Author Archives: pb113645

Thus far in my college experience I have not sought out any non-mandatory resources, save a few conveniences. I have been to the library a couple of times to read, and I wrote one article for the school newspaper which was chopped up, restructured, given a dumb title, and put through some sort of apparatus that takes every word I that I actually put some thought into and changes it to something less concise; all without my permission or knowledge.  The project has not furthered my understanding or appreciation for service to a community that I find flawed and motivated primarily by deception.

I have seen the day-to-day relations of us kids gradually alter however from socially tentative individuals stuck in the same classes together to individuals stuck in the same classes together. Yet despite the usually decline in average temperature that accompanies this time of year, it hasn’t seemed so cold lately. On the other side, where the ceiling is cracked in the hall the rain comes in sometimes. It all really depends how it falls. Slouched yearnings evade hands like sieve sand. This time it only rained for a minute or two, and now me and me small-step down the diffusing corridor. Time, wearing dark glasses, erodes skin and bones as I go, half-heartedly dodging broken glass. Almost all the windows have now been broken, those windows that used to be mirrors in the dark. I’m still learning scales, and my ruminations bounce around like sound, but in stranger pieces. Now as I trudge my prescribed path, I can’t help but get a kick out of the smell of the rain outside on the pavement with regret obscured. Its broken panes crunch under my shoes.

Community Service is the allocation of human labor by an individual or a group for the benefit of the public or its institutions. This should not be confused with altruism, which is the practice of unselfish concern/service to parallel one’s devotion to the welfare of other human beings. This misconception is the crux of my ambivalent discontent when approaching community service, whose participants are vastly non-volunteers being compelled to act by government, school, possibility of profit, or the courts. This by no means should put across the idea that community service is without beneficial effects for the human populace, but it seems in most cases to preserve its own structured bureaucracy of purported altruism than to actually promote a ubiquitous sense of magnanimity.

Perhaps it is the nature of our society or maybe it is this inconsistency between the facets of community service and altruism, but one feels there exists or should exist an apparatus of good will that disseminates proactive human labor in a more efficient way than the network of organized public works. This I believe is the implementation of direct action, which is a far simpler yet more rewarding operation. If you’d would like to see your block cleaner, clean it; if you want to read a cooler magazine, make it and distribute it; if you want to have a music festival in your neighborhood, organize it. This mode of direct action is more potent than community service, not merely in its capacity to be far more rewarding, but the action itself requires collaboration and fosters community just by the nature of its implementation. This is unlike community service, which treats community as if it were something dependent on the existence of organization, in that it acknowledges that altruism and beauty are more transcendent in human nature than the latter. We create beauty for the pleasantness it adds to everyday existence; we create beauty for the sake of sanity. Direct action facilitates and preserves humanity, while community service can only serve people as much as its rigidity can allow. Some positive action requires a larger presence than small community planning of course, but while expanding the scope of one’s undertaking it is imperative to not stray far from the paradigm of individual good will towards the calculated network of tax-deductable magnanimity.

But now above all that, I hum jazz tunes to myself, stressing the spaces in between the sounds, as the opportune gusts blow the ash off the end of the cigarette. And now below the skyline of the city, automobiles rush about, cascading through the sieve-streets like granules of human expedience, whilst those selfsame tall buildings shout the reverie of collective man. I pitch the cigarette and stand serene, hands a-clasped, leaning forward, whispering to myself the words of an old mentor; “…and with joy you realize for the first time, thinking’s just like not thinking—So I don’t have to think anymore”.  Then in the abundant fullness of the void, out stepped the realization of the equivalent mutual opposites, the knowing of life and the muteness of death, and my own conceptualizing of truth as the fulcrum in the center. As I come to, I knocked over my drink yet stand holy in the dense air, on the empty roof. Unfortunately, these sojourns into spiritual solace of late only served as ephemeral evasions of the ever-pursuing cranial claustrophobia. They fail to destroy the perseverance of the contradiction of beliefs and pragmatism, and also to reveal the true nature of altruism in the context of governing bodies.

I was seventeen and it was simply the freest I had ever felt. I remember the kindness of people, the list of characters that were never to return as sojourners into my perceptual consciousness. I yearn for the gravely massage of asphalt through the bottoms of my shoes. I miss the land.

The way that mountains slope and sink into the heartland, only to reappear looming as the snow-capped Rockies. I missed the flatness of the plains allowing more sky to exist than land, adding divinity to the stars of the night sky; more concise and awe-inspiring than any I had gazed upon before. I missed the Mississippi in the four o’ clock sunshine, so wrenching and lovely that I abandoned a thumbed-down car that would have carried me one hundred and fifty more miles, just so I could caress the whims of the nation’s soul, if only to absorb the Twain and Kerouac. My night stranded awake in Las Vegas when down the long street came the moon and I turned my back to it and walked. So many nights like that one, I would watch my feet as I hurried down an obscured alleyway, looking for a place to sleep, but coming up with a dead end, where I’d trip into a dark brown pot-hole puddle, soaking my shoe, then I’d hear a noise, and look up to see a distorted gape and eyes, clearly myself but parts that had been previously unknown, making my self-image twist like a flame in the wind. The way the heat pressed down on my psyche through the arid beauty of the Mojave, and finally the faint glimmer of the Pacific after a week of hard travelin’ —the knowledge that there was only more to come.

In Long Beach, after a stay with a friend, a local cop picked me up for being a minor out-of-state hitchhiking on the 405, which turns into the 605, which turns into I-5, which goes deep into the Pacific Northwest, where I was headed next. After some hungry hours at the station, I was put in a foster home in Inglewood, Los Angeles for the better of a week. There a public supervisor came every eight hours and everyone’s name, DOB, and social worker/parole officer was on a large pallid chalkboard in the living room. Luckily, I had come into some money en route by playing guitar, harmonica, and singing American traditional songs, and thus could afford a ticket back.

Now I’m in college and I have no time; I can’t hold down a job, I can’t read, I can’t write, I can’t focus on anything, let alone attain the daily visceral catharsis of survivalism. I think I’ll either drop out or become a drug-addled robot.

Hello world!