The Dawn of a Themeless Day
Yesterday, I sorted through 13,000+ downloads, categorizing my aural greed, composing playlists instead of songs. Now today I’ve unchecked all my favorites, removed playlists from the library, creating cacophonic juxtapositions in which U2 chants along with Ella Fitz and Joe Pass and she tiptoes and he fingers a way through the classics. Music goes on within and without me, by George. Under the clever, certifiable, testable guise of high school English, I do medialit and image stuff with Chinese students, who’re buying into the whole western trip. Hate Bush, Love McD. Down With Bush, Up With Microsoft. Off Bush, On With TheClothesMakeUpMTV. Cellphones sprout from spongy heads, carrying the messages loud and clear and now in living color. Papa Mao’s greatgreatgreatgrandkids plugged blissfully into the abyss. The road to freedom’s tough enough without toxins from afar. Enjoy the journey, kids. Meet you at the intersection of the roads less taken.
Spring is in the air
Here comes Spring. Neighborhood brushfires airmail plastic offerings to the dead. No longer forced to exist here, they stare down at us in disbelief, relief and pity. Survivors refuse to believe they're there. Faith in an afterlife is too unproductive a form of irrationality. Better to barrel down sidewalks watching foreigners feign surprise and anger, hopping like snails from restaurant water tanks. Everybody's hungry, but nobody volunteers to be lunch. Earplugs take the edge off, imprisoning the voices inside: students clamoring for culture, any kind will do. Spring blows. Eyes water. We wake up sneezing; nothing else to do. Bootleg dvds drench us in hollywood lit. Old series from our early days play soccer with our memories. Maybe things were better than we thought back then. Dumbass western ways ain't so shitty after all. At least we knew the difference between the content and the commercials. Product placement was less scientific. We watched movies about the East and figured we knew what was what. There's nothing inscrutable about environmental abuse. It's as simple as getting your sister drunk and pumping her for the fun of it. Remember when English made sense? Now plastic grows on trees like money.
Natural Beauty
Testing testing eee rrr san
China's back there behind me, testing me, throwing bombs into the queazy guts of what's left of who I was before I came. Ultrastitious explosions of irrationality and potential luck. Maybe the fishermen will haul in some tasty poison today. First they scare the crap out of them, then drop their nets in greedy anticipation. Or maybe the bambambamin's from those guys there fashioning a box conceived to house the ruins of a lost civilization, great square walls in which to hold nothing dear. Call it a school if you like. So long as it sounds really big and important, which is all that counts nowadays in the dust of the dreary dynasties. Make it pretty on the outside. Not compelling or provocative. Just comely enough to enclose the rot, keep inmates in, ideas out. Call it education if you like. Or marketing. Or the wave of the future. World be warned, a terrible tsunami is being generated here, conceived by the crumbling foundations of an ancient attempt at living. Nice try. Today it's BMWs and cellphones in every pot. Send your kids off to learn English. Hope they come back with straight black hair and the traditional willingness to knuckle under to the will of the ever-widening maw and paw who inflicted these wounds of culture and optimistic hopelessness upon their children's beautiful brand new hearts and souls. Call it a Development Zone if you like. Call it progress. Call it the end of the world.
