Tunnel vision
Welcome to the Grand illusion
Come on in and see what's happening
Pay the price, get your tickets for the show
The stage is set, the band starts playing
Suddenly your heart is pounding
Wishing secretly you were a star.
But don't be fooled by the radio
The TV or the magazines
They show you photographs of how your life should be
But they're just someone else's fantasy
So if you think your life is complete confusion
Because you never win the game
Just remember that it's a Grand illusion
And deep inside we're all the same.
We're all the same
-Styx
Come on in and see what's happening
Pay the price, get your tickets for the show
The stage is set, the band starts playing
Suddenly your heart is pounding
Wishing secretly you were a star.
But don't be fooled by the radio
The TV or the magazines
They show you photographs of how your life should be
But they're just someone else's fantasy
So if you think your life is complete confusion
Because you never win the game
Just remember that it's a Grand illusion
And deep inside we're all the same.
We're all the same
-Styx
His name was Jeffrey. I won’t waist thought trying to classify him as friend nor acquaintance because the truth is somewhere in between. I knew him simply as “Free”. A tough but friendly brother from the streets of Philadelphia, he kept to himself why it was that going back there was not an option for him. He just sort of shook his head in his free kind of way while starring off at the buildings in front of him. He said to me, “I’m living someone else’s life”. This is actually not an entirely uncommon sentiment. A recent popular song in fact used it as one of the main lyrics; ‘I feel like my life aint mine’ — Logic.
In the last encounter I had with him before this life took him god knows where Free was in the park blocks with the look in his eye I knew all too well by then as I had seen it overcome a good number of those I love out here. He was telling me how the suburban circling the block was following him. Before long he was eyeing me too quite skeptically because he thought I did not believe him.
The thing is though, I did believe him. I’m fairly hippie minded to begin with, but more than that there is a truth in everything if only one is willing to see it. Intentionally or unintentionally, we are probably sending out territorially threatening cues almost constantly. This considered, maybe he was being followed. Maybe he was picking up on what the rest of us living without the blessings of methamphetamines had learned to normalize on a day to day.
Neither is Free’s sentiment that he was being organized into someone else’s way of living exclusive to black men from the streets of Philly. As a grad student I do love physics, but stuck in my room every day staring at a white-board can be a battle of avoiding the feeling like I’m being neatly organized into someone else’s life. Where did all my dirty hippie bars go to? Where have all my dirty hobos gone? Did the Mayor eat them? Is this the price I pay for wanting an ounce of leverage in this society?
I put on my backpack and start walking until my feet bleed in the summertime’s to avoid going nuts. You know what I see going from town to town? Not too much. But I told the moon I’d not let domesticated culture rob me of her presence for too many nights. As for the culture itself it was more of the same — people doing what their told and living what to me sometimes seems to be increasingly a one-size-fits all way of living. And then there is the hobos literally hiding from them in the shadows. When left to their own devices they create their own world. It would be no use describing a matter of perception with mere articulated words. But suffice it to say places like skid row may be the epitome of everything wrong with american culture, but it is alive in a way the rest of america has seemingly forgotten about.
Beyond physically leaving domesticated society behind for a few months of the year, it is in just those kind of people that I find the one reprieve from this feeling deep in my gut that I’m living someone elses life. I seen the crazy hobo Jo for the first time in ever and he just looked pissed.
Ohh I didn’t tell you about hobo Jo? I slept nearby him in a tunnel some years back. Through the thick of winter this scrawny broken thing would lay on the concrete without so much as a blanket. Stuttering and stammering, he usually would not talk to anyone. He was apparently somewhat successful at floating a sign, enough to allow him to remain a loner to the rest of us anyway. A quiet thing born and raised in Klamath falls, OR it was fascinating to see the human underneath come out when in the presence of someone he actually felt comfortable and secure with. Whatever it was, for a while there he started to come hang with us in the cul-de-sac outside the tunnel. He’d open up and start conversing like a normal human being. He even shaved!
That was some years ago though. That cul-de-sac has been gentrified out since then and now Jo walks the streets fluffier and angrier than ever.
It took me sleeping in a tunnel to loose my tunnel vision. There is no convenient in-between reality. We not only affect those we indirectly rely on in this increasingly interwoven economy, but we pull them into our reality. There is only so much land to go around, consequently there can be no respect nor understanding for the likes of Jo — a man who will most probably never be able to fit into this organized life. And god-bless his little hobo heart; he’ll never try.
There is something to this man that the organized part of my brain could not do justice to. In that tunnel contemplating god knows what, he’d sit with his pliant little legs in a half-lotus position more casually than you or I might breathe, his beer in front of him while he occasionally muttered at the cars screaming below. I thought maybe Jo had accepted things were not going to work out for him here, that he does not belong here, or at least he was going to make absolutely no attempt to figure it out; he just was. Whatever story was playing itself out in Jo’s mumblings, it was clear to me that the outside world was something apart from him. He was creating his own reality in that tunnel — his own perception that was free of the organized reality, more-so than most of us are likely to achieve anyway.
I’d like to speak about the future of Jo, but surrounded as he is and neatly separated from those like myself who would bring out the human side of this thing that now walks the streets of Portland, I’m not sure if there is one to speak of. Many have attempted to rid this green earth of the likes of Jo, and when this failed they tried to organize him.
To that end allow me to share a most curious observation of those out here on the streets that I’ve made; many, when left to their own devices, almost automatically begin constructing their own barriers to divide and protect themselves from one another…. Then there is Jo. Jo has a different life strategy altogether. Rather than trying to manipulate the environment to suit his preconceived need for defense, he lays low. Whereas others walk the streets with a backpack and make their nest with cardboard and some moderate level of possessions, you’d only know Jo was around by a few beer cans tossed to the side. And Jo did not actually own a backpack — let alone anything to put in it. Tough when you push him as anyone living in a tunnel often need be, but most apparently he is a rather helpless creature. In some way it is just that which endows him with a strength the rest of us find hard to touch; Jo cannot be organized.
Ohh Jo, I could be offered10,000 of these domesticated women untouched and not be moved, but for you, and occasionally for the random sleeping bag of a mound on a concrete corner I run a high risk of breaking down into spontaneous fits of sniffs and cuddles. I did not want the domesticated mans pity nor his handouts Jo, I just wanted you.
Neither did I want to be hunted down like a rat for not owning property and broken apart from the likes of Jo every time I try to establish anything more than living completely isolated and alone with nothing under a highway. This is the only form of existence the domesticated man tolerates for those who don’t own property. He just cannot respect nor understand how or why someone should have rights to use the two hands given them to utilize the resources given all of us to make for ourselves.
No, in my aggravated state of mind sometimes I would wonder if the domesticated man was actually capable of understanding or of doing anything other than what he was told, or if he could fathom embracing a life of having direct accountability between people. My questions were seemingly answered when he invoked third party arbitration; he called the cops/ cried to the politician to break everyone up. When this was done things went south and only degeneracy remained. Hence the domesticated man had created a case of confirmational bias; he now saw what he set out to see as what was left was degenerate bums rather than humans. Then came the proposed ‘solution’ in which the nomad’s were to be neatly organized and divided according to age and addiction.
In the last encounter I had with him before this life took him god knows where Free was in the park blocks with the look in his eye I knew all too well by then as I had seen it overcome a good number of those I love out here. He was telling me how the suburban circling the block was following him. Before long he was eyeing me too quite skeptically because he thought I did not believe him.
The thing is though, I did believe him. I’m fairly hippie minded to begin with, but more than that there is a truth in everything if only one is willing to see it. Intentionally or unintentionally, we are probably sending out territorially threatening cues almost constantly. This considered, maybe he was being followed. Maybe he was picking up on what the rest of us living without the blessings of methamphetamines had learned to normalize on a day to day.
Neither is Free’s sentiment that he was being organized into someone else’s way of living exclusive to black men from the streets of Philly. As a grad student I do love physics, but stuck in my room every day staring at a white-board can be a battle of avoiding the feeling like I’m being neatly organized into someone else’s life. Where did all my dirty hippie bars go to? Where have all my dirty hobos gone? Did the Mayor eat them? Is this the price I pay for wanting an ounce of leverage in this society?
I put on my backpack and start walking until my feet bleed in the summertime’s to avoid going nuts. You know what I see going from town to town? Not too much. But I told the moon I’d not let domesticated culture rob me of her presence for too many nights. As for the culture itself it was more of the same — people doing what their told and living what to me sometimes seems to be increasingly a one-size-fits all way of living. And then there is the hobos literally hiding from them in the shadows. When left to their own devices they create their own world. It would be no use describing a matter of perception with mere articulated words. But suffice it to say places like skid row may be the epitome of everything wrong with american culture, but it is alive in a way the rest of america has seemingly forgotten about.
Beyond physically leaving domesticated society behind for a few months of the year, it is in just those kind of people that I find the one reprieve from this feeling deep in my gut that I’m living someone elses life. I seen the crazy hobo Jo for the first time in ever and he just looked pissed.
Ohh I didn’t tell you about hobo Jo? I slept nearby him in a tunnel some years back. Through the thick of winter this scrawny broken thing would lay on the concrete without so much as a blanket. Stuttering and stammering, he usually would not talk to anyone. He was apparently somewhat successful at floating a sign, enough to allow him to remain a loner to the rest of us anyway. A quiet thing born and raised in Klamath falls, OR it was fascinating to see the human underneath come out when in the presence of someone he actually felt comfortable and secure with. Whatever it was, for a while there he started to come hang with us in the cul-de-sac outside the tunnel. He’d open up and start conversing like a normal human being. He even shaved!
That was some years ago though. That cul-de-sac has been gentrified out since then and now Jo walks the streets fluffier and angrier than ever.
It took me sleeping in a tunnel to loose my tunnel vision. There is no convenient in-between reality. We not only affect those we indirectly rely on in this increasingly interwoven economy, but we pull them into our reality. There is only so much land to go around, consequently there can be no respect nor understanding for the likes of Jo — a man who will most probably never be able to fit into this organized life. And god-bless his little hobo heart; he’ll never try.
There is something to this man that the organized part of my brain could not do justice to. In that tunnel contemplating god knows what, he’d sit with his pliant little legs in a half-lotus position more casually than you or I might breathe, his beer in front of him while he occasionally muttered at the cars screaming below. I thought maybe Jo had accepted things were not going to work out for him here, that he does not belong here, or at least he was going to make absolutely no attempt to figure it out; he just was. Whatever story was playing itself out in Jo’s mumblings, it was clear to me that the outside world was something apart from him. He was creating his own reality in that tunnel — his own perception that was free of the organized reality, more-so than most of us are likely to achieve anyway.
I’d like to speak about the future of Jo, but surrounded as he is and neatly separated from those like myself who would bring out the human side of this thing that now walks the streets of Portland, I’m not sure if there is one to speak of. Many have attempted to rid this green earth of the likes of Jo, and when this failed they tried to organize him.
To that end allow me to share a most curious observation of those out here on the streets that I’ve made; many, when left to their own devices, almost automatically begin constructing their own barriers to divide and protect themselves from one another…. Then there is Jo. Jo has a different life strategy altogether. Rather than trying to manipulate the environment to suit his preconceived need for defense, he lays low. Whereas others walk the streets with a backpack and make their nest with cardboard and some moderate level of possessions, you’d only know Jo was around by a few beer cans tossed to the side. And Jo did not actually own a backpack — let alone anything to put in it. Tough when you push him as anyone living in a tunnel often need be, but most apparently he is a rather helpless creature. In some way it is just that which endows him with a strength the rest of us find hard to touch; Jo cannot be organized.
Ohh Jo, I could be offered10,000 of these domesticated women untouched and not be moved, but for you, and occasionally for the random sleeping bag of a mound on a concrete corner I run a high risk of breaking down into spontaneous fits of sniffs and cuddles. I did not want the domesticated mans pity nor his handouts Jo, I just wanted you.
Neither did I want to be hunted down like a rat for not owning property and broken apart from the likes of Jo every time I try to establish anything more than living completely isolated and alone with nothing under a highway. This is the only form of existence the domesticated man tolerates for those who don’t own property. He just cannot respect nor understand how or why someone should have rights to use the two hands given them to utilize the resources given all of us to make for ourselves.
No, in my aggravated state of mind sometimes I would wonder if the domesticated man was actually capable of understanding or of doing anything other than what he was told, or if he could fathom embracing a life of having direct accountability between people. My questions were seemingly answered when he invoked third party arbitration; he called the cops/ cried to the politician to break everyone up. When this was done things went south and only degeneracy remained. Hence the domesticated man had created a case of confirmational bias; he now saw what he set out to see as what was left was degenerate bums rather than humans. Then came the proposed ‘solution’ in which the nomad’s were to be neatly organized and divided according to age and addiction.
the domesticated man
“You’re all dogs!!” the hobo screamed after I crossed him in the intersection as a car sped by honking at him. Domesticated though I’ve tried to be, I cannot help but sympathize.
So tell me domesticate man, now that I am back here, where in your culture may I go when I need to be treated like a human instead of a customer? It was compassion — shared struggle — that I sought as I found in it the power to shift my perspective where I was rather than chasing where the magazines led me too. But of this substance the domesticated man had none to offer. When that failed I asked for understanding, but having confused social intelligence and equality with simply fitting in and ‘same-as’ he caste me off with a label. Labels are good. He likes labels.
When mass shootings became the new fad he could not think of any response to gain foot-hold against this epidemic. Why anyone would be so unhappy in his culture befuddled him. So he endeavored to neatly trim the issue with gun control and more labeling of what he did not understand with mental illness, all the while the roots of the issue continued to grow out the sides. But if only they could just grow out far enough away from him then the domesticated man could close his doors and claim that he had nothing to do with them!
It is the gap in logic I found so distasteful, not the valuing of one’s own home.
I tried to tell him that the rise in seemingly random mass shootings could be directly correlated to the number of times I’ve sought to escape my newfound home by going to Starbucks. He told me,
“depression is a tangle of multiple symptoms…Antidepressants may increase suicidal thoughts or actions in some children, teens or young adults within the first few months of treatment “
Then he just blamed me for not having managed to normalize a culture in which the local watering hole and coffee shop are the most significant sources of community. He then told me I had no friends and needed to attend more drugged-out house parties. When this turned me to an addict he told me, “Despair not, for the mayor was going to sue big pharma for on your behalf!”.
It was at this point I was tempted to play the villain for the domesticated man, but in my heart I knew he’d only invent a hero to oppose me. This hero would of course be armed with an entirely subjective conceptualization of what ‘good’ is and it would have a funny way of having everything to do with the domesticated way of life. But something about the domesticated little children all blowing one another’s heads off told me something was off about this hero.
So I thought of a different way to be evil. Weekly trips to city hall had gotten me privy to an evil that doesn’t sell with Hollywood writers. This evil first occurred to me when I watched the protestors showing up with more good intentions than strategy, fervently pointing the finger at every ‘man’ for their own problems while simultaneously demanding of him that he grant them their very own box. And after that they blew smoke in my face and shut me up with a mega-phone when I tried to reason with them. It is at this point that it occurred to me the domesticated man is his own worst enemy. Donald Trump is proof of this. As to how a shameless capitalist came to power in the domesticated culture of consumerism and a social/ political climate generated by more Facebook likes than actual conversations, this too was as source of befuddlement to the domesticated activists.
So I decided to do the evil thing and ohh-so-neatly take an organized step backward and watch them get dragged out by the heals — I got out of their way. They had got what they came for; to taste a little blood, to point the finger the man, to play the victim, and for a fleeting time they got to come together before going back to their domesticated lives to be nullified by a synthetic form of tribalism.
The mayor promised them that there would be change. But with everyone centering their lives around the attainment of their very own private property, I didn’t see change coming. I told the mayor, “ 90% of what it takes to keep the domesticated man happy is granting him his own box, the other 10% is what we call politics”. He then looked right past me at the crowd and told them what they wanted to hear.
And there it was, plain for me to see. The domesticated man was far from finished in his attempt to outsmart mother entropy. The natural solution will always be repressed in favor of the organized one.
Organized; the domesticate man loved the very sound of the word. Go ahead, ask him what the moral or the professional thing to do is. High chance it will be the organized thing to do.
Ohh domesticated man, why is it every man you follow ends up in the dirt, and that every man you worship chooses to live in it? Stuck in a web of perception he cannot gain foothold in, with no muse to sing the songs of his village and no means for the local hero to emerge by bringing his people together, on a daily he is instead seduced by foreign muses, actors, and superstar athletes alike with the idea that if he could only be somewhere else, around someone else, then maybe he would feel something else.
Many more acts of seemingly random violence, the rise of many more shameless capitalists as political leaders, and opiod epidemics alike will all get worse before the domesticated man even begins to entertain the notion of forsaking that which he holds most dear. In the meantime, no-one was taking my gun.
....But I didn’t actually actually have a gun as I don’t care much for domesticated tools. So I instead asked myself, ‘could there be a tipping point which could cause the domesticated man to share property thereby restoring his shared spaces and outlets for community to occur in a natural fashion — without him first hitting the point of desperation or needing to be forced into it?’
I looked to the left and I looked to the right to see people neatly organizing themselves between left and right. So obsessive was the domesticated man’s attempt to control nature, so automatic was his habit of dividing himself from his brother whenever he had the chance, and correspondingly ohh-so-neat was his habit of dividing issues as he does his neighborhoods and blaming someone else for his problems that I had to accept perhaps my hippie tendencies had gotten the best of me. Domesticated culture was going to get worse before it ever got better, if at all.
I made one last attempt to reason with the domesticate man. I told him, “ 90% of life and communication alike are most likely within the in-articulated parts of biology, yet it is the other 10% upon which all of your policies are based and on which you yourself plan your life around. Life is a biological feeling not an articulated activity. It is not what you do, it is how you feel about it. And there is no greater weapon to manipulate your perspective than that of having your people and the land you share in-tact. Domesticated man, can you not understand how deeply perturbing the culture you’ve created is to some people who struggle to fit into it when you take over their space and force them into it?
I see you, domesticated man, hitting all the right prerequisite social ques and I see the problem. I see that awkward hobo up against the wall not saying anything to anyone, and in his dirty effulgence I see the solution; If a man cannot be around his people without meeting some prerequisite expectation then there is no leverage .”
To this he looked right past me and told the crowd what they wanted to hear.
So it was that like Jo I then accepted that some things were not meant to be in this life, and I decided to sit this one out.
domestication disease
In an effort to spread awareness of the dangers of domestication, the CDC (Center for Domestication Control) has compiled a list of symptoms as well as treatments for domestication. This list is not inclusive.
Symptoms of Domestication:
Symptoms of Domestication:
- The inability to congregate without making loud noises
- Lacks direct accountability to others – may not appreciate the deterioration of social contract nor of his own leverage within society when outsourcing regulation via third party arbitration. Worse, he may not perceive it (direct accountability) to be a source of brotherly love and well-being.
- May perceive rules to be what has been written rather than the interpretation – life itself to him may no longer be an act of interpretation, and if it is then it is not him doing the interpreting.
- Always meets prerequisite expectations to be around his people – heavily reliant upon mediating institutions.
- Consumes an unsustainable amount of resources with utter disregard for the genetic age of extinction his lifestyle has triggered across the globe.
- Prefers fickle social attachments over tribalism. This may result in overpopulation as well as the systematic over-breeding and euthanization of animals as the domesticated man has not tribe, hence he tries to make his own.
- Prefers the more socially palatable act of repression (so long as it occurs in an organized fashion) over the natural ways of addressing issues at their root cause. Does not hesitate to lock living creatures into boxes.
- Usually prefers to stand strictly on the giving side of the line and never the receiving. May possess a high degree of shame.
- May have doused himself with an obnoxious amount of cologne; he has no sent, so he attempts to make one.
- Might describe 'fun' as a premeditated activity rather than a frame of mind.
- May have the appearance of a shaved cat.
- Easily deterred by fences.
- Bunk-beds. Lots of them: Walls/ separation go beyond necessity of survival into the realm of psychological dependency, of which is characterized by anhedonia and dysphoria; lack of satisfaction and anxiety. In terms of evolution, it was the creation of permanent structures which transformed us from hunter-gather nomadic group to sedentary divided agriculturalists. Within this transition hundreds of millions of years evolving through group selectivity was repressed as the need for tribalism was inadvertently stifled and catastrophic seeds were planted. All that was needed for them to grow was development technology to advance such that domestication disease could spread faster than people could control its effects. This has resulted in a degenerate state of Mir (Russian concept [roughly translated] for social awareness and well-being of community), seemingly random acts of mass-violence that are actually cries for help….and Donald Trump.