appendage, like an appendix in your gut that might have to be removed if you appear to be getting too far out of line. The corporate line that is.

The piano is a musical instrument of great potential, as well as all of the rest of the nobel family of musical instruments from all around the world. In earlier times, there used to be instruments in many houses, the center of many family gatherings. Perpetual motion, self-propelled entertainment. Better than entertainment, because it actually engaged you! The creative spirit of joyous revelry! Now the stunned masses laugh at cunning commercials and in sync with fabricated, cued laughter of plastic Americana serials and

I had short hair for a long time. I mean for most of my life. And now, as an experiment, I am growing it long, along with a fuzzy untrimmed beard. It's actually kind of interesting, the social reactions, etc. The waiters and waitresses where I eat look at me funny, but they're getting used to it. It's nice to have this organic feeling to my self and my local space. There's already enough rectangles and paint, metal, wood, and plastic in my life. I need to get away from this stuff. You can't eat it you know. You can eat plants, though! Isn't it amazing? You can actually put plants inside of you, and you will live longer. You can't do that with anything else! Rocks, nope. Wood, nope! Gasoline, you're out of your mind! Metal, plastic, pesticides--hmmmm, sounds like a grim lunchtime salad to me.

PLASTIC: now this is the stuff we should all be made of (according to some). I finally figured out what this stands for. Planned Linear Atrophy Systematically Turned Into Cash. Not your cash, baby, but the cash of giants. Giant coporate executives and their families living in guarded neighborhoods. It's sad too, that these folks live the most plastic lives of all. Their tended gardens might as well be made of plastic itself. These people are so far away from nature that it might as well not exist! They are certainly doing there best to remove all nature from the planet. My neighbor has tried this on his own lawn. What used to be green ivy and flowering bushes has been razed, covered with black sheet plastic, and then with white gravel. Months later, as a few strands of grass crawl from my yard into his, he seems to have poisoned my grass and my spring flowers as well. The guy's sick and deluded.

In wilderness is the preservation of the world. In greed is it's destruction.

Look at the crap the media is pouring on us about Theodore, the Unabomber. Day after day of detective story media-bites, egging us on in our lynching of this guy. Sure he may have killed some people. I read an article in a recent Environmental Defense Fund newsletter about Tibet's Dalai Lama speaking out against destruction of forests around the world. He quoted another great spiritual leader from Tibet's past as saying "One who cuts down a tree commits a thousand murders." This rings clear like a bell. The word for a tree, only four letters long. Seems simple? But the word cuts it off from the reality of a tree. The tree stands in an ecosystem, a very complex intertwining of lives. Birds, insects, other animals, other plants, all benefit from a tree. But the tree is part of a system, and the tree itself depends on this system. The tree is so obviously intertwined with the air--like a river in a landscape, it is a river of sap. Our lungs are like trees in our bodies, rivers of air. This word, 'tree', seems to have cut off the context of the tree as a vital organ in a larger organism. A mathematician friend of mine says that it would take an infinite number of words to fully describe a thing, because a thing is never by itself, but always in context of total reality. This reality is always shifting, transforming, never static. You can't describe a tree fully without describing it's relationships to other things, other beings.

So the timber companies that are removing the lungs of the earth are like malicious 'doctors'.

(Of course, analogies always fall apart because they describe only a few aspects of a system. One must simply see things as they really are. The truth is a complex system, and words are a sketchy memory of it.)

Scraping away like disease bacteria in a sick animal, humans insinuate themselves into every surface and crevice of the earth. Or in other words, the human consumption machine roars across the surface of the earth like a lawnmower on a verdant lawn.

Fragmented thought patterns will be our downfall. The surface of our psyche is crumpled like a plastic bag, quivering in electric street lights, blown by the wind of mechanical beetles cruising asphalt scars. How many remember the ancient masters ideas, like perfect ripples on a great pond in silent morning mist.

Two short poems. (One shorter, one longer.)


Those that work late are trying to find the answers.
Those that go home already know.

Trying to find the answers.
Already know.

Find the answers.

Know.

Answers.




***




Dried testes.

A pubic in the fruit.

Dried fruit.

Pubic testes.

Fruit.

Testes.

Fruit.

Juicy.

Fruit.

Juicy.

Juicy fruit.

Fruity juice.

Fruity.

Juice.

Fruity.

Juicy.

Fruit .

Juice .

Fruit . . .

Juice . . .

Everything is part of one note, a single complex vibration.