In my continuing quest for cheap thrills and deeper insight into the theory of knowledge and the nature of consciousness, I have subjected my body and being to a variety of dangers. I have sustained abrasions and contusions major and minor. I have killed many brain cells. I have travelled to distant lands and walked many miles, sometimes in inclement weather. I have been bitten and stung by bugs, jellyfish, crabs and venemous plants. I have risked drowning in riptides, falls from great heights, muggings on deserted streets. I have experienced projectile vomiting and had panic attacks. More than once, I have felt myself to be on the brink of frostbite or hypothermia. My foot has played host to a worm and my blood and lymph systems to several infectious diseases requiring long convalsences and follow-up blood work to ensure their viral demise--all of these by-products of fun I have pursued. While my pursuit of fun has caused many malfunctions in my body, it never occured to me that the existing malfunctions in my body could actually help me pursue fun.
If you want to experience truly mind-altering entertainment, remove your glasses and walk around your neighborhood at 3:00 a.m. It's like taking a twenty-minute hallucinogenic break. If you bring a friend along to babysit you and help you cross the street, it's one of the safer ways to experience reality as a magical wonderland.
Without corrective lenses, I am legally blind. Though I am technically "nearsighted," which means I should be able to see things that are near to me, my vision is so bad that I cannot read a book without my glasses, because in order to see the print the book has to be up my nose. When I am dating someone, it takes months for me to get comfortable sleeping without my contact lenses, because if I wake up from a strange dream I won't be able to recognize who I am in bed with and will be scared. If I lose a contact lens and don't have an extra, or break my glasses playing dodgeball, as I did in the sixth grade, I must be escorted to my home because I can't find my own street, or identify my front door.
While my current pair of glasses are an improvement over my original blue shimmery plastic oversized satellite lenses (I got glasses in 1987), they aren't really wearable in public. The prescription is so extreme that even though the lenses are the expensive extra-thin kind and the frames are an uber-hip nerd-chic two-tone plastic, they give my eyes that otherworldly effect of peering out from deep inside a glass bottle, no matter how much eye makeup I wear underneath and how diligently I attempt to dilate my pupils. I am currently working on several top-secret plots to amass the funds to have my eyes surgically lasered to fighter-pilot acuity. Then I will be applying to the Texas Air National Guard, which I see as a jumping off point to three things I think I would enjoy immensely: being AWOL, doing massive amounts of cocaine, and then becoming President of the United States. All of these things are within my grasp if only I can pass a vision test.
I've been correcting my vision for so long it occured to me that I haven't really experienced it as it really is. I grope for my glasses while my eyes are still glued shut with sleep crud, and I wear my contact lenses for every waking moment after that. For the last seventeen years, I've had no idea what my eyes can really see on their own.
In the last half hour, I discovered that they can see all kinds of amazing things that boring 20/20 eyes can't. My eyes can't see people or cars or telephone poles or buildings or celestial objects. They can only see light. Big blobs of transparent, layered, shimmering, three-dimensional light. Anything that is lit up is so blurred around the edges that it looks like fireworks that never stop exploding. Anything that doesn't give off it's own light is only visible in relation to the light it blocks. A person walking is a bobbing blotch that blocks the light in a pattern I can eventually recognize is the rhythm of a walking person. The traffic lights on Metropolitan Avenue, the Walk/Don't Walk signs--all of these are so fuzzy in every direction that they form an overlapping, constantly changing 3-D laser light show. The full moon is enormous, its light bleeds into the clouds and all over the sky. If only I could sell tickets to my confused optic nerves, trying to make sense of the misinformation my poor squashed God-given lenses are bouncing onto my retina, it would be like being a performance artist, or a drug dealer, but without the risk of NEA or DEA reproach.
Another cool thing about seeing only light and not individual objects or forms is that if you can't see people, you can't judge them or react to them based on their facial expressions as they pass you on the street. As we walked along in the strange and secret night, I discerned two transparent shapes coming towards us, and heard the sound of a bike being walked. Unable to see if the approaching people were aloof snobby types or pleasant-late-at-night types, I smiled in what I thought was their direction and walked on. I couldn't see if they smiled back of looked askance. I suddenly realized why my blind physics teacher was always so cheerful--he was the only teacher in the high school who couldn't see the looks of suicidal boredom on his students' faces. When you can't see people, if you're an optomist, you assume they like you. You can imagine they are reflecting your goodwill back at you. You never see them scowl, or roll their eyes, or smirk. Of course, you can't see them smile either, but after a while, you forget that people have faces anyway.
Maybe there really are no such things as disabilities, maybe the things we think are our biggest defects and deformities, the biological mistakes we must live with and if possible, rectify, are really just the gifts of an unusual view. Or at the very least, a way to amuse yourself on a Wednesday night without spending money or risking bodily harm.
1. There is no inherent merit in any kind of labor or work. Most of what we call "work" in the so-called developed world is bullshit designed to distract you from fun and the harsh material reality of globalized capitalism. Feed yourself and and have a good time because soon you'll be dead and this life is too short and beautiful to waste fueling someone else's hegemony.
2. Fix small things around your house you have to deal with every day. Loose doorknobs, shaky hooks, things that fall down--your subconscious fear of your own closet can be alleviated with a screwdriver.
3. Do not cut articles of clothing with scissors while stoned, you will fuck them up.
4. Drink as much as possible at family gatherings. Family dysfunction will then seem to be only a play put on by actors, and if you are able to hold your liquor, your family will think that you are well-adjusted and cheerful. If you are not able to hold your liquor, your family will think you are drunk.
5. GO FREELANCE.
6. Buy quality consumer electronics. You will enjoy their pleasantly uninterrupted function.
7. If you enter into a relationship with someone, their problems become your problems.
8. It's been scientifically proven that love is based on smell. If you fall in love with someone, and they wear one type of smell, let's say CK One, and then at some point they switch smells, to let's say CK Be, and then the relationship starts to get a little routine, and you wish it felt as intoxicating as it did in the beginning--well, it can! Just have them switch back to the original smell, and you will feel as if you have just met.
9. When people pull their bullshit with you, call them on it. Say, "I love you very much, but I will not participate in your bullshit."
10. If you notice scratches and insect bites all over your body, bring a trail map next time you go hiking.
11. If you notice bruises on your head of unknown origin, move hard objects away from your bed.
12. Do not attempt to open cardboard boxes with kitchen knives while drunk.
13. Do not use a mitten as a bandage for a flesh wound. Bits of woolly fuzz will get stuck to your flesh wound, and blood will get stuck to your mitten.
14. If you want to save money, don't leave your house. There is nothing to buy there and you don't even need cab fare to get home.
15. Nothing will ever happen if you don't leave your house. The further away from your house you go, the more you can expect to happen, because of all the unfamiliar people, roads and beverages.
16. Before you assume that you are puking up blood, ask yourself, "have I been drinking red wine?"
17. Before you assume that you are being bombed by enemy forces, ask yourself, "am I on hallucinogenic drugs?" If answer is "No," ask yourself, "Has my country recently been invaded by colonizing forces in order to secure access to cheap oil and no-bid corporate contracts to rebuild my country after it is bombed to shreds, creating a situation where the colonizing government pays one set of its friends to make bombs to kill the innocent civilians in my country and another set of its friends to rebuild it?")
18. If you want to be thinner, quit your desk job, walk everywhere, even--especially--if you have to walk quite far and cultivate a lifestyle that causes you to have wild mood swings that may distract you from eating for days at a time. Some things that can contribute to wild mood swings are ambiguous and doomed romantic situations, artistic frustration and absorbing the mainstream media.
19. Do not take psilocybin mushrooms during the Fourth of July fireworks if you are sensitive to loud noises. Do not take psilocybin mushrooms in the Museum of Natural History if you are sensitive to imperialism. Do not take psilocybin mushrooms near the Intrepid if you are sensitive to military spending.
20. All institutions exist solely to perpetuate themselves and very few of them are doing anything good for anyone. Many are doing a great deal of harm. Smash the ones you're a part of and don't join any more.
21. The law isn't real and it doesn't protect anyone. The people who make and enforce the laws are the ones most likely to break them. Thoreau was really on to something up there at the pond.
22. Fear will not keep you safe from harm.
23. Flossing is a very important part of dental health and hygiene.
24. "Rilke" is pronounced "Ril-kuh," not "Ril-kee."
25. It is very, very rare for someone to make you feel like you can be yourself with them, to make you think thoughts you never thought before, to want to know all about you and make you want to know all about them, to agree with you about all the things that are awesome and all the things that suck so you can form a united front in the world, to have the same idea of fun as you do, to make you laugh out loud, and to make your heart skip and pound just by touching you. Some people call this "love" and it is the best drug there is.
It's been a while since I had a good old-fashioned hangover. I can't say I've really been missing them. I think I jinxed myself a while ago, because I actually said out loud, "You know, I haven't drank myself sick and had a vile hangover in quite some time! Maybe I've finally learned moderation!" Then I spent several weeks at a high altitude. Then I returned to sea level, where my red blood cell-rich blood kept my brain and other tissues hyperoxygenated, to the point where I was crumbling pot brownies into my ice cream for an entire weekend and achieving nothing but a faint buzz, while the owners of the pot brownies were encouraging me to finish them off, since the very same brownies had caused them to spend the night in the bar of the local Holiday Inn unable to find their way home.
This altitude change and subsequent intoxicant tolerance enhancement lulled me into a misguided sense of invincibility. Unbeknownst to me, sometime between last weekend and this weekend, my body re-adjusted to this altitude and my oxygenation ability returned to normal. I was unpleasantly surprised to find that without an extra storehouse of red blood cells, you can't split a bottle of wine with a friend, then go out and have a few pints and a shot, without making a tacit committment to spend Sunday curled in the fetal position cursing the end of Prohibition.
A hangover is such a weird thing. One minute you're drunk, the next you're violently ill, the next you're unconscious, and the next, it seems, you're experiencing what it would be like to have your brain surreptitiously removed, used in an infomercial demonstration for a fruit dessicator, and placed back inside your skull.
A hungover day is a loop outside time. It brings the week to a screeching halt with the last thing you remember Saturday night, and you wake up Monday morning having blocked out the entire experience of Sunday. "I had the most horrible dream," you might think. "For twenty-four hours, my body became an apocolyptic wasteland."
But sometimes the hangover can abate in the early evening, giving you the strange burst of energy that comes with the euphoria of being able to move your eyes without inducing nausea. It doesn't make it worth the agony, but the moment you return to your body is always interesting. The gyroscope in your solar plexus suddenly stops spinning, the vertigo disappears, your eye sockets no longer ache. That's a good moment.
I wish I believed, as some perversely excited Democrats do, that the 1,000-casualty mark is going to be the fact that will wake up America. Not the 2000 election, not the Supreme Court, not Florida, not the crashing economy, not Enron, not Halliburton, not the blown CIA cover, not the faked intelligence, not the documented National Guard AWOL record, not the widely reported cocaine abuse, not every word out of Bush and Cheney's mouths--this is it. If only.
I am not so sure. If there is one thing we humans have trouble comprehending, it is death. In many ways, the death of even one person is incomprehensible to us. The death of thousands--or millions--is simply absurd.
I may not understand death, but I do understand numbers. Every time I've seen the number 1,000 in the last couple of days, all I can think about is how this horror has been visited on the citizens of Iraq tenfold. For every one American soldier, ten Iraqi civilians.
The death toll of this war isn't 1,000. It's "more than 11,000," since no one is counting the Iraqi dead well enough to know for sure, no one maintains a warehouse full of their burial clothes in all permuatations and sizes, no one is wondering about how the loss of their lives will sway the election, because they aren't even sure when they'll have any elections.
In the six months following the September 11 attacks, the United States Military killed one Afghan civilian for each dead American--and then some, exceeding the 9/11 death toll of 3,000 by as much as several hundred, reports Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire.
Three years ago, the harm visited upon this country was visited upon the civilians of a country with only a vague connection to that harm in a one-to-one ratio. America, as usual, has progressed exponentially when it comes to revenge killing, by a factor of ten. It doesn't seem to matter of the people you're killing are in any way responsible for the deaths you're supposedly avenging.
1,000 of ours. 10,000 of theirs. It's liberation, American-style. It won't help the U.S. Army recruit soldiers, but it just might help Al Qaeda.
While the FUCK YOU Movement made it abundantly clear that we are AGAINST EVERYONE and FOR NO ONE (or at least for no one who could make it into mainstream politics), I would like to offer this tidbit of editorial advice to the Kerry/Edwards campaign.
The title of your book Our Plan for America: Stronger at Home, Respected in the World, is, in short, totally whacked. "Stronger" is a comparison adjective, while "respected" is one of those adjectives that is also a past participle. This creates a lack of parallel structure in the subtitle. It would sound much better if it were either Our Plan for America: Stronger at Home, More Respected in the World or Our Plan for America: Strong at Home, Respected in the World.
I learned the term "parallel structure," by the way, watching The West Wing, a political reality every bit as real to me as the one The New York Times reports on. Toby the (fictional) White House Communications Director talks about it in reference to a (fictional) speech he is writing for the (fictional) president (played by Martin Sheen). Richard Schiff, the actor who plays Toby the (fictional) White House Communications Director, is married to Sheila Kelley, the actress who plays the woman who does video dating in the movie Singles. Sheila Kelley wrote a book called The S Factor: Strip Workouts for Every Woman. Rebecca Schiff was the assistant to the editor who published this book at the time it was being edited. It was Rebecca Schiff who was absorbed in aparticularly atrocious self-help book while the FUCK YOU movement was taking a midday protest break in Colesium Books on 42nd Street. It was the botched parallel structure in the Kerry-Edwards book I brought to Rebecca to try to distract her from the atrocious self-help tome. You see how it all comes full circle?
Even if you had not just spent a week on a remote farm in Peru with no access to media, then stayed up all night, then travelled for twenty hours zonked on Xanax and arrived in New York at two a.m. unable to sleep until the following night, you might find the Republican National Convention totally surreal. It's like, what if New York was a police state overrun by even more fat white tourists with stupid hair and name tags, and walking around the city suddenly became as hard as driving in it? It's like, what if you lived in a bizzarre kind of Alice-In-Wonderland double-speak world where you can exercise your right to free speech, as long as you do it in a tiny cage conveniently located where none of the people you're speaking to can see or hear you?
Most New Yorkers in their right minds have fled, but SuperLefty is proud to be back in New York in the most unenviable dog days of late August/early September, at the most unenviable moment of the Invasion of the Moron Puppeteers of Evil, to defend her beloved city from these demented, fascist interlopers. She is braving not only demented fascists and their fashion faux pas, but the revolting canyons of midtown, in order to do her part to speak truth to power.
The truth we speak is simple. To the delegates and fundraisers of the Republican National Convention, we say: "FUCK YOU."
No, really. For two days Rebecca and I have been showing up at various convention events and prowling the streets outside Madison Square Garden, sneaking past the barricades to unroll a giant FUCK YOU sign in the faces of Republicans. We are the FUCK YOU movement.
The FUCK YOU movement is simple. There are no meetings, no mass emails, no websites, no t-shirts. There are no permits, no chants, no tactics. We have a big, rolled-up sign. We avoid the little animal pens they've set up for the protestors and sashay right down gauntlets of Republicans lining up for fundraising dinners at Tavern on the Green, a giant FUCK YOU with legs.
We also each have two little paddles we picked up from someone giving out free promotional CNN materials. (Strangely, this person is not asked by the police to "move along" from her spot on the sidewalk. Apparently only people with signs that express actual opinions, instead of the name of television stations, are hazardously blocking the sidewalk.) On the blank side of these paddles, we have each written "FUCK" and "YOU."
The paddles are a quicker draw than the giant sign. They are more useful for giving the FUCK YOU to Republicans on the move. This is easy to do. We walk downtown on Seventh Avenue as they approach the Garden. We wait for clots of them to gather at the intersections. We spot them, passes swinging from their necks, guffawing about their sick, evil Republican plans to wage endless war, control our wombs, kill and starve many of the nonwhite people of the world, and eventually get us all killed. As they approach, we give them the double FUCK YOU. We hold it above our heads, because we are short and many of them are freakishly tall from drinking their bizzarro hormone-laden heartland milk, or eating babies, or whatever it is they do.
The look on their faces when they get the FUCK YOU is priceless. FUCK YOU is not what they are expecting. Especially not from two short girls in sundresses who look like they might still be in high school.
There are several reactions we normally get. Men between twenty and fifty tend to make innuendoes and jokes of the "Would you really?"/"Anytime, baby!" genre. Middle-aged women who have probably absorbed some weird brand of patriotic conservative Christianity drawl, "Well I looooove you!" Less sunny middle-aged to older-ish men and women say things to the effect of, "Oh, that's nice. Nice language. Veeery nice. Your mothers must be very proud of you." To this we say, "You think this SIGN is obscene? Your WAR is obscene. Your GREED is obscene. Your LIES are obscene. Your HATE is obscene. Your PARTY is obscene." We also point out that "Cheney said it on the Senate floor!"
Many of the demented fascists appear to have a sense of humor, and gleefully photograph us, a souvenir of their political moment in craaaazy New York City. Only one guy actually said, "Fuck you, too, ladies." There is a lot of sneering, a lot of uneasy chuckling, a fair amount of nose wrinkling and speeding up of steps. Nobody likes to be followed down the street by a sign that says FUCK YOU. But the best part is the bewildered expression that crosses their faces before they decide how they're going to react. Chanting, inscensed liberals safely barricaded across the street they were expecting, and can ignore. A "FUCK YOU" right in their face is a delicious surprise to deliver. It actually affects them in an unpleasant way. It gets to them. After all these years of them getting to me, and getting to me, and getting to me, I am finally getting to them!
All this time, I have been wanting to get up in the face of these motherfuckers and say FUCK YOU, but they are usually on T.V., or in Washington, or in parts of the country not accessible by New York City mass transit. I was recently in a foreign country, and I met some amazing people there. It made me think about how you should say what you really feel to people you might never see again. It's nice to be able to implement that right here at home. I estimate that I have said FUCK YOU to hundreds of Republicans from all over the United States. Thank you, Republicans, for coming to New York and vilely explointing tragedies that have occured here, tragedies I witnessed with my own eyes that will haunt me forever. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to personally say FUCK YOU to many of you, right to your multitude of smug, doughy, rich, white, ignorant, racist, cigar-smoking, lipstick-feathered faces.
I can imagine certain criticisms of the FUCK YOU movement. Some of the other protestors have accused us of playing into the Republicans' hands, of giving them ammo for their perceptons of liberals as derranged or intolerant. To this I say, (surprise!) FUCK IT. Democrats and liberals are always so fucking worried someone is going to think they are angry or crazy. Newsflash: your enemies already think you are angry and crazy. They should think you are angry and crazy, because you should be angry and crazy. If you get angry and crazy enough you might actually accomplish something. I don't understand why the left is preoccupied with the right thinking they are extreme--the right long ago stopped worrying about being perceived as extreme and just started being extreme, with woefully successful results. That is one of the many ways the Democrats are failing me, and failing this country. They don't understand that to unseat Bush would almost constitute a revolution (Kerry's inadequecies as an alternative notwithstanding), and a revolution requires the careful direction of justified rage.
The Republicans, the government and the police of New York City, however, understand this perfectly. The barricades, police presence and multitudes of arrests are perversely encouraging. However few people show up to protest a Republican fundraising event, how ever hastily lettered their oak tag signs, however heartbreakingly ragtag their chants, however typo-laden their pamphlets, the Republicans, the government and the police are actually scared of us. Their extreme efforts to neutralize these protests are the very proof we need that protest is still worthwhile.
This is why I want to sieze the few moments of the attention I can get not to implore these people to fund health care (they won't) or respect my right to choose (they never have and never will) or admit that their war is based on lies (they know it and they don't care), but to sneer in the face of their supposed power.
I refuse to stand on a corner with a pamphlet full of carefully worded talking points. I refuse to letter a sign with some convoluted message about an issue. This convention is not really about issues. It's about this adminstration and this party saying a big "FUCK YOU" to the city, the country and the entire world. It doesn't get any more FUCK YOU than exploiting an atrocity in the city where it occured, standing up in the middle of a war of false premises and real deaths to claim you are on a mission from God or endangering our lives and claiming to protect them. The Republicans say FUCK YOU to us all every day. I'm rubber, you're glue, my sign is me saying "everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you."
Others might say this is not a very peaceful, loving message. It's not very MLK, Jr., it's not very Mahatma. I save my peace and love for my brothers and sisters. To my enemies, I say, FUCK YOU. I don't think of it as spreading bad vibes. Rather, I think of it as returning these bad vibes to their rightful owners.
The most interesting part of protesting is the encounters with the police. The places we've gone to have had a maybe ten-to-one ratio of cops to protesters. Their mantra is "keep it moving" or "get in the pen."
Most of the cops are around our age. Some of them say they sympathize with the message. Some of them say, "Ladies, I respect your right to free speech." But all of them agree, we have to "keep moving." It's for our safety, they claim. What if someone in the crowd throws a bottle? (There is no crowd.) What if someone "gets violent?" (Later on tonight, I saw some photographs of people getting violent. They were cops, not protesters. Besides the real violence is being plotted right inside Madison Square Garden.) I point out that the pens they shepard us into are often out of view of the hotels and restaurants the Republicans are going to. They can't see us and they can't hear us. "I don't make the rules, lady, but they're for your safety," say the police. "Get in the pen!"
But you can't pen up the FUCK YOU movement. You can't disperse it. It's too swift and too strong. The FUCK YOU movement doesn't get in the pen. It walks down the street, blending in, waiting for the right moment to give each and every Republican his or her own personal dose of the movement's message:
Contact SuperLefty at superleftypfeffer at gmail dot com
Cheap real estate and free contraband welcome, stock tips and snake oil not so much.
(c) 2003-2008 by SuperLefty. All rights reserved.
