January 28th, 2008 by Hoopleton

What am I? That’s the question on my mind. I am mainly water. We all are. And what is water? It’s hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen is the most abundant substance on Earth, as it is in all of outer space. Next is oxygen, again here as in space. Then comes carbon and nitrogen, one for one, on Earth as it is in heaven.

We are not just secluded islands in the vacuum. We are made of the same things as the stars and the planets and the galaxies. We share with everything, and in this way we are a part of everything.

So I am the cosmos and the cosmos is me. I’m the leaf on the wind. I am the wind.

The days are cold and we, in our imagined community, are obsessed with politics and economics and the other trivialities of life. Seldom do we take a break to stop to take a breath.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Close your eyes and take a slow, thirsty breath. Trust me. Do it. Close your eyes and breathe. Let your mind empty and your soul lift.

If for only a moment everything seems meaningless, you may come to realize that no matter the stresses we inflict on ourselves, there is always time to let yourself drift. There is always time to let yourself fold back into the everything that you are. There is always time.

We’re back to Monday. The start of a new week. We’re also at the end of January, a month named for the Roman god Janus, a deity of gates, doorways, beginnings and ends. Janus was a being with two faces, one looking forward and one looking back. The Romans believed that he oversaw transitions such as the tired passage of time, visions, age, and the movement from one universe to the next. But what’s interesting about Janus, and I mean really interesting, is that he looked to the passage of time in both the future and the past. Two lines, forever moving and forever meeting.

According to worship of Janus, we are all that has always been and all that will always be. We are time. We are space. We are everything.

January 25th, 2008 by Hoopleton

Heath Ledger was 28 when he died Wednesday morning. In fact he was only 19 days older than me. His death is especially mind numbing when considering that he was of my generation. Almost to the day. Maybe his passing is personal for me, I don’t know, maybe it’s personal for all of us. But why? Really, why?

A lot has been written about his potential as an actor. His tragic death at an early age. The fact that he leaves behind a young daughter. Blah. Blah. Blah. But what few people are really commenting on is why so many of us, especially those around his age, are finding it hard to ignore his death.

Actors die all the time. Certainly more accomplished ones have passed. And yet, when it comes to this man, it seems hard to forget. Hard to ignore.

Are we so shattered by the death of Heath Ledger because, as the media says, he possessed a unique quality as both an actor and a human being that drew us to him? Maybe. Was it also, perhaps, his few outstanding roles in independent film that made him shine slightly brighter than other stars? I would think that might be part of it too, his early mainstream roles not withstanding, but none of these things explain why his death feels so incredibly personal.

And I know what you’re thinking. He was a celebrity. But we reject celebrity. We reject consumerism and we reject cultism. So maybe it was a blow to our sense of our own immortality. But then I ask you, how can any of us feel immortal in a world so consumed by fear? If anything our generation has been constantly reminded of how short our days are. I’d go so far to say that we are the first generation denied a sense of omnipotence over nature.

So what is it? What makes this so personal?

I’ve been accused of being a very dark person. Someone has recently said that looking around my website one only feels an obsession for death and human misery. If this is true I am a product of my cultural training. But the fact of the matter is that I’ve always believed that to understand death is actually to celebrate life. I’m not alone here. What is our existence but finite? We are reminded of it constantly, and yet, we reject the paradigm so perfectly packaged and marketed for us. We who were born in the latter part of the seventies and into the early eighties enjoy the fruits of life, while at the same time trying to stare down into the abyss that has been opened for us, in an attempt, perhaps, to gain real understanding of our place.

Our daily living isn’t what our parents promised us. The American dream seems like a fading memory. We have no event to define our generation, the few events that have passed have been usurped by forces we neither respect nor support. What we’ve clung to, what has kept us going, has been our unity in the idea that those that came before us cannot understand us, and those generations that are following seem too entrenched in the modern machinery of techno-pop illusions to have seen the context of our time. We have placed ourselves as a generation that was meant to change the world. As a generation that would redefine what it is to be a citizen of the globe. One of our greatest strengths has been our resilience in the face of our own mortality. We do not obsess with death, but we don’t fear to look at it either.

Maybe that’s why the death of Heath Ledger is so damn personal. As of yet we don’t know why it happened. We don’t know how it happened. The whole thing seems oddly scripted in a way. An Olsen twin is involved for God’s sake. He was one of us. But our fascination seems prompted more in some way, in which we cannot place, by the feeling that he was one of us. And perhaps on a deeper level, he made us realize that part of our obsession with death is actually a stronger curiosity than we could ever admit or that those who would seek to program us could ever dream.

We are driven in our hectic lives by a world that places unbelievable stresses on us at every turn. The pace of things seems either agonizingly too slow or cripplingly too fast. Ours is a generation that can’t understand why human beings do what they do, and yet we have more clarity than those who would lead us. We may seem like cynics on the outside, but we are so overwhelmed with hope that when the opportunity arises there could be an explosion unlike this planet has ever seen. All we need is a spark to bring about a new renaissance. All we need is a singularity to focus our untamed energies. Holding it in, trying to contain that beauty that we see as possibility, is sometimes so painful we can’t bare it.

The death of this actor is so personal because we know he couldn’t bare it anymore. What scares us, what grieves us, is the fear that we can’t bare it much longer ourselves. In this way he was one of us. The question we need to ask ourselves, despite however outwardly absurd it may seem when one considers the obvious celebrity obsession of this moment, or the simple fact that we seem so consumed by Heath Ledger, is where do we go from here?

January 22nd, 2008 by Hoopleton

As the light fades and the hour turns over a new day, I wonder if I made the right choices the day before. Has it all vanished before I could really understand it? Could I just cut out a part of my life that I seemed to need so desperately?

As 2008 begins to rumble on and the days grow longer and longer, I look toward to what hasn’t happened yet and I begin to wonder what’s in store for me in the months ahead. Is it heartbreak? Is it rediscovery? Is it the fulfillment of a life’s work?

I’m not a religious man. I’m not often forgiving. And loyalty trumps everything in my life. If I had to define myself, I’d say that I’m someone who wasn’t meant to have the kind of experience in this existence as everyone else. My temperament is passion-driven, my desires are ferocious, my view of everyday happenings is fleeting. All I have time and time again is my writing. All I have is my art.

I’ve made mistakes in my time here, and I’m often looking forward to it all ending, though not enough to force fate’s hand. Money doesn’t mean anything to me. Neither does success. I spend my time looking for answers and maybe someone to ask the questions with.

I’m a soldier without a war. I’m an activist without an issue. Like so many of us, I have yet to find my place and am accepting of the fact that I probably never will.

What scares me when I go to sleep at night, is the possibility that misery is something I can’t do without. That it’s loneliness that drives that passion.

Maybe I’ve seen the future. Maybe I’ve accepted that all death is, is the continuation of these moments into the infinity of space and time. Maybe all this has happened before and it will all happen again. Maybe, just maybe something out there is waiting.

Or will I fade away forgotten? Buried in the insignificance that is human existence. Never to be remembered. Barely an afterthought in the wholeness of cosmic space. If I were to disappear today, would anyone notice?

Our mortality, our cruelty, our pettiness and selfishness are unforgivable sometimes. We exist for a fraction of time and we’re so horrible to eachother and to the planet that gave us birth. And despite it all, all I can think to is the future. And I wonder if I made the right choices today. Because after all, isn’t that all we are? Aren’t we just the choices we make? Or are we the circumstances we can’t control?

All I can be sure of is that the sun will rise tomorrow. That we’ll go on for another day. And maybe, we’ll step closer to reason. Maybe we’ll step closer to understanding. Maybe we’ll step closer to the realization that all we have is these precious minutes that we squander away each day.

January 19th, 2008 by Hoopleton

+        And well, there is the story about those battered bastards of Bastogne. Those were brave soldiers. They were surrounded and fought until help arrived and won the war. It could be like that too, you know. Even so, aren’t they all brave? Of course they are. It’s not all Dresden or Hiroshima. They were fighting Nazis then. Real Nazis.

-         What are Nazis? I don’t understand what that means. I hear that a lot these days. “Nazi,” as though that’s supposed to mean something.   I don’t understand because it doesn’t mean anything you know.

+        I know, I know, there were the bad ones too. And mistakes, oh my yes, lots of mistakes. Market Garden was certainly one. And then the bad ones. Sometimes a massacre perhaps, or maybe we fire bombed Tokyo. Nagasaki was one of the few cities untouched, and by that I mean left standing. And then there was Dresden. The soldiers were good. They were good. Doing their duty.

-         Right. I see, but getting back… What is a Communist? Look around here, aren’t most of these just bourgeois Communists anyway? I have to say that the Nazi thing is still bothering me. Christ, even the Pope was in the Hitler Youth, does that make him a Nazi? These labels are getting confusing.

+        Did you see the parades on Memorial Day? Did you? That’s what I’m referring too. The good ones. Not Nazis. Not Nazis. Our guys. The good guys. Yes there were mistakes. The interment camps, definitely a mistake. But so much good came out of it, you have to admit that. We really pulled together then. We really got in the same cart on that one. Nylon, and of course lipstick casings.

-         Can you really own an iPod and be a Communist?

+        We did use all that power for something good. We did. Ernie Pyle was wrong on that one. Fuck him! Don’t you think? Look at this, wait. Just look. Computers came out of the war, as did the turbine engine, and of course the United Nations. Tom Brokaw called them the “Greatest Generation.” Fuck yeah. All generations make some mistakes, but they defeated the Nazis.

-         No, I see, but I want to know what a Nazi is. Were they all Nazis or just some of them? Could we be Nazis now? I don’t feel evil, but did they? Did they feel evil? They were all war criminals, the only difference was that some won and some lost. That’s the real difference. And labels don’t mean anything. Anything at all.

+        You have to put yourself in their shoes. That’s the heart of it. The atomic bomb. The atomic bomb. And well, what if Truman hadn’t used it? What if we had to invade Japan? What if no one saw first hand the destruction of the atomic bomb? Those people gave their lives to keep us from nuclear annihilation. It’s not pretty but there it is. You forced me to say it. And then it didn’t matter if we were gonna win anyway. It didn’t. We had to do it. It was inevitable.

-         Maybe we are all Nazis a little bit, or at least could be. Wasn’t it Ernie Pyle who said that “we rise above our normal powers only in times of destruction?” I don’t feel evil, but could I be?

+        At least there’s those battered bastards. We still have them.