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.

(thanks to j. chadwick for the title)

"In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined

On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind."

The Lotos-Eaters, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

As archetypal human dilemmas go, none captures the insistent insouciance of the crumbling western consumer dream quite like the lotus eaters in The Odyssey. At once aware of the world's cruelty but determined to fulfill mythological promises of paradise, Odysseus' men gathered in their war weary, fatuous circles to reaffirm their delusions, stoned to the rafters on the plant of bliss. There amongst the oblivious, they tried to assuage the cognitive dissonance grumbling from the memories of victories gained at the cost of so many dead. They whole heartedly embraced the lie by opening themselves unequivocally to whatever mental contagion would bring them peace. What harm is there, I hear myself repeating with them, to take a brief respite from work, weariness and the knowledge of inevitable death? I, too, have been raised to believe I deserve some happiness.

Hence I have run not walked from the culture of which I knew too much. The growing brown shirt movement and racial intolerance of Canada, the pro-war, anti-socialist, blame the poor, shoot the hippo, jingoism of recent memory has walked me quietly and quickly to the nearest exit. Yet, nowhere is lotus bliss more apparent than in the escapism of an ex-patriot community. On the one hand we are proud and self congratulatory for having perceived and rejected the evil doing of our homelands, only to demand a contradictory anti-intellectualism towards anything that would disrupt our pleasant dream. It isn't uncommon for people to misinterpret local law, that foreigners are not permitted political involvements, as justification for not discussing politics at all. As such, social, political, economical or ethical acumen can be read as deplorable and deportable dissention. Far beyond murder it is to point out the palm fronds crashing down amongst our idyll.

In the house across the way there is no activity. This is sufficient to confirm something is wrong. I have come to the street of big houses to tend the Voltaire-ian gardens of some fellow escapees and have become accustomed to the rhythm of this little pseudo suburban road. My neighbor moves and shakes, comes and goes, like the steady wash of waves on our seemingly happy beaches. But not this week.

The facts are non-existent. There is no newspaper and no form of communication but gossip. All that seems true is that he was taken from his restaurant by men with guns.

When the police assaulted the zocalo in Oaxaca during the last teacher's strike they apparently captured some 500 people who they then deported to the state of Nayarit in a recapitulation of Guantanamo Bay. Some of those people were just unlucky enough to have chosen that particular moment to go shopping for eggs. They were tortured of course. I only know this because one of the locals is a psychologist who was involved in post traumatic stress treatment for the detainees. Most refused the treatment because they had already seen psychologists in their Nayarit prison and had been made aware of the intricacies of "treatment" by their captors. They were encouraged, in the midst of what must have been one of the most horrific moments of their lives, to see their discontent as a skewed perspective, to see their grief as the product of their improprieties.

For the new president, Felipe Calderon, the biggest problem Mexico faces at this moment is the transportation of drugs up the coast. Of course, only drug users would also be dissenters in the beautiful dream that is green and pleasant Mexico. That the teachers of Oaxaca and the APPO are dissenters, trouble makers, surrenders them to the inquisition of Calderon's anti-drug army. That Calderon's anti-drug army may be involved in the drug trade is an irony that has certainly fried the sensibilities of the Mexican public.

Contrarily, for too many of the gringos the protests in Oaxaca are about better wages and an inexplicable, culturally endemic unrest. One can practically hear John Wayne's voice pronouncing with no hint of wavering self-doubt that the natives are restless, while completely ignoring just why that might be. The facts are non-existent. There is no newspaper and no form of communication but gossip. All that seems true is that mangos fall from the trees like manna from heaven.

We all, surely, have anxieties about how the world could be and have all had our anxieties lured into dreary congeniality by our fear. Uncertainty and the reluctance to speak about what is not sure, what disrupts, has quieted our cynicism, defensiveness and critical judgment. But such "positive" thinking, trying to pass off our muzzles for some kind of zen, doesn't change the world. It just shuts out what is inconvenient about it. And in the confusion criminals of every kind make off with whomsoever they wish as we nod our heads in passive accord.

Despite the fragmentary appearance of the community's reaction to the kidnapping, there is an unsettling theme running through our conversations. I noticed a distinct relief of tension in myself when I was told the victim was involved in questionable business practices. The event was removed from the paranoic dread of random violence and delivered into the realm of justice, cause and effect, good and evil, god. Such specific comings and goings surely have nothing to do with us general rabble. I have rejected the event's suggestion of wholesale human malevolence for the comfort provided by non-involvement.

Yet, I keep thinking of the detainees in Nayarit being told that their dis-ease, their sins against the state, had incarcerated them. I think of a boss who tried to have the only aware person in the department fired for having too much initiative, I think of a co-worker who, after the fact, spoke shockingly well of a job she had hated and with bubbly enthusiasm reminded me that life was all about enjoyment. I think of Odysseus' men rejecting stark life completely for peaceful somnambulism. And I surely agree that life cannot be unwaveringly about fear and pain. And yet it is, in as much as it is about coming to terms with perennial suffering. We have no patience for the process. We hope that there is somehow a quick resolution to our strife and we consume the answers like cigarettes. We consume. We congratulate ourselves on our enlightenment and cluck and strut with our chests puffed out at those who "resist." We go on vacation. We leave.

"What you resist persists" goes the popular Jungian quote that has been used to substantiate the bland inertia of our era. To think is to sin against our safe, shell-like personal truths. Because truth, our truth, is a selfish little, self serving, self created reality, that any real thought would pop like a blister. We dread knowing. We can not go back to the same old strife, the same old pain, the same old same old.

Jung was not offering a solution to our dilemma in his clever aphorism. It is only to our generation of sound byte addled head nodders that "don't think about it" could somehow resolve the confusion of so many years of baffling human cognizance. We want ... no ... we demand the answer now and it is narcissistically easy to embrace the lotus. But Jung also said, "There is no coming to consciousness without pain." Yes, we must be Buddhist and strive for acceptance, but no, we can not be insincere about it. We should not just embrace this or that because it serves our purposes and we just don't want to suffer anymore ... should we?

We have theories about our disappeared neighbor. We dabble in explanation, justification, discrimination to give our disregard the appearance of awareness. Meanwhile, we dream in paradise and offer money, subservience, condemnation. We allocate blame to individual negativity when people are visited by strife, anything to stay in the hidden port, to hold fast to our vacuous, guiltless peace. Yet, should those who stoke the all consuming machine have need of more fodder, they will know exactly where we can be found.

I've been passing my days of unemployment trying to get some of my old music up on the internet. Why? Yes good question ... portrait of a man with too much time on his hands. Anyway, let's move on. As it turns out myspace is the usual option for such endeavours so I have wandered into the land of absolute vanity and posted a ms music page. It's a staggeringly slow process as the pages flip over and crash and constant advisements of a 24 hour wait until the tiny edit you have made comes up. As we say in Mexico, or at least the Mexicans say in Mexico and I steal from them because I love the expression, que hueva. So, here then, without further ado, is the twelve year old disc that is still sitting in untold, unopened boxes under someone's bed in Canada.

http://www.myspace.com/morethantosurvive

Deary me I am a sentimental old sot. And now back to the gardening ...

It is customary here in Puerto Escondido, when the need to extend one's visit arises and the infinite bureaucratic bludgeoning of immigration becomes impossible, to venture forth to the mysterious border of wild and wily Guatemala. Here, it is said, one may renew one's vows with green and pleasant Mexico and return to her bosom with a minimum of border guard abuse. Seeing as how the crucible set before me by immigration was unquestioningly beyond my grasp, on Monday at 5:30 I set out for the southern reaches of Chiapas to try my luck at the quick frontera exchange.

As Murphy pointed out, nothing ever comes off without a hitch, and this seems to be especially so for me in southern Mexico. Many might point out that according to nouveau esoterica my bad attitude makes such things happen, to which I blow my nose in their general direction. I try my best, like every good monkey, to take the ill tidings of life at their own sway. I simply don't try to lie to myself about how romantic it all is, or that the stupidity of people who suffer under poverty is somehow an enobling simplicity. As Nietszche says, " ... aware of life's terrors, (a person) affirms life without resentment." It is only when we expect the disappointments of life to somehow edify us that their inability to lend more than pain leaves us feeling poisoned.

The truth is that the border of Mexico / Guatemala is a nasty several mile wide example of everything that is wrong with humanity. Poverty, greed and its accompanying lack of imagination and hope when it comes to the problems of existence combine here with the vapors of brimstone. OK, they're just people doing their best and if that means trying to get as much as they can from stupid tourists like myself, then that's the way it is and I shouldn't be resentful.

I can only plead that stupidity is something insidious and contagious. If poverty makes low IQs, and the spread of poverty and low IQs and rampant population growth among the poor makes the world stupider and stupider, the reactions of those who should know better are becoming more and more in concert. I was raised to not categorize, to give each individual an even break, to give each person the opportunity to be uniquely stupid. But as I am judged by those with what I believe is a myopic point of view, I lash out with my own vindictive stupidity. As I am gawked at like a three headed dog dressed in golfer's attire I find my tiny mind taxed to the limit of its patience. It's that look WE get from THE OTHER, that look that says WE really don't know anything about what's going on anywhere at anytime otherwise why would WE eat anything but tortillas, why would anyone eat their meat other than thin and well done, why would anyone believe in anything but the catholic god, why would WE believe in anything, why would anyone laugh and do nothing, why would WE go to war, that gets my back up. One believes the other is stupid and the stupid are incredulous.

Amidst the stumbling rabble of which I too often must count myself I met a man named Nehemias, named after the biblical character assigned to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. While the cambistas crowded round me to try to steal my passport and dole out bad exchanges on pesos and quetzales, Nehemias, in no extraordinary way, offered polite conversation. And returning from Malacatan I was offered a fair price for a taxi, and after braving the cambistas one last time, was given a six month tourist visa when all I asked for was three by a joking and laughing immigration officer. As a matter of fact, almost all the immigration officers were decent, helpful people. But despite such small kindnesses, it's the belief in getting the better of that other's ignorance as a sign of cleverness, and seeing apparent cultural unawareness as a sign of stupidity that leaves enduring bone chips in one's joints. It may be that in the absence of truth the rules that we invent and have the strength to uphold will be the laws of existence. We might be persuaded to believe that the thoughtless money grubbing of the cambistas is something more in the nature of necessary evil, the cruelty of survival. But I cannot help but be petulantly and, yes, stupidly resentful because I want individual strength to uphold the chimeric niceties of a respectful social contract. As the saying goes, "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." Stupidity, not cruelty, is survival's paradigmatic quality; to survive at all costs without a thought as to why is the nihilistic footnote to the world's folly.

And I, sir, have a full belly and the pretensions of a garden to guard my vanity.

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value." - Arthur C. Clarke

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Friedrich Nietzsche

The preceeding blog is a rant. I am in a fever pitch of paranoia and, quite frankly, fear due to incidents leading up to my termination of employment. I have given notice because of the level of discomfort I have been experiencing. However, the discomfort is the blame of only a few of my coworkers and students and a faulty pedogogical and administrative philosophy on the part of the University. I just want to footnote that I have stayed in this city for two and half years because I have met some of the most fantastic and memorable people I have ever had the privilege to dig ditches with, especially here on the campus. I certainly don't want to give the impression that my current and sometime work environment is the overall environment. Tension is high, but while there are people here who are trying to make me uncomfortable, there are many people here who are doing their best to make me feel that they are sympathetic. It's work ... political and crappy and almost over.

This is the way the job ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.

Never do anything for money that you can do for any other reason.

Long ago, in a restaurant far, far away, two ladder climbing bumpkins who shared the misfortune of stumbling onto burger flipping's secret entrance, sat discussing the joint natures of youthful self gratification, meaningful, gainful employment and what is owed. The two weeks since the one's first day on the job had squirmed by and he had happily just given his notice, just pushed up the restaurant turnover rate a notch, while the other watched after his departure with curiosity and a disquieting longing for freedom. Having just won himself a new job after being asked in the interview if he was ready to come in from the wasteland and get started, the marginally more successful of the two offered the one who would stay behind this gem of wisdom, formerly passed on to him from a distant relative, and I now in turn offer it to you: "If you want to know how important you are to a place, what kind of difference you have made, what you have contributed and what you will take away when you leave, stick your hand in and out of a bucket of water." Such sad words to the vanity of youth. Such sad words to anyone with an iota of pride left after experiencing the humiliating "boot to the prunes" that is WORK.

"In physics, mechanical work is the amount of energy (potential) transferred by a force (force is what causes a mass to accelerate and is experienced as a push or a pull)." Work, in and of itself, is certainly not an evil. We transfer energy and things happen. Work creates, changes, maintains, destroys. There is no moral judgment I can connect unqualitatively to work. Yet a pleasureable past time is so easily metamorphosed into drudgery by the designation. It seems an opposing force stands in the way of work, altering the carefree pursuit of moving through existence into the consternation of conquest and war. Work is not such a simple expenditure of energy when viewed in its social, interpersonal contexts. It can not simply be done in isolation from agenda, meaning and profundity. Work is performed in conflict and is not employed by the innocent. Definitions are always provided, especially for those who do not provide their own, and they are rarely polite. The force, the boss, the bourgeois, the whip, the lord, the capitalist, the goal, the result, the reason, the purpose, pushes the energy, the wage slave, the proletariat, the plebe, the serf, the capital, the oil, the mere man, the dumb animal. Despite all the rhetoric of progress, peace, prosperity, better living through technology, the reality of work is the transformation of energy to maintain the oligarchical kingdoms of the human. It may not be necessarily so, but it is arbitrarily so, and everyone and everything, aware or not is drawn in.

Opposition enlightens, all else is stasis, but we are all also the victims of our experience. We have become neurotic and unsure, not because life always plays out in the way we imagine, but because it never does. The positive thinking enthusiasts seem impossibly naïve in this respect. Anyone who has moved beyond the ignorant egotism of a baby whose shrieking gets him exactly what he or she wants, understands this is not the project of being, that getting what you want is an infantile conceptualization of -isness. Thinking positively to make the world how you want it is a philosophical recapitulation of consumerism, where the universe becomes a shopping mall and your good vibe is the work you will exchange for well being. And well being is having it all your way. However, as both the Christ and the Dalai Lama point out, it's how we deal with disappointments, the closed shopping mall and the bad purchase, that is at the heart of our spiritual dilemma. It seems impossible that epiphany is grasping firmly to the wants of "me" through all these endless disillusionments and letdowns. Rather it is how we come to terms with that mix of loss and enlightenment, the crushing of the self in the face of reality, the egress of selfishness and the whiny needs of childhood. The dis-illusion is that there is nothing but flux and not that we create reality but that the flux and flow of reality does not exist just for you, it is not all about you.

We have come to believe that work is about our car. And when we start to feel that we are not getting what we deserve for the work we are doing, we take the blame like good sinners, like the guilty betrayers of paradise we are ... it is our sin, our negativity, our non belief in the system and what we can get that has betrayed our desire for a better life. We just need to work a little harder, to believe a little stronger, to be a little more positive. There is a reason to all of this. It is hidden in the glorious mind of god. Or ... is it the mad and mindless agenda of the despot.

Work has no goal. It is the mind of man that has cursed our movements with meaning, that has obligated our actions, bound our promise, saddled our initiative, abstracted us from our empathy. And the work we do as a result has destroyed paradise and ruined us.

I have been working in hell for the governor of Oaxaca and his evil empire. I have pulled my hand out of the water. I have made no difference. This world is not about me. I am a convenience onto which propaganda regarding the evils of a liberal, thoughtful society can be plastered, an ugly American despite the maple leafs on my backpack, slothful and arrogant and war mongering and aggressive. I am an alcoholic and a drug addict and I am here to steal the babies of the campesinos for medical experiments. There is no need to ask me what I think, because it is obvious by my skin. I am the oligarch and the despot. I am leaving.

"A hundred years of words and war

Have bred the studied sycophantic bore

And the brutal babies of the violent poor

All now crawling off the dirt farm floor."