Stand on Zanzibar meets Childhood's End

My days are long and I’m free range. Only so much happens inside the coop. In the coop time presses down on the captive flock, making them wider and, I suppose, juicier for the palate of other coop dwellers higher on the food chain. But all coops have some things in common and their share of pecking deaths. The more they press together, the tighter the insanity and the more combustive the explosions against the resistance of the mass.

In rat experiments, when rats are confined in a small space, the larger male rats will lose all interest in the females and begin to rape the younger males. Life-forms in captivity exhibit common pathologies that are mirrored in prison life and congested cities. Weird tics become commonplace and people talk to themselves. If you can’t go out and you get pushed in, alcohol and sundry open a larger landscape by altering the headroom of the earphones. Of course this is just a way of giving a different separation to the sound. It’s an appearance; an impression. It isn’t real. It gets less real as different unrealities are compared.

When insanity becomes the norm interesting rules of behavior emerge. Coping devices come into play to order irrational behavior along predictable lines. The cops can’t pull you over in your living room. If you need to color your world because of the chiaroscuro effect, that’s understandable. If it’s illegal but ubiquitous, then further adjustments are made to demarcate when and how you allow the unallowable. If the pressure to kill for space becomes too great it makes sense to do the killing somewhere else. The resulting pressure decrease is then felt at a distance from the blood-spattered walls of the proxy killing fields.

Pipelines of hatred and love are no different than oil and gas pipelines. Breathing allowances have to be made and the technology is formed to compensate for the vagaries of the product. The sex pipeline is the big one. The boiler room is impressive and the dials remind one of the cockpit of a 747. As the natural flow of the sex oil is routed through increasingly complex ways the interpretation of the following behaviors becomes equally complex. New rationalizations are required for things that people do; things that were once considered strange, even pathological, have to be discussed and described and made reasonable. Somewhere between Jerry Springer and the soccer-mom Wicca-weekends lies the holiday table set with the bounty of the land.

As the rules become increasingly complex the reactions from the overview multiply. The message on the t-shirt has to pass through filters. The conversation has to ride on rails. The eye contact must steady at neutral or go to pre-fab. While the controls on the personal tighten, the controls on the broadcasts become more lax. You can’t say what you hear. You can’t behave as you observe. Television is one thing, real life is another. So… the objective mind becomes a camouflaged, hunted beast and the subjective mind becomes a deranged wolverine.

Everything gets mirrored so, if you can’t see it, you’re not watching. Well, it’s not surprising when your entire makeup becomes defensive that you would lose objectivity; and then there’s all the makeup too. And you are told that what you see is not what you see. You are told what you hear is not what you hear and what you think is not what you think. You are even told you are not you. The outsider is way outside. As the press for individuality meets the resistance of enforced conformity, terrorism comes after the pipelines of human expression. It’s not terrorism actually; it’s the self looking for a way out. The individual route is perilous indeed. So group individuality takes over. Individual groups now compete where individuals once did. The pack mentality rises. Scientology Black is playing Raelian Red on ESP this Sunday. The tattooed biker moms merge with the pierced death rockers in detailed legal documents filed in the courts. A new lobby is born and the power of collected masses against collected masses wearing team colors fills the stands. A strange glossolalia of the new Pentecost is forming a holographic Jesus in the air above the high tension lines. This Jesus wears shades. This Jesus pimp dances with the Whore of Babylon. When you’re drowning in the ocean inside yourself and you don’t want to die you’ve got to split in two to find a helping hand and maybe split again. Not everybody likes everybody here. Somebody has to die.

As each new weird replaces the old, an army of therapists sort out the minutiae and new allowances are made. The bottom line in every transition is the adaptation of market forces to how the cereal box is going to be designed; Brother Love’s anal lube for the backdoor kundalini facing in. As the lost is more lost the private intensity must mirror your face alone. Everything else is too strange and so the image must increasingly be the solitary intensity of your face upon itself.

In strange tropical landscapes. market forces have determined that regulated bacchanalias are pipelining requirements to off-set the cubicle pressure and the polyester rash. Mad power presses against mad power presses have dictated the need for whips and chains and the ugly definitions of your bad self at the hands of Domination Mom. As the instantaneous appearance of products on the shelf meets the transforming puberty of the generational edge the mall becomes the paper route and the baby-sitting gig as the currency of flesh is exchanged for the currency of product and youth is recaptured by old men with money. It’s okay but it’s against the law. It’s really okay if your selective group mass has merged with the enforcement-end group mass. No matter what, examples have to be made, just for the salacity of the headlines and market forces. Sooner or later, Stand on Zanzibar meets Childhood’s End.

And what is all of this? How important is this moment and its strange apparel? It’s a belch at one end and a fart at the other. It’s just a temporary digestive condition brought about by a wide diet and stress at work. The six pack didn’t help but a good nights sleep will; pretty colorful dreams though, not that you can remember them now. The system is self-regulating. It wants to come back to the center. Of course, the constant repetition of behavior is where chronic got its name… but even that gets regulated. Everything gets regulated. Little systems get big attitudes. It probably comes about because the little system thinks it’s a big system. It’s like the kid in 3rd grade who insisted he was Superman. And as long as he didn’t try to fly from the top of the house it would probably pass. Some times it doesn’t and Superman has to get clever when he grows up.

Looking into the wheels in the watch can be a fascinating exercise. Nobody sane wants to be a cog and yet they never make the association between what they see and where they are. It’s as if they don’t think they are really there even though they discuss the details of the process more than anything else with everyone else. Minniver Cheevy dances with Paris Hilton in The Overlook Hotel ballroom. You would have to be drunk wouldn’t you?

Ah well, there’s nothing wrong with longing to escape. The problem is more a matter of how and where. In the meantime, one machine stamps out the goods and, at the other end, the same machine reduces the product back to the original elements and then feeds it on to a conveyer belt that loops back to the beginning. The soundtrack changes along with the lights until there’s nothing but the whirring of the projector in a dark room somewhere in LA as The Son of Group Therapy meets It Came from Beneath the Sea of Recovery.

Visible and The Critical List: ♫ The Clicking Mandibles ♫
'The Clicking Mandibles' is track no. 4 of 8 on Visible and The Critical List's 1987 album
'La Vierge Sperme Danceur'
About this song (pops up)