We stayed last night an extra night at the barn
Sleeping above the kitchen in a small vacant room
Up in an attic really
I had to buy you some diapers in a cvs down the road
Got a couple bags of almonds
And then we ordered a mess of Indian food at a surprisingly good take away
You cluster feeding was beyond
Attached all day and night
But it’s working cause you are huge
These infant diapers I bought you aren’t really big enough and these are the first ones we bought cause we aren’t going the disposable route
But we didn’t know we’d be staying so we were caught empty handed
Or wet diapered
The shifts you go through in early parenthood are interesting
Going into a drug store for the first time to buy diapers
To wander through the isles and look for a section you never looked for before
Life is full of surprises and you never know from which way they will come
We’re planning on a lazy drive back to Brooklyn
We aren’t in any hurry at all. It’s rainy and on Sundays we expect very little of ourselves
We try and honor it as a day for the lord
And tech fast sometimes
Your mama is really good at that
When I met her she had been on a thirty day tech fast and just ended it
I tend to be strapped more to the digital tit than she
But since being excommunicated from the tribe
I barely look at social media at all
Never looking at comments
Just hearing tell of how full of hate and venom filled they’ve all become
It’s so abstract when I think of the reason for that
For questioning giving up your rights to decide whether you can choose to take a highly controversial (let’s face it unsafe and ineffective) government injection. It’s the stuff of crazy movies. It’s not real life. It can’t be. Oh but it is.
Anyway
The social media moratorium is a hidden blessing of ostracization
(Book title/idea Me on the cover in a chicken suit. Title being. Being Ostracized aint so bad and other things they’ll never tell you at school)
It’s a blessing because
It’s a long slow detox
From the dopamine hits of approval signals
Which act like tiny handcuffs on your thoughts ability to find it’s own atmosphere
People are addicted to their own make believe celebrity
And social media has turned everyone into junkies for societal approval
Like mice in a lab experiment
The like button being the button their tiny noses keep pressing giving the calming injection into their brains creating the illusion of security and community
And it’s all fine and innocent enough (I guess)
Until you accidentally have a thought outside of the spectrum of the agreed upon
Group thought
Which is transmitted and coordinated through similar or same posts across multiple feeds
The group thought agreed upon and retransmitted
Showing everyone your allegiance to the tribe when you then repost it or even put your little twist on it
But with the same unified message as everyone else
Cultural heroics as Becker puts it in the denial of death
It provides the illusion of taking part in something significant to assuage anxiety and nihilism
Yet there is no risk in it as the group has announced the acceptance of whatever idea is currently being promoted
You then promote that idea
And you feel slightly heroic
And the group applauds your approval of the group idea and the feedback loop of group think continues
Of course all this is utterly dull
And leads to where this is all leading too
A group identity faces masked and shrouded
To reflect the voices masked and shrouded
The death of the individual and the recasting of that idea
The individual
The hero
An evil concept
An idiotic pursuit
Egotism run amok
Damning the greater good and ultimately completely selfish
But that too is simply only serving to strengthen the idea and the validity of cultural heroism to cover up the failure of man to protect his unique voice
His own thought
His connection to the divine
Over his connection to society
Or social media
Or group think
We live in an era of group think run amok
I wonder what the stages of surrendering your own ability to think to the group really are
At one point do you wait for media to tell you what your thought on a current situation is before you even have one?
And if you have a series of thoughts about a situation that is later chastised by the group as wrong think
Do you acknowledge to yourself that you are obliterating your individuality for the sake of fitting in
Or do you slip into total denial that you had thoughts outside of the agreed thoughts of the day
If you’re really a heretic I suppose you secretly harbor those thoughts while hiding them from the group
Perhaps even posting a signal that you agree with the group thought even though you don’t
Creating a fracture in the structure of your reality
You walk around broken
Two halves dancing in a funhouse
If you harbor those thoughts long enough
You may even
In a moment of desperation
To unify yourself
To rescue your fading persona
To give birth to who you actually are
You may decide to display
The wrong think in public
And the group will attack
You will lose friends and family
You will lose business
Managers and booking agents
A paper may even write a hit piece that characterizes you as a fool
You may even be surprised
That the world seems so concerned about an opinion
Which when really considered is nothing but entirely reasonable.
Too much conformity makes the world a dull place.
People will engage in bashing you
Just to replenish their own cultural heroism
You will become demonized
And the fragility of the group think your image now stands to challenge will be revealed by how intense the backlash becomes.
Human life such an interesting experiment
But let’s push things forward.
People so terrified of the mob
That they will gladly relinquish their rights and their child’s rights and the rights of their children’s children to remain accepted on the social scale.
The world is not made of heroes
And no I did not aim to become one
I just got sick of not saying something I thought
And I guess bored enough to want to see what would happen if I did.
Speak up.
And I will say
It’s been interesting
So yeah Sunday we don’t expect much
And we take a break from the phones
I really don’t know what the group think is anymore
My own thoughts
Are alive again
And they seem sane and logical
Good working order
The machine of my mind
Cooking away just fine
On coffee called
Heart Of Darkness
Up here in Massachusetts writing to y’all
Heart of darkness
Apocalypse now
Colonel Kurtz
Come to think of it
The individual has been cast as a lunatic
Forever
Heads on sticks deep in the jungle
A man at war with life
The insanity of war
The lunacy of following orders
Or subjugating yourself to an Army
To God
To anyone or anything at all
Self will run riot
I suppose that cultural trope should be investigated as well as it is the strange brew sitting in my current cup
But in my situation
The jungle is domesticity
Waking up in the country with you cluster feeding on your mama
Wondering how I’m going to take care of you
Half measures avail us nothing
So I will travel through the vortex of my voice and thought all the way to the other side
And see where I end up
I will put my trust and faith in God
To help us overcome
The shadows
I have no fear today
The coffee is good
It’s a joy to write
Like stretching my spirit on the playground of life
These words are what I’ve earned by taking a chance
By shattering the foundations of control
And watching them slowly build back up
Into something unique and evolved
I’ve gone from a caption to a book
And I don’t believe hatred and social shame is anything more than a temporary condition of challenging group think
Stretching the confines
And giving the collective more room to breath
And all it’s given me is a break from the torture of a popularity contest the life of society has become.
And that’s punishment?
Hardly.
Hahaha
On the way up here
Me and your mama were listening to the history of Indian tribes in this country
All things considered
The world has always been spun on a field of lunatics
The Comanches were a joke of a tribe
Until they found the horse
And their skills copied from the Spanish enabled them to take over
At full gallop in war
They could lay all the way over to one side or the other
Using the flesh of the stallion to shield them
Their mystical skills galloping through Nebraska
Don’t give up until you find your horse
Your piece of technology
Your voice galloping through the battlefield
Hanging off the side
Speeding into the setting sun
The world is full of lunatics scalping strangers on the path
Scalping?
Where’d they get that download from?
What evil spirit whispered that idea into the collective?
It’s not all bad though
There are pleasant surprises
People from deep in your past reaching out
Showing support
Just before bed last night
I checked my email and heard from an old friend who I haven’t heard from in years
She wrote
Dear Joseph,
Hello my old friend! I read the LA Times article and seems you’re experiencing fallout from speaking your mind. So I’m sending you a note, in case you need to hear it, to tell you that you are loved and supported. The universe has your back and you have friends who believe in you. This isn’t a note specifically about the vaccine, but to remind you that there are people rooting for you, who welcome your truth and value your First Amendment right to self expression, always, regardless if opinions align. This is a time of great beginnings; a purification of people not meant for you, to create space for the right support to show up, for authentic relationships and unimaginable opportunities to come in. A transition to the place of miraculous abundance that is meant for you.
Thank you for being an inspiration and standing up.
Congratulations on your precious baby girl!! I’m so happy for you and your beautiful girlfriend. Your daughter will know that at the time of her birth her dad stood in the integrity of his beliefs and strong for his family. May you and your family continue to be blessed in every way.
Notes like that don’t suck to get
Notes like that in times like these go a long way
People reveal themselves in these times
For the most part
It’s not a flattering reveal
You have to challenge yourself to forgive
Or else you wind up
Embittered and stuck
Unable for inspiration to come back through
You have to forgive
And love through the betrayal
Which comes in a myriad of ways
And I don’t mean everyone needs to write me or show me support
But when you get outcasted like this
You will remember those that do
And I thank my old friend who wrote that note
It went a long way
It went a very long way.
Ps.
People who chose judgement over love
They will miss out on you
They will miss out on a starlet of the universe
An angel with a gift of mercy
People who chose judgment over love
Chopped a heart out of their life
Stole the presence of a being coming up
A new story for the world
Spinning in an unadulterated consciousness
Untouched by the poisons of the world
People who chose judgement over you
Will miss out on grace flying to the rescue
On a night when starvation will make them look through a veil at your face
But you won’t recognize them
For they chose judgment
And you only knew how
To keep walking.