**for those of you unpatriotic types who continue to criticize our government for offering a helping hand to the corporations who are suffering from our reckless spending and housing needs, i hope this sets ya’ll straight.
fannie mae cares! god bless america, and god bless fannie mae!

Fannie Mae forgives loan for woman who shot herself

(CNN) — Fannie Mae said it will set aside the loan of a woman who shot herself as sheriff’s deputies tried to evict her from her foreclosed home.
Fannie Mae foreclosed on the Akron, Ohio, home of Addie Polk, 90, after acquiring the mortgage in 2007.

Fannie Mae foreclosed on the Akron, Ohio, home of Addie Polk, 90, after acquiring the mortgage in 2007.

Addie Polk, 90, of Akron, Ohio, became a symbol of the nation’s home mortgage crisis when she was hospitalized after shooting herself at least twice in the upper body Wednesday afternoon.

On Friday, Fannie Mae spokesman Brian Faith said the mortgage association had decided to halt action against Polk and sign the property “outright” to her.

“We’re going to forgive whatever outstanding balance she had on the loan and give her the house,” Faith said. “Given the circumstances, we think it’s appropriate.”

Residents of Akron have rallied behind Polk, who is being treated at Akron General Medical Center. She was listed in critical condition Friday afternoon, according to Akron City Council President Marco Sommerville.

U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, mentioned Polk on the House floor Friday during debate over the latest economic rescue proposal.

“This bill does nothing for the Addie Polks of the world,” Kucinich said after telling her story. “This bill fails to address the fact that millions of homeowners are facing foreclosure, are facing the loss of their home. This bill will take care of Wall Street, and the market may go up for a few days, but democracy is going downhill.”

Neighbor Robert Dillon, 62, used a ladder to enter a second-story bathroom window of Polk’s home after he and the deputies heard loud noises inside, Dillon said.

“I was calling her name as I went in, and she wasn’t responding,” he said.

He found her lying on a bed, and he could see she was breathing. He also noticed a long-barreled handgun on the bed, but thought she just had it there for protection. He touched her on the shoulder.

“Then she kind of moved toward me a little and I saw that blood, and I said, ‘Oh, no. Miss Polk musta done shot herself,’ ” Dillon said.

He hurried downstairs and let the deputies in. He said they told him they found Polk’s car keys, pocketbook and life insurance policy laid out neatly where they could be found, suggesting that she intended to kill herself.

“There’s a lot of people like Miss Polk right now. That’s the sad thing about it,” said Sommerville, who had met Polk before and rushed to the scene when contacted by police. “They might not be as old as her, some could be as old as her. This is just a major problem.” Video Watch Polk’s neighbor describe what he saw »

In 2004, Polk took out a 30-year, 6.375 percent mortgage for $45,620 with a Countrywide Home Loan office in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. The same day, she also took out an $11,380 line of credit.

Over the next couple of years, Polk missed payments on the 101-year-old home that she and her late husband purchased in 1970. In 2007, Fannie Mae assumed the mortgage and later filed for foreclosure.

Deputies had tried to serve Polk’s eviction notice more than 30 times before Wednesday’s incident, Sommerville said. She never came to the door, but the notes the deputies left would always disappear, so they knew she was inside and ambulatory, he said.

The city is creating programs to help people keep their homes, Sommerville said. “But what do you do when there’s just so many people out there and the economy is in the shape that it’s in?”

Many businesses and individuals have called since Wednesday offering to help Polk, Sommerville said.

“We’re going to do an evaluation to see what’s best for her,” he said. “If she’s strong enough and can go home, I think we should work with her to where she goes back home. If not, we need to find another place for her to live where she won’t have to worry about this ever again.”

For his part, Dillon hopes his neighbor of 38 years can return to her home.

“She loves that house,” he said. “I hope they can get her back in. That would make me feel better because I don’t know what they’re going to put in there once she leaves.”

He said the neighborhood is declining because so many people have lost their homes.

“There’s a lot of vacant houses around here. … Now I’m going to have a house on my left and a house on my right, vacant,” he said. “That don’t make me feel good, because we were good neighbors, we trusted each other, and we looked out for each other.

“This neighborhood is shot, to me, from what it used to be,” he added.

“When I moved here, if it were like it is now, I would have never moved here. But it was a nice neighborhood. …

“I’ll just tough it out. I’m too old to start thinking about buying another house.”
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Sommerville said that by the time people call for help with an impending foreclosure, it’s usually too late.

“I’m glad it’s not too late for Miss Polk, because she could have taken her life,” Sommerville said. “Miss Polk will probably end up on her feet. But I’m not sure if anybody else will.”

CNN’s Jim Kavanagh, Brad Lendon and Mallory Simon contributed to this report.

**** i fully support the extradition of the following list of smut from the fragile minds of our youth, with the single exception of aristophanes, who was in fact born nearly 500 years before christ.
-r

(Saw this on Joy Harjo’s Blog and decided to forward)

The following is a list of books that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin tried to get banned when she
was mayor of Wasilla.

This information is taken from the official minutes of the Wasilla
Library Board. When the librarian refused, then-Mayor Palin tried to get her fired.

As you will note, the list contains works by, among many others, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and
Stephen King. It also includes the Harry Potter books and Webster’s dictionary.

It speaks to
the underlying truths of Governor Palin’s political philosophy, which may or may not be that of
the Republican party.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K.

Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K.

Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K.

Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K.

Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya AngelouImpressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H.

Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women’s Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D.

Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil’s Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C.

Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William ShakespeareThe New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and
Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S.

by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won’t by Judy Blume
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster Editorial Staff
Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth

after a week of dragging 50 lbs of everything i own back and forth across portland, cheap tacos and cheaper whiskey, sleeping in parks and parking lots, nearly biting through my tongue in the face of a manipulative employer, stringing me along for mere pocket change, and all for the single chance to extinguish a heartbreak that i will never allow myself to feel again..

the train back to california is sold out and the coffee is mysteriously weak. i take inventory of a crushed soul and a shrinking wad of cash. how many more days can i afford to lay in the damp grass waiting for you to sort out your emotions? 2? 3? pity penetrates the pores of the city sidewalk, and it’s most authentic, and more comforting than i’ve ever allowed it to be.

i pay nothing for the train to the airport. trains are the ultimate vessel of false hopes. you may tax the cruel and the privileged. just ask the old lady from seattle who’s purse was stolen yesterday on her flight into town, and is now forced to ride the max back and forth from downtown to the airport, where she sleeps in the baggage claim, and is scared and hungry and exhausted. she’s not paying the fare either.

perhaps it is uncommon for someone to purchase an airline ticket for the next departing flight with cash, perhaps its the tears welling up in my skull, perhaps zenobia at the ticket counter is a prophet of peace and love, providing me with just enough compassion and courage to walk through the gate. i shall send her a card.

i recognize my bag coming down the carousel by the side compartment, shredded from being overstuffed and dragged back and forth along stark street. i can see odd papers and a single sock fighting its way out. i grasp the handle and haul it off the belt in one swift move. something hard and plastic falls from its gaping wound and hits the marble floor with a clank. i stare at the ground in disbelief. surely, it only my deodorant, or my toothbrush holder, surely it’s not a 9 inch black vibrator laying at my feet. without hesitation, i use the soul of my shoe to roll it under the baggage carousel. out of site, out of mind. but as i begin to book it for the door, it rolls back out, following me like a stray puppy. i keep walking, eyes on the door, past the elderly couple standing 3 feet behind me.

“son.., son! you dropped something. something fell out of your bag!”

a optimistic existentialist might suggest that such an event has set the course for confronting the humility of coming home with my tail between my legs and my cock rolling across the airport floor. in my broken state, it’s really the only thing that i can laugh at. but for humility’s sake, i’ll go ahead and hit the publish button.

G C G
i tried to sketch your whisky reflections
D
but the shapes and the lines came out wrong
Em C G
i sailed your portrait on the last wind out of town
D G
and i’ve only time to sketch you this song

the reason i came is the reason i’m leaving
it’s the reason for everything i do
you wont let me in, and you wont let me quit you
there’s no other reason like you

CHORUS
Em C G
dream of the birds that fly so free
D
dream of the rivers that roll towards the sea
Em C G
breathe in the stars and dream well of me
D G
rock-a-bye baby, bye bye

sleep in the tall grass ‘neath berries so bitter
sleep in a bar bathroom stall
sleep in my arms through the storm that never passes
cause tomorrow never happened at all

CHORUS

INSTRUMENTAL

you say that this world never showed you no mercy
you say there’s more than one kind of love
i hope for your sake and for those who surround you
you find all the beauty you dream of

CHORUS X2

last nite, i found myself in a state of panic. no money, no food, no job, and worst of all, no cigarettes. the unknown became overwhelmingly daunting. over the past couple years, i’ve mastered the ability to involuntarily transcend into a euphoric haze during such events. the aforementioned was accompanied by a vision. i closed my eyes, and saw a great coral cathedral, at least 50 stories tall, carved into the side of a mountain. it almost looked like 10,000 years of pale candlewax drippings. the sky whooshed about in colors so vibrant, i could feel them through my pours.  at one point, this moving picture became so intense, i felt as though i was either about to have an orgasm, or perish from a beauty stroke. i was forced to abandon it.

anyway, im not sure if this is connected, but i found this article today. and i feel better regardless.

Shamanism, Anarchy, and the End of the World

Dave Hanson

This article originally appeared in Fifth Estate.

After twenty years of teaching shamanic practices to small groups in several circles in Washington and California, I found the results to be mixed. In the groups in which I participated, there were many moving visionary experiences, but the flabby jargon of the human potential movement left important messages missed amid incessant psychobabble.

Contemporary shamanism, which grew out of the human potential movement of the Big Sur-based Esalen Institute, rapidly became subsumed into the New Age culture as the latest fad/religion. In two or three decades, aided by workshop leaders, it has become lost into the pop culture. While the permutations were endless, pervasive alienation remained a constant. As always, money, sex, and power ruled.

That shamanism has been compromised is not to say that altered states and working in trance cannot offer us a personal healing direction. I know from experience that lives can be changed through shamanic work. A deep trance, engendered in a variety of ways and entered with intention, can be transforming.

The value of shamanism as taught in the contemporary culture may be that it provides some level of psychotherapy, some level of energetic balance, some palliative response to stress along with feelings of community and slightly less alienation. In some cases, shamanic practice may provide actual healing of disease or easing of struggles with death.

My own struggle with shamanism centered on skepticism and the understanding that we can fool ourselves into believing almost anything. My training was in agriculture and science. I was not one to accept much on faith. I continued to bounce between shamanic visions as projections of the psyche and as visitations from a separate spiritual world.

By the time I stopped teaching a few years ago, I had come to understand that the distinction probably didn’t matter. My work and studies since have convinced me that contemporary religious and psychological shamanism represent part of a catastrophic human error which took place at the beginning of history, and that contrary to the notion that it has been around for tens of thousands of years, indigenous shamanism is more likely a transitional phase between the consciousness of hunter gatherers and the alienation of contemporary state religions.

Lives as numb wage slaves

Faith healing comes in many costumes, and shamanism is one of them. We can wear skins or robes. We can beat drums or play pipe organs, burn sage or incense, sing to the element of water, or submerge ourselves in the river. Both the “laying on” of hands and sleight of hand can be efficacious. We can sing to our bear or sing to Jesus, whirl like a dervish, whip ourselves until we bleed, play with rattlesnakes, dance in the sun for four days, or starve ourselves in caves. Take your pick. Each can make less painful our lives as numb wage slaves.

If we can ignore that tiny voice crying for real freedom and calling us back to the circle, our economic and religious subservience will help us pretend to be something more than the imprisoned domestic animals we are.

A large problem remains. Shamanism, or any of the other religious choices as currently practiced, will not turn us from the global abyss. To believe shamanism and religion can bring about some form of planetary healing is much like the notion that more technology will solve our environmental problems. Transference, sexual abuse, misinterpretation of serious pathologies, and lack of ethics, all typical of the human potential movement, combine to further alienate and separate.

Benign attempts at healing by unskilled and uninformed devotees, while perhaps not causing serious harm, can impede solid, long-term movement toward better health. To put it plainly, shamanism draws some seriously crazy folks, and many leaders are happy to look the other way as long as the fees are paid.

Contemporary shamanism teaches vertical, hierarchical religion

For those of us arrogant enough to assume we have mastered this reality enough to explore another, our shamanic practice should pull us toward radical anarchistic action. We’ve been hearing from, and paying huge workshop fees to shamanic leaders for decades about “connecting to spirit,” but their message sidesteps industrial capitalism, the religions to which it is connected, and open, public, radical changes flowing from our spiritual work. The reason for this omission is clear. Contemporary shamanism teaches vertical, hierarchical religion. The focus is on what Mircea Eliade, in Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, described as the “journey,” rather than presence in this biological world.

Agriculture, religion and government have not brought us a better life. The price we have paid for these abstractions is far too high. The amusing charm of a small transistor radio hanging from a tree in an upper Amazon village belies the toxicity of the poisonous little gadget.

Writings of Morris Berman, Paul Shepard, Joel Kovel, Stanley Diamond, John Zerzan, David Watson, Derrick Jensen, Lewis Mumford, and others have led me to conclude that we should not be attaching religious symbolism and meaning to shamanic experience, but instead should seek a practice which takes us to the awareness that preceded the alienating beginning of agriculture and religion.

We should attempt a return to what Berman calls paradox, free of time and language. Even brief experiences of integration might help us build decentralized communities centered on our insight.

Return to “primitive wisdom”

An intentional use of altered states can obliterate the duality that has led to the domination and destruction of our world, an experience of unity, what Sigmund Freud called the regressive “oceanic experience,” what Jung called a progressive return to “primitive wisdom,” and what Morris Berman, in Wandering God, termed the “paradox” of hunter-gatherer consciousness, “a diffuse or peripheral awareness,” and in his earlier book The Re-enchantment of the World, called “participatory consciousness” in which “the sacred, such as it is, simply is the world.”

Unfortunately, shamanic practice as taught imbeds us in pathological constructs. Linear, vertical thinking has brought us to disaster. If we leave religion behind, trance practice can lead us to an egalitarian culture of biological integration. We must reject the religious rituals and notions of upper and lower worlds. We must cease our efforts to ascend and return to living completely here, in ourselves, on this earth, as integrated beings.

The dominant power structures under which we exist are only too happy to have us live in the illusory and impotent condition of duality, and most humans will sit and do nothing during this time of inexorable unraveling. Only a few will work to recover our history as integrated, wild beings.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors are still close. Wiser and healthier than we, they are calling us back from a technological and religious cliff. Small, egalitarian, tribal circles of paradox can return us to the awareness of our ancestors of 10,000 years ago, before they unwittingly brought us religion and planted the seeds of our destruction.

We can reject the linear, oppressive, hierarchical, and alienating forms of religions that have swept our world and begin to live in an archaic, anarchistic, sustained way that begins to heal our planetary home.

We must be done with leaders

We need not travel to other realms. We must learn to step through a barrier and arrive here. Trance brings us home. School is in the garden, the forest, the prairies, the rivers. The teaching we need will not come from priests, gurus, shamans, or scientists. Our circles must be egalitarian and built on a solid mistrust of all power.

We must be done with leaders and their overwhelming lusts for money, sex, and power, impulses so integral to our culture they routinely go unnoticed. We must find ways to explore our way home without the intervention of individuals and organizations that propose equality on the surface but simply duplicate the power and alienation they’ve learned in the academic and capitalistic culture.

A Taoist nun once said, “There is no practice.” I think she was right, for those who have already merged with the living world around them. For the rest of us, if we sing, dance, eat our plant helpers, and there are spirits who care enough to help us return, they will. If we don’t impose our notions of sacred, goodness, power, and importance on our visions, ourselves, and the other beings we encounter, we may be able finally to rest.

The rapture is not a naked ascent into heaven. It is a naked return through a diaphanous membrane to our wild, natural, biological home.

Image by Monsiuer Haze, courtesy of Creative Commons license.

why do the ones who feel the most detached from their personal destiny, the ones who feel they have the least control of their own lives, always compensate by relentlessly demanding control of someone else’s?

is the delicate balance between striving for something greater than themselves, and completely surrendering to the forces far too daunting? are we a nation of sociopaths? is it perhaps an epidemic?

i’m beginning to understand the iron skin of the great wanderers and why they wear their gun outside their pants. there is no proper explanation to satisfy the content. there is only the time between a skipped heartbeat. there is only love.

i just watched my guitar disappear down the street in the back of a pick-up. it may have been a bold move for my empty morning stomach, but i know that music cannot be possessed, it can only be shared. i think i might sell my shoes by the end of the day.

Mutiny of the Soul
Charles Eisenstein

Depression, anxiety, and fatigue are an essential part of a process of metamorphosis that is unfolding on the planet today, and highly significant for the light they shed on the transition from an old world to a new.

When a growing fatigue or depression becomes serious, and we get a diagnosis of Epstein-Barr or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or hypothyroid or low serotonin, we typically feel relief and alarm. Alarm: something is wrong with me. Relief: at least I know I’m not imagining things; now that I have a diagnosis, I can be cured, and life can go back to normal. But of course, a cure for these conditions is elusive.

The notion of a cure starts with the question, “What has gone wrong?” But there is another, radically different way of seeing fatigue and depression that starts by asking, “What is the body, in its perfect wisdom, responding to?” When would it be the wisest choice for someone to be unable to summon the energy to fully participate in life?

The answer is staring us in the face. When our soul-body is saying No to life, through fatigue or depression, the first thing to ask is, “Is life as I am living it the right life for me right now?” When the soul-body is saying No to participation in the world, the first thing to ask is, “Does the world as it is presented me merit my full participation?”

What if there is something so fundamentally wrong with the world, the lives, and the way of being offered us, that withdrawal is the only sane response? Withdrawal, followed by a reentry into a world, a life, and a way of being wholly different from the one left behind?

The unspoken goal of modern life seems to be to live as long and as comfortably as possible, to minimize risk and to maximize security. We see this priority in the educational system, which tries to train us to be “competitive” so that we can “make a living”. We see it in the medical system, where the goal of prolonging life trumps any consideration of whether, sometimes, the time has come to die. We see it in our economic system, which assumes that all people are motivated by “rational self-interest”, defined in terms of money, associated with security and survival. (And have you ever thought about the phrase “the cost of living”?) We are supposed to be practical, not idealistic; we are supposed to put work before play. Ask someone why she stays in a job she hates, and as often as not the answer is, “For the health insurance.” In other words, we stay in jobs that leave us feeling dead in order to gain the assurance of staying alive. When we choose health insurance over passion, we are choosing survival over life.

On a deep level, which I call the soul level, we want none of that. We recognize that we are here on earth to enact a sacred purpose, and that most of the jobs on offer are beneath our dignity as human beings. But we might be too afraid to leave our jobs, our planned-out lives, our health insurance, or whatever other security and comfort we have received in exchange for our divine gifts. Deep down, we recognize this security and comfort as slaves’ wages, and we yearn to be free.

So, the soul rebels. Afraid to make the conscious choice to step away from a slave’s life, we make the choice unconsciously instead. We can no longer muster the energy to go through the motions. We enact this withdrawal from life through a variety of means. We might summon the Epstein-Barr virus into our bodies, or mononucleosis, or some other vector of chronic fatigue. We might shut down our thyroid or adrenal glands. We might shut down our production of serotonin in the brain. Other people take a different route, incinerating the excess life energy in the fires of addiction. Either way, we are in some way refusing to participate. We are shying away from ignoble complicity in a world gone wrong. We are refusing to contribute our divine gifts to the aggrandizement of that world.

That is why the conventional approach of fixing the problem so that we can return to normal life will not work. It might work temporarily, but the body will find other ways to resist. Raise serotonin levels with SSRIs, and the brain will prune some receptor sites, thinking in its wisdom, “Hey, I’m not supposed to feel good about the life I am living right now.” In the end, there is always suicide, a common endpoint of the pharmaceutical regimes that seek to make us happy with something inimical to our very purpose and being. You can only force yourself to abide in wrongness so long. When the soul’s rebellion is suppressed too long, it can explode outward in bloody revolution. Significantly, all of the school shootings in the last decade have involved people on anti-depression medication. All of them! For a jaw-dropping glimpse of the results of the pharmaceutical regime of control, scroll down this compilation of suicide/homicide cases involving SSRIs. I am not using “jaw-dropping” as a figure of speech. My jaw literally dropped open.

Back in the 1970s, dissidents in the Soviet Union were often hospitalized in mental institutions and given drugs similar to the ones used to treat depression today. The reasoning was that you had to be insane to be unhappy in the Socialist Workers’ Utopia. When the people treating depression receive status and prestige from the very system that their patients are unhappy with, they are unlikely to affirm the basic validity of the patient’s withdrawal from life. “The system has to be sound — after all, it validates my professional status — therefore the problem must be with you.”

Unfortunately, “holistic” approaches are no different, as long as they deny the wisdom of the body’s rebellion. When they do seem to work, usually that is because they coincide with some other shift. When someone goes out and gets help, or makes a radical switch of modalities, it works as a ritual communication to the unconscious mind of a genuine life change. Rituals have the power to make conscious decisions real to the unconscious. They can be part of taking back one’s power.

I have met countless people of great compassion and sensitivity, people who would describe themselves as “conscious” or “spiritual”, who have battled with CFS, depression, thyroid deficiency, and so on. These are people who have come to a transition point in their lives where they become physically incapable of living the old life in the old world. That is because, in fact, the world presented to us as normal and acceptable is anything but. It is a monstrosity. Ours is a planet in pain. If you need me to convince you of that, if you are unaware of the destruction of forests, oceans, wetlands, cultures, soil, health, beauty, dignity, and spirit that underlies the System we live in, then I have nothing to say to you. I only am speaking to you if you do believe that there is something deeply wrong with the way we are living on this planet.

A related syndrome comprises various “attention deficit” and anxiety “disorders” (forgive me, I cannot write down these words without the ironic quotation marks) which reflect an unconscious knowledge that something is wrong around here. Anxiety, like all emotions, has a proper function. Suppose you left a pot on the stove and you know you forgot something, you just can’t remember what. You cannot rest at ease. Something is bothering you, something is wrong. Subliminally you smell smoke. You obsess: did I leave the water running? Did I forget to pay the mortgage? The anxiety keeps you awake and alert; it doesn’t let you rest; it keeps your mind churning, worrying. This is good. This is what saves your life. Eventually you realize — the house is on fire! — and anxiety turns into panic, and action.

So if you suffer from anxiety, maybe you don’t have a “disorder” at all — maybe the house is on fire. Anxiety is simply the emotion corresponding to “Something is dangerously wrong and I don’t know what it is.” That is only a disorder if there is in fact nothing dangerously wrong. “Nothing is wrong, just you” is the message that any therapy gives when it tries to fix you. I disagree with that message. The problem is not with you. You have very good reason to be anxious. Anxiety keeps part of your attention away from your tasks of polishing the silverware as the house burns down, of playing the violin as the Titanic sinks. Unfortunately, the wrongness you are tapping into might be beyond the cognizance of the psychiatrists who treat you, who then conclude that the problem must be your brain.

Similarly, Attention Deficit Disorder, ADHD, and my favorite, Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) are only disorders if we believe that the things presented for our attention are worth paying attention to. We cannot admit, without calling into question the whole edifice of our school system, that it may be completely healthy for a ten-year-old boy to not sit still for six hours in a classroom learning about long division and Vasco de Gama. Perhaps the current generation of children, that some call the Indigos, simply have a lower tolerance for school’s agenda of conformity, obedience, external motivation, right-and-wrong answers, the quantification of performance, rules and bells, report cards and grades and your permanent record. So we try to enforce their attention with stimulants, and subdue their heroic intuitive rebellion against the spirit-wrecking machine.

As I write about the “wrongness” against which we all rebel, I can hear some readers asking, “What about the metaphysical principle that it’s ‘all good’?” Just relax, I am told, nothing is wrong, all is part of the divine plan. You only perceive it as wrong because of your limited human perspective. All of this is only here for our own development. War: it gives people wonderful opportunities to make heroic choices and burn off bad karma. Life is wonderful, Charles, why do you have to make it wrong?

I am sorry, but usually such reasoning is just a sop to the conscience. If it is all good, then that is only because we perceive and experience it as terribly wrong. The perception of iniquity moves us to right it.

Nonetheless, it would be ignorant and fruitless to pass judgment upon those who do not see anything wrong, who, oblivious to the facts of destruction, think everything is basically fine. There is a natural awakening process, in which first we proceed full speed ahead participating in the world, believing in it, seeking to contribute to the Ascent of Humanity. Eventually, we encounter something that is undeniably wrong, perhaps a flagrant injustice or a serious health problem or a tragedy near at hand. Our first response is to think this is an isolated problem, remediable with some effort, within a system that is basically sound. But when we try to fix it, we discover deeper and deeper levels of wrongness. The rot spreads; we see that no injustice, no horror can stand in isolation. We see that the disappeared dissidents in South America, the child laborers in Pakistan, the clearcut forests of the Amazon, are all intimately linked together in a grotesque tapestry that includes every aspect of modern life. We realize that the problems are too big to fix. We are called to live in an entirely different way, starting with our most fundamental values and priorities.

All of us go through this process, repeatedly, in various realms of our lives; all parts of the process are right and necessary. The phase of full participation is a growth phase in which we develop gifts that will be applied very differently later. The phase of trying to fix, to endure, to soldier on with a life that isn’t working is a maturation phase that develops qualities of patience and determination and strength. The phase of discovering the all-encompassing nature of the problem is usually a phase of despair, but it need not be. Properly, it is a phase of rest, of stillness, of withdrawal, of preparation for a push. The push is a birth-push. Crises in our lives converge and propel us into a new life, a new being that we hardly imagine could exist, except that we’d heard rumors of it, echoes, and maybe even caught a glimpse of it here and there, been granted through grace a brief preview.

If you are in the midst of this process, you need not suffer if you cooperate with it. I can offer you two things. First is self-trust. Trust your own urge to withdraw even when a million messages are telling you, “The world is fine, what’s wrong with you? Get with the program.” Trust your innate belief that you are here on earth for something magnificent, even when a thousand disappointments have told you you are ordinary. Trust your idealism, buried in your eternal child’s heart, that says that a far more beautiful world than this is possible. Trust your impatience that says “good enough” is not good enough. Do not label your noble refusal to participate as laziness and do not medicalize it as an illness. Your heroic body has merely made a few sacrifices to serve your growth.

The second thing I can offer you is a map. The journey I have described is not always linear, and you may find yourself from time to time revisiting earlier territory. When you find the right life, when you find the right expression of your gifts, you will receive an unmistakable signal. You will feel excited and alive. Many people have preceded you on this journey, and many more will follow in times to come. Because the old world is falling apart, and the crises that initiate the journey are converging upon us. Soon many people will follow the paths we have pioneered. Each journey is unique, but all share the same basic dynamics I have described. When you have passed through it, and understood the necessity and rightness of each of its phases, you will be prepared to midwife others through it as well. Your condition, all the years of it, has prepared you for this. It has prepared you to ease the passage of those who will follow. Everything you have gone through, every bit of the despair, has been necessary to forge you into a healer and a guide. The need is great. The time is coming soon.

Image by obo-bobolina, courtesy of Creative Commons license.

Utah Phillips - singer, songwriter, activist, raconteur and unionist

Aidin Vaziri, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

This article appeared on page B - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

a few days ago, i threw my back out for the very first time. and i wasnt even trying to blow myself. it involved an incredibly heroic feat with a patio table. but aside from the miserable and constant pain, and the pathetic helplessness, i was left to the mercy of my parents couch. where i was force fed an endless supply of mind-rotting television (two full episodes of american idol), and a small cattle farm’s worth of red meat.

today, i finally felt capable of moving about without a walker. though not really feeling up to it, mostly due to an aching stomach full of motrin and beef, i left the house and headed downtown.. in my hometown, where i am more a stranger than anywhere else i know. and just as i do in any town where i dont know anyone, i walk into the loudest, most crowded gay bar i can find.

it was karaoke night, and i was immediately assaulted with an off-key lionel ritchie ballad, absent of the slightest taste of irony. i got a beer and charged for the smoking patio. before i could sit down, i was joined by marc. a tall, lanky chap in his late 30’s. it wasnt so much his tapered, acid-washed jeans and brown leather jacket that stood out, but perhaps it was the entire right side of his face, swollen and bruised, nearly consuming his dilated pupil. i immediately smelled creep on his breath.

“are you gay?”, he asks, in that ever so familiar tweaker rasp.

“no, i come here for the music.”

“hey man, that’s awesome, i love lionel ritchie! i don’t really get the whole gay thing. i don’t fuck guys.. i mean, i will if i have to, you know what i mean? but i love gay guys, you know why? because they listen to me, man.”

this is where i’m inhaling my cigarette as hard and fast as i possibly can.

“did you see what happened to my face?”

“did somebody hit you?”

“somebody!?! more like 30 guys, dude. i was down at paradise beach today, and i see this girl, right? and she’s in her bikini and throwing back shots of jack.. so i go up to her, you know? and i’m just like rapping at her, it’s not like i was even gonna fuck her or anything. how the fuck was i suppose to know she was 14? so all the sudden, i’m surrounded by all these dudes who are all talking shit.. but what they don’t know is that i was in the marines for five fuckin years. so i take my shirt off and i’m like, “you wanna have this out? i’ll kill every single one of you motherfuckers.” cause thats what you got a do, you know? and thats what i did. and i won, too. god, i must sound like such a redneck right now. but you know sometimes that’s just what you gotta do, and you just get so angry.. (this is where marc starts foaming at the mouth) and you.. you just wanna rip out their fucking livers and grind them into the sand with all the blood and bile and shit..”

marc takes a pull off his beer. “i can’t believe i paid 4 dollars for this. thats why i keep a bottle in my scooter.”

i made my break. “hey man, you have a good night. be safe.”

“oh yeah, you too, hey, thanks for listening man. you’re fucking awesome. “

i walked straight out the front door and stood in the gutter pretending to text someone for about 5 minutes. then i went home. my first nite out in nearly two weeks lasted about 30 minutes, and i’ve never hated sacramento more. mostly because i’ve realized that i am the freak. and that marc is gonna find wherever i go. and i’ll probably listen to him.

rescue me, somebody.

i aint so good at small talk. i dont have small thoughts. my visions are grandiose, ridiculous. in fact, they are eating me alive.

i CHOOSE to compensate these lonely and overwhelming nightmares with simple pleasures. i do absolutely nothing for days on end, and you’re not invited. i’m a champion pacer, carving paths all across this beautiful country. today, i’ll walk in circles. tomorrow, the infinite figure eight. i enjoy long, fluid conversations with inanimate objects.  i adore the ocean, and find no time wasted by staring into the tide for days, waiting for the next great species to crawl out and conquer us all. art is the only language i dare to listen to. but i have little response for art that stands alone fingering it’s pussy because it feels good. unless, of course, someone is actually standing alone fingering their pussy. cause that would be kinda awesome. give me sacrifice. give me blood. let me know that i am feeling something that i will still feel tomorrow. make someone vomit on their shoes.

i’m sort of a nice person. despite the countless horrific massacres i’ve stood witness too, i believe people have good intentions, as selfish as they may seem. however, this non-reactionary, non-judgmental path i so desperately cling too often appears as a blank canvas, allowing the graffiti of all the sins in the world. but i believe in truth, in the most cosmic sense, and i think people falling on their face is funny, in the most vaudeville sense, and if my laughter strikes the wrong chord as i wait for the the next rainstorm to baptize me free, then find me guilty.

i love my dog, lush-green forests (and the critters that live inside of them), amateur boy porn, good coffee, my summer wardrobe, and friends that stay out of my shit.

oh, and i smoke too much.

cheers.

The Mike Wallace Interview
Aldous Huxley
5/18/58

Aldous Huxley, social critic and author of Brave New World, talks to Wallace about threats to freedom in the United States, overpopulation, bureaucracy, propaganda, drugs, advertising, and television.

there’s a place in hell for these freaks..

(i swear, it’s not me)

oh well, at least she appeared to enjoy herself

charlton heston was a real son-of-a-bitch, and probably one of the finest comedic actors of all time. having such an extraordinary presence in hollywood, with side-splitters like “the ten commandments” and “ben hur”, it often became difficult to differentiate the man from his super-human abilities, on screen and off. at many times, even impossible to attribute him with any mortal qualities at all. a compassionate, conservative, god-fearing master of the soliloquy, or a musket-toting, militia-oriented, venom spitting gun freak serpent? one thing is most certain; he was most definitely a little bit queer.

in celebration of mr. heston’s epic career, i’ve decided not to indulge in “planet of the apes”.. again, but rather, revisit his riveting and inspirational documentation of the holy word in:

i first discovered most of this vhs box set in the dollar bin at my old job. and what a goldmine it is. i can’t possibly begin to remember how many days and nights i sat in that pink living room in echo park, bong in hand, captivated by the scripture. with no costume change, or angle cut, heston glides from one character into the next, sometimes playing christ and all 12 disciples at once, his enunciation and breath control slice through the dry jeruselum air, often from the exact locations of where these historical events probably never took place.

i would like to imagine that mr. heston is giving his performance of a lifetime at this very moment. and hopefully, for his sake, st. peter is somewhat moved.