carbon footprint

So you make the big words smaller or just get really honest and let your body armor down, or divert from the ego of the intellect to the wholesomeness of the heart. you let go of it all and just go back to being again. maybe thats all you can handle anymore in this dream that we call reality. i know its painful. we were born to suffer. that's why some people eat spam and deep fry twinkies. others decide to be devoted and loyal to real losers. some gamble away their homes. or smoke themselves to death. or devote their lives to the study of scat markings. many people watch five hours of television or more every day, life in front of the light box.
Well you don't need to know my particular sad story to really get me, and i probably dont need to know yours. but sometimes its nice to know someone is well-rounded, or just know them all the way round. maybe you noticed i am not capping the first letters of the first words after every sentence. maybe that makes you wonder how i could have been an English major. is she lazy? is she stupid? is this one of those blogs that serves as immaculate justification for the payment of salaries of editorial staff everywhere? well, judge me if you like, at least i spell judgment right. i prefer to speak the vernacular of my experience. Real is all i care to be.
Faces are more expressive than masks. you know. There are more muscles in the face than you might think. Go ahead and google it, if you dont believe me. Let the internet be your eternal source of wisdom. The Internet knows. I think it invented itself, the internet. I think its all powerful. I think it may have created us out of its electromagnetic primordial ooze. And then what do we do? We blunt our affect with masks. You dont know some people you run into from day to day any different. All they give is that one faded old mask they dusted off the shelf. like Rod Blagogevich they self-parody. Or Garrison Keilor. Or our last president. But its really sad when its someone whose not in front of any camera, just someone you know at work or play who could be a cardboard cutout. Fascinating the way they censor themselves. usually in tribute to some noble concept, like perfection. or fear.
Sounds pretty styrofoam, those collective goals we get co-opted into one American family at at time. I was a child in the seventies and eighties. I wore plaid with stripes. I watched Star Trek. I sucked on crazy straws. I solved the rubix cube but maybe cheated. See, you can excuse me! - I could not opt out of the high fructose corn syrup experience I was co-opted into. We weren't even simple sugar by the time the eighties rolled around. We rolled over with the new Coke and became less the genuine article. Yeah, You can still find us, in Mexico somewhere. The facade fell over a long time ago- a Hollywood prop.
So how the hell do you get out of hell? Just by bringing it! Just by kicking down the door to your self. Just by deep frying twinkies and being laughed out of the room. Just by letting go. Stop trying to look good. Wear plaid with stripes in the wrong decade. Go out without combing your hair. Stop smiling when you are depressed in public. Let people know how you really feel (not recommended for antisocials). Stop killing spiders just because you are scared of them and they ruin your sense of security when the lights go out. be spontaneous. stop editing yourself. be all the way 'live'!
Yesterday I was walking home from downtown Oakland into a cross walk, sychronizing my rhythm to the mp3 music, feeling the sun warm my skin, exuberant maybe, when i looked to the left (like a good girl) and saw this minivan coming toward me without slowing down. i paused there in the street and waited... sensed my internal GPS .... sensed the car accelerate slightly into my path and felt my rage of entitlement fill me up and move me. I started walking (the ground traffic controllers getting nervous now, watching the two blips on the screen on a trajectory toward impact, the green wand waved in circles on their defunct radar screens). The diabolical madman behind the wheel just turned it slightly with a push of his cutoff leather glove and drove into the oncoming traffic (lane) to dodge around me. I had become the obstacle of his obstacle course. (Against every fiber of my being). The car passed close enough i could feel its metallic coal breeze. I kicked the car over with a radiation beam from the sole source of collective energy in my foot then watched the car tumble over, wheels spinning out in the air, and burst into flames! (in my imagination). Really though i am non-violent! i had just touched down same day in my new jetblack hi-top all-stars. I could hardly restrain myself from kicking my carbon all-star footprint right through the window into the passengers funny face. Because i am not into violence, all i did was think about it. The thought was violent enough. One block later i let it go. Why should some asshole rent time and space in my head? Okay, maybe 60 seconds. But the rest of the walk home, kicking it to Jimi Hendrix's 'Power of Love', i wondered who are we to think that two poorly painted parallel white lines on asphalt are gonna do anything to really take us to safety in the twenty-first century?!