"the sexes are living we might say...
i spent a reasonably quiet turkey day by the bayou
backed the suite van into the trees and spread out the
chair and books and music and food box and sat.
rode the bike up and down the levee a few times too.
listened to the pundits on the radio. mostly politics.
so some folks are going to "occupy" some real estate
in down town "slap stick village"
i thought about driving to the place and observing what
the local constabulary were going to do about such a
blatant show of...well, whatever it is they are trying to blatantly show.
what seems to me to be happening is that the 99% folks expect the
elected officials to make the financial institutions, and business owners
agree to make less money on their services and products.
ain't gonna happen.
why would they quit charging all they can?
the only workable solution is to CO-OPERATE
that is start a cooperative.
a banking co-op
a housing co-op
a university co-op
etc.etc. etc.
you are going to have to pay to Cesar
what is Cesar's. been going on for, well a long, long time.
i think the reality is that it is not 99% of the people
who are dis-satisfied.
i'll tell you why.
over the years i have noticed as i go about my working life
as a laboring type mostly,
that there are certain business that have
avoided competition, shall we say.
i remember one fellow who had a small building behind the
woodworking business where i was employed.
he was in the wedge business.
wooden wedges
they were delivered to his door by the rail car full
they were Chinese cedar
they smelled like eucalyptus to me.
on a regular basis the rail car would arrive and he would unload the
rail car with a fork lift and stack those pallets of Chinese cedar wedges in
his warehouse.
little wedges that are used in construction to shim up window
frames and door jams to make them level.
he had an exclusive "deal" on those wedges.
he had "international contacts" which put him in
a very favorable business position.
and he made substantial money.
the wood working shop had a similar deal.
the fact is these business persons had military
and intelligence backgrounds and contacts.
and guess where they got their financing
not from the banks!
nope, that money appeared out of the fog,
like magic.
i have paid a lot of attention to certain aspects of the
businesses where i have labored and i'll be damned if
there aren't a substantial number of businesses that seemed to
have a "most favored" status.
you can't compete with these businesses and i'll
tell you why. they just dis-appear into the fog.
i'll give an illustration of a smaller scale but equally favored business.
i ran into a fellow who was renting a storage unit in the same place
i was renting one near the coast in california.
he was selling "artifacts" from his storage unit.
anthropological type statuary, masks and that sort of thing.
he had plenty of them.
i looked at quite a few of them and he said they were from
south america.
i said i thought they were more australia/oceana looking.
he looked grim and said nothing.
i went to my storage unit and spent a few hours there and
when i returned to this fellows storage unit he had emptied it
and put all the stuff into his large moving van and was headed for the gate.
he was a fellow with "international connections" and an international crook.
so it seems whether you are talking about a storage unit of illegal
artifacts or a multi-million dollar business, if you have "connections"
you probably like the economic situation just like it is.
see these people co-OPERATE!
and until there is a co-operative effort on the part
of the economically "deprived" there is not a snowballs
chance in hell that the "bought" portion of government
is going to change the way things are done.
now, occupying various and assorted places has pretty
much deteriorated into an "occupiers" verses "constabulary"
exercise and the result will be nil, and people who are not
anarchist will be disgusted that the message has been lost.
so, since we do live in a society which will allow co-operative
ventures, and we do live in a society which has a goodly amount
of electronic communication, some knowledgeable and talented
folks might begin by starting a bank, 'cause my money is in
a wal-mart card and i don't like the "rate" i have to pay
to keep up my account and i'll be damned if i am going to
occupy wal-mart any more than i already do!
and i'll risk my little pile of coins as a depositer
in the co-op bank.
"It is not right to want to heal the suffering of people without
committing to fight the very causes of this suffering." jean-paul sartre
i did not spend all my time thinking about business and money
or the lack there-of.
i listened to my "history of science in the 20th century" tapes and had a "revelatory"
experience. i have listened to these tapes maybe 20 times by now.
so the author (dr. goldman) is explaining about how "relationships"
are probably more important than "things"
but not like personal relationships but relationships like
between energy, matter, space, time and gravity.
i have heard all this before, and he has 18 hours
of explaining how things appear to work from quarks up to
the universe and all the many permutations.
but suddenly as i sit there looking out across the bayou at the
willow trees and the cormorants and the black squirrel that has been
playing and feeding for the last couple of hours, and i feel really high.
the trees seem to shimmer in light. things are a unity.
then i remember what ram dass said "the object is not to GET high
the object is to BE high."
and i felt like the time spent to get to that particular insight was time well spent.
"The things we choose express our values" -some anonymous chef on the radio
i also thought about women's titties.
i didn't feel high about it or anything though.
actually i had bought a book at a yard sale for 35 cents
about clothing through the ages.
back in pre-roman and greek times there was a society
in which the women wore clothing which did not cover their breasts.
one would imagine that the men did not riot or commit fornication
in the streets but took it in stride as "just fashion"
what i was thinking was how "social fictions" have so much effect
on the population and how to not adhere to social custom, however
absurd, might cost a person their freedom or their life.
it's kind of frightening.
"...the sexes are living, we might say, in a vast communal neurosis; a
highly contagious neurosis which parents pass on to their children
and men and women pass on to each other. " Olga Knopf
'The art of being a woman" 1932
well it took a while,
but the circus finally came to town!
mr. caytetano
