WTM: "You think you're better than me?"

This phrase, spoken loudly by the white trash person, sums up in both expression and content the paradox at the heart of what I'm calling WTM - white trash mentality, the essence of what it means to be white, poor, and trash - the psychology of the WT person.

The White Trasher speaks loudly, obnoxiously, always makes a scene, and when it's clear he has made a fool of himself, he gets defensive and lashes out at the crowd of disapprovers with bulging red face and asks, "Hey, you think you're better than me?"

The White Trasher is simultaneously unconscious and unaware of many layers of social etiquette and meaning and yet almost intentionally calls attention to his lack of grace and social skills by his obnoxious behavior, making loud noises as if to suggest, 'hey, you may not like me but I'm here and you'll have to deal with me.' This you may notice when people are around others in public, they speak loudly, look around to see who is looking, and imagine that they are being noticed and watched. WTM often is characterized by this type of hyper self consciousness.

(Of course, some White Trashers are shy, or demure, and simply enter a social situation by taking their place, which is on the corner, the perimeter of all the action. They assume their position as last, or in the back of the line, as if everyone around them knows that they are of a lower status.)

Not all white trash folk are obnoxious, but they do get uncomfortable in social situations, and carry this feeling as though they do not fit it or are somehow lesser beings. There is the perceptions of a social conspiracy, that that the all the rich, the socially well connected, the football players and cheerleaders and the good looking in high school who later in life become social players, lawyers, doctors, politicians, are all connected in a secret, unspoken conspiracy against him and his White Trash kin. As if everyone in the social game knows who is connected & accepted and who is not. The White Trasher believes he is not accepted and so from the beginning sets himself up for failure and awkwardness as an outsider, as one who does not belong, set up in opposition to the world around him

Deep in the psyche of a white trash is a sense of shame, shame that somehow they are defective, less than others, damaged, born wrong, and somehow of less value than people with confidence.

White Trash is a state of mind.

Woody Allen, A Funny Perv

"Some guy hit my fender, and I told him, 'Be fruitful and multiply,' but not in those words."

"There are two types of people in this world, good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more."

"I don't believe in the hereafter; but just in case, I'm bringing a change of underwear."

God Was a Duck

Well, not really, but in my dream he/she was. In the dream, a lot of us were at some place, some house near the water. Like a house or flat with a lot of windows. And we were waiting for some people by the water - maybe it was a boat - and these people came along and for some reason we were in a hurry and they had these large glass sheets, like trays or something, and they were telling us we had to wait, because you know, you can't rush God. (I guess we wanted to leave.) And there was God, whom they had brought, in the sink, a duck, not an ugly duck, but just a duck with water running over him (her?). For some reason water was the thing to put on God. God in the form of a duck.

Word for the Day: "Callipygian"

CALLIPYGIAN
Having well-shaped buttocks.

Source: World Wide Words

Just saw "Crumb" again, an excellent documentary on R. Crumb, one of my favorite artists.

Comic Imperative Officially Dead
‘Artistic Imperative’ Voted In

SAN JOSE, CA
The well known and formerly beloved "Comic Imperative" has officially been voted useless by the Imperative Committee of Northern California (ICNC), according to committee spokeswoman Marge Dublatski.

"The decision was unanimous, with a vote of 50 - 0 in favor of disbanding the Comic Imperative. In truth, we're surprised it wasn't shelved years ago. From this moment onwards, all club members will now champion the Artistic Imperative," said Dublatski.

The decision should have dramatic effects almost immediately in both the art world and academia. "Of course, such changes take time to catch on in the popular culture and the media," stated Dublatski.

The vote was followed by an uncharacteristically riotous tea and biscuit ceremony of the usually staid and conservative ICNC (pronounced "ick nick"), whose convention at the McEnery Center went on until at least 10:30 p.m.

The comic imperative was created in the early 1990's by a subcommittee of ICNC members who felt that the world needed a new imperative that would keep up with the changing times. Although originally created to find the truth, albeit humorous, in any given situation regardless the cost to personal vanity, the comic imperative quickly became consumed by mass media and popular culture, and eventually turned into a dreaded form of Irony.

"In fact," according to Pete Colon (of the original Comic Imperative Subcommittee), "this lower form of Irony completely consumed all of mass media, and was beginning to render all forms of serious discourse and communication meaningless. Thus, we had to give the comic imperative a decent burial. We're sad to see it go, but it's time has come."

"The new Artistic Imperative aims at inspiring people to look for the 'artistic truth' or 'aesthetic beauty' of a given life situation, conversation, impression, feeling, or thought, even if this truth is so called 'ugly,' 'immoral,' 'improper,' or 'unpopular,' " according to Colon.

"We encourage people to look for truth that presents itself in whatever form it might take," says Colon, "and to point out that truth, or communicate it in whatever way you know how, be it through music, writing, painting, dancing, or any of the arts - even if this truth comes at the cost of giving up some of your own dearly held beliefs."

Another Fine Cliche, Updated

"There but for the grace of God goes someone else."

Language as Self Hiding Persona Fabric

Related to a discussion I had with Ian (aka, I-Dawg), language is both a means of approaching the truth, and a trap that hides us from meaning - a truth obfuscator. Language in its highest forms is a tool for self revelation and artistic discovery, yet if we are not careful we fall in love with the sounds we make on the page our prose and verses hides from Truths we may find difficult to broach, usually a truth about ourselves. Language is a way to "know thyself" but can become a self hiding persona fabric that keeps us a safe distance from ourselves, from truths and revelations too hot and painful to touch.

This is nothing new. For Socrates, it was those sophisticated sophists and their elaborate linguistic structures that enabled them to evade, indeed relativ-ize the truth, to hide the Logos from their audiences. Thus, he developed the dialog for busting through the layers of language barriers. In the Elizabethan era, it was those lovers of the euphuistic language of the courtiers who fell in love with their own verbal displays of Wit. This ornate style, which eventually led to the stuffy puffy formalism of Pope, had to give way to the blustering romantic wailings of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who thought they would imitate a "natural language" that was closer to the keeping it real with the common uneducated folks whose speech were not diluted with a classical Latin education.

Writing is a powerful tool, and it has more than once saved my life by allowing me to write down all the horror and ugliness in my own head & heart. I learned to trust language, trust that I could write down all my bones and everything I thought, regardless of how disgusting, trust that I wasn't going to burn up right there at the computer.

Writing, if done honestly, can give us insight powerful enough to lead us to an intimation of the truth, such as when poetry reaches the limits of literal and figurative meaning and we catch glimpses of the infinite, of God, of the heart of human emotions - poetry being neither pure fantasy nor pure fact, but somewhere in between, the line dividing the fixed and floating worlds.

But, as with all habits, there is the danger that language and writing becomes yet another means of hiding from the truth, positioning my tragic and delicate, sad-sack self behind some fancy linguistic lattice work: elaborate structures, ornate sentences, and abstract theoretical expostulations (for example).

Language, if we are afraid to say something from the heart and soul, leads us to Prufrock's ironic, pathetic predicament, when we realize: "It is impossible to say exactly what I mean!"

Stolen Money Dream
My dad has all this money, big stacks of cash. He had marked it. My job was that, since this was stolen money through some double crossing scheme, I had to finalize the deal and show this gangster guy (who) that we didn't have all the money, that we only had two stacks and not the entire bag full. I showed the guy the bag and he couldn't believe it, but somehow I got away and still had two stacks. I felt that for all my trouble I should get some of the money. I slipped out a few 100's, then a few more, until I had $700. I pocketed it, and saw that it was marked and that my Dad would know, but I didn't care. I ended up going shoe shopping, at this store which I felt I had been in before. Some sort of sport sandle. Had to find the right sport sandle. That was before we went to the beach where all the sharks were.

As If
(And we ain't talking Clueless)

"The proper expression for our fallible mode of conception would be: that we imagine the world as if [my italics] its being and inner character were derived from a supreme mind."

- I. Kant

From Leonard Cohen's "Closing Time"

I loved you for your beauty
but that doesn't make a fool of me:
you were in it for your beauty too
and I loved you for your body
there's a voice that sounds like God to me
declaring, declaring, declaring that your body's really you
And I loved you when our love was blessed
and I love you now there's nothing left
but sorrow and a sense of overtime
and I missed you since the place got wrecked
And I just don't care what happens next
looks like freedom but it feels like death
it's something in between, I guess
it's CLOSING TIME

America: Land of the BIG BUTTS

If you go into a any restaurant in America, you see a lot of BIG BUTTS.

I went to this breakfast joint the other day, and they served this HUGE piece of coffee cake. I mean, it was like three feet high. And all over the restaurant were these really large people who, after eating HUGE breakfasts of eggs, bacon, pancakes, hash browns, etc. (all sugar, fat, and carbs), would order the highlight of their dining experience: a very BIG piece of coffee cake - each person ordered their own piece - and they would just start mowing down on that big piece of white sugar bread! Their BIG BUTTS barely fit in the booth, they could barely stuff enough of that cake in their huge mouths.

Why do Americans always do things so big and excessive? Big houses (monster homes built on small lots), big cars (Hummers), big breakfasts, big butts. One of these days, people are simply going to start exploding, and they'll have it coming. BOOM! There goes another fat ass. POW POW POW, there's goes a small family of three.

No wonder the rest of the world dislikes us. We are a land of gluttonous, obsese BIG BUTTS, because we're the land of the free and we have the right to stuff our fat faces and we can pursue big butt happiness because it's our God-given right! And that's sadly the way we approach the rest of the world. We need Iraqi oil so we can contniue growing our big BUTTS!. A lot of us bristle at the self conscious, annoyingly self-righteous pose of the vegatarian who always disrupts a simple meal with some tedious special request (Um, excuse me, but I'm a vegatrian, and I can't eat that. Do you have any dairy free products?), but you can see how the pale skinned, politically conscious vegetarian comes out of a reaction to living in a land of BIG BUTTS.

The Structure of Mythic/Religious Experience
(paraphrase, interpretation of J. Campbel's thesis to "Masks of God")

Part of what the mythic (and religious) function is all about is that you attach yourself to an object which represents God - the highest Self, the supreme formless form which has no form, beyond all conception and has no tangibility other than you have this notion of it - because God is unknowable within the limits of your senses, because God has no earthly attributes.

Thus, you attach to this inferior, substitute God-object as a stand in for God, to give God attributes, some form. You willingly pretend that this earthly object (or person) stands for God, or an aspect of God, and you pretend it is God, and you worship it as if it were God. Finally, if you are to experience God, this inferior object must be destroyed, so you will suffer properly and experience the emotional punch necessary to experience God on a visceral, emotional level.

What evokes this mythic experience of God is the mixture and collision of these two psychic levels: one, the consciousness with which you intentionally pretend that this object which you know is not God to actually be God (willing suspension of disbelief), and the other is the giving into emotionally during the destruction of this God surrogate to actually believe that God (and your self attachment to God) is being destroyed.

Plague of Dreams

I knew early on I should have never loved Julessa, but I did anyway. It was clearly a mistake, but reason never stopped desire from claiming its victims. It started from when I first saw her, when I didn't even know her name. She entered my dreams soon after and would not leave for the next 8 years. So began the plague of dreams, as she entered my brain like some feverish poison, tormenting my nights with a dark vision of a fall from which I would not recover for some time after.