Every Hungry Woman Dreams of the Whipping Post; Every Slave Craves their Collar: THFWS &TTM’s

 

Ash was more “fired up” than usual when he wrote his next sermon, and even the ArchAngels were somewhat taken aback by not only the title and theme of that Friday’s rehearsal, but the sheer fervency with which he delivered it was unparalleled for a mere run-through.

He had even written a new song that had all the earmarks of becoming a standard theme for the band, and he told them it would be done as a gospel-style sing-along like they almost always did with “I Must be the Luckiest Man (or Woman, or Child…) in the World.”

This was to be the theme of the sermon:

When I say “Every Hungry Woman Dreams of the Whipping Post; Every Slave Craves their Collar” most people envision BDSM, dungeons and other manifestations of the Kink/Fet community, but I am talking about a completely different form of bondage or slavery that is taking place every day in this country.

Most of us are victims of it ourselves in one way or another, and as I have told you so often before, I cannot tell you exactly what you need to do about it…that has got to be your choice. I am here to council you and to encourage you to find answers for yourselves.

Today, my primary goal is to open your eyes and your minds.

Those who lack involvement, commitment, validation, recognition or a sense of belonging will embrace almost anything that will distract them from their loneliness and isolation…the Great Existential Void…the same loneliness that makes a woman think she cannot escape an abusive relationship…or that keeps someone from kicking an addiction like drugs or alcohol…people who invent unsolvable problems or refuse to face the consequences of the solutions or accept the dogma and doctrine of anyone else, rather than search for meaning or purpose themselves.

This is evidenced by the rising popularity of gang membership among impoverished inner-city youths alienated by generations of ignorance and desperation as well as the affluent suburban middle-class bored by the banality and shallow crass materialism of their self-absorbed parents.

Since the dawn of Man, there have been monarchs and there have been serfs to do their bidding.

Recall the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the first primate grabs a thigh bone and crushes the skull of his opponent. Necessity may be the mother of invention of tools, but adversity is the mother of invention of weapons.

Witness the first ruler of his tribe. As adversity is confronted by imagination, ingenuity and courage, a King is spawned.

On the one hand, leadership is thrust upon (s)he who chooses to take his or her rightful place at the head of the table, but on the other hand, the crown may become a yoke, or a monster may be borne of this ascension to power.

Time passes, as feudal lords preside over serfs and fiefdoms. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…” to support the grandeur that can only exist within the divine right of kings.

Meanwhile, in another part of the village, a sorcerer, a medicine man, a witch, or other practitioner of the cunning ways of knowledge conjures and brews up another way to ascend to a position of power either within or outside of the community.

We have a king, and a priest(ess), but the circle is far from complete without the advisors, attorneys,  generals, gangsters, tax collectors, treasurers, medicine men, legislators, law enforcement,  judges and bankers that await their entrance to the stage, all of whom are looking for their own opportunity to grab whatever portion they can acquire of the general wealth that exists within the community.

To assume wealth is the only power would be naïve, but in one way or another, either wealth follows power, or power follows wealth.

Their stock in trade is built upon the fear and paranoia that they disseminate in the self-fulfilling prophesies that they mutually create and support.

Eons and millennia have passed, and as history records it, the grand stories borne of the lives of great men and women have become the legends of our heritages, yet little has changed in the dynamic between the Haves and the Have-nots.

An iconic leader requires a court and necessary support and infrastructure to be provided by those who are either born or bound to serve.

After the Dark Ages, came the birth of the Middle Class, merchants, artisans, craftsmen and scientists who managed to rise above mere servitude to a lord. The Middle Class grew with the passage of time, and so did their wealth, but it has never rivaled the wealth of those whose riches are increased by what they own rather than by what they do, make or perform.

Wherever there is wealth, there will be those who will try to separate those who have it from their wealth. Charlatans, con artists, burglars, armed robbers, pickpockets, prostitutes, lightening rod salesmen and rainmakers come to mind easily, but the real threat to the general population is more insidious in the way that wide sweeping economic redistribution has attempted to enslave the modern public until they are mere indentured servants who only think they are free.

There was a long dark period in the world’s history when entire races or populations of a particular tribe or region were held as captives forced to perform every manner of service to some other ruling tribe.

This is a travesty of inestimable sorrow and injustice that has run throughout the history of the world. The very concept that one privileged society could rationalize enslaving another to be treated, bought, sold and owned like chattel property seems barbaric, cruel and unjustifiable today despite the fact that the same effect has been created within our own society in such a way as to mesmerize today’s unfortunates into embracing and defending the very system that enslaves them.

Governments do it with taxes, unnatural forms of control of commerce to benefit the privileged and wars that serve no purpose other than to stifle rational discourse, circumvent civil rights and liberties, and make multinational corporations even more wealthy and powerful.

A little perceived prosperity is good, but the glut of wealth of the Great American Dream of the fifties and early sixties that allowed parents to send so many of their children to real colleges and universities in search of knowledge and enlightenment led to the discontent and social unrest of the late sixties that empowered a new generation that stopped an unjustifiable war and challenged the paradigms of social norms everywhere.

The government knows better than to ever let that happen again anytime soon.

A nation of smart people is a good thing, but a nation of enlightened citizens is a liability to the truly corrupt. They require a certain level of threat from some boogeyman like Communism or Al-Qaeda to distract the public sufficiently to keep them from questioning too much of anything.

Churches do it with endless tithing, donations and pleas for more money to do “good works” that mostly involve making the Church wealthier while the poor starve in slums, all the while decreeing that it is a mortal sin to attempt to limit procreation amongst people too poor to feed themselves already and stifling a woman’s right to maintain control over her own body.

The fact is that in addition to preaching doctrines of hatred of pleasure that would deny so many the simple pursuit of happiness or the ways of power and majik or any form of rational discourse or intellectual freedom by labeling it as heresy, they also would pit one superstition against the other to distract them even further from finding or pursuing true enlightenment.

Religion is no longer the “opiate of the people”…it is more like the syringe… and television is the heroin.

Engineered economic depressions have occurred twice in slightly less than one hundred years due to the insatiable greed of the privileged ruling and/or ownership classes of the world for the purpose of accomplishing widespread economic redistribution. Both times it backfired on many who helped participate in it, but the real owners and rulers managed to stay intact and eventually prosper from it.

But by far, the most insidious of all of the schemes to enslave the world now comes from a collusion of lawmakers, attorneys, doctors, insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors, and the so-called “management companies” and “program administrators” who manipulate the entire system despite obvious conflicts of interest and ethics that go unaddressed by either the legislative or judicial branches of this country who are allegedly charged with the protection of its citizens.

“Participating Networks” and “Retail Refill Allowances” dictated by “program administrators” who directly profit from these conflicts of interest (including ownership of their own pharmacies) and the monopolizations that they create not only stifle free market economic competition, but also ensure that they do it with impunity.

Most people take far too much medication. This is because their doctors fail to address the fact that each medication has additional “Side effects”, and “untoward reactions” and it is far easier (and more profitable) to prescribe additional medications to control the undesirable effects rather than to find better palliative measures.

That’s right… “palliative measures”…something to mask or alleviate the signs and symptoms temporarily…there are virtually only a handful of drugs that can claim to actually “cure” anything, and in far too many cases there is at best only scant evidence to support the premise that they really improve the overall quality of life of those who take them, given the side effects inherent in all of them.

We have been brainwashed by the AMA to believe that we must fight disease with drugs, rather than to promote wellness in the first place, and the healthcare insurance industry insures that this misconception remains unchallenged.

That is why we are more likely to refer to healthcare professionals as medical professionals…because our mental preoccupation with drugs eclipses our understanding of health.

After a certain point, instead of Life Extension, we simply prolong Death…for a huge profit.

From the “Gomer Gardens” of intensive care units to the nursing homes and restorative centers that farm the elderly and chronically ill like vegetables, the healthcare industry is effectively strip-mining the aged and infirm for every dollar that can be sucked from the country’s social welfare programs, paid for by the working middle class in taxes.

If a fraction of the cost of pharmaceutical research was spent for determining the true causes and prevention of disease instead of marketing even more medically questionable medications, the health of the world might actually improve.

Our obsession with cholesterol for instance, flies in the face of well-documented research that concludes that cholesterol levels are independent of the prevention of heart attack in the absence of other inflammatory processes.

In the last few years, even the television advertisements have been forced to disclaim any proven relationship between lower cholesterol levels and decreased cardiac risk, but you have to know where to look for it in the ads or you will miss it entirely.

Not to mention that non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications (NSAID’s) themselves can trigger asthma or liver disease and kidney failure, or that steroidal drugs can cause a resurgence of varicella virus (as either Shingles, or Herpes) thereby requiring treatment with anti-viral agents or that glucocorticosteroids are also implicated in the degeneration of bone and cartilage, skin integrity, and heart disease.

Anti-depressants are now as irresponsibly and indiscriminately prescribed as antibiotics were in the fifties and sixties. The indiscriminant and irresponsible prescribing of antibiotics created MRSA and other “super” bacteria that have become so antibiotic resistant that the only cure is almost as dangerous as the disease.

Depression and anxiety are frequently the dysfunctional sibling offspring of modern society, and the drugs that are used to treat either of them can trigger the onset of the other, although this is rarely ever definitively addressed by psychological healthcare professionals.

If you stop to think for a moment, it makes perfect sense…anxiety springs from the conflict created within the mind to attempt to find meaning or purpose in what appears to be a senseless existence and depression is the natural outcome of the overwhelming hopelessness of the “poison thought” of recognition of the sorrow of the human condition.

Anti-depressants (especially the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) have a marked propensity for causing anxiety reactions, and anxiolytic medications are notorious for inducing depression.

And there has yet to be discovered a drug that can treat inadequate parenting. Granted, there is much evidence to indicate that many of the food additives to which the young are subjected may be implicated in the geometric and disproportional rise in hyperactivity and attention deficit disorders diagnosed in this country, but you only have to look around you to see lazy, self-absorbed, selfish parents everywhere who lack the compassion or understanding to recognize or acknowledge the commitment and effort required to responsibly raise their children and who seek a quick fix instead.

Most psychiatrists merely write prescriptions and no longer council patients, preferring to push the responsibility off on less trained individuals who all too frequently work in an independent vacuum, rather than in conjunction with each other. Less time spent with more patients resulting in higher profits is the prime motivation.

The net sum result is that because all of the involved parties are free to overcharge each other for everything only to pass it onto the patient/victims of their unbridled greed, it is only possible due to the ability to have it paid for by insurance.

The insurance industry is rivaled only by pharmaceutical manufacturers, the oil industry and defense industry contractors for sheer wealth, and in fact, insurance companies own a large portion of many of the other companies and industries in America.

The Affordable Healthcare Reform Act is now responsible for promoting insurance that routinely costs as much as one thousand dollars per month per family with a five to ten thousand dollar deductible.

That means twelve to seventeen thousand dollars up front just to be eligible for the so-called “benefits” despite widespread denials of many medications that had been routinely covered for many years prior, even denying coverage for certain brands of insulin or test strips.

Generic medications that cost less than twenty dollars retail out-of-pocket last year now often cost eighty dollars or more as of January 1^st, 2014.

Worst of all, the private insurance companies offering commercial insurance are following the lead set by the HRA policies, using the Affordable Healthcare Reform Act as an excuse to further increase their return on investment with widespread profiteering not justified by their actual cost.

When it comes to abridging your rights and liberties, as well as the quality of your life, everything is incremental, insidious and unrelenting. The Patriot Act and the formation of the NSA are the new bastions of the Fourth Reich.

What makes you think healthcare is going to be any different?

This is why all truly great gangsters and criminals aspire to “go legitimate”…it not only involves less risk, but they are generally free to utilize the same unbridled and ruthless practices of their past in the pursuit of wealth and power as long as they hire enough attorneys and buy off enough legislators to sufficiently disguise their corrupt methods.

I used to joke about my fear that the government was trying to take over the country, but got tired of having to explain what I meant to people who did not understand the definition of a republic…but in truth, my real fear is of those who pull the strings of the marionette that we have allowed them to make of our government.

As long as people would prefer to take a pill than to take responsibility for their diet, nutrition, exercise, emotional health, stress, and parenting skills, insurance and pharmaceutical companies will enslave them.

Everywhere you look, people work too hard for too little for someone else under tremendous soul-killing stress, grateful for the “privilege” of being allowed to work overtime to afford designer clothing, jewelry, and electronic gadgets, talking on smartphones that are more intelligent than they are while they drive overpriced, almost disposable cars stuck in gridlocked traffic aspiring to live in pretentious neighborhoods in lavish but shabbily constructed homes they can’t really afford all the while consuming more and more, obsessed with owning everything they are taught to covet by the ridiculous and vapid television shows that program them to believe that “reality” shows are their only reality.

When you look back on your life and ask yourself “Is that all I did?” will you be satisfied?

Most of us are born naked and screaming in ignorance and will die alone in despair, but everything in between is your own choice if you dare to exercise your options and look for different paradigms, or better still think outside all the other paradigms entirely.

If you let yourself be brainwashed into believing that there are no other alternatives to the lives your parents lived, or what your neighbors covet you will never know. It may have “all been done before”, but not by you….

One (wo)man’s meat is another (wo)man’s poison.

One (wo)man’s ceiling is another (wo)man’s floor.

One (wo)man’s mate is another (wo)man’s person.

One (wo)man’s princess is another (wo)man’s whore.

One (wo)man’s home is another (wo)man’s prison.

One (wo)man’s excitement is another (wo)man’s bore.

One (wo)man’s trash is another (wo)man’s treasure.

One (wo)man’s possessions

may become their own obsession

that eventually possess them

and enslave them evermore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dawn of the Son of Man: The Home for Wayward Souls and the Talking Moneys

 

The Dawn of the Son of Man

The next time the group assembled to partake of the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, it was mutually agreed that the primary avenue (at least for tonight) for accessing the ancient ones and crossing the abyss should not be sexual, despite the unbridled success they had previously achieved.

It is easy to mistaken a path for the way, or the way for the destination.

The more that the group experienced The Knowledge, the wider the parameters of purpose of their Vision Quest became.

Frederick had opened the door to Man’s comprehension of what he had abandoned when he traded Instinct for Reason. The group, (by way of The Knowledge) was witnessing the expansion of Frederick’s sentience in terms of increasing his comprehension and reasoning capabilities in much the same way that Man had done during the Great Eurasian Leap Forward, or Upper Paleolithic Revolution, more than fifty thousand years ago.

Although Man had abandoned his closest cousins shortly afterward with increasing arrogance and disdain for his origins as the eons passed (largely as a bi-product of religion and politics), his preoccupation with words largely blinded him to other cognitive processes and forms of knowledge.

Ever since Darwin, two distinctly divided camps have formed in terms of acknowledgement of sentience within the animal kingdom, depending upon the parameters of the definitions set by either one’s agenda, both of which are at their worst clouded by emotion, religion, politics and other manifestations of delusional substitutes for rational consideration.

At the farthest extreme, are those who maintain that if it is alive, it is sentient, using only the lowest possible common denominator as its threshold. At the other end of the spectrum are those who believe that by definition, only Man can ever be considered to possess sentience.

What is most interesting about the position of the latter group is that as animal research has alternately either discovered previously unknown behaviors, or the animals themselves (especially the primates) have evolved, whether it is from exposure to man or by their own means, man has repeatedly been forced to raise the bar in terms of his definitions of sentience to ensure that only Man is recognized as being worthy of membership in their exclusive club.

First came the discovery of the Honeybee Dance to tell other members of the hive the type of flower, the direction, and the distance, thereby implying language capacities, followed years later by the initial experiments in teaching chimpanzees American Sign Language.

Also, the research of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey established that primates adopt orphans, utilize group parenting of their young, conduct funerals, practice deceptions, negotiate deals, and hide their guilt, as well as chimpanzees’ expressions of joy manifested in the practice referred to as the Rain Dance prompted by stimuli as esoteric as a beautiful sunset.

Recognition of the manipulation of natural objects within their environment to constitute tool-making, as opposed to mere tool use further necessitated re-evaluating what it was that supposedly made man so special as regards sentience.

One such distinction was that it has been noted that as regards language, although primates may appear to construct simple sentences as declarative statements, there is little to support evidence of primates asking questions, or most especially, although there has been some expressions involving Who?, What?, or When?, there is no record of a primate questioning Why?.

It may be that the major gap between lower primate and great ape comprehension skills and Man’s intelligence would be that although virtually all living things respond to stimulus/response-mediated behavior modification, it may be that only Man recognizes a link between Cause and Effect, thereby necessitating the question Why?.

Somewhere along the continuum of intelligence vs. sentience comes the acknowledgement of emotion by some animals that would appear to be derived from feelings rather than simple so-called instincts that may arise from purely biochemically determined responses.

A case in point might be sighted by the way birds will sit on their eggs in order to hatch them. Their apparent devotion to the task is actually more likely to be the result of the bird’s localized loss of feathers, accompanied by inflammation of their lower abdomens, prompting them to sit on the eggs because they are smooth (and more soothing than the ground or the interior of a nest) and help absorb the heat generated by the inflammation. It does not explain what prompts them to feed their young, however.

Animals may fight to the death over food, territory or a mate, exhibiting considerable ferocity that could be interpreted as anger, but there is little evidence that one animal is prompted to dislike or be offended by personality traits or points of view of one of their fellow species the way humans are so inclined to do.

Even Humans are notoriously suspect in mistaking what they interpret to be Love (as opposed to Lust) by the evidence of sexual desire. Similarly, Fear may well be distinctly emotional, where Intimidation may not. Anxiety, especially long-term anticipation is a more human emotion. Emotions are a slippery slope at best, and differentiating between what actually constitutes an emotional response as opposed to instinctive behavior may not be the best determinant of sentience.

As the group began to settle in for another evening of enlightenment and illumination, the increased non-verbal awareness of the human members allowed them to experience the widening of Frederick’s sentience in terms of self-awareness, for instance.

Each of the members’ own human voice was replicated by the thoughts they received from each other, but since Frederick had no audible voice in the nominally real world, it was particularly amusing to everyone else what a sonorous, well-modulated deep voice Frederick projected to his human counterparts, and although there was no way to record or document what he sounded like to each of them, they all were in agreement about their descriptions of his voice as they heard it in their minds.

Keep in mind, that although there was no way to record what each of them heard in their mind, the content of what they heard was consistently verifiable as being identical.

As much as each of them was inclined to attempt to remain scientifically grounded and objective, their ultimate goal was not science, and once again, as Ash was quick to remind them, the operant principle of the willing suspension of disbelief allowed them to bridge the gaps between Science and Spirituality.

The key was to recognize when what they wanted to believe clashed with what they observed and experienced. It’s one thing to follow your faith, which is what you choose to believe in the absence of empirical proof and another to simply blindly accept someone else’s make-believe version of God, Heaven, Hell, or Redemption because you lack the imagination, courage, or ambition to attempt to discover and experience what is revealed to you, and when what you believe conflicts with what you experience, to have the courage and objectivity to re-evaluate what it is that you do believe.

So when Frederick suddenly (telepathically) blurted out “What do you think is making the other chimps and bonobos so sad? everyone in the room audibly gasped.

Tears of joy flowed down Darcy’s cheeks as Frederick suddenly realized that he had taken his first real quantum leap across the abyss, and that there was no turning back from this point on, even if he had wanted to, because once the box was opened, there was no way everything could ever be put back in again.

Everyone in the room was so moved by the realization of what had just happened that they all rushed over to Frederick to either hug, or kiss him, or simply shake his hand to welcome him into this new world he had just discovered.

This was going to be a very long and interesting night indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Iron Dragon Voice Recognition Project

 

Recently I began attempting to utilize the speech recognition function of my computer to dictate text.

Daily (w)rite had just posted the A to Z Challenge: Flash Fiction, which included a photograph and a prompt “Lately he had been feeling…”.

This is completely new ground for me, and I was fascinated.

I decided to attempt the project using the Speech Recognition function of my computer.

Behold the results; a story within a story, it would seem…or…you be the judge….

Here is the artwork, by Joseph W. Richardson: (with the prompt: …”lately, he had been feeling…”)

This is the Iron Dragon Project result:

*****

True on and all,

Too true II be true.

This is going to be eight to two attached

and the howl for the old ones who weren’t.

Iron dragons can be humans

who buy in bulk and buy one another.

Lately he’d been feeling

like an imaginary dinosaur

so out of date that he couldn’t even scare

a five-year old girl.

(Let’s face it…

after Pixar,

how you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm

after they’ve seen

Monsters Inc.?)

Thank you.

***

And you and you might be wrong

if you were among the one

that will allow them believe

this can be done to learn more than one,

or the dragon in the garden may be a man…

is he our own only hope

that can help our town?

Take anything on the day

and it still leaves us poor

and unrecognizable

to my original text

(which is pretty good for a Mayan.)

***

Tensions thee into my mission

and an avid listen

to become one with the machine

which

in their words

might become a bump on a node

in their worlds;

a bogey on the radar

or give a madman time to ship,

were she to tell it all.

***

Dick you.

(that was thank-you, btw)

…mad that really only you

have been equally

compensated

and that early on

you’re more on the money

on the back F.U.N. and Y

(“funny”)

than all the rest

that ever were.

***

And so it goes from where it ends.

Hula room deliveries

and buried on an

old fairgrounds

captured

in a faded photograph.

You don’t know how

to interpret the butt of a joke,

meaning something early on

that makes

me so horney….

And let’s let poor

caveman UG alone,

(let alone the UG woman)

and the older elder too

and that old lady who

laughed

when laugh launched luna.

***

Run one thing on

to

try something on

fun fun fun

as a loan on laughter

in a letter that said

fun is dead

and you can’t play on

fun fun fun alone,

but the challenge to him was that this

…this the…

…this Italian leather dealer

in each letter on a letter

adds up.

…the AIM’s not even close…

but this

intention

could have made a difference,

(…but it didn’t.)

***

I’m not having loved all of this and more.

I’m not loving this.

If you would treat me

as an acute writers group

…maybe God already knew…

if so,

then dial me

but

you have no clue.

No one meant that as a car wreck, children.

No…

I was saying that was a correct assumption…

And by her now this is goodbye for now…

Logo and you finally

get right question.

Goodbye?

(Something there is that does not love auto-correct dictation)

PS: with team Damyani’s permission, I intend to reblog her original post, which I found to be quite a hoot in its own (w)right(e).

 

Cerebral Tunnel Syndrome…WTF?

Cerebral Tunnel Syndrome…WTF?

When Frederick returned to work, he soon became aware that he had not been listening very well. With human trainers training him how to train chimps for the Talking Monkey Project (…Damn!…how he hated that name!) he had become all mouth and no ears, and now it was painfully obvious to him, since his consciousness had been raised by way of The Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

He suddenly went from feeling lighter than air to being deeply burdened by the sorrows of his fellow primates. Granted, most of his previous contact with them involved one-way communications because he hadn’t taken the time to consider that any of them had anything to tell him, telepathically or otherwise.

The other chimps and bonobos seemed to sense the change in Frederick, and quickly began to reach out to him once they realized he was their liaison to the top primate…man.

All the professionals in all the human resource departments in the world could not have learned in weeks of extensive interviews with countless subjects what Frederick divined in a few minutes each with any of his peers.

They no longer exhibited any enthusiasm or playfulness. They seemed dull-witted and slow. Their responses as far as their training or performance exams showed only slightly less improvement according to the trainers, but even they had commented on how truly unhappy the chimps and bonobos appeared to be. And the repressed data about the violence and other behavioral problems in their natural habitat was no longer something that could simply be ignored.

It was as if all of their vitality and energy was focused solely on the endless repetitions of their assigned stimulus-response-mediated behaviors, which they quickly learned. Further mental stimulation of the primates was not a priority, and they were beyond just being bored. This was also way beyond simple monotony, because all of these primates had been selected for their intelligence and learning skills, which were no longer being challenged.

Repetitive motion injuries have long been recognized as a very real and documented risk in certain occupations, but repetitive thought or stress injuries to the brain have never been considered.

Many occupations will address “burn out” but they do little other than lip-service to do so. There does not exist the kind of standardization or controls in the human workplace that are present in research. Some workers possess better coping skills than others do. Outside stressors, hobbies, friends, and family issues vary greatly within any specific occupation, and these items tend to mask the effects.

Because the chimps’ behaviors generally mimicked human workplace environments, and because at the end of each day, they returned to their natural environments, which themselves mimicked human home environments and social order, this project had the potential to give a glimpse into the effects of a particular type of workplace environment upon a very standardized group of test subjects.

With Frederick’s new-found level of sentience came the burden of trying to identify what it was that made him so uncomfortable. He did not possess the reasoning skills to establish a cause and effect relationship. He just knew that his fellow primates were very, very unhappy, but none of them knew specifically why, and neither did he, but he had already become tuned-in enough to recognized that the trainers were also aware of it on a different level, although no one had begun to connect the dots.

He reached out to Mark and Darcy, who agreed with his concern, but something was missing in their analysis. When Mark and Darcy spoke with Merle about their concerns, they came to an interesting question that proved to be the missing key.

Mark and Darcy were unable to explain what could drive the chimps and bonobos to push themselves so hard as to get to this state in the first place. It’s just not in their nature to seek achievement or recognition, and they were not subject to the greed to make commission like their human counterparts.

Most Chimpanzee research has been just that…research, not a long-range occupation consisting of endless repetitions of minimally challenging tasks. There were no new stimuli. Nothing to provoke their curiosity or ingenuity. Nothing to distinguish one day from the next.

Their only reward was a manufactured food pellet that was allegedly comprised mostly of fruits and other flavorings they enjoyed plus some vitamins and a few brain-stimulating nutrients that humans often use to sharpen their wits.

Merle was the first to question the content of the pellets, and asked for a few samples to analyze.

What he discovered shocked them all beyond belief.

Apparently, the designers of the project anticipated that the chimps and bonobos would only work for so long once it became boring and monotonous, unlike their human counterparts, who would do anything for money…especially more money, so the enticements of a few tasty pellets would be minimal…unless there was something more to the pellets.

Merle’s analysis indicated the presence of a very short-acting variation of Adderall (“mixed amphetamine salts”) that were highly addictive…suddenly the “motivation” was obvious. The better that they performed, the more pellets they received.

Thinking two steps ahead, Merle then secured the special vitamins and brain nutrients that the working primates received upon completion of their day. This proved to be especially ingenious; among the usual and customary ingredients, there was a mixture of sleep-inducing hypnotics that helped ensure that they rested at the end of the day. These were also addictive, and resembled alprazolam in terms of the clinical effects.

Devoid of the human addictions to wealth, position and power, the primates required a physical addiction to push themselves to mental and physical ruin the way mankind has done for eons.

This new revelation was huge, but it would be difficult, if not impossible to address, since the entire project was cloaked in so much secrecy in the first place…and Merle was not even authorized to be involved at all.

Frederick’s comprehension of any of this was limited. As has been stated before, sentience and intelligence have a very limited correlation to each other. Sometimes, it even seems as if there is an inverse proportional relationship between intellectualization and true understanding.

It was probably better that he did not really understand what was being done, but if they tried to hide or disguise their findings, he would undoubtedly sense their deceit.

They soon realized that this was a dilemma that would have to be addressed openly amongst the group. Frederick was now one of them. What concerned him was now a concern for the group. In the pursuit of higher consciousness, they had sought the insight of a being outside of their closed human society.

They all believed that there was a purpose in doing so, and had already been given a glimpse of their own origins vis-à-vis the so-called Ascent of Man in terms of how one tribe of primates suddenly achieved sentience beyond the grasp of all the others, thanks to Frederick’s incantation of an age-old chimpanzee legend.

In addition, they appeared to have stumbled onto an awareness of a previously unidentified brain injury that may have been manifesting itself in various forms to various degrees in humans for decades, depending upon the occupation.

In that respect, telemarketers represented a sort of specialized subset of conditions and conditioning conducive to isolating the nature of the injury, almost like a laboratory experiment. The problem is that telemarketers are so generally reviled and despised that even PETA would not be as likely to feel compassion for them as they would for a room full of lab rats.

It gives a whole new meaning to the concept of what is inhumane. Whether it be what we do to animals or to each other, only humans can be capable of inhumanity. When confronted with the spectacle of animal cruelty, most humans feel compassion, outrage, or pity, but when it comes to telemarketers most people feel only schadenfreude.

 

 

 

And then I Saw Myself

One morning

traveling along the road to work

I saw a man

pushing two shopping carts

connected along the top

by two

2X4’s

held together

with bungee cords.

It was quite an ingenious affair

with about three feet

separating the two carts

allowing him to hang

clothes and other items

that were covered with garbage bags

from the boards

in the space

between

the carts.

***

Judging from his tan

and the way he was dressed

I suspected

that even if he had a

specific destination

it was not a permanent one.

I thought

how peculiar

to still try to hold onto

so much

with no place to keep it all.

Both the carts were

filled with bags

full of items

protected from the rain

and the elements.

I suspected

it must have been difficult

to choose

between

what to keep

and take with him

and what to leave

as he set out

on this journey

to nowhere

in particular.

***

We were traveling so fast

the first time I saw him

that I only had time to notice him

before he was far behind us.

Several days later,

I passed him again.

This time I slowed down

so as to allow me

an opportunity

to take his picture

with his bizarre

caravan.

As I did, he turned to face me.

…and then I saw myself….

For Occasional Use Only as Directed…

An angel crash-landed

at Villa Dreamland’s

temporary encampment,

The Home for Wayward Souls.

Loosely clad in

terry shorts

and a satin

team jacket

with only a few of the bottom buttons

fastened,

allowing

the free-range puppies

to

wrestle and cavort

beneath its logo.

***

As I wrestled with the gatekeeper

to my realm of Velocity and Power,

she appeared

out of nowhere.

She noted we shared the same brand

and marks;

the co-conspiring

symbols

of

Speed and Mystery.

I was surprised

when I realized

it wasn’t a Raiders jacket

after all;

(as it turned out

she was a stretcher-bunny

long ago and had developed a taste

for icons and talismans that

captured my attentions….)

“What a coincidence…”

I foolishly assumed.

Part naughty tomboy,

part wood-nymph,

her long chestnut hair

was everywhere,

like a lions mane.

Her feline eyes

sparkled slightly with mischief

while she made suggestions

as to how to regain control

of my access

to time and space.

We conferred

on a few points,

concurred,

and then she

set upon the project

as if it was her own

(with my blessing

and assistance).

Clad only in a bathrobe,

my attempts to access

points below the dashboard

did not go unnoticed,

as she smiled slightly, then

sighed approvingly.

Ignition and liftoff

confirmed our success

as she began to close the case,

and I felt myself falling

yet again,

with no sign of impact

anytime soon.

***

This trailer park angel

is a newfound

neighbor,

but she quickly advised

she could not be taken for granted

and had a life of her own,

her precautionary statements

contrasting her jovial demeanor

She warned

“Take only as directed.”

“Use with caution.”

“For Occasional Use Only.”

“May be habit-forming.”

“May lead to respiratory arrest.”

(She already took my breath away once…)

***

“See ya in the post office, kiddo…”

she whispered in my ear.

(What?) I wondered?

“…the rogue’s gallery…

on the wall,

with the other gangsters….”

She winked playfully

and then I knew….

“You owe me one…”

she said.

“If you got the time later,

maybe you can

help me with a tune-up

I’d like to get done

before my kid gets home from school.”

“…Maybe tonight

you can even

introduce me to your wife…

tell her my name is Mata Hari

and we’ll call her Tokyo Rose…”

***

This woman of mystery,

this trailer-park tomboy angel

with slightly singed wings,

a lover of pearl necklaces,

with a need for speed

reminds me…

“In the Springtime

the rains come

and the grass

grows all by itself…”

Life returns.

Baraka Bashad.

Guerilla Tracks

My world is filled with ghosts

and demons

of past lives

that were lived only a few years ago.

Every song has a chronology

a timeline

a place in time

the connecting ties

are so thin

they can rarely be seen.

My life has been

an on-going film

for years now.

The last few years

have been pretty crappy

in some ways,

and yet I am always given

to recalling

a high, fine

moment

when I felt so alive

that the other

crashes

and heartbreaks

were inaudible

compared to the crushes

and heartbeats

of any of those

lost years.

***

Every painting

every sculpture,

every film

reminds me not only

of times within this present life

a half a lifetime ago,

but somehow

whisks me away

to foreign lands and

times I can only vaguely recall

given that they were

occurring many years

before I was born.

***

The ancient Ones

are with me now

as I sit alone

when you are gone.

As I stare at the screen

they rush up to the sides of me

sometimes even peeking in

around the corners

of my glasses

or standing quietly

in the shadows

on the periphery

of my vision,

choosing to move only to breathe

just enough to make sure I notice them.

I feel a weightless hand

upon my shoulder,

and we both sigh.

I wonder

“Who is it now?

This time?”

I am not afraid

any longer,

and I can now breathe

while they are in the room.

So many years

I recoiled from

our mutual

recognition…

…afraid.

“Of what?”

I ask myself

only to realize

my worst terror

is from withinside

of me.

***

I gasp within

as I realize

how much

is gone.

A dim engram

tucked deep away

in my psyche.

And I breathe deeply

and I am there.

For a moment.

***

Sleep calls seductively

to me.

For once,

I am ready to embrace the dreams.